Ezra Pound: Poems Ezra Pound

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.[p] 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,[q] I cannot make it cohere.

— Paris Review, 1962[r]

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,[s] 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][t] 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".[q] "Canto CXVI" ends with the lines "a little light, like a rushlight / to lead back to splendour."[224]