Yes, Andrew, my comment, “it is a mistake to consider poetry as a vehicle to deliver or convey something other than itself,” suffered from a certain amount of rhetorical over-zealousness and as a result skirted dangerously close to a sterile aestheticism. I didn't mean that poetry is only self-referential, but rather, as you have clarified, that the poetic image is first and foremost irreducible. Meaningfulness here means meaning's fullness, full of meanings, and in fact many of those meanings can contradict one another—which is why a single-minded rational approach strangles an image from the beginning. The image is not the servant of the idea, but rather the ground/matrix of all ideation.
Nemo
|