Ezra Pound: Poet

by A. David Moody

  ‘manifestoe’: TSE to EP, 19 July 1922, TSEL I, 708.

  ‘cannot jeopardise’: TSE to EP, 28 July 1922, TSEL I 712–13.

  ‘If you and I’: TSE to EP, [3 Nov. 1922], TSEL I 771. See also Vivien Eliot to EP, 2 Nov. [1922], TSEL I 770–1.

  ‘NO periodical’: EP to TSE, 4 Nov. [1922], TSEL I 773.

  ‘not thinking’: TSE to EP, [15 Nov. 1922], TSEL I 778–9.

  10,000 francs: mentioned also in EP to DP, 21 July 1922 (Lilly); and EP to JQ, 10 Aug. 1922, EP/JQ 215.

  a short article: copied in TSEL I 789–90n.

  ‘libellous falsehood’: TSE to Gilbert Seldes, 1 Dec. 1922, TSEL I 797.

  letter denying: TSE to Editor, Liverpool Daily Post, [30 Nov. 1922], as in TSEL I 794–5.

  39 did accept: TSE’s June 1923 stamped receipt for £20 received from EP/Bel Esprit is in the Beinecke Pound archive (with letters from TSE to EP). In this connection see TSE to EP, 14 and 20 May 1923, TSEL II 133–4, 139; further, on 21 July 1923 EP wrote to DP that he had ‘French cheque for 1000 francs for T.S.E.’ (Lilly).

  ‘entoiled’: EP, ‘P.L. October 1922’, Dial LXXIII.5 (Nov. 1922) 550.

  A renaissance man

  39 a postcard: see EP/LR 283 for both the p.c. and the LR’s response.

  ‘Dear Dad’: EP to HLP, 12 Apr. [1922], EP/Parents 497–8.

  ‘I shall be dead’: EP to JQ, 12 Apr. 1922, EP/JQ 208.

  40 ‘no respect’: EP to [? MCA], [13 July 1922], EP/LR 287.

  travelling in Italy: details of dates and places from EP’s letters to his parents, AB, WL, JQ, Thayer, and WCW.

  [parents] retiring: EP to IWP, 8 Jan. 1922, EP/Parents 493.

  ‘busy spring’: EP to JQ, 20 June 1922, as extracted in Daniel D. Pearlman, The Barb of Time (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969), p. 302.

  ‘cuban pennies’: EP to DP, 14 July 1922 (Lilly). See also EP to HLP, [July 1922], EP/Parents 500; and 12/53.

  ‘4, probably 5’: EP to AB, 29 June 1922 (Lilly).

  ‘five cantos’: EP to JQ, 4, 5 July 1922, EP/JQ 213.

  Morand’s…fictions: see EP, ‘Paris Letter. September 1921’, Dial LXXI.4 (Oct. 1921) 462; and Gallup: 1983, 448–9. EP’s translations were published as Fancy Goods and Open All Night: Stories by Paul Morand by New Directions in 1984.

  ‘Tami Koumé’: taken from printed invitation on verso of which are notes for Malatesta cantos, in folder of drafts of 1922–3 (Beinecke). Tami Koumé, a Japanese painter Pound had known in London, was killed in the 1924 Tokyo earthquake.

  ‘gt. gland sleuth’: EP to HLP, [July 1922], EP/Parents 500.

  boxing lesson: see WL, ‘Ezra Pound’, in Ezra Pound: A Collection of Essays, ed. Peter Russell, p. 261; for Hemingway’s account see his A Moveable Feast (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1966), pp. 82–3.

  41 ‘pretty unhealthy’…‘Obsequies’: Sibley Watson to Thayer, 29 July 1922, EP/Dial 245.

  ‘damn fit’: EP to JQ, 4, 5 July 1922, EP/JQ 213.

  people…flooding: details from EP to DP, 17 July 1923 (Lilly); and Wilhelm: 1990, 316–17.

  fifty-page booklets: for details see Gallup: 1983, 34–5; and PD (1958), 50–1. Six books were published in this ‘Inquest’, among them EP’s Indiscretions, WCW’s The Great American Novel, FMF’s Women & Men, and Hemingway’s In our Time (1924). See further EP to FMF, 1 Aug. [1922], EP/FMF 68–9; and EP to WCW, [? 1 Aug. 1922], EP/WCW 63–4.

  some sort of affaire: Nancy Cunard’s letters to Pound in 1922 and 1923 are in the Lilly Pound collection. See James J. Wilhelm, ‘Nancy Cunard: A Sometime Flame, a Stalwart Friend’, Pai 19.1–2 (1990) 202–12.

