Ezra Pound - The Four Steps
- Duration: 7:10
- Published: 2009-10-14
- Uploaded: 2010-12-16
- Author: RaisingKundalini
Ezra Pound - The Four Steps, 21 June 1958 BBC Home Service. Ezra Pound outlining his antipathy towards all forms of bureacracy.
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Living in London in the early 20th century, Pound promoted and in some cases shaped the work of contemporaries such as T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, W. B. Yeats, and Ernest Hemingway, using his position as foreign editor of The Little Review and Poetry to help modernist poetry reach an American audience. It was Pound who discovered Eliot and who was largely responsible for the publication of Joyce's Ulysses. Hemingway wrote of him in 1925: "He defends [his friends] when they are attacked, he gets them into magazines and out of jail. He loans them money. ... He advances them hospital expenses and dissuades them from suicide." He also wrote for The New Age and Wyndham Lewis's magazine BLAST, and was known for his translations, which included translating medieval writers such as Guido Cavalcanti, and Ernest Fenollosa's work from Japanese.
Disgusted by the loss of life during the First World War, he lost faith in England and came to believe that only economic reform could prevent another war. He moved to Italy in 1924, where to his friends' dismay he embraced Benito Mussolini's fascism and met Mussolini himself in 1933. He argued that usury and the Bank of England were behind the Great Depression, expressed support for Adolf Hitler, and wrote for publications owned by the British fascist Oswald Mosley. The Italian government paid him during the Second World War to make over 100 radio broadcasts criticizing the United States, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and in particular Jews. The broadcasts were monitored by the U.S. government and he was arrested for treason in 1945, spending months in detention in a U.S. military camp in Pisa, Italy—including 25 days in a six-by-six-foot outdoor steel cage during which he said he had a mental breakdown. Deemed unfit to stand trial, a decision disputed for decades after his death, he was incarcerated in St. Elizabeths psychiatric hospital in Washington, D.C., for over 12 years.
While in custody in Italy he had begun work on The Pisan Cantos (1948), for which he was awarded the Bollingen Prize in 1949 by the Library of Congress, an honor that triggered enormous controversy, mostly because of his antisemitism, and in part because it raised literary questions about whether a mad poet who held such contentious views could produce work of any value. After his release from St. Elizabeths in 1958 he returned to Italy, where he continued to work on The Cantos and died in 1972. His political views ensure that his work remains controversial; in 1933 Time magazine called him "a cat that walks by himself, tenaciously unhousebroken and very unsafe for children." Ernest Hemingway nevertheless wrote, "The best of Pound's writing—and it is in the Cantos—will last as long as there is any literature."
On his mother's side, William Wadsworth, a Puritan, had left England for Boston on the Lion in 1632. The Wadsworths married into the Westons of New York, and Harding Weston and Mary Parker produced Isabel Weston, Pound's mother. She was used to a more sophisticated urban life and was unhappy with the move to Hailey, so Homer gave up his job in 1887 when Pound was two. They lived for a year with her relatives, Ezra Brown Weston and his wife Frances, at 24 East 47th Street, Manhattan, and the next year with Thaddeus Pound in Chippewa Falls in Wisconsin. In 1889 Homer accepted a job as an assayer at the Philadelphia Mint, and the family moved to 417 Walnut Street in nearby Jenkintown, Pennsylvania, then in July 1893 bought a six-bedroom house at 166 Fernbrook Avenue in the WASP-ish town of Wyncote.
at the University of Pennsylvania]] It was at Pennsylvania that he met Hilda Doolittle—the daughter of the university's professor of astronomy—who became a poet known as H.D., thanks to Pound's choice of a name for her. He was seeing two other women at the same time—Viola Baxter and Mary Moore—later dedicating a book of poetry, Personae (1909), to the latter. He asked Mary to marry him too that summer, but she turned him down.
He graduated with a BPhil in 1905, and in the fall of that year enrolled again at the University of Pennsylvania, studying Romance languages under Hugo A. Rennert. He obtained his MA in the spring of 1906, and registered as a PhD student to write a thesis on the jesters in Lope de Vega's plays. The university awarded him a Harrison fellowship with a travel grant of $500 (today $}}), which he used to visit Europe again. He arrived in Gibraltar on May 7, then spent three weeks in Madrid in various libraries, including one in the royal palace. He was standing outside the palace during the attempted assassination on 31 May by anarchists of King Alfonso and his bride on their wedding day, and left the country for fear he would be identified with them. He moved on to Paris, spending two weeks attending lectures at the Sorbonne, followed by a week in the British Museum Reading Room in London. He returned to the U.S. in July, and his first published essay, Raphalite Latin, appeared in Book News in September, in which he committed himself to internationalism, arguing that provincialism was the enemy. Back at the university he apparently annoyed Felix Shelling, the head of English, with silly remarks during lectures—which included insisting that George Bernard Shaw was better than Shakespeare, and taking out an enormous tin watch and winding it with slow precision—and his fellowship was not renewed at the end of the year. It was the only job he ever had, living for the rest of his life on money from his father, his wife's allowance from her parents, gifts from patrons, his royalties and—for several controversial years—fees from Mussolini's government for the broadcasts that saw him arrested for treason.
In August he moved to London, where he ended up staying almost continuously for 12 years. He wanted to meet W.B. Yeats, the greatest living poet in Pound's view, and they became close friends, although Yeats was older by 28 years. He had sent Yeats a copy of A Lume Spento, and Yeats had replied that he found it charming. Pound told William Carlos Williams, a friend from university: "London, deah old Lundon, is the place for poesy."
