Approaching East and West, Words and Images: Ezra Pound and the European Avant-Garde (1910-1920) (original) (raw)

Ezra Pound spent the whole second decade of the 20th century in London; after a short period in Venice, he joined the English capital city in 1909 and left it in 1920 when he settled in Paris. Europe was going through one of the most difficult and controversial periods of its history: nations and populations were preparing themselves for the Great War, while on the other hand a huge artistic ferment was innovating and experimenting new techniques and forms of representation. The young American poet, critic and essayist, an expert of the old Romance literature (he published The Spirit of Romance in 1910), was attracted by the new tendencies and ideas circulating on the Old Continent at that time. In the meanwhile, Pound fortuitously got in touch with the Oriental culture; Mary McNeil, Ernest Fenollosa’s widow, delivered the sinologist’s notes to the poet exactly when he published the first Imagist poems and theories. The essay The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry “revealed a continent full of Imagists” and deeply influenced Pound’s poetic vision; to his knowledge on the old European lyrics, he now integrates Fenollosa’s intuitions about the centrality of the image (i.e., the Chinese ideogram as a verbal-visual category), and the immediate representation of the same image through language. As Pound himself writes in a short essay entitled A Few Don’ts by an Imagist, “An ‘image’ is that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time”: it is the ultimate visual poetry, the definitive connection between words and images. Pound’s participation to the English avant-garde movements is the proof of a constant attitude for improvement: following the direction the main international avant-gardes revealed, he converts the immediacy of his “image” into energy, “a VORTEX, from which, and through which, and into which, ideas are constantly rushing”. In his essay entitled Vorticism, Pound declares anyhow his attachment to the tradition – an idea which clashes with the Vorticist intents – and his poetry remains still faithful to the Imagist poetics and to tradition. It is fundamental to contextualize Pound’s belonging to the English avant-garde in the European milieu in order to better understand his researches in the visual-verbal field. Though a conflictual relationship, Italian Futurism played a leading role in the Vorticist aesthetics, together with Cubism and Russian Cubo-Futurism: the experiencing of these movements and a mutual exchange of ideas will make him the Modernist “great master in English of collage form”, one of the most appreciated poets of all time.