Cross-Cultural Ezra Pound [1 ed.] 9781949979800, 9781949979817, 2016806816

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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 (Emeritus), Tulane University Massimo Bacigalupo (Emeritus), University of Genoa Ronald Bush, University of Oxford Peter Liebregts, University of Leiden 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, University of Alberta Augustana Campus 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 Anderson Araujo, A Companion to Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur Richard Parker, Editor, Readings in The Cantos, Volume 1 Catherine Paul and Justin Kishbaugh, Editors, A Packet of Poems for Ezra Pound Justin Kishbaugh and Catherine E. Paul, Editors, Ezra’s Book Massimo Bacigalupo, Ezra Pound, Italy, and The Cantos

© 2021 Clemson University All rights reserved First Edition, 2021 ISBN: 978-1-949979-80-0 (print) eISBN: 978-1-949979-81-7 (e-book) Published by Clemson University Press in association with Liverpool University Press

Clemson University Press is located in Clemson, SC. For more information, please visit our website at www.clemson.edu/press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Gery, John, editor. | Baumann, Walter, 1935- editor. | McKnight, David (David Norman), editor. Title: Cross-cultural Ezra Pound / John Gery, Walter Baumann, and David McKnight. Description: Clemson : Clemson University Press, [2021] | Series: Ezra Pound center for literature series | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “This volume offers new interpretations of Pound’s poetics, as well as new perspectives on his critical reception globally. It covers Pound’s work from his beginnings as a young poet in Philadelphia in the first decade of the century through his most productive years as a poet, critic, and translator to the first critical treatments of his work in the 1940s and 50s, and on to translations of The Cantos spanning the last fifty years”-- Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2020052132 (print) | LCCN 2020052133 (ebook) | ISBN 9781949979800 (hardback) | ISBN 9781949979817 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Pound, Ezra, 1885-1972--Criticism and interpretation. | Pound, Ezra, 1885-1972--Public opinion. Classification: LCC PS3531.O82 Z567 2021 (print) | LCC PS3531.O82 (ebook) | DDC 811/.52--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020052132 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020052133 Typeset in Minion Pro by Carnegie Book Production.

Contents Cross-Cultural Ezra Pound

List of Figures vii Preface ix David McKnight Introduction: Six Ways a Sunday: The Cross-Cultural Realm of Ezra Pound John Gery, Walter Baumann, and David McKnight

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I.  Pound’s Cross-Cultural Genesis 1. Pound’s Modern (Metrical) Education Ira Nadel

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2. The First Imagists William Pratt

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3. Pound and/or Franklin: A Reading of Canto 31 John Gery

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II.  Pound’s Cross-Cultural Poetics 4. Pound’s Vorticist Theory and H.D.’s “Oread” Yoshiko Kita 5. Fenollosa and Pound: The Authorship Question of The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry Lin Wei

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6. Pound’s Composition of Canto 16: “j’entendis des voix” John Beall

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7. The Genealogy of the China Cantos Kent Su

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III.  Pound and Cross-Cultural Questions of Translation 8. The Poetics of Queering Translation in Ezra Pound’s Homage to Sextus Propertius 105 Christian Bancroft 9. Rainer Maria Gerhardt and Ezra Pound Walter Baumann 10. “Cantos” or “Cantares”? Pound’s Reception in Two Romance Languages Viorica Patea

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IV.  Cross-Cultural Perceptions of Pound and His Work 11. Ezra Pound and Caresse Crosby: From Black Sun to Roccasinibalda Anne Conover 12. Pound, Bergson, and the Vortex of Memory Jonathan Pollock

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13. Ritual and Performance in The Pisan Cantos and H.D.’s Trilogy 173 Giuliana Ferreccio 14. A Carthaginian Peace: Kenner, Watts, and the Founding of Pound Studies Michael Coyle

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Notes 203 Notes on Contributors 235 Index 241

Figures Cross-Cultural Ezra Pound

Figure 3.1. Statue of Benjamin Franklin, Main Post Office, Philadelphia, between 1895 and 1910. Image courtesy of the Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/item/2016806816/

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Figure 3.2. Benjamin Franklin Statue, University of Pennsylvania. Photo credit David Toccafondi

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Figure 4.1. Kaijyo no Fuji (Mount Fuji at Sea). Image courtesy of the Trustees of the British Museum

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Figure 4.2. Kanagawa-Oki Namiura (The Great Wave off Kanagawa). Image courtesy of the Trustees of the British Museum

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Figure 4.3. Haichu no Fuji (Mount Fuji in a Sake Cup). Image Courtesy of the Trustees of the British Museum

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Figure 10.1. José Vázquez Amaral (1913–87). Image courtesy of Special Collections and University Archives, Rutgers University Libraries

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Figure 10.2. Nicolae Steinhardt (1912–89). Image courtesy of Rohia Monastery

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Preface David McKnight

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his volume presents an eclectic gathering of international scholars, all of whom have contributed to an impressive collection of essays inspired by their “cross-cultural” interpretations of Ezra Pound’s work and life. Indeed, Pound might well be considered one of the first “cross-cultural” poets to emerge at the beginning of the twentieth century. In 1913, before he was thirty, Pound wrote in “How I Began,” in T.P.’s Weekly in London: I resolved that at thirty I would know more about poetry than any man living, that I would know the dynamic content from the shell, that I would know what was accounted poetry everywhere, what part of poetry was “indestructible,” what part could not be lost by translation, and—scarcely less important what effects were obtainable in one language only and were utterly incapable of being translated.

Whether he achieved his goal or not, in his search for the origins of poetry and his devotion to identifying and mastering the best poets writing in any age or cultural context, Pound challenged common aesthetic assumptions regarding the power of language—any written language—to transform human experience through the art of poetry. ix

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One such scholar to delve into the origins of Ezra Pound’s genius for making poetry was Emily Mitchell Wallace Harvey (1934–2019), to whom this volume is dedicated. My fellow editors of this volume and I had hoped that she would contribute an essay on Pound’s formative years in Philadelphia prior to his departure for Europe in 1908. In addition to Pound, Emily Wallace had also meticulously documented the career of Pound’s contemporary and fellow student, poet and physician William Carlos Williams. This unlikely pair who had dabbled in poetry met at the University of Pennsylvania in 1902. While at Penn the pair forged a life-long friendship through their passion for poetry. There are few, if any, Pound scholars who possessed Emily Wallace’s encyclopedic knowledge of the early years of the Pound, Williams, and Hilda Doolittle (H.D.) triangle. In her final unpublished research, Dr. Wallace was focused on redressing, what she believed to be a gross injustice: Penn’s decision not to grant Pound his PhD in 1907—then, or, it seems, ever. At the same time, we would also like to acknowledge the passing of Gregory Harvey (1937–2018), a Philadelphia lawyer who was married to Emily for 49 years, and who was, by her own description, “indispensible as a research and technical advisor and photographer to her keynote lectures on Modern Poetry and the visual arts at international conferences.” Together, Emily and Gregory forged a powerful, charismatic presence at numerous Pound and Williams conferences during the past five decades. I am certain that many readers will have memories of this highly cultured couple, who were devoted to the study of literature, society, and art in general, and especially to the poetry of Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and H.D. They will both be missed. David McKnight, Co-Editor University of Pennsylvania

Introduction: Six Ways a Sunday The Cross-Cultural Realm of Ezra Pound John Gery, Walter Baumann, and David McKnight

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ecent scholarship on the work and life of Ezra Pound has brought more and more attention to his international reputation as a (if not the) ground-breaking modernist poet of the twentieth century, not only in his poetry, but in his critical thinking, his practice and theory of translation, his international correspondence, and his collaborations across cultures, not to mention his transnational engagement in all the arts and in society. This volume gathers fourteen essays that offer new cross-cultural interpretations of Pound’s critical thinking and poetics, as well as new considerations of his critical reception globally. It includes authors from eight different countries and covers Pound’s work from his beginnings as a young poet in Philadelphia in the first decade of the twentieth century through his most productive years as a poet, critic, and translator, to the first critical treatments of his work, as well as to translations of The Cantos spanning half a century. Although, in our own time, terms such as “cross-cultural,” “globalism,” “transnationalism,” and “internationalism” remain fluid in literary studies and often stir controversy (if not quite fist fights!), especially in debates about Pound’s role as a prominent modernist figure, worldwide he has remained at the center of such discussions for almost a century now. This collection, therefore, is well-suited to address ongoing studies of Pound’s work from a variety of perspectives—or, to borrow a phrase from Pound’s Canto 93, “going six ways a Sunday” (Canto 93/651)—as 1

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each contributor identifies what Pound would call a “quidity” [sic], or an essential quality implicit in his vision. Without attempting to be comprehensive, the essays here collectively provide a clear picture of the cross-cultural reach of Pound’s preoccupations, as well as readers’ engagement with Pound, in the broadest sense of cross-cultural activity. His cross-cultural realm refers not only to the international scope of his subject matter, his methods, his translations from classical and modern languages, and his editorial work on behalf of others, but also the diverse historical, social, ideological, interdisciplinary, and theoretical contexts in which his works continue to offer new insights and generate strong interest. To that end, the essays collected here have been divided into four categories to suggest the cross-cultural breadth of his work and impact, although individual essays here could well fit into more than one of these categories. The first group of three essays, “Pound’s Cross-Cultural Genesis,” considers Pound’s growth as a poet. While these authors focus on his beginnings as a student and burgeoning artist, they recognize his orientation from the start toward both the wider world and the past. In the opening essay, Ira Nadel looks at the comparative literature milieu of Pound’s education at the University of Pennsylvania and Hamilton College in the first decade of the twentieth century. Tracing how Pound’s classical training precisely shaped his poetry from the start, Nadel notes Pound’s discovery that, while “[o]nly the classics can keep one free from the cant and vagueness found in his contemporaries,” nonetheless, “the classical poets do not insulate one from the contemporary but actually enhance and facilitate it.” To the extent that Pound resolved that “to become modern was to absorb the ancients,” Nadel examines a number of Pound’s early poems (“Apparuit,” “Papyrus,” “Night Litany”), especially for their “metrical elements,” including quantitative Sapphic verse, classical musicality, “the classical reliance on allusion, citation and prosodic inventions,” fragments of lost Greek texts, and what Pound would later call “absolute rhythm,” in which a poem’s prosody “‘corresponds exactly to the emotion or shade of emotion to be expressed’ often through quantity.” The implementation of classical meters, as T. S. Eliot would observe, would distinguish Pound’s modernist verse from the poetry in English of both the recent past and the present.

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As Nadel contends, “Pound’s archaeological process excavates a prosodic past that allows him and others to negotiate a new poetic future.” From the start—and always afterwards—Pound’s verse would locate the contemporary in the distant past of other cultures. In thinking about the genesis of “Imagism” in London before World War I, William Pratt, like Nadel, also traces the origins of this dimension of Pound’s work to his student experience at Penn, especially in his early relationships with Hilda Doolittle (H.D.) and William Carlos Williams, who helped create the milieu in which he could experiment. Although Pound coined the term “Imagism,” and wrote its doctrine in London for Harriet Monroe of Poetry magazine, Pratt locates its true beginnings in Pound’s early poem, “The Tree,” included in his hand-stitched collection, Hilda’s Book, compiled in Philadelphia between 1905 and 1907. Pratt further links the movement historically and in spirit to another Philadelphia document, Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence. To be sure, Pratt concedes, “Pound’s short poem was no match for Jefferson’s historic document, but it was historic in its own way,” giving rise later to Imagism as “a kind of Literary Declaration of Independence.” That movement would launch Modernism itself as “a broader movement that would incorporate the self-critical interior monologues and deeply pessimistic views of modern urban civilization.” Of course, as a movement, Imagism, notes Pratt, had cross-cultural roots, drawing “from widely different sources, none of them American.” Still, whereas Nadel argues for the cross-cultural, cross-temporal impact of classical meters on Pound’s modern verse, Pratt essentially reasons in an opposite direction that, in the same way Jefferson’s concept of individual liberty has come to flourish in cultures beyond the scope of his original document, Pound’s “Imagism turned out to be democratic; it appealed to a wide variety of talented writers who did not live in Philadelphia or London,” especially given its importance to Pound’s Philadelphia contemporaries, H.D., Williams, and Marianne Moore. Like Pound, all of them would attain international acclaim for shaping modernist poetry. And Imagism would become, and is still, a watchword for poets worldwide. In tribute to the uncanny geographic congruence of these four poets, Pratt concludes, “Everyone knows Philadelphia as America’s first political capital; it should also be known as one of America’s foremost poetic capitals.”

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Also taking Philadelphia as his starting point, John Gery echoes Pratt’s association of Pound with the American revolutionaries, but less for Pound’s ties to Jefferson than for his mostly unexplored associations with Benjamin Franklin’s sensibility, in another cross-historical comparison. Gery concedes how, when Pound sought early American counterparts to the prominent figures who populate The Cantos, from Sordello to Confucius, he looks first to Jefferson, then to John Adams as his American icons, despite Franklin’s public prominence in the Philadelphia of Pound’s youth. Although Pound does refer to Franklin some twenty times in The Cantos, he underplays his role. Why? asks Gery: “Given Franklin’s prominent reputation for his imagination, unorthodox manner, wily and sometimes scandalous behavior, inventive spirit, public service, and political savvy,” he might well have a more formidable presence in Pound’s epic. Considering Franklin’s role in the founding of the College of Pennsylvania in 1749, Gery first compares his views on education with Pound’s ideal of a formal education. Then he contrasts both writers’ views on “civic economy” and art. But the latter part of Gery’s essay turns to a close reading of Franklin’s portrait in Canto 31 (as gleaned from a letter by Adams) to determine what Franklin represents for Pound, what aspect of his American imprint has found its way into The Cantos, cross-historically, possible evident as much as by what Pound omits as by what he incorporates. The second group of four essays, “Pound’s Cross-Cultural Poetics,” delves fully into Pound’s poetry and prose itself to uncover its cross-cultural, collaborative, transnational, and interdisciplinary methods, whether consciously applied (as with Vorticism or classic Chinese poetry) or more implicitly evident (as in their technical aspects). In the first of these, Yoshiko Kita provides a case study of the intersection of Vorticism (the movement Pound launched with Wyndham Lewis in London in 1914), H.D.’s poem, “Oread,” and the prints from the Edo period of the Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai (1760–1849). Kita begins with Pound’s dictum, “The vortex is the point of maximum energy,” as declared in his essay, “Vorticism,” in the first issue of Lewis’s avant-garde magazine, Blast (1914). But then, while contrasting Pound’s definition of the “vortex” with H.D.’s classically influenced “Oread” (also published in Blast), Kita juxtaposes H.D.’s poem to three of Hokusai’s watercolors, Mount Fuji at Sea, The Great

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Wave off Kanagawa, and Mount Fuji in a Sake Cup, in order to illuminate “the affinity and, more importantly, the difference between [Pound’s and H.D.’s] poetic criteria during the formative period of Vorticism.” In what can be read as the epitome of a cross-cultural poem, “Oread,” for Kita, demonstrates a prominent point of intersecting historical influences in a very few lines—as it “echoes Pound’s definition of a ‘one image poem,’” embodies the classically Greek spirit of a “nymph of the mountain rock,” and shares structural and thematic elements with Hokusai’s color-engravings, especially as “they convey a sense of the great energy of the elements.” Kita’s detailed analysis of “Oread” disputes the notion that H.D. did not draw from Japanese prints by documenting her keen awareness of Japanese art and underscoring the cross-cultural concurrence in H.D.’s poem of “the dynamic force of nature” associated with Vorticist art, Greek myth, and “the combination of two different types of natural forces,” evident in Hokusai’s seascapes. As significantly, she argues how both Pound’s Vorticist theory and H.D.’s execution of it draw as much from visual art as from literature. Shifting from Pound’s poetry to his critical prose and from Vorticism and H.D. to classical China, Lin Wei writes on the nagging question about the extent of Pound’s authorship regarding the posthumous publication of Ernest Fenollosa’s manuscript, The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry. Setting aside Pound’s separate preoccupation with Far Eastern culture and its influence on modernism, Wei observes how critical discussions of The Chinese Written Character can get confused, principally because Pound, not Fenollosa, is often assumed to be its author. When, after Fenollosa’s death in 1908, his widow asked Pound to edit for publication her husband’s translations and theoretical writings. Pound accepted the challenge and, through his life-long advocacy for Fenollosa’s disputed argument about the visual nature of the classical Chinese language, The Chinese Written Character has exerted an enormous influence on Western poets. Drawing on Haun Saussy’s 2008 scholarly edition of The Chinese Written Character, Wei’s essay compares that edition to earlier editions, as she reflects on Pound’s formidable role as editor, translator, author, and poet in establishing Fenollosa’s legacy. Reviewing the history of Fenollosa’s text, she analyzes Pound’s method of editing, uncovers evidence of his shaping the text to fit his own poetic

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agenda, and (in effect) deconstructs Pound’s theory as an author/editor. But Wei also raises important cross-cultural questions, not only about how Pound “edits” others’ texts, but about the art of translation itself, as she draws from Walter Benjamin’s “The Ways of the Translator.” Still, Wei concludes, even if “[t]he task of the translator should always be distinguished from that of the poet, according to Benjamin,” what Pound achieved in his editing of The Chinese Written Character was to convey “the poetic essence of Eastern culture as transmitted by Fenollosa’s manuscript, whether it is correct or not.” Moving from how Pound’s adaption of Fenollosa elided with his own poetics to how his editing of two revolutionary modernist texts had a comparable impact, John Beall’s essay treats Pound’s method in The Cantos as also a result of his cross-genre work as an editor. As Beall observes, “In contrast to James Joyce’s Ulysses and T. S. Eliot’s Waste Land, where Ezra Pound’s editing and advice are both well-known and well-documented, Pound’s revising of Canto 16 is a relatively unknown monument of modernist polyphony, a jagged and atonal blending of disparate voices.” Applying ideas from “genetic criticism” to Pound’s manuscripts of Canto 16, Beall finds evidence of Pound’s response to Joyce’s and Eliot’s seminal modernist texts, each distinguished by its technique of incorporating cross-cultural voices that led Pound to revise Canto 16 in similar fashion. Beall describes Pound’s composition strategy for Canto 16, as well as the history of its publication in Paris in 1924, not long after Ulysses and The Waste Land appeared. From archived drafts, he also finds textual evidence for Pound’s strategy for this Canto, as “he moved carefully from a monologue as an extension of the Hell Cantos 14 and 15 to a polyphony of multilingual voices.” Besides analyzing drafts of Canto 16, Beall compares the published text to the recording of Pound reading it at the Spoleto Poetry Festival in 1967, especially how his “deadpan voice” reveals the Canto’s humor, illustrating, as Eliot and Pound observed in the “Wandering Rocks” passage in Ulysses, “the jarring and comical effect of shift after transition-less shift” in Joyce’s work. Such multiple narrative moves enact Canto 16’s “vertiginous movement from the narrative monologue to the polyphony marked by the transitional French clause, ‘et j’entendis des voix.’” While this very polyphony can create comic effects, it equally serves as the cross-cultural

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device Pound employs to convey (much differently than in Hugh Selwyn Mauberley) the tragic dimensions of World War I. Aligned with Kita’s, Wei’s, and Beall’s arguments for the crosscultural sources of Pound’s modernist poetics, Kent Su looks further into The Cantos to examine how Pound’s reading of contemporary accounts of Chinese history from a Confucian perspective helped to shape his method for Cantos 52–61, the sequence known as the Chinese Cantos or China Cantos. Following his own dictum in ABC of Reading, “DICHTEN = CONDENSARE” (which Su describes as a “principle of lean philosophical economy”), Pound in the 1930s used the approach of “condensing some historical facts” to capture the pith and gist of ancient Chinese history, an approach Pound also attributes to Mussolini for “catching the point before the aesthetes had got / There” (41/202). Although readers know that for the China Cantos Pound drew heavily on the French text of Joseph-Anne-Marie de Moyriac de Mailla’s 11-volume Histoire générale de la Chine, Su shows that Pound also made significant use of two Chinese texts that served as the basis for de Mailla’s Histoire, namely, Sima Guang’s Zizhi Tongjian and Zhu Xi’s Tongjian Gangmu, the latter essentially a condensation of Guang’s 20-volume history. Pound likely learned about these writings through Herbert Giles’s A History of Chinese Literature (1901). In the context of these sources, Su writes, “Pound ingeniously adapts the literary styles of these sources and incorporates them to form the unique structures of the China Cantos.” What is more, Su argues, the China Cantos, when viewed in the light of these original materials, successfully recreates Confucian philosophical doctrines. “Like the rediscovery of Greek philosophy during the Italian Renaissance, a Western rediscovery of Ancient Chinese philosophy was, to Pound, essential for his own age.” Su astutely contrasts the influences of Greek philosophy and Confucianism on Pound, as he offers a thorough yet condensed analysis of the complex cross-cultural sources of the China Cantos. The third section of three essays, “Pound and Cross-Cultural Questions of Translation,” looks first at the innovative aspects of Pound’s own translation of classical poetry, but then flips sides to examine various questions raised by translations of Pound’s poetry into German, Spanish, and Romanian. In the opening essay here, Christian Bancroft introduces “queering

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translation” as an approach to Pound’s controversial renderings of the poetry of Sextus Propertius in Homage to Sextus Propertius. Based on the work of William Spurlin and others, Bancroft clarifies that, as a methodology, queering translation does not merely concern the translation of a queer writer from one language to another. More pointedly, it involves “the heterogeneity that exists between languages: a space of indeterminacy that includes the untranslatable,” as it “emphasizes the nebulous, the ambiguous, multiplicities, heterogeneities, femininities, masculinities, as well as the sexual, gendered, cultural, and historical differences between languages.” Bancroft’s application of queer theory informs a new reading of Homage, a sequence discussed less often than Mauberley, thereby addressing ongoing issues in both modernist studies and Pound’s methods of “translation.” He reconsiders several of Pound’s specific choices of translated terms, for instance, such as Pound rendering Graios orgia as “Grecian orgies” (instead of the more accurate phrase, “mysteries or sacred rites”), in order to substitute modern idioms and convey Propertius’s humor. For Bancroft, such wordplay “foreignizes the text, disengaging the power relations that would otherwise threaten to domesticate the linguistic and cultural difference of the source text.” Indeed, Pound employs even more radical techniques, he contends, when he “moves away from translating individual elegies, in favor of passages, couplets, or even single lines from various poems written by Propertius, often out of the linear sequence,” thereby destabilizing the original. To approach Pound’s cross-cultural version of Homage, as Bancroft does, reveals how “Pound’s translation epitomizes […] unpredictability” and “his translation praxis becomes increasingly liberal,” echoing what Nadel argues, namely, that for Pound, “the classical poets do not insulate one from the contemporary but actually enhance and facilitate it.” As a poem in English, concludes Bancroft, Homage “blurs the lines between different forms of artistic production and evades any one category” and by doing so it “signifies a translation that is not fixed” but open to a more diverse rendering than before. Taking into account the cross-cultural impact of Pound, not only as a translator but as a poet translated by others, Walter Baumann investigates the life and work of the relatively obscure figure of Rainer Maria Gerhardt, who was instrumental in translating and promoting Pound in Germany after World War II. Baumann recalls how, when he himself was

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first studying Pound, he discovered in Clark Emery’s pioneering work on Pound, Ideas into Action (1958), an extended quotation from Gerhardt’s 1952 German radio broadcast on The Pisan Cantos, a reference that inspired Baumann to search for this little-known source. It turns out the broadcast was by a German student of poetry who had committed suicide in 1954. Still, Baumann came to investigate the extent of Gerhardt’s efforts to bring Pound’s work to German-speaking readers: “How Gerhardt managed to make contact with poets and academics specializing in poetry, ‘from under the rubble heap’ (Canto 90/626) that was Germany well into the 1950s, is a miracle,” Baumann writes, “most of all his obtaining the German translation rights to the works of Ezra Pound.” Having tracked down Gerhardt’s radio broadcast, Baumann provides a careful account of it for those unaware of it or unable to understand German. He further cites Gerhardt’s correspondence at the time with Charles Olson, as his letters comment on Olson’s Poundian manifesto, “Projective Verse.” In addition to analyzing the specific passage by Gerhardt translated by Emery, as well as Olson’s own poem for Gerhardt, Baumann’s essay demonstrates the breadth of Pound’s cross-cultural impact on mid-century poetry, not only through Gerhardt’s translations, but through his deeply personal reaction to Pound’s vision. As Baumann notes about Olson’s elegy to Gerhardt after his suicide at age 30, “This long and gently ironic address … laments the loss of the creative relationship across the Atlantic that had hardly begun.” Yet, he adds, it took another 30 years after Gerhardt’s death before he was recognized for his international efforts on behalf of Pound, American poetry, and German literature. In an essay that examines translations of Pound’s work into not just one, but two other languages, Viorica Patea delves into the intricacies of Pound as translator, as Bancroft does, yet also into translating Pound, as Baumann does, by discussing translation as both a literary practice and a risky political one, especially under the duress of social crises. Patea devotes the first part of her essay to the first translation of The Cantos into Spanish by the Mexican José Vázquez Amaral as a cross-cultural endeavor in which Pound himself took part. Later, she turns to the reception of the Romanian translation of The Cantos during the era of Communist rule, as well as to the reception of the Spanish translation in Latin America at the same time, in order to contrast reactions to Pound under two left-wing

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regimes. Drawing attention to the range of the translations, Patea notes, how Pound’s own involvement with Amaral’s translation “reveals how Pound wanted The Cantos to be interpreted.” But beyond this revelation, contrasting “the reception of Pound’s Cantos in Romania and Nicaragua, two Communist countries, demonstrates just how variously they have been understood (or maybe misunderstood).” Patea’s account of the correspondence between Amaral and Pound highlights a central question of the cross-cultural nature of translation—specifically, in this case, between English and Spanish, a language Pound knew well. Patea traces adoption, over Amaral’s protest, of the Spanish word, “Cantares,” as a more precise term for Pound’s poem than the English term, “Cantos”; indeed, Pound embraced the Spanish term from that point forward. But later Patea documents the sharp contrast between responses to Pound in Romania and in Nicaragua: The Romanian authorities suppressed the translations of Nicolae Steinhardt, a Romanian Jew whom the communists persecuted, whereas in Nicaragua, poet Ernesto Cardenal, a staunch Marxist, openly celebrated Pound as a master. Patea’s investigation reveals that, while Pound is often read (and repudiated) as a political writer, more persistently, he is admired not for his politics, but for how his poetry resists ideological limits altogether. Finally, the fourth group of four essays, “Cross-Cultural Perceptions of Pound and His Work,” broadens the scope of this collection by gathering interpretations of Pound’s work from across professional, philosophical, and political perspectives, taking into account his international orientation and audience. In the first of these, biographer Anne Conover’s posthumous essay focuses on Pound’s working relationship with the publisher, progressive thinker, and benefactress, Caresse Crosby. At the time of her death in 2017, Conover had returned to research done for her 2001 biography, Caresse Crosby: From Black Sun to Roccasinibalda, to look further into Crosby’s life-long relationship with Pound. Here Conover offers a detailed study of Crosby’s attempts to engage Pound in her own ambitious publishing project, Crosby Continental Editions. In the 1920s, Crosby and her husband, Harry Crosby, had founded Black Sun Press, where they produced high end, letter-press limited editions of modernist writers, including James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald,

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and Pound. However, as Conover explains, in the early 1930s, after her husband’s suicide, Crosby turned her attention from publishing limited editions to developing a trade paperback series, which she envisioned could compete with other modern reprint series, such as the Albatross and Tauchnitz Modern series. Based on archival research of the Caresse Crosby Papers at the University of Southern Illinois, Conover examines Crosby’s efforts to bring Pound into this new publishing venture. The first volume in the series, Hemingway’s Torrents of Spring, appeared in December 1931, selling for the modest cover price of ten francs. As Conover observes, “Crosby was again ahead of her time in anticipating the paperback boom.” Yet the Crosby–Pound correspondence demonstrates that, while he was uncompromising on the editorial front, Pound was equally as demanding that authors, particularly translators, be paid well, demonstrating his diehard cultural commitment, despite the economic realities of publishing. Crosby, Conover notes, remained largely indifferent to Pound’s demands. Although the series published ten volumes, the imprint lost money, and soon Crosby abandoned the project. Yet she never wavered in her friendship with Pound and (later) his daughter, Mary de Rachewiltz. From Conover’s perspective, Pound emerges transatlantically as a savvy, if idealistic critic of commercial ventures. Turning from worldly, commercial connections to worldly, but philosophical ones, Jonathan Pollock’s essay explores the crossover between Henri Bergson’s influential poetics in the early twentieth century and Pound’s Vorticism, especially as manifested in The Cantos. Pollock builds his essay on Pound’s link to Bergson via Wyndham Lewis’s 1927 book, Time and Western Man, where Lewis gives considerable attention to Bergson’s metaphysics but also devotes two chapters to Pound “to be ranked alongside Bergson as belonging to that category of minds for whom reality is essentially of a temporal rather than a spatial nature.” Given this affinity between them, Pollock speculates that from the start Pound’s notion of the vortex “almost certainly had in mind the famous cone of memory—a cone balancing on its tip on a flat plane—that Bergson depicted twice in his 1896 essay, Matière et Mémoire.” As such, Bergson’s “metaphysics of the cone presides over the composition of The Cantos.” On this premise, Pollock provides a dexterous reading of Bergson’s metaphysics, especially in Matière et Mémoire, to make a case for Pound’s Bergsonian poetics in

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John Gery, Walter Baumann, and David McKnight

The Cantos. Reading Bergson’s figurative image of the cone metaphysically, Pollock argues for a clear affinity between Bergson’s and Pound’s concepts of time and memory, in which “the cone represents the memory, and the plane upon which it stands, the body.” In The Cantos, as for Bergson, “the vortex of the past is not to be understood as chronological”; rather, “the whole of the past is contained within each level, layer, or stratum of the cone.” Despite this affinity between Bergson and Pound, however, Pollock posits a significant divergence between them, when he discusses Bergson’s image in L’Évolution créatrice (1907) of a human arm plunged into iron filings. As Pollock puts it, compared to this “crass image of a mechanical force acting upon dead matter,” Pound’s analogous image of the rose in the steel dust, where “Energy creates pattern,” is “far more elegant and sophisticated.” These cross-cultural links and contrasts offer a valuable look at how Bergson’s philosophical thinking becomes congruent to, yet varies from, Pound’s. Like Pratt and Kita, Giuliana Ferreccio also offers a rich comparison of the poetry of Pound and H.D., delving into their shared background yet contrasting their cultural orientations. Ferreccio takes up both poets’ later, extended works—namely, Pound’s The Pisan Cantos (1948) and H.D.’s Trilogy (1944–46), applying to both of them Jonathan Culler’s deconstructive concept of the lyric poem, which (as Ferreccio defines it) “highlights the performative character of lyric verse and explores … the peculiarity of their linguistic acts.” Culler’s “notion of performative language acts,” argues Ferreccio, allows readers to recognize (in both poets’ work) how “foregrounding language as act, rather than representation,” can reveal the ways in which “performative language acts have a clear ritualistic character.” Despite the poets’ shared background as Imagist poets and their similar reactions to the horrors of World War II, Ferreccio identifies an important distinction in their technique. Besides his collage method, Ferreccio describes what she calls Pound’s “Forms of Ritual Address,” evident in his “recurrent, most notable lyrical outbursts,” as well as when his epic speaker sees himself as the Odyssey‘s “noman” and in his ritualization of memory. These devices contrast H.D.’s more “assertive and inspired” speaker, whom the poet places, as Ferreccio puts it, “in a transitional space, as it were, resembling that middle stage in rites of passage” aligned with “the conventions of devotional poetry,” while at the same

Introduction

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time “both re-enacting and revising it.” “The main difference [between Trilogy and] the Pisans,” argues Ferreccio, “lies precisely in the status of the lyrical I”: While Pound “offers resistance to that semantic linearity,” for H.D., the “individual voice is forever there in the present tense …, resulting in a ritual which is conducted not by an impersonal mediator but by a priestess figure.” Despite these marked differences, however, Ferreccio acknowledges that both poets draw heavily on cross-cultural sources, so that “[t]he specifically lyrical then seems to lie in the tension between context and utterance, repetition and creation.” In the light of Pound’s cross-cultural engagement with publishing, philosophy, and linguistics, the final essay here turns from Pound’s work itself to recounting the clash among his earliest critics, as an indirect result of his arrest and confinement in 1945 in St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington. Considering the turmoil surrounding Pound’s reputation at that time, Michael Coyle examines the history of and differences between the first academic studies of Pound, especially those by Harold H. Watts and Hugh Kenner. Coyle begins by recalling how, amid the uproar of those both for and against awarding the first Bollingen Prize for Poetry to The Pisan Cantos in 1949, there appeared the first academic studies of Pound’s work. Comparable to how Baumann and Patea recover the contemporaneous efforts on behalf of Pound by his translators, Coyle revisits the work of the now almost forgotten Watts, who, in 1947, was the first to give Pound’s work “professional attention,” even before the Bollingen announcement. Coyle details how the controversy would undercut Watts’s attempts to address (without any political bias) the themes of The Cantos. But the 1951 appearance of Kenner’s astutely designed book, The Poetry of Ezra Pound, with its expressly aesthetic reading of Pound, further undermined Watts’s criticism, eventually relegating his work to obscurity, even among later Poundians. When a year later Watts’s collected essays on Pound appeared as a book, Coyle notes, the essays remained unrevised, despite the intervening controversy over the Bollingen. So while both Watts and Kenner clearly admire Pound, Watts takes the doomed position that, as Coyle writes, “in order to understand Pound better we need to leave Poundian locutions behind,” while in “dramatic” contrast, “Kenner strove wherever possible to adhere to Pound’s own figures and formulations.” “Each approach, of course, poses its own risks,” concedes Coyle, with “Watts’s

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substitution of sometimes ugly philosophical jargon … obfuscating generic transformations,” while “Kenner’s approach risks sacrificing the distance necessary to critical understanding.” Yet despite objections to Kenner’s method, his work prevailed—in part, because his Poundian approach managed “practically to obliterate” Watts’s work. For literary historians, Coyle identifies Kenner as the architect of the foundation of the academic discussions of Pound ever since. Overall, the disparity of subjects and themes represented in this collection, together with the international range of its contributors, testifies to Pound’s enduring body of work, despite its often complex and sometimes highly controversial nature. To be sure, each essay goes its own way, digging into some dimension of Pound in search of the quiddity that substantiates its place on the modernist landscape that still prevails—across languages, genres, political and cultural theories, and art forms. While the authors here address nagging concerns or offer impressive discoveries across the spectrum of Pound’s purview, they consistently find new perspectives, as well as raise fundamental questions, which readers engaged in modernist writing and art worldwide will undoubtedly continue to debate.

A Note on the Text All bibliographic references to The Cantos refer to The Cantos of Ezra Pound (New York: New Directions, 1995). References to this book appear in parentheses in the text of each essay, citing Canto number and page number, separated by a slash. Thus, a citation to Canto 17, page 79, will appear in parentheses, as follows: 17/79.

I.  Pound’s Cross-Cultural Genesis

C HA P T E R ON E

Pound’s Modern (Metrical) Education Ira Nadel

T

wo passages from the same letter of July 1916 seemingly contradict each other:

Catullus, Propertius, Horace and Ovid are the people who matter. Catullus most … . Virgil is a second-rater, a Tennysonianized Homer. Fine literature supposedly saves one from getting swamped in contemporaneousness and from thinking that things naturally … should be as they are … .1

On one hand, the classical poets “matter,” but so, too, does “fine literature.” Catullus, Propertius, and Ovid count, while “the fine literature” of perhaps Tennyson, Swinburne, or the Pre-Raphaelites might protect one “from getting swamped in contemporaneousness.” But Pound knows the balance is wrong. Only the classics can keep one free from the cant and vagueness found in his contemporaries. But Pound goes further: in his essays, letters and poetry, he shows that the classical poets do not insulate one from the contemporary but actually enhance and facilitate it. Pound reads the classics as contemporaries, which becomes the very origin of his modern education. “All ages,” he claims in The Spirit of Romance, “are contemporaneous.”2 17

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From an early stage in his poetic development, Pound realized that to become modern was to absorb the ancients, that Sappho, Homer, or even Propertius “should serve as a model of style, or suggest possibilities of various sorts of perfection or maximum attainment.”3 At Penn and Hamilton, Pound realized that he learned most from the forgotten, or almost forgotten, classical writers; through them he discovered what it meant to be modern, turning them into his contemporaries—but how? To answer that question is to understand how Pound fashioned works that became contested spaces of ideas and forms through his appropriation, assimilation and revivification of the classics—much as the Alexandrians did in the first century bc. But what was the process that made Sappho, Horace, or that “second-rater” Virgil (as well as Dante, Whitman, and Browning), contemporaries?4 What made the revival of Hellenistic poetics valuable for Pound’s sense of the contemporary?5 In a word, prosody. Pound’s recognition of the value of classical metrics became the foundation of his poetic education, duplicating the Alexandrines: to initiate a new style, they had to understand the Homeric tradition. But their issue, as in Pound’s time, was how a poet in the contemporary world could write a Sapphic lyric or an epic when the genres had grown stale? Pound’s dilemma necessitated a move from imitation to creation, discovering his creativity through a mix of generic inheritance and resistance. It is the celebration of Henry Thornton Wharton’s late Victorian translation of Sappho (“the classic achievement”6), while praising the attempts of Richard Aldington and H.D. to create modern Sapphic verses.7 The classics shaped and renewed Pound’s sense of the modern not as an idea but a practice. Whether it was his attempts to transpose Greek quantitative meter (meter based on the duration of syllables rather than stress, alliteration, or syllable count) into English free verse, or his realization of what a fragment could say, the classics remained and sustained him throughout his most experimental and mature writing.8 Even the new became a version of the old: “the desire for vers libre is due to the sense of quantity reasserting itself after years of starvation,” Pound wrote in “A Retrospect.”9 While not entirely accurate—efforts to approximate classical meters in English verse by Tennyson, Arnold, Hardy, Bridges, and Lionel Johnson had gone on for the previous seventy years—Pound revivified the drive for quantitative verse. To Felix Schelling on July 8, 1922, for

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example, he explained that his vers libre in “Sextus Propertius” was part of a constant “search for the quantitative element in English, for liberty of the musician.”10 But it is important to realize that Pound did not, in the words of Peter Liebregts, “advocate imitating classical metres in English” but sought to approximate them, not copy them, reminding readers in 1938 that “WHEN the meter is bad, the language is apt to be poor.”11

I.  “Latin is really ‘modern’” From his early, imitative fin de siècle style, with its largely lyric form, Pound impatiently moved to its opposite: the long poem made up of fragments displaying Alexandrian features summarized by the Latin scholar E. R. Curtius as erudition, knowledge of different languages and literary traditions, and mastery of numerous poetic techniques.12 This characterizes Pound’s modern education but his path to it was neither speedy nor direct, although its goal was clear: poetry as craft—not inspiration— originating in an intertextuality often generated by fragments, with unity achieved through an associative method metrically linked to music. Pound’s study of the past remade the present, effectively rewriting both. Critically, it is a matter of legacy and inheritance versus revision or rejection. Pound absorbs and then renegotiates his classical and Edwardian heritage, with the latter fashioning such early efforts as Hilda’s Book and A Lume Spento, both saturated with fin de siècle archaisms and arch rhymes as he struggles to express, in the language of the aesthetes, “mystic wings that whirr.”13 What freed him from the conventions of an inherited, late nineteenth century metrical and rhythmic straitjacket were the fragmented, incomplete texts of Sappho, Homer, and Bion, who instructed him in prosody through absences as much as complete lines in their texts. While Pound identified himself with the classics, he also challenged the idea that he was an original, claiming that “when I can so snugly fit into the words of Propertius … with no distortion of his phrases, that isn’t justifiable by some other phrase of his elsewhere,” implicitly he asks, how can I be sui generis?14 In the same letter of 1922, he explains that the meter of Mauberley is largely that found in Bion’s “Adonis” and that the point of the “archaic language in the Prov[ençal] trans. [in Quia Pauper

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Amavi] is that the Latin is really ‘modern.’”15 “We are just getting back to a Roman state of civilization, or in reach of it,” he announces.16 The hexameters of Bion’s “Death of Adonis,” plus its assonance, anaphora, and rhythmic syncopation, were essential to study for anyone seriously concerned with understanding and attempting to write modern verses. He illustrated this in his transposition of these very features in the fourth poem of Mauberley. In a letter to William Carlos Williams dated October 1908, Pound clarified his sense of a contemporary when he explained to Williams that he (Pound) sometimes used the “rules of Spanish, Anglo-Saxon and Greek metric that are not common in the English of Milton’s or Miss Austen’s day.”17 This he learned through his classical studies at Penn with Walton McDaniel and at Hamilton with W. P. Shepard and Joseph Ibbotson. A contemporary for Pound is a writer who speaks to him with a voice of directness and originality. And that voice exists in the classics, achieving its tone and timbre and urgency through meter.

II.  A Path to the Modern Pound began his education in the classics at 12 at the Cheltenham Military Academy near Wyncote, Pennsylvania. In a June 1898 letter to his parents, he anticipates “no more Latin, no more Greek / no more smoking on the sneak”18 in expressing his eagerness for a vacation. His essay “Early Translators of Homer” (1918) recalls his imperfect education in Greek but solid education in Latin, which he continued through to the MA level. He often capitalized on this lack, telling Iris Barry in a letter of August 1926 that it is better to know a poem by Sappho by heart than to read Thucydides “without trouble.”19 But not knowing Greek was never an impediment: “early Greek” he tells her, “can be read with wonderful music” and a minimum of comprehension.20 But since Latin metrics models itself closely on Greek, he developed an understanding of epic and lyric Greek meters and possessed a solid knowledge of Greek literature. His grasp of Greek was, if not complete, at least respectable. It was Latin that got him into Penn in 1901, reading Livy and Horace his first year and happily avoiding Greek because of his Bachelor of Science program.21 In 1902, he took five courses that included such Latin writers

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as Catullus, Propertius, Lucretius, Virgil, and Ovid. But he also participated in Euripides’s Iphigenia presented in Greek by the Department of Classical Studies in 1903. These authors, in an almost wilful disregard of new voices, became Pound’s contemporaries and the source of his modern education. Going on to Hamilton in 1903 only intensified his classical interests now adding Provençal, while still neglecting Greek. Pound returned to Penn in 1905 for an MA in Romance Languages, studying Catullus and Martial, later stating that his “‘search for clarity and hardness in verse had its roots in his early reading’” of these Latin poets.22 Pound’s early “Raphaelite Latin” (1906), his first piece of published prose, conveyed some of these early ideas. But instead of focusing on the content of the classical writers, Pound responded to their method, the source for him of their “classical beauty.”23 But just what composed this beauty? What formulated the classics as modern? For Pound, it was prosody. His anti-philological bias meant a greater focus on the metrical elements that make up a poem. His criticism of contemporaries such as Williams occurred largely because they did not understand the têchne of poetry. Understanding meter meant understanding form. For Pound, the classical reliance on allusion, citation, and prosodic inventions had meaning. Pound’s “Apparuit” (1912), alluding to Dante’s first sight of Beatrice in Vita Nuova, is a Swinburneinspired composite of Sapphic stanzas and an early example of the attempt to reproduce quantitative Sapphic verse as English quatrains while sustaining a precise syllabic shape. In September 1911, Pound announced in frustration to Margaret Cravens that “I must make a perfect Sapphic ode before I pass on. That sort of anchor holds.”24The process led him to the quantitative meter of “The Return” (1912) with echoes in metrical phrases in The Cantos. The internal structure of his free verse derives from recombinations of classical metrics, despite the limitations of English in not possessing fixed quantities making a purely quantitative meter impossible. Nevertheless, the technical importance of classical poetry written in quantity remained with Pound throughout his career. Applying the ancient method of Greek verse meant the words could retain their integrity, the duration of the syllables given the measure and rhythm of the spoken word:

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Ira Nadel Golden rose the house, in the portal I saw thee, a marvel, carven in subtle stuff, a portent. Life died down in the lamp and flickered,   Caught at the wonder. (“Apparuit”)25

As he explained to Dorothy Shakespear, “My one comfort is this Sapphic affair. Surely all systems of metric since have been a vulgarity & a barbarism, and their beautiful results have been due to genius & accident & not to any virtue inherent in the ‘system.’”26 Others also sensed its classical musicality: Katherine Ruth Heyman set the poem to music in 1913. Pound believed that, unless you write in quantity, speech, music, and rhythm dilute one another. “Sappho would, unlike W.B.Y., have rejoiced in the piano because it wouldn’t have interfered with the song method” he explains to Dorothy.27 Music and words are central elements for Pound who often chanted or sang his verses as he worked on them. But he also acknowledged that “Greek seems to me a storehouse of wonderful rhythms [but], possibly impracticable rhythms.”28 The important term is “wonderful.” From “Apparuit,” he went on to the truly experimental “Papyrus,” a set of fragments:    Spring . . .    Too long . . .    Gongula . . . (“Papyrus”)29 Technically an attempt at translating the three surviving opening words from an extant 16 lines of a seventeenth-century fragment of Sappho, actually written on parchment not papyrus, Pound constructs an intense, if brief, poem emphasizing ellipses. The original fragment, itself, was not published until 1902, Pound likely coming across it in J. M. Edmond’s The New Fragments of Alcaeus, Sappho and Corinna (1909).30 Early scholars worked to restore the lines, often adding their own ideas of the missing words but Pound’s work, appearing in 1916, did not. It is a song to Gongyla of Colophon but out of these three words, Pound fashions a work of penetrating emotion, a compressed Haiku echoing Cathay.31 Restrained language and

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accuracy of thought combine with feeling, although several unsympathetic critics considered the work a satire on H.D. and her Sapphics.32 Pound valued fragments and understood their structural significance, as Hugh Kenner emphasized in The Pound Era: they became part of his path out of the present into the past and back again. As Kenner notes, “there was virtue in scraps, mysterium in fragments” requiring concentration on detail. “A work of art” Kenner adds “is someone’s act of attention, evoking ours.”33 Curiously (and ironically), although Pound’s knowledge of Greek was imperfect, he valued the language because he understood it as a prime example of melopoeia, an aesthetic marriage of sound and language, enhanced by a wide range of metrical patterns. Its study could expand the possibilities of English verse.

III.  “How it Strikes a Contemporary” Did Pound judge his contemporaries in terms of the classics? Did he read the new in the frame of the old? Yes, as seen both in his imagist poetics and development of what he called “absolute rhythm.” In the former, and through the work of H.D. and her own efforts at Sapphic verse, he revised the verse line so that its quantity was in tension with its imagery producing a powerful poetic statement. With the latter, he sought to create “a rhythm … in poetry which corresponds exactly to the emotion or shade of emotion to be expressed” often through quantity. It was to be distinct and “uncounterfeitable,” while testing but not eliminating the quantitative line.34 An important contemporary voice for Pound supporting his early view of meter was T. E. Hulme whom he first met through the Poet’s Club, which gathered at the Tour Eiffel Restaurant on Percy Street in London. These were a group of young, break-away poets who followed Hulme and his ideas of classicism. They included Edward Storer, F. S. Flint (who reviewed Personae in the New Age, [May 1909]), Desmond Fitzgerald and occasionally Francis Tancred “who does epigrams of a HoratianHerrickesque variety.”35 But Hulme was the key whose “Lecture on Modern Poetry” resonated deeply with Pound, as did his “Notes on Language and Style,” which reads like an Imagist manifesto. “Direct language is poetry, because it deals in images,” he wrote.36

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Hulme’s late 1908 “Lecture on Modern Poetry,” delivered at the Poets’ Club in Soho, outlines several new directions of escape from the shadow of Swinburne. Essentially, Hulme called for a new verse form, a new technique, to move poetry forward as Pound was himself discovering through his recovery of classical verse forms. One should no longer be a virtuoso but a master of one or two key elements, Hulme (and Pound) argued. For Hulme, the essential new form, imported from France, was vers libre, unshackling English poetry from rhyme and regularized meter. The length of a line oscillates with the images used by the poet, Hulme declared, breaking free from what Pound would soon call a metronome (iambic pentameter). The various rhythms that result will keep readers engaged. The denial of a regular number of syllables becomes the new basis of prosody. As Stephen J. Adams writes in Poetic Designs, Pound’s form of vers libre employs a referent that is not “an English meter but the classical meters of Greek or Latin.”37 Young poets, Pound advised, should practice Sapphic stanzas “‘to sharpen their ears for English quantity.’”38 The past leads to the present. And in a critique of T. S. Eliot, Pound complains that in analyzing vers libre, Eliot omits “all consideration of meters depending on quantity, alliteration,” writing as if all “meters were measured by accent.” This, Pound declares, is a defect.39 His focus remains the classical roots of prosody and form. For Pound, Hulme’s views were a breakthrough, a kind capstone to his modern education. If his original work was imitative of Browning, Rossetti, and Swinburne, he found a new voice through renovating the classical writers and then finding new examples that confirmed his practice. A work that reflects the metrically minded Pound is Ezra Pound: His Metric and Poetry, anonymously written by Eliot and appearing in New York in 1917. The order of the title indicates the stress: metrics before analysis. And by metrics, Eliot means rhythmical patterns of verse, emphasizing the definite and concrete expressed in well-controlled lines that incorporate vers libre. But, Eliot emphasizes, Pound’s use of it is only possible because he has rigorously worked with alternate systems of metrics, notably quantitative verse. Eliot recognizes that Pound’s meters are “unfamiliar,”40 but originate in his study of, and experience with, earlier poetic traditions, notably Provençal and classically stressed, quantitative verse. “Canzon: Of

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Incense,” for example, contains “no two lines in the whole poem that have an identical rhythm.” within its iambic limits.41 In “Night Litany” (from A Quinzaine for this Yule) Eliot shows Pound’s preference for a “quantitative measure.”42 This places a burden on every word and makes it “impossible to write like Shelley or Swinburne” because for Pound his language is concrete because “he has always a definite emotion behind it.”43 Commenting on Pound’s remark that “any work of art is a compound of freedom and order,”44 Eliot explains that Pound’s verse is in a state of “constant opposition between free and strict,”45 although there are not two kinds of verse: “there is only a mastery which comes of being so well trained that form is an instinct and can be adapted to the particular purpose in hand.”46 “The Return,” he adds, “is an important study in quantitative verse,”47 as the opening shows:   See, they return; ah, see the tentative    Movements, and the slow feet,    The trouble in the pace and the uncertain    Wavering! (“Return”)48 Eliot’s pamphlet is a useful reminder of Pound’s metrical experiments and link to classical verse forms (see Eliot’s references to Catullus and Martial), as he tests new forms without revoking the old. As Pound wrote in “A Retrospect,” “if you want the gist of the matter [of good poetry] go to Sappho, Catullus, Villon.”49 By 1908, the supremely confident twenty-three-year-old poet had a clear sense of what makes a contemporary: those writers who, because of their metrical practice, incorporate classical technique. A letter of August [18?], 1912 to Harriet Monroe confirms this when he explains to her that poetry is an “art with a technique … an art that must be in constant flux, a constant change of manner, if it is to live”—and anchoring that flux for Pound is classical poetics.50 The idea of a contemporary for him is any poet who maintains that flux but also remains attuned to classical meter or to what William Carlos Williams described as a change from “‘accented verse to a verse that takes as its unity elapsed time’”—this in response to Mary Barnard’s new translations of Sappho. Williams goes on to say that “‘without a means of MEASURING MEASURE, we are lost.’”51 The

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importance of “measuring measure” is what Pound learned from his classical studies and modern experiments.52 Pound understood that technique itself must change in response to the age as concepts of Hellenism shifted in the late nineteenth century with Greek, rather than Roman classicism, dominating.53 Admiration for Latin models declined and Pound adjusted his interests, telling Monroe that he admired the values of Greek: “Would to God I could see a bit more Sophoclean severity in the ambitions of mes amis et confrères,” he writes from Coleman’s Hatch in 1915. “The general weakness of the writers of the new school is looseness, lack of rhythmical construction and intensity,” the latter achieved through meter.54 “There must be no clichés, set phrases, stereotyped journalese. The only escape from such is by precision, a result of concentrated attention to what is writing.”55 The new/old prosody of Pound stands up to the vagaries of a Milton, Tennyson, Swinburne, the Georgians, or the new poets of his time, while providing a means for the vernacular to find expression through its classical expression and technique. Pound’s archaeological process excavates a prosodic past that allows him and others to negotiate a new poetic future. A single sentence summarizes what Pound’s contemporaries (the classical poets) taught him. To the young translator Mary Barnard he wrote that “‘THE JOB of the writer of verse is to get the LIVE language AND the prosody simultaneously. Prosody: articulation of the total sound of a poem (not bits of certain shapes gummed together).’”56 For Pound, “the tension must [always] be kept, and against the metric pattern[,] struggle toward natural speech.”57 Meter vs. natural speech becomes the contested space of the poem, while weighing “Theocritus and Yeats with one balance”58 the constant challenge. Pound’s modernism emerged through his lasting encounter with the ancients, but he did not receive his graduate degree in “Modern Education” until he visited a Giessen hotel room in July 1911. There, the laughter of the floor-rolling Ford Madox Ford overrode the archaisms of Pound’s Canzoni. The response saved the young poet “at least two years, perhaps more” from being trapped in an outmoded style.59 “Ovid before Browning,” Pound proclaimed—and in The Cantos, he repeatedly relies on a variety of Greek metrical feet to situate the poem within the classical epic reconfirming the classical roots of his metrical modernity.60

C HA P T E R T WO

The First Imagists William Pratt

P

hiladelphia is known for many things, but as the home of the Imagists, it has yet to be recognized. Everyone knows it was in Philadelphia, in the late eighteenth century, that Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, announcing to the world that the time had come for “one People to dissolve the Political Bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the Powers of the Earth, the separate and equal Station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them.” Jefferson’s famous words marked the birth of a new nation, with a new form of government, of which one day he would become president. Not many know that it was also in Philadelphia, in the early twentieth century, that an original literary movement began to take shape. That was when Ezra Pound presented Hilda Doolittle (H.D.) with his first hand-written book of poems. He called it “Hilda’s Book,” and it started with “The Tree,” a poem of self-discovery he placed at the head of all his later poems, ending      I have been a tree amid the wood And many a new thing understood That was rank folly to my head before.1 Pound’s short poem was no match for Jefferson’s historic document, but it was historic in its own way. It was the forerunner of a movement 27

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called Imagism, which was a kind of Literary Declaration of Independence. Imagism led to Modernism, a broader movement that would incorporate the self-critical interior monologues and deeply pessimistic views of modern urban civilization, expressed in such masterpieces as Eliot’s The Waste Land and Joyce’s Ulysses. Despite these devastating critiques of its own age, Modernism came to be the major force in English and American literature for the rest of the twentieth century. Pound and H.D. were the vanguard of a new literary movement bent on changing the way words were made into poems. As a movement, Imagism did not begin in Philadelphia but in London, where Pound and H.D. went in search of experimental poets like themselves. But if American political independence began with the words Jefferson wrote in Philadelphia long ago, the case can be made that real American literary independence began with the words Pound wrote in Philadelphia over a century ago. W. H. Auden would look back and argue, later on, that “There are very few living poets, even if they are not conscious of having been influenced by Pound, who could say ‘My work would be exactly the same if Mr. Pound had never lived.’”2 Imagism was Pound’s invention. He named it and set down the principles governing it. He not only wrote this new kind of poetry himself; he distilled the essence of poetry into what he called “A LIST OF DON’TS,”3 which was an ultimatum for maximum verbal economy, fresh imagery, and freedom of verse form. What Pound articulated in the second decade of the twentieth century was nothing less than a new definition of poetry, aimed at matching rhythm to imagery in the fewest possible words, a conscious departure from the old definition of arranging words in patterns of meter and rhyme. The Imagists insisted they were not trying to break the literary tradition but to refresh it, to give words new powers of expression by condensing their meaning, chiefly through the concreteness of their imagery. “It is better,” Pound insisted, “to present one Image in a lifetime than to produce voluminous works.”4 To compare literary with political history may seem to strain the meaning of history, but Imagism was cultural history in the making, and has as much to do with what Jefferson called “the Course of human Events” as political history. Renaissance history is as much cultural as political: it has as much to do with Michelangelo and Leonardo as it does with the

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Medicis. The same is true of other great ages, such as Classical Greece, Augustan Rome or Elizabethan England. We measure greatness by human achievement, whether in art or in politics, and Imagism, a minor movement, gave rise to the major movement we call Modernism. Both Jefferson and Pound became controversial figures later, but what they wrote in Philadelphia is beyond dispute: they were American writers of exceptional originality, whose words have had a profound and lasting effect on politics and on poetry. Jefferson’s words have become American scripture, quoted more often than the words of any other American writer. Pound’s belief that “Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree”5 caused him to charge English with new meaning, and to urge other writers to do the same. Pound begat Imagism; Imagism begat Modernism, which is to say that the dominant literary movement of the twentieth century owes its origin as much to Ezra Pound as to any other writer. Imagism turned out to be democratic; it appealed to a wide variety of talented writers who did not live in Philadelphia or London. Pound was born in Idaho, but he grew up in Philadelphia, where he started to acquire the phenomenal education that made him the first of the four Philadelphia Imagists: The other three were H.D., born in Pennsylvania, who was studying at Bryn Mawr when she met Pound, William Carlos Williams, born in New Jersey, who was a fellow student at the University of Pennsylvania when he met Pound, and Marianne Moore, a native of St. Louis, who was a graduate of Bryn Mawr. Marianne Moore was not drawn into the Imagist movement until after it started, but she is the only Imagist who has a memorial in Philadelphia, where a replica of her Brooklyn ­apartment has been recreated in the Rosenbach Library. Imagism as a movement was Anglo-American, created in London in the second decade of the twentieth century; but the American influence was primary. Pound was naturally international, moving from Philadelphia to London in 1908, publishing his first book of poems in Venice and taking it with him to London, where he added a succession of slim volumes of poetry that documented his verse experiments. In one of them, Ripostes, in 1912, he would announce the existence of a new poetic school: “As for the future,” he asserted, “Les Imagistes have that in their keeping.”6 Though all Les Imagistes were British and

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American, the French spelling was a link with the French Symbolistes, whose experiments with poetic form in another language influenced the Imagists to do likewise with English. H.D. followed Pound from Philadelphia to London, and he christened her the first Imagist—to her astonishment, as we know from a book she published much later in her life: End to Torment: A Memoir of Ezra Pound. In the fall of 1912, she showed some new poems to Pound and Richard Aldington, a young English poet she would eventually marry. The three poets often met in the tearoom of the British Museum, which at that time housed a vast international library, and it was there that Imagism as a movement was born. It was born the moment Pound read H.D.’s poems and exclaimed, “But Dryad [his nickname for her] this is poetry.” He edited her poems on the spot and signed them “H.D. Imagiste,” then sent the manuscript to Harriet Monroe, the editor of Poetry, a new magazine in Chicago for which he was foreign correspondent.7 The poems would be published in 1913 as the first Imagist poems to appear in print. Thus, the Imagist movement was launched in London, by two natives of Philadelphia, whose work was published in Chicago, uniting three cities in one broad swath of creative expression. The event did not make headlines, but its effect was lasting. Pound and H.D. started Imagism; William Carlos Williams and Marianne Moore soon joined them in the pages of Poetry in Chicago and the Egoist in London, from which the new movement in poetry began to spread like wildfire, in America as well as England. Williams was a medical student when he met Pound, who was studying languages, both ancient and modern, and Williams would later say that before and after meeting Ezra Pound was like the difference between bc and ad. He was writing poetry already, and Pound encouraged him to continue writing it after he became a doctor, which would make him famous as an Imagist poet who was also a practicing pediatrician. The fourth Philadelphia Imagist was Marianne Moore, who after graduating from Bryn Mawr became a teacher at the Carlisle Indian School and, later, a librarian at the New York Public Library and, still later, the editor of a well-known little magazine called the Dial. None of the original Imagists were imitators of Pound; each had a distinctly personal style that readily fit into the movement Pound invented.

