Ezra Pound’s paradoxical Linguistic Experiments
p. 73-84
Texte intégral
1Ezra Pound is well-known for having experimented with many languages throughout his long career in order to find his own poetic language. Those life-long experiments run parallel to his interest in foreign cultures and alphabets. In 1935, Pound explains his extensive use of foreign languages in the following way:
If mere extensions of vocabulary, or use of foreign words is a sin, I surely am chief among all sinners living. Yet, to the best of my knowledge, I have never used a Greek word or a Latin one where English would have served. I mean that I have never intentionally used, or wittingly left unexpurgated, any classic or foreign form save where I asserted: this concept, this rhythm is so solid, so embedded in the consciousness of humanity, so durable in its justness that it has lasted 2000 years, or nearly three thousand. When it has been an Italian or French word, it has asserted or I have meant it to assert some meaning not current in English, some shade or gradation.1
2This excerpt, taken from an article entitled “Debabelization and Ogden”, encapsulates many of the issues raised by Ezra Pound’s lifelong search for a poetic language – “idiom”, “voice”, “vocabulary”, “tongue” “speech”, “language” are all used by the poet in his criticism, which is significant of his preoccupation with all aspects of language. First, the passage quoted above illustrates the poet’s will to incorporate neologisms and foreign languages to achieve an ideal of linguistic precision, also suggesting that translation is always imperfect, despite Pound’s assiduous practice of transferring texts into other languages or artistic modes. Second, it is apparent from the quote above that Pound was fully aware of, and played with, the historical and contingent aspects of language (s) in its/their synchronic and diachronic development. Third, and more implicitly, Pound’s reflection illustrates a double paradox: “Debabelization and Ogden” was originally published in a magazine furthering the economic theory of Social Credit, and in an article which praises Basic English, the enterprise developed in 1930 by Charles Kay Ogden and I.A. Richards to simplify English vocabulary and syntax to export the English language more easily. So how do these reductive and political dimensions fit in with Pound’s search for a nuanced poetic language?
3In order to understand Pound’s temporary interest in the reductive Basic English, one needs to go back to his early Imagist and Vorticist poetic programs. Pound’s conception of language is linked to what he sees as the ideal function of poetry and its possible achievements: poetry is seen as a medium that can and should present reality in the most immediate and direct fashion. In “A Retrospect”, Pound writes: “LANGUAGE / Use no superfluous word, no adjective which does not reveal something. [...] Go in fear of abstractions”.2 Pound’s wish, therefore, was always to “prune”, to make more concise. The poet always referred to two prose models, where clarity, “precision”3 or concision were concerned. From Flaubert, on the one hand, Pound takes up the idea of needing to choose “le mot juste”,4 “the exact word”;5 in Ford Madox Ford (formerly Ford Madox Hueffer) on the other hand, Pound praises a “[d] irect treatment of the thing”,6 or “direct presentation of the thing”,7 famously taken up as the first imperative of Imagist poetry in the 1910s, and which found its way into his notion of vortex and poetic intensity later on: “Condensare”,8 such was another way for Pound to formulate this idea, which was taken up by many poets after him.9
4 Compared to prose however, Pound notes, in “How to Read” (first published in 1929), that poetry is “much [more] highly charged” than prose, i.e. more concentrated in its effects, than prose which needs “a much greater amount of language” to express things.10 By comparing prose and poetry, and in defending the latter, Pound suggests that there is a specifically poetic way of putting things. At the same time, Pound’s many inclusions of elements which seem unpoetic (fragments from historical archives, slang, to name but a few) largely expand the scope of what a poetic language could be. In order to achieve the precision mentioned above, Pound insists that one has to turn to other languages to be able to put into words the precise “shade or gradation” the poet has in mind. Throughout his career and in his prescriptive advice to young poets, Pound always insisted that the would-be poet needs to “fill his mind with the finest cadences he can discover, preferably in a foreign language,11 so that the meaning of the words may be less likely to divert his attention from the movement”.12 This advice stems from a double idea: that of translation as good training for young poets practising with new sounds and rhythms, and the idea that only limited or lesser poetry survives translation. As Pound puts it, “[t] hat part of your poetry which strikes upon the imaginative eye of the reader will lose nothing by translation into a foreign tongue; that which appeals to the ear can reach only those who take it in the original”.13 And yet this did not prevent Pound from translating from and into different languages throughout his career. Pound’s practice of translation opened up possibilities for his own creation and greatly furthered our notion of poetic translation: it is not only a matter of faithfully – a highly problematic term – transcribing words into another idiom, it is also about thoroughly displacing ideas, sounds, words, rhythms, and cultural items. Indeed, translation involves all aspects of the linguistic sign and Pound’s insistence on this often caused him to be in opposition with academics (philologists in particular) and professional translators. The debate that occurred when Pound published his Homage to Sextus Propertius is a case in point. Is it homage? Translation? Adaptation?14 At any rate, translation is part of Pound’s poetic project and the final text makes Pound’s personal creation coexist with translations of Propertius’s Latin, which underlines a process of reflection on the construction of one’s poetic language.
