Johnson’s Different Musics

Abstract

Johnson’s poetry changes significantly after The Book of the Green Man. To advance his ocular interests in his next major collection, The Different Musics, Johnson moves away from Pound’s ideogrammic method to pursue a collage mode that draws on the quoting practices of the American composer, Charles Ives (1874–1954). In The Book of the Green Man, Johnson is concerned with achieving visual integrity about one specific subject, the British landscape, by observing it from multiple perspectives and vantage points. In The Different Musics, however, Johnson wants to convey different and contrasting perceptions simultaneously. Essentially, Johnson is keen to sound “different musics” concurrently on the page so that, together, they comprise a new music. In attempting this polyphonic poetry, Pound’s ideogrammic method undergoes considerable reassessment as Johnson implements a more suitable form to allow different perceptions to co-exist simultaneously on the page. As well as indicating the changing aesthetics of Johnson’s collage poetics, Ives’s singular quoting practices, along with his innovations in dissonance and polyphony, provide a valuable model for Johnson’s desire to achieve such simultaneity of perception.

Each one must work out his idea, to his taste.

—Raymond Isidore¹

idiom: of one’s self vernacular: of the folk

—Ronald Johnson²