- ^ On 21 November 1932 Hemingway wrote ("Statement on Ezra Pound", The Cantos of Ezra Pound: Some Testimonies, New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1933): "Any poet born in this century or in the last ten years of the preceding century who can honestly say that he has not been influenced by or learned greatly from the work of Ezra Pound deserves to be pitied rather than rebuked. It is as if a prose writer born in that time should not have learned from or been influenced by James Joyce or that a traveller should pass through a great blizzard and not have felt its cold or a sandstorm and not have felt the sand and the wind. The best of Pound's writing—and it is in the CANTOS—will last as long as there is any literature."[2]
- ^ "There was a young man from the West, / He did what he could for what he thought best; / But election came round; / He found himself drowned, / And the papers will tell you the rest."[13]
- ^ Pound may have attended Cheltenham Township High School for the year 1900–1901.[17]
- ^ In "How I Began", T.P.'s Weekly (6 June 1913), Pound wrote: "I resolved that at thirty I would know more about poetry than any man living, that I would know the dynamic content from the shell, that I would know what was accounted poetry everywhere, what part of poetry was 'indestructible', what part could not be lost by translation and—scarcely less important—what effects were obtainable in one language only and were utterly incapable of being translated."In this search I learned more or less of nine languages, I read Oriental stuff in translations, I fought every University regulation and every professor who tried to make me learn anything except this, or who bothered me with 'requirements for degrees'."[23]
-
^ Pound's advertised lectures were:
- 21 January 1909: "Introductory Lecture. The Search for the Essential Qualities of Literature".
- 28 January: The Rise of Song in Provence".
- 4 February: "Mediaeval Religious Feeling".
- 11 February: "Trade with the East".
- 18 February: "Latin Lyrists of the Renaissance".
- 25 February: "Books and Their Makers during the Middle Ages".[60]
- ^ Personae (1909) was dedicated to Mary Moore: "This book is for Mary Moore of Trenton, if she wants it."[74] He asked Moore to marry him, but she turned him down.[75]
- ^ Pound lived on the first floor of 10 Church Walk, Kensington, from September 1909 – June 1910 and November 1911 – April 1914. According to Moody, the two first-floor windows on the left were Pound's.[101] According to Humphrey Carpenter, Pound was on the top floor behind the window on the far left.[102]
- ^ "What obfuscated me was not the Italian but the crust of dead English, the sediment present in my own available vocabulary, which I, let us hope, got rid of a few years later. You can't go round this sort of thing. It takes six or eight years to get educated in one's art, and another ten to get rid of that education."Neither can anyone learn English, one can only learn a series of Englishes. Rossetti made his own language. I hadn't in 1910 made a language, I don't mean a language to use, but even a language to think in."[107]
- ^ Doolittle and Aldington said they had no recollection of this discussion.[114]
- ^ W. B. Yeats, "The Peacock": "What's riches to him / That has made a great peacock / With the pride of his eye?"
- ^ Pound (1914): "The image is a radiant node or cluster ...by Pound. a VORTEX, from which, and through which, and into which, ideas are constantly rushing."[141] "All experience rushes into this vortex," he wrote in Blast in June 1914. "All the energized past ... RACE, RACE-MEMORY, instinct charging the PLACID, NON-ENERGIZED FUTURE."[142]
- ^ Steven Yao does not view Pound's lack of Chinese as an obstacle, and states that the poet's trawl through centuries of scholarly interpretations resulted in a genuine understanding of the original poem.[161] Chinese poet An Qi acknowledged a debt to Pound in her poem "Pound or the Rib of Poetry".[162]
- ^ In his next poetry collection in 1921, Pound renamed it Homage to Sextus Propertius in response to the criticism.
- ^ Homer, Odyssey 12.189: "For we know all that [happened] in Troy"[183]
-
^ On 13 January 1921, shortly before or after he left for France, the New Age published a long statement of Pound's philosophy, which he called his Axiomata and which included:
- (1) The intimate essence of the universe is not of the same nature as our own consciousness.
- (2) Our own consciousness is incapable of having produced the universe.
