At Home In Exile: Ezra Pound and the Poetics of Banishment

Ezra Pound is one of the most important poets, critics, and writers of the 20th century. Through his literary efforts, and his work on behalf of many other writers, Pound changed the way we read and write poetry today. His cultivation and support of other writers and poets like T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, Robert Frost, Marianne Moore, etc. created the basis for what we refer to as Imagism, Modernism, and other important literary movements of the early 20th century. Pound’s use of fragmentation, pastiche, and bricolage laid the foundation for post-modern writers of the latter half of the 20th century, but it is the nexus between Pound’s poetry and his exiled status, which culminates in his critical work, The Pisan Cantos. The focus of this project is the intersection of Pound’s life as an exile, and the conflation of that estrangement into his poetic technique seen in “Canto 74,” the beginning of the Pisan Cantos. This section starts much differently than it later appeared, and it is the transformation seen in “Canto 74”, which is a product of his years of exile, his imprisonment, and lays the groundwork for Pound’s poetry as the poetics of banishment. “Canto 74” provides the underpinning for the rest of the Pisan Cantos within this critical sequence by highlighting the consequence of Pound’s DTC experience