Blackwell Reference Online

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Twentieth-century American poets have been acutely aware that poetry is not the central art of their time, let alone a discourse that shapes the entire culture. Ezra Pound wrote a critique of the modern poet's dilemma early in the century, in “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley,” his portrait of a poet who feels out of place in the modern world. “The age demanded an image/ Of its accelerated grimace,” an art like “a prose kinema, not, not assuredly, alabaster/ Or the ‘sculpture’ of rhyme” ( Pound 1977 : 98). Modern society wants speed, movies, change. The fictional poet Mauberley responds by trying to withdraw into poetic reveries shaped by traditional poetic language. Pound himself thought this was self-destructive and took the opposite tack. Like many modernists, he believed, in the words of an art historian, “that artists can be scientists, and new descriptions of the world be forged under laboratory conditions, putting aside the question of wider intelligibility for the time being” ( Clark 1999 : 10). Between 1910 and 1920 he developed a poetics that relied heavily on contemporary sciences, notably electromagnetism and biology, because he was convinced that: “The arts and sciences hang together. Any conception which does not see them together in their interrelation belittles them both” ( Bell 1981 : 83). One of his best-known ideas, that it was time to replace the image in poetry with the ... log in or subscribe to read full text