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It was Ezra Pound, not Walt Whitman, after all, who was the author of real American literary independence. Whitman’s free verse was his own singular creation; he had no followers and, though he had imitators, they never started a movement as Pound’s followers did. Pound wrote “A Pact” to Whitman to acknowledge his American ancestry, but his true poetic ancestors were neither American nor English. Whitman nationalized English poetry, giving it a recognizable American identity, but Pound internationalized English poetry, giving it new breadth and freedom. Pound left the United States and settled in Europe because he wanted his poetry to be steeped in the Western literary tradition. His favorite poets were Homer, the epic poet of Greece, and Dante, the epic poet of Italy, as well as Sextus Propertius, the lyric poet of Rome, whose sophisticated Latin love poems he translated into English and remade into his own poems. His later epic, The Cantos, were modeled on Dante’s great Italian epic, The Divine Comedy, with its hundred Cantos, and his first Canto was a liberal translation of Book 11 of The Odyssey, the first great epic poem in Western literature. He drew Imagism itself from widely different sources, none of them American. He modeled his free verse on the subtleties of the French Symbolists, who were more sophisticated than Whitman. His model of brevity was the Japanese haiku. He fused both models into his own original Imagist doctrines of imagery, economy and rhythmic freedom. “Make it New” was his motto, and by “it” he meant the entire Western poetic tradition, from Greek and Latin poets to Italian poets, French poets, even Anglo-Saxon poets. Pound’s outlook was so international he preferred Homer and Dante to Shakespeare. It was his ambition to broaden and enrich, not merely to continue, the English poetic tradition. Pound’s American internationalism had its roots in Philadelphia. He learned Classical Greek and Latin in prep school. He went on to learn Romance languages at Penn and was writing his own poetry in English before he moved to Europe to embrace the world tradition. The Imagist poem as Pound conceived of it was individual, impersonal, and instantaneous. It was shorter than most traditional poems, but complete in itself. It invited readers to share in the effort of charging language with meaning by creative interpretation. Simply to compare short poems by each of the four First Imagists is to see how their individualism followed the main Imagist principles: brevity, imagery, and rhythmic variety.

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The most celebrated Imagist poem has long been Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro,” a marvel of compression that consists of only a title and two lines of verse:     IN A STATION OF THE METRO The apparition of these faces in the crowd; Petals on a wet, black bough.8 This tiny poem, first published in 1913 in Poetry, has endured more than a century, and was extolled as a “Masterpiece” as recently as January 6, 2017, in the Wall Street Journal, which devoted half a page to a detailed analysis of its virtues as a major work of art.9 In a single stroke, Pound’s Imagist poem transforms an image of human faces in a crowded Paris subway station into the image of white petals on a rain-soaked branch. A somber city setting suddenly becomes a bright natural scene by poetic metamorphosis, resonating in the mind of any reader who descends from daylight in a city street into a dark subway tunnel. Pound himself explained that the poem began with a mental image of faces in the crowd, and declared that he spent a year condensing it from thirty lines into two short lines of verse.10 Pound wrote many equally short poems where the words imply much more than they say, as for instance: FAN-PIECE, FOR HER IMPERIAL LORD O fan of white silk,     clear as frost on the grass-blade, You also are laid aside.11 This poem has only a title and three lines of verse, but it tells a poignant story, of a love that once was and no longer is. We know from the title it is spoken by a woman, once a favorite of the emperor of ancient China. Her delicate fan of white silk is a sign of nobility; it is also the image of herself. It was part of her elegant costume when she was the emperor’s favorite, but it has been “laid aside” by the hand of the emperor, for she has lost favor with him, probably transferred to another woman of his court. The lady’s shy deference to the lord who has rejected her is appealing, but she has

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not lost her dignity, since the fan is still “clear as frost on the grass-blade,” a vibrant image contrary to her feeling of neglect. She does not reproach him; she remains loyal to him as emperor, though the tone is sad because she is no longer his favorite. T. S. Eliot called Pound “the inventor of Chinese poetry for our time.” This poem is proof of his achievement. It reads as if translated from an ancient Chinese poem, and we know that Pound had acquired the papers of an Oriental scholar, Ernest Fenollosa, from his widow, which impressed him so much that he taught himself Chinese, which enabled him to read poetry in that language and translate it into English. Pound’s Chinese translations are not literal; they are original poems in their own right. With just a few words, his poem conveys the aura of a past civilization, one so refined that politeness was regarded as the highest virtue. It was bad manners to speak ill of others, rude to complain even when slighted. The emperor’s disregard has caused the woman pain, yet she accepts it without protest. Pound’s exemplary Chinese translations pay homage to an ancient society, which was informed by the wisdom of Confucius, the wise ruler whose teachings were the foundation of civility. Confucian philosophy became the basis of Pound’s own personal philosophy in his later years; in his early years, he published Fenollosa’s essay on “The Chinese Written Language as a Medium for Poetry” as a basis for Imagism, having learned that Chinese characters are themselves condensed images. His luminous translations made ancient Chinese poems into modern Imagist poems across the barrier of time. Though Pound invented Imagism, he anointed H.D. as the first Imagist, praising her poems for their “hardness,” saying “It’s straight talk, straight as the Greek!”12 Like him she could reduce poetry to its essence, as she did in        EPIGRAM       (After the Greek) The golden one is gone from the banquets; She, beloved of Atimetus, The swallow, the bright Homonoea: Gone the dear chatterer.13

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The “Greek” origin of this poem was actually Latin, a verse dialogue between Homonoea, who died during the reign of the Roman Emperor Tiberius, and her husband, Atimetus, who was still living; thus it was an imaginary dialogue between the living and the dead. H.D. converted it into a monologue, spoken by someone who knew them both, who wished to honor the enduring love they shared, reaching beyond life into death. It could have come out of the Greek anthology, yet it recreates in English the scene of Roman opulence, the sumptuous banquets served when Rome was the capital of the civilized world. The chief image is that of the woman, now dead, “the golden one,” who is, as we might imagine, bedecked with gold bracelets and wearing a golden coronet on her head. Her carriage was graceful as a swallow’s flight, and “the dear chatterer” must have possessed a soft voice and appealing humor, making her “the beloved of Atimetus.” Names play an essential part in such a short poem; Homonoea and Atimetus, by their very sounds, express masculine and feminine tones. H.D.’s poetry at its best seems timeless, out of Greece by way of Pennsylvania, as if she were really a dryad who spoke out of Penn’s woods. H.D. was an Imagist from the beginning to the end of her career; it is no wonder Pound gave her his blessing as the first of the Imagists. William Carlos Williams, as his name suggests, was English on his father’s side and Spanish on his mother’s side. One of his most effective Imagist poems bears a Spanish title. EL HOMBRE It’s a strange courage you give me, ancient star: Shine alone in the sunrise toward which you lend no part!14 The title makes us expect that the subject will be a man, but “El Hombre” is not human: it is a star. Williams is saluting the morning star, which is actually one of the planets, quite possibly Jupiter, mythical king of the gods. With a title and four lines of verse, he discovers human qualities in a natural object, gaining emotional strength from what he sees. The star

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shines in the sunrise, outshone by the brilliance of the much larger star that engulfs it, but staunchly sending out its own illumination. Williams’s poetic motto was “no ideas but in things.” He wrote poems about red wheelbarrows and fire engines and cats climbing over flower pots and plums stolen from the refrigerator—homely subjects with little beauty and much utility to recommend them. He even defined poems as “machines made of words.” Imagism was as natural to him as it was to H.D., but for different reasons. He took Les Imagistes seriously, writing a poem titled “Aux Imagistes” to express his gratitude for being one of them, even though he was not in London but in New Jersey, a pediatrician by profession not a poet. His long friendship with Pound began with a poetic apprenticeship, and it is easy to see “El Hombre” as a tribute to Pound as the greater poet, the sun to his morning star. Williams was the most American of the Imagists, in style as well as subject, choosing the commonplace instead of the exotic for his subjects. Yet his poems have an elemental substance that makes many of them unforgettable, seemingly a part of the natural world they describe. Marianne Moore’s poetry is a feminine complement to the masculinity of Williams, though the two appreciated each other’s art. She always preferred the exotic to the commonplace. She loved picture books and zoos, and she especially loved hats, the more extravagant the better. She wrote some of the finest animal poems ever written, about creatures like the pangolin and the giraffe and the ostrich, and one remarkable poem that seemed not merely to describe but to mirror her favorite creature, a lizard that could change its color to mimic its surroundings. Her poem has rhythm and it also has shape.     TO A CHAMELEON Hid by the august foliage and fruit   of the grape-vine  twine   your anatomy     round the pruned and polished stem,       Chameleon.       Fire laid upon     an emerald as long as

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The image projected by these words is both imaginary and visible, a long slim reptile clinging to a grapevine, shining like a massive emerald that only the king of the underworld might possess, glowing many-colored, as if all the colors of the rainbow were embodied in it, as if it had digested the entire color spectrum from ultraviolet to infrared. To read the poem is to slither imaginatively around the vine yourself, following the sinuous motion of the chameleon as you perceive that the words have been given the shape of the creature they are portraying. No wonder Imagism spun off into what came to be called Concretism, where the words of the poem were meant to imitate the shape of their subject, to be an image in the eye as well as in the mind. But Marianne Moore was not a Concretist. Her ode to the chameleon is thoroughly Imagist, a portrait in words, more in the mind than on the page, though partaking of both. Individual to the point of eccentricity, Marianne Moore is definitely one of the First Imagists of Philadelphia, four highly original poets who inspired an original American literary school, which deserves a place of honor in the annals of the city. Everyone knows Philadelphia as America’s first political capital; it should also be known as one of America’s foremost poetic capitals.

C HA P T E R T H R E E

Pound and/or Franklin A Reading of Canto 31 John Gery

T

he 1899 statue of Benjamin Franklin seated, located in the quad in front of College Hall at the center of the University of Pennsylvania campus, was commissioned by Philadelphia department store entrepreneur Justus C. Strawbridge and sculpted by John J. Boyle. Originally, this statue was designed to be placed in front of the main post office building in downtown Philadelphia (see Figure 3.1) to recognize Franklin as the first postmaster general of the United States, but in 1938, when the post office building was demolished, the statue was relocated on loan to Penn (see Figure 3.2); a year later the city donated it permanently to the university to recognize Franklin’s proposal in 1749 to establish what was first called the “Publick College of Philadelphia.” Later the institution’s name was changed to the College of Philadelphia, but then in 1779 (after the American Revolution when the newly formed state of Pennsylvania laid claim to the property), it became the University of the State of Pennsylvania, finally obtaining its current name in 1791, once it was privatized.1 The words inscribed on the monument derive from George Washington’s eulogy for Franklin after his death in 1790: “VENERATED/ FOR BENEVOLENCE/ ADMIRED FOR TALENTS/ ESTEEMED FOR PATRIOTISM/ BELOVED FOR/ PHILANTHROPY/ WASHINGTON.” Although this statue did not grace the quad at Penn while Ezra Pound was a student there, in 1901–3 and 1905–7, without a doubt, Franklin’s 37

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Figure 3.1. Statue of Benjamin Franklin, Main Post Office, Philadelphia, between 1895 and 1910. Image courtesy of the Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/item/2016806816/

profile dominated the landscape of Philadelphia throughout Pound’s youth, from the late 1880s until his move to Crawfordsville, Indiana, in 1907 and his departure for Europe in Spring 1908. Nonetheless, throughout the course of his development as a poet and his venture into The Cantos, when he delves into early American political history, Pound focuses much more on two other American revolutionaries, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, than on his fellow Philadelphian, Franklin. Given Franklin’s prominent reputation for his imagination, unorthodox manner, wily and sometimes scandalous behavior, inventive spirit, public service, and political savvy— in short, his “benevolence,” “talents,” “patriotism,” and “philanthropy”—he

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Figure 3.2. Benjamin Franklin Statue, University of Pennsylvania. Photo credit David Toccafondi

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might seem, at first glance, to share many of the very qualities that Pound found so compelling in Sigismondo Malatesta, who was to become a central figure in The Cantos, and thereby be exactly appropriate for Pound’s Eleven New Cantos (Cantos 31–41, known as the Nuevo Mundo Cantos), when he turns his attention prominently to the American Revolution. Yet even though Franklin does appear, directly or indirectly, some twenty times in The Cantos, mentioned for the first time in Canto 31 and for the last time in Canto 71 (the last of the Adams Cantos),2 the worldly, often deceptive Franklin remains ancillary to Pound’s reification of American history, as he refashions it within the global perspective of Renaissance Italy, Classical China, the Italian Fascist state, and other contexts. Instead, the more stubbornly resistant, arguably provincial John Adams takes center stage. Why? Why does Pound not engage Franklin’s life and thought more than he does in The Cantos, instead of delving so deeply into Jefferson and Adams? Is it a matter of convenience from his available sources when he was living in Europe?3 Might his resistance to Franklin be related to his disillusionment in his contemporary Philadelphians, especially at the university that had denied him his doctorate not once but four times between 1907 and 1930? What does Franklin mean to Pound and how closely related is Pound’s Franklin to the popular figure who founded Poor Richard’s Almanac and whose Autobiography remains a paradigm of both the literary form of the memoir and the embodiment of the American character? More than argue for a specific alignment between these two Philadelphians, however, I want to explore the question of what kinship, if any, they have. For instance, although both Franklin and Pound were born elsewhere (Franklin in Boston, Pound in Hailey), both spent their formative years in Philadelphia (170 years apart from each other), and both were clearly influenced by their “education” and experience there. But whereas Franklin went on to devote the first half of his life to his adopted city and was probably more instrumental than any other individual in shaping its future, establishing among other things its first fire station, public parks, lending library, and most prestigious center of learning, Pound quickly left Philadelphia behind him, even as he took with him Franklin’s resourceful, autonomous, practical-minded, and far-reaching ingenuity to help him shape the future of poetry and literary culture cross-culturally, from London and Paris to Rapallo and Beijing.

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As with the formidable work of John Ruskin, another significant influence on Pound’s thinking who receives only limited mention in Pound’s poetry and prose, Franklin hardly appears in Pound’s work, relative to Jefferson and Adams. Indeed, in what may be conspicuous fashion, Franklin is brushed over, even disregarded, by Pound. In his 1937 essay, “The Jefferson–Adams Letters as a Shrine and a Monument,” Pound praises the second and third US presidents, as well as other founders, in an unqualified manner: In the 170 years the United States have at no time contained a more civilised ‘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 and diaries of J. Q. Adams and Martin Van Buren is merely nonsense.4 But as though keenly aware of the other most prominent Founding Father, Pound seems compelled to add, “Without competence in matters pertaining to Benjamin Franklin, I should nevertheless hazard the opinion that his public writing will be found slithery and perhaps cheap in comparison. He had not the integrity of the word. At least on occasions it deserted him.”5 Nevertheless, might Pound be dismissing Franklin because of his significance? A broad consideration of Franklin’s and Pound’s ideas for education, civic economy, and art suggests they may have more in common than Pound readily admits, although what may be more pertinent is how Franklin does appear prominently in The Cantos, especially in Canto 31 in a single sustained, albeit somewhat enigmatic passage Pound gives over to Franklin (although as portrayed by John Adams). Here may be the best, if not only opportunity to redress the indeterminate place of Pound’s fellow Philadelphian in The Cantos, if not as a central, dynamic, and evolving figure, such as Jefferson and Adams, as a touchstone in Pound’s strategy to reconcile tradition with change in his vision of a paradiso terrestre. As progenitor of the University of Pennsylvania, Franklin literally outlines his vision for education in his 1749 pamphlet, “Proposals Relating to the Education of Youth in Pensilvania,” where he openly argues for a

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course of learning different from the existing colleges in the British colonies that preceded him—namely, Harvard, William and Mary, Yale, and the College of New Jersey (Princeton)—all of whose academics, at that time, focused heavily on theology. In breaking ranks, Franklin proposes alternatively that his contemporaries create an academy for young men, such that [a]s to their STUDIES, it would be well if they could be taught every Thing that is useful, and every Thing that is ornamental: But Art is long, and their Time is short. It is therefore propos’d that they learn those Things that are likely to be most useful and most ornamental. Regard being had to the several Professions for which they are intended.6 Although Franklin invites debate on his proposal, he presumptively provides a curriculum that begins with penmanship and drawing, but goes on systematically to include Arithmetik, Grammar, Stile, pronunciation, History, Geography, Chronology, “Antient Customs” (anthropology), Morality (ethics), Oratory, Publick Religion, Civil Orders and Constitutions (law), “Questions of Right and Wrong” (logic), Foreign Languages, Political Science, Natural Science, Trade, Agriculture, and Mechanics (i.e., engineering). Concerning foreign languages, he assigns Latin and Greek for those studying the Divinity, whereas to future “Merchants” he would assign more usable languages—French, German, and Spanish.7 “And though all should not be compelled to learn Latin, Greek, or the modern foreign Languages,” he concludes, “yet none that have an ardent Desire to learn them should be refused.”8 “With the whole” of a college education, Franklin argues, there “should be constantly inculcated and cultivated, that Benignity of Mind, which shows itself in searching for and seizing every Opportunity to serve and to oblige; and is the Foundation of what is called GOOD BREEDING; highly useful to the Possessor.”9 While Ezra Pound may never have had in mind the immediate practical application of learning that lies behind Franklin’s civil proposal for an academy, he does share with his forebear an impulse toward purposiveness in planning an individual’s education, as in Guide to Kulchur, where he writes

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[I]t does not matter a two-penny damn whether you load up your memory with the chronological sequence of what has happened, or the names of the protagonists, or authors of books, or generals and leading political spouters, so long as you understand the process now going on, or the processes biological, social, economic now going on, enveloping you as an individual, in a social order.10 True, Pound has a more polemical motive in mind, that is, not to bargain for creating an academic institution but to critique it for its excesses. Still, scholarship for its own sake dithers for Pound: “Knowledge is or may be necessary to understanding,” he writes, “but it weighs as nothing against understanding, and there is not the least use or need of retaining it in the form of dead catalogues once you understand process.”11 What the two writers do share in their vision of a formal education, rather than a similar philosophy of learning, is a spirit of innovation for teaching what is to be learned. And for both, that innovation is to be achieved by the most straightforward means possible, to bring an efficiency to changing the very foundations of education without any overly complicated, unduly abstract, or excessive rhetoric (although both writers, especially Pound, can wax dramatic). Such an economy of expression—evident in both Franklin’s assiduous lists and in Pound’s wellknown phrase, “Ideas into action” (which remained important to him at least from the time of Imagism in 1913 to “A Visiting Card,” first published in English in 195212)—can also be found in both writers’ reasoning about the social practice of economics itself, in relation to material culture. As late as 1784, for instance, in “An Economical Project: To the Authors of the Journal of Paris” (enclosed in a letter dated April 26, 1784 to Journal de Paris), Franklin proposes a plan to the city of Paris to institute a citywide policy of ringing church bells and (if necessary) sounding cannons at sunrise, in order to rouse its citizens from sleep. In addition, he proposes a tax be levied against all those whose windows stay lit after dark with candlelight. To cut back on artificial light, he had calculated from his own experience, then multiplied by the size of the Parisian population, could save the city “an immense sum … every year, by the economy of using sunshine instead of candles.”13 (Of course, he mentions nothing of

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those chandlers who would inevitably lose work and income by such a measure.) He reasons: It should be said, that people are apt to be obstinately attached to old customs, and that it will be difficult to induce them to rise before noon, consequently my discovery can be of little use; I answer, Nil desperandum.14 I believe all who have common sense, as soon as they have learnt from this paper that it is daylight when the sun rises, will contrive to rise with him; and, to compel the rest, I would propose the following regulations: 1. tax on light; 2. police limit wax and tallow sales; 3. guards prohibit night carriages except for physicians, surgeons, and midwives; 4. bells and cannons at sunrise.15 Whether Franklin is being serious, droll, or deliberately exaggerated in his proposal, he is certainly neither vague nor especially politic, at least not on paper, to the extent that he measures the value of the law foremost for its impact on the community. Nor does he hesitate to propose a law that would mandate personal habits. Pound, of course, would recoil at Franklin’s design to manage individuals’ behavior, as he would undoubtedly consider this proposal one of those “occasions” when Franklin’s “integrity of the word” has “deserted him” for overt didacticism. Yet considering this proposal’s lucid, efficient prose (whether taken as ironic or not), it does anticipate Pound’s own prose style sometimes, especially when he addresses social concerns—as in Pound’s 1938 essay, “What Is Money For?” which, after the brief introduction, divides into seventeen sections, each a half-page to a page in length. In the fifth section, “THE VALUE OF MONEY,” for example, Pound takes up the definition of money within “a sane and decent economic system,” described sentence by sentence by using “common sense” in the same way Franklin does in his proposal for monitoring artificial light. Pound begins this section, “Take money IN SUCH A SYSTEM as a means of exchange and then realize that to be a JUST means of exchange it must be MEASURED.” So, he next asks, “What are you going to USE to measure the value of anything? An egg is an egg. You can eat it (until it goes bad). Eggs are not all the same size, but they might serve among primitive people as an approximate

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measure.”16 Pound then continues by listing other examples—again, as Franklin often does: Work, or “Arbeitswert,” which served as a measure for the Austrian “monetary reformer,” Unterguggenberger; grain, which served as the standard for exchange in Charlemagne’s era, when farmers were compensated a higher or lower amount but at a constant measure of a peck. Gold (as well as platinum) is a fourth measure, although for Pound it is unsatisfactory as “a single commodity” because of its scarcity, and “STATE AUTHORITY behind the printed note” is the fifth and “best means of establishing a JUST and HONEST CURRENCY.”17 The point here is not to endorse either Franklin’s or Pound’s proposal itself, but to draw attention to the brevity, frankness, and accessibility of both texts. A similar compatibility can be found in their statements about poetry, in fact. To be sure, in his Autobiography, Franklin demeans his own talents as a poet when he explains why he abandoned it at an early age (Poor Richard’s Almanac notwithstanding), while Pound expresses the opposite when he recounts his resolution from an early age that at age thirty I would know more about poetry than any man living, that I would know the dynamic content from the shell, that I would know what was accounted poetry everywhere, what part of poetry was “indestructible,” what part could not be lost by translation, and—scarcely less important what effects were obtainable in one language only and were utterly incapable of being translated.18 In Part One of The Autobiography, Franklin reports how, when he was a teenager in Boston, his father noticed his “Bookish Inclination”19 and thereby directed his son to do an apprenticeship in his older brother’s print shop. This opportunity, Franklin claims, gave him access to more and better books than he had read to date, which further enhanced his literary interests as both reader and writer. One tradesman (Mr. Matthew Adams) invited the young Franklin to see his private library and lent him whatever books he wished. “I now took a Fancy to Poetry,” continues Franklin, and made some little Pieces. My Brother, thinking it might turn to account enourag’d me, & put me on composing two occasional

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John Gery Ballads. One was called The Light House Tragedy, & contain’d an Acc’ of the drowning of Capt. Worthilake with his Two Daughters; the other was a Sailor Song on the Taking of Teach or Blackbeard the Pirate. They were wretched Stuff, in the Grubstreet Ballad Stile, and when they were printed he sent me to Town to sell them. They first sold wonderfully, the Event being recent, having made a great Noise. This flatter’d my Vanity. But my Father discourg’d me, by ridiculing my Performances, and telling me Verse-makers were generally Beggars; so I escap’d being a Poet, most probably a very bad one. But … Prose Writing has been a great Use to me in the Course of my Life.20

Although he associates the poet’s life with penury, Franklin does recognize poetry’s contribution to developing his prose, which he considers “a principal Means of my Advancement.” So, despite disparaging his own talent, he sees poetry as having its “Use.” Indeed, Franklin’s excessive pragmatism may have partly caused Pound to veer away from him toward Jefferson and Adams, when he later immerses himself in American revolutionary history. David Ten Eyck, in Ezra Pound’s Adams Cantos, has thoroughly documented from as early as 1930 Pound’s reading, research, and extensive correspondence behind his composition of the Adams Cantos. Ten Eyck explains how Pound cast his net wide to include a range of Revolutionary era writers, including Franklin, but eventually he looked more and more to Adams, most likely “as defender of the fair distribution of wealth and opponent of banks of credit.”21 Yet Ten Eyck suggests that Pound “seems to have been committed at a very early stage to the idea of composing at least a single canto centered on Jefferson,” even as he “retained a keen interest in Adams.”22 Pound initially invokes Jefferson in Canto 21 by quoting a letter from June 8, 1778, in which Jefferson asks a Parisian associate whether he knows of a gardener who also plays the French horn who might come to Virginia (21/97). But in Canto 31, which opens Eleven New Cantos, although he cites both Jefferson’s and Adams’s letters between 1787 and 1816, Jefferson emerges as the central figure who demonstrates what Ten Eyck calls “passionate intelligence,”23 not a quality Pound ever assigns to Franklin. Following the documentary method of the Malatesta Cantos,

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as a poem consisting primarily of quoted fragments and passages, Canto 31 begins, “Tempus loquendi, / Tempus tacendi” (31/153)—a time for speaking, a time to be silent, the maxim from Ecclesiastes 3.7 that Malatesta had inscribed on the tomb of his beloved Isotta degli Atti in the Tempio Malatesta in Rimini. Malatesta, however, reversed the order of the phrases from the Vulgate Latin translation of the Bible (“Tempus tacendi, et Tempus loquendi”24), thus emphasizing silence rather than eloquence. Ten Eyck interprets this opening as, among other things, Pound establishing his own method of privileging others’ writings over his own.25 Still, as evident throughout The Cantos, Pound’s selection of passages in itself reveals the poet’s hand, as he coalesces his ideogrammic method with his allegiance to historical fact. In Canto 31, Pound generally cites the names of the authors he quotes and even provides dates, a practice he later uses only intermittently, making it easier for a reader to follow the 16 different letters quoted. The Canto zooms in on the shaping of the American colonies into a new nation, as Jefferson and Adams look back on it in their later correspondence, with Jefferson poised at the center, as Stephen J. Adams remarks, “exhibited as a proponent of modernity in sculpture, a visionary.”26 As William Cookson points out, in the same 1937 essay in which Pound derides Franklin’s “public writing” as “slithery and perhaps cheap,” he praises Jefferson’s correspondence as “a still workable dynamo” such that “nothing surpasses the evidence that CIVILIZATION WAS in America, than the series of letters exchanged between Jefferson and John Adams, during the decade of reconciliation after disagreements.”27 After its epigraphical start, Canto 31 covers a broad range of concerns in the new country, from building the Erie Canal to abolishing slavery north of Maryland, from the problem of excessive tariffs placed on American tobacco by France to the promising character of Native Americans and utter mediocrity of European monarchs. What Pound does for quattro­ cento Italy in the Malatesta Cantos and for Venetian history in Cantos 25–26, he launches in Canto 31 as a rendering of early US culture that expands as The Cantos expands. Toward the end of Canto 31, in the tenth letter, one from Adams to Jefferson, Pound through Adams provides the most detailed portrait of Franklin anywhere in The Cantos:

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John Gery “Man, a rational creature!” said Franklin. “Come, let us suppose a rational man. “Strip him of all his appetites, especially his hunger and thirst. “He is in his chamber, engaged in making experiments, “Or in pursuing some problem. “At this moment a servant knocks. ‘Sir, “‘dinner is on the table.’ “‘Ham and chickens?’ ‘Ham!’ “‘And must I break the chain of my thoughts to “‘go down and gnaw a morsel of damned hog’s arse? “‘Put aside your ham; I will dine tomorrow;’ Take away appetite, and the present generation would not Live a month, and no future generation would exist; and thus the exalted dignity of human nature etc. … .     Mr Adams to Mr Jefferson, 15 Nov. 1813. (31/155–56)

In the original letter from which Pound lifts this passage, Adams mostly discusses Jefferson’s now well-known treatises on “the natural and artificial aristocracy.”28 In particular, Adams argues against his friend by defending the superior character of aristocrats on whom birth has bestowed wealth and privilege as equal proof of their natural aristocracy, even though he does concede that, over time, virtually all those born to privilege are inevitably corrupted by their “everlasting Envys, Jealousies, Rivalries and quarrells.” Adams’s admission here anticipates the sentiment twice expressed in Canto 32: “The cannibals of Europe are eating one another again” (32/159). In this way, Adams’s view of the aristocracy does not fundamentally disagree with Jefferson. However, he does label Jefferson’s idea of an entirely natural aristocracy as a “Romance,” while he considers his own view, in effect, more realistic. The passage Pound quotes almost verbatim is found a third of the way into Adams’s letter in a paragraph where Adams first distinguishes between “two solemn characters,” the first resembling John Bunyan (1628–88), the second [Paul] Scarron (1610–69), the seventeenth-century French author of the burlesque novella, Roman comique (1651–57). The former figure to be compared to Bunyan (author of Pilgrim’s Progress) Adams identifies as

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“one John Torrey,” a religious zealot and “Superstitious Bigot” who once argued that it would be better if “Children were always begotten from religious motives only.” But Adams ironically deduces from Torrey’s proclamation that, were religion the only motive for procreating, “Would not religion, in this Sad case, have as little Efficacy in encouraging procreation, As it has now in discouraging it[?]”29 The second character to be likened to Scarron is Franklin, as a Deist the polar opposite of Torrey. To illustrate his case, Adams recalls a day in 1775, almost forty years earlier, when Franklin visited Samuel Adams and himself and was “unusually loquacious.” His tale of the “rational Man” who refuses his ham so as not to “break the chain of my thoughts” clearly represents for Adams the secular antithesis to Torrey’s superstitious bigotry, since Adams believes that “Appetite” is an essential component in building a civilization. But what Pound leaves out after the line, “and thus the exalted dignity of human nature etc,” is Adams’s further reflection. After concluding that, without “Appetite,” “the exalted dignity of human Nature would be annihilated and lost,” in a moment of either deep faith or cynicism, if not despair, Adams adds, “And in my opinion, the whole loss would be of no more importance, than putting out a Candle, quenching a Torch, or crushing a Firefly, if in this world only We have hope.”30 In effect, while it remains ambiguous why Pound places this letter here, Pound’s Adams seems to dismiss Franklin for his preoccupation with mere manners, with appearances only, even with Reason itself, at the expense of the spirit—that which includes human appetite and desire yet supersedes it. This critique of Franklin gets reinforced when juxtaposed by the two lines Pound takes from the next letter (January 9, 1816), not by Adams as Pound erroneously indicates but from Jefferson to Charles Thomson,31 from which Pound quotes: “wish that I cd. subjoin Gosindi’s Syntagma/ “of the doctrines of Epicurus,” an allusion to Pierre Gassendi (1592–1655), the seventeenth-century French author whose Syntagma philosophiae Epicuri Carroll Terrell describes as a work “staunchly defend[ing] experimental science,”32 and which Jefferson praises as “the most rational system of the philosophy of the ancients.”33 In this context, Franklin seems debunked as an extreme rationalist. Curiously, however, might I still ask whether the style of Canto 31, with its aphoristic, Imagistic, ideogrammic, documentarian sequence of letters, has not more in

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common with Franklin’s utilitarian approach, in fact, than with Adams’s and Jefferson’s discursive meditations, the very mark of what Pound finds “civilised” about them? In other words, might Franklin here not be set up as a straw man, less by Adams than by Pound, in his own “silent” effort to envision American culture as he envisions it, that is, in making it new? Or does such an interpretation too easily misread the tone of Adams’s letter about Franklin, when akin to his strategy throughout The Cantos, Pound may be reiterating the age-old debate between spirit and being, illumination and appetite, without taking sides? In one of many later references to Franklin in the Adams Cantos, in Canto 65, Pound quotes from another Adams letter a line that seems, in part, to restore Franklin to the familiar portrait of him in contemporary thinking—not for his “benevolence,” “talents,” “patriotism,” and “philanthropy,” per se, but as a “Great wit, great humorist, great politician” (65/372). Yet here, too, his praise is tempered by the purpose of Adams’s letter, composed in 1785 to Franklin’s grandnephew, the American diplomat J[onathan] Williams (1750–1815) that he try to put into order the financial records that Franklin and his colleagues have left behind in complete disarray. While Franklin is accorded his place in Pound’s American history, he is never quite redeemed.34 Nevertheless, the case of Pound and/or Franklin remains unresolved. One point Ten Eyck emphasizes about the documentarian style and poetic “silence” of the Adams Cantos is that Pound’s technique honors the Confucian principle revered in Canto 13 as to the dignity of that “day” in the past “when historians left blanks in their writings, / I mean for things they didn’t know” (13/60). In this regard, possibly the most important statement about Franklin in Pound’s essay celebrating the Jefferson–Adams correspondence is his admission that he is “[w]ithout competence in matters pertaining to Benjamin Franklin.”35 Something about Franklin kept Pound from pursuing his work and his enormous American legacy with the same vigor with which he delved into Jefferson and Adams. Regardless, has not the trace of Franklin’s distinctive American imprint still found its way into Pound’s quintessentially American epic?

II.  Pound’s Cross-Cultural Poetics

C HA P T E R F O U R

Pound’ s Vorticist Theory and H.D.’s “Oread” Yoshiko Kita

I

n the essay “Vortex,” which appeared in the first issue of Blast published in June 1914, Pound declares, “The vortex is the point of maximum energy.”1 It is well known that he quotes Hilda Doolittle (H.D.)’s “Oread” as a perfect example embodying his idea in the same essay. Moreover, in another essay “Vorticism,” which was first published in The Fortnightly Review in September 1914 and later included in Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir in 1916, Pound notes that H.D.’s “Oread” expresses “much stronger emotions” than in his own “metro” poem.2 Therefore, I aim here to discuss the affinity and, more importantly, the difference between these two poets’ poetic criteria during the formative period of Vorticism.3 At the beginning of Vorticism and the English Avant-Garde, in answering the question, “What was Vorticism?” William C. Wees quotes several accounts of the movement. For instance, the New York Times (August 9, 1914) says, “What is Vorticism? Well, like Futurism, and Imagisme [sic], and Cubism, essentially it is nonsense. But it is more important than these other fantastic, artistic, and literary movements because it is their sure conclusion.”4 As this account shows, it seems to be too complicated, varied, and even paradoxical to sum up its main points. However, it has been widely accepted that, behind the movement, there was a sense of radical challenges to conventions in society, and first of all in arts, in other words “the art Establishment,” as Wees points out: 53

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Yoshiko Kita As a movement, in the senses suggested by Ford and Pound, Vorticism was part of the lives and the milieu of nearly a dozen young avant-garde artists and writers who made London their home in that “little narrow segment of time, on the far side of world war i [sic],” as Wyndham Lewis once put it. As a movement in a still broader sense, Vorticism mirrored its times, and the times—England between 1910 and 1914—saw politics, social relationships, and the arts faced with radical challenges to their traditional values and accepted ways of doing things.5

In the same passage, Wees also quotes Pound’s recollections in a letter to Gladys Hynes dated November 13, 1959 as follows: “W[yndham] L[ewis] certainly made Vorticism … BUT in conversation with E[zra] P[ound] there emerged the idea of defining what WE wanted/ & having a name for it. Ultimately Gaudier [-Brzeska] for sculpture, E.P. for poetry, and W.L., the main mover, set down their personal requirements.”6 Thus, Pound recognizes how important and indispensable those two artists, namely Wyndham Lewis and Gaudier-Brzeska, were to launch “Vorticism.” According to The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, defining Vorticism as “essentially a movement in the visual arts,” Vorticism is “related directly to modern poetry through Ezra Pound’s involvement in it after he left Imagism.”7 In Ezra Pound and the Visual Culture of Modernism, Rebecca Beasley claims that Pound’s criteria for the modernist aesthetic project was closely related to the visual arts: These criteria were wrought from a profound engagement with the sculpture, painting and woodcuts of Jacob Epstein, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Wyndham Lewis and Edward Wadsworth, but were applied to literature as well as the visual arts. The critical terminology Pound developed during this period was immensely influential in placing a technical vocabulary deeply indebted to early twentieth-century art criticism at the heart of twentiethcentury literary criticism.8 In fact, Pound frequently uses art terms such as “primary pigment” in his Vorticist theory. For instance, in an introduction to “Vorticism,” he states

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that “I defined the vortex as ‘the point of maximum energy,’ and said that the vorticist relied on the ‘the primary pigment,’ and on that alone.”9 In addition, he also defines “the image” as “that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time.”10 As an example of a “one image poem” based on this theory, he explicates how he composed his “hokku-like sentence” accordingly. It is as follows: The apparition of these faces in the crowd:   Petals, on a wet, black bough.11 In this context, H.D.’s “Oread” is introduced as a fine example embodying Pound’s Vorticist idea. In the same vein, it was quoted in “Vortex” of the same year.   Oread Whirl up, sea---Whirl your pointed pines, Splash your great pines On our rocks, Hurl your green over us, Cover us with your pools of fir.12 Because of Pound’s enthusiasm for “Oread,” this well-known poem stands at an interesting position among H.D.’s early poems. During the Imagist movement (1913–17), H.D. had successfully published her poems in little magazines such as Poetry, The Egoist, The Little Review, and others. The “Oread” is one of H.D.’s earliest poems and was first published in The Egoist (February 1914), then quoted by Pound in “Vortex” in Blast 1 (June 1914), and later included in The God, which was not published until the Collected Poems of 1925 appeared. Louis L. Martz says that “Oread” is “the union of self with nature”; “the spirit of the Greek mountain-nymph comprehends the waves of the ocean as the pines of her own shore, in one dynamic and unified complex.”13 The combination of two different types of natural phenomena, namely the great wave (of forests) and the mountain (of rocks), forms the subject matter of the composition. In “Oread,” each line, except the fourth, begins with an imperative verb. Here with the

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Figure 4.1. Kaijyo no Fuji (Mount Fuji at Sea). Image courtesy of the Trustees of the British Museum

single exception of the proper noun “sea” in the first line, the verb syntactically dominates the nouns. Consequently, the poem consists mainly of the motions expressed by these verbs. As the title “Oread” implies, a nymph of the mountain rock is the most important figure in the poem. However, in the first line, the invocation is spoken to the “sea” and, since this is the only proper noun, the pronoun, “your,” which appears in every line except the fourth, must always refer to the “sea.” So, the “sea” pervades the whole poem. These two elements, the mountain and the sea, are both distributed equally throughout the poem. We notice that the two elements are interwoven in a very complicated manner. In other words, these two elements are juxtaposed. Thus, the dynamic force of nature conveyed in “Oread” echoes Pound’s definition of a “one image poem” described in “Vorticism” as “a form of super-position, that is to say, it is one idea set on top of another.”14 J. B. Harmer argues that H.D.’s poem “can be read almost as a transcript of a Japanese color-engraving.”15 He does not mention any specific

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Figure 4.2. Kanagawa-Oki Namiura (The Great Wave off Kanagawa). Image courtesy of the Trustees of the British Museum

Japanese print as a source of the “transcript.” However, specifying two different types of natural forces, “sea” and “rocks,” to be the main motifs in “Oread,” we find this particular combination also in Kaijyo no Fuji (Mount Fuji at Sea) (see Figure 4.1) in Hokusai’s series, One Hundred Views of Mount Fuji and in Kanagawa-Oki Namiura (The Great Wave off Kanagawa) (see Figure 4.2), in another series, Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, by a Japanese painter from the Edo period, Katsushika Hokusai (1760–1849). They were both composed in the 1830s.16 In these prints, Hokusai depicts two natural elements, “waves” and “rocks,” just as H.D. does in “Oread.” Both in these prints of Hokusai and in “Oread,” the combination of two different types of natural elements provides the theme and, moreover, they convey a sense of the great energy of the elements, especially the whirling energy of the great wave. More importantly, I would suggest that the affinity between “Oread” and Hokusai’s print is essentially structural. To examine this issue in

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detail, let me quote the words on Hokusai’s great wave of Kanagawa-Oki Namiura by the Japanese poet, Yone Noguchi, who was also in Pound’s literary circle in London: “Oh, what a fierce action of nature in the picture! What a dreadful feeling we receive from the billows, one glance of which makes us feel drenched or drowned. Where is a picture which we can compare with this piece and give us an equally unforgettable sensation?”17 Noguchi clarifies a fundamental affinity between “Oread” and Kanagawa-Oki Namiura in this passage. It is an actual sensation of the great wave that these two works of art convey to us. What we perceive from Hokusai’s print is the enormous power of water as if the massive wave was going to fall and break over us to make us “drenched or drowned.” We also feel a similar sensation in “Oread,” because all the verbs in this poem are related to the movement of the waves: “whirl up,” “whirl,” “splash,” “hurl,” and “cover.” Concerning the composition of Kanagawa-Oki Namiura, Seiji Nagata, a recognized authority on Hokusai, indicates as follows: Seemingly, the massive wave is about to pounce on a tiny boat. Hokusai fixes his eyes at a low angle and looks up at the wave and Mount Fuji as if he were depicting the scene on the boat like that in the print. We cannot render how we are totally overwhelmed by the violence of magnificent nature. It is no exaggeration to say that this is one of Hokusai’s best works. (My translation)18 Thus, Nagata explicates the reason why Hokusai’s Kanagawa-Oki Namiura evokes such a magnificent power of nature from a technical viewpoint. I want to note that the distinctive characteristic of Hokusai’s technique is also true of “Oread.” In the first line, the sea water is put at a higher position than the speaker, the mountain nymph, by the invocation, “whirl up.” Then, in the second line, the tension of the high wave is increased by a repetition of the word “whirl.” Therefore, the motions in the rest of the poem, “splash,” “hurl,” and “cover,” are unconsciously perceived by readers, who are likely to identify themselves with the speaker through the invocation at the beginning of the poem, as the movements from the higher position than themselves. As it were, in “Oread,” we observe those motions of the great waves of the pines at a low

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angle as in Hokusai’s print, and this gives the poem some great energy. Basically, the affinity between Kanagawa-Oki Namiura and “Oread” is based on two points concerning their compositions: the combination of two different types of natural forces and a specific perspective, in other words at a low angle. These technical characteristics create a similar sensation in two different art forms, the print and the poem, giving a sense of the massive energy of natural forces. Needless to say, as a visual art form, Hokusai’s great wave is perceived from a distance in a purely visual way. On the other hand, in H.D.’s “Oread,” because of the speaker calling the waves, the depiction is rendered through the spoken words, under or almost inside the wave. Hence, H.D.’s waves are by nature closer and are mentally perceived in a visual way evoked by the speaker, as Pound declares that “The primary pigment of poetry is the IMAGE,”19 quoting “Oread” as a fine example. It is vital to consider further whether Hokusai offered any hints to H.D. on how she should compose “Oread” and what elements her poem shares with his print.20 It has been believed thus far, that, among Imagist poets, H.D. is one of a few exceptions who demonstrated little, if any, interest in Japanese materials, and that she has never used them in her published works. However, in her novel Asphodel, H.D. exceptionally (or “in particular,”) mentions Japanese material, namely Hokusai. In this autobiographical novel written around 1920, H.D. traces her own experiences as a young expatriate American female poet from her departure for Europe in 1911 to the birth of her daughter in 1919. At the beginning of Part I, Hermione Gart (representing H.D.) visits Rouen with her friend, Fayne Rabb (representing Frances Gregg) and Fayne’s mother, Clara. In a scene set in Rouen Cathedral, describing a reflection in a baptismal fount, Hermione tells Clara that she “must be sure to look in the fount at the odd angle,” because then “you see the whole cathedral reflected in a tiny space, all upside down with all the windows.”21 And she refers to Hokusai as follows: It’s not like our churches. And you do get it a little (I see what they mean) from this angle. See it’s like a shell, not such a big one either and the whole of the church is reflected. It’s like some Hokusai drawings I saw once (you know seeing Fujiyama) a

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Yoshiko Kita hundred views and the same idea. The painter with a little cup or bowl, I suppose and the reflection of the mountain in the bowl.22

Considering the composition of the picture described here, it must be Haichu no Fuji (Mount Fuji in a Sake Cup) (see Figure 4.3), one of the prints in Hokusai’s One Hundred Views of Mount Fuji.23 Henry Smith comments, “Hokusai depicts the folk tale of Hagoromo” because of “the elaborate array of feathers overflowing from the fisherman’s basket and curling around the tree.”24 I would want to note that in this passage of Asphodel, H.D. introduces Hokusai’s unique way of rendering the mountain as an analogy to her seeing “the whole cathedral reflected in a tiny space, all upside down with all the windows.” By citing Hokusai, she emphasizes a way of seeing things from a completely different direction than the conventional one. There is also an echo of Hermione’s voice in another autobiographical novel, Her, which was also written in the 1920s: In Philadelphia people did not realize that life went on in varying dimension, here a starfish and there a point of fibrous peony stalk with a snail clinging underneath it. Pictures of that sort with a crane shadow passing across a wild cherry half in blossom would have explained something of the sort of painting that she would not have known existed.25 We can trace the kinship between H.D.’s idea of a perception of the world in these words (of Her Gart representing H.D.) and Hokusai’s of painting in a postscript to One Hundred Views of Mount Fuji, in which the mountain is depicted from a multi-dimensional viewpoint. Hokusai says as follows: Since the age of six, I have had a passion for portraying the forms of objects. Since I was fifty I have produced a large quantity of pictures, but none of those painted before I was seventy have any real value. When I was seventy-three, I began gradually to understand the anatomy of birds, animals, insects and fish and

Pound’ s Vorticist Theory and H.D.’s “Oread”

Figure 4.3. Haichu no Fuji (Mount Fuji in a Sake Cup). Image Courtesy of the Trustees of the British Museum

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Yoshiko Kita the growth of trees and grasses. From eighty to ninety, I hope to make gradual progress till I have finally completely mastered their secret. When I am a hundred, I hope to be really inspired. At a hundred and ten I shall be perfect in every stroke and my pictures will be true to Nature.26

Here Hokusai shows his wish to present his comprehension of the world as exquisitely as possible using the objects in nature as he lives in it. From a viewpoint of the influence of Hokusai upon Western art, Akiko Mabuchi points out that “Hokusai served as a catalyst for departing from Western art convention.”27 According to Mabuchi, in Western art, “the representation of nature was mainly confined to ‘landscape’ painting,” and she explains: For a long time, since nature was considered God’s creation and ranking below humans, it formed no more than the background to the human narratives (myths, religion, history, stories) of “historical landscape” painting, in terms of artistic expression. … It was not until the age of Japonisme, however, that attention was paid to “small nature.” … Claude Monet, towards the end of his life, showed a visitor to his Giverny residence a Hokusai bird-and-flower print he owned, and commented: “See that flower in the wind, whose petals are turned over, is it not the truth itself? … In the West, what we have most appreciated is the bold cutting of subjects; these people have taught us to compose differently, there is no doubt about that.”28 It is said that by learning from Hokusai’s attempt to capture the natural world, Monet’s works of art “transcend mere imitation, being relived as visual experiences through the artist’s own eyes; they would eventually evolve into a new representation of the world.”29 In fact, the relationship between Monet and Hokusai would be applicable to the case of H.D. and Hokusai; “Oread” also transcends mere transcription and represents its own value as poetry. In addition, in order to show how H.D. paid attention to “small nature” as in Hokusai’s bird and flower prints, let me quote her poem “Evening”:

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The light passes from ridge to ridge, from flower to flower— the hepaticas, wide-spread under the light grow faint— the petals reach inward, the blue tips bend toward the bluer heart and the flowers are lost.30 Among H.D.’s early poems, which were included in Sea Garden (1916) and Collected Poems (1925), “Evening” is the only exception in which the existence of the speaker is not assertive and is rendered merely by the visual elements. As the title “Evening” implies, H.D. depicts an evening scene, particularly in shifts of light and shadow. In this first stanza, the ridges of the mountains are represented and then the flowers, “the hepaticas,” are portrayed as in a close-up. The second stanza is as follows: The cornel-buds are still white, but shadows dart from the cornel-roots— black creeps from root to root, each leaf cuts another leaf on the grass, shadow seeks shadow, then both leaf and leaf-shadow are lost.31 Here the motif is changed from light to shadows. The movements are quicker because of the verbs like “dart,” “creeps,” and “seeks.” The reader perceives the development of time in the evening, which increases speed through the change of color from “blue” in the first stanza to “still white” at the beginning of the second stanza, and it totally becomes dark at the end of the poem. The poem does not consist purely of objective

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things, because the actions are expressed in an anthropomorphic way of employing the verbs. These suggest that the scenery is rendered through particular eyes. Although any clear evidence of the influence of Hokusai’s flower prints upon H.D.’s “Evening” has not been suggested so far, it is possible to consider that H.D. composed the flowers, “being relived as visual experiences” through her own eyes in the same way Monet learned from Hokusai’s attempt to capture the natural world. Peter Morse says, in his essay “Hokusai’s World Wide Reputation,” “America’s love for Hokusai came directly from Japan, not via Europe. The early Boston collectors, such as Fenollosa, Bigelow, and Morse, acquired many treasures during the time they spent in Japan.”32 Moreover, an influential Bostonian, Percival Lowell, visited several countries of the Far East representing the U.S. government and lived chiefly in Japan from 1883 to 1893. He wrote letters to his little sister, Amy Lowell, during these ten years, and brought back with him many Japanese art objects. In a letter of 1917, Amy Lowell says of these Japanese things: “all through my childhood [these Japanese things] made Japan so vivid to my imagination that I cannot realize that I have never been there.”33 Therefore, apparently in America also there would have been ample opportunity to see Japanese woodblock prints, including Hokusai. Like Lowell, H.D. was aware of Japanese prints before they collaborated on the Imagist anthologies; indeed, before they were Imagists. After the publication of Des Imagistes in March 1914, Lowell subsequently took over the project of Imagist anthologies. It has been widely acknowledged that H.D. was more involved in Lowell’s project than Pound’s by late autumn in 1914. For instance, several critics, including Diana Collecott, emphasize the importance of H.D.’s translation of Greek drama in those years, especially between 1915 and 1920, namely, the period of transition from “H.D. Imagiste” to the poet H.D.34 Examining how Aldington undertook the project of the Poet’s Translation Series, from Ballantyne Press, Caroline Zilboorg also suggests that “Greek material and open forms and the act of translation were literary areas in which he [Aldington] and H.D. worked both separately and together, uniquely and in concert.”35 Likewise, it would be possible to consider that in those years she had tried to develop her own poetics in a different way from Pound’s aesthetic.

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Bradford Morrow says, “BLAST functioned as a multi-faceted instrument of change, an intellectual demarcation point between the extreme dying gasps of Victorian England and an explosive, if short-lived battle cry for a new British artistic renaissance.”36 Pound’s definition, “the vortex is the point of maximum energy,” elucidates the gist of a new poetry. On the other hand, seeking her own new poetics, H.D. composed “Oread” by a distinctive insight, as if inspired by Hokusai’s print. Hence, it seems to me that Pound’s definition of Vorticism and H.D.’s “Oread” show a significant point of intersection between these two great American poets, Ezra Pound and H.D.

C HA P T E R F I V E

Fenollosa and Pound The Authorship Question of The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry Lin Wei

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n 2008, The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry: A Critical Edition, co-edited by Haun Saussy, Jonathan Stalling, and Lucas Klein, was published by Fordham University Press (New York). Basically, this work’s author is Ernest Fenollosa (1853–1908), who was born in the United States and traveled overseas conducting his research mainly on eastern art history. After the orientalist’s sudden death in 1908, his widow, Mary Fenollosa, entrusted the American poet Ezra Pound to edit and publish the volume. While in terms of its acceptance, as Saussy mentions in his long introduction to that critical edition, “‘The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry’ has long been read as if Ezra Pound, not Ernest Fenollosa, were its author.”1 Notably, in Saussy’s critical edition, Pound is credited as the co-author rather than merely as the editor, as in previous editions. This edition, though not for the first time, draws attention to the long-term authorship question concerning The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry (CWC).

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I.  The Publishing History of CWC As Pound recalled in 1958 (this essay is also included in the 2008 critical edition of CWC), around 1913, after reading some of Pound’s verses and meeting him in person, Mrs. Fenollosa was assured that Pound was “the only person who could deal with her late husband’s note books as he would [have] wished.”2 In Pound’s own literary career, he was pivoting from Imagism to Vorticism, in an effort to overcome the limitations of the “Image” espoused by earlier Imagists. As J. J. Wilhelm observes, “Fenollosa held that the Chinese characters are actually representations of ideas (ideograms) which present concepts in a visual form; this notion was extremely important to Pound’s study of imagism at the time, since he was striving for a poetry that was visually focused.”3 Consecutively, Pound published three works in book form based on Fenollosa’s manuscripts: Cathay (1913), “Noh” or Accomplishment: A Study of the Classical Stage of Japan (1916), and CWC (1936). Basically, the authorship question of the former two is as subtle as that of CWC. Observed in Pound’s own career, Cathay is not less well-known at all than the Cantos, while it enjoys a wider readership. When first published, it was given a long title: Cathay: For the Most Part from the Chinese of Rihaku, from the Notes of the Late Ernest Fenollosa, and the Deciphering of the Professors Mori and Ariga—Pound demonstrated its multiple sources in detail while crediting himself simply as a translator. However unsurprisingly, for both general readers and professional researchers—with intention or not—Cathay has been long regarded as Pound’s own work anyway. Even though when analyzed in the light of translation, it is as if what Pound the translator relied on were the original Chinese works—despite that Pound’s Chinese language skills were quite limited at that time. Along with that of Kainan Mori or Aruga Nagao, the role of Fenollosa in this process is always diminished or even eliminated. As for the Noh book, somehow Pound was listed as the second author from the very beginning. Concerning the more complicated publishing history of CWC, as early as 1916, Pound had submitted his edited version to the journal called Seven Arts, only to have it rejected. Almost a year later, The Monist showed its willingness to accept the essay, but its editor-in-chief held it

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back for more than a year. Not until August 1918, with the assistance of New York lawyer John Quinn, who helped Pound and his friends in multiple ways, was Pound able to retrieve the script. Finally, from September to December 1919, Pound managed to publish it in four installments in the Little Review, a periodical where he already had considerable influence. On the pages of both the tables of contents and the texts in the four journals, Pound’s name was joined with Fenollosa’s—as if the American poet were the second author rather than merely the editor, and as such it has remained since then, even though Pound put a short foreword directly after the title that “[t]his essay was practically finished by the late Ernest Fenollosa; I have done little more than remove a few repetitions and shape a few sentences.”4 This statement along with the following two passages is kept in most published versions of CWC. In 1920, Pound incorporated CWC in his Instigations, whose full title incorporating its author information was Instigations of Ezra Pound together with an Essay on the Chinese Written Character by Ernest Fenollosa. In this book, Pound mainly discussed poets or artists of older or peer generations and placed Fenollosa’s essay at the very end. In this case, he identified himself as the editor explicitly. Similarly, in 1936, when the first editon of CWC was published, it was noted clearly that Fenollosa was the author with Pound as the editor. In fact, apart from the first published version in the Little Review in 1919 and the 2008 critical edition, all versions of CWC published during Pound’s lifetime list Fenollosa as author and Pound as editor. The two editions without such explicit notation include Pound’s foreword or other editors’ remarks indicating the authorship information specifically. To put it differently, normally on the basis of the facts, readers have the impression that Pound enjoys an equal or even dominant position in comparison with Fenollosa, concerning the authorship question of CWC. Indeed, without Pound’s edition, promotion and personal influence, most likely it would have taken much longer—possibly never—for CWC to become so well-known and to circulate until now. Furthermore, researchers normally know Pound well before delving into this essay. Still, the authorship question of CWC might be better understood if we get to know Pound’s specific editing process on it, as well as how the work affects his own thinking at the time and his activities afterwards.

