/epg/ - Ezra Pound General

[Anonymous No.16415864]

>Stop reading Virgil.
>STOP reading Milton.
>Read the troubadours.
>And, most importantly, watch Perri (1957).
- Ezra Pound, 1972

What the FUCK did he mean by this?

[Anonymous No.16415884]

>>16415864
A man who peaked physical aesthetics as a young man and an old man who surpassed poetic aesthetics

[Anonymous No.16415922]

Why do schizo tier reactionaries have a boner for this guy? I first discovered him years ago from some youtuber who used to upload Eustace Mullins conspiracy shit and videos about vitamin k2 and iodine

[Anonymous No.16415929]

>>16415864
What did he think of Wagner? I know Eliot was influenced by the likes of the Ring and even included lines of it in his Waste Land.

[Anonymous No.16415933]

>>16415884
Very true.

>Shortly after Pound arrived in London in the early twentieth century, Ford Madox Ford described the young poet's clothes: he 'had trousers made of green billiard cloth, a pink coat, a blue shirt, a tie hand-painted by a Japanese friend and an immense sombrero.

[Anonymous No.16415935]

>>16415864
Is there anything worth reading beyond the Cantos?

[Anonymous No.16415939]

>>16415884
>>16415933
But mind you also exceeded physical aesthetics in his old age as well.

[Anonymous No.16415940]

>>16415922
>Youtuber
That's where you went astray

[Anonymous No.16415941]

>>16415933
I love that but if someone did this now all of lit would call him a gimmicky fag

[Anonymous No.16415945]

>>16415864
What's wrong with Milton?

[Anonymous No.16415960]

>>16415864
Just bought the Cantos and the collected poems. Just need the Pisan cantos.

Reminder that Pound self published his first collection of poems then anonymously reviewed them himself:
>Wild and haunting stuff, absolutely poetic ... words are no good describing it

[Anonymous No.16415976]

>>16415945
Nothing. Pound got filtered.

[Anonymous No.16415991]

>>16415960
Man what a sneaky fella, he actually did that!-- I wonder if modern technology would not allow it.

[Anonymous No.16416034]

>>16415991
>hey bro here are some shekels and diversity points
>gimmie 10/10
ez

[Anonymous No.16416038]

>>16415935
absolutely, read the "new selected poems and translations" from 2010

>>16415960
>Just bought the Cantos and the collected poems. Just need the Pisan cantos.
you bought an edition of the cantos without the pisan cantos? they're not a separate work

[Anonymous No.16416045]

>>16416034
>Vixen Finally Has a Hentai Game!
>Celebrities’ Remarkable Weight Loss Journeys
>Quiz: Can You Name All These Classic ’90s Movies?
>You Won't Last 5 Minutes Playing This Game!
But is it moral?

[Anonymous No.16416062]

>>16416038
My bad. I got confused since I read the Pisan Cantos at a library once alongside another selection. I got pic related from amazon, which was cheap for a hardback.

[Anonymous No.16416069]

>>16415945
It's prose broken up into lame lines of poetry, for one.

[Anonymous No.16416074]

>>16416034
>>16416045
Fucking nigger, I did not mean to highlight the ads.

[Anonymous No.16416124]

>>16415945
IIRC Pound believes that Milton latinizes English too much.

[Anonymous No.16416129]

>>16415945
>>16416069
This. And it's not even good prose:

>Of Man's first disobedience and the fruit of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste brought death into the world and all our woe, with loss of Eden, till one greater Man restore us and regain the blissful seat, sing, heavenly Muse, that, on the secret top of Oreb or of Sinai, didst inspire that shepherd, who first taught the chosen seed in the beginning how the heavens and earth rose out of Chaos.

[Anonymous No.16416298]

>>16416129
>It's not even good poetry
ftfy

[Anonymous No.16416300]

>>16416129
Milton ODed on the Wheelock pill

[Anonymous No.16416311]

seriously though, why did pound like perri so much?

>>16416298
what a bizarre reply, that was clearly implied

[Anonymous No.16416374]

>>16416129
How is that a bad poetry?
No, it's not self-evident.

[Anonymous No.16416417]

Is this thread inhabited by that ESL subhuman who claimed that blankverse might as well be written without line breaks?

[Anonymous No.16416973]

>>16415922
>Eustace Mullins conspiracy
The man seems quite based.

