The New Ezra Pound Studies 9781108614719, 9781108499019

Citation preview

T H E NE W E Z R A P O U N D ST U D I E S

This book develops key advances in Pound studies, responding to newly available primary sources and recent methodological developments in associated fields. It is divided into three parts. Part I addresses the state of Pound’s texts, both those upon which he relied for source material and those he produced in manuscript and print. Part II provides a comprehensive overview of the relation between Pound’s poetry and translations and scholarship in East Asian Studies. Part III examines the radical reconception of Pound’s cultural and political activities throughout his career, and his continuing impact, a reassessment made possible by recent controversial scholarship as well as new directions in literary and cultural theory. Pound’s wide-ranging intellectual, cultural, and aesthetic interests are given new analytic treatment, with an emphasis on how recent developments in gender and sexuality studies, medieval historiography, textual genetics, sound studies, visual cultures, and other fields can develop an understanding of Pound’s poetry and prose. mark byron is Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Sydney and an Australian Research Council Future Fellow. His research interests in modern literature include China and Japan, digital textuality, and literature and history. His current project, Modernism and the Early Middle Ages, has produced to date the monograph Ezra Pound’s Eriugena (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), winner of the Ezra Pound Society Book Prize in 2014, and a co-edited dossier on Samuel Beckett and the Middle Ages in the Journal of Beckett Studies (2016). He is the president of the Ezra Pound Society.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:12, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719

T WENT Y- F I RST - CE N T URY CRI T I C AL R E V I S I O N S

This series addresses two main themes across a range of key authors, genres and literary traditions. The first is the changing critical interpretations that have emerged since c. 2000. Radically new interpretations of writers, genres and literary periods have emerged from the application of new critical approaches. Substantial scholarly shifts have occurred too, through the emergence of new editions, editions of letters and competing biographical accounts. Books in this series collate and reflect this rich plurality of twenty-first-century literary critical energies, and wide varieties of revisionary scholarship, to summarize, analyze and assess the impact of contemporary critical strategies. Designed to offer critical pathways and evaluations, and to establish new critical routes for research, this series collates and explains a dizzying array of criticism and scholarship in key areas of twenty-first-century literary studies. Recent titles in this series jean-michel rabate´

The New Samuel Beckett Studies michelle kohler

The New Emily Dickinson Studies joanna freer

The New Pynchon Studies victoria aarons

The New Jewish American Literary Studies cody marrs

The New Melville Studies

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:12, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719

THE NEW EZRA POUND STUDIES edited by MARK BYRON University of Sydney

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:12, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719

University Printing House, Cambridge cb2 8bs, United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, ny 10006, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, vic 3207, Australia 314–321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – 110025, India 79 Anson Road, #06–04/06, Singapore 079906 Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781108499019 doi: 10.1017/9781108614719 © Cambridge University Press 2020 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2020 Printed in the United Kingdom by TJ International Ltd, Padstow Cornwall A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data names: Byron, Mark S., editor. title: The new Ezra Pound studies / edited by Mark Byron, University of Sydney. description: Cambridge, United Kingdom ; New York, NY : Cambridge University Press, 2020. | Series: Twenty-first century critical revisions | Includes bibliographical references and index. identifiers: lccn 2019019518 | isbn 9781108499019 subjects: lcsh: Pound, Ezra, 1885–1972 – Criticism and interpretation. classification: lcc ps3531.o82 z764 2020 | ddc 811/.52–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019019518 isbn 978-1-108-49901-9 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:12, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719

Contents

Notes on Contributors Key to Abbreviations

page vii xii 1

Editor’s Introduction Mark Byron

part i pound’s texts 1 Classical Literature

9

Leah Culligan Flack

2 Early Medieval Philosophy and Textuality

26

Mark Byron

3 Ezra Pound’s Pisan Cantos: The Promise and the Limits of the Archive

40

Ronald Bush

4 ‘Scoured and Cleansed’: Ezra Pound and Musical Composition

57

Josh Epstein

5 The Visual Field: Beyond Vorticism

72

Rebecca Beasley

6 Texts of The Cantos and Theories of Literature

88

Michael Kindellan

7 Pound and Influence

104

Richard Parker

v

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:13, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719

Contents

vi

part ii ezra pound and asia 8 Pound’s Representation of the Chinese Frontiers: From the War Zone to the Green World

127

Akitoshi Nagahata

9 ‘A Treasure Like Nothing We Have in the Occident’: Ezra Pound and Japanese Literature

141

Andrew Houwen

10 Ezra Pound and Chinese Poetry

157

Jeffrey Twitchell-Waas

part iii culture and politics 11 The Transnational Turn

181

Josephine Park

12 Pound, Gender, Sexuality

196

Carrie J. Preston

13 Italian Fascism

208

Anderson Araujo

14 Late Cantos, ‘Aesopian Language’, States’ Rights and John Randolph of Roanoke

227

Alec Marsh

15 Copyright

241

Archie Henderson

16 The Temple and the Scaffolding: The Cantos of Ezra Pound and Digital Culture

257

Roxana Preda

Afterword: ‘read him’ Index

271 277

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:13, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719

Notes on Contributors

anderson araujo is Associate Professor in the Department of English and Cultural Studies and Head of the Department of Languages and World Literatures at the University of British Columbia’s Okanagan campus. His published research engages the intersections of aesthetics and politics in Transatlantic modernism, in articles on avant-garde movements and modernist writers, including Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf and Richard Aldington. His monograph A Companion to Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur (Clemson University Press and Liverpool University Press, 2018) offers a comprehensive review of this critical text in Pound’s oeuvre and biography. He is currently writing a book on modernist cultural politics and the Spanish Civil War. rebecca beasley is Associate Professor in English at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of the Queen’s College. She is the author of Ezra Pound and the Visual Culture of Modernism (Cambridge University Press, 2007) and Theorists of Modernist Poetry (Routledge, 2007), and, with Philip Ross Bullock, editor of Russia in Britain: From Melodrama to Modernism (Oxford University Press, 2013). Her study of the impact of Russian culture on British literary modernism, Russomania, is forthcoming from Oxford University Press. She is co-organizer of the Anglo-Russian Research Network and a former chair of the British Association for Modernist Studies. ronald bush is the Drue Heinz Professor Emeritus in American Literature at the University of Oxford, before which he taught at Caltech and Harvard. His scholarship and teaching spans American literature from the beginning, but centres upon modernism, particularly its internationalist bent. Author of such field-defining books as The Genesis of Ezra Pound’s Cantos (Princeton University Press, 1977), and books on T. S. Eliot, modernism and primitivism, Ron’s vii

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:13, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719

viii

Notes on Contributors

research is also deeply invested in genetic and textual criticism. He is currently completing a major editorial project, a critical and genetic edition of the Pisan Cantos (Oxford University Press). mark byron is Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Sydney and an Australian Research Council Future Fellow. His research interests in modern literature include China and Japan, digital textuality, and literature and history. His current project, Modernism and the Early Middle Ages, has thus far produced the monograph Ezra Pound’s Eriugena (Bloomsbury, 2014) and a co-edited dossier on Samuel Beckett and the Middle Ages in the Journal of Beckett Studies (2016). He is the president of the Ezra Pound Society. josh epstein researches and teaches in twentieth-century anglophone modernism, critical theory, sound studies, film, musicology and adaptation studies at Portland State University, Oregon, where he is Assistant Professor in the Department of English. His first book, Sublime Noise: Musical Culture and the Modernist Writer (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), explores the relationships among modernist literature, music, noise and aural culture. He has essays published or forthcoming in James Joyce Quarterly, Textual Practice, Victorian Literature and Culture, Studies in the Novel and Modern Drama. His current project examines British cultural recovery after World War II, focusing in particular on the filmmaker Humphrey Jennings. leah culligan flack is Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in English at Marquette University, Milwaukee. Her principal areas of research are comparative modernism, classical reception studies and Irish literature, as well as Russian literature. Her monograph Modernism and Homer: The Odysseys of H.D., James Joyce, Osip Mandelstam, and Ezra Pound (Cambridge University Press, 2015) resituates the presence of the Homeric epic in modernism, arguing that writers did not adapt ancient Greek epic as an escape into an idealized classical past, but rather appropriated epics to address such pressing concerns as global warfare and empire, racial hatred, tyranny and censorship. archie henderson obtained his PhD in English at UCLA, and is the author of ‘I Cease Not to Yowl’ Reannotated: New Notes on the Pound / Agresti Correspondence (2009), which illuminates numerous connections between Ezra Pound and figures on the American and Italian Right. He is Head of Research at the Centre for the Analysis of the Radical Right, and the editor of the forthcoming four-volume

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:13, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719

Notes on Contributors

ix

Conservatism, the Right Wing, and the Far Right: A Guide to Archives (Ibidem). Archie also holds a JD and currently practices law in Houston, Texas. andrew houwen is an associate professor at Tokyo Woman’s Christian University. His essay ‘Ezra Pound’s Early Cantos and His Translation of Takasago’, published in the Review of English Studies (2014), won that year’s Ezra Pound Society Article Award. He has published an article on Basil Bunting’s recreation of Kamo no Chōmei’s Hōjōki in Translation and Literature (2016). Andrew is also a translator of Japanese poetry: his translations with Chikako Nihei of the prize-winning post-war Japanese poet Tarō Naka, Music: Selected Poems, appeared with Isobar Press in 2018. michael kindellan is Vice Chancellor’s Fellow in the School of English at the University of Sheffield, where he co-directs the Centre for Poetry and Poetics. His research interests lie broadly in twentiethcentury poetry in English, particularly the avant-garde. His recent monograph, The Late Cantos of Ezra Pound: Composition, Revision, Publication (Bloomsbury, 2017), attempts to combine textual scholarship and literary criticism. His current project is provisionally entitled Present Knowledge: Charles Olson and a Poetics of Pedagogy, and Michael is also editing a collection of essays on John Wieners. alec marsh is Professor of English at Muhlenberg College, Pennsylvania, where he teaches Modern American poetry. He has produced several books on or related to Ezra Pound, including a short biography, Ezra Pound (Reaktion, 2011); a study of economic and modern poetry, Money and Modernity: Pound, Williams, and The Spirit of Jefferson (University of Alabama Press, 1998); and, as editor, a volume on Pound’s father, Small Boy: The Wisconsin Childhood of Homer L. Pound (Ezra Pound Association, 2003). Alec is a past president of the Ezra Pound Society. akitoshi nagahata is Professor in the Graduate School of Humanities at Nagoya University, Japan. His research interests in American literature and modernism extend to experimental literature, as well as Asian American literature and theories of translation. Among his recent publications is a study in Japanese, co-authored with Sanehide Kodama, et al., Dove Sta Memoria: Ezra Pound and 20th Century Poetry (Shichosha, 2005). josephine park is Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, and a member of the faculty steering committee of the Asian American Studies Program. She specializes in twentieth-

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:13, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719

x

Notes on Contributors century American literature and culture, with an emphasis on American Orientalism and Asian American literature. She is the author of Apparitions of Asia: Modernist Form and Asian American Poetics (Oxford University Press, 2008), which was awarded the Literary Book Award by the Association for Asian American Studies, and Cold War Friendships: Korea, Vietnam, and Asian American Literature (Oxford University Press, 2016), which examines Asian American subjectivities shaped by wartime alliances in Korea and Vietnam. She is the co-editor (with Paul Stasi) of Ezra Pound in the Present: Essays on Pound’s Contemporaneity (Bloomsbury, 2016). richard parker is Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Letters at the Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile. He has taught at the University of Sussex, where he received his PhD, as well as universities in the UK and Turkey. His research centres upon modernist and contemporary poetry and poetics, including Ezra Pound, Louis Zukovsky, J. H. Prynne and Keston Sutherland. He is the editor of the three-volume Readings in the Cantos (Clemson University Press and Liverpool University Press), volume 1 of which was published in 2018. He is also editor of News from Afar: Ezra Pound and Some Contemporary British Poetries (Shearsman, 2014). roxana preda is a Leverhulme Fellow in the School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures at the University of Edinburgh. Her research centres on American modernist poetry, resulting in two monographs on Ezra Pound: Ezra Pound’s (Post)modern Poetics and Politics: Logocentrism, Language, and Truth (Peter Lang, 2001) and Ezra Pound and the Career of Modernist Criticism, with Michael Coyle (Camden House, 2018). She edited Ezra Pound’s Economic Correspondence 1933–1940 (University of Florida Press, 2007) and The Edinburgh Companion to Ezra Pound and the Arts (2019). She is a former president of the Ezra Pound Society (2013–18), editor of its journal Make It New and creator of the online digital research environment The Cantos Project (http://thecantosproject.ed.ac.uk). carrie j. preston is the Arvind and Chandan Nandlal Kilachand Professor and Director of Kilachand Honors College and Professor of English and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Boston University. Her monograph Modernism’s Mythic Pose: Gender, Genre, Solo Performance (Oxford University Press, 2011) examines modernist solos in modern dance, film and poetic recitation and received the De La Torre Bueno Prize in dance studies. More recently, Learning to Kneel: Noh, Modernism, and Journeys in

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:13, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719

Notes on Contributors

xi

Teaching (Columbia University Press, 2016) examines the influence of Japanese noh drama on international modernist theatre, poetry and dance, with chapters on Ezra Pound, W. B. Yeats, Ito Michio, Bertolt Brecht and Samuel Beckett. New essays on gender, race and theater appear in Theatre Journal, Modern Drama, Modernism/Modernity and The Drama Review. jeffrey twitchell-waas was Associate Professor in the Department of Foreign Languages at National Chung Cheng University, Taiwan, and was Academic Dean at OFS College, Singapore, in 1998–2008. He works on modernist poetry and its relations with Chinese literature and culture, and has translated the poetry of numerous contemporary Chinese poets, among them Yang Lian, Zhou Yaping and especially Che Qianzi. He is the editor of Z-site: A Companion to the Works of Louis Zukofsky, at www.z-site.net.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:13, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719

Key to Abbreviations

The following abbreviations are standard usage in Pound studies and when used throughout the present volume refer to the editions listed: ABCE ABCR ATH C Cav Con Odes DK E Elek EP&J EP&M FDC GB GK J/M

ABC of Economics (London: Faber, 1933) ABC of Reading (New York: New Directions, 1960) Antheil and the Treatise on Harmony (New York: Da Capo Press, 1968) The Cantos, 15th printing (New York: New Directions, 1996) Ezra Pound’s Cavalcanti: An Edition of the Translations, Notes, and Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983) The Classic Anthology Defined by Confucius (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1954) Dk / Some Letters of Ezra Pound, ed. Louis Dudek (Montreal: DC Books, 1974) Elektra, ed. Richard Reid (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987) Elektra: A Play by Ezra Pound and Rudd Fleming, ed. Carey Perloff (New York: New Directions, 1987) Ezra Pound and Japan: Letters and Essays, ed. Sanehide Kodama (Redding Ridge: Black Swan Books, 1987) Ezra Pound and Music: The Complete Criticism, ed. R. Murray Schafer (New York: New Directions, 1977) Fifth Decade of Cantos (New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1937) Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir (New York: New Directions, 1970) Guide to Kulchur (1938; New York: New Directions, 1970) Jefferson and/or Mussolini (London: Stanley Nott, 1935) xii

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:13, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719

Key to Abbreviations L/ACH L/BC

L/E & DP L/JL L/JQ L/JT L/LZ LE MIN NPL P P&P PD PT SL SP SR WT

xiii

Letters of Ezra Pound to Alice Corbin Henderson, ed. Ira Nadel (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993) Ezra Pound and Senator Bronson Cutting: A Political Correspondence 1930–1935, ed. E. P. Walkiewicz and Hugh Witemeyer (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995) Ezra and Dorothy Pound / Letters in Captivity, 1945–1946, ed. Omar S. Pound and Robert Spoo (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999) Ezra Pound and James Laughlin / Selected Letters, ed. David M. Gordon (New York: Norton, 1994) The Selected Letters of Ezra Pound to John Quinn: 1915–1924, ed. Timothy Materer (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991) Ezra Pound / John Theobald Letters, ed. Donald Pearce and Herbert Schneidau (Redding Ridge: Black Swan, 1984) Selected Letters of Ezra Pound and Louis Zukofsky, ed. Barry Ahearn (New York: New Directions, 1987) Literary Essays, ed. T. S. Eliot (New York: New Directions, 1968) Make It New (London: Faber, 1934) Postscript to the Natural Philosophy of Love, by Remy de Gourmont, 206–19 (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1922) Personae / The Shorter Poems of Ezra Pound, ed. A. Walton Litz and Lea Baechler (New York: New Directions, 1990) Ezra Pound’s Poetry and Prose Contributions to Periodicals, ed. A. Walton Litz, Lea Baechler and James Longenbach, 11 vols. (New York: Garland, 1991) Pavannes and Divagations (New York: New Directions, 1958) Poems and Translations, ed. Richard Sieburth (New York: Library of America, 2003) Selected Letters of Ezra Pound: 1907–1941, ed. D. D. Paige (1950; New York: New Directions, 1971) Selected Prose, 1905–1965, ed. William Cookson (New York: New Directions, 1973) The Spirit of Romance (1910: New York: New Directions, 2005) Sophocles: Women of Trachis (New York: New Directions, 1957)

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:13, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:13, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719

Editor’s Introduction Mark Byron

Ezra Pound’s rallying call to ‘Make It New’ became a powerful modernist motto, invoking a sense of renewal in the avant-garde project in casting off the dead weight of stale custom and forging a new aesthetic. Pound famously adapted this phrase – 薪 日 日 薪 (xin ri ri xin) – from the ancient Shang Dynasty Emperor Ch’eng T’ang (1766–1753 BCE), who, legend has it, inscribed it on the side of his bathtub. It is a gesture emblematic of Pound’s career, crossing history and linguistic borders to create new art informed by the best that had gone before, and it quickly became a heuristic device by which to understand Pound’s artistic legacy and his role in cultural history. From the beginning, Pound scholars have explored his formidable range of sources and the uses to which he put them in his production of poems, essays, music, journalism and critical commentary on the work of other artists and writers. This work is grounded in a vast archive of published and unpublished material, principally housed in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, with other important holdings at the Lilly Library at Indiana, the Harry Ransom Center at Austin and elsewhere. In recent years, Pound studies has experienced a foundational shift in several respects: the enormity of the archive has revealed major manuscripts and a cache of biographical information previously overlooked, radically altering our understanding of Pound’s life and work; changes in copyright law and the passage of time have fundamentally altered the status of published work and archive material; and associated changes in cognate fields, such as the new philology in medieval studies, frontier theory in geography, the ‘transnational turn’ in literary studies and advances in knowledge of Chinese and Japanese poetry and drama, offer a range of new techniques to apply to Pound’s work as well as to his sources. The critical landscape has shifted in fundamental ways too: significant advances in gender and sexuality studies demand the reappraisal of Pound’s poetry, and the impact of theories of literature and textuality, 1

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:12, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.001

2

mark byron

including digital textuality, on methods of reading Pound’s poetry requires mapping in current and future potential configurations. These factors ‘Make It New’ for Pound studies, providing a clearer view of Pound’s own texts and working methods, and allowing far superior evaluation of his sources than was previously possible. Major initiatives in editing Pound’s texts, and in several cases digitizing them, open up a range of possibilities in critically evaluating his role in twentieth-century literature and beyond: his work is being translated into an ever-widening array of languages, and his influence on contemporary Chinese poetry is a subject of enormous consequence, but one only now establishing itself in critical discourse. The New Ezra Pound Studies addresses these developments within and beyond Pound studies in three parts: essays addressing Pound’s texts (those upon which he relied for source material, those he produced in manuscript and print, and the texts and other media with which he interacted and for which his poetry serves as stimulus); essays dealing with the radical reconception of Pound’s cultural and political activities throughout his career, and his continuing impact, a reassessment made possible by recent controversial scholarship as well as new directions in literary and cultural theory; and essays providing an overview of Pound’s poetry and translations in relation to scholarship in East Asian studies, particularly China and Japan. Each of these zones of scholarly inquiry has changed radically in the past fifteen years, demanding a refocused account of the state of scholarship and the significant potential for future work in cognate areas. This volume is not aimed at giving the last word in any of these spheres, but rather to open up potential for further research in the themes covered in the essays, as well as stimulus to advance research in areas not yet covered or still to be given adequate scholarly treatment. The Pound canon has from the start offered an enormously rich and varied range of published materials, recordings and manuscript drafts. Pound’s career famously included poetic composition, literary and cultural essays, music and art reviewing, radio and print propaganda, operatic and chamber music composition, economic journalism, work as impresario and publisher to major literary figures, and unstinting correspondence with writers, artists, publishers and political figures, as well as numerous projects in translation and critical editing of poets and writers from a variety of epochs and languages. The first generations of Pound scholarship sought to clarify and explicate his artistic and professional activities during the last decades of his life and the years following his death. The territorial range of Pound scholarship was slowly established, but with recent advances in a variety of fields, much of this terrain can now

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:12, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.001

Editor’s Introduction

3

be understood at new depths. In addition, scholarship in related fields has advanced the state of knowledge of the textual traditions upon which Pound draws in his poetry and prose: new papyrus manuscripts of key poems in Sappho’s corpus and the Huygens Institute’s digital collation of glosses on Martianus Capella’s Marriage of Philology and Mercury – the so-called oldest commentary tradition – to name just two examples. Pound studies will clearly benefit from these and other major textual advances, as will literary studies more generally. Pound’s reputation has been inextricably tied to his wartime radio broadcasts in Italy and his subsequent award of the inaugural Bollingen Prize for poetry in 1949. These events provided a focus for extensive discussion of the role of ethics in literature, but in several basic respects this discussion has been impeded by the poor state of the evidence. Recent work in the archives has overturned assumptions of the extent of Pound’s wartime activities and his complicity with the Italian Fascist regime during the war. Knowledge of his association with far-right groups and individuals while detained in Washington, DC, following the war has also undergone a profound recalibration. Pound’s literary reputation, legacy, and influence thus enjoys a state of considerable volatility, yet his poetic texts have proved to be sustaining resources for poets and writers from a wide range of literary traditions and political circumstances. Determining why this might be the case is one essential part in a timely reconsideration of Pound’s role in modernist poetics, as well as in world literature of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Recent scholarly attention to East-West modernism has opened a field of inquiry barely imaginable even two decades ago. In a generation the relations between East Asian and Transatlantic modernisms have progressed through the stages of exoticism (explanations of sources and influence), orientalism (critiques of artistic domestication of ‘exotic’ material) and more recently a fuller development of critical expertise on both sides of the East-West dialectic. Modernist literary scholarship is now able to capitalize on this increasingly reflexive and nuanced approach, drawing on expert scholarship in East Asian studies generally, and modernism specifically. Scholars from Asia and the West have made very exciting inroads into some of these questions, and the implications for the understanding of Transatlantic modernism are potentially profound. The critical evaluation of East-West modernism proceeds with a close examination of Western writers and their Eastern influences, including the dialectical relationships they forge with their Eastern counterparts. Pound’s firm place at the centre of such a discourse is

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:12, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.001

4

mark byron

increasingly assured, even as knowledge of traditional and modernist cultural production in China and Japan, and their relations with the West, become subjects of more intensive scholarly attention. Given its legendary status in literary studies, and its bewildering scope and depth, the spectre of Pound’s archive looms large in any critical survey of new directions in the field. Subject to the close attention of many scholars over decades, the archive remains an improbably fruitful source for the generation of new research. The production of new volumes of letters, new drafts and version of cantos and, most prominently, David Moody’s colossal three-volume biography are all causative and symptomatic of the generative work being done in the archives.1 Other recent publications reappraise Pound’s own texts (such as Guide to Kulchur, the Adams Cantos, the late Cantos) by investigating the primary materials in the archives, or Pound’s archived notes on his primary materials (such as medieval philosophy).2 The subjects of Pound’s relation with Italian Fascism and American far right political activity have also received revelatory attention in recent years, also in large part due to work in archives and with primary sources.3 Recent essay collections have responded to these critical examinations of primary materials.4 If the reader can forgive this namecheck in its inevitable partiality and porosity, it registers the robust state of Pound studies in recent times and looks ahead to where these scholarly highways and backroads may take us in the future. In an era when scholarly work is so often subject to measurement and quantification, the qualities of curiosity, inquiry and critique deserve not merely protection, but also the space and time to unfold and extend the range of understanding of this complex poet. If the present volume stimulates such activity in its readers – and further activity in its writers – then it will have made a valuable intervention in Pound studies within its contemporary formation.

Notes 1. Ezra Pound to His Parents, ed. Mary de Rachewiltz, A. David Moody and Joanna Moody (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); Ezra Pound and ‘Globe’ Magazine: The Complete Correspondence, ed. Michael Davis and Cameron McWhirter (London: Bloomsbury, 2015); Canti Postumi, ed. Massimo Bacigalupo (Milano: Mondadori, 2002) and Posthumous Cantos, ed. Massimo Bacigalupo (Manchester: Carcanet, 2015); and A. David Moody,

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:12, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.001

Editor’s Introduction

5

Ezra Pound: Poet, A Portrait of the Man and His Work (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007, 2014 and 2015). 2. Anderson Araujo, Companion to Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur (Clemson: Clemson University Press, 2017); David Ten Eyck, Ezra Pound’s Adams Cantos (London: Bloomsbury, 2012); Michael Kindellan, The Late Cantos of Ezra Pound (London: Bloomsbury, 2017); and Mark Byron, Ezra Pound’s Eriugena (London: Bloomsbury, 2014). 3. Matthew Feldman, Ezra Pound’s Fascist Propaganda, 1935–1945 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2013); Alec Marsh, Ezra Pound and John Kasper: Saving the Republic (London: Bloomsbury, 2015); and Catherine Paul, Fascist Directive: Ezra Pound and Italian Cultural Nationalism (Clemson, SC: Clemson University Press, 2016). 4. Josephine Park and Paul Stasi, eds., Ezra Pound in the Present: Essays on Pound’s Contemporaneity (London: Bloomsbury, 2016); Roxana Preda, ed., The Edinburgh Companion to Ezra Pound and the Arts (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019); and Ralf Lüfter and Roxana Preda, eds., A Companion to Ezra Pound’s Economics (Nordhausen: Verlag Traugott Bautz, 2019).

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:12, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.001

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:12, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.001

part i

Pound’s Texts

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:13, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:13, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719

chapter 1

Classical Literature Leah Culligan Flack

In a 1949 essay entitled ‘The Hellenists’, Ezra Pound argued that ‘a revival and a much greater diffusion of Greek studies is necessary to the conservation of decency’, a statement that expresses his decades-long argument for the wider distribution of classical literature as an engine of social transformation.1 The revival and circulation of classical languages and literatures preoccupied Pound, even as he expressed fluctuating levels of disdain for classics as an academic discipline. In turn, classics scholars have sometimes returned Pound’s animosity, as was seen most prominently when University of Chicago classicist W. G. Hale responded to Pound’s ‘Homage to Sextus Propertius’ by concluding that if he were a Latin professor, ‘there would be nothing left but suicide’.2 In a special issue of The Pound Newsletter (1955) responding to Pound’s translation of Sophocles’ The Women of Trachis, classics scholar Frederic Peachy was perhaps more generous in his evaluation of what he called Pound’s ‘perversions’, asking, ‘What finally shall we say about Pound’s failure and lack of understanding?’ – finally recommending Pound only to advanced students who might benefit from his ‘powerful suggestions’.3 The time may finally be ripe for more open dialogue between scholars interested in Pound and those interested in classical languages and literatures. In the past fifteen years, classics as a discipline has experienced an explosion of critical interest in the field of classical reception studies. Lorna Hardwick’s field-defining project Reception Studies (2003) lays out what have remained the two principal areas of concentration in classical receptions: the act of reception itself and the reception of the reception (or, ‘how the reception is described, analysed, evaluated’).4 Five years after this study, Hardwick collaborated with Christopher Stray to evaluate the evolution of the field and the ‘so-called “democratic turn” in classical reception analysis’, which foregrounds the expansion of classical knowledge to ‘less privileged groups’ in the modern era.5 Recent studies by scholars such as Emily Greenwood (Afro-Greeks), Justine McConnell (Black Odysseys), 9

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:12, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.002

10

leah culligan flack

Konstantinos Nikoloutsos (Ancient Greek Women in Film) and George Kovacs and C. W. Marshall (Classics and Comics) have tracked the reception of ancient works by female writers, writers from nations that were once part of European empires, writers working outside of European literary traditions and writers working in new media. These studies affirm the sense Hardwick and Stray articulated about the promise of this new turn in classical reception studies. Of course, this turn in classical scholarship is due in some part to the changes in higher education that have resulted from the turmoil of the global economy in recent years. Navigating an era of budget cuts and department closures, humanities departments, including classics departments, have had to compete for increasingly scarce resources.6 As such, classicists and classics have also had to vie for a contemporary audience, and classical reception studies helps address the interests of a wider range of twenty-first-century students. Even though the consolidation of high modernism as an elite enterprise has identified Pound with an ideology of exclusivity, he has long been an ally in the project of bringing classical languages and literature to a wider audience. Throughout the twentieth century, Pound confronted the decline of knowledge of the classics in the modern world and improvised many strategies to reverse the downwards trend. The best known of these strategies is his own production of classically inflected poetry and translations and his support of other classically minded modernist writers such as Hilda ‘H. D.’ Doolittle, James Joyce and T. S. Eliot. Pound’s engagement with classical literature has several lesserknown chapters – it is not much of an overstatement to say that his correspondence with classical scholars and translators such as Rudd Fleming, L. R. Lind, W. H. D. Rouse, Robert Fitzgerald and others suggests his involvement with or awareness of a dizzying array of classical translations and translators over several decades. This involvement suggests his abiding commitment to rejuvenating the classics for the modern world. The case of Pound and classics has the potential to offer an important contribution to contemporary debates in classical reception studies and to bridge the disciplinary gap that remains between the disciplines and subfields of classics, English, comparative literature and modernist studies. In many ways, he anticipated some of the central questions of classical reception studies in his poetry, criticism, private correspondence, advocacy and editorial work, and prose. The field of classical reception studies is grounded in the sense, as Charles Martindale argues, that readers and audiences have a significant part in the ‘construction of meaning at the point of reception’.7 As classical reception studies has moved away from

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:12, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.002

Classical Literature

11

a unidirectional sense of the transmission of a text from the ancient world, Hardwick and Stray note, ‘the cultural authority of the ancient work and hence of concepts such as “authenticity” and “faithfulness” is bound to be changed to some degree’.8 In his criticism and his approach to translation, Pound’s work has anticipated some of the major conceptual underpinnings of classical reception studies. In what follows, I will take a late case study – his translations of Sophoclean tragedies after World War II – to consider how Pound used translation to develop a model of reception grounded in the deferral of coherence and meaning. Translating Sophocles, I will argue, helped Pound conceptualize the increasing importance of future unknown moments of reception to his project in The Cantos.

***

On 14 March 1949, Rudd Fleming sent a copy of Pound’s essay ‘The Hellenists’ to Pound’s friend Osmond Beckwith. This was accompanied by a letter detailing Pound’s reading of Greek tragedies in terms of his sense of the need for ‘a renewal in Greek studies’, which he hoped to bring about by intermingling Greek tragedy with Noh. Conveying Pound’s sense of urgency on this renewal, Fleming wrote, ‘It has taken several centuries to evolve Noh; we don’t expect to perfect Greek-plus-Noh in three weeks, but a LOT of people must try, and start NOW’.9 To enlist Beckwith’s support, Fleming identified the three aims of his work with Pound on Greek tragedy: ‘to help strengthen a good tradition; to bring music and words closer together; and to move towards a more intelligent solution of the problems of poetic drama. I don’t see how any of these things can be done if people remain insensitive to Greek’. Given Pound’s precarious position at St. Elizabeths and the recent public controversy surrounding the Bollingen Prize, Fleming noted, ‘Mr. Pound cannot, in his circumstances, launch a “movement” in his own name; but maybe something can be done even so’. Fleming’s letter coincides with the start of his work with Pound on two translations of Sophoclean tragedies – Elektra, which remained unpublished until 1986, and then The Women of Trachis, which was published in the Hudson Review in 1953 and performed on the BBC in 1954. Although it is not definitively known why Pound chose to abandon Elektra, the most common aesthetic reason offered is Fleming’s assertion that Pound felt that the translation was not strong enough for publication. After the Bollingen scandal, Pound and his supporters also felt acutely the risk he would take by publishing – his translation could be taken as proof of his sanity. Their

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:12, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.002

12

leah culligan flack

fears were confirmed in 1954, as David Moody notes, when the assistant attorney general in the Justice Department wrote to Dr. Winfred Overholser, the superintendent of St. Elizabeths. Overholser had written in his 1953 evaluation of Pound that he ‘does no writing and very little reading’.10 In response to Pound’s publication of his translation of The Classic Anthology Defined by Confucius in 1954, the assistant attorney general wrote, ‘You will appreciate that this Department would be derelict in the discharge of its duties if it failed to bring to trial on such a serious charge a man who seemingly is mentally capable of translating and publishing poetry but allegedly is not mentally capable of being brought to justice’.11 Nevertheless, Pound managed to launch a campaign promoting the study of classical literature from St. Elizabeths, even if he could not do so in his own name. In May 1954, the editors of Poetry published a manifesto detailing Pound’s vision that expressed alarm at the ‘neglect of the Greek and Latin classics, milleniar source of light and guide in judgment of ideas and forms’. The signers urged a ‘reorientation’ in the study of literature. Although Pound could not sign this manifesto in 1954, the classical and modernist academics who did sign it (including Hugh Kenner, L. R. Lind and Rudd Fleming) articulated a Poundian position on the kinds of questions readers might bring to a classical text in order to reorient literary study: 1. To what degree of awareness has the given author attained? 2. What was his aim and purpose in writing at all? 3. What part of his discoveries is of use now, or is likely to be of use tomorrow, in maintaining the life of the mind here or elsewhere?12 This manifesto hints at Pound’s attention to developing a useful model of reading classical literature and to a model of deferred classical reception in its anticipation of what is ‘likely to be of use tomorrow’ in maintaining the life of the mind not only here but also in an unidentified ‘elsewhere’. As I will argue, the translations of Sophocles’s Elektra and The Women of Trachis in the years right before this manifesto appeared helped Pound clarify this model of reception. It is essential to see these works as a pair: The Women of Trachis privileges a mode of reception grounded in a positive social vision of redemptive communal interpretive clarity, and Elektra offers a darker, more ambiguous vision held in suspension. Pound read Elektra and The Women of Trachis as an oppositional pair. As Moody notes, Pound wrote in 1951 to Otto Bird, who was setting up a Great Books program at Notre Dame, ‘yr / greek ROTTEN in omitting Trachinae / highest point of greek consciousness / antithesis to Electra’.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:12, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.002

Classical Literature

13

‘Elektra (Soph) / blood and savagery’, he elaborated in some notes he put together for Huntington Cairns, ‘Trachinae infinitely higher state of consciousness / unsurpassed in Xtn / licherchoor, the HIGH for all gk / consciousness’.13 Pound’s decision to publish The Women of Trachis and not to publish Elektra reflects his continued belief in the 1950s in the didactic social function of the classics as an engine of political and social transformation. In October 1953, Pound wrote to Laughlin, ‘Measure of mental squalor is that there are still denizens of this dummysphere with no gratitude to those who started warning in the 1920s / Ruin of classic / educc / / IF they had read Dant and Sophocle they wd / not stand FILTH at the top’.14 Pound’s Trachinae translation appeared to be a part of his wider call for a revitalized form of classical education. In the 1957 New Directions edition of The Women of Trachis, Pound identifies the moment when Herakles reaches an understanding of his past and his fate as the play’s crucial moment. Moody notes that Pound wrote to Eliot, ‘When he finds the destiny FITS, Herakles exults’.15 Pound renders this exultation in the following way: [HER]: It doesn’t. It means that I die. For amid the dead there is no work in service. Come at it that way, my boy, what SPLENDOUR, IT ALL COHERES.16

Pound’s footnote indicates that this is the ‘key phrase, for which the play exists’ (WT 50).17 The stage direction that follows this line suggests Pound’s interest in using the tragic form to generate a communal experience of radiant clarity for his audience: ‘He turns his face from the audience, then sits erect, facing them without the mask of agony; the revealed make-up is that of a solar serenity. The hair golden and electrified as possible’ (WT 50).18 The gradual revelation of the ‘solar serenity’ of Herakles to the audience invites the audience to participate in a communal experience of the splendour of coherence.19 As a genre, tragedy enables Pound to script such an experience in a way that was not possible in the paratactic, epic form of The Cantos. He in fact adapts Herakles to express this impossibility in Canto CV’s confessional line, ‘And I am not a demi-god, I cannot make it cohere.’ As Peter Stoicheff discusses in his analysis of the Drafts & Fragments variants, between 1960 and 1968 Pound softened the line from ‘And I am not a demigod / the damn stuff will not cohere’, a change which has the effect of ‘significantly [locating] the inability to cohere more in Pound than in his poem’.20

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:12, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.002

14

leah culligan flack

Pound’s reference to Herakles here suggests that his translation helped him to articulate his inability to make The Cantos cohere, but this confessional moment is not necessarily an admission of failure. Rather, engaging with Sophoclean tragedy helps him develop a mode of reception grounded substantially in the deferral of meaning and coherence and the transfer of authority from author to reader as the source of potential coherence.21 Pound’s footnote in The Women of Trachis points to Elektra as that play’s buried subtext: ‘This is the key phrase, for which the play exists, as in the Elektra: “Need we add cowardice to all the rest of these ills?”’ (WT 50), which slightly modifies the line Elektra speaks to Chyrsothemis in Pound’s translation of Elektra: ‘Need we add cowardice to all the rest of this filth?’22 Pound’s reference to an unpublished translation as explanation for his reading of the signature moment of The Women of Trachis endows his Elektra with a spectral presence in the margins of The Women of Trachis – the footnote thus uses the unpublished translation to destabilize the coherence it celebrates in The Women of Trachis. Whereas The Women of Trachis offers Pound an image of an ideal world endowed with the highest state of consciousness, Elektra presents a mirror image of the modern world and Pound’s position within it. As Mark Ringer notes, ‘Electra was composed in the final decade of the Peloponnesian War, a time when social and moral standards were frequently at a point of collapse’.23 Critics have paid significant attention to the parallels between Pound’s position in St. Elizabeths and Elektra’s position as she waits for Orestes to return.24 The play’s self-consciousness about the power and limits of language doubtless also attracted Pound in this period. The play opens with the tutor framing the history of Agamemnon’s murder to Orestes in terms of their arrival to the site where Agamemnon landed before them. This recitation challenges Orestes to avoid repeating the history of his father and thus to break the cycle of a violent history. Unlike Orestes, Elektra is paralyzed in a state of suspension, unable to act. Her position strips her of all power except for the power of language. As Ringer argues, Elektra is a storyteller who relishes staging the scenes in which she finds herself. As Karl Reinhardt observes, her speech is ‘an outpouring which invades and overwhelms the mind of the listeners’, in a way that signifies a new development for Sophocles.25 When Elektra and the Chorus reflect on the murder of Agamemnon, they do so not in terms of her possibility for future vengeful action, but rather in terms of her verbal position. The chorus recalls the murder in its sounds: ‘She’d a gloomy voice when he came; / and a gloomy sound when the brass axe hit him, / on the couch there in his dining room’ (E 14). Elektra

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:12, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.002

Classical Literature

15

responds, ‘That was the vilest of all days / and that night at dinner was worse, / beyond speakable language, / horrible / I saw my father killed by the pair of ’em, / And insulted’ (E 14–15). In this telling statement, Elektra defines herself as the witness to an event that is inexpressible in speech. Furthermore, she recognizes that even if she could discover the language needed to bear witness to murder, ‘they’ve got the power, all I can do is yammer / and make too much noise. / I’m ashamed of this clatter’ (E 17). This statement places Elektra in Pound’s pantheon of imperilled, sometimes impotent speakers, a pantheon that is vividly on display in the Pisan Cantos as, among others, the Homeric ‘Noman’ (ου τις) and Wanjina ‘whose mouth was removed by his father / because he made too many things’ (C 446–7). Elektra, her sister tells her, also awaits punishment for her language, since if she does not quit ‘her bawling / they’ll shut [her] up where [she’ll] never see daylight’, a condition well known to Pound when he translated this play (E 22). In Pisa and St. Elizabeths, Pound also considered what happens when verbal power confronts brute force, when the ‘lone ant from a broken anthill’ declares to his jailers, ‘woe to them that conquer with armies / and whose only right is their power’ (C 478, 483). In the world of Elektra, Klytemnestra and Aegisthus hold the power of physical force in Mycenae. Pound’s interest in the conflict between Elektra and her mother is evident in his addition to their dialogue. When Klytemnestra says, ‘You beastly whelp, it’s what I’ve said / and NOT done, that makes you talk a great deal too much’, she tries to maintain a distance between action and word. To this, Elektra manipulates her words and replies: Now you’re talkin’, you did the job, not me, and things done get names. Nomina sunt consequentia rerum

(E 34)

This statement reinforces the relationship between word and action, with Elektra bridging the two by speaking the truth about the ‘things done’ around her and by drawing a verbal distinction between her mother and herself. Pound highlights his interest in this moment by adding the Thomist tag line ‘Nomina sunt consequential rerum’, which has no obvious parallel in the Sophoclean original. This line, which reinforces a natural relationship between words and what they name, has a deep history in Pound’s own writings. For example, in Gaudier-Brzeska (1916), Pound defines Vorticism in the following way: ‘The image is not an idea. It is a radiant node or cluster . . . Nomina sunt consequentia rerum,

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:12, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.002

16

leah culligan flack

and never was that statement of Aquinas more true than in the case of the Vorticist movement’ (GB 106).26 The fact that this phrase, which helped Pound articulate a key aesthetic principle, returns in Elektra helps underscore the extent to which Sophocles’s play served as an important interlocutor for Pound about the responsibilities and limitations of literature in post-war period. Although Pound saw Elektra as the negative ethical antithesis of The Women of Trachis, he also took more creative risks in translation in his Elektra in ways that suggest that the unpublished translation helped him test and complicate the theories of translation he developed five decades earlier. Elektra explores an approach to translation that creates hierarchies of accessibility and exclusionary communities of understanding in a way that seems to anticipate and create the conditions for Pound’s assertion in Rock-Drill (1957) that ‘[i]t can’t all be in one language’ (C 583). Elektra’s entrance in the play makes clear Pound’s translation strategy. She enters speaking both Greek and English in the following passage (translations from Carey Perloff are in brackets [E 77]): OO PHAOS HAGNON [Oh holy light] Holy light Earth, air about us, THRENOON OODAS POLLAS D’ANTEREIS AESTHOU [How many keening songs have you known? How many straight dealt blows?] tearing my heart out when black night is over all night already horrible been with me my father weeping there in that wretched house weeping his doom [. . .] Well I’m not going to forget it and the stars can shine on, all of them tears of hate all flaming rips of the stars tide

(E 6–7)

Pound’s Elektra appears to the audience first as a figure of a translator – she speaks in Greek and then translates her Greek expression. In this, Pound amplifies the self-consciousness of Sophocles’ musings on speech and

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:12, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.002

Classical Literature

17

reception. She is also a translator without audience of her father’s murder and the emotional state in which that event has left her. However, Elektra leaves her next Greek lines untranslated, relying on the openness of the Greek sounds in these phrases to convey the depth of her pain. Though the semantic meaning remains inaccessible to an audience without aural understanding of ancient Greek, Pound relies on sound and performance to convey an emotional and psychological experience that is beyond language. Given the plan of deception that Orestes and the tutor have just worked out in various modern vernaculars, Elektra’s untranslated Greek also deploys the ancient language as a sonic signal of authenticity that she shares only with the Chorus and, potentially, with members of Pound’s imagined audience.27 Pound’s translation of Elektra’s exchanges with the Chorus shows him testing out a range of strategies that I can only glance at here. One of the most notable was in his translation of a passage he calls ‘Elektra’s Keening’, which is Elektra’s emotional response to the false news that Orestes is dead. In his notes to Fleming, he imagined vividly how Greek and English might work together to convey the emotional truth of this moment.28 It should be, he noted: sung from the start, possibly in antiphony, El / solo in English and line by line, greek echo from the chorus. El / gradual crescendo / chorus starting pianissimo / contrapunto. (Chorus probably, yes, I think per force solo at start, and more voices later.) Vocal orchestration. For the emotional passages translate the total emotion of the whole speech. For mental conflicts: the meaning, exact meaning, word by word. (E 100)

This note demonstrates Pound’s detailed attention to the performative context of his translation and how the movement between Greek and English might enhance the emotional force of the experience of the play for its audience. Early on in Elektra, Pound’s use of untranslated Greek opens the possibility that the ancient language might generate intimacy among members of a community committed to justice in an unjust environment. The play’s narrative offers Pound the opportunity to consider a question that preoccupied his career about the impact classical languages and literature might have in the modern world. The end of the play forecloses many of the possibilities that the play earlier opened when Elektra cannot hold her verbal position. The moment of transition appears to occur when Orestes and Elektra confront Klytemnestra and refuse her request for pity. Pound’s stage direction for the chorus

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:12, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.002

18

leah culligan flack

indicates that it ‘SINGS/ cry of misery, keening on one note or minimum rise and fall but monotonous and legato’ (E 82). The murders that follow are depicted exclusively in English, with Elektra taking on short imperative and interrogative phrases, such as ‘Hit her again’ and ‘The bitch is dead?’ (E 82–3). Elektra’s movement into an exclusively modern vernacular shows that she has been overrun by the violence around her and that her language has become an instrument of violence. Pound’s notes show that he was interested in the fact that Sophocles kept Aegisthus’s murder off stage: Note for finale / The big double doors are open so the WHOLE audience can see Klut’s bier, and the scene of lifting the cloth / Aeg / is driven thru another door in the inner room where Ag / was murdered. / Restraint of S. / in NOT including Aeg’s death in actual play. One murder enough in action. One implied, with no doubt about it, but not visibly demonstrated. One doesn’t at first realize that it is not actually in the text. ‘poetry=see / stage = & hear’. (E 103)

This note shows Pound’s careful attention not only to Sophocles’ narrative but also to the reception of this scene visually and psychologically by his imagined audience. That he withheld this play from a contemporary audience by not publishing it or staging it in his lifetime defers this moment of reception to an unknown future. The chorus has the final words in Elektra, and in Pound’s translation, those words return to Greek to convey the failure of the events that have transpired to resolve the conflicts that drove the play (Perloff’s translations in brackets [E 81]): O SPERM’ ATREOOS [Oh the race of Atreus] Atreides, Atreides come thru the dark. (speaks) my god, it’s come with a rush (sings) Delivered, delivered. TEI NUN HORMEI TELEOOTHEN [was completed today with force] swift end so soon. (E 73)

This ending emphasizes the openness of the play’s events and returns to the possibility raised by the play’s opening that history is a futile cycle of neverending violence. Its return to Greek also leaves open a subtler question for the play’s audience (since we are to presume that Elektra herself is no

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:12, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.002

Classical Literature

19

longer receptive to this language) about whether the Greek language might continue to retain power in the modern world. The alternative might be best represented by Pylades, who has borne witness to the play’s events at an even greater remove from the play’s events. He is the silent sidekick of Orestes and is addressed directly once, in the following way: ORESTES (to Pylades who hasn’t said a damn word) Come on, Pylades, cut the cackle May the gods of the door be with us. (E 80)

Reid has perceptively underscored the potential significance of Pylades for Pound, who might have seen Pylades as a ‘presence transcending or just denied the vexed condition of human speech’ and as a ‘witness and abettor of horrors, of a tragedy too unspeakable for words’ (Elek xx). The silence of Pylades signifies one alternative among many, all of which the play takes seriously. The chorus’s final address to a potential audience leaves open whether Greek has a place in a modern world. As a silenced counterpart to the positive social vision of The Women of Trachis, Elektra remained unpublished for decades in a state of suspension that also questioned the possibilities for the classical tradition in the modern world. This question is a crucial one for Pound’s late career, one that reverberates throughout the late Cantos and in his editorial decisions late in his life. Although some critics have argued that Elektra was of limited importance to The Cantos, it is possible to look at the impact of Elektra from a wider angle that considers Elektra as the crucial text of deferred classical reception.29 If the Pisan Cantos signalled Pound’s turn towards a confessional, deeply personal mode of poetry, his later Cantos suggest a turn outwards towards his different actual and potential readers. The same year Pound published The Women of Trachis in The Hudson Review, he also published Canto LXXXV in that journal, which is noteworthy for its inclusion of several Chinese ideograms in juxtaposition with Greek phrases. As Moody suggests, this canto signifies a shift in relation to its readership, as the ideograms signified that ‘he was evidently determined to present readers with an extreme challenge’.30 At the end of Canto LXXXV, Pound included the following note of explanation: ‘Canto 85 is a somewhat detailed confirmation of Kung’s view that the basic principles of government are found in the Shu, the History Classic. The numerical references are to Couvreur’s Chou King. Meaning of the ideograms is usually given in the English text’ (C 579). This note incorporates the apparatus of explication into the poem in a way that culminates in the statement in Canto XCVI: ‘If we never write anything save what is already

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:12, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.002

20

leah culligan flack

understood, the field of understanding will never be extended. One demands the right, now and again, to write for a few people with special interests and whose curiosity reaches into greater detail’ (C 679). These passages affirm Pound’s pointed interest during this era in his audience – he strives to define and limit his audience, to dictate how they might read, but he also embraces epistemological indeterminacy, demanding that his readers become his co-authors. To become his co-authors, Pound’s potential readers would need themselves to become translators of a sort. Or, as he acknowledges in Canto CV, ‘I shall have to learn a little greek to keep up with this /But so will you, drratt you’ (C 770). However, Pound’s model of deferred reception took the risk that such co-authors might never fully materialize. One ending of The Cantos borrows a line from Dante (which Pound had used earlier in his career) to hand his poem over to its possible readers: ‘You in the dinghy (piccioletta) astern there!’ (C 794). This abrupt address opens the poem to a range of possible respondents (including Dante’s), none of which is final. As Peter Nicholls notes, citing Jonathan Culler, Pound’s addresses to readers seem to borrow from the tradition of lyric poetry which uses oblique address to generate a sense of ‘performative temporality’ and ‘attempt to create the impression of something happening now’.31 Nicholls points out that both the present moment and the addressee are subject to constant oscillation and the ‘notional addressee there is constantly unsettled and is subjected to a sort of push-pull of only partial identification with the speaker’s words’.32 Pound’s work on Elektra anticipates precisely this mode of unstable reception – one that is evident throughout the later Cantos. His late engagement with Sophoclean tragedy offered him a form in which to author a drama of potential, as yet unrealized classical reception. Pound’s most direct reference to Elektra in The Cantos appears in Canto XC in the following passage: thick smoke, purple, rising bright flame now on the altar the crystal funnel of air out of Erebus, the delivered, Tyro, Alcmene, free now, ascending e i cavilieri, ascending, no shades more, lights among them, enkindled, and the dark shade of courage Ἠλέκτρα

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:12, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.002

Classical Literature

21

bowed still with the wrongs of Aegisthus. Trees die & the dream remains Not love but that love flows from it ex animo & cannot ergo delight in itself but only in the love flowing from it. UBI AMOR IBI OCULUS EST. (C 628–9)

This passage’s reference to those shades ‘delivered’ ‘out of Erebus’ completes the imagery of Canto I and gestures towards a conclusion of sorts in its act of deliverance. However, Elektra – in untranslated Greek – appears here as a figure who keeps this conclusion from being fully realized. She remains a ‘dark shade of courage’ who is ‘bowed still with the wrongs of Aegisthus’. In this moment, Pound reactivates the uncertainty that his translation brought to a near crisis at the end of his Elektra – we see Elektra as a shade of courage overrun by a violent history she can neither resolve nor escape. She embodies courage as an ideal that retained its value at the end of Pound’s career, along with the ideal of love suggested in the closing lines of this passage. In 1966 Pound sent the following lines to James Laughlin titled ‘Fragment 1966’ that are appended to the end of the collection. As the title suggests, this ending is hardly an ending and remains insistently a fragment: That her acts Olga’s acts Of beauty Be remembered Her name was Courage & is written Olga These lines are for the Ultimate CANTO Whatever I may write In the interim.

The return of the word ‘courage’ here in association with Olga Rudge recalls Pound’s ‘dark shade of courage’, Elektra. This fragment draws upon the deferred model of classical reception Pound worked out in his translation of Sophocles in order to defer the project of The Cantos altogether. Pound invites his readers to suspend their expectation of an ending and to imagine an ultimate Canto. In this way, Pound detaches himself from his poem and from ‘whatever [he] may write’ and turns his

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:12, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.002

22

leah culligan flack

poem over to his readers. Translating Sophocles’s Elektra helped Pound to conclude his career with a moment of classical engagement that allowed him to continue to hold fast to the idea that the ‘the dream remains’.

Notes 1. Ezra Pound, ‘The Hellenists’, Ezra Pound Papers, YCAL MSS 43, Box 106, Folder 4422, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. 2. For Hale’s invective, Pound’s response, and A. R. Orage’s 1922 defense of Pound, see Ezra Pound: The Critical Heritage, ed. Eric Homberger (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972), 155–71. 3. Frederic Peachy, Untitled Review of The Women of Trachis, The Pound Newsletter (January 1955), 8. 4. Lorna Hardwick, Reception Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 5–6. 5. Lorna Hardwick and Christopher Stray, eds., Companion to Classical Receptions (Oxford: Blackwell-Wiley, 2008), 3. 6. For example, in a two-year period between 2012 and 2014, the number of degrees awarded in the humanities at American universities dropped by 8.7 per cent: see www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/03/14/study-shows-87decline-humanities-bachelors-degrees-2-years. Statistics maintained by the Modern Language Association in the United States offer a picture of declining enrollments in Greek and Latin classes over the past half century. In 1968, for example, 34,084 students studied Latin and 19,178 students studied Greek at American colleges and universities. In 2013, 27,912 students studied Latin and 12,917 studied Greek at American colleges and universities. Although these declines at first might not seem catastrophic, they do not take into account the relative increase in the number of students attending college. By comparison, in 1968, 126,303 students studied Spanish at the university level; in 2013, that number had jumped to 790,756. www.mla.org/resources/research/surveysreports-and-other-documents/teaching-enrollments-and-programs/enroll ments-in-languages-other-than-english-in-united-states-institutions-of-high er-education. 7. Hardwick and Stray, Companion to Classical Receptions, 3. 8. Hardwick and Stray, 5. 9. Ezra Pound, correspondence with Rudd Fleming, Pound mss. II, Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana. 10. A. David Moody, Ezra Pound: Poet, Vol. 3 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 305. 11. Moody, Ezra Pound: Poet, Vol. 3, 305. Overholser responded by saying Pound had mostly completed the translation before St. Elizabeths. 12. Untitled Statement, Poetry 84.2 (May 1954): 119. 13. Moody, Ezra Pound: Poet, Vol. 3, 302. As Moody notes, Pound admired that Herakles accepted responsibility for his fate and that, as he wrote to Michael

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:12, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.002

Classical Literature

14. 15. 16.

17.

18.

19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

23

Reck, no one in The Women of Trachis ‘has any evil intentions, NO bad feeling, vendetta, or whatso / All of ’em trying to be nice’. But, he notes, ‘the tragedy moves on just the same’. David M. Gordon, ed., Ezra Pound and James Laughlin: Selected Letters (New York: Norton, 1994), 228. Moody, Ezra Pound: Poet, Vol. 3, 302. As Peter Liebregts points out, Pound’s translation here of the Greek ‘taut’ oun . . . lampra sumbainei’ demonstrates his process of ‘creative translation as a form of literary criticism’. Liebregts, ‘“No man knows his luck ’til he’s dead”: Ezra Pound’s Women of Trachis’, in Massimo Bacigalupo and William Pratt, eds., Ezra Pound, Language, and Persona (Genova: Università degli Studi di Genova, 2008), 309. It is telling that Pound celebrates this moment of understanding in a play that historically has been known for its ambiguity. Herakles may arrive at an understanding of his past and his fate here, but in the moments that directly follow this realization, he enforces an edict of filial obligation on Hyllos, his son, by ordering him to marry Iole, which leads Hyllos to conclude that ‘the delirium is coming back’ in his dying father and to ask, ‘what am I to do, in this mess?’ In this way, Sophocles seems to undercut both Herakles’s and Pound’s certainty and to invite his audience to question the nature of coherence and its use (and cost) for the future represented by Hyllos. On this connection, see Jean Michel Rabaté, Language, Sexuality, and Ideology in Ezra Pound’s Cantos (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1986), 294–5; Michael Alexander, The Poetic Achievement of Ezra Pound (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), 195–6; and Peter Liebregts, ‘“No man knows his luck ’til he’s dead”: Ezra Pound’s Women of Trachis’, 315–16. For many readers, this moment is not without its complications, particularly since Herakles goes on to compel his son to marry Iole against his wishes, a selfish act that enforces filial obligation on his son. Peter Stoicheff, ‘The Interwoven Authority of a Drafts & Fragments Text’, in Lawrence Rainey, ed., A Poem Containing History: Textual Studies in The Cantos (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 216. On this, see Christine Froula, To Write Paradise: Style and Error in Pound’s Cantos (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985). Elektra, ed. Richard Reid (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 21. From this point forward, this edition of Elektra will be cited in the text with the abbreviation ‘E ’. Mark Ringer, Electra and the Empty Urn: Metatheater and Roleplaying in Sophocles (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 127. Moody argues that Pound would have been drawn to Elektra ‘having the courage of her convictions, her continuing to speak the truth to power in spite of being punished for it, and her refusing to compromise in calling for justice to be done’. Ezra Pound: Poet, Vol. 3, 298. James Laughlin discounts claims that Pound’s attraction to Sophocles was through identification with the tragic circumstances of Sophocles’ tragic figures, noting Pound’s often

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:12, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.002

24

25. 26. 27. 28.

29. 30. 31.

32.

leah culligan flack cheerful disposition after his first few weeks at St. Elizabeths. See Pound as Wuz (Saint Paul, MN: Greywolf Press, 1987), 45. Carey Perloff observes, ‘The play explores the madness of incessant “remembering”, the terror of being unable to forget the past in a culture or household in which history is being deliberately erased’ (Elek xiii). Ringer, Electra and the Empty Urn, 146–8. Also see David Ten Eyck, Ezra Pound’s Adams Cantos (London: Bloomsbury, 2012), 141–2. By intermingling a range of American dialects with Greek, Perloff argues, ‘Pound also created a complex verbal system that only Elektra and the Chorus share’ (E xvii). As Perloff notes, Greek here is a ‘potent device to get us to listen more carefully to the nuances of Elektra’s grief, and to make that grief palpable in a sonic sense on the stage. The two languages serve to reinforce each other: the rhythmic electricity of the Greek next to the reassuring familiarity of the English’ (E xvii). Stoicheff, ‘The Interwoven Authority’, 138. Moody, Ezra Pound: Poet, Vol 3, 350. Culler, Theory of the Lyric (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 63 and 37. Quoted in Peter Nicholls, ‘Ezra Pound and the Rhetoric of Address’, Affirmations: of the Modern, Special Issue on Rhetoric and Modernism, 2.3 (2015), http://affirmations.arts.unsw.edu.au. Nicholls, ‘Ezra Pound and the Rhetoric of Address’. W OR KS C I T ED

Alexander, Michael, The Poetic Achievement of Ezra Pound (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981). Culler, Jonathan, Theory of the Lyric (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015). Froula, Christine, To Write Paradise: Style and Error in Pound’s Cantos (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985). Gordon, David M., ed., Ezra Pound and James Laughlin: Selected Letters (New York: Norton, 1994). Hardwick, Lorna, Reception Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Hardwick, Lorna, and Christopher Stray, eds., Companion to Classical Receptions (Oxford: Blackwell-Wiley, 2008). Homberger, Eric, ed., Ezra Pound: The Critical Heritage (New York: Routledge, 2009). Laughlin, James, Pound as Wuz (Saint Paul, MN: Greywolf Press, 1987). Liebregts, Peter, ‘“No man knows his luck ’til he’s dead”: Ezra Pound’s Women of Trachis’, in Massimo Bacigalupo and William Pratt, eds., Ezra Pound, Language, and Persona, 300–314 (Genova: Università degli Studi di Genova, 2008).

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:12, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.002

Classical Literature

25

Peachy, Frederic, Untitled Review of The Women of Trachis, The Pound Newsletter (January 1955): 8. Moody, A. David, Ezra Pound; Poet, Vol. 3 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). Nicholls, Peter, ‘Ezra Pound and the Rhetoric of Address’, Affirmations: of the New, Special Issue on Rhetoric and Modernism, 2.3 (2015), http://affirma tions.arts.unsw.edu.au. Pound, Ezra, The Cantos (New York: New Directions, 1996). ‘The Hellenists’, Ezra Pound Papers, YCAL MSS 43, Box 106, Folder 4422, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. Sophocles’ The Women of Trachis (New York: New Directions, 1957). Pound, Ezra, and Rudd Fleming, Elektra, ed. Carey Perloff (New York: New Directions, 1987). Elektra, ed. Richard Reid (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987). Rabaté, Jean Michel, Language, Sexuality, and Ideology in Ezra Pound’s Cantos (Albany: SUNY Press, 1986). Ringer, Mark, Electra and the Empty Urn: Metatheater and Roleplaying in Sophocles (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1998). Stoicheff, Peter, ‘The Interwoven Authority of the Drafts & Fragments Text’, in Lawrence Rainey, ed., A Poem Containing History: Textual Studies in The Cantos, 213–31 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997). Ten Eyck, David, Ezra Pound’s Adams Cantos (London: Bloomsbury, 2012). Untitled Statement, Poetry 84.2 (May 1954): 119.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:12, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.002

chapter 2

Early Medieval Philosophy and Textuality Mark Byron*

Pound’s inclusion of a musical score in Canto LXXV (C 470–71) asserts a paradox of temporality: the canto is the shortest by line number in all of The Cantos, yet as words give way to music, the time of reading and of hearing becomes undefined and dilatory. The music is Gerhard Münch’s scoring of the violin part of Clément Janequin’s Chant des Oiseaux of 1537, commissioned by Pound for Olga Rudge to perform at the first of the Tigullian concerts in Rapallo in 1933. Janequin’s score derives from Francesco Canova da Milano’s Canzoni degli Uccelli (c. 1528) – a genealogy all perfectly clear and unambiguous – but this is not what attracts Pound’s attention. Instead, he is drawn to the clarity of the birdsong itself as it emerges from the score and its instrumentation, moving him to speculate on its obscure ancient provenance: ‘the forma, the concept rises from death . . . Janequin’s concept takes a third life in our time . . . And its ancestry I think goes back to Arnaut Daniel and to god knows what “hidden antiquity”’ (GK 151–2). In this statement, Pound brings together a moment in the recent past (Münch’s scoring and Rudge’s performance), early sixteenth-century music (Milano and Janequin), twelfth-century Occitan poetry (Arnaut) and an unspecified ‘antiquity’, perhaps commensurate with preclassical Eleusis. Pound implies a transmission from the classical to the high medieval world, but how the birdsong might have crossed the late classical and early medieval era remains a point of obscurity. It is telling that Pound makes this proclamation in Guide to Kulchur, written in mere weeks in 1938: a text, if not exactly encyclopaedic, then at the very least indexical, indicative of the range of Pound’s thinking and the sweep of his historical and aesthetic sources. Pound’s keen eye for aesthetic and intellectual genealogies often found expression in claims for material evidence: textual transmission, direct contact between significant figures by means of conversation or the exchange of letters, or even matters of architecture and epigraphy. But as the example of Janequin’s birds demonstrates, Pound also sought out 26

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:11, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.003

Early Medieval Philosophy and Textuality

27

genealogical modes beyond material boundaries – such as his speculations on some of Guido Cavalcanti’s intellectual sources – transmitted in the aether of influence and discerned only by means of internal evidence. Pound’s interest in and use of late classical and early medieval sources falls somewhere in between these two poles, where influence may be virtually invisible to the untrained eye, but confirmed in the discerning examination of texts either obscure by nature or overlooked by intellectual history. At base, this is a question of methodology: how does Pound apprehend early medieval sources? How does he make a case for their relevance or necessity in understanding the nature of influence in later textual expression or in the historical record? How do these matters of method transform our understanding of Pound’s poetic project, especially when taking into account recent scholarly transformations in such fields as Carolingian textuality, Byzantine history and the history of Islamic transmission of Greek texts to the Latin West? Pound’s education, conventional for its time, trained him in the Greek and Latin classics, the high medieval literature of Occitan and Tuscan poetry and early modern literature in Romance languages, particularly the plays of Lope de Vega, upon which he began doctoral work at the University of Pennsylvania. The fields of early medieval literature and history were not particularly well served in English outside of Norse and Anglo-Saxon poetry, leaving a customary dark zone in Pound’s education he would later seek to illuminate by various means. From the outset of his career, he demonstrated a keen eye for lines of filiation in culture and literature – such as his observations on the birdsong in Münch’s violin line and its archaic origins – which meant a paucity of early medieval scholarship became an impetus to inquiry. From where did Guido Cavalcanti derive his philosophical vocabulary in ‘Donna mi prega’, and within which tradition is he situating his poem? How were legal codes transmitted from late-classical Rome to early modernity? How did intellectual history take shape in the interim between the Gothic invasions and the rise of the European universities? These were central questions for Pound’s poetics, especially as he turned to composing The Cantos. A ‘poem containing history’ required a historiographical rationale for its claims of continuity, conflict and the transmission of ideas, and this meant reckoning with some of the barest phases of history in the West. Pound’s absorption of early medieval history and cultural transmission opens up his poetic rationale for the reader: identifying the sources upon which he drew, and in certain cases the decision behind such choices, clarifies the intent driving his epic poem.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:11, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.003

28

mark byron

Among other sources, he was drawn to early medieval encyclopaedic works such as Justinian’s Corpus Juris Civilis or Eriugena’s Periphyseon, which attempted a summa of a body of knowledge in order to face down political instability or to gather up all possible knowledge. The connections with some of Pound’s critical preoccupations become clear – whether the workings of global capital, the onrush to war or the suppression and vilification of unorthodox ideas – where the serial crises of the modern age impel the writer to shore fragments against collective ruin. The clearer Pound’s sources become – and transformations in recent decades in Carolingian studies, early medieval poetics, and Byzantine studies provide, in some cases, the first authoritative editions of pivotal texts upon which he relied – the better readers and scholars are able to understand the implications of Pound’s choices, including choices made in relative ignorance. When Pound transformed his graduate work in romance philology at the University of Pennsylvania into The Spirit of Romance (1910), he declared in his opening sentence, ‘This is not a philological work’ (SR v). Despite this advertisement – aimed more at Germanic philology then entering the higher education system of the United States and to which Pound objected, than at philology per se – Pound invested significant energy and labour in philological work on the manuscripts of Guido Cavalcanti towards three separate editions of the poems, culminating in his final translation of ‘Donna mi prega’ in Canto XXXVI (C 177–80). In his evaluation of Guido’s poetry, and especially the variant readings evident in the manuscript record, Pound’s attention gravitated to matters of vocabulary and their possible intent. Specifically, he saw glimpses of an intellectual tradition running counter to Aquinian scholasticism in Guido’s poem that bore traces of medieval Islamic philosophy, and associations with some of the most important and egregiously neglected philosophical works of the early middle ages in both Greek and Latin. His tribute to the HibernoCarolingian philosopher John Scottus Eriugena immediately follows ‘Donna mi prega’ in Canto XXXVI, defending Eriugena against a complicated series of papal condemnations and accusations of heresy. The final verse paragraph of the canto then turns to the Italian Troubadour Sordello da Goito, encircling Pound’s foray in ecclesiastical and political history of the early middle ages with matters of thirteenth-century poetics. This intellectual context buttressing Canto XXXVI has received particularly incisive commentary. David Anderson’s Ezra Pound’s Cavalcanti (1983) compiled Pound’s philological work on Cavalcanti along with his translations and commentaries, although it provides limited account of the intellectual background of central concern in this essay.1 Earlier exegeses

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:11, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.003

Early Medieval Philosophy and Textuality

29

presented Eriugena’s significance in early medieval thought, especially in his inheritance of Neoplatonism,2 and later studies turned to the more difficult tasks of untangling some of Pound’s historical errors or misapprehensions concerning Eriugena, and of tracing out the transmission of these ideas through the Islamic philosophical traditions of the later middle ages.3 Despite these illuminating studies, several factors limit our reading of Cavalcanti and the question of his sources and location in intellectual history: the scholarly limitations in romance philology at the time of Pound’s education, the relative paucity of high quality scholarship in Carolingian studies and medieval Islamic philosophy in the anglophone sphere until recent decades, and the associated limitations of reliable editions of texts central to these concerns. My monograph Ezra Pound’s Eriugena (2014) attempts to demarcate recent scholarly advancement in these fields and how it relates to potential readings of Pound, and of Pound’s Cavalcanti.4 Yet there are large domains within these overlapping fields still to be fully mapped out – a matter addressed in further detail as follows. Pound’s lifelong scepticism towards the practice of philology finds especially strident expression in his prose works – one might think of ABC of Reading (1934) or Guide to Kulchur (1938) – but also enters into the fabric of The Cantos: in Canto XIV, the first ‘Hell Canto’, we find ‘pandars to authority . . . sitting on piles of stone books, / obscuring the texts with philology’ (C 63); and in Canto LXXIV, the first of the Pisan Cantos, Pound recounts a discussion held at Oxford with Thomas Collins Snow following Pound’s paper on Cavalcanti, in which Pound mocks Snow’s attempt to prove the poetic superiority of Sappho: ‘the very aged Snow created considerable / hilarity quoting the φαίνε-τ-τ-τ-τττ-αί μοι / in reply to l’aer tremare’ (C 464). Even a casual reading of Pound’s prose on Cavalcanti cannot miss the significance of this quoted phrase from ‘Donna mi prega’, comprising one of the most complicated philological problems in the poem for Pound. Several of his Cavalcanti notebooks dwell on this textual crux and return to it almost compulsively, and it receives extensive treatment on the essay ‘Cavalcanti 1910 / 1932’ in Make It New (1934).5 Not surprisingly, The Spirit of Romance expresses this double-edged sensibility. In the preface, Pound thanks ‘Wm. P. Shepard of Hamilton College’ for his ‘refined and sympathetic scholarship’ – scholarship, not philology, which is instead relegated to ‘the rags of morphology, epigraphy, privatleben and the kindred delights of the archaeological or “scholarly” mind’.6 One might see Pound’s position here as one not demanding an end

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:11, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.003

30

mark byron

to morphology and epigraphy but a mode of learning that moves beyond the mechanics of textual criticism. With a century of hindsight, combined with the challenge of producing scholarly editions of experimental modernist texts and theories to articulate them, textual criticism has become anything but mechanical. Yet Pound’s claim for poetry as a form of scholarly work – the so-called New Method in scholarship – emphasizes virtù and poetic acumen (thus Cavalcanti’s symbolic role) over Germanic philology.7 This humanistic impulse is where the merits of early medieval thought come to the fore: namely the imperative to preserve the best cultural expression of antiquity, and the acute awareness of how imperilled such learning could be within the historical moment. Such acts of conservation resonate with Pound’s own sense of scholarship and poetic process, where to write a ‘poem including history’ is not an archaeological exercise but an act that keeps thought alive in making the past moment contemporary. This is true of earlier instalments of The Cantos, but Pound’s scholarly mode intensifies later in the poem as he becomes more attuned to the lines of transmission and inheritance in intellectual history: notably the persistence of classical thought in late-classical Neoplatonism, early medieval and Islamic philosophy, and then the Troubadours and the Tuscan stilnovisti. His scholarly research on and translations of Cavalcanti thus serve as a kind of pivot on which the earlier visionary mode of scholarly labour fuses with careful philological analysis. Pound’s scholarly work on Cavalcanti’s poetry serves as a gateway to the field of Carolingian studies, largely by virtue of his yoking the intellectual tradition behind ‘Donna mi prega’ to the ecclesiastical controversies surrounding Eriugena several centuries before. Pound’s initial source for information on Eriugena was Francesco Fiorentino’s Manuale di storia della filosofia, first consulted in the later 1920s, and reflected in the focus on Eriugena’s unorthodoxy and its consequences. In 1939–40 Pound consulted volume 122 of the Patrologia Latina containing the Opera or Collected Works of Eriugena, edited by Henry Joseph Floss in a heavily flawed text. Despite the rudimentary state of the texts available to him, Pound was able to discern the critical importance of late classical writers such as Pseudo-Dionysius, Maximus the Confessor, Priscian and others, providing an intellectual continuity with the classical world that had the virtue of operating outside of the constraints of Latin orthodoxy. Eriugena’s translations of Pseudo-Dionysius from Greek was itself a remarkable feat in ninth-century western Europe, but The Celestial Hierarchy in particular established a metaphysical architecture that was to dominate medieval thought down to Dante’s Paradiso and beyond. This

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:11, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.003

Early Medieval Philosophy and Textuality

31

terrain is broadly understood, but the transformation of Carolingian studies in the last generation and the new availability of reliable and expertly edited texts of Eriugena opens the way for new consideration of the significance of such material for Pound’s poem.8 The development of glossing and commentary techniques in the Carolingian Palatine School – Eriugena’s line-by-line commentary on Martianus Capella’s Marriage of Philology and Mercury was the first of its kind, for example9 – transformed the way texts were arranged on the page, establishing scholarly apparatus that persist into the digital age. The contexts for these transformations are clearly important in discerning the significance of Eriugena for Pound, but may also contribute to his methods of glossing throughout The Cantos. Pound’s philological investigations into ‘Donna mi prega’ also opened up the field of medieval Islamic philosophy. Cavalcanti’s vocabulary – memoria, virtù, formato locho, intelletto possible, intelletto agente – and the preponderance of light imagery in his poem drew Pound to Eriugena and to Robert Grosseteste’s thirteenth-century treatise De Luce, but also to the controversies at the University of Paris during the thirteenth century in which the former’s texts were embroiled. Pound knew from Fiorentino and Ernest Renan that the Aristotelian commentaries of Averroes, the twelfth-century philosopher from Cordoba, were at the centre of these controversies.10 Cavalcanti’s poem also led Pound to consider the work of the eleventh-century Persian polymath Avicenna, especially his theory of emanations – a cosmological system governing the relation between the human soul and divinity – and the function of light within this system. Ron Bush, Matthew Little and Robert Babcock, Maria Luisa Ardizzone, and Peter Liebregts among others have devoted considerable exegetical energy in clarifying how these philosophical systems intersect with Pound’s reading of Cavalcanti.11 This field too has experienced a recent flourishing, where scholars respond critically to new translations of central texts and develop new ways of understanding the full effects of these complex texts.12 To single out just one consequence for Pound studies, a greater understanding of the works of Alfarabi has made clear that his theory of emanations, rather than that of Avicenna, is the source for most European applications of this cosmology, including in Dante’s Commedia. Such scholarly work redresses the widespread oversight of the role Islamic philosophy plays in the transmission of Aristotelian and Neoplatonist ideas into the High Middle Ages, and indeed medieval Islamic advances in the long-standing attempts to reconcile these two systems. Despite a surface eclecticism, what binds these early medieval discourses, and might best explain their attraction for Pound, is their impulse towards

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:11, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.003

32

mark byron

encyclopaedism combined with their histories of comparative neglect. Following his work on the Confucian Four Books, Chinese history, the works of John Adams and other compendia projects, Pound was drawn to the comparative study of legal systems, particularly in attempts to systematize and codify vast arrays of source materials. He explores this terrain in Thrones in particular: the Corpus Juris Civilis commissioned by the sixthcentury Byzantine Emperor Justinian the Great in Canto XCVI; the Eparch’s Book of Byzantine Emperor Leo the Wise (866–912 CE) in the same canto; the Sacred Edict (1670) of the Kangzi Emperor, in Cantos XCVIII and XCIX; and Edward Coke’s Institutes of the Laws of England (1628), in Cantos CVII–CIX. Pound gives mention to Byzantium in passing earlier in The Cantos, such as his recurring citation of the ancient Byzantine law of the sea Lex Rhodia in Cantos LXXVIII and XCIV. As Rock-Drill progresses Byzantium, and particularly the rule of Justinian, comes into much sharper focus – several references to the Pandectae or Legal Digests occur in Canto XCIV, for example. In Canto XCVI, early medieval Byzantium is evaluated in concert with another early medieval source, Paul the Deacon’s eighth-century History of the Lombards. Pound’s evident interests in the tectonic relations between empires, especially between the Eastern and Western halves of the Roman Empire, shifts of population, conflict between urban and nomadic forces, and the rising struggle between Christian and Islamic spheres all bring Byzantium to the centre of his enterprise. His source texts included the Patrologia Latina for Paul the Deacon, and Norman H. Baynes and H. Moss’s Byzantium: An Introduction to Eastern Roman Civilisation (1948).13 The extensive scholarship on Byzantium is a particularly rich resource for Pound studies but is yet to be fully exploited. New work by such scholars as Anthony Kaldellis and Nadia Maria El Chiek reorient Byzantine studies – the latter from the perspective of Arab territorial aspirations – and the publication of scholarly editions and translations of important primary texts by Dumbarton Oaks opens up further opportunities to think through the significance of Pound’s attention to the economic, religious, political and cultural achievements of early medieval Byzantium.14 The historical, aesthetic and cultural crosscurrents to which Pound was especially attuned returns the concept of the Mediterranean as the ‘Middle Sea’ to its central role in European and Levantine history. Prosodic innovation transmits between Provence, Tuscany, Alexandria, North Africa and Sicily; and philosophical discourse, especially Neoplatonism and Aristotelianism, passes from the classical centres of Greece and Rome to Byzantium as well as to the Islamic world, from which many crucial texts

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:11, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.003

Early Medieval Philosophy and Textuality

33

were reintroduced to Europe in the middle ages. The translation schools of Baghdad in the east and Toledo in the west bestowed a rich Islamic philosophical legacy upon Europe between the tenth and the thirteenth centuries, shaping the curricula (and consequent controversies) at emergent sites of learning such as the University of Paris. This history and cultural legacy is reasonably well known, if not sufficiently acknowledged in the history of ideas. Perhaps even more germane to Pound’s poetics is the transmission of prosodic techniques and genres: the conventional poetic history of his time saw a line of genealogy from the Troubadour poets of eleventh- and twelfth-century Provence to the Sicilian court of Federico Secondo in the early thirteenth century, and then to the Tuscan sphere of the stilnovisti later in the thirteenth century. Sicily’s role in this history is pivotal, bringing together several discourses of central importance to Pound’s poetic project. But a wider and deeper context arises when considered within a Mediterranean rather than exclusively European sphere: most prominently Islamic and Arab influences from the south and east. These contexts have received more attention in non-anglophone cultural histories and histories of ideas – notably Italian and Spanish – and have percolated into more recent work in English. The role of Islamic learning in Sicily during Byzantine rule from the seventh century and then the Emirate from the ninth to the eleventh centuries, and its legacy under subsequent Norman rule, made a greater contribution to European philosophy and poetics than has been customarily appreciated. This influence arguably extends to prosody, the development of poetic genres, and other aspects of an erstwhile ‘Western’ poetic history that was to become a pivotal aspect of European cultural history in the middle ages, a Mediterranean counterpart to such poetic transformations in northern Europe as the Norse sagas, the skaldic poetry of Iceland and Anglo-Saxon verse. The Sicilian court of Federico Secondo, who ruled from 1198 until his death in 1250, has long been understood as a crucial centre of cultural and artistic production. The blend of Norman and Islamic influences, built upon a Byzantine substrate, provided a singular condition for poetic development, from which emerged the sonnet as a coherent poetic form, as well as the adaptation of Troubadour love poetry into a highly intellectual form of poetic argument to match its supremely complex prosody. Certainly contact with the eastern Mediterranean comprised a central part of Federico’s activities: when he married Yolande (Isabella) of Jerusalem by proxy in 1225 he was crowned King of Jerusalem, and was subsequently instrumental in prosecuting the Sixth Crusade in 1228, during which he

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:11, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.003

34

mark byron

asserted his right to rule in the Holy Land.15 In addition to the Levantine influences with which Federico returned to his court in Palermo, he drew on the historical relationship between Sicily and the Islamic world, enlisting Jewish Sicilians to translate literary works from Greek and Arabic, and sought out Islamic scholars to translate and critically examine philosophical, scientific and other texts: ‘Frederick’s efforts to import, translate, and assimilate Arabic scientific texts, and then disseminate them to other courts in Christian Europe, made Sicily an important center for the diffusion of the Islamic sciences to the Christian world.’16 This fertile fusion of Christian and Islamic cultural knowledge extended to architecture, coinage, palace inscriptions and also to prosody. These are each aspects of cultural contact in the eastern Mediterranean of significance for Pound, especially in Thrones, where he attempts to collate evidence for these various historical forces in the Byzantine sphere into a unified textual expression or compendium. The links between Occitan poetry, the Sicilian School of Federico Secondo and the stilnovisti tell a critical part of the story of the evolution of poetry in Italian. But the Arabic language also bears directly on this history: ‘a complex local and cultural and literary history, which is properly viewed as a chapter of the complex history of Arabic literature in Europe, preceded them [the Sicilian Court poets] in this place where one hundred years earlier a circle of poets had written in praise of Sicilian monarch Roger II in Arabic’.17 This poetry was collected into the major extant Siculo-Arabic verse anthology, Kharīdat al-qasr wa jarīdat al-‘asr (‘The Virgin Pearl of the Palace and the Register of the Age’). While Federico’s court shifted its focus towards mainland Christian Europe, evident in the tendency of poets to emulate the models of Romance vernacular poets, his admiration for Arabic science and politics is indicative of the rich Arabic and Islamic inheritance within the Norman Sicilian polity. The relative belatedness of Siculo-Italian poets arriving at the Provençal discourse of courtly love – famously lamented by Giacomo da Lentini in his poem ‘Amore non vole’ – was itself couched in lapidary imagery drawn from Arabic poetics.18 This influence has been noted in histories of Arabic literature and in Italian scholarship on poetry, but in anglophone scholarship the role of Sicily in the history of poetics as well as its pivotal position as a contact zone for Byzantine, Arabic and Norman spheres of influence remains a recent development.19 Yet the question remains: as fascinating as this poetic and cultural history may be, what possible effect can it have upon our understanding of Pound’s poetry, especially given that he did not demonstrate more than a passing knowledge of the Sicilian poetic context during the Caliphate and

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:11, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.003

Early Medieval Philosophy and Textuality

35

subsequent Norman rule? Pound’s persistence in seeking out poetic and intellectual lineages forms a significant motivation for his wide-ranging historical inquiry. Knowing more about the kinds of texts he sought out (their provenance, stability and authority), and why, assists in clarifying the kinds of claims he made for such continuities, as is clear in the example of Pound’s research on Eriugena. But when these histories are distinguished by a perceived discourse of oppression, occlusion, or neglect – as with Eriugena and his serial condemnations, with the antique bird sounds in Janequin via Arnaut and with the sources for Cavalcanti’s oblique vocabulary – then subsequent scholarly work allows us to reconsider the significance and judiciousness of Pound’s sharp eye. In the Sicilian poetic context, the knowledge that Italian poetic techniques were actively shaped by Arabic literary forms vindicates Pound’s pursuits in etymology, prosody and metrical technique, none more so than in the case of Cavalcanti. He may not have known the extent of this cosmopolitan poetic history in the Mediterranean sphere, between the eras of the Troubadours and the stilnovisti, but his methods of poetic inquiry are entirely in sympathy with this rich and recently rejuvenated history.20

Notes * The research for this chapter was funded by the Australian Government through the Australian Research Council Future Fellowship Scheme for the project Modernism and the Early Middle Ages (FT160100417). 1. David Anderson, Ezra Pound’s Cavalcanti: An Edition of the Translations, Notes, and Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983). 2. See Walter B. Michaels, ‘Pound and Erigena’, Paideuma 1.1 (1972), 37–54; and Peter Makin, ‘Ezra Pound and Scotus Erigena’, Comparative Literary Studies 10 (1973), 60–83. 3. See A. David Moody, ‘“They Dug Him Up out of Sepulture”: Pound, Erigena, and Fiorentino’, Paideuma 25.1–2 (1996), 241–47; and Ronald Bush, ‘La filosofica famiglia: Cavalcanti, Avicenna, and the “Form” of Ezra Pound’s Pisan Cantos’, Textual Practice 24.4 (2010), 669–705. 4. Mark Byron, Ezra Pound’s Eriugena (London: Bloomsbury, 2014). 5. Twelve notebooks numbered 15–26 consist of Pound’s notes as he travelled around northern Italy, Spain and elsewhere in 1925–31, in search of every extant Cavalcanti manuscript he could locate, preparatory to the several editions of Cavalcanti’s Rime he planned over his career. These are housed in the Ezra Pound Collection YCAL MSS 43, Box 114, Folders 4889–91, and Box 15, Folders 4892–94, the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:11, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.003

36

mark byron

6. Ezra Pound, The Spirit of Romance (1910: New York: New Directions, 2005), 5 and 7. 7. James Longenbach, Modernist Poetics of History: Pound, Eliot, and the Sense of the Past (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 103. 8. The standard works on Eriugena for much of the twentieth century were Étienne Gilson, La Philosophie au Moyen Age, I: De Scot Érigène a S. Bonaventure (Paris: Payot, 1922), and Maïeul Cappuyns, Jean Scot Erigène: Sa vie, son oeuvre, sa pensée (1933; Bruxelles: Culture et Civilisation, 1969). However, two studies in English contributed to the transformation of the field: John Contreni, The Cathedral School of Laon from 850 to 930: Its Manuscripts and Masters (München: Bei der Arbeo-Gesellschaft, 1978), and John Marenbon, From the Circle of Alcuin to the School of Auxerre: Logic, Theology and Philosophy in the Early Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). To these may be added numerous subsequent studies on Eriugena, to say nothing of similar transformations in scholarly work on Pseudo-Dionysius, Martianus Capella and other central intellectual figures of the late classical and early middle ages. Édouard Jeauneau’s five-volume scholarly edition of Eriugena’s masterwork, Periphyseon (Turnhout: Brepols, 1996–2003), demonstrates the kind of intimacy between philology and hermeneutics Pound sought to reveal in Cavalcanti’s poetry. 9. Dermot Moran, The Philosophy of John Scottus Eriugena: A Study of Idealism in the Middle Ages (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 41. 10. Ernest Renan, Averroès et l’averroïsme (Paris: Michel Lévy Frères, 1861) remains a comprehensive and authoritative analysis of Averroes’ life and thought. 11. See especially Ronald Bush, ‘La filosofica famiglia’; Matthew Little and Robert Babcock, ‘“Amplius in coitu phantasia”: Pound’s “Cavalcanti” and Avicenna’s De Almahad’, Paideuma 20.1–2 (1991), 63–75; Maria Luisa Ardizzone, Guido Cavalcanti: The Other Middle Ages (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002); and Peter Liebregts, Ezra Pound and Neoplatonism (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2004). 12. For major anglophone interventions in the field, see especially Herbert A. Davidson, Alfarabi, Avicenna, and Averroes, on Intellect: Their Cosmologies, Theories of the Active Intellect, and Theories of Human Intellect (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), and Peter Adamson and Richard C. Taylor, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Arabic Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). Brigham Young University Press publishes a series in which translations of many essential medieval Islamic philosophical texts appear in some cases for the first time in English. 13. Norman H. Baynes and H. Moss, eds., Byzantium: An Introduction to Eastern Roman Civilisation (Oxford: Clarendon, 1948).

