Well, I certainly agree that modernism was not without its flaws and failures, and it's true that many of its contemporary devotees display the reactionary tendencies of aging revolutionaries. But I am not about to give up reading Wallace Stevens because he was a "high modernist." And I have no problem with the poetry of either John Ashbery or Geoffrey Hill. Signorelli doesn't seem to realize that he and his co-author often sound just as intolerant and tyrannical as the early modernists they so deplore. I suspect that Strindberg's The Ghost Sonata would not pass the Sophocles test, but the play remains a masterpiece.
They seem to have no idea what Pound meant in saying "make it new." I haven't read much Pound in a while, but the other week I pulled a volume off the shelf--The ABC of Reading and noticed that he wrote that the one author he always learned something from was Homer.
ReplyDeleteAlmost every one of Signorelli's assumptions is false. This is just a long mishmash of sophistry that boils down to nothing more than "where my pretty buildings? where my pretty novels and poems? must be a conspiracy against pretty. mad at art now. hate you, art."
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