Ezra Pound: Poems Ezra Pound

Rehabilitation efforts, scholarship

Ezra Pound, 30 June 1958, photographed by Richard Avedon at the home of William Carlos Williams, Rutherford, New Jersey.[438]

"The photograph has a legend behind it. Avedon, they say, stepped up close and raised the camera, and said, 'You know I'm Jewish?' and before Pound could reply he clicked the shutter and froze him like this."

— Daniel Swift, The Bughouse, 2018.[439]

After the Bollingen Prize in 1949, Pound's friends sought to rehabilitate him.[440] James Laughlin's New Directions Publishing published his Selected Poems, with an introduction by Eliot, and a censored selection of The Cantos. Ralph Fletcher Seymour published Patria Mia (written around 1912) to show that Pound was an American patriot.[441] In advertisements, magazine articles, and critical introductions, Pound's friends and publishers attributed his antisemitism and fascism to mental illness.[442]

Literary scholar Betsy Erkkila writes that no one was more important to Pound's rehabilitation than Hugh Kenner,[443] who was introduced to Pound by Marshall McLuhan in St. Elizabeths in May 1948, when Kenner was 25.[444] Kenner's The Poetry of Ezra Pound (1951) adopted a New Critical approach, where all that mattered was the work itself.[445]

New Directions and Faber & Faber published Ezra Pound: Translations in 1953, introduced by Kenner, and the following year Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, introduced by Eliot.[441] The first PhD dissertation on Pound was completed in 1948, and by 1970 there were around ten a year. Kenner's The Pound Era (1971), which overlooked the fascism, antisemitism, World War II, treason, and the Bollingen Award, effectively equated Pound with modernism.[446] Pound scholar Leon Surette argued that Kenner's approach was hagiographic. He included in this approach Caroll F. Terrell's Paideuma: A Journal Devoted to Ezra Pound Scholarship,[447] founded in 1972 and edited by Kenner and Eva Hesse,[443][ak] and Terrell's two-volume A Companion to the Cantos of Ezra Pound (1980–1984).[447] In 1971 Terrell founded the National Poetry Foundation to focus on Pound, and organized conferences on Pound in 1975, 1980, 1985, and 1990.[449]

Following Eustace Mullins' biography, This Difficult Individual, Ezra Pound (1961), was Life of Ezra Pound (1970) by Noel Stock. A former reporter, Stock was one of the publishers of Pound's newspaper articles in the 1950s, including his antisemitism.[450] Ronald Bush's The Genesis of Ezra Pound's Cantos (1976) became the first critical study of The Cantos.[451] Several significant biographies appeared in the 1980s: J. J. Wilhelm's three-volume work (1985–1994), beginning with The American Roots of Ezra Pound; John Tytell's Ezra Pound: The Solitary Volcano (1987); and Humphrey Carpenter's 1005-page A Serious Character (1988). A. David Moody's three-volume Ezra Pound: Poet (2007–2015) combines biography with literary criticism.[452]

Studies that examine Pound's relationships with the far right include Robert Casillo's The Genealogy of Demons (1988); Tim Redman's Ezra Pound and Italian Fascism (1999); Leon Surette's Pound in Purgatory (1999);[453] Matthew Feldman's Ezra Pound's Fascist Propaganda, 1935–45 (2013); and Alec Marsh's John Kasper and Ezra Pound (2015).

Legacy

A little light, like a rushlight To lead back to splendour.

— Closing lines of The Cantos[224]

Much of Pound's legacy lies in his advancement of some of the best-known modernist writers of the early 20th century, particularly between 1910 and 1925.[454] In addition to Eliot, Joyce, Lewis, Frost, Williams, Hemingway, H.D., Aldington, and Aiken, he befriended and helped Cummings, Bunting, Ford, Marianne Moore, Louis Zukofsky, Jacob Epstein, Margaret Anderson, George Oppen, and Charles Olson.[455]

Beyond this, his legacy is mixed. He was a strong lyricist with an "ear" for words;[456] his Times obituary said he had a "faultless sense of cadence".[209] According to Ira Nadel, he "overturned poetic meter, literary style, and the state of the long poem". Nadel cited the importance of Pound's editing of The Waste Land, the publication of Ulysses, and his role in developing of Imagism.[457] Hugh Witemeyer argued that Imagism was "probably the most important single movement" in 20th-century English-language poetry, because it affected all the leading poets of Pound's generation and the two generations after him.[458] According to Hugh Kenner in 1951, although no great contemporary writer was less read than Pound, there was no one who could "over and over again appeal more surely, through sheer beauty of language" to people who would otherwise rather talk about poets than read them.[459]

Against this, Robert Conquest argued in 1979 that critics were responsible for having promoted Pound despite his "minimal talent", which was "grossly exaggerated".[460] "This is an accusation less against the fantastic arrogance of Pound", he wrote, "than against the narrow-minded obscurantism of the departments of English and the critical establishment who have set up a system of apologetics which the slyest Jesuit of the seventeenth century would have baulked at."[461] According to Samuel Putnam, those who respected Pound's poetry were less likely to respect his prose or work as a critic.[462]

The outrage over his collaboration with the Axis powers was so deep that it dominated the discussion. "A greater calamity cannot befall the art", Arthur Miller wrote in December 1945, "than that Ezra Pound, the Mussolini mouthpiece, should be welcomed back as an arbiter of American letters ..."[463] Over the decades, according to Redman, critics argued that Pound was not really a poet or not really a fascist, or that he was a fascist but his poetry is not fascistic, or that there was an evil Pound and a good Pound.[464] The American poet Elizabeth Bishop, 1956 Pulitzer Prize winner and one of his hospital visitors—Pound called her "Liz Bish"—reflected the ambivalence in her poem "Visits to St. Elizabeths" (1957).[465] "This is the time / of the tragic man / that lies in the house of Bedlam." As the poem progresses, the tragic man, never named, becomes the talkative man; the honored man; the old, brave man; the cranky man; the cruel man; the busy man; the tedious man; the poet, the man; and, finally, the wretched man.[466]