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Reviewed by:
  • Ezra Pound and the Visual Culture of Modernism
  • Ronald Bush
Ezra Pound and the Visual Culture of Modernism. Rebecca Beasley. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Pp. xiv + 221. $85.00 (cloth).

Rebbecca Beasley’s Ezra Pound and the Visual Culture of Modernism stands comparison with Robert Spoo and Omar Pound’s Ezra and Dorothy Pound: Letters in Captivity, 1945–1946 (1999) and Margaret Fisher’s Ezra Pound’s Radio Operas: The BBC Experiments, 1931–1933 (2002) among the most significant books on Pound published in the last ten years. It is especially impressive in that it combines an expert account of Pound’s own intentions (supported by original archival scholarship) with a sophisticated analysis of his cultural significance. To get both things right in the same discussion represents a considerable achievement, for they pull in opposite directions—the first toward dissolving the critical faculties in empathy, the second toward the historian’s cold eye. In modernist studies, where the work of every major author corresponds to an elaborate private phantasmagoria that requires years to understand, this kind of stereoscopic vision is as rare as it is useful.

Beasley’s introduction announces its intention to “contribute to the recovery of a history of modernism in which the revolutionary rhetoric of the avant-garde, appearing first in the visual arts” can be read not only on its own terms “but rather as having a particular political rhetoric” (9). Toward this end she explores Pound’s aesthetic development in the light of recent investigations of modernist painting, concentrating on moments in which ideological pressure caused the apparent immediacy of the visual arts to be “valued first as an expression of subjectivity, then as the corollary of anarchist direct action, and finally the cult of efficiency” that we associate with communist and fascist aesthetics (10). She is especially good at explaining the significance of what has always seemed Pound’s unlikely flirtation with dadaism, and her account of Pound’s fugitive musings about art and the marketplace goes a long way toward dissolving his aura of titanic idiosyncrasy. What remains is a portrait of a theorist and practitioner fully involved with questions concerning art’s relation to society—questions that have dominated our own discussions of modernity ever since the landmark studies of Peter Bürger and Andreas Huyssen in the 1980s.

Beasely begins with an impressive demonstration of the way Pound’s early poetry and prose (much of the latter still unpublished) is affiliated with the nineteenth-century American aesthetic movement in painting. Out of this emerges a picture of the pre-vorticist Pound as a budding art critic reminiscent of his younger contemporary John Ashbery. Pound, she demonstrates, frequented the circles of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, then recently re-energized by Thomas Eakins. Beasley resurrects a sheaf of Pound’s unpublished art criticism from this period and proceeds to show that Pound deployed literary analogues of the aesthetes’ pure color to resist utilitarian claims on art at the same time as he involved himself in the nineteenth-century beginnings of a reaction against formalism as a primary value. (The young Pound drew distinctions between art as “an ornament” and a “key” (48), but Beasely, choosing not to elaborate his contemporary involvement in, for example, neoplatonism, limits her exploration of the odd but never unimportant reaches of his antiformalist impulse.) Pound deployed aestheticism, she argues, to resist not only the University of Pennsylvania’s preoccupation with literary philology but also [End Page 573] the more general culture of professionalism in which the university was deeply implicated. At the same time, she demonstrates, Pound was on his way toward becoming self-conscious of the paradox that the aestheticism of Whistler (with whom he was engaged both earlier and more profoundly than most of us have realized [see previous review]) served both “as an alternative to the commodity, to the materialist life, and at the same time as the pre-eminent commodity, the major sign of wealth and status” (24).

Beasely then rehearses the story of Pound, imagism, and vorticism. The territory here is more familiar, but Beasely’s contributions, both in fleshing out the terms of his involvement and...

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