The Major Western Cultural Influences on the Incubating Process of Ezra Pound’s Early Poetics

Abstract

This paper intends to study Ezra Pound’s early poetics and his modernist poetry through a close research of the various elements in the shaping process of his poetics, and the significance and influence of his poetic thoughts on the American New Poetry Movement. It studies firstly the early translations and romantic lyrics of Pound, trying to demonstrate that part of the influence on his early poetics is from the Western traditional cultural inheritance and that the emphasis on musicality that Pound inherited from traditional forms of poetry turns out to be one of the major principles that Pound advocates in his early poetics; then it comes to the discussion of the new translation concepts and poetics in “The Seafarer” (1911), which is a great work Pound translated based on an Old English poem; next this paper will focus on the influence of Robert Browning’s dramatic monologues and Yeats’ Symbolism on Pound’s transition from subjectivity to objectivity.