Modernist Poets: Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot
Ezra Pound
Early Work
Pound’s first important book was Cathay (1915), featuring translations like Sonnets and Ballads of Guido Cavalcanti. Cathay consisted of free translations/reinterpretations of ancient Chinese poetry, including “The River-Merchant’s Wife” and “In a Station of the Metro.” Some of these poems are imagistic, using hard images and striking juxtapositions, yet they also frequently employ narration, contrary to some of Pound’s own principles. While sometimes criticized for his liberties with the original texts, they remain elegant and readable.
Hugh Selwyn Mauberly (1920)
Subtitled “Life and Contacts,” this long poem comprises various fragments, recounting Pound’s life in London between 1909 and 1920. It offers depictions of the city’s literary and cultural life, including poetic portraits of his acquaintances. A bitter work, it reflects the disillusionment of living through World War I and indicts modern civilization for its neglect of artists, dominance of commercial values, and impoverishment of life and art. Pound blames business for the decay of humanistic values, arguing that beauty, cultivation, and artistic practice are not esteemed in modern society. He further criticizes big business and greed for their role in World War I. This decay of humanism is evident in the isolation of art and culture within museums and universities, detached from everyday life. The rich traditions of the past are not assimilated into people’s lives, leaving them largely unknown or unlived.
Pound’s constant recall of the past in his writing stems from his attempt to assimilate it into his own life and work. This explains his modern interpretations of classic works as a means of keeping the past alive.
The Cantos
Pound’s main work, The Cantos, was in progress from the mid-1910s until his death in 1972. He continuously published new cantos throughout his life. His initial goal, as told to Yeats in 1918, was to write 100 cantos, structured like a Bach fugue, with two mythological themes: Ulysses’s descent into Hades (from Homer’s Odyssey) and a metamorphosis from Ovid. By his death, Pound had completed 117 cantos, the unity of which remains a subject of discussion.
T.S. Eliot
T.S. Eliot’s main works include verse collections like Prufrock and Other Observations (1917), The Waste Land (1922), The Hollow Men (1924), Ash Wednesday (1930), and Four Quartets (1942). He also wrote poetic plays in verse, such as Murder in the Cathedral, The Family Reunion, and The Cocktail Party. Some are written in Elizabethan blank verse, despite their contemporary settings (except for Murder) and diction. Eliot received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948.
Eliot diagnosed a “dissociation of sensibility” in contemporary culture. He argued that post-17th-century Cartesianism separated the inner mind from the external world. The latter, measurable by science and subject to physical laws, became the realm of action, objectivity, and practicality, while poetry was relegated to the inner mind. This resulted in a materially and technically advanced external world, but one detached from the imagination and insights that poetry offers.
Eliot believed poetry could infuse the contemporary external world with knowledge and intuitions to give meaning to everyday existence. The unpoetical is the squalid world of the modern, industrialized metropolis, and poetry can reveal a deeper, albeit not optimistic, significance within it. This deeper sense is the unreality of a lost, fragmented civilization, lacking community, detached from nature, and without purpose—a waste land. The dissolution of old beliefs and systems of certainty created chaos, and the only hope, according to Eliot, lies in returning to myth and ancient belief systems as residual sources of meaning.
Eliot’s poetry interweaves these myths and cultural references with descriptions of the present. This ability to unify separate areas of existence, which he admired in metaphysical poets and Shakespeare, is evident in his own work, particularly The Waste Land and his later poetry.