It has become clear to me now that Pound’s poetry can be a bit difficult to swallow. He is one of the defining poets of the modernist movement, in fact he is considered one of the principle founders of the movement, and as a result can be a little hard to follow. One quote that I found interesting by him was “No good poetry is ever written in a manner twenty years old,’ he wrote in 1912, ‘for to write in such a manner shows conclusively that the writer thinks from books, convention and cliché, not from real life.” This quote explains quite clearly that, although conservative in the political sense, Pound was definitely progressive in the artistic sense. His poems are filled with allusions to histories and myths of all sorts of different cultures, which make them all the more rich but at the same time all the more difficult to understand. Often I’ve found in his cantos completely different languages as well as Chinese characters in the margins. This makes for a very slow journey throughout the cantos and as a result I’ve starting looking for different poems to use as examples other than the cantos, perhaps his Personae. Either way, there’s no denying that Pound was an interesting man and I’m looking forward to reading more of what he has to offer. 

                I’ve found it interesting to hear about his friendship with James Joyce, because I had not realized before I picked him as the poet that I should write about. I guess no matter what, all of what I read seems to come back to James Joyce. As a side note I found that Ezra Pound thought Finnegan’s Wake was trifling and ridiculous, and his patron tried many times to dissuade him but Joyce went ahead and published it anyway. If there’s one thing I respect about Joyce it’s his dedication and persistence in the service of his vision.