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:11, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.003

Early Medieval Philosophy and Textuality

37

14. See especially Anthony Kaldellis, The Argument of Psellos’ Chronographia (Leiden: Brill, 1999), Hellenism in Byzantium: The Transformations of Greek Identity and the Reception of the Classical Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), and The Byzantine Republic: People and Power in New Rome (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015); and Nadia Maria El Chiek, Byzantium Viewed by the Arabs (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004). Important Dumbarton Oaks editions of primary works include Michael Attaleiates, The History, trans. Anthony Kaldellis and Dimitris Krallis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), and Albrecht Berger, trans., The Patria: Accounts of Medieval Constantinople, Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013). Dumbarton Oaks has also reissued Irfan Shahîd’s monumental seven-volume Byzantium and the Arabs (1984–2010), available for download at www .doaks.org/newsletter/byzantium-and-the-arabs. 15. David Abulafia, Frederick II: A Medieval Emperor (London: Penguin, 1988), 150–53. 16. Karla Mallette, ‘Poetries of the Norman Courts’, in The Literature of AlAndalus, ed. María Rosa Menocal, Raymond P. Scheindlin and Michael Sells (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 377. 17. Mallette, 378. In addition, Arabized Jews in Palermo wrote poetry, including muwāshshahāt – multi-lined strophic verse poems in classical Arabic – ‘as well ˙ of Judah Halevi’, a major Jewish Andalusian poet of the early as imitations twelfth century. 18. Mallette, 382. 19. John Julius Norwich has written two popular histories of Norman Sicily: The Normans in the South 1016–1130 (1967; London: Faber, 2018) and The Kingdom of the Sun 1130–1194 (1970; London: Faber, 2018), as well as Sicily: A Short History from the Ancient Greeks to Cosa Nostra (London: John Murray, 2015). In addition to Kreutz (cited below), the two foundational texts in English on the subject are María Rosa Menocal, The Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History: A Forgotten Heritage (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987), and Sarah Davis-Secord, Where Three Worlds Meet: Sicily in the Early Medieval Mediterranean (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2017). 20. One might take this history back to the ninth century when the first significant Arab impact on southern Italy was felt in places such as Bari, in which an Emirate was established that lasted for a generation, as well as Campagnia, Calabria and of course Sicily, where Arab influence was felt for centuries, along with, in the case of Sicily, conquest and establishment of the Emirate for two centuries. Ironically, given Pound’s intense interests in the Carolingian sphere, it was Louis, Holy Roman Emperor from 844 to 875, who drove out Arab mercenaries operating in the Lombard Civil War of the 830s and 840s, but who failed to clear southern Italy of Arab military and mercantile presence in subsequent decades. See Barbara M. Kreutz, Before the Normans: Southern Italy in the

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:11, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.003

38

mark byron Ninth and Tenth Centuries (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991), especially chapter 2, ‘The First Arab Impact’, 18–35, and chapter 3, ‘A Carolingian Crusade’, 36–54. W OR KS C I T ED

Abulafia, David, Frederick II: A Medieval Emperor (London: Penguin, 1988). Adamson, Peter, and Richard C. Taylor, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Arabic Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). Anderson, David, Ezra Pound’s Cavalcanti: An Edition of the Translations, Notes, and Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983). Ardizzone, Maria Luisa, Guido Cavalcanti: The Other Middle Ages (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002). Attaleiates, Michael, The History, trans. Anthony Kaldellis and Dimitris Krallis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012). Baynes, Norman H., and H. Moss, eds., Byzantium: An Introduction to Eastern Roman Civilisation (Oxford: Clarendon, 1948). Berger, Albrecht, trans., The Patria: Accounts of Medieval Constantinople, Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013). Bush, Ronald, ‘La filosofica famiglia: Cavalcanti, Avicenna, and the “Form” of Ezra Pound’s Pisan Cantos’, Textual Practice 24.4 (2010), 669–705. Byron, Mark, Ezra Pound’s Eriugena (London: Bloomsbury, 2014). Cappuyns, Maïeul, Jean Scot Erigène: Sa vie, son oeuvre, sa pensée (1933; Bruxelles: Culture et Civilisation, 1969). Contreni, John, The Cathedral School of Laon from 850 to 930: Its Manuscripts and Masters (München: Bei der Arbeo-Gesellschaft, 1978). Davidson, Herbert A., Alfarabi, Avicenna, and Averroes, on Intellect: Their Cosmologies, Theories of the Active Intellect, and Theories of Human Intellect (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992). Davis-Secord, Sarah, Where Three Worlds Meet: Sicily in the Early Medieval Mediterranean (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2017). El Chiek, Nadia Maria, Byzantium Viewed by the Arabs (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004). Eriugena, John Scottus, Periphyseon, ed. Édouard Jeauneau, 5 vols. (Turnhout: Brepols, 1996–2003). Gilson, Etienne, La Philosophie au Moyen Age, I: De Scot Érigène a S. Bonaventure (Paris: Payot, 1922). Kaldellis, Anthony, The Argument of Psellos’ Chronographia (Leiden: Brill, 1999). The Byzantine Republic: People and Power in New Rome (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015). Hellenism in Byzantium: The Transformations of Greek Identity and the Reception of the Classical Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). Kreutz, Barbara M., Before the Normans: Southern Italy in the Ninth and Tenth Centuries (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991).

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:11, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.003

Early Medieval Philosophy and Textuality

39

Liebregts, Peter, Ezra Pound and Neoplatonism (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2004). Little, Matthew, and Robert Babcock, ‘“Amplius in coitu phantasia”: Pound’s “Cavalcanti” and Avicenna’s De Almahad’, Paideuma 20.1–2 (1991), 63–75. Longenbach, James, Modernist Poetics of History: Pound, Eliot, and the Sense of the Past (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987). Makin, Peter, ‘Ezra Pound and Scotus Erigena’, Comparative Literary Studies 10 (1973), 60–83. Mallette, Karla, ‘Poetries of the Norman Courts’, in The Literature of Al-Andalus, ed. María Rosa Menocal, Raymond P. Scheindlin and Michael Sells, 375–87 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Marenbon, John, From the Circle of Alcuin to the School of Auxerre: Logic, Theology and Philosophy in the Early Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). Menocal, María Rosa, The Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History: A Forgotten Heritage (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987). Michaels, Walter B., ‘Pound and Erigena’, Paideuma 1.1 (1972), 37–54. Moody, A. David, ‘“They Dug Him Up out of Sepulture”: Pound, Erigena, and Fiorentino’, Paideuma 25.1–2 (1996), 241–47. Moran, Dermot, The Philosophy of John Scottus Eriugena: A Study of Idealism in the Middle Ages (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989). Norwich, John Julius, The Kingdom of the Sun 1130–1194 (1970; London: Faber, 2018). The Normans in the South 1016–1130 (1967; London: Faber, 2018). Sicily: A Short History from the Ancient Greeks to Cosa Nostra (London: John Murray, 2015). Pound, Ezra, Cavalcanti Notebooks 15–26, Ezra Pound Collection YCAL MSS 43, Box 114, Folders 4889–91, and Box 15, Folders 4892–94, the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. The Spirit of Romance (1910; New York: New Directions, 2005). Renan, Ernest, Averroès et l’averroïsme (Paris: Michel Lévy Frères, 1861).

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:11, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.003

chapter 3

Ezra Pound’s Pisan Cantos The Promise and the Limits of the Archive Ronald Bush

Writing in Ezra Pound and Referentiality, the poet Bob Perelman notes that ‘we have been living in . . . the Golden Age of Pound Studies’ in which ‘Pound’s already-published writing was read assiduously; much of the huge bulk of his other public and private writing was published; the ramifications of his references were exfoliated, his ellipses were spelled out, the ideograms were translated’. So why, he (provocatively) asks, has it not ‘become increasingly possible and even easy to read Pound’?1 Perelman’s question, as Pound’s papers continue to surface, becomes ever more pertinent. What in particular has been the value of Pound’s manuscript materials for reading his poems? I wish to suggest that it has been considerable, but also that it does not and can never absolve readers of their critical obligations or resolve certain fundamental ambiguities in Pound’s work. Some preliminary bearings can be found in readers’ struggles with references in the later Cantos, where the private reaches of Pound’s materials stretch the limits of scholarly research while the rewards of even strenuous scholarship remain relatively modest. Noel Stock, Pound’s first serious biographer, is of help here. In his last engagement with Pound, Stock wrote in Reading the Cantos that because Pound’s ‘choice of materials in [Rock-Drill and Thrones] has been governed very largely by the books which happened to be beside him or within reach’, a ‘full explanation [of them] would be impossible without having before us [as Stock once did as an initiate of Pound’s study] the various newsletters, cuttings and crank publications Pound was reading’.2 Even so, Stock allows, it may not be possible to construct a full explanation of what Pound makes of these texts because many were never fully ‘assimilated’ into his poem, with the result that Pound’s insistent reference to works outside his text resemble materials in a ‘mental diary which includes snatches of poetry’.3 Because of this, in Pound’s late work, Stock advises, ‘until we actually look into the sources, handle the books, place ourselves in Pound’s situation and see as nearly as 40

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:12, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.004

Ezra Pound’s Pisan Cantos

41

possible through his eyes, we cannot even begin to know how the material is supposed to function’.4 ‘In order to be able to follow, even roughly’, we must ‘know first of all [his] direct sources . . . we must have also an idea of what else [Pound] was reading at the time, and, finally, a good knowledge of what else he was writing’. Even then, Stock candidly admits, the effort might not get us very far. All we can be assured of is that the return to Pound’s sources ‘will save us from thinking [the poetry] means something else altogether’.5 Perelman’s critique goes deeper but allows more sympathy. In his view, our difficulty in reading Pound arises not only from the ambiguity of undigested sources, but from an essential contradiction in Pound’s purposes – a pervasive tension between pedagogy (a simplifying urge to communicate important information to others) and hermeticism (a belief that the deepest truths are incommunicable to those not equipped to understand them). However, Perelman argues, this tension gives The Cantos its characteristic strength – a power that is not captured by either scholarly or post-modernist interpretations of the work. That is, on the one hand, even though ‘Pound was fond of quoting Ford’s dictum: “get a dictionary / and learn the meanings of words”’, there is finally ‘no Poundian dictionary that can be separated from the experience of reading, deciphering, and adjudicating his work’.6 On the other hand, readings that undervalue the pedagogical drive of Pound’s work and concentrate on the playfulness of its surface fail to do justice to its seriousness, because they reduce Pound’s urgent invocation of references into mere gestures (a la Marianne Moore) towards multi-textured pastiche. Drawn himself towards the latter position, Perelman cites at length Charles Bernstein’s seductive assertion that The Cantos are simply ‘filled with indeterminacy, fragmentation, abstraction, obscurity, verbiage, equivocation, ambiguity, allegory’ and that Pound ‘has made the highest art of removing ideologies from their origins and creating for them a nomadic economy’.7 But he finally cannot see fit to agree, confessing that ‘I’m afraid that I never find any ideological detaching going on in Pound’.8 Parsing these contradictions leads Perelman to re-conceiving The Cantos’ core ambitions. Because the poem neither allows us to avoid glossing its references nor permits us to realize their full import, he argues, the poet leaves us amid the contradictory vectors of his borrowed phrases, ‘peering through estranging ink toward words we hope to recognize’.9 The central thrust of The Cantos, in other words, remains interrogatory, questioning conventions of especially historical interpretation as well as the

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:12, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.004

42

ronald bush

texts in which those conventions have been established. Moreover, this process of interrogation also proves self-reflexive: The Cantos not only puts in question the borrowed texts it explores, but also casts suspicion on its author’s claims to authority over his own work. Michael Kindellan comes to a similar conclusion, albeit from another direction. By entitling the early serial volumes of The Cantos ‘drafts’, Pound demonstrates a preference for process over finish, a predisposition that, for Kindellan, calls out for genetic study. Kindellan interestingly points to Pound’s scepticism about the adequacy of any published text in relation to its author’s intentions – a scepticism that extends well beyond the poet’s repeated cautions that his serial volumes should be regarded as provisional pending final correction. To Pound, Kindellan holds, all texts are to be regarded as ‘deficient’, including and especially his own.10 Paraphrasing Pound’s essay ‘Totalitarian Scholarship and the New Paideuma’,11 Kindellan avers that ‘for Pound, the opportunity to publish verse meant also perforce the loss of some integral aspects of the primary writing scene, aspects that the various stages and complications of setting poetry in type tend only to obscure. A printer’s prerogative should always be to first limit the damage to “sense” typesetting invariably caused’. This is why, Kindellan suggests, Pound could over and over again write to readers eager to help him correct typos or chronological errors in his text, as he wrote to Peter Russell in 1950: ‘NO interest in corrections of Cantos/ mere minutae, INTEREST in getting some god dam NEWS’.12 In Pound’s eyes, that is to say, the poem resides not in any definitive publication but in the poet’s ongoing creative struggle with his material – a struggle that a printer’s imposition of conventional presentation cannot help but minimize. Understanding as much, many commentators turn sooner or later towards a genetic analysis that prioritizes what Kindellan calls ‘the reconstitution and analysis of process’13 and that therefore assigns special importance to the notes, drafts, manuscripts, typescripts and associated materials that make up the Pound archive. They do so, however, not to resolve the poem’s textual and referential knots but to foreground them, transforming archival investigation from a hunt for occulted referents to a critical enterprise fully aware of the poem’s dialectic of conflicted motives, intention and accomplishment, draft and publication. I want in what follows to reflect on these prefatory remarks by means of the archival material I have worked with most closely – materials associated with the Pisan Cantos that David Ten Eyck, Kenneth Haynes and I have explored over a number of years in the course of preparing a genetic and critical edition (to be published by Oxford University Press) of that great

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:12, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.004

Ezra Pound’s Pisan Cantos

43

but frequently oversimplified poem. These materials include a plethora of unpublished notes, manuscript drafts and typescripts in both Italian and English, and a great many pieces of until recently uncollected wartime prose. Read together, this material has reoriented our sense of the composition of the sequence, at once reminding us of the extent to which Pound’s political entanglements affected its composition and, by alerting us to the sequence’s generic, intellectual and emotional fault lines, permitting a serious reconsideration of Pound’s artistic and political complexity. These possibilities arose in the last decade of the twentieth century, as the ingathering of Pound’s papers into American universities’ rare book and manuscript libraries (to name only the most important, those at Hamilton College and at the universities of Yale, Harvard, Indiana and Texas) allowed long-protected material to surface. The early history of those acquisitions has been told by Donald Gallup, who was responsible over many years for the purchase of the extensive collection of Pound’s papers now at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscripts Library at Yale University. In an essay entitled ‘The Ezra Pound Archive 1947–1987’, Gallup reminds us of how recently the first results of that process (now forming the core of the holdings catalogued as Ezra Pound Papers at the Beinecke) were opened to the scholarly community, and adds a note on ongoing acquisitions.14 Although the first tranche of Pound’s papers was transported from Italy to New Haven after long negotiations in 1966, for legal reasons it was not made accessible to scholars until 1973, and even then lacked some extremely valuable items, including the Fenollosa notebooks and Pound’s letters to his parents – both acquired in 1974 – and portions of an important cache of manuscripts and letters left in Paris with William Bird in 1924 when the Pounds moved to Italy, purchased in 1977.15 More pertinent to this essay, it was only in 1981 that the Pisan notebooks and authorial typescripts, having been given after the war to Mary de Rachewiltz in a trust supervised by James Laughlin, were acquired by Yale,16 and not until 1990 that a trove of Olga Rudge materials, including Pisan-related manuscripts she had typed herself, were purchased, afterwards to be classified as Additional Ezra Pound Papers (1992) and Olga Rudge Papers (1993). Meanwhile, the bulk of Pound’s books were acquired by the University of Texas at Austin, and the Ezra and Dorothy Pound St. Elizabeths correspondence was purchased by the Lilly Library of the University of Indiana. Then when James Laughlin died in 1997, he bequeathed his own letters to and from Pound and the entirety of the New Directions manuscript and correspondence files to the Houghton Library at Harvard, a gift that was paralleled by Omar Pound’s bequest on

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:12, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.004

44

ronald bush

his death in 2010 of the remains of much of his own collection to his and his father’s alma mater, Hamilton College in Clinton, New York. The years since 1973 have gradually made available much of Pound’s previously unpublished or uncollected work to the general public. Portions of Pound’s vast output of letters, for example, appeared in print, starting with a volume of selected letters in 1950, and encompass a series of Pound’s correspondence with single individuals, including most relevantly Ezra and Dorothy Pound: Letters in Captivity 1945–1946 (1999) and Ezra Pound to His Parents: Letters 1895–1929 (2011). Beyond the letters, the publication in 1991 by Garland Press of an eleven-volume reproduction of Ezra Pound’s Poetry and Prose: Contributions to Periodicals, edited by A. Walton Litz, Lea Baechler and James Longenbach, should be singled out, as it opened up Pound’s widely scattered uncollected essays to readers unaccustomed to frequenting the research libraries that preserved their originals. Beyond much forgotten but important literary writing, the Litz volumes rescued a series of political essays Pound had published in now obscure Italian newspapers and journals during the 1930s and early 1940s, and thus participated in a general relaxation of restrictions on Pound’s wartime writing in Fascist Italy. (Dorothy and Omar Pound, for example, had once insisted that ‘none of the voluminous materials relating to Pound’s radio broadcasts’ were to be consulted,17 and Olga Rudge’s initial reluctance to make her own papers available had kept from public view many politically charged poetic manuscripts closely associated with the Pisan Cantos.) Many of the Italian essays in the Litz collection have subsequently been described, collected and annotated in separate volumes by Italian and anglophone scholars.18 Collectively, they, along with the re-insertion of the then shockingly pro-Fascist Cantos LXXII and LXXIII into editions of The Cantos starting in 1986,19 and major work on Pound’s Italian years by Tim Redman and Laurence Rainey,20 prepared the ground for a realization of the extent of Pound’s wartime activities and his complicity with the Italian Fascist regime during the war.21 It was only, however, from the nineties onward when scholars began to sort through the Olga Rudge papers that the specific genetic links between Pound’s wartime Fascist activities and the Pisan Cantos came into full relief. Pound, it became apparent, had produced the Italian Cantos LXXII and LXXIII prompted by Mussolini’s last radio call for a resurgent defence of Italy and had incorporated the language of that speech into his poems.22 He then quickly proceeded to produce (also in Italian, and successors to the colloquy between Pound and a recently deceased Marinetti in the Italian Canto LXXII) a series of Dantescan

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:12, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.004

Ezra Pound’s Pisan Cantos

45

dialogues with the dead,23 giving voice to courageous spirits of Latin civilization and hoping to inspire Fascist resistance to the random destruction of the Italian culturescape by the allied bombings of 1944–5.24 The extensive but still largely unpublished drafts for Italian Cantos subsequent to Canto LXXIII took the form both of extended tableaux and provisional drafts for Italian Cantos LXXIV and LXXV,25 altogether constituting in length and seriousness a suite in themselves.26 And though Pound chose to abandon these efforts in the spring of 1945 when Italy was on the brink of losing the war,27 his memories of them would permeate the new suite he began to compose in English when he was a prisoner in the DTC. A representative example of the difference these archival discoveries have made to our reading of the Pisan Cantos may suggest a larger story.28 Prominent among the abandoned Italian drafts written in solidarity with elements of Fascist resistance during the last months of the war is a two-page typescript devoted to Caterina Sforza.29 Readers of Machiavelli will remember that Sforza, the natural daughter of Duke Galeazzo Sforza of Milan, at the age of fifteen married Girolamo Riario, the decadent nephew of Pope Sixtus IV and subsequently captain general of the papal forces in the Romagna. The couple then ruled a papal foothold in the Romagna that combined the cities of Imola and Forlì. A passage in Machiavelli’s Discourses concerns the catastrophic consequences of conspiring against a powerful governor. In Book 3, Chapter 6 of that work, Machiavelli recalls a moment in the history of Forlì in 1488, when (I give it in the 1675 translation of Henry Neville) some conspirators from Furli killed the Count Girolamo, their Lord, and took his wife and children, who were little. [Then] it appeared to them they could not live securely unless they had also made themselves lords of the [town’s] fortress. But as the castellan did not want to give it up to them, Madonna Caterina (as the Countess was called) promised the conspirators that, if they allowed her to enter it, she would have it consigned to them, and that they might retain her children with them as hostages. Under this pledge, these men allowed her to enter, but she, as soon as she was inside the walls, reproached them for the death of her husband, and threatened them with every kind of vengeance. And to show that she did not care for her children, she showed them her genital member, saying that she had the means of making more. Thus [the] conspirators, short of counsel and having too late seen their error, suffered the penalty of their too little prudence by a perpetual exile.30

This tale, retold with verve in Pound’s wartime draft where it is surrounded by similarly ferocious fragments of Sforza’s history, is reduced in

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:12, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.004

46

ronald bush

Canto LXXVI to an almost illegibly brief recall, a fleeting vision of a bloodless victim identified only as ‘she who said: I still have the mould’ (C 472). In Canto LXXVI, it is a phrase sufficient to both assert and disguise Pound’s defiance in the face of his own imprisonment – his resolution to carry on, come what may, in a desperate situation. But the disguised vehemence of the tag suppresses not only shared determination, but also a crucial Italian context of 1944. Forlì, located in Mussolini’s native Romagna, was a major Fascist bastion whose capture cost the Allies dearly in fighting along the so-called Gothic Line from Florence to Rimini and Ravenna and lastly Forlì in the closing months of 1944. The city fell on 13 November.31 Shortly afterwards, however, in Europe above the Alps the Battle of the Bulge began on 16 December, allowing a last desperate hope in Fascist Italy that the Allied invasion of Europe could be turned back. In the midst of these developments, Mussolini’s Ministry of Popular Culture launched a campaign to win back ordinary Italians to Fascism by fuelling anger against the way that Italy’s cultural patrimony was being destroyed by terrorist Allied bombing.32 The lineaments of this dramatic moment can be found in contemporary issues of the Corriere della sera, the last major Italian newspaper still under Fascist control, and the source of much of the heat of Pound’s composition. That winter, the Corriere ran a propaganda series entitled ‘Sangue Italiano’, meant to play up the heroism of average citizens acting in tandem with Fascist Black Brigades. On 1 October, the series had carried an article about ‘L’eroina di Rimini’ (the heroine of Rimini) that, as Lawrence Rainey has shown, Pound mined for the story in Canto LXXIII of the girl who led Canadian troops into a minefield near Rimini and became a type of Italian courage.33 The Corriere report about Forlì was run on Monday 20 November and also highlighted the courage of Fascist women, noting that in Forlì ‘Molte donne del popolo’ aided irregular snipers and for a full day blocked the entrance of Allied troops into the city. The article leaves it unclear whether the women were snipers themselves or whether they simply made it more difficult for the Allies to kill the riflemen beside them. It is also unclear about whether the women appeared on the city walls. It was vehement, though, about the way that these obscure heroines, like others in Florence, rallied the honour and dignity of the city and boosted ‘la fede della Patria’. The article was in all likelihood, as Rainey claims about the Rimini story, a fiction. The events were reported on 3 December 1944 by Il Secolo Dicianovesimo of Genova, but mentioned no women.34 Yet, however accurate, the Corriere’s account fired Pound’s imagination, which linked

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:12, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.004

Ezra Pound’s Pisan Cantos

47

the bravery of the Fascist women to that of Caterina Sforza on the walls of the city five hundred years before. Just as Malatesta, lord of Rimini, gives historical resonance in Pound’s Italian drafts to the Axis defenders of Malatesta’s home city, so Caterina Sforza, the great Renaissance virago, epitomizes the spirit of her heroic descendants at Forlì’s gates. The relevance of the 1945 unpublished Italian draft cantos in Pound’s archives, then, seems as straightforward as it is significant: not only does the Caterina Sforza draft allow us to see significant unspoken associations in the Pisan Cantos, it would appear to align Pound’s combativeness with expressions of Fascist defiance during the last days of the war. Recalling the caveats that began this essay, though, some caution is in order, both in how we read the Italian drafts and in the way Pound cannibalized them in the DTC. Regarding the first, we should note that even the unpublished Caterina Sforza tableau is punctuated by an insistent self-questioning. Echoing the ghost of Marinetti’s demand in Canto LXXII for Pound to lend him his body to continue the Fascist struggle, Pound’s Caterina demands of her poet-interlocutor why he has not fully committed himself to in the struggle and taunts him with the question, ‘Perché non porti le arm[i] [?]’ (Why do you not bear arms?). Both Sforza and Marinetti before her thus confront Pound with his own divided Italo-American allegiance by insistently calling for him to choose between them, and it is through the resulting drama that Pound works through the implications of his situation as a stranded American expatriate in the Italian winter of 1944–5. Pound’s appropriation of the figure of Caterina Sforza in the Pisan Cantos is perhaps more equivocal still. By the time Canto LXXVI was composed in the DTC, the war in Europe was over and Pound’s channelling of the defiant chords of Mussolini’s last exhortations had morphed into a combination of guarded personal resentment, deep melancholy, and an unspoken identification with women and exiles. Along with defiance, there is thus a wistfulness and vulnerability attached to the muted (re) appearance of ‘she who said: I still have the mould’, which speaks of an implied link in Pound’s mind between the suffering of a woman finally dragged, Cassandra-like, to imprisonment in Rome and the reproductive power figured in Canto LXXIV’s characterization of the way poetic images are ‘be formed in the mind’ and ‘to remain there, resurgent EIKONEΣ’ (C 466). In its transposition, that is, the mask of Caterina now reminds us that, despite her show of strength and bluster, her fascination depended ultimately on her gender. (Not many women would have had the steel to say ‘I still have the mould’ of course, which was the point of Machiavelli’s story. But on the other hand, no man could.)

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:12, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.004

48

ronald bush

These qualifications about the interpretive usefulness of archival material, however, are not intended to negate the archive’s value, but rather to reinflect it. Our knowledge of recently accessible texts like the pre-Pisan drafts, even though it fails to produce a transparent ‘meaning’ of the finished suite of the kind that Bob Perelman hypothesized, nevertheless substantially increases our awareness of the internal tensions that shaped the work as it evolved from notes to Italian drafts to English composition and from the context of wartime Italian Fascism to that of Pound’s post-war reassessment. These tensions persist in the Pisan Cantos themselves, and while the archive cannot help us resolve them, it does allow us to see them more clearly. One can argue, of course, that in so doing we do not so much read the suite itself as contemplate its conflicted evolution. But if Kindellan is correct, that is not just all that Pound permits; it is also what he implicitly requires in his vision of poems ceaselessly drawn out of their author towards a perfection that neither the limitations of communication nor the inevitable accidents of publication can effect. Nowhere is all this more apparent than on the textual level, where we encounter the impossibility of constructing a corrected text out of Pound’s endlessly dissatisfied drafts. No documents in the scholarly reinterpretation of the Pisan Cantos archive are more important than the belatedly acquired manuscripts on which the suite was inscribed. Here, at the coalface of scholarship, so to speak, we can begin to understand both the possibilities and the limitations of reading Pound’s work. For Pound’s notebook manuscript and revised typescript show beyond question that current and previous editions of the Pisan Cantos now need serious rethinking.35 All published versions of the Pisan Cantos descend from the 1948 New Directions text, which manuscript evidence shows was based on an incomplete set of Pound’s typescripts and was prepared by editors who, through misunderstandings and a lack of resources, never fully succeeded in translating Pound’s explicit and implied editorial instructions into print. All editions of the Pisan Cantos, for example, have only partially executed Pound’s typescript instructions for the insertion of Greek and have omitted more than fifty sets of Chinese characters that he directed his editors to include.36 As serious, during the editorial process, several thousand corruptions of Pound’s typescript were introduced into the text, of which more than five hundred survived into the poem’s first American and British publications.37 These corruptions are hardly surprising, of course, given the extreme conditions under which the Pisan Cantos were written and transmitted. Pound

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:12, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.004

Ezra Pound’s Pisan Cantos

49

composed the manuscript notebook of the poem in the residual throes of a mental breakdown and then when he was nearly finished hastily typed and revised it in the middle of the night in the DTC’s medical dispensary, using damaged and unfamiliar typewriters and lacking books to check his quotes. After that, his well-intentioned attempts to convert his messy typescripts into a clear setting copy for his publishers were thwarted by prohibitions associated with his imprisonment (censorship, fear of the legal consequences of miscalculated frankness and restrictions on the number of pages he was allowed to send out of the DTC), which prevented many of the triplicate leaves of his typescript (including a number containing unique revisions) from reaching the New Directions office in New York. Ultimately, Laughlin and Pound decided to make a new in-house typescript out of the incomplete set of leaves he still retained (all the pages were represented), causing much information to be lost and inevitably introducing a host of corruptions into the text. And although Pound was permitted to proof the new typescript himself, his continued incarceration in the United States meant in effect that he was denied access to his original papers at every new stage of the editorial process. The history of the suite’s publication thus corresponds to an extreme case of an author forced to delegate responsibility for editorial decisions he would normally have been able to oversee himself. The inconsistency generated by the difficult circumstances of the Pisan Cantos’ composition and transmission did not long go unnoticed. Starting in the 1960s, readers began to sense that there were questionable passages in the suite, but lacking access to Pound’s manuscripts, they were forced to resort to ad seriatim correction. It was then that with Pound’s sometimes encouragement James Laughlin, Hugh Kenner, Eva Hesse and an impressive squad of Pound scholars attempted to assemble a ‘corrections file’. (Pound, responding to a letter from Achilles Fang, even spoke of the need to ‘keep textual corrections in order for [a future] utopian vol’ of The Cantos.38) However, when Kenner and Laughlin pressed Pound in Italy on different occasions about how to proceed, he remained vague, and they went home disappointed. Ultimately and inevitably, the project disintegrated into confusion. Kenner, who was misled by the slightly more conscientious correction of names in the early Faber and Faber editions of the Pisan Cantos, suggested in a ‘proposed procedure for establishing the text of The Cantos’39 to take the Faber text as the basis for a new edition. His proposal, however, failed to realize that the most serious textual deficiencies stemmed from Pound’s imprisonment and were shared by both the New Directions and the Faber editions. Just as seriously, a large gap between Kenner’s and Hesse’s view of

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:12, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.004

50

ronald bush

what constituted appropriate corrections to The Cantos made it clear that very meaning of ‘correction’ in a work like The Cantos is deeply unstable, rooted in a plaintive but misguided hope that the author might remember the intentions behind something he wrote long ago. Kenner confessed as much to Laughlin,40 who finally decided not to sanction further ‘corrections’ to the text, with the result that the text of the Pisan Cantos has remained more or less stable since 1974. There was, however, an alternative to the ‘corrections file’ approach, at least as far as the Pisan Cantos were concerned. As Fredson Bowers noted when Kenner asked him for advice about his ‘proposed procedure’ in 1963, the most appropriate way to establish a new text of the poem was to go back to ‘the author’s typescripts [and use them as] copy-text’.41 In 1963, however, as the annotated document acknowledges, many of the Pisan typescripts were available only at Pound’s daughter’s mountain aerie at Brunnenburg and would need to be ‘microfilmed so that they [could] be consulted when needed’. Because of the considerable inconvenience of this, Kenner disregarded Bowers’ advice and held to what initially seemed like a pragmatic alternative, but ultimately proved a mirage: to ‘collate’ the New Directions and Faber editions of The Cantos and to run a ‘usual check on foreign languages, proper names, etc.’. It was only in the late 1990s when Pound’s materials had been collected into American rare book libraries that it became possible to construct a critical edition along the lines anticipated by Bowers, based on the manuscript notebook and authorial typescripts that were either unavailable to or discounted by New Directions as it prepared the poem for publication between 1945 and 1948. But by then it had become clear that something more – a genetic component – would be required, because, among other things, the conflicting revisions on different leaves of Pound’s typescript pages ensured that a traditional corrected text could never be achieved. This is not to say, however, that certain kinds of corrections were not only possible but necessary. Our new critical edition of the Pisan Cantos can and will correct all corruptions introduced by Pound’s editors into his text and for the first time will execute Pound’s instructions – especially as to missing Chinese characters and the placement of Chinese and Greek characters – that New Directions misunderstood or was unable to perform when the poem was first published. Unlike the kinds of correction that troubled Kenner and Laughlin, an edition limiting itself to these changes makes possible a text that addresses the

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:12, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.004

Ezra Pound’s Pisan Cantos

51

uncommon but not unheard-of situation described by the textual theorist Peter Shillingsburg: [I]t would appear that the editor is faced [in such cases] with choosing to represent what the author did (the manuscript) or what the publisher did (the printed work). But in many cases the former is not what the author wished to see in print, and the latter is not what the author did – and perhaps it is not what he wished, either. For, in fact, it often happens that what the author did was to leave certain things for the publisher to do for him and what the publisher did was to do that and more besides. The editor has a third choice: to edit a text that does for the author what he expected to have done for him but avoids the extraneous alterations imposed by a publisher in his normal but misguided undertaking of the editorial process.42

Shillingsburg, however, still has in mind as the end of such efforts a corrected text that renders further reference to the manuscripts unnecessary. In the case of the Pisan Cantos, such an ambition becomes quixotic – for, even when conflicting variants are indicated in a full textual apparatus, the possibility of an authoritative corrected text remains out of reach. The focus of the new edition, therefore, lies not on a new clean text or (as Michael Kindellan advocates) a full variorum text, but on a full display of every revision from the manuscript notebook to the published text, with emphasis on ‘not just what but how an author wrote’.43 Towards this end, the edition will also include an introductory volume that will excavate the genesis of the sequence, first from an edited version of Pound’s wartime drafts in Italian and then from facing-page transcripts of Pound’s manuscript notebook and first typescript texts. By these means, the editors hope to present a serious account of the dialectic and shifting processes that ground Pound’s always/never to be completed text. As Marilyn Deegan and Katheryn Sutherland have written, ‘Working manuscripts contain vital clues to how authors worked and writings evolved – clues that the reproduction processes of print regularly erase’.44

Notes 1. Bob Perelman, ‘Pound’s Legibility Today: Pedagogy And / Or Imitation’, in Ezra Pound and Referentiality, ed. Hélène Aji (Paris: Presses de L’Université de Paris-Sorbonne, 2003), 33. 2. Noel Stock, Reading the Cantos: A Study of Meaning in Ezra Pound (New York: Minerva Press, 1968), 104, 101. 3. Stock, Reading the Cantos, 97, 103.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:12, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.004

52 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

17. 18.

19.

ronald bush Stock, Reading the Cantos, 102–3. Stock, Reading the Cantos, 105, 106, 114. Perelman, ‘Pound’s Legibility Today’, 33. Bernstein’s account occurs in the essay ‘Pounding Fascism’. See his A Poetics (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), 121–41. Perelman, ‘Pound’s Legibility Today’, 39. Perelman, ‘Pound’s Legibility Today’, 41. Michael Kindellan, The Late Cantos of Ezra Pound: Composition, Revision, Publication (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 243. Ezra Pound, ‘Totalitarian Scholarship and the New Paideuma’, Germany and You, ed. Douglas Fox, 4/5 (April 1937), 95–6, 123–4. Kindellan, Late Cantos, 47, 242. Kindellan, Late Cantos, 240. Donald C. Gallup, ‘The Ezra Pound Archive 1947–1987’, in Pigeons on the Granite: Memories of a Yale Librarian (New Haven: The Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University, 1988), 191–210. Gallup, ‘The Ezra Pound Archive 1947–1987’, 204–7. Gallup, 208. These had been turned over to Mary, who after 1973 placed them in a locked filing cabinet at the Beinecke. They were acquired by Yale only in 1981. The Rachewiltz Trust materials also included valuable letters from Joyce, Eliot and others, which were in 1983 acquired by Yale in a separate transaction. Gallup, 202. See, for example, Ezra Pound, Idee fondamentali. ‘Meridiano di Roma’ 1939–1943, edited by Caterina Ricciardi (Roma: Lucarini, 1991), and Ezra Pound, Carte italiane 1930–1944, cura di Luca Cesari (Milano: Archinto, 2005). Pound’s collection of these articles, Orientamenti, was pulped during the war, but was eventually republished in 1978 (Vibo Valentia: Grafica Meridionale) and in 2014 was the subject of a searching essay by Peter Nicholls, ‘Ezra Pound’s Lost Book: Orientamenti’, Modernist Cultures 9.2 (2014), 139–57. For the history of the two cantos’ publication until the mid-nineties, see Richard Taylor, ‘Towards a Textual Biography of The Cantos’, in Modernist Writers and the Marketplace, ed. Warren Chernak, Warwick Gould and Ian Willison (London: Macmillan, 1996), 233–57, esp. 225–30. Briefly, private editions of the two cantos were published for copyright purposes in Washington and Toronto in 1973 and in Milan in 1983. Cantos LXXII and LXXIII then appeared in Mary de Rachewiltz’s Mondadori edition in 1985 and were placed at the end of the 1986 New Directions tenth printing of The Cantos in 1986. When a combined New Directions / Faber edition of the poem was published in 1989 (the eleventh New Directions printing), the cantos were inserted in their proper chronological place. (Subsequent to Taylor’s essay, a translation of Canto LXXII was discovered among Olga Rudge’s papers. This translation, after separate publication in the fall 1993 issue of The Paris Review, was inserted immediately following the Italian original in the New Directions 1995 thirteenth printing of The Cantos.)

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:12, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.004

Ezra Pound’s Pisan Cantos

53

20. See Laurence Rainey, Ezra Pound and the Monument of Culture (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1991), and Tim Redman, Ezra Pound and Italian Fascism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). 21. These connections were first emphasized in Massimo Bagicalupo’s The Forméd Trace: The Later Poetry of Ezra Pound (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980) and have progressively loomed larger in more recent scholarship. See especially Matthew Feldman, Ezra Pound’s Fascist Propaganda (London: Palgrave, 2013). 22. See Ronald Bush, ‘Pisa’, in Ezra Pound in Context, ed. Ira Nadel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 261–73. 23. Pound explained to Charles Olson in conversations that took place immediately after Pound’s forced return from Pisa to Washington, D.C., that Pound was ‘excited at having rediscovered a Dante method. He especially mentioned the use of a ghost to speak’. See Catherine Seelye, ed., Charles Olson & Ezra Pound: An Encounter at St. Elizabeths (New York: Viking, 1975), 69. 24. See Ronald Bush, ‘“The Descent of the Barbarians”: The Pisan Cantos and Cultural Memory’, Modernism/Modernity 14.1 (January 2007), 71–95. 25. For provisional readings of the unpublished Italian Cantos LXXIV and LXXV, see Massimo Bacigalupo, ‘Ezra Pound’s Cantos 72 and 73: An Annotated Translation’, Paideuma 20 (1991), 11–41, and Ronald Bush, ‘“Quiet, Not Scornful”?: The Composition of the Pisan Cantos’, in A Poem Including History: The Cantos of Ezra Pound, ed. Lawrence Rainey (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), 169–212. 26. See Ronald Bush, ‘Quiet, Not Scornful?’, 169–212, and ‘Towards Pisa: More from the Archives about Pound’s Italian Cantos’, Agenda 34 (1996/97), 89–124. 27. Pound’s letter to his daughter Mary conveying in April 1945 his decision not to go on with the Italian suite is cited in Mary’s translation of the Cantos, I Cantos, a cura di Mary de Rachewiltz (Milan: Mondadori, 1985), 1566. 28. See also Ronald Bush, ‘Towards Pisa’. 29. A fuller version of this argument can be found in Ronald Bush, ‘The Expatriate in Extremis: Caterina Sforza, Fascism, and Ezra Pound’s Pisan Cantos’, Revista di Letteratura d’America, 25 (2005), 27–43. The Beinecke Library provenance of the Italian Caterina typescript referred to here is YCAL MSS 53 Box 29, Folder 627. 30. See Ernst Breisach, Caterina Sforza: A Renaissance Virago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), 103. Breisach gives Guicciardini as an additional source (she ‘lifted her skirt and exclaimed defiantly, “Don’t you think, you fools, that I have the stuff to make others?”’). Some of Pound’s knowledge about Caterina also came from G. F. Young, The Medici (1909). See the two-volume London John Murray edition of 1930, esp. II. 180–212. 31. For a full account of the battles of Rimini, Forlì and Ravenna, see Amadeo Mantemaggi, Linea Gotica 1944 (Museo dell’Aviazione: Rimini, 2002), 200ff, 280ff, 292ff.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:12, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.004

54

ronald bush

32. See Rainey, Ezra Pound and the Monument of Culture, 212. 33. Rainey, Ezra Pound and the Monument of Culture, 215–17. 34. On the actualities of the occasion and the propaganda on both sides, see Montemaggi, 281–3. First reports suggested that the British entry into the town was greeted with acclaim and jubilation. The Italian sources record that they were greeted with coldness and hostility, but not by the active resistance recorded by ‘la propaganda fascista’ found in the Corriere. On the other hand, Hitler, incensed by the prospect of the quick fall of ‘la città della giovinezza del Duce’, gave orders for increased resistance, and hence ‘quei cinque gionei’ became ‘un regalo di Hitler alla propaganda fascista che può esaltare la resistenza dei forlivesi alle truppe alleate’. The only instance of the Italians fighting the British took place on the Ravaldino canal, close to Caterina’s fortress (Montemaggi, 283). 35. For a fuller description of this effort, see Ronald Bush and David Ten Eyck, ‘A Critical Edition of Ezra Pound’s Pisan Cantos: Problems and Solutions’, Textual Cultures 8.2 (fall 2013), 121–41. 36. See Ronald Bush, ‘Confucius Erased: The Missing Ideograms in The Pisan Cantos’, in Ezra Pound and China, ed. Zhaoming Qian (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003), 163–92. 37. The American and British texts of the Pisan Cantos, published by New Directions (1948) and Faber and Faber (1949), are similar but not identical. Faber and Faber worked from the New Directions page proofs, but made further changes based on last-minute authorial emendations, strict British libel laws, and in-house correction of Pound’s English and foreign language spelling. 38. Letter of 13 August 1953, Achilles Fang Papers, YCAL MSS 99, Box 2, Folder 24, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. 39. Kenner’s ‘proposed procedure’ is dated 15 December 1963 and is now held at the Houghton Library at Harvard together with the rest of the New Directions ‘corrections file’ (New Directions Collection, 2921a, Folder 3, Houghton Library, Harvard University). 40. In a letter of 24 June 1974, Kenner synthesized this point for Laughlin, admonishing him about ‘corrections’ that had been introduced into the text without record of their source and advising: ‘New Directions is Keeper of the Tablets, and I think has an obligation to keep them unvarying, except when it can be persuasively argued that a purely printing error is being rectified: in which case the file ought to show clearly who ordered the change, and on what grounds. It’s too late now to regret the difficulty of locating the changes that occurred during Ezra’s lifetime, and of deciding which of them originated with him, but at least from here on in the text should cease to wobble’. Laughlin’s response, on 9 July, records the end of New Directions’ efforts to ‘correct’ the text of The Cantos: ‘I can’t begin to tell you how pleased I was to receive your recommendation that we should stop making corrections in the “Cantos”. I agree with you that the situation has gotten out of hand, probably my fault, but since Ezra would never give me . . . guidance on it, I just did my

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:12, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.004

Ezra Pound’s Pisan Cantos

41. 42. 43. 44.

55

best, and think I only managed to make confusion’ (New Directions Collection, 2921a, Folder 9). Bowers’ marginal comments were inscribed on a copy of Kenner’s proposal dated 15 December 1963 (New Directions Collection, 2921a, Folder 3). Peter L. Shillingsburg, Scholarly Editing in the Computer Age: Theory and Practice, 3rd ed. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), 56. Kindellan, 230ff, 47. Marilyn Deegan and Katheryn Sutherland, ‘Introduction’ to Text Editing, Print, and the Digital World (Oxford: Routledge, 2009), 8. Cited in Kindellan, 47. W OR KS CI T ED

Bacigalupo, Massimo, ‘Ezra Pound’s Cantos 72 and 73: An Annotated Translation’, Paideuma 20 (1991), 11–41. The Forméd Trace: The Later Poetry of Ezra Pound (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980). Bernstein, Charles, ‘Pounding Fascism’, in A Poetics, 121–41 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992). Breisach, Ernst, Caterina Sforza: A Renaissance Virago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967). Bush, Ronald, ‘Confucius Erased: The Missing Ideograms in The Pisan Cantos’, in Ezra Pound and China, ed. Zhaoming Qian, 163–92 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003). ‘“The Descent of the Barbarians”: The Pisan Cantos and Cultural Memory’, Modernism/Modernity 14.1 (January 2007), 71–95. ‘The Expatriate in Extremis: Caterina Sforza, Fascism, and Ezra Pound’s Pisan Cantos’, Revista di Letteratura d’America, 25 (2005), 27–43. ‘Pisa’, in Ezra Pound in Context, ed. Ira Nadel, 261–73 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). ‘“Quiet, Not Scornful”?: The Composition of the Pisan Cantos’, in A Poem Including History: The Cantos of Ezra Pound, ed. Lawrence Rainey, 169–212 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996). ‘Towards Pisa: More from the Archives about Pound’s Italian Cantos’, Agenda 34 (1996/97), 89–124. Bush, Ronald, and David Ten Eyck, ‘A Critical Edition of Ezra Pound’s Pisan Cantos: Problems and Solutions’, Textual Cultures 8.2 (Fall 2013), 121–41. Deegan, Marilyn, and Katheryn Sutherland, ‘Introduction’, in Text Editing, Print, and the Digital World, ed. Marilyn Deegan and Katheryn Sutherland, 1–9 (Oxford: Routledge, 2009). Feldman, Matthew, Ezra Pound’s Fascist Propaganda (London: Palgrave, 2013). Gallup, Donald C., ‘The Ezra Pound Archive 1947–1987’, in Pigeons on the Granite: Memories of a Yale Librarian, 191–210 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988).

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:12, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.004

56

ronald bush

Kenner, Hugh, Letter to James Laughlin, 24 June 1974, New Directions Collection, 2921a, Folder 9, Houghton Library, Harvard University. Kenner, Hugh, ‘Proposed Procedure’, 15 December 1963, New Directions Collection, 2921a, Folder 3, Houghton Library, Harvard University. Kindellan, Michael, The Late Cantos of Ezra Pound: Composition, Revision, Publication (London: Bloomsbury, 2017). Mantemaggi, Amadeo, Linea Gotica 1944 (Museo dell’Aviazione: Rimini, 2002). Nicholls, Peter, ‘Ezra Pound’s Lost Book: Orientamenti’, Modernist Cultures 9.2 (2014), 139–57. Perelman, Bob, ‘Pound’s Legibility Today: Pedagogy and/or Imitation’, in Ezra Pound and Referentiality, ed. Hélène Aji, 31–41 (Paris: Presses de L’Université de Paris-Sorbonne, 2003). Pound, Ezra, I Cantos, a cura di Mary de Rachewiltz (Milan: Mondadori, 1985). Carte italiane 1930–1944, cura di Luca Cesari (Milano: Archinto, 2005). Caterina Sforza typescript (Italian), YCAL MSS 53 Box 29, Folder 627, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. Idee fondamentali. «Meridiano di Roma» 1939–1943, cura di Caterina Ricciardi (Roma: Lucarini, 1991). Letter of 13 August 1953, Achilles Fang Papers, YCAL MSS 99, Box 2, Folder 24, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. Orientamenti (Vibo Valentia: Grafica Meridionale, 1978). ‘Totalitarian Scholarship and the New Paideuma’, Germany and You, ed. Douglas Fox, 4/5 (April 1937), 95–6, 123–4. Rainey, Laurence, Ezra Pound and the Monument of Culture (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1991). Redman, Tim, Ezra Pound and Italian Fascism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). Seelye, Catherine, ed., Charles Olson and Ezra Pound: An Encounter at St. Elizabeths (New York: Viking, 1975). Shillingsburg, Peter L., Scholarly Editing in the Computer Age: Theory and Practice, 3rd ed. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996). Stock, Noel, Reading the Cantos: A Study of Meaning in Ezra Pound (New York: Minerva Press, 1968). Taylor, Richard, ‘Towards a Textual Biography of The Cantos’, in Modernist Writers and the Marketplace, ed. Warren Chernak, Warwick Gould and Ian Willison, 223–57 (London: Macmillan, 1996). Young, G. F., The Medici, 2 vols. (1909; London: John Murray, 1930).

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:12, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.004

chapter 4

‘Scoured and Cleansed’ Ezra Pound and Musical Composition Josh Epstein

Le Testament is the opera of mankind, with all the prose left out. Daniel Albright, Untwisting the Serpent*

What does an ‘opera of mankind’ sound like? It depends on what mankind sounds like, and what sounds the ‘prose’ prevents us from hearing. For Francois Villon, on whom Pound based his first opera, it sounded like the brothel, the street, the tavern, the sounds of ‘theft, murder, whoring, and praying’ and the rhythms of everyday language.1 It is of no small importance that Pound’s primary musical curator is R. Murray Schafer, the Canadian composer who edited Ezra Pound and Music (1977), and who helped Pound prepare Le Testament for a revival radio performance. In The Soundscape (1993), Schafer reads many of the sounds in Pound’s Cantos – the sea, the woodcutter and the machine. In establishing a new culturalscientific-aesthetic ‘interdiscipline’ of soundscape design, Schafer perceived that Pound, for whom all disciplines were interdisciplines, exemplified this tendency in poetry.2 Pound’s Le Testament (live, 1926; radio, 1931), his ‘orrorreorrio’ Cavalcanti (1933) and his settings of Catullus in Collis o Heliconii (1932) are puzzling to both eye and ear. As Robert Hughes and Margaret Fisher suggest, ‘[p]recise music notation was a quest corresponding to his search for “le mot juste” in poetry’;3 for all of Pound’s ‘erasures’, his scoring often appears hyper-rationalized to the point of irrationality, so fastidiously micromanaged as to be almost unperformable. At the same time, the musical effect is bracingly sparse, resembling the streamlined passages of Igor Stravinsky’s L’Histoire du soldat (1918) and Les Noces (1923). Pound was conscious of his musical milieu, including a cosmopolitan scene that also included George Antheil, Erik Satie and Jean Cocteau (whose name Pound sneaks into Le Testament in place of Villon’s Jean Cotard). It is an open question 57

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:12, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.005

58

josh epstein

to what extent Pound’s compositions predicted later musical trends.4 But his engagement with the acoustic environment predicts Schafer’s emphasis on how art digests its world. The imagist dictum to write poetry ‘in the sequence of a musical phrase’, and the complex rhythms of Le Testament that both resist and necessitate a metronome, all wind themselves back into a complex soundscape.5 Pound’s operas have been studied as efforts to put into practice his doctrines of the ‘Great Bass’ and ‘absolute rhythm’, and the obstreperous judgments of his New Age reviews. Albright reads Le Testament as a ‘neomedieval’ synthesis of word, music and image: the negative image of a total artwork that honours the ‘bumps and gnarls of speech’, bending traditional boundaries of musical genre and poetic meter.6 Brad Bucknell weaves Pound’s eccentric time signatures and unconventional voiceleadings into his political programs: as ever, Pound’s ‘refined technical practice seems to lead back to the world’.7 Pound’s musical writings therefore call for critical methodologies that treat music not just as a philological curiosity, but as an intervention into questions of labour, mediation and mechanical reproduction. Filled with the acoustic textures of war, gramophones, Bechsteins, ghostly voices and radios, Pound’s musical writing intervenes consciously into aural culture. Recent developments in cultural musicology and sound studies call attention to sounds as sites of ideological contention: we can hear Pound’s sounds as sensory phenomena, aesthetic media, and objects of technological and cultural discourse. For example, his radio broadcasts by definition produced acousmatic sound: one without a visual source. If the acousmêtre has a pedagogical root (Pythagoras used it to focus his students’ attention on the sounds of his voice), it informed the musique concrète of Pierre Schaffer and the soundscapes of Murray Schafer, and formed a node in ‘the tensile mesh of . . . life’ at those ‘point[s] where disparate auditory and cultural practices intersect’.8 This chapter, then, attempts to unpack some of the potential for cultural analysis of Pound’s musical writings, which often develop strong dialectical tensions. If Pound’s musical writings have been read primarily in the context of his poetic doctrines – the Great Bass, the paideuma, the ideogram and the dictum to write in the rhythms of a musical phrase rather than a metronome9 – Pound focused equally on the relationship between theory and praxis. Theorizing process itself as the ‘content’ of music, Pound’s compositions manifest evolving thinking about how the musical sound reverberates in the imprinted score and the crafted instrument, and how musical notation yields to contingencies of performance.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:12, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.005

‘Scoured and Cleansed’

59

In Canto LXXIV, Pound dilates on ‘the process’ as a material phenomenon: the wind is also of the process, sorella la luna Fear god and the stupidity of the populace but a precise definition transmitted thus Sigismundo

(C 445)

‘The process’ is an expression of multiple forces at once – the raw material of the image; the natural entropy of time’s passage; the cultural rituals of aristocratic patronage or of a Confucian order; the artistic pressures of ‘transmi[ssion]’ and ‘precise definition’. In this respect, Schafer is a perfect companion to Pound: soundscape art, seeking procedures for structuring the sounds latent in our material world, forces composers to find principles for reassembling those sounds.10 For Pound, music could be composed according to an objective relationship between pitch frequencies, harmonies and the temporal durations between them: ‘a sound of any pitch, or any combination of such sounds, may be followed by a sound of any other pitch, or any other combination of such sounds, providing the time interval between them is properly gauged’ (ATH 10). To integrate word and music, rhythm and rhyme, into poetry with a ‘selfjustifying organicism’,11 Pound wished to revive the motz el son tradition of Provençal troubadours, whose names were ubiquitous in Pound’s intellectual milieu (he often thought it unnecessary even to expound his citations of them).12 That milieu included the companions, collaborators and amanuenses who shaped his work. Agnes Bedford, an accomplished pianist and singer, collaborated with Pound on an arrangement of Five Troubadour Songs (1920) and aided in the scoring of Le Testament. Olga Rudge, for whom both Pound and Antheil wrote violin music, features as largely in Pound’s music as in every other aspect of his life; she and Gerhart Münch, who performed Mozart sonatas together in Rapallo, are praised in Guide to Kulchur for their execution and ‘sensibility’, particularly with respect to Baroque music (Pound and Rudge shared a passion for Vivaldi, well before he was a mass-culture fixity). Pound drafted his scores with the aid of George Antheil, the enfant terrible whose ‘machine-music’ pieces Ballet Mécanique (1924) and Mechanisms (1923) prompted infamous scandals in Paris.13 Antheil, who never met an avant-garde doctrine that he couldn’t leverage for his own promotion, inflamed Pound’s bristling ear for the materiality of sound and aided him in finding a ‘technic’.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:12, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.005

60

josh epstein

Rather than offering a coherent ‘program’, Pound’s Antheil and the Treatise on Harmony (1924) reads as a heightening of Pound’s musical contradictions: an embrace of neoclassical form and a Futurist worship of the machine, a manifesto-like burst of rhetorical energy and a headfirst plunge into musical arcana. Pound’s observations about notation – about the place of textuality in realizing sound – are particularly helpful for readers of his poetry, where music takes a concrete form. ‘The development of musical notation’, Pound writes, ‘has been exceedingly slow; . . . up to the year 1300 the written notes were not an exposition of the melody, they were a mnemonic device. A man who knew the tune or a man with a very fine ear for musical phrase could make use of them’ (ATH 45–6). The abstraction of music from the artist’s memory, Pound argued, stultified Western music: the harmonic rules of the common practice period evolved into the ‘diaphanous’ harmonies of Wagner and Debussy, which Pound considered symptoms of atrophy. Avoiding such ideals of harmony, ‘in which the tendency to lifelessness was inherent’ (ATH 19), Pound sought a tight structural relation between pitches and the ‘absolute rhythm’ of the phrase. Pound’s rhythms counterpoint the soundscape; as Edith Sitwell wrote, Hugh Selwyn Mauberley ‘is expressed in a variety of tuneless and broken rhythms, sometimes hesitating and dropping, sometimes hurrying aimlessly; and these convey the life of a figure moving adversely in a world where the natural rhythms of life have broken down’.14 In a 1927 essay for The New Masses, Pound gives rhythm particularly materialist traction, praising Antheil’s Ballet as an allegory for the factory: ‘the eight-hour day shall have its rhythm; so that the men at the machines shall not be demechanized, and work not like robots, but like the members of an orchestra’ (rpt. in ATH 138). If Pound interprets Antheil as an evolved rhythmic sensibility, he means these pre-classical ‘mathematical’ principles to rehabilitate a politics of unalienated labour, going all the way back to ‘the primitive man’ whose rituals Antheil could potentially reconstruct. (The primitivist rhetoric of Antheil’s writings for Nancy Cunard’s Negro Anthology [1934], including a batty essay entitled ‘The Negro on the Spiral’, is no doubt apposite.) Pound’s neoclassical aesthetic – evidenced by his praise of Rudge, Münch and the instrument-maker Arnold Dolmetsch – illuminates how he understood the cultural potential of his art. Having commissioned a Dolmetsch clavichord, Pound wrote about him enthusiastically in The New Age, defending his principles of economy, rhythmic rigor and ‘inner form’.15 Pound heard in Dolmetsch a historiographically aware

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:12, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.005

‘Scoured and Cleansed’

61

craftsman of music ‘untranslatable with modern instruments’,16 and a solution to the problems of free verse: a way of liberating poetry from metronomic bar lines while preserving the ‘absolute rhythm’. The homage to Dolmetsch (and composers Henry Lawes and John Jenkins) in the ‘Libretto’ of Canto LXXXI makes him a model of lyricism by which Pound can purge his ‘vanity’: Lawes and Jenkyns guard thy rest Dolmetsch ever be thy guest, Has he tempered the viol’s wood To enforce both the grave and the acute? Has he curved us the bowl of the lute?

(C 539–40)

As in Canto LXXIV (where Antheil and Villon make brief cameos on the cross) and Canto LXXV (where Münch and Janequin pull Pound out of the depths), the purging of excess in the melodic line, and in the instrument’s own shape, lead to the poet’s ritual catharsis. These organic purgations were impossible, Pound believed, on the piano. Pound loathed the ‘piano-intoxication of the nineteenth century’, associating it with a ‘Wognerized [sic]’ lack of rhythmic rigor in deference to ‘atmosphere’.17 And he distrusted the piano’s Pavlovian effects on the body of the trained pianist. A piano produces a note when the correct key is pressed, whereas a string instrument requires a live sense of intonation and timbre: [T]he very fact that one can play a keyboard instrument quite correctly without in the least knowing whether a given note is in tune or is correct in itself, tends to obscure the value of true pitch. This perception, the first requisite of any player upon strings is therefore left, perhaps, wholly unconsidered by the piano student. The piano tuner is responsible for all that. (ATH 71–72)

In light of the notorious ‘usura’ Canto XLV – ‘Stonecutter is kept from his stone / weaver is kept from his loom’ (C 229) – Pound’s shift of blame to the ‘piano tuner’ reads as an indictment of the division of labour, and his attack on the separation of harmony and rhythm reads as a critique of sensory alienation. The work of hearing has been divided against the work of the fingers, trained through repetitive motion. In turn, only the pianist could take any pleasure from such performance: the pleasure of playing a piano with orchestra as opposed to hearing a piano played with orchestra, is explicable on the grounds of exhilaration. . . . [H]e gets the same physical pleasure as he might from quick and clever use of the foils in a fencing bout; he has no attention left for auditory sensation. . . . But as the player receives this pleasure, he ought to pay the audience . . ., not they him.18

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:12, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.005

62

josh epstein

Pound’s attack on the piano inverts the reasoning of Walter Benjamin, for whom technologies of mechanical reproduction enabled political forms of art built on ‘shock’, which could stimulate the sensorium of a mechanically trained workforce. For Pound, neither performer nor audience could gain anything beyond ‘exhilaration’ with such music, unless it stimulated the performer’s entire body and intellect to recreate all elements of music – pitch, timbre and word – simultaneously. The reflexive training of the pianist, obscuring the ‘precise definition’ of form, was both cause and effect of modernity’s ‘wash’ of somatic intensity. Though the piano seemed to obvert Pound’s demands of cultural training, he did find an ambivalent place for the player-piano (thanks in part to Antheil, who employed sixteen of them in Ballet Mécanique). The pianola in Hugh Selwyn Mauberley is a symptom of cultural decadence, in an essay on Dolmetsch, one of indiscriminate noise: ‘Our ears are passive before the onslaught of gramophones and pianolas. By persuading ourselves that we do not hear two-thirds of their abominable grind, we persuade ourselves that we take pleasure in the remainder of what they narrate’.19 On the other hand, the pianola rendered transparent the mechanical nature of performance and made the pianola composer a craftsman: people ‘going in for sheer pianola’, Pound writes, ‘have the right spirit. They cut their rolls for the pianola itself, and make it play as with two dozen fingers when necessary’ (‘Dolmetsch’, 38). Could the pianola technology generate a patterned, anaphoric music (not unlike the typography of Blast) without instrumentalizing the performer’s body? Perhaps so, inasmuch as the pianola is a complex apparatus of writing and craft, which replaced the ‘dozen fingers’ only to enable participatory kinds of work. As Paul Saint-Amour writes: Although it used its pneumatic lungs to replicate the work of fingers . . . the pianola was dissevered neither from the voice nor from the mark: piano rolls were crisscrossed with multiple forms of writing unique to the medium, including the perforations that activated individual notes, inked tempo and dynamics instructions for the operator, and song lyrics for the benefit of singers. The pianola was proto-karaoke: not an acoustic capture of a single vocal performance for later listening but a spur to participatory singing.20

Thus the pianola isn’t just a modernized piano, but a reading of the piano that ‘materialize[s] the piano’s self-understanding as mechanism’ (20). The pianola’s ‘pneumatic’ physicality made it a suitable medium for the Ballet Mécanique, which orchestrated the energies of the factory without

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:12, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.005

‘Scoured and Cleansed’

63

reducing the workers to mere reflex, and a medium for laying bare music’s overdetermined textuality. With both Dolmetsch’s lute and Antheil’s pianola, Pound reimagines an unalienated process of musical labour: the timbre of the voice and the instrument’s mediation of bodily gesture could be made to resonate in real time. For Pound, as music evolved in bifurcated ways – towards archaic troubadour settings and Antheilesque machine music – it needed to recirculate back to musical sensations felt in the body. In a letter to Bedford, Pound recounts a hearing of Claude Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande (1902), an impressionist opera so lushly orchestrated that Pound swore to ‘tear up the whole bloomin’ era of harmony and do the thing if necessary on two tins and wash-board’ (GK 368). Pound’s slippage between orchestration and ‘harmony’ suggests that Debussy’s thick harmonies and the ‘mush’ of timbres both needed to be counteracted with melodic lines, spare and clean. (Pound tips his hat to Debussy’s settings of Villon, which he finds more robust.) Before composing the opera, Pound asked Bedford for an orchestration textbook, certain that ‘the damn thing wd. be wholly wrong’,21 but conceding that writing for real instruments required intimacy with what they could do. He settled on a tract by the Belgian composer Francois-Joseph Fétis, and Dolmetsch’s Interpretation of the Music of the XVIIth and XVIIIth Centuries (1915). Le Testament approaches the ambition of tins and washboard orchestration: its pared-down use of percussion, including the use of a ‘nose-flute’ to represent prostitutes advertising their wares, underscores the opera’s salacious themes and motivic rhythms, using only instruments that registered the physicality of Villon’s texts. In Cavalcanti, Pound allowed himself liberty to orchestrate more fully, but still wished to avoid obscuring the words – especially for radio, where instrumental nuances would not all be caught. The sounds of the body echo throughout the score. Hearing in Villon’s verse an alternative to the ‘mist and mashed potatoes in the French metric’ of fin-de-siècle concert chansons, Pound imagined the women’s parts sung in ‘the nasal tone of tough, open-air singing’ – adding, ‘If only Ethel Merman or Pinza would!’ (GK 368). Lotte Lenya might have been another option; Brecht’s and Weill’s Threepenny Opera draws heavily on Villon’s texts.22 The score of Heaulmière’s aria marks select passages as sibilant and rasped, alternates between instructions to ‘laugh’ and ‘cry’, and ends with a ‘clack of dry bones’ marking ‘the end of mortal beauty’. (Not everything is coming up roses.) In Pound’s final chorus of hanged men, Frères humains, the flesh, which has been ‘too much nourished’ with sex

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:12, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.005

64

josh epstein

and drink, is ‘scoured and cleansed’, ‘dried and blackened’ by wind and sun and accompanied by violins rumbling col legno (striking the strings with the wood of the bow; bar 93). With Villon’s choric pleas for heavenly absolution (‘Mais priez Dieu que tous nous vueille absouldre’), echoed in Canto LXXIV, the raspy acousmatic voice materializes the decaying vessel in which it resonates. It is hard to square the Antheil epigone with the Dolmetsch epigone, the pianola lover with the pianola hater, though Le Testament works to synthesize both sensibilities. Pound’s complex time signatures, resisting the bar line, reinforce the modernity and the deep tradition involved in music’s rhythmic drive. ‘The early students of harmony’, Pound wrote, ‘were so accustomed to thinking of music as something with a strong lateral or horizontal motion that they never imagined any one, ANY ONE, could be stupid enough to think of it as static. . . . They thought of music as travelling rhythm going through points or barriers of pitch and pitchcombinations’ (ATH 11). The troubadours offered Pound an ideal precedent, as walking metonyms for verbal rhythm ‘travelling’ through the resistant medium of pitches. Proudly archaic and fashionably neoclassical, Le Testament seeks, as Margaret Fisher writes, ‘to provoke his audience to heightened listening, which he believed would lead de facto to individual insight synonymous with self-edification’, building on the radio medium’s experiments with perception and pedagogy.23 In Cavalcanti, likewise, we hear a process of edification, as the eponymous poet teaches his pupil Ricco a ballad of exile, containing a cypher to those waiting in Tuscany (‘Perch’io non spero’). Instructing Ricco on how to enunciate his ‘Zs’ without buzzing, Cavalcanti insists that these sounds need be internalized, not abstracted: ‘You’ve not got to understand it; you’ve got to learn the damn thing’. Mind, body, tongue and teeth must be retrained to vocalize precise relationships among the sounds of words. As Cavalcanti joins with Ricco in the last phrase of the ballad, ‘Anima e tu l’adora sempre nel suo valore’ (His soul must adore the lady for her valor/value), the final ‘-e’ gives way to Cavalcanti’s death gasp. Cavalcanti’s final exhalation of breath coincides with Ricco’s sob of loyal shame (he confesses that he hasn’t learned the thing after all). If beauty is difficult, it should not cease to be so after it has been internalized: music should train performers not into unthinking repetition of pitches, but into ongoing tension with the material. This difficulty is felt deeply in Pound’s scores. Pound resisted the notation of measures, and his reviews scold conductors and pianists for their obsessive downbeats and palpable subdividing: ‘They have this

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:12, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.005

‘Scoured and Cleansed’

65

marvelous milimetric [sic] training; they can count the infinitesimal fractions of the time-inch . . .. But . . . [t]heir ability to count, their metronomic ability, has engulfed them, and they have become insensitive to shape’ (ATH 130–1). Yet if Pound resisted the metronomic machine as a tool of performance, it had its place as reading tool: a poet ought to ‘Get a metronome and learn HOW long the different syllables, and groups of them take’.24 To reproduce the rhythms of speech one must measure them, and then remake the measure from the inside. Pound anticipates those soundscape composers who found that, to make music from environmental sound, one must first quantify those sounds. Recall Pound’s fascination with L’Abbé Rousselot, whose phonetic study of dialect led him to invent a ‘phonoscope’, which inserted tubes into the nasal cavities to measure the durations and rhythms of words, and the bodily aspiration that went into producing them. Much as Antheil’s obsession with the pianola led to his co-invention, with one Hedy Lamarr, of a frequency-hopping device, Rousselot’s phonoscope generated new sonar technologies: ‘old Rousselot / . . . fished for sound in the Seine / and led to detectors’ (C 492). Dialect might be dialectical, and machines needn’t be mechanical. Like Pound’s Cavalcanti, Rousselot detected a cypher in the buzz of words: if the ear could detect the quantitative (temporal) and qualitative (timbral) dimensions of speech, music could transmit them through the mediated historicity of form. Returning to Pound’s comparison between the beat of a metronome and the ‘sequence of a musical phrase’, one might expect Pound’s resistance to the bar-line to have guided him into an archaic form without measures, meters or tempi. In Le Testament, Pound, Bedford and Antheil instead produced a score of alarming metronomic exactitude. An aria sung by Heaulmière, an elderly prostitute lamenting her aging body, features shifts from ‘5/8, 31/32 [?!], 4/8, 3/4, 5/8, 4/8, 4/8, 9/16, 15/32, 1/4, 9/8 containing a triplet, 7/8, 5/4, and two bars without any numbers on ’em, containing 7/ 16, and 1/2’. Performing this music, Pound half-joked, one could ‘tak[e] refuge in the comparative simplicity of Einstein’s hexagonal theorem of the indivisibility of abstract space by French mutton’.25 We have taken to an involuted extreme Pound’s principle that the ‘time interval’ between pitches must be ‘properly gauged’. In an addendum, Pound advised performers to put accents where the words demand them, rather than counting bar lines; he later revised the score into a consistent 5/8 meter. These two kinds of discipline and training in play – the microrhythmic training, the poet’s ear for the fluid arcs of phrasing – differently mediate the passage of time. If the ‘metronomic’ score distorts the phrase, the music enacted in performance will restore its shape. The exigencies of radio,

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:12, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.005

66

josh epstein

which distorted the Testament orchestrations, led Pound into further condensation: ‘the radio version IF it has to be altered will be simplified rather than amplified’.26 Notation serves both as a set of instructions for enacting script into sound, and as an inscription for posterity; a future reader, examining an inscribed score, could diachronically appreciate the relations of pitch and rhythm that may be too intricate to hear, let alone to perform, in real time. Pound’s precise quantitative notations seek both permanence (in the inscribed musical text) and interpretive elasticity (in the knowledge that these boundaries would yield to the process of performance). Musical notation functions as a ‘scoring’ in another sense of the term: a perforation of the textual world that opens it out onto the external soundscape. One might recollect Thomas Hardy’s ‘Darkling Thrush’: ‘The tangled bine-stems scored the sky / Like strings of broken lyres’;27 the material sounds of nature merge with the stringed instrument and, scraping the sky, transduce those sounds through air. Pound links scoring to the image of birds on wires in Canto LXXIX and LXXXII; and, in Canto LXXV, the memory of Le Chant des oiseaux (ca. 1528), a choral piece by Clément Janequin (re-scored for violin by Münch). As Pound gives these sounds the form of an image – ‘an intellectual and emotional complex’ presented ‘in an instant of time’28 – his musical scoring indexes a process of inscription, performance, and audition. In Canto LXXIX, after reflecting that the ‘imprint of the intaglio depends / in part on what is pressed under it’, Pound writes that ‘what matters [in discourse] is / to get it across e poi basta’ (C 506); he then observes several birds rearranging themselves on wires, which reminds him of the notational system of Guido d’Arezzo (C 507). These natural sounds imprint the principle of ‘discourse’ onto the ‘scored’ text of the poem; here, too, music manifests Pound’s conflicted attitudes towards mechanical reproducibility. If d’Arezzo’s notation system atrophied the musician’s memory, it also enabled new ways of ‘getting it across’. From d’Arezzo to the pianola, all musical notation is, in a sense, ‘proto-karaoke’. As the birds reconfigure their positions, Canto LXXXII inscribes their movement, transmitting natural process through the material media of text and air: f

f d g write the birds in their treble scale

(C 545)

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:12, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.005

‘Scoured and Cleansed’

67

Pound’s typography renders this notation spatially, but no two bird pitches align vertically: his emphasis on forward motion is maintained even in this image, presented ‘in an instant of time’. It reads as a downward arpeggio of a G-7 chord, but since the third (B or B-flat) is missing, its harmonic content is vague, epiphenomenal to how pitches follow one another in a ‘scale’. As Margaret Dunn observes, The Cantos put musical scores of birdsong into ‘counterpoint’ with birds made to resemble musical scores, culminating in ‘the essential union of poetry and music’ in Canto LXXV.29 Counterpoint is a fugal subject of The Cantos, though Pound avoided emphasizing it in Cavalcanti, fearing that it would ‘bitch the music’ by obscuring the melodic line.30 But ‘some minds take pleasure in counterpoint’ (C 505), which maps out music’s immanent complexities. For Theodor Adorno, counterpoint is especially dialectical – disallowing an uncritical absorption of harmony and constellating one’s relation to the musical tradition.31 Pound would have been sympathetic to this argument, but felt such complexity no less present in the single rhythmic line, ‘scoured and cleansed’ of harmonic excess. The contradictions of musical scoring, poetic textuality and performance are mediated by the physical sensation of sound. Pound’s depictions of birds somewhat resembles the early ‘cinema of attractions’, which, as Tom Gunning has shown, featured a ‘presentational’ aesthetic of playful astonishment in the new medium.32 (Footage of Antheil’s musical riots, in which Pound appears, had been prefabbed for Marcel L’Herbier’s film L’Inhumaine [1924].) The connection to film, though loose, helps situate music as an effect on the entire sensorium. In Le Mélomane (1903), a short ‘trick film’ by Georges Méliès, the director throws his own face onto a musical staff (Fig. 1), which he conducts with the help of several female assistants (holding placards of the pitches in solfège). Méliès’s technological sleight-of-hand celebrates the cinema’s capacity to compensate for lack of voice with multiple, redundant textual inscriptions. The musical score in Canto LXXV likewise presents music as a system of technological practices, underscoring the material stamp of inscription. Ellen Stauder compares the concrete object of the score in Canto LXXV to Adorno’s notion of the constellation – a refraction of the various processes that language reduces away.33 Janequin’s score, in Münch’s hand, offers a song ‘not of one bird, but of many’ – a line with not one but many resonances. It describes a chorus of birds pared into a clean melodic line; it acknowledges that Pound’s music is also Rudge’s, Bedford’s and Antheil’s; it hopes that The Cantos might disperse the poet’s voice and contribute to the making of culture tout court. If ‘the monument outlasts the bronze

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:12, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.005

68

josh epstein

Figure 1 From George Méliès, Le Mélomane (1903)

casting’ (ABCR 54), as Pound wrote of Münch’s Janequin reduction, the process by which ‘monuments’ are made can be unfolded with every new performance – if the work’s rhythms are true. Pound’s gestures to music use the material elements of musical language to turn inside-out its idealistic gestures, to re-inscribe musical tradition – and the transformative process of composition – as part of the sensible soundscape. His music works to reintegrate the sundered unities of verbal and musical rhythm, notational complexity and performative elasticity. He knew that these unities needed to be made rather than found, and that the ‘scouring and cleansing’ of form required a musical language patinated with the labour of a body extended and multiplied, like Méliès’ head, by the technologies of radio and telegraphy. Pound’s radiophonic voice – a sinister acousmêtre and a performance of multiple rhetorical personae34 – exposes the material consequences of his music. To discuss his music without reference to the acoustic modernity that generated it is to abstract musical sound as if it were immaterial. That is one error that Pound did not make, among the many that he did.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:12, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.005

‘Scoured and Cleansed’

69

Notes * I am grateful to Scott Klein for allowing me to read his work in advance of publication. I also wish to acknowledge my debts to the late Daniel Albright, a scholar of perdurable imagination. 1. Daniel Albright, Untwisting the Serpent: Modernism in Music, Literature, and Other Arts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 140. 2. R. Murray Schafer, The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of Our World (Rochester: Destiny Books, 1993). 3. Robert Hughes and Margaret Fisher, Cavalcanti: A Perspective on the Music of Ezra Pound (Emeryville: Second Evening Art, 2003), 44. Hereafter cited as Cavalcanti. 4. This question is explored in Scott Klein’s “Like coins out of circulation”: Reframing Ezra Pound’s Le Testament’, in The Edinburgh Companion to Ezra Pound and the Arts, ed. Roxana Preda (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019), 334–46. 5. Pound, Le Testament: ‘Paroles de Villon’, ed. Margaret Fisher and Robert Hughes (Emeryville: Second Evening Art, 2008). 6. Albright, Untwisting the Serpent, 146–7. 7. Brad Bucknell, Literary Modernism and Musical Aesthetics: Pater, Pound, Joyce, and Stein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 57. 8. Brian Kane, Sound Unseen: Acousmatic Sound in Theory and Practice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 226. 9. Pound, ‘A Retrospect’ (1918), rpt. in Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. T. S. Eliot (New York: New Directions, 1954), 3. 10. Sam Halliday, Sonic Modernity: Representing Sound in Literature, Culture and the Arts (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013), notes Pound’s fascination with the relationships among pitch, tempo and rhythm. 11. Bucknell, Literary Modernism, 57. 12. See Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), 75. 13. On Antheil’s embrace of these public scandals, see my Sublime Noise: Musical Culture and the Modernist Writer (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014). See also Emily Thompson’s discussion of Antheil and urban noise in The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America, 1900–1933 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004), 141ff. 14. Edith Sitwell, ‘Ezra Pound’, rpt. in An Examination of Ezra Pound, ed. Peter Russell (New York: Gordian, 1973), 45. 15. Rpt. in Ezra Pound and Music: The Complete Criticism, ed. R. Murray Schafer (New York: New Directions, 1977), 30–5. 16. Pound, ‘Arnold Dolmetsch’, The New Age (7 January 1915), rpt. in EPM, 35–40, 39. Hereafter cited as ‘Dolmetsch’. 17. See Pound’s review of a 1918 BBC Proms performance of Mozart, Beethoven and MacDowell, in The New Age (19 September 1918): 335. Rpt. in EPM, 124–6. 18. ‘The Pye-ano’, The New Age (1 January 1920): 144–5. Rpt. in EPM, 206.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:12, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.005

70 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34.

josh epstein Pound, ‘Arnold Dolmetsch’ (The Egoist, August 1917), pp. 104–5, rpt. in EPM 47. Paul Saint-Amour, ‘Ulysses Pianola’, PMLA 130.1 (2015), 17. Letter from Pound to Bedford, 5 May 1921, quoted in Cavalcanti, 16. On Le Testament and Threepenny Opera, see Albright, Untwisting, 139ff. Margaret Fisher, Ezra Pound’s Radio Operas: The BBC Experiments, 1931–1933 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 100. Fisher links Pound’s work to other experimenters in the medium (e.g., Brecht, Arnheim, Marinetti). Pound to Mary Barnard (2 December 1933), qtd. in A. David Moody, Ezra Pound, Poet, Vol. II: The Epic Years, 1921–1939, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 188. Qtd. in Cavalcanti, 30–1. Letter to Agnes Bedford (28 August 1932), qtd. in Cavalcanti, 57. Thomas Hardy, ‘The Darkling Thrush’ (1900), Selected Poems, ed. Robert Mezey (London: Penguin, 1998), 33–4, lines 3–4. Pound, ‘A Retrospect’, 9. Margaret Dunn, ‘Eine Kleine Wortmusik: The Marriage of Poetry and Music in the Pisan Cantos’, Perspectives on Contemporary Literature 13 (1987), 108. On the Cantos’ ‘fugal’ properties, and the limitations of this analogy, see Stephen J. Adams, ‘Are the Cantos a Fugue?’ University of Toronto Quarterly 45.1 (1975), 67–74. Theodor Adorno, ‘The Function of Counterpoint in New Music’, in Sound Figures (1959), trans. Rodney Livingstone (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 123–44. Tom Gunning, ‘The Cinema of Attraction: Early Film, its Spectator, and the Avant-Garde’, Wide Angle 8.3–4 (1986), 63–70. Ellen Keck Stauder, ‘“Without an Ear of His Own”: Pound’s Janequin in Canto 75’, Quaderni di Palazzo Serra 15 (2008), 257–77. On Pound’s radio personae in relation to ‘treason’, see Matthew Feldman’s excellent essay ‘Pound and Radio Treason: An Empirical Reassessment’, in Broadcasting in the Modernist Era, ed. Feldman, Henry Mead and Erik Tonning (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 213–44. W OR KS C I T ED

Adams, Stephen J., ‘Are the Cantos a Fugue?’ University of Toronto Quarterly 45.1 (1975), 67–74. Adorno, Theodor, ‘The Function of Counterpoint in New Music’, in Sound Figures, trans. Rodney Livingstone, 123–44 (1959; Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999). Albright, Daniel, Untwisting the Serpent: Modernism in Music, Literature, and Other Arts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). Bucknell, Brad, Literary Modernism and Musical Aesthetics: Pater, Pound, Joyce, and Stein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Dunn, Margaret, ‘Eine Kleine Wortmusik: The Marriage of Poetry and Music in the Pisan Cantos’, Perspectives on Contemporary Literature 13 (1987), 101–9.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:12, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.005

‘Scoured and Cleansed’

71

Epstein, Josh, Sublime Noise: Musical Culture and the Modernist Writer (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014). Feldman, Matthew, ‘Pound and Radio Treason: An Empirical Reassessment’, in Broadcasting in the Modernist Era, ed. Feldman, Henry Mead and Erik Tonning, 213–44 (London: Bloomsbury, 2015). Fisher, Margaret, Ezra Pound’s Radio Operas: The BBC Experiments, 1931–1933 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002). Gunning, Tom, ‘The Cinema of Attraction: Early Film, its Spectator, and the Avant-Garde’, Wide Angle 8.3–4 (1986), 63–70. Halliday, Sam, Sonic Modernity: Representing Sound in Literature, Culture and the Arts (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013). Hardy, Thomas ‘The Darkling Thrush’ (1900), in Selected Poems, ed. Robert Mezey, 33–4 (London: Penguin, 1998). Hughes, Robert, and Margaret Fisher, Cavalcanti: A Perspective on the Music of Ezra Pound (Emeryville: Second Evening Art, 2003). Kane, Brian, Sound Unseen: Acousmatic Sound in Theory and Practice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). Kenner, Hugh, The Pound Era (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973). Klein, Scott ‘“Like coins out of circulation”: Reframing Ezra Pound’s Le Testament’, in The Edinburgh Companion to Ezra Pound and the Arts, ed. Roxana Preda, 334–46 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019). Moody, A. David, Ezra Pound, Poet, Vol. II: The Epic Years, 1921–1939, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). Pound, Ezra, ABC of Reading (New York: New Directions, 1960). Antheil and the Treatise on Harmony (New York: Da Capo Press, 1968). Ezra Pound and Music: The Complete Criticism, ed. R. Murray Schafer (New York: New Directions, 1977). Guide to Kulchur (New York: New Directions, 1970). ‘A Retrospect’, in Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. T. S. Eliot, 3–14 (New York: New Directions, 1954). Le Testament: ‘Paroles de Villon’, ed. Margaret Fisher and Robert Hughes (Emeryville: Second Evening Art, 2008). Saint-Amour, Paul, ‘Ulysses Pianola’, PMLA 130.1 (2015), 15–36. Schafer, R. Murray, The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of Our World (Rochester: Destiny Books, 1993). Sitwell, Edith, ‘Ezra Pound’, in An Examination of Ezra Pound, ed. Peter Russell, 37–65 (New York: Gordian, 1973). Stauder, Ellen Keck, ‘“Without an Ear of His Own”: Pound’s Janequin in Canto 75’, Quaderni di Palazzo Serra 15 (2008), 257–77. Thompson, Emily, The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America, 1900–1933 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004).