5 The knowledge of many foreign languages is for Pound a necessity: “The sum of human wisdom is not contained in any one language, and no single language is CAPABLE of expressing all forms and degrees of human comprehension”.15 Pound takes up this idea again in “How to Read” and makes explicit the consequence this idea has for literature:
Different languages – I mean the actual vocabularies, the idioms – have worked out certain mechanisms of communication and registration. No one language is complete. A master may be continually expanding his own tongue, rendering it fit to bear some charge hitherto borne only by some other alien tongue, but the process does not stop with any one man. While Proust is learning Henry James, preparatory to breaking through certain French paste-board partitions, the whole American speech is churning and chugging, and every tongue doing likewise.16
6Pound’s practice of translation, therefore, enables him to reflect on his own language – American English expanded from abroad – in relation to others: languages from other countries and regions, varied forms of English, and also languages from other centuries. According to Pound, the necessity to plunder other languages for one’s personal poetic use enables the poet to expand his range of concepts and ideas: “Any mind that is worth calling a mind must have needs beyond the existing categories of language, just as a painter must have pigments or shades more numerous than the existing names of the colours”.17 This is one of the many instances where Pound thinks of the poetic language in terms of other arts or artistic media, often in order to try to incorporate or translate them into poetry to expand the possibilities of poetic writing. Pound’s early and late experiments with foreign languages – which he more or less mastered – such as Provençal, French, Italian, Latin, Greek, or Chinese are ways to study language more fully, taking into account its visual, aural and semantic dimensions. Pound’s study of Rimbaud’s poetry, for example, leads Pound to reflect on many aspects of poetic language, what it conveys and how it does so: “Est-ce que il existe une langue anglais [sic] pour exprimer les lignes de Rimbaud? Je ne dis pas un traducteur capable de le faire, mais est-ce que cette langue existe? (comme moyen) – et depuis quand?”.18
7 Finding a language, therefore, is seen by Pound as a process, and more particularly as a never-ending process of translation. Poetic texts are always to be revised and The Cantos in particular strongly question the very idea of a possible definitive reading of the poetic text and of a definitive version of the poem itself. Pound’s obsession with translation, therefore, can be explained according to his ideal of cosmopolitanism and his ideal of attaining perfection in language by learning what has already masterfully been done in other languages, in order to bring something new to poetry in English: languages (and alphabets) are at the service of the expansion of what eventually becomes his own poetic voice.
8Translation, however, is both “geographic” (French into English for example) and temporal (medieval to modern English). Archaic or modern modes of expression are known to be a key issue in modernist art more generally, but Pound in particular seems embarked on a paradoxical poetic quest: that of looking for a modern idiom apt to convey modern experience, which he seems to be elaborating through his choice and use of archaic words.
9Yet, in a letter to Felix E. Schelling dated 8th July 1922 from Paris, Pound acknowledges his debt to “[a] ny amount of good criticism, chiefly in forms of attacks on dead languages, dialects of books, dialects of Lionel Johnson, etc., recd. from F. Madox Hueffer”.19 Pound’s quarrel with philology as it is taught in academic circles is well-known, and the poet goes on to say that the archaisms in his early poetry had a very definite purpose and were not there for their own sake:
The point of the archaic language in the Prov. trans. is that the Latin is really “modern”. We are just getting back to a Roman state of civilization, or in reach of it; whereas the Provençal feeling is archaic, we are ages away from it. (Whether I have managed to convey this or not I can’t say; but it is the reason for the archaic dialect.) (Anecdote: Years ago when I was just trying to find and use modern speech, old Bridges carefully went through Personae and Exultations and commended every archaism (to my horror) [.]20
10And it would be wrong to assume that Pound went from using archaisms in his early poetry to a modern idiom later on, even though many early poetic volumes such as Hilda’s Book or ALume Spento contain more traditional poetic forms and archaic verbal forms (see “she hath” and “she dreameth” in the early poem entitled “Rendez-vous”21 but also in many instances in later poems). Sometimes, the spelling and syntax mirror the archaic times Pound is evoking and prefigure his future poetic program, as in the aptly titled poem “Masks” which can be read as a key to Pound’s own poetic enterprise of “disguisin [g]”; the poem closes on the following couplet: “All they that with strange sadness in their eyes / Ponder in silence o’er earth’s queynt devyse?”22 Indeed, there are different types of archaisms throughout Pound’s poetry. First, some archaisms he finds essential to express archaic “feelings” (since translation, for him, is not just about translating words and ideas but also feelings), as in his translation of the Provençal poetry of Arnaut Daniel and other troubadours, or in his translations of Cavalcanti. Second, some archaisms are ironic and meant to satirize poetic diction. Finally, others Pound considers relevant for modernity, since they enable intentional mistranslations, puns and/or multiple readings.
