What does Veeky Forums think about Ezra Pound? Trying to get into his Cantos at the moment

What does Veeky Forums think about Ezra Pound? Trying to get into his Cantos at the moment

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WE WUZ KANGS AN SHIET

read the seafarer and his criticism instead. you'll get more out of it

Well Ezra Pound was a fine young man
Though possibly a bit of a dandy

And when it comes to writing things down,
You know, he was pretty handy

But remember this, you pretentious shits
With your books upon your shelf:

When he came, his dick went limp
Like everybody else.


- this is serious mum

> thinks Ezra Pound was a negro

Only his imagist poems are good

His best works were "translations".

The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter
Related Poem Content Details
By Ezra Pound

(After Li Po)

While my hair was still cut straight across my forehead
I played about the front gate, pulling flowers.
You came by on bamboo stilts, playing horse,
You walked about my seat, playing with blue plums.
And we went on living in the village of Chōkan:
Two small people, without dislike or suspicion.
At fourteen I married My Lord you.
I never laughed, being bashful.
Lowering my head, I looked at the wall.
Called to, a thousand times, I never looked back.

At fifteen I stopped scowling,
I desired my dust to be mingled with yours
Forever and forever, and forever.
Why should I climb the look out?

At sixteen you departed
You went into far Ku-tō-en, by the river of swirling eddies,
And you have been gone five months.
The monkeys make sorrowful noise overhead.

You dragged your feet when you went out.
By the gate now, the moss is grown, the different mosses,
Too deep to clear them away!
The leaves fall early this autumn, in wind.
The paired butterflies are already yellow with August
Over the grass in the West garden;
They hurt me.
I grow older.
If you are coming down through the narrows of the river Kiang,
Please let me know beforehand,
And I will come out to meet you
As far as Chō-fū-Sa.

100 years from now people will know him for his translation of Confucius more than anything else

90% of his poems are (acknowledged or unacknowledged) translations. He did very little truly original work. Like Eliot, he is really only good because he worked ceaselessly on his poetry and not because he had any true passion or vision for art. And like Eliot, he likes to use allusion to hide his lack of truly original thought. He essentially did not think deeply of life, but of books.

"In a Station on a Metro" and his poems in Des Imagistes and Cathay are good, but for Imagism I'd go with William Carlos Williams and HD. Some of his critical work is good too, and generally he did a good job pointing people to great writers that have been unjustly ignored (like Chaucer, Villon, Cavalcanti, Daniel, Chinese poetry, etc.) and he complerely BTFO Wordsworth and Milton, but he had more breadth than depth of knowledge.

This, really. Pound is a great technician but he doesn't seem like he could ever find any original ideas to write about, which makes him an ideal translator and a less-than-ideal poet. It would have been great if he could have done more like "In a Station on the Metro", but that two-line poem literally took him a year to finish. So most of his Cantos is random bullshit and historical allusions. In his older days, Pound's biggest regret was wasting so much time on such an incoherent poem.

Actually they'll know him mainly as one of the most prominent modernist poets

Far better at spotting and cultivating literary talent than being a literary talent.

Seeing "For Ezra Pound The Greater Magician" first thing in The Wasteland still makes me droop.

Wich is kind of weird. Eliot originally wanted to open the poem with a quote from Heart of Darkness, but Ezra pretensioned him out of that. Which good cause that Sibyl quote fucking owns, but also sort of sad cause you can really see the effect HoD had on Eliot as a poet.

Although Eliot originally wanted to call the poem, "He Do the Police in Different Voices" which would have alos owned.

Anyway ditch the cantos and pick up Love Song or Wasteland; you'll better for it.

I don't think that's fair to Eliot.

We're not talking obscurantism like Becket here. Eliot was deeply reflective on his study of Bradley; his dissertation on whom he published, as to help apprehension.

But even despite all that, there's so much innate beauty in the quality and the turns of phrase the poetry makes use of.

