Ezra Pound and the Visual Culture of Modernism

Ezra Pound was deeply engaged with the avant-garde art scene in London and Paris during the early twentieth century. The effects of this engagement were not restricted to experiments in poetic form, however; they directly shaped Pound's social and political thought. In this 2007 book Rebecca Beasley tracks Pound's education in visual culture in chapters that explore Pound's early poetry in the context of American aestheticism and middle-class education; imagism, anarchism and post-impressionist painting; vorticism and anti-democracy in early drafts of The Cantos; Dadaist conceptual art, internationalism and Pound's turn to Italian fascism. In establishing a critical vocabulary profoundly indebted to the visual arts, Pound laid the basis for a literary modernism that is, paradoxically, a visual culture. Drawing on archive materials and magazine contributions, this study makes an important contribution to our understanding of Pound's intellectual development and the relationship between modernist literature and the visual arts.