Ezra Pound
American poet and critic (1885–1972) / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Ezra Weston Loomis Pound (30 October 1885 – 1 November 1972) was an expatriate American poet and critic, a major figure in the early modernist poetry movement, and a collaborator in Fascist Italy and the Salò Republic during World War II. His works include Ripostes (1912), Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920), and his 800-page epic poem, The Cantos (c. 1917–1962).[1]
Pound's contribution to poetry began in the early 20th century with his role in developing Imagism, a movement stressing precision and economy of language. Working in London as foreign editor of several American literary magazines, he helped discover and shape the work of contemporaries such as Robert Frost, T. S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, and James Joyce. He was responsible for the 1914 serialization of Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the 1915 publication of Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", and the serialization from 1918 of Joyce's Ulysses. Hemingway wrote in 1932 that, for poets born in the late 19th or early 20th century, not to be influenced by Pound would be "like passing through a great blizzard and not feeling its cold."[lower-alpha 1]
Angered by the carnage of World War I, Pound blamed the war on finance capitalism, which he called "usury".[3] He moved to Italy in 1924 and through the 1930s and 1940s promoted an economic theory known as social credit, wrote for publications owned by the British fascist Sir Oswald Mosley, embraced Benito Mussolini's fascism, and expressed support for Adolf Hitler. During World War II, Pound recorded hundreds of paid radio propaganda broadcasts for the Italian government, including in German-occupied Italy, in which he attacked the United States Federal Government, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Great Britain, international finance, munitions makers, arms dealers, Jews, and others, as abettors and prolongers of the war. He also praised both Eugenics and the Holocaust in Italy, while urging American GIs to throw down their rifles and surrender. In 1945, Pound was captured by the Italian Resistance and handed over to the U.S. Army's Counterintelligence Corps, who held him pending extradition and prosecution based on an indictment for treason. He spent months in a U.S. military detention camp near Pisa, including three weeks in an outdoor steel cage. Ruled mentally unfit to stand trial, Pound was incarcerated for over 12 years at St. Elizabeths psychiatric hospital in Washington, D.C., whose doctors viewed Pound as a narcissist and a psychopath, but otherwise completely sane.
While in custody in Italy, Pound began work on sections of The Cantos, which were published as The Pisan Cantos (1948), for which he was awarded the Bollingen Prize for Poetry in 1949 by the Library of Congress, causing enormous controversy. After a campaign by his fellow writers, he was released from St. Elizabeth's in 1958 and returned to Italy, where he posed for the press giving the Fascist salute and called America "an insane asylum". Pound remained in Italy until his death in 1972. His economic and political views have ensured that his life and literary legacy remain highly controversial.
Family background
Pound was born in 1885 in a two-story clapboard house in Hailey, Idaho Territory, the only child of Homer Loomis Pound (1858–1942) and Isabel Weston (1860–1948),[4] who married in 1884.[5] Homer had worked in Hailey since 1883 as registrar of the United States General Land Office.[4][6] Pound's grandfather, Thaddeus Coleman Pound, a Republican Congressman and the 10th Lieutenant Governor of Wisconsin, had secured him the appointment. Homer had previously worked for Thaddeus in the lumber business.[7]
Both sides of Pound's family emigrated from England in the 17th century. On his father's side, the immigrant ancestor was John Pound, a Quaker who arrived from England around 1650.[5] Ezra's paternal grandmother, Susan Angevine Loomis,[8] married Thaddeus Coleman Pound.[7] On his mother's side, Pound was descended from William Wadsworth, a Puritan who emigrated to Boston on the Lion in 1632. Captain Joseph Wadsworth helped to write the first Connecticut constitution.[9] The Wadsworths married into the Westons of New York; Harding Weston and Mary Parker were Pound's maternal grandparents.[5] After serving in the military, Harding remained unemployed, so his brother Ezra Weston and Ezra's wife, Frances Amelia Wessells Freer (Aunt Frank), helped to look after Isabel, Pound's mother.[10]
Early education
