Eliot’s and Pound’s Declensions of the Past and Present: When Time Becomes Space

Abstract

[EN]The aim of this paper is to analyze the way in which Pound’s and Eliot’s Modernist poetics assume the task of what Longenbach calls the “existential” historian who endeavors in Bradley’s words “to breathe the life of the present into the death of the past.” It argues that stylistically, this approach of time does away with the temporal dimension inherent in a literary text and privileges instead spatiality, which is a characteristic feature of the figurative arts. In the first instance it analyzes the modernist conception of newness and the relationship between past and present, and in the second part it argues that the required technique to reflect the conception of time as a palimpsest together with the non-mimetic aesthetics of modernist poetics transform the modern epic into primarily a spatial poems