Ezra Pound: Poet

by A. David Moody

  Olga was with him: see Wilhelm: 1900, 341.

  ‘My health’: EP to HLP, 4 Sept. [1924], EP/Parents 540.

  ‘shall keep my plans’: DP to EP, [July 1924] (Lilly).

  ‘Mao’: EP to DP, 2 Sept. 1924 (Lilly).

  ‘special book case trunk’: EP to HLP, 13 July 1924, EP/Parents 536.

  ‘melancholy man’…‘not in the movement’: EP to DP, 17 July 1923 (Lilly). Details of this episode in Sept.–Oct. 1924 from: Hemingway, A Moveable Feast, chap. 16; EP to HLP, 15 Oct. 1924, EP/Parents 543.

  63 ‘fine book of poems’: EP to HLP, 15 Oct. 1924, EP/Parents 543. Referred to by EP as ‘The Four Winds’ (see EP to H. L. Mencken, Feb. 1925, L (1951) 270); due to his efforts twelve of the poems appeared in Poetry XXVI.1 (Apr. 1925); others were printed in the Dial and in transatlantic review; and EP printed a further nine in Exile. (For TSE’s—and JJ’s—amazement at EP’s enthusiasm for Dunning’s poems see TSEL II 557.) EP also published an article on ‘Mr Dunning’s Poetry’ in Poetry XXVI.6 (Sept. 1925), and another in Exile no. 3 (Spring 1928). The Poetry selection and EP’s Poetry article were reprinted in Pai 10.3 (1981) [605]–618. In 1929 Edward W. Titus published from his Black Manikin press in Paris Windfalls by R. C. Dunning containing 43 poems, but not including all that had appeared in periodicals. Titus had published Rococo: A Poem by Ralph Cheever Dunning in 1926.

  ‘thinking about civic order’: ‘An Interview with Ezra Pound’ by D. G. Bridson, New Directions 17, ed. J. Laughlin (New York: New Directions, 1961), p. 170.

  2. FROM RAPALLO, 1924–1932

  Human complications

  This section is based for the most part on three sets of correspondence: letters between EP and OR (Beinecke/OR); letters between EP and DP (Lilly); letters from EP to his parents (Beinecke). More of the EP/OR correspondence is given in Anne Conover’s Olga Rudge and Ezra Pound (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001). Mary de Rachewiltz’s memoir, Discretions (Faber & Faber, 1971)—in USA Ezra Pound: Father and Teacher (New York: New Directions, 1975, 2005)—tells her own story superbly.

  64 would record…‘piantato’: from OR Personal Papers (Beinecke/OR)—see Conover 56, 55.

  ‘complications’: EP to AB, 3 June 1926 (Lilly).

  ‘rejuvinated’: EP to WL, 3 Dec. 1924, EP/WL 138.

  ‘the north side’: EP to HLP, 15 Oct. 1924, EP/Parents 543–4—rest of paragraph EP/Parents 543–4.

  18 and 19: from Stock: 1970, 257.

  Sicily: details from EP letters to his parents reproduced in Lettere dalla Sicilia e due frammenti ritrovati, a cura di Mary de Rachewiltz (Valverde, Catania: Il Girasole Edizioni, 1997).

  ‘Greek theatre’: EP, in ‘Hell’ (1934), LE 205.

  65 ‘ought to stick at’: EP to A. P. Saunders, 25/1/25 (Hamilton).

  ‘a phobia’: EP to OR, 13 Mar. 1921, as in Conover, 58.

  advised against Monte Carlo: EP to OR, 4 Mar. 1925 (Beinecke/OR).

  ‘general reading’: EP to IWP, 11 Feb. [1925], EP/Parents 556

  ‘Baldwins’: EP to HLP, 15 Feb. [1925], EP/Parents 556–7.

  ‘taking apartment’: EP to OR, 4 Mar. 1925 (Beinecke/OR). James Laughlin described the apartment in ‘Pound le professeur’, his contribution to L’Herne: Ezra Pound I (Paris, Éditions de L’Herne, 1965,148): ‘Behind the broad terrace were four or five small rooms, furnished with the simplicity Pound loved. Most of the chairs and tables were of his own making, from pieces of wood picked up in the local carpenters’ workshops. There were the beautiful Gaudier sculptures, small but quite pure, and among the paintings a striking Max Ernst, an abstract of two white sea-shells. In Dorothy Pound’s small salon were coloured drawings by Wyndham Lewis, and several of her own skilful sketches. Along the walls were low bookcases made by Pound, with fewer books than one would expect —he was constantly sifting out those he considered not worth keeping’ (my translation).

