Ezra Pound’s Early Verse and Lyric Tradition: A Jargoner’s Apprenticeship

Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012. — 240 p. — ISBN-10: 0748646175; ISBN-13: 978-0748646173.Traces the lyricism and musicality in Pound's early verse through to his radical Modernist style. Robert Stark argues that Pound learned how to write poetry more or less as if it was a foreign tongue - or poetic 'jargon' - with a unique lexicon, grammar, and even morphology, and that his most innovative poetry is the result of his ambivalent orientation towards different European literary traditions.Stark contextualizes Pound's poetic craft by examining his relationship to the Mediaeval and Classical originators of the methods he employs and by considering the practice and criticism of his immediate Victorian and Romantic predecessors. He explores the influence of poets such as François Villon, Guido Cavalcanti, Robert Burns, Robert Browning, Algernon Charles Swinburne and Walt Whitman on Pound's lyrical style. For Stark, Pound's multi-vocalism arises out of his interest in dialect and the acoustic qualities of speech which leads to a 'modern' barbarous language marked by polysemy and heterogeneity.IntroductionPoetic Jargon
Toils Obscure, An' A' That': Romantic and Celtic Influences in 'Hilda's Book'
'Opacity is NOT an American Quality'
'Caliban Casts Out Ariel': Ezra Pound's Victorian Barbarian
The Seafarer' and a 'Living Tongue'
Pound Among the Nightingales: From the Troubadours to a Cantabile Modernism
Beyond/Formulated Language: The Function of Intensity in Cathay and Lustra
Envoi: 'Not of One Bird But of Many'
Appendix: 'Barbarians and Dark Words of God': Poetic Jargon in Greek Drama