The studied language countries literature

The actuals of the theme. The essay is structured as follows: It begins with an explanation of Pound and Eliot’s motives for their exile in Europe. The central biographical facts on both poets are included for clarification. In addition, the chapter sets Pound in context to William Carlos Williams, who decided in the frequent stay-or-put controversy at that time in favor of America. The next chapter examines the common features of their literary theory and criticism. It deals with their common approach to the literary tradition, as well as with the literary models by which they were strongly influenced. Therefore, it mainly takes into consideration the central essays by Pound and Eliot. Further, an excursus on their relation to Walt Whitman is included. Finally, the assignment illustrates the nature of their collaboration concerning The Waste Land. Additionally, the chapter takes a close look on the reception as well as the publishing history of Eliot’s long poem. The essay ends with a conclusion that sums up the main points.
The aim of the theme. This analysis critically discusses the various fields where the common ground of their lifelong literary friendship is evident. Further, it will give a coherent account of the reasons as well as the results of their close collaboration. This will be exemplified on the basis of the significant essays, letters and poetic work of both that was produced during the period of Eliot and Pound’s immense interaction between 1914 and the publishing of The Waste Land in 1922.

Chapter I. T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound
1.1. Eliot and Pound: Leaving America
T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound decided at an early stage of their lives to leave their home country, America, behind in order to live permanently in Europe. Their decision was not unusual at that time as the twentieth century has engendered an enormous number of writers in European exile: Henry James, Stephen Crane, Gertrude Stein, Ford Madox Ford, and Aldous Huxley are some of the writers who went into permanent exile. Many more, including a great number of Americans, travelled extensively abroad - Edith Wharton, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Aiken, Cummings, and Dos Passos are among these. The numbers of eminent writers who stayed put in their home country may seem small by comparison: Faulkner, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, among others. The following passage therefore examines the specific reasons Eliot and Pound had for their chosen exile and how they met in Europe. This represents the starting-point of their literary friendship. Further, the passage focuses on the features that distinguish them from William Carlos Williams, who exemplifies the American poet at home. As the artistic work and theory of both do bear the mark of their origins, the passage includes a short illustration of their biographical background.
Ezra Weston Loomis Pound was born to Quaker parents in Hailey, Idaho, on October 30, 1885. He spent his childhood close to Philadelphia. He received an education in Romance philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania and at Hamilton College in Clinton, New York. During that time, Pound met William Carlos Williams and Hilda Doolittle, with whom he had a lifelong friendship. After a study trip to Europe in 1906, he taught briefly at Wabash College, Indiana, but was dismissed after only four month in January 1908. In February of that year he sailed for Europe and while in Venice somewhat later, published his first volume of poetry, A Lume Spento (1908), at his own expense. In that same year, Pound settled in London where he had close contact William B. Yeats, D.H. Lawrence, Ford Madox Ford and T.E. Hulme in various literary circles. He met T.S. Eliot in 1914. The main project Pound began writing as early as 1917 and continued writing throughout most of his long life was the Cantos, consisting of 117 cantos. A striking characteristic of Pound’s life is that he never settled down in one place for the rest of his life. London was to be his home until 1920, when he moved to Paris for four years and later (1924) to the small Italian town Rapallo for twenty-one years. During the 1930s his economic and political obsessions caused him to support the fascist regime of Mussolini, and in 1941-43 he gave a number of talks on Radio Rome criticizing the U.S. role in World War Two. He was arrested and flown to the United States and charged as a traitor in1945. Declared insane and unfit to stand trial for treason, he had to spend the next thirteen years of his life confined in a lunatic asylum. In 1958 he was released from St. Elizabeths, after a number of prominent writers – among them as the key figure T.S. Eliot – had intervened on his behalf. He returned to Italy, where he died in Venice at eighty-seven in 1972.
Ezra Pound specifically distinguished his generation of writers in exile from the generation of American expatriates of the twenties. “The new lot of American emigrés were anything but the Passionate Pilgrims of James’ day or the enquirers of my own. We came to find something, to learn, possibly to conserve, but this new lot came in disgust.”[1] The circle of emigrants that Pound felt close to had strong motives for leaving their home country. They, in different degrees, settled in and assimilated their adopted European environment. In contrast, the “emigrés” constituted an American artistic colony in Paris, speaking English, and retaining many of the habits and customs of home. Eliot was definitely a member of the first group of exile writers, as he completely repatriated himself. The reasons for this complete immersion lie in his family background.
