This chapter claims that Pound’s reconfiguration of Sophocles’s Trachiniai as a Noh play works towards the realization of the dream of the long Imagist poem that coheres (first articulated in 1916), enabling Pound to return to the writing of the Cantos – much as H.D.’s translation of Ion in the 1930s had allowed her to return to writing and led to Trilogy. Pound’s Women of Trachis offers a condensed image not only of the play which it translates, but also of Pound’s own body of work up to that time. Yet the translation also undercuts the triumphant narrative it seems to present, an undercutting that the soon-to-be-composed late Cantos will seek to refute. Section: Rock-Drill and Thrones recruit first other tragedies to balance and further clarify the relation between poetics and politics that remain ambivalent in the Sophocles translations, and then pre- and post-Athenian Greek texts that, in Pound’s excerpting, seem to harness the Greek language towards a monosemic vision dictated by Pound’s politics. The Trachinian Herakles himself has to be further translated into other mythical figures in the Cantos in order for the promise he represents to be fulfilled.

This chapter examines H.D.’s and Pound’s early work with Greek lyric – in particular, the Greek Anthology and Sappho. It traces Pound’s skeptical, ambivalent, and often self-contradictory use of Greek in the 1910s as he tries to articulate his poetics of the image, tracking the differing prisms (Provençal lyric, Bengali poetics, Chinese ideograms, Primitivism, Vorticism) through which he interprets the value of Greek as his own artistic alliances shift between 1908 and 1918. It contrasts Pound’s varying approaches, whether outlined in his prose writings on prosody and the visual arts or actually followed in his early poems based on Greek lyric to H.D.’s already highly sophisticated and well-developed perspective, as seen in her translations also from the Greek Anthology and Sappho – translations which are the basis of some of her best-known poems. The author argues, moreover, that H.D.’s engagement with Greece even at this early stage is more deeply textual, self-conscious, and historically aware than has been recognized. Nonetheless, she show that despite striking differences in tone and some distinction in approach, Pound and H.D.’s poetics were subtly evolving in similar ways.

This chapter tracks Pound’s plunge into Greek studies – especially focused on Sophocles – during his incarceration at St. Elizabeths after the Second World War; it examines his unpublished correspondence during this period as well as his also unpublished translation of the Sophoclean Elektra (1949). An opening reading of the Pisan Cantos (wr. 1945) argues that Pound explicitly ties the fate of his epic poem, and of American poetry tout court, to a re-engagement with Greek, and especially tragic, poetics. The bilingualism of his Elektra – the play is half in English, half in transliterated Greek – encodes its antithetical ambitions, one poetic and the other political, as Pound uses the translation on the one hand to devise a new prosody for his writing after the war, returning to the prosodic experiments of his early years, and on the other, to continue the fascist ghost theater of the Pisan Cantos.

This chapter treats Pound’s collaboration with Eliot from 1917 into the late 1930s from the perspective of their engagement with Greek. It focuses on the interconnection between drama (whether Japanese Noh or Greek tragedy) and the ambition of the long poem; consistent with their turn to formal verse in 1917, the two poets view theater through a similarly formalist lens. The author traces Pound and Eliot’s joint obsession with Aeschylus’s Agamemnon through an examination of their essays – especially Pound’s multi-part “Hellenist Series” (1918–19) and his writings on Jean Cocteau – private correspondence, and select poetic work and translations (e.g., Pound’s unpublished “Opening for Agamemnon,” Eliot’s “Sweeney among the Nightingales”). Whereas Eliot “declines the gambit, shows fatigue” and chooses to treat Aeschylus from a distance, Pound is both more ambivalent about Aeschylus’s value and more in thrall to elements of his poetic technique and language. Though Pound and Eliot’s abortive Greek projects would lie dormant for some years, the chapter examines the attempted rekindling of their Greek collaboration in the mid-1930s, which provides the transition between the early texts discussed in this chapter and their mature work.

The Introduction outlines the intellectual and literary context of Modernist Hellenism, situating the book in relation to other scholarship in modernist and reception studies and classical receptions. It discusses the discourses both of modernism and of hellenism current in the first half of the twentieth century, and begins to sketch out the ways in which Pound and H.D.’s poetic and translational practice differs from those, expanding on each poet’s theories of poetic composition as translation.

