3.14.2006

poetry considered as an aesthetic framing process.

for the purpose of arriving at conceptual unity, synthesis, integration.

or, perhaps I should say, as a means of arriving at an Archimedean point of leverage : the criticism of life, the just interpretation of cultural habits & human deeds.

thus, for example, Dante's combinatory song outshines the medieval encyclopedias (G. Mazzotta writes about this : Dante's Vision and the Circle of Knowledge).

the encyclopedic, all-encompassing ambition of the epic poet.

symbols of wholeness, inter-relatedness, "ecology".

Blake's titanic imagination (cf. Northrop Frye).

Olson's localism was a method of totalization, or integration. the universal in the concrete, etc.

Zukofsky's hermeticism, something similar.

an aesthetic : how to draw a circle : how to tell a good story.

applying the "measure" of song as, to repeat, a frame. the way a painter measures (& resonates) expansive meaning through symbolic forms & imagery.

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