Was Ezra Pound a New Historicist? Poetry and poetics in the age of globalization

This essay explores the family resemblance between the poetics of Ezra Pound and the critical methodology of New Historicism. I argue that such a resemblance does not simply per-Lain to the relationship between Pound and the New Historicists; it alternatively functions as an organizational principle in each of their works. whether in Pound's poetry or in a New Historicist's critical work, the vast array of materials is often assembled by means of an apparent family resemblance among the Luminous Details. The larger implication of this compositional method becomes clear when we consider a resemblance at another level: both Pound's and the New Historicist's works are global in scale-they tend to use Luminous Details to reveal large pictures of a society or culture. In Pound's words, it is to use "a sufficient phalanx of particulars" to capture recurring paideumatic structures of civilization; in New Historicist terms, it is to put tiny tissues of textual traces under a microscopic lens in order to reveal a picture of a "sublime confrontation between a total artist and a totalizing society." This concern with the passage from a local detail to a global panorama will put both Pound and the New Historicists at the center of our current discourse of globalization. Pound's lifelong commitment to designing a pan-cultural program and New Historicism's recent turn to the study of cultural mobility further suggest that the New Historicists share with Pound a vision not only for a cultural poetics but also for a poetry that circulates and exchanges meanings across cultures.