Seafarer Socialism: Pound, The New Age, and Anglo-Medieval Radicalism

Abstract

Ezra Pounds pre-World War I medieval translations are the ugly ducklings of contemporary Pound scholarship. At a time when Pounds work is undergoing unprecedented socio-cultural scrutiny, these works find themselves snubbed.To the extent they are even discussed by critics, the poems are assigned strictly aesthetic importance, and the bulk of scholarship on them is more than twenty years old.1 This is particularly true of Pounds most celebrated pre-war translation?The Seafarer. Although it has long been regarded as one of Pound s major personae, a poem that gives expression to themes of manly virtue and heroic individual endeavor which were dear to the young American expatriate, analyses of the work have always focused on issues of language. Arguing that The Seafarer consistently sacrifices sense to sound,critics have concentrated on Pounds efforts to bring the harsh,alliterative resources of Anglo-Saxon prosody into modern English poetry. They have emphasized how the poem helped break the pentameter and thereby provided the first heave, as Pound would later reflect in Canto 81, in the modernist poetic revolution.2 In contrast to Pounds translations for Cathay (1915) and Homage to Sextus Propertius (1919), which have been rightly perceived as major statements about World War I and British imperialism respectively, The Sea? farer has been considered apolitical. Other than identifying a fiercely antibourgeois undercurrent (Alexander, PoeticAchievement76), critics have never tied it to contemporary political events or controversies, and the assumption that its subject matter exists apart from ideology continues to shape views of the work.3