Pound did, very consciously, allow for lots of contingency
in the development of the poem (your "transpiration"--bad word!--"of
real-world events"). At a basic structural-mythic level,
the poem is about an Odyssean mind attempting to impose
order on chaos, or attempting to rescue the order glimpsed
within the chaos. Since this structure is well-known and
often remarked upon in the literature, I can't help wondering
what you mean to say or show that is new. In other words,
the thesis statement you give below sounds too general, or
like rediscovery of the wheel. Perhaps you can refine it
to suggest your original take on all this? I'd like to get
a better idea of what you could have done in your fifty pages.
==Dan Pearlman
At 07:55 PM 6/2/98 -0400, you wrote:
>I've been reading Hugh Kenner's _The Pound Era_, Peter Makin's _Pound's
>Cantos_, and Ezra Pound's _Cantos_ (I-XXX); I just picked upWilliam
>Cookson's _A Guide to the Cantos of Ezra Pound_, George Kearns' _The Cantos_
>and a couple other books on the subject.
>
>My thesis statement (at first to be explained in a 3 page prospectus and
>later in a 50 page thesis):
>
>Ezra Pound's Vorticism, as illustrated in Cantos I - XXX, employs the use of
>"subject-rhymes," in the form of historical and imagistic relations, where
>meanings develop as the context changes; with this in mind, the concept of
>order, itself, has become an issue (focus / theme) of Cantos -- appearing to
>be chaotic, their structure arises like a vortex, assuming the form of the
>transpiration of real-world events.
>
>I welcome any and all ideas.
>
>
>
>David Centrone
>
Dan Pearlman Office: Department of English
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