  ‘don’t at present’: EP to DP, 21 July 1922 (Lilly).

  ‘swell out’: EP to HLP, [July 1922], EP/Parents 500.

  The first draft: all the drafts referred to are in Beinecke.

  Eliot’s Tiresias: see The Waste Land Part III, and note to line 218.

  42 Malatesta managed: GK 159. The best account of Sigismondo’s Tempio, with illustrations, is Adrian Stokes’s Stones of Rimini (1934). Hugh Kenner wrote a fine account of visiting it—see ‘The Hiddenmost Wonder’ in his Historical Fictions (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1990), pp. 3–11. For a near contemporary account of the state of Italy in Sigismondo’s time see Niccolo Machiavelli’s History of Florence and the Affairs of Italy, Bk. VI.

  ‘bhloomin historic character’: EP to IWP, 1 Nov. 1924, EP/Parents 546.

  ‘boisterousness’: EP to JQ, 10 Aug. 1922, EP/JQ 217.

  ‘some…vigour’: EP, ‘P.L. October 1922’, Dial LXXIII.5 (Nov. 1922) 554. Re D’Annunzio’s seizing Fiume etc., see Nicholas Farrell, Mussolini: A New Life (Weidenfield & Nicolson, 2003), pp. 84–9.

  ‘openly volitionist’: GK 194.

  43 at Excideuil: see EP: Poet I 382 and 322.

  ‘a wing’: this would be a grasshopper in flight. Cf. 17/79; also WCW in Paterson Bk. II.

  44 ‘no other’: GK frontispiece.

  ‘immense panorama’: TSE, ‘Ulysses, Order and Myth’ (1923), in Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot, ed. Frank Kermode (Faber & Faber, 1975), p. 177.

  ‘cut his notch’: GK 159. In a review of Adrian Stokes’s Stones of Rimini (Criterion XIII.52 (Apr. 1934) 496), EP wrote of Sigismondo’s Tempio, ‘As a human record, as a record of courage, nothing can touch it.’

  ‘shut in by battles’: EP to JQ, 10 Aug. 1922, EP/JQ 217.

  ‘Life was interesting’…‘fascio?’: J/M 49–51.

  Steffens…talking: see ‘Ezra Pound’ [a letter], Morada 3 (1930) 90; 16/74–5; and Lincoln Steffens, The Autobiography (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1931), pp. 750–1 and 760–1.

  ‘ne veux: ‘Kongo Roux’, [391, 15 (10 July 1921):] Le Pilhaou-Thibaou [10].

  ‘measured moments’: EP to Felix Schelling, 8 July 1922, L (1951) 249.

  45 ‘Christianisme’: ‘Kongo Roux’, [391, 15 (10 July 1921):] Le Pilhaou-Thibaou [10].

  ‘Damn remnants’: EP to HM, 16 July 1922, L (1951) 250–1.

  ‘reading up’: EP to JQ, 10 Aug. 1922, EP/JQ 217.

  46 ‘got three’: EP to HLP, 25 Dec. [1922], EP/Parents 505. See also EP to Watson, 4 Jan. 1923, EP/Dial 255–6; and Watson to Thayer, 10 Mar. 1923, EP/Dial 260–1.

  58ter: call slip among drafts and notes for Malatesta cantos (Beinecke). Other details in this paragraph, including correspondence with book dealers, drawn from these notes; also from Ben D. Kimpel and T. C. Duncan Eaves, ‘Pound’s Research for the Malatesta Cantos’, Pai 11.3 (1982) 406–19.

  ‘“Te cavero”’: see 10/43.

  passport: reproduced facing p. 54 of Il viaggio di Ezra Pound, a cura di Luca Gallesi ([Milano]: Biblioteca di via Senato Edizioni, 2002)—catalogue of a ‘bio- bibliographical’ exhibition in the Sala Serpota, Biblioteca di via Senato, 17 Sept.–14 Oct. 2002.

  ‘chewing along’: EP to IWP, 19 Jan. [1923], EP/Parents 506.

  toured…battlefields: see Wilhelm: 1990, 322.

  ‘Geographical verification’: EP to JQ, 17 Feb. 1923, as extracted in Pearlman, The Barb of Time, p. 302.

  ‘documents preserved’: EP draft note to ‘your eminence’, 2 Feb. 1923, with drafts and notes for Malatesta cantos (Beinecke).

  dance with postcards: the postcards and letters exchanged in Mar. 1923, now in Lilly, are the primary source of information about EP’s movements in the following paragraphs.