Arriving in the city with ₤3 (today ₤}}), he rented a room at 8 Duchess Street in the West End. When he found it too expensive he moved briefly to Islington in the north, then when his family sent more money—another ₤4—it was back to the West End and a room a penny bus-ride from the British Museum at 48 Langham Street, near Great Titchfield Street. The house (see right) sat across an alley from the Yorkshire Grey pub, which made an appearance decades later in the Pisan Cantos, "concerning the landlady's doings/with a lodger unnamed/az waz near Gt Titchfield St. next door to the pub". He persuaded the bookseller Elkin Mathews—publisher of Yeats's Wind Among the Reeds and the Book of the Rhymer's Club—to display A Lume Spento, and by October he was being discussed around town. In December he published a second collection, A Quinzaine for This Yule, and after the death of a lecturer at the Regent Street Polytechnic, he managed to acquire a position lecturing in the evenings on "The Development of Literature in Southern Europe". He would spend his mornings in the British Museum Reading Room, followed by lunch at the Vienna Café on Oxford Street. Ford Madox Ford described him, apparently more in connotation than denotation, as "approach[ing] with the step of a dancer, making passes with a cane at an imaginary opponent. He would wear trousers made of green billiard cloth, a pink coat, a blue shirt, a tie hand-painted by a Japanese friend, an immense sombrero, a flaming beard cut to a point, and a single, large blue earring."
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Listen to it—Ezra! Ezra! And a third time—Ezra! He has a wonderful, beautiful face, a high forehead, prominent over the eyes; a long delicate nose, with little, red, nostrils; a strange mouth, never still & quite elusive; a square chin, slightly cleft in the middle—the whole face pale; the eyes grey-blue; the hair golden-brown, and curling in soft wavy crinkles. Large hands, with long, well-shaped fingers and beautiful nails.
The Shakespears were among a number of women who effectively became Pound's patrons. Through them he was introduced to Yeats, the artist Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Wyndham Lewis, and the rest of London's literary circle. Another patron was the American heiress Margaret Cravens, who after knowing him for just one or two days offered him such a large amount of money that he was able to focus entirely on completing The Spirit of Romance (1910), based on his notes from the evening lectures. Cravens killed herself in 1912, probably because the pianist Walter Rummel, long the object of her affection, had married someone else, but possibly also because she learned of Pound's engagement to Dorothy, an engagement so unofficial that over the next few years Dorothy became increasingly angry about it. She had to abide by social convention, while Pound was free to roam, befriending and often bedding any woman he wanted.
In September another 27 poems appeared as Exultations, and around the same time he moved into new rooms at Church Walk, off Kensington High Street, where he lived most of the time until 1914, and where he said the "Imagisme" movement was born in 1912. On 22 February 1911 he sailed from New York on the R.M.S. Mauretania, arriving in Southampton six days later. He did not return to the United States for 28 years.
After a few days in London, he visited Paris again, where he worked on a new collection of poetry, Canzoni (1911), panned by the Westminster Gazette as a "medley of pretension." Through the project with Rummel he developed a greater interest in music, and began to focus on the role of rhythm and pitch in poetry. After returning to London in August 1911 he began work on the collection that became Ripostes, and A. R. Orage, the editor of the socialist journal The New Age, hired him to write a weekly column. Hilda Doolittle arrived in London, and Pound introduced her to the poet Richard Aldington, whom she married in 1913. The three of them lived in Church Walk, and worked daily in the British Museum Reading Room, where in the tearoom one afternoon they decided to start a movement, "Imagisme". The aim was to fight the Victorian use of abstraction, romanticism, symbolism, rhetoric, the inversion of word order, and the over-use of adjectives. One contemporary said: "The concrete image, unruled by an adjective, was a thing [Pound] would have died for. Rhetoric was a thing he would gladly have murdered." The Imagist movement began to attract attention from critics. In 1913 Pound collected poems for the 64-page Des Imagistes, an anthology of Imagisme poets, published in February 1914, which included Joyce's "I Hear an Army Charging Upon the Land." Of great importance was Pound's work on Ernest Fenollosa's papers, given to him to organize by Fenollosa's widow. Fenollosa, an American professor who had taught in Japan, had started translations of Japanese poetry and Noh plays, with which Pound became fascinated. Eventually Pound used Fenollosa's work as a starting point for what he called the ideogrammic method.
In November 1913 Yeats took Pound to stay with him in rooms he rented in Stone Cottage in Coleman's Hatch, Sussex, the first of three winters he spent there with Yeats, including one winter with Dorothy after they married. Pound was to act as his secretary and to read to him—Yeats's eyesight was failing—and they stayed there for 10 weeks, reading and writing, walking in the woods, and fencing for exercise. Yeats was interested in the occult, and he had Pound read him stories about ghosts. "He will be quite sensible," Pound told a friend, "till some question of ghosts or occultism comes up, then ... quality of mind goes."
