Between Apocalypse and Extinction: Eschatology in Ezra Pound’s Poetry

Abstract

Ezra Pound’s lifelong poetic project, The cantos, aspired to comprise ‘the best that had been thought and read’ in history by way of citation, gloss, allusion and quotation of a formidable variety of sources. Although Pound intended his poem to perform as a repository for important ideas and their often-precarious textual transmission, his project was also aimed at the poetic representation of a paradiso terrestre, an ideal state of intellectual community at the end of history. Consequently, in a critical phase during the 1930s he was drawn to models of theological and political eschatology, not least those of the Confucian cosmos and Italian Fascism. This intensified interest was to have drastic consequences: Pound was arrested on charges of treason and subsequently detained in the US Army Disciplinary Training Center outside of Pisa for his radio broadcasts during World War Two in Italy. During his incarceration Pound wrote much of The Pisan cantos, in which pastoral observation is combined with political vituperation and nostalgic reminiscence. Pound also makes sustained reference to John Scottus Eriugena, the ninth-century Hibernian-Carolingian theologian and poet who was condemned on account of disseminating heretical doctrines during his lifetime and again posthumously in the Averroist condemnations at the University of Paris in the thirteenth century. Following the war and the publication of The Pisan cantos (for which Pound was controversially awarded the inaugural Bollingen Prize), Pound’s epic turned to increasingly fragmented meditations on law, economics, political history and cultural production. In these later cantos, the ruined dream of his paradise terrestre is glimpsed at in the world of the Na-Khi, a Chinese ethnic minority adhering to matriarchal social structures and demonstrating a deeply ecological system of knowledge. This essay will explore the ways in which these apparently disparate sources provide Pound with a means by which to imagine a paradise in his poem in the midst of its disillusion in his own life.