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:12, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.005

chapter 5

The Visual Field Beyond Vorticism Rebecca Beasley

In the introduction to her recent study Reading Cy Twombly, Mary Jacobus sets her interpretation of the artist’s work against those of critics who read the names, titles and quotations in his paintings as, on the one hand, selfexpressive (‘sighs, expressions of pleasure or regret’), and on the other, directed towards the creation of a repository of cultural memory. ‘As opposed to a high-humanizing reading of Twombly’s art’, she writes, ‘I want to sidestep the debate in order to recover the specifically twentiethcentury avant-garde context for his practice of quotation and allusion – his anthology – by tracing its relation to American literary Modernism, and in particular, Ezra Pound’. Twombly briefly attended Black Mountain College, encountering Pound’s writings and ideas through Charles Olson, and Jacobus turns to Pound’s ABC of Reading (1934) as a particularly clarifying lens through which to read Twombly. Comparison with Pound’s treatise shows how Twombly’s art can also be read as a pedagogic programme, a series of translations and above all an anthology: Pound’s ABC of Reading defines poetry as condensation (Dichten = Condensare). Pound illustrates this principle with a brief history of disordered texts and compendia (Homer, the Bible, Noh plays) that have been improved over time by their editors, by emperors – and by their translators. The Twombly anthology privileges poetry’s diasporic movement. Poetic composition (dichten) equals displacement; art involves translation and travel, including time-travel.1

That ABC of Reading can be used as a tool to highlight ‘poetry’s diasporic movement’ in Twombly’s painting, triggering ‘displacement’, ‘translation’ and ‘travel’, encapsulates something of the changes in recent criticism about Pound and the visual field. Pound’s poetry has long been read in the context of the visual field. Knowledge of Pound’s interest in quattrocento sculpture and architecture, 72

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:11, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.006

The Visual Field

73

his involvement in Wyndham Lewis’s art movement vorticism and his admiration for the sculpture of Constantin Brancusi has encouraged many critics to look for influences and draw analogies. More significantly, during the second decade of the twentieth century, Pound developed a critical vocabulary deeply indebted to art criticism to describe his own work and that of his literary contemporaries. In a series of essays written over 1914 and 1915, Pound wrought a formalist vocabulary that drew its terminology from James McNeill Whistler’s The Gentle Art of Making Enemies (1890), Laurence Binyon’s The Flight of the Dragon (1911), the manifestos of the Italian Futurists and the vorticists, and the writings about post-impressionism by Clive Bell, Huntly Carter and Roger Fry.2 Pound added to this lexicon throughout his life, but it was the art and aesthetics of Lewis, Gaudier-Brzeska and Brancusi that he endorsed repeatedly. Early criticism of Pound’s poetry understandably followed Pound’s lead. In one of the first reviews of A Draft of XXX Cantos (1930), Dudley Fitts argued that ‘a key to Mr Pound’s method’ could be found in Antheil and the Treatise on Harmony, which Pound had published three years before. Fitts quoted part of the passage in which Pound distinguished between ‘two aesthetic ideals’: ‘the Wagnerian’ in which ‘you confuse the spectator by smacking as many of his senses as possible at every possible moment’, and ‘the other aesthetic [that] has been approved by Brancusi, Lewis, the vorticist manifestos’.3 Pound wrote that the latter ‘aims at focussing the mind on a given definition of form, or rhythm, so intensely that it becomes not only more aware of that given form, but more sensitive to all other forms, rhythms, defined places, or masses. It is a scaling of eye-balls, a castigating or purging of aural cortices; a sharpening of verbal apperceptions’. Reading The Cantos as a product of this aesthetic enabled one to read ‘the poem as a poem’, rather than ‘a sort of historico-archæological cypher’, wrote Fitts. ‘History and literature are for [Pound] a mine of images, and his purpose is to fix certain of these images in a lasting, orderly design, without reference to a philosophy or to any system of teleological principles’. The Cantos interpreted through imagism and vorticism could be promoted as ‘an epic of timelessness’, as ‘pure poetry’.4 Fitts’s use of Pound’s visual analogies was repeated and developed in the major commentaries on Pound’s poetry that appeared over the following years, which established the critical parameters, not only for reading Pound, but modernism more generally. Visual analogies underpinned Hugh Kenner’s account of the ‘patterned energies’ in Pound’s poetry (in The Poetry of Ezra Pound) and modernist literature (in The Pound Era), and also Joseph

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:11, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.006

74

rebecca beasley

Frank’s immensely influential argument that ‘modern literature . . . is moving in the direction of spatial form’.5 The history of such readings presents a problem that still profoundly shapes today’s criticism. One way of characterizing the last thirty years of Pound studies would be to see it as a determined dismantling of the implications of these early statements, which aligned the formalist aesthetic Pound derived from ‘Brancusi, Lewis, the vorticist manifestos’ to values of order, ahistoricism and individualism. In the 1970s and early 1980s, this took the form of a general reaction against modernism, but in the mid-1980s revived interest in Pound included significant work on the visual arts. Harriet Zinnes’s anthology of Pound’s writing on the visual arts made available previously obscure articles, and Charles Altieri, Andrew Clearfield, Reed Way Dasenbrock, Michael North and Marjorie Perloff explored Pound’s poetry through the lenses of cubism, collage, vorticism, classicist architecture and sculpture, and futurism, respectively. In 1984 the Tate Gallery held an exhibition of Pound’s Artists, accompanied by a book of the same name.6 Produced during and in the wake of the theory wars, these works no longer read The Cantos as embodying ‘order’ but ‘indeterminacy’; the poem was no longer ‘an epic of timelessness’ but ‘a poem including history’.7 Returning Pound’s poetry and Pound himself to history has been the dominant project of Pound studies during the last fifteen to twenty years: the turn from analysis of Pound’s aesthetic predilections to his political and economic affiliations has been decisive and welcome. While returning to Pound’s aesthetics may seem like a retrograde move, it is the inevitable and necessary consequence of the new information and perspectives that post-structuralist, Marxist, postmodernist and new modernist studies have provided. There is still much to discover about Pound’s interests, especially outside the well-worked vorticist period, as Frances Dickey’s chapters on Pound in The Modern Portrait Poem (2012) have effectively demonstrated.8 It is striking that the starting point for much recent criticism is a critique of the New Critical conception of modernism as ‘spatial form’, and in particular the ideological affiliations its formalism imported into readings of modernism. (Dudley Fitts’s review was published in the Hound & Horn, an early vehicle for the emerging voices of the New Critics and their associates.9) Criticism that deals with Pound’s interaction with the visual field therefore typically detaches both Pound’s modernism and the visual modernism of the period from the ideological ends they frequently served in the mid-twentieth century. Jacobus makes a representative move when she states that ‘the Twombly anthology can

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:11, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.006

The Visual Field

75

best be understood in relation to the history of American avant-garde poetics and pedagogy, rather than being subsumed into the New Critical reading-protocols to which they gave rise’.10 The most sustained analysis of Pound’s place in this story has been conducted by Greg Barnhisel in his two books James Laughlin, New Directions and the Remaking of Ezra Pound (2005) and the recent Cold War Modernists (2015), which contains a chapter on Pound’s publication in Perspectives USA, the journal of Intercultural Publications Inc., headed by Pound’s publisher James Laughlin and funded by the Ford Foundation. Barnhisel’s meticulous research tells the story of how a disparate set of experimental movements in the arts were made over by networks of publishers, academics, the mass media, cultural foundations, and government agencies as ‘modernism’, an identifiable style used as a weapon in the Cold War to represent American freedom, individualism and cultural superiority. Though the focus of both books is primarily literary – indeed, it is the literary side of a story to which art historians have paid much more attention – Cold War Modernists in particular demonstrates how important the visual arts were to the way modernist literature was characterized. At the Museum of Modern Art, Alfred H. Barr made a cross-disciplinary modernism palatable to the general public: his popular exhibitions, catalogues and books ‘put a crack in modernism’s antiestablishment, antibourgeois façade, as did his choice to bring modernism together with the worlds of media (Vanity Fair’s Frank Crowninshield) and business and plutocracy (founding donors the Rockefellers) on MoMA’s board’; Clement Greenberg’s definition of modernist art as primarily preoccupied with its own medium was part of what ‘defanged the radicalism of early modernism’; and magazines like Perspectives USA strategically placed abstract art alongside modernist writing to promote a version of modernism defined by the formal experiments available to free individuals.11 In Pound studies, the critical response to this reconfiguration of the relationship between literary and visual modernisms can be divided into two strands. The first traces the ideological commitments in Pound’s poetry and prose to recover the relationship between his aesthetics and politics before his mid-century canonization. Works such as Vincent Sherry’s Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis and Radical Modernism (1993), Douglas Mao’s Solid Objects (1998) and more recently my own Ezra Pound and the Visual Culture of Modernism (2007), David Barnes’s The Venice Myth (2014) and Lisa Siraganian’s Modernism’s Other Work (2012) have all sought to reappraise literary interactions with the visual field. Sherry’s work traced Pound’s and Lewis’s prioritizing of the visual

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:11, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.006

76

rebecca beasley

sense and the terms of their rhetoric to a tradition of anti-democratic thought they encountered in the criticism of Julien Benda, Remy de Gourmont, Ortega y Gasset and Wilhelm Worringer. His research demonstrated that Pound’s and Lewis’s ‘aesthetic material – painted image, spoken (or printed) word – spelled the language of a new political discourse, one in which the forces of social reaction and artistic liberation found a single vocabulary’.12 My own work undertook a related task: like Sherry, I was interested in the political investments of Pound’s ostensibly aesthetic writings, but I was also interested in excavating the particular art works, exhibitions, essays and conversations from which, I argued, Pound defined literary modernism in influentially visual terms.13 In the substantial sections about Pound in The Venice Myth, David Barnes reappraises the place of Venice in Pound’s writing, and in doing so provides a pathbreaking account of the influence Fascist visual culture had on the most apparently ahistorical, paradisal sections of The Cantos.14 While Sherry, Barnes and I were primarily interested in the way the visual field informed Pound’s language – critical and poetic – Mao and Siraganian examined what happens when a literary work is confronted with the ‘thingly opacity’ of the object, including the art objects of paintings and sculptures. Mao’s book undertook to question the then still dominant critical position that modernism was defined by its antipathy towards the commodity, by examining ‘modernism’s extraordinary generative fascination with the object understood neither as commodity . . . nor as symbol . . ., but as “object”, where any or all of the resonances of this complexly polysemous word might apply’. His wide-ranging chapter on Pound complicated the facile equation of The Cantos’ difficulty with Pound’s fascism, by arguing that the resistant text is not, in itself, an antidemocratic move, but rather an attempt to establish the poem as an object, or collection of objects, whose allure would appeal to the reader determined and able to learn from the past.15 Like Mao, Siraganian revisited debates about the modernist art work as an autonomous object not to deny the centrality of aesthetic autonomy for modernism, but to redefine it: she argued that, contra New Critical and Adornian interpretations of modernism, ‘autonomous art objects are imagined not as distinct from the world generally but distinct from spectators or readers particularly’. Modernism’s key debate, she argues, is not about realism, but ‘the relevance of the reader or spectator to a text’s meaning’. Though Pound is not a primary subject of Siraganian’s chapters, his writing about the art object is a major point of reference for her, particularly in her discussion of Williams.16

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:11, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.006

The Visual Field

77

Mao’s and Siraganian’s elaborations of the poem’s objecthood are related to a cluster of works informed by art history and museology. Catherine Paul’s Poetry in the Museums of Modernism was the first to think through the significance of Pound’s use of museums, archives and galleries, and his remarks that connected the practice of poetry to the exhibition of visual art works and objects. Like Barnhisel’s, Paul’s work draws on the art historical criticism that pioneered analyses of mid-century formalism, deploying the tools of critical museology to interrogate Pound’s poetry. Paul argues that, influenced by the curators of the museums and galleries he frequented, Pound adopts the selective, educative ‘exhibitionary method’ that had replaced the nineteenth-century conception of the museum as storehouse, ‘fashion[ing] himself into a modernist in the Round Reading Room of the British Museum Library’. The Cantos presents exhibits from history that not only testify to the taste of the poetcurator who has chosen them, but promise to cultivate a knowledge of culture and an appreciation of its monuments in its readers. Not surprisingly, we encounter Alfred H. Barr again here – but where in Barnhisel’s work his exhibition of modernism at MoMA appears as a causal factor in the Cold War version of modernism, it is instructive to note that in Paul’s chronologically earlier-focused discussion, it appears as an effect of early twentieth-century museum culture, an effect whose relation to modernist poetry can be readily discerned in Paul’s description: ‘Building on the trend toward isolating artworks for close viewing, Barr used pale neutral wall coverings; moved away from skying (the practice of covering gallery walls from floor to ceiling with pictures); and left plenty of space between pictures, all hung at eye-level . . .. And although Barr is known for his didactic labels, which taught visitors how to appreciate modern art, those labels always facilitate aesthetic appreciation over pure historical learning’. In this form, Pound’s oft-repeated opposition between beauty and philology is repeated on the walls of MoMA.17 Paul’s recent book Fascist Directive (2016) is concerned wholly with Pound but less with the visual field, though it revisits some of the earlier book’s questions in the context of Pound’s engagement with Fascist culture. In particular, Paul gives greater precision to the oft-made point that Pound’s poetry and prose became more didactic in form as well as content after he committed himself to the support of Italian Fascism. She traces this shift to 1937, during the height of Fascist sponsorship of culture, and the year Pound wrote Guide to Kulchur (1938), ‘his first prose work to exemplify a truly Fascist methodology’. The change in the way Pound sought to disseminate information, Paul argues, followed a change of approach in Fascist

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:11, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.006

78

rebecca beasley

propaganda following Mussolini’s declaration of Italy’s ‘Fascist Empire’ in 1936, exemplified in the difference between the two exhibitions: the Mostra della Rivoluzione Fascista in 1932 and the Mostra Augustea della Romanità in 1938. Pound’s earlier method of exhibition, which Paul had related to the British Museum and avant-garde art galleries, offered up ‘Luminous Details’ selected from the archive of history to the interpretation of the reader. Guide to Kulchur and subsequently the Pisan Cantos are made up of remembered details rather than original quotations, and are no longer so interested in the original ‘document but the significance of the document’ in the larger narrative. Paul points out that the Mostra Augustea della Romanità marked a similar shift from a method of exhibition that could embrace eclecticism and modernism to one that presented a single imperialist narrative: the exhibition’s layout and object labels subordinated the viewer’s interpretation to a dominant narrative of Mussolini’s restoration of Italy’s empire, and casts and models replaced original artefacts – like Pound, valuing ‘the newly created whole over its pieces’.18 Jeremy Braddock’s Collecting as Modernist Practice also contributes to this interpretation of modernist literature through the lens of the cultural institutions, in this case ‘the privately assembled, but publicly exhibited, art collection and the interventionist literary anthology’. But where Paul and, to a certain extent, Mao see the museum collection and its contents as having provided a model for the form of the modernist text (The Cantos as collection of objects, a museum or an art gallery), Braddock is interested in the practice of collection rather than the form of the collection itself. Like Siraganian, Braddock focuses on the relationship between the audience and the artwork, and his argument is that the practice of collecting modernist art or anthologizing modernist poems is, if not an ‘institution of modernism’ in the sense coined by Lawrence Rainey, then a ‘provisional institution’, a means of ‘modeling and creating the conditions of modernism’s reception’. The anthology that both epitomized and signalled the end of the interventionist anthology was A Survey of Modernist Poetry (1927), edited by Laura Riding and Robert Graves, which famously set out the principles against which ‘modernist poetry’ could be defined, including the principles of ahistoricism, autonomy and primacy of form that would be taken up by the New Critics. Those very principles, Braddock argues, dictated their rejection of the Georgian and imagist anthologies that had established the practice of anthologizing as central to modernism. Braddock’s interest in Pound, therefore, is primarily as the editor of Des Imagistes (1914) and Catholic Anthology (1915), and though the introduction

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:11, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.006

The Visual Field

79

contains an interesting discussion of the dispersal of the art collection of John Quinn, Pound's friend and patron, Braddock resists making direct comparisons between the imagist anthologies and the Barnes Foundation or the Phillips Memorial Gallery that are the focus of other chapters. Nevertheless, their juxtaposition reiterates how closely related the processes of canonization and professionalization were in this period’s literary and visual fields.19 The ideological agency of museums and art galleries is also central to the two last books that should be mentioned in this account of reappraisals of Pound’s aesthetics: Rupert Arrowsmith’s Modernism and the Museum (2010) and John R. Williams’s The Buddha in the Machine (2014). Like Paul, both Arrowsmith and Williams revisit Pound’s interactions with the British Museum. But their major interest is somewhat different from those of the books discussed so far: their reappraisal of Pound’s (and other modernists’) careers is achieved less by asking different questions of the same body of work than it is by bringing to the fore a large terrain of Pound’s visual experience still under researched: that of East Asian art. Pound’s engagement with East Asian art and literature is well known, and his friendship with Laurence Binyon and work on the papers of the Ernest Fenollosa, two of the leading experts in East Asian art in Britain and the United States respectively, have been the subject of much discussion, notably by David Ewick, Sanehide Kodama, Zhaoming Qian, Qiyao Wu and Ming Xie.20 Most discussion has focused on literary or broadly cultural influences, but Qian’s 2003 study, The Modernist Response to Chinese Art: Pound, Moore, Stevens, turned the focus to the visual arts, and Arrowsmith and Williams take up a variety of questions first raised there, presenting substantial new material. Arrowsmith’s is a remarkably persistent investigation into what Pound and his cultural network saw, read and learned in the British Museum that effectively demonstrates how much more there is still to be learned about the period’s visual culture from museum archives, advertisements, photographs and memoirs: his book teems with discoveries of sources for the images and themes of Pound’s poetry.21 Williams argues that ‘American art and literature have been shaped as much by resistance to technology as by submission to it’ and that resistance has frequently taken the form of ‘a compelling fantasy that would posit Eastern aesthetics as both the antidote to and the perfection of machine culture’. Pound’s editing of The Chinese Written Character as Medium for Poetry is a signal instance for Williams, who demonstrates in compelling detail how Pound’s editing – during the height of his involvement with vorticism – transforms Fenollosa’s argument for the machine

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:11, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.006

80

rebecca beasley

age. The chapter is particularly valuable for its account of Fenollosa’s career as an art historian and curator – here, not an aid to understanding Pound’s poetry, but rather a central contributor to debates about technology and art that shaped the twentieth century.22 The other major strand that has emerged in studies of Pound and the visual field deliberately expands that field beyond the visual forms historically most strongly associated with Pound and with modernism – sculpture and painting – to analyse the role of technology and new media. Pound’s career contains several examples of his direct engagement with new visual technologies – most obviously, the invention of ‘vortography’ with the photographer Alvin Langdon Coburn in 1916, and collaboration with George Antheil, Fernand Léger, Dudley Murphy and Man Ray on the film Ballet Mécanique in 1923–4.23 Pound’s epistolary friendship with Marshall McLuhan, and McLuhan’s influence on Hugh Kenner (McLuhan introduced Kenner to Pound in 1948, and is the dedicatee of The Poetry of Ezra Pound), ensured that Pound’s predilection for technological vocabulary and analogy was noted by his early critics, and taken up for discussion in the new work on modernism and technology that began to appear in the 1990s, such as Tim Armstrong’s Modernism, Technology, and the Body (1998).24 In this sense, despite the formalism of some of his own writings and that of his early critics, which would seem to align him to a Greenbergian definition of modernism against which new media critics typically define themselves, Pound’s poetry has always been simultaneously available to a more technophilic version of modernism, in which ‘the medium-specific fantasies and feelings that patterned modernism’s culture’ are read ‘as evidence of historical response instead of formalist evasion’, in Mark Goble’s words.25 Both Goble in Beautiful Circuits (2010) and Jessica Pressman in Digital Modernism (2014) emphasise the connections between McLuhan, Kenner and modernism in their rationale for re-reading modernism through media studies: ‘McLuhan established media studies by reading the contemporary period through the lens of modernism and by adapting New Critical reading practices to approach and analyze electronic media’, remarks Pressman; ‘there is no mistaking that [Kenner’s and McLuhan’s] relationship connects modernism’s culture and aesthetics to a faith in communication, which is not something we always think it wanted’, writes Goble.26 For Goble, The Cantos, along with other modernist experiments in historiography by Williams and Oppen, is exemplary of a desire to create a ‘perfectly mediated history’ triggered by the period’s ‘medium fetish for photography’.27Goble’s arguments have some affinities with Julian

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:11, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.006

The Visual Field

81

Murphet’s slightly earlier Multimedia Modernism, which proposed to ‘rewrite literary history . . . as a sedimented trace-history of the competing media institutions of the moment’. In his ingenious account of imagism, Murphet sees Pound reacting to the use of sentiment in visual advertising and film by eviscerating poetry of its conventional affective ploys, and managing to modernize it (to make it more efficient and direct) by using the technique of cinema itself – the cinematic cut, or juxtaposition. Vorticism, he argues, is a similarly near-suicidal reaction to the new forms of media: visual art, such as Lewis’s drawing The Vorticist (1912), becomes abstract, a ‘sacrificial absorption and binding of the shock produced by the mechanical media’, and at the same time Blast’s literature draws attention to its materiality – though in a somewhat different way from that explored by Mao and Siraganian: a ‘deliberate de-sacralization of the poetic word’. Blast appears here as a ‘putsch on behalf of . . . painting’, an attempt by Lewis to establish its authority on its own terms, rather than those of literature (narrative, representation), but one that fails, and in the process restores poetry to a more powerful level. The ‘multimedia aesthetic’ Pound’s essays establish for vorticism demonstrates poetry’s ability to absorb its sister arts and mediate between them within the media system.28 Pressman’s Digital Modernism bears this argument out in its analysis of the way contemporary digital media has made use of modernist poetry – and Pound, she asserts, is a ‘central figure’, not only in the influence his poetry on later writers, but in bequeathing an understanding of literature as ‘an act of recovery and renovation’ rather than an assertion of novelty (literature is ‘news that STAYS news’). Her third chapter analyses the digital work Dakota by the artist duo Young-hae Chang Heavy Industries, who described it in an interview as ‘based on a close reading of Ezra Pound’s Cantos I and first part of II’. Pressman demonstrates how closely the road-trip narrative adapts Pound’s account of Odysseus’s journey, arguing that just as Pound begins The Cantos with an adaptation of the most ancient work of literature, so YHCHI draw upon a work created at the start of the new media epoch: ‘YHCHI draw upon a past that, although not ancient, is the origin of their aesthetic and technological present’. More importantly, though, Pressman explores the significance of Dakota as ‘based on a close reading’. Pound’s first canto ends by naming and putting aside Andreas Divus’s translation of the Odyssey, the text Pound’s canto has read closely, and Dakota too ends by naming and putting aside its source of Pound’s Cantos, the 1973 Norton Anthology edited by Richard Ellmann. For Pressman, this is an invitation to close reading – an emphasis on the literary aspect of the digital work,

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:11, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.006

82

rebecca beasley

a registering of the poem as autonomous art object – and at the same time a refutation of applying traditional literary critical techniques to electronic literature. Ellmann is put aside, and the speed of the flashing text makes close reading impossible.29 I have subtitled this chapter ‘Beyond Vorticism’ to indicate how far criticism has moved away from the excessive focus of early studies on this one element of Pound’s engagement with the visual field. But it is worth noting in closing that during the last fifteen years, vorticism itself has been reappraised in two excellent exhibitions. Jonathan Black’s Blasting the Future (2004) at the Estorick Collection in London and the Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester focused in particular on the influence of Italian Futurism, and Mark Antliff’s and Vivien Greene’s The Vorticists at the Nasher Museum of Art, Duke, the Peggy Guggenheim Museum in Venice and Tate Britain in London took its lead from the three original vorticist exhibitions and Blast. While acknowledging Pound’s role (Antliff and Greene’s exhibition generated important new work on Pound’s contribution by Antliff and Greene themselves, and Allan Antliff and Anne McCauley), the exhibitions and their accompanying publications decisively moved discussion away from the agon of Pound and Wyndham Lewis.30 It is, I think, not a coincidence that studies of vorticism have become less focused on Pound during the same period that Pound studies has engaged with works, artists, media and theories of the visual field beyond vorticism. The visual field provides more than a set of analogies for Pound’s style. His poetry may invite comparison with abstract painting, modernist sculpture, collage and hypertext, but such analogies are only symptoms of more fundamental relations. Modernist art provided a formal model and set of ideological commitments; new exhibition practices suggested a different relationship between the viewer and the artwork; the mass media of photography and cinema presented a fundamental challenge; and digital art works indicate where Pound’s legacy may lie.

Notes I am grateful to Flair Donglai Shi and Yuka Tokuyama for invaluable research assistance that contributed to this essay. 1. Mary Jacobus, Reading Cy Twombly: Poetry in Paint (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016), 3, 6.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:11, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.006

The Visual Field

83

2. See especially ‘Vorticism’, Fortnightly Review 96 (1914), [461]–71, and ‘Affirmations, IV: As for Imagisme’, New Age 16 (1915), 349–50. 3. Ezra Pound, Antheil and the Treatise on Harmony (Chicago: Covici, 1927), 44. 4. Dudley Fitts, ‘Music Fit for the Odes’ [rev. of Ezra Pound, A Draft of XXX Cantos], Hound & Horn 4 (1930–1), 278, 284–6. 5. Hugh Kenner, The Poetry of Ezra Pound (London: Faber & Faber, 1951), 233–4; Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 145–62; and Joseph Frank, ‘Spatial Form in Modern Literature’, Sewanee Review 53 (1945), 225. 6. Ezra Pound and the Visual Arts, ed. Harriet Zinnes (New York: New Directions, 1980); Charles Altieri, Painterly Abstraction in Modernist American Poetry: The Contemporaneity of Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Andrew Clearfield, These Fragments I Have Shored: Collage and Montage in Early Modernist Poetry (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Research Press, 1984); Reed Way Dasenbrock, The Literary Vorticism of Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis: Towards the Condition of Painting (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985); Michael North, The Final Sculpture: Public Monuments and Modern Poets (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985); Marjorie Perloff, The Futurist Moment: Avant-Garde, Avant Guerre, and the Language of Rupture (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1986) and The Poetics of Indeterminacy: From Rimbaud to Cage (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981); Tate Gallery, Pound’s Artists: Ezra Pound and the Visual Arts in London, Paris and Italy (London: Tate Gallery, 1985). 7. Ezra Pound, ‘Date Line’, in Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. T. S. Eliot (New York: New Directions, 1954), 86. 8. Frances Dickey, The Modern Portrait Poem: From Dante Gabriel Rossetti to Ezra Pound (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2012). 9. In the winter 1931 issue, Fitts’s article on A Draft of XXX Cantos is followed by Allen Tate (on Ash Wednesday), R. P. Blackmur (on Santayana’s The Realm of Matter) and Yvor Winters (on Katherine Anne Porter’s Flowering Judas). See Leonard Greenbaum, The Hound & Horn: The History of a Literary Quarterly (The Hague: Mouton & Co, 1966), 125–59. 10. Jacobus, Reading Cy Twombly, 20. 11. Greg Barnhisel, James Laughlin, New Directions, and the Remaking of Ezra Pound (Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2005); Gregory Barnhisel, Cold War Modernists: Art, Literature, and American Cultural Diplomacy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), 31–32, 36, 195. 12. Vincent Sherry, Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, and Radical Modernism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 3. Sherry’s argument that Pound and Lewis inherited ‘ideas of optical privilege’ finds a terminological echo in Christina Walter’s more science-focused discussion of ‘optical impersonality’ in modernism – though Pound appears only briefly: see Optical Impersonality:

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:11, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.006

84

13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

20.

21. 22. 23.

24. 25.

rebecca beasley Science, Images and Literary Modernism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014). Rebecca Beasley, Ezra Pound and the Visual Culture of Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). David Barnes, The Venice Myth: Culture, Literature, Politics, 1800 to the Present (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2014). Douglas Mao, Solid Objects: Modernism and the Test of Production (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 165–7, 176. Lisa Siraganian, Modernism’s Other Work: The Art Object’s Political Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 6–7, 80–3, 107–8. Catherine E. Paul, Poetry in the Museums of Modernism: Yeats, Pound, Moore, Stein (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002), 68, 100–1, 23. Catherine E. Paul, Fascist Directive: Ezra Pound and Italian Cultural Nationalism (Clemson: Clemson University Press, 2016), 199, 225–6; GK 220–1. Jeremy Braddock, Collecting as Modernist Practice (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), 65, 21–6; Lawrence Rainey, Institutions of Modernism: Literary Elites and Public Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 3, 21–2. David Ewick, ‘Ezra Pound and the Invention of Japan’, Essays and Studies in British and American Literature 63 (2017), 13–39; Sanehide Kodama, Ezra Pound and Japan: Letters and Essays (Redding Ridge: Black Swan Books, 1987); Zhaoming Qian, Orientalism and Modernism: The Legacy of China in Pound and Williams (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995); Zhaoming Qian, The Modernist Response to Chinese Art: Pound, Moore, Stevens (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003); Qiyao Wu, Ezra Pound and Chinese Culture (Shanghai: Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press, 2006); and Ming Xie, Ezra Pound and the Appropriation of Chinese Poetry (New York: Garland, 1999). Rupert Richard Arrowsmith, Modernism and the Museum: Asian, African, and Pacific Art and the London Avant-Garde (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). John R. Williams, The Buddha in the Machine: Art, Technology and the Meeting of East and West (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), 1. Melita Schaum, ‘The Grammar of the Visual: Alvin Langdon Coburn, Ezra Pound, and the Eastern Aesthetic in Early Modernist Photography and Poetry’, Paideuma 24.2–3 (1995), 79–106; Judi Freeman, ‘Bridging Purism and Surrealism: The Origins and Production of Fernand Léger’s Ballet Mécanique’, in Dada and Surrealist Film, ed. Rudolf E. Kuenzli (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 28–45. Tim Armstrong, Modernism, Technology, and the Body: A Cultural Study (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 63–5, 89–90. Mark Goble, Beautiful Circuits: Modernism and the Mediated Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 18, 14.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:11, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.006

The Visual Field

85

26. Jessica Pressman, Digital Modernism: Making It New in New Media (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 5; Goble, Beautiful Circuits, 3. 27. Goble, Beautiful Circuits, 22, 257. 28. Julian Murphet, Multimedia Modernism: Literature and the Anglo-American Avant-Garde (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 2–3, 118–19, 134–45, 142, 147, 164–5. 29. Pressman, Digital Modernism, 5, 96. The interview in which Pound is cited is Thom Swiss, ‘“Distance, Homelessness, Anonymity, and Insignificance”: An Interview with Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries’, The Iowa Review Web (15 December 2002), accessed 21 December 2017, http://thestudio.uiowa.edu/tirw/TIRW_Archive/tir web/feature/younghae/interview.html. 30. Mark Antliff, ‘Sculptural Nominalism / Anarchist Vortex: Henri GaudierBrzeska, Dora Marsden, and Ezra Pound’, and Vivien Greene, ‘Ezra Pound and John Quinn: The 1917 Penguin Club Exhibition’, in Mark Antliff and Vivien Greene, eds, The Vorticists: Rebel Artists in London and New York, 1914–1918 (London: Tate Publishing, 2010), 46–57, 74–83; Allan Antliff, ‘Ezra Pound, Man Ray, and Vorticism in America, 1914–1917’, and Anne McCauley, ‘Witch Work, Art Work, and the Spiritual Roots of Abstraction: Ezra Pound, Alvin Langdon Coburn, and the Vortographs’, in Mark Antliff and Scott W. Klein, eds., Vorticism: New Perspectives (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 139–55, 156–74. W OR KS CI T ED Altieri, Charles, Painterly Abstraction in Modernist American Poetry: The Contemporaneity of Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). Antliff, Allan, ‘Ezra Pound, Man Ray, and Vorticism in America, 1914–1917’, in Vorticism: New Perspectives, ed. Mark Antliff and Scott W. Klein, 139–55 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). Antliff, Mark, ‘Sculptural Nominalism / Anarchist Vortex: Henri GaudierBrzeska, Dora Marsden, and Ezra Pound’, in The Vorticists: Rebel Artists in London and New York, 1914–1918, ed. Mark Antliff and Vivien Greene, 46–57 (London: Tate Publishing, 2010). Armstrong, Tim, Modernism, Technology, and the Body: A Cultural Study (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Arrowsmith, Rupert Richard, Modernism and the Museum: Asian, African, and Pacific Art and the London Avant-Garde (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). Barnes, David, The Venice Myth: Culture, Literature, Politics, 1800 to the Present (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2014). Barnhisel, Greg, Cold War Modernists: Art, Literature, and American Cultural Diplomacy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015).

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:11, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.006

86

rebecca beasley

James Laughlin, New Directions, and the Remaking of Ezra Pound (Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2005). Beasley, Rebecca, Ezra Pound and the Visual Culture of Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). Braddock, Jeremy, Collecting as Modernist Practice (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012). Clearfield, Andrew, These Fragments I Have Shored: Collage and Montage in Early Modernist Poetry (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Research Press, 1984). Dasenbrock, Reed Way, The Literary Vorticism of Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis: Towards the Condition of Painting (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985). Dickey, France, The Modern Portrait Poem: From Dante Gabriel Rossetti to Ezra Pound (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2012). Ewick, David, ‘Ezra Pound and the Invention of Japan’, Essays and Studies in British and American Literature 63 (2017), 13–39. Fitts, Dudley, ‘Music Fit for the Odes’ [rev. of Ezra Pound, A Draft of XXX Cantos], Hound & Horn 4 (1930–1), 278–89. Frank, Joseph, ‘Spatial Form in Modern Literature’, Sewanee Review, 53 (1945), 221–40, 433–56, 643–53. Freeman, Judi, ‘Bridging Purism and Surrealism: The Origins and Production of Fernand Léger’s Ballet Mécanique’, in Dada and Surrealist Film, ed. Rudolf E. Kuenzli, 28–45 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996). Goble, Mark, Beautiful Circuits: Modernism and the Mediated Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010). Greenbaum, Leonard, The Hound and Horn: The History of a Literary Quarterly (The Hague: Mouton & Co., 1966). Greene, Vivien, ‘Ezra Pound and John Quinn: The 1917 Penguin Club Exhibition’, in The Vorticists: Rebel Artists in London and New York, 1914–1918, ed. Mark Antliff and Vivien Greene, 74–83 (London: Tate Publishing, 2010). Jacobus, Mary, Reading Cy Twombly: Poetry in Paint (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016). Kenner, Hugh, The Poetry of Ezra Pound (London: Faber & Faber, 1951). The Pound Era (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971). Kodama, Sanehide, Ezra Pound and Japan: Letters and Essays (Redding Ridge: Black Swan Books, 1987). McCauley, Anne, ‘Witch Work, Art Work, and the Spiritual Roots of Abstraction: Ezra Pound, Alvin Langdon Coburn, and the Vortographs’, in Vorticism: New Perspectives, ed. Mark Antliff and Scott W. Klein, 156–74 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). Mao, Douglas, Solid Objects: Modernism and the Test of Production (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998). Murphet, Julian, Multimedia Modernism: Literature and the Anglo-American Avant-Garde (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:11, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.006

The Visual Field

87

North, Michael, The Final Sculpture: Public Monuments and Modern Poets (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985). Paul, Catherine E., Fascist Directive: Ezra Pound and Italian Cultural Nationalism (Clemson, SC: Clemson University Press, 2016). Poetry in the Museums of Modernism: Yeats, Pound, Moore, Stein (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002). Perloff, Marjorie, The Futurist Moment: Avant-Garde, Avant Guerre, and the Language of Rupture (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1986). The Poetics of Indeterminacy: From Rimbaud to Cage (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981). Pound, Ezra, ‘Affirmations, IV: As for Imagisme’, New Age 16 (1915), 349–50. Antheil and the Treatise on Harmony (Chicago: Covici, 1927). ‘Date Line’, in Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. T. S. Eliot, 74–87 (New York: New Directions, 1954). ‘Vorticism’, Fortnightly Review 96 (1914), [461]–71. Pressman, Jessica, Digital Modernism: Making It New in New Media (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). Qian, Zhaoming, The Modernist Response to Chinese Art: Pound, Moore, Stevens (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003). Orientalism and Modernism: The Legacy of China in Pound and Williams (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995). Rainey, Lawrence, Institutions of Modernism: Literary Elites and Public Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998). Schaum, Melita, ‘The Grammar of the Visual: Alvin Langdon Coburn, Ezra Pound, and the Eastern Aesthetic in Early Modernist Photography and Poetry’, Paideuma 24.2–3 (1995), 79–106. Sherry, Vincent, Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, and Radical Modernism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). Siraganian, Lisa, Modernism’s Other Work: The Art Object’s Political Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). Swiss, Thom, ‘“Distance, Homelessness, Anonymity, and Insignificance”: An Interview with Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries’, The Iowa Review Web (15 December, 2002), accessed 21 December 2017, http://thestudio .uiowa.edu/tirw/TIRW_Archive/tirweb/feature/younghae/interview.html. Tate Gallery, Pound’s Artists: Ezra Pound and the Visual Arts in London, Paris and Italy (London: Tate Gallery, 1985). Walter, Christina, Optical Impersonality: Science, Images and Literary Modernism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014). Williams, John R., The Buddha in the Machine: Art, Technology and the Meeting of East and West (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014). Wu, Qiyao, Ezra Pound and Chinese Culture (Shanghai: Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press, 2006). Xie, Ming, Ezra Pound and the Appropriation of Chinese Poetry (New York: Garland, 1999).

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:11, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.006

chapter 6

Texts of The Cantos and Theories of Literature Michael Kindellan

Textual Conditions The textual history of Pound’s Cantos is among the most complex of any work commonly (or indeed uncommonly) associated with Anglo-American modernism.1 Notwithstanding the intricate problems facing any scholar keen on tracing the development of Pound’s poem through its stages of composition and revision, the record of published texts alone presents serious obstacles. As Lawrence Rainey notes, written over a period of almost fifty years, published discretely in more than twenty-five magazines and at least as many different collected volumes across seven countries, ‘no reader other than Pound could ever have traced all the parts of The Cantos’, nor even does any library in world contain copies of every published version.2 For numerous reasons owing both to the poet’s personal temperament and to the social nature of literary production, non-identical changes were made to different in-print versions. The moment a reader, for whatever reason, decides to consult any pre-1975 Cantos text, they will realize that to look at earlier versions is also usually to look at different versions. Such a protracted publication history of The Cantos, resulting in substantial internal discord, makes it impossible to speak of the text; we must speak of texts.3 In what follows, I do not attempt to delineate in detail the absolute textual mess that is Pound’s Cantos, but to consider some implications arising therefrom. Before I do, however, it behoves me to speak at least in outline about the range of textual confusions at hand. So, for example, by the time New Directions, Pound’s American publisher, and Faber, his British one, brought out their first collected editions in 1948 and 1950 respectively, there were several hundred discrepant readings between these two editions alone.4 Furthermore, no matter which text one has to hand, one will most likely suspect orthographic, grammatical or factual errors therein. Eva Hesse, Pound’s German translator and consultant editor for New Directions, found some eight hundred incidents of suspected error in 88

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:12, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.007

Texts of The Cantos and Theories of Literature

89

Faber’s 1954 edition of Cantos;5 Achilles Fang, working independently but in parallel, found a similar number.6 And these are just errors in the published versions of the poem. Ron Bush and David Ten Eyck, for example, have counted some five hundred corruptions of Pound’s typescript text for The Pisan Cantos alone.7 Though Pound and his publishers took extraordinary steps to keep things accurate, the intricacy of the verse and, with regard to collected editions the scale of the project, meant that attempted corrections were at times both uncoordinated and necessarily imperfect. Owing to the logistical hardships involved in bringing such heteroclite poetry into print, suspect passages often passed through several reprints before being put right, if ever. A March 1949 letter from Pound to Laughlin is hilariously instructive in this respect. Pound wrote: and god DAMN it get that FISH correct into canto Canto 51 galley 42 / as I told whatever loony lubber was in the office to get into the BIG Cantos. f i s h / not FLY godbloodydamn their halyards. AND put the KAO*YAO ideogram right side up / there are probably two on one cliche / and the whole thing should be put the other way up.8

Furthermore, Pound is on record admitting to several correspondents that a combination of astigmatism and an inability ‘to spell correctly in ANY language, let alone seven’ made him ‘the WORST proof-reader natr / ever let liv’.9 When otherwise not attributable to medical conditions, Pound’s carelessness betrays a wilful abandon borne from his lifelong antipathy for the mundanities of philological attention to textual details.10 And yet, such questionable passages are made even harder to assess on account of the fact that Pound was sometimes as careful as he was at other times careless about the integrity of his texts. When Pound was careful, his attention sprang from an abiding respect for the exigencies of historical transmission, what Rainey once called ‘the routes of reference’.11 Time and again he resisted suggestions that he bring his text, particularly intertextual references, in line with accepted readings.

Ontology of Text Pound’s oscillations between carefulness and carelessness might be reframed as expressive of a tension between a materialist fascination with,

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:12, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.007

90

michael kindellan

and an idealist suspicion of, the ontology of text. To my mind, a radical ambivalence over the nature of textuality is a principal feature of Pound’s poetics. Ultimately an essentialist, whether it be politically or aesthetically, Pound was not in the end especially concerned by or interested in concrete experience, especially that of printed texts. Now, this is a bold claim that some readers might find contentious; others might find it downright mistaken. What about Pound’s deluxe editions? What about the evident ‘materiality’ – meant in this ventriloquism to mean the printed word’s anti-absorptive resistance to transparent signification – of The Cantos? What about Pound’s careful attention to, and philological reconstitution of, the Cavalcanti manuscripts? By way of response to such eminently reasonable objections, I must stress that I am trying to describe a disposition, not an absolute condition. That said, Pound is on record as having claimed severally that he found the physical action of reading anathema to him, telling Michael Reck bluntly: ‘I have always loathed reading’.12 Here he repeats a point made some twenty years before: ‘To read and be conscious of the act of reading is for some men (the writer among them) to suffer. I loathe the operation’.13 As it would for any poet, the way Pound understood and approached the act of reading bears intrinsically upon his ideas and attitudes towards writing and its reception. One particularly telling and frequently quoted moment of self-reflexive poetic rumination comes towards the end of Canto CXVI. Pound writes: to ‘see again,’ the verb is ‘see,’ not ‘walk on’ i.e. it coheres all right even if my notes do not cohere. Many errors, a little rightness, to excuse his hell and my paradiso. And as to why they go wrong, thinking of rightness And as to who will copy this palimpsest?

(C 816–17)

The subject of many numerous critical evaluations, this passage has not yet been read as a comment specifically on textual scholarship and materialist criticism. So, to add another (rather unsophisticated) reading to the pile: by ‘it’, Pound means the literary ‘work’ known as The Cantos, ‘that forméd trace in his mind’, or what Peter Shillingsburg named ‘the imagined whole implied by all differing forms of a text that we conceive as representing

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:12, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.007

Texts of The Cantos and Theories of Literature

91

a single literary creation’.14 Conversely, the ‘notes’ that Pound finds ‘do not cohere’ comprise the texts of the numerous artefactual documents of The Cantos, or what Shillingsburg also calls ‘the actual order of words and punctuation contained in any one physical form’.15 Such a reading might come across as reductive, especially in comparison to, say, Jean-Michel Rabaté’s more exuberant detection of indeterminacy in the reference implied by the pronoun ‘it’: ‘the world? the dream? the thing? logos? language? the revelation of truth? love?’16 The passage’s question about ‘this palimpsest’ for me renders its subject matter much less inexactly, suggesting Pound here conceives of his ‘notes’ as bearing the residues of older, now effaced writing events, but events whose traces still can be gleaned despite their erasure. Lines like these situate The Cantos within a set of concerns central to post-war Anglo-American textual criticism, explicitly promulgating what James Thorpe once called a theory of literature in which ‘the reality of the work of art is independent of its written or printed form’.17 Though ‘see again’ probably does not mean ‘re-vise’ in the editorial sense, nor would typographical mistakes, backwards ideograms or missing Greek diacritics rank highly among the ‘many errors’ admitted to (and dismissed) here, Pound does imply his poem goes wrong textually because, for him, its principal achievement lay in the basic rightness of its moral precepts. In other words, and in ways remarkably consistent with G. Thomas Tanselle’s theories of textuality, Pound is distinguishing between the ‘work’ itself and its physical instantiation. For Tanselle, ‘the verbal statement is not coequal with its oral or written presentation’;18 ‘the medium of literature is the words’ of any given language, the arrangement of which ‘can exist in the mind, whether or not they are reported by voice or writing’.19 The underlying rationale here is a separation between what Tanselle calls those arts ‘that use solids as media’, such as painting or sculpture, and those others, like poetry and music, he believes ‘sequential’.20 Pound thought so too: ‘the poet cuts his design in TIME’ (ABCR 199). In solid media, the work is identical with an historic object: ‘the pieces are at once art and artefact’. A poem, however, although it can be performed, remains fundamentally intangible. More impressively, verbal works, being immaterial, ‘can never be damaged physically’.21 Essence is divorced from contingency.22 Pound’s placing of poetry in an ideational category cuts against both the particularist, anti-subjective thrust of much modernist ideology, that of the ‘no ideas but in things’ variety, and against the materialist hermeneutics that have emerged as an influential mode of critical reception. As

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:12, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.007

92

michael kindellan

D. C. Greetham put it, for essentialist textual theorists like Tanselle (as for essentialist writers like Pound often is in The Cantos), the ontology of literary work is ‘never assuredly present in historical, particularized text, for it can be achieved only at the unattainable level of nous rather than phenomenon’.23 The same goes for ideogrammic writing, whose telos is always the larger or more general idea extrapolated from the arranged particulars. Greetham goes on to note a peculiar irony in Tanselle’s position, ‘a theorist whose writings on the concrete features of text, on the technical aspects of analytical and descriptive bibliography, have made him one of the leading authorities on the intractably physical’.24 The same irony pervades Pound’s writing in The Cantos. When our attention is not being drawn to the accurate portrayal of textual records such as in Canto LIV (‘and the books were incised in stone / 46 tablets set up at the door of the college / inscribed in 5 sorts of character’ (C 281)) or to the correct pronunciation or spelling of words or names as in Canto CIV (‘Wolff Henry (double ff)’ (C 758)), its self-reflexive intertextuality nevertheless reminds us that we are dealing with written text of a most peculiar kind.

Pound’s Exceptional ‘Materialism’ Thus textuality and the transmission of text constitute not just the subjects of the poem, but also the realities it attempts to transcend. The translated crib of Greek text that opens the poem’s first canto breaks off towards the end with a well-known apostrophe to Andreas Divus, one that shows the poet actively working with, and acting in opposition to, his source text: ‘Lie quiet Divus. I mean, that is Andreas Divus, / In officina Wecheli, 1538, out of Homer’ (C 5). This aside acknowledges the specificity of its source while simultaneously asserting an authority over it. That Pound recognized the philological unsoundness of Divus’s translation is evident from Tiresias’s remarks to the poem’s speaker: ‘A second time? why? man of ill star’ (C 5).25 While Pound clearly revelled in exploiting scholarly mistakes – such as his boastful ejaculation in Canto LXXXV regarding an outlandish etymographic character analysis of the (withheld) sinograph chueh 厥: ‘no, that is not philological’ (C 564); or his rather spoilsport goading of Jules Nicole in Canto XCVI: ‘rather nice use of aveu, Professor, though you were looking at ἄνευ (C 687) – his departures from textual conventions mainly express a core belief that, as he told W. H. D. Rouse in 1935, ‘Tain’t what a man sez, but wot he means that the traducer has got to bring over’ (SL 271). Pound made a similar claim to Michael Reck some twenty years later: ‘don’t bother about the WORDS, translate the MEANING’.26 It was

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:12, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.007

Texts of The Cantos and Theories of Literature

93

always Pound’s prerogative to behave as though the ‘real work’, that is to say, the poem’s ‘real statement’, were ‘hovering somehow behind the physical text’.27 When James Laughlin of New Directions suggested in 1956 that Pound work with various scholars to agree revisions for a ‘definitive cantares’, Pound balked at the proposal. Since the present text allowed the reader to ‘git the ideaHHHHH’, they could leave the ‘canto text as printed’.28 That same year he told Norman Holmes Pearson, a professor of modern literature at Yale who was keeping tabs on potential corrections, that the text of The Cantos was ‘as accurate as the natr of the goodam [sic] author permits. wotterELL, CIV/N aint a one man chop’.29 While Pound would undoubtedly agree that although ‘every verbal text, spoken or written down, is an attempt to convey a work’, he seems also of the opinion that the work (or, his own work at least) is also more a question of authorial intention than authorial action.30 Or: ‘nothing matters but the quality / of the affection – in the end – that has carved the trace in the mind’ (C 477). But in the realm of literary production, such author-centric thinking reveals a deep – perhaps irreconcilable – disjunction between the kind of writing exhibited in The Cantos and the kind of reading imposed by it. From a hermeneutical standpoint, a writer who believes that authorial intention (‘wot he means’) not authorial action (‘what a man sez’) should be key to a reader’s comprehension will naturally expect a reader to identify and accept (which is not to say endorse or believe) the poet’s ideas, assumptions, viewpoints and prejudices. But Canto I enacts a rather different model of reading.31 It shows, I believe, Pound’s commitment as a writer to what Walter Benn Michaels has called ‘the materiality of the signifier’. For Michaels, someone committed to this ideology will identify ‘the idea of the text’s meaning (and the project of interpreting that meaning) with the idea of the reader’s experience’.32 In other words, either we read with full reference to the maker’s purpose – this is how Pound wants and expects us to read his poem – or we read without such reference, and so construe a text’s meaning mainly along subjective lines – this is how Pound reads in order to write. Responding in 1951 to Eva Hesse, after she had queried the philological accuracy of his opening canto, Pound said he was ‘NOT taking Canto 1, back to Homer. but looking at it for wot is there on the page’.33 Not going ‘back to Homer’ means not searching for either Homer’s intentions or for texts more faithful to them (a dubious plausibility at best); instead, looking at ‘wot is there on the page’ makes close attention to the material scene of reading a kind of cover for the imposition his own ideas: what is there for Pound. Which is fine;

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:12, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.007

94

michael kindellan

no one is suggesting that Pound was more of a scholar than a poet, nor contesting the license afforded to writers of that kind. This sort of misreading, upsetting to so many proper scholars at the time, is a function of Pound’s genius. But the point is, as Michaels goes on to argue, ‘if you find yourself committed to the materiality of text’, you also, because of that commitment, find yourself committed to the ‘subject position of the reader’; and if you find yourself committed to the subject position of the reader, then a question about what is there on the page will always really be a question about ‘what’s there to you, a question about what you see’.34 So, despite all the apparent objectivity of The Cantos, its presentation of myriad facts and figures divorced from lyric argument, no line can be discerned according to a schedule other than ‘what does this mean to Pound’? The Cantos, in other words, is a work that fits Lyn Hejinian’s definition of a ‘closed text’, ‘one in which all the elements of the works are directed towards a single reading of it’. Such a text does not ‘invite interpretation’ insofar as it endorses the ‘the authority of the writer over the reader and thus, by analogy, the authority implicit in other (social, economic, cultural) hierarchies’.35 Nowhere is Pound’s brand of readerly ‘materialism’ more apparent than in his engagement with Chinese texts. When Thomas Grieve, in his pioneering ‘Annotations to the Chinese in Section: Rock-Drill’, described ‘Pound’s non-philological breakdown’ of characters, he identified a reading practice wherein, to put it ungenerously but also unequivocally, the reader (in this case Pound) decides willy-nilly what the text means by purposefully ignoring philological convention.36 Indeed, Pound decided early on that looking at Chinese on his own terms, without much apparent training, was not only more expedient, but afforded him clearer ethical and aesthetic insights than were available to someone blinkered by their own expertise. The anecdote in Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir about the inspired amateur’s innate ability to read primitive Chinese serves to conceal an otherwise pretty sweeping suggestion that the only true understanding belongs to a handful of specially qualified artists (GB 46).37 Such faith in the perceptual acuity of certain readers with the right sensibility, like himself, persisted through his career. Even in the 1950s, Pound was still staunchly refusing to accept Achilles Fang’s corrective definitions of ideograms central to his political and poetic thinking. Pound much preferred his own fanciful readings to Fang’s more measured ones, keeping faith in his own interpretations.38 Although ideogrammic writing is basically a form of transhistorical imagination, one that chafes against a wide array of material limitation,39

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:12, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.007

Texts of The Cantos and Theories of Literature

95

it is also prosodically energetic, intellectually impatient, rhythmically idiosyncratic and personally determined. Such writing produces a textuality that tends to foreground its material ‘quiddity’ – Pound’s Cantos is a conspicuously written artefact in this respect. But it does a contingently. Meanings inhere despite not because of the flagrantly material aspect of this writing. Pound’s highly abbreviated style has the opposite effect of minimizing the impositions of the written word. This simple and obvious truth is that Pound’s suppression of the ligatures of logical sense throughout The Cantos – a.k.a. the ideogrammic method – does not save his readers either the time or the trouble of having to traverse them: on the contrary, much of the labour of reading involves painstaking restoration of at least some of the missing contextual information.40 Jerome J. McGann has argued that ‘one of Pound’s greatest contributions to poetry lies concealed in his attentiveness to the smallest details of his texts’ bibliographic codes’.41 This is a persuasive claim. (It is, however, no accident that McGann tends to draw his examples from earlier instalments of Cantos, especially those of its ‘deluxe’ period. Up until about 1930, Pound was quite concerned with the material format of his books.42) The unspoken assumption operating throughout McGann’s writing on bibliographic codes is that they always add, enforce, enrich or somehow complement a work’s meanings. This is because for McGann, a ‘work’ is coterminous with its material representation: ‘textuality cannot be understood except as a phenomenal event’; ‘reading itself can only be understood when it has assumed specific material conditions’.43 In Canto XXVIII, Pound satirized such ‘thick’ materiality: ‘Buk!’ said the Second Baronet, ‘eh . . . ‘Thass a funny lookin’ buk’ said the Baronet Looking at Bayle, folio, 4 vols. in gilt leather, ‘Ah . . . ‘Wu . . . Wu . . . wot you goin’ eh to do with ah . . . ‘ . . . ah read-it?’ Sic loquitur eques (C 139)

This sceptical attitude might be made most explicit towards the conclusion of Canto XCIX – a deeply intertextual canto that, despite its intense ‘written-ness’, aspires to an orality exempt from such documentary transmission – when Pound writes as an aside: ‘no, that is not textual’ (C 732), by which he means to convey the fact that though he is commenting on and at times incorporating others’ texts into his poem, he does not seem particularly interested in specific marks on specific pages, or in the ways these have been received hitherto.44

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:12, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.007

96

michael kindellan

Critical Effects And just as the way in which Pound read texts had a measurable impact upon the kinds of texts he wrote, so too does the way he produced his texts impact upon our reception of them. This is probably true for every text in existence, but it is particularly true of modernist writing like Pound’s, where ‘its subject is often the act and process of writing itself’.45 The ‘processual’ nature of Pound’s poetic is commonly understood as a function of his enthusiasm for the direct treatment of the ‘thing’, where by ‘direct’ is meant something like im-mediate. Over and against the settled finality of gilt leather folios, the notational prosody of The Cantos points to its author’s deep-seated ambivalence about inscription tout court. Formally, the poem appears conjectural, quite literally thrown together, or what George Santayana described as a ‘mental grab-bag’ in need of ‘latent classification’ in order to avoid ‘utter miscellaneousness’.46 Certainly readers will observe the preponderance of the word ‘draft’ in numerous titles of Cantos groupings: A Draft of XVI. Cantos, A Draft of the Cantos 17–27, A Draft of XXX Cantos, A Draft of Cantos XXXI-XLI and of course Drafts & Fragments. That many of these ‘drafts’ were first published deluxe or semi-deluxe editions indicates an on-going contradiction in Pound’s work between the permanent and the transitory.47 ‘Drafts’ is not a metaphorical assignation; it is an instance of right naming: many cantos look like drafts because they quite literally are drafts.48 This renders them susceptible to subsequent revisions that left such a complicated textual history. But it points, I would suggest, to something deeper, namely an abiding respect for the absolute authenticity and authority of the original writing event. Mary de Rachewiltz recently reported that, were it possible, her father would have preferred to publish facsimiles of his notebooks rather than submit his writing to the more intrusive processes of mediation also known as print publication.49 Pound put this preference into action with his 1932 edition of Guido Cavalcanti Rime, insofar as it includes numerous photoreduplications of actual archival material: the idea being that a poet’s original manuscripts are the closest any reader can get to an editorially uninterpolated (which is to say unsocialized) presentation of authorial intentions. And since Pound’s aim is to bring readers into as close an agreement with his intentions as possible, publishing drafts has a sort of logic behind it. His 1937 essay ‘Totalitarian Scholarship and the New Paideuma’ makes his position clear. Calling for a primitive kind of facsimile edition of Vivaldi, Pound declares:

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:12, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.007

Texts of The Cantos and Theories of Literature

97

By all means let us have editors: let our . . . lyric and predatory Nachez lay open, interpret, rewrite and renow [sic] this treasure. . . . BUT let us also have, and for a reasonable price, the verification, the ten inch strip of photographic print which will enable us to distinguish . . . Vivaldi from the great Johann Sebastian where Bach has put new foundations under the swift-writing, inspired Venetian.50

An idea mooted here – one widely shared by textual scholars – is that there is no act of textual transmission that is not also an act of textual corruption. Notwithstanding a certain fetishization of the original compositional scene, Pound’s ideal but impossible solution seems to be, I suppose, to get rid of textual transmission altogether – that is, to have a work that coheres without being degraded by the notes that do not. He aspires instead to create work that need not be read in order to be understood; understanding should, however logistically improbable, precede interpretation, if not rescue us from hermeneutic obligations entirely. Failing this unrealizable ideal, we are left with a situation far more problematic, because if every writing event is provisional, then the grounds upon which we base our critical evaluations are neither as solid nor as significant as we think.

Notes 1. Much of this history has been told in the indispensable work of a handful of scholars. See Barbara Eastman, Ezra Pound’s Cantos: The Story of the Text (Orono: National Poetry Foundation, 1979); Christine Froula, To Write Paradise: Style and Error in Pound’s Cantos (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984); Ronald Bush, The Genesis of Ezra Pound’s Cantos (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989); Lawrence Rainey, Ezra Pound and the Monument of Culture: Text, History and the Malatesta Cantos (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991); Peter Stoicheff, The Hall of Mirrors: Drafts & Fragments and the End of Ezra Pound’s Cantos (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995); Lawrence Rainey, ed., A Poem Containing History: Textual Studies in The Cantos (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), especially Richard Taylor’s essay ‘The History and State of the Texts’, 235–65; and Richard Taylor, ‘The Texts of The Cantos’, The Cambridge Companion to Ezra Pound, ed. Ira B. Nadel (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1999), 161–87. For a recent overview of the state of Pound’s texts generally, not just those of The Cantos, see Mark Byron, ‘Textual Criticism’, in Ezra Pound in Context, ed. Ira B. Nadel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 136–47. 2. Rainey, Poem Containing History, 3.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:12, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.007

98

michael kindellan

3. Peter Stoicheff begins Hall of Mirrors with an anecdote about the nature and the extent of textual discrepancies across different editions of The Cantos. Hall of Mirrors, 1–3. Froula recounts the particularly complex, but not a-typical, genetic history of the texts of ‘Canto 4’ in her To Write Paradise, 53–136. For a demonstration of the deep complexity involved in rationalizing ‘merely’ the different published versions of Pound’s early Cantos texts (i.e., excluding manuscripts and other prepublication material), see Variorum Edition of ‘Three Cantos’ by Ezra Pound: A Prototype, ed. Richard Taylor (Bayreuth: Boomerang Press / Norbert Aas, 1991). 4. Guy Davenport counted 248 variants. See ‘A Collation of Two Texts of The Cantos’, The Pound Newsletter 4 (April 1955): 5–13. In Ezra Pound’s Cantos, Eastman tracks and compares these as manifest in subsequent editions. 5. Hesse marked these in triplicate and sent them to New Directions for a proposed revised edition, which never materialized. She was using Faber’s texts because both she and Laughlin recognized its superiority; eventually Laughlin was forced to abandon plans to adopt Faber’s British text on account of the fact that US copyright law required books be not just bound but physically typeset domestically in order to be afforded legal protection. In subsequent reviews of cantos not included in this edition (i.e., Rock-Drill 1955, Thrones 1959 and Drafts & Fragments 1969), Hesse found and noted scores more suspect readings. 6. Achilles Fang, ‘Materials for the Study of Ezra Pound’s “Cantos”’, PhD dissertation, Harvard University, 1958. 7. Ronald Bush and David Ten Eyck, ‘A Critical Edition of Ezra Pound’s Pisan Cantos: Problems and Solutions’, Textual Cultures 8.2 (2013), 122. 8. Ezra Pound, Letter to James Laughlin, March 1949, New Directions Publishing Corp. Records, circa 1932–97 (MS Am 2077), Item #1371, Houghton Library, Harvard University. 9. Pound, Letter to Mary de Rachewiltz, 11 January 1955, Ezra Pound Papers, YCAL MSS 43, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Box 62, Folder 2739; Pound, Letter to Norman Holmes Pearson, 9 February 1955, Normal Holmes Pearson Papers, YCAL MSS 899, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Box 78. 10. See chapter 1 of Michael Kindellan, The Late Cantos of Ezra Pound: Composition, Revision, Publication (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 1–51. 11. Rainey, Monument of Culture, 69. 12. Michael Reck, Ezra Pound: A Close-Up (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967), 99. 13. Pound, Guide to Kulchur, 55. Pound goes on, advocating instead a nonmaterial, absorptive model of reading – one made effortless by a text’s quasimagical revelatory powers: ‘Man reading shd. / be man intensely alive. The book shd. be a ball of light in one’s hand’. 14. Peter L. Shillingsburg, Scholarly Editing in the Computer Age: Theory and Practice, 3rd ed. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), 42.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:12, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.007

Texts of The Cantos and Theories of Literature

99

15. Shillingsburg, Scholarly Editing, 43. 16. Jean-Michel Rabaté, Language, Sexuality and Ideology in Ezra Pound’s Cantos (Houndmills: Macmillan, 1986), 27. 17. James Thorpe, The Principles of Textual Criticism (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 1972), 6. 18. Thomas G. Tanselle, A Rationale of Textual Criticism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992), 15. 19. Tanselle, Rationale, 17. 20. This line of Tanselle’s thinking is, some might say, decidedly old-fashioned, taking its cue from a set of presumed commonsense truths popularized in 1766 by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing in his Laocoon: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry. I take Pound’s implicit agreement with such thinking as a part of his adversarial modernity – make it new and so on. 21. Tanselle, Rationale, 30. 22. See D. G. Greetham, Textual Transgressions: Essays Towards the Construction of a Bibliography (London: Routledge, 2011). 23. D. C. Greetham, Theories of the Text (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 40. 24. Greetham, Theories of the Text, 40. 25. Divus translates the word δίγονος, meaning twice-born, where most modern scholarly texts invariably give διογενὲς, meaning sprung from Zeus. Here, a character in the text is expressing surprise about the state of the text. 26. Reck, Ezra Pound: A Close-Up, 99. The reader might object that these remarks pertain properly to translation only, but I find this attitude pervasive throughout Pound poetic writing. And as Steven G. Yao has rightly shown, Pound ‘bestow[ed] upon translation, over and above so-called original composition, an explicitly primary and generative, rather than a derivative or supplementary, role in the process of literary culture formation’, in ‘Translation’, Ezra Pound in Context, ed. Ira B. Nadel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 34. 27. Tanselle, A Rationale of Textual Criticism, 15. Tanselle does concede, as Pound would also, that though unreliable, the text is also an indispensable guide to the work as such. 28. Pound, Letter to James Laughlin, 17 May 1956, New Directions Publishing Corp. Records, circa 1932–97 (MS Am 2077) Houghton Library, Harvard University, Item 1371. Pound’s dismissal is pretty rich given the that fact, according to a 20 December 1953 letter from Hugh Kenner, efforts to realize a fully revised text were begun at Pound’s own behest. Suffice it to say that Pound’s thinking about textual matters was thoroughly inconsistent. My suggestion is that this indicates his deeper or more fundamental concerns lay elsewhere. If given a choice between a correct but delayed text and a corrupt but published one, he always opted for the latter. Getting the word right was important, but not as important as getting the word out. 29. Pound, Letter to Norman Holmes Pearson, 15 February 1956, Pearson Papers, Box 78.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:12, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.007

100

michael kindellan

30. Tanselle, A Rationale of Textual Criticism, 68, 78. 31. Cf. Stoicheff’s remark: ‘The always unstable, or only vaguely demarcated, boundary between reader and writer has persisted through The Cantos from its first poem, where Pound’s translation of the Nekuia is both a reading and a writing of it’. Hall of Mirrors, 155. 32. Michaels, Shape of the Signifier, 13. Michaels means ‘materiality’ in a rather different manner than the one I briefly summarized earlier. 33. Pound, Letter to Eva Hesse, 20 June 1951, Eva Hesse Archiv, Munich. 34. Michaels, Shape of the Signifier, 11. 35. Lyn Hejinian, ‘The Rejection of Closure’, in The Language of Inquiry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). 36. Thomas Grieve, ‘Annotations to the Chinese in Section: Rock-Drill’, Paideuma 4.2/3 (Fall and Winter 1974), 398. 37. For a later, slightly altered version of this anecdote, see CWC, 59. 38. Ezra Pound and Achilles Fang, in Ezra Pound’s Chinese Friends, ed. Zhaoming Qian (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 81ff. 39. Charles Olson put this most succinctly when he described The Cantos as material driven through by ‘the beak of [Pound’s] ego’, in Mayan Letters, ed. Robert Creeley (London: Jonathan Cape, 1968), 27. 40. There’s a poignant irony in the fact that a text in many ways written against philology ends up creating so many more philologists. 41. Jerome J. McGann, The Textual Condition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 137. 42. For an extended discussion of this aspect of both McGann’s preferences and Pound’s shifting attitudes, see Miranda B. Hickman, ‘“To Facilitate the Traffic” (Or, “Damn Deluxe Edtns”): Ezra Pound’s Turn from the Deluxe’, Paideuma 28.2/3 (1999), 173–92. 43. McGann, Textual Condition, 11. Cf. Greetham’s comments on Tanselle, cited previously. 44. By ‘that’ Pound refers to his gloss of another withheld ideogram, and by ‘textual’ Pound means philologically justifiable or empirically based. 45. Jerome J. McGann, ‘Ulysses as a Post-Modern Text: The Gabler Edition’, Criticism 27 (1985), 182. 46. George Santayana, Letter to Ezra Pound, 20 January 1940, quoted in Noel Stock, The Life of Ezra Pound (New York: Penguin, 1974), 477. It is tempting to redeem The Cantos on the grounds that it is ideologically closed but formally open, as though the latter undermines the former. I am suggesting there is less of a contradiction here than there seems. 47. For more detailed discussions of Pound’s deluxe outputs, see, in addition to the work by Hickman and McGann noted previously, Olga Nikolova, ‘Ezra Pound: Cantos Deluxe’, Modernism/Modernity 15.1 (January 2008), 155–77; and Michael Kindellan, ‘Ownership and Interpretation: on Ezra Pound’s Deluxe First Editions’, in Reconnecting Aestheticism and Modernism: Continuities, Revisions, Speculations, ed. Bénédicte Coste, Catherine Delyfer and Christine Reynier (London: Routledge, 2017), 187–201.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:12, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.007

Texts of The Cantos and Theories of Literature

101

48. Cf. Pound’s offhand 1918 remark: ‘It has been complained, with some justice, that I dump my note-books on the public’ (LE 9). It must be stated that RockDrill and Thrones are the most textually stable of cantos. 49. Mary de Rachewiltz, in discussion with the author, 5 April 2014. Glenn Horowitz Bookseller’s stunning, uncannily lifelike publication Drafts & Fragments: Facsimile Notebooks (2010) might therefore in some senses fulfil one of Pound’s artistic ambitions. 50. Ezra Pound, ‘Totalitarian Scholarship and the New Paideuma’, ed. Douglas Fox, Germany and You 7.4/5 (25 April 1947), 123–4. W OR KS CI T ED Bush, Ronald, The Genesis of Ezra Pound’s Cantos (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989). Bush, Ronald, and David Ten Eyck, ‘A Critical Edition of Ezra Pound’s Pisan Cantos: Problems and Solutions’, Textual Cultures 8.2 (2013), 121–41. Byron, Mark, ‘Textual Criticism’, in Ezra Pound in Context, ed. Ira B. Nadel, 136–47 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). Davenport, Guy, ‘A Collation of Two Texts of The Cantos’, The Pound Newsletter 4 (April 1955): 5–13. Eastman, Barbara, Ezra Pound’s Cantos: The Story of the Text (Orono: National Poetry Foundation, 1979). Fang, Achille, ‘Materials for the Study of Ezra Pound’s “Cantos”’, PhD dissertation (Harvard University, 1958). Froula, Christine, To Write Paradise: Style and Error in Pound’s Cantos (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984). Greetham, D. G., Textual Transgressions: Essays Towards the Construction of a Bibliography (London: Routledge, 2011). Theories of the Text (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). Grieve, Thomas, ‘Annotations to the Chinese in Section: Rock-Drill’, Paideuma 4.2/3 (Fall and Winter 1974), 361–508. Hejinian, Lyn, The Language of Inquiry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). Hickman, Miranda B., ‘“To Facilitate the Traffic” (Or, “Damn Deluxe Edtns”): Ezra Pound’s Turn from the Deluxe’, Paideuma 28.2/3 (1999), 173–92. Kindellan, Michael, The Late Cantos of Ezra Pound: Composition, Revision, Publication (London: Bloomsbury, 2017). ‘Ownership and Interpretation: on Ezra Pound’s Deluxe First Editions’, in Reconnecting Aestheticism and Modernism: Continuities, Revisions, Speculations, ed. Bénédicte Coste, Catherine Delyfer and Christine Reynier, 187–201 (London: Routledge, 2017). McGann, Jerome J., The Textual Condition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991). ‘Ulysses as a Post-Modern Text: The Gabler Edition’, Criticism 27 (1985), 283–305.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:12, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.007

102

michael kindellan

Nikolova, Olga, ‘Ezra Pound: Cantos Deluxe’, Modernism / Modernity 15.1 (January 2008), 155–77. Olson, Charles, Mayan Letters, ed. Robert Creeley (London: Jonathan Cape, 1968). Pound, Ezra, Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir (New York: New Directions, 1970). Letter to Eva Hesse, 20 June 1951, Eva Hesse Archiv, Munich. Letter to James Laughlin, March 1949, New Directions Publishing Corp. Records, circa 1932–1997 (MS Am 2077), Item #1371, Houghton Library, Harvard University. Letter to James Laughlin, 17 May 1956, New Directions Publishing Corp. Records, circa 1932–1997 (MS Am 2077) Houghton Library, Harvard University, Item 1371. Letter to Mary de Rachewiltz, 11 January 1955, Ezra Pound Papers, YCAL MSS 43, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Box 62, Folder 2739. Letter to Norman Holmes Pearson, 9 February 1955, Normal Holmes Pearson Papers, YCAL MSS 899, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Box 78. Letter to Norman Holmes Pearson, 15 February 1956, Normal Holmes Pearson Papers, YCAL MSS 899, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Box 78. ‘Totalitarian Scholarship and the New Paideuma’, ed. Douglas Fox, Germany and You 7.4/5 ( 25 April 1947), 95–6, 123–4. Qian, Zhaoming, ed., Ezra Pound’s Chinese Friends (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). Rabaté, Jean-Michel, Language, Sexuality and Ideology in Ezra Pound’s Cantos (Houndmills: Macmillan, 1986). Rainey, Lawrence, Ezra Pound and the Monument of Culture: Text, History and the Malatesta Cantos (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991). ed., A Poem Containing History: Textual Studies in The Cantos (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997). Reck, Michael Ezra Pound: A Close-Up (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967). Shillingsburg, Peter L., Scholarly Editing in the Computer Age: Theory and Practice, 3rd ed. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996). Stock, Noel, The Life of Ezra Pound (New York: Penguin, 1974). Stoicheff, Peter, The Hall of Mirrors: Drafts & Fragments and the End of Ezra Pound’s Cantos (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995). Tanselle, Thomas G., A Rationale of Textual Criticism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992). Taylor, Richard, ‘The History and State of the Texts’, in A Poem Containing History: Textual Studies in The Cantos, ed. Lawrence Rainey, 235–65 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997). ‘The Texts of The Cantos’, in The Cambridge Companion to Ezra Pound, ed. Ira B. Nadel, 161–87 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1999).

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:12, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.007

Texts of The Cantos and Theories of Literature

103

ed., Variorum Edition of ‘Three Cantos’ by Ezra Pound: A Prototype (Bayreuth: Boomerang Press / Norbert Aas, 1991). Thorpe, James, The Principles of Textual Criticism (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 1972). Yao, Steven G., ‘Translation’, Ezra Pound in Context, ed. Ira B. Nadel, 33–42 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:12, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.007

chapter 7

Pound and Influence Richard Parker

Told him that the younger poets all learned from him, all derived from him, and were in a sense developing forms that he opened up. And he said, ‘That’s very flattering, but would be very difficult to prove or substantiate’. Allen Ginsberg, Allen Verbatim 1

Ezra Pound has influenced many poets in many ways, both during his lifetime and posthumously. He brought great influence to bear upon his peers about how poetry should be written, establishing and broadcasting the tenets of poetic modernism in English, offering models for how poems could be both far shorter and far longer at the same time as achieving greater focus and covering a broader range of subject than the premodernists imagined. Pound’s interventions around T. S. Eliot’s verse offer the most direct example of that influence. Despite acknowledging that Eliot, uniquely among American writers, ‘had actually trained himself and modernized himself on his own’ (SL 80), Pound worked extensively on Eliot’s work, perhaps most directly in the transition between Eliot’s Poems (1920) and The Waste Land (1922), which saw Eliot initially interpreting Pound’s Imagist concision in Poems, through their shared interest in Théophile Gautier, before adopting a more expansive Poundian ideogrammic method in The Waste Land.2 Arguments have been made for a similarly direct influence on W. B. Yeats and other writers in Pound’s sphere, while seminal essays like ‘A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste’ (1913) and ‘How to Read’ (1929) carried these critical ideas outside of Pound’s peer-group.3 As he was recasting short and long modernist poems, Pound was also establishing the parameters of creative translation, a practice that brought his critical exactitude and poetic sense together. His own work and central influence in this field would focus principally on the Romance languages he studied at university and the poetries of the far east. Among those 104

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:11, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.008

Pound and Influence

105

strongly influenced by these experiments we might think of Louis Zukofsky, Basil Bunting, Paul Blackburn, W. S. Merwin, Richmond Lattimore and Michael Alexander. For all of these Pound both introduced new sonorities and revalued the role of the translator to that of creator. During Pound’s lifetime, his ability to get others published was perhaps his keenest influence. He was practically involved in the launching of careers by diverse poets and movements in the early decades of the twentieth century – his naming of Imagism(e), the professional help he gave to Eliot, H. D. and the Imagists, William Carlos Williams, James Joyce, Robert Frost, Ernest Hemingway, Wyndham Lewis and Louis Zukofsky and the Objectivists are each enough on their own to secure his position in literary history. In this Pound’s influence is singular, as for many of these writers he exerted little to no discernible aesthetic influence while intervening in their careers. Frost and Joyce had no need of Pound’s dicta on writing, but both benefited greatly from his assiduous professional support. Pound’s gift for the promotion of others came together with his aesthetic influence during his work around the launch of the Objectivist poets in the early 1930s. Through this period Pound worked in great detail and with vigorous interest with the younger poet Louis Zukofsky on almost every aspect of Zukofsky’s fledgling movement. As detailed in their correspondence, Pound spoke to Zukofsky about how to write, how to attract writers, how to boost his project and how to secure maximum effective publicity. Pound secured Poetry as the venue of Objectivists, and brought numerous poets into the fold – including established Poundian collaborators like Williams and Eliot. As the Pound/Zukofsky letters show, throughout the process Pound was by turns patrician and collaborative, helpful and demanding, cynical and enthusiastic.4 Another kind of influence which emerges from the Zukofsky correspondence, however, is Pound’s habit of influencing writers away from writing like him. In 1928, for example, Pound tells Zukofsky ‘Where accusation probably false, that reminiscence of E. P. . . . alter, when possible’ (L/LZ 25), with the evidence of ‘A’ suggesting that the younger poet listened and really did move his project away from The Cantos after Pound’s interventions. K. L. Goodwin also detects a similar dynamic with Eliot, musing that Eliot ‘avoided putting into print work that showed traces of Pound’s influence . . . partly because Pound disapproved of the practice’.5 The models of influence above are broadly apolitical. Pound influenced the verse of, and professionally boosted, some poets with politics somewhat in line with his, like Eliot, and did the same for others, like Bunting and

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:11, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.008

106

richard parker

Zukofsky, whose politics opposed his own. This tendency extends throughout Pound’s life and into his posthumous influence. While Pound’s politics are widely discussed in critical readings today, the possibility that those politics might be connected to his contemporary influence is rarely broached.6 Even in his lifetime evidence of Pound’s political understanding influencing other poets is scarce. Goodwin reads Pound’s influence in Williams’s approach to ‘usury’ in parts II and IV of Paterson and, less persuasively, in antisemitism in the poetry of E. E. Cummings.7 In spite of this scant evidence of his direct political influence, however, I would argue that Pound is the preeminent example for political poetry in our time, with the model of a politically-engaged but formally experimental poetry that he arrived at in The Cantos greatly influential for his generation and those that succeeded him. Of writers who have been influenced by Pound’s model of political writing, we might include Zukofsky in the early, Marxist-Leninist sections of ‘A’, Bunting, Hugh MacDiarmid, Allen Ginsberg and the poets I will address below. I will read, then, three political poets who have been influenced by Pound in three markedly different ways. One, Ed Sanders, uses Pound’s methods for self-promotion to provide an effective critique of the poet, his methods and politics. Another, Amiri Baraka, employs Poundian personae to reflect his profound ambivalence about the Poundian inheritance. The third, Keston Sutherland, employs Pound’s invective both to persuade in a Poundian sense and to question the violence in Pound’s verse and his own. None of these poets were influenced by Pound’s politics, yet all of them were influenced by Pound’s political poetry. This model of Pound-influenced political poetry emerges in the mid1960s. Pound was still alive, disconnected from contemporary poetics but occasionally engaging with younger poets, while the critical machinery of the Pound industry was already in movement and the process of embalming Pound’s reputation and oeuvre already beginning.8 This was the last period in which the two sides of Pound’s influence existed at the same time, and the way that they came together at this moment would colour Pound’s practical influence since his death. A clear example of the complexity of Pound’s influence in the countercultural generation can be read in the Fuck You Press edition of Cantos 110–116. In 1967 the poet, musician and activist Ed Sanders produced a pirated edition of a series of cantos that had appeared in unfinished versions in various journals, but which Pound was in no hurry to finalize for publication. The poems that would make up this volume passed

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:11, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.008

Pound and Influence

107

through Donald Hall’s and Tom Clark’s hands before finding their way into Sanders’s, who then quickly published a rough-and-ready volume on his own mimeograph machine ‘at a secret location / in the lower east side’.9 Peter Stoicheff plays down the significance of the Fuck You edition, seeing it as an errant precursor to the established volume Drafts and Fragments of Cantos CX-CXVII (1968) and only commenting that ‘except for a couple of visual misreadings in its Canto CX, no substantive errors were introduced into the edition’.10 That Cantos 110–116 had little direct input on the poems is beside the point. It is the action of this intervention that is the point, with Pound’s practical genius offering Sanders the model for his intervention, and the activist poetics of which it is a part. Daniel Tiffany wonders whether Andy Warhol, a Fuck You collaborator, ‘was the new Pound?’11 This question could also be asked of Sanders, whose career and strategies run even closer to the modernist’s than Warhol’s, providing a direct link between Pound’s practices and the counterculture. Sanders’s aesthetic/activist programme often seems an updated version of Pound’s frenetic activity. Pound, in essays like ‘The Serious Artist’ (1913) and the social poetics of The Cantos, insists on the political and cultural commitment of the worthwhile poet – positions that align closely with Sanders’s practice and his concept of the ‘Total Assault on the Culture’, which sought to bring cultural and political activism together into a less nihilistic version of Warhol’s Happening.12 Sanders’s programme was wideranging: from sit-ins protesting nuclear weapons13 – itself a question that appears when ‘The scientists are in terror’ in Canto 115 / ‘From Canto CXV’ in Cantos 110–11614 – to the vibrant political and cultural discourse of Fuck You / A Magazine of the Arts, a publication that, from 1962 to 1965, served to launch, boost and support Sanders’s circle in the Poundian fashion.15 Sanders also made a moderate success of his band, the Fugs, offering a countercultural twist on Pound’s musical interventions of the 1920s and 1930s. Beyond these broad similarities, however, concrete influence can be traced. Sanders uses explicitly Poundian terms to characterize his youthful careerism, writing that in the early 1960s he ‘was chasing what Ezra Pound called “the white stag of fame”’.16 He also returns to Pound for the terms of his political invective, quoting from the Hell Cantos (1925) in ‘A Fuck You Position Paper: Resistance Against Goon Squads’ (1964) – which is partly written in the form of an exchange with Ginsberg – in enthusiastic defence of hippy New York: ‘If a city or state official lacks a very liberal sensitivity toward sex, cocksucking, dope & welfare, then the fuckhate should be zapped off the set. It’s hard not to be bitter against these . . . “vice crusaders

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:11, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.008

108

richard parker

farhting [sic] through silk” waving their penny whistle censor’s flags’.17 Sanders quotes and then paraphrases from Canto XIV, the original reading: ‘the vicecrusaders, fahrting through silk, / waving the Christian symbols, / frigging a tin penny whistle’ (C 63). The hypocrites who preached moral sanctity while taking the people into the Great War are Pound’s target in the 1920s and are here comparable in 1964 to the ‘military-industrial-surrealist complex’ that was pursuing war in Vietnam.18 These themes are combined with a typically Poundian intertextuality and a disorientingly ideogrammic arrangement of tones and themes, while both Pound and Sanders treat their subject with a deeply moral, proselytizing anger. This combination of formal juxtapositions and moral condemnation is at the root of Pound’s political method, and central to his legacy for the activist poets who have followed him. Yet while Sanders agrees with Pound’s pacifism and excoriating anger at the profiteers, he remains profoundly ambivalent about Pound’s later politics. In 1963 Sanders visited the Library of Congress to read transcripts of Pound’s wartime radio broadcasts and happened to encounter a group of American neo-Nazis during his visit.19 Sanders characterizes this moment as an epiphany regarding Pound’s influence, and is candid about the depth of their disagreement, expressing ‘serious second thoughts’ throughout, while continuing to engage in poetic and organizational strategies that are fundamentally Poundian.20 Pound’s political method, however, is effective enough to accommodate differing political outlooks. Sanders’s booklength poem 1968: A History in Verse (1997), for example, applies a distinctively Poundian line and habits of reference to a history of progressive politics and the Yippy movement, while the multivolume America: A History in Verse (2000–4) similarly employs Poundian methods towards Sanders’s own ends. This ambivalence can be seen as one of the defining elements of the countercultural influence of Pound, in distinction to Pound’s New Critical and institutional rehabilitations, which sought to minimize the poet’s politics and thus his political-poetic methods. Poets like Sanders and Ginsberg sought to understand Pound even as they disagreed with him, their distance from Pound’s understanding of history generating a productive dialectical potentiality in their work. When we turn to Cantos 110–116, we can see this position imbricated into the book-object itself. It is large format, 215 mm by 280 mm, printed on cheap paper stock and crudely stapled down one edge. Its style is that of the ‘zine’ – cheap and easily distributable, far from the kinds of canonconscious luxury printing Pound engaged in with the early decades of The Cantos.21 Likewise, the aesthetics of this object refute the establishment claims of authenticity of the New Directions editions of the last sections of

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:11, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.008

Pound and Influence

109

The Cantos, with their staid emphasis on monochrome and text-heavy cover design. Sanders’s methods, however, are not so far from the strategic uses of the material of printing that Pound employed. Sanders goes with a homoerotic collage cover design by Joe Brainard, and a hand-drawn colophon that features an image of ‘Gash Cow’ lactating flowers alongside an ejaculating penis.22 This is calculatedly provocative – though it is perhaps no more calculated than Pound’s material strategies in works like A Draft of XVI Cantos (1925) and A Draft of the Cantos 17–27 (1928). This is printing as critique in that Sanders establishes a ‘bibliographical code’ that incorporates both the example of Pound and countercultural ambivalence towards him.23 Chelsea Jennings sees Sanders’s edition, in its bringing together of the mimeograph revolution with Pound’s indeterminate authorship and modernist aesthetics, as insisting on The Cantos as ‘an evolving project whose reach extends into the next generation of American poetry’.24 The text evolves in that it insists on Pound’s position while actively reimagining it – building on the work done throughout this long project. M. L. Rosenthal writes that ‘[n]o American poet since Pound has come closer to making poetry and politics reciprocal forms of action’ than Amiri Baraka, a poet who attempts a very different application of Pound’s activist poetics than Sanders, though Pound is as present in this work as he is in Sanders’s editing.25 As with Sanders, Baraka’s Poundian inheritance is dialectical and will entail a working through of his attitudes towards his poetic forebear, though in this case the dialectics will be more transitional, leading to a poetics that, in a fashion, come to lay Pound’s influence aside. Pound’s protégé John Kasper – who offers another model of Poundian influence during this period – appears in ‘Hymn for Lanie Poo’, the second poem of Baraka’s first volume of poetry, Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note (1961).26 In some ways Kasper’s early career mirrors Sanders’s: he founded a countercultural bookstore, Make It New, in 1953, a decade before Sanders opened his Peace Eye Bookstore. It became a key locale in the New York underground while his Square $ book series promulgated Poundian ideas through a distribution system somewhat similar to Fuck You.27 But Kasper would turn from the cultural sphere to direct political engagement in support of Poundian positions – agitating aggressively in support of segregation during the 1960s. Up to the mid-1950s at least, Kasper’s attitude towards African Americans seems to have remained relatively unprejudiced, but by the time Baraka came to write ‘Hymn for Lanie Poo’, his white supremacists politics were notoriously in place.28 The mention in ‘Hymn for Lanie Poo’ is brief – ‘Oh

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:11, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.008

110

richard parker

I knew / John Kasper when he hung around with shades . . . ’ – though it speaks to some important dialectics in Baraka’s early verse.29 In this poem and throughout his first two volumes, the poet problematizes unspoken tensions in the bohemian community of the period. ‘Hymn for Lanie Poo’ is made up of a collage of voices communicating different aspects of hip, Bohemian and black bourgeoise experiences – experiences which are revealed as tense and powerfully ambiguous. Kristen Gallagher writes that this poem ‘seems to critique both bohemians and the black bourgeoisie’, but that the ‘poem is less about Jones making a critique, and more about the discourse landscape he finds himself trapped in as a black poet and intellectual. He wants a life in art, not in politics, but politics follows him everywhere’.30 Here a certain type of politics is personified in Kasper, who also stands for Pound and his model of a political poetics that is unavoidable and undesirable in equal measure. ‘A Contract. (For the Destruction and Rebuilding of Paterson)’, from Baraka’s 1964 collection The Dead Lecturer, evidences an intensely ambivalent relation to Pound and modernism. The inclusion of Paterson in the title references both Baraka’s home state and William Carlos Williams’s long modernist poem, left incomplete in 1963 at his death. Baraka’s poem points up the financial skulduggery and institutional corruption destroying Paterson; the ‘rude hierarchy of money’ that Baraka perceives at work in the city certainly sounds Poundian.31 We can see here, in the reuse of Pound’s and Williams’s methods, an implicit dialectical critique – one that runs right through Baraka’s détournement of Pound. As William J. Harris writes, ‘[i]n rewriting white texts, in criticizing white visions of reality, Baraka creates a new vision that fuses the forms and ideas he learned from others with the realities of his experience as a black man in America’.32 Other moments in Baraka’s early work suggest Poundian cultural considerations, including ‘Rhythm & Blues (1)’, with its screams of ‘“Economics” my God, “Economics”’,33 recalls the irony of Arthur Griffith’s cameo in Canto XIX (1928): ‘Can’t move ’em with a cold thing like economics’ (C 85). ‘The Politics of Rich Painters’ posits, with its ‘whimpering pigment of a decadent economy’,34 an economy of the contemporary arts that recalls Pound’s early criticism and the regretful ennui of Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920). Both of these moments, like ‘A Contract’, are from The Dead Lecturer, a volume that recalls the sentiments and analysis of Pound’s Mauberley throughout. ‘Politics’ gives Baraka’s book its title and offers a self-obituary reminiscent of Pound’s ‘E. P. / Ode Pour L’Élection de Son Sépulchre’, the first section of Mauberley in

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:11, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.008

Pound and Influence

111

which Pound imagines an alter-ego trapped in 1890s aestheticism. Pound closes his poem with his character’s demise: Unaffected by ‘the march of events’, He passed from men’s memory in l’an tretiesme De son eage; the case presents No adjunct to the Muses’ diadem.