Isabel Pound was unhappy in Hailey and took Ezra with her to New York in 1887 when he was 18 months old.[11] Her husband followed and found a job as an assayer at the Philadelphia Mint. After a move to 417 Walnut Street in Jenkintown, Pennsylvania, the family bought a six-bedroom house in 1893 at 166 Fernbrook Avenue, Wyncote.[5] Pound's education began in dame schools: Miss Elliott's school in Jenkintown in 1892 and the Heathcock family's Chelten Hills School in Wyncote in 1893.[5] Known as "Ra" (pronounced "Ray"), he attended Wyncote Public School from September 1894.[12] His first publication was on 7 November 1896 in the Jenkintown Times-Chronicle ("by E. L. Pound, Wyncote, aged 11 years"), a limerick about William Jennings Bryan, who had just lost the 1896 presidential election.[lower-alpha 2]
In 1897, aged 12, he transferred to Cheltenham Military Academy (CMA), where he wore an American Civil War-style uniform and was taught drilling and how to shoot.[14] The following year he made his first trip overseas, a three-month tour with his mother and Aunt Frank, who took him to England, Belgium, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Spain, and Morocco.[15] He attended CMA until 1900, at times as a boarder, but it seems he did not graduate.[16][lower-alpha 3]
University
In 1901, at 15 years old, Pound was admitted to the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.[18] Years later he said his aim was to avoid drill at the military academy.[19] His one distinction in first year was in geometry,[20] but otherwise his grades were mostly poor, including in Latin, his major; he achieved a B in English composition and a pass in English literature.[21] In his second year he switched from the degree course to "non-degree special student status", he said "to avoid irrelevant subjects".[22][lower-alpha 4] He was not elected to a fraternity at Penn, but it seemed not to bother him.[24]
His parents and Aunt Frank took him on another three-month European tour in 1902, and the following year he transferred to Hamilton College in Clinton, New York, possibly because of his grades.[25] Again he was not invited to join a fraternity, but this time he had hoped to do so, according to letters home, because he wanted to live in a fraternity house, and by April 1904 he regarded the move as a mistake.[26] Signed up for the Latin–Scientific course, he appears to have avoided some classes; his transcript is short of credits.[25] He studied the Provençal dialect and read Dante and Anglo-Saxon poetry, including Beowulf and the 8th-century Old English poem The Seafarer.[27]
After graduating from Hamilton in 1905 with a PhB, he returned to Penn, where he fell in love with Hilda Doolittle (who wrote under the name "H.D."). She was then a student at Bryn Mawr College, and he hand-bound 25 of his poems for her, calling it Hilda's Book.[28] After receiving his MA in Romance languages in 1906, he registered to write a PhD thesis on the jesters in Lope de Vega's plays; a two-year Harrison fellowship covered his tuition and a $500 grant, with which he sailed again to Europe.[29] He spent three weeks in Madrid in various libraries, including in the Royal Library. On 31 May 1906 he was standing outside the palace during the attempted assassination of King Alfonso and left the city for fear of being mistaken for an anarchist.[30] After Spain he visited Paris and London, returning to the United States in July 1906.[31] His first essay, "Raphaelite Latin", was published in the Book News Monthly that September.[32] He took courses in English in 1907, where he fell out with just about everyone, including the department head, Felix Schelling, with silly remarks during lectures and by winding an enormous tin watch very slowly while Schelling spoke.[33] In the spring of 1907 he learned that his fellowship would not be renewed.[34] Schelling told him he was wasting everyone's time, and he left without finishing his doctorate.[35]
Teaching
I am homesick after mine own kind,
Oh I know that there are folk about me, friendly faces,
But I am homesick after mine own kind.
— Personae of Ezra Pound (1909)[36]
written in Crawfordsville, Indiana, 1907[37]
From September 1907 Pound taught French and Spanish at Wabash College,[38] a Presbyterian college with 345 students in Crawfordsville, Indiana,[39] which he called "the sixth circle of hell".[40] One former student remembered him as a breath of fresh air; another said he was "exhibitionist, egotistic, self-centered and self-indulgent".[41]
He was dismissed after a few months. Smoking was forbidden, but he would smoke cigarillos in his room in the same corridor as the president's office.[42] He was asked to leave the college in January 1908 when his landladies, Ida and Belle Hall, found a woman in his room.[43] Shocked at having been expelled,[44] he left for Europe soon after, sailing from New York in March on the RMS Slavonia.[45]
A Lume Spento
Pound arrived in Gibraltar on 23 March 1908, where he earned $15 a day working as a guide for an American family there and in Spain.[46] After stops in Seville, Grenada, and Genoa, by the end of April he was in Venice, living over a bakery near the San Vio bridge.[47] In the summer he decided to self-publish his first collection of 44 poems in the 72-page A Lume Spento ("With Tapers Quenched"), 150 copies of which were printed in July 1908.[48] The title is from the third canto of Dante's Purgatorio, alluding to the death of Manfred, King of Sicily. Pound dedicated the book to the Philadelphia artist William Brooke Smith, a friend from university who had recently died of tuberculosis.[49]
