EARLY WORK OF E. POUND AND W.B. YEATS (PECULIARITIES OF THE LYRICAL SUBJECT IN THE POEM “PLANH”)

The article is dedicated to Ezra Pound’s poem “Planh” (Lament), which is included in the poet’s book of poems Exultations. Exploring the phenomenon of Pound’s early poetics, the author of the article pays attention to its extreme sensitivity to various literary influences. The individual poetic voice of the young Pound was largely influenced by the work of W.B. Yeats. Using the example of the poem “Planh”, the article examines the techniques by which Pound borrowed from Yeats some grammatical and syntactic constructions (archaisms, Irishisms, enjambments) as well as the theme and imagery of The Celtic Twilight, which was important to the latter’s work at the turn of the 19th–20th centuries. In comparison with Yeats’s early poems, the images of forest, hunting, stars, plants, and the white colour are analyzed. Following Yeats, Pound treats every word as a symbol: everything that happens in a poem is transferred into the realm of the irrational or even mystical, opposed to the rational approach to “concrete poetry”, which would become the cornerstone of Pound’s poetics a few years later. The influence of the Irish poet may also determine the central themes of “Planh” — the lyrical subject’s search for his true incarnation and his name, metamorphosis. The assumption is made that Pound’s poem had a prototype in Yeats’s lyrics — “The Song of Wandering Aengus”. Finally, the Yeatsian dimension is also revealed in the story of the poem’s creation and its dedication to Pound’s future wife Dorothy Shakespear, a great admirer of Yeats. Thus, “Planh” demonstrates both the partial loss of Pound’s individual poetic voice under the Yeatsian influence and turns out to be a “training ground” for its further development.