A Companion to Ezra Pound's a Guide to Kulcher 9781942954385, 9781942954392, 2017032754, 2017040547

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A Companion to Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur Anderson Araujo

at the University of New Orleans The Ezra Pound Center for Literature Book Series is a project dedicated to publishing a variety of scholarly and literary works relevant to Ezra Pound and Modernism, including new critical monographs on Pound and/or other Modernists, scholarly studies related to Pound and his legacy, edited collections of essays, volumes of original poetry, reissued books of importance to Pound scholarship, translations, and other works. Series Editor: John Gery, University of New Orleans Editorial Advisory Board Barry Ahearn, Tulane University Massimo Bacigalupo, University of Genoa A. David Moody (Emeritus), University of York Ira B. Nadel, University of British Columbia Marjorie Perloff, University of Southern California Tim Redman, University of Texas at Dallas Richard Sieburth, New York University Demetres P. Tryphonopoulos, Brandon University Emily Mitchell Wallace, Bryn Mawr College Also Available in the Ezra Pound Center for Literature Book Series William Pratt, Editor, The Imagist Poem: Modern Poetry in Miniature Patrizia de Rachewiltz, Trespassing Caterina Ricciardi, John Gery, and Massimo Bacigalupo, Editors, I poeti della Sala Capizucchi/The Poets Of The Sala Capizucchi Zhaoming Qian, Editor, Modernism and the Orient John Gery, Daniel Kempton, and H. R. Stoneback, Editors, Imagism: Essays on Its Initiation, Impact and Influence Catherine E. Paul, Fascist Directive: Ezra Pound and Italian Cultural Nationalism

A Companion to ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur Anderson ArAujo

© 2018 Clemson University Press All rights reserved First Edition, 2018

print ISBN: 978-1-942954-38-5 epdf ISBN: 978-1-942954-39-2 Published by Clemson University Press in association with Liverpool University Press

For information about Clemson University Press, please visit our website at www.clemson.edu/press.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Araujo, Anderson, author. Title: A Companion to Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur / by Anderson Araujo. Description: First edition. | Clemson : Clemson University Press, 2018. | Series: The Ezra Pound Center for Literature | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017032754 (print) | LCCN 2017040547 (ebook) | ISBN 9781942954392 (e-book) | ISBN 9781942954385 (hard cover : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Pound, Ezra, 1885-1972. Guide to Kulchur. Classification: LCC PS3531.O82 (ebook) | LCC PS3531.O82 C855 2017 (print) | DDC 814/.52--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017032754 Typeset in Minion Pro by Carnegie Book Production.

Contents

Acknowledgments ix Abbreviations xiii Introduction 1

Guide to Kulchur Frontispiece to PREFACE

Section I

20

Part I

1. DIGEST OF THE ANALECTS

30

2. THE NEW LEARNING: PART ONE

41

3. SPARTA 776 B.C.

60

4. TOTALITARIAN

9

5. ZWECK or the AIM

75

Section II 6. VORTEX 7. GREAT BASS: PART ONE

92 103

v

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A Companion to Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur

8. ICI JE TESTE

108

9. TRADITION

113

Section III

Part II

10. GUIDE

122

11. ITALY

127

12. AESCHYLUS and . . .

128

13. MONUMENTAL

133

Section IV 14. THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY IS . . . ?

Section V

138

Part III

15. VALUES

142

16. EUROPE OR THE SETTING

146

17. SOPHISTS

157

18. KULCHUR: PART ONE

168

19. KULCHUR: PART TWO

173

20. MARCH 12th

178

21. TEXTBOOKS

180

Section VI 22. SAVOIR FAIRE

184

23. THE NEW LEARNING: PART TWO

193

24. EXAMPLES OF CIVILIZATION

202

Contents

vii

25. BOOKS “ABOUT”

205

26. ON ANSWERING CRITICS

210

Section VII

Part IV

27. MAXIMS OF PRUDENCE

214

28. HUMAN WISHES

215

Section VIII 29. GUIDE TO KULCHUR

222

30. THE PROOF OF THE PUDDING

225

31. CANTI

229

32. THE NOVEL AND SO FORTH

232

33. PRECEDENTS

238

34. ON ARRIVING AND NOT ARRIVING

240

35. PRAISE SONG OF THE BUCK-HARE

241

36. TIME-LAG

242

37. THE CULTURE OF AN AGE

243

Section IV 38. EDUCATION OR INFORMATION

246

39. NEO-PLATONICKS ETC.

247

40. LOSSES

250

41. ODES: RISKS

254

42. GREAT BASS: PART TWO

255

43. TONE

257

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A Companion to Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur

Section X

Part V

44. GOVERNMENT

262

45. THE RECURRING DECIMAL

270

46. DECLINE OF THE ADAMSES

274

47. ROYALTY AND ALL THAT

276

Section XI 48. ARABIA DESERTA

288

49. KUNG

291

50. CHAUCER WAS FRAMED?

298

51. HAPPY DAYS

301

52. THE PROMISED LAND

306

Section XII

Part VI

53. STUDY OF PHYSIOGNOMY

312

54. AND THEREFORE TENDING

317

55. PERGAMENA DEEST

352

56. WATCH THE BEANERIES

354

Section XIII 57. EPILOGUE

358

58. TO RECAPITULATE

359

ADDENDA: 1952

361

Notes 391 Index 459

Acknowledgments

This project germinated from a conversation with Stephen J. Adams at Western University in the earliest stages of my doctoral studies over ten years ago. Professor Adams suggested that an annotated edition of Guide to Kulchur was not only a much-needed resource, but it might also prove to be a worthwhile undertaking for my doctoral dissertation. Unbeknownst to either of us at the time, both ideas would evolve considerably in the process. The initial design for an annotated edition gave way to this full-length standalone monograph, while my doctoral thesis, entitled Into the Vortex: The Cultural Politics of Eliot, Woolf, Lewis, and Pound, 1914–1939, took on a life of its own. The present book nonetheless draws amply on my thesis, written under the supervision of Leon Surette. The unstinting guidance I received from Professor Surette helped to shape the following pages in ways that I can hardly convey in so brief a space. This book also benefitted from the generous support and hospitality of Mary de Rachewiltz, who allowed me to roam freely among Pound’s books at Schloss Brunnenburg in Dorf Tirol, Italy, when I was still taking my first tentative steps as a doctoral student. Her wit, keen-eyed intelligence, and dedication to preserving her father’s legacy will remain with me always. To these mentors I dedicate this token of my gratitude and appreciation.

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I am also immensely grateful to John R. O. Gery, editor of the Ezra Pound Center for Literature Book Series, who provided invaluable feedback and worked tirelessly to find a home for this project. Special thanks, too, are due to Wayne K. Chapman and John Morgenstern, Founding Director and Director, respectively, of Clemson University Press, who committed to printing the manuscript in association with Liverpool University Press. I am indebted as well to the skillful assistance of Alison Mero, Clemson’s Managing Editor. To Catherine E. Paul, who expertly prepared the index and spared no effort to ensure that all the details fell into place, I offer my profound and lasting gratitude. Many other scholars engaged with this manuscript at various stages of development and are likewise owed sincere thanks. Walter Baumann generously responded to the draft of the manuscript in its entirety and advised on all the transcriptions of German text. Demetres Tryphonopoulos and Peter Liebregts provided indispensable advice on the transcriptions from the Greek. John Z. Ming Chen provided instrumental guidance on how to properly reproduce Chinese characters. Mathieu Aubin, my doctoral research assistant, advised on the French translations and rendered them idiomatically sound. I also benefitted enormously from Massimo Bacigalupo’s incisive comments on a number of Italian references and, especially, from his vast storehouse of knowledge of all things Poundian. I would also like to pay tribute to the spirit of intellectual openness and collegiality that animates the community of Ezra Pound specialists. If it takes a village to raise a child, to produce a scholarly manuscript is surely not too far off. In many ways, the untold story of the making of this Companion is also the story of the camaraderie that facilitated it. I reserve special thanks to David Ten Eyck and Bernard Dew for their close friendship and steadfast support and encouragement throughout this project. This expression of gratitude would not be complete without also thanking individuals who, like the aforementioned scholars, have long been sources of insight and inspiration: Ronald Bush, Mark Byron, David Capella, Michael Coyle, Galateia Demetriou, Svetlana Ehtee, Christos Hadjiyiannis, Justin Kishbaugh, Alec Marsh, Ira Nadel, Akitoshi Nagahata, Biljana Obradović, Richard Parker, Viorica Patea,

Acknowledgments

xi

Roxana Preda, Sean Pryor, Siegfried de Rachewiltz, Krista Rascoe, Miho Takahashi, and Andy Trevathan. My experience of writing this book was greatly enriched by the many stimulating hours spent in conversation with this dedicated group of colleagues, whom I am also privileged to call friends. My most heartfelt thanks go to my wife, Amanda Snyder, whose unflagging support and loving companionship allayed the anxieties and struggles and made this journey all the more rewarding and worthwhile. The research for this project was generously funded by several grants, beginning with a doctoral fellowship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. I am grateful to the librarians and archivists who helped me access a range of texts and documentary materials in a variety of institutions, most notably the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin, and the Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford. I am also thankful to the Department of Critical Studies at the Okanagan campus of the University of British Columbia, my home institution, for unreservedly supporting my research. A Companion to Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur was also made possible by Declan Spring and Christopher Wait, Vice President and Permissions Editor, respectively, of New Directions, to whom I am deeply indebted for granting permission to quote at length from the following works: Guide to Kulchur Copyright ©1970 by Ezra Pound. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.  The Cantos of Ezra Pound Copyright ©1934, 1937, 1940, 1948, 1950, 1956, 1959, 1962, 1963, 1965, 1966, 1968, 1970, and 1971 by Ezra Pound. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.  Literary Essays of Ezra Pound Copyright ©1935 by Ezra Pound. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.  Selected Letters 1907–1941 of Ezra Pound Copyright ©1950 by Ezra Pound. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.  Selected Prose 1909–1965 Copyright ©1973 by The Estate of Ezra Pound. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. 

Abbreviations

ABCR ATH Blast 1 Blast 2 C

EB EP&M EP&VA EPE GB

ABC of Reading. New York: New Directions, 1960. Antheil, and The Treatise on Harmony, with Supplementary Notes. Chicago: P. Covici, 1927. Blast. Edited by Wyndham Lewis. London: John Lane, 1914. Blast. Edited by Wyndham Lewis. London: John Lane, 1915. The Cantos of Ezra Pound. Thirteenth printing. New York: New Directions, 1995. All bibliographic references to the book cite the canto number and page number, separated by a slash. Thus, a citation from Canto 8, page 33, will appear as follows: 8/33. Encyclopedia Britannica, 15th ed. Edited by Robert McHenry, Philip W. Goetz, and Dale H. Hoiberg. Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, 2010. Ezra Pound and Music: The Complete Criticism. Edited by R. Murray Schafer. New York: New Directions, 1977. Ezra Pound and the Visual Arts. Edited by Harriet Zinnes. New York: New Directions, 1980. The Ezra Pound Encyclopedia. Edited by Stephen J. Adams and Demetres P. Tryphonopoulos. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2005. Gaudier-Brzeska, A Memoir. New York: New Directions, 1970.

xiii

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GK

HRHRC J/M LE LSJ NE ODNB OED P/A

P/C P/I P/J P/N

P/Q P/Z

Guide to Kulchur. New York: New Directions, 1970. All bibliographic references to the book cite the abbreviated title and page number in the body of the annotation. Thus, a citation from page 15 will appear as (GK 15), while a reference to an annotation will appear as (cf. note GK 15). Ezra Pound Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin. Jefferson and/or Mussolini. London: Stanley Nott, 1935. Literary Essays of Ezra Pound. Edited by T. S. Eliot. New York: New Directions, 1968. A Greek–English Lexicon, with a Revised Supplement. Edited by Henry George Liddell, Robert Scott, and Henry Stuart Jones. 9th ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996. Aristotle. The Nicomachean Ethics. Translated by Harris Rackham. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1934. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Edited by H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd ed. Edited by John Simpson and Edmun Weiner. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993. I Cease Not to Yowl: Ezra Pound’s Letters to Olivia Rossetti Agresti. Edited by Demetres P. Tryphonopoulos and Leon Surette. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1998. Pound/Cummings: The Correspondence of Ezra Pound and E. E. Cummings. Edited by Barry Ahearn. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996. Ezra Pound: Letters to Ibbotson, 1935–1952. Edited by Vittoria I. Mondolfo and Margaret Hurley. Orono, ME: National Poetry Foundation, 1979. Pound/Joyce: The Letters of Ezra Pound to James Joyce. Edited by Forrest Read. New York: New Directions, 1967. One Must Not Go Altogether with the Tide: The Letters of Ezra Pound and Stanley Nott. Edited by Miranda B. Hickman. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2011. The Selected Letters of Ezra Pound to John Quinn, 1915– 1924. Edited by Timothy Materer. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991. Pound/Zukofsky: Selected Letters of Ezra Pound and Louis Zukofsky. Edited by Barry Ahearn. New York: New Directions, 1987.

Abbreviations SL SP SR

xv

The Selected Letters of Ezra Pound, 1907–1941. Edited by D. D. Paige. New York: New Directions, 1971. Selected Prose, 1909–1965. Edited by William Cookson. New York: New Directions, 1973. The Spirit of Romance. New York: New Directions, 2005.

Introduction

I The genesis of Guide to Kulchur can be traced to January 27, 1933, just three days shy of Ezra Pound’s fateful meeting with the Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini in the Palazzo Venezia in Rome. In a letter typed on Faber & Faber stationery, Frank V. Morley, a director at the illustrious London publishing house, suggested that Pound write an autobiography. With eventful decades of self-exile behind him in London, Paris, and, since 1924, Rapallo, a resort town on the Ligurian coast of Italy, the forty-seven-year-old writer was the living embodiment of the modernist revolution in the arts and letters. Morley dubbed the would-be book Rough Rider.1 Odd title, this. Even today it is more likely to evoke a rugged cowboy on the American Old West frontier than a celebrated poet on the Italian Riviera. Yet it is surprisingly apt. Born in 1885 in Hailey, in the Territory of Idaho, Pound did indeed utter his first cries in the world conjured by Morley’s moniker. The parallels run deep. The legendary First United States Volunteer Cavalry, widely known as the Rough Riders, became a fearsome fighting force under the command of Assistant Secretary of the Navy and future U.S. president Theodore Roosevelt during the Spanish-American War. It was a motley crew made up of cowboys, Native Americans, soldiers,

2

A Companion to Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur

hunters, and ex-clergymen, mostly from the West, but also doctors, Ivy League athletes, professional gamblers, and even a champion tennis player and a polo player from the East. It was the only volunteer unit to engage in combat during the 1898 conflict. Roosevelt’s bestseller The Rough Riders (1899) chronicles the exploits of his ragtag regiment, “lawless spirits who dwell on the border-land between civilization and savagery.”2 As it happens, this is also the portrait of the poet etched in Pound’s Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920), “seeing he had been born / In a half savage country, out of date; / Bent resolutely on wringing lilies from the acorn.”3 Guide to Kulchur is the record of Pound’s most sustained effort to “wring lilies,” or eke out meaning, from a range of borderlands between history, culture, and memory. It is an exploratory experiment. The book, as he sums it up in 1970, entails “a mousing round for a word, for a shape, for an order, for a meaning, and last of all for a philosophy.”4 Pound’s call to order, echoing Jean Cocteau’s rappel à l’ordre, would remain unfinished, “still mousing around for a significance in the chaos.” Kulchur stands for a cultural archive like no other—a fugitive, untamed domain. Morley’s rebranding of Pound as a literary Rough Rider hit bull’s-eye. The poet’s commitment to open-ended exploration animates his last lengthy prose work. Here, his boldness knows no bounds. Pound’s Confucian ethos barely reins in the fearless maverick imagined by Morley. The book often runs roughshod over the enemies of kulchur, “those who petrify thought, that is KILL it.”5 Pound takes no prisoners, from Aristotle to Zaharoff, the ill-famed international arms dealer. He speaks, or rather shouts, his truth to power, past or present, hero or villain. Morley’s Rooseveltian nom de guerre shows just how strongly Pound’s pugnacious character and no-holds-barred style had come to define his public persona. It also foreshadows the grievous troubles he would rush headlong into. In the turbulent years ahead, only a handful of powerful figures would be spared Pound’s growing wrath. Franklin D. Roosevelt, “Teddy” Roosevelt’s fifth cousin, was not among them. Fresh into his second term in the White House as Pound began composing Guide,

Introduction

3

FDR comes under attack for his “flimflam” and collusion with the dark forces of usury, Pound’s archenemy.6 The plot thickens in our unlikely tale of Pound and the Roosevelts. While the senior U.S. president receives only one mention, a frivolous one at that (“‘Tell us about yr. love affairs, Teddy!’”),7 FDR is cited five times as much. This is symptomatic of Pound’s abiding interest in the present, even when he is surveying the past. His new paideuma, a heavily freighted term derived from the Greek paideia, the comprehensive science of education, does not include “the monumental, the retrospect, but only the pro-spect.”8 Strangely enough, this forward-looking purview is the linchpin of his plan to rectify history and unearth its root causes. He wants to fill in its “fatal lacunae,”9 historical gaps that are far from haphazard. For Pound, “whole beams and ropes of real history have been shelved, overclouded and buried.”10 Put another way, Guide performs a kind of archaeology of “real knowledge” (a recurring phrase in the book), redressing what he sees as a widespread crisis: the suppression, falsification, and erasure of the past. Pound’s enemies are legion, if not always in plain sight. To ferret them out we must wrestle with his quarrelsome prose and come to terms with his tirades and scurrilous ad hominems. Along the way we must also face the bêtes noires that dogged the poet: his Fascism, his anti-Semitism, his paranoia, his near-manic obsessions. Still, the book signifies much more than just sound and fury. It illuminates virtually everything that ever mattered to Pound, particularly The Cantos. Morley’s hoped-for autobiography was not to be, however, at least not in the terms he had envisaged. The idea remained nonetheless incubating in Pound’s mind, as Morley reports in a letter of February 1933.11 It would take another four years for this seed to sprout. In 1937, Morley, now with fellow Faber director T. S. Eliot in tow, would suggest in the playful patois of their private repartees that Pound write a book of kulchur modeled after British biologist Lancelot Hogben’s immensely popular Mathematics for the Million (1936).12 Morley in fact loathed the pedagogic populism of Hogben’s primer, reserving qualified praise for its anti-academicism and commercial success.

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A Companion to Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur

“Panthus” (Pound) took the suggestion put forward by the “Whale” (Morley) and the “Possum” (Eliot) seriously enough. He did, however, drop the Hogben association. That same month, he sent Morley an outline for The New Learning. Although soon discarded, this working title hints at his increasingly didactic aims in the 1930s. He also jettisoned Paideuma, “too long a word for the public.”13 Finally, he tells Morley, “if your public is rough you kin call it the Guide to Kulchur.”14 Evidently, it stuck. It is not too far-fetched to see this, then, as the autobiography Morley dreamt up in 1933, a rough, dizzying ride through the wilds of Pound’s mind. Guide to Kulchur rolled out of Pound’s typewriter with astonishing speed, possibly in as little as eight to ten weeks. He composed it without any reference works other than those in his personal library in Rapallo, and his personal recollections. The vigorous pace of production is broadcast throughout the text: March 12, 16, 18, April 16, 22.15 These signposts convey momentousness. Pound wants to immerse us in his time and space, a historical moment deeply embedded in Italian Fascism. The year is not just 1937, but “anno E.F. XV,” Year 15 of the Era Fascista.16 Nineteen twenty-two, the year of Mussolini’s March on Rome and rise to power, becomes Pound’s year zero. From 1931 onward even his Rapallo letterhead would sport the Fascist calendar. It is in letters written under the aegis of Fascism that we can map out the book’s composition timeline with relative precision. Especially illuminating is his correspondence with Joseph Darling Ibbotson, a literature professor with whom Pound had studied Anglo-Saxon as an undergraduate at Hamilton College. “Bib” visited the poet in Rapallo in February 1937. On the twentyseventh, soon after his old professor had left town, Pound reports that he has “just agreed to do a universal history of all human Kulchur or whatever, in approx. 70;000 [sic] words.”17 He expected to spend a fair amount of time on it, for he also tells Bib, “I shall {have} my nose in that for some time.” Yet well past the first hundred pages in Guide he casually mentions “this day 2nd March 1937.”18 It almost defies belief that he could have written over 20,000 words between Saturday,

Introduction

5

February 27 and Tuesday, March 2. But Pound was no slouch at the best of times. Nor was this a timid venture. He was driven, in John Tytell’s words, by “a sense of harried desperation.”19 The month-long lull in the dates reported between March and April 1937 hardly meant his output had slowed down. Writing in April to fellow Hamilton alumnus, John Lackay Brown, Pound says he is preparing a note on Thomas Hardy’s Collected Poems “for my next prose outbreak.”20 It is beyond doubt that he is alluding to the homestretch of Guide. True to form, he extols the “true poetry” of Hardy’s collection in Chapter 51.21 The book became all-consuming for Pound. In a letter to Ibbotson dated March 6, Dorothy Pound apologizes on her husband’s behalf, “E.P. is too busy on the Kulchur / to answer at this moment.”22 A long epistolary silence ensued between the two men. At last, on January 31, 1938, almost a year after his last missive to Bib, Pound takes up where he had left off, “Am correcting proofs of my GUIDE.”23 His primer would break with traditional taxonomic classifications of knowledge in vogue since the Renaissance. The time has come, he boasts, “for a XXth. century outline and synthesis.” Two weeks later, he tells Montgomery Butchart that he has returned the corrected proofs to Faber.24 The editorial blurb on the dust jacket of the first Faber edition contains a half tongue-in-cheek précis of Guide to Kulchur as “a digest of all the wisdom [Pound] has acquired about art and life during the course of fifty years. In another fifty years, we shall ask him to write a sequel; meanwhile, this can stand.” That was in 1938. There would never be a sequel. Pound’s death in November 1972 came sixteen years too early. But perhaps he might never have felt the need for a followup. Guide also remains the most complete textbook in the curriculum of Pound’s “Ezuversity.” Four decades after he was laid to rest in the Protestant section of the San Michele cemetery in Venice the book still gives us a wide window into his capacious mind and insatiable curiosity, his keen eye for the luminous detail. Morley and Eliot’s call for Pound to state and restate points in his independent education program in Guide arguably informed its recursive structure and made

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A Companion to Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur

allowances for its probing, self-reflexive anxieties.25 The Faber editors were off the mark nonetheless in promoting the volume as a synopsis of Pound’s wisdom. It is above all a clarion call for urgent action. David Moody strikes the right note in describing the book “as an extended doctor’s note diagnosing the cause of the disease and recommending the appropriate treatment.”26 At stake for Pound is nothing less than the health of western civilization itself. Following a month-long delay—to allow libelous passages to be deleted—Guide to Kulchur appeared in print in London on July 21, 1938. Published a few months later, the first American edition did away with the Baedeker overtones of the “guide” and forestalled any confusion kulchur might have stirred up in readers by adopting a terse title: Culture. The text itself remained unaltered. The original title for the work as specified in the contract for the first edition read “Kulch,” or Ez’ Guide to Kulchur, according to a dust-jacket blurb in the 1952 New Directions edition, to which Pound annexed a nineteen-page postscript. Pound’s later dedicatory note to James Laughlin, his American publisher, sums up the book as a struggle “to preserve some of the values that make life worth living.”27 Pound appended the note to the New Directions photographic reprint of 1970, the last revised edition and the base-text for this Companion.

II Throughout his Guide, Pound deploys his subversively playful kulchur as his strategy to make his new learning at once palatable and entertaining. It signifies “the history of ideas going into action,”28 an antidote to the petrification of ideas. The kinetic energy of kulchur runs counter to the “dead, set, stiff, varnished ‘idea’ existing in a vacuum,” as he puts it in Jefferson and/or Mussolini (1935).29 Kulchur (also rendered elsewhere in his correspondence as “KulchOR,” “Kulchuh,” “Kulch,” or “KULCHOOR”), underscores for Pound the “totalitarian” (in the Platonic sense of holistic) scope of culture, its protean, perhaps even unnamable, totality. Poundian culture is the expression of an

Introduction

7

unconscious template of beliefs, habits, assumptions, and prejudices. It registers an “Anschauung,” a “total disposition.”30 The chameleonic spelling and phonetic ambiguity of kulchur also encode a sly yet serious political critique wedged between the contentious German “Kultur” and the stodgy English “culture,” both of which are parodied by Pound’s homophone. He even deploys kulchur self-critically, scolding his generation of avant-garde “experimenters” for not coming up with “a code for action.”31 Kulchur accompanies the “New Learning or New Paideuma.”32 The latter term he borrows from the German ethnologist Leo Frobenius, who uses it, as Pound explains, “for the tangle or complex of the inrooted ideas of any period.”33 In Pound’s idiolect, paideuma denotes “the gristly roots of ideas that are in action.”34 Kulchur and paideuma therefore share the same ground. Pound claims to discern fundamental ideas which (like “gristly roots”) are less accessible, less digestible, that is to say, implicit yet evident in everyday life, and, therefore, less comprehensible. Whereas the standard guidebook dwells in commonplaces, Pound’s tour de force, by his own estimation, bursts at the seams with luminous revelations, but without a grand narrative. As he points out, the publisher’s “contract calls for a guide TO not THROUGH human culture.”35 He justifies his approach as following in the footsteps of Plato, Plutarch, Herodotus, Montaigne, Rabelais, and Walter Pater, all of whom he sees as fellow avatars of kulchur. Having gathered the concrete particulars of culture in their manner, Pound will take us straight to what really matters. He is keen to distance Guide from his earlier pedagogical projects of the 1930s, including How to Read (1931) and ABC of Reading (1934). Those works aim “to establish a series or set of measures, standards, voltometers, here I am dealing with a heteroclite set of impressions.”36 Guide to Kulchur is the palimpsest of Pound’s heteroclite or eccentric impressions. The erasures, revisions, and additions to the original text testify to Jerome McGann’s idea of the multivarious dimensions of a text:

8

A Companion to Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur No book is one thing, it is many things, fashioned and refashioned repeatedly under different circumstances. Its meaning, as Wittgenstein would say, is in its use. And because all its uses are always invested in real circumstances, the many meanings of any book are socially and physically coded in and by the books themselves. They bear the evidence of the meanings they have helped to make.37

In a McGannian twist of fate, even the archival history of Guide bears the evidence of the world history that Pound synthesizes: 230 sheet sets of the first Faber edition were destroyed in a bombing during the Second World War.38 The book also bears the scars of Eliot’s editorial knife. Although no match for Pound’s radical editorial maneuvers in the manuscript of The Waste Land, Eliot’s excisions nonetheless altered the published text considerably. In the chapter, “Happy Days,” the evidence of his intervention is a glaring blank space. A paragraph on Hardy is split at the middle, marking the point where Eliot removed a scathing comment about Hardy’s sisters.39 He even cut out a token of praise to himself. The Companion recovers all of Eliot’s edits from the unexpurgated edition of Guide to Kulchur and annotates the excised passages. I subscribe to Donald Pizer’s argument for presenting the reader with censored versions because of their historical resonance.40 Aborted passages reveal Eliot’s fears of libel and bring Pound’s foes out into the open. In a three-pronged assault, for instance, Pound had originally berated the seventeenth-century French bishop Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet, journalists for The Times, and Nicholas Murray Butler, president of Columbia University. Ignoring the long-dead Bossuet, Eliot redacts the original “N. M. Butler” to “some University Presidents” and “The Times leader writers” to “numerous leader writers.”41 Pound’s later exposé of The Times, the Daily Telegraph, and other mainstream print media controlled by powerful elites is softened to “any paper.”42 Eliot also shucks off “punks, pimps and cheap dudes,” epithets marshaled by Pound to caricature England’s ruling class.43 A few pages later, he

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emends Pound’s condemnation of the Church of England, letting “ally of mammon” stand but erasing a barbed jab at a staid figure in the British establishment: William Cosmo Gordon Lang of Lambeth, the Archbishop of Canterbury. In its place, Eliot makes Pound parrot his own dread of the “danger of libel.”44 Other onslaughts are simply deleted out of hand. Pound’s typescripts housed at Yale’s Beinecke Library reveal a range of excerpts that even he thought too hot to handle and therefore redacted before submitting to Faber. A striking case in point is a Dantean diatribe against university presses. Oxford is singled out as especially loathsome, followed by Cambridge, Yale, Harvard, and others, all of which are run by brainless monkeys and usurious hacks “c’hanno perduto il ben dell’intelletto.”45 Pound cribs the Italian from the beginning of Canto III of Dante’s Inferno, where Virgil tells the Florentine poet to expect to see those “who have lost the good of the intellect.”46 Guide’s cutting room floor is littered with off-color fragments. The book’s title itself telegraphs the discursive unruliness of Pound’s publication. Guide to Kulchur is labyrinthine and allusive. It purposely resists legibility and linearity. Instead, it cross-pollinates eras and subjects in a transcultural, intertextual search for the “just revelation.”47 Pound attempts to present his interdisciplinary program of cultural-aesthetic renewal and political reform in a language shorn of woolliness and excess, if not of coherence itself. In a quick succession of pithy chapters he abridges and critiques a ragbag of histories and cultures, including Confucian and Greek philosophy, Italian Fascism, Western metaphysics, economics, music, Provençal poetry, French cuisine, African and Siberian folksongs, interwar history, and pre-Christian fertility cults. This polysemic interplay makes up his “new synthesis.” But it also betrays a nagging structural anxiety. The motley fragments that jostle against one another in his historiography necessitate constant recasting, reiteration, and justification. “Let the reader be patient,” he enjoins.48 Nowhere else in his oeuvre does he address us so earnestly, nor so often. Pound is keen to lay bare the device. He lets us peek behind his free-associating methodology, “I

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A Companion to Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur

haven’t ‘lost my thread’ in the sense that I haven’t just dropped one thread to pick up another of different shade. I need more than one string for a fabric.” Beneath his tangled skeins, he insists, lies the warp and woof of the fabric of a history the reader must weave for herself. He undertakes an Arnoldian and Carlylean project in Guide, cherrypicking from the storehouses of our collective memory whatever he deems worth salvaging. Yet Pound also seeks to bypass other histories and ideologies. The book valorizes the happenstance nature of knowledge. Consider how he articulates his blueprint for Guide, “I am to write this new Vade Mecum without opening other volumes, I am to put down so far as possible only what has resisted the erosion of time, and forgetfulness.”49 This mnemonic approach yields an idiosyncratic history of ideas, a history with ghostly demarcations. Pound’s anti-Aristotelian rejection of syllogistic logic continually shapes his thought. Not that this was a new development. In Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir (1916), Pound defines the image not as an idea but as a “VORTEX from which, and through which, and into which, ideas are constantly rushing.”50 Twenty-two years later, he reprints the sculptor’s Vorticist manifesto in Guide as a benchmark of “real knowledge.”51 Pound also channels Rémy de Gourmont’s “instinct”—the “result of countless acts of intellection, something after and not before reason”—to establish “axes of reference.”52 His mode of presentation is aphoristic, ideogrammic. More than a rhetorical mode alone, Pound’s ideogrammic method corresponds to the quasi-mystical understanding of knowledge and culture that he derives from Confucius, Gourmont, and Swedenborg. This technique, he explains, “consists of presenting one facet and then another until at some point one gets off the dead and desensitized surface of the reader’s mind, onto a part that will register.”53 In this fitful space he gropes for some measure of meaning, however contingent and provisional it may be. This epistemology also enlists the scholasticism of Richard of St. Victor to privilege what the medieval theologian calls “process”: cogitation, meditation, and contemplation. In the chapter “Zweck or the Aim,” Pound puts forward that “once the process is

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understood it is quite likely that the knowledge will stay by a man, weightless, held without effort.”54 The express purpose of Guide, then, is to showcase the cross-cultural archetypes that will enable kulchur to be actualized. Rather than present normative statements (“dead catalogues”), Pound, here as in The Cantos, “wants to plunge us into the act of discovery itself.”55 He believed as much, stating that “the book shd. be a ball of light in one’s hand.”56 This anticipates his challenge near the end of The Cantos: “I have brought the great ball of crystal; / who can lift it?”57 Which is to say that in the end the reader has to do all the work. Contemporary reviews of Guide to Kulchur suggest, however, that perhaps too much has been left to the reader. One critic deplored its “lack of steady illumination,” while another sneered at its sweeping “zigzag through the entire field of culture.”58 Fascist politics renders this contested site of ideas all the more vexed and vexing.

III Pound’s mussolinismo, or star-struck fascination with Mussolini, fundamentally inflects the book’s many twists and turns.59 He never forgot the question posed by the Duce at their one and only meeting: “Perchè vuol mettere le sue idee in ordine?” (“Why do you want to put your ideas in order?”).60 The query is also telegraphed in Cantos 87, 89, and 93.61 “‘Per mio poema,’” was Pound’s bashful reply to the “Boss,” as logged in the last of these three cantos. Yet perhaps even more so than in his epic poem it is in Guide to Kulchur that he explicitly strives to set his ideas in order. Mussolini trumps Morley as the catalyst for the book. Italian Fascism, as Alec Marsh notes, “meant an opportunity to renovate civilization, to conquer modernity in the name of order.”62 Read thus, Guide is quintessentially a Fascist document. Its project to rise above the noise and confusion in the liberal capitalist marketplace of ideas is built on a small but forceful set of totalizing principles. Pound disavows what he considers to be a travesty of knowing and learning that passes itself off as knowledge. This superficial brand of knowledge is a “drug on the market.”63 It intoxicates the masses with

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A Companion to Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur

a shallow cocktail of epistemologies. Pseudoknowledge becomes increasingly “abundant, superhumanly abundant.” The endgame is chaos and confusion in the body politic. Pound’s prophylactic for this unruly trend is conciseness. It bookends Guide to Kulchur, from the Confucian economy at the outset to “Condensare,” the last heading. It is not sheer synopsis that he seeks. Pound is after an almost atomic kind of concentration. His inductive methodology is informed by the Confucian doctrine of the “one principle,” a cognitive movement from particulars to universals.64 In his digest of Confucius’s Analects in the first chapter Pound notes that the Chinese sign for learning is dominated by the ideograph of a “mortar,” indicating that “knowledge must be ground into fine powder.”65 It is no accident that he is in thrall to the corporatism of totalitarian power. How else to grind and sublimate the irreconcilable contradictions of modernity? Or the usurious, “loose waftiness of demoliberal ideology”?66 Fascism becomes Pound’s mortar and pestle, Mussolini the scion of Confucius. The Italian strongman typifies the seamless fusion of thought and action. This being so, he also embodies kulchur. Untethered from the red tape of democracy Mussolini carries his “thought unhesitant to the root.”67 Yet the swiftness and simplicity Pound fetishizes in his Fascist hero seem out of sync with Guide itself. While swift to a fault, the book is anything but simple. A couple of years earlier, in Jefferson and/or Mussolini, Pound had expressed his belief that linguistic precision “is bound in the long run to be useful to the state and the world at large.”68 This conviction seldom holds out in his prose ventures, however. Guide to Kulchur is no exception; ergo, this Companion.

IV A Companion to Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur had to contend from the start not only with the mechanics of the project but also its justification. Guide hardly seems to warrant annotations, at least on the surface. Pound takes the reader by the hand into the farthest reaches of his thought in 6 parts, 58 chapters, and roughly 75,000 words. But

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Pound is no Virgil. The book conceals as much as it reveals. His staggering range of references and encyclopedic scope may at times be virtually indecipherable to the lay reader. Each chapter can be seen as a cultural ideogram or, more precisely, a cryptogram to be decoded. To wit, “Promised Land” surveys Chaucer, Dante, Henry VIII, Browning, Hardy, Gautier, and Swinburne, among others, while maligning Kipling to the point of libel, all crammed into 4½ pages. The book’s jazzy syncopation dazzles, but it is just as likely to leave the reader in a daze. As a guide, therefore, the book is a monumental failure. J. J. Wilhelm, Pound’s biographer, sees it as a botched attempt “to do in prose what can better be done in poetry, which works far more with the imagination and with suggestion than with logical persuasion.”69 Be that as it may, Wilhelm misses the point. Guide to Kulchur is a failure only insofar as the neo-pagan temple built in Rimini by the Italian Renaissance ruler Sigismundo Malatesta is a failure. The church of San Francesco, also known as the Tempio Malatestiano, ended up, like The Cantos, as an unfinished enterprise or, as Pound quips, “a jumble and a junk shop.”70 Amid statues of Christian saints the myriad bas-reliefs in the Tempio depict a host of zodiac signs, neoplatonic allusions, and mythological figures, including Pallas Athena, Apollo, Minerva, Diana, and sibyls, to name but a few. A “daring synthesis,” the Tempio’s cultural bricolage typifies a crucial effort toward civilization building.71 Poundian kulchur, too, is constructed of materials retrieved readymade from the midden heap of history. Malatesta’s “failure,” he reminds us, is “worth all the successes of his age.”72 And just as the Tempio registers for Pound a fundamental “all-roundness” in spite of itself, Guide telescopes the fullness of his thought at its freest. This Companion, in turn, provides commentary to help the reader not to trip over the book’s “tattered formulations”73 in order to share in Pound’s moments of discovery and revelation. It is little wonder that Guide to Kulchur is more often referenced than read. Pound’s multi-textured patchwork prose can seem daunting. Yet there is method in its apparent randomness. When Eliot famously dedicated The Waste Land to il miglior fabbro he had

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A Companion to Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur

a specific meaning in mind concerning Pound, “the better craftsman.” Eliot wished, in his own words, “to honour the technical mastery and critical ability in [Pound’s] own work, which had also done so much to turn The Waste Land from a jumble of good passages and bad passages into a poem.”74 Pound’s technical and critical virtuosity is also on display in Guide, even if the text looks like a jumble of freestanding chapters. It is worth remembering that the book was written for readers of The Cantos, as Leon Surette has helpfully argued.75 Like the sprawling poem, Guide too is inferential and indexical. It flies in the face of logic and chronology. Hence, one way to gain a fuller appreciation (though not necessarily a fuller understanding) of the book is to approach it as a species of boundary-blurring, genre-resistant hybrid, riffing off everything from the textbook, the encyclopedia, the dictionary, the newspaper, and the travel book to the novel, the poem, the parable, the epigram, and the folk song. Pound conceives the book as an experiment in metahistory. And as an experiment, its “errors” are nothing if not “wanderings in search of truth.”76 As Joseph Conrad, that other modernist master of convolutions, reminds us, “the artist appeals to that part of our being which is not dependent on wisdom . . . He speaks to our capacity for delight and wonder, to the sense of mystery surrounding our lives.”77 By dint of its amphibious meanings and relentless intertextuality, Guide celebrates mystery, “Things not to be spoken save in secret.”78 Pound seeks to kindle in us a reverence for the hidden sacredness of knowledge. Only by tremendous labor after all can we attain its secretum. Hence the book’s puzzling allusions and cryptic references. Engaging with Pound’s epistemology need not be a glum affair, however. Like the rhizome of Deleuze and Guattari, kulchur joyously transgresses boundaries. It, too, “has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo.”79 Pound wants to awaken in us a sense of wondrous delight in this liminality. This then is the point of the tough read that is Guide. It is designed to make the reader “intensely alive.”80 In short, Guide to Kulchur’s nonlinear structure underwrites a thoroughly modernist work. The book approaches the condition of a

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work of art. This is perhaps why New Directions, Pound’s publisher, classifies it as literature. His guide looks nothing like a conventional guidebook. However read, it is genre-defying. Its polyphonic chapters bear out the form-content dialectic of aesthetic modernism. As early as 1929 Pound warded off charges that he wished “to provide a ‘portable substitute for the British Museum’, which I would do, like a shot, were it possible. It isn’t.”81 Guide illustrates this impossibility. In its paratactic structure and radical inclusiveness, it displays some of the same intractable complexities that we find in W. B. Yeats’s A Vision, where Pound is said to have likened The Cantos to a Bach fugue: “No plot, no chronicle of events, no logic of discourse.”82 And like The Cantos—cited in Guide as “the tale of the tribe”83—the volume seeks to provide a far-reaching, multilingual, and dynamic cultural taxonomy. Guide sets great store by Pound’s idea that knowledge weighs nothing against culture. But this is not the culture of the academy, libraries, or museums. It is a state that arises when one has so wholly internalized the cultural archive (“forgotten-what-book”)84 that it seems automatic, effortless. This is the essence of kulchur. Incorporating economics, politics, and art, this iconoclastic cultural pastiche, he believed, would kick start a new renaissance in western civilization. As Pound’s most comprehensive manifesto, Guide also expresses the core of his cultural politics, “or what I wd. do were I minister of Kulchur in Utopia.”85 It is not surprising that he would deem it his best book, alongside Cantos LII–LXXI (1940), the China and Adams Cantos.86 Long before cultural studies emerged as an interdisciplinary field, Pound’s compendium anticipated the pluralism of cultural change, critical theory, and political economy. It constitutes a transhistorical cross-cultural anthropology that parlays his slogan for the renovation of ancient wisdom for current use—“Make It New.” To lay claim to Pound’s own mission statement for Guide to Kulchur, the critical annotations that follow are primarily designed “to provide the average reader with a few tools for dealing with the heteroclite mass of undigested information.”87 Pound has bitten off far more than most of us could ever chew. A Companion to Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur addresses the formidable interpretive challenges of

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A Companion to Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur

his most far-reaching treatise. Providing page-by-page glosses on key terms and passages, the Companion also situates Pound’s allusions and references in relation to other texts in his vast body of work, especially The Cantos. Read side by side the two works complement each other in startling ways. Striking a balance between rigorous scholarly standards and readerly accessibility, the Companion is designed to meet the needs of specialists and non-specialists alike. Endnotes provide bibliographic citations and supplemental information for readers who may wish to dig deeper. In this way, the annotations render Pound’s “book of yatter” more easily negotiated, while being careful to avoid overwhelming the reader with a surfeit of ancillary materials. Paratextual findings have been minimized or left out for brevity’s sake, including marginal notes found in Pound’s hand in many of the works he cites in Guide. The graffiti-like marginalia and cryptics—often etched in thick blue or red pencil, a kind of Poundian hieroglyphics—index the lively conversations he held with the consulted texts. His notations enable us to trace critical points informing the book’s composition process, but they only surface in the Companion when explicitly fruitful. I do not pretend to have produced a foolproof companion piece, far from it. Guide to Kulchur itself is a book of voids and gaps, leaving much unsaid. Yet none other than Confucius endorsed this radical revision of historiography. In Canto 13, Pound invokes the philosopher, who recalls “A day when the historians left blanks in their writings, / I mean for things they didn’t know.”88 Like historian, like annotator. This Companion is no different. My intent is “to lure the reader,” as Pound puts it, mindful that “any hodge-podge of oddities that arouses hunger or thirst is pardonable to the critic.”89 All one dares hope in the end is that the Companion’s shortcomings will stir further appetite for the original. However disjointed and, at times, unpalatable Pound’s digest of cultures and civilizations may appear, it remains an essential index of the author’s omnivorous interests and of his quixotic belief in his own capacity to make the vortices of power and the vortices of kulchur coincide into an “era of brilliance.”90

Introduction

Front of dust jacket, Ezra Pound, Guide to Kulchur (London: Faber and Faber, 1938). Copyright ©1938 by Ezra Pound. Reprinted by permission of the New Directions Publishing Corp.

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Frontispiece to PREFACE

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This wafer of wax . . . from the young Salustio Malatesta: Sallustio de’ Malatesta (1448–70), the only legitimate son and heir of Sigismundo Malatesta (1417–68), the legendary Italian Renaissance condottiere (warlord) of Rimini from 1429 to 1468, and his celebrated mistress and eventual third wife, Isotta degli Atti (1432–74). Sallustio was allegedly murdered by his half brother, Roberto Malatesta (1442–82). Pound’s fascination with the epistolary seal reproduced in the frontispiece stems in no small measure from his tour of libraries and historical archives in Italy from February 11 to April 14, 1923. His nine-week research excursion took him to several cities, including Venice, Milan, Rome, Bologna, Florence, Rimini, and Modena, where he came across the Sallustio seal at Modena’s Archivio di Stato.1 Pound commissioned the photograph of the seal reproduced in GK from a studio in Modena.2 Hugh Kenner cites this passage to illustrate the “vortex of architecture and sculpture” that the Malatesti created in Rimini, noting further that “Pound owned a seal made by Edmund Dulac” (1882–1953), a French illustrator and stamp designer.3 Pound further underscores the seal’s importance in the chapter “Examples of Civilization” (GK 159).    There are three direct references to Sallustio in The Cantos, the first in Canto 9, where his tutor reports in a letter dated December 30, 1454 that his infant pupil “is so much pleased

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with his pony,” and in Cantos 20 and 74, both of which mention the young lord alongside his mother (9/38, 20/94, 74/468). Canto 74 specifically cites the pseudo-Pisanello “intaglios” (seals) of Sallustio “in the time of Ixotta,” his mother. Pisanello medals: Antonio Pisano (Pisanello) (c.1394–1455), Veronese courtly painter and medalist, who pioneered portrait medals made to commemorate special events.4 For Pound, the Pisanello medal marked an index of high civilization in early Renaissance Italy. In Canto 74, Pound cites Pisanello and his Veronese compatriot, Matteo da Pasti (1420–68), who also made medallions of Sigismundo and Isotta:      for praise of intaglios Matteo and Pisanello out of Babylon     they are left us for roll or plain impact     or cut square in the jade block (74/457) Rimini’s civilization in 1460: In a letter of August 10, 1922, Pound writes to John Quinn, a New York lawyer and patron of the arts, about his research on the “historic background” of the Malatesti in preparation to write the first of the four Cantos that make up the Malatesta Cantos (Cantos 8–11), and ends the missive on this emphatic note: “Hang it all its a bloody good period, a town the size of Rimini, with Pier Francesca, Pisanello, Mino da Fiesoli, and Alberti as architect. The pick of the bunch, all working there at one time or another.”5 Pier della Francesca: Piero della Francesca (1415–92), Italian Renaissance painter, portraitist, and art theorist from Umbria, author of, among other works, the portrait of Sigismundo’s archenemy, Federico III da Montefeltro and his countess Battista Sforza (1464). He most likely also painted the panel portrait of Sigismundo Malatesta, now in the Louvre.6 In Canto 8, Pound quotes from a letter of April 7, 1449 from Sigismundo to Cosimo

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A Companion to Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur de’ Medici (1389–1464), founder of the Platonic Academy in Florence, expressing his desire that Piero should refrain from painting a fresco in Sigismundo’s Tempio Malatestiano, Rimini, until the mortar dries. In Pound’s translated excerpt, Sigismundo also reveals his plan to be Piero’s unconditional patron, so as to allow the painter “to work as he likes, / Or waste his time as he likes” (affatigandose per suo piacere o no / no gli manchera la provixione mai)” (8/28–29). Canto 45 features Piero, alongside Bellini (see note below) and other quattrocento painters, as a paragon of artistry in opposition to usura (“usury”), which Pound defines at the end of the Canto as “A charge for the use of purchasing power, levied without regard to production; often without regard to the possibilities of production. (Hence the failure of the Medici bank.)” (45/230). Bellini: Giovanni Bellini (c.1430–1516), the most prominent member of the Bellini family of Venetian painters and one of the foremost artists and religious painters of the Renaissance. He is admired in particular for his extraordinarily diverse treatment of illumination, shadow, and color in the composition of dozens of half-figure depictions of the Virgin and Child.7 In Canto 74, Pound stresses Bellini’s significance by placing the painter in the company of Sigismundo and Agostino di Duccio (1418–81), the Florentine sculptor and architect, all of whom are transmitters of “a precise definition” in art (74/445). If the Tempio is a jumble and junk shop: The Church of San Francesco, Rimini, associated with the Malatesta dynasty since the first Lord of Rimini, Malatesta da Verucchio, was interred there in 1312.8 In the 1440s, Sigismundo commissioned the architect Leon Battista Alberti (1404–72) to remodel the church into a fabric all’antica, with the interior work led by the renowned sculptors, Matteo de’ Pasti (c.1420–67) and Agostino di Duccio.9 Isotta degli Atti is also buried in the Tempio. Its neopagan aesthetic and pastiche of architectural styles impressed Pound as hallmarks of the classical revival in the

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quattrocento. Amid statues of Christian saints the myriad basreliefs in the Tempio depict a host of zodiac signs, neoplatonic allusions, and mythological figures, including Pallas Athena, Minerva, Apollo, Diana, and sibyls, among others (hence “a jumble and a junk shop”). In 1934, he would praise its “daring synthesis” in T. S. Eliot’s Criterion.10 For Pound, the Tempio typifies the kind of cultural bricolage that registers a crucial effort toward civilization building. So monumental was Sigismundo’s project that even his most vociferous enemy, Pius II, grudgingly acknowledged the feat, as reported in Canto 8, “He, Sigismundo, templum ædificavit” (8/32).11 Gemisto: Georgios Gemistos Plethon (1355–1460), Byzantine Neoplatonist philosopher whose remains were interred by Sigismundo in one of the outer walls of the Tempio. In Pound’s estimation, Plethon introduced Neoplatonism to Italy in the 1430s (GK 224). Demetres Tryphonopoulos locates the basis of Pound’s high regard for Plethon in the philosopher’s “rediscovery of or return to the polytheistic ethos of pagan and Hellenistic esoteric rituals.”12 In Canto 83, Pound links Plethon to the neopagan cosmogony of Sigismundo’s Tempio, “Gemisto stemmed all from Neptune / hence the Rimini bas reliefs” (83/548; cf. GK 224). Herr Schulze: Fritz Schultze (1846–1908), author of Georgios Gemistos Plethon und seine reformatorischen Bestrebungen (1874), the main source for Pound’s commentary on Plethon. Laurenziana: Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana or Laurentian Library, rare book and manuscript library in Florence, Italy. unfindable edtn. of Xenophon: (c.428–c.354 BCE), Greek general and historian, known for writings that contest the charges that led to Socrates’s death.13 Pound mentions “an early edtn. of Xenophon” again in Guide, but dates its publication to 1496, not 1460 (GK 224). Dante: Dante Alighieri (1265–1321), Florentine poet, philosopher, and author of the acclaimed epic poem La Divina

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A Companion to Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur Commedia (1307–20). A central figure in The Cantos, Dante is featured in GK as the creator of a “factive” paideuma, Pound’s ideal manifestation of culture (GK 107). Later in the book Pound pairs Dante and Confucius (GK 317), repeating his gesture in an essay of 1933, in which he associates Dante not only with Confucius but also with the third U.S. president Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) and the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini (1883–1945), hailing the Duce’s construction of the via dell’Impero (present-day via dei Fori Imperiali) as an act of the “WILL [VOLONTÀ].”14 Pound owned and extensively marked his copy of the 1869 edition of Dante’s Divina Commedia, now housed in his personal library in Brunnenburg Castle, Dorf Tirol, Italy.15 This copy is the same one he consulted while writing GK. Kulchur: Pound’s irreverent, disruptive reading of “culture” (see Introduction). Kulchur is virtually synonymous with action. As he puts it in the dedicatory preface appended to GK in 1970, the book amounts to nothing less than a comprehensive quest, “a mousing round for a word, for a shape, for an order, for a meaning, and last of all for a philosophy” (GK 8). In Canto 54, Pound illustrates the constructiveness of kulchur in his loose paraphrase from the seventh-century Notes on Conduct, composed by Chinese Tang dynasty Emperor Taï Tsong (598–649 CE) or Li Shimin (李世民) to instruct his son, and the last on keepin’ up kulchur     Saying ‘I have spent money on palaces       too much on ’osses, dogs, falcons but I have united the Hempire (and you ’aven’t)’ (54/287) Although this is the only instance of the term in The Cantos, kulchur encodes for Pound the provisional and experimental nature of culture.

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Louis Zukofsky: (1904–78), American Objectivist poet with whom Pound corresponded extensively, beginning in 1927 when Pound lived in Rapallo, a resort town on the Ligurian coast of Italy.16 Zukofsky spent several weeks with Pound in Rapallo in 1933, the only significant amount of time the poets spent together. Pound would dedicate GK to Zukofsky and Basil Bunting (see note below). The last meeting between Zukofsky and Pound took place in 1954 at St. Elizabeths Hospital, Washington, D.C., a psychiatric hospital where the elder poet was confined from 1946 to 1958. Taking on the role of mentor, Pound actively promoted Zukofsky’s work, prompting Harriet Monroe to assign Zukofsky the editorship of the February 1931 Poetry issue titled “Objectivists.”17 Basil Bunting: (1900–85), British modernist poet admired by Pound and Zukofsky, all three of whom formed a lasting friendship. The Irish poet W. B. Yeats (1865–1939) described Bunting as “one of Ezra’s more savage disciples.”18 Bunting met Pound in Paris in 1922 and lived sporadically in Rapallo for several years, from the late 1920s to the early 1930s. In The Pisan Cantos Pound alludes to the younger poet’s hunger strike (“as pacifist tempted with chicken”) following the six months Bunting spent in jail for being a conscientious objector during the First World War. Pound also cites (albeit with a typo) Bunting’s first poetry collection, Redimiculum Matellarum (1930) (74/451). His admiration for Bunting is also evident in a letter to Douglas McPherson of November 3, 1939. Bunting is one of the few writers, alongside E. E. Cummings, Wyndham Lewis, and T. S. Eliot, among others, whom Pound sets apart as the “surviving members of the human race.”19 Zukofsky anticipates this sentiment in a letter to Pound of November 9, 1930, stating that Bunting “will be the only Englishmun” he will print as editor of the then-forthcoming An “Objectivists” Anthology (1932).20 “Strugglers in the desert,” the phrase Pound chooses to describe Zukofsky and Bunting

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A Companion to Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur in the dedication of the first Faber edition of GK in 1938, may also be understood in the context of the war “against thickness and fatness”—the usurious perversion of culture and civilization—in Canto 74, which features Bunting, Cummings, and the eccentric New York literary figure, Joe Gould (74/452). Given my freedom: Pound had been living in Rapallo since 1924 and beholden to no single employer to earn his keep, other than the many editors of publishing firms, literary magazines, periodicals, and newspapers to whom he submitted a regular stream of contributions. He also organized a series of concerts and lectures in Rapallo, including Vivaldi concerts in 1936 organized with the violinist Olga Rudge (1895–1996). Financial considerations evidently mattered to Pound, however, as shown both in the turn his writing took toward money and economics and in his concern with personal remuneration. Even as he was writing GK in 1937, he briefly contemplated writing a “Life and Times” book about Max Beerbohm on the condition of a high-paying contract.21 The relative isolation and low cost of living in Rapallo undoubtedly gave Pound a sense of freedom he might otherwise have forfeited had he, like many of his avant-garde peers, stayed in London or Paris. In Jefferson and/or Mussolini, Pound would go so far as to say that he felt freer in Fascist Italy than he ever did in London or Paris.22 Kenner paints a vivid picture of Pound’s remove from the main urban hubs of Europe: “he lived in a salubrious overgrown village now, with mountains and the sea and olive trees and no library but his own.”23 This is also the library he primarily relied upon to write GK. “Man is not an end-product,       Maggot asserts.”: Excerpt from “They Say Etna,” a poem by Bunting, first published in Active Anthology (1933). Edited by Pound, the anthology featured a range of modernist writers, “mostly ill known in England,” according to Pound’s preface,24 including Zukofsky, Cummings, Hemingway,

Frontispiece to PREFACE

27

Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, and Eliot, among others. The fragment quoted in GK illustrates Bunting’s enduring presence in Pound’s poetic memory, given its inclusion in this dedicatory note appended to the New Directions edition of GK in 1970, just two years before Pound’s death. It is also a fitting prelude to the book. The poem’s language, as Richard Caddel notes, “is disturbing: spiky, even fragmentary in its syntax, and with unglossed proper names and joke names side-by-side with real contemporary and historical figures. It is full of belligerent argument.”25 Much the same could be said of Pound’s guide, with its litany of obscure figures and cryptic references and arguments. The stanza from “They Say Etna” that immediately follows the quoted excerpt in the dedication may also help to explain why Pound chose to include Bunting’s poetic fragment. It indicts a limping and deformed system with waste accumulating at compound rates of interest. Pound’s economic and political concerns in the 1930s echo strongly here, even at this late stage of his poetic career in 1970. The above passage also resonates later on in GK in the excerpt on “wasted nations,” quoted from Samuel Johnson’s The Vanity of Human Wishes (1749) (GK 178). James Laughlin: (1914–97), Harvard-educated American poet and founder of New Directions, the publishing firm he created under Pound’s influence. The first book published by New Directions was an anthology containing Pound’s Canto 44, New Directions in Prose and Poetry (1936).26 New Directions also published the first American edition of GK, tersely titled Culture, four months after the Faber edition.27 New Directions would eventually reissue the book with its present title in 1952. David M. Gordon, editor of the Pound–Laughlin correspondence, calls their “publisher–author alliance” the twentieth century’s “most important.”28 Like Zukofsky and Bunting, Laughlin spent several months at Pound’s “Ezuversity” in Rapallo between 1934 and 1935, following a brief stay

28

A Companion to Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur in August 1933. After this first visit, Laughlin wrote to Pound to thank him for “the most vital experience of the summer.”29 In a letter to “Jazzz” (Laughlin) of February 28, 1937, Pound writes, “Having refused to write life of M. Beerbohm, I am doin a GUIDE ter kulchur.”30 In a letter of April 10, 1937 he wonders, “but WILL they prink [print] it?”31 In a letter of December 1938 Pound alludes to the libelous passages that Eliot (then-editor at Faber) had excised from GK, lamenting that he “didn’t know sooner, and you [Laughlin] cd / have had sheets unexpugd.”32 Pound’s description of GK in the 1970 dedication stems from Laughlin’s request for a blurb for the jacket copy.33 In his 1987 memoir, Pound as Wuz: Essays and Lectures on Ezra Pound, Laughlin surmises that he “may be the last survivor who knew Pound in his best years, in his prime.”34

Part I

Section I

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1. DIGEST OF THE ANALECTS   that is, of the Philosophic Conversations 15

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DIGEST OF THE ANALECTS: The Analects (Lun Yü, 論語/ 论语), a compilation of the philosophical reflections of Confucius (Kŏng Qīu, 孔丘, 551–479 BCE).1 In June 1937, just a few months after he began to write GK, Pound published his abridged translation of the Analects with Giovanni Scheiwiller, a Milan publisher, bearing the same title as the heading of the present chapter. With the exception of two brief passages, the text is reprinted in its entirety in this chapter. In 1951, Pound would reprint his translation of the complete text under the shorter title, Confucian Analects, first published in the Hudson Review the previous year. Pound first read Confucius as early as July 1907, but it was only when he wintered in 1914–15 at Yeats’s Stone Cottage at Coleman’s Hatch, near Ashdown Forest in Sussex, that he began to read the Chinese philosopher in earnest.2 He came to the serious study of Confucius through sixteen notebooks containing draft translations of Chinese poetry, Noh dramas, and other material bequeathed to him between 1913 and 1915 by the widow of Ernest Fenollosa (1853–1908), an American art historian and professor of political economy and philosophy at Tokyo University.3 Among Fenollosa’s literary papers was his essay, “The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry.” First published in Pound’s Instigations (1920), the essay was published in book form by Stanley Nott in 1936, with a foreword and notes by Pound, as the first of two volumes Pound edited for Nott’s “Ideogrammic Series.”4 Especially influential for Pound was Fenollosa’s central argument that the Chinese ideogram “has not only absorbed

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the poetic substance of nature and built with it a second work of metaphor, but has through its very pictorial visibility, been able to retain its original creative poetry with far more vigor and vividness than any phonetic tongue.”5 This notion is the impetus behind his “ideogrammic method,” described in Guide as consisting “of presenting one facet and then another until at some point one gets off the dead and desensitized surface of the reader’s mind, onto a part that will register” (GK 51). Ever keen to further his knowledge of Chinese writing and literature, even if he never did learn to speak the language, Pound continued to crib from Japanese transcriptions in Fenollosa’s notebooks for his translations, including his 1928 translation of Confucius’s Ta Hio (大学, The Great Learning). In 1947, Pound issued a new and improved translation titled Ta Hsio: The Great Digest, the version I have used in all the quoted references from the book.6 It is worth noting, as Zhaoming Qian observes, that Pound “had owned a set of Robert Morrison’s multivolume Dictionary of the Chinese Language since 1914,” though he did not start trying to learn the language until about 1935.7 In his foreword to the first English edition of his translation of the Confucian Analects (1956), Pound affirms that “the study of the Confucian philosophy is of greater profit than that of the Greek because no time is wasted in idle discussion of errors. Aristotle gives, may we say, 90% of his time to errors.”8 This excerpt not only helps us to understand his critique in GK of the Nicomachean Ethics, by the Greek philosopher Aristotle (384–322 BCE), but it also establishes at the outset the importance of Confucius (Kung)—the “Philosopher”—and the Analects in particular. The opening passage is from Book XV (Wei Ling Kung, 衛靈 公/卫灵公), Chapter II of the Analects. In his own copy of The Analects, translated by William Jennings, Pound marked by hand a passage from Book II, which aptly prefigures the Confucian notion of “one principle”: “Where the mind is set much upon heterodox principles, —there truly and indeed is harm.”9

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A Companion to Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur Sse: Si (Zigòng, 子贡), one of Confucius’s favorite disciples, a kindred spirit.10 In Book I of Pound’s 1950 translation of the Analects Confucius affirms that “one can begin to discuss the Odes with him; gave him the beginning and he knew what comes (after it).”11 I have reduced it all to one principle: Confucius’s lean philosophical economy intersects Pound’s own poetic program, as laid out in his essay “A Few Don’ts” (1913), to “use no superfluous word, no adjective which does not reveal something.”12 Canto 53 notes similarly, “Kung cut 3000 odes to 300” (53/273). Pound thus begins and ends with the principle of “condensare,” as he titles the coda to GK, quoting the maxim by the Imagist poet and critic T. E. Hulme (1883–1917), “All a man ever thought would go onto a half sheet of notepaper. The rest is application and elaboration” (GK 369). 一 以 貫 之: (yi yi guan zhi) “unity” (Analects XV.II.i) or, as Paul R. Goldin renders it, “one thing with which to string [everything] together.”13 Pound translates the concept elsewhere as a binding, germinative principle: “unite, flow through, connect, put forth leaf.”14 In his 1893 translation, British sinologist James Legge (1815–97) phrases it as “unity all-pervading.”15 Rapacity: “The quality or fact of being rapacious; rapacious behaviour or tendencies; greed.”16 The term might properly be understood in relation to a ubiquitous concept in GK and elsewhere in Pound’s writings: “usury.” Canto 45 defines it as “A charge for the use of purchasing power, levied without regard to production; often without regard to the possibilities of production” (45/230). Hence, “usury is contra naturam,” against nature (GK 281). It is noteworthy, however, that in his foreword to the 1973 edition of his Selected Prose, written in Venice and dated July 4, 1972, just a few months before his

1. DIGEST OF THE ANALECTS

16

17

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death, Pound seems to have had a change of heart, “re USURY: I was out of focus, taking a symptom for a cause. The cause is AVARICE.”17 My usual publishers refused the Ta Hio: By the time the University of Washington Book Store published Pound’s translation of Confucius’s Ta Hio in 1928, Pound’s works had been published by a range of presses, notably Boni & Liveright, Three Mountains Press, Elkin Mathews, and The Ovid Press. In a letter dated November 1927, Pound advises the editor of his Ta Hio, Glenn Hughes, to refer “any question or method of interpretation of ideograph” to Fenollosa’s “Essay on the Chinese Written Character.”18 Fan Tchai: Fan-Tchi (Fan Ch’ih, 樊遲/樊迟), one of Kung’s disciples. This passage is taken from the Zi Lu (子路) (Book 13) of the Analects. Tseu-Lou: Zi-lu (Zilu, 子路), one of Kung’s favorite disciples, respected by the Master for his courage, but sometimes reprimanded for being too brash and impulsive.19 Prince of Mei: Duke Ling of Wei (Weiling, 衛靈/卫灵, 534–493 BCE). The tale of his same-sex infatuation with his courtier Mizi Xia, chronicled in the philosophical treatise Han Fei Zi, marks it as a starting point for “the way all literate Chinese conceived of homosexuality.”20 Given Pound’s homophobia, it is unlikely that he would have been privy to this association. He went so far as to resign his associate editorship of the literary magazine, The New Review, after its last issue of 1932 included a poem by Kay Boyle, “In Defense of Homosexuality.”21 正名: (zhengming) “precise terminology” (Analects XIII.III. ii).22 Lou: Lu (魯/鲁), present-day Shandong province in East China and Confucius’s birthplace, where he founded an academy. The Chunqiu (春秋, Spring and Autumn Annals), now included in the Confucian canon, chronicles events at the court of Lu (722–481 BCE).23

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A Companion to Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur Min-tseu-kian: Min Ziqian (敏子騫/敏子骞), a disciple of Kung praised for his devotion to his parents and featured in the Complete Pictures of the Twenty-Four Exemplars of Filial Piety (Quanxiang Ershi Si Xiao, 全鄉二十四孝/全乡二十四 孝), edited in poetic form by Yuan dynasty scholar Guo Jujin (郭俱進).24 Said Szetsun . . . ordinary”: Tuan Szetsun,25 peace activist and organizer of the 1934 World Peace Prayer Conference in Shanghai. Though little is known about Tuan, Cecil Williams, writing in 1935 for The Canadian Theosophist, called him a “prophet,” affirming further that he was then “hailed in China as ‘the only sage after Confucius and Mencius.’”26 Though not wholly subscribing to the Theosophist viewpoint, Pound nods to Tuan’s importance in a letter written in the late 1930s to the Japanese avant-garde poet, Katue Kitasono, to inquire about the fate “of a group of neo-Confucians” under Tuan.27 Pound owned copies of Tuan’s Exposition of Confucian Cosmopolitanism (1936), as he recalls in a letter to his friend and Harvard scholar Achilles Fang (1910–95), sent from St.  Elizabeths Hospital in September 1952.28 Tuan’s translated maxim quoted in GK probably comes from this pamphlet. Writing about the ethics of Mencius in the Criterion issue of July 1938, when Tuan was already in his seventies, Pound remarks, “Tuan Szetsun is old. Certainly a nucleus of sanity exists in China. The West needs the Confucian injection.”29 Four Classics: The four canonical Confucian texts, also known as the “Four Books”: the Analects (Lun Yü, 論語/论 语), the Mencius (Mengzi, 孟子), the Great Learning (Daxue, 大學/大学), and the Doctrine of the Mean (Zhongyong, 中庸). It is noteworthy that Mencius (372–289 BCE), the Latinized form of “Master Meng” (Mengzi), was the most renowned successor to Confucius and disseminated his teachings widely a century and a half after the death of his Master.30

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Mencius studied directly under Confucius’s grandson, Zisi (子思, 491–431 BCE). Chang: (Shāng, 商), disciple of Confucius. The contrast here “is between perfection in meeting an ideal, and an equilibrium between imperfect extremes.”31 May we not suppose that XII, 9 of the Analects teaches the folly of taxation?: Pound has in mind the following passage from the Yan Yuan (顏淵/颜渊) (Book XII): 1. The Duke Ai said to Yu Zo: Bad year, scant harvest, what’s to be done? 2. Yu Zo: Why not tithe? 3. “Two tenths not enough, how would I manage with one?” 4. Answered: If the hundred clans have enough, who won’t give enough to the prince, if the hundred clans are in want who will give enough to the prince?32 May we not suppose that the answers in XIV, 10 of the Analects: The passage is from the Xian Wen (憲問/宪问) (Book XIV): 1. Someone asked about (this) Tze-Chan. He said: A kind man. 2. Asked about Tze-Shi. He said: That bloke! That one! [. . .] 3. Asked about Kwan Chung. He said: Jen yeh [i.e., Oh!], man who snatched from Po chief, P’ien, a city of three hundred [. . .] ate coarse rice till his teeth were gone [. . .] without a grumbling word.”33 知 人: (zhī rén) “to know humanity.” Humanity? is to love men. Knowledge, to know men: Paraphrase of Pound’s own translation of Chapter XXII of Book XII:

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A Companion to Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur 1. Fan Ch’ih asked about humaneness. He [Confucius] said: Love men. Asked about knowledge. He said: To know men. 2. Fan Ch’ih didn’t get as far (see through to the end of that answer).34

19

In the first book of the Lun Yu: The first book of the Analects is Xue Er (學而/学而). The paraphrased passage reads: “He [Confucius] said: To keep things going in a state of ten thousand cars: respect what you do and keep your word, keep accurate accounts and be friendly to others, employ the people in season. [Probably meaning public works are not to interfere with agricultural production.]”35 virtu: virtù, a concept of paramount importance for Pound. His notion of individualism stems from the Italian humanist concept of virtù, the inborn element, which, like a strand of DNA, differentiates individuals. He develops this idea further in I Gather the Limbs of Osiris (1911–12): The soul of each man is compounded of all the elements of the cosmos of souls, but in each soul there is some one element which predominates, which is in some peculiar and intense way the quality or virtù of the individual; in no two souls is this the same. It is by reason of this virtù that a work of art persists. It is by reason of this virtù that we have one Catullus, one Villon.36 Virtù is also the driving force in the creation of aesthetic wholeness. Yet, as Feng Lan observes, “what is especially peculiar about Pound’s concept of individual virtù is that it resists identification with the universal self or a transcendental ego.”37 Since the discovery and expression of this virtue unfolds harmoniously in the Confucian household, the will can directly harness the innermost energy of virtù toward

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political, economic, and aesthetic ends. Pound believed that the will, held in symmetry with virtù, underlay all truly creative action, both in the individual microcosm and in the public sphere. Pound also refers to Emperor Chun-Tchi, who in the eleventh year of his reign found so much virtue in the Odes and so valued them as “an instrument of government, that he ordered a tartar version” (GK 249). I am pro-Tcheou (in politics) said Koung fu Tseu. They examined their predecessors: Paraphrase from Chapter XIV of the Ba Yi (八佾) (Book III) of the Analects. The translated passage reads, “1. [Confucius] said: Chou revised the two dynasties, how full and precise was its culture, I follow Chou.”38 The passage from GK recurs in the second of the China Cantos (i.e., Cantos 52–61, published as a suite by New Directions in 1940). Significantly, it is in this Canto that Confucius is brought into the poem for the first time: “‘I am pro-Tcheou’ said Confucius / ‘I am’ said Confutzius ‘pro-Tcheou in politics’” (53/268). The reiteration in Canto 53 underscores Confucius’s selfless commitment to political life, typifying the wisdom of the Chu dynasty in northeastern China in hiring the Master as a philosopher-minister. As Pound would have learned from Legge’s translation of the Analects, Confucius refers in particular to “the founders of the power and polity of the dynasty—the kings Wăn and Wû, and the duke of Chău. The two past dynasties are the Hsiă and the Shang or Yin.”39 The connection between Confucius and statecraft mirrors Pound’s own quixotic hopes of being appointed to a government position in Mussolini’s Fascist regime.40 In the event, Confucius’s decision was not without travails. As Chapter V of the Wei Zi (微子) (Book XVIII) of the Analects recounts: 1. The madman of Ch’u, Chieh-yu, passed Kung-tze, singing out: “Phoenix, oh Phoenix, how is your clarity fallen, no use blaming what’s past, you might look out for

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A Companion to Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur what’s to come. There’s danger to anyone who goes into this present government.” 2. Confucius got down (from his carriage) and wanted to talk with him but (Chieh) hurried away, so he could not.41

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In the prefatory “Note” to his 1947 translation of the Ta Hsio Pound praises Confucius for his being “more concerned with the necessities of government, and of governmental administration than any other philosopher.”42 You have heard the six words, and the six becloudings? . . . 蔽: Although Pound cites an “anonymous translation,” the passage is found almost verbatim in Legge’s translation of Chapter VIII of the Yang Huo (阳货) (Book XVII) of the Analects. Pound’s interpretation of the ideogram “beclouding” as a sign for “confusion, an overgrowing with vegetation” also appears to be loosely derived from Legge’s footnote, which posits that the composite elements of the ideogram denote “to cover and screen,” whereby its main meaning is said to be “small plants.” Legge interprets the passage to mean that pursued indiscriminately, the six virtues (i.e., benevolence, knowledge, sincerity, straightforwardness, boldness, and firmness) tend to “becloud the mind.”43 one, by, passing through, emerging . . . the stem and the leaf: These “four common signs” revisit the four ideograms that signify “one principle” (or “unity”) at the beginning of this chapter, namely 一以貫之 (一以贯之). Pound’s semiotic interpretation correlates to each of the ideograms. Pauthier is deeper: Pound is comparing Legge’s translation of Chapter II of the Wei Ling Kung (衛靈公/卫灵公) (Book XV)—“I seek a unity all-pervading”44—unfavorably with the French translation by the sinologist, Jean-Pierre Guillaume Pauthier (1801–73), Doctrine de Confucius: Les quatre livres de philosophie morale et politique de la Chine (1852). It is here at last that we can see that Pound derived his translation of “one principle” from Pauthier’s translation: “je ramène tout à

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un seul principe.”45 While Pound relied extensively on Legge’s translations of Confucius, in the first of Pound’s translations of Confucian texts, Ta Hio, The Great Learning of Confucius (1928), his source-text was not the Chinese text of the Da Xue, but Pauthier’s translation.46 Here, too, Pound hardly deviated from Pauthier’s translation as a crib. The ch’ing ming text: i.e., Analects XIII.III.ii.47 “Ch’ing ming” (zhengming, 正名) translates as “precise terminology,” hence the notion that “The ch’ing is used continually against ambiguity.” 學: (学, xué) “to learn, study.” Cf. Pound’s translation of the Ta Hsio, where he parenthetically glosses “the great learning” as “adult study, grinding the corn in the head’s mortar to fit it for use.”48 Il maestro ha detto che ora dobbiamo comperare [sic] un altro libro . . . la vita del uomo: Excerpts from a letter that Mary de Rachewiltz (née Rudge) (b.1925), Pound’s daughter, wrote to her father in Venice when she reached the fifth grade of elementary school in Gais, a commune in the South Tyrol region of northern Italy where she was raised. The excerpted passage reads, in translation, The teacher said that we now have to buy another book, that is the supplement to the fifth elementary (class) [i.e., Il Sussidiario della Quinta Elementare] . . . it contains all the important subjects, religion, history, geography, accounting, science and the life of man . . .                 M.[ary] R.[udge] The excerpts are reproduced in de Rachewiltz’s memoir, Ezra Pound, Father and Teacher: Discretions (1971).49 In the book, she reveals that despite her request to purchase a new schoolbook she was less than studious and even received a two-week suspension from school for insubordination. Her

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A Companion to Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur anti-academicism mirrors Pound’s own. The kind of education he envisions “consists in ‘getting wise,’” a process not readily found in the education system (GK 52). In quoting from his daughter’s letter, Pound suggests nonetheless that he might have seen the Sussidiario as a kind of multi-disciplinary prototype for GK. Launched in 1905, the Sussidiario’s pedagogical-didactic program condensed into a single volume short readings on a range of subjects, as de Rachewiltz intimates in her letter. Mussolini’s Ministerial Order of 11 March 1923 set strict curriculum prescriptions, thus paving the way for the standardized textbook envisioned by the Fascist State.50

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heteroclite: “Deviating from the ordinary rule or standard; irregular, exceptional, abnormal, anomalous, eccentric.”1 Pound had used the term in a similar context just a few years earlier in a Criterion essay praising Laurence Binyon’s translation of Dante’s Inferno (1933) into English triple rhyme: “One got interested in the wealth of heteroclite material, incident, heteroclite anecdote, museum of medieval history, etc. Whenever there was an immediate difficulty one looked at a note, instead of reading on for ten lines and waiting for Dante to tell one.”2 Rabelais’s time: François Rabelais (c.1494–1553), French Renaissance humanist, satirist, and comic writer. Author of the satires Pantagruel (1532–33) and Gargantua (1534). Pound cites Rabelais’s essays elsewhere in GK as precedents for the book (GK 207). It is not hard to see why, as Rabelais’s works display an encyclopedic frame of reference, encompassing virtually all the fields of knowledge of his day—theology, law, medicine, natural science, politics, military art, navigation, botany, ancient and modern languages—and many aspects of everyday life and society. They therefore read as dazzlingly complex and wonderfully disorienting images of the Renaissance world.3 From Jonathan Swift to Laurence Sterne, and James Joyce to Pound, Rabelais’s influence on English literature has been extensive. In the New Republic issue of June 4, 1930, Pound published a defense of Samuel Putnam’s translation of Rabelais.4

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A Companion to Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur Montaigne: Michel de Montaigne (1533–92), French moralist and essayist, widely acknowledged as the inventor of the modern “essay,” a reputation built on his Essais (1580–95). Like Rabelais’s essays, Montaigne’s are also cited as precedents for GK. Both writers, Pound notes, “are unpretentious in so far as they don’t ask you to suppose that they know it all, and yet from Montaigne or Rabelais you would, I believe, acquire curiosity by contagion” (GK 207). Montaigne’s essays cover topics ranging from moral, religious, and philosophical to political and historical. However, as Patrick Riley points out, “it immediately strikes the reader that if the Essays seeks totality, it is not narrative totality. Montaigne paints himself not by telling his story but by representing the shifting thoughts that occupy his mind at the moment of writing.”5 Epicurus: (c.341–c.270 BCE), one of the major philosophers of the Hellenistic period and an important thinker for Pound. Epicurus was born in Samos, Greece, and set up his school, the Garden, in Athens in 307. His post-Aristotelian philosophy is in essence a significantly modified development of the doctrines espoused by the fifth-century atomists Leucippus and Democritus.6 Pound was aware of Epicurus at least as early as 1910, as shown in his essay “Cavalcanti” (1910–31). “Guido [Cavalcanti] is called a ‘natural philosopher,’ I think an ‘atheist,’ and certainly an ‘Epicurean,’” Pound writes, “not that anyone had then any clear idea or has now any very definite notion of what Epicurus taught.”7 Pound then hints at the prestige Epicurean philosophy might have enjoyed had it not become a pejorative term for atheistic hedonism in 1290. He is undoubtedly referring to Dante’s consignment of Epicurus to the sixth circle of hell for having disavowed the immortality of the soul.8 In The Cantos, Epicurus makes a brief appearance in the first of the Jefferson Cantos (31–33), “. . . wish that I cd. subjoin Gosindi’s Syntagma / “of the doctrines of Epicurus. / (Mr Adams.)” (31/156). Although Pound attributes the fragment to the second

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U.S. president, John Adams (1735–1826), its source is in fact a January 1816 letter from Thomas Jefferson. In it, Jefferson describes his creation of “a wee-little book” of the philosophy of Jesus, a collage “made by cutting the texts out of the book, and arranging them on the pages of a blank book, in a certain order of time or subject.” Jefferson continues, If I had time I would add to my little book the Greek, Latin and French texts, in columns side by side. And I wish I could subjoin a translation of Gosindi’s Syntagma of the doctrines of Epicurus, which, notwithstanding the calumnies of the Stoics and caricatures of Cicero, is the most rational system remaining of the philosophy of the ancients.9 Banished from serious intellectual discourse, Epicurus stayed on the fringes of Western thought until the Epicurean revival by the French philosopher Pierre Gassendi (1592–1655) in the seventeenth century. With Gassendi, Epicurus’s vision once again gained currency. It left its stamp on a range of thinkers, from Hobbes and Locke to John Stuart Mill and, not the least, Jefferson. Jefferson’s acculturation of Epicureanism via Gassendi emerges in Canto 31 as an index of the high degree of civilization in America from 1760 to 1830. Pythagoras: (c.580–c.500–490 BCE), a native of Samos, like Epicurus. The philosopher and mathematician is perhaps best known for his eponymous geometric theorem. He reputedly brought the doctrine of the transmigration of souls into Greece and gained quasi-mythic status in his own lifetime as a sage and seer, and become associated with the cult of the Hyperborean Apollo. He is also said to have discovered the musical consonances.10 “Pi-jaw”: Colloquial expression for “moralizing or lecturing speech, esp. as addressed to a child by an adult.”11

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A Companion to Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur Anschauung (Ger.): Although Pound employs the term as equivalent to a Confucian “way of life,” Anschauung is most commonly associated with the German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) and translated as “intuition” or “sense perception.”12 It recurs several times in the book (GK 24, 28, 38, 54, 134, 152, 243). Writing for The Monist in 1892, Paul Carus notes that the term “excludes rigidly any mysticism or supernaturalism” inherent in its translation as “intuition,” stressing further “the immediateness and directness which is implied in Anschauung.”13 Given the active meaning that Pound attaches to the term in GK, it is quite possible that he subscribed to Carus’s viewpoint. It is noteworthy that it was Carus, in his position as editor of The Monist (1852–1919), who “accepted Pound’s and Ernest Fenollosa’s ‘The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry’ but to Pound’s distress never published it.”14 Pauthier and Bazin: Jean-Pierre Guillaume Pauthier (1801– 73) and Antoine Bazin (1799–1863), French sinologists who co-authored the two-volume study, Chine ou description historique, géographique et littéraire de ce vaste empire, d’après des documents chinois (Paris: Firmin Didot Frères, 1837–53). The first volume, Chine, was authored by Pauthier and covers the history of China, while the second volume, Chine moderne, is encyclopedic, covering topics ranging from philosophy, literature, and arts to geography, natural history, agriculture, and games. Neither author had any personal experience in China.15 Iliad and the Odyssey: Epic poems attributed to Homer (c.eighth century BCE), which concern the Trojan War and its aftermath. While Herodotus dated Homer to about 850 BCE, modern scholars tend to date the Iliad and The Odyssey in any of the following three periods: the eighth century, the middle sixth century, or somewhere in between.16 The long poems comprise twenty-four books each and constitute foundational and indispensable texts in Pound’s oeuvre. While references

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and allusions to the Iliad and The Odyssey in The Cantos are too many to mention, it is worth noting that in Canto 80 Pound recalls that “it was old Spencer (, H.) who first declaimed me the Odyssey” (80/532). Written in 1945, while Pound languished in solitary confinement in the U.S. Army’s Disciplinary Training Center (DTC) near Pisa for his active support of Mussolini’s Fascist regime during the Second World War, the line essentially paraphrases Pound’s reminiscence in GK, “A fellow named Spenser [sic] recited a long passage of Iliad to me, after tennis. That was worth more than grammar when one was 13 years old” (GK 145). This passage not only reveals that Pound was exposed to the Iliad early in life but also helps to date the time and place of his introduction to the Greek classic: H. Spencer was Pound’s instructor at Cheltenham Military Academy. Pound was sent to Cheltenham when he was just shy of his twelfth birthday in September 1897 and stayed there until the following year.17 Aeschylus: (c.525–c.456 BCE), Greek tragic poet, author of the Oresteia trilogy (Agamemnon, Choephoroe, and Eumenides) and Prometheus Bound (of dubious authorship), among only seven other surviving works, out of between 70 and 90 plays. Thomas Stanley introduced Aeschylus to the reading public in England with his 1663 edition of the plays, but the Greek tragedian only found wide popularity in the nineteenth century, with Lord Byron’s “Prometheus” (1816), Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound (1820), Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s translation of the play in 1833, and Robert Browning’s translation of the Oresteia in 1877.18 Around 1919, Pound translated Agamemnon into demotic African American phraseology, but never published the play. Canto 82 features the beginning of Pound’s translation (82/543–44).19 Socrates: (469–399 BCE), Greek philosopher and influential figure in the western intellectual tradition. Most of what is known about him comes from Plato, the poet-comedian

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Aristophanes, the historian Xenophon, and Aristotle. While Plato, Aristophanes, and Xenophon knew Socrates personally, Aristotle did not. Socrates was famously charged with impiety after he allegedly introduced new gods and corrupted young men. He was sentenced to die by drinking hemlock.20 In Canto 67, Pound quotes from John Adams’s epistolary essay, Thoughts on Government (1776), featuring Socrates in the company of Confucius, Zoroaster, and Mohammed, “‘not to mention other authorities really sacred’” (67/391). 25 ergoteurs (Fr.): Those who engage in specious reasoning, discuss trivialities, or quibble.21 Francesco Fiorentino: (1834–84), Italian historian of philosophy and author of the book Pound footnotes on this page. Pound owned and extensively annotated his copy of Fiorentino’s Compendio di Storia della Filosofia (1924). Pound’s ideas and maxims in GK intersect Fiorentino’s at key points. Consider, for instance, where Pound mentions “energies measurable in speech and in action” (GK 44–45) in light of Fiorentino’s notion of a “linguaggio di azione,” language of action, one of the many passages Pound marked in pencil.22 Pound is not wholly uncritical of Fiorentino, however. Later, he notes that “Fiorentino tries to whitewash Aristotle’s character” (GK 120). Zeno [the Stoic]: (335–263 BCE), Greek philosopher and founder of Stoicism, born in Citium (Cyprus). Stoicism is established as a holistic, tripartite set of ideas: logic (and epistemology), physics (and metaphysics), and ethics.23 Pound’s lengthy discussion of Stoicism as “a system of conduct that cd. be followed” (GK 122) comports itself with Zeno’s emphasis on virtuous action as a key component of ethics and moral reasoning. Pound nonetheless plays down the role of logic in Stoic philosophy. 26 George Washington: (1732–99), revolutionary army officer and the first U.S. president (1789–97). The reference to his

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“appreciation of ‘the benign influence of ’ the Christian religion” on this page (see also GK 302) is taken from a February 1800 entry in the journal of Thomas Jefferson, Washington’s Secretary of State and subsequently the third U.S. president (1801–9). Like Washington, Jefferson writes in a letter of 1816, I never told my own religion . . . For it is in our lives, and not from our words, that our religion must be read. By the same test the world must judge me. But this does not satisfy the priesthood. They must have a positive, a declared assent to all their interested absurdities.24 Washington appears several times in The Cantos, the first time in Canto 31, which calls attention to his modern spirit. Among excerpted fragments, the Canto quotes from a letter of 14 August 1787, in which Jefferson shows appreciation for Washington’s choice of “modern dress for your statue” (31/153). In the letter itself, Jefferson goes on to say that he thinks “a modern in an antique dress [is] as just an object of ridicule as a Hercules or Marius with a periwig and chapeau bras.”25 the loose waftiness of demoliberal ideology: The phrase must be understood in the wider context of Pound’s antipathy to Western liberal capitalist democracy and the “age of usury” denounced here as well as his political and ideological commitment to Italian Fascism at this juncture. the best age of “scholastic thought”: Pound probably has in mind the pedagogical tradition of the medieval universities that flourished in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. “Scholasticism” refers to a method of theological and philosophical inquiry employed to Christian hermeneutics by way of systematic argumentation and definition. Scholastic thought owed much of its development to the writings of Aristotle and of St. Augustine of Hippo (354–430), along with Thomas Aquinas (c.1225–74) and Duns Scotus (c.1265–1308).26

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A Companion to Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur totalitarian treatise: Here, as elsewhere, Pound employs the term “totalitarian” in the sense of holistic, capacious, and allinclusive (cf. note GK 95). Nevertheless, his usage follows “the Fascist conception of totalitarian culture, where,” as Catherine E. Paul observes, “no single element is valued over the whole.”27 the New Paideuma: Pound uses the term paideuma for “the tangle or complex of the inrooted ideas of any period” (GK 57). He famously encountered it in the work of German ethnologist and archeologist, Leo Frobenius (1873–1938), in particular his colossal, seven-volume Erlebte Erdteile (1925– 29). In the fourth volume, titled Paideuma, Frobenius wants the reader to experience “das Seelenhafte oder, wie ich es mit dem Hauptbegriff dieses Buches nenne, das Paideuma des Wesens der Kultur” (“the ‘soul-like’ or, as I name it with the principle term of this book, the Paideuma of the nature of a culture”).28 Frobenius’s fieldwork on cultural interconnectedness and diffusionism traced shared characteristics in houses, drums, masks, clothing, shields, and other cultural artifacts in West Africa, Melanesia, and Indonesia.29 In his quest to help forge a new civilization, Pound restricts his own use of the term to mean “the gristly roots of ideas that are in action” (GK 58). Whereas Frobenius is keen to differentiate paideuma from Kultur,30 Pound renders paideuma distinct from Zeitgeist, the ideas and spirit of a time and place. Hence, paideuma can also be personal, as artistic production calls for the concentration of an artist’s “own private paideuma” (GK 114). The term appears twice in The Cantos: first, in the Table of Contents for Cantos LII–LXXXI (1940), with reference to “the final lines in greek” of Canto 71, “part of [John] Adams’ paideuma” (256); second, in Canto 87, where the poet sees the American “paideuma fading” in the wake of the honorable presidential terms of John Tyler (1790–1862) and James K. Polk (1795–1849), 10th U.S. president (1841–45) and 11th U.S. president (1845– 49), respectively (87/589).

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“ideogramic”: Pound defines his “ideogramic method” in Chapter 5 (cf. note GK 51). Ernest Fenollosa: Cf. note GK 15. I have a certain real knowledge which wd. enable me to tell a Goya from a Velasquez . . . or a Moreau: Spanish painters Francisco Goya (1746–1828) and Diego Velázquez (1599– 1660), Italian Renaissance painter Ambrogio de Predis (c.1455–c.1508), French portraitist Jean-August-Dominique Ingres (1780–1867), and French Symbolist painter Gustave Moreau (1826–98). Of these painters, only de Predis and Velázquez are mentioned by name in The Cantos, the former in Cantos 45 and 51 (as an exemplar of anti-“usura”) and the latter in Canto 81 (45/230, 51/250, 81/537). Several of Velázquez’s paintings, including Las Meniñas (1656) and Las Hilanderas (c.1655–60), are cited in Canto 80 amid Pound’s reminiscence of seeing the paintings for the first time in the Museo Nacional del Prado in Madrid during his 1906–7 trip to Europe as a University of Pennsylvania Harrison Fellow in Romanics (80/513; cf. note GK 110). Assisted by the American Consul in Madrid, Pound had gained access to the royal library to study the plays of the Spanish Golden Age poet-dramatist Lope de Vega (1562–1635), the subject of his doctoral dissertation at Pennsylvania.31 The “real knowledge” Pound claims to discern here is echoed in a letter of January 1938, in which he boasts that he “can tell the bank-rate and component of tolerance for usury in any epoch by the quality of line in painting.”32 Good old Richter: Ernst Friedrich Richter (1808–79), Professor at the Leipzig Conservatory of Music and author of Lehrbuch der Harmonie (1853), Lehrbuch des einfachen und doppelten Contrapunktes (1872), Lehrbuch der Fuge (1874), and Richter’s Manual of Harmony: Practical Guide to its Study (1867), among other books on musical theory, counterpoint, and harmony, all of which were translated into English.