In "Canto LXXVI" of The Pisan Cantos, he records that he considered throwing the proofs into the Grand Canal, abandoning the book and poetry altogether: "by the soap-smooth stone posts where San Vio / meets with il Canal Grande / between Salviati and the house that was of Don Carlos / shd/I chuck the lot into the tide-water? / le bozze "A Lume Spento"/ / and by the column of Todero / shd/I shift to the other side / or wait 24 hours".[50]
Move to London
In August 1908 Pound moved to London, carrying 60 copies of A Lume Spento.[51] English poets such as Maurice Hewlett, Rudyard Kipling, and Alfred Tennyson had made a particular kind of Victorian verse—stirring, pompous, and propagandistic—popular. According to modernist scholar James Knapp, Pound rejected the idea of poetry as "versified moral essay"; he wanted to focus on the individual experience, the concrete rather than the abstract.[52]
Pound at first stayed in a boarding house at 8 Duchess Street, near the British Museum Reading Room; he had met the landlady during his travels in Europe in 1906.[53] He soon moved to Islington (cheaper at 12s 6d a week board and lodging), but his father sent him £4 and he was able to move back into central London, to 48 Langham Street, near Great Titchfield Street.[54] The house sat across an alley from the Yorkshire Grey pub, which made an appearance in "Canto LXXX" (The Pisan Cantos), "concerning the landlady's doings / with a lodger unnamed / az waz near Gt Tichfield St. next door to the pub".[55]
Pound persuaded the bookseller Elkin Mathews on Vigo Street to display A Lume Spento, and in an unsigned article on 26 November 1908, Pound reviewed it himself in the Evening Standard: "The unseizable magic of poetry is in this queer paper book; and words are no good in describing it."[56] The following month he self-published a second collection, A Quinzaine for this Yule.[57] It was his first book to have commercial success, and Elkin Matthews had another 100 copies printed.[58] In January and February 1909, after the death of John Churton Collins left a vacancy, Pound lectured for an hour a week in the evenings on "The Development of Literature in Southern Europe" at the Regent Street Polytechnic.[59][lower-alpha 5] Mornings might be spent in the British Museum Reading Room, followed by lunch at the Vienna Café on Oxford Street, where Pound first met Wyndham Lewis in 1910.[61] "There were mysterious figures / that emerged from recondite recesses / and ate at the WIENER CAFÉ".[62] Ford Madox Ford described Pound as "approach[ing] with the step of a dancer, making passes with a cane at an imaginary opponent":
He would wear trousers made of green billiard cloth, a pink coat, a blue shirt, a tie hand-painted by a Japanese friend, an immense sombrero, a flaming beard cut to a point, and a single, large blue earring."[63]
Meeting Dorothy Shakespear, Personae
At a literary salon in 1909, Pound met the novelist Olivia Shakespear[64] and later at the Shakespears' home at 12 Brunswick Gardens, Kensington, was introduced to her daughter, Dorothy, who became Pound's wife in 1914.[65] The critic Iris Barry described her as "carrying herself delicately with the air, always, of a young Victorian lady out skating, and a profile as clear and lovely as that of a porcelain Kuan-yin".[66] "Listen to it—Ezra! Ezra!—And a third time—Ezra!", Dorothy wrote in her diary on 16 February 1909.[67]
Pound mixed with the cream of London's literary circle, including Hewlett, Laurence Binyon, Frederic Manning, Ernest Rhys, May Sinclair, Ellen Terry, George Bernard Shaw, Hilaire Belloc, T. E. Hulme, and F. S. Flint.[68] Through the Shakespears, he was introduced to the poet W. B. Yeats, Olivia Shakespear's former lover. He had already sent Yeats a copy of A Lume Spento, and Yeats had apparently found it "charming".[69] Pound wrote to William Carlos Williams on 3 February 1909: "Am by way of falling into the crowd that does things here. London, deah old Lundon, is the place for poesy."[70] According to Richard Aldington, London found Pound amusing. The newspapers interviewed him,[71] and he was mentioned in Punch magazine, which on 23 June 1909 described "Mr. Ezekiel Ton" as "the most remarkable thing in poetry since Robert Browning ... [blending] the imagery of the unfettered West, the vocabulary of Wardour Street, and the sinister abandon of Borgiac Italy".[72]
"Thank you, whatever comes." And then she turned
And, as the ray of sun on hanging flowers
Fades when the wind hath lifted them aside,
Went swiftly from me. Nay, whatever comes
One hour was sunlit and the most high gods
May not make boast of any better thing
Than to have watched that hour as it passed.
