Aphrodite as Acorn: Method and Message in the Cantos of Ezra Pound

The appearances of the goddess Aphrodite in The Cantos of Ezra Pound mark the most beautiful passages of the poem. Both enchanted and challenged, I begin this paper. I will do three things. First, I will survey the critical work on the role of Aphrodite written over the last twenty years. Astonishingly, few scholars have studied the goddess in any great detail and so I have included scholarly opinion on the role of archetypal figures and of the lyric mode in The Cantos since she is an archetypal figure and usually appears in the lyric passages. Second, I will discuss Pound\u27s ideas on the gods in general, on beauty and art, and on the craft of poetry in order to arrive at a better understanding of his method and purposes. I will discuss Hugh Kenner\u27s metaphor of the acorn, and undertake, in the third part of the paper, to show how this metaphor is related to the method of Pound\u27s creation of Aphrodite. My purpose is finally to be able to understand how the appearance of Aphrodite relates to the message of The Cantos