EP/DP Ezra and Dorothy Pound: Letters in Captivity, 1945–1946, ed. Omar Pound and Robert Spoo (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999)
EP/GV Ezra Pound—Giambattista Vicari. Il fare aperto. Lettere 1939–1971, a cura di Anna Busetto Vicari e Luca Cesari (Milan: Archinto, 2000)
EP/WB The Correspondence of Ezra Pound and Senator William Borah, ed. Sarah C. Holmes (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001)
EP/WW Ezra Pound’s Letters to William Watt, [ed.] with an introduction and notes by William Watt (Marquette: Northern Michigan University Press, 2001)
Canti postumi Canti postumi, a cura di Massimo Bacigalupo (Milano: Arnoldo Mondadori, 2002; II edizione 2012)
P&T Ezra Pound: Poems and Translations [selected by Richard Sieburth] (New York: Library of America, 2003)
Cavalcanti Cavalcanti. A sung dramedy in 3 acts, the full score ed. Robert Hughes and Margaret Fisher, in Robert Hughes and Margaret Fisher, Cavalcanti: A Perspective on the Music of Ezra Pound (CPMEP) (Emeryville, Calif.: Second Evening Art, 2003)
CVW Complete Violin Works of Ezra Pound, ed. with commentary by Robert Hughes, introduction by Margaret Fisher (Emeryville, Calif.: Second Evening Art, 2004)
Moscardino Enrico Pea, Moscardino, translated from the Italian by EP [1941] (New York: Archipelago Books, 2004)
Collis Margaret Fisher, The Recovery of Ezra Pound’s Third Opera: ‘Collis O Heliconii’ [includes performance edition] (Emeryville, Calif.: Second Evening Art, 2005)
Carte italiana Ezra Pound. Carte italiana 1930–1944, letteratura e note, a cura di Luca Cesari (Milano: Archinto, 2005)
EWPP Early Writings. Poems & Prose, ed. Ira Nadel (New York: Penguin Books, 2005)
EPEC Ezra Pound’s Economic Correspondence, 1933–1940, ed. and annotated by Roxana Preda (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2007)
Testament I Ezra Pound: Le Testament, ‘Paroles de Villon’—1926 ‘Salle Pleyel’ concert excerpts & 1933 Final Version complete opera, Margaret Fisher and Robert Hughes editors, performance editions (Emeryville, Calif.: Second Evening Art, 2008)
CWC II 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)
EP/CF Ezra Pound’s Chinese Friends. Stories in Letters, ed. Zhaoming Qian (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008)
NSPT New Selected Poems & Translations, ed. and annotated with an afterword by Richard Sieburth (New York: New Directions, 2010)
EP/Parents Ezra Pound to his Parents: Letters 1895–1929, ed. Mary de Rachewiltz, A. David Moody, and Joanna Moody (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010)
D&F facsimile Ezra Pound, Drafts & Fragments: Facsimile Notebooks 1958–1959 (New York: Glenn Horowitz, Bookseller, Inc., 2010)
Testament II Ezra Pound: Le Testament: 1923 facsimile edition edited by George Antheil, with notes for the 1931 BBC radio broadcast, ed. Margaret Fisher and Robert Hughes (Emeryville, Calif.: Second Evening Art, 2011)
EP/SN One Must Not Go Altogether with the Tide: The Letters of Ezra Pound and Stanley Nott, ed. and with essays by Miranda B. Hickman (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2011)
Writings by Others
Abbreviations are used only for books referred to frequently in the notes. For all other books and articles full details are given at the first mention, and a recognizable shortened form is used thereafter.