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A Companion to Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur consciously superior persons, Curzons, etc.: Pound likely has in mind George Nathaniel Curzon (1859–1925), British Viceroy of India (1899–1905) and president of the Royal Geographical Society. Educated at Eton and Oxford, Lord Curzon enjoyed a reputation for vanity and a sense of his own superiority. He is lampooned in the anonymously published broadsheet The Masque of B-l--l [i.e., Balliol College, Oxford], G. N. C. I am a most superior person, Mary, My name is G--RGE N-TH-N--L C-RZ-N, Mary, I’ll make a speech on any political question of the day, Mary, Provided you’ll not say me nay, Mary.33 pari passu: (L.) “Side by side; simultaneously and equally.”34 the millennium between St Ambrose and the “renaissance”: St. Ambrose (339–97), Bishop of Milan. At the end of Chapter 3, Pound situates him as typifying a “transition from self-centred lust after eternal salvation into a sense of public order” (GK 43). As one of Pound’s “serious characters,” ranked as highly as Confucius (GK 40), St. Ambrose is yet another Poundian hero in the poet’s war on greed and usury. It was St. Ambrose who, “midway between Athens and the Sorbonne,” denounced the “‘CAPTANS ANNONAM’. Hoggers of harvest, cursed among the people” (GK 45). Canto 81 reiterates the full phrase in Latin, “‘Captans annonam / maledictus in plebe sit!’” (81/601). Like Confucius, St. Ambrose also delved in politics in his capacity as Bishop of Milan, then the administrative center of the Western Empire; he even went so far as to guide and sometimes reprove rulers.35 father Cairoli: Luigi Pasquale Cairoli, Italian priest and author of the work that Pound has in mind, Il Giusto Prezzo Medioevale: Studio di Economia Politica (1913). The book touches

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on the concept of “fair price” that emerged during the Middle Ages; that is, the formulation of an ethics that would govern the production and distribution of goods in an increasingly complex marketplace.36 St Antonino da Firenze (1389–1459): Dominican friar and Archbishop of Florence. As Prior of the convent of San Marco in Florence he oversaw the building of the library commissioned by Cosimo de’ Medici. He wrote a number of treatises, including the moral and historical summae, Summula Confessionalis and Summa Historialis, concerning the path from vice to virtue and an apologetic compilation, respectively.37 In Ch. 8, Pound surmises that by combining the philosophies of Antonino and Ambrose, as well as the thought of the Neoplatonic Irish philosopher, Scottus Eriugena (c.810–c.877), “plus time, patience and genius you cd. erect inside the fabric something modern man cd. believe” (GK 76). Claudius Salmasius: Claude de Saumaise (1588–1653), French classical scholar and professor at Leiden University. Noteworthy among the “whole slabs of the record in latin” to which Pound alludes in Salmasius’s oeuvre are the usuryfocused books, De usuris liber (1638) and De modo usurarum (1639). Pound owned the second volume of the three-volume De modo usurarum, which in his own synopsis, “treats of terminology and of usurer’s habits, and of laws regulating his process” (GK 115). Ironically, given Pound’s antipathy to usury, both works mount a defense of usury as compatible with Christian principles. Prof. X. Q.: Unidentified. the thought of Van Buren, A. Johnson, A. Jackson and the story of Tuscany under Pietro Leopoldo: Martin Van Buren (1782–1862), 8th U.S. vice-president (1833–37) and 8th president (1837–41) and author of Inquiry into the Origins and Development of Political Parties in the United States (1867), an argument for the introduction of the two-party system into

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A Companion to Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur U.S. politics;38 Andrew Johnson (1808–75), 17th U.S. president and, to date, one of only two presidents to face impeachment, though he was acquitted by the Senate; Andrew Jackson (1767–1845), 7th U.S. president (1829–37) and founder of the Democratic party. Jackson dominated the political scene between the time of Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln (1809–65), 16th U.S. president (1861–65). Pietro Leopoldo (1747–92), of Habsburg-Lorraine—also known as Leopold I, as Grand Duke of Tuscany (1765–90), and Leopold II, as Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire (1790–92)—ruled in the tradition of the “enlightened despots.”39 In Canto 44, Leopold is featured as a champion for agrarian and economic reform, And thou shalt not, Firenze 1766, and thou shalt not sequestrate for debt any farm implement nor any yoke ox nor any peasant while he works with the same.        Pietro Leopoldo (44/223) In Canto 50, we learn that when Leopold tried to abolish “two thids of state debt . . . they sent him off to be Emperor / in hell’s bog, in the slough of Vienna” (50/247). However, of the four men Pound cites in GK, Van Buren is undoubtedly the most significant for him. In Canto 34, he is described as “L’ami de tout le monde” (“the friend of everyone”) and an advocate for the working class, “against more than ten hours a day” (34/170–71). Above all, it is in Canto 37, published in the March 1934 issue of Poetry, that Van Buren emerges (anticipating Pound’s similar treatment of Leopold) as a full-fledged hero waging war on usury and the tyranny of banks: “Thou shalt not,” said Martin Van Buren, “jail ’em for     debt.”     “that an immigrant shd. set out with good banknotes

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    and find ’em at the end of his voyage but waste paper....if a man have in primeval forest set up his cabin, shall rich patroon take it from him?” (37/181)

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Written in Sorrento, “in the vicinage of Vesuvius / near exhumed Herculaneum” (37/183), Van Buren’s autobiography remained unpublished until 1920 (GK 214). Pound owned and heavily annotated his copy of the book, including the following excerpt: “Of my consistent opposition to the multiplication of banks and my readiness to suppress and punish the frauds they have committed on the public I have before spoken.”40 Captans annonam etc.: (L.) “Hoggers of harvest” (cf. note GK 30). Heraclitus: (c.540–c.480 BCE), Greek philosopher from Ephesus and a significant influence on Stoicism. For Plato, the Heraclitean imperative that Pound quotes here—“Everything flows” (from the Greek, “panta rhei”)—positions the philosopher’s theory of universal flux in contradistinction to Parmenides’s theory of reality as a fixed, stable construct.41 H. Jamesian precisions of the Odyssey: This is the first of many references to the American novelist Henry James (1843–1916), author of The Portrait of a Lady (1881), The Turn of the Screw (1898), and The Ambassadors (1903), among other works. The favorable, if gnomic, comparison between Jamesian fiction and Homer’s Odyssey may be understood by way of a long essay Pound published on the novelist in the August 1918 issue of The Little Review. Pound discerns in James “the maximum sensibility compatible with efficient writing.”42 The Dantean phrase with which Pound describes James in the essay—“gli occhi onesti e tardi” (“with slow eyes honest and grave”)43—recurs alongside the Homeric echoes of “old men’s voices” in Canto 7:

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A Companion to Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur And the great domed head, con gli occhi onesti e tardi Moves before me, phantom with weighted motion, Grave incessu, drinking the tone of things, And the old voice lifts itself      weaving an endless sentence. (7/24)

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Pound also locates James’s greatness as a writer in his having “sought a permanent subject matter” (GK 288). Fontenelle: Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle (1657–1757), French writer and philosopher, author of Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes (1686). In The Egoist of April 1917, Pound translates Dialogue X of Fontenelle’s Dialogues des morts (1683). Scarron, Seneca’s interlocutor, tells the story of a platonic philosopher who once asked the ruling emperor to rebuild a ruined town in Calabria along the lines set out in Plato’s Republic, proposing to rename it Platonopolis. The emperor, however, “refused the philosopher, having so little trust in divine Plato’s reason that he was unwilling to risk to it the rule of a dump-heap.”44 Father Lycurgus: (c.seventh century BCE), Spartan lawgiver mentioned in the writings of the Greek historians Herodotus and Xenophon. The Greek historian and philosopher Plutarch (46–120 CE) traced the arc of his career in Life of Lycurgus, even going so far as to claim that it was the reformer who assembled and brought Homer’s poetry to Sparta.45 Pound’s suggestion here that it would be misguided to attempt to understand Greek thought without considering “the iron money of Sparta” refers to Lycurgus’s monetary reforms to prevent a plutocratic concentration of wealth. According to Plutarch, the lawgiver introduced iron discs or bars as currency, banning the circulation and hoarding of gold, silver, and other precious metals.46 Lycurgus also carried out land reforms to prevent land ownership from remaining concentrated in the hands of the few. As Pound writes a few pages later, Lycurgus’s iron coin “was

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distempered so that it cd. not even serve as industrial iron or be beaten back into plowshares” (GK 35). In Canto 68, Pound celebrates the Spartan’s efforts to maintain the balance of power: The philosophers say: one, the few, the many. Regis   optimatium   populique as Lycurgus in Spartha, reges, seniores et populous (68/395)

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The Latin phrase means “kings, elders and [common] people.” Vade Mecum: (L), literally, “go with me.” The phrase denotes a “book or manual suitable for carrying about with one for ready reference; a handbook or guidebook.”47 Aristotle on the other hand failed to keep Alexander in bounds: Allusion to Aristotle’s tutelage of Alexander III of Macedon (356–323 BCE), better known as Alexander the Great. Philip II, the King of Macedon and Alexander’s father, appointed Aristotle to educate the young prince. The philosopher’s liberal curriculum covered a range of subjects: philosophy, physics, geography, and art. Besides reading the works of Herodotus and Xenophon, Alexander also avidly read Homer, especially the Iliad, before going on to emulate the epic poem’s hero, Achilles, to become one of the most successful military commanders in history.48 In Canto 85, Alexander is celebrated not for his imperial exploits, but for having “paid the debts of his troops” (85/568). The ruler’s benevolent act, meaningful for Pound as an anti-usury measure, also recurs elsewhere in The Cantos (85/569, 86/584, 95/664). Any one with Gaudier-Brzeska’s eye will see Greek art as a decadence: Henri Gaudier-Brzeska (1891–1915), French sculptor and draftsman associated with the London avantgarde movement Vorticism. Pound met Gaudier in the summer of 1913 at an Allied Artists’ Association exhibition and, impressed by the “demon of energy that possessed him,

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A Companion to Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur or served him,”49 soon began promoting his work. It was Gaudier who carved in Pentelic marble the well-known Hieratic Head of Ezra Pound (1914). In its earliest stage, the bust was featured in a black and white frontispiece photograph in the New Directions edition of Pound’s 1916 memoir of the sculptor, originally published just a year after Gaudier fell in battle at Neuville St. Vaast, Flanders. Pound recalls that “my best days, the happiest and the most interesting, were spent in his uncomfortable mud-floored studio when he was doing my bust.”50 The idea of Greek art as decadent, which Pound attributes to Gaudier, is echoed later in GK in the “Vortex” chapter. Gaudier’s idiosyncratic “history of sculpture” deems Greek sculpture as “derivative” and its “feeling for form secondary” (GK 64). In Canto 16, Gaudier’s death is memorialized not only as a loss in itself but also as a loss for art, “and they killed him, / And killed a good deal of sculpture” (16/71). The New Economist will say that with such neschek no empire-building was possible: Allusion to the new generation of American economists who came on the scene in the Depression-ravaged 1930s, many of whom held tenure at Yale, Columbia, Harvard, Princeton, and the Brookings Institution. As Robert W. Dimand argues, “while many American economists supported increased public works in the early 1930s, they generally did so without having a theory on which to base their support.”51 It was not until the publication of John Maynard Keynes’s paradigm-shifting General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (1936) that the fundamental point of Keynesian policy was ushered in, “the manipulation of the money supply through central bank manipulation of interest rates and the sale or purchase of treasury bonds.”52 Pound’s use of “neschekh,” the Hebrew term for forbidden interest or usury, introduces a sinister overtone to the economic foundations of empire-building. In his “Addendum” for Canto 100, Pound drives the point home with blunt force:

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The Evil is Usury, neschek the serpent neschek whose name is known, the defiler, beyond race and against race the defiler (“Addendum for C”/818) Carroll Terrell affirms that Pound employs the Hebrew term “to show that the Jews from the time of Moses had rules against usury.”53 However, even around the time of his writing “Addendum for C” in 1941 Pound was much less measured in one of his infamous wartime radio speeches, denouncing “the empire of international usury, that knows no faith and no frontiers. It is called international finance, and the Jew and the Archbishop in London are at work for that tyranny, trying to draft a universal religion in defense of the infamy of the usurers.”54 the difference between 30 per hundred and 6% average roman usury: The details in this “axis of reference” are arguably immaterial. What is significant, according to Jean-Michel Rabaté, is that it reveals Pound’s interpretation of history “as hinged around some fraction which embodies irreducible difference,” thereby tending towards a totalitarian “grasp of all parameters at work in history.”55 A Russian general of high culture . . . fall of the Macedonian empire: Honor Goleyevsky, a Russian general and, in the nineteen teens, military attaché to Count Constantin Alexander von Benckendorff, Russian Ambassador in London, and to Baron Stalevsky, Russian Ambassador in Washington. In the 1920s, Pound and his wife Dorothy were acquainted with Goleyevsky and his English wife in Paris, where the ex-general settled after the Russian Revolution (cf. notes GK 83, 229).56 Pound reiterates Goleyevsky’s theory about the “fall of the Macedonian empire” in Canto 87, albeit with a variant spelling for the general’s name: “And when they bumped off Alexander in Babylon / that

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A Companion to Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur wrecked, said Gollievsky ‘a good deal’” (87/591). Goleyevsky is also the “Kokka” of Canto 74 (74/453). ideas which are intended to “go into action”, or to guide action: For Pound, as shown in Cantos 59 and 98, the Confucian Odes ostendit incitatque (“show and incite”) virtuous action more rationally and precisely than virtually any other source. “That you may reap in the sunlight,” Canto 98 tops it off (98/710). Canto 59 enlists Lacharme’s Latin translation of Emperor Chun-Tchi’s “Prolegomena” to the “Chi-King” (cf. notes GK 204, 249) to beseech, That this book keep us in due bounds of office     the norm show what we shd/ take into action;      what follow within and persistently CHI KING ostendit incitatque. (59/324) bloke who said: all flows . . . and the chap who said: nothing in excess: Respectively, Heraclitus (cf. note GK 31) and Solon of Athens (c.630–c.560 BCE), the statesman, poet, and one of the Seven Sages, whose following inscription adorned the temple of Apollo at Delphi, “Nothing to excess. Seal your words with silence, your silence with timeliness.”57 Al Einstein: Albert Einstein (1879–1955), German physicist who developed the special and general theories of relativity and won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1921. Pound’s interpretation of Einstein’s alleged scandalizing of professional philosophers may stem from the following statement the scientist made in 1936: It has often been said, and certainly not without justification, that the man of science is a poor philosopher. Why then should it not be the right thing for the physicist to let the philosopher do the philosophizing? Such might

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indeed be the right thing at a time when the physicist believes he has at his disposal a rigid system of fundamental concepts and fundamental laws which are so well established that waves of doubt can not reach them; but it can not be right at a time when the very foundations of physics itself have become problematic as they are now. At a time like the present, when experience forces us to seek a newer and more solid foundation, the physicist cannot simply surrender to the philosopher the critical contemplation of the theoretical foundations; for, he himself knows best, and feels more surely where the shoe pinches. In looking for a new foundation, he must try to make clear in his own mind just how far the concepts which he uses are justified, and are necessities.58

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the iron coin of Lycurgus: Cf. note GK 32. Lacedaemon: In ancient Greece, Lacedaemon was an area that comprised the city of Sparta and its surroundings. Lacedaemonian, strictly speaking, means Spartan.1 I do not think HERODOTUS was the father of lies: Herodotus (c.484–c.420 BCE), Greek historian, author of the nine-volume History, chronicling the conflict between the Greek states and the Persian Empire between the sixth century and 478. Pound’s reference to Herodotus’s well-established reputation as a liar stems from the debatable nature of his claims to have traveled widely in the countries covered in History, especially Egypt, then a major player in the Persian Empire.2 Pound cites Herodotus, alongside Plato and Plutarch, as having “set a precedent” for GK (GK 207). the verb hemerodanaidzein: From the Greek ἡμέρα δανείζειν (hēméra daneízein), which translates as “day-loaning” (with interest). In line with Pound’s reasoning, δανείζω (daneízō) also translates as “put out money at usury, lend.”3 Demosthenes: (384–322 BCE), Athenian political leader and Athenian orator from the Classical period. It is worth noting that Pound mistells the story of creditor fraud, as told in Demosthenes’s speech Against Zenothemis (c.353–340 BCE). The “bloke” in question was Hegestratus, the skipper of a ship en route from Athens to Syracuse, Sicily, and back, who colluded with his friend Zenothemis to defraud a merchant named Protus and Demosthenes’s cousin, Demon, for whom the speech was written. Hegestratus and Zenothemis’s plan went awry, however. On the voyage to Athens they failed to sink the ship and thus also failed to render void their contractual

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obligation to repay loans they had incurred under the pretense of shipping grains on board, but which they had already used to ship goods back to their homeland. Hegestratus drowned and Zenothemis was brought to trial.4 the informal Lloyds’ of the day: Nowadays a global operation, Lloyd’s Specialist Insurance Market originated in the late seventeenth century in London to provide marine insurance. the true function of money as MEASURE emerges: The importance of “measure” suggested by the capital letters recurs several times in GK and elsewhere in Pound’s oeuvre. It evinces Pound’s concern with arriving at the proper measure, whether it be of a civilization or an individual. In the context of his diatribe against “hemerodanaidzein,” the emphasis is also against usury. As Peter Liebregts puts it, for Pound “the worst form of unnatural acquisition is lending money on interest, because it annihilates the original purpose of money, that is, being the measure of the value of goods in the exchange process.”5 Pound marked the following passage in his copy of the 1936 edition of Silvio Gesell’s The Natural Economic Order (first published in 1916 under the title Die natürliche Wirtschaftsordnung durch Freiland und Freigeld): “The term ‘measure of value’ sometimes applied to money in antiquated writings on economics, is misleading. No quality of a canary bird, a pill or an apple can be measured by a piece of money.”6 double eagles (20 dollar gold pieces): First produced in 1795, the United States Mint’s Eagle gold coin held a $10 denomination. In 1850, after the Mint struck $20 gold pieces, they came to be popularly known as “Double Eagles.”7 Pound no doubt would have heard about the 1933 double eagle case. In the same month that 445,500 double eagles had been struck, the U.S. government led by Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1882–1945), 32nd U.S. president (1933–45), banned private ownership of gold and began a systematic recall of all gold held in private hands, both coins and gold-backed currency, so that no 1933

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A Companion to Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur double eagle was ever officially released to the public. The nearly half a million extant double eagles were melted into gold bars. At least one coin survived, however, becoming the most valuable coin in the world, valued at over seven million dollars.8 the guaranteed coin of the Florentine chamber: i.e., the florin, which in 1252 became the first gold coin minted by a mercantile state, launched almost simultaneously with its less successful counterpart, Genoa’s genovino, and later followed by the Venetian gold ducat in 1285. The introduction of the florin marked the return of the gold standard, the rise of international trade, and the demand for coins with an intrinsic value.9 Odysseus on the spar after shipwreck: Allusion to Book XII of Homer’s Odyssey. Just as Odysseus and his crew are about to sail near the cave harboring the six-headed monster Scylla and the whirlpool vortex of Charybdis, Zeus sends “killer-squalls” and lightning that tear the ship apart. Odysseus saves himself from drowning by lashing the mast and keel together into a makeshift raft.10 Sam Smiles: Samuel Smiles (1812–1904), physician, journalist, and CEO of a series of railway companies. He wrote several books championing rags-to-riches, self-made individuals, of which Self-Help (1859) was the most successful, selling more than a quarter of a million copies in his lifetime.11 Pound owned and extensively marked a copy of Self-Help, including this passage: “To constitute the millionth part of a Legislature, by voting for one or two men once in three or five years, however conscientiously this duty may be performed, can exercise but little active influence upon any man’s life and character.”12 Smiles’s idea of self-reliance and individual responsibility anticipates Pound’s own. Plato’s Republic: Written by Greek philosopher, Plato (c.429–347 BCE), this political-philosophical treatise is narrated by Socrates in dialogue with other interlocutors.

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The Republic introduces, among other things, the concept of perfect “forms,” which is essential to Platonic philosophy. In the context of “communal responsibilities” in which Pound situates the text, it is significant, as Stanley Rosen points out, that a key argument in Book I of Republic is the idea that “whatever the reasons for which we enter into communal life, the need for justice arises spontaneously from our dealings, private and public, with one another.”13 In contrast, Thrasymachus, one of Socrates’s interlocutors, represents the might-makes-right ethos that Pound deems more prevalent in the ancient world. vide infra: (L.) “see below.” the irresponsible protagonist of the New Testament: i.e., Christ. Pericles’ court: A celebrated Athenian statesman and orator, Pericles (c.495–429 BCE) played a decisive role in shaping democratic and civil institutions in Athens. As Pound suggests, Pericles took an active interest in the arts. In the spring of 472, for instance, he sponsored Aeschylus’s play, The Persians, a dramatic celebration of the triumph of the Athenian navy over the Persians at Salamis eight years earlier.14 Balzac: (1799–1850), French novelist, author of the seventeenvolume La Comédie humaine (The Human Comedy), published between 1842 and 1847. In a letter to John Quinn of April 1917, Pound already expressed his opinion of the novelist in GK as an “adolescent” enthusiasm: “I read about a dozen books of Balzac’s ten years ago, but I can’t read him how.”15 Cervantes: Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (1547–1616), Spanish novelist, poet, and playwright, author of Don Quixote de la Mancha (1605–15), widely considered the “first European novel.”16 The motto quoted by Pound appears in one of the many episodes in Don Quixote where the titular knight debates with his squire and comic foil, Sancho Panza, about how to restore the conventions of knight-errantry and chivalry

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A Companion to Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur in the modern world. In Canto 71, Pound alludes to Cervantes’s mad anti-hero in a diatribe against “our whole banking system,” but he admits that “an attempt to abolish all funding in the / present state of the world wd/ be as romantic / as any adventure in Oberon or Don Quixote” (71/416). Featured in a number of literary, dramatic, and operatic works, Oberon is the king of the fairies made famous in William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Longinus: (fl. first century CE), also known as Dionysius Longinus or Pseudo-Longinus, presumed author of one of the foremost works of literary criticism from antiquity, On the Sublime. Attribution of the book’s authorship to “Dionysius Longinus” has been a longstanding practice since the Italian humanist Francis Robortello issued the first early modern edition in 1554. English writers have traditionally upheld this tradition, including Addison, Hume, and Pope. That Plato should be, as Pound puts it here, a “cynosure” or guide for Longinus is borne out by the fact that Plato is one of the four authors most often quoted in the work, the other three being Homer, Herodotus, and Demosthenes.17 Crassus: Marcus Licinius Crassus (c.115–53 BCE), Roman politician, orator, and financial tycoon. Plutarch chronicled his ascent to power and wealth in his Life of Crassus. In 54, Crassus was hailed imperator (commander) after successfully campaigning across the Euphrates, but a subsequent battle at Carrhae in 53 BCE, a town in Mesopotamia, led to his defeat, capture, and execution by forces commanded by the Parthian general, Surenas.18 Antoninus, Constantine and Justinian were serious characters: Antoninus Pius (86–161 CE), Roman emperor whose rule (138–61) was widely held as a model of peaceful government and efficient administration.19 He is cited several times in The Cantos in connection to his writings on maritime law, but also in relation to usury, as shown in Canto 46:

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“I rule the Earth” said Antoninus “but LAW rules the sea” meaning, we take it, lex Rhodi, the Law Maritime      of sea lawyers. usura and sea insurance (46/234) Constantine (Flavius Valerius Constantinus, c.274–337 CE), was the first Christian Roman Emperor (306–37). The most important source about Constantine is Eusebius’s Life of Constantine, in which the eponymous hero is offered “unrestrained praises in varied words” as the founder of a Christian empire.20 In contrast to Constantine’s portrayal as a “serious character” in GK, in Canto 94 he is called a “louse” (94/654). Justinian (c.483–565 CE), Byzantine emperor (527–65), reformed the Roman law code, as inscribed in his Digest and Institutes, a textbook for lawyers and one of the earliest foundations of European law. This history of Justinian’s reign was chiefly recorded by the chronicler John Malalas and the historian Prokopios of Caesarea, but otherwise little is known about Justinian.21 The relative dearth of extant material from Justinian’s era helps to explain Pound’s similar point in Canto 78: “Knowledge lost with Justinian, and with Titus and Antoninus / (‘law rules the sea’ meaning lex Rhodi)” (78/499). modus vivendi: (L), “mode of living” or “way of life.” his Excellency Edmondo Rossoni: (1884–1965), Italian Fascist Syndicalist much admired by Pound. Rossoni prefigured the Fascist corporatization of the state with his aim of establishing a conservative and authoritarian syndical state (“corporativismo integrale”) with no oversight from external political parties.22 Following his ascension to power in 1922 Mussolini made Rossoni Secretary General of the Confederation of Fascist Corporations (Confederazione delle Corporazioni Fasciste), a position he held until 1928.23 Although his relationship with Mussolini was at times strained, he later served the Fascist government as Minister of Agriculture and Forestry.

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A Companion to Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur Rossoni was also the editor of the leading periodical La Stirpe. His ministerial role underpins Pound’s panegyric to Rossoni here and elsewhere in GK. “Of living men,” Pound writes in the “Kung” chapter, Rossoni, “with his agricultural experts and his care for crops, is nearest the Confucian model” (GK 274). That Pound held Rossoni in high regard throughout his life is evident in as late as Canto 101, “Rossoni: ‘così lo stato . . .’ etcetera” (101/746). Marcus Aurelius: (121–80 CE), Roman philosopher-emperor (161–80), whose Meditations, a Stoic philosophical work, remains one of the most widely read texts from antiquity.24 Prof. Rostovtzeff of Yale: Mikhail Ivanovich Rostovtzeff (1870–1952), Russian-American archeologist and historian of the ancient world. The Yale professor’s most important and best-known works are the two-volume History of the Ancient World (1926–28), the two-volume Social and Economic History of the Roman Empire (1926), and the three-volume Social and Economic History of the Hellenistic World (1941). the distinction between neschek, corrosive usury, and marbit . . . is clear in the pentateuch: Pound cites the three references to usury featured in the Pentateuch (the Law of Moses) in Exodus 22:25, Leviticus 25:35–7, and Deuteronomy 23:19–20. While neshekh is the Hebrew term for interest in Exodus and Deuteronomy (cf. note GK 34), it occurs in tandem with tarbit or marbit in Leviticus. Neshekh (“bite”) designates the exaction of interest from the debtor’s perspective; marbit is the creditor’s recovery of interest. Contrary to Pound’s estimation that neshekh is the greater evil, both are forbidden in the Mosaic injunctions.25 old John Adams’ remarks: (1735–1826), 2nd president of the United States (1797–1801). The “remarks” Pound cryptically alludes to should be read in the context of Adams’s denunciation of money lenders (“money racketeers”) and usury. Adams writes:

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In the Roman history we see a constant struggle between the rich and the poor, from Romulus to Caesar. The great division was not so much between patricians and plebeians, as between debtor and creditor. Speculation and usury kept the state in perpetual broils. The patricians usurped the lands, and the plebeians demanded agrarian laws. The patricians lent money at exorbitant interest, and the plebeians were sometimes unable and always unwilling to pay it. These were the causes of dividing the people into two parties, as distinct and jealous, and almost as hostile to each other, as two nations.26

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Pound owned a copy of Charles Austin Beard’s Economic Origins of Jeffersonian Democracy (1915) and marked the following passage: “Adams built his entire system upon an economic foundation, upon the material needs of human nature.”27 Later in GK Pound further highlights the significance of John Adams, “The tragedy of the U.S.A. over 160 years is the decline of Adamses. More and more we cd., if we examined events, see that John Adams had the corrective for [Thomas] Jefferson” (GK 254). Yet, nowhere is Adams’s significance put forward more boldly than in the ten Cantos (62–71) Pound devotes to the statesman. Based on the ten-volume Life and Works of John Adams, this suite of Cantos was composed soon after GK’s publication, over a short period between the end of 1938 and the first few months of the following year. David Ten Eyck has argued for the vital and lasting importance of the Adams Cantos, noting that even as Pound continued to work on The Cantos in subsequent decades “the Adams Cantos remained associated in his mind with the notion of constructive effort, directed at laying down the ethical and legal foundations of a just state.”28 Pax Romana: The long period of relative peace and stability that existed under much of the Roman Empire, from the

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nous . . . full of light: The nous, spirit-mind (or intellect), is a concept Pound adapted from Plotinus (c.205–70 CE), Greek philosopher and founder of Neoplatonism. As Liebregts explains, Pound “linked activity with light and energy, and passivity with matter, while connecting both with this concept of the nous as a creative force” enabling humanity to create new forms and modes of expression and to translate “knowledge of eternal truths.”1 In Canto 40, as in GK, the nous is imaged as “the ineffable crystal” (40/201). Nothing is, without efficient cause: Epigram of Pound’s prose polemic, Jefferson and/or Mussolini (1935). The axiom appropriates the third element in Aristotle’s quadripartite theory of causality comprising material, formal, efficient, and final causes. Tim Redman argues that Pound’s belief in efficient cause “was the foundation of many of his glaring misjudgments over the next twelve years.”2 Dr Soddy, in Butchart’s collection Tomorrow’s Money: Pound owned and extensively marked this 1936 collection of essays compiled by economic historian, Montgomery Butchart (1902–69). The last sentence of the long quote that follows the citation is thickly underlined in Pound’s copy, “The provision of the correct quantity of money should be the first and most important duty of the State.”3 The passage is from an essay by the English economist and nuclear chemist, Frederick Soddy (1877–1956), 1921 Nobel Laureate in Chemistry. The book also features contributions by other economists whom Pound admired, most notably Silvio Gesell (1862–1930) (writing under the alias “J. Stuart Barr”), and Major C. H. Douglas (1879–1952) (cf. note GK

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A Companion to Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur 48). Pound corresponded with Butchart often throughout the 1930s. OECONOMICORUM: The Latin title of Aristotle’s treatise on economics. Pound likely has in mind the 1515 edition translated into Latin by the Florentine historian and humanist, Leonardo Bruni (1370–1444). The closing chapters of Economics comprise a catalogue of kings and leaders who profited from underhanded schemes. Cleomenes, the Spartan king, typifies the unethical treatment of subordinates in his practice of deferring paying his soldiers “one month in every year” and thus continually depriving them of a month’s pay.4 Jean Barral: French author of La Révolution économique (1935). Pound had commended the book in a review published in the December 5, 1935 issue of the New English Weekly, the periodical founded by Alfred Richard (A. R.) Orage (1873– 1934) in 1932. In a letter to Olivia Rossetti Agresti of January 31, 1956, Pound would refer to Barral as a “gesellite”5 (i.e., a follower of Silvio Gesell). Barral spearheaded the dissemination in France of the theories of Gesell and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809–65), the founder of Anarchism. Barral also created three magazines, beginning in 1923: L’Ordre Social, L’Ecole franchiste, and L’Economie franchiste.6 Matsumiyo: Hajime Matsumiya, Secretary of the Japanese Embassy in Rome, with whom he corresponded at least once in December 1937.7 Charlemagne fights the monopolists . . . “frumento parato”: Charlemagne (742–814), Frankish king (768–814) and Emperor of the West (800–14). Pound is alluding to the monetary reform that Charlemagne enacted in 794, which set in motion the history of Western monetary standards. As per his decree, the currency of the Holy Roman Empire would be the silver denarius, which contained 1.7 grams of pure silver and weighed 1.9 grams.8 The grain-denarius conversion table Pound presents is spelled out in Latin in the Capitulaires de

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Charlemagne, ending with the price of six denarii for each measure of “frumento parato” (Pound’s “superior wheat”), followed by the inscription, Et ipse modius sit quem omnibus habere constitutum est, ut unusquique habeat aequam mensuram et equales modios (“And [Charlemagne] himself established the measure, so that everyone should have a fair and equal share of the measure”).9 Echoing Pound’s mention of the Carolingian “grain denar” in GK, Canto 89 also makes a passing reference to “Charlemagne’s grain price” (89/621). David Hume: (1711–76), Scottish philosopher and historian. His economic thought is found in the second volume of his Essays: Moral, Political and Literary (1752). In Hume’s original text, the passage Pound paraphrases reads as follows: “If we consider any one kingdom by itself, it is evident, that the greater or less plenty of money is of no consequence; since the prices of commodities are always proportioned to the plenty of money.”10 Gesell and Douglas: Silvio Gesell (1862–1930), German monetary theorist and inventor of stamp scrip money (Schwundgeld) (cf. note GK 166), and Major Clifford Hugh Douglas (1879–1952), British engineer and founder of the Social Credit movement. After favorably reviewing Douglas’s first book, Economic Democracy (1920), in The Little Review in 1920 Pound fully embraced Social Credit, an underconsumptionist theory that advocated “a kind of negative tax, called the national dividend, to make up the shortfall in purchasing power and was opposed to expansion of the money supply.”11 Pound’s point in the next page that Douglas “remained misunderstood for years because he relapsed into algebra” encompasses Douglas’s A + B theorem, the foundation of Social Credit theory: In any manufacturing undertaking the payments made may be divided into two groups: Group A: Payments made

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A Companion to Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur to individuals as wages, salaries, and dividends; Group B: Payments made to other organizations for raw materials, bank charges and other external costs. The rate of distribution of purchasing power to individuals is represented by A, but since all payments go into prices, the rate of generation of prices cannot be less than A plus B. Since A will not purchase A plus B, a proportion of the product at least equivalent to B must be distributed by a form of purchasing power which is not comprised in the description grouped under A.12

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I myself once printed an analytical formula in a discussion of sculpture: It is quite possible that Pound is referring to the standard form equation of a circle he reproduced in his memoir of the Vorticist sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska: “(x-a)2 + (y-b)2 = r2.”13 Prof S.: Frederick Soddy (1877–1956) (cf. note GK 46). However much Soddy “used to sneer at philosophy,” as Pound puts it, in at least one instance the scientist did find it compatible with modern chemistry: “We are returning to the view of the Greek philosophers and the alchemists that elements are qualities and not constituents. Every one of the conceptions which associated the atom with the chemical element now has to be modified.”14 We traced the “just word” back to Flaubert: i.e., “le mot juste,” a phrase signifying the quest for linguistic precision carried out with almost manic preoccupation by the French novelist, Gustave Flaubert (1821–80), author of Madame Bovary (1857) and Salammbô (1862), among other novels. The phrase appears in a letter Flaubert wrote in 1876 to his fellow French novelist, George Sand (1804–76).15 Even as early as 1914, in an essay on “The Prose Tradition in Verse,” Pound rebukes the English Romantic poet William Wordsworth (1770–1850) for so busying himself “about the ordinary world that he never

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found time to think about le mot juste.”16 Flaubert also appears in Canto 80 in association with his friend and Russian novelist Ivan Turgenev (1818–83) and in Canto 82 “in a discussion of Flaubert” (80/514, 82/544). Leibniz: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716), German philosopher, mathematician, and author of The Theodicy (1710) and Monadology (1714), among other works. In The Cantos, Leibniz is one of a triumvirate of exceptional thinkers, the other two being the American lexicographer Noah Webster (1758–1843) and the French philosopher Voltaire (1694–1778) (104/763). In the “Great Bass” chapter, Pound deems Leibniz “the last philosopher who ‘got hold of something’” (GK 74). Leibniz’s “unsquashable monad” alludes to the foundational concept of his metaphysics. Monads are the “basic units of the world” or “the ultimate bottom layer of things.”17 Huxley or Haldane: Sir Julian Sorell Huxley (1887–1975), one of the most prominent English biologists and evolutionists, and J. B. S. Haldane (1892–1964), English geneticist and physiologist. Huxley and Haldane co-published Animal Biology (1927), but the latter scientist is Pound’s source here. Haldane writes in a July 1932 letter, “I expect that Galileo spent far longer in making his telescope than in discovering Jupiter’s satellites.”18 Galileo: Galileo Galilei (1564–1642), Italian Renaissance physicist and astronomer. Galileo appears a few times in The Cantos, mostly in reference to the Church’s opposition to his Copernican theories, as suggested in Canto 48, “Galileo; pronounced ‘Garry Yeo’ / err’ un’ imbecille; ed ha imbecillito / (voice under my window) il mondo” (Galileo “was an imbecile, and he has turned the world imbecile”) (48/241). The late Victorians and the Wellses were boggit in loose expression: In his Vorticist days (1914–15), Pound joined the chorus led by Wyndham Lewis (1882–1957), his friend and leader of the London-based movement, against the Victorian era. The “years 1837 to 1900” are mercilessly written off

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A Companion to Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur in Blast, the Vorticist magazine, with several prominent late Victorian figures and institutions “blasted”: the Strachey clan, the British Academy, the novelist John Galsworthy (1867– 1933), the French philosopher Henri Bergson (1859–1941), the poet-philosopher Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941), among many other members of the British Establishment.19 It is somewhat ironic that H. G. Wells (1866–1946) should be lumped in with the “late Victorians” in GK, given that in Canto 42 Pound cryptically recounts a conversation with the novelist in 1918, in which “H.G.” is said to have expressed surprise that the Victoria Memorial, a large monument to Queen Victoria (1819–1901) in front of Buckingham Palace, should still be allowed to stand (42/209).20 In a letter of April that same year Pound complains of the “excessive” nature of some passages in James Joyce’s Ulysses, but notes that Joyce “does not disgust me as Wells does.”21 In 1937, Pound would go so far as to include Wells among the “illustrious punks and messers” who continued to degrade “the values.”22 mediaeval scholasticism: Cf. note GK 26.

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Zweck: (Ger.) “Purpose, aim.” The ideogramic method: A core component of Pound’s poetics. It stems from the quasi-mystical epistemology that he derived from editing Fenollosa’s essay, “The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry” (1913/1920). Confucius, Gourmont, and Swedenborg (cf. notes GK 88, 73) also influenced Pound’s method. As Pound suggests, the ideogrammic method is associative and combinatory. The heuristic juxtapositions he outlines here enable him to assemble a mosaic of gists and piths, which he hopes will ultimately coalesce to form a coherent image in the reader’s mind. Pound seeks to create a new stereoscopic consciousness capable of shoring up the scattered ruins of the past to build a new civilization. Once gathered, these bits and pieces are deployed as “luminous details.” Kenner has described this technique as “‘patterned integrities’ which [when] transferred out of their context of origin retain their power to enlighten us.”1 In ABC of Reading (1934), Pound explains that the Chinese ideogram does not try to be the picture of a sound, or to be a written sign recalling a sound, but it is still the picture of a thing; of a thing in a given position or relation, or of a combination of things. It means the thing or the action or situation, or quality germane to the several things that it pictures [. . .]    [A Chinese person] is to define red. How can he do it in a picture that isn’t painted in red paint?

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A Companion to Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur    He puts (or his ancestor put) together the abbreviated pictures of       ROSE      CHERRY     IRON RUST    FLAMINGO2 For Pound, a language thus inscribed is inherently poetic. Moreover, he sees his ideogrammic method as carrying on and systematizing Fenollosa’s unfinished work, since the sinologist “died before getting round to publishing and proclaiming a ‘method.’” That the ideogram is paramount in Pound’s mind as he was writing GK may be gleaned in a letter he wrote to the classicist W. H. D. Rouse on October 30, 1937 (cf. note GK 71). Pound argues that “There is more kick in ideogram for us, and for the next century of the Occident than in any other study. Or if that is a silly way of saying it, say than in any other study until you get down down down to bedrock—where almost no one ever does get.”3 In a letter to the Japanese poet, Kitasono Katue (1902–78) (cf. notes GK 137–38), dated November 15, 1940, Pound writes: Ideogram is essential to the exposition of certain kinds of thought. Greek philosophy was mostly a mere splitting, an impoverishment of understanding, though it ultimately led to development of particular sciences. Socrates a distinguished gas-bag in comparison with Confucius and Mencius.4

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Baldwin: Stanley Baldwin, First Earl Baldwin of Bewdley (1867–1947), three-time Prime Minister (1923–24, 1924–29, 1935–37), in office while Pound wrote GK. Pound’s antipathy to Baldwin arose at least in part from the politician’s “firm belief that capitalism was the natural order of things,” while Baldwin’s association with newspapers, as Pound suggests here, may have stemmed from his active (if uneasy) engagement

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with the press, radio, and sound newsreels, thus becoming the first “‘media prime minister.’”5 Webbs and Villards: Sidney James Webb (1859–1947) and Beatrice Webb (née Potter) (1858–1943). Married in 1882, the British economists, Fabian socialists, social reformers, and historians co-authored Soviet Communism: A New Civilisation? (1935). In this work, the Webbs dwelt at length on the interrelationship of socialism and democracy, a position Pound would have found particularly galling. Canto 15 singles out “the fabians crying for the petrification of putrefaction / for a new dung-flow cut in lozenges” (15/64).6 Henry Gustav Villard (1835–1900) was a newspaper magnate who acquired The Nation in 1881, a leftist weekly literary supplement for the New York Evening Post and the oldest such publication continuously in print in the U.S. His son, Oswald Garrison Villard (1872–1949) was an American journalist and owner-editor of the liberal-leaning The Nation in the 1920s and 1930s.7 In a letter to E. E. Cummings sent from Rapallo on January 31, 1935, Pound rails against “shitson Villard / and all that bastardly old gang of pewked begbugs obstructin the traffik.”8 John, James, Howard and William: Stock stand-ins for dimwitted, boorish Anglo-American everymen. Mohammedan conquest and flop: Allusion to the long history of Islamic conquest, settlement, and retreat in the centuries following the death of the Prophet Mohammed in 632. Arab scholars use the term “conquest” (fath), strictly speaking, “to describe the taking over of the lands of the Byzantine and Persian empires,” though in time the Islamic empire would stretch into the farther reaches of North Africa, the Iberian peninsula, and beyond. As Pound notes, there were also “flops.” One of the worst defeats suffered by Muslim troops took place on November 26, 634, two years after the Prophet’s death, when Persian forces nearly destroyed them at the Battle of the Bridge near al-Hira in Iraq.9

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A Companion to Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur Averroes, Avicenna: Islamic philosophers. Averroes, Latin version of Abu al-Walid Muhammad ibn Rushd (1126–98), Andalusian philosopher, theologian, and jurist; Avicenna (980–1036), Latin version of Abu Sina, Persian philosopher and physician. They not only combined the ideas of Plato and Aristotle, but as Liebregts observes, “these Islamic thinkers, basing themselves on commentators such as Porphyry, also interpreted Aristotle in a Neoplatonic manner.” Pound underscores his own Neoplatonism in his essay “Cavalcanti” by claiming that it is possible to trace the ideas of the Tuscan poet to both philosophers.10 In Canto 93, Pound mentions Avicenna alongside the Persian mystic Algazel (1058–111), Latin for Abu Hamid (93/645). the Alcazar, the Alhambra: The Alcázar of Seville, a royal palace built by the Moors in the tenth century, is the oldest royal palace in Europe still in use. Combining Islamic influences with Renaissance and Baroque expansions and renovations commissioned by succeeding Castillian kings, the mudéjar style of the Alcázar would undoubtedly have impressed Pound as an architectural exemplar of cultural hybridization. In Canto 81, Pound alludes to his visit to the Alcázar in 1906 (“forty years gone”) (81/537).11 Even more famous than its illustrious counterpart, the Alhambra palace in Granada was built between 1334 and 1391 as the seat of the Nasrid caliphs. It constitutes what Pound might term a “heteroclite” group of buildings, which includes a private chapel built by Ferdinand and Isabella, Catholic monarchs, after the conquest of the palace in 1492.12 Keats: John Keats (1795–1821), English poet and a key figure in the Romantic movement. Echoing Pound’s hint at Keats’s Eastern influences, Samar Attar connects Madeline, or Lamia, the orientalized heroine of “La Belle Dame sans Merci,” with the tales of One Thousand and One Nights, adding that “in the East that Keats never visited lies the demonic and the

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seductive, pornography and piety, the fantastic and the sinister.”13 In 1906 in Tangier: Pound visited the Moroccan port city with his Aunt Frank (Frances Weston) in late June 1898 and again during a three-month tour of Europe with her and his parents in 1902. The trip cited here took place during his first solo trip to study Romance literature, funded by a Harrison Fellowship from the University of Pennsylvania.14 British Museum main reading room: The importance of this London landmark for Pound can be seen in a letter of November 18, 1911 to the pianist Margaret Cravens (1881– 1912). Pound ends it by saying that he is “off for an anglo Saxon mss at the [British] museum.” Pound’s signature translation of the Anglo-Saxon poem “The Seafarer” was published in The New Age about two weeks later. It is also worth noting that even though the “Seafarer” manuscript in the Exeter Book would not have been archived in the British Museum, the text of the poem was available in a number of scholarly editions.15 It is significant that in his essay “How to Read, or Why” (1929) Pound writes that he has “been accused of wishing to provide a ‘portable substitute for the British Museum’, which I would do, like a shot, were it possible. It isn’t.”16 Yet, GK arguably seeks to do just that. Catherine E. Paul notes that the Museum’s reading room “epitomized Pound’s faith in museums’ ability to keep history and culture alive rather than entombed in dusty storage rooms.”17 Hamilton College: College in Clinton, New York, where Pound studied between 1903 and 1905. Noteworthy among the faculty was William Pierce Shepard (1870–1948), Professor of Romance Languages and Literature, with whom Pound enrolled in an extracurricular course in Provençal. David Moody sees Pound’s The Spirit of Romance (1910) as “very much a product and a record of Pound’s studies with Shepard.”18 Pound’s first signed poem in print was published

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A Companion to Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur in the Hamilton Literary Review in May 1905, a translation of the Provençal poem, “Belangal Alba.” The Ezra Pound Collection at Hamilton College currently comprises more than 4,600 catalogued volumes, more than 1,000 volumes of secondary sources, and over 2,300 periodical articles about or by Pound.19 I have never read all of Bayle: Pierre Bayle (1647–1706), French Enlightenment philosopher and skeptic. The four volumes to which Pound refers here make up Bayle’s magisterial Dictionnaire historique et critique (1695–97), the “philosophical blockbuster of all time,” to quote Thomas Lennon, more popular in its time than the works of Voltaire, Locke, Newton, and Rousseau.20 In this passage, Pound is echoing an earlier allusion to the Dictionnaire in Canto 28: “Buk!” said the Second Baronet, “eh... “Thass a funny lookin’ buk” said the Baronet Looking at Bayle, folio, 4 vols. in gilt leather, “Ah... “Wu... Wu... wot you goin’ eh to do with ah... “... ah read-it?” (28/139)

Monsieur R.: Unidentified. 54–55 The eminent professor and historian G. promised me light on Mediaeval philosophy . . . years of silence: Étienne Gilson (1884–1978), French philosopher and historian of medieval thought. In the 1930s, he held posts at the Collège de France and at the University of Toronto.21 Gilson’s lengthy silence after Pound had sent him photographs of the literary commentary of Dino del Garbo (d.1327), Florentine professor-physician, on Guido Cavalcanti (c.1255–1300), Tuscan poet and Dante’s contemporary, greatly frustrated Pound. In a letter of January 1938 to the medievalist Otto Bird (1914–2009) (cf. n. 1 GK 55), who would write his dissertation on Cavalcanti, Pound complains, “Blast ole Gilson, five years and nowt done . . .

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Where is Gilson, if he ain’t in Toronto?”22 As J. J. Wilhelm notes, however, Gilson made up for his silence in his laudatory review (though in ignorance of the author’s identity) of Pound’s Guido Cavalcanti Rime (1932) in the October 1932 issue of the Criterion.23 [n. 2] Col (pantalettes) Harvey when edtr. of the North. Am. Rev.: Colonel George Brinton McClellan Harvey (1864–1928), who became publisher and editor of the North American Review after purchasing the influential journal of arts, letters, and politics in 1899. Harvey also edited Harper’s Weekly from 1901 to 1913 and served as president of the publishing house Harper and Brothers. He published renowned writers, including Mark Twain, Henry James, and H. G. Wells. Pound’s quip about Harvey’s colonelship (“pantalettes” were feminine undergarments) may stem from the fact that he was called “Colonel” for his service in aiding the governorship of Woodrow Wilson in New Jersey, rather than for any military accomplishment.24 In Jefferson and/or Mussolini, Pound had made a similar charge that “even our supposedly serious quarterlies do not correct misstatements. My mind goes back to Col. Harvey who was an editor before he wore short pants in London.”25 [n. 2] Untermeyer’s anthologies: Louis Untermeyer (1885– 1977), New York poet, editor, translator, and influential anthologist of English and American poetry, with his Britannica Library of Great American Writing (1960) and Lives of the Poets (1961) chief among his anthologies. He corresponded with Pound, as conveyed in EP to LU: Nine Letters Written to Louis Untermeyer by Ezra Pound (1963), but did not think much of The Cantos.26 Funk Wagnall’s encyclopedia: Funk & Wagnalls Standard Encyclopedia of the World’s Knowledge, comprising twenty-five volumes, was first published in 1912. Fructus inter folia: (L.) “Fruit among the leaves.”

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A Companion to Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur Schönbrun: Schönbrunn Palace in Vienna, Austria, formerly a Lustschloss, or imperial country palace, the preferred residence of Empress Maria Theresa (1740–80). It was designed to rival Versailles, though even in the eighteenth century the Empress’s renovations of areas of the imperial suite “produced a predominantly dark tonality that set them apart from the light-filled, gold-and-white coloration typical of Viennese rococo architecture.”27 In Gaudier-Brzeska (1916), Pound praises the “white-gleaming intelligence” of the sculptor’s studio as superior to “the podgy and bulbous expensiveness of Schonbrun, the tawdry, gummy, adhesive costliness of the trappings of the bourgeois drawing-rooms of the period.”28 Venice Biennale: The oldest and most prestigious international art exhibition in the world, held in Venice every two years since 1895. Here, Pound rehearses his criticism in the New English Weekly (May 30, 1935) of the Biennale as “a poor show . . . No Brancusi, no Picasso, no Douanier, or at any rate none of the first rate painters.”29 Let us say this is hyper-aesthesia: “Excessive and morbid sensitiveness of the nerves or nerve-centres.”30 Pound attempts to define the term in a May 1917 letter as “the sensation of being thrust head downward up to chin into the mire of an open privy which comes upon me at the mention of the house of Murray, the Bookman, Seccombe, Chesterton, the whole order of these things.”31 The value of Leo Frobenius to civilization: In praising the archeological fieldwork of the German ethnologist, Pound nonetheless stressed his own paideumic program as distinct from Frobenius’s. Pound writes to T. S. Eliot in February 1940, “I shd. claim to get on from where Frobenius left off, in that his Morphology was applied to savages and my interest is in civilizations at their most.”32 Pound’s interpretation of Frobenian paideuma as “the tangle or complex of the inrooted ideas of any period” in GK is consistent with a passage he marked in

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his copy of Monumenta Africana, the sixth volume of Frobenius’s Erlebte Erdteile: “Das Verstehen der Stile nach ihrer Raum und Zeitbedingtheit ist die erste Aufgabe der Kulturmorphologie” (“Understanding the styles according to their spatial and temporal contingency is the first task of cultural morphology”).33 bronze car of Dis: Dis Pater is the Roman equivalent of the Greek Hades, or Pluto, Persephone’s spouse (cf. note GK 244).34 Frazer: Sir James George Frazer (1854–1941), Scottish anthropologist, classicist, and historian of religion, knighted in 1914. First published in two volumes in 1890, his magnum opus The Golden Bough, a study of cultural anthropology, mythology, magic, and religion, comprised twelve volumes by the third edition (1911–15), with the fourth edition published in 1936 adding a thirteenth volume titled Aftermath.35 In the headnote to his epochal poem The Waste Land (1922), Eliot pays homage to The Golden Bough as a seminal anthropological source for the poem, especially in reference to vegetation rituals that underlie the poem’s “primary metaphor of a dead land that the hero must, by seeking self-sacrifice, restore to life.”36 In a letter of March 1925, Eliot singles out Frazer as “a living force.”37 Without Frazer necessarily in mind, Pound ends Canto 1 with Aphrodite’s “Bearing the golden bough of Argicida” (1/5), which in Virgil’s Aeneid guarantees that Aeneas can travel safely between the world of the living and the dead.38 The Paideuma is not the Zeitgeist: Cf. note GK 27. Napoleon said he failed for opposing the spirit of his time: This passage riffs off a longer statement by the legendary French military general and emperor, Napoleon Bonaparte (1769–1821), in Canto 50, published just a year before GK as The Fifth Decad of the Cantos XLII–LI (1937):             ‘Not’ said Napoleon ‘because of that league of lice

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A Companion to Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur but for opposing the Zeitgeist! That was my ruin, That I ran against my own time, turning backward’ (50/249) idées reçues: (Fr.) “received ideas” (i.e., clichés, truisms). The “New Learning” under the ideogram of the mortar: For Pound, the ideogram of the “mortar” is synonymous with the Chinese character for learning, 學 (学) (cf. note GK 21). In a February 1937 letter to F. V. Morley (1899–1980), one of the directors of Faber, Pound signals his willingness to title his embryonic GK “The New Learning” instead of “Paideuma,” the latter “being too long a word for the public.”39 In a subsequent letter, he even goes so far as to “suggest The New Learning as a be’r title than Guide to Kultur,” worried that “the public mightn’t take the Guide idear seereeyus.”40 The discarded title echoes Giovanni Battista Vico’s opus Scienza nuova (1725), whose cyclical theory of history may have directly or indirectly influenced Pound.41 CH’ING MING, a new Paideuma . . . 正名: Pound explicitly identifies the Ch’ing ming (正名, “precise terminology”) as the basis of his program for cultural renewal (cf. note GK 21). Similarly, in Canto 60, the penultimate of the China Cantos (52–61), Pound cribs in French from J. A. M. de Moyriac de Mailla’s Histoire générale de la Chine (1777–85) to praise the restoration of Confucian ethics enacted under the rule of Kang Xi (1662–1723), qu’ils veillèrent à la pureté du langage et qu’on n’employât que des termes propres     (namely CH’ing ming)           正名      (60/332–33) The French excerpt reads, “they saw to the purity of the language / and that one ought to employ only apt terms.”42

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Dr Monotti: Francesco Monotti, Rapallo writer who interviewed Pound for the March 1931 issue of the magazine Belvedere.43 Monotti also interviewed Frobenius for the January 1933 issue of the literary supplement of the Rapallo newspaper, Il Mare.44 STYLE: In Gaudier-Brzeska, Pound defines style as “‘the absolute subjugation of the details of a given work to the dominant will; to the central urge or impulse.’” He would also praise the originality of Gaudier’s work, “free from influence, the personal style which is even by great artists often attained only toward the end of a lifetime.”45 Anseres, geese, as Dante has branded them, immune from learning: Allusion to the following passage from Dante’s De Vulgari Eloquentia (1303–5): Et ideo confutetur illorum stultitia qui, arte scientiaque immunes, de solo ingenio confidentes, ad summa summe canenda proprumpunt; et a tanta presumptuositate desistant; et si anseres natural vel desidia sunt, nolint astripetam aquilam imitari.46 [And on that account let the stupidity be silenced of those who, innocent alike of art and learning, burst forth boldly, trusting only to their talents, upon subjects that are appropriate to the noblest poetry. And let them abandon their excessive presumption. If they are geese by nature or by laziness, let them not seek to imitate the star-seeking eagle.] I have heard Brancusi: la sculpture n’est pas pour les jeunes hommes: Constantin Brâncuşi (1876–1957), Romanianborn abstract sculptor whom Pound met in Paris on April 23, 1921.47 In 1928, Brancusi moved permanently to his Paris studio in Impasse Ronsin No. 11 in Montparnasse.48 With

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A Companion to Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur reference to Canto 17, Rebecca Beasley, like Michael North, sees Brancusi’s studio and sculpture as “a major model for the paradise described in The Cantos, with its ‘forest of marble’, and ‘arbours of stone – / marble leaf, over lea’” (17/78).49 Pound’s remembered snippet of conversation with Brancusi translates from the French as “sculpture is not for young men.” In 1921, in the autumn “Brancusi Number” of The Little Review, Pound published an article on the sculptor, a “man in love with perfection.” “Where Gaudier had developed a sort of form-fugue or form-sonata by a combination of forms,” he writes, “Brancusi has set out on the maddeningly more difficult exploration toward getting all the forms into one form; this is as long as any Buddhist’s contemplation of the universe or as any medieval saint’s contemplation of the divine love.”50 Elsewhere in GK, Pound praises Brancusi likewise, “in some dimensions a saint” (GK 105). On the other hand, as he suggests in Canto 86, the sculptor’s perfectionism may have slowed the pace of his creative output: “And Brancusi repeating: je peux commencer / une chose tous les jours, mais / fiiniiiir” (“I can start one thing every day, but finish”) (86/580). two centuries of Provençal life devoted a good deal of energy to motz el son: While Pound’s interest in the Provençal cultural universe of medieval southern France was sparked at Hamilton College from 1903 to 1905 (cf. note GK 54), by 1916 Provençal had become a crucial element in his poetics. In a July 1916 letter to the poet-novelist, critic, and curator Iris Barry (1895– 1969), he says as much: “There was poetry in Egypt . . . Cathay will give you a hint of China, and the ‘Seafarer’ on the AngloSaxon stuff. Then as MacKail says (p. 246) nothing matters till Provence.”51 The brief allusion to John William Mackail’s Latin Literature (1895) helps to contextualize Pound’s reference in GK to motz el son, “the union of word and music.” Mackail viewed eleventh-century Provençal poetry as a “second spring” for poetic production, a return of the golden age of Roman

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poetry as exemplified by the Latin poem Pervigilium Veneris (c. second to third centuries), “the whole poem swaying to its own music.”52 Frank Chambers highlights the rich musical tradition of Provençal poetry in noting that “motz” by itself denoted “words of a song,” while “moz senes so” was used to call attention to a poem not meant to be accompanied by music.53 Pound’s timeline of “two centuries of Provençal life” has been validated by recent scholarship, which groups the major troubadour poets into five periods ranging from 1100 to 1300, while also stressing that their art “was never a stable, fixed phenomenon. It moved.”54 Pound would dedicate a great deal of energy to motz el son in his 1921 operatic adaptation of Le Testament, a poem composed in 1461 by the French medieval poet, François Villon (1431–c.1463) (see the “Heaulmière” section of the opera in GK 361–65). As Charles Mundye points out, Pound’s “compositional technique in the songs of Le Testament grows out of, and is consistent with, his mature understanding of troubadour and trouvère melodic interpretation.”55 In Canto 20, Pound recounts a conversation with Hugo Albert Rennert (1858–1927), a professor of Romance languages with whom he studied at the University of Pennsylvania, who recommended that he seek the help of the German philologist Emil Lévy (1855–1918), author of Provenzalisches Supplement-Wörterbuch (8 vols., 1892–1925): “Nobody, no, nobody / Knows anything about Provençal, or if there is anybody, / It’s old Lévy” (20/89). from Arnaut and his crew down to Janequin: Arnaut Daniel (fl. 1180–1200), Provençal troubadour much admired by Pound. In The Spirit of Romance (1910), Pound devotes to Arnaut the chapter “Il Miglior Fabbro,” incidentally also Eliot’s dedication of The Waste Land to Pound, while the phrase itself is from Dante’s description of Arnaut in De Vulgari Eloquentia. In the essay, Pound praises Arnaut’s canzoni as one of the “two perfect gifts” of the twelfth century, the other one being the

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A Companion to Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur Italian-Romanesque church of San Zeno in Verona.56 Specifically, Pound admired the harmonic and rhythmic versification of the vernacular in Arnaut’s minstrelsy. A decade later, Pound would return to the motz el son motif by affirming in Instigations (1920) that no other troubadour “had thought so of the sound of the words with the music, all in sequence and set together” as Arnaut.57 In turn, the polyphonic vocal music of French composer and choirmaster Clément Janequin (c.1485– 1558) rendered the sounds of war so accurately in La guerre that his chanson was said to “imitate not just the action of battle, but the passions of those who fought,” to the point of quickening “fury in male listeners.”58 Gerhart Münch (1907– 88), a German pianist and composer, arranged and played with Olga Rudge an instrumental version for piano and violin of Janequin’s Le Chant des oiseaux at concerts Pound organized in Rapallo in the 1930s.59 Mark Byron points out that the piece was played in the opening concert of October 10, 1933 and its score, featured in Canto 75 in Münch’s hand (75/470– 71), represents an “idea of aesthetic purity.”60 Janequin is also mentioned in Canto 79 as an “esempio” (“example”) of artists “contending for certain values” (79/505). Frobenius Institute and Afrikarchiv: Founded in 1925, the Frobenius-Institut (http://www.frobenius-institut.de) is the oldest ethnological research institute in Germany and still operates as an independent institution within Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main. Mr Butchart unearthed Stuart Mill’s account of the Makute: Pound recommended Butchart’s Money: Selected Passages Presenting the Concepts of Money in the English Tradition, 1640–1935 (1935), as essential to the study of economic history (cf. note GK 46).61 John Stuart Mill’s discussion of the macute, a unit of value once used by certain Western African tribes, is found in his Principles of Political Economy with some of their Applications to Social Philosophy (1848). Mill notes

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that “there is no real thing called a macute: it is a conventional unit, for the more convenient comparison of things with one another.”62 University of C. which is said to possess a manuscript of Cavalcanti: Perhaps the University of Chicago, though the only Cavalcanti manuscript listed in the university library’s catalogue is a critical work (c.1550) attributed to Bartolomeo Cavalcanti (1503–62), not Guido Cavalcanti. From 1928 to 1929, Pound examined early Cavalcanti manuscripts held at several libraries in Italy: Milan’s Ambrosiana, Verona’s Capitolare, Venice’s Querini Stampalia and Marciana, Florence’s Riccardiana and Laurenziana (cf. note GK 2), Siena’s ­Comunale, and the Vatican in Vatican City.63 A professor of romanics: Unidentified, but probably a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, to which Pound had submitted in 1931 the philological research he had compiled for his then-forthcoming Guido Cavalcanti Rime (1932) in hopes that it would fulfill the requirements for a doctorate in Romanics, a pursuit he had abandoned almost two decades earlier. Pound and his father had repeatedly petitioned the university to grant the poet the Ph.D., but, once again, the university declined their request.64 gombeen men: “Gombeen” derives from the modern Irish gaimbín, with “gombeen-man” meaning money-lender or “usurer.”65 The anti-Semitic subtext of the term for Pound emerges in his letter to an editor, James Taylor Dunn, dated March 18, 1937, less than a month after he accepted a contract with Faber to write GK: “The small jew suffers for the sins of the big gombeen man.”66 Dr Breasted of Chicago: James Henry Breasted (1865–1935), American Egyptologist, historian, and professor at the University of Chicago. With financial support from the Rockefeller family foundation, Breasted founded the Oriental Institute at the university in 1919. Like the Frobenius-Institut, the

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A Companion to Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur Oriental Institute is still active and was founded on a German model of operating within a university structure while maintaining its independence as an organization. Breasted shared Pound’s suspicion of universities (“beaneries”), especially the idea that their essential values “were being eroded.”67 the quarterly Zeitschrift: Zeitschrift für französischen und englischen Unterricht, Berlin-based periodical. In 1930, Pound published a brief note in Zeitschrift with three corrections to Frederick Sefton Delmer’s article covering Pound and Imagism in the preceding issue.68 Usury: Cf. note GK 15.

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VORTEX: Pound reprints verbatim Gaudier-Brzeska’s original essay published in the first issue of the London literary magazine Blast (1914–15), the mouthpiece for Vorticism.1 The painter and writer Wyndham Lewis (1882–1957) edited the only two issues of the magazine. Pound’s only variation on the original text here is to change most of the font, originally in all caps, to italics. Missing from the essay is the iconic image of a cone intersected by a vertical line, which appears at the end of the original piece to symbolize the creative vortex propounded by the Vorticists. Gaudier-Brzeska’s essay is the last piece in the inaugural issue of Blast and functions as its manifestic core. The essay follows a contribution by Pound, also titled “Vortex.” Significant in its own right, Pound’s essay prefaces the aesthetic and art-historical foundations of Gaudier-Brzeska’s transhistorical and impressionistic sketch of sculpture. “All experience rushes into this vortex,” Pound proclaims, “All the energized past, all the past that is living and worthy to live.”2 Above all, he presents what is arguably his most seminal statement on Vorticism as a movement that concerns itself primarily with the visual arts. First published in Poetry in March 1913, the maxim reads, “An ‘Image’ is that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time.”3 Likely with Gaudier-Brzeska in mind, Pound affirms that “every concept, every emotion presents itself to the vivid consciousness in some primary form,” with “form or design in three planes” assigned to sculpture.4 Pound reprints the French sculptor’s Vorticist manifesto as a benchmark of “real knowledge” (GK 70). Gaudier-Brzeska’s elemental, hieratic sculptures

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embed “primary form,” combining variety and expressive experimentation. These sculptural compositions underwrite what Miranda Hickman aptly calls “the signature geometric idiom of Vorticism.”5 Pound supported the young artist with more than mere praise. In a December 1913 letter to William Carlos Williams, he reveals that he has “just bought two statuettes from the coming sculptor, Gaudier-Brzeska. I like him very much. He is the only person with whom I can really be ‘Altaforte.’ [John] Cournos I like also. We are getting our little gang after five years of waiting.”6 The reference to “Altaforte” recalls his “Sestina: Altaforte” (1909), a poem set in the Altaforte castle of Bertans de Born, a troubadour jongleur (“singer”) who prefers strife over “foul peace.”7 In “Affirmations,” first published in the February 4, 1915 issue of The New Age, Pound predicts that the sculptor’s synthesis of sculpture “will become the text-book in all academies of sculpture before our generation has passed from the earth.”8 John Cournos: (1881–1966), Russian-born poet and translator, whose poem “The Rose,” jointly written with poet Kazimierz Tetmaier (1865–1940), was published in the first Imagist anthology, Des Imagistes (1914), edited by Pound, and in the subsequent Imagist anthologies (1915, 1916, 1917), edited by Amy Lowell (1874–1925). After Gaudier-Brzeska’s death in the First World War (cf. note GK 33), Cournos published an article in The Egoist of September 1, 1915 acknowledging the sculptor’s historical sensibility as “a natural evolutionary process bridging him over from old ideas to new.”9 The paleolithic vortex . . . procession of horses carved in the rock: The “Dordogne caverns” denotes a network of grottes (“caves”) in the Vézère valley of the Dordogne region in southwestern France, of which Font-de-Gaume is but one of nearly 350 discovered caves containing prehistoric art created by the first civilization in recorded history.10 The oldest paintings are about 30,000 years old. Besides the “procession of

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A Companion to Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur horses” which Gaudier-Brzeska cites, Font-de-Gaume also contains Palaeolithic paintings of mammoths, reindeer, bison, and stenciled hands. In keeping with Gaudier-Brzeska’s idea that “the driving power was life in the absolute,” Picasso notes that the art of Lascaux, one of the most famous caves in the Dordogne, marks “the first tangible instance in which sensibility fully reaches its highest power.”11 The hamite vortex of Egypt: Allusion to ethnological and racialist explanations for the alleged Hamitic origins of ancient Egyptian civilization. The Hamitic hypothesis derives from representations of Ham, the cursed son of Noah chronicled in Genesis, as dark-skinned and sinfully degenerate. While the idea was used in a colonialist and racist context to subjugate Africans to non-human status, in the nineteenth century “the notion of Hamites was resurrected by a subtle shift in biblical interpretation which allowed Hamites to be reconstituted as Caucasoid; as such they could then be considered capable of civilization.”12 Urmila Seshagiri sees Gaudier-Brzeska’s and the Vorticists’ strident praise of premodern art forms as a kind of “aesthetic colonialism” in their reduction of “primitive non-Western cultures to a series of formal qualities that have to be wrested from their ‘backward’ birthplaces and then incorporated into the modern Western metropolis.”13 This is precisely the idea that informs Cournos’s enthusiasm for Gaudier-Brzeska’s “whole history of sculpture,” as reported by Pound, who adds the Frobenian slant that it is “also the history of Kulturmorphologie.”14 The semitic vortex was the lust of war: As chronicled in Genesis (10:21–30) Elam and Asshur were descendants of the patriarch Shem. As uncertain as some of these names may be, biblical classification shows that the Arabs, Babylonians, Arameans, Assyrians, and Hebrews were regarded as Semites, or descendants of Shem.15 For this section, Gaudier-Brzeska could have consulted reference books such as the Encyclopedia

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of Religions (1906). The text notes that “Kheta” was the designation the Egyptians gave to a Syrian people (“Heth” in Hebrew, also known as Hittites in English), while also underlining that they were not, technically speaking, Semitic, but would have mingled widely with Semitic peoples. Hittite monuments in Armenia suggest Semitic presence, likewise Canaan, where the Hittites and Amorites were the chief tribes.16 From Sargon to Amir-nasir-pal: Sargon II, Assyrian king (721– 705 BCE) whose human-headed winged bull colossi adorned his palace and several of the city gates at Dur Sharrukin, in present-day Khorsabad, Iraq.17 Gaudier-Brzeska probably saw a pair of the bulls at the British Museum. “Amir-nasir-pal” is likely a misreading of Ashur-nasir-pal II, Assyrian king (883– 859 BCE). The walls of his palace at Nimrud (ancient Kalhu, present-day Mosul, Iraq) were panelled with almost two miles of bas-reliefs in sculptured alabaster, with twenty-seven portals flanked by winged bull colossi and lion-sphinxes.18 Gothic sculpture . . . Roman traditions: Gaudier-Brzeska’s line of transmission between Roman and Gothic sculptural traditions can be seen at Reims cathedral in France, in particular the eleven caryatid-like angels created in the 1220s. As Paul Williamson argues, they “reveal a knowledge of Roman sculpture which could only have been obtained from study of the originals.”19 land of Amen-Ra: i.e., Egypt (Amun-Ra was the Egyptian sun-god with a cult centered in Thebes, present-day Karnak).20 quattro e cinque cento: (It.) The terms denote the high period of Italian Renaissance art and culture in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, respectively. For Pound, the quattrocento represents, among other things, a “morally clean,” pre-usury era for art, as he writes in a letter dated January 1938.21 Elsewhere, he would go so far as to assert that the quattrocento “is almost wholly contained in a small bas relief by Gaudier-Brzeska.”22

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fall of impressionism: As a Vorticist, Gaudier-Brzeska was opposed, at least in principle, to Impressionism, the nineteenth-century aesthetic and artistic movement the London Vortex associated with Futurism, the Italian avant-garde experiment launched by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876– 1944) with a manifesto published in the Paris newspaper Le Figaro in 1909. In Blast, Pound dismisses Impressionism and Futurism as “CORPSES OF VORTICES.”23 65–66 The black-haired men . . . valley of the Yellow River: Khotan was one of the most important states on the Silk Road connecting China with India and Rome, also known for its abundance of jade. The seventh-century account by Chinese monk Xuanzang confirms Gaudier-Brzeska’s notion of the prosperity of the region’s inhabitants. Xuanzang recorded their cultivation of cereal crops and orchards as well as their welcoming and content disposition and their enjoyment of music and dance. A civilization first emerged along the valley of the Yellow River in northern China under the Shang dynasty (c.1600–1050 BCE).24 66 The Shang and Chow dynasties: The Shang and Chow (or Zhou) (c.1050–256 BCE) dynasties are known as the “Bronze Age” of China, with the metal used to fashion not only vases and other vessels but also weapons and parts of chariots.25 In drawing links across vast geographical spans, Gaudier-Brzeska follows the idea of cultural simultaneity that informs Ernest Fenollosa’s Epochs of Chinese and Japanese Art (1912). Fenollosa claims, for instance, that the “triangular interlacing of the bands” in Shang bronze vases “is almost identical with motives carved in stone upon the facades of Mexican temples.”26 The features of Tao-t’ie: Taotie (饕餮), monster-mask (or theriomorphic) motifs and designs on Shang bronze artifacts, which functioned primarily as visual representations of the Shang order.27

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Han and T’ang dynasties: In keeping with Gaudier-Brzeska’s notion of a loss of “form-understanding,” the decline and fall of the Han dynasty (202 BCE–220 CE) was marked by the nearly complete destruction of government libraries and archives. Even the more cultural and cosmopolitan Tang dynasty (618–907 CE) declined with a gradual weakening of central control, though more recent scholarship has noted that the late Tang also saw a “major revitalization of Confucianism.”28 In Canto 54, after chronicling the rise of Kao Tseu, the first Tang emperor (618–626), Pound writes that “Kung is to China as is water to fishes” (54/285). they founded the Ming and found artistic ruin and sterility: Gaudier-Brzeska takes for granted the commonplace belief that the Ming dynasty (1368–1644 CE) was isolationist and culturally conservative. However, recent scholarship suggests that this stereotype about Ming arts and culture largely applied to the arts produced by court-sponsored artists of the Northern school. Dong Qichang (1555–1636), the late Ming period painter and calligrapher, noted in contrast the freedom enjoyed by literati artists of the Southern school. Landscape paintings of the latter group in particular displayed more creativity and spontaneity. “Free both from the court and from the pecuniary concerns of the market and entrepreneurs,” Southern school artists “could afford to explore the meaning of nature through art and to invest their explorations and insights with Confucian values.”29 66–67 After many wanderings . . . the vortex of destruction: The art of the Maya, Toltecs, Mixtecs, and Aztecs reflected a pervasive preoccupation with human sacrifice. The “cruel nature and temperament” Gaudier-Brzeska reductively identifies in these Mesoamerican peoples stems from the sacrificial acts ritually performed and deeply embedded in the religio-social structures of these civilizations.30

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A Companion to Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur Epstein, Brancusi, Archipenko, Dunikowski, Modigliani, and myself: European avant-garde sculptors, among whom Jacob Epstein (1880–1959) stands out by virtue of his association with Gaudier-Brzeska, though nearly all the sculptors were also known to each other. Epstein was an Anglo-American artist known for his bronze and metal sculptures. Two untitled drawings by Epstein appeared in the first issue of Blast, even if he never formally embraced Vorticism. In a review of a 1915 exhibit by the modernist London Group, which Epstein had helped found in 1913, Wyndham Lewis praises two statues by Gaudier-Brzeska of “considerable beauty” alongside Epstein’s biomorphic sculpture Rock Drill (1913–16), “a vivid illustration of the greatest function of life.”31 Epstein notes in his autobiography that Gaudier-Brzeska was very enthusiastic about his sculpture “when he visited my studio in 1913 with Ezra Pound to view it.”32 Pound would borrow Epstein’s title for his 1955 section of Cantos 85–95. The sculpture Rock Drill embodies Gaudier-Brzeska’s idea here of the modernists’ “incessant struggle in the complex city.” In Epstein’s own words, it is “a machine-like robot, visored, menacing, and carrying within itself its progeny, protectively ensconced . . . No humanity, only the terrible Frankenstein’s monster we have made ourselves into.”33 Epstein became close friends with Brancusi and also met Picasso and Amedeo Modigliani (1884–1920), the Italian painter and sculptor, while working from 1912 to 1913 on the monument for Oscar Wilde’s tomb commissioned for Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris.34 Gaudier-Brzeska and his cohort would likely also have met the Paris-based Ukrainian Cubist sculptor and graphic artist Alexander Archipenko (1887–1964) and Polish Secessionist sculptor Xawery Dunikowski (1875–1964). Written from the Trenches: The footnote to the text appears as a headnote in the “War Number” of Blast. “Boches,” cited in the note, was a pejorative term for German troops. In Blast, the

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title of the sculptor’s testimonial is instead a subtitle, headed by “Vortex Gaudier-Brzeska.” Missing from the otherwise verbatim text in GK is a note marking his death “in a charge at Neuville St. Vaast, on June 5th, 1915.”35 The epitaph must have been appended rather hastily, as this issue of Blast came out in July. As suggested in the footnote in GK, Gaudier-Brzeska enlisted in the French Army soon after the First World War began in August 1914. Pound would call his death “the gravest individual loss which the arts have sustained during the war.”36 Canto 16 tersely notes that “Henri Gaudier went to it, / and they killed him, / And killed a good deal of sculpture” (16/71). Two days ago I pinched from an enemy a mauser rifle: The wooden Mauser rifle stock that Gaudier-Brzeska broke off and upon which he carved a design was the 7.92 mm (0.312 inch) Gewehr 98, the weapon Germany employed in the First World War. His dislike of the Mauser’s design was shared even by the German army. After the end of the War, operational analysis demonstrated that it was both too long and too bulky for front-line use.37 (vide Aristotle’s fivefold division later): (L.) Vide or “see” Pound’s discussion of Aristotle’s five “kinds of knowing” in Chapter 54 (GK 327 ff.). 8 and saxpence: i.e., eight shillings and sixpence. Pound thinks this amount is an extravagant fee, as he also suggests in a letter of 1934 to the poet-translator Mary Barnard (1909–2001). He complains that the Active Anthology he edited and published with Faber in 1933 was priced at “oh damn 7/6 shillings, so I suppose prohibitive in the U.S.”38 Mr Edison’s electric light bulb: Thomas Edison (1847–1931) invented the electric light in 1879. [n.] “Greek” sez Doc. Rouse, “necessity of civilized life”: William Henry Denham Rouse (1863–1950), classicist and translator of Homer’s Odyssey (1937; titled The Story of Odysseus) and The Iliad (1938; titled The Story of Achillês), among

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A Companion to Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur other translations from the Greek. Starting in 1934 Pound corresponded with Rouse, who had been editor of the Loeb Classical Library since 1911.39 As the letters reveal, Rouse sent drafts of his monographs to Pound. In a letter of February 1935, Pound recommends to Rouse that he “finish the new translation in [his] own way and own spirit, uncontaminated.”40 In a postcard sent to Henry Swabey the previous month, Pound refers to Rouse as one of the “live minds.”41 Arthur Symons . . . all the freudian tosh in existence: Arthur William Symons (1865–1945), English critic, poet, editor of the short-lived avant-garde periodical The Savoy (1896) and author of the influential study, The Symbolist Movement in Literature (1899). The 1919 edition of his chief book added several new chapters, including one on Balzac. The “actress” Pound cites here in relation to Symons’s Spiritual Adventures (1905) is the fictional Esther Khan for whom the “gestures of people” were always more meaningful “than their words; they seemed to have a secrete meaning of their own, which the words never quite interpreted. She was always unconsciously on the watch for their meaning.”42 For Pound, Symons’s use of the term “unconsciously” in this passage is judicious, a case of “special sensibility,” in contrast to Freudian psychoanalysis, which Pound dismisses as “tosh,” or nonsense. Balzac’s Louis Lambert: Balzac’s novel was first published in 1832 and subsequently revised several times until 1835. Pound’s idea that Symons’s Spiritual Adventures is indebted to the novel may stem from the book’s main argument that will power is essentially a physical substance—a “fluide vital”— which can attain unlimited power by force of concentration.43 Walter Rummel’s brief preface to his edition of troubadour songs: In 1913, the German pianist and composer Walter Morse Rummel (1887–1953) published a collection of troubadour songs and melodies, with translations by Pound, including a setting of Arnaut Daniel’s sestina in Pound’s Hesternae Rosae.44

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In 2006, Hyperion Records issued a recording of twenty-five Bach piano transcriptions by Rummel, played by Jonathan Plowright. In the liner notes to the album, Charles Timbrell comments on Rummel’s avid interest in medieval poetry and music, while also drawing attention to his friendship with the French composer Claude Debussy (cf. note GK 368). Following his move to Paris in 1909, Rummel would premier ten of his friend’s works.45 In Canto 80, Pound alludes to Rummel’s renowned interpretations of Debussy’s compositions: “Debussy preferred his playing / that also was an era (Mr. W. Rummel)” (80/513). Arnold Dolmetsch’s manner of writing: In 1915, Arnold Dolmetsch (1858–1940), French-born musicologist and instrument maker, published The Interpretation of the Music of the XVIIth and XVIIIth Centuries. As early as in Pavannes and Divisions (1918), Pound revealed his predilection for Dolmetsch’s clear style and apt “citation of old authors,” quoting liberally from his book.46 Pound owned a clavichord Dolmetsch built for him in 1915, bearing an inscription inside the lid: “Plus fait Douceur que Violence” (“Better kindness than violence”).47 In Canto 80, the poet recalls “Dolmetsch’s own clavichords / painted and toned with that special sacred vermilion” (80/524). Antheil’s incisiveness: George Antheil (1900–59), American composer and virtuoso pianist, most famous for composing the score for the avant-garde film Ballet Mécanique (1923–24), co-directed by Fernand Léger and Dudley Murphy. In Antheil and the Treatise on Harmony (1924), Pound argues that just as Picasso, and [Wyndham] Lewis, and Brancusi have made us increasingly aware of form, a form combination, or the precise limits in demarcations of flat forms and of volumes, so Antheil is making his hearers increasingly aware of time-space, the divisions of time-space.48

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A Companion to Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur Daniel Albright sees Pound’s fascination with Antheil as a product of the composer’s discovery of a “musiceme”—“an elementary particle of rhythmic energy,” which, once isolated, “can’t be developed, or extenuated, or intensified; it can only be repeated.”49 By the time Pound attended the premiere of Antheil’s opera Transatlantic (The People’s Choice) at the Frankfurt Opera House on May 25, 1930, Antheil was already known as “the bad boy of modern music” (also the title of his 1945 autobiography).50 Pound invited Frobenius to the concert and insisted on the anthropologist’s judging “between die zwei Barbarismus” [“the two barbarisms”] (GK 217). As Pound suggests, Frobenius was underwhelmed, calling the performance “naive” and castigating Antheil for using “royal instruments for proletarian music.” Antheil’s perceived tenacity in the face of harsh criticism may have led Pound to refer to him as “that very tough baby” (GK 94). Antheil appears in Canto 74 alongside the novelist Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) (74/447).

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Great Bass: The main tenet in Pound’s music theory, presented here as a précis of the ideas he had already developed at length in Antheil and the Treatise on Harmony (1924). In the earlier work, Pound defines music as “a composition of frequencies.”1 In “Machine Art” (1927–30), he uses the Great Bass “to designate the frequencies below those which the ear has been accustomed to consider as ‘notes.’”2 In keeping with this, R. Murray Schafer characterizes the Great Bass “as the reduction of a composition to simple frequency ratios, a sort of heterodyne of inscrutable to scrutable elements.”3 When Pound returns to the second part of this discussion in Chapter 42 of GK, he equates “bass” with “basis,” “the 60, 72, or 84, or 120 per minutes . . . the bottom note of the harmony” (GK 233). Earlier in the book he says that great composers are unlikely to neglect “this basis” (GK 73). It is only lesser musicians that fumble “about OFF the gt. bass key” (GK 234). Related to this notion is his idea of “pitch” or “a certain frequency of vibration” (GK 73). It informs his proviso in Treatise on Harmony that “A SOUND OF ANY PITCH, or ANY COMBINATION OF SUCH SOUNDS, MAY BE FOLLOWED BY A SOUND OF ANY OTHER PITCH, OR ANY COMBINATION OF SUCH SOUNDS, providing the time interval between them is properly gauged.”4 Thus, the interdependence of pitch and rhythm is also implicit here. As Albright puts it, “for Pound, every piece of music has a unique tempo, a tempo derived in some sense from its key. To play a piece at the wrong tempo is to render it viscid, sloppy.”5 Quirky though it may be, the Great Bass was not conceived in a vacuum. Similar ideas were percolating among music theorists in the early decades of the

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A Companion to Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur twentieth century. Noteworthy among these is the American musicologist and composer Henry Cowell (1897–1965). Cowell’s theorization of the overtone series in his influential New Musical Resources (1930) bears a striking resemblance to Pound’s Great Bass.6 Spinoza: Benedict de Spinoza (1632–77), Dutch philosopher and theologian. In invoking Spinoza’s ubiquitous concept of “intellectual love” in this context, Pound casts it as the “Great Bass” or basis of the philosopher’s thought. In his Ethics, Spinoza affirms that “no love save intellectual love is eternal.”7 Swedenborg . . . I saw three angels, they had hats on their heads: Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772), Swedish philosopher and mystic. Pound had already used this quote in a 1930 article in the Criterion, though in relation to the French Surrealists: André Breton (1896–1966), Benjamin Péret (1899– 1959), and Louis Aragon (1897–1982).8 An analogous passage appears in the second volume of Swedenborg’s True Christianity (1771). Swedenborg writes that “four men appeared, dressed in shining white, with caps on their heads. One of them had been an archbishop in the world; the other three had been bishops; they had since become angels.”9 In Heaven and Hell (1758), Swedenborg also devotes a chapter to “The Clothes Angels Appear In,” with their clothes reflecting their intelligence.10 Pound read Swedenborg with Yeats as early as the summer of 1914 at Stone Cottage. As Leon Surette points out, “Yeats’s essay ‘Swedenborg, Mediums, and the Desolate Places’ registers his attempt to consolidate Swedenborg, Blake, spiritualism, theosophy, and the Japanese Noh drama, which he and Pound were translating into a single theory of visionary symbolism.”11 The standard of conduct among angels in his third heaven: For Swedenborg, the level of perfection of angels in the third heaven “far surpasses that of angels in the intermediate heaven.”12

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Leibniz . . . the new science of Galileo and of the renaissance: Cf. note GK 50. wireless telegraph: Invented by the Italian electrical engineer, Guglielmo Marconi (1874–1937), the wireless telegraph was significant for Pound as a technological leap with implications for his poetry and translations. In an October 1930 article published in L’indice, he writes of seeking out “this brevity, this style, not really telegraphic, though it does belong to the epoch of the telegraph. In the end, clarity and vigor of thought will make the new style.”13 In Wireless Writing in the Age of Marconi, Timothy C. Campbell argues that “A Draft of XXX Cantos occurs under the sign of the telegraph and the radio, longhand for the wireless.”14 Leibniz . . . and Bossuet ran onto the snag of “authority”: Leibniz and Jacques Bénigne Bossuet (1627–1704), French bishop and orator, corresponded extensively from 1683 to 1700. The “snag of ‘authority’” to which Pound alludes refers to Leibniz’s quixotic attempts in the 1680s to reunite Catholics and Protestants. This campaign sparked his correspondence with Bossuet, then Bishop of Meaux and a key player in the Assembly of the Clergy of France, the most powerful Roman Catholic country. Despite Bossuet’s entreaty to Louis XIV, among other protracted efforts, the reunion never materialized. Elsewhere, Pound dismisses Bossuet as a “tumid rhetorical parasite, hardly better than some University Presidents” (GK 165). More tactfully, even Bossuet’s editor calls his Politique tirée de l’Écriture sainte (1709) “a little repetitious and diffuse.”15 Leo X didn’t take Luther’s thought as a serious matter: In 1520, Martin Luther (1483–1546), German Augustinian monk and founder of the Protestant Reformation, wrote “The Freedom of a Christian” for Pope Leo X (1475–1521) to assure him that his criticisms were not personally directed at the pontiff but at the indulgences sold in his name. However, as Nathan Montover

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A Companion to Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur speculates, “the pope—if he ever read the document—would have surely been unimpressed with the tone and content. Luther wrote to Leo as an equal and even dared provide him advice.”16 This apparent disdain notwithstanding, Leo X would threaten Luther with excommunication that same year in his bull Exurge Domine, a copy of which Luther famously burned. Scotus Erigena held that: Authority comes from right reason: Johannes Scottus Eriugena (c.810–c.877), Neoplatonic Irish philosopher, posthumously condemned as a heretic by Pope Honorius III and even suspected of Pelagianism, the denial of original sin. In 1225, Honorius ordered the official burning of all the copies of Eriugena’s pantheistic De divisione naturae (862–66).17 In life, the royal protection of Charles the Bald (823–77) kept Eriugena safe from harm following his condemnations as a Manichean and the association of his teaching with the Albigensian heresy. His problems with the Church began with his refutation of the argument for predestination set forth by the Carolingian theologian, Gottschalk of Orbais (c.803– c.868).18 In the 1930s, Pound began to integrate Eriugena into his writing in relation to heresy and Troubadour poetry. His Eriugenian preoccupations intensified toward the end of the decade, as seen in letters to T. S. Eliot, George Santayana, Otto Bird, and Étienne Gilson (cf. note GK 54–55).19 Eriugena’s concept of authority and, in Pound’s eyes, his unjust condemnation, haunted the poet during this period.20 Canto 36 quotes Eriugena’s maxim in full, “Authority comes from right reason, / never the other way on” (36/179). Pound revisits the precept in Chapter 25 of GK as the highest expression of “Civilized Christianity” and a third time in Chapter 54, concluding that it “wd. have been orthon logon in greek, not doxy” (GK 164, 333). He cribs the latter instance from Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, where the oft-recurring formula, κατὰ τὸν ὀρθὸν λόγον (katà tòn orthòn lógon), signifies “to act in conformity with right principle.”21 Pound is keen to divorce “doxy” [sic]

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(i.e. δόξα [dόxa], “opinion”) from “orthon logon” because it is contrary to “knowledge of any kind” (GK 333). Agony Column: A “regular newspaper or magazine feature containing readers’ questions about personal difficulties, with replies from the columnist.”22 Gaudier, Great Bass, Leibniz, Erigena, are parts of one ideogram: One way to interpret what Pound is trying to convey here is to look at how he interprets the ideogram developed from the characters for “man” (人), “tree” (木), and “sun” (日), with the composite 東 signifying “sun tangled in the tree’s branches, as at sunrise, meaning now the East.”23 By the same logic, Gaudier, Great Bass, Leibniz, and Eriugena form an analogous ideogram, which Pound leaves up to the reader to decipher.

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Ici Je Teste: (Fr.) “Here, I Test.” The XIXth, or most infamous, century: Pound’s dismissal of the nineteenth century reflects his longstanding antipathy for much of the period. In “A Retrospect” (1918), he describes it as “a rather blurry, messy sort of a period, a rather ­sentimentalistic, mannerish sort of a period.”1 the Church’s best friend was Cavour: Camillo Benso, Count of Cavour (1810–61), Italian statesman and the country’s first Prime Minister. Cavour was a prime mover in the unification of Italy under King Vittorio Emanuele II (1820–78). Il Risorgimento, the journal he founded in 1847, primarily aimed to support unification. Cavour subscribed to the separation of church and state, but also believed, as his famous slogan indicates, in “a free Church in a free State,” that is, ecclesiastical autonomy respectful of the legitimate rights of the secular, liberal state. Pope Pius IX (1792–1878) was never thoroughly convinced that his loss of temporal power would not threaten his independence as spiritual leader of the Church. Yet, Cavour was proven right in the end. The spiritual prestige of the Catholic Church continued to grow even after the pope’s temporal power ended in 1870.2 Cardinal Antonelli: Giacomo Antonelli (1806–76), Cardinal Secretary of State (1848–76) under Pope Pius IX, vehemently opposed the unification of Italy, the Risorgimento ­championed by Cavour.3 Concordat: The Italian Concordat or Conciliazione of 1929 between Pope Pius XI (1857–1939) and Mussolini entailed, among other things, the Fascist regime’s official recognition of

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the sovereignty of the Vatican City and the recovery of some of the Church’s powers, privileges, and property taken away by ecclesiastical legislation during the Risorgimento.4 The Concordat in effect was the realization of Cavour’s idea of “a free Church in a free State.” Quadrigesimo Anno and the other economic passages from the Encyclicals: Pope Pius XI’s encyclical, Quadragesimo Anno (1931) (Pound misspells the first word), was one of several papal encyclicals addressing sociopolitical subjects. While wary of the potential dangers of the centralized state, the encyclicals also rejected Marxist socialism and economic laissez-faire, proposing instead social harmony and cooperation founded on a corporatist model that was essentially sympathetic to Italian Fascism insofar as it proposed that “people should form natural associations based on functional interests” (cf. note GK 185).5 Given Erigena, given St Ambrose and St Antonino: Cf. notes GK 75, 30. zenanas: “In Islamic South Asia and Iran: that part of a dwelling house in which the women of the family are secluded; a harem”6 (here comically alluding to the Vatican, “that dusty and baroque fabric”). sheer rascality of anglicans à la Baxter: Richard Baxter (1615–91), English Nonconformist Presbyterian minister. Pound’s unflattering description of Baxter as “swine who sold his king and his church to the usurers” stems from Baxter’s anti-Royalist political stance during the first English Civil War (1642–46). As historian Tim Cooper notes, the Battle of Naseby in June 1645, “the military climax of the first civil war,” was a turning point for Baxter. It prompted him to enlist as a chaplain in the New Model Army of Parliamentarians led by Oliver Cromwell and Sir Thomas Fairfax against Charles I.7 In 1939, Pound would similarly disparage the “ignorantism coming from Calvin, Cromwell, Baxter, and persisting

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A Companion to Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur through the mercantilist era.”8 GK’s original index erroneously identifies Baxter as “Wm.,” or William. Grosseteste: Robert Grosseteste (c.1175–1253), Bishop of Lincoln (1235–1253), the first Chancellor of Oxford University and regent master in theology, though there is scholarly debate regarding the dates of the latter two posts. That Grosseteste should be in Pound’s mind at this stage is not surprising given the poet’s lengthy treatment of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics in GK. Grosseteste was a seminal figure in establishing the academic tradition that still reads Aristotle’s treatise as a paradigm of moral wisdom.9 Pound’s mention of “Grosseteste on Light” in Chapter 8 alludes to the philosopher’s De Luce, a book containing his philosophic and pseudo-scientific cosmogony of how light played a part in the formation of the thirteen spheres of the material universe.10 De Luce, as Mark Byron observes, is also the chief source for Pound’s Neoplatonic light philosophy.11 Albert de la Magna: St. Albertus Magnus (c.1200–80), German Dominican philosopher, naturalist, and theologian. He taught St. Thomas Aquinas as regent master at the University of Paris from 1245 to 1248. Dubbed “the Great” in his own lifetime, Albertus was the only Scholastic to compose commentaries on all the extant works of Aristotle and the Neoplatonist Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, among other theological, philosophical, and scientific treatises.12 Aquinas lacked faith: St. Thomas Aquinas (c.1225–74), Italian Dominican theologian and Scholastic philosopher, author of Summa Theologiae (1265–74), an enormously influential text in the Renaissance. Pound alludes to the fact that Aquinas subscribed to Aristotelian empiricism, thereby rejecting “innate knowledge or the attainment of knowledge from a direct intuition of the essences of things” and proposing instead that “we only come to know anything by a process of abstraction from sensible objects.”13 In his famous

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biography of Aquinas published in 1933, G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936) underscores the “Aristotelian realism” of Aquinas’s Summa.”14 It is noteworthy that Pound ultimately rejects Aquinas’s empiricist epistemology or, in Pound’s argot, his lack of “faith” or “intuition,” as he equates both terms (cf. GK 165).15 A few months after publishing GK, Pound reveals in a letter that as far as the form of The Cantos goes he does not have an “Aquinas-map.”16 Richard St Victor: Richard of St. Victor (d.1173), Scottish Victorine theologian, mystic, Prior of the Abbey of St. Victor in Paris, and author of De Trinitate, Benjamin Minor, and Benjamin Major, among other treatises. In Canto 87, Pound reiterates in Latin Richard’s “three modes of thought,” while acknowledging his influence on Dante, “‘Cogitatio, meditatio, contemplatio.’ / Wrote Richardus, and Dante read him” (87/590). In his Summa, Aquinas relates these activities to the “contemplative life.”17 Terrell sees Richard’s triad just as (if not more) important to the design of The Cantos as Dante’s Hell–Purgatory–Paradise is to the design of The Divine Comedy, and interprets Pound’s description of Richard’s “three modes” in GK as corresponding to Dante’s schema.18 Max Ernst: (1891–1976), German painter, sculptor, Dadaist, and Surrealist. Pound’s comparison of Grosseteste’s De Luce to Ernst’s work may stem from the hermetic allusions and cosmic play of light and darkness in the artist’s work, especially in the 1920s and 30s. In 1942, Ernst was celebrated as “the alchemistmagician of the surrealist movement.”19 The Descartian hat trick. His grandfather was Aquinas: i.e., cogito ergo sum, “I think, therefore I am,” the famous proof of the reality of one’s own mental existence, as first proposed by French philosopher René Descartes (1596–1650) in Discourse on Method (1637). In keeping with Pound’s assessment, Marleen Rozemond argues that Cartesian dualism “is closer

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A Companion to Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur to Aquinas’s argument for the status of the soul as a subsistent incorporeal entity than to the modern problem of consciousness with its focus on sensory states.”20

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Frobenius . . . general mind: Cf. note GK 27. Dr Rouse found his Aegean sailors . . . to current Elias, identified with the prophet: In the introduction to his translation of Argyris Eftaliotis’s Modern Tales of the Greek Islands (1897), Rouse notes that “there is something Homeric still lingering about rural Greece, and especially about those isles of the Aegean where few travellers come.”1 Pound most likely came across Rouse’s anecdote connecting Odysseus and the Hebrew prophet Elias (Elijah) in the manuscript of Rouse’s 1937 translation of The Odyssey (cf. note GK 71). Rouse marvels at the millennia-long appeal of Homer’s story and recalls hearing “its far-off echo in a caique on the Aegean Sea, when the skipper told me how St. Elias carried an oar on his shoulder until someone called it a winnowing fan.”2 The anecdote is analogous to the episode in the final book of The Odyssey, where Odysseus recapitulates Tiresias’s prophecy whereby Odysseus should carry an oar until he finds people who are far enough inland to be ignorant of the sea. In Canto 74, Pound rehearses Rouse’s discovery, “and Rouse found they spoke of Elias / in telling the tales of Odysseus” (74/446). seven sages: The Seven Sophoi (“Sages): Solon, Kleoboulos, Bias, Chilon, Thales, Pittakos, and Periander.3 Heraclitus’ “Everything Flows”: Cf. note GK 31. somebody’s “nothing in excess”: Maxim attributed to Solon of Athens (c.630–c.560 BCE) (cf. note GK 34). “Know thyself ”: Inscription featured in the temple of Apollo at Delphi and attributed to Chilon, the Spartan ephor (“magistrate”), one of the Seven Sages.4

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a motto that Yeats once printed in an early volume of poems: In 1919, Pound quoted Yeats’s motto, “God has need of every individual soul,” without attributing it to the Irish poet. Yeats unpacks the statement in his prose autobiography, The Trembling of the Veil (1922): “‘The love of God is infinite for every human soul because every human soul is unique; no other can satisfy the same need in God.’”5 80 “Listening to Incense”: The highly formal and elaborate Japanese art of ceremonial incense-burning is also known as kōdō (“way of incense”), and flourished at Higashiyama Palace in the imperial court of shogun Ashikaga Yoshimasa (1436–90).6 Pound learned about this practice in Frank Brinkley’s Japan: Its History, Arts and Literature (1901) while living with Yeats at Stone Cottage.7 In his introduction to Pound and Fenollosa’s Certain Noble Plays of Japan (1916), Yeats also mentions “that curious game which the Japanese called, with a confusion of the senses that had seemed typical of our own age, ‘listening to incense.’”8 In his own introduction to the 1959 edition of the book, titled The Classic Noh Theatre of Japan, Pound also describes the practice as a “game” and as “a refinement in barbarous times, comparable to the art of polyphonic rhyme, developed in feudal Provence four centuries later, and now almost wholly forgotten.”9 when Younghusband finally got to Lhassa: The British imperial-invasive expedition to Lhasa, the capital of Tibet, in 1904 was led by the explorer and mystic, Sir Francis Edward Younghusband (1863–1942).10 Pound’s report of Younghusband’s coming across a stove pipe salesman from Connecticut in Lhasa is almost certainly apocryphal. 80–81 Katharine Carl . . . This book records a high degree of civilization: Katharine A. Carl (1865–1939), American portrait painter and author of With the Empress Dowager of China (1905). The “St Louis exposition of sometime or other” cited here was in fact the Louisiana Purchase Exposition that took

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place in St. Louis, Missouri, from May to December 1904, to commemorate the centennial of the United States’s purchase of the Louisiana Territory from France in 1803.11 In 1903, Carl painted, in her own words, “the first portrait that had ever been painted of the Empress Dowager of Great China, the powerful ‘Tze-Shi.’”12 Empress Dowager Cixi (1835–1908), the penultimate ruler of the Qing dynasty (1644–1911), was herself a painter and a patron of the arts.13 As Pound suggests, Carl was fascinated by the Empress’s masterly painting of ideograms. Carl vividly recounts the experience: When all was ready, and the huge scroll spread out before her on a table, [the Empress] dipped her brush into the bowl of ink, held by the eunuch, and began the first stroke of one of these famous characters, in which she is said to equal the most proficient writers in China. I was amazed at the firmness of her wrist and the beautiful clearness of her stroke, which deviated not a hair’s breadth from the line she wished to follow.14 81

Noh: With origins in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, this ritualistic and ceremonial form of Japanese classical masked drama flourished during the Edo period (1603– 1868) under the patronage of Tokugawa shoguns. There are about 240 extant plays.15 In 1916, Pound published a collection of four Noh plays, Certain Noble Plays of Japan: From the Manuscripts of Ernest Fenollosa, Chosen and Finished by Ezra Pound, with an Introduction by William Butler Yeats.16 It is acknowledged as one of the first books to introduce Noh to the English-speaking world.17 In his introduction to the 1959 edition, Pound characterizes Noh as an “art of allusion,” a “symbolic stage, a drama of masks,” while also underscoring the spiritual ethos and musicality which make it “impossible to give much idea of the whole of this art on paper.”18

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A Companion to Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur The ghost of Kumasaka: One of the four Noh plays in Certain Noble Plays of Japan. As Pound sums it up, the climactic scene in the two-act play by Noh playwright and actor Shichiro Ujinobu (1405–c.1470) portrays a duel (staged as a dance) between the outlaw Kumasaka and his rival, the teenaged Ushiwaka. The play ends with Kumasaka vanishing “like a dew” after being pierced by the young man’s spear-blade.19 The play Kagekiyo has Homeric robustness: The play, also printed in Certain Noble Plays of Japan, is attributed to Noh playwright, actor, and theorist Zeami Motokiyo (1363– 1443).20 The Homeric parallels Pound traces in the play can be found in the portrayal of the eponymous protagonist, a shade of his former self. Exiled after being defeated in the Battle of Yashima by an opposing clan, the aged and blind warrior is now a beggar in a “dark hovel,” who tells and mimes the story of the conflict to his daughter Hitamoro.21 Chas. Condor: Identified with Australia’s Heidelberg School of impressionist painters, Charles Conder (1868–1909) was a British landscape painter known for creating Arcadian scenes in watercolors on silk. He was strongly influenced by American-born artist James Abbott McNeill Whistler (1834–1903), whom Pound greatly admired.22 The Grand Dukes: Lineage of tsars from the Romanov dynasty that ruled the Russian Empire for more than 300 years, beginning in 1613. As Jamie Cockfield points out, their “lives were often one continuous excess,” with each grand duke owning vast landed estates and commanding “an army of servants, valets, coachmen, cooks, gardeners, and groomsmen at the beck and call.”23 Pound’s reference to Basel is likely shorthand for the Swiss city’s Bank for International Settlements, an emblem of usurious and profligate use of capital, much like the Banque de France and the Grand Dukes. Hence, too, their lack of “moral splendour.” la vie humaine des littérateurs: (Fr.) “the life of letters.”24

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Madame Tussaud’s: London museum featuring waxworks of famous public and historical figures, founded by Madame Marie Tussaud (1761–1850), a wax modeler. “toppers”: British slang for top-hat or tall hat. Henry James: Cf. note GK 31. weskit: Colloquial pronunciation of “waistcoat,” formal male attire “worn under an outer garment” (a coat or jacket), “and intended to be partly exposed to view when in wear.”25 In Canto 79, Pound also mentions James’s “checqued [sic] waistcoat” (79/508). the steward still called it “claret”: Allusion to the anachronistic manner of designating French Bordeaux wine, de rigueur at dinner parties in Victorian England.26 Stilton?: Strong, rich farmhouse blue cheese enjoyed by early Victorian and Georgian gentry alike.27 von X.: Count Albert von Mensdorff-Pouilly-Dietrichstein (1861–1945), Austro-Hungarian Ambassador at London (1904–14) and European agent for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Pound met von Mensdorff in Vienna in 1928, and co-wrote with him a letter to Nicholas Murray Butler, president of the Endowment in New York, calling for an inquiry into the causes of war. Although acknowledged, the letter was in effect ignored, making Butler a permanent arch-villain for Pound (cf. notes GK 165, 169).28 Pound’s 1919 date for the end of the First World War alludes to the Treaty of Versailles signed on June 28, 1919, formalizing the Armistice signed on November 11, 1918. Countess M. . . . Good GOD, no!!” said the general: All of Section 3 of this chapter is made up of remembered fragments of conversations between Pound and his “most prolific Urquell.” Urquell is the German term for “primary source” and functions here as Pound’s alias for Goleyevsky, the Russian general whom he befriended in Paris in the 1920s (cf. note GK 34). The conversation Pound recalls having taken place at the (now defunct)

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84

The “old Marchesa” above is GK’s “Countess M.” While the identity of the silent “Duchess of D.” remains a mystery, Rabaté sees her description in this passage as “Pound’s finest example of such a mute utterance which discloses the ultimate meaning of life.”30 I don’t know the source of Allan Upward’s quotation: “The quality of the sage is like water” appears to paraphrase a very similar passage in Legge’s translation of Book 27 of Confucius’s Doctrine of the Mean: “How great is the path proper to the Sage! Like overflowing water, it sends forth and nourishes all things, and rises up to the height of heaven.”31 Canto 83 returns to this motif, “the sage / delighteth in water” (83/549), which is reiterated in his 1950 translation of the Analects as “the wise delight in water.”32 Allen Upward (1863–1926) was a poet, novelist, and Pound’s close friend. Pound published his poem “Scented Leaves from a Chinese Jar” in the first Imagist anthology, Des Imagistes (1914). Upward also contributed regularly to Orage’s journal, The New Age. He was an occultist and the source of Pound’s interest in China, following Upward’s publication of the series Wisdom of the East in his Primrose (later the Orient) Press.33

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Palazzo Capoquadri: Palazzo Capoquadri Salimbeni in Siena, on the via San Martino, where the violinist Olga Rudge spent many summers. Upon hearing Rudge playing a Mozart sonata there, Antheil deemed her “a consummate violinist.”34 (ref. H. James plus Madox Ford’s exegeses): The passage quoted in connection to James and Ford is found in Portraits from Life (1937), by Pound’s long-time friend and British modernist novelist-critic Ford Madox Ford (1873–1939). The snippet recurs in Canto 87, “Or as Henry again: ‘we have, in a manner of speaking, / arrived. / Got to, I think he says, ‘got to, all got to’” (87/596). the Goncourt: The brothers Edmond de Goncourt (1822–96) and Jules de Goncourt (1830–70), French realist novelists and social and historical commentators whose literary project bridges Balzac’s realism and Zola’s naturalism.35 In 1888, in an article for the Fortnightly Review on their nine-volume Journal (1851–96), Henry James notes the “extraordinarily ‘modern’” tenor of their work, “illustrative of feelings that had not yet found intense expression in literature.”36 Landor: Walter Savage Landor (1775–1864), English poet and essayist, author of the seven-book epic, Gebir (1798) and the collection of love poems, Simonidea (1806), among other works. Pound’s allusion to Landor’s invented conversations comes from his metafictional prose experiment, Imaginary Conversations of Literary Men and Statesmen (1824–29). In a letter of July 1916 to Iris Barry, Pound reveals that he and Yeats “spent our last winter’s months on Landor. There is a whole culture.” As much as Pound admired Landor, he also notes in the letter that Landor “isn’t very good as a poet save in a few places, where he is fine, damn fine, but he is no use as a model.”37 at Picabia’s: Francis Picabia (1879–1953), French Dadaist painter, poet, and avant-garde provocateur known for his revolutionary mechanomorphic style of painting.38 Pound’s note

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opusculus: (L.) from opusculum, “a small work, especially a minor literary work.”1 Marcel Duchamp: (1887–1968), French artist and avantgarde theorist whose painting Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2 (1912) made him notorious, as did his unfinished The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even, also known as The Large Glass (1915–1923), a treatment of “cerebral, mechanized bodies with nongenerative sexualities.”2 He exhibited the latter work at the New York Armory show of 1913, to which Picabia also contributed. Together, they shared a fascination with erotic machines.3 A leading figure in New York Dada, Duchamp’s series of “readymades” includes most famously his urinal piece, Fountain (1917). David Hopkins demonstrates that Pound’s suggestion of Duchamp’s influence on Picabia is accurate, as the latter artist “produced works, often in response to Duchamp, conflating mechanical form and anatomical reference.”4 Eric Satie: Erik Satie (1866–1925), French composer, whose connection with Dada painters and poets dates almost to the arrival of the movement in Paris in January 1920. In November of that year, Picabia quipped “Erik est Satierik” in his Dadaist magazine, 391. Satie contributed two articles to the January issue of the journal’s illustrated supplement, Le Pilhaou-Thibaou.5 Bayle and Voltaire: Cf. notes GK 54, 50, respectively. reductio ad absurdum: (L.), “reduction to the absurd,” denotes the “practice of demonstrating the falsity of a hypothesis, principle, etc., by showing that the consequence of assuming it to be true is something absurd or contradictory.”6

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“Europe exhausted by the conquest of Alsace Lorraine”: Canto 87 attributes this remark to Picabia (87/590). idées reçues: (Fr.), “received ideas,” or generally accepted notions or opinions. Dada: International anarchic avant-garde movement begun by poet-theorist Hugo Ball (1886–1927) in the Cabaret Voltaire he founded in February 1916 in the Spiegelgasse in Zurich. Its founding members also included the performer Emmy Hennings (1885–1948), the poet Tristan Tzara (1896–1963), the artist Marcel Janco (1895–1984), poet-artist Jean Arp (1886–1966), and the dancer Sophie Taeuber (1889–1943).7 The “totally different constructive movement” to which Pound alludes is probably Surrealism, which followed Dada in 1922, led by poet-theorist André Breton (1896–1966). As Louise Tythacott explains, Surrealists wished to destroy artificial contradictions created by modern rationalism and technology; they believed that industrialization, and its warlike consequences, had alienated humankind from a real experience of the world . . . By deliberately realigning different cultural realities, adherents believed they could bring into q ­ uestion the very nature of their own European reality.8 The Surrealist’s challenge to Eurocentrism might have seemed particularly appealing to Pound. Yet, he could be critical of the movement. In a letter to Kitasono Katue, dated March 1937, Pound praises contemporary Japanese poetry, calling it “Surrealism without the half-baked ignorance of the French young.”9 Gourmont: Rémy de Gourmont (1858–1915), French Symbolist poet much admired by Pound. Canto 7 paraphrases Gourmont’s The Problem of Style (1902), “Thin husks I had known as men, / Dry casques of departed locusts / speaking a

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A Companion to Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur shell of speech . . . ” (7/26). Anticipating these lines in his 1914 essay, “The Prose Tradition in Verse,” Pound interprets Gourmont’s vision as conveying how “most men think only husks and shells of the thoughts that have been already lived over by others.”10 In a letter to Harriet Monroe of October 2, 1915, Pound laments the poet’s death just a few days earlier, noting that “the world’s light is darkened.”11 Romain Rolland: (1866–1944), French novelist, playwright, biographer, and essayist, also known for his prolific correspondence and diaries. In 1915, he received the Nobel Prize for Literature. Given Pound’s Fascist sympathies in the 1930s, it is not surprising that he would disavow Rolland, who was by then well known for his progressive, democratic, and antifascist political vision.12 As early as 1918, Pound had asserted, “I don’t believe in Rolland.”13 Gide: André Gide (1869–1951), French novelist, playwright, and recipient of the 1947 Nobel Prize for Literature. Like Rolland, Gide also became famous for his controversial views on political, moral, and religious issues. In 1952, the Vatican placed all his works on the Index librorum prohibitorum. This move followed the banning of his works by the Soviet government and Communist party in 1936 and by the French government under Nazi occupation during the Second World War.14 In a 1937 letter to Faber’s F. V. Morley, Pound puns sarcastically on Gide’s name as he ponders the title of his book-in-progress: “I suggest The New Learning as a be’r title than Guide to Kultur. The public mightn’t take the Guide idear seereeyus. However, if your public is rough you kin call it the Guide to Kulchur, so long as you don’t call it the Gide.”15 Barrès: Maurice Barrès (1862–1923), French Symbolist novelist and essayist, also known for his militant nationalist, conservative, Boulangist, and anti-Dreyfusard political commitments.16 Pound’s mention of Barrès’s “unclean daily press” may allude to the fact that the literary journal Le

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Mercure de France, also cited in this passage, was founded in 1890 under Barrès’s aegis. Remy de Gourmont also became closely associated with Le Mercure.17 Hennique remembered Flaubert and Maupassant: Léon Hennique (1851–1935), French Naturalist short story writer, novelist, and playwright. Hennique and fellow Naturalist short story writer Guy de Maupassant (1850–1893) were regulars at Flaubert’s salon in Paris in the 1870s.18 Lorimer: George Horace Lorimer (1867–1937), editor of the Indianapolis-based Saturday Evening Post. Under his editorship, the magazine published a number of key American writers, including Jack London, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Stephen Crane. The post-war frogs à grand tirage were a set of perruquiers: Pound is slamming French editors of wide-circulation newspapers (“presse à grand tirage”) as “perruquiers” (wigmakers), that is, disguisers of facts. Z. Character in a novel by “Willy” (see next note). Willy and the earlier Abel Hermant: “Willy” was one of the many pseudonyms used by the French writer Henri Gauthier-Villars (1859–1931), though the “Claudine” series of four novels (1900–3) authored by “Willy” were in fact co-written with his wife, the French novelist Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette (1873–1954).19 There are several references to “Willy” in The Cantos, including Pound’s recollection in Canto 80 of a cupboard in “Tolosa” (Toulouse) “piled half full / with novels of ‘Willy’ etc / in the old one franc editions” (80/523). Abel Hermant (1861–1950) was a satirist and theater critic for the Parisian literary magazine Gil Blas and Le Figaro.20 Mr Eliot’s obit for Marie Lloyd: In the December 1922 issue of the Dial, Eliot published an obituary (reprinted with revisions in the Criterion of January 1923) lamenting the loss of the popular British music-hall singer and artiste, Marie Lloyd (1870–1922).