  ‘about 8 or 9’: EP to HLP, [April 1925], EP/Parents 563.

  ‘permanent locale’: EP to HLP, [24 June 1925], EP/Parents 570.

  66 ‘up to XXIII’: EP to HLP, 25 Mar. 1925, EP/Parents 561.

  ‘mostly borasco’: EP to AB, 13 Mar. 1925 (Lilly).

  This Quarter: Norman: 1960, 274–8 gives the dedication and fills out the story.

  ‘two weeks chase’: EP to AB, 7 June 1925 (Lilly).

  ‘capolavoro’: EP to William Bird, 24 Aug. 1925, L (1951) 273.

  ‘so bored’: OR to EP, [June 1925], as in Conover, 58.

  ‘Where officially’: EP to OR, 18 Apr. 1925 (Beinecke/OR).

  ‘figlia di Arturo’: see MdR, Discretions 203.

  ‘[leon]cina’: OR to EP, 11 July 1925 (Beinecke/OR).

  ‘no talent’: OR to EP, 22 July [1925] (Beinecke/OR).

  ‘if you would like’: OR to EP, 20 July 1925 (Beinecke/OR).

  67 ‘a contadina’: OR to EP, 22 July [1925] (Beinecke/OR).

  humanity and wisdom: see Discretions, 7–15 in particular.

  ‘D’s birthday’: EP to HLP, 14 Sept. 1925, EP/Parents 576.

  ‘one from Egypt’: EP to DP, 17 Oct. 1925 (Lilly).

  ‘la mia leoncinina’: OR to EP, 22 Oct. [1925] (Beinecke/OR).

  ‘crowded and successful’: EP to OR, 7 Dec. 1925 (Beinecke/OR).

  ‘XXII to XXIII’: EP to IWP, 24 Oct. [1925], EP/Parents 579.

  cutting up his ‘Villon’: EP to AB, 26 Nov. 1925 (Lilly).

  ‘throwing out’: EP to HLP, 28 Nov. and 2 Dec. 1925, EP/Parents 582.

  68 met there by ‘R’: DP to EP, ‘15 Dec. 1925’ (Lilly). When DP removed all her possessions from the castle at Brunnenburg c.1966 she left behind one book, a copy of McAlmon’s Being Geniuses Together, in which there is a bookplate which she had designed for ‘E. Hassan Riffai’. Riffai was an Egyptian army officer. In Jan.1939 ‘Captain Rifai’ sent Dorothy stamps for Omar’s collection, and in Jan. 1940 she asked Omar if he had heard anything from him—see DP to Omar Pound, 18 Jan. 1939 and 7 Jan. 1940 (Omar S. Pound Archive, Hamilton).

  ‘at last escaped’…tea with Beerbohm: EP to HLP, 24 Dec. [1925], EP/Parents 584.

  ‘played him’: OR in unpublished transcript of interview, 1981 or 1982, by New York Center for Visual History for their film Ezra Pound: American Odyssey, as cited in Carpenter: 1988, 450.

  ‘At the heart’: DP to EP, 20 Dec. 1925 (Lilly).

  ‘at last thought out’: EP to OR, 17 Feb. 1926 (Beinecke/OR).

  ‘enjoying pyramids’: EP to HLP, 11 and 17 Jan. [1926], EP/Parents 585, 586.

  ‘oriental drapery’: EP to HLP, 2 Feb. [1926], EP/Parents 587.

  ‘somewhat worn’: EP to HLP, 3 Mar. 1926, EP/Parents 589.

  ‘half ill’: EP to OR, 20 Mar. 1926 (Beinecke/OR).

  ‘Troppo incommodo’: EP telegram to OR, 19 Mar. 1926 (Beinecke/OR).

  ‘not pleased’: OR to EP, 29 Mar. 1926 (Beinecke/OR).

  ‘a coup de désespoir’: OR to EP, 19 Mar. 1926 (Beinecke/OR).

