(Twenty-First-Century Critical Revisions) Mark Byron - The New Ezra Pound Studies-Cambridge University Press (2019)

T H E NE W E Z R A P O U N D ST U D I E S
This book develops key advances in Pound studies, responding to

newly available primary sources and recent methodological develop-
ments in associated fields. It is divided into three parts. Part I
addresses the state of Pound’s texts, both those upon which he relied
for source material and those he produced in manuscript and print.
Part II provides a comprehensive overview of the relation
between Pound’s poetry and translations and scholarship in East
Asian Studies. Part III examines the radical reconception of Pound’s
cultural and political activities throughout his career, and his con-
tinuing impact, a reassessment made possible by recent controversial
scholarship as well as new directions in literary and cultural
theory. Pound’s wide-ranging intellectual, cultural, and aesthetic
interests are given new analytic treatment, with an emphasis on how
recent developments in gender and sexuality studies, medieval histor-
iography, textual genetics, sound studies, visual cultures, and other
fields can develop an understanding of Pound’s poetry and prose.
mark byron is Associate Professor in the Department of English at

the University of Sydney and an Australian Research Council Future
Fellow. His research interests in modern literature include China and
Japan, digital textuality, and literature and history. His current project,
Modernism and the Early Middle Ages, has produced to date the
monograph Ezra Pound’s Eriugena (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), win-
ner of the Ezra Pound Society Book Prize in 2014, and a co-edited
dossier on Samuel Beckett and the Middle Ages in the Journal of Beckett
Studies (2016). He is the president of the Ezra Pound Society.
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T WENT Y- F I RST - CE N T URY CRI T I C AL R E V I S I O N S
This series addresses two main themes across a range of key authors, genres and
literary traditions. The first is the changing critical interpretations that have
emerged since c. 2000. Radically new interpretations of writers, genres and
literary periods have emerged from the application of new critical approaches.
Substantial scholarly shifts have occurred too, through the emergence of new
editions, editions of letters and competing biographical accounts. Books in this
series collate and reflect this rich plurality of twenty-first-century literary critical
energies, and wide varieties of revisionary scholarship, to summarize, analyze and
assess the impact of contemporary critical strategies. Designed to offer critical
pathways and evaluations, and to establish new critical routes for research, this
series collates and explains a dizzying array of criticism and scholarship in key areas
of twenty-first-century literary studies.
Recent titles in this series
jean-michel rabaté
The New Samuel Beckett Studies
michelle kohler
The New Emily Dickinson Studies
joanna freer
The New Pynchon Studies
victoria aarons
The New Jewish American Literary Studies
cody marrs
The New Melville Studies
THE NEW EZRA POUND
STUDIES
edited by
MARK BYRON
University of Sydney
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© Cambridge University Press 2020
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First published 2020
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names: Byron, Mark S., editor.
title: The new Ezra Pound studies / edited by Mark Byron, University of Sydney.
description: Cambridge, United Kingdom ; New York, NY : Cambridge University Press,
2020. | Series: Twenty-first century critical revisions | Includes bibliographical references and
index.
identifiers: lccn 2019019518 | isbn 9781108499019
subjects: lcsh: Pound, Ezra, 1885–1972 – Criticism and interpretation.
classification: lcc ps3531.o82 z764 2020 | ddc 811/.52–dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019019518
isbn 978-1-108-49901-9 Hardback
Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of
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and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain,
accurate or appropriate.
Contents
Notes on Contributors page vii

Key to Abbreviations xii
Editor’s Introduction 1
Mark Byron
part i pound’s texts

1 Classical Literature 9
Leah Culligan Flack
2 Early Medieval Philosophy and Textuality 26
Mark Byron
3 Ezra Pound’s Pisan Cantos: The Promise and the Limits of the
Archive 40
Ronald Bush
4 ‘Scoured and Cleansed’: Ezra Pound and Musical Composition 57
Josh Epstein
5 The Visual Field: Beyond Vorticism 72
Rebecca Beasley
6 Texts of The Cantos and Theories of Literature 88
Michael Kindellan
7 Pound and Influence 104
Richard Parker
vi Contents
part ii ezra pound and asia
8 Pound’s Representation of the Chinese Frontiers: From
the War Zone to the Green World 127
Akitoshi Nagahata
9 ‘A Treasure Like Nothing We Have in the Occident’:
Ezra Pound and Japanese Literature 141
Andrew Houwen
10 Ezra Pound and Chinese Poetry 157
Jeffrey Twitchell-Waas
part iii culture and politics

11 The Transnational Turn 181
Josephine Park
12 Pound, Gender, Sexuality 196
Carrie J. Preston
13 Italian Fascism 208
Anderson Araujo
14 Late Cantos, ‘Aesopian Language’, States’ Rights
and John Randolph of Roanoke 227
Alec Marsh
15 Copyright 241
Archie Henderson
16 The Temple and the Scaffolding: The Cantos of Ezra
Pound and Digital Culture 257
Roxana Preda
Afterword: ‘read him’ 271
Index 277
Notes on Contributors
anderson araujo is Associate Professor in the Department of

English and Cultural Studies and Head of the Department of
Languages and World Literatures at the University of British
Columbia’s Okanagan campus. His published research engages the
intersections of aesthetics and politics in Transatlantic modernism, in
articles on avant-garde movements and modernist writers, including
Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf and Richard Aldington. His
monograph A Companion to Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur (Clemson
University Press and Liverpool University Press, 2018) offers
a comprehensive review of this critical text in Pound’s oeuvre and
biography. He is currently writing a book on modernist cultural
politics and the Spanish Civil War.
rebecca beasley is Associate Professor in English at the University of
Oxford and a Fellow of the Queen’s College. She is the author of
Ezra Pound and the Visual Culture of Modernism (Cambridge
University Press, 2007) and Theorists of Modernist Poetry
(Routledge, 2007), and, with Philip Ross Bullock, editor of Russia
in Britain: From Melodrama to Modernism (Oxford University Press,
2013). Her study of the impact of Russian culture on British literary
modernism, Russomania, is forthcoming from Oxford University
Press. She is co-organizer of the Anglo-Russian Research Network
and a former chair of the British Association for Modernist Studies.
ronald bush is the Drue Heinz Professor Emeritus in American
Literature at the University of Oxford, before which he taught at
Caltech and Harvard. His scholarship and teaching spans American
literature from the beginning, but centres upon modernism, particu-
larly its internationalist bent. Author of such field-defining books as
The Genesis of Ezra Pound’s Cantos (Princeton University Press,
1977), and books on T. S. Eliot, modernism and primitivism, Ron’s
vii
viii Notes on Contributors
research is also deeply invested in genetic and textual criticism. He is
currently completing a major editorial project, a critical and genetic
edition of the Pisan Cantos (Oxford University Press).
mark byron is Associate Professor in the Department of English at the
University of Sydney and an Australian Research Council Future
Fellow. His research interests in modern literature include China and
Japan, digital textuality, and literature and history. His current project,
Modernism and the Early Middle Ages, has thus far produced the
monograph Ezra Pound’s Eriugena (Bloomsbury, 2014) and a co-edited
dossier on Samuel Beckett and the Middle Ages in the Journal of
Beckett Studies (2016). He is the president of the Ezra Pound Society.
josh epstein researches and teaches in twentieth-century anglophone
modernism, critical theory, sound studies, film, musicology and
adaptation studies at Portland State University, Oregon, where he is
Assistant Professor in the Department of English. His first
book, Sublime Noise: Musical Culture and the Modernist
Writer (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), explores the relation-
ships among modernist literature, music, noise and aural culture. He
has essays published or forthcoming in James Joyce Quarterly, Textual
Practice, Victorian Literature and Culture, Studies in the Novel
and Modern Drama. His current project examines British cultural
recovery after World War II, focusing in particular on the filmmaker
Humphrey Jennings.
leah culligan flack is Associate Professor and Director of
Graduate Studies in English at Marquette University, Milwaukee.
Her principal areas of research are comparative modernism, classical
reception studies and Irish literature, as well as Russian literature. Her
monograph Modernism and Homer: The Odysseys of H.D., James Joyce,
Osip Mandelstam, and Ezra Pound (Cambridge University Press,
2015) resituates the presence of the Homeric epic in modernism,
arguing that writers did not adapt ancient Greek epic as an escape
into an idealized classical past, but rather appropriated epics to
address such pressing concerns as global warfare and empire, racial
hatred, tyranny and censorship.
archie henderson obtained his PhD in English at UCLA, and is the
author of ‘I Cease Not to Yowl’ Reannotated: New Notes on the Pound /
Agresti Correspondence (2009), which illuminates numerous connec-
tions between Ezra Pound and figures on the American and Italian
Right. He is Head of Research at the Centre for the Analysis of the
Radical Right, and the editor of the forthcoming four-volume
Notes on Contributors ix
Conservatism, the Right Wing, and the Far Right: A Guide to Archives
(Ibidem). Archie also holds a JD and currently practices law in
Houston, Texas.
andrew houwen is an associate professor at Tokyo Woman’s
Christian University. His essay ‘Ezra Pound’s Early Cantos and His
Translation of Takasago’, published in the Review of English
Studies (2014), won that year’s Ezra Pound Society Article Award.
He has published an article on Basil Bunting’s recreation of Kamo no
Chōmei’s Hōjōki in Translation and Literature (2016). Andrew is also
a translator of Japanese poetry: his translations with Chikako Nihei of
the prize-winning post-war Japanese poet Tarō Naka, Music: Selected
Poems, appeared with Isobar Press in 2018.
michael kindellan is Vice Chancellor’s Fellow in the School of
English at the University of Sheffield, where he co-directs the Centre
for Poetry and Poetics. His research interests lie broadly in twentieth-
century poetry in English, particularly the avant-garde. His recent
monograph, The Late Cantos of Ezra Pound: Composition, Revision,
Publication (Bloomsbury, 2017), attempts to combine textual scholar-
ship and literary criticism. His current project is provisionally entitled
Present Knowledge: Charles Olson and a Poetics of Pedagogy, and
Michael is also editing a collection of essays on John Wieners.
alec marsh is Professor of English at Muhlenberg College,
Pennsylvania, where he teaches Modern American poetry. He has
produced several books on or related to Ezra Pound, including a short
biography, Ezra Pound (Reaktion, 2011); a study of economic and
modern poetry, Money and Modernity: Pound, Williams, and The
Spirit of Jefferson (University of Alabama Press, 1998); and, as editor,
a volume on Pound’s father, Small Boy: The Wisconsin Childhood of
Homer L. Pound (Ezra Pound Association, 2003). Alec is a past
president of the Ezra Pound Society.
akitoshi nagahata is Professor in the Graduate School of
Humanities at Nagoya University, Japan. His research interests in
American literature and modernism extend to experimental litera-
ture, as well as Asian American literature and theories of translation.
Among his recent publications is a study in Japanese, co-authored
with Sanehide Kodama, et al., Dove Sta Memoria: Ezra Pound and
20th Century Poetry (Shichosha, 2005).
josephine park is Professor of English at the University of
Pennsylvania, and a member of the faculty steering committee of
the Asian American Studies Program. She specializes in twentieth-
x Notes on Contributors
century American literature and culture, with an emphasis on
American Orientalism and Asian American literature. She is the
author of Apparitions of Asia: Modernist Form and Asian American
Poetics (Oxford University Press, 2008), which was awarded the
Literary Book Award by the Association for Asian American
Studies, and Cold War Friendships: Korea, Vietnam, and Asian
American Literature (Oxford University Press, 2016), which examines
Asian American subjectivities shaped by wartime alliances in Korea
and Vietnam. She is the co-editor (with Paul Stasi) of Ezra Pound in
the Present: Essays on Pound’s Contemporaneity (Bloomsbury, 2016).
richard parker is Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Letters at the
Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile. He has taught at the
University of Sussex, where he received his PhD, as well as universities
in the UK and Turkey. His research centres upon modernist and
contemporary poetry and poetics, including Ezra Pound, Louis
Zukovsky, J. H. Prynne and Keston Sutherland. He is the editor of
the three-volume Readings in the Cantos (Clemson University Press
and Liverpool University Press), volume 1 of which was published in
2018. He is also editor of News from Afar: Ezra Pound and Some
Contemporary British Poetries (Shearsman, 2014).
roxana preda is a Leverhulme Fellow in the School of Literatures,
Languages and Cultures at the University of Edinburgh. Her research
centres on American modernist poetry, resulting in two monographs
on Ezra Pound: Ezra Pound’s (Post)modern Poetics and Politics:
Logocentrism, Language, and Truth (Peter Lang, 2001) and Ezra Pound
and the Career of Modernist Criticism, with Michael Coyle (Camden
House, 2018). She edited Ezra Pound’s Economic Correspondence
1933–1940 (University of Florida Press, 2007) and The Edinburgh
Companion to Ezra Pound and the Arts (2019). She is a former president
of the Ezra Pound Society (2013–18), editor of its journal Make It New
and creator of the online digital research environment The Cantos
Project (http://thecantosproject.ed.ac.uk).
carrie j. preston is the Arvind and Chandan Nandlal Kilachand
Professor and Director of Kilachand Honors College and Professor of
English and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Boston
University. Her monograph Modernism’s Mythic Pose: Gender,
Genre, Solo Performance (Oxford University Press, 2011) examines
modernist solos in modern dance, film and poetic recitation and
received the De La Torre Bueno Prize in dance studies. More
recently, Learning to Kneel: Noh, Modernism, and Journeys in
Notes on Contributors xi
Teaching (Columbia University Press, 2016) examines the influence of
Japanese noh drama on international modernist theatre, poetry and
dance, with chapters on Ezra Pound, W. B. Yeats, Ito Michio, Bertolt
Brecht and Samuel Beckett. New essays on gender, race and theater
appear in Theatre Journal, Modern Drama, Modernism/Modernity
and The Drama Review.
jeffrey twitchell-waas was Associate Professor in the
Department of Foreign Languages at National Chung Cheng
University, Taiwan, and was Academic Dean at OFS College,
Singapore, in 1998–2008. He works on modernist poetry and its
relations with Chinese literature and culture, and has translated the
poetry of numerous contemporary Chinese poets, among them Yang
Lian, Zhou Yaping and especially Che Qianzi. He is the editor of
Z-site: A Companion to the Works of Louis Zukofsky, at www.z-site.net.
Key to Abbreviations
The following abbreviations are standard usage in Pound studies and when
used throughout the present volume refer to the editions listed:
ABCE ABC of Economics (London: Faber, 1933)

ABCR ABC of Reading (New York: New Directions, 1960)
ATH Antheil and the Treatise on Harmony (New York: Da Capo
Press, 1968)
C The Cantos, 15th printing (New York: New Directions,
1996)
Cav Ezra Pound’s Cavalcanti: An Edition of the Translations,
Notes, and Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1983)
Con Odes The Classic Anthology Defined by Confucius (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1954)
DK Dk / Some Letters of Ezra Pound, ed. Louis Dudek
(Montreal: DC Books, 1974)
E Elektra, ed. Richard Reid (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1987)
Elek Elektra: A Play by Ezra Pound and Rudd Fleming, ed. Carey
Perloff (New York: New Directions, 1987)
EP&J Ezra Pound and Japan: Letters and Essays, ed. Sanehide
Kodama (Redding Ridge: Black Swan Books, 1987)
EP&M Ezra Pound and Music: The Complete Criticism, ed.
R. Murray Schafer (New York: New Directions, 1977)
FDC Fifth Decade of Cantos (New York: Farrar & Rinehart,
1937)
GB Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir (New York: New Directions,
1970)
GK Guide to Kulchur (1938; New York: New Directions, 1970)
J/M Jefferson and/or Mussolini (London: Stanley Nott, 1935)
xii
Key to Abbreviations xiii
L/ACH Letters of Ezra Pound to Alice Corbin Henderson, ed. Ira
Nadel (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993)
L/BC Ezra Pound and Senator Bronson Cutting: A Political
Correspondence 1930–1935, ed. E. P. Walkiewicz and
Hugh Witemeyer (Albuquerque: University of New
Mexico Press, 1995)
L/E & DP Ezra and Dorothy Pound / Letters in Captivity, 1945–1946,
ed. Omar S. Pound and Robert Spoo (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1999)
L/JL Ezra Pound and James Laughlin / Selected Letters, ed.
David M. Gordon (New York: Norton, 1994)
L/JQ The Selected Letters of Ezra Pound to John Quinn:
1915–1924, ed. Timothy Materer (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 1991)
L/JT Ezra Pound / John Theobald Letters, ed. Donald Pearce and
Herbert Schneidau (Redding Ridge: Black Swan, 1984)
L/LZ Selected Letters of Ezra Pound and Louis Zukofsky, ed. Barry
Ahearn (New York: New Directions, 1987)
LE Literary Essays, ed. T. S. Eliot (New York: New Directions,
1968)
MIN Make It New (London: Faber, 1934)
NPL Postscript to the Natural Philosophy of Love, by Remy de
Gourmont, 206–19 (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1922)
P Personae / The Shorter Poems of Ezra Pound, ed. A. Walton
Litz and Lea Baechler (New York: New Directions, 1990)
P&P Ezra Pound’s Poetry and Prose Contributions to Periodicals,
ed. A. Walton Litz, Lea Baechler and James Longenbach,
11 vols. (New York: Garland, 1991)
PD Pavannes and Divagations (New York: New Directions,
1958)
PT Poems and Translations, ed. Richard Sieburth (New York:
Library of America, 2003)
SL Selected Letters of Ezra Pound: 1907–1941, ed. D. D. Paige
(1950; New York: New Directions, 1971)
SP Selected Prose, 1905–1965, ed. William Cookson (New York:
New Directions, 1973)
SR The Spirit of Romance (1910: New York: New Directions,
2005)
WT Sophocles: Women of Trachis (New York: New Directions,
1957)
Editor’s Introduction
Mark Byron
Ezra Pound’s rallying call to ‘Make It New’ became a powerful modernist