This chapter examines H.D.’s Helen in Egypt (1961). While H.D. reviews her own life’s (Greek) work in her long poem in ways that recall Pound’s gathered currents in Women of Trachis, the challenge she sets herself is the opposite of that discernible in Pound’s late cantos: not coherence, but the embrace of proliferating images. The whole poem is an extended “hatching” of the Greek word eidolon ‘image, phantom, idol.’ The importance of the eidolon for H.D. has been previously recognized; the argument here differs in the specificity with which the author traces its lexical and conceptual translation throughout the poem. She reads the first part of Helen in Egypt both as a faithful and programmatic translation of Euripides’s Helen and as a revision of H.D.’s own previous writings on Helen. As with H.D.’s earlier translations, this one too catalyzes new writing: Helen in Egypt’s next two parts in subsequent years, where the Euripidean play’s import and relevance, as well as its unresolved tensions, are teased out. Helen in Egypt thus both performs and argues for the kind of approach to Greek here termed modernist hellenism: balancing freedom and constraint, “philology” and poetry.

This chapter approaches genre both as a name for historically variable groupings of recurring patterns within poems and as an interpretive device that serves as a frame for engaging with individual poems. Examining Ezra Pound's translations of classical Chinese poetry, recent work by Marilyn Chin, and the anonymous body of verses in Chinese known collectively as “the Angel Island poems,” composed between 1910 and 1940 by detainees at the Angel Island Immigration Station in San Francisco Bay, the chapter explores how genres acquire new features or traits as they travel across and take root in different languages and literary traditions. In this way, the chapter demonstrates how genres generate expectations and other affective attachments among readers. At the same time, the chapter argues, individual poems may partake of, depart from, and otherwise play with the conventions of multiple genres simultaneously.

This chapter provides a concise narrative of the relationship and collaboration between Robert Lowell and Ezra Pound. It traces the attempts by the young Lowell to establish Pound as a mentor and the older poet’s ambivalent responses, as well as the two poets’ occasional correspondence and thoughts about one another’s mature works. It concludes with a depiction and discussion of some late addresses that each poet made to the memory and work of the other.

Chapter 1 expands on the Introduction’s brief exploration of Norbert Wiener’s theories alongside modernist literary aesthetics to argue that Ezra Pound’s Cantos and radio broadcasts employ the logic of cybernetic feedback as a pedagogical model for teaching twentieth-century readers how to negotiate large quantities of data, find meaningful patterns within messages from the past, and adapt their conduct to best achieve their goals. Elucidating arguments that Pound makes in his radio broadcasts and poetry (particularly the Chinese History Cantos) and comparing them to Wiener’s mid-century theories of cybernetic feedback, Love challenges the critical tendency to compare Pound’s work to unidirectional radio transmission. Instead, the chapter’s analyses illustrate that Pound champions the principle of circulation and positions his readers as cybernetic machines, inviting them to learn from the feedback loops that circulate throughout history, culture, and language.

This chapter considers Ezra Pound’s The Cantos, William Carlos Williams’ Paterson, and Charles Olson’s The Maximus Poems in light of the various difficulties they pose to readers interested in thinking of them in formal and also in generic terms (however broadly construed). I suggest that each of them might be understood as individual attempts to resist intellectual, critical, and hermeneutic recourse to any such generalization per se. A salient feature of these “modernist” “American” “long poems” consists in a variable but tenacious schedule of negations: of literary conventions, of readerly expectations, of internal consistencies, and, ultimately, of any sense of an ending whatsoever. I reflect upon the implications of negation and excess when discussing “long poems” by three straight, white male poets, especially in a context as institutional as a Cambridge History.

This chapter returns to American fascination with the Orient in the modernist era to consider the work of Asian writers in the US in a period of rising nativism and hardening policies of exclusion. The modernist aesthete and the modern liberal mark out defining poles for the reception of literary works by Asians in this period, and my discussion is structured around the influence of the high modernist orientalism of Ezra Pound and Amy Lowell in the work of Sadakichi Hartmann and Yone Noguchi, the strictures of Pearl Buck’s interwar humanitarianism for the work of Lin Yutang and H. T. Tsiang, and finally a pair of writers unfettered by prevailing Orientalist modes, Carlos Bulosan and José Garcia Villa. All of these writers present transpacific imaginations unconstrained by their constituting bonds: they fashioned new selves, pitched anti-imperialist philosophies, and produced electrifying art.

This chapter traces key moments and motifs in the history of the translation of Greek texts primarily into English. It highlights how Greek translation becomes paradigmatic for translation tout court, informing both translation rhetoric and practice, and then tackles the model cases of Homer and Sappho, the former diachronically, the latter synchronically through several case studies from the first half of the twentieth century. It homes in on modernist writers’ particular understanding of translation as poised between critical scholarship and creative practice in order to argue that poets such as H.D. or Ezra Pound evade or even subvert existing modes of conceptualizing both ‘Greece’ and translation, thus opening the way for the plethora of approaches that characterize Greek translation today. The chapter concludes with a cautionary note as it examines the programmatic resistance to Greek translation displayed by Virginia Woolf and Yorgos Seferis.

