EZRA POUND Ezra Pound, Ezra Pound; Poems and Translations, Ed

Total Page:16

File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb

EZRA POUND Ezra Pound, Ezra Pound; Poems and Translations, Ed EZRA POUND Ezra Pound, Ezra Pound; Poems and Translations, ed. Richard Sieburth (Library of America; New York, 2003) [text-editions selected rather than re-edited; very brief notes; this edition reviewed by Marjorie Perloff, 'Pound Ascendant', Boston Review, April/May 2004]. Ezra Pound, Collected Early Poems, ed. M.J. King (London, 1977). Ezra Pound, Homage to Sextus Propertius [written in 1917, first published entire in Quia Pauper Amavi (London, October 1919); reprinted in the edition of Personae listed below; prefer that edition to the version of Homage included in Collected Shorter Poems (London, 1952), where the text is not fully reliable; or use Sieburth's Library of America text]. Ezra Pound, Personae; The Shorter Poems of Ezra Pound, ed. Lea Baechler and A. Walton Litz (New York, c.1990) [prefer this edition where possible to the Collected Shorter Poems, which has never been in the hands of a named editor and which contains many mistakes; or again use Sieburth's Library of America text]. Ezra Pound, The Cantos of Ezra Pound (4th collected ed., London, 1987) [current reprint is 1994]. Ezra Pound, Variorum Edition of 'Three Cantos'; A Prototype, ed. Richard Taylor (Bayreuth, 1991). Ezra Pound, The Pisan Cantos, ed Richard Sieburth (New York, 2003). Richard Taylor, 'Towards a Textual Biography of The Cantos', in Willison (Ian) et al. (eds), Modernist Writers and the Marketplace (Basingstoke, 1996), pp. 223-57; and see his 'The Texts of The Cantos' in Ira B. Nadel (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Ezra Pound (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 161- 87. Ezra Pound, The Spirit of Romance (London, 1910). Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading (London, 1934). Ezra Pound, Gaudier Brzeska; A Memoir (London, 1916; reprinted, Hessle, Yorkshire, 1960). Ernest Fenollosa, from The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, ed. Ezra Pound (City Lights reprint, San Francisco, [1964]). Ezra Pound, Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. T.S. Eliot (London, 1954). Ezra Pound, Selected Letters, ed. D.D. Paige (London, 1950). The Letters of Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis, ed. Timothy Materer (London, 1985). Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams, Pound/Williams: Selected Letters of Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams, ed. Hugh Witemeyer (New 2 York, 1996). Ezra Pound, Pound/Zukofsky; Selected Letters of Ezra Pound and Louis Zu- kofsky, ed. Barry Ahearn (New York, 1987). Ezra Pound, The Translations of Ezra Pound, with intro. by Hugh Kenner (London, 1953) [not really edited at all, uncritical reprint; all these texts also included in Sieburth]. [T.S. Eliot], Ezra Pound, his Metric and Poetry, originally published anonymously (New York, 12 November 1917); reprinted in To Criticize the Critic (London, 1965); and see Pound (Ezra), 'T.S. Eliot' (1917), review of Prufrock and Other Observations (London, 1917), in The Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. T.S. Eliot (London, 1954), pp. 418- 22, and Pound (Ezra), 'Mr Eliot's Solid Merit' (1934), in his Polite Essays (London, 1937), pp. 98-105; and further, Robert Langbaum, 'Pound and Eliot' in George Bornstein (ed.), Ezra Pound Among the Poets (Chicago, 1985). T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land; a Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Draft