motto, invoking a sense of renewal in the avant-garde project in casting off
the dead weight of stale custom and forging a new aesthetic. Pound
famously adapted this phrase – 薪日日薪 (xin ri ri xin) – from the
ancient Shang Dynasty Emperor Ch’eng T’ang (1766–1753 BCE), who,
legend has it, inscribed it on the side of his bathtub. It is a gesture
emblematic of Pound’s career, crossing history and linguistic borders to
create new art informed by the best that had gone before, and it quickly
became a heuristic device by which to understand Pound’s artistic legacy
and his role in cultural history.
From the beginning, Pound scholars have explored his formidable range
of sources and the uses to which he put them in his production of poems,
essays, music, journalism and critical commentary on the work of other
artists and writers. This work is grounded in a vast archive of published and
unpublished material, principally housed in the Beinecke Rare Book and
Manuscript Library at Yale University, with other important holdings at
the Lilly Library at Indiana, the Harry Ransom Center at Austin and
elsewhere. In recent years, Pound studies has experienced a foundational
shift in several respects: the enormity of the archive has revealed major
manuscripts and a cache of biographical information previously over-
looked, radically altering our understanding of Pound’s life and work;
changes in copyright law and the passage of time have fundamentally
altered the status of published work and archive material; and associated
changes in cognate fields, such as the new philology in medieval studies,
frontier theory in geography, the ‘transnational turn’ in literary studies and
advances in knowledge of Chinese and Japanese poetry and drama, offer
a range of new techniques to apply to Pound’s work as well as to his
sources. The critical landscape has shifted in fundamental ways too:
significant advances in gender and sexuality studies demand the reappraisal
of Pound’s poetry, and the impact of theories of literature and textuality,
1
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2 mark byron
including digital textuality, on methods of reading Pound’s poetry requires
mapping in current and future potential configurations. These factors
‘Make It New’ for Pound studies, providing a clearer view of Pound’s
own texts and working methods, and allowing far superior evaluation of his
sources than was previously possible. Major initiatives in editing Pound’s
texts, and in several cases digitizing them, open up a range of possibilities in
critically evaluating his role in twentieth-century literature and beyond: his
work is being translated into an ever-widening array of languages, and his
influence on contemporary Chinese poetry is a subject of enormous con-
sequence, but one only now establishing itself in critical discourse.
The New Ezra Pound Studies addresses these developments within and
beyond Pound studies in three parts: essays addressing Pound’s texts (those
upon which he relied for source material, those he produced in manuscript
and print, and the texts and other media with which he interacted and for
which his poetry serves as stimulus); essays dealing with the radical re-
conception of Pound’s cultural and political activities throughout his
career, and his continuing impact, a reassessment made possible by recent
controversial scholarship as well as new directions in literary and cultural
theory; and essays providing an overview of Pound’s poetry and transla-
tions in relation to scholarship in East Asian studies, particularly China and
Japan. Each of these zones of scholarly inquiry has changed radically in the
past fifteen years, demanding a refocused account of the state of scholarship
and the significant potential for future work in cognate areas. This volume
is not aimed at giving the last word in any of these spheres, but rather to
open up potential for further research in the themes covered in the essays,
as well as stimulus to advance research in areas not yet covered or still to be
given adequate scholarly treatment.
The Pound canon has from the start offered an enormously rich and
varied range of published materials, recordings and manuscript
drafts. Pound’s career famously included poetic composition, literary and
cultural essays, music and art reviewing, radio and print propaganda,
operatic and chamber music composition, economic journalism, work as
impresario and publisher to major literary figures, and unstinting corre-
spondence with writers, artists, publishers and political figures, as well as
numerous projects in translation and critical editing of poets and writers
from a variety of epochs and languages. The first generations of Pound
scholarship sought to clarify and explicate his artistic and professional
activities during the last decades of his life and the years following his
death. The territorial range of Pound scholarship was slowly established,
but with recent advances in a variety of fields, much of this terrain can now
be understood at new depths. In addition, scholarship in related fields has
advanced the state of knowledge of the textual traditions upon
which Pound draws in his poetry and prose: new papyrus manuscripts of
key poems in Sappho’s corpus and the Huygens Institute’s digital collation
of glosses on Martianus Capella’s Marriage of Philology and Mercury – the
so-called oldest commentary tradition – to name just two examples. Pound
studies will clearly benefit from these and other major textual advances, as
will literary studies more generally.
Pound’s reputation has been inextricably tied to his wartime radio
broadcasts in Italy and his subsequent award of the inaugural Bollingen
Prize for poetry in 1949. These events provided a focus for extensive
discussion of the role of ethics in literature, but in several basic respects
this discussion has been impeded by the poor state of the evidence. Recent
work in the archives has overturned assumptions of the extent of Pound’s
wartime activities and his complicity with the Italian Fascist regime during
the war. Knowledge of his association with far-right groups and individuals
while detained in Washington, DC, following the war has also undergone
a profound recalibration. Pound’s literary reputation, legacy, and influence
thus enjoys a state of considerable volatility, yet his poetic texts have proved
to be sustaining resources for poets and writers from a wide range of literary
traditions and political circumstances. Determining why this might be the
case is one essential part in a timely reconsideration of Pound’s role in
modernist poetics, as well as in world literature of the twentieth and
twenty-first centuries.
Recent scholarly attention to East-West modernism has opened a field
of inquiry barely imaginable even two decades ago. In a generation the
relations between East Asian and Transatlantic modernisms have pro-
gressed through the stages of exoticism (explanations of sources and
influence), orientalism (critiques of artistic domestication of ‘exotic’
material) and more recently a fuller development of critical expertise on
both sides of the East-West dialectic. Modernist literary scholarship is
now able to capitalize on this increasingly reflexive and nuanced
approach, drawing on expert scholarship in East Asian studies generally,
and modernism specifically. Scholars from Asia and the West have made
very exciting inroads into some of these questions, and the implications
for the understanding of Transatlantic modernism are potentially pro-
found. The critical evaluation of East-West modernism proceeds with
a close examination of Western writers and their Eastern influences,
including the dialectical relationships they forge with their Eastern
counterparts. Pound’s firm place at the centre of such a discourse is
4 mark byron
increasingly assured, even as knowledge of traditional and modernist
cultural production in China and Japan, and their relations with the
West, become subjects of more intensive scholarly attention.
Given its legendary status in literary studies, and its bewildering
scope and depth, the spectre of Pound’s archive looms large in any
critical survey of new directions in the field. Subject to the close
attention of many scholars over decades, the archive remains an
improbably fruitful source for the generation of new research. The
production of new volumes of letters, new drafts and version of cantos
and, most prominently, David Moody’s colossal three-volume biogra-
phy are all causative and symptomatic of the generative work being
done in the archives.1 Other recent publications reappraise Pound’s
own texts (such as Guide to Kulchur, the Adams Cantos, the late
Cantos) by investigating the primary materials in the archives,
or Pound’s archived notes on his primary materials (such as medieval
philosophy).2 The subjects of Pound’s relation with Italian Fascism
and American far right political activity have also received revelatory
attention in recent years, also in large part due to work in archives
and with primary sources.3 Recent essay collections have responded to
these critical examinations of primary materials.4
If the reader can forgive this namecheck in its inevitable partiality and
porosity, it registers the robust state of Pound studies in recent times and
looks ahead to where these scholarly highways and backroads may take us
in the future. In an era when scholarly work is so often subject to
measurement and quantification, the qualities of curiosity, inquiry and
critique deserve not merely protection, but also the space and time to
unfold and extend the range of understanding of this complex poet. If the
present volume stimulates such activity in its readers – and further activity
in its writers – then it will have made a valuable intervention in Pound
studies within its contemporary formation.
Notes
1. Ezra Pound to His Parents, ed. Mary de Rachewiltz, A. David Moody and
Joanna Moody (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); Ezra Pound
and ‘Globe’ Magazine: The Complete Correspondence, ed. Michael Davis and
Cameron McWhirter (London: Bloomsbury, 2015); Canti Postumi, ed.
Massimo Bacigalupo (Milano: Mondadori, 2002) and Posthumous Cantos, ed.
Massimo Bacigalupo (Manchester: Carcanet, 2015); and A. David Moody,
Ezra Pound: Poet, A Portrait of the Man and His Work (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2007, 2014 and 2015).
2. Anderson Araujo, Companion to Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur (Clemson:
Clemson University Press, 2017); David Ten Eyck, Ezra Pound’s Adams Cantos
(London: Bloomsbury, 2012); Michael Kindellan, The Late Cantos of
Ezra Pound (London: Bloomsbury, 2017); and Mark Byron, Ezra Pound’s
Eriugena (London: Bloomsbury, 2014).
3. Matthew Feldman, Ezra Pound’s Fascist Propaganda, 1935–1945 (Basingstoke:
Palgrave, 2013); Alec Marsh, Ezra Pound and John Kasper: Saving the Republic
(London: Bloomsbury, 2015); and Catherine Paul, Fascist Directive: Ezra Pound
and Italian Cultural Nationalism (Clemson, SC: Clemson University Press,
2016).
4. Josephine Park and Paul Stasi, eds., Ezra Pound in the Present: Essays on Pound’s
Contemporaneity (London: Bloomsbury, 2016); Roxana Preda, ed., The
Edinburgh Companion to Ezra Pound and the Arts (Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, 2019); and Ralf Lüfter and Roxana Preda, eds., A
Companion to Ezra Pound’s Economics (Nordhausen: Verlag Traugott Bautz,
2019).
part i
Pound’s Texts
chapter 1
Classical Literature
Leah Culligan Flack
In a 1949 essay entitled ‘The Hellenists’, Ezra Pound argued that ‘a revival
and a much greater diffusion of Greek studies is necessary to the conserva-
tion of decency’, a statement that expresses his decades-long argument for
the wider distribution of classical literature as an engine of social
transformation.1 The revival and circulation of classical languages and
literatures preoccupied Pound, even as he expressed fluctuating levels of
disdain for classics as an academic discipline. In turn, classics scholars have
sometimes returned Pound’s animosity, as was seen most prominently
when University of Chicago classicist W. G. Hale responded to Pound’s
‘Homage to Sextus Propertius’ by concluding that if he were a Latin
professor, ‘there would be nothing left but suicide’.2 In a special issue of
The Pound Newsletter (1955) responding to Pound’s translation of
Sophocles’ The Women of Trachis, classics scholar Frederic Peachy was
perhaps more generous in his evaluation of what he called Pound’s ‘perver-
sions’, asking, ‘What finally shall we say about Pound’s failure and lack of
understanding?’ – finally recommending Pound only to advanced students
who might benefit from his ‘powerful suggestions’.3
The time may finally be ripe for more open dialogue between scholars
interested in Pound and those interested in classical languages and litera-
tures. In the past fifteen years, classics as a discipline has experienced an
explosion of critical interest in the field of classical reception studies. Lorna
Hardwick’s field-defining project Reception Studies (2003) lays out what
have remained the two principal areas of concentration in classical recep-
tions: the act of reception itself and the reception of the reception (or, ‘how
the reception is described, analysed, evaluated’).4 Five years after this study,
Hardwick collaborated with Christopher Stray to evaluate the evolution of
the field and the ‘so-called “democratic turn” in classical reception analy-
sis’, which foregrounds the expansion of classical knowledge to ‘less privi-
leged groups’ in the modern era.5 Recent studies by scholars such as Emily
Greenwood (Afro-Greeks), Justine McConnell (Black Odysseys),
9
10 leah culligan flack
Konstantinos Nikoloutsos (Ancient Greek Women in Film) and George
Kovacs and C. W. Marshall (Classics and Comics) have tracked the recep-
tion of ancient works by female writers, writers from nations that were
once part of European empires, writers working outside of European
literary traditions and writers working in new media. These studies affirm
the sense Hardwick and Stray articulated about the promise of this new
turn in classical reception studies.
Of course, this turn in classical scholarship is due in some part to the
changes in higher education that have resulted from the turmoil of the
global economy in recent years. Navigating an era of budget cuts and
department closures, humanities departments, including classics depart-
ments, have had to compete for increasingly scarce resources.6 As such,
classicists and classics have also had to vie for a contemporary audience, and
classical reception studies helps address the interests of a wider range of
twenty-first-century students. Even though the consolidation of high
modernism as an elite enterprise has identified Pound with an ideology
of exclusivity, he has long been an ally in the project of bringing classical
languages and literature to a wider audience. Throughout the twentieth
century, Pound confronted the decline of knowledge of the classics in the
modern world and improvised many strategies to reverse the downwards
trend. The best known of these strategies is his own production of classi-
cally inflected poetry and translations and his support of other classically
minded modernist writers such as Hilda ‘H. D.’ Doolittle, James Joyce and
T. S. Eliot. Pound’s engagement with classical literature has several lesser-
known chapters – it is not much of an overstatement to say that his
correspondence with classical scholars and translators such as Rudd
Fleming, L. R. Lind, W. H. D. Rouse, Robert Fitzgerald and others
suggests his involvement with or awareness of a dizzying array of classical
translations and translators over several decades. This involvement suggests
his abiding commitment to rejuvenating the classics for the modern world.
The case of Pound and classics has the potential to offer an important
contribution to contemporary debates in classical reception studies and to
bridge the disciplinary gap that remains between the disciplines and sub-
fields of classics, English, comparative literature and modernist studies. In
many ways, he anticipated some of the central questions of classical
reception studies in his poetry, criticism, private correspondence, advocacy
and editorial work, and prose. The field of classical reception studies is
grounded in the sense, as Charles Martindale argues, that readers and
audiences have a significant part in the ‘construction of meaning at the
point of reception’.7 As classical reception studies has moved away from
Classical Literature 11
a unidirectional sense of the transmission of a text from the ancient world,
Hardwick and Stray note, ‘the cultural authority of the ancient work and
hence of concepts such as “authenticity” and “faithfulness” is bound to be
changed to some degree’.8 In his criticism and his approach to
translation, Pound’s work has anticipated some of the major conceptual
underpinnings of classical reception studies. In what follows, I will take
a late case study – his translations of Sophoclean tragedies after World War
II – to consider how Pound used translation to develop a model of
reception grounded in the deferral of coherence and meaning.
Translating Sophocles, I will argue, helped Pound conceptualize the
increasing importance of future unknown moments of reception to his
project in The Cantos.
***
On 14 March 1949, Rudd Fleming sent a copy of Pound’s essay ‘The
Hellenists’ to Pound’s friend Osmond Beckwith. This was accompanied
by a letter detailing Pound’s reading of Greek tragedies in terms of his sense
of the need for ‘a renewal in Greek studies’, which he hoped to bring about
by intermingling Greek tragedy with Noh. Conveying Pound’s sense of
urgency on this renewal, Fleming wrote, ‘It has taken several centuries to
evolve Noh; we don’t expect to perfect Greek-plus-Noh in three weeks, but
a LOT of people must try, and start NOW’.9 To enlist Beckwith’s support,
Fleming identified the three aims of his work with Pound on Greek
tragedy: ‘to help strengthen a good tradition; to bring music and words
closer together; and to move towards a more intelligent solution of the
problems of poetic drama. I don’t see how any of these things can be done
if people remain insensitive to Greek’. Given Pound’s precarious position
at St. Elizabeths and the recent public controversy surrounding the
Bollingen Prize, Fleming noted, ‘Mr. Pound cannot, in his circumstances,
launch a “movement” in his own name; but maybe something can be done
even so’.
Fleming’s letter coincides with the start of his work with Pound on two
translations of Sophoclean tragedies – Elektra, which remained unpub-
lished until 1986, and then The Women of Trachis, which was published in
the Hudson Review in 1953 and performed on the BBC in 1954. Although it
is not definitively known why Pound chose to abandon Elektra, the most
common aesthetic reason offered is Fleming’s assertion that Pound felt that
the translation was not strong enough for publication. After the Bollingen
scandal, Pound and his supporters also felt acutely the risk he would take
by publishing – his translation could be taken as proof of his sanity. Their
fears were confirmed in 1954, as David Moody notes, when the assistant
attorney general in the Justice Department wrote to Dr. Winfred
Overholser, the superintendent of St. Elizabeths. Overholser had written
in his 1953 evaluation of Pound that he ‘does no writing and very little
reading’.10 In response to Pound’s publication of his translation of The
Classic Anthology Defined by Confucius in 1954, the assistant attorney general
wrote, ‘You will appreciate that this Department would be derelict in the
discharge of its duties if it failed to bring to trial on such a serious charge
a man who seemingly is mentally capable of translating and publishing
poetry but allegedly is not mentally capable of being brought to justice’.11
Nevertheless, Pound managed to launch a campaign promoting the
study of classical literature from St. Elizabeths, even if he could not do so
in his own name. In May 1954, the editors of Poetry published a manifesto
detailing Pound’s vision that expressed alarm at the ‘neglect of the Greek
and Latin classics, milleniar source of light and guide in judgment of ideas
and forms’. The signers urged a ‘reorientation’ in the study of literature.
Although Pound could not sign this manifesto in 1954, the classical and
modernist academics who did sign it (including Hugh Kenner, L. R. Lind
and Rudd Fleming) articulated a Poundian position on the kinds of
questions readers might bring to a classical text in order to reorient literary
study:
1. To what degree of awareness has the given author attained?
2. What was his aim and purpose in writing at all?
3. What part of his discoveries is of use now, or is likely to be of use
tomorrow, in maintaining the life of the mind here or elsewhere?12
This manifesto hints at Pound’s attention to developing a useful model of
reading classical literature and to a model of deferred classical reception in
its anticipation of what is ‘likely to be of use tomorrow’ in maintaining the
life of the mind not only here but also in an unidentified ‘elsewhere’. As
I will argue, the translations of Sophocles’s Elektra and The Women of
Trachis in the years right before this manifesto appeared helped Pound
clarify this model of reception. It is essential to see these works as a pair:
The Women of Trachis privileges a mode of reception grounded in a positive
social vision of redemptive communal interpretive clarity, and Elektra
offers a darker, more ambiguous vision held in suspension.
Pound read Elektra and The Women of Trachis as an oppositional pair.
As Moody notes, Pound wrote in 1951 to Otto Bird, who was setting up
a Great Books program at Notre Dame, ‘yr / greek ROTTEN in omitting
Trachinae / highest point of greek consciousness / antithesis to Electra’.
‘Elektra (Soph) / blood and savagery’, he elaborated in some notes he put
together for Huntington Cairns, ‘Trachinae infinitely higher state
of consciousness / unsurpassed in Xtn / licherchoor, the HIGH for all
gk / consciousness’.13 Pound’s decision to publish The Women of Trachis
and not to publish Elektra reflects his continued belief in the 1950s in the
didactic social function of the classics as an engine of political and social
transformation. In October 1953, Pound wrote to Laughlin, ‘Measure of
mental squalor is that there are still denizens of this dummysphere with
no gratitude to those who started warning in the 1920s / Ruin of classic /
educc / / IF they had read Dant and Sophocle they wd / not stand FILTH
at the top’.14 Pound’s Trachinae translation appeared to be a part of his
wider call for a revitalized form of classical education.
In the 1957 New Directions edition of The Women of Trachis, Pound
identifies the moment when Herakles reaches an understanding of his past
and his fate as the play’s crucial moment. Moody notes that Pound wrote
to Eliot, ‘When he finds the destiny FITS, Herakles exults’.15 Pound
renders this exultation in the following way:
[HER]: It doesn’t. It means that I die.
For amid the dead there is no work in service.
Come at it that way, my boy, what
SPLENDOUR,
IT ALL COHERES.16
Pound’s footnote indicates that this is the ‘key phrase, for which the play
exists’ (WT 50).17
The stage direction that follows this line suggests Pound’s interest in
using the tragic form to generate a communal experience of radiant clarity
for his audience: ‘He turns his face from the audience, then sits erect, facing
them without the mask of agony; the revealed make-up is that of a solar serenity.
The hair golden and electrified as possible’ (WT 50).18 The gradual revelation
of the ‘solar serenity’ of Herakles to the audience invites the audience to
participate in a communal experience of the splendour of coherence.19 As
a genre, tragedy enables Pound to script such an experience in a way that
was not possible in the paratactic, epic form of The Cantos. He in fact
adapts Herakles to express this impossibility in Canto CV’s confessional
line, ‘And I am not a demi-god, I cannot make it cohere.’ As Peter Stoicheff
discusses in his analysis of the Drafts & Fragments variants, between 1960
and 1968 Pound softened the line from ‘And I am not a demigod / the
damn stuff will not cohere’, a change which has the effect of ‘significantly
[locating] the inability to cohere more in Pound than in his poem’.20
Pound’s reference to Herakles here suggests that his translation helped him
to articulate his inability to make The Cantos cohere, but this confessional
moment is not necessarily an admission of failure. Rather, engaging with
Sophoclean tragedy helps him develop a mode of reception grounded
substantially in the deferral of meaning and coherence and the transfer of
authority from author to reader as the source of potential coherence.21
Pound’s footnote in The Women of Trachis points to Elektra as that
play’s buried subtext: ‘This is the key phrase, for which the play exists, as in
the Elektra: “Need we add cowardice to all the rest of these ills?”’ (WT 50),
which slightly modifies the line Elektra speaks to Chyrsothemis in Pound’s
translation of Elektra: ‘Need we add cowardice to all the rest of this filth?’22
Pound’s reference to an unpublished translation as explanation for his
reading of the signature moment of The Women of Trachis endows his
Elektra with a spectral presence in the margins of The Women of Trachis –
the footnote thus uses the unpublished translation to destabilize the
coherence it celebrates in The Women of Trachis.
Whereas The Women of Trachis offers Pound an image of an ideal world
endowed with the highest state of consciousness, Elektra presents a mirror
image of the modern world and Pound’s position within it. As Mark
Ringer notes, ‘Electra was composed in the final decade of the
Peloponnesian War, a time when social and moral standards were fre-
quently at a point of collapse’.23 Critics have paid significant attention to
the parallels between Pound’s position in St. Elizabeths and Elektra’s
position as she waits for Orestes to return.24 The play’s self-consciousness
about the power and limits of language doubtless also attracted Pound in
this period. The play opens with the tutor framing the history of
Agamemnon’s murder to Orestes in terms of their arrival to the site
where Agamemnon landed before them. This recitation challenges
Orestes to avoid repeating the history of his father and thus to break the
cycle of a violent history. Unlike Orestes, Elektra is paralyzed in a state of
suspension, unable to act. Her position strips her of all power except for the
power of language. As Ringer argues, Elektra is a storyteller who relishes
staging the scenes in which she finds herself. As Karl Reinhardt observes,
her speech is ‘an outpouring which invades and overwhelms the mind of
the listeners’, in a way that signifies a new development for Sophocles.25
When Elektra and the Chorus reflect on the murder of Agamemnon, they
do so not in terms of her possibility for future vengeful action, but rather in
terms of her verbal position. The chorus recalls the murder in its sounds:
‘She’d a gloomy voice when he came; / and a gloomy sound when the brass
axe hit him, / on the couch there in his dining room’ (E 14). Elektra
responds, ‘That was the vilest of all days / and that night at dinner was
worse, / beyond speakable language, / horrible / I saw my father killed by
the pair of ’em, / And insulted’ (E 14–15). In this telling statement, Elektra
defines herself as the witness to an event that is inexpressible in speech.
Furthermore, she recognizes that even if she could discover the language
needed to bear witness to murder, ‘they’ve got the power, all I can do is
yammer / and make too much noise. / I’m ashamed of this clatter’ (E 17).
This statement places Elektra in Pound’s pantheon of imperilled, some-
times impotent speakers, a pantheon that is vividly on display in the Pisan
Cantos as, among others, the Homeric ‘Noman’ (ου τις) and Wanjina
‘whose mouth was removed by his father / because he made too many
things’ (C 446–7). Elektra, her sister tells her, also awaits punishment for
her language, since if she does not quit ‘her bawling / they’ll shut [her] up
where [she’ll] never see daylight’, a condition well known to Pound when
he translated this play (E 22).
In Pisa and St. Elizabeths, Pound also considered what happens when
verbal power confronts brute force, when the ‘lone ant from a broken
anthill’ declares to his jailers, ‘woe to them that conquer with armies / and
whose only right is their power’ (C 478, 483). In the world of Elektra,
Klytemnestra and Aegisthus hold the power of physical force in
Mycenae. Pound’s interest in the conflict between Elektra and her mother
is evident in his addition to their dialogue. When Klytemnestra says, ‘You
beastly whelp, it’s what I’ve said / and NOT done, that makes you talk
a great deal too much’, she tries to maintain a distance between action and
word. To this, Elektra manipulates her words and replies:
Now you’re talkin’,
you did the job, not me,
and things done get names.
Nomina sunt consequentia rerum (E 34)
This statement reinforces the relationship between word and action, with
Elektra bridging the two by speaking the truth about the ‘things done’
around her and by drawing a verbal distinction between her mother and
herself. Pound highlights his interest in this moment by adding the
Thomist tag line ‘Nomina sunt consequential rerum’, which has no
obvious parallel in the Sophoclean original. This line, which reinforces
a natural relationship between words and what they name, has a deep
history in Pound’s own writings. For example, in Gaudier-Brzeska
(1916), Pound defines Vorticism in the following way: ‘The image is not
an idea. It is a radiant node or cluster . . . Nomina sunt consequentia rerum,
and never was that statement of Aquinas more true than in the case of the
Vorticist movement’ (GB 106).26 The fact that this phrase, which
helped Pound articulate a key aesthetic principle, returns in Elektra helps
underscore the extent to which Sophocles’s play served as an important
interlocutor for Pound about the responsibilities and limitations of litera-
ture in post-war period.
Although Pound saw Elektra as the negative ethical antithesis of The
Women of Trachis, he also took more creative risks in translation in his
Elektra in ways that suggest that the unpublished translation helped him
test and complicate the theories of translation he developed five decades
earlier. Elektra explores an approach to translation that creates hierarchies
of accessibility and exclusionary communities of understanding in a way
that seems to anticipate and create the conditions for Pound’s assertion in
Rock-Drill (1957) that ‘[i]t can’t all be in one language’ (C 583). Elektra’s
entrance in the play makes clear Pound’s translation strategy. She enters
speaking both Greek and English in the following passage (translations
from Carey Perloff are in brackets [E 77]):
OO PHAOS HAGNON [Oh holy light]
Holy light
Earth, air about us,
THRENOON OODAS
POLLAS D’ANTEREIS
AESTHOU [How many keening
songs have you known? How many
straight dealt blows?]
tearing my heart out
when black night is over
all night already horrible
been with me
my father weeping
there in that wretched house
weeping his doom
[. . .]
Well I’m not going to forget it
and the stars can shine on, all of them
tears of hate
all flaming rips of the stars
tide (E 6–7)
Pound’s Elektra appears to the audience first as a figure of a translator – she

