The Passions Observed: The Visionary Poetics of Ezra Pound

Abstract

“Intense emotion causes pattern to arise in the mind — if the mind is strong enough”.¹ This remark, which appeared in 1915, expresses an important aspect of Ezra Pound’s campaign to revolutionize English poetry in the early years of this century. Unfortunately, it is one of many remarks that are often cited but rarely given the kind of attention they deserve. Such statements reveal that Pound was a visionary poet who believed that elemental passions are lodged in imaginary objects which are directly observable. He claimed that these imaginary objects could be apprehended as clearly as any object available to the senses, and he attempted to render them as precisely as possible in his verse. This emphasis on the passions has been obscured by the traditional view of Modernism as a reaction against the emotional excesses of Romanticism and a reassertion of the Classical virtues of impersonality, objectivity, and detachment. But in Pound’s case as well as Eliot’s, impersonality and objectivity were designed not so much to suppress the emotions as to alter the way in which they are poetically expressed. For these seminal poets of the Modernist movement, our passions are originally revealed in the very things we see, and it is the task of art to present immediate experience in a way that awakens us to new or forgotten types of emotion.