— Personae: The Collected Poems of Ezra Pound (1926)[73]
In April 1909 Elkin Mathews published Personae of Ezra Pound (half the poems were from A Lume Spento)[58][lower-alpha 6] and in October a further 27 poems (16 new) as Exultations.[76] Edward Thomas described Personae in English Review as "full of human passion and natural magic".[77] Rupert Brooke complained in the Cambridge Review that Pound had fallen under the influence of Walt Whitman, writing in "unmetrical sprawling lengths that, in his hands, have nothing to commend them". But he did acknowledge that Pound had "great talents".[78]
In or around September, Pound moved into new rooms at Church Walk, off Kensington High Street, where he lived most of the time until 1914.[79] He visited a friend, Walter Rummel, in Paris in March 1910 and was introduced to the American heiress and pianist Margaret Lanier Cravens. Although they had only just met, she offered to become a patron to the tune of $1,000 a year, and from then until her death in 1912 she apparently sent him money regularly.[80]
The Spirit of Romance, Canzoni, the New Age
In June 1910 Pound returned for eight months to the United States; his arrival coincided with the publication in London of his first book of literary criticism, The Spirit of Romance, based on his lecture notes from the polytechnic.[81] Patria Mia, his essays on the United States, were written at this time.[82] In August he moved to New York, renting rooms on Waverly Place and Park Avenue South, facing Gramercy Square.[83] Although he loved New York, he felt alienated by the commercialism and newcomers from Eastern and Southern Europe who were displacing the white Anglo-Saxon Protestants.[84] The recently built New York Public Library Main Branch he found especially offensive.[85] During this period his antisemitism became apparent; he referred in Patria Mia to the "detestable qualities" of Jews.[86] After persuading his parents to finance his passage back to Europe, he sailed from New York on the RMS Mauretania on 22 February 1911. It was nearly 30 years—April 1939—before he visited the U.S. again.[87]
After three days in London he went to Paris,[88] where he worked on a new collection of poetry, Canzoni (1911),[89] panned by the Westminster Gazette as "affectation combined with pedantry".[90] He wrote in Ford Madox Ford's obituary that Ford had rolled on the floor with laughter at its "stilted language".[91] When he returned to London in August, he rented a room in Marylebone at 2A Granville Place, then shared a house at 39 Addison Road North, W11.[92] By November A. R. Orage, editor of the socialist journal the New Age, had hired him to write a weekly column.[93] Orage appears in The Cantos (Possum is T. S. Eliot): "but the lot of 'em, Yeats, Possum and Wyndham / had no ground beneath 'em. / Orage had."[94]
Pound contributed to the New Age from 30 November 1911 to 13 January 1921,[95] attending editorial meetings in the basement of a grimy ABC tearoom in Chancery Lane.[96] There and at other meetings he met Arnold Bennett, Cecil Chesterton, Beatrice Hastings, S. G. Hobson, Hulme, Katherine Mansfield, and H. G. Wells.[95] In the New Age office in 1918, he also met C. H. Douglas, a British engineer who was developing his economic theory of social credit, which Pound found attractive.[97] Douglas reportedly believed that Jews were a problem and needed to abandon a Messianic view of themselves as the "dominating race".[98] According to Colin Holmes, the New Age itself published antisemitic material.[99] It was within this environment, not in Italy, according to Tim Redman, that Pound first encountered antisemitic ideas about "usury".[95] "In Douglas's program," Christopher Hitchens wrote in 2008, "Pound had found his true muse: a blend of folkloric Celtic twilight with a paranoid hatred of the money economy and a dire suspicion about an ancient faith."[100]
Poetry magazine, Ripostes, Imagism
In May 1911, H.D. left Philadelphia for London. She was accompanied by the poet Frances Gregg and Gregg's mother; when they returned in September, H.D. stayed on. Pound introduced her to his friends, including Aldington, who became her husband in 1913. Before that, the three of them lived in Church Walk, Kensington—Pound at no. 10, Aldington at no. 8, and Doolittle at no. 6—and worked daily in the British Museum Reading Room.[79]
At the British Museum, Laurence Binyon introduced Pound to the East Asian artistic and literary concepts Pound used in his later poetry, including Japanese ukiyo-e prints.[103] The visitors' book first shows Pound in the Prints and Drawings Students' Room (known as the Print Room)[104] on 9 February 1909, and later in 1912 and 1913, with Dorothy Shakespear, examining Chinese and Japanese art.[105] Pound was working at the time on the poems that became Ripostes (1912), trying to move away from his earlier work.[106] "I hadn't in 1910 made a language," he wrote years later. "I don't mean a language to use, but even a language to think in."[lower-alpha 8]
In August 1912 Harriet Monroe hired Pound as foreign correspondent of Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, a new magazine in Chicago.[108] The first edition, in October, featured two of his own poems, "To Whistler, American" and "Middle Aged". Also that month Stephen Swift and Co. in London published Ripostes of Ezra Pound, a collection of 25 poems, including a contentious translation of The Seafarer,[109] that demonstrate his shift toward minimalist language.[79] In addition to Pound's work, the collection contains five poems by Hulme.[110]
Ripostes includes the first mention of Les Imagistes: "As for the future, Les Imagistes, the descendants of the forgotten school of 1909, have that in their keeping."[111] While in the British Museum tearoom one afternoon with Doolittle and Aldington, Pound edited one of Doolittle's poems and wrote "H.D. Imagiste" underneath;[112] he described this later as the founding of a movement in poetry, Imagisme.[113][lower-alpha 9] In the spring or early summer of 1912, they agreed, Pound wrote in 1918, on three principles:
1. Direct treatment of the "thing" whether subjective or objective.
2. To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation.
3. As regarding rhythm: to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome.[115]
Poetry published Pound's "A Few Don'ts by an Imagist" in March 1913. Superfluous words, particularly adjectives, should be avoided, as well as expressions like "dim lands of peace". He wrote: "It dulls the image. It mixes an abstraction with the concrete. It comes from the writer's not realizing that the natural object is always the adequate symbol." Poets should "go in fear of abstractions".[116] He wanted Imagisme "to stand for hard light, clear edges", he wrote later to Amy Lowell.[117]
The apparition of these faces in the crowd:
Petals on a wet, black bough.
