Thought, dogblast you, thought is made up of particulars, and when those particulars cease to be vividly present to the consciousness in the general statement, thought ceases and blah begins.
"A peculiar anthologic maze, an amusing literary chaos, a farrago of quotations, a mere olla podrida of quaintness, a pot pourri of pleasant delites, a florilegium of elegant extracts, a tangled fardel of old-world flowers of thought, a faggot of odd fancies, quips, facetiae, loosely tied" (Holbrook Jackson, Anatomy of Bibliomania) by a "laudator temporis acti," a "praiser of time past" (Horace, Ars Poetica 173).
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Friday, September 29, 2023
Blah Begins
Ezra Pound, "Our Contemporaries and Others," New Review 1.2 (June-July 1931) 150, quoted in A. David Moody, Ezra Pound, Poet: A Portrait of the Man and His Work, Vol. II: The Epic Years, 1921-1939
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), p. 102: