ABSTRACT

This chapter focuses on Ezra Pound’s engagement with music, brought into focus in the Pisan Cantos. Towards the end of World War II, Pound was held as a US traitor in a prisoner of war camp outside Pisa. As well as Pound’s longstanding relationships with musicians and practical music making, Pound’s poetry and theories of poetry were deeply indebted to music. It is in The Cantos that Pound’s practical and theoretical engagement with music is most evident. The chapter considers some of the ways in which Pound suggested we might hear poetry and his own practice when he read his poetry aloud, particularly in terms of what Katherine Ruth Heyman called three-dimensional rhythm: “flow of the length of the vowels,” “dynamic accent,” and “chromatic stress.” It explores W. B. Yeats’s experiments in “Speaking to the Psaltery” with Arnold Dolmetsch and Florence Farr.