Modernist Poetics of History: Pound, Eliot, and the Sense of the Past

by James Longenbach

By thoroughly examining T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound collected and uncollected writings, James Longenbach presents their understandings of the philosophical idea of history and analyzes the strategies of historical interpretation they discussed in their critical prose and embodied in their poems including history."

Originally published in 1987.

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298 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1987

About the author

James Longenbach is a poet and critic whose work is often featured in publications such as The New Yorker, Paris Review, and Slate. He lives in Rochester, New York.

Reviews

[Liam Guilar · Rating 4 out of 5]

A thought provoking discussion of the context and workings of Pound and Eliot's ideas of History, how it related to arguments about the writing of history that were current, and how their ideas played out in their poetry. Longenbach traces the development of Pound's "historical method" and his attempt to write "the history of the tribe" or 'A poem Including history". He suggests that a shift in his historiography between his early attempts in Three Cantos and the final version as it developed in the Cantos proper, lead to the removal of the usual markers of the writer's presence from the poem. Longenbach argues this is a rhetorical strategy which may have been disasterous: the Cantos are not history speaking objectively, but one man's highly idiosyncratic view of history. Pound had been working with the idea that history is always something someone knows and the idea of the Luminous detail required someone (the inspired artist rather than the drudging Philologist) to intuit its importance.

Longenbach argues that Eliot, learning from Pound, but filtering the lesson through his training in Philosophy and his interests in Theology, was able to achieve what Pound failed to do: to write 'A Poem Including History". Whether the argument is solid requires a second reading: the claim that the Waste Land was "the last modern poem" is an interesting one. The idea that the Waste land does not juxtapose a rich past against a grim present seems unconvincing. However, there are thought provoking readings of numerous poems, some of which take on a different meaning when read in the light of the poets' ideas ideas of History.