Ezra Pound and the Ideology of Art

Abstract

Ezra Pound’s significant engagement with visual art and artists makes him a natural subject for visual culture studies. As a young poet, Pound worked under the spell o f Pre-Raphaelite painters and the impressionist James Abbott McNeill Whisder; later, as he “modernized,” Wyndham Lewis and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska (among others) showed him the way. Throughout his London years (1908-20) Pound worked closely with artists, collabo­ rating with them on projects such as BLAST, sitting for them (resulting in portraits by Lewis, Gaudier, and Alvin Langdon Coburn), “booming” them in his reviews (as in the art criticism he wrote for the New Age from 1917 to 1920), debating with them, and of course frequendy infuriating them. The impact of vorticism, along with futurist painting, cubism, and collage on the “open form” of the Cantos has long been a central topic of Pound scholarship, from Hugh Kenner’s The Pound Era and Timothy Materer’s Vortex through Maijorie Perloff’s The Futurist Moment, Charles Altieri’s Painterly Abstraction in Modernist American Poetry, and Vincent Sherry’s Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, and Radical Modernism. In this well-documented field it is not easy to find an opening for an original critical intervention, but in Ezra Pound and the Visual Culture of Modernism Rebecca Beasley offers new research findings and detailed analysis of Pound’s engagement with the milieu o f artists, art criticism, and the ideas driving contemporary art during Pound’s formative years in London and Paris. W hat distinguishes her approach from earlier stud­ ies of Pound and the visual arts, she claims, is her focus on the “shifting ideological significance” of the arts for him (2), “an insistence that the visual arts be seen as part o f the ‘argument’ o f Pound’s work, providing a model that is not restricted to the formal” (7). In the current critical parlance, “visual culture” usually refers to all cultural artifacts and activities with a visual component (including advertising, new and old media, toys, fashion, landscape, etc.). Beasley’s scope is restricted, however, by Pound’s