From Epitaph to Obituary: The Death Politics of T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound

This essay explores how modernist writers adopted and adapted the epitaph, the obituary, and the memoir. In particular, posthumous homages by Eliot and Pound to Virginia Woolf, Henry James, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, and James Joyce show the two modernist poets reworking traditional memorial genres for their own purposes, by using such age-old salutes to dead colleagues to position themselves and their generation within literary history and the canon.