(PT 549)

The tone of ‘Politics’ is angrier, but no less defeatist: Undone by the logic of any specific death. (Old gentlemen) who still follow fires, tho are quieter and less punctual. It is a polite truth we are left with. Who are you? What are you saying? Something to be dealt with, as easily. The noxious game of reason, saying, ‘No, No, you cannot feel’, like my dead lecturer lamenting thru gipsies his fast suicide.35

The dead lecturer is Baraka’s Mauberley, his death as necessary for his poetic rebirth as Pound’s character. Pound uses Mauberley to both criticize himself and the decadence of the society around him, clearing the ground for political commitment and The Cantos. The Dead Lecturer performs the same transitional function for Baraka’s oeuvre, with the poet exploring anxieties to do with race and class in relation to an autobiographical persona, laying the groundwork for the radical social analysis that follows.36 Mauberley preceded Pound’s move away from London and turn towards political verse, while The Dead Lecturer precedes Baraka’s name change from LeRoi Jones; the poet ends the volume with the comment ‘When they say, “It is Roi / who is dead?” I wonder / who will they mean?’37 In 1967 he would change his name to Imamu Amear Baraka (later becoming Amiri Baraka), an expression of his growing concern with Black Nationalism and the forging of a commensurate poetics. Similarly, Pound was in his midthirties when he imagined Mauberley’s death at thirty and Baraka was in his thirtieth year as he published The Dead Lecturer. The book can be seen, then, as a clearing of the decks, addressing the particular anxieties of this particular poet as he sought to ready himself for his major task, and using Poundian methods to move away from the Poundian white Bohemian Beat scene. At the end of the volume, LeRoi Jones ceases to exist, the poet sloughs off an old identity while preparing to move on to a more focused social critique, moving away from the Poundian tradition to create a distinctively Black American poetics, though the new poetry would retain Poundian influence.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:11, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.008

112

richard parker

As William J. Harris writes, ‘rejecting the white avant-garde artists was also to be true to them; turning their weapons against them was still to use the weapons they gave him’.38 Baraka’s mature work – the poetry of his Black Nationalist and Marxist Leninist phases – is characterized by an ideogrammic proselytizing that tracks back to Pound. It is also, at moments, intensely antisemitic, employing a violence of expression in his use of racially charged language that bears some comparison with Pound. Baraka discusses the particulars of his antisemitism in ‘Confessions of a Former Anti-Semite’ in The Village Voice (1980). There Baraka explicitly links his prejudice to an encounter with black nationalists in 1967, and reads his antisemitism through the paradigm of his blackness throughout.39 The extent to which Pound’s politics and racial language offered Baraka a model for his verse is imponderable. It is clear, however, that the ambiguities around Pound’s politics were useful for Baraka in his exploration of the Bohemian mid-century poetry scene – allowing him to expose unspoken attitudes towards race in the white counterculture, and thus creating the space in which his mature poetry would develop. Ginsberg asserts that ‘Baraka came a great deal out of Pound with the particularism of his Black revolution’, and while Baraka’s second and third poetic periods do not retain the Poundian sonorities of his first volumes, it is clear that Pound’s example is key in the dialectics that leads to that poetry.40 Of the next generation of American writers, the Language Poets would seem most committed to the Poundian-activist tradition. Their combination of political commitment with avant-garde formalism and groupbuilding tends towards the Poundian, though it is an influence mediated through Zukofsky and balanced by Gertrude Stein. Perhaps Ron Silliman’s attempt to demonstrate historical materialism through the technique of the ‘New Sentence’ in poems likes Tjanting (1981), with his stipulation that in this new arrangement of meaning the ‘[p]rimary syllogistic movement is toward the paragraph as a whole, or the total work’, can be read as ideogrammic and derived from the subject-rhymes of Pound’s technique in The Cantos.41 Similarly, the long-form ideogrammic / Vorticist poetics of The Cantos can be discerned in the ten-volume group-autobiography of The Grand Piano by Rae Armantrout, Steve Benson, Carla Harryman, Lyn Hejinian, Tom Mandel, Ted Pearson, Bob Perelman, Kit Robinson, Silliman and Barrett Watten, as well as in Silliman’s ongoing enormous Ketjak project (1974–). These poets’ concentration on post-structuralist understandings of language seems a long way from Pound’s poetics, however.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:11, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.008

Pound and Influence

113

Across the Atlantic versions of Pound’s political poetics were promulgated through the British Poetry Revival and the Cambridge School through the 1970s, with the Cambridge version descended through Charles Olson and Ed Dorn to J. H. Prynne.42 For Prynne the extended ideogrammic method is the central Poundian inheritance. A letter to Charles Olson in May 1963 details the manner in which the Englishman reads Pound’s organizational strategies in The Cantos: the monolinear sequence allows too little breadth of narrative, too little space in which to deploy the larger patterns of awareness. The locus, that is, as well as the vector (or, as I revert to it, the noun as well as the verb). The overall Poundian structure, even, as a form of parallelistic gerundial patternment.43

Josh Kotin and Ryan Dobran have shown how integral Poundian methods are to Prynne’s poetics and the ways in which his poems deal with knowledge.44 Laura Kilbride, meanwhile, makes a provocative case for a Poundian influence in the work of British poet-activist Anna Mendelssohn – emphasizing the extent to which ambivalence and influence are intertwined in the reception of this poet.45 Second-generation Cambridge poet Keston Sutherland’s ‘In Memory of Your Occult Convolutions’ (2011) offers a rubric for the understanding of Pound as poet and critic for contemporary poet-activists.46 Sutherland’s text is principally a collage of quotes from the essays ‘How to Read’ (1929), ‘The Serious Artist’ (1913), ‘The Teacher’s Mission’ (1934) and ‘The Constant Preaching to the Mob’ (1916), with an epistrophe, ‘it shall be you’, from section 24 of Walt Whitman’s ‘Song of Myself’, while the title gestures towards Frank O’Hara’s ‘In Memory of My Feelings’ and ‘Occult Convolutions’ also taken from section 24 of ‘Song of Myself’. Pound’s essays are quoted in the same unchronological order in which they are collected in T. S. Eliot’s edition of the Literary Essays of Ezra Pound (1963). Sutherland’s poem forms a provocatively Poundian détournement of the original texts, the poet selecting Pound’s barbed insults apparently without concern for the critical context in which they are placed. Thus the beginning of the piece opens with the following extracts from ‘How to Read’: Low-brow reader, it shall be you; those who try to make a bog, a marasmus, a great putridity in place of a sane and active ebullience, from sheer simian and pig-like stupidity; half-knowing and half-thinking critics with one barrel of sawdust to each half-bunch of grapes; out-weariers of Apollo continuing in Martian generalities, it shall be you; all those with minds still hovering above their testicles; less determinate sorts of people who

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:11, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.008

114

richard parker comprise the periphery; the diluters whose produce is of low intensity, some flabbier variant, some diffuseness in the wake of the valid; those who add but some slight personal flavour, some minor variant of a mode, without affecting the main course of the story; those who at their faintest do not exist, it shall be you.47

This is an act of violent appropriation of Pound’s words that bears comparison with Sanders’s treatment of Cantos 110–116. The names of those Pound insults are excised, as is much of the material of his ire and the historical contexts of his essays. We are left with a distillation of the American’s invective that makes a mockery of Pound’s vaunted critical specificity, and offers an irreverent challenge to the wider contextualities of the ideogram celebrated by Prynne, Silliman and others. This pure anger is related to those elements of Pound’s practice inherited by Sanders and Baraka, with Sutherland offering something of a caricature of their influences – asking, in a way which is as self-reflexive as the poems of The Dead Lecturer – whether the contemporary inheritance from Pound is simply sound and fury and, consequently, where that might leave late modernist poetics. In The Odes to TL61P (2013) Sutherland warns the reader that ‘[i]t’s not enough to do Pound in indifferent voices’, which seems very much like what he does in ‘In Memory of Your Occult Convolutions’.48 This dilemma is present through Sutherland’s verse, which is both committed to revolutionary invective and anxious about the efficacy and unintended consequences of the wielding of that righteous anger. Among those Sutherland-influenced Poundians we might include Joe Luna, whose volume Ten Zones contains an epigraph from Pound’s translation of Cavalcanti’s canzone ‘Donna mi priegha’, with the philosophic love poetry of Cavalcanti – as imagined into being by Pound in his various translations – forming a machine for looking with that works effectively with Luna’s austere and careful poetics. In this application of Cavalcanti we immediately think of Zukofsky’s detournings of ‘Donna mi priegha’ in his multiple versions of ‘A’-9 – a locale for an intense agon around the problematics of influence. Meanwhile, Luna’s Data for Ethics (2015) takes its title from ‘The Serious Artist’.49 This volume, typically for these later generations of Pound-influenced poets, takes up argument with Pound at the same time as offering partial endorsement of his educative aims. Luna wonders at Pound’s insistence that poetry can provide this kind of ‘data for ethics’, both insisting on poetry’s ethical project and responsibility, while focusing on the failure of poetry to offer meaningful ethical models. Here the moment of ethical failure is highlighted by the failure of Europe to deal ethically with the Mediterranean refugee crisis, a historical particular

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:11, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.008

Pound and Influence

115

carefully unfolded in a poetics which fails again and again to offer the aesthetic certainty of Pound’s conception of ‘ethics’ in ‘The Serious Artist’. Other parts of the American poetic world have continued to employ Pound’s methods to different ends from The Cantos. Claudia Rankine’s long poem Citizen: An American Lyric (2014) is perhaps the most prominent recent example of these. Rankine’s long, hybrid text bears remarkable similarities to The Cantos – with its sections mixing genres, types of texts and critical portrait of American society, it is ideogrammic in its construction. Her application of these techniques to a thorough-going critique of American society feels close to The Cantos – and, once again, wholly opposed to his politics. It can be argued that Pound’s demarcation of the kinds of roles a Svengali-like figure of Pound’s ilk can play in the creation and construction of poetic scenes is still influential. Perhaps recent developments which push back against the phallocentric modernist tradition of provocation, such as the ‘No Manifesto for Poetry Readings and Listservs and Magazines and “Open Versatile Spaces Where Cultural Production Flourishes”’, mark the passing of a century of Poundian careerism and canon building.50 Having said this, an extensive range of contemporary poetic activity is indebted to Pound’s influence well beyond the Anglo-American poetic scene. The Cantos have been translated into several Slavic languages in recent years (by Czeslaw Karkowski into Polish, Ihor Kostets’kyi into Ukrainian, Vojo Sindolic into Serbo-Croatian and Ian Probstein into Russian51), and his influence on such writers as Tadeusz Rozewicz, Halina Poświatowska and Tadeusz Pióro (who wrote his doctoral dissertation on Pound and James Joyce) has shaped Slavic poetics in recent years. This extensive influence should be measured alongside Pound’s impact upon Latin American poetics, such as the work of the Nicaraguan poet Ernesto Cardenal and the Peruvian poet Antonio Cisneros. Rodolfo Jaruga has written on Pound’s continuing influence in Brazil through the Noigandres movement and other cultural manifestations,52 while Fernando Pérez Villalón has written on the poet’s reception in Chile.53 Pound’s near-global influence on poetry and poetic practice over the last half-century takes on particular resonance in the context of Chinese poetry from the Cultural Revolution onwards. Yunte Huang has translated The Pisan Cantos into Mandarin and other translation projects followed, while Pound’s influence on the Misty poets and the postTianenmen generation is sufficiently significant to warrant separate treatment. Make It New’s occasional ‘Ezra Pound in the World’ section continues to shed light on Pound’s reception around the globe:

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:11, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.008

116

richard parker

Mohammad Shaheen has written on Pound’s place in contemporary Arabic literature and Seda Şen Alta has complied a bibliography of Pound studies in Turkey.54 The three poets I have concentrated on – Sanders, Baraka and Sutherland – offer applications of Pound that are profoundly different, though the manner in which each of them appropriates Pound connects these disparate oeuvres. For Sanders Pound is the organizer, a promoter suited to the counterculture whose works must be reclaimed, repackaged and critiqued through activist poetics. For Baraka the oppressive ubiquity of Pound’s poetic presence at mid-century offers an opportunity for creating complicatedly Poundian personae that serve to work through Baraka’s Poundian inheritance, laying the groundwork for a poetry of intense political commitment. Sutherland’s poem risks greater proximity to Pound’s words, forcing the reader to consider the efficacy and violence of both Pound’s and Sutherland’s activist poetics. The dialectics of each of these models of influence offers an insight into the complexity of Pound’s wider influence today – each poet uses elements of Pound’s method to critique the poet’s political poetics, a factor that speaks to the continued necessity of engagement with this most controversial poet.

Notes 1. Allen Ginsberg, Allen Verbatim: Lectures on Poetry, Politics, Consciousness, ed. Gordon Ball (New York: McGraw Hill, 1975), 187. 2. See K. L. Goodwin, The Influence of Ezra Pound (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966), 117–22. 3. See James Longenbach, Stone Cottage: Pound, Yeats and Modernism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). 4. See Ezra Pound and Louis Zukofsky, Pound/Zukofsky: Selected Letters of Ezra Pound and Louis Zukofsky, ed. Barry Ahearn (New York: New Directions, 1987). Much of this volume is dedicated to the frenetic activity preceding the launch of the Objectivists, with the many letters between 1930 and 1931 offering most detail about Pound’s strategies. 5. Goodwin, The Influence of Ezra Pound, 142. 6. Recent publications, including Alec Marsh’s John Kasper and Ezra Pound: Saving the Republic (London: Bloomsbury, 2015) and Matthew Feldman’s Ezra Pound’s Fascist Propaganda, 1935–45 (London: Palgrave Pivot, 2013), have expanded our knowledge of the facts of Pound’s political engagement, while Michael Kindellan, The Late Cantos of Ezra Pound: Composition, Revision, Publication (London: Bloomsbury, 2017) insists on the centrality of those politics to Pound’s late poetics.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:11, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.008

Pound and Influence

117

7. Goodwin, The Influence of Ezra Pound, 35, 175. 8. D. D. Paige’s Letters of Ezra Pound was published in 1950, Hugh Kenner’s The Poetry of Ezra Pound was published in 1951, John Hamilton Edwards and William V. Vasse’s Annotated Index to the Cantos of Ezra Pound was published in 1959 and a gradually increasing number of other monographs and articles appeared throughout the 1960s. 9. The location is taken from the colophon of Cantos 110–116 and appears throughout the run of Fuck You Press pamphlets and Fuck You / A Magazine of the Arts. It is notable how quickly most accounts of this moment have passed over Sanders’s intervention. Peter Stoicheff, in The Hall of Mirrors: Drafts and Fragments and the End of Ezra Pound’s Cantos (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), the fullest account of the poetry of Drafts and Fragments, dedicates just a couple of pages (58–60) to the Fuck You Press, with only glancing references to Sanders, while A. David Moody, in Ezra Pound: Poet: A Portrait of the Man and His Work, Vol. 3, The Tragic Years 1939–1972 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), passes over the episode entirely. The fullest accounts can be found in Sanders’s own Fug You: An Informal History of the Peace Eye Bookstore, the Fuck You Press, the Fugs, and Counterculture in the Lower East Side (New York: Da Capo, 2011) and Chelsea Jennings’s ‘Pirating Pound: Drafts and Fragments in 1960s Mimeograph Culture’, Journal of Modern Literature 40.1: Poetry: New Discoveries, New Interpretations (Fall 2016), 88–108. 10. Stoicheff, Hall of Mirrors, 60. 11. Daniel Tiffany, My Silver Planet: A Secret History of Poetry and Kitsch (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), 169–70. 12. Sanders, Fug You, xiv. 13. Sanders, Fug You, 10–14. 14. Ezra Pound, The Cantos of Ezra Pound (New York: New Directions, 1996), 814; Pound, Cantos 110–116, unpaginated. This late fragment became something of a favorite of the counterculture. Ginsberg calls it ‘[t]he last great Canto’, Allen Verbatim, 185. 15. ‘I sent copies of F. Y. [Fuck You / A Magazine of the Arts] to Pablo Picasso, Samuel Beckett in Ussy-sur-Marne, Nikita Kruschev, Jean Paul Sartre, Charles Olson in Gloucester, Fidel Castro in Cuba, and Allen Ginsberg care of an American Express office in India. . . . I also sent the magazine to Edward Dahlberg, Gary Snyder, Robert Duncan, and others’. Sanders, Fug You, 16. This list closely resembles the types of lists Pound would send to young editors as he coached them in scene building. 16. Sanders, Fug You, 15. Ezra Pound, ‘The White Stag’, in Poems and Translations, ed. Richard Sieburth (New York: Library of America, 2003), 101. 17. Fuck You / A Magazine of the Arts 5.7 (September 1964), quoted in Sanders, Fug You, 100. 18. Sanders, Fug You, 241. 19. Sanders, Fug You, 47–8.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:11, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.008

118

richard parker

20. Sanders, Fug You, 49, 86. 21. See Jerome J. McGann, Black Riders: The Visible Language of Modernism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 79–80. 22. Stoicheff, The Hall of Mirrors, 59. 23. Jerome J. McGann writes of ‘bibliographical codes’ that ‘both linguistic and bibliographical texts are symbolic and signifying mechanisms. Each generates meaning, and while the bibliographical text commonly functions in a subordinate relation to the linguistic text, “meaning” in literary work results from the exchanges these two great semiotic mechanisms work with each other’. See Jerome J. McGann, The Textual Condition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 67. 24. Jennings, ‘Pirating Pound’, 91. 25. Quoted in William J. Harris, ‘Introduction’, in The LeRoi Jones / Amiri Baraka Reader, ed. William J. Harris (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1991), xxi. 26. Clive Webb is helpful in establishing the extent of Pound’s direct influence on Kasper. See Rabble Rousers: The American Far Right in the Civil Rights Era (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011), 50–3. 27. See Alec Marsh, John Kasper and Ezra Pound, 36–43. Marsh reports that ‘Kasper found that his shop attracted Black Nationalists – who were unfazed by the shop’s anti-Semitic politics’, 41. 28. See Alec Marsh, John Kasper and Ezra Pound, 47–51 for discussion of Kasper’s attitudes during his Bohemian phase. 29. Amiri Baraka, SOS: Poems 1961–2013 (New York: Grove Press, 2014), 10. 30. Kristen Gallagher, ‘On LeRoi Jones, “Preface to A Twenty-Volume Suicide Note”’, Jacket2, http://jacket2.org/article/leroi-jones-preface-twenty-volumesuicide-note, accessed 26 February 2018. 31. Baraka, SOS, 52. 32. William J. Harris, The Jazz Aesthetic: The Poetry and Poetics of Amiri Baraka (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1985), 22–3. 33. Baraka, SOS, 81. 34. Baraka, SOS, 72. 35. Baraka, SOS, 107–8. 36. Michael Coyle, Daniel Tiffany and Peter Wilson all call Mauberley a ‘transitional’ poem: Michael Coyle, ‘Ezra Pound: Hugh Selwyn Mauberley’, in A Companion to Modernist Literature and Culture, ed. Peter Bradshaw and Kevin J. H. Dettmar (London: John Wiley, 2008), 439; Daniel Tiffany, Radio Corpse: Imagism and the Cryptaesthetic of Ezra Pound (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 55; Peter Wilson, A Preface to Ezra Pound (London: Routledge, 2014), 152. The LeRoi Jones / Amiri Baraka Reader – which is organized in sections established in collaboration with Baraka himself – categorizes The Dead Lecturer as a part of ‘The Transitional Period’ (vi), a designation which various critics have found central to the text, including Daniel Matlin in On the Corner: African American Intellectuals and the Urban Crisis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:11, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.008

Pound and Influence

37. 38. 39.

40. 41. 42.

43. 44.

119

University Press, 2013), 147; James Campbell in Syncopations: Beats, New Yorkers, and Writers in the Dark (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 140; and Walton M. Muyumba in The Shadow and the Act: Black Intellectual Practice, Jazz Improvisation, and Philosophical Pragmatism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 133. Baraka, SOS, 115. William J. Harris, The Jazz Aesthetic: The Poetry and Poetics of Amiri Baraka (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1985), 30. See Amiri Baraka, ‘Confessions of a Former Anti-Semite’, The Village Voice 25.50 (17–23 December 1980), 1. Baraka, later in the same article, triangulates his prejudice with ‘suburban prejudice’ (Michael Reck, Ezra Pound: A Close Up [New York: McGraw Hill, 1973], 154) of whites like Pound: ‘Jews were different from other white people. They were more lowly regarded than other white people, at least by white people. Though in my childhood and adolescence there were no teachings of anti-Semitism within my family or in the Black neighbourhood I lived in, there was always an undercurrent of feeling that the Jews were something “other”’. ‘Confessions’, 19. Ginsberg, Allen Verbatim, 182. Ron Silliman, ‘The New Sentence’, The New Sentence (New York: Roof, 2003), 91. The material collected in Certain Prose of The English Intelligencer, ed. Neil Pattison, Reitha Pattison and Luke Roberts (Cambridge: Mountain Press, 2014) makes Olson’s importance to the Cambridge inheritance clear. More broadly, the application of Pound’s practices in contemporary avant-garde poetics in the UK can be traced to two main disseminators, Eric Mottram at Kings College London and J. H. Prynne in Cambridge. See Richard Parker, ‘“Here’s Your Fucking Light Shithead”: Ezra Pound and Contemporary British Poetry’, in News from Afar: Ezra Pound and Some Contemporary British Poetries, ed. Richard Parker (Bristol: Shearsman, 2015), 9–20, for an overview of this bifurcated influence. For material relating to Mottram’s impact, see also in the same volume Robert Hampson’s ‘Eric Mottram and Ezra Pound: “There is no substitute for a life-time”’ (53–85), and Gavin Selerie’s ‘Pound and Contemporary British Poetry: The Loosening of Form’ (212–28). Anthony Mellors’s Late Modernist Poetics: From Pound to Prynne (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005) also contains material on this topic. Charles Olson and J. H. Prynne, The Collected Letters of Charles Olson and J. H. Prynne (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2017), 63. See Josh Kotin, ‘Blood-Stained Battle-Flags: Ezra Pound, J. H. Prynne and Classical Chinese Poetry’, in News from Afar: Ezra Pound and Some Contemporary British Poetries, ed. Richard Parker (Bristol: Shearsman, 2015), 133–41, and Ryan Dobran, ‘Myth, Culture and Text: Ezra Pound’s Homer and J. H. Prynne’s Aristeas’, in News from Afar, 142–60.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:11, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.008

120

richard parker

45. Laura Kilbride, ‘“Real Games with Books”: On Anna Mendelssohn and Ezra Pound’, in News from Afar, 184–93. 46. For a detailed gloss on the Pound materials collected in this poem, see Richard Parker, ‘On In Memory of Your Occult Convolutions’, Glossator 8 (November 2013), 317–44. 47. Keston Sutherland, ‘In Memory of Your Occult Convolutions’, in News from Afar, 21. 48. Keston Sutherland, The Odes to TL61P (London: Enitharmon, 2013), 31. 49. Pound writes: ‘As our treatment of man must be determined by our knowledge of what man is, the arts provide data for ethics’. Ezra Pound, Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. T. S. Eliot (New York: New Directions, 1968), 46. 50. The Chicago Review, Fall 2014–Winter 2015, 221–32. 51. The Pound Society’s quarterly newsletter has recently published a selection of articles on the subject of ‘Pound in Russia’, in Make It New 4.3 (December 2017), http://makeitnew.ezrapoundsociety.org/pound-in-russia. 52. ‘Ezra Pound’s Arrival in Brazil’, Make It New 4.1–2 (September 2017), http://makeitnew.ezrapoundsociety.org/volume-iv/4-1-2-september-2017/ ezra-pound-in-the-world. 53. ‘Versions, Variations, and Reverberations: Ezra Pound in Chile’, Make It New 3.4 (April 2017), http://makeitnew.ezrapoundsociety.org/volume-iii/3-4/pou nd-in-the-world. 54. ‘Teaching Pound’, Make It New 3.2 (September 2016), http://makeitnew .ezrapoundsociety.org/volume-iii/3–2-september-2016/shaheen-article-ma ke-it-new-3-2, and ‘Ezra Pound in Turkey: A Bibiliography, 1961-2016’, Make It New 3.3 (December 2016), http://makeitnew.ezrapoundsociety.org /volume-iii/3-3-december-2016/documentary. Thanks to Mark Byron for providing much of the material for this review of Pound’s international influence. W OR KS C I T ED Alta, Seda Şen, ‘Ezra Pound in Turkey: A Bibliography, 1961-2016’, Make It New 3.3 (December 2016), http://makeitnew.ezrapoundsociety.org/volume-iii/ 3–3-december-2016/documentary. Baraka, Amiri, ‘Confessions of a Former Anti-Semite’, The Village Voice 25.50 (17–23 December 1980), 1. SOS: Poems 1961–2013 (New York: Grove Press, 2014). Campbell, James, Syncopations: Beats, New Yorkers, and Writers in the Dark (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008). Coyle, Michael, ‘Ezra Pound: Hugh Selwyn Mauberley’, in A Companion to Modernist Literature and Culture, ed. Peter Bradshaw and Kevin J. H. Dettmar, 431–9 (London: John Wiley, 2008).

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:11, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.008

Pound and Influence

121

Dobran, Ryan, ‘Myth, Culture and Text: Ezra Pound’s Homer and J. H. Prynne’s Aristeas’, in News from Afar: Ezra Pound and Some Contemporary British Poetries, ed. Richard Parker, 142–60 (Bristol: Shearsman, 2015). Feldman, Matthew, Ezra Pound’s Fascist Propaganda, 1935–45 (London: Palgrave Pivot, 2013). Gallagher, Kristen, ‘On LeRoi Jones, “Preface to A Twenty-Volume Suicide Note”’, Jacket2, http://jacket2.org/article/leroi-jones-preface-twenty-volume -suicide-note, accessed 26 February 2018. Gender Forum Collective, ‘No Manifesto for Poetry Readings and Listservs and Magazines and “Open Versatile Spaces Where Cultural Production Flourishes”’, The Chicago Review (Fall 2014–Winter 2015), 221–32. Ginsberg, Allen, Allen Verbatim: Lectures on Poetry, Politics, Consciousness, ed. Gordon Ball (New York: McGraw Hill, 1975). Goodwin, K. L., The Influence of Ezra Pound (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966). Hampson, Robert, ‘Eric Mottram and Ezra Pound: “There is no substitute for a life-time”’, in News from Afar: Ezra Pound and Some Contemporary British Poetries, ed. Richard Parker, 53–85 (Bristol: Shearsman, 2015). Harris, William J., ‘Introduction’, in The LeRoi Jones / Amiri Baraka Reader, ed. William J. Harris, xvii–xxx (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1991). The Jazz Aesthetic: The Poetry and Poetics of Amiri Baraka (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1985). Jaruga, Rodolfo, ‘Ezra Pound’s Arrival in Brazil’, Make It New 4.1–2 (September 2017), http://makeitnew.ezrapoundsociety.org/volume-iv/41-2-september-2017/ezra-pound-in-the-world. Jennings, Chelsea, ‘Pirating Pound: Drafts and Fragments in 1960s Mimeograph Culture’, Journal of Modern Literature 40.1 (Fall 2016), 88–108. Kilbride, Laura, ‘“Real Games with Books”: On Anna Mendelssohn and Ezra Pound’, in News from Afar: Ezra Pound and Some Contemporary British Poetries, ed. Richard Parker, 184–93 (Bristol: Shearsman, 2015). Kindellan, Michael, The Late Cantos of Ezra Pound: Composition, Revision, Publication (London: Bloomsbury, 2017). Kotin, Josh, ‘Blood-Stained Battle-Flags: Ezra Pound, J. H. Prynne and Classical Chinese Poetry’, in News from Afar: Ezra Pound and Some Contemporary British Poetries, ed. Richard Parker, 133–41 (Bristol: Shearsman, 2015). Longenbach, James, Stone Cottage: Pound, Yeats and Modernism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). Marsh, Alec, John Kasper and Ezra Pound: Saving the Republic (London: Bloomsbury, 2015). Matlin, Daniel, On the Corner: African American Intellectuals and the Urban Crisis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013). McGann, Jerome J., Black Riders: The Visible Language of Modernism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993). The Textual Condition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991).

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:11, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.008

122

richard parker

Mellors, Anthony, Late Modernist Poetics: From Pound to Prynne (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005). Moody, A. David, Ezra Pound: Poet: A Portrait of the Man and His Work, Vol. 3, The Tragic Years 1939–1972 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015). Muyumba, Walton M., The Shadow and the Act: Black Intellectual Practice, Jazz Improvisation, and Philosophical Pragmatism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). Olson, Charles, and J. H. Prynne, The Collected Letters of Charles Olson and J. H. Prynne (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2017). Parker, Richard, ‘“Here’s Your Fucking Light Shithead”: Ezra Pound and Contemporary British Poetry’, in News from Afar: Ezra Pound and Some Contemporary British Poetries, ed. Richard Parker, 9–20 (Bristol: Shearsman, 2015). ‘On In Memory of Your Occult Convolutions’, Glossator 8 (November 2013), 317–44. Pattison, Neil, Reitha Pattison and Luke Roberts, eds., Certain Prose of the English Intelligencer (Cambridge: Mountain Press, 2014). Pound, Ezra, The [Selected] Letters of Ezra Pound, 1907–1941, ed. D. D. Paige (1950; New York: New Directions, 1971). Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. T. S. Eliot (New York: New Directions, 1968). Poems & Translations, ed. Richard Sieburth (New York: Library of America, 2003). Pound, Ezra, and Louis Zukofsky, Pound/Zukofsky: Selected Letters of Ezra Pound and Louis Zukofsky, ed. Barry Ahearn (New York: New Directions, 1987). Reck, Michael, Ezra Pound: A Close Up (New York: McGraw Hill, 1973). Sanders, Ed, ‘A Fuck You Position Paper: Resistance Against Goon Squads’, Fuck You / A Magazine of the Arts 5.7 (September 1964), 1–4. Fug You: An Informal History of the Peace Eye Bookstore, the Fuck You Press, the Fugs, and Counterculture in the Lower East Side (New York: Da Capo, 2011). Selerie, Gavin, ‘Pound and Contemporary British Poetry: The Loosening of Form’, in News from Afar: Ezra Pound and Some Contemporary British Poetries, ed. Richard Parker, 212–28 (Bristol: Shearsman, 2015). Shaheen, Mohammad, ‘Teaching Pound’, Make It New 3.2 (September 2016), http://makeitnew.ezrapoundsociety.org/volume-iii/3–2-september-2016/ shaheen-article-make-it-new-3–2. Silliman, Ron, The New Sentence (New York: Roof, 2003). Stoicheff, Peter, The Hall of Mirrors: Drafts and Fragments and the End of Ezra Pound’s Cantos (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995). Sutherland, Keston, ‘In Memory of Your Occult Convolutions’, News from Afar: Ezra Pound and Some Contemporary British Poetries, ed. Richard Parker, 21–4 (Bristol: Shearsman, 2015). The Odes to TL61P (London: Enitharmon, 2013). Tiffany, Daniel, My Silver Planet: A Secret History of Poetry and Kitsch (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014).

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:11, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.008

Pound and Influence

123

Radio Corpse: Imagism and the Cryptaesthetic of Ezra Pound (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995). Villalón, Fernando Pérez, ‘Versions, Variations, and Reverberations: Ezra Pound in Chile’, Make It New 3.4 (April 2017), http://makeitnew.ezrapoundsociety.org /volume-iii/3-4/pound-in-the-world. Webb, Clive, Rousers: The American Far Right in the Civil Rights Era (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011). Wilson, Peter, A Preface to Ezra Pound (London: Routledge, 2014).

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:11, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.008

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:11, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.008

part ii

Ezra Pound and Asia

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:12, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:12, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719

chapter 8

Pound’s Representation of the Chinese Frontiers From the War Zone to the Green World Akitoshi Nagahata

Sinocentrism In his London years, Pound had ambivalent feelings about the marginal status of the country of his origin, the United States. On the one hand, he had a strong desire to position himself in the centre of Western civilization; on the other hand, he could not help being conscious of his origin in the margin – the frontier – of that civilization. For example, at the beginning of ‘What I Feel about Walt Whitman’, published in 1909, he wrote, ‘From this side of Atlantic I am for the first time able to read Whitman, and from the vantage of my education and . . . my world citizenship’ (SP 145), but in his poem ‘A Pact’, published in 1916, he addressed to his imaginary Whitman, ‘We have one sap and one root – / Let there be commerce between us’ (PT 269). In ‘Patria Mia’, published in 1912, he wrote, ‘there is no man now living in America whose work is of the slightest interest to any serious artist’ (SP 109), but in a letter to Harriet Monroe dated 11 November 1912, he wrote, ‘England hasn’t yet accepted [a Weltlitteratur standard], so we’ve plenty of chance to do it first’ (SL 25). His mixed feelings about the frontier, it seems, are reflected in the positions he takes regarding the frontiers in his poems. While he selected topics related to the political, economic and cultural affairs within the civilizations, he also wrote poems using the exile motif, as well as the theme of expedition, such as Canto XL, which features the expedition of Hanno, a Carthaginian explorer who led an expedition off the coast of West Africa. ‘Periplum’, the word Pound coined, meaning a geography ‘as a coasting sailor would find it’ (ABCR 43), also indicates his interest in a position on the periphery. In Pound’s poems about China, however, it is the centralist viewpoint that is more prominent than the viewpoint from the periphery. Certainly, there are numerous references to the Chinese frontiers in his poems. 127

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:12, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.009

128

akitoshi nagahata

Cathay (1915), a collection of translations of classic Chinese poems based on Ernest Fenollosa’s manuscripts, for example, includes poems depicting the life and feelings of soldiers dispatched to the borderland. In ‘the Chinese History Cantos’, Cantos LIII to LXI, there are also references to the frontier regions in China or its outer areas, such as Mongolia, Tibet, Japan and Korea, among others. However, in these poems, the frontiers, as well as the lands beyond them, are viewed from the Chinese point of view. Peoples beyond the borders are treated as barbarians and as China’s enemies. One might argue that the centralist viewpoint in his poems, especially in ‘the Chinese History Cantos’, is derived from the Sinocentric view of the world in its source text, Joseph-Anne-Marie Moyriac de Mailla’s L’Histoire générale de la chine, a history of China based on the Manchu translation of Tong-Kien-Kang-Mou [Tongjian Gangmu], the extract of Chinese annals compiled by Zhu Xi, a twelfth-century Confucian philosopher. According to the traditional Sinocentric view of the world, China was at the centre of the earth, and the peoples in the outer rim were viewed as barbarians. They were classified in different ways, but they were generally called derogatory names, such as the ‘Four Barbarians’ (Dongyi [Eastern Barbarians], Nanman [Southern Barbarians], Xirong [Western Barbarians] and Beidi [Northern Barbarians]).1 According to Miyoko Nakano, in the ‘Zhuixing’ (Forms of the Earth) chapter of the Huainanzi, a collection of essays compiled in the period of Han (second century BCE), there is a map showing the ‘Nine Regions’ (Jiu Zhou [九州]), where Chinese people live in the centre of the entire world, surrounded by concentric, increasingly larger squares: the Eight Yin (八殥), the Eight Hong (八紘) and the Eight Ji (八極). The Eight Yin, which surrounds the Nine Regions, is mostly ‘the sea and the swamp lands’, the Eight Hong is ‘the frontier lands that surround the sea and the swamp lands’, and the Eight Ji is ‘the point of contact with the universe’.2 In the geography shown in this map, one can see not only the ancient Chinese perception of the world but also their Sinocentric hierarchical world order, which was accepted in various schools of Chinese philosophy, including Confucianism, and was the basis of China’s foreign relations: non-Chinese regimes could interact with China only ‘by accepting their own subordination and presenting tribute to the Chinese ruler’.3 Pound’s representation of the Chinese frontiers in many of his poems replicates this Sinocentric view of the world. The frontiers are viewed as the places of Barbarians, who are treated as China’s enemies. Of the poems included in Cathay, for example, ‘Song of the Bowmen of Shu’,

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:12, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.009

Pound’s Representation of the Chinese Frontiers

129

‘Lament of the Frontier Guard’ and ‘South-Folk in Cloud Country’ highlight the feelings of the soldiers sent to the frontier to defend the country against the enemies, the equestrian nomads. ‘Song of the Bowmen of Shu’, attributed to Wen Wang of the Zhou Dynasty, represents frontier guards (‘bowmen’) wondering when they can go home, while ‘picking the first fern-shoots’ (PT 249). ‘Lament of the Frontier Guard’, by Li Bai, also represents a soldier sent to the North Gate as a frontier guard to watch against the ‘barbarian land’ (PT 254) – that is, the land of the Xiongnu. In this poem, the speaker laments the extreme weather condition (‘the wind blows full of sand’), loneliness (‘lonely from the beginning of time until now’) and the desolation of the place (‘Desolate castle, the sky, the wide desert’; ‘Bones white with thousand frosts’; PT 254). Asking who brought about this situation, he blames ‘Barbarous kings’, predicting a grim future of themselves: ‘we guardsmen fed to the tigers’ (PT 254); eventually they will be killed by the enemies and their bones will be left unheeded in the desert. Likewise, in ‘SouthFolk in Cold Country’, also by Li Bai, the narrator, a soldier sent to guard the Northern frontier, reports about the desert, the ‘flying snow’, the lice that ‘swarm like ants over [their] accouterments’ and the hard fight with no reward (PT 259). The frontier is thus represented as a war zone in these poems. It is characterized by hardship, desolation, loneliness, death, futility and despair. The soldiers are faced with the fearsome enemies of China, the Barbarians, and the great soldiers like Li Mu in the Spring and Autumn Time or General Li Guang of the Han Dynasty are viewed as China’s longdead superheroes.

Frontiers in ‘The Chinese History Cantos’ The frontiers and the lands beyond them are also viewed with a strong sense of Sinocentrism in ‘the Chinese History Cantos’, composed in the later 1930s. This is attested by various historical fragments included in the cantos, but it can also be seen in a fragmentary passage in Canto LIII (C 267–268), which refers to the funeral of King Cheng of Zhou and the enthronement of his son, King Kang. This passage is based on a Confucian classic, Shujing, or Book of Documents, in which it is shown that both ceremonies were performed in the innermost area of the court, located in the middle of the city that is considered to be in the centre of the world. There the pieces contributed by the wild tribes are placed, and during the ceremony the new king receives the mandate from Heaven; and in the

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:12, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.009

130

akitoshi nagahata

speech to the princes, the new king says, ‘Thus did great Heaven . . . give them the four quarters (of the land)’ (‘Announcement of King Kan’, Book of Documents).4 While ‘the Chinese History Cantos’ reflect the Confucian Sinocentric view of world order, Pound also shows that it is in constant threat; the threat of the nomadic peoples from outside China is one of the key topics. A significant number of lines in these cantos are concerned with their invasions across the borders and the attempts of resistance by the Han Chinese.5 In Canto LIII, for example, it is mentioned that King Cheng of Zhou appointed Duke Mu of Shao (Chaomoukong [C 270]) to be the general to fight against ‘the west tartars’ (C 270). In Canto LIV, there is a line showing that Shihuangdi, the founder of the Qin Dynasty, made the Great Wall built to protect the land of China (‘WALL rose in the time of TSIN CHI’ [C 275]). In the same canto, there is also a mention of General Li Guang of the Han Dynasty – the general also mentioned in ‘South-Folk in Cold Country’ in Cathay – who fought against the Xiongnu (C 281). In Canto LIV, Pound shows the Chinese had dominance over the nomads in the time of Emperor Xuan of the Han Dynasty, introducing the episode of Chanyu, chief of the Xiongnu, kneeling to the Emperor (‘And the Tchen-yu knelt to HAN SIEUN / and stayed three days there in festival / whereafter he returned to his border and province’ [C 279]). But later in the same canto, Pound indirectly shows the invasions of China by five non-Han peoples – that is, Xiongnu, Xianbei, Jie, Di and Qiang. As demonstrated in the episode of Emperor Min (‘MIN TI’ [C 282]) of the Jin Dynasty who was ‘taken by tartars / made lackey to Lieou-Tsong of Han [Former Zhao]’ (C 282), Sinocentrism is now beyond recognition. In the subsequent Sui and the Tang Dynasties, however, China regained power, and in Canto LIV, Pound features Taizong of the Tang Dynasty, who carried out a series of campaigns against Eastern and Western Turks, along with attempted but unsuccessful invasions of Korea. The land was expanded, and ‘an embassy came from north of the Caspian’ (C 286), and when Taizong died, Pound reports, there were Tartars who ‘wanted to die at his funeral’ (C 287). Nevertheless, this seemingly peaceful relation between China and non-Han nomads did not last, as indicated in such lines as ‘And more goddam Tartars bust loose again / better war than peace with these tartars’ (C 289). In Canto LV, Pound shows that the Tang Dynasty could not stop their invasions any more by mentioning their repeated raids: ‘and more Tou-san (tartars) / were raiding’ (C 291) and ‘Tartars still raidin’ (C 291).

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:12, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.009

Pound’s Representation of the Chinese Frontiers

131

The conflict between China and the non-Han nomads continues to be a major topic in the cantos covering the times of the Song Dynasty and the Conquest Dynasties. The relation between Chinese and nomadic peoples was reversed, with the non-Han people, Qidan, who established Liao, now being dominant over Song. In order to secure peace, Song had to seal a treaty with Liao (the Treaty of Chanyuan), by which Song gave annual tributes to Liao, and their mutual relationship came to be viewed as that of a younger and an elder brother, which was humiliating to the Chinese. Near the fall of Song Dynasty, the invasion of non-Han nomads into Song land is summarized in such lines as ‘tartars more tartars / tartars pass over Hoang-ho’ and ‘Hoang ho, Hoang ho, tartars pass over Hoang ho’ (C 299). When the Mongols conquered China and established the Yuan Dynasty, as reported in Canto LVI, the idea of Sinocentrism was crushed. Although the next dynasty, Ming, restored the land from the Mongols, its history summarized in Canto LVII is dominated by various episodes regarding the conflicts with nomadic peoples invading from beyond the border. Ming was harassed not only by the Mongols and Jin but also by Japan, whose ruler Toyotomi invaded Korea, as reported in Canto LVIII. In the North, the Jurchens (the later Manchus) expanded their sphere of influence and, joining with the Mongols, closed in upon the Chinese border. It should be mentioned that the historical fragments concerning the relations between China and the non-Han nomadic peoples in ‘the Chinese History Cantos’ are generally written in a factual style, without the romanticism associated with the Western Region and the Silk Road; the lands beyond the borders are simply viewed as places of terror and the frontier as the place of wars. Although the history of those relations could include episodes that incite readers’ imagination about the frontier and the Western Regions, Pound generally avoids them. For example, there is no mention of Wang Zhaojun, who was sent by Emperor Yuan of the Han Dynasty to marry a Xiongnu Chief, or Chanyu, so that they could establish friendly relations. Also absent is the story of the Buddhist monk Xuangzang, who, in the seventh century, travelled from China to India and came back with Buddhist scriptures after visiting 125 countries and territories – a historical journey that inspired the composition of Journey to the West, the famous Ming Dynasty novel by Wu Cheng. Certainly, there is an occasional romanticism in ‘the Chinese History Cantos’. For example, the arrival of embassies from north-western and northern kingdoms across the borders are reported with a touch of exoticism:

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:12, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.009

132

akitoshi nagahata And an embassy came from north of the Caspian from Koulihan of short nights where there is always light over horizon and from the red-heads of Kieï-kou Blue-eyed and their head man was Atchen or Atkins Chélisa

(C 286)

Also, in Canto LVI, the lines reporting the expedition of Mongke, the fourth Great Kahn of the Mongol Empire, resonate with frontier exoticism, with the mention of ‘Kutano’, or Koko Nor (the Blue Sea Lake; ‘And Megko went into Bagdad, went into Kutano / and died by the wall at Ho-tcheou’ [C 303]). The expedition to discover the sources of the Yellow River mentioned in the same canto (‘Hoang-ho’s fount in a sea of stars’ [C 304]), is, as Nakano shows, a topic that had long incited the curiosity of the Chinese.6 However, Pound moves on to other episodes, without going into the details of these topics concerning the Western Regions, possibly because his interest lies in examining the rise and fall of dynasties in connection with the observance of Confucian moral and political philosophy.

Emperor Kangxi in the Pastureland In Canto LIX and Canto LX, two of the three cantos dealing with the history of the Qing Dynasty, the frontier is represented with more details and new implications. In Canto LIX, for example, a long passage summarizes the Qing ambassadors’ journey to Nerchinsk, where they signed a treaty with Russia and determined the border between Qing and Russia. The embassy, including two Jesuit missionaries, Jean-François Gerbillon and Thomas Pereira, took the route to Tibet, and then went on towards the Khans of Khalkas, but there they received an order to return because of the war between the Oirat and the Khalkas. The next year, they started on a new journey and reached Nerchinsk, where they signed the agreement. Although the description of this journey is focused on the two Jesuit missionaries who served as interpreters and assisted the negotiation between the Chinese and the Russians (Pound mentions that Gerbillon kept the tempers of the ambassadors [C 327]), the passage includes such episodes as seeing a Living Buddha who ‘blessed them with tea and a luncheon’ (C 326), and another who said ‘he didn’t see how he cd/ have lived in another body / before this’ (C 326). There is also a brief description of the Amur frontiers, over which there had been disputes and conflicts between China and Russia – the land which the Manchus considered to be part of their homeland: ‘we wanted our martin sables,

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:12, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.009

Pound’s Representation of the Chinese Frontiers

133

our huntin’ / that was on the north side of the Amur / where are mountains and great lakes’ (C 327). The lines portraying the toilsome journey of the ambassadors in the mountain areas – which Pound calls ‘Mt Paucity’ (C 326) – are reminiscent of other journeys, such as the one made by Xuangzang in the seventh century. There is an element of frontier exoticism in this canto. And yet, as the description of the north side of the Amur indicates, they are also seen as a part of the Empire, lands of profit-making and hunting. Moreover, in Canto LX, featuring the life and deeds of Emperor Kangxi, the frontiers are given a still new meaning; they are portrayed as a green world associated with robust equestrian activities of nomadic life. Kangxi is known to have been an open-minded emperor who protected Jesuit missionaries in China, and helped introduce various scientific knowledge of the West to China, in such fields as astronomy, mathematics, natural sciences and music. Kangxi also expanded the Imperial territory. He suppressed the Revolt of the Three Feudatories; forced the Tungning Kingdom of Taiwan to submit to Qing rule; intervened in a dispute between Mongolian tribes, the Khalkas and the Dzungars; and defeated Galdan Khan, who led the Dzungars, in the first Oirat-Manchurian War. He also took control of Lhasa, Tibet, by defeating again the Dzungars who had occupied it. In Canto LX, Pound’s focus is on the activities of the Jesuit missionaries in China in connection with Kangxi. There are textual fragments referring to such historical events as the persecution of the missionaries in Zhejiang Province and the government’s decision to protect them (C 328), the treatment of the Emperor’s illness with quinine the missionaries provided (C 328), the government’s permission for them to build a church in Beijing (the North Church; C 328), the Rites Controversy (C 329–30), and Chin Mao’s petition that accused Europeans and Christianity as a threat to China (C 330–1).7 Among these episodes, Pound inserts a passage related to the first Oirat-Manchurian War and Emperor Kangxi’s expedition (C 328–9). While this passage includes a reference to General An Fiyanggu (Pound calls him ‘General Feyenkopf’ [C 328]), who led the expedition along with the Emperor, it is mostly composed of excerpts of Kangxi’s letters to the Crown Prince, his second son, who stayed in Beijing to take care of the governmental business. Interestingly, instead of the war or fighting, the Emperor’s letters – at least, those Pound selected – refer to the land he passed and to the hunting he enjoyed there. For example, the letters report, the Emperor ‘shot six quail with six arrows’ (C 328), sent the Crown Prince a horse and sheep, and crossed the Yellow River, which was

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:12, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.009

134

akitoshi nagahata

frozen. The Emperor also reports his observations of the land. He says, for example, that the land of the Ordos (now in Inner Mongolia) seems to be good for hunting, with ‘a lot of pheasants and hares’ (C 329), that its pasturage is excellent, and that people there are good at ‘lookin’ after their animals’ (C 329). One also learns from the letters that the Emperor carried out a survey of the sun and delayed his return to the capital in order to enjoy hunting in Paichen, or Baicheng (in the north-western part of the present Jilin Province), because he was ‘pleased with the pasture land’ (C 329). The pastures in the frontiers, Mongolia and Northern China, described in the Emperor’s letters, are thus represented as places where he was freed from the political and military affairs of the empire. The letters are personal and intimate in tone, the tone not expected of an Emperor but of a father. They represent the Emperor’s joy, happiness and familial love, and they make a striking contrast with the lines that refer to politics and military campaigns in this canto and throughout ‘the Chinese History Cantos’. This contrast would be all the more striking given the fact that the Emperor’s letters were originally written in Manchu, the language of his people. Qing was a Dynasty founded by the Manchus. When they became the rulers of China, the majority of Qing’s population was Han Chinese. Although the ruling Manchu forced their custom of wearing pigtails and Manchurian costumes on the Han Chinese and other peoples, they adopted a multi-lingual policy, making Manchu, Chinese and Mongolian their official languages. Even though Manchu was a primary language in the court, the Chinese language was still the dominant language in the Empire, and as the Sinification of Manchu officials progressed, the Manchu language began its decline. The Manchus had been indebted to Chinese and its literature and culture even before they began to rule China. For example, as shown in Canto XLVIII, Tai Tsong or Hong Taiji, the second Emperor of Qing, brought laws and letters from China (‘TAI TSONG of Manchu took them the law from China / forbade manchus marry their sisters’ [C 319]; ‘I take letters from China / which is not to say that I take orders from any man’ [C 320]). The absorption of the Chinese language and culture continued even after Qing became the rulers of China. The third Emperor, Shunzhi, who attached great importance to Confucianism, promulgated ‘Six Edicts’, and had the Confucian classics translated into Manchu, as shown by the excerpts of his preface to the translation of Shijing, or Book of Odes, placed at the beginning of Canto LIX. Kangxi, the fourth emperor, promulgated the ‘Sacred Edicts’, and had numerous Chinese classics translated into

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:12, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.009

Pound’s Representation of the Chinese Frontiers

135

Manchu. The fifth emperor, Yongzheng, as shown in Canto XCVIII and Canto XCIX (in Thrones), made Kangxi’s ‘Sacred Edict’ available for ordinary people who lacked proficiency in the classical Chinese in which it was written. Under the strong influence of the Chinese language, in which the Confucian classics were written, the Manchu language was fated to decline, even if it was the language of the rulers. Yongzheng said, ‘If some special encouragement . . . is not offered, the ancestral language will not be passed on and learned’.8 Kangxi’s letters to his son, written in Manchu, and sent from the frontiers, thus not only offer a glimpse of the Emperor’s private life and fatherly affection; they also indicate the ethnic roots and the cultural position of the Manchu in China. His description of the pastures in Mongolia and northern China highlights these significances, because they suggest the link between the rulers who adopted Confucianism and their original nomadic lifestyle in the north. The references to horses and hunting are especially significant in this context. The line ‘Ortes very orderly, have lost none of their mongol habits’ (C 329), although it refers to the Mongols, not the Manchus, suggests that the Ordos people still kept the traditional habit of hunting, as opposed to the sophisticated city life in China, which the Manchu officials were in the process of adopting, forgetting their original simple but robust lifestyle. In addition, the horse references in the canto – that is, the horse the Emperor sent to the Crown Prince with a comment ‘I don’t know that chinese bean fodder will suit him’ (C 328), and the horse that ‘sweat pink’ (C 329), which reminded his followers of the legendary ‘Taouen’ or Pergamon horses – also serve as a critique of the Sinification of the former equestrian nomads, including the Manchus. The references in Canto LX to the pasture, horses and hunting in Kangxi’s letters, written in Manchu, thus provide the frontiers with a new image: the place associated with terror, desolation and loneliness is now represented as a peaceful pastureland where the equestrian nomads’ robust life is still kept. Furthermore, it should also be pointed out that this peaceful image of pastureland is in contrast to the pastoral image of the green farmland presented in Shijing, or Book of Odes, a Confucian classic, which Pound later translated into English. ‘Kiung MuMa’, a poem about horses, begins with the lines, ‘Wild at grass the bull horses / move over moor-land, / black-rump’d and roans, / all-blacks and bays, / a splendour for wagons, unwinded. / Phang! Phang! I’ll say some horses!!’ (PT 979). As the phrase ‘splendour for wagons’ suggests, the horses here are for farm work and transportation, not for hunting. While Kangxi was an advocate

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:12, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.009

136

akitoshi nagahata

of Confucianism and the Manchu officials were rapidly absorbing the Chinese language and culture, the image of the Emperor hunting in the pastureland in Canto LX serves to characterize the frontier not only as a secure Chinese territory but also as that of the equestrian nomads, the Manchus.

Naxi’s Pastoral Space Pound continued to write cantos based on Confucian texts. In Section: Rock Drill, he took up Shujin, or Book of Documents, and the focus of Cantos XCVIII and XCIX is Kangxi’s ‘Sacred Edict’ and Wang Youpu’s explication of it for the ordinary people. Then, towards the end of Thrones and in Drafts and Fragments (Cantos CI, CIII, CX, CXII and CXIII), Pound introduces the topic of the Na-khi (Naxi), an ethnic minority group in Southwest China. The Naxi are not Han-Chinese. Traditionally, they believed in Dongba (Tompa) religion and used Dongba pictorial symbols. Regarding their relations with China, from the thirteenth century they were under the indirect rule of the Yuan and the Ming Dynasties, and in the eighteenth century, they came under the direct rule of Qing Dynasty. In these cantos, Pound describes the places, landmarks, people and religious rites of the Naxi, using Joseph F. Rock’s ethnographic writings, and juxtaposing them with anecdotes about modern society and politics. Unlike the frontier poems in Cathay and ‘the Chinese History Cantos’, the Naxi cantos represent the frontier as a pastoral space of serenity and spiritual consolation, secluded from politics and war. Pound highlights harmony between men and nature, using folklore and religious motifs. In Canto CI, for example, based on the photographs taken by Rock in Li Chiang (Lijiang) and reproduced in his text, Pound describes a peasant and a priest (2dto-1mba), being one with the landscape, exhibiting the folklore symbols, and anticipating the performance of the religious rite: With the sun and moon on her shoulders, the star-discs sewn on her coat at Li Chiang, the snow range, a wide meadow and the 3dto-1mba’s face (exorcist’s) muy simpático

(C 746)

The image of nature-human harmony presented in this and other passages in the Naxi cantos is different from the robust, manly image of Emperor

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:12, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.009

Pound’s Representation of the Chinese Frontiers

137

Kangxi hunting in the pasture, even if they both represent the frontier in peace. Here the tone is calmer, suggesting the spiritual aspect of the place, which is shown more clearly at the end of the canto with the quotations from the priest’s words of prayer: ‘May their pond be full; The son have his father’s arm and good hearing; (noun graph upright; adjective sideways) ‘His horse’s mane flowing His body and soul are at peace.’

(C 746–7)

The prayer for the well-being of a family and that for the funeral of a warrior are put together here. In the latter, the spirit of the dead warrior is appeased by the prayer. The requiem tone is prominent, and it continues in Canto CX, where the lines are quoted from ‘2Hăr-2la-1llü 3k’ö’ (Harlallu), the thirteen ceremonies for expiating the spirits of suicides (C 797). Whether the serenity in which the theme of expiation is pursued reflects Pound’s old age, or his wish for appeasing the spirits of his deceased friends, Pound’s representation of the frontiers as natural and spiritual places is in a remarkable contrast with his earlier works related to the frontiers. Despite this serenity, however, we cannot overlook Pound’s tacit reference to the political background of the Naxi. For example, in Canto CI, a line stating that Temur, Emperor Chengzong of the Yuan Dynasty, visited a temple in Naxi (‘Te Te of Ch’eng, called Timur, 1247, came hither’ [C 743]) serves as a reminder of the indirect rule of the Naxi by the Mongols.9 The mention of the letters and gifts used in the ceremonies held by Yuan and Ming to invest their chiefs to govern (‘4 letters patent, 5 seals / after the 4th year of Yung-lo / 12th May, 1406, and a gold belt / inlaid with flowers’ [C 743]) also indicates the rule of the Naxi by the Yuan and the Ming Dynasties. Furthermore, the lines quoted above that introduce the 2dto-1mba (priest) is followed by a quotation from the inscription on the Stone Drum (‘by the waters of Stone Drum, / the two aces’ [C 746]), which commemorates a sixteenth-century victory of the Naxi over a Tibetan army,10 a military exploit achieved in the time of the Ming rule. These reminders of Naxi’s subjugation to China may be linked to the portrayal of the frontiers as the territories of Chinese Dynasties seen in the frontier poems in Cathay and in Canto LX in ‘the Chinese History Cantos’. However, even if these references evoke the memory of conquests,

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:12, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.009

138

akitoshi nagahata

the sense of territorial occupation is suppressed in these cantos. Instead, with the folklore and religious motifs, and the inclusion of the pictorial symbols, the Naxi cantos present an indigenous world of its own, apart from the traditional Chinese or Manchu culture. Pound’s apparent empathy with the cultural tradition of this ethnic community hints at a supposition that nearly at the end of his life, Pound has returned to a position on the periphery, possibly one closer to nature.

Notes 1. For more detailed account of the classifications of the ‘Barbarian’ peoples, see: Liu Junping and Deyuan Huang, ‘The Evolution of Tianxia Cosmology and Its Philosophical Implications’, Frontiers of Philosophy in China 1.4 (2006), 517–38; and Chen Zhi, ‘From Exclusive Xia to Inclusive Zhu-Xia: The Conceptualisation of Chinese Identity in Early China’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 14.3 (2004), 185–205. 2. Nakano Miyoko, Henkyō no fūkei: Nihon to Chūgoku no kokkyo ishiki [The Frontier Landscape: The Border Consciousness in Japan and China] (Sapporo: Hokkaido University Press, 1979), 138–9. The translation of the quotations from Nakano is mine. 3. Nicolas Tackett, ‘The Great Wall and Conceptualizations of the Border under the Northern Song’, Journal of Song-Yuan Studies 38 (2008), 100. 4. See also John J. Nolde, Blossoms from the East: The China Cantos of Ezra Pound (Orono, ME: National Poetry Foundation / University of Maine, 1983), 54–57; and the French translation by S[éraphin] Couvreur of the Chou King: Texte chinois avec une double traduction en Français et en Latin des annotations et un vocabulaire par S. Courvreur S. J. (Ho kien Fou: Imprimerie de la Mission Catholique, 1897), 344–62. 5. See Nolde for the passages in de Mailla’s translation of Tongjian Gangmu corresponding to Pound’s historical episodes. For more recent historical views on the relations between China and the nomadic peoples, see John K. Fairbank, ed., The Chinese World Order: Traditional China’s Foreign Relations (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968); Nicola Di Cosmo, Ancient China and Its Enemies: The Rise of Northern Power in East Asian History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); and Jonathan Karam Skaff, Sui-Tang China and Its Turko-Mongol Neighbors: Culture, Power, and Connections, 580–800 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). 6. Nakano, [‘The Frontier Landscape’], 180–200. 7. Chen Mao’s petition, or memorial, translated into French, can be found in de Mailla Vol. 11, 321–5. A partial English translation is in Nolde 386–387. For the original Chinese text, see Susumu Murao, ‘“Tokuni issho wo mōkete”: Kessekichin sōheikan Chin Mao no sōshū to Nagasaki, Kōshū’ [‘Establishing a Special Spot: A Memorial from the Brigadier General Chen Mao and the Nagasaki-

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:12, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.009

Pound’s Representation of the Chinese Frontiers

139

Guangzhou Connection’], Chūgoku bunka kenkyū [Chinese Cultural Research (Tenri University)] 29 (2012): 3–4. 8. Edward J. M. Rhoads, Manchus and Han: Ethnic Relations and Political Power in Late Qing and Early Republican China, 1861–1928 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2000), 53. 9. It is possible that Pound confused Timur for Kublai. See Terrell 653. 10. Emily Mitchell Wallace, ‘“Why Not Spirits?” – “The Universe Is Alive”: Ezra Pound, Joseph Rock, the Na Khi, and Plotinus’, in Ezra Pound & China, ed. Zhaoming Qian (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003), 240. W OR KS CI T ED Chen Zhi, ‘From Exclusive Xia to Inclusive Zhu-Xia: The Conceptualisation of Chinese Identity in Early China’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 14.3 (2004), 185–205. Couvreur, Séraphin, trans., Chou King: Texte chinois avec une double traduction en Français et en Latin des annotations et un vocabulaire par S. Courvreur S. J. (Ho kien Fou: Imprimerie de la Mission Catholique, 1897). De Mailla, Joseph Anne Marie de Moyriac, L’Histoire générale de la chine, ou annales de cet empire, traduites du Tong-Kien-Kang-Mou, par Joseph-Anne Marie de Moyriac de Mailla Jesuite François, 13 vols. (Paris: D. Pierres, 1777–85). Di Cosmo, Nicola, Ancient China and Its Enemies: The Rise of Northern Power in East Asian History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Fairbank, John K., ed., The Chinese World Order: Traditional China’s Foreign Relations (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968). Legge, James, trans., Book of Documents (Kindle ed. Dragon Reader, 2014). Liu Junping and Deyuan Huang, ‘The Evolution of Tianxia Cosmology and Its Philosophical Implications’, Frontiers of Philosophy in China 1.4 (2006), 517–38. Murao, Susumu, ‘“Tokuni issho wo mōkete”: Kesseki-chin sōheikan Chin Mao no sōshū to Nagasaki, Kōshū’ [‘Establishing a Special Spot: A Memorial from the Brigadier General Chen Mao and the Nagasaki-Guangzhou Connection’], Chūgoku bunka kenkyū [Chinese Cultural Research (Tenri University)] 29 (2012), 3–4. Nakano Miyoko, Henkyō no fūkei: Nihon to Chūgoku no kokkyo ishiki [The Frontier Landscape: The Border Consciousness in Japan and China] (Sapporo: Hokkaido University Press, 1979). Nolde, John J., Blossoms from the East: The China Cantos of Ezra Pound (Orono, ME: National Poetry Foundation / University of Maine, 1983). Pound, Ezra, ABC of Reading (New York: New Directions, 1960). The Cantos, 15th printing (New York: New Directions, 1995). Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. T. S. Eliot (New York: New Directions, 1968). Poems and Translations, ed. Richard Sieburth (New York: Library of America, 2003).

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:12, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.009

140

akitoshi nagahata

Selected Letters of Ezra Pound 1907–1941, ed. D. D. Paige (New York: New Directions, 1950). Selected Prose 1909–1965, ed. William Cookson (New York: New Directions, 1973). Rhoads, Edward J. M., Manchus and Han: Ethnic Relations and Political Power in Late Qing and Early Republican China, 1861–1928 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2000). Skaff, Jonathan Karam, Sui-Tang China and Its Turko-Mongol Neighbors: Culture, Power, and Connections, 580–800 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). Tackett, Nicolas, ‘The Great Wall and Conceptualizations of the Border under the Northern Song’, Journal of Song-Yuan Studies 38 (2008): 99–138. Terrell, Carroll F., A Companion to the Cantos of Ezra Pound (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993). Wallace, Emily Mitchell, ‘“Why Not Spirits?” – “The Universe Is Alive”: Ezra Pound, Joseph Rock, the Na Khi, and Plotinus’, in Ezra Pound and China, ed. Zhaoming Qian, 213–77 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003).

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:12, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.009

chapter 9

‘A Treasure Like Nothing We Have in the Occident’ Ezra Pound and Japanese Literature Andrew Houwen

Pound’s relationship with Japanese literature can be broadly divided into three areas: the influence of ‘hokku’ on his work, his interest in ‘Noh’ drama and his own impact on Japanese literature. The first of these has, until recently, dominated in English-language Pound scholarship about Japan. This is likely due to the popularity of ‘In a Station of the Metro’, his most well-known poem, composed before 13 October 1912 and first published in Poetry in April 1913: The apparition of these faces in the crowd: Petals on a wet, black bough.1

Its connection with ‘hokku’ was established when Pound himself compared it to ‘sixteen-syllable’ [sic] Japanese poetry in ‘How I Began’ (June 1913) and described it as a ‘hokku-like sentence’ in ‘Vorticism’ (September 1914).2 After receiving the manuscripts of the Japanologist Ernest Fenollosa in the autumn of 1913, Pound published fifteen nō plays in various literary magazines from May 1914, in Certain Noble Plays of Japan in September 1916, and in ‘Noh’ or Accomplishment in January 1917. He also wrote four unpublished ‘Noh’ of his own in 1916 and incorporated elements of nō in Le Testament de Villon (1924) and The Women of Trachis (1954).3 Pound’s reception in Japanese literature has been given the least coverage of these three areas. Two major Japanese poets, Nishiwaki Junzaburō and Kitasono Katué, introduced his poetry and poetics in Japan before the Second World War. Soon after the war, Iwasaki Ryōzō translated the first book of Pound’s poetry into Japanese; Pound’s ‘ideogrammic method’, meanwhile, influenced the work of the internationally acclaimed concrete poet Niikuni Seiichi in the 1960s. This chapter will explore recent developments in these three areas before concluding on possible directions for future research.

141

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:12, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.010

142

andrew houwen

In addition to Pound’s own description of ‘In a Station of the Metro’ as a ‘hokku-like sentence’, F. S. Flint’s apparent role in introducing this poetic form to Pound has also been frequently noted due to Flint’s praise of it in his review in The New Age of 11 July 1908, which discussed Kimura Shōtarō and Charlotte Peake’s Sword and Blossom Songs and also included examples of two ‘haikai’ that did not appear in this book. One of these, by the sixteenth-century Japanese poet Arakida Moritake, was later also translated by Pound in ‘Vorticism’. Flint’s version reads: A fallen petal Flies back to its branch: Ah! A butterfly!4

Flint’s account of Imagism’s formation in 1915, in which he describes the group of poets that included himself and Pound writing ‘dozens’ of ‘tanka and haikai’, is also often cited.5 The question of Flint’s source for haikai appeared to have been settled by J. B. Harmer in 1975.6 According to Harmer, the Japanologist Basil Hall Chamberlain’s 1902 essay, ‘Bashō and the Japanese Poetical Epigram’, was read by the French translator PaulLouis Couchoud, who in 1906 discussed several ‘haïkaï’ in his Les Lettres article, ‘Les haïkaï (Epigrammes poétiques du Japon)’.7 Flint, in turn, then read Couchoud’s article. Harmer’s account of Flint’s source for his interest in ‘haikai’ formed the basis of Helen Carr’s description of the link between Imagism and ‘hokku’ in The Verse Revolutionaries, which appeared in 2009.8 Harmer points out, however, that Flint cannot have been the only source for Pound’s understanding of this form, as Pound only ever used the word ‘hokku’ rather than ‘haikai’, the term Flint always used. In the same year in which Carr’s The Verse Revolutionaries came out, Yoshinobu Hakutani proposed an alternative view in Haiku and Modernist Poetics.9 Hakutani also observes that Pound only used ‘hokku’ and suggests that this constitutes evidence for the Japanese poet Yone Noguchi, who also used the term ‘hokku’, as ‘most likely’ to be Pound’s source rather than Flint.10 Kiuchi Toru, building on Hakutani’s suggestion, even claims that ‘none other than Noguchi’ was Pound’s inspiration.11 It is true that Noguchi and Pound corresponded from 1911, and that Noguchi wrote an article, ‘Hokku’, published in The Academy in July 1912, which Pound might have read before 13 October 1912, when he submitted ‘In a Station of the Metro’ to Harriet Monroe.12 Kiuchi adds that Noguchi’s thricerepeated error in ‘What Is a Hokku Poem?’ of January 1913 in describing hokku as having ‘sixteen syllables’ also appears in Pound’s ‘How I Began’ of that June, which discusses hokku’s role in the composition of ‘In a Station

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:12, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.010

‘A Treasure Like Nothing We Have in the Occident’

143

of the Metro’.13 Both Hakutani and Kiuchi omit to mention, however, that Chamberlain also used the term ‘Hokku’ (as did W. G. Aston, Lafcadio Hearn, F. V. Dickins and William N. Porter before 1912). Furthermore, neither explains why Pound arranged both of his translations of hokku as well as ‘In a Station of the Metro’ in two lines, rather than the three that Noguchi, and most others, used. The only translators to have done so until then were Chamberlain and Dickins. The latter slightly adapted a few of Chamberlain’s versions to make them rhyme in 1906; Chamberlain’s translations reappeared in his Japanese Poetry of 1910.14 As Carr observes, Chamberlain’s ‘Japanese epigrams’ take a more ‘literal’ approach than his earlier translations of Japanese poetry into ‘rhymed stanzas’: this allows him to emphasize ‘the qualities that would make this poetry so important for modernist poetry – its fragmentary, elliptical nature, its intense condensation of meaning’.15 This ‘fragmentariness’ results from Chamberlain’s understanding of the ‘Hokku’, for which he provides in parentheses the alternatives ‘Haiku’ (the first time this term appears in English) and ‘Haikai’.16 A ‘Hokku’, Chamberlain notes, is the ‘starting verse’ first of a tanka, then of a renga (‘linked verse’). One form of the latter, haikai renga (‘comic linked verse’), had arisen in the sixteenth century with different rules from previous linked-verse forms and, initially, a comic (‘haikai’) tendency. Because a hokku ‘is part only of a complete stanza’, Chamberlain explains, ‘it is essentially fragmentary’.17 Others such as Aston, Couchoud and Flint used ‘haikai’ to refer to an independent hokku. As Yamazaki Kagotarō’s 1893 essay Haikaishidan (‘A Discussion of Haikai’s History’) makes clear, this has a Japanese precedent: ‘What is generally called haikai by people today is very different from the haikai of the past’: independent ‘starting verses’ (‘hokku’) had themselves also become known as ‘haikai’.18 Yamazaki proposed using the until then rarely used term ‘haiku’ to refer to an independent hokku, a proposal taken up by the Japanese writer and critic Masaoka Shiki that year; Shiki and his disciples are Chamberlain’s source for the introduction of this term. It was the ‘fragmentary’ quality of the ‘Hokku’, however, that particularly appealed to modernist poets like Pound. Most of Chamberlain’s ‘Hokku’ translations consist of two four-stress lines (a few are given in prose). One example, which Harmer incorrectly states was ‘not one of the poems translated by Chamberlain’, is his version of Arakida Moritake’s sixteenth-century ‘butterfly’ hokku.19 Chamberlain discovered this hokku in Aeba Kōson’s 1893 essay Haikairon (‘On Haikai’).20 Kōson sees it as one of Moritake’s ‘finest works’.21 It

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:12, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.010

144

andrew houwen

was later also translated by Aston, Couchoud, Flint, Pound and Noguchi (the latter in March 1914, some months before Pound’s ‘Vorticism’ essay). Chamberlain’s translation still includes archaisms, and some awkward contractions to fit his four-stress rule, but it avoids rhyme: Fall’n flow’r returning to the branch, – Behold! it is a butterfly.22

This version’s lineation and punctuation clearly call attention to the juxtaposition of the two compared objects, the ‘flow’r’ and the ‘butterfly’. Unlike Couchoud, Flint, Noguchi and all other translators except Chamberlain and Dickins up to that point, Pound also gives Moritake’s hokku in two lines: The fallen blossom flies back to its branch: A butterfly.23

Pound emphasizes what he calls the ‘super-position’, or ‘one idea set on top of another’, of the two compared objects through lineation and punctuation, as Chamberlain’s translation of Moritake’s hokku does. Pound also uses this approach for his version of the hokku apparently composed by the ‘Japanese naval officer’ as related to him by Victor Plarr and, more famously, for his own ‘hokku-like sentence’. Noguchi’s ‘Hokku’ article criticizes Chamberlain’s term ‘epigram’ for ‘hokku’; if Pound had indeed read it (which would also have meant that he at least knew Chamberlain to be a hokku translator), he evidently agreed, as he only used the latter term. Noguchi also shows ‘very little satisfaction even with the translations of Professor Chamberlain and the late Mr. Aston’ as well as the ‘defects’ of Porter’s A Year of Japanese Epigrams of 1911: he is particularly scathing about the latter’s forced use of rhyme, which ‘cheapens’ the original.24 Instead, he presents one of his own English ‘hokku’, which also appears in The Pilgrimage, the collection he sent to Pound in 1911: My love’s lengthened hair Swings o’er me from Heaven’s gate: Lo, Evening’s shadow!25

This contains even more archaisms and awkward contractions than Chamberlain’s: in addition to the archaic ‘Lo’, ‘lengthened’ is itself a forced lengthening of the more natural ‘long’ to fit the five-syllable count Noguchi imposes on his opening line, while ‘over’ is shortened to make the second line seven syllables. Most noticeably, however, Noguchi employs precisely the kind of concrete-abstract combinations (‘Heaven’s gate’) condemned in Pound’s ‘A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste’.26 Like most

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:12, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.010

‘A Treasure Like Nothing We Have in the Occident’

145

of his English ‘hokku’ – and unlike Chamberlain or Pound – it attempts to adhere to a strict five-seven-five-syllable pattern. In both form and diction, then, Noguchi’s ‘hokku’ seem a less convincing possibility as a model for ‘In a Station of the Metro’. In addition to the question of Pound’s sources for the form of ‘In a Station of the Metro’, that of its subject matter’s origins has also continued to attract numerous explanations. Rupert Richard Arrowsmith has recently proposed as another possible influence one of the Japanese prints Pound may have seen on his frequent visits to the British Museum, particularly from 1909 after he had met Laurence Binyon, the Keeper of Prints and Drawings in its Japanese Department. Hokusai’s woodblock print, given the English title ‘Poem by Ono no Komachi’ in the catalogue, is accompanied by one of Komachi’s tanka translated on an index card by Inada Hogitarō and Arthur Waley: While I have been sauntering through the world, looking upon its vanities, lo! My flower has faded and the time of the long rains come.27

Arrowsmith suggests that ‘“In a Station of the Metro” offers in its closing line an image strikingly similar to this contrast between the pale, fallen hanami petals and rain-wet cherry wood’.28 Pound had returned to the Japanese Department of the British Museum in September 1912 after his summer walking tour of France; it is thus plausible that, when composing ‘In a Station of the Metro’, Pound had seen this print and its translated tanka. Any, all or none of these propositions for the source of Pound’s Metro poem may be true; it remains an unresolved question. Perhaps it is fitting that Pound used the term ‘hokku’ rather than ‘haikai’ or ‘haiku’: although his hokku experiments constituted a pivotal moment in his poetic development, they functioned as a starting point from which he soon moved away towards longer poetic forms. As David Ewick notes, Pound only uses the term ‘hokku’ eight times in all written material that has seen print – four of those in his ‘Vorticism’ essay of September 1914.29 By the time of that essay’s publication, Pound had received Ernest Fenollosa’s manuscripts and was translating nō plays, one of which – Nishikigi – had already been published in May. At the end of ‘Vorticism’ Pound writes: I am often asked whether there can be a long imagiste or vorticist poem. The Japanese, who evolved the hokku, evolved also the Noh plays. In the best ‘Noh’ the whole play may consist of one image. I mean it is gathered about one image. Its unity consists in one image, enforced by movement and music. I see nothing against a long vorticist poem.30

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:12, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.010

146

andrew houwen

Pound clearly saw a link between the ‘one image’ hokku and the ‘one image’ nō play. Despite the dominance of hokku in discussions of Pound’s relationship with Japanese literature, however, it was ‘Noh’, not hokku, that served from then on as the most influential Japanese literary form for Pound, as Ewick observes.31 Indeed, following ‘Vorticism’, Pound’s translations of the nō plays appeared in various periodicals and two books; he wrote ‘Noh’ himself; above all, nō was of great importance to The Cantos from its beginnings in 1915 to the concluding Drafts and Fragments.32 The last few years have witnessed a marked turn towards re-examining Pound’s interest in nō and its influence on The Cantos. My article on ‘Ezra Pound’s Early Cantos and his Translation of Takasago’ of August 2013 focuses on the connection between Pound’s statement in a letter of January 1917 to Harriet Monroe that the ‘theme’ of The Cantos would be based ‘roughly’ on that of Takasago and the discovery that, despite Hugh Kenner’s claim to the contrary, Pound did translate this play.33 Moreover, in his letter to Monroe’s assistant editor Alice Corbin Henderson of 7 July 1915, sent with his translation, some six weeks after he had told her he had started on his ‘long poem’, he praised Takasago as having a ‘flawless structure’ and constituting ‘the very core of the “Noh”’.34 It was one of the nō plays Pound considered to be ‘built into the intensification of a single Image’, a notion he likely derived about nō from Binyon’s The Flight of the Dragon.35 That ‘single Image’ was ‘the pines in Takasago’: the play centres on two pine trees said to be paired, one at Takasago and the other at Sumiyoshi, whose spirits appear as an old married couple.36 They represent the prosperous imperial reigns and literature of the play’s past and present. Pound emphasized the political aspect of this prosperity: in his writing on nō, he prioritized its patronage by the shōgun and the aristocracy.37 The ‘unity of Image’ and the ‘flawless structure’ Pound discovered in Takasago was supported by, and paralleled, a political system structured around the dominant political centre of the shōgun and the emperor. It thus anticipates his own turn towards ‘the totalitarian’.38 Pound’s translation of Takasago enabled him to develop his poetics of ‘super-position’ in The Cantos. The reference to Takasago in Canto IV is well-known; its centrality to the canto is further clarified, however, by its first appearance in Pound’s drafts, in which it is inserted in pencil between two compared scenes (Actaeon and Vidal’s pursuit by hounds).39 It is a focal point of transition in the canto, connecting sections together, thus corresponding with Takasago’s own super-position of two elements across space and time. Takasago thus functions as the canto’s structural method.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:12, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.010

‘A Treasure Like Nothing We Have in the Occident’

147

Kenner claimed that this is the only reference to Takasago, but it reappears in Canto XXI, in which Pound compares the rule of Lorenzo de’ Medici and Thomas Jefferson before concluding on the depiction of the Eleusinian Mysteries, a vegetal regeneration rite that, in Pound’s view, resembles that of Takasago. In A Draft of Cantos 17–27, published in 1928, four marginal notes appear alongside sections of Canto XXI. The entire ‘Eleusinian’ section falls under the marginal note ‘Takasago and Ise’.40 What no article has yet touched on is that this reference to Takasago also recurs in Canto XXIX: the images of the ‘Brookwater over brown sand’ and ‘the white hounds on the slope’ from the ‘Eleusinian’ sections of Cantos IV and XXI again reappear; shortly afterwards, the canto concludes on the ‘Pine by the black trunk of its shadow / And on hill black trunks of the shadow / The trees melted in air’ (C 146). During this time, the ‘single Image’ of Takasago’s pine trees thus still produced for Pound a vital culminating vision for his paradiso. Another nō play that remained important for Pound’s paradiso at this time was Hagoromo, in which a tennin (‘heavenly being’) asks a fisherman for her ‘feather-mantle’ (‘hagoromo’) to be returned to her so she can fly back to heaven. When he returns it, she performs the ‘dance of the rainbow-feathered garment’ and disappears into the sky over Mount Fuji.41 Hagoromo celebrates the longevity of imperial rule by comparing it to how long it would take for the ‘rock of earth’ to be worn away by the ‘feather-mantle’.42 This celebration is also expressed in the tennin’s dance, which was first passed to the Chinese Emperor Xuanzong.43 The dance represents the movements of the sun and moon, ‘here where the moon is unshadowed, here in Nippon, the sun’s field’.44 Previous commentators have noted references to Hagoromo in the ‘Three Cantos’, the Pisan Cantos and Drafts and Fragments; but none has yet observed its appearance in what Kenner described as the ‘still point’ of The Cantos, Canto XLIX, composed between 1928 and 1937.45 In this canto, the rule of beneficent emperors is also represented by the sun and moon’s movements: the ‘Autumn moon’ is balanced with the ‘Sun blaze’ and the ‘light’ on the ‘north sky line’ with that on the ‘south sky line’ (FDC 46). Pound then transcribes lines from what was China’s national anthem until 1928, which itself also emphasizes the importance of the sun and moon’s movements as a metaphor for imperial order. Two of Pound’s typescript drafts for this canto preserve an explicit reference to Hagoromo: in these, ‘Yodai’ (Emperor Yangdi), the builder of the ‘canal’ that ‘goes still to TenShi’, watches ‘the dance that is still

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:12, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.010

148

andrew houwen

called Hagormo Hagoromo’.46 While the published version omits this explicit reference, the play’s depiction of the sun and moon’s ordered movements representing harmonious imperial rule remains at the heart of the canto. As Diego Pellecchia’s article of fall 2013 on ‘Ezra Pound and the Politics of Noh Film’ demonstrates, Pound’s interest in nō continued into the 1930s and 1940s.47 In London and Paris, Pound’s Japanese acquaintances, the artist Kume Tamijūrō and the playwright Kōri Torahiko, both of whom were deeply familiar with nō, and the dancer Itō Michio, who was not, had provided him with an understanding of nō as it was performed.48 Pound’s viewing in Rapallo of a scene from a nō play in the 1937 film Atarashiki tsuchi (‘New Land’) reinvigorated his fascination for nō. ‘I have (had strong) nostalgia for Japan’, Pound wrote to the Japanese poet Kitasono Katué on 3 March 1939, ‘induced by the fragment of Noh in Mitsuco [a translated title of Atarashiki tsuchi]’.49 ‘ALL the Noh plays ought to be filmed’, he told Kitasono; ‘It must be 16 years since I heard a note of Noh (Kumé and his friends sang to me in Paris)’.50 During his return to the United States from April to June that year ‘with the intention of convincing President Roosevelt not to embark on war with Japan’, he first saw a sound film of another nō play he had translated from Fenollosa’s notes, Aoi no ue.51 This further encouraged his nō enthusiasm: on 25 March 1941, he wrote to Kitasono proposing that ‘We shd/give you Guam but INSIST on getting Kumasaka and Kagekiyo in return’.52 For Pound at this time, nō was ‘a treasure like nothing we have in the occident’.53 Pellecchia contrasts Pound’s perception of nō with the ‘imperialist nostalgia’ of earlier translators such as Chamberlain and Hearn.54 In light of Pound’s evident view of nō as a celebration of imperial rule, however, it is also possible to see his understanding of it as ‘imperialist nostalgia’ of another kind. The proposition that Pound’s conception of the ‘unity of Image’ in nō was political as well as aesthetic is further developed in Christopher Bush’s article, ‘“I am all for the triangle”: The Geopolitical Aesthetic of Pound’s Japan’ of 2016.55 He considers nō to be central to Pound’s political and aesthetic projects: ‘the noh was not simply to be included in his vision of world culture. In very important ways, it provided a kind of model for how the history of culture might be organized, kept alive, and remain politically vital’.56 The Cantos can be compared to Takasago in particular because ‘it is about the building of networks of association between different historical eras, but also about creating “rhymes” between different places, a kind of translatio imperii’.57 Bush

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:12, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.010

‘A Treasure Like Nothing We Have in the Occident’

149

convincingly outlines the contradictions between the cosmopolitanism of such intercultural ‘rhymes’ and Pound’s embrace of fascism; such contradictions, Bush rightly contends, are inherent in fascism itself. The article also argues that Pound saw nō, and Japanese literature more generally, as ‘modern’.58 This view was reinforced by his correspondence with Kitasono: ‘I know of no group of poets in Europe or America as alert as Mr. Kitasono’s Tokio friends’.59 Pound thus did not merely conceive of Japan as a repository of ancient source material to be plundered for the development of his modernist poetics; he considered it an equal partner in what he saw, in Fenollosan terms, as the coming ‘serious fusion’ of ‘Oriental and Occidental cultures’.60 Kitasono was one of very few poets in Japan, however, to take an interest in Pound before the Second World War. The earliest Japanese accounts of Imagism, such as that of the poet and English literature scholar Sangū Makoto in 1918 and the poet Momota Sōji in 1929, present Amy Lowell as the movement’s founder. Sangū mentions him last in his list of Imagist poets, also mistakenly describing him as a British poet; in Momota’s list, he is not included at all.61 Three of Pound’s poems appeared in Sangū’s Anthology of New English Verse in 1921.62 The following year, at the start of a three-year stay in England when he also befriended Kōri, the prominent poet and critic Nishiwaki Junzaburō read H. D.’s ‘Oread’ (which had also appeared in Sangū’s introduction to Imagism) and Pound’s introduction of it as the best example of a ‘vorticist’ poem in the first issue of BLAST.63 Soon after his return to Japan in 1925, Nishiwaki had four Vorticist-inspired poems published in Momota’s poetry magazine Sekitoku (‘Letters’), including his famous poem ‘Ame’ (‘Rain’).64 In 1933, one of Nishiwaki’s former students at Keiō University, Kinoshita Tsunetarō, translated Pound’s How to Read under the title Bungaku seishin no gensen (‘The Origins of the Spirit of Literature’); it is this publication that likely spurred Kitasono to contact Pound some three years later.65 From August 1936 to August 1939, six of Pound’s poems were translated and published in VOU by Kitasono; his articles continued to be published in VOU and its successor, Shin gijutsu ('New Art'), until March 1941.66 As Niikura Toshikazu suggests, though, Pound only began receiving significant attention as a poet in Japan after the war.67 This attention was first demonstrated by Kitasono’s translation and publication of seven of Pound’s poems in the August 1951 issue of VOU; among these is the first-ever Japanese version of ‘In a Station of the Metro’.68 Pound’s new poetry publications were also advertised in later issues. Iwasaki edited the first book of Pound’s poetry in Japanese

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:12, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.010

150

andrew houwen

five years later.69 John Solt contends, however, that Pound’s poetry had little effect on Kitasono’s, noting that their relationship was one of ‘pretended familiarity and real indifference’.70 Kitasono did, though, play a part in the foundation of the concrete poetry movement through his connection, via Pound, with the Brazilian poets Haroldo and Augusto de Campos. One Japanese concrete poet, Niikuni Seiichi, took a particular interest in Pound’s ‘ideogrammic method’ via the de Campos brothers’ concrete poetry manifesto in their magazine Noigandres. ‘What I particularly took note of in the Noigandres “manifesto”’, Niikuni reflects, ‘was the attention paid, via E. F. Fenollosa and Ezra Pound, to the way of writing Chinese characters and the function of individual Chinese words’.71 This led to Niikuni’s composition of concrete poems such as ‘Rain’ (1966) that took apart the constituent elements of Chinese characters in order to call attention to what Niikuni considered to be their visual etymologies. Niikuni’s concrete poems were exhibited across the world and published in several anthologies, including the Penguin Post-War Japanese Poetry in 1972. By the time of Pound’s death, then, the influence of his ‘ideogrammic method’ can thus also be gauged by its journey from the west back to the east. Although the dominant recent trend in scholarship concerning Pound’s relationships with Japanese literature has been a turn towards nō, there is still scope for more research on Pound and hokku. As Kōson’s influence on Chamberlain already suggests, what Flint and Pound encountered in ‘haikai’ or ‘hokku’ was partly shaped by fundamental reforms to it in the 1890s led by Masaoka Shiki (another influence Chamberlain acknowledges).72 A study of these changes in relation to Pound’s interest in ‘hokku’ might illustrate the extent to which his conception of it as embodying a poetics of concretion and ‘super-position’ is merely his projection or, instead, shares an affinity with Japanese precedents. Similarly, research on the political role of nō in late-nineteenth-century Japan, especially of Takasago and Hagoromo, could shed further light on how their promotion of imperialism anticipated Pound’s fascism. Recent scholarship that has challenged the narrative of Pound’s interest in nō as relatively minor could be further extended: in light of the discovery of Pound’s Takasago translation, for example, Kenner’s contention that this play’s ‘hymn to vegetal powers became the whole of Rock-Drill’ merits further investigation.73 Niikuni’s concrete poems, meanwhile, offer a potentially valuable contribution to the discussion of Pound’s ‘ideogrammic method’, and Pound’s impact on contemporary Japanese

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:12, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.010

‘A Treasure Like Nothing We Have in the Occident’

151

poets such as Kido Shuri, who is also a translator of Pound, and the senryū poet Aota Senryū remain as yet unexplored. Pound’s relationships with Japanese literature can thus still provide much as yet undiscovered treasure.