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A Companion to Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur George Mozart: Stage name of David John Gillings (1864– 1947), British music hall and vaudeville performer.21 He receives a “blessing” in Blast.22 Ellen Terry: Dame Ellen Terry (1847–1928), British actress famous for performing in sentimental melodramas and Shakespearean productions. The precocious member of a theatrical dynasty, Terry’s first professional role came at the age of nine as Mamillius, the doomed young prince in The Winter’s Tale. Pound first met Terry in February 1909.23 my sentence of 30 years ago: Pound first expressed his belief in “technique as the test of a man’s sincerity” in his essay “Prolegomena,” published in the February 1912 issue of Poetry and Drama.24 Simone Memmi’s painting: Composite designation of two closely associated Sienese painters: Simone Martini (c.1284– 1344) and Lippo Memmi (1317–c.1350), the latter being Martini’s brother-in-law. Pound is likely alluding to Annunciation with Saints, co-created by the two painters for the altar of Sant’Ansano in Siena Cathedral in 1333.25

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F. M. H.: Ford Madox Hueffer (Ford) (cf. note GK 84). Fox of the Forschungsinstitut: Douglas C. Fox, assistant to Frobenius at the Forschungsinstitut für Kulturmorphologie in Frankfurt, through whom Pound corresponded with Frobenius in the 1930s.1 In 1937, Fox and Frobenius co-published African Genesis: Folk Tales and Myths of Africa (cf. notes GK 133, 242). local Italian librarian: Most likely Manlio Torquato Dazzi (1891–1968), librarian at the Malatestine Library in Cesena, whom Pound had recently praised in the July 1936 issue of The Delphian Quarterly of Chicago in an article titled “Possibilities of Civilization: What the Small Town Can Do.”2 Glaucus and in his Ixion: Only fragments survive of these tragedies by Aeschylus. Tozzi: Federigo Tozzi (1883–1920), Italian avant-garde writer, and author of Il podere, Tre croci, and Gli egoisti, among other novels.3 Monti: Luigi Monti, a minor writer from the Tuscan town of Cortona. Monti ran “Ars Umbra,” a gift shop in Rapallo specializing in arts and crafts from central Italy. In 1932, his son, Rolando Monti, painted a well-known portrait of Pound striding along the Rapallo promenade.4

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Sophokles: (c.495–406 BCE) Athenian tragedian, author of more than 120 plays, including Oedipus Rex, Antigone, and Women of Trachis. Pound’s complaint about the mediocre quality of translations of works by Sophocles and other Greek dramatists in the next paragraph echoes his August 1916 letter to Iris Barry, where he complains about “a bad trans. of Sophocles” and opines that “the whole Oedipus story is a darn silly lot of buncombe—used as a peg for some very magnificent phrases. Superbly used.”1 Eliot’s interment of Murray . . . greek language”: Pound paraphrases from Eliot’s essay, “Euripides and Professor Murray,” which takes to task Australian-British classical scholar Gilbert Murray (1866–1957) for his verse translation of Medea, a tragedy by Euripides (c.480–407 BCE). For Eliot, Murray has “sapped our soul and shattered the cup of all life for Euripides” by his electing “the William Morris couplet [and] the Swinburne lyric” in place of the genuine sound of ancient Greek verse.2 I asked Eliot to have a shot at the Agamemnon . . . it stands rock-like: Pound greatly admired Aeschylus’s tragedy, the chief play in the Oresteia trilogy, as demonstrated in these passages and elsewhere (cf. note GK 24). That Agamemnon and Prometheus Bound prompt Pound to associate the plays with Shakespeare’s Pericles, Prince of Tyre may simply owe to the fact that he had been corresponding with the classicist W. H. D. Rouse (cf. note GK 71). In a letter dated November 4, 1937, Pound quotes Lysimachus’s lines in Act 4, Scene 6: “Faith, she would serve, (pause) / after a long voyage at sea,” and praises a cadence “so well-taken that even the archaism

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in the first word doesn’t dim the naturalness of the sentence.”3 Yet it was precisely his and Eliot’s inability to produce a similar naturalness of speech in their never-completed translation of the Agamemnon that frustrated Pound. He reveals as much in a letter to Eliot sent from Paris in January 1922, even as editorial concerns about The Waste Land loomed large in their correspondence, “Aeschylus not so good as I had hoped, but haven’t had time to improve him, yet.”4 A few years earlier, in a 1919 article published in The Egoist, Pound had asserted that the litmus test of a translation is “by the feel of being in contact with the force of a great original.”5 Surette traces the impact of the Agamemnon on Cantos 4–7, noting that Pound fundamentally alters Aeschylus’s motifs of adultery, murder, and rape to function not as “instruments of a tragic destiny, but images of energy perverted and gone wrong; they are domestic images of the communal violence of war.”6 I made the watchman talk nigger: i.e., slang talk in the African American manner. remplissage: (Fr.), “filling” or “padding.” H. D. in her Ion: Hilda Doolittle (1886–1961), American avant-garde novelist and leading Imagist poet, the first to carry the movement’s designation which Pound gave her in 1913 when he scrawled “H.D., Imagiste” on the manuscript of her earliest collection of published poems.7 Several of her poems appeared in the first Imagist anthology, Des Imagistes (1914). H.D. and Pound met as teenagers in 1901 and were briefly engaged between late 1907 and early 1908.8 She chronicles their turbulent relationship and long-standing friendship in her poignant journal-memoir, End of Torment: A Memoir of Ezra Pound (1958). H.D.’s Ion: A Play After Euripides would likely have been fresh in Pound’s mind, as it was published just as he began writing GK in 1937. He might have known about it sooner, however. H.D. completed the translation while undergoing a five-month psychoanalysis with Freud in March

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A Companion to Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur and June of 1933 and October and November of 1934. After receiving a copy of her Ion translation, Freud wrote to her to say that he was “deeply moved by the play.”9 Pound’s judgment that her Ion has “pared down” the play is consistent with the sparse economy of Imagist poetry. the Genevan pacifist: In the unexpurgated copy of GK, the phrase reads “the unspeakable Genevan pacifist,” with the adjective crossed out in Eliot’s hand. This is a coded dig at Gilbert Murray (cf. note GK 92). In 1924, Murray contributed to a discussion about world peace in Geneva, Switzerland, on behalf of the League of Nations Union.10 Cocteau: Jean Cocteau (1889–1963), French writer, film director, and avant-garde artist. Cocteau’s adaptation of Sophocles’s Antigone premiered at the Théâtre de l’Atelier in Paris in 1922. James Williams echoes Pound’s appraisal of H.D.’s “pared down” Ion in deeming Cocteau’s Antigone likewise “pared down to the bare essentials and conveyed through a rapid delivery of lines sometimes just a phrase long.”11 The phrase Pound quotes from the play—“T’as inventé la justice” (“You have invented justice”)—would recur in one of Pound’s footnotes to his own translation of Sophocles’s Women of Trachis, “the key phrase, for which the play exists.”12 Pirandello: Luigi Pirandello (1867–1936), Italian playwright, novelist, short story writer, and recipient of the 1934 Nobel Prize for Literature. Pound admires Pirandello’s purported rejection of psychoanalysis, notwithstanding the dramatist’s exploration of “how the secret life of the instincts could invade consciousness and produce a dreamlike state while destroying the ordinary perceptions of time and space.”13 Pirandello’s, “‘No, he won’t fall into that mess. Il est trop bon poète,’” quoted in GK, recurs explicitly in Canto 77: “‘He won’t’ said Pirandello ‘fall for Freud, / he (Cocteau) is too good a poet’” (77/489). dea ex machina: “goddess in the machine,” the theatrical device in classical drama whereby a character (typically a

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god or goddess) appears toward the end of a play to resolve a paradox or insoluble complexity of a plot.14 As Pound suggests, Cocteau brilliantly subverts the device by having his oracle speak in numbers, thereby heightening the tragedy’s “riddle.” George Antheil: Cf. note GK 71. In 1936, Antheil moved to Hollywood after composing two film scores the previous year, Once in a Blue Moon and The Scoundrel, for the writer-directors Ben Hecht and Charlie MacArthur. He would also score Cecil B. DeMille’s The Plainsman (1936) and The Buccaneer (1938), among a range of other films.15 In keeping with Pound’s notion that Antheil “has made himself a motley and then some,” Antheil reveals that after failing to secure the rights to score DeMille’s western Union Pacific (1939), “I decided that perhaps the Hollywood music departments considered me too aloof, snob, standoffish.”16 The “solidity” Pound praises in Antheil is made clear in Pound’s Antheil and the Treatise on Harmony (1924): “By solid object ‘musically’, I suppose we mean a construction or better a ‘mechanism’ working in timespace, in which all the joints are close knit, the tones fit each other at set distances, it can’t simply slide about.” Pound calls it a “quasi-sculptural solidity.”17 undeformable “monads”: Cf. note GK 50. All the angels have big feet . . . Hump, bump, stunt: Mocking allusion to Four Saints in Three Acts (1934), an avant-garde opera with music composed by Virgil Thomson (1896–1989) and a libretto by Gertrude Stein (1874–1946). Featuring an all African American cast, producer, and choral director, it enjoyed a successful run of some sixty performances in six weeks, becoming, at the time, the longest-running opera in Broadway history.18 Jean’s Rappel à l’Ordre: Jean Cocteau’s Le rappel à l’ordre (A Call to Order), a collection of critical essays published in 1926. Cocteau’s cryptic idea of music “like tables and chairs,” as Pound presents it, may be understood more clearly by way of

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Mr Joyce: James Joyce (1882–1941), Irish novelist, poet, and a towering figure in literary modernism. Pound first became acquainted with Joyce when Yeats suggested the young Irish writer’s work for possible inclusion in the poetry anthology Pound was editing, Des Imagistes (1914). Joyce gave Pound permission to publish “I Hear an Army Charging upon the Land” and soon thereafter sent him a typescript of his groundbreaking collection of short stories Dubliners (1914) along with a chapter of his novel-in-progress, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916). The two writers would only meet for the first time in June 1920 in Sirmione, Italy.1 Canto 76 chronicles the meeting, “recalling the arrival of Joyce et fils [his son, Giorgio] / at the haunt of Catullus” (76/476), the Roman poet whose country villa sat at the tip of the Sirmione peninsula on Lake Garda. In a 1918 essay Pound traces the seminal influence of Flaubert on Joyce and asserts that “there is nothing in life so beautiful that Joyce cannot touch it without profanation” and “nothing so sordid that he cannot treat it with his metallic exactitude.”2 In “Past History,” an essay published in The English Journal of May 1933, Pound acknowledges Yeats’s “discovery” of Joyce, but lays claim to having helped get several of the latter’s works into print, including the serialization of Ulysses in The Little Review.3 Pound would grow increasingly less sympathetic toward Joyce’s work in the 1930s, particularly Finnegans Wake (1939). In the same essay, Pound opines that he cannot “see that Mr Joyce’s later work concerns more than a few specialists” or that is greatly preoccupied with “the present.”4 Sweet Christ . . . fadeless excrement: This bawdy bit of doggerel, which Pound sent to Eliot in an unpublished letter,

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A Companion to Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur was not meant for publication. The ellipsis in the original second line reads “fahrt,” a spelling Pound often used in his correspondence with Eliot.5 “Ulysses”: The quintessentially modernist novel patterned after Homer’s Odyssey, Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) was serialized in twenty-three installments in The Little Review, from 1918 to 1920. The U.S. Post Office seized and banned three of the issues, and in September 1920 the New York Society for the Prevention of Vice filed an official complaint against the magazine’s editors, Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap. The complaint resulted in a conviction of publishing obscenity, a fine of fifty dollars, and a prohibition of publishing any additional chapters of the novel, a decision that would not be lifted until December 6, 1933.6 That Pound invokes the novel immediately after his scatological quatrain should come as no surprise, given the novel’s foray into a range of taboo topics, including defecation, masturbation, adultery, sadomasochism, fornication, foul language, and so forth, all of which contributed to its being banned. In 1921, Pound called the suppression of Ulysses “imbecile.”7 Brancusi inveighed against the “monumental”: Allusion to a point Pound had made in a 1921 article on Brancusi (cf. note GK 59). For Pound, the sculptor sought to forge an aesthetic based on a “single mass,” rather than exciting “transient visual interests by more monumental and melodramatic combinations.”8 La Tour du Pin in his phrase “age of usury”: René de La Tour du Pin Chambly (1834–1924), Lieutenant Colonel and Marquis de La Charce. La Tour du Pin became a leading monarchist and Catholic social thinker and reformer in France. In 1871, in collaboration with the Comte Albert de Mun (1814–1914) and other social reformers, La Tour du Pin founded the Œuvre des Cercles Catholiques d’Ouvriers, a network designed “to promote the union of capital and labour in Christian guilds

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under the patronage of the Church and the upper classes.”9 In Vers un ordre social chrétien (1882–1907), La Tour du Pin explicitly links usury with capitalism.10 He would also characterize usury as a “protean monster” that “takes on different forms depending on the terrain, where it exerts its ravages.”11 While evidently nodding to La Tour du Pin’s loathing of usury in GK, elsewhere Pound is scornful of his political economy. In 1935, Pound lumps the German revolutionary philosopher and economist Karl Marx (1818–1883) and La Tour du Pin as “equally deaf dumb and blind to money. La Tour du Pin managed to write a whole chapter in denunciation of usury without looking into its substance.”12 The katharsis of “Ulysses” . . . Holland Place: This paragraph describes the cathartic effect Joyce’s novel had on Pound as he received the first installments of Ulysses in his flat at 5 Holland Place Chambers in Kensington, London, his home from 1914 to 1920.13

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obiter dicta: (L.), incidental statements or opinions expressed by a judge, but which are not legally binding.1 It is perhaps Aristotle’s glory that he did try to sort out the cosmological guesses: Aristotle’s geocentric cosmology followed the model proposed by the Greek philosopher and astronomer Eudoxus (408–355 BCE), which assumed that the planets, the sun, and the stars rotated in concentric shells around the Earth.2 “Gorgias debunks the logical process”: Gorgias (fifth century BCE) was the most celebrated rhetorician of his time. His “debunking” of logic is found in the extant fragments of his On the Nonexistent or On Nature. Gorgias holds forth that the ultimate reality of the world cannot be conveyed by recourse to logoi (words, thoughts, or reasonings) because words can never actually be the reality they appear to capture.3 “Erlebte Erdteile”: Frobenius’s seven-volume ethnographical study containing the episodes and points recounted in the preceding two paragraphs (cf. notes GK 27, 57). the parody of Chevy Chase: Among the oldest English ballads, “Chevy Chase” concerns the 1388 Anglo-Scottish Battle of Otterburn and dates approximately to the fifteenth century. Pound’s earlier reference to “flute music” reflects the culture of the border region between Celtic-Gaelic Scotland and Norman-Saxon England, where it was customary to play fiddles and pipes and sing about bravery and prowess in the border wars.4 Mr Alexander Pope: (1688–1744), English essayist, satirist, critic, and poet. Pound is alluding to Pope’s heroic couplet in the second epistle of his An Essay on Man (1732–34):

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Know then thyself, presume not God to scan; The proper study of Mankind is Man.5 99

POLLON D’ANTHROPŌN IDEN: From the opening lines of Homer’s Odyssey, πολλῶν δ’ ἀνθρώπων ἴδεν ἄστεα καὶ νόον ἔγνω (pollō͂ n d’ a̓ nthrṓ pōn ı̓ ́ den a̓ ́ stea kaì nóon e̓ ́ gnō, “many cities of men [Odysseus] saw and learned their minds”).6 知 人: “To know humanity” (cf. note GK 18). twopenny weeklies, 24 lines of chromosomes, six lines on a three-headed calf: In his essay, “Boys’ Weeklies” (1939), George Orwell describes these youth-oriented publications as “vilely printed two-penny papers, most of them with lurid cover-illustrations in three colours.” In keeping with Pound’s idea that the twopenny weeklies cater to “human curiosity,” Orwell notes that they cover “every hobby and pastime— cage-birds, fret-work, carpentering, bees, carrier-pigeons, home conjuring, philately, chess,” and so forth.7 24 pairs of chromosomes would be a genetic anomaly for a person, given that the human body contains 23 pairs of homologous chromosomes. However, Pound is almost certainly citing the number in good faith, following the work of the well-known American zoologist, Theophilus Painter (1889– 1969), who pronounced in 1923 that there were indeed 24 pairs, a genomic count deemed authoritative for the next three decades.8 Pound’s cryptic reference to bovine polycephaly (multiple heads) also recalls the three-headed calf Wyndham Lewis designed in 1912 for the brochure of the Cabaret Theatre Club.9 Mme Montessori: Maria Montessori (1870–1952), Italian educator and founder of the “Method” that bears her name. Pound’s paideumic pedagogy resonates with Montessori education, which aims to provide meaningful contexts to assist children in acquiring new knowledge.10

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99–100 Edgar Wallace: (1875–1932), English crime writer, journalist, and playwright, author of dozens of detective thrillers. Pound’s appreciation of the deductive shrewdness of Wallace’s stories owes to their attention to detail and familiarity with police methods and criminal psychology. 100 fakirism . . . To the glory of Shiva?: A strain of Islamic mysticism, “fakirism” is known in the west as a form of ascetic Sufism, with roots in the early Umayyad period (661–749) of Arabic-Islamic caliphate culture. Fakirs are known for their vow of poverty (faqir in Arabic and darvish in Persian). By citing Shiva, a major god in Hinduism, Pound is alluding to the Sufis in India, who syncretized certain features of Hindu mysticism.11 “Occupy leisure with the arts.”: Paraphrase of Book I, Chapter VI of the Analects of Confucius (“Kung”). In Pound’s own translation elsewhere, the exhortation reads, “if [young men] have any further energy left over, let them devote it to culture.12 For Pound, the Confucian vision of the arts, as John Gery points out, entails “cultural pluralism, or a cultural diversity that is truly inclusive.”13 101 Kung “fished occasionally with hook and line . . . missed an exception: Excerpt from Book VI, Chapter XXVII of Confucius’s Analects. Pound would later translate it more tersely: “he fished but not with a net; shot but not at sitting birds.”14 187th ideogram (MA) meaning horse . . . unless I have missed an exception: Allusion to an entry in Rev. Robert Morrison’s seven-volume A Dictionary of the Chinese Language (1815–22), which lays out a visual etymology of the Chinese ideograph for horse (馬), suggesting that the image of a horse itself is embedded in the character.15 Fenollosa echoes Morrison’s perception , stating that Chinese characters are “based upon a vivid shorthand picture of the operations of nature,” which establishes “a natural connection between the thing and the sign,” with the ideogram for horse showing that the horse stands “on his four legs.”16

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Brancusi in some dimensions a saint: Cf. note GK 59. Picabia a brilliant intellect: Writing to John Quinn from Paris in May 1921, Pound says, “Picabia is alive, but as a thinker.”1 In 1937, he singles out Picabia “as the only man I have ever met who has a genius for handling abstract concepts with the ease and surety a chartered accountant would have with a bill (ordinary) of lading.”2 Gaudier had and Cocteau has genius: In Gaudier-Brzeska, Pound defines the sculptor’s genius as “an abnormal sympathy with, an intelligence for, all moving animal life, its swiftness and softness.”3 In 1935, in an article for the New English Weekly, Pound affirms that “Cocteau has the freest mind, and the purest, in Europe.”4 In the Criterion of July 1937, Pound dubs Cocteau “the live writer in France” and, alongside Picabia and Wyndham Lewis, one of the “lively minds meeting a common need of the period.”5 Mussolini a great man: Benito Mussolini (1883–1945), Italian Fascist dictator. That Mussolini follows Brancusi, Picabia, Gaudier, and Cocteau in Pound’s list of genius-artists may seem odd, but it should come as no surprise. In the section “Dictatorship as a Sign of Intelligence” of his ABC of Economics (1933), Pound declares that “Mussolini as intelligent man is more interesting than Mussolini as the Big Stick. The Duce’s aphorisms and perceptions can be studied apart from his means of getting them into action.”6 His meeting with Mussolini in the Palazzo Venezia in Rome on January 30, 1933 marked a milestone in the poet’s affiliation with Italian Fascism and, more specifically, in his full-fledged conversion to the dictator’s cult of personality or mussolinismo.7 The brief tête-à-tête

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made a lasting impression on Pound. Nearly every rhetorical gesture in his writings from this point onward would bear the stripes of this encounter. In a famously revealing moment of self-referentiality, Canto 41 registers Mussolini’s amused appraisal of A Draft of XXX Cantos (1930), a copy of which the ruler is said to have held in his hand when Pound entered the imposing Hall of the Mappa Mundi where he kept his desk,8 MA QVESTO,”      said the Boss, “è divertente.” catching the point before the aesthetes had got     there; (41/202) Tim Redman transliterates Mussolini’s comment as a disarmingly frank and routine remark, “But this is amusing.” Pound grossly misjudged Mussolini’s offhand quip and, consequently, overestimated his own prospects as court poet in the Italian state. To put the meeting into perspective, “for a busy politician it was merely one of perhaps a dozen appointments that afternoon, and an aide probably told Mussolini who Pound was and what was to be accomplished from the visit before handing him a copy of the Cantos, all just before Pound entered.”9 However mundane the meeting might have been for Mussolini, it not only triggered Pound’s unbending faith in the Duce but also confirmed his belief, as Alec Marsh shows, that “Italian Fascism meant an opportunity to renovate civilization, to conquer modernity in the name of order.”10 So impressed was Pound that he hung the official notice granting the audience with the Duce on the wall of his Rapallo apartment.11 In the years following the encounter, Pound would publish a series of works informed by his newly found Fascist creed: ABC of Economics, Make It New (1934), Social Credit (1935), and Jefferson and/or Mussolini (1935), to name but a few. Cantos 87, 89, and 93 truncate Mussolini’s famous

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A Companion to Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur question for Pound, quoted in full in GK, “Perchè vuol mettere le sue idee in ordine?” (“Why do you want to put your ideas in order?)” (87/589, 89/621, 93/646). Pound bashfully replied, “Pel mio poema” (“For my poem,” i.e., The Cantos) (93/646). Arthur Balfour, a fake: Arthur James Balfour, First Earl of Balfour (1848–1930), British politician educated at Eton and Cambridge. Active in the Conservative Party for much of his adult life, Balfour held a range of prominent posts, including Chief Secretary for Ireland (1887–1991), First Lord of the Treasury and Leader of the Commons (1891–92, 1895–1902), and Prime Minister (1902–5). Most famously, as Foreign Secretary he wrote what has become known as the Balfour Declaration in a letter dated November 2, 1917 to Walter Rothschild, Second Baron Rothschild (1868–1937), the unofficial leader of the British Jewish community. Prefiguring the creation of the present state of Israel, Balfour declared the British government’s support for “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.”12 Pound’s dismissal of Balfour as a “fake,” though not widely shared, reflected the opinion of H. H. Asquith, Liberal Prime Minister (1908–16), who once derided his Conservative counterpart’s “superficial charm.”13 Arthur Griffith: (1872–1922), Irish nationalist and founder of Sinn Féin, whom Pound met in London in October 1921. Griffith’s admonition to Pound (quoted at the end of this paragraph) appears verbatim in Pound’s ABC of Economics and recurs chorus-like in The Cantos (19/85, 78/501, 97/698, 103/755).14 Pound even repeats it to E. E. Cummings in a 1935 letter: “you can’t move ’em with a cold thing like EKONomics/ etc.”15 For Pound, Griffith’s “reactions,” like Mussolini’s, are the hallmarks of his “droiture,” or uprightness. A volcanic and disordered mind like Wyndham Lewis’s is of great value: In the Criterion of July 1937, Pound likewise calls Lewis “explosive,” quoting his friend’s Vorticist provocations in Blast: “‘Chaos invading concept.’ ‘Any great Northern

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Art will partake of this insidious an volcanic chaos.’”16 Thus, Lewis is the antidote to English “fugg,” or suffocating stuffiness. Canto 115 bears witness to how staunchly Pound valued Lewis’s “great energy.” He pays tribute to Lewis’s brilliance, while alluding to his loss of eyesight to a tumor and refusal to undergo surgery for fear of the risks, The scientists are in terror     and the European mind stops Wyndham Lewis chose blindness     rather than have his mind stop. (115/814) True to form, from the time Lewis announced his loss of vision in May 1951, he would still go on to write seven books in longhand.17

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The De Vulgari Eloquio is still the best guide to the troubadours: As Pound suggests, Dante’s linguistic treatise De Vulgari Eloquentia (c.1303–5) mainly concerns the three vernaculars of Southern Europe: oc, oïl, and sì. Dante associates oïl with prose, sì with the poetic vernacular of Italy, and oc with the poetry of the troubadours.1 Although second in importance for Dante (sì takes pride of place as the most suitable language for contemporary Italian poetry), oc is nonetheless the language of troubadour poets, which would also be critically important for Pound. As Dante writes in Book II, “we find that illustrious individuals have written poetry in the vernacular: Bertran de Born on arms, Arnaut Daniel on love, Giraut de Borneil on integrity; Cino da Pistoia on love.”2 Dante goes on to cite a number of other canzoni. In his essay written in Italian and published in Rome in 1942 (translated into English in 1952 as A Visiting Card), Pound writes, “Dante was my Baedeker in Provence.”3 Petrarch: Francesco Petrarca (1304–74), Italian poet and humanist, author of the collection of Italian lyrics Canzoniere (Rerum Vulgarium Fragmenta), containing a long series of sonnets devoted to the poet’s unrequited love for Laura. Petrarch ranked himself second only to Dante in the pantheon of literary history. However, as Pound hints at here, and as Petrarch’s allegorical poem Triumphi demonstrates, Petrarch also aimed to create a subjective and psychological alternative to the eschatological and metaphysical vision of Dante’s Divina Commedia.4 Chaytor: In The Troubadours of Dante (1902), Henry J. Chaytor (1871–1954) pays tribute to the “deep study of Provençal

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poetry” that constitutes Dante’s De Vulgari Eloquentia. As Pound suggests, Chaytor also acknowledges his indebtedness to the treatise “for what we know of the theory of stanza form in the troubadour lyrics,” stressing the necessity of studying troubadour stanza forms to understand the development of Dante’s own forms of lyric poetry: the canzone, the ballata, the sestina, and the sonnet.5 107–8 Sordello . . . thought for her slaves: This important paragraph begins with an allusion to Sordello (c.1220–c.1269), Italian-born Provençal troubadour much admired by Dante, who placed his forerunner in Book VI of Purgatorio in La Divina Commedia.6 In The Cantos (2/6, 6/22, 36/180), Pound quotes from Camille Chabaneau’s entry for Sordello in Les Biographies des troubadours en langue provençale (1885): “Lo Sordels si fo di Mantoana” (“Sordello is from Mantua”).7 Canto 2 also alludes to “Sordello” (1840), the title of an epic poem by Robert Browning (1812–89). Written in Provençal, Chabaneau’s biographical précis originates in a manuscript housed at the Ambrosian Library in Milan. In his 1913 essay for the Quarterly Review, “Troubadours—Their Sorts and Conditions,” Pound translates the section from Chabaneau at length (cf. 6/22).8 Chaytor’s aforementioned study situates Sordello’s didactic poem, Ensenhamen d’onor, as marking the transition in Provençal lyric poetry from the “old ideal of love,” one based on “the selfishness of the early troubadours,” to the “spirit of the lover whose lady’s honour was dearer to him than life,” as typified in Dante’s canzone and the Vita Nuova.9 Cunizza da Romano (c.1198–c.1279) was Sordello’s mistress. Pound’s image in this section of GK of “Cunizza, white-haired in the House of the Cavalcanti” evokes the Tuscan poet and Dante’s contemporary, Guido Cavalcanti. Cunizza spent her old age in the Cavalcanti household, and Dante might have heard tales about her affair with Sordello from ­Cavalcanti. Perhaps because of Cavalcanti’s sympathetic

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memories of Cunizza, Dante places her in the Heaven of Venus in paradise as a perfect illustration of the relation between human and divine love.10 She also features several times in The Cantos. Canto 6 cites her as having “freed her slaves on a Wednesday” (6/22), while Canto 29 draws from Giambatista Verci’s Storia degli Ecelini (1779), “Liberans et vinculo ab omni liberatos” (L., “And freeing from every chain those who have been freed”) (29/141). Pound alludes to this same incident in GK. Cunizza’s act of grace and charity carried out on Wednesday, April 1, 1265 entailed her “sweeping over the most violent authority of her time” (GK 107), a reference to the fact that the slaves had belonged to her father and brothers, especially her notoriously brutal brother, Ezzelino III da Romano (1194–259), consigned by Dante to the river of boiling blood in Canto XXII of the Inferno.11 Pound elevates the story of Cunizza above the Arthurian romances of Chrétien de Troyes (fl.1165–80), the twelfth-century author of Perceval or the Story of the Grail and Lancelot, or the Knight of the Cart, despite Chrétien’s fine “eye for the color of medieval pageantry,” as Pound remarks in The Spirit of Romance.12 108 Arnaut Daniel: Cf. note GK 60. Grosseteste . . . Albertus: Cf. notes GK 77. 108–9 A PAIDEUMA carried on . . . no one cd. cover church walls with gold mosaic: Founded by Emperor Constantine in 330 CE, Byzantium or Constantinople (present-day Istanbul) was the capital of the Byzantine Empire until its fall to the Ottoman Turks in 1453. Just a month and a half after the riots of the Nika Revolt of 532 destroyed Hagia Sophia, Emperor Justinian began rebuilding the city’s most famous church and crowning architectural achievement.13 Pound’s idea that a paideuma originated out of Byzantium rehearses his point in “Cavalcanti,” where he argues at length that Byzantine a­ rchitecture provides

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the best inner structure, that we know, I mean for proportions, for ornament flat on the walls, and not bulging and bumping and indulging in bulbous excrescence. The lines for example of the Byzantine heritage in Sicily, from which the best “Romanesque”, developing to St Hilaire in Poitiers; or if the term Romanesque has become too ambiguous through loose usage, let me say that there are medieval churches such as the cathedral at San Leo, or San Zeno in Verona, and others of similar form which are simply the Byzantine minus riches. It is the bare wall that the Constantinopolitan would have had money enough to cover with gold mosaic.14

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The absence of “bulbous excrescence” in Byzantine architecture anticipates Pound’s reasoning that “this total PAIDEUMA is anti-usura” (GK 109). Canto 98 likewise traces the longevity of the Byzantine Empire to its constant and relatively low interest rate, “In Byzantium 12% for a millennium” (98/704). the new Westminster Cathedral: The construction of Westminster Cathedral began in 1895. It opened to the public in 1903. It is no coincidence that Pound mentions the Cathedral after his commentary on Byzantine architecture. A 1923 guide points out that “the style of the Cathedral is early Christian Byzantine: its prototype is Justinian’s great church (now a mosque) of Sta. Sophia at Constantinople, and the nearest approach to it in western Christendom is the church of St. Mark,” in Venice, Italy.15 Modena, San Zeno (Verona), St Trophime . . . St Apollinaire (Classe, Ravenna): Construction of Modena’s Romanesque Duomo began in 1099 and finished in 1184. Modena is significant for Pound’s conception of GK because it was there that he first encountered the Sallustio seal reproduced in the frontispiece. As early as 1910, Pound marvelled at the Romanesque Basilica di San Zeno Maggiore in Verona, calling it “pure

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roof in Poictiers / If it were gold” (4/14). The Tour Maubergeon in the visigothic Palais de Justice or Hall of Justice contains the room mentioned in Canto 90, “where one can stand / casting no shadow” (90/625).23 murrain and a marasmus: Murrain signifies decaying flesh, while marasmus means “a state of decline, degeneration, atrophy.”24 For 31 years . . . the Drinkers: Pound mentally constructed the “rich diagram” of paintings by Diego Velázquez (1599–1660) in Madrid’s Museo Nacional del Prado during his 1906 visit to Madrid, Seville, and Córdoba (cf. note GK 28). Though Pound misspells the title of Las Hilanderas (1655–60) here, he cites it correctly in Canto 80, along with Las Meniñas (1656) and other Velázquez paintings referenced in GK (80/513). These also include La Coronación de la Virgen (1635–36) (Pound’s “Virgin enthroned”) and Las Lanzas o la rendición de Breda (1634–35) (“The Surrender of Breda”). Pound’s speculation in GK that the last painting “was not invented ex nihil and ex novo” (“from nothing” and “from scratch”), based on a similar fresco he saw in the southeastern French city of Avignon, is also echoed in The Cantos (80/529). Other Velázquez works Pound cites here include paintings of the prince Baltasar Carlos (1629–46) and his father King Felipe IV (1605–65), Mercurio y Argos (c.1659), and Los Borrachos, o El triunfo de Baco (1627–29) (Pound’s “the Drinkers”). Jimmy Whistler: James Abbott McNeill Whistler (1834– 1903), American-born painter. The “light, green shadows” Pound admires in his paintings can be seen in Harmony in Grey and Green: Miss Cicely Alexander (1872), lauded in Canto 80 as one of the “portraits in our time” (80/532). In Patria Mia (1912), Pound praises Whistler as one of only two world-class artists (the other one being Henry James) that the U.S. has produced.25 In Pound’s poem of 1912, “To Whistler, American,” the painter emerges as “our first great,” whose choicest

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A Companion to Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur works are as “Perfect as Dürer!” a reference to the German Renaissance artist Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528).26 Rembrandt: Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn (1606– 1669), Dutch Baroque painter whose works, as Pound suggests here, often incorporated semi-translucent shades of brown. Canto 80 highlights “the brown meat of Rembrandt” (80/531).27 Manet: Like Rembrandt, the French proto-modernist painter Édouard Manet (1832–83) was also heavily influenced by Velázquez, after seeing his works in Vienna in 1856.28 Manet’s Le Bar aux Folies-Bergères (1881) is critically considered his masterpiece. The “fragments” Pound mentions refers to one of Manet’s series of paintings composed between the summer of 1867 and the winter of 1868–69, depicting the execution of Emperor Maximillian of Mexico in 1867. The painting was cut up into four fragments, sold separately, and later reunited by the French artist Edgar Degas (1834–1917).29 Don Juan de Austria, a Velázquez painting of 1632, depicts a jester who worked at the court of Felipe IV from 1624 to 1645.30 Où sont . . . ?: (Fr.) “Where are . . . ?” Russia shall not have Constantinople: Allusion to a war song composed by Victorian music hall singer G. H. MacDermott (1845–1901) in support of British intervention in the 1877–78 war between Russia and Turkey. The last two lines of the chorus convey sheer bravado: “We’ve fought the Bear before and while we’re Britons true / The Russians shall not have Constantinople.” The song also gave rise to the term “jingoism,” following the oath in the chorus, “by jingo.”31 quest of Osiris: Enjoining his readers to immerse themselves in the art collections at the Prado, Pound implies that the project to gather the fragments of past wisdom is akin to the Egyptian myth of Isis gathering the scattered fragments of Osiris and bringing him back to life after he was dismembered by his brother Set, the god of darkness. For Pound,

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artistic vision is radically fragmented. No one—not even the artistic genius—can see the truth as one whole. One can only apprehend it in fits and starts. This, too, is the impetus of Pound’s twelve-part essay, I Gather the Limbs of Osiris (1911–12). In 1911 there was an international currency (20 franc pieces): The 20 franc gold coin, a precursor to the euro, was issued in various mintages and used from 1803 until the First World War. The issue to which Pound refers would likely have been produced by the Paris Mint between 1898 and 1914.32 (Hell rot Wilson AND the emperor, I think it was Decius): Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924), 28th U.S. president (1913– 21). Pound’s invective against Wilson alludes to the fact that in 1917 his administration introduced the modern format of the passport.33 Emperor Decius (d. 251 CE) devoted considerable time and resources to the persecution of Christians during his brief reign (249–51), calling for a return to the worship of and sacrifice to the pre-Christian Roman gods. To expose dissenters, Decius issued a libellus, a papyrus parchment or passport confirming their loyalty.34 afoot from Poitiers, from Brives, From Périgord or Limoges: A few of the places Pound visited in his walking tour of southern France in 1912. In Canto 74, he recalls that “at Limoges the young salesman / bowed with such french politeness ‘No that is impossible’” (74/448). The roads go over the Appenines, they go over the Bracca: The Appenines are a series of mountain ranges that make up the physical backbone of peninsular Italy. Bracca is a municipality in Lombardy, northern Italy. Exarchate: Administrative unit that emerged in the Byzantine Empire toward the end of the sixth century, set aside for the governments of Africa and Italy, especially Carthage and Ravenna, respectively.35 Taormina: Town and municipality on the east coast of Sicily.

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A Companion to Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur The Nihon Jin Kwai: The Nihonjin Kai, the Japanese Association of London, though not technically a restaurant, had dining facilities and served Japanese cuisine.36 Gurdieff: Georgii Ivanovich Gurdjieff (c.1866–1919), GrecoArmenian mystic, spiritual leader, and founder of the Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man in Fontainebleau, France. Among his followers was A. R. Orage. Editor of The New Age since 1907, Orage left the position in the autumn of 1922 to join Gurdjieff in France (cf. note GK 246).37 Pier della Francesca in tone: Cf. note GK 2. (tinted Rembrandt): Cf. note GK 110. Perugia . . . Hellenic monuments: Pound mentions several Italian cultural attractions and destinations, from central and coastal towns to southern Sicily. Since 1878, the Palazzo Pubblico or Palazzo dei Priori in Perugia has housed the Galleria Nazionale dell’Umbria, containing paintings from the Umbria region, ranging from the thirteenth to the nineteenth centuries. Notable among the painters featured in the Galleria and in several Perugia churches, as Pound points out, is the Perugian painter, Benedetto Bonfligli (c.1420–96). Established in 1932, Siena’s Pinacoteca Nazionale exhibits works by important Sienese painters and sculptors. Several churches in the Tuscan city of Cortona once contained works by the Florentine painter and Dominican friar, Fra Angelico (c.1395–1455), most famously the altarpiece L’Annunciazione (c.1432–34), now housed in the city’s Museo Diocesano.38 Siena’s Palazzo Pubblico dates from 1297 and incorporates architectural innovations all’antica with traditional Gothic forms.39 The mosaics in the presbytery and apse of the Basilica di San Vitale in Ravenna, the former capital of the Byzantine empire in Italy, are renowned for their exquisite colors and “ever-changing effects of light.”40 Canto 11 conveys Pound’s impression of the subtle play of light upon the gold mosaics in the tomb of the Roman Empress Galla Placidia

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(c.390–450), “In the gloom, the gold gathers the light against it” (11/51), an image that recurs elsewhere (17/78, 21/98). The Scuola di San Giorgio degli Schiavoni in Venice hosts several paintings by Vittore Carpaccio (c.1460/65–1525/26).41 Santa Maria dei Miracoli is a fifteenth-century church in Venice. Pound’s reference to “Giovan Bellin’ in Rimini” most likely refers to the 1470 painting Pietà, by Giovanni Bellini, now in the Museo della città di Rimini (cf. note GK 2). The Accademia Carrara in Bergamo houses La Madonna Lochis (c.1475) by Carlo Crivelli (c.1430/5–c.1493/5).42 The Palazzo Schifanoia in Ferrara contains Renaissance frescoes, some of which were ruined by a pope who used the palace as a tobacco factory and by Napoleon’s troops who turned it into a barracks in 1801.43 The most famous of the paintings by Sandro Botticelli (c.1455–1510) are at the Uffizi in Florence, including Primavera (c.1480) and the Birth of Venus (c.1485). The fourteenth-century Palazzo Davanzati is now a museum. Florence is the city that “cast out its greatest writer,” Dante, exiled and permanently banned by the Black Guelf government on 10 March 1302.44 The thirteenth-century Palazzo Bargello is also the Museo Nazionale del Bargello. Taormina and Siracusa are both on the eastern coast of Sicily. Siracusa (Syracuse) in particular, the hometown of mathematicianscientist Archimedes, became one of the greatest cities of Greece’s Hellenistic Age and later the main city of Roman Sicily. Chak Mool: A plaster cast of a statue of this Toltec-Mayan rain god, typically sculpted as a male reclining figure, made a powerful impression on the English sculptor Henry Moore (1898–1986) when he came upon it at the Trocadéro Museum in Paris in 1925.45 Pound’s claim that no Egyptian sculpture in the Louvre is worth mentioning is somewhat surprising, given that in spite of its slow start due to the British Museum’s confiscation of antiquities (including the Rosetta Stone) from

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A Companion to Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur French expeditions, the museum’s Egyptian collection dates to 1827, the year it was officially opened by the French orientalist, Jean-François Champollion (1790–1832).46 Goya: New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art holds the second-largest (after the Prado) collection of paintings, figure drawings, and prints by the Spanish painter. The first exhibit opened in 1936.47 De Schloezer’s Strawinsky: In 1929, the musicologist Boris de Schloezer (1881–1969) published Igor Stravinsky, a biography of the eminent Russian composer of the groundbreaking and polemical avant-garde ballet, The Rite of Spring (1913), among other significant works. Stravinsky (1882–1971), however, angrily objected to de Schloezer’s humanist-classicist interpretation of his music, seeking instead a freer and more intuitive abstract formalism.48 Pound translated de Schloezer’s book from French in seven installments published in the Dial from October 1928 to July 1929.49 secolo decimonono: (It.) “nineteenth century” (cf. note GK 50). Chopin carried over precedent virtue: Frédéric Chopin (1810–49), Polish composer and virtuoso pianist. His German friend and fellow composer-pianist, Felix Mendelssohn (1809– 1847) once wrote to a friend about Chopin, “How happy I am once again hearing a real musician, not one of those half-classical virtuosi who would so much like to combine the honours of virtue with the pleasures of vice in music.”50

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Suretyship: “Responsibility undertaken by one person on behalf of another for the performance of some act, such as for payment of a debt.”1 seven sages: Cf. note GK 79. Salmasius . . . wrote De Modo Usurarum: Allusion to the very public literary spat between Salmasius and the English poet, critic, and iconoclast John Milton (1608–74). In response to Salmasius’s Defensio regia pro Carolo I (1649), an apologia for Charles I, which along with other contemporary works was used to vilify Milton as a regicide, Milton wrote Pro populo Anglicano Defensio Contra Claudii Anonymi, alias Salmasii, Defensionem Regiam (1651) (A Defence of the People of England, In Answer to Salmasius’s Defence of the King), a sustained assault on Salmasius’s arguments, especially for the divine right of kingship (cf. note GK 30).2 Bourbon: A member of the Bourbons, a European dynastic family that ruled France from 1589 to the French Revolution in 1789 and Spain from 1700 to the declaration of the Second Republic in 1931 and from 1975 to the present.3 Stuart: A member of the House of Stuart dynasty, the first royal dynasty to rule Great Britain with the accession to the throne of James VI of Scotland, son of Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, following the death of Elizabeth I in 1603.4 Rostovtzeff: Cf. note GK 41. the unreadable and dull Ferrero: Guglielmo Ferrero (1871–1942), Italian historian, sociologist, and author of the five-volume The Greatness and Decline of Rome (1902–6), among a number of other works. Malatesta and the late condottieri: Cf. note GK 2.

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Valturio: Roberto Valturio (1405–75) dedicated to Malatesta his magnum opus, De re militari (1472), a treatise on military strategies, formations, and technologies, along with the values and principles of ancient warfare and qualities that make the perfect condottiere. Valturio is buried in Malatesta’s Tempio in Rimini.5 Vickers’ advertisement: A British manufacturer of a range of military submarines, aircraft, arms, and warships, Vickers Limited rose to prominence during the First World War, widely advertising its military products and services.6 115–16 “Wars are paid for by depreciation of currency”: With reference to the American War of Independence (1775–1783), the Philadelphia merchant Pelatiah Webster (1726–1795) argues in his Political Essays (1791) that “all expenditures of the war for three years past . . . have been actually paid in depreciation of our currency.”7 116 so weiter: (Ger.) und so weiter, “and so on,” “et cetera.” We know where the Pope got his money for one war: Boniface IX (c.1350–1404), Roman Pope from 1389 to 1404, exploited the financial potential of year-long jubilees by promoting privileges, such as indulgences, to pilgrims traveling to Rome for the jubilee of 1400, even extending it into the next year. The “war” Pound cites here probably refers to the Great Schism in the Catholic Church (Clement VII claimed the title of Pope in Avignon from 1378 to 1394) and more specifically to the eruption in 1400 of chaos, famine, and riots in Rome, even as living conditions in the city were already strained under the occupation of the city from 1386 to 1414 by King Ladislaus of Naples (1376–1414) and his allies.8 Reynolds: Reynolds’s Weekly Newspaper, launched in 1850 by the radical journalist George William MacArthur Reynolds (1814–1879), was an immediate sensation, selling more than 350,000 copies by 1870.9

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anno E.F. XV: (It.) “anno Era Fascista XV” (“Year XV of the Fascist Era”). Pound began to use the Fascist dating system to date his letters and writings from 1931 onwards. The year zero of Mussolini’s grandiose alternative to the Gregorian calendar was 1922, when his March on Rome on October 28 in effect launched the Era Fascista. “XV” thus signifies 1937. Historians like Buchan and Thayer and Bell: Scottish novelist and historian John Buchan (1875–1940), American historian specializing on Italian history William Roscoe Thayer (1859– 1923), and historian and political biographer Herbert Clifford Francis Bell (1881–1966). 117 Anaximandros 610 av. J. C., of Miletus . . . after Anaximenes: Pound cites the Greek name for Anaximander, the natural philosopher from the Ionian coastal city of Miletus, using the French designation for his birthdate, 610 “avant Jésus-Christ” (he died in 546 BCE). The philosopher and scientist Thales (c.624–c.545 BCE), the natural philosopher Anaximenes (c.585–525 BCE), and Anaximander were from Miletus. Pound’s interpretation of Anaximander’s apeiron, an indeterminate, boundless starting point of all matter (Pound’s “primitive matter”) counters Thales’s monist claim that water is the unchangeable element of the universe. In turn, Anaximenes located the primal element in “air,” manifested as pyknosis (condensation) and manosis (rarefaction).10 For Pound, these pre-Socratic philosophers were the forerunners of the “mediaeval writers on light and diaphana.” That is, writers concerned with “medieval doctrines of colour, of diaphana, of all colours united in the white,” as he puts it in “Cavalcanti.”11 Notable among such light philosophers are Cavalcanti, Arnaut Daniel, Grosseteste, and Eriugena. 117–18 The “being” of Parmenides . . . and conserves trace of it.”: The maxim “All is one,” coined by the philosopher Xenophanes (c.570–c.478 BCE), served as a point of departure for Parmenides (fl. c.480 BCE) to construct his monist concept

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A Companion to Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur of the “One,” a corporeal, spherical Being with plenum or “filling space” (cf. Anaximander’s apeiron above). As Pound’s quotation suggests, Parmenidean reality is unitary, eternal, and unchangeable, while the plurality and changes our senses perceive in the world are merely illusory, thereby placing reason and sense in opposition.12 Zeffer, Uberweg . . . Schleiermacher, Marsten and Bertini: Pound misspells the names of the first two German historians of philosophy, Eduard Zeller (1814–1908), author of Die Philosophie der Griechen in ihrer geschichtlichen Entwicklung (1889), and Friedrich Ueberweb (1826–71), author of Untersuchungen über die Echtheit und Zeitfolge Platonischer Schriften und über die Hauptmomente aus Platos Leben (1861), among other works. Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834) was a German Protestant theologian, philosopher of religion, and translator of Plato. “Marsten” is likely a misspelling of Simon Karsten (1802–64), Dutch philologist and editor of the three Greek philosophers who wrote in verse: Xenophanes, Parmenides, and Empedocles.13 The quote Pound produces in this paragraph, “Truth from opinion,” echoes a line in Karsten’s translation of Parmenides, which the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) paraphrases, “In order to attain truth, one should not follow stupid eyes, nor with ringing ears or the tongue, but rather one must grasp with the power of thought (λόγψ).”14 Given the philosophers and philologists listed here, “Bertini” is likely Giovanni Maria Bertini (1818–76), historian of philosophy at the University of Torino and author of Idea di una filosofia della vita (1850). Zenophanes . . . making Gods in their image: Xenophanes, the poet-philosopher from “Hellas” (Greece), undermines orthodox religion’s anthropomorphic representation of the gods by means of the reductio ad absurdum that Pound rewords here.15

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Heraclitus: Pound paraphrases the philosopher’s most celebrated maxim, “You cannot step twice into the same river.” This maxim follows Heraclitus’s formula, “everything flows” (cf. note GK 31). 118–19 Empedocles . . . panton hridzomata”: Empedocles (c.495– c.435), the first philosopher to theorize the four basic material elements (fire, air, water, and earth) that formed the Greek conception of the nature and structure of the physical world. His πάντων ριζώματα (pántōn rizṓ mata, “roots of all things”), refers to these indestructible and immortal material principles.16 In turn, stoicheion (στοιχεῖον, “primary element”) is the third part of a triad Aristotle discusses in his Metaphysics, the first two being arche (ἀρχή, “principle”) and aition (αἴτιον, “cause”). As Pound notes here, Plato’s stoicheioi can also refer to the elemental principles of compound bodies.17 The unexpurgated copy of GK contains the following footnote, crossed out in pencil and subsequently deleted from the published version: “μέν τις φιλίαν” with Tredennick’s note. “Empedocles”. Aristo le Metaphysics. Love predominated. F. Fiorentino predominava l’amore. X.27.18

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Pound is cribbing from Book X (1053b) of Hugh Tredennick’s translation of Aristole’s Metaphysics (1935) and Francesco Fiorentino’s Compendio di Storia della Filosofia (1924) (cf. note GK 25). Tredennick translates the Greek phrase μέν τις φιλίαν (mén tis philían) as “the One is Love,” while his note, cited by Pound, attributes to Empedocles the idea of love as the primordial element in the cosmos.19 “Democritus who postulated the world due to chance”: From Canto IV of Dante’s Inferno, which places the Greek philosopher Democritus (c.460–c.370 BCE) in Limbo.20

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A Companion to Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur Nunc et Anaxagorae (says Lucretius) . . . pauxillis minutis, particles: (L.) “And now Anaxoragas,” the beginning of a passage about the pre-Socratic philosopher Anaxagoras (c.500–428 BCE), by the Roman Epicurean poet-philosopher Lucretius (c.99/94–c.55/51 BCE) in his De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things). In the quoted snippets, Lucretius argues that Latin is a limited language in comparison to Greek. For Lucretius, there is no equivalent in Latin for Anaxagoras’s doctrine of homoeomerian because of the “poverty of our ancestral speech.” As Joseph Farrell explains, the Greek term entails “the principle of like-partedness,” that is, the idea that everything comes from tiny (pauxillis minutis) versions of the same element, including, as Pound notes, “bones” (ossa).21 Gorgias: Cf. note GK 98. the bloke who attributed all being to fire: i.e., Heraclitus (cf. note GK 31).22 Fiorentino: Cf. note GK 25. Cunizza: Cf. note GK 107–8. Marx sold a pup by the Sadducees: Given that the expression “to sell someone a pup” means to swindle and that the Sadducees, a religio-political party within ancient Judaism, were portrayed as legalistic and materialistic, Pound’s quip implies that Marx’s historical materialism is a kind of confidence trick. Pindar’s racing reports: Pindar (c.522–c.438 BCE), Greek lyric poet, known for the “victory odes” he composed for winning athletes.23 pari passu: (L.) “side by side.” Battle of Cheronea . . . B.C. 146: The Battle of Chaeronea took place in late summer 338 BCE, on a plain near the Boeotian city. Philip II of Macedon (383–336 BCE) triumphed over an alliance of independent Greek city-states led by Athens and Thebes and became the ruler of all Greece. In the aftermath of the Achaean War of 146 BCE between Rome and the Achaean

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League, the Peloponnese region was annexed to the Roman Empire.24 Fiorentino’s dicta . . . La Morale e La Politica: Francesco Fiorentino belonged to the Neapolitan school of Italian philosophy, which privileged political community and the theory of the ethical state, as Pound intimates here (cf. note GK 25).25 mythopoeic sense: From mythopoeia or myth-making. Pound’s own mythopoeia in The Cantos and GK aims to find, as Michael Bell aptly puts it, “the Archimedian point from which the whole culture can be judged and improved.”26 Kung . . . once asked the boy had he read the Odes: Achilles Fang recounts the anecdote of Confucius and his son, Po-yü, in his introduction to Pound’s translation of the Confucian Odes, Shih-ching: The Classic Anthology Defined by Confucius (1954).27 Pythagoras imposed five years silence: Allusion to the rigorous process that prospective students or mathematikoi had to endure to gain admission to the Pythagorean society. The five-year vow of complete silence for every novice student was a requirement that Pythagoras considered essential to learning.28 詩: Shī, the Confucian Odes or Book of Odes, an anthology of poems venerated in imperial China, constituting a virtual encyclopedia of predynastic Chinese history and culture chronicled in verse. Although the dating of the Odes is still disputed, it is thought that the merging of narrative odes and expressive songs comprised in the anthology took place during late Western Zhou (eighth-century BCE).29 Dr. Ward (English Poets): Thomas Humphry Ward (1845– 1926) edited the multi-volume anthology The English Poets (1880–1918), which featured a general introduction by the eminent Victorian poet-critic, Matthew Arnold (1822–88). Four Classics . . . Mencius: Cf. note GK 17.

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A Companion to Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur Papa Flaubert: Cf. note GK 49. The man who hath not . . . in his soul (yrs. Bill Shxpeare): Pound probably has in mind Lorenzo’s speech to Shylock’s daughter, Jessica, in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice: The man that hath no music in himself, Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds, Is fit for treasons, stratagems and spoils; The motions of his spirit are dull as night And his affections dark as Erebus: Let no such man be trusted. Mark the music.30

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知 人: “To know humanity” (cf. note GK 18). Zeno: Cf. note GK 25. Crisippus . . . Marcus Aurelius: Pound’s list of Stoic philosophers begins with the Greek Stoic Chrysippus (c.278–c.205 BCE), from Soli, in Asia Minor, who took over as head of the school around 232 BCE and is regarded as the most important of the early Stoics, if not the preeminent Stoic.31 Gaius Laelius (c.190–c.129 BCE), a Roman Stoic who appears as the interlocutor in De amicitia (On Friendship) by Marcus Tullius Cicero (106–43 BCE), was a close friend of Publius Cornelius Scipio Aemilianus (c.185–129 BCE) and his son-in-law, Quintus Mucius Scaevola (d. 82 BCE) (cf. note GK 124). Cato the Younger (95–46 BCE) is the only Stoic praised by Cicero for his virtue, eloquence, and Republican heroism.32 Chemon is likely one of the lesser-known tutors to the notorious Roman Emperor Nero (37–68 CE), who in fact persecuted the Stoics.33 Marcus Aurelius (121–180 CE) was the last important Roman Stoic philosopher (cf. note GK 40).34 school of the Porch: Allusion to the origin of Stoicism, as its founder, Zeno of Citium (cf. note GK 25), taught at a “stoa” or covered colonnade (“porch”) in the agora of Athens.35

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syllogism was not apodictic but anapodictic: Unlike Aristotelian syllogisms, whose variables concern terms and classes, Stoic syllogisms put forth logical propositions, hence Pound’s notion that they are “anapodictic,” or not established on absolute evidence.36 Their four categories: Moving from lesser to greater degrees of concreteness, the four categories of Stoic syllogisms are also known as substance (the materiality of things), quality (how matter is organized to form individual beings), disposition (individual attributes, including size, color, actions, etc.), and relative disposition (how an individual relates to other phenomena).37 “Scientes quia rationale animal homo est . . . principio Physicorum testatur”: From Dante’s De Vulgari Eloquentia, which translates as, If we know that a human being is a rational animal, and that an animal consists of a body and a sensitive soul, but do not know what that soul is, nor yet that body, we cannot have a perfect understanding of the human being; for the perfect understanding of anything must take into account its basic elements, as the master of those who know [i.e., Aristotle] affirms at the beginning of his Physics.38

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Zeller: Cf. note GK 118. “noos” (mind): Cf. note GK 44. God the architectural fire, pur texnon: Zeno employs the phrase πῦρ τεχνικόν (pũr tekhnikόn, “artistic fire”) to denote the creative force of the cosmos, while Cicero calls it ignem artificiosum (“creative fire”) in De Natura Deorum. In combination with the divine Logos, pur technikon forms the substance of the physical universe. Like Aristotle, the Stoics formulated a theory of the “pneuma,” a combination of “fire” and air holding objects together.39 The early Stoic doctrine of ekpyrosis

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(ἐκπύρωσις, literally, “out of fire”) entails the periodic annihilation and recreation of the universe, a notion later excised from Stoic philosophy.40 Tryphonopoulos sees this “emanationist theory” as yet another example of Pound’s investment in the occultist secretum (“secret history”), here signifying “dispersal through death conceived as an act of creation.”41 Seneca: Lucius Annaeus Seneca (4 BCE–65 CE), also known as Seneca the Younger, Roman Stoic philosopher. Seneca’s Stoic determinism held that although every event is determined by an “interwoven series of causes,” god has fixed the succession of events from the beginning of time. Thus, even god is unable to alter fate.42 Kant and Calvin: Kant expressly rejects the concept of divine predestination, arguing that “Everything in nature works according to laws. Only a rational being has the power to act according to his conception of laws, i.e., according to principles, and thereby has he a will.”43 Conversely, John Calvin (1509–64), a French Protestant theologian and reformer, expounds his belief that God decreed, even before the fall of Adam, that all events concerning human beings were “fixed and determined.”44 知 人: “To know humanity” (cf. notes GK 18). 124–25 Scaevola, pontifex maximus: Quintus Mucius Scaevola (d. 82 BCE), the “high priest” of Roman theology. Scaevola’s “three theologies” were systematically developed by the foremost Roman theologian, Marcus Terentius Varro (116–27 BCE), in his sixteen-volume Antiquitates rerum divinarum (Antiquities of Divine Things) (50–45 BCE). Varro outlines the threefold division: (1) the mythicon of poets (concerning the mythic and the fabulous); (2) the physicon (naturale) of philosophers; (3) the politicon (civile) of politicians. Each of these types covers, respectively, the nature, origins, and proper worship of the gods.45

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decree of the Roman Senate (161 B.C.) which forbade the entrance of Stoics: Eduard Zeller (cf. note GK 118) locates the source of the decree in Suetonius’s De claris rhetoribus (Lives of the Rhetoricians) and points to Rome’s fear of the influence of Greek philosophy on Roman youth as its cause.46 一 以 貫 之: “unity” (cf. note GK 15). eleven thousand virgins of Cologne: The origin of this legend and cult of the martyred virgins is recorded in the Clematius Inscription, an early fifth-century stone plaque found in the Church of St. Ursula in Cologne, Germany.47 the Xth legion: Julius Caesar’s elite 10th Legion is the most cited legion in all the classical histories.48

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When you don’t understand it . . . Kung on spirits: Cf. Pound’s Shih-ching: “The spirits have their own divisions of thought / not to our measure wrought, / that ours yet shoot toward.”1 Byron regretted that Kung hadn’t committed his maxims to verse: In a brief entry in his Letters and Journals (1830), titled “China,” the English Romantic poet Lord Byron (1788–1824) writes, “I never heard of any Chinese poet but the Emperor Kien Long, and his ode to Tea. What a pity their philosopher Confucius did not write poetry, with his precepts of morality!”2 platonic purple patch: Flowery or excessively ornate writing. Ogden’s scholars . . . [n.] Basic English. “Psyche”: In the late 1920s the British linguist and psychologist Charles Kay Ogden (1889–1957) developed “Basic English,” a simplified grammar and vocabulary of English that he envisioned as a complementary universal language for international communication. In 1923, he founded Psyche, a journal of general and linguistic psychology, which he edited until 1952.3 Plato the purple swine advocated the expulsion of “poets” . . . sloppy poets: In Book X of The Republic, Plato banishes poets (“rhapsodes”) from his ideal state, labelling Homer, Hesiod, and their poetic successors as “imitators of phantoms of virtue,” who “don’t lay hold of the truth.”4 Pound retorts in Canto 68 by quoting John Adams, “some parts of Plato . . . are as wild as the ravings of Bedlam” (68/395). “Eddie” Marsh or Edward Marsh (1872–1953) edited the five Georgian Poetry anthologies published between 1912 and 1922. As early as 1915, in a footnote to his poem “Our Contemporaries,” Pound

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mocks the old-fashioned “style Victorienne de la ‘Georgian Anthology.’”5 The newspaper The Observer, in circulation since 1791, is the oldest Sunday paper in the world.6 Cadmus: In Greek myth, Cadmus, prince of the Phoenician city of Tyre, founded the Greek city of Thebes and taught the Greeks how to write.7 128–29 (e.g. Colonel X. . . . holy water”.): GK’s original index lists a curious entry for this page, “Rocke ?” Given the context here, Pound might be referring to Colonel Rocke, “an Englishman active on behalf of Italy during the Abyssinian war, who disseminated information that was being refused circulation in Britain and elsewhere.”8 The Colonel also appears once in The Cantos as “Old Rocke” (104/759) (cf. note GK 250). 129 The popular novelist H.: Pound cites the unidentified author in a letter to W. H. D. Rouse of May 1935, writing that “a best-selling novelist said apropos my Propertius that he (the novelist) couldn’t do anything like that, ‘I got no depth.’”9 Given the reference to Pound’s Homage to Sextus Propertius (1919), it is possible that the novelist in question might be Ernest Hemingway, who published a “Homage to Ezra” in 1925 in the magazine This Quarter, acknowledging Pound as “the major poet” and expressing gratitude for all his efforts on behalf of his friends.10 Binyon: Laurence Binyon (1869–1943), poet-critic, dramatist, translator, Western art historian, scholar of Asian art and culture, and author of The Flight of the Dragon: An Essay on the Theory and Practice of Art in China and Japan, Based on Original Sources (1911). “Slowness is beauty,” the phrase Pound recalls here from his conversation with Binyon, is not found in the book. Binyon nonetheless expresses a similar idea, “Landscape in European art appears first as a pleasant background, and only by slow and gradual changes does it rise to independence.”11 Matsumiya: Cf. note GK 47.

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J. J. in Ulysses: The events in James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) unfold within twenty-four hours of a single day in Dublin (cf. note GK 96). In the next paragraph, Pound associates Joyce’s novel with the so-called Aristotelian “unities”—a tradition based on a sixteenth-century misreading of Aristotle’s Poetics—precisely because of its first injunction about “time” (i.e., the action of a play should occur in the span of a single day or less). The other two unities are “place” (a play should be set in one location), and “action” (a play must dramatize only one central action, with no digressions). The last unity is the only one Aristotle suggests in his Poetics.12 Arithmetic, Euclid and the Arabs (with Monsieur Ptolemy somewhere): The Latin translation of the Arabic version of the treatise on geometry by the Greek mathematician Euclid (c.330–260 BCE) became highly influential among seventeenth-century European mathematicians. Arabian geographers, in particular Abu’l-Fida (1273–1331 CE), were instrumental in transmitting the teachings of the Greek astronomer, mathematician, and geographer Ptolemy (139–61 CE).13 “L’année julienne . . . wished to know how the stars moved: The excerpt in French is from the first volume of Pauthier’s Chine (1837) (cf. note GK 24) and translates as, “The Julian year among a people so far removed from European nations, in an era dating back to 2,357 BCE.”14 Pauthier is expressing his astonishment at the precision of the astronomic calculations of the annual revolution of the sun in the court of the legendary Emperor Yao (reign: 2357–2256 BCE). The Book of History, one of the Five Classics of the Confucian canon, features Yao as a sage-king of great virtue and learning.15 Descartes: Cf. note GK 78. 130–31 one of Roosevelt’s gang . . . as if . . .: The unnamed member of “Roosevelt’s gang” is George Nelson Peek (1873–1943) (cf. next note). The “slimily flattering preface” to which Pound refers is Peek’s foreword to the book he co-authored with Samuel 130

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Crowther, Why Quit Our Own (1936). Peek is less sycophantic than Pound indicates, accusing the Roosevelt Administration of rejecting “arithmetic and policies alike. Consequently I retired,” he writes.16 In the unexpurgated GK, the elliptical clause in this paragraph reads, “as if no cheating or substitution had occurred.”17 In “The Individual in his Milieu” (1935), Pound lashes out at Roosevelt’s “idiotic accumulation of debt,” while in “In the Wounds” he calls the president “the shiftiest great politican (as distinct from mere cheats and scoundrels) that I can, for the moment think of.”18 Pound’s antipathy to FDR would take a dramatic turn in the 1944 pamphlet, L’America, Roosevelt e le cause della guerra presente. John Drummond (who also helped Pound create the index for GK) translated it in 1951. At the end of America, Roosevelt and the Causes of the Present War, Pound absolves Mussolini and Hitler from any culpability in causing the Second World War, blaming it instead on the “world usurocracy, or the congregation of High Finance,” with “Roosevelt being in all this a kind of malignant tumour.”19 This dogfish: In lieu of this phrase, the unexpurgated GK features “This shark (Peck or Peek I think his name was),” which has been crossed out in pencil, with “dogfish” written on the right margin for substitution. Pound is striving to recall George Peek, who in 1933 became the first head of Roosevelt’s Agricultural Adjustment Administration, a position from which he resigned shortly thereafter. Peek controversially believed that only the opening up of foreign markets to exports could liberate American agricultural economy. Appointed by Roosevelt, Peek served as president of the Export-Import Bank of the United States from February 1934 to November 1935.20 X.’s falsification of a Douglas equation: As shown in the unexpurgated GK, “X.” is an unnamed professor (cf. note GK 48). Other excisions associated with “Prof. X.” appear at the end of the next paragraph. The editor has crossed out “their

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A Companion to Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur mendacity” as well as “This kind of thing is hired.” This last sentence originally appeared in the center of the page for emphasis. Gehazi by the hue that chills thy cheek . . . Mr Swinburne: Lines of verse excerpted from the first of two sonnets in “The White Czar” by the English poet and critic, Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837–1909). As Swinburne’s note to the poem explains, the twinned sonnets were designed to be a “counterblast” to a poem by “A Russian Poet to the Empress of China,” which appeared in an English magazine in 1877. Swinburne avers that he “will scarcely be suspected of royalism or imperialism; but it seemed to him that an insult levelled by Muscovite lips at the ruler of England might perhaps be less unfitly than unofficially resented by an Englishman who was also a republican.”21 Pound cites the poem to flag Swinburne’s antipathy to the violent methods employed during the notorious reign of the Romanov dynasty in Russia for more than three hundred years (cf. note GK 81). Among these was the “knout,” a leather whip used as an instrument of punishment, often lethally. Harding, C. Coolidge, H. Hoover: The historiography of the successive administrations of the 29th, 30th, and 31st U.S. presidents Warren Harding (1865–1923; presidency: 1923– 29), Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933; presidency: 1923–29), and Herbert Hoover (1874–1964; presidency: 1929–33) shows that in Pound’s time the three Republican statesmen were consigned to the following caricatures: Harding was associated with political corruption, Coolidge with reactionary laissezfaire economics, and Hoover with the Great Depression.22

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Mr Maeterlinck’s The Bee: In 1901, Belgian Symbolist dramatist, poet, and essayist Maurice Maeterlinck (1862–1949) published La vie des abeilles (The Life of the Bee), an impressionistic history of beekeeping and “all that can with any certainty be known of the curious, profound, and intimate side” of the industrious insect.1 He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1911. Gourmont’s method: Remy de Gourmont’s The Natural Philosophy of Love (1904), which Pound translated in 1922, contains a chapter on “love among social animals,” which describes the social and reproductive organization of bees. Gourmont characterizes the typical hive as a “sort of matriarchate” centered around the queen bee, whose “wedding” and copulation concludes with an “explosion” that kills the male drone. Gourmont also cites Maeterlinck’s study of bees.2 “gli uomini vivono in pochi”: (It.) “Humanity lives in a few.” Pound uses the full Italian maxim as an epigraph to his Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir (1916), attributing the authorship to Machiavelli: “Gli uomini vivono in pochi e gli altri son pecorelle” (“Humanity lives in a few, and the rest are sheep”) (cf. note GK 266). Dr C.: Unidentified. R. L. S.: Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–94), Scottish novelist, essayist, poet, and author of the adventure novel Treasure Island (1883) and the Gothic novella The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), among many other works. Henry James, a close friend, refers to Stevenson in a magazine article of 1888 as a “bright particular genius.”3 Stevenson left Scotland for the United States in 1879 and worked as a journalist in

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A Companion to Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur California. In 1887, even after he had become a famous author, Stevenson still desperately sought to receive royalties from American editions of his work.4 G. Rogers . . . was on the Inquirer when I met him: The Kingston Daily Freeman of October 4, 1907 cites George Rogers as an editor at The Philadelphia Inquirer.5 Pound would have met Rogers in his Philadelphia days. It is unclear whether the British novelist and poet Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936) ever sought employment at the Inquirer during his four-year residency in Dummerston, Vermont, from 1892 to 1896. He did consider American journalists “nosey, importunate, ignorant.”6 Raphael: Raphael Santi (1483–1520), Italian Renaissance painter whose early works epitomize the style known as “unione,” the harmonious balance of lively, bold colors.7 D. C. Fox’s ironic: “we have cannibalism . . . factory product”: In 1936, the German anthropologist Helmut Petri (1907–86) published Die Geldformen der Südsee (The Types of Money of the South Sea). In the previous year, Petri had become an Assistant at Frobenius’s Forschungsinstitut für Kulturmorphologie, where Douglas C. Fox also held an assistantship (cf. notes GK 91, 151).8 Blast: Cf. note GK 63. “dada”: Cf. note GK 88. publications by Picabia from N. York: After returning to New York in 1917, Picabia produced three more issues (5–7) of 391, the Dadaist magazine, between June and August (cf. notes GK 87).9 Lewis discovered Hitler: In November 1930, Lady Rhondda, editor of the politically independent Time and Tide, an influential weekly magazine of literature and current affairs, commissioned Wyndham Lewis to write a series of articles on Hitler, covering his travel expenses for several weeks in Berlin.10 His impressions from that journalistic trip provided

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him with the bulk of the material he used in Hitler (1931), a prescient, if somewhat hagiographic, overview of the German Führer. As late as 1948, in a letter to Lewis, Pound would praise the book as “that admirable work,” notwithstanding Lewis’s denunciation of the Nazi dictator in The Hitler Cult (1939).11 my own “discovery” of Mussolini: Cf. note GK 195. “o’er dull and speechless tribes”: The antepenultimate line in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 107, in which the poet claims immortality for himself, his works, and his beloved, in contrast to said “tribes.”12 Ford Madox Ford . . . outer-world consciousness: Cf. Pound’s description of Ford in 1914 as “the best critic in England, one might say the only critic of any importance.”13 RAPPEL A L’ORDRE: Cf. note GK 95. 134–35 Boccherini, Op. 8 N.5 . . . Bartok’s Fifth Quartet: The first piece is the String Quartet in F major, Op. 8, No. 5, by Italian cellist and composer Luigi Boccherini (1743–1805). Musicologist Elisabeth Le Guin argues that his “handling of repetition, thematic reminiscence, and cyclicity” in ensemble settings of this composition “shows his sensitivity to the paradox that lies at the heart of the notion of ‘repetition’” as well as “the uncontrollable permeability of current experience by the past.”14 In a concert that Pound organized in Rapallo’s town hall on November 14, 1933, the violinists Olga Rudge and Luigi Sansoni, the pianist Gerhart Münch, and the cellist Marco Ottone performed sonatas by Boccherini, among other composers.15 The String Quartet No. 5, by Hungarian composer Béla Bartók (1881–1945), is structured on the principle of the palindrome, where the themes are recapitulated in reverse order. The New Hungarian Quartet performed Bartók and Boccherini together in March 1937.16 135 jokes in Boccaccio: In the tales of his novella Decameron (1349–51), the Florentine poet, humanist, and classicist

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A Companion to Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–75) employs humor in ways that range from tales of cuckoldry to stories and practical jokes, while always relying on wordplay and wit.17 Kung said: “This music is utterly beautiful but . . .”: Excerpt from the Analects (III.25). Pound’s own translation sheds light on the ethical import of the passage, “[Confucius] said: The Shao (songs) are completely beautiful and wholly good. The Wu are beautiful, completely, but not completely good (morally proportioned).”18 For Confucius, Shao music exemplified the personal moral achievement of its creator, Shun, a commoner who succeeded Emperor Yao (cf. note GK 130) by virtue of his cultural contributions.19 Koromzay says the “Kolisch” have played it: The Hungarian violist Dénes Koromzay (1913–2001) was one of the founding members of the New Hungarian Quartet. Koromzay is referring to the Kolisch Quartet, a Viennese ensemble that was instrumental in popularizing Bartók’s quartets.20 Sta Maria dei Miracoli: Early Venetian Renaissance church built by Pietro Lombardo (c.1435–1515) between 1481 and 1489. The “carving” to which Pound alludes is the bas-relief on a plinth depicting four marble sirens sculpted by Lombardo’s son, Tullio Romano (c.1455–1532). Pound revisits his encounter with the church’s “old guardian” or “old custode” in Canto 76:       and Tullio Romano carved the sirenes        as the old custode says: so that since then no one has been able to carve them     for the jewel box, Santa Maria Dei Miracoli (76/480)21 Pound’s anecdote originates in his review of Adrian Stokes’s The Quattro Cento (1932).22

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Lavignac’s consummate manual: The excerpted passage on Boccherini is from the musicology primer, La musique et les musiciens (1895), by French music theorist and Professor of Harmony at the Paris Conservatory, Albert Lavignac (1846– 1916). It reads, “Many [of Boccherini’s compositions] are still unpublished and are likely to remain so.” Lavignac also praises Boccherini as a very prolific composer, possessing a “rare originalité.”23

20. MARCH 12th 137–38 The VOU club . . . performed by ideoplasty”: The VOU Club was formed in 1935 and comprised a group of Japanese poets led by Kitasono Katue (1902–78) with whom Pound maintained a thirty-year epistolary friendship. Several of Pound’s poems appeared in translation in the club’s avant-garde magazine VOU, published in Tokyo and edited by Katue. With Pound’s help, an Italian translation of Katue’s essay on ideoplasty was published in the January 1938 issue of the magazine Broletto. In that same month, the London avant-garde journal Townsman: A Quarterly Review published the Katue essay excerpted here, Pound’s “Vou Club [Introduction],” and a number of poems by VOU members. Katue’s concept of ideoplasty—the suggestive capacity of the imagination1—is termed ōka kannen (応化観念, “idea adjustment”) in the Japanese version of his essay.2 In the Criterion of January 1938, Pound professes to know “of no group of poets in Europe or America as alert as Mr. Kitasono’s Tokio [sic] friends. I mean to say as conscious of the day that we live in.”3 139 What he says is not alien to something I once wrote re Dr Williams’ poems: Pound’s essay on the American poet William Carlos Williams (1883–1963), published in the Dial of November 1928, intersects Katue’s intuitive-rational combination of imagery and ideoplasty as an “exact method” for poetry. Pound wonders whether Williams might be at his best “retaining interest in the uncommunicable or the hidden roots of the consciousness of people he meets, but confining his statement to presentation of their objective manifests.”4 Gaudier’s sculptural principles: Cf. notes GK 63.

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“The sick-bay where Nelson died . . . stava un poco ad agio”: The English naval commander, Admiral Horatio Lord Nelson (1758–1805), died on the battleship HMS Victory after being shot in the shoulder by a French sharpshooter at the Battle of Trafalgar on October 21, 1805. The makeshift sickbay where Nelson expired was in the cramped cockpit on the orlop deck situated below the waterline. The anecdote that only Nelson stava un poco ad agio (“was a little at ease”) alludes to the fact that he would have been the only one lying down in this confined space.5

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The one designed for children of eleven: Il Sussidiario della Quinta Elementare (cf. note GK 22). Prayer for Rain . . . prayer for serenity: Pound translates Italian versions of ancient Roman prayers found in the eighthcentury book of liturgy and ritual, Liber Sacramentorum Romanae Ecclesiae (The Gelasian Sacramentary). The first prayer is one of several orisons to plead for rain, Orationes ad pluviam postulandam, followed by Orationes ad poscendam serenitatem (“Prayers for Serenity”).1 Hilarity . . . l’ilarità: Cf. Plethon’s concept of divinity in Canto 98, “‘By Hilaritas’, said Gemisto, ‘by hilaritas: gods; / and by speed in communication’” (98/705). At a secular level of signification, Canto 83 invokes Eriugenian “Hilaritas the virtue hilaritas,” which Mark Byron defines as “robust moral vigour” (83/548).2 Il Cantico del Sole of St. Francis: The Canticle of the Sun, by the Italian monk and founder of the Franciscan order, St. Francis of Assisi (c.1182–1226), is a prelapsarian, Edenic poem about the natural world recreated by Christian redemption and salvation. The Cantico dwells on the beauty, sacramentality, and harmony of nature.3 Fogazzaro on the bells: Italian novelist and poet Antonio Fogazzaro (1842–1911) included the choral lyric “Campane a sera” (“Evening bells”) in his collection of lyrics, Vasolda (1876). Like St. Francis’s Cantico, Fogazzaro’s poetry concerns a mystical vision of nature in which the divine plan is clearly perceptible.4 a bit of Manzoni: Alessandro Manzóni (1785–1873), Italian Romantic poet, novelist, and playwright, author of the

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immensely popular novel, I promessi sposi (The Betrothed) (1825–27).5 “I Templi” of Silvio Pellico: (1789–1854), Italian nationalist poet and tragedian, who achieved great success with his tragedy Francesca da Rimini (1815).6 There is no poem titled “I Templi” (“The Temples”) in his Opere di Silvio Pellico da Salluzo (1834). However, Pound might have been thinking of the analogous poem “I Santuarii” (“The Shrines”). In the final stanza, Pèllico establishes a connection between the “strong bonds of patriotic love” and Italy’s “ancestral temples and shrines” (“E ben di patrio amor vincoli forti / Son quindi i Templi e i Santuarii aviti”).7 Mazzini: Giuseppe Mazzini (1805–1872), one of the chief leaders and political thinkers of the Italian Risorgimento. His then-radical and controversial arguments in support of progressive causes, from universal suffrage and social justice to democratic and national self-determination, informed a range of anticolonial movements in Europe, Latin America, the Middle East, and beyond.8 Cavour: Cf. note GK 76. 142–43 one book, eleven lire, 648 pages . . . aimed at practical life: Cf. note GK 22. 143 Italy . . . smuggling gold and bonds: Mussolini’s Banking Reform Act of 1936 brought the Bank of Italy and the majority of other major Italian banks under state control, thus paving the way for the kinds of fines and penalties on non-compliant institutions and industries that Pound reports.9 Although the Italian lira remained tethered to the gold standard during the Great Depression, Italy ended the commitment in September 1936 and was one of the last countries to devalue against the metal in the following month.10 Mussolini’s punitive measures against “financial traitors” and financiers were consistent with his vision of the corporatist economic foundation of Fascism as a war on the colluding forces of liberal democratic capitalism.

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A Companion to Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur In Pound’s copy of Mussolini’s The Doctrine of Fascism (1936), the closing phrase of the following passage is heavily underlined in pencil: Democratic regimes may be described as those under which the people are, from time to time, deluded into the belief that they exercise sovereignty, while all the time real sovereignty resides in and is exercised by other and sometimes irresponsible and secret forces.11

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SAVOIR FAIRE: (Fr.) “Knowledge of the correct course of action in a particular situation.”1 the Odyssey and the Ta Hio: Homer’s Odyssey (cf. note GK 24) and Confucius’s Ta Hio (The Great Learning) (cf. notes GK 15–16). the Odes: The Confucian Odes (cf. note GK 121). The Duce and Kung fu Tseu: Mussolini and Confucius. Eleusis: Archaeological evidence traces the origins of the Eleusinian Mysteries, paramount among ancient Greek mystery cults, to the Mycenaean period (fifteenth century BCE). The site of Eleusis was likely destroyed by Alaric the Visigoth around 395 BCE. Situated at the crossroads of a trade route linking Attica and the Peloponnese, Eleusis hosted secret rites to worship and honor Demeter, the Greek goddess of grain, and her daughter Kore (“maiden”), or Persephone, as told in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter. The two stages of initiation at Eleusis—myêsis and epopteia—entailed a progression for the initiant from being a mystês (one with closed eyes and/ or mouth) to becoming an epoptês (one who sees).2 Pound’s “catechumens” (from the Greek, κατηχούμενος or “one being instructed in the rudiments of religion”)3 may be seen as analogous to initiants. In Origine et esthétique de la tragédie (1905), the French Rosicrucian Joséphin Péladan (1858–1918) calls Eleusis a “théâtre religieux,” unearthing the roots of Greek drama in the Mysteries.4 His eccentric historiography runs counter to scholarly consensus on the origins of Greek drama in the Athenian festival of Dionysus, where the first tragedies are said to have been staged in 534 BCE.5 In 1906, Pound reviewed Péladan’s Origine et esthétique de la tragédie and Le secret des

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troubadours: de Parsifal à Don Quichotte (1906). Pound would eventually merge the ideas in these two books so that by the 1930s he was identifying the Albigensian heresy, troubadour art, and Eleusis.6 Seminal for Pound, too, as Surette argues, is Péladan’s “conception of the mystery cult—although not the details of its belief—and the idea of formulating history in terms of such a secret cult.” Crucially, Péladan also introduced Pound to the palingenetic nekuia, the descent into the underworld (Hades) and calling forth of the dead in the Eleusinian rites.7 Pound’s first “Three Cantos,” originally published in 1917 in Harriet Monroe’s Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, invoke the nekuia from Homer’s Odyssey, with “Canto Three” (later edited into Canto 1 in The Cantos) closing with a translation of the nekuia, along with a fragment from the hymn to Aphrodite.8 Hence, as Tryphonopoulos suggests, the purpose of The Cantos is to bring about a “palingenesis” (or rebirth) “achieved through participation in the ‘mystery’ contained in the text.”9 That Pound should think of Confucius and Eleusis in the same paragraph in GK mirrors the initiatory and mythopoeic nature of The Cantos, where we find the “Taught and the not taught. Kung and Eleusis / to catechumen alone” (52/272). pons asinorum: (L.) literally, “bridge of asses,” also, “a particularly difficult or insurmountable obstacle or problem,” which “can only be solved by an expert.”10 “Il sait vivre,” said Brancusi of Léger: (Fr.) “He knows how to live.” In Paris, from the pre-First World War years onward, Brancusi counted among his leading avant-garde friends, Fernand Léger (1881–1955), a French Cubist painter and designer who directed the Dadaist experimental film, Ballet Mécanique (1923–24) (cf. notes GK 59, 71). In 1912, Brancusi, Léger, and Duchamp visited the Paris Air Show together, while Pound lived a few doors from Léger in the early 1920s.11 Provence: Cf. note GK 60. Erigena: Cf. note GK 75.

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Dr Rouse: Cf. note GK 71. E. A.: Possibly American modernist poet Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869–1935), who preferred to be called “E. A.”15 imaginary spectator: In Homer’s Iliad, the poet introduces an anonymous, “imaginary spectator” to invite the audience to feel sorrow, even as he himself remains emotionally detached (“stout-hearted”) from the fierce battle that is unfolding.16 study in moeurs: Balzac’s “Études de mœurs” (“Studies of manners”) was one of the three divisions (the other two being “Études philosophiques” and “Études analytiques”) that he conceptualized for his sprawling collection of novels, La Comédie humaine (The Human Comedy) (cf. note GK 39).17 Castiglione’s Il Cortegiano: Il libro del cortegiano (The Book of the Courtier), by Italian Renaissance humanist Baldassare

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Castiglione (1478–1529), was written over a period of twelve years and published in 1528. The book dialogically describes the perfect courtier as a standard to which courtiers can aspire and glorifies the Duchy of Urbino and the Montefeltro, its ruling house.18 polumetis: (Gr.) “Many-minded” or “resourceful,” one of Homer’s stock epithets for Odysseus. In Canto 9, Pound calls out Sigismundo Malatesta for “being a bit too Polumetis” (9/36), while in Jefferson and/or Mussolini the American president strikes the right balance as a polumetis “who did get things DONE.”19 Weltmensch: (Ger.) “Man of the world.” Nausikaa: The young daughter of Alcinous, King of the Phaeacians, featured in Book VI of The Odyssey. Pound comically alludes to the moment Odysseus meets Nausicaa after being shipwrecked on the island of Scheria. Yet, instead of Pound’s imagined “gibus [opera hat] and opera cloak,” Odysseus is naked—“a terrible sight, all crusted, caked with brine.”20 And as Zeus said: . . . One of US: Pound creatively paraphrases Zeus’s exchange with the goddess Athena in the first book of The Odyssey. The Olympian god is aghast at Athena’s charge that he is “dead set against Odysseus,” and replies, “how on earth could I forget Odysseus? Great Odysseus / who excels all men in wisdom, excels in offering too / he gives the immortal gods who rule the vaulting skies?”21 As Pound also implies, Odysseus’s intelligence and piety make him god-like. Pound had already elaborated this idea in a February 1935 letter to W. H. D. Rouse (cf. note GK 71),    What about Zeus saying: How can I forget Odysseus, the fellow is one of us,” or “How can I forget Odysseus, who is one of us, one our own kind,” or almost one of us.”

