This paper aims to look into a common denominator of poetic modernism, that is, a longing to get close to the thing as it is by subduing rhetorical excess, through a close examination of Ezra Pound and Wallace Stevens who have been widely accepted as ...

This paper aims to look into a common denominator of poetic modernism, that is, a longing to get close to the thing as it is by subduing rhetorical excess, through a close examination of Ezra Pound and Wallace Stevens who have been widely accepted as two antithetical poets of modernism. This longing they share will also put into doubt Marjorie Perloff's daring critical assessment that "no inclusive definition of Modernism can quite close" the gap between them.

As is shown in his "In a Station of Metro" and "Liu Ch'e," Pound's image is a means of presenting, not representing, the poetic object in a concise and concrete way which requires the control of linguistic impulse. In addition, his ideogram, deriving from his investigation into the Chinese character and poetry, attempts to bind the abstract concept to its constituent particulars by presenting a picture of the elements it relates. In this regard, both image and ideogram represent Pound's yearning to get close to the thing as it is by recovering the natural bond between words and things themselves.

Stevens who has been largely labelled as the poet of fiction also shows the poetics of realism tantamount to that of Pound. In his "Metaphors of a Magnifico" Stevens attempts to gain access to the particularity of the poetic object by subduing the linguistic impulse. Furthermore, one of his best-known poems, "The Snow Man," deals with the possibility of experiencing the otherness of the world by subduing the desire to impose meanings on it. This linguistic abstinence is also carried out in his later short poems such as "The Course of a Particular" and "Not Ideas about the Thing but the Thing Itself."

The common impulse of Pound and Stevens to get close to or grasp the thing itself echoed in one of their successors, Gary Snyder. He presents the elusiveness of nature which would not be trapped in the prison house of language in "Ripples on the Surface." More radically in "Finding the Space in the Heart" which resembles the fragmented pattern of Pound, Snyder attempts to see the world without language and bring "that seeing" into language, which is in turn the theme of Stevens's "The Snow Man."

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