Pound, Frost, Moore, and Poetic Precision Science in Modernist American Poetry Barry Ahearn Pound, Frost, Moore, and Poetic Precision Barry Ahearn Pound, Frost, Moore, and Poetic Precision Science in Modernist American Poetry Barry Ahearn Tulane University New Orleans, LA, USA ISBN 978-3-030-36543-1 ISBN 978-3-030-36544-8 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36544-8 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifcally the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microflms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. 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Cover credit: mauritius images GmbH/Alamy Stock Photo This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland To the Memory of Hugh and Mary Anne Kenner ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Grateful acknowledgment is made to the editor of the Tennyson Research Bulletin for permission to republish a portion of “Tennyson and Babbage,” Tennyson Research Bulletin 10:1 (2012), 53–65. Grateful acknowledgment is made to New Directions Publishing Corporation for permission to republish material from the following works by Ezra Pound. Personae, © 1926 by Ezra Pound. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. The Cantos of Ezra Pound, © 1934, 1937, 1940, 1948, 1950, 1956, 1959, 1962, 1963, 1965, 1966, 1968, 1970, and 1971 by Ezra Pound. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. Gaudier-Brzeska, © 1970 by New Directions Publishing Corp. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. Collected Early Poems, © 1926, 1935, 1954, 1965, 1967, 1976 by The Ezra Pound Literary Property Trust. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. ABC of Reading, © 1934 by Ezra Pound. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. Selected Prose 1909–1965, © 1973 by The Estate of Ezra Pound. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. Unpublished drafts of The Cantos, © 2019 by Mary de Rachewiltz and the Estate of Omar Pound. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. vii viii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Every reasonable effort has been made to secure permission from the estate of Marianne Moore. “Acquainted with the Night,” “West-Running Brook,” “A Roadside Stand,” “On the Heart’s Beginning to Cloud the Mind,” “At Woodward’s Garden,” “Desert Places,” “On Taking from the Top to Broaden the Base,” “Build Soil,” “A Missive Missile,” “A Considerable Speck,” and “In Winter in the Woods Alone” by Robert Frost. From the book The Poetry of Robert Frost edited by Edward Connery Lathem. Copyright © 1934, 1936, 1942, 1956, 1962 by Robert Frost. Copyright © 1964, 1970 by Leslie Frost Ballantine. Reprinted by permission of Henry Holt and Company. All rights reserved. For their assistance I would like to thank the librarians and staff of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, and Elizabeth E. Fuller, librarian at the Rosenbach Museum and Library, Philadelphia. I wish to thank John Gery, Donald Pizer, and Zhaoming Qian for reading portions of the manuscript. I also wish to thank the two anon- ymous reviewers for their advice on improvements. Finally, my most heartfelt thanks to my wife, Pamela, who has had the grace to put up with this project for far too long. CONTENTS 1 Introduction 1 2 To Be Precise 9 3 Ezra Pound and Error 61 4 Robert Frost and “Something” 141 5 Marianne Moore and Ac-/cident 213 6 Afterword 287 Works Cited 301 Index 317 ix ABBREVIATIONS WORKS OF EZRA POUND ABC ABC of Reading. New York: New Directions, 1960 C The Cantos of Ezra Pound. New York: New Directions, 1972 Con Confucius: The Unwobbling Pivot, The Great Digest, The Analects. New York: New Directions, 1969 EP/LZ Pound/Zukofsky: Selected Letters of Ezra Pound and Louis Zukofsky. Ed. Barry Ahearn. New York: New Directions, 1987 EPPP Ezra Pound’s Poetry and Prose: Contributions to Periodicals. Ed. Lea Baechler; A. Walton Litz; James Longenbach. 11 vols. New York: Garland, 1991 J/M Jefferson and/or Mussolini. New York: Liveright, 1970 K Guide to Kulchur. New York: New Directions, 1970 LE The Literary Essays of Ezra Pound. Ed. T. S. Eliot. Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions, 1954 P Personae: The Shorter Poems of Ezra Pound. Ed. Lea Baechler and A. Walton Litz. New York: New Directions, 1990 SP Selected Prose 1909-1965. Ed. William Cookson. New York: New Directions, 1973 WORKS OF ROBERT FROST BW A Boy’s Will. New York: Henry Holt, 1915 CPPP Collected Poems, Prose, and Plays. Ed. Richard Poirier and Mark Richardson. