Historicizing Modernism
2 total works
Ezra Pound's Washington Cantos and the Struggle for Light
by Professor Alec Marsh
Published 6 May 2021
Ezra Pound's unfinished long poem The Cantos is regarded as a seminal work of modernist poetry - many critics, however, have sought to read the work as set apart from the author's politics. Reading the poetry alongside correspondence and unpublished archival writings, Ezra Pound's Washington Cantos and the Struggle for Light is an important new work on a poet who stands at the heart of 20th-century modernism. Building on his previous book John Kasper and Ezra Pound (Bloomsbury, 2015), Alec Marsh here explores the way the political ideas revealed in Pound's correspondence manifested themselves in his later poetry.
Through an in-depth reading of the later cantos - Rock-Drill and Thrones - this book reveals the ways in which Pound integrated into his verse themes and ideas that remain central to American far-right ideology to this day: state's rights, segregation, the usurpation of the Constitution by the Supreme Court, history as racial struggle.
Through an in-depth reading of the later cantos - Rock-Drill and Thrones - this book reveals the ways in which Pound integrated into his verse themes and ideas that remain central to American far-right ideology to this day: state's rights, segregation, the usurpation of the Constitution by the Supreme Court, history as racial struggle.
John Kasper was a militant far-right activist who first came to prominence with his violent campaigns against desegregation in the Civil Rights era. Ezra Pound was the seminal figure in Anglo-American modernist literature and one of the most important poets of the 20th century. This is the first book to comprehensively explore the extensive correspondence - lasting over a decade and numbering hundreds of letters - between the two men.
John Kasper and Ezra Pound examines the mutual influence the two men exerted on each other in Pound's later life: how John Kasper developed from a devotee of Pound's poetry to an active right-wing agitator; how Pound's own ideas about race and American politics developed in his discussions with Kasper and how this informed his later poetry. Shedding a disturbing new light on Ezra Pound's committed engagement with extreme right-wing politics in Civil Rights-era America, this is an essential read for students of 20th-century literature.
John Kasper and Ezra Pound examines the mutual influence the two men exerted on each other in Pound's later life: how John Kasper developed from a devotee of Pound's poetry to an active right-wing agitator; how Pound's own ideas about race and American politics developed in his discussions with Kasper and how this informed his later poetry. Shedding a disturbing new light on Ezra Pound's committed engagement with extreme right-wing politics in Civil Rights-era America, this is an essential read for students of 20th-century literature.