Nation Poetry Month Celebration (Pt.3): Pound & Eliot

I'll never forget the first time I read Ezra Pound's In a Station at The Metro. The words startled me, like the sound of a siren. I nearly jumped out of my seat. The image Pound had created was so clear in my mind that although I was sitting in the quiet corner of a bland classroom, I felt myself to be in a crowded station, at the metro.

It wasn't until that poem that I understood words to be wood and writing to be a craft, something you work at slowly but surely, taking your time, until you're finally skilled enough to be able to whittle syllables into nothing but pure imagery--and manipulate a reader's mind any which way you want.

Because the poem that came after In a Station at The Metro in the anthology I was reading at the time was The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound have always gone hand-in-hand in my mind. Although I have a particular affinity to Pound, Eliot has stolen the breath from my lungs nearly as much as his mentor. He attacks language with a primal energy, his libido pumping loudly in the background of each of his poems, while still adhering to a sense of structure and rhythm. I get the same goose bumps reading Eliot as I get listening to Miles Davis.

The following links are two gems I found hiding in The Paris Review, old interviews by Donald Hall of both Eliot and Pound. They delve into the relationship Pound and Eliot shared, the work of both, and provide a small window into the shared mind of two master craftsmen.


The Art of Poetry No. 1, T.S. Eliot

The Art of Poetry No. 5, Ezra Pound