Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Pound, Ezra Loomis, 1885-'

This study of Ezra Pound's Cantos considers quotations in the poem which are clearly marked as such, not for their content, nor for the relationship between new and old contexts, but for the oral qualities of the quoted material, and for the rhetorical effects of the fact of quotation itself. After cataloguing the principal means by which quotation is marked, the thesis assesses the notion (most clearly formulated by Walter Benjamin) that the great power of quotation lies in its interruptive power rather than in its value as authority in argument (Chapter 3). Such interruptive power, drawing attention as it does to the multiplicity of voices available in the text, reinforces our sense of The Cantos as an oral text. This chapter and the one following — which traces the connections between The Cantos and oral traditions and traditional techniques — suggests that the neglect of the oral qualities of quotation has led critics to consider the poem as deeply and irretrievably fragmented. Situating The Cantos in relation to other oral works shows not only the ways in which Pound draws on the tension between the aural and the visual elements of the poem and of language (speech and song in contrast to the written) but also the pervasive omnipresence of the heard: the play of ear against eye is a play of melopoeia against phanopoeia, and the text of The Cantos is most fruitfully to be seen as a score for the speaking voice. Such orality enables Pound to draw directly upon the resources and techniques of the classical rhetorical tradition, thereby enabling him in quoting the words of others to lend their words the authority of his own voice. The poem thus achieves a strong sense of a multiplicity of voices and effects unified by the presence of the poet himself, without compromising Pound's conviction (shared with Yeats and Williams and others of his contemporaries) that rhetoric is utterly to be distinguished from poetry, and kept separate from it.
Arts, Faculty of
English, Department of
Graduate

Pound foregrounded the importance of "shaping" poetic books through particular arrangements of individual poems by using his ideogrammic method as the crucial organizational principle for constructing Personae (1926). Critics have long understood Pound's use of the ideogrammic method in individual poems, but have so far ignored his application of it to the structuring of poetic books and sequences. Lea Baechler and A. Walton Litz, the editors of a 1990 edition of Personae (1926), however, have moved a crucial section of poems, and their rearrangement of the original text both disregards evidence of authorial intention and obscures Pound's innovative principles for arranging his shorter poems into meaningful sequences.

Le passage de l'esthétisme au modernisme est ici envisagé sous ses aspects historiques et esthétiques dans l'œuvre de Théophile Gautier (1811-1872) et Ezra Pound (1885-1972). S'inscrivant dans un XXe siècle naissant, l'émergence des modernistes s'accompagne d'une volonté de redéfinition par opposition au siècle précédant, à ses courants littéraires et artistiques. Cependant, en dépit de l'apparition des nouvelles techniques artistiques, l'artiste s'interroge sur l'esthétique du siècle passé : l'importance du style, de la voix poétique, de la technique et de l'objectivité. Si la correspondance entre l'art plastique et la littérature reste déterminante dans le modernisme au début siècle, il s'agit d'intégrer les principes d'un art traversé par une crise de représentation, le sujet s'effaçant derrière la forme et la technique artistique. Ces recherches s'orientent donc vers l'approfondissement des notions de différence et de similitude esthétique caractérisant ce temps de la transition : de l'art pour l'art à un art de l'action, et du mot juste à une représentation en directe de la chose, etc. Cette étude repose sur des revues et des documents esthétiques de l'époque ainsi que les oeuvres principales des deux poètes
From Aestheticism to Modernism examines the dominant features of Aestheticism and describes their continuation, transformation, and death with regard to the emergence of Anglo-American Modernism. This comparative study focuses on the critical writings and poetry of Théophile Gautier (1811-1872) and Ezra Pound (1885-1972). In spite of bona fide progress in new poetic techniques, the artist reopens many of the same aesthetic questions from the preceding century : the importance of style, poetic voice, technique, and objectivity. If the correspondence between the visual arts and literature remains a fertile terrain of exploration, the arts undergo a crisis of representation, whereby the subject of modernist works is dispersed within form and technique. This study explores the notions of similitude and difference which characterize this period of transition: from art for art's sake to an art of action, from the mot juste to a direct representation of the object, etc. The principal sources used are aesthetic documents from the period as well as the literary works of the two poets

In this thesis I argue against the conventionally held belief that collage as a form is defined through the mutual differences existing between the inserted material fragment and those signifiers that surround it. Examining works by Pablo Picasso and then turning my attention to Ezra Pound's Cantos, I seek to establish, within the related frameworks of visual and verbal collage respectively, a structural model of these and other such works predicated upon the continuity, not the distinctiveness, of fragment and host-text. Collage, I hope to show, is necessarily organic in structure due to the unstable nature of the linguistic sign, a phenomenon of language that informs the thesis from beginning to end. Ultimately, I aim to present this model as a metaphor for perception generally, as both a delineation and demonstration of the way in which one comes to know the world.

