Ezra Pound, Popular Genres, and the Discourse of Culture

by Michael Coyle

In 1917, having begun the long poem that would prove his life's work, Ezra Pound affirmed that "the ultimate goal of scholarship is popularization." Few scholars subsequently have noticed this aim without finding it merely ironic or dismissing it as an early foible. Yet, as Michael Coyle demonstrates, Pound made similar assertions throughout his career, and his affirmation informs most of his work, including the Cantos. Coyle begins by examining T. S. Eliot's editorial work on the collection he called, over Pound's objections, Literary Essays of Ezra Pound . He then discusses a wide variety of discursive and generic combinations, explaining how Pound was led to attempt them and how those combinations affected his broadest ambitions. By establishing that literature itself is a historically privileged grouping of genres, Coyle makes possible a new understanding of how and why Pound mixed literary and nonliterary, popular and polite genres.

268 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1995

About the author

Michael Coyle, Professor of English at Colgate University, is founding President of the Modernist Studies Association and currently serves as Vice President of the T. S. Eliot Society. Previous edited collections include Ezra Pound and African American Modernism (National Poetry Foundation, 2001); Raymond Williams and Modernism (a special issue of Keywords, Summer 2003); and Broadcasting Modernism, with Debra Rae Cohen and Jane Lewty (University Press of Florida, 2009). He is as well the author of Ezra Pound, Popular Genres, and the Discourse of Culture (Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995), and has published broadly on modernist literature and cultural history. His Professional Attention: Ezra Pound and the Career of Modernist Criticism is forthcoming from Camden House Press.