Commentary on the poem “Villanelle: the psychological hour” by Ezra Pound (1915)

Abstract

The commentary presents a general portrayal of the modernist poem Villanelle: The Psychological Hour, an American literary masterpiece from the early twentieth century by Ezra Pound. This paper is an attempt to conceive a didactic frame on poetry analysis to facilitate the work of the students of English literature I under my supervision. In the first hand, I present an outline of the contextual aspects of the masterpiece to continue with the interpretive analysis of the main linguistic elements that characterizes the modernist approach in American literature. Consequently, I also comment aspects related to the semantics of the text by approaching Pound’s inner cultural and emotional dimensions connoted in the poem within the frame of modernist tenets. Finally, I present a psychological portrait of the poetic voice by demonstrating that Pound’s aim is to recreate the perfect situation: his readers are able to access the semantic universe of others in a commun’entente conversation when they reach the required level to understand pragmatic, discursive, reciprocal and cultural skills of modern American discourse.

Keywords: Literary analysis, teaching of literature in English, poetry, American modernism, Ezra Pound.