Including the Annotations of Ezra Pound, ed. Valerie Eliot (London, 1971); and see Stillinger (Jack), 'Pound's Waste Land', in his Multiple Authorship and the Myth of Solitary Genius (New York, 1991). Anderson (David) (ed.), Pound's Cavalcanti; An Edition of the Translations, Notes, and Essays (Princeton, 1983); see also Sieburth (Richard), 'Channeling Guido: Ezra Pound's Cavalcanti Translations', in Ardizzone (Maria Luisa) (ed.), Guido Cavalcanti tra i Suoi Lettori (Fiesole, c.2003), and his 'EP/LZ: Corresponding Cavalcantis' (http:// writing/upenn.edu/epc/authors/Zukofsky/100/Sieburth_Pound_Zuk.d oc). Zinnes (Harriet) (ed.), Ezra Pound and the Visual Arts (New York, 1980). Yeats (W.B.) (ed.), Oxford Book of Modern Verse, 1892-1935 (Oxford, 1936) [the Preface to this landmark anthology is an important document]; and see Longley (Edna), '"Why Should Men's Heads Ache?"; Yeats and American Modernism', in Clark (Steve) and Ford (Mark) (eds), Something We Have That They Don't; British & American Poetic Relations Since 1925 (Iowa City, 2004), pp. 30-52. Carpenter (Humphrey), A Serious Character; The Life of Ezra Pound (London, 1988). Ackroyd (Peter), Ezra Pound and his World (London, 1980). Homberger (E.) (ed.), Ezra Pound; The Critical Heritage (1972; reprinted, London, 1997). Froula (Christine), A Guide to Ezra Pound's 'Selected Poems' ([New York], 3 1983). Ruthven (K.K.), A Guide to Ezra Pound's 'Personae' (1926) (Berkeley & Los Angeles, 1969). Kearns (George), Guide to Ezra Pound's 'Selected Cantos' (New Brunswick, N.J., and Folkstone, 1980). John (Roland), A Beginner's Guide to 'The Cantos' of Ezra Pound (Salzburg, 1995). Cookson (William), A Guide to the 'Cantos' of Ezra Pound (rev. 2nd ed., London, 2001). Terrell (C.F.), A Companion to the Cantos of Ezra Pound (2 vols, Berkeley & Los Angeles, 1980-4). Dilligan (Robert J.) (comp.), A Concordance to Ezra Pound's Cantos (New York, 1981). Albright (Daniel), Quantum Poetics; Yeats, Pound, Eliot, and the Science of Modernism (Cambridge, 1997). Altieri (Charles), 'The Pound/Stevens Era', Wallace Stevens Journ., 26 (2002), 228-50. Barkan (Elazar) and Bush (Ronald) (eds), Prehistories of the Future; The Primitivist Project and the Culture of Modernism (Stanford, Cal., 1995). Bell (I.A.) (ed.), Ezra Pound: Tactics for Reading (London, 1982). Bell (Ian F.A.), 'The Real and the Etherial: Modernist Energies in Eliot and Pound,' in Clarke (Bruce) and Henderson (Linda Dalrymple) (eds), From Energy to Information; Representations in Science, Technology, Art, and Literature (Stanford, Cal., 2002), pp, 114-25. Berrman (Jo Brantley), Circe's Craft; Ezra Pound's 'Hugh Selwyn Mauberley' (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1983). Berryman (John), 'The Poetry of Ezra Pound', Partisan Review, 16 (1949), 377- 94, reprinted in his The Freedom of the Poet (New York, 1976), pp. 253- 69. Blackmur (R.P.), Language as Gesture; Essays in Poetry (London, c.1954). Bornstein (George) (ed.), Ezra Pound Among the Poets (Chicago, 1985); see also Aji (Hélène), 'Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams's Romantic Dilemmas: From Obliteration to Remanence', Cercles, 12 (2005), 50-63 [on Whitman, and Browming]. Brooker (Peter), 'The Lesson of Ezra Pound: An Essay in Poetry, Literary Ideology and Politics', in I.A. Bell (ed.), Ezra Pound: Tactics for Reading (London, 1982). Brooke-Rose (Christine), A ZBC of Ezra Pound (London, 1971). Bush (Ronald), The Genesis of Ezra Pound's Cantos (Princeton, 1976). 