Pound began writing for Wyndham Lewis's literary magazine BLAST, the first issue of which appeared in June 1914. An advertisment in The Egoist said it would discuss "Cubism, Futurism, Imagisme and all Vital Forms of Modern Art." Pound took the opportunity to extend the definition of Imagisme to art, naming it Vorticism: "The image is a radiant node or cluster; it is ... a VORTEX, from which, and through which, and into which, ideas are constantly rushing." When in reaction to the magazine, Lascelles Abercrombie called for the rejection of Imagism and a return to the traditionalism of William Wordsworth, Pound challenged him to a duel on the basis that, "Stupidity carried beyond a certain point becomes a public menace." Abercrombie suggested as their choice of weapon unsold copies of their own books. The publication of BLAST was celebrated at a dinner attended by New England poet Amy Lowell, who came to London to meet the Imagists, but Hilda and Richard were already moving away from Pound's understanding of the movement, as he moved closer to Wyndham Lewis's ideas. When Lowell agreed to finance an anthology of Imagist poets, Pound's work was not included. He began to call Imagisme "Amygism," and in July 1914 declared it dead, asking only that the term be preserved, although Lowell eventually Anglicized it.
In 1915 Pound published Cathay, a collection of translated Chinese poems gathered by Ernest Fenollosa. That he saw himself as an outsider is evident from his remarks on the last page: "There are also other poems... But if I give them ... it is quite certain that the personal hatred by which I am held by many, and the invidia which is directed against me because I have dared openly to declare my belief in certain young artists, will be brought to bear on the flaws of such translation ... Therefore I give only these unquestionable poems".
's (above in 1918) A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.]] He was devastated when Henri Gaudier-Brzeska was killed in the trenches in June 1915, and the next year he published Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir, with letters, illustrations and photographs, establishing the sculptor's reputation. Publication of Lustra was stopped in 1917 when the editor Elkin Mathews objected to the tone, writing that it was "unsuitable for the innocent Young Person and the right-thinking Family". Pound refused any suggested revisions, and the volume was published as a private edition that June.
He was now a regular contributor to three literary magazines. From 1917 he wrote music reviews for The New Age under the pen name William Atheling, and weekly pieces for The Little Review and The Egoist. The topics were varied: he wanted better education in the United States, he began to write about economics, discovered and reviewed a French folk singer, and continued to translate Arnaut. The volume of writing exhausted him, and he began to believe he was wasting his time with prose. He blamed American provincialism when the Comstock Laws—which made it illegal to send obscene material through the mail—were applied to The Little Review, suppressing the October 1917 issue, and again applied to stop the serialization of Joyce's Ulysses. In September 1917 T.E. Hulme was killed by shell fire in Flanders. In 1918, the Arnaut manuscript was lost at sea, and Pound became sick, presumably with the Spanish influenza. When the Armistice was signed on 11 November 1918, he wandered among the crowds in Piccadilly, standing just two feet away from the King at one point, listening to the singing, and thinking, "the sense of rhythm is not dead in this island."
During the war he had financially supported Joyce while the latter finished Ulysses, and in June 1920 he convinced Joyce, who was living in poverty and considering returning to Ireland, to join him in France. Pound gave him a suit and traveled with him to Paris, where he provided introductions and rented lodgings for the family. Six months later he and Dorothy also moved to Paris. A. R. Orage wrote in the January 1921 issue of The New Age:
... Mr. Pound has shaken the dust of London from his feet with not too emphatic a gesture of disgust, but, at least, without gratitude to this country. Mr. Pound has been an exhilarating influence for culture in England: he has left his mark upon more than one of the arts, upon literature, music, poetry and sculpture ... With all this, however, Mr. Pound, like so many others who have striven for advancement of intelligence and culture in England, has made more enemies than friends, and far more powerful enemies than friends. Much of the Press has been deliberately closed by cabal to him; his books have for some time been ignored or written down; and he himself has been compelled to live on much less than would support a navvy. His fate, as I have said, is not unusual ... by and large England hates men of culture until they are dead.
It was in 1922 that I placed before him in Paris the manuscript of a sprawling chaotic poem called "The Waste Land" which left his hands, reduced to about half its size, in the form in which it appears in print. I should like to think that the manuscript, with the suppressed passages, had disappeared irrecoverably; yet, on the other hand, I should wish the blue pencilling on it to be preserved as irrefutable evidence of Pound's critical genius. Pound and Dorothy lived in an inexpensive apartment at 70 bis, rue Notre Dame des Champs, and there introduced Hemingway to Lewis, Ford and Joyce. Hemingway tried to teach Pound to box, but as he told Sherwood Anderson, "[Pound] habitually leads with his chin and has the general grace of a crayfish ...". They toured Italy together in 1923, during which Hemingway had Pound visit Italian battlefields and explained to him the tactics of Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta, in whom Pound found a hero to add to his Cantos.Meeting Olga Rudge
in 1922 started a love affair that lasted 50 years.]] Pound was 36 when he met the American violinist Olga Rudge in Paris in the fall of 1922, beginning a love affair that lasted 50 years. John Tytell writes that Pound had always felt there was a link between his creativity and his ability to seduce women, something Dorothy had turned a blind eye to over the years. He complained shortly after arriving in Paris that he had been there for three months without having managed to find a mistress. He was introduced to Olga, then 26 years old, at a musical salon hosted by American heiress Natalie Barney in her home at 20 rue Jacob, near the Boulevard Saint-Germain. Pound was glamorously dressed in a red jacket embroidered with gold dragons, and Olga was attracted to his looks, charisma and eyes, of which Barney wrote: "Cadmium? amber? no, topaz in Chateau Yquem". The two moved in different social circles: she was the daughter of a wealthy Youngstown, Ohio steel family, living in her mother's Parisian apartment on the Right Bank, socializing with aristocrats, whereas his friends were mostly impoverished writers of the Left Bank.The couple spent the following summer in the south of France, where Pound introduced her to "the land of the troubadours". He began to write music, and composed two complete operas, including Le Testament de Villon, working with George Antheil to apply the concepts of Vorticism to music. Helped by an English pianist, he picked out the rhythm of troubadour poetry; Olga was surprised at his musical sensibility and the way in which his seemingly unrelated pieces fitted together. He also wrote several pieces for solo violin, which Olga performed.
