Showing posts with label Ezra Pound. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Ezra Pound. Show all posts

Friday, May 16, 2014

Pound on poetry and mathematics

HERE at PoetryFoundation.org we find an article by Carl Sandburg (1878-1967), published in POETRY Magazine in 1916, in which Sandburg offers highest praise to poet Ezra Pound (1885-1972). Sandburg includes this quote from a 1910 essay by Pound that connects poetry and mathematics.

"Poetry is a sort of inspired mathematics, which gives us equations, 
not for abstract figures, triangles, spheres and the like, but equations 
for the human emotions.  If one have a mind which inclines to magic
rather than science,  one will prefer to speak of these equations 
as spells or incantations; it sounds more arcane, mysterious, recondite."

The complete article is available here.

And, in a footnote* to the poem "In a Station of the Metro" -- found in my Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry we find a bit more of Pound's mathematical thinking.