Pound, Ezra. (1885 - 1972).
W o r k
- a poet, literary critic, social critic, translator, and literary entrepreneur
- began to transform English literatura immediately after his moving to London = ‘the place for poetry’ (1908)
- exported the modernist revolution to America: a corresponding editor for Harriet Monro’s Chicago-based Poetry
- founded the Imagist movement: insisted on the ‘luminous detail’ (his “In a Station of the Metro”: an unexplained juxtaposition = the immediacy of reality)
- founded the Vorticist movement: inspired by the pictographical characters of the Chinese poetry, insisted on the concept of poetry as a succession of these ‘concrete pictures’
- attempted to aid D. H. Lawrence, J. Joyce, T. S. Eliot, W. C. Williams, R. Frost, E. Hemingway, & others, also edited T. S. Eliot’s Waste Land
- adopted traditional forms and rendered them in a new way: not to break with the past x but: to modernise the past, ‘make it new’
- claimed a poem must be vitally alive x but: his early poetry often lapsed into ‘literaryism’
< influenced by the literary traditions of the classics, the medieval Europe, the ancient Chinese haiku, and the 18th century America
Canzoni (1911):
- made F. M. Fox roll on the floor in mock horror at its ‘literaryism’
Personae (1909):
- possibly his finest collection
Cathay (1915):
- a translation from Chinese
Hugh Selwyn Mauberley: Life and Contacts (1920):
- a reaction to the death of his friend, the sculptor Henri Gaudier-Bryeska, at the WW I front; calls the ‘civilisation’ ‘an old bitch’
The Cantos:
- an epic to bridge the ancient x modern cultures
- a long, unending, and encyclopaedic poem in open form and free verse
- includes all from personal anecdotes to literary allusions: employs the technique of cryptic, fragmented, and highly allusive references
- concentrates on a sentence, avoids the narrative structure, and proves himself an obscure and never boring master of the modern language
<=> parallel to W. Whitman (= ‘the pig-headed father’ of his “Pact”):
(a) spent the bulk of his career on a long poem in the Whitmanesque tradition (Cantos)
(b) Cantos <=> W.’s “Song of Myself”: contain multitudes of ideas, insights, characters, events, etc., etc.
The Pisan Cantos:
- composed as a prisoner in an American camp for the prisoners of war in Italy at the end of WW II
Basics
(Photo: Alvin Langdon Coburn. 1913. Source: Wikimedia Commons).
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Author
Ezra (Weston Loomis) Pound. (1885 - 1972). American. -
Work
Poet. Critic. Promoter of Modernism. Author of Cantos. -
Genres
Modernism. Imagism. Vorticism.
Literature
Baym, Nina, ed. The Norton Anthology of American Literature. New York: W. W. Norton, 1995.
Bercovitch, Sacvan, ed. The Cambridge History of American Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
Cunliffe, Marcus. The Literature of the United States. London: Penguin, 1991.
Lauter, Paul, ed. The Heath Anthology of American Literature. Lexington: D. C. Heath, 1994.
McQuade, Donald, gen.ed. The Harper American Literature. New York: Harper & Collins, 1996.
Ruland, Richard, Malcolm Bradbury. Od puritanismu k postmodernismu. Praha: Mladá fronta, 1997.
Vančura, Zdeněk, ed. Slovník spisovatelů: Spojené státy americké. Praha: Odeon, 1979.
Quote
"A classic is classic not because it conforms to certain structural rules, or fits certain definitions (of which its author had quite probably never heard). It is classic because of a certain eternal and irrepressible freshness".
From "Warning" in ABC of Reading (1934).