Wow! eBook
Ezra Pound's Adams Cantos: 9 Annotated Edition
Author(s): David Ten Eyck (Author)
- Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
- Publication Date: 25 Oct. 2012
- Edition: Annotated
- Language: English
- Print length: 244 pages
- ISBN-10: 1441100490
- ISBN-13: 9781441100498
Book Description
Ezra Pound transformed his style of poetry when he wrote The Adams Cantos in the 1920s. But what caused him to rethink his earlier writing techniques? Grounded in archival material, this study explores the extent to which Pound’s poetry changed in response to his reading of 17th-century American History and the social climate of the pre-war period.
Drawing on the Ezra Pound papers, David Ten Eyck documents the changes to Pound’s documentary techniques, establishing a chronology of the composition of The Cantos. His close readings of specific passages, set against the interwar years, allow Ten Eyck to gain insights into Pound’s 1930s political and social criticism. Through references to the annotated copy of The Works of John Adams, he explores Pound’s engagement with Adams at the expense of Thomas Jefferson: a figure formally at the heart of his previous work. Ultimately, this contextual and archival study uses John Adams and America to unlock the fascist beliefs and the later poetry of Ezra Pound.
Editorial Reviews
Review
“Without insisting that [The Adams Cantos] are always as successful as the best of Pound’s other work, Ten Eyck shows that they are much more successful, and much more interesting, than they can seem. As such, Ezra Pound’s Adams Cantos represents an invaluable contribution to Pound studies. The book also opens up new opportunities for thinking about the poetry of the 1930s, modernist poetry more generally, and the histories of found poetry and documentary poetics.” —Sean Pryor, University of New South Wales, Modernism/Modernity
About the Author
David Ten Eyck teaches Modernism and poetry at the University of Lorraine, France. He is currently co-editing a new critical edition of Pound’s Pisan Cantos and, in addition to his work on Pound he has written articles on twentieth century writers such as David Jones, James Joyce, John Berryman and Philip Larkin.
