Word: pounded
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1930-1939
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...about 1953 U. S. expatriate Poet Ezra Loomis Pound, if he continues to compose at his current rate, will have finished his life's masterwork. That masterwork, if its specifications remain unchanged, will finally round out to 100 constituent poems, or cantos. Cantos I-XVI appeared in 1925. Recently Poet Pound passed his masterwork's equatorial line by finishing The Fifth Decad of Cantos- Cantos numbered XLII...
...Cantos, one by one, record Poet Pound's attempted circumnavigation of the world of space-time curved within the convolutions of his brain. The voyage proceeds along a course unexploited by earlier epic navigators. These poet-navigators attempted to carry their loads to their readers' understandings somewhat as Australian grain boats, knot by knot, carry wheat to Liverpool. Poet Pound's boating is more like a torpedo bug's: he scoots about his map every which way, and tries to be everywhere on it as simultaneously as possible...
...Homeric tale of Odysseus' journey through Hades, the Ovidian tale of the seamen who, while kidnapping Bacchus, were transformed to dolphins as their ship, becalmed, sprouted grape-laden vines. The legends appear indiscriminately in ancient. Renaissance and modern dress, according to whichever time or whatever place Poet Pound's eruditely literate, expatriated sensibilities lead him to be thinking about. The resultant confusion is only skin-deep -since to any man, anywhere, any time, life may seem like Hell; and some sea-change in men or matter may, anywhere, any time, startle any man into his creative senses. Into...
Abhorrence No. 1, Hell-devil No. 1, to Poet Pound, is usury. In nine of these ten Cantos he does some powerful cursing at usury in English, Latin, and Greek: he calls it commune sepulchrum helandros kai heleptolis kai helarxe (everybody's grave -man-destroying-and city-destroying- and state-destroying). Throughout history Poet Pound sees the same monetary blood-sucking going on, whether in profaned ancient Greek temples, perverted lyth-Century Mounts of Pity (i.e., municipal pawnshops), or stone-faced 20th-century banks...
...empires fell on this grease spot, meditates Poet Pound, takes bitter note of Napoleon and others of his heroes who took a stick to usury and either failed to catch it, or ended up impaled. Most readers will agree that Poet Pound's attack on usury succeeds in giving some sinister validity to the Hell that in earlier Cantos appeared merely grotesquely dull and* dirty. Outside Hell all is as beautiful as ever...