THREE NAMES IN AMERICAN LITERATURE: EZRA POUND, ERNEST HEMINGWAY AND EUGENE O'NEILL

                THREE NAMES IN AMERICAN LITERATURE :
                EZRA POUND, ERNEST HEMINGWAY AND EUGENE O’ NEILL

                ELENA-MADALINA SIRBU
                CURTEA DE ARGES 2022

1.  The Twenties                                                                            page   3  -  4 

2. Innovative Poetry in the Beginnings of
the Twentieth Century American Poetry                                    page   5  -  6

3. Ezra Pound                                                                                page   6  -  13
                                                                                
4. An Overview of American Literary Fiction
Between the two World Wars                                                     page   14  - 16
                                                   
5. Ernest Hemingway                                                                  page   17  -  22
                                                                   
6. Eugene O’Neill and the Beginnings
of American Artistic Drama                                                         page   23  -  24

7. Eugene O’Neill                                                                         page  24  -  26

THE TWENTIES

In This Side of Paradise Scott Fitzgerald described the generation of the 1920s as "a new generation, grown up to find all Gods dead ,all wars fought , all faiths in man shaken...."Gertrude Stein coined the statement : "You are all a lost generation," used by Hemingway as a motto to The Sun Also Rises. Certainly the generation of the 1920s, writers included ,felt itself to be radically different from their predecessors, largely because of the traumatic experience of the First World War, known at the time as the Great War .
Malcolm Cowley has called World War I “the extinction of the fittest." Nearly a whole generation of the finest young men were killed in the trenches of the Great War .The battle of Verdun, for instance, lasted six months and it is estimated that a million men died in it, with neither side making any gains. To those fighting on the Western front it became a nightmare dominated by the idea of death, not victory. Hence the popularity of the American poem by Alan Seeger "I Have a Rendezvous with Death". Those who did not die rotted in the trenches for months or even years, became shellshocked or poisoned by the gases used for the first time in warfare.
The United States entered the war in 1917, relatively late. When the Armistice came in November 1918 they were not as exhausted as the Europeans.Fitzgerald even considered the Jazz Age a result of America’s “unexpended energy" in the war and it was in the 1920s that the American lifestyle and American fashions began to invade Europe, which was tired of suffering and longing to have a good time. Before that happened ,however, a number of American writers had gone abroad to fight in the war.
Many of them volunteered and many served in ambulance units (Hemingway, Dos Passos) or foreign armies (e.e. cummings in the French army, Faulkner in - the Canadian Air Force). There was an element of observation, of being a spectator of exciting events for them; in some cases they became fascinated by the danger of war and took unnecessary risks to brush close to death (Hemingway, for instance). Even the pacifist Dos Passos claimed that the presence of death “sharpened the senses. The sweetness of white roses, the shape and striping of a snail shell, the taste of an omelet, the most casual sight or sound appeared desperately intense against the background of the great ~ massacres". This may explain in part the vividness with which the writers of the 1920s evoke sensory perceptions in their fiction.
Some, like e.e.cummings, became victims of the stupidity and narrow -mindedness of the older establishment .He spent three months in a French detention Camo because of a mistake, an experience he described in his only novel, The Enormous Room (1922). Right after the Armistice the future looked hopeful to young Americans, as democracy had triumphed; the great tyrannies were over and young men out of uniform could bring a new order to the shattered world.
The old and narrow-minded, however, stayed in power. America entered a boom period when money and consumerism became the chief aim. It also entered the era of Prohibition with its subsequent growth in violence, gangsterism and corruption. In disillusionment young American writers turned away from social action and social writing. In the 1920s writers on the whole were concerned with the individual, with probing the human heart and analyzing the human personality, to which tendency Freud’s theories contributed as well.’ American fiction after World War I is distinguished by a marked in the individual and his psyche as subject matter, and a search for more precise modes of expression in form. The model writers for the new generation were those who stressed dedication to art -Flaubert, Mallarme, Proust, T.S. Eliot, and Joyce in particular. 
Many writers stayed on in Paris after the War, or came later, lured by the culture, the congenial atmosphere for artists, and the cheapness of post-war Europe. Hemingway entitled his memories of Paris A Moveable Feast, and Dos Passos - The Best Times. Paris in this period was the cultural capital of the Western world with the most active avant - garde in the arts, as well as a stable background of cultural tradition. It was international and welcomed foreign artists. Indeed, although there has been no Iack of native French artists in the 20th century, the three "presiding geniuses" of Paris-Picasso in painting, Stravinsky in music, and Joyce in literature-were all foreigners. A variety of new styles and movements developed in Paris - fauvism, cubism, dada, and surrealism- which enriched and inspired artists working there. Among the Americans who stayed in Paris were the writers Gertrude Stein, Sherwood Anderson, John Dos Passos, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and the  poets Ezra Pound, e.e. cummings, William Carlos Williams, Archibald MacLeish,  Stephen Vincent Benet, Allen Tate and Hart Crane.
Of these, Gertrude Stein exerted the deepest influence on younger writers: flocking to Paris. She evolved an experimental, truly 20th-century style of prose, exploring the possibilities of language to the very limits of intelligibility. In Three Lives (1909) and The Making of Americans (1925) she developed a technique of reproducing human speech in all its repetitiveness and simplicity of syntax. Tender Buttons (1914) are prose poems in which Stein comes close to the cubist technique of analyzing and abstracting objects. Her best- known (and least characteristic) work-The Autobiography of Alice & Toklas (1932- presents a vivid account of Paris in the 1920s with painters, musicians, and writers of various nationalities gathering in her salon. Stein was not widely read but, as Sherwood Anderson pointed out, her importance is "not for the public but for the artist who happens to with words as his material “. Stein influenced Sherwood Anderson, the writer who ushered in the second phase of realism in American letters, the so-called "New Realism", with his most enduring work, a collection of loosely connected portraits of lonely, obsessed people in a small mid- Western town called Winesburg, Ohio (1919) Both Stein and Anderson helped the young Hemingway in his search for a suitable literary style.

