Ezra Pound, Guide to Kulchur

Anderson D. Araujo (University of British Columbia)

The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 1.2.1.08: English Writing and Culture of the early Twentieth Century , 1900-1945.
Vol. editors: Chris Baldick (Goldsmiths College, University of London), Peter Childs (Birmingham Newman University), Nicole Kennedy (University of Newcastle), Louise McDonald (Birmingham Newman University), Andrew Radford (University of Glasgow), Sean Seeger (University of Essex)

Domains

Political Science

Dates

First circulation or publication 1938

Places

United States (Country of Origin)

Genres and Modes

Non-Fiction
- Commentary / Criticism (literary)
Essays/ Lectures (any)
Non-fictional prose

Resources

Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur would be the author’s last lengthy prose venture in a literary career spanning six decades. In its fifty-eight chapters and postscript, the work encapsulates Pound’s many concerns at the time it was written: his economic and political agenda; his cultural, philosophical, poetic, and epistemological theories; and his occult and religious beliefs. All these informed Pound’s poem-in-progress, The Cantos, arguably the most important experimental work of Anglo-American literary modernism. In its self-consciously paratactic structure and radical inclusiveness, Guide to Kulchur displays some of the same intractable complexities that W. B. Yeats associated with The Cantos in 1927, likening it to a “Bach Fugue”: “No plot, no chronicle of events, no logic of discourse” (A Vision, 4). And like The Cantos – cited in Guide as “the tale of the tribe” (194)...

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2050 words

Citation: Araujo, Anderson D.. "Guide to Kulchur". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 08 November 2005 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=9055, accessed 05 December 2025.]