Money and modernity

The Modernist poets William Carlos Williams and Ezra Pound were latter-day Jeffersonians whose politics and poetry were strongly marked by the Populism of the late 19th century. They were sharply aware of the social contradictions of modernization and were committed to a highly politicized, often polemical poetry that criticized finance capitalism and its institutions - notably banks - in the strongest terms. Providing a history of the aesthetics of Jeffersonianism and its collision with Modernism in the works of Pound and Williams, Alec Marsh traces "the money question" from the republican period through the 1940s. Marsh can thus read two Modernist epics - Pound's Cantos and Williams's Paterson - as the poets hoped they would be read, as attempts to break the hold of "false" financial values on the American imagination.