Notes 1. Ezra Pound, ‘In a Station of the Metro’, Poetry 2/1 (April 1913), 12. 2. Pound, ‘How I Began’, T. P.’s Weekly (6 June 1913), 707; Pound, ‘Vorticism’, Fortnightly Review, n. s. 573 (1 September 1914), 467. 3. This chapter uses the spelling ‘nō’, rather than Pound’s ‘Noh’, because the former is the standard Latin-script spelling for the term in Japanese. For a relatively recent discussion of nō elements in Pound’s The Women of Trachis, see Miho Takahashi, ‘Herakles on the Blazing Pyre: A Reading of The Women of Trachis’, in ROMA/AMOR: Ezra Pound, Rome, and Love, ed. William Pratt and Caterina Ricciardi (Brooklyn: AMS, 2013), 215–28. 4. F. S. Flint, ‘Book of the Week: Recent Verse’, The New Age, 3/2 (11 July 1908), 212–13. 5. Flint, ‘The History of Imagism’, The Egoist 2/5 (1 May 1915), 70–71. 6. J. B. Harmer, Victory in Limbo: Imagism, 1908–1917 (London: Secker and Warburg, 1975). 7. Paul-Louis Couchoud, ‘Les haïkaï (Épigrammes poétiques du Japon)’, Les Lettres 3 (April 1906), 189–98. 8. Helen Carr, The Verse Revolutionaries: Ezra Pound, H. D. and The Imagists (London: Jonathan Cape, 2009). 9. Yoshinobu Hakutani, Haiku and Modernist Poetics (Basingstoke; Macmillan, 2009). 10. Hakutani, Haiku, 73. 11. Kiuchi Toru, ‘Noguchi Yonejirō – haiku wo sekai ni hirometa hito’ (‘Noguchi Yonejirō – The Person Who Spread Haiku around the World’), Kadokawa haiku 65/10 (September 2016), 118–29 (118). Except where specified, all translations are my own. 12. Rupert Richard Arrowsmith, Modernism and the Museum; Asian, African and Pacific Art and the Avant-Garde (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 122. However, Andrew Thacker claims, like Hakutani, that Noguchi’s ‘What Is a Hokku Poem?’ Rhythm, 12 (January 1913), 354–9, is the proposed inspiration for ‘In a Station of the Metro’. Thacker, The Imagist Poets (Tavistock: Northcote, 2011), 62. 13. Kiuchi, ‘Noguchi Yonejirō’, 128. 14. F. V. Dickins, Primitive and Medieval Texts (Oxford: Clarendon, 1906); Basil Hall Chamberlain, Japanese Poetry (London: John Murray, 1910). 15. Carr, The Verse Revolutionaries, 192. 16. Chamberlain, Japanese Poetry, 147.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:12, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.010

152

andrew houwen

17. Chamberlain, Japanese Poetry, 164. 18. Yamazaki Kagotarō, Haikaishidan (‘A Discussion of Haikai’s History’) (Tokyo: Hakubunkan, 1893), 14–15. 19. Harmer, Victory in Limbo, 133. 20. Aeba Kōson, Haikairon (‘On Haikai’) (Tokyo: privately printed, 1893), 3. 21. Kōson, Haikairon, 3. 22. Chamberlain, ‘Bashō and the Japanese Poetical Epigram’, Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan 30 (1902), 312; Chamberlain, Japanese Poetry, 212. 23. Pound, ‘Vorticism’, 467. 24. Noguchi, ‘Hokku’, The Academy 83 (July 1912), 58. 25. Nogushi, ‘Hokku’, 58. 26. The ‘mixing of an abstraction with the concrete’, such as ‘dim lands of peace’, ‘dulls the Image’ – Pound, ‘A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste’, Poetry 1/6 (March 1913), 201. 27. Arrowsmith, Modernism and the Museum, 121. 28. Arrowsmith, Modernism and the Museum, 121. 29. David Ewick, ‘Imagism Status Rerum and a Note on Haiku’, Make It New 2/1 (2015, 55). 30. Pound, ‘Vorticism’, 471. 31. Ewick, ‘Imagism Status Rerum’, 55. 32. For a recent analysis of Pound’s own ‘Noh’, Tristan, see Mikhail Oshukov, Representation of Otherness in Literary Avant-Garde of Early Twentieth Century: David Burliuk’s and Ezra Pound’s Japan [sic] (PhD thesis, University of Turku, 2017), 273–90. 33. Andrew Houwen, ‘Ezra Pound’s Early Cantos and His Translation of Takasago’, Review of English Studies 65/269 (April 2014), 322. The online version appeared in August 2013. The existence of Pound’s translation of Takasago has been noted in Réka Mihálka’s Japonism and Modernism: Ezra Pound and His Era (PhD thesis, Eötvös Loránd University, 2010), 141–4. 34. Pound, letter to Alice Corbin Henderson (7 July 1915), in Ira Nadel (ed.), Ezra Pound’s Letters to Alice Corbin Henderson (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993), 109. 35. Pound, ‘The Classical Stage of Japan’, The Drama 5/18 (May 1915), 224. 36. Pound, ‘Classical Stage’, 224. 37. Pound, ‘Classical Stage’, 205. 38. Houwen, ‘Ezra Pound’s Early Cantos and His Translation of Takasago’, 341. 39. Houwen, ‘Takasago’, 333. 40. Houwen, ‘Takasago’, 336. 41. Fenollosa and Pound, ‘Noh’ or Accomplishment (London: Macmillan, 1916), 172. 42. Fenollosa and Pound, ‘Noh’ or Accomplishment, 174. 43. Fenollosa’s notes explain this: he calls Emperor Xuanzong ‘Genso Kotei’, which approximates the Japanese transliteration (‘Gensō kōtei’) of the Chinese ‘Xuanzong huangdi’ (‘Emperor Xuanzong’). See Akiko Miyake, Sanehide Kodama and Nicholas Teele, eds., A Guide to Ezra Pound and

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:12, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.010

‘A Treasure Like Nothing We Have in the Occident’

44. 45.

46. 47.

48.

49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55.

56. 57. 58. 59.

153

Ernest Fenollosa’s Classic Noh Theatre of Japan (Orono, MN: National Poetry Foundation, 1994), 189. Pound almost certainly read an account of this dance in Noguchi’s nō play ‘The Everlasting Sorrow’, based on the poem of that name by Bai Juyi, in which the Emperor’s famous consort Yang Guifei performs ‘the dance of the Rainbow Skirt and the Feather Jacket’ at its conclusion. Noguchi, ‘The Everlasting Sorrow’, The Egoist 4/9 (October 1917), 142. Fenollosa and Pound, ‘Noh’ or Accomplishment, 174. Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 432. Pound’s reference to Hagoromo in the drafts of Canto XLIX is similarly not noted in Carrie J. Preston’s Learning to Kneel: Noh, Modernism, and Journeys in Teaching (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), which devotes a chapter to Pound and Hagoromo. Ezra Pound Papers, YCAL MSS 43, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Box 74, Folder 3314. Diego Pellecchia, ‘Ezra Pound and the Politics of Noh Film’, Philological Quarterly 92/4 (Fall 2013), 499–516. The significance for Pound of viewing nō in Atarashiki tsuchi had previously been discussed in Akitoshi Nagahata’s conference paper, ‘Revisiting the Fenollosa Manuscripts in The Japan Times: Pound’s Language of Nostalgia and International Affairs’, given at the XXIVth Ezra Pound International Conference, London, 7 July 2011. For a detailed account of Pound’s interactions with Kōri, Kume and Itō, see Ewick, ‘Notes toward a Cultural History of Japanese Modernism in Modernist Europe, 1910–1920. With Special Reference to Kōri Torahiko’, The Hemingway Review of Japan 13 (June 2012), 19–36; Tateo Imamura, ‘Hemingway, Pound, and the Japanese Artist, Tamijuro Kume’, The Hemingway Review of Japan 13 (June 2012), 37–47; and Dorsey Kleitz, ‘Michio Ito and the Modernist Vortex’, The Hemingway Review of Japan 13 (June 2012), 49–57. Sanehide Kodama, ed., Ezra Pound and Japan: Letters and Essays (Redding Ridge: Black Swan Books, 1987), 32. Kodama, ed., Ezra Pound and Japan, 32. Pellecchia, ‘Ezra Pound and the Politics of Noh Film’, 503. Kodama, ed., Ezra Pound and Japan, 112. Kodama, ed., Ezra Pound and Japan, 150. Pellecchia, ‘Ezra Pound and the Politics of Noh Film’, 512–13. Christopher Bush, ‘“I am all for the triangle”: The Geopolitical Aesthetic of Pound’s Japan’, in Ezra Pound in the Present: Essays on Pound’s Contemporaneity, ed. Paul Stasi and Josephine Park (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 75–106. Bush, ‘Pound’s Japan’, 93. Bush, ‘Pound’s Japan’, 92. Bush, ‘Pound’s Japan’, 93. Bush, ‘Pound’s Japan’, 93.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:12, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.010

154

andrew houwen

60. Bush, ‘Pound’s Japan’, 95. 61. Sangū Makoto, Shibun kenkyū (‘Poetry and Literature Studies’) (Tokyo: Sekibundō, 1918), 3–18; Momota Sōji, Atarashii shi no kaishaku to tsukurikata (‘The Interpretation and Ways of Writing New Poetry’) (Tokyo: Kōseikaku, 1929), 183–4. 62. Pound, ‘The Garret’, ‘Salutation’ and ‘A Pact’, in Sangū (ed.), An Anthology of New English Verse (Osaka: Suzuya, 1921), 112, 112–13 and 113, respectively. 63. Niikura Toshikazu, Shijintachi no seiki: Nishiwaki Junzaburō to Ezura Paundo (‘The Poets’ Century: Nishiwaki Junzaburō and Ezra Pound’) (Tokyo: Misuzu, 2003), 33. 64. Niikura, Shijintachi no seiki, 33. ‘Rain’ appears in English translation in Geoffrey Bownas and Anthony Thwaite’s Penguin Book of Japanese Verse, 3rd ed. (London: Penguin, 2009), 189. 65. Pound, Bungaku seishin no gensen (‘The Origins of the Spirit of Literature’), trans. Kinoshita Tetsutarō (Tokyo: Kinseidō, 1933). 66. Pound, ‘Itarii tsūshin’ (‘Letter from Italy’), Shin gijutsu (‘New Art’) 32 (March 1941), 22–24. 67. Niikura, Shijintachi no seiki, 48. 68. Pound, ‘Metoro no teishaba nite’ (‘In a Station of the Metro’), trans. Kitasono, VOU 35 (August 1951), 16. 69. Iwasaki Ryōzō, Ezura Paundo Shishū (‘Selected Poems of Ezra Pound’) (Tokyo: Arechi, 1956). 70. John Solt, Shredding the Tapestry of Meaning: The Poetry and Poetics of Kitasono Katué (1902–1978) (Cambridge, MA: Harvard East Asian Monographs, 1999), 135. 71. Niikuni Seiichi, ‘Konkuriito poetorii jūnen – ASA no seiritsu to sono tenkan’ (‘Ten Years of Concrete Poetry – ASA’s Foundation and Development’), in Niikuni Seiichi shishū (‘The Poems of Niikuni Seiichi’), ed. Kamimura Hiroo (Tokyo: ASA, 1979), 61. 72. Kita Yoshiko is the first to mention Shiki’s reforms in passing in an article on Pound and hokku, though no connection between these and English translations of hokku or Pound is yet made. Kita Yoshiko, ‘Ezra Pound and Haiku: Why Did Imagists Hardly Mention Basho?’, Paideuma 29/1–2 (Spring and Fall 2000), 182. I first proposed the possibility of such links in my article ‘“Thinking by Images”: Kamo no Chōmei’s Hōjōki and Basil Bunting’s Chomei at Toyama’, Translation and Literature 25/3 (Autumn 2016), 364. 73. Kenner, The Pound Era, 284. W OR KS C I T ED Aeba Kōson, Haikairon (‘On Haikai’) (Tokyo: privately printed, 1893). Arrowsmith, Rupert Richard, Modernism and the Museum: Asian, African and Pacific Art and the Avant-Garde (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:12, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.010

‘A Treasure Like Nothing We Have in the Occident’

155

Bush, Christopher, ‘“I am all for the triangle”: The Geopolitical Aesthetic of Pound’s Japan’, in Ezra Pound in the Present: Essays on Pound’s Contemporaneity , ed. Paul Stasi and Josephine Park, 75–106 (London: Bloomsbury, 2016). Carr, Helen, The Verse Revolutionaries: Ezra Pound, H. D. and The Imagists (London: Jonathan Cape, 2009). Chamberlain, Basil Hall, ‘Bashō and the Japanese Poetical Epigram’, Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan, 30 (1902), 243–362. Japanese Poetry (London: John Murray, 1910). Dōgen, Shōbōgenzō zenyaku dokkai (‘Treasury of the True Dharma Eye with Complete Translation and Commentary’), ed. Masutani Fumio, 8 Vols., Vol. 3 (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 2004). Ewick, David, ‘Imagism Status Rerum and a Note on Haiku’, Make It New 2/1 (2015), 42–57. ‘Notes Toward a Cultural History of Japanese Modernism in Modernist Europe, 1910–1920. With Special Reference to Kōri Torahiko’, The Hemingway Review of Japan, 13 (June 2012), 19–36. Fenollosa, Ernest, and Ezra Pound, ‘Noh’ or Accomplishment (London: Macmillan, 1916). Flint, F. S., ‘Book of the Week: Recent Verse’, The New Age, 3/2 (11 July 1908), 212–13. ‘The History of Imagism’, The Egoist, 2/5 (1 May 1915), 70–1. Hakutani, Yoshinobu, Haiku and Modernist Poetics (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2009). Harmer, J. B., Victory in Limbo: Imagism, 1908–1917 (London: Secker and Warburg, 1975). Houwen, Andrew, ‘Ezra Pound’s Early Cantos and His Translation of Takasago’, Review of English Studies, 65/269 (April 2014), 321–41. ‘Thinking by Images: Kamo no Chōmei’s Hōjōki and Basil Bunting’s Chomei at Toyama’, Translation and Literature, 25/3 (Autumn 2016), 363–79. Imamura, Tateo, ‘Hemingway, Pound, and the Japanese Artist, Tamijuro Kume’, The Hemingway Review of Japan, 13 (June 2012), 37–47. Kenner, Hugh, The Pound Era (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971). Kita Yoshiko, ‘Ezra Pound and Haiku: Why Did Imagists Hardly Mention Basho?’, Paideuma, 29/1–2 (Spring and Fall 2000), 179–91. Kiuchi Toru, ‘Noguchi Yonejirō – haiku wo sekai ni hirometa hito’ (‘Noguchi Yonejirō – The Person Who Spread Haiku Around the World’), Kadokawa haiku 65/10 (September 2016), 118–29. Kleitz, Dorsey, ‘Michio Ito and the Modernist Vortex’, The Hemingway Review of Japan, 13 (June 2012), 49–57. Kodama, Sanehide, Ezra Pound and Japan: Letters and Essays (Redding Ridge: Black Swan Press, 1987). Mihálka, Réka, Japonism and Modernism: Ezra Pound and His Era (PhD thesis, Eötvös Loránd University, 2010).

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:12, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.010

156

andrew houwen

Miyake, Akiko, Sanehide Kodama and Nicholas Teele, ed., A Guide to Ezra Pound and Ernest Fenollosa’s Classic Noh Theatre of Japan (Orono, MN: The National Poetry Foundation, 1994). Momota Sōji, Atarashii shi no kaishaku to tsukurikata (‘The Interpretation and Ways of Writing New Poetry’) (Tokyo: Kōseikaku, 1929). Nadel, Ira, ed., Ezra Pound’s Letters to Alice Corbin Henderson (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993). Niikuni Seiichi, ‘Konkuriito poetorii jūnen – ASA no seiritsu to sono tenkan’ (‘Ten Years of Concrete Poetry – ASA’s Foundation and Development’), in Niikuni Seiichi shishū (‘The Poems of Niikuni Seiichi’), ed. Kamimura Hiroo, 57–63 (Tokyo: ASA, 1979). Niikura Toshikazu, Shijintachi no seiki: Nishiwaki Junzaburō to Ezura Paundo (‘The Poets’ Century: Nishiwaki Junzaburō and Ezra Pound’) (Tokyo: Misuzu, 2003). Noguchi, Yone, ‘Hokku’, The Academy, 83 (July 1912), 57–8. ‘What Is a Hokku Poem?’, Rhythm, 12 (January 1913), 354–59. ‘The Everlasting Sorrow’, The Egoist, 4/9 (October 1917), 141–43. Pellecchia, Diego, ‘Ezra Pound and the Politics of Noh Film’, Philological Quarterly, 92/4 (Fall 2013), 499–516. Pound, Ezra, ‘The Classical Stage of Japan’, The Drama 5/18 (May 1915), 199–247. A Draft of XXX Cantos (Paris: Hours Press, 1930). ‘A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste’, Poetry 1/6 (March 1913), 200–6. The Fifth Decad of Cantos (New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1937). ‘How I Began’, T. P.’s Weekly (6 June 1913), 707. ‘In a Station of the Metro’, Poetry, 2/1 (April 1913), 12. ‘Vorticism’, Fortnightly Review, n. s. 573 (1 September 1914), 461–71. Sangū Makoto, An Anthology of New English Verse (Osaka: Suzuya, 1921). Shibun kenkyū (‘Poetry and Literature Studies’) (Tokyo: Sekibundō, 1918). Solt, John, Shredding the Tapestry of Meaning: The Poetry and Poetics of Kitasono Katué (1902–1978) (Cambridge, MA: Harvard East Asian Monographs, 1999). Takahashi, Miho, ‘Herakles on the Blazing Pyre: A Reading of The Women of Trachis’, in ROMA/AMOR: Ezra Pound, Rome, and Love, ed. William Pratt and Caterina Ricciardi, 215–28 (Brooklyn: AMS, 2013). Thacker, Andrew, The Imagist Poets (Tavistock: Northcote, 2011). Yamazaki Kagotarō, Haikaishidan (‘A Discussion of Haikai ’s History’) (Tokyo: Hakubunkan, 1893).

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:12, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.010

chapter 10

Ezra Pound and Chinese Poetry Jeffrey Twitchell-Waas

On the publication of the Chinese translation of the Pisan Cantos, the poet Yang Lian observed that now, in the Chinese language, The Cantos had achieved its full realization.1 For those of us who can read The Cantos only in English and a smattering of Western tongues, this is a somewhat disheartening proposition, yet the very suggestion resonates with a whole cluster of issues bound up with the central role that China came to play in Pound’s work. One might think the topic of China in Pound’s writings had been exhaustively covered, especially discussions of Cathay and Ernest Fenollosa’s essay on written Chinese as a medium for poetry, yet there is no abatement in the seemingly inexhaustible re-treading of old ground along with new approaches. To focus the spiralling questions and relations inevitable in any discussion of Pound, the following will stick to the obvious nodal points of Cathay, Fenollosa’s essay, the Seven Lakes Canto (Canto XLIX) and the Confucian Odes, but there will also be an attempt to turn this around to briefly address the relation of Pound with contemporary Chinese poetry.

Cathay Cathay is the rare intersection of a decisive work in the development of Anglo-American verse and a seminal, highly influential translation into English. These vectors are inextricable, yet the mountain of critical commentary on this slim volume tends to emphasize one approach or the other. On the one hand, Cathay is seen as crystalizing Pound’s ongoing efforts to modernize English verse, above all the campaign for free verse, so that the poems represent his major contribution as an Imagist poet. On the other hand, there are those who insist that the poems of Cathay must be read as translations, which after all is how Pound himself presented them, albeit somewhat ambiguously. From this perspective, Pound’s versions are read against their originals, although considerably complicated by the fact 157

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:13, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.011

158

jeffrey twitchell-waas

that Pound knew no Chinese and little about Chinese poetry so that a proper discussion must be triangulated with Fenollosa’s notebooks.2 In between there is ample space for a diversity of cultural translation approaches focusing on Cathay’s representation of China and its various forms of mediation. These too can emphasize how the poems replicate or counter certain Western Orientalist traditions of the day or how Chinese sources influenced, were even formative in the development of the modernist values Pound propagated.3 Then there is the complicated and somewhat under-studied question of Cathay’s long shadow on subsequent poetry, whether as a certain style of free verse, as a model of translation or as a poetic representation of China.4 Usually, one can tell at a glance whether a given translation from classical Chinese poetry is pre- or post-Cathay. Pound’s decisive decisions, probably made out of ignorance as much as conscious choice, were to ignore the form and the metonymic or allusive network of the originals, so we end up with the paradox of an ancient, highly traditionalist and formalist poetry dressed up in a seemingly limpid free verse. Any reader of China’s greatest novel, Hong lou meng (Story of the Stone, A Dream of Red Mansions), which incorporates extensive discussions and performances of poetry, will recognize how integral the formal and technical complexities were to the Chinese conception of poetry, as well as the allusive and allegorical echo chamber that was taken for granted and based on what we would consider prodigious feats of memorization. For precisely these reasons, most Western experts prior to Cathay considered Chinese poetry untranslatable and very often not worth the effort.5 Virtually all subsequent translators have adhered to Pound’s basic decisions. Post-Cathay translations usually claim at least implicitly a greater familiarity with the original poetry than Pound, or even than Fenollosa, and therefore feel obliged to at least gesture at the formal elements of the original. Yet these translations, considerable in number, remain almost entirely a free verse and Imagistic province, and it is as such that they have come to occupy a place in modern Anglo-American poetry, with a significantly higher profile than any other non-Western poetic tradition.6 No one today is likely to read Cathay as authoritative or representative of Chinese poetry generally, although a remarkable amount of recent critical commentary would give the impression that the volume exists in isolation and has had an almost magical influence we still need to shake off. The numerous critical examinations of this or that Pound version against the details of the original text often obscure the larger issues of translation beyond questions of semantic equivalence: on the one hand, a rigorous

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:13, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.011

Ezra Pound and Chinese Poetry

159

comparative consideration of the linguistic resources and poetic assumptions between classical Chinese and contemporary English, while on the other, the examination of the act of translation as a reciprocal interaction within specific socio-historical contexts.7 To an astonishing degree, authoritative readings of Pound’s translations, often by native Chinese speakers, conclude that, whatever inevitable errors and embarrassments in details, Pound often intuits the sensibility and inner form of the originals better than those with greater expertise. Such readings necessarily assume certain interpretations of the original Chinese poems that more pedantic sinologists presumably miss, assumptions which readers of modernist poetry are rarely in a position to adjudicate. Beyond the intrinsic ambiguity for which classical Chinese poetry is noted and often prized, the object of study is in a dead language formed and perpetuated within state institutions and an educational system now extinct. The latter would have sustained reading habits and assumptions that went a long way towards stabilizing the understandings of the poems – understandings that modern Western readers might find unpalatably moralistic or abstrusely allegorical. Today there is a strong consensus for the superiority of Cathay over the translations of Pound’s primary contemporaries – by Amy Lowell and Florence Ayscough, Witter Bynner and Kang-hu Kiang, and above all Arthur Waley – which is to say, as poems in English Pound’s still remain highly readable whereas the others seem increasingly less so, in part because Pound played such a determining role in forming modern poetic values and tastes.8 However, it is still worth reading Cathay alongside these contemporaneous translations, particularly those of Waley, because they sprang seemingly spontaneously in the immediate wake of Cathay’s microselection, greatly expanding the representation of classical Chinese poetry and, in turn, creating a larger context within which Cathay could be read.9 In the post–World War II period, English translations of classical Chinese poetry, especially in the United States, have given increasing emphasis to the reclusive tradition, a Taoist-Buddhist countercultural inflection that is often presented as the authentic heart of Chinese poetry more generally, in addition to justifying a perpetuation of the Cathay’s Imagistic manner of apparent directness and avoidance of poetic rumination. One of the curious sidelights of the argument for Cathay’s intuitive recognition of the inner form of the originals has been the claim or implication that Pound was a closet Taoist, despite his stated allegiance to Confucianism.10 This smacks of trying to save Pound from himself. Again, such readings are premised on identifying a stable poetic essence that is invariably reductive, and the reclusive tradition in China can hardly

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:13, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.011

160

jeffrey twitchell-waas

be understood, except as thoroughly imbricated within a Confucian context. Curiously, after Cathay Pound never pursued further translations from the Fenollosa notebooks, despite tinkering with the possibility on a number of occasions, nor did he in any major way incorporate the manner of these translations into his subsequent work.11 It is plausible to detect, as many have, vestiges of Chinese poetry in the various landscape vignettes scattered throughout The Cantos, but it is equally plausible to attribute these to any number of Pound’s multitudinous interests and influences – after all, he himself claimed that ‘all the verbal constructions’ of Cathay had already been road tested in ‘Provincia Deserta’ (SL 101). Canto XLIX (the ‘Seven Lakes’ Canto) represents Pound’s major translation from Chinese poetry after Cathay, aside from the late renderings of the Confucian Book of Odes. Compared with Cathay, the translations in Canto XLIX evidence the impact of Fenollosa’s essay or at least Pound’s direct involvement with Chinese characters, at this stage still quite rudimentary, as these translations are notably more telegraphic in manner, emphasizing the presentation of discrete imagistic units (predominately substantive) and suppressing syntactical connections, which are then enacted by the reader, thus mimicking Fenollosa’s claim for a poetry of natural force and relations.12 This canto’s ideographic gesturing is reinforced by the odd inclusion of a phonetic transcription from Japanese of an archaic Chinese poem, which highlights the poem’s pre-literate roots, which for the Western reader is encountered as pure sound poetry.13 But then, it is also a visual or concrete poem, which has a similarly primitivistic effect, as the layout attempts to visually suggest an ideographic text. In large part, this peculiar intrusion of an unreadable block of text serves a heuristic function to clue the reader into eyeing and mouthing the text as if estranged, to seehear it anew. Although some commentators have highlighted the Taoism in the painterly landscape renditions of the opening two-thirds of the canto, the larger poem contextualizes this as explicitly political – that is, the utopian expression of imperial power felt as no government at all and where a life of basic manual labour is experienced as simply natural.14 The ultimate historical act of this ideal is the Emperor’s construction of a canal for his pleasure that benefits his people, a thoroughly Confucian ideal in which the personal acts of the Emperor are spontaneously communal. Finally, this canto functions as a reminder of the poet’s utopian impulse going back to those archaic communal songs as the assertion of a hope in a present dominated by Geryon (usura). We will see how this anticipates assumptions behind Pound’s late versions of the Confucian Odes.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:13, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.011

Ezra Pound and Chinese Poetry

161

Fenollosa The common supposition is that after Cathay Pound shifts his attention to Ernest Fenollosa’s essay on the Chinese written character, which would have far-reaching consequences for his poetics and practice. Despite numerous detailed discussions, the precise relationships remain slippery between the intentions of Fenollosa’s original essay, its public version as edited by Pound and, especially, just what Pound took from it. It is widely claimed that the essay represents a foundational statement of American modernist poetics, and is often taken as a definitive, albeit retrospective, statement of Pound’s Imagist, as well as post-Imagist, position. Yet despite Pound’s vigorous promotion one has to look very hard to find any mention of the essay, much less any critical discussion, until after World War II.15 In the early 1950s, Charles Olson, when he was still an unknown in the shadow of Pound, declared the seminal importance of Fenollosa’s essay, and at roughly the same time both Hugh Kenner and Donald Davie, key figures in the formative period of Pound studies, advocated the essay as a fundamental statement of Pound’s poetics and therefore of American poetic modernism.16 The essay’s profile was only enhanced by attacks from sinologists, beginning especially with a 1958 essay by George A. Kennedy.17 From this cluster of authorities, the importance of Fenollosa’s essay has been taken for granted, particularly because academic exegesis, when confronted with the challenges of modernist verse, requires statements of poetics that tend to be reified out of their polemical and strategic contexts as eternal principles of poetics that can then be applied to demystify the primary texts. Often the so-called ideogrammic method is evoked as central to a broad Poundian tradition, but as a compositional practice this is simply a variation on collage or paratactic construction that was already widely and diversely practiced throughout modernism and beyond.18 We have long known that we should be embarrassed by the conception of the Chinese written character set forth in Fenollosa’s essay – that is, the claim that the characters are a non-phonetic script whose residual pictographic origins can still be read, however precariously.19 Yet Fenollosa’s ghost remains remarkably alive judging from the burgeoning, often sympathetic attention he has received lately, which was affirmed by the publication on the centennial of his death of an elaborate critical edition of his essay. While the essay as edited by Pound is necessarily given pride of place as the first exhibit, this is very much a Fenollosa book – presenting an unedited version of his essay with a handful of further lectures and essays to

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:13, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.011

162

jeffrey twitchell-waas

help contextualize his larger project, which is further enhanced by a typically lucid introduction by Haun Saussy.20 The editors particularly emphasize the impact of the specifically Japanese intellectual milieu, notably Fenollosa’s engagement with certain schools of Buddhism, on the essay and his larger project, which envisions a necessary marriage between East and West. What comes through forcefully is the intrinsic interest of Fenollosa as a transcultural mediating figure during the tumultuous and fateful period of the Meiji reforms, a figure who deserves further attention. It is also clear that Pound, as one would expect, was a heavyhanded editor of Fenollosa’s essay in pursuit of his own ends. In any case, we now must distinguish carefully between Fenollosa’s essay, and the larger project of which it is a part, and the essay as presented by Pound within the context of his own concerns, and the latter will be what I refer to in the following discussion. One might wonder why the essay seems to drive many sinologists to the verge of apoplexy. The answer is that its argument, its use by Pound and subsequent influence (somewhat exaggerated) was an easy target for inveighing against and demystifying the ‘ideographic myth’ at a time when sinological studies had come to a consensus, based on scholarship beginning in the 1920s and 1930s, on the pervasive, if complex, role of phonetic components in Chinese writing. Therefore, the point of attack is on the pictographic reading of characters. It is not often highlighted that such interpretations have a long and venerable tradition among the Chinese themselves and the ideographic myth is by no means solely a Western fantasy. While we must take on-board the fact that Chinese characters cannot reliably be read in a pictographic-etymological manner, the simple dismissal of this myth can be obfuscating and beside the point with regard to Fenollosa’s main argument, which is concerned with poetic effects. After all, even the well educated do not usually dwell in their language according to the protocols of scholarly correctness, and this is perhaps especially the case with poets and their readers. Recently an increasing number of sinologically trained scholars have been setting Fenollosa’s essay within broader and more complex discursive fields, such as the long heritage of Western intellectual analysis and speculations on Chinese writing as a critical counterpoint to Western scripts and modes of thought, or within Chinese traditions of character reading and nondualistic conceptions of writing, or as a node of intercultural exchange and translation.21 Fenollosa’s basic model posits a state of language that is vital, relatively fluid and open-ended that maps natural forces or the real of experience set

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:13, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.011

Ezra Pound and Chinese Poetry

163

over against a static state of language – that of abstract logic, grammar and complete statements. As such, this model can be widely found across modernism, or for that matter going back at least to the Romantics and up to the present day. The appeal of this model is obvious for artists, poets and intellectuals, especially those advocating radical or innovative procedures, since it implies the possibility and necessity of their exploratory endeavours with strong epistemological and even socio-political implications. Whatever influence Fenollosa’s essay has had, it is not primarily because it offers a theory of the Chinese written language, but because of its suggestiveness about language generally. That the object of discussion is the Chinese character has obvious advantages because, for the Western reader, it has a built-in alienation effect, thus offering glimpses of a different and truer relationship between signifiers and the fluid state of the real, which the ideographic conception of the characters obviously enhances. Despite the prominence that Fenollosa and even more so Pound give to the pictographic reading of the characters, it is not at all clear that the basic model or argument relies on such discernment, as long as the script effectively suggests and heightens its graphic element and thus gestures at a counter-dualistic reading process. Modernist works along with their critical exegesis have been much preoccupied with strategies of textual estrangement and foregrounding the material signifier. Fenollosa himself overtly anticipated that ‘sinologues’ would be out of sympathy with his views, since after all they dwell strictly within the realm of grammar and sentences which defines their criteria of knowledge.22 But the most problematic question is determining just what Pound took from Fenollosa’s essay, and it should not surprise us if that proves to be variable, not necessarily consistent and not necessarily plausibly adhering to Fenollosa’s actual arguments. In the first instance the essay convinced Pound that he must engage directly with the Chinese text, that he could not rest content with a secondhand knowledge as he had for Cathay and Canto XIII. In other words, he must enter into the force field of the Chinese text. While we can read the heavy larding of The Cantos with foreign language quotations and tags as symptomatic of an aspiration or gesturing towards a concept of world poetry and culture, the retention of the original text remains crucial, since even when translated they retain an irreducible and thus untranslatable tang or trace of their particularity. This view fits neatly with Fenollosa’s argument in which the distinctness of the script is integral to what is distinct about the language and its sensibility. In this sense, as Chinese cultural and texts take on such a central role in Pound’s image of a possible

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:13, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.011

164

jeffrey twitchell-waas

redeemed society, the Chinese characters must enter directly into the poem, as they do so insistently with Rock-Drill. The second effect of Fenollosa’s essay was on Pound’s propensity for pictographic-etymological readings of the characters, particularly in his later translations from Confucius. Pound was perfectly aware that such readings were ‘not philological’ and was quite explicit that when he was dissatisfied with a definition or explanation from an authoritative source, he felt free to explore other possibilities (SP 82). Again, the interpretations Pound seeks are determined by his larger project for cultural regeneration and therefore by how Confucius can be brought over for that purpose. Canto I sets a paradigm for historical textual transmission and translation, which is to say for the act of writing generally, which in this case reaches back well before Homer to archaic ritual that Pound is now performing in the present as an act of cultural renewal. The text has to be performed in order to act in the present of the West. Therefore, the ideogrammic reading is a method of engaging intimately with the Chinese text, a performative attempt to recover as a contemporary something like the reading experience of the original, which is not a matter of matching definitions but an ethical and social engagement. This can be seen within the larger propensity for etymological thinking characteristic of so much of modernism, for which Heidegger is paradigmatic. Pound readily used and consulted other translations and authoritative resources, but, however suggestive, they were not to be trusted because the very nature of their enterprise was mummification, the hypostatizing of the texts as critical objects distinct from their possibilities as cultural agents, in other words the translation of texts into the abstract state and grammar that Fenollosa’s argument was posed against.23 The most confusing impact of Fenollosa’s essay on Pound was with regard to the ‘ideogrammic method’. It is not plausible that Pound developed the formal method of the Cantos on the basis of the essay, which emphasizes verbal syntax rather than juxtaposition, and it is not until the early 1930s that he begins to speak regularly on this ‘method’, which coincides with the turn to China as the major paradigm for a redeemed society and his advocacy of the Confucian doctrine of cheng ming or the rectification of names.24 In his own explanations, the context is usually explicitly pedagogic, and the ‘ideogrammic method’ is presented primarily as a critical rather than a specifically poetic practice. Pound invariably insists that Fenollosa’s central insight is that the ideogram manifests the epistemology of science as opposed to logic – that of experiment and exploration with specifics rather than the assumption of abstract rules or

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:13, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.011

Ezra Pound and Chinese Poetry

165

grammar. In other words, Pound presents what is a basic inductive method: generalities must arise from particulars and their comparisons (ABCR 17–27; GK 27–8, 51; SP 77–9). The invariable example he gives of defining ‘redness’ as a compound of the relatively concrete words ‘rose’, ‘cherry’, ‘iron rust’ and ‘flamingo’ does not correspond to any ideogram, nor do Chinese characters function in this manner – that is, their ‘meaning’ is not determined by nor does it arise from what is common among the individual radicals. Nor does this appear a very plausible explanation of the method of The Cantos or how one reads the poem. Nevertheless, we can recognize a nominalist impulse here, an insistence on particulars in their uniqueness as the basis for reading, authentic experience and knowledge. As Pound finally got The Cantos rolling, the critical establishment and most poets wrote it off as a hodgepodge without method or structure. Thus the ideogrammic method with its authority in the unjustly ignored Fenollosa was in part an attempt to respond to such accusations, although few were persuaded at that time. With regard to the internal trajectory of The Cantos, what Fenollosa offered Pound was less a theory of language per se than the authority of China. The implication is that the inductive mode of thought that Fenollosa’s argument claimed was manifest in and perpetuated by the Chinese written language, with poetic thought taken as its highest form, made possible and supported Chinese culture and its remarkable sustainability. This thinking was by no means uniquely Chinese, and The Cantos is much preoccupied with presenting the manifold instances throughout Western history and culture of similar modes of experience and expression, but in China this mode predominated, with fluctuations, over an extremely long period of time and managed to establish institutions that perpetuated rather than repressed it. This is what the larger ambitions of Pound’s project required. But, of course, for this purpose Fenollosa was helpful but of less importance compared with the role of a renewable and adaptable Confucian tradition.

The Confucian Odes Pound’s rendition of the Confucian Book of Odes has received nothing like the acclaim and attention of Cathay, but at the very least it complicates many of the generalizations and judgements made about Pound as a translator of Chinese poetry.25 If we have Cathay in mind, the Confucian Odes appear in every respect its antithesis: whereas previously Pound ignored the formal and allusive dimensions of the

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:13, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.011

166

jeffrey twitchell-waas

originals, here it is precisely these that are foregrounded. Here the old champion of innovative verse comes up with a razzle-dazzle assortment of rhymed and metered poems in an attempt to bring over the archaic and folk qualities of the Chinese. He rummages the English tradition not only for forms but for an array of dictions – Renaissance, Biblical, dialect. But this is a redeployment of traditional resources in the wake of modernism so that past templates are aggressively reworked such that any given poem may have irregular line lengths, stanza forms, rhyme schemes, shifts of meter, yet always strongly evoking traditional patterns. It is as if Pound is groping back to the moment when spontaneous expression has not yet entirely submitted to conventionalized conceptions and grammar in order to create the effect of a poetry with roots in folk creations and ritual ceremony. It is useful to read Pound’s versions alongside those of Waley, still taken as the standard, where one can typically expect the shape and sense of the originals to be reliably replicated but read in quantity can be a deadening experience.26 Pound’s poems jump off the page in their aspiration towards song and dance, even if not infrequently they fall down too. The available text of Pound’s Confucian Odes is a very truncated version of the grandiose project he conceived and prepared, which much to his exasperation was never published.27 This edition was to include a complete ‘singing key’ or phonetic transcription of all the poems along with two versions of the Chinese text – a standard Chinese text plus an archaic seal script version that would enhance the pictographic aspect of the characters as well as being contemporaneous with Confucius. While the conception is somewhat boggling, the implication that his translations should be read against the phonetic texts is suggestive and completely at odds with many of the standard assumptions based on the translations in Cathay. This touches on the deeper significance of this project for Pound, because beyond resorting to conventional poetic forms as a translation of the formalism of the Chinese poems, Pound wants to present an effectively social or communal poetry, which is how he understands the status of the anthology as a Confucian classic – that is, Confucius’s critical act in selecting and arranging the poems. They are socially performative with roots in various archaic social rites and festivals, both folk and courtly. In some respects, Pound’s Confucian Odes anticipates ethnopoetics’ deployment of modernist forms to suggest the performative essence of archaic, often pre-literate ‘poetries’. As has frequently been noted, the Cathay poems are the expression or depiction of isolate individuals and separation is their defining setting; therefore, the pervasive mood of melancholy and

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:13, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.011

Ezra Pound and Chinese Poetry

167

alienation was readily accessible to readers brought up on nineteenthcentury verse. The Confucian anthology taps into the more primal roots of poetry as an enactment and affirmation of the collective, which is not just a matter of the individual poems but of the total collection concerned with manifold aspects of society. This brings up the other problem that Cathay simply repressed – that of the allusive or metonymic network Chinese poetry inhabits. To a certain degree, the mere presentation of a large body of traditional forms would give this impression, but Pound makes various small interpolations, most often as epigraphs, suggesting links with Western themes and poems to at least hint at this contextualizing effect. In contrast to Cathay, the Confucian Odes are arguably best read in bulk or skipped around, rather than focusing on discrete poems. Pound’s emphasis on the performative in his renditions and their socially affirmative presentation indicates the seriousness with which he took the project as a contribution to the regeneration of contemporary Western civilization. Of course, hardly anyone paid attention, and Pound’s Confucianism has found little appeal among poets, translators or even Poundians.28 As mentioned, the predominant development of translations of Chinese poetry in English, especially by poets, has tended to repress Confucianism in preference for a reclusive, spiritual version.

Pound and Chinese Poetry Now Pound is a natural subject for recent interest in ‘world literature’ and transnational or trans-Pacific modernisms. Clearly China’s geopolitical rise has had its effects on Pound studies, as on Western literary-cultural studies generally, with a dramatic increase in cross-cultural exchange, the presence of Chinese-born scholars in the field, the presence of Western scholars with expertise in China studies, and the availability in English of authoritative information on Chinese literature, history and culture. In China itself, the huge investment in translation studies guarantees that Pound receives considerable attention, much of it quite critical, although it has to be noted that within English few of these foreign voices are heard unless assimilated into Anglo-American academic protocols. In the wake of Mao Zedong’s death in 1976 and the official, if halting, adoption of a policy of ‘opening to the outside world’, all manner of modernisms, including China’s own still-born versions, trickled and then poured into mainland China. These usually arrived with what we would consider inadequate framing and via highly uneven translations (very few poets at the time were fluent in English or other Western languages), but

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:13, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.011

168

jeffrey twitchell-waas

this higgledy-piggledy influx had its advantages in being immensely suggestive to younger writers and artists accompanied by little anxiety as to whether they were getting it right. The young poets of this period achieved remarkable cultural celebrity during the decade of the 1980s and were labelled by their official detractors as Menglong (misty or obscure) poets. It is often stated that these poets were strongly influenced by Imagism and related modernisms from the West, which is certainly true, but more to the point these poets adopted various strategies to counter the hortatory strictures of the Maoist period – strategies that can be succinctly summarized as self-expression and indirection. Of course, for several millennia Chinese poets have been practicing such arts within an imperial context where a wrong step, even if based on a wilful misreading, could cost one one’s head as well as those of one’s family. If the post-Mao period saw a tumult of outside influences enter into mainland China, it was also a period of recovering its own cultural riches – not only the standard classical tradition, but also a highly influential ‘root seeking’ movement explored versions of Chinese localism, primitivism and exotic traditions often on the fringes of Han culture, both as renewing resources and as an implicit critique of the centre. Within China the Menglong poets and the innumerable offshoots they generated defined themselves against ‘official’ poets, but aside from the inevitable blurring of the precise distinction between ‘official’ and ‘unofficial’ poets and their support systems, both sides of the divide are always in a fierce state of contention – primarily ideological and political in the former, aesthetic and intellectual in the latter. All of this is merely to gesture at a situation where if we pose the question of Pound’s influence, we should not expect that its presence, when detected, will appear to us as properly Poundian.29 Yang Lian’s suggestion that The Cantos aspires to realize itself as a Chinese poem may allow us a glimpse beyond our habitual assumptions. His larger argument suggests that The Cantos desires to leave behind history, to achieve a synchronic vision, but was shackled by being written in English with its propensity for semantic and grammatical specificity, whereas Chinese, especially classical poetry, tends towards indefiniteness, an openness that the reader must meet at least halfway. This may strike us as directly counter to our usual assumptions about The Cantos as a ‘poem including history’ and its concern with particulars, but it has to be admitted that Pound’s extreme commitment to specificity and polemical interpretations of history are problematic for even his most sympathetic readers. Yang attempts to read the poem as

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:13, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.011

Ezra Pound and Chinese Poetry

169

a ‘record of struggle’ on the level of its linguistic medium, between the natural propensities of Pound’s native tongue and other possibilities intuited by his engagement with Chinese. Underlying Yang’s argument, one might discern an often asserted model among comparativists: a Western poetics or aesthetics founded on a Platonic tradition of mimesis and thus focused on questions of representation and the true as opposed to a Chinese tradition of non-dualistic correlatives that focuses on questions of balancing antitheses, harmonization and affects – the aesthetic object as participating in rather than as always a more or less inadequate representation of larger realities.30 On this model, Pound studies, as one would expect, have been strongly dominated by the representational perspective, so one might consider the value of a reorientation less obsessed with evaluating to what degree Pound accurately represents Chinese poetry, Confucianism or history, which invariably assumes there is a stable or authentic original. Can we imagine The Cantos as struggling to become a Chinese poem? Yang himself was a key figure among the Menglong poets and also associated with the root seeking movement, and for the past few decades has been in self-imposed exile in the West – all phases of what he would consider his evolving poetic identity and self-consciousness. Indeed, he takes these phases as encapsulating the development of post-Mao Chinese poetry generally, which he provocatively correlates with Pound’s own development from Cathay (Imagism) to the Chinese History cantos (root seeking) to the late Cantos – a movement back into the heart of classical Chinese poetry that then realizes itself as global. There is more than a dash of cultural chauvinism in Yang’s claim, and he is far from alone in implying the Chinese language’s superiority as a poetic medium, in part because the unique qualities of the written characters are so much more suggestive and multidimensional than the alphabetic scripts on which Western poets must rely. So we encounter a curious return of the Fenollosa-Pound thesis from voices where there is little question of Orientalist bias, but in a context where again the desire is to counter the abstracting tendencies of modernity by recouping a supposedly lost sensibility latent in one’s language. Pound’s engagement with China is more than yet another case of highhanded modernist appropriation of exotic materials since its presence in the latter two-thirds of The Cantos, as well as virtually all his late nonCantos creative projects, is structurally so pervasive and integral to the poem’s overall intentions. It is nothing less than an effort at grafting China with complimentary roots within Western culture. China is thus not a subject of the poem but a defining presence and force within it. At the

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:13, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.011

170

jeffrey twitchell-waas

very least Yang Lian has taken this more seriously than most Poundians have been able to. So perhaps his suggestion is not so outlandish, and in an uncanny sense the China of Cathay, the Confucian Odes and The Cantos is at the moment expanding and even taking over the poems’ readings.

Notes 1. Lian Yang, ‘“In the Timeless Air”: Chinese Language, Pound and The Cantos’, trans. Liping Yang, Paideuma, 30 (2001), 101–5. See also John Cayley and Lian Yang, ‘Hallucination and Coherence’, Positions: Asia Critique, 10 (2002), 773–84. Strictly speaking, Yang is not overly impressed with the specific translation into Chinese by Yunte Huang (Guilin: Lijiang Publishing House, 1998), but it is the occasion for a claim about the deeper aspiration of Pound’s poem, which I will discuss further as follows. 2. For the former emphasis, the canonical argument is that of Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 192–231, 289–98. The case for Cathay as translations was initially explored by Wai-lim Yip, Ezra Pound’s Cathay (Pricenton: Princeton University Press, 1969) without the benefit of direct access to Fenollosa’s notebooks, which has been followed up by, among many others, Zhaoming Qian, Orientalism and Modernism: The Legacy of China in Pound and Williams (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995) and The Modernist Response to Chinese Art: Pound, Moore, Stevens (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003). A mediate position attempting to balance the advantages of both is offered by Ming Xie, Ezra Pound and the Appropriation of Chinese Poetry: Cathay, Translation, and Imagism (New York: Garland, 1999). 3. For the former, see Robert Kern, Orientalism, Modernism, and the American Poem (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Yunte Huang, Transpacific Displacement: Ethnography, Translation, and Intertextual Travel in Twentieth-Century American Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 60–92; Eric Hayot, Chinese Dreams: Pound, Brecht, Tel Quel (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003), 1–53. For the latter position, see particularly Qian and, more speculatively, Christopher Bush, Ideographic Modernism: China, Writing, Media (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 3–71. 4. See Steven G. Yao, Translation and the Languages of Modernism: Gender, Politics, Language (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 25–51. On Cathay in relation to Asian American poetry, see Josephine Nock-Hee Park, Apparitions of Asia: Modernist Form and Asian American Poetics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 23–56, and Steven G. Yao, Foreign Accents: Chinese American Verse from Exclusion to Postethnicity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 39–62. 5. For example, see Arthur Waley’s 1962 preface to 170 Chinese Poems (originally published 1919) in Madly Singing in the Mountains: An Appreciation and Anthology of Arthur Waley, ed. Ivan Morris (New York: Harper Torchbooks,

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:13, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.011

Ezra Pound and Chinese Poetry

6.

7. 8.

9. 10. 11. 12.

13.

171

1972), 133; Ernest Fenollosa and Ezra Pound, The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, A Critical Edition, ed. Haun Saussy, Jonathan Stalling and Lucas Klein (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 43. In China there is a significant cottage industry of translating classical Chinese poetry into English and other Western languages motivated by the widespread assumption that only a native speaker has the sensibility to properly interpret such poetry. A high percentage of these renditions insist on conventional meter and rhyme, as well as artificial poetic diction, the awkwardness of which will strike most native English speakers as unintentionally parodic, yet the point of interest here is the conviction that the predominate approach to translating classical Chinese poetry in English since Pound is fundamentally flawed. A. C. Graham gives the classic statement of this argument in his introduction to Poems of the Late T’ang (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965, 1977), which remains the best brief overview of the problems of translating classical Chinese poetry into English. For a good example of the former, see Charles Kwong, ‘Translating Classical Chinese Poetry into Rhymed English: A Linguistic-Aesthetic View’, Traduction, terminologie, rédaction 22 (2009), 189–220. Lowell and Ayscough, Fir-Flower Tablets: Poems Translated from the Chinese (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1921); Bynner and Kiang, The Jade Mountain: A Chinese Anthology (New York: Knopf, 1929); Waley, 170 Poems from the Chinese (London: Constable & Co., 1918), More Translations from the Chinese (New York: Knopf, 1919), The Temple and Other Poems (New York: Knopf, 1923), the bulk of these three volumes are conveniently gathered into Chinese Poems (London: Allen & Unwin, 1946). For a fine critical consideration of Waley’s translations, see Zeb Raft, ‘The Limits of Translation: Method in Arthur Waley’s Translations of Chinese Poetry’, Asia Major, 3rd series 25 (2012), 79–128. For example, Kenner, 454–8, and Qian, Orientalism and Modernism, 65–109, and The Modernist Response, 64–80. On Pound’s tentative work on further poems in the Fenollosa notebooks, see Qian, Orientalism and Modernism, 88–109. In a tail note to the original publication of Cathay, Pound gives two lines of a translation rendered in a similar manner but not included in the main text because he claimed it would not be acceptable to the reading public. See Cathay (London: Elkin Mathews, 1915), 32; a facsimile edition augmented with relevant pages from Fenollosa’s notebooks is available as Cathay: The Centennial Edition, ed. Zhaoming Qian (New York: New Directions, 2016). As Hugh Kenner points out, the apparent explanation for this seeming oddity is Fenollosa’s claim, by no means eccentric, that the Japanese pronunciation of Chinese characters is closer to their ancient phonetic values than modern Mandarin. Kenner, The Pound Era, 226; Fenollosa and Pound, The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, 134–5; see also SL 347.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:13, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.011

172

jeffrey twitchell-waas

14. Much of the commentary on Canto XLIX has focused on the complicated question of Pound’s source text for his Chinese renditions, a set of Japanese landscape paintings in the Chinese style each accompanied by poems which were hastily rendered at Pound’s request by a Chinese acquaintance. See Sanehide Kodama, American Poetry and Japanese Culture (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1984), 105–20; Qian, The Modernist Response, 123–37; Wai-lim Yip, Pound and the Eight Views of Xiao Xiang (Taipei: National Taiwan University Press, 2008); Ezra Pound’s Chinese Friends: Stories in Letters, ed. Zhaoming Qian (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 9–17. 15. On the early reception of Fenollosa’s essay, see David Ewick, ‘The Instigations of Ezra Pound by Ernest Fenollosa, I: The Chinese Written Character, Atlantic Crossings, Texts Mislaid, and the Machinations of a Divinely-Inspired Char Woman’, and ‘The Instigations of Ezra Pound by Ernest Fenollosa, II, Larceny: Pound, the Telluric Mass of Miss Lowell, and the Pilfering of “The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry,” 1914–1921’, Essays and Studies in British American Literature 66 (2015), 53–72, and 61 (2015), 15–32, http://twcu.academia.edu/DavidEwick. The primary exception to the early critical silence on Fenollosa is John Gould Fletcher, ‘The Orient and Contemporary Poetry’, The Asian Legacy and American Life, ed. Arthur E. Christy (New York: Asia Press, 1945), 145–74. 16. Olson, ‘Projective Verse’ (1950), and ‘The Gate and the Center’ (1951) in Collected Prose, eds. Donald Allen and Benjamin Friedlander (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 169, 244; Hugh Kenner, The Poetry of Ezra Pound (London: Faber & Faber, 1951), 62–95; Donald Davie, Articulate Energy: An Inquiry into the Syntax of English Poetry (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1955), 33–42. 17. George A. Kennedy, ‘Fenollosa, Pound and the Chinese Character’, Yale Literary Magazine 126 (1958), 24–36, www.pinyin.info/readings/texts/ezra_ pound_chinese.html. This remains a fine critique, if not to be taken uncritically. 18. Pound himself suggested that he and others were practicing the ‘ideogrammic method’ before they encountered Fenollosa (SP 453). For the argument that the ‘ideogrammic method’ underwrites an entire tradition within AngloAmerican poetic modernism, see Laszlo Géfin, Ideogram: History of a Poetic Method (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982). 19. Aside from Kennedy, the most frequently referenced authority for the demystification of the ideogram is John DeFrancis, The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1984). Authoritative, admirably lucid and written with considerable wit, this work is highly recommended but is not the last word as a number of commentators on Pound and Fenollosa seem to assume. It should be kept in mind that DeFrancis’s underlying argument is for Chinese language reform, involving especially the eradication of Chinese characters in favour of the complete adoption of a romanized system for writing Chinese. This was a Maoist project adopted

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:13, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.011

Ezra Pound and Chinese Poetry

20.

21.

22.

23. 24.

25.

173

in the late 1950s but derailed, and thus an incomplete revolution that nonetheless, so DeFrancis assures us, the inexorable laws of history will sooner or later bring to fruition, speeded by the technological demands of using computers. This ultra-utilitarian view colours every aspect of DeFrancis’ argument and presentation, from the dedication to the end notes, and so it is not surprising that he does not entirely approve of Mao’s dabbling in poetry and, even worse, in the classical manner. See DeFrancis, ‘The Prospects for Chinese Writing Reform’, Sino-Platonic Papers 171 (2006), http://sinoplatonic.org/complete/spp171_chinese_writing_reform.pdf. Fenollosa and Pound, The Chinese Written Character. This volume is importantly augmented by two chapters on Fenollosa in Jonathan Stalling, The Poetics of Emptiness: Transformations of Asian Thought in American Poetry (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010). See Haun Saussy, Great Walls of Discourse and Other Adventures in Cultural China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2001), 35–74, and also Kern; Zong-qi Cai, Configurations of Comparative Poetics: Three Perspectives on Western and Chinese Literary Criticism (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2002), 171–202; Andrea Bachner, Beyond Sinology: Chinese Writing and the Scripts of Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 57–73. For a rigorous comparative historical and philosophical consideration of the ideographic tradition, see Timothy Michael O’Neill, Ideography and Chinese Language Theory: A History (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016). Fenollosa and Pound, The Chinese Written Character, 43. Wai-lim Yip defends the Fenollosa-Pound understanding of the Chinese written character as accurately intuiting essential elements of classical Chinese poetics (see Pound’s Cathay, esp. 158–65), and this perspective pervades his more expansive comparative discussions of classical Chinese and modern American poetry, which he grounds on a Taoist inflected poetics. See Diffusion of Distances: Dialogues Between Chinese and Western Poetics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). Yip has been an influential figure in Chinese poetry over the past half century both as a practitioner of modernist verse and an exponent of a classical-modernist poetics. For a critical defence of Pound’s ‘etymographic’ translations, see Feng Lan, Ezra Pound and Confucianism: Remaking Humanism in the Face of Modernity (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005), esp. 29–37. During the mid-1930s Pound reedited Fenollosa’s essay for republication, primarily adding editorial comments including an appendix that offers substantial further examples of ideograms with pictographic-etymological interpretations. This addition was entitled, ‘Appendix: With Some Notes by a Very Ignorant Man’, which they amply demonstrate. Pound, The Classic Anthology Defined by Confucius (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1954). For a comprehensive consideration of Pound’s interest in Confucius with substantial examination of his translations of the Odes, see Mary Paterson Cheadle, Ezra Pound’s Confucian Translations (Ann Arbor:

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:13, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.011

174

26. 27. 28.

29.

30.

jeffrey twitchell-waas University of Michigan Press, 1997). For sinological comparative analysis of Pound’s versions with those of other translators, see Eugene Chen Eoyang, The Transparent Eye: Reflections on Translation, Chinese Literature, and Comparative Poetics (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1993), 190–209. The Book of Songs, originally published 1937; this volume has been reissued in a thoroughly reedited version (Grove Press, 1996), dispensing with Waley’s arrangement and relegating his notes to the back. Ezra Pound’s Chinese Friends, 107–60. A number of the more prominent scholars on Pound and Chinese poetry (e.g., Yip, Qian) have generally steered clear of his Confucianism and, given the pervasiveness of the latter in The Cantos and other late projects, the paucity of full-scale studies is striking, all the more so given the strong renewal of interest in Confucianism among Chinese intellectuals. On the latter, see Feng Lan, 123–7. The closest thing to a one-stop manifesto for the Menglong poets, published under the pseudonym of ‘Hong Huang’, is a good sample of the melange of half-digested modernisms (including mention of Pound and Imagism) together with an even more eclectic if better digested list of classical Chinese authors, see ‘The New Poetry – A Turning Point?’ trans. Zhu Zhiyu and John Minford, Renditions 19 and 20 (1983), 191–4. For some idea of the complex polemical situation in which Menglong poetry and its adaptation of Western modernisms was situated, see Xiaomei Chen, Occidentalism: A Theory of Counter-Discourse in Post-Mao China (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 69–98. The best thick description in English of the contemporary Chinese poetry scene, although it focuses on the decade of the 1990s, is Maghiel van Crevel, Chinese Poetry in Times of Mind, Mayhem and Money (Leiden: Brill, 2008); https://brill.com/view/title/14399. It should be mentioned in passing that traces of Pound’s influence, direct or indirect, can be detected at the very outset of modern Chinese literature early in the twentieth century, specifically on the seminal manifestos of Hu Shi; see John J. Nolde, ‘The Literary Revolution of Hu Shih and Ezra Pound’, Paideuma 9 (1980), 235–48; and Jenine Heaton, ‘Gained in Translation: Ezra Pound, Hu Shi, and Literary Revolution’, Journal of Cultural Interaction in East Asia 3 (2012), 35–55. For a skeptical view of this link, however, see Michelle Yeh, Modern Chinese Poetry: Theory and Practice Since 1917 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), 56–8. See, for example, Cai, Configurations of Comparative Poetics; Stephen Owen, Traditional Chinese Poetry and Poetics: Omen of the Word (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985); Cecile Chu-chin Sun, The Poetics of Repetition in English and Chinese Lyric Poetry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), or more philosophically, the many works of François Jullien – for a short sample, see ‘Did Philosophers Have to Become Fixated on Truth?’ Critical Inquiry 28 (2002), 803–24. For a critique of such models’ tendency to rigidly define ‘the other’ as an antithetical mirror image of the West, see Saussy, Great Walls of Discourse, especially 91–117.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:13, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.011

Ezra Pound and Chinese Poetry

175

W OR KS CI T ED Bachner, Andrea, Beyond Sinology: Chinese Writing and the Scripts of Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014). Bush, Christopher, Ideographic Modernism: China, Writing, Media (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). Bynner, Witter, and Kang-hu Kiang, The Jade Mountain: A Chinese Anthology (New York: Knopf, 1929). Cai, Zong-qi, Configurations of Comparative Poetics: Three Perspectives on Western and Chinese Literary Criticism (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2002). Cayley, John, and Lian Yang, ‘Hallucination and Coherence’, Positions: Asia Critique, 10 (2002), 773–84. Cheadle, Mary Paterson, Ezra Pound’s Confucian Translations (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997). Chen, Xiaomei, Occidentalism: A Theory of Counter-Discourse in Post-Mao China (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). Crevel, Maghiel van, Chinese Poetry in Times of Mind, Mayhem and Money (Leiden: Brill, 2008). Davie, Donald, Articulate Energy: An Inquiry into the Syntax of English Poetry (Abingdon: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1955). DeFrancis, John, The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1984). ‘The Prospects for Chinese Writing Reform’, Sino-Platonic Papers 171 (2006); online: http://sinoplatonic.org/complete/spp171_chinese_writing_reform .pdf. Eoyang, Eugene Chen, The Transparent Eye: Reflections on Translation, Chinese Literature, and Comparative Poetics (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1993). Ewick, David, ‘The Instigations of Ezra Pound by Ernest Fenollosa, I: The Chinese Written Character, Atlantic Crossings, Texts Mislaid, and the Machinations of a Divinely-Inspired Char Woman’, Essays and Studies in British American Literature 66 (2015), 53–72. ‘The Instigations of Ezra Pound by Ernest Fenollosa, II, Larceny: Pound, the Telluric Mass of Miss Lowell, and the Pilfering of “The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry,” 1914–1921’, Essays and Studies in British American Literature 61 (2015), 15–32. Fenollosa, Ernest, and Ezra Pound, The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, A Critical Edition, ed. Haun Saussy, Jonathan Stalling and Lucas Klein (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008). Fletcher, John Gould, ‘The Orient and Contemporary Poetry’, in The Asian Legacy and American Life, ed. Arthur E. Christy, 145–74 (New York: Asia Press, 1945). Géfin, Laszlo, Ideogram: History of a Poetic Method (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982). Graham, A. C., trans., Poems of the Late T’ang (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965, 1977).

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:13, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.011

176

jeffrey twitchell-waas

Hayot, Eric, Chinese Dreams: Pound, Brecht, Tel Quel (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003). Heaton, Jenine, ‘Gained in Translation: Ezra Pound, Hu Shi, and Literary Revolution’, Journal of Cultural Interaction in East Asia 3 (2012), 35–55. Huang, Hong, ‘The New Poetry – A Turning Point?’ trans. Zhu Zhiyu and John Minford, Renditions 19 and 20 (1983), 191–4. Huang, Yunte, trans., 比萨诗章 / Bisa shi zhang (Guilin: Lijiang Publishing House, 1998). Transpacific Displacement: Ethnography, Translation, and Intertextual Travel in Twentieth-Century American Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). Jullien, François, ‘Did Philosophers Have to Become Fixated on Truth?’ Critical Inquiry 28 (2002), 803–24. Kennedy, George A., ‘Fenollosa, Pound and the Chinese Character’, Yale Literary Magazine 126 (1958), 24–36. Kenner, Hugh, The Poetry of Ezra Pound (London: Faber & Faber, 1951). The Pound Era (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971). Kern, Robert, Orientalism, Modernism, and the American Poem (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Kodama, Sanehide, American Poetry and Japanese Culture (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1984). Kwong, Charles, ‘Translating Classical Chinese Poetry into Rhymed English: A Linguistic-Aesthetic View’, Traduction, terminologie, rédaction 22 (2009), 189–220. Lan, Feng, Ezra Pound and Confucianism: Remaking Humanism in the Face of Modernity (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005). Lowell, Amy, and Florence Ayscough, Fir-Flower Tablets: Poems Translated from the Chinese (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1921). Nolde, John J., ‘The Literary Revolution of Hu Shih and Ezra Pound’, Paideuma 9 (1980), 235–48. O’Neill, Timothy Michael, Ideography and Chinese Language Theory: A History (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016). Olson, Charles, Collected Prose, eds. Donald Allen and Benjamin Friedlander (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). Owen, Stephen, Traditional Chinese Poetry and Poetics: Omen of the Word (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985). Park, Josephine Nock-Hee, Apparitions of Asia: Modernist Form and Asian American Poetics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). Pound, Ezra, Cathay: The Centennial Edition, ed. Zhaoming Qian (New York: New Directions, 2016). The Classic Anthology Defined by Confucius (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1954). Qian, Zhaoming, ed., Ezra Pound’s Chinese Friends: Stories in Letters (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:13, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.011

Ezra Pound and Chinese Poetry

177

The Modernist Response to Chinese Art: Pound, Moore, Stevens (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003). Orientalism and Modernism: The Legacy of China in Pound and Williams (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995). Raft, Zeb, ‘The Limits of Translation: Method in Arthur Waley’s Translations of Chinese Poetry’, Asia Major, 3rd series 25 (2012), 79–128. Saussy, Haun, Great Walls of Discourse and Other Adventures in Cultural China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2001). Stalling, Jonathan, The Poetics of Emptiness: Transformations of Asian Thought in American Poetry (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010). Sun, Cecile Chu-chin, The Poetics of Repetition in English and Chinese Lyric Poetry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). Waley, Arthur, 170 Poems from the Chinese (London: Constable & Co., 1918). The Book of Songs (London: Allen & Unwin, 1937); rev. ed. Joseph Roe Allen (Grove Press, 1996). Chinese Poems (London: Allen & Unwin, 1946). Madly Singing in the Mountains: An Appreciation and Anthology of Arthur Waley, ed. Ivan Morris (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1972). More Translations from the Chinese (New York: Knopf, 1919). The Temple and Other Poems (New York: Knopf, 1923). Xie, Ming, Ezra Pound and the Appropriation of Chinese Poetry: Cathay, Translation, and Imagism (New York: Garland, 1999). Yang, Lian, ‘“In the Timeless Air”: Chinese Language, Pound and The Cantos’, trans. Liping Yang, Paideuma, 30 (2001), 101–5. Yao, Steven G., Foreign Accents: Chinese American Verse from Exclusion to Postethnicity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). Translation and the Languages of Modernism: Gender, Politics, Language (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002). Yeh, Michelle, Modern Chinese Poetry: Theory and Practice since 1917 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991). Yip, Wai-lim, Diffusion of Distances: Dialogues between Chinese and Western Poetics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). Ezra Pound’s Cathay (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969). Pound and the Eight Views of Xiao Xiang (Taipei: National Taiwan University Press, 2008).

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:13, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.011

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:13, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.011

part iii

Culture and Politics

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:11, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:11, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719

chapter 11

The Transnational Turn Josephine Park

The ‘transnational turn’ has cycled from its establishment within the social sciences in the 1990s, its dissemination across the humanities in the 2000s, to its reassessment in our present decade. It is the contention of this chapter that to reread Ezra Pound’s comparatist aesthetic and political labours within this presently contested framework demonstrates anew the significance of Pound’s methods of literary and cultural appraisal – and that this exercise can illuminate, too, the critical affordances and limitations of the transnational turn itself. The 1990s ‘transnational moment’1 was largely instantiated by social scientists weary of the theoretical abstractions of late-twentieth-century cultural studies. At the heart of this shift was an indictment of universalizing theories of globalization, which were deemed not only vacuous but pernicious. Looking back at this moment, we may fit transnationalism within a broader post-theory turn, characterized by an aversion to poststructuralist abstraction. This reaction sought to restore zones and relations seemingly lost to the ether of concepts like ‘hybridization’2 and pointedly argued for an agency that had been theorized away. Social science practitioners of transnationalism made quick work of shedding a generation of abstraction to insist on sociological use-value, and the humanities took heed. The literary uptake of transnationalism was highly visible in the 2000s. Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih’s edited volume Minor Transnationalisms (2005) significantly positioned the concept within comparative literature and spelled out the expanded spaces of transnational literary study, which reconsidered ‘border-crossing agents, whether dominant or marginal’, but particularly emphasized peripheral actors unmediated by the global centre.3 This commitment to peripheries was a critical legacy of the social scientific elaboration of transnationalism, but one that has been particularly vexed for modernist literary study, in large part because modernist internationalism 181

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:12, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.012

182

josephine park

bears a formal – and sometimes confounding – resemblance to transnationalism. Indeed, modernist literary study has been defined by critical efforts at signifying and resignifying modernist internationalism, and the transnational turn instigated what editors Laura Doyle and Laura Winkiel identified as a new ‘self-consciousness about positionality’ in the preface to their major volume Geomodernisms, also published in 2005.4 Modernist literary study has thus been particularly ripe for the transnational turn, which layers a new awareness onto its internationalist scope. In fact, contemporary modernist scholarship has staked its present relevance on the transnational turn, both by newly charting peripheries and by seeking postcolonial impulses within canonical modernist works. Douglas Mao and Rebecca Walkowitz’s 2008 elaboration of ‘The New Modernist Studies’ in the PMLA heralded a sea-change instigated by the transnational turn: surveying the recent wave of modernist scholarship, they identified spatial and vertical expansions that cut against both modernism’s Eurocentrism and its predilection for high culture. Mao and Walkowitz named politics as the point where these expansive critical tendencies met, explaining that ‘the new transnationalism, if it is to be new at all, must probe much further the effects of the state on modernist production’. Such probes call forth ‘the echo of Foucault’, and their discussion concludes with the prevalence of ‘issues of nation and mass politics’.5 That the transnational turn leads back to poststructuralist and nationalist critique is neither surprising nor especially contradictory, but the particular elaboration of this return here reveals that ‘The New Modernist Studies’ returns to the disciplinary political mechanisms that high modernist cultural production tended to obscure. Mao and Walkowitz’s discussion culminates in ‘politics as itself’6 – echoing Doyle and Winkiel’s ‘self-consciousness about positionality’ – to distinguish the new modernist studies from modernist internationalism. The effects of this turn in our present decade are evident in major scholarly reassessments of cosmopolitanism and a more expansive modernism, both scaled up to insist upon a planetary consciousness. Bruce Robbins’s 2012 re-evaluation of cosmopolitanism invokes a planetary scale as a critical means of addressing the very real fact of transnational warfare: arguing that nation-framed politics are simply unable to access a responsible worldview, Robbins insists upon cosmopolitanism as a detachment from national self-interest, pitched towards a ‘transnational domain [that] is, after all, a zone of real political struggle and real political belonging’.7 Susan Stanford Friedman’s massive Planetary Modernism

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:12, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.012

The Transnational Turn

183

(2015) dramatically expands the time and space of modernism to call for comparative literary study across centuries and the globe. Friedman’s planetary turn is explicitly pitched against ‘modernism’s parochial internationalism’,8 fatally compromised as it is by Western colonialism. Each of these major exhibits offers an apotheosis of the transnational turn, radically expanded to face global war and map a global cultural history. It is at this present juncture that Ezra Pound’s aesthetic arguments against provincialism and his fascination with Far Eastern poetics resonate anew. From this opening genealogical sketch, this chapter reconsiders Pound’s anti-provincial aesthetics within the context of a planetary consciousness, and then turns to a telling instance of Pound’s sustained aesthetic contact with the orient. Critical reappraisals of Pound’s China proceeded alongside the transnational turn, and the recent wave of scholarship devoted to this material has demonstrated the methodological significance of his orientalism. The bulk of this chapter considers a contested oriental allusion early in The Cantos, in which a curious, turning figuration reveals a transnational imagination central to Pound’s poetic method.

