T'ang's bathtub: innovative work by four Canadian poets

Two hundred years ago, in times not unlike our own, of intense escalation of plunder, exploitation, dispossession, and a deluge of cheap meaningless entertainment, Wordsworth lamented the "multitude of causes . . . acting with a combined force to blunt the discriminating powers of the mind, and...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Canadian literature 2011-09 (210/211), p.116
Main Author: Quartermain, Meredith
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
American literature
Analysis
Avant-garde (Aesthetics)
Canadian poetry
Criticism and interpretation
Literature, Experimental
Poetics
Poetry
Poets
Pound, Ezra (1885-1972)
Writers
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Summary:Two hundred years ago, in times not unlike our own, of intense escalation of plunder, exploitation, dispossession, and a deluge of cheap meaningless entertainment, Wordsworth lamented the "multitude of causes . . . acting with a combined force to blunt the discriminating powers of the mind, and, unfitting it for aU voluntary exertion, to reduce it to a state of almost savage torpor" (104). Wordsworth wants to rescue knowledge; Pound wants to carry forward great art, though not without protesting the social injustices of cut-throat rapaciousness (e.g., "Canto 33"), which he particularly links to a perversion of language ("Canto 14"): Profiteers drinking Blood sweetened with sh-t And behind them ... f and the financiers lashing them with steel wires.
ISSN:0008-4360