Modernism, Inflation and the Gold Standard in T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound

The great inflation of the 1920s had a dramatic effect on Anglophone literary modernism. Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot and Ernest Hemingway all recognized that financial signs had come unmoored from any objective reference, and their work explores the literary implications of representation's newly autonomous, performative power. Pound blamed the economic and cultural crisis on ‘usury.’ Following Aristotle, he conceived of usury as the unnatural reproduction of autonomous representation, and thus as the antithesis of natural sexual and semiotic fertility. He particularly deplored the historical role played by Samuel Loyd, the Victorian head of Lloyds Bank, who had cunningly manipulated the gold standard in order to give control of the economy to ‘usurers.’ In his financial journalism for Lloyds Bank Monthly, Eliot used the gold standard as an economic logos in order to facilitate usury. Pound saw that Eliot's theory of the ‘objective correlative’ was incompatible with the referential model of representation assumed by the gold standard.

Download Full-text

Butts, Mary (1890–1937)

Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism ◽

10.4324/9781135000356-rem1322-1 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Nina Angela Enemark

Keyword(s):

Short Stories ◽

Ernest Hemingway ◽

Hilda Doolittle ◽

Ezra Pound ◽

Djuna Barnes ◽

Marianne Moore ◽

Jean Cocteau

Mary Butts was a well-known and prolific British novelist, essayist, poet, and writer of short stories in her time. First published by Robert McAlmon, Butts was acquainted with and admired by a host of familiar modernist figures, such as Ernest Hemingway, Jean Cocteau, Hilda Doolittle, Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, and Djuna Barnes, and was married for many years to the important publisher of modernist writing John Rodker. Despite her prominence on the scene of modernist writing, and having been published in leading modernist journals such as The Dial, the Little Review and the Transatlantic Review, she was largely forgotten after her death until her rediscovery in the early 1990s.

Download Full-text

Make It Old: Hollis Frampton contra Ezra Pound

October ◽

10.1162/octo_a_00322 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 164 ◽

pp. 29-48

Author(s):

George Derk

Keyword(s):

Ezra Pound ◽

Literary Modernism ◽

Late Work ◽

The World ◽

History Of ◽

Elizabeths Hospital ◽

The Impact

Hollis Frampton's films have often been characterized as the afterimages of literary modernism. While the material and linguistic concerns of his early films as well as his time spent visiting Ezra Pound at St. Elizabeths Hospital attest to the impact that modernist poetics had on him, the grand finale of his career—the cycle of films that comprise Magellan—marked his most significant departure from these original influences. Considering Magellan in relation to Pound's Cantos illuminates the competing modernisms, both literary and cinematic, in Frampton's late work. In his depiction of two simultaneous voyages—one through the world and one through the history of film—Frampton counterintuitively suggests that a modernism uniquely conceived for film can only be realized after establishing a tradition to renovate: film can finally make it new only through becoming old.

Download Full-text

Carter vs. Poets (Round 2)

10.1093/oso/9780190259150.003.0012 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

David Schiff

Keyword(s):

Ezra Pound ◽

William Carlos Williams ◽

Wallace Stevens ◽

Literary Modernism ◽

Marianne Moore ◽

Middle Years ◽

Instrumental Works ◽

The Aesthetic ◽

Aesthetic Ideas

Alongside the lucid, transparent instrumental works of his last years, Carter composed seven works for voice and ensemble that set poetry by the founding generation of American literary modernism: William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot and e.e. cummings. Though contemporaries, these poets differed widely in their aesthetic and political stances. Carter’s settings connect with each of them in different ways. Some of these works revive the darker, more troubling explorations of Carter’s middle years. Taken as a whole though, they can be heard as a legacy project, a monument to and critique of the aesthetic ideas Carter first encountered in his teens.

Download Full-text

Occultism, Spiritualism and Hermeticism

Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism ◽

10.4324/9781135000356-rem1357-1 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Jennifer Large Seagrave

Keyword(s):

William Butler Yeats ◽

Ezra Pound ◽

Literary Modernism ◽

Religious Knowledge ◽

Beliefs And Practices ◽

Hidden Knowledge ◽

Black Magic

Sometimes called ‘hidden knowledge’, Occultism refers to beliefs and practices concerning the intersection of the material and spiritual worlds, purportedly representing the most ancient religious knowledge, but mainly originating in Hellenistic and medieval times. The term carries with it nefarious overtones, often indicating evil works associated with black magic, though this veil obscures the ancient arts of spiritual understanding, manipulation and evolution contained in the Western esoteric tradition. Many modernist artists devoted serious study to occult mysteries, which led Leon Surette to theorize that the interest of William Butler Yeats (1865–1939), Ezra Pound (1885–1972) and T. S. Eliot (1888–1965) in Occultism underlies the aesthetics of literary Modernism.

Download Full-text

Monroe, Harriet (1860–1936)

Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism ◽

10.4324/9781135000356-rem113-1 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Christos Hadjiyiannis

Keyword(s):

Ezra Pound ◽

American Woman ◽

Associate Editor ◽

Wallace Stevens ◽

Ford Madox Ford ◽

Literary Modernism ◽

Modernist Literature ◽

Long Time ◽

Foreign Correspondent ◽

Formative Years

Harriet Monroe was an American woman of letters who — from her position as founder and long-time editor of Poetry: A Magazine of Verse — fostered, promoted, and disseminated modernist literature. Although also a poet, critic, biographer, dramatist and anthologist in her own right, it is her editorship of Poetry that accounts for Monroe’s reputation and warrants her significance as an influential figure in the development of literary modernism. From its inception in October 1912 and throughout modernism’s formative years, Poetry served as the primary venue for the work of prominent modernist writers. H. D., T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, and Ford Madox Ford, among many others, all found in Poetry a welcoming venue for their work. In her effort to encourage and disseminate modernist literature, Monroe was significantly aided by the magazine’s associate editor (1912-1922), Alice Corbin Henderson, and by Ezra Pound, who acted as Poetry’s foreign correspondent from 1912 to 1917. Poetry continues to publish more than one hundred years after Monroe founded it.

Download Full-text

Modernism and Māoritanga

Modernism, Postcolonialism, and Globalism ◽

10.1093/oso/9780199980963.003.0014 ◽

2018 ◽

pp. 277-294

Author(s):

Philip Steer

Keyword(s):

New Zealand ◽

Critical Realism ◽

Ernest Hemingway ◽

Literary Modernism ◽

Sherwood Anderson ◽

Cultural Traditions ◽

Postcolonial Identity

In its reading of the bone people, this chapter reexamines Keri Hulme’s controversial borrowings from literary modernism in light of her claims to represent a postcolonial identity derived from Māori cultural traditions. The chapter distinguishes between a “modernist critical realism” deriving from Ernest Hemingway and Sherwood Anderson and a more formally experimental modernism employing myth, fantasy, intertextual borrowings, and Joycean wordplay. This second strain of modernism has raised doubts about the “authenticity” of Hulme’s representation of a New Zealand reborn out of Māori culture. The chapter argues that it was never Hulme’s aim to portray or preserve a pure and “authentic” Māori culture. Hulme’s narrative instead models an understanding of indigeneity as capable of incorporating modernist aesthetics within it. Hulme thus reconfigures “postcolonial hybridity” in the service of a bicultural vision of New Zealand that embraces settler culture within a distinctively Māori framework.

Download Full-text