  47 ‘Somewhat full day’: EP to DP, 8 Mar. 1923 (private collection).

  ‘highest quality’: EP, ‘Possibilities of Civilization: What the Small Town Can Do’, Delphian Quarterly, XIX.3 (July 1936) 16.

  ‘Hotel-keeper’: EP to DP, [21 Mar. 1923] (Lilly). On this incident see J/M 26–7.

  ‘descended’: EP to DP, [28 Mar. 1923] (Lilly). I am aware of the damaging construction put upon these two notes of 21 and 28 Mar. 1923 by Lawrence Rainey, who has asserted in a number of places that they prove that what drew Pound to Fascism was a love of violence. I find that an over-determined and false reading of those notes. There is no lack of evidence to establish that
Pound’s interest in Fascism had quite other motivations—e.g. see his letter of 15 Aug. 1923 to Nancy Cox McCormack, cited here (from one of Rainey’s own articles) on pp. 54–5. For a less lurid light on Pound’s friendship with the hotel-keeper Averardo Marchetti, see Luca Cesari, ‘Pound e il “farsi scannar” del romagnolo Marchetti’, in Ezra Pound 1972/1992, a cura di Luca Gallesi (Milano: Greco & Greco editori, 1992), pp. 210–23. See Ezra Pound 1972/1992, 445–6 for a biographical note on Marchetti.

  48 Nancy Cunard: see Wilhelm, ‘Nancy Cunard: A Sometime Flame’, Pai 19.1–2 (1990) 202–12; and Wilhelm: 1900, 324.

  ‘divorce news’: DP to EP, [Mar. 1923—misfiled as 1921] (Lilly).

  ‘wd. be some time’: EP to DP, [21 Mar. 1923] (Lilly).

  sojourning foreigner: the authority is among papers of J. Atherton Parker, D’s solicitor (Pound MSS II, Box 12, Lilly).

  sent off…24 April: EP’s typescript note from Paris to Watson, saying he had ‘sent off the Cantos, day before yesterday’, is dated ‘26/3/1923’, EP/Dial 264—but he must have mistaken the month since on 26 Mar. he was in Rimini without his typewriter. An April date is supported by Watson’s arranging to have the revised cantos copied for Thayer about 5 May—see EP/Dial 274.

  ‘on tactical grounds’: TSE to EP, [27 May? 1923], TSEL II 141.

  49 the objective poetic self: see EP: Poet I 306–11, 363.

  Gemistus Plethon: see GK 45 and 224–5.

  50 historians now recognize: e.g. P. J. Jones, The Malatesta of Rimini and the Papal State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974), pp. 228–31.

  Burckhardt: see Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860) (Phaidon Press, 1944), p. 278.

  51 ‘fighting the world’: Cantos 802, among the final fragments.

  52 ‘paradiso terrestre’: Cantos 802 (emphasis added).

  Life and times: 1923–1924

  52 state visit: see Farrell, Mussolini, p. 135.

  not visit…‘Confucius’: EP to HLP, 19 May [1923], EP/Parents 511—EP’s emphasis.

  Persian soup: Stock: 1970, 253.

  ‘de looks edtn.’: EP to IWP, 11 May [1923], EP/Parents 511.

  ‘a dee looks edtn’: EP to Kate Buss, 12 May 1923, L (1951) 256.

  53 ‘canto on Kung’: EP to HLP, ‘about the 21st June 1923’, EP/Parents 514.

  ‘Kung said’: 13/59.

  ‘exact reverse’: EP to HLP, ‘about the 21st June 1923’, EP/Parents 514.

  ‘portrait of contemporary’: EP to WL, 3 Dec. 1924, EP/WL 139.

  ‘state of’…‘decomposition’: EP to FMF, 16 Nov. [1933], EP/FMF 134. See also EP to Schelling, 8 July 1922, L (1951) 247–8.

  ‘vice-crusaders’: 14/63.

  ‘fearfully painful’: OS to EP, 12 July [1923] (Lilly).

  ‘to know for certain’: DP to EP, 9 July 1923 (Lilly).

  ‘had O. Rudge’: EP to DP, [27 June 1923] (Lilly).

  ‘The Rudge’: EP to DP, 17 July 1923 (Lilly).

  ‘Olga played over’: EP to DP, 7 Aug. 1923 (Lilly).

