Ezra Pound and the Visual Culture of Modernism

Ezra Pound was deeply engaged with the avant-garde art scene in London and Paris during the early twentieth century. The effects of this engagement were not restricted to experiments in poetic form, however; they directly shaped Pound\'s social and political thought. In this book Rebecca Beasley tracks Pound\'s education in visual culture in chapters that explore Pound\'s early poetry in the context of American aestheticism and middle-class education; imagism, anarchism and post-impressionist painting; vorticism and anti-democracy in early drafts of The Cantos; Dadaist conceptual art, internationalism and Pound\'s turn to Italian fascism. In establishing a critical vocabulary profoundly indebted to the visual arts, Pound laid the basis for a literary modernism that is, paradoxically, a visual culture. Drawing on unpublished archive materials and little known magazine contributions, this study makes an important contribution to our understanding of Pound\'s intellectual development and the relationship between modernist literature and the visual arts.

• An original reading of Pound, aesthetics and art • Extensive use of previously unpublished archival sources and magazine contributions • Enhances our understanding of the importance of art to the development of literary modernism

Introduction; 1. American aestheticism: the origins of an interdisciplinary modernism; 2. Imagism, vorticism, and the politics of criticism; 3. A visual poetics? From the first cantos to Mauberley; 4. Conceptual art and the rappel à l\'ordre; Afterword.