  ‘thoroughly understands’: OR to EP, [? 26 Mar. 1926] (Beinecke/OR). ‘The Rapallo Tennis Club was much frequented by the bel mondo of Rapallo, mainly foreign residents and artists and Italian nobility’ (Giuseppe Bacigalupo, Ieri a Rapallo, V edizione (Pasian de Prato: Campanotto Editore, 2006), p. 182).

  ‘24/3/1926’: EP, small notebook (YCAL MSS 43, box 34, folder 804, Beinecke).

  ‘crucial part’: EP to OR, May 1926 (Beinecke/OR).

  ‘don’t make a vollum’: EP to OR, Apr. 1926 (Beinecke/OR).

  69 ‘down to Rome’: EP to IWP, 13 May 1926, EP/Parents 699.

  ‘Homage Froissart’: see CPMEP 159.

  ‘Dear Dad’: EP to HLP, 11 Oct. [for Sept.? 1926], EP/Parents 602.

  ‘sur déclaration’: details from copy of birth certificate (Lilly). In British and US law a child born in wedlock is presumed to be the husband’s legitimate child, a presumption that can be set aside only by a judicial decision based upon clear evidence that the husband is not the father. In Some Do Not (1924), the first part of Parade’s End, Ford Madox Ford had his hero Tie
tjens say about accepting his estranged wife Sylvia’s child as his own: ‘a child born in wedlock is by law the father’s, and if a gentleman suffer the begetting of his child he must, in decency, take the consequences; the woman and the child must come before the man, be he who he may.’

  ‘small operation’: EP to OR, 27 Sept. 1926 (Beinecke/OR).

  ‘taps, tests, analyses’: EP to HLP, [Oct. 1926], EP/Parents 603.

  by Raymonde Collignon: details from DP’s letters to EP in May and June 1927 (Lilly).

  ‘adopt’: WBY to OS, 24 Sept. 1926, cited Norman: 1960, 283.

  ‘Omar’s eyes’: DP to EP, 9 June 1927 (Lilly). In late September or October 1926 DP told HLP and IWP that Omar’s eyes were ‘dark blue’; however, when sending a ‘little photo of Omar’ in April 1927 she wrote that he had ‘brown eyes after mother’. DP’s own eyes, according to her passport, were blue.

  70 ‘Do you favour’: EP to OR, 1 Nov. 1926 (Beinecke/OR).

  didn’t ‘see much fun’: DP to EP, 13 Apr. 1931 (Lilly).

  ‘Cat and Water Carrier’: EP to ‘Dear Progenitors’ 22 Dec. [1926], EP/Parents 611. The clavichord was transported early in 1928; the ‘Hieratic Head’ in Nov. 1931.

  ‘somewhat functional’: EP to OR, 2 Apr. 1927 (Beinecke/OR).

  ‘I do not think’: EP to OR, [22 Jan. 1929] (Beinecke/OR).

  ‘wd. putt it’: EP to OR, 26 Jan. [1929] (Beinecke/OR).

  ‘a set of values’: EP to OR, [12 Dec. 1928] (Beinecke/OR).

  71 ‘very American’: see Norman: 1960, 303–4.

  ‘the only reason’: EP to OR, [12 Dec. 1928] (Beinecke/OR).

  cuckold: among EP’s ‘legal papers’ is this undated note: ‘I, Ezra Pound, declare that Omar is not my son save in the legal sense. I am cuckold.’ (Beinecke YCAL MSS 53, box 37, folder 859.) Another copy of the note, in EP’s hand, is preserved with OR’s Notebooks (Beinecke).

  Greek tragedy: cf. Aeschylus’ Eumenides, and Sophocles’ Women of Trachis in EP’s version.

  Saving the world by pure form

  71 blocking in 28–30: EP to HLP, 7 Sept. [1927], EP/Parents 636.

  ‘new American version’: EP to AB, 22 Jan. 1928 (Lilly).

  72 ‘how to rhythm’: EP to OR, [Nov. 1927] (Beinecke/OR). Much of the detail in this paragraph is from EP’s letters to OR in Oct. and Nov. 1927.

  ‘the summa’: EP to Glenn Hughes, 11 Apr. 1928 (HRC).

  ‘carry dissipation’: EP to OR, [Feb. 1928] (Beinecke/OR).

