Timing the Thunder: Ezra Pound's Poetic Historiography.

Ezra Pound's faith in formal structures out of which the knowledge that he wishes the reader to gain is a motif that runs throughout his career. His early translations, particularly Cathay (1915) and Homage to Sextus Propertius (1917), succeed particularly through his ability to generate formal structures in English as analogues for the cultural information he sought to convey. The formal structures that emerge out of the objectification of the syntax of The Cantos serve as a means of incorporating into the open the reader as the subject determining how to read the poem's contents. Out of the information, the poems' objectified contents, provided in the text, the reader thus creates the knowledge gained in the course of reading The Cantos, without depending on a locatable subject to mediate that knowledge. The typical syntactic structures of the verse of The Cantos of Ezra Pound manifest a consistent pattern in which the grammatical subject is suppressed in favor of the object. This technique serves to depersonalize the poetry, forcing to a radical degree the reader's attention away from any presumed source of a subjective presence in the verse and onto the poetic objects, the contents, themselves. The lack of a mediating subject with which the reader can usually expect to identify as the guide to the emotional or cognitive effects of the verse collapses the traditional distance between the reader and the poems' contents, a peculiarly uncomfortable and difficult situation for the reader used to the reassuring presence of a "poet" or "speaker" conventionally serving as such a guide. Pound's success in the use of history as the primary source of the contents of The Cantos--his ability to develop a method of poetic historiography--therefore depended on the success of the formal structures he developed in his attempt to bring the unmediated historical object into his poem, and on the capacity of his readers to generate the appropriate knowledge out of the structures into which he placed those objects. This requirement dem and ed that he develop forms that would work temporally, in time, and yet without employing the conventions of narrative--the traditional grammatical structures and the speaking subject that would restore the distance between the reader and the poems' contents.Ph.D.American literatureUniversity of Michiganhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/160919/1/8612471.pd