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 1995 xi xii ABBREViations CPRF The Collected Prose of Robert Frost. Ed. Mark Richardson. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 2007 FR A Further Range. New York: Henry Holt, 1936 LRF 1 The Letters of Robert Frost: Volume 1, 1886-1920. Ed. Donald Sheehy, Mark Richardson, and Robert Faggen. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 2014 LRF 2 The Letters of Robert Frost: Volume 2, 1920-1928. Ed. Donald Sheehy, Mark Richardson, Robert Bernard Hass, and Henry Atmore. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 2016 MI Mountain Interval. New York: Henry Holt, 1916 NB North of Boston. New York: Henry Holt, 1915 NH New Hampshire. New York: Henry Holt, 1923 NRF The Notebooks of Robert Frost. Ed. Robert Fagen. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 2010 WB West-Running Brook. New York: Henry Holt, 1928 WORKS OF MARIANNE MOORE CP The Complete Poems of Marianne Moore. New York: Penguin, 1982 Prose Complete Prose of Marianne Moore. Ed. Patricia Willis. New York: Viking, 1986 SLMM The Selected Letters of Marianne Moore. Ed. Bonnie Costello, Celeste Goodridge and Cristanne Miller. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997 CHAPTER 1 Introduction This book is about three poets—Ezra Pound, Robert Frost, and Marianne Moore—and how they responded to the demand that poetry aspire to scientifc precision. This may seem a topic of minor importance compared to their involvement with such grave matters as politics, eco- nomics, literary history, and contemporary culture. But how they han- dled this demand affected such concerns; they would not have been the same poets without their varying responses to the insistence that poetry be precise. It is important to add that they often found precision shad- owed by its opposite—imprecision. And just as Pound, Frost, and Moore handled precision differently, they found varied uses for imprecision. Before the early twentieth century, precision had rarely been associ- ated with poetry. Pound sought to marry them as early as 1910 when he proclaimed in The Spirit of Romance (1910) that “Poetry is a sort of inspired mathematics, which gives us equations, not for abstract fg- ures, triangles, spheres, and the like, but equations for the human emo- tions” (1968, 14). This analogy between poetry and exact mathematics was novel; it had been customary to regard them as barely acquainted. Indeed, poets and novelists sometimes ridiculed science and mathemat- ics. Two centuries earlier, in Gulliver’s Travels (1726), Swift had derided the experimental eccentricities of the Royal Society in his description of the grand academy of Lagado. He also satirized the misuse of mathe- matics in the court of Laputa, where a tailor employs a quadrant, a rule, and compasses to measure Gulliver for a suit of clothes that turns out to be “very ill made.” Between Swift’s day and Pound’s, however, © The Author(s) 2020 1 B. Ahearn, Pound, Frost, Moore, and Poetic Precision, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36544-8_1 2 B. AHEARN science and mathematics increasingly demonstrated their practical util- ity. Steamboats freed mariners from dependence on the wind and tide. Samuel F. B. Morse made it possible to communicate instantaneously across vast distances. By the middle of the nineteenth century it had become commonplace to praise science extravagantly. In The Gay Science (1866), Eneas Sweetland Dallas exulted that “In electricity we seem to be hovering on the verge of some grand discovery, and already the elec- tric spark has been trained to feats more marvellous than any recorded of Ariel or Puck. Optics now enable us to discover the composition of the sun, and to detect the presence of metals to the millionth part of a grain. Seven-league boots are clumsy beside a railway; steam-ships make a jest of the fying carpet” (1866, 1: 52). It was not enough for Dallas to boast about the triumphs of science and technology. His disparagement of Ariel, Puck, and the fying carpet implied that the romance of science had eclipsed the fantasies of dramatists, novelists, and poets. Science and mathematics had increasingly become the means by which civilization measured itself and the surrounding universe.