Why Poetry Matters: The Transpersonal Force of Lyric Experience in Ezra Pound's The Pisan Cantos (Arizona Quarterly) (original) (raw)
Related papers
Aesthetic and Methodologic Resources of Ezra Pound’s Poetry
American, British and Canadian Studies Journal, 2012
The study of The Cantos, one of the most complex and difficult works belonging to literary modernism makes possible, precisely due to this observation, the exploration of a series of characteristics and dimensions of Pound’s work that have either remained in a programmatic stage or should be revisited more closely in order for their meanings to be discerned. ‘Analyticity’ and ‘scientism’ can be considered relevant characteristics of Pound’s work, with both aesthetic and methodologic meanings. The present study aims at investigating these two dimensions of Pound’s poetry as they appear in the second and the fourth decades of the 20th century. In conclusion the question is whether Pound’s analyticity and scientism could still be considered valuable from an aesthetic or methodologic point of view.
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.
The Cantos of Ezra Pound": The Cantos Project
Literature of the Americas, 2019
This article evaluates the theoretical and historical underpinnings underlying the design of The Cantos Project, a digital research environment dedicated to The Cantos of Ezra Pound. It critiques annotation as conceived in print culture and investigates possibilities offered by the digital medium to correct its shortcomings, abuses and limitations. The electronic medium cannot change the aggressive stance of annotators towards the poem they gloss but can considerably alleviate its intrusive aspect by strategies of website management. Readers are thus empowered to make use of the critical apparatus on the website to the extent they need, without being overwhelmed, or even disturbed. The editor of The Cantos Project, Roxana Preda, has learned from the reception history of her predecessor, Carroll F. Terrell: the article spells out her conclusions, which are not only operating in her current annotation of The Cantos but give suggestions relevant for a general theory of annotation in the digital age.
To Break the Hexameter: Classical Prosody in Ezra Pound’s Early Cantos
Modern Philology, 2017
Through the bewildering array of aesthetic theories and literary movements that Ezra Pound would adopt and discard over the course of his life, he maintained a steadfast belief that English verse could be reborn in the twentieth century by incorporating the meters of ancient Greek and Latin. In "A Retrospect" of 1917, Pound declared that "the desire for vers libre is due to the sense of quantity reasserting itself after years of starvation." 1 Because Pound never cared to define what "quantity" might mean in English verse, these statements are vague; but Pound took them seriously, bristling against criticism that his verse might not be metrical. In 1922, when Felix E. Schelling described Pound as a "confirmed devotee of vers libre" in a complimentary review of Homage to Sextus Propertius, Pound wrote a letter to Schelling in response, explaining where the reviewer was in error. 2 Pound argued that Schelling had fundamentally misunderstood his poetic forms, which were a "search for the quantitative element in English, for liberty of the musician." 3 As the decades passed, Pound became more insistent on the primacy of meter in poetic technique. In 1938, he
[Dispatches From the Poetry Wars (http://dispatchespoetrywars.com/commentary/2018/03/poet-pharmakos-poet-strange-attractor-control-complexity-pisan-cantos-martin-rosenberg/\], 2018
In this most accessible sequence in Pound's epic, poetry no longer manifests itself as the superimposition of order onto disorder: male, authoritarian, "the phallus or spermatozoid charging head on, the female chaos" (Natural Philosophy of Love, 170), but as passive, fragmented, circumstantial. The poetry seems symptomatic of a mind brutalized, perhaps even unhinged. POOR EZ! But Pound's critics are not all moved. Because of Pound's problematic stature as a preeminent man of letters, and as a high priest of fascism, an anti-Semite and a crackpot economist, critics have failed to observe the formal implications of how first Mussolini, and especially Pound function as sacrificial bullocks in the Pisan sequence. Il Duce and Pound are pharmakoi, at once casualties of a shift in the historical winds, poisonous, medicine for cultural renewal out of the ravages of war, the focus for the emotional and irrational fragments seemingly dispersed across the landscape of the Pisan Cantos. We must defer discussing the charges against Pound, substantial though they may be, in order to inquire how Pound's role as pharmakos shapes the matter and form of the Pisan sequence. Specifically: how sincere is Pound in registering the experience of a man "on whom the sun has gone down"(74/430)? How precise is he in transforming that experience into a poetics of victimization that diverges radically from the fascistic implications of his earlier, geometric and phallo-centric aesthetic, and indeed, bears study as a crucial anticipation of post-modern poetics? By comparing the palpably disintegrating interior and exterior landscapes of the Pisan sequence by reference to attractor states in complex systems, new and significantly original orderings seem to emerge spontaneously, contingently, and with significance beyond the emphasis of either the formal or substantial issues at stake with Pound's imprisonment.
“This ‘Magic Moment’: Ephemera in Ezra Pound’s Cantos as Literary Readymades”
South Atlantic Review 80.1/2, 2015
Reading Pound’s work alongside the writings of Marcel Duchamp, this paper explores ephemera in The Cantos as literary readymades which revealed themselves to the poet in moments of “rendezvous,” a term Duchamp chose for his selection of readymade objects turned artistic things. Such a reading not only collapses the critical distance between Pound’s Imagist movement and Duchamp’s Dadaism, it also affirms a comprehensive modernist project of indefinitely deferred meanings continuously reinscribed within a constantly shifting hermeneutic temporal horizon. At the same time, this paper takes up the call in modernist studies by those such as Dilip Gaonkar for resisting hegemonic critical paradigms as it deploys the temporal aspect of modernism conceptually to think about the materiality of Pound’s text as a form of literary immanence.
“And as for text we have taken it...”: Retranslating Ezra Pound’s Renaissance Cantos
Lingue e linguaggi, 2014
Ezra Pound’s Cantos, a Modernist classic, present many challenges for the translator, who has to follow in Pound’s footsteps and often divine the intention and context of the fragments that compose his historic and lyric collage. A new Italian translation of the first extensive installment of the poem, XXX Cantos (1930), appeared in 2012; a previous Italian rendering of the same work, by the poet’s daughter Mary de Rachewiltz, was published in 1961. By comparing representative excerpts of the two translations, this paper discusses different approaches to one source text. While the 1961 target text aimed at concision at the expense of fluency, the 2012 text employs a more colloquial style, attempting to make an arduous and complex work more reader-friendly. However, the two translations adopt the same strategy when rendering the many passages Pound paraphrased from medieval and renaissance Italian writings. Rather than retranslating Pound’s English, they print excerpts from the Italian originals he worked from, with their quaint spellings and often obscure wording. Just as Pound asks his readers and translators to work with him on the texts he presents in the poem, so the translators presuppose a reader who is also a collaborator, and who will be intrigued by the old documents appearing opposite Pound’s modernist paraphrases. Translation is always a work in progress, but this is particularly the case when approaching the uniquely intricate and collaborative project of Pound's Cantos.