Ezra Pound's Medievalism

Among the denumerable traits of the longest poem in English is a strong emphasis on the Middle Ages. Perhaps the strongest single literature of form-giving dimension is the literature of the Middle Ages. Due to the early experience of Medieval ideas and forms Pound could arrive at what film-maker Hollis Frampton has called a "thesaurus of compositional strategies". This study provides a survey of Ezra Pound's life-long dialogue with the Middle Ages culminating in essays on Chaucer and Dante.