He continued to work on The Cantos, and wrote the bulk of the "Malatesta Sequence" in this period. The sequence introduces one of the major personae of the poem and reflects Pound's preoccupations with politics and economics. "Cantos IX-XII" were published in The Criterion, with two further cantos published in the first issue of Ford's transatlantic review in 1924. Pound secured funding for the review from the American attorney John Quinn, and it published works by Pound, Hemingway, and Gertrude Stein, as well as extracts from Joyce's Finnegans Wake, before the money ran out in 1925. Pound wrote music reviews for it that were later collected into Antheil and the Treatise on Harmony.
Italy (1924–45)
Birth of the children
in 1924. "Italy is my place for starting things," he said. Many English writers went to Rapallo for the sun; John Keats had described it in Ode on a Grecian Urn. Olga Rudge followed them there, carrying Pound's child. She had no interest in marrying him or raising a child, but Tytell writes that she felt having his child would keep her connected to him. She gave birth to a daughter, Mary, on 9 July 1925 in Bressanone, and handed the baby over to a peasant woman, Frau Marcher, whose own child had died, and who agreed to raise Mary for 200 lire a month. In March 1927 he launched his own literary magazine, The Exile, but only four issues were published. According to James J. Wilhelm, it burned brightly during its first year, with contributions from Hemingway, E. E. Cummings, Basil Bunting, Yeats, William Carlos Williams and Robert McAlmon. With the exception of Canto XXIII, Wilhelm argues that the poorest writing came from Pound himself in the form of rambling editorials about Confucianism, and that the seeds of Pound's intolerance were showing roots. He continued to work on Fenollosa's manuscripts, and in 1928 won the Dial poetry of the year award for the translation of Confucius's poem Ta Hio. That year Homer and Isabel visited him in Rapallo. They had not seen him since 1914, and by then Homer had retired so they decided to move to Rapallo themselves, taking a small house, Villa Raggio, on a hill above the town. Pound told his father about Mary's existence, but Isabel was either not told about her or chose not to acknowledge her.Turn to fascism
During the 1920s Pound came to believe that the solution to the economic crisis of the Great Depression was social credit. He believed fascism was the vehicle for economic reform, and became annoyed that his friends saw him as an apologist for Mussolini. Determined to spread the message of economic reform he presented a series of lectures on economics, and convinced of his influence made contact with politicians in the United States about education, interstate commerce and international affairs. Although Hemingway advised against it, on 30 January 1933 Pound met Mussolini, presenting him a copy of Cantos XXX. As a result of the meeting he began work on two books, The ABC of Economics and Jefferson and/or Mussolini.In 1936 James Laughlin—who had visited Pound in Rapallo in 1933 as a 20-year-old student—started his publishing company New Directions. According to Wilhelm, Pound's burgeoning antisemitism became most apparent in Canto 34. A number of Pound's books were published in the 1930s, including an American edition of A Draft of Cantos XXX, Eleven New Cantos, the English edition of The ABC of Reading (1934), English editions of Social Credit: An Impact and Jefferson and/or Mussolini, and A Guide to Kulchur (1938).
When Dorothy's mother died in October 1938 in London, Dorothy asked Pound to organize the funeral, clean out the house, and provide care for their 12-year-old son Omar, who met his father for the first time in eight years. He visited T.S. Eliot and Wyndham Lewis, and produced a now-famous portrait of Pound reclining. In April 1939 he sailed for New York, believing he could stop America from involvement in the Second World War, happy to answer reporters' questions about Mussolini while he lounged on the deck of the ship in a tweed jacket. He traveled to Washington, D.C. where he met senators and congressmen. Mary said he did it out of a sense of responsibility, rather than megalomania; he was offered no encouragement, and left depressed and frustrated. William Carlos Williams, Pound's old friend from university, wrote in a letter: "The man is sunk, in my opinion, unless he can shake the fog of fascism out of his brain during the next few years, which I seriously doubt that he can do." Pound left Washington to receive an honorary PhD from Hamilton College on 12 June, and a week later returned to Italy.
Second World War, radio broadcasts
When he returned he began writing anti-Semitic material for Italian newspapers, including one entitled "The Jews, Disease Incarnate." He wrote to his publisher, James Laughlin, to say that Roosevelt represents Jewry, and signed the letter "Heil Hitler." He started writing for Action, a newspaper owned by the British fascist, Sir Oswald Mosley, arguing that the Third Reich was the "natural civilizer of Russia." After war broke out in September 1939, he began a furious letter-writing campaign to the politicians he had petitioned six months earlier, arguing that the war was the result of an international banking conspiracy, and the United States should keep out of it.Tytell writes that no American or English poet had been so active politically since William Blake. Pound had written over a thousand letters a year for the past decade, and had presented his ideas in hundreds of articles, as well as in The Cantos. According to Tytell, Pound's fear was an economic structure that depended on the armaments industry, where the profit motive would determine war and peace. He started reading George Santayana, and The Law of Civilization and Decay by Brooks Adams, finding confirmation of the danger of the capitalist and usurer becoming dominant. Cantos LII to LXXI were published in January 1940; he also translated Italy's Policy for Social Economics for Odon Por. and later they were not allowed to board a diplomatic train.