4 Bush (Ronald) (ed.), T.S. Eliot; The Modernist in History (Cambridge, 1991). Bush (Ronald), 'Modernism, Fascism, and the Composition of Ezra Pound's Pisan Cantos', in Modernism/Modernity, 2 (1995), 69-87. Bush (Ronald), 'Remaking Canto 74', Paideuma, 32 (2003), 157-186. Casillo (Robert), The Genealogy of Demons; Anti-Semitism, Fascism, and the Myths of Ezra Pound (Evanston, Ill., 1988). Chace (William), The Political Identities of Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot (Stanford, Cal., 1973). Childs (J.S.), Modernist Form: Pound's Style in the Early Cantos (Cranbury, N.J., c.1986). Creeley (Robert), 'A Note on Ezra Pound' (1965)', in The Collected Essays of Robert Creeley (Berkeley, Cal., c.1989), pp. 25-7. Davie (Donald), Ezra Pound; Poet as Sculptor (New York, 1964). Davie (Donald), 'Pound and Eliot: A Distinction' (1970), in his The Poet in the Imaginary Museum; Essays of Two Decades, ed. Barry Alpert (Man- chester, 1977), 191-207, 294. Davie (Donald), Pound ([London], 1975). Davis (Kay), Fugue and Fresco; Structures in Pound's Cantos (Orono, Maine, 1984). DuPlessis (Rachel Blau), 'Oppen and Pound', Paideuma, 10 (1981), 59-83. DuPlessis (Rachel Blau) and Quartermain (Peter) (eds), The Objectivist Nexus; Essays in Cultural Poetics (Tuscaloosa, Ala., c.1999). Eastman (Barbara), Ezra Pound's Cantos: The Story of the Text, 1948-1975 (Orono, Maine, 1979). Eliot (T.S.), 'Ulysses, Order, and Myth', review of James Joyce, Ulysses, in The Dial, LXXV.5 (Nov. 1923), reprinted in Frank Kermode (ed.), Selected Prose of T.S. Eliot (London, 1975), pp. 175-8. Ellmann (Maud), The Poetics of Impersonality; T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound (Brighton, 1987). Furia (Philip), Pound's Cantos Declassified (University Park, Penn, 1984). Gelpi (Albert), A Coherent Splendor; The American Poetic Renaissance, 1910- 1950 (Cambridge, 1987), Chap. 4. Gibson (Mary Ellis), Epic Reinvented; Ezra Pound and the Victorians (Ithaca, N.Y., 1995). Gould (Warwick), 'The Unknown Masterpiece: Yeats and the Design of the Cantos', in Gibson (Andrew) (ed.), Pound in Multiple Perspective; A Collection of Critical Essays (London, 1993), pp. 40-92. Grieve (Thomas F.), Ezra Pound's Early Poetry and Poetics (Columbia, Mo., c.1997). Hallberg (Robert von), 'Olson's Relationship to Pound and Williams', Contemp. Lit., 15 (1974), 15-48. 5 Hamilton (Scott), Ezra Pound and the Symbolist Inheritance (Princeton, 1992). Hermans (Theo), The Structure of Modernist Poetry (London, 1982). Hewitt (Andrew), Fascist Modernism; Aesthetics, Politics, and the Avant-Garde (Stanford, Cal., 1993). Hooley (Daniel M.), The Classics in Paraphrase; Ezra Pound and Modern Translators of Latin Poetry (Cranbury, N.J., 1988). Jackson (T.H.), The Early Poetry of Ezra Pound (Cambridge, Mass., 1968). Kayman (Martin A.), The Modernism of Ezra Pound (London, 1986). Kenner (Hugh), The Pound Era (Berkeley, Cal., 1971). Kodama (Sanehide), American Poetry and Japanese Culture (Hamden, Conn., 1984). Kuberski (Philip), 'Ego, Scriptor: Pound's Odyssean Writing', Paideuma, 14 (1985). Leavis (F.R.), New Bearings in English Poetry (London, 1932), esp. Chap. IV: 'Ezra Pound'. Lentricchia (Frank), Modernist Quartet (Cambridge 1994). Levenson (Michael H.), A Genealogy of Modernism; A Study of English Literary Doctrine, 1908-22 (Cambridge, 1984). Levin (Harry), Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot and the European Horizon (Oxford, 1975). Longenbach (James), Modernist Poetics of History; Pound, Eliot, and the Sense of the Past (Princeton, 1987). Longenbach (James), Stone Cottage; Pound, Yeats, and Modernism (New York, 1988).
