Ezra Pound
Comments & Themes
Ezra Pound. Study Questions. You can reflect and/or write a paper on the following topics:
- Analyze Pound's creative translations, transformation and re-adaptations of literatures of the past. (Chinese literature, Latin literature, the troubadours, Dante, Villon...)
- History as lived experience. In what way are Pound's historic or legendary figures fused in the consciousness of a 20thc audience.
- Analyze Pound's ideogrammic method in his Cantos.
- Many of Pound's poems set up a parallelism or contrast between the present and the past.
- The Poet as cultural hero, exile and "seafarer"
- How does Pound "make it new"???
- Bertran de Born
Mauberley
- Aesthetic and social critique.
- Eye imagery in Mauberley
- The Homeric quest in the modern age
- Mauberley's aesthetic and personal failure
Cantos
- Cultural memory and visionary imagination in the Cantos
- Myth and history
- Usura
- The Chinese impact
Canto I:
- Trace the motif of the descent to the dead.
- How many time epochs does the Canto encompass?
Canto IV
- How many citadels are there in the Canto? What do they stand for?
- What kind of "boundaries" are set up or transgressed in C IV ?
- Is there any meaning in the array of towers and strongholds?
- Which are the pools referred to here and what do they have in common?
- Pound refers to a series of women. Who are they? What is their role?
- Can you list some destructive and creative forces or aspects of C IV?
- What is the function of the metamorphoses ? How many can you recall? Is there any unifying underlying element in all these love stories?
- What relates Actaeon to Vidal ? Itys to Cabestanh ? Actaeon to Gyges ? Polhonac to Gyges ? Deioces to Cadmus ? Deioces to Danae's father Acrisius ?
- What link is there between Danae's story and So-Gyoku's? Danae and P?re Henri Jacques ?
- What can you say about the light effect in C IV ?
- Explain "And we sit here... / there in the arena ..."