He continued to write about the danger of Jewry wherever he could. He wrote in the Japan Times that "Democracy is now currently defined in Europe as a 'country run by Jews.'" He told Mosley's newspaper that the English were a slave race governed by the Rothschilds since Waterloo. He also pushed to be allowed to broadcast over Rome Radio; he had done so occasionally, but the Italians were concerned that he might be a double agent and were reluctant to allow him regular airtime. He told a friend: "It took me, I think it was, TWO years, insistence and wrangling etc., to GET HOLD of their microphone." He began broadcasting regularly on 23 January 1941, and was paid around $17 for each ten-minute broadcast. He traveled to Rome one week a month to pre-record them, and they were broadcast every three days, with everything he wrote needing the Italian government's approval in advance. The politics apart, he needed the money. His father, Homer, had fallen and broken his hip and his pension payments had stopped—Homer died in February 1942—and Pound had his mother and Dorothy to look after. Olga and Mary were also considerations; Mary was by this time living with Olga in Sant 'Amgrogio. On 15 March 1942 he said:
No Rothschild is English, no Streiker is English, no Roosevelt is English, no Baruch, Morgenthau, Cohen, Lehman, Warburg, Kuhn, Kahn, Schiff, Sieff or Solomon was ever yet born Anglo-Saxon. And it is for this filth that you fight. It is for this filth that you have murdered your Empire. It is this filth that elects, selects, elects your politicians.The broadcasts were monitored by the Foreign Broadcast Monitoring Service of the United States government, and he was indicted in absentia for treason on 26 July 1943.
Arrest for treason
A few weeks later he returned south via Milan to Olga and Dorothy. They had been living in Isabel's apartment, but it was small so they decided to move in with Olga at Sant' Ambrogio. Mary, then 19, was sent to Gais in Switzerland, leaving Pound, as she wrote, "pent up with two women who loved him, whom he loved, and who coldly hated each other." He was in Rome when the Allies landed in Sicily in July 1943. The situation was chaotic, and Pound borrowed a pair of hiking boots and a knapsack and left the city, having finally decided to tell Mary about his wife and son. He traveled 450 miles north, spending a night in an air raid shelter in Bologna, and taking a train part of the way to Verona. She almost failed to recognize him he was so dirty and tired when he arrived. He told her everything about his other family; she later said she felt more pity for him than anger. He stayed with her long enough for his feet to heal. The village was occupied by Germans who considered Pound an enemy, and two soldiers were sent to arrest him, but one of the men, a local wood-carver, reportedly decided not to because he found Pound's head interesting.He returned to Rapallo, and on 2 May 1945, four days after Mussolini was shot, armed partisans arrived at the house while Pound was there alone. He stuffed a copy of Confucius and a Chinese dictionary in his pocket, and was taken to their HQ in Chiavari, although he was released shortly afterwards. He and Olga then gave themselves up to an American military post in the nearby town of Lavagna. It was decided that Pound should be transported to U.S. Counter Intelligence Corps headquarters in Genoa, where he was interrogated by Frank L. Amprin, the FBI agent assigned by J. Edgar Hoover to gather evidence following the 1943 indictment. Pound asked permission to send a cable to President Truman to offer his help in negotiating a "just peace" with Japan, given his knowledge of Japanese culture. He also asked to deliver a final radio broadcast from a script called "Ashes of Europe Calling," in which he recommended peace with Japan, American management of Italy, the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine, and leniency toward Germany. His requests were denied and the script forwarded to Hoover.
On 8 May, the day Germany surrendered, he was interviewed in Genoa by a reporter from the Philadelphia Record and Chicago Sun. He told the reporter Hitler was "a Jeanne d'Arc, a saint," and that Mussolini was an "imperfect character who lost his head." On 24 May he was transferred to the United States Army Disciplinary Training Center north of Pisa, used to house thousands of military prisoners. The temporary commander placed him in one of the camp's "death cells"—a series of six-by-six-foot outdoor steel cages lit up all night by floodlights. He was left in isolation in the heat, denied exercise, eyes inflamed by dust, no bed, no belt, no shoelaces, and no communication with his captors, except for the chaplain. After two and a half weeks he began to break down under the strain. Richard Sieburth writes that he recorded it in Canto 80, where Odysseus is saved from drowning by Leucothea: "hast' ou swum in a sea of air strip/through an aeon of nothingness,/when the raft broke and the waters went over me." The following week the medical staff moved him out of the cage; a psychiatric examination found premonitory symptoms of a mental breakdown, and he was transferred to his own officer's tent, where he was allowed reading material after another psychiatric evaluation. He began to write, and drafted what became known as The Pisan Cantos; the existence of a few sheets of toilet paper showing the beginning of Canto LXXXIV suggests he may have started it while in the cage. On 25 November he was arraigned in Washington D.C. on charges of treason. The charges included broadcasting for the enemy, attempting to persuade American citizens to undermine government support of the war, and strengthening morale in Italy against the United States. He was admitted to St. Elizabeths psychiatric hospital, where in June 1946 Dorothy was declared his legal guardian. He was held for a time in the hospital's prison ward, Howard's Hall, known as the "hell-hole," a building without windows in a room with a thick steel door and nine peepholes, which allowed the psychiatrists to observe him while they tried to agree on a diagnosis. Visitors were allowed only for 15 minutes at a time, and the other patients wandered around outside the room, screaming and frothing at the mouth, according to T.S. Eliot.— requested his release at a bail hearing in January 1947. The hospital's superintendent, Winifred Overholser, agreed instead to move him to the more pleasant surroundings of Chestnut Ward, close to Overholser's private quarters, which is where he spent the next 12 years.
