Book description
Ezra Pound transformed his style of poetry when he wrote The Adams
Cantos in the 1920s. But what caused him to rethink his earlier writing
techniques? Grounded in archival material, this study explores the
extent to which Pound's poetry changed in response to his reading of
seventeenth-century American History and the social climate of the
pre-war period.
Drawing on the Ezra Pound papers, David Ten Eyck documents the changes
to Pound's documentary techniques, establishing a chronology of the
composition of The Cantos. His close readings of specific passages, set
against the interwar years, allow Ten Eyck to gain insights into Pound's
1930s political and social criticism. Through references to the
annotated copy of The Works of John Adams, he explores Pound's
engagement with Adams at the expense of Thomas Jefferson: a figure
formally at the heart of his previous work. Ultimately, this contextual
and archival study uses John Adams and America to unlock the fascist
beliefs and the later poetry of Ezra Pound. David Ten Eyck's book
provides an invaluable service to scholarship in its scrupulous
adumbration of famously difficult modernist verse. Ezra Pound's Adams Cantos
elaborates the "documentary method" at work in Pound's epic,
tracing its development from the Malatesta Cantos of the 1920s to its
fullest expression in the inscrutable poems dealing with the political
thought and milieu of John Adams, composed swiftly in the lengthening
European shadows of World War Two. Ten Eyck accomplishes a rare thing by
showing how Pound's methods of citation transform from conventional (if
dense) literary reference to what Peter Nicholls calls "an
autonomous and continuous discourse." In doing so, Ten Eyck unlocks
a hitherto oblique dimension of Pound's "poem containing
history." The book is a lesson in How to Read: it performs a
material hermeneutics carefully calibrated to a deep and judicious
awareness of seemingly intransigent poetic materials and underlying
documentary evidence. More than bringing the archive into the text -
though surely the book does a deft job of this - Ezra Pound's Adams Cantos
reinvigorates our understanding of Pound's own aspiration to write a
poem that would function as a cultural repository, a textual place
"where memory liveth. David Ten Eyck teaches Modernism and poetry
at the University of Lorraine, France. He is currently co-editing a new
critical edition of Pound s Pisan Cantos
and, in addition to his work on Pound he has written articles on
twentieth century writers such as David Jones, James Joyce, John
Berryman and Philip Larkin.
