Feeling the Eleusinian Mysteries in Ezra Pound's The Cantos

Scholarship has long recognized the influence of the Eleusinian Mysteries of Ancient Greece on Ezra Pound’s The Cantos, specifically Pound’s desire to evoke what he understood as the Eleusinian initiate’s movement from the descent of the confused δρώμενα (dromena) stage to the ascent of the epiphanic ἐποπτεία (epopteia) stage. This talk likewise reads The Cantos for the presence of the Eleusinian but forgoes the typical scholarly practice of identifying δρώμενα or ἐποπτεία only in Pound’s recondite allusions. Instead, this talk proposes that Pound creates Eleusinian moments of epiphany and confusion in The Cantos through the modulation of readerly difficulty and pleasure. 

Jacob Sponga is an MA student in English at McGill University. He is principally interested in Anglo-Irish modernism and classical reception. Other areas of attention include logic, hermeneutics, and Old Occitan literature.