An example of Imagist poetry is Pound's "In a Station of the Metro", published in Poetry in April 1913 and inspired by an experience on the Paris Underground. "I got out of a train at, I think, La Concorde," he wrote in "How I began" in T. P.'s Weekly on 6 June 1913, "and in the jostle I saw a beautiful face, and then, turning suddenly, another and another, and then a beautiful child's face, and then another beautiful face. All that day I tried to find words for what this made me feel. ... I could get nothing but spots of colour." A year later he reduced it to its essence in the style of a Japanese haiku.[119]
James Joyce, Pound's unpopularity
In the summer of 1913 Pound became literary editor of The Egoist, a journal founded by the suffragette Dora Marsden.[120] At the suggestion of W. B. Yeats, Pound encouraged James Joyce in December of that year to submit his work.[121] The previous month Yeats, whose eyesight was failing, had rented Stone Cottage in Coleman's Hatch, Sussex, inviting Pound to accompany him as his secretary, and it was during this visit that Yeats introduced Pound to Joyce's Chamber Music and his "I hear an Army Charging Upon the Land".[122] This was the first of three winters Pound and Yeats spent at Stone Cottage, including two with Dorothy after she and Ezra married in 1914.[123] "Canto LXXXIII" records a visit: "so that I recalled the noise in the chimney / as it were the wind in the chimney / but was in reality Uncle William / downstairs composing / that had made a great Peeeeacock / in the proide ov his oiye."[124][lower-alpha 10]
In his reply to Pound, Joyce gave permission to use "I hear an Army" and enclosed Dubliners and the first chapter of his novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.[122] Pound wrote to Joyce that the novel was "damn fine stuff".[125] Harriet Shaw Weaver accepted it for The Egoist, which serialized it from 2 February 1914, despite the printers objecting to words like "fart" and "ballocks", and fearing prosecution over Stephen Dedalus's thoughts about prostitutes. On the basis of the serialization, the publisher that had rejected Dubliners reconsidered. Joyce wrote to Yeats: "I can never thank you enough for having brought me into relation with your friend Ezra Pound who is indeed a miracle worker."[126]
Around this time, Pound's articles in the New Age began to make him unpopular, to the alarm of Orage.[127] Samuel Putnam knew Pound in Paris in the 1920s and described him as stubborn, contrary, cantankerous, bossy, touchy, and "devoid of humor"; he was "an American small-towner", in Putnam's view. His attitude caused him trouble in both London and Paris.[128] English women, with their "preponderantly derivative" minds, were inferior to American women who had minds of their own, he wrote in the New Age. The English sense of what was right was based on respect for property, not morality. "[P]erched on the rotten shell of a crumbling empire", London had lost its energy. England's best authors—Conrad, Hudson, James, and Yeats—were not English. English writers and critics were ignorant, he wrote in 1913.[129]
Marriage
Ezra and Dorothy were married on 20 April 1914 at St Mary Abbots in Kensington,[130] the Shakespears' parish church, despite opposition from her parents, who worried about Ezra's income. His concession to marry in church had helped. Dorothy's annual income was £50, with another £150 from her family,[131] and Ezra's was £200.[132] Her father, Henry Hope Shakespear, had him prepare a financial statement in 1911, which showed that his main source of income was his father.[133] After the wedding the couple moved into an apartment with no bathroom at 5 Holland Place Chambers, Kensington, next door to the newly wed H.D. and Aldington.[131] This arrangement did not last. H.D. had been alarmed to find Ezra looking for a place to live outside the apartment building the day before his wedding. Once Dorothy and Ezra had moved into the building, Ezra would arrive unannounced at H.D.'s to discuss his writing, a habit that upset her, in part because his writing touched on private aspects of their relationship. She and Aldington decided to move several miles away to Hampstead.[134]
Des Imagistes, dispute with Amy Lowell
The appearance of Des Imagistes, An Anthology (1914), edited by Pound, "confirmed the importance" of Imagisme, according to Ira Nadel.[135] Published in the American magazine The Glebe in February 1914 and the following month as a book, it was the first of five Imagist anthologies and the only one to contain work by Pound.[136] It included ten poems by Richard Aldington, seven by H. D., followed by Flint, Skipwith Cannell, Lowell, Carlos Williams, James Joyce ("I Hear an Army", not an example of Imagism), six by Pound, then Hueffer (as he was known as the time), Allen Upward and John Cournos.[137]
Shortly after its publication, an advertisement for Lewis's new magazine, Blast promised it would cover "Cubism, Futurism, Imagisme and all Vital Forms of Modern Art."[138] Described by Pound as "mostly a painter's magazine with me to do the poems,”[139] and bearing the heavy influence of Futurism,[140] Blast was the magazine of a London art movement formed by Lewis with Pound’s collaboration. Pound named the movement Vorticism.[lower-alpha 11] Vorticism included all the arts, and in Blast “the Imagist propaganda merged into the Vorticist.” [143] In the end, Blast was published only twice, in 1914 and 1915. In June 1914 The Times announced Lewis's new Rebel Arts Centre for Vorticist art at 38 Great Ormond Street.[144]
