Discussion Topics
What are the characteristics of Ezra Pound’s most successful Imagist poems?
In what ways does Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, published shortly after World War I, adumbrate the posture Pound adopted in World War II?
How has Homage to Sextus Propertius influenced later students and translators of classical Greek and Latin poetry?
Does Pound’s poetic practice contradict his poetic theories, or was he simply unable to carry out his theories in his poetry?
In what ways do Pound’s Cantos mirror the twentieth century world in which they were written?
Pound assisted many other writers. What does the diversity of their talent and accomplishments say for Pound’s literary judgment and tutorial skills?
Other literary forms
Ezra Pound was the most influential translator of poetry in the twentieth century. He translated, sometimes with assistance, from Greek, Latin, Provençal, Italian, French, German, Old English, Chinese, and Japanese. The Translations of Ezra Pound (1953) contains most of his poetic translations; there are also two separate books of Chinese translations, The Classic Anthology Defined by Confucius (or The Confucian Odes, 1954) and Confucius (1969), which gathers together in one volume Pound’s translations of two of the Four Books associated with Confucius, the Zhong yong (wr. c. 500 b.c.e.; The Doctrine of the Mean, 1861, titled The Unwobbling Pivot by Pound), and the Da xue (fifth-first century b.c.e.; The Great Learning, 1861, titled The Great Digest by Pound), as well as Confucius’s Lunyu (late sixth-early fifth century b.c.e.; The Analects, 1861).
Pound wrote a great deal of criticism. His music criticism has been collected in Ezra Pound and Music: The Complete Criticism (1977); the best of his art criticism is found in Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir (1916) and his miscellaneous pieces have been brought together in Ezra Pound and the Visual Arts (1980). More important than either of these was his literary criticism, which, though more the notes of a working poet than a systematic body of doctrine, influenced many of the important poets of the century. Literary Essays (1954) and ABC of Reading (1934) contain the best of Pound’s formal criticism, though the informal criticism found in The Letters of Ezra Pound, 1907-1941 (1950) is at least as interesting.
Pound’s translations and criticism have aroused controversy, but nothing in comparison with that aroused by his writings on social, political, and economic questions. These include ABC of Economics (1933), Jefferson and/or Mussolini (1935), Guide to Kulchur (1938), and Impact: Essays on Ignorance and the Decline of American Civilization (1960). Pound’s Selected Prose, 1909-1965 (1973) includes a generous sampling of his writing in this area.
It testifies to the diversity of Pound’s interests that even this account far from exhausts Pound’s work in other forms. He composed an opera, The Testament of François Villon (1926); one of his first books, The Spirit of Romance (1910), was an extended discussion of medieval literature; he translated Confucius into Italian as well as English; and his contributions to periodicals number in the thousands.
Achievements
There is more disagreement over Ezra Pound’s achievements than over those of any other modern poet. There can be no disagreement, however, over Pound’s extraordinary importance in the literary history of the twentieth century. Such importance derives in large measure from the close relationship that he enjoyed with so many of the twentieth century’s leading writers. While serving as William Butler Yeats’s secretary (from 1913 to 1915), he introduced Yeats to Japanese N drama, which served as a model for Yeats’s subsequent plays for dancers. In the same period, he discovered, promoted, and found publishers for James Joyce and T. S. Eliot. Later, in 1922, he edited Eliot’s masterpiece, The Waste Land ,...
(This entire section contains 674 words.)
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into final form. In 1914, he and Wyndham Lewis founded the Vorticist movement and the short-lived but seminal magazineBlast. During these years, he was actively involved with some of the most exciting literary journals of the period, including Poetry, The Egoist, Little Review, and The Dial.
In the 1920’s, as Pound began to write the long poem that would occupy him for fifty years, the Cantos, his pace of activity as a promoter of other writers declined. Nevertheless, he was an important influence on several generations of American poets, from his contemporaries William Carlos Williams and Marianne Moore to E. E. Cummings, Louis Zukofsky, Charles Olson, and others. It is no exaggeration to say that the literary history of the twentieth century is unthinkable without Pound.
Pound’s work as a translator was as multifarious and stimulating as his activities on behalf of other writers. With Pound’s Chinese translations in mind, Eliot in his introduction to Pound’s Selected Poems called Pound “the inventor of Chinese poetry for our time.” His versions of Sextus Propertius, Arnaut Daniel, and Guido Cavalcanti have done a great deal to increase interest in these poets. More important, Pound’s example has redefined the art of translation and has influenced several generations of poets. The enormous importance of translation in contemporary poetry can largely be traced to Pound’s groundbreaking work. Nevertheless, his translations have also been attacked as hopelessly inaccurate; his scholarship has been said to be nonexistent; and it must be granted that Pound’s translations, in attempting to catch the spirit of the original, often do great violence to the letter.
The achievement of Pound’s early verse (that written between 1908 and 1920) is, to put it simply, that he, with Eliot, created the modern poetic idiom in English and American poetry. Breaking free from the Victorian style in which he had begun, he began to write concise, laconic, austere poems in free verse, in which the line was the chief unit of composition. This style is usually called Imagism, a useful term as long as one remembers that Pound was the instigator of the style and movement, not simply one among equals. The best-known Imagist poem is Pound’s famous two-line poem, “In a Station of the Metro” (1913), but Pound quickly outgrew the tight, haiku-like style of his Imagist period (1912-1914), applying its concision and characteristically elliptical juxtapositions in longer, more complex, and more substantial poems.
This change quickly bore fruit in Homage to Sextus Propertius (first published in Quia Pauper Amavi, 1919), a kind of translation whose problematic status as a translation has diverted critical attention from its substance, and Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, one of the classics of modernism. Even before completing the dense, witty Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, Pound had begun what was to be the work of a lifetime, the Cantos. He first published sections from the Cantos in 1917; the poem was left unfinished at his death in 1972. The Cantos has been praised as the greatest long poem of the twentieth century, but it has also been vigorously attacked or simply dismissed without comment. For a number of reasons, the achievement of the Cantos remains a matter of great controversy and may not be settled soon. Pound was awarded the Bollingen Prize in 1949. In 1963, he, along with Allen Tate, was the recipient of an Academy of American Poets Fellowship.
