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A University of Sussex DPhil thesis Available online via Sussex Research Online: http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/ This thesis is protected by copyright which belongs to the author. This thesis cannot be reproduced or quoted extensively from without first obtaining permission in writing from the Author The content must not be changed in any way or sold commercially in any format or medium without the formal permission of the Author When referring to this work, full bibliographic details including the author, title, awarding institution and date of the thesis must be given Please visit Sussex Research Online for more information and further details CREDIBLE PRACTICES: WHITMAN’S CANDOUR, POUND’S SINCERITY, OLSON’S LITERALISM MICHAEL KINDELLAN THIS THESIS IS SUBMITTED FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY UNIVERSITY OF SUSSEX SEPTEMBER 2010 3 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am grateful to the Arts and Humanities Research Council for three years of full funding support, as well as for providing money to make an overseas research visit and to deliver a paper in Rome at the International Ezra Pound Conference in 2009. I am also grateful to Mara Kalnins and Clive Wilmer of the University of Cambridge for their support during the application process for that initial award. I am indebted to many people for their help during the completion of this thesis. I would like to thank Tony Lopez, Anthony Caleshu, David Tucker, Roger Johnson, Zoë Hyman, Lee Spinks, Richard Parker, Charles Hall, John Gery, David Herd and their respective selection panels for accepting various conference paper proposals. In the talks that followed many of the ideas and arguments made below were first aired. To Melissa Watterworth and her staff at the Dodd Research Center, University of Connecticut, thank you. By your kind efforts and professionalism my two visits to Storrs were made both productive and valuable. Thanks also to Pam Schipani at UConn Student Housing, for making my stays possible. I also owe a debt of thanks to Molly Wheeler, Adrienne Sharpe, Anne Marie Menta, Diane Ducharme, Leah Jehan and June Can at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. Their knowledge, courtesy and patience were and remain very much appreciated. Thanks are owed as well to Renee Robichaud, Yale Graduate Housing, for making this stay possible. 4 Aside from those already mentioned, or about to be mentioned, at the University of Sussex I am grateful to Alun Howkins, Andrew Hadfield, Pam Thurschwell, Margaret Reynolds and especially Maggie Pryer for their guidance and assistance. Thanks furthermore are due to Jane Bennett, Ben Dawson, Sara Crangle, Michael Davidson, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Gareth Farmer, Miranda Hickman, Josh Kotin, Sam Ladkin, Linda Oppen, Alex Pestell, Zhaoming Qian, Tim Redman, Eiric Steinhoff, Duncan White, Eric White and Zöe [sic] Sutherland. I have had useful and sometimes crucial discussions with all of them. Their input, advice and knowledge has helped to make whatever is interesting about this thesis more so. Special thanks are owed to Chris Woods for his excellent and timely criticisms of these drafts, such as they are. I remain grateful in particular to Peter Nicholls, my supervisor between 2006 and 2008. Without his intelligence, generosity and practical guidance this thesis could not have been written. Thanks are also due to my current supervisor, Keston Sutherland. He has been instrumental in encouraging me not only to give further shape and substance to my ideas, but in helping me to realise them more intelligibly. To Julia Schüler, thank you for your readiness to share many of the pressures and strains involved in bringing this thesis to some kind of fruition. Because of the grace and kindness with which you have shouldered so many of the burthens arising directly or otherwise from this process, I will always be in your debt. Finally, I wish to acknowledge the tremendous love and support of my family, and of my parents in particular. I cannot express my gratitude for these things in just a few words; please accept these 100,000 as a start. 5 TABLE OF CONTENTS TITLE PAGE . 1 STATEMENT . 2 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS . 3 TABLE OF CONTENTS . 5 ABBREVIATIONS . 7 ABSTRACT . 9 INTRODUCTION . 10 Outline of the thesis . 14 CHAPTER ONE—WHITMAN’S CANDOUR . 17 A principle of discourse, 1855 . 17 Historical note on “candour” . 21 Neutrality . 31 The catalogues—1 (section fifteen) . 49 The catalogues—2 (section thirty-three) . 61 Parallelism revisited . 68 Kinds of self-reference . 72 Courage in verse . 88 On contradiction . 97 CHAPTER TWO—POUND’S SINCERITY . 106 A brief summary of existing “sincerity” scholarship . 106 Expertise . 109 Imagism . 138 Ideograms . 151 6 Originate, promote . 169 Section: Rock-Drill . 180 Man standing beside word . 195 Drafts . 210 CHAPTER THREE—OLSON’S LITERALISM . 