Pound, peripatetic verse, and the postwar liberal aesthetic

Andrew S. Gross

pp. 253-266

in: Klaus Benesch, François Specq (eds), Walking and the aesthetics of modernity, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016

Abstract

This chapter explores how those attempting to recuperate Ezra Pound's poetry after World War II misunderstood his epic project as a lyrical one. He was read as a personal or subjectivist writer by a generation of poets who turned to "walk poetry" as one of their primary lyrical forms. Pound also wrote walk poems, but they did not foreground the open-ended freedom celebrated by postwar poets, rather the constraining influence exercised by a landscape already shaped by cultural traditions. It makes sense, I argue, to read Pound's walk poems as expressions of confinement and freedom, and to explore the hidden constraints lurking behind the postwar lyrics that turn to mobility as a metaphor for personal freedom.

Cited authors

Pound Ezra