11It sometimes seems difficult to reconcile what remains an ideal notion of poetic language as expressed by Pound in his prose, and the effective realization of speech in his poetry. Indeed, it is speech that Pound emphasizes, as early as 1909 when he has in mind the epic scope and project of the Cantos and defines the epic as “the speech of a nation through the mouth of one man”.23 Pound’s interest in spoken languages is often underlined in his letters: the poet needs “to make [his] work sound like natural speech”.24 Hence the oral quality of many poems which include slang, as in the opening of Canto 8 which stages two allegorical and mythical figures emblematic of Pound’s poetic project: “These fragments you have shelved (shored). / “Slut!” “Bitch!” Truth and Calliope / Slanging each other sous les lauriers [...]”.25 These lines illustrate the incorporation in poetry of many elements long considered alien to it: dialogue, slang, various languages, and a recognizable quote from a contemporary (in this case T. S. Eliot). Here, one sees another paradox in Pound’s search for, and definition of, what a specifically poetic language could be: there is indeed a tension between his appeal to orality and actually used speech and a poetry that is sometimes very abstract, written, “difficult”, in keeping with Eliot’s injunction – which Pound shared – that modern poets “must be difficult”, in order to be able to reflect the “great variety and complexity” of modern civilization. According to Eliot, “[t] he poet must become more and more comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into his meaning”.26 The inclusion of, and play on, the definition of speech or oral language, that of the archaic, are indeed ways to dislocate language into a meaning that sometimes remains elusive. In the end, Pound may be looking for a poetic language with extended possibilities, but what he achieves is creating a singular poetic voice which remains recognizable despite the many literary borrowings in the poetic texts and despite the many masks of the speakers they stage.
12Finding an adequate language is felt by Pound to be an urgent necessity in order to voice his political program as precisely as possible. As the poet puts it, “[l] anguage is the main means of communication”,27 hence the need for the mode of expression to be clear. Quite often in Pound’s poetry, writing in different languages also entails using different alphabets, as in Canto 97 where Pound mixes Greek characters, Chinese ideograms and what look like Egyptian hieroglyphics,28 but are not, contrary to the ones at the opening of Canto 93. This poem is influenced by Pound’s reading of Alexander del Mar’s History of Monetary Systems (1896). While comparing the monetary systems of many countries and empires (Britain, India, Byzantium, Rome, etc.), Pound refers to other cultures in order to suggest a different path and a way to put an end to the usury he sees at work in the Western world. All the foreign quotations in the passage29 evoke the idea of making new (Pound’s poetic motto), of reforming and making better, hence adapting Pound’s theoretic and poetic ideal to the field of politics and money: the poet uses Chinese ideograms meaning “sensibility” and “dawn”, together with very short quotes from Homer (often Homeric epithets), and a reference to Dante’s Purgatorio – “novelle piante” in Pound’s poem alludes to Dante’s “novella fronda”, when the narrator “atop Mount Purgatory, faces a new life by cutting away the old”30 and compares himself to a plant made new thanks to new leaves. Pound stresses the importance of his program, which he feels needs to be applied in concrete terms: “an interest in equity / not in mere terminology”.31 The particular effect of bringing together different cultures and different eras is to attempt a synthesis of human wisdom in order to correct Western mistakes, in the fields of politics and finance in particular, by suggesting an alternative model. Pound justifies his collage and defends it as part of his poetic and epic program:
I refuse to accept ANY alphabetic display as final
AND the sagetrieb
different spellings used to indicate the stream where thru
and whereby our
legend came
latin, portagoose, french. Epos is not COLD history32
13Pound wants to make his Cantos the visible result of different layers of history and civilization put side by side on the page of the poetic text, echoing and completing one another. Indeed, fragments of authentic historical documents from various eras are juxtaposed on the page; historical characters taken from different cultures and civilizations are sometimes assimilated or brought together on purpose, and the poetic line eventually blends them, especially when a reference is taken up many times in the course of The Cantos. The ethical dimension of the poetic project is also summed up by two different words taken from different languages (but the terms overlap to a certain extent): the ideogram cheng (originally taken from a Confucian principle of government and meaning “call things by their right name”33) and the term sagetrieb ( “combining the German elements sagen ( “to tell”, “to say”) and Trieb ( “life force”, “drive”)”34). When it comes to determining their original context, how Pound used them and exactly what he meant in different instances in the Cantos (which where written over a span of more than fifty years), critics differ slightly. Both terms, however, have to do with the naming of things, and the effects this is meant to have on men themselves (politics and ethics included).