Quand le traducteur se saisit d'un poeme avec l'intention de faire lui-meme oeuvre de poete, quelle strategie doit-il appliquer? le present expose de reponses possibles s'appuie sur l'experience du poete americain ezra pound qui, parmi les contemporains, a le plus nourri sa propre poesie de la traduction, aussi bien comme materiau que comme "critique en acte". Trois parties etudient donc successivement le materiau sonore et rythmique du poeme, puis le reseau de ses images, enfin comment il replace ce poeme dans un contexte historique et poetique (au passage, sont poses les problemes de la fidelite a la lettre ou a l'esprit et des rapports en traduction entre modernite et tradition), pour conclure sur le resultat de cet "echange" entre le texte et sa traduction : un art et un langage poetiques penetres par la poetique etrangere
When a translator takes over a foreign poem with the intention of behaving like a true poet, what kind of strategy is he more likely to use? the present account of possible responses to this question is based upon the experience of the american poet ezra pound who, among his contemporaries, fleshed out most of his own poetry with translation, using it not only as a material but also as a criticism "in action". The three parts study first, how he conveys the sonic and rhythmic material of the poem, then the network of images used, finally how he puts this poem back in a historical and poetical system (meanwhile, we will examine the problems of fidelity to the spirit or to the word and of the rapports in translation between modernity and tradition), to conclude with the result of such an exchange between the original text and its translation : a poetical art and language forstered by foreign poetics

En rapport avec la tradition du poète-historien du vingtième siècle, la poétique documentaire pratiquée par Ezra Pound et Susan Howe de manières distinctes mais liées sert de base à une étude de la matérialité complexe au sein du processus compositionnel des deux écrivains. Fondée sur les matériaux d'archives des deux séquences, une analyse détaillée des « Malatesta Cantos » de Pound et de « Marginalia de Melville » de Howe permet une réflexion sur le développement de la transformation typographique dans le domaine de la poésie. Tout au long de cette critique, Steven Paschall aborde les processus de la signification de la matérialité en parallèle aux conceptions et expériences Poundiennes et Howiennes de l'archive historique et de la production littéraire. Pour Pound l'interprétation du quattrocento et de la saga de Sigismond Malatesta, et pour Howe celle des notes marginales et des ébauches manuscrites, a mené à la composition des poèmes innovateurs qui, à partir des sources textuelles, redéfinissent les idées conventionnelles de l'historiographie et de la pratique interprétative poétique au moyen des techniques structurelles et formelles. En examinant les opérations de l'appropriation littéraire, de la révision du langage écrit et de la page visuo-spatiale, Paschall avance un lien généalogique entre la matérialité archivistique du « poème contenant l'histoire » de Pound et les expériences visuelles d'articulation effectuées dans les reconfigurations palimpsestiques de Howe
Set against the tradition of the 20th-century poet-historian, the documentary poetics practiced in distinct yet related ways by Ezra Pound and Susan Howe serves as the basis of this study's investigation of the complex materiality underpinning each writer's compositional process. Pound's "Malatesta Cantos" and Howe's "Melville's Marginalia" are the focus of detailed analysis specifically grounded in the archival materials for each sequence in order to explore the development of typographic metaphrasis. Throughout this critical work, Steven Paschall sets the processes of materiality's signification in parallel to Pound and Howe's conceptions of, and engagements with, the historical archive and literary production. Pound's reading of the quattrocento and the saga of Sigismondo Malatesta, and Howe's reading of marginalia and manuscript drafts, resulted in unique source-based poems, the structural and formal techniques of which redefine conventional notions of historiography and interpretative poetic practice. In addressing the mechanics of literary appropriation, editing written language, and the visio-spatial page, Paschall asserts a genealogical thread between the archival materiality of Pound's "poem containing history" and the visual experiments in articulation of Howe's palimpsestic reconfigurations thereof

