In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle analyses a minor classic of Anglo-Saxon poetry
‘The Seafarer’ is one of the earliest poems in English literature. Its ‘plot’ can be summarised easily enough: an elderly sailor speaks to us about his alienation from the world. The 124-line poem is often considered an elegy, since it appears to be spoken by an old man looking back on his life and preparing for death.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Ezra Pound (1885-1972) was a controversial but central figure in the history of modernist literature. He helped to publish both T. S. Eliot and James Joyce, was friends with a number of leading modernist writers including W. B. Yeats and Ford Madox Ford, and his slogan, ‘Make It New’, encapsulates much of what modernist literature sought to do.
But as well as all this, we should remember that Ezra Pound was a major modernist poet himself, albeit a very difficult one. Here’s our pick of five of Pound’s best poems or poetic works.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Ezra Pound’s colossal work of modernist poetry, The Cantos, runs to over 800 pages and took him over half his life to write – and even then, he never finished it. In Canto II, Pound does something which he had previously done in his long 1920 poem Hugh Selwyn Mauberley: that is, he analyses and considers the status and role of poetry, and the poet, in the world.
In summary, Pound opens Canto II by mentioning four different versions of the 13th-century troubadour poet Sordello: Pound’s version of the poet, Robert Browning’s version from a work of 1840, Sordello the real man, and the version of Sordello that can be gleaned from the biographical fragments appended to his poems. (Browning’s Sordello wasn’t particularly well-received when it was published in 1840: Jane Carlyle famously said that when she finished reading it she still wasn’t sure whether Sordello was a man, a city, or a book.) Which one of these – Browning’s, or Sordello’s own version of himself – is the ‘true’ Sordello?
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920) is a long poem by the American-born modernist poet Ezra Pound (1885-1972), who described the poem as his ‘farewell to London’. It is partly a response to the First World War, but it is more self-reflexively about the artist or poet’s role in the wake of the war: whereas another great long poem of the early 1920s, T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, would address this issue in only an oblique sense, Ezra Pound’s poem tackles the issue more directly, being an analysis of the role of poetry in a world torn apart by conflict and mass carnage, and about Pound’s own struggle to recover the ‘dead art’ of poetry in the years leading up to the war.
So, as well as being about poetry itself, Hugh Selwyn Mauberley is also about WWI and the effect of the war and its aftermath on the generation to which Pound belonged (his earlier associate, T. E. Hulme, had been killed in the war in 1917).
But to understand Hugh Selwyn Mauberley it is also necessary to understand Pound’s fondness for adopting personae – this was the title he gave to his second collection of poetry published in 1909. (It’s somewhat amusing that when Pound published Ripostes three years later, the page at the beginning of the book listing ‘Books by the Same Author’ misprinted the title of Personae as ‘Personal’ – try as Pound might, people were intent on taking his poetry personally!)
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Ezra Pound’s colossal work of modernist poetry, The Cantos, runs to nearly 800 pages and took him over half his life to write – and even then, he never finished it. Is The Cantos a masterpiece of twentieth-century poetry or an artistic failure? Is it sheer self-indulgent verbiage or an under-read and underappreciated epic for the modern world? We can hardly scratch the surface in this short introduction to Pound’s Cantos, but we’re going to address some of the key aspects of the poem and offer an analysis of its overall aims and features.