Recommended publications
  • Ezra Pound His Metric and Poetry Books by Ezra Pound
    EZRA POUND HIS METRIC AND POETRY BOOKS BY EZRA POUND PROVENÇA, being poems selected from Personae, Exultations, and Canzoniere. (Small, Maynard, Boston, 1910) THE SPIRIT OF ROMANCE: An attempt to define somewhat the charm of the pre-renaissance literature of Latin-Europe. (Dent, London, 1910; and Dutton, New York) THE SONNETS AND BALLATE OF GUIDO CAVALCANTI. (Small, Maynard, Boston, 1912) RIPOSTES. (Swift, London, 1912; and Mathews, London, 1913) DES IMAGISTES: An anthology of the Imagists, Ezra Pound, Aldington, Amy Lowell, Ford Maddox Hueffer, and others GAUDIER-BRZESKA: A memoir. (John Lane, London and New York, 1916) NOH: A study of the Classical Stage of Japan with Ernest Fenollosa. (Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1917; and Macmillan, London, 1917) LUSTRA with Earlier Poems. (Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1917) PAVANNES AHD DIVISIONS. (Prose. In preparation: Alfred A. Knopf, New York) EZRA POUND HIS METRIC AND POETRY I "All talk on modern poetry, by people who know," wrote Mr. Carl Sandburg in _Poetry_, "ends with dragging in Ezra Pound somewhere. He may be named only to be cursed as wanton and mocker, poseur, trifler and vagrant. Or he may be classed as filling a niche today like that of Keats in a preceding epoch. The point is, he will be mentioned." This is a simple statement of fact. But though Mr. Pound is well known, even having been the victim of interviews for Sunday papers, it does not follow that his work is thoroughly known. There are twenty people who have their opinion of him for every one who has read his writings with any care.
    [Show full text]
  • The Thought of What America": Ezra Pound’S Strange Optimism
    University of New Orleans ScholarWorks@UNO English Faculty Publications Department of English and Foreign Languages 2010 "The Thought of What America": Ezra Pound’s Strange Optimism John Gery University of New Orleans, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.uno.edu/engl_facpubs Part of the Literature in English, North America Commons Recommended Citation Gery, John “‘The Thought of What America’: Ezra Pound’s Strange Optimism,” Belgrade English Language and Literature Studies, Vol. II (2010): 187-206. This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Department of English and Foreign Languages at ScholarWorks@UNO. It has been accepted for inclusion in English Faculty Publications by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks@UNO. For more information, please contact [email protected]. UDC 821.111(73).09-1 Pand E. John R O Gery University of New Orleans, USA “THE THOUGHT OF What AMerica”: EZRA POUND’S STRANGE OPTIMISM Abstract Through a reconsideration of Ezra Pound’s early poem “Cantico del Sole” (1918), an apparently satiric look at American culture in the early twentieth century, this essay argues how the poem, in fact, expresses some of the tenets of Pound’s more radical hopes for American culture, both in his unorthodox critiques of the 1930s in ABC of Reading, Jefferson and/or Mussolini, and Guide to Kulchur and, more significantly, in his epic poem, The Cantos. The essay contends that, despite Pound’s controversial economic and political views in his prose (positions which contributed to his arrest for treason in 1945), he is characteristically optimistic about the potential for American culture.
