Poetics: Jesse Nathan, "Pound's Browning: Hang It All"

Influence fascinates me. Ubiquitous, sometimes almost invisible, sometimes flagrantly obvious, always working on us. Literary texts, perhaps particularly poems, are sites of influence performance. A poet establishes priorities by rhyming with certain elements of the past. This dissertation considers models and modes of influence operating between twentieth-century American poets and the specific Victorian precursors to which they look back. Each chapter reads a Victorian poet and a modernist, anatomizing the bridge between them. Each chapter consists of a formalist reading of the nineteenth-century poet’s poetry, placed in the light of a modernist’s reading of the Victorian’s poetry. The selection I wish to focus on for the workshop comes from the middle of my chapter “Pound’s Browning: Hang It All.” 
The critical insight in this chapter is that Pound, right from the beginning, finds in Browning’s Sordello a method for collapsing and traversing history, such that literary traditions can be mined and imbued with productive illusions of simultaneity. Pound is not interested in a separation from the past, but rather in a re-use and filtering of both the distant and immediate past. He is in love with both. Browning sets Pound’s imagination free to roam history, to drop through wormholes that lead from the United States circa 1900 to Italy in the thirteenth century.