Ce travail se propose d'etudier en parallele le recours a la tradition antique chez deux poetes americains contemporains : ezra pound et hart crane. Cette etude est suivie d'une traduction en francais du recueil de hart crane white buildings, precedee d'une introduction et suivie de notes. Ce travail montre successivement la maniere dont apparaissent et se tranforment, dans les oeuvres de ces poetes, les motifs antiques de la descente aux enfers et de la metamorphose, puis dans quelle mesure ces poetes ont emprunte a la philosophie antique platonicienne ou neoplatonicienne, pour decrire enfin comment se batit dans leurs oeuvres une cite utopique. Par l'etude de la descente aux enfers, il a ete possible d'apprecier les rapports que ces poetes entretiennent avec la mort, la tradition et leur terre d'origine, par celle de la metamorphose, la place que ces poetes revendiquent pour eux-memes dans le monde ainsi que l'usage qu'ils font du langage comme procede pouvant leur permettre de le transformer. Aborder la maniere dont ils ont recours l'un et l'autre a la philosophie antique permet de les situer dans l'histoire de la pensee ; enfin, voir se construire dans leurs oeuvres une cite utopique montre leur projection dans l'histoire et permet d'apprecier leur pensee politique. La conclusion de cette etude, pose la question difficile de l'heritage de pound et de hart crane.

Le but de ce travail est de présenter comment la traduction est devenue une poétique pour le poète américain Ezra Pound et le poète brésilien Haroldo de Campos. Les deux poètes ont utilisé la traduction pour élargir leur compréhension de la poésie mais, en même temps, créer une nouvelle approche du phénomène littéraire en rassemblant des œuvres d'auteurs de différentes régions, époques et langues différentes. Pound a commencé à écrire de la poésie au rythme de l'anglo-saxon, puis il a pris une direction différente en produisant des livres avec des commentaires sur ses traductions comme les troubadours provençaux et la poésie chinoise. Il a passé presque 25 ans à traduire l'ensemble du travail de Confucius et, après cette période, il a publié ses dernières traductions de poèmes grecs et égyptiens. Haroldo était un admirateur de Pound et il a partagé sa passion de traduction. Il a fondé le mouvement avant-gardiste de la poésie concrète au Brésil et il a fait des traductions collectives avec les membres du mouvement. Sa spécialisation dans les langues l'a amené à traduire la poésie d'avant-garde de plusieurs langues différentes, puis il s'est déplacé vers les classiques comme Dante, Goethe, Homer et la Bible. De Campos a bénéficié de son poste universitaire pour obtenir des conseils spécialisés pour ses traductions. En outre, il a élaboré une théorie sur la traduction après des textes philosophiques, qu'il appelait «la transcreation». Il était convaincu que la meilleure poésie en tout temps était essentiellement d'avant-garde
The aim of this work is to present how translation became a poetics for the American poet Ezra Pound and the Brazilian Poet Haroldo de Campos. Both poets employed translation to expand their understandings about poetry but, at the same time, to create a new approach to the literary phenomenon by bringing together works of authors from many different geographies, epochs and languages. Pound started to write poetry following the rhythm of the Anglo-Saxon and then he took a different direction producing books with comments on his translations like Provençal troubadours and Chinese poetry. He spent almost 25 years translating the entire work of Confucius and after that period he published his last translations of Greek and Egyptian poems. Haroldo was an admirer of Pound and he shared his translation passion. He founded the Avant-garde movement of Concrete Poetry in Brazil and he did collective translations with the members of the movement. His specialization in languages prompted him to translate Avant-garde poetry from many different languages and then he moved to the classics like Dante, Goethe, Homer and the Bible. De Campos benefited from his academic position to obtain specialized advising for his translations. Furthermore, he elaborated a theory on translation following philosophical texts, that he called “transcreation.” He was convinced that the best poetry in all times is essentially Avant-garde