    [Show full text]
  • Walter Pater — Imagism — Objectivist Verse
    22 WALTER PATER — IMAGISM — OBJECTIVIST VERSE Richard Parker (The University of Sussex) Abstract In this paper I make a two-fold argument; first that the Objectivist inheritance from modernism is, in a specific sense, Paterian, and secondly, that this Paterian influence (manifested principally in the form of the Paterian aesthetic moment) is not, as might be assumed, in conflict with the political tendencies exhibited by my central examples—Ezra Pound and Louis Zukofsky—but that the arguably apolitical aesthetic moment is in fact key to their political understandings. I will begin analysing how the Paterian moment lingers in Pound's poetry, especially his Imagist and Vorticist work, and is still at the core of his poetics when he begins The Cantos . I will then go on to argue that this same Paterian aesthetic moment continues in the early work of second-generation Modernists the Objectivists, and will look at the works of Louis as a representative example. I will then argue that this group of poets' Communism is not a break with their engagement with Paterian aestheticism, but that the Paterian moment is in fact alloyed with their understanding of Marxist-Leninism. The engagement with the far left that is generally supposed to mark these writers' defining divide with their modernist forebears will therefore be shown to be more closely linked to the older generation's practices than it might be thought and I will, finally, question the apparently aesthetic basis of Pound's alignment with the far-right. A consensus has developed regarding Walter Pater's influence upon the early stages of literary modernism.
    [Show full text]
  • The Luminous Detail: the Evolution of Ezra Pound's Linguistic and Aesthetic Theories from 1910-1915
    Western University Scholarship@Western Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository 8-21-2014 12:00 AM The Luminous Detail: The Evolution of Ezra Pound's Linguistic and Aesthetic Theories from 1910-1915 John J. Allaster The University of Western Ontario Supervisor Stephen J. Adams The University of Western Ontario Graduate Program in English A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the equirr ements for the degree in Master of Arts © John J. Allaster 2014 Follow this and additional works at: https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/etd Part of the Literature in English, North America Commons Recommended Citation Allaster, John J., "The Luminous Detail: The Evolution of Ezra Pound's Linguistic and Aesthetic Theories from 1910-1915" (2014). Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository. 2301. https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/etd/2301 This Dissertation/Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by Scholarship@Western. It has been accepted for inclusion in Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository by an authorized administrator of Scholarship@Western. For more information, please contact [email protected]. THE LUMINOUS DETAIL: THE EVOLUTION OF EZRA POUND’S LINGUISTIC AND AESTHETIC THEORIES FROM 1910-1915 by John Allaster Graduate Program in English A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts The School of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies The University of Western Ontario London, Ontario, Canada © John Allaster 2014 Abstract In this study John Allaster traces the evolution of Ezra Pound’s linguistic theories from the method of the Luminous Detail during 1910-12, to the theory of the Image in Imagism during 1912-13, to that of the Vortex in Vorticism during 1914-1915.
    [Show full text]
  • Ezra Pound and the Rhetoric of Science, 1901–1922
    EZRA POUND AND THE RHETORIC OF SCIENCE, 1901–1922 Kimberly Kyle Howey University College London Thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of doctor of philosophy in European Studies, University College London, January 2009. 1 I, Kimberly Kyle Howey, confirm that the work presented in this thesis is my own. Where information has been derived from other sources, I confirm that this has been indicated in the thesis. 2 ABSTRACT This thesis identifies science as Ezra Pound’s first extended extra-poetic interest. This reference to science in Pound’s poetic theory and poetry is portrayed as rhetoric, with its emphasis on the linguistic signifier or word rather than the actual concepts and data of science. The material covers over two decades between 1901, when Pound entered university, and 1922, after he left London. Beginning with Pound’s exposure to philology, the thesis establishes a correlation between his educational background and his use of scientific rhetoric in his prose. As he attempted to establish a professional status for the poet, he used metaphors linking literature to the natural sciences and comparisons between the poet and the scientist. Additionally, Pound attempted to organize poetic movements that resembled the professional scientific organizations that were beginning to form in America. In his writings promoting these movements, Pound developed a hygienic theory of poetry— itself an extensive rhetorical project—which produced a clean, bare poem and further linked Pound’s poetic output with the sciences. Beyond his rhetorical use of science, Pound attempted to study the sciences and even adopted a doctor persona for his friends with illnesses—both diagnosing and prescribing cures.
