39- ] American Literature - Ezra Pound

39- ] American Literature 

Ezra Pound

Ezra Pound is widely considered one of the most influential and most difficult poets of the 20th century; his contributions to Modernist poetry are enormous. He was an early champion of a number of avant-garde and Modernist poets, developed important channels of intellectual and aesthetic exchange between the United States and Europe, and contributed to important literary movements. Pound, along with Richard Aldington and other writers, founded the Imagist movement. Pound edited its first anthology, Des Imagistes, in 1914. He also helped found vorticism with Wyndham Lewis and the sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, which, for some, replaced Imagism. The founders published the magazine Blast.

American poet and critic, a supremely discerning and energetic entrepreneur of the arts who did more than any other single figure to advance a “modern” movement in English and American literature. Pound promoted, and also occasionally helped to shape, the work of such widely different poets and novelists as William Butler Yeats, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Robert Frost, D.H. Lawrence, and T.S. Eliot. His pro-Fascist broadcasts in Italy during World War II led to his postwar arrest and confinement until 1958.

In his efforts to develop new directions in the arts during what is now considered the Modernist period, Ezra Pound promoted and supported such acclaimed writers as James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, Robert Frost, W.B. Yeats, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, H.D., and Ernest Hemingway.

Pound’s published books include A lume spento (1908), Exultations (1909), Personae (1909), Provenca (1910), Canzoni (1911), Lustra and Other Poems (1917), Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920), Umbra: Collected Poems (1920), Cantos I–XVI (1925), A Draft of XXX Cantos (1930), Homage to Sextus Propertius (1934), The Fifth Decade of Cantos (1937), Cantos LII-LXXI (1940), The Pisan Cantos (1948), Patria Mia (1950), and The Cantos (1972).

Ezra Pound was born in Hailey, Idaho, in 1885, and grew up near Philadelphia. He completed undergraduate work at the University of Pennsylvania and earned a BA in philosophy from Hamilton College, but he lived much of his adult life in England, France, and Italy.

Pound’s life’s work in poetry, The Cantos, remains a signal Modernist epic. Its mix of history, politics, and what Pound called “the periplum”—a point of view of one in the middle of a journey—gave countless poets incentive to develop a range of poetic techniques that capture life in the midst of experience. In an introduction to the Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot declared that Pound “is more responsible for the 20th-century revolution in poetry than is any other individual.” Donald Hall reaffirmed in remarks collected in Remembering Poets that “Ezra Pound is the poet who, a thousand times more than any other man, has made modern poetry possible in English.” Pound arguably never sought, nor had, a wide reading audience for his own work during his lifetime; his technical innovations and use of unconventional poetic materials often baffled even sympathetic readers. Early in his career, Pound aroused controversy because of his aesthetic views and later, because of his political views, including his support for the Fascist government in Italy. For the greater part of the 20th century, however, he devoted his energies to advancing the art of poetry.

Pound was involved in Fascist politics, particularly of Mussolini, and did not return to the United States until 1945, when he was arrested on charges of treason for broadcasting Fascist propaganda by radio to the United States during World War II. In 1946, he was acquitted of the charges and declared mentally unstable and committed to St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, D.C. During his confinement, the jury of the Bollingen Prize for Poetry overlooked Pound’s political career and focused on his literary achievements, awarding him the prize in 1948 for the Pisan Cantos. After appeals from those who knew him, Pound was released from the hospital in 1958. He died in November of 1972 and  was buried in Italy, on the cemetery island Isola di San Michele.

Success abroad

In England, success came quickly to Pound. A book of poems, Personae, was published in April 1909; a second book, Exultations, followed in October; and a third book, The Spirit of Romance, based on lectures delivered in London (1909–10), was published in 1910.

After a trip home—a last desperate and unsuccessful attempt to make a literary life for himself in Philadelphia or New York City—he returned to Europe in February 1911, visiting Italy, Germany, and France. Toward the end of 1911 he met an English journalist, Alfred R. Orage, editor of the socialist weekly New Age, who opened its pages to him and provided him with a small but regular income during the next nine years.

In 1912 Pound became London correspondent for the small magazine Poetry (Chicago); he did much to enhance the magazine’s importance and was soon a dominant figure in Anglo-American verse. He was among the first to recognize and review the poetry of Robert Frost and D.H. Lawrence and to praise the sculpture of the modernists Jacob Epstein and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska. As leader of the Imagist movement of 1912–14, successor of the “school of images,” he drew up the first Imagist manifesto, with its emphasis on direct and sparse language and precise images in poetry, and he edited the first Imagist anthology, Des Imagistes (1914).

