The Verse Revolutionaries: Ezra Pound, H.D. and the Imagists by Helen Carr (original) (raw)
Related papers
Resisting Apollo: The Legacy of Ezra Pound in Late 20th Century American Poetry
Literature of the Americas
While Ezra Pound is still widely repudiated in the U.S. for his wartime associations with Mussolini and his anti-Semitic statements, he is nonetheless recognized there and throughout the world as a groundbreaking modernist literary figure. Why this divided attitude? Of course, there is no dearth of interest in Pound inside and outside the U.S. Yet the most telling proof of his legacy is evident in his continuing influence on contemporary American poets. This essay offers an overview of Pound's deep yet varied impact on a broad range of later poets, especially among those at the turn of the twenty-first century, despite that these same poets tend to resist Pound as an influence and, often, do not to admit to any association with each other. While Pound's influence manifests itself in highly varied ways-for example, from the classical pose of Robert Pinsky to the ludic wordplay of Charles Bernstein, and from the untethered experimentation of Rachel Blau DuPlessis to the post-Imagist poetics of Marilyn Chin-the abiding characteristic that binds these and other American poets to Pound is their poetics of resistance, itself a trait intrinsic to American poetry from its beginnings. This essay considers Pound less for his political affinities than for his quintessentially American sensibility-revealed, as his diverse successors demonstrate, in the breadth of his innovations, his resistance to constraints on the imagination, and his fidelity to the word.
Ezra Pound's Cantos: A Compact History of Twentieth-Century Authorship, Publishing and Editing
Modern Book History, ed. Kate Longworth, spec. ed. of Literature Compass 4.4 (July 2007): 1158-1168, 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2007.00475.x. Reprinted in Virtual Issue: Modern Book History, Literature Compass 4 (Dec 2007), 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2007.00475.x.
Ezra Pound’s modernist epic poem, The Cantos, was composed over almost six decades of the twentieth century. Its publication history – from the earliest instalments in little magazines in the nineteen-teens to collected and posthumous editions – entails several challenges to traditional notions of literary completion, authorial control, justified (and unjustified) editorial intervention, and collaboration between authors and scholars intent on ‘cleaning-up’ apparently corrupted texts. Pound’s cultural engagements (particularly politics and economics), creative pursuits and personal history inflect some of these aspects of his text’s literary and bibliographical career over the last ninety years (for example, his incarceration by the United States Army during the Second World War and the subsequent loss of his status as the legal owner of his written words). In this paper I will indicate some challenges to literary and bibliographical convention arising from Pound’s text as well as from his personal circumstances and his relations with his principal editors: T. S. Eliot at Faber and Faber, and James Laughlin at New Directions. I will also address some challenges to editing Pound’s text today: the ways in which competing printed versions and ancillary materials might be brought to bear on persistent questions of status and permissible editorial agency; the role of technology in attempts to ‘clean up’ Pound’s text; and the way in which editorial theory might assist in reflecting upon the kind(s) of authorial status and editorial mediation at work in this distillation of so much history and cultural production. Pound’s epic poem can be seen to challenge the very boundaries of the text and the book in radical ways, both in modernist and in contemporary (including electronic) modes.
EZRA POUND AND WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS’S ROMANTIC DILEMMAS From Obliteration to Remanence
2008
Williams’s respective projections of tradition, which are powerfully evidenced in the ambivalent relations they establish with their immediate predecessors. Whereas both American poets start out advocating a specifically American tradition—to be uncovered or made up—as well as a specifically American form for the poem, they do not seem willing to acknowledge American influences and they direct their readers toward Asia or Europe for poetic sources. Simultaneously they lay emphasis on the need for radical innovation and a break from the modes of Romanticism, which in their essays, they mock at leisure. This has led to the very notion of a Modernist age, indeed opened up by such poets as Pound and Williams, one which, according to Marjorie Perloff in 21 st-Century Modernism, is not yet over. One would however be tempted to expand Perloff’s outlook and question the idea of a wholly new era to begin in the 1910s, especially as one tries to read through the layers of the Modernist intert...
