https://www.biography.

com/people/ezra-pound-9445428

Ezra Pound was an expatriate American poet and critic, and a major figure in the early modernist
poetry movement. His contribution to poetry began with his development of Imagism, a movement
derived from classical Chinese and Japanese poetry, stressing clarity, precision and economy of
language. Pound worked in London during the early 20th century as foreign editor of several American
literary magazines, and helped discover and shape the work of contemporaries such as T. S. Eliot,
James Joyce, Robert Frost and Ernest Hemingway. Angered by the carnage of World War I, Pound lost
faith in Great Britain and blamed the war on usury and international capitalism. He moved to Italy in
1924 and throughout the 1930s and 1940s embraced Benito Mussolini's fascism, expressed support
for Adolf Hitler. During World War II, he was paid by the Italian government to make hundreds of
radio broadcasts criticizing the United States, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Jews, as a result of which he
was arrested in 1945 by American forces in Italy on charges of treason. He spent months in detention
in a U.S. military camp in Pisa. Pound began work on sections of The Cantos while in custody in Italy.
These parts were published as The Pisan Cantos (1948), for which he was awarded the Bollingen Prize
in 1949 by the Library of Congress, leading to enormous controversy. Largely due to a campaign by his
fellow writers, he was released from St. Elizabeths in 1958 and returned to live in Italy until his death.
Pound published his first book of poetry in 1908 in Venice titled A Lume Spento after Dante’s
Purgatorio. It’s still in the tradition of the Victoria Age and Pre-Raphaelite. At the very beginning of his
career, he was quite a traditional poet. Later on, he became an innovator in this field. There’s a close
connection between Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Ezra Pound. Pound inherited Provençal, Stilnovistic
and Dante tradition just like Rossetti. We can see that in the Donzella Beata. Donzella is the
translation of Rossetti’s Damozel.

Differences and similarities between the British Vorticism and the Italian Futurism, the letter led by
Marinetti:

VORTICISM was a short-lived modernist movement in British art and poetry of the early 20th century,
partly inspired by Cubism.
The movement was announced in 1914 in the first issue of BLAST, which contained its manifesto and
the movement's rejection of landscape and nudes in favour of a geometric style tending towards
abstraction. The Vorticism group has roots in the Bloomsbury Group, Cubism and Futurism. Though
the style grew out of Cubism, it is more closely related to Futurism in its embrace of dynamism, the
machine age and all things modern. However, Vorticism diverged from Futurism in the way it tried to
capture movement in an image. In a Vorticist painting modern life is shown as an array of bold lines
and harsh colours drawing the viewer's eye into the centre of the canvas. The name Vorticism was
given to the movement by Ezra Pound in 1913, although Lewis, usually seen as the central figure in the
movement, had been producing paintings in the same style for a year or so previously.
Because Vorticism was created as a backlash to Futurism, one of the best ways to describe the ideals
of the Vorticists is to compare them with the ideals of the Futurists. The Vorticist Manifesto,
contained within the pages of Blast, stated how much of "humanity was fleeing from the mechanized
world of science into an imaginary world" (Materer 20). Both the Futurists and Vorticists thought that
they were different from other artists, as they confronted the new aesthetic of technology instead of
retreating like the rest of the world into a universe of romantic nostalgia. As is written in the
manifesto in Blast, "curse with expletive the whirlwind the Britannic Aesthete" (Blast 15). The
Futurists however, according to the Vorticists, maintained the same old aesthetic in a disguised way,
describing the machine age in a style of "sentimentality and romance" (Materer 41).
http://joshuasperber.tripod.com/vorticism.htm
Vorticism was the trailblazing movement of Modernism led by James Joyce.

http://modjourn.org/render.php?view=mjp_object&id=mjp.2005.00.094
http://www.bl.uk/learning/histcitizen/21cc/counterculture/assaultonculture/blast/blast.html

Modernism: is a philosophical movement that, along with cultural trends and changes, arose from
wide-scale and far-reaching transformations in Western society during the late 19th and early 20th
centuries. Among the factors that shaped modernism were the development of modern industrial
societies and the rapid growth of cities, followed then by reactions of horror to World War I.
Modernism also rejected the certainty of Enlightenment thinking, and many modernists rejected
religious belief. Modernism, in general, includes the activities and creations of those who felt the
traditional forms of art, architecture, literature, religious faith, philosophy, social organization,
activities of daily life, and sciences, were becoming ill-fitted to their tasks and outdated in the new
economic, social, and political environment of an emerging fully industrialized world. The poet Ezra
Pound's 1934 injunction to "Make it new!" was the touchstone of the movement's approach towards
what it saw as the now obsolete culture of the past. In this spirit, its innovations, like the stream-of-
consciousness novel, atonal (or pantonal) and twelve-tone music, divisionist painting and abstract art,
all had precursors in the 19th century. A notable characteristic of modernism is self-consciousness and
irony concerning literary and social traditions, which often led to experiments with form, along with
the use of techniques that drew attention to the processes and materials used in creating a painting,
poem, building, etc. Modernism explicitly rejected the ideology of realism and made use of the works
of the past by the employment of reprise, incorporation, rewriting, recapitulation, revision and
parody. 1922: T.S. Elliot / Virginia Woolf / The Cantos by Ezra Pound.

