英美文学选读学习笔记 Ezra Pound

Ezra Pound (1885-1972), a leading spokesman of the "Imagist Movement," was one of the most important poets in his time. He exerted a profound influence on the generation of the British and American writers who launched modern literature after the First World War, and decisively affected the course of 20th century American literature.

Although born in Halley, Idaho, Pound was brought up in Pennsylvania. He was undoubtedly a genius. Before graduating from university, he had mastered nine languages. After four months of teaching at college, Pound left for Venice in 1908. Then he went to London where he made the acquaintance of William Butler Yeats, which proved to be beneficial to both of them. During the years when he was in London, Pound lectured on romance literature, published several volumes of verse and criticism, translated edieval Italian poetry, and became foreign editor of the important new Chicago magazine Poetry. In 1915 Pound began writing his great work, The Cantos, which spanned from 1917 to 1959 and were collected in The Cantos of Ezra Pound (1986). At the end of 1920, he left London for Paris which was the scene of intense American expatriate literary and artistic activity. There he joined a famous literary salon run by an American woman writer Gertrude Stein, and became involved in the experimentations on poetry. When World War II broke out, Pound began working for the Italian government, engaged in some radio broadcasts of anti-Semitism and pro-Fascism. At the end of the war he was brought back to the United States, accused of treason, but declared insane on examination. Pound was confined for 12 years in a hospital for the criminally insane in Washington, D C. During these years he received visits, wrote letters, composed cantos, translated some ancient Greek and Chinese works and won the Bollingen Prize for his Pisan Cantos. The charge of treason was dropped in 1958 and Pound was released. He returned to Italy and spent the rest of his life there with his wife and daughter, chiefly withdrawn from the public, until his death in 1972.

Despite the fact that he was politically controversial and notorious for what he did in the wartime, Pound's literary talents are extraordinary. He composed poems, wrote criticisms and did translations. His commitment to poetry was total: to poetry as a craft, as a moral and spiritual resource and eventually as a means of salvaging culture, redeeming history. Pound's poetic works include twelve volumes of verse which were later collected and published in Collected Early Poems of Ezra Pound (1982), and Personae (1909), and some longer pieces such as Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920) and his life's work, the one hundred and sixteen Cantos that he published between 1916 and 1969. Pound's earlier poetry is saturated with the familiar poetic subjects that characterize the 19th century Romanticism: songs in praise of a lady, songs concerning the poet's craft, love and friendship, death, the transience of beauty and the permanence of art, and some other subjects that Pound could call his own: the pain of exile, metamorphosis, the delightful psychic experience, the ecstatic moment, etc. Later he is more concerned about the problems of the modern culture: the contemporary cultural decay and the possible sources of cultural renewal as well. Take his epic poem, The Cantos, for example. Pound traces the rise and fall of eastern and western empires, the moral and social chaos of the modern world, especially the corruption of America after the heroic time of Jefferson. From the perception of these things, stems the poet's search for order, which involves a search for the principles on which the poet’s craft is based.

In addition to his poetic works, Pound produced quite a number of critical essays, which can be found in Make It New (1934), Literary Essays (1954), The ABC of Reading (1934) and Polite Essays (1937), etc. These essays best reflect Pound's appraisals of literary traditions and of modern writing. He also published several volumes of translation, most notably The Translations of Ezra Pound (1953), Confucius (1969), and Shih-Ching (1954), which have not only cast light on Pound's affinity to the Chinese and his strenuous effort in the study of Oriental literature, but also offered us a clue to the understanding of his poetry and literary theory. From the analysis of the Chinese ideogram Pound learned to anchor his poetic language in concrete, perceptual reality, and to organize images into larger patterns through juxtaposition.

Pound's artistic talents are on full display in the history of the Imagist Movement, which flourished from 1909 to 1917 and involved quite a number of British and American writers and poets. This is a movement that advanced modernism in arts which concentrated on reforming the medium of poetry as opposed to Romanticism, especially Tennyson's wordiness and high-flown language in poetry. As one of the leaders of the Imagists, Pound endorsed the group's three main principles, which include direct treatment of poetic subjects, elimination of merely ornamental or superfluous words, and rhythmical composition in the sequence of the musical phrase rather than in the sequence of a metronome. "The point of Imagism," Pound wrote in 1914, "is that it does not use images as ornaments. The image itself is the speech. The image is the word beyond formulated language." Obviously the primary Imagist objective is to avoid rhetoric and moralizing, to stick closely to the object or experience being described, and to move from explicit generalization. Pound's famous one-image poem "In a Station of the Metro" would serve as a typical example of the imagist ideas.

The other important aspects of Pound's poetic work include his use of myth and personae. The poet, he argued, cannot relate a delightful psychic experience by speaking out directly in the first person: he must "screen himself" and speak indirectly through an impersonal and objective story, which is usually a myth or a piece of the earlier literature, or a "mask," that is, a persona. In this way, Pound could sustain a dialogue between past and sent successfully. As to his language, his lines are usually oblique yet marvelously comssed. His poetry is dense with personal, literary, and historical allusions, but at the expense of syntax and summary statements. In spite of all this, Pound's reputation as a forerunner of 20th-century American poetry has never been deciated.