earticle

영어

One of the characteristics of a modern poet is his painful consciousness of alienation from his society. Ezra Pound, one of the pioneers of modern poetry, was also conscious of his dislocation from a larger reading public. His anxiety about his inadequacy, however, did not drive him to the dead-end of alienation from his audience, though he would not make a compromise with the contemporary philistine public. From the beginning, Pound incessantly tried to communicate with his audience. His earlier poetry, before the period of the Imagist movement, employed a plain style of writing to facilitate the understanding of his verses for his readers. As a kind of prescription for the disease of contemporary poetry, which was too sentimental and used too many redundant words, he gradually developed a new poetics of Imagism based on precise expression, condensation, and ellipsis, which he learned from the study of Romance and Oriental poetry. This new poetics used a juxtaposition of two or more phrases and sentences without any connecting or explanatory parts, so that it made his poetry hard to comprehend. Pound's new poetics was not a temporary tactic against the hostile public. It was a result of his tenacious endeavor for exact and compressed expressions in verse. Pound was a poet who forged not an exclusive but an inclusive audience for his poetry throughout his long poetic career.