The present volume of new, interdisciplinary scholarship investigates the arts with which Pound had a lifelong interaction including architecture, ballet, cinema, music, painting, photography and sculpture. Divided into 5 historically and thematically arranged sections, the 28 chapters foreground the shifting significance of art forms throughout Pound's life which he spent in London, Paris, Rapallo and Washington. The Companion maps Pound's practices of engagement with the arts, deepening areas of study that have recently emerged, such as his musical compositions. At the same time, it opens up new fields, particularly Pound's interaction with the performing arts: opera, dance, and cinema. The volume demonstrates overall that Ezra Pound was no mere spectator of the modernist revolution in the arts; rather he was an agent of change, a doer and promoter who also had a deep emotional response to the arts.
Author(s): Roxana Preda
Series: Edinburgh Companions to Literature and the Humanities
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Year: 2019
Language: English
Pages: 560
City: Edinburgh
Acknowledgements
List of Abbreviations
A Brief Introduction
PART I FOUNDATIONS
1 ‘Mermaids, that Carving’: Ezra Pound and Italian Art
2 ‘Templum Aedificavit’: Ezra Pound and Architecture
3 Ezra Pound and East Asian Art
4 Ezra Pound and Old Music
5 Ezra Pound: Premier Danseur by Proxy
6 Time, Speed, Precision and the Poetry of the Everyday; or, Ezra Pound’s Cinema Aesthetic
PART II THE LONDON PERIOD 1908–1920
7 Ezra Pound and Nineteenth-Century Aestheticism: Sharing ‘Breath for Beauty and the Arts’ with Rossetti and Pater
8 Ezra Pound and James McNeill Whistler: Modernism and Conceptual Art
9 Ezra Pound and Walter Rummel
10 ‘Museum Pieces’: Laurence Binyon, Ezra Pound and the Visual Arts
11 Into the Vortex: Ezra Pound, Anarchism and the Ideological Project of Art Criticism
12 ‘Intelligence . . . Shut in by the Entrenched Forces of Stupidity’: Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis
13 Vorticist Photography, or The Three Angles of Ezra Pound and Alvin Langdon Coburn
14 ‘Creation and Action’: Ezra Pound and Italian Futurism
15 Ezra Pound and Wassily Kandinsky: Inner Necessity and the Paradiso Terrestre
16 Agnes Bedford: An Invisible Helpmate
PART III PARIS 1921–1924
17 Constantin BrâncuŞi, Vorticist: Sculpture, Art Criticism, Poetry
18 Percussive Music for a Triangle: Ezra Pound’s Relationship with George Antheil and Olga Rudge
19 ‘Like Coins out of Circulation’: Reframing Ezra Pound’s Le Testament
20 Ezra Pound as Music Theorist: Antheil and the Treatise on Harmony
21 The Expansion of a Theory: Great Bass and Ballet mécanique
22 Renaissance Man: Ezra Pound’s Search for a Contemporary Colour Palette Through His Solo Violin Works
PART IV THE ITALIAN YEARS 1925–1945
23 Ezra Pound’s Artistic Thinking and Relations in Italy, 1925–1945
24 Music Recollected: Ezra Pound’s Cavalcanti
25 Vida Sin Fin: Ezra Pound and Gerhart Münch
PART V WASHINGTON: MENTORING THE YOUNG IN THE 1950s
26 Sheri Martinelli: The White Goddess
27 Art ‘in the Solid’: Ezra Pound and Michael Lekakis
28 A ‘Transference of Power’: Ezra Pound and the Cinema of Hollis Frampton
Notes on Contributors
Bibliography
Index