Only three years younger than Pound, Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in St. Louis in 1888. Among his ancestors, who came in 1630 with John Winthrop for the founding of Boston to America, were noticeable traders and clergymen in New England and especially in Boston. The remarkable history of his family influenced his strong belief in tradition, which will be discussed later in this essay. Eliot attended Harvard University, where he received his Bachelor’s degree in 1909. After a year at the Sorbonne University in Paris, he returned to Harvard to pursue a doctorate in philosophy. Shortly before the outbreak of World War One, Eliot departed for Europe. His main stations were Paris and Germany, before finally settling down in England in 1914. After working as a teacher and in the foreign department of Lloyd’s Bank, he began a publishing career and, eventually, became one of the directors of the publishing house of Faber & Faber. In contrast to Pound, Eliot remained a resident of England for the rest of his life; and even got the British citizenship in 1927. He began working on The Waste Land in 1921 and finished it in a Swiss sanatorium while recovering from a mental breakdown caused by overwork, marital problems, and general depression. A striking feature of his life is his conversion to Anglo-Catholicism in the late thirties, which will be dealt with later. First and foremost, Eliot’s mastery – like Pound’s - was his poetry and literary criticism. He was awarded the 1948 Nobel Prize in Literature. Eliot died in London in 1965.
The collaboration between the two poets began in 1914. From the very start Eliot recognized one distinguishing feature of their personalities. He had the impression that Pound was “only a temporary squatter;” being rather permanently on the move than settling down. Eliot recalls this in the description of their first meeting in Pound’s flat:
This appearance was due, not only to his restless energy/in which it was difficult to distinguish the energy from the restlessness and the fidgets, so that every room, even a big one, seemed too small for him/but to a kind of resistance to growing into any environment. In America, he would no doubt have always seemed on the point of going abroad; in London, he always seemed on the point of crossing the Channel. I have never known a man, of any nationality, to live so long out of his native country without settling anywhere else.
Although both were cosmopolitan city-dwellers, it is revealing of the character and aims of each how each writer traveled and where they chose to settle. Pound and Eliot’s reasons for leaving America were similar: both were alienated intellectuals repelled by a society in which business was considered the only respectable career for a man. Pound and Eliot early discovered how difficult it would be either to live or to make a living as artists in America. They found America at the turn of the century a cultural desert. As Midwesterners of English and New England ancestry, both poets felt displaced. Pound’s revulsion was, like Eliot’s, against time and place inimical to art, but it was much more violent. The alienation Pound felt was at the same time aesthetic and economic. For example, he wrote to Harriet Monroe in 1912:
There is no other magazine in America which is not an insult to the serious artist and to the dignity of art. […] I may be myopic, but during my last tortured visit to America I found no writer and but one reviewer who had any worthy conception of poetry, The Art.
Europe drew both writers, because it was the treasure house of culture. With its age old cities, its great monuments, museums, and libraries, it offered them the artistic milieu and resource they craved and lacked in their homeland. “There is no town like London to make one feel the vanity of all art except the highest,” Pound wrote to William Carlos Williams in 1909.[4] To be in the company of fellow artists was another strong inducement for going abroad. Both Pound and Eliot were associated with several artistic circles and had close contact with many artists.
In England, the country of his ancestors, Eliot sought and found an organic society which satisfied his hunger for tradition and order. Compared to his home country, in Britain society, politics and religion were more close-knit and institutionalized. In addition, it offered the enormous advantage of allowing Eliot to cleave to the mother tongue and, as a spokesman for British culture, of enabling him to mediate between the New and Old Worlds. Eliot, unlike Pound, led an ordered and rooted life; he physically and mentally settled in Britain, for which becoming a British citizen in 1927 can be seen as the final step. Eliot’s criticism bears an increasingly English stamp. However, one finds little physical evidence of his adopted country in his poetry. Such images as there are of city, village, and church are universalized, and not specifically local. In accordance, Pound’s influence on his environment was vital but he did not stay put. Whatever town he lived in, he spent as much time and energy promoting art as practising it. His poetry shows that he was sensually alive to his surroundings. Examining Pound’s work, one finds vivid images of the many places he lived in or visited – for example Venice, Rapallo, Provence, Pisa, Paris and London. He needed the change of place as a source of inspiration.
Nothing could be more appropriate to the production of such cosmopolitan work than the travel and the exile that gave Pound and Eliot knowledge of many different languages, cultures and societies. Despite the loss of roots, exile offers distinct advantages. It enables one to see and to experience much that is new and different from what one is accustomed to. In assessing the difference between the foreign and the familiar, one acquires a dual viewpoint, which is immensely valuable. Such a dual viewpoint entails and reinforces a simultaneous sense of detachment and involvement. Moreover, the dual viewpoint can lead to a sense of proportion, to a feeling for what is important, enduring, and valuable, and what is not. Thus, Pound and Eliot made it their life’s work to discover what was permanent, what recurrent, and what merely transitory in poetry.