Climbing the Poundian Alps

Abstract

Michael Alexander. The Poetic Achievement of Ezra Pound. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1979. 247 pp. William Harmon. Tune in Ezra Pound's Work. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1977. 165 + xiii pp. Leon Surette. A Light from Eleusis: A Study of Ezra Pound's Cantos. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979. 306 + xiv pp. The greatest stumbling block in modern poetry is probably Ezra Pound's Cantos. What are we to make of this shambles of a long poem? This sequence which occupied almost fifty years of a poet's career raises almost every question about the nature of the long poem in the twentieth century. If it is possible to construct a poem of any length, the Cantos have already worried at the nature of its structure—can there be an epic in the twentieth century? What form will give it coherence? Can there be an epic hero? If epic is not possible, can there be any other kind of mythic narrative? And what of narrative itself? Can poetry at length still tell a story? Can there be a hero suited to modern demands? And will such a poem be able to radiate outwards from some moral center or has modernism put paid to the didactic element in poetry?