il miglior fabbro

T.S Eliot’s post- World War I poem The Waste Land, opens with a benediction: for Ezra Pound il miglior fabbro: Italian for “the better craftsman” (Norton 474). Though both Eliot and Pound had a significant impact on 20th century English writing, Ezra Pound is “often called ‘the poet’s poet’ “ (Liukkonen) for his work in discovering and nurturing new poets and their writing styles, and indeed, that was his role in T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land.

Pound was first drawn to Eliot after reading his poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”, and the poem was first published on Pound’s recommendation. The most famous example of Pound’s influence in Eliot’s work, however, comes from The Waste Land – originally titled “He Do the Police in Different Voices”. Pound edited the poem immensely, deleting large sections, and telling Eliot to condense or rearrange others, until the resulting poem reflected “almost as much Pound’s vision of Eliot’s poem as of Eliot’s himself”. Interestingly, Pounds changes reflected stylistic issues; he liked and left intact the basic message of the poem. Pound’s work in editing served to simply bring the points Eliot had crafted to a better light. The resulting benediction alludes first to Pounds great influence in crafting the finished poem, to Pounds’ set of poems the Cantos; and also in borrowing the phrase from Dante’s praise of the poet Arnaut David, whose work Pound had spent time translating (University of Delaware Library).

The publication of The Waste Land was a triumph for both Eliot and Pound. Eliot’s poem was praised by critic Lawrence Rainey for moving modernism out of “minority culture to one supported by an important institutional and financial apparatus”, and formed an apex of what Pound had been working towards for over fifteen years, “and mark[ed] the moment of his greatest triumph- the justification of ‘our modern experiment’” (University of Delaware Library). The Waste Land took modernism out of the sphere of experimentation; it helped cement modernism and the modern style, and became the most famous poem of the post- World War I period.

Though correspondence between Eliot and Pound continued after The Waste Land, they did not collaborate to the same degree on any other works.

Pounds influence on modernism neither began nor ended with Eliot’s The Waste Land; he is accredited with almost single-handedly starting the modernist movement. He fostered the modernist style in poets and forced editors to publish their works, taking modernism to the general public. In addition to Eliot’s work, he proposed changes in the works of W.B. Yeats and Robert Frost, and discovered James Joyce.

Works Cited

Liukkonen, Petri http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/epound.htm

Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry

University of Delaware Library http://www.lib.udel.edu/ud/spec/exhibits/pound/wasteland.htm