14Moreover, Pound’s statements on his conception of language often involve more than just the linguistic medium, it often also has to do with music (and indeed Canto 75, for example, is mostly composed of a musical score) or the visual arts (sculpture, architecture, painting). In his search for an adequate and new poetic language, therefore, Pound tried to find a form of expression that would be multidimensional and would need to be both heard and seen, by the eyes and the mind, yet which also always runs the risk of not being able to be read save by an ideal polyglot reader. In Pound’s defense, one can also argue that, very often, Pound provides both the original text (sometimes with mistakes) and a translation, as is the case for the hieroglyphics that open Canto 93, which are immediately followed by their translation which Pound himself puts between inverted commas: “A man’s paradise is his good nature”.35 In other instances, Pound gives the quote in the original language in one place, and the translation in another, thus creating a system of echoes in The Cantos. In different alphabets and cultures, Pound looks for confirmation of his own intuitions.
15Finally, Pound’s debabelization is to be understood politically. Indeed, his article “Debabelization and Ogden” was originally published in a journal that promoted the Social Credit economic theory on which Pound constructed his own economic system. The urgency to find a poetic voice is justified in Pound by his connection of language and ethics. The language of the tribe needs to be purified because it should eventually bring about a more accurate and intelligent civilization. As T.S. Eliot wrote in Four Quartets: “[...] our concern was speech, and speech impelled us / To purify the dialect of the tribe”.36 These lines apply to many modernist poets – Pound among them. In his Guide to Kulchur, where Pound obviously links his poetics and his ideal definition of society and culture, the poet indicates somewhat arguably that “There is no mystery about the Cantos, they are the tale of the tribe”.37 Finding a suitable modern language is indeed connected to Pound’s social and political program, however condemnable his conclusions were. In his ABC of Reading, Pound states the following: “[...] the ‘statesman cannot govern, the scientist cannot participate in his discoveries, men cannot agree on wise actions without language’, and all their deeds and conditions are affected by the defects or virtues of idiom. A people that grows accustomed to sloppy writing is a people in process of losing grip on its empire and on itself”.38 Hence the crucial need to adopt correct, just (in both senses of the term) language – and the poet is the guardian of language. It should come as no surprise, then, that Pound should group and condemn politicians, profiteers and philologists in his poetry, as James Longenbach has noted.39 One cannot overstress this political and ethical dimension of the poetic language in Pound (despite his later fascist stance).
16There is a paradox, however, between the urge for a purified language and the poet’s effective creation of a long and difficult poem written in a singular and enigmatic voice. If “language is the main means of communication”, then Pound’s Cantos for example may not have succeeded in conveying one clear message. The connection between politics and good government on the one hand, and accurate language on the other is also expressed in The Cantos, and in Canto 76 in particular: “in government not to lie down on it [...] / the word is made / perfect”;40 those lines are associated with an ideogram which Pound translates in his Confucius as “sincerity”.41 This stresses his notion of true language as going hand in hand with the virtu he admired in Provençal culture. For Pound, language mirrors civilization: “Greece and Rome civilized BY LANGUAGE. Your language is in the care of your writers”; “If a nation’s literature declines, the nation atrophies and decays.”42 Those statements set a high role for the poet within his community. It is because of this high aim that the Cantos eventually built up to be the monumental and encyclopedic work we know today, far from the poetic ideal of concision that Pound had originally set as his goal.
