to Enter Arcanum : Gnosticism In Ezra Pound\u27s cantos

Despite the painstaking work of Pound scholars, the mythos of the Cantos has yet to be properly understood, because its occult sources have not been examined sufficiently. The occult here includes the body of speculative, heterodox religious thought which lies outside all religious doxologies--including Gnosticism, Hermeticism, Neoplatonism, Cabalism, and Theosophy. As well, occultism involves belief in gnosis or direct awareness of the Divine which can be attained through myesis or ritual initiation.;Drawing upon recently published material and unpublished Pound letters, the thesis traces Pound\u27s intimate engagement with specific occultists (Mead, Upward, and Orage) and their ideas, and argues that speculative occultism helped shade his aesthetic theories and poetry. Special attention is paid to Mead\u27s work on Gnosticism and its contribution to Pound\u27s extraordinary aesthetic and religious sensibility much noticed in Pound criticism.;The discussion falls into three sections. Chapter I sees the Cantos as palingenesis and argues that the poem should be read symbolically. Chapter II and III discuss the intense public interest at the time of Pound\u27s arrival in London. Chapter II also details Pound\u27s interest in particular occult movements and describes modern philosophical occultism. Then Chapter III establishes, first, that Pound\u27s contact with the occult began at least as early as his undergraduate years and that he came to London already primed on the occult, and second, that many of his London acquaintances were unquestionably occultists. They include Upward, Mead, Orage, Yeats, and Olivia and Dorothy Shakespear (Pound\u27s future mother-in-law and wife). The occultism of Upward and Mead was most congenial to Pound and was adopted in the Cantos. Chapters IV and V examine selected cantos (17, 23, 45-51, and 90-91) in light of Pound\u27s occult interests. Chapter IV outlines a triparite schema for the Cantos called katabasis/palingenesis/epopteia. It is argued that the Cantos are structured on the model of an initiation rather than a journey, but that the poem does not so much describe an initiation rite as enact one for the reader. The last chapter is an analysis of cantos 90 and 91. The emphasis is placed here on the spiritual drama enacted by the illuminated soul undergoing an initiation. The discussion of canto 90 reveals that it can be read palingenetically and a reading of canto 91 interprets that canto as an account of paradise as a higher plane of being in occult terms

Burnt and Blossoming: Material Mysticism in Trilogy and Four Quartets

This paper brings two WWII poems into dialogue: H.D.'s Trilogy and Eliot's Four Quartets. Both poems express a creative response to the destruction of war. My reading of Trilogy suggests a material mysticism in which vision and renewal are situated within the natural world, rituals and bodily experience. Bringing this understanding of mysticism to bear on Four Quartets reveals tension between transcendence and materiality. For Eliot, redemption comes through time and location, while for H.D., redemption lies within material particularity. Four Quartets oscillates between an apophatic discourse that seeks to transcend desire and history and an emphasis on material particularities

Marjorie Perloff, Infrathin: An Experiment in Micropoetics. U of Chicago P, 2023, pp. 320.

Book revie

Ezra Pound Chronology

A chronology of the life of Ezra Pound, an adjunct to Teaching Approaches to Ezra Pound's Poetry and Prose (MLA)

"With usura hath no man a house of good stone" (Pound, Canto 45)

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William Carlos Williams and the Language of Poetry

The essays collected in this volume explore from many different perspectives the rhythms and textures of Williams\u27s poetic language, to suggest that his work represents a continuous interrogation of language itself. Essays by Suzanne W. Churchill, Kerry Driscoll, Burce Holsapple, Tom Orange, Piotr Parlej, Michael Boughn, George W. Layng, Mark Gorey, Brian M. McGrath, Shane Rhodes, Darryl Whetter, Norman Finkelstein, Aldon Nielsen and Donald Wellman.https://digitalcommons.library.umaine.edu/fac_monographs/1241/thumbnail.jp