Here I take Pound’s reflection “On His Own Face in a Glass” as the basis for a reflection on some modern and post-modern revisions of the classical “mimetic” and Romantic “‘creative’ models. Whereas Abrams sees the Romantics as giving priority to the originary light (“lamp”) of creation over the classical “‘mirror” that reflects a transcendent reality, Pound sees the eternal as itself transient and the mirrors of phenomenal reality as vitally expressive. While Krieger distinguishes a poem’s inward-reflecting “mirrors”  (objectivism) from its “windows” onto reality, Culler, for whom free origination is still a version of imitation, claims we never get beyond the “mirrors and lamps” of signifying language. But Pound’s “scintillating beauty” of the mirror-world, of pure specularity is perhaps the most playful and subtle of all these views of light-mirror relationship.

mimetic, windows, mirrors, specularity, transcendence, lamps, scintillating, immanence, creative, objectivism