Ezra Pound the Imagist: Major Source of T. S. Eliot’s Early Poetics

Abstract

Ezra Pound the Imagist: Major Source of T. S. Eliot’s Early Poetics Kyung-Sim Chung (Duksung Women’s University) Any discussion of T. S. Eliot’s early poetic theory is imperfect without commenting on the influence of Ezra Pound, whose Imagist movement served as a stepping stone for the younger poet’s declaration of impersonality in 1917. The impersonal theory of poetry, in fact, was prepared and vigorously experimented by Pound before Eliot became its official spokesman. Especially Pound’s idea of “tradition” and “Image,” his use of persona, and the Symbolist irony became the foundations of Eliot’s key ideas and methods of impersonality: the doctrines of “tradition” and “objective correlative,” the dramatic monologue dominant in early poetry, and the Laforguean irony to intensify and concretize language. Though the two poet-critics' different views of the final authority had prepared for their partings from the very beginning, Eliot’s thesis of impersonality as both traditional and modern was deeply indebted to Pound who took the lead in the theorization of modernism and bridged Eliot with major sources, especially Imagism and Symbolism.