    [Show full text]
  • READING POUND : ONE 1. in Vain Have I Striven to Teach My Heart To
    READING POUND : ONE 1. In vain have I striven to teach my heart to bow; In vain have I said to him "There be many singers greater than thou." But his answer cometh, as winds and as lutany, As a vague crying upon the night That leaveth me no rest, saying ever, "Song, a song." Their echoes play upon each other in the twilight Seeking ever a song. Lo, I am worn with travail And the wandering of many roads hath made my eyes As dark red circles filled with dust. Yet there is a trembling upon me in the twilight, And little red elf words crying "A song," Little grey elf words crying for a song, Little brown leaf words crying "A song," Little green leaf words crying for a song. The words are as leaves, old brown leaves in the spring time Blowing they know not whither, seeking a song. White words as snow flakes but they are cold Moss words, lip words, words of slow streams. In vain have I striven To teach my soul to bow, In vain have I pled with him, "There be greater souls than thou." For in the morn of my years there came a woman As moon light calling As moon calleth the tides, "Song, a song." Wherefore I made her a song and she went from me As the moon doth from the sea, But still came the leaf words, little brown elf words Saying "The soul sendeth us." A song, a song!" And in vain I cried unto them "I have no song For she I sang of hath gone from me." Ezra Pound, initial two-thirds of 'Praise of Ysolt', the first piece in Personae (London, April 1909); reprinted in Umbra (London, June 1920), in Collected Shorter Poems (London, 1952), pp.
    [Show full text]
  • Richard Parker
    ON IN MEMORY OF YOUR OCCULT CONVOLUTIONS Richard Parker 317 GLOSSATOR 8 In Memory of Your Occult Convolutions1 1 Keston Sutherland’s ‘In Memory of Your Occult Convolutions’ was written for, and delivered at, a poetry reading organised to coincide with the 24th Ezra Pound Conference, London, July 5-9, 2011. The audience was predominantly made up of Pound scholars from around the world. The poem is constructed from excerpts from essays by Ezra Pound that deal with the relation of pedagogy to literature; ‘How to Read’ (1929), ‘The Serious Artist’ (1913), ‘The Teacher’s Mission’ (1934) and ‘The Constant Preaching to the Mob’ (1916). They are all collected, consecutively, in T.S. Eliot’s edition of the Literary Essays of Ezra Pound (1954) [hereafter LE]. Further extracts are taken from the poems ‘Fratres Minores’ (1914) and Homage to Sextus Propertius (1919), as well as Pound’s early critical work The Spirit of Romance (1910). The ‘Occult Convolutions’ of the title are taken from section 24 (of the 1892 version) of Walt Whitman’s ‘Song of Myself’. If I worship one thing more than another it shall be the spread of my own body, or any part of it, Translucent mould of me it shall be you! Shaded ledges and rests it shall be you! Firm masculine colter it shall be you! Whatever goes to the tilth of me it shall be you! You my rich blood! your milky stream pale strippings of my life! Breast that presses against other breasts it shall be you! My brain it shall be your occult convolutions! Root of wash’d sweet-flag! timorous pond-snipe! nest of guarded duplicate eggs! it shall be you! Mix’d tussled hay of head, beard, brawn, it shall be you! Trickling sap of maple, fibre of manly wheat, it shall be you! Sun so generous it shall be you! Vapors lighting and shading my face, it shall be you! You sweaty brooks and dews it shall be you! Winds whose soft-tickling genitals rub against me it shall be you! Broad muscular fields, branches of live oak, loving lounger in my winding paths, it shall be you! Hands I have taken, face I have kiss’d, mortal I have ever touch’d, it shall be you.