A shaper of modern literature

Though his friend Yeats had already become famous, Pound succeeded in persuading him to adopt a new, leaner style of poetic composition. In 1914, the year of his marriage to Dorothy Shakespear, daughter of Yeats’s friend Olivia Shakespear, he began a collaboration with the then-unknown James Joyce. As unofficial editor of The Egoist (London) and later as London editor of The Little Review (New York City), he saw to the publication of Joyce’s novels Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses, thus spreading Joyce’s name and securing financial assistance for him. In that same year he gave T.S. Eliot a similar start in his career as poet and critic.

Pound continued to publish his own poetry (Ripostes, 1912; Lustra, 1916) and prose criticism (Pavannes and Divisions, 1918). From the literary remains of the great Orientalist Ernest Fenollosa, which had been presented to Pound in 1913, he succeeded in publishing highly acclaimed English versions of early Chinese poetry, Cathay (1915), and two volumes of Japanese Noh plays (1916–17) as well.

Development as a poet of Ezra Pound

Unsettled by the slaughter of World War I and the spirit of hopelessness he felt was pervading England after its conclusion, Pound decided to move to Paris, publishing before he left two of his most important poetical works, “Homage to Sextus Propertius,” in the book Quia Pauper Amavi (1919), and Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920). “Propertius” is a comment on the British Empire in 1917, by way of Propertius and the Roman Empire. Mauberley, a finely chiseled “portrait” of one aspect of British literary culture in 1919, was one of the most praised poems of the 20th century.

During his 12 years in London, Pound had completely transformed himself as a poet. He had arrived a Late Victorian for whom love was a matter of “lute strings,” “crushed lips,” and “Dim tales that blind me.” Within five or six years he was writing a new, adult poetry that spoke calmly of current concerns in common speech. In this drier intellectual air, “as clear as metal,” Pound’s verse took on new qualities of economy, brevity, and clarity as he used concrete details and exact visual images to capture concentrated moments of experience. Pound’s search for laconic precision owed much to his constant reading of past literature, including Anglo-Saxon poetry, Greek and Latin classics, Dante, and such 19th-century French works as Théophile Gautier’s Émaux et camées and Gustave Flaubert’s novel Madame Bovary. Like his friend T.S. Eliot, Pound wanted a modernism that brought back to life the highest standards of the past. Modernism for its own sake, untested against the past, drew anathemas from him. His progress may be seen in attempts at informality (1911):

Have tea, damn the Caesars,

Talk of the latest success…

in the gathering strength of his 1911 version of the Anglo-Saxon poem “Seafarer”:

Storms, on the stone-cliffs beaten,

fell on the stern

In icy feathers…

and in the confident free verse of “The Return” (1912):

 

See, they return; ah, see the tentative

Movements, and the slow feet…

From this struggle there emerged the short, perfectly worded free-verse poems in Lustra. In his poetry Pound was now able to deal efficiently with a whole range of human activities and emotions, without raising his voice. The movement of the words and the images they create are no longer the secondhand borrowings of youth or apprenticeship but seem to belong to the observing intelligence that conjures up the particular work in hand. Many of the Lustra poems are remarkable for perfectly paced endings:

Nor has life in it aught better

Than this hour of clear coolness,

the hour of waking together.

But the culmination of Pound’s years in London was his 18-part long poem Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, which ranged from close observation of the artist and society to the horrors of mass production and World War I; from brilliant echo of the past:

When our two dusts with Waller’s shall be laid,

Siftings on siftings in oblivion,

Till change hath broken down

All things save Beauty alone.

to the syncopation of

With a placid and uneducated mistress

He exercises his talents

And the soil meets his distress.

The Cantos

During his stay in Paris (1921–24) Pound met and helped the young American novelist Ernest Hemingway; wrote an opera, Le Testament, based on poems of François Villon; assisted T.S. Eliot with the editing of his long poem The Waste Land; and acted as correspondent for the New York literary journal The Dial.

In 1924 Pound tired of Paris and moved to Rapallo, Italy, which was to be his home for the next 20 years. In 1925 he had a daughter, Maria, by the expatriate American violinist Olga Rudge, and in 1926 his wife, Dorothy, gave birth to a son, Omar. The daughter was brought up by a peasant woman in the Italian Tirol, the son by relatives in England. In 1927–28 Pound edited his own magazine, Exile, and in 1930 he brought together, under the title A Draft of XXX Cantos, various segments of his ambitious long poem The Cantos, which he had begun in 1915.

