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Too often regarded as merely an experiment in language, an effort to bring the harsh alliterative resources of Anglo-Saxon prosody into modern English poetry, Ezra Pound's "The Seafarer" is a far more ideologically complex text than modernist scholars have assumed. When examined in conjunction with medievalist commentary and political reflections written by Pound for the English socialist magazine The New Age between 1911 and 1914, this celebrated Anglo-Saxon translation reveals itself to be not only deeply political but surprisingly socialist in its sympathies. By publishing "The Seafarer" and other writings in this radical publication, Pound affirmed his solidarity with striking English laborers, particularly what was understood to be their patriotic efforts to recover ancient Saxon liberties. He also gave provisional support to an Anglo-medievalist variant of socialism known as guild socialism, thereby establishing that his pre-war politics were more progressive and left-leaning than previously acknowledged.
Keywords: Pound / modernism / "Seafarer" / politics / socialism
Ezra Pound's pre-World War I medieval translations are the ugly ducklings of contemporary Pound scholarship. At a time when Pound's work is undergoing unprecedented socio-cultural scrutiny, these works find themselves snubbed. To the extent they are even discussed by critics, the poems are assigned strictly aesthetic importance, and the bulk of scholarship on them is more than twenty years old.1 This is particularly true of Pound's most celebrated pre-war translation - "The Seafarer." Although it has long been regarded as one of Pound's major "personae," a poem that gives expression to themes of manly virtue and heroic individual endeavor which were dear to the young American expatriate, analyses of the work have always focused on issues of language. Arguing that "The Seafarer" consistently sacrifices sense to sound, critics have concentrated on Pound's efforts to bring the harsh, alliterative resources of Anglo-Saxon prosody into modern English poetry. They have emphasized how the poem helped "break the pentameter" and thereby provided the "first heave," as Pound would later reflect in Canto 81, in the modernist poetic revolution.2 In contrast to Pound's translations for Cathay (1915) and Homage to Sextus Propertius (1919), which have been rightly perceived as major statements about World War I and British imperialism respectively, "The Seafarer" has been considered apolitical. Other than identifying a "fiercely antibourgeois" undercurrent (Alexander,...