INNOVATIVE POETRY IN THE BEGINNINGS OF THE 20TH CENTURY POETRY

With the death of Walt Whitman in 1892, American poetry came to a longer pause. In the second half of the nineteenth century — American life changed rapidly; the western frontier had all but disappeared by 1890, the industrial revolution had mechanized American labor and industry, the number of farms was shrinking as the children of farmers moved to cities, and huge waves of European immigrants swelled the populations of cities. The language and the conditions of modern life were changing radically . A new poetry seemed needed. With few exceptions, however, the poets of late nineteenth century America wrote an artificial verse, derivative of Romantic and English models, full of classical allusions and lofty ideals, with little reference to the changing social and political realities around it. As the critic Roy, Harvey Pearce put it, these poets, whose names are hardly recognized or remembered were "utterly at a loss to deal with live situations in live language ".
What the United States needed at the turn of the century was a poet or poets to carry on the Academic tradition of earlier America writers such as Emerson, Hawthorne; and Whitman, and to translate that tradition into modern terms. Those writers had seen themselves and their fellow Americans as the new men who would create a new world. Pearce points out that the strength of American poetry had derived from "the poet’s inability or refusal at some depth of consciousness to wholly accept his culture's system of values."The poet is not only an Adam, a newly created and self-creating pioneer, he is a prophet and a rebel, warning his culture, and if necessary, opposing it.
American poetry became independent sometime between 1910 and 1920; 1912 is the year often named. That year Robert Frost went to England, where he published his first book. There he met and was promoted by Ezra Pound, already busy forging transatlantic modernism. Imagism, which has been called the most important single literary movement of the 20th century, is also usually dated from 1912 and the same year also saw the founding of Poetry magazine by Harriet Monroe in Chicago, with Pound as European editor. Poetry would help launch the major experimental movements in American poetry. It introduced a vigorous naturalistic movement by publishing the poetry of E.A. Robinson,   Vachel Lindsay, Robert Frost and Carl Sandburg .