    [Show full text]
  • Ezra POUND's Strange Optimism
    UDC 821.111(73).09-1 Pand E. John R O Gery University of New Orleans, USA “THE THOUGHT OF What AMerica”: EZRA POUND’S STRANGE OPTIMISM Abstract Through a reconsideration of Ezra Pound’s early poem “Cantico del Sole” (1918), an apparently satiric look at American culture in the early twentieth century, this essay argues how the poem, in fact, expresses some of the tenets of Pound’s more radical hopes for American culture, both in his unorthodox critiques of the 1930s in ABC of Reading, Jefferson and/or Mussolini, and Guide to Kulchur and, more significantly, in his epic poem, The Cantos. The essay contends that, despite Pound’s controversial economic and political views in his prose (positions which contributed to his arrest for treason in 1945), he is characteristically optimistic about the potential for American culture. Behind his flamboyant style, his self- destructive allegiance to Mussolini, and his complex poetics, Pound anticipated and even initiated the multicultural imperative that by the end of the century emerged as an essential component of American literature. Key words: Ezra Pound, early poetry, satire attitude, radical hopes, epic poems, The Cantos, optimistic views, multicultural imperative Cantico del Sole (From Instigations) The thought of what America would be like If the Classics had a wide circulation Troubles my sleep, The thought of what America, The thought of what America, The thought of what America would be like 187 Belgrade BELLS If the Classics had a wide circulation Troubles my sleep. Nunc dimittis, now lettest thou thy servant, Now lettest thou thy servant Depart in peace.
    [Show full text]
  • Ezra Pound's Copyright Statute
    EZRA POUND’S COPYRIGHT STATUTE: PERPETUAL RIGHTS AND THE PROBLEM OF HEIRS * Robert Spoo This Article explores the historical and present-day significance of proposals for copyright reform advanced in 1918 by the controversial American poet, Ezra Pound. These proposals have never been discussed by legal scholars and have received but scant attention from literary scholars. Yet, like William Wordsworth and Mark Twain, whose efforts to reform copyright law are much better known, Pound is a major writer whose views shed considerable light on the state of copyright law and the conditions of authorship in his time. Pound’s proposed statute—offered as a “cure” for American book piracy—begins by making authors’ copyrights exclusive and perpetual, and goes on, surprisingly, to introduce broad compulsory-license provisions that would prevent authors and their heirs from interfering with later efforts to disseminate authors’ works and require publishers only to pay a fixed royalty on sales. The tension in Pound’s proposal between a perpetual, exclusive copyright and expansive compulsory licenses shows him to be an inheritor of two legal and economic traditions: on the one hand, a Lockean and Romantic belief in a strong property rule grounded in an author’s natural rights and unique personality, and, on the other, an anti-monopoly, free-trade preference for a liability rule that would encourage wide dissemination of affordable works to serve the public interest. As the author of such a dual-purpose proposal, Pound emerges as remarkably and presciently alert to the dangers currently posed by lengthy copyright terms unaccompanied by limitations that adequately protect the public.
