Poets’ Punctuation
Poets’ Punctuation: Thomas Hardy, Ezra Pound and the technology of accidentals
Editorial Institute, Boston University
3 March 2015
Starts:
5:30 pm on Tuesday, March 3, 2015
Location:
143 Bay State Road, Room 106
Punctuation matters always, but it takes on a new force and significance in early twentieth-century verse. Ezra Pound’s devotion to Hardy may be understood in these terms, especially if we look upon the spaces between words as a species of punctuation, as in the first printing (Poetry, April 1913) of Pound’s ‘In a Station of the Metro’:
The apparition of these faces in the crowd :
Petals on a wet, black bough .
The multiple tab spaces that can be inserted between words, and between words and punctuation marks, can be indicated only by typewriter. The typewriter enables the poet to remove from the printing house what we can call ‘spatial authority’. Subsequent developments of free verse and the eccentricities of its lay-out depend on this technology, at least until the coming of the word-processor, whose control over space is much weaker than that of a typewriter. Among the last of the ‘typewriter’ poets is Robert Duncan who made of New Directions demands unprecedented in the history of printed verse.
Charles Lock has been Professor of English Literature at the University of Copenhagen since 1996. A Senior Scholar of Keble College, he received his D.Phil. from Oxford in 1982 for a dissertation on John Cowper Powys. In 1979 he was awarded the Laurence Binyon Prize (a University Prize) in the History of Art. He taught for two years at the University of Karlstad, in Sweden, and from 1983 was at the University of Toronto where he was appointed to Full Professor in 1993; he was also adjunct professor at Toronto in Comparative Literature, Russian and East European Studies, Religious Studies, and Medieval Studies.