Ezra Pound: Poet

by A. David Moody

  ‘uncut forest’: S Pr 97n.

  ‘Basis of renewal’: 20/91–2—see also 21/98–100.

  ‘something to think about’: EP, unpublished TS leaf (Y CAL MSS 43/Collected Prose [formerly Box 77, folder 2945], Beinecke).

  Literary relations old and new

  90 ‘one of the most’: ‘Announcement’, Dial LXXXIV.1 (Jan. 1928) 90.

  ‘Isolated Superiority’: ‘Announcement’, Dial LXXXIV.1 (Jan. 1928) 4–7.

  ‘read Confucius’: EP, ‘Credo’ (1930), S Pr 53.

  declare him a heretic: see After Strange Gods: A Primer of Modern Heresy (Faber & Faber, 1934), pp. 41–3.

  91 Pound would riposte: see ‘Credo’ (1930), S Pr 53.

  ‘best possible’: EP to John Price, 2 Apr. 1926, as in Barry S. Alpert, ‘Ezra Pound, John Price, and The Exile’, Pai 2.3 (1973) 432.

  ‘nice little note’: EP to WCW, 18 Dec. [1931], EP/WCW 114–15.

  ‘revolutionary simpleton’…‘intellectual eunuch’: WL, Time and Western Man (Chatto & Windus, 1927), pp. 55–7, 85–7.

  Guggenheim: see EP to Henry Allen Moe [secretary to the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation], 31 Mar. 1925, EP&VA 294–9.

  ‘Don’t worry’: EP to HLP, 1 June [1927], EP/Parents 631.

  ‘ole Wyndham’: EP to WCW, 5 Nov. [1929], EP/WCW 98.

  ‘large and vivid’: EP, ‘D’Artagnan Twenty Years After’ (1937), S Pr 429.

  pirating of Ulysses: see EP/JJ 224–7.

  92 ‘Nothing short’: EP to JJ, 15 Nov. 1926, EP/JJ 228.

  ‘network of french banks’: EP, ‘Past History’ (1933), EP/JJ 251–2.

  ‘never had any respect’: EP, ‘After Election’ (1931), EP/JJ 239.

  ‘not lack conversation’ et seq.: WBY, A Packet for Ezra Pound (1929), as in A Vision (Macmillan & Co., 1937), pp. 3–6.

  93 ‘flux his theme’ et seq.: WBY, ‘Introduction’, The Oxford Book of Modern Verse 1892–1935 (Oxford: At the Clarendon Press, 1936), pp. xxiii–xxvi.

  ‘a fugue from a frog’: EP to John Lackay Brown, Apr. [1937], L (1951) 385.

  ‘Melopoeia’: FMF, ‘Pound and How To Read’ (1932), EP/FMF 103.

  ‘a closed mind’…‘word as reality’: WCW, ‘Excerpts from a Critical Sketch: A Draft of XXX Cantos by Ezra Pound’ (1931), Selected Essays of WCW (New York: New Directions, 1969), 106–7.

  94 ‘no ideas but in things’: see WCW, Paterson: Book One, I.

  ‘not ideas about the thing’: Wallace Stevens, ‘Not Ideas about the Thing but the Thing Itself’, The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (Faber & Faber, 1945), p. 534.

  ‘First cheering’: EP to LZ, 18 Aug. 1927, EP/LZ 3.

  father in poetry: see Barry Ahearn, ‘Introduction’, EP/LZ xix–xx.

  95 ‘all new subject matter’: LZ, ‘Ezra Pound’, Prepositions: The Collected Critical Essays (Rapp & Carroll, 1967), p. 71.

  ‘hate, comprehension’: LZ, ‘Ezra Pound’, 69.

  organizer of form: see LZ, ‘Preface’, An ‘Objectivists’ Anthology (Le Beausset, Var.: TO, Publishers: 1932), p. 18.

  ‘greatest poem’: LZ, ‘Preface’, 24.

  ‘still for the poets’: LZ, ‘Preface’, [27].

  ‘Every generation’ et seq.: EP to LZ, 22 Dec. [1931], EP/LZ 123.

  96 ‘Objectivists’ number: Poetry XXXVII.5 (Feb. 1931).

  ‘arrogance of youth’ et seq.: Harriet Monroe, ‘Comment’, Poetry XXXVII.6 (Mar. 1931) 328–33.

  ‘gave over’: [LZ], ‘Notes’, Poetry XXXVII.5 (Feb. 1931) 295.