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A Companion to Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur    “A man with a mind like that comes near to godhead”; “when a man’s got a mind like that even the gods respect him” (“can respect”).22

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“Who even dead yet hath his mind entire”: Allusion to Tiresias, the great blind prophet of Thebes, repeated at the beginning of Canto 47 (47/236). Canto 39 quotes the related passage at length in the Greek (39/194). In The Odyssey, Tiresias retains his mind even in death. As Circe reveals to Odysseus before bidding him to question the seer in Hades, “Persephone has given [Tiresias] wisdom, / everlasting vision to him and him alone . . . / the rest of the dead are empty, flitting shades.”23 Kipling and Hemingway: Cf. notes GK 133, 129, respectively. The Ta Hio is so edited: Cf. notes GK 16, 21. the whole foetid lot of ’em, . . . men with NO human curiosity: Pound’s typescript explicitly names said “University presses” (at the point indicated here by the ellipsis): Cambridge, Yale, Harvard, and others, all of which are run by brainless monkeys and usurious hacks “c’hanno perduto il ben dell’intelletto.” The Italian phrase is lifted from Canto III of the Inferno, where Virgil tells Dante to expect to see those “who have lost the good of the intellect.”24 Fenollosa died in 1908: Cf. note GK 15. Li Po (Rihaku): Li Po (李白 [Li Bai] 701–62 CE), a Chinese poet in the High T’ang period (712–60). Pound derives “Rihaku” from Fenollosa’s transliteration from the Japanese and uses both versions of the poet’s name interchangeably. In Cathay (1915), Pound creatively translates several poems by Rihaku, noting prefatorily that the “Anglo-Saxon Seafarer is of about this period.”25 The Old English poem is the only nonChinese work to be featured in the collection. Li Po’s poetry mainly concerns wild nature as a “numinous phenomenon,” rendering a landscape punctuated not merely by natural

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objects but sacred markers.26 Pound praises Li Po in 1933 as one of the avatars of “every great culture” that produced “a new sacred book.”27 In “How to Read” (1929), Pound extols Rihaku as having “attained the known maximum of phanopoeia,” “the greatest drive toward utter precision of word.”28 In the China Cantos (52–61), Pound quotes from a poem by Li Po: Mt Tai Haku is 300 miles from heaven      lost in a forest of stars, Slept on the pine needle carpet (56/301)

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Noh dramas: Cf. note GK 81. my last edition of The Chinese Written Character: i.e., the Stanley Nott edition of 1936 (cf. note GK 15). the mss. of Vivaldi and Boccherini: Apropos the Italian composer Antonio Vivaldi (1675–1741), Pound is alluding to the collection at the Sächsische Landesbibliothek in Dresden, which the pianist-composer Gerhart Münch was exploring (cf. note GK 60). As for Boccherini, Pound probably has in mind the manuscripts at the National Library in Turin and at the Fitzwilliam Museum at Cambridge University, where Olga Rudge had catalogued Vivaldi manuscripts in 1935 and 1936. In the spring of 1939, Pound also consulted Vivaldi scores in the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.29 Canto 92 registers the efforts of Rudge and Pound in lobbying Giuseppe Bottai, Mussolini’s Minister of Education, to secure Vivaldi manuscripts at the Turin Library: “Bottai also phoned Torino / instanter, to dig out Vivaldi” (92/641).30 A number of Boccherini’s original manuscript scores for sonatas are held in the Fondo Noseda collection in the Library of the Milan Conservatory (cf. note GK 134–35). young Bridson: D. G. Bridson (1910–80), a retired BBC radio writer-producer who published “An Interview with Ezra Pound” in 1961. Pound was less impressed with Bridson’s

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A Companion to Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur review of A Draft of XXX Cantos in 1933. In particular, Bridson’s call for “an annotated and simplified edition” prompted Pound to castigate London “pimps” (critics), “Are these the vermin for whom one should write footnotes?”31 Yet, as Betsy Erkkila argues, “Bridson was one of the first to recognize the political significance of the content of the Cantos and the irony of the fact that [Pound’s] radically new style was keeping him from reaching the very world he wanted so passionately to reform.”32 Bridson dubs Pound a “romantic” in The Filibuster: A Study of the Political Ideas of Wyndham Lewis (1972).33 I did not speak of Shakespeare in that opusculus: ABC of Reading (1934), Pound’s “opusculus” (“small book”), in fact touches on Shakespeare a number of times, including the apt point that in Shakespeare’s sonnets the bard is “practising his craft.”34 the VOU club: Cf. notes GK 137–38. Pericles: Shakespeare’s Pericles, Prince of Tyre, first published in two known Quartos in 1609, begins with a choric soliloquy spoken by the fourteenth-century poet John Gower (c.1330–1408). Lombard law behind Venetian penalties against mayhem: In 1787, Emperor Joseph II (1741–90) published his Code of Crimes and Penalties (Codice dei delitti e delle pene) in Lombardy, thereby enshrining a series of penal reforms and new methods of classifying crimes. Joseph’s Code paved the way for the promulgation in 1815 of the Austrian Penal Code of 1803 in the Lombard and Venetian provinces (Codice dei delitti e delle gravi transgressioni di polizia).35 The undercurrents in the Merchant of Venice . . . Baldwin: The “undercurrents” in Shakespeare’s play of 1600 alludes to the usura practiced by the villain, Shylock. Pound illustrates the modern “era of ‘usury’” by citing the Victorian Age (cf. note GK 50); the Austro-Hungarian Empire to which Archduke Franz Ferdinand (1863–1914) was heir when he was

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assassinated, triggering the First World War; and the successive U.S. presidencies of General Ulysses S. Grant (1822–85), 18th president (1869–77), and Hoover, 31st president (1929– 33; cf. note GK 132) as well as the three-time term of Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin (1923–24, 1924–29, 1935–37) (cf. note GK 52). “Is your gold rams and ewes?”: In The Merchant of Venice, Antonio asks this question of Shylock in protest against the moneylender’s usurious interest rates, suggesting that, unlike livestock, money cannot be multiplied naturally. Shylock replies nonchalantly, “I cannot tell, I make it breed as fast.”36 Antonio himself lends money without interest and thus poses a threat to Shylock’s business practices. Hesiod: Works and Days, a long didactic poem in dactylic hexameter composed by the early Greek poet Hesiod (fl. 700 BCE), is a kind of archaic farmer’s almanac brimming with practical advice, such as “sow fallow and when the soil is still loose; such land will spare you curses and the clamor of hungry children.”37 Demosthenes: Cf. note GK 36. “Usury as Mahomet forbade”: Cf. note GK 109. POLLON D’ANTHROPŌN IDEN: Cf. note GK 99. 149–50 Homer, Ovid, . . . The Tempest: Pound essentially reiterates points from his ABC of Reading. The Roman poet Ovid (43 BCE–17 CE) is the author of the epic Metamorphoses (Pound’s “Changes”) and the three books of elegies that comprise Amores. In ABC of Reading, Pound describes the 1567 translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses by Arthur Golding (1536–1605) as “the most beautiful book in the language.” He also cites the translation of Amores by the Elizabethan dramatist Christopher Marlowe (1564–93) and praises the translation of The Aeneid (1513) by Gavin Douglas (c.1474–1522).38 Canto 85 also pays tribute to the translations of Ovid attributed to Queen Elizabeth I (1533–1603) (“Queen Bess”) (85/563).

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A Companion to Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur Ronald Storrs: (1881–1955), colonial governor, Middle Eastern specialist, and Consul General in Cairo, where a shared interest in classics with T. E. Lawrence led to a lasting friendship.39 In his memoirs, published in 1937, Storrs lists his “consolations”: “(with ascending climax) Homer, Dante, Shakespeare and the English Bible.”40 Storrs appears once in The Cantos, as “Sir Ronald” (80/530). Mozart’s violin sonatas: In 1923, Pound advised Olga Rudge to concentrate her practice on Beethoven and Mozart, “so as to eeeliminate the effects of modern music.”41 Nobody, in 1938, knows anything of Vivaldi . . . And I doubt if anyone else does: Cf. note GK 148. Larousse: Shorthand for the fifteen-volume Grand dictionnaire universel du XIXe siècle (1866–76), edited by French lexicographer and encyclopedist, Pierre Larousse (1817–75). A version of the dictionary continues to be published under the title Le Petit Larousse. Encyclopédie de Musique et Dictionnaire du Conservatoire: Multi-volume encyclopedia published between 1913 and 1931 and edited by Albert Lavignac (cf. note GK 136) and Lionel de la Laurencie (1861–1933), one-time president of the French Society of Musicology.

23. THE NEW LEARNING: PART TWO The Forschungsinstitut in Frankfurt: The origin of Frobenius’s Forschungsinstitut für Kulturmorphologie (Research Institute for Culture Morphology) in Frankfurt dates to 1898, when he founded the “Afrika Archiv” (Africa Archive) in Berlin as a private foundation. In 1920, the archive moved to Munich, where the Forschungsinstitut was formally established. Five years later, the Institute relocated to Frankfurt and became associated with the Johann Wolfgang GoetheUniversität, where Frobenius held a lectureship in culture and ethnology. In 1946, the Forschungsinstitut was renamed Frobenius-Institut, and it continues to host ethnological and anthropological research in Africa, eastern Indonesia, and Oceania.1 151–52 If Fr. Di Milano and Besard . . . melodic conjunctions from the violin solo: Italian composer and lutenist, Francesco da Milano (1497–1543), and French composer and lutenist, JeanBaptiste Besard (c.1567–c.1617). Besard was the author of the ten-volume anthology of lute music Thesaurus harmonicus (1603), containing lute songs and pieces for lute ensemble by a number of composers, including fantasias and other pieces by the English Renaissance lutenist, John Dowland (1563– 1626).2 More significant is Pound’s allusion to the same score of Münch’s violin and piano version of Francesco’s lute score of Janequin’s La canzone degli ucceli (The Song of the Birds), the violin line of which is featured in Canto 75 (75/470–71). In ABC of Reading, Pound comments on these musical adaptations of Janequin’s canzone, noting that “Francesco da Milano reduced it for the lute, the birds were still in the music. And when Münch transcribed it for modern instruments the birds 151

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A Companion to Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur were still there. They ARE still there in the violin part. That is why the monument outlasts the bronze casting.”3 In an article written in Italian for Il Mare of November 18, 1933, Pound praises the second concert held four days earlier at Rapallo’s Town Hall, featuring Olga Rudge and Münch, as “a veritable artistic event.” Among Münch’s arrangements performed that evening, Pound highlights Besard’s version of Dowland’s Chorea Anglicana and Francesco’s adaptation of Janequin’s Canzone (cf. note GK 60).4 “I made it out of a mouthful of air”: This line, from Yeats’s poem “He thinks of those who have Spoken Evil of his Beloved,” is preceded by the poet’s plea, “But weigh this song with the great and their pride.” First published in the collection The Wind Among the Reeds (1899), the poem speaks to the enduring power of poetry to memorialize love and outlast malicious gossip and hubris.5 The forma . . . The coin Tiberius: For Pound, the magnetic fields made visible when “dead iron-filings” are sprinkled over glass underlain by a magnet illustrate how the mind of the great artist (like that of “Bill Yeats in his heyday”) creates lasting beauty and order out of chaos. The trope also forms the coda to Canto 74,     Hast ’ou seen the rose in the steel dust            (or swansdown ever?) so light is the urging, so ordered the dark petals of iron we who have passed over Lethe. (74/469)6 Pound’s marked copy of Allen Upward’s The New Word (1910) contains a brief passage on “iron crumbs drawn into patterns by the magnet.”7 The “forma” also recalls the “form-sense 1910 to 1914” (GK 134), which germinated Imagism and Vorticism. Accordingly, in a January 1915 article on Vorticism for The New Age, Pound enlists the analogy to stress that “it is only by

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applying a particular and suitable force that you can bring order and vitality and then some beauty into a plate of iron filings, which are otherwise as ‘ugly’ as anything under heaven.”8 Thus, Pound’s image of the rose in the steel dust displaying the lines of force of a magnet in static form arguably illustrates the gist of Vorticist dynamics—captured motion. He first used the term “vortex” in his 1908 poem “Plotinus” with a consciousness of its Cartesian and Blakean provenance.9 Pound’s idea in GK that “the forma, the concept rises from death” evokes the quatrain (the last two lines of which are quoted here) from “Ars Victrix,” by Victorian poet Austin Dobson (1840–1921): All passes. Art alone   Enduring stays to us; The Bust outlasts the throne, —   The Coin, Tiberius;10 Arnaut Daniel: Cf. note GK 60. The Persian hunting scene, the Arabian ribibi: Following the caccia (hunting), an Italian Ars Nova form, Janequin produced programmatic chansons that onomatopoeically evoke the sounds of the battlefield and hunting scenes, such as La Chasse (1528).11 The ribibe is a medieval three-stringed precursor to the modern violin. Pisanello’s Este portrait: Still housed at the Louvre, Pisanello’s profile portrait of a Princess of the House of Este (1436–38) has long been thought to depict the 15-year-old illegitimate daughter of Niccolò III d’Este (1393–1441), Ginevra d’Este (1419–40), whom Sigismundo Malatesta married in 1434 (cf. notes GK 2).12 Pietro di Borgo (della Francesca): Allusion to the provenance of Piero (not “Pietro”) della Francesca’s family in Borgo San Sepolcro, in the upper part of the Tiber Valley. Pound’s idea that Pisanello and Piero mark “an end to the Mediaeval

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A Companion to Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur Anschauung” is borne out by the contributions of both painters to the Renaissance invention of perspectiva artificialis (“artificial perspective”), a departure from its origins in the medieval science known as “optics.” De prospectiva pingendi (On Perspective for Painting), Piero’s treatise on perspective, is a primer on how to construct perspective images of any given figure.13 Vivaldi: Cf. note GK 148. Couperin: François Couperin (1668–1733), French Baroque composer and harpsichordist, whose L’Art de toucher le clavecin (1716) remains one of the most informative books on French harpsichord performance.14 J. S. Bach: Johannes Sebastian Bach (1685–1750), German Baroque composer and organist. In The Well-Tempered Clavier (1722), a collection of preludes and fugues for keyboard, “Bach exhibits,” as Joseph Kerman puts it, “his unsurpassed contrapuntal virtuosity and also the seemingly infinite types, forms, and characters that may emerge—at his hands, and at his hands alone—from the art of the fugue.” While Bach composed several toccatas for clavier and organ in his early years, by the eighteenth century the genre had fused with the fugue.15 In the revised 1937 edition of A Vision Yeats recalls a conversation in which Pound likened the structure of The Cantos to a Bach Fugue, “There will be no plot, no chronicle of events, no logic of discourse.”16 Hindemith today in his Schwannendreher: Paul Hindemith (1895–1963), German composer, whose performance of his signature viola concerto Schwanendreher so impressed Pound at the Venice Biennale in 1936.17 “as Velasquez and Ambrogio Praedis”: Cf. note GK 28. St Hilaire”: Cf. note GK 109. St Pauls: The construction of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London began in the aftermath of the Great Fire of 1666. The architect Sir Christopher Wren (1632–1723) began building the

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Cathedral in the spring of 1675, an event to which Pound alludes here in a backhanded compliment to Wren, “Bach builds up from the bottom, as distinctly as Wren did. In Bach’s case the result is magnificent.”18 Berenson and co. . . . Cosimo Tura: Bernard Berenson (1865–1959), Harvard-educated critic and connoisseur of Italian Renaissance art, author of The Venetian Painters of the Renaissance (1894), The Central Italian Painters (1897), and most influentially, The Drawings of the Florentine Painters (1903).19 Italian Mannerist painters, such as Rosso Fiorentino (1494–1540), Jacopo da Pontormo (1494–1556), and Francesco Parmigianino (1503–40), were enormously significant for Flemish artists, even as late as the time of the Flemish Baroque painter, Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640).20 Incidentally, Berenson disparaged the later phase of Jacopo as “an academic constructor of monstrous nudes,” all caricatures of Michelangelo’s nudes.21 Berenson also thought that the Netherlandish painter Hans Memling (c.1430–94) was inferior to the Venetian painters of the period.22 He reserved the highest praise for the Ferrarese painter, Cosimo Tura (c.1430–1495): “His world is an anvil, his perception is a hammer, and nothing must muffle the sound of the stroke. Naught more tender than flint and adamant could furnish the material for such an artist.”23 Mr Porpora’s German editor . . . (David, Hochschule der Violin): In 1867, the acclaimed German violinist, composer, and editor Ferdinand David (1810–73) published Die Hohe Schule des Violinspiels, a collection of his arrangements for violin and pianoforte of works by Baroque masters, including a sonata by the Italian composer Nicolò A. Pórpora (1686–1766).24 Mascagni and Puccini: Italian opera composers, Pietro Mascagni (1863–1945) and Giacomo Puccini (1858–1924). In 1890, the electrifying debut of Mascagni’s opera, Cavalleria rusticana (1890), brought him worldwide fame, critical

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A Companion to Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur acclaim, and a legion of devoted fans.25 While Mascagni would struggle to match the success of his first opera, Puccini was a prolific composer whose fame now rests largely on his most successful operas: La bohème (1896), Tosca (1900), and Madama Butterfly (1904). Mascagni attended the première of La bohème in Turin on February 1, 1896.26 Lawes and Campion: In contrast to Mascagni and Puccini, the English composer-musicians Henry Lawes (1596–1662) and Thomas Campion (1567–1620) catered to niche audiences. Lawes set the lyrics of leading Cavalier poets to music, while Campion, who was, in the words of his biographer, “a musical poet,” produced a number of “ayres,” Elizabethan lyric songs arranged for lute or other instrumental accompaniment.27 We will have to join the Monsignori against Babbitt: Pound is contrasting the high degree of “civility” or civilization represented by the Vatican Library with the humanist values espoused by the American literary critic and Harvard professor, Irving Babbitt (1865–1933). T. S. Eliot, whom Babbitt taught at Harvard, anticipated Pound in a review-essay of Babbitt’s Democracy in Leadership (1924), where he challenges his former professor’s “instinctive dread of organized religion.”28 Yet, in After Strange Gods (1934), Eliot would associate Babbitt with Pound on the grounds of their supposedly shared Confucianism, cosmopolitanism, individualism, and above all libertarianism.29 Celtic Twilight: Yeats’s prose collection of tales of Irish mysticism and folklore or, as he puts it, “that great Celtic phantasmagoria whose meaning no man has discovered, nor any angel revealed.”30 The book was first published in 1893 and reprinted with additions in 1902. In Rousseau and Romanticism (1919), Babbitt traces a predilection for “something akin to aesthetic romanticism” in Yeats’s interest in the Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941).31

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Sinclair Lewis: (1885–1951), American novelist and 1930 Nobel Laureate for Literature, whose acclaimed satire Babbitt (1922) lampoons the Harvard humanist as the stock middle-class American philistine which Pound hints at. In Sinclair’s scathing satire, “George F. Babbitt” is a superficial, ­materialistic, status-obsessed modern business man; one who gave orders to clerks and drove a car and played occasional golf and was scholarly in regard to Salesmanship. His head suddenly appeared not babyish but weighty, and you noted his heavy, blunt nose, his straight mouth and thick, long upper lip, his chin overfleshy but strong; with respect you beheld him put on the rest of his uniform as a Solid Citizen.32 Mellon and Mellonism: Andrew W. Mellon (1855–1937), American businessman, philanthropist, art collector, and U.S. Secretary of the Treasury (1921–32) under Presidents Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover (cf. notes GK 111, 132). The term “Mellonism” gained currency in 1931 after Wright Patman, a Democratic congressman from Texas, began using the term in a sustained campaign against Mellon’s alleged corruption and malfeasance as Treasury Secretary, going so far as to claim that Mellon was hardly better than the gangster Al Capone. Mellon submitted his resignation to Hoover in 1932, before Patman’s move to impeach him could be fully investigated by the House Judiciary Committee.33 155–56 the reigns of Wilson, Harding, Coolidge and the supremely uncultivated, uneducated gross Hoover: U.S. presidents (cf. notes GK 111, 132). 156 In the last lustrum: i.e., in the last five years. The mysteries will never be legal: Cf. note GK 145. 157 I reviewed P. B.’s novel: In the New English Weekly of May 2, 1935, Pound reviewed Private Worlds (1934), a psychiatric

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A Companion to Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur drama by British novelist, essayist, and short story writer Phyllis Bottome (1884–1963). Calvert: Bruce T. Calvert (1866–1940), editor and publisher of the monthly periodical, The Open Road. Selections from the journal were published in Thirty Years of Open Road with Bruce Calvert (1941). Kraft durch Freude: (Ger.) “Strength through joy.” Kraft durch Freude (KdF) was a vast leisure organization of the Nazi regime, modeled after a similar institution established in Fascist Italy in 1925. KdF was a subsidiary of the Deutsche Arbeitsfront (DAF, or German Labor Front), the large-scale Nazi trade union created in the spring of 1933 to replace Germany’s free trade unions. The unexpurgated GK erroneously features the preposition Zur (“to”) instead of durch.34 Padre José’s name . . . foreign assistance: Father José Maria de Elizondo (1878–1922), author of La leyenda de San Francisco según la versión catalana del “Flos Sanctorum” (1910). The Cavalcanti manuscript, of which Pound was able to obtain a photostat through Elizondo’s influence, was one of a number of Italian manuscripts housed at the sixteenthcentury library of the Escorial Monastery, near Madrid.35 Pound’s remark about Spain’s “killing off Spaniards with foreign assistance” would typically allude to Hitler’s and Mussolini’s military assistance to the Spanish Fascist dictator Francisco Franco (1892–1975) during the Spanish Civil War (1936–39), including the infamous bombing of the Basque town of Guernica on April 26, 1937 by Hitler’s Luftwaffe division. However, given Pound’s Fascist sympathies it is more likely that he is referring to the also ghastly atrocities— known as the “Red Terror”—committed by the antifascist Republican side with the aid of the Soviets and a range of foreign interventionists.36 Canto 81 features snippets of conversations between Elizondo and Pound (81/537). Rémy de Gourmont: Cf. note GK 88.

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to “save Spain”: Immediately following this phrase, the unexpurgated GK features the following sentence, “Among the signal shirkers I think we may list Sr Madariaga.” Salvador de Madariaga (1886–1978) was a Spanish diplomat and historian whom Pound had met in London. Pound’s frustration with Madariaga stems from the latter’s apparent failure to follow up on Pound’s request in 1934 that he introduce Douglas’s theory of Social Credit to the new Spanish republic.37 “Spain, a rabbit,” says E.  Gimenez Caballero: Ernesto Giménez Caballero (1899–1988), Spanish writer, diplomat, and editor of the Madrid avant-garde journal La Gaceta Literaria. In characterizing Spain as a rabbit, Caballero evokes the etymology of Hispania, the Latin moniker for the country, which derives from the Phoenician “I-shepan-in” (“coast of rabbits” or “island of rabbits”).38 Like many Spanish Fascist intellectuals in the 1920s and 1930s, Caballero was deeply influenced by Italian Fascism. In his textbook for Falangist youth, España nuestra: El libro de juventudes españolas (1943), he would revisit the motif of Spain as a rabbit, calling upon students to draw the map of the peninsula as the animal the Phoenicians imagined it to resemble.39

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The Tempio Malatestiano . . . Malatesta managed against the current of power: Cf. notes GK 2. “Zuan Bellin” is Bellini (cf. 25/120, 45/230). In saying that “Federigo Urbino was his Amy Lowell” Pound is drawing an analogy between the “lifelong mortal feud” between Sigismundo and Urbino (also known as Federico III da Montefeltro) and Pound’s own protracted literary feud with American poet Amy Lowell (1874–1925) over Imagism, the free verse movement he had helped to found and left almost as soon as the first anthology was published in 1914. Pound sneeringly punned on Imagism under Lowell’s stewardship as “Amygism.”1 St Hilaire: Cf. note GK 109. If ever Browning had ready an emphasis for his “reach and grasp” line: Truncated phrase from “Andrea del Sarto,” Browning’s dramatic monologue, “Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp / Or what’s a heaven for?”2 Gemisto’s conversation at Ferrara: Here, as in The Cantos (8/31), Pound alludes to the 1438–39 Council of Ferrara, a harried bid by the Byzantine emperor, John VIII Palaeologus (1392–1448), and Pope Eugenius IV to end the schism between the Greek and Latin Churches and defend Christendom against the Ottoman Empire. Gemistos Plethon, the Byzantine philosopher, was in attendance. Fears of the Black Death in Ferrara drove delegates to move the Council to Florence. Amid the theological proceedings of the Council, Gemisto gave public lectures on the key differences between Plato and Aristotle, likely at the behest of Cosimo de’ Medici, founder of the Platonic Academy. His aim was to substitute Plato for Aristotle as the basis of metaphysical conjecture.3

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Pound irreverently recaps the ecumenical event in Canto 26 as a decision “on the holy ghost / And as to the which begat the what in the Trinity” (26/123–24).4 Cunizza at Cavalcanti the elder’s: Cf. note GK 107–8. Ficino: Marcilio Ficino (1433–99), Italian Renaissance philosopher, humanist, and priest. Ficino headed the syncretic Platonic Academy of Florence, founded by Cosimo de’ Medici under the influence of Gemistos Plethon.5 Valla: In 1440, The Italian Renaissance humanist Lorenzo Valla (1407–57) published On the Donation of Constantine, an antipapal oration that exposed as a forgery a widely circulated document claiming that the Roman Emperor Constantine gratefully bequeathed a third of the Empire to the Roman Church following his miraculous cure from leprosy by Pope Sylvester.6 Pico Mirandola . . . multifarious context: In his influential study The Renaissance (1873/1893), English writer and art critic Walter Pater (1839–94) devotes a chapter to Italian Renaissance philosopher Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463–94). Pater introduces Pico as belonging to the same Christian-Platonic syncretic milieu of Marsilio Ficino. “Mirandola’s prized paragraph” refers to the following passage in Latin, which Pater quotes and translates: Tritum est in scholis, [Pico] says, esse hominem minorem mundum, in quo mixtum ex elementis corpus et spiritus coelestis et plantarum anima vegetalis et brutorum sensus et ratio et angelica mens et Dei similitudo conspicitur:—‘It is a commonplace of the schools that man is a little world, in which we may discern a body mingled of earthy elements, and ethereal breath, and the vegetable life of plants, and the senses of the lower animals, and reason, and the intelligence of angels, and a likeness to God.’7

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A Companion to Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur Addington Symonds: (1840–93), English poet, critic, and author of the seven-volume study, Renaissance in Italy (1875–86). Catullus: Gaius Valerius Catullus (c.84–c.54 BCE), Roman lyric poet whose verse Pound deemed an essential part of a comprehensive appreciation of European poetry, going so far as to say that “the Greeks might be hard put to it to find a better poet among themselves.”8 Barney Oldfield: Berna Eli “Barney” Oldfield (1878–1946), pioneering American automobile racer and a legendary figure in motorsports.9 Mr Edison: Thomas Edison (1847–1931) invented the cylinder phonograph (later known as the gramophone) in 1877.

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Wyndham Lewis (author of Tarr and of Cantleman’s Spring Mate): Lewis published the short story “Cantleman’s SpringMate” in The Little Review in October 1917 and the wartime novel Tarr the following year. The “criticism of Shakespeare” that Pound attributes to Lewis can be found at length in the painter-writer’s study of Machiavelli’s influence on the bard, The Lion and the Fox: The Role of the Hero in the Plays of Shakespeare (1927). Rutland . . . Baconians: The controversial authorial attribution of Shakespeare’s comedies to Roger Manners, 5th Earl of Rutland (1576–1612), first proposed around the turn of the twentieth century, gained traction when University of Brussels professor, Celestin Demblon, published Lord Rutland et Shakespeare in 1912 and L’Auteur d’Hamlet two years later. However, as Pound sardonically notes, Rutland would have been much too young to have created at least some of the plays—he was only sixteen when Venus and Adonis was published. As early as 1805, Rev. J. Wilmot, rector of Bartonon-the-Heath, near Shakespeare’s hometown of Stratford, speculated authorship of Shakespeare’s plays to Sir Francis Bacon (1561–1626), though he later recanted his theory.1 Mischung von Totemismus . . . (Auspragen also monetize or coin): Fragments from Petri’s Die Geldformen der Südsee (cf. note GK 133), the first two of which translate as “mixture of totemism . . . Papuan-speaking.” Pound translates the longer German phrase himself (i.e., “The idea of a measure of value not yet sharply defined”). Ausprägen, as Pound suggests (albeit with a missing umlaut), means “minting coins.”

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A Companion to Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur An England without . . . . . . . . . : The unexpurgated GK shows “Runciman” in the elision, a reference to Sir Walter Runciman (1870–1949), British Liberal Member of Parliament and president of the Board of Trade until his resignation in May 1937, the episode hinted at here.2 (for Regius professoriate . . . vide Hollis’ Two Nations): Allusion to the scathing critique of Regius professors at Oxford in Christopher Hollis’s The Two Nations: A Financial Study of English History (1935). Hollis contrasts the unreasonably high salaries of the Regius professoriate (£400 a year) with their paltry scholarly output, claiming that the “only work of historical scholarship produced by a University History Professor during the eighteenth century came from the pen of Spence, Regius Professor at Oxford and tutor to the Duke of Newcastle’s son.”3 Pound revisits the controversy in Canto 104, “Said Hollis (Christopher) / Regius . . . (deleted) Professorships / for falsification” (104/762). Cavour . . . Cardinal Antonelli’s: Cf. notes GK 76. Shaw . . . conversion of Xtianity to the savage: In his play Man and Superman (1903), George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950), Irish dramatist, critic, and 1925 Nobel Laureate for Literature, writes, “The conversion of a savage to Christianity is the conversion of Christianity to savagery.”4 Erigena’s “Authority comes from right reason” . . . Bossuet: Cf. notes GK 75. some University Presidents: In lieu of this phrase, the unexpurgated GK features “N. M. Butler,” or Nicholas Murray Butler (1862–1947), president of Columbia University (1902–45), who was often criticized for his authoritarian style of leadership. In 1925, he became president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1931 (cf. note GK 238).5 the Reverendo: T. S. Eliot. Pound’s quip to Eliot that Aquinas is “unsound” anticipates his comment in a letter of February

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1939 concerning the form of The Cantos, “I haven’t an Aquinasmap; Aquinas not valid now.”6 Mlle X. “Mais, moi, M. Descartes, qui ne pense pas?”: Illustration of how a “shallow mind” misinterprets Descartes’s dictum, “Je pense, donc je suis” (“I think, therefore I am”) (cf. note GK 78). The naive “Mlle X.” asks, “But, [as for] me, Mr. Descartes, who doesn’t think?” In contrast to the flippancy implicit in the mademoiselle’s question, Descartes’s theories were seriously discussed in the salons of learned seventeenthcentury Parisian women. Famously, “Discours à Madame de La Sablière,” a poem in Book IX of the Fables, by Jean de la Fontaine (1621–95), mounts an explicit attack on Descartes, positing the existence of souls for animals.7 I pointed out in Noh that we err: One of the errors Pound brings up in his introduction to The Classic Noh Theatre of Japan is the critical misunderstanding of the “function of the individual plays in the performance,” whereby Western scholars “have thought them fragmentary, or have complained of imperfect structure. The Noh plays are often quite complete in themselves.”8 Bertie Russell: Bertrand Russell (1872–1970), English philosopher, mathematician, and the 1950 Nobel Laureate for Literature. ROSSONI: Cf. note GK 40. stamp-scrip: Also known as “stamp currency,” Schwundgeld or stamp scrip was proposed by the German businessman Silvio Gesell (cf. note GK 48) as a way to levy a small user fee on money and thus prevent hoarding and encourage monetary circulation. To maintain the face value of the scrip one had to purchase and affix a stamp priced at 1 percent of the denomination of the scrip. In the early 1930s, Gesell’s idea was successfully implemented in the Bavarian coal mining town of Schwanenkirchen and the Austrian town of Wörgl. The Schwanenkirchen experiment ended under pressure from

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A Companion to Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur the German government; likewise Wörgl, hard-pressed by the Austrian central bank.9 fare il suo affare: Rossoni is specifying that the state would get its share or “cut” from Gesell’s stamp scrip. Canto 101 prints the first half of the sentence, “Rossoni: ‘così lo stato . . .’ etcetera” (101/746). As Pound discloses in an interview, the full sentence reads, “Così lo stato fa il suo affare” (“That’s where the state gets its cut”).10 In six weeks Por had two articles out . . . Regime Corporativo: Odon Por (b. 1883), Hungarian-born economist, with whom Pound corresponded from 1934 onwards. As Tim Redman highlights, their correspondence “was one of the richest of Pound’s fascist period.”11 Like Pound, Por not only published articles in Rossoni’s La Stirpe and Regime Corporativo, but he also authored one of the first full-length monographs on Fascism. Just a year after Mussolini’s Fascists marched on Rome in 1922, the English translation of Por’s Fascism was published in London. Pound’s praise of Por and Rossoni as superior “Corporate State fellows” mirrors Por’s endorsement of Rossoni in the book, “The Corporations are the economic, productive side of Fascism.”12 ortodossia praecox: (L.) “premature orthodoxy,” a play on Dementia praecox. La vera moneta è oro: (It.) “The real coin (currency) is gold.” Seven Heretics (“Tomorrow’s Money”): Cf. note GK 46. The Canonist doctrine of the just price: The Canonists advocated the Aristotelian concept of “just price,” or exchange on the basis of the cost of labor, through most of early Christian Europe. With the advent of the Reformation, Canonist economic doctrine collapsed.13 In an article published in the Rassegna Monetaria of May/June 1937, Pound traces the origins of Canonist economics to Saint Ambrogio and its development to Saint Antonino of Florence.14 The VOU club: Cf. notes GK 137–38.

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the Vegh: The Vegh Quartet, founded by the Hungarian violinist Sándor Végh (1912–97).15 Palotai, Halmos: Cellist Vilmos Palotai (1904–72), one of the members of the New Hungarian Quartet, which included its founding members: Végh, the violinist Lászlo Halmos (b. 1909), and the violist Dénes Koromzay (1913–2001) (cf. note GK 135). Egon Heath: Literary reviewer in the 1930s for the London weekly Time and Tide, to which Pound also contributed occasionally, along with a number of Britain’s most prominent writers (cf. note GK 134). my A B C: ABC of Reading (cf. note GK 148). De Schloezer’s Strawinsky: Cf. note GK 114. Minnesingers: Twelfth- and thirteenth-century German poetsingers of “Minne” (courtly love).

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Butlerism, the little Nicky Flunkies: Another gibe at the president of Columbia University, Nicholas Murray Butler (cf. notes GK 165, 238). Abelard went to Paris and defeated his precursor: Peter Abélard (1079–1142), controversial French scholar, dialectician, and master of the cathedral school of Notre Dame in Paris, where he eventually set out to discredit his master, William of Champeaux (c.1070–1122), and steal his students. In time, William grew weary of Abélard’s tactics and retired.1 George H. Tinkham: (1870–1956), U.S. House of Representatives member from Massachusetts (1915–43). The Republican Representative corresponded extensively with Pound from 1933 to 1940. The two men first met in Venice in 1936 at the Excelsior Hotel at the Lido and again in Washington, D.C. in 1939. Given Pound’s endorsement of Tinkham’s “cinema technique,” an exposé of the mechanism behind the political theatrics of “tyrants and bleeders,” it is ironic that in a letter to the congressman in 1936 Pound praises Mussolini’s “great triumph” of defying England and the League of Nations.2 Like the Italian dictator, Tinkham also opposed the League of Nations (and campaigned to keep the U.S. out of it). In 1939, Pound would write to the Boston Herald to put Tinkham forward as a candidate for the Presidency.3 Tinkham appears several times in The Cantos as “Uncle [or “Unkle”] George.”4 modus bene vivendi: (L.) “mode of living” or “way of life.” distich: A poetic couplet. The bust outlasts the throne: Cf. note GK 152. In the usury system . . . every thousand men shd. maintain a musician: Cf. Thomas Jefferson in The Cantos,

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The bounds of American fortune Will not admit the indulgence of a domestic band of Musicians, yet I have thought that a passion for music Might be reconciled with that economy which we are Obliged to observe. (21/97) Gershwin and Puccini: George Gershwin (1898–1937), American composer, most closely associated with popular music of the early twentieth century, and Italian opera composer Giacomo Puccini (cf. note GK 154–55).5 As Fernand L. says “c’est autre chose”: Fernand Léger (cf. note GK 145), “that’s different.” 172 Kant, Hegel, Marx come out in OGPU: As Pound suggests, the philosophy and political thought of these German icons arguably informed the creation of the much-feared Soviet secret police, OGPU (Unified State Political Administration), whose earlier incarnation, the “Cheka,” was a key instrument of the Red Terror, responsible for killing some 140,000 people.6 Leibniz: Cf. note GK 50. 172–73 New Economy in England: The 1935 series, Pamphlets on the New Economics, was published by Stanley Nott, who brought out, among other titles, Social Credit and the War on Poverty, by the Very Rev. Hewlett Johnson (1874–1966), Dean of Canterbury.7 173 Butchart’s collection on “Money”: Cf. note GK 46. the Witenagemot: Or “meeting of wise men,” the general council of the Anglo-Saxon kings.8 174 1865: i.e., the end of the American Civil War, begun in 1861.

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Eliot . . . attending to fools: As editor of the Criterion, “a recruiting ground for potential Faber authors,” as Jason Harding observes, Eliot “carefully cultivated and advised several generations of writers,” many of whom the famously prickly Pound would no doubt have considered “fools.”1 Writing in The Little Review twenty years earlier, Pound had chastised Poetry likewise for its “unflagging courtesy to a lot of old fools and fogies whom I should have told to go to hell tout pleinement and bonnement.”2

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Dr Johnson’s London . . . alteration”: Eliot wrote an introductory essay for the 1930 edition of Samuel Johnson’s “London: A Poem” and “The Vanity of Human Wishes,” published in London by Frederic Etchells and Hugh Macdonald. In the quoted excerpt, Eliot praises the originality of both Johnson and the Irish poet Oliver Goldsmith (1730–74) for having “used the form of Pope beautifully, without ever being mere imitators.”1 Anatole France’s conscious process: French novelist, poet, and critic, Anatole France (1844–1924) was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1921. In La Révolte des anges (The Revolt of the Angels) (1914), France’s fictional painter, Monsieur Gaétan, describes the technique of the French Romantic painter, Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863), in terms analogous to Pound’s idea of France’s own “conscious process”: “I saw Delacroix engaged on this work. Impassioned but anxious, he modelled feverishly, scraped out, re-painted unceasingly; his mighty hand made childish blunders, but the thing is done with the mastery of a genius and the inexperience of a schoolboy. It is a marvel how it holds.”2 Arthur Symons . . . praised Whistler: Pound paraphrases Symons’s Studies in Seven Arts (1906) (cf. note GK 71). In a chapter on the painter James Whistler (cf. note GK 110), Symons posits that in none of the artist’s pursuits “does he try to follow a fine model or try to avoid following a model. He sees each thing in its own way, within its own limits.”3 See nations slowly wise . . . everlasting debt: From Johnson’s The Vanity of Human Wishes (1749).4

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A Companion to Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur Gautier’s name: Théophile Gautier (1811–72), French poet, playwright, art critic, and one of the main exponents of the Aestheticist and proto-modernist doctrine of l’art pour l’art (“art for art’s sake”), a manifesto for the autonomy of art and the inseparability of form and content in its production.5 Bernard (gentil): Pierre-Joseph Bernard (1708–75), French poet, dramatist, and librettist. He achieved fame with his libretto Castor and Pollux, set to music by the Baroque composer Jean-Philippe Rameau (1683–1764). The libretto followed Voltaire’s ideal to reform lyric tragedy.6 “The bust outlasts the throne . . . the value of being undazzled: Cf. note GK 152. Pound’s “poeic, the making” hearkens to the Greek ποιεῖν (poiein, “to make”), the root of poetry. The distinction he draws between “positive” and “negative” may be properly understood as philosophical categories, as expounded by the German philosopher Friedrich Schelling (1775–1854). In negative philosophy, reason correlates only with itself, while in positive philosophy it enters into relation with reality.7 Pope and Johnson therefore represent the Enlightenment privileging of reason, while Dobson’s tribute to the permanence of art (“The bust outlasts the throne”) is “positive” in the sense of being more “real” than ephemeral social institutions and conventions. As Pound’s footnote to this page suggests, Pope’s youthful imitation of ­Chaucer’s The Hous of Fame, recast as The Temple of Fame (1715), also ­constitutes a “positive” or poeic mode of poetic creation. Pius XI: Cf. note GK 76. Gongorism: Named after the Spanish poet Luis de Góngora (1561–1627), Gongorism was the principal literary Baroque style, with embellished and inflated language aimed at a cultured audience.8 Madame Bovary: Novel by Flaubert (cf. note GK 49). W. Carlos Williams . . . Kitasono: Cf. notes GK 137–38, 139. Pietro Leopoldo’s cabinet: Cf. note GK 30.

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Jonson (without the h): Ben Jonson (1572–1637), English Renaissance dramatist, lyric poet, and critic. Pound’s low opinion of Eliot’s essay on Jonson accords with the latter poet’s own idea that “no critic has succeeded in making [Jonson] appear pleasurable or even interesting.”9 Metastasio: Pietro Metastasio (1698–1782), Italian poet and celebrated librettist. 180–81 the Whistler show in 1910 . . . Blake’s fanatic designs: In 1910, the Metropolitan Museum of Art mounted a small retrospective exhibit of oils and pastels by Whistler. Pound contrasts the “real wisdom” of Whistler’s paintings with the “fanatic designs” created by the Romantic poet and painter, William Blake (1757–1827). Laurence Binyon, albeit much less harshly than Pound, also flags Blake’s frequent preoccupation with “images of oppression, and torment, and desolation.”10 181 The distressing Rousseau . . . ending with Whitman: Pound finds the philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78) “distressing” along the same lines as T. E. Hulme, who traces the roots of Romanticism to Rousseau. In his influential essay “Romanticism and Classicism,” Hulme argues that Rousseau taught the Romantics that the natural goodness of humanity is suppressed by “bad laws and customs,” concluding that “this is what made them think that something positive could come out of disorder.”11 Pound is much kinder to the American poet Walt Whitman (1819–92), as evinced in “A Pact.” In the poem, Pound recants his former aversion to Whitman, acknowledges poetic kinship with his predecessor, and concedes, “It was you that broke the new wood.”12 In other words, it was Whitman’s pioneering use of free style verse in Leaves of Grass (1855) that paved the way for the vers libre of the Anglo-American avant-garde. Pound expresses a similar point in his essay “What I feel about Walt Whitman.” Acknowledging the American bard as his “spiritual father,” Pound admits, “I read him (in many parts) with

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A Companion to Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur acute pain, but when I write of certain things I find myself using his rhythms.”13 Tom Jefferson’s letters: While conducting research for Eleven New Cantos (1934) in the early 1930s, Pound spent a considerable amount of time reading the John Adams–Thomas Jefferson correspondence, as well as Jefferson’s correspondence found in the twenty-volume Lipscomb–Bergh edition of The Writings of Thomas Jefferson.14 “No man has a natural right to be a money-lender save him who has money to lend”: This is the twelfth of the sixteen Jefferson “doctrines” that Pound compiles in Jefferson and/or Mussolini (1935).15 Leone Vivante: (1887–1970), Italian idealist philosopher, whom Pound knew personally and whose Note sopra la originalità del pensiero (1925) he cites in his essay on Confucius and Mencius in the Criterion of July 1938.16 Eliot recommends Vivante’s book to the English critic I. A. Richards (1893–1979) in a letter of 1926.17 Perchè vuol mettere le sue idee in ordine?: Cf. note GK 105. Gli indifferenti non hanno mai fatto la storia: (It.) “The indifferent have never made history.” Mussolini coined the maxim in a speech to operai (“workers”) in Milan on October 6, 1934.18 “pragmatic pig of a world”: A remembered fragment from Yeats’s “Blood and the Moon,” where the poet references the theory by Anglo-Irish philosopher and Anglican bishop, George Berkeley (1685–1753), whereby the material world exists only insofar as our senses can perceive it.19 Pound also alludes to the poem in The Cantos (79/507). Mencken: Henry Louis Mencken (1880–1956), arguably the most widely known and accomplished American journalist-author of the twentieth century, with thirty-one books published and a career as editorial writer, columnist, and editor for magazines and daily newspapers, from the Smart Set

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and the American Mercury magazines to the New York Evening Mail.20 Beginning in 1914, Pound maintained a four-decadelong correspondence with Mencken, often entailing epistolary quarrels, especially over politics.21

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Haydn’s melodic line up to Mozart’s: Austrian classical composer Joseph Haydn (1732–1809) greatly revered Mozart’s prodigious talent. In 1785, Mozart dedicated to the esteemed elder composer six quartets for violin, viola, and cello, known as the “Haydn quartets.”1 Pound prized melody foremost among the elements of music, above harmony, tonality, and form. “The modern musician says he can’t hear a melody till it’s harmonized,” he inveighs in Antheil and the Treatise on Harmony—“This is utter atrophy . . . “DAMN it all, the melody contains the root of the matter” (cf. note GK 365–66).2 Bartok: Cf. note GK 134–35. “And pause a while from letters to be wise”: Paraphrase of a couplet in Johnson’s The Vanity of Human Wishes, “Deign on the passing World to turn thine Eyes, / And pause awhile from Learning to be wise.”3 Stendhal: Pseudonym of Marie-Henri Beyle (1783–1842), French novelist much admired by Pound. In “How to Read,” Pound highlights Stendhal’s most celebrated novels, Le rouge et le noir (1830) and La chartreuse de Parme (1839), alongside Flaubert’s novels, as prose touchstones for poets.4 Don Juan: Epic comedy composed by the Romantic English poet Lord Byron (1788–1824). Published in stages from 1819 to 1824, Don Juan is a long poem in ottava rima, divided into seventeen cantos.5 You can’t Goya and Ambrogio Praedis at the same time: Cf. note GK 28. Pius’ last encyclical (against communism): Pope Pius XI issued this encyclical in Rome on March 19, 1937, denouncing the “imminent danger” of “bolshevistic and atheistic

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communism, which aims at upsetting the social order and at undermining the very foundations of Christian civilization” (cf. note GK 76).6 The genius of Mussolini . . . crisis not IN but OF the system: Mussolini proposed this interpretation of the Depressionera economic crisis in a speech to 25,000 members of the Partito Nazionale Fascista (PNF) on October 16, 1932 at Piazza Venezia in Rome, marking the first decade of Italian Fascism: O questa è una crisi ciclica “nel” sistema e sarà risolta; o è una crisi “del” sistema, ed allora siamo davanti a un trapasso da un’epoca di civiltà ad un’altra. (“Either this is a cyclical crisis ‘in’ the system and will be resolved, or it is a crisis ‘of ’ the system, in which case we are facing a transition from an era of civilization to another”).7

Prohibition amendment in the U.S.: The Eighteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which prohibited the manufacture, transportation, or sale of intoxicating beverages. It was ratified in January 1919 and repealed in February 1933, when Congress approved the Twenty-first Amendment, in effect overturning the old.8 186–87 Nous avons le génie pour la mauvaise organisation: (Fr.) “We have a knack for poor organization.” 187 “papiers”: (Fr.) “Papers,” or “documents.” una “scroada”, das heist Schweineri, scroferia!: ItalianGerman dialect expression, which Pound probably overheard in Liguria or elsewhere in northern Italy. The German phrase in standard form is “das heißt Schweinerei” (“that is, a mess”). “Scrofa,” Italian for “sow,” and “Schwein,” German for “pig,” suggest that “scroada” would be the dialect equivalent of “Schweinerei,” literally, “piggishness.” It is noteworthy that Schweinerei may also be translated as “rascality,” which is in

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When the Lusitania was sunk: A German U-20 submarine torpedoed the Cunard Line R.M.S. Lusitania on May 7, 1915. Of the more than 1,000 lives lost to the sea, 128 were American. The sinking is commonly credited with hastening America’s entry into the First World War.1 Pound’s near-certainty that the Lusitania “carried munitions to kill Germans” was a widely circulated idea, which was also exploited by the German foreign office to justify the sinking.2 Chas. Ricketts: Charles Ricketts (1866–1931), English painter, stage designer, Pre-Raphaelite follower, and Yeats’s friend.3 Morgan ideology: John Pierpont (“J. P.”) Morgan (1837– 1913), American financier and scion of the polemical Morgan banking dynasty. As Ron Chernow sums up (with Poundian overtones), their detractors saw the family as tyrannical hypocrites who intimidated companies, colluded with foreign powers, and wheedled America into war for profit.4 When Isaac Singer invented his sewing machine: As documents from the U.S. Patent Office show, American inventor Isaac M. Singer (1811–75) invented and patented a sewing machine in 1851, which, as Pound suggests, built on Singer’s earlier experiments. The patent itself was eventually issued in 1856.5 It is volitionism: The key points in the anti-materialist “system of values” to which Pound alludes are spelled out in his “Volitionist Economics” (1934), a handbill synthesizing Douglasite and Gesellian principles (cf. note GK 250). He would stress its significance further by featuring the phrase, “Volitionist Economics,” on the title page of Jefferson and/or Mussolini.6

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A Companion to Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur Pius XI . . . Pio Nono and his cronies: During his papacy from 1846 to 1878, Pius IX (1792–1878) was widely vilified as a reactionary and anti-nationalist for opposing Italian unification. In contrast, the anticommunism of Pius XI facilitated the Church’s rapprochement with the Fascist government after Mussolinni came to power in October 1922, just nine months after Pius XI’s election to the papacy in February, a position he held until his death in 1939 (cf. note GK 76).7 L’art religieux est mort?: (Fr.) “Religious art is dead?” Gourmont says as much in La Culture des idées (1900): “Tout d’abord, puisqu’il n’y a pas aujourd’hui d’art religieux, la tentative d’union entre la religion et l’art ne pouvait se faire qu’au moyen de l’archéologie” (“First, since there is no religious art today, the attempted union between religion and art could only be accomplished through archeology”).8 M. told me Surrealism was not an art movement but a moral discipline: Juan Ramón Masoliver (1910–97), Spanish Surrealist, critic, translator, and for a time Pound’s personal secretary in Rapallo.9 the gang now ruling England: The unexpurgated GK is considerably more caustic: “the gang of punks, pimps and cheap dudes now ruling England.” Lady L.: Lady Low (?). In the nineteen teens, Lady Anne Penelope Harriet Angela Low was a close friend of Oliva Shakespear’s, the mother of Pound’s then-fiancée, Dorothy. Lady Low hosted an informal salon at her home near Kensington Gardens, in central London, where Pound gave lectures before the First World War.10 H. J.: Henry James (cf. note GK 31). 1908 to ’11: In 1908, the twenty-three-year-old Pound arrived in London by way of Gibraltar and Venice, where he published his first book of poetry, A Lume Spento.11 Writing to Williams in 1909, Pound calls London “Gomorrah” and says that there

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is no town like it “to make one feel the vanity of all art except the highest.”12 I wd. set up the statue of Aphrodite again over Terracina: Pound reiterates this statement in “Credo” (1930), “Given the material means I would replace the statue of Venus on the cliffs of Terracina,” on the Gulf of Gaeta, an inlet of the Tyrrhenian Sea.13 The trope recurs in The Cantos (34/195, 74/454–55, 91/630). However, as Liebregts points out, “there never has been a statue nor a temple of Venus in the region of Terracina. What has been found are the ruins of a temple of Jupiter, and one dedicated to the pre-Roman goddess Feronia on Mount Circeo.”14 B. M.: Benito Mussolini. hoggers of harvest: Cf. note GK 30. 191–92 Communism . . . chicken run: In his eulogy for A. R. Orage, published in the Criterion of April 1935, just a few months after Orage’s death in November, Pound anticipates his own diatribe against Communism in GK, “Marx failed to realise sufficiently the root difference between property and capital; property a possession; capital a claim on other men’s work, often savagely enforceable.”15 192 “Shakespeare never repeats”: From the “Illustrative Comments” of Howard Staunton’s 1858 edition of The Plays of Shakespeare, albeit out of context. Staunton claims that the Bard “never repeats himself unnecessarily.”16 Lope de Vega or Vivaldi: Cf. notes GK 28, 148. Brancusi’s “Toutes mes choses datent de quinze ans”: Brancusi’s testament to the difficulty of producing great art also headlines Pound’s epigraph to the postcript of his 1929 revised edition of The Spirit of Romance,   Toutes mes choses datent de quinze ans. Je peux commencer une chose nouvelle tous les jours, mais finir . . . ?       —Brancusi (in conversation.)17

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A Companion to Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur Lucretius on Nature: Cf. note GK 119. Stendhal attacked . . . fustian “à la Louis XIV”: Stendhal asks in a missive of January 1, 1823, “Qui nous délivrera de Louis XIV?” (“Who will deliver us from Louis XIV?”). He pans contemporary French writers for making “un point de doctrine de soutenir le genre à la Louis XIV” (“a point of doctrine to support the genre à la Louis XIV”), by which he means the reactionary tendency in French letters to indulge in the “fustian,” to borrow Pound’s term, excesses embodied by the extravagant “Sun King” (1638–1715). In Souvenirs d’égotisme (1892), Stendhal mocks his compatriots likewise as “un peuple étiolé par deux cents ans de Louis XIV” (“a people enfeebled by two hundred years of Louis XIV”).18 (teste scriptore): (L.) “according to the writer,” or “testimony of the writer.” Binyon’s translation of the Inferno: Cf. note GK 23. neither Apollo nor Minerva: While in Greek mythology Apollo was the venerated Olympian god of poetry, prophecy, music, archery, and healing, in later hellenized Roman culture Minerva was accorded a similar status, becoming the goddess of the arts, sciences, and culture.19

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There is no mystery about the Cantos, they are the tale of the tribe: The source for Pound’s oft-quoted label for The Cantos is an address Kipling delivered at the Royal Academy Dinner in 1906. He also employs the phrase in a letter of April 1937 to John Lackay Brown, signaling the importance of pulling off his great poetic experiment “as reading matter, singing matter, shouting matter, the tale of the tribe.” In composing The Cantos Pound hoped to embody Kipling’s conception of the artist’s task of articulating at a fundamental level, as Michael André Bernstein puts it, “the common aspirations, ethical beliefs and unifying myths” of his era.1 Malatesta cantos: Cantos 8–11. Monte dei Paschi: Founded in 1472, the Banca Monte dei Paschi is the oldest bank in the world and presently heads the Gruppo Montepaschi, the third largest Italian banking group. The bank’s revenue came directly from the grazing rights to the paschi, or pastures, near Siena, and from the agricultural production of the land. Hence, as a financial index of “the abundance of nature,” as Pound states here, the Monte is the antithesis of usury’s animus contra naturam, “against nature” (cf. notes GK 15, 281). The Monte is the chief concern of Cantos 42 and 43, with the earlier Canto underscoring the Sienese bank’s mission to lend and “receive licitly money / at moderate and legitimate interest” (42/210). Narciso Mengozzi, Pound’s primary source for the history of the Monte dei Paschi, lays further emphasis on the bank’s aim “to improve the moral and material welfare of the working classes” (al miglioramento morale e al benessere material delle classi lavoratrici).2

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A Companion to Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur “stinking puritan”: American Creoles and Southerners often directed this pejorative phrase at their Northern foes, particularly in the post-Civil War period.3 Comstockery: “Excessive opposition to, or censorship of, supposed immorality in art or literature; prudery.”4 in such a manner that I can’t print what he says without danger of libel: In lieu of this clause, the unexpurgated GK reads, “Cosmo is probably the wickedest man who ever sat in the seat of St. Augustine.” Faber’s concern with potential libel action from printing the original statement was well warranted—Pound is referring to William Cosmo Gordon Lang of Lambeth (1864–1945), First Baron, Archbishop of Canterbury from 1928 to 1942, a formidable figure in the British establishment.5 Gli indifferenti non hanno mai fatto la storia: Cf. note GK 182. nitchevo: “The tendency to accept defeat or to do nothing.”6 Dr Rouse: Cf. note GK 71. “Culture: what is left after a man has forgotten all he set out to learn”?: Although this saying is often identified with Pound, its origin is uncertain. It appears almost verbatim in an article in The Nation of February 20, 1908.7 Cf. Gourmont’s “instinct”: The subject of Chapter 19 of Gourmont’s The Natural Philosophy of Love (1904), where he ascribes to instinct “the series of acts which tend to conserve the present condition of a species; and to intelligence, those which tend to modify that condition” (cf. note GK 133).8 Cui prodest: (L.) Fragment of a speech by Medea in the eponymous play by the Roman philosopher and tragedian, Lucius Annaeus Seneca (the Younger) (c.1 BCE–65 CE): cui prodest scelus, / is fecit (“Who gains by the crime / Did it”).9 No man knows the meaning of ANYTHING in any paper: In the unexpurgated GK, Pound explicitly names the newspapers, so that in lieu of “any paper” the original text features the “Times, Telegraph or any other paper.”

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vigliaccheria: (It.) “cowardice.” Winston’s nephew: Esmond Romilly (1918–41), a nephew of Winston Churchill. A committed anti-Fascist, Romilly traveled to Madrid in the fall of 1936 to join the International Brigades fighting on the Republican side against Franco’s Falangists.10 Gerhart M.: Gerhart Münch (cf. notes GK 60, 134–35, 148, 151–52). “great bass”: Cf. note GK 73. 198 Rubato: Italian for “robbed” or “stolen,” rubato or tempo rubato emerged in the first half of the eighteenth century as an expression in baroque vocal music to describe how specific note values may be altered for expressive purposes within a melody, even as the accompaniment maintains a strict rhythm. Eventually, the expression began to refer to rhythmic alterations in the tempo of the entire musical substance, its most common usage today.11 199 Strawinsky: Cf. notes GK 114, 251.12 café-tango composer B.: Unidentified. Frobenius’ anecdote: Cf. Frobenius’s advice to schoolteachers and directors, “die Begeisterungsfähigkeit der Jugend” (“the enthusiasm of the young”) must be channeled; “Man sollte sie erziehen” (“One should educate them”).13 if you use 64th notes or 32nds you can make more “funny shapes”: The visually arresting 64th note has four flags attached to its stem, while a 32nd has three. Neither the half note nor the quarter note sports any flags.14 Rummel: From 1910 to 1913, Rummel worked with Pound on setting to music Provençal poetry and a few of Pound’s own lyrics, including Three Songs of Ezra Pound for a Voice with Instrumental Accompaniment (1911) and Hesternae Roae: Serta II (1913) (cf. note GK 71).15 197

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Stevenson: More precisely, Stevenson’s maxim reads, “The man who cannot forgive any mortal thing is a green hand in life” (cf. note GK 133).1 Turgenev: Both quotes by Russian novelist Ivan Turgenev (1818–83) appear in his 1859 novel, A Nest of Gentlefolk (Дворянское гнездо). In a footnote to his essay on Henry James, Pound cites Turgenev’s use of both Russian proverbs as exemplars of prose that attains “poetic intensity.”2 Kipling: Pound quotes from the beginning of Kipling’s “As Easy as A.B.C.” (1912), a utopian science fiction story about a world ruled by a cabal of technocrats in the year 2065 CE: “The A.B.C., that semi-elected, semi-nominated body of a few score persons, controls the Planet. Transportation is Civilisation, our motto runs. Theoretically we do what we please, so long as we do not interfere with the traffic and all it implies.”3 comedie des mœurs: (Fr.) “comedy of manners.” Plato’s dialogues: In Book X of the Republic, Plato disallows Aristotle’s theory of the purgation or catharsis of pity and fear in tragedy, as Socrates tells Glaucon that after “feeding fat the emotion of pity [in the tragic theatre], it is not easy to restrain it in our own sufferings.” In turn, the idea of “presenting individual character” in comedy, as Pound expresses it here, is also given short shrift by Plato, given that the “intense pleasure in buffooneries” on the comic stage would lead one to become a base “comedian in private.”4 Quintilian: Marcus Fabius Quintilianus (c.35/40–c.96 CE), Roman rhetorician from Spain and author of the most extensive compendium on classical rhetoric from Roman antiquity, Institutio Oratoria.5

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中: (zhong) ideogram meaning “mean” or “middle,” an allusion to a key component of Confucius’s “Doctrine of the Mean,” as articulated in the eponymous Confucian classic Chung Yung (Zhongyong, 中庸) (cf. note GK 17). Pound’s prefatory note to his translation of the book, published in 1947 as Chung Yung: The Unwobbling Pivot, presents the Confucian scholar Chu Hsi phonetisizing the ideogram as chung, signifying what is bent neither to one side nor to the other. The word yung signifies unchanging. What exists plumb in the middle is the just process of the universe and that which never wavers or wobbles is the calm principle operant in its mode of action.6

中 recurs in The Pisan Cantos (76/474, 77/484, 84/560). Klabund’s translations: Klabund, the pen name of German writer Alfred Henschke (1890–1928), published the most popular Chinese translations in Germany in the early twentieth century. Like Pound, he produced creative, loose poetic translations which he dubbed nachdichtungen (“after-poems” or free paraphrase).7 202 Pauthier: Cf. note GK 21. Judith Gautier: (1845–1917), French writer and avid orientalist, Gautier was fluent in Chinese, producing the first French translation of the works of renowned Chinese poets. Her novel Le dragon impérial (1868) became a bestseller. She was the daughter of Théophile Gautier (cf. note GK 178).8 my Cathay: Published in 1915, the book primarily features Pound’s translations of poems composed by Li Po (Rihaku) (cf. note GK 147). 202–3 von Morungen, Vogelweide and Hans Sachs . . . earlier verseart: Heinrich von Morungen (d.1222) was a German courtly troubadour (Minnesinger) whose graphic poetic imagery was largely grounded in the Romance lyric.9 As Pound suggests here,

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A Companion to Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur Morungen’s courtly dawn song was modeled after the Provençal alba (“dawn”), the first of the German Minnesänger to do so.10 His more famous contemporary, Walther von der Vogelweide (c.1170–1230), also composed courtly love songs (Minnelieden) about the painful joys of unrequited love for a highborn woman (hôhe minne). Vogelweide’s Sangspruch—songs of a political, didactic, religious, and personal nature—offer snapshots into the turbulent political events of the Holy Roman Empire. Although over 600 stanzas in about three dozen manuscripts are extant, only five of his melodies survive. His “Unter der Linden” is the most widely known German lyric.11 Hans Sachs (1494–1576) was a Nuremberg Meistersinger (“master singer” or poet-musician), the star of Wagner’s opera Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (1868), and a shoemaker by trade. Sachs’s Das Ständebuch (The Book of Trades) was published in Frankfurt in 1568. It features 114 woodcut illustrations by Jost Amman (1539–1591), each one accompanied by colloquial lyrics in rhyming couplets about a range of trades. Gerhart Münch gave Pound the 1934 facsimile edition of the book excerpted here.12 In Canto 75, we find the pianist-composer “with the Ständebuch of Sachs in yr/ luggage” (75/470). The passages quoted in GK conflate two poems, “The Singers” (Die Singer) and “Three Viol Players” (Drey Geiger), as well as the first couplet of a third poem, “The Luthier” (Der Lautenmacher). Theodore K. Rabb translates the stanzas as follows: A lively song for all we bring, Which you’ll hear from voices sing— Soprano, tenor, alto, bass— To a courtly text, with grace. Our harmony is close and sweet: Sounds that you will find a treat, And lift your heart the whole day long. Amphion invented song.

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So artfully on strings we play, All your sadness goes away. Our skill makes sounds both fine and sweet, Fit for noble dancing feet, Whose quiet steps in courts are bred— Love they win as love they spread. And when with small steps dances start, Joy must fill one’s soul and heart. The lutes I long have built have fine Workmaship made out of pine.13

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The “translation of the Canticles” to which Pound alludes is likely Das Hohelied (1847), a widely circulated German paraphrase of Solomon’s “Canticles” or Song of Songs by Gustav Jahn (1818–88). The Canticles exerted a strong influence on the medieval love song.14 Anna M. May titled her English translation of Das Hohelied, published in 1865, Spiritual Songs from the Canticles, from the German of Gustav Jahn. “German tonkunst” refers to the emergence of Tonkunst (“musical art”) in the eighteenth century to signify music as an art form rather than as a fickle and ephemeral form of popular culture.15 Guillaume Apollinaire had called Frobenius “father”: There is no evidence that the French avant-garde poet, Guillaume Apollinaire (1880–1918), either stole any artifacts from the Musée du Trocadéro in Paris or knew about Frobenius’s anthropological studies, a tale Pound nonetheless would retell Wyndham Lewis in 1949.16 Once a cultural vortex breaks: Cf. notes GK 63 ff. Weltliteratur: (Ger.) “World Literature.” Without a rigorous technique, NO renaissance: Cf. Pound’s statement twenty years earlier in “Credo”:

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A Companion to Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur It is certain that the present chaos will endure until the Art of poetry has been preached down the amateur gullet, until there is such a general understanding of the fact that poetry is an art and not a pastime; such a knowledge of technique; of technique of surface and technique of content, that the amateurs will cease to try to drown out the masters.17

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The Lioness warning her cubs (vide infra): Cf. note GK 209–10. Vide infra is Latin for “see below.” Qui dira les torts de la platitude / Et qui dira ses droits?: Pound appears to be riffing off a line in “Ars Poetica,” a poem by the French Symbolist poet Paul Verlaine (1844–96): “Ô qui dira les torts de la Rime?” (“Rhyme! Who will its infamies revile?”).18 In keeping with this, Pound’s quip reads in translation, “Platitude—who will its infamies revile / And who will declare its rights?” CONFUCII CHI-KING / SIVE / LIBER CARMINUM: Pound reproduces the typography of the title page of Père Lacharme’s Chi-King, Sive Liber Carminum, a Latin translation of Shī-King, the Confucian Odes (cf. note GK 121). Published in 1830, the manuscript dates from around 1733, as James Legge reveals in his translation of the Odes.19 Penelope web: In Homer’s Odyssey, Penelope, the longsuffering wife of Odysseus, sets up a great loom in the royal halls to weave a web, promising her suitors that once she finishes it she will decide which one of them to marry. Unbeknownst to them, each night she unweaves the web, thereby continually deferring her decision.20 P. Lacharme ex soc. Jesu. . . . adest sub curru: Père (“Father”) Lacharme was a Jesuit missionary in China. In presenting a brief historiography of the book, Pound is loosely translating from the prefatory remarks in Latin by Julius Mohl, the Parisian editor of Lacharme’s Chi-King. The verbatim excerpt in

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Latin is from the first paragraph of Ode III (Book I, Chapter XV).21 Pound’s 1954 translation of the passage reads, From the long East Mount campaign we came west, under a drizzle of rain nor believed the news or their oaths, but to be free of the gag and of army clothes. Worms had filmed over the mulberry trees, under the stars we guardsmen slept lonely, under our cars.22 Kong lieu . . . before the Tcheou came to Empire, and so forth: Direct translation from Lacharme’s explanatory notes to Ode III.23

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Brantôme: Pierre de Bourdeille, Seigneur et Abbé de Brantôme (c.1540–1614), French writer of exemplary historical biographies, collected in Mémoires de Messire Pierre de Bourdeilles (1665–66). Brantôme’s appeal for Pound may be attributed in part to his belief in the stylistic virtues of clarity and precision in prose.1 McKail’s Latin Literature: Historical survey by classical scholar, literary critic, and poet John William Mackail (1859– 1945). Published in 1895, it traces the origins of Latin poetry and prose. Lionel Johnson’s Post Liminium: Written by the poet and literary scholar Lionel Pigot Johnson (1867–1902), the collection comprises essays and critical papers on a range of English and European literary and historical figures and subjects, beginning with Walter Pater. Fontenelle: Cf. note GK 31. Landor: Cf. note GK 84. Bayle’s Dictionnaire nor Voltaire’s: i.e., Bayle’s Dictionnaire historique et critique (1695–97) and Voltaire’s Dictionnaire philosophique (1764) (cf. notes GK 50, 54). what I attempted in How to Read or in the A B C of Reading: The first edition of How to Read was published in London in December 1931. ABC of Reading appeared in print three years later “to meet the need for fuller and simpler explanation of the method outlined” in the earlier book, which Pound admits may be seen as a “controversial pamphlet.”2 In a February 1937 letter, Pound outlines the structure of his nascent manuscript for GK to F. V. Morley, one of the directors at Faber,

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characterizing its literary component as a “restatement” (but not a “repeat”) of his earlier two books.3 Pitigliano: Medieval town in Tuscany, also known as La Piccola Gerusalemme (Little Jerusalem) for harboring a sizable community of Jewish emigrés seeking refuge from the restrictions imposed by neighboring independent feudal enclaves, from around the end of the fifteenth century onward.4 At the beginning of Canto 10, Pound quotes loosely translated fragments from a letter Aldobrandino Orsino, Count of Pitigliano, sent to Sigismundo Malatesta, who had mounted a siege on behalf of Siena to retake strongholds seized by Pitiligano (10/42).5 wumplets: Diminutive plural of “wump,” “a foolish or feeble person.”6

34. ON ARRIVING AND NOT ARRIVING 209 Edgar Wallace: Cf. note GK 99–100. 209–10 Eckart v. Sydow’s admirable anthology . . . 1904: The full title of the anthology edited by German art historian and ethnologist Eckart von Sydow (1885–1942) is Dichtungen der Naturvölker: religiöse, magische und profane Lyrik (Poetry by Primitive People: Religious, Magical and Profane Lyrics), published in 1935 by Phaidon Press in Vienna. Sydow’s source for “The Lioness Warns Her Cubs,” the Sudanese praise song Pound translates from the German, is linguist Rudolf Prietze’s collection of proverbs and songs in the ajami language of the Hausa people of Sudan, Haussa-Sprichwörter und HaussaLieder (1904).1

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35. PRAISE SONG OF THE BUCK-HARE 211–13 I am the buck-hare, I am, . . . Teleuten, Sibirien: Found in von Sydow’s Dichtungen der Naturvölker, the praise song Pound translates here originated with the Teleuts, a Turkic ethnic group of southern Siberia, translated into German by Wilhelm Radloff as Des Hasen Loblied in the first volume of Proben der Volksliteratur der türkischen Stämme Süd-Sibiriens (I–VIII, 1866–99), a study of oral traditions in Central Asia.1

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36. TIME-LAG Van Buren’s autobiography: Cf. note GK 30. Père Lacharme’s latin . . . Mohl’s edition: Cf. note GK 205. 214–15 Regio quam alluit . . . he is beautiful like a gem: Pound quotes the Latin passage from the second Confucian ode in Book IX (Part I) of Lacharme’s Chi-King, and translates nearly the entire ode.1 The 1891 English translation of the Shī-King, which Pound derides “an infamy” here, is probably the metrical translation by William Jennings, who titles the ode “Official Niggards.” Jennings ends the ode with the only line that Pound omits, “Sure, not the Clan-Recorder is with them!”2 Legge translates the line as, “But, perhaps, he is not what the superintendent of the ruler’s relations should be.”3 215 O mus ingens . . . meum comedere: The first line of Ode 7, Book IX in Lacharme’s translation.4 Pound adds the exclamatory “O” at the beginning of the line, which in Legge’s translation reads, “Large rats! Large rats! / Do not eat our millet.”5 215–16 Dated U. of Penn. 1906 . . . original research: Pound earned an MA from the University of Pennsylvania in 1906, where he had hoped, as he recalls in Canto 29, to pursue “a career with honor / To step in the tracks of his elders” (29/144). He did obtain a Harrison Fellowship aimed at funding research toward his doctoral dissertation. However, as implied here, Pound’s doctoral bid met with fierce opposition from Pennsylvania faculty (cf. note GK 61).6 216 Nulli curae tibi fuerunt res meae: “And you have not been willing to show any regard for us,” from Ode 7, Book IX in Lacharme’s translation.7 214

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I said to Frobenius . . . invented a mechanism etc. . . .”: Pound is recalling his invitation to Frobenius to attend the first performance of Antheil’s opera, Transatlantic (cf. note GK 71). By referring to Frobenius as a Geheimrat (privy councillor), Pound acknowledges the anthropologist’s prominence. Ito: Michio Ito (c.1892–1961), Japanese Noh dancer, who performed in Yeats’s play At the Hawk’s Well in 1916 and rented Pound’s Church Walk flat in London, where he most likely saw the photo of the Noh actor Umewara Minoru (1828–1909) on Pound’s mantleshelf (cf. note GK 276). In Canto 77, Pound remembers Ito’s meeting with then-Prime Minister H. H. Asquith in 1914 (77/489).1 Bach, Lubek, Tielmann: Covering the Rapallo concerts of 1934 in Il Mare, Pound notes that Münch played preludes and fugues by Bach (cf. note GK 153), an intermezzo in six parts of Clavier Übung (1728) by Hamburg-based composer, organist, and teacher Vincent Lübeck (1654–1740), “followed by a Telemann masterpiece, a magnificent cantata (1725)” (cf. notes GK 60, 134–35, 151–52).2 Hence, “Tielmann” may refer to Georg Philipp Telemann (1681–1767), the most prolific German composer of the first half of the eighteenth century, whose chamber music also featured in the Rapallo programs of 1936.3 Pound’s spelling nonetheless also suggests Tielman Susato (c.1510–70), Dutch Renaissance composer, editor, and publisher. The Stammbuch, Minnelied: “The Stammbuch” is a misreading of Hans Sachs’s Das Ständebuch (The Book of Trades), while Minnelied refers to the German courtly love song (cf. note GK 202–3).

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A Companion to Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur Burns’ wish for a mirror: Allusion to the closing stanza of “To a Louse” by the Scottish poet Robert Burns (1759–96): “O wad some Pow’r the giftie gie us / To see oursels as others see us!”4

Section IV

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38. EDUCATION OR INFORMATION German Universities: By the early twentieth century, German universities were among the world’s top-ranked institutions, attracting many foreign students, including T. S. Eliot, who briefly attended a summer school at Marburg University before fleeing for London once the First World War broke out in August 1914.1 I wasted time . . . Lope’s plays: The “Gracioso” or clown in Lope de Vega’s plays is a stock character akin to the Shakespearean fool, who alternates between comic witticisms and serious sermonizing (cf. notes GK 28, 39).2 219–20 Elias Lowe’s story . . . arbres”: Elias Avery Lowe (1879–1969), American palaeographer. The source of Lowe’s anecdote is unknown to the editor. The hapless scientist pursued by a crocodile exclaims, “But no! But NO! Crocodiles do NOT climb trees.” 220 Bibliothèque Nationale: The National Library of France, in Paris. In the spring of 1931, Pound spent six weeks at the Bibliothèque Nationale conducting research on early American history, especially about John Adams, a material that would seminally inform his development of the Adams Cantos (62–71).3 221 my Cavalcanti: Pound’s opera (1931–1933) (cf. note GK 366). Edison: Cf. note GK 71. Luigi Valli’s Linguaggio Segreto: Il linguaggio segreto di Dante e dei “Fedeli d’Amore” (1928), by the literary critic and Dante scholar, Luigi Valli (1878–1931) (cf. note GK 294). 219

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the caeruleum coelum, the augustum coelum, etc.: “The azure heaven, the majestic heaven, etc.” In glossing the “celestial” or Neoplatonic tradition, Pound borrows the Latin phrase from Ode 6, Book IX (Part II) of Lacharme’s Chi-King.1 Legge translates the excerpted passage as “O distant and azure Heaven!”2 “The heaven . . . place of true knowledge”: Excerpts from the 1871 Oxford edition of Plato’s Phaedrus, where he describes “the dwelling of the gods,” a realm of pure forms.3 The second paragraph in quotation also launches Pound’s discussion of Dante’s Paradiso in The Spirit of Romance.4 It annoys Mr Eliot: At Harvard, Eliot had read Plato in the Greek. In a letter dated January 28, 1915, written from Oxford, where he had begun his doctoral studies on the English idealist philosopher F. H. Bradley (1846–1924), Eliot tells one of his former Harvard professors, J. H. Woods, that he is writing essays on Plato. Eliot reveals, however, that “in general philosophical discussion I did not often really ‘get anywhere’ with him, though this failure was due no doubt as much to my fatal disposition toward scepticism as to his Hegelianism.”5 “société anonyme”: Société Anonyme, Inc., an avant-garde art association founded in 1920 by Katherine S. Dreier, Marcel Duchamp, and Man Ray as America’s first experimental museum of contemporary art.6 Iamblichus . . . tou ton theon pyros: Iamblichus (c.245–325 CE) Neoplatonist philosopher of the Syrian school, author of De Mysteriis (On the Mysteries), where he avers that “the fire of the Gods, indeed, shines forth with an indivisible and ineffable light, and fills all the profundities of the world.”7 As Liebregts explains, “light is the Neoplatonic single principle from which

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A Companion to Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur the plurality of things derive.”8 Iamblichus’s light philosophy comes into view in Canto 5, “Iamblichus’ light, / the souls ascending” (5/17). Gemistus Plethon . . . His gods come from Neptune: The Marciana Library in Venice holds the autograph manuscript of Plethon’s 1540 treatise De Differentiis (On the Differences of Aristotle from Plato) (cf. note GK 2).9 Ficino’s sinecure, at old Cosimo’s expense: Cf. note GK 160. Porphyry: (c.234–c.305 CE), Syrian polymath, influential exponent of Neoplatonism, author of Life of Plotinus, and Iamblichus’s teacher. Porphyry’s Neoplatonism held sway over the western tradition until Eriugena translated the Dionysian corpus in the ninth century.10 Psellos: (1018–c.1078 CE), Byzantine Neoplatonic philosopher, author of Chronographia, an invaluable history of eleventh-century Byzantium.11 Canto 23 begins by quoting from Psellos’s De Omnifaria Doctrina, “‘Et omniformis.’ Psellos, ‘omnis / Intellectus est’” (“And every intellect is capable of assuming every shape”) (23/107).12 Hermes Trismegistus: Alleged author of the Hermetica, a body of work containing the Hermetic tradition. His writings emerged out of the syncretic, Hellenistic philosophy of nature, which itself was a collection of Platonic, Aristotelian, Stoic, and Pythagorean doctrines, interspersed with motifs from Egyptian mythology and themes derived from Jewish and Iranian sources.13 John Heydon: (1629–c.1670), English Neoplatonist, occultist, astrologer, and author of The Rosie Crucian (1660), The English Physitians Guide, or, A Holy Guide (1662), and The Harmony of the Worlds (1662), among other works.14 Heydon’s inclusion in GK among other Neoplatonic philosophers can be traced to Pound’s Ur-Canto 3 (1917), which invokes Heydon’s Holy Guide, “Let us hear John Heydon! / ‘Omniformis / Ominis intellectus est’— thus he begins, by spouting half of Psellus.”15

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In Canto 87, Heydon is associated with the famous Neoplatonic-Confucian axiom, “In nature are signatures / needing no verbal tradition, / oak leaf never plane leaf,” while in Canto 91 he appears as “Secretary of Nature” (87/593, 91/631). Se non è vero è ben trovato: Italian proverb, “Even if it is not true, it is well conceived.” 225–26 “Old Krore” (G. R. S. Mead) . . . to have arrived where they are”: George Robert Stow Mead (1863–1933), English Theosophist, Gnostic scholar, and editor of the London occultist quarterly review for the Quest Society, The Quest (1909–30). Before the First World War, the Society hosted meetings at the Kensington Town Hall with leading and emerging avantgarde artists and intellectuals, including Yeats, Pound, Hulme, Lewis, George Russell, and Arthur Symons.16 In the 1920s, Pound corresponded with Mead and was influenced by his occult thought. “Old Krore,” Pound’s unflattering nickname for Mead, alludes to his ties with Theosophy—“crore,” an Anglo-Indian term used to designate ten million, appeared often in Theosophical publications to signify multiplicity (e.g. “Everywhere was the Self in a crore of forms”).17 Mead was the personal secretary to Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (1831–91), founder of the Theosophical Society, and wrote a preface for her reference book, The Theosophical Glossary (1892). Mead’s comical quip on the inconsistency between the belief of so many people that they were Mary Queen of Scots in a past life and their much humbler station in their present life, as quoted in GK, helps to shed light on the same take on “metempsychosis” (reincarnation) in Canto 74, “but as Mead said: if they were, / what have they done in the interval, / eh, to arrive by metempsychosis at . . . .?” (74/466).

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Gautier’s Albertus: Published in 1832, Gautier’s long narrative poem Albertus ou l’âme et le péché, légende théologique marks a self-conscious aesthetic transition from the morbid Romanticism of his earlier verse to a rebellious affirmation of poetic autonomy and art for art’s sake (cf. note GK 178).1 Turgenev or James or Whistler or Picasso, had to know Paris: Cf. notes GK 200, 31, 110, 71, respectively. In 1914, Pound acknowledged the cultural vitality of the French capital, hailing it as “an intellectual and artistic vortex.”2 Camillo Cavour? Browning carried on from Landor: Cf. notes GK 76, 84, 287. Col. Jackson: Joseph Jackson, the “Old Colonel Jackson” quoted in Canto 80 complimenting Gaudier-Brzeska on the sculptor’s pledge to fight for France, while proposing to “cook for the armies of Ulster” despite his advanced age (80/524).3 Luke Ionides: (1837–1924), Anglo-Greek art patron and collector, and a lifelong friend of Whistler (cf. note GK 110).4 Palmerston: Henry John Temple, Third Viscount Palmerston (1784–1865), British Prime Minister from 1855 to 1858 and again from 1859 to 1864. Pound’s citing Palmerston as a benchmark of masculinity may be due to the politician’s brash disregard for Victorian mores and “cheerfully amoral private life.”5 Gosse’s generation: Edmund Gosse (1849–1928), English translator, literary historian, and critic. Gosse’s reputation suffered in his own time when his From Shakespeare to Pope (1885) was savaged by the literary critic John Churton Collins (1848–1908). In his book review, Collins exposed Gosse for not having read some of the books critiqued in the study.6

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Douglas had been in India: C. H. Douglas claimed to have been Chief Reconstruction Engineer for British Westinghouse Company in India, but the company has no record of his employment.7 Goeben: S.M.S. Goeben, a powerful dreadnought of the German Imperial Navy. In 1914, at the outbreak of the First World War, the battleship reached Constantinople after eluding an Allied chase, a prelude to the Ottoman Empire’s entry into the war on the side of the Central Powers.8 Carlo Delcroix: (1896–1977), Fascist leader of the Associazione nazionale dei mutilati e invalidi di guerra (ANMIG) (National Association for War Mutilated and Disabled) from 1926 to 1943. After an accident with a grenade in 1917, he lost his sight and the use of his hands.9 In 1928, he published a biography of Mussolini, Un uomo e il popolo. Pound’s mention of “the beginning of the Abyssinian acquisition” dates his meeting with Delcroix soon after Mussolini’s forces invaded Ethiopia (Abyssinia) on October 3, 1935. As in my letter to Muir: Edwin Muir (1887–1959), Scottish poet and literary critic. The letter to which Pound refers is perhaps the one he wrote to Muir on March 27, 1937, thanking him for reviewing one of his monetary works.10 my ex-Russian ex-General: i.e., Honor Goleyevsky (cf. note GK 34). Leo XIII: Gioacchino Vincenzo Raffaele Luigi (1810–1903), Pope Leo XIII from 1878 to 1903, established in 1886 the Istituto di Alta Letteratura, a higher institute for the study of the Latin, Greek, and Italian classics.11 the Lacharme version of the ODES: Cf. note GK 205. Salmasius’ De Modo Usurarum: Cf. note GK 30. french edtn. of Fracastorius: i.e., Syphilis, ou le Mal Vénérien, published in Paris in 1796, the French edition of the long poem originally in Latin, Syphilis, sive morbis gallicus (1530), by Italian poet, monk, and humanist Girolamo Fracastoro (1478–1553).

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A Companion to Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur the intelligent men with whom Leibniz wanted to keep in touch: Leibniz (cf. note GK 50) was a prolific letter writer. The collection of his manuscript papers at the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Bibliothek—Niedersächsische Landesbibliothek in Hanover, Germany, contains about 15,000 letters with 1,100 correspondents, including the eminent musicians Pound mentions here. the Leibniz-Bach episode: The “teutonic paideuma” whose origins Pound locates in the traffic of ideas between the famous German philosopher and the musician has a historical basis in the fact that Bach was closely associated with Lorenz Mizler (1711–78), a Baroque composer who was a follower of Leibniz and his pupil Christian Wolff. As John Butt argues, the philosophy of Leibniz (and Spinoza) coincides with the musical thought of Bach “like two perfectly-crafted clocks.”12 the Kreuzer . . . XIXth century messiness, blur, soup: Beethoven’s famous Kreutzer Sonata, Opus 47, for piano and violin, premiered in Vienna on May 24, 1803. An August 1805 review of the newly published sonata would anticipate Pound’s view that it marked the slither into the nineteenth century. While praising Beethoven’s “great genius,” the reviewer pulls no punches: “one must be possessed by a type of aesthetic or artistic terrorism or be won over to Beethoven to the point of blindess” not to see the sonata as “blatant proof ” of the artist’s “shift toward the greatest arbitrariness.”13 The work was further immortalized in the controversial novella, The Kreutzer Sonata (1889), by Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) and the 1901 painting, Kreutzer Sonata, by René François Xavier Prinet (1861–1946). von Morungen: Cf. note GK 202–3. 1653 Wm. Young’s sonatas printed in Innsbruck: William Young (d. 1662), English violist and chamber musician to Archduke Ferdinand Karl of Innsbruck from around 1650 until his death in 1662.14

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Stuartism: The Stuart period (1603–1714), which began with the peaceful accession of James VI of Scotland (1566–1625) to the English throne, culminated with the overthrow of the authoritarian King James II (1633–1701) in the Glorious Revolution of 1688, and ended with the death of Queen Anne (1665–1714).15 Pound’s contempt for “Stuartism” is evident in Canto 107, where “Jimmy Stuart” (i.e., James VI) is vilified as the “foulest” of scoundrels (107/778). the kaiser’s filth and the European bank-botching in 1914: The allusion to Kaiser Wilhelm II (1859–1941) implicates the German Emperor and King of Prussia from 1888 to 1918 as the principal architect of the First World War, while the “European bank-botching in 1914” is Pound’s shorthand for the devastating financial crisis that year, triggered by the approach of war. European banks responded by restricting withdrawals by depositors, among other moratoria, including the closure of stock exchanges. Nevertheless, these restrictions disrupted economic and commercial activity and exacerbated the crisis.16

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CONFUCIAN pedagogy . . . Have you studied the Rites?”: Paraphrase of Book XVI (Ji Shi, 季氏), Chapter XIII of the Analects (Lun Yü). In Pound’s own translation (cf. note GK 15), after quizzing Po-yu, Ch’an K’ang “retired saying delightedly: Asked one question and got to three things. I heard of the Odes, I heard of the Book of Rites, I heard that a proper man don’t nag his son.”1

42. GREAT BASS: PART TWO 233–34 The 60, 72, or 84, or 120 per minute is a BASS, or basis . . . a ¼ tone too high: Pound’s emphasis on “time-division” here is consistent with his theory of harmony in Antheil and the Treatise on Harmony. “The element most grossly omitted from treatises on harmony up to the present,” he affirms, “is the element of TIME. The question of the time-interval that must elapse between one sound and another if the two sounds are to produce a pleasing consonance or an interesting relation, has been avoided.”1 It is essential for the musician to gauge the “time-interval” properly by hearing both the time (duration) and pitch of a note. Pound enlists Dolmetsch to illustrate one of the ways in which this process can unfold in practice, After Dolmetsch tunes a clavichord he has slightly to untune it. Why? That is to say, the proportion of the different notes remains correct but each note is sounded on two strings, and these must not be in absolute accord. He says the waves “cut” each other and ruin the resonance (cf. notes GK 71, 73).2 234

revolutionary simpleton . . . chronological idiot: In Time and Western Man (1927), Wyndham Lewis writes, “Pound is not a vulgar humbug even in those purely propagandist activities, where, to my mind, he certainly handles humbug, but quite innocently, I believe. Pound is—that is my belief—a genuine naïf. He is a sort of revolutionary simpleton!”3 In Blasting and Bombardiering (1937), Lewis paints himself as a “chronological idiot” with “no feeling for history,” attributing his obtuseness

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there is a right speed for a piece or movement: Pound had made much the same argument in The New Age of January 3, 1918: The tempo of every masterwork is definitely governed; and not only the general tempo of the whole work, but the variations in speed, the tempo of individual passages, the time interval between particular notes and chords. The actual sound of a given note or chord needs a certain time to round itself out before the next sound is imposed or shot after it . . . The sense of the real tempo may be instinctive and incommunicable.1

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Towser: A stock name for a large dog or an energetic person.2 A. Waley: Arthur David Waley (1889–1966), Cambridgeeducated sinologist and translator of, among other works, The Nō Plays of Japan (1922) and The Analects of Confucius (1938). Pound met Waley in London during the First World War. Waley apparently found Pound’s translations of Li Po’s poetry in Cathay not up to par, retranslating several of the poems in a paper presented at the China Society at the School of Oriental Studies in London.3 POLLON D’ANTHRŌPON IDEN: Cf. note GK 99. The macron diacritic in “D’ANTHROPŌN” has been shifted incorrectly to the first “O.” The Homeric Epos: Homer’s epic poems, The Iliad and The Odyssey (cf. note GK 24). The Odes: Cf. note GK 121. Metamorphoses: Cf. note GK 149–50.

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A Companion to Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur Divina Commedia: Cf. note GK 2. Cocteau: Cf. note GK 93. Montaigne: Cf. note GK 23. With 309 concerti of Vivaldi unplayed, lying in Turin: Cf. note GK 148. In 2012, a new manuscript version dated to 1714 of Vivaldi’s opera Orlando Furioso, containing as many as twenty new arias, was discovered among the vast collection of the composer’s personal papers at Turin’s Biblioteca Nazionale.4 Y . . . : Yale University. The basis of credit is the abundance of nature . . . the whole people: In Social Credit: An Impact (1935), Pound constructs a similar argument to illustrate the virtues of Siena’s Monte dei Paschi bank, “The CREDIT rests in ultimate on the ABUNDANCE OF NATURE, on the growing grass that can nourish the living sheep” (cf. note GK 194).5 Canto 52 begins along the same lines, And I have told you of how things were under Duke        Leopold in Siena     And of the true base of credit, that is         the abundance of nature with the whole folk behind it. (52/257) Carnegie Peace endowment: Founded in 1910 by American industrialist Andrew Carnegie (1835–1919), the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (CEIP) is a non-partisan think tank with a charter that ostensibly aims to promote global peace “through analysis and development of fresh policy ideas and direct engagement and collaboration with decisionmakers in government, business, and civil society.”6 In his essay, “Peace” (1928), Pound urges foundations such as the Endowment to “stop studying the ‘effects of war’” and study its known causes, mainly the arms trade, market

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“overproduction and dumping” schemes, and “the works of interested cliques.”7 Nic Butler: The controversial president of Columbia University (cf. note GK 165). Butler was also the president of the Carnegie Endowment at this time, serving from 1925 to 1945. recurring decimal: Any continuously repeating digit or set of digits. The trope itself recurs in GK to indicate any overarching pattern of repetition throughout history, whether it be the re-emergence of beauty in great works or periods of art or the recurrence of “infamy” in usurious times (cf. notes GK 242, 247, 251). Sol oriens . . . Odes I. 8. 4: This passage, from Lacharme’s translation of the Confucian Odes,8 reads in Pound’s adaptation, Sun’s in the East, her loveliness Comes here To undress.9

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44. GOVERNMENT Valturio’s treatise: Cf. note GK 115. witan: Members of the national council (witenagemot) of Anglo-Saxon kings (cf. note GK 173). Lenin won by Radio, Roosevelt used it. Coughlin used it as minority weapon: Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924), the Russian communist who led the Bolshevik Revolution, was an ardent supporter of radio as a means of maximizing the scope and reach of Communist propaganda. The first broadcast of his speeches, recorded between 1919 and 1921, took place on December 8, 1922.1 Roosevelt (cf. note GK 130–31) produced a series of thirty-one radio broadcasts between 1933 and 1945, which became widely known as “Fireside Chats.”2 The anti-Semitic Father Charles E. Coughlin (1891–1979) was a notorious Detroit-based Roman Catholic priest known for his inflammatory radio broadcasts, including anti-Roosevelt speeches. When Pound gave his first radio talk on January 11, 1935 on the economic triumph of Italian Fascism, he used Father Coughlin as his model.3 jaw-house: i.e., the United States Congress, composed of the Senate and the House of Representatives. Pound is also punning on “jo-house” (privy), as used in The Pisan Cantos (80/533). 241–42 rotten houses by A . . . s, . . . now reigning: In the unexpurgated GK, this passage reads, “rotten houses by N . . . s, B . . . s, S . . . s, S . . . s, and the dither of bank-pimps now reigning, Badlewigs, Wigwams, Coop-D . . . s and Feedons.” Of these obscure nicknames for corrupt financiers and financial institutions, the only one the editor has been able to trace with any certainty is “Wigwams.” Although the term originally 241

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designated a dwelling of the North American Indian peoples, it was appropriated in 1789 by the Society of St. Tammany. Formed in New York, the Irish Catholic fraternal and patriotic organization adopted pseudo-Native American titles and rituals, with its headquarters designated as the “Wigwam.” It soon became the most powerful urban political movement in the United States, counting among its early leaders the eighth U.S. vice-president, much admired by Pound, Martin Van Buren (cf. note GK 30).4 Fascist Quindecennio: i.e., the first fifteen years (1922–37) of Mussolini’s Fascist regime. Pound’s accompanying footnote telegraphs his growing admiration for Italian Fascism. English edtn. of Frobenius: Pound probably has in mind African Genesis, published in 1937 as he was working on GK (cf. note GK 91). The book includes ngona horn stories of the Wahungwe Makoni tribe of South Rhodesia, some of which were printed by Pound’s acolyte, James Laughlin (cf. note GK 8).5 Notably, it also contains the legend of Cassire’s Lute and the city of Wagadu, vital to the Africanist elements in The Pisan Cantos.6 K. Kitasono . . . VOU: Cf. note GK 137–38. “Every Polish nobleman had his jew”: While the origin of the phrase is uncertain, it attests to the large and longstanding Jewish presence in Poland. In the eighteenth century, Polish Jews served as officials of noblemen, often living under the same roof.7 Frobenius’s dissociations . . . Shemite, etc.: In his Monumenta Africana (1929), Frobenius writes of the “symptoms” (Symptome) or leading characteristics that define each culture, including the Hamitic and Shemitic (or Semitic) peoples (cf. note GK 56).8 Dante . . . non ride”: From Canto V of Dante’s Paradiso, though Pound misspells “tra” in the phrase “fra voi” (“among you”). Binyon translates the tercet thus, “If evil greed aught

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A Companion to Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur else to you have cried, / Be men, not witless sheep, so that the Jews / Among you may not mock you and deride.”9 “Anschauung”: Cf. note GK 24. “All things move . . . some imperfection in themselves”?: In Summa Theologiae, Aquinas argues that movement is the vital difference between the living and the dead, so that only those things which move themselves with one or other kind of movement—whether we take movement in the strict sense as “the act of that which is incomplete,” i.e. in potentiality for (further) existence, or in the wider sense as including “the act of that which is already completed,” in the way that an act of understanding or of sensation is also called movement, as we read in Aristotle [i.e., in On the Soul].10

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I prefer a lex Germanica to a lex Salica: While the Salic Law of Succession, an agnatic rule named after the code of the Salian Franks, excluded women from succeeding to a throne, the common law of Germany, in particular the constitutions of Saxony, Bavaria, and Würtemberg, allowed for royal female succession.11 Canto 42 features both as well, “Lex salica! lex Germanica” (42/209). According to Daniel Katz, “Pound imagines a ‘lex Germanica’ that would feature a polyandrous matrilineal kinship structure, in which men wander among different women, untethered to family.”12 That a man find the car of Persephone in a German burrow: [barrow] A nod to Frobenius’s intuitive talent for discerning hidden paideumas, Persephone being a goddess of the underworld who, along with her mother Demeter, was integral to the Eleusinian Mysteries (cf. notes GK 57, 145).13 “The art” . . . “of being ruled”: The title of Wyndham Lewis’s formidable study of political theory, published in London in 1926. Reed Way Dasenbrock has characterized The Art

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of Being Ruled as “one of the great modernist allusive texts, closer to The Waste Land, The Cantos and Ulysses in its way of working than we have realized (or than Lewis would have liked to admit).”14 “Ch’ing Ming”: “Precise terminology” (cf. notes GK 21, 58). Gourmont’s Dissociation d’idées: Gourmont’s essay in La culture des idées (cf. note GK 88) posits that the rare individuals capable of dissociating themselves from conventional ideas possess “une intelligence créatrice,” a creative intelligence.15 Gourmont’s doctrine for “cleaning language” is noteworthy, as Feng Lan points out, “because it showed Pound a way to verbal precision and, more significantly, prepared him for Confucius’s doctrine of zheng ming” (Pound’s “ch’ing ming”).16 244–45 In one recent period . . . still left open in London: In the unexpurgated GK, this paragraph reads, One of the messiest characters of British public life (or filth) in our time passed many laws so ambiguous in wording that lawyers knew not how to interpret them. The same blot on humanity put through a law which led to overbuilding some of the ground still left open in London.

