Conclusion

Summary

He is very likely, in ways controversy still hides, the contemporary of our grandchildren.

—Hugh Kenner (1971)

I shall survive as a curiosity. The art of letters will come to an end before A.D. 2000.

—Ezra Pound (1910)

IN ORALITY AND LITERACY: The Technologizing of the Word (1982), Walter Ong developed his theory of “secondary orality,” a condition whereby the written word ceases to be the primary means by which a culture exchanges ideas and information. Ong couldn't, in 1982, have foreseen our twenty-first-century world where readers spend more time in front of screens than they do in the pages of books; a world where literature survives, but—almost reverting to its condition in the medieval or ancient worlds—increasingly does so as an art valued principally by elite culture. Ong couldn't have foreseen it, but in a curious way Pound did. The epigraph above comes from a letter he sent to his mother, at a time when his aspirations still absolutely eclipsed his accomplishments. The letter caught the attention of Mary Ellis Gibson, who quotes it at length:

I shall survive as a curiosity. The art of letters will come to an end before A.D. 2000 and there will be a sort of artistic dark ages till about A.D. 2700.

The last monument will be a bombastic, rhetorical epic wherethrough will move Marconi, Pierpont Morgan, Bleriot, Levavasour [sic] Latham, Peary [sic], Dr. Cook, etc. clothed in the heroic manner of Greek imitation…. I shall write it myself if threatened with actual starvation.

In 1910, a twenty-five-year-old Pound was already imagining himself as a kind of Mauberley, born too late, a kind of relic living in a society that no longer values the art to which he has dedicated his life (“He strove to resuscitate the dead art / of Poetry”). He was also imagining that an epic poem for his time would necessarily include politics, economics, and history. He was anticipating, in other words, the kinds of trouble that awaited him, and awaited us. The story of Pound's reception is very much the story of our arguments with ourselves. We continue to debate the power of his work in large part because we remain uncertain about what it is we want from a great poet.