The 1930s saw the publication of further volumes of The Cantos (Eleven New Cantos, 1934; The Fifth Decad of Cantos, 1937; Cantos LII–LXXI, 1940) and a collection of some of his best prose (Make It New, 1934). A growing interest in music caused him to arrange a long series of concerts in Rapallo during the 1930s, and, with the assistance of Olga Rudge, he played a large part in the rediscovery of the 18th-century Italian composer Antonio Vivaldi. The results of his continuing investigation in the areas of culture and history were published in his brilliant but fragmentary prose work Guide to Kulchur (1938).

Following the Great Depression of the 1930s, he turned more and more to history, especially economic history, a subject in which he had been interested since his meeting in London in 1918 with Clifford Douglas, the founder of Social Credit, an economic theory stating that maldistribution of wealth due to insufficient purchasing power is the cause of economic depressions. Pound had come to believe that a misunderstanding of money and banking by governments and the public, as well as the manipulation of money by international bankers, had led the world into a long series of wars. He became obsessed with monetary reform (ABC of Economics, 1933; Social Credit, 1935; What Is Money For?, 1939), involved himself in politics, and declared his admiration for the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini (Jefferson and/or Mussolini, 1935). The obsession affected his Cantos, which even earlier had shown evidence of becoming an uncontrolled series of personal and historical episodes.

Most of the writing on which Pound’s fame now rests may be found in Personae (The Collected Poems; 1926, new ed. 1949), a selection of poems Pound wished to keep in print in 1926, with a few earlier and later poems added in 1949; The Cantos (1970), cantos 1–117, a collection of all the segments published to date; The Spirit of Romance (1910); Literary Essays (1954), the bulk of his best criticism, ed. with an introduction by T.S. Eliot; Guide to Kulchur (1938); and The Letters of Ezra Pound, 1907–1941, ed. by D.D. Paige (1950), an excellent introduction to Pound’s literary life and inimitable epistolary style.

Selected works

(1908). A Lume Spento. Venice: A. Antonini (poems, privately printed).

(1908). A Quinzaine for This Yule. London: Pollock (poems, privately printed); and Elkin Mathews.

(1909). Personae. London: Elkin Mathews (poems).

(1909). Exultations. London: Elkin Mathews (poems).

(1910). The Spirit of Romance. London: J. M. Dent & Sons (prose).

(1910). Provenca. Boston: Small, Maynard and Company (poems).

(1911). Canzoni. London: Elkin Mathews (poems)

(1912). The Sonnets and Ballate of Guido Cavalcanti Boston: Small, Maynard and Company (translations; cheaper edition destroyed by fire, London: Swift & Co).

(1912). Ripostes. S. Swift, London, (poems; first mention of Imagism)

(1915). Cathay. Elkin Mathews (poems; translations)

(1916). Gaudier-Brzeska. A Memoir. London: John Lane (prose).

(1916). Certain Noble Plays of Japan: From the Manuscripts of Ernest Fenollosa, chosen by Ezra Pound.

(1916) with Ernest Fenollosa. "Noh", or, Accomplishment: A Study of the Classical Stage of Japan. London: Macmillan and Co.

(1916). Lustra. London: Elkin Mathews (poems).

(1917). Twelve Dialogues of Fontenelle (translations).

(1917). Lustra. New York: Alfred A. Knopf (poems, with the first "Three Cantos").

(1918). Pavannes and Divisions New York: Alfred A. Knopf (prose).

(1918). Quia Pauper Amavi London: Egoist Press (poems).

(1919). The Fourth Canto. London: Ovid Press (poem).

(1920). Hugh Selwyn Mauberley. London: Ovid Press (poem).

(1920). Umbra. London: Elkin Mathews (poems and translations).

(1920) with Ernest Fenollosa. Instigations: Together with an Essay on the Chinese Written Character. New York: Boni & Liveright (prose).

(1921). Poems, 1918–1921. New York: Boni & Liveright.

(1922). Remy de Gourmont: The Natural Philosophy of Love. New York: Boni & Liveright (translation).

(1923). Indiscretions, or, Une revue des deux mondes. Paris: Three Mountains Press.

(1924) as William Atheling. Antheil and the Treatise on Harmony. Paris (essays).

(1925). A Draft of XVI Cantos. Paris: Three Mountains Press. The first collection of The Cantos.

(1926). Personae: The Collected Poems of Ezra Pound. New York: Boni & Liveright.

(1928). A Draft of the Cantos 17–27. London: John Rodker.

(1928). Selected Poems. Edited and with an introduction by T. S. Eliot. London: Faber & Faber.

