Samuel Beckett’s writing career is inextricably bound up in the idea of modernism: he was deeply attentive to literary and artistic history, eager to learn from the radical experiments of his elders, and sensitive to the aesthetic projects of his peers. He was implicated in the development of modernist poetics: its roots in Rimbaud and Baudelaire, its avant-garde practices in Eliot, Stein and Pound, and its grappling with loss and belatedness in Denis Devlin and Thomas MacGreevy. His activities as a translator also reflect these perceptions and interests, providing him with a wider range of perspectives by which to evaluate poetic form, such as how Spanish and South American poetry might be positioned against French and English modernist poetics. Beckett’s extensive poetic knowledge plays little obvious part in most of his novels, plays and short prose texts, save for the occasional poetic interjection. Yet these poetic devices are turned to effect in his later prose, where prose rhythm performs a critical poetics, and literary allusion – fragmentary and submerged – begins to align into a sustained meditation on the value of poetic history. This belatedness fits with Beckett’s anointment as a Late Modernist, where his poetic touchstones tend to be medieval, Elizabethan and Romantic rather than High Modernist. Beckett’s relation to modernist poetics is uneven, fragmented and complicated in its historicity and genealogy, yet in shaping his early poetry and later prose its influence is evident in the contours of his long writing career.

Pound’s inclusion of a musical score in Canto LXXV (C 470–71) asserts a paradox of temporality: the Canto is the shortest by line number in all of The Cantos, yet as words give way to music, the time of reading and of hearing becomes undefined and dilatory. The music is Gerhard Münch’s scoring of the violin part of Clément Janequin’s Chant des Oiseaux of 1537, commissioned by Pound for Olga Rudge to perform at the first of the Tigullian concerts in Rapallo in 1933. Janequin’s score derives from Francesco Canova da Milano’s Canzoni degli Uccelli (c. 1528) – a genealogy all perfectly clear and unambiguous – but this is not what attracts Pound’s attention.

A collection of essays titled The New Ezra Pound Studies cannot help but deploy the currency of Transatlantic Modernism. Indeed the coin Pound himself fashioned in the imperative mood, to ‘Make It New’, directs us to chart where new avenues of inquiry are to be found, and where more familiar terrain may enjoy renewal by virtue of newly available archival sources, methodological advances, developments in various discourses since Pound’s day, and different kinds of reception in a range of geographical, linguistic and cultural spheres. Each essay presents a case for reconsidering what we think we know about Pound, but also what we think we know about Modernism, the Greek and Roman classics, Italian Fascism, Queer discourse, post-Mao Chinese poetics, copyright law, and United States political culture, among numerous other topics, and the way these intersect with Pound’s own cultural production.

Ezra Pound’s rallying call to ‘Make It New’ became a powerful Modernist motto, invoking a sense of renewal in the avant-garde project in casting off the dead weight of stale custom and forging a new aesthetic. Pound famously adapted this phrase – 薪 日 日 薪 (xin ri xin) – from the ancient Shang Dynasty Emperor Ch’eng T’ang (1766–1753 BCE), who, legend has it, inscribed it on the side of his bathtub. It is a gesture emblematic of Pound’s career, crossing history and linguistic borders to create new art informed by the best that had gone before, and it quickly became a heuristic device by which to understand Pound’s artistic legacy and his role in cultural history.