This is the greatest literary achievement of America

I am in fact a pleb, I like Eliot better simply because I like how he puts his words together more, and how the lines follow after each other, which in Pound I find a bit mangled even I like an individual line a lot.

Thank you for the answer though, I vaguely get what you're saying and can see how the Cantos can be seen as a very large accomplishment based on those standards.

>ezra pound
>american
He wouldnt want to be called that lmao

you know nothing about ezra pound yet you say this

Bought this one used online, and for is probably time in my life it came in full of useful notes and commentary.

especially for the later poems I feel as though I'm engaged in a dialogue with a previous owner

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The thought of what America would be like
If the Classics had a wide circulation
Troubles my sleep,
The thought of what America,
The thought of what America,
The thought of what America would be like
If the Classics had a wide circulation
Troubles my sleep.

Gr isn't even Pynchon's best, user

fuck I have used a version of the same copy wish I had a dust jacket for it

I used to care deeply about American literature and what we’ve managed to contribute to the canon. But now that America is well and truly fucked and I’m off to either Scotland, Ireland or England, I’ve stopped looking at American literature as American and realized that history will not even look back at it as such. There will have been a brief period in America’s founding when some European descendants wrote great literature—then it became South Africa with quesadillas and even itself disowned any connection with white devil wordery. Pound, Eliot, Melville, Whitman, Plath, etc., in two hundred years will not be identified as “American” literature, they’ll be taken essentially as Europeans who had a cute idea for a nation in the Americas that didn’t go so well and now have come back to the fold—that they were once “Americans” will be hardly notable, and if mentioned a cause for incredulity in European classrooms.

bro do not even remotely go to the fucking UK if youre worried about people attacking 'white devils', that island is damned.

Go to Poland or Hungary or something, the UK is unbelievably broken

I know what you mean, but I’d prefer an Englishspeaking nation. I don’t think the UK is as damned as you do, it’s still way whiter than America, way more cultured, with a growing nationalist sentiment. There will be an exodus of white Americans to the UK in the next couple decades that will also contribute to shifting the culture, since they’ll have learned better.
I was even in London recently, twitter makes it look way worse than it is. I was surrounded by white Londoners and Asian tourists. Went to lunch at one of the many classy options, nothing but white families. A table next to us of King’s College students joined us and chatted shit about classic literature. It was there that I had the epiphany that I needed to come back, even if it has a bit of a knifey knifey Muslim problem at the moment. I can feel in my gut that the future bodes terribly ill for America, and excitingly bright in Europe (in general), despite the current forecast. I could sense a renaissance bubbling under my feet.

It's definitely possible, but I am not hopeful with the way shit is happening these days. Not going to contradict you and all power to your efforts, but I see a very dark pall cast on that place, only my own view of it.

>buy the cantos
>read some of them
>understand nothing of it
>no knowledge of greek, chinese, provençal french
what books do i need to read in order to understand the cantos

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Read them anyway. Just let them flow over you. Read them again when you know more.

People keep going on about how great he is.
then nominate your favorite cantos

the only one i liked was canto I, a fantastic reinterpretation of the odyssey. i wish pound had made a whole canto like that

The average white Brit has far more in common with an Indian or Jamaican than he ever will with a white American. You are no more welcome here than they are. Sorry to burst your bubble, but fuck off we're full.

>a whole odyssey like that

Count yourself lucky.

What did he mean by this?

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>no knowledge of greek, chinese, provençal french
oh pound had no knowledge of them either

if pound wasn't a nazi none of you chantards would give a fuck.
you niggers haven't even read 1/8th of the american canon to be able to deduce what "the greatest" is.

post2016 Yea Forums barely reads

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is that supposed to be a dig at america?
a pretty good stroke, though not very sporting.

>assumption
>assumption
>assumption
nice

how so

He wasn’t a nazi

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My sophomore high school english teacher made us read parts of this, which while cool and I'm glad I got exposed to it, we were in no way prepared to comprehend the words we were haltingly stuttering in class. It would have been much better to rush through an anthology of actual American literature (like we were supposed to, and did in a half-assed way). We had none of the background in Western lit to appreciate what Pound had done with The Cantos.

That said, our teacher also made available his copy of The ABC of Reading by Pound, although it wasn't assigned. That would have been a great book to have us read due to its friendly textbook style (unlike modern /textbooks/) and exposure to excellent passages of literature and poetry. I was the only one in my class to borrow the book and I now have my own copy and read it every few years.

