11.1

1. 11.1 • Business? • Paper questions? • Imagination – Real; Art-Imagination • The Red Wheelbarrow • Other poems? • HW • Start reading Stein and Evans/Agee • Monday will be a review day, catch up on our theme before we get to the crazy stuff. • Bring course pack and questions.

2. How will he accomplish this? • How will art save the imagination? • Not a question of the “beautiful illusion” or “copy of nature” • Expansion. 136 • Limits. 135 • Relationship to reality. 134 Imagination is key to our accessing the fullness of reality.

3. Relationship to the Real, through Imagination. “The inevitable flux of the seeing eye [Emerson?] toward measuring itself by the world it inhabits can only result in himself crushing humiliation unless the individual raise to some approximate co-extension with the universe. This is possible by aid of the imagination. Only through the agency of this force can man feel himself moved largely with sympathetic pulses at work – ” [135]

4. Even the most robust constitution has its limits, though the Roman feast with its reliance upon regurgitation to prolong it shows an active ingenuity, yet the powers of a man are so pitifully small, with the ocean to swallow – that at the end of the feast nothing would be left but suicide. That or the imagination… is known in that form – the release from physical necessity. Having eaten to the full we must acknowledge our insufficiency since we have not annihilated all food nor even the quality of a good sized steer. However we have annihilated all eating: write plainly we have no more appetite. This is to say that the imagination has removed us from the banal necessity of bursting ourselves – by acknowledging a new situation. We must acknowledge that the ocean we would rink is too vast – but at the same time we realize that extensionin our case is not confined to the intestine only. The Stomach is full, the ocean no fuller, both have the same quality of fullness. In that, then, one is equal to the other. Having eaten, the man has released his mind. [135-136]

5. Expansion and Enlargement • Truly men feel an enlargement before great or good work. [136] • Should recall Pound: • “It is the presentation of such [an intellectual and emotional] “complex” instantaneously which gives that sense of sudden liberation; that sense of freedom from time limits and space limits; that sense of sudden growth, which we experience in the presence of the greatest works of art” [98] • Achieving this once is better than volumes of poems. • So, how do they compare on this?

6. For Pound, achieving that sense was all that mattered. That “sudden growth” was the goal. • For WCW: • “…this is not as so many believe today a ‘lie’… bitter to the individual, by a ‘vision of beauty’ [you may try to run this into a criticism of Pound’s elitism]” • “It gives the feeling of completion by demonstrating the importance of personality [you may read this as a dig on Eliot], by showing the individual, depressed before it, that his life is valuable – when completed by the imagination. And then only. Such work elucidates—” • Imagination elucidates reality, it brings you in communion with the real through comparable feelings (fullness in both). • “The exhaltation men feel before a work of art is the feeling of reality they draw from it”

7. “Imagination is not to avoid reality, nor is it description nor an evocation of objects or situations, it is to say that poetry does not tamper with the world but moves it – It affirms reality most powerfully and therefore, since reality needs no personal support but exists free from human action, as proven by science in the indestructibility of matter and of force, it creates a new object, a play, a dance which is not a mirror up to nature but – ”[142] But what?!?

8. Moreover… According to my present theme the writer of imagination would attain closest to the conditions of music not when his words are disassociated from natural objects and specified meanings [again, read anti-Pound, “dissociate the vocabulary from the cadence” p99] but when his words are liberated from the usual quality of that meaning by transportation into another medium, the imagination …to free the world of fact from the impositions of “art” (see Hartley’s last chapter) and to liberate the man to act in whatever direction his disposition leads. The words is not liberate, therefore able to communicate release from the fixities which destroy it until it is accurately tuned to the fact which giving it reality, by its own reality establishes its own freedom from the necessity of the word, thus freeing it and dynamizing it at the same time. [142] Word use ties to imagination, affected by old forms tied to freedom.

9. So, let’s imagine us some reality. so much depends upon a red wheel barrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens Take a moment by yourself to write down everything you can about this poem. Anything and everything it touches in 3 minutes. Share with the person next to you. So, what depends on a red wheelbarrow?

10. HW • Monday will be a review day. We are going to take a step back, talk about where we have been, and, now that we have some resources, assess that status of interpretation. • So, we will not be talking about anything new on Monday. • But, we do have big reading assignments coming up • Stein – Tender Buttons + Composition as Explanation • Evans/Agee – Let Us Now Praise Famous Men • It would be smart to get a head start on these.