Charles Henri Ford: Between Modernism and Postmodernism by Howard Alexander

Author:Howard, Alexander
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK

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An equivalent situation arises when we strive to situate Ford in relation to the New Critics. Led by John Crowe Ransom, the staunchly formalist New Critics came to cultural prominence in the early 1940s and dominated American literary criticism in the middle decades of the twentieth century. Reacting against what they perceived as the unsatisfactorily impressionistic nature of contemporary academic criticism, and influenced by T. S. Eliot’s first-generation modernist notion of the objective correlative, the New Critics developed a formally rigorous, depersonalized system of literary theory that eschewed historical, cultural, and biographically informed interpretations of any given poetic text. We see this in John Crowe Ransom’s seminal account of The New Criticism (1941). Ransom here contends that pre-existing formal demands impact on the act of poetic creation. He specifically maintains that there are two key components that determine the success of a poem, and as such, its status as a worthwhile object of critical study. This first component concerns the issue of metrics. Ransom comments that ‘The poets of our time have been insensitive to metrical niceties as the poets of no earlier period have been; and, for I think this follows, insensitive to the poetic function of the meters’.114 Ransom strives to rectify this state of affairs. In order to do so, however, he also needs to address the notion of argumentation. According to Ransom, ‘the composition of a poem is an operation in which the argument fights to displace the meter, and the meter fights to displace the argument.’115 Thus, in Ransom’s reckoning, it is the productive tension between metre and argument that ensures the success of a poem, and, in turn, the poet who wrote it.

I want now to demonstrate the ways in which Ford’s conceptualization of poetic composition can be said to differ significantly from the conflict-driven model championed by Ransom. Consider, by way of brief introduction, the contents of the following passage:

Poems that might be written anywhere: in a prison or on board a troopship: having not necessarily anything to do with where one is. And most importantly: musically organized – no regular metre – and no attempt at ‘intelligibility’ either, or didacticism or philosophy, or showing one’s own vain ‘intelligence’ – but letting the unconscious take over … to explore those Jungian depths with a more ‘free’ somnambulism: ‘Magnetiseur et somnambule’, Baudelaire’s definition of the poet: he was so right – that’s the combination of qualities he admired in Poe. The ‘somnambule’ aspect: the image; the magnetiseur controls the musical form: the combination produces the magic of the poem.116

This passage, which is taken from Ford’s unpublished ‘A Record of Myself’ (1950), revisits, as we can see, ideas and phrases contained in the earlier Imaginationist Manifesto. There is, however, one major point of difference between the two documents. Whereas in the earlier text emphasis fell squarely on the issue of Surrealist aesthetics, Ford’s ‘Record’ is concerned primarily with notions of poetic technique and craft. Two things stand out in particular here. The first concerns Ford’s

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