The two apparently separate spheres of aesthetics and economics have usually been treated as phenomena completely alien to one another. This is not the truth, however. For thousands of years, poets and artists have been intensely aware of the indissoluble tie and relationship between the two, and have directly and indirectly indicated this relationship in their works. Ezra Pound (1885-1972), the arguably greatest western poet of the twentieth century, spent almost all his poetic life trying to draw attention to this deep relationship between poetry and economics as both content and form or metaphor. By attending to Pound explaining the relationship, at least two aims can be achieved: firstly, getting to know the nature of this relationship and how it influences our reading of literary texts; secondly, acquiring a better appreciation of an important aspect of modernism in general, and of modern poetry in particular.
Literary Criticism
