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Ezra Pound and Modernism
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14428 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
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6 / 1988 |
4,844 Words |
| Author
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Hugh Kenner
Hugh Kenner is professor of English at Johns Hopkins Univesity
and the author of many celebrated books, particularly on Ezra
Pound. |
The first odd thing about international Modernism is that its language was English. If, in 1895, you had sensed it was coming, you would have watched for something French. But you wouldn't have known about a schoolboy in Dublin named Jimmy Joyce, another near Philadelphia nicknamed "Ray" Pound, or yet another in St. Louis, shy Tom Eliot. In 1895 they were thirteen, ten, and seven, and untroubled by any inkling of intertwined futures abroad.
Working in solitude, James Joyce would create Modernism's paradigm--the book of the century is Ulysses. The last comparable watershed in English literature, dividing all into "before" and "after," had been Paradise Lost. It was the synergetic presence of Ezra Pound that lets us speak of international Modernism, and the diplomatic intelligence of Eliot that provided us with ways to think about it. Also, Pound and Eliot contributed two of the movement's constituent works: The Cantos and The Waste Land.
So it's natural to ask what the three of them share, besides growing up speaking a dialect of English in places other than England. The answers include a heritage and a time.
Part of the heritage was something we can now identify in retrospect--nineteenth-century Europe's greatest intellectual adventure, the sorting out of the Indo-European languages. One result of that process was that great repository of the English language, the Oxford English Dictionary, which was published between 1884 and 1928. It is convenient to date modern linguistics from the year 1788, when Sir William Jones declared that the origins of European words, whether Latin, Greek, German, Flemish, or English, were "Indo-European" and could be sought by studying the primordial mother tongue, Sanskrit. His late friend Samuel Johnson would have been startled; in his 1755 Dictionary, Johnson had blandly assumed one could etymologize by eye, using handy tongues. Though he couldn't get from "fish" to Latin piscis, he was confident that "crocodile" came from Greek krokos (yellow) and deilos (fearful); hence a saffron-fearer, whatever sense that made. (We now invoke kroke (pebble) and drilos (worm), obtaining a creature that suns itself on stones, a lizard, of which class any crocodile is a huge specimen.)
The realization that etymologies should make sense historically came after Jones and helped shape a fascination with isolated words. By 1851, Richard Trench of Dublin was calling "Many a single word... a concentrated poem, having stores of poetical thought and imagery laid up in it." Trench also quoted Ralph Waldo Emerson's
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