Ezra Pound, Popular Genres, and the Discourse of Culture

In 1917, having begun the long poem that would prove his life's work, Ezra Pound affirmed that "the ultimate goal of scholarship is popularization." Few scholars subsequently have noticed this aim without finding it merely ironic or dismissing it as an early foible. Yet, as Michael Coyle demonstrates, Pound made similar assertions throughout his career, and his affirmation informs most of his work, including the Cantos.

Coyle begins by examining T. S. Eliot's editorial work on the collection he called, over Pound's objections, Literary Essays of Ezra Pound. He then discusses a wide variety of discursive and generic combinations, explaining how Pound was led to attempt them and how those combinations affected his broadest ambitions. By establishing that literature itself is a historically privileged grouping of genres, Coyle makes possible a new understanding of how and why Pound mixed literary and nonliterary, popular and polite genres.