EZRA POUND
THE MOST STRIKING FACT in twentieth-century English literary history is the revolution in poetic taste and practice which resulted in the rejection of the view of poetry represented by Palgrave’s Golden Treasury (first published in 1864 and used as a school textbook in Britain well into the 1930s) in favor of one which saw poetry as at the same time more symbolist and more cerebral. This revolution was an Anglo American achievement. T.S. Eliot (1888 -1965) , who settled in England before the First World War while still a young man and afterward exchanged his American for British citizenship , and Ezra Pound, the literary gadfly whose stay in England in 1912 stung so many poets and critics into new activity, were in large measure its leaders, but much of the theoretical ammunition was supplied by T.E. Hulme  who, before his death in the war in 1917 ,had contributed to the New Age and other periodicals a number of essays in which he declared war not only on what he considered to be the Romantic view of life and of art but also on "the Weltanschauung.... of all philosophy since the Renaissance". Hulme wanted discipline, precision, "the exact curve of the thing", “dry hardness," classicism. "I object even to the best of the romantics", he wrote in his essay "Romanticism and Classicism". "I Object -still more to the receptive attitude. I object to the sloppiness which doesn’t consider that a poem is a poem unless it is moaning or whining about something or other". Hulme produced a collocation of classicism, the  “religious" attitude,  abstract or geometrical art,  belief in original sin, hard, clear and precise images,  the medieval viewpoint, discipline and authoritarianism in politics on the good Side of the ledger against romanticism, humanism, naturalistic art, belief in man‘s unlimited potentialities, the emotional and soft, the Renaissance attitude, self expression and democracy on the bad side. Few of those in the new movement accepted the complete balance sheet as Hulme prepared it (Eliot came nearest to doing so), but many were influenced by his insistence on hardness and clarity and his war on self- expression as a literary ideal. The Imagist movement”, deriving from Hulme and Pound who soon lost interest and others, demanded clear and precise images elimination of every word “that did not contribute to the presentation", and a rhythm freed from the artificial demands of metrical regularity. 
E.P. for a generation the mere initials have identified the Father of Modernism, the first and the last of a band of revolutionists who changed the cause of twentieth century.  Some of the most distinguished writes of his time Yeats, Eliot, D.H. Lawrence, Joyce ,Frost, Williams are only a few of those who acknowledged their debt.
He survived them all  and not until his death at the age of 87 did it seem that a remarkable literary era had finally ended.
Ambitious for himself, poetry and Western civilization, Ezra Pound followed a path that led to exile, well-founded charges of treason ,a diagnosis of insanity, and a long imprisonment. To defend and appreciate his poetry, critics try to separate it from his life and especially his obstreperous anti-Semitism. Yet Pound himself insisted that his work, life and ideas were all of a piece. It is highly ironic that this most political of poets has-been critically refashioned a spokesman for pure aestheticism. 
The most extraordinary career in modern poetry has unchallengeably been that of Ezra Pound. It was he more than anyone who made poets write modern verse, editors publish it, and readers read it. Yeats asked Pound’s help when in 1912 he felt his style had become abstract; Eliot asked Pound’s help when in 1921 he had to revise The Waste Land out of amass of ill-assorted material. Even Robert Frost was obliged to admit that two or three changes which Pound proposed in "The Death of the Hired Man" were acceptable. Pound may also be said to have discovered Joyce, first as a poet and then as a prose writer, and to have made possible all his later work. These were major benefactions, but there were innumerable minor ones as well. Until the later misadventures, Pound’s life was a history of openhandedness, financial-though be had little money - as well as literary.
His life was centered with great energy on the pursuit of what Arnold  called the best that has been thought and said in the world, and on the attempt to  "make it new" (his slogan )for the present day. He showed an American voracity for a swallowing up talented utterance in all languages. Pound was born on October 30 1885 , in Hailey, Idaho; at the age of two he was taken to Pennsylvania and brought up in the East. He retained a frontiersman’s pleasure in thinking about the opening up of the West, and prided himself on the exploits of a grandfather who built a railway; he kept up a rough-and-ready manner, an American bluntness in effete Europe. His career might be viewed as a struggle to build a cultural railway from Idaho to Provence, or even to Peking for he incorporated Chinese characters in his later verse and translated as freely from Chinese and Japanese as from Italian or Greek. He tried to marry continental and Oriental suavities with western directness and even vulgarity more profoundly, he sought to bring incandescent moments "magic moments", he sometimes called then out of seeming welter, precision out of seeming improvisation ,the most telling English out of conversational or prosy   details. The result of this effort remains controversial. Yeats found Pound’s verse to be too experimental; Eliot thought personally devoted to him, thought it verged on  the " quaint an archaic". Pound himself had misgivings about his literary as well as political directions. But if his poetry is imperfect, it suits the present time , when many poets feel, without misigivings, that the effect of formal perfection is to betray the original vision. Pound has had a great effect on verse written in the second half of the century, notably that of Charles Olson, no less than on verse written in the first half. .
At the age of sixteen Pound enrolled as a special student (rather than as a degree candidate)at the University of Pennsylvania, to study (as he said) what he thought important. Then in 1903 he matriculated more conventionally at Hamilton College, and took a Ph.B.in 1905.His interests were in Romance languages and literatures; he returned as a fellow in these to the University of Pennsylvania in 1905. He took a master of arts degree that year, but much more consequential was his meeting with two poets also just getting started, Williams and Hilda Doolittle. She later became a member of Pound’s Imagist group, and Williams and Pound criticized and befriended each other all their lives.