speaks in Greek and then translates her Greek expression. In this, Pound
amplifies the self-consciousness of Sophocles’ musings on speech and
reception. She is also a translator without audience of her father’s murder
and the emotional state in which that event has left her. However, Elektra
leaves her next Greek lines untranslated, relying on the openness of the
Greek sounds in these phrases to convey the depth of her pain. Though the
semantic meaning remains inaccessible to an audience without aural
understanding of ancient Greek, Pound relies on sound and performance
to convey an emotional and psychological experience that is beyond
language. Given the plan of deception that Orestes and the tutor have
just worked out in various modern vernaculars, Elektra’s untranslated
Greek also deploys the ancient language as a sonic signal of authenticity
that she shares only with the Chorus and, potentially, with members
of Pound’s imagined audience.27
Pound’s translation of Elektra’s exchanges with the Chorus shows him
testing out a range of strategies that I can only glance at here. One of the
most notable was in his translation of a passage he calls ‘Elektra’s Keening’,
which is Elektra’s emotional response to the false news that Orestes is dead.
In his notes to Fleming, he imagined vividly how Greek and English might
work together to convey the emotional truth of this moment.28 It should
be, he noted:
sung from the start, possibly in antiphony, El / solo in English and line by
line, greek echo from the chorus. El / gradual crescendo / chorus starting
pianissimo / contrapunto. (Chorus probably, yes, I think per force solo at
start, and more voices later.) Vocal orchestration. For the emotional pas-
sages translate the total emotion of the whole speech. For mental conflicts:
the meaning, exact meaning, word by word. (E 100)
This note demonstrates Pound’s detailed attention to the performative
context of his translation and how the movement between Greek and
English might enhance the emotional force of the experience of the play
for its audience.
Early on in Elektra, Pound’s use of untranslated Greek opens the
possibility that the ancient language might generate intimacy among
members of a community committed to justice in an unjust environ-
ment. The play’s narrative offers Pound the opportunity to consider
a question that preoccupied his career about the impact classical lan-
guages and literature might have in the modern world. The end of the
play forecloses many of the possibilities that the play earlier opened when
Elektra cannot hold her verbal position. The moment of transition
appears to occur when Orestes and Elektra confront Klytemnestra and
refuse her request for pity. Pound’s stage direction for the chorus
indicates that it ‘SINGS/ cry of misery, keening on one note or minimum
rise and fall but monotonous and legato’ (E 82). The murders that follow
are depicted exclusively in English, with Elektra taking on short impera-
tive and interrogative phrases, such as ‘Hit her again’ and ‘The bitch is
dead?’ (E 82–3). Elektra’s movement into an exclusively modern verna-
cular shows that she has been overrun by the violence around her and that
her language has become an instrument of violence. Pound’s notes show
that he was interested in the fact that Sophocles kept Aegisthus’s murder
off stage:
Note for finale / The big double doors are open so the WHOLE audience can see
Klut’s bier, and the scene of lifting the cloth / Aeg / is driven thru another door in
the inner room where Ag / was murdered. / Restraint of S. / in NOT including
Aeg’s death in actual play. One murder enough in action. One implied, with no
doubt about it, but not visibly demonstrated. One doesn’t at first realize that it is
not actually in the text. ‘poetry=see / stage = & hear’. (E 103)
This note shows Pound’s careful attention not only to Sophocles’ narrative
but also to the reception of this scene visually and psychologically by his
imagined audience. That he withheld this play from a contemporary
audience by not publishing it or staging it in his lifetime defers this
moment of reception to an unknown future.
The chorus has the final words in Elektra, and in Pound’s translation,
those words return to Greek to convey the failure of the events that have
transpired to resolve the conflicts that drove the play (Perloff’s translations
in brackets [E 81]):
O SPERM’ ATREOOS [Oh the race of Atreus]
Atreides, Atreides
come thru the dark.
(speaks)
my god, it’s come with a rush
(sings)
Delivered, delivered.
TEI NUN HORMEI TELEOOTHEN
[was completed today with force]
swift end
so soon. (E 73)
This ending emphasizes the openness of the play’s events and returns to the
possibility raised by the play’s opening that history is a futile cycle of never-
ending violence. Its return to Greek also leaves open a subtler question for
the play’s audience (since we are to presume that Elektra herself is no
longer receptive to this language) about whether the Greek language might
continue to retain power in the modern world. The alternative might be
best represented by Pylades, who has borne witness to the play’s events at
an even greater remove from the play’s events. He is the silent sidekick of
Orestes and is addressed directly once, in the following way:
ORESTES (to Pylades who hasn’t said a damn word)
Come on, Pylades, cut the cackle
May the gods of the door be with us. (E 80)
Reid has perceptively underscored the potential significance of Pylades
for Pound, who might have seen Pylades as a ‘presence transcending or just
denied the vexed condition of human speech’ and as a ‘witness and abettor
of horrors, of a tragedy too unspeakable for words’ (Elek xx). The silence of
Pylades signifies one alternative among many, all of which the play takes
seriously. The chorus’s final address to a potential audience leaves open
whether Greek has a place in a modern world. As a silenced counterpart to
the positive social vision of The Women of Trachis, Elektra remained
unpublished for decades in a state of suspension that also questioned the
possibilities for the classical tradition in the modern world.
This question is a crucial one for Pound’s late career, one that reverbe-
rates throughout the late Cantos and in his editorial decisions late in his life.
Although some critics have argued that Elektra was of limited importance
to The Cantos, it is possible to look at the impact of Elektra from a wider
angle that considers Elektra as the crucial text of deferred classical
reception.29 If the Pisan Cantos signalled Pound’s turn towards
a confessional, deeply personal mode of poetry, his later Cantos suggest
a turn outwards towards his different actual and potential readers. The
same year Pound published The Women of Trachis in The Hudson Review,
he also published Canto LXXXV in that journal, which is noteworthy for
its inclusion of several Chinese ideograms in juxtaposition with Greek
phrases. As Moody suggests, this canto signifies a shift in relation to its
readership, as the ideograms signified that ‘he was evidently determined to
present readers with an extreme challenge’.30 At the end of Canto
LXXXV, Pound included the following note of explanation: ‘Canto 85 is
a somewhat detailed confirmation of Kung’s view that the basic principles
of government are found in the Shu, the History Classic. The numerical
references are to Couvreur’s Chou King. Meaning of the ideograms is
usually given in the English text’ (C 579). This note incorporates the
apparatus of explication into the poem in a way that culminates in the
statement in Canto XCVI: ‘If we never write anything save what is already
understood, the field of understanding will never be extended. One
demands the right, now and again, to write for a few people with special
interests and whose curiosity reaches into greater detail’ (C 679). These
passages affirm Pound’s pointed interest during this era in his audience –
he strives to define and limit his audience, to dictate how they might read,
but he also embraces epistemological indeterminacy, demanding that his
readers become his co-authors. To become his co-authors, Pound’s poten-
tial readers would need themselves to become translators of a sort. Or, as he
acknowledges in Canto CV, ‘I shall have to learn a little greek to keep up
with this /But so will you, drratt you’ (C 770).
However, Pound’s model of deferred reception took the risk that
such co-authors might never fully materialize. One ending of The Cantos
borrows a line from Dante (which Pound had used earlier in his career) to
hand his poem over to its possible readers: ‘You in the dinghy (piccioletta)
astern there!’ (C 794). This abrupt address opens the poem to a range of
possible respondents (including Dante’s), none of which is final. As Peter
Nicholls notes, citing Jonathan Culler, Pound’s addresses to readers seem
to borrow from the tradition of lyric poetry which uses oblique address to
generate a sense of ‘performative temporality’ and ‘attempt to create the
impression of something happening now’.31 Nicholls points out that both
the present moment and the addressee are subject to constant oscillation
and the ‘notional addressee there is constantly unsettled and is subjected to
a sort of push-pull of only partial identification with the speaker’s words’.32
Pound’s work on Elektra anticipates precisely this mode of unstable
reception – one that is evident throughout the later Cantos. His late
engagement with Sophoclean tragedy offered him a form in which to
author a drama of potential, as yet unrealized classical reception.
Pound’s most direct reference to Elektra in The Cantos appears in Canto
XC in the following passage:
thick smoke, purple, rising
bright flame now on the altar
the crystal funnel of air
out of Erebus, the delivered,
Tyro, Alcmene, free now, ascending
e i cavilieri,
ascending,
no shades more,
lights among them, enkindled,
and the dark shade of courage
Ἠλέκτρα
bowed still with the wrongs of Aegisthus.
Trees die & the dream remains
Not love but that love flows from it
ex animo
& cannot ergo delight in itself
but only in the love flowing from it.
UBI AMOR IBI OCULUS EST. (C 628–9)
This passage’s reference to those shades ‘delivered’ ‘out of Erebus’
completes the imagery of Canto I and gestures towards a conclusion of
sorts in its act of deliverance. However, Elektra – in untranslated Greek –
appears here as a figure who keeps this conclusion from being fully realized.
She remains a ‘dark shade of courage’ who is ‘bowed still with the wrongs of
Aegisthus’. In this moment, Pound reactivates the uncertainty that his
translation brought to a near crisis at the end of his Elektra – we see Elektra
as a shade of courage overrun by a violent history she can neither resolve
nor escape. She embodies courage as an ideal that retained its value at the
end of Pound’s career, along with the ideal of love suggested in the closing
lines of this passage. In 1966 Pound sent the following lines to James
Laughlin titled ‘Fragment 1966’ that are appended to the end of the
collection. As the title suggests, this ending is hardly an ending and remains
insistently a fragment:
That her acts
Olga’s acts
Of beauty
Be remembered
Her name was Courage
& is written Olga
These lines are for the
Ultimate CANTO
Whatever I may write
In the interim.
The return of the word ‘courage’ here in association with Olga Rudge
recalls Pound’s ‘dark shade of courage’, Elektra. This fragment draws upon
the deferred model of classical reception Pound worked out in his transla-
tion of Sophocles in order to defer the project of The Cantos
altogether. Pound invites his readers to suspend their expectation of an
ending and to imagine an ultimate Canto. In this way, Pound detaches
himself from his poem and from ‘whatever [he] may write’ and turns his
poem over to his readers. Translating Sophocles’s Elektra helped Pound to
conclude his career with a moment of classical engagement that allowed
him to continue to hold fast to the idea that the ‘the dream remains’.
Notes
1. Ezra Pound, ‘The Hellenists’, Ezra Pound Papers, YCAL MSS 43, Box 106,
Folder 4422, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
2. For Hale’s invective, Pound’s response, and A. R. Orage’s 1922 defense
of Pound, see Ezra Pound: The Critical Heritage, ed. Eric Homberger
(London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972), 155–71.
3. Frederic Peachy, Untitled Review of The Women of Trachis, The Pound
Newsletter (January 1955), 8.
4. Lorna Hardwick, Reception Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2003), 5–6.
5. Lorna Hardwick and Christopher Stray, eds., Companion to Classical
Receptions (Oxford: Blackwell-Wiley, 2008), 3.
6. For example, in a two-year period between 2012 and 2014, the number of
degrees awarded in the humanities at American universities dropped by
8.7 per cent: see www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/03/14/study-shows-87-
decline-humanities-bachelors-degrees-2-years. Statistics maintained by the
Modern Language Association in the United States offer a picture of declining
enrollments in Greek and Latin classes over the past half century. In 1968, for
example, 34,084 students studied Latin and 19,178 students studied Greek at
American colleges and universities. In 2013, 27,912 students studied Latin and
12,917 studied Greek at American colleges and universities. Although these
declines at first might not seem catastrophic, they do not take into account the
relative increase in the number of students attending college. By comparison,
in 1968, 126,303 students studied Spanish at the university level; in 2013, that
number had jumped to 790,756. www.mla.org/resources/research/surveys-
reports-and-other-documents/teaching-enrollments-and-programs/enroll
ments-in-languages-other-than-english-in-united-states-institutions-of-high
er-education.
7. Hardwick and Stray, Companion to Classical Receptions, 3.
8. Hardwick and Stray, 5.
9. Ezra Pound, correspondence with Rudd Fleming, Pound mss. II, Lilly
Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana.
10. A. David Moody, Ezra Pound: Poet, Vol. 3 (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2015), 305.
11. Moody, Ezra Pound: Poet, Vol. 3, 305. Overholser responded by saying Pound
had mostly completed the translation before St. Elizabeths.
12. Untitled Statement, Poetry 84.2 (May 1954): 119.
13. Moody, Ezra Pound: Poet, Vol. 3, 302. As Moody notes, Pound admired that
Herakles accepted responsibility for his fate and that, as he wrote to Michael
Reck, no one in The Women of Trachis ‘has any evil intentions, NO bad
feeling, vendetta, or whatso / All of ’em trying to be nice’. But, he notes, ‘the
tragedy moves on just the same’.
14. David M. Gordon, ed., Ezra Pound and James Laughlin: Selected Letters
(New York: Norton, 1994), 228.
15. Moody, Ezra Pound: Poet, Vol. 3, 302.
16. As Peter Liebregts points out, Pound’s translation here of the Greek ‘taut’
oun . . . lampra sumbainei’ demonstrates his process of ‘creative translation as
a form of literary criticism’. Liebregts, ‘“No man knows his luck ’til he’s
dead”: Ezra Pound’s Women of Trachis’, in Massimo Bacigalupo and William
Pratt, eds., Ezra Pound, Language, and Persona (Genova: Università degli
Studi di Genova, 2008), 309.
17. It is telling that Pound celebrates this moment of understanding in a play that
historically has been known for its ambiguity. Herakles may arrive at an
understanding of his past and his fate here, but in the moments that directly
follow this realization, he enforces an edict of filial obligation on Hyllos, his
son, by ordering him to marry Iole, which leads Hyllos to conclude that ‘the
delirium is coming back’ in his dying father and to ask, ‘what am I to do, in
this mess?’ In this way, Sophocles seems to undercut both Herakles’s
and Pound’s certainty and to invite his audience to question the nature of
coherence and its use (and cost) for the future represented by Hyllos.
18. On this connection, see Jean Michel Rabaté, Language, Sexuality, and Ideology
in Ezra Pound’s Cantos (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1986), 294–5; Michael
Alexander, The Poetic Achievement of Ezra Pound (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1981), 195–6; and Peter Liebregts, ‘“No man knows his luck
’til he’s dead”: Ezra Pound’s Women of Trachis’, 315–16.
19. For many readers, this moment is not without its complications, particularly
since Herakles goes on to compel his son to marry Iole against his wishes,
a selfish act that enforces filial obligation on his son.
20. Peter Stoicheff, ‘The Interwoven Authority of a Drafts & Fragments Text’, in
Lawrence Rainey, ed., A Poem Containing History: Textual Studies in The
Cantos (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 216.
21. On this, see Christine Froula, To Write Paradise: Style and Error in Pound’s
Cantos (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985).
22. Elektra, ed. Richard Reid (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 21.
From this point forward, this edition of Elektra will be cited in the text with
the abbreviation ‘E ’.
23. Mark Ringer, Electra and the Empty Urn: Metatheater and Roleplaying in
Sophocles (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 127.
24. Moody argues that Pound would have been drawn to Elektra ‘having the
courage of her convictions, her continuing to speak the truth to power in spite
of being punished for it, and her refusing to compromise in calling for justice
to be done’. Ezra Pound: Poet, Vol. 3, 298. James Laughlin discounts claims
that Pound’s attraction to Sophocles was through identification with the
tragic circumstances of Sophocles’ tragic figures, noting Pound’s often
cheerful disposition after his first few weeks at St. Elizabeths. See Pound as
Wuz (Saint Paul, MN: Greywolf Press, 1987), 45. Carey Perloff observes, ‘The
play explores the madness of incessant “remembering”, the terror of being
unable to forget the past in a culture or household in which history is being
deliberately erased’ (Elek xiii).
25. Ringer, Electra and the Empty Urn, 146–8.
26. Also see David Ten Eyck, Ezra Pound’s Adams Cantos (London: Bloomsbury,
2012), 141–2.
27. By intermingling a range of American dialects with Greek, Perloff argues,
‘Pound also created a complex verbal system that only Elektra and the Chorus
share’ (E xvii).
28. As Perloff notes, Greek here is a ‘potent device to get us to listen more
carefully to the nuances of Elektra’s grief, and to make that grief palpable in
a sonic sense on the stage. The two languages serve to reinforce each other: the
rhythmic electricity of the Greek next to the reassuring familiarity of the
English’ (E xvii).
29. Stoicheff, ‘The Interwoven Authority’, 138.
30. Moody, Ezra Pound: Poet, Vol 3, 350.
31. Culler, Theory of the Lyric (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015),
63 and 37. Quoted in Peter Nicholls, ‘Ezra Pound and the Rhetoric of
Address’, Affirmations: of the Modern, Special Issue on Rhetoric and
Modernism, 2.3 (2015), http://affirmations.arts.unsw.edu.au.
32. Nicholls, ‘Ezra Pound and the Rhetoric of Address’.
W OR KS C I T ED
Alexander, Michael, The Poetic Achievement of Ezra Pound (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1981).
Culler, Jonathan, Theory of the Lyric (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015).
Froula, Christine, To Write Paradise: Style and Error in Pound’s Cantos (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1985).
Gordon, David M., ed., Ezra Pound and James Laughlin: Selected Letters
(New York: Norton, 1994).
Hardwick, Lorna, Reception Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2003).
Hardwick, Lorna, and Christopher Stray, eds., Companion to Classical Receptions
(Oxford: Blackwell-Wiley, 2008).
Homberger, Eric, ed., Ezra Pound: The Critical Heritage (New York: Routledge,
2009).
Laughlin, James, Pound as Wuz (Saint Paul, MN: Greywolf Press, 1987).
Liebregts, Peter, ‘“No man knows his luck ’til he’s dead”: Ezra Pound’s Women of
Trachis’, in Massimo Bacigalupo and William Pratt, eds., Ezra Pound,
Language, and Persona, 300–314 (Genova: Università degli Studi di
Genova, 2008).
Peachy, Frederic, Untitled Review of The Women of Trachis, The Pound Newsletter
(January 1955): 8.
Moody, A. David, Ezra Pound; Poet, Vol. 3 (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2015).
Nicholls, Peter, ‘Ezra Pound and the Rhetoric of Address’, Affirmations: of the
New, Special Issue on Rhetoric and Modernism, 2.3 (2015), http://affirma
tions.arts.unsw.edu.au.
Pound, Ezra, The Cantos (New York: New Directions, 1996).
‘The Hellenists’, Ezra Pound Papers, YCAL MSS 43, Box 106, Folder 4422,
Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
Sophocles’ The Women of Trachis (New York: New Directions, 1957).
Pound, Ezra, and Rudd Fleming, Elektra, ed. Carey Perloff (New York: New
Directions, 1987).
Elektra, ed. Richard Reid (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987).
Rabaté, Jean Michel, Language, Sexuality, and Ideology in Ezra Pound’s Cantos
(Albany: SUNY Press, 1986).
Ringer, Mark, Electra and the Empty Urn: Metatheater and Roleplaying in Sophocles
(Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1998).
Stoicheff, Peter, ‘The Interwoven Authority of the Drafts & Fragments Text’, in
Lawrence Rainey, ed., A Poem Containing History: Textual Studies in The
Cantos, 213–31 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997).
Ten Eyck, David, Ezra Pound’s Adams Cantos (London: Bloomsbury, 2012).
Untitled Statement, Poetry 84.2 (May 1954): 119.
chapter 2
Early Medieval Philosophy and Textuality

Mark Byron*
Pound’s inclusion of a musical score in Canto LXXV (C 470–71) asserts