Barnard Mary Barnard, Assault on Mount Helicon: A Literary Memoir (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984)
Carpenter Humphrey Carpenter, A Serious Character: The Life of Ezra Pound (Faber & Faber, 1988)
CPMEP Robert Hughes and Margaret Fisher, Cavalcanti: A Perspective on the Music of Ezra Pound (Emeryville, Calif.: Second Evening Art, 2003)
Conover Anne Conover, Olga Rudge and Ezra Pound (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001)
Discretions Mary de Rachewiltz, Discretions (Faber & Faber, 1971; Boston: Atlantic-Little Brown, 1971; New York: New Directions, 1975, 2005)
EPRO Margaret Fisher, Ezra Pound’s Radio Operas: The BBC Experiments, 1931–1933 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002)
ESC Ego Scriptor Cantilenae: The Music of Ezra Pound, Robert Hughes conductor and musical director, Margaret Fisher author, containing audio CD (Other Minds OM 1005-2) and booklet (San Francisco: Other Minds Inc., 2003)
EP: Poet I A. David Moody, Ezra Pound: Poet. A Portrait of the Man & his Work, i: The Young Genius 1885–1920 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007)
Farrell Nicholas Farrell, Mussolini: A New Life (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2003)
Foster: 2003 R. F. Foster, W. B. Yeats: A Life, ii: The Arch-Poet 1915–1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003)
Gallup Donald Gallup, Ezra Pound: A Bibliography (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1983)
Homberger Eric Homberger, ed., Ezra Pound: The Critical Heritage (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972)
Makin Peter Makin, Pound’s Cantos (George Allen & Unwin, 1985)
Norman: 1960 Charles Norman, Ezra Pound (New York: Macmillan, 1960)
Redman Tim Redman, Ezra Pound and Italian Fascism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991)
Stock: 1970 Noel Stock, The Life of Ezra Pound (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970)
Terrell, Companion Carroll F. Terrell, A Companion to the Cantos of Ezra Pound, 2 vols. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980, 1984)
Tytell John Tytell, Ezra Pound: The Solitary Volcano (Bloomsbury, 1987)
TSEL I The Letters of T. S. Eliot, i: 1898–1922, revised edn., ed. Valerie Eliot and Hugh Haughton (Faber & Faber, 2009)
TSEL II The Letters of T. S. Eliot, ii: 1923–1925, ed. Valerie Eliot and Hugh Haughton (Faber & Faber, 2009)
WCW/JL William Carlos Williams and James Laughlin: Selected Letters, ed. Hugh Witemeyer (New York: W. W. Norton, 1989)
Wilhelm: 1990 J. J. Wilhelm, Ezra Pound in London and Paris, 1908–1925 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1990)
Wilhelm: 1994 J. J. Wilhelm, Ezra Pound, the Tragic Years, 1925–1972 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994)
Zapponi Niccolò Zapponi, L’Italia di Ezra Pound (Roma: Bulzoni Editore, 1976)
Other Abbreviations
AB Agnes Bedford
ACH Alice Corbin Henderson
AMacL Archibald MacLeish
AVM Arthur Valentine Moore
BB Basil Bunting
Beinecke Ezra Pound Papers. Yale Collection of American Literature. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Yale University
Beinecke/OR Olga Rudge Papers. Yale Collection of American Literature. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Yale University
Dial The Dial (ed. Scofield Thayer, Sibley Watson, Marianne Moore, New York, 1920–9)