The poetry that he had in mind in these early years was in vogue at  the turn of the twentieth century-melodious in verification and diction , romantic  in themes, world-weary in tone- poetry for which the term decadent was used .A particular image of the poet went with such poetry; the poet committed to art for its own sake, careless of convention ,and continually shocking the respectable middle class, who were thought to appreciate only art with conventional moral messages. A rebellious and colorful personality, Pound delighted in this role but quickly found that it was not compatible with the sober behavior expected from professors of language. He lost his first teaching job, at Wabash College in Indiana, in fewer than six months. .
Pound won a fellowship to go to Provence, Italy and especially Spain, in preparation for a dissertation on Lope de Vega. This was never to be written. On his return he became an instructor in Romance languages at Wabash College in Crawfordsville, Indiana. The-London years, between 1908-1920, were those in which  his dictum "Make it new” became the rallying cry of modernism, and as London  became the center of literary activity ,Pound became the center of the center – discovering, coaching, promoting, serving as a tireless gadfly to whatever new talent came is way.
Pound first campaigned for "imagism", a name he coined for a new kind of poetry. Rather than describing something-an object or situation -and then generalizing about it, imagist poets attempted to present the object directly .In doing so, they had to avoid the ornate diction and-complex but predictable verse: forms of traditional poetry, elements that distracted the reader from the impact of the pure image. Any significance to be derived from the image had to appear inherent in its spare, clean presentation."Go in fear of abstraction", Pound wrote. The rules of grammar seemed too artificial, and hence this new tended to work in non syntactical fragments. Although imagism as a formal movement lasted only briefly most subsequent twentieth- century poetry shows its influence, Pound soon moved on to "vorticism" which although still espousing direct and bare presentation ,sought for some principle of dynamism and energy in the image. In his imagist phase Pound was connected with H.D. and Richard Aldington, a British poet who became H.D. ‘s husband, as a vorticist he was allied with the iconoclastic writer and artist Wyndham Lewis.
                Pound’s major works during his London years consisted of free translation of languages unknown to modern Westerners: Provencal, Chinese, Japanese. He also experimented with the dramatic monologue form developed by the English Victorian poet Robert Browning. Poems from these years appeared in his volumes A Lume Spento (Italian,"by the spent licht)", which appeared in 1908. A. Quinzaine for This Yule (1908), and Personae (1910). Persona means "mask", and the poems in this last volume developed the dramatic monologue as a means for the poet to assume various identities  and to engage in acts of historical reconstruction and empathy.
At that time (1908) Pound was convinced that all English poets except Yeats were on the wrong track, and that Yeats was the greatest poet writing English. The friendship of these two which began shortly after Pound’s arrival, was important for both. It was the period when Victorianism was giving way to a new idiom:  Virginia Woolf said that in 1910 human personality changed and at any it appeared to do so as modern art, music ,and architecture began to coalesce with modern literature Pound did not confine himself to literature; he was friendly with the sculptors Jacob Epstein and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska (about whom he wrote a book), the painter and writer Wyndham Lewis and others , including later Constantin Brancusi ; he wrote an opera, Villon and did a book on the American composer George Antheil . In literature he was perhaps excessively fond of the troubadours, but he also evinced great respect  for a writer like Henry James ,the full range of whose modernity was not yet clear to most readers. He profited from the friendship of Ford Madox Ford, a novelist and poet much occupied with bringing the language up to date. Finally, Pound moved in the same circle as T.E. Hulme, who offered the modern movement one of its principal esthetic programs. Hulme, trained in philosophy, was fed up with Romanticism, humanism and individualism; he thought it important for man to recognize himself as finite and limited burdened down with original sin. Hulme opposed disingenuous the current meliorism, which assumed a permanent betterment of the human race. Against the vague outlines and damp emotions which he found in Romantic art, he espoused the formalized lines of Byzantine sculpture and painting and the geometrical qualities of Egyptian art. He said that Romanticism was a well, clasicism a bucket and that the bucket was preferable.
             With T.E. Hulme, he started imagism ,he started writing of short, free -verse , poems presenting a simple image; with Wyndham Lewis, he promoted vorticism, a literay version of cubism that argued for a poetry of “vigorous impact with simple image at its" vortex" he published translations of Chinese poetry, Japanese Noh drama initiating the orientalist techniques that became a modernist vogue.
Without quite subscribing to Hulme’s doctrines ,Pound in this milieu wrote poems that became starker. To Harriet Monroe ,the editor of the newly founded Magazine Poetry she sent his famous pronouncement."Poetry must be as well written as prose" and went on: “Its language must be a fine language ,departing in no way from speech save by a heightened intensity (i.e. simplicity) .There must be no book words ,no periphrases, no inversions. It must be as De Maupassant ‘s best prose, and as hard as Stendhal’s... Objectivity and again objectivity and expression no hindside - beforeness ,no straddled adjectives(as “addled mosses dank”), no Tennysonianness of speech, nothing - nothing that you couldn’t, in some circumstance, in the stress of some emotion actually say. Every literaryism ,every book word, fritters away a scrap of the reader’s patience a scrap of his sense of, your sincerity”
His gradual accumulation of these principles led him in 1912 , with Hilda Doolittle, Richard Aldington , and F.S. Flint, to found the Imagist group. Their purpose was to sanction experimentation in verse form and to aim at new modes of perception . Pound published in Poetry (march 1913) "A Few Don ‘ts for an Imagist", which set forth three principles:

