Modern American Poetry I Week 7 Ezra Pound

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! These were the swift to harry; These the keen-scented; These were the souls of blood. Slow on the leash, pallid the leash-men!

Ezra Pound A Pact I make truce with you, Walt Whitman— I have detested you long enough. I come to you as a grown child Who has had a pig-headed father; I am old enough now to make friends. It was you that broke the new wood, Now is a time for carving. We have one sap and one root— Let there be commerce between us.

Ezra Pound Coda O my songs, Why do you look so eagerly and so curiously into people's faces, Will you find your lost dead among them?

Ezra Pound The Sea of Glass I looked and saw a sea roofed over with rainbows, In the midst of each two lovers met and departed; Then the sky was full of faces with gold glories behind them.