DP Dorothy Shakespear Pound
DS Dorothy Shakespear
EEC E. E. Cummings
EP Ezra Loomis [Weston] Pound
FMF Ford Madox Ford [FMH up to 1919]
FMH Ford Madox Hueffer
G-B Henri Gaudier-Brzeska
Hamilton Ezra Pound Collection, Special Collections, Burke Library, Hamilton College, Clinton, NY
HD Hilda Doolittle
HLP Homer Loomis Pound
HM Harriet Monroe
HRC Ezra Pound Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas at Austin
IB Iris Barry
IWP Isabel Weston Pound
JJ James Joyce
JL James Laughlin
JQ John Quinn
Lilly Pound Mansucripts, The Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington
LR The Little Review (1914–29)
LZ Louis Zukofsky
MB Mary Barnard
MCA Margaret C. Anderson
MdR Mary de Rachewiltz
MM Marianne Moore
NA The New Age (ed. A. R. Orage, 1907–23)
NEW New English Weekly
OR O
lga Rudge
OS Olivia Shakespear
OSP Omar Shakespear Pound
Pai Paideuma. A Journal Devoted to Ezra Pound Scholarship (1972–2009)
Poetry Poetry: A Magazine of Verse (Chicago, 1912–36)
TSE Thomas Stearns Eliot
UPenn Ezra Pound Collections, Van Pelt Library, University of Pennsylvania
VBJ Viola Baxter Jordan
WBY W. B. Yeats
WCW William Carlos Williams
WL Wyndham Lewis
WR Walter Rummel
W&W E. P. Walkiewicz and Hugh Witemeyer
NOTES
PART ONE: 1921–1932
1. A YEAR IN PARIS, 1921–1924
Pound’s nine ‘Paris Letters’ contributed to the Dial between September 1921 and February 1923 have served as a guide to the background of the first section of this chapter. In the notes to this chapter ‘Paris Letter’ will be shortened to ‘P.L.’
3 too ‘northern’: EP to Ottoline Morrell, 7 July [1922] (HRC).
his senses open…‘moving energies’: see EP, ‘Cavalcanti’, LE 152 and 154.
‘solid year’: EP to WCW, 2 Feb. 1921, L (1951) 229.
in bed with flu: EP to Thayer, 10 Feb. 1921, EP/Dial 207.
‘for the first time’: EP to FMF, ‘6/4/1921’, EP/FMF 55.
His typewriter: EP’s letters from Saint-Raphaël, as to FMF and the Dial, were handwritten, while those from Paris or London were generally typewritten.
‘Palm leaf hut’: EP to ACH, 25 Jan. 1921, EP/ACH [223].
‘five hours’: EP to AB, Mar. 1921, cited Carpenter 383.
‘hand in sling’: EP to Thayer, ‘21/3/21’, EP/Dial 213.
silver ash tray…‘Paris next week’: EP to FMF, ‘6/4/1921’, EP/FMF 55.
‘not much space’: EP to FMF, 22 May [1921], EP/FMF 58.
4 ‘dismissal’: EP to Thayer, 19 Apr. [1921], EP/Dial 216.
‘no means’: EP to MCA, [22? Apr. 1921], EP/LR 265—see also EP/Dial 267.
‘special summer number’: EP to FMF, 11 May [1921], EP/FMF 56.
‘intelligent nucleus’: EP to FMF, 22 May [1921], EP/FMF 58.
‘in his atelier’: EP, ‘Parisian Literature’, Literary Review [of the New York Evening Post], I.49 (13 Aug. 1921) 7. Re no abstract ideas see also EP’s ‘Brancusi’ (details below).
‘doing what Gaudier’: EP to FMF, [Aug.? 1921], EP/FMF 61.
‘Where Gaudier’ and rest of paragraph: EP, ‘Brancusi’, LR VIII.1 (Autumn 1921) 3–7.
‘infinite beauty’: EP, ‘P.L. January 1922’, Dial LXXII.2 (Feb. 1922) 188.
‘who have cast off’: EP, ‘P.L. January 1922’, Dial LXXII.2 (Feb. 1922) 188.
‘sort of Socratic’: EP, ‘Parisian Literature’, Literary Review [of the New York Evening Post], I.49 (13 Aug. 1921) 7.
nettoyage: EP, ‘P.L. September 1921’, Dial LXXI.4 (Oct. 1921) 457.
‘contemporary average’: EP, ‘P.L. August 1922’, Dial LXXIII.3 (Sept. 1922) 333.
5 ‘civilization’: EP, ‘P.L. February 1923’, Dial LXXIV.3 (Mar. 1923) 279.