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II.  An Analysis of Pound’s Editing In terms of its editions, it should always be kept in mind that before those published already mentioned, CWC appeared initially as Fenollosa’s draft, which Pound received from Mrs. Fenollosa. Before the critical edition came out in 2008, what most readers have known is the one that Pound edited carefully. In other words, despite his own description, what he did was more than simply removing a few repetitions or shaping a few sentences. Generally, Pound’s editing was a process of reduction. To begin with, he obviously modified the title and deleted some consecutive passages. Fenollosa’s final draft was entitled, “The Chinese Written Language as a Medium for Poetry,” rather than “The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry,” the title so well-known from Pound’s editing of it. Narrowing the term from “language” to “character” reveals the focus of Pound himself or, at least, the focus of Fenollosa in Pound’s conception. Also, the last passage by Fenollosa was entirely removed by Pound. Its first sentence states that he “had intended in this lecture to speak of the subject of visible Chinese metres and stanzas; but this will be better postponed to the second lecture,” where Fenollosa indicates that the “sounds of Chinese verses” would be discussed and “an outline of its evolution” exhibited.5 The reference should be to the two texts dated 1903 on Chinese and Japanese poetry.6 Either is most likely drawn from a lecture—so in CWC, basically Pound is transposing an oral lecture into a written essay (more appropriate for publication) by his alterations that include deleting specific words, phrases, sentences and passages. Most topics in the two 1903 texts were retained in both the draft and the Poundian version of CWC. Whether seen from the distribution of length or the highlighting, the phonetic part in Chinese poetry or the written character is seen as inferior to the visual element. This is recognized by Fenollosa himself when he mentions that “[u]p to this time, it will be noticed, I have spoken of Chinese poetry, as if it were entirely addressed to the eye; as if it had no phonetic element at all. This is, of course, not true.”7 Exploring the phonetic element of Chinese poetry, the two 1903 texts offer comparison between Chinese and Western written characters, which appeal to the eye and the ear respectively, in order to emphasize the superiority

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of the former: the capacity to demonstrate dimensions of thinking and phonetics, which the Western language manages, and the visual aspect of which the Western one fails. In this way, the Chinese written character is able to show vividly the relationships between things, which are more essential than things themselves (including the human, nature, and the world), thus rendering Chinese the ideal poetic language. This was always what Fenollosa and Pound stressed. It is definitely erroneous to suggest that Fenollosa knew nothing about the phonetic component of Chinese characters or about the custom of combining poetry and music in ancient China. Nevertheless, he wishes in his essay to emphasize his own focus, when he writes, “[w]e have carefully omitted this side heretofore, because we wished to lay special stress upon the fact that, even if Chinese poetry had been a visible speech only, it would have possessed in a peculiar and striking way all the important qualities to make up poetry proper.”8 But while editing CWC, Pound goes much further than Fenollosa. In terms of the phonetic side of the Chinese written character, Fenollosa strives to differentiate it from the absolute abstraction which the “Melopoeia”9 category in Western language possesses (according to Pound’s classifications). He states that “it is incredible that such minute subdivisions of the ideas could ever have existed as abstract sound without the concrete characters”10—indicating that the original basis of the phonetic component of Chinese written characters consisted of specific visual images rather than abstract sounds. With regard to the combination of poetry and music, in both the 1903 texts, Fenollosa mentions that the vocal part of Chinese poetry had been deteriorating for some time, owing to the evolution of phonetics from ancient times up to the present, thus making “the modern Mandarin pronunciation” “not really the sound of the original Chinese poetry at all.”11 Furthermore, the poetic notations vanish. Were Fenollosa and Pound to admit to any shortcoming in the Chinese written character as a medium for poetry, it would be that “[t]he characters have held the thought, but nothing has held their sound,”12 according to Fenollosa. Later academics continue to criticize Fenollosa’s—or, more precisely, Pound’s—neglect of the phonetic part of the Chinese language and characters. But this so-called “neglect” is more likely derived from an intentional choice, rather than from ignorance. Pound put it frankly that he “took what seemed to [him] most needed, omitting the passages re/

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sound.”13 Such a selective method in his editing process can also be seen in his other literary activities. Apart from those comments concerning phonetic elements in Chinese poetry, what Pound deleted significantly was Fenollosa’s observations of contemporary international relations. In Fenollosa’s draft, such discussion was shown in the very beginning as a sort of foreword, while few sentences were left in Pound’s version. In his “The Coming Fusion of East and West” (1898), Fenollosa makes clear what he had tried to express in the two removed passages. Written at the turning point from the nineteenth to the twentieth century, this essay affirms that, despite global uncertainties, the future ideal relationship between the East and the West “must be no conquest, but a fusion.” On the way to such a fusion, the main Eastern contributors were supposed to be China and Japan, while the Western ones would be Great Britain and the United States, given that they share the same Anglo-Saxon ancestors. Fenollosa believes that such a global fusion should be based on the spiritual or cultural aspects, or “divine destinies of man,” which both sides had planted their faith in equally and similarly.14 By emphasizing the Chinese written character as a medium for poetry and Chinese itself as an ideal poetic language, in practical terms Fenollosa is striving to reverse the ignorance and subsequent prejudice of the West about the East toward his own understanding, thus aiming to realize his ideal fusion. Whether such a view was ultimately correct or not, when he was given Fenollosa’s manuscripts around 1915, Pound at the time obviously cared more about arts than about politics. Even though he started to become more concerned with politics and economics after the 1920s, his focus initially was more on the West and his home country than on the whole world or the East, as it was in Fenollosa’s mind. In any case, Pound definitely did not “need” the deleted passages. Nevertheless, to a large extent, most readers’ comprehension of CWC has been and will continue to be influenced by Pound’s editing. And frequently it has been observed in the literary trajectory of Pound’s own writing, since explicitly or not, he himself exerted a specific impact on the essay by his editing of it. A. C. Graham suggests that for Pound, “[t]he art of translating Chinese poetry is a by-product of the Imagist movement.”15 Significantly, it was in 1915 that Pound’s contact with Chinese literature,

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as well as his translation and specific editing of it, occurred. Given Pound’s literary activities and thinking during this period, we have good reason to affirm Graham’s contention that, correspondingly, Pound’s editing of CWC was a by-product of his gradual transfer from Imagism to Vorticism. .

III.  CWC and Pound’s Vorticist Poetics In comparison with the so-called “Chinese–English translation” in Cathay, the editing of CWC made it possible for Pound to gain a deeper understanding of Chinese culture and the structure of Chinese poetry, as well as to be deeply inspired, despite his limited abilities to read Chinese. As Saussy’s analysis points out, “Pound took from the ‘Chinese Written Character’ the idea of an ‘ideogrammic’ way of writing and thinking: a logic of juxtaposed particulars, ‘luminous details’ that speak for themselves when revealed by the poet (or any other competent craftsman).”16 The indication of “action,” “process” in Chinese ideographic characters, and the “relations” that “are more real and more important than the things which they relate,”17 all of which were stressed repeatedly by Fenollosa in his CWC draft and retained by Pound, contributed to his Vorticist concepts, especially the energetic “Image” in it. Basically, “Vorticism” refers to the only British avant-garde artistic group of the early twentieth century, propagating their aesthetic in the journal Blast. In fact, Pound participated in this movement enthusiastically, even though he did not himself produce visual art. Most likely, Pound’s primary contribution to Vorticism, so short-lived and largely unknown later on, was to retain its name by his own authorization. If editing can be seen as a similar way to demonstrate such participation, regarding Vorticism’s relationship with Pound, his editing of CWC parallels his efforts on behalf of Vorticism. The core statements in Pound’s Vorticism include: “[t]he Vortex is the point of maximum energy,”18 which evolves from the static Image of Imagism and “from which, and through which, and into which, ideas are constantly rushing.”19 Containing energy and force or not is the main differentiating standard between the motive “Vortex” and the static “Image.” Here, Pound focuses his poetics on energy and force. According to Donald Davie, in the CWC draft, Fenollosa identifies certain core notions also found in Pound’s Vorticism: energy, force; the association

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between things and energy/force; and the process of things’ transferring energy/force.20 In Vorticism and the English Avant-Garde (1972), William C. Wees summarizes the characteristics of the visual Vorticists as: in sculpture, they would favor “primitive, archaic, and exotic sculpture with the qualities those Venuses [referring to those ‘Greco-Roman and Gothic’ works] lacked: hardness, angles, mystery, and force,” while in painting “progressively reducing realistic forms to geometrical shapes and interrelated planes and masses.”21 These qualities also apply to the ideal literary style that Pound pursued as a Vorticist, the only label he assigned to himself in Who’s Who.22 The poem called “Dogmatic Statement on the Game and Play of Chess,” which Pound published in the second (and final) number of Blast, symbolizes this literary mode deriving from visual arts such as painting and sculpture. The brief language with great energy and force in this poem provides us with a strong sense of imagery: chess pieces in various colors moving via different angles are depicted; “[t]his board is alive with light / [t]hese pieces are living in form.” Therefore, the capitalized subtitle bracketed below the poem’s title seems not surprising at all: “Theme for a Series of Pictures.”23 Observing CWC through this and comparing Fenollosa’s draft and Pound’s editing, we may find that Saussy’s statement makes sense: through the editing process, the “hard and sane” language of Imagist poetics predominated.24 Or more poignantly, such a “hard and sane” style, as energetic and active as a Vortex, can be attributed to Vorticism, if we consider Pound’s differentiation between Image and Vortex together with statements in CWC concerning how the energetic process is illustrated by the Chinese written character in poetry. This link is evident from those words, phrases and sentences that Pound did not remove but subtly altered. For instance, in the paragraph discussing the Chinese written character’s “quality of vividness in the structure” owing to its graphic virtue, at first sight, what Pound does to Fenollosa’s draft is merely to “remove a few repetitions and shape a few sentences.” But a scrutinizing of the text reveals a substantive change in the essay’s style. Pound deletes those oral expressions that had little influence on contextual logic, such as “[l]et us now” (followed by “leaving for a moment the form of the sentence”), “[i]t is, of course, a commonplace truth that” (“the earliest forms of these

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characters were pictorial”) or “so to speak.” Meanwhile, he inserts to a certain extent written phrases in place of those inappropriate ones to be wholly removed: “on their face” is replaced by “carry in them” (“a verbal idea of action”); “deeper view will see” by “examination shows”; and so on.25 Similar traces of alteration fill in Pound’s editing. In other words, here again Pound’s changes follow a process of transposing an oral text into a written one, on the one hand, while making “the ‘hard and sane’ language” dominate, on the other. In addition, Pound’s careful consideration of specific nouns and verbs can be detected if we associate them with references to the Chinese written character’s notations of action and process, as seen in Fenollosa’s draft. Fenollosa mentions in his text that “[n]ow this metaphor, which reveals nature, is the very substance of Poetry.” The attributive clause between the commas is modified by Pound into an appositive: “the revealer of nature.”26 Also, obviously found in other parts of the edited version, Pound prefers to take advantage of those nouns that imply actions to express similar meanings. One instance is: “[a]ll nations have written their strongest and most vivid literature before they invented a grammar.”27 Fenollosa’s draft and Pound’s published version seem to be exactly identical here. Nevertheless, we can see from the manuscript retaining Pound’s modifications that the past perfect tense in this sentence was once altered into “the invention of grammar”—in other words, the action is degraded into a pure noun, an option considered as the significant shortcoming of Western language, when compared to Chinese language and poetry, according to CWC. In other words, Pound’s returning to the very beginning in his other publications most likely grounded in his comprehension of this essay itself. For Pound the editor, in CWC, the Vortex that “is the point of maximum energy” is best illustrated by the “hard and sane” language of the piece itself. This literary style derives from his work from the Imagism period and is further intensified by later Vorticism and Fenollosa’s manuscript. Indeed, the terms, “energy” and “force,” are frequently intertwined in both Pound’s Vorticist remarks and his editing of Fenollosa’s essay; furthermore, both can also be related to the American poet’s political vortex, or controversy, in his later life. In The Cambridge History of American Literature, the “Ezra Pound” chapter starts with the remark, “[a]mong modernists of the English-speaking world, not even Joyce achieved the

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infamy and authority of Ezra Pound.”28 Ostensibly, this “infamy” refers to his affinity with Italian Fascism, led by Benito Mussolini. Such a “will to power,” according to Friedrich Nietzsche, is “the unexhausted procreative life-will” that seeks self-meaning and purpose via those who are or appear superior.29 In CWC, Fenollosa strives to seek in the Chinese written character an ideal language that will be superior to the Western one. It is also Pound’s endeavor in his pursuit of force and energy. Besides this condition, what is even more analogous are the later criticisms of each. George A. Kennedy, a sinologist from Yale University, for instance, was born and grew up in China. His negative evaluation represents that of professional linguists, already familiar with Fenollosa’s analysis of Chinese written character, who believed the “ideogrammic method” to be “just a fantasy” and to be “based on a ‘complete misunderstanding’ of the Chinese language.”30

IV.  The Authorship Question Surrounding CWC From Structuralism to Post-Structuralism, literary criticism remains preoccupied with the authorship question. Pierre Macherey assigns the task of discovering meanings to critics, and Roland Barthes discusses “The Death of the Author” while Michel Foucault asks, “What is an Author?” Generally, diminishing the status of author, who enjoys an absolute authority in traditional literary criticism, has become a mainstream practice. From this debate, though, in terms of the authorship question of CWC, there develops a rivalry between Pound, whose multiple roles combine being an editor, reader and scholar with being an author, and Fenollosa as the author. Regarding Structuralism as a research method paralleling traditional literary criticism, Macherey suggests that both approaches are “reductive—a return to the structure that reposes within the work” aiming at “restor[ing] for us that initial object without which there would be no reading, and certainly no writing.” Such an endeavor towards an ideal objective truth, according to him, is “only a variant of theological aesthetics.”31 Basically, these questions apply equally as well to Fenollosa’s proposal concerning Chinese as the ideal language and its written character as a medium for poetry, and they further Pound’s emphasis on its ideogrammic aspect in both his editing and his later literary activities. In such a rivalry for significance—without

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any contradiction—Pound’s “reductive” method of editing CWC’s style confronts Barthes’s theory that writing ceaselessly posits meaning ceaselessly in order to evaporate it.32 In his selection and modification of both the content and the form of CWC, probably at a cost of other parts, Pound manages to retain and even highlight the core of Fenollosa’s draft: namely, the insistence on the ability of the Chinese written character—a medium for poetry—to denote action and process. But for Pound, this emphasis is more likely to reify the energetic Vortex in his Vorticism thinking. He was the first serious reader of Fenollosa’s draft and its chief proponent. And the later circulation of CWC has proven, ironically, the virtue of Barthes’s famous dictum: the birth of the reader must come at the cost of the death of the Author.33 In “The Death of the Author,” Barthes places quotation marks around “translation.” By doing so, he illustrates how différance can affect the generation of meanings. In traditional literary criticism, the author is the “Author-God” “releasing a single ‘theological’ meaning,” while for Barthes, a text is “a multi-dimensional space” or “a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres.” Therefore, the author’s function is merely to translate “the inner ‘thing’” that “is itself only a ready-formed dictionary”—“its words only explainable through other words, and so on indefinitely.”34 In the light of Barthes’s thinking, the author’s function for Fenollosa in relation to CWC would be to produce a “translation” in this “multi-dimensional space” filled with différance. While regarding the generation of meanings, Pound the editor—or the translator—is interpreting through translation. It would not be surprising at all if Pound were to be credited as translator. Basically, Cathay, which is also based on Fenollosa’s manuscripts, was once considered as Pound’s Chinese–English translation work of ancient Chinese poems. Nevertheless, be it called editing or translating, Pound’s method of “taking what seemed to him most needed” demonstrates his subjective comprehension of an exotic culture that was utterly different from his own experience. In respect to the authorship question of CWC, over this process, the status of Fenollosa transforms from “the sole author” into “one of the authors.” He acts as a transmitter between distinctive civilizations. Whereas, Pound serves as the first receiver of information, but after which he gradually achieves the status of a co-author rather than an inferior one.

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Among Post-Structuralists, Barthes is not alone in paralleling différance and translation. This is also what concerns Walter Benjamin when he is discussing “the kinship of languages” in his essay, “The Task of the Translator.” In his opinion, even though “in every one of [the languages] as a whole, one and the same thing is meant,” a translation can never be “the pure language” by which “the totality of [languages’] intentions [supplement] one another.” Pure language is definitely not the original of any certain translation, but is similar to Barthes’s space of différance filled with exclusion and supplement.35 Therefore, Pound, playing the ambiguous roles of editor and author, somehow conducts the task of the translator on CWC. Pound does not strive for a “likeness to the original”—for Benjamin, “no translation would be possible if [such endeavor was] in its ultimate essence,” since the translation inevitably transforms the original, and furthermore in translations “the life of the originals attains its latest, continually renewed, and most complete unfolding.”36 Correspondingly, Fenollosa’s draft gets rejuvenated once it goes through Pound’s scrutiny. The task of the translator should always be distinguished from that of the poet, according to Benjamin. Even so, if we describe what Pound grasped best during his editing or translating, which may fail to act in fidelity to the original, it would be the poetic essence of Eastern culture as transmitted by Fenollosa’s manuscript, whether it is correct or not. Pound’s capacity to accomplish this task comes from outside of his role as author, editor or translator—because, primarily, he was a poet.

C HA P T E R SI X

Pound’s Composition of Canto 16 “j’entendis des voix” John Beall

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n the final page of a Radio France notebook in which Pound enclosed a typescript, with revisions by hand, of his Draft of XVI. Cantos, he signed his initials, “E.P.,” and wrote the date: “6 Jan 1924.”1 By so doing, he handed over his “Draft” for publication by Bill Bird’s Three Mountains Press. This essay will explore the stages of Pound’s composition of the sixteenth Canto that he sent to Bird for publication, in alignment with the French school of “genetic criticism” where a writer’s outlines, sketches, drafts, and edited proof copies become “avant-textes” useful to reconstruct “the movement of writing … the chain of events in the writing process.” This essay explores Pound’s “movement of writing” through the drafts of Canto 16 leading to its publication in A Draft of XVI. Cantos by the Three Mountains Press in 1925. By tracing Pound’s composition of this Canto from its earliest to its final stages, I will suggest how vital to The Cantos was his including in Canto 16 not just the clause “j’entendis des voix,” but the voices he wrote and recorded so powerfully in his reading of the Canto at Spoleto, Italy, in the summer of 1967 that is preserved, and can be heard, on Pennsound.2 The most important development in Pound’s composition of Canto 16 is from the monologue of the first part of the Canto that was initially included in the Hell Cantos to the polyphony of languages and voices in his revision of Canto 16, principally in 1923.3 79

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In contrast to James Joyce’s Ulysses and T. S. Eliot’s Waste Land, where Ezra Pound’s editing and advice are both well-known and well-documented, Pound’s revising of Canto 16 is a relatively unknown monument of modernist polyphony, a jagged and atonal blending of disparate voices. As Daniel Albright has argued, “the Cantos are a set of impersonations … the ideal reader is a comedian, an aged vocal mime who can speak the highbrow lines in a highbrow voice … foreign accents in a cartoon voice.”4 Pound’s drafts for Canto 16 show, rather precisely in the drafts preserved in the Beinecke Library at Yale University, the moment when he moved carefully from a monologue as an extension of the Hell Cantos 14 and 15 to a polyphony of multilingual voices, such as reflects the deep influence of Pound’s work editing Joyce’s Ulysses and Eliot’s Waste Land. Where Pound breaks new ground beyond Joyce and Eliot’s work is his multilingual blend of languages sustained in their comical testimony of the brutality of wars that, in Falstaff ’s words, treat humans as “food for powder.” Moving beyond even Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, Pound’s Canto 16 is a monumental symphony composed to record the sounds of war and peace—a purgatorial movement before the next movement of the paradisal Canto 17. Pound’s own reading of Canto 16 at the Spoleto Festival is perhaps the finest recording of polyphony in poetry that we have. In his deadpan voice Pound captures the comedy of the Canto. Despite the numbering of folders at the Beinecke Library, the manuscript contents of folders 87 and 88 pre-date the typescripts in folders 85, 86, and 89. In folder 87, numbered “XII” at the top of the first page—almost surely in Pound’s hand—are nine pages containing language eventually incorporated in Cantos 14 and 16. The initial appearance of the words “And before the hell mouth,” the beginning of Canto 16, appears on the bottom of page six of this manuscript in Pound’s hand (folder 87, page 6). The first five pages of that manuscript are filled with early drafts of Canto 14—with references to leaders like Lloyd George and Woodrow Wilson “Standing bare bum/Faces smeared on their rumps …” (folder 87, page 1). Pound retained such scatological, sibilant language, replacing the letters with elisions to disguise the names (14/61). Five manuscript pages later, Pound included the phrase “& before hell mouth,” with its mountains, “Blake shouting,” and “Il Fiorentino / Seeing hell in the mirror” (87:6–7; 16/68). As of the manuscripts contained in folder 87, these references

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to Blake and Dante were imbedded in the Hell Cantos. Likewise, along with the manuscript drafts of Canto 15 on the same pages in folder 88 as Pound’s handwritten letters to T. S. Eliot and Richard Aldington from Sirmione in June 1922, these drafts in folder 87 can be dated as composed at that time. The contents of folders 85, 86, and 89 were composed a year later in Paris, “probably July–August 1923.”5 In each of these drafts during 1922 and 1923, Pound was focused on the Hell Cantos. Thus, initially Pound wrote the phrase “& before Hell mouth” with Hell, not Purgatory, as foremost in his mind. The fullest early record of Pound’s working on Canto 16 is in a typescript titled “Canto XIII,” with “io venni,” the first words of Canto 14, written by hand on the top right corner of the first page and correcting the earlier spelling of “io vieni” (folder 86, folder 90). The contents of folder 90 are complex to sort through—and seem to involve at least three separate stages of Pound’s drafting the Cantos. This version of Canto 13 begins very much as does Canto 16, from the first line “And before hell mouth” all the way to “the criminal lies in blue lakes of acid,” with Pound’s revising the line breaks to read: “the criminal / lying in blue lakes of acid” (folder 90, 16/68). The second of these pages contains the lines about a “blue acid” bath to “free myself of the hell ticks”—lines paper clipped to the bottom of that second page, the same lines bracketed at the bottom of the first page in folder 89. Then the pages numbered 2, 3, and 4 that follow the first unnumbered pages contain language from what would become Canto 14, from “The profiteers drinking blood sweetened with shit” (the numbered page 2 of folder 90, 14/61) through “obstructors of distribution” at the end of the Canto (the numbered page 4 of folder 90, 14/63). Thus, Pound has pages that would become part of Canto 16 mixed with a large section of what would become Canto 14. At this point, the “acid bath” still seems more infernal than purgatorial. Then, on a sheet marked in Pound’s hand on the top right corner, “XVI–p. 4,” comes a crucial turn in the process of his composing Canto 16. The original typescript, with revisions by hand, is in purple ink, preserved in box 5, folder 176, of the William Bird/Ezra Pound Papers. This typescript in folder 176 contains the first medley of voices (“des voix”), distinct from the initial third-person narrator of Canto 16. This section—marked by Pound as “XVI, p. 4”—is a turning point in the

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composition of Canto 16 from its inclusion as initially part of the Hell Cantos to its development as a polyphonic medley of languages and voices. Because this typescript is a clean draft unmixed with other drafts, I will cite it hereafter as folder 176—a pivotal point in Pound’s swerving towards a multitude of languages, dialects, and voices in Canto 16. After crossing out the typed words “For the morale of Europe,” Pound wrote by hand: “Prone in that grass, in sleep” (folder 176, 16/70). This handwritten addition signals the shift of the poem to the dream-vision of the sleeper who hears the voices of the night. This shift reflects the presence of Dante, “Il Fiorentino,” whose Commedia is an epic in the tradition of the dream-vision.6 In the right margin of this typescript, Pound added by hand the lines that would become, in effect, the subtitle of the Canto: “et j’entendis des voix” (folder 176, 16/70). With that handwritten addition, Pound seems to arrive at the principal form of Canto 16—its multiplicity of voices, languages, and dialects. In this typescript draft (and, in the printing of Canto 16 in Bill Bird’s Three Mountains Press publication), Pound does not signal that Victor Plarr is the narrator: he simply presents the narrative from the point of view of an adult recounting his memory as a child who thought that the charge at Sedan was “pretty bloody damn fine” (“bloody” struck by hand but later restored, folder 176, 16/70). This sequence of scenes from the Franco-Prussian War is the first case in Canto 16 of Pound’s adopting the voice of a narrator who recounts events that Pound himself did not witness. The next set of handwritten revisions contributes to the colloquial narrative of casualties in World War I, told in Pound’s own voice. Briefly, I want to offer two observations. First, by hand, Pound repeatedly struck a more wooden refrain, “And thither whent”—a phrase Pound originally had introducing Henri Gaudier and “old T.E.H.” as two friends who died in the war (folder 176). By hand Pound changed that refrain to the informally comical “went to it,” as in “And Henri Gaudier went to it.” Pound’s revision from the formal “thither” to the casual “went to it” contributes to the humor in Pound’s comical response to the “trench confessions” that he mocked in section IV of Hugh Selwyn Mauberley.7 Second, in the typescript contained in folder 176, Pound initially wrote “And thither whent my friend Aldi,” a reference no doubt to Richard Aldington—whose name is preserved in the current edition of Canto 16: “They put Aldington on

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Hill 70” (16/71). However, by hand Pound crossed out “And thither whent my friend Aldi” (folder 176). He even substituted “my friend Verdi” and then crossed that name out as well. Instead, the line in the typescript simply reads, “And they put him on Hill 70 in a trench” (folder 176). That is how the line appears in the Three Mountains Press first edition, reproduced in The Cantos Project.8 As Barbara Eastman has noted, there is no record to support the naming of Aldington at this point of Canto 16.9 By striking Aldington’s name, Pound gave names only to the dead, and not to the surviving veterans of the war. In the Three Mountains Press edition of Canto 16, although preserving the names Henri Gaudier and T.E.H., Pound does not name Wyndham Lewis (using the pseudonym Maxy Larmann instead), nor does he name Ernest (or Ernie) Hemingway. Instead, in the typescript, it is “Cyril Hemmerton” who “went to it” before they “burried [sic] him for four days” (folder 176). And so it is Cyril Hammerton, with the slight change from Hemmerton, in every edition until the New Directions edition of 1970. Furthermore, when Pound gave a reading of the poem at the Spoleto Festival of 1967, he read “Maxy Lahrman” and “Cyril Hammerton.” Hugh Kenner’s liner notes about the recording praise Pound’s reading of Canto 16: “No poet cares more about local accuracy of meaning, and he reads line by line as he hopes to be understood … [His] central discipline, which was to state things exactly and arrange these statements in an elucidative order, survives the impediments of failing strength and faltering attention.”10 In the Spoleto recording, Pound reads the line “They put him on Hill 70, in a trench,” not “They put Aldington on Hill 70, in a trench,” Furthermore, he reads the line “And Cyril Hammerton went to it,” not “And Ernie Hemingway went to it.” Pound’s reading of Canto 16 at the Spoleto Festival adheres to the English text in his daughter’s bilingual edition of I Cantos, the text in that edition that Pound apparently accepted.11 Indeed, if one follows Kenner’s claim about the poet’s preferring the English side of his daughter’s Lerici text, then Pound seemed to authorize retaining those pseudonyms for the soldiers who survived the war.12 Although Pound did not name Hemingway in his editions of Canto 16, he did want Hemingway to read the Canto he labeled his “war” Canto in his drafts for the table of contents.13 Indeed, his correspondence strongly suggests that he asked Hemingway to read the “war” Canto almost as soon

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as he completed it. Once Pound worked intently on the section of Canto 16 narrated by the unnamed Léger, he seems to have worked quickly. On October 14, 1923 he reported in a letter to Dorothy Pound that he had “got up to Leger’s part of the XVIth.”14 Within a week, in a letter Pound wrote to Dorothy on October 20, 1923, he strongly implied that he had completed at least a full draft of that section: “Leger has approved the section of Canto 16 that deals with his account of Verdun.”15 Just a few days later, in a letter to Hemingway dated October 24, 1923, Pound referred to his “few chaste words on the war” after his Hell Cantos in his “XVI chants.”16 Pound’s irony about his “chaste words” suggests his desire to have Hemingway read his “war” Canto. In the same letter on this date, Pound wrote that Bill Bird “has finished Adams’ book, so his art margins for yours will presumably be underweigh by the time you get this.” Pound’s references to the “art margins” for in our time, also published by Bird’s Three Mountains Press, implies that he had finished editing Hemingway’s chapters for that publication. In a letter to his father of October 1923, Pound wrote that he had “finished canto XVI.”17 These references imply that Pound had finished editing Hemingway’s in our time for the Inquest series roughly at the same time as he finished Canto 16 for his Draft of XVI. Cantos, both published by Bill Bird’s Three Mountains Press.18 Pound’s revisions for the next section of Canto 16 mainly involve his trying to render the French monologue, based on conversations with Fernand Léger, more accurately and idiomatically. Pound revised the French monologue extensively. On the typescript page beginning with the reference to “Cyril Hemmerton,” and continuing with the French monologue, Pound made roughly a dozen changes, filling both the left and right margins with his handwritten notes (folder 176). Soon after checking the narrative about the battle at Verdun with Léger, Pound was at work on the next sections of Canto 16. In the letter to Dorothy dated October 20, 1923, Pound indicated that he was already revising a draft of the vignettes from the Russian Revolution, for whom the unnamed Lincoln Steffens was a source for the narrative, if not for the final spelling of Russian words: “Stef supplies troublesome details about Petrograd” and “Golly has supplied Stef ’s defective orthography.”19 At the time of these letters, Pound suggested that he moved rather quickly from the narrative about Verdun to the scenes from the Russian Revolution.

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In between those narratives, however, Pound broke the chronology of events. From Verdun, the long battle that took place during most of 1916, he shifted to a scene after the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk was signed on March 3, 1918 by the new Bolshevik government, almost a year after the Bread Riot in St. Petersburg reported by the unnamed Lincoln Steffens.20 Pound probably composed the Brest-Litovsk monologue at the same time as he finished the section on Verdun and was revising the section on the Russian Revolution—that is, October 1923. In this monologue, a speaker, in heavily accented English, relates an argument between a Bolshevik and a group of people, presumably non-Bolshevik Russians, challenging him. Apparently, Pound revised little or none of this Brest-Litovsk section, whereas he heavily revised the sections set in Verdun and St. Petersburg. In the typescript, there is not a single alteration by hand (folder 176). The monologue itself is comically polyphonic—with voices of a crowd challenging a Bolshevik, who scoffs at his challengers. As Pound read Canto 16 at the Spoleto Festival, he delivered this scene in a key of deadpan vaudevillian comedy. Both the “zhamefull beace” monologue about the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk and the following anecdote about a student killed for laughing are late additions to Canto 16—not present in folders 85, 86, 87, 88, or 89 in Box 2 of the Bird/Pound Archives. The relative lateness of the “zhamefull beace” in Pound’s composition of Canto 16 suggests that he probably wrote that passage during or after his time reading and editing Hemingway’s “Nick sat against the wall” chapter of in our time as part of his work on Hemingway’s volume, the final publication of the “Inquest” series by the American Bill Bird’s Three Mountains Press. Near the end of this chapter, Hemingway’s character Nick Adams, badly wounded in battle, refers to his forming “a separate peace” with the Italian soldier Rinaldi.21 Amending “a separate peace” to a Russian-inflected dialect in defense of the “zhamefull beace” following the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, Pound’s comic monologue seems to be his riff off the young Hemingway’s vignette. The final page in folder 90—not included in the pages whose original is in folder 176—is a purple typescript numbered 10 (typed) on the top right with handwritten revisions. The typescript of this page is an exact match, aside from the difference in color, with the typed page 10 in folder 91. On the final page of folder 90, Pound extensively revised by hand the

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typescript. Those changes are reflected exactly in the clean typescript that is preserved in folder 91. With its handwritten revisions, this last page of folder 90 is a later draft than the typescript preserved in box 5, folder 176. For example, Pound changed the spelling from “vishka” to “bjolistä” (“ä,” with the German umlaut) by hand in folder 176, and from “bjolisté” (“é,” with a French accent aigu) to “Pojalouista” by hand on the last page in folder 90. “Pojalouista” is the corrected spelling of the word spoken by the Cossacks that appears on its own line in the 1925 Three Mountains Press edition of A Draft of XVI. Cantos. These changes suggest Pound’s uncertainty about how to spell the Russian word, until his consultation with “Golly.”22 Lincoln Steffens had spelled the word “Pajalista” and translated it as meaning “If you please” or “By your leave.”23 The clean typescript in folder 91 records these handwritten changes to the typescript on the final page of folder 90. To summarize the sequence of Pound’s revisions of the Russian Revolution scenes: folder 176 contains the original typescript copied in the middle of folder 90. The heavily revised, final page of folder 90 is later and must date around the time of Pound’s reference in his October 20, 1923 letter to Golijewski’s correcting Lincoln Steffens’s (and Pound’s) orthography. The page of the (even later) clean typescript in folder 91 records and reflects these handwritten changes on the last page in folder 90. Thus, Pound continued to fine-tune the voices in the poem, including his American narrator’s reporting about the Russian Revolution. On the final page of folder 90, he also added phrases specifying the location of the scenes, writing by hand “in the square at the end of the Nevsky” on one line and “in front of the Moscow station” in the right margin (final page of folder 90, 16/75). By specifying the location of the massacre, Pound gave this voice a journalistic tone of reporting exactly where his narrator had witnessed the events. Perhaps the most striking revision on the final page of folder 90 was his added reference to a lieutenant (“of infantry” added by hand) who killed a student for laughing. Pound added this detail between the lieutenant’s commanding his troops to fire on the crowd and the Cossack’s cutting down the lieutenant. To the right of the typescript, Pound added (and then crossed out) the words “and he killed a student.” Below those words, he wrote by hand the words “pulled his sword on for laughing”—close to the line “And he pulled his sword on a student for

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laughing/And killed him” (16/75). Steffens’s Autobiography, published in 1931, years after Pound’s Draft of XVI. Cantos, contains the incident of the laughing student.24 Steffens’s version bears comparing with the more deadpan humor of the end of Canto 16, particularly as Pound read it at the Spoleto Festival. This scene seems a dark comedy in the spirit of Pound’s own memoir to Gaudier-Brzeska.25 Along with the typescript in folder 91 that records the revisions Pound made, by hand, to the final page of folder 90 is a manuscript page, where Pound wrote notes that he labeled “Canto XVI.” This page of notes probably coincides with Pound’s extensive revisions on the final page contained in folder 90—changes that are incorporated in the typed second and third pages of folder 91. At the top of the first page in folder 91, written by hand, is the beginning of a new stanza, “you can’t make ’em.” The voice here still seems to be Pound’s narrator, sardonically commenting about the chaos of the Russian Revolution, “you cant make you cant make ’em/no body knew it was coming” (folder 91). In this handwritten page, Pound added a biting comment about the “mediocre young” as manning the post office, in contrast to the leaders who knew nothing of the revolution: There were the mediocre young on    A post office &   the palace but none of the leaders     knew it was coming. (folder 91) After this page of manuscript, on the second and third pages in folder 91, are two typescript pages. The first typescript page in folder 91 is numbered 10 on the top right of the page and includes the additions he made by hand to this scene in the final page of folder 90, a page also numbered 10. The first typescript page in folder 91 incorporates the handwritten additions about the lieutenant and the laughing student. Pound included much of the hand-written language on the inserted manuscript page, but he removed the phrase about “the mediocre young” (folder 91). Instead, Pound added the line, “Guns on top of the post-office and the palace,” before his line about the leaders (folder 91:2). Replacing “the mediocre

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young” with “Guns” is more menacing. Pound’s drafts in folders 176/90 and 91 reflect his carefully reworking the vignette set in St. Petersburg to blend understated humor with such signs of a violent revolution. His revisions bring the scene in St. Petersburg from the enthusiastic distance of a Bolshevik’s defending the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, to the close-up perspective of an eyewitness present at the Moscow Station in St. Petersburg. The last lines of this typescript, the third page in folder 91, remained virtually verbatim from the typescript version (folder 176) to the 1925 publication by Three Mountains Press. These final lines add a note of ironic distance in shifting from an eyewitness account of the Russian Revolution to a scene in a London opera, where the conversation turned to the soldiers’ resistance to serving under General Haig, apparently with no effect on the plans for an advance that was going to begin “in a week” (16/75). The final voice of the poem is enigmatic—probably British, certainly from a vantage point of some distance from the war: “So we used to hear it at the opera” (16/75)26 The phrase “used to hear” implies that the narrator no longer hears about the troops and Haig—perhaps because the war is over. The phrases “wouldn’t be” and “was going to begin” leave unclear whether the troops did or did not follow Haig’s orders. The ending of Canto 16 is a complex blend of past and conditional tenses that are more ambiguous than the opening strophe of the Canto. At the end of Canto 16, we learn what the narrator “used to hear” at the opera, less definitive than what Pound’s figures for the visionary poet enacted at the beginning with their “running” and “howling” and “Seeing hell” (16/68). In this final stage of his composition of Canto 16, collected in the final page of folder 90 and in the typescript in folder 91 of the Bird/Pound Archive, Pound brought A Draft of XVI. Cantos to a close. The polyphony of voices in Canto 16 is in a common key with the modernist works of Joyce, Stein, Eliot, Cummings, and Hemingway. Yet Pound’s masterful blend of voices, languages, and dialect concerned Hemingway. In a letter that he wrote to Pound in late September 1925, Hemingway worried that the “dialect business … can wreck the whole damned project of the Cantos which Christ knows is a swell project.”27 He seems to be referring to Canto 16. The best record of Pound’s response is his continuing to include Canto 16, with dialects intact, in his subsequent collections The Cantos, balanced by his naming Hemingway, alongside the

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composer Antheil, in Canto 74, the first of the Pisan Cantos. In his liner notes for the recording of Pound’s reading his poetry at the 1967 Spoleto Festival, Hugh Kenner wrote that Canto 16 “carries us out of a hell of the mind, witnessed by Blake and Dante, into a visionary paradise … where sleep is troubled by voices recalling wars: Victor Plarr on the War of 1870, Fernand Léger in highly colloquial French on the Great War, Lincoln Steffens on the Russian Revolution.”28 Pound’s drafts for Canto 16 show his moving carefully from a monologue as part of the Hell Cantos to a polyphony of multilingual voices, such as reflects the deep influence of his reading and editing Joyce’s Ulysses and Eliot’s Waste Land.29 Pound’s own performance of Canto 16 at the Spoleto Festival is perhaps the finest recording of such polyphony in poetry that we have. Between Valerie Eliot’s publication of the drafts of The Waste Land and the record of Pound’s editing of Ulysses, scholars know in rich detail the specific impact that Pound had in shaping these two masterpieces of modernism. In the case of Eliot’s Waste Land, for instance, we know that Pound struck a large section from the original opening of “The Burial of the Dead.” In its earlier typescript, Eliot’s “Burial” began with what sounds like an adolescent’s sexual confession, “First we had a couple of feelers down at Tom’s place.” We can see how Pound crossed out the lines until the famous opening, “April is the cruelest month, breeding/Lilacs …” Likewise, we can see how Pound stopped Eliot from trying to sound like Joyce. Striking “yes” from another of Eliot’s famous lines, Pound wrote in the margins “Penelope JJ.”30 Instead, Eliot’s line simply quotes from The Tempest: “Those are pearls that were his eyes.” That is, Pound’s close work editing Eliot’s poem to strip and meld its narrator’s and characters’ conversational voices probably influenced his own composition of Canto 16. However, Pound’s polyphony includes monologues in Léger’s French and in a Russian’s broken English that are more extended and sustained tours de force than Eliot’s brief lines of German or French. Eliot’s fortune tellers speak in English—Madame Sosostris, Teiresias, and Lil’s frank advisor,31 whose monologue is interrupted periodically by the chantlike, “HURRY UP PLEASE.” In Canto 16, Pound converts that peacetime curfew call to the darker, colloquial refrain, “And … went to it.” In Pound’s original Three Mountains Press version, the only actual names of those who “went to it” were “Henri Gaudier” and “T.E.H.,” who died in the

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war; Pound gave those who survived, like Hemingway and Lewis, pseudonyms. Those pseudonyms may reflect Pound’s editing of The Waste Land, where earlier drafts included naming of Symonds and Pater—names taken out by the final version.32 In Pound’s Canto 16, the pseudonyms are more noticeable by giving actual names only to the dead. And the extended monologue in Léger’s French is far more extensive than Eliot’s inclusion of German, French, or Hindi. Thus, while Canto 16 is not exactly a “captain’s tower” in which Pound is literally “fighting” with T. S. Eliot, as Bob Dylan sang in “Desolation Row,” the Canto reflects Pound’s writing about war’s casualties and survivors in a cacophonous symphony that turns the trauma of war into a comically purgatorial poem. Pound’s editing of Joyce’s Ulysses included his work with the “Wandering Rocks” chapter, a chapter that probably also influenced Eliot’s Waste Land. A. Walton Litz pointed out that Eliot probably read “Wandering Rocks” closely as a proofreader for The Egoist.33 Litz also pointed to the influence of Joyce’s Ulysses on Pound’s early Cantos, but did not suggest the likely impact on Pound’s Canto 16. In “Wandering Rocks,”34 Joyce shifts the voices and viewpoints shift multiple times, from Father Conmee’s to the narrator who follows the progress of the Viceregal Cavalcade until his vision ends with the “salute” of Almidono Artifoni’s “sturdy trousers.” Joyce concludes “Wandering Rocks” with the comic touch of Artifoni’s hind side as blocking or diverting the narrator’s view of the regal Cavalcade.35 With Joyce’s multiple viewpoints in “Wandering Rocks,” both Eliot and Pound saw first-hand the jarring and comical effect of shift after transition-less shift. Such multiple narrative perspectives become, in Canto 16, the even more vertiginous movement from the narrative monologue to the polyphony marked by the transitional French clause, “et j’entendis des voix.” That transition, extending his work with Eliot and Joyce into his own epic Cantos, marks a turning point that we can see in folder 176, a striking record of Pound’s redirecting The Cantos to the multiple voices that make its comic music.

C HA P T E R SE V E N

The Genealogy of the China Cantos Kent Su

HISTORY, called Tsé-tchi tong kien hang mou on the model of Tso kieou ming (55/298)

A

fter the publication of Cantos LII–LXXI, Ezra Pound sent a copy to Benito Mussolini and wrote in the accompanying letter: “I hope I have done a useful job in condensing some historical 1 facts.” Like Confucius who “had two thousand years of documented history behind him which he condensed so as to render it useful to men in higher official position,”2 Pound undertook similar endeavours and aimed to advise the Duce. He considered the publication to be his “best book,”3 and one that exemplifies the “Dichten = Condensare” principle of lean philosophical economy. Pound carefully selected the best sources to compress in his version of history.4 These sources include Joseph-AnneMarie de Moyriac de Mailla’s 11-volume work Histoire générale de la Chine and Charles Francis Adams’s ten-volume edition of The Life and Works of John Adams. These historical documents are typical of Pound’s commitment to “constatation of fact.”5 For this article, I aim to focus exclusively on the China Cantos. John Nolde briefly documents and identifies the multi-layered origin of the 91

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sequence, which came from de Mailla’s volumes; de Mailla’s version is a translation of Zhu Xi’s Tongjian Gangmu, which was in turn a condensation of Sima Guang’s Zizhi Tongjian.6 Nolde admirably opened the China Cantos to scholarship, and subsequent scholars have been keen to use his research.7 However, such focus offers a somewhat unsatisfying narrative of probabilities and suppositions to suggest how much influence these sources have had on Pound’s creative method. As the epigraph has shown, Pound was aware of the two sources that came before de Mailla’s volumes. By tracing the genealogy of the China Cantos and contextualizing the significance of these sources, I will show how Pound ingeniously adapts the literary styles of these sources and incorporates them to form the unique structures of the China Cantos. Furthermore, I will explore the extent to which the China Cantos, when viewed in the contexts of these original materials, successfully recreates philosophical doctrines of Confucianism in this complex process of cultural transmission. Pound’s modus operandi was to turn to neglected cultures both for influence and for their inherent novelty, the latter of which he thought might pique Western interest. For Pound, a twentieth-century revivification of values in the West was possible only through discovering other cultural models: “It is possible that this century may find a new Greece in China.”8 Like the rediscovery of Greek philosophy during the Italian Renaissance, a Western rediscovery of Ancient Chinese philosophy was, to Pound, essential for his own age. He discerned in Confucianism a harmonious unity and solution to the decay and disintegration of Western civilization.9 Consequently, the China Cantos with the thematic tones of Confucian morality serves as a primary example of Pound’s devotion to the philosophy.

I.  The Multi-Layered Sources of the China Cantos The French source of the China Cantos which Pound uses derives originally from Sima Guang’s (1019–86) monumental Zizhi tongjian (Comprehensive Mirror for Aid in Government), which consists of 20 volumes and 9,612 pages.10 This work was a general chronicle of Chinese history from the Warring States Period in 403 bce to the beginning of the Song Dynasty in 959 ce.

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Many Chinese scholars consider Zizhi tongjian as one of the finest single historical works in Chinese,11 because it eschews the method of the poorly structured jizhuanti (“biographic and thematic type”), which was the dominant form of constructing narratives in Chinese historical discourse.12 The works of jizhuanti focus on annals of dynasty, tables of reigns, treatises of state rituals, and imperial biographies. The mixture of categories poses challenges for readers wishing to pinpoint specific historical events. In contrast to this model, Zizhi tongjian follows biannianti (“clear chronological pattern”),13 allowing the reader to find quickly what he or she is looking for in the history of China. The author himself further claims, “I have compiled the work in biannianti form in order to show that there is a pattern for the sequences of later events, that pure and coarse are not random, and that a single dynasty has too little strength to be able to achieve perfection.”14 Sima Guang sought to demonstrate the chronological influences and the patterns of continuity in his historical compilation.15 As part of his chronological history, Sima Guang wrote a short introduction to, and summary of, each important event to help readers to easily understand and follow an historical course of events. The readers could thus better grasp how Chinese history unfolded. Additionally, Sima Guang provided his own comments on the history he chronicled, in paragraphs introduced by the words “chen Guang yue” (臣光曰), a phrase that means “servant Guang says.” The statement demonstrated his humility, thus helping him to connect more intimately with his readers even while he articulated his historical knowledge. His book served as a textbook on governance and was read by princes and emperors as a guidebook on how to rule. The word “jian” or “鑒” in the work’s title, Zizhi tongjian, means “mirror / looking glass.” It can also be used as a verb, meaning “to warn.” In the Zizhi tongjian’s pedagogic historiography, readers encounter rhetorical elements, such as the Mandate of Heaven, dragons, natural calamities, and sage kings, which should not be treated as mere filler or poetic embellishments that intrude upon the “real” story.16 What emerges is political advice given within a moral universe, in which the actions of individuals have negative consequences for the people, for heaven, and for the earth. The form of these powerful images conveys the relationship between cultural ideals and the

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recorded past.17 History was thus a mirror by which statesmen could be guided by models of the past, both virtuous and evil.18 Zhu Xi (1130–1200), a Neo-Confucian thinker, demanded an abridged edition of Sima Guang’s work. The resulting publication, completed in 1171, was entitled Tongjian gangmu (Outline and Digest of the General Mirror).19 In this version, Sima Guang’s text was significantly reduced: the Tongjian gangmu (59 volumes) is much shorter than Sima Guang’s Zizhi tongjian (294 scrolls). Zhu Xi’s edition has been applauded for maintaining the essence of Sima Guang’s history even while condensing it.20 The text of the Tongjian gangmu is simple and accessible while still being educational and informative; Zhu Xi was clear about what he hoped to impress upon his readers. He presented his version of history in two parts. The first part describes historical events in general outline, all written in large characters. The second part provides detailed explanations, which are written in smaller type. Readers can thus scan major points of Chinese history before proceeding to the more comprehensive information in the comments. While Sima Guang’s Zizhi tongjian was written in a more neutral tone, Zhu Xi attempted to illustrate the moral principles in government and interpret historical events with an unswerving emphasis on traditional Confucian values. On the Confucian idea of “rectifying the names” (zhengming 正名), Zhu Xi emphasized the importance of using correct and proper terms. Zheng is commonly known as “correction,” “rectification,” or “centralization.” Ming is often referred to as “names.” In the original text of The Analects 13.3, zhengming is an ancient, feudal doctrine commanding that each person must have a social name and standing. These markers of identification are in turn associated with the person’s responsibilities and duties. They also outline the ramifications of failing to respect the doctrine’s tenets, which become the foundation and principles for the country. For instance, the decay of a nation will be the inevitable consequence of a ruler who does not effectively govern the country or give appropriate instructions to his subjects. Alternatively, if a subject pretends to be a ruler, the country will suffer the same consequences. Without zhengming, those in different social positions would begin to fabricate nonsensical words and a language for their own benefit. The doctrine thus shows how important proper titles are for the overall well-being of society.

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In one of the chapters of Tongjian gangmu, Zhu Xi instructs the reader on his understanding of imperial houses, designations of years, titles, positions, and reign mottos. With the help of such designations and terms, Zhu Xi was able to praise and criticize all actors in history. Tongjian gangmu is therefore often seen as the paramount history of rigid and orthodox Neo-Confucianism. Pound perhaps learned of Sima Guang’s and Zhu Xi’s texts from Herbert Giles’s A History of Chinese Literature (1901), a book that provided Pound with an encyclopaedic corpus of Chinese literary knowledge.21 Giles describes Zhu Xi’s most notable work as “revision of the history of Ssu-ma Kuang [Sima Guang], which, under the title of T’ung Chien Kang Mu [Tongjian gangmu], is still regarded as the standard history of China.” Giles stresses that Zhu Xi “placed himself first in the first rank of commentators on the Confucian Canon,”22 a point that would have aroused Pound’s curiosity in the philosophy. In a letter to his mother on October 13, 1913, Pound said “You’ll find Giles ‘Hist. of Chinese Literature’ a very interesting book.”23 Giles’s book thus enabled Pound to grasp the basic knowledge of the literary history in China. Zhu Xi’s Tongjian gangmu later served as the basis for the first comprehensive history of China published in the West. Joseph-Anne-Marie de Moyriac de Mailla (1669–1748) was responsible for creating this crosscultural dialogue between China and Europe. De Mailla was a French Jesuit missionary, who went to Beijing in 1700 and lived at the court of the emperor Kangxi (1654–1722). He compiled the massive eleven-volume work, Histoire générale de la Chine, and also updated Zhu Xi’s historical volumes to include the early Qing era.24 De Mailla’s version contains paragraphs of unpolished and verbose description. He used highly formal diction to illustrate the extended narratives of different events in a sequential manner, giving the reader an extensive amount of factual information on the history of China. In spite of the structural difference from the previous versions, the thematic concerns of de Mailla’s translation stayed the same. His version was filled with passages on the philosophy of Confucius that instructed emperors and ministers in the operation of good government. As such, de Mailla brought the civilization of China back to Europe. Significantly, de Mailla’s work coincided with the Enlightenment period in Europe, and

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thus he brought the Confucian principles of good government and social order to the minds of those who were engineering revolutions in America and France.25 By appropriating traces of these three original sources, Pound’s China Cantos develop a similar stylistic as well as ideological approach. For example, Pound adapts Sima Guang’s chronological technique to frame the general structure of his Cantos. He also borrows Zhu Xi’s emphasis on zhengming as a way of showing the importance of linguistic precision. Lastly, his ambition is to align his work with that of de Mailla: both of them, as Western “missionaries,” aimed to bring back Chinese culture and history to their countries. Pound thus creates a style of his own by blending all three versions together.

II.  The Influences of Sima Guang, Zhu Xi and de Mailla on the China Cantos Following Sima Guang’s chronological and natural approach to recording history (biannianti 編年體), Pound grounds the narrative of the rise and fall of Chinese dynasties in concrete chronological data. For example, in the margins of Canto 53 readers encounter notes such as “b.c. 1053,” “b.c. 860” and “b.c. 279.” Reflecting Sima Guang’s influential design for relating history, Pound employs these specific key dates to demonstrate that these historical events happened chronologically. Furthermore, Pound designs a table of contents to introduce the China Cantos. In this table, Pound traces the history of China from its legendary beginnings in the third millennium bce through the eighteenth century ce (at which point the subsequent Cantos switch from Chinese dynastic history to the American dynasty of the Adams family). The reader can thus quickly understand the sequence of events in Chinese history. In the table of contents, Pound places major historical events or figures as titles. Through these, he captures the essence of each specific era. The result is that the reader has the opportunity, in the table of contents itself, to discover basic information about Chinese history that will then be detailed throughout The Cantos. These indicators in the table of contents also provide readers with a chronological progress through the reigns of different emperors, to show that this history progresses in a

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linear fashion. Under the titles in the table of contents, the name of each dynasty is capitalized, allowing the reader to perceive quickly the chronology of successive dynasties. Below is the table of the contents from Cantos 52–57: Table

Rays ideogram from Fenollosa collection

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CANTO LII  LI KI

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LIII Great Emperors First dynasty HIA Tching Tang of CHANG (second dynasty) bc 1766 Third dynasty TCHEOU bc 1122–255 Confucius (KUNG FU TSEU) 551–479

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LIV Fourth Dynasty TSIN, Burning of the Books 213 Fifth Dynasty HAN bc 202 Eighth Dynasty SUNG ad 420 Thirteenth Dynasty TANG 618

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LV Tchun of TANG ad 805 Ngan’s reforms Nineteenth Dynasty SUNG 960

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LVI Ghengis 1206 Kublai 1260 Twentieth Dynasty YUEN (Mongol) Lady Ouang Chi HONG VOU died 1399 Twenty-first Dynasty MING 1368

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LVII Flight of Kien Ouen Ti

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Sima Guang’s influence as regards chronology was powerful, but Zhu Xi’s impact on Pound’s work was similarly considerable. In particular, Pound’s perception of language was affected by Zhu Xi’s Confucian philosophy of zhengming (正名) or rectification of names. Pound’s version redefines the ming or “names” as “precise terminology.” In this way, he reduces the feudal implications and focuses on the linguistic aspects of the zhengming doctrine. Zhengming becomes the call for the necessity of clarity, precision, unity, and explicitness in language. Writers, then, are responsible for ensuring that appropriate definitions are given to different subjects in order to maintain intellectual progress and social stability. Pound thus reinvents his own interpretation of the Confucian classic to conform to his theory of precise language. Pound believes that language is a nominative act. Relatedly, poetry represents the highest degree of perfection in language, which needs to be as accurate and rigorous as possible.26 This precision in relation to meanings appears in specific figures, concepts, or locations throughout the China Cantos. The result is a kind of “documentary poetics” because of The Cantos’ commitment to facts.27 The specific figures mentioned in the preceding paragraph include emperors, eunuchs and advisors, who either brought development or decline to the dynasty. They were real people who played a role in the making of Chinese history. For instance, in Canto 53, Pound frequently mentions Hoang Ti, Yao, Chun, Yu, Duke of Zhou and Confucius, who were all paragons of virtues and significant figures. They assisted in China’s establishment. Pound emphasizes their stature in the form of ideograms, compelling the reader visually to remember them. Their names occupy more than half of a page in Canto 53 (263): YAO                 CHUN             YU                   

堯 舜 禹

Moreover, Pound explores specific concepts of Confucianism and insists on the importance of following them. In one of the famous sections of Canto 53, Pound adapts the story of the virtuous king, Cheng Tang, from Confucius’s The Great Learning:28

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      and       wrote MAKE IT NEW  新 hsin1 on his bath tub       日  jih4    Day by day make it new 日 jih4 cut underbrush,   新 hsin1 pile the logs keep it growing (53/265) Pound reports that Cheng reminded himself of the important Confucian motto “新日日新” or “day by day make it new” by inscribing the motto on a bronze wash basin.29 Pound applies this four-character Chinese expression as the modernist injunction for poetic reform and experimentation: one must seek out and learn the ancient forms and make them new. Interestingly, there is an error in transcribing of “新” or “New” because the punctuation mark in the Chinese text was taken as part of the character. In a way, Pound is inadvertently following his own maxim and giving the word “New” a completely different meaning. The process of renewal in the motto, “新日日新,” can be applied to the history of China. Rulers would continually make Confucianism “new” in the sense that they repeatedly renewed Confucianism when they implemented it in their political ideology. Pound was convinced that a similar renewal was essential to the social health of the West. In order to attain the harmony and virtue that he found in China, the West would have to mirror the values and practices that the ancient Chinese rulers continually renewed. Pound realized that his readers, that is, a Western audience, lived in a different place and time than the rulers in Chinese dynastic history. He wanted to reflect in a mirror, so to speak, the greatness of the wise rulers who grasped Confucianism—and, in turn, he wanted those in his contemporaries to see this reflection and to embrace the philosophy of Confucius. Moreover, like the sages before them, he wanted his readers to find new versions of Confucianism without altering its essence.30 The Confucian philosophy of rectification of names continues when Pound provides factual markers of mountains, rivers, and provinces that are locatable on a map. The development of different dynastic events can strongly affect these landscapes. For example, sage rulers believed ineffective emperors, corruption at the court, or the baleful influence of women and

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palace eunuchs would often lead to ill omens in nature and eventually result in the collapse of the dynasty. A case in point was that of a beautiful maiden named Pao-ssu (Pao-sse), who was given to the Chou king, Yu Wang (Yeououang), by a neighboring state. Besotted with Pao-ssu, Yu Wang neglected his kingdom, spending all his time with the maiden.31 Natural landscapes began to disintegrate. Pound succinctly details the terrible events: The Lady Pao Sse brought earthquakes TCHEOU falleth,           folly, folly, false fires no true alarm       Mount Ki-chan is broken.     Ki-Chan is crumbled in the 10th moon of the 6th year of Yeou Ouang (53/271) Ki-Chan, an actual mountain located in Fujian province of China, succumbs to inevitable destruction because of the incompetence of dynastic rulers, who should have focused on overseeing the state’s affairs rather than on frivolous matters. In contrast, Chinese historical records have shown that, as long as the ruler followed Confucian principles, everything in nature would be in balance. For instance, even before he became ruler, Yu was dedicated to making the state better by devising a system of taxation, dividing the several provinces into various districts and assessing each according to the fertility of its soil, the particular skills of its inhabitants, and its ­non-agricultural resources:32 Ammassi, to the provinces,     let his men pay tithes in kind. “Siu-tcheou province to pay in earth of five colours Pheasant plumes from Yu-chan of mountains Yu-chan to pay sycamores     of this wood are lutes made Ringing stones from Se-choui river and grass that is called Tsing-mo’ or μωλυ. (52/262–63) Yu’s capacity to manage effectively a state facilitates the harmonious co-existence of different living beings in nature. The stability of Yu-chan,

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a mountain located in Jiangsu province of China, is a sign of peace, which further expedites the growth and activities of the natural world. Although Pound adapted directly from his Chinese source, he would ingeniously add his own words. For example, the first line includes the Italian word, “Ammassi,” which refers to a quantity of goods used by a community for common purposes and was an aspect of the economic programs of Mussolini’s regime. Pound seems to connect the deeds of the legendary figure in China with Mussolini. Similarly, the last line contains another foreign word, “μωλυ” (molu, a magical herb given by Hermes to Odysseus to counteract the drugs of Circe).33 This fusion of Eastern and Western references appears to indicate Pound’s vision of the paideuma, an elusive term pointing to how different ideas rush together to form the timelessness of history: “the tangle or complex of the inrooted ideas of any period.”34 In addition to Sima Guang and Zhu Xi, de Mailla influenced Pound in the sense that, like his Western forebear, Pound wanted to bring Chinese history back to the West. The poet perceived himself as a literary missionary, whose goal was to communicate knowledge of the ancient narratives from the East to his readers.