Consacree a l'oeuvre du poete anglais contemporain geoffrey hill (ne en 1932), la these se divise en deux parties distinctes: "poetique de la redemption" et "poesie de la mediation". La premiere partie s'attache a deceler une poetique ambitieuse, qui met au jour trois failles cardinales dans le langage: l'equivoque, l'eloquence et le cliche. Trois chapitres analysent la portee de ces defauts ethiques, et les diverses techniques permettant de les surmonter : ponctuation, ellipse, collage, paradoxe, oxymore. . . Le dysfonctionnement volontaire, la rhetorique restreinte, la purification du cliche permettent au poeme de lutter contre la force d'inertie de la langue, investissant le texte d'une responsabilite proprement morale. Chaque chapitre s'ouvre sur une micro-lecture visant a degager les principes de la poetique analysee par la suite; l'oeuvre critique de hill est egalement mise a contribution. Chaque recueil oscille entre deux grands mythes du langage: la confusion des langues (babel) et le "don des langues" (pentecote). Ainsi surgit une parole jamais dupe de son propre pouvoir, capable d'aborder les themes les plus perilleux - la souffrance, la deportation, l'elegie. La voix mediane est celle du poete moderne, mediateur entre les mots et le monde, pourfendeur d'une immediatete lyrique impuissante a rendre compte du chaos. Une seconde partie examine les recueils dans leur ordre chronologique. Une analyse de for the unfallen (1959) permet de situer hill dans une tradition originale - contre le "movement" des annees 1950 et dans la descendance moderniste de pound et d'eliot. La figure du poete domine le recueil suivant, king log (1968), veritable modele de l'elegie contemporaine. Avec mercian hymns (1971), hill aborde le poeme en prose et joue avec l'histoire de l'angleterre et de ses langues. Dans tenebrae (1978) culminent les preoccupations chretiennes de l'auteur, qui y accueille mystiques et martyrs. Un survol de canaan (1996) laisse entrevoir les ruptures et les continuites d'une oeuvre encore en cours
The thesis is entitled "the via media : ethics and poetics in the poetry of geoffrey hill" (born 1932). It is made up of two different parts: "redeeming the longue" and "the modern poet as a go-between". Both in his prose and poetry, geoffrey hill seems to be intent on surveying the shortcomings of language. The "tongue's atrocities" are to be redeemed by a principled distrust of words, a creative vigilance allowing for a dignified and purified medium. Eloquence, ambiguity and cliches are among hill's major preoccupations, while various poetic devices help him counter the "inertial drag" of speech. Cliches, for instance, are turned from verbal determinism into rich creative opportunities; eloquence is flattened down in seemingly bombastic lines; ambiguity in turn becomes the very embodiment of a twofold quality in words. The five chapters in part two provide studies on each volume of poetry, starting with for the unfallen (1959) and up to canaan (1996). The modernist influence of ezra pound and t. S. Eliot, the fascination for american poetry and romanticism, hill's interest in translation, the classics, christianity, music, history and politics, all come under scrutiny, as well as a close reading of most poems

En premier, j'avance que la traduction de la poesie a besoin d'une versification comparative qui saisit le role des divers elements de la forme dans le fonctionnement interactif du poeme. Ensuite, j'avance quatre postulats : 1) le metre n'est pas le rythme. 2) le rythme n'est pas la versification. 3) la versification dans ce travail constitue l'interaction des elements formels du poeme qui cree les patterns et/ou la structure. 4) la voix que l'on entend dans le poeme, et la versification sont inextricables. A partir de ces quatre postulats, j'ai etudie l'anglais et le francais, afin d'etablir les veritables differences entre ces deux langues et leurs traditions poetiques. J'avance qu'il existe quatre formes de traduction : 1 ) la traduction semantique, 2) la traduction formelle 3) la traduction semantico-formelle 4) la traduction organique qui essaie de transposer l'unite du poeme, et qui fonctionne grace a l'unite indivisible de la voix et de la versification. Dans l'analyse des poemes de t. S. Eliot et d'ezra pound, et de leurs traductions en francais il s'agit d'etablir quels aspects de la forme posent un probleme dans la reconstitution de la voix et la versification.

