coeditor of two anthologies. His recent books include Destruction Was My Beatrice: Dada and the Unmaking of the Twentieth Century and History of a Shiver: The Sublime Impudence of Modernism.
Rasula applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, What the Thunder Said: How The Waste Land Made Poetry Modern, and reported the following:
My book is largely narrative, so any given page is a moment in the flow.Learn more about What the Thunder Said at the Princeton University Press website.
Page 99 finds us in the midst of a narrative arc involving American poet Ezra Pound, and it quotes his famous definition: “An ‘Image’ is that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time.” This is a credo of Imagism, the movement Pound advanced to promote the work of himself and his friends. It was Pound’s fervent attempt to appear “modern” in 1913. A year later, meeting T. S. Eliot and being thunderstruck by the manuscript of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” Pound gushed that this young American had “modernized himself on his own.”
Because my book takes its title from Eliot’s famous poem (named in the subtitle, How “The Waste Land” Made Poetry Modern), I took the precaution of spelling out the role of the man and his poem early in the Introduction. “The Waste Land is not so much the subject of this book, as its center of gravity,” adding that Eliot “does not make an appearance until halfway through.” The narrative arc involving Eliot does not commence until page 137. The Eliot story is nested into Pound’s because Pound “discovered” Eliot and later performed the crucial editorial task that made The Waste Land what it was.
Eliot remained grateful to Pound for the rest of his life. Fittingly, the narrative resonances of their own lives lead the book towards a conclusion many years later, when Eliot is awarded the Nobel Prize for literature at the very moment Pound’s Pisan Cantos receives the Bollingen Prize, resulting in a stormy controversy owing to the fact that Pound had recently been consigned to a mental institution, thus fending off the charge of treason for radio broadcasts he made under the auspices of the Fascist regime in Italy during World War Two.
The Page 99 Test happens to land on a key episode in Ezra Pound’s effort to make poetry modern, a course that would catapult Eliot into the front rank of modern poets, and ultimately lead to Pound’s ignominious downfall.
--Marshal Zeringue
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