Curious, do you think other whites who live outside of Europe will immigrate back as well or just the American ones?

what an absolute chad

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Moby Dick is some of the most poetic prose ever written.

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>What's wrong with that man?
Holy shit, Graves sounds like a nice guy, I would have asked if his boyfriend left him recently.
>the limpest of handshakes
Hahaha, Chad.

all of this criticism is moot when you read white goddess and realise graves is a hack

>There will be an exodus of white Americans to the UK in the next couple decades that will also contribute to shifting the culture
>immigration is bad because it changes the culture
>we should become immigrants ourselves to change the culture in other countries
How much self awareness are you on right now? What makes you think Brits want a bunch of white Americans moving in, bring their culture of country music and school shootings?

waley was known for his shit translations of chinese, Ezra Pound literally lived in portugal, spain, french and italy having to be fluent in the languages of each, You're a retard. and so is Waley.

the author is using blake literally an unknown romantic author who didn't make a dint on this history of poetry to evaluate pound, a modernist?color me suprised that pseud on this board actually agree with this. Whitmans barbaric yawp? lmao, speaks the german, nevermind that but what he's misinterpreting for whitman is ee cummings. fucking pseud retard get off my board you fucking faggot

uhm yes Yea Forums should evaluate ezra pound under the terms of a real american canon like... harold bloom another Yea Forums meme, shut the fuck up retard pseud

it's ironic because graves was a known homosexual, frogposters who pretend they post on /fit/ retards be like

T.E Lawrence was not an authority on Provencal poetry, Ezra and Francis Hueffer still are, graves wished he was a modernist so bad

There is considerable evidence that Lawrence was a masochist. He wrote in his description of the Dera'a beating that "a delicious warmth, probably sexual, was swelling through me," and he also included a detailed description of the guards' whip in a style typical of masochists' writing.[154] In later life, Lawrence arranged to pay a military colleague to administer beatings to him,[155] and to be subjected to severe formal tests of fitness and stamina.[156] John Bruce first wrote on this topic, including some other claims that were not credible, but Lawrence's biographers regard the beatings as established fact.[157] French novelist André Malraux admired Lawrence but wrote that he had a "taste for self-humiliation, now by discipline and now by veneration; a horror of respectability; a disgust for possessions".

Mainly from the Americas, including Mexico. The whole continent is under extreme duress that will only get worse.

You think you have to be 'white' to be American. Talk about 'cultured'. You realize the people destryoing American lit are mostly white liberals right?

no he wasn't. he had homosexual affairs at school but those boys were separated from girls. r.g. was 'known' for liking women

t. e. lawrence liked pound

that's rich

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are you joking?

isnt demeter the goddess of fertility? i dont understand the poem

you have autism and think british people want to be around crazed racists

Yeah I deleted my post because I reread you and realized it wasn’t worth it, you total retard lmao. Muh raycizm

delete this one too, embarrasing

>for all I know, they may have traced from the nearest tea-chest
Absolutely fucking based.

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The British establishment is stuffed with crazed racists, you arsewit.

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oh the poem is by pound

no, people who like blake are insufferable

seems like graves didn't understand the poem either

Ezra Pound had literally cucked other authors, rating him on his masculinity is funny when the other two authors that are used against him are a homosexual and masochist.

yeah that's his point

pound v two war heroes hmm

that's not what he did

Robert Graves doesn't deserve to be considered literarily qualified just because he was in a war, Graves work is trash, even the white goddess itself seem like it's trying to copy off of Pound's 'Eleusis' and it does terribly in consideration of that. Robert Graves was surrounded by people better than writing at him like Sassoon. Literally Goodbye to all that is much worse than any of Sassoon's writings on the war. Sassoon is still trash though and with Graves lack of independence from the people around him, he was trash too.
It's ironic that he singled out one of the poems earlier about Demeter and didn't analyze it for the poetic value except for the fact that 'lynxes weren't in Rome'. But then his work of comparative religion seems oh so similar to pound's infatuation with prosperine and shows no actual worldly consideration of religion or society lmao. Ezra Pound was friends with war heros also lmao, he had friends that died in the war. Let it be known that Pound was liked among war going men for his actual poetry, and not just because he served.

he literally uses blake as a metric to qualify pound's "good verses". Why should Pound listen to a dilettante who uses INDIVIDUAL WRITERS as a metric for poetics lmao

Pound may have issues, but at least he put words together in an invigoratingly weird way. Isn’t Robert Graves just a dull pedant with disproven theories about ancient society that crazy cat ladies who wanted to be professors read in order to feel smarter than the rest of the scrapbooking club?

