Parallelism in Pound

When Gerard Manley Hopkins claimed that parallelism was the basis of poetic structure, the models of parallelism he had in mind were, presumably, those of Robert Lowth as applied to Hebrew poetry: synonymical, oppositional, and synthetic.  Those models served their own purposes, but recent studies of Hebrew poetry have added significant new models.  They will be verified here by applying two of Adele Berlin's models, based on Roman Jakobson, to Ezra Pound’s poetry: bidirectional and syntagmatic.


By applying the second model to "In a Station of the Metro," the reading whereby paradigmatic word pairs can become syntagmatic ones will be suggested.  


By applying it to the metamorphic passage in Canto 29 where metaphor and metamorphosis concur, the possibility of parallelism that is both paradigmatic and syntagmatic will be pointed out.


Starting from suggestive hints by Frye and Rodger, I try to demonstrate in this book that Hopkins' insight into the basic structure of poetry is valid for Pound's poetry, by incorporating parallelistic models gleaned from recent biblical studies.  Of equal significance is the fact that it proves a source of fresh readings to come.


Eiichi Hishikawa

Professor, Graduate School of Humanities, Kobe University


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