Rupert Brooke’s Ambivalent Mourning, Ezra Pound’s Anticipatory Nostalgia

Abstract

In 1940 Allen Tate (who would be named consultant to the Library of Congress, or Poet Laureate, in 1943) ends his essay “Understanding Modern Poetry” with the salvo: “[m]odern poetry is difficult because we have lost the art of reading any poetry that will not read itself to us; and thus our trouble is a fundamental problem of education. … We had better begin, young, to read the classical languages, and a little later the philosophers. There is probably no other way” (274). In Ezra Pound’s Pisan Canto 81, written in 1945, Pound dramatizes his version of a literary history in which modern poetry rejects English metrical tradition, based on the classical languages, by breaking free from the shackles of regular rhythms and moving steadfastly into a new age. He famously proclaims, at least as far as one can proclaim in a parenthetical statement: “To break the pentameter, that was the first heave” (1.55). Pound’s declaration conveys something evocative, especially considering that it was written from prison; a worn out manifesto, the line tries to assert that the work of “breaking the pentameter” began a movement that flooded modern poetry with the “new.” Hugh Kenner calls this section of The Cantos a “courtship of the English decasyllabic” and charts the way that Pound writes the history of English meter “from Chaucer to 1945” into the Pisan Cantos, wondering whether there exists “another passage in literature that can number among the protagonists in its drama the meter itself?” (493).