Hart Crane aspired to be "Pindar of our machine age". Praise-poems like "For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen" and "The Bridge" have, in that sense, a Pindaric elan vital.

Had some things to say about Mandelstam yesterday, in the comments thread to Stephen Burt's article on Pindar & the Olympics.

Was wondering how to write a Pindaric ode about the 29th Games, when I ran into Stephen's essay...

... Because, and this gets to the root of it, what appeals to me in Crane above all is that intrepid, improvisational, brave, audacious, crazy, ecstatic spirit of affirmation - the bell rings out - that "exultance", which he flung in the face of Eliot, Yvor Winters, Allen Tate... (& paid for it in their dismissals). This for me is the authenticity of the authentic, the true insignia, the mark of the poet. Crane said he was aiming to be the "Pindar of his age" - the great praise-poet. He was drawing on Whitman for that. & there is some validity to the claim that his aim was true.

Reading Rykwert on break. More interesting stuff from Aristotle & Plato's Sophist.

Thinks the term poiesis might have changed in late 7th cent. BC when poets started charging for their services & refining their techne (the main purpose being to create a monument to fame more lasting than marble - not their own fame, but their patron's - cf. Pindar). Poiesis before meant "making" more generally.

Distinctions between acquisitive techne - hunting, fishing, fighting - and productive techne - agriculture, shipbuilding, architecture, etc. Also distinctions between productive mimesis (the carpenter builds this table based on the concept "table") and imitative mimesis (the painter paints a copy of carpenter's "this" table).

acquisitive techne = rhetoric, sophism ?
productive techne = poiesis ?

(tendencies or sharp distinctions?)

Clearly I moved my awfully extremely accurate foot from soccer to metrics & music.
"This man is a. . . foot."
Clearly an athlete's foot.
Pn dar. (whew!)