Fascinating. I am reminded of a debate between Gide and St-John Perse in which the latter deplored the concrete nature of English and its desire to "reincarnate the thing itself". He thoughts the French words "like coins as values of monetary exchange", whereas English "was still at the swapping stage".
I am also reminded that the chap from Dante’s Inferno who turns up in the long epigraph to Prufrock, Guide da Montefeltro, was placed in hell for the crime of counterfeiting.
"Trattando l'ombre come cosa salda" did in fact come to mind as I was writing this -- but I had forgotten he was a counterfeiter... Fake money being a subject of interest to Gide too, of course. There's also a passage in Pound's wretched "A Visiting Card" (1942) where he effectively asserts the intrinsic value of ancient "numismatic art", and then repeats himself about Dichtung = condensare, either side of a casual anti-semitic remark about "the Rothschilds" that I won't repeat here. Hill, I think, treads warily because he sees how the path leads from absolutist aesthetics to politics.
The poem as “promissory note” reminds me of Transtrømer’s image of poetry as “inspired notes” of a different kind: https://andrewjshields.blogspot.com/2007/11/inspired-notes.html
Fascinating. I am reminded of a debate between Gide and St-John Perse in which the latter deplored the concrete nature of English and its desire to "reincarnate the thing itself". He thoughts the French words "like coins as values of monetary exchange", whereas English "was still at the swapping stage".
I am also reminded that the chap from Dante’s Inferno who turns up in the long epigraph to Prufrock, Guide da Montefeltro, was placed in hell for the crime of counterfeiting.
"Trattando l'ombre come cosa salda" did in fact come to mind as I was writing this -- but I had forgotten he was a counterfeiter... Fake money being a subject of interest to Gide too, of course. There's also a passage in Pound's wretched "A Visiting Card" (1942) where he effectively asserts the intrinsic value of ancient "numismatic art", and then repeats himself about Dichtung = condensare, either side of a casual anti-semitic remark about "the Rothschilds" that I won't repeat here. Hill, I think, treads warily because he sees how the path leads from absolutist aesthetics to politics.