17The civilizing dimension of language is a notion that runs throughout Pound’s poetry from his early years. Indeed, Pound’s poetry is meant to shock the reader and produce an unusual, different, alien effect. As he puts it in the poem “Anima Sola”, “My music is weird and untamed / Barbarous, wild, extreme”, “My music is your disharmony / Intangible, most mad”.43 It should come as no wonder, then, that Pound should analyze the history of translation and Western cultures in terms of barbarism: the poet-critic contends that translating works from other centuries, languages and countries, when it manages to produce new and better literary works, amounts to fighting barbarism and savagery.44 This implies a particularly crucial role for the poet. Robert Stark analyzes the increasingly opaque quality of Pound’s poetry in terms of barbarism itself45 : it enables the poet to challenge poetic conventions of his time, while subverting and appropriating the notion of barbarism from a negative notion evoking the other, to one that positively qualifies the novelty of one’s own poetry. Stark indicates that Pound borrowed the notion of impulsive, intense literary barbarism from George Santayana’s essay “The Poetry of Barbarism”.
18Obviously, Pound’s search for a poetic language is full of paradoxes: it is poetry in English but which includes many other languages and alphabets, a poetry that also borrows from other arts, and that betrays the poet’s wish to be the spokesman of a tribe but through a very idiosyncratic voice that eventually formulated condemnable ideas. Despite the multiplicity of terms used by Pound in his prose – language, idiom, speech, voice, tongue – and their fluctuating definitions and usages, Pound did not claim to solve all the questions he raised through his quest for an always mutating yet distinctively poetic language and a representative poetic voice, but he unquestionably modified the perception and practice of modern poetry, while both uniting and toying with the notions of language (s) and poetry.
Bibliographie
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Bibliography
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— —, , (1975), ‘The Metaphysical Poets’ (1921), in T.S. Eliot, Selected Prose. Ed. Frank Kermode. London: Faber and Faber. 59-67.
Froula, Christine (1984), To Write Paradise: Style and Error in Pound’s Cantos. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Grafe, Adrian, and Stephens, Jessica, eds (2012), Lines of Resistance: Essays on British Poetry from Thomas Hardy to Linton Kwesi Johnson. Jefferson: McFarland.
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Pound, Ezra (1913), ‘Status Rerum’ in Poetry, 1, 123-7.
— —, (1934), ABC of Reading. New York: New Directions.
— —, (1968), Literary Essays. Ed. T. S. Eliot. New York: New Directions.
— —, (1970), Guide to Kulchur. New York: New Directions.
— —, (1970), A Memoir of Gaudier-Brzeska. New York: New Directions.
— —, (1971), The Selected Letters of Ezra Pound: 1907-1941. Ed. D. D. Paige. New York: New Directions.
— —, (1996), ‘Debabelization and Ogden’ (1935), in Machine Art and Other Writings: The Lost Thought of the Italian Years, Essays. Ed. Maria Luiza Ardizzone. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 126-128.
— —, (1996), The Cantos. New York: New Directions.
— —, (2003), Poems and Translations. Ed. Richard Sieburth. New York: Library of America.
Smith, J. Mark (2006), “The Sign of the Translators: I. A. Richards, Ezra Pound and ‘Debabelization’”, in Paideuma, 35-1/2, 179-217.
— —, (2011), ‘The Energy of Language (s): What Pound Made of Philology’, in ELH, 78-4, 769-800.
Stark, Robert (2012), Ezra Pound’s Early Verse and Lyric Tradition: A Jargoner’s Apprenticeship. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
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Notes de bas de page
1 Ezra Pound, “Debabelization and Ogden” (1935) in Machine Art and Other Writings: The Lost Thought of the Italian Years, Essays, ed. Maria Luiza Ardizzone (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), p. 126.
2 Ezra Pound, “A Retrospect” in Literary Essays, ed. T. S. Eliot (New York: New Directions, 1968), p. 4.
3 Ibid., p. 11.
4 The expression is used in relation to F. M. Ford in ibid., p. 7.
5 Ibid.
6 Ibid., p. 3.
7 Ezra Pound, “Status Rerum” in Poetry 1 (1913, p. 123-127), p. 125.
8 Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading (New York: New Directions, 1934), p. 92.
9 Cf. my essay “Basil Bunting: Resistance, History, Myth” in Lines of Resistance: Essays on British Poetry from Thomas Hardy to Linton Kwesi Johnson, ed. Adrian Grafe and Jessica Stephens (Jefferson: McFarland, 2012, p. 120-134), p. 127.
