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This chapter argues that Ezra Pound's multiple invocations of China were bound to his American ambitions. Pound struggled with Whitman to take on the mantle of American bard, but he turned to the Orient as a means of disciplining the homeland he had fled. Reading both Pound's early interest in Tang Dynasty verse in his Imagist poetry and his later devotion to Confucianism in the China Cantos, this chapter unveils an underlying desire to speak for and to America via the Orient that runs the length of Pound's career.

This chapter looks at Ezra Pound's collection of poems about Venice, the place he credited with awakening his interest in “civilization.” His first collection establishes an archaeological process that would inform his entire work: the “mingled chords” drawn “from out the shadows of the past.” The antique cosmopolitan city of Venice offers an archive for these “mingled chords” that remains productive for the duration of Pound's career, although he never settles on a single meaning of the place. From his first collection through multiple phases of The Cantos, Venice appears as a repository of material histories that motivate Pound's open historiography. The chapter examines how Venice inspires Pound to poetic reanimation that challenges both backward- and forward-looking teleological approaches to time—approaches manifested in Gabriele D'Annunzio's restorative nostalgia, Futurism's projected obliteration of the past, and the instrumental historicism of the Fascist ventennio.

The first chapter uses the famous play, Hagoromo (The Feather Mantle), to explore noh dramaturgy and performance technique. Pound received a version of Hagoromo along with other draft translations of noh plays by Ernest Fenollosa and Hirata Kiichi, and it had a surprising impact on his theories of imagism and The Pisan Cantos.

Ezra Pound was an important figure in W. B. Yeats’s imagination in the genesis, development, explication and dissemination of the system of A Vision. Beginning with the time that Yeats and his new wife, George, spent at Stone Cottage together (during which they began their automatic writing sessions), continuing through their travels in Italy and residence in Rapallo, and culminating in Pound’s role as the intended recipient of the “Packet” that opens the second version of A Vision, Ezra Pound’s presence is persistent. Drawing together many strands of Yeats’s and Pound’s literary and personal relationships (including Pound’s appearance in early drafts and versions of A Vision), as well as some examination of parallels between their work, this essay argues for the centrality of Pound to A Vision, further suggesting that A Vision and The Cantos are in conversation with one another, as different means of exploring modernism’s more esoteric aspects.

Digital writers Young-hae Chang Heavy Industries claim that their work of Flash-based digital literature, Dakota, is “based on a close reading of Ezra Pound’s Cantos part I and part II.” The chapter close reads the digital work in relation to its proclaimed source material despite the fact that the speed at which Dakota flashes challenges efforts to do so. YHCHI brilliantly adapt Pound’s poetry at the level of content and form. For not only do YHCHI remix the language of the first cantos but they also use Flash to renovate Pound’s poetic technique of “super-position” or textual montage. This chapter examines the transformation of Pound’s formal technique into Flash to show how the poetic result illuminates connections between the modernist and digital modernist texts as well as the literary periods they represent.

This chapter considers ectoplasm in relation to the materiality of film, and ask what this materiality does to questions of mimesis. It looks at Ezra Pound's conflicted attitude to film, via both his critical writing and The Cantos, and compares it to the aesthetics and politics of Sergei Eisenstein, in particular in his writings on Disney. For both, the filmic and the ectoplasmic incarnate central questions of the relation between representation and the world, but to very different effect. The chapter argues that in the end the politics of each depend on the extent to which they allow representation to be ectoplasmic.

The conclusion considers the implications of the geopoetic method laid out in the book that seeks to historicize the spatial strategies of literary texts—even experimental poetic ones—in the context of the reigning geographic epistemologies of the day. The conclusion demonstrates the usefulness of this method by briefly considering environmental determinism in relation to another text, T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, in addition to gesturing to the interplay between poetic modernism and two other geographic paradigms of the first half of the twentieth century: the possibilism and regionalism of Carl Sauer in relation to William Carlos Williams’ Paterson, and the academic development of geopolitics (specifically, the Italian version of it, spazio vitale) in relation to Ezra Pound’s Pisan Cantos. In these brief considerations of modernist poetic texts, we can observe writers using geography and form together to generate political interventions along multiple scales of identification: for the individually authorized artist, for culture, and for larger collectivities of the nation, transnation, and globe.

This chapter considers the naturalization of inheritance in relation to the Tudor usurpation of the English throne and its Stuart aftermath. I examine the implication of a language of succession in various early modern discussions of the opposed values of constancy and change. In the literature of the Elizabethan succession crisis, in Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene, in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, and in the projects superintended by the seventeenth-century noblewoman Anne Clifford we see a variety of attempts to discover in practices of inheritance a ground of psychic stability and sociopolitical domination. In each case, however, these efforts at control find themselves confronted by a recalcitrant matter—encountered on the Gaelic-speaking peripheries of the British islands, in the medieval past, in women’s bodies, or in the changeable fabric of all created things—that resists full regimentation.