    [Show full text]
  • Ezra Pound and the Rhetoric of Address
    PETER NICHOLLS Ezra Pound and the Rhetoric of Address Ezra Pound’s repudiation of “rhetoric” constituted one of the principal strands in early modernism’s attempt to define itself against the literary values of the nineteenth century. For Pound, Victorianism represented a culture of “the opalescent word, the rhetorical tradition”;1 in “A Retrospect” (published in 1918), he called famously for a “harder and saner” poetry, one freed from the previous century’s “rhetorical din, and luxurious riot,” “austere, direct, free from emotional slither.”2 Yet even as he argued for this “harder and saner” poetry Pound also discerned a dimension of poetry precisely as being in excess of directly communicable meaning. When his theorizing took a self-consciously “modern” turn with the poetics of imagism he tended to appeal to the visual as a model for an affective “pattern” capable of curbing the unfocussed expression of emotion he associated with the backwash of Romanticism.3 It was here that the term “rhetoric” was constantly invoked as the enemy or the other of modernism. The imagist program, with its call for “direct treatment of the ‘thing’,” verbal economy, and rhythms determined by “the sequence of the musical phrase,” was underpinned by both the Kantian criticism of rhetoric as “the art of persuasion, i.e., of deceiving by a beautiful show (ars oratoria)”4 and by the assumption that rhetoric trafficked in some sort of merely verbal excess. Kant was not objecting to persuasion per se, of course, but to what he called a rhetorical “machinery of 1 “The Prose Tradition in Verse” (1914), in Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed.
    [Show full text]
  • Chapter 1 Life
    Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-63069-6 - The Cambridge Introduction to Ezra Pound Ira B. Nadel Excerpt More information Chapter 1 Life People quite often think me crazy when I make a jump instead of a step, just as if all jumps were unsound and never carried one anywhere. Pound, 1937–8 Ezra Pound loved to jump, from idea to idea, from culture to culture, from lyric to epic. Whether on the tennis court or in the salon, he remained energized by ideas and action. He was also outspoken and insistent: “I have never known anyone worth a damn who wasn’t irascible,” Pound told Margaret Anderson in 1917 and he fulfilled this dicta completely (SL 111). His agenda as a poet, translator, editor, anthologist, letter-writer, essayist and provocateur was clear, his plan precise: “Man reading shd. be man intensely alive. The book shd. be a ball of light in one’s hand” (GK 55). Vague words are an anathema, the hard, clear statement the goal. And he does not hesitate to instruct: “Against the metric pattern,” he tells the poet Mary Barnard, “struggle toward natural speech. You haven’t yet got sense of quantity” (SL 261). The best “mecha- nism for breaking up the stiffness and literary idiom is a different meter, the god damn iambic magnetizes certain verbal sequences” (SL 260). “To break the pentameter, that was the first heave,” Pound announces in The Cantos (LXXXI/538). These statements against complacency and convention reveal the man as much as they do his literary practice. Everything about Pound was unorthodox.
    [Show full text]
  • Ezra Pound's Medieval Classicism: the Spirit of Romance and the Debt
    Ezra Pound’s Medieval Classicism: The Spirit of Romance and the Debt to Philology Jonathan Ullyot Introduction “I want to maintain that after a hundred years of romanticism,” T. E. Hulme begins his famous lecture to the Quest Society in 1911, “we are in for a clas- sical revival.”1 Hulme characterizes Romanticism as the belief that man is “an infinite reservoir of possibilities,” whereas classicism contends that, “man is an extraordinarily fixed and limited animal whose nature is absolutely con- stant. It is only by tradition and organization that anything decent can be got out of him.” He calls for “accurate, precise and definite description” “without the infinite being in some way or other dragged in,” and insists that, “beau- ty may be a small, dry thing.” A year earlier, Ezra Pound wove a manifesto of classicism into an enthusiastic survey of medieval literature, The Spirit of Romance (1910).2 Taking as his authorities the scholarly works of Gaston Paris, Joseph Bédier, and Walter Ker, Pound teases out a definition of medieval classicism that would define (his) modernism and direct the methodology of The Cantos: the “Hellenic” austerity of style; the “depersonalization” of the implied author or poet; the idea of literary composition as the compiling and arranging of fragmented sources; the proximity of literary composition to (philological) literary criticism; the use of Latin texts as necessary intermedi- aries to understanding Greek texts; and the practice of the medieval transla- tio (studii et imperii), which means both to “translate” a classical text as well as “transfer” (adapt, update) its material to reflect contemporary (scientific and religious) “truths.” The Spirit of Romance is composed of a series of lectures about the burgeon- ing field of medieval literature.
    [Show full text]