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As Pound indicates here and in the subsequent paragraph, Victorian London underwent an explosion in real estate speculation from 1840 to 1879, leading to a growth in ground rents (i.e., rent on a long lease paid to a landlord or freeholder of a property). As early as July 1850, a speculator’s foreman noted that when ground rents are not paid, the landlord “has the power of seizing the houses.”17 The London ground rents . . . 9 or 99 years: From the 1870s onward, the population growth in London outpaced new housing supply. Yet, as Pound suggests, overbuilding became endemic as speculative building projects went up to allow

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A Companion to Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur investors to capitalize on a rising market, even if houses might have stood empty for a while. “B. H. Dias”: Pound contributed art criticism to The New Age under this alias for two and a half years, beginning on November 22, 1917.18 my Viennese café conspirator . . . all pacifism is a diabolic and conscious device: Pound is probably alluding to Wyndham Lewis, whom he had met around 1909 at the Vienna Café in New Oxford Street, near the British Museum. In Canto 80, Pound laments that “the loss of that café / meant the end of a B. M. era / (British Museum era)” (80/526). D. G. Bridson concurs with Pound that Lewis disavowed “out-and-out pacifism,” as “it would surely have implied a heavily armed neutrality. That in its turn would have implied rearmament, since general disarmament had been rejected by everyone else.”19 Lewis’s polemical essay The Diabolical Principle (1929) strikes a complementary note with its epigraph from Laotze’s Tao Te Ching, “When the great Tao is obliterated, we have humanness and righteousness. Prudence and circumspection appear, and we have much hypocrisy.”20 Larrañaga, McNair Wilson, Christopher Hollis: Pedro Juan Manuel Larrañaga (1893–1956) wrote treatises on economics, including Gold, Glut, and Government: A New Economic Dawn (1932) and Senderos en la jungla económico-política (Paths in the Economic-Political Jungle) (1940). As Pound points out in the next page, Larrañaga was also a “builder of roads, a technician,” a fact borne out in his earlier work, Successful Asphalt Paving (1926). Robert McNair Wilson (1882–1963) was a physician whose writing career began in 1914 when he accepted a position as medical correspondent for The Times. From 1925 to 1950, Wilson wrote twenty-six crime novels under the pseudonym Anthony Wynne. Pound read Wilson primarily (if not exclusively) as a thinker on economics. Wilson is one of the seven “leading monetary

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heretics” in Montgomery Butchart’s To-morrow’s Money (1936) (cf. note GK 46). Christopher Hollis (1902–77) was an Oxford economist, whose book We Aren’t So Dumb: Further Conversations on all that Matters in the News (1937) Pound owned and annotated heavily (cf. note GK 163). Canto 104 features all three writers (104/762, 764). 245–46 Soddy’s “Preposterous that banks . . . community’s wealth”: The untruncated text of the essay by Frederick Soddy (cf. notes GK 46, 49), one of Butchart’s “monetary heretics,” reads, It is preposterous that the banks, in the teeth of all the constitutional safeguards against it, should by a mere trick usurp the function of Parliament and, without any authority whatever, make forced levies on the community’s wealth.21

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In his copy of the book, Pound heavily underlined the last clause in this sentence. Economic light in our time . . . has come from free men: A veritable who’s who of Pound’s economic universe (cf. notes GK 40, 46, 48, 49, 166, 241, 245). In lauding A. R. Orage for having “had the intelligence to quit a rusty and inefficient set of theories” Pound is alluding to Orage’s break with Fabianism to embrace Social Credit, among his other conversions (cf. note GK 112).22 Dr. Hugo R. Fack was an anti-Semitic physician from San Antonio, Texas, with whom Pound corresponded about combining Gesellite and Social Credit theory. A small press publisher, Fack reprinted the English translation of Gesell’s influential work The Natural Economic Order (1916) in two volumes in 1934 and 1936.23 Vincent C. Vickers (1879– 1939) was an economist, governor of the Bank of England (1910–19), and author of a number of books on economics, including the work published in Stanley Nott’s “Social Credit Collection,” Finance in the Melting Pot: Reform or Revolution?

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A Companion to Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur The Petition to His Majesty the King (1936) and the posthumous Economic Tribulation (1941). voilà l’estat divers d’entre eux!: From Villon’s Le Testament (1461) (cf. note GK 60), “See how differently they’ve come out.”24 G. G. or A. G. or an Al Capone: Governor General and Attorney General (distinguished positions in the British government), and the notorious Chicago gangster Al Capone (cf. note GK 155). Farley’s ink: James (Jim) Farley (1888–1976), Roosevelt’s campaign manager, chairman of the Democratic Party, and the fifty-third Postmaster General. Farley’s trademark was to sign all his letters in green ink.25 Pound ends Canto 46 with an ironic reference to a recent newspaper headline saying that FDR’s Attorney General Homer Cummings (1870–1956) “wants Farley’s job” (46/235). the League at Geneva: i.e., the League of Nations. Susan B. Anthony: (1820–1906), suffragist and feminist reformer, honored with the issue of a three cent purple stamp on August 26, 1936.26 Lodge, Knox, Borah and George Holden Tinkham: American politicians strongly opposed to the membership of the United States in the League of Nations (pejoratively dismissed in the next paragraph as the “League of Two Measures”). Henry Cabot Lodge (1850–1924), Philander Chase Knox (1853–1921), and William Borah (1865–1940) were Republican senators from Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Idaho, respectively. Pound corresponded frequently with Borah in the 1930s. In a letter dated October 10, 1935, just a few days after Mussolini invaded Ethiopia (Abyssinia), Pound assures the senator that he “can have perfectly clear conscience that 7 million of subjected population in Abyssinia will be benefitted by conquest.”27 Pound also maintained an extensive correspondence with Tinkham (or “Uncle George”), often praising

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his fierce opposition to the League of Nations, particularly after the League condemned Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia in 1935 (the “imbroglio” to which Pound refers in the present paragraph) (cf. note GK 170). The Cantos pithily recounts the conflicts over the League of Nations staged in the Senate by Lodge, Knox, and Tinkham. In Canto 89, “Uncle George said he knew when he came out / (Lodge, Knox) that there wd / be one hell of a row in the Se- / nate” (89/623). Canto 78 pits “Lodge, Knox against world entanglement” and “Mr Tinkham / Geneva the usurers’ dunghill” (78/501).28 Captans annonam: Cf. notes GK 30, 31. Münch comes back from Capri: The southwestern Italian island of Capri, on the Tyrrhenian Sea, was a favorite haunt for foreigners such as Münch (cf. notes GK 60, 134–35). “Food and lodging were cheap and the incomes of most of them came from dividends, remittances and allowances,” as described in Compton Mackenzie’s satirical novel, Extraordinary Women (1928).29 Münch’s fellow musician, Olga Rudge, spent the summer of 1921 on the island with several friends, and documented the trip extensively in photographs. Dolmetsch’s pedagogy: Cf. note GK 71. Franchetti’s comment: Luigi Franchetti, pianist who performed in a series of concerts in Rapallo in the spring of 1937, including a program with Rudge on February 3, which covered sonatas by Mozart, Bach, and César Franck. In an article on “The Art of Luigi Franchetti” in Il Mare of January 30, Pound commends the pianist’s “sensibility,” “large knowledge of music,” and capacity to memorize and compare a range of interpretations.30

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RECURRING DECIMAL: Cf. note GK 238. Gavin Douglas . . . Golding made a new Ovid: Cf. note GK 149–50. Chun-Tchi . . . translation of the Odes: The excerpt in Latin is from the preface by Ch’ing emperor Chun-Tchi in Lacharme’s version of the Confucian Odes (cf. notes GK 34, 205).1 Pound misspells the accusative singular “hanc” (“this”) as “haec” (“these”), which Lacharme renders correctly. Loosely translated, the passage reads, “So much benefit emanates from this book that I wanted to heap praises on it, hence this preface.” Canto 59 opens with the beginning of Chun-Tchi’s preface: De libro CHI-KING sic censeo wrote the young MANCHU, CHUN TCHI, less a work of the mind than of affects brought forth from the inner nature here sung in these odes. (59/324) Mussolini . . . monetary issue: The Duce’s understanding of the cultural capital and political power of poetry (or at least poetic rhetoric) can be discerned in a speech he gave in Florence on April 26, 1924, following a speech by Delcroix (cf. note GK 229). Mussolini praises Delcroix’s “magnifica impressione di poesia” (“magnificent poetic impression”) and his “alato e spendente discorso” (“sublime and radiant speech”).2 Delcroix’s remark is from a letter to Pound dated February 19, 1935, “It is necessary for poets to concern themselves with economics and with every other political and civil question, because the world is going to ruin above

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all from the fact that poetry has become in a certain sense extraneous to life.”3 250 Ickes: Harold L. Ickes (1874–1952), progressive Republican appointed by Roosevelt as Secretary of the Interior in 1933, the only cabinet minister to serve all twelve years of the Roosevelt administrations.4 The author of several books, including New Democracy (1934) and Back to Work: The Story of the PWA (1935), Ickes shared Pound’s distrust of plutocratic power. British Colonel . . . 8 Volitionist questions: The “British Colonel” is possibly Colonel Rocke (cf. note GK 128–29). The volitionist “questions” are in fact provisos that Pound published in a handbill sometime in August 1934, titled “Volitionist Economics” (cf. note GK 189). He prefaces the clauses with the question, “Which of the following statements do you agree with?” The first clause puts forth, “It is an outrage that the state shd. run into debt to individuals by the act and in the act of creating real wealth.”5 “Les hommes . . . peur étrange de la beauté”: (Fr.) “Men have I don’t know what strange fear of beauty.” The apocryphal saying recurs in Canto 80 and is playfully attributed to a “Monsieur Whoosis,” a colloquial contraction of “who is this?” (80/531). kakotropic: From “kakotopia” (κακός being a Greek adjective for “bad” or “evil”), a dystopian condition. 250–51 Janequin’s Birds . . . Vivaldi’s Sol minore Concerto: Cf. notes GK 60, 148, 151–52. 251 Strawinsky’s Pulcinella: Stravinsky’s suite for the ballet Pulcinella (1919–20) with music based on the theatrical model of the commedia dell’arte and produced in collaboration with Picasso, the Russian choreographer Léonide Massine (1895–1979), and the Russian impresario Sergei Diaghilev (1872–1929). Pulcinella marked Stravinsky’s transition from his earlier Primitivism toward Surrealism and Neoclassicism. It premiered at the Paris Opéra on May 15, 1920.6

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Bach had a perfect right to reset Vivaldi for his organ: Vivaldi vitally influenced Bach’s compositional technique. The German composer transcribed three Vivaldi concertos for organ: BWV 593, 594, 596.7 Maestro Piccardi: Oreste Piccardi, conductor whose quoted statement originally appeared in an article Pound published in Il Mare of January 30, 1937, “Maestro Piccardi used to tell me: ‘This music of yours, you can have it with a small group of instruments, not with a full orchestra.’”8 Respighi: Ottorino Respighi (1879–1936), Italian orchestral and opera composer, transcribed old Italian music for orchestra, including three sets of lute pieces, Antique Dances and Arias.9 251–52 Casella’s resetting of the Chaconne for orchestra . . . performance of this composition: In 1936, Italian composer and pianist Alfredo Casella (1883–1947) arranged for the full modern orchestra the fifth and final movement of Bach’s solo instrumental piece for violin, Partita No. 2 in D Minor, BWV 1004, known as the Chaconne.10 On May 6, 1926, Casella accompanied Olga Rudge in a recital in Rome featuring Pound’s “Hommage à Froissart.” In the January 1937 issue of The Delphian Quarterly Pound would describe Casella as “the most competent of living Italian composers.”11 252 Erlich’s 605 experiments: Paul Ehrlich (1854–1915), German scientist and recipient of the 1908 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, discovered the first effective drug treatment for syphilis in 1909. He called it Salvarsan 606, after the fact that he and his staff experimented with 605 chemicals until the 606th compound proved effective in curing a rabbit infected with syphilis microbes.12 Honegger: Arthur Honegger (1892–1955), Paris-based Swiss composer and violinist. The conductor-musician Geoffrey Spratt notes that Honegger’s violin sonatas are marked by “violent contrast and complexity of tonal organization.”13 251

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Münch’s progress . . . Vivaldi 1936: Cf. notes GK 60, 148, 151–52. Mozart, Boccherini, Porpora or Caldara: Writing in The New Age in 1920, Pound praises the music of Italian Baroque composer Antonio Caldara (1670–1736) as “straight art, Bel Canto,” alongside Vivaldi’s (cf. notes GK 134–35, 150, 154).14 Des Imagistes: The first Imagist poetry anthology, published in 1914, featured a range of then little-known authors who would go on to define literary modernism, including H.D., Pound, Lowell, Williams, Joyce, and Ford, among others. Its lean aesthetic economy typified Pound’s aim to “desuetize” poetry.

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John Adams had the corrective for Jefferson: Given his own Fascist proclivities in this period, it is not surprising that Pound should invoke Adams, who, in contrast with Jefferson, advocated for a strong national government, fearing that the United States had become “too much of a democracy, a system of governance that historically had ended everywhere in tyranny and chaos” (cf. note GK 42).1 Liberalism is a running sore, and its surviving proponents are vile: Cf. Pound’s categorical statement, “There are no good liberals,” made in August 1938 in Action, the journal of the British Union of Fascists. “The essence of Liberalism,” he continues, “consists in lying about usury, and refusing to connect morals with matters of money.”2 “Droits de l’homme” . . . “right to do what harms not others”: Inaugurated in 1890, the Monument aux droits de l’homme (Monument to the Rights of Man), in Aurillac, France, displays the 17 Articles of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, adopted in 1789. Here, Pound loosely translates an excerpt from Article 4, “La liberté consiste à pouvoir faire tout ce qui ne nuit pas à autrui” (“Liberty consists in the freedom to do everything which injures no one else”). Corrado Ricci . . . via Aurelia: (1858–1934), Italian writer, art historian, archeologist, and author of Il tempio malatestiano (1924), published twelve years after he began a complete restoration of the interior of the church so admired by Pound. The poet met with Ricci in February 1923, and in the following year Mussolini approved Ricci’s project to rebuild the areas around the imperial forums, culminating with the monumental construction of the via Dell’Impero (present-day via dei Fori

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Imperiali).3 Since imperial times the via Aurelia has been one of the main thoroughfares into Rome from the west. 255 Pythagoras and Confucius: Cf. notes GK 24, 15, respectively. T. Beecham: Sir Thomas Beecham (1879–1961), English conductor hailed by Pound in a letter of 1917 as not only an “intelligent” man but also “the only man in England who can conduct an orchestra.”4 “i massimi problemi”: (It.) “the greatest problems.” 255–56 Geo. Moore . . . the first Roosevelt: George Moore (1852– 1933), Irish novelist, who likely conversed with the “first Roosevelt”—Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919), 26th U.S. president (1901–9)—in the drawing room of Yeats’s friend and patron, Lady Gregory (1852–1932), at Coole Park.5

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Edward: Edward Albert Christian George Andrew Patrick David (1894–1972) reigned briefly from January to December 1936 as King Edward VIII. Pound alludes to Edward’s thenrecent abdication of the throne to marry the American socialite and divorcée Wallis Simpson (née Warfield) (1896–1986).1 In his essay “Abdication,” Pound had already written at length on the “grand refusal,” saying that “Edward refused to be a stuffed rabbit.” He also recalls his “Tory friend G.” (the same friend quoted in GK), who “hammers the table and says: ‘The King OUGHT to be a stuffed rabbit, that is his job, that is what he is paid for.’”2 Egidio Colonna: (1243–1316), also known as Giles of Rome, Italian theologian and Scholastic philosopher, author of De regimine principum (translated into French in the late thirteenth century as the Livre du gouvernement des rois), a treatise on the conduct of monarchs, commissioned by Philip III of France (1245–85) for his son and successor Philip IV (1268–1314).3 Machiavelli: Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527), Italian Renaissance political philosopher and writer, author of the landmark study in artful statesmanship and political power, The Prince (1532). Orage: Cf. note GK 246. Trollope: In his novel The Warden (1855) and collection of essays Clergymen of the Church of England (1866), among other works, Victorian novelist Anthony Trollope (1815–82) portrays the English Church as an antiquated institution in need of reform. King’s proctor: An official who assists the High Court of England in matters of family jurisdiction, the King’s Proctor

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also has the authority to intervene on behalf of the Crown in divorce cases complicated by allegations of suppression of facts or other impropriety.4 For Pound, the office is “England’s leading obscenity” because it allows for the abuse of power. Writing in The Spectator in 1933, E. S. P. Haynes calls for the abolition of the office, characterizing it as an “un-English system of espionage . . . All that the King’s Proctor usually discovers is some act of adultery (sometimes 20 years old) on the part of a petitioner who has obtained a decree nisi.”5 The “mild reform” to which Pound alludes in his footnote refers to the Matrimonial Causes Act of 1937, which extended the grounds for petition for divorce.6 Pio IX: Cf. note GK 189. Cardinal Antonelli: Cf. note GK 76. Borgias: Hispano-Italian dynasty notorious for its excesses, both real and fabricated. Its three most “picturesque” members were Rodrigo (1431–1503), made Pope Alexander VI in 1492, and two of his children: Cesare (c.1475–1507), the most ruthless Borgia, featured in Machiavelli’s The Prince, and Lucrezia (1480–1519), rumoured to have committed incest with both Cesare and her father. She is “Madame ὝΛΗ” in Canto 30, “Clothed with the light of the altar / And with the price of the candles” (30/148). Canto 5 touches on the murder of a third Borgia sibling, Giovanni—“John Borgia is bathed at last,” a reference to the washing of his body after it was recovered from the Tiber river in Rome (5/18).7 Pauthier, Lacharme and Don Bosco: The French sinologist, the French Jesuit missionary (cf. notes GK 21, 205), and the Italian priest and founder of the Salesian Order, Giovanni Bosco (1815–88), widely known as Don Bosco, canonized in 1934.8 AlexaNNdeRRRR RRrrrrberrrrtson . . . “l’empreunte papale!”: Rev. Alexander Robertson MacEwen, D.D. (1851–1916), Scottish minister and Professor of Church History at the University of Edinburgh. The “Sc’tch kiRRRRk in Venice” is

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A Companion to Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur the Presbyterian Church in which Pound heard the Reverend rail against the Roman Catholic Church and papal tyranny in 1908.9 Robertson would have admired the anti-papal animus of the Venetian historian and philosopher Paolo Sarpi (1552– 1623), who wrote in 1610 that “all the religious controversies that trouble the world” stem from “the power of the pope.”10 The French phrase quoted by Pound translates as “Subscribe to the papal loans!” and most likely alludes to the post-First World War national loans to which the Vatican subscribed several million lire.11 gombeen: Cf. note GK 62. Edward VIIths’ reading matter . . . Lorenzo Medici: Albert Edward (1841–1910) reigned as King Edward VII from 1901 to 1910. Backing Pound’s unflattering assessment, Edward’s own mother, Queen Victoria, once revealed that he “has never been fond of reading and . . . from his earliest years it was impossible to get him to do so. Newspapers and very rarely, a novel are all he ever reads.”12 In contrast, Lorenzo de’ Medici (1449–92), the Florentine Renaissance condottiere, was a polymath and patron of the arts under whom such luminaries as Michelangelo, Verrocchio, and Botticelli flourished. Lorenzo was also an accomplished poet, who wrote in nearly every vernacular genre available in his day, including Petrarchan love poetry, philosophical poems, etc. He is “Lauro Medici” in Canto 21, whose many accomplishments include the revival of the University of Pisa in 1473 (21/98).13 Senator Cutting . . . Dwight L. Morrow: Bronson Murray Cutting (1888–1935), Republican Senator from New Mexico with whom Pound corresponded from 1930 to 1935 and Dwight W. (not “L.”) Morrow (1873–1931), US Ambassador to Mexico and Republican Senator from New Jersey from 1930 until his death. The letter from Cutting to which Pound refers dates from December 9, 1930 and ends with the following list of senators:

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As for “literacy”, I don’t suppose you are interested in people like Moses & Bingham & Dave Reed, who sin against the light. That leaves Borah & Norris & LaFollette & Hiram Johnson & Tydings & Wheeler & Walsh of Montana & I suppose Dwight Morrow, & not much else. But don’t say I said so.14

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The list recurs in The Cantos (86/588, 98 /705, 102/748). Cal. Coolidge: Cf. note GK 132. Mœurs Contemporaines: (Fr.) “Contemporary Manners,” also the title of Pound’s poem in Quia Pauper Amavi (1919), first published in The Little Review in 1918. Homer: Cf. note GK 24. Herodotus: Cf. note GK 35. Demosthenes: Cf. note GK 36. One of the early kalifs: Umar ibn al-Khattab (c.581–644), the second caliph of Islam (634–44), formalized a system for paying stipends and pensions as a form of dividends.15 Macaulay: Thomas Babington Macaulay, Baron Macaulay (1800–59), Whig historian, essayist, and poet. Macaulay’s essay on John Milton anticipates Pound’s imagist poetics, “the business of poetry is with images, and not with words.”16 Frederic II of Sicily: Frederick II of Hohenstaufen (1194– 1250), Holy Roman Emperor, King of Jerusalem, and King of Sicily, his most cherished kingdom. Challenging Pound’s generous assessment of Frederick II’s cultural and economic contributions, David Abulafia’s authoritative biography, Frederick II: A Medieval Emperor (1988), argues that “the major cultural advances of the early thirteenth century were being made by Jews, Muslims and Christians working side by side in the translation of Greek and Arabic texts, not in Sicily but in Spain.” Abulafia notes further that Frederick II’s fiscal policies show that “he was mainly anxious to extract profit from

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A Companion to Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur the full range of economic activities, rather than to induce economic ‘growth.’”17 S. Malatesta: Cf. note GK 2. Madox Ford: Ford (cf. note GK 134) sketches the argument Pound recounts here in the figure of Edward Ashburnham, the protagonist of Ford’s epochal novel The Good Soldier: A Tale of Passion (1915). A member of the British upper class, Ashburnham subscribes to “the theory of an overlord doing his best by his dependents, the dependents meanwhile doing their best for the overlord.”18 Mrs Albert Memorial . . . Belgian Uncle: Soon after the death of her husband Prince Albert (1819–61) from typhoid, “Vicky” (Queen Victoria) commissioned the esteemed architect, Sir George Gilbert Scott (1811–78), to construct a memorial in the Gothic revival style in London’s Hyde Park. Within years of the completion and installation of Albert’s statue in November 1875, the memorial was widely dismissed as sentimental and vulgar. Queen Victoria’s “Belgian Uncle” was Leopold I of Belgium (1790–1865), who tutored her before she became queen and with whom she maintained a lengthy correspondence until his death.19 rastaquouires: (Fr.) A misspelling of the plural form of rastaquouère, a social interloper often “considered to be nouveau riche or excessively ostentatious in manners or dress.”20 Alfonso XIII: King of Spain from birth, Alfonso XIII (1886– 1941) took formal charge of the throne in 1902. His reign has been often characterized as beset by corruption, inflexibility, and continual crisis.21 Napoleon III . . . Pam was the government: The episode to which Pound alludes took place when Queen Victoria and Prince Albert swiftly punished Foreign Secretary Henry John Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston (1784–1865), for approving and even congratulating Napoleon III (1808–73) after he staged a coup d’état and declared himself emperor of France in

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December 1851. Under pressure from the royal couple, Prime Minister Lord John Russell (1792–1878) demanded Palmerston’s immediate resignation.22 262–63 Bomba . . . Gladstone: Ferdinand II of Naples (1810–59), King of the Two Sicilies, earned the nickname “King Bomba” after crushing the royalist counterrevolutions of 1848–49 in southern Italy. As Pound notes, the Liberal British politician William Ewart Gladstone (1809–98) denounced Ferdinand II for the mistreatment of liberal political prisoners, calling his Bourbon dynasty the “negation of God set up as a system of government.”23 Gladstone would go on to succeed Russell (see previous note) as Leader of the British Liberal Party. 263 Provence: Cf. note GK 60. Exarchate: Cf. note GK 112. Romulus Augustulus: (fl. late fifth century CE), arguably the last emperor of the Western Empire, ruling briefly from October 475 to September 476.24 Avicenna . . . Varchi wanted the facts: Pound’s architects of a “conspiracy of intelligence”: Avicenna, Eriugena, Grosseteste, Petrarch, Gemistos Plethon, Valla, and Pico della Mirandola (cf. notes GK 2, 53, 75, 77, 107, 160). Benedetto Varchi (1503–65) was a Florentine historian whose magisterial sixteen-volume Storia Fiorentina (1721) purports to present an objective account of the history of the Florentine republic under the Medici. In Canto 5, Pound draws extensively on Varchi, who is quoted admiringly as “one wanting the facts”—the phrase recurs in Canto 87— and resisting the urge to draw conclusions beyond the evidence available in the historical record (5/19, 87/589). Pietro Leopoldo and Ferdinand III of Habsbourg-Lorraine: Son and father, respectively. After succeeding Pietro Leopoldo (cf. note GK 30), Ferdinand III (1769–1824) became Grand Duke of Tuscany from 1790 to 1801 and again after recovering Tuscany from Napoleon in 1814 until his death. Like his father, he was known as a moderate, enlightened ruler. Canto

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A Companion to Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur 44 presents an extended account of the celebration in honor of “Ferdinado [sic] il Terzo” in 1792 for his declaration against the exportation of grain in Tuscany, “thought grain was to eat” (44/223–25).25 Cavour: Cf. note GK 76. New Era: Pound’s new “Pagan” and Fascist era. As Massimo Bacigalupo notes, in the spring of 1922 Pound printed anonymously in The Little Review the calendar of his new era “p.s.U” (“post scriptum Ulysses,” after Joyce’s groundbreaking novel published that year). Bacigalupo also argues that the calendar is “partly a joke, partly a scheme of the mythical universe of The Cantos.”26 The year 1922 also marks the beginning of the Fascist era (cf. note GK 116). In Pound’s view, as David Barnes points out, “a new approach to Italian history was being engineered” under Mussolini’s Fascist regime.27 Garibaldi, Mazzini, Vittorio Emanuele . . . Cavour: Modern Italy’s founding fathers, widely heroicized and mythologized in Italian culture. The monuments Pound cites, like the hagiographies of the “great quadrumvirate,” as Giuseppe Maria Finaldi puts it, sprouted “like mushrooms from every street and piazza” in the late nineteenth century.28 General Giuseppe Garibaldi (1807–82), Mazzini (cf. note GK 142), King Vittorio Emanuele II (1820–78), and Cavour (cf. note GK 76) were the main architects of the Italian Risorgimento, the Italian unification movement. Daniele Manin: (1804–57), Venetian republican and one of the heroes of the Risorgimento in the revolution of 1848–49 against Austrian geopolitical hegemony and occupation of Venice.29 Ricasoli: Baron Bettino Ricasoli (1809–80), Tuscan politician and key figure in the endeavour to bring about a national unity government during the Risorgimento.30 Secret history . . . secretum: In his essay on Cavalcanti, Pound argues likewise, “the language of Guido is secret only as the

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language of any technical science is secret for those who have not the necessary preparation.”31 Flaubert: Cf. note GK 49. La Tour du Pin: Cf. note GK 96. The history of the United States . . . correspondence of J. Adams, Jefferson, J. Q. Adams, Van Buren: Pound makes much the same argument in his 1937 essay, “The JeffersonAdams Letters as a Shrine and a Monument”: In 170 years the United States have at no time contained a more civilized “world” than that comprised by the men to whom Adams and Jefferson wrote and from whom they received private correspondence. A history of American Literature that omits the letters of the founders and memoirs or diaries of J. Q. Adams and Martin Van Buren is merely nonsense.32 Of particular interest to Pound in the epistolary record of the second, third, sixth, and eighth U.S. presidents, respectively, is the Adams-Jefferson correspondence (cf. notes GK 42, 181). As Pound observes, the presidents frequently debated historical and literary subjects in their letters. A prolific letter writer, John Quincy Adams (1767–1848) wrote even more prodigiously in his diary, “an unmatched report,” as biographer Paul C. Nagel describes it, on a wide range of issues in the United States and Napoleonic Europe, from history and statecraft to literature and travel.33 Pound owned a copy of Adams’s diary and heavily marked it, including this passage: “A man of good breeding, inoffensive manners, and courteous deportment is nearer to the true diplomatic standard than one with the genius of Shakespeare, the learning of Bentley, the philosophical penetration of Berkeley, or the wit of Swift.”34 Grant administration: General Ulysses S. Grant served as the 18th U.S. president from 1869 to 1877 (cf. note GK 149).

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A Companion to Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur Wm. Mahl has got Jim Fisk into readable drama: William Mahl, minor New York playwright. “Jim Fisk” is the protagonist of his plays The Age of Gold: An American Historical Play and The Great and the Small: A Comedy of Contemporary Confusion, both of which were published in one volume, Plays of the Social Comedy (1935). Pound was impressed enough by Mahl’s plays on gold, money, and politics to inquire about him to Ford and Cummings in early 1938. Pound’s interest in Mahl endured. In 1944, he would affirm that “One can learn more . . . from William Mahl’s TWO PLAYS OF THE SOCIAL COMEDY about the attempt of monopolising the gold in 1869, than he is likely to learn from historiographers.”35 cunctative: From cunctatious, or “prone to delaying.”36 ex-rector of the Q. University: Unidentified. Gesell’s statement that Marx never questioned money: In The Natural Economic Order (1916), Gesell surmises that Marx “can never have given the theory of money five minutes attention—witness his three large volumes upon interest (capital).”37 Quincy Adams was communist (of a sort): Pound’s claim is flimsy and anachronistic. John Quincy Adams spent considerable time in Russia, first as part of the entourage of Francis Dana (1743–1811), the first American diplomatic agent in 1783, and again in 1809 as the first U.S. Minister to Russia, but he always remained cautious of the country.38 Gli uomini vivono in pochi . . . “Gaudier”: (It.) “Humanity lives in a few” (cf. note GK 133). When the vortices of power . . . Vorticism was constructive: Pound in essence answers the question he had posed in 1915 in The New Age as to whether the “quattrocento shines out because the vortices of power coincided with the vortices of creative intelligence?”39 Hence, he also reaffirms the importance of Blast and Vorticism as twentieth-century manifestations of the same “brilliance” that fueled the Italian Renaissance.

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Kung fu Tseu was a vorticist: Naikan Tao speculates that Pound thinks of Confucius as a Vorticist by virtue of the philosopher’s advocating the reading of poetry in his Shī-King or Book of Odes as a means to cultivate morality. Tao avers further that what Pound “means by ‘vortices’ and ‘vorticist’ in this context is but the unification of morality and literature into an artistic form. This matches Confucius’s view of literature as an ideally didactic means. The significance of Confucian preaching through literature allows Pound to liken Confucius to a modern vorticist.”40 John Cournos . . . a highly delectable document: Cf. notes GK 63–67.

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48. ARABIA DESERTA Doughty’s volume: Travels in Arabia Deserta (1888), by English explorer, travel writer, and poet, Charles Doughty (1843–1926). The book painstakingly records, in more than 1,000 pages, the details of his two-year pilgrimage through the Arabian Peninsula.1 267–68 K. Carl’s book . . . to persuade me”: Pound owned a copy of the 1937 Faber edition of Wu Yung’s The Flight of an Empress from which he excerpts the passage quoted here (cf. note GK 80–81).2 He sums up the overtone of usury in this passage by pencilling in “banks” on a back page of the book. 268 General Grant’s diamond-headed cane went to Li Hung Chang: Chinese statesman Li Hung-Chang (1823–1901) played a key role in the development of Chinese foreign policy and relations and western style industrialism. He fell from power in the wake of China’s defeat in the 1894 SinoJapanese War. Li was a great admirer of General Ulysses S. Grant (cf. note GK 264). On August 30, 1896, just over a year after Grant’s death, Li paid a visit to his tomb in New York while carrying a gold-mounted cane, though it is unclear if it was the same cane cited here.3 No diamond-headed cane appears in the list of accessions to the U.S. National Museum for 1886–87, though the catalogue shows several iron, silver, and gold-headed canes presented to Grant. The inventory also shows two cloisonné jars presented by Li.4 We have the spectacle of disorders: In the summer of 1900, the Boxer Rebellion entailed a violent uprising in northern China against the influence of foreign imperialist powers, a last-ditch attempt to preserve Chinese culture, religion, and way of life.5 Pound’s reference to a contemporary “spectacle 267

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of disorders” in Russia and Spain alludes to the Great Terror in Russia, an orgy of purges and executions ordered by Stalin from 1936 to 1939, as well as the Spanish Civil War (1936–39), which Hitler exploited to remind Germans of the ongoing threat of Soviet Bolshevism.6 268–70 Mr Cullis . . . (Cicero to Atticus; 51 B.C.): The two excerpts on the evils of usury were mailed to Pound’s home in Rapallo by Michael F. Cullis, a student in England with whom he corresponded from 1933 to 1937.7 The first passage from Bellum Civile (The Civil Wars) by Greek historian Appian of Alexandria (fl. second century CE) denounces usury and culminates with money-lenders cutting the throat of the Roman praetor Asellio, exasperated with his attempt to revive an ancient Roman law against lending on interest. Cicero (cf. note GK 122) corresponded extensively with his wealthy friend Titus Pomponius Atticus (110–32 BCE). Cicero’s letter excerpted in the quoted passage concerns his staunch refusal to allow the overturning of his decision to fix a 12% maximum rate for interest. Under pressure from the Senate, however, he eventually capitulated to Brutus’s agent and money-lender, Scaptius, the man responsible for the usurious loan to the Salaminians (not “Slaminians”).8 270 Salmasius: Cf. note GK 30. pour servir à l’histoire: (Fr.) “to serve history.” Roosevelt’s attack on the Supreme Court . . . needed regulation: In early 1937, just weeks into the second presidential term he won by a landslide in November 1936, FDR mounted a vigorous attack against a series of rulings by the United States Supreme Court, which had left in ruins much of his New Deal legislation (cf. note GK 130–31). Financier Bernard Baruch (1870–1965) and James Farley (cf. note GK 247) were close advisers to FDR during the debacle. His bid to appoint and influence federal judges in the Judiciary Committee ultimately failed.9

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Kung’s first public job: In 501 BCE, at the age of fifty-one, Confucius accepted his first public position as head of a very small town, Zhongdu, with a focus on the moral cultivation of the townspeople. It was only a year later, once Duke Ding of Lu took notice of how well Confucius managed Zhongdu, that he promoted the budding philosopher-statesman to the position of assistant minister of public works of the state of Lu.1 In his Records of the Grand Historian (Shi ji, 史記), the Han dynasty historian Sima Qian (c.145–c.90 BCE) implies that Confucius was Prime Minister of Lu, but his wording likely reflects the tendency in the Han period to magnify Confucius’s political stature.2 Cavour or Rossoni: In October 1850, Cavour (cf. note GK 76) was appointed Minister for Trade and Agriculture and soon thereafter for the Navy. The following year he became Minister of Finance.3 Rossoni was Minister of Agriculture and Forestry under Mussolini (cf. note GK 40). Bedaux and Stakhanov: Charles Bedaux (1886–1944), French-born American efficiency engineer, designed a wageincentive program to measure and speed up productivity.4 Aleksei Stakhanov (1906–77), a coal miner, was held up by Stalin as a hyperefficient worker-hero for industrial laborers after he hewed 102 tons of coal in a six-hour shift in August 1935.5 Tuan Szetsun: Cf. note GK 17. Frazer-Frobenius research: Cf. notes GK 27, 57. Ovid: Pound characterizes Ovid as enigmatic because the Metamorphoses, according to Lillian Feder, “provided neither the conception of deity nor the ideological framework that

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he required for converting metamorphosis into the religious and social process which the Cantos promulgate” (cf. note GK 149–50).6 273   仁   者 仁  以 者  身 以  發 身  身 發  不 財   : Pound translates this passage from Book X of Confucius’s Ta Hio (The Great Learning) (cf. notes GK 15–16) as “‘Good king is known by his spending, ill lord by his taking.’ The humane man uses his wealth as a means to distinction; the inhumane becomes a mere harness, an accessory to his takings.”7 Canto 55 reproduces the ideograms precisely as printed here (55/290).8 274 Edmondo Rossoni: Cf. notes GK 40, 272. Farinacci’s demand for the condemnation of Toeplitz: In February 1926, Roberto Farinacci (1892–1945), a pro-Nazi Fascist leader, began a sustained campaign against Giuseppe Toeplitz (1866–1938), the Jewish president of the Banca Commerciale Italiana. Farinacci accused Toeplitz of conspiring to destabilize the Italian lira in the service of foreign interests, justifying his attack on the grounds that the banker was Polish-born and Jewish.9 Even shortly after Toeplitz’s death in 1938 Farinacci compared the banker unfavorably against the “ancient Italian race,” noting that Toeplitz “had only been an Italian citizen since 1895.”10 The trial and condemnation of Chao-tcheng-mao . . . accept the office: According to Xunzi, a third-century BCE Confucian thinker, within seven days of taking office in Lu (cf. note GK 272) Confucius ordered the execution of a rival teacher, Shaozheng Mao. In Xunzi’s account, Confucius alleged that

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Shaozheng Mao possessed all “five odious predilections humans can possess,” including “speaking falsehood and loving disputation,” while having “enough appeal to draw a crowd of followers around him.”11 C. T. Mao was the Mellon-Norman plus of the time: Pound is suggesting that Shaozheng Mao (see previous note) was as corrupt as Andrew Mellon (cf. note GK 155) and Montagu Norman (1871–1950), the Governor of the Bank of England, considered the most influential banker in the world at the time and known for traveling under a false identity.12 Mellon and Norman associated frequently and both financiers saw themselves as global statesmen, rescuing a continent in crisis and re-establishing a world order that had collapsed since the First World War, the irony of which is implicit in Pound’s pairing of the two tycoons.13 Tai Tsoung: Tang dynasty Emperor from 626 to 649 CE, featured at length in Canto 54 as “Taï Tsong,” who “turned out 3000 / fancies” (54/285) (cf. note GK 3). Like Pound, Taï Tsoung considered literature and culture essential to political economy.14 Tchin Tsoung: (1043–85 CE), or Shenzong (神宗), Song dynasty Emperor from 1068 to 1085. Like his predecessors in the Song dynasty, Shenzong placed culture and the arts above military activities. In the first year of his peaceful and prosperous reign, Shenzong reconfigured the academy into four divisions: astronomy, calligraphy, medicine, and painting, thereby elevating court painters to the same level of prestige as professionals in the other disciplines.15 In Canto 55, “TchinTsong” admonishes, “don’t worry about coming ages / the people need time to breathe” (55/295). Constantine or Justinian: Cf. note GK 40. lex Romana: A compilation of legal codes spelling out the personal Roman law applicable to Roman subjects, with two of the most important codes being the Lex Romana

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A Companion to Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur Visigothorum, promulgated in 506 CE by Alaric II (d. 507), the King of the Visigoths, and the Lex Romana Burgundionum, enacted in 517 CE by Sigismund (d. 524), the King of the Burgundians.16 Wu Yung in the recent Boxer times . . . beheading prevalent: In The Flight of an Empress (cf. notes GK 267–68, 268), Wu Yung recounts the beheading of several men.17 In Confucius’s time, wartime and political beheadings were also common. In the unending struggles for dynastic succession princes plotted against fathers with the support of rival noble families. In failed coups conspirators were beheaded, drawn, and quartered, while their families were also killed and all their estate became the property of the ruler.18 Tai Tsoung . . . the privilege of immolating themselves: Canto 54 chronicles that upon Taï Tsong’s death “the tartars wanted to die at his funeral / and wd / have, if TAÏ hadn’t foreseen it / and writ expressly that they should not” (54/287). 1013 de notre ère Tchin Tcoung brought out a new edition of the classics: Volume 8 of one of Pound’s main sources for the China Cantos (52–61), J. A. M. de Moyriac de Mailla’s Histoire Générale de la Chine (1777–85), notes similarly that in 1013 “de l’ere Chrétienne” (or as Pound puts it, “of our era”), Tchin Tsong made “les vrais disciples de Confucius” (“the true disciples of Confucius”) acquainted with “l’estime qu’il faisoit de ce philosophe & de la doctrine,”(“the high regard with which he held the philosopher and the doctrine”).19 Harakiri: The colloquial form of Seppuku (切腹), ritualistic self-disembowelment. Though its precise origins remain unclear, in the late Heian Period (794–1185 CE) the practice gained acceptance as an honorable alternative to being captured in battle, a development that coincided with medieval Japan’s increasing militarization.20 per aspera: Short form of the Latin saying, Per aspera ad astra, “Through difficulties to the stars.”

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Daimio: Tamiosuke Koumé, Japanese painter and actor whom Pound knew in his London days and whose work he admired. Koumé died in the 1923 Tokyo earthquake. Canto 76 mentions “the hidden nest, Tami’s dream,” references to the Venice apartment Pound shared with Olga Rudge and to a large painting by Koumé, respectively, which Pound took to Paris and subsequently to Venice (76/482). The painting disappeared from the “hidden nest” during the Second World War. Canto 77 briefly touches on “the young / Daimio’s ‘tailor’s bill’” (77/486).21 Samurai: Michio Ito, Japanese Noh dancer whose paternal grandfather was a Samurai. Ito also adapted and directed a production of Samurai and Geisha in Los Angeles and New York in 1930.22 A New York Times review of 1978 titularly describes him as “An All-But-Forgotten Pioneer of American Modern Dance” (cf. note GK 217).23 Kung went for the big bad boss . . . Tai Tsoung reduced taxes: Cf. notes GK 274. Pietro Leopoldo and Ferdinando III: Cf. notes GK 30, 263. Rossoni: Cf. notes GK 40, 166. Gesell: As Leon Surette explains, “Gesell’s stamp scrip amounts to a tax of 2 percent per month (24 percent per year) on all outstanding currency,” or “medium of exchange” (cf. note GK 48).24 新 日 日 新: (xin ri ri xin) “Day by day make it new,” Pound’s most famous slogan and the foundation of his 1934 book of essays, Make It New. The ideogrammatic palindrome appears on the title page of the first edition, published in London by Faber & Faber. The following year, in Jefferson and/or Mussolini, Pound would reprint the ideograms with a Fascist bent, explaining that “the first ideogram . . . shows the fascist axe for the clearing

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A Companion to Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur away of rubbish (left half) the tree, organic vegetable renewal. The second ideograph is the sun sign, day, ‘renovate, day by day renew.’”25 In Canto 53, Pound also reproduces the ideograms and uncovers the origin of the motto by Shang period (1600–1100 BCE) Emperor “Tching” or Cheng [Shang] Tang (c.1675–1646 BCE). Cheng “wrote MAKE IT NEW / on his bath tub / Day by day make it new” (53/265). Canto 98 prints the first ideogram (新, “new”) and Cheng’s call for renewal (98/704). The injunction itself is Confucian, and it is found in Book II of Ta Hio. In his translation of the book, Pound notes the proclamation In letters of gold on T’ang’s bathtub:   As the sun makes it new   Day by day make it new   Yet again make it new.26 Significantly, the oft-cited ideograms appear in GK in the context of Pound’s discussion of money and Gesellian economics. Soon after publishing the book, Pound would return to this association with greater clarity in a 1939 piece, What is money for?: Emperor Tching Tang issued the first national dividend in 1766 B.C. . . . It may have been an emergency dole, but the story will at least clear up one muddle. The emperor opened a copper mine and issued round coins with square holes and gave them to the poor “and this money enabled them to buy grain from the rich”, but it had no effect on the general shortage of grain.27 Aristotle . . . saw that money was a measure: Paraphrase of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics (V.v.14). In the Rackham edition, which Pound owned, Aristotle recommends that

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all commodities “have their prices fixed; this will ensure that exchange, and consequently association, shall always be possible. Money then serves as a measure which makes things commensurable and so reduces them to equality.”28 Pound makes a similar point in What is money for? (1939), “money is a measure of price.” For Pound, however, Aristotle does not go far enough in defining money. It is trivially true that money is a measure, but “you have got to know what money is FOR.” “For the purpose of good government,” Pound writes, “it is a ticket for the orderly distribution of WHAT IS AVAILABLE.”29 NOMISMA . . . rendered useless at will: In Nicomachean Ethics (V.v. 11).30 The second paragraph selected by Mr Butchart: In Montgomery Butchart’s Money (cf. note GK 61).31 “Guarantee of future exchange”: The phrasing is slightly different in the Rackham edition of the Nichomachean Ethics (V.v.14), “Now money serves us as a guarantee of exchange in the future.”32 Kung is superior to Aristotle: Pound’s “Procedure” prefacing his translation of Confucius’s Analects sheds further light on this claim, “The study of the Confucian philosophy is of greater profit than that of the Greek because no time is wasted in idle discussion of errors. Aristotle gives, may we say, 90% of his time to errors.”33 Aesop’s contention . . . moderate kinship without excessive equality: Aesop, the prolific sixth-century BCE Greek fabulist, casts Prometheus, acting at the behest of Jupiter (Zeus), as the creator of not just humankind but all other animals. In Aesop’s fable “Prometheus and the Making of Man,” Jupiter, after seeing that the irrational creatures created by Prometheus far outnumbered rational creatures, “bade him redress the balance by turning some of the latter into men. Prometheus did as he was bidden, and this is the reason why some people have the forms of men but the souls of beasts.”34

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That he was slayne . . . nat but for envye: Excerpt from “The Legend of Ariadne,” in The Legend of Good Women, by the English poet Geoffrey Chaucer (c.1340–1400). The passage alludes to the death of her brother, Androgeus, following the decision of their father Minos, “the mighty kyng of Crete,” to send him to Athens to be educated.1 The episode reflects Pound’s aversion to the “envy of dullards,” who lack “intelletto” (“intellect”), as he says in “Cavalcanti.”2 “Adam Bell, Clym of the Clough and Wm. Cloudesley”: An outlaw ballad whose earliest fragments survive from a 1536 edition. The narrative about the exploits of the early modern “gangsters,” Adam, Clim, and William, rivalled the  tales of Robin Hood in popularity and commercial success.3 “de raptu meo” suit against Chaucer . . . 24 hours?: The source for Pound’s allusion to the rape charge (de raptu meo) brought against Chaucer in 1380 is found in a footnote in the introduction to The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer (1898), edited by University of London professor and bibliographer Alfred W. Pollard (1859–1944). Pound’s provocative suggestion that Chaucer may have been “framed” stems from Pollard’s claim that on May 1, 1380 Cecilia de Chaumpaigne, the woman who had accused Chaucer, “executed an absolute release to [him] from all liability de meo raptu.” Pound also brings up the bizarre coincidence that on September 6, 1390 Chaucer was robbed twice by the same gang of highwaymen, though at least one of the robbers was eventually discovered and hanged.4 Crestien de Troyes: Cf. note GK 107–108.

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Beroul: Twelfth-century CE Anglo-Norman writer, author of one of the three surviving versions of the Arthurian romance Tristan and Iseult (c.1160).5 Pollard doubts if he knew the Decameron: In his introduction, Pollard hypothesizes that Chaucer was acquainted with Boccaccio’s long epic poems Teseide (c.1340) and Il Filostrato (c.1338), the source for Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde (c. early 1380s), but not with the Decameron (cf. note GK 135).6 Libri gialli: (It.) “yellow books,” a euphemism for Italian detective fiction. After 1929, the genre was dubbed “giallo” when the publishing firm Mondadori began to release mysteries, especially translations of U.S. and British mysteries, with a yellow cover.7 preface dated 1842 . . . (of the Ballads): Pound quotes from the prefatory “Advertisement” of Richard John King’s edition of Selections from the Early Ballad Poetry of England and Scotland (1842), which, ironically, given Chaucer’s ribald humor, features a demure epigraph from the late medieval poet, “Ye shall fynde enow both grete and smale of storiall thing that toucheth gentylnesse and eke moralitie and holinesse.”8 Usury is contra naturam: Cf. note GK 15. Miltonism . . . Romantic rebellion: “Miltonism” alludes to the Protestant ethos of John Milton (cf. note GK 115). J. Martin Evans calls it the “Miltonic moment,” which is in essence “a moment of purification, of catharsis, without which the moral victory of good would be impossible.”9 In contrast, most Romantic artists rejected religious absolutism of any kind. In A Refutation of Deism: A Dialogue (1814), Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) affirms his conviction in the “laws of attraction and repulsion, desire and aversion” as sufficient “to account for every phenomenon of the moral and physical world.”10 gentilezza: (It.) “nobility,” a Dantean concept. In his poem “Le dolci rime d’amor ch’i’ solia” (“The Soothing Rhymes of Love I

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A Companion to Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur Used One Day”), Dante writes, “E’ gentilezza dovunqu’è vertute / ma non vertute ov’ella” (“Nobility’s wherever virtue is, / not virtue where the other seems to be”).11 Rabelais and Brantôme: Cf. notes GK 23, 207. Grosseteste . . . Robt. de Brunne, trans.: Cf. notes GK 77. Pound quotes from Handlyng Synne (1303) or Manual of Sins, a poem written in French by Grosseteste and translated into Middle English by the English chronicler Robert de Brunne (Robert Mannyng) (d. c.1338). In modern English, the passage reads, The virtue of the harp, through skill and right, Will destroy the devil’s might; And to the cross by God’s skill Is the harp likened well.12 The truth about a field . . . make it grow: Paraphrase of Pound’s statement a few years earlier in Jefferson and/or Mussolini, “A field is one thing to the strolling by-passer, another to the impressionist painter, yet another to the farmer determined to plant seed in it, and get a return.”13 The magic of music . . . a sense of proportion: Cf. “And Kung said: ‘Without character you will / be unable to play on that instrument / Or to execute the music fit for the Odes’” (13/60).

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Queen Anne: (1665–1714), the last monarch of the House of Stuart reigned for twelve years (1702–14) (cf. note GK 231). Pope’s enemies: Alexander Pope (cf. note GK 98–99) was viciously and frequently attacked in the public prints of his day. His enemies mocked him for a physical deformity that resulted from spinal tuberculosis (Pott’s disease), which stunted his growth and left him dependent on the help of others. He was also attacked for his mock-heroic verse satires and ostracized for his Catholicism, a religion that had fallen out of favor in England within months of Pope’s birth, once James II was deposed from the throne in the Glorious Revolution of 1688.1 Hardy quotes ole sheepy Wordsworth . . . carefully excluded”: The quote, from William Wordsworth’s Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1800), is found in the prefatory “Apology” to the collection of poems, Late Lyrics and Earlier, With Many Other Verses (1922), by the English poet and novelist Thomas Hardy (1840–1928).2 τάδ’ ώδ’ έχει: (Gr.) “That’s how it is,” spoken by Clytemnestra as she unrepentantly admits to having murdered her husband Agamemnon to the Chorus in Aeschylus’s eponymous tragedy (cf. note GK 24).3 Madox Ford: Cf. note GK 134. Harriet’s Home Gazette . . . Ford’s specifications as to what a poem shd. be: “Home Gazette” is Pound’s derisive term for Poetry: A Magazine of Verse launched in 1912 and edited by the American poet, editor, and literary critic Harriet Monroe (1860–1936). Incidentally, the magazine is still active today. It published Pound’s first “Three Cantos” in 1917 (cf. note GK 145), among other works by some of the most influential

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A Companion to Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur modernist poets. His reference to a “critical document” in Poetry outlining the core of Ford’s poetics is probably Pound’s own “Status Rerum” in the editorial comment of the January 1913 issue of the magazine. Pound writes that Ford “believes in an exact rendering of things. He would strip words of all ‘association’ for the sake of getting a precise meaning. He professes to prefer prose to verse. You would find his origins in Gautier or in Flaubert. He is objective.”4 Browning . . . after the death of Shelley: Pound quotes from the preface to the first volume of The Poetical Works of Thomas Lovell Beddoes (1890) and alludes to the introduction by Edmund Gosse (cf. note GK 227). According to Gosse, Beddoes (1803– 49) was the earliest English poet “to imitate Shelley’s lyrical work.” Gosse also ranks Beddoes more highly as a lyrist than as a dramatist. The “list of poets” Pound mentions includes Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834), the Irish poet Thomas Moore (1779–1852), the English Romantic poet Robert Southey (1774–1843), the Scottish poet Thomas Campbell (1777–1844), and the Scottish writer Walter Scott (1771–1826), while excluding Walter Savage Landor (cf. note GK 84).5 all right for Hardy to live it . . . If I have, a few pages back: The unexpurgated GK includes the following passage between the above clauses, But its ubicity was indicated after his [i.e., Hardy’s] death when his stinking old sisters observed that they hadn’t thought it quite nice for him to write novels.   It is customary to allude to this pronunciamento of the aged hens with a pawky snigger. From another angle it is not funny. It is savage and degraded. After Mr Eliot no first rate foreigner entered England to stay. T. S. Eliot excised the above from the 1938 Faber edition, no doubt for fear of libel, but perhaps also because the famously

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reticent and self-effacing poet may have found Pound’s praise embarrassingly fulsome. Eliot nonetheless pencilled on the left margin that a “Clear space” should be left in the final printed version to indicate the deletion, a format also kept by New Directions. Landor, who was quick to see Browning’s prying inquisitiveness: Landor’s sonnet “To Robert Browning” praises Browning to the extent that Since Chaucer was alive and hale, No man hath walkt along our roads with step So active, so inquiring eye, or tongue So varied in discourse.6 Pound himself considered Browning a better poet than Landor.7 Sero sero te amavi, pulchritudo tam antiqua, quam nova: (L.) “Too late loved I Thee, O Thou Beauty of ancient days, yet ever new!,” from St. Augustine’s Confessions.8 The Latin excerpt also furnishes the epigraph of Yeats’s poetry collection, The Rose (1893).9 Yeats quotes the line again in his essay “Ireland and the Arts” (1910).10 In Canto 25, Pound alludes to Augustine’s lament, “Heavy sound: / ‘Sero, sero . . . .’” (25/118). Hardy, Swinburne, H. James: Cf. notes GK 284, 131, 31, respectively. pre-Raphaelites: Founded in 1848, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood comprised a group of painters attending the Royal Academy Schools in London: William Holman Hunt (1827– 1910), John Everett Millais (1829–96), and Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–82). As the movement’s moniker suggests, the Pre-Raphaelites aimed to reform British painting by reviving aspects of art from before the time of the Italian Renaissance painter Raphael (cf. note GK 133). Their “rebellion,” as Pound puts it, entailed the adoption of a deliberately archaic artistic

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Five varieties of Roman marriage: The legal distinctions in the varieties of marriage in ancient Roman society were slightly more complicated than Pound suggests. There were in fact two forms of marriage: cum manu and sine manu, respectively entailing the wife’s falling under the power of her husband (or of his paterfamilias) or remaining under the power of her own paterfamilias. There were three varieties of marriage cum manu: confarreatio, coemptio, and usus, the first being a religious ceremony presided over by a priest of Jupiter, the second a formal ceremony conducted as a fictitious sale of the wife to the husband, and the third a ceremony intended for a wife who cohabited with her husband for a year without interruption.15

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Hardy to Swinburne: Cf. notes GK 284, 131, respectively. my great uncle Albert: Albert E. Pound (b. 1831), brother of Thaddeus C. Pound (1832–1914), Ezra Pound’s grandfather. Albert Pound is described in the Wisconsin volume of The United States Biographical Dictionary (1877) as a Republican elected to the State Legislature in 1871 and as a working member of the Wisconsin Assembly, “bold and outspoken, freely, fearlessly and fully expressing his views on any question under consideration.”1 He makes a brief appearance as “Al” in Canto 114, amidst remembered fragments of old family conversations (114/812). Only Rudyard Kipling .  .  . courageous ingenuity: The sentence was redacted from the original version in the unexpurgated GK, Only Kipling, who had a gross and most British mind regarding women, put up some sort of episcopal frontage, because he was despicably cowardly when it came to matters of thought, outside his given limits, limits wherein thought was mainly a sort of technical and courageous ingenuity. (cf. note GK 194) Hardy . . . “That the greatest of things is Charity”: A reference to Hardy’s poem “Surview,” whose epigraph is a Latin tag from Psalm 119:59, Cogitavi vias meas (“I thought on my ways”).2 Browning had a revivalist spirit . . . [n.] ? and Swinburne: Pound had illustrated this point several years earlier in a 1913 essay on the Troubadours published in the Quarterly Review,

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citing Browning and Dante as responsible for creating “so much interest in Sordello” (cf. note GK 107–108). Pound credits Swinburne with reviving “the conception of poetry as a ‘pure art’” (cf. note GK 131).3 we believed in the individual case: This sentiment fundamentally informed Vorticism, as expressed in the movement’s magazine in 1914, “Blast presents an art of Individuals” (cf. note GK 63).4 “new synthesis”: Cf. note GK 95. Crime Club: A special imprint of the publishing firms William Collins in Britain and Doubleday in the U.S., specializing in detective and mystery fiction.5 Sì vid’ io ben piu di mille splendori . . . che da lei uscia”: From Canto V of Dante’s Paradiso. The tercet reads in translation, “So thousand splendours, ay, and more beside, / I saw drawn toward us: and from each was heard / ‘Lo one, by whom our loves are magnified.’” The next two quoted lines are from the subsequent tercet, “The shade was seen with joy to overflow / By the effulgence that from it appeared.”6 the arcanum is the arcanum . . . Cook’s ticket thereto: A profound secret or mystery, as typified in the rites of Eleusis (cf. note GK 145). The arcanum remains hidden, beyond the reach of a “Cook’s ticket” (after the travel agency, Thomas Cook & Son). In 1939, Pound would write, “The mysteries are not revealed, and no guide book to them has been or will be written.”7 In Canto 91, “They who are skilled in fire / shall read 旦 tan, the dawn / Waiving no jot of the arcanum” (91/635).8 Bosschère: Jean de Bosschère (1878–1953), Belgian poet and painter. In a letter of June 30, 1916 to Margaret Anderson, editor of The Little Review, Pound describes de Bosschère as “undoubtedly about the most ‘modern’ writer Paris can boast.” Anderson quotes Pound’s comment in the November 1916 issue of her magazine, in which she also prints de Bosschère’s

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poem, “L’Offre de Plebs,” having already published his “Ulysse fait son lit” in the August issue.9 Writing to John Quinn two years later, however, Pound would complain, “De Bosschère is too queer, too out of touch with everything.”10 And at dead of night . . . Quem elegisti”: The final stanza of Hardy’s poem “After Reading Psalms XXXIX., XL., Etc.” Pound neglects to include the question mark at the end of Latin phrase, which translates as, “Whom hast thou chosen?”11 293 Chaucer . . . Wm. Cloudesley: Cf. note GK 280. Conversation at Dawn: The “situation” in Hardy’s poem of 1910, “A Conversation at Dawn,” involves a tense dialogue between a husband and wife in a hotel room. The poem reaches a climax when the wife reveals that she had already wed another man, albeit “informally.” Her present husband, however, vows to teach her “a lesson,” “‘Till I’ve starved your love for him; nailed you mine!”12 Erectheus: Erechtheus: A Tragedy (1876) by Swinburne (cf. notes GK 131, 290). Gerard Hopkins: (1844–89), English poet and Jesuit priest. In his obituary for Ford Madox Ford in 1939, Pound briefly mentions the “recently unduly touted, metrical labours of G. Manley Hopkins.”13 faute de mieux: (Fr.) “for want of something better.”14 gradus ad Parnassum: (L.) “a step to Parnassus.” In Greek mythology, Mount Parnassus, located a few miles north of Delphi, was sacred to Apollo and the Muses; hence, it denotes cultural or literary greatness. Hardy is Gautier’s successor: In a letter of December 1934, Pound affirms that no one has taught him “anything about writing since Thomas Hardy died” in 1928 (cf. note GK 178).15 293–94 Pastime and good company . . . Henry VIIIth’s mind: The first line is also the eponymous title of a hedonistic lyric by Henry VIII. Its carefree tone notwithstanding, the poem ends on a moralistic note,

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  My mind shall be: Virtue to use, Vice to refuse,   Shall I use me.16 294 Eleusis: Cf. note GK 145. knowledge is a drug on the market . . . superhumanly abundant: Cf. “Yet must thou sail after knowledge / Knowing less than drugged beasts” (47/236). 294–95 Says Valli . . . Manes or of anything else: As Pound admits in the final paragraph of this chapter, this passage is “as obscure as anything in my poetry.” This is partly because his target, Luigi Valli’s Il linguaggio segreto di Dante e dei “Fedeli d’Amore” (1928) (cf. note GK 221), is also opaque. In Dante’s time, the two main opposing factions in German and Italian politics were the Ghibellines—loyal to the German Holy Roman emperors—and the Guelphs—loyal to the papacy. Valli’s book alleges that he and Dante, along with the poets Cecco Angiolieri (c.1260–c.1312), Francesco da Barberino (1264–1348), Petrarch, and Cavalcanti belonged to a secret sect that worshipped a feminine incarnation of Sophia, or holy wisdom, and cultivated links with Templars and Ghibelline factions.17 As Tryphonopoulos and Surette have argued, the secret Ghibelline communications in Dante’s work were for Valli political in nature. This is precisely the point Pound challenges in Valli’s euhemeristic (i.e., allegorical and secular) argument, Surette affirms, as he “wants an esoteric mystery, not a political secret; a society of illuminated souls, not a cabal of zealots.”18 295 Certain colours exist in nature: Cf. “Earth and water dye the wind in the valley / tso feng 風 tso feng suh / that his feelings have the colour of nature” (98/709). Truth . . . proper “lighting”, fitfully and by instants: A recurring trope in Pound’s criticism and poetics, most memorably

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Part V I

Section XII

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R. L. Stevenson . . . Virginibus Puerisque: Stevenson’s 1881 collection of philosophical essays on a range of subjects (cf. note GK 133). Romantic poetry . . . concept of reincarnation: Pound’s point may be gleaned in Wordsworth’s “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood,” published in its final edited form in 1815. Wordsworth enlists elements of the Platonic doctrine of metempsychosis, naturalizing loss and offering hope of spiritual rebirth.1 I assert that the Gods exist: In “Axiomata,” published in The New Age of January 13, 1921, Pound declares, “God, therefore, exists . . . Concerning the intimate essence of the universe we are utterly ignorant. We have no proof that this god, Theos, is one, or is many, or is divisible or indivisible, or is an ordered hierarchy culminating, or not culminating, in a unity.”2 Canto 113 puts it less ambivalently, “The Gods have not returned. ‘They have never left us.’ / They have not returned. / Cloud’s processional and the air moves with their living” (113/807). Mr Eliot . . . What Mr P. believes?: A shorter version of the question Eliot had posed in a 1928 review of Pound’s Personae (1926), “What does Mr. Pound believe?”3 In his prose polemic, After Strange Gods (1934), Eliot takes Pound to task for his cosmopolitan Confucianism and “post-Protestant prejudice,” deeming Pound’s vision of Hell in A Draft of XXX Cantos “a perfectly comfortable one for the modern mind to contemplate.”4 Pound’s gibe about Eliot’s “nest of frousty and insular parsons” alludes to his friend’s Anglo-Catholic faith, to which Eliot formally converted in 1927.

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Ovid’s long poem: Ovid’s Metamorphoses (cf. notes GK 149–50, 272). For Pound, Ovid’s poem is not “a poetic fiction,” Surette argues, quoting from a letter Pound wrote to his father in 1927, but “a metaphor for the relationship between the human and the divine, the third subject of the Cantos, ‘the magic moment’ or moment of metamorphosis, burst thru from quotidien into ‘divine or permanent world.’”5 I don’t in the least wish that I had missed a Xtian education: Pound was brought up in a Presbyterian household. Ironically, given his description here of the Old Testament as “a record of revolting barbarism and turgid poesy,” his first name bears witness to the popularity among Presbyterians of the author of The Book of Ezra, the Old Testament reformer known as Ezra the Scribe.6 Only in basicly pagan Italy has Christianity escaped becoming a nuisance: Earlier, Pound attributes the supposedly Pagan element in Italian Catholicism to “Mediterranean moderation” and cites selected works found in Il Sussidiario della Quinta Elementare, the textbook supplement to the fifth elementary class of his daughter, Mary (GK 141). For Pound, the selections typify a quasi-Pagan Christian vision of nature built on a classical, Mediterranean foundation (cf. notes GK 141–42). CAMPANOLATRY: Pound’s portmanteau for the excessive tolling of church bells (campana, Italian for “bell,” + idolatry) ensuing from clerical dogmatism. filthy racket imposed on denizens of Kensington, W.8: ­Allusion to the sound made by church bells at St. Mary Abbots Parish Church, Kensington, W8, adjacent to the flat at 10 Church Walk where Pound lived from September 1909 to June 1910, and from November 1911 to April 1914. It was also in this church that he and Dorothy Sheakespear (1886–1973) were married on April 20, 1914. The church’s stone built tower, the tallest spire in London, holds ten bells.7 Trollope: Cf. note GK 258.

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A Companion to Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur porcine physiognomy: Pound’s anti-clerical stance is colored by the pseudo-scientific field that heads the title of the present chapter: physiognomy, the study of the interrelation between facial traits and character, a practice deeply embedded in Victorian culture. Unlike phrenology, a descriptor applied to individuals, physiognomy developed into a diagnostic tool for group characteristics.8 Tempio Malatestiano: Cf. note GK 2. my farewells solo ai elefanti . . . Oh well it’s all a religion: The first reminiscence alludes to Pound’s visit to the Tempio in Rimini, the first of which took place about May 15, 1922, just before he began the first drafts and notes for the Malatesta Cantos in the following month. His farewell “only to the elephants” refers to the sculpted stone elephants that support the columns of the church. These are the “aliofants” mentioned in The Cantos (9/40).9 In Jefferson and/or Mussolini Pound recounts in greater detail the truncated anecdotes involving a “country priest” and an “old nun in hospital”: My anti-clericalism petered out in Romagna. I recall a country priest guying the sacristan in the Tempio Malatestiano because the foreigner knew more about the church, “his” church, than the sacristan. I recall also the puzzled expression of the same priest a few days later as he saw me making my farewells to the stone elephants. I asked him if he considered this form of devotion heretical. He grinned and seemed wholly undisturbed by fears for my indefinite future. An old nun in hospital had a good deal of trouble in digesting the fact that I wasnt Christian, no I wasnt; thank God, I wasnt a Protestant, but I wasnt a Catholic either, and I wasnt a Jew, I believed in a more ancient and classical system with a place for Zeus and Apollo. To which with infinite gentleness, “Zè tutta una religione.” “Oh well its all a religion.”10

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funny church: All Souls Church, Anglican, member of the Evangelical Alliance, located at Langham Place, just north of Oxford Circus in central London. Blougram’s Apology: “Bishop Blougram’s Apology,” Robert Browning’s dramatic monologue of 1855, features a bon vivant, worldly bishop, who is at times skeptical and for whom the clerical life is a trade, rather than a divine calling.11 Church Assembly a year ago: The Church of England Assembly in June 1936. The Assembly issued a Church and State Report, prompting Bishop Garbett of Winchester to call for a renewed “connection between Church and state,” crucial “at a moment when Europe was in a restless condition.”12 Thoughts after Lambeth: Published by Faber in 1931 as a standalone volume, Eliot’s essay was prompted by the Report of the Lambeth Conference of 1930, a decennial meeting of the bishops of the Anglican Communion. Commenting on the Church of England’s position on a range of subjects, including science, literature, marriage, and birth control, Eliot surmises that “the real conflict is not between one set of moral prejudices and another, but between the theistic and the atheistic faith; and it is all for the best that the division should be sharply drawn.”13 J. H.’s criticism: John Hargrave (1894–1982), British Social Crediter, leader of the movement’s militant wing, the Green Shirts, and editor of the journal Attack!, with whom Pound corresponded in the mid-1930s. Pound had quoted Hargrave’s quip in a 1935 letter to William Carlos Williams with the same irreverent tone about the religious beliefs of “the Rev/ Possum” (i.e., Eliot).14 302 Coughlin: Cf. note GK 241. Hardy’s preface: Hardy’s prefatory “Apology” to his collection Late Lyrics and Earlier, With Many Other Verses (cf. note GK 284). Pound alludes to the question Hardy poses, “what other purely English establishment than the Church, of sufficient

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A Companion to Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur dignity and footing, and with such strength of old association, such architectural spell, is left in this country to keep the shreds of morality together?”15 faute de mieux: Cf. note GK 293. Max Gate: The fairly isolated house on the outskirts of Dorchester, Dorset, in which Hardy lived from 1885 until his death from a heart attack in 1928.16 Washington . . . “the benign influence”: Cf. note GK 26. The benign influence of Dickens’ fiction: In a 1920 review of Wyndham Lewis’s novel Tarr (1918), Pound situates the “serious work” of Lewis and the “perfectly well-known type novel” of Charles Dickens (1812–70) in contrast with the average novel produced by “a third-rate mind’s imitation.”17 litterae humaniores: (L.) the humanities, especially the study of the Greek and Roman classics, philosophy, and ancient history. Wm. Baxter: Cf. note GK 77. De Gourmont: Cf. note GK 88. Zaharoff: Sir Basil Zaharoff (1849–1936), international weapons and ammunition dealer and financier, dubbed the “Supersalesman of Death.” Russian newspapers described him “as the most active and enterprising agent of Vickers” (cf. note GK 115).18 In a nod to his Greek heritage, Zaharoff is featured satirically in Cantos 18 and 38 as “Zenos Metevsky,” “‘the wellphilantrophist,’” as portrayed by the press (18/80–82, 38/187). His real name appears once in The Cantos. Pound recalls how “Taffy went putty-colour when I mentioned Zaharoff (1914)” (93/647). Alfred (Taffy) Fowler, the “old quaker Hamish” (18/82), was an engineer from Leeds, who, in a salutary contrast to Zaharoff, manufactured steam-ploughs.19

54. AND THEREFORE TENDING Novum Organum . . . Bacon found Aristotle unsatisfactory: Originally written in Latin by the English Renaissance philosopher Francis Bacon (1561–1626), Novum Organum (1620) ambitiously aimed to offer nothing less than “True Directions for the Interpretation of Nature,” as boasted in the book’s subtitle. Although it takes its title from Aristotle’s logical treatise, Organum, Bacon’s work purports to supplant it. As Pound suggests, Bacon rejects Aristotle’s dialectical arguments and syllogistic method of reasoning. For Bacon, Aristotle “utterly enslaved his natural philosophy to his logic, and made it a matter of disputation and almost useless.”1 304–5 Nichomachean Ethics . . . tavola rasa: Aristotle’s magnum opus on moral science, the Nicomachean Ethics comprises ten books dedicated to his son Nicomachus and his pupil Eudemus, according to Porphyry, an early commentator. Pound’s comment that the treatise “offers a better tavola rasa” (or “blank slate”) must be measured in relation to Confucian philosophy, against which he pits Aristotelian logic and ethics in a less favorable light (cf. note GK 15). Jiyuan Yu aptly sums up the structural differences between the two modes of ethical thinking: 304

First, there is a distinction between practical wisdom and theoretical wisdom in Aristotle, and the theory of contemplation gives rise to a tension with the theory of practical virtue in the middle books of the Nicomachean Ethics. In contrast, there is no division between practical virtue and theoretical virtue in Confucian ethics.2

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Pound owned and extensively annotated his copy of the 1934 revised edition of Harris Rackham’s translation of the Nicomachean Ethics, first published in 1926. 305 Paideuma: Cf. note GK 27. ante Christum: (L.) “before Christ.” Mr Swabey: Reverend Henry Swabey, a young Anglican minister with whom Pound corresponded about economics and the Church of England in the mid-1930s, as shown in a letter to Swabey of December 19, 1936 concerning the Church Assembly that year (cf. note GK 301) and “the nature of money monopoly, credit and economics.”3 Swabey edited the Social Credit journal Voice and wrote an unpublished monograph, Usury and the Church of England, citing Aristotle’s and Pound’s attacks on usury, including the portrayal of usury as “the beast with a hundred legs” in The Cantos (15/64).4 the Stagirite: Aristotle, born in the Macedonian city of Stagira, in northeastern Greece. my impertinence on pp. 46 of this volume: Allusion to Pound’s suggestion that Aristotle’s Economics “probably has nowt to do with culture and civilization” (cf. note GK 46). 306 Aquinas: Cf. note GK 77. “Moerbeke’s”: William of Moerbeke (c.1215–c.1286), Flemish archbishop and classical translator of the works of Aristotle and other early Greek philosophers into Latin, including the revised translation of the Nicomachean Ethics by Grossesteste (cf. note GK 77).5 Schopenhauer’s admirable essay on style: As Pound suggests, in his essay “On Authorship and Style” German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) differentiates between the “false nature” or “dead mask” of writers who mindlessly imitate the style of ancient authors and the genuine stylistic “physiognomy” that distinguishes original writers, among whom he cites Eriugena, Bacon, Petrarch, Spinoza, and Descartes.6 Ta Hio: Cf. notes GK 15, 16.

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“Utilities”: A possible reference to the Journal of Land and Public Utility Economics, the flagship publication of the Institute for Research in Land Economics and Public Utilities, founded in 1920 at the University of Wisconsin. University of Paris had prohibited . . . the teaching of Aristotle: In 1270 and 1277, Étienne Tempier (d. 1279), Bishop of Paris, issued several Condemnations banning the teaching of Aristotelian and Averroist (cf. note GK 53) ideas at the University of Paris with the aim to reassert the pre-eminence of orthodox Christian doctrines over natural philosophy.7 Plato’s gossip of Socrates: Allusion to the famous philosophical genealogy that began with Socrates and continued with his star pupil Plato, who transmitted the philosophy of Socrates in a series of dialogues and exerted a profound impact upon his own prize pupil, Aristotle.8 Darwin and Huxley (and Ball: British evolutionists. The botanist and zoologist Charles Darwin (1809–82) propounded his groundbreaking theory of evolution by natural selection in On the Origin of Species (1859), while physiologist and biologist Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895) became a prominent champion of evolution and a staunch defender of Darwin. William Platt Ball (1844–1917) was a freethinker, Darwinist, and author of Are the Effects of Use and Disuse Inherited? (1890). Huxley held the book in high esteem, as it mounts a sustained defense of natural selection against the “poorly founded” neo-Lamarckian hypothesis of the biologist and philosopher Herbert Spencer (1820–1903), which held that “natural selection can do so little in modifying the higher animals.”9 εύδαιμονείν . . . DAEMON: Pound takes Rackham to task for the latter’s translation of εύδαιμονείν (eúdaimoneín), a variant of εὐδαιμονία (eudaimonía), often rendered as “the highest good.” In Rackham’s translation of the Nicomachean Ethics (NE I.iv.2), Aristotle’s definition of the highest good is in keeping with the opinion of the majority, “for both the multitude and

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A Companion to Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur persons of refinement speak of it as Happiness, and conceive ‘the good life’ or ‘doing well’ to be the same thing as ‘being happy.’” Pound responds directly to Rackham’s footnote to this passage, “This translation of εὐδαιμονία can hardly be avoided, but it would perhaps be more accurately rendered by ‘Wellbeing’ or ‘Prosperity’: and it will be found that the writer does not interpret it as a state of feeling but as a kind of activity.”10 As chronicled in Plato’s Apology, soon after being sentenced to death by drinking hemlock in 399 BCE Socrates enlists εὐδαιμονίας (“bliss”) in his cross-examination of Meletus, his main accuser in his trial for allegedly corrupting Athenian youth. Socrates affirms that death could provide “inconceivable happiness” if it would enable him to associate with great figures from the past, such as Homer, Hesiod, Orpheus, Odysseus, and others.11 Socrates’s “DAEMON,” as Pound suggests, is embedded in the term eudaimonia. Socrates first mentions the concept in the Apology, saying that he has a daimonion, or spiritual companion, that guides his actions. It “began for me in childhood,” Socrates explains, “a sort of voice comes, and whenever it comes, it always turns me away from whatever I am about to do, but never turns me forward.”12 It is in light of the supernatural overtones of this Socratic doctrine that Pound characterizes εύδαιμονείν as form of “thaumaturgy” (from the Greek θαυματουργία [thaumatourgía], “wonderworking” or “conjuring”).13 Spectator-New-Statesman-Villard-Webbite: Founded in 1828, The Spectator, a conservative publication, is the longestrunning continuously published weekly magazine in English. New Statesman is a weekly review founded in 1913 by Sidney and Beatrice Webb (hence Pound’s pejorative “Webbite”). Henry and Oswald Villard were American liberal newspaper moguls (cf. note GK 52). Together, these publications and publishers represent third-rate “choinulism,” Pound’s slang for the kind of superficial journalism he abhors.

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Bloomsbury simp: The idea that “Arry” might be a “Bloomsbury simp” reflects Pound’s longstanding animosity toward the Bloomsbury Group, a collective of writers and artists. Bloomsburians proceeded mostly out of the University of Cambridge, and the group consisted chiefly of Virginia and Leonard Woolf, E. M. Forster, Clive Bell, Vanessa Bell, Katherine Mansfield, John Maynard Keynes, Bertrand Russell, Roger Fry, Lytton Strachey, Duncan Grant, Sigmund Freud, and arguably even T. S. Eliot, whom Virginia Woolf first met in 1918. Ann Banfield points out that the “implicit raison d’être of Bloomsbury discussions was the extension of knowledge beyond the confines of the university elite.”14 In turn, Christine Froula argues that while “Britain’s major poets contemplated ‘saving civilization’ with fatalistic despair, nostalgia, and ‘embarrassment,’ Bloomsbury’s internationalist thinkers and artists fought in public debate across the disciplines—economics, politics, psychoanalysis, social criticism, arts and letters— for a civilization that had never existed (hence could not be ‘saved’).”15 While Bloomsburian aims might seem to intersect with Pound’s objectives, he was intensely antagonistic to the group, which he saw as representing “hokum, affectation, snobism.”16 Prof. Q. writes to L. V. . . . Gallus 15, 11, I.: “L. V.” stands for the Italian idealist philosopher, Leone Vivante (cf. note GK 181). The first of the fragmentary handwritten notes by “Prof. Q.,” which Vivante “et uxore” (“and his wife”) could not decipher, blends Latin and modern Italian: “Consules decretum . . . furono cacciati da Roma nel 161 senatus consultum” (“The consuls decree . . . they were expelled from Rome in 161 [BCE] by decree of the Senate”). The professor quotes excerpts from De Grammaticis et Rhetoribus, the biographical work on grammarians and rhetoricians composed by the prolific Roman biographer Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus (c.70–c.130 CE). As Suetonius notes, Caius (or Gaius) Fannius Strabo

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A Companion to Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur and Marcus Valerius Messala were appointed consuls by the Roman Republic in 161 BCE. The full passage, which Pound partially quotes in Latin, translates as,   In the consulship of Gaius Fannius Strabo and Marcus Valerius Messala, the praetor Marcus Pomponius consulted the Senate.   Whereas a report was made concerning philsophers and rhetoricians, the senators proposed as follows in regard to said matter:   Marcus Pomponius, the praetor, shall take measures and shall provide that no philsophers or rhetoricians shall dwell in Rome, if it appears to him to be in the public interest and in accordance with his own good faith.17 The decree authorizing the expulsion of all philosophers from Rome reflects the concerns of conservative Romans during the first half of the second century BCE with the effects of Greek thought, morals, and manners. This context informs Prof. Q.’s opinion that “Fiorentino ut[i] Romae ne essent” (“should not remain in Rome”), possibly a reference to the contemporary Italian philosopher Francesco Fiorentino (cf. note GK 25). In De Grammaticis et Rhetoribus, Suetonius also gives an account of Lucius Plotius Gallus, a first-century BCE teacher of rhetoric, whose school was also banned in 92 BCE.18 Schopenhauer’s acid test for writers: Cf. note GK 306. Rackham . . . p. xxii of his introduction: The passages in question refer to Rackham’s explication of Aristotle’s conception of the telos or “teleological view of nature and of life.” The “clue to the evil” that Pound finds in Rackham’s reading of Aristotelian teleology boils down to the fact that Aristotle places no absolute value on the “Life of Action.” “It is not a part of,” Rackham concludes, “but only a means to, the End, which is the Life of Thought.”19

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EUDAIMONIA and EUDAIMONEIN: Cf. note GK 307. Ap. 16 anno XV: April 16, 1937 (cf. note GK 116). an Aristotelic residuum left in Mussolini’s own mind: In ABC of Economics (1933), Pound plays down “Aristotelian logic,” promoting instead the “ideogrammic method of first heaping together the necessary components of thought.” Later in the book, he asserts that “the Duce’s aphorisms and perceptions can be studied apart from his means of getting them into action.”20 Hence, the “Aristotelic residuum” flagged in GK may be read as Pound’s veiled criticism of traces in Mussolini of a kind of Aristotelian privileging of the life of thought over the life of action. 309–10 Sadakichi Hartmann . . . Chinese magician in Fairbank’s Thief of Bagdad: Sadakichi Hartmann (1867–1944), Japaneseborn American art critic, poet, playwright, and photographer. He was mentored in his youth by Walt Whitman, and recorded his encounters with the elderly poet in Conversations with Walt Whitman (1895), the first of which took place in November 1894. In Paris in the early 1890s, Hartmann became part of the inner circle of Symbolists, including Mallarmé, Laforgue, and Remy de Gourmont, among other writers and painters. Like Pound, Hartmann valued Confucius, as seen in his play Confucius: A Drama in Two Acts (1923), reprinted in Buddha, Confucius, Christ: Three Prophetic Plays (1971). After moving to Los Angeles in March 1923, Hartmann became involved with the actor and director Douglas Fairbanks (1883–1939), who cast him as the star of the 1924 film, The Thief of Bagdad. Pound’s admiration for Hartmann, with whom he corresponded, emerges with full force in Canto 80, where Pound imagines that

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          Mr Hartmann, Sadakichi a few more of him, were that conceivable, would have enriched

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A Companion to Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur    the life of Manhattan    or any other town or metropolis the texts of his early stuff are probably lost with the loss of fly-by-night periodicals. (80/515)

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In her introduction to a collection of Hartmann’s art writings, Jane Calhoun Weaver corroborates Pound’s impression in The Cantos and in GK to the extent that had Hartmann’s writings “appeared in accessible print in their own day, or had been published in their entirety, [his name] would be recorded with greater celebration in American art annals.”21 “the true statesman . . . special study of goodness”: Aristotle’s rationale for this claim is his ideal stateman’s aim “to make the citizens good and law-abiding men.”22 O.K. . . . RUBBISH: Pound’s comparative table translates as follows (arranged below in corresponding order): δυσαφαίρετον: (dusaphaíreton), (I.v.4) “not easy to be taken away.” The phrase pertains to Aristotle’s rejection of a political life based on the pursuit of honor as “the Good.” Because honor depends on the whims of those who confer it, it can be taken away from the recipient, whereas the Good “must be something proper to its possessor.”23 ἀρχὰς ῥᾳδίως: (arkhàs rhaͅdíōs), (I.iv.7) literally, “first principles easily,” in “And the man of good moral training knows first principles already, or can easily acquire them.”24 vi. 16.: Pound deems this entire passage “rubbish,” Moreover, it is not easy to see how knowing that same Ideal Good will help a weaver or carpenter in the practice of his own craft, or how anybody will be a better physician or general for having contemplated the absolute Idea. In fact it does not appear that the physician studies even health in the abstract; he studies the health of the human being—or rather of

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some particular human being, for it is individuals that he has to cure.25 χρηματιστὴς βίαιός: (khrēmatistḕ s bíaiós), (I.v.8) literally, “money-maker constrained.” Rackham’s footnote indicates that βίαιός signifies “violent.” The complete sentence reads, “The Life of Money-making is a constrained kind of life, and clearly wealth is not the Good we are in search of, for it is only good as being useful, a means to something else.”26 The οὐ before τὴν τοῦ σώματος: (ou . . . tḕ n toũ sṓ matos), (I.xiii.6) literally, “The ‘not’ before ‘that of the body,’” in “But human goodness means in our view excellence of soul, not excellence of body; also our definition of happiness is an activity of the soul.”27 ἥδεσθαι τῶν ψυχικῶν: (hḗ desthai tō͂ n psukhikō͂ n), (I.viii.10) “pleasure of the soul,” in “For the feeling of pleasure is an experience of the soul.” Distinct from bodily pleasures, this pleasure is the kind that arises from “the life of active virtue.”28 θεωρήσει τὰ κατ᾽ ἀρετήν = vir(tus) . . . 仁: (theōrḗ sei tà kat᾽ aretḗ n), (I.x.11) “contemplating the things that are in conformity with virtue.” Pound singles out ἀρετήν (aretḗ n) as “vir(tus),” a rendering that is equivalent with the Confucian ideogram 仁 (“benevolence”). Legge translates the ideogram in its adjectival form as “virtuous,” while Pound translates it as “good” (cf. note GK 273).29 πράξεις καὶ τὰ ἔργα: (práxeis kaì tà érga) “actions and results.” Pound misattributes the phrase to I.x.11, but it belongs to I.xii.2. It concerns Aristotle’s rendering of happiness as an expression of value, “For we praise just men and brave men, in fact good men and virtue generally, because of their actions and the results they produce.”30 συνετὸς: (sunetòs), (I.xiii.20) “intelligent,” in the closing passage of Book I, “When describing a man’s moral

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A Companion to Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur character we do not say that he is wise or intelligent, but gentle or temperate; but a wise man also is praised for his disposition, and praiseworthy dispositions we term virtues.”31 the start of Schopenhauer’s essay on style: The philosopher’s oft-cited essay begins by contrasting “two kinds of authors, those who write for the sake of the subject and those who write for the sake of writing. The former have had ideas or experiences which seem to them worth communicating; the latter need money and thus write for money.”32 I envy Cocteau his greek as I shd. never envy Swinburne: Pound greatly admired Cocteau’s adaptations of Greek drama, singling out in an essay of 1933 Cocteau’s Sophoclean plays, Antigone (1922) and Oedipus Rex (1927), the latter a libretto in Latin for an opera-oratorio by Stravinsky (cf. notes GK 93, 199).33 Pound’s preference for Cocteau’s adaptions over Swinburne’s echoes his earlier criticism of the latter’s Greek tragedy, Erechtheus (1876) (GK 293). bosse: (Fr.) “flair” or “gift,” employed ironically here. Roman Senate, 161 a.c.: Cf. note GK 308. University of Paris, 1313: In keeping with the Condemnations of the previous century (cf. note GK 306), the faculties of theology in Paris and Oxford continued to uphold the ban on the teaching of Aristotelian philosophy, including the Aristotelian commentaries of Aquinas (cf. note GK 77). In 1313, the Dominican brotherhood to which Aquinas belonged and which sought to assimilate Aristotelian philosophy to Christianity forbade all denial of Thomism within the order in protest of the papal bans at the University of Paris.34 Georgio Gemisto, 1437: Allusion to the treatise composed by Gemistos Plethon around the time of the Council of FerraraFlorence. In De differentis (1439), Plethon attempts to expose perceived fallacies in Aristotle’s philosophy in contrast with the virtues of Platonic philosophy (cf. note GK 160).

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中: “Mean” or “middle” (cf. note GK 201). Anaisthetos: ἀναίσθητος or “insensible” in Rackham’s translation. The connection with the above-mentioned Confucian term only becomes apparent in the full context of Pound’s allusion to the following passage in the Nicomachean Ethics (I.ii.7), Similarly he that indulges in every pleasure and refrains from none turns out a profligate, and he that shuns all pleasure, as boorish persons do, becomes what may be called insensible. Thus Temperance and Courage are destroyed by excess and deficiency, and preserved by the observance of the mean.35 II.ii.3 is mere subversive CRAP . . . Plato: The full verse reads, But let it be granted to begin with that the whole theory of conduct is bound to be an outline only and not an exact system, in accordance with the rule we laid down at the beginning, that philosophical theories must only be required to correspond to their subject matter; and matters of conduct and expediency have nothing fixed or invariable about them, any more than have matters of health.36 The “admirable” quote from Plato appears in II.iii.2, highlighting the importance the philosopher places on “having been definitely trained from childhood to like and dislike the proper things; this is what good education means.”37 II.iii.5, words slide about . . . nothing: Pound penciled this simile almost verbatim at the top of the corresponding page in his copy of the Nicomachean Ethics, strongly underlining “nothing.” The passage, as a whole, outlines Aristotle’s convoluted notion of the realization of the soul’s “full nature.”38

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A Companion to Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur It is not as if Chinese were Fenollosa’s discovery: Pound makes an analogous observation in the Criterion of July 1937, “The ideogrammic method did not wait for Fenollosa’s treatise to become current in book form. We didn’t wait to know of Fenollosa’s existence.”39 Bacon: Cf. note GK 304. mikropsuxic: Pound’s play on “micropsia,” a neurological or psychological disorder that causes the sufferer to perceive objects as smaller than their actual size. 知 人: “To know humanity” (cf. notes GK 18, 122, 124–25). Meyer Anselm: A Frankfurt-based German Jew, Meyer Anselm Rothschild (1743–1812) founded the banking dynasty that bears his famous surname. He comes on the scene in Canto 74 as the protagonist of a “rrromance” with high finance and in a similar combative standpoint, “the yidd is a stimulant, and the goyim are cattle / in gt/ proportion and go to saleable slaughter / with the maximum of docility” (74/459).40 Dante . . . third heaven: Dante’s “maestro di color che sanno” (“the Master of those who know”), his honorific title for Aristotle as the greatest philosopher of antiquity, who dwells in the first circle or Limbo of the Inferno.41 In An Introduction to the Economic Nature of the United States (1944), Pound compares the design of The Cantos to Dante’s Divina Commedia, “For forty years I have schooled myself, not to write an economic history of the U.S. or any other country, but to write an epic poem which begins ‘In the Dark Forest’ crosses the Purgatory of human error, and ends in the light, and ‘fra I maestri di color che sanno.’”42 In Canto VIII of the Paradiso, Dante and Beatrice arrive in Venus, the third heaven, and are approached by the one of the spirits “che ’ntendendo il terzo ciel movete” (“who by intellect the third heaven move”).43 Pound thus contrasts Dante’s conception of Aristotle’s earthly (i.e., finite) knowledge and the extraordinary scope of divine intelligence.

