Ezra Pound's Early Verse and Lyric Tradition: A Jargoner's Apprenticeship

Traces the lyricism and musicality in Pound's early verse through to his radical Modernist style. Robert Stark argues that Pound learned how to write poetry more or less as if it was a foreign tongue, a poetic 'jargon' with a unique lexicon, grammar, and even morphology. Stark contextualizes Pound's poetic craft by examining his relationship to the Mediaeval and Classical originators of the methods he employs and by considering the practice and criticism of his immediate Victorian and Romantic predecessors. He explores the influence of poets such as François Villon, Guido Cavalcanti, Robert Burns, Robert Browning, Algernon Charles Swinburne and Walt Whitman on Pound's lyrical style. For Stark, Pound's poly-vocalism arises out of his interest in dialect and, above all, in the the acoustic qualities of language.