Lowell, who was to win the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1926, was unhappy that only one of her poems had appeared in Des Imagistes. She arrived in London in July 1914 to attend two dinners at the Dieudonné restaurant in Ryder Street, the first to celebrate the publication of Blast and the second, on 17 July, the publication of Des Imagistes. At the second, Ford Madox Hueffer announced that he had been an Imagiste long before Lowell and Pound, and that he doubted their qualifications; only Aldington and H.D. could lay claim to the title, in his view. During the subsequent row, Pound left the table and returned with a tin bathtub on his head, suggesting it as a symbol of what he called Les Nagistes, a school created by Lowell's poem "In a Garden", which ends with "Night, and the water, and you in your whiteness, bathing!" Apparently his behavior helped Lowell win people over to her point of view, as did her offer to fund future work.[145]
H.D. and Aldington were moving away from Pound's understanding of Imagisme anyway, as he aligned himself with Lewis's ideas.[146] Lowell agreed to finance an annual anthology of Imagiste poets, but she insisted on democracy; according to Aldington, she "proposed a Boston Tea Party for Ezra" and an end to his despotic rule.[147] Upset at Lowell, Pound began to call Imagisme "Amygism";[148] he declared the movement dead and asked the group not to call themselves Imagistes. Not accepting that it was Pound's invention, they refused and Anglicized the term.[149]
Meeting Eliot, Cathay, translation
When war was declared in August 1914, opportunities for writers were immediately reduced; poems were now expected to be patriotic.[150] Pound's income from October 1914 to October 1915 was £42.10.0,[151] apparently five times less than the year before.[152]
On 22 September 1914 T. S. Eliot traveled from Merton College, Oxford, with an introduction from Conrad Aiken, to have Pound read Eliot's unpublished "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock".[153] Pound wrote to Harriet Monroe, editor of Poetry, on 30 September to say that Eliot—who was at Oxford on a fellowship from Harvard—had "sent in the best poem I have yet had or seen from an American ... He has actually trained himself and modernized himself on his own."[154] Monroe did not like Prufrock's "very European world-weariness", according to Humphrey Carpenter, but she published it anyway, in June 1915.[155]
A Letter
At fourteen I married My Lord you.
I never laughed, being bashful.
Lowering my head, I looked at the wall.
Called to, a thousand times, I never looked back.
At fifteen, I stopped scowling,
I desired my dust to be mingled with yours
Forever and forever and forever.
Why should I climb the look out?
— "The River Merchant's Wife: A Letter" by Li Bai, translated in Cathay (1915)[156]
The 1915 poen Cathay contains 25 examples of Classical Chinese poetry that Pound translated into English based on the notes of the Orientalist Ernest Fenollosa. Fenollosa's widow, Mary McNeill Fenollosa, had given Pound her husband's notes in 1913,[157] after Laurence Binyon introduced them.[158] Michael Alexander saw Cathay as the most attractive of Pound's work.[159] There is a debate about whether the poems should be viewed primarily as translations or as contributions to Imagism and the modernization of English poetry.[160] English professor Steven Yao argued that Cathay shows that translation does not need a thorough knowledge of the source language.[lower-alpha 12]
Pound's translations from Old English, Latin, Italian, French and Chinese were highly disputed. According to Alexander, they made him more unpopular in some circles than the treason charge.[163] Robert Graves wrote in 1955: "[Pound] knew little Latin, yet he translated Propertius; and less Greek, but he translated Alcaeus; and still less Anglo-Saxon, yet he translated The Seafarer. I once asked Arthur Waley how much Chinese Pound knew; Waley shook his head despondently."[164]
Pound was devastated when Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, from whom he had commissioned a sculpture of himself two years earlier, was killed in the trenches in June 1915. In response, he published Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir (1916), writing "A great spirit has been among us, and a great artist has gone."[165] Two months before he died, Gaudier-Brzeska had written to Pound to say that he kept Cathay in his pocket "to put courage in my fellows".[166]
"Three Cantos", resignation from Poetry
After the publication of Cathay, Pound mentioned that he was working on a long poem. He described it in September 1915 as a "cryselephantine poem of immeasurable length which will occupy me for the next four decades unless it becomes a bore".[167] In February 1916, when Pound was 30, the poet Carl Sandburg paid tribute to him in Poetry magazine. Pound "stains darkly and touches softly", he wrote:
All talk on modern poetry, by people who know, ends with dragging in Ezra Pound somewhere. He may be named only to be cursed as wanton and mocker, poseur, trifler and vagrant. Or he may be classed as filling a niche today like that of Keats in a preceding epoch. The point is, he will be mentioned. ...