III.  The Style of the China Cantos Pound’s China Cantos represent layers of a poetic palimpsest and are a series of adaptations. De Mailla’s version served as the primary basis for Pound’s work. Pound compressed de Mailla’s 6,376 pages into roughly 2,500 lines and condensed 5,000 years of Chinese history into 80 pages.35 The poet summarized only events he personally considered pertinent. He took out many extended narratives and turned them into brief, concise phrases that he believed captured the essence of the original version.36 Therefore, there seems to be interplay between subjective decisions and the facts of history operating beneath the textual surface of the China Cantos. The adoption of the method of subjectively selecting a series of source-based fragments, and then juxtaposing them, as the basis for understanding an entire historical complex shows Pound’s confidence in his editing choices. However, by modern standards, Pound’s version should not be called history at all. He focused solely on the philosophy of Confucius and ignored other important philosophical schools, such

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as Daoism and Buddhism, which were deemed heretical for their occult practices. His decision to provide the barest factual information meant that he declined to convey the complexity of art, culture, economy, and literature in Chinese history. He only mentioned in passing certain political events, such as the Duke of Zhou’s willingness to cede his power to King Cheng for the purpose of ensuring the well-being of the country. Pound thus failed to acknowledge the significance of many historical episodes. However, Pound was not concerned with presenting a perfect and comprehensive version of history. What mattered to Pound was the advocacy of Confucianism. Pound wanted to reveal the success and failure of Chinese history to Western readers, who, looking in the mirror of his text, would thus become more aware of their own cultural crisis.

IV. Conclusion Sima Guang, Zhu Xi, and de Mailla each exerted an influence on Pound’s China Cantos. Their styles enabled Pound to create a unique type of “historical” poetry that demonstrated a different way of delivering a narrative. Because of their disjointed structures and metamorphosing references, the China Cantos might at first appear to be a “cut and paste” compilation from different sources. Foreign names of people, locations and events force readers to devise their own interpretations. It is almost impossible to understand them without extensive knowledge of Chinese history. Each reader thus needs a comprehensive dictionary for consultation. However, there is an underlying sense of unity and coherence behind these fragmented and erratic lines, which can largely be found when readers extract the Cantos’ themes. Confucianism is the backbone that links each China Canto together. In Pound’s own words, “Kung is to China as is water to fishes” (Canto 54, 285). Good rulers followed Confucian values closely and ensured the overall well-being of the country, whereas bad rulers caused chaos and destruction because of their failure to read the Confucian texts. Pound attempted to compose an overarching morality tale from Chinese history that readers would see mirrored in the crisis of the West. In other words, Pound hoped that the West could learn from Ancient China’s virtues as well as its mistakes.

III.  Pound and Cross-Cultural Questions of Translation

C HA P T E R E IG H T

The Poetics of Queering Translation in Ezra Pound’s Homage to Sextus Propertius Christian Bancroft

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his essay introduces the term “queering translation” as it applies to Ezra Pound’s Homage to Sextus Propertius (1919). I will first explain what queering translation is before briefly drawing attention to recent critical treatments of the poem. Following this, I will examine various elements of Homage, such as the paronymous calques, the willful anachronisms and their relationship to the queer time and temporal drag as considered by Elizabeth Freeman, and the ideas of becoming and unbecoming, as discussed by Elizabeth Grosz and Jack Halberstam, respectively. By applying the theory of queering translation, the discourse surrounding the poem becomes more nuanced, and invites historically marginalized critical approaches to enlarge the social, cultural, gendered, and sexual politics as they concern Pound’s oeuvre. Queering translation is a term used, occasionally, by some critics before the twenty-first century, but the most significant developments in the field begin with William Spurlin. In 2011, he chaired a seminar for the  American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA) in Vancouver, sponsored by the International Comparative Literature Association’s Committee on Comparative Gender Studies that addressed gender and queer politics of translation. These seminar papers developed into a 105

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collection of essays published in Comparative Literature Studies in 2014, showcasing work by Aarón Lacayo, Pierre Zoberman, Sergey Tyulenev, Elizabeth Richmond-Garza, Serena Bassi, and Mehammed Amadeus Mack, which led to further inquiries into relationships between gender, sexuality, and their representations in translation and translation studies. Finally, in the Blackwell Companion to Translation Studies, published in 2014, William Spurlin’s essay “Queering Translation” elaborates on many of his ideas, arguing that both “‘queer’ and ‘translation’ mediate between hegemonically defined spaces, and their critical conjunction offers the possibility of new sites of heterogeneity and difference as a vital heuristic for the work of comparative literary and cultural studies.”1 Spurlin’s idea squares nicely with Teresa de Lauretis’ introduction of queer theory as “another discursive horizon, another way of thinking the sexual,”2 thereby shifting focus away from “the reification of essentialist identities to focus on desire and performance.”3 Queerness and translation both function as heterogeneous sites that offer difference “as a vital heuristic for the work of comparative literary and cultural studies,” writes Spurlin, and this “work of translation, like the work of queer, is never finished, as both modes of inquiry are committed to the endless proliferation of difference(s).”4 Spurlin’s primary goal in bringing queerness in conversation with translation is for the sake of knowledge production, so that queer is “not simply about sexual rights,”5 nor is translation merely about the equivalences between languages. Queering translation is a methodology of translation. It imagines the relationships among languages in terms of the identities, cultures, and societies that produce them. Queering translation may be read as the heterogeneity that exists between languages: a space of indeterminacy that includes the untranslatable. This translation style emphasizes the nebulous, the ambiguous, multiplicities, heterogeneities, femininities, masculinities, as well as the sexual, gendered, cultural, and historical differences between languages. It blurs contact zones between borders and bodies, acknowledging the fluid movements that occur between and beyond them. Thus, queering translation resists “monolithic modes of articulation and being”6 and pushes against the “straightening device” of compulsory heterosexuality, thereby confronting the direction “towards” which a translation style moves from source text to translation.7

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Steven G. Yao’s book, Translation and the Languages of Modernism: Gender, Politics, Language (2002) is the only recent book that provides a detailed examination of translation’s role in Modernism. Even more recently than Yao, in 2013 Jean-Michel Rabaté advocated for a “broader hospitality to verbal, linguistic, ethnic and conceptual otherness [as it] corresponds to a new perception of the modern.”8 This introduction to an issue of the Journal of Modern Literature continues: [M]odernism has expanded; it has crossed new conceptual and geographical borders in order to turn into today’s diasporic and dialogic modernity. Such modernity relies on more than one language, more than one accent, more than one skin color. It is founded on a renewed sense of the marginalized … a modernist hospitality to the other will push forward the practice of translation, turning it into a creative and disorienting tool.9 For over two decades, Modernist studies has expanded beyond its Anglocentric geneses. Modernism qua multilingual movement pushed “forward the practice of translation,” and Rabaté accurately refers to Modernist translation as “a creative and disorienting tool.” Additionally, in Ignacio Infante’s After Translation (2013), he stresses that the very function of translation was embedded in Modernism, which only reemphasizes the central role that translation played during Modernism and its transnational impact on cultures and their languages. With all of this acknowledgement on the significance of Modernist translation, Alan Golding, echoing Bob Perelman, calls for even more critical rigor, arguing that it is “‘time to translate modernism into a contemporary idiom’…that translation must involve the question of what it means to read Pound now.”10 But there is little doubt among contemporary scholars that discussions of Pound and translation need to be reworked “into a contemporary idiom.” Many of these scholars do not dwell on rehashing older complaints about whether or not Pound translated a work like Homage. Instead, they bypass them altogether to make nuanced assertions like Andrés Claro from his 2009 essay, “Broken Vessels: Philosophical Implications of Poetic Translation (the limits, hospitality, afterlife, and Marranism of languages).” In his piece, Claro claims that Homage is

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“one of the most extraordinary translations of the twentieth century (and contrary to what is generally believed, one of the most faithful renderings ever made of the original Latin elegies).”11 He continues by declaring that Pound forged “a translation which was not only a remarkable poem in itself but produced a sea-change in … Propertius’s work … giving it a renewed life, a historical afterlife, unfolding its signification for the present.”12 It is no secret that Pound was one of the greatest literary promoters of the twentieth century and that his outspoken respect for poets like Sextus Propertius and François Villon, among many others, reignited critical interest in their work. Adam Piette’s 2008 essay “Pound’s ‘The Garden’ as Modernist Imitation: Samain, Lowell, H.D.” contends that translation theory—especially as it pertains to Modernist translation—needs to move past the binary formulations of whether or not a translation is a literal or loose rendition of the source text: Translation theory has too often assumed that a binary simplicity governs the relations between source and target culture in the transactions of translation. To paraphrase Pound, we can argue that modernist translation has no simple model for the cultural work it is doing on both source and target cultures: the translation may augment, diminish, multiply, or divide the source text’s verbal energies; or use the source text to augment, diminish, multiply, and divide the target culture’s power of tradition.13 Pound himself claimed that language should not be categorized as “merely positive and negative; but let us say +, -, ×, ÷, +a, -a, ×a, ÷a, etc.”14 Therefore, there is not a convincing reason why Homage should not be read as a translation and an original poem. In “The Mother Tongues of Modernity: Modernism, Transnationalism, Translation” (2010), Roland Végső advances exactly this idea: that Pound’s “controversial ‘creative translations’ [show] us that translations can aspire to become poems in their own right.”15 Like Végső, Sullivan, Yao, and others, I maintain that Homage is a creative translation—a kind of hybridized form of translation—that includes elements of word-for-word renderings, free associative riffs,

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homage, persona, criticism, as well as moments of original poetic composition. As such, his translation recognizes and embraces the spaces between these labels as well as the very movements within and beyond these spaces. There is nothing static about Homage; it is constantly becoming something else, differentiating itself from its previous state and, in fact, the poem emphasizes these differences and their ensuing multiplicities, creating in effect spaces “between languages that [are] amorphous, ambiguous, different, and quite possibly queer.”16 The first four lines of Homage have drawn a considerable amount of feedback; specifically, the fourth line, with its translation of “Graios orgia” as “Grecian orgies.” While Pound offers a homophonic translation of orgia, some critics have complained that the word “orgies” degenerates the semantic import to what Propertius was really referring (i.e., mysteries or sacred rites). In Daniel M. Hooley’s essay on Homage, he defends the use of “orgies” as an appeal to a more modern audience. However, Steven J. Willett, in his 2005 “reassessment” of Pound’s Homage, retorts that such justification “strains risibility,” because “no modern audience would associate ‘Grecian orgies’ with Yeatsian dance any more than Yeats would have.”17 Comparing “and the dance into Italy” as a kind of “Yeatsian dance,” Willett believes that a modern audience would have understood the use of the word “mysteries,” rather than “orgies” in conjunction with “dance.” Retaining the wordplay associated with “orgies” resists the ethnocentric translation praxis advocated by Willett and the professor of Latin who initially lambasted Homage for its inaccuracies, W. G. Hale. This wordplay foreignizes the text, disengaging the power relations that would otherwise threaten to domesticate the linguistic and cultural difference of the source text. “Orgies” also forecasts the homophonic translation of “nocturnaeque canes” in Part II, which Pound translates to “‘Night dogs,” obviously teasing out nocturna and canes.18 While the pun on canes for “dogs” is not a literal translation, it has outraged critics, who feel as though this rendition only gives them more reason to dispute Pound’s translation.19 The pun actually anticipates the kind of work that Louis and Celia Zukofsky will do with Catullus (1969) or Raymond Roussel’s Comment j’ai écrit certains de mes livres (1935) and, by that measure, the pun functions as an innovative form of translation that represents some warped combination

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of a homophone and a paronymous calque. Despite what critics say, the “night dogs” line in Homage does not abandon semantics. Pound redefines the relationship between his translation and Propertius’s source text. A level of performativity and playfulness percolates throughout Homage, generating attention to the sound, rhythm, and prosody of Propertius’s elegies. “Night dogs” is just one of those moments; it interrupts preconceived notions of what a “direct” or “normative” translation might look like. It also represents a moment in which Pound challenges canonical, traditional ideas of what a translation should or should not do, instead embracing a translation more linguistically ambiguous that unhinges the semantic content of Propertius’s original poem. There are inherent differences between the original text and the translated text, but even the very differences become blurred, masquerading—or perhaps performing—as content from Propertius’s own elegies to such an extent that Pound becomes a sort of translator-performer. Pound is not the only one performing in Homage (as Propertius, the speaker), the translated text itself performs as a translation of Propertius’s texts by including something like “gout” into the translation, which, at first, seems like an accurate rendition of Propertius’s work. The performativity that transpires in these instances operates as a queer space, as a protean space that decenters, in Judith Butler’s words, “the subject as the exclusive origin or owner of what is said.”20 In translation, the source text is given a central position that distorts the power balance between itself and the translated text. Pound’s protean rendition of Propertius diffuses this power and the “uneven correspondence” between the source text and the translated text, opening up the opportunity for spaces between languages that are “amorphous, ambiguous, different, and quite possibly, queer.” These playful methodologies align with Pound’s reading of Propertius, who, according to Pound, was concerned to work within the poetic tradition, but was also interested in subverting that same tradition, by parodying the expectations of his readers who had been accustomed to the kind of poetry written in Alexandria. Translation, hence, represents a site of “struggle in the negotiation and production of meaning, always capable of new possibilities of counter-translation.”21 Pound’s willful anachronisms—which stand out more to readers than his homophonic calques—call attention to the arrangement of

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time and history, which in the poem, works against the ways “in which historical narrative … organizes various temporal schemata into consequential sequence.”22 Pound’s translation, in part, “track[s] the ways that nonsequential forms of time … can also fold subjects into structures of belonging and duration that may be invisible to the historicist eye.”23 Because the anachronisms Pound integrates do not sequence time into a series of consequential occurrences, they have the ability to “fold subjects into structures of belonging.” For example, the inclusion of Tibet “full of Roman policemen”24 helps to assimilate Pound’s arguments against imperialism into the poem. Moments such as these buttress Eliot’s argument that Homage is a criticism. Homage juxtaposes the precise timing of other imperialist examples, “synching up bodies and time”25 in such a way that brings “past and present together.”26 This queer temporality, Freeman argues, is a way of “forging—in the sense of both making and counterfeiting—history differently.”27 This act of “both making and counterfeiting” distorts the relationship between source text and translated text; in short, queering the translation. Pound’s hybrid translation makes a persona from the poem, incorporating moments that are not translated from Propertius’s Elegiae (i.e., Pound’s original composition), and counterfeits the translation of Propertius’s poetry at the same time. Again, Pound is both performer and persona. One might argue that he has created a performance out of his persona and a persona from his performance.28 The asynchronous references slice the poem into “discontinuous pieces of time,”29 interrupting a “temporal order that, in turn, proposes other possibilities for living in relation to indeterminately past, present, and future others: that is, of living historically.”30 Pound’s creative translation “jump[s] the timeline,”31 by shifting from various time periods from the first century bce to the seventh century ce, back to the first century bce, then to the nineteenth century ce, etc. Pound’s “body” (as persona and performance) exists on multiple planes. Writing of the dialectic between a “pedagogical” time and a “performative” time, Homi Bhabha explains that pedagogical time measures historical events as they accumulate toward a “given destiny,” whereas performative time “recreates itself as such through taking up a given activity simultaneously.”32 Homage employs both forms of time. There is at once a clear narrative progression from the beginning of the poem to the end of the poem; at the

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same time, Pound’s persona and performance as Propertius and translator enables him to “recreate” Propertius’s historical narrative simultaneously with the hindsight of someone living in the twentieth century, integrating other imperialist examples and anachronistic ephemera like Wordsworth and a Frigidaire patent into the first narrative tracking Propertius. The simultaneity in Homage “catalyze[s] new becomings”33 across multiple temporal surfaces because the anachronisms scattered throughout Propertius’s narrative recontextualize (i.e., become) both the events during Propertius’s life as well as the anachronisms from the ce that Pound inserts into the poem. These temporal crossings recall Freeman’s notion of the temporal drag, which involves an “excess … of the signifier ‘history’ rather than of ‘woman’ or ‘man.’”34 In other words, the anachronisms in the poem dislocate the reader from the current moment within Propertius’s narrative, and bring to light futures that in turn put perspective on the past. The willful anachronisms are the result of Pound’s power of performativity, as Freeman would have it. Pound’s translation, as a critique of imperialism, represents “the pull of the past on the present,” and the function of Propertius’s narrative in part is “the refraction of Sextus Propertius through a modern intelligence or superimposition of one upon the other,” or a “‘Vorticist’ portrait,” according to David Moody.35 Moody’s term is yet another addition to the long list of descriptions of Pound’s Homage; he does concede that it is a translation, but not “in the usual sense.”36 The term “refraction” calls to mind Freeman’s “discontinuous pieces of time,” and the ways in which Homage reevaluates the present and the past by way of their mutual “superimposition of one upon the other.” One version of temporal drag is “the ability to comprehend a historical situation only as it becomes obsolete,” a kind of “retroactivism,” if you will, or “a mode of regeneration that aims to awaken the dissident and minor future once hoped for in the past.”37 Pound retroactively visits Propertius’s own disillusion with imperial wars as a way to declare his own bitterness and disenchantment toward twentieth-century imperialism. His performative historiography binds—to use Freeman’s term—both the past and the present as a way to interrogate the historiography of imperialism and to recontextualize its relationship to other imperial moments throughout history (e.g., Tibet) and up to the twentieth century. Thus, Pound’s translation defies the “myth,” according to Butler, of an original textual body, by

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refusing to acknowledge the ways in which translation as performative act is “always already influenced by culture and not reducible to the textual body alone.”38 Pound’s role as translator–performer–persona in the poem allows him to move outside of whatever constraints a more literal translation might require of him. He does not have to adhere to the internal logic of Propertius’s elegies; he can move in, out of, and between the various textual spaces of a translation, a persona, a performance, a “Vorticist portrait,” an original composition, etc. Pound challenges the temporality of unilateral spectrums because he creates his own res non verba in the poem. As a performer, a person slips in and out of a number of different identities. The text may also assume a range of identities, without any sort of advertisement or signal indicating that it plans to do so. The translation does not have to inform the reader of any new styles or approaches that the translator may take, which is especially what Homage does. There are points in the poem when Pound translates a specific line from Propertius’s elegies; however, in the subsequent line, Pound may translate something that is not included in any of Propertius’s elegies (e.g., “Much conversation is as good as having a home” from Part III). Accordingly, there is a nebulousness around the performances of the translation. Since it does not have to indicate to the reader what style it will adopt, the styles, therefore, as they shift and become new styles or new approaches to translation, underscore the very ambiguity involved in certain instances of becoming. Becoming, therefore, is not always a transparent process that signals to the reader what will happen along this process, what kinds of changes will evolve. If I extrapolate these ideas, removing them from this particular context, the Darwinian notions around evolution, according to Grosz, are not necessarily limited to reveal to us what will happen to us as a species. We do not know toward what direction our species is headed or how we ourselves will become. This is to say that it is not necessarily easy to analyze the process of becoming in retrospect, but it is not always possible to predict how it will develop. In Homage, it is not apparent what kind of translation Pound will employ. From section to section, the first-time reader cannot predict if Pound will use a literal translation of Propertius’s Elegiae, a liberal translation, or something else. When Pound shifts his praxis from translating entire passages or elegies of Propertius to translating lines or phrases of

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Propertius’s elegies, it becomes almost impossible to determine what style his translation will assume. This is particularly true when we think of the anachronistic moments in the text. If Pound mentions Wordsworth in the text, what is to stop him from mentioning Keats, Chaucer, or even his contemporaries, like Eliot? Thus, the process of becoming welcomes elaborations of identity, and how new directions and new forces “emerge from these processes of destabilization” inaugurated by Pound’s translation practice. By Part VI of Homage, Pound moves away from translating individual elegies, in favor of passages, couplets, or even single lines from various poems written by Propertius, often out of the linear sequence in which the elegies were first arranged. At this point in Homage and throughout the rest of the poem, Pound’s translation moves much more fluidly between literal translation, original composition, and what some critics call his “mistranslations.” Notwithstanding, it is the fluid movement that I see as one of the more interesting aspects of the poem: the ways that Pound’s translation slides in and out of these various spaces. This movement of a textual body (the original text) toward another body (the translation) initiates a sense of becoming that transforms the original text in ways that are “unpredictable and irreversible.”39 Pound’s translation epitomizes this unpredictability; as we get further along in the poem and as his translation praxis becomes increasingly liberal, the narrative direction toward which the translation moves refuses predictability. Through this movement, Pound’s translation undergoes a process by which each subsequent state differentiates itself from its previous state. The very movement of translation preexists the translation itself, and each movement forward, toward a futurity, represents a moment in which the act of carrying Latin over to English, the act of translation, is constantly differentiating itself from its previous linguistic state. Homage, however, amplifies these degrees of difference because of his liberal rendition of Propertius’s poems. By not producing a literal translation, Homage increases its degrees of difference from the source text, differences only generated through the process of becoming, for the reason that becoming, according to Grosz, “is the operation of self-differentiation.”40 In as much as becoming perpetuates differentiation, it is also “about affinities … to sustain and generate interconnectedness,”41 as Braidotti reminds us. This movement forward is

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not conducted haphazardly, because Homage “conveys meaning at virtually every level of its engagement with it source.”42 Even when Pound is not translating Propertius in any capacity, he is still engaged with Propertius’s elegies, which, when Pound loosely adapts or writes about imperialism in his own words, acts as a criticism against imperialism. Propertius, therefore, functions in those instances like a critic from whom Pound bases his own arguments against twentieth-century British imperialism.

     The different modalities under which Homage operates provide another reason how it destabilizes spectrums. The spectrum of a translation practice suggests a range of individual features that overlap and form a continuous sequence, with literal translation on one end and loose translations that only hint at the source text on the other end. Pound’s translation practice in Homage, however, is capricious, adding passages of his own work interspersed with loose translations of Propertius, mistranslations, and, of course, literal translations—all without any consistency. In fact, the only consistency in his practice is inconsistency itself. These discrepancies should not be criticized. They embrace the mutability of language, its fluidity; they blur the boundaries between the individual characteristics of a translation spectrum. In Jack Halberstam’s book, The Queer Art of Failure (2011), he advocates for “low theory,” which looks for a way out of the usual traps and impasses of binary formulations. Low theory tries to locate all the in-between spaces that save us from being snared by the hooks of hegemony and speared by the seduction of the gift shop. But it also makes its peace with the possibility that alternatives dwell in the murky waters of a counterintuitive, often impossibly dark and negative realm of critique and refusal.43 Low theory also tries to “push through the divisions between life and art … into a more chaotic realm of knowing and unknowing.”44 Likewise, Homage, pushes itself “into a more chaotic realm of knowing and unknowing,” slipping past the “hooks of hegemony” of “normative”

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translations. It is not always apparent where moments of original composition end and a loose paraphrase of the source text begins. It goes without saying that the poem operates beyond “binary formulations.”45 Homage privileges heterogeneity and the slippages that occur between source text and translated text and, in the process, subverts any hegemonic argument that tries to affix a set of rules or system to which the poem adheres. Instead, the poem favors difference and queerness. Part XI in Homage assembles material from five different elegies, and many of these passages only use one or two lines from the source text. One might argue that Part XI signifies a moment in the poem when Pound utilizes a combination of paraphrase and original composition. Part XI.1 derives from I.15.1 in Propertius’s Elegiae, and then the second line in Homage, “I am hung here, a scare-crow for lovers”46 represents only a shadow of the source text, at the very end of Propertius’s poem, I.15.41– 42. In other words, there is no mention of “scarecrows” in the Latin. The problem with critics who feverishly leaf through Homage, scanning for resemblances to Propertius’s poems, and upon finding discrepancies, chastise Pound, is that they are concerned with coding Homage with a particular system external to the poem’s logic. Ultimately, such a critical approach yields nothing but chagrin. These kinds of “standards of passing and failing” are exactly what Halberstam refers to in his book. As he states, “Under certain circumstances failing … may in fact offer more creative, more cooperative, more surprising ways of being in the world.”47 By “failing” in translating the poem to more normative (i.e., “successful” for critics like Hale and Willett) forms of rendering Propertius’s elegies into English, Pound has created a work of literature that “offers different rewards”48 than the kind of literal translation for which some scholars hope, thereby “[poking] holes” in the “toxic”49 expectations critics have for translations, homages, personae, etc. While Halberstam’s low theory works well in conjunction with Homage, I disagree with his argument that becoming is something exclusively related to positivity and success, as I stated earlier. The poem may be read concurrently as a text that unbecomes a normative translation and, in doing so, becomes something much more nuanced and complex. Through its unbecoming, the text is able to “propose a different relation to [our] knowledge” of creative translation practices in such a way that Pound’s

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Homage does not seem so much as a translation lacking the elements of a more “appropriate” or traditional translation as it does generate new ways of engaging with translation practices, thereby reconstituting epistemological notions of what a translation is and a source text’s relationship to its translation. This reconstitution blurs the lines between different forms of artistic production and evades any one category, which is exactly what work operating under queering translation does: they blur lines and challenge expectations. The idea of unbecoming and becoming at the same time correlates to the notion of mistranslation, or according to Hale, the howlers in Homage. Pound did not revise or “fix” his mistranslations because, according to him, it was not a translation in the strict meaning of the word; it was something well beyond a translation. Pound could have easily translated these mistranslated moments in the poem, but chose not to. Thus, we return to the idea of unbecoming, because by choosing not to translate or revise these mistranslations, Pound actively chose for the text to not become (i.e., unbecome) a more traditional translation. Consequently, the text actually becomes something much more dynamic and something much more complex and intricate, giving itself over to “destabilization, unbecoming, and unraveling.”50 Homage “references the spaces in between and refuses to respect the boundaries that usually delineate … the copy from the original,” much like Halberstam’s description of a collage.51 If the poem is taken seriously, unbecoming enacts a “refusal of coherence and proscriptive forms of agency.”52 Homage challenges hegemonic systems that favor oeuvres of other Latin poets and systems that purport to preserve qualifiable standards. Resultantly, these systems refute the fluid, organic, and natural interactions that happen in and among the spaces of translatability. This in turn shuts out a variety of meanings and production between source text and translated text, and all of the social, cultural, gendered, and political forces at play in such a translation. Homage signifies a translation that is not fixed and does not cling to fixed systems, which is how it established an approach to translation that gave rise to other innovative translations in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

C HA P T E R N I N E

Rainer Maria Gerhardt and Ezra Pound Walter Baumann

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wonder how many Poundians younger than I am are familiar with the name Clark Emery (1909–2009). Way back in 1958 he published the first guide-like study of Pound’s Cantos under the very Poundian title: Ideas into Action. His initial intention had been to produce an ABC of Ezra Pound’s Cantos, but since he wanted to approach the poem indirectly, through Pound’s prose, he decided to use as his title the phrase that occurs four times in Guide to Kulchur, most prominently in Pound’s definition: “The history of a culture is the history of ideas going into action.”1 Emery’s book was vital to me when I started work on my DPhil thesis for Zurich University a year after its publication. Rereading it, I was still impressed by the clarity of Emery’s explications of Pound’s central ideas and his “pathfinding” exploration of The Cantos. But what drew me back to Emery’s book was the recollection that he had quoted and translated out of German a section of probably the first radio broadcast about Pound in the German-speaking world, written by one Rainer Maria Gerhardt (1927–54). Then and now, how many literary scholars in the Anglophone world actually read German? Unlike me, Emery was also familiar with the beginning of the “folksong” whose third line, “soll deine Liebe sein” (“shall be your love”), Pound inserted into Canto 83, four lines after quoting “as the grass grows by the weirs” (83/549) from Yeats’ “Down by the Sally Gardens.” I only found out that Emery’s “Still wie die Nacht,/ Tief wie das 119

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Meer” (“Quiet like the night / deep like the sea”)2 is the opening of an often performed song set to music by the best-selling German composer Carl Bohm (1844–1920), when I came across Massimo Bacigalupo’s gloss in Notes and Queries.3 Nowadays, you can listen to it on YouTube as sung by Richard Tauber or Fritz Wunderlich.4 This is the way Emery introduced his lengthy quotation from Rainer Maria Gerhardt’s radio-broadcast: “As for metrical build-up of the image, it is probable that Rainer Maria Gerhardt … has given the most acute analysis.”5 Now who was this Rainer Maria Gerhardt? Since Emery’s “Literature Cited” list refers to the Hessische Rundfunk (Radio Hesse), I sent a letter to them asking whether they could send me the script. In their reply of November 2, 1960 they told me that they happened to find one last copy of this “Abendstudiosendung” (“Late Night Studio Broadcast”) from March 1952 and were happy to send it to me.6 I did not really explore it very much at the time. Nor did I spend much time trying to learn more about the author. It was when I saw a copy of the Wallstein Verlag’s Rainer Maria Gerhardt Umkreisung: Das Gesamtwerk (Complete Works)7 among the books at Brunnenburg that it occurred to me to pursue Gerhardt further. Gerhardt was born in Karlsruhe in 1927. His father was a painter and graphic artist, and his mother came from a musical family. After the house of his grandmother, with whom he grew up, was bombed, Rainer moved in with his uncle, Hans Erich Apostel, a composer and Schönberg pupil, in whose house near the Stephansdom in Vienna he first came in touch with world literature and twelve-tone music. He finished his apprenticeship as an insurance clerk with distinction, and his first poems won the Viennese medal for Young Artists. But he was drafted into the Reichsarbeitsdienst (Third Reich Labour Camp) and into pre-military training. Gravely ill, he returned to Vienna. Before another serious illness he managed to pass his Abitur in September 1946. From 1947 to 1948 Gerhardt attended lectures, without matriculating for a degree, in German Studies and Psychology at Freiburg University. In August 1948 he married Renate Schlothauer, a student of German, English, and French. She was also employed by the Americans to help with the restocking of the library, had far better English than Rainer, and was often his co-translator. This was also the year the Gerhardts, with friends such as Klaus Bremer, organized the first literary

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and musical evenings as part of the Freiburg cultural weeks. Blätter für Freunde (Pages for Friends) were mimeographed and distributed far and wide. How Gerhardt managed to make contact with poets and academics specializing in poetry, “from under the rubble heap” (90/626) that was Germany well into the 1950s, is a miracle, most of all his obtaining the German translation rights to the works of Ezra Pound. Gerhardt’s surviving letters reveal that Dorothy Pound was active as agent and persuaded both New Directions and Faber to send him copies of Pound’s works. The German firm that Gerhardt had been able to interest in publishing Pound was Limes Verlag in Wiesbaden. Whereas Pound approved of the sample translations Gerhardt had sent him, the Limes Verlag publisher, Max Niedermayer, had his doubts and sought advice. Gottfried Benn, at the time the authority on poetry in Germany, told him confidentially that he considered Gerhardt’s translations of Ezra Pound linguistically very poor indeed, even saying they were “saumäßig“ (“damn rotten”).8 Unfortunately this is near the truth regarding Gerhardt’s rendering of Canto 84, which he had included in a letter to Niedermayer, but it is hardly true of most of his other Pound translations: How to Read, the Confucian Ta Hio, some shorter poems, the Usura Canto, and the parts of the other Cantos featured in the March 1952 broadcast. Niedermayer was glad when Peter Schifferli, the founder of the Arche Verlag in Zürich, took over the publication of Pound in German. That Eva Hesse (1925–2020), the winner of several prizes as Pound’s German translator, had a rival in one of Hugh Kenner’s star pupils, the German Lore Lenberg (1926–2008), who called Hesse’s translations bad, and who used as the title of her study of The Cantos, Rosen aus Feilstaub (1966), the German equivalent of the title of my thesis, The Rose in the Steel Dust (1967 and 1970), are two other stories. Gerhardt’s March 1952 radio feature, with music and five readers, appears to have been broadcast more than once. Though its title was Die Pisaner Gesänge its scope went far beyond The Pisan Cantos. After some words of introduction, in which it is wrongly claimed that Pound was a financial advisor to the Italian government, having lived in Italy since 1922 (instead of 1924), the beginning of Canto 74 is recited, up to “as was about 1925 Oh my England” (74/445–46). Following a comment about the importance of clarity and precision, there is a reading of the second

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half of Canto 13, from “And Kung said / “You old fool” (13/59–60). Then there is a glance at the Imagist program (“Use no superfluous word …”9) and a return to The Pisan Cantos for a further demonstration of precision and clarity in Canto 74. The next reading consists of the whole of the Usura Canto (45). Gerhardt then defends Pound against those who call him an anti-Semite. They do this, said Gerhardt, because of Pound’s attack on the existing financial system. He uses Canto 74’s passages containing references to the Old Testament (74/460) to prove that Pound was not anti-Semitic. After a musical interlude the broadcast continues with lengthy passages from Pound’s How to Read. The two outstanding ones he picked are: It appears to me quite tenable that the function of literature as a generated prize-worthy force is precisely that it does incite humanity to continue living …10 And: One “moves” the reader only by clarity. In depicting the motions of the “human heart” the durability of the writing depends on the exactitude. It is the thing that is true and stays true that keeps fresh for the new reader.11 After the recitation of the section of Canto 83, beginning with “in the drenched tent there is quiet” to “only the stockade posts stand” (83/549– 51), Gerhardt jumps back to How to Read, to tell the radio listeners all about MELOPOEIA, PHANOPOEIA, and LOGOPOEIA. After some more from Canto 83, “And now the ants seem to stagger” (83/551), we get to the section which caught the special attention of Clark Emery. I am quoting Gerhardt in Emery’s excellent translation: In contrast to the classical conception of verse as that of a certain symmetrical and metrical pattern or of being constructed in accordance with such a pattern, modern verse is a matter of breathing, consequently, of speaking, of hearing. Notwithstanding

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the dangers one is exposed to, when defining things of one category in terms of another, one may say that modern verse requires the use of counterpoint and compositional skill in a way which is peculiar to modern music, or, even more obviously, to modern films—if they are good. The principle of the construction and the arrangement of verse consists in the relation of sound, rhythm and meaning of single terms to a certain line; and of the relation of each of these lines and their terms to one another. A certain parallel to Schoenberg’s theory of twelve-tone composition can be observed … . The first breathing unit of a verse strikes up the theme. All the succeeding verses are dependent on or in a certain way related to it.12 Charles Olson’s “Projective Verse” essay was first published in Poetry New York in 1950, two years before Gerhardt’s broadcast. As no one had ever proposed such a prosody with emphasis on breathing, least of all in Germany, he must have had access to this article, whereas Emery apparently had not. Introducing his German fellow-poets and poetry lovers to this technique and introducing them to the poetry the Nazis had all but kept out of Germany, through translations, was indeed Gerhardt’s ultimate aim, in connection with which he founded his own firm: Verlag der Fragmente. Sadly, most of his world-wide publishing plans died with him. After further recitations from, and comments about the technique of Cantos 83 and 84, Gerhardt ends with his very neat translation of sections 4–7 of Kung’s Great Learning, which shows how thorough an Ezra Pound disciple he was. The news of Rainer Maria Gerhardt’s suicide on July 17, 1954 prompted Charles Olson to write “The Death of Europe: A Funeral Poem for Rainer Maria Gerhardt.” It is the opening poem in the 1961 anthology entitled Junge amerikanische Lyrik (Recent American Poetry).13 Unlike most of the little reviews that were published in Germany after 1945, Gerhardt’s five cyclostyled Blätter für Freunde and the two printed issues of Fragmente were international in scope, and so were his personal contacts. It is possible that it was actually Ezra Pound who urged Robert Creeley to visit Rainer in Freiburg, as Pound always wanted his adherents to get in touch with each other. But it was, above all, Creeley’s

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close friend and life-long correspondent, Charles Olson, who entered into the far-reaching, transatlantic dialogue with Gerhardt. Creeley included Olson’s poem with the long title, “TO GERHARDT, THERE, AMONG EUROPE’S THINGS OF WHICH HE HAS WRITTEN US IN HIS ‘BRIEF AN CREELEY UND OLSON,’” in his edition of Olson’s Selected Writings.14 In June 1962, in Boston, Charles Olson gave a marvellous reading of it, lasting just under 13 minutes. You can listen to it on Pennsound.15 But did Gerhardt actually get the Olson message? I only got it after reading Sherman Paul’s interpretation in Olson’s Push: A European [Gerhardt] is now the son, and an American [Olson] the father, and the father, in chastising the son, does so relentlessly, because he himself is a son deposing a father. Pound stands behind Gerhardt: Pound, “the snob of the West,” “the ultimate image of the end of the West.” Gerhardt suffers because he revives for Olson all his misgivings about Pound. Olson allows Gerhardt nothing, not even the Poundian prosody to which he himself is indebted.16 At the end of his funeral poem for Gerhardt, Olson appears to regret his harsh words: I take back the stick. I open my hand to throw dirt into your grave I praise you who watched the riding on the horse’s back It was your glory to know that we must mount O that the Earth had to be given to you this way!

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O Rainer, rest in the false peace Let us who live try.17 This long and gently ironic address to Rainer, the dead German brotherpoet, laments the loss of the creative relationship across the Atlantic that had hardly begun. It was almost 30 years after his death when Volker Bischoff properly recognized Gerhardt’s role as a mediator between American and German poetry18 In any case, Gerhardt’s brave efforts to introduce German-speakers to Pound’s world deserve to be remembered. I do not know how Ezra and Dorothy Pound took the depressive, heavily indebted Rainer’s suicide, but there remained a family connection, as Pound had agreed to be godfather to the Gerhardts’ second son whom they named Ezra.

C HA P T E R T E N

“Cantos” or “Cantares”? Pound’s Reception in Two Romance Languages Viorica Patea

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ound’s own poetic oeuvre has been translated into over seventy languages. Indeed, it is remarkable how translators from such a wide variety of languages continue to find that his poems resonate with readers from often radically different cultures. Here I wish to focus on translations of Pound into two Romance languages and their reception of his work in three parts of the world. I begin with the translation of The Cantos into Spanish by the Mexican academic José Vázquez Amaral (see Figure 10.1) in which Pound was heavily involved. Amaral’s translation therefore reveals how Pound wanted The Cantos to be interpreted, especially the Later Cantos. But the reception of Pound’s Cantos in Romania and Nicaragua, two Communist countries, demonstrates just how variously they have been understood (or maybe misunderstood). While in the case of Romanian, the translators had many barriers to overcome merely to be allowed to publish Pound in a regime that practiced MarxistLeninist totalitarianism, which resulted in a detective story of sorts, full of intrigues and spiced with Greek tragic irony. Nicaragua, on the other hand, though ideologically comparable to Romania, revered Pound as one of the greatest hero poets—and victims—of our time. These two examples alone prove how Pound, so often considered, as well as repudiated, as a highly political writer, could be admired by people from any part 127

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Figure 10.1. José Vázquez Amaral (1913–87). Image courtesy of Special Collections and University Archives, Rutgers University Libraries

of the political spectrum, ranging from Nicolae Steinhardt, a Romanian Jew persecuted by the Communists, to the Nicaraguan Ernesto Cardenal, a staunch Marxist. Yet what comes to light is how persistently Pound is admired not so much for his politics, but for his poetry which transcends ideological differences. In 1958 Pound reportedly wrote to his Ukrainian translator, Eaghor Kostetzky (1913–83),1 that he considered Amaral’s translations superior

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to those in any other language.2 Amaral was to have a crucial influence on Pound. Their disputes concerning the Spanish translation, especially the title of The Cantos, made Pound add the Spanish appellation “de los cantares” to the title of his Later Cantos, which from then on applied to other Romance language translations, including the Portuguese and the Romanian.3 Amaral’s essays on Pound, as well as his record of their conversations, gives us glimpses of Pound’s Weltanschauung and his conception of The Cantos. In his old age he worried about who would take up The Cantos after his death. In Canto 116 of Drafts and Fragments, for instance, Pound regards The Cantos not so much as a poem but as “a record,” “a palimpsest,” “my notes,” in the form of an unfinished “tangle of works” (815).4 And he wonders what will happen to them: “And as to who will copy this palimpsest?” (817). His hopes are with the translators. In his prolific correspondence with them he generously offered textual clarifications, often detailed explications of the things they did not understand. In fact, the publication of Pound’s letters to his translators could become an indispensable research resource. When writing to Kostetzky, Pound sent him the addresses of other translators, especially since Kostetzky’s Selected Ezra Pound was to include many other translations, into Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, German, French, Swedish, Norwegian, Oriya, Japanese, and Arabic. Pound praised Ungaretti and Quasimodo’s translations but believed that his daughter Mary “gets nearer the swing and gist of the text” into Italian. He also lauded René Laubies for his “perspicacity with the Adams Cantos,” and mentions Ryozo Iwasaki’s bilingual edition of Mauberley (Keio University, Tokyo). Yet, as usual in his instructions to his translators, he always expresses his disdain for scholars, professors, and the academic establishment, but encourages the translators to take liberties with the text: “make the selection of poems that you have made, conserve the alliteration with due accommodation to the nature of your own language AND in general to give the signs of intelligence which appear in your own letters, and I (we) don’t need to bother about any yank or kenuk of professors.” Of all translators he most highly recommends José Vázquez Amaral for “his MAGnificently vivid spanish version of the Pisanos.”5 In fact, the first language into which the complete Cantos were translated was Spanish, in 1975 by Amaral. It was followed ten years later by the English/Italian edition translated by Mary de Rachewiltz, and

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in 1986 the French-only Les Cantos. Despite Eva Hesse’s early pioneering of Eliot’s and Pound’s works, the first complete German edition of The Cantos is the most recent one, published in 2012. Even the Portuguese Os Cantos, appeared thirteen years earlier.6

I.  The Spanish Translation as Key to the Later Cantos José Vázquez Amaral (1913–87) was a literary critic, academic, translator, and chair of the Spanish Portuguese Department at Rutgers University from 1947 to 1982. Amaral first contacted Pound in 1951, and Pound immediately put him in touch with William Carlos Williams, who was “part Spanish, and has for fifty years been meaning to translate MORE spanish into northamerican.”7 Pound considered Amaral the ideal man to translate Spanish American poets into English, to “stir up some enthusiasm at Rutgers,” and hence to promote the Spanish language and Hispanic literatures.8 Amaral’s pan-American attitude inspired him to translate both from English to Spanish and from Spanish to English. He took up Pound’s idea of contacting Williams who, as a well-established poet, would help attract attention to these poets and masters of the American idiom. Amaral met Pound in 1952, through Rafael Heliodoro Valle, the Honduran ambassador, who proposed a visit to Pound at St. Elizabeths; Amaral jumped at the opportunity to write on a celebrity.9 He was to discover that this was a fateful encounter. It gave him twenty-two years of sleepless nights as a translator of The Cantos. “The giant of contemporary letters in English,” as he called Pound, impressed Amaral so much that he felt guilty about his initially frivolous intentions to translate The Pisan Cantos (1948).10 At the time, he “foolishly” promised to translate them within three months. Instead, it took him three years, having received hundreds of notes from Pound, and making many more visits to St. Elizabeths. There Amaral queried Pound until he would exclaim “Leave it alone, Amaral, you’re losing spontaneity.”11 Soon the “handsome, genial”12 Amaral became a regular member of the Ezuniversity, which held its peripatetic classes on the grounds of St. Elizabeths. When Amaral finished translating The Pisan Cantos (1956), Pound persuaded him to do all of the Cantos so as to “save” the poem “from

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incompetents, from hack translators.”13 He did not complete The Cantos until 1975, three years after Pound’s death. But he continued his lifelong engagement with Pound’s work. He had dedicated twenty-three years to the translation of The Cantos; but his was to prove the first integral translation of the epic.14 Amaral assimilated Pound’s Cantos intellectually and emotionally, and he wrote several exegetical essays on Pound in Spanish and English, which he summed up in his preface to The Cantos (1975) and which have been reprinted in the Spanish edition of 1994. Although he repeats some information and ideas, they are not exact translations, and each contains new details and nuances. The most discussed word in the correspondence and the conversations between Amaral and Pound was “cantares.” Because of their disputes, Pound decided to add the Spanish de los Cantares to the last two full sections of The Cantos, Rock Drill and Thrones. He told Amaral “cantares” “was the key” to his epic “and that only he [Pound] and I knew this explicitly.”15 “Cantares” became the prism through which Amaral later interpreted Pound’s oeuvre systematically in his many essays, a vantage point that becomes essential to understanding The Cantos. To begin with, Amaral took it for granted that “Cantos” was the appropriate title for Pound’s epos. The term is also closest to the original. It is the natural designation, not only in Spanish but also in French, Italian, Romanian, Portuguese, and even in German. Yet the debate about the title escalated into “guerrilla warfare.” Pound insisted that a correct translation would be “Cantares,” from the singular “cantar,” an obsolete and archaic term in Spanish, instead of the Italian “canto.” Amaral contradicted him vehemently, as he himself admits, with the superiority a native speaker feels towards “somebody who is an outsider to a literary tradition which is not his.” Pound listened to his arguments but did not budge. So Amaral appealed to his Mexican colleagues at the university press, Universidad Autónoma de México, confident that they would not accept a title that would smack of linguistic incompetence. Predictably, like all other Spanish speakers, they were unanimous that the right term to use was Cantos. Pound was not impressed and remained unrelenting. Exhausted by Pound’s obstinacy, Amaral told him that “cantar” belonged to the prehistory of the Spanish language and was used exclusively in the title of Cantar o Poema de Mío Cid, the oldest Spanish epic poem, composed

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between 1140 and 1207, based on the exploits of Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar, affectionately called “Mío Cid” (“My Lord”), during the Reconquista, the reconquest of Spain from the Moors. Unlike other medieval epics, it is written in a realistic style—although it does depart from historical facts. Pound believed Cantar de Mío Cid to be the epics of epics, “the tale of the tribe” par excellence, and he explained to Amaral that he also conceived of The Cantos as “the tale of the tribe.”16 Amaral asked to what tribe he was referring. “The tribe of the human race, Amaral!” retorted Pound. Amaral finally understood Pound’s maieutic method in which he himself had been “the naive victim.” “And so that I would not forget,” Amaral concludes, “and so that nobody dared, in Spanish or in any other language, name his cantares by the name of Cantos, Ezra Pound subtitled from then on, the subsequent sections, Rock-Drill and Thrones: De los Cantares.”17 Next, Amaral had to struggle with the Mexican press to accept Pound’s archaic “cantares instead of “Cantos.” Amaral understood Pound’s intention that “on the face of the world there is only one tribe, the Tribe of Man.”18 Hence, Cantares, not Cantos. Pound disclosed the key to his Cantos which are about the feats of man’s attempt to appeal to the whole human race: “a poetic synthesis of Man’s thought and culture.”19 In 1955, Jaime Ferrán (1928–2016), another Spanish poet of the generation of the 1950s who was to produce one of the first translations of Pound in Spain, visited Pound at St. Elizabeths, being introduced by Amaral. In the garden he met Pound, Dorothy, Sheri Martinelli, and a northern poet. “And what does Ferrán want from old Ezra?” Pound asked. Ferrán, twenty-seven years old at the time, did not want anything in particular, he was “just happy to contemplate him, to render homage, knowing that he was before the world’s greatest poet.” Ferrán gave Pound his book of poems with a dedication, “To Ezra Pound the last humanist,” which in retrospect he corrected, “not the last but the first,” since it was evident that “the miglior fabbro” “did not close but introduced a new era.”20 Mindful of Amaral’s reluctance to accept “cantares,” Pound always brought up the “canto” versus “cantares” dispute with whomever he could, and so he did with Ferrán, who reported two years later that the controversy was still going on among the speakers of Portuguese: Pound insisted on “cantares” and confronted the Brazilian Augusto

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de Campos who, together with Décio Pignatari and Haroldo Campos, was to translate seventeen Cantares (1960).21 Ferrán, like Amaral, was shocked by Pound’s tenacity on using “cantares,” but he triumphantly held up the notice announcing the imminent publication of Section Rock-Drill: 85–95 de los Cantares”22 in Italy. As a translator, Ferrán respected Pound’s wish. In the 1950s, Pound himself started using the Spanish appellation Cantares whenever he referred to his Cantos in English. On May 17, 1956, in a letter to James Laughlin, he proposes a “Definitive Cantares”; earlier, on January 29, 1956, he writes to Norman Holmes Pearson of “Some urge toward a correct edtn/ of Cantares/ WITH Fang’s ideog/s in margin.”23 Moreover, in line with the Spanish “cantares,” both the Faber and the New Directions editions of the Selected Cantos have the title “Jefferson—Nuevo Mundo” in the table of contents for the selection from Eleven New Cantos. Amaral while translating The Cantos realized Pound’s intention to expand the scope of his long poem beyond Mallarmé’s “mots de la tribu” to the chançon de geste, or epic, of mankind which spans all human history, from China, the Roman Empire, Byzantium, and Lombardy to America of the eighteenth century. In Amaral’s opinion they are the most eloquent “expression of the most elevated Weltansicht of Western culture.”24 Amaral realized that if Pound’s panoramic vision includes all cultures, it is not because he cultivated exoticism but because he was on a universal quest for “values” and “essences.” To Amaral, Pound is to modern poetry what Joyce is to the modern novel, Monteverdi to music, and Picasso to painting. Pound becomes the pivotal figure who revolutionized the lyric, as Monteverdi subverted pure polyphony and invented the pizzicato or as Picasso invented abstract art.25 Amaral also keeps comparing Pound to Cervantes. The American poet holds as monumental a role in modern literature as does Cervantes in his age. Living under powerful empires, both experienced a similar fate, full of tragic irony: Spain, the powerful nation of the Golden Age, produced the first modern man of European literature, only to let him die in misery; similarly, the United States, the modern superpower, allowed its great poet to live and die expatriated in Italy. As Amaral concludes, “The maestro received from the country that incarcerated him the gift of freedom in exile.”26

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II.  The Romanian Translation: A Detective Story with an Erased Translator In Communist countries beyond the Iron Curtain, Pound was a difficult poet to publish because literature had to have an ideological message and Pound was seen as an advocate of an inimical camp.27 Translated into Romanian by the poet and essayist, Ion Caraion (pen name of Stelian Diaconescu, 1923–86), with an introduction by Vasile Nicolescu, Cantos și alte poeme (1975),28 three years after Pound’s death, was the first collection of Pound’s works to appear in Romania. At 339 pages it was substantial and included a wide selection of poems from Personae (1910), Ripostes (1912), Lustra (1916), Cathay (1915), and Blast (1914, 1915), as well as twenty-eight Cantos, some of them only in part. In order to legitimize the publication of this book, Nicolescu starts his preface by condemning Pound’s political views so as not to be accused of Fascist sympathies himself and then dissociates the biography from his work. Although the translations appeared under Caraion’s signature, the main, unacknowledged translator, whose name was omitted by Communist censorship, was none other than the famous writer, philosopher, and theologian, Nicolae Steinhardt (1912–89), author of Jurnalul Fericirii (The Diary of Happiness) (see Figure 10.2). Of those working on Pound, Steinhardt alone had a high command of English. His collaboration with Caraion, however, was a long, drawn out adventure, begun sometime before 1969, and ended by February 1971, but their book was not published until 1975 when the Communist officials finally authorized it after a delay of four years. Thus, the publication of Pound in Romanian could well be described as a detective story or as theatre of the absurd full of twists and surprises. Originally, Steinhardt’s collaboration in the Pound translation was known only to a few of his friends and today only to scholars in the field of his other works, such as George Ardeleanu from the University of Bucharest, who eventually became the first to reveal Steinhardt’s clandestine authorship. Unfortunately, despite the remarkable bibliographical and exegetical information provided, Steinhardt’s contribution to the Romanian translation has been overlooked by the current editors of a new, complete, and impressively annotated edition of Pound’s poems from Humanitas Press. Moreover, the translators have ignored the “Cantos/Cantares” debate, using

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Figure 10.2. Nicolae Steinhardt (1912–89). Image courtesy of Rohia Monastery

the term “Cantos” as used in Dante’s Divina Commedia, instead of “cânturi,” which would be more in accord with Pound’s conception.29 In truth, the first translation of Pound’s poetry into Romanian was a collaboration between Steinhardt and Caraion, both of them former

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political prisoners. Jewish by birth, Steinhardt, was related to Sigmund Freud on his mother’s side; his father was an engineer and Einstein’s former colleague at the Zürich Polytechnic. He himself is associated with the generation of interwar writers, including Mircea Eliade, Emil Cioran, and Eugen Ionesco, whom he befriended, a friendship for which the ­Communists would later imprison him. While incarcerated as a political prisoner (1960–64) Steinhardt converted to Christianity and, after his liberation, he became a monk. The tragic irony is that Steinhardt’s collaborative translation project of Pound is inextricably linked to the composition of his own masterpiece, “The Diary of Happiness.” This major document of detention in communist prisons is also a philosophical treatise of the totalitarian phenomena, which he was writing at the time. “The Diary of Happiness” was later confiscated by the Securitate, the Romanian secret police, as a consequence of Caraion’s denunciation, a confiscation that might well have been precluded, had Steinhardt not been so intimately involved with him in the Pound project. Indeed, Steinhardt died unaware of Caraion’s betrayal. In Romania, after the Communists seized power in 1948, it would become almost impossible for intellectuals and writers to publish without the consent of the government, which had nationalized presses and printing firms, while closing down independent journals and cultural magazines. Censorship was introduced and culture fell under the constraints of enforced Socialist Realism (which, anything but “real,” was a contradiction in terms). Poets were marginalized and constrained by ideological uniformity. Traditional authors were prohibited from publishing or their works were distorted, banned, or expunged; libraries were set on fire, books were forbidden or confiscated, and the mere fact of having read a certain book could be considered a serious criminal offense. Many writers were banned, detained or exterminated in political prisons. The only form of art allowed was propagandistic, to promote Communist ideology. Culture was permitted to exist only for purposes of ideological manipulation. Thus, many writers became silent and, in order to survive, they earned their living by translating. This was quite common throughout the Soviet bloc, as in the cases of Pasternak and Akhmatova, among many others. In fact, Akhmatova’s translations appeared anonymously until 1956, since

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her name was banned. Like most other writers, Steinhardt and Caraion, as former political prisoners, took up translating as a means of survival. Still, Pound’s personality and artistic legacy made the publication of his work in translation even more difficult, given that his sympathy for Mussolini was counter to the Communist dogma; anyone who translated his poems was immediately suspected of sympathizing with his beliefs. Caraion was a founding member of the Communist newspaper, Scânteia, and had been censured during the Marshal Antonescu’s military regime. Despite his former left-wing sympathies, the Communist government arrested him twice in 1950 and 1958. Caraion received a death sentence, later commuted to life imprisonment. He then spent a total of eleven years in detention and passed through the most terrible centers: Jilava, Canal, Cavnic, Peninsula, Baia Sprie, Malmaison, Gherla, and Aiud, where he met Steinhardt. Before the war, Steinhardt had studied Jewish civilization and spirituality, had earned a PhD in Constitutional Law (1936), and had become an expert on conservative liberalism. But under Communist rule he was excluded from the bar in 1948 and forced to take up unqualified jobs. In 1960 he was sentenced to twelve years in prison because he refused to give evidence against his friends in a show trial against the group of writers led by the philosopher Constantin Noica and the poet Dinu Pillat, together with twenty-two other prestigious intellectuals. In all, more than 300 people were involved, including twenty-three defendants and twenty-five witnesses for the accused (two of whom died under interrogation). The charge, which today seems absurd, was that they had (1) corresponded with Eliade, Ionesco, and Cioran who lived in Paris, a highly treasonable act in the eyes of the authorities; (2) read Eliade’s novel, Foret Interdite (1955), and Cioran’s essay, La tentation d’existir (1956)30 published in Paris by Gallimard; and (3) participated in literary soirées where they discussed the manuscripts of the philosopher Constantin Noica, “Povestiri din Hegel” (“Narrations of Hegel”) and “Anti-Goethe,”31 meant for publication in the West at the French publishing house, Plon. These three activities were deemed hostile, subversive attempts to overthrow the people’s government. The judges handed down a total 269 years of imprisonment. The group leaders received the maximum sentence of twenty-five years, with the loss of their civic rights and access to their possessions, and in

