Quantum Poetics: Yeats, Pound, Eliot, and the Science of Modernism, and: Radio Corpse: Imagism and the Cryptaesthetic of Ezra Pound (review)

Both of these books take as their subject canonical English-language modernists. Albright has a number of interesting things to say about Yeats, Pound, and Eliot; Tiffany concentrates on Pound, although his reading of Pound has a general resonance. Both are concerned as well to explore links between modern science, technology, and modernist poetics.

Albright begins by frankly affirming the metaphorical nature of the science/ poetry connection, which gives him license to propose a figure of his own for exploring that link: complementarity, the wave/particle duality of quantum physics. He demonstrates in each of the poets a kind of wave aesthetic and a particle aesthetic, and shows their “complementarity” in each poet’s thought and work. For example, although Yeats might be considered a poet primarily of the wavey sort, his work demonstrates, in its obsession with the symbol or image, an important particulate quality as well; if Pound is obviously a poet in search of the poetic particle (Albright calls this the “poememe”), he is also subject to inundations of the poetic wave. Albright is doing here something like what Kenner, in The Pound Era, has done: he proposes a heuristic metaphor employing scientific terms in order to get at something interesting in the work and thought of these modernist writers. But his use of a critical vocabulary taken from the discourse of science is also, like Kenner’s, often anachronistic. This would not be a problem if the book were not called Quantum Poetics, and did not advertise itself as “the first examination of the relationship between science and Modernist poetry.” The claim is absurd, and made more egregious by the fact that it is part of an anonymous blurb actually bound into the book. I assume that it is not Albright’s claim, for he seems much too good a scholar to have made it. The title’s strong implication that “the relationship between science and Modernist poetry” was, historically, a metaphorical link with quantum physics is disavowed in Albright’s introduction, where, while he shows us that these writers were certainly aware of Einstein, of Bohr’s atomic model, and of the mysteries of radiation, he does not attempt to demonstrate for them any significant familiarity with quantum theory; indeed, he indicates pretty clearly that, for some of them, the monads and vortices of Leibniz were preferable to the constructions of modern physics.

Mostly, Albright deploys his own version of “the pseudomorphism between poetry and physics” (p. 2) in order to offer an unusual critical vocabulary; the poetics of waves and particles might as easily be called the poetics of being and becoming, or of Apollo and Dionysus, but the quantum pseudomorphism is a way of refreshing the old metaphorical and critical categories. Since he is a very acute reader, and an engaging stylist, the anachronistic or ahistorical aspects of his approach are easy to accept. But if, after finishing Albright’s book, one wants a more searching examination of the effects and implications of the pseudomorphic relation between technoscience and poetics among the modernists—the profoundly unscientific, animistic, and fetishistic tendencies inherent in that relation—then one might profitably take up Daniel Tiffany’s Radio Corpse.

In Radio Corpse, Tiffany focuses on Pound’s “Doctrine of the Image,” which he takes as the inaugural gesture of Anglo-American modernist poetics. Swiftly adducing W. J. T. Mitchell, Martin Jay, Jonathan Crary, Lisa Cartwright, and Maurice Blanchot (not to mention Melville, Freud, and Marx—among others), Tiffany begins by suggesting that the objectivity of the modernist image is not that of a thing simply seen, but is akin to the uncanny and disturbing objectivity of a corpse, or a fetish, or an object of positivist science. He then offers for our consideration the decadent necrophilia...