{"id":3106,"date":"2017-09-18T21:44:03","date_gmt":"2017-09-18T21:44:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/courses.suzannechurchill.com\/eng394-f17\/?p=3106"},"modified":"2017-09-20T19:34:42","modified_gmt":"2017-09-20T19:34:42","slug":"3106","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/courses.suzannechurchill.com\/eng394-f17\/2017\/09\/18\/3106\/","title":{"rendered":"Ezra the Enigma"},"content":{"rendered":"

Biography<\/b><\/h4>\n

Ezra Pound, born in Hailey, Idaho on October 30, 1885, was an American poet who contributed greatly to the modernist movement and the imagist movement, a 1912 movement that focused on concrete, succinct language. He spent most of his youth and acquired most of his education in Pennsylvania, but traveled to both Venice and London in his twenties (Wilmer). <\/span><\/p>\n

Pound was an avid anti-war advocate and proponent of fascism, and his radical speech had him arrested and sent back to the United States in 1945. He subsequently spent twelve years, from 1946-1958, incarcerated in Saint Elizabeth\u2019s Hospital in Washington, D.C. on grounds of insanity. Following his incarceration, he returned to Venice, where he eventually died on November 1, 1972.<\/span><\/p>\n

Stylistically, Pound \u201cadvocat[ed] concreteness, economy, and free verse\u201d in his poetry, and has been considered by some to be \u201cpersonally responsible\u201d for English poetry\u2019s in the 1910s revival (Wilmer). His most famous work, \u201cIn a Station of the Metro,\u201d is only two lines long, but contains an \u201cineffable\u201d quality that has perplexed and delighted critics for nearly one hundred years (\u201c<\/span>On \u2018In a Station of the Metro.\u2019\u201d<\/span>).<\/span><\/p>\n

As a result, Pound is widely considered the father of imagism. One description calls imagism a \u201csuccinct verse of dry clarity and hard outline in which an exact visual image ma[kes] a total poetic statement.\u201d The description continues, \u201cImagism was a successor to the French Symbolist movement, but, whereas Symbolism had an affinity with music, Imagism sought analogy with sculpture\u201d (Imagism). Pound himself wrote a manifesto for Imagism that gained great traction, and his poems. <\/span><\/p>\n

Mina Loy also deeply admired Pound. However, the frequency, nature, and depth of Pound\u2019s interaction with Mina Loy remains ambiguous. Their interactions are few and inconsistent. The ones that do exist are cryptic. Some historians have envisioned the relationship as a solely one-way one, wherein the eminent Pound was a mentor or role model to the relatively obscure Loy. Yet, a closer look at the evidence points to the contrary: Pound famously coined the term <\/span>logopoiea<\/span><\/i>–defined as <\/span>“a dance of the intelligence among words and ideas and modification of ideas and characters\u201d–to describe Loy\u2019s writing. <\/span>He also once wrote in a letter to Marianne Moore, \u201cexcept you, Bill [Williams] and Mina Loy who can write anything of interest in verse?\u201d Finally, and most surprisingly, critics have noticed that marked similarities in word choice and vocabulary between Pound\u2019s <\/span>Hugh Selwyn Mauberley<\/span><\/i> and Loy\u2019s work hint that Pound truly admired–and perhaps at times even strove to emulate–Loy\u2019s abstract, emotionless writing style. <\/span><\/p>\n

Pound \u201cremains a controversial figure\u201d to many today (Wilmer). His poetry, and his character, are immensely polarizing. Loy recalled that Pound \u201cwas like a child, and an old professor at the same time\u201d and that he \u201cwas a sensitive man who didn\u2019t think other people were sensitive.\u201d She recalls, \u201cOne of his friends said he had brought from America the faults of America, and none of the virtues\u201d (Nicholls). Likewise, Wilmer writes:<\/span><\/p>\n

His brutal politics have been damaging to his lofty view of the artist and civilization; he is also condemned as an \u00e9litist, an obscurantist, and a charlatan\u2014a man deficient in self-knowledge, with no real understanding of the modern world despite his avant-gardiste posturing. [Yet, n]one of these charges quite shakes the substance of his achievement, which is fundamentally a matter of technical accomplishment to a point where refinement of skill becomes a moral quality. Such is the sensitivity of his verse movement that it seems to release independent life and otherness in his subjects, as if it had discovered them by chance[,] whether he seeks to evoke the movement of olive leaves in the wind or the character of a Renaissance <\/span>condottiere<\/span>. The same quality lies behind his genius for translation, an art he has been said to have invented for our time: uncannily, he creates a language for each author which registers the remoteness of the author from our world while at the same time making his work available to us. (Wilmer)<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

As such, the mystery of Pound is the charm of Pound. More is said by the words that he does not say than the words that he does. The same traits that are his worst, least attractive traits are the same ones that release the poetic genius within. Thus, Wilmer concludes: <\/span><\/p>\n

If Pound is obscure, it is largely because of his wide frame of reference; he was also an educator, who used poetry to introduce his readers to works and ideas he had discovered for himself. It is hardly his fault that his syllabus has never been adopted.<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

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