Beginning with Claude McKay’s “The Harlem Dancer”—in which the national space of Harlem opens up to the Caribbean from which its eponymous dancer has likely emigrated—this chapter reads the mass migration resulting from the structures of imperial capital as the determining social ground of modernist literature. Indeed, modernism registered, to an unprecedented degree, in both formal and thematic terms, an early moment of what we have now come to call globalization. But if modernist form betrays a complicity with globalization, in its persistence representation of the way national literary spaces open themselves up to cultural materials from elsewhere, it also levels a consistent critique of both capitalism and nationalism, a critique that unites its left and right wings. Modernist texts thus tend to separate economic and cultural globalization, critiquing the first, while advocating for the second, even as they demonstrate their deep inter-relationship.

A study of Elliott Carter’s song cycles and other text settings from the period 1998-2011, with close readings of both poetry and music. Included are individual analytical essays on Tempo e tempi (poetry by Eugenio Montale, Salvatore Quasimodo, and Giuseppe Ungaretti), Of Rewaking (poems by William Carlos Williams), In the Distances of Sleep (poems by Wallace Stevens), Mad Regales (poems by John Ashbery), “La Musique” (poem by Charles Baudelaire), On Conversing with Paradise (texts from Ezra Pound’s Pisan Cantos), Poems of Louis Zukofsky, What Are Years (poems by Marianne Moore), A Sunbeam’s Architecture (poems by e e cummings), Three Explorations (poems by T. S. Eliot), The American Sublime (poems by Wallace Stevens).

This chapter charts the transition, in British literature of the early twentieth century, from the Decadence associated with Wilde and his generation to the modernism associated with Eliot and his generation. If criticism has readily acknowledged that London, as the locus of an emergent modernist sensibility, was bound up in geographically extended networks of transatlantic and European literary practice, the story of historical transition from Decadence to modernism has been less often told. With particular reference to the poetries of Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, the chapter shows how the aesthetics of Decadence were reconfigured and repurposed by modernist writers, before turning in a brief coda to the counter-example of W. B. Yeats, for whom questions of Decadence and modernism were bound up with the national politics of a changing Ireland.

How Norman Mailer enters the discussion of Modernism may be as opaque as the discussion of Modernism itself. Several lines of approach, however, may be useful: First, which traditions did Mailer gravitate towards; second, how did Mailer define himself as an artist; third, what were the central elements of his worldview and poetics; and fourth, what questions of form and style did his work attempt to explore? This chapter situates Mailer’s work within the literary and historical context of the Modernist movement by focusing on his use of persona, his worldview, and the thematic content of his work.

Nineteenth-century British and French intellectuals set the terms by which Europe evaluated Irish and American cultures before World War I. Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America proposed that democratic literatures would be deformed by social levelling and market forces and unable to rival aristocratic literatures for distinction. Rare exceptions might occur at brief tipping points when democratic and aristocratic cultures mutually contested and energized each other, but the emergence of a new mass culture less sophisticated than classical or aristocratic literatures seemed inevitable. In Studies in Celtic Literature, Matthew Arnold proposed that though the Celtic peoples of the United Kingdom were too unruly to govern their own affairs, their literatures possessed qualities of lyrical imagination that might usefully correct the worst elements of a materialist modern English culture. Nineteenth-century literary renaissances in Ireland and the United States were founded upon and reacted against these discourses. William Butler Yeats and Ezra Pound emerged as especially important figures, daringly reworking received literary discourses to set the terms for a brilliant new modernism that sometimes became stridently anti-democratic in its bid to challenge the degradation of taste that nineteenth-century liberal writers like Tocqueville and Arnold had forecast.

This chapter explores how the work of three of the ‘major’ modernist authors – T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and W. B. Yeats – might be considered to be invested in the ‘Decadent’ sensibility. The chapter begins by tracing the emergence of this Decadent sensibility in the late age of revolutionary romanticism, and in particular in Shelley’s claim that ‘Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the World.’ If poets are, in 1821, legislators, it suggests they are no longer revolutionaries. Post-romantic poetry is then written in an age of failed, exhausted revolution and is often characterized by reactionary, backward-looking politics. In this narrative late modernism marks the culmination of this increasingly dispirited view of the world, so that Eliot, by the 1930s, invests in absolutist authority rather than in poetic possibility. As the chapter suggests, this view of the failure of poetic possibility was one which with the Decadent writers of the 1890s began to grapple. Try as they might, modernist authors found themselves caught in a Decadent paradox in which poetry could no longer transform the world, and so they turned to totalizing, even totalitarian politics.