Camden House (NY) Ezra Pound and the Career of Modern Criticism: Professional Attention: 75 (Literary Criticism in Perspective)

Forty-five years after his death, and more than seventy years after his indictment for treason, Ezra Pound remains a deeply controversial figure. Today it is hard to imagine a poet sparking national debate, but Pound did just that. His receipt in 1949 of the first-ever Bollingen Award for Poetry started a hue and cry that spread to every US periodical that made even a pretense of following "cultural" issues: even Time weighed in. It took two years for things to simmer down, and when they finally did, literary study looked profoundly different. Everyone engaged in the study of poetry today, professors and students alike, works in an environment shaped by that national crisisof conscience. The present book considers this untold story, and investigates not just what critics have had to say about Pound but also why they have asked the questions they have asked. It is routine for reception histories to distinguish between professional studies and more popular responses; this book encourages us to consider why we make that distinction and what the costs of doing so might be. Unprofessional responses to Pound have often beenideologically and politically embarrassing for Pound scholars, who have in response policed the distinction between professional and popular readings with extraordinary vigilance. As a result, the history of Pound's reception unfolds as a kind of drama - perhaps the last ongoing theater for McCarthyite cultural-political anxieties. Michael Coyle is Professor of English at Colgate University and has published widely on Pound. Roxana Preda is Leverhulme Fellow in American Literature at the University of Edinburgh and President of the Ezra Pound Society. Review As seasoned scholars with a mature capacity for untangling skeins of fact and weaving narrative, considering the big picture steadily and whole, Coyle and Preda have developed a magnificent achievement making sense of (and offering a very legible map of) this Poundian world and its major driving vortices. Above all, beyond the controversies and gossip, the cliques, the frequent masculinism, the eccentricity and sometime crankishness, they rightly feature the work of scholarship-the courageous and generous achievement of generations of Pound scholars who always moved to a different rhythm, stubborn against the grain of mainstream academia. ― MODERNITY While this study is valuable for retracing the history of modernism's acceptance in the academy, its exhaustive and far-reaching scope also allows one to move freely in the midst of the wider intellectual context surrounding and permeating both Pound Studies and the manifold, controversial aspects of literary criticism both in and out of the academic milieu. ― Make It New