Short Lit Response to Wallace Stevens/William Carlos Williams Vs. Ezra Pound

        Had I not been told that Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams had other professions other than writing I would not have been able to tell by simply reading their poetry. It is detectable that they think differently then Ezra Pound, but not detectable that they were not full-time writers. Their poetry has as much sustenance, if not more, then Pounds does due to Pound’s common inability to be solidly coherent at all times in his writings. It seems that Pound was trying to impress a certain elitist group when he wrote his continuation to Homer’s Odyssey along with many of his other poems geared at furthering the Mythological poetry of the past. This was ever clear with the number of footnotes needed in the Norton Anthology just for the common person to attempt to get through Pound’s relatively short continuations. When reading Stevens or Williams very few footnotes were added because there were very few references made to past works that required readers to read and/or know in order to understand. Wallace Stevens says “Death is the mother of beauty; hence from her, Alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams And our desires.” (287) This is not cryptic, it does not include words that come from another dialectic point from the past; it is simple and straight forward. It does not boast legal professional jargon nor stories of past clients, nor descriptions of how to run or better our lives. His job did not define his poetry, it provided him money to survive, and possibly a more level head. Pound’s sole career included writing and nothing else, it could then be remarked that possibly Pound was too engrossed in the literary world that he was becoming disconnected to humanity giving his writings a bias towards other writers and not the general public at large.



                                                                        Works Cited:

• Baym, Nina, and Robert S. Levine.The Norton Anthology of American Literature. D, New York, W.W. Norton & Co., 2012. Page. 287.