(1) Typify Pound’s violation of English grammar and syntax by analyzing the grammar of some of his cantos.
(2) Summarize the force of several of the more daring modern poets, including Wallace Stevens, Hart Crane, and Ezra Pound. Determine how subtle poetic controls channel verse energy into emergent image and theme. Consider, for example, Pound’s re-creation of Odysseus’ voyage or the dramatic monologue “The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter.”
(3) Characterize elements of parody in “Envoi,” which Pound wrote as a reply to Edmund Waller’s romantic “Go, Lovely Rose,” a tribute to beauty.
(4) Contrast the emotion in Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum Est,” T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, W. H. Auden’s “The Unknown Citizen,” Robinson Jeffers’s “Shine, Perishing Republic,” or William Butler Yeats’s “The Second Coming” with Pound’s first canto of Hugh Selwyn Mauberley: Life and Contacts. Express the post war generation’s fear of disintegration and decay.
(5) Is any of Pound’s poetry confessional? If so, discuss those poetic lines that are. What makes them confessional?
