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In: Rheinsprung 11. Zeitschrift für Bildkritik, 5 (2013): 104–124.
While most scholarship examining Ezra Pound’s influence on Ernesto Cardenal’s poetics has focused on style and form, little attention has been given to the vast ideological differences that separate the two. Why would Cardenal, a committed Marxist and Liberation Theologist, claim as his biggest influence a poet whose fascist, anti-Semitic politics figure so prominently in his work? If perhaps the most obvious response is that Cardenal was more interested in Pound’s aesthetics than his ideology, this conclusion obviates the question of how Cardenal accounts for Pound’s politics. By taking a look at Cardenal’s discussion of Pound’s politics and probing possible ideological congruencies in their works, this article proposes that Cardenal was not only inspired by Pound’s reinvention of the epic and use of the archive, but also stirred by his figuration of the poet as a political actor, and persuaded by his condemnation of the U.S. government and usury. This affinity between these two great poets, I argue, discloses the slippage between two oppositional discourses—the Fascist and the Marxist—in their critiques of production in the mid-twentieth century.
Journal of Modern Literature, 2010
Modern Book History, ed. Kate Longworth, spec. ed. of Literature Compass 4.4 (July 2007): 1158-1168, 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2007.00475.x. Reprinted in Virtual Issue: Modern Book History, Literature Compass 4 (Dec 2007), 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2007.00475.x.
Ezra Pound’s modernist epic poem, The Cantos, was composed over almost six decades of the twentieth century. Its publication history – from the earliest instalments in little magazines in the nineteen-teens to collected and posthumous editions – entails several challenges to traditional notions of literary completion, authorial control, justified (and unjustified) editorial intervention, and collaboration between authors and scholars intent on ‘cleaning-up’ apparently corrupted texts. Pound’s cultural engagements (particularly politics and economics), creative pursuits and personal history inflect some of these aspects of his text’s literary and bibliographical career over the last ninety years (for example, his incarceration by the United States Army during the Second World War and the subsequent loss of his status as the legal owner of his written words). In this paper I will indicate some challenges to literary and bibliographical convention arising from Pound’s text as well as from his personal circumstances and his relations with his principal editors: T. S. Eliot at Faber and Faber, and James Laughlin at New Directions. I will also address some challenges to editing Pound’s text today: the ways in which competing printed versions and ancillary materials might be brought to bear on persistent questions of status and permissible editorial agency; the role of technology in attempts to ‘clean up’ Pound’s text; and the way in which editorial theory might assist in reflecting upon the kind(s) of authorial status and editorial mediation at work in this distillation of so much history and cultural production. Pound’s epic poem can be seen to challenge the very boundaries of the text and the book in radical ways, both in modernist and in contemporary (including electronic) modes.
Ezra Pound spent the whole second decade of the 20th century in London; after a short period in Venice, he joined the English capital city in 1909 and left it in 1920 when he settled in Paris. Europe was going through one of the most difficult and controversial periods of its history: nations and populations were preparing themselves for the Great War, while on the other hand a huge artistic ferment was innovating and experimenting new techniques and forms of representation. The young American poet, critic and essayist, an expert of the old Romance literature (he published The Spirit of Romance in 1910), was attracted by the new tendencies and ideas circulating on the Old Continent at that time. In the meanwhile, Pound fortuitously got in touch with the Oriental culture; Mary McNeil, Ernest Fenollosa’s widow, delivered the sinologist’s notes to the poet exactly when he published the first Imagist poems and theories. The essay The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry “revealed a continent full of Imagists” and deeply influenced Pound’s poetic vision; to his knowledge on the old European lyrics, he now integrates Fenollosa’s intuitions about the centrality of the image (i.e., the Chinese ideogram as a verbal-visual category), and the immediate representation of the same image through language. As Pound himself writes in a short essay entitled A Few Don’ts by an Imagist, “An ‘image’ is that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time”: it is the ultimate visual poetry, the definitive connection between words and images. Pound’s participation to the English avant-garde movements is the proof of a constant attitude for improvement: following the direction the main international avant-gardes revealed, he converts the immediacy of his “image” into energy, “a VORTEX, from which, and through which, and into which, ideas are constantly rushing”. In his essay entitled Vorticism, Pound declares anyhow his attachment to the tradition – an idea which clashes with the Vorticist intents – and his poetry remains still faithful to the Imagist poetics and to tradition. It is fundamental to contextualize Pound’s belonging to the English avant-garde in the European milieu in order to better understand his researches in the visual-verbal field. Though a conflictual relationship, Italian Futurism played a leading role in the Vorticist aesthetics, together with Cubism and Russian Cubo-Futurism: the experiencing of these movements and a mutual exchange of ideas will make him the Modernist “great master in English of collage form”, one of the most appreciated poets of all time.
Interdisciplinary Studies of Literature, 2022
In this (virtual) interview, Massimo Bacigalupo, Emeritus Professor in the University of Genoa, Italy, begins by sharing personal anecdotes of his encounters with numerous literary figures who shaped his own experience of becoming an artist and scholar. Among these, the most influential for his future activities was the American poet, Ezra Pound (1885-1972). Massimo Bacigalupo's interdisciplinary approach, combining literature with other disciplines, finds parallels in the poetic method of Ezra Pound, whose magnum opus, The Cantos, embraces a wide variety of interests, ranging from humanities to science. Bacigalupo attempts to create his own Poundian "periplum," "not as land looks on a map / But as sea bord seen by men sailing" (Canto LIX). In so doing, he navigates the seas of his life experiences using a variety of media and approaches. In the course of the interview, Bacigalupo further provides readers, who are tasked with mentally immersing themselves in Pound's creations, with advice on, and suggestions for, approaching the intricacies and allusiveness of the American poet's multilingual work. He discusses the "vogue for writing about Fascism in Pound and others" in contemporary Anglo-American scholarship, which is occasionally marred by an insufficient knowledge of history and politics, and may lead scholars to see Fascist implications where none exist, or vice versa, to miss larger patterns of Pound's response to Italian politics of the 1930s. Bacigalupo notes Pound's frequent exclusion from current curricula, as against his popularity in the 1960s and 1970s, when he was seen as a scapegoat rather than as an espouser of discredited and offensive ideas, and accordingly doubly difficult to present in class. Ezra Pound's ultimate purpose was to offer an account of the world as he perceived it and to suggest a way out from war and debt, in the interest of a more just and satisfactory public and private life. While the ongoing digital Cantos Project helps us to identify sources and processes of composition, and is thus invaluable, readers must decide for themselves that Pound is worth reading as a poet and recounter of stories old and new.
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