Ezra Pound's City: The Total Light Process
Graduation Date
Spring 1978
Document Type
Master's Thesis
Document Form
Degree Name
Master of Arts
Program Name
Humanities
Abstract
Ezra Pound became infatuated with the beauty of Venice when he traveled through Europe with his Aunt Frank as a young man of twelve. The sensibility expressed by the stones of Venice became an inspiration to which he gravitated for the rest of his life: "I first saw Venice in 1898 and have always wanted to go back. It has never disappointed me." This love of Quattrocento architecture conflicted, however, with a contempt he felt for the decadence visible in Venice, To Pound the decadence symbolized a decline in Western culture.. As he gazed at the physical beauty of the Venetian art forms, he yearned to find a modern city which preserved tradition in the arts and encouraged new art as a healthy outgrowth of the old. The Cantos are the story of active man the speaker of the poem — searching for his city:
The early interpreters of The Cantos tended to see the poem as a study of the man of willed and directed action, as a persona of Odysseus. It is now clear that the poem rests most firmly in a deeper, stiller sense of humanity, the city and its continuity, symbolized by the goddess of field and citadel wearing the sanctuary of her people as a crown.
The purpose of this paper is to explain Pound's search for a city: to distinguish between his outer and inner search for a city, to define his concept of city as seen in images of The Cantos, and, finally, to analyze his inner search for a city as seen in the Venice ideograms of The Cantos.