FUTURISM was an artistic and social movement that originated in Italy in the early 20th century and
was founded in Milan in 1909. It emphasised speed, technology, youth, violence, and objects such as
the car, the airplane, and the industrial city. Its key figures were the Italians Filippo Tommaso
Marinetti, Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Gino Severini, Giacomo Balla, and Luigi Russolo. It glorified
modernity and aimed to liberate Italy from the weight of its past. Important Futurist works included
Marinetti's Manifesto of Futurism. The Futurists practiced in every medium of art, including painting,
sculpture, ceramics, graphic design, industrial design, interior design, urban design, theatre, film,
fashion, textiles, literature, music, architecture, and even cooking. To some extent Futurism
influenced the art movements Art Deco, Constructivism, Surrealism, Dada, and to a greater degree
Precisionism, Rayonism, and Vorticism.

Donzella Beata has 3 Stanzas, each composed of 6 lines [sestina]. The second stanza is composed of 7
lines. At the first approach, can we find analogies/similarities with Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s? Yes, in
the second Stanza. The syntax is quite complicated. From an aesthetic point of view, this poem
represents the continuity with the past tradition [Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s movement – archaism –
sophisticated written grammatical forms] and at the same time it distances itself from that tradition.
We find this theory in the Anxiety of Influence written by Harold Bloom published in 1973.

The Anxiety of Influence: Bloom's central thesis is that poets are hindered in their creative process by
the ambiguous relationship they necessarily maintained with precursor poets. While admitting the
influence of extra literary experience on every poet, he argues that "the poet in a poet" is inspired to
write by reading another poet's poetry and will tend to produce work that is in danger of being
derivative of existing poetry, and, therefore, weak. Because poets historically emphasize an original
poetic vision in order to guarantee their survival into posterity (i.e., to guarantee that future readers
will not allow them to be forgotten), the influence of precursor poets inspires a sense of anxiety in
living poets. Thus Bloom attempts to work out the process by which the small minority of 'strong'
poets manage to create original work in spite of the pressure of influence. Before writing this book,
Bloom spent a decade studying the Romantic poets of the early nineteenth century. This is reflected in
the emphasis given to those poets and their struggle with the influence of John Milton. Bloom claimed
that influence was particularly important for post-enlightenment poets. Conversely, he suggested that
influence might have been less of a problem for such poets as Shakespeare and Ben Jonson. Bloom
since has changed his mind, and the most recent editions of The Anxiety of Influence include a preface
claiming that Shakespeare was troubled early in his career by the influence of Christopher Marlowe.
The book itself is divided into six major categories, called "six revisionary ratios" by Bloom. They are
clinamen, tessera, kenosis, daemonization, askesis, and apophrades. The theory derives from
Freudian theories [Oedipus’s theory] and Bloom calls the Young Poet, Ephebe which means young
man in Greek.

DONZELLA BEATA

Era mea
In qua terra
Dulce myrti floribus
Rosa amoris
Via erroris
Ad te coram veniam?

We have an image that echoes The Blessed Damozel by Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

Soul [echoes the idea of twin souls – reference to Rossetti’s],

Caught in the rose-hued mesh [: trama tinta di sfumatura di rosa – erotic detail]
Of o’er fair [: bellissima] earthly flesh [: carne terrena – difference from Rossetti’s – expresses physical
detail],
Stooped you this thing [object of the period – complex syntax] to bear [verb of the period – complex
syntax]
Again for me [rhetorical question] ? And be
Rare light to me [: to be a guiding light], gold-white [reference to Rossetti’s chromaticism]
In the shadowy path [here on Earth- even though not openly declared as in Rossetti’s] I tread [:
sopportare] ?

Surely a bolder maid [has a different stylistic value than using the word ‘girl’] art thou [archaism –
reference to Rossetti’s]
Than one in tearful, fearful longing [: attesa piena di pianti e spaventosa – reference to Rossetti’s “I
saw her smile / tears”]
That should wait
Lily-cinctured [reference to Rossetti’s] at the gate
Of high heaven, Star-diadem’d [Reference to Rossetti’s – similar image of celestial crown]
Crying that I should come to thee [: che piange / implora che io ti raggiunga].

(A Lume spento, 1908)