  New Masses: for EP’s brief letter in New Masses, New York, II.2 (Dec. 1926) 3, see P&P IV, 373; for his article, ‘Workshop Orchestration’, New Masses II.5 (Mar. 1927) 21, see P&P IV, 381; and for his further letter and Gellert’s reply, New Masses II.5 (Mar. 1927) 25, see P&P IV, 382. See also EP&M 315.

  73 ‘three perfectly placed’: NPL 156.

  ‘After the intellect’: EP, ‘How to Write’[1930], Machine Art 102.

  ‘mental formation’: EP, ‘The Jefferson–Adams Letters as a Shrine and a Monument’ (1937), S Pr 118.

  ‘active element’: EP, ‘For a New Paideuma’ (1938), S Pr 254.

  ‘All men’: EP’s instance in J/M 21.

  ‘the organizing thought’…‘We need’: EP, ‘Simplicities’, The Exile no. 4 (1928) 5.

  ‘18th century’: EP, ‘Simplicities’, The Exile no. 4 (1928) 4.

  ‘interesting phenomena’…‘The republic’: EP, [editorial notes], The Exile no. 1 (Spring 1927) 89–90.

  74 ‘the present state’: EP to Glenn Hughes, 2 Sept. 1927 (HRC).

  ‘Starting at the bottom’: taken from EP’s later revised version of Ta Hio, ‘The Great Digest or Adult Study’, Confucius 19. [EP’s Ta Hio. The Great Learning of Confucius (1928) was translated from Guillaume Pauthier’s French version in Doctrine de Confucius ou Les Quatres Livres de philosophie morale et politique de la Chine (Paris, 1841). EP’s 1945 translation is based on his own study of the Chinese text.]

  ‘increases through’: Confucius 27.

  75 ‘The men of old’: Confucius 29–33.

  76 ‘abundance of nature’: 52/257.

  Fenollosa: see CWC 12 and 22.

  77 ‘When we see’: Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species (1859), chap. IV, §7.

  ‘talk of science’…‘We continue’: EP, ‘Simplicities’, The Exile no. 4 (1928) 3–4.

  ‘Familiarity’: EP, ‘Addenda. II’ [c.1928], Machine Art 111.

  ‘We are as capable’: EP, ‘Epstein, Belgion, and Meaning’ (1930), EP&VA 166.

  ‘human consciousness’: EP, ‘How to Read’ (1929), LE 22.

  78 ‘nutrition of impulse’: EP, ‘How to Read’ (1929), LE 20.

  A sextant for ‘A Draft of XXX Cantos’

  78 hell…into proportion: EP to William Bird. 26 Dec. 1924, L (1951) 263.

  Rodker’s deadline: information from EP letters to HLP and DP, June–Sept. 1927.

  the designs: see EP to William Bird, 10 and 17 Apr. 1924, L (1951)5257–9. Further information from Anthony Ozturk, in a paper to 12th International EP Conference, Oxford, 1987.

  de luxe editions: in a draft letter dated 31 Jan. 1932 to the editor of the Paris edition of the Chicago Tribune EP wrote: ‘A few years ago the de luxe edition was one of the few means of publishing anything not likely to have large commercial success’ (Beinecke). For a sampling of his published comments see: ‘The Renaissance. III’, Poetry VI.2 (May 1915) 91; ‘On a Book of Prefaces’, [Nov. 1917], EP/LR 157; ‘Historical Survey’, LR VIII.1 (Autumn 1921) 39–42; ‘Paris Letter. Sept. 1921’, Dial LXXI.4 (Oct. 1921) 463; ‘Paris Letter. Oct. 1922’, Dial LXXIII.5 (Nov. 1922) 550; ‘Paris Letter. Dec. 1922’, Dial LXXIV.1 (Jan. 1923) [85]; to R. P. Blackmur, 30 Nov. 1924, L 260–1; to John Drummond, 18 Feb. [1933], L (1951) 320; ABCE 110–11; ‘Past History’, English Journal (College Edition) XXII.5 (May 1933) 350–1.

  ‘Soncino and Bodoni’: EP, ‘Deflation Benefit’, Globe I.5 (Aug. 1937) 66. Jerome McGann’s suggestion in The Textual Condition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991) and elsewhere that these de luxe editions of the cantos showed Pound under the influence of William Morris’s Pre-Raphaelite Kelmscott Press is contradicted by this statement, and by Pound’s determined ‘No Kelmscott mess of illegibility. Large clear type…’ (L(1951) 256). Soncino is given honourable mention at the close of XXX Cantos. McGann appears unaware that Pound had deliberately purged his work of Pre-Raphaelite influences before 1914.