‘this new Brancusi’: EP to MCA, 4 May [1921], EP/LR 273.
The ‘average mind’: EP, ‘P.L. August 1922’, Dial LXXIII.3 (Sept. 1922) 333. Note: I have substituted ‘Creon’ for ‘Oedipus’—the reason will become apparent.
Sophocles’ Antigone, to end of paragraph: EP, ‘P.L. December 1922’, Dial LXXIV. 3 (Feb. 1923) 278–9.
‘power to do him evil’ et seq.: EP, ‘P.L. December 1922’, Dial LXXIV.3 (Feb. 1923) 279.
Upward’s suicide: see A. D. Moody, ‘Pound’s Allen Upward’, Pai 4.1 (1975) 62–5.
6 ‘function of poetry’: EP, [Answers to three questions], Chapbook 27 (July 1922) 17–18.
Brancusi’s ‘universe’: EP, ‘P.L. December 1921’, Dial LXXII.1 (Jan. 1922) 77.
‘cavern’: EP, ‘P.L. December 1921’, Dial LXXII.1 (Jan. 1922) 77.
‘junk-shops’: EP, ‘Brancusi’, LR VIII.1 (Autumn 1921) 7.
‘clap-trap’…‘galleries’: EP, ‘P.L. September 1921’, Dial LXXI.4 (Oct. 1921) 462.
saw Braque: EP to WL, 27 Apr. 1921, EP/WL 128; also to JQ, 21 May 1921, EP&VA 246.
‘met Picasso’: EP to IWP, 8 Jan. 1922, EP/Parents 493.
Léger: see EP, ‘D’Artagnan Twenty Years After’ (1937), in S Pr 427–8.
‘at Picabia’s’: EP, ‘D’Artagnan Twenty Years After’ (1937), in S Pr 427.
Parade: ‘a ballet extravaganza commissioned by Diaghilev for his Russian ballet and written by Jean Cocteau.…Cocteau persuaded Picasso to do the stage sets, great Cubist sculptures that looked like costumes. The music was by Erik Satie…[and] incorporated the sounds of a typewriter, a ship siren, machine guns, and the cries of a circus barker.…The programme note…by Apollinaire…introduced the word “surrealism”’ (John Tytell, Ezra Pound: The Solitary Volcano (Bloomsbury, 1987), pp. 161–2).
7 ‘Satie’s Socrate’: EP to AB, [April? 1921], L (1951) 231.
Natalie Barney: details in this paragraph drawn from ‘Ezra Pound: Letters to Natalie Barney’, ed. with commentary by Richard Sieburth, Pai 5.2 (1976) [279]–95; also from Wilhelm: 1990, 261–2. EP recalled her salon in a 1933 note, ‘The Violinist Olga Rudge’, EP&M 342–3.
‘a good piss’: WCW, Autobiography (1951) (New York: New Directions, 1967), pp. 228–9.
‘got out of life’: from Barney’s own words, cited by EP in ‘P.L. September 1921’, Dial LXXI.4 (Oct. 1921) 458, and from EP’s paraphrase in 84/539.
‘velvet jacket’: Sylvia Beach, Shakespeare and Company (Faber & Faber, 1960), pp. 38–9.
‘Rooseveltian voice’: MCA, My Thirty Years War, pp. 243–4, as cited EP/LR 300.
8 Gertrude Stein: see Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933) (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1966), p. 217.
talked him down: see Norman: 1960, 246—citing Scofield Thayer.
‘mended a cigarette box’: Beach, Shakespeare and Company, pp. 38–9.
‘wonderfully entertaining’: E. E. Cummings to Charles Norman, 1959, in Norman: 1960, 247.
‘a good talker’: Sisley Huddleston, Bohemian Literary and Social Life in Paris: Salons, Cafés, Studios (Geo. G. Harrap & Co.,1928), p. 97.
