Modernism’s “Doors of Perception”: From Ezra Pound’s Ideogrammic Method to Marshall Mcluhan’s “Mosaic”

Abstract

Writing to Ezra Pound in May 1948, Marshall McLuhan told the poet that, “we [that is, Hugh Kenner and I] have long taken a serious interest [in] your work.” And so, McLuhan along with Kenner visited Pound at St Elizabeths in June 1948. The rest makes for interesting modernist literary and cultural studies history. This paper argues that McLuhan’s method of composition, which he called a “mosaic,” derives from his understanding of Pound’s poetics of the ideogrammic method. In The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (1962), McLuhan explains that the book “develops a mosaic or field approach to its problems. Such a mosaic image of numerous data and quotations in evidence offers the only practical means of revealing the causal operations in history.” McLuhan learned much from the American poet, including to view literature/pedagogy as “training of perception”; and both developed texts that placed readers in media res, encouraging an heuristic approach to “reading” whereby readers are empowered to arrive at their own meaning or interpretation irrespective of the writers’ ideology and/or agenda. Using examples from The Cantos and The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects (1967), this essay also probes the relationships between modernist aesthetics, technological prophesy and sociopolitical praxis.