The Wallace Stevens Journal Volume 26 Number 2 Fall 2002 Special Issue: Wallace Stevens and Ezra Pound Edited by Glen MacLeod Contents Introduction —Glen MacLeod 131 “Pound/Stevens: Whose Era?” Revisited —Marjorie Perloff 135 Bloody Battle-Flags and Cloudy Days: The Experience of Metaphor in Pound and Stevens —Patricia Rae 143 How to Do Things with Modernism —Douglas Mao 160 Stevens/Pound in the Cold War —Alan Filreis 181 Genius for Sale! —Rachel Blau DuPlessis 194 Poets/Readers: Whose Era? —Vincent N. LoLordo 211 The Pound/Stevens Era —Charles Altieri 228 Pound vs. Stevens: Old Wine in New Bottles or New Bottles for Old Wine —Leon Surette 251 Poems 267 Reviews 277 News and Comments 285 Cover from Three Crows 2000. Metal, height 11' 6" by William L. Salisbury Sculptor The Wallace Stevens Journal EDITOR John N. Serio POETRY EDITOR ART EDITOR BOOK REVIEW EDITOR Joseph Duemer Kathryn Jacobi George S. Lensing EDITORIAL ASSISTANTS EDITORIAL BOARD Maureen Kravec Milton J. Bates A. Walton Litz Hope Steele Jacqueline V. Brogan James Longenbach Robert Buttel Glen MacLeod Eleanor Cook Marjorie Perloff TECHNICAL ASSISTANT Alan Filreis Joan Richardson Sue Campbell B. J. Leggett Melita Schaum George S. Lensing Lisa M. Steinman The Wallace Stevens Society, Inc. PRESIDENT ADVISORY BOARD John N. Serio Milton J. Bates H. L. Hix Owen E. Brady Kathryn Jacobi Robert Buttel George S. Lensing David M. Craig A. Walton Litz The Wallace Stevens Journal is published biannually in the Spring and Fall by the Wal- lace Stevens Society, Inc. Administrative and editorial offices are located at Clarkson University, Box 5750, Potsdam, NY 13699. Phone: (315) 268-3987; Fax: (315) 268-3983; E-mail: [email protected]; Web site: www.wallacestevens.com. The subscription rate for individuals, both domestic and foreign, is $25 for one year or $45 for two years and includes membership in the Wallace Stevens Society. Rates for institutions are $34 per year domestic and $39 per year foreign. 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ISSN 0148-7132 Introduction GLEN MACLEOD HIS SPECIAL ISSUE on Wallace Stevens and Ezra Pound is also a tribute to Marjorie Perloff, who has been a valued member of the Teditorial board of The Wallace Stevens Journal since 1984. The issue began as a panel at the Modernist Studies Association conference in Octo- ber 2000, which reconsidered Perloff’s influential essay “Pound/Stevens: Whose Era?” (first published in 1982). The papers from that panel appear, in revised form, as the first four essays in this issue. “Pound/Stevens: Whose Era?” has informed the critical debate about these two poets for twenty years. In it, Perloff divides the field of modern poetry into two camps: partisans of Stevens (e.g., Helen Vendler, Harold Bloom) vs. partisans of Pound (e.g., Hugh Kenner, Donald Davie). The defenders of Stevens think of modernism as an extension of the romantic lyric tradition and define poetry primarily in terms of what it says; the defenders of Pound think of modernism as a fundamental break with ro- manticism and define poetry primarily in terms of how it says what it says. There is of course much more to it, but, in sum, Perloff’s essay is a sharp-eyed analysis of the critical situation in the 1970s and early 1980s, and it focuses on issues that still concern poets and critics today. It is regu- larly included on reading lists in graduate courses on modern poetry. What most strikes the Stevens specialist is the essay’s polemical tone. Perloff was clearly championing Pound, whom she saw as the poetic un- derdog at the time. (That bias became more obvious when “Pound/Stevens: Whose Era?” was republished as the opening chapter of her book The Dance of the Intellect [1985], aptly subtitled Studies in the Poetry of the Pound Tradi- tion.) Among other things, the essay challenged Stevensians to defend their version of modernism. Perloff’s central commitment as a critic has always been to modernism and to keeping alive the modernist spirit that wel- comes vital controversy. That commitment is nowhere more evident than in the provocative edge of her best criticism, of which “Pound/Stevens: Whose Era?” is a prime example. The essays in this issue demonstrate that it can still provoke sharp responses. It is appropriate that Perloff’s essay was itself inspired by a “wonder- fully argumentative” encounter circa 1980, as she tells us in the lively re- consideration of her original argument that leads off this special issue. It THE WALLACE STEVENS JOURNAL 26.2 (FALL 2002): 131–133. © 2002 THE WALLACE