Gaudier-Brzeska had been killed in France. In fact, the onset and escalation of the war effectively ended the fledgling publication Blast, which lasted for only two, but two very influential, issues.127 In 1916, Pound would account for his feelings about the war, publishing his tribute to his sculptor friend, Gaudier- Brzeska: A Memoir. Inspired by this loss and his desire to write an epic modeled on Dante’s The Divine Comedy, Pound began work on the epic that would consume him for the rest of his life and which would remain unfinished at his death, . Pound published earlier and less skilled versions of the first three cantos in the July and August issues of Poetry in 1917, then included them, much revised, in A Draft of XVI Cantos American expatriate poet . with Three Mountains Press in 1925. Still much consumed with the horror and useless- ness of war, especially after the death of writer and 1925, Three Mountains Press published a deluxe edi- philosopher T. E. Hulme—who had a tremendous tion of the reworked and revised first sixteen cantos, influence on Pound—at the front in 1917, Pound A Draft of XVI Cantos. came into contact with Major C. H. Douglas, a man In 1925, Eliot rededicated to Pound, whose concept of economics and its relationship to referring to him as il migglior fabbro, or, the bet- corporate profits and the impoverishment of work- ter craftsman (maker, poet), and in the same year, ers would have a huge impact on Pound’s thinking Pound left Paris for Rapallo, the Italian seacoast about the war and about society. By 1919, Douglas’ town that would be his home for years to come. Economic Democracy was being serialized in the Those remaining years would make Pound a pariah prestigious “little” magazine The New Age. for his increasingly virulent anti-Semitism, his open In 1920 Pound published Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, support of Mussolini’s government during World War using this poem in part as a means of saying farewell II, his imprisonment in Pisa for treason against the to London. While traveling in Italy, Pound met Joyce United States in 1945, his institutionalization in St. and persuaded him to move to Paris where he helped Elizabeth’s Psychiatric Hospital until 1958, and his him get established. By early 1921, Pound had moved lapse into public silence for much of the rest of his to Paris as well and first saw Eliot’s draft of what life. would become The Waste Land. In January 1922, while When Ezra Pound died in 1972, he had become a Eliot was back in Paris, Pound completed extensive silent and bitter man, one who felt deeply that he had revisions and excisions of the manuscript, which failed in The Cantos,129 instilling this sense of failure helped shape the final version of The Waste Land as in the later cantos and writing in the notes for Canto published simultaneously in Criterion and The Dial, CXVII, incomplete at his death: and then in book form, with Eliot’s extensive foot- notes, late that year. In addition to working on Eliot’s I have tried to write Paradise manuscript, Pound met Picasso and Hemingway in Do not move January and February 1922. Pound was essential Let the wind speak in helping Hemingway get published, promoting that is paradise. his tiny volume Three Stories and Ten Poems, and Let the gods forgive what I Hemingway remembered Pound’s kindness many have made years later as he drafted his memoirs: Let those I love try to forgive Ezra was the most generous writer I have ever what I have made.130 known and the most disinterested. He helped Near the end of his life, though, Pound would have poets, painters, sculptors and prose writers a final opportunity to connect briefly to the glori- that he believed in and he would help anyone ous promise of his early years. From 1924 until 1968, whether he believed in them or not if they were the manuscript and typescript pages of The Waste 128 in trouble. Land, which Eliot had given to collector and patron Pound had continued, since 1921, to publish sections John Quinn, were presumed lost. In 1968, though, of cantos; V, VI, and VII were published in The Dial, the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library for example, as Pound continued to revise older ver- released the news that the manuscript had been in sions and draft new cantos. The Malatesta Cantos, its collection since 1958. In 1968, Valerie Eliot, T. S. VIII – XI, were finished by the end of 1923, and in Eliot’s widow, invited Ezra Pound to her hotel room

58 ACADEMIC DECATHLON® LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE RESOURCE GUIDE REVISED PAGE 2013–2014 *