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EZRA POUND |
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The American poet Ezra Loomis Pound (1885-1972) was one of the most controversial, influential and important literary and artistic theorists of the 20th century. He was also a major poet. A major creator of literary modernism, the 20th century's most important literary movement, Pound instigated one of its poetic variants, Imagism (1909), and co-instigated another (with British artist and writer Wyndham Lewis, 1882-1957), Vorticism (1913-ca. 1918). Among his other achievements, Pound discovered the Irish writer James Joyce (1882-1941), perhaps the most highly regarded literary writer of the 20th century, and through a persistent single-handed campaign of harangue and exhortation got Joyce's early works Dubliners (1914) and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) into print. He then found financial assistance for Joyce. Pound also encouraged American writer Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961), one of the 20th century's most influential writers of prose, and American poet Robert Frost (1874-1961), one of the century's most enduring poets. He helped his close friend, the then-unknown Anglo-American poet, playwright, and critic Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888-1965) get his first work into print. Pound then helped Eliot edit out about one-third of Eliot's landmark poem "The Waste Land" (1922); he then found a magazine to publish the poem. In his early career Pound harangued editors and publishers to publish the work of other writers whom he considered important, like the American poets Amy Lowell (1874-1925) and H.D. (Hilda Doolittle, 1886-1961). He encouraged and worked with both the British artist and writer Wyndham Lewis (1882-1957) and the American poet Louis Zukovsky, author of A. Through lectures and essays (collected in his The Spirit of Romance) Pound popularized the work of Provençal troubadour poets like Arnaut Daniel (flourished 1290) and Guido Cavalcanti (1250?-1300). He publicized as well the work of the avantgarde French sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska (died World War I). And Pound's own ideas and ideals about poetry, which I shall discuss later, were enormously influential after World War II. Pound also influenced the taste and perceptions, as well as helping the development of the Canadian critics and thinkers Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980) and Hugh Kenner (died 2003), and the American culture critic Roger Shattuck. Finally, Pound wrote some of the early 20th century's most influential short poems and its most titanic and influential long poem, The Cantos (begun 1915; published 1925-1970). All this Pound did as a one-man hurricane for change. But I would like to question this legacy. I would like to suggest that not all of Pound's agitations worked for good. In some ways Pound is responsible for shaping today's advanced literary taste and judgment, and this is not all good. The problem with artistic manifestoes and philosophies is usually narrowness of taste. An artist or philosopher naturally sees all of life through his or her own eyes, through a judgement that has been shaped by his or her own experience and values. That which is beyond the range of the artist's experience is often condemned without having been understood. As we shall see, this unfortunately the case with Pound.
Pound was an American original. Born In Hailey, Idaho on the American frontier, he spent his childhood in Philadelphia. There he enjoyed a visit to the Philadephia mint. He later drew successfully on this experience. He demonstrated an ability to absorb and later draw on distant sources of literary experience: classical Greek mythology, the Noh plays of Japan, the pictographic writing of China, Confucianism, Dante, and medieval Provençal poets. But in America Pound also came under the influence of nativist American antisemitism. # # # In 1908 he was expelled from a teaching position at Wabash College in Crawfordsville, Indiana, because of being caught in a compromising position with a female student. He travelled to Venice, Italy, where he published his first books of poems A Lume Spento and Personae. He then travelled to England. In 1911 he began to work for the British socialist magazine Pound's antisemitism was of the most extreme, unrestrained, vile, and noxious kind (see Heymann's Ezra Pound: The Last Rower, in particular pp. 116 ff. of the paperback edition). His wartime admiration for Italian dictator Benito Mussolini (1883-1945) and fascism in broadcasts to the United States caused him to be arrested in 1945 by American soldiers for treason. He was confined in an open cage in Pisa, returned in 1946 from Italy to the United States, found insane, and confined to St. Elizabeths psychiatric hospital in Washington, D.C. He was held for 12 years, until May 7, 1958. He then returned to Italy. To the American poet Allen Ginsburg (1926-1997) Pound later admitted his antisemitism had been "suburban". He thought it had been his greatest mistake. It certainly was among his greatest. To some, the political landscape of the early 20th century shows a struggle between two dynamic movements, fascism and communism. Pound came down strongly on the side of fascism. He was an admirer of Benito Mussolini, the Italian dictator, whom he thought of as a dynamic improver of society who might well be imitated by American statesmen. [To Be Continued and Revised]
Books By and About Ezra PoundAlexander, Michael. The Poetic Achievement of Ezra Pound. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1979. Furia, Philip. Pound's Cantos Declassified. University Park (Pennsylvania?) and London: Pennsylvania State University, 1984. Heymann, C. David. Ezra Pound: The Last Rower. New York: Seaver Books (Viking Press), 1976. Jackson, Thomas H. The Early Poetry of Ezra Pound. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1968. Kearns, George. Ezra Pound: The Cantos. Cambridge University Press, 1989. Kenner, Hugh. The Poetry of Ezra Pound. 1951. -------. The Pound Era. University of California Press: Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1971. This is Kenner's opus maximus, a fascinating trove of information about Pound and his times. Occasionally Kenner is somewhat elliptical. Pound, Ezra. Personae. New York: New Directions, 1909, 1926 and subsequently. Pound's collected shorter original poems. Pound enlarged and edited it several times, notably in 1926. -------. The Spirit of Romance. 1910. Pound's book about medieval French and Italian poets. Should probably be read in conjunction with the originals and translations. -------. The ABC of Reading. New York: New Directions, 1934. A good little book about how to read and write poetry. You will learn a great deal from Pound's crotchets. -------. Guide to Kulchur. New York: New Directions. -------. Jefferson and/or Mussolini: L'Idea Statale, Fascism as I Have Seen It. New York: Stanley Nott Ltd., 1936.
Here Pound is at his crankiest. The best source for learning what Pound thought of Mussolini (if that's your bag). How could Pound not have seen what is obvious to us? Or are we all wrong? -------. Literary Essays of Ezra Pound. New York: New Directions, 1954. An excellent compendium. Poets and writers can learn a great deal about literature and writing from this book. -------. The Cantos. New York: New Directions, 1970. The final collected form of one of the greatest and most disorganized poems of the 20th century. Contains cantos 1-117. Study of this work will teach you a great deal. But if you are a donkey, expect to remain a donkey at the end of studying it. Tytell, John. Ezra Pound: the Solitary Volcano. New York: Anchor Press (Doubleday), 1987. Home | About Grant | What's New | Links | Coming Soon | Send E-Mail Last modified: 11:58 AM 21/01/2004 |