a paradox of temporality: the canto is the shortest by line number in all of
The Cantos, yet as words give way to music, the time of reading and of
hearing becomes undefined and dilatory. The music is Gerhard Münch’s
scoring of the violin part of Clément Janequin’s Chant des Oiseaux of 1537,
commissioned by Pound for Olga Rudge to perform at the first of the
Tigullian concerts in Rapallo in 1933. Janequin’s score derives from
Francesco Canova da Milano’s Canzoni degli Uccelli (c. 1528) –
a genealogy all perfectly clear and unambiguous – but this is not what
attracts Pound’s attention. Instead, he is drawn to the clarity of the bird-
song itself as it emerges from the score and its instrumentation, moving
him to speculate on its obscure ancient provenance: ‘the forma, the concept
rises from death . . . Janequin’s concept takes a third life in our time . . .
And its ancestry I think goes back to Arnaut Daniel and to god knows what
“hidden antiquity”’ (GK 151–2). In this statement, Pound brings together
a moment in the recent past (Münch’s scoring and Rudge’s performance),
early sixteenth-century music (Milano and Janequin), twelfth-century
Occitan poetry (Arnaut) and an unspecified ‘antiquity’, perhaps commen-
surate with preclassical Eleusis. Pound implies a transmission from the
classical to the high medieval world, but how the birdsong might have
crossed the late classical and early medieval era remains a point of obscur-
ity. It is telling that Pound makes this proclamation in Guide to Kulchur,
written in mere weeks in 1938: a text, if not exactly encyclopaedic, then at
the very least indexical, indicative of the range of Pound’s thinking and the
sweep of his historical and aesthetic sources.
Pound’s keen eye for aesthetic and intellectual genealogies often found
expression in claims for material evidence: textual transmission, direct
contact between significant figures by means of conversation or the
exchange of letters, or even matters of architecture and epigraphy. But as
the example of Janequin’s birds demonstrates, Pound also sought out
26
Early Medieval Philosophy and Textuality 27
genealogical modes beyond material boundaries – such as his speculations
on some of Guido Cavalcanti’s intellectual sources – transmitted in the
aether of influence and discerned only by means of internal
evidence. Pound’s interest in and use of late classical and early medieval
sources falls somewhere in between these two poles, where influence may
be virtually invisible to the untrained eye, but confirmed in the discerning
examination of texts either obscure by nature or overlooked by intellectual
history. At base, this is a question of methodology: how does Pound
apprehend early medieval sources? How does he make a case for their
relevance or necessity in understanding the nature of influence in later
textual expression or in the historical record? How do these matters of
method transform our understanding of Pound’s poetic project, especially
when taking into account recent scholarly transformations in such fields as
Carolingian textuality, Byzantine history and the history of Islamic trans-
mission of Greek texts to the Latin West?
Pound’s education, conventional for its time, trained him in the Greek
and Latin classics, the high medieval literature of Occitan and Tuscan
poetry and early modern literature in Romance languages, particularly the
plays of Lope de Vega, upon which he began doctoral work at the
University of Pennsylvania. The fields of early medieval literature and
history were not particularly well served in English outside of Norse and
Anglo-Saxon poetry, leaving a customary dark zone in Pound’s education
he would later seek to illuminate by various means. From the outset of his
career, he demonstrated a keen eye for lines of filiation in culture and
literature – such as his observations on the birdsong in Münch’s violin line
and its archaic origins – which meant a paucity of early medieval scholar-
ship became an impetus to inquiry. From where did Guido Cavalcanti
derive his philosophical vocabulary in ‘Donna mi prega’, and within which
tradition is he situating his poem? How were legal codes transmitted from
late-classical Rome to early modernity? How did intellectual history take
shape in the interim between the Gothic invasions and the rise of the
European universities?
These were central questions for Pound’s poetics, especially as he turned
to composing The Cantos. A ‘poem containing history’ required
a historiographical rationale for its claims of continuity, conflict and the
transmission of ideas, and this meant reckoning with some of the barest
phases of history in the West. Pound’s absorption of early medieval history
and cultural transmission opens up his poetic rationale for the reader:
identifying the sources upon which he drew, and in certain cases the
decision behind such choices, clarifies the intent driving his epic poem.
28 mark byron
Among other sources, he was drawn to early medieval encyclopaedic works
such as Justinian’s Corpus Juris Civilis or Eriugena’s Periphyseon, which
attempted a summa of a body of knowledge in order to face down political
instability or to gather up all possible knowledge. The connections with
some of Pound’s critical preoccupations become clear – whether the work-
ings of global capital, the onrush to war or the suppression and vilification
of unorthodox ideas – where the serial crises of the modern age impel the
writer to shore fragments against collective ruin. The clearer Pound’s
sources become – and transformations in recent decades in Carolingian
studies, early medieval poetics, and Byzantine studies provide, in some
cases, the first authoritative editions of pivotal texts upon which he relied –
the better readers and scholars are able to understand the implications
of Pound’s choices, including choices made in relative ignorance.
When Pound transformed his graduate work in romance philology at
the University of Pennsylvania into The Spirit of Romance (1910), he
declared in his opening sentence, ‘This is not a philological work’ (SR v).
Despite this advertisement – aimed more at Germanic philology then
entering the higher education system of the United States and to
which Pound objected, than at philology per se – Pound invested signifi-
cant energy and labour in philological work on the manuscripts of Guido
Cavalcanti towards three separate editions of the poems, culminating in his
final translation of ‘Donna mi prega’ in Canto XXXVI (C 177–80). In his
evaluation of Guido’s poetry, and especially the variant readings evident in
the manuscript record, Pound’s attention gravitated to matters of vocabu-
lary and their possible intent. Specifically, he saw glimpses of an intellectual
tradition running counter to Aquinian scholasticism in Guido’s poem that
bore traces of medieval Islamic philosophy, and associations with some of
the most important and egregiously neglected philosophical works of the
early middle ages in both Greek and Latin. His tribute to the Hiberno-
Carolingian philosopher John Scottus Eriugena immediately follows
‘Donna mi prega’ in Canto XXXVI, defending Eriugena against
a complicated series of papal condemnations and accusations of heresy.
The final verse paragraph of the canto then turns to the Italian Troubadour
Sordello da Goito, encircling Pound’s foray in ecclesiastical and political
history of the early middle ages with matters of thirteenth-century poetics.
This intellectual context buttressing Canto XXXVI has received parti-
cularly incisive commentary. David Anderson’s Ezra Pound’s Cavalcanti
(1983) compiled Pound’s philological work on Cavalcanti along with his
translations and commentaries, although it provides limited account of the
intellectual background of central concern in this essay.1 Earlier exegeses
presented Eriugena’s significance in early medieval thought, especially in
his inheritance of Neoplatonism,2 and later studies turned to the more
difficult tasks of untangling some of Pound’s historical errors or misappre-
hensions concerning Eriugena, and of tracing out the transmission of these
ideas through the Islamic philosophical traditions of the later middle ages.3
Despite these illuminating studies, several factors limit our reading of
Cavalcanti and the question of his sources and location in intellectual
history: the scholarly limitations in romance philology at the time
of Pound’s education, the relative paucity of high quality scholarship in
Carolingian studies and medieval Islamic philosophy in the anglophone
sphere until recent decades, and the associated limitations of reliable
editions of texts central to these concerns. My monograph Ezra Pound’s
Eriugena (2014) attempts to demarcate recent scholarly advancement in
these fields and how it relates to potential readings of Pound, and
of Pound’s Cavalcanti.4 Yet there are large domains within these over-
lapping fields still to be fully mapped out – a matter addressed in further
detail as follows.
Pound’s lifelong scepticism towards the practice of philology finds
especially strident expression in his prose works – one might think of
ABC of Reading (1934) or Guide to Kulchur (1938) – but also enters into the
fabric of The Cantos: in Canto XIV, the first ‘Hell Canto’, we find
‘pandars to authority . . . sitting on piles of stone books, / obscuring the
texts with philology’ (C 63); and in Canto LXXIV, the first of the Pisan
Cantos, Pound recounts a discussion held at Oxford with Thomas Collins
Snow following Pound’s paper on Cavalcanti, in which Pound mocks
Snow’s attempt to prove the poetic superiority of Sappho: ‘the very aged
Snow created considerable / hilarity quoting the φαίνε-τ-τ-τ-τττ-αί μοι /
in reply to l’aer tremare’ (C 464). Even a casual reading of Pound’s prose
on Cavalcanti cannot miss the significance of this quoted phrase from
‘Donna mi prega’, comprising one of the most complicated philological
problems in the poem for Pound. Several of his Cavalcanti notebooks
dwell on this textual crux and return to it almost compulsively, and it
receives extensive treatment on the essay ‘Cavalcanti 1910 / 1932’ in Make
It New (1934).5
Not surprisingly, The Spirit of Romance expresses this double-edged
sensibility. In the preface, Pound thanks ‘Wm. P. Shepard of Hamilton
College’ for his ‘refined and sympathetic scholarship’ – scholarship, not
philology, which is instead relegated to ‘the rags of morphology, epigraphy,
privatleben and the kindred delights of the archaeological or “scholarly”
mind’.6 One might see Pound’s position here as one not demanding an end
30 mark byron
to morphology and epigraphy but a mode of learning that moves beyond
the mechanics of textual criticism. With a century of hindsight, combined
with the challenge of producing scholarly editions of experimental mod-
ernist texts and theories to articulate them, textual criticism has become
anything but mechanical. Yet Pound’s claim for poetry as a form of
scholarly work – the so-called New Method in scholarship – emphasizes
virtù and poetic acumen (thus Cavalcanti’s symbolic role) over Germanic
philology.7 This humanistic impulse is where the merits of early medieval
thought come to the fore: namely the imperative to preserve the best
cultural expression of antiquity, and the acute awareness of how imperilled
such learning could be within the historical moment. Such acts of con-
servation resonate with Pound’s own sense of scholarship and poetic
process, where to write a ‘poem including history’ is not an archaeological
exercise but an act that keeps thought alive in making the past moment
contemporary. This is true of earlier instalments of The Cantos,
but Pound’s scholarly mode intensifies later in the poem as he becomes
more attuned to the lines of transmission and inheritance in intellectual
history: notably the persistence of classical thought in late-classical
Neoplatonism, early medieval and Islamic philosophy, and then the
Troubadours and the Tuscan stilnovisti. His scholarly research on and
translations of Cavalcanti thus serve as a kind of pivot on which the earlier
visionary mode of scholarly labour fuses with careful philological analysis.
Pound’s scholarly work on Cavalcanti’s poetry serves as a gateway to the
field of Carolingian studies, largely by virtue of his yoking the intellectual
tradition behind ‘Donna mi prega’ to the ecclesiastical controversies sur-
rounding Eriugena several centuries before. Pound’s initial source for
information on Eriugena was Francesco Fiorentino’s Manuale di storia
della filosofia, first consulted in the later 1920s, and reflected in the focus on
Eriugena’s unorthodoxy and its consequences. In 1939–40 Pound con-
sulted volume 122 of the Patrologia Latina containing the Opera or
Collected Works of Eriugena, edited by Henry Joseph Floss in a heavily
flawed text. Despite the rudimentary state of the texts available to
him, Pound was able to discern the critical importance of late classical
writers such as Pseudo-Dionysius, Maximus the Confessor, Priscian and
others, providing an intellectual continuity with the classical world that
had the virtue of operating outside of the constraints of Latin orthodoxy.
Eriugena’s translations of Pseudo-Dionysius from Greek was itself
a remarkable feat in ninth-century western Europe, but The Celestial
Hierarchy in particular established a metaphysical architecture that was to
dominate medieval thought down to Dante’s Paradiso and beyond. This
terrain is broadly understood, but the transformation of Carolingian
studies in the last generation and the new availability of reliable and
expertly edited texts of Eriugena opens the way for new consideration of
the significance of such material for Pound’s poem.8 The development of
glossing and commentary techniques in the Carolingian Palatine School –
Eriugena’s line-by-line commentary on Martianus Capella’s Marriage of
Philology and Mercury was the first of its kind, for example9 – transformed
the way texts were arranged on the page, establishing scholarly apparatus
that persist into the digital age. The contexts for these transformations are
clearly important in discerning the significance of Eriugena for Pound, but
may also contribute to his methods of glossing throughout The Cantos.
Pound’s philological investigations into ‘Donna mi prega’ also opened
up the field of medieval Islamic philosophy. Cavalcanti’s vocabulary –
memoria, virtù, formato locho, intelletto possible, intelletto agente – and the
preponderance of light imagery in his poem drew Pound to Eriugena and
to Robert Grosseteste’s thirteenth-century treatise De Luce, but also to the
controversies at the University of Paris during the thirteenth century in
which the former’s texts were embroiled. Pound knew from Fiorentino
and Ernest Renan that the Aristotelian commentaries of Averroes, the
twelfth-century philosopher from Cordoba, were at the centre of these
controversies.10 Cavalcanti’s poem also led Pound to consider the work of
the eleventh-century Persian polymath Avicenna, especially his theory of
emanations – a cosmological system governing the relation between the
human soul and divinity – and the function of light within this system.
Ron Bush, Matthew Little and Robert Babcock, Maria Luisa Ardizzone,
and Peter Liebregts among others have devoted considerable exegetical
energy in clarifying how these philosophical systems intersect with Pound’s
reading of Cavalcanti.11 This field too has experienced a recent flourishing,
where scholars respond critically to new translations of central texts and
develop new ways of understanding the full effects of these complex texts.12
To single out just one consequence for Pound studies, a greater under-
standing of the works of Alfarabi has made clear that his theory of emana-
tions, rather than that of Avicenna, is the source for most European
applications of this cosmology, including in Dante’s Commedia. Such
scholarly work redresses the widespread oversight of the role Islamic
philosophy plays in the transmission of Aristotelian and Neoplatonist
ideas into the High Middle Ages, and indeed medieval Islamic advances
in the long-standing attempts to reconcile these two systems.
Despite a surface eclecticism, what binds these early medieval discourses,
and might best explain their attraction for Pound, is their impulse towards
32 mark byron
encyclopaedism combined with their histories of comparative neglect.
Following his work on the Confucian Four Books, Chinese history, the
works of John Adams and other compendia projects, Pound was drawn to
the comparative study of legal systems, particularly in attempts to system-
atize and codify vast arrays of source materials. He explores this terrain in
Thrones in particular: the Corpus Juris Civilis commissioned by the sixth-
century Byzantine Emperor Justinian the Great in Canto XCVI; the
Eparch’s Book of Byzantine Emperor Leo the Wise (866–912 CE) in the
same canto; the Sacred Edict (1670) of the Kangzi Emperor, in Cantos
XCVIII and XCIX; and Edward Coke’s Institutes of the Laws of England
(1628), in Cantos CVII–CIX. Pound gives mention to Byzantium in
passing earlier in The Cantos, such as his recurring citation of the ancient
Byzantine law of the sea Lex Rhodia in Cantos LXXVIII and XCIV. As
Rock-Drill progresses Byzantium, and particularly the rule of Justinian,
comes into much sharper focus – several references to the Pandectae or
Legal Digests occur in Canto XCIV, for example. In Canto XCVI, early
medieval Byzantium is evaluated in concert with another early medieval
source, Paul the Deacon’s eighth-century History of the Lombards. Pound’s
evident interests in the tectonic relations between empires, especially
between the Eastern and Western halves of the Roman Empire, shifts of
population, conflict between urban and nomadic forces, and the rising
struggle between Christian and Islamic spheres all bring Byzantium to the
centre of his enterprise. His source texts included the Patrologia Latina for
Paul the Deacon, and Norman H. Baynes and H. Moss’s Byzantium: An
Introduction to Eastern Roman Civilisation (1948).13 The extensive scholar-
ship on Byzantium is a particularly rich resource for Pound studies but is
yet to be fully exploited. New work by such scholars as Anthony Kaldellis
and Nadia Maria El Chiek reorient Byzantine studies – the latter from the
perspective of Arab territorial aspirations – and the publication of scholarly
editions and translations of important primary texts by Dumbarton Oaks
opens up further opportunities to think through the significance
of Pound’s attention to the economic, religious, political and cultural
achievements of early medieval Byzantium.14
The historical, aesthetic and cultural crosscurrents to which Pound was
especially attuned returns the concept of the Mediterranean as the ‘Middle
Sea’ to its central role in European and Levantine history. Prosodic
innovation transmits between Provence, Tuscany, Alexandria, North
Africa and Sicily; and philosophical discourse, especially Neoplatonism
and Aristotelianism, passes from the classical centres of Greece and Rome
to Byzantium as well as to the Islamic world, from which many crucial texts
were reintroduced to Europe in the middle ages. The translation schools of
Baghdad in the east and Toledo in the west bestowed a rich Islamic
philosophical legacy upon Europe between the tenth and the thirteenth
centuries, shaping the curricula (and consequent controversies) at emer-
gent sites of learning such as the University of Paris. This history and
cultural legacy is reasonably well known, if not sufficiently acknowledged
in the history of ideas. Perhaps even more germane to Pound’s poetics is
the transmission of prosodic techniques and genres: the conventional
poetic history of his time saw a line of genealogy from the Troubadour
poets of eleventh- and twelfth-century Provence to the Sicilian court of
Federico Secondo in the early thirteenth century, and then to the Tuscan
sphere of the stilnovisti later in the thirteenth century.
Sicily’s role in this history is pivotal, bringing together several discourses
of central importance to Pound’s poetic project. But a wider and deeper
context arises when considered within a Mediterranean rather than exclu-
sively European sphere: most prominently Islamic and Arab influences
from the south and east. These contexts have received more attention in
non-anglophone cultural histories and histories of ideas – notably Italian
and Spanish – and have percolated into more recent work in English. The
role of Islamic learning in Sicily during Byzantine rule from the seventh
century and then the Emirate from the ninth to the eleventh centuries, and
its legacy under subsequent Norman rule, made a greater contribution to
European philosophy and poetics than has been customarily appreciated.
This influence arguably extends to prosody, the development of poetic
genres, and other aspects of an erstwhile ‘Western’ poetic history that was
to become a pivotal aspect of European cultural history in the middle ages,
a Mediterranean counterpart to such poetic transformations in northern
Europe as the Norse sagas, the skaldic poetry of Iceland and Anglo-Saxon
verse.
The Sicilian court of Federico Secondo, who ruled from 1198 until his
death in 1250, has long been understood as a crucial centre of cultural and
artistic production. The blend of Norman and Islamic influences, built
upon a Byzantine substrate, provided a singular condition for poetic
development, from which emerged the sonnet as a coherent poetic form,
as well as the adaptation of Troubadour love poetry into a highly intellec-
tual form of poetic argument to match its supremely complex prosody.
Certainly contact with the eastern Mediterranean comprised a central part
of Federico’s activities: when he married Yolande (Isabella) of Jerusalem by
proxy in 1225 he was crowned King of Jerusalem, and was subsequently
instrumental in prosecuting the Sixth Crusade in 1228, during which he
34 mark byron
asserted his right to rule in the Holy Land.15 In addition to the Levantine
influences with which Federico returned to his court in Palermo, he drew
on the historical relationship between Sicily and the Islamic world, enlist-
ing Jewish Sicilians to translate literary works from Greek and Arabic, and
sought out Islamic scholars to translate and critically examine philosophi-
cal, scientific and other texts: ‘Frederick’s efforts to import, translate, and
assimilate Arabic scientific texts, and then disseminate them to other courts
in Christian Europe, made Sicily an important center for the diffusion of
the Islamic sciences to the Christian world.’16
This fertile fusion of Christian and Islamic cultural knowledge extended
to architecture, coinage, palace inscriptions and also to prosody. These are
each aspects of cultural contact in the eastern Mediterranean of significance
for Pound, especially in Thrones, where he attempts to collate evidence for
these various historical forces in the Byzantine sphere into a unified textual
expression or compendium. The links between Occitan poetry, the Sicilian
School of Federico Secondo and the stilnovisti tell a critical part of the story
of the evolution of poetry in Italian. But the Arabic language also bears
directly on this history: ‘a complex local and cultural and literary history,
which is properly viewed as a chapter of the complex history of Arabic
literature in Europe, preceded them [the Sicilian Court poets] in this place
where one hundred years earlier a circle of poets had written in praise of
Sicilian monarch Roger II in Arabic’.17 This poetry was collected into the
major extant Siculo-Arabic verse anthology, Kharīdat al-qasr wa jarīdat al-‘asr
(‘The Virgin Pearl of the Palace and the Register of the Age’). While
Federico’s court shifted its focus towards mainland Christian Europe, evident
in the tendency of poets to emulate the models of Romance vernacular poets,
his admiration for Arabic science and politics is indicative of the rich Arabic
and Islamic inheritance within the Norman Sicilian polity. The relative
belatedness of Siculo-Italian poets arriving at the Provençal discourse of
courtly love – famously lamented by Giacomo da Lentini in his poem
‘Amore non vole’ – was itself couched in lapidary imagery drawn from
Arabic poetics.18 This influence has been noted in histories of Arabic literature
and in Italian scholarship on poetry, but in anglophone scholarship the role of
Sicily in the history of poetics as well as its pivotal position as a contact zone
for Byzantine, Arabic and Norman spheres of influence remains a recent
development.19
Yet the question remains: as fascinating as this poetic and cultural
history may be, what possible effect can it have upon our understanding
of Pound’s poetry, especially given that he did not demonstrate more than
a passing knowledge of the Sicilian poetic context during the Caliphate and
subsequent Norman rule? Pound’s persistence in seeking out poetic and
intellectual lineages forms a significant motivation for his wide-ranging
historical inquiry. Knowing more about the kinds of texts he sought out
(their provenance, stability and authority), and why, assists in clarifying the
kinds of claims he made for such continuities, as is clear in the example
of Pound’s research on Eriugena. But when these histories are distin-
guished by a perceived discourse of oppression, occlusion, or neglect – as
with Eriugena and his serial condemnations, with the antique bird sounds
in Janequin via Arnaut and with the sources for Cavalcanti’s oblique
vocabulary – then subsequent scholarly work allows us to reconsider the
significance and judiciousness of Pound’s sharp eye. In the Sicilian poetic
context, the knowledge that Italian poetic techniques were actively shaped
by Arabic literary forms vindicates Pound’s pursuits in etymology, prosody
and metrical technique, none more so than in the case of Cavalcanti. He
may not have known the extent of this cosmopolitan poetic history in the
Mediterranean sphere, between the eras of the Troubadours and the
stilnovisti, but his methods of poetic inquiry are entirely in sympathy
with this rich and recently rejuvenated history.20
Notes
* The research for this chapter was funded by the Australian Government
through the Australian Research Council Future Fellowship Scheme for the
project Modernism and the Early Middle Ages (FT160100417).
1. David Anderson, Ezra Pound’s Cavalcanti: An Edition of the Translations, Notes,
and Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983).
2. See Walter B. Michaels, ‘Pound and Erigena’, Paideuma 1.1 (1972), 37–54; and
Peter Makin, ‘Ezra Pound and Scotus Erigena’, Comparative Literary Studies 10
(1973), 60–83.
3. See A. David Moody, ‘“They Dug Him Up out of Sepulture”: Pound, Erigena,
and Fiorentino’, Paideuma 25.1–2 (1996), 241–47; and Ronald Bush, ‘La
filosofica famiglia: Cavalcanti, Avicenna, and the “Form” of Ezra Pound’s
Pisan Cantos’, Textual Practice 24.4 (2010), 669–705.
4. Mark Byron, Ezra Pound’s Eriugena (London: Bloomsbury, 2014).
5. Twelve notebooks numbered 15–26 consist of Pound’s notes as he travelled
around northern Italy, Spain and elsewhere in 1925–31, in search of every extant
Cavalcanti manuscript he could locate, preparatory to the several editions of
Cavalcanti’s Rime he planned over his career. These are housed in the
Ezra Pound Collection YCAL MSS 43, Box 114, Folders 4889–91, and Box 15,
Folders 4892–94, the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale
University.
36 mark byron
6. Ezra Pound, The Spirit of Romance (1910: New York: New Directions, 2005), 5
and 7.
7. James Longenbach, Modernist Poetics of History: Pound, Eliot, and the Sense of
the Past (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 103.
8. The standard works on Eriugena for much of the twentieth century were
Étienne Gilson, La Philosophie au Moyen Age, I: De Scot Érigène a S.
Bonaventure (Paris: Payot, 1922), and Maïeul Cappuyns, Jean Scot Erigène:
Sa vie, son oeuvre, sa pensée (1933; Bruxelles: Culture et Civilisation, 1969).
However, two studies in English contributed to the transformation of the
field: John Contreni, The Cathedral School of Laon from 850 to 930: Its
Manuscripts and Masters (München: Bei der Arbeo-Gesellschaft, 1978),
and John Marenbon, From the Circle of Alcuin to the School of Auxerre:
Logic, Theology and Philosophy in the Early Middle Ages (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1981). To these may be added numerous
subsequent studies on Eriugena, to say nothing of similar transformations
in scholarly work on Pseudo-Dionysius, Martianus Capella and other
central intellectual figures of the late classical and early middle ages.
Édouard Jeauneau’s five-volume scholarly edition of Eriugena’s master-
work, Periphyseon (Turnhout: Brepols, 1996–2003), demonstrates the kind
of intimacy between philology and hermeneutics Pound sought to reveal in
Cavalcanti’s poetry.
9. Dermot Moran, The Philosophy of John Scottus Eriugena: A Study of Idealism in
the Middle Ages (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press,
1989), 41.
10. Ernest Renan, Averroès et l’averroïsme (Paris: Michel Lévy Frères, 1861)
remains a comprehensive and authoritative analysis of Averroes’ life and
thought.
11. See especially Ronald Bush, ‘La filosofica famiglia’; Matthew Little and
Robert Babcock, ‘“Amplius in coitu phantasia”: Pound’s “Cavalcanti” and
Avicenna’s De Almahad’, Paideuma 20.1–2 (1991), 63–75; Maria Luisa
Ardizzone, Guido Cavalcanti: The Other Middle Ages (Toronto: University
of Toronto Press, 2002); and Peter Liebregts, Ezra Pound and Neoplatonism
(Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2004).
12. For major anglophone interventions in the field, see especially Herbert
A. Davidson, Alfarabi, Avicenna, and Averroes, on Intellect: Their
Cosmologies, Theories of the Active Intellect, and Theories of Human Intellect
(New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), and Peter Adamson
and Richard C. Taylor, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Arabic Philosophy
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). Brigham Young
University Press publishes a series in which translations of many essential
medieval Islamic philosophical texts appear in some cases for the first time in
English.
13. Norman H. Baynes and H. Moss, eds., Byzantium: An Introduction to Eastern
Roman Civilisation (Oxford: Clarendon, 1948).
14. See especially Anthony Kaldellis, The Argument of Psellos’ Chronographia
(Leiden: Brill, 1999), Hellenism in Byzantium: The Transformations of Greek
Identity and the Reception of the Classical Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2007), and The Byzantine Republic: People and Power in New
Rome (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015); and Nadia Maria El
Chiek, Byzantium Viewed by the Arabs (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2004). Important Dumbarton Oaks editions of primary works include
Michael Attaleiates, The History, trans. Anthony Kaldellis and Dimitris
Krallis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), and Albrecht
Berger, trans., The Patria: Accounts of Medieval Constantinople, Dumbarton
Oaks Medieval Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013).
Dumbarton Oaks has also reissued Irfan Shahîd’s monumental seven-volume
Byzantium and the Arabs (1984–2010), available for download at www
.doaks.org/newsletter/byzantium-and-the-arabs.
15. David Abulafia, Frederick II: A Medieval Emperor (London: Penguin, 1988),
150–53.
16. Karla Mallette, ‘Poetries of the Norman Courts’, in The Literature of Al-
Andalus, ed. María Rosa Menocal, Raymond P. Scheindlin and Michael Sells
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 377.
17. Mallette, 378. In addition, Arabized Jews in Palermo wrote poetry, including
muwāshshahāt – multi-lined strophic verse poems in classical Arabic – ‘as well
˙ of Judah Halevi’, a major Jewish Andalusian poet of the early
as imitations
twelfth century.
18. Mallette, 382.
19. John Julius Norwich has written two popular histories of Norman Sicily:
The Normans in the South 1016–1130 (1967; London: Faber, 2018) and The
Kingdom of the Sun 1130–1194 (1970; London: Faber, 2018), as well as Sicily:
A Short History from the Ancient Greeks to Cosa Nostra (London: John
Murray, 2015). In addition to Kreutz (cited below), the two foundational
texts in English on the subject are María Rosa Menocal, The Arabic Role in
Medieval Literary History: A Forgotten Heritage (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 1987), and Sarah Davis-Secord, Where Three Worlds
Meet: Sicily in the Early Medieval Mediterranean (Ithaca and London:
Cornell University Press, 2017).
20. One might take this history back to the ninth century when the first
significant Arab impact on southern Italy was felt in places such as Bari,
in which an Emirate was established that lasted for a generation, as well
as Campagnia, Calabria and of course Sicily, where Arab influence was
felt for centuries, along with, in the case of Sicily, conquest and estab-
lishment of the Emirate for two centuries. Ironically, given Pound’s
intense interests in the Carolingian sphere, it was Louis, Holy Roman
Emperor from 844 to 875, who drove out Arab mercenaries operating in
the Lombard Civil War of the 830s and 840s, but who failed to clear
southern Italy of Arab military and mercantile presence in subsequent
decades. See Barbara M. Kreutz, Before the Normans: Southern Italy in the
38 mark byron
Ninth and Tenth Centuries (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 1991), especially chapter 2, ‘The First Arab Impact’, 18–35, and
chapter 3, ‘A Carolingian Crusade’, 36–54.
W OR KS C I T ED
Abulafia, David, Frederick II: A Medieval Emperor (London: Penguin, 1988).
Adamson, Peter, and Richard C. Taylor, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Arabic
Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
Anderson, David, Ezra Pound’s Cavalcanti: An Edition of the Translations, Notes,
and Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983).
Ardizzone, Maria Luisa, Guido Cavalcanti: The Other Middle Ages (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 2002).
Attaleiates, Michael, The History, trans. Anthony Kaldellis and Dimitris Krallis
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012).
Baynes, Norman H., and H. Moss, eds., Byzantium: An Introduction to Eastern
Roman Civilisation (Oxford: Clarendon, 1948).
Berger, Albrecht, trans., The Patria: Accounts of Medieval Constantinople,
Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2013).
Bush, Ronald, ‘La filosofica famiglia: Cavalcanti, Avicenna, and the “Form” of
Ezra Pound’s Pisan Cantos’, Textual Practice 24.4 (2010), 669–705.
Byron, Mark, Ezra Pound’s Eriugena (London: Bloomsbury, 2014).
Cappuyns, Maïeul, Jean Scot Erigène: Sa vie, son oeuvre, sa pensée (1933; Bruxelles:
Culture et Civilisation, 1969).
Contreni, John, The Cathedral School of Laon from 850 to 930: Its Manuscripts and
Masters (München: Bei der Arbeo-Gesellschaft, 1978).
Davidson, Herbert A., Alfarabi, Avicenna, and Averroes, on Intellect: Their
Cosmologies, Theories of the Active Intellect, and Theories of Human Intellect
(New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992).
Davis-Secord, Sarah, Where Three Worlds Meet: Sicily in the Early Medieval
Mediterranean (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2017).
El Chiek, Nadia Maria, Byzantium Viewed by the Arabs (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2004).
Eriugena, John Scottus, Periphyseon, ed. Édouard Jeauneau, 5 vols. (Turnhout:
Brepols, 1996–2003).
Gilson, Etienne, La Philosophie au Moyen Age, I: De Scot Érigène a S. Bonaventure
(Paris: Payot, 1922).
Kaldellis, Anthony, The Argument of Psellos’ Chronographia (Leiden: Brill, 1999).
The Byzantine Republic: People and Power in New Rome (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2015).
Hellenism in Byzantium: The Transformations of Greek Identity and the Reception
of the Classical Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
Kreutz, Barbara M., Before the Normans: Southern Italy in the Ninth and Tenth
Centuries (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991).
Liebregts, Peter, Ezra Pound and Neoplatonism (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson
Little, Matthew, and Robert Babcock, ‘“Amplius in coitu phantasia”: Pound’s
“Cavalcanti” and Avicenna’s De Almahad’, Paideuma 20.1–2 (1991), 63–75.
Longenbach, James, Modernist Poetics of History: Pound, Eliot, and the Sense of the
Past (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987).
Makin, Peter, ‘Ezra Pound and Scotus Erigena’, Comparative Literary Studies 10
(1973), 60–83.
Mallette, Karla, ‘Poetries of the Norman Courts’, in The Literature of Al-Andalus,
ed. María Rosa Menocal, Raymond P. Scheindlin and Michael Sells, 375–87
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
Marenbon, John, From the Circle of Alcuin to the School of Auxerre: Logic, Theology
and Philosophy in the Early Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1981).
Menocal, María Rosa, The Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History: A Forgotten
Heritage (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987).
Michaels, Walter B., ‘Pound and Erigena’, Paideuma 1.1 (1972), 37–54.
Moody, A. David, ‘“They Dug Him Up out of Sepulture”: Pound, Erigena, and
Fiorentino’, Paideuma 25.1–2 (1996), 241–47.
Moran, Dermot, The Philosophy of John Scottus Eriugena: A Study of Idealism
in the Middle Ages (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1989).
Norwich, John Julius, The Kingdom of the Sun 1130–1194 (1970; London: Faber,
2018).
The Normans in the South 1016–1130 (1967; London: Faber, 2018).
Sicily: A Short History from the Ancient Greeks to Cosa Nostra (London: John
Murray, 2015).
Pound, Ezra, Cavalcanti Notebooks 15–26, Ezra Pound Collection YCAL MSS 43,
Box 114, Folders 4889–91, and Box 15, Folders 4892–94, the Beinecke Rare
Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
The Spirit of Romance (1910; New York: New Directions, 2005).
Renan, Ernest, Averroès et l’averroïsme (Paris: Michel Lévy Frères, 1861).
chapter 3
Ezra Pound’s Pisan Cantos

