Medieval Studies Brown Bag Workshop: Mapping Postmedieval Race in Ezra Pound’s “The Music of Beowulf”

A reflection on and discussion of a new digital critical edition on the Digital Mappa platform…

Citation: Ezra Pound, “The Music of Beowulf”: A Digital Critical Edition and Introduction, edit. Maxwell Gray (Madison, WI: Center for the History of Print and Digital Culture, 2019): https://uw.digitalmappa.org/57. DOI: 10.21231/5sh6-ga95.

Description: Ezra Pound’s previously unpublished essay draft “The Music of Beowulf” represents the modernist American poet’s recollection of his personal experience of the sounds and senses of Old English poetry in the modern city of London. Written in Rapallo in 1928, the essay returns to the scene of a performance of Scottish Gaelic folk music at Aeolian Hall in London in 1918. This open-access digital critical edition presents the essay with other related archival materials from the Pound Papers collection at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library (Yale) that represent a fuller picture of the essay in the context of Pound’s early Old English. The edition introduction situates Pound’s essay among problems in the field of medieval literary studies of medievalism, affect and race. I coin the critical term “racial rhythms” to name interactions of early medieval sounds, senses, and affects of race and ethnicity in the essay.

Questions?: maxgray20@gmail.com