The Genealogy of the Poetics of the ＂Grid＂ in the Twentieth-Century Poetry: Yeats, Plath, Merrill, Olson, Dewdney Nichol, and Carson

Abstract

Since the discovery of the concept of the grid in the twentieth-century poetry, modern understanding of the world has been changed, bound up within a literary economy of the visual representation of the verbal representation. According to Oxford English Dictionary, grid refers to "a framework of spaced bars that are parallel to or cross each other" and to "a network of lines that cross each other to form a series of squares or rectangles." In fact, the grid in poetry is a typographical concept which helps the poet organize the content of the page so that the reader can see it by imposing structure and cohesion to the layout of the poem at large. Examples of the usage of the grid in poetry are abundant. Modern poets such as Yeats (gyres) and Pound (vortex) have made the grid central to their entire life's work, and other post-modern poets of next generation such as Sylvia Plath and James Merrill have experimented it as a device for sustaining a primary visual endeavor via the grid of ouija board. Canadian poets, such as bp Nichol and Christopher Dewdney among others, appropriate this device of the grid, confirming the change of their world view in their Concrete Poetry. The origin of the visual poetry in particular traces back to what Gil McElroy calls the "ground state" and encounters the grid, a device for the ground state which was hidden to be retrieved to be a prevalent medium for both modern and postmodern art. In fact, the grid attracts both modern and post-modern poets who then have provided the verbal representation of the visual representation in a way of what Yeats calls "stylistic arrangements" for a vision to embellish their creative thoughts. When they fall into the lack of communicative creativity, they can always count on the visual momentum of the grid's recursive and repetitive "flashbacks" of duplications and multiplications. With the grid, the literary world eventually initiated an avant-garde and further postmodern devices that were able to retrieve and reproduce works of art, which shuttle back and forth between foreground and background in the world of the visual. In this context, the purpose of this paper is to look backward to the origins of the grid in Yeats’s gyres which have succeeded to provide the metaphors for poetry as well as to find out how Yeats’s discovery leads back to the future epistemology of the grid in the modern and contemporary North American poetry. Having established Irish-American connection with its initiating anchor of Yeatsian grid of geometrical symbols, this paper will return to the here and now of Irish poetry, the locus in which Ciaran Carson is distinctive in continuing Yeatsian tradition of the grid by mapping Belfast in terms of trenches.