The Poetics of Impersonality: T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound

by Maud Ellman and Maud Ellmann

T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound dominated English poetry and criticism in the first half of the twentieth century. At the center of their practice is what Maud Ellmann calls the poetics of impersonality. Ellmann's examination yields a set of superb readings of the major poems of the modernist canon.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0674678583
• ISBN13: 9780674678583
• Release Date: March 1988
• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Length: 224 Pages
• Weight: 0.95 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.5" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

splendidly theoretical

Ellman's book is one I return to as I teach Eliot and Pound. Her work is powerfully, and usefully, illuminating, especially in its examination of the interrelation between (aspects of) theory and literature. I especially admire her use of Freud and Bataille in her reading of "The Waste Land" (via the notions of the "uncanny" and the "abject"). Her readings do in fact read the poems instead of enacting the masturbatory fantasies that academics can sometimes fall prey to. This is an unjustly unknown book: Ellman's critical intelligence is staggering.