Steve

Thank you very much for  Perl's distinctions.  It gives a lot to ponder.
Kermode is evidently key to this and I think I'll start my reading there.
Perl has been on my reading list for a long, long time and his time has also
come.

Perhaps I will find resolution to my immediate objection to the use of the
prefix "Paleo" and "Neo".  It seems to imply through taxonomy a phylogeny
that actually was a synergetic happenstance.   It implies a historical
schooling and followers with the "paleos" being the foregoers and the "neos"
being the late comers.  I don't think that is what happened.  Furthermore,
by the 1930's EzP, WCW and TSE were mutually estranged and would, I think,
have objected to any close literary association beyond the general lumping
of "Modern" and the friendship of genius.  Perhaps the purist of the
practioners of modernisms, H.D. went her own way.  Not a teacher or haranger
H.D. was simply a poetic genius.

Rick Seddon
McIntosh, NM, USA
-----Original Message-----
From: [log in to unmask] <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask] <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Wednesday, August 08, 2001 10:07 PM
Subject: 'Paleo' and 'Neo' Moderrnism


>Rick Seddon writes on 8/8/01:
>
>> Where does Dr. Perl get the idea that synthesis might apply to Modernism?
>> . . .  Modernism was often deliberately jarring and disruptive.
>> It was the intent of the authors to break the intellectual
>> complacency of the Victorians.  To break away from the rhetorical
>> writing of poetry into a new "Modern" way.
>> . . . In your brief excerpt  Dr. Perl seems to blur between
>>  Modernism as a retrospective term of critics  and as a set
>> of operating guidelines for the Modernist poet.
>
>Perl gets into this in great depth in the lectures. He distinguishes two
>braches of Modernism, "Paleo-Modernism [e.g,, Joyce, Pound, Eliot]" and
>"Neo-Modernism [e.g., William carlos Williams, Gertrude Stein]". I think
the
>type you're referring to Perl would call "Neo-Modernism