Joyce isn't deep, but he's fun. Fiction is just for fun, if you want something deep, read philosophy

Who are you? Wtf

t. e. lawrence wasn't used against him
why don't you read things properly eh

Seems like high iq people are great at socializing and speaking(high being 145+)
I'm probably like 120 or 30, and have few friends, because I'm interested in literature and philosophy. I'm not a social god though, and slow socially.

the longfellow bit that Graves keeps using?lmao. shut up retard. go back to /fit/ frogposter u can only bench 120.

Pound was a fascist

how is that relevant to the post ur replying to?

>people dont get it
please consider developing your post a little beyond this take. I sick of reading it and I don't need to be reminded every thread.

you're waffling on about god knows what here. i didn't imply they were liked because they were soldiers. and graves was a captain & died officially at the somme, but recovered and volunteered to go back to the front.
>the white goddess itself seem like it's trying to copy off of Pound's 'Eleusis'
where'd you get that from
>Literally
i wish people would stop misusing this word you know. which authors did pound literally cuckold by the way? actually graves' relationship with his second wife began when she was married to a writer.
>It's ironic
oh right, you don't think poems should make sense?
>no actual worldly consideration of religion or society
well the crux of graves' book was how the transitional age we live in relates back to separating the two sides of christianity. it's used as a sub rosa textbook in som theological faculties
>Let it be known
just talk normally

>Pound may have issues, but at least he put words together in an invigoratingly weird way
mark of a true poet, eh
>Isn’t Robert Graves just a dull pedant with disproven theories about ancient society that crazy cat ladies who wanted to be professors read in order to feel smarter than the rest of the scrapbooking club?
no

you're waffling on about god knows what here. i didn't imply they were liked because they were soldiers. and graves was a captain & died officially at the somme, but recovered and volunteered to go back to the front.
>the white goddess itself seem like it's trying to copy off of Pound's 'Eleusis'
where'd you get that from
>Literally
i wish people would stop misusing this word you know. which authors did pound literally cuckold by the way? actually graves' relationship with his second wife began when she was married to a writer.
>It's ironic
oh right, you don't think poems should make sense?
>no actual worldly consideration of religion or society
well the crux of graves' book was how the transitional age we live in relates back to separating the two sides of christianity. it's used as a sub rosa textbook in som theological faculties
>Let it be known
just talk normally

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right, but those are your quotes. i dont think graves would go so far as to say pound had any good verses. he said it was a simple blake-like verse (as opposed to his free verse &tc)

you said nothing

that wasn't a put down, you dolt. lawrence liked pound

" It's used as a sub rosa textbook in som theological faculties"
no it isn't fuck off pseud

this guy is autistically taking the symbols and situating their validity in physical geography instead of abstract meaning. To me the poem, which I have not read before, is very clear in its meaning and carries pathos

cringe, proof people on Yea Forums don't read books

what did waugh think of pound?

George Orwell isn't a good literary critic, and neither was Graves

You have zero idea what ur talking about lmao

>To me the poem, which I have not read before, is very clear in its meaning
share the wealth
>carries pathos
generally known as the feeblest mode of writing

had a feeling you'd take that line

Le 1984 0_0 Stalin bad Social democracy is good, being spineless and having uninteresting and dreary prose is good! look how bad i fee for shooting this elephant durrrrrr! let me ignore joyce and wyndham lewis cus uhhhhh im too dumb to understand modernism durrrrrrrr

do you understand what pathos is?gtfo grave fanboy. nobody takes the white goddess seriously lmao

Graves was rejected because even though he had written several historical novels he was still primarily seen as a poet, and committee member Henry Olsson was reluctant to award any Anglo-Saxon poet the prize before the death of Ezra Pound, believing that other writers did not match his talent.[49] graves btfo

>nobody takes the white goddess seriously
no. really?

