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ENG 564
Pawlowski
the decline. The moment was much the same for art, especially
art of the coming age. This situation could not be truer than in
Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot, who exemplify the modern ideal, not
Here lies a key that can be useful in decoding how these poets
dynamic way (Spenser and Krauze). Through this process, the two
played out in the works and ideas of the three Modernist poets.
Yeats and Pound take the role of oppositional forces within the
Yeats being tied strongly to the previous age and more reserved
themes and the way in which each poet deals with them in their
works. The themes that will be explored here are the specific
challenging one another, setting the old against the new, and
process.
is kept from his stone / the weaver is kept from his loom
does not eat his own grain / the girl’s needle goes blunt
he can. When describing the people, his lines are even free of
the Round Tower, they come to realize that tower and the
heavens and the earth, the celestial bodies are not the literal
dream moment from the supernal nature of the tower. The message
images, where the sun beats, / And the dead tree gives
world after the Great War in visceral terms that create a sense
war world. The question posed about the roots not only asks what
literal life might grow from this scene of tragedy, but also
the least, but Eliot is able to make the depiction of the roots
among the stones both a symbol and an image at once. Where Pound
of the real and Yeats is revealing the abstract truths that lie
behind all common things, Eliot is showing that the concrete and
to blur the concrete and the abstract is from his poem The Love
and skills, such as farming and masonry, which have been handed
spirit, but merely locked away in a tomb, the barley his only
manifestation.
Again, this positivist outlook only seems to conflict with
gained via such paths just as valuable as any other. His poem
vision at the end of the poem (Yeats 172). Where Pound is only
concerned with what humanity can learn from history and the
material world, Yeats knows the supernatural world holds keys to
shows his belief in a world beyond the next. Though rather than
the poem: the drowning sailor, the Lady of Situations, the three
staves, the wheel, and the rest, all come together to reveal a
time. His study of Hegel showed him how this occurs through the
initiated this process by his own hands. Yeats, Irish born, with
Pound wished to see in the Modern, but in some ways relied too
much for the average person to handle. Pound saw much in their
Pound and Yeats broke each other’s works down, Pound handed
Eliot the superior remaining pieces and showed him how to put
them together. Eliot was the perfect choice for this synthesis.
of the movement can be found than Yeats, Pound and Eliot. During
emerge victorious.
Works Cited
1963. Print.
Pound, Ezra. The Cantos of Ezra Pound. New York: New Directions,
1995. Print.
1996. Print.
Print.