Les mythologies - gréco-romaine, irlandaise, perse, indienne, japonaise, chinoise -sont omniprésentes dans la poésie de Bunting, Eliot, Pound et Yeats. Les prédilections desauteurs pour certaines mythologies, véritables choix identitaires et politiques, montrenttoutefois une péroccupation commune pour les mythes violents, aux niveaux martial et sexuel.Ce premier niveau thématique se combine avec une réflexion plus distanciée sur le mythe,outil critique qui permet la reformulation de croyances rituelles et spirituelles, et de nouvellesthéories poétiques qui visent à ordonner et donner un sens au monde chaotique du XXe siècle.Le mythe, subversif, permet donc l'articulation de nouvelles spiritualités et denouvelles expériences poétiques. Enfin, matériau vivant et modelable, dont la mention est à lafois un raccourci de récits anciens et un horizon élargi vers d'autres références et réécritures,le mythe est objet linguistique. En traduction, le mythe transfert les contenus thématiques,déplace les rythmes et fait circuler et s'entremêler les arts. En effet, retour fantasmé à uneorigine du langage artistique, le mythe est parfois fiction d'un art total où les figuresmythiques seraient à la fois objet linguistique, représentation imaginaire picturale etmanifestation musicale. De cette vision du mythe émane une poésie polyphonique et hybride,à l'image du centaure et des autres créatures monstrueuses présents dans l'oeuvre poétique deBunting, Eliot, Pound et Yeats.

This study concerns itself with the phenomenon of literary encyclopaedism, as especially evident in James Joyce's Finnegans Wake, Philippe Sollers' Paradis and Ezra Pound's Cantos. The study focuses on developing the notion of an encyclopaedic literary mode and on establishing the existence of a genre of fictional encyclopaedias. It finds an encyclopaedic mode in literature to be one comprehending and imitating other literary modes, both mimetic and didactic. Further, the idea of a fictional encyclopaedia is developed through an understanding of the traits of the neighbouring forms of essay, Menippean satire and epic, and through an understanding of the paradoxes associated with the making of the non-fictional encyclopaedia. The fictional encyclopaedia thus comprehends and exceeds the following traits: 1. A tension, characteristic of the essay, between integrated autobiography and impersonal (and ultimately fragmented) exposition of the categories of knowledge. 2. A tension, characteristic of the Menippean satire, between tale and digression, between a single narrating subject and a multiplicity of transient narrating voices. The menippea also contributes a simultaneous preoccupation with the most sacred and the most profane subjects. 3. A totalizing drive characteristic of the epic, a desire--rivalling the urge to tell a story--to list or include all aspects of the culture in the epic past. The fictional encyclopaedia also translates into fiction the following paradoxes associated with the encyclopaedic enterprise: 1. The recognition, implicit in the drive to trace a complete and eternally-perfect circle of the arts and sciences, that encyclopaedic knowledge is always ultimately incomplete and obsolete. 2. The recognition, at the heart of the attempt to produce an objective and unmediated picture of the world, that encyclopaedic knowledge is ideologically shaped and textually mediated. The dominance of the encyclopaedic gesture in Finnegans Wake, Paradis and the Cantos allows us to account for the characteristic length, obscurity and "bookishness" of these works; they absorb the traits and tensions of essay, Menippean satire and epic while yet exceeding these traits in their fictional translation of the encyclopaedic paradoxes noted above. This translation manifests itself in each work as a characteristic parodic hesitation before the authority of totalizing predecessors; it manifests itself in the texts' fascination with images of a paradisiacal completion and timelessness, a tendency that is undercut by a repetitive, digressive or fragmented form which asserts the inevitability of time and incompletion. Further, the Wake, Paradis and the Cantos, in their overt and extensive intertextual activity, emphasize the textual boundaries of encyclopaedic knowledge. Nonetheless, in their foregrounding and valorization of speech rhythms, the works also repeat the challenge that the encyclopaedia brings to its own limited nature as written book.
Arts, Faculty of
English, Department of
Graduate

This thesis challenges the assumption that Chaucer is the father of the living English poetic tradition. Nobody would deny that poetry existed in a form of English before the fourteenth century, but it is commonly assumed that linguistic and cultural changes have made Anglo-Saxon poetry a specialist area of concern, of no use or interest to modern poets. It is demonstrated that during the nineteenth century, advances in linguistic and textual scholarship made Anglo-Saxon poetry more widely available than had been the case, probably since the Anglo-Norman period. Knowledge of Anglo-Saxon literature is subsequently communicated to poets, particularly after the subject is institutionalized in English departments at British and American universities. Chapter One charts this rise in awareness of Anglo-Saxon poetry and considers its effects on several nineteenth-century poets (William Barnes, Henry Longfellow, Alfred Tennyson and William Morris). Major studies then follow of Gerard Hopkins, Ezra Pound and W. H. Auden and the uses that they make of Anglo-Saxon in their own poetry. It is argued that through these writers Anglo-Saxon has had a more important impact on modern poetry than has been thought previously. Moreover, Anglo-Saxon is often included as part of a poetics that might be called 'modernist'. For each of the three poets under study, the nature of their contact with Anglo-Saxon poetry is determined from documentary evidence (whether at university, or via secondary literature), and different stylistic debts are examined by close readings of a number of poems. No previous work has attempted a detailed analysis of the uses to which these three writers put Anglo-Saxon poetry. This thesis offers such an analysis and synthesizes the different approaches to Anglo-Saxon in order to provide an overview of this phenomenon in nineteenth- and twentieth-century poetry.

