Sex In Ezra Pound's Coitus

Anti-traditional Conception of Sex in Pound's "Coitus"

Critics have been fascinated and often baffled by Ezra Pound's shifting poetic style, which ranges from the profound simplicity of "In a Station of the Metro" to the complex intertextuality of the "Cantos." Pound's significance derives largely from his constant resolve to break traditional form and ideology, both literary and poetic. What is particularly unique about Pound, however, is that as he continually establishes precedence, he rarely abandons his thorough knowledge and appreciation of classical literature, drawing heavily from his literary and historical education in even his most groundbreaking works. "Coitus," one of Pound's early short works, exemplifies both his interest

They do not seem as sexually explicit as the haiku-like couplets, but incorporate multiple intertextual references that do. Pound invokes the Renaissance painter and architect Giulio Romano (1499-1546) as a type of muse. Romano is best known for his Palazzo del Te, a building in Mantua that contains erotic frescoes depicting the lovemaking of the gods. In a sense the implied author himself seeks inspiration from Romano, who through the frescoes allows the gods to live again, and to engage in sexual acts. Pound similarly seeks to galvanize the gods, to reintroduce the pagan mythology with his modern innovations. With "dead gods" he infers that the gods have disappeared, from art, in Romano's case, and from writing, in his own. Perhaps, like Eliot in the "Waste Land", Pound is trying to entice fertility into a barren modern culture by using pagan eroticism, but this is problematic because it implies that he looks favorably upon a sexuality that he depicts as barbaric. But the excitement is evident, however frightening, and suggests the likely influence of Sir James Frazer's The Golden Bough, an anthropological study that inspired in Pound an interest in magic, mythology and

Although it precedes "The Waste Land" by nearly a decade, it foreshadows Eliot's own break with tradition, yoking allusive fragments of western culture with elements of modern life. By combining the ancient with the new, Pound produces disturbing and sexually centered anachronisms that capitalize on the previous history of literature but also revolutionary modern theories; psychological, sexual and literary. As a whole, "Coitus" is an atom of knowledge, capable of splitting and exploding into far reaches of historical and literary realms, yet instantly and intriguingly disturbing for its modern sexual