Oleksandr Gon delivered a lecture at Pennsylvania State University titled "Ezra Pound and Yuriy Klen: Contexts of Two Modern Unfinished Epics"

Oleksandr Gon, Professor of the Department of Foreign Languages at IIR, delivered a lecture at Pennsylvania State University titled "Ezra Pound and Yuriy Klen: Contexts of Two Modern Unfinished Epics".

Oleksandr Gon is a Fulbright Program scholar and a visiting professor at the Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures at Pennsylvania State University for the 2025/2026 academic year.

Professor Gon’s lecture was part of this year's series of open university lectures and was dedicated to a comparative analysis of two significant texts of American and Ukrainian poetic modernism — "The Cantos" (1917–1968) and "Ashes of Empires" (1943–1947). The research project aims to develop a comprehensive and practical comparative approach to the works of Pound and Klen, identifying the features of national poetic modernisms as reflected in the relationship between the inner world of the lyrical "I" and the epic tradition.

The central thesis of the presentation is linked to the concept of poetic "ver(s)ification of history" for investigating diverse creative practices within modernist epics. Both texts prioritize thematic rhymes and intertextuality to emphasize cultural continuity that transcends geographical and temporal boundaries. Examined in synchronic and diachronic contexts, these uncompromisingly elitist works demonstrate significant structural affinities in artistic concepts, poetic style, and self-referentiality. Simultaneously, they reveal a fundamental divergence in Klen’s post-romantic millenarian and teleological poetics and ideology — as opposed to Pound’s cyclical and mythological poetics and ideology.