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Vossler . . . Cavalcanti’s: Pound is challenging the charge Karl Vossler (1872–1949) lobs in Die philosophischen Grundlagen (1904) against Cavalcanti’s “imprecise psychological terminology.” Pound had already raised precisely the same contention in his essay on Cavalcanti.44 iv.6, is correct view: The passage reads, But the mass of mankind, instead of doing virtuous acts, have recourse to discussing virtue, and fancy that they are pursuing philosophy and that this will make them good men. In so doing they act like invalids who listen carefully to what the doctor says, but entirely neglect to carry out his prescriptions. That sort of philosophy will no more lead to a healthy state of soul than will the mode of treatment produce health of body.45

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v.3, on not getting angry enough: The passage itself yields a somewhat different meaning from Pound’s interpretation. Aristotle affirms that we are not “either praised or blamed for our emotions—a man is not praised for being frightened or angry, nor is he blamed for being angry merely, but for being angry in a certain way—but we are praised or blamed for our virtues and vices.”46 v.4, ἀρεταὶ προαιρέσεις: (aretaì proairéseis) “virtues are certain modes of choice.”47 vi.2., εξις: Rackham translates ἕξις (héxis) as “disposition,” with Aristotle stipulating in II.vi.1 that “it is not enough merely to define virtue generically as a disposition; we must also say what species of disposition it is.”48 vi.9: viz. Pound’s paraphrase, Aristotle argues that “excess and deficiency destroy perfection”; therefore, virtue—like art— “has the quality of hitting the mean.”49 ix. 5: The “besetting error” cited here refers to any error to which we are most prone. We can discover it “by observing

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A Companion to Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur the pleasure or pain that we experience,” and once the error is identified “we must drag ourselves away in the opposite direction,” toward the mean. Note that the typo in the preposition at the start of Pound’s quote nullifies the causal connection, “[f]or by steering wide of our besetting error we shall make a middle course.”50 v[erse]. 6: II.ix.6 enjoins us to “be most of all on our guard against what is pleasant and against pleasure; for when pleasure is on her trial we are not impartial judges.”51 Manchester Guardian: Liberal newspaper founded in 1821. i. 2: III.i.2 reads, “It is then generally held that actions are involuntary when done (a) under compulsion or (b) through ignorance.” Pound’s allusion to his remarks on the Confucian concern with precise terminology (cf. notes GK 16, 21, 58) is spurred by Rackham’s extensive footnote to this passage. Rackham attempts to parse the baffling ways in which Aristotle renders the variants of the terms “voluntary” and “involuntary.”52 Pound implies that Aristotle fails to choose le mot juste, the exact word. KALON: καλόν (“noble,” “beautiful”), in III.i.11, “For (1) pleasure and nobility between them supply the motives of all actions whatsoever. Also (2) to act under compulsion and unwillingly is painful, but actions done for their pleasantness or nobility are done with pleasure.”53 The contrast of kalon and hedu: i.e., “nobility” and “pleasantness” (καλόν and ἡδὺ in III.i.11) (cf. previous note). 庸: (yung) “unchanging” (cf. note GK 201). intendimento: (It.) “understanding.” The term appears in the last stanza of Cavalcanti’s “Donna mi prega,” a canzone to which Pound devoted considerable attention since he first translated it for The Dial in 1928 and had recently retranslated in Canto 36. In praising Confucius and Dante’s “much deeper intendimento” Pound riffs off Cavalcanti’s notion that only “persone / ch anno intendimento,”54 “those who have

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understanding,” can fully appreciate his poem. As Pound translates the coda, Go, song, surely thou mayest Whither it please thee For so art thou ornate that thy reasons Shall be praised from thy understanders, With others hast thou no will to make company. (36/179)

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As with Cavalcanti’s canzone, only a select few “understanders” can fully share in and appreciate the intendimento of Confucius and Dante. “maestro di color che sanno”: Cf. note GK 315. Erhlich: Cf. note GK 252. Semmelweis: Ignaz Philipp Semmelweis (1818–65), AustroHungarian physician who discovered that deadly infections such as puerperal fever resulted from the common practice of physicians’ not washing their hands or instruments after performing autopsies and attending to patients, particularly in obstetrics wards. Though controversial at the time, his theory of infection control by the antiseptic procedure of ordering medical students and physicians to wash their hands in disinfectant solution greatly reduced the death rate in his obstetrics ward in the Vienna General Hospital.55 DeKruif ’s men against death: Allusion to the enormously popular Microbe Hunters (1926), a book by microbiologist Paul De Kruif (1890–1971). Still in print, the bestseller dramatizes the stories of the scientists who contributed to the development of the germ theory of disease. III.i.11 (3): “It is absurd to blame external things, instead of blaming ourselves for falling an easy prey to their attractions; to take the credit of our noble deeds to ourselves, while putting the blame for our disgraceful ones upon the temptations of pleasure.”56

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i. 13 final clause: “Acts done through ignorance therefore fall into two classes: if the agent regrets the acts, we think that he has acted involuntarily; if he does not regret it, to mark the distinction we may call him a ‘non-voluntary’ agent—for as the case is different it is better to give it a special name.”57 iii. 2: Alhough Pound quotes the verse verbatim, the correct citation is iii.3. BOULUETAI: βουλεύεται, “to deliberate.” Lorenzo Valla: Cf. note GK 160. BOULEUOMAI: βουλεύομαι, the more active sense of the verb “to deliberate,” or, as Pound puts it, “deciding whether.” Aristotle’s geometric illustration: i.e., the latter part of Aristotle’s proposition in III.iii.3, lamenting that “nobody ­ deliberates about things eternal, such as the order of the universe, or the incommensurability of the diagonal and the side of a square.”58 “No Lacedaemonian . . . government for Scythia: Aristotle in III.iii.7, who then posits by way of contrast, “any particular set of men deliberates about the things attainable by their own actions.”59 318–19 iii. 8 . . . BOULOUO: Aristotle stipulates that “there is no room for deliberation about matters fully ascertained and completely formulated as sciences.” Note that Pound uses the root form of the verb, βουλεύω (“to deliberate,” “take counsel”), while Aristotle uses the noun form, βουλή (“deliberation,” “will,” “decision”).60 319 Pollon d’anthropon iden OU: Cf. note GK 99. iv 5 . . . SPOUDAIOS: In Rackham’s translation, Aristotle distinguishes the “good man” (σπουδαῖος, spoudaĩos) as one who “sees the truth in each kind, being himself as it were the standard and measure of the noble and pleasant.” Pound’s interpretation of spoudaios as “‘the serious character’” slang from his Vorticist days (cf. note GK 63) resonates with contemporary scholarship. George Whalley’s translation of

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Aristotle’s Poetics, for instance, consistently renders spoudaios as “morally serious.”61 22 April anno XV: April 22, 1937 (cf. note GK 116). III.vii: The chapter discusses the nature of courage, rashness, and cowardice.62 i.7: The second element in Aristotle’s definition of virtue in this verse, following “doing good rather than in having good done to one.”63 319–20 i.17: The “necessary condition” alluded to in the passage is for the “liberal man” to “acquire wealth from the proper source.”64 320 ii.15: The “magnificent man” spends his money on public projects, “and his gifts have some resemblance to votive offerings.”65 iii.18: This Stoic injunction defines the “great-souled man.”66 “MELEIN . . . DOXES”: μελεῖν τῆς ἀληθείας μᾶλλον ἢ τῆς δόξης (meleĩn tē͂ s alētheías mãllon ḕ tē͂ s dóxēs), “care more for the truth than for what people think.”67 megalopsux . . . Grandisons: Pound’s latinized “megalopsux” is the root of μεγαλοψυχία (megalopsukhía), “greatness of soul,” while “Grandisons” denotes the epistolary novel by Samuel Richardson, The History of Sir Charles Grandison (1753), whose protagonist displays the virtues of Aristotle’s “great-souled” person, as shown in IV.iii.1.68 Rackham uses a footnote . . . magnanimous: The footnote glosses “Greatness of Soul”—“μεγαλοψυχία, magnanimitas, means lofty pride and self-esteem rather than magnanimity or high-mindedness (in the modern sense of the word).”69 Castiglione: Cf. note GK 146. 321 Rackham’s note on the third word: Rackham has a lengthy footnote on the slippery meaning of δικαιοσύνης (dikaiosúnēs, “justice”) in Book V, narrowing it down to a “special Moral Virtue,” which could be rendered in English “sometimes as Justice, sometimes as Honesty or uprightness.” Pound

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A Companion to Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur specifically refers to Rackham’s comments on ἀδικεῖν (adikeĩn, “injustice”), meaning “not only to act unjustly, or dishonestly, but also to do, or have done, any wrongful injury to another, or any wrongful or illegal act, and so, as a legal term, to be guilty of a break of the law.”70 Claudius Salmasius: Cf. note GK 30. ADIKON: ἄδικον (“unjust”). PARANOMON: παράνομον (“unlawful”). ANISON: ἄνισον (“unequal”). we find a piece of tosh: Pound may have in mind the murky distinction Aristotle draws between “unjust and Injustice in the particular sense” and “unjust and Injustice in the universal sense.”71 “divisible assets of the community”: The material aspect of “Particular Justice,” involved in allotting equal or unequal shares to members of the community (V.ii.12).72 eleutherion: ἐλευθέρων (“free”). In V.v.18, Aristotle defines Political Justice as “justice between free and (actually or proportionately) equal persons, living a common life for the purpose of satisfying their needs.” However, as Pound points out, Rackham renders ἐλευθέρων as “gentleman” in IV.viii.10, “The cultivated gentleman will therefore regulate his wit, and will be as it were a law to himself.”73 οἱ δ’ ἀριστοκρατικοὶ ἀρετήν: (hoi d’ aristokratikoì aretḗ n) “upholders of aristocracy make it [i.e., Distributive Justice] virtue” (V.iii.7).74 DIKAIOSUNE . . . DIORTHŌTIKON: δικαιοσύνης (“justice”) and διορθωτικόν (“correction”). Aristotle specifies the latter as “Corrective Justice, which operates in private transactions.” Unlike Distributive Justice, Corrective Justice dictates that the law look “only at the nature of the damage, treating the parties as equal, and merely asking whether one has done and the other suffered injustice, whether one inflicted and the other has sustained damage” (V.iv.1–3).75

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μεταδόσει δὲ συμμένουσιν: (metadósei dè summénousin) “It is exchange that binds them together” (V.v.6).76 Metadidomi: μεταδίδωμι (“share,” “impart”). διὸ καὶ Χαρίτων ἱερὸν: (diò kaì Kharítōn hieròn) “This is why we set up a shrine of the Graces” (V.v.7).77 money is BORN as a MEASURE: Aristotle reasons that “money constitutes in a manner a middle term, for it is a measure of all things, and so of their superior or inferior value, that is to say, how many shoes are equivalent to a house or to a given quantity of food” (V.v.10).78 χρεία: (khreía) “demand.” Pound alludes to V.v.11, It is therefore necessary that all commodities shall be measured by some one standard . . . And this standard is in reality demand, which is what holds everything together, since if men cease to have wants or if their wants alter, exchange will go on no longer, or will be on different lines.79

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In translating χρεία as “demand,” Rackham follows W. D. Ross’s earlier translation, published by Clarendon Press in 1908 (cf. note GK 357). USUS . . . OPUS: “Need” (usus) determines the value of a commodity, but the “workmanship” (opus) put into its production may distort its price. Rabaté remarks that for Pound “it was enough to eliminate the -ura suffix from usura to find usus as the true basis of life.”80 Regius foundations: Cf. note GK 163. The sentence beginning PASXEI men oun: (πάσχει μὲν οὖν), “Money, it is true, is liable to the same fluctuation of demand as other commodities, for its purchasing power varies at different times” (V.v.14).81 “The proper thing . . . prices fixed”: Aristotle’s solution to stabilizing the exchange of commodities, given fluctuations

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A Companion to Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur in monetary values. Pound, however, takes issue with the philosopher’s notion that money “tends to be comparatively constant.”82 Irving Fisher (1867–1947), one of the economists Pound admired, labels this misconception “the money illusion” in a 1928 book bearing that title.83 PANTA TETIMESTHAI: πάντα τετιμῆσθαι (“all commodities to have their price fixed”) (V.v.14).84 Charlemagne’s commodity denar: Cf. note GK 47. V.x.3 . . . general statement: Aristotle portrays ἐπιεικές (epieikés, “equity”) as superior to “justice.” His reasoning, as the quoted excerpt from V.x.3 suggests, is clarified further in V.x.6, [equity] is a rectification of law where law is defective because of its generality. In fact this is the reason why things are not all determined by law: it is because there are some cases for which it is impossible to lay down a law, so that a special ordinance becomes necessary.85

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x.5: The full verse reads, When therefore the law lays down a general rule, and thereafter a case arises which is an exception to the rule, it is then right, where the lawgiver’s pronouncement because of its absoluteness is defective and erroneous, to rectify the defect by deciding as the lawgiver would himself decide if here were present on the occasion, and would have enacted if he had been cognizant of the case in question.86 ἐῶμεν: (eō͂ men) “permit.” Pound proposes substituting “would” for Rackham’s “do” in V.vi.5, “This is why we do not permit a man to rule, but the law, because a man rules in his own interest, and becomes a tyrant.”87

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mesos, metron and kanon (V.x.7): μέσος (mésos) “middle” or “moderate,” often used to designate moderation or equilibrium in one’s character (cf. VII.vii.2); μέτρον (métron), “measure” (cf. V.v.14); and κανών (kanṓ n) “straight rod,” “standard” (see V.x.7).88 HOROS . . . ὅρος: The “boundary” or “standard of measure” that Pound cites here refers to Aristotle’s definition of the mean or middle ground for moral virtue, “there is a certain standard determining those modes of observing the mean which we define as lying between excess and defect, being in conformity with the right principle” (VI.i.1).89 Pound’s footnote suggests a correlation between the Aristotelian mean in the Nicomachean Ethics to a similar principle in Book II of Aristotle’s Metaphysics. Though ὅρος is not, strictly speaking, present in Book II, Aristotle nonetheless posits a similar middle ground in the study of Truth, affirming that “each thinker makes some statement about the natural world, and as an individual contributes little or nothing to the inquiry; but a combination of all conjectures results in something considerable.”90 VI.vii.4: Pound seems irked by Aristotle’s conclusion that “even some of the lower animals are said to be prudent, namely those which display a capacity for forethought as regards their own lives.”91 ἕξις μετὰ λόγου: literally, “way of being [héxis] rational [metà lógou].” Rackham translates the phrase as “that reasons truly.” It alludes to Aristotle’s argument that “art is the same thing as a rational quality, concerned with making, that reasons truly” (VI.iii.3) (cf. note GK 330–31).92 Heidegger renders ἕξις as the “being-there of human beings in its concrete possibilities” and as “the having of something, the mode of being in having, the mode of being-positioned in relation to what is had.” He also underscores μετὰ λόγου, “insofar as we are always inquiring into the λόγου, into that speaking

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about, and addressing of, the world, wherein concept and conceptuality are at home.”93 326–27 sophia . . . κεφαλεν ἔχουσα ἐπιστήμη τῶν τιμιωτάτων: (kephalen [sic] ékhousa epistḗ mē tō͂ n timiōtátōn) Allusion to Rackham’s footnote to Aristotle’s notion that wisdom (σοφία, sophía) “must be a consummated knowledge of the most exalted objects” (VI.vii.3). Note that Pound misspells κεφαλὴν (kephalḕ n, “head”). Rackham’s footnote offers a literal translation of the phrase as “knowledge having as it were a head,” and claims that Aristotle copied the phrase from Plato’s dialogue, Gorgias (cf. note GK 98).94 327 prudence (PHRONESIS) . . . φρόνησις τõ καθ’ ἕκαστα: (phrónēsis tõ [sic] kath’ hékasta) Pound truncates the excerpt from VI.vii.7 and misspells τὰ (tà, “the”) in φρόνησις τὰ καθ’ ἕκαστα (literally, “prudence [φρόνησις] the particulars [τὰ καθ’ ἕκαστα]).” This cryptic statement must be understood in the context of Aristotle’s idea that Prudence is not a “knowledge of general principles only: it must also take account of particular facts, since it is concerned with action, and action deals with particular things.” For Pound, the Aristotelian virtue of φρόνησις (phrónēsis) relates to the Confucian principle of learning—as encoded in the “mortar ideogram” 學 (“learn” or “study”)—insofar as both involve moderation and diligence or action (cf. notes GK 21, 58).95 VI.viii.6/9 . . . Rackham, Burnet: In these passages, Aristotle continues to refine his concept of Prudence as an intuitive perception opposite to Intelligence and transcending Scientific Knowledge. Pound quotes Rackham’s footnote to “Intelligence” (“Definitions are the first principles of science”) and alludes to the footnoted commentary of the classicist John Burnet (1863–1928) on Aristotle’s argument in VI.viii.9. Aristotle avers that Prudence deals with “the sort of intuition whereby we perceive that the ultimate figure in mathematics is a triangle; for there, too, there will be a

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stop.” Burnet interprets this point as an illustration of the limit of analysis, which we reach “just as much when we descend to particulars as when we ascend to first principles or definitions.”96 the dhirty greek . . . quotes Homer: In VI.vii.2, Aristotle cribs from Homer’s mostly lost comedic epic poem Margites, “Neither a delver nor a ploughman him / The Gods had made, nor wise in aught beside.” Aristotle interprets the sense of the passage as signifying that “some people are wise in general and not in one department, not ‘wise in something else.’” Rackham’s footnote, however, as Pound suggests, disallows Aristotle’s interpretation, “The sense rather requires ‘wise in some particular thing,’ but the expression is assimilated to the quotation.”97 327–28 “five” kinds of knowing . . . the triangle is the simplest possible polygon: In VI.iii.1, Aristotle distinguishes “five qualities through which the mind achieves truth in affirmation or denial, namely Art or technical skill, Scientific Knowledge, Prudence, Wisdom, and Intelligence.” It is worth mentioning that Rackham’s footnote to this verse specifies that “Art” (τέχνη, tékhnē) “means here craftsmanship of any kind; it includes skill in fine art, but is not limited to it.” For this reason, Pound defines τέχνη in this paragraph as “skill in an art, in making things” (cf. note GK 351). Rackham’s interpretation of Aristotelian intelligence as “intuitive in a special way,” as Pound puts it, can be seen in the foonote to VI.viii.9, “intuition of particular facts . . . is intellectual, not sensuous” (VI.viii.9).98 The unexpurgated GK stresses the importance of Aristotle’s “‘five’ kinds of knowing” with a thick vertical line printed alongside the margin. 328 R. St Victor’s gradation of processes: Cf. note GK 77. atasal: Pound derives the Sufi concept of atasal (from the Arabic, ‫إ ِت ّصال‬, ittis ̣āl) from Avicenna (cf. note GK 53) and translates it as “union with the divine.” Pound thus renders it

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A Companion to Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur analogous to the third element in Richard’s threefold structure, “contemplation, the identification of the consciousness WITH the object.” Avicenna’s nuanced use of the term reinforces Pound’s interpretation of atasal along the contemplative vein espoused by Richard. For the “‘ecstatic’, highly emotional union of Sufi mysticism,” Avicenna used the term ittih ̣ād, while reserving ittis ̣āl as a “strictly epistemic ‘contact.’”99 The term crops up in Canto 76, “. . . nor is this yet atasal / nor are here souls, nec personae / neither here in hypostasis” (76/478). the point raised on p. xxii of Rackham’s introduction: Pound enlists Rackham’s synopsis of Aristotelian teleology (Telos) and contemplation (Theoria) as complements to his own digest of the unifying principles espoused by Richard of St. Victor, Avicenna, and Sufism. As Rackham spells out, “the content of Theoria or the contemplative activity, the nature of the divine life to which that activity approximates, and the relation of man to the Deity which that approximation involves, are all matters which bring morals into relation with metaphysics.” Consequently, the meaning of Telos goes beyond either aim or purpose. It signifies “completion or perfection: the aim of a living organism, the final cause of its being, is to realize the potentiality of its nature, to grow into a perfect specimen of its species.”100 chorus off stage singing: . . . join our ho—lyband: Pound playfully parodies anti-colonial songs from the time of the British Raj. Small groups of chelas (“disciples”) of Gandhi, many of whom lived in ashrams, would gather all over India to sing devotional hymns of praise to the Mahatma and the nationalist cause of passive resistance (satyagrahi), including the following verses by the poet Kalyanji Mehta: We are the satyagrahi chelas of the guru Gandhiji; ready to die are we, for the sake of preserving our vow.

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Gandhi has given the mantra by which we all must live and die; We all should transcend our difficulties, and never fear the suffering.101 329

gemüthlich . . . SUGGNOMONIKON: Gemütlich, German for “pleasant” or “cheerful.” Rackham translates συγγνωμονικὰ (sungnōmonikà) as “pardonable,” in “Errors not merely committed in ignorance but caused by ignorance are pardonable” (V.viii.12).102 In establishing a one-way semantic relation from gemüthlich to “suggnomonikon” [sic], Pound might have in mind the alternative meaning of συγγνωμονικὰ as “inclined to make allowance, indulgent.”103 VI.xi.4 . . . ἐκ τῶν καθ’ ἕκαστα γὰρ τὰ καθόλου: (ek tō͂ n kath’ hékasta gàr tà kathólou) “General rules are based on particular cases.”104 Clarkson’s: Willy Clarkson (1861–1934), London wigmaker, theatrical costumier, and the subject of Harry James Greenwall’s The Strange Life of Willy Clarkson: An Experiment in Biography (1936). Usus, opus: Cf. note GK 324. “directio voluntatis”: (L.) “direction of the will,” as found in Dante’s De vulgari eloquentia (II.2.7), “where it means to set the will on the way to the virtues.”105 Aretes . . . deinotes: Arete (ἀρετή, “Moral Virtue”) directs the will to put our deinotes (δεινότης, “Cleverness”) to good use. Hence the significance of arete, given that “cleverness can be used for good or for evil. If clever people efficiently do whatever they set out to do, they are not always moral.”106 As Pound suggests, the expression “terribly clever” is encoded in one of the meanings of the root form of δεινότητα (deinótēta), “terribleness.”107 xii. 10 . . . Aquinas: Rackham’s translation of the core of Aristotle’s argument in VI.xii.10 reads,

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A Companion to Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur deductive inferences about matters of conduct always have a major premise of the form “Since the End or Supreme Good is so and so” (whatever it may be, since we may take it as anything we live for the sake of the argument); the Supreme Good only appears good to the good man: vice perverts the mind and causes it to hold false views about the first principles of conduct.108

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Pound’s claim that Rackham’s rendering of Aristotle’s relativistic idea of the supreme good channels “a little too much” Aquinas probably stems from the argument in Summa Theologiae, “What supreme goodness adds to goodness is something not absolute but merely relative.”109 “hotidepote”: ὁτιδήποτε (“whatever,” “anything”). “Zeus whoever he is?”: A query in Aeschylus’s Agamemnon, meant not to imply uncertainty about the deity being invoked, but to “articulate the inscrutable magnitude of the supreme divine power, which cannot be captured in one name.”110 Hermes’ remarks to Calypso: In Book V of Homer’s Odyssey, Hermes delivers a message on behalf of Zeus to the nymph Calypso, telling her to release Odysseus, whom she has kept on her island of Ogygia for seven years. The “touch of irony” Pound detects in Hermes’s message reflects the herald-god’s barely concealed annoyance at being forced to do Zeus’s bidding, “It was Zeus who made me come, no choice of mine / [. . .] But there is no way, you know, for another god to thwart / the will of storming Zeus and make it come to nothing.”111 Thus, rather than portray Zeus as an inscrutable god Hermes exposes him as a capricious tyrant. Dean of C.: The Very Reverend Hewlett Johnson (1874–1966), Dean of Canterbury from 1931 to 1963, became widely (and notoriously) known as the “Red Dean” for his Communist sympathies and conviction that the principles of Christiniaty and Communism were virtually interchangeable.112

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Every comrade is a bit / of concentrated hate: From “kumrads die because they’re told),” E. E. Cummings’s poem in the collection No Thanks (1935), satirizing the inhumane conditions in Stalinist Russia. Pound is likely quoting from memory, given that he misspells Cummings’s “kumrad” and writes “concentrated hate” instead of the original “quite unmitigated hate.”113 excised account of Holophernes: In the apocryphal Book of Judith, the Jewish heroine deceives and beheads Holofernes, a drunken invading Assyrian general, and carries his severed head back to her camp victoriously.114 The myth of Judith and Holofernes became immensely popular during the Renaissance and was widely depicted in sculptures and paintings of the period, most famously the 1460 bronze sculpture by Donatello (c.1386–1466), who is also mentioned in The Cantos (79/507). Luther and Calvin . . . Leo X: Cf. notes GK 75, 123. 330–31 Hegxis ἕξις of catholicism during the Renaissance . . . Mr Rackham: Rackham translates ἕξις (héxis) as “disposition” (V.i.4–5, VII.ii.6) and “that reasons truly” (VI.iii.3; cf. note GK  326).115 It can also be translated as a “state or habit of mind.”116 Aquinas draws heavily on this Aristotelian notion in his “treatise on habits” in the Summa Theologiae. However, he stretches Aristotle’s concept of habit to include God-given dispositions or habits, thus combining divinely infused and naturally acquired virtues.117 331 [n.] Harvard riot: There were several student riots or “rebellions” at Harvard University from 1766 to 1834, starting with the “Great Butter Rebellion,” the first known incident of its kind on an American campus.118 goguenard: (Fr.) “quietly ironic.” 332 Fr. Fiorentino’s summary: i.e., Compendio di Storia della Filosofia (cf. note GK 25). 333 Scotus Erigena . . . Bossuet and Leibniz: Cf. notes GK 75.

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A Companion to Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur Aristophanes: (c.450–c.385 BCE), Athenian comic dramatist (cf. note GK 24). Pythagoras: Cf. note GK 24. Anacreon: (c.570–c.485 BCE), Greek lyric poet, “alive 536 to 520,” as Pound brackets the period he flourished. The dates are roughly in keeping with the Roman historian Eusebius, who assigns the poet a floruit of circa 530 BCE.119 Aeschylus: Cf. note GK 24. Pindar: Cf. note GK 120. Sophokles: Cf. note GK 92. Euripides: Greek tragic dramatist (cf. note GK 92). Socrates: Cf. note GK 24. Theocritus and Callimachus: The Greek poets—Theocritus (c.300–c.260 BCE), creator of the pastoral idyll, and Callimachus (c.305–c.240 BCE), a model for Catullus and Propertius—were born 22 and 17 years, respectively, after Aristotle’s death in 322 BCE. Pope: Cf. note GK 98–99. πηρώσεις: (pērṓ seis), from πηρόω (pērόō), “to maim, mutilate,” or, metaphorically, “to incapacitate.”120 Rackham translates it as “arrested development,” in “a bestial character is rare among human beings; it is found most frequently among barbarians, and some cases also occur as a result of disease or arrested development” (VII.i.3).121 Aphrodite’s girdle: To seduce Zeus in Book XIV of Homer’s Iliad, the goddess Hera wears the magical “‘broidered girdle” that she tricked Aphrodite to relinquish to her. After seducing Zeus with the girdle, Hera plans to help the besieged Greeks as her estranged husband lies in bed in a post-coital stupor. This subtext informs Aristotle’s judgment that “desire is crafty,” followed by Homer’s wonderment at the power of Aphrodite’s girdle, “Cajolery that cheats the wisest wits” (VII.vi.3).122 Pound’s quip that Rackham “goes non-conformist” in his translation of this passage may owe to his rendering πάρφασις

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(párphasis) as “cajolery.” LSJ cites this episode from the Iliad in its alternative translation of πάρφασις as “allurement, persuasion” and “deceitful speaking,” noting that it is the poetic form of παράφᾰσις (paráphăsis), “address, encouragement, consolation.”123 Baxter and Calvin: Cf. notes GK 77, 123. 334–35 VII.vi.6 . . . It is below Arry’s worst: Aristotle’s “egxistimation”—Pound’s fusion of ἕξις (cf. notes GK 326, 330–31) and “estimation”—about non-human animals may seem decidedly strange and unsettling to the modern reader, we do not use the terms temperate or profligate of the lower animals, except metaphorically, of certain entire species distinguished from the rest by their exceptionally lascivious, mischievous, or omnivorous habits; for animals have neither the faculty of choice nor of calculation: they are aberrations from nature, like men who are insane.

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Rackham’s footnote to the passage explains that Aristotle regards “all animals as unnatural, in the sense of imperfectly developed, because irrational.”124 x. 2: In VIII.x.2, Aristotle places Kingship above Aristocracy and Timocracy (rule based on the ownership of property) and concludes that the “perversion of Kingship is Tyranny.”125 x. 3: Quoted almost verbatim. Aristotle also argues that “Democracy is the least bad of the perversions, for it is only a very small deviation from the constitutional [i.e., timocratic] form of government.”126 xiv. 3: Quoted almost verbatim.127 contains (vii. 4) “we exist in activity”: This passage is the only one in Book IX that Pound deems worthy of comment. It is unsurprising, given that in IX.vii.4 Aristotle speaks to the love that artists, especially poets, have of their own creations, “we exist in activity, since we exist by living and

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A Companion to Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur doing; and in a sense one who has made something exists actively, and so he loves his handiwork because he loves existence.”128 i.2: The excerpt comes out of Aristotle’s discussion in X.i.2 of whether Pleasure is the Supreme Good or “altogether bad,” as the clause quoted by Pound suggests.129 i.3: “In matters of emotion and of action, words are less convincing than deeds; when therefore our theories are at variance with palpable facts, they provoke contempt, and involve the truth in their own discredit.”130 Eudoxus: A noted Greek astronomer and mathematician, Eudoxus of Cnidus (c.408–c.355) was also “an unorthodox pupil of Plato,” as Rackham describes him in a footnote to X.ii.1. In establishing a correspondence between Dante’s thought in the Paradiso and “Eudoxus’ gravitation” Pound is responding to the philosopher’s argument that Pleasure is the Supreme Good because all creatures gravitate towards it.131 Pound probably has in mind the sommo piacer (“supreme joy”). In contrast to the pull of carnal pleasures of Eudoxus’s schema, Dante (literally) gravitates towards the sommo piacer of heaven by the grace of God.132 He therefore transcends the fate of the will unmoored from Providence, which makes the human creatura “To earth be wrested, by false pleasure held,” as he puts it toward the end of Canto I.133 III. 4 and 5 . . . egXis and of “existing in activity”: In these verses, Aristotle debates whether pleasure is a motion (“kinesis”) or not, concluding that “pleasure possesses neither absolute nor relative velocity.” He also raises the question of whether pleasure can be a “process of generation” (“genesis”) and postulates that “if pleasure is the generation of something, pain is the destruction of that thing.”134 Pound calls on Rackham to produce a future footnote to clarify Aristotle’s earlier thoughts on “egXis” (cf. notes GK 326, 330–31) and his tenet in IX.vii.4, “we exist in activity.”

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iii. 6. τὴν δ ἡδονὴν ἀναπλήρωσιν: (τὴν δ’ ἡδονὴν ἀναπλήρωσιν, tḕ n d’ hēdonḕ n anaplḗ rōsin) In “Also they say that pain is a deficiency of the natural state and pleasure is its replenishment.”135 6 and 7 downright silly: In X.iii.6–7, Aristotle argues, The belief that pleasure is a replenishment seems to have arisen from the pains and pleasures connected with food: here the pleasure does arise from a replenishment, and is preceded by the pain of a want. But this is not the case with all pleasures: the pleasures of knowledge, for example, have no antecedent pain. When Pound ascribes Aristotle’s “silly” affirmations to “a lack of grasp of what some kundiger Mensch” [“knowledgeable person”] might have said,” he is referring to the philosopher’s attribution at the beginning of X.iii.6, “they say.” Rackham’s footnote indicates the source as Plato’s late Socratic dialogue, Philebus, an exploration of pleasure, wisdom, and the good life.136 iv. 6, “pleasure perfects the activity . . . v. 7: This axiom is in fact found at the end of X.iv.5. Aristotle immediately hedges its claim in X.iv.6 by stating that “pleasure does not however perfect the activity in the same way as the object perceived and the sensory faculty, if good, perfect it.” As in verse 6, the tentativeness of X.iv.7 further frustrates Pound, “pleasure is greatest when the sensory faculty is both in the best condition and acting in relation to the best object.”137 aesthesis and hedonè: The “wedge” Pound sees Aristotle driving between αἰσθήσεις (aisthḗ seis, “sense-perceptions, sensations”) and ἡδοναί (hēdonaí, “delights, enjoyments, pleasures”) manifests in X.v.2, “the activities of the intellect differ from those of the senses, and from one another, in kind: so also therefore do the pleasures that perfect them.” Note that Rackham translates dianoia (διάνοια, “thought”) as “intellect.”

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A Companion to Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur As Pound suggests, the gist of Aristotle’s argument in this section is that “there is no pleasure without activity, and also no perfect activity without its pleasure” (X.iv.11).138 eudaimonia . . . energeian: Pound’s sense that Aristotle divorces eudaimonia (“happiness”; cf. note GK 307) from “thaumaturgic inheritance” or miraculous causes, stems from Aristotle’s rejection of happiness as a character trait. “If it were,” Aristotle contends, happiness “might be possessed by a man who passed the whole of his life asleep, living the life of a vegetable, or by one who was plunged in the deepest misfortune” (X.vi.2). As Pound telegraphs it, this line of reasoning leads Aristotle to surmise that happiness is some form of energeian (ἐνέργειαν, “activity, operation”).139 In X. vii. 2 . . . auto-rule: “Happiness consists in contemplation,” Aristotle affirms. Pound, however, finds Aristotelian contemplation (θεωρητική, theōrētikḗ ) “unsympathetic” in relation to Dante’s tripartite schema in the Paradiso (cf. note GK 77). Pound also alludes here to the Condemnations banning the teaching of Aristotle at the University of Paris in the thirteenth century (cf. note GK 306). Rackham translates autarchia (αὐτάρκεια) as “self-sufficiency.” Pound’s rendering it as “self-rule” to apply to “Dante’s God” introduces a religiomoral dimension to autarchia that is in effect missing from Aristotle’s conception. At the end of X.vii.4 Aristotle presents the wise man as the most self-sufficient of all people because he “can also contemplate by himself, and the more so the wiser he is.” The concept of autarchia became integral to the project of national economic self-sufficiency in Fascist Italy in the 1930s. Thus, the Fascist meaning of the term also would surely have been in Pound’s mind.140 “it follows that it is the activity of the intellect . . . human happiness”: Quoted verbatim from X.vii.7.141 νοῦ ἐνέργεια σπουδῇ, ἡ τελεία δὴ εὐδαιμονία αὕτη ἂν εἴν ἀνθρώποω: “It is the activity of the intellect that constitutes

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complete human happiness” (X.vii.7). Pound’s reference to the “Hellenists” poring over the passage likely hints at the fact that he has truncated two Greek clauses from this verse, as indicated by the comma he inserts between νοῦ ἐνέργεια σπουδῇ (noũ enérgeia spoudē͂ ͅ, “activity of the intellect”) and ἡ τελεία δὴ εὐδαιμονία αὕτη ἂν εἴη ἀνθρώπου (hē teleía dḕ eudaimonía haútē àn eíē anthrṓ pou, “this is the complete human happiness”).142 In vii.9 . . . Aquinas: In X.vii.9–viii.1, Aristotle reiterates the primacy of the intellect for a happy life, “as the intellect more than anything else is man,” while the “life of moral virtue . . . is happy only in a secondary degree.” Pound takes issue with Aristotle’s facile syllogistic reasoning that “therefore this life [of the intellect] will be the happiest.” Aquinas, too, challenges Aristotle’s thesis that “the moral virtues belong to active but not to contemplative happiness.” Aquinas reckons that “the moral virtues dispose one to the contemplative life by causing peace and purity of heart.” He brings moreover a Christian inflection to the debate, positing “the love of God and neighbour” as a requirement for the contemplative life.”143 Laforgue’s little Salomé: “Salomé,” a short story in the collection Moralités légendaires (1887), by the French Symbolist writer Jules Laforgue (1860–87), parodies Flaubert’s short story “Hérodias” in the collection Trois contes (1877), in which Salomé is the daughter of the titular protagonist. In 1917, Pound had praised Laforgue as “a purge and a critic. He laughed out the errors of Flaubert, i.e., the clogging and cumbrous historical detail . . . Salome makes game of the rest.”144 The end of viii.7 is just talk: Aristotle locates perfect happiness, as enjoyed by the gods, in “some form of contemplative activity.” “It follows,” he hazards, “that the activity of God, which is transcendent in blessedness, is the activity of contemplation; and therefore among human activities that

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A Companion to Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur which is most akin to the divine activity of contemplation will be the greatest source of happiness” (X.viii.7).145 Arry teases Heraclitus for vehement assertion: “Some men are just as firmly convinced of what they opine as others are of what they know: witness Heracleitus” (VII.iii.4).146 EUDAIMONIA . . . THEORIA: Cf. notes GK 307, 328. ix. 4: In X.ix.4, Aristotle builds upon the recognition in the previous verse of the limits of ethical theory in instilling moral nobility in the masses, For it is the nature of the many to be amenable to fear but not to a sense of honour, and to abstain from evil not because of its baseness but because of the penalties it entails; since, living as they do by passion, they pursue the pleasures akin to their nature, and the things that will procure those pleasures, and avoid the opposite pains, but have not even a notion of what is noble and truly pleasant having never tasted true pleasure.147

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Older editions of GK erroneously cite “viii. 4” as the source of Pound’s comparison of the verse to “something very like doctrine of original sin.” However, as the passage quoted above demonstrates, Pound’s biblical analogy aligns itself more closely with Aristotle’s emphasis on the deterrent effects of “penalties” associated with commiting evil acts in X.ix.4 than with the philosopher’s discussion of moral virtue in X.viii.4. ix. 8: Aristotle’s rationale for proposing that the State’s administering of discipline is so that “temperance and hardiness will not be painful when they have become habitual” in the young.148 ix. 21: The verse concerns the value of practical experience and student training. “Collections of laws and constitutions,” Aristotle asserts, “may be serviceable to students capable of studying them critically, and judging what measure are

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valuable or the reverse, and what kind of institutions are suited to what national characteristics.”149 22: The uncut verse reads, As then the question of legislation has been left uninvestigated by previous thinkers, it will perhaps be well if we consider it for ourselves, together with the whole question of the constitutions of the State, in order to complete as far as possible our philosophy of human affairs.150 “Aristotle compiled . . . constitutions of 158 Greek states”: Of these constitutions, as Rackham’s footnote to X.ix.23 shows, only the Constitution of Athens survives. Verse 23 itself outlines a sequel to the Nicomachean Ethics, a text that would eventually make up the eight books of Aristotle’s Politics. Covering statecraft, governance, constitutional law, and political philosophy, the Politics often refers to its predecessor. There is some evidence that Aristotle regarded the earlier text as a companion piece to the Politics or even both works as a single volume, with the Nicomachean Ethics focusing on individual ethics and the Politics on state ethics.151

55. PERGAMENA DEEST Pergamena Deest: (L.) “[I] do not have the parchment.” Mihi pergamena deest is also the one-line postscript to Pound’s “Marvoil,” a first-person lyric featuring the Perigordian troubadour Arnaut de Mareuil (or Maruelh) (fl. 1170–1200).1 Downing St, Cambridge: Shorthand for the University of Cambridge’s Faculty of Economics and Politics, which was housed in the Downing Street science buildings complex in the early 1930s. Rackham’s note: Cf. note GK 341. Constantine and Justinian: Cf. note GK 40. Just Price: Cf. note GK 167. 342–43 “Hence the tendency to think of the End . . . the ‘theoretic’ intellect”: Rackham’s synopsis of Aristotle’s “End” (Telos) is informed by its fundamental dual meaning as “completion or perfection” and “ultimate point, the last term of a series, the summit and crown of a process.”2 343 “split man” in Mr Wyndham Lewis’ Apes: In his sprawling roman-à-clef, The Apes of God (1930), Lewis satirizes and lampoons London’s interwar artistic and literary community as a motley crew of dilettantes and imitators (“apes”) of true artists. Chief among these dabblers is Julius Ratner, the “split-man.” Ratner illustrates the “schismatic tendency” in the Aristotelian privileging of the “‘theoretic’ intellect” as well as in the contemporary Freudian fragmentation of the self because as an author, publisher and bookseller, Ratner selfservingly “splits” himself into the role of creator, publisher, and distributor.3 Dante put Aristotle in Limbo: Cf. note GK 315. 342

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Master of those that cut apart, dissect and divide: A spoof of Dante’s honorific title for Aristotle—“maestro di color che sanno” (“the Master of those who know”) (cf. note GK 315).

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Beaneries: American slang for cheap restaurants and one of Pound’s favorite putdowns for universities, as shown in his anti-Semitic tirade in Canto 91: Democracies electing their sewage till there is no clear thought about holiness a dung flow from 1913 and, in this, their kikery functioned, Marx, Freud      and the american beaneries Filth under filth (91/633–34) make your Gestalt, of Kung . . . and the peripheries: Cf. Canto 94, To Kung, to avoid their encirclement, To the Odes to escape abstract yatter,     to Mencius, Dante, and Agassiz      for Gestalt seed pity, yes, for the infected,           but maintain antisepsis, let the light pour. (94/655)

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a NEW Quattrocento: i.e., a new Renaissance, akin to the Early Renaissance in fifteenth-century Italy. caught like X. in a forgery: The unexpurgated GK shows “Prof X,” whose identity remains unidentified. The light of the Sorbonne shone: In April 1231, Pope Gregory IX (c.1145–1241) issued a bull, Parens scientiarum, granting the University of Paris the authority to establish statutes

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regulating all manner of academic practices in its schools, including the defense of theses.1 “University not here for the unusual man . . . Carl Sandburg: The phrase originally appeared in a letter Pound wrote on February 24, 1925 to art patron and philanthropist Simon Guggenheim (1867–1941). “Prof. S.” refers to Felix E. Schelling (1858–1945), a literature professor and head of the Department of English at the University of Pennsylvania when Pound was a student there (cf. note GK 215–16). In the fall of 1916, Pound had written to Schelling recommending that the poet Carl Sandburg (1878–1967) be offered a fellowship “for creative ability” at the university, a proposal the professor rejected.2 It was also Schelling who told Pound that he was wasting his time pursuing a doctorate, effectively putting an end to his thesis on the Spanish Golden Age poet-dramatist Lope de Vega (1562–1635) (cf. notes GK 28, 61).3 Dante’s Inferno, Canto XXI, line 139: “ed elli avea del cul fatto trombetta.” Binyon translates it rather coyly as “A sound that made a trumpet of his breech.”4 The closing line of Dante’s Canto describes the sonorous fart each Malebranche (“EvilTalons”) demon lets out as a “signal to his chief ” upon leaving to escort Virgil and Dante into another chasm of the Malebolge or eighth circle of Hell.5

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57. EPILOGUE to balance the frontispiece 346

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Ricards . . . Gaudier: Edwin Alfred Rickards (1872–1920), British architect who, in partnership with Henry Vaughan Lanchester (1863–1953), played a key role in popularizing Edwardian Baroque public architecture. In his tribute to Rickards’s “true sense of form,” allied with the notion that the unemployed Gaudier-Brzeska could have lent a hand at the architect’s firm, Pound seems to imply that their aesthetics intersected at critical points. Rickards’s architectural style typifies, as John Warren sums it up, “simplicity and severity of the basic masses when stripped of their ornament.”1 This coincides to a remarkable degree with Pound’s assessment of Imagism in Gaudier-Brzeska, “it does not use images as ornaments. The image is itself the speech. The image is the word beyond formulated language.”2

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Ta Hio: Confucius’s The Great Learning or The Great Digest (cf. notes GK 15–16). 詩: Shī, the Confucian Odes or Book of Odes (cf. note GK 121). Plato . . . life force: Cf. Pound’s affirmation in “The Serious Artist” (1913), “You feel bucked up when you come on a swift moving thought in Plato.”1 Michelet: Jules Michelet (1798–1874), French historian and author of Histoire de la Révolution française (1847–53) and the monumental Histoire de France (1833–69). In keeping with Pound’s view that “Michelet saw France as something in process,” Roland Barthes argues that “Micheletist history proceeds by waves: the narrative is always conducted toward a display, an epiphany, and the tableau is never closed, its goal is an anxiety . . . no chapter of Michelet is ever really conclusive, but no line of facts is ever without its tropism.”2 In “The Jefferson-Adams Letters” (1937–38), Pound groups Michelet with other eminent French writers as individuals who “wanted to set down an intelligible record of life in which things happened.”3 one of the Nicomachean dissociations (V. iii. 7, page 322): In V.iii.7, Aristotle further outlines his thoughts on distributive justice, This [i.e., principle of equality and justice in distributions] is also clear from the principle of “assignment by desert.” All are agreed that justice in distributions must be based on desert of some sort, although they do not all mean the same sort of desert; democrats make the criterion free

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ARISTOTLE’S “MAGNA MORALIA”: The Faber editor who told Pound that his exposé of the earliest compilers of Aristotle’s Magna Moralia “‘would do him no good at Oxford’” might have been concerned about possible objections on the part of the Oxford Aristotelian Society. Its illustrious roster included W. D. Ross, a Fellow of Oriel College and chief editor of the multi-volume translations that make up The Works of Aristotle, including St. George Stock’s translation of the Magna Moralia, published by Oxford University’s Clarendon Press in 1915. In his introduction to the work, Stock makes no mention of Pound’s allegation that the author or compilers of the Magna Moralia suppressed “TEXNE” (τέχνη, “craftsmanship”) (cf. note GK 327–28), but he does convey the scholarly consensus about the work as derivative, authored by a later writer who cribbed ideas from the Nicomachean Ethics and the Eudemian Ethics.1 The source for Pound’s claim is almost certainly the introduction to the moral treatise in George Cyril Armstrong’s translation of 1935. Armstrong remarks on the striking parallels between I.xxxiv.7 of the Magna Moralia and VI.iii.1 of the Nicomachean Ethics, as both works share the “enumeration of five intellectual faculties by which we attain Truth.” The Magna Moralia, however, substitutes “ὑπόληψις for τέχνη,” a key distinction for Pound since, as Armstrong points out, ὑπόληψις (hupólēpsis, “conception”) “carries no certainty of truth.”2 I. THE FOUR BOOKS: Cf. note GK 17. II. Homer: Odyssey: Odysseus’s clever ploys to trick, evade, or escape his enemies means that he rarely resorts to brute force alone, thereby embodying the value of intelligence in The Odyssey (cf. notes GK 24, 38, 99, 146).

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A Companion to Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur III. The Greek TRAGEDIANS: Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides (cf. notes GK 24, 92). IV. DIVINA COMMEDIA: Cf. notes GK 2, 77, 315. V. FROBENIUS: Cf. notes GK 27, 57, 98. VI. BROOKS ADAMS . . . essential omission from Adams’ thought: Brooks Adams (1848–1927), Harvard-educated historian, grandson of President John Quincy Adams and great-grandson of President John Adams (cf. notes GK 264, 42, respectively). Brooks’s The Law of Civilization and Decay: An Essay on History (1895) advances a theory of civilizational degeneration in liberal capitalist democracies, prefiguring Pound’s own views on usury and nineteenth-century decadence. The book ends with an indictment of the Victorian era as vulgar and ruinously bound to economic interests, with London art, culture, architecture, and perhaps even the British Empire itself, being on the verge of disintegration. Charles A. Beard’s lengthy introduction to the 1943 edition challenges Adams’s theory of history as a repetitive rise-and-fall cycle. Beard points out that Adams leaves out “acts of creative intelligence in history and the cumulative force of such acts,” an omission that was bound to irk Pound.3 In A Visiting Card (1942/1952), Pound would nonetheless praise Adams’s “cyclic vision of the West.” He tempers his appreciation of Adams’s distinction “between the swindle of the usurers and that of the monopolists” by taking issue with his sliding “into the concept, shared by Mill and Marx, of money as an accumulator of energy.”4 This caveat also informs Canto 89, “and as for the Adamses, Brooks and Henry, / they went back to their grandfather, dratt ’em, / and not back to old John” (89/614). Which is to say, Brooks and his brother Henry (1838–1918), also a historian, relied more on the thought of their grandfather John Quincy Adams than on that of their great-grandfather John Adams (cf. note GK 254).

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VII. The English Charters . . . The American Constitution: The earliest recorded English Charters date from the organization of the English Church conducted during the episcopate of Theodore of Tarsus (602–90), Archbishop of Canterbury (668–90). Usually inscribed in Latin, the charters were either “royal” or “private” and were based on the late Roman private deeds. The charters were designed to set out land boundaries and grants, with the more elaborate royal charters containing an invocation, followed by a religious proem as well as expressions of piety and devotion in the body of the grant, especially in the case of grants by landowners making permanent endowments to religious entities.5 Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765–69), a historical treatise authored by the English legal writer, judge and Vinerian professor of law at Oxford, Sir William Blackstone (1723–80), chronicles and describes the doctrines of English law.6 Canto 88 also cites “a ‘Blackstone’ (a.D. 1804)” (88/599), a reference to the five-volume American edition of Blacktone’s Commentaries, compiled and revised by the Virginia jurist and law professor St. George Tucker (1752–1827), whose extensive notes and appendices made the original text more applicable to American law. Published in 1803, Tucker’s version was titled Blackstone’s Commentaries: with Notes of Reference, to the Constitution and Laws, of the Federal Government of the United States; and of the Commonwealth of Virginia. On September 17, 1787, thirtynine delegates at the Federal Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia signed the U.S. Constitution, a new charter designed to enshrine in the thirteen states the political liberties achieved during the American Revolution.7 In Canto 113, Pound alludes to the Convention and Article X of the Constitution, “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people” (113/809).

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A Companion to Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur INTRODUCTORY TEXTBOOK: Although Pound’s Introductory Text Book was compiled in 1938 and printed privately in London by Bonner & Company the following year, it only found its way into GK in the New Directions edition of 1952. By then, the leaflet already had been included in the 1951 reprint of What is Money For? (1939), published as No. 3 of “Money Pamphlets by £.” The significance of this short primer on American history for Pound may be gleaned from the fact that he began to enclose the leaflet with his letters after receiving copies in March 1939. The following month, an Italian translation was published in Il Mare. Noel Stock reveals that the translation was “preceded by a signed note in which Pound said that attacks on Fascist Italy were based not only on falsehood but on fetid ignorance of the history of the United States and of the principles of its founders.”8 CHAPTER I: From a letter John Adams sent to Thomas Jefferson from London, dated August 25, 1787 (cf. note GK 42).9 CHAPTER II: From a letter Jefferson sent to William H. Crawford (1772–1834) from Monticello, Virginia, dated June 20, 1816 (Pound’s emphasis).10 In Jefferson and/or Mussolini, Pound highlights the significance of this excerpt by means of a thick vertical line printed marginally alongside the fragment.11 He would also reprint the excerpt under the heading “Statal Money” in What is Money For? (1939). Here, Pound recommends the reader “FRAME Jefferson’s statement,” and asserts, “Jefferson’s forma is SOLID. IF the state emits ENOUGH money for valid and justifiable expenses and keeps it moving, circulating, going out the front door and coming in the tax window, the nation will not suffer stagnation.”12 CHAPTER III: From a letter Abraham Lincoln wrote to Col. Edmund Dick Taylor (1804–1891), a Chicago businessman, dated December 16, 1864. In the letter, Lincoln credits Taylor with being the “father of the present greenback,” the U.S. Civil War-era paper currency Taylor conceived in 1862.13

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CHAPTER IV: The first paragraph, outlining the powers delegated to the U.S. Congress to coin and regulate the value of money, is found in clause 5 of the Constitution, not “page 5,” as Pound indicates. Pound also mistakenly cites the “7th” of September as the date George Washington signed the document, rather than the correct date, September 17, 1787.14 Note: An appendix to Pound’s Introductory Text Book, the “Note” reflects his deepening allegiance to Social Credit (cf. note GK 48) and preoccupation with reforming the U.S. Federal Reserve System. Pound campaigned for a reform of the Fed from as early as March 1931, when he wrote to Senator Bronson Cutting (cf. note GK 260) to suggest several selection and structural changes of the Federal Reserve Board.15 As Pound suggests, Willis Overholser’s A Short Review and Analysis of the History of Money in the United States (1936) is informed by Lincoln’s epistolary tribute to Col. Edmund Taylor for creating the greenback, the last of the three snippets by U.S. presidents showcased in the Text Book. Overholser argues that American “monetary history reveals beyond dispute that the banking interests have endeavored continually, from the inception of our Government, first gradually to gain, and then to retain, control over the governmental function of issuing money.”16 Following Overholser, Pound undoubtedly saw the abrogation of these Congressional powers in the enactment of the Federal Reserve Act, signed into law by President Woodrow Wilson (cf. note GK 111) on December 23, 1913. Under the Act, the Federal Reserve System would become a privately owned banking system divided into twelve regional Federal Reserve Banks conducting business under the supervision of the Board of Governors.17 Calling for a return to the Constitution, Overholser exclaims that “Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson could have turned over in their graves” on the day the Act became law.18 Jerry Voorhis (1901–84) was a five-term Democratic member of Congress for California’s

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A Companion to Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur 12th District (1937–47), with whom Pound corresponded. His political career ended rather abruptly in the 1946 election when he lost his seat to an upstart Republican, Richard M. Nixon (1913–94).19 In his Confessions of a Congressman (1947), Voorhis reveals that he was part of a push to “make the bank of issue of the United States—the twelve Federal Reserve Banks—government property.”20 The campaign to nationalize the Fed proved unsuccessful in the end, but his speech to the House of Representatives on June 6, 1938 prompted Pound to write to him in January of the following year to praise his initiative. Surette notes that Pound “had a copy of Overholser’s book sent to Voorhis (letter of 24 Oct. 1939), but there is no indication that Voorhis received it.”21 The connection Pound draws between Lincoln’s statement quoted in the Text Book and the “sub-head” proposals by Douglas (cf. note GK 48) may be traced to the Social Crediter’s Economic Democracy (1920). Whereas Lincoln saw the creation of the greenback as a way for individuals to enjoy the freedom of having “their own paper to pay their own debts,” Douglas goes a step further in questioning the “fundamental currency” that allows an individual to “liquidate his debts.” He concludes that the only “inalienable property” that an individual possesses is “potential effort over a definite period of time,” or what he calls “time-energy unit,” “the real unit of the world’s currency.”22 Pound’s reference to “Gesell’s ‘invention’” pertains to the economist’s creation of stamp scrip money, as expounded in The Natural Economic Order (1916) (cf. notes GK 36, 48, 166).23 The other treatises on economic theory that Pound recommends also feature regularly in his writings of this period and evince his growing obsession with political economy: Christopher Hollis’s The Two Nations: A Financial Study of English History (1935); McNair Wilson’s Promise to Pay: An Inquiry into the Principles and Practice of the Latter-day Magic Called Sometimes High Finance (1934); P. J. M. Larrañaga’s Gold,

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Glut, and Government: A New Economic Dawn (1932); and Montgomery Butchart’s Money: Selected Passages Presenting the Concepts of Money in the English Tradition, 1640–1935, published by Stanley Nott in 1935 (cf. notes GK 46, 61, 245). 一 言 僨 事: (yi yán fèn shì), from Book IX, verse 3 of Confucius’s Ta Hio (The Great Digest). The ideograms originate in Pound’s translation of the book (cf. note GK 15), where he translates the Chinese slightly differently, “one word will ruin the business,” followed by “one man can bring the state to an orderly course.”24 The mistranslation . . . χρεία, demand: Pound misses the mark here. As Rabaté rightly points out, “there is nowhere in Rackham’s text an interpolation of the word ‘value,’” a mistake Rabaté attributes to Pound’s reading of the economist Alexander Del Mar (1836–1926) between the publication of GK in 1938 and this 1952 addendum (cf. note GK 324).25 One wonders, given the rush with which Pound wrote the book, whether he might have mistaken ἀξία (axía, “worth,” “value”) for χρεία (khreía) in Rackham’s translation of IV.i.1, “wealth meaning all those things whose value is measured by money” (χρήματα δὲ λέγομεν πάντα ὅσων ἡ ἀξία νομίσματι μετρεῖται, khrḗ mata dè légomen pánta hósōn hē axía nomísmati metreĩtai).26 Mill and Marx: Pound’s judgment that Mill and Marx (cf. notes GK 61, 96) misused the word “creates” in relation to work and wealth is borne out by Mill’s argument that “whatever increases the productive power of labour creates an additional fund to make savings from, and enables capital to be enlarged.”27 Pound caricatures Marx’s position, however. Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875) begins with the following proviso, “Labour is the source of all wealth

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A Companion to Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur and all culture.” But the statement is not Marx’s. Rather, he quotes from the draft program for the proposed Socialist Workers’ Party of Germany only to immediately contest its key premise. “Labour is not the source of all wealth,” Marx writes, “Nature is just as much the source of use-values (and what else is material wealth?) as labour, which is itself only the expression of a natural power, human labour power.”28 Ironically, Marx’s conceptual framework is seamlessly aligned with Pound’s idea here that “Nature’s productivity is the root.” In Capital (1867), one of Pound’s main sources for Canto 33, Marx sketches out his theory of labor likewise, “Human labour-power in motion, or human labour, creates value, but is not itself value.”29 It is noteworthy that Frederick Soddy, an economist whom Pound admired (cf. note GK 46), had defended Marx precisely on these grounds. Soddy considered it “a common error to think that Marx saw the source of all wealth as human labor.”30 In “The Individual and his Milieu” (1935), Pound excoriates Marx as “deaf, dumb and blind to money . . . And the amazing history of the nineteenth century is summed up in: ‘Marx found nothing to criticise in money’” (cf. 46/233–34).31 Pound’s reference to Del Mar’s procreative theory of interest comes from a footnote in the economist’s Money and Civilization (1886) concerning the legal rate of interest enacted in France in 1602, “Teleologically, interest is due to the growth of domestic animals and plants, and has nothing whatever to do with the supply of money.”32 Pound would also invoke Del Mar’s biological principle of “legitimate interest” in his radio interview with D. G. Bridson, taped in Italy in April 1959 and aired on the BBC’s Third Programme on July 11 (cf. note GK 148).33 C. H. Douglas . . . Marx does not face the problem of money: In 1935, Pound had stated along the same lines that Gesell “saw (to his eternal glory) that Marx did not question money.” Hence, Pound continues, “Douglas saw the limitation of

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Marx’s value theory. He saw that if value arises from work, a vast deal of that work has already been done by men who can no longer eat its fruit, namely by the dead.”34 Santayana . . . invisible wealth: George Santayana (1863– 1952), the influential Spanish-American philosopher, poet, and critic, used this phrase as synonymous with capitalism, as shown in a letter dated January 18, 1932, The collapse of “capitalism”, or what I call invisible wealth would not involve communism: people might still own houses and land, ships and merchandise, as people did in antiquity, and down to recent times. Private property is a natural thing, because men like to possess, and are unequally capable of creating or holding their possessions: so that there are naturally rich and poor people.35 After the Second World War, Santayana would rehearse the trope of “invisible wealth,” but would also stress the misery ciphered in the visibility of poverty, Unattached circulating wealth, such as commerce accumulates sheer invisible credit or money in the bank, acts as a sort of lubricant, giving a magic power to the mind. It opens up possibilities, uncramps old prejudices, stimulates the arts by the shock of the exotic, and creates a floating, idle, talkative, rationalistic atmosphere of universal information and easy competence . . . While wealth, at least great wealth, is not visible in a man or woman, but only in their houses or other belongings, poverty can be recognised at sight, and is distress made visible.36 On January 4, 1939, while on a visit to Rome, Pound met Santayana for the first time and corresponded with the philosopher in late 1939 and early 1940, even citing “Kulch” (i.e.,

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A Companion to Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur GK) in a letter of January 16, 1940. Writing to Eliot two days later, Pound recalls a recent meeting with Santayana in Venice, “[I] like him. Never met anyone who seems to me to fake less. In face, I gave him a clean bill.37 Santayana also appears several times in The Cantos, including as “the monument” (74/453) and as “old Jarge,” who “held there was a tradition, / that was not mere epistemology” (87/593; see also 80/515, 81/539, 95/666, 100/737). ARISTOTLE . . . XREIA: Cf. notes GK 324, 357. JOHN LAW: (1671–1729), Scottish economist and author of Money and Trade Considered, with a Proposal for Supplying the Nation with Money (1705/1720), remembered as the catalyst for the speculative bubbles that burst in 1720 in France, Holland, and England. Law believed that land-backed currency would render the monetary system more stable than currency based on gold or silver. To reconcile the fact that land is not a homogeneous good or, as Pound points out, a good “which cannot be picked up and delivered,” Law advocated combining land of varying quality into standardized units as a form of money.38 HUME: Cf. note GK 48. ALEXANDER DEL MAR: Cf. note GK 357. C. H. DOUGLAS: Cf. notes GK 48, 357. GESELL: As shown in The Natural Economic Order, the measurable correlation between money and work in Gesell’s thought is considerably more nuanced than Pound lets on (cf. note GK 36), Wares are paid for with wares, and money can be measured only by wares, by the material characteristics of wares. There is no other measure of money. I have given wares for money and I shall receive wares for it. Not work, not sweat. Someone in exchange for my money gives me an article. How he came into possession of it, how long he worked upon it, is his concern, not mine. I am interested solely

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in the product. Labour must be sharply distinguished from the product of labour, and wages must therefore be rejected as a measure of the price of money. Wages do indeed depend upon the product of labour and not, as Marx asserts, upon the factory clock. But wages are not identical with the product of labour, inasmuch as a deduction must be made from the latter in the shape of rent and interest. But wages, plus rent, plus interest, are equivalent to the product of labour which, in the form of wares, is, as we have seen, the measure of the price of money.39 The line of transmission in economic theory that Pound establishes between Gesell and Benjamin Franklin (1706–90), diplomat, scientist, one of the Founding Fathers of the United States, and signatory to the Constitution, may be seen in “Advice to a Young Tradesman” (1748), where the celebrated icon writes, Remember that Time is Money. He that can earn Ten Shillings a day by his Labour, and goes abroad, or sits idle one half of that Day, tho’ he spends but Sixpence during his Diversion or Idleness, ought not to reckon That the only Expence; he has really spent or rather thrown away Five Shillings besides.40 Franklin is cited or alluded to many times in The Cantos, perhaps most memorably in Canto 31. In an anecdote about Franklin, recounted in a letter John Adams wrote to Thomas Jefferson in 1813, the polymath mocks the “rational man”: “Strip him of all his appetites, especially his hunger and thirst / [. . .] Take away appetite, and the present generation would not / Live a month, and no future generation would exist” (31/155–56).

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A Companion to Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur Falsification of history: In Canto 68, Pound quotes from a 1780 letter by John Adams, lamenting “The skill of our enemy (England) / in forging false news” (68/398) (cf. notes GK 131, 163). IMBECILITY of the tax system . . . clogging the circulation of goods and money: Pound takes on taxation in like manner in ABC of Economics (1933), “The moment you conceive money as certificate of work done, taxes are an anomaly, for it would be perfectly simple to issue such certificates of work done for the state, without wasting effort in recollecting certificates already in circulation.”41 The argument is also rehearsed in Canto 78:     “No longer necessary,” taxes are no longer necessary in the old way if it (money) be based on work done     inside a system and measured and gauged to human                requirements inside the nation or system                  道and cancelled in proportion             to what is used and worn out à la Wörgl. (78/501–2) (cf. note GK 166)

361–65 “Heaulmiere”: Facsimile of the manuscript, with music and text handwritten by Olga Rudge, containing the whore’s aria of the “Heaulmière” section of Pound’s opera, Le Testament de Villon (1923). Rudge had played violin in the performances of the opera in Paris in 1924 and 1926, with the tenor Yves Tinayre (1891–1972) singing the “Heaulmière,” among other sections, in the June 29, 1926 performance. Although Le Testament was “composed in an eclectic medieval style,” as Margaret Fisher reports, “Pound suggested that it be delivered in a heavily

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inflected cabaret style.” The manuscript in facsimile and the accompanying essay, “VILLON AND COMMENT,” were first published in the April 1938 (not “1948,” as the footnoted citation indicates) of Townsman and reprinted (without the essay) later that year in New Directions in Prose and Poetry.42 Pound highlights the aria’s significance in “How to Read” (1929), “By using several hundred pages of prose, Flaubert, by force of architectonics, manages to attain an intensity comparable to that in Villon’s Heaulmière.”43 In ABC of Reading (1934), Pound hails Villon as representing “the end of a tradition, the end of the mediaeval dream, the end of a whole body of knowledge, fine, subtle, that had run from Arnaut to Guido Cavalcanti, that had lain in the secret mind of Europe for centuries.”44 Meanwhile, in “Date Line” (1934), among the five essential categories of criticism that Pound outlines is “Criticism via music, meaning definitely the setting of a poet’s words; e.g. in Le Testament, Villon’s words.”45 True to form, Pound in collaboration with Antheil (cf. note GK 71) set to music the text of Villon’s “Les regrets de la belle heaulmière (Jà parvenue à vieillesse).” In 1910, the French sculptor Auguste Rodin (1840–1917) titled his heartrending cast bronze sculpture of the elderly courtesan, La Belle qui fut heaulmière.46 The “Heaulmière” sequence in Rudge’s hand is comprised of ten eight-line stanzas, or huitains: Advis m’est que jo’y regretter La belle qui fut heaulmiere, Soy jeune fille souhaitter Et parler en ceste maniere: “Ha! vieillesse felonne et fiere, Pourquoy m’as si tost abatue? Qui me tient que je ne me fiere, Et qu’à ce coup je ne me tue?

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A Companion to Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur “Tollu m’as ma haulte franchise, Que beaulté m’avoit ordonné Sur clercz, marchans et gens d’Eglise; Car alors n’estoit homme né Qui tout le sien ne m’eust donné, Quoy qu’il en fust des repentailles, Mais que luy eusse abandonné Ce que reffusent truandailles. “A maint homme l’ay reffusé, Qui n’estoit à moy grand saigesse, Pour l’amour d’ung garson rusé, Auquel j’en feiz grande largesse. A qui que je feisse finesse, Par m’ame, je l’amoye bien ! Or ne me faisoit que rudesse, Et ne m’amoyt que pour le mien. “Jà ne me sceut tant detrayner, Fouller au piedz, que ne l’aymasse, Et m’eust-il faict les rains trayner, S’il m’eust dit que je le baisasse Et que tous mes maux oubliasse; Le glouton, de mal entaché, M’embrassoit . . . J’en suis bien plus grasse! Que m’en reste-il? Honte et peché. “Or il est mort, passé trente ans, Et je remains vieille et chenue. Quand je pense, lasse ! au bon temps, Quelle fus, quelle devenue; Quand me regarde toute nue, Et je me voy si très-changée,

ADDENDA: 1952 Pauvre, seiche, maigre, menue, Je suis Presque toute enragée. “Qu’est devenu ce front poly, Ces cheveulx blonds, sourcilz voultyz, Grand entr’œil, le regard joly, Dont prenoye les plus subtilz; Ce beau nez droit, grand ne petiz; Ces petites joinctes oreilles, Menton fourchu, cler vis traictis, Et ces belles lèvres vermeilles? “Ces gentes espaules menues, Ces bras longs et ces mains tretisses; Petitz tetins, hanches charnues, Eslevées, propres, faictisses A tenir amoureuses lysses; Ces larges reins, ce sadinet, Assis sur grosses fermes cuysses, Dedans son joly jardinet? “Le front ridé, les cheveulx gris, Les sourcilz cheuz, les yeulx estainctz, Qui faisoient regars et riz, Dont maintz marchans furent attaincts; Nez courbé, de beaulté loingtains; Oreilles pendans et moussues; Le vis pally, mort et destaincts; Menton foncé, lèvres peaussues: “C’est d’humaine beauté l’yssues! Les bras courts et les mains contraictes, Les espaulles toutes bossues; Mammelles, quoy! toutes retraictes;

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A Companion to Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur Telles les hanches que les tettes. Du sadinet, fy! Quant des cuysses, Cuysses ne sont plus, mais cuyssettes Grivelées comme saulcisses. “Ainsi le bon temps regretons Entre nous, pauvres vieilles sottes, Assises bas, à croppetons, Tout en ung tas comme pelottes, A petit feu de chenevottes, Tost allumées, tost estainctes; Et jadis fusmes si mignottes! . . . Ainsi en prend à maintz et maintes.”47 In The Testaments of François Villon (1924)—a collection containing translations by Swinburne, D. G. Rossetti, Arthur Symons, and ending with Pound’s “Villonaud for this Yule”—the editor, John Heron Lepper, provides the following translation of the “Heaulmière,” or “The Regrets of the Fair Armouress at Having Grown Old”: Methought I heard in great distress That ancient woman thus complain Who was the beauteous armouress And wish herself a girl again: “Ah age, so fell, whom all disdain, Why hast thou conquered me so soon? What hinders me to strike amain And find the stroke of death a boon? “The right to rule thou hast removed, Rare beauty’s dower to make men mad, On merchants, clerks and clergy proved. No man alive but then was glad

ADDENDA: 1952 To give me freely all he had, Whate’er repentance followed after, So that I granted to the lad What beggars now refuse with laughter. “To many a man I did deny The same (great folly you’ll agree), Through fancying a lover sly Who had full many gifts from me. Whoever else might cheated be I loved him well, if truth be told, But still his ways were rude to see, He loved me only for my gold. “Although he spurned and dragged me round, I loved him, yea, would for his sake Have gathered faggots from the ground; When he but sought one kiss to take I soon forgot all grief and ache; The rake but needed to begin To hug me. . . . So I gained my stake. What’s left me now? But shame and sin. “Well, he is dead gone thirty year And I still live, old, white with care. Ah when I think of byegone cheer, My then estate with this compare, When I behold myself all bare And see myself transmuted quite, All withered, wrinkled, lean and spare, I almost do grow mad outright. “Where be they now? the forehead fair, The eyebrows arched, the hair so bright,

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A Companion to Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur Large pupils and look debonair That captured the most crafty wight; The shapely nose of size aright; The ears close clinging to the head; The dimpled chin, skin clear and white, And lovely lips of rosy red! “Straight shoulders, arms both slim and long With little hands and slender wrists, Small nipples, haunches plump and strong, High, smooth, where every charm assists To make them meet for amorous lists; Wide loins, fat thighs, and therein set, Like love conceled amid the twists Of silken curls, that amulet! “The forehead wrinkled, ringlets gray, The eyebrows hairless, dim the eyes That smiled so saucily and gay Entrancing men of merchandise, The nose a hook whence beauty flies; Ears limp, and mossy-like their skin; The face pale, dead, in faded guise; Lips coarse and swollen; shrunken chin; “Thus human beauty ends its dream! Stiff arms, and hands all claw-wise bent, The shoulders fit for hunchback seem; The breasts, they’re withered now and spent; The haunches shrunk a like extent. The amulet, bah! as for thighs, They are but bags of discontent And flecked like sausages by flies.

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“Thus we the past good times regret In company, each poor old trot! Heaped close, as tennis balls are set, Upon our hunkers, as we squat Around a wretched fire, God wot, Soon kindled and soon burnt away; Yet we were once a dainty lot! . . . So time makes men and women pay.”

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In his notes, Lepper states that Heaulmière “was a very real personage.” Born about 1375 she would have been 86 in 1461 when Villon immortalized her unhappy story.48 Conversely, Jane H. M. Taylor sheds light on Heaulmière’s “historical reality (however tenuous or disputable),” which anchors and “individualises her, gives her a mimetic solidity—and makes her epistemologically independent of her creator.”49 “It will be twenty years before they will stand it”: Following a concert performance of Le Testament just four years after Antheil’s cynical forecast, the American composer Virgil Thomson (1896–1989) remarked, “The music was not quite a musician’s music, though it may well be the finest poet’s music since Thomas Campion. . . . Its sound has remained in my memory.”50 Still, Antheil’s prediction was not altogether off the mark. The definitive 1923 Antheil edition of Pound’s opera would only receive its world stage premiere on November 13, 1971 at Zellerbach Auditorium, University of California, Berkeley, performed by San Francisco Opera’s Western Opera Theater, conducted by Robert Hughes, and recorded by Fantasy Records.51 “But it has never been done,” said Herr M.: The likely source of this skeptical remark is Gerhart Münch, the German pianist-composer with whom Pound and Rudge collaborated in the Rapallo concerts in the 1930s (cf. notes GK 60, 134–35).

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A Companion to Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur Author . . . Tibor Serly: Hungarian-American composer Tibor Serly (1901–78), who developed, in his own words, “a sort of teacher-disciple, almost father-son, relationship” with Béla Bartók (cf. note GK 134–35).52 Serly is the “Mr Fidascz” of Canto 35, Mr Fidascz explained to me the horrors of playing the fiddle while that ass Nataanovitch, or some other better known -ovitch whose name we must respect because of the law of libel, was conducting in particular the Mattias Passion, after requesting that the audience come in black clothes (35/172) The “ass Nataanovitch” refers to the British conductor and organist Leopold Stokowski (1882–1977), known for his orchestral transcriptions of organ works by Bach, including the German composer’s “Mattias Passion” (St. Matthew’s Passion, BWV 244) (1727). As Fidascz/Serly suggests, Stokowski’s live performances were at times eccentric.53 Writing to E. E. Cummings from Rapallo, a town Serly often visited, Pound questions, “Why don’t them buzzards in Noo Yok play bro Tibor Serly’s muzik? Stokowsky keeps promising, and then Tibor has to come here or go to Budapesth for concerts (hand made) or orchestrated.”54 Only Serly, Antheil, “and possibly two other composers,” Pound laments in “Date Line,” understood his theory of the Great Bass (cf. note GK 73).55 Commenting on the irregular, mixed meters of Antheil’s revised version of 1923 of Pound’s original score of Le Testament prepared in 1920, Fisher cites the “Heaulmière” as an illustration of the formidable challenges the opera presents for a conductor, noting that the

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aria at a tempo of quarter note = M.M. 88 moves from 2/8 to 25/32 to 3/8 to 2/4 meter (bars 25–28). To accommodate the syllables (usually one per note) with the 32d note at such a fast clip, the 25/32 bar needs to be conducted with four beats comprised of 6/32 for the 1st beat, 10/32 for the 2d beat, 6/32 for the 3d beat and 3/32 for the 4th beat.56 365–66 Boris de Schloezer . . . melody is the most artificial thing in all music: In “Cavalcanti,” Pound remarks along the same lines, There is opposition, not only between what M. de Schloezer distinguishes as musical and poetic lyricism, but in the writing itself there is a distinction between poetic lyricism, the emotional force of the verbal movement, and melopoeic lyricism, the letting the words flow on a melodic current, realized or not, realizable or not, if the line is supposed to be sung on a sequence of notes of different pitch.57 (cf. note GK 114) 366

motz el son . . . Arnaut Daniel, Sordello to Dante: Cf. notes GK 60, 107–8. one must still go for the ABC of the subject: In A Visiting Card, Pound insists likewise, “Unless you know Homer, Sappho, Ovid, Catullus, Propertius, Dante, Cavalcanti, a few songs of the troubadours together with a few of von der Vogelweide or Hans Sachs, Villon, and Gautier, you won’t know European poetry.”58 I sat in the electrician’s kitchen in Rapallo . . . the sense of the words: The long wave radio broadcast of the BBC production of The Testament of François Villon aired on October 26 and 27, 1931. Dorothy Pound attended the first performance at the BBC. Pound’s boast that he could distinguish a few of the singers

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A Companion to Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur as well as “the words, and the sense of the words” suggests that he is referring to the first broadcast. When Dorothy listened to the performance, which aired the following day, she noted that she could barely hear the orchestra, while Pound also complained about the difficulty of making out some of the instrumentation. He proposed most of the cast for his operafor-radio, from Bozo (the brothel keeper) to Villon and his mother, among other roles, while he was working in Paris in May 1931 with the BBC producer, Edward Archibald Fraser Harding (1903–53), and by correspondence thereafter.59 The music is to that extent a comment on . . . the emotive contents: The symbiotic relationship between music and language recurs often in Pound’s criticism and poetry. In Antheil and the Treatise on Harmony, Pound states “that music and poetry had been in alliance in the twelfth century, that the divorce of the two arts had been to the advantage of neither, and that melodic invention declined simultaneously and progressively with their divergence.”60 His definition of melopoeia in “Marianne Moore and Mina Loy” (1917) reinforces this kinship, “to wit, poetry which moves by its music, whether it be a music in the words or an aptitude for, or suggestion of, accompanying music.”61 Canto 28 pays homage to the Provençal troubadour “Marcebrus” or Marcabrun (c.1130– 48), “He made it, feitz Marcebrus, the words and the music” (28/137), while Canto 53 features Emperor “Ti Ko,” or Di Ku (帝嚳), a mythical ruler who sponsored the composition of a number of Chinese traditional songs and “set his scholars to fitting words to their music” (53/262).62 The “Cavalcanti” . . . poems of Sordello’s: Cavalcanti, Pound’s only other complete opera after Le Testament, was composed between 1931 and 1933, mostly during the summer of 1932. Pound conceived his three-act “sung dramedy” primarily for the radio, adjusting the opera’s pitch range to compensate for radiofrequency bias and to emphasize the clarity of the words. He

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also anticipated eventual stage production. While composing the opera, he consulted frequently with Agnes Bedford (1892– 1969), his London-based musical advisor and pianist, and E. A. F. Harding, the BBC producer with whom he had already collaborated on the broadcast of Le Testament. Pound’s revelation in GK that Cavalcanti “needed much more play written” helps to explain why the opera incorporates not only eleven canzone and ballate by the titular Tuscan poet (including poems that since then have been attributed to other poets), but also borrows the plot of Boccaccio’s “Ninth Tale of the Sixth Day” from Il Decameron in Act I and Sordello’s poems “Tos temps serai” in Act II and “Ailas” at the start of Act III for “contrast in melodic shape.” Following Pound’s final scoring of Cavalcanti in 1933, however, Harding was unsuccessful in convincing the BBC to broadcast it. The opera was postponed indefinitely with no known explanation from Harding, who appears to have broken off all contact with Pound that same year. Cavalcanti would only be performed in full fifty years later, just over a decade after Pound’s death. It premiered on March 28, 1983 in San Francisco, produced and conducted by Robert Hughes with the Arch Ensemble for Experimental Music.63 Shakespeare’s Pericles is not a libretto: As Pound suggests, Shakespeare’s play Pericles, Prince of Tyre (1609) has never been staged as an opera. In 1820, French playwright JeanPons-Guillaume Viennet (1777–1868) produced a one-act opera, Aspasie et Périclès, but it was not at all based on Shakespeare’s text. Verdi used Shakespeare . . . e tacit’  e mor-   ta!: The Italian opera composer Giuseppe Verdi (1813–1901) created three operas inspired by Shakespeare’s works: Macbeth (1847/1865), Otello (1887), and Falstaff (1893). Verdi’s grandiose plan to produce an unorthodox opera modeled after King Lear never materialized. The quoted excerpt is from the denouement of Act IV, the final act, of Verdi’s Otello, which debuted at the

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Teatro alla Scala in Milan on February 5, 1887. Otello grieves the pale (“pallida”) and lifeless (“morta”) Desdemona, shortly after strangling her (rather than smothering her with a pillow, as he does in the play).64 367–68 Henry Lawes . . . went on to a field of greater interest: Pound revisits comments he had made about Lawes (cf. note GK 155) in Antheil and the Treatise on Harmony. Holding up Lawes’s work in the earlier book as “an example of how the words of a poem may be set, and enhanced by music,” he heaps praise on the Cavalier composer-poet,   Lawes was English of the English, he was no obscure man in his day, being a King’s musician and a man lauded by poets. He did not fall a prey to the pigheaded insularity of the British Association of Musicians; he did not shun foreign competition.   He set a poem of Anacreon’s in the Greek, and he set songs in Italian and Latin. He was, for all I know, the last English composer to know Greek.65 In Ayres and Dialogues: For One, Two, and Three Voyces (1653), Lawes indeed set to music Anacreon’s “Ode, call’d the Lute, Englished and to be sung by a basse alone.” In his preface, he affirms that since our palates are so much after Novelties, I desir’d to try the Greek, having never seen any thing Set in that Language by our own Musicians or Strangers, and (by Composing some of Anacreon’s Odes) I found the Greek Tongue full as good as any for Musick, and in some particulars sweeter than the Latine. Lawes also chastises the “present Generation” for being “so sated with what’s Native, that nothing takes their eare but

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what’s sung in a Language which (commonly) they understand as little as they do the Musick.”66 As Pound hints at, the English lyric poet Edmund Waller (1606–87) contributed a commendatory poem to the volume, titled “To Mr. Henry Lawes, who had then newly set a Song of mine in the Year, 1635.” Dolmetsch (cf. note GK 71) published Lawes’s music in the two-volume Select English Songs and Dialogues of the 16th and 17th Centuries (1898–1912). In the June 5, 1919 issue of The New Age, Pound writes (as “William Atheling,” the pen name he assumed to review music):   There is no copy of Henry Lawes’ three volumes of “Ayres and Dialogues” at the little second-hand music shop in Great Turnstile . . . Dolmetsch’s arrangement of some of this music is out of print. Only in a nation utterly contemptuous of its past treasures and inspired by a rancorous hatred of good music could this state of affairs be conceivable. I have bought Waller’s poems for a shilling. Yet Lawes’ position in English music is proportionally much more important than Waller’s position among English poets.   This condition of things is more eloquent of the debasement and utter contemptibility of British music publishers and the slovenly ignorance of British so-called musicians than the laws of libel permit me to attempt to express in these columns.67

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That same month, “Atheling” would also lament that “Since Lawes and Waller collaborated, the technique of English setting has been appalling.”68 Idem Debussy . . . went back toVillon and Charles D’Orleans: Like Lawes, the visionary French composer and musician Claude Debussy (1862–1918) also changed the direction of his music, as evinced in recently discovered sketches for his settings

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A Companion to Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur of poems by the Symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé (1842–98), which the Bibliothèque Nationale de France purchased in 2005.69 Closer to Pound’s own interests in the troubadours, in 1908 Debussy also set to music Trois chansons de Charles d’Orléans, three madrigalesque and lyrical songs for a cappella four-part mixed chorus based on verses by the courtly poet Charles, duc d’Orléans (1394–1465). Four years earlier, Debussy had adapted d’Orléans’s poetry in his Trois chansons de France (1904). Writing in the Dial in 1928, Pound calls Debussy’s settings of d’Orléans among “the great songs one remembers” and, as K. K. Ruthven proffers, it is probable that Pound translated the French poet’s song “Dieu! Qu’il La Fait” “with Debussy’s music in mind.”70 In May 1910, Debussy also completed a collection of songs, Trois ballades de François Villon. Tracing Debussy’s late-career interest in archaic forms of French music and literature to his “increasing nationalism,” Eric Frederick Jensen notes that the composer’s music “is, as always, intimately crafted to the text . . . Perhaps most striking is the subdued and reflective temper of most of these songs, aspects that do not work to their advantage in a concert hall setting.”71 In The New Age of May 2, 1918, “Mr. Atheling” characterizes Debussy’s “Noël des enfants” as “an interesting experiment; it shows the composer’s unsurpassed comprehension of the relation of rhythm to emotion.”72 In GK, Pound also cites Yvette Guilbert (1867–1944), the stage name of Emma Laure Esther Guilbert, a Belle Époque star of the lowbrow chanson moderne of the Parisian café-concert scene. Like Debussy, the chanteuse would eventually develop a repertoire that celebrated the historical chanson ancienne, thereby distancing herself from the moribund genre of the café concert.73 Pound had originally written the “Heaulmière” aria with Guilbert in mind, but her prohibitive fee made it impossible for E. A. F. Harding to secure her contract.74 baraque de foire . . . [n.]*If only Ethel Merman or Pinza would!: To illustrate the flexibility of Le Testament as a

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performance piece, Pound imagines that his opera could be sung in a baraque de foire, a fun house at a fair or amusement park. Ethel Merman was the stage name of Ethel Agnes Zimmermann (1908–84), an immensely popular Broadway star with a long career in American musical theater, film, and television. As Pound suggests, Merman’s robust voice was legendary. Caryl Flinn, her biographer, observes that “to many, the voice seemed grander than nature itself, and over her career, critics and composers had fun comparing it to marching bands, calliopes, and sonic booms.” Pound’s notion that Merman could have sung Le Testament jibes with Gary Wedow, chorus master of the New York City Opera, who once remarked, “Judging from the recordings she made in the thirties, Merman would probably have made a good opera singer.”75 Ezio Pinza (1892–1957) was an Italian-American opera singer, who performed with New York’s Metropolitan Opera and was also known for his commanding stage presence and sonorous voice. After leaving the Met, Pinza went on to star in musical comedies, film, radio, and television.76 “Collis O Heliconii” (half done, and no small technical problem): Collis O Heliconii, Pound’s third opera, based on the poetry of Catullus (cf. note GK 161) and the Greek lyric poet Sappho (c.610–c.570 BCE), was never finished. Collis would have completed the operatic trilogy Pound had begun with Le Testament and Cavalcanti. Recalling the “Heaulmière” holographic facsimile in GK, the extant sketches of Collis show that Pound began composing the opera in the late summer of 1932 with a solo violin accompaniment, just as he was composing Act III of Cavalcanti. The Cavalcanti-Sordello pairing he utilized in Cavalcanti set the stage for the Catullus-Sappho literary relationship in Collis. Written in a form of glyconic meter attributed to Sappho and her contemporary Alcaeus (c.620–c.580 BCE), a fellow poet from the Greek island of Lesbos, Catullus’s Carmen LXI furnishes Pound’s musical

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A Companion to Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur setting in Collis and much of Pound’s Catullan references in Cantos 3–5 and in Canto 28. Specifically, the opera would have featured Catullus’s epithalamium (a song or poem celebrating a marriage), “Collis o Heliconnii,” with its choric invocations to Hymen, the god of marriage, and Sappho’s ode to Aphrodite, Poikilothron, an impassioned appeal to the goddess of love to kindle in Sappho’s unwilling lover an irresistible desire for the poet.77 In a 1916 letter, Pound provides an early clue to the impetus behind Collis, I prize the Greek more for the movement of the words, rhythm, perhaps than for anything else. There is the POIKILOTHRON and then Catullus, “Collis O Heliconii,” and some Propertius, that one could do worse than know by heart for the sake of improving what rhythm really is.78

As Hughes and Fisher explain, in its exploration of “iambic and anapestic ‘snaps’ to give the music a certain forward thrust,” Collis would have been “more rhythmically experimental than Cavalcanti, though less so than Testament.” However, based on the slim holdings of Collis O Heliconii at the Beinecke Library—just twelve pages of music sketches marked “Collis” and “Poi etc.,” “Poi” being short for Sappho’s Poikilothron, the second aria—Hughes and Fisher see as “wishful thinking” Pound’s claim that the opera was “half done.”79 Pound’s failure to complete it, in Moody’s estimation, owed mainly to “his being drawn out of music by his increasing activism.”80 368–69 Mr. Cantleman’s Mate: “Cantleman’s Spring-Mate,” a short story by Wyndham Lewis, was first published in The Little Review of October 1917 and reprinted in a slightly revised version in The Ideal Giant (1917), a pamphlet printed privately for The Little Review. In raising “the question of presenting THAT to the public,” Pound alludes to the fact that the United States postal authorities suppressed on obscenity charges

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the issue of The Little Review containing Lewis’s short story. Margaret Anderson, the magazine’s editor, unsuccessfully fought the suppression in court (cf. note GK 96). However, the phrase Pound quotes here—“Dear Ma, this war is a fair buggar!”—is from another short story by Lewis, “The War Baby,” first published in Art and Letters in 1918 and reprinted in the second edition of Blasting and Bombardiering (1967). Pound’s confusion may owe to the fact that Lewis wrote the story as a companion piece to “Cantleman’s Spring-Mate.”81 T. W. Hulme’s latest editor: In A Visiting Card, Pound also quotes the adage by the Imagist poet T. E. (not “T. W.,” as cited in GK) Hulme (cf. note GK 15). Following Hulme’s paean to brevity, Pound concludes, “Without strong tastes one does not love, nor, therefore, exist.”82

Notes

Introduction 1 Beinecke MSS 43, Box 35, Folder 1480. 2 Theodore Roosevelt, The Rough Riders (New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1899), 11, 20. See also Sarah Lyons Watts, Rough Rider in the White House: Theodore Roosevelt and the Politics of Desire (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). 3 Pound, Personae, The Shorter Poems of Ezra Pound, ed. Lea Baechler and A. Walton Litz (New York: New Directions, 1990), 185. 4 GK, 8. 5 Ibid., 277. 6 Ibid., 270. 7 Ibid., 255–56. 8 Ibid., 96. 9 Ibid., 31. 10 Ibid., 30. 11 Beinecke MSS 43, Box 35, Folder 1480. 12 Ibid., Folder 1485. 13 LE, 288. 14 Ibid., 289. 15 GK, 116, 137, 166, 306, 319. 16 Ibid., 116. 17 P/I, 67. 18 GK, 116. 19 John Tytell, Ezra Pound: The Solitary Volcano (New York: Anchor Press, 1987), 247.

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SL, 294. GK, 286. P/I, 74. Ibid., 79. Letter of Jan. 14, 1938 (HRHRC, Box 5, Folder 10). Letter of Feb. 11, 1937 (Beinecke MSS 43, Box 35, Folder 1480). Anthony David Moody, Ezra Pound: Poet, A Portrait of the Man and His Work, vol. 2, The Epic Years 1921–1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 247. 27 GK, 8. 28 Ibid., 44. 29 J/M, 21. 30 GK, 28. 31 Ibid., 291. 32 Ibid., 27. 33 Ibid., 57 (cf. note GK 27). 34 Ibid., 58. 35 Ibid., 343. 36 Ibid., 208. 37 Jerome McGann, “From Text to Work: Digital Tools and the Emergence of the Social Text,” Romanticism on the Net, no. 41–42 (Feb.–May 2006), accessed Aug. 18, 2016, https://www.erudit.org/fr/revues/ ron/2006-n41-42-ron1276/013153ar/ 38 Donald C. Gallup, Ezra Pound: A Bibliography (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1983), 61. 39 GK, 286. N.B. The pagination remains identical in both the unexpurgated version containing the original text published by Faber & Faber in 1938 and in the New Directions edition of 1970; hence, only the pagination from the New Directions edition is cited here and elsewhere. The unexpurgated text consulted for the Companion, one of the six surviving copies, is found in the Ezra Pound Collection at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin. 40 Donald Pizer, “Self-Censorship and Textual Editing,” in Textual Criticism and Literary Interpretation, ed. Jerome J. McGann (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 156. 41 GK, 164–65. 42 Ibid., 196. 43 Ibid., 190. 44 Ibid., 195. 45 Beinecke MSS 43, Box 105, Folder 4396. Cf. GK, 147. 46 Dante, Divina Commedia (Inferno), III.18. 47 GK, 51. 20 21 22 23 24 25 26

Notes 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55

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Ibid., 29. Ibid., 33. GB, 92. GK, 70. Ibid., 195. Ibid., 51. Ibid., 53. George Kearns, ed., Guide to Ezra Pound’s Selected Cantos (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1980), 104. 56 GK, 55. 57 116/815. 58 Ezra Pound: The Critical Heritage, ed. Eric Homberger (New York: Routledge, 1972), 332, 337. 59 See Catherine E. Paul, Fascist Directive: Ezra Pound and Italian Cultural Nationalism (Clemson: Clemson University Press, 2016), 91–99. 60 GK, 105, 182. 61 87/589, 89/621, 93/646. 62 Alec Marsh, Money and Modernity: Pound, Williams, and the Spirit of Jefferson (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1998), 108. 63 GK, 294. 64 Ibid., 15. 65 Ibid., 21. 66 Ibid., 26. 67 Ibid., 105. 68 J/M, 74. 69 J. J. Wilhelm, Ezra Pound: The Tragic Years, 1925–1972 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994), 169. 70 GK, 2. 71 Pound, Review of Adrian Stokes’s Stones of Rimini, Criterion 13 (Apr. 1934): 496. 72 GK, 2. 73 Michael O’Driscoll, “Guide to Kulchur,” ed. Demetres P. Tryphonopoulos and Stephen Adams, The Ezra Pound Encyclopedia (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2005), 140. 74 T. S. Eliot, “On a Recent Piece of Criticism,” Purpose 10, no. 2 (Apr.–June 1938): 92–93. 75 Leon Surette, A Light from Eleusis: A Study of Ezra Pound’s Cantos (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), 25. 76 GK, 252. 77 Joseph Conrad, The Nigger of the Narcissus: A Tale of the Forecastle, ed. Ford Madox Ford (New York: Doubleday, 1925). 78 GK, 145.

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79 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 25. 80 GK, 55. 81 LE, 16. 82 W. B. Yeats, A Vision: The Revised 1937 Edition, ed. Margaret Mills Harper and Catherine E. Paul, The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats, vol. 14 (New York: Scribner, 2015), 4. 83 GK, 194. 84 Ibid., 134. 85 Letter to D. F. Aitken, Aug. 11, 1936, quoted in Margaret Fisher, Ezra Pound’s Radio Operas: The BBC Experiments, 1931–1933 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 196. 86 Wilhelm, Tragic Years, 130. 87 GK, 23. 88 13/60. 89 GK, 161. 90 Ibid., 266. Frontispiece to PREFACE 1

2 3 4 5

Lawrence S. Rainey, Institutions of Modernism: Literary Elites and Public Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 119–20. See also Rainey’s chapter, “Desperate Love: Isotta and the Monument of Civilization,” in Ezra Pound and the Monument of Culture: Text, History, and the Malatesta Cantos (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 155–228. Rainey highlights the widely accepted view that the epistolary seal attributed to the Italian painter and medalist Antonio Pisano (Pisanello) (c.1395–c.1455) is a forgery, observing that by 1938 Pound “was perhaps the last person who still did” believe it to be a Pisanello (164). See also Carroll F. Terrell, A Companion to the Cantos of Ezra Pound (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1980), 55, 387. In his glossary for Canto 8, however, Terrell mistakenly identifies the seal as depicting “Sigismundo’s profile as shown facing the title page of GK” (37), and not Sallustio’s profile. Peter D’Epiro, A Touch of Rhetoric: Ezra Pound’s Malatesta Cantos (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1983), 11. Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1971), 247. Claire Van Cleave, Master Drawings of the Italian Renaissance (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 36. P/Q, 217–18.

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6 See Judith Veronica Field, Piero della Francesca: A Mathematician’s Art (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005). 7 Oskar Bätschmann, Giovanni Bellini (London: Reaktion Books, 2008), 29–30, 83, 208 ff. 8 Notwithstanding Verucchio’s vaunted piety, Pope Pius II singled him out as “a traitor and a fraud,” in Maria Grazia Pernis and Laurie Schneider Adams, Federico da Montefeltro and Sigismondo Malatesta: The Eagle and the Elephant (New York: Peter Lang, 1996), 33. 9 Robert Tavernor, On Alberti and the Art of Building (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 51. 10 Pound, Review of Adrian Stokes’s Stones of Rimini, Criterion 13 (April 1934): 496. 11 As Roxana Preda notes, however, Pound conveniently elides Pius’s scathing condemnation of Malatesta for filling the Tempio with pagan works, in “VIII,” The Cantos Project, accessed Jan. 30, 2017. http:// thecantosproject.ed.ac.uk/index.php/a-draft-of-xvi-cantos-overview/ cantos-viii-xi/canto-viii/viii-poem. See also Anthony F. D’Elia, Pagan Virtue in a Christian World: Sigismondo Malatesta and the Italian Renaissance (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), 26 ff. 12 Demetres P. Tryphonopoulos, The Celestial Tradition: A Study of Ezra Pound’s the Cantos (Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1992), 17. 13 S Blackburn, Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), s.v. “Xenophon.” 14 Pound, “Ave Roma,” Il Mare 26, no. 1243 (Jan. 7, 1933): 3–4. 15 Henceforth, all cited texts found in Pound’s literary estate in Brunnenburg Castle, Dorf Tirol, Italy, will be identified as “Brunnenburg.” 16 See P/Z. 17 Barry Ahearn, “Zukofsky, Louis (1904–1978),” EPE, 309. 18 Quoted in Noel Stock, The Life of Ezra Pound (New York: Pantheon Books, 1970), 283. 19 SL, 328. 20 P/Z, 71. 21 Stock, Life, 344. 22 J/M, 74. 23 Kenner, Pound Era, 395. 24 Pound, ed., Active Anthology (London: Faber, 1933), 5. 25 Richard Caddel, “Acknowledged Land: A Biography of ‘They Say Etna’ and a Debate between Bunting and Pound,” in Ezra Pound and Europe, edited by Richard Taylor and Claus Melchior (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1993), 70. 26 Peggy L. Fox, “New Directions,” EPE, 205.

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27 Donald C. Gallup, Ezra Pound: A Bibliography (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1983), 63. Gallup also notes that after the initial print run of 519 copies “had been sold, New Directions imported and sold copies of the English edition at $3.00.” 28 David M. Gordon, “Introduction,” in Ezra Pound and James Laughlin, Selected Letters, ed. David M. Gordon (New York: Norton, 1994), ix. 29 Gordon, Ezra Pound and James Laughlin, 3. 30 Ibid., 75. 31 Ibid., 79. 32 Ibid., 101. 33 Laughlin, Pound as Wuz: Essays and Lectures on Ezra Pound (Saint Paul, MN: Graywolf Press, 1987), 19. 34 Ibid., 3. 1. DIGEST OF THE ANALECTS 1

In keeping with Pound’s own usage, I refer to Confucius and his family name, Kung, interchangeably. Whenever Traditional Chinese Characters differ from Simplified Chinese Characters, I present both forms (separated by a forward slash or in brackets), either side by side, as is the case here, or in endnotes. I also provide Pinyin (拼音), the standard system of romanized spelling for transliterating Chinese, as Pound’s quaint phonetic renderings follow neither the Wade-Giles system of romanization nor the Pinyin. 2 Stock, Life, 176. 3 Ibid., 176, 148. 4 Gallup, Bibliography, 159. 5 Ernest Fenollosa, The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, ed. Ezra Pound (London: Stanley Nott, 1936), 24. 6 See also Wilhelm, Tragic Years, 27. 7 Zhaoming Qian, “The Orient,” in Ezra Pound in Context, ed. Ira B. Nadel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 338. 8 Pound (trans.), Confucian Analects (London: Peter Owen, 1956), 7. 9 William Jennings (trans.), Confucian Analects (London: G. Routledge and Sons, 1895), 49. 10 Ann-ping Chin, Confucius: A Life of Thought and Politics (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 64, 72. 11 Pound (trans.), Confucius: The Unwobbling Pivot, The Great Digest, The Analects (New York: New Directions, 1969), 197. 12 LE, 4. 13 Paul Rakita Goldin, Confucianism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 12.

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14 Pound (trans.), Confucius, 263. See also Bryan Van Norden’s essay, “Unweaving the ‘One Thread’ of Analects 4:15,” for a critical perspective on other similar translations of this passage by James Legge and Qing dynasty scholar Dài Zhèn, in “Unweaving the ‘One Thread’ of Analects 4:15,” Confucius and the Analects: New Essays, ed. Van Norden (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 216–36. Van Norden finds these translations (as he might find Pound’s) “a little too elliptical” (222). 15 Legge (trans.), Confucian Analects, The Great Learning, and The Doctrine of the Mean (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1893), 295. Rendered in Simplified Chinese Characters, the ideograms read, 一以贯之. 16 OED, s.v. “rapacity.” 17 SP, 3. 18 SL, 214. 19 Roger T. Ames and Henry Rosemont Jr. (trans.), The Analects of ­Confucius: A Philosophical Translation (New York: Random House, 1998), 6. 20 Bret Hinsch, Passions of the Cut Sleeve: The Male Homosexual Tradition in China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 20. 21 P/Z, 233. 22 Pound (trans.), Confucius, 249. 23 Ames and Rosemont (trans.), Analects, 2,14. 24 Yong Huang, Confucius: A Guide for the Perplexed (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 138. 25 Cf. GK, 272. 26 C. Williams, “A Sage’s Prediction,” The Canadian Theosophist 16, no. 9 (Nov. 1935): 291. 27 Pound, Ezra Pound & Japan: Letters & Essays, ed. Sanehide Kodama (Redding Ridge, CT: Black Swan Books, 1987), 102. 28 Pound, Ezra Pound’s Chinese Friends: Stories in Letters, ed. Zhaoming Qian (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 119. 29 SP, 95. 30 Ames and Rosemont (trans.), Analects, 14. 31 Bruce Brooks and A. Taeko Brooks (trans.), The Original Analects: Sayings of Confucius and His Successors (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 73. 32 Pound (trans.), Confucius, 245. 33 Ibid., 256. 34 Ibid., 248. 35 Ibid., 195. 36 SP, 28. 37 Feng Lan, Ezra Pound and Confucianism: Remaking Humanism in the Face of Modernity (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005), 100.

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38 Pound (trans.), Confucius, 203. Cf. Legge’s translation: “The Master said, ‘Zhou had the advantage of viewing the two past dynasties. How complete and elegant are its regulations! I follow Zhou’” (Confucian, 160). 39 Legge (trans.), Confucian, 160. 40 See Tim Redman, Ezra Pound and Italian Fascism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). 41 Pound (trans.), Confucius, 280. 42 Ibid., 19. 43 Legge (trans.), Confucian, 322. 44 Ibid., 295. 45 Guillaume Pauthier (trans.), Confucius, Doctrine de Confucius ou Les quatre livres de philosophie morale et politique de la Chine (Paris: Librairie Garnier Frères, 1921), 171. 46 Mary P. Cheadle, Ezra Pound’s Confucian Translations (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 2, 7. 47 Cf. note on the same two ideograms, 正名 (GK 16). 48 Pound (trans.), Confucius, 27. 49 Mary de Rachewiltz, Ezra Pound, Father and Teacher: Discretions (New York: New Directions, 1975), 93–95. 50 http://www.treccani.it, L’Enciclopedia Italiana, s.v. “Il Sussidiario.” 2. THE NEW LEARNING: PART ONE OED, s.v. “heteroclite.” LE, 208. D. Birch, ed., Oxford Companion to English Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 7th ed., s.v. “Rabelais, François.” 4 Gallup, Bibliography, 278. 5 Patrick Riley, Character and Conversion in Autobiography: Augustine, Montaigne, Descartes, Rousseau, and Sartre (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2004), 61. 6 R. W. Sharples, Stoics, Epicureans and Sceptics: An Introduction to Hellenistic Philosophy (New York: Routledge, 1996), 5. 7 LE, 158. 8 Eugene O’Connor, “Introduction,” in The Essential Epicurus: Letters, Principal Doctrines, Vatican Sayings, and Fragments (New York: Prometheus Books, 1993), 14. 9 Thomas Jefferson, The Writings of Thomas Jefferson: Being His Autobiography, Correspondence, Reports, Messages, Addresses, and Other Writings, Official and Private, vol. 6, ed. H. A. Washington, 9 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 518–19. 1 2 3

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10 Simon Hornblower and Antony Spawforth, eds, Oxford Companion to Classical Civilization, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), s.v. “Pythagoras.” 11 OED, s.v. “pi-jaw.” 12 Ibid., “Anschauung.” 13 Carus, “What Does Anschauung Mean?,” Monist 2, no. 4 (July 1, 1892): 530. 14 P/Q, 119. 15 Georg Lehner, ed., China in European Encyclopaedias, 1700–1850 (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 78. 16 Reyes Bertolín Cebrián, Singing the Dead: A Model for Epic Evolution (New York: Peter Lang, 2006), 126. 17 Humphrey Carpenter, A Serious Character: The Life of Ezra Pound (London: Faber, 1988), 30. 18 Oxford Companion to English Literature, 7th ed., s.v. “Aeschylus.” 19 See also Richard Sieburth’s edition of The Pisan Cantos (New York: New Directions Publishing, 2003), 154. 20 See William J. Prior, “The Socratic Problem,” in A Companion to Plato, ed. Hugh H. Benson (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 25–35. 21 From “ergot”: “Contester quelque chose avec des raisonnements spécieux; discuter sur des futilités; chicaner” (Larousse, Dictionnaires de français). 22 Fiorentino, Compendio di storia della filosofia (Florence: Vallecchi Editore, 1924), 90 (Brunnenburg). 23 Simon Hornblower, Antony Spawforth, and Esther Eidinow, eds, Oxford Classical Dictionary, 4th ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), s.v. “Zeno.” 24 Jefferson, Writings, vol. 7, 28. 25 Ibid., vol. 2, 250. 26 Anne Kerr and Edmund Wright, eds, Dictionary of World History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 3rd ed., s.v. “scholasticism.” 27 Catherine E. Paul, Fascist Directive: Ezra Pound and Italian Cultural Nationalism (Clemson: Clemson University Press, 2016), 203. 28 Leo Frobenius, Erlebte Erdteile, vol. 4, Paideuma: Umrisse Einer KulturUnd Seelenlehre, 2nd ed. (Frankfurt: Societäts-Druckerei, 1928), 55. 29 Marvin Harris, The Rise of Anthropological Theory: A History of Theories of Culture (Walnut Creek, CA: Rowman Altamira, 2001), 383. 30 “Vor allem sah ich mich gezwungen, das Wort Kultur in einem speziellen Sinn und für ein spezielles Bedeutungsgebiet durch das oben genannte Wort ‘Paideuma’ zu ersetzen” (“Above all I felt obliged to replace the word Kultur, in a particular sense and for a special field of meaning, by the above-named word, Paideuma”). Later in the book, Frobenius also knocks “Kultur” as “abgenutzt und stumpf ” (“worn and dull”), in

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Paideuma, 55–56, 139–40. In a curious crosslinguistic twist, however, the closest German equivalent to paideuma is “Kulturseele,” the soul or spirit of a culture. 31 Stock, Life, 28–29. 32 SL, 303. 33 Quoted in Walter George Hiscock, ed., The Balliol Rhymes (Oxford: printed for the editor, 1955). 34 OED, s.v. “pari passu.” 35 David Farmer, ed., Oxford Dictionary of Saints, 5th rev. ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), s.v. “Ambrose.” 36 Cf. P/N 233. See also http://www.treccani.it, L’Enciclopedia Italiana, s.v. “Giusto prezzo.” 37 André Vauchez, ed., Encyclopedia of the Middle Ages, 2nd rev. ed. (Cambridge: James Clarke and Co., 2001), 2 vols., s.v. “Antoninus of Florence.” 38 John J. Patrick, Richard M. Pious, and Donald A. Ritchie, The Oxford Guide to the United States Government (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 668. 39 EB, s.v. “Leopold II.” 40 Martin Van Buren, The Autobiography of Martin Van Buren (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1920), 221 (Brunnenburg). 41 Heraclitus, The Art and Thought of Heraclitus: A New Arrangement and Translation of the Fragments with Literary and Philosophical Commentary, trans. Charles H. Kahn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 4, 168. 42 LE, 331. 43 Ibid., 295 (I use Pound’s translation, in SR, 129). 44 Pound, “Dialogues of Fontenelle,” The Egoist 4, no. 3 (Apr. 1917): 39 (reprinted in Pound, Pavannes and Divagations (New York: New Directions, 1918), 132–35). 45 Gregory Nagy, Homeric Questions (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009), 72. 46 Larry Allen, The Encyclopedia of Money (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2009), 376. 47 OED, s.v. “vade-mecum.” 48 Nigel Cawthorne, Alexander the Great (London: Haus Publishing, 2004), 5–6. 49 GB, 39. 50 Ibid., 47. 51 Robert W. Dimand, “The New Economics and American Economists in the 1930s Reconsidered,” Atlantic Economic Journal 18, no. 4 (Dec. 1990): 46.

