THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: Ezra Pound

Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The 2024 syllabus can be found here. This episode, of which the first 16 minutes are free, is about the poetry of Ezra Pound. We begin at the ending, with the tragedy of Pound’s later-life political dereliction and incarceration. We ask not only how these events happened, but also why this most extraordinarily gifted of poets did not become his century’s greatest, his politics notwithstanding. Then I discuss Pound’s biography and trace his poetic and intellectual development from his early poetry through The Cantos, with a triple focus on 1. his love of Troubadour poetry and the esoteric Cathar gnostic mystical goddess cult he detected beneath it it; 2. his interest in Anglo-Saxon poetry as a resource for restoring English verse back to its accentual and alliterative strength after more than half a millennium of imposed iambic pentameter and rhyme; 3. and his engagement with Chinese poetry and what he thought its ideograms portended for a poetry of the image. We also discuss, with help from Hugh Kenner, his inner conflict between Romanticism-Taoism-anarchism, on the one hand, and Classicism-Confucianism-fascism, on the other. His obsession with an obscure economic theory and its influence on his politics after the calamitous Great War is also considered, as is the failure of The Cantos to find a readership even other difficult high modernist great books have. What, finally, can we all learn from Pound’s failure? Please like, share, comment, and enjoy!—and please offer a paid subscription so you don’t miss the rest of the episode, the remainder of the American literature sequence, with forthcoming episodes on Wallace Stevens and William Faulkner, not to mention the archive of episodes on modern British literature from Blake to Beckett and our previous sequences on the works of Joyce, including Ulysses, and on George Eliot’s Middlemarch, and whatever awaits us in 2025. The slideshow corresponding to the lecture can be downloaded below the paywall: