Ezra Pound and his influence on Literature of the Twentieth Century - Research Paper Example

Pound’s contributions to the imagist movement were a counterpoint to the Georgian poets who approached poetry in more conventional terms and treated more or less traditional themes. His friendship with Richard Aldington and H.D. played a great part in his being involved in this movement even though the primary motive was a strong conviction regarding the nature of poetry and the role of images in improving the existing condition of poetry. Pound’s influence on the imagist movement and the works of other writers who came after it as a result of it was immense.

The dedication of T.S. Eliot’s masterpiece, The Wasteland, is to Pound who had edited the piece and suggested changes to the original draft of it. The involvement of Pound in the literary activities of his times can be seen through this. Other writers have also talked of their debt to Pound as he was one of the most towering figures in literature during his time. Even today, we find his influences on poetry and also other genres like the lyrics of popular songs where different images are yoked together to invoke feelings in the reader or the listener.

Different associations are called to the mind of the audience which then has a personal interpretation to make of the poem or the song. Pound’s poetry and his theories regarding poetry also encouraged people to make such personal interpretations which did not need to stick to a particular set of definitions regarding a genre as was set by earlier thinkers. This was a part of the innovations in literature that happened during the initial decades of the twentieth century, of which Pound was a very important part.

These innovations were in a great way responsible for the increase in the interest that people felt in poetry. With the rise of the novel as the dominant literary genre during the nineteenth century, poetry was largely on the decline. It is largely due to the influences of Pound and Eliot that poetry as a genre experienced a revival that made people look at the genre in a different way. Poetry was created anew as a genre that could reflect the troubled times of the First World War. An abandonment of the set notions of form and structure was used to unsettle the reader and shock him into understanding the complexity of the changes that the human psyche was undergoing during this epoch in history.

This led to charges of obscurity in the poetry of Pound but it was mostly the novelty f his treatment of the genre that led to these. The use of images was taken up by other modernists as well such as Robert Frost, in whose poetry we can see the juxtaposition of images that would conjure complex emotions. The source of these emotions is not always known and the development of psychoanalysis was crucial in the development of the Imagists’ poetry. These ideas were taken up by other writers as well and the development and growth of psychoanalysis in the twentieth century was paralleled by the growth and the wide acceptance of the views that were propounded and endorsed by Pound.

Pound’s writings and his ideas have had an immense influence on the works of post-modernist writers as well. The non-linear syntax that he employed in his writings was an important influence on