l. Direct treatment of the "thing" whether subjective or objective .
2. To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation
3.  As regarding rhythm: to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in the sequence of the metronome.
In the preface to his anthology, Des Imagistes (1915) he added to these: | To use the language of common speech, but always the exact word-not the almost exact one. To create new rhythms, free verse was encouraged but not required. Absolute freedom in the choice of subject, but as time passed, Imagism was taken over by late arrivals, especially by Amy Lowell and degenerated into what Pound considered sentimentality and called " Amygism". Something tougher seemed required, and Pound now joined with Wyndham Lewis to promulgate a new movement, Vorticism. Its principal difference from Imagism was in insisting upon dynamism; the mood of Imagism had been too placid. The Vorticist image was a force rather than a picture. 
Pound ‘s most congruent literary relationship in England was with  T.S. Eliot , whom he met in September 1914. He was astonished to discover that Eliot had “modernized himself on his own", and he quickly obliged Harriet Monroe to publish "Prufrock" and persuaded the editor of the Egoist, Harriet Weaver, to  publish Eliot’s first book, Prufrock and Other Observations. But then both men decided on a change of technique. As Pound wrote, "at a particular date in a particular room, two authors, neither engaged in picking the other ‘s pocket, decided that the dilutation of verse libre.  Amygism , Lee Masterism, general floppiness". Had gone too far and that some countercurrent must be set  going. Parallel situation — centuries ago in China . Remedy prescribed "Emaux et Camees (Enamels and Cameos ,by 'Teophile Gautier) ( or the Bay State Hymn Book). Rhyme and regular strophes. Results: Poems in Mr. Eliot’s second volume , not contained in his first,...also H.S. Mauberley". Divergence later.
"Hugh Selwyn Mauberley: Life and Contacts" was first published in 1920, though its first section was completed at least a year earlier. : It anticipates many of the devices of "The Waste Land"(1922) such as sudden shifts of perspective, unacknowledged quotations in different languages, and the presentation of an individual consciousness against a panorama of the age. It is much more loosely knit, however. Pound was eager to disavow that the poem was autobiographical:" Of course; I’m no more Mauberley than Eliot is Prufrock -... Mauberley is a mere surface. Again a study in form, an attempt to condense the James novel, Meliora speramus ).
In the meantime Pound had begun his principal work, the "Cantos", long meditated and destined to occupy him during the rest of his life. He eventually published 117 Cantos, the last ones being incomplete. At various times Pound offered indications of his plan in the "Cantos", but these varied from each other . In one he claimed a musical organization :" Take a fugue: theme, response, contrasujet. Not that I mean to make an exact analogy of structure .... There is at start, descent to the shades, metamorphoses, parallel (Vidal - Actaeon). All of which is mere matter for little  instructions  unless I pull it off as reading matter, singing matter, shouting matter, the tale of the tribe". Another explanation, to his father, offered as his outline of the main scheme another fugal pattern :
"A. A. Live man goes down into world of Dead
C.B. "The repeat in history"
B.C. The magic moment or moment of metamorphosis, bust through from quotidien into" divine or permanent world".
He indicates in the same letter that poem includes aspects of an inferno , a purgatorio and a paradise.
Although Pound insisted that "There is no mystery about the Cantos", readers have experienced difficulties with their abrupt shifts in time and place, and their often recondite allusions. Pound is eager to avoid predigesting his materials, and wants to present as many particulars as possible before generalizing about them.
As he wrote in his ABC of Economics," I am not proceeding according to Aristotelian logic but according to the ideogramic method of first heaping together the necessary components of thought." Chinese  scholars do not agree with Pound’s theory that the ideogram is still read with a sense of its original components. The Cantos  include many kinds of data and many forms of artistic resolution. Pound is fond of the image of the magnet which exerts its force through a mirror on iron filings scattered on the glass, causing them to assume a pattern, a “rose in the steel dust". But the total impression of the Cantos may rather be one of shifting, intersecting forms, coming into being and then retreating from the page. 
Yet the Cantos do, in the aggregate, display Pound’s preference for what is active, bountiful abundant, passionate, and concrete, over what is passive usurious, niggardly, ratiocinative ,and abstract. They pose a "green world" against a waste land, and instead of the fragments adding up to degradation, as in Eliot, they compose for Pound possibilities and brief realizations. The Cantos stand like a monolith in modern literature, not to be avoided or ignored;
Looking for an explanation of what had gone wrong Pound came upon the reactionary" social credit" theories of Major Clifford Hugh Douglas, a social economist who attributed all the ills of civilization to the interposition of money between human exchanges of goods. Once and for all, potry and politics fused in Pound’s work as he began to search for a society in which art was protected from money and to record this search in poems and essays. Leaving England for good in 1920, he lived in “Paris for a time and then settled in the small Mediterranean town of Rapallo in 1925. His survey of history having persuaded him that the ideal society was a hierarchy with a strong leader and an agricultural economy, he greeted the Italian fascist dictator Benito Mussolini as a deliverer.
After World War II broke out, he voluntarily served the Italian government by making numerous English language broadcasts aimed at American soldiers in which he vilified the Jews (whom he identified with a money economy). American president Franklin D. Roosevelt , and American society in general. When the Americans occupied Italy , Pound was arrested , held for weeks in an open -air cage at the prison near Pisa , and finally, brought back to the United States to be for treason . The trial did not take place, however, because the court accepted a psychiatric report to the effect that Pound was “insane and mentally unfit to be tried"." From 1946 to 1958 he was a patient and a prisoner in St. Elizabeth’s Hospital for the criminally insane in Washington D.C. During these years he received visits, wrote letters, composed cantos, and continued his polemic against American society.
After the U.S entered the war he continued to give these talks, and so Was indicted in 1943 for treason. The following year the U.S Army arrested him, and he suffered continement in a stockade in Pisa. This experience was reflected in some of his best poems, the Pisan Cantos. In 1945 he was flown to Washington to stand trial but was remanded to St Elizabeth’s Hospital for the criminally insane .When  in 1949 he was awarded the Bollingen Prize for poetry , a great furore was raised  and detractors argued the merits of his case, and of the poems, for a long time afterwards. In 1958, because of the intercession of various poets, including Frost and MacLeish, and of other sympathizers, the indictment for treason was dismissed. Pound went to Italy and resided for a time with his daughter at Schloss Brunnenburg near Merano and then with his longtime companion, Olga Rudge, in Venice. .
Although the controversy that began with the" Pisan Cantos" has continued to spur partisan assessments of Pound’s achievement this importance during the second and third decades of the century is beyond question. His best poems, like all his poetry, represent a wide diversity of forms.
Among them, certainly are some of the early, finely wrought, imagist pieces, his translations from the Chinese- from the “Anglo- Saxon “Seafarer” and Mauberley. 
At the end of his life Pound acknowledged his failure as a social theorist and as a poet.
He had became the lost leader for the poetry of a departed age.
Few literary figures had stirred such hatred, fewer still had labored so prodigiously for poetry and aroused such gratitude admiration.
He died at Venice, at the age of 87, on November ,1,1972.