  79 money from the ventures: Lawrence Rainey’s argument—as in ‘The Creation of the Avant-Garde: F. T. Marinetti and Ezra Pound’, Modernism/Modernity I.3 (1994) 209–12—that the de luxe editions of the cantos turned the poem into a market commodity are not in accord with the known facts about the production (i.e. the writing) of the cantos, about the individuals involved in the material production of those editions, and about the conditions under which the cantos had to be published at that time. That some copies—it is not known how many—were bought as collector’s items and traded on the rare book market could not turn the poem into a commodity, but only those copies of it. The poem lives, after all, in the mind, not on paper.

  ‘sextant’: GK 352.

  80 ‘The best lack’: WBY, ‘The Second Coming’.

  82 ‘Mr Pound’s Hell’: TSE, After Strange Gods (Faber & Faber, 1934), p. 43.

  taste for damnation: cf. TSE, ‘Baudelaire’ (1930), Selected Essays, 3rd edn. (Faber & Faber, 1951), pp. 427–9.

  ‘Io venni’: Dante, Inferno V, 28.

  Plotinus’ idea: see Enneads I. 8.

  ‘mental rot’: EP to FMF, 16 Nov. [1933], EP/FMF 134. See also EP to John Lackay Brown, Apr. 1937, L (1951) 385–6.

  84 Kublai: see EP, ‘Kublai Khan and his Currency’ (1920), S Pr 174–6. William McNaughton, for one, reads the episode very differently, as an instance of the head of state properly exercising his sovereign power and responsibility to issue money—see Pai 21.3 (1992) 20. It is also true that his currency served commerce. The problem is that he neglected to distribute his wealth for the common g
ood.

  Masaryk: see vol. i, 393–7.

  ‘the unit submerged’: from EP to OR, 20 Aug. 1927 (Beinecke/OR).

  ‘from the TOP’: EP to Ingrid Davies, 25 Mar. 1955, with reference to the Russian Revolution and ‘my Tovarisch Canto’ (HRC).

  85 ‘light of the Renaissance’: EP, ‘Remy de Gourmont’ (1920), LE 355.

  ‘the finest force’: see EP: Poet I 313.

  inventors of…loan capitalism: see Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of our Times (Verso, 1994), chap. 2 ‘The Rise of Capital’, especially pp. 96–109 (‘The Genesis of High Finance’).

  86 King Midas: see Ovid, Metamorphoses V. Lemprière notes that according to Plutarch Midas later suffered from bad dreams. (To remedy the omission of canto 23 from this account the exigent reader might look up Burton Hatlen’s essay ‘Pound and Nature: A Reading of Canto XXIII’, Pai 25.1 and 2 (1996) 161–88.)

  Ruskin: see Stones of Venice, i: The Foundations, chap. 1, § 1–39; ii: The Sea Stories, chap. 8, ‘The Ducal Palace’, § 13–25; iii: The Fall, chap. 4, § 6.

  87 Sulpicia: her poems can be found in David Roessel, ‘“Or perhaps Sulpicia”: Pound and a Roman Poetess’, Pai 19.1–2 (1990) 125–35.

  88 ‘biological process’: 29/144–5. Cf. cantos 39 and 47.

  Zagreus: see p. 34 above.

  formal structure: cf. EP in letter to John Lackay Brown, Apr. 1937: ‘the cantos are in a way fugal’—‘theme, response, contrasujet. Not that I mean to make an exact analogy of structure’ (L (1951) 386).

  89 natural energies: cf. SR 92–3.

  action as against stasis: cf. EP, ‘The American or Christian morality is dastardly because it is a lie; it is false. | Greek mythology and science alike show us not a strife between a good and a bad but a conflict of forces and inertias, a conflict of different necessities and modalities; each good in a certain degree’ (‘How to Write’, Machine Art 112).

  90 ‘the growing tree’: CWC (Stanley Nott, 1936), p. 52—not in CWC 1964—and see 53/265. [hsin1 is character 2737 in Mathews’ Chinese–English Dictionary.]