Gathering Friedman explains that Planetary Modernisms ‘treats modernism as the aesthetic domain of modernity’, understood ‘on a planetary scale, across time’.9 This approach necessitates a different method: we ought first to turn to the specificities of a given modernity and then ask what creative forms it produced – in the Tang Dynasty, for example, or the Abbasid Caliphate, Al-Andalus, the Songhay Empire, Renaissance Florence, Enlightenment Paris, colonial Calcutta, or imperial London.10

For readers of Pound’s literary disquisitions, this approach is a familiar one. In a recent reappraisal of Pound’s Spirit of Romance (1910), for example, Jean-Michel Rabaté discusses a characteristic global collocation, in which Pound maps together Jerusalem, Gibraltar and Russia. It is Rabaté’s significant claim that in Pound’s ‘wish to establish solid crossreferences across different regions and nations’, we encounter ‘a whole program for scholarship still in the making’11 – in which Friedman’s planetary overhaul may be readily, if uneasily, incorporated. A perusal of Pound’s prose throughout his career reveals persistent globeranging efforts, as in this particularly illustrative moment from his twelve-part series of articles titled ‘I Gather the Limbs of Osiris’, published in The New Age from 1911 to 1912:12

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:12, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.012

184

josephine park Let us suppose a man, ignorant of painting, taken into a room containing a picture by Fra Angelico, a picture by Rembrandt, one by Velasquez, Memling, Rafael, Monet, Beardsley, Hokusai, Whistler, and a fine example of the art of some Egyptian. He is told that this is painting and that every one of these is a master-work. He is, if a thoughtful man, filled with confusion. These things obey no common apparent law. (SP 24)

Like Friedman’s litany, this gallery presents vastly different styles from multiple periods and regions, and both are deeply invested in a creative exemplarity, which privileges masterworks – as evidenced in Pound’s placeholder, the ‘art of some Egyptian’, which gestures towards the titular Osiris and reveals a principle of civilizational representation. Pound shifts to a further, and core, analogy to sketch out an intelligent appreciation of these varied forms: If, however, he is a specialist, a man thoroughly trained in some other branch of knowledge, his feelings are not unlike mine when I am taken into the engineering laboratory and shown successively an electric engine, a steam-engine, a gas-engine, etc. I realize that there are a number of devices, all designed for more or less the same end, none ‘better’, none ‘worse’, all different. . . .They all ‘produce power’ – that is, they gather the latent energy of Nature and focus it on a certain resistance. (SP 25)

To ‘gather the limbs of Osiris’ is to ‘gather the latent energy of Nature’: we are in the realm of planetary consciousness. Pound’s literary criticism remains exhilarating and disturbing because of its hunger for power, and the telling allegory of the engineering laboratory demonstrates that this drive incorporates and indeed requires diverse engines – and, further, their differences do not indicate their value: ‘none “better”, none “worse”’. Indeed, the efforts of gathering and focusing energy are in fact more visible in less familiar engines; hence, for Pound, more distant temporal and geographical examples of aesthetic power were especially crucial for exhibiting this process. The ideogram, of course, was Pound’s central and enduring showcase for the operation of wresting artistic power from nature, especially prized because he deemed it to be highly visible, swift and economical. He was famously impatient with the slow work of reading (indeed, his various guides to reading are all about reading less) and ‘I Gather the Limbs of Osiris’ endures as Pound’s key elaboration of ‘“the new method” – that of luminous detail’ (25), in which, as he puts it at the conclusion of the series, ‘the critic or professor presents the energetic part of his knowledge’ (43). The method of luminous detail is a gallery of energetic parts, a kind of exalted shorthand for a global history of art.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:12, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.012

The Transnational Turn

185

The spatial and temporal expanse of this knowledge is part and parcel of its utility and necessity for Pound, and it is pitched against, as he put it, ‘Provincialism the Enemy’, the characteristic title of another series of pieces he published for The New Age in 1917.13 Proclaiming that provincialism is ‘ignorance plus a lust after uniformity’, Pound rails against ‘the yelp of “nationality”’ (SP 190) to welcome multiplicity within and across nations, emphasizing that, for example, ‘England is so many races, even “Little England”, that she has kept some real respect for personality, for the outline of the individual’ (190). Pound’s defence of civilization over nationality rests on cosmopolitan encounters: ‘Peace, our ideas of justice, of liberty, of as much of these as are feasible, the immaterial, as well as material things, proceed from a metropolis’ (200). A concrete proposal emerges from the series: a tunnel between England and France, because ‘a closer union of the two capitals [would] make for a richer civilization’ (202). It is this tunnel that makes Pound’s civilizational order particularly amenable to transnationalism as it has been conceived in our era: the expansions he envisioned always specified the terms of the movement between differing times and spaces, from this proposed actual tunnel to the close work of translation – and to the astonishing variety of formal modes he employed to rhyme subjects across history and the globe. ‘A tunnel is more than a dynasty’, Pound proclaims in ‘Provincialism the Enemy’ – a ringing line that brings out the particular crisis that instigated this series: ‘A tunnel would almost be worth part of this war, or, at least, a resultant tunnel would leave the war with some constructiveness directly to its credit, and no single act of any of the Allies would have so inhibitive an effect on all war parties whatsoever’ (199). The First World War, of course, was an instance of devastating internationalism, and Pound’s exhortation to construct a material connection argues for the tunnel as not only a positive legacy but an anti-war action. Pound’s belief in 1917 that a tunnel between metropolises could counteract world war echoes a century later, in Robbins’s call for cosmopolitanism as a bulwark against transnational wars. Robbins’s trenchant critique of nationalism, too, closely parallels Pound’s dismissal of nationality: both seek to leverage active transnational bonds against conflicts that overrun national boundaries. That Pound’s literary and cultural efforts resonate with these recent efforts to outrun the scope of internationalism – not least in the open and highly mobile style of Friedman’s study – demonstrates the promiscuity of a planetary consciousness: such large-scale efforts may be hitched to repressive or emancipatory political ambitions. Pound’s 1917 arguments for civilization were in the service of peace, and he continued to imagine

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:12, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.012

186

josephine park

himself as a peace broker into the next war – even as he aligned himself with repressive regimes. Pound’s anti-parochialisms mark the other end of the political spectrum to these contemporary studies: while Pound circled the globe in the service of consolidating power, whether aesthetic or political, both Friedman and Robbins seek to counter repressive political legacies. Despite their opposing political attitudes, Pound’s internationalism echoes with these more recent transnationalisms, and this critical resemblance indicates the possibilities and limits of this shared method. Further, alongside the heroic methodological efforts of Robbins and Friedman, contemporary reassessments of the turn mark a concurrent scepticism, whether by exposing the deployment of cultural internationalism as a means towards securing political nationalisms14 or by unmasking imperial pretensions behind the new cosmopolitanism.15 Such critiques demonstrate how readily transnationalism collapses into modernist internationalism. Ezra Pound’s internationalism was an aesthetic revolution that bolstered both his pacifist and later bellicose intentions; these recent and trenchant critiques of cosmopolitan and planetary turns demonstrate that these critical efforts themselves risk effacing difference and elevating abstraction. Matthew Hart’s recent discussion of transnationalism as ‘more method than theory’ astutely critiques the layering of an emancipatory politics onto literary presentations of transnational contact.16 And yet the transnational turn is distinct from its sibling formations precisely because of its emancipatory ascriptions; this politics is transnationalism’s most salient distinguishing feature and the source of its critical availability. Perhaps in this exercise of reading Pound’s modernist internationalism with the transnationalism of the new millennium, then, we may identify both the isomorphic tendency of the method of comparison across time and space and comprehend the necessity of today’s self-consciousness. The new modernism is a political selfawareness – ‘politics as itself’ – that comprehends the transnational turn as a means of superseding politically retrograde concepts of modernist internationalism. The troubling fact that transnationalism calls forth the spectre of this internationalism may in fact underscore the political utility of the turn: because of the ever-present danger of recapitulating imperial designs, transnationalism must perpetually expose them.

Churning Jahan Ramazani’s A Transnational Poetics intertwines method and politics to theorize an inherent transnationalism legible in the form of modern poetry: as a product of global modernity, the poem’s ‘complex texture’

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:12, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.012

The Transnational Turn

187

reveals ‘the interconnecting cultural traces wound into the DNA of poetic forms and poetic language’.17 Ramazani turns to Eliot, Yeats and Pound for foundational evidence of modernist poetic transnationalism by identifying a nodal point ‘between exoticism and historicity’ in their eastern fascinations. Returning to ‘In a Station of the Metro’ in particular, Ramazani identifies ‘an orientalism that is also antiorientalist, that is cross-cutting and counterdiscursive’.18 It is worth noting that Pound’s ‘orientalism that is antiorientalist’ vouchsafes his oeuvre for transnationalism in a way that his continent-wide time travel across the literatures of Europe does not. The anticolonial contours of the transnational turn thus retrieve and reposition modernist orientalism, and for Pound in particular, his orient has come to offer a striking counterbalance to the demons of imperial fascism that have clouded but also defined his pre-eminence. For Pound’s critical legacy, his orient has become his saving grace. Studies of Pound’s orient date back to the first readings of his oeuvre, and this significant scholarly thread examines the deep imbrication of this material within his formal revolutions. The recent generation of scholarship that maps onto the rise of the transnational turn has established the centrality of the Far East to Pound’s poetics, from his early lyrics all the way to the late, fragmentary cantos. One pivotal and controversial instance of oriental apparition will serve as my primary exhibit for comprehending the function of the transnational turn in Pound’s poetics: the so-called ‘So-shu controversy’ of Canto II. On the heels of Canto I’s epic descent, Canto II turns to protean figures of metamorphoses. While Homer presides over Canto I, Canto II is governed by Ovid, and this second poem is an entirely different reading experience, which features rhapsodic morphologies of bodies and language. Pound famously launched the poem by announcing his poetic intent vis-à-vis Robert Browning (‘my Sordello?’), and then the poem quickly dives into a cluster of femmes fatales (Helen, Eleanor of Aquitaine, Tyro) pitched into oceanic movement before turning to an intoxicating, twisting translation of an Ovidian episode, in which Dionysus, lured onto a ship by pirates, stills and transforms the ship and his captors; the poem concludes by settling into a charged calm. Guy Davenport identified the central play of this canto as ‘a pattern of radiance introduced in a context ignorant of it’,19 and the poem sustains sinuous, waterborne movements throughout. After the initial elaboration of the Sordello question, the poem presents an unknown character: ‘So-shu churned in the sea’ (C 6). This figure reappears immediately after the Dionysus episode:

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:12, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.012

188

josephine park And So-shu churned in the sea, So-shu also, using the long moon for a churn-stick . . .

(C 9)

20

As Davenport put it, ‘The provenance of So-shu is dark’, and it remains so: scholarly efforts to identify and explicate this character have long occasioned dispute. These scholarly exchanges foreground Pound’s wellknown confusions about Chinese and Japanese sources as well as his broader tendencies of loose and highly refracted references. The first published instance of this figure appeared in the 1917 ‘Three Cantos’: the material that would evolve into the So-shu of Canto II concludes a passage in which Pound judges his own verse as ‘too plain, / Too full of footnotes’: ‘And Ka-hu churned the sea, / Churning the ocean, using the moon for a churn-stick’.21 Christine Froula’s rigorous analysis of ‘the beginnings’ of The Cantos turns to Pound’s early manuscripts to puzzle through this figuration, and her analysis identifies a shift in poetic method: What is interesting about coming upon it here in the early manuscripts is precisely that here too it has no illuminating thematic context. It is as though Pound conjured it out of the air. In its very gratuitousness, its lack of a particular thematic meaning in the context of the passage in which it occurs, the Ka-hu image bespeaks an impulse toward a change of poetic method rather than the introduction of a new subject: it is an image of the Image. Its meaning has to do not with reference to any specific moment in oriental poetry but with the ‘paradisal’ language which Pound is seeking and which this image, in contrast to the Browningesque bombast that precedes it, embodies.

Froula pitches this elaboration against attempts at ‘scholarly sourcehunting’ and, in a footnote, offers a rebuke to such efforts: ‘The premise that everything in Pound’s poem must refer to a source, with respect to which it is either an accurate rendering or a mistake, allows no room for the creative and interpretive play in which the poem, even in the act of citation, is always engaged’.22 The Cantos, of course, send us source-hunting, and the searches instigated by So-shu demonstrate the archival pleasures and live debates instigated by Pound’s epic. The more ingenious explications have linked So-shu to the Noh materials from the Fenollosa manuscripts, including a captivating recent suggestion featured in The Cantos Project online, which turns to the Noh play Shojo: Shojo means monkey and appears to the mortal eye as a man, but he is really the god of sake whose cup never runs dry. . . . In the play, Shojo is waiting for a friend on the bank of the Yangtze River: ‘The moonlight fills the tilted

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:12, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.012

The Transnational Turn

189

sake cup, waiting’. Beyond the play, Pound seems to have been aware of the iconography of the shojo, which shows him standing on a sake cup on the sea and rowing or churning with a ladle.23

Shojo’s resonances with Dionysus are compelling, and the moonlit scene is especially fitting for the second reference to So-shu in the canto, ‘using the long moon for a churn-stick’. The disguised god in the moonlight, churning the sea: how ably Shojo links the clusters of transformations in the canto, all set in the waves. Between the felicitous resonance of Shojo, on the one hand, and Ka-hu as ‘an image of the Image’, on the other, we may locate the method and significance of Pound’s transnational turn. The hunt for So-shu has periodically reopened Pound’s early encounters with and receipt of oriental sources, and the discovery of Shojo in particular beautifully encapsulates and expands the sphere of references, not only in our comprehension of Pound’s sources, but of the images that were both available and circulating in his time and place. To cite Froula’s reproach differently, the scholarly labour that uncovered the myth and representation of Shojo extends ‘the creative and interpretive play’ of the poem to its reception, all the way to the present. Froula’s methodological consideration of the So-shu material as an imagistic ‘impulse toward a change in poetic method’ is pointedly detached from ‘reference to any specific moment in oriental poetry’, but Pound, of course, ‘conjured’ this figure out of a particular air: Pound’s image is inseparable from his oriental interests and, critically, the new ‘medium’ of the ‘Chinese Written Language’. In Canto II, Soshu ushers in the poem’s oceanic gestures and transformations; his figure shifts the frame of the poem beyond what Friedman terms ‘modernism’s parochial internationalism’. By layering the discoveries of ‘scholarly source-hunting’ onto Froula’s insight, I believe we can gesture towards the significance of Pound’s transnationalism, in which the incorporation of peripherical global sources entailed a metamorphosis in poetic method. So-shu’s appearance in Canto II accords with Ramazani’s ‘orientalism that is also antiorientalist’, and the self-reflexive awareness built into Soshu’s transnational presence is visible in his literal churning, which instigates a methodological turn. It is worth noting, too, a different order of reflexivity: So-shu is both the agent and object of the churning motion. In the earlier ‘Three Cantos’, ‘Ka-hu churned the sea’, but in Canto II, remarkably, ‘So-shu churned in the sea’: in The Cantos, So-shu

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:12, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.012

190

josephine park

first appears captive to the natural motion of the sea. Canto II preserves the object-sense of So-shu in his second appearance, but then appends a more agential position: ‘And So-shu churned in the sea, So-shu also, / using the long moon for a churn-stick’. The end-stopped emphasis on ‘also’ underscores the secondary nature of So-shu’s more godlike gesture of ‘using the long moon’: So-shu is at the mercy of nature before he is a master of it. Reading So-shu in this position, we may see, too, that the radiant patterning of this canto requires surrender, from Tyro’s ravishing within the glassy wave to the oarsmen Dionysus covers over with fish scales. So-shu governs the broader gestures of this poem even as he is a figure plunged within it – and his place in the poem echoes, too, the figure of Acoetes in the Ovidean material: the captain of the ship, Acoetes serves as the witness to Dionysus’s ‘god-sleight’, and in his testimony he famously repeats, ‘I have seen what I have seen’ (C 9). The recursive quality of this line, in which ‘what I have seen’ serves as the object of ‘I have seen’, recalls the doubled sense of So-shu’s churning: in both cases, their gestures of encasing the action fold back into the action. This imbrication of the seer, or what So-shu does ‘also’, resonates with the order of self-reflexivity Ramazani identifies in modernist orientalism, in which Eastern method reveals Western self-consciousness. I’d like to indulge in a little source-hunting of my own, by turning to what has long been deemed an unrelated instance of So-shu in Pound’s oeuvre: ‘Ancient Wisdom, Rather Cosmic’, published in his groundbreaking Lustra (1917; part of a cluster of poems composed between 1913 and 1915). Here is the brief poem in its entirety: So-shu dreamed, And having dreamed that he was a bird, a bee, and a butterfly, He was uncertain why he should try to feel like anything else, Hence his contentment.24

Carroll F. Terrell’s notes to Canto II in his comprehensive companion to The Cantos issues a clear injunction: ‘Not to be confused with “So-shu” in “Ancient Wisdom, Rather Cosmic” which is a Japanese transliteration of the name of the Chinese philosopher Chuang Chou (more commonly known as Chuang Tzu)’.25 I propose to dive into this confusion, however, by reading these evidently distinct figures together in order to explore the depth of Pound’s plunge into the Far East.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:12, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.012

The Transnational Turn

191

‘Ancient Wisdom, Rather Cosmic’ is likely a riff on a poem by Li Po – a handful of the poems in Lustra are reworkings of Tang Dynasty poems that precede the receipt of Fenollosa’s papers – featuring the Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi (Chuang Tzu in Wade-Giles romanization) and his famous dream. Herbert Giles translated Zhuangzi’s dream episode in 1886: Once upon a time, I, Chuang Tzu, dreamt I was a butterfly, fluttering hither and thither, to all intents and purposes a butterfly. I was conscious only of following my fancies as a butterfly, and was unconscious of my individuality as a man. Suddenly, I awaked, and there I lay, myself again. Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly dreaming I am a man.26

Pound’s poem undoes this ‘ancient wisdom’: his So-shu is content; he experiences none of the existential doubts that are the hallmark of Zhuangzi’s insight. Instead, the alliteration of ‘a bird, a bee, and a butterfly’ reduces the postulated inhuman imagination to a menagerie, readily contained and then dismissed. Between the flat wisdom of this first So-shu and the churning indeterminacy of So-shu in Canto II, however, we find preserved a sense of contentment that eludes everyone else in Canto II, including the voice of Pound himself (‘Hang it all’). The earlier So-shu absorbs and settles the dream-lesson of becoming fauna; the So-shu of Canto II is no more unsettled by his object status. Hence, though Pound opens the canto with his frustration at attempting to discover his own poetic subject, Soshu’s ‘ancient wisdom’ offers a critical shift that opens into metamorphosis, whose governing logic is a tautology, ‘I have seen what I have seen’. This action of looping back suggests a telling revelation of Pound’s transnational turn: Pound is transformed by the orient, but his orient is his own. The odd contentment of his So-shu mirrors Pound’s own encounter with oriental sources, in which Chinese dreams confirm that one need not ‘try to feel like anything else’; instead, Pound revels in having had the dream. Considering these two instantiations of So-shu together, it is tempting to read the oriental sage as the dreamer of the canto. From Pound’s opening frustration in Canto II, the appearance of So-shu portends a different and foreign imagination in which, citing Davenport again, ‘a pattern of radiance [is] introduced in a context ignorant of it’. Considering, too, Froula’s reading of this material as an elaboration of Pound’s imagistic

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:12, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.012

192

josephine park

method, we recall the patterned radiance of Pound’s ideogram, forever his ‘image of the Image’. Perhaps, then, the dizzying reflection of subject and object that So-shu instigates can be extended to Pound and So-shu: each dreams the other. A manifestation of Pound’s search for new radiance, So-shu marks a methodological sea change, in which the seer revels in what he has seen. Acoetes, the seer in the Ovid episode, is shattered by what he has seen, but So-shu, churning and being churned, frames and illuminates the episode. In the moonlight of his gestures, the speech of the bewildered witness acquires oracular tones. The multiply self-reflexive turns embedded within the figuration of So-shu indicates the methodological significance of the transnational turn, which entails a transformative contact with peripheral materials. The governing force of such material in Pound’s oeuvre has been critical to his present reception, and Pound’s orient has had a redemptive value for his poetic legacy. Ezra Pound’s globe-spanning methods resonate with recent critical expansions of the transnational turn – and all such efforts have occasioned thoroughgoing critique. This chapter has attempted to map out the relevance of Pound’s poetics for our present critical landscape, and the particular resonances elaborated here suggest both the promise of turning away from the imperial centre and the perils of methodological expansionism, itself charged with imperial echoes.

Notes 1. Anita Patterson provides a lucid overview of this dissemination in the opening of Race, American Literature, and Transnational Modernisms (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 1. 2. In their introduction to the volume Transnationalism from Below (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1998), editors Michael Peter Smith and Luis Eduardo Guarnizo insist upon wresting transnationalism from imaginary or abstract conceptual spaces, 11. 3. Lionnet and Shih, Minor Transnationalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 5. 4. Doyle and Winkiel, Geomodernisms: Race, Modernism, Modernity (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), 3. 5. Mao and Walkowitz, ‘The New Modernist Studies’, PMLA 123.3 (2008), 745–6, 746. 6. Mao and Walkowitz, ‘The New Modernist Studies’, 745. Thanks to Mark Byron for pointing out the dangers of a new abstraction, which are particularly evident in the planetary gestures that follow.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:12, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.012

The Transnational Turn

193

7. Robbins, Perpetual War: Cosmopolitanism from the Viewpoint of Violence (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), 26. 8. This phrase is from Friedman’s ‘World Modernisms, World Literature, and Comparativity’, The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 500. 9. Friedman, Planetary Modernisms: Provocations on Modernity across Time (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), 4. 10. Friedman, Planetary Modernisms, 5. 11. Rabaté, ‘Ezra Pound and the Globalization of Literature’, Ezra Pound in the Present: Essays on Pound’s Contemporaneity, edited by Paul Stasi and Josephine Park (New York: Bloomsbury, 2016), 116. 12. Pound, ‘I Gather the Limbs of Osiris’, Ezra Pound: Selected Prose, 1909–1965, ed. William Cookson (New York: New Directions, 1973). 13. Pound, ‘Provincialism the Enemy’, Ezra Pound: Selected Prose, 1909–1965, ed. William Cookson (New York: New Directions, 1973). 14. See Roland Vegso’s ‘The Mother Tongue of Modernity: Modernism, Transnationalism, Translation’, Journal of Modern Literature 33.2 (2010), 24–46, for a trenchant critique of cultural internationalism as a cover for political nationalism which effaces immigrant experience. 15. See Michael Spiegel’s ‘Is Modernism Really Transnational?: Ulysses, New Cosmopolitanism, and the Celtic Tiger’, Cultural Critique 90 (2015), 88–114, for a particularly bracing critique of new cosmopolitanism as a reiteration of neoliberal globalization. 16. Matthew Hart, ‘Transnationalism at the Departure Gate’, in A Handbook of Modernism Studies, edited by Jean-Michel Rabaté (Hoboken: Wiley, 2013), 158. 17. Ramazani, A Transnational Poetics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 8, 13. 18. Ramazani, A Transnational Poetics, 112, 113. 19. Guy Davenport, ‘Ezra Pound’s Radiant Gists: A Reading of Cantos II and IV’, Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature 3.2 (1962, 55). 20. Davenport, ‘Ezra Pound’s Radiant Gists’, 54. 21. Massimo Bacigalupo’s recently compiled Posthumous Cantos (Manchester, England: Carcanet, 2015) reprints the 1917 ‘Three Cantos’ that ‘remained forgotten in the back files of Poetry . . .to be reprinted only after Pound’s death’, xi, 22. 22. Froula, To Write Paradise: Style and Error in Pound’s Cantos (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), 19. It is worth noting, too, Pound’s play with pseudonyms in his early poetry, quoting from non-existent authors such as ‘Weston St. Llewmys’, an obvious play on family names from his mother’s and father’s side. My thanks to the anonymous reader of this chapter for underscoring this practice. 23. http://thecantosproject.ed.ac.uk/index.php/a-draft-of-xvi-cantos-overview/c 2-in-a-draft-of-16/ii-poem. 24. Pound, Personae (New York: New Directions, 1990), 123.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:12, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.012

194

josephine park

25. Terrell, A Companion to The Cantos of Ezra Pound (Orono, ME: National Poetry Foundation, 1980), 5. 26. Herbert Giles, Chuang Tzu: Mystic, Moralist, and Reformer (London: Bernard Quaritch, 1889), 32. W OR KS C I T ED Davenport, Guy, ‘Ezra Pound’s Radiant Gists: A Reading of Cantos II and IV’, Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature 3.2 (1962), 50–64. Doyle, Laura, and Laura Winkiel, Geomodernisms: Race, Modernism, Modernity (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005). Friedman, Susan Stanford, ‘World Modernisms, World Literature, and Comparativity’, in The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms, ed. Mark Wollaeger and Matt Eatough, 499–524 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). Froula, Christine, To Write Paradise: Style and Error in Pound’s Cantos (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984). Giles, Herbert, Chuang Tzu: Mystic, Moralist, and Reformer (London: Bernard Quaritch, 1889). Hart, Matthew, ‘Transnationalism at the Departure Gate’, in A Handbook of Modernism Studies, ed. Jean-Michel Rabaté, 157–72 (Hoboken: Wiley, 2013). Lionnet, Françoise, and Shu-mei Shih’s, Minor Transnationalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005). Mao, Douglas, and Rebecca Walkowitz, ‘The New Modernist Studies’, PMLA 123.3 (2008), 737–48. Patterson, Anita, Race, American Literature, and Transnational Modernisms (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008). Pound, Ezra, ‘I Gather the Limbs of Osiris’, in Ezra Pound: Selected Prose, 1909–1965, ed. William Cookson, 19–44 (New York: New Directions, 1973). Personae, ed. A. Walton Litz and Lea Baechler (New York: New Directions, 1990). Posthumous Cantos, ed. Massimo Bacigalupo (Manchester, UK: Carcanet, 2015). ‘Provincialism the Enemy’, in Ezra Pound: Selected Prose, 1909–1965, ed. William Cookson, 189–203 (New York: New Directions, 1973). Rabaté, Jean-Michel, ‘Ezra Pound and the Globalization of Literature’, Ezra Pound in the Present: Essays on Pound’s Contemporaneity, ed. Paul Stasi and Josephine Park, 107–34 (New York: Bloomsbury, 2016). Ramazani, Jahan, A Transnational Poetics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). Robbins, Bruce, Perpetual War: Cosmopolitanism from the Viewpoint of Violence (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012).

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:12, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.012

The Transnational Turn

195

Smith, Michael Peter, and Luis Eduardo Guarnizo, eds., Transnationalism from Below (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1998). Spiegel, Michael, ‘Is Modernism Really Transnational?: Ulysses, New Cosmopolitanism, and the Celtic Tiger’, Cultural Critique 90 (2015), 88–114. Terrell, Carroll, A Companion to The Cantos of Ezra Pound (Orono, ME: National Poetry Foundation, 1980). Vegso, Roland, ‘The Mother Tongue of Modernity: Modernism, Transnationalism, Translation’, Journal of Modern Literature 33.2 (2010), 24–46.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:12, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.012

chapter 12

Pound, Gender, Sexuality Carrie J. Preston

Most previous discussions of Ezra Pound, gender and sexuality have focused on Pound’s poetic depictions of women and his relationships with women artists, patrons and muses. The fascinating biographical stories include such figures as the poet H. D., perhaps Pound’s first love; the pianist and patron Margaret Cravens, who took her life after playing a song Pound and Walter Rummel wrote for her; Pound’s wife, Dorothy (Shakespear) Pound; and his long-time mistress, Olga Rudge, a concert violinist.1 When critics focus on sexuality and Pound, the result tends to be ‘paranoid’ rather than ‘reparative’ readings, to use Eve Sedgwick’s famous formulation.2 The paranoid position is based in suspicion, anticipation of generalized misogyny and bigotry, and the desire to expose homophobia. Pound’s work offers ample support for paranoid readings as, for example, when he overtly ‘coupled’ sodomy and usury with sides of antisemitism and misogyny in both prose and poetry: By great wisdom sodomy and usury were seen coupled together. If there comes ever a rebirth or resurrection of Christian Church . . . it will come with a recognition and an abjuration of the great sin contra naturam, of the prime sin against natural abundance.3 Usura slayeth the child in the womb It stayeth the young man’s courting It hath brought palsey to bed, lyeth between the young bride and her bridegroom CONTRA NATURAM They have brought whores for Eleusis

(C 230)

Usury, defined by Pound in Canto XLV as ‘[a] charge for the use of purchasing power’, murders fetuses, destroys the virility of young men, infects the conjugal bed and sends ‘whores’ rather than initiates to the sacred Eleusinian mysteries. Each of these horrors is more logically 196

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:11, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.013

Pound, Gender, Sexuality

197

associated with sexualities that were considered ‘against nature’ than with economic activity, making sodomy the true criminal of the poem. Homophobia in Pound’s Canto XLV is abundantly evident without the kinds of paranoid readings that have been the norm in the field of sexuality studies, a field that regularly seeks to identify and avoid normativity. Recognizing that paranoid readings were ubiquitous and occasionally reductive, Sedgwick encouraged reparative readings that are ‘additive and accretive’, approaches that focus on the capacity of individuals to find satisfaction and even joy in practices emerging from bigoted cultures (i.e., all cultures).4 Sedgwick presented both paranoid and reparative readings as flexible and necessary strategies, yet a new dichotomy has emerged in the wake of her important work, one that sets reparative in opposition to paranoid readings. This essay will draw on both paranoid and reparative strategies to promote a reconsideration of Pound, gender and sexuality. I focus on the famous sequence, the Pisan Cantos (1948), as an example of the contradictions in Pound’s poetic representation of gender and sexuality throughout The Cantos that can productively be read across the paranoid / reparative divide. Discussions of gender in the Pisan Cantos have often focused on deciphering Pound’s veiled references to women in his life, partly because the sequence is so poignantly biographical and the relationships so fascinatingly complex. A new approach to the Pisan Cantos will point to future directions in analyzing gender and sexuality across Pound’s oeuvre. First, I want to clarify that a reparative reading should not echo the early apologetics issued by the Library of Congress when it awarded Pound its first (and only) Bollingen Prize for the Pisan Cantos (1948).5 The award committee’s press release insisted, ‘The fellows are aware that objections may be made to awarding a prize to a man situated as is Mr. Pound [in St. Elizabeths Hospital for the Criminally Insane] . . .To permit other considerations than that of poetic achievement to sway the decision would destroy the significance of the award and would in principle deny the validity of that objective perception of value on which civilized society must rest’.6 Feminist theorists have long questioned notions of an ‘objective perception of value’ along with a ‘civilized society’ when that society continues to devalue sexual and racial minorities, women, Jews and other groups – as does Pound throughout The Cantos. Far more concerned with Pound’s indictment for treason than his bigotry, Robert Hillyer, then president of the Poetry Society of America, published his outrage in the Saturday Review of Literature, arguing that the Bollingen Prize had been given to a traitor who had ‘served the enemy in direct poetical and

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:11, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.013

198

carrie j. preston

propaganda activities against the United States’.7 In a more recent statement on the controversy, Marjorie Perloff insisted that by now, ‘most critics would agree that, whatever else the [Pisan] sequence was or wasn’t, it was certainly the best book of poems published in 1948 and hence well deserved the much disputed prize’.8 Her ‘one caveat’ turned, once again, to Pound’s biography as a bigamist who never even mentions women ‘by name’. Perloff is right that women in Pound’s life are not named in the Pisan Cantos, but in this chapter I focus on the contradictory and tangled polyerotics of Pound’s construction of the poet/artist in the Pisan Cantos. A depiction of the dissolution of poetic identity set against the backdrop of widespread cultural destruction, the Pisan segment asks how a self and a culture can be reconstructed through poetry. The speaker of the poem is closely linked to Pound, who wrote the section while imprisoned at the U.S. Army’s Disciplinary Training Center (DTC) north of Pisa and under indictment for treason. But even when the poetry seems most personal, we should recognize its performative work and acknowledge the distance between speaker and poet. Pound’s speaker presents a series of intimate relationships with male writers and artists as part of a search for aesthetic and personal guidance. The excavation of these relationships produces lyrical, echoic phrases that structure the poem’s longing for friendship, love and beauty. Conventional, normative erotic or gendered identities are insufficient for the poem’s project of self- and world-building. While a new self cannot be clearly established, the speaker’s search is centred in masculine power, but also male-male erotic and aesthetic intimacy that produces contradictory, messy investments in non-normative gender and sexuality. Neither the Pisan Cantos nor any of Pound’s other work presented a coherent theory of gender and sexuality. When discussing Pound, gender and sexuality, we need to clarify which work, which moment and for which audience he was writing. The most theory-like statements of sexuality he produced were in his ‘Translator’s Postscript’ to Remy de Gourmont’s argument for sexual liberation, The Natural Philosophy of Love (1922). Pound presented the brain as ‘a sort of great clot of genital fluid held in suspense or reserve’ and suggested that ‘creative thought is an act like fecundation, like the male cast of the human seed . . . that ejaculation’.9 Regularly linking creativity and masculine virility, Pound pointed to ‘the symbolism of phallic religions, man really the phallus or spermatozoid charging, head-on, the female chaos; integration of the male in the male organ. Even oneself has felt it, driving any new idea into the great passive vulva of London, a sensation analogous to the male feeling in copulation’

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:11, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.013

Pound, Gender, Sexuality

199

(NPL 207). Pound was not interested in, as he wrote, ‘any digression on feminism’, but claimed that women are ‘better than man in the “useful gestures”’ while men have ‘the “inventions”, the new gestures’ (NPL 207). This is familiar misogyny, but a ‘paranoid’ reading of Pound’s ‘Translator’s Postscript’ risks overlooking his more surprising investment in nonnormative sexualities. While he celebrated virility in many passages, Pound associated the ascetic who ‘has tried to withhold all his sperm’ in the attempt to ‘super-think’ with ‘the dope-fiend’, ‘the mystics’, ‘priestesses in the temple of Venus’ and ‘stray priestesses in the streets’ (prostitutes?; NPL 218). Pound presented these types as if they were all seeking heightened states of consciousness through the pursuit of alternative sexualities. The list could be the basis of an unusual and queer coalition of cultural outcasts, although Pound used it to celebrate individual genius rather than political coalition.10 Pound’s speaker in the Pisan Cantos does not assert a masculine virility and genius but represents an identity under extreme duress. Twenty-three years after his experience in ‘the great vulva of London’, Pound was living in Sant’Ambrogio, in the hills above Rapallo, Italy in a small cottage that, due to wartime circumstances, he shared with both his wife, Dorothy Pound, and his mistress, Olga Rudge. Pound delivered more than 120 broadcasts on Rome radio during the war, some of which were pro-fascist and antisemitic, and on 3 May 1945, he was captured and accused of treason. After about seventeen days of solitary confinement in a six-by-six-foot ‘death cell’ at the U.S. Army’s DTC, he was overwhelmed by the heat of the Italian summer sun and the glare of floodlights trained on him and experienced a breakdown, or a ‘lesion’ as he termed it.11 Army psychiatrists intervened, and Pound was moved to a private tent in the medical compound, where, after several weeks of recovery, he resumed his writing and began drafting the Pisan Cantos. Pound drew up a ‘paradisal scenario’ for this section of his Cantos, imagining ‘the erotico-mystical encounters of the wandering OdysseusDante-Pound with a series of goddesses’ (xvii). Canto LXXIV, the first poem of the sequence, features several such encounters with the Japanese moon angel ‘Hagoromo’ (C 450); Buddhist goddess of mercy ‘Kuanon’ (C 448, 455, 463); Greek goddesses of fertility, Demeter (C 451); and love, Venus (C 455, 463, 464), among others. Some of these feminine deities probably have real-life correlates: Richard Sieburth suggests that Olga Rudge is referenced in the description ‘she did her hair in small ringlets, á la 1880 it might have been, / red, and the dress she wore Drecol or Lanvin / a great goddess, Aeneas knew her forthwith’ (C 455). Poetically

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:11, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.013

200

carrie j. preston

turning women into inspiring and comforting goddesses or muses is a time-worn masculinist practice, but none of the goddess encounters are particularly salvatory for Pound’s speaker. The true saviour in the poem appears: and Mr Edwards superb green and brown in ward No 4 a jacent benignity, of the Baluba mask: ‘doan you tell no one I made you that table’

(C 454)

Henry Hudson Edwards was a black GI trainee who, against regulations, made a writing desk for Pound out of a medical supply box. Racist primitivism is evident in the description of Edwards’s facial features as an African mask. Still, Pound’s speaker recognizes the power of the act of reappropriating a writing table in his statement, ‘and the greatest is charity / to be found among those who have not observed / regulations’ (C 454). Two pages later, ‘Mr Edwards, Hudson, Henry’ is described as a ‘comes miseriae’ – companion in misery – after he states, ‘I don’t know how humanity stands it / with a painted paradise at the end of it / without a painted paradise at the end of it’ (C 456). The goddesses featured in innumerable paintings and sculptures seem part of a paradise that does not help humanity ‘stand it’, certainly not as helpful as Henry Hudson Edwards and a regulation-bending medical supply box turned desk. While the efficacy of the goddesses is questionable in the Pisan Cantos, the speaker states that ‘filial, fraternal affection is the root of humaneness’ (C 457). The speaker’s references to ‘coon’ (C 456) and ‘nigger’ (C 475, 505) indicate a less than filial attitude towards Edwards and the other black Americans who were overrepresented in the prison population at the DTC, the only racially integrated command in the Mediterranean.12 The speaker’s acknowledged [white] brothers are named in his invocations of ghosts, ‘Lordly men are to earth o’ergiven / these the companions’: Ford Madox Ford, W. B. Yeats, James Joyce, Victor Plarr, Edgar Jepson, Maurice Hewlett, Henry Newbolt and Henry James (C 452–3). These brothers discuss art and culture with variations of the phrase, ‘beauty is difficult’, first attributed to ‘Mr [Aubrey] Beardsley’ (C 464), an English illustrator associated with Symbolism and Decadence and perhaps most famous for illustrating Oscar Wilde’s 1891 play Salome. After Wilde was arrested in 1895 for gross indecency with men, Beardsley lost his job as the first art editor of the Decadent journal The Yellow Book, a title that may have been inspired by the yellow-covered book that exerts a corrupting influence on Dorian in Wilde’s novel A Picture of Dorian Gray (1890). Beardsley’s

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:11, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.013

Pound, Gender, Sexuality

201

phrase, ‘beauty is difficult’, is repeated three times in the next twenty-two lines, then revised twenty-five lines later as the epithet ‘lover of beauty’ with homoerotic implications: and old Rhys, Ernest, was a lover of beauty and when he was still engineer in a coal mine a man passed him at high speed radiant in the mine gallery his face shining with ecstasy ‘A’hv joost. . . . . . . . Tommy Luff.’ (C 465) and as Luff was twice the fellow’s size, Rhys was puzzled.

The ellipses stand for ‘buggered’. Ernest Rhys, an English editor, is described as ‘puzzled’, not horrified or titillated, to wonder how the man could have been so ecstatic or successful, given Luff’s size. The speaker, far from insisting that anal sex was ‘against nature’ or akin to usury (although there is a later reference to a ‘buggering bank’ [C 488]), also seems primarily puzzled by the homoeroticism that attends poets, artists and other lovers of beauty: and as for the vagaries of our friend Mr Hartmann, Sadakichi a few more of him, were that conceivable, would have enriched the life of Manhattan or any other town or metropolis the texts of his early stuff are probably lost with the loss of fly-by-night periodicals and our knowledge of Hovey, Stickney, Loring, the lost legion or as Santayana has said: They just died They died because they just couldn’t stand it and Carman ‘looked like a withered berry’ 20 years after Whitman liked oysters at least I think it was oysters

(C 515)

This passage composes a unique history of American poetry, beginning with Sadakichi Hartmann, a German-Japanese critic and poet who published a book based on his relationship and conversations with Walt Whitman.13 The ‘vagaries’ and desire for ‘a few more of him’ might reference the fact that he occasionally lectured and wrote as a genteel alterego ‘Sidney Allan’. Among the few American poets Pound mentioned with Whitman as positive influences were Bliss Carman and Richard Hovey,

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:11, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.013

202

carrie j. preston

largely forgotten figures who collaboratively published the Vagabondia volumes in 1894, 1896 and 1900. Pound read these volumes and wrote in an unpublished essay of 1909, ‘I see him [Walt Whitman] as America’s poet. The only Poet before the artists of the Carman-Hovey period, or better, the only one of the conventionally recognized “American Poets” who is worth reading’.14 Hovey’s ‘Comrades’, the last poem in Songs from Vagabondia (1894), celebrates homosocial, filial camaraderie: ‘Comrades, watch the tides to-night . . . With a shout of glee, / When strong men roam together!’15 Whitman’s nonnormative sexuality is invoked when Pound’s poetic history alludes to his purported fondness for oysters, a food frequently associated with Aphrodite, mythic aphrodisiacs and sexual taste.16 The reappearance of the phrase ‘beauty is difficult’ in Canto LXXX is prompted by an anecdote about a Kommandant who refused to play Bach to the regiments because it was too ‘mathematical’, even an indication of a ‘loose taste in music’ (C 530). The phrase is given in French: Les hommes ont je ne sais quelle peur étrange, said Monsieur Whoosis, de la beauté La beauté, ‘Beauty is difficult, Yeats’ said Aubrey Beardsley when Yeats asked why he drew horrors or at least not Burne-Jones and Beardsley knew he was dying and had to make his hit quickly

(C 531)

Monsieur Whoosis (who is this?) exclaims, ‘Men have I know not what strange fear . . . of beauty’, suggesting that there is something to be feared in Beardsley’s phrase and the related epithet ‘lover of beauty’, linked in the poem to anal sex between men. Beardsley, dying of tuberculosis, tells Yeats again that beauty is difficult and the pre-Raphaelite art of Sir Edward Burne-Jones (1833–98) will not catch the difficult beauty that the doomed young illustrator must draw. In Canto LXXX, Pound’s speaker also feels himself to be near death, describing how ‘the raft broke and the waters went over me’ (C 533). Whitman (with Lovelace this time) reappears at this crisis in M. E. Speare’s The Pocket Book of Verse: Great English and American Poems that Pound discovered in the DTC latrine: ‘that from the gates of death: Whitman or Lovelace / found on the jo-house seat at that / in a cheap edition!’ (C 533).17 The anthology contains eighteen pages of Whitman’s poetry, Richard Lovelace’s ‘To Althea, from Prison’ and selections from the King James Bible, including a passage from Job (38)

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:11, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.013

Pound, Gender, Sexuality

203

referencing ‘the gates of death’.18 The quotes seem to ground the drowning speaker, and allusions to this anthology of poetry now join scraps of ancient Greek, Chinese and Japanese literary materials. The allusiveness of the Pisan Cantos is all the more remarkable, given that before finding The Pocket Book of Verse, Pound had access to few books or articles aside from the copy of the Confucian Classics and the Chinese Dictionary he had slipped into his pockets when he was captured.19 Oscar Wilde’s ‘Ballad of Reading Goal’, also included in The Pocket Book of Verse, inspires the lyrical closing sequence of Canto LXXXI. As if in response to Wilde’s famous line, ‘And all men kill the thing they love’, Pound’s speaker insists, ‘What thou lovest well remains . . . What thou lovest well is thy true heritage / What thou lov’st well shall not be reft from thee’ (C 540, 541). ‘What thou lovest . . . ’ leads into another refrain, the famous and controversial ‘Pull down thy vanity’. Critics have debated whether the passage addresses the U.S. military, mankind more generally or Pound himself, in an indication of his shame and repentance (C 541).20 I read the phrase as a choric chant aimed at multiple groups and expressing an ambivalent mixture of shame, doubt and arrogance. Significantly, the speaker claims it was not vanity when a committee of poets including Yeats and Pound paid homage to another poet and anti-imperialist activist, Wilfred Scawen Blunt, on 18 January 1914: But to have done instead of not doing this is not vanity To have, with decency, knocked That a Blunt should open To have gathered from the air a live tradition or from a fine old eye the unconquered flame (C 541–2) This is not vanity.

The committee of poets organized by Pound had lunch at Blunt’s estate and presented him with a marble reliquary engraved by Gaudier-Breszka and filled with their poems. The memory of the event and the chant, ‘Pull down thy vanity’, may have been provoked by Blunt’s lines from ‘With Esther’, included in The Pocket Book of Verse: ‘Till I too learn’d what dole of vanity / Will serve a human soul for daily bread’.21 The very ‘decent’ poets, far from doling up ‘daily bread’, ate a peacock served on a tray arranged with the bird’s plumage, then stood for a famous photograph in front of a vine-covered stone wall at Blunt’s estate.22 The group of male poets and intellectuals posing with hands in pockets or across the breast of a three piece suit might be described as vain, certainly conveying an elite poetical

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:11, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.013

204

carrie j. preston

masculinity. The photograph, anecdote and its recollection in the Pisan Cantos more effectively emphasizes that Pound constructs his speaker’s poetic masculinity and identity more generally on a foundation of intimate homosocial relationships with other male poets, artists, teachers and mentors. The intimate aesthetic and erotic male-male relationships appearing in the Pisan sequence are described with repetitive chants that provide a structure for the poem. Descriptions of these relationships contain references to Pound’s actual friends and literary inspirations. Compare the throngs of male friends that appear in the Pisan Cantos, offering succour and comfort, to the few actual women referenced in the poem. Allusions to lovers from Pound’s life tend to be oblique, with ‘real’ women turned into goddesses or mythic figures. One of the lyrical choric lines that is not provoked by homosocial intimacy is the serial reference to the Dryad in Canto LXXXIII: Δρυάς, your eyes are like clouds

(C 550)

Δρυάς, your eyes are like the clouds over Taishan

(C 550)

Dryad, thy peace is like water There is September sun on the pools

(C 550)

Dryad may refer to the poet H. D., as it was Pound’s nickname for her when they were young lovers.23 Yet, H. D. is never named in the Pisan Cantos, and there is nothing in the poem that requires linking the invocation of the dryad to her identity. ‘Beauty is difficult’, and the other lyrical passages I have discussed, name the identities of male friends. A paranoid reading of the Pisan Cantos points us to the misogyny and masculine privilege in the poem. A reparative reading emphasizes poetic moments that challenge versions of virile, self-determining, misogynistic masculinity. Such a proud identity was obviously challenged by Pound’s biographical imprisonment in a ‘gorilla cage’, but it is also poetically under attack. The poem repeatedly represents salvation, human intimacy and artistic accomplishment as dependent on intense relationships between men. Committees of poets honouring an elder man, artistic groups and mentors, even editors and publishers haunt The Pisan Cantos with their homosocial but taboo erotics. Homosexual sex produces confusion rather than horror in this section of The Cantos. Homosocial intimacy produces some of the most plaintive and beautiful lyrical moments in all of The Cantos.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:11, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.013

Pound, Gender, Sexuality

205

Notes 1. See Helen Dennis, ‘Gender and Sexuality’, in Ezra Pound in Context, ed. Ira B. Nadel (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 402–11. 2. Eve Sedgwick, ‘Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is about You’, in Touching Feeling (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 123–51. 3. ‘John Buchan’s “Cromwell”’, The New English Weekly (6 June 1935), in Ezra Pound, Selected Prose: 1909–1965, ed. W. Cookson (New York: New Directions, 1973), 265–6. 4. Sedgwick, ‘Paranoid Reading’, 149. 5. Wai Chee Dimock’s ‘Aesthetics at the Limits of the Nation: Kant, Pound, and the Saturday Review’, in American Literature 76.3 (2004), 525–47, points out that the Bollingen Prize has, since 1949, been sponsored not by the Library of Congress but by Yale University (544–45, n. 28). 6. Qtd. in Richard Sieburth, ‘Introduction’, The Pisan Cantos (New York: New Directions, 2003), xxxix. All quotations from the Pisan Cantos will be cited parenthetically from The Cantos, 15th printing (New York: New Directions, 1996). 7. Dimock, ‘Aesthetics’, 535, 537. Robert Hillyer, ‘Treason’s Strange Fruit: The Case of Ezra Pound and the Bollingen Award’, Saturday Review of Literature (11 June 1949), and ‘Poetry’s New Priesthood’, Saturday Review (18 June 1949). 8. Marjorie Perloff, ‘Pound Ascendant’, Boston Review (April/May 2004). Accessed on 7 July 2012 at http://bostonreview.net/BR29.2/perloff.html. See also Perloff’s ‘Fascism, Anti-Semitism, Isolationism: Contextualizing the Case of EP’, Paideuma 16 (1987), 7–21. 9. Remy de Gourmont, The Natural Philosophy of Love [1903], trans. Ezra Pound (New York: Boni & Liveright, 1922), 206, 210. 10. Cathy Cohen issued an early and important call for ‘a politics where the nonnormative and marginal position’ of various outcasts could be ‘the basis for progressive transformative coalition work’ in ‘Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics’, GLQ 3 (1997), 438. Cohen’s list of ‘punks, bulldaggers, and welfare queens’ was more raceand class-conscious than Pound’s ascetics, addicts, mystics and prostitutes, but they both cite a mix of minorities. 11. Sieburth, Pisan, xiii–xiv. 12. Sieburth, Pisan, xix. 13. Sadakichi Hartman, Conversations with Walt Whitman (New York: E. P. Coby & Co. 1895). 14. Quoted by Leon Surette in ‘Ezra Pound, Bliss Carman and Richard Hovey’, Canadian Poetry 43 (Fall–Winter 1998), 44–69. 15. Richard Hovey, ‘Comrades’, in Songs from Vagabondia (Boston: Copeland and Day, 1894), 54. I compare Hovey’s ‘Comrades’ to Pound’s ‘Ballad of the Goodly Fere’ (1908–11) in Modernism’s Mythic Pose: Gender, Genre, Solo Performance (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 127–8.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:11, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.013

206

carrie j. preston

16. The passage foreshadows the famous ‘oysters and snails’ scene that was censored from Stanley Kubric’s 1960 film, Spartacus. Roman General Marcus Crassus (Laurence Olivier) quizzes his body slave, Antoninus (Tony Curtis), who happens to be giving the general a bath, about the differences between morality and taste before declaring, ‘My taste includes both snails and oysters’. 17. M. E. Speare, ed., The Pocket Book of Verse: Great English and American Poems (New York: Washington Square, 1940). 18. Sieburth, Pisan, 150, n. 661–4. 19. Sieburth, Pisan, ix. 20. Peter D’Epiro summarizes responses to this question and argues that the lesson is meant for his captors, the U.S. Military, in ‘Whose Vanity Must Be Pulled Down’, Paideuma 29.3 (1984), 248–52. 21. Sieburth, Pisan 153–4, n. 169. 22. Lucy McDiarmid also describes the literary homosociality represented by the event in Poets and the Peacock Dinner: The Literary History of a Meal (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015). See also Dan Chiasson, ‘When Pound and Yeats Ate a Peacock’, The New Yorker (24 February 2015), https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/poundyeats-ate-peacock. 23. Sieburth, Pisan, 156 n 64. W OR KS C I T ED Chiasson, Dan, ‘When Pound and Yeats Ate a Peacock’, The New Yorker (24 February 2015), https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/po und-yeats-ate-peacock. Cohen, Cathy, ‘Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics’, GLQ 3 (1997), 437–65. D’Epiro, Peter, ‘Whose Vanity Must be Pulled Down’, Paideuma 29.3 (1984), 248–52. Dennis, Helen, ‘Gender and Sexuality’, in Ezra Pound in Context, ed. Ira B. Nadel, 402–11 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010). Dimock, Wai Chee, ‘Aesthetics at the Limits of the Nation: Kant, Pound, and the Saturday Review’, American Literature 76.3 (2004), 525–47. Gourmont, Remy de, The Natural Philosophy of Love, trans. Ezra Pound (1903; New York: Boni & Liveright, 1922). Hartman, Sadakichi, Conversations with Walt Whitman (New York: E. P. Coby & Co. 1895). Hillyer, Robert, ‘Poetry’s New Priesthood’, Saturday Review (18 June 1949): 7–9. ‘Treason’s Strange Fruit: The Case of Ezra Pound and the Bollingen Award’, Saturday Review of Literature (11 June 1949): 9–11. Hovey, Richard, Songs from Vagabondia (Boston: Copeland and Day, 1894). McDiarmid, Lucy, Poets and the Peacock Dinner: The Literary History of a Meal (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015).

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:11, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.013

Pound, Gender, Sexuality

207

Perloff, Marjorie, ‘Fascism, Anti-Semitism, Isolationism: Contextualizing the case of EP’, Paideuma 16 (1987), 7–21. ‘Pound Ascendant’, Boston Review (April/May 2004). Accessed on 7 July 2012 at http://bostonreview.net/BR29.2/perloff.html. Pound, Ezra, ‘John Buchan’s “Cromwell”’, The New English Weekly (6 June 1935), in Selected Prose: 1909–1965, ed. W. Cookson, 265–66 (New York: New Directions, 1973). The Pisan Cantos, ed. Richard Sieburth (New York: New Directions, 2003). Preston, Carrie J., Modernism’s Mythic Pose: Gender, Genre, Solo Performance (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). Sedgwick, Eve, ‘Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, You’re so Paranoid, You Probably Think this Essay is About You’, in Touching Feeling, 123–51 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003). Sieburth, Richard, ‘Introduction’, in Ezra Pound, The Pisan Cantos, ix–xliii (New York: New Directions, 2003). Speare, M. E., ed., The Pocket Book of Verse: Great English and American Poems (New York: Washington Square, 1940). Surette, Leon, ‘Ezra Pound, Bliss Carman and Richard Hovey’, Canadian Poetry 43 (Fall–Winter 1998), 44–69.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:11, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.013

chapter 13

Italian Fascism Anderson Araujo

It is a curious accident of history that 1922 marks the annus mirabilis of both aesthetic modernism and Italian Fascism.1 Mussolini’s epoch-making March on Rome on 28 October came on the heels of Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room, published by Hogarth Press just two days earlier. Other landmarks of modern art and literature to arrive on the scene that year include T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, James Joyce’s Ulysses, Jean Cocteau’s Antigone, Edith Sitwell’s Façade and Pablo Picasso’s Two Women Running on the Beach, to name but a few. None of these modernist mavericks supported Fascism, of course – quite the contrary. Radical politics was stirring nonetheless in the ashes of the First World War. The avant-garde would not remain on the sidelines for long. The Italian Futurists led the way on the right. F. T. Marinetti, the movement’s founder and leader, met frequently with Mussolini only a year after the Armistice and was present at the birth of Italian Fascism on 23 March 1919, at an assembly in Piazza San Sepolcro in Milan.2 A slew of writers and intellectuals would increasingly engage the motley assortment of fascisms spreading across Europe. Even the winner of the 1922 Nobel Prize for Literature, conservative-leaning centrist and celebrated Spanish playwright Jacinto Benavente, would in time collaborate with Falangist intellectuals, writers and other supporters of Franco’s para-fascist regime.3 If Ezra Pound was in no small measure responsible for monumentalizing 1922,4 this was not, strictly speaking, one of his most notable publication years. Aside from several contributions to periodicals his only book was a translation of Remy de Gourmont’s The Natural Philosophy of Love (1903). It is hard to fathom a title more at odds with the political juggernaut rising in the Italian peninsula. Yet even here, in Pound’s postscript, we find the poet already railing against the ‘money fetish’ of his era, a pre-echo of his eventual obsession with the economics of usury, the nemesis lurking behind much of his political thought.5 He also probes the nature of genius, ‘a sudden out-spurt of mind which takes the form demanded by the problem’.6 His conception 208

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:11, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.014

Italian Fascism

209

of genius would in time find a local habitation and a name in none other than Mussolini. The roots of his devotion to mussolinismo, or the myth of the Italian strongman, can thus be traced at least as far back as the apex of high modernism. While conducting research on the fifteenth-century condottiere Sigismondo Malatesta in Rimini in the spring of 1923 Pound was granted access to restricted manuscripts by the city’s Fascist Comandante della Piazza.7 The experience convinced him that Mussolini was a modern-day Malatesta and ‘marked his first real engagement with Italian Fascism’.8 Pound’s visit to the Mostra della Rivoluzione Fascista in Rome in December 1932 would trigger even deeper connections. The massive exhibition celebrating the Fascist decennial showcased a reconstructed version of Mussolini’s office at Il Popolo d’Italia, the newspaper he founded in 1914. In Canto XLVI, Pound likens the reconstructed office to ‘ours’ (C 231), alluding to A. R. Orage’s New Age office on Cursitor Street in London, one of the founding sites of Anglo-American modernism. As Alec Marsh notes, Pound relished the parallel timelines of early modernism and Fascism – 1914–22 – signifying that ‘Fascism is, in fact, a modernist politics’.9 The Duce would come to typify for Pound the ‘force of will’, taking the form, as it were, demanded by ‘the problem of civilisation’ (SP 262). The politician had become the poet’s messiah, Fascism his panacea. At stake for Pound was nothing less than the cultural and economic salvation of Italy. Just a few months before the outbreak of the Second World War, he would hold no punches in his pamphlet What Is Money For? (1939): ‘USURY is the cancer of the world, which only the surgeon’s knife of Fascism can cut out of the life of nations’ (SP 300). Pound’s fascism had reached a pathological pitch, and there would be no turning back. The foregoing serves to preface this essay’s contribution to the ongoing critical reassessment of Pound’s deep and abiding fascination with Italian Fascism. As suggested, the poet’s path to the political movement predates his formal adherence to it by a wide margin. Yet it is important to avoid facile assumptions and misleading labels. To say that he was a reactionary modernist who combined experimental techniques with crypto-fascist ideas, as Edward Timms alleges,10 implies a subterranean fascistic strain in Pound. As we shall see, however, he was nothing if not explicit about the interface between aesthetic and politics. Nor was he coy about his radical politics, Italian Fascism being no exception. ‘As fast as possible I put my cards and beliefs on the table’, he boasts in Jefferson and/or Mussolini (1935; J/M 34). Among the beliefs Pound voices in the book is his firm conviction that Mussolini is an artist. The Duce’s achievements as philosopher-king of

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:11, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.014

210

anderson araujo

the Fascist state amount to a kind of artistic performance, ‘the artwork in the civic sense’ (J/M 100). In keeping with Pound’s assessment, I contend that Italian Fascism itself needs to be taken more seriously as a formidable cultural-political force to be reckoned with, rather than just as ‘a fuzzy form of totalitarianism’11 or as ‘a total historical negativity, an aberration away from the development of European society and culture’,12 the onceprevailing interpretations of the movement. Pound would come to see his own cultural-aesthetic project in Guide to Kulchur (1938) as ‘the new synthesis, the totalitarian’ (GK 95). His usage parrots Mussolini’s conception of the all-embracing nature of Fascism. ‘Fascism, is totalitarian’, the Duce proclaims in The Doctrine of Fascism, cowritten with Giovanni Gentile, ‘and the Fascist State – synthesis and a unit inclusive of all values – interprets, develops, and potentiates the whole life of a people’.13 Pound evidently immersed himself in Fascist ideology. Even its heavily hemmed-in notions of individual liberty and agency would come to resonate with him. The mass politics of Fascism was predicated on the cultic glorification of sacrifice and heroism, subordinating every institution and individual to the superstate. The fascio emblematized the collectivism of the movement. Italian for a bundle of rods or sticks tied together, the fascio became a symbol of strength through unity. Pound would play on this iconography in A Visiting Card (1942). The image of a thousand candles blazing intensely together illustrates ‘the liberty of the individual in the ideal and fascist state’ (SP 119). This is a far cry from his early tribute in 1913 to the American ethos of personal freedom and selfdevelopment in Patria Mia (SP 119). In 1935, Pound would go so far as to say that he felt freer in Fascist Italy than he ever did in London or Paris or, presumably, America (J/M 74). It is beyond doubt that Pound was a Fascist. There is nothing to be gained by treading softly around this once-controversial point. We are still left with a galling conundrum, of course. How could the mind that conceived the sublime lyricism of the Pisan Cantos simultaneously accommodate the technocratic corporatism of Italian Fascism? To chalk it up to compartmentalization alone seems all too tidy an answer. It is the error of thinking of Fascism as an aberration, a monstrous dimension in the poet’s life. As Primo Levi reminds us, one of the most frightening aspects of fascism was precisely the fact that even its most brutal enforcers were not, for the most part, monsters: ‘they were ordinary people’.14 Pound may not have been ordinary in any conventional sense, but neither was he a monster. His loathsome views nonetheless would see him locked up like one in an open-air steel cage at the U.S. Army’s Detention and

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:11, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.014

Italian Fascism

211

Training Centre near Pisa in 1945. Long before his downfall, however, his exposure to Fascism would have been all but inevitable once he left Paris for the seaside resort town of Rapallo, on the Italian Riviera, just two years after Mussolini’s rise to power. Years would pass before Fascism made inroads with him. Yet the unrelenting stream of Fascist propaganda would surely have seeped into his political consciousness by the time his meeting with Marinetti in Rome in 1932 sparked his interest in Mussolini and Fascism.15 Hence, I see Fascism as part of a continuum in Pound’s psychopolitical and aesthetic development. It might not be too far-fetched to see his Fascist turn as a logical outcome, given his long-standing antipathy to the two dominant political choices available to him at the time: Soviet communism and liberal capitalist democracy. What follows rests on a key premise – Pound’s fascism and art engaged in a dialectic that is as fraught as it is complicated. Hence, if we are to reach a new understanding of his cultural politics we must move beyond Walter Benjamin’s programmatic definition of fascism as the aestheticization of politics.16 Pound’s aesthetics and the politics of Fascism were not stuck in a static double helix. Rather, both evolved into darker versions of their former selves. To wit, a New York Sun article dated 8 October 1933 describes Margherita Sarfatti as the co-author of Fascist ideology, noting that ‘the beautiful, Titian blonde and Junoesque’ Mussolini’s mistress ‘is a Jewess, and Rome recalls, happily, that there has been no hint of antiSemitism in the Italian Fascist Regime’.17 Without racial prohibitions to restrict Fascist affiliation, membership was open to virtually anyone until 1938. Even during the Second World War ‘Jews felt much less in danger in Nice or Haute-Savoie, areas under Italian occupation, than in Marseilles, which was under the control of the Vichy government’.18 The composite nature of Pound’s fascism, too, makes it hard to pin down. Rebecca Beasley has neatly summed up his worldview by the end of the 1930s as ‘an unlikely synthesis of Italian fascism, Social Credit economics, and Confucian social values’.19 It is as difficult to atomize his fascism into its constituent parts as it is to define the political experiment itself. Instead, what we find in his political philosophy may be likened to the ‘messy mixture’ David D. Roberts locates in Fascism, with its many ‘elements in motion, coalescing and reacting against each other’, making it ‘an uncertain, unstable field of forces’.20 However, as Roberts also acknowledges, ‘the Fascist accent on Italian cultural primacy, based on the originality and superiority of Latin Civilization, remained central until the fall of the regime in 1943’.21 Without Mussolini’s celebration of Italian cultural nationalism, the staying power of Fascism in Pound’s political ken would likely have been limited.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:11, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.014

212

anderson araujo

Perhaps it might even have fizzled out. Instead, it grew in leaps and bounds from the early 1930s onward. Nearly one hundred years after Mussolini’s black-shirted squadristi marched on Rome, how might we in the early decades of the twenty-first century begin to reconsider Pound’s fascistic commitments? The widening scope of Pound scholarship and Fascist studies has yielded numerous instrumental approaches to the political phenomenon and the poet enthralled by it. Matthew Feldman prefaces his probing archival study of Pound’s contributions to the propaganda efforts of Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, and Sir Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists (BUF) by throwing down the gauntlet, ‘It is high time to start taking Ezra Pound’s fascism seriously’.22 On the face of it, the challenge seems ironclad. While Pound’s antisemitism is relatively easy to spot and condemn, Fascism remains the most vexed and vexing of his preoccupations. Yet reams of evidence suggest that Pound scholars and modernist critics have taken the poet’s fascism seriously for quite a while, since at least the publication of Tim Redman’s indispensable Ezra Pound and Italian Fascism (1991). Monographs by Robert Casillo, Paul Morrison, Leon Surette, Luca Gallesi and, most recently, Feldman and Catherine E. Paul – to cite only works that examine Pound’s fascism at length or exclusively – have greatly enhanced our understanding of the complexities of the poet’s involvement with the movement. David Moody’s magisterial three-volume biography of Pound (2007–15) has furnished a richly researched background against which to situate the poet’s creative and political exploits. My own newly-published A Companion to Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur (2018) characterizes his most difficult and far-reaching prose venture as ‘fundamentally a Fascist document’ that ‘is built on a small but forceful set of totalizing principles’.23 Scholarly essays and book chapters by David Barnes, David Bradshaw and James Smith, Michael North, Lawrence Rainey, among many others, also have shed new light on lesser-known aspects of the cultural impact of Fascist politics on Pound’s poetry, prose and the propaganda networks to which he contributed in the service of Italian Fascism and the Republic of Salò. Fascist studies is undergoing a thorough reassessment. Long-held assumptions are being interrogated, challenged, overhauled and, at times, discarded altogether.24 Everything from Mussolini’s sex life to fashion and cinema in Fascist Italy is now open to consideration. While some of the topics broached recently have been covered for decades, it is the turn to the interrelatedness of phenomena within Fascism that sets apart the studies published in the last dozen years. Perhaps nowhere is this collective shift

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:11, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.014

Italian Fascism

213

more apparent than in Fascism: Journal of Comparative Fascist Studies, a biannual open-access periodical founded in 2012. Opening the inaugural issue, Roger Griffin, one of the world’s leading historians of fascism, writes of the ‘new consensus’ that emerged in comparative fascist studies in the 1990s. The consensus was based on the primacy of palingenetic or regenerative myth in fascist thought. It also established the practice to examine fascism as not only ideology, but as ‘unique concrete manifestations and developmental (narrative arcs)’.25 Lately, the emergence of a ‘new wave’ of interdisciplinary research on extremism in all its forms has moved the study of Fascism ‘far beyond the narrowly political understanding of the phenomenon that enjoyed a stultifying hegemony for decades’.26 My purpose here is not to provide an exhaustive synopsis of these new approaches, but to enlist those that seem most promising to a re-examination of Pound’s Fascist proclivities. The growing interdisciplinary entente between historians and literary critics betokens a cross-pollination of ideas that can greatly enrich the study of Fascist-era Pound. The most sweeping transformation in the past two decades has doubtless been the near-universal rejection of the cavalier view expressed in 1982 by the influential Italian political philosopher Norberto Bobbio, ‘There never was a Fascist culture’.27 Scholars may never agree on a clear-cut definition of Fascism, but the cultural artifacts produced and archeologically recovered in Fascist Italy can no longer be overlooked or treated in isolation from the movement. The Fascist fusion of modernism and traditionalism, underlain by the cult of romanità (Romanness), fuelled an architectural and archaeological renaissance in Mussolini’s Italy, particularly in Rome. Fascist archaeology, as Joshua Arthurs remarks, ‘was informed by the aggressive desire to reclaim space and bodies, erase the visible passage of time from the face of the Eternal City and blur the boundaries – spatial, temporal, and experiential – between the Roman past and Fascist present’.28 The Fascist valorization of a seamless continuity between Rome’s imperial glory and Roman modernity cohered with Pound’s famous slogan for the renovation of ancient wisdom for current use, ‘Make It New’. Like Mussolini, Pound construed the past as a transhistorical manifold as early as 1910 in The Spirit of Romance: ‘It is dawn at Jerusalem while midnight hovers above the Pillars of Hercules. All ages are contemporaneous. It is B.C. let us say, in Morocco. The Middle Ages are in Russia. The future stirs already in the minds of the few’ (SR 6). That the first part of his statement borrows freely from Canto II of Dante’s Purgatorio only further reinforces his argument for temporal simultaneity by suggesting that the Florentine poet’s insight remains as fresh as the day

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:11, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.014

214

anderson araujo

it was inked. For Pound, Fascist Italy would be the locus of a sustained endeavour to ally culture, tradition and modernity in a constitutive relationship. Fascist leader Giuseppe Bottai spoke virtually in the same register as Pound. Fascism entailed a vision of modern Italy predicated ‘not on a restoration but a renovation, a revolution in the idea of Rome’.29 Pound’s investment in the cultural project of Fascism has recently received compelling critical attention in Catherine E. Paul’s Ezra Pound and Italian Cultural Nationalism (2016). The study skilfully uncovers the connections between Pound’s most important prose works, Italian modernism, and the nationalist cultural practices of the Fascist period. With ample references to the most influential historical studies of Fascism, Paul explores ‘Pound’s imagining of Fascism – a project as creative as it is ideological’.30 A far more complicated picture emerges of the movement’s attraction for the poet than the stereotype of a Fascist crank would allow for. Quoting from an unpublished essay by Pound from the mid-1930s, Paul shows how Pound understood Fascism as fundamentally a struggle for the cultural heritage of Italy.31 Rather than paper over the heinous implications of his Fascism, a wider critical and historical engagement allows for a more capacious and thus more comprehensive interpretation. The entry for Pound in World Fascism: A Historical Encyclopedia also makes the link between Italian Fascism and culture explicit. On 25 July 1943, the day the Duce was deposed, Pound is said to have exclaimed, ‘Our culture lies shattered in fragments’.32 Fascism and Mussolini had become synonymous with culture. The fall of one entailed the fall of the other. Violence marched in lockstep with Fascism, from the earliest stirrings of the pre-First World War fasci to the thuggery of the squadristi. Yet therein, too, lay the lasting appeal of Fascism for Pound. He admired Mussolini’s uncanny ability to wrest order from chaos. The Duce’s knack for picking out ‘the element of immediate and major importance in any tangle’ (J/M 66) blinded Pound to the hard-line bigotry and belligerence of Fascist cultural politics. Its stranglehold on Pound was felt keenly by his fellow American poet, William Carlos Williams. In a letter to James Laughlin dated 7 June 1939, Williams expressed serious doubts as to whether Pound would be able to ‘shake the fog of Fascism out of his brain during the next few years’.33 Williams’s prediction that it would soon kill Pound was off the mark, but he was certainly on target about the depth of the poet’s commitment. Even as late as 1958, as Pound disembarked from a liner in Naples following his release from a lengthy incarceration at St. Elizabeths Hospital, in Washington, D.C., he posed smilingly for photographers with his left hand on his hip and the other

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:11, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.014

Italian Fascism

215

raised in the Fascist salute. While Marinetti would come to recognize the racist and imperialist project of Fascism as essentially unsustainable,34 Pound’s commitment neither flagged nor wavered. Rather, his brand of fascism eventually enmeshed itself wholly with his cultural politics. His interest in Fascism was arguably less political than it was cultural-aesthetic, however. As it happens, his discourse of culture – unlike his Confucianism – contains very little of state theory. Nor can his fascism be reduced, as Eco believes, to ‘a radical anti-capitalism’.35 Above all, Pound saw Italian Fascism as instantiating a new paideuma, his ideal manifestation of culture. The year 1922 once again yields further clues towards the odd synergy between the poet and the Duce. A letter Pound sent to Williams from his Paris studio on 18 March sketches out his Bel Esprit scheme to provide Eliot with enough financial security to allow the poet unfettered time to write. The episode has become the stuff of legend in modernist literary history and need not be recounted here.36 For our purposes, what stands out is the carbon outline enclosed with the letter. It begins with a startling claim, ‘There is no organized or coordinated civilization left, only individual scattered survivors’ (SL 172). Pound’s vision of a Western civilization in ruins is of a piece with his trenchant indictment of a botched, toothless civilization in Hugh Selwyn Mauberley two years earlier (P 188). Pound’s despair was widely shared in a world still reeling from the wholesale slaughter of the First World War. The trope would recur several years later in Eleven New Cantos XXI–XLI (1934), where ‘[t]he last crumbs of civilization . . .’ trails off into an inauspicious ellipsis (C 129). Still, in his letter to Williams, the image of ‘individual scattered survivors’ rising out of a post-apocalyptic Europe lets in a ray of hope. It signals the possibility of a civilizational resurgence, a Risorgimento. Pound here seems to be echoing and complicating his earlier hankering for a renaissance in his own country. In Patria Mia, he had put forth with revolutionary fervour that ‘[a] Risorgimento implies a whole volley of liberations; liberations from ideas, from stupidities, from conditions and from tyrannies of wealth or of army’ (SP 112). Paradoxically perhaps, this longing is also the ground zero for Pound’s fascism. At its core is his steadfast belief in the power of extraordinary individuals to salvage and revitalize a moribund culture and civilization. His discovery of the Tempio Malatestiano in Rimini in the summer of 1922 would bolster his conviction.37 A ‘jumble and a junk shop’ of Christian and neo-Pagan traditions, the Church of San Francesco built by Sigismondo Malatesta registers a cultural concept so monumental that ‘there is no other

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:11, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.014

216

anderson araujo

single man’s effort equally registered’ (GK 2). As chronicled in Canto VIII, Malatesta accomplished the feat despite intense opposition from the Church. The power of genius against all odds, the virtù of the ‘strongminded’, became paramount for Pound.38 His belief in exceptional ‘survivors’ was evidently shared by Mussolini as early as the nineteen teens. Closing a lengthy speech delivered at the Teatro Comunale in Bologna on 24 May 1918, the Duce-to-be prefigures Pound’s language even as the war still raged on. ‘We, the survivors – we the returned, vindicate our right to govern Italy’, he boasts, ‘to make her – in thought and deed – worthy to take her place among the great nations which will build up the civilisation of the world to-morrow’.39 The stage was set for the Fascist takeover four years later. Mussolini would spearhead a cultural (‘thought’) and political (‘deed’) renaissance. Pound’s hero worship of the dictator rests upon these twin articles of faith. His near-religious belief would only grow in the years ahead. In Jefferson and/or Mussolini, he would go so far as to assert that any thorough appraisal of Mussolini calls for ‘an act of faith’ (J/M 33). Although Pound would never be fully enthralled by Fascist hypernationalism, he would pin his hopes for a new age onto national heroes. He telegraphs as much in the title of his 1935 polemic. The two titans, Thomas Jefferson and Mussolini, are placed on equal footing across time and space. Pandering to peasants and poets alike, Mussolini would become ever more significant for Pound. In the same Bologna address of 1918, the Duce singles out poets for special acclaim, ‘they grasp truths which remain half veiled to the ordinary person’.40 Not surprisingly, Pound thought precisely along the same lines. ‘Artists are the antennae of the race’, he would pithily put it in the Little Review in August 1918 (LE 297). The metaphor is eerily prophetic of his controversial broadcasts for Radio Rome in the early 1940s. Radicalized by the Great Depression and Social Credit theory in the mid1930s, he would interpret Mussolini’s totalitarian style of governance as approaching the plenitude of aesthetic wholeness. Cheering his ‘passion for construction’, Pound urges us to ‘[t]reat him as artifex and all the details fall into place. Take him as anything save the artist and you will get muddled with contradictions’ (J/M 33–34). The art of politics and politics as art would become virtually interchangeable for the poet. Fascist mythology, too, as Paul demonstrates, ‘imagined Mussolini as a “new man” and a “national renewer”, and added the idea of the Duce as a “savior of the fatherland” and “great artist [artifice] of its glory and future greatness”’.41 Like Jefferson and John Adams, architects of the American experiment,

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:11, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.014

Italian Fascism

217

Mussolini had effectively created the Fascist state. Pound envisaged the state as an artefact that can be created, expanded and revised. Mussolini would exploit the demiurgic agency of the autocrat with unflinching focus. In The Doctrine of Fascism (1935), he defines Fascism as the expression of ‘the whole group ethnically moulded by natural and historical conditions into a nation, advancing, as one conscience and one will, along the self-same line of development and spiritual formation’.42 In a grotesque caricature of the social contract in a democratic-republican system of government whereby the electorate invests the leader with contingent and negotiated power, the Fascist strongman typifies the nation’s will by fiat. Mussolini merges the national consciousness and volition with his own. Predicated on a charismatic and messianic totalitarianism, Italian Fascism could brook no other outcome. In seeking a middle way between the decadence of bourgeois liberal capitalism and the tyranny of Communism, Pound would come to see Fascist absolutism as a unifying and stabilizing force and Mussolini as the only man stout enough to wield it. ‘The great man is filled with a very different passion, the will toward order’, he writes with the Duce foremost in mind (J/M 99). Mussolini’s directio voluntatis, reified in Italian Fascism, would ‘remagnetize the will and the knowledge’ (J/M 95). His purposeful control of the will was also seen as manifesting itself in the material world. In an essay published in Il Mare in January 1933, Pound hails the Duce’s construction of the via dell’Impero (present-day via dei Fori Imperiali) as an act of the ‘WILL [VOLONTÀ]’.43 That Pound thought any means would be the right means for Mussolini to accomplish his vision of the Fascist polis helps bracket the poet’s silence (though not exculpate him for it) in the face of the increasingly violent and racist measures carried out by Fascists in the late 1930s and early 1940s. As a cultural cartographer, Pound drew a road map to kulchur – ‘the history of ideas going into action’ (GK 44) – by propagandizing (‘propaganda’ signifying for him the spreading of good news). He became a de facto evangelist for the gospel of Italian Fascism. Broadly speaking, he ‘wanted to politicize the aesthetic and – more disturbingly – aestheticize the political’.44 Accordingly, Pound saw Mussolini’s agenda as directly intersecting his own. In Guide to Kulchur, Pound once again dubs Mussolini ‘a great man’ and praises his ‘swiftness of mind’ (GK 105). Astonishingly, he sets the Duce on a par with four prime movers of modernist art: Brancusi, Picabia, Gaudier and Cocteau. The unvarnished candidness of Pound’s declaration of admiration for Mussolini encodes his profound allegiance to the project of Italian Fascism at this juncture. Earlier, too, in his ABC of Economics

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:11, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.014

218

anderson araujo

(1933), he plays down the tyrant’s militancy to spotlight his aphoristic intelligence (SP 261). Most of all, it was his meeting with Mussolini in the Palazzo Venezia in Rome on 30 January 1933 (the same day Hitler was sworn in as chancellor of Germany) that would forever enshrine the politician in his mind as an enlightened philosopher-king. The meeting was made possible in part by Olga Rudge, an accomplished violinist who herself had once met and performed for the Italian leader, and who also was Pound’s mistress and the mother of their daughter, Mary.45 Canto XLI registers Mussolini’s glib appraisal of A Draft of XXX Cantos (1930), a copy of which the ruler is said to have held in his hand when Pound entered his office: ‘MA QVESTO,’ said the Boss, ‘è divertente.’ catching the point before the aesthetes had got there;

(C 202)

Pound grossly misjudged Mussolini’s offhand quip, ‘But this is amusing’, as a sign of his innate shrewdness and penetrating insight into The Cantos. Consequently, he also overestimated his own prospects as court poet in the Fascist state. The brief tête-à-tête would have been all but inconsequential for a busy politician accustomed to fielding dozens of appointments on any given day.46 But for Pound it had the force of a mystic revelation. The meeting consolidated his faith in Italian Fascism as a tool ‘to renovate civilization, to conquer modernity in the name of order’.47 He would go on to publish a series of works informed by his newly-found Fascist creed: ABC of Economics (1933), Make It New (1934), Social Credit (1935), Jefferson and/or Mussolini (1935) and Guide to Kulchur (1938), among others. Mussolini’s famous question for Pound, ‘Perchè vuol mettere le sue idee in ordine?’ (‘Why do you want to put your ideas in order?’) (GK 105), elicits a rather coy reply in Canto XCIII, ‘Pel mio poema’ (‘For my poem’; i.e., The Cantos) (C 646). In Mussolini he saw the benevolent despot with the soul of a poet. Pound goes so far as to place him on equal footing with Confucius, given that ‘[t]he Duce and Kung fu Tseu equally perceive that their people need poetry’ (GK 144). The intense aesthetic and ideological kinship Pound felt with the Italian strongman means that any attempt to overlook or whitewash the connections between Pound’s politics and his art during the Fascist period, especially from the 1930s onward, is doomed to fall short as a heuristic and critical tool. Nor should we fear the often shocking confrontation with his bêtes noires, lest it mar our appreciation of his poetry and poetics. Zeev

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:11, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.014

Italian Fascism

219

Sternhell aptly calls this inseparability ‘the Fascist synthesis’, a new scale of ethical and aesthetic values in the service of a new vision of culture in which ‘aesthetics became an integral part of politics and economics’.48 That said, it would be facile to use Pound to peg literary modernism as inherently totalitarian. While acknowledging the ease with which ‘a connection between an aesthetic drive for reconciliation and authoritarian politics’ may be established, Michael North notes that ‘this connection . . . is not sufficient reason to reject either politics or the aesthetic project of reconciliation’.49 More recent studies of the plurality of fascisms, as well as studies of Pound, confirm that historians and literary critics alike are increasingly shifting towards an inclusive approach to the interface between radical politics and art. I subscribe to the position Griffin articulates in his latest overview of the cultural revolution in Fascist Italy. For Griffin, a thorough understanding of Fascism’s totalitarian modernism can only take place when Italian Fascism itself is seen ‘as a collective project of total cultural renewal and not just the emanation from the fevered brain of a narcissistic leader’.50 Crucially, he also stresses the need to logically extend the concept of modernism itself. It should encompass ‘not just formal experimentalism in literature, art, and architecture, but a wide range of experimental, innovative phenomena in the spheres of intellectual and spiritual life, social reform, applied science, and radical or revolutionary politics’.51 In sum, the integrated study of modernism needs to cast a transhistorical, transnational, and cross-disciplinary net. Pound’s fascism was consistent with his commitment to help create and promote an inclusive modernist aesthetic. Fascist culture would not only cradle a burgeoning modern civilization informed by romanità in the Mediterranean basin, but it would also help jumpstart a new cultural awakening. Pound’s fantastic ideation of Italian Fascism reflected the movement’s core mythology, as inscribed in Latin in the Codex Fori Mussolini, a parchment containing the history of the movement. The document, buried under a colossal obelisk of white marble in Rome in 1932 to celebrate the first decade of Fascist rule, or Decennale, promoted the relationship between ancient Rome and the modern Italian nation, while crystallizing the Fascist dream of a novus ordo, a new world order.52 It is little wonder that Pound fell in thrall to this grandiose fantasy. This is not to say that he bears no responsibility in his own descent into political extremism. Since the diagnosis of his clinical psychosis postdates his Fascist affiliations, it cannot excuse his wilful blindness to the wanton violence and eugenic racism of the Axis powers. His odious antisemitism, too, has caused irreparable harm to his reputation. There is no doubt that his

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:11, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.014

220

anderson araujo

Fascist affiliation will always haunt him. However, it bears remembering that the full scale of brutalities carried out by fascist regimes could not possibly have registered in the popular political consciousness of Europe in the 1930s. Pound was very much a creature of his own time. His downfall, then, might owe less to his initial support of Italian Fascism than to his stubborn refusal to shun it once its racial policies took hold after 1938. Fascist aesthetics and politics, initially hailed as the means to free Europe from the rationalist and humanist heritage of the Enlightenment, would prove to be the twin means to promote Mussolini’s imperialist vision, while the fascist war machines exacted a fearsome toll. Pound, the poetcum-propagandist, would become not only one of Italian Fascism’s fiercest defenders, but also one of its most notorious casualties.

Notes 1. The capitalization of ‘Fascism’ is typically used in academic practice to refer to the movement’s specifically Italian variant. This essay follows suit, employing lowercase ‘fascism’ as a general term. 2. Paul Ginsborg, Family Politics: Domestic Life, Devastation and Survival, 1900–1950 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), 146–7. 3. Stanley G. Payne, Fascism in Spain, 1923–1977 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1999), 160–1; Francisco Linares, ‘Theatre and Falangism at the Beginning of the Franco Régime’, in Fascism and Theatre: Comparative Studies on the Aesthetics and Politics of Performance in Europe, 1925–1945, ed. Günter Berghaus, trans. R. I. MacCandless (Providence: Berghahn Books, 1996), 214. 4. Tim Armstrong, Modernism: A Cultural History (Cambridge: Polity, 2005), 34. See also Bill Goldstein, The World Broke in Two: Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, E. M. Forster and the Year That Changed Literature (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2017). 5. Ezra Pound, ‘Translator’s Postscript’, in The Natural Philosophy of Love, by Remy de Gourmont (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1922), 209. 6. Pound, ‘Translator’s Postscript’, 212. 7. A. David Moody, Ezra Pound: Poet, A Portrait of the Man and His Work, II. The Epic Years 1921–1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 47. 8. Matthew Feldman, Ezra Pound’s Fascist Propaganda, 1935–45 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 12. 9. Alec Marsh, Ezra Pound (London: Reaktion Books, 2011), 106. See also Miranda B. Hickman, The Geometry of Modernism (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005), 100–5. 10. Edward Timms, ‘From the Hapsburg Empire to the Holocaust: Die Fackel (1899–1936) and Der Brenner (1910–54)’, in The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines: Volume III: Europe 1880–1940, ed. Peter Brooker et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 1022.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:11, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.014

Italian Fascism

221

11. Umberto Eco, Five Moral Pieces, trans. Alastair McEwen (New York: Harcourt, 2001), 73. 12. Emilio Gentile, ‘A Provisional Dwelling: The Origin and Development of the Concept of Fascism in Mosse’s Historiography’, What History Tells: George L. Mosse and the Culture of Modern Europe, ed. Stanley G. Payne, David Jan Sorkin and John S. Tortorice (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004), 54. 13. Benito Mussolini, The Doctrine of Fascism (Firenze: Vallechi, 1936), 11. 14. Primo Levi, The Reawakening, trans. Stuart Woolf (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995), 228. 15. Humphrey Carpenter, A Serious Character: The Life of Ezra Pound (London: Faber, 1988), 489. 16. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Random House, 1968), 241. 17. Qtd. in Philip V. Cannistraro and Brian R. Sullivan, Il Duce’s Other Woman: The Untold Story of Margherita Sarfatti, Benito Mussolini’s Jewish Mistress, and How She Helped Him Come to Power (New York: Morrow, 1993), 413. 18. Zeev Sternhell, Mario Sznajder and Maia Ashéri, The Birth of Fascist Ideology: From Cultural Rebellion to Political Revolution, trans. David Maisel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 5. 19. Rebecca Beasley, Theorists of Modernist Poetry: T. S. Eliot, T. E. Hulme, Ezra Pound (London and New York: Routledge, 2007), 7. 20. David D. Roberts, Fascist Interactions: Proposals for a New Approach to Fascism and Its Era, 1919–1945 (New York: Berghahn, 2016), 16. 21. Roberts, Fascist Interactions, 17. 22. Feldman, Fascist Propaganda, viii. 23. Anderson Araujo, A Companion to Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur (Clemson, NC: Clemson University Press; Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2018), 11. 24. See Caroline Moorehead, A Bold and Dangerous Family: The Remarkable Story of an Italian Mother, Her Two Sons, and Their Fight against Fascism (Toronto: Random House, 2017); R. J. B. Bosworth, The Italian Dictatorship: Problems and Perspectives in the Interpretation of Mussolini and Fascism (New York: Arnold, 1998); Paul E. Gottfried, Fascism: The Career of a Concept (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2016); Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Italian Fascism’s Empire Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015); A. James Gregor and Antonio Messina, Reflections on Italian Fascism: An Interview with Antonio Messina (Berlin: Logos Verlag, 2015); David I. Kertzer, The Pope and Mussolini: The Secret History of Pius XI and the Rise of Fascism in Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014); António Costa Pinto and A. Kallis, Rethinking Fascism and Dictatorship in Europe (London: Palgrave, 2014); Constantin Iordachi, ed., Comparative Fascist Studies: New Perspectives (London and New York: Routledge, 2010); Mario Lupano and A. Vaccari, eds., Fashion at the Time of Fascism: Italian Modernist Lifestyle, 1922–1943 (Bologna: Damiani, 2009); Steven Ricci, Cinema and Fascism: Italian Film

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:11, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.014

222

25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45.