  54 ‘Mi rencusi’: OR to EP, 6 June 1923 (Beinecke/OR)—Conover, 6, dates this as 21 June.

  ‘Caro’: OR to EP, 6 July 1923 (Beinecke/OR).

  ‘25 kilometers’: OR note on snapshot, cited Conover, 7. OR’s 1923 album is in Beinecke.

  ‘not to panic’: DP to EP, 21 July 1923 (Lilly).

  ‘left everything’: DP to EP, 9 Aug. 1923 (Lilly).

  ‘combined intake’: EP to IWP, 30 Aug. 1923, EP/Parents 518.

  ‘rewriting’: EP to DP, [13 July 1923] (Lilly).

  ‘de looks’…‘sense of form’: EP to DP, 23 July 1923 (Lilly).

  by 1 August: EP to DP, 1 Aug. 1923 (Lilly).

  small booklet: EP to AB, 3 Aug. 1923 (Lilly); also EP to DP, [? 7 Aug. 1923] (Lilly).

  ‘on 16th’: EP to AB, 23 Aug. 1923 (Lilly).

  still working on that: EP to DP, 14 Oct. 1923 (Lilly).

  ‘a creative force’: Nancy Cox McCormack, ‘Gifted Sculptor Gives Vivid Pen Picture of Mussolini’, newspaper clipping from unidentified source dated ‘Oct. 1923’ among Cox-McCormack Papers in the Poetry/Rare Books Collection, State University of New York at Buffalo—as cited in Lawrence S. Rainey, ‘“All I Want You to Do Is to Follow the Orders”: History, Faith and Fascism in the Early Cantos’, in Lawrence S. Rainey, ed., A Poem Containing History: Textual Studies in The Cantos (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), p. 95.

  ‘To clear up’: EP to Nancy Cox McCormack, 15 Aug. 1923 (Buffalo)—as cited Rainey, ‘“All I Want”’, pp. 98–9.

  55 ‘vortices of power’: see EP: Poet I 262–3.

  ‘uproars, fiascos’: EP, ‘“Inverno Musicale”: La violinista Olga Rudge’, Il Mare XXVI.1281 (30 Sept. 1933) [1], as translated in EP&M 344. Antheil said it was to hear Stravinsky’s Les Noces, first performed on 13 June, that he had gone to Paris.

  hours of it: from Antheil, Bad Boy of Music (New York, 1945), p. 117, cited EP&M 245.

  ‘demoniac temperament’: EP, ‘La violinista Olga Rudge’, Il Mare XXVI.1286 (4 Nov. 1933) 2, as translated in EP&M 345.

  ‘Hitting the piano’: ‘George Antheil Plays…’, Paris Edition Chicago Tribune (13 Dec. 1923), as in EP&M 246.

  ‘a riot’:‘The Mailbag’, New York Herald (Paris), 22 Dec. 1923, cited Conover, 7.

  According to Alex Ross, ‘it turned out that the brouhaha had been staged for the benefit of the film director Marcel L’Herbier, who needed a wild crowd scene for his thriller L’Inhumaine’ (Alex Ross, The Rest Is Noise (Fourth Estate, 2008), p. 138).

  three of his compositions: detail from Ellmann, James Joyce, 568.

  ‘turned into bedlam’…‘Cagney’: EP, ‘“Inverno Musicale”: La violinista Olga Rudge’, Il Mare XXVI.1281 (30 Sept. 1933) [1], as translated in EP&M 344.

  56 ‘white winer’: James Charters, This Must Be the Place (Michael Joseph, 1934), p. 96—cited Wilhelm: 1990, 289. EP appears briefly, not drinking, in Robert McAlmon’s ‘Truer than Most Accounts’—a record of life in Paris c.1923–4—in The Exile no. 2 (Autumn 1927) 40–86.

  ‘swashbuckling…chess’: BB in Descant on Rawthey’s Madrigal: Conversations with Basil Bunting, ed. Jonathan Williams (Lexington, Ky.: Gnomon Press, 1968), [n.p.].

  ‘locked up’: BB to Lieppert, 30 Oct. 1932 (University of Chicago Library)—as cited in Victoria Forde, The Poetry of Basil Bunting (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Bloodaxe Books, 1991), p. 24.

  ‘petty thieves’: from BB’s more detailed account of the episode as recorded by Caroll F. Terrell in ‘Basil Bunting: An Eccentric Biography’, in Basil Bunting: Man and Poet, ed. Carroll F. Terrel (Orono, Me.: National Poetry Foundation, 1981), pp. 41–2.

  note, from ‘Prison’: BB to EP, [6 Oct. 1923], (Lilly)—cited Peter Makin, Bunting: The Shaping of his Verse (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), p. 26.

