The Cultural Influence and Stylistic Evolution in Pound's Poetry

The cultural influence of Pound

The poet Pound's works are complex and heterogeneous, and in fact expresses a peculiarity of his poetry: the differentiated cultural influence.

The poems written between 1908 and 1920 (remember Personae, Ripostes, Lustra and the famous Hugh Selwyn Mauberley) bring significant traces of his rediscovery of Provencal and stilnovistic poetry, of his conscious admiration for French-style authors like Flaubert and, Above all, of his active participation in the literary movements of time.

The main issues addressed by the poet are the concept of poetry as a synthesis of knowledge of time, pluralism and plurilingualism.

The encounter with Eastern culture

Another important event in Pound's intellectual career is his encounter with Chinese and Japanese culture, leading to direct knowledge of key Confucian texts and an active confrontation with Oriental philosophy.
Thanks to the encounter with Oriental culture, Pound's main work, the Cantos, was inspired.

The work is fragmentary but united, it is a kind of ambitious history of humanity in which different and remote epochs and civilizations overlap and intertwine around a singular line of conduct: the conviction that the root of every evil, of every decadence and Corruption is nested in the practice of wear, and thus in the fifteenth century of banks and bankers.

From a stylistic standpoint, the work is written on the Dante's Comedy model and contains different registers, languages and styles: it is the apotheosis of plurilingualism, which combines the ossymoron of diversity and unity, following with different languages a single conductive thread.