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Hi all.

This thread is a continuation of the poetry reading group I started two weeks ago. The idea behind the reading group is to read through the 20th century chronologically, in five year increments, reading one collection of poetry for each period.

For 1905-1909, we decided to read Ezra Pound’s “Personae.” (Last week, for 1900-1904, we read Thomas Hardy’s “Poems of the Past and the Present.”)

As to be expected with Pound, this collection is pretty dense and will require some re-reading, at least for me. In it, you definitely see the stirrings of the high modernist sensibility: obscure allusions, fragmented stanzas, irregular lines, poems about isolation, madness, shifting of poetic voices, etc.

Yet, at the same time, I did get the feeling that this collection was slightly “behind the times.” The poet Basil Bunting said that Pound was decades behind the London poets when he arrived in Europe (which was only a year before this collection was published). During this period, the early stages of Imagism were underway, meaning a shorter and more precise type of poetry was coming to the fore.

In a way, I feel that the comment by Bunting rings true. The poems in “Personae” are verbose, containing antiquated, even sometimes sentimental, language. Really, Pound’s “personae” poetics just feels like Browning’s poetic project ramped up slightly.

The stand out poems for me were the Glaucus poem and “In Durance.” I feel like these two poems were the only ones that successfully balanced the various tonalities of Pound’s poetic vision. An honorable mention should go to “Masks” too. This poem hints at the ideas behind Pound’s “personae” (while also hinting at Yeats’ later poetics, which was greatly influenced by Pound).

Anyway, did anyone else read the collection? Feel free to talk about Pound’s poems here, or any other collections published between 1905 and 1909. Also, we can discuss the period more generally, artistically, historically, etc