the poetry of ezra pound

Bob Holman on the Nuyorican, oral tradition, and how poetry led him to activism. The year 1915 also saw Eliot's first major publication, when "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" appeared in the June issue of As well as being a fine poet, Ezra Pound was also a gifted translator, and many of his own poems incorporate allusions to different literary traditions, from the Japanese haiku to ancient Greek lyric and epic poetry and the French troubadours. An admirer of Mussolini, he lived in fascist Italy beginning in 1925. We seem to have come an exhaustive full circle since Hugh Kenner's 1950 introductory I paint my man as I conceive him,” explaining that “the sort of thing I do” is “the short so-called dramatic lyric.” Pound continued to explore the possibilities of the dramatic lyric in his work, later expanding the technique into the character studies of Homage to Sextus Propertius (1934) and Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920), and of the countless figures who people the Cantos. An incisive study of Ezra Pound's time in an insane asylum. Eliot, and Robert Frost. Most of it was written between 1915 and 1962, although much of the early work was abandoned and the early cantos, as finally published, date from 1922 onwards. Cantos V, VI, and VII appeared in the Dial (1921) and “The Eighth Canto” appeared in 1922, but except for limited editions, no new poems appeared in book form for the next decade. When Joyce and family arrived in Paris in July, Pound was there to help them settle: he arranged for lodgings, and loans … and introduced Joyce … to the future publisher of Ulysses (1922), Sylvia Beach.” Ezra Pound achieved an improbable balance of scholar erudition in literature and poetry, and clarity for the lay person. Canto I introduces these controlling themes, presenting Odysseus’s visit to the underworld, where he is to receive information from the spirits of the dead that will enable him to return home. An epic also encompasses the entire known world and its learning; it is “the tale of the tribe.” Thus, the Cantos were designed to dramatize the gradual acquisition of cultural knowledge. For several weeks during that hot summer, Pound was confined to the cage. About Ezra Pound Ezra Pound was an American expatriate famous poet and critic and a major figure in the early modernist movement in poetry. A Girl, And The Days Are Not Full Enough, A Pact Interviewed by Donald Hall Issue 28, Summer-Fall 1962. 20. Ezra Pound (1885-1972) is now recognised as the central figure of Anglo/American modernism, the man who did most to shape the movement which in turn did most to shape the 20th Century cultural landscape in the west. In his 1934 essay “Date Line” (in Literary Essays of Ezra Pound), Pound defined an epic as “a poem containing history.” He further declared, in An Introduction to the Economic Nature of the United States (1944; reprinted in Selected Prose, 1909-1965), that for 40 years “I have schooled myself, not to write an economic history of the US or any other country, but to write an epic poem which begins ‘In the Dark Forest,’ crosses the Purgatory of human error, and ends in the light and ‘fra i maestri di color che sanno’ [among the masters of those who know].” Bernstein explained that Pound’s concept of an epic determined many of the characteristics of the Cantos: “the principle emotion aroused by an epic should be admiration for some distinguished achievement,” rather than “the pity and fear aroused by tragedy.” Thus, the Cantos are peopled with figures Pound considers heroic. Embodying the ideals of personal freedom, courage, and independent thinking, they represented to Pound heroic figures whose public policies led to enlightened governing. In 1946, he was acquitted, but declared mentally ill and committed to St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, D.C. During his confinement, the jury of the Bollingen Prize for Poetry (which included a number of the most eminent writers of the time) decided to overlook Pound's political career in the interest of recognizing his poetic achievements, and awarded him the prize for the Pisan Cantos (1948). In 1924, he moved to Italy; during this period of voluntary exile, Pound became involved in Fascist politics, and did not return to the United States until 1945, when he was arrested on charges of treason for broadcasting Fascist propaganda by radio to the United States during World War II. Create lists, bibliographies and reviews: or Search WorldCat. Cantos (1925) in an edition of only 90 copies came out in Paris, and A Draft of XXX Cantos in 1930; but commercial editions of the first 30 Cantos were not published in London and New York until 1933. In a July, 1922 letter to his former professor, Felix Schelling, Pound described Propertius and Mauberley as “portraits,” his rendering of sensibilities. Flint wrote in a May 1909 review in the New Age, “we can have no doubt as to his vitality and as to his determination to burst his way into Parnassus.” Flint praised the “craft and artistry, originality and imagination” in Personae, although several other unsigned reviews pointed out difficulties with Pound’s poems. Poet Ezra Pound studied literature and languages in college and in 1908 left for Europe, where he published several successful books of poetry. [Hugh Kenner] Home. Daniel Swift’s study of Pound’s dozen years in St. Elizabeths Hospital, The Bughouse: The Poetry, Politics, and Madness of Ezra Pound (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017), promises to be just such a book. Pound was a confounding man, his Cantos perplexing, jejune, beautiful dispensations. Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920) avoided the problems of being evaluated as a translation, since the title refers to a fictional rather than an historical poet. … I picked out this and that thing that interested me, and then jumbled them into a bag. Edited letter collections include correspondence with poets William Carlos Williams and E.E. Upon his release from St. Elizabeth’s in 1958, Pound returned to Italy, where he lived quietly for the rest of his life. In a circular (reprinted in Pound’s Letters) for Bel Esprit, the well-intentioned but ill-fated scheme to help support artists in need, Pound described the poetic sequence of Eliot’s poem as “possibly the finest that the modern movement in English has produced.” Eliot in turn dedicated the poem to “Ezra Pound, il miglior fabbro” (the better craftsman), and in his introduction to Pound’s Selected Poems (1928) declared, “I sincerely consider Ezra Pound the most important living poet in the English language.” The poetry of Ezra Pound by Hugh Kenner, 1951, New Directions edition, in English No_Favorite. As the art of the haiku traveled west, influential American writers like Ezra Pound picked up the craft. Forrest Read, in his introduction to Pound/Joyce: The Letters of Ezra Pound to James Joyce, reported that Pound described Joyce to the Royal Literary Fund as “without exception the best of the younger prose writers.” Read declared that Pound “got Joyce printed” and “at critical moments Pound was able to drum up financial support from such varied sources as the Royal Literary Fund, the Society of Authors, the British Parliament, and the New York lawyer John Quinn in order to help Joyce keep writing.” Richard Sieburth in Istigatios: Ezra Pound and Remy de Gourment noted, “Ever concerned about the state of Joyce’s health, finances, and masterpiece-in-progress, Pound prevailed upon him to quit Trieste for Paris, thus setting in motion one of the major forces that would make Paris the magnet of modernism over the next decade. EMBED. The poetry of Ezra Pound Item Preview remove-circle Share or Embed This Item. ), Objectivism (Lorine Niedecker, Charles Reznikoff) and the American contribution to France’s Surrealism (Marianne Moore). WorldCat Home About WorldCat Help. These commentaries often attacked Roosevelt and the Jewish bankers whom Pound held responsible for the war. All responded or reacted to the three major movements of the first half of the 20th century: Imagism (Ezra Pound, h.d. By the 1930s, Pound was writing about banking and economic systems, and incorporating into the Cantos his own ideas about usury, which he identified as an exploitative economic system. At night floodlights lit his prison. Read and Enjoy Poetry! The student, James Laughlin, came to visit the poet in Rapallo, sparking a correspondence that would span the remainder of the poet’s life and Laughlin’s own rise to founder of New Directions Press, Pound’s US publisher. So Eliot introducing Pound’s poetry, even talking about his poetry, is a window into the history of the modern literary movement. After continuous appeals from writers won his release from the hospital in 1958, Pound returned to Italy and settled in Venice, where he died, a semi-recluse, on November 1, 1972. Pound advanced a … In The Spirit of Romance (1910), Pound had earlier interpreted the Divine Comedy both as a literal description of Dante’s imagining a journey “through the realms inhabited by the spirits of the men after death” and as the journey of “Dante’s intelligence through the states of mind wherein dwell all sorts and conditions of men before death.” The Cantos also dramatize such a journey. The British Poetry Revival was a wide-reaching collection of groupings and subgroupings that embraces performance, sound and concrete poetry as well as the legacy of Pound, Jones, MacDiarmid, Loy and Bunting, the Objectivist poets, the Beats and the Black Mountain poets, among others. The scene also serves as an analogy to the poet’s exploration of the literature from the past in hopes of retrieving information that may be significant in his own time. To these models, Pound added the teachings of Confucius, historical material, and information from his immediate experience. Representative Poetry Online, edition 6.0, is a web anthology of 4,800 poems in English and French by over 700 poets spanning 1400 years. Ezra Pound, The Art of Poetry No. He married Dorothy Shakespear in 1914 and became London editor of the Little Review in 1917. When World War II broke out, Pound stayed in Italy, retaining his US citizenship, and broadcasting a series of controversial radio commentaries. Eliot declared that Pound “is more responsible for the 20th-century revolution in poetry than is any other individual.” Four decades later, Donald Hall reaffirmed in remarks collected in Remembering Poets that “Ezra Pound is the poet who, a thousand times more than any other man, has made modern poetry possible in English.” Pound never sought, nor had, a wide reading audience during his lifetime; his technical innovations and use of unconventional poetic materials often baffled even sympathetic readers. Any effort to restore the value of his critical production is worthwhile remove-circle Share or Embed this.! 1951, new Directions edition, in English 3 a successful effort to restore the value his... Echo, and the United States from the new centennial anthology Pound criticism will be published the... Poem he entitled the Cantos tags ) Want more them into a bag as a Poundian! Embed ( for wordpress.com hosted blogs and archive.org Item < description > tags ) Want?! 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