10 Ezra Pound, “How to Read” in Literary Essays, op. cit., p. 26.
11 A note from Pound at this point adds: “This is for rhythm, his vocabulary must of course be found in his native tongue”, a statement which Pound does not follow!
12 Ezra Pound, “A Retrospect”, op. cit., p. 5.
13 Ibid., p. 7.
14 For an analysis of the first reactions to Homage to Sextus Propertius in Pound’s time, see J. P. Sullivan, Ezra Pound and Sextus Propertius: A Study in Creative Translation (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1964).
15 Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading, op. cit., p. 34. Later on, Pound adds that climates and temperaments “leave trace in the language, and leave it more ready [i.e. suited] for certain communications and registrations.” (ibid., p. 35)
16 Ezra Pound, “How to Read”, op. cit., p. 36.
17 Ezra Pound, A Memoir of Gaudier-Brzeska (New York: New Directions, 1970), p. 87-88.
18 The quote is taken from a 1928 letter from Ezra Pound to René Taupin, then preparing his L’Influence du symbolisme français sur la poésie américaine, quoted in Majorie Perloff, “Pound and Rimbaud: The Retreat from Symbolism” in Iowa Review 6-1 (winter 1975, p. 91-117), p. 99.
19 Ezra Pound, The Selected Letters of Ezra Pound: 1907-1941, ed. D. D. Paige (New York: New Directions, 1971), p. 178.
20 Ibid., p. 179.
21 Ezra Pound, Poems and Translations, ed. Richard Sieburth (New York: Library of America, 2003), p. 17. The poem is taken from Hilda’s Book (1907), dedicated to H. D. (Hilda Doolittle).
22 Ibid., p. 45. The poem is taken from A Lume Spento (1907).
23 Letter from Pound to his mother in 1909, quoted in Noel Stock, The Life of Ezra Pound (New York: Pantheon Books, 1970), p. 76.
24 Ezra Pound, The Selected Letters, op. cit., p. 269.
25 Ezra Pound, The Cantos (New York: New Directions, 1996), p. 28.
26 T. S. Eliot, “The Metaphysical Poets” (1921) in T. S. Eliot, Selected Prose, ed. Frank Kermode (London: Faber and Faber, 1975), p. 65.
27 Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading, op. cit., p. 32.
28 Ezra Pound, The Cantos, op. cit., p. 695-701.
29 Ibid., p. 695.
30 Carroll F. Terrell, A Companion to The Cantos of Ezra Pound (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993; first edition, 1980), p. 621.
31 Ezra Pound, The Cantos, op. cit., p. 700.
32 Christine Froula, To Write Paradise: Style and Error in Pound’s Cantos (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), p. 145-146.
33 J. Mark Smith, “The Sign of the Translators: I. A. Richards, Ezra Pound and ‘Debabelization’’’ in Paideuma 35-1/2 (fall 2006, p. 179-217), p. 192.
34 J. Mark Smith, “The Energy of Language (s): What Pound Made of Philology” in ELH 78-4 (winter 2011, p. 769-800), p. 784.
35 Ezra Pound, The Cantos, op. cit., p. 643.
36 T. S. Eliot, The Complete Poems and Plays (London: Faber and Faber, 1969), p. 194. Cf. the introduction to the current volume which quotes Mallarmé’s words alluded to by Eliot here.
37 Ezra Pound, Guide to Kulchur (New York: New Directions, 1970), p. 194.
38 Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading, op. cit., p. 34.
39 James Longenbach, Modernist Poetics of History: Pound, Eliot and The Sense of the Past (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), p. 96.
40 Ezra Pound, The Cantos, op. cit., p. 474.
41 Carroll F. Terrell, A Companion to the Cantos of Ezra Pound, op. cit., p. 393.
42 Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading, op. cit., p. 32, 33.
43 Ezra Pound, Poems and Translations, op. cit., p. 33, 34.
44 Ezra Pound, “How to Read”, Literary Essays, op. cit., p. 35.
45 Robert Stark, Ezra Pound’s Early Verse and Lyric Tradition: A Jargoner’s Apprenticeship (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), p. 100-101.
Auteur
-
Charlotte Estrade
Université Paris Nanterre
Le texte seul est utilisable sous licence Licence OpenEdition Books. Les autres éléments (illustrations, fichiers annexes importés) sont « Tous droits réservés », sauf mention contraire.
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