Tytell writes that there was a sense in which Pound was in his element in Chestnut Ward. He was at last provided for and able to work. He was allowed to read and write, the visiting regulations were relaxed, and Dorothy was allowed to stay for several hours each day. He took over a small alcove with wicker chairs just outside his room, and turned it into his private living room, where he entertained his friends and important literary figures, calling his circle of visitors "Ezuversity."
The Pisan Cantos, Bollingen Prize
, suggesting Pound may have begun it while in the steel cage]] His publisher, James Laughlin of New Directions, had Cantos 74–84 ready for publication in 1946 under the title The Pisan Cantos, and even gave Pound an advance copy, but he had held them back, waiting for an appropriate time to publish them. Tytell writes that in June 1948 a group of Pound's friends—Eliot, Cummings, W.H. Auden, Allen Tate, and Joseph Cornell—met Laughlin to discuss how to have him released. According to the poet Archibald MacLeish, the men conceived a plan to have Pound awarded the first Bollingen Prize, a new national poetry award that had just been announced by the Library of Congress, with $1,000 prize money donated by the Mellon family. Pound called it the "Bubble-Gum Prize," thinking he ought to be awarded the Nobel Prize. The awards committee consisted of 15 fellows of the Library of Congress, which included several of Pound's supporters, such as Eliot, Tate, Conrad Aiken, Amy Lowell, Katherine Anne Porter, and Theodore Spencer. The idea was that the Justice Department would be placed in an untenable position if Pound won a major award and was not released. Laughlin published The Pisan Cantos on 30 July 1948, and the following year the prize went to Pound. There were two dissenting voices, Katherine Garrison Chapin, the wife of Francis Biddle, the Attorney General who had indicted Pound for treason, and Karl Shapiro, who said that he could not vote for an anti-Semite because he was Jewish himself. Pound's response to the news of the award was, "No comment from the bughouse."There was uproar. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette wrote: "Perhaps no English poem since the time of Alexander Pope has stirred so much fuss as the Pisan Cantos," and quoted critics who said "poetry [cannot] convert words into maggots that eat at human dignity and still be good poetry." Robert Hillyer, a Pulitzer Prize winner and president of the Poetry Society of America, attacked the committee in two articles for The Saturday Review of Literature, telling journalists that he "never saw anything to admire in Pound, not one line." Congressman Jacob K. Javits demanded an investigation into the awards committtee, and as a result it was the last time the prize was administered by the Library of Congress. Even more damaging was his friendship with a far-right activist and member of the Ku Klux Klan, John Kasper. Kasper had come to admire Pound during some literature classes at university, and after he wrote to Pound in 1950 the two became friends. Kasper opened a bookstore in Greenwich Village in 1953 called "Make it New," reflecting his commitment to Pound's ideas; it specialized in far-right material, including Nazi literature, and Pound's poetry and translations were displayed in the window. Kasper and another follower of Pound's, David Horton, set up a publishing imprint, Square Dollar Series, which Pound used as a vehicle for his tracts about economic reform. Kasper was eventually jailed for the 1957 bombing of the Hattie Cotton School in Nashville, targeted because a black girl had registered as a student. Wilhelm writes that there were a lot of perfectly respectable people visiting Pound too, such as the classicist J.P. Sullivan and the writer Guy Davenport, but it was the association with Mullins and Kasper that stood out, Shortly after Hemingway won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954, he told Time magazine: "I believe this would be a good year to release poets."
In 1957 several publications began campaigning for his release. Le Figaro published an appeal entitled "The Lunatic at St Elizabeths." The New Republic, Esquire and The Nation followed suit; The Nation argued that Pound was a sick and vicious old man, but that he had rights too. In 1958 MacLeish hired Thurman Arnold, a prestigious lawyer who ended up charging no fee, to file a motion to dismiss the 1945 indictment. Overholser, the hospital's superintendent, supported the application with an affidavit saying Pound was permanently and incurably insane, and that confinement served no therapeutic purpose. The motion was heard on 18 April by the same judge who had committed him to St Elizabeths. The Department of Justice did not oppose the motion, and Pound was free. |width = 30% |align = right }}
Pound arrived in Naples in July, where he was photographed giving a fascist salute by the waiting press. He and Dorothy went to live with Mary at Castle Brunnenburg near Merano, in Bolzano-Bozen—where he met his grandson, Walter, and his granddaughter, Patrizia, for the first time—then returned to Rapallo, where Olga Rudge was waiting to join them. They were accompanied by a teacher Pound had met in hospital, Marcella Spann, 40 years younger than him, who was now ostensibly acting as his secretary, collecting poems for an anthology. The four women soon fell out, vying for control over him; Canto 113 alluded to it: "Pride, jealousy and possessiveness/3 pains of hell." Pound was in love with Marcella, seeing in her his last chance for love and youth. He wrote about her in Canto CXIII: "The long flank, the firm breast/and to know beauty and death and despair/And to think that what has been shall be,/flowing, ever unstill." Dorothy had usually ignored his affairs, but she used her legal power over his royalties to make sure Marcella was seen off, sent back to America. Pound wrote to Hemingway: "Old man him tired."