Poetical and Political: Ezra Pound as an Exilic Intellectual
In his "The Teacher"s Mission" (1934), Pound defines the artists as "the antennae of the race" and "the voltameters and steam-gauges of the nation"s intellectual life. They are the registering instruments, and if they falsify their reports there is no measure to the harm that they do" (Pound 1968, p.58 [1]). Pound trusts art and artists" power not only to descry, but also to cure social evils that are rooted in politics and economic; forbye, artists and intellectuals have a public role to speak truth to power and to spotlight social evils for the sake of a socio-cultural reform. Sixty years later, Edward W. Said speaks of the public role of the intellectual and characterizes the intellectual as "exile and marginal, … and as the author of a language that tries to speak the truth to power" (Said 1994, p.xvi [2]). Said"s vision of the public role of the intellectual in addition to his perception of the humanist intellectual as exile and marginal unlocked the door for this current study which aims at traveling back in time to read the American Modernist poet, and critic Ezra Pound as a Saidian exilic intellectual, an outsider, and a disturber of the status quo. Via examining selected poems composed by Pound at different stages of his life, this article intends to explore Pound"s stance as a self-exiled intellectual and a "naysayer" who straddles a critical, detached locus from where he proves capable of examining and criticizing not only his native culture, but also the host ones.
The Pound Reaction. Liberalism and Lyricism in Midcentury American Literature
American, British and Canadian Studies Journal, 2016
Andrew S. Grossʼs book, The Pound Reaction. Liberalism and Lyricism in Midcentury American Literature, is not actually a Pound monograph. Better said, it is one-but not only that. Indeed, taking Pound's case as its starting point, it aims at much more than just re-reading Poundʼs poetryeven though this would have already been a major and applaudable task. But Grossʼs ambition is much higher: his study sets as a goal the examination of the Bildung of a whole cultural context, the formation of the postwar Zeitgeist in American literary studies. More precisely, his book tries to answer not a single question ("What does Pound's poetry look like if re-read now?"), but a whole set of questions, which the author explicitly asks early on his study:
Ezra Pound's (post)modern poetics and politics : logocentrism, language, and truth
2001
212 resist reading and the construction of a fixed meaning? For Gwin, reading is usually a pleasurable experience-but is that always the case? There is also a tendency to imagine that literary space can be relived as a "real space," reconstructed as it was experienced by the writer which results in a conflation of these two notions of space. Does not the process of reading work in a more complex way than an attempted recreation of a supposedly original space? Although many of these questions are often referred to, they do not receive the critical attention and depth of thought they deserve. Maybe this could have been avoided by giving more space to formal analysis instead of focusing too much on plot and characters when considering the spatial in literary texts. Nevertheless, The Woman in the Red Dress is an interesting and important book which blends literary analysis with autobiographical reflections, and it is on that level where the book is at its most successful. Furthermore, it introduces a wide range of texts which deserve to be read and discussed in the class room.
Ezra Pound and the Modern Idiom
Ezra Pound's influence on American poetry in English reserves a special place within the founders of the tradition. While the Transcendentalists were on a pursuit to find The American Poet within the soil of America, Pound's narrative circumvented the Nationalist trajectory. With his development of the Imagist aesthetic and more notably, his editorial and personal mentorship of American poets like Eliot and Yeats, Pound prepared the soil for the free voices of even later poets such as the beatniks. This paper briefly explores his own poetic style, his discursive function within a decolonized tradition and his status of perhaps, the most influential editor of all time.
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), ISBN: 9781108614719
This book develops key advances in Pound studies, responding to newly available primary sources and recent methodological developments in associated fields. It is divided into three parts. Part I addresses the state of Pound's texts, both those upon which he relied for source material and those he produced in manuscript and print. Part II provides a comprehensive overview of the relation between Pound's poetry and translations and scholarship in East Asian Studies. Part III examines the radical reconception of Pound's cultural and political activities throughout his career, and his continuing impact, a reassessment made possible by recent controversial scholarship as well as new directions in literary and cultural theory. Pound's wide-ranging intellectual, cultural, and aesthetic interests are given new analytic treatment, with an emphasis on how recent developments in gender and sexuality studies, medieval historiography, textual genetics, sound studies, visual cultures, and other fields can develop an understanding of Pound's poetry and prose.