             The Cantos
Ezra Pound began to publish the Cantos in 1917, when, early versions of the first three appeared In the end, there were 109 complete Cantos and" drafts and fragments " of eight more. From the beginning  he was vague about the final dimensions of the work : his decision in 1969 to publish incomplete versions of the latest additions may have meant that he thought he could do no more.
Attempts to establish the Cantos structural plan have so far been unconvincing and Pound himself offered only partial explanations . He said that the poem constitutes a" commedia agnostica" as against Dante’s Divina Commedia . In a letter to  his father, he suggested an analogy to musical structure : "The Cantos are rather like , or unlike subject and response and counter subject in fugue ", the principal three elements being". Live man goes down into the world of Dead. The magic moment or moment of metamorphosis bust through from quotidian  into divine or permanent world ,Gods, etc ". He also hoped  that "Out of  the three main classes of themes ,permanent ,recurrent , and casual (or haphazard) , a hierarchy, a values should emerge". Though he often intimated that he could provide an "quinas- map" of the Cantos if he chose, such guidance was not forthcoming . |
Pound’s intention was to develop a modern epic, a "poem including history  that encompasses not only the world’s literature but its art and architecture ,myths, economics, the lives of historical figures- in effect "the tale of the tribe"- in a profuse assemblage of particular details that may, or may not, make connections with each other. The famous obscurity of the Cantos results partly from Pound’s disjunctive arrangement of his materials, but partly also from the obscurity of the materials themselves; Pond, formidably traveled and read , usually assumes that his readers are as familiar with sixteenth -century Italian architecture, Confucian philosophy and medieval economic history as he is as well as he is  with the nearly dozen languages from which he draws, or into which he translates.
Cantes 1 - 7 indicate the poem‘s procedures and some of its themes .Cantos 9 - 11 present Sigismundo Malatesta (d. 1468 )the Venetian soldier and art patronage as  the man of action. Cantos 12 - 13 contrast modern economic exploitation with the tranquil order of Confucian moral philosophy. Cantos 14 - 16 describe a  passan through hell (in the guise of modern London ) , ending with a vision of medieval Venice as paradise in Cantos 17. American presidents whose policies and personal styles Pound admires are presented in Cantos 31 - 33 (Jefferson ); 34 (John Quin Adams), 37(Van Buren ) , and 62 - 71 (John Adams): Canto 41 introduces Mussolini , whom Pound sympathizing with the Fascist economic program and seeming patronage of art,  thought the best contemporary leader. As Pound identifies humane civilization and government with Confucian ethics, he sketches a history of ancient China (Cantos 52-61) to show that Chinese prosperity and peace only attended rule by Confucian moral principles -a conclusion that modern historians find dubious. In counterpoint to these "historical" Cantos Pound sets those of the Fifth Decade of Cantos , which inveigh against usurious monetary systems (those according to Pound based on paper values rather than real ones ) and exalt those principles ,from the Eleusinian mysteries of ancient Greece to the "social credit" theories of Pound’s contemporary C.H. Douglas, which encourage the growth of natural fertility and realth. During the second World War Pound wrote two Cantos in Italian which have not been published; at the war’s end he was imprisoned near Pisa by the U.S. Army on charges of treason arising from his wartime broadcasts on the Italian radio. The Pisan Cantos , written in the prison camp under great physical and psychological duress while Pound was  waiting to be returned to the United States for trial and quite possibly execution, record a “dark night of the soul" through which the poet passes toward a vision of Aphrodite ,the goddess of love, and the acceptance of his death. Available to him were the scenes and events of the detention camp, the Bible, an edition of  Confucius , a poetry anthology, and the resources of his extraordinary memory. Under extreme pressure these elements combine, in a “magic moment " recorded in “Canto 81. The Pisan Cantos are both impressive and difficult , and when they won the Bollingen prize in 1949 (given by the Library of Congress, the distinguished jury included T.S. Eliot), a controversy was set off involving not only the charge of treason which was still pending against Pound, and the undeniably Fascist and anti - Semitic passages in parts of the poems , but also a reaction against the esthetic of post -symbolist "modernism" as exemplified in all the works of Pound and Eliot.
The later Cantos - Section : Rock Drill (1955 ) and Thrones (1959) - consolidate the insights of the earlier Cantos and are yet more cryotic. The Drafts and Fragments of Cantos CX. CXVII (1969) hint at an apologia : "But the beauty is not  the madness/ Tho ‘my errors and wrecks lie about me/ And I am not a demigod,/I cannot make  a cohere" (from Canto 116). In a 1968 conversation with Daniel Cory, Pound said that he had "potched" the work. But despite its unevenness and obscurity, the Cantos  remains for readers and for other poets  one of the great literary challenges and inspirations of the century.

