Ezra Pound's Poetry between Victorianism and Modernism: A Historical-Biographical Analysis (original) (raw)

Ezra Pound and English romanticism : a study in the concept of tradition

2016

The thesis sets out to examine Ezra Pound's attitudes to the English Romantic tradition from its inception to his own time, with a view to discovering whether or not he looks upon it as a healthy or decrepit tradition. His attitudes are contrasted with those of his contemporaries in a study of three pairs of writers; two Romantics, Keats and Byron; two Victorians, Tennyson and Browning; and two Moderns, Eliot and Lawrence. By charting the changes in his outlook over his lifetime, a clear split becomes noticeable between the early apprentice poet and the later mature poet-critic interested in disseminating the knowledge and insights he has collected. The considerable deviance of his opinion from the accepted attitudes of the day demonstrates the consistency and independence of his own concepts. The conclusion of the thesis is that, in finding the English tradition to be decrepit, Pound does not find the cause to lie in Romanticism. Rather, it is caused by a desertion, or ignoranc...

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.

The Modernist Movement in English Poetry: Focusing on T.S. Eliot, W.B. Yeats, and Ezra Pound"

International Journal of Academic Multidisciplinary Research (IJAMR), 2023

This research paper delves into the Modernist Movement in English poetry, focusing on the works of T.S. Eliot, W.B. Yeats, and Ezra Pound. Through an exploration of their poetry, the paper analyzes the key themes, stylistic innovations, and formal experimentation that characterized Modernist verse. The study investigates the influence of historical and personal contexts on the poets' works and examines their contributions to the development of Modernism. The comparative analysis highlights both the shared elements and distinct approaches of Eliot, Yeats, and Pound, emphasizing their impact on the broader landscape of English poetry. The conclusions underscore the significance of these poets in reshaping literary traditions and offer insights into the enduring relevance of the Modernist Movement.

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.

Portraits of Ezra Pound: a diachronic approach to visual and poetic manifestoes

Savoirs en prisme, 2020

The aim of this article is to compare portraits of Ezra Pound in the visual arts (painting, photography, sculpture, drawing) with his own appropriation of some their aesthetic features. Indeed Pound's poetics often developed in parallel with fellow artists' work. One will also analyze the difference between individual and collective portraits of Ezra Pound, and the way they interact with Pound's poetic masks. How do they influence each other? What influence does the artistic medium have on the portrait itself? Eventually, Pound's portraits often contain elements that are constructed by the poet himself, posing as both canonical and revolutionary.

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.