The Promise and the Limits of the Archive
Ronald Bush
Writing in Ezra Pound and Referentiality, the poet Bob Perelman notes that
‘we have been living in . . . the Golden Age of Pound Studies’ in which
‘Pound’s already-published writing was read assiduously; much of the huge
bulk of his other public and private writing was published; the ramifications
of his references were exfoliated, his ellipses were spelled out, the ideograms
were translated’. So why, he (provocatively) asks, has it not ‘become increas-
ingly possible and even easy to read Pound’?1 Perelman’s question,
as Pound’s papers continue to surface, becomes ever more pertinent. What
in particular has been the value of Pound’s manuscript materials for reading
his poems? I wish to suggest that it has been considerable, but also that it
does not and can never absolve readers of their critical obligations or resolve
certain fundamental ambiguities in Pound’s work.
Some preliminary bearings can be found in readers’ struggles with
references in the later Cantos, where the private reaches of Pound’s materi-
als stretch the limits of scholarly research while the rewards of even
strenuous scholarship remain relatively modest. Noel Stock, Pound’s first
serious biographer, is of help here. In his last engagement with Pound,
Stock wrote in Reading the Cantos that because Pound’s ‘choice of materials
in [Rock-Drill and Thrones] has been governed very largely by the books
which happened to be beside him or within reach’, a ‘full explanation
[of them] would be impossible without having before us [as Stock once did
as an initiate of Pound’s study] the various newsletters, cuttings and crank
publications Pound was reading’.2 Even so, Stock allows, it may not be
possible to construct a full explanation of what Pound makes of these texts
because many were never fully ‘assimilated’ into his poem, with the result
that Pound’s insistent reference to works outside his text resemble materi-
als in a ‘mental diary which includes snatches of poetry’.3 Because of this,
in Pound’s late work, Stock advises, ‘until we actually look into the sources,
handle the books, place ourselves in Pound’s situation and see as nearly as
40
Ezra Pound’s Pisan Cantos 41
possible through his eyes, we cannot even begin to know how the material
is supposed to function’.4 ‘In order to be able to follow, even roughly’, we
must ‘know first of all [his] direct sources . . . we must have also an idea of
what else [Pound] was reading at the time, and, finally, a good knowledge
of what else he was writing’. Even then, Stock candidly admits, the effort
might not get us very far. All we can be assured of is that the return
to Pound’s sources ‘will save us from thinking [the poetry] means some-
thing else altogether’.5
Perelman’s critique goes deeper but allows more sympathy. In his view,
our difficulty in reading Pound arises not only from the ambiguity of
undigested sources, but from an essential contradiction in Pound’s pur-
poses – a pervasive tension between pedagogy (a simplifying urge to
communicate important information to others) and hermeticism (a belief
that the deepest truths are incommunicable to those not equipped to
understand them). However, Perelman argues, this tension gives The
Cantos its characteristic strength – a power that is not captured by either
scholarly or post-modernist interpretations of the work. That is, on the
one hand, even though ‘Pound was fond of quoting Ford’s dictum:
“get a dictionary / and learn the meanings of words”’, there is finally ‘no
Poundian dictionary that can be separated from the experience of reading,
deciphering, and adjudicating his work’.6 On the other hand, readings that
undervalue the pedagogical drive of Pound’s work and concentrate on the
playfulness of its surface fail to do justice to its seriousness, because
they reduce Pound’s urgent invocation of references into mere gestures
(a la Marianne Moore) towards multi-textured pastiche. Drawn himself
towards the latter position, Perelman cites at length Charles Bernstein’s
seductive assertion that The Cantos are simply ‘filled with indeterminacy,
fragmentation, abstraction, obscurity, verbiage, equivocation, ambiguity,
allegory’ and that Pound ‘has made the highest art of removing ideologies
from their origins and creating for them a nomadic economy’.7 But he
finally cannot see fit to agree, confessing that ‘I’m afraid that I never find
any ideological detaching going on in Pound’.8
Parsing these contradictions leads Perelman to re-conceiving The
Cantos’ core ambitions. Because the poem neither allows us to avoid
glossing its references nor permits us to realize their full import, he argues,
the poet leaves us amid the contradictory vectors of his borrowed phrases,
‘peering through estranging ink toward words we hope to recognize’.9 The
central thrust of The Cantos, in other words, remains interrogatory, ques-
tioning conventions of especially historical interpretation as well as the
42 ronald bush
texts in which those conventions have been established. Moreover, this
process of interrogation also proves self-reflexive: The Cantos not only puts
in question the borrowed texts it explores, but also casts suspicion on its
author’s claims to authority over his own work.
Michael Kindellan comes to a similar conclusion, albeit from another
direction. By entitling the early serial volumes of The Cantos ‘drafts’, Pound
demonstrates a preference for process over finish, a predisposition that, for
Kindellan, calls out for genetic study. Kindellan interestingly points to Pound’s
scepticism about the adequacy of any published text in relation to its author’s
intentions – a scepticism that extends well beyond the poet’s repeated cautions
that his serial volumes should be regarded as provisional pending final correc-
tion. To Pound, Kindellan holds, all texts are to be regarded as ‘deficient’,
including and especially his own.10 Paraphrasing Pound’s essay ‘Totalitarian
Scholarship and the New Paideuma’,11 Kindellan avers that ‘for Pound, the
opportunity to publish verse meant also perforce the loss of some integral
aspects of the primary writing scene, aspects that the various stages and
complications of setting poetry in type tend only to obscure. A printer’s
prerogative should always be to first limit the damage to “sense” typesetting
invariably caused’. This is why, Kindellan suggests, Pound could over and
over again write to readers eager to help him correct typos or chronological
errors in his text, as he wrote to Peter Russell in 1950: ‘NO interest in
corrections of Cantos/ mere minutae, INTEREST in getting some god dam
NEWS’.12
In Pound’s eyes, that is to say, the poem resides not in any definitive
publication but in the poet’s ongoing creative struggle with his material –
a struggle that a printer’s imposition of conventional presentation cannot
help but minimize. Understanding as much, many commentators turn
sooner or later towards a genetic analysis that prioritizes what Kindellan
calls ‘the reconstitution and analysis of process’13 and that therefore assigns
special importance to the notes, drafts, manuscripts, typescripts and asso-
ciated materials that make up the Pound archive. They do so, however, not
to resolve the poem’s textual and referential knots but to foreground them,
transforming archival investigation from a hunt for occulted referents to
a critical enterprise fully aware of the poem’s dialectic of conflicted
motives, intention and accomplishment, draft and publication.
I want in what follows to reflect on these prefatory remarks by means of
the archival material I have worked with most closely – materials associated
with the Pisan Cantos that David Ten Eyck, Kenneth Haynes and I have
explored over a number of years in the course of preparing a genetic and
critical edition (to be published by Oxford University Press) of that great
but frequently oversimplified poem. These materials include a plethora of
unpublished notes, manuscript drafts and typescripts in both Italian and
English, and a great many pieces of until recently uncollected wartime
prose. Read together, this material has reoriented our sense of the compo-
sition of the sequence, at once reminding us of the extent to which Pound’s
political entanglements affected its composition and, by alerting us to the
sequence’s generic, intellectual and emotional fault lines, permitting
a serious reconsideration of Pound’s artistic and political complexity.
These possibilities arose in the last decade of the twentieth century, as
the ingathering of Pound’s papers into American universities’ rare book
and manuscript libraries (to name only the most important, those at
Hamilton College and at the universities of Yale, Harvard, Indiana and
Texas) allowed long-protected material to surface. The early history of
those acquisitions has been told by Donald Gallup, who was responsible
over many years for the purchase of the extensive collection of Pound’s
papers now at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscripts Library at Yale
University. In an essay entitled ‘The Ezra Pound Archive 1947–1987’,
Gallup reminds us of how recently the first results of that process (now
forming the core of the holdings catalogued as Ezra Pound Papers at the
Beinecke) were opened to the scholarly community, and adds a note on
ongoing acquisitions.14 Although the first tranche of Pound’s papers was
transported from Italy to New Haven after long negotiations in 1966, for
legal reasons it was not made accessible to scholars until 1973, and even
then lacked some extremely valuable items, including the Fenollosa note-
books and Pound’s letters to his parents – both acquired in 1974 – and
portions of an important cache of manuscripts and letters left in Paris with
William Bird in 1924 when the Pounds moved to Italy, purchased in 1977.15
More pertinent to this essay, it was only in 1981 that the Pisan notebooks
and authorial typescripts, having been given after the war to Mary de
Rachewiltz in a trust supervised by James Laughlin, were acquired by
Yale,16 and not until 1990 that a trove of Olga Rudge materials, including
Pisan-related manuscripts she had typed herself, were purchased, after-
wards to be classified as Additional Ezra Pound Papers (1992) and Olga
Rudge Papers (1993). Meanwhile, the bulk of Pound’s books were acquired
by the University of Texas at Austin, and the Ezra and Dorothy Pound
St. Elizabeths correspondence was purchased by the Lilly Library of the
University of Indiana. Then when James Laughlin died in 1997, he
bequeathed his own letters to and from Pound and the entirety of the
New Directions manuscript and correspondence files to the Houghton
Library at Harvard, a gift that was paralleled by Omar Pound’s bequest on
44 ronald bush
his death in 2010 of the remains of much of his own collection to his and
his father’s alma mater, Hamilton College in Clinton, New York.
The years since 1973 have gradually made available much of Pound’s
previously unpublished or uncollected work to the general public. Portions
of Pound’s vast output of letters, for example, appeared in print, starting
with a volume of selected letters in 1950, and encompass a series of Pound’s
correspondence with single individuals, including most relevantly Ezra and
Dorothy Pound: Letters in Captivity 1945–1946 (1999) and Ezra Pound to His
Parents: Letters 1895–1929 (2011). Beyond the letters, the publication in 1991
by Garland Press of an eleven-volume reproduction of Ezra Pound’s Poetry
and Prose: Contributions to Periodicals, edited by A. Walton Litz, Lea
Baechler and James Longenbach, should be singled out, as it opened
up Pound’s widely scattered uncollected essays to readers unaccustomed
to frequenting the research libraries that preserved their originals. Beyond
much forgotten but important literary writing, the Litz volumes rescued
a series of political essays Pound had published in now obscure Italian
newspapers and journals during the 1930s and early 1940s, and thus
participated in a general relaxation of restrictions on Pound’s wartime
writing in Fascist Italy. (Dorothy and Omar Pound, for example, had
once insisted that ‘none of the voluminous materials relating to Pound’s
radio broadcasts’ were to be consulted,17 and Olga Rudge’s initial reluc-
tance to make her own papers available had kept from public view many
politically charged poetic manuscripts closely associated with the Pisan
Cantos.) Many of the Italian essays in the Litz collection have subsequently
been described, collected and annotated in separate volumes by Italian and
anglophone scholars.18 Collectively, they, along with the re-insertion of the
then shockingly pro-Fascist Cantos LXXII and LXXIII into editions of The
Cantos starting in 1986,19 and major work on Pound’s Italian years by Tim
Redman and Laurence Rainey,20 prepared the ground for a realization of
the extent of Pound’s wartime activities and his complicity with the Italian
Fascist regime during the war.21
It was only, however, from the nineties onward when scholars began to
sort through the Olga Rudge papers that the specific genetic links
between Pound’s wartime Fascist activities and the Pisan Cantos came
into full relief. Pound, it became apparent, had produced the Italian
Cantos LXXII and LXXIII prompted by Mussolini’s last radio call for
a resurgent defence of Italy and had incorporated the language of that
speech into his poems.22 He then quickly proceeded to produce (also in
Italian, and successors to the colloquy between Pound and a recently
deceased Marinetti in the Italian Canto LXXII) a series of Dantescan
dialogues with the dead,23 giving voice to courageous spirits of Latin
civilization and hoping to inspire Fascist resistance to the random destruc-
tion of the Italian culturescape by the allied bombings of 1944–5.24
The extensive but still largely unpublished drafts for Italian Cantos
subsequent to Canto LXXIII took the form both of extended tableaux
and provisional drafts for Italian Cantos LXXIV and LXXV,25 altogether
constituting in length and seriousness a suite in themselves.26 And
though Pound chose to abandon these efforts in the spring of 1945 when
Italy was on the brink of losing the war,27 his memories of them would
permeate the new suite he began to compose in English when he was
a prisoner in the DTC.
A representative example of the difference these archival discoveries have
made to our reading of the Pisan Cantos may suggest a larger story.28 Prominent
among the abandoned Italian drafts written in solidarity with elements of
Fascist resistance during the last months of the war is a two-page typescript
devoted to Caterina Sforza.29 Readers of Machiavelli will remember that Sforza,
the natural daughter of Duke Galeazzo Sforza of Milan, at the age of fifteen
married Girolamo Riario, the decadent nephew of Pope Sixtus IV and subse-
quently captain general of the papal forces in the Romagna. The couple then
ruled a papal foothold in the Romagna that combined the cities of Imola and
Forlì. A passage in Machiavelli’s Discourses concerns the catastrophic conse-
quences of conspiring against a powerful governor. In Book 3, Chapter 6 of that
work, Machiavelli recalls a moment in the history of Forlì in 1488, when (I give
it in the 1675 translation of Henry Neville)
some conspirators from Furli killed the Count Girolamo, their Lord, and
took his wife and children, who were little. [Then] it appeared to them they
could not live securely unless they had also made themselves lords of the
[town’s] fortress. But as the castellan did not want to give it up to them,
Madonna Caterina (as the Countess was called) promised the conspirators
that, if they allowed her to enter it, she would have it consigned to them, and
that they might retain her children with them as hostages. Under this
pledge, these men allowed her to enter, but she, as soon as she was inside
the walls, reproached them for the death of her husband, and threatened
them with every kind of vengeance. And to show that she did not care for
her children, she showed them her genital member, saying that she had the
means of making more. Thus [the] conspirators, short of counsel and having
too late seen their error, suffered the penalty of their too little prudence by
a perpetual exile.30
This tale, retold with verve in Pound’s wartime draft where it is sur-
rounded by similarly ferocious fragments of Sforza’s history, is reduced in
46 ronald bush
Canto LXXVI to an almost illegibly brief recall, a fleeting vision of
a bloodless victim identified only as ‘she who said: I still have the mould’
(C 472). In Canto LXXVI, it is a phrase sufficient to both assert and
disguise Pound’s defiance in the face of his own imprisonment – his
resolution to carry on, come what may, in a desperate situation. But the
disguised vehemence of the tag suppresses not only shared determination,
but also a crucial Italian context of 1944. Forlì, located in Mussolini’s native
Romagna, was a major Fascist bastion whose capture cost the Allies dearly
in fighting along the so-called Gothic Line from Florence to Rimini and
Ravenna and lastly Forlì in the closing months of 1944. The city fell on
13 November.31 Shortly afterwards, however, in Europe above the Alps the
Battle of the Bulge began on 16 December, allowing a last desperate hope in
Fascist Italy that the Allied invasion of Europe could be turned back. In the
midst of these developments, Mussolini’s Ministry of Popular Culture
launched a campaign to win back ordinary Italians to Fascism by fuelling
anger against the way that Italy’s cultural patrimony was being destroyed
by terrorist Allied bombing.32
The lineaments of this dramatic moment can be found in contemporary
issues of the Corriere della sera, the last major Italian newspaper still under
Fascist control, and the source of much of the heat of Pound’s composi-
tion. That winter, the Corriere ran a propaganda series entitled ‘Sangue
Italiano’, meant to play up the heroism of average citizens acting in tandem
with Fascist Black Brigades. On 1 October, the series had carried an article
about ‘L’eroina di Rimini’ (the heroine of Rimini) that, as Lawrence
Rainey has shown, Pound mined for the story in Canto LXXIII of the
girl who led Canadian troops into a minefield near Rimini and became
a type of Italian courage.33 The Corriere report about Forlì was run on
Monday 20 November and also highlighted the courage of Fascist women,
noting that in Forlì ‘Molte donne del popolo’ aided irregular snipers and
for a full day blocked the entrance of Allied troops into the city. The article
leaves it unclear whether the women were snipers themselves or whether
they simply made it more difficult for the Allies to kill the riflemen beside
them. It is also unclear about whether the women appeared on the city
walls. It was vehement, though, about the way that these obscure heroines,
like others in Florence, rallied the honour and dignity of the city and
boosted ‘la fede della Patria’.
The article was in all likelihood, as Rainey claims about the Rimini
story, a fiction. The events were reported on 3 December 1944 by Il Secolo
Dicianovesimo of Genova, but mentioned no women.34 Yet, however
accurate, the Corriere’s account fired Pound’s imagination, which linked
the bravery of the Fascist women to that of Caterina Sforza on the walls of
the city five hundred years before. Just as Malatesta, lord of Rimini, gives
historical resonance in Pound’s Italian drafts to the Axis defenders of
Malatesta’s home city, so Caterina Sforza, the great Renaissance virago,
epitomizes the spirit of her heroic descendants at Forlì’s gates.
The relevance of the 1945 unpublished Italian draft cantos in Pound’s
archives, then, seems as straightforward as it is significant: not only does the
Caterina Sforza draft allow us to see significant unspoken associations in
the Pisan Cantos, it would appear to align Pound’s combativeness with
expressions of Fascist defiance during the last days of the war. Recalling the
caveats that began this essay, though, some caution is in order, both in how
we read the Italian drafts and in the way Pound cannibalized them in the
DTC. Regarding the first, we should note that even the unpublished
Caterina Sforza tableau is punctuated by an insistent self-questioning.
Echoing the ghost of Marinetti’s demand in Canto LXXII for Pound to
lend him his body to continue the Fascist struggle, Pound’s Caterina
demands of her poet-interlocutor why he has not fully committed himself
to in the struggle and taunts him with the question, ‘Perché non porti le
arm[i] [?]’ (Why do you not bear arms?). Both Sforza and Marinetti before
her thus confront Pound with his own divided Italo-American allegiance
by insistently calling for him to choose between them, and it is through the
resulting drama that Pound works through the implications of his situation
as a stranded American expatriate in the Italian winter of 1944–5.
Pound’s appropriation of the figure of Caterina Sforza in the Pisan
Cantos is perhaps more equivocal still. By the time Canto LXXVI was
composed in the DTC, the war in Europe was over and Pound’s channel-
ling of the defiant chords of Mussolini’s last exhortations had morphed
into a combination of guarded personal resentment, deep melancholy, and
an unspoken identification with women and exiles. Along with defiance,
there is thus a wistfulness and vulnerability attached to the muted (re)
appearance of ‘she who said: I still have the mould’, which speaks of an
implied link in Pound’s mind between the suffering of a woman finally
dragged, Cassandra-like, to imprisonment in Rome and the reproductive
power figured in Canto LXXIV’s characterization of the way poetic images
are ‘be formed in the mind’ and ‘to remain there, resurgent EIKONEΣ’
(C 466). In its transposition, that is, the mask of Caterina now reminds us
that, despite her show of strength and bluster, her fascination depended
ultimately on her gender. (Not many women would have had the steel to
say ‘I still have the mould’ of course, which was the point of Machiavelli’s
story. But on the other hand, no man could.)
48 ronald bush
These qualifications about the interpretive usefulness of archival
material, however, are not intended to negate the archive’s value, but
rather to reinflect it. Our knowledge of recently accessible texts like
the pre-Pisan drafts, even though it fails to produce a transparent
‘meaning’ of the finished suite of the kind that Bob Perelman
hypothesized, nevertheless substantially increases our awareness of the
internal tensions that shaped the work as it evolved from notes to
Italian drafts to English composition and from the context of wartime
Italian Fascism to that of Pound’s post-war reassessment. These ten-
sions persist in the Pisan Cantos themselves, and while the archive
cannot help us resolve them, it does allow us to see them more clearly.
One can argue, of course, that in so doing we do not so much read
the suite itself as contemplate its conflicted evolution. But if Kindellan
is correct, that is not just all that Pound permits; it is also what he
implicitly requires in his vision of poems ceaselessly drawn out of their
author towards a perfection that neither the limitations of commu-
nication nor the inevitable accidents of publication can effect.
Nowhere is all this more apparent than on the textual level, where we
encounter the impossibility of constructing a corrected text out of Pound’s
endlessly dissatisfied drafts. No documents in the scholarly reinterpretation
of the Pisan Cantos archive are more important than the belatedly acquired
manuscripts on which the suite was inscribed. Here, at the coalface of
scholarship, so to speak, we can begin to understand both the possibilities
and the limitations of reading Pound’s work. For Pound’s notebook
manuscript and revised typescript show beyond question that current
and previous editions of the Pisan Cantos now need serious rethinking.35
All published versions of the Pisan Cantos descend from the 1948 New
Directions text, which manuscript evidence shows was based on an incom-
plete set of Pound’s typescripts and was prepared by editors who, through
misunderstandings and a lack of resources, never fully succeeded in
translating Pound’s explicit and implied editorial instructions into print.
All editions of the Pisan Cantos, for example, have only partially
executed Pound’s typescript instructions for the insertion of Greek and
have omitted more than fifty sets of Chinese characters that he directed his
editors to include.36 As serious, during the editorial process, several thou-
sand corruptions of Pound’s typescript were introduced into the text, of
which more than five hundred survived into the poem’s first American and
British publications.37
These corruptions are hardly surprising, of course, given the extreme con-
ditions under which the Pisan Cantos were written and transmitted. Pound
composed the manuscript notebook of the poem in the residual throes of
a mental breakdown and then when he was nearly finished hastily typed and
revised it in the middle of the night in the DTC’s medical dispensary, using
damaged and unfamiliar typewriters and lacking books to check his quotes.
After that, his well-intentioned attempts to convert his messy typescripts into
a clear setting copy for his publishers were thwarted by prohibitions associated
with his imprisonment (censorship, fear of the legal consequences of miscalcu-
lated frankness and restrictions on the number of pages he was allowed to send
out of the DTC), which prevented many of the triplicate leaves of his typescript
(including a number containing unique revisions) from reaching the New
Directions office in New York. Ultimately, Laughlin and Pound decided to
make a new in-house typescript out of the incomplete set of leaves he still
retained (all the pages were represented), causing much information to be lost
and inevitably introducing a host of corruptions into the text. And
although Pound was permitted to proof the new typescript himself, his
continued incarceration in the United States meant in effect that he was denied
access to his original papers at every new stage of the editorial process. The
history of the suite’s publication thus corresponds to an extreme case of an
author forced to delegate responsibility for editorial decisions he would nor-
mally have been able to oversee himself.
The inconsistency generated by the difficult circumstances of the Pisan
Cantos’ composition and transmission did not long go unnoticed. Starting
in the 1960s, readers began to sense that there were questionable passages in
the suite, but lacking access to Pound’s manuscripts, they were forced to
resort to ad seriatim correction. It was then that with Pound’s sometimes
encouragement James Laughlin, Hugh Kenner, Eva Hesse and an impress-
ive squad of Pound scholars attempted to assemble a ‘corrections file’.
(Pound, responding to a letter from Achilles Fang, even spoke of the need
to ‘keep textual corrections in order for [a future] utopian vol’ of The
Cantos.38) However, when Kenner and Laughlin pressed Pound in Italy on
different occasions about how to proceed, he remained vague, and they
went home disappointed.
Ultimately and inevitably, the project disintegrated into confusion.
Kenner, who was misled by the slightly more conscientious correction of
names in the early Faber and Faber editions of the Pisan Cantos, suggested
in a ‘proposed procedure for establishing the text of The Cantos’39 to take
the Faber text as the basis for a new edition. His proposal, however, failed
to realize that the most serious textual deficiencies stemmed from Pound’s
imprisonment and were shared by both the New Directions and the Faber
editions. Just as seriously, a large gap between Kenner’s and Hesse’s view of
50 ronald bush
what constituted appropriate corrections to The Cantos made it clear that
very meaning of ‘correction’ in a work like The Cantos is deeply unstable,
rooted in a plaintive but misguided hope that the author might remember
the intentions behind something he wrote long ago. Kenner confessed as
much to Laughlin,40 who finally decided not to sanction further ‘correc-
tions’ to the text, with the result that the text of the Pisan Cantos has
remained more or less stable since 1974.
There was, however, an alternative to the ‘corrections file’ approach, at
least as far as the Pisan Cantos were concerned. As Fredson Bowers noted
when Kenner asked him for advice about his ‘proposed procedure’ in 1963,
the most appropriate way to establish a new text of the poem was to go back
to ‘the author’s typescripts [and use them as] copy-text’.41 In 1963, how-
ever, as the annotated document acknowledges, many of the Pisan type-
scripts were available only at Pound’s daughter’s mountain aerie at
Brunnenburg and would need to be ‘microfilmed so that they [could] be
consulted when needed’. Because of the considerable inconvenience of
this, Kenner disregarded Bowers’ advice and held to what initially seemed
like a pragmatic alternative, but ultimately proved a mirage: to ‘collate’ the
New Directions and Faber editions of The Cantos and to run a ‘usual check
on foreign languages, proper names, etc.’.
It was only in the late 1990s when Pound’s materials had been collected
into American rare book libraries that it became possible to construct
a critical edition along the lines anticipated by Bowers, based on the
manuscript notebook and authorial typescripts that were either unavailable
to or discounted by New Directions as it prepared the poem for publica-
tion between 1945 and 1948. But by then it had become clear that some-
thing more – a genetic component – would be required, because, among
other things, the conflicting revisions on different leaves of Pound’s type-
script pages ensured that a traditional corrected text could never be
achieved.
This is not to say, however, that certain kinds of corrections were
not only possible but necessary. Our new critical edition of the Pisan
Cantos can and will correct all corruptions introduced by Pound’s
editors into his text and for the first time will execute Pound’s instruc-
tions – especially as to missing Chinese characters and the placement
of Chinese and Greek characters – that New Directions misunderstood
or was unable to perform when the poem was first published. Unlike
the kinds of correction that troubled Kenner and Laughlin, an edition
limiting itself to these changes makes possible a text that addresses the
uncommon but not unheard-of situation described by the textual
theorist Peter Shillingsburg:
[I]t would appear that the editor is faced [in such cases] with choosing to
represent what the author did (the manuscript) or what the publisher did
(the printed work). But in many cases the former is not what the author
wished to see in print, and the latter is not what the author did – and perhaps
it is not what he wished, either. For, in fact, it often happens that what the
author did was to leave certain things for the publisher to do for him and
what the publisher did was to do that and more besides. The editor has
a third choice: to edit a text that does for the author what he expected to
have done for him but avoids the extraneous alterations imposed by
a publisher in his normal but misguided undertaking of the editorial
process.42
Shillingsburg, however, still has in mind as the end of such efforts
a corrected text that renders further reference to the manuscripts unneces-
sary. In the case of the Pisan Cantos, such an ambition becomes quixotic –
for, even when conflicting variants are indicated in a full textual apparatus,
the possibility of an authoritative corrected text remains out of reach. The
focus of the new edition, therefore, lies not on a new clean text or (as
Michael Kindellan advocates) a full variorum text, but on a full display of
every revision from the manuscript notebook to the published text, with
emphasis on ‘not just what but how an author wrote’.43 Towards this end,
the edition will also include an introductory volume that will excavate the
genesis of the sequence, first from an edited version of Pound’s wartime
drafts in Italian and then from facing-page transcripts of Pound’s manu-
script notebook and first typescript texts. By these means, the editors hope
to present a serious account of the dialectic and shifting processes that
ground Pound’s always/never to be completed text. As Marilyn Deegan
and Katheryn Sutherland have written, ‘Working manuscripts contain
vital clues to how authors worked and writings evolved – clues that the
reproduction processes of print regularly erase’.44
Notes
1. Bob Perelman, ‘Pound’s Legibility Today: Pedagogy And / Or Imitation’, in
Ezra Pound and Referentiality, ed. Hélène Aji (Paris: Presses de L’Université de
Paris-Sorbonne, 2003), 33.
2. Noel Stock, Reading the Cantos: A Study of Meaning in Ezra Pound (New York:
Minerva Press, 1968), 104, 101.
3. Stock, Reading the Cantos, 97, 103.
52 ronald bush
4. Stock, Reading the Cantos, 102–3.
5. Stock, Reading the Cantos, 105, 106, 114.
6. Perelman, ‘Pound’s Legibility Today’, 33.
7. Bernstein’s account occurs in the essay ‘Pounding Fascism’. See his A Poetics
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), 121–41.
10. Michael Kindellan, The Late Cantos of Ezra Pound: Composition, Revision,
Publication (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 243.
11. Ezra Pound, ‘Totalitarian Scholarship and the New Paideuma’, Germany and
You, ed. Douglas Fox, 4/5 (April 1937), 95–6, 123–4.
12. Kindellan, Late Cantos, 47, 242.
13. Kindellan, Late Cantos, 240.
14. Donald C. Gallup, ‘The Ezra Pound Archive 1947–1987’, in Pigeons on the
Granite: Memories of a Yale Librarian (New Haven: The Beinecke Rare Book
& Manuscript Library, Yale University, 1988), 191–210.
15. Gallup, ‘The Ezra Pound Archive 1947–1987’, 204–7.
16. Gallup, 208. These had been turned over to Mary, who after 1973 placed them
in a locked filing cabinet at the Beinecke. They were acquired by Yale only in
1981. The Rachewiltz Trust materials also included valuable letters from Joyce,
Eliot and others, which were in 1983 acquired by Yale in a separate transaction.
17. Gallup, 202.
18. See, for example, Ezra Pound, Idee fondamentali. ‘Meridiano di Roma’
1939–1943, edited by Caterina Ricciardi (Roma: Lucarini, 1991), and
Ezra Pound, Carte italiane 1930–1944, cura di Luca Cesari (Milano:
Archinto, 2005). Pound’s collection of these articles, Orientamenti, was
pulped during the war, but was eventually republished in 1978 (Vibo
Valentia: Grafica Meridionale) and in 2014 was the subject of a searching
essay by Peter Nicholls, ‘Ezra Pound’s Lost Book: Orientamenti’, Modernist
Cultures 9.2 (2014), 139–57.
19. For the history of the two cantos’ publication until the mid-nineties, see
Richard Taylor, ‘Towards a Textual Biography of The Cantos’, in Modernist
Writers and the Marketplace, ed. Warren Chernak, Warwick Gould and Ian
Willison (London: Macmillan, 1996), 233–57, esp. 225–30. Briefly, private
editions of the two cantos were published for copyright purposes in
Washington and Toronto in 1973 and in Milan in 1983. Cantos LXXII and
LXXIII then appeared in Mary de Rachewiltz’s Mondadori edition in 1985
and were placed at the end of the 1986 New Directions tenth printing of The
Cantos in 1986. When a combined New Directions / Faber edition of the
poem was published in 1989 (the eleventh New Directions printing), the
cantos were inserted in their proper chronological place. (Subsequent to
Taylor’s essay, a translation of Canto LXXII was discovered among Olga
Rudge’s papers. This translation, after separate publication in the fall 1993
issue of The Paris Review, was inserted immediately following the Italian
original in the New Directions 1995 thirteenth printing of The Cantos.)
20. See Laurence Rainey, Ezra Pound and the Monument of Culture (Chicago:
Chicago University Press, 1991), and Tim Redman, Ezra Pound and Italian
Fascism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
21. These connections were first emphasized in Massimo Bagicalupo’s The
Forméd Trace: The Later Poetry of Ezra Pound (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1980) and have progressively loomed larger in more recent
scholarship. See especially Matthew Feldman, Ezra Pound’s Fascist
Propaganda (London: Palgrave, 2013).
22. See Ronald Bush, ‘Pisa’, in Ezra Pound in Context, ed. Ira Nadel (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2010), 261–73.
23. Pound explained to Charles Olson in conversations that took place immedi-
ately after Pound’s forced return from Pisa to Washington, D.C., that Pound
was ‘excited at having rediscovered a Dante method. He especially mentioned
the use of a ghost to speak’. See Catherine Seelye, ed., Charles Olson &
Ezra Pound: An Encounter at St. Elizabeths (New York: Viking, 1975), 69.
24. See Ronald Bush, ‘“The Descent of the Barbarians”: The Pisan Cantos and
Cultural Memory’, Modernism/Modernity 14.1 (January 2007), 71–95.
25. For provisional readings of the unpublished Italian Cantos LXXIV and
LXXV, see Massimo Bacigalupo, ‘Ezra Pound’s Cantos 72 and 73: An
Annotated Translation’, Paideuma 20 (1991), 11–41, and Ronald Bush,
‘“Quiet, Not Scornful”?: The Composition of the Pisan Cantos’, in A Poem
Including History: The Cantos of Ezra Pound, ed. Lawrence Rainey (Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), 169–212.
26. See Ronald Bush, ‘Quiet, Not Scornful?’, 169–212, and ‘Towards Pisa: More
from the Archives about Pound’s Italian Cantos’, Agenda 34 (1996/97), 89–124.
27. Pound’s letter to his daughter Mary conveying in April 1945 his decision
not to go on with the Italian suite is cited in Mary’s translation of the
Cantos, I Cantos, a cura di Mary de Rachewiltz (Milan: Mondadori,
1985), 1566.
28. See also Ronald Bush, ‘Towards Pisa’.
29. A fuller version of this argument can be found in Ronald Bush, ‘The
Expatriate in Extremis: Caterina Sforza, Fascism, and Ezra Pound’s Pisan
Cantos’, Revista di Letteratura d’America, 25 (2005), 27–43. The Beinecke
Library provenance of the Italian Caterina typescript referred to here is
YCAL MSS 53 Box 29, Folder 627.
30. See Ernst Breisach, Caterina Sforza: A Renaissance Virago (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1967), 103. Breisach gives Guicciardini as
an additional source (she ‘lifted her skirt and exclaimed defiantly, “Don’t
you think, you fools, that I have the stuff to make others?”’). Some
of Pound’s knowledge about Caterina also came from G. F. Young, The
Medici (1909). See the two-volume London John Murray edition of 1930,
esp. II. 180–212.
31. For a full account of the battles of Rimini, Forlì and Ravenna, see Amadeo
Mantemaggi, Linea Gotica 1944 (Museo dell’Aviazione: Rimini, 2002), 200ff,
280ff, 292ff.
54 ronald bush
32. See Rainey, Ezra Pound and the Monument of Culture, 212.
33. Rainey, Ezra Pound and the Monument of Culture, 215–17.
34. On the actualities of the occasion and the propaganda on both sides, see
Montemaggi, 281–3. First reports suggested that the British entry into the
town was greeted with acclaim and jubilation. The Italian sources record that
they were greeted with coldness and hostility, but not by the active resistance
recorded by ‘la propaganda fascista’ found in the Corriere. On the other hand,
Hitler, incensed by the prospect of the quick fall of ‘la città della giovinezza del
Duce’, gave orders for increased resistance, and hence ‘quei cinque gionei’
became ‘un regalo di Hitler alla propaganda fascista che può esaltare la
resistenza dei forlivesi alle truppe alleate’. The only instance of the Italians
fighting the British took place on the Ravaldino canal, close to Caterina’s
fortress (Montemaggi, 283).
35. For a fuller description of this effort, see Ronald Bush and David Ten Eyck, ‘A
Critical Edition of Ezra Pound’s Pisan Cantos: Problems and Solutions’,
Textual Cultures 8.2 (fall 2013), 121–41.
36. See Ronald Bush, ‘Confucius Erased: The Missing Ideograms in The Pisan
Cantos’, in Ezra Pound and China, ed. Zhaoming Qian (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 2003), 163–92.
37. The American and British texts of the Pisan Cantos, published by New
Directions (1948) and Faber and Faber (1949), are similar but not identical.
Faber and Faber worked from the New Directions page proofs, but made
further changes based on last-minute authorial emendations, strict British
libel laws, and in-house correction of Pound’s English and foreign language
spelling.
38. Letter of 13 August 1953, Achilles Fang Papers, YCAL MSS 99, Box 2, Folder
24, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
39. Kenner’s ‘proposed procedure’ is dated 15 December 1963 and is now held at
the Houghton Library at Harvard together with the rest of the New
Directions ‘corrections file’ (New Directions Collection, 2921a, Folder 3,
Houghton Library, Harvard University).
40. In a letter of 24 June 1974, Kenner synthesized this point for Laughlin,
admonishing him about ‘corrections’ that had been introduced into the text
without record of their source and advising: ‘New Directions is Keeper of the
Tablets, and I think has an obligation to keep them unvarying, except when it
can be persuasively argued that a purely printing error is being rectified: in
which case the file ought to show clearly who ordered the change, and on what
grounds. It’s too late now to regret the difficulty of locating the changes that
occurred during Ezra’s lifetime, and of deciding which of them originated
with him, but at least from here on in the text should cease to wobble’.
Laughlin’s response, on 9 July, records the end of New Directions’ efforts to
‘correct’ the text of The Cantos: ‘I can’t begin to tell you how pleased I was to
receive your recommendation that we should stop making corrections in the
“Cantos”. I agree with you that the situation has gotten out of hand, probably
my fault, but since Ezra would never give me . . . guidance on it, I just did my
best, and think I only managed to make confusion’ (New Directions
Collection, 2921a, Folder 9).
41. Bowers’ marginal comments were inscribed on a copy of Kenner’s proposal
dated 15 December 1963 (New Directions Collection, 2921a, Folder 3).
42. Peter L. Shillingsburg, Scholarly Editing in the Computer Age: Theory and
Practice, 3rd ed. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), 56.
43. Kindellan, 230ff, 47.
44. Marilyn Deegan and Katheryn Sutherland, ‘Introduction’ to Text Editing,
Print, and the Digital World (Oxford: Routledge, 2009), 8. Cited in
Kindellan, 47.
W OR KS CI T ED
Bacigalupo, Massimo, ‘Ezra Pound’s Cantos 72 and 73: An Annotated
Translation’, Paideuma 20 (1991), 11–41.
The Forméd Trace: The Later Poetry of Ezra Pound (New York: Columbia
Bernstein, Charles, ‘Pounding Fascism’, in A Poetics, 121–41 (Cambridge: Harvard
Breisach, Ernst, Caterina Sforza: A Renaissance Virago (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1967).
Bush, Ronald, ‘Confucius Erased: The Missing Ideograms in The Pisan Cantos’, in
Ezra Pound and China, ed. Zhaoming Qian, 163–92 (Ann Arbor: University
of Michigan Press, 2003).
‘“The Descent of the Barbarians”: The Pisan Cantos and Cultural Memory’,
Modernism/Modernity 14.1 (January 2007), 71–95.
‘The Expatriate in Extremis: Caterina Sforza, Fascism, and Ezra Pound’s Pisan
Cantos’, Revista di Letteratura d’America, 25 (2005), 27–43.
‘Pisa’, in Ezra Pound in Context, ed. Ira Nadel, 261–73 (Cambridge: Cambridge
‘“Quiet, Not Scornful”?: The Composition of the Pisan Cantos’, in A Poem
Including History: The Cantos of Ezra Pound, ed. Lawrence Rainey, 169–212
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996).
‘Towards Pisa: More from the Archives about Pound’s Italian Cantos’, Agenda
34 (1996/97), 89–124.
Bush, Ronald, and David Ten Eyck, ‘A Critical Edition of Ezra Pound’s
Pisan Cantos: Problems and Solutions’, Textual Cultures 8.2 (Fall 2013),
121–41.
Deegan, Marilyn, and Katheryn Sutherland, ‘Introduction’, in Text Editing, Print,
and the Digital World, ed. Marilyn Deegan and Katheryn Sutherland, 1–9
(Oxford: Routledge, 2009).
Feldman, Matthew, Ezra Pound’s Fascist Propaganda (London: Palgrave, 2013).
Gallup, Donald C., ‘The Ezra Pound Archive 1947–1987’, in Pigeons on the
Granite: Memories of a Yale Librarian, 191–210 (New Haven: Yale
56 ronald bush
Kenner, Hugh, Letter to James Laughlin, 24 June 1974, New Directions
Collection, 2921a, Folder 9, Houghton Library, Harvard University.
Kenner, Hugh, ‘Proposed Procedure’, 15 December 1963, New Directions
Collection, 2921a, Folder 3, Houghton Library, Harvard University.
Kindellan, Michael, The Late Cantos of Ezra Pound: Composition, Revision,
Publication (London: Bloomsbury, 2017).
Mantemaggi, Amadeo, Linea Gotica 1944 (Museo dell’Aviazione: Rimini, 2002).
Nicholls, Peter, ‘Ezra Pound’s Lost Book: Orientamenti’, Modernist Cultures 9.2
(2014), 139–57.
Perelman, Bob, ‘Pound’s Legibility Today: Pedagogy and/or Imitation’, in
Ezra Pound and Referentiality, ed. Hélène Aji, 31–41 (Paris: Presses de
L’Université de Paris-Sorbonne, 2003).
Pound, Ezra, I Cantos, a cura di Mary de Rachewiltz (Milan: Mondadori, 1985).
Carte italiane 1930–1944, cura di Luca Cesari (Milano: Archinto, 2005).
Caterina Sforza typescript (Italian), YCAL MSS 53 Box 29, Folder 627, Beinecke
Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
Idee fondamentali. «Meridiano di Roma» 1939–1943, cura di Caterina Ricciardi
(Roma: Lucarini, 1991).
Letter of 13 August 1953, Achilles Fang Papers, YCAL MSS 99, Box 2,
Folder 24, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
Orientamenti (Vibo Valentia: Grafica Meridionale, 1978).
‘Totalitarian Scholarship and the New Paideuma’, Germany and You, ed.
Douglas Fox, 4/5 (April 1937), 95–6, 123–4.
Rainey, Laurence, Ezra Pound and the Monument of Culture (Chicago: Chicago
Redman, Tim, Ezra Pound and Italian Fascism (Cambridge: Cambridge
Seelye, Catherine, ed., Charles Olson and Ezra Pound: An Encounter at St. Elizabeths
(New York: Viking, 1975).
Shillingsburg, Peter L., Scholarly Editing in the Computer Age: Theory and Practice,
3rd ed. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996).
Stock, Noel, Reading the Cantos: A Study of Meaning in Ezra Pound (New York:
Minerva Press, 1968).
Taylor, Richard, ‘Towards a Textual Biography of The Cantos’, in Modernist
Writers and the Marketplace, ed. Warren Chernak, Warwick Gould and
Ian Willison, 223–57 (London: Macmillan, 1996).
Young, G. F., The Medici, 2 vols. (1909; London: John Murray, 1930).
chapter 4
‘Scoured and Cleansed’

