On the Trope of Black Images and American Historical Writing in Pound’s Cantos

Abstract

Abstract: Black images first appear in Cantos XXI, the very Canto in which the motif of American history is presented for the first time. In this part of The Cantos where his reference to American history surfaces, Pound delineates a tragicomic “Africanist Presence.” In fact, Pound not only wrote about blacks in The Cantos, but also created “the back corridors” for them, so that different types of blacks crowded into the vast space of this inclusive poetic text. The reason that black images could find their way into Pound’s poems has a lot to do with his ideal of writing a “secret history” of America that would be personal, marginal, and multiple. In The Cantos, black image is the synecdoche for slavery and racism, the self-reflection of the darkness of the White, the symbol of the complex identity of the marginal man, and the metaphor of modern man’s conflicting identity. Therefore, as psychological, social, political and literary signs, blacks are essential to Pound’s modernist narrative perspective and literary accomplishment.

Key words: Ezra Pound, The Cantos, black images, trope, historical writing

Wang Zhuo. On the Trope of Black Images and American Historical Writing in Pound’s Cantos[J]. Foreign Literature Studies, 2019, 41(3): 92-107.

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