T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound: To the History of Creative Contacts

• Main Author: V.M. Tolmatchoff
• Format: Article
• Language: deu
• Published: Russian Academy of Sciences, A.M. Gorky Institute of World Literature 2019-11-01
• Series: Литература двух Америк
• Subjects: t.s. eliot; ezra pound; facts of creative biography; correspondence; eliot’s image in the cantos; pound’s image in the waste land.
• Online Access: http://litda.ru/images/2019-7/LDA-2019-7_248-321_Tolmatchoff.pdf
• ISSN: 2541-7894; 2542-243X

V.M. Tolmatchoff examines in detail a life-long history of T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound's creative contacts. Despite the fact that Eliot and Pound have been assigned very different images (the first one is seen a conservative, defender of Christian culture, a Nobel laureate, while the other is famous for being an eternal exile, a herald of permanent poetic revolution, an admirer of Benito Mussolini), these two figures complement each other, thus illustrating the versatility of Anglo-American literary modernism. Based on almost all information available today and brought together, the paper analyses facts of biography, strategy of relations, mutual correspondence, reviewing of each other, collaboration in the Criterion magazine, cultural activities, as well as Pound’s participation in editing The Waste Land and other Eliot’s texts. Back in 1912, Ezra Pound, who worked as the European editor of the avant-garde Poetry magazine (Chicago), became interested in the work of a novice poet, T.S. Eliot. Later, their creative contacts will become closer and more complex. V.M. Tolmatchoff pays special attention to the image of Eliot in Pound’s poetry (The Cantos) and the image of Pound in Eliot’s poetry (The Waste Land, Ash Wednesday), and also the issue of poetic influence of one author on another. Thus, for example, Ezra Pound influenced the appearance of the The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot, became in fact a co-author of it, and later was himself influenced by this poem in some of his cantos.