In the cool and purple meantime, Pound goes ahead producing new poems having the slogan, "Guts and Efficiency," emblazoned above his daily program of work. His genius runs to various schools and styles. He acquires traits and then throws them away. One characteristic is that he has no characteristics. He is a new roamer of the beautiful, a new fetcher of wild shapes, in each new handful of writings offered us.[168]
In June, July and August 1917 Pound had the first three cantos published, as "Three Cantos", in Poetry.[169][170] He was now a regular contributor to three literary magazines. From 1917 he wrote music reviews for the New Age as William Atheling and art reviews as B. H. Dias.[171] In May 1917 Margaret Anderson hired him as foreign editor of the Little Review.[172] He also wrote weekly pieces for The Egoist and the Little Review; many of the latter complained about provincialism, which included the ringing of church bells.[173] (When Pound lived near St Mary Abbots he had "engaged in a fierce, guerrilla warfare of letters" about the bells with the vicar, Reverend R. E. Pennefather, according to Richard Aldington.)[174] The volume of writing exhausted him.[175] In 1918, after a bout of illness which was presumably the Spanish flu,[176] he decided to stop writing for the Little Review. He had asked the publisher for a raise to hire a typist, the 23-year-old Iseult Gonne, causing rumors that they were having an affair, but he was turned down.[177]
And the days are not full enough
And the nights are not full enough
And life slips by like a field mouse
Not shaking the grass.
— Personae (1926)[178]
A suspicion arose in June 1918 that Pound himself had written an article in The Egoist praising his own work, and it was clear from the response that he had acquired enemies. The poet F. S. Flint told The Egoist's editor that "we are all tired of Mr. Pound". British literary circles were "tired of his antics" and of him "puffing and swelling himself and his friends", Flint wrote. "His work has deteriorated from book to book; his manners have become more and more offensive; and we wish he would go back to America."[179]
The March 1919 issue of Poetry published Pound's Poems from the Propertius Series,[180] which appeared to be a translation of the Latin poet Sextus Propertius.[lower-alpha 13] Harriet Monroe, editor of Poetry, published a letter in April 1919 from a professor of Latin, W. G. Hale, who found "about three-score errors" in the text; he said Pound was "incredibly ignorant of Latin", that "much of what he makes his author say is unintelligible", and that "If Mr. Pound were a professor of Latin, there would be nothing left for him but suicide" (adding "I do not counsel this").[181] Pound replied to Monroe: "Cat-piss and porcupines!! The thing is no more a translation than my 'Altaforte' is a translation, or than Fitzgerald's Omar is a translation." His letter ended "In final commiseration". Monroe interpreted his silence after that as his resignation from Poetry magazine.[182]
Hugh Selwyn Mauberley
Pound reading Mauberley, Washington, D.C., June 1958
OR three years, out of key with his time,
He strove to resuscitate the dead art
Of poetry; to maintain "the sublime"
In the old sense. Wrong from the start—
No hardly, but, seeing he had been born
In a half savage country, out of date;
Bent resolutely on wringing lilies from the acorn;
Capaneus; trout for factitious bait;
Ἴδμεν γάρ τοι πάνθ', ὅσ 'ένι Τροίη[lower-alpha 14]
Caught in the unstopped ear;
Giving the rocks small lee-way
The chopped seas held him, therefore, that year.
— Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920)[184]
By 1919 Pound felt there was no reason to stay in England. He had become "violently hostile" to England, according to Aldington,[185] feeling he was being "frozen out of everything" except the New Age,[186] and concluding that the British were insensitive to "mental agility in any and every form".[187] He had "muffed his chances of becoming literary director of London—to which he undoubtedly aspired," Aldington wrote in 1941, "by his own enormous conceit, folly, and bad manners."[185]
Published by John Rodker's The Ovid Press in June 1920,[188] Pound's poem Hugh Selwyn Mauberley marked his farewell to London, and by December the Pounds were subletting their apartment and preparing to move to France.[189] Consisting of 18 short parts, Mauberley describes a poet whose life has become sterile and meaningless. It begins with a satirical analysis of the London literary scene before turning to social criticism, economics, and the war. Here the word usury first appears in his work. Just as Eliot denied he was Prufrock, Pound denied he was Mauberley.[190] In 1932 the critic F. R. Leavis, then director of studies in English at Downing College, Cambridge, called Mauberley "great poetry, at once traditional and original. Mr. Pound's standing as a poet rests on it, and rests securely".[191]
On 13 January 1921 Orage wrote in the New Age: "Mr. Pound has shaken the dust of London from his feet with not too emphatic a gesture of disgust, but, at least, without gratitude to this country. ... [He] has been an exhilarating influence for culture in England; he has left his mark upon more than one of the arts, upon literature, music, poetry and sculpture; and quite a number of men and movements owe their initiation to his self-sacrificing stimulus ..."[192]
