Ezra Pound, Hugh Selwyn Mauberly and American Modernism

This essay investigates the complex duality of the concept of modernity as both lived experience and artistic tenet. It explores Modernism as a socio-economic force and as a literary movement which helped to create the historical image of the early twentieth century. As representatives of American Modernism, Ezra Pound and W. C. Williams expound the Modernist incorporation of aspects of the ironic and the ambiguous, promoting a state of ‘constant flickering’ or a suspension of resolution; offering not explanations or reassurances but contradictions and unsynthesized dialectics. By examining the dynamics of poetic and socio-economic change reflected in the work of Pound and Williams, this essay provides a useful theoretical snapshot of American Modernism, in both an historical and literary-historical context. While the focus of the work is Pound and Williams’ figurations of these ideas, this paper also incorporates several other influences through both American and world poetics.

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