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all eighty-five were sentenced to jail and fifty-three to forced labor. The lightest sentence was six years for the woman who typed the manuscript meant for publication in the West. The Noica–Pillat trial was part of the second wave of terror (1958–60) under Gheorghe Gheorghiu Dej’s government. The first wave (1948–53) had pursued the elimination of the political and economic élite: political leaders, diplomats, high functionaries, military leaders, bankers, industrialists, impresarios, and businessmen. The second phase of repression (1958–60) was a preventive assault on civil society, which took place ten years after the Communists had seized power and destroyed any possible alternative to power, in a Europe clearly divided into zones of influence. It reflected the insecurity of a government afraid to lose its hold on the population. The arrests for the Noica–Pillat trial began in 1958, a few weeks after the Nobel Prize was awarded to Boris Pasternak for Doctor Zhivago, initially published in Italy. The Soviet authorities could not tolerate that a work of fiction that questioned Communist reality had received a prize in the West. To them, a writer could shape public opinion and, in the absence of political parties, he could campaign for an alternative political leadership.32 The Romanian Communist authorities feared that the Pasternak case might be repeated in Romania and damage the image they wanted to project in the West. The Noica–Pillat trial took place in the aftermath of Khrushchev’s liberalizing policy33 which had triggered a power struggle between Stalinists and Reformers leading to revolutions and strikes in Hungary and Poland. Khrushchev’s reform menaced the hegemony and stability of Dej, then Romania’s prime minister and formerly Stalin’s favorite, who then found himself in a vulnerable position. He changed the Penal Code so as to criminalize all types of activities (Article 209). Reading books published in the West, a simple literary meeting, or correspondence with family members or friends abroad could easily be interpreted as a conspiracy, a plot to subvert the Socialist order, espionage, or treason. In prison Steinhardt converted to Christianity. Finally liberated in 1964 after the amnesty decree for political prisoners, he spent his last years as a monk at Rohia monastery in northern Romania. Nevertheless, Steinhardt is the author of over twenty volumes of essays, literary

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criticism, constitutional law, Judaism, Christian sermons, liberal ideology, dialogues, memoirs, and correspondence, of which seventeen volumes of his complete works have so far appeared in print. Jurnalul Fericirii (The Diary of Happiness),34 his masterpiece of Gulag literature, which made him one of the most important Romanian writers of the second half of the twentieth century, was not published until 1990. It gained the admiration of Pope John Paul II and, to date, has been translated into seven languages: French, Italian, Spanish, Greek, Hungarian, Hebrew, and Portuguese. Like Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago, Jurnalul is a historical document as well as the story of an inner conversion. The journal itself had a dramatic destiny: it was confiscated twice by the Securitate, first in 1972 because of Ion Caraion’s betrayal, after which Steinhardt rewrote it; it reappeared three years later, only to be seized again in 1985. Finally, it was published posthumously in 1991, based on a carbon copy entrusted to friends. Political prisoners were not completely free after their liberation. The Communist authorities forced them to become informers and hand in regular reports on friends, family and former prison mates. Collaboration meant economic advantages such as a job, the right to a home, and the right to publish, impossible to achieve otherwise in a state-controlled economy. Steinhardt refused to collaborate with the Securitate. Consequently, despite his exceptional qualifications and extensive knowledge of languages, he never obtained work as a translator or writer with publishers; and, although he always had the best score by far in official examinations, he was invariably rejected by the Communist authorities, whose approval was mandatory. Refusing to collaborate, he could only find work as a factory worker. Unlike Steinhardt, Ion Caraion collaborated with the Securitate, using the code names “Artur” and “Anatol” and he eventually had a glorious career: he was rehabilitated as a writer, he was granted the right to publish, and he became an editor of the prestigious România literară journal. Caraion became a zealous informer, in one of the most dramatic cases of cooperation with the authorities. Believing Caraion to be his friend, Steinhardt candidly shared his work with him; as soon as he finished Jurnalul, he gave it to Caraion and even worried about his friend’s fate, should the Securitate ever discover the manuscript. Then in 1981, Caraion defected to Switzerland.35

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Steinhardt’s participation in the Pound translation is attested by three sources: (1) documents found in the archives of the secret police, as George Ardeleanu, a Steinhardtian specialist, has shown;36 (2) Steinhardt’s correspondence with Virgil Ierunca (1920–2006), a writer and literary critic who lived, together with his wife Monica Lovinescu (1923–2008), as an exile in Paris; and (3) his correspondence with Alexandru Ciorănescu (1911–99), a writer, diplomat, playwright, linguist, etymologist, historian, academic, and world authority on baroque studies, who also lived in exile in the Canary Islands, Spain. In the archives, a note by Caraion himself, under his code name, “Artur,” reports on Steinhardt’s advice to him; unaware that his friend was an informer, Steinhardt innocently asked him for forgiveness, if the manuscript of “The Diary of Happiness” were confiscated and caused Caraion problems with the Securitate. As a potential alibi for Caraion, should he be detained, Steinhardt suggested that the two of them collaborate on a translation from English, since Steinhardt’s linguistic competence was superior to that of his friend; this work would then justify their having to meet. We further know about Steinhardt’s Pound translations from his correspondence with Ierunca exiled in Paris. In February and March 1975, when the Pound anthology appeared in print, Steinhardt wrote to Ierunca, confiding in him that he himself had translated incognito the volume of Pound’s poems published by Caraion. He explains how he had collaborated “in secret” and that his role was that of an “occult counselor.”37 Moreover, Steinhardt’s thoughts on Pound’s poems are revealed in his correspondence with Ciorănescu, who had been Steinhart’s high school classmate at Lycée Spiru Haret. Of his correspondence with Ciorănescu, there are ten extant letters chronicling the avatars and obstacles in translating Pound, a project he had started sometime before May 1969 and continued until its publication in 1975. Indeed, no other writer occupied Steinhardt more than Pound. Other translations are just briefly mentioned. Nonetheless, translating Pound proved a long, dreary process with many setbacks. In 1972 Steinhardt mused to Ciorănescu: “Pound moves like a turtle; but Zenon advises us to be hopeful.”38 By August of the same year, however, the Pound book “became very problematic.”39 And some months later its publication seemed no longer a possibility.40 In October he wondered whether he himself had been the cause of the delay: “Poor

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Pound (he had so much bad luck).” And then, in the same year, a silver lining: “I hope this year two of my translations will be published … Pound is still waiting.”41 In December 1972 he was again hopeful “Pound may be published next year! It is not sure.”42 Yet two years later, in April 1974, probably answering Ciorănescu’s inquiry about the fate of the book, he wrote: “Pound is not out (although the MS has been submitted to the press) and we don’t know when or if it will appear.43 To Ciorănescu, too, Steinhardt confessed that the book “will not be published under my name, but under the names of the poet with whom I have collaborated. It could not be done otherwise” (my emphasis)44 However, he later hoped 1975 might bring a change. On January 2, 1975 he reported: “I hope Pound will appear in March–April (the translation will be signed only by Ion Caraion although we have worked on it as hard), I will come back to this once I send you the volume.”45 And he was finally able to convey the good news ten months later, on November 16, 1975: “I can finally send you Pound’s translation, signed by Ion Caraion, in which I had the honor of producing a genuine, stylistically polished translation.”46 Originally, Steinhardt had turned to his friend Ciorănescu for philological help with a term he did not understand in Pound. He was puzzled by the meaning of “plasmatour,” “O plasmatour and true celestial light,” in Pound’s translation of Girart de Bornello’s poem, which appears in the “Langue d’Oc” section of Personae.47 Ciorănescu had a doctorate from the Sorbonne on “L’Arioste en France”, in the country where he worked as cultural counselor at the Romanian embassy in Paris and later as cultural attaché (1946). After the Communist regime came to power, he became an exile in Spain, introducing the field of Comparative Literature at the University of La Laguna in the Canary Isles, and he also had access to good libraries in the West. Surely, Steinhardt must have had many more questions of this kind, yet there are no other surviving letters. In the course of his correspondence with Ciorănescu, he reveals his opinions on Pound, a writer in many respects as learned and unconventional as himself: Steinhardt knew five languages well and had an encyclopedic memory, just like Pound or Eliade. On July 9, 1969 he confessed: “I agonize over Pound,” yet he is shocked by his erudition and finds him “précieux, plutôt ridicule.”48 Although he shared with Pound the same wide-ranging frame of mind, he was nevertheless astounded by Pound’s bookishness:

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Viorica Patea This sophisticated Pound—who gives me a hard time, although he sometimes manages to move me, and who is never unlikeable—is without doubt a pure mannerist. Like so many others in our time, he is a maniac regarding erudition. This mania is different from poetic erudition, which all poets knowingly or unknowingly have. Pound, unlike St. John Perse, or Paul Valéry, is not only a savant poet, like T. S. Eliot, he is also an erudite poet; Pound is and wants to be above all a poet about whom all should know that he knows everything.49

Steinhardt considered Pound to be “half a philologist and if not obsessed with philology he is, at least in part, a snob”50 whose obsessions sometimes verge on pure “didacticism.” The task of translating Pound must have exhausted Steinhardt, who declared he finally felt relieved to go out and enjoy nature, free from his preoccupations with Mauberley and So-shu. All the same, Steinhardt openly praised the “the lamenting tone of many Cantos, and their sound of revolt against imbecility and the absurd.”51 Pound did not seem to him to be American at all: “He seems to me more English than American, much more so, if only we consider Italiana, Burgundisms, Provençalisms with a whiff of smart British affectation, a whisky with irony instead of soda (as the siphon is called in the West).”52 To be sure, he worried about how Pound’s “acrobatic precious subtle indulgencies” would fare in the “stringy, wise and bright Romanian language” and concluded, “Dieux le veulti [sic] who works in even more devious ways.”53 He also expressed reservations about the finished translation: The contribution of the Translator is significant and he was able to do beautiful things, although I believe he has betrayed Pound’s style, looking for beautiful effects, foreign sonorities and harmonies to Pound’s dry and ironic-cultural style. … I have worked a lot on Pound and I am happy and a bit proud to have realized the raw material “out of which I hope has come something not too Romanianly beautiful.”54 And again: “My opinion is that IC [Caraion] has veered into too much hyper-stylization. Pound’s style seems to me harder, more bare.”55

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III.  Latin America: Cantares as the Epic of the Human Race in the Nuevo Mundo At the other end of the Marxist world, away from the Soviet bloc, in Nicaragua, the Sandinista government, despite its staunch Communist ideology, allowed Nicaraguan poets, for the most part sympathizers and members of the establishment, to project an entirely different view of Pound as a hero and victim of anti-capitalist pronouncements, a masterful poet who had mistakenly fallen for and believed in Mussolini. The influential thinker, poet and essayist, José Coronel Urtecho (1906– 94), a strong supporter of the Sandinista Liberation Front in 1979, and Ernesto Cardenal (1925–2020), the poet, priest and politician (who later, as Nicaragua’s Minister of Culture, was scolded by Pope John Paul II on the Managua runway for his participation in liberation theology), both translated Pound’s poems, which appeared originally in El Salvador in the journal Cultura and later in Antología de la poesía norteamericana (1963), a collection of American poetry published in Madrid. In 1960, Cardenal wrote a prologue for an Ezra Pound—Antología (Ezra Pound—Anthology), which was later included in the two translators’ collection of Pound (1979).56 In their translations, Urtecho and Cardenal hail Pound as the founding father of modern poetry and gladly use the word cantares whenever they refer to The Cantos in Spanish. As with Amaral, they embrace Pound’s conception of cantares as the epic of the human race, referring to the great achievement of modern consciousness that articulates the language of modernity, that is, the language of el Nuevo Mundo. It is worth noting that Nicaraguan Marxist poets and critics took Pound as their idol despite his Fascism and do not locate him in an ideologically hostile camp. In October 1985, the magazine El Nuevo Amanecer Cultural, dedicated a whole issue to “Ezra Pound en Nicaragua,” a commemorative issue for the 100th anniversary of Pound’s birth, that contains a long, unsigned editorial article, “Ezra Pound en Nicaragua,” Cardenal’s “El miglior fabro” [sic], and two articles by Urtecho, “El imagismo de Ezra Pound” and “Darío y Pound,” the latter being continued in one of the November issues on three long pages. Pound is considered to have inspired the Sandinista Revolution and is described as the greatest artist of all time, the revolutionary of revolutionaries, the avant-garde of

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the avant-garde, and the artist who established bridges between Oriental and Western culture. Above all, they praise Pound as the “liberator of modern poetry.” His great merit is not only to have changed the poetic idiom, but also to have attempted to change the world itself. Meanwhile, his Fascist sympathies are labeled a mistake, from a naiveté on his part, for which he can be forgiven since he himself was deceived and neglected by Mussolini, a politician who vainly promised the poet to implement a policy of social credit but never did so. As a poète maudit, Pound is portrayed as a victim of capitalism because of his anti-capitalist crusade, for which he tried to win the favor of Stalin and various leaders of the Spanish Republic. For these poets, Pound’s avowed anti-capitalism redeems his Fascist ingenuity and error: “we will always reproach his fascism,” argues the anonymous editorial, “yet nobody can disagree with his anti-capitalism.” In the end, he was a victim of the U.S. army, which “is today a neo-fascist menace to humanity.” The editorial author acknowledges that Pound has had a decisive influence on the Nicaraguan avant-garde and recognizes him as part of the Nicaraguan literary tradition, as part of the Nuevo Mundo. His poetic language is deemed the basis for nothing less than the Nicaraguan poetic idiom and its freedom: “[A]ll the poems before and after the Sandinista Revolution come from Pound and, hence revolutionary poetry proceeds from him.” Furthermore, these Nicaraguan poets censure the conspiracy of silence that enshrouds Pound’s work. Indeed, poets such as Cardenal and Urtecho openly identify with Pound and see in him the “victims of the U.S. and its imperialist policy.”57 In addition, they pay homage to Pound by comparing him to Rubén Darío (1867–1916), the Nicaraguan poet who initiated Spanish American modernism. Like Dario, Pound is hailed as the great Poet of the Nuevo Mundo and modernity: “What Rubén Dario was to the poetry of his time, Pound was for ours.” Pound is regarded the greatest poet of the twentieth century, the alpha and omega not only of modern poetry in English, but of all poetry in Spanish for “his language lies just beneath our language, couched in freedom.” He freed poetry from the rules and stringencies of language by demonstrating how any theme can become poetic: “All the poems before and after the Popular Sandinista revolution derive from Pound, and hence, all revolutionary poetry comes from him.” Not only are Pound and Darío both exiles, but as Americans

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“born of its Independence,” they both belong to the Nuevo Mundo, as both initiated a poetic revolution against a dead tradition. The unsigned editorial then adds that Urtecho’s and Cardenal’s translations of Pound into Spanish also parallel the way that the Spanish poets, Juan Boscán and Garcilaso de la Vega, brought Italian poetry into Spain in the Renaissance. In Urtecho’s opinion, Pound’s Americanism was spontaneous, not “forced” as Whitman’s was, but a “natural,” even “subconscious instinct against all forms of barbarism.” He eagerly sought to assimilate and Americanize the European tradition and to elevate it to the universal, beyond time, space, and customs, while infusing it with novelty, life, and a new spirit. Urtecho fundamentally agrees with Ralph Waldo Emerson’s vision of the American Poet, but he corrects Emerson’s prophecy of the great American poet to come, the Poet of America, from Whitman to Pound. He further insists that Darío and Pound were not “spontaneous” innovators like Whitman, but true artisans of the poetic word, keenly conscious of their craft and poetic ambitions. And, unlike Whitman, they each found the perfect equilibrium, the “harmony between independence and discipline,” spontaneity and experience, eternal freshness and new freshness, harmonizing the aesthetics of the “wilderness” with that of “the park,” as well as “order with adventure.” Together, in Urtecho’s view, Pound and Dario elevated the poetry of the Americas to the heights of the European tradition and, in doing so they regenerated and invigorated European poetry to achieve even greater excellence. Moreover, they opened the range of poetry for young European poets aware of the new world working in two of the most widespread languages: English and Spanish. Pound rebelled against a hostile environment against the “aristocratic” art of poetry. Throughout his lifetime he distinguished himself by his serious study and patient work, earning him the title of “the artist of the race.”58 In his prologue to Pound’s poems, in a similar vein, Cardenal writes, “Pound’s adherence to fascism is only in the area of economics, never in that of political practice,” and The Cantos are a hymn to freedom contrary to the Fascist practice. Cardenal illustrates his claim with many passages from The Cantos. He believes Pound to be an expert economist who shared his denunciation of usury and his dream of an economy free of usury. As a Nicaraguan, Cardenal had experienced to the full the US policy of controlling his region economically, and he echoes Pound’s scorn of banks

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and North American politics. In Pound, he finds a powerful voice against US imperialism, which he himself had encountered.59 Thus Urtecho’s and Cardenal’s views concur with Pound’s notion of his Cantos as Cantares. As Amaral beautifully asserts: “The history of the tribe is the testimony (testes) of a man who wanted to build a paradiso terrestre yet lost his center fighting the world.”60

IV.  Cross-Cultural Perceptions of Pound and His Work

C HA P T E R E L E V E N

Ezra Pound and Caresse Crosby From Black Sun to Roccasinibalda Anne Conover

C

aresse Crosby is almost unknown today. Yet during the 1920s and 1930s, when Paris was at the crossroads of many emerging expatriate writers known as the Lost Generation, she was instrumental in bringing to fruition many important works under the imprint of the Black Sun Press. Among the several English language small presses, Black Sun was arguably the one with the greatest influence and longevity. Originally founded as Editions Narcisse by Harry and Caresse Crosby to publish their own poetry, it evolved into one of the most important presses of that era, publishing then unknown writers whose works were not accepted by mainstream publishers—among them Ernest Hemingway, D. H. Lawrence, James Joyce, and Hart Crane, including letters by Marcel Proust and Henry James.1 In the literature, Caresse is often overshadowed by her then husband Harry, whose brief, violent and often insane life has been well documented.2 But it was what happened to Caresse after Harry that intrigued me, leading me to undertake dedicated research into her life and times in the archives of Southern Illinois University Library, and to engage in in-depth interviews with friends and acquaintances still living who had known her—Caresse died in 1970. I discovered a woman ahead of her times, influential in the lives of writers and artists, whose own life was 149

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filled with major accomplishments beyond the dreams of many—all carried out with remarkable joie de vivre.3 For an American woman without a formal university education, Crosby was remarkably well-versed in the literature of her time, but of necessity relied heavily on Ezra Pound’s critical acumen in her publishing ventures. His contribution to the Black Sun Press, as one of its earliest authors, literary collaborators, and editorial advisors, must be examined as yet another example of Pound’s influence on European and American writing and publishing of the era between the two world wars. Harry Crosby and his wife, née Mary Phelps Jacob, who later adopted the nom de plume Caresse, were among the flock of post-World War I expatriates who revolted against their Puritan background and provincial mores by settling on Paris’s Left Bank. Mary’s family name, Jacob, was derived from the English Jacobeans who, after the War of the Roses, settled on the Isle of Wight. Among her distinguished American ancestors were the first governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony, William Bradford, and Robert Fulton, inventor of the steamboat.4 She married young—Richard Peabody, the father of her two children, scion of one of Boston’s most aristocratic families. Soon after, Dick was called into service in World War I and returned with what in our time would be called PTSD, addicted to alcohol and bizarre behavior such as chasing fire engines at odd hours of the night. Not long after their divorce, she married Harry Crosby, another Bostonian blueblood—then a Harvard undergraduate—in the most scandalous and gossiped-about affair of that season. The Crosbys fled to Paris, but were more fortunate than most expatriates because Harry’s cousin, Walter Berry, was a distinguished man of letters respected in literary circles, a close friend of Edith Wharton and Marcel Proust. Encouraged by Berry, Mary pursued a youthful talent for poetry. A review in Poetry, Harold Monro’s magazine published in London, caught Mary’s irresistible joie de vivre, “a devout and joyous wantonness … upon whom the shadow of our smoke-palled civilization has not fallen.” Berry advised her to submit her work to Houghton Mifflin of Boston: “They have just lost Amy Lowell,” he suggested.5 Her first slim volume was Crosses of Gold (1925). She puzzled over the name to imprint on the title page, to go with the alliterative C of the

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Crosby surname. “Caresse” was Harry’s choice, and Mary Peabody was born again as Caresse Crosby. The Boston matriarchs were appalled: “It’s like undressing in public,” one auntie wrote. Undaunted, Caresse linked her new name with Harry’s in a golden cross to form the colophon of what would become the Black Sun Press. In turn, Caresse urged Harry to take up the pen. Inspired by T. S. Eliot’s “Hollow Men,” Harry wrote to his father in Back Bay: “There is, I think, a crime in ending life as so many people do, with a WHIMPER … . For the poet, there is love and there is death, and for other things to assume such vital importance is out of the question.”6 Harry’s Sonnets for Caresse was their next venture. She was the driving force behind the press: she was the designer who chose the paper, typeface, and layout of the handsomely bound volumes of their first imprint, Editions Narcisse. With whimsical humor, they had named the press after their beloved black whippet, Narcisse Noir. Harry’s poetry was more significant, inspired by his reading of Edgar Allan Poe, Stéphane Mallarmé, and his idol, Arthur Rimbaud. Often macabre, Harry appeared to be trying to exorcise his ghastly experiences in World War I. Under recruitment age, he had joined the American Field Service Auxiliary, as did many other idealistic young men, including Hemingway. Poe’s Fall of the House of Usher, with macabre illustrations by the Hungarian artist, Alastair, followed. In a limited edition, Poe’s oeuvre was a great success, by which the Crosbys were able to expand their imprint into a wider sphere, changing the name to the Black Sun Press, inspired by Harry’s favorite color, black, and his idolatrous worship of the sun god. What began as simple literary dabbling evolved into a serious commitment. In the beginning, the Crosbys discovered Roger Lescaret, a master printer with deep pride in his work, close by their flat at 19 rue de Lille, only 200 yards from the Deux Magots, the watering hole frequented by Hemingway and other expatriates. So began a literary collaboration that lasted for more than twenty years. As a small private imprint, the Black Sun Press distributed limited editions through select bookstores, such as Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare and Company. Caresse had an uncanny knack for picking winners among the vast smorgasbord of aspiring writers in Paris. On Beach’s recommendation, she approached James Joyce, whose Ulysses had been rejected by US publishers as pornography, but was brought out by Beach. Joyce promised Black Sun two colorful Irish tales, “The Mookes and the Gripes”

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and “The Ondt and the Graicehopper.” In Beach’s words, “The Crosby’s were connoisseurs of fine books, but better still, of fine writing.”7 In time, the Crosbys were introduced into Eugene and Maria Jolas’s circle of writers. Harry was listed on the masthead of transition, the legendary avant-garde magazine the Jolases published. In December 1929, soon after the stock market plunged the world into the Great Depression, Harry Crosby carried out his threat “to die at the right time,” ending his life in a suicide pact with a much younger girlfriend. During her period of deep mourning, Caresse—a strong and resilient woman—began to edit Harry’s collected poems and asked “a distinguished man of letters” to write an introduction to each of the four volumes. Ezra Pound agreed to write an introductory note to the last one, The Torchbearer. In Harry’s widow’s view, Pound caught the spirit of Harry’s verse better than anyone else. In Ezra’s words: “Harry’s was a death of excess vitality, a vote of confidence in the cosmos.” Pound also found in Harry’s poem, “The End of Europe,” a cautionary note, arguably applicable to the twenty-first century: “when a social order fails to satisfy even those who are most privileged by it, that order is very possibly ready for upset or alteration.”8 Ezra Pound’s Imaginary Letters appeared in October 1930, fifty signed copies on Japanese vellum and 300 copies printed on handsome Navarre paper.9 Pound would have liked Caresse to publish his Cavalcanti, but she was more concerned about bringing out Harry’s favorite poet, Arthur Rimbaud, whose work she hoped to publish in English translation if she could find someone to capture his style. Pound’s advice was solicited. He wrote on 25 August 1930: The Rimbaud problem is very complicated … . I have sent my Carnevali to see if it will produce copy of R. to [Emanuel] any results … . I MEAN (ad interim) I think Rimbaud is good when he’s using the equivalent to “howling bird shit” and not redundant phrases such as “screams and excrement of clamorous birds.” … Whether ANYone ever translates anything to the satisfaction of ANYone else? … You might send a Rimbaud slip to W.C. [William Carlos] Williams, 9 Ridge Rd. Rutherford N.J. … Tell him he is one of the few people wh. cd., and wd. he do a few decent licks of work on the job.

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In 1931, at the beginning of the economic depression, Crosby was determined to transform Black Sun from a small press specializing in finely printed limited editions into a commercial firm marketing inexpensive paperbacks. In presenting the best of expatriate American writers and avant-garde Europeans, she would be in direct competition with Tauchnitz, the German firm which, at that time, was the only publisher on the Continent reprinting classics in English. Crosby again called upon Pound to act as her guide in selecting titles and launching the new imprint. The following are Pound’s comments with regard to the proposed Crosby Continental Editions: C.C.E It’s not so much a question of grandfather seeking shelter as of knowing whether the Black Sun wd. consent to shine i.e. ink certain books that I think OUGHT to be printed … to remove from me the pestilential burthen of hunting up the means every times something turns up that needs a publisher … . Wd. you for example do [Louis] Zukofsky’s poems? … I don’t think free and untrammeled presses such as B.S. presumably is, shd. be called in to do what more institutional or even regular an’ cmsrshl [commercial] presses can be used for … (November 1930) When Pound informed her that a firm in Genoa was doing his Cavalcanti, Caresse replied: I am so glad the Cavalcanti has gone to press. I feel so disappointed not being able to do it … The deluxe book is very fine in its way and every now and then I will continue to produce one but to run a press entirely on very expensive editions has cost me too much. (July 17, 1931) From Rapallo (Luglio 22, [1931]), Pound replied: Thanks very much (chk/ recd/) I am glad to hear you are considering more active life. The deluxe book was (has been) useful in breaking the strangle hold that the s.o.b. [Tauchnitz] had on ALL publication. But the minute the luxe was made into a trust

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Anne Conover (Random Louse etc.) and forced into trade channels it ceased pretty much to be useful // e.g. you found yourself tied by what cd. SELL.

On a postcard Caresse had told Pound about her contact with Hachette, publishers of George Sand and Victor Hugo: I’m full of new ideas—and ways and means—Hachette will be the sole agent and I’m going to get out a 15-franc book, of which they have ordered 2000 to begin with. 12 books a year … . Only they have to be saleable as well as readable or Hachette will let me down. Can it be done? Quality, Quality, and salability all at once! I’ll try. (no date) Pound in his reply on August 2, [1931] said: You don’t say whether your series is limited to unpublished stuff. I think you might do it half and half. Insist on 6 new vols/against six per year that OUGHT to sell. Tauch[nitz] / pubs, all Hardy save his best novel (The Mayor of Casterbridge) … nothing of [Ford Madox] Ford’s. There would be a fine collection of Wyndham Lewis’ short stories. Joyce’s “Dubliners.” As for new stuff, I advise stories by [Robert] McAlmon and Jas. Farrel. I am willing to compile a murkn [American] anthology to beat the damn Tauchnitz … one would have to divide it between the better poets, the ones that make the bk salable, and squeeze the minor figures who derive adv/ val/ from the distinguished company and approval of the selector … . I think the selection of the first 12 vols. very important … if they go Hachette will continue, and if they don’t they won’t. From her country retreat, the Moulin de Soleil in Ermenoville, Crosby wrote on August 28, 1931: Your wonderful and enthusiastic letter about bucking Tauchnitz gave me a thrill … if you really will help, I am sure we can do wonders … . They say the first few books must be good sellers;

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after that they gave me carte blanche—I said I wouldn’t do trash. We spoke first of making it a library of only translations—from French Italian German Russian—but then we said, why limit it? Your idea of an anthology is wonderful, especially if you will do the selections with preface. Hemingway has promised me three short stories—I’ve just seen him in Spain … . I might do first “Diablo au Corps” Radiguet … or “Le Grand Meaulnes” Fournier … . Has the “Enormous Room” by Cummings been done in cheap edition? Two long handwritten letters from Pound’s mailing address in Venice (Presso Scarpa, 310 Fondamenta Soranzo, S. Gregorio) were dispatched in late August and early September 1931. Here is an excerpt from the first: [T]he FIRST Italian item shd. be [Federigo] Tozzi’s “Tre Croci.” … Basil Bunting is ready to translate and wd. do it well … . Among first dozen – Hemingway, Wynd[ham] Lewis (stories)/ Joyce. Dubliners/ Cummings Enor. Room/McAlmon (stories. selected)/ Tozzi. Tre Croci … a very light and amusing “Un Terrorista” [Notari] … F. M. F. [Ford Madox Ford] Women & Men, my Indiscretions … Bill [William Carlos] Wms … Hemingway … Frobenius Paideuma very important. And this from the second, thirteen-page hand-written letter: These lists [compiled by Crosby] look like sort of stuff a certain variety of vermin called publisher’s readers are paid 10 or 20 dollars a day to have opinions about. I shall never recommend you a lot of books because there are never such a lot worth reading or readable. The only german I take the trouble to read in the original is FROBENIUS. I have for 15 years tried to get someone to write an article about mod. ger. books that wd. indicate a ½ doz. worth attempting (no success). By careful questioning I discovered (3 years ago, in Vienna) that mod. ger. lit, (i.e. what they read) is Shaw and Pirandello. Get some intelligent german like Arp. or [Max] Ernst to tell you titles of anything they can read. The italian list—pract. Nothing on it in class with Tre Croci, or

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On Italian titles Pound wrote: Do understand that there is a tradition of bluff among British. pubrs. that transltns don’t SELL and that this is kept up by choosing dull stuff—There is very little Italian good enough to compete in International tournaments. Commercial whoring in print is MUCH more highly developed in English and French where the pimps are so much more PAID. Crosby replied on September 10, 1931 from the rue Cardinale: Your opinion is invaluable to me … . As for the “Tre Croci” I should like very much to see Mr. Bunting’s first chapter … it sounds like a good item to begin with … . I think I will start with Hemingway … . If you have the possibility of writing something about our project in one or several of the many reviews that you have access to, it would help. Ten days later, she wrote: I think “Un Terrorista” sounds very much what I am looking for. Who will translate it? Also, where can I find Bob McAlmon? No one seems to know his address … . Would McAlmon be the best if you wrote an introduction? I enclose a general list of French English Italian German titles (most of the German and Italian you say are tripe, so they are not to be considered)—Are you coming to Paris? (September 20, 1931) On September 23, Pound said: Olga Rudge wd. do the Terrorista. She has made very good trans/ of Cocteau’s Mystère Laic … That and the Tre Croci wd. cover Italian for 1st year … . I cert/ favor doing Hem’s Torrents of

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Spring. Possibly preceded by SHORT bits of In our Time that wd. make a full vol. I am pretty willing to do preface for Bob/ McA/ but doubt if he wd. like it. Seems to me a jacket blurb with my signature wd. serve the purpose. Pound’s relationship with McAlmon dated back to his London years, when H.D. and William Carlos Williams first suggested to McAlmon that he might call on him. James Wilhelm has reported on the encounter in which McAlmon viewed Pound as “a pompous, long-legged Bohemian with a Van Dyck-ish beard and an 1890-ish artist’s get up,” but he sensed “a heart under the pretentious behavior.”10 For his part, Pound remarked of that visit, “another young one wanting me to make a poet of him with nothing to work on.”11 On November 8, Crosby wrote to Pound: I have been in Scandinavia and Berlin … . But the CCE goes on, and I hope it will succeed. By succeed I mean that we can print things we want and not go broke! On December 1st “Torrents of Spring” is coming out and on the 15th “Diable au Corps” de Radiguet … . I still hope to publish McAlmon, but I haven’t got in touch with him …. Do you think the person you spoke of [i.e., Olga Rudge] would be willing to translate the first 20 pages of “Un Terrorista” to show us? … And would you write me one or two lines to quote as blurbs for our first month? Something about the collection as a whole … or about “Torrents of Spring?” A month before the appearance of the first of the Crosby Continental Editions, the Pound/Crosby correspondence terminated abruptly for reasons explicit in an undated letter from Pound: I don’t know who wrote to Bunting re/ Tre Croci … but I CANT ask people to go translating great chunks of books for nothing … . Anything I cd. say as a blurb depends wholly and utterly on whether the few books I want to see printed are going to be included. I strongly object to Jolas, and am not interested in some other items … . Also I oughtn’t to be expected to do clerical work and negotiation. A publisher’s reader gets a fee for advice,

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Anne Conover and that ends it. It is either taken or dropped. He is not expected to use the arts of persuasion. Translation at best is not highly paid, but you can’t ask even the underdog to do a week’s work for nothing. If you are offering a small fee the C.C.E can then write direct to the proposed translator … anything I can say as blurb depends on there being a definite and agreed list containing a certain percentage of stuff that I think is worth printing … . At present yr/ list is pretty much a program that might have been written by transition. There it is/ very hard not to be made a damn fool of by feminine charm … will try to keep my sense of literary values immune. (November 1931)

In December 1931, Ernest Hemingway’s Torrents of Spring was published as the first of the Crosby Continental Editions, at a modest cover price of ten francs. Remembering an excursion with Ernest and his then wife Pauline Pfeiffer to the bullfights “on a torrential day in Spain last August,” Crosby’s “Open Letter to Hemingway” served as the Introduction: Every American fancies himself a new Columbus rediscovering Europe … . The barrier that separates us and always will is the language … one wants to know what the other people are saying and thinking. That is what I was thinking of, across the din and pageantry of that afternoon … to give all these eager travelers a glimpse into the minds of the people they were visiting … . Now I am venturing on something in keeping with the times … books that will express the genius of every country at a price we can afford.12 Subtitled A Romantic Novel in Honor of the Passing of a Great Race, Torrents was written in Hemingway’s sparest prose and set against the background of his native Michigan. Perhaps Crosby was unaware that it is a satirical work, to many eyes an obvious spoof or mockery of Sherwood Anderson’s style? It must be assumed that this minor work was selected (with Pound’s approval) “to get hold of a public.” The cover blurb was written by the distinguished French biographer, André Maurois, thus indicating that the new venture was taken seriously by other members of the literary establishment: Paul Valéry has rightly said, “the real League of Nations

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should be a League of Minds,” but how to create this when Anglo-Saxons and Latins misunderstand each other? To widely diffuse—as does the Crosby Continental Editions—the best books of two civilizations are to lead towards the formation of a new Europe.” Until November 1932, when correspondence with Pound resumed, Crosby of necessity had to carry on alone in making editorial decisions. The second CCE (January 1932) was Kay Boyle’s translation of Le Diable au Corps (Devil in the Flesh) by the “wonderchild novelist,” Raymond Radiguet. For the cover blurb Aldous Huxley wrote: “English-speaking people are great travelers in the body but stay-at-home in the mind. They carry their island and their distant continent with them wherever they go. By publishing translations of the best Europeans literature, you are … making it possible for tourists to go abroad mentally as well as physically.” A reprint of William Faulkner’s Sanctuary was published in March 1932. In a later edition, Noel Polk recognized it as one of the “modern masterpieces in English … a highly sophisticated blend of T. S. Eliot, Freud, Frazer, mythology, local color, even ‘current trends’ in hard-boiled detective fiction.” On November 14, 1932, Pound took the initiative in mending fences with Crosby. Their correspondence resumed with a postcard from Pound referring to the Rapallo newspaper to which he contributed a literary column every fortnight: “Shall prob. do note for II Mare on continental edtns … . I shall curse Tau./ say a word of Albatross. If the CCE is doing anything I can mention that … . Mare will pub. notice of forthcoming books.” “I am glad,” wrote Caresse on December 13, “to be getting your queer letters again. I missed them.“ Pound answered on December 15, 1932: I will endeavor to turn on CCE a little publicity. In fact, spent an hour at this this a.m. As you have not made a million neglecting my advice, why not try to follow it for a change??? I don’t in the least feel sure that you would have made any more if you had started taking it … . I don’t think you really need to worry about not having broken into the market …. Old [J.M.] Dent told me it was touch and go … (bankruptcy etc.) … for works after starting Everyman’s Library/ … he nearly went bust/ and then up and sold

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Anne Conover a million or something of that sort// Ev. Man Lib/ finally put out 400 or 500 or more vols. If you want to change the line a little I can provide three items (the anth/ and two others). I believe Neumayer (70 Charing Cross Rd.) cd. and wd. be glad to sell whatever isn’t unimportable into England. He cert/ wd. and cd. sell anything with my name on it, or (with less diligence), anything I specifically recommend … . The McA. [McAlmon]/ recd/ thanks/ … II Mare reviews books. I have done the announcement of the Bob myself. Review will appear later.

Financial difficulties mounted as Crosby made an unsuccessful foray to New York to interest US publishers—such as Richard Simon of Simon and Schuster, a friend of long standing—in the new imprint. In her view, the American public of the Great Depression would be as receptive to paper editions as Europeans were—long accustomed to selecting and paying for, according to their taste and means, their own bindings. Crosby was again ahead of her time in anticipating the paperback boom that came some 20 years later. In her final letter to Pound (January 1933), Crosby admitted defeat: [A]bout the CCE, I am completely discouraged in that particular form of publishing … . I only did one book that hadn’t been done before, Bob McAlmon’s (that you advised) and it was a complete flop—I must sell 3,000 to pay expenses and I’ve sold 800 of Bob’s … . So I’ve definitely abandoned the Crosby Continental Editions. But I have not given up the Black Sun Press. During World War II, while Roger Lescaret the printer fought for the Resistance in France, Crosby was “cooped up in America” (her words). Her next base of operations was Washington, DC, where she continued to publish Portfolio from the basement of a townhouse at Dupont Circle, 1606–20th Street. She lived “above the store” on the second story, the street level housed the first contemporary art gallery in the Nation’s Capital. This was a much-needed venue for literature and the arts for European writers and artists exiled to America. Crosby announced the publication of a new quarterly journal on Independence Day, 1945. transition

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had ceased publication in 1938, so she hoped to continue the tradition of Marie and Eugene Jolas, with some of the same authors. Two young writers of the French Resistance newspaper, Combat—Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre—were among the first contributors. They were followed by a distinguished list of contemporary avant-garde American writers, including Henry Miller. Because paper was scarce during wartime, Crosby purchased oversized rainbow-colored printers’ endpapers and creatively gathered them in a paperboard loose leaf binder, a “portfolio” tied with red ribbon. W. P. Tompkins, a specialist in poster reproduction at 931 D Street, was the printer. An International Quarterly of Literature and the Arts was emblazoned on the cover in large red-and-black script. These Portfolios are today valuable collectors’ items. The first Portfolio published on 20th Street in Washington was a great success, followed by five other similar productions. She had been restless to return overseas during the war years and used this new venture as an excuse to bring out three more editions in foreign capitals: Paris, Rome, and Athens. The latter was published in spring 1948, although Greece was still suffering from the ravages of war and the German occupation. Crosby continued to publish Portfolio until a mushroom cloud appeared on the horizon at Hiroshima, causing her to put aside her creative concerns and to take on a new role as political activist. She considered that she had “lost” two husbands as casualties of two world wars, and she was determined to prevent another one. She used her considerable influence as publisher to organize the first Women’s Party in the District of Columbia, an advocacy group for Women Against War (“ALL women against ALL wars”). She registered as a lobbyist to sponsor the first Peace Bond Bill, to replicate the War Bonds issued to help finance World War II. It was introduced by the representative from her native state of New York, Katherine Price Collier St. George. These activities expanded to become a world peace movement, headed by Crosby and Buckminster Fuller, Citizens of the World. The Black Sun Press issued international passports, providing legal status for refugees displaced by war from their native countries. To mention all of Crosby’s efforts on behalf of world peace would be the subject of another paper! It is well known that Ezra Pound was taken into custody in May 1945 by the U.S. Army and held in the military camp in Pisa, where he wrote

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one of his most outstanding works, The Pisan Cantos. In November of that year, he was flown back to Washington to stand trial for treason because of his broadcasts over Rome radio in wartime. His friends in the literary world hoped that psychiatrists could convince the authorities that he was mentally ill and unfit to stand trial. Crosby was called upon as his former publisher to assess his condition. Caresse thought—but did not report to the doctors—that Ezra was as sane as he had been when she last saw him ten years before. As Charles Olson who also visited him said: “his jumps in conversation were no more than I, or anyone with an active mind, would make.”13 Pound went to his “sanity” hearing wearing the new blue suit Caresse Crosby had purchased for him. She remained a loyal friend to Pound through all the years and offered her home to Pound’s daughter, Mary de Rachewiltz, when visiting her father in Washington. Crosby herself was a frequent visitor to inmate #58102 in the red brick building across the Anacostia River. After his release and return to Italy, Pound and Olga Rudge were Crosby’s guests at the Castello di Roccasinibalda in Rieti province, where she lived until her death in 1970, a principessa in her own realm. Her last grandiose plan was to establish an Italian Yaddo colony for creative writers and artists there and to provide a refuge for world peace activists, a home for the organization she and Buckminster Fuller founded, Citizens of the World. To the end, Crosby continued publishing, using an old-fashioned printing press discovered in the village of Rieti to bring out small but noteworthy volumes of poetry, among them the work of a young California professor, Sy Kahn. Professor Harry Moore, a distinguished D. H. Lawrence scholar from Southern Illinois University, wrote an admiring obituary for the London Times, praising Crosby’s positive contributions to world peace and to the lives of artists and writers she sponsored. “Bucky” Fuller was master-of-ceremonies when her friends gathered with Frances Steloff at the legendary Gotham Book Mart to celebrate her life on February 18, 1970.

C HA P T E R T W E LV E

Pound, Bergson, and the Vortex of Memory Jonathan Pollock

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he Vorticists blasted the French philosopher Henri Bergson in the first number of their review, but that is not to say they did not fall under his influence. Blasting Bergson at the beginning of the twentieth century was similar to blasting Freud in the 1970s: such thinkers were blasted from within the configuration of the new discursive universes that their writings had brought about. During his stay in Paris, Wyndham Lewis attended Bergson’s lectures at the Collège de France, and T. E. Hulme translated “Introduction à la Métaphysique” in 1912.1 Besides, Lewis does full justice to the extent of Bergson’s influence in his 1927 essay Time and Western Man.2 In it, he devotes two chapters to Ezra Pound, “Ezra Pound, etc.” and “A Man in Love with the Past.” It is clear that, in Lewis’ opinion at least, Pound is to be ranked alongside Bergson as belonging to that category of minds for whom reality is essentially of a temporal rather than a spatial nature. And, indeed, two conflicting conceptions of the Vortex were at stake. On page 147 of Blast, Lewis writes: “Our vortex is not afraid of the Past: it has forgotten its existence.”3 But Pound’s definition on page 153 is very different: “All experience rushes into this vortex. All the energized past, all the past that is living and worthy to live. All the MOMENTUM, which is the past bearing upon us, RACE, RACE-MEMORY, instinct charging the PLACID,/ NON-ENERGIZED FUTURE.”4 When Pound invented the 163

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symbol of the vortex, he almost certainly had in mind the famous cone of memory—a cone balancing on its tip on a flat plane—that Bergson depicted twice in his 1896 essay, Matière et Mémoire, in an attempt to explain the relation of past to present. If this was indeed the case, the metaphysics of the cone presides over the composition of The Cantos. No mere “ragbag” of juxtaposed elements, The Cantos arguably constitute a “heterogeneous multiplicity”5 of the sort described by Bergson in his Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience, a flux of highly diversified elements that interpenetrate and mutate according to complex temporal rhythms. Why, then, does Bergson use a conical figure in motion in order to schematize his conception of time? The model of the cone may be understood on a metaphysical level (the relation between past and present) or on a psychological level (the relation between mind and body). Given that the present passes, only what the present passes into, namely, the past (represented by the cone), can be said to exist. Why, or rather, how does time pass? According to Bergson, each moment of the present has two sides to it, an actual dimension and a virtual dimension. The latter dimension partakes intrinsically of the past: it is the part of the past within the present, the reason why the present passes, and the dimension within which the past is conserved.6 In as much as the present is actual and the past virtual, we can only act in the present—but that does not mean that the past no longer exists. Indeed, the pure present is none other than the extreme point of the cone, boring its way incessantly forward, like Pound’s “turbine” (Blast) or “rock-drill” (Cantos). From a psychological point of view, the cone represents the memory, and the plane upon which it stands, the body. Bergson distinguishes between different kinds of memory. Firstly, the manner in which our eyes or ears contract and synthesize any number of pulsations from light or sound waves is already a form of memory, for we perceive in a single instant the sum of a vast series of electro-magnetic or aerial vibrations. Secondly, there is what is now known as “procedural” memory, Bergson’s “mémoire motrice” or “mémoire qui répète,” stored in the body, and which allows us to ride a bike or drive a car without having to recall the many lessons we had in order to acquire those motor skills. And thirdly, there is the memory which revoit (“sees again”), the memory which actualizes memories in the form of images. According to Bergson, such memories are not

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stored in the brain: they belong to the past, and you have to cast your mind back into the past in order to find them. Just as we perceive things where they are present, i.e. in space, we remember them where they have passed, i.e. in time, and we go out of ourselves in both instances (Bergson is anything but solipsistic). However, one must be careful to distinguish between memories and memory-images. Memories do not exist in the form of images in the past, only in the present. You have to go looking for them in the past, but they only become images when they have become actualized in the present. Until then they are purely virtual. “Essentially virtual, we can only seize the past as past if we follow and adopt the movement by which it flowers as an image in the present, emerging from the darkness into the full light of day.”7 In as much as the Ancient Greek nekuia (“the step beyond”) is a ritual invocation of the past, Pound’s first Canto is an excellent example of Bergson’s ontology. Odysseus must undertake a journey to the land of the dead in order to consult Tiresias, the blind “seer” of images that correspond to past or future events. And where do the dead live? According to the fable, they reside in the Cimmerian Lands beyond the western Ocean, but behind the mythological transposition, there is a complex act of remembrance. To ask, “where do the dead live?” is to ask, “when were the dead alive?” and the answer to that question is: in the past. In order to re-member Tiresias, and Elpenor, and his mother, Odysseus must first return to the past. As we have seen, according to Bergson, there are no images or visions of the past as such: images are always present. That is why, in order to actualize a memory from the past, you must first cast your mind back, or take a psychic leap back, into the vast cone of time in all its generality. Just as long as the past remains virtual, nothing can be seen at all: Sun to his slumber, shadows o’er all the ocean, Came we then to the bounds of deepest water, To the Kimmerian lands, and peopled cities Covered with close-webbed mist, unpierced ever With glitter of sun-rays Nor with stars stretched, nor looking back from heaven Swartest night stretched over wretched men there. (1/3)

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Odysseus has to adopt the right disposition in order to orientate himself in the past, in order to find the right region, the right moment: Here did they rites, Perimedes and Eurylochus, And drawing sword from my hip I dug the ell-square pitkin; Poured we libations unto each the dead (1/3) Little by little a nebula begins to form, a (battle-) host of images assaults his mind, all manner of simulacra crowd in upon him: “Souls out of Erebus, cadaverous dead, of brides / Of youths and of the old who had borne much” (1/3). Involuntary memories take on a sharper focus—those of his deceased mother and his deceased companion, Elpenor, which is something of a shock as he did not know that they were dead—, until the one of which he was in search (Tiresias) comes into focus, properly actualized by a libation of living blood. Pound’s “framing” of the Homeric nekuia in the first Canto insists on the process of successive actualizations of memories, belonging both to Odysseus’ personal past and to the Western World’s cultural past. Not only is the journey to the Cimmerian Lands a mythological transcription of an act of remembrance, but in narrating his experience to Alcinus and his court, Odysseus reactualizes the same memory-images for the benefit of his audience. The Latin translation by Andreas Divus of the Homeric original is a further reactualization—and transposition—of the past (events from the past mediated by a text from the past), to say nothing of Pound’s English translation of Divus, delivered in the guise of an AngloSaxon pastiche. Not only does each layer of this series of transpositions have as its subject matter the original Homeric nekuia, but each transposition is itself the result of a nekuia, the retrieval of fragments from the wreckage of human history and their reactualization as verbal images in a modern context. The cone of memory, the vortex of the past is not to be understood as chronological, stretching away from the point of the present into ever more remote regions of the past. According to Bergson, the whole of the past is contained within each level, layer, or stratum of the cone, under

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a certain degree of tension. The strata closest to the point are those in which the past has undergone the greatest amount of contraction. As the cone splays out, as the layers dilate, the past gains in detail and precision. Hence the procedural memories, the motor habits—riding a bike, swimming—are to be found closest to the point. The further away you move from the point, the greater the chance that your memories will materialize as images: “We tend to spread out [into the wider sections of the cone] the more we detach ourselves from our sensory motor state in order to live the life of dreams; we tend to [inhabit the point of the cone] the more we concentrate on present reality, responding by motor reactions to sensory stimulations.”8 Bergson thus establishes a polarity between the vividness of dream and the automaticity of action. In between there are words. Most words signify classes, not individuals. And each word itself forms a class: you do not need to recall each separate occurrence of a word in order to understand its meaning. But what happens when you come across a word whose meaning eludes you, a word such as noigandres? Of course, you can ask your tutor and, more likely than not, he will send you off to Germany to consult the world’s leading specialist on the Provençal language. But what if this eminent philologist does not know either? What then? There is only one thing for it. Every night, when you go to bed, ask yourselves: “Noigandres, eh, noigandres,/ Now what the DEFFIL can that mean!” (20/90). And perchance you will dream. And what does the delicious, sweet-smelling Mediterranean landscape of which you dream reveal to you? As Pound writes, “You would be happy for the smell of that place / And never tired of being there,” adding, “The smell of that place—d’enoi ganres.” (20/90) We have discovered, as in a dream, the meaning of noigandres. And how have we done it? By changing strata in the cone of memory. The form noigandres is overly contracted, thereby hiding its meaning. The mind has to settle itself upon a more dilated stratum, where experience is sharper, more detailed, and sensuous. The word itself must be dilated, the contraction undone, so that noigandres becomes enoi ganres. Thus Pound teaches us in Canto 20 how to read The Cantos. Rather than pore over dictionaries and encyclopaedias, rather than consult academic specialists in order to unravel foreign words and recondite references, let the poetry evoke dream-images in your mind.

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The play of memory, then, is not limited to one stratum. The mind flits from one stratum of the cone to another, according to the needs of the moment; or, rather, the mind recreates the strata incessantly by moving across the intervals between them. Indeed, Bergson claims that “its life consists in this very movement.”9 The movement thus described is that of a spiral, or vortex. Each spiralling movement of the mind operates a transversal linking several strata. This transversal I suggest we call a “plateau,” in honour of another Bergsonian thinker, Gilles Deleuze, author, along with Félix Guattari, of Mille Plateaux.10 Could it not be claimed that each Canto represents a plateau of this sort? Pound’s “ideogrammatic method” is not that of simple juxtaposition, it is a transversal drawn through several non-localized strata of the virtual cone of time. If The Cantos can purport to be the “tale of the tribe” without summarizing all of human history, it is because the all of human history is virtual: it does not need to be actualized in order to be present in the poem. The fragmentary quotations are actualized moments salvaged from the vast abyss of cultural memory. In consequence, the poem requires no beginning nor end in order to represent the whole of time—the first word of the first Canto is the conjunction of coordination and, and the last Cantos are a mere “draft,” time being precisely that which has no end, and no beginning. The fragments of verbal utterances, texts and conversations, that are shored up in The Cantos act as memory-images in that they allow the past to be reactualized in the mind of the reader. As we have seen, everything that has ever happened continues to exist in the past. The mind is capable of retrieving these past occurrences or, rather, of bringing them back into the present in the form of mental images. These images are not, however, mere representations. They are conscious embodiments hic et nunc of past events. That is to say that their nature is not only psychological but also ontological. In the introduction to Matière et Mémoire, Bergson annuls the distinction that had prevailed in Western philosophy since at least Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason between things in themselves and their representation in the mind of the perceiver. If reality is essentially temporal, if the only true substance is time itself, then everything is image: “Being [themselves] images, the body [and the brain] cannot stock images, because [they are] part of those images.”11 The function of memory is not to reactivate trace-images stored in the brain but to search

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the past for those realities which, reactualized as memory-images, allow us to understand the present situation. Just as the substance of reality is time itself, mind and memory are one and the same. One can understand why Bergson was often accused of spiritualism and Neoplatonism. In “On nature, contemplation and the One,” the thirtieth treatise of his third Ennead, Plotinus develops a form of monism that equates the act of spiritual contemplation (theorein) with that of natural production (poiein). In other words, the productiveness inherent in nature (physis) is a sort of meditation in actu. From this perspective, living beings in particular are no longer considered as objects of thought, but constitute thoughts in themselves; there is absolutely no difference between the act of thought and what is thought. If, for Plotinus, the soul (psyche) is a form of intelligence that still perceives the objects of nature as being other than itself, divine intelligence (nous) is the locus of fusion where life and thought become one.12 Medieval scholastic philosophy made a similar distinction, one to which Pound refers on several occasions. In Guide to Kulchur, for example, he quotes approvingly the “three modes of thought” distinguished by Richard St. Victor: cogitation, meditation and contemplation. In the first the mind flits aimlessly about the object [as when the student is foxed by noigandres], in the second it circles about it in a methodical manner [as in the exploration of Canto XX’s dream landscape], in the third it is unified with the object [as in the oneiric and poetical experience of a place which staves off ennui, or enoi, for ever].13 Understood in terms of Bergson’s modern metaphysical psychology, cogitation, meditation and contemplation represent different degrees of the scale by which the mind manages more or less successfully to “produce” the object of its remembrance. The mechanism of cogitation must give way to the powers of contemplation if we are fully to reactualize moments that belong to the cultural past or to the cosmic mind (nous), i.e. moments that surpass the personal memories of the individual dreamer or writer. Of all Bergson’s books, Matière et Mémoire is the one that has least aged. It is not for nothing that the renewal of interest in Bergson in recent

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years is focused mainly on his 1896 study. This is where he went furthest in his metaphysical thinking, going beyond the dichotomies of matter and memory, space and time, body and soul, and proposing a kind of monism. This he achieves by forever widening the cone so that in its broadest strata the detail coincides with every single pulsation or grain of subatomic matter. At this level of dilation, matter and memory are one and the same. The universe is one vast diffuse consciousness—far too diffuse to constitute a form of self-consciousness capable of acting, or being acted upon, by anything other than itself. With L’Évolution créatrice (1907), Bergson takes a step back in horror and reinstates dualism. At the end of the first chapter of this new work, he elaborates on an analogy calling upon an image of iron filings, in order to show how the life force, the élan vital, acts upon matter.14 If you push your hand into a mass of iron filings, at some point you will not be able to push any further, and the filings will retain the hollow shape of your hand and forearm even after you have extracted your limb from the mass. Now, that shape had not been predetermined teleologically, nor had the filings come together by accident. Their arrangement is the consequence of what happens to a force when it is obstructed by matter. Thus, the myriad forms of life are so many ways in which matter resists the élan vital. The human eye is not something put together piece by piece according to a preordained plan, but an accumulation of matter sculpted by, and resisting, the force of vision, which otherwise would be infinite in its capacity. However one might admire the metaphysics, the idea of pushing one’s hand into a box full of iron filings strikes one as pretty odd, and rather primitive. Pound’s use of the image of iron filings in Guide to Kulchur15 and at the end of Canto 74 is far more elegant and sophisticated. Serenely in the crystal jet     as the bright ball that the fountain tosses (Verlaine) as diamond clearness (74/469) In his poem, “Clair de lune,” Paul Verlaine compares the soul to a “paysage choisi”16: the soul is a landscape, a mindscape. “Serenely” evokes the “serein,” a French word for the evening dew.

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   How soft the wind under Taishan      where the sea is remembered    out of hell, the pit    out of the dust and glare evil    Zephyrus / Apeliota (74/469) Let it be further remembered that in Ancient Greek and Latin, pneuma, anima, spiritus, aura are all words that designate the wind as well as the mind. This liquid is certainly a     property of the mind nec accidens est   but an element           in the mind’s make-up est agens and functions   dust to a fountain pan otherwise (74/469) The serene dew and the spiritual wind fill the brainpan just as water does the fountain pan. The mind is bathed in cosmic spirit, be it the nous described by Plotinus, or the qi evoked by Mencius. And this cosmic spirit acts upon the mind in a way similar to that in which magnetic “fluid” influences iron filings.     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) The quotation from Ben Jonson’s “A Celebration of Charis” (1623) is an allusion to Aphrodite, a beautiful form who emerged from the foam (aphros in Greek) of marine turbulence. But how are these phenomena of emergence brought about? In order to explain the mental serenity conducive to poetic creation, Pound like Bergson eschews teleology and chance. But he does not employ the crass image of a mechanical force acting upon

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dead matter. He uses that of a field, a magnetic field, a field of energy. “Energy creates pattern,” he writes in Affirmations.17 Caught in a spiritual force field, subjected to the influence of the nous or the qi, words organize themselves in the poet’s mind—and consequently on the written page—so as to form a poetic conceit in the same way that the magnetized dust of iron filings arranges itself into a rose: The forma, the immortal concetto, the concept, the dynamic form … is like the rose pattern driven into the dead iron-filings by the magnet, not by material contact with the magnet itself, but separate from the magnet. Cut off by the layer of glass, the dust and filings rise and spring into order. Thus the forma, the concept rises from death.18 The pattern is not “driven” into iron filings like a hand, as in Bergson’s analogy. It emerges gradually as inert (verbal, vocal or visual) matter orders itself within the electromagnetic field of the all-encompassing cosmic mind. By a process of serene meditation, the nous informs and produces the very object of its contemplation. The liquid agency of the spirit is not to be understood as distinct from the matter upon which it acts. What we are in the habit of calling matter is simply a concentration, opacification, or contraction of cosmic energy. The human mind is capable of surpassing the limits of its own separateness, providing it eschews cogitation and attains to the contemplative capacity of the nous. On this plane of being, theoretical contemplation and poetical production amount to the same thing. In this respect, Pound remains true to the ideas professed in Matière et Mémoire, whereas Bergson, by reinstating a rigid dualism between élan vital and dead matter in L’Evolution créatrice, betrays his earlier inspiration.

C HA P T E R T H I RT E E N

Ritual and Performance in The Pisan Cantos and H.D.’s Trilogy Giuliana Ferreccio

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he revaluation of H.D.’s later work has revealed strong connections between Trilogy and The Pisan Cantos, whose complexities have recently been investigated.1 For a long time H.D.’s fame had rested on her Imagist phase and not on her work from the 1930s and 1940s, in which she made the transition from Imagism to the more expansive masterpieces. Like Pound, she had to leave Imagism behind to write her epic poems, but it took her a longer time, a different stance and the new language she developed with the aid of psychoanalysis and the rediscovery of her Moravian ancestry. I am going to analyze again the possible links connecting those two late works under the new perspective of recent theories of the lyric, particularly relying on Jonathan Culler’s new contribution to the subject, which highlights the performative character of lyric verse and explores the compelling aspects of lyric language, the peculiarity of their linguistic acts. By comparing them in this light we may come closer to newly appreciating the specifically lyric aspects in either work and measure the distance H.D.’s later writings have taken from Pound’s oeuvre.

