Ezra Pound’s Global Poetics

Abstract

This essay will explore the reasons for the international appeal of Ezra Pound and his importance in the creation of “Global Poetics.” What, in his writing, especially his poetry, makes him a transnational figure not only translated into Russian, French, German, Japanese, Chinese and Greek, but appealing to writers in a variety of cultures? What makes his work influential for other, often foreign writers, and what can we as readers identify as his international style? How, in short, does he articulate a global poetics? Throughout his work, beginning with The Spirit of Romance (1910), Pound was a comparatist but his ideas and examples constantly absorb multiple poetics and poetic forms, whether Troubadour poets, Renaissance Italian writers or Confucius. He is our first global poet, translingual, translational and transnational which this essay will demonstrate through his use of global history, languages and imagery. The roots of Pound’s global poetics may be in his cultural cosmopolitanism incorporating imagery, content and form from other literatures into his writing. He develops a transcultural vision that valorizes the dislocation and displacement of voices, as much sources and texts. Three texts that highlight this practice are Cathay, essay “The Chinese Written Character As a Medium for Poetry, and Guide to Kulchur”. Pound, I shall argue, not only introduces global poetics but a new vocabulary for Global Modernism. In his prose and poetry, borders, boundaries and separations disappear which force us as readers to become transnational and even translocational responders to his texts. In his “A Draft of Three Cantos” (1917), Pound parallels Confucius with Dante. The effort to link the two in terms of content and form is an early expression of the global poetics elaborated more fully in The Cantos which will be at the center of this discussion.

Keywords

• globalism
• modernism
• pound
• translation
• comparative literature.