Modern American Poetry I
Week 7: Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound
• Ezra Pound is one of the most controversial figures of the American Poetry
• A well-read figure who was bold enough to say that he would be the person who knows the most about poetry by the time he got thirty.
• He had complex realtionship to literary personages as well as political figures and politics itself.
• He is accepted to contribute
greatly to Eliot’s Wasteland as an editor.
• He was in Italy during the Second World War and
supported the fascist army of Mussolini against America.
• He had personal contact with Mussolini and presented him a copy of his Cantos.
• At the end of the war, he was first imprisoned, later institutionalized and spent long years away from freedom.
• He was released with the effort of the intellectuals of the time.
• He was the founder and a member of Imagist movement but later left the group.
• He is known to be one of the leading poets of
modernism.
Ezra Pound
The Return
See, they return; ah, see the tentative Movements, and the slow feet,
The trouble in the pace and the uncertain Wavering!
See, they return, one, and by one, With fear, as half-awakened;
As if the snow should hesitate And murmur in the wind,
and half turn back;
These were the "Wing'd-with-Awe,"
inviolable.
Gods of the wingèd shoe!
With them the silver hounds, sniffing the trace of air!
Haie! Haie!
These were the swift to harry;
These the keen-scented;
These were the souls of blood.
Slow on the leash, pallid the leash-men!
