This is an odd category in that it describes a style or format of essay rather than essays having to do with a certain subject matter: whereas the names of the other categories of post describe what the posts in that category are about, this one describes how the posts are written.
The name comes from the eponymous Ezra Pound essay in which he wrote that, like Isis, who searches all over mythic Egypt for the scattered limbs of her husband, burying pieces and building a commemorative shrine wherever she finds them and thus creates the landscape of Egypt (replete with shrines, pyramids, sphinxes, etc.), the effective scholar can will into existence a kind of tableau or gestalt by offering "luminous details" analogous to Isis' commemorative monuments that, even when considered on their own, apart from the others, in and of themselves point to a larger network of "circumadjacent" ideas: to a sort of conceptual landscape.
For Pound, the great poet, this was his method and his passion. For me, it's something I occasionally think I'm man enough to pull off (but never quite get exactly right). |