I.  The Meeting of Opposites My first clues come from H.D.’s scattered comments on The Pisan Cantos in her autobiographical memoir, End to Torment (1958), where she sums 173

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up the direction I want to follow here, by dwelling on the performative quality of Pound’s verse, while commenting on Canto 90: “the invocation ‘m’elevasti’ does invoke, does call one out ‘from under the rubble’ of daily cares and terrors.”2 When alluding to Helen in Egypt, H.D. is aware of their common ground: “But I completed my own Cantos as Norman called them.”3 Their cross-references are frequent, among them, her mentioning one of Pound’s sacred places in Tribute to the Angels “The marble sea-maids in Venice, / who climb the altar stairs / in Santa Maria dei Miracoli,”4 when H.D. remembers her visit there with Pound and unwittingly anticipates the Pisans, “mermaids: that carving” (83/549). At the same time, however, she clearly sees their diverging paths: “I … (read) through The Cantos … some of my own lines came to me and laid the ghost, as it were. I had developed along another line, in another dimension-only the opposites could meet in the end.”5 Several topics connect their works from early on, starting with Pound’s occult interests and H.D.’s syncretistic blending of Christian religion with Greek and Egyptian myths and mythical figures. In the Pisans, especially, archaic earth-mothers and feminine divinities are likewise fused with Greek goddesses representing natural cycles and the alternation of death and rebirth: Demeter and Persephone merge with Japanese Kuanon and the Virgin Mary, while in Canto 79 they are all transfigured into the goddess Aphrodite taking part in Eleusinian fertility rites. Reiterated rituals of initiation are at the core of both poets’ work and often filter their experience through myths of metamorphosis that provide H.D. with a repertoire of masks—much in Pound-like fashion—spanning from the dramatic monologue of “Eurydice” (1917) down to the late autobiographical pseudonym of Delia Alton, a dominant leitmotif in her work from the beginning. Their “historical sense” is based on a notion of history as palimpsest, where “all ages are contemporaneous.” While Pound starts “Gathering the Limbs of Osiris” in 1911, H.D. will recurrently elaborate on the Isis-Osiris myth, throughout her career up to The Mystery (1949– 51), albeit with the more intimate slant of recomposing the fragments of a lacerated self. Around the 1940s, their common epic terrain, in Trilogy as well as in The Pisan Cantos, was wartime poetry, with its relying on two, or more, planes of narration, the mythical and visionary on the one hand, contemporary war and the detention scene on the other. Structurally,

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however, the main connection may be seen in similar alternations of visionary moments and the tangible rendering of natural objects, rooted in the everyday. For both, natural process seems to acquire a momentous lyrical force only when enfolded in a wartime or detention context. Perception of natural process and wartime visions are so inextricably connected that one seems to sprout out of the other. Can one describe this transition as a sort of elegiac reassuring instinct, transforming grief into consolation or are we dealing with something more intricate, like a restorative move involving death and rebirth, a common topic for both poets? The Pisan Cantos absorbed much of the previous “Italian Drafts” of the 1940s, now collected in Posthumous Cantos,6 which acquire a new dimension when merged in the other strains of the Pisans.7 They are a series of visionary epiphanic encounters, narrated in the first person, set in the natural scenery, amid the olive groves and steep slopes of the Ligurian coast above Rapallo, where Pound hears divine and ancient voices that will resurface in the Pisans as “the suave eyes” of merciful divinities, Kuanon, Aphrodite, the Virgin Mary, presiding over his bereft condition as a prisoner, a noman and a potential candidate for execution. When these slivers of paradise re-emerge in the Pisans, however, the first person disappears.8 In H.D. we find the same alternations of visionary moments and everyday sights, albeit of “ancient London,” under the German air-raids of World War II. As the world is crumbling down, they both seem to find in myth and religions from different cultures, protective presences representing either a paradisal indestructible shelter against wartime destruction and loss, or a firm ground for actual rebirth. Against a world irretrievably lost or driven to ruin, in both the Pisans and Trilogy, the direct interventions of nature, whether they be a lizard, an ant’s shadow, the smell of mint and clover, or bees, spiders, worms, become signs of defiance and endurance. Pound skilfully arranges his sequence alternating his epiphanic encounters—the magic moment of metamorphosis—with a series of subtly rendered, minute perceptions of the quotidian, a diversified, yet masterfully constructed, flow of free-associated material, made up of immediate perception and visionary experience: “The ant’s a centaur in its dragon world” (81/541) or “When the mind swings by a grass-blade / an ant’s forefoot shall save you / the clover smells and tastes as its flowers” (83/553). In a similar

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identification with natural phenomena and nature dwellers, H.D. sees the “Luxor bee” pursuing its “unalterable purpose” among the London ruins, or the worm, enduring in spite of destruction: “In me (the worm) clearly / is no righteousness, but this- / persistence; I escaped spidersnare, … clung to grass-blade, / the back of a leaf / when storm-wind / tore it from its stem; I escaped, I explored … was rain-swept / down the valley of a leaf.”9 However, although the poems share many common themes and topics, from a prosodic point of view the similarities are scant, mainly because of different rhetorical strategies and technical devices. Like The Pisan Cantos, Trilogy’s three parts are linked by textual reiterations, but in H.D. linear narration flows smoothly: its drift gives the feeling of a continuous movement forward. There is also a mimetic aspect, which some have called metonymic,10 as her way of writing presents a shattered content yet is held together by a steady movement of syntactical continuity. In the Pisans, on the contrary, montage and juxtaposition break up any linear progression. While both works contain the records of intense individual struggle in time of war or in its aftermaths, extended fragmentation in Pound is countered by consistent narrative connections in Trilogy. Her recitation, combining a chanting rhythm and story-telling, has its clear discursive musicality, whereas the Pisans need repeated readings for their subterranean rhythm to emerge. However, certain passages will stand out in the flow, as more immediately memorable. The most notable lyric parts punctuate, but do not blend with the main structural levels, the shiftings of reminiscence and the intrusions from the life of the camp; they suddenly emerge out of the context as new conceptual potentialities. The Pisan Cantos register and mirror the poet’s fright of losing his identity and give glimpses of a deprived, broken up consciousness threatened by a loss of self. The Trilogy poses the problem of identity as well, but the palimpsest and invocation to the gods and goddesses produce an ever-changing, fluid, yet dense textual identity, testified by the overall presence of a first-person narrator. The Poundian extended nekuia is replaced by a continuous succession of metamorphoses and rebirths. As H.D. declared, “We have gone through some hell together, separately.”11

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II.  Forms of Ritual Address In both Trilogy and the Pisans, however, lyric utterances often put a strong accent on forms of ritual, usually based on repetition, whether it be H.D.’s repeated invocations (“take me home, Father”),12 or Pound’s recurrent, most notable lyrical outbursts, such as “What thou lovest well remains” (81/540). In order to analyze their different uses of ritual repetition, the notion of performative language acts may come to help, seeing that it has the great advantage, for a critical approach, of foregrounding language as act, rather than representation, and performative language acts have a clear ritualistic character.13 They allude to anthropological, religious, and devotional domains, pointing to the possibility of making something happen in the world, i.e. they shift our focus from lyric as imitation of an experience or event (Wordsworth’s famous overflow of powerful feelings) to lyric as being itself an event. A language which accomplishes the act to which it refers, as in “I baptize you Queen Elisabeth” is particularly apt to describe the operations of lyric because these world-changing modes of language bring into being that which they speak about. Like acts of language, certain lyric expressions may be said to be both iterable and inaugural, repeatable and new, repeated and originating.14 Their repetitions perform an act in the present that was done before, or voice an utterance that was uttered before: as in a ritual, they re-enact a script, a habit, a common stance.15 As a “language within a language,” such utterances bear the instantaneous quality of a speech act.16 Although, the Middle and Late Cantos are full of rituals and ritualistic expressions, notably in the Usura Canto or in Cantos 36 and 47, this concept has mainly been applied to the Pisans in as far as they do not simply depict an evolving process like the motions of nature or the operations of light from neo-platonic philosophy, but rather perform it while the poet is writing his verse,17 or the reader is rehearsing his performance.18 The “process” whether dimly or forcefully discerned, is counteracted by the shiftings of a deserted consciousness, yet inhabited by “compound ghosts,” by all the various voices and personae that have surged to resound in Pound’s “involuntary memory” or have been conjured up from the dead in order to fend off psychic disintegration. On the contrary, what prevails in H.D.’s performative lyrical acts is ritual invocation or address, following the conventions of

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prayer as, for instance, in “Not in our time, O Lord, / The plowshare for the sword,”19 or “Swiftly relight the flame, / Aphrodite, holy name.”20 H.D. deals with a kind of explicitly direct address (though indirectly meant for the reader) by means of apostrophe to something or someone else, to an absent, divine power, an inanimate object or nature, intentionally and masterfully multiplying instances of the infamous pathetic fallacy. The less ordinary the addressee the more the poem becomes a ritualistic invocation, expressing the wish that the entities addressed might in their turn reply, following the common pattern of invocation in prayer and religious ceremonies, where the sacred, devotional context justifies the otherwise irrational claim. Lyric is, and has always been, typically extravagant, performing unusual speech acts of unrealistic address, enhancing, in H.D.’s case, what she calls “spiritual realism.” Yet identities are elusive, mobile, split, as “the splintered crystal of identity”21 she attributes to Amen, one of her composite “Christos” figures, with a clear allusion to her earlier “crystalline” lyrics. In fact, the deep center of H.D.’s poetry, after her initial imagist phase, can only be caught through the shifting features of a kaleidoscopic, kinetic mask,22 whether it be Eurydice, or the various feminine/masculine divinities inhabiting Trilogy, and synthesized in a gendered, compounded Holy Ghost.23 Her frequent invocations, however, place the speaker in a transitional space, as it were, resembling that middle stage in rites of passage that is identified as a place of transition and transformation. Trilogy follows the conventions of devotional poetry, albeit of a fictionalized kind, and like devotional poetry, H.D.’s verse recalls and transforms words and postures that are part of a long devotional tradition, both re-enacting and revising it.24 Christian sacred figures and tenets mix with Greek and Egyptian myths weaving a complex tracery of masks and channels, allowing the speaker constantly to inhabit a borderline, to dwell at the intersection of opposite, conflicting forces.25 Surprisingly, however, Trilogy is sustained by a strong, solid individual voice, a sacramental, priestlike intonation, a speech based on ritual repetition in the first person that seems to be emerging from the ruins of the London bombardments. Her tones are both assertive and inspired, as though a medium’s governing spirit were dictating his messages from the underworld. When she starts writing Trilogy, H.D. has gone through the deconstructive work of psychoanalysis and, above

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all, has delved into her ancestral past by writing The Gift (1941–43). Her voice may not be so personal after all, seeing that it was a “gifted” voice, as she herself maintains.26 As in her earlier poems, one feels a disjunction between the speaker’s anguished voice and the poet’s secure, firmly rooted style. This distinction becomes clearer when in 1927 H.D. starts engaging in filmmaking and film criticism and elaborates on the key notion of borderline, a liminal condition or a space of doubtful boundaries, which becomes the title of an avant-garde film by Kenneth MacPherson (1930), in which she played a main role. In Borderline, a critical pamphlet she wrote to comment on the homonymous film, where cinema and her early interests in psychoanalysis come together, H.D. expounds on the technique of “pictographic writing,” a kind of ideogrammic montage allowing her to experiment on bordering states of consciousness, a dimension she will depict as “there and not there” (CP 559), a liminal condition often recurring in later works both in prose and in poetry. In one of her writings on film for Close Up (1927–33) she had already caught a structural analogy between the dynamic imagery of silent films and the process of visualizing prophetic intuitions.27 As both poets stand at the beginning of the Imagist revolution with their short and intense poems, one may wonder what made them swerve apart, other than their personal lives and choices. I would suggest that one of the turning points was their encounter with avant-garde cinema, which offers one more instance of their similarities in difference. While in H.D.’s Borderline experiment the visionary experience supersedes the film by merging objective images and subjective perception, Pound’s engagement in Ballet Méchanique (1923– 24) helps him refine his impersonal ideogrammic montage technique. By juxtaposing unrelated objects, machines, people at breathless speeds, Ballet Méchanique shows no central experiencing subject, no characters or acting, but only meaningful forms.28

III.  A Bunch of Memories Gods often “float in the azure air” in Pound’s poetry but they are never addressed, and in The Pisan Cantos their visionary apparitions materialize by themselves, independently from any address or invocation. The forms of address are here quite complex, but mainly tending toward an

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internalized dialogue.29 Nonetheless, the performative element is pervasive, not only in the Eleusinian fertility rites of Canto 79, but much more so in their re-enacting slivers of remembered expressions, gestures, voices, “Come pan, niño!” (80/513), or “And Jim the comedian singing: / “Blarney castle me darlin’” (74/453). The speech events, mainly shreds from his early years recalling friends and acquaintances, are so presented as to give the impression that they happen not only in the past but also now, they attempt to be that event itself, not a description of that event. While we seem to be witnessing a retelling, we are also spectators to a restorative performance.30 In her wry remarks, “Of course all the last … scraps of cantos are yourself, the memories that make up your person. Is then one only a bunch of memories?” Dorothy Pound does not seem to be catching the performative value of Pound’s “bunch of memories.”31 Remembered voices, gestures, details are not just a storehouse of static, changeless remembrances, but rather mobile, dynamic voices coming from the dead (“Lordly men are to the earth o’ergiven” 74/452), rescued from oblivion thanks to the poet’s ventriloquist ability; as in a séance the voices perform their roles on the empty stage of his psyche. Remembrance is letting the voices speak for themselves, as in a tragic chorus, re-enacting the past in the present and transforming it through the poet’s ritualistic descent to the underworld, a death, and an ensuing, if dubious, rebirth. Interspersed among the shards of remembrance, the voices take up lyric and memorable intensity because they seem to rise, unexpectedly and abruptly, out of wartime destructions and intrusions from the life on the DTC. The rather stilted divine apparitions from the “Italian Drafts” have now acquired a new inaugural power, because startling and unexpected once they are considered in that context. The themes, gods and images at the core of the poem come back here, but are renewed and altered by repetition, giving rise to the sudden emergence of new conceptual formulations. Evoking Pound’s old friends and acquaintances, the poem produces speech events creating the impression of something happening now. Readers experience their speech as if they were there, not in spite of their being past memories, but because of their pastness. The productive tension arising from the contrast between the past and the now, the repeated and the inaugural, is further enhanced when

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new voices emerge along with past ones and mingle with them. There are traces of elegy in these recollections, but the elegiac mode is kept at bay when an alternative mode breaks forth suddenly to interrogate other previous practices. The voices of his fellow-prisoners enter the throng of crowding voices, punctuating and enlivening remembrances with the everyday actual material occurrences of the camp. The recurrence of his various inmates’ exclamations, “doan you tell no one / I made you that table” (74/454) in their African American dialect (or language) creates an unexpected emotional link between London in the 1910s and early original sounds of American speech.32 One might note in passing that Pound’s Italian expressions sound most engaging when quoted from actual speech and rather stiff and high-flown when he ventures into “literary” style, as he does in Cantos 72–73. Mr. Edwards’ repeated words, when he supplies the poet with a crate to write on and to enable him to proceed in his poem, perform the rituals of daily life on the camp, but also rhyme with Leucothea’s raft saving Ulysses (for a while) from shipwreck (95/667). Their ritual repetition in Canto 81/539, along with the “unmasked eyes,” suddenly and unexpectedly gives rise to one of the poems’ most celebrated lyrical passages, “What thou lovest well remains,” as though it originated from a re-enactment of things past, just as Proust’s Madeleine starts off Marcel’s account of his becoming a writer and fending off death. Both Trilogy and the Pisans offer multiple angles of approach to the search for identity, one of the poem’s central themes. Yet, contrary to Trilogy, the individual self in the Pisans is intentionally nowhere to be found, a noman (apart from the flamboyant “Ego Scriptor”), whose very absence gives leeway to a demonic mediation between the earthly and the divine, a multifarious receptacle for a lively dialogue of discourses, whether they be remembrances, impingements from the contemporary world through the news he hears in the camp, visionary moments or the instantaneous blending of consciousness into a natural process, “to a half meter grass growth, / lay on the cliffs’ edge / … nor is this yet atasal (76/478). The speaker’s direct allusions to his own state of dispossession are more or less consistently distanced by a posture of objective detachment, except for a poignant and unexpected juxtaposition of a Dantescan quotation, artistic treasuries and everyday sights on the camp: “with two larks in contrappunto / at sunset / ch’intenerisce / a sinistra la Torre / seen

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through a pair of breeches” (74/451). Sieburth’s insightful remark that Pound’s most dramatic moments of despondency take place, “as it were, in translation” is quite to the point and stresses the relevance of transitions from one language to another. The lyric counterpoint of voices opens unto a dynamical mental space running counter to the only possibly linear narration of the Pisans, the defeat of his political preferences. Pound’s montage offers resistance to that semantic linearity. Narrative and performance, memory and event, seem to question each other.

IV.  Ritual and Repetition A similar tension between a past event and its ritual re-enactment in the now of a speech-act can be detected in Trilogy, where repeated invocations to gods and goddesses highlight the strong connection tying lyric to a devotional poetry of sorts, though the kind of worship we have here is far from any devotion in a Christian sense and closer to initiation rites belonging to an ancient occult lore.33 Like devotional poetry, H.D.’s poetic sequence recalls and transforms words and postures that are part of a long tradition, while restoring and altering it. Reiteration is crucial to this lyric process, and to Trilogy in particular, in that it creates new meanings when the choice of words links one imagistic, clear-cut strain to another. Her frequent invocations offer themselves as palimpsestic reiterations of original rituals, though origins remain indeterminate. In her merging the Judeo-Christian tradition with Egyptian and Greek pagan cultural lore, H.D. creates a wide-ranging, heterogeneous text that intentionally echoes the typological and intertextual structure of the Bible, itself a superposition of pre-biblical narratives. References to Biblical typology make H.D.’s texts Gospel-like rewritings of Old Testament sources: “different yet the same as before.”34 As in the Pisans, the performative aspect of ritual repetition is one of the main traits of the most powerful lyrical passages, but contrary to the Pisans, performative acts are carried out by the very act of narration in the first person and in the present tense, not by objective, detached montage techniques or juxtaposition. “A constant reminder of death”35 to be experienced in bombed London is H.D.’s starting point for her exploration of the layers of a palimpsestic arrangement of historical and mythical events. “The orgy of destruction”

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opens up a parallel between ancient Egypt and “ancient London,” where the ruins of both places expose the vestiges of remote and contemporary worlds, just like the fragments of voices from his London years emerged to try and patch up Pound’s fragmented psyche. As in the Pisans, the poem’s style and content present ruptures and discontinuities, yet the speaker keeps above them by attesting her own presence in reiterated forms of invocation. The speaker is always steadily posited, setting the words with decision and exact care, voicing an intensifying range of sound inflections and modulations, while at the same time upholding a syntactical consistency of diction and subject-matter. Her apostrophes are a ritual action whereby her vatic voice calls in order to expound its calling and to bear out its identity as a poetic voice.36 The main difference from the Pisans lies precisely in the status of the lyrical I, whose individual voice is forever there in the present tense (though often shifting to the plural), resulting in a ritual that is conducted not by an impersonal mediator but by a priestess figure who performs a religious ceremony or a rite of passage. H.D.’s voice has a sacramental inflection, as though she was asking the reader to worship the powers she calls forth, to become an initiate or simply be part of a rite not dissimilar from the various confessional versions of the Christian mass or service. At times, the poet’s voice makes one think of the founder of a new religion, as H.D. herself suggested, after Freud unwittingly declared that her ideas revealed the dangerous symptom of a megalomaniacal tendency. Trilogy is deeply informed by H.D.’s sessions with Freud and her discovering among the “hieroglyphs” left in the London ruins the “deepest hidden subconscious terrors” and their unfathomable thresholds, perilously or poetically bridging conscious and unconscious mental scenes, that ever-changing “ocean of universal consciousness.”37 However, the very assertiveness of the speaker’s voice makes one doubt about her, or his, coherent identity. Is the narrating I to be meant as the author herself? Or is the lyric stance somehow detached from the narrating I? Can one perform a ritual by addressing divinities belonging to various cults and cultures and at the same time conduct a narration in which they figure as compound protagonists? Furthermore, the speaking voice’s identity is hard to locate: at times she identifies with her addressees: (“I am Mary, she said, … / I am Mary-O, there are Marys a-plenty (though

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I am Mara, bitter),”38 at times with the “Lady” or with Hermes; its relation with the biographical author is, more often than not, indeterminate. Once the poem’s voice is posited as a character, however, a strong fictional element merges with lyrical discourse, as is the case with dramatic monologue, or in lyric sequences of related poems in which a broad narrative is easily detectable. The lyric sequence relying on myth involves a plot, characters and past events that are evoked in the act of lyric enunciation, introducing a fictional element in a lyric text. Yet lyric and fiction do not always peacefully coexist, mainly because of their divergent time settings: lyrical utterances happen in an atemporal dimension, suspending the linear time sequence of fictional events happening in the past. When past events are related in the present tense, we experience this kind of narration as unrealistic or unfamiliar, no matter how accustomed to present tense narration we have by now become.39 As the poem does rely on the form of the narrative sequence, her repeated apostrophes and utterances in the present tend to work against the narrative and its sequential course, which the lyric subsumes with distinctive temporal strategies. Narration and forms of address, invocation, or apostrophe, tend to exclude each other or, better, intentionally work against each other, as for instance in Wordsworth’s famous apostrophe to the Imagination in The Prelude VI.40 There is always a conflicting counterpoint between the apostrophic and the narrative, in this case in particular because H.D.’s syncretistic divine beings are both fictive actors in a historical plot spanning from ancient Egypt to World War II and divine addressees in a liturgical act. The counterpoint of story and character, on the one hand, and lyrical invocation on the other, between the fictional and the ritualistic, disrupts narrative, making the poem more of an event in the lyric present than a narration of past events. When one of these modes seems to prevail, the alternative mode arises to question and deconstruct it. Nevertheless, whether lyric or narrative or both, Trilogy seems to be located on a middle ground, as it were, a marginal space41 between narrative and ritual, fiction and evocation, where the “walls” that survived the bombings remained intact and became tokens of a resistance to forgetfulness, by enclosing spaces that keep rehearsing common rituals of the everyday (“your old town square … another sliced wall / where poor utensils show …

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the fallen roof / leaves the sealed room / open to the air”;42 “coins, gems, gold, / beakers, platters”)43 in their exposing to the sight the interiors of sundry Freudian family romances. The same marginal space encompasses speaker and characters as part of a ritual process caught in its transitional stage when marginal individuals are neither in one world nor in another: “we sleep and are awake, / we dream and are not here,”44 like Hermes, the presiding figure of H.D.’s early work. Hermes, the overstepper of limits, returns here not only as an agent of transformation but as one of linguistic trespassing as well, performing a mutual deconstruction of the mythical and the ritual. The Hermes figure belongs to both legend and anthropology, like the fool or the king of misrule, dwelling in the gaps of discourse and overturning the laws of language, inhabiting its uncertainties and ambiguities, just as H.D.’s many borderline figures embody the ambiguities of gender. Hermetic is the knowledge her late prose works rely on, while Hermes, the “stylus,” stands here for a constant shifting that gives rise to the liberating drive of wordplay, springing at the breaking forth of an alternative mode of discourse. Wordplay and visionary experience have been closely connected ever since H.D. started seeing silent cinema as a universal visual language made of cryptic messages surfacing from an otherwordly dimension. In Borderline she associates characters’ names or filmic images and situations to conventional metaphors or sayings: Pete, the protagonist’s name, equals “peat” and refers to the earth; a cascade literally stands for “drowning in happiness,” and so on.45 Far from undermining meanings in a Falstaffian fashion, H.D.’s wordplay gives way to new signifying possibilities, enhanced by recurrent transformations echoing throughout the Trilogy. Like Hermes, Amen is at the same time a man, a divinity, a wordplay and a liturgical act: “here am I, Amen-Ra whispers, / Amen, Aries, the Ram,”46 “where the grasshopper says / Amen, Amen, Amen.”47 By means of wordplay Mary is the Virgin Mary, the Star of the Sea, a gift announcing the birth of a god and an allusion to Mary Magdalene: “mer, mere, mère, mater, Maia, Mary, / Star of the Sea, / Mother.”48 We may say that the generative force behind both poems lies in two forms of tension, a dialogical discourse of earthly and ghostly voices on Pound’s part, a dialectical play of ritual and fictional phenomena, performing on a threshold between narrative and devotional invocations, on H.D.’s. In both cases lyric performativity points to a middle ground

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where the creative force of language finds a material embodiment for the possibility of making something happen in the world. Seen in this light, lyric may be at bottom a resistance to the disenchantment of the world, to the secular rationality that has overtaken older forms of thinking in which ritual played an important part. One of the central features of lyric may be the tension between enchantment and disenchantment. However, a memorable lyrical passage like “What thou lovest well remains,” besides being a performative act with all of its inaugural force, may represent a performance as well, in that it also attempts to move the reader, to stimulate reflection, to “make new,” to praise what should be retained. The specifically lyrical then seems to lie in the tension between context and utterance, repetition and creation, a tension where Derrida discerns the creative power of language and of origination in general. If these justly “celebrated” lines call into being what one loves well, the success of its inaugural lyric act may ironically derive from its having become a commonplace, of its having entered the language imaginary, like “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day” or “When lilacs last …” or “Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown” and so on. Success comes from an inaugural, and repeatable, formulation, which has become a cliché, a motto, or an aphorism. Jonathan Culler reminds us that, according to Baudelaire, genius lies in the poet’s ability to create a poncif, a cliché.49

C HA P T E R F O U RT E E N

A Carthaginian Peace Kenner, Watts, and the Founding of Pound Studies Michael Coyle

P

ound’s receipt of the first-ever Bollingen Prize for Poetry, on February 20, 1949, represented a long-awaited formal tribute.1 But “a man situated as [was] Mr. Pound,” as the public announcement from “the Committee of the Fellows of the Library of Congress in American Letters” delicately put it, was no longer capable of defining the terms of his own recognition.2 Perhaps no writer is. W. H. Auden’s “In Memory of William Butler Yeats” (1939) justly observed that “the words of a dead man / Are modified in the guts of the living.”3 But Pound was not dead yet, and it was part of his misfortune to have to watch, more or less helplessly, as his admirers tried to save him from himself. In this way, and in terms starkly different from those proposed by Auden, after his award Pound “became his admirers.” The energetic iconoclast became the professors’ poet; the reformer who had so often pitched his appeal to those excluded from university education came to depend on the academy for the audience that was at last, mostly, prepared to meet him. I am here interested in the earliest stages of this process: the ways in which the academic study of Pound was informed for decades to come by a public outcry that possibly was dismissed too summarily. The first ever Bollingen Prize for Poetry was announced on February 17, 1949. It went to Pound, who in February 1946 had been judged mentally unfit to stand 187

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trial for treason and remanded to St. Elizabeths Hospital. A few months passed with little to no notice being taken—the kind of reception modern poetry usually gets, of course. Public discussion of the award began in earnest only that May, when the comparatively highbrow Partisan Review published a forum on “The Question of the Pound Award.” But the next month, after the Saturday Review of Literature printed popular poet Robert Hillyer’s invective, “Treason’s Strange Fruit,” intellectual discussion quickly yielded to public outcry. By mid-summer a broad range of popular magazines and papers were fanning the flames and it was clear that the question was not about to be settled easily or soon. Pound would learn all over again that, as he had written in the opening of Canto 46, you cannot “get through hell in a hurry” (46/231). It is hard not to see a certain irony in this moment. For the first time in his career Pound had genuinely caught the popular attention he had always sought, but it came to him arguably in the wrong way, for the wrong reasons, about the wrong things. The Bollingen controversy raged for the next two years, not just in elite magazines like Poetry or Partisan Review, where poetry was a familiar topic, but also in such mainstream fixtures as Time, Newsweek, the New Republic, Atlantic Monthly, and the New Statesman, among others, as well as in the newspapers of America’s urban centers. From coast to coast, tempers ran high. The Saturday Review pushed the issue as hard as it could, with Hillyer using the platform given to him to charge the Library Fellows with being part of an anti-democratic, even Fascist conspiracy, and the Review using Hillyer to boost its circulation (circulation had been approximately 20,000 during the early years of World War II, but by 1955 had grown to 151,000).4 Critics hostile to Pound’s prize inveighed against the moral blindness of “the New Criticism” and the question of Pound’s award spread into a kind of referendum on modernist literature in general. In retrospect, it is clear that the controversy represented a kind of bourgeois counterattack on the elite arts. In what was perhaps the perfect sign of the times, poet Allen Tate (one of the Library Fellows who had awarded the Prize to Pound) challenged philosopher William Barrett to a duel. The question of the Pound award had become a conflagration that seemed to feed on itself. Public attention was still lingering over l’affaire Pound in the summer of 1951 when Hugh Kenner’s The Poetry of Ezra Pound dismissed it

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more or less for good. It did not do so by overtly hostile gestures, or by presenting incontrovertible arguments about the appropriateness of Pound’s Bollingen Prize. It was instead silent about Pound’s political activities, reticent about Pound’s biography, and studiously inattentive to the concerns available to most middle-class readers. It was a splendid performance that never for an instant allowed the relevance of anything besides aesthetic and strictly poetic questions. It was also a performance that would have been impossible at any earlier moment, let alone in the heat of the Bollingen controversy. The Poetry of Ezra Pound was as perfectly the creature of its historical moment as it was the creator of academic discourse on Ezra Pound. Or, as we shall see, re-creator. As American history records, or at least has recorded recently, few pioneers encounter previously uninhabited Edens. In staking and holding his claim, Kenner had both to displace earlier societies and also to defeat rival claims from other academic colonizers. Beyond this point, however, the pioneer analogy reverses itself. Because the kind of criticism Kenner pioneered did not relegate other critical discourses to reservations—it expelled them from the reservation. Other models, become insufficiently formalist and so unprofessional, were left to do their work outside of academe. With Kenner’s work, “Pound criticism” first developed as such. It was Kenner who transferred the study of Pound from middle- and high-brow popular monthlies and quarterlies into academic organs, superseded the review with the scholarly study, and transformed the poet and polemicist into an academic subject. Kenner’s crucial role in the opening and shaping of Pound studies is almost universally acknowledged. But in writing above that The Poetry of Ezra Pound “dismissed it for good” the “it” wasn’t just the controversy over Pound’s Bollingen Prize—it was also the reading public caught up in that controversy. Effectually, Kenner advised lay readers to leave poetry to the experts and, although there are certainly other, larger socio-historical forces that contributed to this leaving, leaving it to the experts is precisely what American readers have by and large done ever since. I have written elsewhere about Pound’s passionate and abiding interest in popularization, and it is worth remembering the extent to which Pound’s defenders found this aspect of his work something of an embarrassment.5 Certainly the anxious justifications of Tate, Berryman, or Carruth prepared Kenner’s

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ground, making expertise a recognized prerequisite for judgment and informing not only what Kenner argued but how. Most dramatically, perhaps, the terms in which the Library Fellows defended their judgment bristle just underneath Kenner’s opening, a first chapter, entitled “A Prefatory Distinction,” which dismisses the passion of the previous two years in two short sentences. Kenner wrote: The Pisan Cantos were … during a few months of 1949 more “in the news” (for irrelevant reasons) than perhaps any volume of poetry in modern times. They were widely written off as a dead loss, and all sorts of alarming implications were read into their author’s receipt of the Bollingen Prize for Poetry at the hands of a committee of fellow poets.6 A disarming representation to be sure: the scare quotes around “in the news,” and the suggestion that “a committee of fellow poets” cannot but be harmless, render bathetic the indignation and high feeling previously exhibited on both sides of the Bollingen question. The Pisan Cantos was not merely “in the news,” but the basis of Kenner’s saying so is evident in that parenthesis tossed off en passant: “(for irrelevant reasons).” That is, the parenthesis assumes that the appreciation of poetry has little to do with political apperception and does not submit this assumption to discussion. More than half a century later, Kenner’s “prefatory distinction” comes less easily, if at all. Nevertheless, Kenner could justly say that The Pisan Cantos were largely “written off ”; even favorable reviews like Richard Eberhart’s or J. V. Healy’s tended to celebrate isolated lyrical passages. Less positive reviewers, like William Rose Benét, allowed nothing more than that. C. H. Sisson tried to go such dismissals one better by praising the volume for its “continuous readability,”7 which quality he attributed to Pound’s masterful rhythms. But it is no accident that Sisson also chastised the “obsession” of the average reader with “understanding,” about which concept exists, he wrote, a great deal of confusion. Like most everyone else, Sisson found himself nearly at a loss to describe Pound’s content: few critics other than Pound’s antagonists showed much enthusiasm for engaging those difficult and dangerous questions. One critic proved exceptional in this regard, proposing an exegetical model that differed

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from Kenner’s in nature almost as sharply as it did in method. This critic’s name was Harold Holiday Watts. In his now virtually forgotten rivalry with Kenner he got the earlier start, but looked all too much like the confused latecomer in his finish. He got there first, but it was Kenner who prepared the trail that would be followed by the first generation of professional readers. In the history of Pound’s reception there is no other case where the fortunes of a particular study were so profoundly reversed by the time required for its own conception. I will give here primary consideration to Watts’s original essays, rather than to the later book, in order to dramatize the impact of the Bollingen controversy on the practice of literary criticism. Watts’s Ezra Pound and the Cantos (1952) was not published until nearly a year after Kenner’s groundbreaking book, but Watts had begun publishing its chapters as essays in 1947—a crucial two years before Kenner published his first essay on Pound. Initially, Watts’s essays attracted respectful notice. No one else had hitherto seemed to command so sure a grasp of Pound’s larger purposes. And yet, while Watts’s attempt to weigh the whole of Pound’s work in a single balance anticipated many features of the revisionist studies of the 1980s, Watts himself would on the whole be neglected. For this neglect there are several reasons, as we shall see, but chief among them must be the peculiar way in which Watts internalized Pound’s own resistance to the professional compartmentalization of knowledge. Watts reproduced too few of what had become the identifying features of “literary criticism” at a time when the profession of literary study was consumed with policing its own frontiers. Watts seems to have been oblivious to the socio-political pressures that were in the postwar era actively shaping the newly expanded and repurposed discipline of English. By contrast, we might remember T. S. Eliot’s 1956 lecture, “The Frontiers of Criticism,” delivered at the University of Minnesota to a stadium audience of 14,000 people. That kind of attention is almost unimaginable to us today, and although the size of that audience certainly owed much to Eliot’s 1948 Nobel Prize, its topic matters very much. The setting of boundaries and the delineation of critical method was in the postwar era veritably a preoccupation. Harold Watts failed to notice, and so failed to sustain the attention he initially had won. Ironically, the displacement of formalist literary theory—or perhaps better put the attempted sublation of

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the opposition between formalist and political analyses—after the 1960s by the varieties of continental critical theory did nothing to recuperate his reputation because his Aristotelian and exegetical vocabulary then came to seem too narrowly literary. Quite simply, Watts’s work has dated. Restored to the context of his rivalry with Kenner, however, it demonstrates the terrific impact of the Bollingen controversy on the shape of academic study. Indeed, the increasingly specialized nature of Pound studies in the early 1950s in itself bespeaks an academic cutting of losses, an attempt to guarantee intellectual freedom by withdrawing to a reduced but defensible domain. Watts perceived this less clearly than Kenner, and published a book for which there could be in 1952 no audience: it had been fractured and scattered by the public confusion and controversy generated by Pound’s award. Both Watts’s arguments and his method were consequently rendered untimely, an impertinence to lay readers and an unwanted intrusion to academics. By the same token, those readers inclined to regard Pound in primarily political terms felt no need for detailed exposition or nuanced commentary; those readers more favorably disposed towards Pound, or meeting his work for the first time, wanted to regard him primarily in poetic terms. Even Watts’s title, which makes The Cantos an interest secondary to the man who wrote them, bespeaks his emphasis. Kenner’s title, by contrast, identifies the poetry as its principal subject. Lest anyone should miss the distinction, Kenner nailed it down in an aggressively disapproving review.8 Watts would thereafter never again publish on Pound. Born in 1906, Watts’s PhD thesis (University of Illinois, 1932), considered Art in Fiction: The Intellectual and Artistic Development of Lord Lytton. The topic may seem an odd beginning for the man who would first expound The Cantos, but it should be remembered that Kenner’s first book (1947) was on G. K. Chesterton.9 Moreover, Watts’s relation of Lytton’s intellectual and artistic development anticipated his later work on Pound. It was that very emphasis, that subordination of aesthetic critique to intellectual history, which would draw Kenner’s fire. Generally, Watts’s academic writing (he was also a playwright) was exegetical in manner; indeed, by the time that he began writing essays on Pound he had already published his Modern Readers’ Guide to the Bible (1949). Watts’s exegetical proclivities, his tendency to bring to literary study techniques

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and emphases more usually associated with hermeneutics, gave to his work an explanatory power new in Pound’s reception. The comments of other critics offer ample testimony that this was so. Published in Cronos in March 1948, Watts’s second essay on Pound, “Philosopher at Bay,” attracted particular attention.10 UCLA professor (and one of the founding editors of the Norton Anthology of British Literature) Robert Adams, for instance, borrowed heavily from Watts in his aptly titled “A Hawk and a Handsaw for Ezra Pound.”11 Adams’s position might be guessed from his title phrase—an old idiom signifying someone who is perceptive and sees things correctly. Adams uses the phrase not about Pound himself, but Watts. Asking “what shall we make of Ezra Pound,” Adams began by reviewing Pound’s critical reception up to that point: In 1935 Horace Gregory said Ezra Pound had been mentally moribund since 1918. In 1938 Delmore Schwartz paid tribute to Pound as one of the great inventors of the age. In 1940 J. V. Healy said, approximately, that in a confusing and incoherent way Pound was a great poet. In 1942 Eunice Tietjens solemnly read him out of the pages of Poetry for giving aid and comfort to Mussolini. In 1943 the government indicted him for treason; in 1945 the indictment was dismissed and Ezra Pound was committed to Saint Elizabeth’s [sic] Federal Hospital, as a man of unsound mind. Now he reappears, the subject of a respectful volume by a member of a respected academy.12 The “respectful volume” was Watts’s, and Adams showed Watts himself respect in dubbing him “Pound’s expounder.”13 Adams’s essay is not quite a review of Watts’s book, but it overtly uses Watts’s attempt to erect an “arch over The Cantos” as a basis for the reconsideration of Pound’s work. Other critics, usually poet critics, had written sometimes insightfully about Pound, but Adams’s essay represents something new. In 1948, with Watts’s essays, Ezra Pound became subject to professional attention. Adams was not alone in his admiration for Watts’s work. Neither was the recognition Watts was beginning to receive limited to scholars. Soon after the appearance of Adams’s “Hawk and a Handsaw,” poet Lloyd Frankenberg, discussing both Cantos 1–84 and The Pisan Cantos for the New

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York Times Book Review, quoted approvingly from Watts’s “Philosopher at Bay.”14 Even “beat” poet, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, later praised Watts’s work and called it “exceptionally fair.”15 By the outbreak of hostilities over the Bollingen Prize, Watts was well on his way to establishing his own professional authority as well as some academic stature for Pound. No strong beginning was ever more wholly disappointed. By the time he gathered his essays and published them in book form (1952), the Bollingen controversy had utterly transformed the context in which any book on Pound would be received. If the questions Watts set out to answer remained pertinent, the way in which he asked and answered them did not. Decidedly academic, and unlikely to invite the attention of lay readers, Watts’s book was at the same time poorly calculated to appeal to the growing but defensive academic audience for Pound. What it offered was literally an “exposition,” since it endeavored to consider Pound quite apart from, or “out of,” his “position near the heart of the most influential form of modernist experimentation.”16 Still less germane to Watts’s work than Pound’s modernist credentials were Pound’s poetic credentials. Watts proposed the revolutionary potential of Pound’s language in terms that were not poetic, but political. By 1952, the furor over Pound’s award had rendered such a project threatening to the academic interests that were investing so much in Pound’s defense. Watts does not seem to have recognized how public events were changing the cultural disposition of literary criticism. His essay, “The Devices of Pound’s Cantos” (December 1949), for example, identifies rhetorical devices and explains what they do and why without ever attending to them as poetic qualities.17 Pound’s Cantos are, under Watts’s gaze, a locus of locutionary strategies without being a poem. By his own admission, Watts’s language is “barbarous” although he insisted it was nonetheless “quite precise.”18 In calling Pound a “Philosopher at Bay,” Watts intended both to celebrate Pound’s analysis of history and also to present that analysis as fundamentally philosophical rather than political. Invariably, Watts focused on ideas found in Pound’s poetry and not on the poetry as such. Watts was more interested in what he saw as Pound’s struggle with “nominalism” and with the “accuracy” of his words than he was with aesthetic questions of any kind. “Philosopher at Bay,” “Points on a Circle,” “Means to an End,” “The Devices of Pound’s Cantos”: Watts’s

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titles all suggest a fundamentally instrumentalist view of poetry. An exegete bent on demystification, he proceeded as though all in The Cantos that was primarily poetic was but another rhetorical device to attract and then hold attention. Even if he had done the work for “Means to an End” or for “The Devices of Pound’s Cantos” before the public reaction to Pound’s Bollingen Prize reached fever pitch, he made no substantial revisions before publishing them in Ezra Pound and the Cantos. This decision was a crucial error. Watts held back from the Bollingen controversy, and he appears to have decided simply to let it play itself out before publishing his study. When he did publish the book, “Devices,” like his earliest essay on Pound, “Means to an End,” retained their identities as individual chapters. For that matter, “Philosopher at Bay” was incorporated into the “Reckoning” that closes the volume. Tellingly, only his review The Pisan Cantos—“Points on the Circle”—does not constitute a recognizable part of the book. In other words, the one essay published late enough to have responded to the issues raised by the award is the one that Watts believed least integral to his argument. During the two and a half years that separated the appearance of Ezra Pound and the Cantos from the publication of the later essays, Watts published on Yeats (“Theology Bitter and Gay,” South Atlantic Quarterly, July 1950), but offered no revision of his work on Pound. Instead, his first chapter (“Mr. Pound’s Pilgrimage”) refers only briefly and obliquely to l’affaire Pound. Watts opens his argument by asserting the precedence of temporal over spatial dislocations without recognizing the epoch-marking critical dislocations of his own time. That he reprints “Means to an End” without revision is itself a decision that speaks volumes. The title identifies a central feature of Watts’s approach to Pound: his conviction that the poetry of The Cantos functions merely as a vehicle to bring the reader to Pound’s ultimately more significant goal. In Watts’s thesis, Pound’s long poem “is part—and the crucially important part—of a life-long struggle to alter the world as he conceives it.”19 Watts undoubtedly figured that his affirmation that poetry was “the crucially important part” of Pound’s “struggle to alter the world” demonstrated his appreciation of it. It was in 1947 a bold step, especially from an academic, to propose that there was anything redeemable—let alone praiseworthy—in Pound’s critique of modernity. But to describe in 1952 Pound’s poetry as “a part,”

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even “the crucially important part,” of Pound’s work was bound to attract professional derision. The Pisan Cantos had been awarded for their excellence as poetry, and the Library Fellows defended that award by avowing the only adventitious relation of Pound’s politics or anti-Semitism to that same excellence. In presenting Pound as a visionary or reformer first, and poet second, Watts unwittingly was playing into the hands of Pound’s detractors. Watts himself thought otherwise. Persuaded by Pound’s condemnations of usury as a cancer eating at the heart of Western culture, Watts sought to re-present Pound’s thesis in more systematic and philosophical language. Consider, for instance, his discussion of irony while explicating “The Devices of Pound’s Cantos.” After his very academic discussion of “unimplemented pronouns” takes him to the question of irony, Watts proposes that: Pound can approach the historically distant collective consciousness with beautiful dispassion (have we not suggested that, in The Cantos, continuation of the “mode of disavowal” signified the strongest kind of avowal?). He cannot approach the modern collective consciousness without the strongest stirrings of repudiating hated; what other emotion is possible whenever we walk in the realms of usury?20 Here is Watts celebrating what he takes to be Pound’s vision of modernity. His sympathy for Pound’s position is undisguised, if not exactly unprofessional (Kenner makes similar gestures). But his expectation is that in order to understand Pound better we need to leave Poundian locutions behind: we need to discuss Pound in terms other than his own. Watts had put things more directly a few pages earlier, in the context of discussing Pound’s use of masks: “The device of the mask limits strictly the use of pronouns; and the persistence of the mode of disavowal in the imagistic sections would not be enriched by the juggling of pronouns now in question, for—in The Cantos at least—what is disavowed is admired actually.”21 Watts’s focus on how Poundian irony informs history works in The Cantos is well-chosen. But his critical methodology requires him at every important turn to engage in a complex process

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of translation. “Disavowal” and “avowal” are immediately ethical terms that suggest an interest in something beyond the formal dynamics of the poem. The contrast with Kenner is dramatic. While Kenner strove wherever possible to adhere to Pound’s own figures and formulations, Watts deliberately avoided them. Each approach, of course, poses its own risks: Watts’s substitution of sometimes ugly philosophical jargon for Pound’s own often resonant phrases risks obfuscating generic transformations; Kenner’s approach risks sacrificing the distance necessary to critical understanding. Watts in any case ran into trouble, particularly with “Philosopher at Bay.” When the editors of Cronos magazine sent Watts’s manuscript to Pound for comment, Pound managed little more than exasperated ejaculations (“nuts!”) in the margin—leaving it to Dorothy to send a few curt sentences explaining to the editors (and so to Watts) that “my husband is too ill to enter into abstract discussion—largely irrelevant,” and that “he has never argued about his poetry.” Watts’s editors published Pound’s marginal responses along with the essay22 and, although the exchange between the perhaps overly earnest scholar and the unamused poet generated little readerly response, it anticipated in its small way the fracas of the following two years. Speculation about Pound’s philosophy and politics is, Dorothy adjured, “irrelevant.” It was precisely the word Kenner would use in laying to rest popular questions three years later in his observation that “The Pisan Cantos were … during a few months of 1949 more “in the news” (for irrelevant reasons) than perhaps any volume of poetry in modern times.” But in Pound’s case, especially given his own history, the answer carried an uncomfortable tone that suggests Pound recognized already that critical matters were out of his hands. Watts’s language can be clumsy in its abstraction, and less clear even than Pound’s own sometimes willfully metaphorical figures. For example, Watts calls the Poundian practice of suggesting identity through historical and formal change “time-binding.”23 Pound’s own phrase was “subject rhymes.” Any critic is free to depart from his subject’s critical vocabulary, but in this and other instances, Watts’s decision seems almost to be less a critical decision than a function of his having redacted The Cantos into a chapter in that ancient contention between realism and nominalism. Watts considers “the actual effect of the poem” not aesthetically, but in

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terms of “general yet comprehensible statements.”24 As Kenner wrote in his review, Watts “operates at an incredible remove from the words of the poem.”25 In publishing “Philosopher at Bay,” the editors of Cronos expressed their relief that “here at last was an unbiased study, putting in clear light and sharp focus the various ideas which led both to [Pound’s] Cantos and to his political actions.” Watts, they believed, had “ably” completed the first careful examination of Pound’s “works.” The sense of unbiased examination in Watts’s study is a function of the “remove” he preserved from Pound’s language. Even so, Watts was by no means unbiased; he advocated what he took to be Pound’s position, and wrote in a manner that bespoke his confidence that any thinking reader who came to understand the poem would respond as he had himself. This universalizing of his own perception was not unique to Watts; Kenner did it too. But Watts’s confidence that “we” experience a poem in the same way that “we” do a philosophical treatise was an equivocation that other critics refused to allow. Undervaluing that crucial difference risked re-entering the arena of Saturday Review-style combat. Watts’s first essay on Pound, as we have seen, appeared in 1947, but he took five years to produce his full monograph. Kenner’s first short pieces about Pound began appearing about two years later (in the winter, 1949 issue of Hudson Review). But Kenner’s The Poetry of Ezra Pound was in print by summer of 1951—nearly a year before Watts’s book. Consequently, it was Kenner whom we remember as author of the first monograph devoted to Pound. Where Watts maintained a professional distance from the poet, Kenner cultivated a relationship with Pound and endeavored to represent Pound’s work almost entirely in Poundian language. Kenner’s approach irritated some readers, who found his critical vocabulary of “radiant tensions”26 a private and irritating idiolect, but Kenner deliberately developed this language as a corrective to the increasingly mechanistic efficiency of scholarly analysis. In particular, discoursing on “The Moving Image,” Kenner addressed the inadequacy of the critical models developed by I. A. Richards and, more pointedly, William Empson. The difficulty of Pound’s poetry, Kenner affirmed, differs in kind from the kinds of difficulty respected by academic analysis: while “the criticism stemming from Empsonian

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dissection of symbol clusters has made everyone familiar with intellectual complexity, this order of complexity … bears no necessary relation to the inherent voltage, to the value of the work in question as a human product.”27 Although Kenner’s mixture of organic and kinetic metaphors might exemplify the occasional confusions of his language, it leaves no doubts as to its aim. Kenner wishes to establish a poem as a contained dynamic, or process, as opposed to conceiving of it in terms of static relations and fixed structures. In this way, the complexity of Pound’s poetry ceases to be the sign of some pedantic obscurity and becomes a sign of its vitality. Scholars who, as Wordsworth wrote, “murder to dissect” are precluded from the outset of detecting any signs of life; hence “Empsonian methods find no handles by which to take hold of Pound’s verse.” “This is not,” Kenner offers, “to be ungrateful to Empson, who has forged analytical tools of the utmost value”; but “one cannot be grateful to the obfuscators who have confused the dialectical-rhetorical analytics of Messrs. Empson and Richards with the ‘new criticism’ instigated by Mr. Eliot.”28 When Watts’s book finally appeared, Kenner avoided making an occasion of its publication, and he did not in fact publish his objections until reviewing Pound’s translation of The Great Digest and the Unwobbling Pivot. “Watts has done some things right,”29 Kenner allowed: Watts was the first academic to affirm in print that The Cantos offer a sustained and serious purpose. But for all the boldness in Watts having claimed for Pound the dignity of a “philosopher” held at bay by a system unwilling to face its own corruption, Kenner faulted the impulse to turn a poet into a philosopher. Kenner understood his historical moment. He recognized the postwar need to preserve for poetry a special status and a protected place in cultural life. It has to be noted, however, that the harshest critic of what Kenner wrought was Pound himself, although Kenner certainly won the master’s approval in ways Watts decidedly did not. Pound had early on advised Kenner to use what Walter Baumann would later make the title of his book, The Rose in the Steel Dust (1967). Kenner’s more generic title left him more room to pursue his own perceptions, but Pound complained— in a letter to Patricia Hutchins—“I usually find my own simple statements more comprehensible than the eggsplantation by flatchested highbrows.

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H. K. definitely AIMED at Yale grad/school etc. and frankly said so.”30 But in a letter to Huntington Cairns, Pound was more charitable: “Kenner has read the text and does not talk nonsense, if you MUST get all yr/ information at 2nd. Hand.”31 Pound remained uncomfortable in having his writing mediated by academic authority, and in having that mediation mark him as a necessarily erudite subject. Robert Lowell complained to Pound that Kenner “seems to have read no one except you and Eliot and Dr. Leavis (his style is barbarous earnest parody of you and Leavis).”32 But on the whole Lowell’s reaction to these poets was at odds with that of other reviewers. Generally, Kenner was praised for bringing professional rigor to the evaluation of Pound. His purpose was to make a case for Pound’s poetry as poetry: to submit that “rationalized rhetorical analysis” abets the lifeless scholarly orthodoxy that in America made common cause with Saturday reviewers against the New Criticism, against modernist poetry, and against Pound. Kenner’s strategy here thus anticipates those grumblings about “the Pound cult”; Pound is not for Kenner a special case for criticism but a test case demonstrating it is not Pound who needs academe but academe that needs Pound. By emphasizing Eliot’s role in the formation of New Criticism, Kenner argues the value of academe schooling itself in the poetry of the modernist masters. In the process, Kenner champions the vitality of New Criticism as much as he does the vitality of Pound’s poetry. This association of the New Criticism with Eliot, and of Eliot with Pound, implies both Pound’s prestige and the necessity of Kenner’s approach. One important sign of how well Kenner understood his moment is the way his book anticipated the work that T. S. Eliot subsequently did in framing the collection, Literary Essays of Ezra Pound (1954). Eliot sought to demonstrate Pound’s critical seriousness by dissociating it from his voluminous topical prose—political, economic, and cultural. Eliot proceeded by means of series of distinctions. To be precise, he distinguished between man and poet, and between poet and critic. Pound, Eliot affirms, is a particular kind of critic, whose preoccupation is not with understanding but with craft. This demonstration is the primary work of his edition of Literary Essays of Ezra Pound. More than the convenience it proposes to be, Literary Essays dramatically redacts Pound’s work and career, either eliding or de-emphasizing Pound’s tireless essays at changing

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the world. “Pound’s literary criticism is the most contemporary criticism of its kind,” Eliot affirmed, “but the limitation of its kind is in its concentration upon the craft of letters, and of poetry especially.”33 I have argued before that this idea of Pound’s work would be ironic from any quarter, but coming from Eliot and his more than 30 years’ experience of Pound’s decidedly extra-aesthetic tirades, it is especially striking.34 No argument in Eliot’s career was bolder—or more successful: “For well over 60 years now Literary Essays has been the only one of Pound’s critical books to remain consistently in print; and between 1954 and 1968 it was the only serious collection still in print in either Britain or America.”35 Eliot accomplished his redaction with unprecedented agility, with a touch so light and familiar that forty years later we still hardly notice its pressure. We do not notice because the frame of Literary Essays has in large part become the frame through which we view the sprawling and heterogeneous body of Pound’s prose. The process begun by the Fellows in American Literature of the Library of Congress in defending their award of the Bollingen Prize to Pound here assumes its classic form, a form reproduced in most Pound scholarship through the late 1970s. Looking back on this debate over six decades later, Kenner’s victory seems both historically necessary and methodologically just. But it was, all the same, to borrow that phrase of Maynard Keynes that, as Nancy Gish has observed, resonates so deeply in Eliot’s The Waste Land, “A Carthaginian Peace.”36 Kenner’s victory was so total as practically to obliterate the historical record and make the course charted seem inevitable. It was not. Of course, the at least temporarily absolute scale of Kenner’s victory is not all on him. Kenner was as much the creature of his historical moment as he was its architect: the same cultural and economic forces that favored the institutionalization of the New Criticism served Kenner, even though he himself was never really a new critic (he was too much a reader of Pound for that). But the profession did not rejoin questions about Pound’s politics or ethics until the next time changes in critical methodology produced widespread, non-academic outrage: the so-called “culture wars” of the Reagan/Thatcher era and immediately after. When those questions reappeared, they did so with all the energy of the repressed. Those wars, too, have now passed and our challenge remains how best to present Pound to a world he himself once

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again could not wholly have anticipated. The words of a dead man are modified in the guts of the living precisely as serious readers struggle to find ways to keep the poetry they love alive, and they typically do that by attempting to make it new.

Harold H. Watts’s Publications on Pound: Watts, Harold H. “Pound’s Cantos: Means to an End.” In Ezra Pound Issue. Special issue of Yale Poetry Review 6 ([fall?] 1947): 9–20. Watts, Harold H. “Philosopher At Bay.” Cronos 2 (March 1948): 1–17. Watts, Harold H. “Points on the Circle.” Sewanee Review 57 (Spring 1949): 303–6. Watts, Harold H. “The Devices of Pound’s Cantos.” In a special issue of Quarterly Review of Literature, 5, no. 2 (December 1949): 147–73. Watts, Harold H. Ezra Pound and The Cantos. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1952; Chicago, IL: Henry Regnery, 1952. Watts, Harold H. “Reckoning.” Reprinted from Ezra Pound and The Cantos in Ezra Pound: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Walter E. Sutton, 98–114. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice, 1963.

