'Pull Down Thy Vanity': Post-Pastoral Subject in Ezra Pound's Cantos
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Anglophone modernism is often interpreted as reflecting a crisis of modernity brought about, among other factors, by the trauma of World War One. The parameters of the crisis include the perception that things are “falling apart,” i.e. a growing sense of the fragmentation of reality and of the exhaustion of traditional teleological narratives such as religion or the myth of progress. Poetry written in the face of this condition must necessarily be paradoxical in that it combines the profound skepticism of the times with an almost religious faith in the redemptive power of art. The paradoxes of modern poetry and its frequent recourse to silence in general have been discussed from a number of perspectives. Seldom, though, have critics taken into consideration the role played by the silence of nature in modernist poetry. In the work of Ezra Pound, it is possible to trace a progress from pastoral representations of nature to what Terry Gifford has defined as the “post-pastoral” mode. The latter mode is especially present in the Pisan section of Pound’s great epic poem Cantos and in its concluding parts. However, the earlier pastoral model is always already complicated by the tension between what, after Lacan, can be called the “enonce” (statement) and the “enonciation” (enunciation) within Pound’s text. The pastoral and post-pastoral modes of nature representation correspond to two different subject positions. The pastoral setting involves a rigid subject/object dichotomy and the subject’s dominion over nature. The post-pastoral requires a reconfiguration of subjectivity to make space for the silent presence of nature, which no longer serves as a bearer of man-made meanings.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.017 | 0.020 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".