  ‘my point of view’…‘produce something’: EP to LZ, 24 Oct. [1930], EP/LZ 45–7.

  ‘And the verse’: EP to LZ, 28 Oct. [1930], EP/LZ 55.

  ‘A group’ et seq.: EP toLZ, 12 Aug. 1928, EP/LZ 11–15.

  ‘most solid’: EP, ‘Small Magazines’, English Journal (College Edition) XIX.9 (Nov. 1930) 702.

  ‘Every generation’: EP to Charles Henri Ford, 1 Feb. 1929, L (1951) 301.

  97 ‘My son’: EP to Lincoln Kirstein, [? May 1931], L (1951) 314.

  ‘stir up the animals’: EP to Samuel Putnam, 3 Feb. 1927, P&P IX, 477.

  ‘intellectual communication’: EP, ‘Small Magazines’, English Journal (College Edition) XIX.9 (Nov. 1930) 670.

  ‘The work of writers’: EP, ‘Small Magazines’, 702.

  independent little magazine: see EP to HLP, 15 Nov. [1926], EP/Parents 606.

  ‘EXILE’: postcard, statement over ‘yours as circumstances permit/EZRA POUND, editor’, (copy in HRC).

  ‘mss.…which cdn’t’: EP to Richard Aldington, 25 Jan. 1927 (HRC).

  ‘new show’: EP to John Price, 12 Jan. 1927, ed. Barry S. Alpert, ‘Ezra Pound, John Price, and The Exile’, Pai 2.3 (1973) 437.

  ‘to go ahead’: EP to John Price, 20 Jan. 1927, Pai 2.3 (1973) 440. EP told Pascal Covici the second number was to have ‘three separate sorts of thing: Poetry, prose…that is the finished work, and rapportage, i.e. wholly unassuming but s’far as I know veracious accounts of things, and this last need not have any “literary” or artistic merit’ (EP to Covici, 9 Feb. 1927 [HRC]).

  In the sphere of action

  98 ‘mostly stop-gap’: EP to Sibley Watson, 20 Oct. 1927, EP/Dial 324.

  ‘Occasionally’: EP to John Price, 8 Jan. 1926, ed. Barry S. Alpert, ‘Ezra Pound, John Price, and The Exile’, Pai 2.3 (1973) 430.

  ‘critical prose’…‘social or political prose’…‘booted into thinking’: EP, unpublished TS leaf (Y CAL MSS 43/Collected Prose [formerly Box 77, folder 2945] (Beinecke).

  Lenin’s short and effective: see EP, ‘Data’, Exile 4 (1928) 115–16, and Cantos 16/74.

  99 ‘root’ idea: see EP, ‘Simplicities’, Exile 4 (1928) 1–5.

  ‘observe the nation’: EP, ‘Dr Williams’ Position’ (1928), LE 391–2.

  ‘Improvements’: EP, ‘Poundings, Continued’, Forum LXXX.1 (July 1928) 156–7.

  ‘Damnation’: EP to Judge Beals, 7 May 1930, reproduced with covering letter of 8 May 1930 in P&P X, 88–91; ‘lyric’ is from EP’s letter. For ‘article 211’ see EP: Poet I 354.

  100 ‘A good state’…‘aristocracy’: EP, ‘Definitions etc.’, Der Querschnitt V.1 (Jan. 1925) 54. ‘White coal’=water-generated electricity.

  ‘sane method’: EP, ‘Newspapers, History, Etc.’, Hound & Horn III.4 (July/Sept. 1930) 578.

  ‘democratic idea’: EP, ‘Newspapers, History, Etc.’, Hound & Horn III.4 (July/Sept. 1930) 578.

  ‘The more one’…‘Fascio’: EP to John Price, 8 Jan.1926, ed. Alpert, Pai 2.3 (1973) 435.

  101 private performance: see EP to William Bird, 4 Mar. 1927, L (1951) 282–3.

  ‘We are tired’…‘raison d’être’: see EP, ‘Simplicities’, Exile 4 (1928) 5.

  Rimini Commandante: see p. 47 above.

  ‘passport imbecility’…‘comprehensive order’: EP to Bronson Cutting, 17 Feb. [1931], EP/BC 50.

  ‘effective program’: EP, interview with Francesco Monotti in Belvedere (Mar. 1931), as translated by Redman in his Ezra Pound and Italian Fascism, p. 76.

  ‘an opportunist’: EP, ‘mike [gold] and other phenomena’, Morada 5 (1930) 44.

  ‘an opportunist’: EP, J/M 17–18.