Nancy Cox McCormack: this recollection is from an extract from her unpublished manuscript, ‘Ezra Pound in the Paris Years’, reproduced with permission from The Poetry/Rare Books Collection, University Libraries, State University of New York at Buffalo, in Tytell, Ezra Pound: The Solitary Volcano, p. 171.
did not enjoy…Paris: see, for example, WCW, Autobiography, p. 226.
the way he danced: Caresse Crosby’s account in her The Passionate Years (New York: Dial, 1953), p. 225 is taken from Wilhelm: 1990, 290–1.
9 ‘one of the spectacles’: Sisley Huddleston, Bohemian Literary and Social Life in Paris, p. 144.
Nature, genius, and the state of the world
9 Isis and Osiris: see EP: Poet I 169.
Imagisme: see EP: Poet I 225–9.
Vorticism: see EP: Poet I 255–6.
mind and…nature…one and the same: Whitman, of course, was there in his fashion in Song of Myself well before EP; and, before Whitman, Emerson, guided by Carlyle and Coleridge and Wordsworth, had been on the same track. But Pound had to find his own way in the terms of his own time to identify human genius with the organic energy of the universe.
‘biological basis’ etc.: EP, ‘Remy de Gourmont: A distinction’ (1920), LE 343–4.
10 ‘rush order’: EP to AB, 21 June 1921 (Lilly).
‘Speak not’: EP to DP, 23 July 1921 (Lilly).
‘supplementary chapter’: EP to HLP, 28 June 1921, EP/Parents 486.
‘There might be’: NPL (1926), p. 55.
he speculated: ‘Translator’s Postscript’, NPL (1926), pp. 169–80.
‘scientifically demonstrable’: EP, ‘The Wisdom of Poetry’ (1912), S Pr 332—see EP: Poet I 243.
one life in all: Spinoza, wrestling with that conception in th
e 1670s and coming at it from the perspectives of theology and logic, determined that all individual beings are ‘modes’ of the one universal being. The modern physicist has no problem conceiving of everything we know or can guess at from the boson and the quark to the whole cosmos of uncountable galaxies as made up of the one lot of moving energies—though when he comes to consider just how those stellar energies translate themselves into his calculations about them he is as much in the dark as Pound was.
‘various statements’: EP, ‘The New Therapy’, NA XXX.20 (16 Mar. 1922) 259–60—rest of paragraph is from this article.
11 subject to the limited knowledge…of his time: The science of genetics in 1921 was a long way from conceiving of DNA. The chromosome had been identified as the carrier of genetic characteristics; but the exact nature of the gene and how it functioned had yet to be discovered. Further, the rational hypothesis that both parents contributed to the genetic makeup of their offspring had yet to be proved and was still a matter of debate.
conventional prejudices: paragraph based on ‘Translator’s Postscript’, NPL (1926), pp. 170–1, and ‘The New Therapy’. Re Marianne Moore being not a female chaos see EP: Poet I 345.
Canto II: seeing the light
11 Dionysos: ref. C. Kerényi, Dionysos: Archetypal Image of Indestructible Life (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1976); Oxford Classical Dictionary, 3rd edn. (1996); J. Lemprière, A Classical Dictionary (George Routledge and Sons, 1904).
12 ‘You rely on force’: Euripides, The Bacchae [with other plays], trans. Philp Vellacott (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1954), p. 191.
Ovid’s version: in Metamorphoses—see Golding’s version Bk. III, ll. 642–921.
13 Homeric hymn: in Loeb Classical Library, Hesiod, The Homeric Hymns and Homerica, with an English translation by Hugh G. Evelyn-White (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1974), pp. 428–33.
Odysseus calling up Tiresias: on this see EP: Poet I 314–15.
‘it shouts aloud’: EP to W. H. D. Rouse, 23 May 1935, L (1951) 363.
14 ‘cord welter’: ‘cold-welter’ is an unfortunately persistent misprint.
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