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The Collected Shorter Poems of Ezra Pound. 1926

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The Collected Shorter Poems of Ezra Pound. 1926 395 Wellington Street 395. me Wellington OîîawaON K1A ON4 OttawaON K1AON4 Canada Canada The author has granted a non- L'auteur a accorde une licence non exclusive licence allowing the exclusive permettant à la National Library of Canada to Bibliothèque nationale du Canada de reproduce, loan, distribute or sell reproduire, prêter, distribuer ou copies of this thesis in microform, vendre des copies de cette thèse sous paper or electronic formats. la forme de microfiche/nlm, de reproduction sur papier ou sur format éiectronique. The author retains ownership of the L'auteur conserve la propriété du copyright in this thesis. Neither the droit d'auteur qui protège cette thèse. thesis nor substantial extracts fiom it Ni la thèse ni des extraits substantiels may be printed or otherwise de celle-ci ne doivent être imprimés reproduced without the author's ou autrement reproduits sans son permission. autorisation. "[Pound] was a man uncornfortable in the midst of an unpleasant world, where dullness masqueraded as creativity and sham masqueraded as culture. He thought he saw the same deceit in every facet of American life. He could not smash what he saw, but he could leave. He went to London, Paris and Rapallo, and in these places whirlpools of energy boiled into being by his presence. America had unleashed into the world the bug that made her itch, and he made many people itch. And. in their itching and scratching, most good writing in English was born and most modem thinking in the arts was done. Pound's greatest contribution to his century is his emphasis upon the tech- nique of poetry. This emphasis has repercussions far beyond the world of lit- erature. From it stems al1 modern efforts to communicate well, to pass ideas frorn language to language unimpaired, to educate the people to the facts of economics as they truly are, and to keep the intelligence in touch with the live culture of the past. Pound sees the poet not as a mere fiddler with words. He sees him, in Shelley's phrase, as one of the 'legislators of the world.' . There is not an important poet of the century who does not in various ways owe his worth to Pound." (R.J. Maôween "Ezra Pound: A Personal Estimate." 1963. Rpt. in The An t igonish Review 87-88 [Fa111991 - Winter 19921 132-33.) Abstract In the early days of "wireless" technology, it was the fashion of first-time and somewhat skeptical users to exhort that they were "'raising' so-and-so by tele- graph." Their use of the term "raising" was homologous with "raising" the departed via the Ouija board, another medium of fascination at the turn of the twentieth century. That the occult and wireless technology co~aturally attended the birth of modernism was no coincidence. Because it was non- corporeal and without the self-reifying "efficiency" of Cartesian causality, "the wireless" was considered occultish. A similar social phenornenon relating to "virtual" technologies is recumng today, manifest in the resurgence of interest in Marshall McLuhan. W hile much McLuhanism and quasi-McLuhanism is floating around in hyper- space--most of it appropriating the McLuhan name metonymically without considering, beyond a few aphorisms, what the man actually meant--the real story of the rising McLuhan myth is related to Our culture's fascinating schizophrenia: its simultaneous technophobia and technofetish. The hegemony of digital ubiquity, then, coupled with our repressed Romantic aversions to technology are "raising" McLuhan's name; that is, in a search for theorists to explain and legitimize the implications of a suddenly autocratic technocracy, we are exhuming the seer who predicted its rise to dominance in the first place. We are only secondarily "raising" McLuhan "via" the digital chip--that is merely Our "field," McLuhan would have argued--rather, our medium, bringing us back reluctantly to Tom Wolfe's question, "What if he is right?" In short, Our backward search for a bête noire has not only conjured McLuhan, but licensed a historical relativism whose presiding metaphor is that of the rear-view rnirror. It is in the same spirit of cultural and historica1 relativism that the following thesis presides. Using the metaphor of the rear-view mirror to effect a re- versed historical psychoanalysis, 1 have fixed McLuhan as an analysand for whom the historical figure of Ezra Pound, his modernist mentor, creates a turbulent anxiety of influence. Just as Our technocratic culture revisits McLuhan to assuage its own anxiety (seeking bahfor its phobia, and desiring legitimization and arousal of its fetish), so does McLuhan, 1 show, draw on Pound's modernism to make similar sense (and play) of the burgeoning postmodemity that threatens the visual and the literate with the oral and haptic. Preface It seems true that British poets swerve from their precur- sors, while American poets labor rather to "complete" their fathers. (Anxiety 68) If British poets swerve and American poets complete, how do Canadian poets proximate and avert their precunors? The question imposes itself in