On 1 April 2026, 1:30-3:00 p.m. (ET), Oleksandr Gon, Doctor of Philology, Professor at the Chair of Foreign Languages, Educational and Scientific Institute of International Relations, gave a lecture at Penn State University, entitled ‘Ezra Pound and Yurii Klen: Contexts of Two Modern Unfinished Epics’. Oleksandr is a visiting Fulbright Scholar at the Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures at Penn State University for the 2025/2026 academic year. Oleksandr’s lecture was part of the receiving university’s 2025–2026 Speaker Series.
His talk focused on the comparative analysis of two consequential texts in American and Ukrainian poetic modernisms, The Cantos (1917–1968) and Popil imperii (The Ashes of Empires, 1943–1947). This project seeks to develop a coherent and practical comparative approach to Pound and Klen identifying the specifics of national poetic modernisms as reflected in the relationships between the interiority of the lyrical self and the epic tradition. The core argument of the presentation was associated with the concept of a poetic ‘ver(s)ification of history’ to examine diverse creative practices in modernist long poems. Both texts foreground subject rhymes and intertextuality to highlight cultural continuity across geographical and temporal divides. Contextualized both synchronically and diachronically, these unapologetically elitist works display a significant structural affinity in artistic concepts, poetic idiom, and self-referentiality as well as a sharp divergence in Klen’s post-Romantic millennial and teleological as opposed to Pound’s cyclic and mythologic poetics and ideology.
