Abstract
In this chapter I read deployments of the nekuia by two central modernist poets, Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot. Both Pound and Eliot saw the poetic landscape that surrounded them as something of a wasteland—used up and played out. Each sought to reinvigorate poetry through a mode of experimentation and invention deeply dependent upon the resources inherent in the literary tradition. In the deliberately monumental and cannily marketed projects that consolidated a sense of modernism—Pound’s 1925 A Draft of XVI Cantos and Eliot’s 1922 The Waste Land—each poet had recourse to the ancient tradition of the descent into the Underworld to consult the prophet Tiresias. In the 1917 Three Cantos that made up his first attempt at the long poem that would come to dominate his career, and in the final version of that long poem’s first Canto (1925), Pound staged a nekuia through which he at once enacted and justified the poetic practices by which he would “make it new.” At the center of The Waste Land, Eliot also stages an encounter with Tiresias, who, I will argue, represents the tradition against and through which Eliot works. As Pound does in Canto I, Eliot in “The Fire Sermon” makes a forceful declaration of interdependence. I conclude this chapter with a brief look at a counter tradition that coexists with Pound and Eliot and continues to the present: the feminist revision of the necromantic encounter, which emphasizes the dynamic of interdependence by modeling collaboration rather than competition.
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Notes
Myles Slatin, “A History of Pound’s Cantos I-XVI, 1915–1925,” American Literature 35 (May 1963), 183–95
Pound, Literary Essays, ed. T.S. Eliot (New York: New Directions, 1968), 86.
As Michaela Giesenkirchen argues, Pound found in Browning’s poem at once a way of dramatizing “the author’s own making and meta-poetic meditations,” a model for realizing a “poetic objectivity that would synthesize the poet’s subjectivity with transpersonal truth,” and a set of specific strategies—the accumulation and paratactic relation of textual and historical details, the imposition upon those details of a narrative obedient not to chronology but to the poet’s thematic needs, the presence of a stage-directing narrator—for embodying these aims. Michaela Giesenkirchen, “‘But Sordello, and My Sordello?’: Pound and Browning’s Epic,” Modern ism/Modernity 8.4 (November 2001), 623–42
See, for example, Giesenkirchen, 624. See also Leon Surette, “‘A Light from Eleusis’: Some Thoughts on Pound’s Nekuia” Paideuma 3 (1974), 191–216
Pound, Personae, 60. For example, Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 148–49
Hugh Witemeyer, The Poetry of Ezra Pound: Forms of Renewal, 1908–1920 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), 160.
See, for example, Jerome McGann’s discussion of A Draft of XVI Cantos in The Textual Condition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 122–25
Pound, The Cantos (New York: New Directions, 1973), 3.
Lawrence Rainey, Ezra Pound and the Monument of Culture: Text, History, and the Malatesta Cantos (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 4.
Jewel Spears Brooker and Joseph Bentley, Reading The Waste Land: Modernism and the Limits of Interpretation (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1990), 138.
T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land, ed. Michael North (New York: W.W. Norton, 2001), 23.
Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” in The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (London: Methuen, 1920), 47–59
Maud Ellmann, The Poetics of Impersonality: TS. Eliot and Ezra Pound (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 95.
H.D., Selected Poems, ed. Louis Martz (New York: New Directions, 1988), 36. Subsequent citations in text.
Edna St. Vincent Millay, Collected Sonnets (New York: Washington Square Press, 1959), 54.
Sandra Gilbert, “Female Female Impersonator: Millay and the Theatre of Personality,” in William B. Thesing, ed., Critical Essays on Edna St. Vincent Millay (NewYork: G.K. Hall, 1993), 303.
David Kalston, Five Temperaments: Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, James Merrill, Adrienne Rich, John Ashbery (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 146.
Wendy Martin, “From Patriarchy to the Female Principle: A Chronological Reading of Adrienne Rich’s Poems,” in Barbara Charlesworth Gelpi and Albert Gelpi, eds., Adrienne Rich’s Poetry (New York: W.W. Norton, 1975), 175–88
Elizabeth Hirsh, “Another Look at Genre: Diving into the Wreck of Ethics with Rich and Irigaray,” in Lynn Keller and Cristannne Miller, eds., Feminist Measures: Soundings in Poetry and Theory (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 117–38
Barbara Eckstein, “Iconicity, Immersion and Otherness: The Hegelian ‘Dive’ of J.M. Coetzee and Adrienne Rich,” Mosaic 29.1 (March 1996), 57–71
Quoted in Cheri Colby Langdell, Adrienne Rich: The Moment of Change (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2004), 117.
Adrienne Rich, The Fact of a Doorframe: Poems Selected and New, 1950–1984 (New York: W.W. Norton, 1984), 163.
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© 2009 Michael Thurston
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Thurston, M. (2009). Declarations of Interdependence: The Necromantic Confrontation with Tradition. In: The Underworld in Twentieth-Century Poetry. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230102149_2
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