Metres and the Pound: Taking the Measure of British Modernism

2011 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 285-297
Author(s):  
Raphael Ingelbien
Keyword(s):  
Ezra Pound ◽  
English Poetry ◽  
Modernist Literature ◽  
Free Verse ◽  
British Modernism ◽  
Modernist Poetry ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Limited Role ◽  
Victorian Period

Seen in the broader context of European modernism, British modernist literature stands out through the limited role of collective avant-gardes and the conservative or reactionary politics of the writers who make up the canon of modernist poetry. This article explores how these peculiarities are replicated in the use of traditional poetic forms (metres in particular) in the works of W.B. Yeats (1865–1939), Ezra Pound (1885–1972) and T.S. Eliot (1888–1965). As modernist (rather than avant-garde) writers, those poets rejected or backed away from free verse and simultaneously cultivated forms that harked back to older and less insular poetic traditions than the ones that dominated mainstream English poetry in the Victorian period.

Ghostly Effects: Orientalist Translation in Pound and the Yasusada Text

2001 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 234-248
Author(s):  
Jeffrey Twitchell-Waas
Keyword(s):  
Fundamental Problem ◽  
Ezra Pound ◽  
Easy Access ◽  
Chinese Poetry ◽  
Free Verse ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Particular Solutions ◽  
Poetic Translation ◽  
The Look ◽  
Modernist Project

AbstractT.S. Eliot famously remarked that Ezra Pound was "the inventor of Chinese poetry for our time." The nature of this invention is examined within the context of Pound's larger modernist project: his transformation of classical Chinese poetry into Imagist free verse and his projection of a vision of China as a utopian counter-image to the failure of the contemporary West. Although Pound clearly enough was consciously appropriating Chinese poetry according to his own poetic concerns, his particular solutions have had a pervasive impact in determining the look and sound of classical Oriental poetry in English ever since. The fundamental problem raised by this very influential tradition of poetic translation is the illusory desire for easy access to the foreign. In the early 1990s there began to appear the hoax texts purportedly by the previously unknown avant-garde Japanese poet Akiri Yasusada. Although a simulation rather than a translation proper, the Yasusada text will here be considered as a forceful questioning of the usual assumptions of translation's faithfulness and obligations to the foreign original. The elaborate construction of the Yasusada texts, including their initial public presentation as a hoax and the subsequent controversy, puts the reader in a disquieting and self-reflective position with respect to the desire for the authentic foreign.

Free Verse

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Niall Munro
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
English Language ◽  
Ezra Pound ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
English Poetry ◽  
Free Verse ◽  
Language Poetry ◽  
Victorian Poetry ◽  
Late Nineteenth

Free verse is a technique of poetic composition that was employed and discussed by poets and critics during the modernist period. Exemplified by a disregard for regular metre and rhyme, free verse came into English poetry via two main routes: the work of the American poet Walt Whitman, and late nineteenth-century French Symbolist poetry. Although not precisely equivalent, the French term vers libre began to be used interchangeably with free verse in the early 1910s when members of the Imagist movement began to advocate its use to develop an aesthetic that shifted verse written in English away from the Victorian poetry they considered hackneyed and full of unnecessary words. The movement toward free verse had a tremendous influence on English-language poetry throughout the modernist period and beyond, even though, by the 1920s and 30s, some of the mode’s earliest advocates (including Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot) were criticizing what they saw as a decline in the quality of poems written in free verse, and urging a return to the more formal features of rhyme and regular lineation.

Fashion, Chinoiserie and Modernism

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Cheang
Keyword(s):  
Interior Design ◽  
Chinese Culture ◽  
British Modernism ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Western Modernity ◽  
The Arts ◽  
The Feminine ◽  
Complex Picture ◽  
The Impact

Fashion, chinoiserie and Modernism do not necessarily make easy bedfellows. Fashion’s dynamic of continuous experimentation and renewal can be aligned with Modernism’s agenda of artistic reinvention, self-conscious newness and cultural improvement. Dress and interior design were certainly of interest to Modernist designers, and Chinese culture had a significant influence on British avant-garde literature, theatre and the arts. Yet, fashion’s strong conceptual associations with the feminine, with irrational desire and with Western modernity create a complex picture for expressions of Chineseness, and Chinese design often connoted flights of fancy, locations of private pleasure and an intense nostalgia that is antithetical to the progressive and disruptive anti-traditional stance of interwar Modernism. This chapter examines the impact of fashionable chinoiseries in Britain as a culturally important but as yet under-theorised phenomenon of twentieth-century modernity, an equivalent trend to the negrophilia craze of the 1920s and the Primitivist art movement, a hybrid cosmopolitanism and an imperialist Orientalism. The wearing of Mandarin robes as evening coats, the collecting of jades, the lacquering of dressing tables, and the nurturing of Pekingese lapdogs offer new and stimulating ways to reappraise and shed light on the role of the Orient within British Modernism.

scholarly journals Yeats, Pound, and the Little Review, 1914-1918

2018 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 33-48
Author(s):  
Clare Hutton
Keyword(s):  
Ezra Pound ◽  
First World War ◽  
Modernist Literature ◽  
World War ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The First World War ◽  
The Individual ◽  
First World

Yeats made a small but interesting set of contributions to the avant-garde US periodical the Little Review, a journal for which Ezra Pound acted as ‘Foreign Editor’ and an important locus for modernist literature. My essay explores the range of Yeats’s contributions, and Pound’s rationale for being editorially involved. It examines editorial attitudes to the First World War, particularly in 1917, and the version of ‘In Memory of Robert Gregory’ which Yeats placed in the journal. By focusing on such specific moments and small textual details, the essay close reads what Sean Latham has described as “emergence,” “a particular kind of complexity that arises not from the individual elements of a system, but only from their interaction.”

