Sean Pryor

Diverse modernist poems, far from advertising a capacity to prefigure utopia or save society, understand themselves to be complicit in the unhappiness and injustice of an imperfect or fallen world. Combining analysis of technical devices and aesthetic values with broader accounts of contemporary critical debates, social contexts, and political history, this book offers a formalist argument about how these poems understand themselves and their situation, and a historicist argument about the meanings of their forms. The poetry of the canonical modernists T. S. Eliot, Mina Loy, and Wallace Stevens is placed alongside the poetry of Ford Madox Ford, better known for his novels and his criticism, and the poetry of Joseph Macleod, whose work has been largely forgotten. Focusing on the years from 1914 to 1930, the book offers a new account of a crucial moment in the history of British and American modernism.

Poetry, Modernism, and an Imperfect World

David Trotter

Writing, Medium, Machine: Modern Technographies is a collection of thirteen essays by leading scholars which explores the mutual determination of forms of writing and forms of technology in modern literature. The essays unfold from a variety of historical and theoretical perspectives the proposition that literature is not less but more mechanical than other forms of writing: a transfigurative ideal machine. The collection breaks new ground archaeologically, unearthing representations in literature and film of a whole range of decisive technologies from the stereopticon through census-and slot-machines to the stock ticker, and from the Telex to the manipulation of genetic code and the screens which increasingly mediate our access to the world and to each other. It also contributes significantly to critical and cultural theory by investigating key concepts which articulate the relation between writing and technology: number, measure, encoding, encryption, the archive, the interface. Technography is not just a modern matter, a feature of texts that happen to arise in a world full of machinery and pay attention to that machinery in various ways. But the mediation of other machines has beyond doubt assisted literature to imagine and start to become the ideal machine it is always aspiring to be. Contributors: Ruth Abbott, John Attridge, Kasia Boddy, Mark Byron, Beci Carver, Steven Connor, Esther Leslie, Robbie Moore, Julian Murphet, James Purdon, Sean Pryor, Paul Sheehan, Kristen Treen. This work was published by Saint Philip Street Press pursuant to a Creative Commons license permitting commercial use. All rights not granted by the work's license are retained by the author or authors.

Modern Technographies

Writing, Medium, Machine

Emphasizing the interplay of aesthetic forms and religious modes, Sean Pryor's ambitious study takes up the endlessly reiterated longing for paradise that features throughout the works of W. B. Yeats and Ezra Pound. Throughout his study, Pryor argues that Yeats and Pound reconceive the quest for paradise as a quest for a new kind of poetry, a journey that Pryor traces by analysing unpublished manuscript drafts and newly published drafts that have received little attention.

W.B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, and the Poetry of Paradise

Emphasizing the interplay of aesthetic forms and religious modes, Sean Pryor's ambitious study takes up the endlessly reiterated longing for paradise that features throughout the works of W. B. Yeats and Ezra Pound. Yeats and Pound define poetry in terms of paradise and paradise in terms of poetry, Pryor suggests, and these complex interconnections fundamentally shape the development of their art. Even as he maps the shared influences and intellectual interests of Yeats and Pound, and highlights those moments when their poetic theories converge, Pryor's discussion of their poems' profound formal and conceptual differences uncovers the distinctive ways each writer imagines the divine, the good, the beautiful, or the satisfaction of desire. Throughout his study, Pryor argues that Yeats and Pound reconceive the quest for paradise as a quest for a new kind of poetry, a journey that Pryor traces by analysing unpublished manuscript drafts and newly published drafts that have received little attention. For Yeats and Pound, the journey towards a paradisal poetic becomes a never-ending quest, at once self-defeating and self-fulfilling - a formulation that has implications not only for the work of these two poets but for the study of modernist literature.

Alec Marsh

Alex Niven

Peter Nicholls

Richard Parker

Mark Steven

Alexander Howard

Roxana Preda

Michael Kindellan

Alex Pestell

Mark Byron

James Dowthwaite

Archie Henderson

Miranda Hickman

Kristin Grogan

GLOSSATOR 10 (2018) Astern in the Dinghy: Commentaries on Ezra’s Pound’s Thrones de los Cantares 96-109 Edited by Alexander Howard You in the dinghy (piccioletta) astern there! (CIX/788) Mr. Pound Goes to Washington Alexander Howard (University of Sydney) Some Contexts for Canto XCVI Richard Parker (University of Surrey) Gold and/or Humaneness: Pound’s Vision of Civilization in Canto XCVII Roxana Preda (University of Edinburgh) Hilarious Commentary: Ezra Pound’s Canto XCVIII Peter Nicholls (New York University) “Tinkle, tinkle, two tongues”: Sound, Sign, Canto XCIX Michael Kindellan (University of Sheffield) “In the intellect possible”: Revisionism and Aesopian Language in Canto C Alex Pestell (Independent Scholar) Deep Rustication in Canto CI Mark Byron (University of Sydney) Shipwrecks and Mountaintops: Notes on Canto CII Mark Steven (University of Exeter) Revised Intentions: James Buchanan and the Antebellum White House in Canto CIII James Dowthwaite (University of Göttingen) Exploring Permanent Values: Canto CIV Archie Henderson (Independent Scholar) Canto CV: A Divagation? Alec Marsh (Muhlenberg College) So Slow: Canto CVI Sean Pryor (University of New South Wales) ‘The clearest mind ever in England’: Pound’s Late Paradisal in Canto CVII Miranda Hickman (McGill University) Three Ways of Looking at a Canto: Navigating Canto CVIII Kristin Grogan (Exeter College, University of Oxford) ‘To the king onely to put value’: Monarchy and Commons in Pound’s Canto CIX Alex Niven (University of Newcastle)

Glossator 10: Thrones

Astern in the Dinghy: Commentaries on Ezra’s Pound’s Thrones de los Cantares XCVI—CIX

Sean Pryor

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