Pound vs. Eliot

[jdeirmend]

What I am saying is that the intent of whoever came up with Beowulf is irrelevant, intent doesn't change or charge words

I get what you're saying. You keep asserting it, and you offer no argument for its truth. I've offered a slew of counterargument that you seem to be ignoring entirely. I don't care to repeat myself at this point, but to ask you a question: what forms sentences besides intent?

I'm tempted to say that we're equivocating on the sense of intent, here, with you using it in the sense of what the author desired his work to be, and myself focusing on the mentation/intentionality of the writer. But I'm not going to commit fully to that, because these two aspects, I believe, belong to a still more general sense of "intent." In its most general form, intent is simply purposive desire. It is practically interchangeable, in this context, with consciousness.

Intent cannot change the meaning of the words, the words themselves need to stand alone. This reminds me of an interview with my old friend, Julie Carter, read it, and think about it slowly, especially the part about the eyebrows:

You haven't explicated what you mean at all by a work "standing alone."

I invited you to consider that there is a paradox at work here. To see that a work of literature has something timeless to say requires a sensitivity to context that proceeds by acknowledging, respecting, and in some sense, participating in the temporality of the same. (Incidentally, this is a condition on the possibility of the meaningful translation of writing. So if you think that there can be better or worse translations of things, let alone successful, functional ones, then you implicitly agree with this statement).

To speak, write, read and comprehend any particular language requires an awareness of rules, norms and truths, some of which aren't timeless at all. No particular language, no grammar in and of itself is timeless. Rather does each have its sense, in some necessary part, in and by a series of contingent conventions.

You seem to be insistent on ignoring this line of argument, which I previously presented to you, as well.

Why you would ascribe a cliché argument like "literature is timeless" to me is baffling, moreso to anyone who has actually bothered reading anything I have ever written(!)

It is clear you are not bothering to actually read and understand what is being written even after I provided that wonderful interview with julie carter.

You just studied discerning authorial intent and you are excited about it. Good. The rest of us have been unlearning it for a decade or more now.

Our new rallying cry is "a writer's job is to observe and report, meaning is left to readers."

But why can't you leap frog us and unlearn this already? Because you haven't learned it yet and it is trickier than it sounds.

Try and notice what you've just done. It is of a piece with what Abu pointed out prior. You've just ascribed all kinds of mental states to me, on the basis of inferences you're making from the words I'm writing. So, if you're right about where I'm at in my head as a reader, then in practice, you have conceded to the legitimacy of my position. I would invite you, in closing, to take your own advice, now, and chew the words, carefully.