Ezra Pound, Popular Genres, and the Discourse of Culture - Hardcover

Coyle, Michael

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0271014210 ISBN 13: 9780271014210

Publisher: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995

Synopsis

In 1917, having begun the long poem that would prove his life's work, Ezra Pound affirmed that "the ultimate goal of scholarship is popularization." Few scholars subsequently have noticed this aim without finding it merely ironic or dismissing it as an early foible. Yet, as Michael Coyle demonstrates, Pound made similar assertions throughout his career, and his affirmation informs most of his work, including the Cantos.

Coyle begins by examining T. S. Eliot's editorial work on the collection he called, over Pound's objections, Literary Essays of Ezra Pound. He then discusses a wide variety of discursive and generic combinations, explaining how Pound was led to attempt them and how those combinations affected his broadest ambitions. By establishing that literature itself is a historically privileged grouping of genres, Coyle makes possible a new understanding of how and why Pound mixed literary and nonliterary, popular and polite genres.

About this title

About the Author

Michael Coyle is Associate Professor of English at Colgate University. He is the author of A Reception History of Ezra Pound (forthcoming).

Edition details

• Publisher: Pennsylvania State University Press
• Publication date: 1995
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0271014210
• ISBN 13: 9780271014210
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 268