[Anonymous No.16417206]

>>16415922
With the significance of Vitamin K2 and Iodine in optimal human health just recently having been established I'd like to know the name of that youtuber

[Anonymous No.16417225]

>>16417206
Iodine is mostly important to counteract the high levels of fluoride you involuntarily ingest in the current day.

[Anonymous No.16417273]

>>16415922
>schizo reactionaries

I hope you are aware that nearly all modernist writers owe a great debt to him.

Left-wing writers who admired Pound:

- Pier Paolo Pasolini (communist)
- Haroldo de Campos
- Augusto de Campos
- Ernest Hemingway
- Allen Ginsberg
- Mário Faustino
- Paulo Leminski
- João Cabral de Melo Neto
- Gary Snyder (environmentalist)
- William Carlos Williams
- Pere Gimferrer
Etc.

And those are poets from the traditions I am best familiar with. I imagine many German, Russian, Dutch etc. poets were also influenced by Pound.

I am a libertarian, by the way, therefore not a reactionary.

[Anonymous No.16417284]

>>16415945
I explained his problem with Milton here:

>>/lit/thread/S16202380#p16208369

[Anonymous No.16417303]

>>16416417
You do not understand Pound's criticism of Milton. Has nothing to do with blank verse, but with the way Milton employs the English language in an unnatural, over-Latinized manner.

Which Milton indeed does, and it is indeed a nearly omnipresent characteristic of his style. I say this as someone who deeply admires Milton's poetry.

>Overall, once stopwords are removed, roughly 60% of the words of Paradise Lost are Latinate, from Anglo-Norman, French, Middle French, Old French, and Latin, mostly. Another 35% are Germanic, from Old English, Old Norse, or German. The remaining few percentage points are divided between Hellenic (Ancient Greek, at around 1%), Semitic (Hebrew, 0.25%), and other language families. Since Latinate and Germanic proportions account for the majority of the total words of the poem, they correlate negatively with one another. A high proportion of Latinate words in a section almost always means a low proportion of Germanic words. For this reason, this study will mostly examine the proportions of Latinate words in Paradise Lost.

[Anonymous No.16417359]

>>16415929
I don't remember reading him talking about Wagner.
He had real admiration for Italian music. His favorite historical periods seem to have been the Baroque and modernism. He disliked Puccini, thought Handel a bore, and considered Haydn inferior to Mozart and Vivaldi.
Some of the composers and works he cites or recommends include:

- Vivaldi (whom he greatly helped to rediscover), including his Juditha Triumphans
- Boccherini
- Mozart (he says every civilized man should listen to the complete violin sonatas at least once every year)
- Janequin, specially his Chant des Oiseaux
- Thomas Campion
- John Dowland
- Stravinsky
- George Antheil
- Debussy
- Mendelssohn
- Bach (with great admiration), including his works for violin
- Alfredo Casella
- Hindemith
- Bartok, specially the quartets
- Scriabin

He also composed two operas: one based on François Villon, another based on Guido Cavalcanti. There is also some work based on a poem by Catullus.

[Anonymous No.16417462]

I think the more pressing question is what he meant by pic related. I feel like taking on Ezra Pound is the beginning of a very deep rabbit hole

[Anonymous No.16417468]

>>16415922
>YouTuber
Go back

[Anonymous No.16417493]

>>16417462
He always referred to Shakespeare like that. I believe it is a joke on the people who claim he didn't write the plays, as well as a reminder that the author is irrelevant - i.e., it could be Shakespeare, Shxpear, Jacques Pere, but the only thing that matters is the literary substance of the play, with the whole question of authorship being irrelevant from an aesthetic perspective.

[Anonymous No.16417529]

>>16417493
Do you have any suggestions where to start with Pound? Any commentaries, secondary litterature you would recommend?

[Anonymous No.16417574]

>>16417529
The anthology of poems published by New Directions, edited by Richard Sieburth, is a good start.
Read also the ABC of Reading.

Then you can read:
- The Colllected Poems, published by the Library of America
- The Cantos (with the guide by William Cookson, which explains all the references)
- Selected Literary Essays
- Guide to Kulchur
- The Spirit of Romance
- The Pound Era, by Hugh Kenner

[Anonymous No.16417595]

>>16417574
Much appreciated, anon

[Anonymous No.16417609]

>>16417303
I am not talking about Pound, I'm talking about an ESL fag who came into a pottery thread and started insisting you might as well write blankverse in prose.

[Anonymous No.16417614]

>>16417609
I see.
Needless to say, he's wrong. The Greeks and the Romans didn't even use rhyme, yet are among the most musical poets.