By December 1959 he had fallen into a depression, insisting his work was worthless and The Cantos were botched. In a 1960 interview given in Rome to Donald Hall for Paris Review, he said: "You—find me—in fragments." Hall wrote that he seemed in an "abject despair, accidie, meaninglessness, abulia, waste." He paced up and down during the three days it took to complete the interview, never finishing a sentence, bursting with energy one minute, then suddenly sagging, and at one point seemed about to collapse. Hall said it was clear that he "doubted the value of everything he had done in his life." Those close to him thought he was suffering from dementia, and in the summer of 1960 Mary placed him in a clinic near Merano when his weight dropped. He picked up again, but by the spring of 1961 he had a urinary infection. Dorothy felt unable to look after him, so he went that summer to live with Olga, first in Rapallo, then Venice; Dorothy mostly stayed in London after that with Omar. He attended a neo-Fascist May Day parade in 1962, but his health continued to decline, and he was in and out of hospitals. The next year he told an interviewer, Grazia Levi, "I spoil everything I touch. I have always blundered. ... All my life I believed I knew nothing, yes, knew nothing. And so words became devoid of meaning."
William Carlos Williams died in 1963, followed two years later by T. S. Eliot. Pound attended Eliot's funeral in London and traveled to Dublin to visit Yeats's widow. He continued to travel throughout the 1960s and gave occasional poetry readings. Allen Ginsberg visited him in Rapallo in 1967. Pound told him The Cantos were a mess: "Stupidity and ignorance all the way through." He also told Ginsberg: "But the worst mistake I made was that stupid suburban prejudice of anti-Semitism. All along that spoiled everything." and received a standing ovation at Hamilton College when Laughlin received an honorary doctorate. Shortly before his death in 1972 it was proposed he be awarded the Emerson-Thoreau Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, but after a storm of protest the academy's council opposed it by 13 to 9. The sociologist Daniel Bell, who was on the committee, argued that it was important to distinguish between those who explore hate and those who approve it. Two weeks before his 87th birthday he read for a gathering of friends at a café:
On his birthday he was too weak to leave his bedroom at his home in the Piazza San Marco, and the following night he was admitted to the city's Civil Hospital, where he died in his sleep of an intestinal blockage on 1 November, aged 87, with Olga at his side. Dorothy was unable to travel to the funeral. Four gondoliers dressed in black rowed the body to the island cemetery, Isola di San Michele, where he was buried near Diaghilev and Stravinksy. Dorothy died in England the following year. Olga died in 1996 and was buried next to Pound. He drew on a variety of literature from medieval troubadour and ancient Chinese poetry to contemporary traditions. Nadel writes that Pound wanted his poetry to represent an "objective presentation of material which he believed could stand on its own," without use of symbolism or romanticism. The Chinese writing system most closely met his ideals. According to Nadel, he used Chinese ideograms to represent "the thing in pictures," and from Noh theater learned that plot could be replaced by a single image. In its purest form Imagism was a form of minimalism, but minimalism did not lend itself to the epic, and he therefore used the more dynamic structure of Vorticism for The Cantos.
The Cantos
The Cantos rely on the use of ideogrammic translation, and the incorporation of up to 15 different languages. Ideas, cultures, and historical periods are layered with the juxtaposition of modern vernacular and classical languages. William O'Connor writes that they are nearly impossible to read—filled with "cryptic and gnomic utterances, dirty jokes, [and] obscenities of various sorts"—though hailed as a great achievement in 20th-century poetry. Eliot published an explanation of the work as early as 1917. Zukofsky published another in 1929, and Laughlin added an explanation to Cantos LIII–LXXI in 1940. A common criticism is the lack of coherence and form; Pound mixes satire, diaries, hymns, elegies, essays, and memoir, disregarding the boundaries of literary genres.Legacy
Pound was responsible for advancing the careers of some the best-known modernist writers of the early 20th century. In addition to Eliot, Joyce, Lewis, Frost, Williams, and Hemingway, he befriended and helped Marianne Moore, Louis Zukofsky, Jacob Epstein, Basil Bunting, E.E. Cummings, George Oppen, and Charles Olson. Hugh Witmeyer argues that the Imagist movement is the most important movement in 20th-century English language poetry because every prominent poet of the century applied imagist theories and practices.Beyond his influence on the Imagist movement, Pound's legacy and reception are mixed. Hugh Kenner writes that there is no great contemporary writer less read than Pound; his antisemitism is central to an evaluation of his poetry, including whether it is read at all. The critic M.S. Rosenthal wrote that it was "if all the beautiful vitality and all the brilliant rottenness of our heritage in its luxuriant vitality were both at once made manifest" in Pound. The outrage after the treason charge was so deep that the imagined method of his execution—hanging or shooting—dominated the discussion. Arthur Miller considered him worse than Hitler: "In his wildest moments of human vilification Hitler never approached our Ezra ...he knew all America's weaknesses and he played them as expertly as Goebbels ever did". The response went to so far as to denounce all modernists as fascists, and it was only in the 1980s that critics began a re-evaluation. Wendy Flory argues that Pound represented an ingrained but unacknowledged national antisemitism, and his vilification as "National Monster" mitigated national guilt, that his antisemitism served "as a convenient placeholder for all those whose antisemitism was not being confronted". Flory's view is that the best way to approach The Cantos is to separate the poetry from Pound's antisemitism, although she concedes that the approach is perceived as apologetic.