Notes

Chapter One: Pound’s Modern (Metrical) Education   Ira Nadel Ezra Pound, Selected Letters 1907–1941, ed. D. D. Paige (New York: New Directions, 1971), 87. 2 Ezra Pound, The Spirit of Romance (New York: New Directions, 1968), [6]. 3 Pound, Selected Letters, 87. 4 All writers outside the curriculum as he observes in Guide to Kulchur (New York: New Directions, 1970), 215–16. 5 Especially useful on this topic is Anita Christina George’s “The New Alexandrians: The Modernist Revival of Hellenist Poetics in the Poetry of T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound.” Dissertation, 1997. University of Toronto. George carefully articulates the poetic revolution begun in Alexandria in the third century bc by the Greek poet Callimachus and his circle, revised in the first century bc by the Roman poets Catullus, Ovid, Propertius, and Virgil. She essentially shows how Pound attempts to fuse the large-scale epic with the small-scale lyric seeking an alternate to traditional Homeric unity. The solution was a new associative unity that links disjunctive elements of one to the other. The generic codes of greater epic mix with those of the lyric using an associative technique. There are also elements of performance: by incorporating or attempting Hellenistic prosody, Pound was showing that he experienced the poem as he hoped the audience would. The Homeric age understood poetry as prepared for performance. Only in the Hellenist age, argues George, was it written to be read, “the absence of public performances” 1

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affecting its formal qualities, particularly that of meter (George 7). Pound’s poetry was always public and performative. But when books became the primary mode of communicating poetry, it profoundly impacted poetics. Texts to be read became denser and contained more allusions in the Hellenistic Period, becoming more self-conscious and intertextual, often displaying the poet’s intimate knowledge of literary tradition. Alexandrian poetics is reactionary, its poetry highly allusive, obscure, erudite and scholarly, self-conscious and aware of its status as art and concerned with literary tradition. There was also a fondness of blurring “linguistic, generic, spatial and temporal boundaries” while also being musical (George 11–12). Alexandrian poetry also resists the epic tradition. 6 Pound, Selected Letters, 87. See Henry Thornton Wharton, Sappho: Memoir, Text, Selected Renderings, and a Literal Translation (London: John Lane, 1895). 7 Eileen Gregory, H.D. and Hellenism: Classic Lines (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 150–51. 8 Orla Polton, “To Break the Hexameter: Classical Prosody in Ezra Pound’s Early Cantos,” Modern Philology 115, no. 2 (Nov. 2017): 266–67. Polton suggests Pound’s inaccurate sense of “quantitative meter.” James Powell also argues that Pound does not essentially contrast quantitative and accentual meters but adapts “rhythmic shapes generated by Greek quantitative verse to the capability of English accentual techniques” in “The Light of Vers Libre,” Paideuma 8, no. 1 (1979): [3]–34, in Polton, 267. 9 Pound, “A Retrospect,” in Ezra Pound, Literary Essays, ed. T. S. Eliot (London: Faber and Faber, 1954), 12. 10 Pound, Selected Letters, 181. 11 Peter Liebregts, Translations of Greek Tragedy in the Work of Ezra Pound (London: Bloomsbury, 2019), 16. Pound, “a brace of axioms for all poetry.” Townsman I.3 (July 1938): 16. In 1962, Pound added that “the best free verse comes from an attempt to get back to quantitative meter” (Pound interviewed by Donald Hall, Paris Review 28 [1962]: 26). 12 E. R. Curtius, “T.S. Eliot,” in Essays in European Literature, tr. Michael Kowal (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973), 359. 13 Ezra Pound, Poems and Translations, ed. Richard Sieburth (New York: Library of America, 2003), 3 (“Hilda’s Book”). 14 Pound, Selected Letters, 181. 15 Pound, Selected Letters, 179. 16 Pound, Selected Letters, 179. 17 Pound, Selected Letters, 4. 18 Ezra Pound, Ezra Pound to His Parents: Letters 1895–1929, ed. Mary de Rachewiltz, A. David Moody, and Joanna Moody (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 5.

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19 Pound, Selected Letters, 9. 20 Pound, Selected Letters, 95. Pound’s knowledge of Greek and Greek prosody has been debated for some time and remains unresolved. See Peter Liebregts’s recent discussion in Translations of Greek Tragedy in the Work of Ezra Pound (London: Bloomsbury, 2019), 12–18 and 19 fn. 5. Also helpful is Lea Culligan Flack, “Classical Literature,” in New Pound Studies, ed. Mark Byron (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 9–25. 21 Peter Liebregts, “The Classics,” in Ezra Pound in Context, ed. Ira B. Nadel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 171–80. 22 Noel Stock, The Life of Ezra Pound (New York: Pantheon, 1970), 21. 23 “Raphaelite Latin,” in Ezra Pound’s Poetry and Prose Contributions to Periodicals, ed. Lea Baechler, A. Walton Litz, and James Longenbach (New York: Garland Publishing, 1991) vol. I, 5–8. 24 Omar Pound and Robert Spoo, eds., Ezra Pound and Margaret Cravens: A Tragic Friendship (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1988), 89. 25 Pound, Poems and Translations, 231. 26 Ezra Pound and Dorothy Shakespear: Their Letters 1909–1914, ed. Omar Pound and A. Walton Litz (New York: New Directions, 1984), 63. 27 Ezra Pound and Dorothy Shakespear, 64. 28 Pound, Selected Letters, 87. 29 Pound, Poems and Translations, 289. 30 K. K. Ruthven, A Guide to Ezra Pound’s Persona, 1926 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1969), 190, and Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1971), 54. 31 For commentary on both “Apparuit” and “Papyrus,” see A. David Moody, Ezra Pound: Poet, vol. I (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 168–69 and Kenner, The Pound Era. His chapter “The Muse in Tatters” (54–75) is especially revealing. Also useful is David Gordon, “Ezra Pound to Mary Barnard: An ABC of Metrics,” Paideuma 23, no. 1 (1994): 159–71. Robert Graves and Laura Riding offer a more negative reading of “Papyrus” in A Survey of Modern Poetry (London: Heinemann, 1927 [218–19]). Graves’s playful version of “Papyrus” is his poem, “In Broken Images” (1929). 32 Glenn Hughes, Imagism and the Imagists: A Study of Modern Poetry (New York: Biblio & Tannen, 1931), 123. 33 Kenner, The Pound Era, 53. 34 Pound, Literary Essays, 9. 35 Ezra Pound to His Parents, 179. 36 T. E. Hulme, Further Speculations, ed. Samuel Hynes (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1955), xviii. 37 Stephen J. Adams, Poetic Designs: An Introduction to Meters, Verse Forms and Figures of Speech (Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview Press, 1997), 175. 38 Adams, Poetic Designs, 175.

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39 Pound, Literary Essays, 421. Pound is commenting on Eliot’s “Reflections on vers libre,” New Statesman, March 3, 1917, accessed December 1, 2017, https:// www.newstatesman.com/culture/culture/2013/05/t-s-eliot-vers-libre. 40 T. S. Eliot, “Ezra Pound: His Metric and Poetry,” in To Criticize the Critic (London: Faber and Faber, 1965), 165. 41 Eliot, 168. 42 Eliot, 169. 43 Eliot, 170. 44 Eliot, 171. 45 Eliot, 172. 46 Eliot, 172. 47 Eliot, 174. 48 Pound, Poems and Translations, 244. 49 Pound, Literary Essays, 7. 50 Pound, Selected Letters, 91. 51 Williams in Mary Barnard’s Assault on Mount Helicon (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984), 286. 52 T. S. Eliot will echo this view in his 1916 essay “Classics in English,” Poetry 9 (November 1916): 101–4. 53 Eileen Gregory in H.D. and Hellenism carefully outlines the state of the shifting classical model and the so-called Alexandrian Project in the early twentieth century in pp. 38–52. 54 Pound, Selected Letters, 50. 55 Pound, Selected Letters, 49. 56 Ezra Pound in Barnard, 282. 57 Pound, Selected Letters, 261. 58 Pound, The Spirit of Romance, [6]. 59 Pound, Literary Essays, 432 (Obit for FMF). 60 See Stephen Adams, “The Metrical Contract of ‘The Cantos,’” Journal of Modern Literature 15 (1989): 55–72. Also useful is Orla Polton, “To Break the Hexameter: Classical Prosody in Ezra Pound’s Early Cantos,” Modern Philology 115, no. 2 (2017): 264–88.

Chapter Two: The First Imagists   William Pratt Ezra Pound, Personae: The Shorter Poems, ed. Lea Baechler and A. Walton Litz (New York: New Directions, 1990), 3. 2 W. H. Auden, The Complete Works, vol. III: Prose 1946–1955 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 692. 3 Ezra Pound, Literary Essays, ed. T. S. Eliot (London: Faber and Faber, 1954), 4. 4 Pound, Literary Essays, 4. 1

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5 Pound, Literary Essays, 23. 6 Pound, Personae, 266. 7 Hilda Doolittle (H.D.), End to Torment: A Memoir of Ezra Pound (New York: New Directions, 1979), 18. 8 Pound, Personae, 111. 9 Willard Spiegelmann, “A Poem Distills Life and Death into Two Lines,” Wall Street Journal, January 6, 2017, accessed online August 3, 2020, https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-poem-distills-life-and-death-intotwo-lines-1483735368. 10 “How I Began,” facsimile in Ezra Pound’s Poetry and Prose Contributions to Periodicals, ed. Lea Baechler, A. Walton Litz, and James Longenbach (New York: Garland Publishing, 1991) vol. I, 147. 11 Pound, Personae, 111. 12 Ezra Pound, Selected Letters 1907–1941, ed. D. D. Paige (New York: New Directions, 1971), 11. 13 H.D., “Epigram,” in The Imagist Poem: Modern Poetry in Miniature, ed. William Pratt (New Orleans, LA: University of New Orleans Press, 2008), 95. 14 William Carlos Williams, “El Hombre,” in The Imagist Poem, 105. 15 Marianne Moore, “To a Chameleon,” in The Imagist Poem, 148.

Chapter Three: Pound and/or Franklin: A Reading of Canto 31   John Gery 1

Stephen Morgan Friedman, “UNIVERSITY HISTORY: A Brief History of the University of Pennsylvania.” Penn University Archives and Records Center, accessed June 10, 2017, https://archives.upenn.edu/exhibits/ penn-history/brief-history#container. 2 A later, indirect reference to Franklin occurs in Canto 80 when Pound mentions the Franklin Inn Club in central Philadelphia: “And the Franklin Inn Club …/ and young fellows go out to the colonies/ but go on paying their dues/ but old William was right in contending/ that the crumblin of a fine house/ profits no one/ (Celtic or otherwise)” (80/527). While the reference to this revered inn is notable, Franklin’s name here is not thematically significant. 3 In 1922, T. S. Eliot presented Pound as a gift his own ten-volume “Memorial” edition of The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, ed. R. Johnston, A. Ellery, and A. Adgate Lipscomb (Washington, DC: Thomas Jefferson Memorial Association, 1905, 1907), which Eliot’s father had given him. See Noel Stock, The Life of Ezra Pound. Expanded ed. (San Francisco, CA: North Point Press, 1982), 247. In August 1930 Pound apparently first encountered one volume of The Works of John Adams, Second President of the United States, ed. Charles Francis Adams (Boston, MA: Little

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Brown, 1850–56) in Rapallo and wrote to Olga Rudge of his intentions to purchase the ten-volume edition; in April 1931 he traveled to Paris for six weeks to read Adams’s works at the Bibliothèque Nationale, but finally purchased a set in 1938. See David Ten Eyck, Ezra Pound’s Adams Cantos (London: Bloomsbury, 2012), 17–18, 24. Nothing indicates he encountered, read from, or purchased the ten-volume works of Franklin similarly published in 1905–7. 4 Ezra Pound, “The Jefferson–Adams Letters as a Shrine and a Monument,” in Selected Prose, 1909–1965, ed. William Cookson (New York: New Directions, 1973), 148. 5 Pound, “The Jefferson–Adams Letters,” 148. 6 Benjamin Franklin, Writings, Selected with notes by J. A. Leo Lemay (New York: Library of America, 1987), 329. 7 Franklin, 341–42. 8 Franklin, 339. 9 On this point, John L. Puckett and Mark Frazier Lloyd cite Franklin’s letter to Samuel Johnson (August 23, 1750): “‘I think with you, that nothing is of more importance for the public weal, than to form and train up youth in wisdom and virtue, Wise and good men are, in my opinion, the strength of a state: much more so than riches and arms, which, under the management of Ignorance and Wickedness, often draw on destruction, instead of providing for the safety of a people.’” John L. Puckett and Mark Frazier Lloyd, Becoming Penn: The Pragmatic American University, 1950–2000 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), 331. 10 Ezra Pound, Guide to Kulchur (New York: New Directions, 1938), 51–52. 11 Pound, Guide to Kulchur, 53. 12 In “A Retrospect” (1916) is where Pound first writes, “Go in fear of abstractions”; twenty-six years later in “A Visiting Card,” originally published in Italian in 1942, then translated into English by John Drummond and published by Peter Russell in 1952, he writes, “Thought is organic, It needs these ‘gristly facts’. The idea is not achieved until it goes into action. The idea is completed by the word. It is completed by its going into action.” See Ezra Pound, “A Retrospect,” in Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. T. S. Eliot (New York: New Directions, 1935, 1968), 5; Ezra Pound, Selected Prose, 1909–1965, ed. William Cookson (New York: New Directions, 1973), 334. 13 Franklin, 986. 14 The Latin, quoted from Horace’s Odes. I.7.27, translates, “Never despair.” See note in Franklin, Writings, 1544. 15 Franklin, 986–87. 16 Pound, “What Is Money For?”, Selected Prose, 292. 17 Pound, “What Is Money For?”, Selected Prose, 292.

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18 Ezra Pound, Early Writings: Poems and Prose, ed. Ira B. Nadel (New York: Penguin, 2005), 213. 19 Franklin, 1317. 20 Franklin, 1318. 21 Ten Eyck, 21. 22 Ten Eyck, 18. 23 Ten Eyck, 22. 24 Carroll F. Terrell, A Companion to the Cantos of Ezra Pound (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984), 120. 25 Ten Eyck, 53. 26 Stephen J. Adams, “The Cantos: Eleven New Cantos XXXI–XLI,” in The Ezra Pound Encyclopedia, ed. Demetres P. Tryphonopoulos and Stephen J. Adams (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2005), 31. 27 Pound, “The Jefferson–Adams Letters,” 147. Pound adds: “From 1760 to 1826 two civilised men lived and to a considerable extent reigned in America. They did not feel themselves isolated phenomena … . [And] they both wrote an excellent prose which has not, so far as I know, been surpassed in our fatherland” (147–48). 28 John Adams, “John Adams to Thomas Jefferson, 15 November 1813,” Founders Online, National Archives, last modified March 30, 2017, accessed June 15, 2017, http://founders.archives.gov/documents/ Jefferson/03-06-02-0478. [Original source: The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Retirement Series, vol. 6, 11 March to 27 November 1813, ed. J. Jefferson Looney (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), 621–27.] 29 Adams, “John Adams to Thomas Jefferson, 15 November 1813,” Founders Online. 30 Adams, “John Adams to Thomas Jefferson, 15 November 1813,” Founders Online. 31 See Thomas Jefferson, “Thomas Jefferson to Charles Thomson, 9 January 1816,” Founders Online, National Archives, accessed June 4, 2020, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/03-09-02-0216. [Original source: The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Retirement Series, vol. 9, September 1815 to April 1816, ed. J. Jefferson Looney (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), 340–42.] 32 Terrell, 123. 33 William Cookson, A Guide to The Cantos of Ezra Pound. Revised and Expanded (New York; Persea Books, 2001), 48. For a dismissive view of Gassendi in The Cantos, see Noel Stock, Reading the Cantos: A Study in Meaning in Ezra Pound (New York: Minerva Press, 1966), 23–24. 34 Franklin is mentioned nineteen times in the Adams Cantos, mostly quoted in Adams’s writings—from a dismissive reference to “the ethics, so called,/ of Franklin” (62/345) to Adams’s praise for Franklin’s charm

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Notes to pages 50–57

and popularity among both the French and the English (63/351, 65/372), to his successful collaborations with Adams, despite their philosophic differences, in securing support, weapons, and loans for the Americans when both were acting as “commissioners” abroad (68/397). Two lines attributed to Franklin in Canto 52, “Remarked Ben: better keep out the jews / or yr/ grandchildren will curse you” (52/257), are from a document proven to be a forgery. See Terrell, 201; Cookson, 73. 35 Pound, “The Jefferson–Adams Letters,” 148.

Chapter Four: Pound’ s Vorticist Theory and H.D.’s “Oread” Yoshiko Kita 1 Ezra Pound, “Vortex,” Blast 1 (June 1914; repr., Santa Rosa, CA: Black Sparrow Press, 1989), 153. 2 Pound, Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir (New York: New Directions, 1970), 89. 3 A shorter Japanese version of this paper, “Vorticism and H.D.—‘the point of maximum energy,’” was read at the 38th Annual Meeting of The Ezra Pound Society of Japan, 29 October 2016, Waseda University, Tokyo, and was included later in Ezra Pound Review 20 (March 2018): 39–49. I would like to express my deep gratitude to the anonymous reviewers, who helped me revise my earlier manuscript. 4 William C. Wees, Vorticism and the English Avant-Garde (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1972), 3. 5 Wees, Vorticism and the English Avant-Garde, 6–7. 6 Wees, Vorticism and the English Avant-Garde, 3. 7 The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, ed. Alex Preminger and T. V. F. Brogan (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 1367. 8 Rebecca Beasley, Ezra Pound and the Visual Culture of Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 49. 9 Pound, Gaudier-Brzeska, 81. 10 Pound, Gaudier-Brzeska, 86. 11 Pound, Gaudier-Brzeska, 89. 12 H.D., Collected Poems 1912–1944, ed. Louis L. Martz (New York: New Directions, 1983), 55. Pound quoted this poem in “Vortex,” 154. 13 Louis L. Martz, introduction to Collected Poems 1912–1944, by H.D. (New York: New Directions, 1983), xiv. 14 Pound, Gaudier-Brzeska, 89. 15 J. B. Harmer, Victory in Limbo: Imagism 1908–1917 (London: Secker & Warburg, 1975), 131. 16 It is said that Hokusai had already conceived this kind of composition as early as Kyowa period (1801–4). See Seiji Nagata, Landscape, vol. 2 of Hokusai Museum (Tokyo: Shueisha, 1990), 41.

Notes to pages 58–64

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Yone Noguchi, Hokusai (London: Elkin Mathews, 1925), 25. Seiji Nagata, Landscape, 41. Pound, “Vortex,” 154. As for the relationship between modernist poetics and Japanese woodblock prints, in another essay, “H.D. and Hokusai: ‘The Odd Angle,’” I have compared “Oread” with Richard Aldington’s “The River,” based on supposedly Utamaro or Toyokuni. See Yoshiko Kita, “H.D. and Hokusai: ‘The Odd Angle,’” in Diversions: A Celebration for James Kirkup on His Eightieth Birthday, ed. James Hogg (Salzburg: Salzburg University, 1998), 284–95. 21 H.D., Asphodel, ed. Robert Spoo (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 1992), 10. 22 H.D., Asphodel, 10. 23 This print is included in the second volume of the original One Hundred Views of Mount Fuji along with Kaijyo no Fuji. 24 Henry Smith, commentaries on the plates to the English edition of One Hundred Views of Mount Fuji by Hokusai (New York: Thames & Hudson, 1988), 205. 25 H.D., Her (HERmione) (London: Virago Press, 1984), 13. 26 Hokusai, note on One Hundred Views of Mount Fuji. English trans. by Arthur Waley, in the “Catalogue of Japanese Illustrated Books,” 77. See Arthur Waley, “Catalogue of Japanese Illustrated Books” (Typescript), the Department of Japanese Antiquities, the British Museum, London. Waley introduced Oriental literature to Western readers from the beginning to the mid-twentieth century. He obtained a post in the print room of the British Museum in 1913. In Tribute to Freud, H.D. mentions that she met Waley in London in the very early days. So, it was possible for H.D. to view Japanese prints through Waley in London also. See H.D., Tribute to Freud (Manchester: Carcanet, 1985), 167. I would like to thank the Department of Japanese Antiquities, the British Museum, especially Ms. Sally Morton, for their permission to view those records on Hokusai and to quote during my doctoral research at Durham University, England. 27 Akiko Mabuchi, “The Hokusai Phenomenon in Japonisme,” in Hokusai and Japonisme (Tokyo: The National Museum of Western Art, 2017), 329. 28 Mabuchi, “The Hokusai Phenomenon,” 328. 29 Mabuchi, “The Hokusai Phenomenon,” 329. 30 H.D., Collected Poems, 18–19. 31 H.D., Collected Poems, 19. 32 Peter Morse, “Hokusai’s World Wide Reputation,” in Dai Hokusai Ten [Great Hokusai Exhibition] (Tokyo: Tobu Museum Art, 1993), xiv–xvi. 33 See the letter to Paul K. Hisada, August 13, 1917, in Amy Lowell, ed. Damon S. Foster, (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1935; repr., Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1966), 55.

17 18 19 20

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Notes to pages 64–72

34 See, for instance, Diana Collecott, “H.D.: IMAGISTE?” in Homage to Imagism, ed. William Pratt and Robert Richardson (New York: AMS Press, 1992), 113–27. 35 Caroline Zilboorg, “Joint Venture: Richard Aldington, H. D. and the Poets’ Translation Series,” Philological Quarterly 70, no. 1 (Winter 1991): 70. 36 Bradford Morrow, “Blueprint to the Vortex,” Blast 1 (June 1914; repr., Santa Rosa, CA: Black Sparrow Press, 1989), v.

Chapter Five: Fenollosa and Pound: The Authorship Question of The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry  Lin Wei 1 Haun Saussy, “Fenollosa Compounded: A Discrimination,” in Ernest Fenollosa and Ezra Pound, The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry: A Critical Edition, ed. Haun Saussy et al. (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 2. 2 Ezra Pound, “Retrospect on the Fenollosa Paper,” in The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry: A Critical Edition, 174. 3 J. J. Wilhelm, Ezra Pound in London and Paris (1908–1925) (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1990), 130. 4 Ernest Fenollosa and Ezra Pound, “The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry,” The Little Review (September 1919): 62. See The Little Review 6 (1919–1920) (New York: Kraus Reprint Corporation, 1967). 5 Ernest Fenollosa, “The Chinese Written Language as a Medium for Poetry (Final draft, ca. 1906, with Pound’s notes, 1914–16),” in The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry: A Critical Edition, 104. 6 These two texts were included by the 2008 critical edition. See 105–43. 7 The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry: A Critical Edition, 132. 8 Ernest Fenollosa, “Chinese and Japanese Poetry. Draft of Lecture I. Vol. II.,” in The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry: A Critical Edition, 133. 9 “Melopoeia”, “Phanopoeia,” and “Logopoetia” are three means proposed by Pound “to charge language with meaning of the utmost possible degree”. See Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading (New York: New Directions, 1960), 63. 10 Fenollosa, “Chinese and Japanese Poetry. Draft of Lecture I. Vol. II.,” 127. 11 Fenollosa, “Chinese and Japanese Poetry. Draft of Lecture I. Vol. II.,” 135–37. 12 Fenollosa, “Chinese and Japanese Poetry. Draft of Lecture I. Vol. II.,” 134. 13 Pound, “Retrospect on the Fenollosa Paper,” 174. 14 See Ernest Fenollosa, “The Coming Fusion of East and West,” in The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry: A Critical Edition, 155, 161.

Notes to pages 72–77

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15 A. C. Graham, Poems of the Late T’ang, Harmondsworth (Middlesex: Penguin, 1977), 13–15. See Saussy, “Fenollosa Compounded: A Discrimination,” 35. 16 Saussy, “Fenollosa Compounded: A Discrimination,” 4. 17 Haroldo de Campos, Ideograma: Lógica, Poesia, Linguagem (Sãn Paulo: Editora Cultrix, 1977), 43–44. Cf. Haun Saussy, “Fenollosa Compounded: A Discrimination,” 22. 18 Ezra Pound, “VORTEX,” in Blast No. 1, ed. Wyndham Lewis (London: John Lane, The Bodley Head, 1914), 153. 19 Ezra Pound, “Vorticism,” Fortnightly Review (September 1, 1914): 461–71. See Harriet Zinnes, ed., Ezra Pound and the Visual Arts (New York: New Directions, 1980), 207. 20 Donald Davie, Articulate Energy: An Inquiry into the Syntax of English Poetry (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1955), 38–40. See also Saussy, “Fenollosa Compounded: A Discrimination,” 21. 21 William C. Wees, Vorticism and the English Avant-Garde (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1972), 134–35. 22 See Ira B. Nadel, “The Lives of Ezra Pound,” in Ezra Pound in Context, ed. Ira B. Nadel (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 159. 23 Ezra Pound, “Dogmatic Statement on the Game and Play of Chess,” in Blast No. 2 (War Number), ed. Wyndham Lewis (London: John Lane, The Bodley Head, 1915), 19. 24 Saussy, “Fenollosa Compounded: A Discrimination,” 18. 25 Ernest Fenollosa, “The Chinese Written Language as a Medium for Poetry (Final draft, ca. 1906, with Pound’s notes, 1914–16),” 81. 26 Ibid., 95. 27 Ibid., 90; Ernest Fenollosa, The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, ed. Ezra Pound (San Francisco, CA: City Light Books, 1936), 16. 28 Sacvan Bercovitch, ed., The Cambridge History of American Literature (Vol. 5) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 131. 29 Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for Everyone and Nobody, trans. Graham Parkes (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 98–101. 30 See Saussy, “Fenollosa Compounded: A Discrimination,” 1. 31 Pierre Macherey, “Literary Analysis: The Tomb of Structures,” in Pierre Macherey, A Theory of Literary Production, trans. Geoffrey Wall (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978), 142, 154. 32 Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” in Roland Barthes, Image, Music, Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 147. 33 Barthes, 148. 34 Barthes, 146.

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Notes to pages 78–83

35 Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator,” in Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, 1: 1913–1926, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002), 256–57. 36 Benjamin, 255–56.

Chapter Six: Pound’s Composition of Canto 16: “j’entendis des voix”   John Beall 1

Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscript Library, Yale University, YCAL MSS Oversize Box 241, Folder 57. Pound’s drafts of Canto 16 are preserved in the William Bird/Ezra Pound Archives at Yale. I will refer to these drafts by folder number. I cite excerpts from Pound’s letters and drafts with permission from Declan Spring at New Directions. The cited letters and drafts are copyright © 2017 by Mary de Rachewiltz and the Estate of Omar S. Pound. I want to thank Diane Ducharme and Nancy Kuhl for their help with my research at the Beinecke Library. 2 https://media.sas.upenn.edu/pennsound/Pound/Spoleto-1967/PoundEzra_02_Canto-XVI_Spoleto_1967.mp3. On genetic literary criticism, see Jed Deppman, Daniel Ferrer, and Michael Groden, eds., Genetic Criticism: Texts and Avant-textes (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004). The quotation is from p. 2. See also especially pp. 8 and 38–41. 3 I gave an earlier version of this essay as a presentation at the Ezra Pound International Conference on June 21, 2017. I am grateful to Roxana Preda, the chair of that panel on “Studies of The Cantos,” for her extensive encouragement and support. My fuller discussion of Pound’s composition of Canto 16, and the PowerPoint presentation accompanying that essay, are accessible on the Pound Cantos Project: http://thecantosproject.ed.ac.uk/index.php/a-draft-of-xvi-cantos-overview/canto-xvi/ xvi-resources. 4 Daniel Albright, “Early Cantos I–XII,” in Ira B. Nadel, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Ezra Pound’s Cantos (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 70. 5 Roxana Preda, e-mail message to author, August 12, 2017. 6 Teodolinda Barolini, The Undivine Comedy: Detheologizing Dante (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 143–65. 7 Ezra Pound, New Selected Poems and Translations, ed. Richard Sieburth (New York: New Directions, 2010), 113. 8 For the Three Mountains Press edition see https://drive.google.com/ file/d/0B991_Zen-cTSSEE4TzA3cjVGTQ/view. 9 Barbara Eastman, Ezra Pound’s Cantos: The Story of the Text, 1948–1975 (Orono, ME: National Poetry Foundation, 1979), 62.

Notes to pages 83–84

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10 Hugh Kenner quoted in Richard Sieburth, “The Sound of Pound: A Listener’s Guide,” Pennsound, University of Pennsylvania, accessed June 18, 2018, https://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/text/SieburthRichard_Pound.html. 11 Hugh Kenner, introduction to Eastman, xix. 12 Mary de Rachewiltz’s explanation is that “Alcuni nomi fittizi sono stati sostuiti nella traduzione col correspondente storico.” (“Some of the fictional names have been replaced in the translation with their corresponding names.”) See Ezra Pound, I Canti, trans. and ed. Mary de Rachewiltz (Milan: Lerici, 1961), 14. According to Barbara Eastman, the 1958 corrections were the last to be “certainly the results of the poet’s attentions to his text” (15 and 18). For a defense of the 1970 New Direction edition see Richard Taylor. “The Texts of the Cantos,” The Cambridge Companion to Ezra Pound (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 161–87. 13 The first page in folder 97 of the Bird/Pound Archive is a letter to Pound from the Paris Branch of the Equitable Trust Company of New York, dated March 23, 1923. In the same folder are a variety of notes related to A Draft of XVI. Cantos. Perhaps the most intriguing of these notes are three different drafts of Pound’s plan for the Cantos. In the first draft Pound has question marks suggesting some uncertainty about his sixteenth Canto: “?War” “Purgatory.” In the second page of notes, there are no question marks. Rather, below “Hell,” Pound writes “Purg.” Below that he adds the French clause, “j’entendis des voix.” On the top right on this sheet, Pound’s notes reflect the chronology of these voices: “Byron Strasbourg War Leger” (folder 97). 14 Ezra Pound to Dorothy Shakespear, October 14, 1923, MSS IIII, Aug.– October 1923, Lilly Library, Indiana University. Roxana Preda kindly sent me her transcriptions of Pound’s letters to Dorothy Shakespear in October 1923. The letters are quoted partially in the “Chronology” section for Canto 16 of the Pound Cantos Project, cited above. 15 Ezra Pound to Dorothy Shakespear, October 20, 1923. 16 Ezra Pound and Ernest Hemingway, “‘Yr Letters Are Life Preservers’: The Correspondence of Ezra Pound and Ernest Hemingway,” Paris Review 163 (2002): 118. 17 Ezra Pound to His Parents: Letters 1895–1929, ed. Mary de Rachewiltz, A. David Moody, and Joanna Moody (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 519. 18 For a discussion of Pound’s role in editing Hemingway’s chapters for in our time, see my essay, “Pound, Hemingway, and the ‘Inquest’ Series,” Paideuma 44 (2017): 173–204. 19 Ezra Pound to Dorothy Shakespear, October 20, 1923, MSS IIII, August– October 19123, Lilly Library, Indiana University. For a discussion of

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Notes to pages 84–90

Nikolai Golijewski’s (Golly’s) role in correcting Steffens’s spelling, and the likelihood that he is the Russian speaker in the Brest-Litovsk section of Canto 16, see Roxana Preda, “The Online Companion to the Cantos of Ezra Pound, XVI,” The Cantos Project, n. 42 and n. 47. 20 Lincoln Steffens, The Autobiography Lincoln Steffens (Berkeley, CA: Heyday Books, 2005), 750–51. 21 Ernest Hemingway, The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway (New York: Scribner, 2003), 105. 22 Preda, n. 52. 23 Steffens, 750. 24 Steffens, 751. 25 In his memoir Gaudier-Brzeska, Pound quoted from his friend’s manifesto: “Two days ago I pinched from an enemy a mauser rifle … I broke the butt off and with my knife I carved in it a design” (New York: New Directions, 1974, 28). Pound also recorded the sculptor’s letters as evoking a comical chaos of a night excursion (57–58); in one letter he described the trenches near eight hundred stinking German corpses as “a sight worthy of Dante” (59). 26 See George Kearns, Guide to Ezra Pound’s Selected Cantos (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1980), 71. 27 Sandra Spanier, Albert J. DeFazio III, and Robert W. Trogdon, eds., The Letters of Ernest Hemingway, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 395. 28 Kenner quoted in Sieburth, 15. See also A. David Moody, Ezra Pound: A Portrait of the Man and His Work, Vol. II: The Epic Years 1921–1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 44, 58. 29 See Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1971), 381, 416. 30 T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Draft including the Annotation of Ezra Pound (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1971), 4–7, 12–13. 31 Eliot, The Waste Land, 26–27. 32 A. Walton Litz, “Pound and Eliot on Ulysses: The Critical Tradition,” James Joyce Quarterly 10, no. 1 (Fall 1972): 5. 33 Litz, 5–6. 34 In their essay “Paragraphs in Expansion (James Joyce),” Daniel Ferrer and Jean-Michel Rabaté argue that “Wandering Rocks” is part of a “second stage” in Joyce’s composition of Ulysses. Joyce was shifting from “the still conventional narrative thread” towards “labyrinthine structures, developed parodies … absurd improvisations, a growing autonomy of language reworked and recreated from the inside in order to mime music or the gestation of idioms” (in Jed Deppman et al., eds., Genetic Criticism, 142). The gestation of Pound’s Canto 16 shows his evolution

Notes to pages 90–93

217

towards a comparable polyphony as evoked in the “second stage” of Joyce’s composition of Ulysses. 35 James Joyce, Ulysses: The Corrected Text (New York: Vintage Books, 1986), 209.

Chapter Seven: The Genealogy of the China Cantos   Kent Su 1 Translated quotation in Serenella Zanotti, “Fascism,” Ezra Pound in Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 382. 2 Ezra Pound, Confucius: The Unwobbling Pivot / The Great Digest / The Analects (New York: New Direction, 1969), 19. 3 Ira Nadel, “Visualizing History: Pound and the Chinese Cantos,” in A Poem Containing History: Textual Studies in The Cantos, ed. Lawrence Rainey (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 151. 4 Ezra Pound, Jefferson And/Or Mussolini: L’idea Statale; Fascism, As I Have Seen It (London: S. Nott, 1935). “THE SECRET OF THE DUCE is possibly the capacity to pick out the element of immediate and major importance in any tangle; or, in the case of a man, to go straight to the centre, for the fellow’s major interest. ‘Why do you want to put your ideas in order?’” (66). 5 Ezra Pound. “The Approach to Paris,” New Age, XIII (1913), 662. 6 John J. Nolde, Blossoms from the East: The China Cantos of Ezra Pound (Orono, ME: National Poetry Foundation, 1983), 25–27. 7 For examples, please see Feng Lan, Ezra Pound and Confucianism: Remaking Humanism in the Face of Modernity (Toronto: University of Toronto, 2003), 172; Jean-Michel Rabaté, Language, Sexuality, and Ideology in Ezra Pound’s Cantos (New York: SUNY Press, 1986), 87–88. 8 Ezra Pound, “The Renaissance: I—The Palette,” Poetry 5, no. 5 (Feb., 1915): 228. 9 Guide to Kulchur (1938) opens with a passage from Book 15.3 (Wei Ling Gong 衛靈公) of The Analects. Pound intersperses different Chinese ideograms between the dialogues. As a result, the pages provide a visually stunning linguistic typography. The Chinese phrase, 一以貫之 (yī yǐ guàn zhī), literally means “one strings together.” Pound translates it into “one-principle,” which underlines his advocacy for the unification of humanity, nature and culture in Confucian aesthetics. See Anderson Araujo’s new Companion to Guide to Kulchur (Clemson, SC: Clemson UP, 2018), 30. 10 Ji Xiao Bin, “Mirror for Government: Ssu-ma Kuang’s Thought on Politics and Government in Tzu-chih t’ung-chien,” in The New and the Multiple, ed. Thomas H. C. Lee (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 2003), 3. 11 Du Weiyun. Chinese Historiography, 3 vols (Beijing: Commercial Press, 2010)

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Notes to pages 93–98

12 Sima Qian’s Shiji (“Records of the Grand Historian”) is the embodiment of the genre. Qian says, “the chronologies are difficult to follow when different genealogical lines exist at the same time.” Endymion Wilkinson, Chinese History: A New Manual. Harvard-Yenching Institute Monograph Series 84 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard-Yenching Institute, 2012), 706. 13 “編” means “to organize/to weave/ to edit.” “年” means “year.” “體” means “style / system/ form.” 14 Quoted in Robert André Lafleur, A Rhetoric of Remonstrance: History, Commentary, and Historical Imagination in Sima Guang’s Zizhi Tongjian. Dissertation, 1996, University of Chicago, 76. 15 Jennifer W. Jay, Encyclopedia of Historians and Historical Writing, vol. 1, ed. Kelly Boyd (London: Fitzroy Dearborn, 1999), 1092–93. 16 Lafleur , A Rhetoric of Remonstrance, 184–85. 17 Lafleur, A Rhetoric of Remonstrance, 186. 18 John Nolde, The Chinese Cantos of Ezra Pound, 26. 19 Zhu Xi’s idea was to construct a book indicating major strands (gang 綱 “ropes”) that were to be supplemented by particular details (mu 目 “meshes”). Such a structure would help the reader to get a better overview of many events and circumstances. 20 Endymion Wilkinson, Chinese History: A Manual (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2000), 500. 21 For a detailed discussion on Pound’s engagement with Giles’s book, see Zhaoming Qian’s Orientalism and Modernism, especially ch. 2, “Via Giles: Qu Yuan, Liu Che, Lady Ban,” 23–47. 22 Herbert Giles, The History of Chinese Literature (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1901), 217–19 (Sima Guang) and 228–31 (Zhu Xi). 23 Quoted in Leon Surette, The Birth of Modernism: Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, W.B. Yeats, and the Occult (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s Press, 1993), 191. 24 Roger T. Ames. “Zhu Xi,” Encyclopædia Britannica Online. Encyclopædia Britannica Inc., last modified on April 16, 2018, http://www.britannica. com/biography/Zhu-Xi. 25 A. David Moody, Ezra Pound: Poet: Volume II: The Epic Years (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 272. 26 See Feng Lan’s ch. 2 “Confucianism and Pound’s Rethinking of Language” in Ezra Pound and Confucianism, 45–83. 27 David Ten Eyck, Ezra Pound’s Adams Cantos (London: Bloomsbury, 2012), 57. 28 The Great Learning, from which Pound takes the last four characters, reads “苟日新，又日新，日日新”: “If you can one day renovate yourself, do so from day to day. Yea, let there be daily renovation.” James Legge, The Chinese Classics, vol. 1 (Simon Publications LLC, 2001), 361.

Notes to pages 99–107

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29 Qinjun Li argues that the Chinese expression, “新日日新,” is also an example of Pound’s use of palindrome, a word or a sequence of words that reads—letter for letter—the same backwards as forwards. As such, in Pound’s choice of these four characters, the first two are mirrored by the second, and vice versa. Li, “Ezra Pound’s Poetic Mirror and the ‘China Cantos’: The Healing of the West,” Southeast Review of Asian Studies 30 (2008): 47. 30 Li, “Ezra Pound’s Poetic Mirror and the ‘China Cantos,’” 47. 31 John Nolde, Blossoms from the East: The Chinese Cantos of Ezra Pound, 75. 32 Nolde, The Chinese Cantos of Ezra Pound, 36. 33 Nolde, The Chinese Cantos of Ezra Pound, 36. 34 Ezra Pound, Guide to Kulchur (London: Faber and Faber, 1938), 58. 35 David Moody, Ezra Pound: Poet: Volume II: The Epic Years, 270. 36 To read more about de Mailla’s version and Pound’s editing skills, see Nolde’s The Chinese Cantos of Ezra Pound.

Chapter Eight: The Poetics of Queering Translation in Ezra Pound’s Homage to Sextus Propertius  Christian Bancroft 1 William Spurlin, “Queering Translation,” in Blackwell Companions to Literature and Culture: A Companion to Translation Studies, ed. Sandra Bermann and Catherine Porter (Somerset: Wiley-Blackwell, 2014), 307. 2 Teresa de Lauretis, “Queer Theory: Lesbian and Gay Sexualities,” Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 3, no. 2 (1991): iv. 3 Brian James Baer and Klaus Kaindl, “Introduction: Queer(ing) Translation,” in Queering Translation, Translating the Queer: Theory, Practice, Activism, ed. Brian James Baer and Klaus Kaindl (New York: Routledge, 2017), 1. 4 Spurlin, “Queering Translation,” 307. 5 Spurlin, 307. 6 Sian Melvill Hawthorne, “‘Reparative Reading’ as Queer Pedagogy,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 24, no. 1 (Spring 2018): 156. 7 Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 23. 8 Jean-Michel Rabaté, “Editor’s Introduction: Cosmopolitan Modernism, Polylingual Strategies and Cultural Hybridity,” Journal of Modern Literature 37, no. 1 (2013): v. 9 Rabaté, v. 10 Alan Golding, “‘Time to Translate Modernism into a Contemporary Idiom’: Pedagogy, Poetics, and Bob Perelman’s Pound,” Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies 27, no. 3 (2009): 29. My emphasis.

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Notes to pages 108–11

11 Andrés Claro, “Broken Vessels: Philosophical Implications of Poetic Translation (the limits, hospitality, afterlife, and Marranism of languages),” CR: The New Centennial Review 9, no. 3 (2009): 124. 12 Claro, 124–25. 13 Adam Piette, “Pound’s ‘The Garden’ as Modernist Imitation: Samain, Lowell, H.D.,” Translation and Literature 17, no. 1 (2008): 22–23. 14 Ezra Pound, “I Gather the Limbs of Osiris,” in Selected Prose 1909–1965, ed. William Cookson (London: Faber and Faber, 1973), 34. 15 Roland Végső, “The Mother Tongues of Modernity: Modernism, Transnationalism, Translation,” Journal of Modern Literature 33, no. 2 (2010): 30. 16 Spurlin, “Queering Translation,” 302. 17 Steven J. Willett, “Reassessing Pound’s Homage to Sextus Propertius,” Syllecta Classica 16 (2005): 181. 18 Pound, Poems & Translations, 530. 19 Again, see Willett, Hale, and other classics scholars. 20 Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993), 227. 21 Spurlin, “Queering Translation,” 302. 22 Elizabeth Freeman, Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), xi. 23 Freeman, xi. 24 Pound, Poems & Translations, 536. 25 Freeman, Time Binds, xi. 26 Freeman, xi. 27 Freeman, xi. 28 The adaptations Pound makes in Homage, as well as the moments when he writes in a style akin to Propertius, not to mention the first-person narrative of the poem, all contribute to the performativity of Homage. I use this term distinctly from persona, though the two concepts overlap and are interrelated. The personae that Pound employed in his poetry derive from Robert Browning’s dramatic monologues, though Pound has distilled the Browningesque monologue into his own style, for his own purposes. Many of these personae came from and were inspired by troubadour poetry. Of course, Pound performs in his poetry through these personae, but performativity can also operate independently of personae; that is to say, if Pound is not writing in the guise of a persona, he can still be performing. One might even argue that all of translation is a kind of performance—both on the part of the text, as it performs in another language, and as the translators themselves, as they perform in the role of translator. 29 Freeman, Time Binds, xii. 30 Freeman, xii.

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Freeman, xi. Freeman, 6. Freeman, 53. Freeman, 62. A. David Moody, Ezra Pound: Poet: I: The Young Genius 1885–1920 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 350. 36 Moody, 350. 37 Freeman, Time Binds, 85. 38 Spurlin, “Queering Translation,” 302. 39 Elizabeth Grosz, Becoming Undone: Darwinian Reflections on Life, Politics, and Art (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 1. 40 Grosz, 43. 41 Braidotti, Rosi, Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming (Cambridge, MA: Polity, 2002), 8. 42 Steven G. Yao, Translation and the Languages of Modernism: Gender, Politics, Language (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 61. 43 Jack Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 2. 44 Halberstam, 2. 45 This point is particularly relevant when reflecting on the number of terms critics have ascribed to the poem—all terms that could denote the poem, but do not encapsulate everything the poem actually does. 46 Pound, Poems & Translations, 542. 47 Halberstam, 2. 48 Halberstam, 2. 49 Halberstam, 2. 50 Halberstam, 136. 51 Halberstam, 136. 52 Halberstam, 136.

Chapter Nine: Rainer Maria Gerhardt and Ezra Pound Walter Baumann Ezra Pound, Guide to Kulchur (New York: New Directions, 1970), 44; also 58, 188, 349. 2 Clark Emery, Ideas into Action (Coral Gables, FL: University of Miami Press, 1958), 150. 3 Massimo Bacigalupo, “A Musical Allusion in Ezra Pound’s Canto 83,” Notes and Queries 38, no. 1 (Sept. 1991): 345. 4 Richard Tauber, accessed online February 8, 2018, https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=Xzk7gDqVDS8; Fritz Wunderlich, accessed online February 8, 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPBVbtbk4l4. 5 Emery, 79. 1

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6 Rainer M. Gerhardt, “Die Pisaner Gesänge, eine Sendung,” Hessischer Rundfunk, 1952. Now also in Gerhardt’s complete works (see n. 7). For more information on Gerhardt, see Volker Bischoff, “Rainer Maria Gerhardt und die amerikanische Lyrik: Eine Episode deutschamerikanischer Wechselbeziehungen im Kontext der deutschen Pound-Rezeption,” in Die amerikanische Literatur in der Weltliteratur, ed. Claus Uhlig and Volker Bischoff (Berlin: Erich Schmidt Verlag, 1982), 415–36 and Franz Josef Knape, ... zugeritten in manchen Sprachen... : Über das Werk des Dichters und Vermittlers Rainer Maria Gerhardt (Würzburg: Verlag Königshausen & Neumann, 1995). 7 Rainer M. Gerhardt, Umkreisung: Das Gesamtwerk, ed. Uwe Pörksen et al. (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2007). 8 Gerhardt, Umkreisung, 387. 9 Ezra Pound, Literary Essays, ed. T. S. Eliot (London: Faber and Faber, 1954), 4. 10 Pound, Literary Essays, 20. 11 Pound, Literary Essays, 22. 12 Emery, 79. 13 Charles Olson, Selected Writings, ed. Robert Creeley (New York: New Directions, 1966). 14 Gregory Corso and Walter Höllerer, eds., Junge amerikanische Lyrik (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1962), 6–23. See also Charles Olson, The Collected Poems of Charles Olson, Excluding the Maximus Poems, ed. George F. Butterick (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, [1987], 1997), 308–16. 15 Charles Olson, Reading in Boston, June 1962, Number 17. To Gerhardt There Among Europe’s Things. Pennsound. https://media.sas.upenn.edu/ pennsound/authors/Olson/Boston-62/Olson-Charles_17_To-Gerhardt_ Boston_06-62.mp3. 16 Sherman Paul, Olson’s Push: Origin, Black Mountain and Recent American Poetry (Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1978), 62–63. 17 Corso and Höllerer, eds., Junge amerikanische Lyrik, 20 and 22; Olson, The Collected Poems, 315–16. 18 Bischoff, 415–36.

Chapter Ten: “Cantos” or “Cantares”? Pound’s Reception in Two Romance Languages   Viorica Patea 1

Eaghor Kostetzky, Ezra Pound Selected Works. Volume I. Poems. Essays. Cantos (Munich: Na Gore, 1960), 16–17. In 1955, Kostetzky, a literary critic and translator, founded with his wife Elisabeth Kottmeier (a German poet and translator) a private publishing house, which published

Notes to pages 128–30

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a number of modern and classical texts, such as those by William Shakespeare, Oscar Wilde, Federico García Lorca, and T. S. Eliot. Kostetzky’s anthology of Pound comprises two of his essays, fifty-two short poems and fifty-five Cantos. José Vázquez Amaral, “Introducción, cronología y anecdotario sobre Ezra Pound,” in Los Cantares Completos, vol. I, ed. Javier Coy (Madrid: Cátedra Letras Universales, 1994), 108. See, for instance, Carlos Viola Soto’s Antología poética (Buenos Aires: Compañía General Fabril Editora, 1963). In the same Canto he also meditates, “But the record/ the palimpsest” (116/815); and then he adds, “i.e. it coheres all right/ even if my notes do not cohere” (116/817). All citations from The Cantos indicated by Canto number and page number in parentheses, are from Ezra Pound, The Cantos of Ezra Pound (New York: New Directions, 1995). On Pound’s letter to Kostetzky written from St. Elizabeths on January 10, 1958, see also Selected Ezra Pound, vol. 1, ed. Mykola Polyuha and Marko Robert Stech, trans. Eaghor Kostetzky (Kyiv: Pennmen; Ukrayinski propileyi, 2017), 16–17, 28; and Mykola Polyuha,“‘Dear Maitre’: Correspondence of Eaghor Kostetzky with Ezra Pound,” Kuryer ­ Kryvbasu (April–June 2014): 293–95. Both sources are written in Ukrainian. Ezra Pound, Cantares completos, trans. José Vázquez Amaral (México: Editorial Moritz, 1975); Ezra Pound, I Cantos, trans. Mary de Rachewiltz (Milano: Mondadori, 1985); Ezra Pound, Les Cantos, trans. Jacques Darras, Yves DiManno, Philippe Mikriammos, and Denis Roche (Paris: Flammarion, 1986); Ezra Pound, Die Cantos: Zweisprachige Erstausgabe, trans. Eva Hesse (Hamburg: Arche Verlag, 2013); Ezra Pound, Os Cantos, trans. José Lino Grünewald (Lisbon: Assírio & Alvim, 2005). Jonathan Cohen, “Into the American Idiom: William Carlos Williams’ Translation of Jorge Carrera Andrade’s Dictado por el Agua,” Translation Review 77/78 (2009): 21–22. https://doi.org/10.1080/07374836.2009.105 23991. Jonathan Cohen, “Reading the Williams (-Amaral) Translations of Latin American Poetry,” William Carlos Williams Review 33, no. 1–2 (2016): 21. See also Paul Mariani, “Remembering William Carlos Williams: Hugo Rodríguez Alcalá (1917–2007),” William Carlos Williams Review 31, no. 1 (2014):1, accessed July 26, 2018, https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/ willcarlwillrevi.31.1.0001. Amaral, “Introducción,” 107. Unless otherwise noted, all English translations of original Spanish texts are by the author. Pound had received the Bollingen Prize in 1949 and the atmosphere was still heated by the controversy the award had stirred up. Pound’s detractors believed it was not appropriate to bestow an award on a man who

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Notes to pages 130–34 was charged with high treason, a position Amaral termed as “the infallible logic of the stupid.” See Amaral, “Introducción,” 108. Amaral, “Introducción,” 108. Amaral wrote on various occasions on Pound and on his own collaboration with him both in Spanish and in English. See José Vázquez Amaral, “Ezra Pound el poeta del Nuevo Mundo,” Revista UNAM (July 11, 1954): 9–11; José Vázquez Amaral, “Words for Ezra Pound,” Rutgers Review 3 (Winter 1968): 40. His articles in English were published in the Rutgers Review, which is difficult to access. The most complete and reliable version of his texts remains his “Introducción,” included in Cantares Completos (ed. Javier Coy), the source used here whenever the information overlaps. Mariani, 1. Amaral, “Introducción,” 108–9. Amaral also translated Whitman, Thoreau and Williams into Spanish. He is also the author of a history of the Unites States, Los gringos (Mexico: B. Costa-Amic, 1969) and of a history of Mexico, México: Datos para su biografía (Mexico: B. Costa-Amic, 1945), as well as of The Contemporary Latin American Narrative (New York: Las Américas Publ.,1970). Amaral, “Introducción,” 112. See Amaral, “Introducción,” 110–13; Amaral, “Words for Ezra Pound,” 40. In Guide to Kulchur, Pound confirms: “the Cantos, they are the tale of the tribe.” See Ezra Pound, Guide to Kulchur (New York: New Directions, [1938] 1970), 194. Amaral, “Introducción,” 112. Amaral, “Introducción,” 97. Amaral, “Introducción,” 104. Jaime Ferrán, “Una tarde con el viejo Ezra,” Introducción a Ezra Pound. Antología general de textos (Barcelona: Barral Editores, 1973), 1–14. Ezra Pound, Cantares trans. Augusto de Campos, Décio Pignatari and Haroldo Campos (Rio de Janeiro: Ministério da Educação e Cultura, Serviço de Documentação, 1960). Ferrán, 9. Cited by Michael Kindellan, The Late Cantos of Ezra Pound (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 45. The original letters can be found at Houghton Library, Harvard U, MS Am 2077, 1371, New Directions Records circa 1932–97; and Beinecke Rare Book, Yale U, Norman Holmes Pearson Papers, Ezra Pound Letters, YCAL MSS 899, Yale, Box 78, respectively. Amaral, “Ezra Pound el poeta,” 11. Amaral, “Ezra Pound el poeta,” 10. Amaral, “Introducción,” 104. Pound’s personality and artistic legacy was described as at best odious in the former USSR. See O. M. Gun, “Ezra Pound’s Linguopoetics and the

Notes to pages 134–40

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Tradition of Russian Formalism,” in Style and Translation. Collection of Academic Works, vol. I (Kiev: Taras Shevchenko National University of Kiev, 2015), 296. 28 Ezra Pound, Cantos și alte poeme, trans. Ion Caraion, Introduction by Vasile Nicolescu (Bucharest: Editura Univers, 1975). In 1983, the same scholar would write a second preface to a new edition of the Cantos translated by Virgil Teodorescu and Petronela Negosanu at Editura Junimea. This is a smaller selection, 155 pages long, with only 13 Cantos, including the same ones selected by Steinhardt and Caraion, but with two additional ones: 76 and 79. 29 Ezra Pound, Opere—Poezii I, ed. Horia-Roman Patapievici, trans. Mircea Ivănescu and Radu Vanca (Bucharest: Humanitas, 2015). 30 The best study on Steinhardt’s life and work is George Ardeleanu, N. Steinhardt şi paradoxurile libertăţii: O perspectivă monografică (Bucharest: Humanitas, 2009). For English versions, see Mircea Eliade, Forbidden Forest, trans. Mac Linscott Ricketts and Mary Park Stevenson (Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1978); Emil Cioran, The Temptation to Exist, trans. Richard Howard (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1998). 31 While he was in prison, Noica’s manuscripts were published in Paris in 1962 in the journal Semne, as well as in book format as Fenomenologia spiritului de G.-W.-F. Hegel, istorisită de Constantin Noica (Paris: Centre roumain de recherches, 1962). “Povestiri din Hegel” was republished in Romania as Povestiri despre om. După o carte a lui Hegel (Bucharest: Cartea Românească, 1980); “Anti-Goethe” was published in 1976 as Despărțirea de Goethe (Bucharest: Editura Univers, 1976). 32 Romulus Rusan et al., “Le système repressif communiste en Roumanie,” in Du passé faisons table rase!, ed. Stéphane Courtois et al. (Paris: Robert Laffont, 2002), 369–443. See also Stelian Tănase, Anatomia mistificării (Bucharest: Humanitas, 2003), 36–48. 33 In 1956 Khrushchev presented a secret report of the Twentieth Soviet Communist Party Congress in February 1956 and denounced Stalin’s “personality cult,” a euphemism for his crimes. 34 Nicolae Steinhardt, Jurnalul fericirii (Iași: Rohia Monastery and Polirom Publishing House, 2008), 83. The first edition appeared in 1991. 35 See Clara Cosmineanu, Nicu Steinhardt în dosarele Securității 1959– 1989 (Bucharest: Nemira, 2005); Mihai Giugariu et al., eds., Prigoana: Documente ale Procesului C. Noica, C. Pillat... (București: Editura Vremea, 2010); George Ardeleanu, N. Steinhardt. 36 Ardeleanu, N. Steinhardt, 455–56. 37 Nicolae Steinhardt, Dumnezeu în care spui că nu crezi. Scrisori către Virgil Ierunca (1967–1983) (Bucharest: Humanitas 2000), 178–79.

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Notes to pages 140–46

38 Horia Nestorescu-Bălcești, ed., N. Steinhardt în corespondență cu Alex. Ciorănescu (1966–1989) (Bucharest: Editura Nestor, 2013), 72. All English translations from Romanian are by the author, unless otherwise noted. 39 Nestorescu-Bălcești, 73. 40 Nestorescu-Bălcești, 75. 41 Nestorescu-Bălcești, 76. 42 Nestorescu-Bălcești, 78. 43 Nestorescu-Bălcești, 82. 44 Nestorescu-Bălcești, 82. 45 Nestorescu-Bălcești, 87. 46 Nestorescu-Bălcești, 88. 47 Ezra Pound, Personae (New York: New Directions, [1926] 1950), 170. 48 Nestorescu-Bălcești, 58. 49 Nestorescu-Bălcești, 59. 50 Nestorescu-Bălcești, 59. 51 Nestorescu-Bălcești, 82. 52 Nestorescu-Bălcești, 59. 53 Nestorescu-Bălcești, 59. 54 Nestorescu-Bălcești, 82. 55 Nestorescu-Bălcești, 88. 56 Cultura (El Salvador) 21, July–September 1961, 13–21. The poems were published two years later, when Cardenal and Urtecho edited the Antología de la poesía norteamericana (Madrid: Aguilar, 1963). Both of them published Ezra Pound, Antología de Ezra Pound, Preface by Ernesto Cardenal, Epilogue by Lawrence Ferlinghetti (Madrid: Visor, 1979). 57 “Ezra Pound en Nicaragua,” El Nuevo Amanecer Cultural, Year VI, no. 280, October 26, 1985, 1–4. The editorial council for this issue was composed of Urtecho, although Lizandro Chávez may also have contributed to this text. Besides Cardenal’s “Il miglio fabro” [sic], on pp. 2–3, the issue includes a translation of several of Pound’s poems, and a chronology of his life and works. 58 “Coronel Urtecho sobre Pound. El imaginismo de Pound. Darío y Pound,” El Nuevo Amanecer Cultural, Year VI, no. 280, October 26, 1985, 4. Urtecho’s article continues two issues later, as “Ezra Pound visto por José Coronel Urtecho,” El Nuevo Amanecer Cultural, Year VI, no. 284, November 23, 1985, 1–2, 4. 59 Ernesto Cardenal, “Il miglior fabro,” El Nuevo Amanecer Cultural, Year VI, no. 280, October 26, 1985, 2–3. This essay originally appeared as “Prólogo” in Ezra Pound, Ezra Pound—Antología, ed. Ernesto Cardenal (Madrid: Visor, 1960). Cardenal republished the essay with some changes and additions in several other editions of his and Urtecho’s Antología de Ezra Pound, including these editions: Madrid: Visor, 1979; Managua:

Notes to pages 146–52

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Editorial La Ocarina, 1988, 9–19; Caracas: Venezuela, 2007, ix–xxxi. In this last one, on p. xxxi, he closes the essay with a wink at Hugo Chavez’s notion that the people of Latin America will one day be reunited with those of the United States. Also reprinted in 1961 in a journal in San Salvador, Cardenal ends his essay with an ardent exhortation that Pound should get the Nobel Prize for Literature, with a warning that by not giving him this award the Swedish Academy discredits itself: “UNDOUBTEDLY, IF THERE IS A WRITER IN THE WORLD NOW, WHO ABOVE ALL DESERVES THE NOBEL PRIZE (AND WHO HAS DESERVED THE PRIZE FOR A LONG TIME AND DESERVES IT NOW THIS BEING A DISCREDIT TO THE NOBEL COMMITTEE ITSELF BY NOT AWARDING IT TO HIM) THIS IS EZRA POUND. See Ernesto Cardenal, “El caso de Pound,” Cultura. Revista del Ministerio de Educación, no. 21, July–September, 1961, 12. 60 Amaral, “Introducción,” 113.

