Ezra Pound and Neoplatonism

Ezra Pound and Neoplatonism
Author: P. Th. M. G. Liebregts
Publisher: Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press
Total Pages: 470
Release: 2004
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780838640111

This book is a detailed study of Ezra Pound's explicit and implicit use of elements of the Neoplatonic tradition in his prose and poetry, and of the way it informed his poetics as well as his political and social-economic views. The book not only discusses the ideas of those Pound considered to be leading figures in the development of Neoplatonism (such as Plotinus, Dionysus the Areopagite, Eriugena, Dante, Gernisthus Plethon, and Thomas Taylor), but, more importantly, it shows how and why Pound adapted and appropriated their notions to develop his interpretation of what he saw as an ongoing Neoplatonic tradition. Through this adaptation of Neoplatonism, Pound's work may be seen as an insightful commentary upon this religio-philosophical tradition as well as a contribution to it.

Selected Prose, 1909-1965

Selected Prose, 1909-1965
Author: Ezra Pound
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
Total Pages: 484
Release: 1973
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 9780811205740

Essays by the distinguished poet illuminate his philosophical beliefs as well as the principal themes found in the Cantos.

Between the Pigeonholes

Between the Pigeonholes
Author: Alison Falby
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 220
Release: 2020-12-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 1527563774

Aldous Huxley described Gerald Heard as “that rare being—a learned man who [made] his mental home on the vacant spaces between the pigeonholes.” Heard’s off-beat interests made him a cultural and intellectual pioneer on both sides of the Atlantic in the middle decades of the twentieth century. Despite accolades from such figures as E.M. Forster, who characterized him as “one of the most penetrating minds in England,” and Christopher Isherwood, who described him upon his death as one of the “few great magic mythmakers and revealers of life’s wonder,” Heard is largely unknown today. Between the Pigeonholes is the first published full-length study of Gerald Heard. Alison Falby examines Heard’s ideas and contexts in interwar Britain and postwar America, demonstrating his significance in several important twentieth-century movements. These movements include popular science and psychology, psychical research, Eastern spirituality, pacifism, cooperativism, and Californian counter-culture. All of Heard’s involvements expressed his desire to convey religious ideas in the modern languages of biological, social, and physical science. Falby also traces Heard’s shifting political leanings from left-liberal in the early-1930s to libertarian in the early-1960s. She finds that his modernist theological approach, conventionally associated with liberal religion and politics, provided spiritual fodder for those on both the Left and the Right: Isherwood and W.H. Auden on the one hand, and Clare Boothe Luce and Spiritual Mobilization on the other. Using Heard as a prism through which to examine popular ideas, Falby shows that the twentieth century contained much political and religious heterogeneity. This heterogeneity illustrates the diverse and overlapping roots of both liberal religion and conservative politics in the twenty-first century.

True Friendship

True Friendship
Author: Christopher Ricks
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 272
Release: 2010-03-02
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0300162847

True Friendship looks closely at three outstanding poets of the past half-century—Geoffrey Hill, Anthony Hecht, and Robert Lowell—through the lens of their relation to their two predecessors in genius, T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. The critical attention then finds itself reciprocated, with Eliot and Pound being in their turn contemplated anew through the lenses of their successors. Hill, Hecht, and Lowell are among the most generously alert and discriminating readers, as is borne out not only by their critical prose but (best of all) by their acts of new creation, those poems of theirs that are thanks to Eliot and Pound. “Opposition is true Friendship.” So William Blake believed, or at any rate hoped. Hill, Hecht, and Lowell demonstrate many kinds of friendship with Eliot and Pound: adversarial, artistic, personal. In their creative assent and dissent, the imaginative literary allusions—like other, wider forms of influence—are shown to constitute the most magnanimous of welcomes and of tributes.

Poetry, Politics, and Culture

Poetry, Politics, and Culture
Author: Harold Kaplan
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 455
Release: 2017-07-05
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1351499386

A salient feature of modern poetics is its direct connection with cultural history and politics. Among the great American poets of the twentieth century, Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams offer a significant contrast with T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. Where the latter advocated a theocentric or reactionary response to the cultural crises of modernity, the former affirmed an essentially humanist and democratic social and aesthetic ethos. In Poetry, Politics, and Culture, Harold Kaplan offers a penetrating comparative study of these representative and distinctively influential poets.All four poets wrote in an atmosphere of cultural crisis following World War I, caught as they were between outmoded belief systems and various forms of artistic and political nihilism. While each believed in poetry as a source of cultural values and beliefs, they nevertheless experienced loss of confidence in their own vocation in a world characterized by scientific, rationalist thinking and the mundane struggle for survival. For each, therefore, the poetic imagination was a means of restoring order, or building a new civilization out of chaos. In trying to define a revitalized culture, the four exemplified the perennial quarrel between Europe and America.

Ezra Pound and History

Ezra Pound and History
Author: Marianne Korn
Publisher: Orono, Me. : National Poetry Foundation, University of Maine
Total Pages: 216
Release: 1985
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN:

One Must Not Go Altogether with the Tide

One Must Not Go Altogether with the Tide
Author: Miranda B. Hickman
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
Total Pages: 464
Release: 2011-05-06
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0773585974

Nott, who published Jefferson and/or Mussolini (1935), was an interested and encouraging interlocutor for a poet seeking re-invention as an economist and political commentator - someone who sustained Pound as he swam against the tide. Pound's close involvement with his publisher illuminates an important episode in literary modernism as well as for the study of print culture in the interwar period. This edition of the letters retains Pound's idiosyncratic epistolary idiom and analyzes letter-writing as a genre critical to Pound's intellectual and cultural project, capturing Pound as a collaborator at work.

W.E.B. Du Bois on Asia

W.E.B. Du Bois on Asia
Author: William Edward Burghardt Du Bois
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
Total Pages: 246
Release: 2005
Genre: History
ISBN: 1604737085

A selection of the best of Du Bois's vision on the global battle for equality