Faults and Faulted Lines in Ezra Pound’s Cantos
Starting with the observations made by Poundian and Eliotian criticism on the near-impossibility of consistently applying a poetics of impersonality in the modernist poets’ works, this paper’s aim is to reveal the fault lines of Ezra Pound’s discourse, whether it be of a didactic or of a more lyric...
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| Pubblicato in: | URI:https://journals.openedition.org/polysemes, |
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| Autore principale: | |
| Natura: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
| Lingua: | Anglais |
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Polysèmes
2024
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| Accesso online: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| Riassunto: | Starting with the observations made by Poundian and Eliotian criticism on the near-impossibility of consistently applying a poetics of impersonality in the modernist poets’ works, this paper’s aim is to reveal the fault lines of Ezra Pound’s discourse, whether it be of a didactic or of a more lyric nature. This will be done through the analysis of ideological and semiotic insistencies in Pound’s prose and poetry. While arguments have been made for reading his poetry in a non-ideological manner, his political and economic pamphlets are evidently ideological and overtly fascist; but Pound’s staunch support for Italian fascism is often complicated by sentences in which he expresses respect for political ideas which fascist purists would have deemed unorthodox at best. What eventually dominates those texts of the 1940s, as well as the Cantos that Pound wrote after the Second World War, is an overwhelming sense of fragmentation. In his poetry there are a number of lines with which critics have found (moral) fault because they exhibit the full extent of Pound’s support for Italian fascism, but a close study of them demonstrates that the author’s preference for a collage poetics undermines any authoritativeness of the lyric voice. This ultimately weakens his ideological enterprise, though it does not cancel it out: the writer’s fragmented psyche is especially perceptible in the fractured texture of the later sections of his lifelong poem, reflecting his personal experience of the increasingly complex world in which he lived rather than merely depicting his ideological views. |
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