STEVENS SOCIETY, INC. 131 is not giving away too much to say that, in this new essay, she ultimately shifts the ground entirely, finding the relevant models for contemporary poets not in Pound and Stevens but in early T. S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, and—characteristically stressing the importance of the visual arts to mod- ern poetry—Marcel Duchamp. (This shift of perspective is developed in more detail in her new book 21st-Century Modernism: The “New” Poetics, published this year by Blackwell.) Patricia Rae mounts a three-part assault on Perloff’s distinction, in her original essay, between Stevens as a poet of metaphor and Pound as a poet of metonymy. Extending her own argument in The Practical Muse (1997), Rae shows that Pound and Stevens share a number of fundamen- tal assumptions about life, poetry, and the relations between them. Douglas Mao attributes the staying power of “Pound/Stevens: Whose Era?” to its focus on debates (e.g., open vs. closed form, paratactic vs. syllogistic constructions) that remain centrally important to contempo- rary poets. But he also finds a troubling anti-intellectual slant in the rheto- ric of Perloff’s essay, as well as in her more recent Wittgenstein’s Ladder (1996). Alan Filreis responds to these first three papers by reconstructing the broader historical context of “Pound/Stevens: Whose Era?” In the 1950s and early 1960s, poetic categories were more fluid, not polarized as they had become when Perloff entered the fray. He agrees with Perloff that the situation at the beginning of the twenty-first century is once again more open, with both Pound and Stevens (and many others) available as mod- els to practicing poets. Rachel Blau DuPlessis finds unexamined vestiges of “genius thinking” in both Perloff’s original essay and her present reconsideration of it. In- stead of asking “Whose Era?” she suggests we ask “Which Pound?” or “Which Stevens?” Better yet, we should avoid such reductive dichoto- mies altogether and focus more on the material basis of artistry, the “rol- licking community with many players” behind every act of creation. Vincent N. LoLordo applies the principles DuPlessis expounds (as do Mao and Filreis, in different ways), focusing on John Ashbery’s Flow Chart as an example of how poetry can include the social, and argues that “[t]he current debate most relevant as successor to Perloff’s formulation con- cerns two versions of this single poet.” Charles Altieri challenges Perloff’s dichotomy by proposing a single Pound/Stevens era, beginning in the 1960s. According to Altieri, the two poets share a sense of the pressure of history and what he calls a “second- order lyricism.” Later poets have drawn upon both Pound and Stevens as equally useful aspects of their heritage. Altieri reads Stevens’ “Examina- tion of the Hero in a Time of War” and Pound’s Malatesta cantos to show that both poets seek to train readers in a similar kind of responsiveness to both poetry and life. 132 THE WALLACE STEVENS JOURNAL Finally, Pound scholar Leon Surette takes issue with Perloff’s charac- terization of modernism, arguing that, according to her own criteria, Pound himself does not qualify as a modernist. He offers his own definition of modernism, based on the spiritual aspirations of the abstract painters, in which Pound and Stevens both fit comfortably. One conclusion to be drawn from these essays is that Pound and Stevens seem today to have much more in common than they seemed to have in 1982. As modernism recedes into history, the leading modernist poets seem more and more part of a small, select group whose differences may be less significant than their shared interests. In that spirit, let me end with one point on which Perloff and the other contributors will readily agree: it is a great pleasure to be able to include in this special issue of The Wallace Stevens Journal a poem by Ezra Pound’s daughter, Mary de Rachewiltz. University of Connecticut, Waterbury INTRODUCTION 133 Stevens/Pound: Whose Era? Charcoal drawing by Alexis W. Serio “Pound/Stevens: Whose Era?” Revisited MARJORIE PERLOFF HE IDEA FOR “Pound/Stevens: Whose Era?” came to me one after- noon circa 1980 in the course of a wonderfully argumentative con- Tversation with two young men—brilliant, witty, and charming—I had just met at the Los Angeles home of the poet Charles Wright—Paul Monette and Roger Horwitz, both of whom were to die of AIDS, Roger in 1986 (after a long, painful illness, commemorated in Paul’s harrowing memoir Borrowed Time) and Paul in 1995.