Ezra Pound and Musical Composition
Josh Epstein
Le Testament is the opera of mankind, with all the prose left out.
Daniel Albright, Untwisting the Serpent*
What does an ‘opera of mankind’ sound like? It depends on what mankind

sounds like, and what sounds the ‘prose’ prevents us from hearing. For
Francois Villon, on whom Pound based his first opera, it sounded like the
brothel, the street, the tavern, the sounds of ‘theft, murder, whoring, and
praying’ and the rhythms of everyday language.1 It is of no small impor-
tance that Pound’s primary musical curator is R. Murray Schafer, the
Canadian composer who edited Ezra Pound and Music (1977), and who
helped Pound prepare Le Testament for a revival radio performance. In The
Soundscape (1993), Schafer reads many of the sounds in Pound’s Cantos –
the sea, the woodcutter and the machine. In establishing a new cultural-
scientific-aesthetic ‘interdiscipline’ of soundscape design, Schafer perceived
that Pound, for whom all disciplines were interdisciplines, exemplified this
tendency in poetry.2
Pound’s Le Testament (live, 1926; radio, 1931), his ‘orrorreorrio’
Cavalcanti (1933) and his settings of Catullus in Collis o Heliconii
(1932) are puzzling to both eye and ear. As Robert Hughes and
Margaret Fisher suggest, ‘[p]recise music notation was a quest corre-
sponding to his search for “le mot juste” in poetry’;3 for all of Pound’s
‘erasures’, his scoring often appears hyper-rationalized to the point of
irrationality, so fastidiously micromanaged as to be almost unperform-
able. At the same time, the musical effect is bracingly sparse, resem-
bling the streamlined passages of Igor Stravinsky’s L’Histoire du soldat
(1918) and Les Noces (1923). Pound was conscious of his musical milieu,
including a cosmopolitan scene that also included George Antheil,
Erik Satie and Jean Cocteau (whose name Pound sneaks into Le
Testament in place of Villon’s Jean Cotard). It is an open question
57
58 josh epstein
to what extent Pound’s compositions predicted later musical trends.4
But his engagement with the acoustic environment predicts Schafer’s
emphasis on how art digests its world. The imagist dictum to write
poetry ‘in the sequence of a musical phrase’, and the complex rhythms
of Le Testament that both resist and necessitate a metronome, all wind
themselves back into a complex soundscape.5
Pound’s operas have been studied as efforts to put into practice his
doctrines of the ‘Great Bass’ and ‘absolute rhythm’, and the obstreperous
judgments of his New Age reviews. Albright reads Le Testament as
a ‘neomedieval’ synthesis of word, music and image: the negative image
of a total artwork that honours the ‘bumps and gnarls of speech’, bending
traditional boundaries of musical genre and poetic meter.6 Brad Bucknell
weaves Pound’s eccentric time signatures and unconventional voice-
leadings into his political programs: as ever, Pound’s ‘refined technical
practice seems to lead back to the world’.7
Pound’s musical writings therefore call for critical methodologies that
treat music not just as a philological curiosity, but as an intervention into
questions of labour, mediation and mechanical reproduction. Filled with
the acoustic textures of war, gramophones, Bechsteins, ghostly voices and
radios, Pound’s musical writing intervenes consciously into aural culture.
Recent developments in cultural musicology and sound studies call atten-
tion to sounds as sites of ideological contention: we can hear Pound’s
sounds as sensory phenomena, aesthetic media, and objects of technologi-
cal and cultural discourse. For example, his radio broadcasts by definition
produced acousmatic sound: one without a visual source. If the acousmêtre
has a pedagogical root (Pythagoras used it to focus his students’ attention
on the sounds of his voice), it informed the musique concrète of Pierre
Schaffer and the soundscapes of Murray Schafer, and formed a node in ‘the
tensile mesh of . . . life’ at those ‘point[s] where disparate auditory and
cultural practices intersect’.8
This chapter, then, attempts to unpack some of the potential for cultural
analysis of Pound’s musical writings, which often develop strong dialectical
tensions. If Pound’s musical writings have been read primarily in the
context of his poetic doctrines – the Great Bass, the paideuma, the
ideogram and the dictum to write in the rhythms of a musical phrase
rather than a metronome9 – Pound focused equally on the relationship
between theory and praxis. Theorizing process itself as the ‘content’ of
music, Pound’s compositions manifest evolving thinking about how the
musical sound reverberates in the imprinted score and the crafted instru-
ment, and how musical notation yields to contingencies of performance.
‘Scoured and Cleansed’ 59
In Canto LXXIV, Pound dilates on ‘the process’ as a material
phenomenon:
the wind is also of the process,
sorella la luna
Fear god and the stupidity of the populace
but a precise definition
transmitted thus Sigismundo (C 445)
‘The process’ is an expression of multiple forces at once – the raw material

of the image; the natural entropy of time’s passage; the cultural rituals of
aristocratic patronage or of a Confucian order; the artistic pressures of
‘transmi[ssion]’ and ‘precise definition’. In this respect, Schafer is
a perfect companion to Pound: soundscape art, seeking procedures for
structuring the sounds latent in our material world, forces composers to
find principles for reassembling those sounds.10 For Pound, music could
be composed according to an objective relationship between pitch fre-
quencies, harmonies and the temporal durations between them:
‘a sound of any pitch, or any combination of such sounds,
may be followed by a sound of any other pitch, or any
other combination of such sounds, providing the time interval
between them is properly gauged’ (ATH 10).
To integrate word and music, rhythm and rhyme, into poetry with a ‘self-
justifying organicism’,11 Pound wished to revive the motz el son tradition of
Provençal troubadours, whose names were ubiquitous in Pound’s intellec-
tual milieu (he often thought it unnecessary even to expound his citations of
them).12 That milieu included the companions, collaborators and ama-
nuenses who shaped his work. Agnes Bedford, an accomplished pianist
and singer, collaborated with Pound on an arrangement of Five
Troubadour Songs (1920) and aided in the scoring of Le Testament. Olga
Rudge, for whom both Pound and Antheil wrote violin music, features as
largely in Pound’s music as in every other aspect of his life; she and
Gerhart Münch, who performed Mozart sonatas together in Rapallo, are
praised in Guide to Kulchur for their execution and ‘sensibility’, particularly
with respect to Baroque music (Pound and Rudge shared a passion for
Vivaldi, well before he was a mass-culture fixity). Pound drafted his scores
with the aid of George Antheil, the enfant terrible whose ‘machine-music’
pieces Ballet Mécanique (1924) and Mechanisms (1923) prompted infamous
scandals in Paris.13 Antheil, who never met an avant-garde doctrine that he
couldn’t leverage for his own promotion, inflamed Pound’s bristling ear for
the materiality of sound and aided him in finding a ‘technic’.
60 josh epstein
Rather than offering a coherent ‘program’, Pound’s Antheil and the
Treatise on Harmony (1924) reads as a heightening of Pound’s musical
contradictions: an embrace of neoclassical form and a Futurist worship
of the machine, a manifesto-like burst of rhetorical energy and a headfirst
plunge into musical arcana. Pound’s observations about notation – about
the place of textuality in realizing sound – are particularly helpful for
readers of his poetry, where music takes a concrete form. ‘The development
of musical notation’, Pound writes, ‘has been exceedingly slow; . . . up to
the year 1300 the written notes were not an exposition of the melody, they
were a mnemonic device. A man who knew the tune or a man with a very
fine ear for musical phrase could make use of them’ (ATH 45–6). The
abstraction of music from the artist’s memory, Pound argued, stultified
Western music: the harmonic rules of the common practice period evolved
into the ‘diaphanous’ harmonies of Wagner and Debussy, which Pound
considered symptoms of atrophy. Avoiding such ideals of harmony, ‘in
which the tendency to lifelessness was inherent’ (ATH 19), Pound sought
a tight structural relation between pitches and the ‘absolute rhythm’ of the
phrase.
Pound’s rhythms counterpoint the soundscape; as Edith Sitwell wrote,
Hugh Selwyn Mauberley ‘is expressed in a variety of tuneless and broken
rhythms, sometimes hesitating and dropping, sometimes hurrying aim-
lessly; and these convey the life of a figure moving adversely in a world
where the natural rhythms of life have broken down’.14 In a 1927 essay for
The New Masses, Pound gives rhythm particularly materialist traction,
praising Antheil’s Ballet as an allegory for the factory: ‘the eight-hour day
shall have its rhythm; so that the men at the machines shall not be
demechanized, and work not like robots, but like the members of an
orchestra’ (rpt. in ATH 138). If Pound interprets Antheil as an evolved
rhythmic sensibility, he means these pre-classical ‘mathematical’ principles
to rehabilitate a politics of unalienated labour, going all the way back to
‘the primitive man’ whose rituals Antheil could potentially reconstruct.
(The primitivist rhetoric of Antheil’s writings for Nancy Cunard’s Negro
Anthology [1934], including a batty essay entitled ‘The Negro on the Spiral’,
is no doubt apposite.)
Pound’s neoclassical aesthetic – evidenced by his praise of
Rudge, Münch and the instrument-maker Arnold Dolmetsch – illumi-
nates how he understood the cultural potential of his art. Having commis-
sioned a Dolmetsch clavichord, Pound wrote about him enthusiastically in
The New Age, defending his principles of economy, rhythmic rigor and
‘inner form’.15 Pound heard in Dolmetsch a historiographically aware
craftsman of music ‘untranslatable with modern instruments’,16 and
a solution to the problems of free verse: a way of liberating poetry from
metronomic bar lines while preserving the ‘absolute rhythm’. The homage
to Dolmetsch (and composers Henry Lawes and John Jenkins) in the
‘Libretto’ of Canto LXXXI makes him a model of lyricism by
which Pound can purge his ‘vanity’:
Lawes and Jenkyns guard thy rest
Dolmetsch ever be thy guest,
Has he tempered the viol’s wood
To enforce both the grave and the acute?
Has he curved us the bowl of the lute? (C 539–40)
As in Canto LXXIV (where Antheil and Villon make brief cameos on the
cross) and Canto LXXV (where Münch and Janequin pull Pound out of
the depths), the purging of excess in the melodic line, and in the instru-
ment’s own shape, lead to the poet’s ritual catharsis.
These organic purgations were impossible, Pound believed, on the
piano. Pound loathed the ‘piano-intoxication of the nineteenth century’,
associating it with a ‘Wognerized [sic]’ lack of rhythmic rigor in deference to
‘atmosphere’.17 And he distrusted the piano’s Pavlovian effects on the body of
the trained pianist. A piano produces a note when the correct key is pressed,
whereas a string instrument requires a live sense of intonation and timbre:
[T]he very fact that one can play a keyboard instrument quite correctly without
in the least knowing whether a given note is in tune or is correct in itself, tends
to obscure the value of true pitch. This perception, the first requisite of any
player upon strings is therefore left, perhaps, wholly unconsidered by the piano
student. The piano tuner is responsible for all that. (ATH 71–72)
In light of the notorious ‘usura’ Canto XLV – ‘Stonecutter is kept from his
stone / weaver is kept from his loom’ (C 229) – Pound’s shift of blame to
the ‘piano tuner’ reads as an indictment of the division of labour, and his
attack on the separation of harmony and rhythm reads as a critique of
sensory alienation. The work of hearing has been divided against the work
of the fingers, trained through repetitive motion. In turn, only the pianist
could take any pleasure from such performance:
the pleasure of playing a piano with orchestra as opposed to hearing a piano
played with orchestra, is explicable on the grounds of exhilaration. . . . [H]e
gets the same physical pleasure as he might from quick and clever use of the
foils in a fencing bout; he has no attention left for auditory sensation. . . .
But as the player receives this pleasure, he ought to pay the audience . . ., not
they him.18
62 josh epstein
Pound’s attack on the piano inverts the reasoning of Walter Benjamin, for
whom technologies of mechanical reproduction enabled political forms of
art built on ‘shock’, which could stimulate the sensorium of a mechanically
trained workforce. For Pound, neither performer nor audience could gain
anything beyond ‘exhilaration’ with such music, unless it stimulated the
performer’s entire body and intellect to recreate all elements of music –
pitch, timbre and word – simultaneously. The reflexive training of the
pianist, obscuring the ‘precise definition’ of form, was both cause and effect
of modernity’s ‘wash’ of somatic intensity.
Though the piano seemed to obvert Pound’s demands of cultural
training, he did find an ambivalent place for the player-piano (thanks in
part to Antheil, who employed sixteen of them in Ballet Mécanique). The
pianola in Hugh Selwyn Mauberley is a symptom of cultural decadence, in
an essay on Dolmetsch, one of indiscriminate noise: ‘Our ears are passive
before the onslaught of gramophones and pianolas. By persuading our-
selves that we do not hear two-thirds of their abominable grind, we
persuade ourselves that we take pleasure in the remainder of what they
narrate’.19 On the other hand, the pianola rendered transparent the
mechanical nature of performance and made the pianola composer
a craftsman: people ‘going in for sheer pianola’, Pound writes, ‘have the
right spirit. They cut their rolls for the pianola itself, and make it play as
with two dozen fingers when necessary’ (‘Dolmetsch’, 38). Could the
pianola technology generate a patterned, anaphoric music (not unlike the
typography of Blast) without instrumentalizing the performer’s body?
Perhaps so, inasmuch as the pianola is a complex apparatus of writing
and craft, which replaced the ‘dozen fingers’ only to enable participatory
kinds of work. As Paul Saint-Amour writes:
Although it used its pneumatic lungs to replicate the work of fingers . . .
the pianola was dissevered neither from the voice nor from the mark: piano
rolls were crisscrossed with multiple forms of writing unique to the
medium, including the perforations that activated individual notes,
inked tempo and dynamics instructions for the operator, and song lyrics
for the benefit of singers. The pianola was proto-karaoke: not an acoustic
capture of a single vocal performance for later listening but a spur to
participatory singing.20
Thus the pianola isn’t just a modernized piano, but a reading of the piano
that ‘materialize[s] the piano’s self-understanding as mechanism’ (20). The
pianola’s ‘pneumatic’ physicality made it a suitable medium for the
Ballet Mécanique, which orchestrated the energies of the factory without
reducing the workers to mere reflex, and a medium for laying bare music’s
overdetermined textuality.
With both Dolmetsch’s lute and Antheil’s pianola, Pound reimagines an
unalienated process of musical labour: the timbre of the voice and the
instrument’s mediation of bodily gesture could be made to resonate in real
time. For Pound, as music evolved in bifurcated ways – towards archaic
troubadour settings and Antheilesque machine music – it needed to
recirculate back to musical sensations felt in the body. In a letter to
Bedford, Pound recounts a hearing of Claude Debussy’s Pelléas
et Mélisande (1902), an impressionist opera so lushly orchestrated
that Pound swore to ‘tear up the whole bloomin’ era of harmony and do
the thing if necessary on two tins and wash-board’ (GK 368). Pound’s
slippage between orchestration and ‘harmony’ suggests that Debussy’s
thick harmonies and the ‘mush’ of timbres both needed to be counteracted
with melodic lines, spare and clean. (Pound tips his hat to Debussy’s
settings of Villon, which he finds more robust.) Before composing the
opera, Pound asked Bedford for an orchestration textbook, certain that ‘the
damn thing wd. be wholly wrong’,21 but conceding that writing for real
instruments required intimacy with what they could do. He settled on
a tract by the Belgian composer Francois-Joseph Fétis, and Dolmetsch’s
Interpretation of the Music of the XVIIth and XVIIIth Centuries (1915).
Le Testament approaches the ambition of tins and washboard orchestra-
tion: its pared-down use of percussion, including the use of a ‘nose-flute’ to
represent prostitutes advertising their wares, underscores the opera’s sala-
cious themes and motivic rhythms, using only instruments that registered
the physicality of Villon’s texts. In Cavalcanti, Pound allowed himself
liberty to orchestrate more fully, but still wished to avoid obscuring the
words – especially for radio, where instrumental nuances would not all be
caught. The sounds of the body echo throughout the score. Hearing in
Villon’s verse an alternative to the ‘mist and mashed potatoes in the French
metric’ of fin-de-siècle concert chansons, Pound imagined the women’s
parts sung in ‘the nasal tone of tough, open-air singing’ – adding, ‘If only
Ethel Merman or Pinza would!’ (GK 368). Lotte Lenya might have been
another option; Brecht’s and Weill’s Threepenny Opera draws heavily on
Villon’s texts.22 The score of Heaulmière’s aria marks select passages as
sibilant and rasped, alternates between instructions to ‘laugh’ and ‘cry’, and
ends with a ‘clack of dry bones’ marking ‘the end of mortal beauty’. (Not
everything is coming up roses.) In Pound’s final chorus of hanged men,
Frères humains, the flesh, which has been ‘too much nourished’ with sex
64 josh epstein
and drink, is ‘scoured and cleansed’, ‘dried and blackened’ by wind and sun
and accompanied by violins rumbling col legno (striking the strings with
the wood of the bow; bar 93). With Villon’s choric pleas for heavenly
absolution (‘Mais priez Dieu que tous nous vueille absouldre’), echoed in
Canto LXXIV, the raspy acousmatic voice materializes the decaying vessel
in which it resonates.
It is hard to square the Antheil epigone with the Dolmetsch epigone, the
pianola lover with the pianola hater, though Le Testament works to
synthesize both sensibilities. Pound’s complex time signatures, resisting
the bar line, reinforce the modernity and the deep tradition involved in
music’s rhythmic drive. ‘The early students of harmony’, Pound wrote,
‘were so accustomed to thinking of music as something with a strong lateral
or horizontal motion that they never imagined any one, ANY ONE, could
be stupid enough to think of it as static. . . . They thought of music as
travelling rhythm going through points or barriers of pitch and pitch-
combinations’ (ATH 11). The troubadours offered Pound an ideal prece-
dent, as walking metonyms for verbal rhythm ‘travelling’ through the
resistant medium of pitches.
Proudly archaic and fashionably neoclassical, Le Testament seeks, as
Margaret Fisher writes, ‘to provoke his audience to heightened listening,
which he believed would lead de facto to individual insight synonymous
with self-edification’, building on the radio medium’s experiments with
perception and pedagogy.23 In Cavalcanti, likewise, we hear a process of
edification, as the eponymous poet teaches his pupil Ricco a ballad of exile,
containing a cypher to those waiting in Tuscany (‘Perch’io non spero’).
Instructing Ricco on how to enunciate his ‘Zs’ without buzzing, Cavalcanti
insists that these sounds need be internalized, not abstracted: ‘You’ve not
got to understand it; you’ve got to learn the damn thing’. Mind, body,
tongue and teeth must be retrained to vocalize precise relationships among
the sounds of words. As Cavalcanti joins with Ricco in the last phrase of
the ballad, ‘Anima e tu l’adora sempre nel suo valore’ (His soul must adore
the lady for her valor/value), the final ‘-e’ gives way to Cavalcanti’s death
gasp. Cavalcanti’s final exhalation of breath coincides with Ricco’s sob of
loyal shame (he confesses that he hasn’t learned the thing after all). If
beauty is difficult, it should not cease to be so after it has been internalized:
music should train performers not into unthinking repetition of pitches,
but into ongoing tension with the material.
This difficulty is felt deeply in Pound’s scores. Pound resisted the
notation of measures, and his reviews scold conductors and pianists for
their obsessive downbeats and palpable subdividing: ‘They have this
marvelous milimetric [sic] training; they can count the infinitesimal fractions
of the time-inch . . .. But . . . [t]heir ability to count, their metronomic
ability, has engulfed them, and they have become insensitive to shape’ (ATH
130–1). Yet if Pound resisted the metronomic machine as a tool of perfor-
mance, it had its place as reading tool: a poet ought to ‘Get a metronome and
learn HOW long the different syllables, and groups of them take’.24 To
reproduce the rhythms of speech one must measure them, and then remake
the measure from the inside. Pound anticipates those soundscape composers
who found that, to make music from environmental sound, one must first
quantify those sounds. Recall Pound’s fascination with L’Abbé Rousselot,
whose phonetic study of dialect led him to invent a ‘phonoscope’, which
inserted tubes into the nasal cavities to measure the durations and rhythms of
words, and the bodily aspiration that went into producing them. Much as
Antheil’s obsession with the pianola led to his co-invention, with one Hedy
Lamarr, of a frequency-hopping device, Rousselot’s phonoscope generated
new sonar technologies: ‘old Rousselot / . . . fished for sound in the Seine /
and led to detectors’ (C 492). Dialect might be dialectical, and machines
needn’t be mechanical. Like Pound’s Cavalcanti, Rousselot detected
a cypher in the buzz of words: if the ear could detect the quantitative
(temporal) and qualitative (timbral) dimensions of speech, music could
transmit them through the mediated historicity of form.
Returning to Pound’s comparison between the beat of a metronome and
the ‘sequence of a musical phrase’, one might expect Pound’s resistance to
the bar-line to have guided him into an archaic form without measures,
meters or tempi. In Le Testament, Pound, Bedford and Antheil instead
produced a score of alarming metronomic exactitude. An aria sung by
Heaulmière, an elderly prostitute lamenting her aging body, features shifts
from ‘5/8, 31/32 [?!], 4/8, 3/4, 5/8, 4/8, 4/8, 9/16, 15/32, 1/4, 9/8 containing
a triplet, 7/8, 5/4, and two bars without any numbers on ’em, containing 7/
16, and 1/2’. Performing this music, Pound half-joked, one could ‘tak[e]
refuge in the comparative simplicity of Einstein’s hexagonal theorem of the
indivisibility of abstract space by French mutton’.25 We have taken to an
involuted extreme Pound’s principle that the ‘time interval’ between
pitches must be ‘properly gauged’. In an addendum, Pound advised
performers to put accents where the words demand them, rather than
counting bar lines; he later revised the score into a consistent 5/8 meter.
These two kinds of discipline and training in play – the microrhythmic
training, the poet’s ear for the fluid arcs of phrasing – differently mediate
the passage of time. If the ‘metronomic’ score distorts the phrase, the music
enacted in performance will restore its shape. The exigencies of radio,
66 josh epstein
which distorted the Testament orchestrations, led Pound into further
condensation: ‘the radio version IF it has to be altered will be simplified
rather than amplified’.26 Notation serves both as a set of instructions for
enacting script into sound, and as an inscription for posterity; a future
reader, examining an inscribed score, could diachronically appreciate the
relations of pitch and rhythm that may be too intricate to hear, let alone to
perform, in real time. Pound’s precise quantitative notations seek both
permanence (in the inscribed musical text) and interpretive elasticity (in
the knowledge that these boundaries would yield to the process of
performance).
Musical notation functions as a ‘scoring’ in another sense of the term:
a perforation of the textual world that opens it out onto the external
soundscape. One might recollect Thomas Hardy’s ‘Darkling Thrush’:
‘The tangled bine-stems scored the sky / Like strings of broken lyres’;27
the material sounds of nature merge with the stringed instrument and,
scraping the sky, transduce those sounds through air. Pound links scoring
to the image of birds on wires in Canto LXXIX and LXXXII; and, in Canto
LXXV, the memory of Le Chant des oiseaux (ca. 1528), a choral piece by
Clément Janequin (re-scored for violin by Münch). As Pound gives these
sounds the form of an image – ‘an intellectual and emotional complex’
presented ‘in an instant of time’28 – his musical scoring indexes a process of
inscription, performance, and audition. In Canto LXXIX, after reflecting
that the ‘imprint of the intaglio depends / in part on what is pressed under
it’, Pound writes that ‘what matters [in discourse] is / to get it across e poi
basta’ (C 506); he then observes several birds rearranging themselves on
wires, which reminds him of the notational system of Guido d’Arezzo
(C 507). These natural sounds imprint the principle of ‘discourse’ onto the
‘scored’ text of the poem; here, too, music manifests Pound’s conflicted
attitudes towards mechanical reproducibility. If d’Arezzo’s notation system
atrophied the musician’s memory, it also enabled new ways of ‘getting it
across’. From d’Arezzo to the pianola, all musical notation is, in a sense,
‘proto-karaoke’.
As the birds reconfigure their positions, Canto LXXXII inscribes their
movement, transmitting natural process through the material media of text
and air:
f f
d
g
write the birds in their treble scale (C 545)
Pound’s typography renders this notation spatially, but no two bird
pitches align vertically: his emphasis on forward motion is maintained even
in this image, presented ‘in an instant of time’. It reads as a downward
arpeggio of a G-7 chord, but since the third (B or B-flat) is missing, its
harmonic content is vague, epiphenomenal to how pitches follow one
another in a ‘scale’. As Margaret Dunn observes, The Cantos put musical
scores of birdsong into ‘counterpoint’ with birds made to resemble musical
scores, culminating in ‘the essential union of poetry and music’ in Canto
LXXV.29 Counterpoint is a fugal subject of The Cantos, though Pound
avoided emphasizing it in Cavalcanti, fearing that it would ‘bitch the
music’ by obscuring the melodic line.30 But ‘some minds take pleasure in
counterpoint’ (C 505), which maps out music’s immanent complexities.
For Theodor Adorno, counterpoint is especially dialectical – disallowing
an uncritical absorption of harmony and constellating one’s relation to the
musical tradition.31 Pound would have been sympathetic to this argument,
but felt such complexity no less present in the single rhythmic line,
‘scoured and cleansed’ of harmonic excess.
The contradictions of musical scoring, poetic textuality and perfor-
mance are mediated by the physical sensation of sound. Pound’s depictions
of birds somewhat resembles the early ‘cinema of attractions’, which, as
Tom Gunning has shown, featured a ‘presentational’ aesthetic of playful
astonishment in the new medium.32 (Footage of Antheil’s musical riots, in
which Pound appears, had been prefabbed for Marcel L’Herbier’s film
L’Inhumaine [1924].) The connection to film, though loose, helps situate
music as an effect on the entire sensorium. In Le Mélomane (1903), a short
‘trick film’ by Georges Méliès, the director throws his own face onto
a musical staff (Fig. 1), which he conducts with the help of several female
assistants (holding placards of the pitches in solfège). Méliès’s technologi-
cal sleight-of-hand celebrates the cinema’s capacity to compensate for lack
of voice with multiple, redundant textual inscriptions.
The musical score in Canto LXXV likewise presents music as a system of
technological practices, underscoring the material stamp of inscription.
Ellen Stauder compares the concrete object of the score in Canto LXXV to
Adorno’s notion of the constellation – a refraction of the various processes
that language reduces away.33 Janequin’s score, in Münch’s hand, offers
a song ‘not of one bird, but of many’ – a line with not one but many
resonances. It describes a chorus of birds pared into a clean melodic line; it
acknowledges that Pound’s music is also Rudge’s, Bedford’s and Antheil’s;
it hopes that The Cantos might disperse the poet’s voice and contribute to
the making of culture tout court. If ‘the monument outlasts the bronze
68 josh epstein
Figure 1 From George Méliès, Le Mélomane (1903)
casting’ (ABCR 54), as Pound wrote of Münch’s Janequin reduction, the

