. . . but again, why didn't Hart Crane "break the pentameter"? There was a positive reason : he could reshape the Elizabethan line, as in "For the Marriage of Faustus & Helen", and parts of The Bridge. In Crane the 1590s returned; he was Marlowe as W.Stevens was Shakespeare.

The Nietzschean idea of "eternal return" was in the air; the notion of cyclical time & the presence of the past. It was reflected in Eliot's recapitulation of Tradition, his Heraclitean sense of the conjunction of time & Eternity ("History is Now and England"); it was in Mandelstam's invocations of Ovid; it was in Joyce's overlap of Homer & Dublin; it was in Pound's mythologizing, & Yeats' gyres. Crane thought he could see the recurrence of ancient times, Atlantis/New York in the dentist's chair.

Where you won't find it is in the futurist wing of modernism; for the Futurists, whether Russian or Italian or Vorticist, the past was something to be obliterated for the sake of absolute Progress. They were too much the sophisticated, politicized materialists, to accept some version of neo-Platonic aesthetics. In Russian poetics it's formalized in the divide between Acmeism & Futurism. Total novelty obliterates the potential for the presence of past times, past forms, past poems.

Acmeism, on the other hand, or the eternal return, intimates the possibility of re-incarnation, of time travel, of the ghostly presence of dead avatars, of communion with the dead.

I don't want to repeat a mirror-image of Ron Silliman's simplistic binaries. The futurist Pound & his disciples Olson & Zukofsky certainly created their own very effective versions of the presence of the past (& sometimes of the pentameter, too). But they did so in the context of a radical distancing from ordinary speech & cultural norms. It takes a very refined taste to appreciate how these prodigal sons echoed that general culture by means of ultra-private idioms. Their uncompromising independence makes them culture heros, in a sense; but their choices are not the only option (witness again, for example, Stevens or Crane).

Here's a very old poem of mine. It was written in the 70s, after a visit to the Minneapolis Art Institute. Across the street, hidden among some fir trees, I found a statue of George Washington.


MEMORIAL DAY


Statue standing grey in summer rain,
wrinkled stone worn by many seasons,
brow, shoulders, backbone full of purpose,
memory shivering in the roar of battle,
emblem of endurance everlasting,
lasting now in peacetime summer rain.

Rising in the shadow of the trees,
mist of thoughts returning from the dead,
comes to life within the broken heart,
comes to join the living and the dead,
statue of the mystery of glory,
statue standing grey in summer rain.

Of course, most post-avantistes today consider the pentameter, along with everything else, broken a long time ago, and why not.

Pragmatics is a branch of contemporary linguistics; it emphasizes language as communicative utterance. One of the things it looks at are the pre-suppositions of a speaker regarding his or her audience, which influence all the choices of vocabulary & style. If you looked at the attitudes of various modern & contemporary poets toward style through the lens of pragmatics (as R.A. York did in The Poem as Utterance, back in the 80s), you could interpret the style of their "utterances" as motivated by social attitudes.

Why would a poet like Crane not break the pentameter, to take a salient instance? Perhaps because the social attitudes motivating wide ranges of modernist experiment - such as "epater le bourgeoisie" (then) or "disrupt oppressive social systems based on standardized syntax & meaning" (not too long ago) - held little value for him. The simplistic binary polemics which offer a bourgeois-sellout "them" vs. an aesthetic-political vanguard "us" are based on attitudes which severely warp the reception/absorption of the main stream of poetry in English; this has its consequences for practice.