AN OVERVIEW OF AMERICAN LITERARY FICTION BETWEEN THE TWO WORLD WARS

In the period between the two world wars, literature in the United States reached a new height of technical perfection and depth of meaning. By 1925 the literary movement of the century had become stabilized, its shape and scope definable. The protests and preachments of the literary radicals and the neohumanists had begun to give way to a criticism that was ready to grapple with specific problems of society, personality, and literary form. Fiction, poetry and  drama threw off their old restraints and plunged into an era of experimentation and selfconscious power such as had never been equaled on the Western continent . Sinclair Lewis, in his Stockholm address of 1930, announced this second "coming of age" as an accomplished fact. His audience, if it wished, could read most of the writings he mentioned in all the languages of Europe. Abroad as well as at home, the new literature of the United States was being recognized as a surprising but undeniable  force in Western culture. By 1935 the second renaissance had come to full flower.
The writers who produced most of this literature were not those who had led the revolt. The older group was still active, but most of them were now saying better what they had said before. The year 1925 saw An American Tragedy, Barren Ground, and The Professor’s House, and the Pulitzer Prize for poetry at that time was going to Frost, Robinson , and Amy Lowell for volumes that fell  short of their ,but the same years also saw the first important experimental work of Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and their contemporaries. It was a Crossroads in time, at which two generations met. .
The younger generation of writers, most of whom were born in the final decade of the old century and nurtured in the years when the nation was reaching its maturity as a world power, were quite ready to consider themselves "lost" when they were plunged at the moment of manhood, into what looked like the collapse  of Western civilization. The world they had known, a world in which peace, prosperity and progress had been taken for granted as the evidences of an achieved humanity, was suddenly challenged by barbarities that had supposedly been laid aside for all time. Shocked and dismayed they first were seized with the spirit  of the Crusades and rushed out to set things right, to make the world once more “safe for democracy", to fight “the war to end wars", to care for the wounded, and  to arouse the people of Europe against their misguided leaders. Woodrow Wilson led the campaign and provided. most of the slogans, but Theodore Dreiser, H.L. Mencken, and the iconoclasts critics of France, Russia, and England provided their reading. On the surface they appeared to be a company of idealists and reformers, but at heart they knew that the evil they were fighting lay closer to home than they cared to admit.
When the war ceased as suddenly as it had started ,these young men 4 looked back to their country only to find that it had suffered the shack but few of the actualities of war, and that its people had profited by war industries and the sense of power and self- righteousness that comes with victory. A second disillusionment then turned them against this insensitive country of theirs, and they took up, with all the enthusiasm they had put into the military crusade, a battle for literary and moral integrity both in America and in themselves. The vigor  they had thrown into the driving of the wounded back from the front in Red Cross ambulances, or fighting in the air or in the soggy trenches, they now put into  writing. Many- almost a majority- of them rejected the vigorous materialism of postwar prosperity in the United States and returned, after discharge from military service, to Europe, there to haunt the ateliers of Paris, to discuss art rather than politics, and, if one may judge from their own accounts, to waste their disillusioned  minds and bodies in drink and dissipation. Even though the pose of decadence did not suit them as well as it had the sad young men of the nineties, the outlook was not promising for a new American literature that could offer solutions to the problems of humanity.
But the literature of power asks rather than answers questions. In  the American writers who reached maturity between wars, what at first had seemed  an irresponsible flight from reality turned out to be the means toward a realization of their true calling. These young men needed the perspective of distance as well as of time in order to discover new forms of art for the expression of man’s dilemma in the twentieth century. The elder writers had posed the problems with which literary art must deal; the younger must learn to write. Whether they stayed abroad or came home and retreated from their society, they slowly taught themselves their art.
Among critics, Malcolm Cowley (b.1989) and Edmund Wilson (b.18959 were their best spokesmen. These two must stand for a host of others became they had a clear sense of the literary history of their own times. In Cowley’s Exile’s Return (1934)  the experience of a generation of writers is summarized and evaluated. He and his fellows, he tells us, had found that European intellectuals were even more disillusioned than those at home. The burden of inferiority that American writers had traditionally taken for granted as their birthright somehow disappeared -"it was not so much dropped as it leaked away like sand from a bag carried on the shoulder".  The realization that America possessed a folklore, new forms of art, and a recognizable national type and civilization gave them the necessary self -confidence. They created the myth of the Lost Generation and set to work to find themselves again.
The story, as Cowley tells it, was a pattern of alienation and reintegration. He carries it up only to 1930, but he hints (especially in his revision of 1951) at the meaning of the following decade as well. Exile occupied the decade of the twenties - exile and devotion to art. Reintegration was still to come, and in 1934 the reconstruction of society seemed the natural means for its accomplishment. There were two paths for the artist: either to escape from society into the subjective problems of his own personality or to identify himself with humanity and accept the movements which seemed to promise best for social reform. In either case, there was work at home for the artist to do.
Wilson responded to his times even more fully than did Cowley. When Axel’s Castle appeared in 1931, the new generation received its testament in art; a decade later, in 1940, to the Finland Station provided the formula for its faith in social reform. To Wilson must be credited the most impressive body of literary criticism produced by any one writer of this generation. Combining an immediate but usually accurate comprehension of even a totally new work of art with a firm grounding in historical method, Wilson's complete works, though largely ephemeral in their original inspiration, provided the literary chronicle of the era. He succeeded in producing, in his various reviews and essays, what he himself described to Christian Gauss, his teacher, as a contemporaneous "history of man” s ideas and imaginings in the setting of the conditions which shaped them".
Wilson's criticism recognizes three forces operating on the literary mind of his times; symbolism, Freudianism, and Marxism. The first is primarily a concern of art as such; the other two are formulations of personality and of society. If English and American critics had failed to comprehend the work of modern “writers, the reason, he explains in the introductory chapter of Axel’s Castle, might be that they had not recognized a literary revolution which had occurred mainly outside English literature: the symbolist movement as developed in France but represented early in the work of Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, Whitman, and  Emerson. Here was an indigenous American literary movement which was shared primarily with the great writers of Continental Europe rather than exclusively with those of Britain. All at once the feeling of American writers that they could command their own place in world literature was validated, the explanation was given. Axel’s Castle was for this era what Van Wyck Brooks's  America’s Coming of Age  had been for the earlier one.
Wilson's attempt to link modern naturalism  with an earlier classicism, and  symbolism with romanticism, is not altogether successful, but his discovery and definition of symbolism as such elucidates many lesser questions. It was, he points out, a revolt, as the earlier Romantic Movement had been in its first phases , against objective and conformist demands of scientific rationalism.

