User:DeRossitt/A Light from Eleusis: A Study of Ezra Pound's Cantos

A Light from Eleusis: A Study of Ezra Pound's Cantos is a 1979 book on Ezra Pound's Cantos by Leon Surette.

Overview
 Beginnings

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Love and War A Light from Eleusis Amor and Usura An Epic Includes History America, Italy and China Pisa The Later Cantos</li> <li>Conclusions</li> </ol>

A version of Chapter 3 was first published in Paideuma as ""A LIGHT FROM ELEUSIS": SOME THOUGHTS ON POUND'S NEKUIA."

"... The Tale of the Tribe is in line with two recent studies of The Cantos: my own A Light from Eleusis (1979) and Massimo Bacigalupo's The Formed Trace (1980). Bernstein, like Bacigalupo and myself, is driven by considerations of the poem's content and intentions to judge it a failure: 'A poem's intention is not something external known only from its author's out side statements; instead, it determines much of the texfs fundamental structure and should logically figure in any analysis of the work, even if our judgement includes a sense that the intention has never found an adequate realization'"

The Troubadours: A Romance of Scholarship "It is now more than twenty years since I first published an the role of Provence, the troubadours, and the Albigensian the generation of the historical narrative that animates Pounds I argued then that Pound's idiosyncratic understanding of history was derived from two books by Josephin Peladan, esthetique de la tragedie and Le Secret des Troubadours, reviewed in The Book News Monthly for September of expanded that account five years later in A Light from Eleusis a book which appeared the year after Peter Makins Provence Pound. Makin also took note of the review and gave prominence the troubadours and the Albigenses in his account of metahistory, but discounted the importance of Péladan.'"

Reviews
Walter Baumann in Journal of American Studies

But this eminently sensible book goes far beyond a study of Eleusis, i.e., Pound's mythology, which would require much more discussion. It proposes at the outset to deal with the Cantos not as a masterpiece, but as a "failed epic" .... This book, which can enlighten both the outsider and the Poundian, is not the product of a detractor, but an enthusiast trying to be honest at the same time. This has resulted in a fair assessment of Pound's attitude to life and history, but it has unwittingly brought out Surette's bias against modernism as a whole. How else could he have been driven to say that Pound's "technique did not work"? (492)

Helen M. Dennis in The Modern Language Review

"Mr Surette makes The Cantos sound like an eclectic and cranky work, whether of prose or poetry is not made clear, which tries to fit the Odyssey and possibly Eleusis and Provensal song into some secret Rosicrucian order. His assumption is that The Cantos are written in a sort of code which he will unravel, with a lot of help from Paideuma and from previously-published critical works about Pound."

"His book has no real sense of continuity; it is a series of essays exploiting other people's findings. He views religious, historical, and economic subjects separately; so that the organic ordering, the poetic mimesis of the spirit of Eleusis through diverse materials, which does emerge in The Cantos, totally escapes him." (60)

Stephen Fender in Paideuma

"The fact is that Mr· Surette's revolution in Pound studies goes only part way. Though he denies the popular plot of The Cantos-the restless search for truth, the descent into the underworld, the re-emergence and ascent into Paradise—his own allocation of space to various aspects of the poem reflects the popular view. He gives only 35 (out of 267) pages of text to the post-Pisan Cantos. Though he recognises that The Cantos do not form a unified whole, he cannot escape the old romantic idea of the self-sufficient aesthetic object, the “poetry，，，with its unique pleasures and truths, distinct from the world." (586)

A. D. Moody in The Review of English Studies

"Dr Surette's failure to make sense of the Cantos as a whole is the consequence of his way of reading them. He deals with them via their background, their sources and materials, and the kind of sense he can make of them in prose paraphrase. But he does not deal with them in their own terms, as poetry. Strictly speaking, he isn't really reading the Cantos at all. It is rather as if one were to give a comprehensive account of Mussorgsky's Pictures from an Exhibition in terms of the pictures and the exhibition, but not as one hears it. The question of whether or not the Cantos succeed must remain open until we have learnt how to read them. Clearly, this is not a book to be looked to for some positive contribution to the appreciation and understanding of the Cantos; it will appeal only to those who want to write them off." (496)

Mentions
One of the Three or Four -- Timothy Materer in Paideuma

"A Light from Eleusis: A Study of the Cantos of Ezra Pound (1979)，which is one of the three or four books that any student of The Cantos has read." (253)

One hopes - Colin McDowell in Paideuma

One hopes that Surette's new work is more readable than A Light From Eleusis, where Surette、desire to distance himself from Pound at every opportunity had the effect of interposing Surette between his subject and the reader, as though a photographer insisted on appearing in every photograph that he took. (204)

Surette brings us closer- DEMETRES P. TRYPHONOPOULOS in Paideuma

"In A Light from Eleusis, Leon Surette brings us closer to a proper understanding of the poem's mythos by chronicling Pound's revisionist rendering of the Odyssean myth in terms of the Eleusinian mysteries .... the poem cannot be understood without some familiarity with the occult and ... a proper understanding of Pound's "occultism" sheds new light upon the mythos of The Cantos.... Professor Surette's pioneering work .. initiated this discussion but .. also seriously underestimated the extent of Pound's involvement with the occult." (7)

This criticizes Surette

Colin McDowell in Paideuma

Ezra Pound's Egypt and the Origin of the "Cantos" (First major work to treat Pound's occultism)

Angus Fletcher in Twentieth Century Literature

"The first major work to treat Pound's occultism in a serious and thoroughgoing manner was Leon Surette's A Light From Eleusis." (18)

Mary P. Cheadle in Twentieth Century Literature

"33 Leon Surette, A Light from Eleusis: A Study of Ezra Pound's Cantos (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1979). While A Light from Eleusis is rich in its explication of the presence of Eleusis in the Cantos, Surette draws an only implicit connection between Eleusis and Neoplatonism" (129)