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well if henry olsson said it

nobody does
graves btfoed

tfw Ezra cucked Graves out of his nobel prize and then he had to go on a crybaby rant for the rest of his life along with all his fanboys

graves wouldn't have accepted it m8

cope seething

turned down a knighthood didn't he

On a related note (to the pic), something I’ve never seen anybody else grasp, the reason for Eliot’s refrain of “In the room the women come and go, talking of Michelangelo” is a reference to terribilita, which he uses throughout the poem, most notably in the opening lines.

literally trying to copy yeats who's prodigy was... Ezra Pound... geez it all makes sense now

eh?

If the quality of an epic is assessed on its ability to synthesize form then Ulysses is better than Moby Dick and Hamlet (and we know it's not). I get your point, but I don't think the Cantos truly crowns the American tradition in the way you say it does, in fact, I would say it is hardly any emblem of the American tradition, largely DUE to it's great synthesizing effort. Mind you, I believe the Cantos to be the most aesthetically beautiful use of English yet, but the most moving or memorable? Not necessarily. Moby Dick still takes the cake for me even though it's prose, and if I had to choose an American poem it would be Leaves of Grass. These pieces, in my opinion, much more fully encapsulate the American language with that vivacious, loose style the Americans invented in contrast from the British, and their themes. What's more American than a crazy captain attempting to take down a seemingly omnipotent, supernatural being, and more than that, being conscious that the effort is grandiose and well deluded but still fighting for it. What is the American spirit but the spirit of rebellion and will to liberty? And on Whitmans end, he captures the more meditative soul that pervails our art from our traditional landscape paintings to the likes of Emerson and Williams. If we are to parse the American soul into two emblefying essences it is our meditative relationship with nature, and our passionate will to freedom and innovation. Pound caters to a much more recent tradition, the modernist zeal for great art as defined by its ability to harmonize intellectualism with mysticism and soul. However this is not distinctly American, as evidenced by the likes of Joyce, Auden, and Eliot (who is just as british as he is American if we are being honest). Pound is a world-poet, not the American bard. Pound does well to honor the Chaucerian aesthetics of English, with a clear Romantic influence as well, but again, this is not of the American tradition, this is modernism as a whole. And personally, as admirable as Pound's craft is, I still am more moved by the likes of Baudelaire and Yeats because I feel that they appeal to a more preferable nature of poetry. This is just my own two cents personally, but I like for poetry to speak directly to the soul, im not so interested in the intellectualism of it, it just seems like a masturbatory comment on literary academia.

The Muslims aren't the biggest problem. The constant surveillance is. Stand your fucking ground. Or move to Oz.

that excerpt reads perfectly fine to me. sounds like the critic has an aversion to strong language, not any actual criticism. not a good look for a grown man.

i have adhd i cant read a block of text

The cantos fucking blow with the exception of maybe 4 or 5 of them, even Pound himself came to realize this.

Moby dick is the greatest piece of american literature, as many in this thread have already said, and Wallace Stevens is the best american poet

Where does pound deprecate his own poetry lmao u retard, if ur talking about his last cantos u have no idea what the fuck ur talking about, if it wasn’t for pound wallace stevens wouldnt even be on the map

Go back to twitter logo

Trying to fit something as variable and subjective as literature into an abstract, psuedo-objective rating system is a thinly vieled attempt to pretend you're superior.

Sounds like u have an inferiority complex

see how Pound images Dante on onto greek lyricists and Catullus and Confucius up to Thomas Jefferson, the beauty in it and importance to the american "tradition" of poetry as a whole is astounding. Having basic knowledge of all these characters mentioned is the most memorable way to read the cantos while understanding it's immense poetic impact as an "Epic"

It dais something that the whole thread is essentially just people arguing over his theoretical and historic merit rather the discussing any particular poem.

Because the poems are nonsensical bullshit with literally nothing to say.

>el kanto

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The UK wants nothing to do with your delusional white flight dream. You would take up valuable space for actual Commonwealthers, like Canadians.

I don’t know why a bunch of leftist Britons keep responding to him like representatives with authority, or like it’s a super witty angle to posture like one when it’s already been done plenty before you. Do you delight in being the ricochet of other men?
He’s right, there will be a white exodus to Europe in the coming years and the majority will be looking to go to the UK. Believe it or not, your trendy Yea Forums posts don’t play a role.

the argument was whether or not the cantos constituted the "american epic" it wasn't poetic criticism
True Robert Graves poems are retarded and say nothing besides being sentimental

>the argument was whether or not the cantos constituted the "american epic" it wasn't poetic criticism

Alright, then i'd like to bring this article to your attention

>poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/articles/68978/the-arrow-has-not-two-points