  57 11 December concert: programme reproduced in EP&M [249].

  Schwerke: EP&M 247–8.

  ‘hell’s own’: EP to HLP, 8 Dec. 1923, EP/Parents 521.

  ‘He discussed’: EP to William Bird, [? Dec. 1923], L (1951) 256. Cf. EP to HLP, 8 Dec. 1923, EP/Parents 521.

  58 20 October: EP to DP, 20 Oct. 1923 (Lilly).

  ‘vorticist film’: see EPRO 230 n. 66; and John Alexander, ‘Parenthetical Paris, 1920–1925: Pound, Picabia, Brancusi and Léger’, Pound’s Artists: Ezra Pound and the Visual Arts in London, Paris and Italy (The Tate Gallery, 1985), pp. 109ff.

  specimen pages: see Philippe Mikriammos, ‘Ezra Pound in Paris (1921–1924)’, Pai 14.2–3 (1985) 391.

  ‘Eliot turned up’: EP to DP, 25 Nov. 1923 (Lilly).

  ‘My Dear Son’: HLP to EP, 10 Dec. 1923 (Beinecke).

  aunt or an uncle: EP to IWP, 10 Feb. 1924, EP/Parents 524; also Conover, 53.

  ‘Must stay on diet’: EP to HLP, 6 Jan. [1924], EP/Parents 521.

  ‘6 Jan. 1924’: the setting copy is in Beinecke. The Malatesta cantos were probably set from the Criterion printing.

  59 ‘Darling’: EP to OR, from Hot
el Mignon, Rapallo, [Jan. 1924], (Beinecke/OR).

  ‘Caro’: OR to EP, 22 Jan. 1924 (Beinecke/OR).

  ‘vigliacco’: in the slang of a later era, that could be ‘I want you something rotten’.

  ‘a few days’: EP to OR, [Feb. 1924] (Beinecke/OR).

  ‘the miseries’: EP to OR, 25 Feb. 1924 (Beinecke/OR).

  ‘to interior’: EP to HLP, 12 Mar. [1924], EP/Parents 525.

  ‘in palazzo’: EP to parents, 25 Mar. [1924], EP/Parents 526.

  ‘Ezra’s things’: OS to DP, 11 May 1924—as cited in Conover, 53.

  Fiddle Music: see CPMEP 143–4; and Conover, 52.

  ‘superfluous rubbish’: EP to William Bird, 17 Apr. 1924, L (1951) 259; other details from EP to Bird, 10 and 17 Apr. 1924, L (1951) 257–9.

  61 copied…songs: see CPMEP 152ff.

  ‘doing sketches’: EP to HLP, 12 May 1924, EP/Parents 529.

  ‘a few more cantos’: EP to HLP, 16 May 1924, EP/Parents 530.

  ‘Jefferson’: EP to HLP, 28 May [1924], EP/Parents 531.

  ‘Marco Polo’s note’: EP to HLP, 21 June [1924], EP/Parents 534.

  ‘another large wad’: EP to AB, 30 Aug. 1924 (Lilly).

  ‘Pagany’: WCW, A Voyage to Pagany (New York: Macaulay, 1928).

  ‘renaissance music’: WCW, Autobiography, 225–6. See also Paul Mariani, William Carlos Williams: A New World Naked (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1981), pp. 238–41.

  tones…from the instrument: see CPMEP 142ff.

  ‘Musique Américaine’: details of the concert of 7 July from: the Invitation-Programme (HRC); CPMEP 152–8; Conover, 53–4; Wilhelm: 1990, 340; Sylvia Beach, Shakespeare and Company 132; Mariani, WCW 240.

  Fiddle Music: for an expert account and edition of EP’s dozen or so compositions for violin in the years 1923–32 see Complete Violin Works of Ezra Pound, ed. with Commentary by Robert Hughes (Emeryville, Calif.: Second Evening Art, 2004).

  62 ‘intestinal waters’: EP to DP, [17 July 1924] (Lilly).

  ‘First day’: EP to DP, 31 July 1924 (Lilly).

  ‘not a bad sign’: EP to DP, 4 Aug. 1924 (Lilly).

  ‘general survey’: EP to DP, 15 Aug. 1924 (Lilly).

  in the Vienne: EP to HLP, ‘end of Aug.’ [1924], EP/Parents 539.