(1928). Ta Hio: The Great Learning, newly rendered into the American language. Seattle: University of Washington Bookstore (translation).

(1930). A Draft of XXX Cantos. Paris: Nancy Cunard's Hours Press.

(1930). Imaginary Letters. Paris: Black Sun Press. Eight essays from the Little Review, 1917–18.

(1931). How to Read. Harmsworth (essays).

(1932). Guido Cavalcanti Rime. Genoa: Edizioni Marsano (translations).

(1933). ABC of Economics. London: Faber & Faber (essays).

(1934). Eleven New Cantos: XXXI–XLI. New York: Farrar & Rinehart (poems).

(1934). Homage to Sextus Propertius. London: Faber & Faber (poems).

(1934). ABC of Reading. New Haven: Yale University Press (essays).

(1934). Make It New. London: Faber & Faber (essays).

(1935). Alfred Venison's Poems: Social Credit Themes by the Poet of Titchfield Street. London: Stanley Nott, Ltd. Pamphlets on the New Economics, No. 9 (essays).

(1935). Jefferson and/or Mussolini. London: Stanley Nott. (essays).

(1935). Social Credit: An Impact. London: Stanley Nott. (essays). Repr.: Peter Russell (1951). Money Pamphlets by Pound, no. 5, London.

(1936) with Ernest Fenollosa. The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry. London: Stanley Nott.

(1937). The Fifth Decade of Cantos. New York: Farrar & Rinehart (poems).

(1937). Polite Essays. London: Faber & Faber (essays).

(1937). Confucius: Digest of the Analects, edited and published by Giovanni Scheiwiller, (translations)

(1938). Guide to Kulchur. New York: New Directions.

(1939). What Is Money For?. Greater Britain Publications (essays). Money Pamphlets by Pound, no. 3. London: Peter Russell.

(1940). Cantos LXII–LXXI. New Directions, New York (John Adams Cantos 62–71).

(1942). Carta da Visita di Ezra Pound. Edizioni di lettere d'oggi. Rome. English translation by John Drummond: A Visiting Card. Money Pamphlets by Pound, no. 4. London: Peter Russell, 1952 (essays).

(1944). L'America, Roosevelt e le cause della guerra presente. Casa editrice della edizioni popolari, Venice. English translation, by John Drummond: America, Roosevelt and the Causes of the Present War, Money Pamphlets by Pound, no. 6, Peter Russell, London 1951

(1944). Introduzione alla Natura Economica degli S.U.A.. Casa editrice della edizioni popolari. Venice. English translation An Introduction to the Economic Nature of the United States, by Carmine Amore. Repr.: Peter Russell, Money Pamphlets by Pound, London 1950 (essay)

(1944). Orientamenti. Casa editrice dalla edizioni popolari. Venice (prose)

(1944). Oro et lavoro: alla memoria di Aurelio Baisi. Moderna, Rapallo. English translation: Gold and Work, Money Pamphlets by Pound, no. 2, Peter Russell, London 1952 (essays)

(1948). If This Be Treason. Siena: privately printed for Olga Rudge by Tip Nuova (original drafts of six of Pound's Radio Rome broadcasts)

(1948). The Pisan Cantos. New York: New Directions Publishing (Cantos 74–84)

(1948). The Cantos of Ezra Pound (includes The Pisan Cantos). New Directions, poems

(1949). Elektra (started in 1949, first performed 1987), a play by Ezra Pound and Rudd Fleming

(1950). Seventy Cantos. London: Faber & Faber. OCLC 468875760

(1950). Patria Mia. Chicago: R. F. Seymour (reworked New Age articles, 1912–1913). OCLC 230706458

(1951). Confucius: The Great Digest and Unwobbling Pivot. New York: New Directions (translation). OCLC 334011927

(1951). Confucius: Analects (John) Kaspar & (David) Horton, Square $ Series, New York (translation).

(1954). The Classic Anthology Defined by Confucius. Harvard University Press (translations)

(1954). Lavoro ed Usura. All'insegna del pesce d'oro. Milan (essays)

(1955). Section: Rock-Drill, 85–95 de los Cantares. All'insegna del pesce d'oro, Milan (poems)

(1956). Sophocles: The Women of Trachis. A Version by Ezra Pound. Neville Spearman, London (translation)

(1957). Brancusi. Milan (essay)

(1959). Thrones: 96–109 de los Cantares. New York: New Directions (poems).

(1968). Drafts and Fragments: Cantos CX–CXVII. New York: New Directions (poems).