Modernism – Page 11 – Interesting Literature

A Short Analysis of Ezra Pound’s Canto II

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 13^th-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?

A Short Analysis of Hilda Doolittle’s ‘Oread’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

Along with Ezra Pound’s ‘In a Station of the Metro’, the short poem ‘Oread’ by Hilda Doolittle or H. D. (1886-1961) may be the defining poem of the Imagist movement. You can read ‘Oread’ here, before proceeding to our analysis of the poem below.

‘Oread’ was published in the 1915 anthology Some Imagist Poets, which also featured poems by Ezra Pound, Richard Aldington, and F. S. Flint – probably the main poets who published under the Imagist banner.

A Summary and Analysis of Henry James’s ‘The Figure in the Carpet’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘The Figure in the Carpet’ has become a short-hand or idiom for the ‘key’ to understanding a writer’s work. And yet the story in which the idiom was born, Henry James’s 1896 tale ‘The Figure in the Carpet’, refuses to open itself up to easy interpretations or analysis. Neither we nor Henry James’s narrator learn the secret, the ‘figure in the carpet’. So what is this ambiguous story saying? You can read James’s story here.

A Detailed Summary and Analysis of T. S. Eliot’s ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ has been called, by the academic literary critic Christopher Ricks (one of the finest living critics and the co-editor of Eliot’s poetry), the best first poem in a first volume of poems: it opened Eliot’s debut collection, Prufrock and Other Observations, in 1917.

A Short Analysis of Hilda Doolittle’s ‘The Pool’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘The Pool’ is, along with ‘Oread’, Hilda Doolittle’s finest achievement as an Imagist poet. The poem was first published in the 1915 anthology Some Imagist Poets. You can read ‘The Pool’ here (all five lines of it), before proceeding to our analysis of this curious little poem.