New Collection of Essays on Ezra Pound and Modernism: The Irish Factor

New Publications

Ezra Pound and Modernism: The Irish Factor

Eds. Walter Baumann and  William Pratt

Edward Everett Root Publishers, 2017

(Preface by Seamus Heaney)

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.

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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.