| This dissertation examines the desires that Ezra Pound and Basil Bunting had for their later poetry, and the ultimate failure of poetry to fully realize these desires. It investigates the poetic styles and strategies of Pound's Rock-Drill and Thrones through theoretical, philosophical, and political lenses in order to both outline his poetic project in the later stages of his life, and to chart how poetry approaches but does not finally enact that project. It argues that his poetic decisions in these later Cantos follow a trajectory beginning with desires for a transcendent, contemplative community, and ending in a quest for poetic purity and absolutism alongside increasingly idiosyncratic American politics and individual solipsism. Bunting's roughly contemporaneous Briggflatts is similarly grounded in a philosophical endeavor to create a transcendent poetics; in his case, one that passes beyond the borders of language as set out in Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus . The dissertation as a whole argues that these modernists, who share certain stylistic affinities and arise out of similar artistic milieus, undertake extremely ambitious poetic projects that, in the final works, simultaneously reveal their authors' artistic philosophies and the extent to which the poetry is able to actually approach these transcendent ends.;Keywords. Pound, Rock-Drill, Thrones, Cantos, Bunting, Briggflatts, Wittgenstein, poetry, form, modernism, philosophy, logical atomism, politics, Square Dollar Series, fascism, anti-Semitism, Dante, America, Women of Trachis, sagetrieb, Coke, Richard of St Victor, Benton, Aristotle... |
