Bloomsbury Ezra Pound's Adams Cantos: 9 (Historicizing Modernism)

Review "Without insisting that [The Adams Cantos] are always as successful as the best of Pound's other work, Ten Eyck shows that they are much more successful, and much more interesting, than they can seem. As such, Ezra Pound's Adams Cantos represents an invaluable contribution to Pound studies. The book also opens up new opportunities for thinking about the poetry of the 1930s, modernist poetry more generally, and the histories of found poetry and documentary poetics." --Sean Pryor, University of New South Wales, Modernism/Modernity Product Description Ezra Pound transformed his style of poetry when he wrote The Adams Cantos in the 1920s. But what caused him to rethink his earlier writing techniques? Grounded in archival material, this study explores the extent to which Pound's poetry changed in response to his reading of 17th-century American History and the social climate of the pre-war period.Drawing on the Ezra Pound papers, David Ten Eyck documents the changes to Pound's documentary techniques, establishing a chronology of the composition of The Cantos. His close readings of specific passages, set against the interwar years, allow Ten Eyck to gain insights into Pound's 1930s political and social criticism. Through references to the annotated copy of The Works of John Adams, he explores Pound's engagement with Adams at the expense of Thomas Jefferson: a figure formally at the heart of his previous work. Ultimately, this contextual and archival study uses John Adams and America to unlock the fascist beliefs and the later poetry of Ezra Pound. About the Author David Ten Eyck is Associate Professor of American Literature at Nancy-Universite, France. He is currently co-editing a new critical edition of Ezra Pound's Pisan Cantos in collaboration with Ronald Bush.