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Historically Gaudier Brzeska (1891-1915), was the Vorticist and precocious member of the London circle of U.S. Eloit and T.E. Hulme. Wyndam Lewis and Ezra Pound. The Vorticists took their name with the idea that all art must originate in a state of emotional vortex and their aim, according to Pound was to establish what we consider to be characteristic in the in the consciousness and form content of our time. Henri Gaudier left his established family when they banned his Platonic love. Sophie Brzeska--a Polish writer twice his age--from their estate. He then adopted her name...
Poesy indeed. The "arthritic milieu" he encountered was not what this energy-packed, short-tempered, culture-hungry provincial had in mind at all. But Pound also found Yeats and Ford Madox Ford, who befriended him at once. To Yeats he explained his conviction that verse must be concrete and contain no superfluous words. The older poet was astonished at how many abstractions he had been using, and began to cut down. The streamlined effect on his writing was immediate...
...modern poets, Ezra Pound, who died at 87 in Venice last week, caught the heavenly benefactors in the most contrary of moods. Few literary figures in history have stirred such admiration, affection and gratitude among fellow artists. But none has aroused such hatred. In art, Pound's instincts were always right when it counted. In life, he tragically erred when the moral stakes were highest...
...Pound's mission in life, as he announced in Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, was "To resuscitate the dead art/ of poetry; to maintain the sublime/ In the old sense." After the rhetoric and moral posturing of the Victorians, he declared early for a different approach -harder, saner, nearer the bone, Pound said, "austere, direct, free from emotional slither." Then as gadfly, teacher, prosodist and selfless promoter of gifted contemporaries (Eliot, Yeats, Frost), he encouraged the spare, sensuous verse, the ironic double vision that has helped modern poets consider and refine the challenges and confusions of a new and terrifying century...
Experiments. One mark of that century's rich outpouring of verse was the fact that Americans for the first time dominated poetry written in English. Pound served as a link between what Walt Whitman called "the American yawp" and the sophisticated experiments going on overseas. He was born in Hailey, Idaho. At 15-already 6 ft. tall, with a blazing shock of carrot hair-he entered the University of Pennsylvania to study "eight or nine" languages and flout the regular curriculum. He also met a medical student named William Carlos Williams, and they began poetic experiments together. After...