consid- ering the association between Marshall McLuhan and Ezra Pound. Born a generation apart, Pound and McLuhan shared an important "resonating in- terval": a Canada/ US. border across which at McLuhan's bequest, flowed Pound's influence. And, as McLuhan would learn, that influence was tanta- mount to an infusion of literary modernism. As late as 1968, McLuhan was still somewhat horrified to leam that he was one of the few professors in Canadian departments of English who was teaching Pound and the early modernists. Most of Canada, it seerns, had not yet caught up to the shift in literary consciousness that Pound's modernism had precipitated some forty years earlier. When we did awaken to the fad, however, our aitics were reck- less in their haste to pronounce Pound's influence on Our modernism. To claim-as have Eli Mandel, Linda Hutcheon, and Frank Davey, to name but a few--that Pound's modernism came to Canada in some proximity to McLuhan to constitute, ultimately, Our own modernism, it is first necessary to examine the Pound/McLuhan relationship. An evident paradox in our critical history, legitimized seemingly by lateness and haste, has allowed that claim of Pound's influence to be made without the requisite check of the requisite check. The relationship between McLuhan and Pound, as 1 outline in Chapter One, can be broken into two phases: pre- and post-1948. Although the few McLuhan critics who have alluded to Pound (and the fewer Pound critics who have alluded to McLuhan) would have us believe that McLuhan's first encounter with his modernist mentor was in June 1948 at St. Elizabeths Hospital for the Criminally Insane outside Washington, D.C., the archiva1 record dearly indicates that McLuhan was reading Pound as early as 1934 at Cambridge. T'hat record indicates that McLuhan received his introduction to Pound from the New Critics, specifically from Mansfield Forbes, who ap proached Pound pedagogically via T.S. Eliot's early criticism. The extent to which McLuhan studied Pound between 1934 and their first meeting in 1948 is less clear. However, through dose analysis of McLuhan's correspondence, persona1 diary entries, and critical essays, as well as through accounts from colleagues like Hugh Kenner, Walter Ong, Felix Giovanelli, and Pound's con- temporary, Wyndham Lewis, 1 trace the implications of what McLuhan meant by writing to Pound in May 1948, "we [Hugh Kenner and II have long taken a serious interest [in] your work" (Lefters of MM 192). In Chapter Two, 1 consider the much richer relationship that began after the May 1948 letter that introduced McLuhan and Kenner to Pound. A fascinat- ing, mostly unpublished correspondence of almost 100 letters and fragments exists between Pound and McLuhan. To cal1 the correspondence fascinating is somewhat of an understatement: it is nothing less than a sweeping interdis- ciplinary curriculum of modernism and culture. The relationship that grew fervour of his Catholicism and fears of a Masonic conspira9 to execute him, accused Pound of using the rituals of secret societies "as a basis for art activity" (Letfers of MM 235). After that letter, the relationship certainly cooled--as did, curiously, the relationship between McLuhan and Kenner, though more from McLuhan's suspicions of Kenner's plagiarism than from accusations of Pound's occult collusion. By 1953, it must be remembered, Kenner, McLuhan's prodigy, had become the pre-eminent Poundian, responsible al- most solely for the provenance of Pound studies. In al1 that he has published (and he has published unremittingly for some forty-five years), Kenner has divulged little of what transpired among the three in those early years of their association, and, thus, to this day, little is known about it. More than any other source, the letters reveal how carefully McLuhan was studying Pound in the late 1940s and early 1950s: they reveal McLuhan's recognition of form and paratactic method in Pound's poetio ("Your Cantos, 1 now judge, to be the first and only serious use of the great technical possibili- ties of the cinematograph" [Letters of MM 1931); McLuhan's discovery of Pound's theory of textuality contra history ("1 know that your rationale [is] to direct attention always to the texts . rather than relying on historical per- spectives" 11961); and McLuhan's adoption of Pound's belief in intertext and i nterdisciplinary study ("1 am preparing a bibliography of necessary reading in the arts and sciences . the ABC of Reading method . to provide a coher- ent picture of when and how to use one book to encounter another" [199]). Similarly, the letters from Pound to McLuhan reveal Pound's fascination with McLuhan's desire for a specifically Canadian cultural revolution, one grounded theoretically in Pound's ABC of Reading (1934) and Guide tu vii insistence that McLuhan move from a consideration of metonymic cause to metaphoric effect, resulting, in 1951, in The Mechan ical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man, the book that demonstrates unequivocally the shift in McLuhan's thought toward the epigrammatic and sottisier--toward what McLuhan would cal1 the "probes" of contemporary post-literate inquiry.
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