O poema icônico de T. S. Eliot The Waste Land, publicado em 1922, é indiscutivelmente o texto principal de poesia moderna em inglês. Eliot residia em Londres no momento da sua composição, e embora o poema contenha numerosas citações literárias e culturais, The Waste Land não é considerado como tendo sido influenciado por nenhum dos poetas ingleses que foram contemporâneos de Eliot. Pelo contrário, o poema é tido como um afastamento radical e uma reação contra, a poesia inglesa escrita antes e durante a Primeira Guerra Mundial (1914-1918). Neste artigo, eu argumento que The Waste Land contém ecos da obra dos poetas ingleses Harold Monro e Herbert Read, ambos os quais conheciam Eliot bem. Olhando retrospectivamente a partir de 1922, tendo The Waste Land como meu texto modernista base e ponto de partida crítico, eu conduzo uma reavaliação da cena poética inglesa do período 1910- 1922, a partir dos Georgian Poets do pré-guerra até o aparecimento, no pós-guerra, da obraprima de Eliot. Ambos Monro e Read foram influenciados pelo movimento radical 'Imagism' de Ezra Pound, que formou um elemento central na cena da poesia progressiva de Londres nos anos que antecederam a guerra. Portanto, utilizo ambos The Waste Land e os experimentos 'Imagist' de Pound como modelos de prática modernista através dos quais comparar e contrastar a obra dos Georgian Poets (especificamente Wilfrid Gibson), a poesia produzida durante a Primeira Guerra Mundial, e a obra de Monro e Read. Os princípios orientadores da minha abordagem analítica são dois: em termos de prática poética, eu avalio o trabalho de Eliot e seus contemporâneos, comparando as suas abordagens quanto à forma, a fim de demonstrar como a forma poética não apenas define o conteúdo, mas também revela mudanças nos valores culturais. Em segundo lugar, minha abordagem teórica é baseada nos conceitos mutantes da função estética da poesia, buscando demonstrar como valores estéticos estão historicamente relacionados a, e determinam, a produção e a recepção da poesia, expondo como os experimentos modernistas de Eliot e Pound estão historicamente relacionados com princípios estéticos românticos.
T. S. Eliot’s iconic poem The Waste Land, published in 1922, is indisputably the key Modernist poetry text in English. Eliot was living in London at the time of its composition, and although the poem contains numerous literary references, The Waste Land is not thought to have been influenced by the poetry of Eliot’s English contemporaries. On the contrary, the poem is regarded as a radical departure from, and reaction against, the English poetry being written before and throughout the Great War (1914-1918). In this paper, I argue that The Waste Land contains echoes of the work of English poets Harold Monro and Herbert Read, both of whom knew Eliot well. Looking back retrospectively from 1922, with The Waste Land as my exemplary Modernist text and critical starting point, I carry out a reassessment of the English poetry scene from 1910 to 1922, from the pre-war Georgians to the post-war appearance of Eliot’s masterpiece. Both Monro and Read were influenced by Ezra Pound’s radical ‘Imagism’ movement, which formed a central plank in the progressive London poetry scene in the years leading up to the war. I therefore employ both The Waste Land and Pound’s ‘Imagist’ experiments as models of Modernist practice by which to compare and contrast the work of the Georgians (particularly Wilfrid Gibson), the poetry produced during the Great War, and the work of Monro and Read. The guiding principles of my analytical approach are twofold: firstly, in terms of poetic practice, I evaluate the work of Eliot and his contemporaries by comparing their approaches to form, assessing how poetic technique both defines content and offers insight into shifts in cultural values; secondly, my theoretical approach is based on changing concepts of the aesthetic function of poetry, revealing how aesthetic values are historically relative to, and determine, the production and reception of poetry, ultimately exposing how Eliot and Pound’s Modernist experiments are historically related to Romantic aesthetic principles.