Ezra Pound and Constantin Brancusi: sculptural form and the struggle to ‘make it cohere’

Abstract

This article takes an interdisciplinary approach in order to show the artistic importance of the friendship between Ezra Pound and Constantin Brancusi. It refers to key moments in Pound’s late cantos that evidence his development of a specifically sculptural aesthetic technique. With reference to Pound’s critical writings on the visual arts as well as to his allusions to sculpture and the process of direct carving throughout The Cantos, Pound’s and Brancusi’s work is seen as exemplary of experiments in poetic and sculptural form during the first half of the twentieth century. More specifically, Pound’s invocation of ‘no slither’ and his reference to Brancusi’s Bird in Space (1924, etc.) in Canto CXVII are read as being connected to his struggle to ‘make it cohere’. While Harriet Zinnes and Rebecca Beasley have both analysed Pound’s work in relation to the visual arts, this article sees his interest in the work of Brancusi as something that not only influences the shape of his late cantos, but also is intrinsic to his fraught creative process and sculptural aesthetic.