  ‘sense of responsibility’etc.: whole paragraph based on EP, ‘Fungus, Twilight or Dry Rot’, New Review I.3 (1931) 112–16.

  102 ‘Thought, dogblast you’: EP, ‘Our Contemporaries and Others’, New Review I.2 (1931) 150.

  aristocracy of artistic genius: see EP: Poet I 262–3.

  103 ‘amiable jaw’: EP to LZ, May 1932 (HRC).

  ‘glorious advent’: Benito Mussolini as cited by EP, ‘Appunti’, Il Mare XXV.1235 (12 Nov. 1932) 3—my paraphrase of EP’s Italian.

  Pound recalled: in ‘Appunti’, Il Mare XXV.1237 (26 Nov. 1932) 4—my paraphrase.

  D’Annunzio: concerning him EP wrote in 1928, ‘The only living author who has ever taken a city or held up the diplomatic crapule at the point of machine guns, he is in a position to speak with more authority than
a bunch of neurasthenic incompetents or of writers who never having swerved from their jobs, might be, or are, supposed by the scientists and the populace to be incapable of action’ (‘Cavalcanti’, LE 192).

  ‘Appunti’…L’Indice: this paragraph is indebted to Redman.78–83.

  104 interviewer in 1931: i.e. Francesco Monotti, as in Redman 76.

  ‘every reinvigoration’: EP, ‘Appunti. I. Lettera al traduttore’, L’Indice I.12 (Oct. 1930) [1].

  had he been living in Italy: EP, ‘Appunti. XIII. Scultura’, L’Indice II.7 (10 Apr. 1931) [1]—my paraphrase.

  ‘went bust’: to be exact, ‘The Indice has gone bust’, EP to Langston Hughes, 8 May 1932, ed. David Roessel, ‘“A Racial Act”: The Letters of Langston Hughes and Ezra Pound’, Pai 29.1–2 (2000) 216.

  ‘Supplemento Letterario’: for a complete collection of all the contributions see Il Mare Supplemento Letterario 1932–1933, a cura della Società Letteraria Rapallo (Rapallo: Commune di Rapallo, 1999).

  asserted that Futurism: EP, ‘Appunti’, Il Mare XXV.1235 (12 Nov. 1932) 3.

  ‘advocated’…‘reputation’: Walkiewicz and Witemeyer, ‘The Poet and the Senator’, EP/BC 15. I am much indebted to the commentary and notes of W & W.

  ‘tool of tyranny’: BC, as cited from the Congressional Record by W & W, EP/BC 18.

  ‘Article 211’: EP to BC, 8 Nov. 1930, EP/BC 38.

  105 ‘the Baboon law’ etc.: BC to EP, 23 Jan. 1932, EP/BC 69.

  ‘amendment died’: W & W, EP/BC 27.

  ‘list of the literate’: EP to BC, 8 Nov. 1930, EP/BC 38.

  ‘& I suppose’: BC to EP, 9 Dec. 1930, EP/BC 40.

  ‘American govt.’: EP to Langston Hughes, 18 June 1932, L (1951)323.

  ‘Democracies’: 91/613.

  ‘theoretical perfection’: EP, ‘Bureaucracy the Flail of Jehovah’, Exile 4 (1928) 13.

  ‘went to Dionysius’: 8/31.

  106 free passage of new invention: see EP, ‘Newspapers, History, Etc.’, Hound & Horn III.4 (July/Sept. 1930) 574–9.

  forty-hour week…shortened working day: EP wrote to DP, 17 Sept. 1932: ‘Von Papen has come out for 40 hour week and no reduction in pay to workers. 15 hours wd. prob. be nearer the mark; but le principe and the possibility seems to be penetrating. N. Y. SUN printed my scorcher on short day; on Aug. 20. (I.e. before either the Muss. or the Von P. proclamations.)’ (Lilly). The London Times of 23 Sept. 1932 reported the Italian proposal at the ILO meeting and the British opposition to it. On EP’s support for a shorter working day see W. & W., EP/BC 89–90, and EP to BC, 20 Mar. 1931, 9 Oct. 1931,11 Feb. 1932, EP/BC 56, 58–9, 71–2.

  ‘a plutocratic era’: EP, ‘Left vs. Right’, Chicago Tribune, Paris (16 Mar. 1930), 5.

  ‘democratized’: EP to BC, 20 Mar. 1931, EP/BC 54–5.