I feel like Eliot gets a bum rap for something he was far less guilty of than his contemporaries. Joyce suffers from the exact same affliction--a person who wants to communicate but has been forced to do so in a certain way in order to best convey their message.

Definitely second-rate. A total fake. A venerable fraud.

The best critic I have ever read.

Some very good short poems, but he lacked the faith or sense of cosmic wholeness necessary to write an epic. This is why he took Ovid and Chaucer as his models - a series of independent poems with an overarching connection. Except he couldn't find a connection.

Even a less than deadly serious writer like Ovid was able to take a worldview for granted, but Pound was trying to thrash one out solo.

...I think if the Axis had won the war, Pound might have been able to find a cadence for his cantos. As it was, he placed his bet on the wrong horse.

I've been trying to get into his Pantos for a while

I feel sad for Ezra, Knut, and Yukio. Politics fucked their shit up.

he was a fascist. Let me tell you something folks, you'll never see me hanging around the likes of him. I've heard from good sources he was a nazi sympathizer. Very bad hombre.

He basically was though

>Beckett
>Obscurantist

Spot the pseud

Also Louis

did you just make this up? Its genuinely amazing.

I like his poem "Hugh Selwyn Mauberley," but that's about it.

Alt-right autist, never wrote anything worthwhile

This, he was basically the Milo of his time

>that two-line poem literally took him a year to finish
Interesting. Source?
>In his older days, Pound's biggest regret was wasting so much time on such an incoherent poem.
Interesting. Source?

>Joyce suffers from the exact same affliction--a person who wants to communicate but has been forced to do so in a certain way in order to best convey their message.
Agreed

Also Gabriele

>not becoming a propagandist for a foreign fascist nation, railing against President Rooseveltstein back home

To all the boys that “placed their bets on the wrong horse.“

Pound is probably one of the most powerful forces in 20th century literature. Virtually everyone associated with modernism--and I use this word here sort of vaguely to also include more subtle precursors to modernism as well as works that can be fit into a narrative of 'modernity' even if they are not traditionally 'modernistic' persay--was associated with Pound in some way. The main issue with approaching his work is that I feel it is necessary to have at least a basic understanding of his philosophy in order to see exactly what his poetry is trying to accomplish. This is in contrast to figures such as Eliot, who although still having dense allusive qualities (or intertextual? I've seen that this word has been more popular as critics try more and more to divorce the author from the text) is also distinctly more accessible than segments of the Cantos. There are however many deserving parts that are devastating all on their own though:


But a part of himself talked to himself
and not to its center
and his shade grew grayer
Until another note of the scale
came from the hollow emptiness"

(Cantos LXXII)

The seminal piece on untangling all the imagistic/vorticist elements of modernism would be Kenner's "The Pound Era" which is an interesting book in that it's a very personable book (Kenner had a pretty great relationship with Pound and he has a way of showing his analysis almost as if he's delivering an opinion). Kenner is also great just for really trying to rip apart the Cantos and it'll start you on the right track as far as sources are concerned. Other books that come to mind are Bradbury and McFarlane's little compilation of Modernistic essays; they work well as a companion piece to some of the more canonical or central works of criticism, of which I would recommend getting a collection of Pound's essays. Soon you'll start to see how despite it's experimental nature, there is a very distinct feeling or gestalt or whatever underlying early 20th century thought. This also connects to concepts such as Russian futurism--which is deeply interwoven with marxist utopianism (which is implies that there is any utopianism idealism that isn't Marxist, a claim I'm a little skeptical of) as well as German expressionism, which is sort of another useless term but does have at least some connection to Romantic aestheticism/humanism. I'm rambling now but if anyone has any questions that I might be able to answer shoot away

Why do you feel the need to be opinionated but not informed

didn't make it up.

youtube.com/watch?v=zgZd_KHShG0

Why are you trying to slam them? What is this insistence on an original 'idea? Your post makes you seem like you have a chip on your shoulder.

Personally I like Eliot. I think he combines words and ideas pretty well to make great poems.

>Tism