Epic Reinvented: Ezra Pound and the Victorians

In Epic Reinvented, Mary Ellis Gibson examines Ezra Pound's Cantos to trace connections between his aesthetics and his politics. She treats little-known and unpublished writings, including many early poems. One substantial poem, "In Praise of the Masters," appears here in print for the first time. Discussing Pound's relationship to his Victorian predecessors, particularly Robert Browning and nineteenth-century historians, Gibson demonstrates how Pound's attempt to write a post-Romantic epic both confronted questions of genre and social order and led to the unpredictabilities of his politics. She develops a rhetorical tropology to account for the formal and cultural dimensions of Pound's contradictions. Exploring fin-de-siecle publishing, Gibson investigates how Pound's utopian political vision was rooted in nineteenth-century and fascist ideologies of gender. Violence is implicit in both. For Gibson, the aesthetic Pound and the political Pound, Pound the visionary and Pound the historian, are one