With all this, however, Mr. Pound, like so many others who have striven for advancement of intelligence and culture in England, has made more enemies than friends, and far more powerful enemies than friends. Much of the Press has been deliberately closed by cabal to him; his books have for some time been ignored or written down; and he himself has been compelled to live on much less than would support a navvy. His fate, as I have said, is not unusual ... Taken by and large, England hates men of culture until they are dead.[192][lower-alpha 15]
Meeting Hemingway, editing The Waste Land
The Pounds settled in Paris around April 1921 and in December moved to an inexpensive ground-floor apartment at 70 bis fr:Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs.[194] Pound became friendly with Marcel Duchamp, Fernand Léger, Tristan Tzara, and others of the Dada and Surrealist movements, as well as Basil Bunting.[195] He was introduced to the American writer Gertrude Stein, who was living in Paris. She wrote years later that she liked him but did not find him amusing; he was "a village explainer, excellent if you were a village, but if you were not, not".[196]
Pound's collection Poems 1918–1921 was published in New York by Boni and Liveright in 1921. In December that year Ernest Hemingway, then aged 22, moved to Paris with his wife, Hadley Richardson, and letters of introduction from Sherwood Anderson.[197] In February 1922 the Hemingways visited the Pounds for tea.[198] Although Pound was 14 years older, the men became friends; Hemingway assumed the status of pupil and asked Pound to edit his short stories.[199] Pound introduced him to his contacts, including Lewis, Ford, John Peale Bishop, Malcolm Cowley, and Derek Patmore, while Hemingway tried to teach Pound to box.[200] Unlike Hemingway, Pound was not a drinker and preferred to spend his time in salons[201] or building furniture for his apartment and bookshelves for Sylvia Beach's Shakespeare and Company bookstore.[202]
Eliot sent Pound the manuscript of The Waste Land in 1922. Pound edited it with comments like "make up yr. mind",[202] and reduced it by about half. Eliot wrote in 1946: "I should like to think that the manuscript, with the suppressed passages, had disappeared irrecoverably; yet, on the other hand, I should wish the blue pencilling on it to be preserved as irrefutable evidence of Pound's critical genius."[203] His dedication in The Waste Land was "For Ezra Pound / il miglior fabbro" (the "better craftsman"), from Canto 26 of Dante's Purgatorio.[204]
Meeting Olga Rudge
Pound was 36 when he met the 26-year-old American violinist Olga Rudge in Paris in the summer of 1922.[205] They were introduced at a salon hosted by the American heiress Natalie Barney at her 300-year-old house at 20 Rue Jacob, near the Boulevard Saint-Germain.[206] The two moved in different social circles: Rudge was the daughter of a wealthy Youngstown, Ohio, steel family, living in her mother's Parisian apartment on the Right Bank, socializing with aristocrats, while Pound's friends were mostly impoverished writers of the Left Bank.[207]
Restarting The Cantos
Twice the length of Paradise Lost and 50 times longer than The Waste Land, Pound's 800-page The Cantos ("Canto I" to "Canto CXVI", c. 1917–1962) became his life's work.[lower-alpha 16] His obituary in The Times described it as not a great poem, because of the lack of structure, but a great improvisation: "[T]he exasperating form permits the occasional, and in the early Cantos and in The Pisan Cantos not so occasional, irruption of passages of great poetry, hot and burning lava breaking through the cracks in piles of boring scree."[209]
I have brought the great ball of crystal;
Who can lift it?
Can you enter the great acorn of light?
But the beauty is not the madness
Tho' my errors and wrecks lie about me.
And I am not a demigod,[lower-alpha 17]
I cannot make it cohere.
— Paris Review, 1962[lower-alpha 18]
The first three cantos had been published in Poetry magazine in June, July, and August 1917,[169] but in 1922 Pound abandoned most of his work and began again.[211] The early cantos, the "Ur-Cantos", became "Canto I" of the new work.[212] In letters to his father in 1924 and 1927, Pound said The Cantos was like the medley of voices you hear when you turn the radio dial,[lower-alpha 19] and "[r]ather like or unlike subject and response and counter subject in fugue":
- A.A. Live man goes down into world of Dead.
- C.B. The 'repeat in history'.
- B.C. The 'magic moment' or moment of metamorphosis, bust thru from quotidien into 'divine or permanent world.' Gods., etc.[214]
Alluding to American, European and Oriental art, history and literature, the work is also autobiographical.[215] In the view of Pound scholar Carroll F. Terrell, it is a great religious poem, describing humanity's journey from hell to paradise, a "revelation of how divinity is manifested in the universe ... the kind of intelligence that makes the cherrystone become a cherry tree."[216] The poet Allen Tate argued in 1949 that it is "about nothing at all ... a voice but no subject".[217] Responding to A Draft of XXX Cantos (1930), F. R. Leavis criticized its "lack of form, grammar, principle and direction".[218] The lack of form became a common criticism.[219][lower-alpha 20] Pound wrote in the final complete canto, "Canto CXVI" (116, first published in the Paris Review in 1962), that he could not "make it cohere",[221] although a few lines later, referring to the universe: "it coheres all right / even if my notes do not cohere."[222] According to Pound scholar Walter Baumann, the demigod of "Canto CXVI"—"And I am not a demigod"—is Heracles of Sophocles' Women of Trachis (450–425 BCE), who exclaims before he dies (based on Pound's translation): "SPLENDOUR, / IT ALL COHERES".[lower-alpha 17] "Canto CXVI" ends with the lines "a little light, like a rushlight / to lead back to splendour."[224]