- (3) God, therefore exists. That is to say, there is no reason for not applying the term God, Theos, to the intimate essence ...[193]
-
^ For around 23,000 lines, 800 pages, and the comparison to Milton and Eliot, see Beach (2003), 32; for 116 sections, see Stoicheff (1995), 6
For the years: the first cantos were published in 1917, and the final complete canto was first published in 1962. Peter Stoicheff regards the 1968 Stone Wall/New Directions/Faber & Faber volume as the first authorized edition.[208]
- ^ a b Walter Baumann (Paideuma, 1983): "... Eva Hesse has informed us, presumably on Pound's authority, that the word 'demigod' alludes to the Heracles of Sophocles' Women of Trachis. The prominence Pound gave to the moment in the play when Heracles finally understands the full meaning of the oracles concerning him—that he is to be 'released from trouble,' not by a 'life of comfort,' but by death—is far more a revelation of his state of mind when making his version of the Trachiniae than of Sophocles' intentions, and the ad-libbing he allowed himself at the crucial point in the Sophoclean text is literally a shorthand anticipation of Canto 116: 'SPLENDOUR, / IT ALL COHERES'".[223]
- ^ For the earliest version (with a line missing), Pound (1962), 14–16. For more on Canto 116, Baumann (1983). For the publication history of the final sections, Stoicheff (1986) and Stoicheff (1995). Also see Drafts and Fragments of Cantos CX–CXVII (1969).[210]
- ^ Richard Sieburth (Poetry, 1979): "As early as 1924, in a letter to his father, Pound was comparing his Cantos to the medley of voices produced by tuning a radio dial. The speakers did not need to be identified, he explained, for 'you can tell who is talking by the noise they make'—all the reader needed to do was listen attentively as one timbre cut into another, sometimes with clean edge, sometimes with a burst."[213]
- ^ George Kearns wrote that Pound's love of its production is what held the work together; in his view, Pound is speaking to the poem itself in a final fragment: "M'amour, m'amour".[220]
- ^ Richard Taruskin (2003): "Pound's musicking, like Wagner's, mainly took the form of idiosyncratic operas. The first, after Villon, was finished in 1923 and performed both in public and over the radio during Pound's lifetime. Two others, after Cavalcanti and Catullus, were planned and partly realized. But calling them operas was as idiosyncratic as everything else about them. They are medleys of poems tenuously connected by action, or by mere narration, based on events in the lives of the poets."[235]
- ^ In 1939, according to Samuel Putnam, Pound refused to enter Frances Steloff's Gotham Book Mart in New York because she was Jewish, even though she had helped to sell his work. Writing in 1947, Putnam said he heard this directly from Steloff.[255] According to Carpenter, this did not happen. He says that Steloff called it "an absolute falsehood".[256]
- ^ Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library (2012): "Reading Pound's correspondence, researchers can delve in to his relationships with, and influence on, younger poets. Such is the case with Pound's letters to poet, composer, and performance artist Jackson Mac Low. In addition to discussing literature and politics, Pound defends himself from charges of anti-Semitism with the inflammatory remark that 'some kike might manage to pin an antisem lable on me IF he neglected the mass of my writing.'"[259]
- ^ Mein Kampf was translated into English in full in 1939, but in 1931 Chatto & Windus published the book Hitler, by Pound's friend Wyndham Lewis, with translated fragments of Mein Kampf.[262] Lewis later turned against fascism.[100]
- ^ Tim Redman (2001): "Pound's antisemitism, which had been sporadically in evidence since the publication of 'Patria Mia' in 1912, grew in virulence with that of the Italian regime. With the passage of the racial laws in 1938, the onset of the Second World War in 1939, and the foundation of the Salo Republic, Pound's antisemitic outbursts grew in viciousness and frequency until the end of the war, when public awareness of the Holocaust forced a realization of the horrific consequences of hateful speech."[280]
- ^ Tytell writes that the suite was said to have been paid for by the Italian government,[283] but Carpenter writes that Pound had simply decided to travel in style.[284]
- ^ William Carlos Williams, his friend since university, wrote to Pound's publisher, James Laughlin, in June 1939: "The man is sunk, in my opinion, unless he can shake the fog of fascism out of his brain ...".[290]
- ^ According to his daughter, it was during this visit that Pound first told her he had a wife in Rapallo and a son in England.[313]
- ^ The 19 counts consisted of broadcasts that had been witnessed by two technicians; the charge was that Pound had violated his allegiance to the United States by unlawfully supporting the Kingdom of Italy.[341]
- ^ Visitors included Conrad Aiken, Elizabeth Bishop, E. E. Cummings, Guy Davenport, T. S. Eliot, Achilles Fang, Edith Hamilton, Hugh Kenner, Robert Lowell, Archibald MacLeish, Marshall McLuhan, H. L. Mencken, Marianne Moore, Norman Holmes Pearson, Allen Tate, Stephen Spender, and William Carlos Williams.[354]
- ^ The Associated Press reported the list of judges as Conrad Aiken, W. H. Auden, Louise Bogan, Katherine Garrison Chapin, T. S. Eliot, Paul Green, Robert Lowell, Katherine Anne Porter, Karl Shapiro, Allen Tate, Willard Thorp, and Robert Penn Warren. Also on the list were Léonie Adams, the Library of Congress's poetry consultant, and Theodore Spencer, who died on 18 January 1949, just before the award was announced.[358]
- ^ "At their [the committee's first] meeting [in November 1948], and to no one's great surprise, given [Allen] Tate's behind-the-scenes maneuverings and the intimidating presence of recent Nobel Laureate T. S. Eliot, The Pisan Cantos emerged as the major contender ..."[361]
- ^ For example, one flier was modeled on the 1914 Blast manifesto: "JAIL NAACP, alien, unclean, unchristian / BLAST irrelevant ungodly LEADERS".[378]
- ^ The women soon fell out; "Canto CXIII" may have alluded to it: "Pride, jealousy and possessiveness / 3 pains of hell."[413]
- ^ According to John Tytell and Humphrey Carpenter, he was photographed on May Day at the head of a neo-fascist Movimento Sociale Italiano parade of 500 men.[421] This did not happen, according to Tim Redman and A. David Moody, and no such photograph has emerged.[422]
- ^ In 1988 Christopher Ricks took issue with Pound's use of the word mistake, which he wrote was "scarcely commensurate with the political and spiritual monstrosity" of Pound's antisemitism.[429] Anthony Julius argued in 1995 that Pound's use of the term suburban was the result of "an arrogance that broods on the descent from an ideal of greatness rather than on the injury which that descent did to others".[430]
- ^ From 2001 Paideuma began publishing material about modernist poetry in general, not only Pound.[448]
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