‘이디오그램’: 파운드 시의 구조

Abstract

The question of whether Pound’s poetry is a whole hinges upon what sort of logic it involves. Some critics regard it as a heap of fragments without any integrating principle. Perloff, particularly, puts it into the category of ‘collage poetry’ and characterizes it as having no ‘deep’ level of meaning but metonymic play of literal meanings on a flat surface. Perloff is right in that like a collage it gathers different ‘things’ from different contexts and juxtaposes them without any coherent order of narrative. But she overlooks the possibility of unity through an intrinsic, organic logic stemming from the poetic elements themselves. In fact, Pound’s poetry realizes such an organic, immanent logic, which corresponds to the order of nature, what he calls ‘natural processes.’ His main critical concepts, ‘Image,’ ‘Vortex,’ and ‘Ideogram’ all concern his idea of poetic form and hence logic. Among them ‘Ideogram,’ which is developed from the others, satisfies his final idea that poetry should be like Chinese ideogram that he believes actualizes ‘natural processes,’ whereby things are constantly reunited in new wholes according to their functions. As an ‘Ideogram,’ therefore, Pound’s poetry can be seen as a temporary whole, a dynamic and open-ended structure that is neither a complete unity nor a heap of fragments.