Readies for Bob Brown's Machine

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Carlton Brown
Keyword(s):  
Text Messaging ◽  
Gertrude Stein ◽  
Ezra Pound ◽  
William Carlos Williams ◽  
Public Attention ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Internet Media ◽  
Facsimile Edition ◽  
Viewing Screen ◽  
Writing Technology

This is the much-anticipated new edition of the important volume of avant-garde writing, Readies for Bob Brown's Machine. The original collection of Readies was published by Brown’s Roving Eye Press in 1931. Despite including works by leading modernist writers including Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Kay Boyle, F.T. Marinetti, and 35 other writers and artists, this volume has never been re-issued. Like the ‘talkies’ in cinema, Brown’s machine and the ‘readies’ medium he created for it proposed to revolutionise reading with technology by scrolling texts across a viewing screen. Apart from its importance to modernism, Brown’s research on reading seems remarkably prescient in light of text messaging, e-books, and internet media ecologies. Brown’s designs for a modernist style of reading, which emphasised speed, movement, and immediacy, required a complete re-design of reading and writing technology. Complete with a new Preface by Eric White and a new Introduction and a separate chapter on the contributors by Craig Saper, this critical facsimile edition restores to public attention the extraordinary experiments of writing readies for a reading machine.

"WHAT FREE VERSE IS NOT FREE FROM". DISCUSSION ABOUT RUSSIAN FREE VERSE

2020 ◽  
pp. 116-123
Author(s):  
Kseniya A. Egolnikova ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Free Verse

This article explores the role of the discussion “What free verse is not free from”, published in the “Voprosy literatury” magazine in 1972, and in the formation of a discourse about free verse at the stage of the formation and development of the poetic traditions of the Russophone free verse. Special attention is paid to studying the positions of poets the free verse practitioners in order to understand how the poets themselves determined the boundaries of free verse.

Modernism and Non-Translation

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
James Joyce ◽  
Ezra Pound ◽  
Modernist Literature ◽  
Cultural Implications ◽  
The Rich ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Reading Key ◽  
Modernist Fiction ◽  
Selection Of

Modernism and Non-Translation proposes a new way of reading key modernist texts, including the work of canonical figures such as T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, and Ezra Pound. The topic of this book is the incorporation of untranslated fragments from various languages within modernist writing. It explores non-translation in modernist fiction, poetry, and other forms, with a principally European focus. The intention is to begin to answer a question that demands collective expertise: what are the aesthetic and cultural implications of non-translation for modernist literature? How did non-translation shape the poetics, and cultural politics, of some of the most important writers of this period? Twelve essays by leading scholars of modernism explore American, British, and Irish texts, alongside major French and German writers, and the wider modernist recovery of Classical languages. They explore non-translation from the dual perspectives of both ‘insider’ and ‘outsider’, unsettling that false opposition, and articulating in the process their individuality of expression and experience. The range explored indicates something of the reach and vitality of the matter of translation—and specifically non-translation—across a selection of poetry, fiction, and non-fictional prose, while focusing on mainly canonical voices. Offering a series of case studies, the volume aims to encourage further exploration of connections across languages and among writers. Together, the collection seeks to provoke and extend debate on the aesthetic, cultural, political, and conceptual dimensions of non-translation as an important yet hitherto neglected facet of modernism, helping to redefine our understanding of that movement. It demonstrates the rich possibilities of reading modernism through instances of non-translation.

From great man to fittest survivor: Reputation, recapitulation and survival in Victorian concepts of Wagner's genius

2009 ◽  
Vol 13 (2_suppl) ◽  
pp. 415-445
Author(s):  
Bennett Zon
Keyword(s):  
Richard Wagner ◽  
Victorian Culture ◽  
Modern Music ◽  
Scientific Terminology ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Victorian Period ◽  
Musical History ◽  
Survival Of The Fittest

The transposition of the Great Man into the Fittest Survivor is at the very root of an endemic interchange between the sciences and the arts in late Victorian culture, giving rich metaphoric substance to more heavily concretised scientific terminology. Herbert Spencer's famous phrase, “survival of the fittest” is, arguably, one of the most commonly transposed and consequently influential scientific expressions of the Victorian period, and as such, one of its most malleable idioms. In Victorian musicology this influence is especially obvious in biographical works which privilege Richard Wagner as the greatest genius of musical history. Thus in Mezzotints in Modern Music (1899) James Huneker declares that “Wagner carried within his breast the precious eucharist of genius. ” It is the attitude of Huneker and like-minded musicologists, like C. Hubert H. Parry, William Wallace, Francis Hueffer and Richard Wallaschek, which forms the basis of a three-part exploration of Wagner's genius, covering (1) the role of “endurance” in Victorian definitions of genius, from Carlyle and Sully to Galton; (2) the influence of German morphology on evolutionary terminology in Britain, with particular reference to ontogeny, phylogeny and recapitulation; and (3) Spencer's adaptation of German morphology and his influence on Victorian perceptions of Wagner's genius. These collectively argue through the paradigm of Wagner that the formulation of late Victorian musical genius was incomplete without recourse to evolutionary terminology of survival. Indeed, for Victorian musicology, Wagner, the Great Man, had evolved Into Wagner, the Fittest Survivor.

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