46.

anderson araujo and Society, 1922–1943 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2008); Claudia Lazzaro and Roger J. Crum, eds., Donatello among the Blackshirts: History and Modernity in the Visual Culture of Fascist Italy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005). Roger Griffin, ‘Studying Fascism in a Postfascist Age. From New Consensus to New Wave?’, Fascism: Journal of Comparative Fascist Studies 1.1 (1 January 2012), 11–13. Griffin, ‘Studying Fascism’, 14. Qtd. in R. J. B. Bosworth, The Italian Dictatorship: Problems and Perspectives in the Interpretation of Mussolini and Fascism (New York: Arnold, 1998), 155. Joshua Arthurs, Excavating Modernity: The Roman Past in Fascist Italy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2012), 60. Giuseppe Bottai, ‘Roma e Fascismo’, Roma: Rivista di studi e di vita romana 15.10 (1937), 352. Catherine E. Paul, Fascist Directive: Ezra Pound and Italian Cultural Nationalism (Clemson: Clemson University Press, 2016), 17. Paul, Fascist Directive, 47. Cyprian Blamires and Paul Jackson, eds., World Fascism: A Historical Encyclopedia, Vol. 2: L–Z (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2006), 532. William Carlos Williams, The Selected Letters of William Carlos Williams, ed. John C. Thirlwall (New York: New Directions, 1984), 184. Rosetta Giuliani Caponetto, Fascist Hybridities: Representations of Racial Mixing and Diaspora Cultures under Mussolini (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 72. Eco, ‘Ur-Fascism’, The New York Review of Books, 22 June, 1995, http://nybooks.com/articles/1995/06/22/ur-fascism. See Moody, Ezra Pound: Poet, II, 35ff. Lawrence S. Rainey, Ezra Pound and the Monument of Culture: Text, History, and the Malatesta Cantos (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 191–7. Pound, ‘Translator’s Postscript’, 206. Mussolini, Mussolini as Revealed in His Political Speeches (November 1914–August 1923), trans. Bernardo Quaranta di San Severino (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1923), 48. Mussolini, Political Speeches, 40. Paul, Fascist Directive, 92. Mussolini, Doctrine of Fascism, 44. Ezra Pound, ‘Ave Roma’, Il Mare 26, 1243 7 (January 1933), 3–4. Michael Coyle, Ezra Pound, Popular Genres, and the Discourse of Culture (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995), 5. J. J. Wilhelm, Ezra Pound: The Tragic Years, 1925–1972 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994), 69–72. See also Anne Conover, Olga Rudge and Ezra Pound: ‘What Thou Lovest Well . . .’ (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008). Tim Redman, Ezra Pound and Italian Fascism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 95; Feldman, Fascist Propaganda, 15ff.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:11, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.014

Italian Fascism

223

47. Alec Marsh, Money and Modernity: Pound, Williams, and the Spirit of Jefferson (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1998), 108. 48. Sternhell, Birth of Fascist Ideology, 29. 49. Michael North, The Political Aesthetic of Yeats, Eliot, and Pound (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 20. 50. Griffin, ‘Fascism’s Modernist Revolution: A New Paradigm for the Study of Right-Wing Dictatorships’, Fascism 5.2 (27 October, 2016), 127. 51. Griffin, ‘Fascism’s Modernist Revolution’, 110. 52. Han Lamers and Bettina Reitz-Joosse, The Codex Fori Mussolini: A Latin Text of Italian Fascism (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 17–19. W OR KS CI T ED Araujo, Anderson, A Companion to Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur (Clemson: Clemson University Press; Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2018). Armstrong, Tim, Modernism: A Cultural History (Cambridge: Polity, 2005). Arthurs, Joshua, Excavating Modernity: The Roman Past in Fascist Italy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2012). Barnes, David. ‘“Ct/ Volpe’s Neck”: Re-Approaching Pound’s Venice in the Fascist Context’, in Ezra Pound, Ends and Beginnings: Essays and Poems from the Ezra Pound International Conference Venice, 2007, ed. John Gery and William Pratt, 17–30 (New York: AMS Press, 2011). ‘Fascist Aesthetics: Ezra Pound’s Cultural Negotiations in 1930s Italy’, Journal of Modern Literature 34.1 (2010): 19–35. Beasley, Rebecca, Theorists of Modernist Poetry: T. S. Eliot, T. E. Hulme, Ezra Pound (London and New York: Routledge, 2007). Ben-Ghiat, Ruth, Italian Fascism’s Empire Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015). Blamires, Cyprian, and Paul Jackson, eds., World Fascism: A Historical Encyclopedia (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2006). Bosworth, R. J. B., Claretta: Mussolini’s Last Lover (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017). The Italian Dictatorship: Problems and Perspectives in the Interpretation of Mussolini and Fascism (New York: Arnold, 1998). Bottai, Giuseppe, ‘Roma e Fascismo’, Roma: Rivista di studi e di vita romana 15.10 (1937). Bradshaw, David, and James Smith, ‘Ezra Pound, James Strachey Barnes (“The Italian Lord Haw-Haw”) and Italian Fascism’, Review of English Studies 64.266 (2013): 672–93. Cannistraro, Philip V., and Brian R. Sullivan, Il Duce’s Other Woman: The Untold Story of Margherita Sarfatti, Benito Mussolini’s Jewish Mistress, and How She Helped Him Come to Power (New York: Morrow, 1993). Caponetto, Rosetta Giuliani, Fascist Hybridities: Representations of Racial Mixing and Diaspora Cultures under Mussolini (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:11, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.014

224

anderson araujo

Carpenter, Humphrey, A Serious Character: The Life of Ezra Pound (London: Faber, 1988). Casillo, Robert, The Genealogy of Demons: Anti-Semitism, Fascism, and the Myths of Ezra Pound (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1988). Conover, Anne, Olga Rudge and Ezra Pound: ‘What Thou Lovest Well . . .’ (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008). Coyle, Michael, Ezra Pound, Popular Genres, and the Discourse of Culture (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995). Eco, Umberto, Five Moral Pieces, trans. Alastair McEwen (New York: Harcourt, 2001). ‘Ur-Fascism’, The New York Review of Books, 22 June 1995, http://nybooks.com/articles/1995/06/22/ur-fascism/. Feldman, Matthew, Ezra Pound’s Fascist Propaganda, 1935–45 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). Gallesi, Luca, Le origini del fascismo di Ezra Pound (Milan: Edizioni Ares, 2005). Gentile, Emilio, ‘A Provisional Dwelling: The Origin and Development of the Concept of Fascism in Mosse’s Historiography’, in What History Tells: George L. Mosse and the Culture of Modern Europe, ed. Stanley G. Payne, David Jan Sorkin and John S. Tortorice, 41–109 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004). Ginsborg, Paul, Family Politics: Domestic Life, Devastation and Survival, 1900–1950 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014). Goldstein, Bill, The World Broke in Two: Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, E. M. Forster and the Year That Changed Literature (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2017). Gottfried, Paul E., Fascism: The Career of a Concept (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2016). Gregor, A. James, and Antonio Messina, Reflections on Italian Fascism: An Interview with Antonio Messina (Berlin: Logos Verlag, 2015). Griffin, Roger, ‘Studying Fascism in a Postfascist Age. From New Consensus to New Wave?’ Fascism: Journal of Comparative Fascist Studies 1.1 (1 January 2012): 1–17, https://doi.org/10.1163/221162512X623601. Hickman, Miranda B., The Geometry of Modernism (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005). Iordachi, Constantin, ed., Comparative Fascist Studies: New Perspectives (London and New York: Routledge, 2010). Kertzer, David I., The Pope and Mussolini: The Secret History of Pius XI and the Rise of Fascism in Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). Lamers, Han, and Bettina Reitz-Joosse, The Codex Fori Mussolini: A Latin Text of Italian Fascism (London: Bloomsbury, 2016). Lazzaro, Claudia, and Roger J. Crum, eds., Donatello among the Blackshirts: History and Modernity in the Visual Culture of Fascist Italy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005). Levi, Primo, The Reawakening, trans. Stuart Woolf (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995).

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:11, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.014

Italian Fascism

225

Linares, Francisco, ‘Theatre and Falangism at the Beginning of the Franco Régime’, in Fascism and Theatre: Comparative Studies on the Aesthetics and Politics of Performance in Europe, 1925–1945, ed. Günter Berghaus, trans. R. I. MacCandless, 210–28 (Providence: Berghahn Books, 1996). Lupano, Mario, and A. Vaccari, eds., Fashion at the Time of Fascism: Italian Modernist Lifestyle, 1922–1943 (Bologna: Damiani, 2009). Marsh, Alec, Ezra Pound (London: Reaktion Books, 2011). Money and Modernity: Pound, Williams, and the Spirit of Jefferson (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1998). Moody, A. David, Ezra Pound: Poet, A Portrait of the Man and His Work, I. The Young Genius 1885–1920 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). Ezra Pound: Poet, A Portrait of the Man and His Work, II. The Epic Years 1921–1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). Ezra Pound: Poet, A Portrait of the Man and His Work, III. The Tragic Years 1939–1972 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). Moorehead, Caroline, A Bold and Dangerous Family: The Remarkable Story of an Italian Mother, Her Two Sons, and Their Fight Against Fascism (Toronto: Random House, 2017). Morrison, Paul, The Poetics of Fascism: Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Paul de Man (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). Mussolini, Benito, The Doctrine of Fascism (Firenze: Vallechi, 1936). Mussolini as Revealed in His Political Speeches (November 1914–August 1923), trans. Bernardo Quaranta di San Severino (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1923). North, Michael, The Political Aesthetic of Yeats, Eliot, and Pound (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). Paul, Catherine E., Fascist Directive: Ezra Pound and Italian Cultural Nationalism (Clemson: Clemson University Press, 2016). Payne, Stanley G., Fascism in Spain, 1923–1977 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1999). Pinto, António Costa, and A. Kallis, Rethinking Fascism and Dictatorship in Europe (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2014). Pound, Ezra, ‘Ave Roma’, Il Mare 26.1243 (7 January 1933), 3–4. ‘Translator’s Postscript’, in The Natural Philosophy of Love, by Remy de Gourmont, 206–19 (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1922). Rainey, Lawrence S., ‘Between me and Mussolini (How Ezra Pound was won over to fascism at Rimini’s Palace Hotel)’, Revista de Occidente 227 (April 2000), 123–41. Ezra Pound and the Monument of Culture: Text, History, and the Malatesta Cantos (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991). Redman, Tim, Ezra Pound and Italian Fascism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). Ricci, Steven, Cinema and Fascism: Italian Film and Society, 1922–1943 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2008). Roberts, David D., Fascist Interactions: Proposals for a New Approach to Fascism and Its Era, 1919–1945 (New York: Berghahn, 2016).

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:11, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.014

226

anderson araujo

Sternhell, Zeev, Mario Sznajder, and Maia Ashéri, The Birth of Fascist Ideology: From Cultural Rebellion to Political Revolution, trans. David Maisel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994). Surette, Leon, Dreams of a Totalitarian Utopia: Literary Modernism and Politics (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s Press, 2011). Timms, Edward, ‘From the Hapsburg Empire to the Holocaust: Die Fackel (1899–1936) and Der Brenner (1910–54)’, in The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines: Volume III: Europe 1880–1940, ed. Peter Brooker, Sascha Bru, Andrew Thacker and Christian Weikop, 1014–31 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). Williams, William Carlos, The Selected Letters of William Carlos Williams, ed. John C. Thirlwall (New York: New Directions, 1984).

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:11, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.014

chapter 14

Late Cantos, ‘Aesopian Language’, States’ Rights and John Randolph of Roanoke Alec Marsh

In the summer of 1952, Ezra Pound told Guy Davenport that ‘the poet looks forward to what’s coming next in the poem’,1 as though the poem, not the poet, dictated the work. One way of interpreting this Delphic remark is to suppose that Pound meant pending events, whether in the poet’s head or out in the world, would determine the content of the later Cantos. Noel Stock called the late cantos ‘the diary of a mind’;2 therefore they inevitably comment on current events. Recall that from Canto LXXIV on, from 1945 to 1958, when virtually all of the later cantos were written, Pound was a prisoner, his correspondence subject to censorship.3 He rarely signed letters while in St. Elizabeths, for fear it might compromise him.4 Paranoia? As Pound was incarcerated unconvicted of any crime, it was reasonable to consider himself a political prisoner. Recall too, that for all of their gestures towards paradise, Pound is most interested in a ‘Paradiso / terrestre’ (C 822). Therefore these poems are political – he told Noel Stock that The Cantos were a ‘political weapon’.5 Pound and even James Laughlin worried that ‘Jews’ and unnamed political ‘enemies’ in the printing plants – presumably Communists – stood ready to ruin the poem in production in order to block its political message: ‘A fear of sabotage in the printing presses might help explain the rampant obscurity of Pound’s late cantos’, Michael Kindellan suggests.6 Fear of censorship, sabotage and the Jewish ‘blackout’ meant that their radical political content would appear in coded form. Pound acknowledged the situation in Canto C. The lines about ‘Aesopian Language’ taken from the ‘Preface to the Russian Edition’ of Lenin’s Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (1917), written in exile in 1916 and published a year later in revolutionary Petrograd, are crucial to understanding how to read Rock-Drill and Thrones. And Lenin: ‘Aesopian language (under censorship) Where I wrote “Japan” you may read “Russia”’

(C 733)

227

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:11, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.015

228

alec marsh

Lenin actually refers to ‘that accursed “Aesopian language”’ (my emphasis) and remarks how ‘painful it is in these days of liberty to reread the passages . . . which have been distorted, cramped, compressed in an iron vice on account of the censor’.7 Just so, the unhappy reader often finds the later Cantos ‘distorted, cramped and compressed’ as well as heavily coded. Read ‘Aesopianly’ as directed, the phrase ‘“not a trial but a measure” committed Danton’ (C 733) just a few lines down this same page can be taken as referring to Pound himself. Likewise we are free to read the opening of Canto C where Senator Wheeler criticizes FDR for ‘packing the Supreme Court’ as code for Eisenhower’s practice of using ‘recess appointments’ to bypass Congress and get his own judges on board – most glaringly and fatefully, Governor Earl Warren of California, his principal rival in the Republican party.8 Once installed, Warren and the ‘Warren Court’ became notorious in right-wing circles for making public policy. Pound and his fellows on the Right saw Warren and the rest of the court taking direction from Moscow and ultimately the Jews. This was evident by the court’s 1954 ruling in Brown v. Board of Education mandating the racial integration of the public schools. Brown led to a series of decisions eroding ‘Jim Crow’ in the segregated south while at the same time the court made a series of rulings that appeared favourable to accused Communist subversives, on occasion reversing lower court convictions, thereby infuriating and frightening an American public.9 The code we are concerned with here conceals resistance to the racial integration of schools and inevitable ‘mongrelization’ of society once racial equality was achieved. The Jewish/Communist conspiracy directing the Warren Court could fulfil its long-term desire to destroy the white race and the so-called ‘American way of life’. A major coded theme in these poems is Pound’s covert politicking in favour of the rights of states to resist the federal mandates abolishing racial segregation. ‘States’ Rights’ is marked in Canto CIII. Near the end of the canto, Pound twice quotes remarks from President James Buchanan’s inaugural address, given in March 1857 and directed at the issue of expansion of slavery into the western territories of Kansas and Nebraska. Thanks to the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, the question was to be decided by the voters of the new states themselves (when they became states), not by the federal government. The catastrophic ‘Kansas-Nebraska Act’, the brainchild of Stephen Douglas and seconded by President Franklin Pierce, effectively abrogated the ‘Missouri Compromise’ of 1820, which had served for a generation to keep slavery confined to the southern areas of the

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:11, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.015

Late Cantos, ‘Aesopian Language’, States’ Rights

229

country below the Mason-Dixon line at longitude 36’30’. The 1854 Act repealed the 1820 compromise and reopened the possibility of slavery north of the line by making it a local issue. Predictably, proslavery and anti-slavery elements moved into the Kansas and Nebraska territories hoping to influence the vote, eventually resulting in two territorial governments, one legal and pro-slavery, the other illegal and anti-slavery. Soon Kansas was involved in a violent civil struggle and at odds with the federal government, earning the title ‘Bleeding Kansas’. Pound quotes Buchanan in support of States’ Rights, and implicitly holds up the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 as a model for how to handle the current crisis of the 1950s. That men have sunk to consider the mere material value of the Union a grant from States of limited powers

(C 756)

Nothing could be more clearly in support of States’ Rights than this formula used by Buchanan to defend the Kansas-Nebraska Act, so where’s the ‘code’? Pound is using Aesopian language: where we discern historical controversies about slavery, Pound wishes us to consider contemporary controversies about racial integration broached by Brown v Board of Education. Pound’s Aesopian point is that the states should decide if they wish to integrate themselves, not the federal government. For Pound the Brown decisions abrogated Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) with its ‘separate but equal’ formula, which had served to contain the racial problem in the United States for half a century by providing a cover for Jim Crow laws. The Brown decisions were equivalent to the Kansas-Nebraska Act: equivalent – but opposite. Kansas-Nebraska did the right thing, Pound thought, by returning power to the states, whereas Brown was usurping the rights of states to govern themselves. Were he voting in 1860, it is probable that Pound would have voted for Stephen Douglas, whose mantra was the ‘sovereign rights’ of states.10 We begin to see why Buchanan gets so much space in Canto CIII, along with two other ante-bellum Presidents who interpreted the Constitution as strictly limiting Federal power to interfere in the ‘domestic relations’ of the States: Franklin Pierce and Millard Fillmore (misspelled ‘Fillimore’ at C 754). These men worked to avoid, delay and, if possible, to stop a civil war between north and south. In this they resemble King Edward VIII, who, in Pound’s view expressed in Cantos LXXXVI and LXXXIX, bought ‘three years’ peace’ by negotiating with the Germans in 1936 (C 577, 621). For that, and because the war-mongers feared the King ‘would balk and

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:11, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.015

230

alec marsh

not sign mobilization’ Pound tells us, Edward was forced to abdicate (C 793). Using selective quotations from a biography of the fourteenth President, Pound gives the impression that Franklin Pierce suffered a similar fate in the opening lines of Canto CIII – although, typically, Pierce is not mentioned by name. Thus: 1850: gt objection to any honesty in the White House ’56 an M.C. from California killed one of the waiters at the Willard 22nd. Brooks thrashed Sumner in Camera Senatus ‘respectful of our own rights and of others’ For which decent view he was ousted.

(C 752)

Somehow, Pound manages to praise South Carolina Congressman Preston Brooks for clubbing the abolitionist Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts nearly to death in the Senate in 1856 for telling the truth about slavery. The passage is deliberately garbled so that words spoken by Pierce supporting States’ Rights and the Fugitive Slave Law urging abolitionist hotheads to be ‘respectful of our own rights and of others’ seem to be ascribed to Brooks, thereby giving the impression that Pierce, not Brooks, was ‘ousted’ from office,11 much like Edward VIII. In fact, the unpopular Pierce could not stand for re-election. The nomination fell to James Buchanan and not because Pierce upheld the Constitution, but because the Democratic Party had splintered over the slavery issue, its freesoil faction splitting off to become the new Republican party. Meanwhile, to avoid being ousted, Brooks resigned from Congress after a farewell speech upholding the South – making him wildly popular in his home state, South Carolina, which promptly re-elected him.12 At the same time, Pound insists that ‘the slaves were red herring’ as cause of the Civil War (C 752) because, as we have seen, ‘the Union’ is merely ‘a grant from States of limited powers’ (C 756) – the ‘States’ Rights’ position revived by southern resistance to Brown.13 Lest we misunderstand the larger global, even cosmic, issues at stake, Pound follows the Pierce/Brooks tangle with a kind of equation: Homestead versus kolschoz Rome versus Babylon

(C 752)

We should read this as assigning Homestead and Rome to the realm of virtue where coexist the American dream of individual independence and Roman (including Fascist) order. These are opposed to Soviet agricultural

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:11, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.015

Late Cantos, ‘Aesopian Language’, States’ Rights

231

collectives and ‘Babylon’ – a consistent metonym for ‘the Jews’ from the Pisan Cantos forward. In brief: freedom and order versus a Jewish/ Communist tyranny. Noel Stock observed that ‘we are better able to follow what is going on in Thrones’ if we know something about the numerous ‘unsigned or pseudonymous items Pound contributed’ to dissident publications directed by his acolytes when they were being composed.14 Carroll Terrell’s notes elucidating the ‘Homestead versus kolschoz’ passage above are exceptionally useful because they draw on remarks Pound published in Bill McNaughton’s Strike 5 (October 1955). In his Strike piece, Pound used Mencius’s ‘nine field’ system to criticize Soviet land policy and asked, in regard to American China policy, whether ‘The Voice of America’ was using Mencius’s ‘idea in the fight against Communism in China. Bolshevism started off as an attack against loan-capital and quickly shifted into an attack against the homestead’.15 Although Joe McCarthy had lost his power by this time, it is significant that Pound attacks two of the Senator’s favourite targets, ‘The Voice of America’ and the State Department ‘China hands’, in addition to using Hitler’s term ‘loancapital’ (Liehkapital) to score against the Bolsheviks. ‘Loan-capital’ signifies the preferred mode through which economic imperialism as practiced by Anglo-American finance worked; loan capital seeks ‘investment opportunities’ abroad, leading, Lenin argued, to inevitable global conflict. Pound correctly saw Lenin’s heirs trying to exacerbate global tensions by ‘dumping’ goods abroad, while enslaving the Soviet masses at home – it is a recurrent theme in his Axis radio speeches. The temporary alliance between Great Britain, the USA and the USSR (1941–5) remains one of the most unlikely events of the time, fertile ground for the worst sort of speculation about a global conspiracy – the ‘conspiracy so immense’ – invoked by McCarthy. But another ‘States’ Rights’ strand running through the late Cantos, starting in Rock-Drill, is carried by the figure of John Randolph. The archrepublican John Randolph of Roanoke is something of a leitmotif from Canto LXXXVIII onward. He figures prominently in Cantos LXXXVIII and LXXXIX as a figure in Senator Thomas Hart Benton’s recollections of Andrew Jackson’s ‘bank war’. There, Pound links Randolph with his then allies, Benton, Martin van Buren and Andrew Jackson (C 610). In Canto C Pound quotes Randolph (though he coyly assigns his words to Andrew Jackson) ‘That Virginia be sovreign’ (C 735), leaving scholars to finish the quote: ‘That Virginia “is and of right, ought to be a free, sovereign and independent state”’.16 In Canto CVII Pound remarks that Randolph has

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:11, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.015

232

alec marsh

been a victim of the historic ‘blot-out’, listing Randolph with Alexander the Great (because he paid his soldiers) and Antoninus Pius (who kept marine insurance to a minimum) as historical non-persons for practicing economic sanity.17 Randolph surfaces in these cantos for three reasons. One, he is an ancestral connection of Dorothy’s, standing as a tribute to her perseverance during the years of Pound’s incarceration. Randolph was a close cousin of Dorothy’s maternal great-grandfather, St. George Tucker, who married Randolph’s widowed mother and raised the boy, a fact alluded to in Canto LXXXVIII (C 599). Two, Randolph was a radical republican of the Jeffersonian persuasion, a firm believer in ‘the principles of 1798’, as expressed in the Virginia and Kentucky resolutions that interpreted the US Constitution to be a voluntary compact, not a binding contract, between states that could be repudiated at the States’ discretion. This position underlies all States’ Rights interpretations of the Constitution and was used to justify the secession of the southern states in 1860. Pound would have known that James Kilpatrick of The Richmond News Leader had revived them and published the resolutions in full in the autumn of 1955 to support resistance to Brown.18 Third, and consequently, in Canto C, Randolph becomes as Aesopian figure for more contemporary States’ Rights agitators reacting to the Supreme Courts’ ‘encroachments’ onto state sovereignty. Pound covertly deploys Randolph’s States’ Rights creed as both a critique of the Warren Court and the Brown decisions as support for the ‘massive resistance’ then being organized in Virginia to defy federally mandated integration of schools, which would lead, Pound thought, to the destruction of the United States, through the inevitable racial mixing that would occur once young people got to know each other socially at school.19 James J. Kilpatrick, his vocal segregationist past forgotten, would later become a nationally known TV commentator. Harry Meacham, the poetry reviewer for his paper, The Richmond News Leader, became interested in Pound the poet. Meacham wrote Pound and agitated for his release. To look ahead, Meacham persuaded Kilpatrick to write a significant editorial about Pound’s situation, ‘EZRA POUND: SET HIM FREE!’ in February 1958, that concluded: ‘No possible useful purpose is served by keeping Pound locked up in St. Elizabeths. To all intents and purposes, he remains a political prisoner—in a nation that prides itself on political freedom. What does it take to get him free’.20 The editorial may have helped Pound’s release in April that year.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:11, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.015

Late Cantos, ‘Aesopian Language’, States’ Rights

233

Kilpatrick’s interest in Pound was reciprocated by the poet. When the Warren Court threatened to put the federally mandated integration of schools into practice, Kilpatrick pushed the 1798 Virginia and Kentucky resolutions, advocating resistance to the federal government through the doctrine of ‘interposition’ drawn directly from the ‘legacy of Jefferson and Madison and the “principles advocated so forcefully”’. Kilpatrick argued that they had ‘“great validity today” in the present school crisis’.21 ‘Interposition’ ‘was the doctrine once held in one form or another by Southern leaders that a state had the right to “interpose its sovereignty between the federal government and its people”’.22 It is akin to antebellum legal strategies of Constitutional ‘nullification’ and other discredited States’ Rights doctrines, which were revived in the 1950s as the South’s best hope to avoid the law of the land. Kilpatrick’s editorializing was designed to influence the Virginia legislature, which in September was considering revising its Constitution to preserve their dual school system at any cost, including abolishing the public schools altogether. Pound himself would also be involved in efforts to revise the Constitution of Virginia through the thirty-two-page pamphlet that he co-authored with Dave Horton, John Kasper and others called Virginians On Guard!, distributed in Charlottesville by Kasper and the Seaboard White Citizens Council (SWCC) in August of 1956.23 With these three factors in play – the personal connection through Dorothy’s family, Randolph’s radical brand of Jeffersonian politics and his usefulness as a Aesopian cover name for Pound’s own politicking via his Cantos – we can begin to appreciate Randolph’s position in the poem. In his mock autobiography, Indiscretions (1923), Pound bragged that ‘one could write the whole history of the United States from one’s family annals’ (PD 6), an important strategy in The Cantos, which make regular references (often in Aesopian code) to family and friends. In Rock-Drill Pound attends to the appearance of John Randolph with a shout-out to Dorothy, interrupting the narrative of Randolph’s duel with Secretary of State Henry Clay to remind us that ‘[h]is (R’s) stepfather / brought out a “Blackstone”’ (C 599), an edition of the British legal Bible in 1803.24 This stepfather was St. George Tucker, Dorothy’s ancestral connection. On the next page, Pound quotes from this edition, establishing Tucker’s work as part of the source-field for The Cantos. ‘My wife’s connections go back to that Tucker who married John Randolph’s ma and brought out a Blackstone’, as Pound noted in a September 1957 letter to Meacham.25 Dorothy explained more fully to Meacham that her grandfather’s father was first cousin to St. George Tucker (1752–1827), a Virginia notable and

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:11, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.015

234

alec marsh

patriot who fought against Cornwallis in the Yorktown campaign and later became a distinguished judge. Her own branch of the family returned to England before the American Revolution, but Dorothy’s connection to one of Virginia’s first families (‘The Tuckers are to Virginia what the Lowells are to Massachusetts’, Meacham remarks26) was important enough that one of the first things the Pounds did together after Ezra’s release from St. Elizabeths was to visit the Tucker house in Williamsburg in Meacham’s company at the end of May 1958. St. George Tucker married John Randolph’s widowed mother when John was five, and John was raised on the Tucker plantation – wonderfully named ‘Bizarre’ – which he inherited. An extreme republican and anti-Federalist, an explicator of ‘States’ Rights’ doctrine, a slave-owner who as Pound notes twice in his poem freed his slaves after his death – ‘liberavit masnatos’ – in Cantos LXXXIX (C 610) and XC (C 620), Randolph was aristocratic, charming, brilliant, bad-tempered, in constant ill-health (possibly from syphilis) and, by the end, of doubtful sanity. An owner of enormous estates and hundreds of slaves, like Jefferson he preached the virtues of agriculture. Like Jefferson, he was burdened by debt and like all Virginians hated banks and bankers. Henry Adams marked his politics as follows: Dread of the Executive, of corruption and patronage, of usurpations by the central government; dread of the Judiciary as an invariable servant of despotism; dread of national sovereignty altogether, were the slogans of this creed. All these men foresaw what the people of America would be obliged to meet; they were firmly convinced that the central government, intended to be the people’s creature and servant, would one day make itself the people’s master, and, interpreting its own powers without asking permission, would become extravagant, corrupt, despotic.27

These same fears define American populism to this day and are perfectly consistent with Pound’s own views in the 1950s. The poet was a devoted Jeffersonian from early on, and, as I have shown in John Kasper and Ezra Pound, influenced by anti-Reconstruction pro-southern revisionism.28 In letters to Meacham, Pound wrote of his lifelong interest in Virginia, in Jefferson and in Jefferson’s University of Virginia, hinting that he might like to live there if and when he was ever released, even enquiring of Meacham if the stables at Monticello might be available as living quarters.29 Randolph first enters The Cantos through Senator Thomas Hart Benton’s memoir of his public life, My Thirty Year’s View (1854), part of which Pound redacted to form the hearts of Cantos LXXXVIII and

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:11, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.015

Late Cantos, ‘Aesopian Language’, States’ Rights

235

LXXXIX, published in The Hudson Review in the summer of 1955. His source chapters appeared in a Square $ book, Bank of the United States (1954), obviously intended as a useful gloss on the poems.30 These cantos are mostly concerned with the recharter of the Bank of the United States, which Benton, a true-blue Jeffersonian, opposed. Nonetheless, Canto LXXXVIII begins with an extensive account of Randolph’s duel with Secretary of State Henry Clay on 8 April 1826 – Randolph had offended the Secretary in Senate debate implying he was a ‘white slave’ doing his master’s bidding; the master being the Bank of the United States. Pound uses the action to show Randolph asking for his money at the local bank preparatory to crossing the Potomac for his combat. Randolph refuses the paper bills offered him and demands real money, hard money, gold. Fortunately, the combat ended without injury to either party. The point of this extended story, which takes up much of Canto LXXXVIII, is the Aesopian parable of the Virginian in combat with the Federal Government: Randolph v. Clay. It shows that the Virginian has a Jeffersonian concept of money, as opposed to the bank’s (implicitly, Clay’s and the government’s) view. The Federal government is corrupt, as Randolph claimed with all but pathological vehemence, and Pound implies that it is because of its financial arrangements. This is important because Pound argues in The Cantos and elsewhere that the Civil War was caused by northern financial machinations, not slavery. ‘J[ohn] Q[uincy A[dams] objecting to slavery’, he complains in Canto LXXXIX (C 613), leaving his real meaning unsaid, which is, ‘when he should have been objecting to usury’. To be clear, later, in Canto CIII he states: ‘The slaves were red herring / land not secure against issuers’ (C 746) of bonds and mortgages. Cantos LXXXVIII and LXXXIX, about Benton and the Bank War, were designed to call attention to the Jeffersonian interpretation of the United States at precisely the same time and for the same reasons as Kilpatrick’s editorials espousing States’ Rights. This can be seen in two ways: by the publication of the chapters from Benton’s Thirty Years View from which the cantos are redacted, and by the invention of the ‘Benton Award’ given by the Defenders of the American Constitution to honour the member of Congress who had best defended the US Constitution from judicial and executive usurpation.31 The point is that Cantos LXXXVIII and LXXXIX were composed not as historical curiosities, but as activist poetry. ‘The cantos are a political implement’, Pound told a correspondent in 1957.32

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:11, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.015

236

alec marsh

In Canto C, Randolph comes in under Aesopian cover when Pound assigns to Andrew Jackson language Terrell shows is Randolph’s. The poem reads: ‘“That Virginia be sovreign”, said Andy Jackson / “never parted with . . . ”’ (C 735). At the end of his life, John Randolph offered some States’ Rights resolutions in the Charlotte courthouse to the effect, ‘That Virginia is, and of right, ought to be, a free sovereign and independent state . . . when Virginia joined the other twelve colonies . . . she parted with no portion of her sovereignty’.33 Ironically, as T. C. Duncan Eaves and Ben Kimpel noted years ago, these resolutions were made against Jackson, but from the 1930s Pound preferred ideological consistency to historical accuracy in his rendition of history, especially American history. He found these resolutions in Martin Van Buren’s Autobiography34 and alludes to them in Canto LXXXVIII (C 612).35 They were part of the political discussion at St Elizabeths, which was clearly a hotbed of States’ Rights talk from 1954 on. When indictments against Pound were dismissed on 18 April 1958, he was released as incompetent in charge of ‘the Committee’ (his wife Dorothy). On 30 April Harry Meacham brought Pound down for drinks and dinner at the exclusive Rotunda Club in the Jefferson Hotel in Richmond. Present, among others, was James J. Kilpatrick, Meacham’s friend and editor who wrote up the evening in a sympathetic and touching article for William F. Buckley’s The National Review on 24 May 1958.36 Kilpatrick admits they did not talk serious politics – ‘it is useless’, he conceded, ‘to talk serious politics with Ezra Pound. He is the last statesman of a lost cause – a cause lost a thousand years ago – and most of his enemies are dust’.37 Pound’s political table talk, in short, was much too much like The Cantos. Nonetheless, Kilpatrick does mention in passing that Pound brought him a personal message of greeting from ‘Mrs. Lane of Arlington’, a segregationist member of the Arlington, Virginia, School Board, a guest on Dave Horton’s right-wing radio show, and a supporter of George Lincoln Rockwell, Führer of the American Nazi party.38 If this was the evening’s only nod to contemporary politics, it does suggest the direct ideological linkage between past and present, Randolph and Pound, in these late cantos. Pound’s ‘Washington Cantos’ are casually said to be ‘paradisal’ gestures, but they may be best read as utopic poems; that is, as political, even activist poetry. As the poet told Donald Hall, ‘The thrones of Dante’s Paradiso are for the spirits of the people who have been responsible for good government. The thrones in The Cantos are an attempt to move out from egoism and to establish some definition of order possible or at any rate conceivable on

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:11, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.015

Late Cantos, ‘Aesopian Language’, States’ Rights

237

earth’ (my emphasis).39 As I’ve shown, Pound told correspondents The Cantos were a ‘political implement’, even a ‘weapon’. Pound’s Aesopian tactics, and other, subtler forms of coded speech explored by Peter Nicholls in a number of articles40 and most recently by Michael Kindellan in The Late Cantos of Ezra Pound, suggest that these poems’ relation to current events, including the predicament of the poet as a political prisoner are well worth teasing out. Pound’s turn to American nineteenth-century politics and politicians in these poems is an intervention into current events, just as, when he turns to Edward Coke in the final poems of Thrones, he is enlisting the great ‘oracle of the law’ in his own defence: a topic, perhaps, for another day.

Notes 1. Lewis Leary, ed., Motive and Method in The Cantos of Ezra Pound (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961), 33. 2. Noel Stock, Reading The Cantos (New York: Pantheon, 1966), 104. 3. Eustace Mullins says Pound was not subject to censorship – but only because he entrusted his outgoing mail to Dorothy, not to the hospital mailroom. See Mullins, This Difficult Individual, Ezra Pound (New York: Fleet, 1961), 331. 4. ‘SHUT UP’, he chided Louis Dudek, in a letter in December 1956. Dudek had tried to be helpful by urging Pound’s release in his journal, CIV/n, No.4. ‘You are not supposed to receive any letters from E.P. They are UNSIGNED / and if one cannot trust one’s friends to keep quiet re / the {supposed} source / whom can one trust’. See Dk / Some Letters of Ezra Pound, ed. Louis Dudek (Montreal: DC Books, 1974), 105–6. 5. Stock, Reading The Cantos, 91. 6. Michael Kindellan, The Late Cantos of Ezra Pound: Composition, Revision, Publication (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 111. 7. Vladimir Lenin, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (1917; New York: International Publishing, 1939), 7. 8. Peter Nicholls, ‘Thrones de los cantares: XCVI-CIX’, in The Ezra Pound Encyclopaedia, ed. Demeters P. Tryphonopoulos and Stephen J. Adams (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2005), 47. 9. Bernard Schwartz and Stephan Lesher, Inside the Warren Court 1953–1969 (New York: Doubleday, 1983), 103–21. 10. Douglas’s refusal to compromise on this issue is what split the Democratic Party in 1860 in the face of the Republican threat and Abraham Lincoln. The South was for enforcement of the law – both the Kansas Nebraska Act and the Fugitive Slave Law. In short they wanted protection of their slave property over the protests and non-acquiescence of the free states. This is what the Dred Scott case was all about. Thus the South seceded from the Democratic Party before seceding from the Union. By nominating John C. Breckenridge

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:11, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.015

238

11. 12. 13.

14. 15. 16. 17.

18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

alec marsh as a ‘southern’ Democrat and refusing to accept Douglas, the ‘northern’ Democratic nominee, they fatally split the party along sectional lines, guaranteeing a Republican victory solely through northern votes intolerable to the South. The facts and Pound’s attitude can be untangled by reference to Pound’s source, Roy Nichols’s Franklin Pierce: Young Hickory of the Granite Hills (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1931), 464. Carroll F. Terrell, A Companion to The Cantos of Ezra Pound, Vol. II (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 663. For example, ‘The Southern Manifesto’ of 12 March 1956, which deplores the ‘trend in the federal judiciary undertaking to legislate in derogation of Congress, and to encroach upon the reserved rights of the States and the people’, qtd. in Waldo E. Martin Jr., ed., Brown v Board of Education: A Brief History with Documents (Boston: Bedford St. Martin’s, 1998), 220. Incidentally, Virginians on Guard! attacked ‘The Southern Manifesto’ as so much senatorial bluster that needed to be backed up with violent action; see Martin, Brown v Board, 13. Stock, Reading The Cantos, 104. Terrell, Companion, 663–4. Terrell, Companion, 648. This despite a recent 1951 biography of Randolph by Russell Kirk, Randolph: A Study in Conservative Thought (Washington, D.C.: Regnery, 1951). Kirk’s publisher Henry Regnery was one of Pound’s correspondents and later the publisher of Impact. Randolph had had two other biographies, Henry Adams’ hostile John Randolph (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1882 and 1888), and Pound’s main source besides Benton’s My Thirty Years View, the definitive two-volume biography by William Cabell Bruce, John Randolph, 1773–1833 (New York: Putnam, 1922). There have been others since Pound’s time. Benjamin Muse, Ten Years of Prelude (New York: Viking, 1964), 70–1. Alec Marsh, Money and Modernity: Pound, Williams and the Spirit of Jefferson (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1998), 88. Qtd. in Harry M. Meacham, The Caged Panther: Ezra Pound at St. Elizabeths (New York: Twayne, 1967), 68. George Lewis, Massive Resistance: The White Response to the Civil Rights Movement (London: Hodder Arnold, 2006), 63. Muse, Ten Years of Prelude, 20. See Alec Marsh, John Kasper and Ezra Pound: Saving the Republic (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 133–49. Meacham, Caged Panther, 156. Qtd. in Meacham, Caged Panther, 51. Meacham, Caged Panther, 155–6. Adams, John Randolph, 56–7. Marsh, Saving the Republic, 9–24. Meacham, Caged Panther, 83.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:11, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.015

Late Cantos, ‘Aesopian Language’, States’ Rights

239

30. Thomas Hart Benton, Thirty Years View, 2 vols. (New York: D. Appleton, 1854); and Bank of the United States (New York: Square $, 1954). 31. Marsh, Saving the Republic, 105–13. 32. Donald Pearce and Herbert Schneidau, eds., Pound / Theobald Letters (Redding Ridge: Black Swan, 1984), 44. 33. Qtd. in Terrell, Companion, 648. 34. Martin Van Buren, Autobiography (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1920), 424–5. 35. Ben Kimpel and T. C. Duncan Eaves, ‘American History in Rock-Drill and Thrones’, Paideuma IX.3 (Winter 1980), 424–5. They cite the discussion in Bruce’s John Randolph (425): Benton naturally reminded Pound of his earlier source for the Bank war, Martin Van Buren, and there are a good many references to Van Buren’s Autobiography [16] in Canto LXXXIX. On pages 458–59 the Autobiography has a flattering picture of Talleyrand, who also appears as one of the heroes of the later cantos: ‘Van Buren already in ’37 unsmearing Talleyrand’ (p. 597). Actually it was five years before 1837 that Van Buren formed his favorable opinion. He has a full account of the resolutions which Randolph of Roanoke got adopted at a meeting in 1833 at Charlotte Court House, resolutions against Jackson’s opposition to South Carolina’s Nullification Act (pp. 424–25), and Pound alludes to these in ‘Randolph of Roanoke: Charlotte Court House, ‘32’ (p. 598). In Canto C, page 715, part of Randolph’s resolutions (‘That Virginia is, and of right, ought to be, a free, sovereign and independent state . . . when . . . Virginia entered into a strict league of amity and alliance with the other twelve colonies . . ., she parted with no portion of her sovereignty’ [17]) strangely gets assigned to the man they were directed against.

36. Reprinted in Meacham, Caged Panther, 137–42. 37. Meacham, Caged Panther, 137. 38. Vide the letter from Horton to Pound of 11 November 1958, Ezra Pound Collection, YCAL MSS 43, Box 23, Folder 1002, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. 39. Donald Hall, Their Ancient Glittering Eyes: Remembering Poets (New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1992), 333. 40. See ‘The Allusive Allusion: Poetry and Exegesis’, in Teaching Modernist Poetry, ed. Peter Middleton and Nicky Marsh (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 10–24; and ‘“Two Doits to a Boodle”: Reckoning with Thrones’, Textual Practice 18.2 (June 2004), 233–49. W OR KS CI T ED

Adams, Henry, John Randolph (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1898). Benton, Thomas Hart, Bank of the United States (New York: Square $, 1954). Thirty Years View, 2 vols. (New York: D. Appleton, 1854). Bruce, William Cabell, John Randolph, 1773–1833 (New York: Putnam, 1922). Dudek, Louis, ed., Dk / Some Letters of Ezra Pound (Montreal: DC Books, 1974). Hall, Donald, Their Ancient Glittering Eyes: Remembering Poets (New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1992).

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:11, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.015

240

alec marsh

Kimpel, Ben, and T. C. Duncan Eaves, ‘American History in Rock-Drill and Thrones’, Paideuma, IX.3 (Winter 1980), 417–39. Kindellan, Michael, The Late Cantos of Ezra Pound: Composition, Revision, Publication (London: Bloomsbury, 2017). Leary, Lewis ed., Motive and Method in The Cantos of Ezra Pound (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961). Lenin, Vladimir, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (1917; New York: International Publishing, 1939). Lewis, George, Massive Resistance: The White Response to the Civil Rights Movement (London: Hodder Arnold, 2006). Marsh, Alec, John Kasper and Ezra Pound: Saving the Republic (London: Bloomsbury, 2015). Money and Modernity: Pound, Williams and the Spirit of Jefferson (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1998). Martin, Waldo E., Jr., ed., Brown v Board of Education: A Brief History with Documents (Boston: Bedford St. Martin’s, 1998). Meacham, Harry M., The Caged Panther: Ezra Pound at St. Elizabeths (New York: Twayne, 1967). Mullins, Eustace, This Difficult Individual, Ezra Pound (New York: Fleet, 1961). Muse, Benjamin, Ten Years of Prelude (New York: Viking, 1964). Nicholls, Peter, ‘The Allusive Allusion: Poetry and Exegesis’, in Teaching Modernist Poetry, ed. Peter Middleton and Nicky Marsh, 10–24 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). ‘Thrones de los cantares: XCVI–CIX’, in The Ezra Pound Encyclopaedia, ed. Demetres P. Tryphonopoulos and Stephen J. Adams, 46–8 (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2005). ‘“Two Doits to a Boodle”: Reckoning with Thrones’, Textual Practice 18.2 (June 2004), 233–49. Nichols, Roy, Franklin Pierce: Young Hickory of the Granite Hills (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1931). Pound, Ezra, Pavannes and Divigations (New York: New Directions, 1958). Schwartz, Bernard, and Stephan Lesher, Inside the Warren Court 1953–1969 (New York: Doubleday, 1983). Stock, Noel, Reading The Cantos (New York: Pantheon, 1966). Pearce, Donald, and Herbert Schneidau, eds., Pound / Theobald Letters (Redding Ridge: Black Swan, 1984). Terrell, Carroll F., A Companion to The Cantos of Ezra Pound, Vol. II (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). Van Buren, Martin, Autobiography (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1920).

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:11, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.015

chapter 15

Copyright Archie Henderson

When Ezra Pound launched his writing career in London in 1908, English copyright was governed by an Act of 1844, which required registration of works at Stationers’ Hall in order for copyright to be secured. The Act was soon replaced, however, by the Imperial Copyright Act of 1911, under which copyright protection was extended to works upon creation without the need for registration.1 Notable among the changes effected by the Act of 1911 was the extension of the term of copyright to life plus fifty years (subject to certain exceptions). Previously, the law fixed the term of copyright at either forty-two years from first publication or the life of the author plus seven years, whichever proved the longer. Two provisions allowed for compulsory licenses as a limitation on copyright. First, during the last twenty-five years of the term of copyright (i.e., after twenty-five years after the death of the author), any person may reproduce a work without consent on payment of a 10 per cent royalty. Second, at any time after the death of the author, any person may apply for a compulsory license with the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council on refusal of the copyright holder to republish or to allow the republication of the work in question.2 The purpose of the compulsory license provisions was to encourage the availability and circulation of creative works. In the United States, where Pound also published some of his early books, the terms of copyright did less to protect the author’s monetary returns and less to ensure the continued public availability of copyrighted material. Article I, section 8, clause 8 of the US Constitution grants Congress the power ‘to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries’.3 The first implementing legislation was passed by Congress on 31 May 1790. Entitled ‘An Act for the encouragement of learning, by securing the copies of maps, charts, and books to the authors and proprietors of such copies, during the times therein mentioned’, the Act granted copyright protection only to citizens 241

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:12, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.016

242

archie henderson

or residents of the United States who satisfied the formal notice and deposit requirements of the Act. The period of protection was fourteen years, with the option for renewal for a like term of years provided that the author was living at the end of the first term.4 In the third general revision of the copyright laws, signed by President Theodore Roosevelt on 4 March 1909, the maximum term of protection was extended to fifty-six years, but the limitation to citizens or residents of the United States was retained. As contrasted with English law, compulsory licenses were restricted to the recording of copyrighted musical compositions. Proprietors of musical compositions were granted initial mechanical recording rights, subject to a compulsory licensing provision.5 The new Copyright Act of 1909 imposed technical requirements of a kind that were not required under English copyright law, including book manufacture by an American typesetter and/or printer – a protectionist measure – and timely deposit of two copies of the book with the Library of Congress. As a resident of a country with which the United States had no reciprocal copyright legislation, Pound – although an American citizen and otherwise eligible for American copyright – could not use English publication as a means of satisfying American copyright requirements. Furthermore, he would have had no legal recourse against unauthorized reprinting of his work in the United States. Pound was blithely, or perhaps naively, unconcerned with the risks of unauthorized American reprints of some of his earlier volumes of poems. Personae (1909) and Exultations (1909) were published in London by Elkin Mathews, with no contracts with American publishers for corresponding American editions. The risks, however, were mitigated by the American printing of a new volume in 1910 collecting the best of the previous year’s volumes. Provença: Poems Selected from Personae, Exultations, and Canzoniere of Ezra Pound was published in Boston by Small, Maynard and Company on 22 November 1910, with two copies received for American copyright deposit on 12 December 1910.6 By 1916, Pound contracted with publishers on both sides of the Atlantic for the printing of many of his books and, for those books, obtained copyright in both countries. As such, a change in American copyright law would not in his view have worked to his immediate personal advantage any more than removal of the American import tariff on books – another protectionist measure – about which he was to write in 1918: ‘The present writer is no longer in a position personally to benefit by removal of the tariff as his work is now published in both countries, and his American publication for the present rather ahead of his English publication’.7 Despite his lack of a personal stake in the matter, Pound pointed to the

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:12, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.016

Copyright

243

damage to American cultural progress caused by the tariff on books and the backward state of the copyright law. These protectionist measures, as he saw it, kept America provincial by restraining the circulation of the latest literature from the Continent. As Pound wrote to John Quinn at the end of February 1916: THE REAL TROUBLE WITH A LOT OF OUR COM-PATRIOTS IS IGNORANCE just BONE Abyssinian ignorance. And that two things that would help slowly but still help a lot are. A. abolition of prohibitive tariff on books all tariff on all books. B. International copyright. Old Putnam began on this last strain in 1830, but it aint been brought off yet.8

In another letter to Quinn in late July 1916, Pound pressed the urgency of the copyright and tariff issues: There ought to be a decent copyright law in the U.S. AND there should be no tariff on books. I don’t know whether I have written you all the why, or whether you have come on any notes of mine on the matter. I won’t write the case at length until I know whether you are already convinced of the importance of the matter, or whether you want convincing. old Putnam has been fighting for this all his life/ also he must be a distant relation of mine. for what thats worth.9

In the same year, responding in the affirmative to an invitation to sign a protest against the suppression of Theodore Dreiser’s novel The ‘Genius’ (1915), Pound took the opportunity to ask Harold Hersey, an assistant acting on behalf of the Authors’ League of America, about the League’s efforts, if any, to eliminate the tariff on books or to reform copyright law: Can you inform me whether [the Authors’ League of America, the sponsor of the protest] has ever before attempted to do anything for the freedom of American letters; for getting a decent copyright law; for getting rid of the tariff of books, or, in short, whether it has until the present date been typically ‘American’ after the fashion of the older magazines and the general religiose dunginess of American ‘associations’ . . . You are the first person among my correspondents who has ever shown a flicker of sense re/ tariff and internat. copyright. (Save of course old Putnam who has been hammering on ’em for years.) I have recently sent a letter to the Little Review, and some notes to Poetry on these matters. I dont know what good it will do. I never can get anyone to send me information, detailed information re/ the tariff and copyright law texts etc. on which I might base more forceful criticism.10

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:12, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.016

244

archie henderson

His ‘notes to Poetry’ probably refers to ‘Things to Be Done’, a list of five ideas to fight American provincialism and to encourage American civilization. Pound writes second on the list (after tariff reform), that ‘we should get a good copyright law. The present law, framed in the interest of a few local mechanics, is also an obstacle to the free circulation of thought. Is there any reason why the United States should lag behind other countries in a matter of this sort?’11 The ‘letter to the Little Review’ is likely Pound’s open reply to the American writer of a letter to the Little Review accusing Pound of writing propaganda. Pound retorts, ‘If I were propaganding I should exhort you to get a decent international copyright law – though as my own income will presumably never equal that of a plumber, or stir the cupidity of the most class-hating, millionaire-cursing socialist, I have very little interest in this matter’.12 Pound’s ‘propaganding’ for American tariff and copyright reform began in earnest as World War I drew to a close. Pound saw that reciprocal copyright legislation, beyond pulling America out of the provinces, would further the post-war unity of the United States and England. He probably took his cue from A. R. Orage, editor of The New Age. In September 1918, Orage laid out the ‘facts which constitute the real difficulties in the way of a League, even of America and England, not to say of all the nations of the world’.13 Orage cited examples given by Dr. Charles Eliot in his correspondence to Professor Frederick C. De Sumichrast. Eliot ‘affirms that to the extent to which America and Britain desire to co-operate in world-responsibility, a common policy must be pursued by the two Governments as regards foreign investments, the relations of Capital and Labour, the treatment of alcoholism and venereal disease, tariffs and preferences, the conditions of military service and armaments, to which we may add, as quite as vital, the matter of literary copyrights and mutual intellectual commerce’.14 It is almost certain that Pound read Orage’s column, particularly the passages referring to tariffs and literary copyrights. In the very next number of The New Age, Pound contributed an essay on ‘Tariff and Copyright’, in which he wrote that hindrance to communication represented by American copyright regulations ‘calls for reciprocal intelligence and reciprocal action between England and America’.15 In the following number, Orage responded to Pound’s article in agreement, writing: As far as I have been able to discover, I must agree with Mr. Pound that the literary relations of our two countries are bad, and that much of this

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:12, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.016

Copyright

245

estrangement, if not all of it, is due to remediable causes lying at present on the American book of statutes. The actual facts of the situation are simple. The copyright laws of America unlike those of any other civilised country, with the exception of ex-Tsarist Russia, require as a condition of extending the protection of its copyright to any work of foreign publication that the latter shall be set up, printed and published in America within a period of 30 to 60 days after its publication in the country of its origin. Failing such practically simultaneous publication in America, not only is any American publisher thereafter entitled to publish the work in question without the permission of the author, but the author and his national publisher are not entitled to demand any royalties or fees on the sale of the same. In other words, as far as the original author and publisher are concerted, they are non-existent in America unless they have made arrangements for the publication of their work in America within one or, at most, two months of its original publication in their own country.16

Orage went on to say: Every author and publisher in this country knows how difficult it is to arrange for the simultaneous publication of the majority of works at home and in America. . . . The American Copyright Law is thus seen to be a modern example of Morton’s fork. By requiring that the foreign author shall publish his work in America within one or two months of its publication at home, it compels him to make a choice (in the majority of cases) between forfeiting his copyright in America, or delaying, at his own cost, the publication of his book in his own country. Upon either prong he is impaled. If he elects for American publication he must forgo the chance of the immediate market at home; and if he elects for immediate publication at home he must forgo the prospect of the protection of American copyright.17

Orage then turned to the matter of the tariff on books imported in America. Against the presumed protectionist argument in favour of the tariff, he answered that the tariff was counterproductive: Now, if books were like other commodities, their sale, like the sale of other commodities, would fall under the economic law of diminishing returns. Thereunder, as their supply increased, the demand for books would tend to decrease, as is the case with cotton, say, or wooden spoons. And upon such an assumption there might be some reason for prohibiting the free importation of printed books, since the imported articles would compete in the home market for a relatively inelastic demand. But books, it is obvious, are not a commodity in this sense of the word. They do not satisfy demand, but stimulate it; and their sale does not, therefore, fall under the economic law of diminishing returns, but under the very contrary, that of increasing returns. . . . The free importation of books is not, therefore, a means of

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:12, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.016

246

archie henderson contracting the home-production of books; it is the very opposite, the most effective means of stimulating home-production to its highest possible degree. If I were an American author, resident in America, and concerned for the prosperity of the American book-making profession, craft and industry, I should not be in the least disposed to thank the American Copyright Law for the protection it professed to give me.18

Using similar language, Pound pointed to the ‘immaterial’ component of books in arguing against the tariff on books as an everyday commodity: America’s tariff on books should be removed because it is a hindrance to international communication, serious at any time, and doubly serious now when we are trying to understand France and England more intimately. The question, however, should be wholly dissociated from the question of tariffs in general. Books have an immaterial as well as a material component, and because of this immaterial component they should circulate free from needless impediment, and should not be hindered in their migrations, even for the sake of material gain. After all, the Government’s income from import duty on serious literature is negligible; and the sole solid result is to handicap American authors, and to preserve a provincial tone in American literature.19

Responding both to Pound and Orage, British publisher Sir Stanley Unwin (1884–1968), founder of the George Allen and Unwin Ltd UK publishing house in 1914, lamented the obstacles erected by the American Copyright Act: With the mournful exception of Tsarist Russia, the U.S.A. was at the outbreak of war in 1914 the only civilised country of importance that remained outside the Berne Convention – a Convention that secures copyright in literary work in all the countries of the signatories – a convention that Germany has respected even throughout the War. The one obstacle that prevents the adherence of the U.S.A. is now, as it always has been, the ‘Manufacturing clause’ of their Copyright Act – a requirement peculiar to America, which involves the actual type-setting, printing and production of a book in the U.S.A. within thirty (or under certain circumstances sixty) days of its publication in Great Britain. Unless this condition is complied with, British literary property is at the mercy of anyone who cares to print it in the States; and although, it is true, no reputable American publisher would think of doing so, there are American firms which make a practice of pirating English books.20

In a letter of 15 March 1918 to the Special Commissioner, US Treasury Department, Unwin condemned the legalized theft of British intellectual property under American copyright law and urged uniform protection for American and British authors:

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:12, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.016

Copyright

247

On the very day of your visit we received a communication which you will remember we produced for your inspection showing that the rights in three of our books are being pirated by one firm alone. You do not we know defend this and all the reputable publishers in the U.S.A. (amongst whom Major George Haven Putnam is one of the most active) unite in condemning it, but your Government none the less permits literary property to be stolen and has done so for many years past. Representations have continually been made but without effect. Even within the last few months Mr. Herbert Putnam, Librarian of Congress, and Mr. Thorvald Solberg of the Register of Copyright of the U.S., have signed a report advocating equality of treatment for American and British authors and expressing the opinion that ‘literary and artistic property protection in the States should be uniform and equal with no difference or distinctions based upon the nationality of the author, and should be free from inequality in the conditions or formalities imposed upon the author or his publishers’. They state that: ‘The present most urgent need is some remedy for the serious defects in our copyright relations with Great Britain’. But nothing has been done and feeling on this side is apt to grow bitter.21

On the point of tariffs, Unwin concluded: ‘The U.S.A. and Great Britain are reaping the fruits of co-operation in war. Both are conscious of the need of a greater mutual understanding. Is there a more effective road than the free interchange of thought? Are any barriers desirable in the Literary field?’22 It was not only English publishers and authors who supported reform of the American copyright laws. Their American counterparts were equally in favour of reform.23 As Unwin points out, Thorvald Solberg (1852–1949), the Register of Copyrights at the Library of Congress from 1897 to 1930, was himself an advocate of copyright reform; as early as 1918, he had signed a report ‘advocating equality of treatment for American and British authors’ and expressing the opinion that ‘literary and artistic property protection in the States should be uniform and equal with no difference or distinctions based upon the nationality of the author, and should be free from inequality in the conditions or formalities imposed upon the author or his publishers’.24 The solution put forward by Unwin and others was the removal of the manufacturing clause of the Copyright Act of 1909. Pound’s proposed remedy went much further. For the sake of promoting post-war American-British unity more than for personal interest, Pound offered his own copyright statute for the United States.25 In his ‘sketch of what the copyright law ought to be’, Pound calls for presumptive and perpetual American copyright protection for all printed

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:12, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.016

248

archie henderson

books wherever printed.26 Formalities for obtaining and maintaining copyright would be eliminated, as copyright would be automatic and perpetual. Perpetual copyright – and with it, the perpetual payment of royalties as a cost built into the price of the books – would mean that books by long-dead authors, to whose estates royalties were not owed, could not undercut those of living authors in price. This provision, designed to protect living authors, would in effect freeze the public domain such that no newly printed books would ever enter it. As a ‘safeguard’ to prevent books from falling out of distribution and circulation on account of the lack of a public domain to absorb them, Pound adds a compulsory license provision: ‘If the heirs neglect to keep a man’s work in print and at a price not greater than the price of his books during his life, then unauthorised publishers should be at liberty to reprint said works, paying to heirs a royalty not more than 20 per cent and not less than 10 per cent’.27 Pound probably borrowed the idea of compulsory license from the Copyright Act of 1911, under which a similar provision could be triggered after the death of the author. Pound adds a second compulsory license provision for books by living authors which have not found an American publisher and whose authors fail to respond to a publisher’s request for permission to publish or otherwise give notice of intent to publish with another publisher.28 A third compulsory license provision allows for reprinting of very popular works subject to royalty payments.29 Pound’s copyright proposal ensures both an ample public sphere of cultural treasures (all books can be kept in print) and a stream of income to living authors and their heirs. Beyond these cultural values, Pound sees a political benefit as well: the improvement of international relations, vital in the aftermath of the world war. In Pound’s words, ‘no person who has given the matter any thought, and who desires freer and more cordial communication between America and the rest of the world can remain indifferent to the need of reciprocal copyright between America and her allies’.30 The potentially fatal weakness of Pound’s proposal for perpetual copyright is, of course, the constitutional requirement that copyright laws must be granted ‘for limited Times’. A grant of perpetual copyright is inconsistent with granting a copyright for ‘limited Times’.31 Some possible ways around the constitutional restriction have been proposed. While Congress could not grant perpetual copyright under the authority of the Constitution’s Copyright Clause, it might have such authority under other grants of power to Congress, such as the power to regulate interstate and foreign commerce.32 Another argument is that, if copyrights were made subject to extension by means of periodic renewal, then, since

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:12, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.016

Copyright

249

Congress could cut off the right of renewal at any time, a law authorizing renewals without limit would be less vulnerable to a constitutional challenge than a grant of perpetual copyright.33 There are also practical limitations. Pound’s proposal leaves open the question of what happens when rights holders cannot be found. Pound took steps to publicize his proposal for copyright reform. To give a boost to his propagandizing efforts, Pound sought out the London office of the US Government Committee on Public Information (USCPI), which was charged with disseminating official news for the United States of America. The London office, at 11 Ebury Street, was established in April 1918.34 His first contact was either Charles Edward Russell, the director until October 1918, or, more likely, his son John Russell, who served as office manager while his father was away on his frequent speaking engagements.35 Whichever Russell it was told Pound that ‘[i]f we don’t get to know these people [i.e., English, French, Italian, our allies] better, this war is a failure’. Pound considered these words to be ‘the finest words spoken by any American official since the death of Abraham Lincoln’.36 His next contact at USCPI was Paul Victor Perry (ca. 1867–1944), a wellknown newspaperman and formerly the telegraph editor of the Detroit Free Press. In late October or early November 1918, Perry succeeded Charles Edward Russell as head of the London office, becoming the fifth director in seven months.37 George Creel, the head of USCPI, was later to write that Perry served ‘with distinction to the end’.38 Pound wrote to G. Herbert Thring, Secretary of the Society of Authors, indicating: Mr. Paul Perry . . . promised to send my two articles to Washington with recommendation that the suggestions be acted upon, by proper Senate Committee. They covered both copyright and the import duty on books. . . . I took it up with him on the grounds of U. S. A. propaganda; the line to take with him, and the only line on which he can work officially is that America will improve her position with European intellectuals, and via them with all the public, by getting rid of two mediaeval imbecilities, the rotten copyright regulation and the import duty on books.39

Pound was fully aware of the difficulty of persuading Congress to pass copyright legislation. In another letter, Pound wrote Thring that ‘the commercial loss to Britain is no argument to congressmen who have to please “hecker” constituencies. They’ve got to be told why it will benefit America to refrain from committing acts of barratry, piracy, etc. against British authors, and why their aesthetic gain more than balances the loss occasioned by civilized honesty. . . . It is only for the sake of one book in

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:12, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.016

250

archie henderson

two hundred that there is any intellectual gain to be had from fair copyright or freedom from import duty’.40 Pound and Thring stood in agreement on ‘old Putnam’s shortcomings’. In Pound’s view, ‘like all other “old houses” his firm fears like hell a new movement or a new standard’.41 George Haven Putnam (1844–1930), in his capacity as Secretary of the American Publishers’ Copyright League, had travelled to England in the spring of 1918, seeking ways of securing and maintaining copyright for American authors in Great Britain and the British Commonwealth in the face of the dislocation of the mails during wartime. The Authors’ League of America, however, considered the proposal of American publishers to be one-sided rather than reciprocal. Thring was appointed to represent the League in London for the purpose of presenting its suggestions to the British government. On 4 June, Thring wrote to Putnam to notify him of his appointment. After meeting with Putnam, Thring found the American publisher’s proposals both inequitable and useless for authors.42 These proposals may have been what Thring termed the ‘stupid suggestion’ that Putnam made to him, as he described it in a letter to Pound.43 As a result of the lobbying efforts on both sides of the Atlantic, the two nations passed reciprocal retrospective copyright relief from wartime disruption. On the American side, what emerged was H.R. 3754, ‘A bill to amend sections 8 and 11 of the copyright act’, which was approved by the House on 4 March 1919, passed the Senate without change on 8 December 1919, and was signed into law on 18 December 1919. Covered under the Copyright Act of 1919 were works published abroad after 1 August 1914, and before the date of the President’s Proclamation of Peace, and not previously copyrighted in the other country.44 The only permanent provision of the Act was a mild relaxation of registration formalities. The Act provided, among other amendments, for an increase from thirty days to sixty days for deposit of a copy for the registration of the ad interim copyright after first publication abroad of a book in the English language. The ad interim term of protection was extended from thirty days to four months.45 No provision was made for permanent American recognition of reciprocal copyright between America and her allies, as Pound desired. Between 1931 and 1932, more than a decade later, Pound supported the efforts of Senator Bronson M. Cutting on behalf of copyright legislation to make copyright automatic and divisible and to permit the United States to join the International Copyright Union. Regretfully, Cutting’s efforts came to naught, and it was not until 1 May 1989, that the United States joined the Berne Convention.46

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:12, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.016

Copyright

251

Notes 1. ‘Copyright Records of the Stationers’ Hall’, The National Archives, http:// nationalarchives.gov.uk/help-with-your-research/research-guides/copyrightrecords-stationers-hall/. 2. E. J. Mac Gillivray, The Copyright Act, 1911, Annotated. With Appendix Containing the Revised Convention of Berne (London: Stevens and Sons, Limited, 1912), iv, 45, 50, 51, https://ia902704.us.archive.org/7/items/copy rightact191100grearich/copyrightact191100grearich.pdf. 3. US Constitution Art. I, § 8, cl. 8. 4. Act of May 31, 1790 § 1, 1 Stat. 124, 124; Benjamin W. Rudd, ‘Notable Dates in American Copyright 1783–1969’, https://copyright.gov/history/dates.pdf. 5. Rudd, ‘Notable Dates in American Copyright 1783–1969’. On the legislative history of the 1909 Copyright Act, see Harry G. Henn, The Compulsory License Provisions of the U.S. Copyright Law (Study No.6) (July 1956), https://copyright.gov/history/studies/study5.pdf, and Legislative History of the 1909 Copyright Act, ed. and compiled by E. Fulton Brylawski and Abe Goldman, 6 vols. (South Hackensack, NJ: Fred B. Rothman & Co., 1976). 6. Library of Congress, Copyright Office, Catalogue of Copyright Entries, Part 1, Group 1. Books 1910. New Series, Volume 7, Group 1, No. 54, Published Jan. 12, 1911 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, Library Division, 1911), 1536, https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=hvd.32044049966617;view=1up; seq=854. 7. Ezra Pound, ‘Tariff and Copyright’, Little Review V.7 (November 1918), 22. Copies of Pound’s contributions to periodicals are online at the Ezra Pound Society website, http://ezrapoundsociety.org/. 8. Pound to Quinn, 29 February 1916, The Selected Letters of Ezra Pound to John Quinn: 1915–1924, ed. Timothy Materer (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), 64. 9. Pound to Quinn, 27 July 1916, L/JQ 78. 10. Pound to Harold Hersey, [ca. late August 1916] and 24 October 1916, as quoted in ‘Two Unpublished Pound Letters: Pound’s Aid to Dreiser [Edited] by Louis Oldani’, Library Chronicle, University of Pennsylvania 42.1 (Summer 1977), 68. 11. Pound, ‘Things to Be Done’, Poetry 9.6 (March 1917), 312. 12. Pound, ‘Letters from Ezra Pound’, Little Review IV.6 (October 1917), 38. 13. A. R. Orage, ‘Notes of the Week’, New Age 23.21 [no. 1358] (19 September 1918), 326. 14. Orage, ‘Notes of the Week’, 326. 15. Pound, ‘Tariff and Copyright’, The New Age 23.22 [no. 1359] (26 September 1918), 348. 16. R. H. C. [i.e., A. R. Orage], ‘Readers and Writers’, The New Age 24.1 [no. 1365] (7 November 1918), 10. 17. R. H. C. [i.e., A. R. Orage], ‘Readers and Writers’, 10.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:12, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.016

252

archie henderson

18. R. H. C. [i.e., A. R. Orage], ‘Readers and Writers’, 10. 19. Pound, ‘Tariff and Copyright’, The New Age 23.22 [no. 1359] (26 September 1918), 348. Pound uses practically identical language in an essay for the Little Review: Pound, ‘Tariff and Copyright’, Little Review V.7 (November 1918), 21. 20. Stanley Unwin, ‘British Literature and the United States’, The New Age 24.4 [no. 1368] (28 November 1918), 56–7, reprinted in The Publishers’ Weekly XCV (11 January 1919), 95–96, and The Bookseller, Newsdealer and Stationer (New York) L.4 (15 February 1919), 151–3. 21. [Stanley Unwin], ‘An English Publisher on American Revenue Methods’, The Publishers’ Weekly (New York) XCIII.16 [Whole No. 2411] (20 April 1918), 1215. The report is Report of the Register of Copyrights for the Fiscal Year 1916–1917 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1917), 21, 22, https://copy right.gov/reports/annual/archive/ar-1917.pdf. 22. [Stanley Unwin], ‘An English Publisher on American Revenue Methods’, 1215. 23. Stanley Unwin, ‘More English Comment on American Copyright Matters’, The Publishers’ Weekly 95 (22 March 1919), 852. 24. [Stanley Unwin], ‘An English Publisher on American Revenue Methods’; Stanley Unwin, ‘British Literature and the United States’, 56, reprinted in The Publishers’ Weekly (11 January 1919), 95, and The Bookseller, Newsdealer and Stationer (15 February 1919), 152. 25. Pound’s proposals were printed in his essay ‘Copyright and Tariff’, New Age 23.23 [no. 1360] (3 October 1918), 363–4, and largely reprinted (from ‘The copyright of any book printed anywhere . . .’ to ‘Royalty on same payable at rate of 20% to author or heirs’) in the section on ‘Copyright’ in ‘Tariff and Copyright’, Little Review V.7 (November 1918), 24–5. On the statute, see generally Robert Spoo, ‘Ezra Pound’s Copyright Statute: Perpetual Rights and Unfair Competition with the Dead’, Without Copyrights: Piracy, Publishing, and the Public Domain (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 116–52. 26. Pound, ‘Copyright and Tariff’, 363. 27. Pound, ‘Copyright and Tariff’, 363; Pound, ‘Tariff and Copyright’, 25. 28. Pound, ‘Copyright and Tariff’, 363–4; Pound, ‘Tariff and Copyright’, 25. 29. Pound, ‘Copyright and Tariff’, 364; Pound, ‘Tariff and Copyright’, 25. 30. Pound, ‘Copyright and Tariff’, 364. 31. Richard A. Posner and William M. Landes, ‘Indefinitely Renewable Copyright’, University of Chicago Law Review 70.2 (2003), 471, 493. 32. Posner and Landes, 473. 33. Posner and Landes, 493. 34. James R. Mock and Cedric Larson, Words That Won the War: The Story of the Committee on Public Information 1917–1919 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1939), 244; The Anglo-American Year Book (London: American Chamber of Commerce in London, 1918), 11. The Cross-Reference Index to the Series ‘General Correspondence, 1917–1919’ of the records of the Committee on Public Information (Record Group 63), at the National

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:12, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.016

Copyright

35.

36. 37.

38. 39.

40.

41. 42. 43. 44.

45.

253

Archives, contains no mention of Pound. Information courtesy of archivist Tom McAnear (email of 25 September 2017). George Creel, How We Advertised America: The First Telling of the Amazing Story of the Committee on Public Information that Carried the Gospel of Americanism to Every Corner of the Globe (New York and London: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1920), 298. Pound (mis)remembered the name of the official as George Russel. Pound, ‘Tariff and Copyright’, 21. ‘American Newspaper Man Heads London Bureau’, The Fourth Estate 1288 (2 November 1918), 12; Complete Report of the Chairman of the Committee on Public Information (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1920), 118; Foreign Relations of the United States, 1917–1972. Public Diplomacy, World War I (Washington, D.C., United States Government Printing Office, 2014), 28. Creel, 298. British Library, Society of Authors Archive, ADD 63317, Vol. cxii ff. 215, ff. 1–9 Ezra Pound, f.2, stamped 12 November 1918 [photocopy]; as quoted in RR Auction, Catalog 434, 13 August 2014 (Boston, 2014), lot 668, p. 168, https://rauction.com/PastAuctionItem/3329455 and https://issuu.com/rrauc tion/docs/434vc. Pound, letter to G. Herbert Thring [late October 1918], as quoted in Sotheby Parke Bernet & Co. Catalogues of Sales Jul 21–Oct 17, 1983 (1983), lot 479, p. 171. The Dictionary of American Regional English lists ‘hecker’ as a rather uncommon regionalism for a rustic or countrified person; a boob or provincial. (The Dictionary of American Regional English, 6 vols. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985–2013.) Examples of this usage, however, are common in Pound. Pound wrote an article on ‘Hecker-nomiks’ (1933–4). Pound, letter to G. Herbert Thring, [late October 1918]. ‘War Copyrights’, The Authors’ League Bulletin 6.8 (November 1918), 6–10. Pound to Thring, stamped 12 November 1918. Thorvald Solberg, ‘Copyright Report for the Fiscal Year 1920–21’, The Publishers’ Weekly CI (28 January 1922), 208; ‘Copyright Act, Approved December 18, 1919’, Library of Congress Copyright Office, Catalogue of Copyright Entries. Part 1: Books, Group 1. New Series, Volume 16 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1919), 55–6; ‘Copyright Bill’, Report of the Register of Copyrights for the Fiscal Year 1918–1919 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1919), 141–2; the President’s Proclamation of April 10, 1920, Report of the Register of Copyrights for the Fiscal Year 1919–1920 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1920), 141–5; the Copyright Order in Council, Buckingham Palace, 9 February 1920, Report of the Register of Copyrights for the Fiscal Year 1919–1920 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1920), 145–7. Report of the Register of Copyrights for the Fiscal Year 1918–1919 (Washington, D.C., Government Printing Office, 1919), 130–1.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:12, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.016

254

archie henderson

46. Ezra Pound and Bronson Cutting, Ezra Pound and Senator Bronson Cutting: A Political Correspondence 1930–1935, ed. E. P. Walkiewicz and Hugh Witemeyer (Albuquerque: University Press of New Mexico, 1995), 28, 29. W OR KS C I T ED Act of May 31, 1790 § 1, 1 Stat 124 ‘American Newspaper Man Heads London Bureau’, The Fourth Estate 1288 (2 November 1918), 12. The Anglo-American Year Book (London: American Chamber of Commerce in London, 1918). Brylawski, E. Fulton, and Abe Goldman, ed. and compilers, Legislative History of the 1909 Copyright Act, 6 vols. (South Hackensack, NJ: Fred B. Rothman & Co., 1976). C., R. H. [i.e., A. R. Orage], ‘Readers and Writers’, The New Age 24.1 [no. 1365] (7 November 1918), 10–11. Complete Report of the Chairman of the Committee on Public Information (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1920). ‘Copyright Act, Approved December 18, 1919’, Library of Congress Copyright Office, Catalogue of Copyright Entries. Part 1: Books, Group 1. New Series, Volume 16, 55–6 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1919). ‘Copyright Bill’, Report of the Register of Copyrights for the Fiscal Year 1918–1919, 141–2 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1919), https://copy right.gov/reports/annual/archive/ar-1919.pdf. The Copyright Order in Council, Buckingham Palace, 9 February 1920, Report of the Register of Copyrights for the Fiscal Year 1919–1920, 145–7 (Washington, D. C.: Government Printing Office, 1920), https://copyright.gov/reports/annu al/archive/ar-1920.pdf. ‘Copyright Records of the Stationers’ Hall’, The National Archives, http://natio nalarchives.gov.uk/help-with-your-research/research-guides/copyrightrecords-stationers-hall/. Creel, George, How We Advertised America: The First Telling of the Amazing Story of the Committee on Public Information that Carried the Gospel of Americanism to Every Corner of the Globe (New York and London: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1920). The Dictionary of American Regional English, 6 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985–2013). Foreign Relations of the United States, 1917–1972. Public Diplomacy, World War I (Washington, D.C.: United States Government Printing Office, 2014). Henn, Harry G., The Compulsory License Provisions of the U.S. Copyright Law (Study No.6) (July 1956), https://copyright.gov/history/studies/study5.pdf. Library of Congress Copyright Office, Catalogue of Copyright Entries. Part 1, Group 1. Books 1910. New Series, Volume 7, Group 1, No. 54, Published Jan. 12, 1911 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, Library Division, 1911).

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:12, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.016

Copyright

255

Mac Gillivray, E. J., The Copyright Act, 1911, Annotated. With Appendix Containing the Revised Convention of Berne (London: Stevens and Sons, Ltd., 1912). Mock, James R., and Cedric Larson, Words That Won the War: The Story of the Committee on Public Information 1917–1919 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1939). Orage, A. R., ‘Notes of the Week’, New Age 23.21 [no. 1358] (19 September 1918), 325–7. Posner, Richard A., and William M. Landes, ‘Indefinitely Renewable Copyright’, University of Chicago Law Review 70.2 (2003), 471–518. Pound, Ezra. ‘Copyright and Tariff’, New Age 23.23 [no. 1360] (3 October 1918), 363–4. ‘Letters from Ezra Pound’, Little Review 4.6 (October 1917) 37–9. The Selected Letters of Ezra Pound to John Quinn: 1915–1924, ed. Timothy Materer (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991). ‘Tariff and Copyright’, Little Review V.7 (November 1918) 21–5. ‘Tariff and Copyright’, The New Age 23.22 [no. 1359] (26 September 1918), 348–9. ‘Things to Be Done’, Poetry 9.6 (March 1917), 312–14. ‘Two Unpublished Pound Letters: Pound’s Aid to Dreiser’, ed. Louis Oldani, Library Chronicle, University of Pennsylvania 42.1 (Summer 1977), 67–70. Pound, Ezra, and Bronson Cutting, Ezra Pound and Senator Bronson Cutting: A Political Correspondence 1930–1935, ed. E. P. Walkiewicz and Hugh Witemeyer (Albuquerque: University Press of New Mexico, 1995). The President’s Proclamation of April 10, 1920, Report of the Register of Copyrights for the Fiscal Year 1919–1920 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1920), 141–5, https://copyright.gov/reports/annual/archive/ar-1920 .pdf. Report of the Register of Copyrights for the Fiscal Year 1916–1917 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1917), https://copyright.gov/reports/annual/ar chive/ar-1917.pdf. Report of the Register of Copyrights for the Fiscal Year 1918–1919 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1919), https://copyright.gov/reports/annual/ar chive/ar-1919.pdf. RR Auction, Catalog 434, August 13, 2014 (Boston, 2014), lot 668, 168, https:// rauction.com/PastAuctionItem/3329455 and https://issuu.com/rrauction/do cs/434vc. Rudd, Benjamin W., ‘Notable Dates in American Copyright 1783–1969’, https:// copyright.gov/history/dates.pdf. Solberg, Thorvald, ‘Copyright Report for the Fiscal Year 1920–21’, The Publishers’ Weekly CI (28 January 1922), 207–8. Sotheby Parke Bernet & Co., Catalogues of Sales Jul 21–Oct 17, 1983 (1983), lot 479, 171. Spoo, Robert, Without Copyrights: Piracy, Publishing, and the Public Domain (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013).