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52 Surette, Pound in Purgatory: From Economic Radicalism to Anti-Semitism (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 40. 53 Terrell, Companion, 724. 54 Pound, “Ezra Pound Speaking”: Radio Speeches of World War II, ed. Leonard W. Doob (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1978), 411–12. 55 Jean-Michel Rabaté, Language, Sexuality, and Ideology in Ezra Pound’s Cantos (Albany: SUNY Press, 1986), 184. 56 Eva Hesse, “Notes and Queries,” Paideuma 2, no. 1 (Spring 1973): 141–42. See also GK, 83, 229. 57 Michael Gagarin, ed., Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient Greece and Rome (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), s.v. “Seven Sages.” 58 Albert Einstein, “Physics and Reality,” trans. Jean Piccard, Journal of The Franklin Institute 221 (1936): 349. 3. SPARTA 776 B.C. 1 John Roberts, ed., Oxford Dictionary of the Classical World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), s.v. “Lacedaemon.” 2 Jessica Priestley, Herodotus and Hellenistic Culture: Literary Studies in the Reception of the Histories (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 215 ff.; Donald B. Redford, ed., Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient Egypt (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 3 vols., s.v. “Herodotus.” 3 LSJ, s.v. δανείζω. 4 Demosthenes, Demosthenes, Speeches 27–38, trans. Douglas M. MacDowell (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004), 84–94. 5 Peter Liebregts, Ezra Pound and Neoplatonism (Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2004), 229. 6 Silvio Gesell, The Natural Economic Order, trans. Philip Pye (London: Peter Owen, 1958), 12 (Brunnenburg). 7 “United States Mint Recovers 10 Famed Double Eagles,” United States Mint, August 11, 2011, accessed Sept. 5, 2013, http://www.usmint.gov/ pressroom/?action=press_release&ID=607 8 David Tripp, Illegal Tender: Gold, Greed, and the Mystery of the Lost 1933 Double Eagle (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2007), xi–xvii. 9 Richard A. Goldthwaite, The Economy of Renaissance Florence (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), 48–49. 10 Homer, The Odyssey, trans. Robert Fagles, XII.440 ff. 11 J. Cannon, ed., Oxford Companion to British History (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2014), 2nd ed., s.v. “Smiles, Samuel.” 12 Samuel Smiles, Self-Help (London: John Murray, 1929), 13 (Brunnenburg). 13 Stanley Rosen, Plato’s Republic: A Study (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), 61.

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14 Stephen V. Tracy, Pericles: A Sourcebook and Reader (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2009), 15. 15 SL, 109. 16 Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, trans. Michael Henry Heim (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981), 237. 17 W. Rhys Roberts, ed., Longinus on the Sublime: The Greek Text Edited After the Paris Manuscript (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 1, 238. 18 Matthew Bunson, A Dictionary of the Roman Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 74, 116–17. 19 Michael Grant, The Antonines: The Roman Empire in Transition (New York: Routledge, 1996), 2. 20 Quoted in Jonathan Bardill, Constantine, Divine Emperor of the Christian Golden Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 4. 21 James Allan Stewart Evans, The Emperor Justinian and the Byzantine Empire (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2005), xiii. 22 Franklin Hugh Adler, Italian Industrialists from Liberalism to Fascism: The Political Development of the Industrial Bourgeoisie, 1906–34 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 349. 23 Peter Neville, Mussolini (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), 80–81. 24 See Marcel Van Ackeren, ed., A Companion to Marcus Aurelius (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012). 25 Mervyn K. Lewis, “Comparing Islamic and Christian Attitudes to Usury,” in Handbook of Islamic Banking, ed. Kabir Hassan and Mervyn K. Lewis (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2007), 65. See also Rabaté, Language, 189. 26 John Adams, The Works of John Adams, vol. 6, ed. Charles Francis Adams, 10 vols. (Boston: Charles C. Little and James Brown, 1851), 530. 27 Charles Austin Beard, Economic Origins of Jeffersonian Democracy (New York: Macmillan, 1935), 300 (HRHRC). 28 David Ten Eyck, Ezra Pound’s Adams Cantos (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 7. 29 OED, s.v. “Pax Romana.” 4. TOTALITARIAN 1 Liebregts, Neoplatonism, 195. See also David J. Yount, Plotinus the Platonist: A Comparative Account of Plato and Plotinus’ Metaphysics (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 69 ff. 2 Redman, Fascism, 116–18; cf. Surette, Purgatory, 97. See also Howard Rachlin, The Escape of the Mind (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 15–25.

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3 Montgomery Butchart, ed., To-Morrow’s Money: By Seven of Today’s Leading Monetary Heretics (London: Stanley Nott, 1936), 99 (Brunnenburg). 4 Aristotle, The Politics and Economics of Aristotle, trans. Edward Walford (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1853), 324. 5 P/A, 224. 6 Werner Onken, “Ein vergessenes Kapitel der Wirtschaftsgeschichte: Schwanenkirchen, Wörgl und andere Freigeldexperimente,” Zeitschrift Für Sozialökonomie 20, no. 57/58 (May 1983): 13. 7 Pound, Ezra Pound & Japan: Letters & Essays, 248. 8 Angela Redish, Bimetallism: An Economic and Historical Analysis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 5. 9 Benjamin Guérard, Polyptique de l’abbé Irminon, ou Dénombrement des manses, serfs et revenus de l’abbaye de Saint-Germain-des-Prés sous le règne de Charlemagne (Paris: L’Imprimerie Royale, 1844), 954. 10 David Hume, Essays: Moral, Political and Literary, ed. Eugene F. Miller (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1987), 281. 11 Surette, Purgatory, 8, 38. 12 C. H. Douglas, The Monopoly of Credit (London: Chapman & Hall, 1931), 35. See also Surette, Purgatory, 29 (for a thorough overview, see 13–46). 13 GB, 122. 14 Quoted in Discovery: The Popular Journal of Knowledge 6–7 (1945–46): 7. 15 Gustave Flaubert, Lettres choisies de Gustave Flaubert, ed. René Dumesnil (Paris: Jacques et René Wittmann, 1947), 149. 16 LE, 373. 17 Daniel Garber, Leibniz: Body, Substance, Monad (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 317. 18 Arnold Henry Moore Lunn, ed., Science and the Supernatural: A Correspondence Between Arnold Lunn and J. B. S. Haldane (London: Sheed & Ward, 1935), 11. 19 Blast 1, 18–21. 20 See also Terrell, Companion, 170. 21 SL, 133. 22 Ibid., 296. 5. ZWECK or the AIM 1 Kenner, Pound Era, 153. 2 ABCR, 21–22. 3 SL, 298. 4 Ibid., 347.

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5 Andrew Thorpe, “Stanley Baldwin, First Earl Baldwin of Bewdley,” ed. Robert Eccleshall and Graham Walker, Biographical Dictionary of British Prime Ministers (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), 275, 278. 6 See also Mark Bevir, The Making of British Socialism (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2011), 191. 7 Christopher H. Sterling, ed., Encyclopedia of Journalism (Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE, 2009), 78; James D. Hart and Phillip Leininger, eds, Oxford Companion to American Literature, 6th ed. (New York: Oxford University Press), s.v. “Villard, Osward Garrison.” 8 P/C, 50. 9 Hugh Kennedy, The Great Arab Conquests: How the Spread of Islam Changed the World We Live In (Philadelphia: Da Capo Press, 2007), 6; Encyclopedia of Islamic Civilization and Religion, s.v. “Bridge, Battle of the.” 10 Liebregts, Neoplatonism, 21, 207. 11 See also D. Fairchild Ruggles, “The Alcazar of Seville and Mudejar Architecture,” Gesta 43, no. 2 (Jan. 2004): 87–98. 12 See also Robert Irwin, The Alhambra (London: Profile Books, 2005). 13 Samar Attar, Borrowed Imagination: The British Romantic Poets and their Arabic-Islamic Sources (Plymouth: Lexington Books, 2014), 16. 14 Ira Nadel, “Nothing but a Nomad, Ezra Pound in Europe (1898–1911),” in Ezra Pound and Europe, ed. Richard Taylor and Claus Melchior (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1993), 22. 15 Pound, Ezra Pound and Margaret Cravens: A Tragic Friendship, 1910– 1912, ed. Omar Pound and Robert Spoo (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1988), 100. 16 LE, 16. 17 C. Paul, Poetry in the Museums of Modernism: Yeats, Pound, Moore, Stein (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002), 67–68. 18 Moody, Ezra Pound: Poet, A Portrait of the Man and His Work, vol. 1, The Young Genius 1885–1920 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 21. 19 Cameron McWhirter, “Introduction,” in A Selected Catalog of the Ezra Pound Collection at Hamilton College, ed. McWhirter and Randall L. Ericson (Clinton, N.Y.: Hamilton College Library, 2005), vii, xxvi. 20 Thomas M. Lennon, Reading Bayle (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), 7. 21 EB, s.v. “Étienne Gilson.” 22 SL, 304; P/N, 331. 23 Wilhelm, Tragic Years, 66. 24 American National Biography Online, s.v. “Harvey, George Brinton McClellan.” 25 J/M, 42.

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26 Cameron McWhirter, “Untermeyer, Louis,” EPE, 296. 27 Michael Elia Yonan, Empress Maria Theresa and the Politics of Habsburg Imperial Art (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011), 72, 92. 28 GB, 141. 29 EP&VA, 215. See also Enzo Di Martino, The History of the Venice Biennale: 1895–2005: Visual Arts, Architecture, Cinema, Dance, Music, Theatre (Venice: Papiro Arte, 2005). 30 OED, s.v. “hyperaesthesia.” 31 SL, 112. 32 Ibid., 336. 33 Frobenius, Erlebte Erdteile (Monumenta Africana), vol. 6 (Frankfurt: Societäts-Druckerei, 1929), 34 (Brunnenburg). 34 EB, s.v. “Dis Pater.” 35 Robert Ackerman, J.G. Frazer: His Life and Work (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 57. 36 Russell E. Murphy, Critical Companion to T. S. Eliot: A Literary Reference to His Life and Work (New York: Facts on File, 2007), 524. 37 T. S. Eliot, The Letters of T. S. Eliot, vol. 2, 1923–1925, ed. Hugh Haughton and Valerie Eliot (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011), 609. 38 See also Tryphonopoulos, Celestial, 109. 39 SL, 288. 40 Ibid., 289. 41 See Christine Brooke-Rose, A ZBC of Ezra Pound (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1971), 176. 42 Feng Lan, Ezra Pound and Confucianism: Remaking Humanism in the Face of Modernity (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005), 81–82. As Brooke-Rose observes, Pound changed Mailla’s text slightly, putting “qu’ils for qui” and ommitting “y,” in ZBC of Ezra Pound, 121. 43 Redman, Fascism, 76. 44 See Società Letteraria Rapallo, ed., Il Mare: Supplemento Letterario 1932– 1933 (Rapallo: Comune, 1999). 45 GB, 78, 132. 46 Quoted in Robin Kirkpatrick, Dante’s Paradiso and the Limitations of Modern Criticism: A Study of Style and Poetic Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 56. 47 See the letter Pound wrote to Scofield Thayer, editor of the Dial, in Walter Sutton, Pound, Thayer, Watson, and the Dial: A Story in Letters (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1995), 218. 48 Albrecht Barthel, “The Paris Studio of Constantin Brancusi: A Critique of the Modern Period Room,” Future Anterior 3, no. 2 (Winter 2006): 35. 49 Rebecca Beasley, Ezra Pound and the Visual Culture of Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 184; Michael North,

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The Final Sculpture: Public Monuments and Modern Poets (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985), 160. 50 LE, 442. 51 SL, 88. 52 J. W. Mackail, Latin Literature (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1895), 245. 53 Frank M. Chambers, An Introduction to Old Provençal Versification (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1985), 183, 294. 54 William D. Paden, “Troubadours and History,” in The World of Eleanor of Aquitaine: Literature and Society in Southern France Between the Eleventh and Thirteenth Centuries, ed. Marcus Graham Bull and Catherine Léglu (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2005), 160–63. 55 Charles Mundye, “‘Motz El Son’: Pound’s Musical Modernism and the Interpretation of Medieval Song,” Cambridge Opera Journal 20, no. 1 (Mar. 1, 2008): 65. 56 SR, 22. 57 LE, 113. 58 Kate van Orden, Music, Discipline, and Arms in Early Modern France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 25–27. 59 EP&M, 496. 60 Mark Byron, “A Definining Moment in Ezra Pound’s Cantos: Musical Scores and Literary Texts,” in Literature and Music, ed. Michael J. Meyer (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002), 159–61. 61 P/N, 163; see also Stock, Life, 334. 62 John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy with Some of their Applications to Social Philosophy, vol. 2 (London: Parker, Son, and Bourn, 1862), 4. 63 Moody, Poet, vol. 2, 109. 64 Moody, Poet, vol. 1, 33; Stock, Life, 300. 65 OED, s.v. “gombeen.” 66 Quoted in Redman, Fascism, 178. 67 Jeffrey Abt, American Egyptologist: The Life of James Henry Breasted and the Creation of His Oriental Institute (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 216; see also “The Oriental Institute,” accessed Oct. 26, 2013, http://oi.uchicago.edu/ 68 Gallup, Bibliography, 278; Massimo Bacigalupo, “Tigullio Itineraries: Ezra Pound and Friends,” Quaderni Di Palazzo Serra 15 (2008): 444. 6. VORTEX 1 2 3

Blast 1, 155–58. Ibid., 153. Ibid., 154; LE, 4.

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4 Ibid., 154. 5 Miranda B. Hickman, The Geometry of Modernism, Literary Modernism Series (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005), 6. 6 SL, 27. 7 Pound, Personae, The Shorter Poems of Ezra Pound, ed. Lea Baechler and A. Walton Litz (New York: New Directions, 1990), 26–28. 8 GB, 107. 9 John Cournos, “Gaudier-Brzeska’s Art,” The Egoist: An Individualist Review 2, no. 9 (Sept. 1, 1915): 137. 10 Gregory Curtis, The Cave Painters: Probing the Mysteries of the World’s First Artists (New York: Knopf, 2006), 15. 11 Quoted in Georges Bataille, The Cradle of Humanity: Prehistoric Art and Culture, ed. Stuart Kendall (New York: Zone Books, 2005), 197. 12 Andrew Reid, “Ancient Egypt and the Source of the Nile,” in Ancient Egypt in Africa, ed. David O’Connor and Andrew Reid (London: UCL Press, 2003), 65–66. 13 Urmila Seshagiri, Race and the Modernist Imagination (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2010), 95. See also Michael Golston, Rhythm and Race in Modernist Poetry and Science: Pound, Yeats, Williams, and Modern Sciences of Rhythm (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013). 14 GB, 143. 15 Jewish Encyclopedia, s.v. “Semites (originally Shemites),” by Emil G. Hirsch and George A. Barton, accessed Aug. 3, 2011, http://www. jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/13414-semites 16 John G. R. Forlong, Encyclopedia of Religions, vol. 2, E–M (New York: CosimoClassic, 1906), 365, 390–92. 17 John Malcolm Russell, The Writing on the Wall: Studies in the Architectural Context of Late Assyrian Palace Inscriptions (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1999), 103. 18 Julian Reade, “The Early Exploration of Assyria,” in Assyrian Reliefs from the Palace of Ashurnasirpal II: A Cultural Biography, ed. Ada Cohen and Steven E. Kangas (Lebanon, N.H.: University Press of New England, 2010), 96. 19 Paul Williamson, Gothic Sculpture, 1140–1300 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), 62–63. 20 Gay Robins, The Art of Ancient Egypt (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 101. 21 SL, 303. 22 EP&VA, 223. 23 Blast 1, 154. 24 Charles Higham, Encyclopedia of Ancient Asian Civilizations (New York: Facts on File, 2004), 143; Jackson Spielvogel, Western Civilization (Stamford, CT: Cengage Learning, 2014), 6.

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25 Craig Clunas, Art in China (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 18–29. 26 Fenollosa, Epochs of Chinese and Japanese Art: An Outline History of East Asiatic Design (San Diego, CA: Stone Bridge Press, 2007), 18. 27 Ladislav Kesner, “The Taotie Reconsidered: Meanings and Functions of the Shang Theriomorphic Imagery,” Artibus Asiae 51, no. 1/2 (Jan. 1991): 49. 28 Patricia Buckley Ebrey, The Cambridge Illustrated History of China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 84, 135. 29 Morris Rossabi, A History of China (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), 251. 30 Hugh Honour and John Fleming, A World History of Art (London: Laurence King Publishing, 2005), 510 ff. 31 Blast 2, 78. 32 Jacob Epstein, Epstein, an Autobiography (New York: Arno Press, 1975), 56. 33 Quoted in Charles Harrison, English Art and Modernism, 1900–1939 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), 99. 34 Evelyn Silber, The Sculpture of Epstein: With a Complete Catalogue (Oxford: Phaidon, 1986), 23–26. 35 Blast 2, 34. 36 GB, 136. 37 Chris Bishop, ed., The Encyclopedia of Weapons of World War II (New York: Metrobooks, 2002), 216. 38 SL, 259. 39 Christopher Stray, The Living Word (London: Bristol Classical Press, 1992), 60 ff. 40 SL, 268. 41 Ibid., 264. 42 Arthur Symons, Spiritual Adventures (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1905), 54. Pound’s fear of there being “no second edition” of the book was misplaced. There were two reprints: Martin Secker’s in 1924 and Constable’s in 1928, both published in London. 43 Peter France, New Oxford Companion to Literature in French (Oxford: Oxford University Press), s.v. “Louis Lambert.” 44 Daniel Albright, Untwisting the Serpent: Modernism in Music, Literature, and Other Arts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 144; John Haines, Eight Centuries of Troubadours and Trouveres: The Changing Identity of Medieval Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 207. 45 Charles Timbrell, liner notes to Bach: Piano Transcriptions, vol. 6, Walter Rummel, Jonathan Plowright, Hyperion Records, CD, 2006. 46 LE, 437 ff.

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47 See Kenner, Pound Era, 85. 48 ATH, 41–42. 49 Albright, Untwisting, 228. 50 Stock, Life, 288; Susan C. Cook, “George Antheil’s Transatlantic: An American in the Weimar Republic,” Journal of Musicology 9, no. 4 (1991): 498–520. 7. GREAT BASS: PART ONE 1 ATH, 24. 2 Pound, Machine Art and Other Writings: The Lost Thought of the Italian Years, ed. Maria Luisa Ardizzone (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1996), 74. 3 EP&M, 476. 4 ATH, 10. 5 Albright, Untwisting, 163. See also M. Fisher, “Great Bass: Undertones of Continuous Influence,” Performance Research: A Journal of Performing Arts 8, no. 1 (Mar. 2003): 23–40; The Transparency of Ezra Pound’s Great Bass (Emeryville, CA: Second Evening Art Publishing, 2013); Stephen J. Adams, “Musical Neofism: Pound’s Theory of Harmony in Context,” Mosaic 13 (1980): 49–69. 6 In the technical study he began working on as early as 1916, Cowell points out that overtones are related to each other, and to the fundamental tone, by mathematical ratios, even if their theoretical range is beyond the ability of the human ear to follow. In the hands of capable musicians, however, modern instruments can produce higher overtones that have the power to expand our notions of harmonic combinations and allow us to react musically to new modes of dissonance arising naturally out of overtone complexes. Consequently, he proposes, overtones “should be made the basis of musical theory to a far greater extent than they have been, and that in particular the new types of chords found in contemporary music might be studied in relation to higher overtone combinations,” in Henry Cowell, New Musical Resources (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 4–5, 154. 7 Benedict de Spinoza, Improvement of the Understanding, Ethics and Correspondence, trans. R. H. M. Elwes (New York: Cosimo, 2006), 271. 8 EP&VA, 165. 9 Emanuel Swedenborg, True Christianity, vol. 2 (West Chester, PA: Swedenborg Foundation, 2011), 290. 10 Emanuel Swedenborg, Heaven and Hell, trans. George F. Dole (West Chester, PA: Swedenborg Foundation, 2010), 94. For a discussion of Swedenborg’s influence on Pound, see Tryphonopoulos’s “Ezra Pound and Emanuel Swedenborg” and Andrzej Sosnowski’s “Pound’s Imagism

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and Emanuel Swedenborg,” in Paideuma 20, no. 3 (Winter 1991): 7–15, 31–38. 11 Surette, The Birth of Modernism: Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats, and the Occult (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1994), 186–87. 12 Swedenborg, Heaven, 20. 13 Pound, “Appunti I. Lettera Al Traduttore,” L’indice 8 (October 1930): 1. 14 Timothy C. Campbell, Wireless Writing in the Age of Marconi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 100. 15 Patrick Riley, “Introduction,” in Bossuet: Politics Drawn from the Very Words of Holy Scripture, by Jacques Bénigne Bossuet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), xv. 16 Nathan Montover, Luther’s Revolution: The Political Dimensions of Martin Luther’s Universal Priesthood (Cambridge: James Clarke and Co., 2012), 42, 46. 17 John Cocking, Imagination: A Study in the History of Ideas (New York: Routledge, 2005), 144. 18 Matthew Bryan Gillis, Heresy and Dissent in the Carolingian Empire: The Case of Gottschalk of Orbais (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 122, 133. 19 M. Byron, Ezra Pound’s Eriugena (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 18–27, 46 n. 20 Liebregts, Neoplatonism, 221. 21 NE, 74–75. 22 OED, s.v. “agony column.” 23 ABCR, 21. 8. ICI JE TESTE 1 LE, 11. 2 Harry Hearder, Cavour (New York: Routledge, 1994), 33, 43–46, 168, 173. 3 Frank J. Coppa, Cardinal Giacomo Antonelli and Papal Politics in European Affairs (Albany: SUNY Press, 1990), 6–7. 4 John F. Pollard, The Vatican and Italian Fascism, 1929–32: A Study in Conflict (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 46–47. 5 Garth Stevenson, Parallel Paths: The Development of Nationalism in Ireland and Quebec (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2006), 245. See also Pound’s essay “Immediate Need of Confucius” (1937) (SP, 78). 6 OED, s.v. “zenana.” 7 Tim Cooper, John Owen, Richard Baxter and the Formation of Nonconformity (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), 46 ff.

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8 SP, 65. 9 James McEvoy, Robert Grosseteste (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 24, 120. 10 Clare C. Riedl, “Introduction,” in On Light (De Luce), by Robert Grosseteste (Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 1942), 5. 11 M. Byron, Eriugena, 220. 12 See Irven Resnick, “Albert the Great: Biographical Introduction,” in A Companion to Albert the Great: Theology, Philosophy, and the Sciences, ed. Resnick (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 1–11. 13 Liebregts, Neoplatonism, 208. 14 G. K. Chesterton, St. Thomas Aquinas (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1933), 13. 15 Cf. Liebregts, who locates Pound’s rejection of the Scholastic tradition and its Christian Aristotelianism in the fact that “its preclusion of intuitive knowledge divorces metaphysics and physics by turning its attention from vision to observation, from the turning inward to the turning outward, to the sensible world” (Neoplatonism, 208). 16 SL, 323. 17 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, vol. 46, ed. Jordan Aumann (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 21, 23. Aquinas adds that the “contemplative life consists in any contemplation of truth” (27). 18 Terrell, Companion, 470–71. 19 M. E. Warlick, Max Ernst and Alchemy: A Magician in Search of Myth (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2013), 77–78, 171, 253. 20 Marleen Rozemond, “Descartes’ Dualism,” in A Companion to Descartes, ed. Janet Broughton and John Peter Carriero (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2008), 387. See also Anthony Kenny, Aquinas on Being (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 30; Richard Watson, Cogito, Ergo Sum: The Life of René Descartes (Boston: David R. Godine, 2007), 3–8. 9. TRADITION 1 2 3 4 5

W. H. D. Rouse, “Introduction,” in National Histories, Natural States: Nationalism and the Politics of Place in Greece, by Argyris Eftaliotis, trans. Rouse (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1942), 9. Rouse, “Introduction,” in The Odyssey: The Story of Odysseus, by Homer, trans. Rouse (New York: New American Library, 1937), vii. Richard P. Martin, “The Seven Sages as Performers of Wisdom,” in Cultural Poetics in Archaic Greece: Cult, Performance, Politics, ed. Carol Dougherty and Leslie Kurke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 109. Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient Greece and Rome, s.v. “Seven Sages.” Pound, “Homage to Propertius,” The New Age 26, no. 5 (1919): 82; Yeats, The Trembling of the Veil (London: T. Werner Laurie, 1922), 245.

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Silvio A. Bedini, The Trail of Time (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 37. 7 James Longenbach, Stone Cottage (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 44. 8 Yeats, in The Classic Noh Theatre of Japan, by Ezra Pound and Ernest Fenollosa (New York: New Directions Publishing, 1959), 162. 9 Pound, Classic Noh, 4. 10 For a full account of Younghusband’s ill-fated expedition, which left hundreds of Tibetans dead in clashes, see Peter Fleming, Bayonets to Lhasa: The British Invasion of Tibet (London: R. Hart-Davis, 1961). 11 Nancy J. Parezo and Don D. Fowler, Anthropology Goes to the Fair: The 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007), 1. 12 Katharine A. Carl, With the Empress Dowager of China (New York: The Century Co., 1905), 10. 13 Oxford Encyclopedia of Women in World History, 4 vols. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), s.v. “Cixi, Empress Dowager.” 14 Carl, Empress, 135–36. 15 Benito Ortolani, The Japanese Theatre: From Shamanistic Ritual to Contemporary Pluralism (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995), 132, 300–22. 16 The book was reprinted in 1917, without Yeats’s introduction, as “Noh” or Accomplishment, and in 1959, with the introduction and several other plays, as The Classic Noh Theatre of Japan. 17 Eric C. Rath, The Ethos of Noh: Actors and their Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2004), 1. 18 Pound, Classic Noh, 4. 19 Ibid., 45. 20 McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of World Drama, vol. 1, 2nd ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1984), s.v. “Zeami Motokiyo (1363–1443).” 21 Pound, Classic Noh, 106. 22 Ann Galbally, Charles Conder: The Last Bohemian (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2004), 31, 92. 23 Jamie H. Cockfield, White Crow: The Life and Times of the Grand Duke Nicholas Mikhailovich Romanov: 1859–1919 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2002), 2–3. 24 For a critical examination of this paragraph, see Amie Elizabeth Parry, Interventions into Modernist Cultures: Poetry from Beyond the Empty Screen (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2007), 35–43. 25 OED, s.v. “waistcoat.” 26 Andrea Broomfield, Food and Cooking in Victorian England: A History (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2007), 107. 27 Ibid., 102.

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28 Moody, Poet, vol. 2, 118–19; Alec Marsh, Ezra Pound (London: Reaktion Books, 2011), 103–104; Gordon Martel, The Month that Changed the World: July 1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 251–53. 29 Paul Metzner, Crescendo of the Virtuoso: Spectacle, Skill, and SelfPromotion in Paris During the Age of Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 17. 30 Rabaté, Language, 237. 31 Legge (trans.), Confucian, 422. Pound’s own translation of the Doctrine of the Mean, titled The Unwobbling Pivot (1947), stops just short of translating this passage. He acknowledges that it is incomplete and signals his (unfulfilled) intention to end with Book 26, “temporarily at least” (Confucius, 188). 32 Pound (trans.), Confucius, 217. 33 Surette, Purgatory, 51. See also Tryphonopoulos, Celestial, 74–78; Liebregts, Neoplatonism, 285. 34 Anne Conover, Olga Rudge & Ezra Pound: “What Thou Lovest Well . . .” (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), 7, 132. 35 Marie Lathers, Bodies of Art: French Literary Realism and the Artist’s Model (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001), 142. 36 Henry James, “The Journal of the Brothers De Goncourt,” Fortnightly Review 44, no. 262 (October 1888): 501. 37 SL, 89. See also Stock, Life, 190. 38 Willard Bohn, The Rise of Surrealism: Cubism, Dada, and the Pursuit of the Marvelous (Albany: SUNY Press, 2002), 51. 39 SP, 458. 40 Cf. Stock, Life, 360. 10. GUIDE OED, s.v. “opusculum.” Marcia Brennan, Painting Gender, Constructing Theory: The Alfred Stieglitz Circle and American Formalist Aesthetics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 60. 3 Bohn, Surrealism, 65. 4 David Hopkins, “Questioning Dada’s Potency: Picabia’s ‘La Sainte Vierge’ and the Dialogue with Duchamp,” Art History 15, no. 3 (Sept. 1992): 321. 5 Mary E. Davis, Erik Satie (London: Reaktion Books, 2007), 136. 6 OED, s.v. “reductio ad absurdum.” 7 Hopkins, Dada and Surrealism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 4–6. 8 Louise Tythacott, Surrealism and the Exotic (New York: Routledge, 2003), 2. 9 SL, 292. 1 2

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10 LE, 371. See also Richard Sieburth, Instigations: Ezra Pound and Remy de Gourmont (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), 66–67, 109. 11 SL, 64. 12 David J. Fisher, Romain Rolland and the Politics of Intellectual Engagement (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988), 5–6. 13 SL, 133. 14 Alan Sheridan, André Gide: A Life in the Present (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), xi. 15 SL, 289. 16 Charles S. Doty, From Cultural Rebellion to Counterrevolution: The Politics of Maurice Barrès (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1976), 4. 17 Venita Datta, Birth of a National Icon: The Literary Avant-Garde and the Origins of the Intellectual in France (Albany: SUNY Press, 1999), 27, 235. 18 Laurence M. Porter, ed., A Gustave Flaubert Encyclopedia (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2001), 164. 19 Jennifer Waelti-Walters, Damned Women: Lesbians in French Novel (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2000), 65. 20 William C. Carter, Marcel Proust: A Life (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), 269. 21 Anthony Slide, The Encyclopedia of Vaudeville (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2012), 66. 22 Blast 1, 28. 23 Russ McDonald, Look to the Lady: Sarah Siddons, Ellen Terry, and Judi Dench on the Shakespearean Stage (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005), 7; Moody, Poet, vol. 1, 83; Stock, Life, 61. 24 LE, 9. 25 Oxford Companion to Western Art, s.v. “Simone Martini.” 11. ITALY 1 2 3 4

Tony Tremblay, “Frobenius, Leo (1873–1938),” EPE, 126. See Stock, Life, 251–52. Franco Petroni, Le parole di traverso: ideologia e linguaggio nella narrativa d’avanguardia del primo Novecento (Milan: Jaca Book, 1998), 94. Bacigalupo, “Tigullio Itineraries,” 387; Nadel, Ezra Pound: A Literary Life (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 201. 12. AESCHYLUS and . . .

1 2

SL, 95. T. S. Eliot, The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (London: Methuen, 1920), 74–75.

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3 SL, 299. 4 Ibid., 171. 5 Pound, “Hellenist Series—V: Aeschylus,” The Egoist 6, no. 1 (Feb. 1919): 8. 6 Surette, Eleusis, 32–33. 7 Diana Collecott, H.D. and Sapphic Modernism, 1910–1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 138. 8 Helen Carr, The Verse Revolutionaries: Ezra Pound, H.D. and The Imagists (London: Jonathan Cape, 2009), 7, 81–84. 9 Quoted in Carol Camper, “Introduction,” in H.D. [Hilda Doolittle], Hippolytus Temporizes and Ion: Adaptations of Two Plays by Euripides (New York: New Directions, 2003), xviii. 10 Gaynor Johnson, Lord Robert Cecil: Politician and Internationalist (London and New York: Routledge, 2013), 143–44. 11 James S. Williams, Jean Cocteau (London: Reaktion Books, 2008), 104. 12 Pound (trans.), Women of Trachis, by Sophocles (New York: New Directions, 1985), 50. 13 Douglas Radcliff-Umstead, The Mirror of Our Anguish: A Study of Luigi Pirandello’s Narrative Writings (Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1978), 109. 14 Phyllis Hartnoll and Peter Found, eds, Concise Oxford Companion to the Theatre, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), s.v. “Deus ex Machina.” 15 George Antheil, Bad Boy of Music (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1945), 292–307. 16 Antheil, “‘I Am Not a Businessman’ (1945),” in The Hollywood Film Music Reader, ed. Mervyn Cooke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 267. 17 ATH, 49; cf. S. Adams, “Musical Neofism,” 49–69. 18 EP&M, 320; Virgil Thomson and Gertrude Stein, Four Saints in Three Acts, ed. H. Wiley Hitchcock and Charles Fussell (Middleton, WI: A-R Editions, 2008), xiii, xxxii. 19 Jean Cocteau, A Call to Order, trans. Rollo H. Myers (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1974), 19. 20 Ian Chilvers, ed., Oxford Dictionary of Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 3rd ed., s.v. “Mantegna, Andrea.” 13. MONUMENTAL 1 P/J, 1. 2 LE, 412. 3 P/J, 246–47. 4 Ibid., 251. 5 Quoted in Gabrielle McIntire, Modernism, Memory, and Desire: T. S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 24.

416 6 7 8 9 10 11

12 13

A Companion to Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur Jeffrey Segall, Joyce in America: Cultural Politics and the Trials of Ulysses (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993), 3. SL, 167. LE, 443. Eugen Weber, Action française: Royalism and Reaction in Twentieth Century France (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1962), 68. René de La Tour Du Pin, Vers un ordre social chrétien: jalons de route, 1882–1907 (Paris: La Librarie Français, 1987), 66. Quoted in Antoine Murat, La Tour du Pin en son temps (Versailles: Via romana, 2008), 90 (my translation). The original passage reads, “Monstre protéiforme, l’usure prend des formes différentes suivant le terrain où elle exerce ses ravages.” SP, 272. See also Moody, Poet, vol. 1, 249. 14. THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY IS . . . ?

1 OED, s.v. “obiter dictum.” 2 Friedel Weinert, Copernicus, Darwin and Freud: Revolutions in the History and Philosophy of Science (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 7. 3 Ben-Ami Scharfstein, A Comparative History of World Philosophy: From the Upanishads to Kant (Albany: SUNY Press, 1998), 129. 4 Ruth Perry, “War and the Media in Border Minstrelsy: The Ballad of Chevy Chase,” in Ballads and Broadsides in Britain, 1500–1800, ed. Patricia Fumerton, Anita Guerrini, and Kris McAbee (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), 251. 5 Alexander Pope, The Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. John Butt (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1963), 516. 6 Homer, Odyssey, I.3. 7 George Orwell, A Collection of Essays (Orlando, FL: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1981), 280. 8 Brian Sheldon and Geraldine Macdonald, A Textbook of Social Work (New York: Routledge, 2010), 40. 9 See Terry Smith, In Visible Touch: Modernism and Masculinity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 156. 10 Angeline S. Lillard, Montessori: The Science Behind the Genius (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 256. 11 Matt Stefon, ed., Islamic Beliefs and Practices (New York: Britannica Educational, 2009), 155–57. 12 Pound (trans.), Confucius, 195. 13 John Gery, “‘The Thought of What America’: Ezra Pound’s Strange Optimism,” Belgrade English Language and Literature Studies 2 (2010): 201.

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14 Pound (trans.), Confucius 222. 15 See also Kenner, Pound Era, 250–51. 16 Fenollosa, The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, ed. Ezra Pound (London: Stanley Nott, 1936), 12. 15. VALUES 1 EP&VA, 246. 2 SP, 458. 3 GB, 79. 4 SP, 435. 5 Ibid., 458. 6 Ibid., 261. 7 See C. Paul, Fascist Directive, 91–99. 8 For a detailed description of the storied room where the first terrestrial globe was installed and to gain insight into what it might have been like for Pound to meet with Mussolini here, see the account by German biographer Emil Ludwig of his meetings with the Duce less than a year before Pound’s audience, in Talks with Mussolini, trans. Eden Paul and Cedar Paul (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1933), 11–13. 9 Redman, Fascism, 95. See also Carpenter, Serious Character, 490–91; Matthew Feldman, Ezra Pound’s Fascist Propaganda, 1935–45 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 15 ff. 10 Marsh, Money, 108. 11 Frances S. Saunders, The Woman Who Shot Mussolini (Faber: London, 2010), 311. 12 Quoted in Jonathan Schneer, The Balfour Declaration: The Origins of the Arab–Israeli Conflict (London: Bloomsbury, 2010), 341. 13 Quoted in Geoffrey Searle, “Arthur James Balfour, First Earl of Balfour,” in Biographical Dictionary of British Prime Ministers, ed. Robert Eccleshall and Graham Walker (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), 237. 14 SP, 239. 15 P/C, 65–66. 16 SP, 453. 17 Kenner, Pound Era, 549. 16. EUROPE OR THE SETTING 1 Steven Botterill, “Introduction,” in Dante: De Vulgari Eloquentia, ed. Botterill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), xxii. 2 Dante Alighieri, Vulgari Eloquentia, 53. 3 SP, 322–23.

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Fabio Finotti, “The Poem of Memory,” in Petrarch: A Critical Guide to the Complete Works, ed. Armando Maggi and Victoria Kirkham (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 64. 5 H. J. Chaytor, The Troubadours of Dante, Being Selections from the Works of the Provençal Poets Quoted by Dante (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1902), xxviii. 6 Dante, Divina Commedia (Purgatorio), VI.73–75. 7 Camille Chabaneau, Les Biographies des troubadours en langue provençale (Toulouse: Edouard Privat, 1885), 106. 8 LE, 97. 9 Chaytor, Troubadours, xxiv. 10 Barbara Reynolds, Dante: The Poet, the Political Thinker, the Man (London: I.B. Tauris, 2007), 12–13. See also Peter Makin, Provence and Pound (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1978), 197 ff. 11 Jay Ruud, Critical Companion to Dante: A Literary Reference to His Life and Work (New York: Facts on File, 2008), 190. 12 SR, 82. 13 Timothy E. Gregory, A History of Byzantium (Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, 2010), 138. 14 LE, 150–51. 15 Westminster Cathedral: An Illustrated Guide to the Chief Metropolitan Church with Notes Upon its History, Architecture, Liturgy, Music and Organization (London: Tablet House, 1923), 5. 16 Trudy Ring, ed., International Dictionary of Historic Places, vol. 3, Southern Europe, s.v. “Modena (Modena, Italy).” 17 Quoted in Carpenter, Serious Character, 144. 18 Raquib Zaman, “Riba and Interest in Islamic Banking: An Historical Review,” in The Foundations of Islamic Banking: Theory, Practice and Education, ed. Mohamed Ariff and Munawar Iqbal (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2011), 222–23. 19 See Andrew Petersen, Dictionary of Islamic Architecture (New York: Routledge, 1996), 56. 20 Shahid Suhrawardy, The Art of the Mussulmans in Spain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 104. 21 Judith Davis, “William IX of Aquitaine (1071–1126),” in The Rise of the Medieval World, 500–1300: A Biographical Dictionary, ed. Jana K. Schulman (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2002), 438. 22 Pound, A Walking Tour in Southern France: Ezra Pound Among the Troubadours, ed. Richard Sieburth (New York: New Directions, 1992), 3, 7. 23 See also Kenner, Pound Era, 331. 24 OED, s.v. “murrain,” “maramasmus.” 25 SP, 115. 26 Pound, Personae, 249. 4

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27 See also Ernst van de Wetering, Rembrandt: The Painter at Work (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1997), 23. 28 Gilles Néret, Manet (Cologne: Taschen, 2003), 15. 29 John Elderfield, Manet and the Execution of Maximilian (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2006), 99. 30 Gary Tinterow, Manet/Velázquez: The French Taste for Spanish Painting (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2003), 452. 31 Spencer Tucker, Encyclopedia of the Spanish-American and PhilippineAmerican Wars, vol. 1 (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2009), s.v. “British Song That Gave Rise to the Concept of ‘Jingoism,’ 1878.” 32 Arthur L. Friedberg and Ira S. Friedberg, Gold Coins of the World: From Ancient Times to the Present: An Illustrated Standard Catalog with Valuations (Clifton, N.J.: Coin and Currency Institute, 2009), 245. 33 Ross A. Kennedy, A Companion to Woodrow Wilson (Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, 2013), 162. 34 Michael Collins, The Fisherman’s Net: The Influence of the Popes on History (Mahwah, N.J.: Hidden Spring, 2005), 38. 35 Encyclopedia of the Middle Ages, s.v. “Exarchate.” 36 Keiko Itoh, The Japanese Community in Pre-War Britain: From Integration to Disintegration (New York: Routledge, 2001), 71. 37 Paul Beekman Taylor, Gurdjieff and Orage: Brothers in Elysium (York Beach, ME: Weiser Books, 2001), vii, 20. 38 Stephan Beissel, Fra Angelico (New York: Parkstone International, 2007), 22–23. 39 Fabrizio Nevola, Siena: Constructing the Renaissance City (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 106–107. 40 Deborah Deliyannis, Ravenna in Late Antiquity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 236. 41 Nicholas Turner, Lee Hendrix, and Carol Plazzotta, European Drawings 3: Catalogue of the Collections (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 1997), 23. 42 Alberto Veca, La natura morta (Florence: Giunti Editore, 1990), 44–45. 43 Dana Facaros and Michael Pauls, Bologna and Emilia Romagna (London: New Holland Publishers, 2007), 246. 44 Richard Lansing, ed., The Dante Encyclopedia (New York: Routledge, 2010), 362. 45 Colin Grant, ed., Henry Moore at Dulwich Picture Gallery (London: Scala, 2004), 67. 46 Donald Malcolm Reid, Whose Pharaohs?: Archaeology, Museums, and Egyptian National Identity from Napoleon to World War I (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002), 46. 47 Colta Ives and Susan Alyson Stein, Goya in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1995), 34.

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48 Tamara Levitz, Modernist Mysteries: Persephone (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 310, 316. 49 EP&M, 320. 50 Quoted in Ashton Jonson, A Handbook to Chopin’s Works (Bremen: Dogma, 2013), xxvi–vii. 17. SOPHISTS OED, s.v. “suretyship.” John T. Shawcross, John Milton: The Self and the World (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1993), 170–71. 3 See J. H. Shennan, The Bourbons: The History of a Dynasty (London: Hambledon Continuum, 2007). 4 See John Miller, The Stuarts (London: Hambledon Continuum, 2004). 5 Michael Wyatt, “Technologies,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Italian Renaissance, ed. Wyatt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 111. 6 Ian Philpott, The Birth of the Royal Air Force (Barnsley: Pen and Sword, 2013), 206. 7 Pelatiah Webster, Political Essays on the Nature and Operation of Money, Public Finances, and Other Subjects (Philadelphia: Joseph Crukshank, 1791), 29. 8 Carol M. Richardson, Reclaiming Rome: Cardinals in the Fifteenth Century (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 146 ff. 9 “Gone and (Largely) Forgotten,” British Journalism Review 17, no. 2 (June 1, 2006): 52. 10 Nils Gilje and Gunnar Skirbekk, A History of Western Thought: From Ancient Greece to the Twentieth Century (New York: Routledge, 2001), 11. 11 LE, 190. 12 Y. Masih, Critical History of Western Philosophy: Greek, Medieval and Modern (New Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1999), 12–13. See also Liebregts, Neoplatonism, 56. 13 Giannis Stamatellos, Introduction to Presocratics: A Thematic Approach to Early Greek Philosophy with Key Readings (Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, 2012), 7. 14 Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, The Pre-Platonic Philosophers, trans. Greg Whitlock (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001), 86. 15 See also Jenny Bryan, Likeness and Likelihood in the Presocratics and Plato (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 37. 16 Stamatellos, Presocratics, 25–29. 17 Simplicius, On Aristotle Physics 2, trans. Barrie Fleet (London: Bloomsbury, 1997), 161. 18 HRHRC. 1 2

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19 Aristotle, The Metaphysics, Books X–XIV, trans. Hugh Tredennick, vol. 2 (London: William Heinemann, 1935), 12–13. 20 Dante, Divina Commedia (Inferno), IV.136. 21 Joseph Farrell, Latin Language and Latin Culture: From Ancient to Modern Times (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 48–49. 22 See also Heraclitus, Art and Thought, 136 ff. 23 For examples of Pindaric odes, see Pindar, Odes for Victorious Athletes, trans. Anne Burnett (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010). 24 Lee L. Brice, “Chaeronea, Battle of,” in Greek Warfare: From the Battle of Marathon to the Conquests of Alexander the Great, ed. Lee L. Brice (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2012), 31–33; Dictionary of the Ancient Greek World, s.v. “Achaea.” 25 Nico De Federicis, “Hegel in Italy (1922–1931): The Dispute on the Ethical State,” in Hegel’s Thought in Europe: Currents, Crosscurrents and Undercurrents, ed. Lisa Herzog (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 234. 26 Michael Bell, Literature, Modernism and Myth: Belief and Responsibility in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 131. 27 Achiles Fang, “Introduction,” Shih-Ching: The Classic Anthology Defined by Confucius, by Ezra Pound (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1954), ix. 28 Dimitra Karamanides, Pythagoras: Pioneering Mathematician and Musical Theorist of Ancient Greece (New York: Rosen, 2006), 45–46. 29 Michael Nylan, The Five “Confucian” Classics (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), 74–77. 30 William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, V.i.90–95. 31 John Sellars, Stoicism (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2006), 7. 32 Marcia I. Colish, The Stoic Tradition from Antiquity to the Early Middle Ages, vol. 1, Stoicism in Classical Latin Literature (Leiden: Brill, 1985), 81, 133–35. 33 P. A. Brunt, Studies in Stoicism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 277. 34 Van Ackeren, ed., Companion to Marcus Aurelius, 1. 35 Colish, Stoic, 7. 36 Ibid., 54. 37 Ibid., 55–56. 38 Dante, Vulgari Eloquentia, 75. 39 David Skrbina, The Metaphysics of Technology (New York: Routledge, 2014), 26, 42. See also Tryphonopoulos, Celestial, 15. 40 Richard E. Rubenstein, Aristotle’s Children: How Christians, Muslims, and Jews Rediscovered Ancient Wisdom and Illuminated the Dark Ages (Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 2003), 54–56.

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41 Tryphonopoulos, Celestial, 15. 42 Brunt, Stoicism, 484. 43 Immanuel Kant, Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals: On a Supposed Right to Lie because of Philanthropic Concerns, trans. James W. Ellington (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1993), 23; Ronald M. Green, Kierkegaard and Kant: The Hidden Debt (Albany: SUNY Press, 1992), 141. 44 John Calvin, Concerning the Eternal Predestination of God, trans. J. K. S. Reid (Cambridge: James Clarke, 1961), 121. 45 Edwin H. Palmer, Encyclopedia of Christianity (Wilmington, DE: National Foundation for Christian Education, 1964), vol. 4, s.v. “Threefold Division.” 46 Eduard Zeller, A History of Eclecticism in Greek Philosophy, trans. S. F. Alleyne (London: Longmans, Green, and Company, 1883), 7–8. 47 Scott B. Montgomery, St. Ursula and the Eleven Thousand Virgins of Cologne: Relics, Reliquaries and the Visual Culture of Group Sanctity in Late Medieval Europe (New York: Peter Lang, 2009), 9 ff. 48 Stephen Dando-Collins, Caesar’s Legion: The Epic Saga of Julius Caesar’s Elite Tenth Legion and the Armies of Rome (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2002), 285. 18. KULCHUR: PART ONE 1 Pound, Confucian Anthology, 177. 2 George Gordon Byron, Letters and Journals of Lord Byron: With Notices of His Life, ed. Thomas Moore, vol. 1 (New York: J. & J. Harper, 1830), 85. 3 Theresa Enos, ed., Encyclopedia of Rhetoric and Composition (Hoboken, N.J.: Taylor and Francis), s.v. “Ogden, Charles Kay (1889–1957).” 4 Plato, The Republic of Plato, ed. Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1991), 283. 5 Blast 2, 21. 6 “History of the Observer,” Guardian, June 6, 2002, sec. GNM archive, accessed Aug. 5, 2013, http://www.theguardian.com/gnm-archive/2002/ jun/06/2 7 Dictionary of the Ancient Greek World, s.v. “Cadmus.” 8 N. Stock, Reading the Cantos: The Study of Meaning in Ezra Pound (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1967), 111. 9 SL, 274. 10 Ernest Hemingway, “Homage to Ezra,” This Quarter 1, no. 1 (Spring 1925): 221–25. 11 Laurence Binyon, The Flight of the Dragon: An Essay on the Theory and Practice of Art in China and Japan, Based on Original Sources (London:

Notes

12 13

14 15 16 17 18 19

20

21 22

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J. Murray, 1911), 38. See also John Trevor Hatcher, Laurence Binyon: Poet, Scholar of East and West (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995). Louis E. Catron, The Elements of Playwriting (Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press, 2002), 30. G. A. Russell, “The Seventeenth Century: The Age of ‘Arabick,’” in The “Arabick” Interest of the Natural Philosophers in Seventeenth-Century England (Leiden: Brill, 1994), 13; P. M. Holt, “Background to Arabic Studies in Seventeenth-Century England,” in “Arabick” Interest, 27. Guillaume Pauthier, Chine, ou description historique, géographique et littéraire de ce vaste empire, d’après des documents chinois (Paris: Firmin Didot Frères, 1837), 34. Dorothy Perkins, ed., Encyclopedia of China: History and Culture (New York: Facts on File), s.v. “Yao, Emperor.” George N. Peek and Samuel Crowther, Why Quit Our Own (New York: D. Van Nostrand, 1936), 8. HRHRC; Gallup, Bibliography, 62. SP, 280, 441. Pound, “America, Roosevelt and the Causes of the Present War,” trans. John Drummond, Money Pamphlets by £ (No. VI) (London: Peter Russell, 1951), 18. As Redman points out, “Despite constant talk of usurers and usocracy, there is very little overt anti-Semitism in this work,” Fascism, 246. Alonzo L. Hamby, For the Survival of Democracy: Franklin Roosevelt and the World Crisis of the 1930s (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004). 156–57; William H. Becker and William M. McClenahan, Jr, The Market, the State, and the Export-Import Bank of the United States, 1934–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 302. Algernon Swinburne, The Collected Poetical Works of Algernon Charles Swinburne, vol. 3 (London: William Heinemann, 1917), 129. John F. Fox, Jr., “Progressivism in an Age of Normalcy: Women’s Rights, Civil Service, Veterans’ Benefits, and Child Welfare,” in A Companion to Warren G. Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover, ed. Katherine A. S. Sibley (Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, 2014), 40–41. 19. KULCHUR: PART TWO

Maurice Maeterlinck, The Life of the Bee, trans. Alfred Sutro (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1901), 5–6. 2 Remy de Gourmont, The Natural Philosophy of Love, trans. Ezra Pound (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1922), 157–61. 3 Henry James, “Robert Louis Stevenson,” Century Illustrated Magazine (1881–1906) (Apr. 1888), 869. 1

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Pedro Ponce, “Robert Louis Stevenson’s America,” Humanities 21, no. 6 (Nov. 1, 2000): 18. 5 “Conference of Friends of Indians,” Kingston Daily Freeman (Oct. 4, 1907). 6 Judith Plotz, “Kipling’s Very Special Relationship: Kipling in America, America in Kipling,” in The Cambridge Companion to Rudyard Kipling, ed. Howard J. Booth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 37, 41. 7 Philip Ball, Bright Earth: Art and the Invention of Color (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 110. 8 Thomas Michel, “Helmut Petri, 1907–1986,” Paideuma [Frobenius Institute] 34 (Jan. 1, 1988): 3. 9 Alan Young, Dada and After: Extremist Modernism and English Literature (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1983), 11. 10 Jeffrey Meyers, The Enemy: A Biography of Wyndham Lewis (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980), 187 ff. 11 P/L, 246. 12 See also Hester Lees-Jeffries, Shakespeare and Memory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 136. 13 LE, 371. 14 Elisabeth Le Guin, Boccherini’s Body: An Essay in Carnal Musicology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 215. 15 Stock, Life, 316–17. 16 László Somfai, Béla Bartók: Composition, Concepts, and Autograph Sources (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996), 20; EP&M, 486. 17 Encyclopedia of Humor Studies, s.v. “Boccaccio, Giovanni.” 18 Pound (trans.), Confucius, 205. 19 David L. Hall and Roger T. Ames, Thinking Through Confucius (Albany: SUNY Press, 1987), 279. 20 Dörte Schmidt, “‘I Try to Write Music That Will Appeal to an Intelligent Listener’s Ear’: On Elliott Carter’s String Quartets,” in Elliott Carter Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 173. 21 See also Allison Sherman, “‘Soli Deo Honor et Gloria’? Cittadino Lay Procurator Patronage and the Art of Identity Formation in Renaissance Venice,” in Architecture, Art and Identity in Venice and its Territories, 1450–1750: Essays in Honour of Deborah Howard, ed. Nebahat Avcioglu and Emma Jones (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), 17 ff. 22 Pound, Review of Adrian Stokes’s The Quattro Cento, Symposium 3, no. 4 (Oct. 1932): 521. 23 Albert Lavignac, La musique et les musiciens (Paris: Delagrave, 1904), 503. 4

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20. MARCH 12th 1 2 3 4 5

OED, s.v. “ideoplasty.” See John Solt, Shredding the Tapestry of Meaning: The Poetry and Poetics of Kitasono Katue (1902–1978) (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). SP, 285. LE, 398. Edgar Vincent, Nelson: Love and Fame (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 489, 579–83. 21. TEXTBOOKS

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

9 10

11

Henry Austin Wilson, ed., Liber Sacramentorum Romanae Ecclesiae (The Gelasian Sacramentary) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1894), 258–60. M. Byron, Eriugena, 5. See Alessandro Vettori, Poets of Divine Love: Franciscan Mystical Poetry of the Thirteenth Century (Bronx, N.Y.: Fordham University Press, 2004). Carmelo Ciccia, Saggi su Dante e altri scrittori (Cosenza: Pellegrini Editore, 2007), 164–65. Treccani.it, s.v. “Manzóni, Alessandro.” Ibid., “Pèllico, Silvio.” Silvio Pellico, Opere di Silvio Pellico da Saluzzo (Leipzig: Ernest Fleischer, 1834), 31. Stefano Recchia and Nadia Urbinati, “Introduction: Giuseppe Mazzini’s International Political Thought,” in A Cosmopolitanism of Nations: Giuseppe Mazzini’s Writings on Democracy, Nation Building, and International Relations, trans. Stefano Recchia (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2009), 1–2. Alexander J. De Grand, Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany: The “Fascist” Style of Rule (New York: Routledge, 2004), 52. Harold James and Kevin H. O’Rourke, “Italy and the First Age of Globalization, 1861–1940,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Italian Economy Since Unification, ed. Gianni Toniolo (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 58. Benito Mussolini, The Doctrine of Fascism (Florence: Vallechi, 1936), 31 (Brunnenburg).

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A Companion to Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur 22. SAVOIR FAIRE

1 OED, s.v. “savoir faire.” 2 Helene P. Foley, ed., The Homeric Hymn to Demeter: Translation, Commentary, and Interpretive Essays (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993), 65–66, 79–80. See also Surette, Eleusis, 44–45. 3 OED, s.v. “catechumen.” 4 Joséphin Péladan, Origine et esthétique de la tragédie (Paris: E. Sansot, 1905), 6. 5 Brett M. Rogers, “Classic Greek and Roman Drama,” in Western Drama Through the Ages: Four Great Eras of Western Drama, ed. Kimball King, vol. 1 (Westport, CN: Greenwood Press, 2007), 5. 6 Liebregts, Neoplatonism, 63. As Surette demonstrates, however, Péladan himself makes no such connection between the troubadours and Eleusis, in Birth of Modernism, 127–28. 7 See Péladan: “Perséphone, c’este l’âme qui a goûté à la grenade fatale et qui doit descendre dans l’Hadès pour renaître” (Origine, 10). 8 Surette, Eleusis, 15. 9 Tryphonopoulos, Celestial, 8. 10 OED, s.v. “pons asinorum.” 11 Fernand Léger, Fernand Leger, 1911–1924: The Rhythm of Modern Life, ed. Dorothy Kosinski (Munich: Prestel, 1994), 203; SP, 457. 12 Vera Castiglione, “A Futurist before Futurism: Émile Verhaeren and the Technological Epic,” in Futurism and the Technological Imagination, ed. Günter Berghaus (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009), 108. 13 ABCR, 60. 14 Cf. note GK 54 for “Bill Shepard.” 15 Scott Donaldson, Edwin Arlington Robinson: A Poet’s Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 15. 16 Emily Allen-Hornblower, From Agent to Spectator: Witnessing the Aftermath in Ancient Greek Epic and Tragedy (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016), 23. 17 Michael Pitwood, Dante and the French Romantics (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1985), 262. 18 Peter Burke, The Fortunes of the Courtier: The European Reception of Castiglione’s Cortegiano (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995), 32–36. 19 J/M, 89. 20 Homer, Odyssey, VI.151. 21 Ibid., I.75, 78–80. 22 SL, 270. 23 Homer, Odyssey, X.543–45. 24 Beinecke MSS 43, Box 105, Folder 4396; Dante, Divina Commedia (Inferno), III.18.

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25 Pound, Cathay (London: Elkin Mathews, 1915), 4. 26 David Hinton, “Introduction,” in The Selected Poems of Li Po, by Li Po, trans. Hinton (New York: New Directions, 1996), xiii–xiv. 27 SP, 394. 28 LE, 26–27. 29 Conover, What Thou Lovest Well, 130, 124–25, 127, 135–36; EP&M, 328. 30 See also Wilhelm, Tragic Years, 111; Stephen J. Adams, “Pound, Olga Rudge, and the ‘Risveglio Vivaldiano,’” Paideuma 4, no. 1 (1975): 111–18; C. Paul, “Ezra Pound, Alfredo Casella, and the Fascist Cultural Nationalism of the Vivaldi Revival,” Quaderni Di Palazzo Serra 15 (2008): 91–112. 31 Pound: The Critical Heritage, 264–68. 32 Betsy Erkkila, “Introduction,” in Ezra Pound: The Contemporary Reviews, ed. Erkkila (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), xxxvi. 33 D. G. Bridson, The Filibuster: A Study of the Political Ideas of Wyndham Lewis (London: Cassell, 1972), 66. 34 ABCR, 59. 35 Carlo Calisse, A History of Italian Law, vol. 2 (Washington, D.C.: Beard Books, 2001), 473, 478. 36 Shakespeare, Merchant of Venice, I.iii.97. 37 Hesiod, Theogony, Works and Days, Shield, trans. Apostolos N. Athanassakis (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), 76. 38 ABCR, 58–59. W. H. D. Rouse edited Shakespeare’s Ovid (1904), containing Golding’s translation of The Metamorphoses. 39 ODNB, s.v. “Storrs, Sir Ronald Henry Amherst.” 40 Ronald Storrs, The Memoirs of Sir Ronald Storrs (New York: Putnam, 1937), 551. 41 Quoted in Conover, What Thou Lovest Well, 8. 23. THE NEW LEARNING: PART TWO See “The Frobenius Institute,” Frobenius-Institut an Der Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität, accessed May 22, 2011, http://www.frobenius-institut. de/en/ 2 Julie Anne Sadie, ed., Companion to Baroque Music (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998), 144. 3 ABCR, 54. 4 EP&M, 348–51. 5 Cf. Longenbach, Stone Cottage, 241. 6 See also Tryphonopoulos, Celestial, 9 ff., Liebregts, Neoplatonism, 253 ff. 7 Allen Upward, The New Word (New York: Mitchell Kennerley, 1914), 222. 8 Pound, “Affirmations, by Ezra Pound. II. Vorticism,” The New Age 16, no. 11 (1915): 277. 1

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9 Meyers, Enemy, 63. In Pound’s copy of Allen Upward’s The New Word (1910), Surette has found marked passages on Upward’s notion of the “‘whirl-swirl’—the vortex, or funnel that is reported in many mystic visions of the other world” and whose image and symbolism the Vorticists appropriate, while Yeats calls it a “gyre,” in Birth of Modernism, 136–37. 10 Austin Dobson, “Ars Victrix,” in A Victorian Anthology, 1837–1895, ed. Edmund Clarence Stedman (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin company, 1895), 489. 11 David Potter, Renaissance France at War: Armies, Culture and Society, c.1480–1560 (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2008), 291–92. 12 D’Elia, Pagan Virtue in a Christian World, 32, 36, 186. 13 Field, Mathematician’s Art, 65–66, 129 ff. 14 David Tunley, François Couperin and “The Perfection of Music” (Burlington: Ashgate, 2004), 18. 15 Joseph Kerman, The Art of Fugue: Bach Fugues for Keyboard, 1715–1750 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2005), 1, 66. 16 Yeats, Vision, 4. 17 EP&M, 495. 18 See Paul Jeffery, City Churches of Sir Christopher Wren (London: Hambledon Continuum, 2007). 19 See Ernest Samuels and Jayne Samuels, Bernard Berenson, the Making of a Legend (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987). 20 Walter F. Friedlaender, Mannerism and Anti-Mannerism in Italian Painting (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 41, 88. 21 Bernard Berenson, The Florentine Painters. The Central Italian Painters (London and New York: Phaidon, 1968), 38. 22 Rachel Cohen, Bernard Berenson: A Life in the Picture Trade (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013), 67. 23 Berenson, The Venetian Painters. The North Italian Painters (London and New York: Phaidon, 1968), 64. 24 Ferdinand David, Die Hohe Schule Des Violinspiels (Leipzig: Breitkofpf & Härtel, 1867), 28–37. 25 Alan Mallach, Pietro Mascagni and His Operas (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2002), xii, 166–67. 26 Julian Budden, Puccini: His Life and Works (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 154 ff. 27 Graham Parry, Glory, Laud and Honour: The Arts of the Anglican CounterReformation (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2008), 165; Miles Kastendieck, England’s Musical Poet Thomas Campion (New York: Oxford University Press, 1938), 44, 54. 28 Eliot, “The Humanism of the Irving Babbitt,” in Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot, ed. Frank Kermode (London: Faber, 1975), 281.

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29 T. S. Eliot, After Strange Gods: A Primer of Modern Heresy (London: Faber, 1934), 41–42. 30 W. B. Yeats, The Celtic Twilight (London: A. H. Bullen, 1902), 22. 31 Irving Babbitt, Rousseau and Romanticism (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1919), 149. 32 Sinclair Lewis, Babbitt (London: Jonathan Cape, 1922), 18. 33 David Cannadine, Mellon: An American Life (New York: Vintage, 2008), 283, 313, 397, 449–52. 34 Julia Timpe, Nazi-Organized Recreation and Entertainment in the Third Reich (New York: Springer Nature, 2017), 1–2; HRHRC. 35 See Jole Ruggieri, Manoscritti Italiani Nella Biblioteca dell’Escuriale (Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 1933). 36 See Julius Ruiz, The “Red Terror” and the Spanish Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). 37 SL, xxiii. 38 José Carlos Fernández Corte, “‘Cuniculosae Celtiberiae’ de Catulo 37 y la etimología fenicia de Hispania,” Voces, no. 10 (1999): 60. 39 Ernesto Giménez Caballero, España nuestra: El libro de las juventudes españolas (Madrid: Vicesecretaría de Educación Popular, 1943). See also Douglas W. Foard, The Revolt of the Aesthetes: Ernesto Giménez Caballero and the Origins of Spanish Fascism (New York: Peter Lang, 1989); Victoriano Peña Sánchez, Intelectuales y fascismo: La cultura italiana del Ventennio Fascista y su repercusión en España (Granada: Universidad de Granada, 1995). 24. EXAMPLES OF CIVILIZATION P. J. Jones, The Malatesta of Rimini and the Papal State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 185; Moody, Poet, vol. 1, 223. 2 Browning, Selected Poetry, 117. 3 Christopher Woodhouse, George Gemistos Plethon: The Last of the Hellenes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), x. 4 Recent scholarship corroborates Pound’s point. As Jonathan Harris points out, delegates debated everything from the doctrine of purgatory to which kind of bread ought to be consumed in the Eucharist. “Inevitably,” Harris concludes, “these issues gave infinite opportunity for theological hair-splitting,” in The End of Byzantium (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), 144. 5 See Marsilio Ficino: His Theology, His Philosophy, His Legacy, ed. Michael J. B. Allen, Valery Rees, and Martin Davies (Leiden: Brill, 2002). 6 Carlo Ginzburg, History, Rhetoric, and Proof (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1999), 54–55. 1

430 7 8 9

A Companion to Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur Walter Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry: The 1893 Text, ed. Donald L. Hill (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1980), 31. SP, 324; LE, 240. J. A. Martin and Thomas F. Saal, American Auto Racing: The Milestones and Personalities of a Century of Speed (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2004), 16–17. 25. BOOKS “ABOUT”

Warren Hope and Kim Holston, The Shakespeare Controversy: An Analysis of the Authorship Theories, 2nd ed. (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2009), 4, 66. 2 Peter Neville, Historical Dictionary of British Foreign Policy (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2013), 242. 3 Christopher Hollis, The Two Nations: A Financial Study of English History (London: G. Routledge and Sons, 1935), 38–39. 4 Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman: A Comedy and a Philosophy (New York: Brentano’s, 1903), 242. 5 James Freedman, Liberal Education and the Public Interest (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2005), 6–7. 6 SL, 323. 7 Erica Harth, Cartesian Women: Versions and Subversions of Rational Discourse in the Old Regime (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1992), 65; Juliana Schiesari, Beasts and Beauties: Animals, Gender, and Domestication in the Italian Renaissance (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010), 71. 8 Pound, Classic Noh, 6. 9 Thomas Greco, Money: Understanding and Creating Alternatives to Legal Tender (White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2001), 64–66. See also Surette, Purgatory, 176 ff. 10 D. G. Bridson, “An Interview with Ezra Pound,” in New Directions in Prose and Poetry, 17, ed. James Laughlin (New York: New Directions, 1961), 175–76. See also Bacigalupo, L’ultimo Pound (Rome: Ed. di Storia e Letteratura, 1981), 464. 11 Redman, “Por,” EPE, 237–38. See also Wilhelm, Tragic Years, 132. 12 Odon Por, Fascism, trans. E. Townshend (London: Labour Publishing Company, 1923), 225. 13 Marc R. Tool, Value Theory and Economic Progress: The Institutional Economics of J. Fagg Foster (Norwell, MA: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2000), 41. 14 Redman, Fascism, 144–45. 1

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15 Stephen Broad, Olivier Messiaen: Journalism 1935–1939 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), 26. 26. ON ANSWERING CRITICS Ian P. Wei, Intellectual Culture in Medieval Paris: Theologians and the University, C. 1100–1330 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 9–12. See also Pound’s “Patria Mia,” in SP, 133–34. 2 Pound, “Dear Uncle George”: The Correspondence Between Ezra Pound and Congressman Tinkham of Massachusetts, ed. Philip J. Burns (Orono, ME: National Poetry Foundation, 1996), 19, 75. 3 Stock, Life, 326. 4 See in particular Canto 80, where Tinkham reminisces about his experiences as a hunter and alludes to his meeting with Pound at the Lido Excelsior (80/529). See also de Rachewiltz, Discretions, 84. 5 See Howard Pollack, George Gershwin: His Life and Work (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2007). 6 See Archie Brown, The Rise and Fall of Communism (London: Bodley Head, 2009), 55. 7 Brian Burkitt and Frances Hutchinson, Political Economy of Social Credit and Guild Socialism (New York: Routledge, 1997), 146. 8 Michael Frassetto, The Early Medieval World: From the Fall of Rome to the Time of Charlemagne, vol. 1, A–M (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2013), 565.

1

27. MAXIMS OF PRUDENCE 1 2

Jason Harding, The Criterion: Cultural Politics and Periodical Networks in Inter-War Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 74–75. Pound, “Editorial,” The Little Review 4, no. 1 (May 1917): 3. 28. HUMAN WISHES

Eliot, “Johnson’s London and The Vanity of Human Wishes,” in English Critical Essays: Twentieth Century, ed. Phyllis M. Jones (London: Oxford University Press, 1947), 303. 2 Anatole France, The Revolt of the Angels, trans. Wilfrid Jackson (London: John Lane, 1914), 39. 3 Arthur Symons, Studies in Seven Arts (London: Archibald Constable, 1906), 128. See also GB, 122. 4 Samuel Johnson, The Vanity of Human Wishes. The Tenth Satire of Juvenal, Imitated by Samuel Johnson (London: R. Dodsley, 1749), 14, 16. 1

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See James Kearns, Théophile Gautier, Orator to the Artists: Art Journalism in the Second Republic (London: Legenda, 2007). 6 Cynthia Verba, Dramatic Expression in Rameau’s Tragédie en Musique: Between Tradition and Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 119–20. 7 Bernard Bykhovskii, Kierkegaard, trans. Henry F. Mins (Amsterdam: B. R. Grüner, 1976), 9. 8 Richard Eugene Chandler and Kessel Schwartz, A New History of Spanish Literature (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1991), 14. 9 Eliot, Sacred Wood, 104. 10 Binyon, The Engraved Designs of William Blake (London: Ernest Benn, 1926), 27. 11 T. E. Hulme, Speculations: Essays on Humanism and the Philosophy of Art (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1924), 116. 12 Pound, Personae, 90. 13 SP, 145. 14 Ten Eyck, Adams Cantos, 17–18. 15 J/M, 118. 16 SP, 84, 87. 17 Eliot, The Letters of T. S. Eliot, Vol. 3, 1926–1927, ed. Valerie Eliot and John Haffenden (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012), 96–97. 18 Mussolini, Opera omnia di Benito Mussolini, ed. Edoardo Susmel and Duilio Susmel, vol. 26 (Florence: La Fenice, 1958), 357. 19 Yeats, The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats, ed. Richard J. Finneran (New York: Scribner, 1996), 238. 20 Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature, s.v. “Mencken, H. L.” 21 Demetres P. Tryphonopoulos, “Letters,” in Ezra Pound in Context, ed. Ira B. Nadel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 56. See also The H. L. Mencken and Ezra Pound Correspondence, ed. Demetres P. Tryphonopoulous (New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming). 5

29. GUIDE TO KULCHUR 1 John Irving, Mozart: The “Haydn” Quartets (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 13. 2 ATH, 30, 133. 3 Johnson, Vanity, 14. 4 LE, 32. 5 See Jerome Christensen, Lord Byron’s Strength: Romantic Writing and Commercial Society (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993). 6 “Divini Redemptoris on Atheistic Communism,” reprinted in Harry C. Koenig, ed., Principles for Peace: Selections from Papal Documents

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from Leo XIII to Pius XII (Washington, D.C.: National Catholic Welfare Conference, 1943), 510. 7 Mussolini, Opera omnia, vol. 25, 136. 8 David E. Kyvig and Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, Repealing National Prohibition (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2000), 3–6. 9 www.dict.cc, Deutsch-Englisch-Wörterbuch, s.v. “Schweinerei.” 30. THE PROOF OF THE PUDDING See Diana Preston, Lusitania: An Epic Tragedy (New York: Berkley Books, 2003). 2 Thomas A. Bailey, “The Sinking of the Lusitania,” American Historical Review 41 (1935): 61. 3 Elizabeth Bergmann Loizeaux, Yeats and the Visual Arts (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2003), 197. 4 Ron Chernow, The House of Morgan: An American Banking Dynasty and the Rise of Modern Finance (New York: Grove Press, 2001), xi. 5 United States Patent Office, Decisions of the Commissioner of Patents for the Year 1870 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1871), 146–47. See also Roxana Preda, Ezra Pound’s (Post)modern Poetics and Politics: Logocentrism, Language, and Truth (New York: Peter Lang, 2001), 58. 6 For the text of the handbill, see Surette, Purgatory, 291 (cf. 79 ff.). See also Marsh, Pound, 121. 7 Roland Sarti, Italy: A Reference Guide from the Renaissance to the Present (New York: Facts on File, 2004), 490–92. 8 Remy de Gourmont, La culture des idées: du style ou de l’écriture, la création subconsciente, la dissociation des idées (Paris: Mercure de France, 1900), 135. 9 Richard Burton, A Strong Song Tows Us: The Life of Basil Bunting, Britain’s Greatest Modernist Poet (Oxford: Infinite Ideas, 2013), 181; Bacigalupo, “Tigullio Itineraries,” 413. 10 Pound, Ezra Pound and Dorothy Shakespear, Their Letters, 1909–1914, ed. Omar S. Pound and A. Walton Litz (New York: New Directions, 1984), 349; L. Rainey, Institutions, 26 ff. 11 Moody, Poet, vol.  1, 62  ff. 12 SL, 8. 13 SP, 53. 14 Liebregts, Neoplatonism, 171. 15 SP, 444. 16 Howard Staunton, ed., The Plays of Shakespeare, vol. 1 (London: G. Routledge and Company, 1858), 103 (my italics). 1

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17 SR, n.p. The epigraph translates as, “All my [sculptures] take fifteen years to complete. I can start something new every day, but finish . . .?” (my translation). 18 Marie-Henri Beyle (Stendhal), Courrier Anglais, vol. 1 (Paris: Divan, 1935), 69–70; Souvenirs d’égotisme (Paris: Bibliothèque-Charpentier, 1892), 260. 19 Kathleen N. Daly, Greek and Roman Mythology, A to Z (New York: Chelsea House, 2009). 14–15, 93. 31. CANTI SL, 294; Michael André Bernstein, The Tale of the Tribe: Ezra Pound and the Modern Verse Epic (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1980), 7 ff. 2 Marsh, Money, 119; Surette, Purgatory, 223; 42/210; Narciso Mengozzi, Il Monte Dei Paschi Di Siena (1625–1921) (Florence: R. Bemporad, 1922), 13. 3 Joseph G. Tregle Jr., “Creoles and Americans,” in Creole New Orleans: Race and Americanization, ed. Arnold R. Hirsch and Joseph Logsdon (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992), 170. 4 OED, s.v. “comstockery.” 5 See Stock, Life, 354. 6 OED, s.v. “nitchevo.” 7 Agnes Perkins, The Nation, ed. Joseph H. Richards (New York: New York Evening Post Co., 1908), 167. 8 Gourmont, Natural Philosophy, 186. 9 Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Medea, ed. A. J. Boyle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 40–41. 10 James K. Hopkins, Into the Heart of the Fire: The British in the Spanish Civil War (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 133 ff. 11 Richard Hudson, Stolen Time: The History of Tempo Rubato (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 1. 12 See also Peter Hill, Stravinsky: The Rite of Spring (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 13 Leo Frobenius, Aus den Flegeljahren der Menschheit (Hanover: Gebrüder Jänecke, 1901), vii. 14 For a pictorial representation of the elements of notation, see Theodore Baker, Nicolas Slonimsky, and Laura Kuhn, eds., Schirmer Pronouncing Pocket Manual of Musical Terms (New York: Schirmer, 1995), ix. 15 Nadel, Literary Life, 50–51. 1

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32. THE NOVEL AND SO FORTH 1 Robert Louis Stevenson, Prince Otto: A Romance (London: Chatto & Windus, 1888), 269. 2 LE, 324. 3 Rudyard Kipling, A Diversity of Creatures (London: Macmillan, 1918), 1. 4 Plato, The Collected Dialogues of Plato, Including the Letters, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1971), 831. 5 Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient Greece and Rome, s.v. “Quintilian.” 6 Pound (trans.), Confucius, 97. 7 Eric Hayot, Chinese Dreams: Pound, Brecht, Tel Quel (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009), 62–63. 8 See Bettina L. Knapp, Judith Gautier: Writer, Orientalist, Musicologist, Feminist, a Literary Biography (Lanham, MD: Hamilton Books, 2004). 9 Olive Sayce, The Medieval German Lyric, 1150–1300: The Development of its Themes and Forms in their European Context (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), 32, 177. See also Rodney W. Fisher, The Minnesinger Heinrich von Morungen: An Introduction to His Songs (San Francisco: International Scholars Publications, 1996). 10 Joachim Bumke, Courtly Culture: Literature and Society in the High Middle Ages (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991), 98. 11 William Davis Snodgrass, ed., Selected Translations (Rochester, N.Y.: BOA Editions, 1998), 116, 150; Medieval Germany: An Encyclopedia, s.v. “Walther von der Vogelweide.” 12 Walter Baumann, “German Literature, Translation, and Kultur,” EPE, 132–33. 13 Hans Sachs, A Sixteenth-Century Book of Trades: Das Ständebuch, trans. Theodore K. Rabb (Palo Alto, CA: The Society for the Promotion of Science and Scholarship, 2009), 201, 215, 207. 14 For the influence of the Canticles on von Morungen and Cavalcanti, among others, see Peter Dronke, “The Song of Songs and Medieval Love-Lyric,” in The Bible and Medieval Culture, ed. W. Lourdaux and D. Verhelst (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 1979), 236–62. 15 William Weber, The Musician as Entrepreneur, 1700–1914: Managers, Charlatans, and Idealists (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), 87–88. 16 Willard Bohn, Apollinaire and the International Avant-Garde (Albany: SUNY Press, 1997), 36. 17 LE, 10.

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18 Paul Verlaine, One Hundred and One Poems by Paul Verlaine: A Bilingual Edition, trans. Norman R. Shapiro (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 128–29. 19 James Legge (trans.), The Chinese Classics. The She-King, or The Book of Poetry, by Confucius, vol. IV (Hong Kong: Lane, Crawford and Company, 1871), v. 20 Homer, Odyssey, XIX.167 ff. 21 Père Lacharme (trans.), Confucii Chi-King, Sive Liber Carminum (Stuttgart and Tübingen: J. G. Cotta, 1830), 69. 22 Pound (trans.), Shih-Ching: The Classic Anthology Defined by Confucius (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1954), 77. 23 Lacharme, Chi-King, 271. 33. PRECEDENTS 1 2 3 4 5 6

Robert D. Cottrell, Brantôme: The Writer as Portraitist of His Age (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1970), 83. ABCR, 11. SL, 288. Biondi, Angelo, “The Jews in Pitigliano,” Città di Pitigliano, accessed Nov. 5, 2011, www.comune.pitigliano.gr.it/index.php?T1=80000. See also Terrell, Companion, 47, 49. OED, s.v. “wump.” 34. ON ARRIVING AND NOT ARRIVING

1

Mary Wren Bivins, Telling Stories, Making Histories: Women, Words, and Islam in Nineteenth-Century Hausaland and the Sokoto Caliphate (Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 2007), 8. 35. PRAISE SONG OF THE BUCK-HARE

1

Shirin Akiner, Islamic Peoples of the Soviet Union (New York: Routledge, 2010), 435; Wilhelm Radloff, Proben der Volkslitteratur der türkischen Stämme Süd-Sibiriens, vol. 1 (St. Petersburg: Commissionäre der Kaiserlichen akademie der Wissenschaften, 1866), 243–44. 36. TIME-LAG

1 See Lacharme, Chi-King, 45. 2 Jennings, Confucian Analects, 121. 3 Legge, Chinese Classics, 165. 4 Lacharme, Chi-King, 47.

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5 Legge, Chinese Classics, 171. 6 See Emily Mitchell Wallace, “America,” in Ezra Pound in Context, ed. Ira B. Nadel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 205–6; Stock, Life, 28 ff. 7 Lacharme, Chi-King, 47 (translation from Legge, Chinese Classics, 171). 37. THE CULTURE OF AN AGE 1 See also Wilhelm, Tragic Years, 181; Helen Caldwell, Michio Ito: The Dancer and His Dances (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1977), 41. 2 EP&M, 361. 3 Conover, What Thou Lovest Well, 123. 4 Robert Burns, Selected Poems and Songs, ed. Robert P. Irvine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 99. 38. EDUCATION OR INFORMATION 1 James E. Miller Jr., T. S. Eliot: The Making of an American Poet, 1888– 1922 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005), 131, 195. 2 Luciano García Lorenzo, “Cual el gracioso se impone en la comedia: La discreta enamorada, de Lope de Vega,” in La construcción de un personaje: el gracioso, ed. Lorenzo (Madrid: Editorial Fundamentos, 2005), 130. 3 Ten Eyck, Adams Cantos, 19 ff. 39. NEO-PLATONICKS ETC. 1 Lacharme, Chi-King, 112. See also Tryphonopoulos, Celestial, 13. 2 Legge, Chinese Classics, 111. 3 Plato, Collected Dialogues, 580–81. 4 SR, 140. See also Liebregts, Neoplatonism, 50. 5 Eliot, Letters, vol. 1, 91. See also Dennis Brown, “Plato and Eliot’s Earlier Verse,” in Platonism and the English Imagination, ed. Anna Baldwin and Sarah Hutton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 298–307. 6 Grove Encyclopedia of American Art, vol. 1, s.v. “Société Anonyme, Inc.” 7 Iamblichus, Iamblichus on the Mysteries of the Egyptians, Chaldeans, and Assyrians, trans. Thomas Taylor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 92. 8 Liebregts, Neoplatonism, 148. 9 E. B. Fryde, Greek Manuscripts in the Private Library of the Medici, 1469–1510 (Aberystwyth: National Library of Wales, 1996), 657. See also Woodhouse, Last of the Hellenes, 191 ff.

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10 Robert M. Berchman, Porphyry Against the Christians (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 2; Andrew Smith, Porphyry’s Place in the Neoplatonic Tradition: A Study in Post-Plotinian Neoplatonism (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974). 11 See Stratis Papaioannou, Michael Psellos: Rhetoric and Authorship in Byzantium (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). 12 See Terrell, Companion, 92; Liebregts, Neoplatonism, 314. 13 Florian Ebeling, The Secret History of Hermes Trismegistus: Hermeticism from Ancient to Modern Times, trans. David Lorton (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2007), 9. 14 ODNB, s.v. “Heydon, John.” 15 See Terrell, Companion, 17; Liebregts, Neoplatonism, 129, 307–9. 16 See Tryphonopoulos, Celestial, 82–92; Surette, Birth of Modernism, 231–34. 17 Theosophy, vol. V, 3 (Bombay: Theosophy Company, 1917), 162. 40. LOSSES Constance Gosselin Schick, Seductive Resistance: The Poetry of Théophile Gautier (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994), 34–36. 2 LE, 222. 3 Terrell describes Jackson as “a John Wayne type,” in Companion, 438. See also Wilhelm, Tragic Years, 239. 4 ODNB, s.v. “Ionides, Alexander Constantine.” 5 Robert Eccleshall and Graham S. Walker, eds, Biographical Dictionary of British Prime Ministers (London: Routledge, 2002), s.v. “Henry John Temple, Third Viscount Palmerston.” 6 Peter H. Sutcliffe, The Oxford University Press: An Informal History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002), 135. 7 Moody, Poet, vol. 1, 372; ODNB, s.v. “Douglas, Clifford Hugh.” 8 William Mulligan, The Origins of the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 87. 9 Martina Salvante, “Italian Disabled Veterans: Between Experience and Representation,” in Stephen McVeigh and Nicola Cooper, eds, Men After War (New York: Routledge, 2013), 124. 10 See Stock, Life, 343. 11 “Chi Siamo.” Pontificia Università Lateranense. Accessed October 23, 2017. https://www.pul.it/it/chi-siamo. 12 John Butt, “‘A Mind Unconscious that it is Calculating’? Bach and the Rationalist Philosophy of Wolff, Leibniz and Spinoza,” in John Butt, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Bach (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 60–71. 1

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13 Quoted in Jan Swafford, Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph: A Biography (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014), 408 (see also 325–27, 987). 14 Stephen Morris, “William Young, ‘Englishman,’” The Viola Da Gamba Society Journal 1 (2007): 51. 15 See Maurice Ashley, The Stuarts, ed. Antonia Fraser (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000). 16 Richard Roberts, Saving the City: The Great Financial Crisis of 1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 197–99. See also William L. Silber, When Washington Shut Down Wall Street: The Great Financial Crisis of 1914 and the Origins of America’s Monetary Supremacy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2014). 41. ODES RISKS 1

Pound (trans.), Confucius, 272–73. 42. GREAT BASS: PART TWO

ATH, 9–10; Moody, Poet, vol. 2, 25–26. See also Vincent B. Sherry, Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, and Radical Modernism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 181–85. 2 ATH, 33. 3 Wyndham Lewis, Time and Western Man (London: Chatto & Windus, 1927), 45. 4 Wyndham Lewis, Blasting and Bombardiering (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1937), 271–72. 1

43. TONE EP&M, 66. OED, s.v. “towser.” Wai-lim Yip, Ezra Pound’s “Cathay” (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2015), 5, 88. 4 Dalya Alberge, “Vivaldi’s Lost Masterpiece is Found in Library Archives,” Guardian, July 15, 2012, https://www.theguardian.com/music/2012/ jul/15/orlando-furioso-vivaldi-1714-version 5 SP, 270. 6 “The Global Think Tank,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, accessed July 20, 2015, http://carnegieendowment.org/about 7 SP, 222. 8 Lacharme, Chi-King, 41. 9 Pound, Classic Anthology, 47.

1 2 3

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A Companion to Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur 44. GOVERNMENT

Stephen Lovell, Russia in the Microphone Age: A History of Soviet Radio, 1919–1970 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 21. 2 See Franklin D. Roosevelt, FDR’s Fireside Chats, ed. Russell D. Buhite and David W. Levy (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992). 3 Marsh, Pound, 137. 4 Donald L. Miller, Supreme City: How Jazz Age Manhattan Gave Birth to Modern America (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2015), 15–16. 5 Frobenius and Douglas C. Fox, African Genesis: Folk Tales and Myths of Africa (New York: Stackpole Sons, 1937), 45. 6 Surette, Eleusis, 180–85. 7 Gershon David Hundert, Jews in Poland–Lithuania in the Eighteenth Century: A Genealogy of Modernity (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2004), 60. 8 Cf. Rabaté, Language, 48. 9 Dante, Divina Commedia (Paradiso), V.79–81. 10 Aquinas, Summa, vol. 4, ed. Thomas Gornall, 117. 11 Moisei Ostrogorski, The Rights of Women: A Comparative Study in History and Legislation (London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co., 1893), 3–8. 12 Daniel Katz, “Travel,” in Ezra Pound in Context, ed. Ira B. Nadel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 430. 13 Cf. Guy Davenport, “Persephone’s Ezra,” Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics 7, no. 2 (July 1, 1968): 165–99; Marsh, John Kasper and Ezra Pound: Saving the Republic (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 55–56. 14 Reed Way Dasenbrock, ed., The Art of Being Ruled, by Wyndham Lewis (Santa Rosa, CA: Black Sparrow Press, 1989), 400. 15 Gourmont, La culture des idées, 73. 16 Lan, Pound and Confucianism, 63. 17 Jerry White, London in the Nineteenth Century: A Human Awful Wonder of God (London: Vintage, 2008), 80–82. 18 Stock, Life, 210. 19 Bridson, Filibuster, 149. 20 Lewis, The Diabolical Principle and The Dithyrambic Spectator (London: Haskell, 1931), 1. 21 Frederick Soddy, in To-morrow’s Money, 99. 22 See P. Taylor, Gurdjieff, 4. 23 See P/N, 92, 337; P/A, 269. 24 François Villon, The Poems of François Villon, trans. Galway Kinnell (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1982), 41. 25 Daniel Mark Scroop, Mr. Democrat: Jim Farley, the New Deal and the Making of Modern American Politics (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009), 104. 1

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26 Gordon T. Trotter, “Susan B. Anthony Issue,” Smithsonian National Postal Museum, Nov. 27, 2007. Accessed July 26, 2015. http://arago. si.edu/category_2033174.html 27 Pound, The Correspondence of Ezra Pound and Senator William Borah, ed. Sarah Holmes (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001), 42. 28 See also Moody, Poet, vol. 2, 202. 29 Compton Mackenzie, Extraordinary Women: Theme and Variations (London: Martin Secker, 1928), vii. 30 EP&M, 418–19. 45. THE RECURRING DECIMAL 1 See Lacharme, Chi-King, xii. 2 Mussolini, Opera omnia, vol. 20, 243. 3 Quoted in Wilhelm, Tragic Years, 131. 4 Michael Hiltzik, The New Deal: A Modern History (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2011), 311, 386. 5 Quoted in Surette, Purgatory, 291. 6 See Igor Stravinsky, Stravinsky’s Pulcinella: A Facsimile of the Sources and Sketches, ed. Maureen Carr (Middleton, WI: A-R Editions, 2010). 7 Peter Williams, The Organ Music of J. S. Bach (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 209–24. 8 EP&M, 418. 9 EB, s.v. “Ottorino Respighi.” 10 Georg Feder, “History of the Arrangements of Bach’s Chaconne,” in The Bach Chaconne for Solo Violin: A Collection of Views, ed. Jon F. Eiche, trans. Egbert M. Ennulat (Bloomington, IN: Frangipani Press, 1985), 59–60. 11 EP&M, 487, 409. See also C. Paul, “Casella,” 91–112. 12 Lisa Yount, A to Z of Biologists (New York: Facts on File, 2003), 76. 13 Geoffrey K. Spratt, The Music of Arthur Honegger (Cork: Cork University Press, 1987), 21. 14 EP&M, 232. 46. DECLINE OF THE ADAMSES John E. Ferling, Adams vs. Jefferson: The Tumultuous Election of 1800, Pivotal Moments in American History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 28–29. 2 Pound, “The Liberal: Request for an Effective Burial of Him,” Action 132 (August 27, 1938): 13. 3 See L. Rainey, Monument, 193–97; C. Paul, Fascist Directive, 126. 4 SL, 104. 5 Edward Malins and John Purkis, A Preface to Yeats (New York: Routledge, 2013), 125. 1

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A Companion to Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur 47. ROYALTY AND ALL THAT

1 EB, s.v. “Edward VIII.” 2 Pound, Ezra Pound and “Globe” Magazine: The Complete Correspondence, ed. Michael T. Davis and Cameron McWhirter (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 187. 3 William W. Kibler and Grover A. Zinn, eds, Medieval France: An Encyclopedia (London: Routledge, 2017), s.v. “Giles of Rome.” 4 OED, s.v. “proctor.” 5 E. S. P. Haynes, “Abolish The King’s Proctor,” The Spectator 150, no. 5461 (1933): 243. 6 Stephen Michael Cretney, Family Law in the Twentieth Century: A History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 250. 7 See also G. J. Meyer, The Borgias: The Hidden History (New York: Random House, 2013). 8 Oxford Dictionary of Saints, 5th ed. rev., s.v. “Bosco, John.” 9 Stock, Life, 46. 10 Quoted in Jaska Kainulainen, Paolo Sarpi: A Servant of God and State (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 165. 11 John F. Pollard, Money and the Rise of the Modern Papacy: Financing the Vatican, 1850–1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 122. 12 Quoted in Jane Ridley, Bertie: A Life of Edward VII (London: Chatto & Windus, 2012), 161. 13 F. W. Kent, Lorenzo De’ Medici and the Art of Magnificence (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 41, 49. 14 Pound, Ezra Pound and Senator Bronson Cutting: A Political Correspondence, 1930–1935, ed. E. P. Walkiewicz and Hugh Witemeyer (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995), 40–41. 15 See Wilferd Madelung, The Succession to Muhammad: A Study of the Early Caliphate (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 149–50. 16 Thomas Babington Macaulay, Miscellaneous Works of Lord Macaulay, vol. 1 (New York: Harper and Bros., 1880), 31. 17 David Abulafia, Frederick II: A Medieval Emperor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 255, 216. 18 Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier. Selected Memories. Poems (London: Bodley Head, 1962), 132. 19 Helen Rappaport, Queen Victoria: A Biographical Companion (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2003), 11–13, 243–44. 20 OED, s.v. “rastaquouère.” 21 See Javier Moreno Luzón, Modernizing the Nation: Spain During the Reign of Alfonso XIII, 1902–1931, trans. Nick Rider (Eastbourne: Sussex Academic Press, 2012).

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22 Gillian Gill, We Two: Victoria and Albert: Rulers, Partners, Rivals (New York: Ballantine Books, 2009), 270 ff. 23 Quoted in John A. Davis, Naples and Napoleon: Southern Italy and the European Revolutions, 1780–1860 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 327. 24 Dictionary of the Roman Empire, s.v. “Romulus Augustulus.” 25 44/223–25. 26 Bacigalupo, “‘Safe with My Lynxes’: Pound’s Figure in the Carpet?,” in Ezra Pound’s Cantos: A Casebook, ed. Peter Makin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 112, 118. 27 David Barnes, The Venice Myth: Culture, Literature, Politics, 1800 to the Present (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2014), 93. 28 Giuseppe Maria Finaldi, Italian National Identity in the Scramble for Africa: Italy’s African Wars in the Era of Nation-Building, 1870–1900 (New York: Peter Lang, 2009), 52. 29 Paul Ginsborg, Daniele Manin and the Venetian Revolution of 1848–49 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 144 ff.; Michael Rapport, 1848: Year of Revolution (New York: Basic Books, 2009), 90 ff. 30 Christian Satto, Dalla rivoluzione al governo. La sinistra di Antonio Mordini nell’età della destra 1861–1869 (Milan: Franco Angeli, 2014), 93. 31 LE, 182. 32 SP, 148. 33 Paul C. Nagel, John Quincy Adams: A Public Life, a Private Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 87. 34 John Quincy Adams, The Diary of John Quincy Adams, 1794–1845: American Diplomacy, and Political, Social, and Intellectual Life, from Washington to Polk, ed. Allan Nevins (New York: Longmans, Green, and Company, 1928), 214. 35 SP, 182; P/C, 126–27; Pound, Pound/Ford, the Story of a Literary Friendship: The Correspondence between Ezra Pound and Ford Madox Ford and their Writings about Each Other, ed. Brita Lindberg-Seyersted (London: Faber & Faber, 1982), 160. 36 OED, “cunctatious.” 37 Gesell, Natural Economic Order, 99. 38 Eugene P. Trani and Donald E. Davis, “Roosevelt and the U.S. Role: Perception Makes Policy,” in The Treaty of Portsmouth and its Legacies, ed. Steven J. Ericson and Allen Hockley (Lebanon, N.H.: University Press of New England, 2008), 73. 39 Pound, “Affirmations. Arnold Dolmetsch,” The New Age 16, no. 10 (1915): 247. 40 Naikan Tao, “Ezra Pound’s Comparative Poetics,” CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 3, no. 4 (2001): 8.