process by which ‘monuments’ are made can be unfolded with every new
performance – if the work’s rhythms are true.
Pound’s gestures to music use the material elements of musical language
to turn inside-out its idealistic gestures, to re-inscribe musical tradition –
and the transformative process of composition – as part of the sensible
soundscape. His music works to reintegrate the sundered unities of verbal
and musical rhythm, notational complexity and performative elasticity. He
knew that these unities needed to be made rather than found, and that the
‘scouring and cleansing’ of form required a musical language patinated
with the labour of a body extended and multiplied, like Méliès’ head, by
the technologies of radio and telegraphy. Pound’s radiophonic voice –
a sinister acousmêtre and a performance of multiple rhetorical personae34 –
exposes the material consequences of his music. To discuss his music
without reference to the acoustic modernity that generated it is to abstract
musical sound as if it were immaterial. That is one error that Pound did not
make, among the many that he did.
Notes
* I am grateful to Scott Klein for allowing me to read his work in advance of
publication. I also wish to acknowledge my debts to the late Daniel Albright,
a scholar of perdurable imagination.
1. Daniel Albright, Untwisting the Serpent: Modernism in Music, Literature, and
Other Arts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 140.
2. R. Murray Schafer, The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of
Our World (Rochester: Destiny Books, 1993).
3. Robert Hughes and Margaret Fisher, Cavalcanti: A Perspective on the Music of
Ezra Pound (Emeryville: Second Evening Art, 2003), 44. Hereafter cited as
Cavalcanti.
4. This question is explored in Scott Klein’s “Like coins out of circulation”:
Reframing Ezra Pound’s Le Testament’, in The Edinburgh Companion to
Ezra Pound and the Arts, ed. Roxana Preda (Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, 2019), 334–46.
5. Pound, Le Testament: ‘Paroles de Villon’, ed. Margaret Fisher and Robert
Hughes (Emeryville: Second Evening Art, 2008).
6. Albright, Untwisting the Serpent, 146–7.
7. Brad Bucknell, Literary Modernism and Musical Aesthetics: Pater, Pound, Joyce,
and Stein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 57.
8. Brian Kane, Sound Unseen: Acousmatic Sound in Theory and Practice (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2014), 226.
9. Pound, ‘A Retrospect’ (1918), rpt. in Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed.
T. S. Eliot (New York: New Directions, 1954), 3.
10. Sam Halliday, Sonic Modernity: Representing Sound in Literature, Culture and
the Arts (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013), notes Pound’s fasci-
nation with the relationships among pitch, tempo and rhythm.
11. Bucknell, Literary Modernism, 57.
12. See Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1973), 75.
13. On Antheil’s embrace of these public scandals, see my Sublime Noise: Musical
Culture and the Modernist Writer (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
2014). See also Emily Thompson’s discussion of Antheil and urban noise in
The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of
Listening in America, 1900–1933 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004), 141ff.
14. Edith Sitwell, ‘Ezra Pound’, rpt. in An Examination of Ezra Pound, ed. Peter
Russell (New York: Gordian, 1973), 45.
15. Rpt. in Ezra Pound and Music: The Complete Criticism, ed. R. Murray Schafer
(New York: New Directions, 1977), 30–5.
16. Pound, ‘Arnold Dolmetsch’, The New Age (7 January 1915), rpt. in EPM,
35–40, 39. Hereafter cited as ‘Dolmetsch’.
17. See Pound’s review of a 1918 BBC Proms performance of Mozart, Beethoven
and MacDowell, in The New Age (19 September 1918): 335. Rpt. in EPM, 124–6.
18. ‘The Pye-ano’, The New Age (1 January 1920): 144–5. Rpt. in EPM, 206.
70 josh epstein
19. Pound, ‘Arnold Dolmetsch’ (The Egoist, August 1917), pp. 104–5, rpt. in EPM 47.
20. Paul Saint-Amour, ‘Ulysses Pianola’, PMLA 130.1 (2015), 17.
21. Letter from Pound to Bedford, 5 May 1921, quoted in Cavalcanti, 16.
22. On Le Testament and Threepenny Opera, see Albright, Untwisting, 139ff.
23. Margaret Fisher, Ezra Pound’s Radio Operas: The BBC Experiments, 1931–1933
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 100. Fisher links Pound’s work to other
experimenters in the medium (e.g., Brecht, Arnheim, Marinetti).
24. Pound to Mary Barnard (2 December 1933), qtd. in A. David Moody,
Ezra Pound, Poet, Vol. II: The Epic Years, 1921–1939, 2nd ed. (Oxford:
25. Qtd. in Cavalcanti, 30–1.
26. Letter to Agnes Bedford (28 August 1932), qtd. in Cavalcanti, 57.
27. Thomas Hardy, ‘The Darkling Thrush’ (1900), Selected Poems, ed. Robert
Mezey (London: Penguin, 1998), 33–4, lines 3–4.
28. Pound, ‘A Retrospect’, 9.
29. Margaret Dunn, ‘Eine Kleine Wortmusik: The Marriage of Poetry and Music
in the Pisan Cantos’, Perspectives on Contemporary Literature 13 (1987), 108.
30. On the Cantos’ ‘fugal’ properties, and the limitations of this analogy, see
Stephen J. Adams, ‘Are the Cantos a Fugue?’ University of Toronto Quarterly
45.1 (1975), 67–74.
31. Theodor Adorno, ‘The Function of Counterpoint in New Music’, in Sound
Figures (1959), trans. Rodney Livingstone (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 1999), 123–44.
32. Tom Gunning, ‘The Cinema of Attraction: Early Film, its Spectator, and the
Avant-Garde’, Wide Angle 8.3–4 (1986), 63–70.
33. Ellen Keck Stauder, ‘“Without an Ear of His Own”: Pound’s Janequin in
Canto 75’, Quaderni di Palazzo Serra 15 (2008), 257–77.
34. On Pound’s radio personae in relation to ‘treason’, see Matthew Feldman’s
excellent essay ‘Pound and Radio Treason: An Empirical Reassessment’, in
Broadcasting in the Modernist Era, ed. Feldman, Henry Mead and Erik
Tonning (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 213–44.
W OR KS C I T ED
Adams, Stephen J., ‘Are the Cantos a Fugue?’ University of Toronto Quarterly 45.1
(1975), 67–74.
Adorno, Theodor, ‘The Function of Counterpoint in New Music’, in Sound
Figures, trans. Rodney Livingstone, 123–44 (1959; Stanford: Stanford
Albright, Daniel, Untwisting the Serpent: Modernism in Music, Literature, and
Other Arts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).
Bucknell, Brad, Literary Modernism and Musical Aesthetics: Pater, Pound, Joyce, and
Stein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
Dunn, Margaret, ‘Eine Kleine Wortmusik: The Marriage of Poetry and Music in
the Pisan Cantos’, Perspectives on Contemporary Literature 13 (1987), 101–9.
Epstein, Josh, Sublime Noise: Musical Culture and the Modernist Writer (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014).
Feldman, Matthew, ‘Pound and Radio Treason: An Empirical Reassessment’, in
Broadcasting in the Modernist Era, ed. Feldman, Henry Mead and
Erik Tonning, 213–44 (London: Bloomsbury, 2015).
Fisher, Margaret, Ezra Pound’s Radio Operas: The BBC Experiments, 1931–1933
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002).
Gunning, Tom, ‘The Cinema of Attraction: Early Film, its Spectator, and the
Avant-Garde’, Wide Angle 8.3–4 (1986), 63–70.
Halliday, Sam, Sonic Modernity: Representing Sound in Literature, Culture and the
Arts (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013).
Hardy, Thomas ‘The Darkling Thrush’ (1900), in Selected Poems, ed.
Robert Mezey, 33–4 (London: Penguin, 1998).
Hughes, Robert, and Margaret Fisher, Cavalcanti: A Perspective on the Music of
Ezra Pound (Emeryville: Second Evening Art, 2003).
Kane, Brian, Sound Unseen: Acousmatic Sound in Theory and Practice (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2014).
Kenner, Hugh, The Pound Era (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973).
Klein, Scott ‘“Like coins out of circulation”: Reframing Ezra Pound’s Le
Testament’, in The Edinburgh Companion to Ezra Pound and the Arts, ed.
Roxana Preda, 334–46 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019).
Moody, A. David, Ezra Pound, Poet, Vol. II: The Epic Years, 1921–1939, 2nd ed.
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).
Pound, Ezra, ABC of Reading (New York: New Directions, 1960).
Antheil and the Treatise on Harmony (New York: Da Capo Press, 1968).
Ezra Pound and Music: The Complete Criticism, ed. R. Murray Schafer
(New York: New Directions, 1977).
Guide to Kulchur (New York: New Directions, 1970).
‘A Retrospect’, in Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. T. S. Eliot, 3–14 (New York:
New Directions, 1954).
Le Testament: ‘Paroles de Villon’, ed. Margaret Fisher and Robert Hughes
(Emeryville: Second Evening Art, 2008).
Saint-Amour, Paul, ‘Ulysses Pianola’, PMLA 130.1 (2015), 15–36.
Schafer, R. Murray, The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of Our
World (Rochester: Destiny Books, 1993).
Sitwell, Edith, ‘Ezra Pound’, in An Examination of Ezra Pound, ed. Peter Russell,
37–65 (New York: Gordian, 1973).
Stauder, Ellen Keck, ‘“Without an Ear of His Own”: Pound’s Janequin in Canto
75’, Quaderni di Palazzo Serra 15 (2008), 257–77.
Thompson, Emily, The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the
Culture of Listening in America, 1900–1933 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004).
chapter 5
The Visual Field

Beyond Vorticism
Rebecca Beasley
In the introduction to her recent study Reading Cy Twombly, Mary Jacobus

sets her interpretation of the artist’s work against those of critics who read
the names, titles and quotations in his paintings as, on the one hand, self-
expressive (‘sighs, expressions of pleasure or regret’), and on the other,
directed towards the creation of a repository of cultural memory. ‘As
opposed to a high-humanizing reading of Twombly’s art’, she writes, ‘I
want to sidestep the debate in order to recover the specifically twentieth-
century avant-garde context for his practice of quotation and allusion – his
anthology – by tracing its relation to American literary Modernism, and in
particular, Ezra Pound’. Twombly briefly attended Black Mountain
College, encountering Pound’s writings and ideas through Charles
Olson, and Jacobus turns to Pound’s ABC of Reading (1934) as
a particularly clarifying lens through which to read Twombly.
Comparison with Pound’s treatise shows how Twombly’s art can also be
read as a pedagogic programme, a series of translations and above all an
anthology:
Pound’s ABC of Reading defines poetry as condensation (Dichten =
Condensare). Pound illustrates this principle with a brief history of disor-
dered texts and compendia (Homer, the Bible, Noh plays) that have been
improved over time by their editors, by emperors – and by their translators.
The Twombly anthology privileges poetry’s diasporic movement. Poetic
composition (dichten) equals displacement; art involves translation and
travel, including time-travel.1
That ABC of Reading can be used as a tool to highlight ‘poetry’s diasporic