         ERNEST HEMINGWAY - NOVELIST
         The poet must find or invent the special language in which to express his personality and feelings ,which are different from those of everyone else. The symbols of the symbolists do not stand for broad generalizations, as do, for example, the Cross or the flag; they are private and special metaphors detached from their subjects and designed to convey unique personal feelings. In Yeats, Valery, Eliot, Proust, Joyce, and Gertrude Stein, Wilson finds the chief exponents  of the theory, the makers of modern literature, but he himself is unwilling to accept the divorce of the artist from society which this theory seemed: to demand.  In his final chapter, he contrasts the renunciation of experience as illustrated  in the life - denying hero of Villiers de L’Isle’ - Adam’s Axel (1890) with the life of primitive activity as lived by Rimbaud. Neither way would seem satisfactory alone, and yet the twentieth century was forced to a choice. Wilson’s book is in effect an angry protest against his times as he is unwilling to accept this impasse either for himself or for literature. Instead of remaining a private language, symbolism, he feels, may come to offer a new and imperfectly understood means of expressing the complicated experiences presented by modern science. One must avoid Axel’s castle if one wishes to contribute to the reintegration of modern man and society.
The way was thus open to the influence of Freud who offered a formula for reevaluating the individual, and to Marx, who seemed to supply a similar instrument for society. Both claimed to wipe away Axel’s belief that illusion is superior to reality, and to deal with man in the same scientific terms that man was learning  to use in dealing with nature. In the critical essays of The Triple Thinkers (1938) and The Wound and the Bow (1941), and in his historical study of all branches of socialism, to the Finland Station (1940), Wilson explored the sources of these two systems of thought and applied them to literary problems. Without allowing himself to be seriously caught in the webs of dogma that entangled many lesser critics of art and society during these years, he provided the rationale of the American literary movement at its climax. Out of the creative tensions of naturalism-symbolism came the great works Eugene O’Neill, Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe, William Faulkner, T.S. Eliot, and all the other once- young men who by 1935 had lived through war and spiritual exile and into an uneasy but dynamic harmony with their times and their country.
The narrator in Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms reflecting on his war experiences, observes at one point, "I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice and the expression in vain.... I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it. There were many words that you could not stand to hear". Hemingway had not always been embarrassed by these grand words; he brought more to his writing than disillusionment or cynicism - he brought an ever- vivid sense of betrayal. His aim and achievement as a novelist and short-story writer were to convey his concerns in a prose style built from what was left after eliminating all the words one “could not stand to hear". As flamboyant in his personal style as he was severe in his writing, Hemingway became an international celebrity. At the time of his death, he was probably the most famous writer in the world.
He was born and raised in Oak Park, Illinois, one of six children. His mother was a strong ,active woman; a music teacher, director of the church choir, a lover of high culture who had contemplated a career as an opera singer . His father was a successful physician who enjoyed hunting, fishing, and cooking and who shared in household responsibilities more than most men of his era. The family  spent summers at their cottage in northern Michigan, where many of Hemingway’s  stones are set. After high school, Hemingway took a job on the Kansas City Star. When the United States entered the war in 1917, Hemingway was eager to go. An eye problem barred him from the army, so he joined the ambulance corps. Within three weeks he was wounded by shrapnel. After six months in the hospital Hemingway went home as a decorated hero; when wounded ,he had carried a comrade more badly hurt than he to safety. He found readjustment difficult and became increasingly estrange from his family, especially his mother. Years later, when his father became ill and committed suicide, Hemingway blamed his brother for that death.
In 1920 he married Hadley Richardson and went with her to live in Paris. Supported partly by her money and partly by his journalism, Hemingway worked at becoming a writer. He came to know Gertrude Stein, Sherwood Andersen ,Ezra Pound, F.Scott Fitzgerald, and others in the large community of expatriate artistic and literary Americans. Besides reading his manuscripts and advising him, Fitzgerald and Anderson, better known than he, used their influence to gest his book of short stories, In Our Time, published in the United States in 1925. In this book, stories about the adolescent Nick Adams as he grows up in northern Michigan alternate with very brief, powerful vignettes of war and crime. The  effect is to portray the world of adulthood as an arena of danger and violence.
              The spareness and tensensess of Hemingway’s prose is a result of his conviction that"Literature is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over." Ellipses, if handled well, can be as important as what  is actually said in a work of literature, for "the dignity of the iceberg is due to, only one-eighth of it being above water."Hemingway uses this technique in one of his greatest novels, The Sun Also Rises (1926), published in Britain as Fiesta. It was the most notable product of the American expatriate scene, a picture of Paris in the 1920s, as well as of the new lifestyle and the new, post-war  morality. Jake Barnes, the narrator, has been rendered impotent by a war wound, a suitable symbol for the effects of war on its participants. It is through Jake's eyes that we see Lady Brett Ashley and the other disillusioned representative of the “lost generation". Their lives are aimlessly restless and futile, and their only principle, shared by Jake, is to accept life without complaint and derive as much enjoyment out of it as possible. Jake complains little, despite his very real suffering. His emotions are barely visible under the restraint he sets himself. He tries to forget his wound and his hopeless love for Brett not only in drink, but also in work, in good companions, in his shaky religious faith, and in the rituals of fishing and bullfighting . The stylized precision of the bull fight provides the most effective counterbalance to the disillusioned futility of Brett and her friends as well as to the puerile illusions of Robert Cohn. The bullfight, with its ancient traditions, its real danger, the skill and daring involved in this representation of the primordial struggle between man and beast, provides a  touchstone against which the characters can be judged. 
Gertrude Stein’s words: "You are a lost generation" provide one motto of the novel, and in Jake and Brett we see the effects of the war on the sensibilities of a whole generation. The other motto is taken from the Ecclesiastes, the book of the Bible that stresses the vanity of human endeavors, and the quotation  points to the passing of generations while “the earth abideth  forever." Nature, the backdrop for human passions, in its endurance offers hope of stability in the midst of futile human activities.
A Farewell to Arms (1929), Hemingway, s novel of World War I, reveals some of the causes for the "lost generation's" wounded sensibilities through the love Story of an American officer and a British nurse on the Italian front. The long disillusionment of the war pushes Frederick Henry and Catherine Barkley to escape the war by deserting to Switzerland, where their union ends with Catherine’ s death in childbirth. For Henry the action of the novel is a movement away from nihilism towards a personal commitment in love, and a growing awareness that life is a ordeal that always ends in death. The book’s opening description of marching troops, miserable in the rain and carrying their deadly weapons like a promise of life (a hint as well of Catherine,s still-born child and death) reveals the suffering and illusions of the war, while the death of "only seven thousand" soldiers from cholera points up the inhumanity of the war machine. In carefully restrained language Hemingway succeeds in conveying images and  attitudes that come through to the reader despite the sparsity of details.
                Hemingway portrayed another war in For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), probably the best literary tribute to the struggle of the Spanish people in the Spanish Civil War. Here the outsider, the foreign observer, Robert Jordan, dies for the just case of another nation. The book displays features of the classic epic and presents not only the struggle of the individual, but of a whole country. In order to render the flavor and peculiarities of the Spanish language Hemingway uses a most effective technique of distorting English so that it sounds as if translated from Spanish. The novel reveals great understanding of and solidarity with the common people of Spain, solidarity stressed by the title, taken from John Donne’s reminder that "No man is a island, entire of itself".
             In his book on bullfighting, Death in the Afternoon (1932), Hemingway , thus summarizes the aims of his writing:
           I was trying to write then and I found the greatest difficulty ,aside  from knowing truly what you really felt, rather than what you were supposed to  feel, and had been taught to feel, was to put down what really happened in action; what the actual things were which produced the emotion that you experienced... the real thing, the sequence of mition and fact which made the emotion and which would be valid in a year or in ten years or, with luck and if you stated it purely enough, always, was beyond me and I was working very hard to get it The only place where you could see life and death now that the wars were over, was in the bullring...I was trying to write, commencing with the Simplest things, and one of the simplest and the most fundamental is violent death .
In most of Hemingway’s fiction violent death or the threat of death present, serving to test and define his protagonists. Most often, however, Hemingway sets a solitary protagonist against death. In war, hunting  or fishing the Hemingway character must face death with equanimity and skill, as Macomber  learns to do on a safari in "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber". In "The Snows of Kilimanjaro"  a writer dying of gangrene in the African bush must face death aware that he has not used his talent and skill to their best advantage. Hemingway stresses the responsability of the craftsman in whatever field-literature, hunting, bullfighting - to do his best as a way of maintaining control over life and of achieving dignity and respect.
In The Old Man and the Sea (1952), which helped Hemingway gain the Nobel Prize in 1954, the old Cuban fisherman Santiago, alone in the vastness of the ocean captures a gigantic marlin, which is both his opponent and his "brother" the unity of man with nature. His struggle with the fish and later with the sharks that devour it before he can tow it home becomes, in Hemingway’s hands, a universal fable of human life, with overtones of Christ’s Calvary . Santiago, although he comes back with only the skeleton of the fish, has tested his strength and endurance to their limits and thus achieved heroic dimensions and a a spiritual victory.
Hemingway’ s devotion to his craft had an enormous influence on the writers of his own and later generations, though the legend of Hemingway the man for a time eclipsed the writer. He himself defined literary creation as making something "through your invention that is not a representation but a whole new thing truer than anything true and alive, and you make it alive, and if you make it well enough, you give it immortality. Hemingway’s best works achieve this enduring quality.
            The contrasting violences in Dos Passos denunciation of society and Wolfe’s revelation of the i