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(2016) Walking and the aesthetics of modernity, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan.
This chapter explores how those attempting to recuperate Ezra Pound's poetry after World War II misunderstood his epic project as a lyrical one. He was read as a personal or subjectivist writer by a generation of poets who turned to "walk poetry" as one of their primary lyrical forms. Pound also wrote walk poems, but they did not foreground the open-ended freedom celebrated by postwar poets, rather the constraining influence exercised by a landscape already shaped by cultural traditions. It makes sense, I argue, to read Pound's walk poems as expressions of confinement and freedom, and to explore the hidden constraints lurking behind the postwar lyrics that turn to mobility as a metaphor for personal freedom.
Publication details
DOI: 10.1057/978-1-137-60364-7_18
Full citation:
Gross, A. S. (2016)., Pound, peripatetic verse, and the postwar liberal aesthetic, in K. Benesch & F. Specq (eds.), Walking and the aesthetics of modernity, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 253-266.
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