Chapter Eleven: Ezra Pound and Caresse Crosby: From Black Sun to Roccasinibalda   Anne Conover The unpublished correspondence between Caresse Crosby and Ezra Pound is located among the Special Collections Research Center, Morris Library, Southern Illinois University, 605 Agriculture Drive, Mailcode 6632, Carbondale, IL 62901: Caresse Crosby papers, 1912–70, ID: 1/1/MSS 140. Series 5, Box 64, Folder 7: Pound, Ezra Loomis. Dates of the letters are given in the text. https://archives.lib.siu.edu/?p=collections/findingaid&id=2127&q=&ro otcontentid=51021#id51021. 1 See George Robert Minkoff, A Bibliography of the Black Sun Press. (Great Neck, NY: G.R. Minkoff, 1970). Introduction by Caresse Crosby, entitled “How It Began.” 2 See Geoffrey Wolff, Black Sun: The Brief Transit and Violent Eclipse of Harry Crosby (New York: Random House, 1970). 3 Anne Conover, Caresse Crosby: From Black Sun to Roccasinibalda (Santa Barbara, CA: Capra Press, 1989), vii. For further bibliographical information see 217–33. 4 Conover, 41. 5 Conover, 13. 6 Caresse Crosby papers, 1912–70, Special Collections Research Center, Morris Library, Southern Illinois University. ID: 1/1/MSS 140. Series 5, Box 44, Folder 3: [Harry Crosby] corr. to Stephen Crosby, 1908–23. 7 Sylvia Beach, Shakespeare and Company (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1959), 134. 8 Harry Crosby, The Torchbearer: Collected Poems with Notes by Ezra Pound (Paris: Black Sun Press, 1931), 1–8.

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Ezra Pound Papers, Beinecke, accessed July 19, 2020, http://hdl.handle. net/10079/bibid/1172202. 10 James J. Wilhelm, Ezra Pound in London and Paris 1908–1925 (University Park and London: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1990), 284. 11 Wilhelm, Ezra Pound in London and Paris, 284. 12 Caresse Crosby, Introduction, in Ernest Hemingway, Torrents of Spring (Paris: Black Sun Press, 1931), 7. 13 Charles Olson, Charles Olson & Ezra Pound: An Encounter at Saint Elizabeths, ed. Catherine Seelye (New York: Grossman, 1975), 40. See also, A. David Moody, Ezra Pound: Poet, A Portrait of the Man & His Work, vol. III: The Tragic Years 1939–1972 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 194–95.

Chapter Twelve: Pound, Bergson, and the Vortex of Memory Jonathan Pollock 1 Henri Bergson, An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. T. E. Hulme (Indianapolis, IN and Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, [1912] 1999). 2 Wyndham Lewis, Time and Western Man (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, [1927] 1957). 3 Wyndham Lewis, ed., Blast 1 (1914). Reprint (Santa Barbara, CA: Black Sparrow Press, 1981), 147. 4 Ezra Pound, “Vortex,” Blast 1 (1914). Reprint (Santa Barbara, CA: Black Sparrow Press, 1981), 153. 5 Bergson, Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience (Paris: PUF Quadrige, [1927] 2003), 169–70. 6 Henri Bergson, Matière et Mémoire (Paris: PUF Quadrige, [1939] 1999), 166–6cv 7. Unless otherwise noted, all English translations from the French are by the author. 7 Bergson, Matière et Mémoire, 149–50. 8 Bergson, Matière et Mémoire, 181. 9 Bergson, Matière et Mémoire, 272. 10 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Mille Plateaux (Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1980), 32. 11 Bergson, Matière et Mémoire, 168. 12 Plotinus, Third Ennead, 8 (30th treatise), trans. Stephen MacKenna (New York: Larson Publications, 1992), 323. 13 Ezra Pound, Guide to Kulchur (New York: New Directions, [1938] 1968), 77. 14 Henri Bergson, L’Evolution créatrice (Paris: PUF Quadrige, [1941] 2006), 94–98. 15 Pound, Guide to Kulchur, 152.

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16 Paul Verlaine, “Clair de lune,” Fêtes galantes (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1976), 33. 17 Ezra Pound, Selected Prose, ed. William Cookson (New York: New Directions, 1973), 374. 18 Pound, Guide to Kulchur, 152.

Chapter Thirteen: Ritual and Performance in The Pisan Cantos and H.D.’s Trilogy Giuliana Ferreccio See David Ten Eyck, “The Modernist Poetics of H.D.’s Trilogy and Ezra Pound’s Pisan Cantos: A Comparative Study” in H.D.’s Trilogy and Beyond, ed. Hélène Aji, Antoine Cazé, Agnès Derail Imbert, and Clément Oudart (Paris: Presses Universitaires de Paris Ouest, 2013), 157. Ten Eyck’s essay is meant to underline the differences between the two poems and, in turn, point out some of the reasons why H.D.’s Trilogy has only belatedly been recognized as a central point of Anglo-American Modernist poetics. 2 H.D., End to Torment: A Memoir of Ezra Pound, ed. Norman Holmes Pearson and Michael King (New York: New Directions, 1979), 30. Abbreviations for H.D.’s works will be followed by poem and page number, as follows: ET: End to Torment TF: Tribute to Freud (New York: New Directions, 1956) CP: Collected Poems, ed. Louis L. Martz (New York: New Directions, 1983) WF: Trilogy: The Walls Do Not Fall, ed. Aliki Barnstone (New York: New Directions, 1998). TA: Trilogy: Tribute to the Angels FR: Trilogy: The Flowering of the Rod 3 ET, 32. 4 TA, 31/96. 5 ET, 30. 6 Ezra Pound, Posthumous Cantos, ed. Massimo Bacigalupo (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 2015); bilingual edition, Canti postumi (Milan: Mondadori, 2002). 7 See Ronald Bush, “’Quiet, Not Scornful?’. The Composition of The Pisan Cantos,” in A Poem Containing History: The Cantos of Ezra Pound, ed. Lawrence Rainey (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1996), 188. Bush has shown that Pound had the “Italian Drafts” already in mind when he started the Pisan sequence in the DTC. 8 These encounters are often retold in Italian. Since they were written at about the time of the two Italian Cantos , 72–73, with their idiosyncratic Dantescan tones, Pound might have borrowed the Commedia’s prevailing first person narration. 9 WF, 6/11. 1

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10 See Diana Collecott, “H.D.’s Transformative Poetics,” in The Cambridge Companion to H.D., ed. Nephie J. Christodoulides and Polina Mackay (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 96. Collecott identifies the prevailing trait of H.D.’s poetics in her preference for metonymy over metaphor, basing her assumptions on Roman Jakobson’s opposition between metaphor and metonymy: while metaphor implies the substitution of figural for literal meaning, metonymy may imply the substitution of one non-figurative meaning for another, often adjacent or factual. In Boris Eichenbaum’s view, metonymy functions by means of a “displacement, or lateral semantic shift, that lends words new meanings without leaving the literal plane.” 11 ET, 26. 12 WF, 22/31. 13 See Jonathan Culler, Theory of the Lyric (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015). While seeking to identify the traits characterizing lyric genres, Culler insists on dissociating lyric from dramatic monologue and from interpretations of lyric poems based on a fictional and narrative dimension. In his view, lyric and narrative work against each other; lyrical outbursts may have an anti-narrative function and fictionality may undermine lyric’s magic. Among lyric modes, lyric address and, especially, indirect address (“address to the reader by means of address to something or someone else” [125]) are seen as paramount lyric devices and as a central aspect of the ritualistic scope of lyric. We may extend his examples to Prufrock’s invitation au voyage, which would not signal a real address to an audience, but rather offer a ritualistic, performative act of something happening in the present time of discourse, what Culler calls the “performative temporality of the lyric” (63). Rather than “a voice overheard,” as in the case of internalized dialogue, ways of address are “scripts for performance.” To invoke or address something that is not the true audience highlights the event of address itself as an act, whose function and outcome “demand critical attention” (186). 14 Culler, 122. Culler draws his considerations on literary performativity from J. L. Austin’s How to Do Things with Words (1955–62), while enlarging Austin’s field by Derrida’s linking the performative with the creative power of language. 15 I am indebted, and thankful, to Kinereth Meier’s insightful suggestions and analyses of lyric performativity, especially in “Performances of Devotion: Lancelot Andrewes, George Herbert, and T. S. Eliot,” a paper she delivered at the T. S. Eliot Summer School, July 2017. See also Kinereth Meier, “Between Poetry and Devotion: Lancelot Andrewes, George Herbert and T. S. Eliot,” in George Herbert’s Travels: International Print and Cultural Legacies, ed. Christopher Hodgkins (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2011), 95–112. Although she concentrates on devotional

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poetry and T. S. Eliot’s “Journey of the Magi,” her remarks about the ritual element in lyric may be widely extended. Parallels between H.D.’s Trilogy and Eliot’s Four Quartets have been explored by Cyrena Pondrom. See Cyrena Pondrom, “Literary Filiations: H.D. and Eliot (Re)Write History,” in H.D.’s Trilogy and Beyond, ed. Aji et al., 137–45. There is no denying that H.D.’s voice has a prayer-like slant. 16 See Peter Nicholls, “Ezra Pound and the Rhetoric of Address,” Affirmations of the Modern 3, no, 1 (2015): 32–48, accessed July 15, 2020, https:// affirmationsmodern.com/articles/48/. Nicholls analyzes the “intricacies” of various forms of address in The Cantos, especially The Pisan Cantos. He underlines the peculiarity of certain Poundian modes of address in which “the language will convey the immediacy of the ‘now’ of a speech act while giving its pronouns ‘I’ and ‘you’ a kind of citational function, making them iterations of prior ‘literary expression.’” Citation would seem to distance lyric utterance from any “performative temporality” or immediacy, as is the case in Pound’s dramatic monologues, especially when he follows the tracks of Browning’s Sordello in Ur-Canto I. However, as Nicholls maintains, Pound is working toward an “enlargement” of lyric that might retain elements of both. The citational quality of forms of address may point to what both connects and distances The Pisan Cantos from Trilogy. 17 See Richard Sieburth’s “Introduction” to Ezra Pound, in The Pisan Cantos, ed. Richard Sieburth (New York: New Directions, 2003), xxiv. 18 According to Helen Vendler’s formulation, lyric is a script written “for performance by the reader.” See Helen Vendler, The Given and the Made: Strategies of Poetic Redefinitions (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), xi. 19 TA, 4/66. 20 TA, 12/75. 21 WF, 21/30. 22 See Louis L. Martz’s “Introduction” to CP, xxii. 23 For H.D.’s Moravian ancestors the Virgin Mary was the symbol of the Holy Spirit, and the Holy Spirit was female. See Matte Robinson and Demetrios P. Tryphonopoulos, “HERmione and Other Prose,” in The Cambridge Companion to H.D., 164. 24 Kinereth Meier, “Between Poetry and Devotion,” 4. 25 See CP, xi. Also, see Collecott, “H.D.’s Transformative Poetics,” 100–102. 26 See Aliki Barnstone, “Introduction” to H.D.’s Trilogy, x–xiii. 27 François Bovier, “H.D. et le Cinéma: le modèle de l’’écriture pictographique,’” in H.D.’s Trilogy and Beyond, ed. Aji et al., 29. Bryher and her second husband, Kenneth MacPherson, established Close-Up in 1927 as one of the first little magazines devoted to significant analysis of the new experimental medium of the cinema. See Cyrena Pondrom, “H.D. and the ‘little magazines,’” in The Cambridge Companion to H.D., 47.

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Notes to pages 179–86

28 R. Bruce Elder, “Time, Speed, Precision and the Poetry of the Everyday; or, Ezra Pound’s Cinema Aesthetic,” in The Edinburgh Companion to Ezra Pound and the Arts, ed. Roxana Preda (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019), 119. 29 Nicholls, “Ezra Pound and the Rhetoric of Address,” 32–48. 30 Meier, “Between Poetry and Devotion,” 4. 31 Omar Pound and Robert Spoo, eds., Ezra and Dorothy Pound, Letters in Captivity, 1945–1946 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 131. 32 Sieburth, “Introduction” to Ezra Pound, The Pisan Cantos, xxi. 33 Robinson and Demetres Tryphonopoulos, “HERmione and Other Prose,” 127. 34 TA, 39/105. 35 Quoted in Norman Holmes Pearson’s foreword to the first New Directions edition of Trilogy; cited by Barnstone, viii. 36 Culler, 216. 37 TF, 71. 38 FR, 16/135. 39 In her chapter on J. M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians, “Deviance of Simultaneous Narration,” Dorrit Cohn highlights the “deconstructive attributions of fictionality,” when a first-person narrator recounts episodes in the present tense, as though he were experiencing them while narrating. This device has a strong performative function, while also giving the impression that we are reading stage directions for a play or witnessing an interior monologue. In either case, the language conveys the immediacy of present discourse. See Dorrit Cohn, The Distinction of Fiction (Baltimore, MD and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 96–108. 40 Monique R. Morgan, “Narrative Means to Lyric Ends in Wordsworth’s Prelude,” Narrative 16, no. 3 (2008): 301. See also Giuliana Ferreccio, “Time and Narrative in Wordsworth’s Prelude,” La Questione Romantica: New Perspectives on William Wordsworth 3, no. 2 (2011): 97–112. 41 Collecott, “H.D.’s Transformative Poetics,” 106–8. Collecott convincingly argues that all of H.D.’s production relies on a poetics of “betweenness” and transformation. 42 WF, 1/3–4. 43 WF, 36/49. 44 “Projector II,” CP, 353. 45 François Bovier, “H.D. et le cinéma,” 30. 46 WF, 21/30. 47 WF, 23/32. 48 TA, 8/71; see also “I am Mary- … (though I am Mara, bitter) I shall be Mary-myrrh” FR 16/135. 49 Culler, 130.

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Chapter Fourteen: A Carthaginian Peace: Kenner, Watts, and the Founding of Pound Studies   Michael Coyle 1 This essay is redacted from the opening chapters of Ezra Pound and the Career of Modern Criticism: Professional Attention (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2018), a book co-written with Roxana Preda. 2 “The Pisan Cantos Wins for Ezra Pound First Award of Bollingen Prize in Poetry,” pamphlet from the Library of Congress, rpt. in Hayden Carruth, ed., The Case Against the Saturday Review (Chicago, IL: Poetry, 1949), 542. 3 W. H. Auden, “In Memory of W.B. Yeats,” in Collected Poems, ed. Edward Mendelson (New York: Vintage, [1976] 1991), 247. 4 During this period the Saturday Review was edited by Norman Cousins. For circulation figures, see Theodore Peterson, Magazines in the Twentieth Century (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1956), 354; and from History of the Saturday Review, accessed July 6, 2018, https:// collectingoldmagazines.com/magazines/saturday-review/. According to Greg Lindsay, by 1971 circulation of the Review, still under Cousins’ editorship, reached its maximum at 660,000. See Greg Lindsay, “A Great One Remembered,” Folio: the Magazine for Magazine Management 32, no. 2 (2003): 58. 5 Michael Coyle, Ezra Pound, Popular Genres, and the Discourse of Culture (University Park: Penn State University Press, 1995). 6 Hugh Kenner, The Poetry of Ezra Pound, New Preface by the Author (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, [1951] 1985), 16. 7 C. H. Sisson, “Ego Scriptor: The Pisan Cantos of Ezra Pound,” New English Weekly (July 28, 1949): 186–87. 8 Hugh Kenner, “Gold in the Gloom,” Poetry (November 1952): 127–32. 9 The choice of topic is not as anomalous as it might seem: Chesterton was a major influence on McLuhan—perhaps the major influence in McLuhan’s conversion to Roman Catholicism while he was at Cambridge; and McLuhan, of course, was Kenner’s teacher. 10 Watts, “Philosopher at Bay,” Cronos 2 (March 1948): 1–17. Cronos has an interesting history, having begun life as The Maryland Quarterly before moving to Ohio State University in 1947, becoming associated with the Golden Goose Press and becoming a venue for Charles Olson and Robert Creeley; see Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker, eds., Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, vol. II (Oxford: Oxford ­University Press), 980–82. 11 Robert Adams, “A Hawk and a Handsaw for Ezra Pound,” Accent (Summer 1948): 205–14. 12 Adams, 205. 13 Adams, 209.

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14 Lloyd Frankenberg, “Ezra Pound – and His Magnum Opus,” New York Times Book Review (August 1, 1948): 14. The author of The Pleasure Dome: On Reading Modern Poetry (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1949), Frankenberg’s notice was particularly important. 15 Lawrence Ferlinghetti, review of Watts’s Ezra Pound and the Cantos, San Francisco Chronicle (May 25, 1952): 31. 16 Harold H. Watts, “The Devices of Pound’s Cantos,” Quarterly Review of Literature 5, no. 2 (1949): 147–73. Guest editor of this special issue, D. D. Paige, would edit Pound’s Selected Letters, 1907–1941, two years later. 17 Watts, “The Devices of Pound’s Cantos,” 34. 18 Watts, “Devices,” 161. 19 Harold H. Watts, Ezra Pound and The Cantos (Chicago, IL: H. Regnery Co., 1952), 25. 20 Watts, Ezra Pound and The Cantos, 75. 21 Watts, Ezra Pound and The Cantos, 72. 22 See Watts, “Philosopher at Bay,” Cronos 2 (March 1948): 1–17. In a prefatory note to Watts’s essay, the editors wrote of their pleasure “to find that here at last was an unbiased study, putting in clear light and sharp focus the various ideas which led both to his Cantos and to his political actions. In fairness to Pound, the editors sent to him the manuscript for comment” (1). Dorothy Shakespear’s response also included three subsequent sentences which identified where Watts should go to understand Pound’s philosophy, views on poetry, and political views. 23 Watts, “Philosopher at Bay,” 8–9. 24 Watts, “Philosopher at Bay,” 10. 25 Kenner, “Gold in the Gloom,” 128. 26 See, for instance, Marshall McLuhan’s review of The Poetry of Ezra Pound in Renascence (Spring 1952), 216. 27 Kenner, The Poetry of Ezra Pound, 64. 28 Kenner, The Poetry of Ezra Pound, 65. 29 Kenner, “Gold in the Gloom,” 129. 30 Quoted in Humphrey Carpenter, A Serious Character: The Life of Ezra Pound (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1988), 799. 31 Quoted in Carpenter, A Serious Character, 799. 32 Quoted in Carpenter, A Serious Character, 799. 33 T. S. Eliot, “Introduction,” in The Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. T. S. Eliot (New York: New Directions, 1954), x, xiii. 34 Coyle, Ezra Pound, Popular Genres, and the Discourse of Culture (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995), 12–13. 35 Coyle, 15. 36 Nancy Gish, “Eliot and Virgil in Love and War,” in The T.S. Eliot Studies Annual, vol. I, ed. John D. Morgenstern (Clemson, SC; Clemson University Press, 2017), 177–96.

Notes on Contributors Cross-Cultural Ezra Pound

Christian Bancroft received their PhD from the University of Houston and are the recipient of a Michener Fellowship. A semifinalist for the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award and the Lena-Miles Wever Todd Prize for Poetry, they are the author of Queering Modernist Translation (2020) and the co-editor of Adelaide Crapsey: The Life & Work of an American Master (2018). Their work has appeared or is forthcoming in Callaloo, The Missouri Review, Prairie Schooner, jubilat, Gulf Coast, Cimarron Review, and Asymptote, among others. Walter Baumann grew up in Switzerland and studied English, German, and Philosophy at the universities of Zurich and Aberdeen. He started his teaching career in German Studies at the University of Toronto (1964–66), after which he moved to the University of Ulster, from which he retired in 1996. His involvement with Ezra Pound started in 1959 with a seminar paper on Pound and Imagism. His DPhil dissertation, The Rose in the Steel Dust: An Examination of the Cantos of Ezra Pound, was published in Switzerland in 1967 and at the University of Miami Press in 1970. He was a frequent contributor to Paideuma and published his collected Pound Essays, Roses from the Steel Dust with the National Poetry Foundation in 2000. Since 1976 he has been an organizer of Pound conferences and is now looking back to over sixty years with Ezra Pound. 235

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John Beall has been teaching English since 1989 at Collegiate School in New York City. His first book of poems, Self-Portraits, was published in 2019 by the Finishing Line Press. The poems, “Self-Portrait” and “November 22, 1963,” were awarded the Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Prize in 2016 and 2017. His poems have appeared in The Henry James Review, Slant, MidAmerica, and Songs and Poems for Hemingway & Paris. His essay on “Pound, Hemingway, and the Inquest Series,” appeared in volume 44 of Paideuma. His essay on “Ernest Hemingway’s Reading of James Joyce’s Ulysses” appeared in volume 51.4 of The James Joyce Quarterly. He has published several other essays about Hemingway in MidAmerica and The Hemingway Review. Anne Conover received a BA in English Literature and an MA in Latin American Studies from Stanford University. Her home was Washington D.C. She held editor, writer, and research positions with the Curtis Publishing Company, U.S. Information Agency (USIA), Johns Hopkins University Press, the Hispanic Division of the Library of Congress. She was the author of several biographies of women including Caresse Crosby: From Black Sun to Roccasinibalda (1990; reissued as an ebook in 2018) and Olga Rudge and Ezra Pound: “What thou lovest well” (2001), nominee for Best Biography of the Year. She was an active writer, lecturer, and conference presenter, contributing regularly to academic journals such as Paideuma. Anne died in April 2018. Michael Coyle is Professor of English at Colgate University. He is founding President of the Modernist Studies Association and past President of the International T.S. Eliot Society. His Ezra Pound, Popular Genres, and the Discourse of Culture was published in 1995; he has subsequently edited two Pound collections for the National Poetry Foundation: Ezra Pound and African American Modernism (2001) and, with Steven G. Yao, Ezra Pound and Education (2012). Recent essays on Pound include “Pound and Race” (in Ezra Pound in Context, ed. Ira Nadel) and “Ringing True: Poundian Translation and Poetic Music,” in The Classics in Modernist Translation, ed. Miranda Hickman and Lynn Kozak. Professional Attention: Ezra Pound and the Career of Modernist Criticism, co-written with Roxana Preda, was published by Camden House Press in 2018.

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Giuliana Ferreccio is former Professor of English at the University of Turin, head of the Centro Studi Arti della Modernità and co-editor of its online journal Cosmo: Comparative Studies in Modernism. She is the author of Jane Austen: La passione dell’ironia (1990), William Wordsworth: Paesaggi della coscienza (2006), and has written extensively on comparative and modernist literature and literary theory. She recently edited and translated Wordsworth’s Two-Part Prelude (2013) and Shakespeare’s 2 Henry IV (2017) into Italian. Some of her recent modernist contributions appeared in Roma/Amor: Ezra Pound, Rome and Love (2013), Ezra Pound and Modernism: The Irish Factor (2017), The Edinburgh Companion to Ezra Pound and the Arts (2019), and Ezra Pound’s Green World (2019). John Gery, Research Professor of English at the University of New Orleans, directs summer seminars at the Ezra Pound Center for Literature, Brunnenburg, Italy. His poetry collections include The Enemies of Leisure (1995/2020), Davenport’s Version (2003), A Gallery of Ghosts (2008), and Have at You Now! (2014). He has received fellowships from the NEA, Fulbright Foundation, Louisiana Division of the Arts, and University of Minnesota Center for Advanced Studies, among others. His books include Nuclear Annihilation and Contemporary American Poetry: Ways of Nothingness (1996); In Venice and the Veneto with Ezra Pound (2007), co-authored with Rosella Mamoli Zorzi, Massimo Bacigalupo, and Stefano Maria Casella; Hmayeak Shems: A Poet of Pure Spirit (2010), co-authored with Vahe Baladouni. He has also edited numerous books of poetry and criticism, including, with William Pratt, Ezra Pound, Ends and Beginnings: Essays and Poems (2010) and, with Daniel Kempton and H. R. Stoneback, Imagism: Essays on Its Initiation, Impact and Influence (2013). Since 2005 Gery has served as Secretary of the Ezra Pound International Conference. Yoshiko Kita, Visiting Research Fellow in the Institute of Policy and Cultural Studies at Chuo University, Tokyo, recently published an essay, “Ezra Pound and Noh Play—the Significance of His Translation” in The Possibility of Harmonious Mutuality in Asian Thoughts. She is a member of the Ezra Pound Society of Japan and acts as one of the editors of its annual journal, Ezra Pound Review. She also belongs to the Japan Society for the

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Comparative Study of Civilizations. She has been translating American and British modern poetry including Pound, H.D., and Basil Bunting into Japanese and some of her translations appeared in Aurora. David McKnight is Director of the Annenberg Rare Book and Manuscript Library at the University of Pennsylvania Libraries. Prior to accepting the position at the University of Pennsylvania in 2006, he was the Director of Rare Book and Manuscript Library and Head of the Digital Collections Program at McGill University Libraries, where he worked in various roles for fifteen years. He was a co-organizer of the 2017 Ezra Pound International Conference held at the University of Pennsylvania. In 2019, McKnight curated a major exhibition on the history of the Gotham Book Mart. A past president of the Bibliographical Society of Canada, McKnight is currently founding Co-Director of the Philadelphia AvantGarde Studies Consortium. Ira Nadel, Professor of English at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, has published biographies of Leonard Cohen, Tom Stoppard, and David Mamet. He has also edited the Cambridge Companion to Ezra Pound and Ezra Pound in Context. His essay “Ezra Pound’s Global Poetics” recently appeared in Literature of the Americas published by the Gorky Institute, Moscow. Forthcoming is a critical biography of Philip Roth and Teaching Approaches to Ezra Pound co-edited with Demetres Tryphonopoulos. Viorica Patea is Professor of American Literature at the University of Salamanca, where she teaches American and English literature. Her published books include Entre el mito y la realidad: Aproximación a la obra poética de Sylvia Plath (1989), a study on Whitman, La apología de Whitman a favor de la épica de la modernidad (1999) and T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (2005). She has edited various collections of essays such as Critical Essays on the Myth of the American Adam (2001) and, together with Paul Scott Derrick, Modernism Revisited: Transgressing Boundaries and Strategies of Renewal in American Poetry (2007). Her edited collection of essays, Short Story Theories: A Twenty-First-Century Perspective (2012) received the Javier Coy Research Award for the best edited book (2013) from the

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Spanish Association of American Studies. Her research interests include foremost poetry and poetics, as well as comparative studies in witness literature of East European countries. Jonathan Pollock is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Perpignan-Via Domitia, France. He is the author of Qu’est-ce que l’humour ? (2001), Le Moine (de Lewis) d’Antonin Artaud (2002), Le Rire du Mômo: Antonin Artaud et la littérature anglo-américaine (2002), Déclinaison: Le naturalisme poétique de Lucrèce à Lacan (2010) and Lire Les Cantos d’Ezra Pound (2014). William Pratt is Professor of English Emeritus at Miami University of Ohio, where he taught for over forty years. He was Secretary of the Ezra Pound International Conference from 1991 to 2005, and Lecturer at the Yeats Summer School in Sligo, 1978–83. His books include The Imagist Poem: Modern Poetry in Miniature, The Fugitive Poets: Modern Southern Poetry in Perspective, Singing the Chaos: Madness and Wisdom in Modern Poetry, Ezra Pound and the Making of Modernism, and, most recently, A Faulkner Profile, the Man and the Writer (2020). Kent Su is Lecturer of English Language and Literature at Shanghai International Studies University. He is currently completing a monograph based on his PhD thesis, which examines the philosophical evocation of Chinese landscapes in Ezra Pound’s Cantos. He is the co-organizer of the well-acclaimed London Cantos Reading Group. His research lies primarily in modernist art and poetry, ecology, Chinese philosophical traditions, comparative literature and transnational studies. Lin Wei is Lecturer at the School of Foreign Languages and Literature, Tianjin University. She holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from Renmin University of China (Beijing). Her dissertation is on Ezra Pound and Vorticism, examining how Pound’s interaction with the Western modern visual arts in the early twentieth century affected his thought on literature, art, economics, and politics. Her research interests include comparative literature, Anglo-American literature, and Western sinology, on which topics she has published several articles and reviews.

Index

Adams, Charles Francis 91 The Life and Works of John Adams 91, 207–8n3 Adams, John 4, 38, 40, 41, 46–50, 96 Adams, John Quincy 41 Adams, Matthew 45 Adams, Robert 193 “A Hawk and a Handsaw for Ezra Pound” 193 Adams, Samuel 49 Adams, Stephen J. 24, 47 Poetic Designs 24 Akhmatova, Anna 136 Aldington, Richard 18, 30, 64, 81, 82–83 Alexandrines 18 Amaral, José Vázquez 9, 10, 127–33, 143, 146 American Comparative Literature Association 105 American Field Service Auxiliary 151 Anderson, Sherwood 158 Antheil, George (composer) 89 Ballet Mécanique 179 anti-Semitism 122, 196 Aphrodite 171, 174–75, 178 Apostel, Hans Erich 120 Arche Verlag (publisher) 121

Ardeleanu, George 134, 140, 225n30 Arnold, Matthew 18 Atimetus 33–34 Atlantic Monthly (magazine) 188 Auden, Wystan Hugh 28, 187 “In Memory of William Butler Yeats” 187 Bacigalupo, Massimo 120 Ballantyne Press 64 Ballet Mécanique (George Antheil, composer) 179 Bancroft, Christian 7–8, 9 Barnard, Mary 25, 26 Barrett, William 188 Barry, Iris 20 Barthes, Roland 76–78 “The Death of the Author” 76 Bassi, Serena 106 Baudelaire, Charles 186 Baumann, Walter 8–9, 13, 199 The Rose in the Steel Dust 121, 199 Beach, Sylvia 151–52 Beall, John 6–7 Beasley, Rebecca 54 Ezra Pound and the Visual Culture of Modernism 54

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Beijing, China 40, 95 Benét, William Rose 190 Benjamin, Walter 6, 78 “The Ways of the Translator” 6 Benn, Gottfried 121 Bergson, Henri 11–12, 163–72 Affirmations 172 “Introduction à la Métaphysique” 163 L’Evolution créatrice 12, 170–72 Matière et Mémoire 11, 164, 168, 169, 172 Berry, Walter 150 Berryman, John 189 Bigelow (William Sturgis) 64 Bion 19–20 “Adonis” 19 “Death of Adonis” 20 Bird, William (“Bill”) 79, 81–82, 84–85, 88 Black Sun Press 10, 160–61 Blackwell Companion to Translation Studies 106 Blake, William 80–81, 89 Blast 4, 53, 55, 65, 73–74, 134, 163–64 Bohm, Carl 120 Bollingen Prize for Poetry 13, 187–92, 194–95, 223–24n10 Bolshevism 85, 88 Boscán, Juan 145 Boston, Massachusetts 40, 45, 64, 124, 150–51 Boyle, John J. 37 Boyle, Kay 159 Bradford, William 150 Bremer, Klaus 120 Bridges, Robert 18 British Museum 30, 56–57 Browning, Robert 18, 24, 26 Bryher (Annie Winifred Ellerman) 231n27 Close Up (journal) 179, 231n27 Bryn Mawr College 29, 30 Buddhism 102 Bunyan, John 48 Bush, Ron 229n7

Cairns, Huntington 200 Callimachus 203n5 Cambridge History of American Literature 75 Campos, Haroldo 133 Camus, Albert 161 Canary Islands, Spain 140–41 Cantar o Poema de Mio Cid 131–32 “Cantares”/Los Cantares (Spanish appellation for The Cantos) 10, 129, 131, 143 see also Pound, Ezra The Cantos Project 83 Caraion, Ion (penname of Stellan Diaconescu) 134–35, 137, 139–42 Cardenal, Ernesto 10, 128, 143–45, 226–27n59 “El miglior fabro” 143 “Ezra Pound en Nicaragua” 143 Carlisle Indian School 30 Carruth, Hayden 189 Castello di Roccasinibalda 162 Catullus, Gaius Valerius 17, 21, 25, 109 Cervantes, Miguel de 133 Charlemagne 45 Cheltenham Military Academy 20 Chesterton, Gilbert Keith 192, 233n9 Chicago, IL 30 Chun 98 Cioran, Emil 136–37 La tentation d’existir 137 Ciorănescu, Alexandru 140–41 Citizens of the World 161–62 Claro, Andres 107 Close Up (journal) 179, 231n27 Coetzee, J. M. 232n39 Waiting for the Barbarians 232n39 Coleman’s Hatch 26 Collecott, Diana 64, 230n10 Combat (newspaper) 161 Communism 9–10, 127–28, 134, 136–39, 141, 143 Concretism 36 Confucianism 7, 33, 50, 92, 94–96, 98–100, 102, 121

Index Confucius 4, 33, 91, 95, 97–99, 102 The Analects 94 The Great Learning (Ta Hio), or The Great Digest 98, 123, 199 see also Pound, Ezra Conover, Anne 10–11 Cookson, William 47 Coyle, Michael 13–14 Crane, Hart 149 Cravens, Margaret 21 Crawfordsville, Indiana 38 Creeley, Robert 123–24, 233n10 Cronos (journal) 193, 233n10 Crosby, Caresse (née Mary Phelps Jacob) 10–11, 149–54, 157–62 Crosses of Gold 150–51 Crosby, Harry 10, 149–52 “The End of Europe” 152 Sonnets for Caresse 151 The Torchbearer 152 Crosby Continental Editions (CCE) 10, 153, 157–60 Culler, Jonathan 12, 173, 186, 230n13, 230n14 Cummings, Edward Estlin 88, 155 Curtius, E. R. 19 Dante Aligieri 18, 21, 31, 81–82, 89, 135 The Divine Comedy 31 Vita Nuova 21 Daoism 102 Darío, Ruben 143–45 Davie, Donald 73 de Bornello, Girart 141 de Campos, Augusto 132 de la Vega, Garcilaso 145 de Mailla, Joseph Anne Marie de Moyria 7, 91–92, 95–96, 101–2 Histoire générale de la Chine 7, 91, 95 de Rachewiltz, Mary (Rudge) 11, 129, 162, 215n12 Declaration of Independence 3, 27 Deleuze, Gilles 168 Mille Plateaux 168 Demeter 174

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Derrida, Jacques 186, 230n14 Des Imagistes 64 The Dial 30 différance 77–78 Divus, Andreas 166 Duke of Zhou 98, 102 Dylan, Bob 90 Eastman, Barbara 83 Eberhart, Richard 190 Editions Narcisse (publisher) 149, 151 Edmund, J. M. 22 The New Fragments of Alcaeus, Sappho and Corinna 22 The Egoist 30, 55, 90 Einstein, Albert 136 El Nuevo Amanecer Cultural 143 Eleusinian rites 174, 180 Eliade, Mircea 136–37, 141 Foret Interdite 137 Eliot, Thomas Stearns 2, 6, 24–25, 28, 33, 80, 81, 88–90, 111, 114, 130, 142, 151, 159, 191, 199–201, 207n3 “Hollow Men” 151 The Waste Land 6, 28 80, 89–90, 201 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 145 Emery, Clark 9, 119–20, 122–23 Ideas into Action 9, 119 Empson, William 198–99 Erie Canal 47 Ermenoville, France 154 Ezuniversity 130 Faber & Faber (publisher) 121, 133 Fascism 40, 76, 134, 143–45, 188 Fenollosa, Ernest 5, 6, 33, 64, 67–73, 75–78, 97 Cathay: For the Most Part from the Chinese of Rihaku, from the Notes of the Late Ernest Fenollosa, and the Deciphering of the Professors Mori and Ariga 68 Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry 5–6, 67, 70–72, 76–77

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“The Chinese Written Language as a Medium for Poetry” 33 “The Coming Fusion of East and West” 72 see also Pound, Ezra Fenollosa, Mary 67 Ferlinghetti, Lawrence 194 Ferrán, Jaime 132–33 Ferreccio, Giuliana 12–13 Fitzgerald, Desmond 23 Fitzgerald, F. Scott 10 Flint, Frank Stuart 23 Ford, Ford Madox 26, 54, 154–55 Fordham University Press 67 Fortnightly Review 53 Foucault, Michel 76 Fragmente (journal) 123 Frankenberg, Lloyd 193 Franklin, Benjamin 4, 37–50, 55, 208n9, 209n34 Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin 40, 45 Poor Richard’s Almanac 40, 45 “Proposals Relating to the Education of Youth in Pennsylvania” 41 Freeman, Elizabeth 105, 111–12 Freiburg, Germany 120–21, 123 Freiburg University 120 Freud, Sigmund 136, 159, 163, 183 Freudian 185 Fuller, Buckminster 161–62 Fulton, Robert 150 Gallimard (publisher) 137 Gassendi, Pierre 49 Syntagma philosophiae Epicuri 49 Gaudier-Brezska, Henri 53–54, 82–83, 87, 89 George, Anita Christina 203–4n5 George, Lloyd 80 Georgians 26 Gerhardt, Ezra 125 Gerhardt, Rainer Maria 8–9, 119–23, 125 Blätter für Freunde 121, 123 Gery, John 4

Gheorghiu-Dej, Gheorghe 138 Giles, Herbert 7, 95 A History of Chinese Literature 7, 95 Gish, Nancy 201 Golding, Alan 107 Golijewski, Nikolai 86, 215–16n19 Gotham Book Mart 162 Graham, A. C. 72–73 Greek (Classical) 31 see also H.D.; Pound, Ezra Gregory, Eileen 206n53 Gregory, Horace 193 Grosz, Elizabeth 105, 113–14 Guattari, Felix 168 H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) x, 3–5, 12–13, 18, 23, 27–30, 33–35, 53, 55–65, 108, 157, 173–79, 182–85, 230n10, 232n41 and Greek myth 174, 178 and Hokusai 4–5, 57–64 and Imagism 27–30, 33–35, 173 and Pound 27–33, 54–55, 174–78 and Vorticism 4–5, 55–56, 65 works by Asphodel 59–60 Borderline (pamphlet) 179, 185 Close Up (journal) 179 Collected Poems of 1925 55 End to Torment: A Memoir of Ezra Pound 30, 173 “Epigram” 33–34 “Eurydice” 174 “Evening” 62–64 The Gift 179 Helen in Egypt 174 The Mystery 174 “Oread” 4–5, 53, 55–59, 62, 65, 211n20 Sea Garden 63 Tribute to Freud 211n26 Tribute to the Angels 174 Trilogy 12–13, 173–78, 181–85, 229n1, 230–31n15 compared to The Pisan Cantos 12–13, 173–77, 179–82

Index Haig, Douglas, First Earl Haig 88 haiku 22, 31 Halberstam, Jack 105, 116–17 Hamilton College 2, 18, 20–21 Hardy, Thomas 18, 154 Harvard University 42, 150 Harvey, Gregory x Healy, J. V. 193 Hellenism 26 Hemingway, Ernest 10, 83–84, 88, 90, 149, 151, 155–56, 158 In Our Time 85, 156 Torrents of Spring 11, 156–58 Hermes 101, 184–85 Hesse, Eva 121, 130, 223n6 Hessische Rundfunk (Radio Hesse) 120 Heyman, Katherine Ruth 22 Hillyer, Robert 188 “Treason’s Strange Fruit” 188 Hokusai, Katsushika 4–5, 57–60, 62, 64, 211n26 works by The Great Wave off Kanagawa 5, 57–59 Kanagawa-Oki Namiura 57–59 Mount Fuji at Sea 4, 56–57 Mount Fuji in a Sake Cup 5, 60, 61 One Hundred Views of Mount Fuji 57, 60 Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji 57 Homer 17–20, 31 Homeric 18, 166, 203–4n5 Homonoea 33, 34 Horace 17–18, 20 Hugo, Victor 154 Hulme, Thomas Ernest 23–24, 82, 83, 89, 163 “Lecture on Modern Poetry” 23–24 “Notes on Language and Style” 23 Humanitas Press (Bucharest) 134 Hutchins, Patricia 199 Huxley, Aldous 159 Ibbotson, Joseph 20 Idaho 29

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Ierunca, Virgil 140 Imagism 3, 23, 27–31, 33, 35–36, 43, 54–55, 59, 64, 68, 73, 75, 122, 173 see also H.D.; Pound, Ezra Imagistes, Les 29, 35 Infante, Ignacio 107 After Translation 107 International Quarterly of Literature and the Arts (portfolio) 161 Ionesco, Eugen 136–37 Iron Curtain 134 Isis-Osiris myth 174 Italian Renaissance 7, 92 Iwasaki, Ryozo 129 James, Henry 149 Jefferson, Thomas 3–4, 27–29, 38, 40–41, 46–50, 133, 207n3, 217n4 Johnson, Lionel 18 Johnson, Samuel 208n9 Jolas, Eugene 152, 157, 161 Jolas, Maria 152 Jonson, Ben 171 “A Celebration of Charis” 171 Journal of Modern Literature 107 Joyce, James 6, 10, 28, 75, 80, 88–90, 133, 149, 151, 155, 216–17n34 “The Mookes and the Gripes” 151 “The Ondt and the Graicehopper” 152 Ulysses 6, 28, 80, 89–90, 151, 216–17n34 Junge amerikanische Lyrik (Recent American Poetry) 123 Kahn, Sy 162 Kant, Immanuel 168 Critique of Pure Reason 168 Karlsruhe, Germany 120 Kennedy, George A. 76 Kenner, Hugh 13–14, 23, 83, 89, 121, 188–92, 196–201 The Poetry of Ezra Pound 189 The Pound Era 23, 205n3 Keynes, Maynard 202

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Khrushchev, Nikita 138 Ki-Chan (mountain) 100 Kita, Yoshiko 4–5, 7, 12 Klein, Lucas 67 Kostetzky, Eaghor 128–29, 222–23n1 Kuanon (Japanese) 174–75 Lacayo, Aaron 106 Laubies, René 129 Laughlin, James 133 Lawrence, David Herbert 149, 162, 218 Léger, Fernand 84, 89–90 Lewis, Wyndham 4, 11, 54, 83, 90, 154–55, 163 Time and Western Man 11, 163 Liebregts, Peter 19, 204n11 Limes Verlag (publisher) 121 The Little Review 55, 69 Litz, A. Walton 90, 205, 216–17n34 Livy 20 London 3–4, 23, 28–30, 35, 40, 54, 58, 88, 150, 157, 175–76, 178, 181–83 London Times 162 Lovinescu, Monica 140 Lowell, Amy 64, 108, 150 Lowell, Percival 64 Lowell, Robert 200 Lucretius Carus, Titus 21 Lycée Spiru Haret (Bucharest) 140 Mabuchi, Akiko 62 Macherey, Pierre 76 Mack, Mehammed Amadeus 106 MacPherson, Kenneth 179, 231n27 Madrid, Spain 143 Malatesta, Sigismondo 40, 46–47 Mallarmé, Stéphane 133, 151 Managua, Nicaragua 143 Martial, Marcus Valerius (Martialis) 21, 25 Martinelli, Sheri 132 Martz, Louis L. 55 Marxism 10, 127–28, 143 Maryland 47

Maurois, André 158 McAlmon, Robert 154–57, 160 McDaniel, Walton 20 McKnight, David x McLuhan, Marshall 233n9 melopoeia, phanopoeia, logopoeia 23, 71, 122, 212n9 Mencius 171 Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti 28 Miller, Henry 161 Modernism 3, 5, 26, 28–29, 89, 107–8, 144 Monet, Claude 62, 64 The Monist (journal) 68 Monro, Harold 150 Monroe, Harriet 3, 25–26, 30 Monteverdi Claudio 133 Moore, Harry 162 Moore, Marianne 3, 29–30, 35–36 “To a Chameleon” 35–36 Mori, Kainan 68 Morrow, Bradford 65 Morse, Peter 64 “Hokusai’s World Wide Reputation” 64 Mussolini, Benito 7, 76, 91, 101, 137, 143–44, 193, 217n4 Nadel, Ira 2–3, 8 Nagao, Aruga 68 Nagata, Seiji 58 nekuia 165–66, 176 New Age 23 New Criticism 188–89, 199–200 New Directions (publisher) 14, 83, 121, 133 New Jersey 29, 35, 42 New Republic (magazine) 188 New Statesman (magazine) 188 New York 24, 30, 53, 67, 69, 160–61 New York Public Library 30 New York Times Book Review 193–94 Newsweek (magazine) 188 Nicaragua 10, 127, 143

Index Nicholls, Peter 231n16 Nicolescu, Vasile 134, 225n28 Niedermayer, Max 121 Noguchi, Yone 58 Noica, Constantin 137–38 “Povestiri din Hegel” (“Narrations of Hegel”) 137 Nolde, John 91–92 Notes and Queries 120 Odysseus (Homer) 101, 165–66 Odyssey 12, 31 Olson, Charles 9, 123–25, 162, 233n10 “The Death of Europe: A Funeral Poem for Rainer Maria Gerhardt” also titled “TO GERHARDT, THERE, AMONG EUROPE’S THINGS OF WHICH HE HAS WRITTEN US” 123–25 “Projective Verse” 9, 123 Selected Writings 124 Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso) 17, 21, 26 paideuma 101 paradiso terrestre 41, 146 Paris 6, 32, 40, 43, 81, 137, 140–41, 149–51, 156, 161, 163 Partisan Review (journal) 188 Pasternak, Boris 138 Doctor Zhivago 138 Patea, Viorica 9–10, 13 Paul, Sherman 124 Peabody, Mary (Caresse Crosby) 150–51 Peabody, Richard 150–51 Pearson, Norman Holmes 133, 174 Foreword to Trilogy 174 Pennsound 79, 124 Pennsylvania 20, 29, 34, 37 Perelman, Bob 107 Perse, St. John 142 Persephone 174 Pfeiffer, Pauline 158 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania x, 1, 3–4, 27–31, 36–38, 40, 60

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Picasso, Pablo 133 Piette, Adam 108 Pignatiari, Decio 133 Pillat, Dinu 137–38 Pisa, Italy 161 Plarr, Victor 82, 89 Plon (publisher) 137 Plotinus 169, 171 Ennead 169 Poe, Edgar Allan 151 Poetry (Chicago) 3, 30, 32, 55, 188, 193 Poetry (London) 150 Poetry New York 123 Poets’ Club 24 Poet’s Translation Series 64 Pollock, Jonathan 11–12 Pope John Paul II 139, 143 Portfolio 160–61 Post-Structuralism 76 Pound, Dorothy see Shakespear, Dorothy (Pound) Pound, Ezra passim as cross-cultural figure 1–14, 91–93, 105–6, 166, 168–69 early Pound studies 13–14, 187–202 and Greek meter 2, 18–26, 31, 33–4, 203–4n5, 204n8 and Greek myth 5, 55, 165, 171, 182 and Greek philosophy 7, 92 and H.D. 4–8, 27–33, 54–57 and Imagism 3, 27–31, 35–36, 68, 73, 75 and Nobel Prize for Literature 226–27n59 translated into German 7, 8–9, 119–25 translated into Romanian 7, 9–10, 127–29, 131, 134–42 translated into Spanish 7, 9–10, 127–33, 143–45 and Vorticism 53–55, 73–77, 163–68 works by A Lume Spento 19 ABC of Reading 7 “Apparuit” 2, 21–22

248

Cross-Cultural Ezra Pound The Cantos of Ezra Pound 1, 4, 6, 7, 9–10, 11–14, 21, 26, 31, 38, 40, 41, 47, 50, 79–80, 83, 88, 90, 96, 98, 119, 121, 127, 129–33, 143, 145, 164–72, 173–82, 190–99 Adams Cantos 40, 46, 50, 129, 209–10n34 Cantos și alte poeme (Romanian translation) 134 China Cantos or Chinese Cantos 7, 91–93, 95–99, 101–2, 219n29 Die Pisaner Gesänge (Pisan Cantos in German translation) 222 Eleven New Cantos (Nuevo Mundo Cantos) 40, 46, 133 Later Cantos 127, 129, 130 los Cantares 131, 132, 133 Os Cantos (Portuguese translation) 130 The Pisan Cantos 9, 12–13, 89, 121–22, 130, 162, 173–77, 179–83, 190, 193–97 compared to Trilogy 12–13, 164–72, 173–77, 179–82 reception in 1949 193–97 Posthumous Cantos 175 Section Rock Drill de los Cantares 131 Thrones de los Cantares 131–32 individual Cantos Canto 1 165–66 Canto 3 179 Canto 13 50, 81, 122 Cantos 14–15 (Hell Cantos) 6, 79–82, 84, 89 Canto 15 81 Canto 16 6, 79–90, 215n13, 216–17n34 Canto 20 168

Canto 21 46 Cantos 25–26 47 Cantos 31–41 (Nuevo Mundo Cantos) 40 Canto 31 4, 37, 40, 41, 46–49 Canto 36 177 Canto 45 (Usura Canto) 121–22 Canto 46 188 Canto 47 177 Canto 52 209–10n34 Cantos 52–57 97 Canto 53 96, 98 Canto 54 102 Canto 65 50 Canto 71 40 Cantos 72–73 181, 229n8 Canto 74 89, 121–22, 170–71, 180–81 Canto 76 181 Canto 79 174, 179–80 Canto 80 180, 207n2 Canto 81 175, 177, 181 Canto 83 119, 122–23, 174–75 Canto 84 121, 123, 193 Canto 90 9, 121, 174 Canto 93 1 Canto 116 129, 223n4 Cathay 22, 68, 73, 77, 134 see also Fenollosa, Ernest The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry 5–6, 67–77 see also Fenollosa, Ernest “Dogmatic Statement on the Game and Play of Chess” 74 Drafts and Fragments 129 Draft of XVI Cantos 79, 84, 86–88 “Fan-Piece, for Her Imperial Lord” 32–33 “Gathering the Limbs of Osiris” 174

Index Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir 53, 87, 216n25 The Great Digest and the Unwobbling Pivot 199 see also Confucius Guide to Kulchur 42, 119, 169, 217n9 Hilda’s Book 3, 19, 27 Homage to Sextus Propertius 8, 105, 107–17, 220n28 “How I Began” ix, 32, 207n Hugh Selwyn Mauberley 7, 8, 19, 20, 80, 82, 129, 142 Imaginary Letters 152 “In a Station of the Metro” 32 Jefferson And/Or Mussolini: L’idea Statale; Fascism, As I Have Seen It 217n4 “The Jefferson–Adams Letters as a Shrine and a Monument” 41, 209n27 Literary Essays of Ezra Pound 200–201 Lustra 134 “Night Litany” 2, 25 “Papyrus” 2, 22, 207 Personae (1909) 23, 134, 141 A Quinzaine for this Yule 25 “A Retrospect” 25, 208n12 “The Return” 21, 25 Ripostes 29 134 Selected Cantos 133 The Spirit of Romance 17 “The Tree” 3, 27 “A Visiting Card” 43, 208n12 “Vortex” (essay) 53, 55 “Vorticism” (essay) 4, 53, 54–56, 73 “What Is Money For?” 44 Pratt, William 3–4, 12 Pre-Raphaelites 17 Princeton University (College of New Jersey) 42, 54 Propertius, Sextus 8, 17–19, 21, 31, 105, 108–16 Proust, Marcel 149–50

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Quasimodo, Salvatore 129 queering translation 7–8, 105–17 Quinn, John 69 Rabaté, Jean Michel 107, 216–17n34 Rachewiltz, Mary de see de Rachewiltz, Mary (Rudge) Radiguet, Raymond 155, 157, 159 Le Diable au Corps (Devil in the Flesh) 155, 159 Rapallo, Italy 40, 153, 159, 175 Reagan, Ronald 201 Reichsarbeitsdienst (Third Reich Labour Camp) 120 Renaissance 28, 40, 145 Richard St. Victor 169 Richards, I. A. 198–99 Richmond-Garza, Elizabeth 106 Rieti, Italy 162 Rimbaud, Arthur 151–52 Rimini, Italy 47 Rohia (monastery) 135, 138 Romania 10, 127, 134, 136, 138 Romanian “detention centers”: Jilava, Canal, Cavnic, Peninsula, Baia Sp Sprie, Malmaison, Gherla, and Aiud 137 România literară 139 Rosenbach Library (Philadelphia) 29 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel 24 Rudge, Olga 156–57, 162 Ruskin, John 41 Russian Revolution 84–89 Rutgers University 128, 130 Sand, George 154 Sandinista government (Nicaragua) 143–44 Sandinista Liberation Front 143 Sappho (sapphics) 2, 18–20, 22, 25 Sartre, Jean-Paul 161 Saturday Review of Literature (journal) 188, 198, 200, 233n4 Saussy, Haun 5, 67, 73–74 Scarron, Paul 48, 49

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Schelling, Felix 18 Schifferli, Peter 121 Schlothauer, Renate 120 Schönberg, Arnold 120 Securitate (Romanian secret police) 136, 139–40 Seven Arts 68 Shakespear, Dorothy (Pound) 22, 84, 121, 125, 132, 180, 197, 234n22 Shakespeare, William 31 Henry IV, Part II (quoted) 186 Sonnet 18 (quoted) 186 Shakespeare and Company (bookstore) 151 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 25 Shepard, W. P. 20 Sieburth, Richard 182 Sima Guang 7, 92–96, 98, 101–2 Tongjian gangmu (Outline and Digest of the General Mirror) 92, 94 Zizhi Tongjian (Comprehensive Mirror for Aid in Government) 7, 92–94 Simon, Richard 160 Simon and Schuster (publisher) 160 Sirmione, Lago di Garda, Italy 81 Sisson, C. H. 190 Smith, Henry 60 Socialist Realism 136 Solzhenitsyn, Alexander 139 Gulag Archipelago 139 Sordello 4, 231n16 South Atlantic Quarterly 195 Southern Illinois University 149, 162 Spoleto Poetry Festival 6, 79–80, 83, 85, 87, 89 Spurlin, William 8, 105–6 “Queering Translation” 105–6 St. Elizabeths Hospital 13, 130, 132, 188 St. George, Katherine Price Collier 161 St. Louis, Missouri 29 St. Petersburg, Russia 85, 88 Stalin, Joseph 138, 144 Stalling, Jonathan 67 Steffens, Lincoln 84–87, 89 Autobiography 87

Steinhardt, Nicolae 10, 128, 134–42 Jurnalul Fericirii (“The Diary of Happiness”) 134, 136, 139–40, 142 Steloff, Frances 162 Storer, Edward 23 Strawbridge, Justus C. 37 Structuralism 76, 78 Swinburne, Algernon Charles 17, 24–26 Symbolistes 30, 31 Tate, Allen 188, 189 Tauber, Richard 120 Tauchnitz (publisher) 11, 153–54 Ten Eyck, David 46–47, 50, 229n1 Ezra Pound’s Adams Cantos 46 Tennyson, Alfred, Lord 17–18, 26 Terrell, Carroll 49 Thatcher, Margaret 201 Thomson, Charles 49 Three Mountains Press 79, 82–86, 88–89 Thucydides 20 Ti, Hoang 97–98 Tiberius Caesar Augustus 34 Tietjens, Eunice 193 Time (magazine) 188 Torrey, John 49 totalitarianism 127–28 T.P.’s Weekly ix transition (journal) 152, 158, 160–61 translation ix, 1–2, 5–10, 25, 31, 33, 45, 64, 68, 73, 77–78, 92, 105–17, 121–23, 127–32, 134–37, 140–43, 145, 152, 155, 158–59, 166, 182, 197, 199 see also Pound, Ezra; Spurlin, William Treaty of Brest-Litovsk 85, 88 Tyulenev, Sergey 106 Ungaretti, Giuseppe 129 Universidad Autónoma de México 131 University of Bucharest 134 University of Illinois 192 University of la Laguna in the Canary Isles 141 University of Pennsylvania x, 2, 37, 39, 41 College of Pennsylvania 4

Index Urtecho, Coronel 143–45 “Darío y Pound” 143–45 “El imagismo de Ezra Pound” 143 Valéry, Paul 142, 158 Valle, Rafael Heliodoro 130 Van Buren, Martin 41 Végső, Roland 108 Venice Italy 29, 155, 174 Verdun 84–85 Verlag der Fragmente (publisher) 123 Verlaine, Paul 170 “Clair de lune” 170 vers libre (free verse) 18–19, 24 Vienna, Austria 120, 155 Villon, François 25, 108 Virgil (Publius Vergilius Maro) 17–18, 21 Virgin Mary 174–75, 185, 231n23 Vorticism (vortex) 4–5, 11–12, 53–56, 65, 68, 73–75, 77, 112–13, 163–68 see also H.D.; Pound, Ezra W. P. Tompkins (printer) 161 Waley, Arthur 211n26 Wall Street Journal 32 Wallace Harvey, Emily Mitchell x Wallstein Verlag (publisher) 120 Washington, DC 13, 160–62 Washington, George 37 Watts, Harold H. 13–14, 191–99, 202, 234n22 Art in Fiction: The Intellectual and Artistic Development of Lord Lytton 192 “The Devices of Pound’s Cantos” 194–96 Ezra Pound and the Cantos 191, 195 “Means to an End” 194, 195 Modern Readers’ Guide to the Bible 192 “Philosopher at Bay” 193–94, 197–98, 234n22 “Points on a Circle” 194

251

Wees, William C. 53–54, 74 Vorticism and the English AvantGarde 53, 74 Wei, Lin 5–6, 7 Wharton, Edith 150 Wharton, Henry Thornton 18 Whitman, Walt 18, 31, 145 “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” 186 William and Mary College 42 Williams, William Carlos x, 3, 20–21, 25, 29–30, 34–35, 130, 152, 157 “El Hombre” 34–35 Wilson, Woodrow 80 Women Against War 161 Wordsworth, William 112, 114, 177, 184, 199 The Prelude 184 World War I (Great War) 3, 7, 82, 89, 150–51 World War II 8, 12, 160–61, 175, 184, 188 Wunderlich, Fritz 120 Wyncote, Pennsylvania 20 Yale University 42, 76, 80, 199, 200 Yao 98 Yao, Steven G. 107, 108 Translation and the Languages of Modernism: Gender, Politics, Language 107 Yeats, William Butler 22, 26, 109, 119, 187, 195 “Down by the Sally Gardens” 119 Yu Wang (Yeou-ouang, Chou King) 98, 100 zhengming (Ching Ming) 94, 96, 98 Zhu Xi 7, 92, 94–98, 101, 102 Tongjian Gangmu 7, 92, 94–95 Zilboorg, Caroline 64 Zoberman, Pierre 106 Zürich, Switzerland 119, 121 Zürich Polytechnic 136