EER
ISBN 9781912224241 Hardback £75.00 Order
258 pp.
Edward Everett Root Publishers Co. Ltd.
Ezra Pound and Modernism
The Irish Factor
Papers from the 25th Ezra Pound International Conference in Dublin, 2013
Walter Baumann and William Pratt (eds)
Preface by Seamus Heaney
About this book
That Ezra Pound was the chief architect of Modernism in English and American poetry is well established. So, too, is the fact that in T. S. Eliot he discovered a peer, whose early career he fostered. Together, Pound and Eliot defined what Modern Poetry meant. But they also had peers in two great Irish writers: Yeats in poetry and Joyce in fiction. With them, they were major shapers of the Modernist style. The Age of Modernism was dominated by American and Irish writers who took part in reshaping the English literary tradition in the twentieth century. “Ezra Pound and Modernism” was the topic of the 25th Ezra Pound International Conference in Dublin in July of 2013, and the papers selected for this volume clearly demonstrate that.
Modernism had both American and Irish roots. Modernism in English literature had its origins in the work of Irish and American writers. Pound was the chief advocate of a new literary style in English, which the writings of Yeats, Joyce, and T. S. Eliot would articulate. Ulysses and The Waste Land, published in the same year, 1922, would become its complex masterpieces, still challenging readers after nearly a century, and still unsurpassed.
Contents: Preface; Seamus Heaney: Welcome Address. I. ASPECTS OF MODERNISM: William Pratt, Defining Modernism: Technique Plus Critique; Alice Bailey Cheylan,Amy Lowell’s European Experiment; Desmond Egan, The Modernists, Pound and Hopkins. II. ON TRANSLATION: Heinz Ickstadt and Manfred Pfister, Eva Hesse and the Adventures of The Cantos in German;Giovanna Epifania, Dante’s Afterlife and the Question of Translation: Pound, Binyon, Heaney; Peter Liebregts, “With the sun in a golden cup”: Pound and Stesichorus in Canto 23; Giuliana Ferreccio, Pound, Benjamin, and the Language of Names; John Gery, Paradise, Compassion, and Jen in Canto 93. III. IRISH DIMENSIONS: Walter Baumann, “I ask you, had Synge an audience in his life-time?”: Ezra Pound and J. M. Synge; Anne Conover, The Pounds and the Yeatses: An Irish-American Friendship and Its Influence on Modern Poetry. Catherine Paul, Reading Yeats Reading Pound; Massimo Bacigalupo, “Iseult who was the great love”: Ezra Pound, Iseult Gonne, and Francis Stuart; Ira Nadel, Pound & the Artichoke, Beckett & the Whistle. IV. THE FINE ARTS: Caterina Ricciardi, Botticelli’s Mystical Nativity and the Isle of Capri in W. B. Yeats’s A Vision; Jonathan C. Creasy, “Let’s to Music”: Florence Farr, Arnold Dolmetsch and Pound’s Musical Poetics; Jo Brantley Berryman Ezra Pound, Aubrey Beardsley, and The Yellow Book.Notes on Contributors. Index.
About the authors
Walter Baumann, a native of Switzerland, is a retired Senior Lecturer of the University of Ulster, where he taught German literature and language. He obtained his Dr. phil. degree from the University of Zurich. His dissertation was published by Francke Verlag in Bern in 1967 and the University of Miami Press 1970 entitled The Rose in the Steel Dust: An Examination of the Cantos of Ezra Pound. He has been a student of Ezra Pound for 60 years. From 1976 to the present he has attended and helped to organize all but two Pound conferences. His collected Pound essays were published by the National Poetry Foundation in Orono, Maine, in 2000 under the title Roses from the Steel Dust. With William Pratt he edited Ezra Pound and London: New Perspectives (AMS Press, New York, 2015) and Ezra Pound and Modernism: The Irish Factor (forthcoming from EER).
William Pratt has held academic posts at Vanderbilt University and at Miami University from where he was Associate Professor and Director of Freshman English, 1964‑68 and where he is now Professor of English Emeritus. He was Fulbright‑Hays Professor of American Literature, University College, Dublin, 1975‑76; Scholar in Residence, Miami University European Center, Luxembourg, Fall 1976; and Writer in Residence, Tyrone Guthrie Centre, Annaghmakerrig House, Co. Monaghan, Ireland, Summer, 1992 and 1996. He was Secretary of the Ezra Pound International Conference, 1991-200, amongst other scholarly and public appointments. This is his 20th book. He has published widely on many major modern writers. His works concerned with Ezra Pound alone include Ezra Pound and London: New Perspectives edited by Walter Baumann and William Pratt (AMS Press, 2015); Roma/Amor: Ezra Pound, Rome and Love edited by William Pratt and Caterina Ricciardi (AMS Press, 2013); Ezra Pound, Ends and Beginnings, Essays and Poems, edited by John Gery and William Pratt. (AMS Press, 2011); The Imagist Poem, Third Edition, edited (University of New Orleans Press, 2009); Ezra Pound, Language and Persona, edited by Massimo Bacigalupo and William Pratt (University of Genoa Press, 2008), and Ezra Pound and the Making of Modernism (AMS Press, 2007).
Reviews
"Modern literature remains challenging to readers after a century as the dominant form of expression, but it is as worthy as ever of intelligent assimilation. as successive Pound conferences have proved, none more convincingly than the 25th Ezra Pound International Conference in Dublin in 2013, from which this volume of papers was selected." - Professor David Pierce.