Reading Pound Reading: Modernism After Nietzsche

This book examines Ezra Pound’s own critical writing in an effort to establish its links both to 19th-century thought and to modern critical movements ranging from New Criticism to post-structuralism. In Reading Pound Reading, Kathryne Lindberg argues that traditional Modernist views of Pound held by the literary academy fail to describe the work of a writer who defied all literary boundaries—including the literary practices and tenets of “modernism.” Because Pound had no coherent aesthetics—he read against ideas and opposed generalizations—he adapted reading strategies from discourses as varied as philosophy, anthropology, sinology, entymology, physics, and politics. Through a careful analysis of Pound’s often forgotten literary and cultural criticism, Lindberg reveals the elements it shares with certain Nietzschean habits of reading, and uncovers surprising links with such unlikely accomplices as Emerson, Whitman, Williams, and Charles Olson. Under this scrutiny, Pound’s cultural criticism yields a kind of reading that is at once avant-garde, neo-Nietzschean, and undeniably American.