Getting Spliced: Modernism and Sexual Difference

Abstract

SINCE THE PUBLICATION OF HUGH KENNER'S THE POUND ERA, EZRA POUND HAS increasingly displaced T. S. Eliot as the representative American modernist poet, especially among writers and critics who see continuity between the early days of modernism and its recent postmodernist permutations. Pound also occupies a central position from the related perspective of those who, in Marjorie Perloff s words, read synchronically, against the backdrop of the avant-garde arts of Europe in the period entre deux guerres, for whom Pound's structures seem quintessentially modem. In this view, how the poem is put together is of greater interest than what it says: