The Eros Behind The Loss:Melancholic Mourning In The Elegies Of Ezra Pound

The genre of elegy has undergone a psychological transformation from the compensatory to the melancholic mode of mourning across the Atlantic Ocean in the twentieth century,thus forming the anti-elegy which features melancholic mourning as its main mode of emotional expression.Research on modern English elegy has so far neglected to study the elegies of Ezra Pound,nor has it addressed how melancholic mourning developed in his works as a result of the interaction between loss and eros.Taking the psyche and social milieu of Ezra Pound at the time of his elegiac composition in account,this paper intends to study this literary progression by applying psychoanalytic theories of melancholia,and thus assessing the significance of Pound in the history of modern elegy.Pound produced most of his elegies in the earliest dozen of poetry collections prior to 1920.From Hilda's Book to Hugh Selwyn Mauberley,Pound's elegiac composition initially deals mainly with erotic loss,then it gradually undertakes the more abstract mourning over lost literary genres.Unlike the traditional elegist of compensatory mourning who deny loss and seek consolation,Pound insisted his erotic desire for the lost object;as he internally revived beloved friends and literature in melancholic elegies where narcissistic and suicidal feelings intertwine,Pound initiated the modern anti-elegy which features such melancholic mourning.Pound has little interest for contemporary psychoanalysis,and his elegies,despite their overt melancholic characteristics,are occasionally mixed up with the compensatory mode;while most of his earlier elegies are quintessentially melancholic,though varying in degrees of emotional intensity,his later elegies feature the alternation between these two modes of mourning,and gradually veer toward the compensatory mode until Pound completely abandons elegiac writings upon his departure from London.By rewriting the classical myths associated with love and death,Pound has unfolded various aspects of melancholic mourning together with their respective literary significance.Drawing upon the metamorphoses myths of Daphne and Syrinx,Pound laments lost lovers and friends via the tree impersonation which fulfills narcissistic object identification,and via the mirror motif,the blinding reflection of which illustrates the threat posed by the alienated ego(identifying with the lost object)towards the mourner's original ego.Pound later substitutes "the Yearly Slain" Persephone for the dryad as a representative for his lost love,through which he reveals the psychological detour in which melancholic mourning waxes and wanes,to be replaced by the compensatory mode.Pound also compares himself to Orpheus,the melancholic propensity of whose mourning Pound unearths as he revives the long-forgotten classical erotic elegy and incorporates its melancholic attributes by creative translation,before he buries all his past works and bids farewell to elegiac writings and melancholic mourning.The importance of Pound's elegies lies three-fold:firstly,he illustrates various features of melancholic mourning;secondly,he provides a sound basis for further development of the modern anti-elegy;and thirdly,his transformation from melancholic to compensatory mourning foretells the similar development track of anti-elegy.As representatives of anti-elegies,W.H.Auden and Sylvia Plath have respectively elaborated on the Pound's quasi-homosexual expressions and revisions of the classical dryad myths plus its mourning psyche.Auden and Plath pushes the melancholic elements in their forebear's works to such an extreme,that they unconsciously and even inevitably stand opposite against the very source of their inspiration.Through poets like Pound,Auden and Plath,the elegiac genre has become ever so melancholic in the twentieth century that it earns the title "anti-elegy";such revolt against the mourning tradition then ironically leads to a revolt against itself,as anti-elegy runs the risk of being overtaken by the compensatory paradigm at the end of the twentieth century.The development of anti-elegy is thus urged and pushed forward by recurrent self-denial which manifests itself in both individual inheritance of poetic skills and the mourning psycho of the genre itself;and what sets all these into motion is precisely Pound's melancholic elegies which features his erotic fixation on the unconfessed loss.