Philip Kuberski on Ezra Pound

Kuberski contends that Pound sought the type of objectivity in language that was unavailable due to Saussure's and Freud's destabilizations. Kuberski argues that Pound attempts to reverse this relativism and put language back together, recovering the foundation of language and its significance.

I appreciate Kuberski's text because he recognizes the ambivalence of Pound's aims. That is, Pound's desire for solidity and an unassailable grounding of language and culture is destabilized by his own poetic practice. Kuberski writes: "Pound can create an unrequited desire for resolution by each new fragment that necessarily delays it; desire for presence and origin is extended by each eruption of absence and citation" (8). So Pound's poetic technique is unequivocally "modernist" while it appears to reclaim all the stability undone by modernism.

Kuberski is particularly interested in what is specifically American about what he calls "the duplicity of the sign." This is an immensely intriguing phrase and I think it could be usefully applied to Pound's notion of the poetic image. Kuberski seems to use the term "duplicity" to mean an intended breakdown of unified meaning. He provides a quick tour of American literature to show how this duplicity arises and is fostered. It seems strange to me, however, that Kuberski suggests Pound works against this duplicity. I feel that Pound attempts to increase the disturbances in linguistic meaning in order to activate psychological meanings. Kuberski comes from the standard perspective which holds that Pound's Imagism sought objectivity and scientific clarity above everything. I'm not so sure I agree. Instead, Pound seems to prize the insights that come from destabilization.