by Pericles Lewis Ezra Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro” of 1911, reads, in its entirety: The apparition of these faces in the crowd; Petals on a wet, black bough. The juxtaposition of two images, the travelers on the subway platform and the flower petals, offers what Pound called “direct treatment.” The sparseness of… Continue Reading In a Station of the Metro
Tag: Pericles Lewis
Ezra Pound
Biography by Anthony Domestico and Pericles Lewis Critic, poet, impresario, and propagandist, Ezra Pound (1885-1972) was one of the shaping forces of modernism, with connections to the era’s most influential writers of prose and poetry. In championing the liberatory effects of free verse and in skillfully practicing the techniques of collage and allusion, Pound placed a… Continue Reading Ezra Pound
Kermesse
Wyndham Lewis’s painting Kermesse (1912) exemplifies the patterns of lines, arcs, and other geometric shapes of Vorticist art, which sometimes seem purely non-representational but often suggest the rapid movement of bodies or machines. The painting, named after a Flemish peasant dance, represents a radically mechanized alternative to Matisse’s graceful, flowing paintings of dancers. The huge… Continue Reading Kermesse
BLAST
by Pericles Lewis Ezra Pound collaborated with Wyndham Lewis on the first issue of the journal BLAST, published less than a month before the outbreak of the first world war (July 1914). The volume contained a manifesto, a few of Pound’s less successful poems, reproductions of Vorticist paintings, the first draft of Ford Madox Ford’s… Continue Reading BLAST
Lady Chatterly’s Lover
by Pericles Lewis Like E.M. Forster’s Maurice, Lawrence’s most controversial novel, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, could not be published as written in England during his lifetime. Privately printed in Italy in 1928, the novel revolves like Maurice around the relationship between an upper-class figure and a game-keeper. Here, the upper-class lover is a woman, Lady Chatterley,… Continue Reading Lady Chatterly’s Lover
D.H. Lawrence
Biography by Pericles Lewis A prolific poet, painter, and essayist, D.H. Lawrence (1885-1930) is today best known for his novels, which remain popular with a general reading public in part because he maintained conventional syntax and grammar and fairly straightforward plots, such as the chronicle of several generations in the life of a family. Thematically, however,… Continue Reading D.H. Lawrence
Franz Kafka
Biography by Pericles Lewis The works of Franz Kafka (1883-1924) seek to pare language and experience down to the elemental. Kafka, a Czech Jew who wrote in German, worked for an insurance company (as did Wallace Stevens on the other side of the Atlantic, but it seems to have done Stevens less harm). He died… Continue Reading Franz Kafka
Finnegans Wake
by Pericles Lewis Throughout the 1930s, James Joyce published excerpts of Finnegans Wake, which combined the anarchic energies of the avant-garde with the epic ambitions of high modernism. The Wake tells of a mythical world, bearing some resemblance to the Dublin of Ulysses, but dreamed of by a sleeping, drunken man, possibly a giant, possibly… Continue Reading Finnegans Wake
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Like T.S. Eliot’s “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), though a work of youth, seems prematurely aged. Joyce treats his fictional version of his younger self with a mixture of irony and sympathy. The novel tells the story of Stephen Dedalus, a young Irishman,… Continue Reading A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Ulysses
by Pericles Lewis “It is a book to which we are all indebted and from which none of us can escape,” wrote T. S. Eliot of James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922).[1] Joyce’s novel describes a day in the life of an advertising canvasser in pre-war Dublin, drawing implicit parallels between his adventures and those described in… Continue Reading Ulysses