Chapter 6 - “Now time to go back to an effort of 1912”

Summary

This chapter tracks Pound’s plunge into Greek studies – especially focused on Sophocles – during his incarceration at St. Elizabeths after the Second World War; it examines his unpublished correspondence during this period as well as his also unpublished translation of the Sophoclean Elektra (1949). An opening reading of the Pisan Cantos (wr. 1945) argues that Pound explicitly ties the fate of his epic poem, and of American poetry tout court, to a re-engagement with Greek, and especially tragic, poetics. The bilingualism of his Elektra – the play is half in English, half in transliterated Greek – encodes its antithetical ambitions, one poetic and the other political, as Pound uses the translation on the one hand to devise a new prosody for his writing after the war, returning to the prosodic experiments of his early years, and on the other, to continue the fascist ghost theater of the Pisan Cantos.