Issue:

№7 2019

УДК / UDK: 82-13
DOI:

https://doi.org/10.22455/2541-7894-2019-7-40-166

Author: Ian Probstein
About the author:

Ian Probstein (Ph. D., Associate Professor, Touro College, New York City, USA)

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Abstract:

The article explores the life and work of Ezra Pound, an outstanding poet and a controversial figure of the 20th century, focusing on The Pisan Cantos. Pound was striving to overcome symbolism, “to make it new”, and became one of the leading figures of European and American Modernism, introducing such notions as personae, imagism, vorticism. By 1915 Pound started drafting The Cantos, a modernist 20th century epic poem, to which he would devote more than 50 years of his life. In The Cantos, epic in scope and lyrical philosophic in form, he attempted to embrace world culture, history, and civilization from antiquity to modernity. At the same time, he was often hotheaded, irascible, and intolerant towards his opponents’ opinion. Paradoxically, the descendant of the first Puritan settlers, he ended up with Dionysian mysteries, while his strife for social justice has turned him into a supporter of Mussolini and fascism. Propaganda of such views did not only damage his poetry, but it also nearly ruined his life. As is known, Pound started writing The Pisan Cantos in the Pisan DTC, actually a prison. He was accused of collaboration with the regime of Mussolini, radio broadcasting, and high treason. Awarded the Bollingen Prize (1949), The Pisan Cantos impacted Louis Zukofsky, the confessional poets, such as Robert Lowell, the Black Mountain Poets, starting with their leader Charles Olson who in his “Projective Verse” Manifesto acknowledged the impact of The Pisan Cantos, and many others. Ezra Pound was an idealist, utopian, who paid a high price for his delusions and fallacies. However, The Cantos remain a well from which many generations of American and English–speaking poets have been drawing.

Keywords: Ezra Pound, American poetry, Modernism, Avant-guard, The Cantos, Pisan Cantos, personae, make it new, epic poetry, idealism, fascism, utopianism.
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