An Analysis of The influence of Pound on Eliot

时间:2022-09-15 01:50:38

【Abstract】 Ezra Pound is generally considered the poet most responsible for defining and promoting a modernist aesthetic in poetry. His significant contributions to poetry began with his leadership in Imagist Movement which has been unanimously viewed as the first and most lastingly influential modernist movement. T.S. Eliot, as one of the greatest American writers among the Modernists, inevitably came under the influence of Ezra pound.

【Key words】imagism, modernism, the biggest beneficiary, the co-author of The Waste Land, Eliot's theory of the "Objective correlative, a marked shift

1. A Brief Introduction to imagism and modernism

In 1908, Pound traveled abroad to Europe and finally settled in London in the same year. During his settlement there, he championed the Imagist Movement. This literary movement, as the first major step of English poetry towards modernism, came as a reaction against traditional English poetics, especially that of the Victorian Age in the late19th century. Forgoing the traditional rhyme, meter, fustian and rhetoric, Imagist Movement advocated precision, concision, exactness and absence of pretension and didacticism in poetry writing. This avant-garde movement, lasted for about ten years (1908―1917) and led successively by three outstanding poets, T. E. Hulme, Ezra Pound and Amy Lowell.

Modernism is an omnibus term for a number of tendencies in the arts which were prominent in the first half of the 20th ; In English literature it is particularly associated with the writings of T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, W. B. Yeats, F. M. Ford and Joseph Conrad.

2. T.S. Eliot, a close association with the American poet Ezra Pound.

Eliot actually spent much of his time in London. This city had a monumental and life-altering impact on Eliot for multiple reasons, the most significant of which was his introduction to the acclaimed literary figure Ezra Pound. A connection through Aiken resulted in an arranged meeting and on September 22, 1914, Eliot paid a visit to Pound's flat. Pound instantly deemed Eliot "worth watching" and was imperative to Eliot's beginning career as a poet as he is credited with promoting Eliot through social events and literary gatherings. He was instead spending long periods of time in London, in the company of Ezra Pound and "some of the modern artists whom the war has so far spared... It was Pound who helped most, introducing him everywhere." In 1914 Eliot met and began a close association with the American poet Ezra Pound.

3. T. S. Eliot, the biggest beneficiary of Ezra Pound's Imagist poetics

In his introduction to Literary Essays of Ezra Pound (1968), T. S. Eliot pointed out that: "It is necessary to consider Pound's pronouncements in the light of the circumstances in which they were written, both in order to grasp the extent of the revolution of taste and practice which he has brought about, and in order to understand the particular kind of critic of which he is so eminent an example. He has always been, first and foremost, a teacher and a campaigner. He has always been impelled, not merely to find out for himself how poetry should be written, but to pass on the benefit of his discoveries to others; not simply to make these benefits available, but to insist upon their being received... Pound's criticism is always addressed, implicitly, first of all to his fellow craftsmen; to all those who write the English language... it is precisely this address to writers that gives Pound's criticism a special and permanent value for readers." (Eliot, 1968: xii)

The biggest beneficiary of Ezra Pound's Imagist poetics might be T. S. Eliot himself. Eliot arrived in London in September, 1914. In the previous three years, he had written some poems, but failed to find a publisher for them. However, with great literary perceptiveness, Ezra Pound instantly recognized Eliot's talent and "within a week of meeting Eliot and reading his work, Pound had embarked on another of his promotional campaigns with the editors of Poetry and other magazines... "(Wilson, 1997: 40) In June, 1915, Eliot's fame-winning poem The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock was published in Poetry with the help of Pound.

4. Pound, the co-author of The Waste Land

What's better known is Pound's role in the production of the most famous and archetypal modernist poem, Eliot's The Waste Land. "Pound performed radical surgery on the poem, advising drastic cuts, the reordering of whole sections and even changes in the wording of individual lines...Although Eliot was responsible for the final draft, he accepted most of Pound's recommendations. Furthermore, the overall tone of the poem as well as the tenor of some individual lines and sections must now be seen as Pound's achievement as well as, or even rather than, Eliot's. The view that Pound should be considered the co-author of The Waste Land is at least defensible." (Wilson, 1997: 45-46) After Pound's "radical surgery", The Waste Land becomes a classic poem of modernism. It is harder, more concise and suggestive. Therefore, the poem, after being blue-penciled by Pound, bears more Imagist marks, which has contributed much to its acceptance by readers and recognition by literary critics. The Waste Land was published in the English Criterion in October, 1922 and one month later in the American Dial. T. S. Eliot really owed much to Pound. Thus, when Eliot reprinted the poem in 1925, he dedicated it to him:" For Ezra Pound il miglior fabbro." The Italian phrase means "the better craftsman" As Eliot later accounted, he used the phrase to honor Pound's craftsmanship and critical ability, which had turned The Waste Land "from a jumble of good and bad passages into a poem."

5. The starting point for Eliot's theory of the "Objective correlative"

Eliot used the phrase “objective correlative” in the context of his own impersonal theory of poetry; it thus had an immense influence toward correcting the vagueness of late Victorian rhetoric by insisting on a correspondence of word and object.

The scholar Mario Praz considered this idea as the starting point for Eliot's theory of the "Objective correlative": "The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an 'objective correlative'; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula for that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked." (quoted in Winters, 1987: 467) It is much convenient for us to borrow Eliot's idea of "Objective correlative" for the analysis of logopoeia in Pound's Cathay. "The poems in Cathay are things of a supreme beauty. What poetry should be, that they are. And if a new breath of imagery and handling can do anything for our poetry, that new breath these poems bring...Poetry consists in so rendering concrete objects that the emotions produced by the objects shall arise in the reader..."(quoted in Eliot, 2004: 23) "

6. Ash-Wednesday by Eliot after his 1927 conversion to Anglicanism a marked shift

Ash-Wednesday is the first long poem written by Eliot after his 1927 conversion to Anglicanism. Published in 1930, it deals with the struggle that ensues when one who has lacked faith acquires it. Sometimes referred to as Eliot's "conversion poem", it is richly but ambiguously allusive, and deals with the aspiration to move from spiritual barrenness to hope for human salvation. Eliot's style of writing applied typically in Ash-Wednesday showed a marked shift from the poetry he had written prior to his 1927 conversion, and his post-conversion style would continue in a similar vein. His style was to become less ironic, and the poems would no longer be populated by multiple characters in dialogue. His subject matter would also become more focused on Eliot's spiritual concerns and his Christian faith. There is a religious meditation in the style of “Ash Wednesday” entirely different from that of any of the earlier poems. This and subsequent poems were written in a more relaxed, musical, and meditative style than his earlier works, in which the dramatic element had been stronger than the lyrical.

From this poem, we can see that the influence of Pound on Eliot has decreased a lot.

7. Conclusion

Bearing in mind the influence of Ezra Pound and the signification of his Imagist poetics in literature, this essay has chiefly done the analytical and textual exploration into Pound's enormous influence on T. S. Eliot. Based on the valuable academic work done by foreign and domestic scholars, the paper mainly deals with the roles which pound plays as both a friend and a influencer of Eliot’s. it is with pound’s help that Eliot published his first poem The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, furthermore, we can see from Eliot’s works that his writing style is much influenced by the imagism movement, which is championed by Ezra Pound. Through the painstaking exploration, I would say that, without pound, we may not have such a talented poet as T. S. Eliot.

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