232 “Systematic disorganisation”. 234 What is meant by “Olson’s literalism” . 260 Minima . 272 Least song . 278 Reticule . 297 Measure . 307 Against abstraction . 311 Coda . 326 CONCLUSION . 328 BIBLIOGRAPHY . 330 APPENDICES . 360 Appendix one—Walt Whitman . 361 Figure 1: Leaves of Grass “Section 33” (facsimile) . 362 Figure 2: Example of a revised mss page . 369 Appendix two—Ezra Pound . 370 Figure 1: A retrospective note on Carlyle . 371 Figure 2: Rousselot’s graph . 375 Figure 3: From Canto 85 . 376 Appendix three—Charles Olson . 380 Figure 1: Full text of “Letter 15” (MI 71) . 381 Figure 2: “I set out now” (CORC 4|187) . 386 Figure 3: “A Maximus”. 387 Figure 4: Cover of The Maximus Poems (1960) . 388 Figure 5: Pages from Olson’s copy of Language . 389 7 ABBREVIATIONS WHITMAN CP&CP Complete Poetry and Collected Prose DA Democracy in America LG Leaves of Grass NUPM Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts SCW The Structure of Complex Words WWC With Walt Whitman in Camden POUND ABCR ABC of Reading C The Cantos CWC The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry CEP Collected Early Poems Con Confucius: The Unwobbling Pivot; The Great Digest; The Analects GB Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir MA Machine Art & Other Writings LE Literary Essays of Ezra Pound SA Sincerity and Authenticity SL The Selected Letters of Ezra Pound SP Ezra Pound: Selected Prose, 1909-1965 SR The Spirit of Romance P Personae: The Collected Shorter Poems YCAL The Ezra Pound Papers, MSS 43. Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. 8 OLSON O&C Charles Olson and Robert Creeley: The Complete Correspondence CORC Charles Olson Research Collection. Archives & Special Collections at the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center, University of Connecticut, Storrs. CPO The Collected Poems of Charles Olson CP Collected Prose MI The Maximus Poems (1960) MII Maximus Poems IV, V, VI (1968) MIII The Maximus Poems: Volume Three (1975) P&R Process and Reality SVH The Special View of History 9 ABSTRACT This dissertation focuses on Walt Whitman, Ezra Pound and Charles Olson. It examines some individual but related theories of expression in their writings about poetics as well as their strategies of realising such ideals in their major poems. Chapter one explores the role of candour in “Song of Myself”, first by tracing a brief history of its use, and then by showing that latent in its definition is a denotational contradiction germane to Whitman’s own practice. On the one hand, poetic candour means forthright and frank expression well-suited to Whitman’s formal experimentation, while on the other, it requires a suspension of judgment (a neutrality) adequate to the radical democratic structures he seems to everywhere promote. Chapter two explores the meaning and function of sincerity in some of Pound’s early theory and verse; it argues that sincerity at first meant a kind of expertise or skill in rhythmic composition but later came to denote a rhetorical insistence on precise definition. I track some manifestations of this phenomenon in Rock-Drill. In chapter three I explore literalism as a sustained refusal of certain forms of generalisation. Following a clarification of what is meant by literalism as it applies to Olson’s verse, I examine some smaller (i.e., minimal) poems from The Maximus Poems and argue that in seeking to avoid the abstractions of both conventional metrics as well as rational discourse, Olson risks constructing a subject at the centre of his poem that might successfully disable the lyric ego at the expense of installing more controlling kinds of authority. 10 INTRODUCTION No! I want to talk. I mean, you want to listen to a poet? I mean, you know, like, a poet, when he’s alive, whether he talks or reads you his poems, it’s the same thing. Dig that! [APPLAUSE] And when he is—when he is made of three parts, his life, his mouth and his poem, then by God the earth belongs to us! And what I think has happened is that that’s—well gee, one doesn’t want to claim things. —Charles Olson (Reading at Berkeley 14) This thesis argues that “candour”, “sincerity” and “literalism” are poetics. It analyses aspects of three poets’ attempts to write poems adequate to their convictions. The poets, and their poems, are: Walt Whitman and “Song of Myself”; Ezra Pound and The Cantos; and Charles Olson and The Maximus Poems. Though no subsequent comparison to Sir Philip Sidney’s 1581 Defence of Poesie is offered, I understand Whitman, Pound and Olson to be working towards individual refutations of Sidney’s claim about poetic artifice, that the poet “nothing affirmeth, and therefore never lieth” (29). Neither Whitman, Pound nor Olson would have been able to recognise Sidney’s claim as a viable description of their own aims. They would also have found unfamiliar Sidney’s subsequent declaration that a poet “never tries to conjure you to believe for true, what he writeth” (29).
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