Ezra Pound: His Metric and Poetry by T. S. (Thomas Stearns) Eliot
page 6 of 36 (16%)
page 6 of 36 (16%)
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decorative metaphor. He cannot be usefully compared with any
living writers;... full of personality and with such power to express it, that from the first to the last lines of most of his poems he holds us steadily in his own pure grave, passionate world.... The beauty of it (In Praise of Ysolt) is the beauty of passion, sincerity and intensity, not of beautiful words and images and suggestions ... the thought dominates the words and is greater than they are. Here (Idyll for Glaucus) the effect is full of human passion and natural magic, without any of the phrases which a reader of modern verse would expect in the treatment of such a subject. Mr. Scott James, in the "Daily News," speaks in praise of his metres: At first the whole thing may seem to be mere madness and rhetoric, a vain exhibition of force and passion without beauty. But, as we read on, these curious metres of his seem to have a law and order of their own; the brute force of Mr. Pound's imagination seems to impart some quality of infectious beauty to his words. Sometimes there is a strange beating of anapaests when he quickens to his subject; again and again he unexpectedly ends a line with the second half of a reverberant hexameter: "Flesh shrouded, bearing the secret." ... And a few lines later comes an example of his favourite use of spondee, followed by dactyl and spondee, which comes |
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