Ezra Pound Developing IdeasEzra Pound Developing IdeasEzra Pounds Developing IdeasOften called “the poets poet,” because of his profound influence on 20th century writing in English, American poet and critic, Pound, believed that poetry was the highest of the arts. You never would have believed that a writer and optimist such as Ezra Pound would have been born in Hailey, Idaho in 1885. From the sound of his work youd thing he was definitely one of those European Imagist. In 1908, after teaching college for two years, Pound traveled abroad to Spain, Italy, and London. He followed the teachings of Ernest Fenellosa and became very intrigued by Japanese and Chinese poetry. The literary figure who has had the most substantial impact on modern thought is without a doubt Ezra Loomis Pound. Â In The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry (1988), he is described in the following manner:
“The most extraordinary career in modern poetry has unchallengingly been that of Ezra Pound. Â It was he more than anyone who made poets write modern verse, editors publish it, and readers read it” (374)
One poem that stood out for me was Pounds work “A Virginal.” Composed in 1912, this is a great example of Pounds skillful and early developing sonnets. It is very catching how Pound opens the sonnet with great emotion, “No, no speaking in pretense of a lover discarding a lady. In the concluding sestet Pound returns to the original two stressed syllable, “No, no,” a dismissal of his discarded love, and the beginning of his reason for abandoning the attraction of traditional verse.
“No, no! Go from me. I have left her lately.I will not spoil my sheath with lesser brightness,For my surrounding air hath a new lightness;Slight are her arms, yet they have bound me straightlyAnd left me cloaked as with a gauze of aether;As with sweet leaves; as with subtle clearness.Oh, I have picked up magic in her nearnessTo sheathe me half in half the things that sheathe her.No, no! Go from me. I have still the flavour,Soft as spring wind thats come from birchen bowers.Green come the shoots, aye April in the branches,As winters wound with her sleight hand she staunches,Hath of the trees a likeness of the savour:As white as their bark, so white this ladys hours.”Intent on experimentation, he prefers the green shoots that shows a new thrust through earth’s crust. Its also interesting how he alliterates the past as a “winter wound” and looking ahead to April’s “white-barked trees,” using the color white as symble of an developing purity. “A Virginal,” seems to have expressed Pound’s exasperation with the predictable American artistry and with poets who refused to let go of the past.
The poems of Lustra (1916) reflect the range of Pound’s intellectual interests, the variety of his technical experiments, and the extent of his artistic achievement in his London years. Such as “In a Station of the Metro.”
“The apparition of these faces in the crowd;Petals on a wet, black bough.”For Pound as for other modernists, the First World War marked a turn away from the aestheticism of his early years toward what he would call “the poem including history.” Having laid to rest the aesthete figure of his early period in “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley,” which was published in 1920, Pound departed for Europe and turned his main energies into writing his epic Cantos. Under the influence of C. H. Douglas’s ideas on Social Credit and, after 1924, the politics of Mussolini in Italy, Pound came to attribute the waste of the war and the depression of the modern world to the taking over of bankers and defense manufacturers, usury, and Jews. Insisting on the relationship between good government, good art, and the good life, Pound incorporated his social and economic views into the
\1\ themes of his poetry. But with his own work, he also began to be criticized in the 1920s for his politics toward the American elite. In 1924, Pound’s “The Postwar World”—which is today known as †The Postwar World—became his first short work. When Pound and Postwar produced their first works, they did so as a reaction against the reactionary political ideology championed by Milton Friedman, a conservative who opposed such a program. With the success of The Postwar World, a new emphasis was placed on the relationship between good government and good art. At the end of 1926, the government was the primary focus of Pound’s work. The work began to move away from a focus on what, under the rule of the French Revolution, was viewed as the good (though not the bad) of the British Empire. While Pound’s focus was on the military of an independent, European empire, his most influential work was that of a new art form, the National. The nation was to be a collection of national institutions, known as a Nationale (national, sovereign).
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It made sense to have the national government provide the building blocks of a public image, which Pound developed. And on this basis Pound, to a certain extent, embraced the national institutions and public image that had been defined as having the ultimate character. His work reflected the ideals of his early decades, and also reflected the growing prominence of modern art in American society, particularly in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. But while Pound’s approach to art may have received negative reception from contemporaries of his time (the criticism of the 1920s in print), this was not the first time that his political ideas were often expressed in such a manner. For example, in 1922, Pound was asked to write a satirical article about the war in Italy by a Frenchman who had been involved with the French. The postpartum depression forced the French to allow Pound to leave his post and join a newly formed group of French artists called the ‘Nationale du Monde’. The group—known through the title was also called the ‘Nationale—’ before its actual name was formed—grew out of the work of a young man named François de PottĂ©, a man who was deeply affected by the depression at the time. In Pound’s words, “The national [depression] is a form of propaganda—the press is one form of art in history but the real effect is as propaganda. It opens up the door and is able give the impression of having been silenced by the masses. The first post of the Nationale du Monde shows that the country is an effective tool against the masses, but the most successful of them are the people that are affected and have formed the collective consciousness. The whole country is now in a crisis and a crisis must be looked at through the eyes of the American people.”” The Nationale du Monde was named after the fact that French people had started to speak out against the Depression and its impact by showing the American public how the American public could resist the effects of depression. In the 1930s, Pound, with the backing of a Frenchman named Jean-Pierre Duchesne, was able to join another French group called VĂ©lo-Marine