Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot

Ezra Pound’s “The River Merchant’s Wife” and “The Cantos”

Out of the two works by Ezra Pound that we were assigned, I favored “The River Merchant’s Wife.” Not only was this poem much more straight forward, but it was also easier to relate to on a person level than “The Cantos.” I enjoyed how the content of “The River Merchant’s Wife” guides the reader through the speaker’s youth. At first, the speaker recalls meeting an anonymous person while playing outside. The next stanza reveals that the speaker is fourteen years old. In the third stanza, he’s fifteen and then sixteen. Finally, in the last stanza, he awaits the return of his loved one whom he met at the very beginning of the poem. Everything is tied together through the timeline of the speaker’s life. I also thought that Pound did a beautiful job with his usage of details at the end of his this work. Because I have not read Homer’s Odyssey in six years, I had a difficult time following “The Cantos.” I did not have a personal reaction while reading it for this reason.


T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” “Sweeney Among the Nightingales,” and “The Hollow Men”

“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”
This poem interested me the most out of everything that we read this week. I have always enjoyed reading modern literature, especially anything dealing with introspection and the human psyche. In “The Love Song,” the speaker struggles socially with women. The seemingly impossible task of speaking to a woman he does not know appears to have tainted his ego. This minute task weighs so heavily on his mind that any action toward accomplishing it might “disturb the universe.” A quote in this work that stood out to me the most was “In a minute there is time for decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.” This statement is applicable to life in a variety of ways, especially when dealing with big decisions. Because I am a junior, I think more and more about what I want to do when I get out of college every day. I can empathize with the speaker’s frustration and indecisiveness.

“Sweeney Among the Nightingales”
Even after reading the introductory explanation, I did not get a whole lot out of this poem. Eliot’s references to rape seem very subtle to me. Every action or progression in the poem seems carefully written, almost discrete. Toward the end of the work, Eliot does an exceptional job describing Philomela’s transformation into a nightingale.

“The Hollow Men”
This work by Eliot stood out to me as one of his most conclusive and meaningful works that we read. To me, Eliot is stating that people tend to hide their true selves from others. I found his final statements regarding this shameful tendency to be quite powerful. He writes “This is the way the world will end…Not with a bang but a whimper.” Perhaps, the visage that we, as a human race, put up every day to protect ourselves from the scrutiny of our own kind will eventually cause our inevitable destruction.