A flowering word: The modernist expression in Stephane Mallarme, T. S. Eliot, and Yosano Akiko

Beginning with Baudelaire's symbolic oxymoron, Les Fleurs du mal, modernist poetry characterizes itself as a most "eloquent" enigma. Charged with the energy of ambivalence, this French precursory text is derived from a long line of development of avant-gardist works. Mallarme's esoteric shadow of linguistic creativity flashes an ostentatious glimpse of a cosmic panorama within which Rimbaldian texts claim an apocalyptic ending, simulating the Tower of Babel.;The obscurity and compression of Anglo-American modernist poetry inaugurated by Ezra Pound culminated with T. S. Eliot's universal metonymy, in the Four Quartets. This poetic movement even involved the Japanese traditional short poem, with the 31-syllable, one-line form, which had enjoyed more than one thousand years of centrality. It is within this context that I want to consider Yosano Akiko's 399 line Tangled Hair. The modernist aesthetic of Yosano Akiko's poetry emerges from the scrambling of the syntagmatic order by grammatical, especially semantic impertinence of the combined words, as is typified by Mallarmean poetry as in the final "Un coup de des". Akiko's fragmented text seeks its own minimization, tending toward the absolute limit of language and poetry the embodiment of the poetic word as the smallest and yet self-sufficient, if highly pregnant, unit. The modernist "word" has a meaningful sameness which explodes into polysemia through the syntactical connection. This is the high point of modernist art: it achieves an aesthetic experience in the reader by foregrounding limitedness and overcoming the ontological crises in Japan's capitalistic wartime. Tangled Hair requires the reader to be engaged in inventive supplementation, with a view to realizing productive communication. As the symbol of "present"-"modern" and the alienated self-consciousness of the author-reader, the emerging "poetic word", the minimal sign with its propagation in the reader's experience triggers the imagination in the form of enchained interpretants and self-reflexivity drives the creative participant to live his or her limited/limitless life as a basic and total experience. In the poet's ceremonial appropriation of language for human salvation, the work also self-consciously shapes itself into the matrix of poetry, or into the "poetic word" as the primordial, verbal artifact, the creative force.