Ezra Pound and Modernism: The Irish Factor

That Ezra Pound was the chief architect of Modernism in English and American poetry is well established. So, too, is the fact that in T. S. Eliot he discovered a peer, whose early career he fostered. Together, Pound and Eliot defined what Modern Poetry meant. But they also had peers in two great Irish writers: Yeats in poetry and Joyce in fiction. With them, they were major shapers of the Modernist style. The Age of Modernism was dominated by American and Irish writers who took part in reshaping the English literary tradition in the twentieth century. "Ezra Pound and Modernism" was the topic of the 25th Ezra Pound International Conference in Dublin in July of 2013, and the papers selected for this volume clearly demonstrate that.

Modernism had both American and Irish roots. Modernism in English literature had its origins in the work of Irish and American writers. Pound was the chief advocate of a new literary style in English, which the writings of Yeats, Joyce, and T. S. Eliot would articulate. Ulysses and The Waste Land, published in the same year, 1922, would become its complex masterpieces, still challenging readers after nearly a century, and still unsurpassed.