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:12, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.016

256

archie henderson

US Const Art. I, § 8, cl. 8. [Unwin, Stanley], ‘An English Publisher on American Revenue Methods’, The Publishers’ Weekly (New York) XCIII.16 [Whole No. 2411] (20 April 1918), 1215. Unwin, Stanley, ‘British Literature and the United States’, The New Age 24.4 [no. 1368] (28 November 1918), 56–7, reprinted in The Publishers’ Weekly XCV (11 January 1919), 95–6, and The Bookseller, Newsdealer and Stationer L.4 (15 February 1919), 151–3. More English Comment on American Copyright Matters’, The Publishers’ Weekly XCV (22 March 1919), 852. ‘War Copyrights’, The Authors’ League Bulletin 6.8 (November 1918), 6–10.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:12, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.016

chapter 16

The Temple and the Scaffolding The Cantos of Ezra Pound and Digital Culture Roxana Preda

The Cantos on the Web – a Historical Review As the impact of the internet has rippled in ever larger circles over the past twenty-seven years, Pound’s presence on the web has slowly made itself felt: as web aggregators started anthologizing poetry, selections from his work, particularly the shorter poems, were showcased on websites like Poetry Foundation, Bartleby.com or Poetry Archive. Universities, in their turn, began hosting modernist literature projects, such as PennSound in Philadelphia,1 where parts of Pound’s work are presented and commented on next to that of other modernist writers. Online libraries or book clubs hold scanned versions of the New Directions edition of The Cantos in closed access. Commentators publish their own work with extensive quotations in blogs or digital magazines, and artists upload artwork inspired by Pound and his poem. Wikipedia now boasts a long article on Pound himself, one on The Cantos and one on a ‘List of Cultural References in The Cantos’. As these developments were taking place, a decline in the number of studies on The Cantos in print could be observed through the late 1990s and 2000s, most prominently the disappearance of a whole genre of scholarly work – the monograph on the poem as a whole.2 This development had less to do with the internet and more with the emergence of new modernist studies, which apart from marking a sociological and historicist direction in modernism research also implied a turn away from the focused study of individual authors. If years like 1983 or 1991 had miraculously been rich in publications, for the twenty years between 1997 and 2017, there were just eight monographs in all. Book-length studies, such as Peter Liebregts’s Ezra Pound and Neoplatonism (2004), or even collections of studies such as Peter Makin’s Ezra Pound’s Cantos: A Casebook (2006),3 became few and far between. The work on the poem continued, albeit in a low-key way. 257

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:11, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.017

258

roxana preda

Prominent scholars published articles in collections; they translated and edited, rather than engaging in full monograph studies. The poem was rarely critiqued in and for itself and even less in its entirety: scholars chose to focus on a single cycle or compared the poem with epics or drama.4 This trend has continued in the dissertations of the past two decades: grouping Pound with other modernist authors and The Cantos with the epics of Homer, Olson, Williams, Seferis and so forth has been the recent dominant practice. Kenner’s The Pound Era (1972) and Terrell’s Companion to The Cantos of Ezra Pound (1984) have maintained their established position as the gates to and pillars of Pound scholarship on the poem.5 During this same period, however, digital culture began to make itself felt ever more forcefully. From the very first website uploaded at CERN by Tim Berners Lee in 1991 to the World Wide Web as we know it today, digital culture has affected modernist studies in thousands of ways and Pound Studies with it. Nevertheless, there was a privileged domain in which it influenced the Pound scholars most and that was in research on The Cantos. The development of interactive platforms, first within institutions and then for individuals, made it conceivable that new projects and dreams could thrive in the digital domain. The year 1997 can be considered a benchmark in which the importance of digital developments for Pound scholarship first became unmistakable. In 1997, Pound scholars showed real interest in theorizing the possibilities of hypertext as a model for understanding The Cantos. A first instance was proposed in the two articles published in Paideuma by William Cole and Patricia Cockram.6 Both these articles used ‘hypertext’ as a methodological concept describing the formal organization of the poem. Cole’s article clarified how the notion of hypertext reformulates the poem’s method as a network of textual blocks connected by links and gave a contemporary colour to established concepts like the ideogrammic method, subject rhyme and luminous detail. Cockram’s contribution was a meditation on the model of power underlying hypertext. A generation before, Hugh Kenner had compared modernism with the linotype, whose complex, unnatural logic was geared towards best functionality and visibility.7 Now Cockram warned that despite the illusion of convenience and freedom that hypertext promised, readers were not actually empowered, since the programming behind the text was invisible, ever changing and impenetrable to the uninitiated.8 Hypertext was indeed a useful conceptual tool in thinking about The Cantos, offering a suggestive image of its textual organization and Pound’s

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:11, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.017

The Temple and the Scaffolding

259

working method. Nevertheless, a more fruitful line of inquiry consisted in rethinking the model of reading that hypertext offered: a freedom to cross Pound’s poetic sequences as a surfer crosses the wave, traversing the poem from link to link, from node to node: readers could thus become aware of the changes of context that each particular position afforded and of possible choices and alternate routes within the poem. Tim Redman’s article, ‘An Epic is a Hypertext Containing Poetry’, explained it best: readers would find a quotation or a name – clicking on it would bring a page explaining it and including another significant name, which could also be clicked for an explanation – every reading could thus follow varying trajectories. Redman affirmed that a simple glossing of references in the poem would not be spectacular and a true departure. This would emerge when readers would be empowered to add glosses and create links and paths.9 There was a certain enthusiasm in this period for creating an electronic instance of the poem like a huge network where a reader could skip around from gloss to gloss, link to link, be free to wander away from the poem to scholarship on various topics and back; each reading could thus be unique and produce different results, even if the starting points of the journey were the same. Apart from this giddying freedom in choosing readings, interactivity and continuous updates of the critical apparatus were also strong reasons why a digital annotated edition of the poem was a desirable goal. These were dreams and speculations on paper. In reality, copyright restrictions were in place, forbidding the digital display of the whole poem – without the full text, no real hypertextual model of reading could take place. Moreover, the technology of the 1990s was not advanced enough to handle The Cantos: Richard Taylor’s account of his Variorum Project saga proved it in the clearest terms.10 Nevertheless, several smallscale projects and one-canto prototypes were published on the internet at various times. The first was ‘Kybernekia’, Ned Bates’ website at the University of North Carolina, Queensboro, which in 1997 published Canto LXXXI with linked annotations.11 The model was simple: the reader could find the poem on one webpage; annotated words and phrases were marked in blue, to signal they were links. The gloss was on a different page; the reading model was thus a simple route of a step away and back, not much different from the experience of reading the poem with Carroll Terrell’s print Companion. Kybernekia’s model was followed by Jeff Grieneisen’s annotated ‘Canto 31’ of 2004. Another example was Canto XLV, published in the digital magazine Flashpoint in 2008.12 The principle was the same: poem

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:11, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.017

260

roxana preda

text on one page, gloss on another and the only step towards the free and creative reading that Redman envisaged was the simple movement of away and back. The situation began improving after 2009, when several cantos (I, XLV, LXXII and LXXXI) were uploaded on the ‘Genius’ platform – glosses appeared on request, on the same page as the poem, which was a definite improvement, though the text had to contend with both annotation and advertising to catch the reader’s attention.13 However, all these practical applications were done as one-canto efforts, student work, magazine articles, Wikipedia-like community contributions: uncoordinated, contingent, incomplete and provisional. All the annotated cantos apart from the ones of Genius have now been deleted and their traces effaced. However, the situation began to change again as the idea of online ‘platform’ began to take root and spread: Drupal was launched in 2001, Wordpress in 2003 and Joomla in 2005. These platforms, which are bundles of software meant to enable non-programmers to design and manage content online, made possible the creation of complex websites dedicated to writers and artists. Online editions, presentations of facsimile pages and multimedia resources could be managed by IT professionals in an academic context, but also by ordinary people who were willing to learn how a platform works so as to use its capabilities imaginatively. These recent possibilities, as well as the rise of digital humanities as an academic discipline after 2010, made it possible that ambitious students became willing to combine technological knowledge with a project on The Cantos. Trevor Sawler was the first to complete such an amphibious project at the University of New Brunswick in 2012.14 His PhD consisted in a written dissertation on poetic allusion in The Cantos combined with an online application. As Sawler had programming knowledge, he built a special platform just for the poem. In it, he presented the text of the Pisan Cantos with the annotation published by Richard Sieburth in 2003.15 It was the first time that a digital presentation went beyond a single canto into a more comprehensive attempt to annotate and link the poems together. Sawler also thought of categories of possible readers and distinguished between a connoisseur and a student: the links to his glosses could be visible if a student needed them, and hidden for readers who wanted to meet the text on their own terms, without any mediation. Sawler has not yet published his dissertation on The Cantos, but created another website, ‘The Modernist Web’, in 2014, in which Pound’s poetic works in the public domain are presented alongside that of other modernist writers. Around 2012, when Sawler finished the first doctoral work which could properly be called an application of ‘digital humanities’ to The Cantos, the

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:11, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.017

The Temple and the Scaffolding

261

first gazetteer of the poem created by James Cocola was published at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute. Cocola’s curriculum vitae indicates that he started the Gazetteer with around eight hundred place marks in 2010. In 2014, it was a functioning resource, which could be profitably consulted. Cocola’s Gazetteer displayed maps keyed to each section of The Cantos, showing the toponymical concentrations in the poem. Each place mark was linked to its webpage in Wikipedia. This stage of the gazetteer, useful as it was, would have required further work to connect the place marks to the toponymical occurrences in the poem and explain their relevance to their immediate poetic contexts. A report Cocola published in the digital quarterly Make It New in March 2015 seemed to be the last act of a functioning resource that spanned all the cantos and looked promising. Shortly afterwards, the gazetteer was withdrawn from its website and Cocola redirected his interest towards other writers. At the time of writing (January 2018), the gazetteer is slowly being revived after a few years’ absence: Cantos I–XVI and LXXIV–LXXXIV can now be consulted.16 While Cocola was drafting and publishing his gazetteer, two students of the emerging digital humanities discipline were reconceptualizing the digital approach to The Cantos. The question of ‘platform’ that had been defining for Sawler’s approach around 2011 was no longer pressing, quite the contrary. Responding to the most recent developments of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) – a consortium started at the University of Virginia to provide a standard for the encoding of text in XML – Kent Emerson at the University of Tulsa and Robin Seguy at the University of Pennsylvania took upon themselves the enormous task of encoding The Cantos in the xml language according to TEI protocols, as practical application of their doctoral work. While Emerson concentrated on A Draft of XXX Cantos in a dissertation on multiple authors, Seguy encoded the whole poem in TEI and centred his discussion on the textual and philological issues highlighted by this work.17 By this approach, the poem was converted into an xml document which could be interrogated for facts, relationships, statistics, visualizations, much like a refined, multifunctional electronic concordance. However, encoding the poem in TEI did not necessarily mean that humanities scholars also had access to a website, or at least a search box where they could interrogate the poem for information. TEI describes a text and categorizes its components through editorial mark-up, but does not provide a layout, or an interface for users. For that, the scholar has to learn XSLT, a program that turns the xml lines into a formatted document that can be displayed. Then, of course, one would need additional software

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:11, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.017

262

roxana preda

to make that layout accessible through a website. At the time of writing, neither of the two TEI versions of The Cantos have a website to provide the interface between the user and the poem. Copyright, which has to be negotiated with every new project presenting the poem to the public, acts to prevent the set-up of full online archives, or digital editions like those of say, Swinburne or Rossetti. Though contemporary software like EXist does offer a platform for TEI documents, both these dissertations have yet to be built into a website which users can access and interrogate. Neither Sawler in 2011, nor Seguy or Emerson in 2016 planned to develop the annotation to The Cantos from the bases laid out by scholars like Terrell or Sieburth – they used the annotations as they found them. Yet, re-annotating The Cantos was a scholarly task that was not only timely, but overdue.

Re-Annotating The Cantos: The Cantos Project The project of re-annotating The Cantos was made possible by the rise and development of digital humanities as an academic discipline after 2010. Universities and research councils started routinely sponsoring new projects: digital editions, archives of correspondence, databases, ensuring not only the high scholarly quality of internet platforms in the humanities, but also their technological perfectibility, sustainability and security over time. This favourable context indicated that the time was ripe for the task of adapting both The Cantos and the studies around it to the electronic medium. It was in 2014, with my design and implementation of The Cantos Project18 platform, that a comprehensive professional effort to follow up on Tim Redman’s vision of the possibilities of hypertext led to the creation of a digital research environment for The Cantos. It was decided at start that the site would adopt the New Directions edition to ensure continuity with the current print text and that only six cantos could be displayed at any one time (this permission was extended to twelve cantos in 2017). Negotiations thus ruled out the possibility of creating a new digital edition of the poem, but allowed a necessary adjustment to the initial idea. If readers could not yet have an electronic text of The Cantos in open access, they could have a record of the research on the poem, a gathering together of all the dispersed sources of information and interpretation, a virtual place where they could enjoy and/or study the poem on their own. The Cantos Project was designed as a ‘go to’ place for anyone wishing to find out all the available information on each

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:11, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.017

The Temple and the Scaffolding

263

canto. The full text of a canto is published on the site together with new digital annotation, serially, at the rhythm of approximately once a month. After the twelfth canto is annotated, a ‘companion’ page containing just the annotation replaces the first full-text canto so that annotation can move on. The goal is to create virtual study centres for each, trusting the search function of the website to provide the necessary indexing for the review of relationships. Serial annotation goes against the idea of the printed book: information is not gathered and perfected in bulk before publication, but rather released as a series in time, refined, supplemented and corrected quickly in an implicit running dialogue between annotator and her community of readers.19 The idea underlying the project owed more to the emergence of general use platforms than to the newer developments in digital humanities around the use of TEI. A platform such as Joomla could perform all the functions needed in matters of architecture of the site, search capabilities, annotation software and inclusion of multimedia. The Cantos Project was thus not encoded in TEI, with which Joomla is at present incompatible, but in HTML5 and CSS. The priority was not to describe The Cantos by encoding the poem in xml, since copyright had barred the presentation of the whole poem, but rather to concentrate on new annotation and publish results immediately, so that the website grows under the public eye and becomes usable from day one. Taking account of The Cantos as a whole, collecting relevant exegesis, providing full access to sources, connecting Pound’s poem to his journalism and correspondence were bold advances at spanning a bridge over the three decades that had passed since the publication of Carroll F. Terrell’s Companion to The Cantos of Ezra Pound in 1980 and 1984. The goal was implicitly an investigation into how the digital medium could provide an enhancement and corrective to the understanding of the poem we had inherited.

Annotation, or Digital Annotation? Online annotation has to rest on theoretical choices responding to practical questions: do digital-born glosses obey different constraints than print ones? Can the digital medium correct the defects of print and does it create new problems as it solves old ones? Does annotation rest on a different or extended type of research? What principles should rule in the annotation of poetry in general and Pound’s Cantos specifically?

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:11, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.017

264

roxana preda

Annotation, as a method of research and criticism, has been understood for centuries to be a form of mediation between writer and reader, a tool for self-study and a prerequisite of interpretation. The annotator’s professional attention is focused on every line, every word, indeed every punctuation mark and provides a foundational deep reading that is the starting point for every other hermeneutic effort. A first difficulty faced by the annotator in the print medium is that she is forced to invade the poet’s page and divert the reader’s attention from page to gloss. Here, the digital medium offers a few options for designing the poem page so that the annotator’s mediation becomes quasi invisible. In the case of The Cantos Project, the page is structured as a one-to-one encounter between reader and the poem: the critical apparatus is moved away in the wings, glosses are hidden, links are subtly provided in grey underline, the top menu on white background does not assert its presence. Moreover, since the poem is displayed on a single webpage, it is not cut by the arbitrary segmentation of book pages. In any collage poem like The Cantos, where both ‘cuts’ and ‘continuities’ are units of design, the print medium interferes with the writing, going against the formatting intended by the poet and spoiling both his typographical and rhetorical effects. The reader’s difficulties in managing the balance between poem and gloss are also alleviated. The gloss appears only on demand, when the user hovers with the mouse over its link. The reader does not need to leave the poem, turn pages or squint at small print: since the gloss appears as a popup, it still has the canto page as a general background, as an implicit reminder of the need to return. Digital glossing per definition encourages what Jerome McGann called ‘radial reading’: annotation contains multimedia and links that do take the reader away from the page in the quest for more contextual information. Nevertheless, in The Cantos Project bifurcations cease after the first link, casual browsing and hopping from canto to canto are discouraged; the reader, while at any time able to choose to interrupt reading a canto to try another, has to use at least two links to switch. While browsing across cantos is easy, the whole architecture of the site is designed to encourage readers to stay on the poem’s page to the end, read and study a canto for its own sake. The gloss is managed according to invisible guidelines: essential information is provided at the top; further down, an interested reader might find an interpretation, or a source. This division responds to the need of addressing several categories of readers: the informal poetry lover will choose to open a gloss or not; the student will choose to read the text at the top only, so as not to be overwhelmed; the passionate scholar will

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:11, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.017

The Temple and the Scaffolding

265

follow the links, read all the material provided and possibly return for a second reading without assistance. Such readers might even choose to write the editor to point out an error, or add a new item of information. In this way, The Cantos Project is aimed to go beyond Terrell’s ‘handbook for students’ and respond to the needs of every conceivable reader. Addressing the needs of the reader leads to a different method of managing information than Terrell’s Companion. To minimally impede the reading flow, a gloss should be short: it is therefore reasonable to separate large chunks of information from the gloss and build them into a framing architecture20 in the antechambers of the canto: its ‘title page’ has an image and an introductory paragraph, a calendar of composition, audio readings, images from first editions and canto bibliography; overviews, sources, resources and references are placed in the side menus. The framing architecture includes Pound’s own effort to repeat, explain and point out: articles from the press, passages from earlier and later poems, translations, music. So, what remains for us to do and how can we improve on the situation we have inherited? First, a contemporary annotator working in the digital medium will recognize that a pioneering approach, clearly a requirement in Terrell’s time, has become both a useless and potentially harmful methodology in ours. Contemporary annotation of this sort is already done, not only by Terrell, but also independently of Pound research by Google and Wikipedia. This standard, general sort of information is inappropriate because in time, and by myriad scholarly efforts, we have come to recognize that Pound rarely used standard information: he always selected, modified and reshaped it to fit what he wanted to say in the poem. Pound’s ‘source’ is only a starting-point: the annotator has to chart the poet’s changes to elucidate their role in the poem. This of course presupposes that the annotator has views on the meaning of the whole canto – contextualization is only possible if the annotator already has done interpretive research, correlated partial commentaries with sources and Pound’s own collateral comments and reached a conclusion about the meaning of the whole canto. The task of glossing The Cantos is thus a hermeneutic circle, going from the elucidation of detail to the view of the whole and back. General information is almost in all cases irrelevant or insufficient to the poem and gives the impression that Pound’s fragments are unrelated, assuming, as Terrell seemed to do, that fragmentation in the poem is arbitrary and insurmountable. The pioneer approach is therefore insufficient in providing assistance to a meaningful reading. By concentrating on local passages without an

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:11, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.017

266

roxana preda

insight about the links between them, we will be unable to read a canto, any canto as a unified whole. We have been led to assume, by our own particular fragmentary understanding, that a canto’s ideogram does not even exist, that all we have is a grab bag of details. Even worse, our inability to provide correlations has led to our views of Pound as a sort of intellectual harpy, a collector of exotica who put into his poem whatever happened to strike his fancy. A silly poet, with a scattered mind. Yet the digital medium presupposes a culture of correlating details. Google does this in mechanical way by pointing out proximities of keywords. Contemporary digital research makes it not only easier, but unavoidable that we look for relationships and spaces where a certain item of information becomes meaningful. This leads to delicate points of balance, redefinition and adjustment in the position of the annotator visà-vis the commentator and theoretician. An annotator’s responsibility is to provide a foundation for interpretation, an integrative view that not only identifies particulars but also works to provide a rationale for how they are correlated. In this sense, our world is much richer than Terrell’s: Pound’s Contributions to Periodicals are accessible, electronic copies of rare books Pound read are published by Internet Archive and Project Gutenberg; drafts of the cantos at the Beinecke Library have been digitized – this electronic accessibility makes the work of integration possible. As these new diverse sources of information are at hand, the information in the glosses becomes more specific: the annotator is like a photographer adjusting his camera lens to get from a blurry impression to a sharp picture. Generality was a necessary evil at the time of pioneers, so was speculation; both can become a thing of the past. In being sensitive to the annotation activity as perceived in the tradition of print culture, we may shift our understanding of annotation in the digital age to correct the shortcomings and negative implications of this work as it was embedded into the print medium. We need to balance the potential abundance of information that hypertext makes possible with the requirements for validity and relevance traditionally associated with ideal annotation. Hypertext and framing architecture enable the annotator to respond to various categories of readers and provides the platform for a flexible reading geared to individual preference. It helps the scholar withdraw from an aggressive stance towards author, text and reader and teaches her the additional skills of managing information, as well as strategies of placement and deferral. In the question of annotating Pound, we stand on the shoulders of

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:11, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.017

The Temple and the Scaffolding

267

giants – our task is huge and consists in reassessment, complexity and refinement. In overcoming our solitude and collaborating on a largescale project, we can place ourselves in an ideal position to understand the poem while preserving its mystery and majesty.

Notes 1. The PennSound archive, directed by Charles Bernstein and Al Filreis and run from the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing at the University of Pennsylvania, hosts poetry recordings, podcasts, and other resources. See http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/. 2. This is a phenomenon we may witness by checking the bibliography of monographs on The Cantos published on The Cantos Project site (http://th ecantosproject.ed.ac.uk/index.php/bibliography/secondary), as well as the current digital bibliography by Archie Henderson and Roxana Preda published on the Ezra Pound Society website: http://ezrapoundsociety.org/index .php/english-language-scholarship-on-ezra-pound/the-bibliographic-project. 3. Peter Liebregts, Ezra Pound and Neoplatonism (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2004); Peter Makin, Ezra Pound’s Cantos: A Casebook (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). 4. Ursula Shioji, Ezra Pound’s Pisan Cantos and the Noh (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1997); Line Henricksen, Ambition and Anxiety: Ezra Pound’s ‘Cantos’ and Derek Walkott’s ‘Omeros’ as Twentieth-Century Epics (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007); Leah Culligan Flack, Modernism and Homer: The Odysseys of H.D., James Joyce, Osip Mandelstam, and Ezra Pound (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). 5. Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era (London: Faber, 1972); Carroll F. Terrell, A Companion to The Cantos of Ezra Pound (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). 6. William Cole, ‘Pound’s Web: Hypertext in the Rock-Drill Cantos’, Paideuma 26.2–3 (Fall–Winter 1997), 137–50; Patricia Cockram, ‘Hypertextuality and Pound’s Fascist Aesthetic’, Paideuma 26.2–3 (Fall–Winter 1997), 151–63. 7. Hugh Kenner, The Mechanic Muse (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 9–15. 8. Cockram, ‘Hypertextuality’, 160–1. 9. Tim Redman, ‘An Epic Is a Hypertext Containing Poetry. Eleven New Cantos (31–41)’, in A Poem Containing History. Textual Studies in The Cantos, ed. Lawrence Rainey (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 117–50. 10. Richard Taylor, ‘The Tragi-Comical History of the Variorum Project and Its Ongoing Betrayal – Especially by Cambridge University Press’ (2005), www .richard-dean-taylor.de/index.php?id=14.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:11, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.017

268

roxana preda

11. Ned Bates, ‘A Hypervortex of Ezra Pound’s Canto LXXXI’. See Gail McDonald, ‘Hypertext and the Teaching of Modernist Difficulty’, Pedagogy 2.1 (Winter 2002): 17–30 for a full rationale and description of the site. It was created as a student project to a Pound seminar that McDonald taught at the University of Queensboro, North Carolina, and has now been unpublished – the link that MacDonald gave in her article now leads to the homepage of the English Department. 12. See Jeff Grieneisen, ‘The Ezra Pound Project: Canto 31’, State College of Florida, http://faculty.scf.edu/GrieneJ/cantoproject/primarypoundpage .htm. Though I am familiar with Grieneisen’s website on Canto XXXI, it has not survived: the bibliographic record provided is taken from his curriculum vitae. The annotation to Canto XLV was published in the digital magazine Flashpoint (Winter 2008, extra issue 11), but has since been deleted. That was a salutary move on the editor’s part, as the glosses were full of errors. 13. See Cantos I, XLV, LXXII and LXXXI on the Genius platform: https://genius .com/Ezra-pound-canto-i-annotated. 14. Trevor Craig Sawler, ‘Hypertexting High Modernism: Ezra Pound’s Pisan Cantos as Hypertext’, PhD dissertation, University of New Brunswick, 2012. As the Henderson/Preda bibliography indicates, neither Ned Bates, the creator of ‘A Hypervortex’, nor William Cole, the author of the ‘Pound’s Web’ article in Paideuma, developed their technological approach to submit doctoral work on The Cantos. 15. Ezra Pound, The Pisan Cantos, ed. with annotation by Richard Sieburth (New York: New Directions, 2003). 16. Cocola, Jim, ‘Notes Toward a Draft of “A Gazetteer of Ezra Pound”’, Make It New 1.4 (March 2015): 50–4, http://makeitnew.ezrapoundsociety.org/volum e-i/vol-i-no-4/the-world-and-the-work-cocola. See also the URL of the gazetteer, accessed 30 January 2018, http://users.wpi.edu/~jcocola/poundiana/ind ex.html. 17. Kent Emerson. ‘Database Modernism: Literary Information Media’, PhD dissertation, University of Tulsa, 2016; Robin Seguy, ‘Prolegomena to the Automated Analysis of a Bilingual Poetry Corpus, with Particular Reference to an Annotated Edition of The Cantos of Ezra Pound’, PhD dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 2016. 18. The Cantos Project was launched as a project sponsored by the Ezra Pound Society in October 2014. Funding obtained from the Leverhulme Foundation in February 2016 allowed the project to be integrated into the software package of the University of Edinburgh, allowing me to devote myself to the work full time, for an initial period of five years. 19. The idea of serial digital annotation was born as a corrective to the research situation around 2011–14. At that time, two gigantic projects, Richard Taylor’s Variorum Edition of Ezra Pound’s Cantos and Ronald Bush’s genetic edition of the Pisan Cantos, started in the era of print (at the beginning of the 1980s) and conceived as books, were still unpublished. They still are, at the moment of writing.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:11, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.017

The Temple and the Scaffolding

269

20. John Whittier Ferguson, Framing Pieces: Designs of the Gloss in Joyce, Woolf, and Pound (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). W OR KS CI T ED Bates, Ned, ‘A Hypervortex of Ezra Pound’s Canto LXXXI’, www.uncg.edu/eng lish/pound/canto.htm (dead weblink). Cockram, Patricia, ‘Hypertextuality and Pound’s Fascist Aesthetic’, Paideuma 26.2–3 (Fall–Winter 1997), 151–63. Cocola, Jim, ‘A Gazetteer of Ezra Pound’, http://users.wpi.edu/~jcocola/poundi ana/index.html, accessed 30 January 2018. ‘Notes toward a Draft of “A Gazetteer of Ezra Pound”’, Make It New 1.4 (March 2015): 50–4, http://makeitnew.ezrapoundsociety.org/volume-i/vol-i-no-4/th e-world-and-the-work-cocola. Cole, William, ‘Pound’s Web: Hypertext in the Rock-Drill Cantos’, Paideuma 26.2–3 (Fall–Winter 1997), 137–50. Emerson, Kent, ‘Database Modernism: Literary Information Media’, PhD dissertation, University of Tulsa, 2016. Ferguson, John Whittier, Framing Pieces: Designs of the Gloss in Joyce, Woolf, and Pound (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). Flack, Leah Culligan, Modernism and Homer: The Odysseys of H.D., James Joyce, Osip Mandelstam, and Ezra Pound (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). Grieneisen, Jeff, ‘The Ezra Pound Project: Canto 31’, State College of Florida, http://faculty.scf.edu/GrieneJ/cantoproject/primarypoundpage.htm. Henricksen, Line, Ambition and Anxiety: Ezra Pound’s ‘Cantos’ and Derek Walkott’s ‘Omeros’ as Twentieth-Century Epics (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007). Kenner, Hugh, The Mechanic Muse (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988). The Pound Era (London: Faber, 1972). Liebregts, Peter, Ezra Pound and Neoplatonism (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2004). McDonald, Gail, ‘Hypertext and the Teaching of Modernist Difficulty’, Pedagogy 2.1 (Winter 2002): 17–30. Makin, Peter, Ezra Pound’s Cantos: A Casebook (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). Pound, Ezra, ‘Cantos I, XLV, LXXII and LXXXI’, Genius, https://genius.com/ Ezra-pound-canto-i-annotated. The Pisan Cantos, ed. with annotation by Richard Sieburth (New York: New Directions, 2003). Redman, Tim, ‘An Epic Is a Hypertext Containing Poetry. Eleven New Cantos (31–41)’, in A Poem Containing History: Textual Studies in The Cantos, ed. Lawrence Rainey, 117–50 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997). Sawler, Trevor Craig, ‘Hypertexting High Modernism: Ezra Pound’s Pisan Cantos as Hypertext’. PhD dissertation, University of New Brunswick, 2012.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:11, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.017

270

roxana preda

Seguy, Robin, ‘Prolegomena to the Automated Analysis of a Bilingual Poetry Corpus, with Particular Reference to an Annotated Edition of The Cantos of Ezra Pound’, PhD dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 2016. Shioji, Ursula, Ezra Pound’s Pisan Cantos and the Noh (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1997). Taylor, Richard, ‘The Tragi-Comical History of the Variorum Project and Its Ongoing Betrayal – Especially by Cambridge University Press’ (2005), www.richard-dean-taylor.de/index.php?id=14. Terrell, Carroll F., A Companion to The Cantos of Ezra Pound (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:11, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.017

Afterword ‘read him’ Mark Byron

A collection of essays titled The New Ezra Pound Studies cannot help but deploy the currency of Transatlantic modernism. Indeed the coin Pound himself fashioned in the imperative mood, to ‘Make It New’, directs us to chart where new avenues of inquiry are to be found, and where more familiar terrain may enjoy renewal by virtue of newly available archival sources, methodological advances, developments in various discourses since Pound’s day, and different kinds of reception in a range of geographical, linguistic and cultural spheres. Each essay presents a case for reconsidering what we think we know about Pound, but also what we think we know about modernism, the Greek and Roman classics, Italian Fascism, Queer discourse, post-Mao Chinese poetics, copyright law, and United States political culture, among numerous other topics, and the way these intersect with Pound’s own cultural production. His translations, dramatic adaptations, operas and other musical compositions; his interventions on behalf of other poets and artists; his recuperation of lost or forgotten poets, artists and composers; his energetic promotion of prosodic experimentation; his music and art criticism; his attempts at political intervention – all of these dimensions shape a formidable artistic profile and give Pound a cultural force to which few other modernists approach, and none surpass. Pound’s failings are as stark as his achievements are astonishing, and any sense of scholarly renewal in Pound studies is compelled to take up the ethical imperative to address all aspects of this complex and paradoxical force of culture. In the era of the New Modernism studies of the past two decades, Pound studies has enjoyed a resurgence as his texts, composition methods and biographical complexities have come under greater scrutiny. On the face of it this state of affairs is a curious one: Pound’s politics, for example, have always provided a big stumbling block to the dispassionate study of his poetics, but on the other hand his formidable archive stands near the centre of the so-called documentary turn in modernism studies. The better his 271

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:12, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.018

272

mark byron

composition processes are understood, the more able scholars are to place Pound within the complex ecologies across which his life and work traversed. The current state of Pound scholarship demonstrates very significant work being done in the archives to produce new texts and editions of his work, as well as providing new ways of thinking about the interpretive strategies we might bring to his poetry as well-informed readers. The introduction to this volume gave a very brief sketch of the abundant new work on Pound resulting from assiduous archival research and its careful calibration with the documents, sources and texts already circulating in the field. The replenishing force of the Pound archive is complemented by advances in particular fields, such as scholarly work in English on Chinese and Japanese poetics (historical and contemporary), early medieval philosophy and digital scholarly methods. Just in the past few months new primary materials as well as collections of essays on Pound have appeared.1 As Timothy Billings’s critical edition of Cathay demonstrates, by returning to Ernest Fenollosa’s notebooks in the Pound archive,2 many of the poems in Cathay retain the historical residues of generic affiliation, formalism built into uses of image and metaphor, and other perennial features of Chinese prosody. This retention is deeply inherent in Chinese poetics, but is also evident in large part due to the scholarship of Mori and Ariga, passed down to Pound via Fenollosa. As is often noted, Pound was only aware in the most general way of the specific conventions and allusions at work in the poems he drew from Fenollosa’s notebooks. Yet not only was he correct in his intuitive grasp of a ‘sense of history’ inhering in the poetry, a good deal of this poetical history was recorded in Mori’s lectures and cribs provided to Fenollosa in the course of their collaboration. A wider (nonsinological) readership can now know this because of Billings’s brilliant edition. As Haun Saussy perceptively points out, the choice of the volume’s title is significant: ‘Cathay would be China desired, anticipated, or vicariously experienced, and thus not simply China.’3 This way of seeing Pound’s volume promotes matters of historical adaptation, poetic invention and emulations of tone and poetic form. In Christopher Bush’s formulation: ‘Cathay might better be understood not as a translation of a set of originals, but rather as a link in a series of compilations, glosses, and creative rewrites.’4 This new edition of Cathay provides non-specialists with foundational knowledge of Chinese poetics as well as a sense of how such a body of knowledge was absorbed by Anglophone translators – if not repelled or ignored – and thus shows how careful archival work, allied with expertise

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:12, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.018

Afterword

273

in cognate disciplines, still has plenty to tell us of Pound’s own poetic practices. The example of Cathay is germane due to the fundamental role it played in establishing a certain modernist poetics, thus shaping the discipline of modernism studies from its earliest iterations in the post-war period. This history is counterbalanced by the role of Chinese aesthetics in Pound studies – in my view there may be no more significant cultural field still to explore in Pound studies and in modernism generally. Another recent publication drawing heavily of the Pound archive is the manuscript critical edition of The Blue Spill,5 an unfinished clue-puzzle detective novel co-authored by Pound and Olga Rudge in 1929 or 1930 in Rapallo – just at the moment Golden Age detective writers such as Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers were being translated into Italian. At first glance, one might wonder what such an undertaking can tell us about two avant-garde artists choosing to write in a popular genre. Rudge and Pound composed the novel in Italy in the aftermath of Black Friday, 1929 and the Great Depression. Specific scenes in the novel set in Soho recall the Imagiste and Vorticist era that was so violently interrupted by the First World War, and the offending document, a ‘purloined letter’ or MacGuffin at the centre of the mystery, the eponymous blue spill, bears crucial stock information pertaining to Corradium Cylinders Ltd., an investment concern implicating several characters and a plot device that gives Pound the opportunity to expand on his critique of stock-market capitalism. Contained within an unfinished typescript the plot is never resolved, but it does signal some of the historical concerns and cultural themes pressing upon both authors during a turbulent time. These two examples of Cathay and The Blue Spill – ‘out of the archive’ as it were – provide supporting material for scholarship and arguments about Pound’s writing activities and how he came by the source material that allowed him to pursue the agendas seen in these texts. But in the end, Pound’s significance and influence, profound as it might be in more general terms, rests squarely upon his poetry, and principally The Cantos. Through all the scholarly peaks and troughs Pound’s work has endured over the decades, the scandals of radical political association and antiSemitism, his poetry is simply unavoidable for any comprehension of Anglophone poetry of the past century, and much other poetry besides (perhaps especially Chinese poetry of the last half-century). As Basil Bunting put it so starkly in his poem ‘On the Fly-Leaf of Pound’s Cantos’: There are the Alps, fools! Sit down and wait for them to crumble!6

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:12, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.018

274

mark byron

This oft-quoted homage to Pound, expressive of Bunting’s impatient awe, only tells part of the story. As Bob Perelman points out, mountain chains are prone to weathering and erosion: ‘the increasingly bald fact is that without an ongoing present tense – students, teachers, critical interest – the Alps-like Cantos would be slowly crumbling in high-density storage’.7 Like all poems The Cantos needs its readers, its students and its scholars. The foregoing essays provide many lines of inquiry for deeper and broader reading of the poem, and yet further dimensions of the poem and its contexts are still emerging. Some of the most important poetic resources in the Pound archive are yet to be published, and a number of projects are underway that aim to resolve this state of affairs to the greatest possible extent. As the field of modernism studies has expanded – from close reading of the mandarins of high modernism to middlebrow and popular texts; from a Eurocentric and Transatlantic hegemony to subaltern, postcolonial and global literary formations; ‘bad’ modernisms, late modernisms, and competing theories of modernity each inflecting the cultural field in different ways – Pound’s role of impresario, literary editor, advisor and confidante to many of his peers in poetry and across the arts still registers as an index of the cultural movement at the outset of the last century. Yet his poetry, and its crucial role in post-Mao Chinese poetry, in Brazilian and Chilean poetry of the past thirty years, to name just these few examples, demonstrates its continuing valency. Pound’s poetry is also set to benefit from resurgent interest in historical poetics, and the rise of New Formalism: these critical practices have trained scholarly attention on close reading of poetry in ways that offer new contexts and new methods by which to process poetic material, but that engage the kinds of reading methods native to scholars educated in New Criticism, New Historicism, deconstruction and other methodologies grounded in close reading practices. These ‘field effects’ are important, but close attention to Pound’s own poetics, his techniques and negotiations of history, is equally so. Few poets have taken their artistic patrimony so much to heart, to the extent that the history of poetry comprises much of Pound’s subject matter and presents a guiding line through the bewildering array of The Cantos. To know Pound is to know much of literary production in the classical, medieval, early modern, and modern West, and to receive an advanced beginner’s guide to East Asian literary and artistic production. His influence on Anglophone poetry is a complex matter to define, since for every poet bearing direct lines of influence from Pound there are others that react to Pound in ways that produce entirely different poetic tropes and prosodic

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:12, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.018

Afterword

275

techniques. For a poet around whom so much mythology seems to hang, there are manifold ways to discover his enduring influence, to find tangible effects as though in a magnetic field. As all who have listened to the various recordings of Pound reading his poetry are acutely aware, his recital voice both invites imitation and inscribes its inimitability in the aural medium. Instead, by way of conclusion, I return to the written text, a text marked with verbal emphasis as the last word, an epitaph or curtal elegy paying tribute to the enduring force of the poet. As Pound wrote on the death of his friend T. S. Eliot, I echo in response to Pound himself: ‘I can only repeat, but with the urgency of 50 years ago: read him’.8

Notes 1. Two recent collections are Roxana Preda, ed., Ezra Pound and the Arts (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019); and Ralph Lüfter and Roxana Preda, eds., A Companion to Ezra Pound’s Economics (Nordhausen: Verlag Traugott Bautz, 2019). 2. Ezra Pound, Cathay: A Critical Edition, ed. Timothy Billings (New York: Fordham University Press, 2019). 3. Haun Saussy, ‘Foreword: The Archive of Cathay’, in Cathay: A Critical Edition, ed. Timothy Billings (New York: Fordham University Press, 2019), xii. 4. Christopher Bush, ‘Introduction: “From the Decipherings”’, in Cathay: A Critical Edition, ed. Timothy Billings (New York: Fordham University Press, 2019), 5. 5. Mark Byron and Sophia Barnes, eds., Ezra Pound’s and Olga Rudge’s The Blue Spill: A Manuscript Critical Edition (London: Bloomsbury, 2019). 6. Basil Bunting, ‘On the Fly-Leaf of Pound’s Cantos’, in Complete Poems (New York: New Directions, 2004), 130. 7. Bob Perelman, Modernism the Morning After (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2017), n. 9, 123. 8. ‘For T. S. E.’ in Selected Prose 1909–1965, ed. and intro. William Cookson (London: Faber, 1973), 434. Pound originally had this note published in The Sewanee Review 74.1 (Winter 1966), 89. W OR KS CI T ED Bunting, Basil, Complete Poems (New York: New Directions, 2004). Bush, Christopher, ‘Introduction: “From the Decipherings”’, in Ezra Pound, Cathay: A Critical Edition, ed. Timothy Billings, 1–13 (New York: Fordham University Press, 2019). Byron, Mark, and Sophia Barnes, eds., Ezra Pound’s and Olga Rudge’s The Blue Spill: A Manuscript Critical Edition (London: Bloomsbury, 2019).

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:12, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.018

276

mark byron

Lüfter, Ralph, and Roxana Preda, eds., A Companion to Ezra Pound’s Economics (Nordhausen: Verlag Traugott Bautz, 2019). Perelman, Bob, Modernism the Morning After (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2017). Pound, Ezra, Cathay: A Critical Edition, ed. Timothy Billings (New York: Fordham University Press, 2019). Preda, Roxana, ed., Ezra Pound and the Arts (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019). Saussy, Haun, ‘Foreword: The Archive of Cathay’, in Ezra Pound, Cathay: A Critical Edition, ed. Timothy Billings, xi–xvii (New York: Fordham University Press, 2019).

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:12, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.018

Index

1922 (year), 208, 215 Abbasid Caliphate, 183 abolition, 230 abstract art, 75 abstract painting, 82 Acoetes, 190, 192 acousmatic sound, 58 Actaeon, 146 Adams, Henry, 234 Adams, John, 32, 216 Adams, John Quincy, 235 Adorno, Theodor, 67, 76 Aeba Kōson Haikairon (‘On Haikai’), 143 Aeneas, 199 Aesopian language, 227, 229, 232, 233, 235, 236, 237 aestheticism, 111 Al-Andalus, 183 Albright, Daniel, 57, 58 Alexander the Great, 232 Alexander, Michael, 105 Alfarabi, 31 Alta, Seda Şen, 116 Altieri, Charles, 74 American far right politics, 3, 4, 108 American Nazi Party, 236 American Publishers’ Copyright League, 250 American Revolution, 234 annotation, 259, 260, 262, 263, 264, 265, 266 Antheil, George, 57, 59, 61, 63, 64, 65, 67, 80 Ballet Mécanique, 59, 60, 62 Mechanisms, 59 pianola, 65 Antheil, George, et al Ballet Mécanique (film), 80 anthology, 78 Georgian poetry, 78 Imagist poetry, 78 anti-Semitism, 106, 112, 196, 199, 211, 219, 227, 273

Antliff, Mark, and Vivien Greene, 82 Antoninus Pius, 232 Aphrodite, 202 Aquinas, Thomas, 15, 28 Arakida Moritake, 142, 143 architecture, 34, 72, 74, 219 archive, 1, 4, 42, 48, 77, 79, 271, 272, 273, 274 Ardizzone, Maria Luisa, 31 Ariga Nagao, 272 Arikada Moritake, 144 Aristotelianism, 31, 32 Armantrout, Rae, 112 Armstrong, Tim, 80 Arrowsmith, Rupert Richard, 79, 145 art gallery, 77, 78, 79 Arthurs, Joshua, 213 Aston, W. G., 143, 144 Authors’ League of America, 243, 250 avant-garde, 208 avant-garde poetics, 75, 112 Averroes (Ibn Rushd), 31 Avicenna (Ibn Sina), 31 Ayscough, Florence, 159 Babcock, Robert, 31 Babylon, 230 Bach, Johann Sebastian, 97, 202 Baechler, Lea, 44 Baghdad, 132 school of translation, 33 Bank of the United States, 235 Bank War, 235 Baraka, Amiri, 106, 109, 114, 116 ‘Confessions of a Former Anti-Semite’, 112 ‘Hymn for Lanie Poo’, 109 Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note, 109 The Dead Lecturer, 110, 111, 114 Barnes Foundation, 79 Barnes, David, 75, 76, 212 Barnhisel, Gregory, 75, 77 Barr, Alfred H., 75, 77

277

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:13, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.019

278

Index

Bartleby.com, 257 Bates, Ned Kybernekia, 259 Battle of the Bulge, 46 Baynes, Norman H., and H. Moss, 32 BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation), 11 Beardsley, Aubrey, 184, 200, 202 Beasley, Rebecca, 211 Bechstein, 58 Beckwith, Osmond, 11 Bedford, Agnes, 59, 63, 65, 67 Beijing, 133 Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, 1, 22, 35, 43, 54, 98, 153, 239, 266 Additional Ezra Pound Papers, 43 Ezra Pound Papers, 43 Olga Rudge Papers, 43, 44 Bel Esprit, 215 Bell, Clive, 73 Benavente, Jacinto 1922 Nobel Prize for Literature, 208 Benda, Julien, 76 Benjamin, Walter, 62, 211 Benson, Steve, 112 Benton, Thomas Hart, 231, 234, 235 Bernstein, Charles, 41 bibliographic codes, 95, 109 Billings, Timothy Cathay critical edition, 272 Binyon, Laurence, 79, 145 Flight of the Dragon, The, 73, 146 Bird, Otto, 12 Bird, William, 43 Black American poetics, 111 Black Mountain College, 72 Black Nationalism, 111, 112 Black, Jonathan, 82 Blackburn, Paul, 105 Blast, 62, 81, 82, 149 Blunt, Wilfred Scawen, 203 Bobbio, Norberto, 213 Bollingen Prize, 3, 11, 197 Bologna, 216 Bolshevism, 231 Boston, 242 Bowers, Fredson, 50 Braddock, Jeremy, 78 Bradshaw, David, and James Smith, 212 Brainard, Joe, 109 Brancusi, Constantin, 73, 217 Brecht, Bertolt Threepenny Opera, 63 British Museum, 78, 79, 145 Japanese Department, 145 Reading Room, 77

British Union of Fascists (BUF), 212 Brooks, Preston, 230 Brown v. Board of Education, 228, 229, 230, 232 Browning, Robert, 187 Brunnenburg, 50 Buchanan, James, 228, 229, 230 Buckley, William F., 236 Bucknell, Brad, 58 Buddhism, 131, 132, 159, 162 Bunting, Basil, 105, 106, 273 Burne-Jones, Edward, 202 Bush, Christopher, 148, 272 Bush, Ronald, 31, 89 Bynner, Witter, 159 Byzantine studies, 28, 32 Byzantium, 32 history, 27, 33 Lex Rhodia, 32 Cairns, Huntington, 13 Calcutta, 183 Cambridge School of Poetry, 113 Canova da Milano, Francesco, 26 Canzone degli Uccelli, 26 Cantos Project, The (online), 188 Capella, Martianus, 3 Marriage of Philology and Mercury, 3, 31 Cardenal, Ernesto, 115 Carman, Bliss, 201 Carolingian Empire textual production, 27 Carolingian studies, 28, 29, 30, 31 Carr, Helen, 142 Carter, Huntly, 73 Casillo, Robert, 212 Caspian Sea, 132 Catullus, 57 Cavalcanti, Guido, 27, 29, 30, 31, 35, 64 ‘Donna mi prega’, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 114 poetry manuscripts, 90 censorship, 227 Chamberlain, Basil Hall, 143, 144, 145, 148, 150 ‘Bashō and the Japanese Poetical Epigram’, 142 Japanese Poetry (1910), 143 Charlottesville, 233 China, 231 Chinese characters, 50, 150, 160, 163, 164 phonetic component, 162 Pisan Cantos, 48 Chinese History, 167 ‘Four Barbarians’, 128 Ch’eng T’ang (Shang Dynasty Emperor), 1 Chanyu (Xiongnu chief), 130 Cheng (Zhou Dynasty Emperor), 129, 130

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:13, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.019

Index Chengzong (Yuan Dynasty Emperor), 137 Chuang Chou (Chuang Tzu, philosopher), 190 Duke Mu of Shao (Zhou Dynasty), 130 frontier, 127, 128, 129 Amur (Heilongjiang), 132 General An Fiyanggu (Qing Dynasty), 133 General Li Guang (Han Dynasty), 129, 130 Great Wall, 130 Han Dynasty, 130 Huainanzi (Han Dynasty), 128 Jesuit missionaries (Qing Dynasty), 133 Jurchens (Manchu), 131 Kang (Zhou Dynasty Emperor), 129 Kangxi (Qing Dynasty Emperor), 32, 133, 135, 137 Li Mu, soldier (Spring and Autumn), 129 Min (Jin Dynasty Emperor), 130 Ming Dynasty, 131, 136 nomadic peoples, 130 Di, 130 Dzungar Mongols, 133 Jie, 130 Khalka Mongols, 132, 133 Manchu, 136 Oirat Mongols, 132 Ordos, 134, 135 Qiang, 130 Qidan (Liao Dynasty), 131 Turks, 130 Xianbei, 130 Xiongnu, 130 Oirat-Manchurian War (Qing Dynasty), 133 Qing Dynasty, 132, 136 Sacred Edict, 32, 134, 136 Shang Dynasty, 1 Shihuangdi (Qin Dynasty Emperor), 130 Shu, Classic of History, 19 Shujing, Book of Documents, 129, 136 Shunzhi (Qing Dynasty Emperor), 134 Silk Road, 131 Song Dynasty, 131 Tai Tsong (Qing Dynasty Emperor), 134 Taizong (Tang Dynasty Emperor), 130 Tang Dynasty, 130, 183 threat of Christianity, 133 Treaty of Chanyuan (Song Dynasty), 131 Xiongnu, 129 Xuan (Han Dynasty Emperor), 130 Xuangzang (Buddhist monk, Tang Dynasty), 131, 133 Xuanzong (Tang Dynasty Emperor), 147 Yangdi (Sui Dynasty Emperor), 147 Yuan (Han Dynasty Emperor), 131 Yuan Dynasty (Mongol), 131, 136

279

Zedong, Mao, 167 Zhu Xi, Tong-Kien-Kang-Mou, 128 Chinese literature, 167 Hong lou meng (Story of the Stone, A Dream of Red Mansions), 158 Wu Cheng, Journey to the West, 131 Chinese poetry, 1, 2, 166, 169, 271, 272, 273, 274 classical, 128, 168, 169 Li Bai (Tang Dynasty), 129, 191 Menglong (Misty) poets, 115, 168, 169 metonymy, 167 root seeking movement, 168, 169 Shijing, Book of Odes, 134, 135 Wen Wang (Zhou Dynasty), 129 Chinese written language, 165, 169 seal script, 166 chorus, Greek, 17, 18 Christie, Agatha, 273 cinema, 67 Cisneros, Antonio, 115 Clark, Tom, 107 classical reception, 19, 21 classical reception studies, 9, 10 classical scholarship, 10, 27, 271 Clay, Henry, 233, 235 Clearfield, Andrew, 74 close reading, 274 Coburn, Alvin Langdon ‘vortography’, 80 Cockram, Patricia, 258 Cocola, James Gazetteer, 261 Cocteau, Jean, 57, 217 Antigone, 208 Coke, Edward, 237 Institutes of the Laws of England, 32 Cold War, 75, 77 Cole, William, 258 collage, 74, 82, 110, 161, 264 colophon, 109 commodity, 76 communism, 217, 227, 228, 231 concrete poetry, 150 Confucian Classics, 203 Confucianism, 128, 132, 134, 135, 136, 159, 160, 165, 167, 169, 211, 215 cheng ming (‘rectification of names’), 164 Confucius, 19, 59, 164, 166, 218 Four Books, 32 copyright, 259, 262, 263 copyright law, 1, 98, 242, 243, 244, 245, 246, 247, 249, 271 Berne Convention, 246, 250 compulsory license, 241, 242, 248 English Act (1844), 241

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:13, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.019

280 copyright law (cont.) Imperial Copyright Act (1911), 241, 248 international, 244 International Copyright Union, 250 perpetual copyright, 248 piracy, 246, 247, 249 protection, United States, 241, 247 reciprocal, 250 US Copyright Act (1909), 242, 246, 247 US Copyright Act (1919), 250 US-British retrospective relief, 250 copy-text, 50 Cornwallis, Earl Charles, 234 Corriere della sera, 46 cosmopolitanism, 182, 185, 186 Couchoud, Paul-Louis, 143, 144 ‘Les haïkaï (Epigrammes poétiques du Japon)’, 142 counterculture, 107, 108, 116 Couvreur, Séraphin Chou King, 19 Cravens, Margaret, 196 Creel, George, 249 Cubism, 74 Cummings, E. E., 106 Cunard, Nancy Negro Anthology, 60 Cutting, Bronson M., 250 d’Arezzo, Guido, 66 Daniel, Arnaut, 26, 35 Dante, 13, 20, 199 Commedia, 31 Paradiso, 30, 236 Purgatorio, 213 Daoism/Taoism, 159 Dasenbrock, Reed Way, 74 Davenport, Guy, 187, 191, 227 Davie, Donald, 161 De Sumichrast, Frederick C., 244 Debussy, Claude, 60 Pelléas et Mélisande, 63 Decadence, 200 deconstruction, 274 Deegan, Marilyn, 51 Defenders of the American Constitution (DOAC), 235 deluxe editions, 90, 96 Demeter, 199 democracy, 211, 217 Dickey, Frances, 74 Dickins, F. V., 143, 144 digital annotated edition, 259 digital culture, 258, 266

Index digital edition, 262, 272 digital humanities, 260, 261, 262 digital media, 81 digitization, 2 Dionysus, 187, 189, 190 directio voluntatis, 217 Divus, Andreas, 92 Odyssey translation, 81 Dobran, Ryan, 113 Dolmetsch, Arnold, 60, 62, 63, 64 Doolittle, Hilda, ‘H.D.’, viii, 10, 105, 149, 196, 204, 267 Dorn, Ed, 113 Douglas, Stephen, 228, 229 Doyle, Laura, and Laura Winkiel, 182 Dreiser, Theodore, 243 Dunn, Margaret, 67 early medieval history, 27, 272 East Asian art, 79 East-West Modernism, 3, 162 Eaves, T. C. Duncan, and Ben Kimpel, 236 Eco, Umberto, 215 economics, 110 Edwards, Henry Hudson, 200 Einstein, Albert, 65 Eisenhower, Dwight, 228 El Chiek, Nadia Maria, 32 Eleanor of Aquitaine, 187 Eleusinian Mysteries, 147, 196 Eleusis, 26 Eliot, Charles, 244 Eliot, T. S., 10, 13, 104, 105, 113, 187, 215, 275 Poems, 104 The Waste Land, 104, 208 Ellmann, Richard, 81 Emerson, Kent, 261, 262 encyclopaedism, 32 England, 185, 246 epigraphy, 30 Eriugena, John Scottus, 28, 29, 30, 31, 35 Periphyseon, 28 Estorick Collection, London, 82 Eurocentrism, 182 Ewick, David, 79, 145, 146 exile, 127 Faber and Faber, 49, 50, 88, 89 Falangism, 208 Fang, Achilles, 49, 89, 94 fascism, 219 palingenesis, 213 Federico Secondo, 33 Sicilian School of, 34

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:13, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.019

Index Feldman, Matthew, 212 Fenollosa, Ernest, 79, 128, 141, 145, 149, 150, 157, 158, 160, 161–5, 272 Fétis, Francois-Joseph, 63 Fillmore, Millard, 229 film/cinema, 81, 82, 212 Fiorentino, Francesco, 31 Manuale di storia della filosofia, 30 First World War/Great War, 108, 185, 208, 215, 244, 273 President’s Proclamation of Peace, 250 Fisher, Margaret, 57, 64 Fitts, Dudley, 73, 74 Fitzgerald, Robert, 10 Fleming, Rudd, xii, 10, 11, 12, 17, 22 Flint, F. S., 142, 143, 144, 150 Florence, 46, 183 Ford, Ford Madox, 41, 200 Forlì, 45, 46 formato locho, 31 Foucault, Michel, 182 Fra Angelico, 184 fragmentation, 265 France, 185, 246 Franco, Francisco, 208 Frank, Joseph, 74 Friedman, Susan Stanford, 182, 183, 184, 185, 189 frontier, 127, 131, 132, 135, 136, 137 frontier theory, 1 Frost, Robert, 105 Froula, Christine, 188, 189, 191 Fry, Roger, 73 Fugitive Slave Law, 230 Gallagher, Kristen, 110 Gallesi, Luca, 212 Gallup, Donald, 43 ‘The Ezra Pound Archive 1947–1987’, 43 Gaudier-Brzeska, Henri, 73, 203, 217 Gautier, Théophile, 104 gender, 196, 198 genetic analysis, 42 George Allen and Unwin, 246 Gerbillon, Jean-François (Jesuit missionary), 132 Germany, 246 Geryon (usura), 160 Gibraltar, 183 Giles, Herbert, 191 Ginsberg, Allen, 106, 108, 112 Goble, Mark, 80 gold currency, 235 Golden Age detective fiction, 273 Goodwin, K. L., 105 Google, 266

281

Gourmont, Remy de, 76 Natural Philosophy of Love, The (1903), 198, 208 gramophone, 58, 62 Great Britain, 231, 246 Great Depression, 216, 273 Greek tragedy, 11 Greek, untranslated, 17, 18, 21 Greenberg, Clement, 75, 80 Greenwood, Emily, 9 Greetham, D. C., 92 Grieneisen, Jeff, 259 Grieve, Thomas, 94 Griffin, Roger, 213, 219 Griffith, Arthur, 110 Grosseteste, Robert De Luce, 31 Guam, 148 haiku, 143 haikai, 142, 143, 145, 150 hokku, 141, 142, 143, 144, 145, 150 Hakutani, Yoshinobu, 143 Haiku and Modernist Poetics, 142 Hale, W. G., 9 Hall, Donald, 107, 236 Hamilton College, 29, 43, 44 Hanno the Carthaginian, 127 Hardwick, Lorna, 9 Hardy, Thomas, 66 Harmer, J. B., 142, 143 Haroldo and Augusto de Campos Noigandres, 150 Harris, William J., 110, 112 Harry Ransom Center, Austin, Texas, 1 Harryman, Carla, 112 Hart, Matthew, 186 Hartmann, Sadakichi, 201 Haynes, Kenneth, 42 Hearn, Lafcadio, 143, 148 Heidegger, Martin, 164 Hejinian, Lyn, 94, 112 Helen of Troy, 187 Hemingway, Ernest, 105 Henderson, Alice Corbin, 146 Herakles, 22, 23, 151, 156 hermeneutic circle, 265 hermeticism, 41 Hersey, Harold, 243 Hesse, Eva, 49, 88, 93 Hewlett, Maurice, 200 high modernism, 10, 274 Hillyer, Robert, 197 historical materialism, 112 Hitler, Adolf, 218, 231

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:13, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.019

282

Index

Hogarth Press, 208 Hokusai, 145 Homer, 15, 72, 92, 93, 164, 187, 258 homoeroticism, 201 homophobia, 197 homosexuality, 204 homosociality, 202, 204 Horton, David, 233, 236 Houghton Library, Harvard University, 43 Hound & Horn, 74 Hovey, Richard, 201 Huang, Yunte translation of the Pisan Cantos (Mandarin), 115 Hudson Review, 11, 19, 235 Hughes, Robert, 57 hypertext, 82, 258, 259, 262, 266 ideogram, 19, 40, 89, 91, 92, 94, 108, 112, 114, 115, 164, 184, 192, 266 ideogrammic method, 95, 104, 113, 141, 150, 161, 164, 165, 258 ideology, 41, 79, 82, 91, 93, 210 Il Mare, 217 Imagism, 81, 105, 142, 149, 157, 158, 159, 161, 168, 169, 189, 191, 273 import tariff, 242, 243, 244, 245, 246, 247 Inada Hogitarō, 145 intelletto agente, 31 intelletto possible, 31 internationalism, 185, 186 internet, 259 Internet Archive, 266 Islamic culture medieval learning, 34 medieval philosophy, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32 medieval science, 34 textual transmission, 27 Italian Fascism, 4, 44, 45, 46, 48, 76, 77, 149, 208, 209, 210, 211, 213, 214, 217, 218, 220, 230, 271 archaeology, 213 Bottai, Giuseppe, 214 Codex Fori Mussolini, 219 cultural nationalism, 211, 214, 216, 219 fascio (symbol), 210 Mostra della Rivoluzione Fascista (1932), 209 racism, 217 Republic of Salò, 212 romanità (Romanness), 213, 219 Sarfatti, Margherita, 211 squadristi (blackshirts), 212, 214 Italian Futurism, 60, 73, 82, 208 Itō Michio, 148 Iwasaki Ryōzō, 141, 149

Jackson, Andrew, 231, 236 Jacobus, Mary, 72, 74 James, Henry, 200 Janequin, Clément, 26, 35, 61, 67 Le Chant des oiseaux, 26, 66 Japan, 128, 131, 149, 227 Meiji Era, 162 Toyotomi Hideyoshi, 131 Japanese film Atarashiki tsuchi (‘New Land’), 148 Japanese literature, 141, 149, 150, 151, 272 Japanese prints (ukiyo-e), 145 Hokusai, 184 Jaruga, Rodolfo, 115 Jefferson, Thomas, 147, 216, 233, 234 Monticello, 234 University of Virginia, 234 Jenkins, John, 61 Jennings, Chelsea, 109 Jepson, Edgar, 200 Jerusalem, 183, 213 Jim Crow, 228, 229 Joyce, James, 10, 105, 115, 200 Ulysses, 208 Justinian, Byzantine Emperor, 32 Corpus Juris Civilis, 28, 32 Pandectae (Legal Digests), 32 Kaldellis, Anthony, 32 Kansas-Nebraska Act (1854), 228, 229 Kasper, John, 109, 110, 233 Make It New (bookstore), 109 Square $ (book series), 109, 235 white supremacists politics, 109 Kennedy, George A., 161 Kenner, Hugh, 12, 49, 50, 73, 80, 146, 147, 150, 161, 258 The Pound Era, 258 Kentucky, 232 Kiang, Kang-hu, 159 Kido Shuri, 151 Kilbride, Laura, 113 Kilpatrick, James J., 232, 236 Kimura Shōtarō, 142 Kindellan, Michael, 42, 48, 51, 227, 237 King Edward VIII, 229, 230 King James Bible, 202 Kinoshita Tsunetarō, 149 Kitasono Katué, 141, 148, 149, 150 Kiuchi Toru, 142, 143 Kodama, Sanehide, 79 Komachi, 145 Korea, 128, 130, 131 Kōri Torahiko, 148, 149

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:13, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.019

Index Kōson, 150 Kotin, Josh, 113 Kovacs, George, and C.W. Marshall, 10 Kuanon/Guanyin, 199 kulchur, 217 Kume Tamijūrō, 148 L’Herbier, Marcel L’Inhumaine, 67 Lamarr, Hedy, 65 Language Poets, 112 The Grand Piano, 112 Lattimore, Richmond, 105 Laughlin, James, 13, 21, 43, 49, 50, 75, 89, 93, 214, 227 Lawes, Henry, 61 Lee, Tim Berners, 258 legal codes, 27 Léger, Fernand, 80 Lenin, V. I., 231 Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism (1917), 227 Lenya, Lotte, 63 Leo the Wise, Byzantine Emperor Eparch’s Book, 32 LeRoi Jones. See Baraka, Amiri Levi, Primo, 210 Lewis, Wyndham, 73, 75, 81, 82, 105 Li Chiang (Lijiang), 136 Library of Congress, 108, 197, 242, 247 Liebregts, Peter, 31, 257 Lilly Library, Indiana, 1, 22, 43 Lincoln, Abraham, 249 Lind, L. R., 10, 12 linotype, 258 Lionnet, Françoise, and Shu-mei Shih, 181 Little Review, 216, 243, 244 Little, Matthew, 31 Litz, A. Walton, 44 London, 111, 127, 148, 183, 198, 199, 210, 241, 242, 249, 250 Soho, 273 Longenbach, James, 44 Lovelace, Richard, 202 Lowell, Amy, 149, 159 luminous detail, 184, 258 Luna, Joe, 114 lute, 63 lyric poetry, 20 MacDiarmid, Hugh, 106 Machiavelli, Niccolò, 45, 47 Discourses, 45 Madison, James, 233

283

Mailla, Joseph-Anne-Marie Moyriac de Histoire générale de la Chine, 128 Make It New (journal), 115, 261 Make It New (motto), 1, 2, 213, 271 Makin, Peter, 257 Malatesta, Sigismondo, 47, 59, 209, 215 Manchu (language), 134, 135 Mandel, Tom, 112 manuscript, 40, 96, 273 manuscript revision, 50, 51, 88 Mao, Douglas, 75, 76, 78, 81, 182 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso, 47, 208, 211, 215 Marsh, Alec, 209 Marxism Leninism, 112 Masaoka Shiki, 143, 150 Masaya Saito, 151 masculinity, 204 Mason-Dixon line, 229 Massachusetts, 234 Mathews, Elkin, 242 Maximus the Confessor, 30 McCarthy, Joseph, 231 McConnell, Justine, 9 McGann, Jerome J., 95 radial reading, 264 McLuhan, Marshall, 80 McNaughton, William, 231 Meacham, Harry, 232, 233, 234, 236 Medici, Lorenzo de’, 147 Mediterranean refugee crisis, 114 Méliès, Georges, 68 Le Mélomane, 67 Memling, Hans, 184 memoria, 31 Mencius, 231 Mendelssohn, Anna, 113 Merwin, W. S., 105 metronome, 58, 65 Michaels, Walter Benn, 93, 94 microfilm, 50 middlebrow literature, 274 Milan Piazza San Sepolcro, 208 mimeograph, 109 mimesis, 169 Ministry of Popular Culture (Minculpop), 46 misogyny, 196, 199, 204 Missouri Compromise (1820), 228 Modernism, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 80, 88, 96, 110, 158, 161, 163, 164, 166, 169, 181, 182, 183, 208, 209, 213, 214, 219, 257, 258, 271, 273 Chinese, 167 New Modernism Studies, 182, 257, 271 documentary turn, 271

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:13, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.019

284

Index

Modernism (cont.) Transatlantic, 271 transnational, 167 modernist poetics, 3, 149, 161, 273 Momoda Sōji, 149 Monet, Claude, 184 Mongolia, 128, 134, 135 Mongke, fourth Great Khan, 132 Monroe, Harriet, 127, 142, 146 Moody, A. David, 4, 12, 13, 212 Moore, Marianne, 41 Mori Kainan, 272 Morocco, 213 Morrison, Paul, 212 Mosley, Sir Oswald, 212 Mostra Augustea della Romanità, 78 Mostra della Rivoluzione Fascista, 78 motz el son, 59 Mount Fuji, 147 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 59 Münch, Gerhart, 26, 27, 59, 60, 61, 66, 67 Murphet, Julian, 81 Murphy, Dudley, 80 museum, 77, 78, 79 Museum of Modern Art, New York, 75, 77 music, 91 musical notation, 66 musique concrète, 58 Mussolini, Benito, 44, 47, 78, 209, 211, 212, 214, 216, 217, 220 and Giovanni Gentile, The Doctrine of Fascism, 210 Il Popolo d’Italia (newspaper), 209 March on Rome, 208 mussolinismo, 209 The Doctrine of Fascism (1935), 217 Nakano, Miyoko, 128 Na-khi/Naxi, 136, 137, 138 2 Hăr-2la-1llü 3 k’ö (Harlallu ceremony), 137 Dongba (religion), 136 Dongba pictogram, 136 Naples, 214 Nasher Museum of Art, Duke University, 82 Nazi Germany, 212 Neoplatonism, 29, 30, 31, 32 Nerchinsk, Russia, 132 New Age, The, 58, 60, 142, 183, 185, 244 New Criticism, 74, 75, 76, 78, 80, 108, 274 New Directions, 43, 48, 49, 50, 88, 93, 108, 257, 262 New Formalism, 274 New Historicism, 274 New York, 109 Newbolt, Henry, 200

Nicholls, Peter, 20, 237 Nicole, Jules, 92 Niikuni Seiichi, 141, 150 Niikura Toshikazu, 149 Nikoloutsos, Konstantinos, 10 Nishiwaki Junzaburō, 141, 149 nō (Japanese classical drama), 1, 11, 72, 141, 146, 148, 150, 188 Aoi no ue, 148 Hagoromo, 147, 150 Kagekiyo, 148 Kumasaka, 148 Nishikigi, 145 Shojo, 188 Takasago, 146, 147, 148, 150 tennin (‘heavenly being’), 147 Noguchi, Yone, 142, 143, 144, 145 ‘Hokku’, 142, 144 ‘What is a Hokku Poem?’, 142 The Pilgrimage, 144 North, Michael, 74, 212, 219 O’Hara, Frank ‘In Memory of My Feelings’, 113 Objectivism, 105 Occitan poetry, 27 Odysseus, 81, 199 Olson, Charles, 72, 113, 161, 258 online platform, 260 Oppen, George, 80 Orage, A. R., 244, 245, 246, See New Age, The Orientalism, 169, 183, 187, 190 Ortega y Gasset, José, 76 Overholser, Dr. Winfred, 12 Ovid, 187, 192 Paichen/Baicheng (Jilin Province), 134 paideuma, 58, 215 Paideuma (journal), 258 painting, 72, 76, 80, 91, 184, 200 Palermo, 34 paranoid reading, 196, 197, 204 Paris, 59, 148, 183, 210, 211, 215 Paterson, New Jersey, 110 Patrologia Latina, 30, 32 Paul the Deacon History of the Lombards, 32 Paul, Catherine E., 77, 78, 212, 214, 216 Peachy, Frederic, 9 Peake, Charlotte, 142 Pearson, Norman Holmes, 93 Pearson, Ted, 112 pedagogy, 41, 75 Peggy Guggenheim Museum, Venice, 82 Pellecchia, Diego, 148

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:13, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.019

Index PennSound Archive, 257 Pereira, Thomas (Jesuit missionary), 132 Perelman, Bob, 40, 41, 48, 112, 274 periplum, 127 Perloff, Marjorie, 74, 198 Perry, Paul Victor, 249 Perspectives USA, 75 Phillips Memorial Gallery, 79 philology, 29, 30, 77, 89, 92, 93 piano, 61, 62 pianola, 62, 63, 64, 66 Picabia, Francis, 217 Picasso, Pablo Two Women Running on the Beach, 208 pictograph, 162, 163, 164, 166 Pierce, Franklin, 228, 229, 230 Pióro, Tadeusz, 115 Pisa, 15 Pisan DTC, 45, 47, 49, 198, 199, 200, 202, 211 Plarr, Victor, 144, 200 Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), 229 Pocket Book of Verse, The, 202 poem including history (motto), 27, 30, 74, 168 Poetry (Chicago), 12, 105, 141, 243 Poetry Archive, 257 Poetry Foundation, 257 Poetry Society of America, 197 Pope Sixtus IV, 45 Porter, William N., 143 A Year of Japanese Epigrams (1911), 144 post-structuralism, 112 Poświatowska, Halina, 115 Pound, Ezra ‘A Few Don’ts By an Imagiste’, 104, 144 ‘A Pact’, 127 ‘Ancient Wisdom, Rather Cosmic’, 190 ‘Cavalcanti 1910 / 1932’, 29 ‘Dolmetsch’, 62 ‘Fragment 1966’, 21 ‘Homage to Sextus Propertius’, 9 ‘How I Began’, 141, 142 ‘How to Read’, 104, 113 ‘I Gather the Limbs of Osiris’, 183, 184 ‘In a Station of the Metro’, 141, 142, 143, 145, 149, 187 ‘Itarii tsūshin’ (‘Letter from Italy’), 149 ‘Noh’ or Accomplishment, 141 ‘Patria Mia’, 127, 210, 215 ‘Provincia Deserta’, 160 ‘Provincialism the Enemy’, 185 ‘Tariff and Copyright’, 244 ‘The Constant Preaching to the Mob’, 113 ‘The Hellenists’, 9, 11 ‘The Serious Artist’, 107, 113, 114 ‘The Teacher’s Mission’, 113

285 ‘Three Cantos’, 147, 188, 189 ‘Totalitarian Scholarship and the New Paideuma’, 42, 96 ‘Translator’s Postscript’. See Gourmont, Remy de, 76, 198, 208 ‘Vorticism’, 141, 142, 144, 145, 146 ‘What I Feel about Walt Whitman’, 127 A Draft of Cantos XXXI-XLI, 96 A Draft of the Cantos 17–27, 96, 109, 147 A Draft of XVI Cantos, 96, 109 A Draft of XXX Cantos, 73, 96, 218, 261 ABC of Economics, 217, 218 ABC of Reading, 29, 72 Adams Cantos, 4, 5, 24 Antheil and the Treatise on Harmony, 60, 73 Canto I, 21, 81, 93, 164, 187, 260 Canto II, 81, 187, 189, 190 So-shu, 187, 188, 189, 191 Canto IV, 146, 147 Canto VIII, 216 Canto XIII, 163 Canto XIV, 29, 108 Canto XIX, 110 Canto XXI, 147 Canto XXVIII, 95 Canto XXIX, 147 Canto XXXI, 259 Canto XXXVI, 28 Canto XL, 127 Canto XLI, 218 Canto XLV, 61, 196, 197, 259, 260 Canto XLVI, 209 Canto XLVIII, 134 Canto XLIX, 147, 157, 160 Canto LI, 89 Canto LIII, 129, 130 Canto LIV, 92, 130 Canto LV, 130 Canto LVI, 131, 132 Canto LVII, 131 Canto LVIII, 131 Canto LIX, 132, 134 Canto LX, 132, 133, 135, 136, 137 Canto LXXII, 44, 47, 260 Cantos LXXII-LXXIII, 44 Canto LXXIII, 46 Canto LXXIV, 29, 47, 59, 61, 64, 199, 227 Canto LXXV, 26, 61, 66, 67 Canto LXXVI, 46, 47 Canto LXXVIII, 32 Canto LXXIX, 66 Canto LXXX, 202 Canto LXXXI, 61, 203, 259, 260 Canto LXXXII, 66 Canto LXXXIII, 204

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:13, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.019

286

Index

Pound, Ezra (cont.) Canto LXXXV, 19, 92 Canto LXXXVI, 229 Canto LXXXVIII, 231, 232, 234, 235, 236 Canto LXXXIX, 229, 231, 234, 235 Canto XC, 20, 234 Canto XCIII, 218 Canto XCIV, 32 Canto XCVI, 19, 32, 92 Canto XCVIII, 32, 135, 136 Canto XCIX, 32, 95, 135, 136 Canto C, 227, 228, 231, 232, 236 Canto CI, 136, 137 Canto CIII, 136, 228, 229, 230, 235 Canto CIV, 92 Canto CV, 13, 20 Canto CVII, 231 Cantos CVII-CIX, 32 Canto CX, 107, 136, 137 Canto CXII, 136 Canto CXIII, 136 Canto CXV, 107 Canto CXVI, 90 Cantos 110–116 (Fuck You Press), 106, 107, 108, 114 Cantos, The, 19, 20, 21, 27, 29, 30, 31, 40, 41, 42, 44, 49, 50, 57, 67, 73, 74, 76, 77, 78, 80, 81, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 111, 112, 113, 115, 146, 148, 157, 160, 163, 164, 165, 168, 169, 183, 188, 197, 199, 204, 218, 227, 228, 233, 234, 236, 257, 258, 259, 260, 261, 262, 263, 264, 265, 273, 274 annotation, 262 paradiso, 147 Cathay, 128, 136, 137, 157–60, 161, 163, 165, 166, 167, 169, 170, 272, 273 ‘Lament of the Frontier Guard’, 129 ‘Song of the Bowmen of Shu’, 128 ‘South-folk in Cloud Country’, 129 ‘South-Folk in Cold Country’, 130 Catholic Anthology, 78 Cavalcanti (opera), 57, 63, 64, 67 Certain Noble Plays of Japan, 141 Chinese History Cantos LIII-LXI, 128, 129, 130, 131, 134, 136, 169 Classic Anthology Defined by Confucius, The, 12 Collis o Heliconii, 57 Confucian Odes, 157, 160, 165–7, 170 Contributions to Periodicals, 266 copyright statute, 247 Des Imagistes, 78 didacticism, 13, 77

Drafts & Fragments of Cantos CX-CXVI, 13, 96, 107, 136, 146, 147 Elektra, 11, 12–13, 14–21 Eleven New Cantos XXI-XLI, 215 essays in Italian, 44 Exultations, 242 Ezra and Dorothy Pound: Letters in Captivity 1945–1946, 44 Ezra Pound to His Parents: Letters 1895–1929, 43, 44 Ezra Pound’s Poetry and Prose: Contributions to Periodicals, 44 Fenollosa notebooks, 43, 158, 160, 188, 272 Gaudier-Brzeska, 15, 94 Guide to Kulchur, 4, 26, 29, 59, 71, 77, 78, 98, 210, 212, 217, 218, 221 Guido Cavalcanti Rime, 96 Hell Cantos, 107 How to Read, 149 Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, 60, 62, 100, 111, 215 Indiscretions, 233 Italian Cantos LXXIV and LXXV, 45, 47, 48 Jefferson and/or Mussolini, 209, 216, 218 late Cantos, 19, 231 Le Testament, 57, 58, 59, 63, 64, 65, 66, 141 letters, general, 44 Literary Essays, 113 Lustra, 190 Make It New, 29, 218 musicology, 65, 66 absolute rhythm, 58, 60, 61 Great Bass, 58 Personae, 242 Pisan Cantos, 15, 19, 29, 42, 44, 45, 47, 48, 49, 50, 78, 89, 147, 157, 197, 198, 199, 200, 203, 204, 210, 231, 260 genetic and critical edition, 42 Pisan notebooks, 43, 49 political essays, 44 pre-publication documents, 42, 43, 91, 146, 147, 188 Provença, 242 radio broadcasts, 3, 44, 58, 108, 199, 216, 231 Rock-Drill, 16, 32, 40, 94, 136, 150, 164, 227, 231, 233 Social Credit, 218 Spirit of Romance, The, 28, 29, 183, 213 Thrones, 32, 34, 40, 135, 136, 227, 231, 237 Visiting Card, A, 210 wartime activities, 44 What Is Money For?, 209 Women of Trachis, The, 9, 11, 12, 13–14, 141 Yongzheng (Qing Dynasty Emperor), 135 Pound, Ezra, and Ernest Fenollosa

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:13, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.019

Index

287

The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, 79, 161, 162, 189 Pound, Ezra, and Olga Rudge The Blue Spill, 273 Pound, Omar, 43, 44 Preda, Roxana The Cantos Project, 262, 263, 264 Pressman, Jessica, 80, 81 print culture, 266 Priscian, 30 Privy Council, 241 Project Gutenberg, 266 propaganda, 217 prosody, 32, 33, 34, 166 Prynne, J. H., 113, 114 Pseudo-Dionysius, 30 The Celestial Hierarchy, 30 Putnam, George Haven, 243, 247, 250 Putnam, Herbert, 247 Pythagoras, 58

late-classical, 27 Palazzo Venezia, 218 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 148, 228 Roosevelt, Theodore, 242 Rosenthal, M. L., 109 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 262 Rouse, W. H. D., 10, 92 Rousselot, L’Abbé, 65 royalties, 245, 248 royalty, 241 Rozewicz, Tadeusz, 115 Rudge, Olga, 21, 26, 43, 44, 59, 60, 67, 196, 199, 218, 273 Rummel, Walter, 196 Russell, Charles Edward, 249 Russell, John, 249 Russell, Peter, 42 Russia, 132, 183, 213, 227, 245, 246 Moscow, 228 Petrograd, 227

Qian, Zhaoming, 79 Quinn, John, 79, 243

Saint-Amour, Paul, 62 Sanders, Ed, 106, 107, 108, 109, 114, 116 1968: A History in Verse, 108 America: A History in Verse, 108 Fuck You Press, 109 Fuck You/ A Magazine of the Arts, 107 Peace Eye (bookstore), 109 Sangū Makoto, 149 Anthology of New English Verse (1921), 149 Sekitoku (‘Letters’), 149 Sant’Ambrogio, Liguria, 199 Santayana, George, 96, 201 Sanzio, Raphael, 184 Sappho, 3, 29 Satie, Erik, 57 Saturday Review of Literature, 197 Saussy, Haun, 162, 272 Sawler, Trevor, 260, 261, 262 Sayers, Dorothy, 273 Schafer, R. Murray, 57, 58, 59 Schaffer, Pierre, 58 scholarly editing, 2, 272, 273 sculpture, 72, 74, 76, 80, 82, 91, 200 Seaboard White Citizens Council (SWCC), 233 Second World War, 149, 161, 209, 211 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 196, 197 Seferis, Giorgos, 258 Seguy, Robin, 261, 262 setting copy, 49 sexuality, 196, 197, 198 non-normative, 199, 202 Sforza, Caterina, 45, 47 Sforza, Galeazzo, 45 Shaheen, Mohammad, 116

Rabaté, Jean-Michel, 91, 183 Rachewiltz, Mary de, 43, 96, 218 racial integration, 228, 229 schools, 233 racial segregation, 228 radio, 58, 64, 66, 68 Rainey, Lawrence, 44, 46, 78, 88, 212 Ramazani, Jahan, 186, 189, 190 Randolph, John, 231, 232, 233, 234, 235, 236 Rankine, Claudia Citizen, An American Lyric, 115 Rapallo, 59, 148, 199, 211, 273 Ravenna, 46 Ray, Man, 80 Reck, Michael, 90, 92 Redman, Tim, 44, 259, 260, 262 Renan, Ernest, 31 renga, 143 haikai renga, 143 reparative reading, 196, 197, 204 Rhys, Ernest, 201 Riding, Laura, and Robert Graves, 78 Rimini, 46, 209 Risorgimento, 215 Robbins, Bruce, 182, 185 Roberts, David D., 211 Robinson, Kit, 112 Rock, Joseph F., 136 Rockwell, George Lincoln, 236 Romance philology, 28, 29, 104 Rome, 209, 211, 213, 219, 230

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:13, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.019

288

Index

Shakespear, Dorothy, 44, 196, 199, 232, 233, 236 Shepard, William P., 29 Sherry, Vincent, 75, 76 Shillingsburg, Peter, 51, 90 Sicily, 33, 34 Islamic heritage, 33 Norman Kingdom, 35 Rashidun Caliphate, 34 Siculo-Arabic poetry, 34 Sieburth, Richard, 199, 260, 262 Silliman, Ron, 112, 114 Ketjak, 112 Tjanting, 112 Sinocentrism, 127, 128, 129, 130, 131 Siraganian, Lisa, 75, 76, 78, 81 Sitwell, Edith, 60 Façade, 208 slavery (United States), 228, 229, 230, 234, 235 Small, Maynard and Company, 242 Social Credit, 211, 216 Society of Authors, 249 sodomy, 196, 197 Solberg, Thorvald, 247 Solt, John, 150 Songhai Empire, 183 Sophocles, 9, 11, 13, 14, 16 Sordello, 28, 187 soundscape, 57, 58, 65, 68 South Carolina, 230 Soviet communism, 211 St Elizabeths Hospital, Washington, D. C., 12, 14, 15, 197, 214, 227, 232, 234, 236 States’ Rights, 228, 229, 230, 231, 232, 234, 235, 236 Stauder, Ellen Keck, 67 Stein, Gertrude, 112 Sternhell, Zeev, 219 stilnovisti, 30, 33, 34, 35 Stock, Noel, 40, 227, 231 Stoicheff, Peter, 13, 107 Stravinsky, Igor, 57 Sumner, Charles, 230 Surette, Leon, 212 Sutherland, Kathryn, 51 Sutherland, Keston, 106, 113, 114, 116 ‘In Memory of Your Occult Convolutions’, 113 Odes to TL61P, 114 Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 262 Symbolism, 200 tanka, 142, 145 Tanselle, G. Thomas, 91, 92 Taoism, 160 Tate Britain, 82 Tate Gallery

Pound’s Artists, 74 Taylor, Richard, 259 technology, 79, 80, 81 and art, 80 and new media, 80 telegraph, 68 Tempio Malatestiano, 215 Ten Eyck, David, 42, 89 Terrell, Carroll F., 190, 231, 236, 259, 262 Companion to The Cantos of Ezra Pound, 258, 263, 265 text as process, 42, 96 Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), 261 textual corruptions, 48, 89, 91, 94, 97 textual criticism, 30, 90 Anglo-American, 91 textual estrangement, 163 textual gloss, 259, 260, 263, 264, 265, 272 Thorpe, James, 91 Thring, G. Herbert, 249, 250 Tibet, 128, 132, 137 Lhasa, 133 Tiffany, Daniel, 107 Tigullian concerts (Rapallo), 26 Timms, Edward, 209 Toledo, school of translation, 33 toponym, 261 totalitarianism, 217, 219 translation, 17, 104 translation of The Cantos Karkowski, Czeslaw (Polish), 115 Kostets’kyi, Ihor (Ukrainian), 115 Probstein, Ian (Russian), 115 Sindolic, Vojo (Serbo-Croatian), 115 transnationalism, 181, 182, 183, 185, 186, 187, 189, 191, 192 treason, 197, 198, 199 Troubadours, 30, 33, 34, 35, 59, 63 Tucker, St. George, 232, 233, 234 Tungning Kingdom of Taiwan, 133 Twombly, Cy, 72, 74 Tyro, 187, 190 United States Civil War, 230, 235 United States Congress, 228, 230, 248, 249 United States Constitution, 229, 232, 241 Copyright Clause, 248 United States Government Committee on Public Information (USCPI), 249 United States of America, 127, 148, 159, 210, 231 United States Supreme Court, 232 United States Treasury Department, 246 University of New Brunswick, 260

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:13, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.019

Index University of North Carolina, 259 University of Paris, 31, 33 University of Pennsylvania, 27, 28 University of Texas at Austin, 43 University of Virginia, 261 Unwin, George, 247 Unwin, Sir Stanley, 246 USSR, 231 usury, 106, 196, 201, 208, 209, 235 van Buren, Martin, 231, 236 van Rijn, Rembrandt, 184 Vega, Lope de, 27 Velasquez, Diego, 184 Venice, 76 Venus (Greek god), 199 Vichy government, 211 Vidal, Piere, 146 Vietnam War, 108 Village Voice, The, 112 Villalón, Fernando Pérez, 115 Villon, François, 57, 61, 63 Virginia, 231, 232, 233, 234, 236 Constitution, 233 Rotunda Club, Richmond, 236 Williamsburg, 234 virtù, 30, 31, 216 visual culture, 79 visual field, 72, 74, 75, 76, 77, 79, 82 Vivaldi, Antonio, 59, 96 Vorticism, 15, 73, 74, 79, 81, 82, 112, 149, 273 VOU, 149 Wagner, Richard, 60, 61, 73 Waley, Arthur, 145, 159, 166 Walkowitz, Rebecca, 182 Wanjina, 15 Warhol, Andy, 107 Warren Supreme Court, 228, 232, 233 Warren, Earl, 228 Watten, Barrett, 112

289

Weill, Kurt Threepenny Opera, 63 Whistler, James McNeill, 73, 184 Whitman, Walt, 127, 201, 202 ‘Song of Myself ’, 113 Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, 82 Wikipedia, 257, 261, 265 Wilde, Oscar ‘Ballad of Reading Gaol’, 203 Picture of Dorian Gray, The (1890), 200 Salome (1891), 200 Williams, John R., 79 Williams, William Carlos, 76, 80, 105, 110, 214, 215, 258 Paterson, 106 Woolf, Virginia Jacob’s Room, 208 Worcester Polytechnic Institute, 261 world literature, 167 World Wide Web, 258 Worringer, Wilhelm, 76 Wu, Qiyao, 79 Xie, Ming, 79 Yamazaki Kagotarō Haikaishidan (‘A Discussion of Haikai’s History’), 143 Yang Lian, 157, 168, 169, 170 Yangtze River, 188 Yeats, W. B., 104, 187, 200, 202, 203 Yellow Book, The, 200 Yellow River, 133 Yolande (Isabella) of Jerusalem, 33 Young-hae Chang Heavy Industries, 81 Zhejiang Province, 133 Zinnes, Harriet, 74 Zukofsky, Louis, 105, 112, 114 ‘A’, 106

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Universite de Montreal, on 23 Jul 2021 at 02:03:13, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.019