  ‘to prevent’…‘two causes’: EP, ‘By All Means Be Patriotic’, New English Weekly I.25 (6 Oct. 1932) 589. See also ‘More Bolshevik Atrocities’, Exile 3 (1928) 97–101; ‘Peace’, Exile 4 (1928) 15–19; ‘A Possibly Impractical Suggestion’, Poetry XXXIV.3 (June 1929) 178; Impact 281–2 [the ‘Mensdorff letter’]; Cantos 18, 19, 31–51.

  ‘that stays news’: ABCR 29.

  ‘mental slop’…‘public enemy’: EP, ‘That Messianic Urge’, New York Sun (4 June 1932) 12. The title is on EP’s TS (Beinecke).

  one…counter-attacked: ‘[Burton] Rascoe’s Riposte’, New York Sun (11 June 1932) 36.

  ‘strife and tumult’: OED s.v. ‘bear garden’.

  107 ‘where you are talking’: EP to Mike Gold, 17 Aug. 1930 (HRC).

  ‘propagandist literature’: EP, ‘Open Letter to Tretyakow, kolchoznik’, Front I.2 (Feb. 1931) 126—repr. Impact 227.

  ‘the classic work’: ‘A Classic Art, by Boris de Schloezer, Translated from the French by Ezra Pound’, Dial LXXXVI.6 (June 1929) 464–5.

  108 ‘rage for order’: Wallace Stevens, ‘The Idea of Order at Key West’.

  Krishna: see Bhagavad Gita chap. xi.

  Cavalcanti: the intelligence of love

  This section is indebted to David Anderson’s comprehensive Pound’s Cavalcanti: An Edition of the Translations, Notes, and Essays (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), with a good ‘Editor’s Introduction’. Note that, of necessity, this does not reproduce Pound’s Guido Cavalcanti Rime (Genova: Edizioni Marsano SA, [1932]). For some further light on the preparation and publication of Rime see Stefano Maria Casella, ‘“To adjust the spelling of Guido”’, Ezra Pound 1972/1992, a cura di Luca Gallesi (Milano: Greco & Greco editori, 1992), pp. 155–98.

  The philosophical dimension has been extensively discussed. See: Georg M. Gugelberger, ‘The Secularization of “Love” to a Poetic Metaphor: Cavalcanti, Center of Pound’s Medievalism’, Pai 2.2 (1973) 159–73; James J. Wilhelm, Dante and Pound: The Epic of Judgement (Orone, Me.: University of Maine Press, 1974); Kevin Oderman, ‘“Cavalcanti: That the Body is not Evil’, Pai 11.2 (1982) 258–79; Mohammad Shaheen, ‘Pound’s Transmission of Ittisal in Canto 76’, Pai 17.1 (1988) 133–45; Matthew Little and Robert Babcock, ‘“Amplius in coitu phantasia”: Pound’s “Cavalcanti” and Avicenna’s De Almahad’, Pai 20.1–2 (1991) 63–75; Maria Luisa Ardizzone, ‘The Genesis and Structure of Pound’s Paradise: Looking at the Vocabulary’, Pai 22.3 (1993) 13–37; Jacqueline Kaye, ‘Pound and Heresy’, Pai 28.1 (1999) 89–111; Peter Makin, ‘Pound’s “Provence” and the Duecento’, Ezra Pound and the Troubadours, ed. Philip Grover (24680 Gardonne, France: éditions fédérop, 1995), pp. 91–110; Line Henriksen, ‘Chiaroscuro: Canto 36 and Donna mi prega’, Pai 29.3 (2000) 33–57; Maria Luisa Ardizzone, Guido Cavalcanti: The Other Middle Ages (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002); Peter Liebregts, Ezra Pound and Neoplatonism (Madison: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 2004).

  On Pound’s opera Cavalcanti (1931–3) I am much indebted for both information and interpretation to (a) Margaret Fisher, Ezra Pound’s Radio Operas: The BBC Experiments, 1931–1933 (EPRO)(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002), pp. 146–95; (b) Robert Hughes and Margaret Fisher, Cavalcanti: A Perspective on the Music of Ezra Pound (Emeryville, Calif.: Second Evening Art, 2003): CPMEP (1) contains their ‘Perspective and Analysis’ of all Pound’s musical compositions, with Cavalcanti covered on pp. 41–124; CPMEP (2), pages separately numbered, presents Robert Hughes’s edition of the full score of Pound’s opera or ‘sung dramedy’, Cavalcanti; (c) Ego Scriptor Cantilenae: The Music of Ezra Pound (ESC), Robert Hughes conductor and musical director, Margaret Fisher author, containing audio CD (Other Minds OM 1005–2) and 80-page booklet (San Francisco: Other Minds Inc., 2003)—the Other Minds CD contains selections from Cavalcanti and from Pound’s unfinished third opera, Collis O Heliconii (1932). See also Margaret Fisher, ‘Great Bass: Undertones of Continuous Influence’, Performance Research 8.1 (Spring 2003) 23–40, particularly pp. 30 and 34–9. I am indebted to Mary de Rachewiltz for a recording of the performance of Cavalcanti: A Sung Dramedy in 3 Acts under the direction of Marcello Fera in the Nuovo Teatro Communale of Bolzano, 14 July 2000.

