A Place for Abstraction: No Ideas But in Metrical Things?
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Occasionally, Poetry Witchery shares a relevant piece that has appeared elsewhere . This musing on abstraction is adapted from a passage in A Poet's Craft: A Comprehensive Guide to Making and Sharing Your Poetry (University of Michigan Press, 2013) "No ideas but in things," admonished William Carlos Williams in probably the most famous statement on poetics of the twentieth century. His remark summed up the credo of the Imagists, a group devoted to writing poems that centered on the "direct treatment of the thing" in simple, almost spartan language. In a reaction to what they saw as the eighteenth and nineteenth century tendency to draw on symbolism and abstraction rather than actual experience, poets of the early twentieth century made a great effort to, as Ezra Pound wrote, “Go in fear of abstractions.” As Marianne Moore famously put it in her poem called “Poetry,” she preferred her poems to be "imaginary gardens with real toads in them.”.
A Place for Abstraction: No Ideas But in Metrical Things?
A Place for Abstraction: No Ideas But in…
A Place for Abstraction: No Ideas But in Metrical Things?
Occasionally, Poetry Witchery shares a relevant piece that has appeared elsewhere . This musing on abstraction is adapted from a passage in A Poet's Craft: A Comprehensive Guide to Making and Sharing Your Poetry (University of Michigan Press, 2013) "No ideas but in things," admonished William Carlos Williams in probably the most famous statement on poetics of the twentieth century. His remark summed up the credo of the Imagists, a group devoted to writing poems that centered on the "direct treatment of the thing" in simple, almost spartan language. In a reaction to what they saw as the eighteenth and nineteenth century tendency to draw on symbolism and abstraction rather than actual experience, poets of the early twentieth century made a great effort to, as Ezra Pound wrote, “Go in fear of abstractions.” As Marianne Moore famously put it in her poem called “Poetry,” she preferred her poems to be "imaginary gardens with real toads in them.”.