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1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

ODNB, s.v. “Doughty, Charles Montagu.” Wu Yung, The Flight of an Empress, trans. Ida Pruitt (London: Faber & Faber, 1937), 283–84 (Brunnenburg). “Visited General Grant’s Grave. Li Hung Change Placed a Beautiful Wreath on It,” Sacramento Daily Union, August 31, 1896, 1. Index to the Miscellaneous Documents of the House of Representatives for the First Session of the Fiftieth Congress, 1887–’88 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1889), 651–52. Peter Harrington, Peking 1900: The Boxer Rebellion (Oxford: Osprey Publishing, 2001), 7. Robert Gellately, Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler: The Age of Social Catastrophe (New York: Knopf, 2007), 248, 278, 313. See Stock, Life, 355; Beinecke MSS, Box 10, Folders 479–82. George Hill, A History of Cyprus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 229. Jeff Shesol, Supreme Power: Franklin Roosevelt vs. the Supreme Court (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2010), 2–6, 84, 304, 489. SL, 183. 49. KUNG

1 Huang, Confucius, 11. 2 Sima Qian, Records of the Grand Historian: Qin Dynasty, trans. Burton Watson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 20. 3 Hearder, Cavour, 59–60. 4 EB, s.v. “Charles Eugene Bedaux.” 5 Robert Service, A History of Modern Russia from Nicholas II to Vladimir Putin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 217. 6 Lillian Feder, “Pound and Ovid,” in Ezra Pound Among the Poets, ed. George Bornstein (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 15. 7 Pound (trans.), Confucius, 83. 8 The Simplified Chinese Characters are transcribed as follows:   仁 者 仁 以 者 身 以 发 身 身 发 不 财

Notes 9

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Matteo Di Figlia, “A proposito dell’instransigentismo fascista: Farinacci e la plutocrazia bancaria,” Meridiana, no. 47/48 (Jan. 1, 2003): 220. See also David I. Kertzer, The Popes Against the Jews: The Vatican’s Role in the Rise of Modern Anti-Semitism (New York: Vintage, 2002), 285 ff. 10 Quoted in Michele Sarfatti, The Jews in Mussolini’s Italy: From Equality to Persecution, trans. Anne C. Tedeschi and John Tedeschi (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006), 123. 11 Chin, Confucius, 156. 12 Liaquat Ahamed, Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World (New York: Penguin, 2009), 1–2. 13 Cannadine, Mellon, 321. 14 Jack Wei Chen, The Poetics of Sovereignty: On Emperor Taizong of the Tang Dynasty (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 2–4. 15 Menglong Feng, Stories to Awaken the World: A Ming Dynasty Collection, trans. Yunqin Yang and Shuhui Yang (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2009), 39; Valérie Malenfer Ortiz, Dreaming the Southern Song Landscape: The Power of Illusion in Chinese Painting (Leiden: Brill, 1999), 48. 16 George Mousourakis, A Legal History of Rome (New York: Routledge, 2007), 182. 17 Yung, Flight, 76 ff. 18 Lee Dian Rainey, Confucius and Confucianism: The Essentials (Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, 2010), 6–7. 19 Joseph-Anne-Marie de Moyriac de Mailla, Histoire générale de la Chine: ou, Annales de cet empire; traduites du Tong-kien-kang-mou, vol. 8 (Paris: P.D. Pierres, Clousier, 1778), 169. 20 Kenneth Henshall, Historical Dictionary of Japan to 1945 (Plymouth: Scarecrow Press, 2014), 377. 21 See Wilhelm, Tragic Years, 230–31; Moody, Poet, vol. 2, 40; Terrell, Companion, 400–1, 405. 22 Caldwell, Ito, ix, 53, 126. 23 Anna Kisselgoff, “Dance View: An All-But-Forgotten Pioneer of American Modern Dance,” New York Times, Feb. 26, 1978, D10. 24 Surette, Purgatory, 204. 25 J/M, 113. 26 Pound (trans.), Confucius, 36. 27 SP, 295. 28 NE, 287. 29 SP, 290–91, 295. 30 NE, 285. 31 Butchart, Money: Selected Passages Presenting the Concepts of Money in the English Tradition, 1640–1935 (London: Stanley Nott, 1935), 27.

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32 NE, 287. 33 Pound (trans.), Confucius, 191. 34 Aesop, Aesop’s Fables, trans. V. S. Vernon Jones (London: William Heinemann, 1912), 221. 50. CHAUCER WAS FRAMED? Geoffrey Chaucer, The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry Dean Benson, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 620. 2 LE, 154. 3 Thomas Hahn, “Adam Bell, Clim of the Clough, and William of Cloudesley,” in Medieval Outlaws: Twelve Tales in Modern English Translation, ed. Thomas H. Ohlgren (West Lafayette: Parlor Press, 2005), 397–98. 4 Alfred W. Pollard, “Introduction,” in The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer (London: Macmillan and Co., 1898), xviii–xix. 5 Joseph Bédier, The Romance of Tristan and Iseut, trans. Edward J. Gallagher (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2013), 133. 6 Pollard, “Introduction,” xxiv. 7 Rita Wilson, “On the Margins: Antonio Tabucchi’s Investigative Reflections,” in Differences, Deceits and Desires: Murder and Mayhem in Italian Crime Fiction, ed. Mirna Cicioni and Nicoletta Di Ciolla (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2008), 24. 8 Richard John King, ed., Selections from the Early Ballad Poetry of England and Scotland (London: William Pickering, 1842). 9 J. Martin Evans, The Miltonic Moment (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2015), 123. 10 Percy Bysshe Shelley, A Refutation of Deism: In a Dialogue (London: Progressive Publishing Company, 1890), 23. 11 Dante, Dante’s Lyric Poems, trans. Joseph Tusiani (Ottawa: Legas, 1999), 57. 12 Quoted in Frederick A. Hoffmann, Poetry, Its Origin, Nature, and History (London: Thurgate and Sons, 1884), 539. 13 J/M, 42. 1

51. HAPPY DAYS See Pat Rogers, A Political Biography of Alexander Pope (New York: Routledge, 2010). 2 Thomas Hardy, Late Lyrics and Earlier, with Many Other Verses (London: Macmillan and Co., 1922), vii. 3 Aeschylus, Oresteia, 171. 4 Pound, “Status Rerum,” Poetry: A Magazine of Verse 1, no. 4 (1913): 125. 1

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5 Edmund Gosse, “Preface and Introduction,” in The Poetical Works of Thomas Lovell Beddoes, vol. 1 (London: L. M. Dent and Co., 1890), xiii, xviii, xxxviii. 6 Walter Savage Landor, The Works of Walter Savage Landor, vol. 2 (London: Edward Moxon, 1846), 673. 7 LE, 33. 8 Augustine, The Confessions of S. Augustine, trans. E. B. Pusey (Oxford: John Henry Parker, 1838), 203. 9 Yeats, Collected Poems, 28. 10 Yeats, Early Essays, ed. Richard J. Finneran and George Bornstein, The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats, vol. 4 (New York: Scribner, 2007), 153. 11 Robert de La Sizeranne, The Pre-Raphaelites (New York: Parkstone International, 2008), 102; T. J. Barringer, Reading the Pre-Raphaelites (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 7–8, 135; Elizabeth Prettejohn, The Art of the Pre-Raphaelites (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000), 115. 12 Thomas Hardy, The Collected Poems of Thomas Hardy (Ware: Wordsworth Editions, 1994), 271. 13 Hardy, Collected Poems, 354. 14 Henry James, The Ivory Tower (New York: Scribners, 1917), 285. 15 Mousourakis, Roman Law and the Origins of the Civil Law Tradition (Cham: Springer, 2015), 106–7. 52. THE PROMISED LAND The United States Biographical Dictionary and Portrait Gallery of Eminent and Self-Made Men; Wisconsin Volume (Chicago, Cincinnati and New York: American Biographical Publishing Company, 1877), 32. 2 Hardy, Collected Poems, 661. 3 LE, 97, 11. 4 Blast 1, 8. 5 See Ellen Nehr, Doubleday Crime Club Compendium, 1928–1991 (Martinez, CA: Offspring Press, 1992). 6 Dante, Divina Commedia (Paradiso), V.103–5, 107–8. 7 SL, 327; Tryphonopoulos, Celestial, 14–15; Kenner, Pound Era, 103–4. 8 See also Surette, Eleusis, 132, 243–44; Bacigalupo, The Forméd Trace: The Later Poetry of Ezra Pound (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), 298. 9 Pound, Pound/The Little Review, The Letters of Ezra Pound to Margaret Anderson: The Little Review Correspondence, ed. Thomas L. Scott, Melvin J. Friedman, and Jackson R. Bryer (New York: New Directions, 1988), 1. 10 SL, 137. 1

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11 Hardy, Collected Poems, 660. 12 Ibid., 344–50. 13 SP, 461. 14 OED, s.v. “faute de mieux.” 15 SL, 264. 16 Richard Garnett and Edmund Gosse, eds., English Literature: An Illustrated Record, vol. 1 (London: William Heinemann, 1903), 357. 17 George Steiner, My Unwritten Books (New York: New Directions, 2008), 42. 18 Guido Ruggiero, The Renaissance in Italy: A Social and Cultural History of the Rinascimento (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 56; Tryphonopoulos, Celestial, 7–8; Surette, Birth of Modernism, 22, 116; Leibregts, Neoplatonism, 397. 53. STUDY OF PHYSIOGNOMY 1 See Kurt Fosso, Buried Communities: Wordsworth and the Bonds of Mourning (Albany: SUNY Press, 2004), 198. 2 SP, 49. See also Hugh Witemeyer, The Poetry of Ezra Pound, 1908–1920 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1969), 25–26; William M. Chace, The Political Identities of Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1973), 82–83. 3 Eliot, “Isolated Superiority,” The Dial 84, no. 1 (Jan. 1928): 7. See also Moody, Poet, vol. 2, 90–91. 4 Eliot, Strange Gods, 41–43. 5 Surette, Eleusis, 100. 6 Moody, Poet, vol. 1, 4–5. 7 Stock, Life, 70 ff., 154–55; Moody, Poet, vol. 1, 114. 8 Sharrona Pearl, About Faces: Physiognomy in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 1–2, 192. 9 L. Rainey, Monument, 217, 334; Kenner, Pound Era, 429. 10 J/M, 31. 11 Browning, The Poems of Browning, vol. 3, 1846–1861, ed. John Woolford, Daniel Karlin, and Joseph Phelan (New York: Routledge, 2014), 162. 12 Quoted in Matthew Grimley, Citizenship, Community, and the Church of England: Liberal Anglican Theories of the State Between the Wars (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 184. 13 Eliot, Selected Essays (San Diego, CA: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1932), 314. 14 Moody, Poet, vol. 2, 208; Pound, Pound/Williams: Selected Letters of Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams, ed. Hugh Witemeyer (New York: New Directions, 1996), 168. 15 Hardy, Late Lyrics, xvii.

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16 See Michael Millgate, Thomas Hardy: A Biography Revisited (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). 17 LE, 425. 18 Helmuth Carol Engelbrecht and Frank Cleary Hanighen, Merchants of Death: A Study of the International Armament Industry (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1934), 95 ff., 105. 19 Moody, Poet, vol. 1, 81. 54. AND THEREFORE TENDING 1 Francis Bacon, Novum Organum, ed. Lisa Jardine and Michael Silverthorne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 46. 2 Jiyuan Yu, The Ethics of Confucius and Aristotle: Mirrors of Virtue (New York: Routledge, 2007), 170. 3 SL, 285. 4 See also P/N, 182; Stock, Life, 443; Wilhelm, Tragic Years, 137. 5 Jessica Rosenfeld, Ethics and Enjoyment in Late Medieval Poetry: Love after Aristotle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 2; Jozef Abrams, “The Revised Version of Grosseteste’s Translation of the Nicomachean Ethics,” Bulletin de Philosophie Médiévale 36 (1994): 45 ff. 6 Arthur Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena: Short Philosophical Essays, trans. E. F. J. Payne (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974), 510–18. 7 Rubenstein, Aristotle’s Children, 216, 235–36. 8 For a thorough account of the interrelationship between Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle see Gail Fine, On Ideas: Aristotle’s Criticism of Plato’s Theory of Forms (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). 9 W. P. Ball, Are the Effects of Use and Disuse Inherited? (New York: Humboldt, 1890), 19–20; ODNB, s.v. “Ball, William Platt.” 10 NE, 10–11. 11 Plato, Plato’s Apology of Socrates: An Interpretation, with a New Translation, trans. Thomas G. West (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1979), 48. 12 Ibid., 38. See also C. D. C. Reeve, Socrates in the Apology: An Essay on Plato’s Apology of Socrates (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1989), 69 ff. 13 OED, s.v. “thaumaturgy.” 14 Ann Banfield, The Phantom Table: Woolf, Fry, Russell, and the Epistemology of Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 17. 15 Christine Froula, Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Avant-Garde: War, Civilization, Modernity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 3. 16 SP, 56. 17 Allan Chester Johnson, Paul Robinson Coleman-Norton, and Frank Card Bourne, trans., Ancient Roman Statutes: A Translation with Introduction,

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Commentary, Glossary, and Index (Clark, N.J.: The Lawbook Exchange, 2009), 31. 18 Kraus Jiří, Rhetoric in European Culture and Beyond, trans. Petra Key (Prague: Karolinum Press, 2014), 61. 19 NE, xxii–iii. 20 SP, 239, 261. 21 Jane Calhoun Weaver, “Introduction,” in Sadakichi Hartmann, Critical Modernist: Collected Art Writings (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991), 1–2, 44, 48. 22 NE, 61. 23 Ibid., 14–15. 24 Ibid., 12–13. 25 Ibid., 24–25. 26 Ibid., 16–17. 27 Ibid., 60–61. 28 Ibid., 40–41. 29 Ibid., 50–51. 30 Ibid., 56–57. 31 Ibid., 68–69. 32 Schopenhauer, Parerga, 501. 33 SP, 434; Macintosh, “Medea between the Wars: The Politics of Race and Empire,” in Rebel Women: Staging Ancient Greek Drama Today, ed. Stephen Wilmer and John Dillon (London: Bloomsbury, 2005), 67. 34 Georges Duby, The Age of the Cathedrals: Art and Society, 980–1420, trans. Eleanor Levieux and Barbara Thompson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 211. 35 NE, 77. 36 Ibid., 75–77. 37 Ibid., 79. 38 Ibid., 81. 39 SP, 453. 40 See also Terrell, Companion, 379. 41 Dante, Divina Commedia (Inferno), IV.131. 42 SP, 167. 43 Dante, Divina Commedia (Paradiso), VIII.37. 44 Karl Vossler, Die philosophischen Grundlagen zum “süssen neuen Stil” des Guido Guinicelli, Guido Cavalcanti und Dante Alighieri: Eine Studie (Heidelberg: Carl Winter’s Universitätsbuchhandlung, 1904), 92; LE, 173. 45 NE, 87. 46 Ibid., 89. 47 Ibid., 88–89. 48 Ibid. 49 Ibid., 93.

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50 Ibid., 111–13. 51 Ibid., 113. 52 Ibid., 117. 53 Ibid., 121–23. 54 LE, 167. 55 L. Yount, Biologists, 275–76. 56 NE, 123. 57 Ibid. 58 Ibid., 135. 59 Ibid. 60 Ibid. 61 Aristotle, Aristotle’s Poetics, ed. John Baxter and Patrick Atherton, trans. George Whalley (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1997), 80. 62 NE, 157–63. 63 Ibid., 191. 64 Ibid., 193. 65 Ibid., 211. 66 Ibid., 219. 67 Ibid., 222–23. 68 Ibid., 213. 69 Ibid. 70 Ibid., 252–53. 71 Ibid., 265. 72 Ibid., 267. 73 Ibid., 291, 249. 74 Ibid., 268–69. 75 Ibid., 273–74. 76 Ibid., 281. 77 Ibid. 78 Ibid., 283. 79 Ibid., 285. 80 Rabaté, Language, 205, 229. 81 NE, 286–87. 82 Ibid., 287. 83 See Irving Fisher, The Money Illusion (New York: Adelphi, 1928); Surette, Purgatory, 188. 84 NE, 286–87. 85 Ibid., 315–17. 86 Ibid. 87 Ibid., 293. 88 Ibid., 413, 287, 317. 89 Ibid., 325.

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90 Aristotle, Metaphysics, Books I–IX, trans. Hugh Tredennick, vol. 1 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1933), 85. 91 NE, 343. 92 Ibid., 335. 93 Martin Heidegger, Basic Concepts of Aristotelian Philosophy, trans. Robert D. Metcalf and Mark B. Tanzer (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2009), 121–22, 71. 94 NE, 343. 95 Ibid., 345–47. 96 Ibid., 351. 97 Ibid., 343. 98 Ibid., 332–33; 352. 99 Philip Merlan, Monopsychism Mysticism Metaconsciousness: Problems of the Soul in the Neoaristotelian and Neoplatonic Tradition (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 2012), 29; cf. M. Byron, Eriugena, 170. 100 NE, xxii. 101 Douglas E. Haynes, Rhetoric and Ritual in Colonial India: The Shaping of a Public Culture in Surat City, 1852–1928 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991), 233–34. 102 NE, 302–3. 103 LSJ, s.v. “συγγνωμον-ικός, ή, όν.” 104 NE, 362–63. 105 Liebregts, Neoplatonism, 110. 106 Louis Groarke, An Aristotelian Account of Induction: Creating Something from Nothing (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2009), 242. 107 NE, 366–67; LSJ, s.v. “δεινότης.” 108 NE, 369. 109 Aquinas, Summa, vol. 2, ed. Timothy McDermott, 87. 110 Henk Versnel, Coping with the Gods: Wayward Readings in Greek Theology (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 50. 111 Homer, Odyssey, V.111, 115–16. 112 See John R. Butler, The Red Dean of Canterbury: The Public and Private Faces of Hewlett Johnson (London: Scala, 2011). 113 E. E. Cummings, No Thanks, ed. George James Firmage (New York: Liveright, 1978), 30. 114 Mary Anna Bader, Tracing the Evidence: Dinah in Post-Hebrew Bible Literature (New York: Peter Lang, 2008), 133–34. See also Robert Casillo, The Genealogy of Demons: Anti-Semitism, Fascism, and the Myths of Ezra Pound (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988), 40. 115 NE, 255, 381, 335. 116 LSJ, s.v. “ἕξις.”

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117 Bonnie Kent, “Habits and Virtues,” in The Ethics of Aquinas, ed. Stephen J. Pope (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 2002), 118. 118 Corydon Ireland, “Harvard’s Long-ago Student Risings,” Harvard Gazette, Apr. 19, 2012, accessed Aug. 12, 2014, http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/ story/2012/04/harvards-long-ago-student-risings/ 119 Patricia A. Rosenmeyer, The Poetics of Imitation: Anacreon and the Anacreontic Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 12. 120 LSJ, s.v. “πηρόω.” 121 NE, 376–77. 122 Ibid., 409. See also Jessica Wolfe, Homer and the Question of Strife from Erasmus to Hobbes (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015), 227. 123 LSJ, s.v. “παράφᾰσις.” 124 NE, 410–11. 125 Ibid., 489. 126 Ibid., 491. 127 Ibid., 513. 128 Ibid., 547. 129 Ibid., 577. 130 Ibid., 577–79. 131 Ibid., 578–79. 132 Dante, Divina Commedia (Paradiso), XXXIII.33. 133 Ibid., I.135. 134 NE, 585–87. 135 Ibid., 587. 136 Ibid., 586–87. 137 Ibid., 595–97. 138 Ibid., 598–99. 139 Ibid., 606–7. 140 Ibid., 612–15; Philip V. Cannistraro, ed., Historical Dictionary of Fascist Italy (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1982), 43. See also C. Paul, Fascist Directive, 193, 252. 141 Ibid., 619. 142 Ibid., 616. 143 Ibid., 619; Aquinas, Summa, vol. 46, 19. 144 LE, 282. See also Scott Hamilton, Ezra Pound and the Symbolist Inheritance (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992), 98–99. 145 NE, 623. 146 Ibid., 387. 147 Ibid., 629. 148 Ibid., 631. 149 Ibid., 641–43. 150 Ibid., 643.

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151 Curtis N. Johnson, Philosophy and Politics in Aristotle’s Politics (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 16. 55 PERGAMENA DEEST 1 Pound, Personae, 21–23. 2 NE, xxii–xxiii. 3 See Mark Perrino, The Poetics of Mockery: Wyndham Lewis’s The Apes of God and the Popularization of Modernism (London: W.S. Maney & Son, 1995), 140. 56. WATCH THE BEANERIES Stephen C. Ferruolo, The Origins of the University: The Schools of Paris and their Critics, 1100–1215 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1985), 300. 2 SL, 99. 3 See also Moody, Poet, vol. 1, 30; Wallace, “America,” 215–16. 4 Binyon, Dante, The Selected Works, ed. Paolo Milano (London: Chatto & Windus, 1947), 115. 5 Dante, Divina Commedia (Inferno), XXI.139. 1

57. EPILOGUE 1 2

John Warren, “Edwin Alfred Rickards,” in Edwardian Architecture and its Origins, ed. Alastair Service (London: Architectural Press, 1975), 341. GB, 88. 58. TO RECAPITULATE

1 LE, 45. 2 Roland Barthes, Michelet, trans. Richard Howard (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992), 23. 3 SP, 149. 4 The pagination (“322”) cited in GK refers to the 1926 first edition of Rackham’s translation. It may be an editorial citation, given that Pound evidently used the 1934 revised edition, in which V.iii.7 is found on p. 269. ADDENDA 1952 1 St. George Stock, “Introduction,” in The Works of Aristotle [Magna Moralia], ed. W. D. Ross, vol. 9 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1915), v.

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2 George Cyril Armstrong, “Introduction,” in Metaphysics: Bks. 10–14, Vol. II [Magna Moralia], by Aristotle, vol. 287 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1935), 436. 3 Charles A. Beard, “Introduction,” in The Law of Civilization and Decay: An Essay on History, by Brooks Adams (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1943), 51. 4 SP, 307. 5 Dorothy Whitelock, ed., English Historical Documents, 500–1042 (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), 374–77. 6 EB, s.v. “Sir William Blackstone.” 7 See Akhil Reed Amar, America’s Constitution: A Biography (New York: Random House, 2005). 8 Stock, Life, 360; Gallup, Bibliography, 64. The complete text of the Introductory Textbook is also showcased in SP, 159–60. 9 John Adams, The Works of John Adams (Letters and State Papers, 1782– 1799), ed. Charles Francis Adams, vol. 8 (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1853), 447. 10 Jefferson, Writings, vol. 7, 8. 11 J/M, 116–17. 12 SP, 296. 13 Abraham Lincoln, Selected Writings of Abraham Lincoln, ed. Albert Bushnell Hart (New York: Gregg Publishing, 1944), 404. 14 The Constitution of the United States of America (Washington, D.C.: United States Government Printing Office, 2007), 4, 10. 15 Surette, Purgatory, 131. 16 Willis A. Overholser, A Short Review and Analysis of the History of Money in the United States, with an Introduction to the Current Money Problem (Libertyville, IL: Progress Publishing Concern, 1936), 7, 44. 17 George B. Grey, Federal Reserve System: Background, Analyses and Bibliography (New York: Nova Science Publishers, 2002), 77. 18 Overholser, History of Money, 40. 19 Glenn Fowler, “Jerry Voorhis, ’46 Nixon Foe,” New York Times, Sept. 12, 1984, sec. Obituaries. 20 Jerry Voorhis, Confessions of a Congressman (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1947), 167. 21 Surette, Purgatory, 132. 22 C. H. Douglas, Economic Democracy (London: Cecil Palmer, 1920), 100. 23 Cf. Surette, Purgatory, 190 ff. 24 Pound (trans.), Confucius, 61. Transcribed in Simplified Chinese, the characters read, 一言偾事. 25 Rabaté, Language, 229–30. 26 NE, 188–89.

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27 Mill, Principles of Political Economy, 70. See also Pound’s “Gold and Work” (1944/1951): “Marx and Mill, in spite of their superficial differences, agreed in endowing money with properties of a quasi-religious nature,” in SP, 346–47. 28 Karl Marx, Marx: Later Political Writings, ed. Terrell Carver (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 208 (emphasis in original). 29 Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, ed. Friedrich Engels and Ernest Untermann, trans. Samuel Moore and Edward B. Aveling, vol. 1 (Chicago: C. H. Kerr and Company, 1909), 59. 30 John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark, “The Paradox of Wealth: Capitalism and Ecological Destruction,” Monthly Review, Nov. 1, 2009, accessed May 23, 2015, http://monthlyreview.org/2009/11/01/the-paradox-ofwealth-capitalism-and-ecological-destruction/ 31 SP, 272–73. See also Surette, Purgatory, 147 ff. 32 Alexander Del Mar, Money and Civilization: Or, A History of the Monetary Laws and Systems of Various States since the Dark Ages, and their Influence upon Civilization (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1886), 225. 33 Bridson, “Interview,” 159–84. Gallup, Bibliography, 444; Moody, Ezra Pound: Poet, A Portrait of the Man and His Work, vol. 3, The Tragic Years 1939–1972 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 456. 34 SP, 278. See also Redman, Fascism, 149. 35 George Santayana, The Letters of George Santayana: Book Four, 1928– 1932, ed. William G. Holzberger (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), 313 (emphasis in original). 36 Santayana, Dominations and Powers: Reflections on Liberty, Society, and Government (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1951), 400. 37 SL, 334; Stock, Life, 372–73. 38 Roger L. Emerson, “The Scottish Contexts for David Hume’s Political–Economic Thinking,” in David Hume’s Political Economy, ed. Carl Wennerlind and Margaret Schabas (New York: Routledge, 2008),16; Antoin E. Murphy, John Law: Economic Theorist and Policy-Maker (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 59. 39 Gesell, Natural Economic Order, 202. 40 Benjamin Franklin, The Political Thought of Benjamin Franklin, ed. Ralph Louis Ketcham (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2003), 51. 41 SP, 263. 42 Fisher, Radio Operas, 20, 23, 132; Gallup, Bibliography, 63, 317. 43 LE, 26. 44 ABCR, 104. 45 LE, 74. 46 Pound cites Rodin’s “statuette” in a letter to Harriet Monroe of August 21, 1917, in SL, 116.

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47 François Villon, Œuvres complètes de François Villon, publiées avec une étude sur Villon, des notes, la liste des personnages historiques et la bibliographie, ed. M. Louis Moland (Paris: Garnier frères, 1879), 54–58. Given the variants in spelling, I have chosen the Moland edition of 1879 because it most closely resembles Rudge’s own spelling. The authoritative edition of Villon’s work is the Longnon-Foulet edition published in 1932. 48 Villon, The Testaments of François Villon, trans. John Heron Lepper (New York: Liveright, 1924), 35–37, 105. 49 Jane H. M. Taylor, The Poetry of François Villon: Text and Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 95. 50 Quoted in M. Fisher, Radio Operas, 19–20. 51 M. Fisher, Radio Operas, 132. See also Moody, Poet, vol. 2, 23–28. 52 Quoted in Donald Maurice, Bartók’s Viola Concerto: The Remarkable Story of His Swansong, Studies in Musical Genesis and Structure (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 37. 53 William Ander Smith, The Mystery of Leopold Stokowski (Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1990), 23, 32; Terrell, Companion, 140. 54 SL, 268; Moody, Poet, vol. 2, 183. 55 LE, 86. 56 M. Fisher, Radio Operas, 23, 228. 57 LE, 197. 58 SP, 324. 59 M. Fisher, Radio Operas, 2, 89, 131 ff. It was also Harding who recruited D. G. Bridson (cf. note GK 148), in Seán Street, Historical Dictionary of British Radio (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015), 162. 60 ATH, 43. 61 SP, 424; see also Kimberly Fairbrother Canton, “Opera as Translation: Ezra Pound’s Le Testament,” University of Toronto Quarterly 79, no. 3 (2010): 941–57. 62 See also Lihui Yang, Deming An, and Jessica Anderson Turner, Handbook of Chinese Mythology (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 98. 63 Robert Hughes and Margaret Fisher, Cavalcanti: A Perspective on the Music of Ezra Pound (Emeryville, CA: Second Evening Art, 2003), 47, 56, 114; M. Fisher, Radio Operas, 171–95; Hughes and M. Fisher, “Cavalcanti,” EPE, 54. 64 Giuseppe Verdi and Arrigo Boito, Otello: A Lyrical Drama in Four Acts, trans. Francis Hueffer (Boston: Oliver Ditson and Co., 1888), 46; Budden, Verdi (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 55, 380–81. 65 ATH, 79–81.

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66 Henry Lawes, Ayres and Dialogues: For One, Two, and Three Voyces (London: John Playford, 1653), iii. See also Ian Spink, Henry Lawes: Cavalier Songwriter (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 100–102. 67 Pound, “Music,” The New Age 25, no. 6 (June 5, 1919): 103. 68 ATH, 104–5. 69 Jann Pasler, “Debussy the Man, His Music, and His Legacy: An Overview of Current Research,” Notes—Quarterly Journal of the Music Library Association 69, no. 2 (Dec. 2012): 204. 70 K. K. Ruthven, A Guide to Ezra Pound’s Personae (1926) (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1969), 59. 71 Eric Frederick Jensen, Debussy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 209–10. 72 Pound, “Music,” The New Age 13, no. 1 (May 2, 1918): 11. 73 Jacqueline Waeber, “Yvette Guilbert and the Revaluation of the Chanson Populaire and Chanson Ancienne during the Third Republic, 1889–1914,” in The Oxford Handbook of the New Cultural History of Music, ed. Jane F. Fulcher (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 264 ff. 74 Hughes and Fisher, Cavalcanti, 52. 75 Caryl Flinn, Brass Diva: The Life and Legends of Ethel Merman (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2007), viii, 48. 76 EB, s.v. “Ezio Pinza.” 77 M. Fisher, The Recovery of Ezra Pound’s Third Opera Collis O Heliconii: Settings of Poems by Catullus and Sappho (Emeryville, CA: Second Evening Art, 2005), xii, xix, 3, 31, 58. 78 SL, 91. 79 Hughes and Fisher, Cavalcanti, 48; M. Fisher, Radio Operas, 276. 80 Moody, Poet, vol. 2, 116. 81 Bradford Morrow and Bernard Lafourcade, A Bibliography of the Writings of Wyndham Lewis (Santa Barbara, CA: Black Sparrow Press, 1978), 229–31. 82 SP, 327–28. Curiously, a similar point comes up in Proverb Lore (1906), a book by the Staffordshire naturalist and artist Frederick Edward Hulme (1841–1909) (no relation to T. E. Hulme). Hulme points out how rarely people remember proverbs, notwithstanding the thousands of examples, adding that if his readers “will turn their thoughts inwards . . . they will probably find that half a sheet of note-paper will very comfortably suffice to put down their stores,” in Frederick Edward Hulme, Proverb Lore; Many Sayings, Wise or Otherwise, on Many Subjects, Gleaned from Many Sources (London: Elliot Stock, 1906), 16.

Index

Abélard, Peter 210 Abu al-Walid Muhammad ibn Rushd see Averroes Abu Hamid see Algazel Abu Sina see Avicenna Abu’l-Fida 170 Action (London) 274 Active Anthology 26, 99 “Adam Bell, Clim of the Clough, and William of Cloudesley” 298, 308 Adams, Brooks 362 Adams, Henry 362 Adams, John 42–43, 46, 48, 66–67, 168, 218, 246, 274–75, 283, 359, 362, 364, 371–72 Adams, John Quincy 283, 284, 362 Addison, Joseph 64 Aemilianus, Publius Cornelius Scipio 164 Aeschylus 45, 63, 127, 128–29, 301, 342, 344, 362 Aesop 297 Agassiz, Louis 354 Agostino di Duccio 22 Agresti, Olivia Rossetti 70 Alaric II 293–94 Alaric the Visigoth 184 Albert Memorial (London) 280

Albert, Prince of England 280–81 Alberti, Leon Battista 21, 22 Alcaeus 387–88 Alcázar (Seville) 78, 150 Alexander the Great (Alexander III) 55, 57 Alexander VI, Pope 277 Alfonso XIII, King of Spain 280 Algazel (Abu Hamid) 78 Alhambra (Granada) 78, 150 Amen-Ra (Amun-Ra) 95 American Mercury (New York) 218–19 Amir-nasir-pal (Ashur-nasir-pal II) 95 Amman, Jost 234 Anacreon 344, 384 Anarchism 70, 123 Anaxagoras 162 Anaximander (Anaximandros) 159, 160 Anaximenes 159 Anderson, Margaret 134, 307, 388–89 Angiolieri, Cecco 309 Anne, Queen 253, 311 Anschauung 7, 44, 196, 264 Antheil, George 101–2, 119, 131, 243, 373, 379–80 Anthony, Susan B. 268 Antonelli, Giacomo 108, 206, 277 Antoninus Pius 64–65

459

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Aphrodite (Venus) 83, 148, 155, 185, 205, 227, 328, 344–45, 388 Apollinaire, Guillaume 235 Apollo 13, 23, 43, 58, 113, 228, 308, 314 Appian of Alexander 289 Aquinas see St Thomas Aquinas Aragon, Louis 104 Archimedes 154–55, 163 Archipenko, Alexander 98 Argicida 83 Aristophanes 46, 344 Aristotle 2, 10, 31, 42, 45–46, 47, 55, 69, 70, 78, 99, 106, 110–11, 138, 161, 165, 170, 202–3, 208, 232, 248, 264, 296–97, 317–53, 359, 361, 370, 411n15 Constitution of Athens 351 Economics 70, 318 Eudemian Ethics 361 Magna Moralia 361 Metaphysics 161, 337 Nicomachean Ethics 31, 106, 110, 296–97, 317–53, 359–60, 361 Physics 165 Poetics 170, 332–33, 351 Armstrong, George Cyril 361 Arnaut de Mareuil (Maruelh) 352 Arnold, Matthew 163 Arouet, François-Marie see Voltaire Arp, Jean 123 Art and Letters (London) 389 Asellio 289 Asquith, H. H. 144, 243 Atheling, William (Ezra Pound) 385–86 Athena (Minerva) 13, 23, 187, 228 Attack! (London) 315 Atti, Isotta degli 20–21, 22 Atticus, Titus Pomponius 289 Augustine of Hippo see St Augustine of Hippo Augustus Caesar 67–68 Aunt Frank see Frances Weston Averroes (Abu al-Walid Muhammad ibn Rushd) 78, 319 Avicenna (Abu Sina) 78, 281, 339–40

Babbitt, Irving 198, 199 Bach, Johann Sebastian 15, 101, 196–97, 243, 252, 269, 272, 380 Bacon, Sir Francis 205, 317, 318, 328 Baldwin, Stanley 76–77, 190–91 Balfour, Arthur James 144 Ball, Hugo 123 Ball, William Platt 319 Balzac, Honoré de 63, 100, 119, 186 Banks 49, 52–53, 56, 64, 71–72, 181, 207–8, 225, 253, 262–63, 267, 288, 292, 328, 365–66, 369 Austrian central bank 207–8 Banca Commerciale Italiana 292 Banca Monte dei Paschi (Siena) 229, 258 Bank for International Settlements (Basel) 116 Bank of England 267, 293 Bank of Italy 181 Banking Reform Act (1936) 181–82 Banque de France 116 Export-Import Bank of the United States 171 Federal Reserve Bank (USA) 365–66 Medici bank 22 Barnard, Mary 99 Barral, Jean 70 Barrès, Maurice 124–25 Barry, Iris 86, 119, 128 Bartók, Béla 175, 176, 222, 380 Baruch, Bernard 289 Baxter, Richard 109–10, 316, 345 Bayle, Pierre 80, 122, 238 Bazin, Antoine 44 Beard, Charles Austin 67, 362 Bedaux, Charles 291 Beddoes, Thomas Lovell 302 Bedford, Agnes 383 Beecham, Sir Thomas 275 Beerbohm, Max 26, 27 Beethoven, Ludwig van 192, 252 Bell, Clive 321 Bell, Herbert Clifford Francis 159 Bell, Vanessa 321

Index Bellini, Giovanni 22, 155, 202 Belvedere (Milan) 85 Berenson, Bernard 197 Bergson, Henri 74 Berkeley, George 218, 283 Bernard, Pierre-Joseph 216 Beroul 299 Bertini, Giovanni Maria 160 Bertrans de Born (Bertran de Born) 93, 146 Besard, Jean-Baptiste 193–94 Bias of Priene 113 Binyon, Laurence 41, 169, 217, 228, 263–64, 355 Bird, Otto 80–81, 106 Blackstone, Sir William 363 Blair, Eric Arthur see George Orwell Blake, William 104, 195, 217 Blast (London) 74, 92–93, 96, 98–99, 126, 132, 144–45, 168–69, 174, 284, 307 Blavatsky, Madame Helena Petrovna 249 Bloomsbury Group 321 Boccaccio, Giovanni 175–76, 299, 383 Boccherini, Luigi 175, 177, 189, 273, 383 Bonfligli, Benedetto 154 Boni & Liveright (publisher) 33 Boniface IX, Pope 158 The Bookman (New York) 82 Borah, William 268–69, 278–79 Borgia dynasty 277 Bosschère, Jean de 307–8 Bossuet, Jacques-Bénigne 8, 105, 206, 343 Boston Herald 210 Bottai, Giuseppe 189 Botticelli, Sandro 154–55, 278 Bottome, Phyllis 199–200, 304 Bourbon dynasty 157, 281 Boyle, Kay 33 Bradley, F. H. 247 Brâncuşi, Constantin 82, 85–86, 98, 101, 134, 142, 185, 227 Brantôme, Pierre de Bourdeille, Seigneur et Abbé de 238, 300 Breasted, James Henry 89–90

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Breton, André 104, 123 Bridson, D. G. 189–90, 368 Brinkley, Frank 114 Broletto (Como) 178 Brookings Institution 56 Brown, John Lackay 5, 229 Browning, Elizabeth Barrett 45 Browning, Robert 13, 45, 147, 202, 250, 302, 303, 306–7, 315 Sordello 147–48, 306–7, 381, 382–83, 387 Bruni, Leonardo 70 Brunnenburg Castle (Dorf Tirol) 24, 395n15 Buchan, John 159 Bunting, Basil 25–27 Burne-Jones, Edward 303–4 Burns, Robert 244 Butchart, Montgomery 5, 69–70, 88–89, 211, 266–67, 297, 366–67 Butler, Nicholas Murray 8, 117, 206, 210, 259 Byron, George Gordon, Lord 45, 168, 222 Caballero, Ernesto Giménez 201 Cabaret Voltaire 123 Caesar, Julius 67, 167 Cairoli, Luigi Pasquale 50–51 Caldara, Antonio 273 Callimachus 344 Calvert, Bruce T. 200 Calvin, John 109–10, 166, 343, 345 Campbell, Thomas 302 Campion, Thomas 198, 379 The Canadian Theosophist (Toronto) 34 Capone, Alphonse Gabriel “Al” 199, 268 Carl, Katharine A. 114–15, 288 Carnegie, Andrew 258 Carnegie Endowment for International Peace 117, 206, 258–59 Carpaccio, Vittore 154–55 Carus, Paul 44 Casella, Alfredo 272 Castiglione, Baldassare 186–87, 333

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Cato the Younger 164 Catullus, Gaius Valerius 36, 133, 204, 344, 381, 387–88 Cavalcanti, Bartolomeo 89 Cavalcanti, Guido 42, 78, 80–81, 89, 147–48, 159, 186, 200, 203, 246, 282–83, 298, 309, 329, 330–31, 373, 381, 382–83, 387–88 Cavour, Camillo Benso, Count of 108–9, 181, 206, 250, 282, 291 Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de 63–64 Chabaneau, Camille 147–48 Chak Mool 155 Champollion, Jean-François 155–56 Chang (Shāng) 35 Chao-tseng-mao (Shaozheng Mao) 292–93 Charlemagne (Charles the Great, or Charles I) 70–71, 336 Charles, duc d’Orléans 385–86 Charles I (England) 109, 157 Charles the Bald (Charles II) 106 Chaucer, Geoffrey 13, 216, 298–300, 303, 308 Chaumpaigne, Cecilia de 298 Chaytor, Henry J. 146–47 Cheltenham Military Academy 45, 186 Chemon 164 Cheng Tang see Emperor Tching Chesterton, Gilbert Keith 82, 110–11 Chilon of Sparta 113 Ch’ing (Qing) dynasty 115, 249, 270, 397n14 Ch’ing ming (“precise terminology”) 39, 84, 265 Chopin, Frédéric 156 Chow (Zhou) dynasty 96, 163 Chrétien de Troyes 148, 298 Chrysippus 164 Chu dynasty 37 Chun-Tchi, Emperor 37, 58, 270 Churches and mosques All Souls Church (London) 315 Carceri di Sant’Ansano, Chiesa delle (Siena) 126

El Escorial, Monasterio de (Madrid) 200 Eremitani, Chiesa degli (Padua) 132 Hagia Sophia (Istanbul) 148–49 Mezquita de Córdoba (Great Mosque of Córdoba) 150 Notre-Dame-La-Grande, Église (Poitiers) 150–51 Saint-Hilaire-le-Grand, Église (Poitiers) 149–51, 196, 202 St Mary Abbots Paris Church (Kensington) 313 St Paul’s Cathedral (London) 196–97 St Trophime, Église (Arles) 149–50 St Ursula in Köln, Kirche (Cologne) 167 Sant’Apollinare in Classe, Basilica di (Ravenna) 149–50 San Francesco, Chiesa di (Rimini) see Tempio Malatestiano San Leo, Duomo di (San Leo) 148–49 San Marco, Basilica Cattedrale Patriarcale di (Venice) 149 San Marco, Convento di (Florence) 51 Santa Maria dei Miracoli, Chiesa di (Venice) 154–55, 176 San Michele in Isola, Chiesa di, and cemetery (Venice) 5 San Vitale, Basilica di (Ravenna) 154–55 San Zeno Maggiore, Basilica di (Verona) 87–88, 148–50 Tempio Malatestiano (Rimini) 13, 20, 22–23, 149–50, 158, 202, 274–75, 314, 395n11 Westminster Cathedral (London) 149 Churchill, Winston 231 Cicero, Marcus Tullius 43, 164, 165, 289 Cino da Pistoia 146 Cixi see Tze-Shi Clarendon Press 335, 361 Clarkson, Willy 341 Clemens, Samuel Langhorne see Mark Twain Clement VII, Pope 158

Index Cleobulus see Kleoboulos Cocteau, Jean 2, 130–32, 142, 258, 326 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 302 Colette, Sidonie-Gabrielle 125 Collins, John Churton 250 Collins, William (publisher) 307 Colonna, Egidio (Giles of Rome) 276 Complete Pictures of the Twenty-Four Exemplars of Filial Piety (Quanxiang Ershi Si Xiao) 34 Concordat, Italian (Conciliazione) 108–9, 226 Conder, Charles 116 Confucius (Kung, or Kung fu Tseu, or Kŏng Qīu) 2, 9, 10, 12, 16, 24, 30–40, 46, 50, 58, 66, 75–76, 84, 97, 118, 140, 163, 168, 170, 176, 184, 185, 198, 218, 233, 236, 242, 249, 254, 257, 259, 265, 270, 275, 285, 291–97, 300, 312, 317, 323, 325, 327, 330–31, 338, 354, 359, 367, 396n1 Analects (Lun Yü) 12, 30–40, 118, 140, 163, 176, 254, 257, 297, 397n14 Doctrine of the Mean (Zhongyong) 34, 118, 163, 233 The Great Learning (Ta Hio or Daxue, or Ta Hsio, The Great Digest) 31, 34, 38–39, 163, 184, 292, 359, 367 Mencius (Mengzi) 34–35, 163 Odes (Shī) 37, 58, 163, 184, 236–37, 251, 254, 257, 259, 270, 285, 300, 354, 359 Spring and Autumn Annals (Chunqiu) 33 Constantine (Flavius Valerius Constantinus) 64–65, 148, 203, 293, 352 Cook, Thomas & Son 307 Coolidge, Calvin 172, 199, 279 Coughlin, Father Charles E. 262, 315 Couperin, François 196 Cournos, John 93, 94, 285 Cowell, Henry 104 Crane, Stephen 125 Crassus, Marcus Licinius 64 Cravens, Margaret 79

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Crawford, William H. 364 Criterion (London) 13, 23, 34, 41, 81, 104, 120, 125, 142, 144, 178, 214, 218, 227, 328 Crivelli, Carlo 154–55 Cromwell, Oliver 109–10 Crowther, Samuel 170–71 Cullis, Michael F. 289 Cummings, Edward Estlin 25, 26, 77, 144, 284, 343, 380 Cummings, Homer 268 Cunizza da Romano 147–48, 162, 203 Curzon, George Nathaniel 50 Cutting, Bronson Murray 278–79, 365 Dada 111, 119–20, 122, 123, 174, 185 Dài Zhèn 397n14 Daily Telegraph (London) 8, 230 Daimio see Tamiosuke Koumé Dana, Francis 284 Daniel, Arnaut 87–88, 100–101, 146, 148, 159, 195, 373, 381 Dante Alighieri 9, 13, 23–24, 41, 42, 53, 80, 85, 87–88, 111, 146–48, 155, 161, 165, 188, 192, 228, 246, 247, 258, 263–64, 299–300, 306–7, 309, 328, 330–31, 341, 346, 348, 352, 353, 345, 355, 362, 381 De Vulgari Eloquentia 85, 87–88, 146–47, 165, 341 La Divina Commedia 9, 23–24, 41, 42, 111, 146, 147–48, 161, 165, 188, 228, 247, 258, 263–64, 307, 328, 346, 348, 352, 355, 362 La Vita Nuova 147 Darwin, Charles 319 David, Ferdinand 197 Dazzi, Manlio Torquato 127 Debussy, Claude 101, 385–86 Decius, Emperor 153 Degas, Edgar 152 De Kruif, Paul 331 Delacroix, Eugène 215 Delcroix, Carlo 251, 270–71 Del Mar, Alexander 368, 370 Delmer, Frederick Sefton 90

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The Delphian Quarterly (Chicago) 127, 272 Demblon, Celestin 205 Demeter 184, 264 DeMille, Cecil B. 131 Democritus 42, 161 Demosthenes 60–61, 64, 191, 279 Descartes, René 111–12, 170, 207, 318 Des Imagistes 93, 118, 129, 133, 273 d’Este, Ginevra 195 d’Este, Niccolò 195 Diaghilev, Sergei 271 The Dial (Chicago, New York) 125, 156, 178, 330, 386, 405n47 Diana (Artemis) 13, 23 Dias, B. H. (Ezra Pound) 266 Dickens, Charles 316 Ding of Lu, Duke 291 Dionysus 184–85 Disciplinary Training Center (DTC, Pisa) 45 Dis Pater see Hades Dobson, Austin 195, 216 Dolmetsch, Arnold 101, 255, 269, 385 Donatello (Donato di Niccolò di Betto Bardi) 343 Dong Qichang 97 Donne, John 186 Doolittle, Hilda (H. D.) 129–30, 273 End to Torment: A Memoir of Ezra Pound 129–30 Ion: A Play After Euripides 129–30 Douanier, Le see Henri Julien Rousseau Doubleday (publisher) 307 Doughty, Charles 288 Douglas, Gavin 191, 270 Douglas, Major Clifford Hugh 69–70, 71–72, 171–72, 201, 225, 251, 366, 368–69, 370 Dowland, John 193–94 Dreier, Katherine S. 247 Drummond, John 171 Duchamp, Marcel 122, 185, 247 Dudevant, Amantine-Lucile-Aurore (née Dupin) see George Sand

Dulac, Edmund 20 Dunikowski, Xawery 98 Dunn, James Taylor 89 Dürer, Albrecht 151–52 Edison, Thomas 99, 204, 246 Edward VII (Albert Edward) 278 Edward VIII (Edward Albert Christian George Andrew Patrick David) 276 Eftaliotis, Argyris 113 The Egoist (London) 54, 93, 129 Einstein, Albert 58–59 Eleusis (Greece) and Eleusinian Mysteries 184–85, 264, 307, 309 Eliot, Thomas Stearns 3, 4, 8–9, 13–14, 23, 25, 26–27, 28, 82, 83, 87, 106, 125, 128–29, 130, 133–34, 198, 206–7, 214, 215, 217, 218, 246, 247, 302–3, 312, 315, 321, 370 After Strange Gods 198, 312 Thoughts after Lambeth 315 The Waste Land 8, 13–14, 83, 87, 129, 264–65 Elizabeth I, Queen 157, 191 Elizondo, Father José Maria de 200 Elkin Mathews (publisher) 33 Empedocles 160, 161 The English Journal (Chicago) 133 Epicurus 42–43 Epstein, Jacob 98 Era Fascista 4, 159, 282, 323, 333 Eriugena, Johannes Scottus 51, 106, 107, 109, 159, 185, 206, 248, 281, 318, 343 Erlich, Paul 272 Ernst, Max 111 Etchells, Frederic 215 Euclid 170 Eudoxus of Cnidus 138, 346 Eugenius IV, Pope 202 Euripides 128, 129, 344, 362 Eusebius of Caesarea (Eusebius Pamphili) 65, 344 Ezuversity 5, 27–28 Ezzelino III da Romano 148

Index Faber & Faber (publisher) 1, 3, 5–6, 8, 9, 17, 26, 27–28, 84, 89, 99, 124, 214, 230, 238–39, 288, 295, 302–3, 315, 361, 392n39 Fabianism 77, 267 Fack, Dr. Hugo R. 267 Fairbanks, Douglas 323 Fairfax, Sir Thomas 109 Fang, Achilles 34, 163 Fan-Tchai (Fan-Tchi, or Fan Chi’h) 33 Farinacci, Roberto 292 Farley, James “Jim” 268, 289 Fascism, Italian 3, 4, 9, 11, 12, 26, 37, 40, 45, 47, 48, 65, 108–9, 124, 142, 143, 159, 181–82, 200, 201, 208, 223, 226, 251, 262, 263, 274, 282, 292, 295–96, 364 Fascism, Spanish 200, 201 Federico III da Montefeltro 21, 202 Fenollosa, Ernest 30–31, 33, 44, 49, 75–76, 96, 114–15, 140, 188, 189, 328 Certain Noble Plays of Japan 114–16 “The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry” 30–31, 33, 44, 75–76, 189 Epochs of Chinese and Japanese Art 96 Ferdinand II of Aragon 78 Ferdinand II of Naples (King of the Two Sicilies) 281 Ferdinand III of Habsbourg-Lorraine 281–82, 295 Ferrero, Guglielmo 157 Ficino, Marcilio 203, 248 Le Figaro (Paris) 96, 125 Fiorentino, Francesco 46, 161, 162, 163, 322, 343 Fiorentino, Rosso 197 First United States Volunteer Cavalry (a.k.a. Rough Riders) 1 Fisher, Irving 336 Fitzgerald, Francis Scott Key 125 Flaubert, Gustave 72–73, 125, 133, 164, 216, 222, 283, 302, 349, 373 Fogazzaro, Antonio 180 Fontaine, Jean de la 207

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Font-de-Gaume (Dordogne) 93–94 Fontenelle, Bernard le Bovier de 54, 238 Ford, Ford Madox (Hueffer) 119, 127, 175, 273, 280, 284, 301–2, 308 Forschungsinstitut für Kulturmorphologie see Frobenius-Institut Forster, E. M. 321 Fowler, Alfred (Taffy) 316 Fox, Douglas C. 127, 174 Fra Angelico 154 Fracastoro, Girolamo 251 France, Anatole 215 Francesco da Barberino 309 Francesco da Milano 193–94 Franchetti, Luigi 269 Franck, César 269 Franco, Francisco 200, 231 Franklin, Benjamin 371 Franz Ferdinand 190–91 Frazer, Sir James George 83, 291 Frederic II of Sicily (Frederick II of Hohenstaufen) 279–80 Freud, Sigmund 100, 129–30, 321, 352, 354 Frobenius, Leo 7, 48, 82–83, 85, 88, 94, 102, 113, 127, 138, 174, 193, 231, 235, 243, 263, 264, 291, 362, 399–400n30 Frobenius-Institut (Frankfurt am Main, a.k.a. Forschungsinstitut für Kulturmorphologie) 88, 89–90, 127, 174, 193 Fry, Roger 321 Funk & Wagnalls Standard Encyclopedia of the World’s Knowledge 81 Futurism 96, 186 La Gaceta Literaria (Madrid) 201 Galileo Galilei 73, 105 Gallus, Lucius Plotius 322 Galsworthy, John 74 Gandhi, Mahatma Mohandas Karamchand 340–41 Garbett of Winchester, Bishop 315 Garbo, Dino del 80–81

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Garibaldi, Giuseppe 282 Gassendi, Pierre 42–43 Gaudier-Brzeska, Henri 55–56, 72, 82, 85, 86, 92–102, 107, 132, 142, 173, 178, 250, 284, 358 Hieratic Head of Ezra Pound 56, 92–93 Gauthier-Villars, Henri 125 Gautier, Judith 233 Gautier, Pierre Jules Théophile 13, 216, 233, 250, 302, 308, 381 The Germ: Thoughts Towards Nature in Literature, Poetry, and Art (London) 304 Gershwin, George 211 Gesell, Silvio 61, 69, 70, 71–72, 207, 208, 225, 267, 284, 295–96, 366, 368–69, 370–71 Ghibellines 309 Gide, André 124 Gil Blas (Paris) 125 Giles of Rome see Egidio Colonna Gillings, David John see George Mozart Gilson, Étienne 80–81, 106 Giraut de Borneil 146 Gladstone, William Ewart 281 Goeben, S.M.S. 251 Golding, Arthur 191, 270, 427n38 Goldsmith, Oliver 215 Goleyevsky, Honor 57–58, 117–18 Goncourt, Edmond de 119 Goncourt, Jules de 119 Góngora, Luis de 216 Gongorism 216 Gorgias 138, 162, 338 Gosse, Edmund 250, 302 Gottschalk of Orbais 106 Gould, Joe 26 Gourmont, Rémy de 10, 75, 123–24, 125, 173, 186, 200, 226, 230, 265, 316, 323 Gower, John 190 Goya, Francisco 49, 156, 222 Grant, Duncan 321 Grant, Ulysses S. 190–91, 283, 288 Gray, Effie 304

Great Bass 73, 103–7, 231, 255–56, 380 Greenwall, Harry James 341 Gregory IX, Pope 354 Gregory, Lady Isabella Augusta 275 Griffith, Arthur 144 Grosseteste, Robert 110, 111, 148, 159, 281, 300 Guelphs 309 Guggenheim, Simon 355 Guilbert, Emma Laure Esther (Yvette) 386 Guillaume de Poitiers 150 Guo Jujin 34 Gurdjieff, Georgii Ivanovich 154 Hades (Pluto, or Dis Pater) 83, 185, 188 Haldane, J. B. S. 73 Halmos, Lászlo 209 Hamilton Literary Review (Clinton, NY) 79–80 Han dynasty 97, 291 Harding, Edward Archibald Fraser 382–83, 386, 457n59 Harding, Warren G. 172, 199 Hardy, Thomas 5, 8, 13, 301, 302, 303, 304, 306, 308, 315–16 Hargrave, John 315 Harper’s Weekly (New York) 81 Hartmann, Sadakichi 323–24 Harvey, Colonel George Brinton McClellan 81 Haydn, Joseph 222 Haynes, E. S. P. 277 Heap, Jane 134 Hecht, Ben 131 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 211, 247 Heian period 294 Hemingway, Ernest 26, 102, 169, 188 Hennings, Emmy 123 Hennique, Léon 125 Henry VIII, King 13, 308–9 Henschke, Alfred (Klabund) 232 Hera 344 Heraclitus 53, 58, 113, 161, 162, 350 Hercules 47

Index Hermant, Abel 125 Hermes 342 Hermes Trismegestus 248 Herodotus 7, 44, 54, 55, 60, 64, 279 Hesiod 168, 191, 320 Heydon, John 248–49 Hindemith, Paul 197 Hitler, Adolph 171, 174–75, 200, 288–89 Hobbes, Thomas 43 Hogben, Lancelot 3, 4 Hollis, Christopher 206, 266–67, 366–67 Homer 44–45, 53, 54, 55, 62, 64, 99–100, 113, 116, 134, 139, 168, 184, 185, 186, 187, 191, 192, 236, 257, 279, 320, 339, 342, 344–45, 361, 381 Iliad 44–45, 55, 99, 186, 257, 344–45 Margites 339 The Odyssey 44–45, 53, 62, 99, 113, 134, 139, 184, 185, 186, 187–88, 236, 257, 342, 361 Honegger, Arthur 272 Honorius III 106 Hoover, Herbert 172, 190–91, 199 Hopkins, Gerard Manley 308 Hsiă dynasty 37 Hudson Review (New York) 30 Hughes, Glenn 33 Hulme, Frederick Edward 458n82 Hulme, Thomas Ernest 32, 217, 249, 389 Hume, David 64, 71, 370 Hunt, William Holman 303–4 Huxley, Sir Julian Sorell 73 Huxley, Thomas Henry 319 Hymen 388 Iamblichus 247–48 Ibbotson, Joseph Darling 4, 5 Ickes, Harold L. 271 ideogrammic method 10, 12, 30–31, 49, 75–76, 107, 323, 328 Imagism 32, 90, 92, 93, 118, 129, 130, 133, 194–95, 202, 273, 279, 358, 389 Impressionism 96, 116, 300 Ingres, Jean-August-Dominique 49 Ionides, Luke 250

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Isabella I of Castile 78 Ito, Michio 243, 295 Jackson, Andrew 51–52, 365 Jackson, Colonel Joseph 250 Jacopo da Pontormo 197 Jahn, Gustav 235 James II, King 253, 301 James VI of Scotland 157, 253 James, Henry 53–54, 81, 117, 119, 151, 173, 226, 232, 250, 303, 304 Janco, Marcel 123 Janequin, Clément 87–88, 193–94, 195, 271 Jefferson, Thomas 24, 43, 47, 52, 67, 210–11, 218, 274, 283, 359, 364, 365, 371 Jennings, William 31, 242 John VIII Palaeologus 202 Johnson, Andrew 51–52 Johnson, Hewlett 211, 342 Johnson, Lionel Pigot 238 Johnson, Samuel 27, 215, 216, 222 Jonson, Ben 217 Joseph II, Emperor 190 Journal of Land and Public Utility Economics (Madison, Wisc.) 319 Joyce, James 41, 74, 133, 134, 135, 170, 253, 282 Dubliners 133 Finnegans Wake 133 A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man 133 Ulysses 74, 133, 134, 135, 170, 282 Jupiter see Zeus Justinian the Great 64–65, 148, 149, 293, 352 Kant, Immanuel 44, 166, 211 Kao Tseu 97 Karl of Innsbruck, Archduke Ferdinand 252 Karsten, Simon 160 Katue, Kitasono 34, 76, 123, 178 Keats, John 78–79

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Keynes, John Maynard 56, 321 Khan, Esther 100 King, Richard John 299 Kipling, Joseph Rudyard 13, 174, 188, 229, 232, 306 Klabund see Alfred Henschke Kleoboulos (Cleobulus) 113 Knox, Philander Chase 268–69 Kolisch Quartet 176 Koromzay, Dénes 176, 209 Koumé, Tamiosuke (Daimio) 295 kulchur 2, 3, 6–7, 11, 12, 13, 14–15, 16, 24 Kung (Kung fu Tseu) see Confucius Lacharme, Père 236–37, 242, 247, 251, 259, 270, 277 Ladislaus, King of Naples 158 Laelius, Gaius 164 Laforgue, Jules 323, 349 Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste 319 Lanchester, Henry Vaughan 358 Landor, Walter Savage 119, 238, 250, 302, 303 Lang, William Cosmo Gordon 9, 230 Larousse, Pierre 192 Larrañaga, Pedro Juan Manuel 266–67, 366–67 Lascaux (Dordogne) 93–94 La Tour du Pin Chambly, René 134–35, 283 Laughlin, James 6, 27–28, 263 Laurencie, Lionel de la 192 Lavignac, Albert 177, 192 Law, John 370 Lawes, Henry 198, 384–86 Lawrence, T. E. 192 Léger, Fernand 101, 185, 211 Legge, James 32, 37–39, 118, 236, 242, 247, 325, 397n14 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 73, 105, 107, 211, 252, 343 Leipzig Conservatory of Music 49–50 Lenin, Vladimir 262 Leo X, Pope 105–6, 343 Leo XIII, Pope 251

Leopold I of Belgium 280 Leopoldo, Pietro (Leopold I of Tuscany, Leopold II of the Holy Roman Empire) 51–52, 216, 281, 295 Lepper, John Heron 376–79 Leucippus 42 Lévy, Emil 87 Lewis, Percy Wyndham 25, 73, 92–93, 98, 101, 132, 139, 142, 144–45, 174–75, 190, 235, 249, 255–56, 264–65, 266, 316, 352, 388–89 The Apes of God 352 The Art of Being Ruled 264–65 Blasting and Bombardiering 255–56, 389 “Cantleman’s Spring-Mate” 205, 388–89 The Diabolical Principle 266 Hitler 174–75 The Hitler Cult 175 The Ideal Giant 388–89 The Lion and the Fox: The Role of the Hero in the Plays of Shakespeare 205 Tarr 205, 316 Time and Western Man 255 “The War Baby” 389 Lewis, Sinclair 199 Li Hung-Chang 288 Li Po (Rihaku) 188–89, 233, 257 Li Shimin see Taï Tsong Libraries and archives consulted by Pound and his friends Archivio di Stato (Modena) 20 Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana (Vatican City) 89, 198 Biblioteca Capitolare (Verona) 89 Biblioteca Comunale degli Intronati (Siena) 89 Biblioteca Malatestiana (Cesena) 127 Biblioteca Marciana (Venice) 89, 248 Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana (Florence) 23, 89 Biblioteca Nazionale Universitaria di Torino (Turin) 189, 258

Index Biblioteca Riccardiana (Florence) 89 Bibliothèque Nationale de France (Paris) 246, 385–86 British Museum Library see Museums, British Museum Conservatorio di musica “Giuseppe Verdi” di Milano 189 Fondazione Querini Stampalia (Venice) 89 Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Bibliothek—Niedersächsische Landesbibliothek (Hanover) 252 Library of Congress (Washington) 189 Sächsische Landesbibliothek (Dresden) 189 Veneranda Biblioteca Ambrosiana (Milan) 89, 147 Lincoln, Abraham 52, 364, 365–66 L’indice (Genoa) 105 Ling of Wei, Duke see Prince of Mei The Little Review (New York) 53, 71, 86, 133, 134, 205, 214, 279, 282, 307, 388–89, 447n9 Lloyd, Marie 125 Lloyd’s Specialist Insurance Market 61 Locke, John 43, 80 Lodge, Henry Cabot 268–69 Loeb Classical Library 100 Lombardo, Pietro 176 London, John Griffith “Jack” 125 Longinus, Dionysius (Pseudo-Longinus) 64 Lorimer, George Horace 125 Louis XIV 105–6, 228 Low, Lady Anne Penelope Harriet Angela 226 Lowe, Elias Avery 246 Lowell, Amy 93, 202, 273 Loy, Mina 382 Lübeck, Vincent 243 Lucretius Carus, Titus 162, 228 Ludwig, Emil 417n7 Lusitania, R.M.S. 225 Luther, Martin 105–6, 343 Lycurgus 54–55, 60

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MacArthur, Charlie 131 Macaulay, Thomas Babington, Baron Macaulay 279 MacDermott, G. H. 152 Macdonald, Hugh 215 Machiavelli, Niccolò di Bernardo dei 173, 205, 276, 277 Mackail, John William 86, 238 Mackenzie, Compton 269 McPherson, Douglas 25 Madariaga, Salvador de 201 Maeterlinck, Maurice 173 Mahl, William 284 Mailla, J. A. M. de Moyriac de 84, 294 Malalas, John 65 Malatesta da Verucchio (Lord of Rimini) 22, 395n8, 395n11 Malatesta dynasty 22 Malatesta, Roberto 20 Malatesta, Sallustio de’ 20–21, 148–49 Malatesta, Sigismundo 13, 20, 21, 22–23, 157, 158, 187, 195, 202, 239, 280, 394n1 Mallarmé, Stéphane 323, 385–86 Manchester Guardian 330 Manet, Édouard 152 Manin, Daniele 282 Manners, Roger (5th Earl of Rutland) 205 Mansfield, Katherine 321 Mantegna, Andrea 132 Manzóni, Alessandro 180–81 Marcebus (Marcabrun) 382 March on Rome 4, 159, 208 Marconi, Guglielmo 105 Marcus Aurelius 66, 67–68, 164 Il Mare (Rapallo) 24, 85, 194, 243, 269, 272, 364 Maria Theresa, Empress 82 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso 96, 186 Marius 47 Marlowe, Christopher 191 Marsh, Edward 168–69 Martini, Simone 126 Marx, Karl 109, 135, 162, 211, 227, 284, 354, 362, 367–69, 370–71, 456n27

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Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots 157, 249 Mascagni, Pietro 197–98 Masoliver, Juan Ramón 226 Massine, Léonide 271 Matsumiya, Hajime 70, 169 Matteo da Pasti 21, 22 Maupassant, Guy de 125 Max Gate (Dorchester, Dorset) 316 Maximillian, Emperor of Mexico 152 May, Anna M. 235 Mazzini, Giuseppe 181, 282 Mead, George Robert Stow 249 Medici, Cosimo de’ 21–22, 51, 202, 203 Medici dynasty 281 Medici, Lorenzo de’ 278 Mellon, Andrew W. 199, 293 Memling, Hans 197 Memmi, Lippo 126 Mencius (Mengzi) 34–35, 76, 163, 218, 354 Mencken, Henry Louis 218–19 Mendelssohn, Felix 156 Mengozzi, Narciso 229 Mengzi see Mencius Mensdorff-Pouilly-Dietrichstein, Count Albert von 117 Le Mercure de France (Paris) 124–25 Merman, Ethel (Ethel Agnes Zimmermann) 386–87 Messala, Marcus Valerius 321–22 Metastasio, Pietro 217 Metropolitan Opera (New York) 387 Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni 197, 278 Michelet, Jules 359 Mill, John Stuart 43, 88–89, 362, 367 Millais, John Everett 303–4 Milton, John 157, 279, 299 Min Ziqian see Min-tseu-kian Minerva see Athena Ming dynasty 97 Mino da Fiesoli 21 Minoru, Umewara 243 Min-tseu-kian (Min Ziqian) 34 Mizi Xia 33

Mizler, Lorenz 252 Modena, Duomo di 149–50 Modigliani, Amedeo 98 Mohammed (Mahomet, or Muhammed) 46, 77, 150, 191 Mondadori (publisher) 299 Monist (Oxford) 44 Monotti, Francesco 85 Monroe, Harriet 25, 124, 185, 301, 456n46 Montaigne, Michel Eyquem de 7, 42, 258 Montessori, Maria 139 Monti, Luigi 127 Monti, Rolando 127 Moore, George 275 Moore, Henry 155 Moore, Marianne 26–27, 382 Moore, Thomas 302 Moreau, Gustave 49 Morgan, John Pierpont 225 Morley, Frank V. 1–5, 11, 84, 124, 238–39 Morris, William 128, 303–4 Morrison, Robert 31, 140 Morrow, Dwight W. 278–79 Morungen, Heinrich von 233–34, 252 Motokiyo, Zeami 116 motz el son 86–88, 381 Mozart, George (David John Gillings) 126 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus 119, 192, 222, 269, 273 Muir, Edwin 251 Mun, Comte Albert de 134–35 Münch, Gerhart 88, 175, 189, 193, 194, 197, 234, 243, 269, 273, 379 Murphy, Dudley 101 Murray, Gilbert 128, 130 Murray, Henry 82 Museums and galleries in Guide to Kulchur Accademia Carrara di Belle Arte di Bergamo 155 British Museum (London) 15, 79, 95, 155–56, 266

Index Fitzwilliam Museum (Cambridge) 189 Galleria degli Uffizi (Florence) 155 Galleria Nazionale dell’Umbria (Perugia) 154 Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum (London) 117 Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York) 156, 217 Musée du Louvre (Paris) 21, 155, 195 Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro (Paris) 155, 235 Museo della città di Rimini 155 Museo Diocesano (Cortona) 154 Museo Nacional del Prado (Madrid) 49, 151, 152, 156 Museo Nazionale del Bargello (Florence) 155 Pinacoteca Nazionale (Siena) 154 Société Anonyme, Inc. 247 United States National Museum (Arts and Industries Building, Washington) 288 Mussolini, Benito 1, 4, 11, 12, 24, 37, 40, 45, 65, 108–9, 142–44, 159, 171, 175, 181–82, 184, 189, 200, 208, 210, 218, 223, 227, 251, 263, 268–69, 270–71, 274–75, 282, 291, 295–96, 323, 417n8 Napoleon Bonaparte 83–84, 155, 281–82, 283 Napoleon III 280–81 The Nation (New York) 77, 230 Nelson, Admiral Horatio Lord 179 Neoplatonism 13, 22–23, 51, 69, 78, 106, 110, 247–49 Nero, Emperor 164 The New Age (London) 79, 93, 114, 118, 154, 194, 257, 266, 273, 284, 312, 385, 386 New Directions (publisher) 6, 15, 17, 27–28, 37, 56, 303, 364, 373, 392n39, 396n27 New English Weekly (London) 70, 82, 142, 199 New Hungarian Quartet 175, 176, 209

471

New Republic (New York) 41 The New Review (London) 33 New York Evening Mail 219 New York Evening Post 77 The New York Times 295 Newton, Isaac 80 Nietzsche, Friedrich 160 Nihonjin Kai (Nihon Jin Kwai, London) 154 Nixon, Richard M. 365–66 Noh drama 30, 104, 114–16, 189, 207, 243, 295 Norman, Montagu 293 North American Review (Boston) 81 Nott, Stanley 30, 189, 211, 267–68, 366–67 The Observer (London) 168–69 Ogden, Charles Kay 168 Oldfield, Berna Eli “Barney” 204 One Thousand and One Nights 78–79 Opéra de Paris 271 Orage, Alfred Richard 70, 118, 154, 227, 267, 276 Orient Press see Primrose Press Orsino, Aldobrandino 239 Orwell, George (Eric Arthur Blair) 139 Osiris 152–53 Ottone, Marco 175 Overholser, Willis 365–66 Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso) 191–92, 257, 270, 291–92, 313, 381 The Ovid Press 33 paideuma 3, 4, 7, 24, 48, 82–83, 84, 148–49, 252, 264, 318, 399–400n30 Painter, Theophilus 139 Palais de Justice (Hall of Justice, Poitiers) 150–51 Palazzo Bargello (Florence) 154–55 Palazzo Capoquadri Salimbeni (Siena) 119 Palazzo Davanzati (Florence) 154–55 Palazzo Pubblico (Palazzo dei Priori, Perugia) 154

472

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Palazzo Pubblico (Siena) 154 Palazzo Schifanoia (Ferrara) 155 Palazzo Venezia (Rome) 1, 142–43, 223, 417n8 Palmerston, Henry John Temple, Third Viscount 250, 280–81 Palotai, Vilmos 209 Parmenides 53, 159–60 Parmigianino, Francesco 197 Partito Nazionale Fascista (PNF) 223 Pater, Walter 7, 203, 238 Patman, Wright 199 Pauthier, Jean-Pierre Guillaume 38–39, 44, 170, 233, 277 Peek, George Nelson 170–71 Péladan, Joséphin 184–85 Pelagianism 106 Pèllico, Silvio 181 Père Lachaise Cemetery (Paris) 98 Péret, Benjamin 104 Periander 113 Pericles 63 Persephone (Kore) 83, 184, 188, 264 Petrarch (Francesco Petrarca) 146, 278, 281, 309, 318 Petri, Helmut 174, 205 The Philadelphia Inquirer 174 Philip II of Macedon 55, 162 Philip III of France 276 Philip IV of France 276 Picabia, Francis 119–20, 122, 123, 142, 174 Picasso, Pablo 82, 94, 98, 101, 120, 250, 271 Piccardi, Oreste 272 Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni 203, 281 Piero della Francesca 21–22, 154, 195–203 Pindar 162, 344, 421n23 Pinza, Ezio 387 Pirandello, Luigi 130 Pisano, Antonio (Pisanello) 21, 195–96, 394n1 Pittakos of Mytilene (Pittacus) 113 Pius II, Pope 23, 395n8, 395n11

Pius IX, Pope 108, 226, 277 Pius XI, Pope 108–9, 216, 222–23, 226 Plato 6–7, 22, 45–46, 53, 54, 60, 62–63, 64, 78, 160, 161, 168, 202–3, 232, 247, 248, 312, 319, 320, 326, 327, 338, 346, 347, 359 Apology 320 Gorgias 338 Phaedrus 247 Philebus 347 Republic 54, 62–63, 168, 232 Platonic Academy (Florence) 22, 202–3 Plethon, Georgios Gemistos 23, 180, 202–3, 248, 281, 326 Plotinus 69, 248 Plutarch (Lucius Mestrius Plutarchus) 7, 54, 60, 64 Pluto see Hades Poetry: A Magazine of Verse (Chicago) 25, 52, 92–93, 185, 214, 301–2 Poetry and Drama (London) 126 Polk, James K. 48 Pollard, Alfred W. 298, 299 Pomponius, Marcus 322 Pope, Alexander 64, 138–39, 215, 216, 250, 301, 344 Por, Odon 208 Porphyry 78, 248, 317 Pórpora, Nicolò A. 197, 273 Pound, Albert E. 306 Pound, Dorothy (née Shakespear) 5, 57, 226, 313, 381–82 Pound, Ezra, works by A Lume Spento 226–27 ABC of Economics 142, 143, 144, 323, 372 ABC of Reading 7, 75–76, 186, 190, 191, 193, 209, 238, 373, 381 “Abdication” 276 Adams Cantos (62–71) 15, 67, 246 “Addendum for C” 56–57 “Affirmations” 93, 284 Agamemnon 45, 128–29 L’America, Roosevelt e le cause della Guerra presente 171

Index Antheil and the Treatise on Harmony 101–2, 103, 131, 222, 255, 382, 384 “Appunti” 105 “Ave Roma” 24, 395n14 “Axiomata” 312 Canto 1 83, 185 Canto 2 147 Canto 4 128–29, 150–51 Canto 5 128–29, 247–48, 277, 281 Canto 6 128–29, 149–50 Canto 7 53–54, 123–24, 128–29 Canto 8 21–22, 23, 202, 394n1 Canto 9 20–21, 187, 314 Canto 10 239 Canto 11 155 Canto 13 16, 300 Canto 15 77, 318 Canto 16 56, 99 Canto 17 86, 155 Canto 18 316 Canto 19 144 Canto 20 20–21, 87 Canto 21 155, 210–11, 278 Canto 23 248 Canto 25 202, 303 Canto 26 202–3 Canto 28 80, 382 Canto 29 147–48, 242 Canto 30 277 Canto 31 42–43, 47, 371 Canto 33 368 Canto 34 52, 227 Canto 35 232, 380 Canto 36 106, 147, 330–31 Canto 37 52–53 Canto 38 316 Canto 39 188 Canto 40 69 Canto 41 143 Canto 42 74, 229, 264 Canto 44 27, 52, 229, 281–82 Canto 45 22, 32, 49, 149–50, 202 Canto 46 64–65, 268, 368 Canto 47 188, 309 Canto 48 73

473

Canto 50 52, 83–84 Canto 51 49, 149–50 Canto 52 185, 258 Canto 53 32, 37, 296, 382 Canto 54 24, 97, 293, 294 Canto 55 292, 293 Canto 56 189 Canto 59 58, 270 Canto 60 84 Canto 67 46 Canto 68 55, 168, 372 Canto 71 48, 64 Canto 74 20–21, 22, 25–26, 57–58, 102, 113, 118, 153, 194, 227, 249, 328, 369–70 Canto 75 88, 193, 234 Canto 76 133, 176, 233, 295, 340 Canto 77 130, 233, 243, 295 Canto 78 65, 144, 269, 372 Canto 79 88, 117, 218, 343 Canto 80 44–45, 49, 73, 101, 125, 151, 152, 186, 192, 250, 262, 266, 271, 323–24, 369–70, 431n4 Canto 81 49, 50, 78, 200, 369–70 Canto 82 45, 73 Canto 83 23, 118, 180 Canto 84 233 Canto 85 55, 191 Canto 86 55, 86, 278–79 Canto 87 11, 48, 57–58, 111, 119, 123, 143–44, 248–49, 281, 369–70, 393n61 Canto 88 363 Canto 89 11, 71, 120, 143–44, 269, 362, 393n61 Canto 90 151 Canto 91 227, 249, 307, 354 Canto 92 189 Canto 93 11, 78, 143–44, 316, 393n61 Canto 94 65, 354 Canto 95 55, 369–70 Canto 97 144 Canto 98 58, 149, 180, 296, 309 Canto 100 56–57, 369–70 Canto 101 66, 208

474

A Companion to Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur

Canto 102 279 Canto 103 144 Canto 104 73, 169, 206, 267 Canto 107 253 Canto 113 312, 363 Canto 114 306 Canto 115 145 Canto 116 11, 309–10, 393n57 Cantos 3, 11, 13, 14, 15, 16, 20, 24, 42, 44–45, 47, 48, 49, 55, 64, 67, 73, 81, 86, 111, 125, 143–44, 147, 148, 151, 163, 169, 185, 190, 192, 196, 202, 207, 210–11, 218, 227, 229, 264–65, 269, 278–79, 282, 292, 309–10, 313, 314, 316, 318, 324, 328, 343, 370, 371 Cantos LII–LXXI 15, 48 Cathay 86, 188, 233, 257 “Cavalcanti” (essay) 42, 78, 148, 159, 282–83, 298, 329, 381 Cavalcanti (opera) 246, 382–83, 387–88 Certain Noble Plays of Japan 114–16, 207, 412n16 China Cantos (52–61) 37, 84, 189, 294 “The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry” 30–31, 33, 44, 75–76, 189 The Classic Noh Theatre of Japan see Certain Noble Plays of Japan Collis O Heliconii 387–88 Confucian Analects 30–40 Confucius see also Confucius (Kung) Analects (Lun Yü) 12, 30–40, 118, 140, 163, 176, 254, 257, 297 Shih-ching (Odes) 163, 168, 236–37, 259 Ta Hsio: The Great Digest (Ta Hio, or Daxue, The Great Learning) 31, 33, 34, 38–39, 184, 188, 292, 296, 318, 359, 367 The Unwobbling Pivot (Zhongyong, The Doctrine of the Mean) 34, 118, 163, 233, 413n31 “Date Line” 373, 380

“Dialogues of Fontenelle” 54, 238 A Draft of XXX Cantos 105, 143, 190, 312 “Editorial” (Little Review, May 1917) 214 Eleven New Cantos 218 “Ezra Pound Speaking” 57 “A Few Don’ts” 32 The Fifth Decad of the Cantos XLII–LI 83–84 Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir 10, 55–56, 72, 82, 85, 94, 142, 173, 358 “Gold and Work” 456n27 Guido Cavalcanti Rime 80–81, 89 “Heaulmière” see Le Testament de Villon “Homage to Propertius” 114 Homage to Sextus Propertius 169 “Hommage à Froissart” 272 How to Read 7, 238 “How to Read” 79, 189, 222, 373 Hugh Selwyn Mauberley 2 I Gather the Limbs of Osiris 36, 152–53 “Immediate Need of Confucius” 410n5 “In the Wounds” 171 “The Individual in his Milieu” 171, 368 Instigations 30–31, 88 An Introduction to the Economic Nature of the United States 328 Introductory Textbook 364, 455n8 Jefferson and/or Mussolini 6, 12, 26, 69, 81, 143, 187, 218, 225, 295–96, 300, 314, 364 “The Jefferson Adams Letters as a Shrine and a Monument” 283, 359 Jefferson Cantos (31–33) 42 “Machine Art” 103 Make It New 143, 295 Malatesta Cantos (8–11) 21, 229, 314 “Marianne Moore and Mina Loy” 382 “Marvoil” 352 “Mœurs Contemporaines” 279

Index “Noh” or Accomplishment see Certain Noble Plays of Japan “Our Contemporaries” 168–69 “A Pact” 217–18 “Past History” 133 Patria Mia 151, 431n1 Pavannes and Divisions 101 Personae (1926) 312 The Pisan Cantos 25, 233, 262, 263 “Plotinus” 195 “Possibilities of Civilization: What the Small Town Can Do” 127 “Prolegomena” 126 “The Prose Tradition in Verse” 72, 124–25 Quia Pauper Amavi 279 “A Retrospect” 108 review of Adrian Stokes, Stones of Rimini 13, 23, 393n71, 395n10 review of Adrian Stokes, The Quattro Cento 176, 424n22 “The Seafarer” 79, 86, 188–89 Section: Rock Drill de los Cantares LXXXV–XCV 98 Selected Prose 32–33 “The Serious Artist” 359 “Sestina: Altaforte” 93, 100–101 Social Credit: An Impact 143, 258 The Spirit of Romance 79, 87, 148, 227, 247 “Status Rerum” 301–2 Le Testament de Villon (The Testament of François Villon) 87, 372–79, 380–83, 386–87 “Three Cantos” (Ur-Cantos) 185, 248, 301–2 “To Whistler, American” 151–52 “Troubadours—Their Sorts and Conditions” 147, 306–7 “VILLON AND COMMENT” 372–73 “Villonaud for this Yule” 376 A Visiting Card 146, 362, 381, 389 “Volitionist Economics” 225, 271 “Vortex Gaudier-Brzeska” 98–99

475

What Is Money For? 296, 297, 364 Women of Trachis 130 Pound, Thaddeus C. 306 Predis, Ambrogio de (Ambrogio Praedis) 49, 196, 222 Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood 225, 303–4 Prietze, Rudolf 240 Primrose (Orient) Press 118 Prince of Mei (Duke Ling of Wei, Weiling) 33 Prinet, René François Xavier 252 Prokopios of Caesarea 65 Prometheus 297 Propertius, Sextus 114, 169, 344, 381, 388 Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph 70 Psellos 248 Pseudo-Longinus see Dionysius Longinus Psyche (London) 168 Ptolemy 170 Puccini, Giacomo 197–98, 211 Putnam, Samuel 41 Pythagoras 43, 163, 275, 344 Qian, Sima 291 Qing dynasty see Ch’ing dynasty Quarterly Review (London) 147, 306–7 Quinn, John 21, 63, 142, 308 Quintilian (Marcus Fabius Quintilianus) 232 Rabelais, François 7, 41, 42, 300 Rachewiltz, Mary de (née Rudge) 39–40 Rackham, Harris 296, 297, 317–18, 319–20, 322, 325, 327, 329, 330, 332–48, 351, 352, 367, 454n4 Radloff, Wilhelm 241 Rameau, Jean-Philippe 216 Rapallo (Italy) 1, 4, 25, 26, 27–28, 77, 85, 88, 127, 143, 175, 194, 226, 243, 269, 289, 379, 380, 381 Raphael Santi 174, 303–4 Rassegna Monetaria (Rome) 208 Ray, Man 247 Regime Corporativo (Rome) 208

476

A Companion to Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur

Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn 152, 154 Rennert, Hugo Albert 87 Respighi, Ottorino 272 Reynolds, George William MacArthur 158 Reynolds’s Weekly Newspaper (London) 158 Rhondda, Lady 174–75 Ricasoli, Baron Bettino 282 Ricci, Corrado 274–75 Richard of St Victor 10, 111, 339–40 Richards, I. A. 218 Richardson, Samuel 333 Richter, Ernst Friedrich 49 Rickards, Edwin Alfred 358 Ricketts, Charles 225 Rihaku see Li Po Il Risorgimento (Turin) 108 Robert de Brunne (Robert Mannyng) 300 Robinson, Edwin Arlington 186 Robortello, Francis 64 Rocke, Colonel 169, 271 Rodin, Auguste 373, 456n46 Rogers, George 174 Rolland, Romain 124 Romano, Tullio 176 Romanov dynasty 116, 172 Romilly, Esmond 231 Romulus 67 Romulus Augustulus 281 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano 2–3, 61–62, 170–71, 262, 268, 271, 289 Roosevelt, Theodore 1–2, 3, 275 Ross, W. D. 335, 361 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel 303–4, 376 Rossoni, Edmondo 65–66, 207, 208, 291, 292, 295 Rostovtzeff, Mikhail Ivanovich 66, 157 Rothschild, Meyer Anselm 328 Rothschild, Walter, Second Baron Rothschild 144 Rouse, William Henry Denham 76, 99–100, 113, 128, 169, 187, 427n38

Rousseau, Henri Julien 82 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 80, 118, 198, 217 Rubens, Peter Paul 197 Rudge, Olga 26, 88, 119, 175, 189, 192, 194, 269, 272, 295, 372–76, 379, 457n47 Rummel, Walter Morse 100–101, 231 Runciman, Sir Walter 206 Ruskin, John 303–4 Russell, Bertrand 207, 321 Russell, George 249 Russell, Lord John 281 Sachs, Hans 233–34, 243, 381 St Albertus Magnus 110, 148 St Ambrogio 208 St Ambrose 50, 68, 109 St Antonino da Firenze 51, 109, 208 St Augustine of Hippo 47, 230, 303 St Christopher 132 St Elias 113 St Elizabeths Hospital (Washington, D.C.) 25, 34 St Francis of Assisi 180 St James 132 St Tammany, Society of (London) 263 St Thomas Aquinas 47, 110–12, 206–7, 264, 318, 326, 341–42, 343, 349 Summa Theologiae 110–11, 264, 342, 343 St Victor, Richard of see Richard of St. Victor Salmasius, Claudius (Claude de Saumaise) 51, 157, 251, 289, 334 Sand, George (Amantine-Lucile-Aurore Dudevant, née Dupin) 72 Sandburg, Carl 355 Sansoni, Luigi 175 Santayana, George 106, 369–70 Sappho 381, 387–88 Sargon II 95 Satie, Erik 122, 132 Saturday Evening Post (Indianapolis) 125 Saumaise, Claude de see Claudius Salmasius 51

Index The Savoy (London) 100 Scaevola, Quintus Mucius 164, 166 Scheiwiller, Giovanni 30 Schelling, Felix E. 355 Schelling, Friedrich 216 Schleiermacher, Friedrich 160 Schloezer, Boris de 156, 209, 381 Scholasticism 10, 47, 74, 110, 276, 411n15 Schönbrunn Palace (Vienna) 82 Schopenhauer, Arthur 318, 322, 326 Schultze, Fritz 23 Scott, Sir George Gilbert 280 Scott, Sir Walter 302 Scotus, John Duns 47 Seccombe, Thomas 82 Semmelweis, Ignaz Philipp 331 Seneca, Lucius Annaeus (Seneca the Younger) 166, 230 Serly, Tibor 380 Sforza, Battista 21 Shakespear, Dorothy see Dorothy Pound (née Shakespear) Shakespear, Olivia 226 Shakespeare, William 64, 126, 128, 164, 175, 190, 192, 205, 227, 246, 250, 283, 383–84 Shāng see Chang Shang dynasty 37, 96 Shang Tang see Emperor Tching Shaozheng Mao see Chao-tcheng-mao Shaw, George Bernard 206 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 45, 299, 302 Shenzong see Tchin Tsoung Shepard, William Pierce 79, 186 Shiva 140 Si see Sse Sigismund, King of the Burgundians 293–94 Simpson, Wallis (née Warfield) 276 Singer, Isaac M. 225 Smart Set (New York) 218–19 Smiles, Samuel 62 Social Credit 71–72, 143, 201, 211, 258, 267, 315, 318, 365, 366

477

Socrates 23, 45–46, 62–63, 76, 232, 319–20, 344, 347 Soddy, Frederick 69, 72, 267, 368 Solon of Athens 58, 113 Song dynasty 293 Sophia (wisdom) 148–49, 309, 338 Sophocles (Sophokles) 128, 130, 326, 344, 362 Sordello 147–48, 306–7, 381, 382–83, 387 Southey, Robert 302 The Spectator (London) 277, 320 Spencer, H. 45, 186 Spencer, Herbert 319 Spinoza, Benedict de 104, 252, 318 Sse (Si, or Zigòng) 32 Stakhanov, Aleksei 291 Stalin, Joseph 289, 291, 343 Stanley, Thomas 45 Staunton, Howard 227 Stein, Gertrude 131 Stendhal, Marie-Henri Beyle 222 Sterne, Laurence 41 Stevenson, Robert Louis 173–74, 232, 312 La Stirpe (Rome) 66, 208 Stock, St. George 361 Stoicism 43, 46, 53, 66, 164–66, 167, 248, 333 Stokes, Adrian 13, 23, 176, 393n71, 395n10, 424n22 Stokowski, Leopold 380 Stone Cottage (Sussex) 30, 104, 114 Storrs, Ronald 192 Strabo, Caius Fannius 321–22 Strachey, Giles Lytton 74, 321 Stravinsky, Igor (Strawinsky) 156, 209, 231, 271, 326 Stuart dynasty 157, 253, 301 Suetonius Tranquillus, Gaius 167, 321–22 Sufism 140, 339–40 Surenas (Surena or Suren) 64 Surrealism 104, 111, 123, 226, 271 Susato, Tielman 243 Il Sussidiario Della Quinta Elementare 39–40, 180, 313

478

A Companion to Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur

Swabey, Henry 100, 318 Swedenborg, Emanuel 10, 75, 104, 409–10n10 Swift, Jonathan 41, 283 Swinburne, Algernon Charles 13, 128, 172, 303, 306–7, 308, 326, 376 Sydow, Eckart von 240, 241 Sylvester, Pope 203 Symonds, Addington 204 Symons, Arthur William 100, 215, 249, 376 Taeuber, Sophie 123 Tagore, Rabindranath 74, 198 Taï Tsong (Tai Tsoung, or Li Shimin) 24, 293, 294, 295 T’ang (Tang) dynasty 24, 97, 293 Taylor, Colonel Edmund Dick 364, 365 Tchin Tsoung (Shenzong) 293, 294 Tching, Emperor (Cheng [Shang] Tang) 296 Telemann, Georg Philipp 243 Tempier, Étienne 319 Terry, Dame Ellen 126 Thales of Miletus 113, 159 Thayer, Scofield 405n47 Thayer, William Roscoe 159 Theocritus 344 Theodore of Tarsus 363 Theosophy 34, 104, 249 This Quarter (Paris) 16 Thomson, Virgil 131, 379 Three Mountains Press 3 391 (Paris) 174 Time and Tide (London) 174–75, 209 The Times (London) 8, 230, 266 Tinayre, Yves 372–73 Tinkham, George Holden 210, 268–69, 431n4 Toeplitz, Giuseppe 292 Tolstoy, Leo 252 Townsman: A Quarterly Review (London) 178, 373 Tozzi, Federigo 127 Tredennick, Hugh 161

Trollope, Anthony 276, 313 Tseu-Lou (Zi-lu or Zilu) 33 Tuan Szetsun 34, 291 Tucker, St George 363 Tura, Cosimo 197 Turgenev, Ivan 73, 232, 250 Tussaud, Madame Marie 117 Twain, Mark (Samuel Langhorne Clemens) 81 Tyler, John 48 Tzara, Tristan 123 Tze-Shi (Cixi) 35, 115 Ueberweb, Friedrich 160 Ujinobu, Shichiro 116 Umar ibn al-Khattab 279 Universities, colleges, and schools Cambridge University 9, 144, 188, 189, 321, 352 Columbia University (New York) 8, 56, 206, 210, 259 Eton College 50, 144 Hamilton College 4, 5, 79–80, 86 Harvard University (Cambridge, Mass.) 9, 27, 34, 56, 188, 197, 198, 199, 247, 343, 362 Istituto di Alta Letteratura (Rome) 251 Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main 88, 193 Philipps-Universität Marburg 246 Princeton University 56 School for Oriental Studies (London) 257 Scuola di San Giorgio degli Schiavoni (Venice) 154–55 Tokyo University 30 Universiteit Leiden 51 Université libre de Bruxelles 205 University of California 379 University of Chicago 89–90 University of Edinburgh 277–78 University of London 298 University of Oxford 9, 50, 110, 206, 247, 267, 326, 361, 363

Index Université de Paris 110, 319, 326, 348, 354–55 Università di Pisa 278, 319 University of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia) 49, 79, 87, 89, 242, 355 Università degli studi di Torino 160 University of Toronto 80 University of Washington Book Store 33 University of Wisconsin 319 Yale University 9, 56, 66, 188, 258 Untermeyer, Louis 81 Upward, Allan 118, 194, 428n9 usura (usury) 3, 9, 12, 22, 26, 32–33, 47, 49, 50, 51, 52, 55, 56–57, 60–61, 64–65, 66–67, 89, 90, 95, 109, 116, 134–35, 149, 150, 157, 171, 188, 190, 191, 210, 224, 229, 251, 259, 269, 274, 288, 289, 299, 318, 335, 362 Valla, Lorenzo 203, 281, 332 Valli, Luigi 246, 309 Valturio, Roberto 158, 262 Van Buren, Martin 51–53, 242, 263, 283 Varchi, Benedetto 281 Varro, Marcus Terentius 166 Vega, Lope de 49, 227, 246, 355 Végh, Sándor 209 Vegh Quartet 209 Velázquez, Diego 49, 151, 152 Venice Biennale 82, 196 Venus see Aphrodite Verdi, Giuseppe 383–84 Verhaeren, Emile 186 Verlaine, Paul 236 Verrocchio, Andrea del 278 Versailles, Palace of 82 Versailles, Treaty of 117 via Aurelia (Rome) 274–75 via dell’Impero (via dei Fori Imperiali, Rome) 24, 274–75 Vickers Limited 158, 316 Vickers, Vincent C. 267–68 Vico, Giovanni Battista 84

479

Victoria Memorial (London) 74 Victoria, Queen 278, 280–81 Viennet, Jean-Pons-Guillaume 383 Villard, Henry Gustav 77, 320 Villard, Oswald Garrison 77, 320 Villon, François 36, 87, 268, 373, 376–79, 381, 382, 385–86, 457n47 Virgil (Publius Vergilius Maro) 9, 13, 83, 188, 355 virtù 36–37 Vittorio Emanuele II, King 108, 282 Vivaldi, Antonio 26, 189, 192, 196, 227, 258, 271, 272 Vivante, Leone 218, 321 Vogelweide, Walther von der 233–34, 381 Voice (Liverpool) 318 volontà (will) 24 Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet) 73, 80, 122, 216, 238 Voorhis, Jerry 365–66 vortex 10, 16, 20, 56, 62, 92–102, 194–95, 235, 250, 284–85 Vorticism 10, 55, 72, 73–74, 92–102, 144–45, 194–95, 284–85, 307, 332–33 Vossler, Karl 329 VOU (Tokyo) 178, 263 VOU Club 178, 190, 208 Wagner, Richard 234 Waley, Arthur David 257 Wallace, Edgar 140, 240 Waller, Edmund 385 Ward, Thomas Humphry 163 Washington, George 46–47, 316, 365 Webb, Beatrice (née Potter) 77, 320 Webb, Sidney James 77, 320 Webster, Noah 73 Webster, Pelatiah 158 Wells, Herbert George 73–74, 81 Weston, Frances (“Aunt Frank”) 79 Whistler, James Abbott McNeill 116, 151–52, 215, 217, 250 Whitman, Walt 217–18, 323 Wilde, Oscar 98

480

A Companion to Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur

Wilhelm II, Kaiser 253 William of Champeaux 210 William of Moerbeke 318 Williams, Cecil 34 Williams, James 130 Williams, William Carlos 27, 93, 178, 216, 226–27, 273, 315 Wilmot, Rev. J. 205 Wilson, Robert McNair (Anthony Wynne) 266–67, 366 Wilson, Woodrow 81, 153, 199, 365 Wolff, Christian 252 Woods, J. H. 247 Woolf, Leonard 321 Woolf, Virginia 321 Wordsworth, William 72–73, 301, 302, 312 World Peace Prayer Conference (Shanghai) 34 Wren, Sir Christopher 196–97 Wu Yung 288, 294 Wynne, Anthony see Robert McNair Wilson Xenophanes (Zenophanes) 159, 160 Xenophon 23, 45–46, 54, 55 Xuanzang 96 Xunzi 292–93 Yao, Emperor 170, 176 Yeats, William Butler 15, 25, 30, 104, 114, 115, 119, 133, 194, 196, 198, 218, 225, 243, 249, 275, 303, 412n16 At the Hawk’s Well 243 “Blood and the Moon” 218

The Celtic Twilight 198 Certain Noble Plays of Japan 114–16 “He thinks of those who have Spoken Evil of his Beloved” 194 “Ireland and the Arts” 303 The Rose 303 “Swedenborg, Mediums, and the Desolate Places” 104 The Trembling of the Veil 114 The Wind Among the Reeds 194 A Vision 15, 196 Yin dynasty 37 Yoshimasa, Ashikaga 114 Young, William 252 Younghusband, Sir Francis Edward 114, 412n10 Yuan dynasty 34 Zaharoff, Sir Basil 2, 316 Zeitschrift für französischen und englischen Unterricht (Berlin) 90 Zeller, Eduard 160, 165, 167 Zeno of Citium 46, 164, 165–66 Zenothemis 60–61 Zeus (Jupiter) 62, 187–88, 227, 297, 305, 314, 342, 344 Zhou dynasty see Chow dynasty Zigòng see Sse Zilu see Tseu-Lou Zimmerman, Ethel Agnes see Ethel Merman Zisi 35 Zola, Émile 119 Zoroaster 46 Zukofsky, Louis 25–26, 27