  108 ‘Guido’: EP to DP, 14 Sept. 1927 (Lilly).

  ‘Guido’s philosophy’: EP to OR, [Oct. 1927] (Beinecke/OR).

  ‘proof’: EP, ‘Cavalcanti’, MIN 345, LE 149.

  ‘biological proof’:EP, Poetry Notebook 13 (Beinecke).

  ‘nature’s source’: EP, trans. of ‘Donna mi prega’ in ‘Cavalcanti’, MIN 353, LE 155.

  ‘by miracle’: EP to IWP, 11 Nov. 1927, EP/Parents 639. Other details from EP to OR, [early Nov. 1927] (Beinecke/OR).

  ‘full text’: EP to HLP, 16 Nov. [1927], EP/Parents 640.

  109 title page: from Anderson, ‘Editor’s Introduction’, Pound’s Cavalcanti, p. xxi.

  ‘Specimen pages’: Gallup: 1983, 153.

  Rossetti’s Early Italian Poets: Pound’s marked copy is now in HRC.

  110 David Anderson records: Anderson, ‘Editor’s Introduction’, Pound’s Cavalcanti, pp. xxii–xxiii. The Gilson review is reprinted in Homberger: 1972, 273–9.

/>   ‘very complicated’: EP, ABCR 104; see p. 23 above.

  ‘psychologist of the emotions’: EP, ‘Introduction’ to Sonnets and Ballate of Guido Cavalcanti (1912), T 18, Anderson 12.

  111 ‘Exhausted’: EP, ‘Introduction’, T 20, Anderson 14.

  after Eliot: Eliot’s actual words, in ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ (1919), were of course ‘the man who suffers and the mind which creates’.

  ‘It is only when the emotions’: EP, ‘Introduction’ to Sonnets and Ballate of Guido Cavalcanti (1912), T 24, Anderson 19.

  re Canzoni, see EP: Poet I 135–49.

  ‘not as platonic’: EP, ‘Date Line’, MIN 15.

  ‘super-in-human refinement’: cf. ‘super-in-human refinemengts’, EP to AB, 24 Oct. 1933 (Lilly).

  112 ‘Mediaevalism’: this paragraph and the first sentences of the next are based on this, the first part of ‘Cavalcanti’, as in MIN 345–52 and LE 149–55.

  cites Gilson: in ‘Partial Explanation’, MIN 359–60, LE 160–1.

  113 ‘intenzion’: see MIN 361, LE 162.

  ‘Voi che intendendo’: Paradiso VII, 37. See GK 315, 317.

  ‘much more “modern”’: EP, ‘Cavalcanti’, MIN 346, LE 149.

  Renan’s Averroës et L’Averroïsme: Pound’s marked copy is in HRC. Cf. MIN 388–90, LE 184–6.

  ‘the eternal act’: S. T. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria (1817), chap. XIII.

  ‘perfection of the rational soul’: ‘La perfection de l’âme rationelle est de devenir le miroir de l’univers’ (attributed to Avicenna), Ernest Renan, Averroës et L’Averroïsme (Paris, 1925), p. 96.

  no question…of a paradise out of this world: on this aspect see Mohammad Shaheen, ‘Pound’s transmission of ittisal in Canto 76’, Pai 17.1 (1988) 133–45.

  ‘ever at the interpretation’: see EP: Poet I 225 and SR 92–3.

  114 ‘the active and passive’: EP, ‘Terra Italica’ (1931), S Pr 59—the rest of this paragraph is based on this important essay, S Pr 54–60.

  ‘Coition, the sacrament’:EP TSS note (Beinecke), cited by Margaret Fisher, EPRO 153.

  ‘meaning can be explained’: EP, ‘Preface’, CPMEP (2) vi. Underlining as in EP’s TSS, ‘Pound/Cavalcanti —General directions’ (Beinecke).