BK. Ezra Pound

97. Kenner, Hugh. ‘The Moving Image’. In The Poetry of Ezra Pound. Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions, 1951. Reprint, Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1985.

The chapter opens with an astute observation that leads to an unexpected conclusion related to this study: ‘The action of the simplest category of lyric, the two-line Japanese hokku with which Pound experimented extensively, depends on Aristotle’s central plot-device, peripeteia, or “reversal of the situation”’, a ‘peripeteia that juxtaposes two worlds of perception to strike light from their interaction’. With this in mind Kenner observes that The Pisan Cantos (56) ‘are full of hokku’, and offers well chosen examples from canto LXXVI (56c). See also 171 and, for an argument that classical Japanese poetry has nothing whatever to do with ‘seeming contrasts’ such as those characterised by Aristotelian peripeteia (or Poundian super-position), see A40.