Michael Alexander writes that, as a translator, Pound was a pioneer with a great gift of language and an incisive intelligence. He helped popularize major poets such as Guido Cavalcanti and Du Fu and brought Provençal and Chinese poetry to English-speaking audiences. He revived interest in the Confucian classics and introduced the west to classical Japanese poetry and drama (the Noh theatre). He translated and championed Greek, Latin and Anglo-Saxon classics and helped keep them alive at a time when classical education was in decline, and poets no longer considered translations central to their craft.
Works published in his lifetime
1908 A Lume Spento, poems (Venice) 1908 A Quinzaine for This Yule, poems (London). 1909 Personae, poems (London) 1909 Exultations, poems (London) 1910 Provenca, poems (Boston) 1910 The Spirit of Romance, essays (London) 1911 Canzoni, poems (London) 1912 Ripostes, poems (London) 1912 The Sonnets and ballate of Guido Cavalcanti, translations, (London) 1915 Cathay, poems / translations 1916 Gaudier-Brzeska. A Memoir (London) 1916 Certain noble plays of Japan: from the manuscripts of Ernest Fenollosa, chosen and finished by Ezra Pound, with an introduction by William Butler Yeats. 1916 "Noh", or, Accomplishment: a study of the classical stage of Japan, by Ernest Fenollosa and Ezra Pound. 1916 "The Lake Isle", poem 1916 Lustra, poems. 1917 Twelve Dialogues of Fontenelle, translations 1918: Pavannes and Divisions, prose (New York) 1919 Quia Pauper Amavi, poems (London) 1919 The Fourth Canto, poems 1920 Umbra, poems and translations (London) 1920 Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, poems (London) 1921 Poems, 1918–1921, poems (New York) 1922 The Natural Philosophy of Love, by Rémy de Gourmont, translations 1923 Indiscretions, essays 1923 Le Testament de Villon 1924 Antheil and the Treatise on Harmony, essays (Paris) 1925 A Draft of XVI Cantos, poems (Paris) 1926 Personae: The Collected Poems of Ezra Pound (New York) 1927 Exile, poems 1928 A Draft of the Cantos 17–27, poems 1928 Selected Poems, edited by T. S. Eliot (London) 1928 Ta hio, the great learning, newly rendered into the American language, translation 1930 A Draft of XXX Cantos, poems (New York) 1930 Imaginary Letters, essays 1931 How to Read, essays 1933 ABC of Economics, essays 1933 Cavalcanti, three-act opera 1934 Eleven New Cantos: XXXI-XLI, poems (New York) 1934 Homage to Sextus Propertius, poems (London) 1934 ABC of Reading, essays 1935 Make It New, essays 1936 Chinese written character as a medium for poetry, by Ernest Fenollosa, edited and with a foreword and notes by Ezra Pound 1937 The Fifth Decade of Cantos, poems (London) 1937 Polite Essays, essays 1937 Digest of the Analects, by Confucius, translation 1938 Guide to Kulchur, essays 1939 What Is Money For?, essays 1940 Cantos LII-LXXI, poems 1944 Introduzione alla Natura Economica degli S.U.A., prose 1947 Confucius: the Unwobbling pivot & the Great digest, translation 1949 Elektra (started in 1949, first performed 1987), a play by Ezra Pound and Rudd Fleming 1948 The Pisan Cantos, poems (New York) 1950 Seventy Cantos, poems 1951 Confucian analects, translator 1953: The Translations of Ezra Pound, translations (London) 1955 Section: Rock-Drill, 85–95 de los Cantares, poems (Milan) 1956 Sophocles: The Women of Trachis. A Version by Ezra Pound, translation (London) 1959 Thrones: 96–109 de los Cantares, poems (Milan) 1960 IMPACT; Essays on Ignorance and the Decline of American Civilization (Chicago) 1968 Drafts and Fragments: Cantos CX-CXVII, poems Notes
References
Elek, Jon. "Personae", The Literary Encyclopedia, 8 April 2004. Retrieved 6 October 2010. Kelly, Lionel. Pound, Ezra Loomis," Oxford Dictionary of National Biography'', Oxford University Press, 2004. Tytell, John. Ezra Pound: The Solitary Volcano. Doubleday, 1987. |title=Magill's Survey of American Literature |publisher=Salem Press |edition=|year=2007 |url=http://connection.ebscohost.com/content/ |accessdate=2010-06-14 |ref=harv }}External links
Ezra Pound papers, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, accessed 12 October 2010. Ezra Pound collection, University of Victoria, accessed 12 October 2010. Frequently requested records: Ezra Pound, United States Department of Justice, accessed 14 October 2010. Archival search, The National Archives, accessed 14 October 2010. Orwell, George. "The Question of the Pound Award", in Orwell, Sonia and Angus, Ian. George Orwell: In Front of Your Nose. David R. Godine Publisher, 2000. ;Audio/video
Hammer, Langdon. Lecture on Ezra Pound, Yale University, accessed 12 October 2010. Ezra Pound recordings, University of Pennsylvania, accessed 12 October 2010.
Category:1885 births Category:1972 deaths Category:American composers Category:American expatriates in France Category:American expatriates in Italy Category:American fascists Category:American pamphlet writers Category:American poets Category:American Social Crediters Category:American translators Category:Burials at Isola di San Michele Category:Chinese–English translators Category:Hamilton College alumni Category:Imagists Category:Italian poets Category:Modernism Category:Opera composers Category:People from Blaine County, Idaho Category:Propagandists Category:Translators to English Category:T. S. Eliot Category:University of Pennsylvania alumni Category:Vorticists Category:Wabash College Category:Writers from Idaho Category:Writers from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
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