This final chapter focuses on the early work of Ezra Pound to offer a brief poetic study extending my analysis of lyric subjectivity and lyric chorus; but it also fulfils a rather different function from the other poetic case studies by offering a historical ‘coda’ to the aestheticist poetic trajectory that I trace across this book. Much of this chapter will be concerned with sketching out some connections with a modernist idea of poetry in the twentieth century. I take Pound as my subject because he is a modernist whose early work is deeply formed by aestheticism, but also because (particularly in his pre-Mauberley work) he shows a profound engagement with the concept of lyric specifically. His early poetry and essays grapple with the idea of lyric, directly in relation to the experience of modernity, in ways that are particularly relevant to my core concerns. It has been more common in recent years for scholars to look to T. S. Eliot than Pound to provide a link from aestheticism through to modernism. Thaïs E. Morgan, for example, has argued for Eliot's desire to reinstate Swinburne into the English canon, and more recently Cassandra Laity has argued for ‘Prufrock’ ‘drawing directly on Swinburne's “A Leave-Taking” ‘, noting ‘Prufrock's shift from the irony and paralyzing self-consciousness of the urban sections toward childlike wonder and longing for self-dissolution in Swinburnian seas’. (And indeed, ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ is one of the great meditations on lyric introspection.) Yet I am more interested here in the less discussed but equally visceral connections between Swinburne and Pound that take them both back to an idea of lyric based around a multiple and communal subject.

Pound's rediscovery of Swinburne in 1910 speaks of his excitement in encountering one who embraces life so completely: ‘I have gone back to my Swinburne with new eyes – at least to the poems in the “Laus Veneris” edition’. Poems such as ‘The Ballad of Life’, Pound claims, ‘give us the great Swinburne, the high priest, the lifter of the hearts of men. His vision of our marvellous vitality, of our power for survival!’ He writes of Swinburne seeing humanity ‘divided not according to “good” and “evil” but into those who have accepted & those who have rejected life. The first are the conquerors. […] The unhappy are only those who refuse to live.’