movement’ in Twombly’s painting, triggering ‘displacement’, ‘translation’
and ‘travel’, encapsulates something of the changes in recent criticism
about Pound and the visual field.
Pound’s poetry has long been read in the context of the visual field.
Knowledge of Pound’s interest in quattrocento sculpture and architecture,
72
The Visual Field 73
his involvement in Wyndham Lewis’s art movement vorticism and his
admiration for the sculpture of Constantin Brancusi has encouraged
many critics to look for influences and draw analogies. More signifi-
cantly, during the second decade of the twentieth century, Pound devel-
oped a critical vocabulary deeply indebted to art criticism to describe his
own work and that of his literary contemporaries. In a series of essays
written over 1914 and 1915, Pound wrought a formalist vocabulary that
drew its terminology from James McNeill Whistler’s The Gentle Art of
Making Enemies (1890), Laurence Binyon’s The Flight of the Dragon
(1911), the manifestos of the Italian Futurists and the vorticists, and the
writings about post-impressionism by Clive Bell, Huntly Carter and
Roger Fry.2 Pound added to this lexicon throughout his life, but it was
the art and aesthetics of Lewis, Gaudier-Brzeska and Brancusi that he
endorsed repeatedly.
Early criticism of Pound’s poetry understandably followed Pound’s lead.
In one of the first reviews of A Draft of XXX Cantos (1930), Dudley Fitts
argued that ‘a key to Mr Pound’s method’ could be found in Antheil and
the Treatise on Harmony, which Pound had published three years before.
Fitts quoted part of the passage in which Pound distinguished between
‘two aesthetic ideals’: ‘the Wagnerian’ in which ‘you confuse the spectator
by smacking as many of his senses as possible at every possible moment’,
and ‘the other aesthetic [that] has been approved by Brancusi, Lewis, the
vorticist manifestos’.3 Pound wrote that the latter ‘aims at focussing the
mind on a given definition of form, or rhythm, so intensely that it becomes
not only more aware of that given form, but more sensitive to all other
forms, rhythms, defined places, or masses. It is a scaling of eye-balls,
a castigating or purging of aural cortices; a sharpening of verbal appercep-
tions’. Reading The Cantos as a product of this aesthetic enabled one to
read ‘the poem as a poem’, rather than ‘a sort of historico-archæological
cypher’, wrote Fitts. ‘History and literature are for [Pound] a mine of
images, and his purpose is to fix certain of these images in a lasting, orderly
design, without reference to a philosophy or to any system of teleological
principles’. The Cantos interpreted through imagism and vorticism could
be promoted as ‘an epic of timelessness’, as ‘pure poetry’.4 Fitts’s use
of Pound’s visual analogies was repeated and developed in the major
commentaries on Pound’s poetry that appeared over the following years,
which established the critical parameters, not only for reading Pound, but
modernism more generally. Visual analogies underpinned Hugh Kenner’s
account of the ‘patterned energies’ in Pound’s poetry (in The Poetry of
Ezra Pound) and modernist literature (in The Pound Era), and also Joseph
74 rebecca beasley
Frank’s immensely influential argument that ‘modern literature . . . is
moving in the direction of spatial form’.5
The history of such readings presents a problem that still profoundly
shapes today’s criticism. One way of characterizing the last thirty years
of Pound studies would be to see it as a determined dismantling of the
implications of these early statements, which aligned the formalist
aesthetic Pound derived from ‘Brancusi, Lewis, the vorticist manifestos’
to values of order, ahistoricism and individualism. In the 1970s and early
1980s, this took the form of a general reaction against modernism, but in
the mid-1980s revived interest in Pound included significant work on the
visual arts. Harriet Zinnes’s anthology of Pound’s writing on the visual arts
made available previously obscure articles, and Charles Altieri, Andrew
Clearfield, Reed Way Dasenbrock, Michael North and Marjorie Perloff
explored Pound’s poetry through the lenses of cubism, collage, vorticism,
classicist architecture and sculpture, and futurism, respectively. In 1984 the
Tate Gallery held an exhibition of Pound’s Artists, accompanied by a book
of the same name.6 Produced during and in the wake of the theory wars,
these works no longer read The Cantos as embodying ‘order’ but ‘indeter-
minacy’; the poem was no longer ‘an epic of timelessness’ but ‘a poem
including history’.7 Returning Pound’s poetry and Pound himself to
history has been the dominant project of Pound studies during the last
fifteen to twenty years: the turn from analysis of Pound’s aesthetic pre-
dilections to his political and economic affiliations has been decisive and
welcome.
While returning to Pound’s aesthetics may seem like a retrograde move,
it is the inevitable and necessary consequence of the new information and
perspectives that post-structuralist, Marxist, postmodernist and new mod-
ernist studies have provided. There is still much to discover about Pound’s
interests, especially outside the well-worked vorticist period, as Frances
Dickey’s chapters on Pound in The Modern Portrait Poem (2012) have
effectively demonstrated.8 It is striking that the starting point for much
recent criticism is a critique of the New Critical conception of modernism
as ‘spatial form’, and in particular the ideological affiliations its formalism
imported into readings of modernism. (Dudley Fitts’s review was pub-
lished in the Hound & Horn, an early vehicle for the emerging voices of the
New Critics and their associates.9) Criticism that deals with Pound’s
interaction with the visual field therefore typically detaches both Pound’s
modernism and the visual modernism of the period from the ideological
ends they frequently served in the mid-twentieth century. Jacobus makes
a representative move when she states that ‘the Twombly anthology can
The Visual Field 75
best be understood in relation to the history of American avant-garde
poetics and pedagogy, rather than being subsumed into the New Critical
reading-protocols to which they gave rise’.10
The most sustained analysis of Pound’s place in this story has been
conducted by Greg Barnhisel in his two books James Laughlin, New
Directions and the Remaking of Ezra Pound (2005) and the recent Cold
War Modernists (2015), which contains a chapter on Pound’s publication in
Perspectives USA, the journal of Intercultural Publications Inc., headed
by Pound’s publisher James Laughlin and funded by the Ford Foundation.
Barnhisel’s meticulous research tells the story of how a disparate set of
experimental movements in the arts were made over by networks of
publishers, academics, the mass media, cultural foundations, and govern-
ment agencies as ‘modernism’, an identifiable style used as a weapon in the
Cold War to represent American freedom, individualism and cultural
superiority. Though the focus of both books is primarily literary – indeed,
it is the literary side of a story to which art historians have paid much more
attention – Cold War Modernists in particular demonstrates how important
the visual arts were to the way modernist literature was characterized. At
the Museum of Modern Art, Alfred H. Barr made a cross-disciplinary
modernism palatable to the general public: his popular exhibitions, cata-
logues and books ‘put a crack in modernism’s antiestablishment, antibour-
geois façade, as did his choice to bring modernism together with the worlds
of media (Vanity Fair’s Frank Crowninshield) and business and plutocracy
(founding donors the Rockefellers) on MoMA’s board’; Clement
Greenberg’s definition of modernist art as primarily preoccupied with its
own medium was part of what ‘defanged the radicalism of early modern-
ism’; and magazines like Perspectives USA strategically placed abstract art
alongside modernist writing to promote a version of modernism defined by
the formal experiments available to free individuals.11
In Pound studies, the critical response to this reconfiguration of the
relationship between literary and visual modernisms can be divided into
two strands. The first traces the ideological commitments in Pound’s
poetry and prose to recover the relationship between his aesthetics and
politics before his mid-century canonization. Works such as Vincent
Sherry’s Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis and Radical Modernism (1993),
Douglas Mao’s Solid Objects (1998) and more recently my own
Ezra Pound and the Visual Culture of Modernism (2007), David Barnes’s
The Venice Myth (2014) and Lisa Siraganian’s Modernism’s Other Work
(2012) have all sought to reappraise literary interactions with the visual
field. Sherry’s work traced Pound’s and Lewis’s prioritizing of the visual
76 rebecca beasley
sense and the terms of their rhetoric to a tradition of anti-democratic
thought they encountered in the criticism of Julien Benda, Remy de
Gourmont, Ortega y Gasset and Wilhelm Worringer. His research demon-
strated that Pound’s and Lewis’s ‘aesthetic material – painted image,
spoken (or printed) word – spelled the language of a new political dis-
course, one in which the forces of social reaction and artistic liberation
found a single vocabulary’.12 My own work undertook a related task: like
Sherry, I was interested in the political investments of Pound’s ostensibly
aesthetic writings, but I was also interested in excavating the particular art
works, exhibitions, essays and conversations from which, I argued, Pound
defined literary modernism in influentially visual terms.13 In the substantial
sections about Pound in The Venice Myth, David Barnes reappraises the
place of Venice in Pound’s writing, and in doing so provides a path-
breaking account of the influence Fascist visual culture had on the most
apparently ahistorical, paradisal sections of The Cantos.14
While Sherry, Barnes and I were primarily interested in the way the
visual field informed Pound’s language – critical and poetic – Mao and
Siraganian examined what happens when a literary work is confronted with
the ‘thingly opacity’ of the object, including the art objects of paintings and
sculptures. Mao’s book undertook to question the then still dominant
critical position that modernism was defined by its antipathy towards the
commodity, by examining ‘modernism’s extraordinary generative fascina-
tion with the object understood neither as commodity . . . nor as
symbol . . ., but as “object”, where any or all of the resonances of this
complexly polysemous word might apply’. His wide-ranging chapter
on Pound complicated the facile equation of The Cantos’ difficulty
with Pound’s fascism, by arguing that the resistant text is not, in itself,
an antidemocratic move, but rather an attempt to establish the poem as an
object, or collection of objects, whose allure would appeal to the reader
determined and able to learn from the past.15 Like Mao, Siraganian
revisited debates about the modernist art work as an autonomous object
not to deny the centrality of aesthetic autonomy for modernism, but to
redefine it: she argued that, contra New Critical and Adornian interpreta-
tions of modernism, ‘autonomous art objects are imagined not as distinct
from the world generally but distinct from spectators or readers particu-
larly’. Modernism’s key debate, she argues, is not about realism, but ‘the
relevance of the reader or spectator to a text’s meaning’. Though Pound is
not a primary subject of Siraganian’s chapters, his writing about the art
object is a major point of reference for her, particularly in her discussion of
Williams.16
The Visual Field 77
Mao’s and Siraganian’s elaborations of the poem’s objecthood are
related to a cluster of works informed by art history and museology.
Catherine Paul’s Poetry in the Museums of Modernism was the first to
think through the significance of Pound’s use of museums, archives and
galleries, and his remarks that connected the practice of poetry to the
exhibition of visual art works and objects. Like Barnhisel’s, Paul’s work
draws on the art historical criticism that pioneered analyses of mid-century
formalism, deploying the tools of critical museology to interrogate Pound’s
poetry. Paul argues that, influenced by the curators of the museums and
galleries he frequented, Pound adopts the selective, educative ‘exhibition-
ary method’ that had replaced the nineteenth-century conception of the
museum as storehouse, ‘fashion[ing] himself into a modernist in the
Round Reading Room of the British Museum Library’. The Cantos pre-
sents exhibits from history that not only testify to the taste of the poet-
curator who has chosen them, but promise to cultivate a knowledge of
culture and an appreciation of its monuments in its readers. Not surpris-
ingly, we encounter Alfred H. Barr again here – but where in Barnhisel’s
work his exhibition of modernism at MoMA appears as a causal factor in
the Cold War version of modernism, it is instructive to note that in Paul’s
chronologically earlier-focused discussion, it appears as an effect of early
twentieth-century museum culture, an effect whose relation to modernist
poetry can be readily discerned in Paul’s description: ‘Building on the
trend toward isolating artworks for close viewing, Barr used pale neutral
wall coverings; moved away from skying (the practice of covering gallery
walls from floor to ceiling with pictures); and left plenty of space between
pictures, all hung at eye-level . . .. And although Barr is known for his
didactic labels, which taught visitors how to appreciate modern art, those
labels always facilitate aesthetic appreciation over pure historical learning’.
In this form, Pound’s oft-repeated opposition between beauty and philol-
ogy is repeated on the walls of MoMA.17 Paul’s recent book Fascist
Directive (2016) is concerned wholly with Pound but less with the visual
field, though it revisits some of the earlier book’s questions in the context
of Pound’s engagement with Fascist culture. In particular, Paul gives
greater precision to the oft-made point that Pound’s poetry and prose
became more didactic in form as well as content after he committed
himself to the support of Italian Fascism. She traces this shift to 1937,
during the height of Fascist sponsorship of culture, and the year Pound
wrote Guide to Kulchur (1938), ‘his first prose work to exemplify a truly
Fascist methodology’. The change in the way Pound sought to disseminate
information, Paul argues, followed a change of approach in Fascist
78 rebecca beasley
propaganda following Mussolini’s declaration of Italy’s ‘Fascist Empire’
in 1936, exemplified in the difference between the two exhibitions: the
Mostra della Rivoluzione Fascista in 1932 and the Mostra Augustea della
Romanità in 1938. Pound’s earlier method of exhibition, which Paul had
related to the British Museum and avant-garde art galleries, offered up
‘Luminous Details’ selected from the archive of history to the interpreta-
tion of the reader. Guide to Kulchur and subsequently the Pisan Cantos are
made up of remembered details rather than original quotations, and are
no longer so interested in the original ‘document but the significance of
the document’ in the larger narrative. Paul points out that the Mostra
Augustea della Romanità marked a similar shift from a method of
exhibition that could embrace eclecticism and modernism to one that
presented a single imperialist narrative: the exhibition’s layout and object
labels subordinated the viewer’s interpretation to a dominant narrative of
Mussolini’s restoration of Italy’s empire, and casts and models replaced
original artefacts – like Pound, valuing ‘the newly created whole over its
pieces’.18
Jeremy Braddock’s Collecting as Modernist Practice also contributes to
this interpretation of modernist literature through the lens of the cultural
institutions, in this case ‘the privately assembled, but publicly exhibited, art
collection and the interventionist literary anthology’. But where Paul and,
to a certain extent, Mao see the museum collection and its contents as
having provided a model for the form of the modernist text (The Cantos as
collection of objects, a museum or an art gallery), Braddock is interested in
the practice of collection rather than the form of the collection itself. Like
Siraganian, Braddock focuses on the relationship between the audience
and the artwork, and his argument is that the practice of collecting
modernist art or anthologizing modernist poems is, if not an ‘institution
of modernism’ in the sense coined by Lawrence Rainey, then a ‘provisional
institution’, a means of ‘modeling and creating the conditions of modern-
ism’s reception’. The anthology that both epitomized and signalled the end
of the interventionist anthology was A Survey of Modernist Poetry (1927),
edited by Laura Riding and Robert Graves, which famously set out the
principles against which ‘modernist poetry’ could be defined, including the
principles of ahistoricism, autonomy and primacy of form that would be
taken up by the New Critics. Those very principles, Braddock argues,
dictated their rejection of the Georgian and imagist anthologies that had
established the practice of anthologizing as central to modernism.
Braddock’s interest in Pound, therefore, is primarily as the editor of Des
Imagistes (1914) and Catholic Anthology (1915), and though the introduction
The Visual Field 79
contains an interesting discussion of the dispersal of the art collection of
John Quinn, Pound's friend and patron, Braddock resists making direct
comparisons between the imagist anthologies and the Barnes Foundation
or the Phillips Memorial Gallery that are the focus of other chapters.
Nevertheless, their juxtaposition reiterates how closely related the processes
of canonization and professionalization were in this period’s literary and
visual fields.19
The ideological agency of museums and art galleries is also central to the
two last books that should be mentioned in this account of reappraisals
of Pound’s aesthetics: Rupert Arrowsmith’s Modernism and the Museum
(2010) and John R. Williams’s The Buddha in the Machine (2014). Like
Paul, both Arrowsmith and Williams revisit Pound’s interactions with the
British Museum. But their major interest is somewhat different from those
of the books discussed so far: their reappraisal of Pound’s (and other
modernists’) careers is achieved less by asking different questions of the
same body of work than it is by bringing to the fore a large terrain
of Pound’s visual experience still under researched: that of East Asian
art. Pound’s engagement with East Asian art and literature is well
known, and his friendship with Laurence Binyon and work on the papers
of the Ernest Fenollosa, two of the leading experts in East Asian art in
Britain and the United States respectively, have been the subject of much
discussion, notably by David Ewick, Sanehide Kodama, Zhaoming Qian,
Qiyao Wu and Ming Xie.20 Most discussion has focused on literary or
broadly cultural influences, but Qian’s 2003 study, The Modernist Response
to Chinese Art: Pound, Moore, Stevens, turned the focus to the visual arts,
and Arrowsmith and Williams take up a variety of questions first raised
there, presenting substantial new material. Arrowsmith’s is a remarkably
persistent investigation into what Pound and his cultural network saw,
read and learned in the British Museum that effectively demonstrates how
much more there is still to be learned about the period’s visual culture from
museum archives, advertisements, photographs and memoirs: his book
teems with discoveries of sources for the images and themes of Pound’s
poetry.21 Williams argues that ‘American art and literature have been
shaped as much by resistance to technology as by submission to it’ and
that resistance has frequently taken the form of ‘a compelling fantasy that
would posit Eastern aesthetics as both the antidote to and the perfection of
machine culture’. Pound’s editing of The Chinese Written Character as
Medium for Poetry is a signal instance for Williams, who demonstrates in
compelling detail how Pound’s editing – during the height of his involve-
ment with vorticism – transforms Fenollosa’s argument for the machine
80 rebecca beasley
age. The chapter is particularly valuable for its account of Fenollosa’s career
as an art historian and curator – here, not an aid to understanding Pound’s
poetry, but rather a central contributor to debates about technology and art
that shaped the twentieth century.22
The other major strand that has emerged in studies of Pound and the
visual field deliberately expands that field beyond the visual forms histori-
cally most strongly associated with Pound and with modernism – sculpture
and painting – to analyse the role of technology and new media. Pound’s
career contains several examples of his direct engagement with new visual
technologies – most obviously, the invention of ‘vortography’ with the
photographer Alvin Langdon Coburn in 1916, and collaboration with
George Antheil, Fernand Léger, Dudley Murphy and Man Ray on the
film Ballet Mécanique in 1923–4.23 Pound’s epistolary friendship with
Marshall McLuhan, and McLuhan’s influence on Hugh Kenner
(McLuhan introduced Kenner to Pound in 1948, and is the dedicatee of
The Poetry of Ezra Pound), ensured that Pound’s predilection for techno-
logical vocabulary and analogy was noted by his early critics, and taken up
for discussion in the new work on modernism and technology that began
to appear in the 1990s, such as Tim Armstrong’s Modernism, Technology,
and the Body (1998).24 In this sense, despite the formalism of some of his
own writings and that of his early critics, which would seem to align him to
a Greenbergian definition of modernism against which new media critics
typically define themselves, Pound’s poetry has always been simultaneously
available to a more technophilic version of modernism, in which ‘the
medium-specific fantasies and feelings that patterned modernism’s culture’
are read ‘as evidence of historical response instead of formalist evasion’, in
Mark Goble’s words.25
Both Goble in Beautiful Circuits (2010) and Jessica Pressman in Digital
Modernism (2014) emphasise the connections between McLuhan, Kenner
and modernism in their rationale for re-reading modernism through media
studies: ‘McLuhan established media studies by reading the contemporary
period through the lens of modernism and by adapting New Critical
reading practices to approach and analyze electronic media’, remarks
Pressman; ‘there is no mistaking that [Kenner’s and McLuhan’s] relation-
ship connects modernism’s culture and aesthetics to a faith in commu-
nication, which is not something we always think it wanted’, writes
Goble.26 For Goble, The Cantos, along with other modernist experiments
in historiography by Williams and Oppen, is exemplary of a desire to create
a ‘perfectly mediated history’ triggered by the period’s ‘medium fetish for
photography’.27Goble’s arguments have some affinities with Julian
The Visual Field 81
Murphet’s slightly earlier Multimedia Modernism, which proposed to
‘rewrite literary history . . . as a sedimented trace-history of the competing
media institutions of the moment’. In his ingenious account of imagism,
Murphet sees Pound reacting to the use of sentiment in visual advertising
and film by eviscerating poetry of its conventional affective ploys, and
managing to modernize it (to make it more efficient and direct) by using
the technique of cinema itself – the cinematic cut, or juxtaposition.
Vorticism, he argues, is a similarly near-suicidal reaction to the new
forms of media: visual art, such as Lewis’s drawing The Vorticist (1912),
becomes abstract, a ‘sacrificial absorption and binding of the shock pro-
duced by the mechanical media’, and at the same time Blast’s literature
draws attention to its materiality – though in a somewhat different way
from that explored by Mao and Siraganian: a ‘deliberate de-sacralization of
the poetic word’. Blast appears here as a ‘putsch on behalf of . . . painting’,
an attempt by Lewis to establish its authority on its own terms, rather than
those of literature (narrative, representation), but one that fails, and in the
process restores poetry to a more powerful level. The ‘multimedia
aesthetic’ Pound’s essays establish for vorticism demonstrates poetry’s
ability to absorb its sister arts and mediate between them within the
media system.28 Pressman’s Digital Modernism bears this argument out
in its analysis of the way contemporary digital media has made use of
modernist poetry – and Pound, she asserts, is a ‘central figure’, not only in
the influence his poetry on later writers, but in bequeathing an under-
standing of literature as ‘an act of recovery and renovation’ rather than an
assertion of novelty (literature is ‘news that STAYS news’). Her third
chapter analyses the digital work Dakota by the artist duo Young-hae
Chang Heavy Industries, who described it in an interview as ‘based on
a close reading of Ezra Pound’s Cantos I and first part of II’. Pressman
demonstrates how closely the road-trip narrative adapts Pound’s account
of Odysseus’s journey, arguing that just as Pound begins The Cantos with
an adaptation of the most ancient work of literature, so YHCHI draw upon
a work created at the start of the new media epoch: ‘YHCHI draw upon
a past that, although not ancient, is the origin of their aesthetic and
technological present’. More importantly, though, Pressman explores the
significance of Dakota as ‘based on a close reading’. Pound’s first canto
ends by naming and putting aside Andreas Divus’s translation of the
Odyssey, the text Pound’s canto has read closely, and Dakota too ends by
naming and putting aside its source of Pound’s Cantos, the 1973 Norton
Anthology edited by Richard Ellmann. For Pressman, this is an invitation
to close reading – an emphasis on the literary aspect of the digital work,
82 rebecca beasley
a registering of the poem as autonomous art object – and at the same time
a refutation of applying traditional literary critical techniques to electronic
literature. Ellmann is put aside, and the speed of the flashing text makes
close reading impossible.29
I have subtitled this chapter ‘Beyond Vorticism’ to indicate how far
criticism has moved away from the excessive focus of early studies on this
one element of Pound’s engagement with the visual field. But it is worth
noting in closing that during the last fifteen years, vorticism itself has been
reappraised in two excellent exhibitions. Jonathan Black’s Blasting the
Future (2004) at the Estorick Collection in London and the Whitworth
Art Gallery in Manchester focused in particular on the influence of Italian
Futurism, and Mark Antliff’s and Vivien Greene’s The Vorticists at the
Nasher Museum of Art, Duke, the Peggy Guggenheim Museum in Venice
and Tate Britain in London took its lead from the three original vorticist
exhibitions and Blast. While acknowledging Pound’s role (Antliff and
Greene’s exhibition generated important new work on Pound’s contribu-
tion by Antliff and Greene themselves, and Allan Antliff and Anne
McCauley), the exhibitions and their accompanying publications decisi-
vely moved discussion away from the agon of Pound and Wyndham
Lewis.30 It is, I think, not a coincidence that studies of vorticism have
become less focused on Pound during the same period that Pound studies
has engaged with works, artists, media and theories of the visual field
beyond vorticism.
The visual field provides more than a set of analogies for Pound’s
style. His poetry may invite comparison with abstract painting, mod-
ernist sculpture, collage and hypertext, but such analogies are only
symptoms of more fundamental relations. Modernist art provided
a formal model and set of ideological commitments; new exhibition
practices suggested a different relationship between the viewer and the
artwork; the mass media of photography and cinema presented
a fundamental challenge; and digital art works indicate where
Pound’s legacy may lie.
Notes
I am grateful to Flair Donglai Shi and Yuka Tokuyama for invaluable research
assistance that contributed to this essay.
1. Mary Jacobus, Reading Cy Twombly: Poetry in Paint (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2016), 3, 6.
The Visual Field 83
2. See especially ‘Vorticism’, Fortnightly Review 96 (1914), [461]–71, and
‘Affirmations, IV: As for Imagisme’, New Age 16 (1915), 349–50.
3. Ezra Pound, Antheil and the Treatise on Harmony (Chicago: Covici, 1927), 44.
4. Dudley Fitts, ‘Music Fit for the Odes’ [rev. of Ezra Pound, A Draft of XXX
Cantos], Hound & Horn 4 (1930–1), 278, 284–6.
5. Hugh Kenner, The Poetry of Ezra Pound (London: Faber & Faber, 1951),
233–4; Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1971), 145–62; and Joseph Frank, ‘Spatial Form in Modern
Literature’, Sewanee Review 53 (1945), 225.
6. Ezra Pound and the Visual Arts, ed. Harriet Zinnes (New York: New
Directions, 1980); Charles Altieri, Painterly Abstraction in Modernist
American Poetry: The Contemporaneity of Modernism (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1989); Andrew Clearfield, These Fragments
I Have Shored: Collage and Montage in Early Modernist Poetry (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Research Press, 1984); Reed Way Dasenbrock, The
Literary Vorticism of Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis: Towards the Condition
of Painting (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985); Michael
North, The Final Sculpture: Public Monuments and Modern Poets (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1985); Marjorie Perloff, The Futurist Moment:
Avant-Garde, Avant Guerre, and the Language of Rupture (Chicago: Chicago
University Press, 1986) and The Poetics of Indeterminacy: From Rimbaud to
Cage (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981); Tate Gallery, Pound’s
Artists: Ezra Pound and the Visual Arts in London, Paris and Italy (London:
Tate Gallery, 1985).
7. Ezra Pound, ‘Date Line’, in Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. T. S. Eliot
(New York: New Directions, 1954), 86.
8. Frances Dickey, The Modern Portrait Poem: From Dante Gabriel Rossetti to
Ezra Pound (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2012).
9. In the winter 1931 issue, Fitts’s article on A Draft of XXX Cantos is followed by
Allen Tate (on Ash Wednesday), R. P. Blackmur (on Santayana’s The Realm of
Matter) and Yvor Winters (on Katherine Anne Porter’s Flowering Judas). See
Leonard Greenbaum, The Hound & Horn: The History of a Literary Quarterly
(The Hague: Mouton & Co, 1966), 125–59.
10. Jacobus, Reading Cy Twombly, 20.
11. Greg Barnhisel, James Laughlin, New Directions, and the Remaking of
Ezra Pound (Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2005);
Gregory Barnhisel, Cold War Modernists: Art, Literature, and American
Cultural Diplomacy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), 31–32,
36, 195.
12. Vincent Sherry, Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, and Radical Modernism
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 3. Sherry’s argument that Pound
and Lewis inherited ‘ideas of optical privilege’ finds a terminological echo in
Christina Walter’s more science-focused discussion of ‘optical impersonality’
in modernism – though Pound appears only briefly: see Optical Impersonality:
84 rebecca beasley
Science, Images and Literary Modernism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 2014).
13. Rebecca Beasley, Ezra Pound and the Visual Culture of Modernism
14. David Barnes, The Venice Myth: Culture, Literature, Politics, 1800 to the Present
(London: Pickering & Chatto, 2014).
15. Douglas Mao, Solid Objects: Modernism and the Test of Production (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1998), 165–7, 176.
16. Lisa Siraganian, Modernism’s Other Work: The Art Object’s Political Life
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 6–7, 80–3, 107–8.
17. Catherine E. Paul, Poetry in the Museums of Modernism: Yeats, Pound, Moore,
Stein (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002), 68, 100–1, 23.
18. Catherine E. Paul, Fascist Directive: Ezra Pound and Italian Cultural
Nationalism (Clemson: Clemson University Press, 2016), 199, 225–6; GK
220–1.
19. Jeremy Braddock, Collecting as Modernist Practice (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2012), 65, 21–6; Lawrence Rainey, Institutions of Modernism:
Literary Elites and Public Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998),
3, 21–2.
20. David Ewick, ‘Ezra Pound and the Invention of Japan’, Essays and Studies in
British and American Literature 63 (2017), 13–39; Sanehide Kodama,
Ezra Pound and Japan: Letters and Essays (Redding Ridge: Black Swan
Books, 1987); Zhaoming Qian, Orientalism and Modernism: The Legacy of
China in Pound and Williams (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995);
Zhaoming Qian, The Modernist Response to Chinese Art: Pound, Moore, Stevens
(Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003); Qiyao Wu, Ezra Pound
and Chinese Culture (Shanghai: Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press,
2006); and Ming Xie, Ezra Pound and the Appropriation of Chinese Poetry
(New York: Garland, 1999).
21. Rupert Richard Arrowsmith, Modernism and the Museum: Asian, African, and
Pacific Art and the London Avant-Garde (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2010).
22. John R. Williams, The Buddha in the Machine: Art, Technology and the
Meeting of East and West (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), 1.
23. Melita Schaum, ‘The Grammar of the Visual: Alvin Langdon Coburn,
Ezra Pound, and the Eastern Aesthetic in Early Modernist Photography
and Poetry’, Paideuma 24.2–3 (1995), 79–106; Judi Freeman, ‘Bridging
Purism and Surrealism: The Origins and Production of Fernand Léger’s
Ballet Mécanique’, in Dada and Surrealist Film, ed. Rudolf E. Kuenzli
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 28–45.
24. Tim Armstrong, Modernism, Technology, and the Body: A Cultural Study
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 63–5, 89–90.
25. Mark Goble, Beautiful Circuits: Modernism and the Mediated Life (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2010), 18, 14.
The Visual Field 85
26. Jessica Pressman, Digital Modernism: Making It New in New Media (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2014), 5; Goble, Beautiful Circuits, 3.
27. Goble, Beautiful Circuits, 22, 257.
28. Julian Murphet, Multimedia Modernism: Literature and the Anglo-American
Avant-Garde (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 2–3, 118–19,
134–45, 142, 147, 164–5.
29. Pressman, Digital Modernism, 5, 96. The interview in which Pound is
cited is Thom Swiss, ‘“Distance, Homelessness, Anonymity, and
Insignificance”: An Interview with Young-Hae Chang Heavy
Industries’, The Iowa Review Web (15 December 2002), accessed
21 December 2017, http://thestudio.uiowa.edu/tirw/TIRW_Archive/tir
web/feature/younghae/interview.html.
30. Mark Antliff, ‘Sculptural Nominalism / Anarchist Vortex: Henri Gaudier-
Brzeska, Dora Marsden, and Ezra Pound’, and Vivien Greene, ‘Ezra Pound
and John Quinn: The 1917 Penguin Club Exhibition’, in Mark Antliff and
Vivien Greene, eds, The Vorticists: Rebel Artists in London and New York,
1914–1918 (London: Tate Publishing, 2010), 46–57, 74–83; Allan Antliff,
‘Ezra Pound, Man Ray, and Vorticism in America, 1914–1917’, and Anne
McCauley, ‘Witch Work, Art Work, and the Spiritual Roots of Abstraction:
Ezra Pound, Alvin Langdon Coburn, and the Vortographs’, in Mark Antliff
and Scott W. Klein, eds., Vorticism: New Perspectives (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2013), 139–55, 156–74.
W OR KS CI T ED
Altieri, Charles, Painterly Abstraction in Modernist American Poetry: The
Contemporaneity of Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1989).
Antliff, Allan, ‘Ezra Pound, Man Ray, and Vorticism in America, 1914–1917’, in
Vorticism: New Perspectives, ed. Mark Antliff and Scott W. Klein, 139–55
Antliff, Mark, ‘Sculptural Nominalism / Anarchist Vortex: Henri Gaudier-
Brzeska, Dora Marsden, and Ezra Pound’, in The Vorticists: Rebel Artists in
London and New York, 1914–1918, ed. Mark Antliff and Vivien Greene, 46–57
(London: Tate Publishing, 2010).
Armstrong, Tim, Modernism, Technology, and the Body: A Cultural Study
Arrowsmith, Rupert Richard, Modernism and the Museum: Asian, African, and
Pacific Art and the London Avant-Garde (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2010).
Barnes, David, The Venice Myth: Culture, Literature, Politics, 1800 to the Present
(London: Pickering & Chatto, 2014).
Barnhisel, Greg, Cold War Modernists: Art, Literature, and American Cultural
Diplomacy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015).
86 rebecca beasley
James Laughlin, New Directions, and the Remaking of Ezra Pound (Amherst and
Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2005).
Beasley, Rebecca, Ezra Pound and the Visual Culture of Modernism (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2007).
Braddock, Jeremy, Collecting as Modernist Practice (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
Clearfield, Andrew, These Fragments I Have Shored: Collage and Montage in
Early Modernist Poetry (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Research
Press, 1984).
Dasenbrock, Reed Way, The Literary Vorticism of Ezra Pound and Wyndham
Lewis: Towards the Condition of Painting (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
Dickey, France, The Modern Portrait Poem: From Dante Gabriel Rossetti to
Ezra Pound (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2012).
Ewick, David, ‘Ezra Pound and the Invention of Japan’, Essays and Studies in
British and American Literature 63 (2017), 13–39.
Fitts, Dudley, ‘Music Fit for the Odes’ [rev. of Ezra Pound, A Draft of XXX
Cantos], Hound & Horn 4 (1930–1), 278–89.
Frank, Joseph, ‘Spatial Form in Modern Literature’, Sewanee Review, 53 (1945),
221–40, 433–56, 643–53.
Freeman, Judi, ‘Bridging Purism and Surrealism: The Origins and Production of
Fernand Léger’s Ballet Mécanique’, in Dada and Surrealist Film, ed. Rudolf
E. Kuenzli, 28–45 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996).
Goble, Mark, Beautiful Circuits: Modernism and the Mediated Life (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2010).
Greenbaum, Leonard, The Hound and Horn: The History of a Literary Quarterly
(The Hague: Mouton & Co., 1966).
Greene, Vivien, ‘Ezra Pound and John Quinn: The 1917 Penguin Club
Exhibition’, in The Vorticists: Rebel Artists in London and New York,
1914–1918, ed. Mark Antliff and Vivien Greene, 74–83 (London: Tate
Publishing, 2010).
Jacobus, Mary, Reading Cy Twombly: Poetry in Paint (Princeton: Princeton
Kenner, Hugh, The Poetry of Ezra Pound (London: Faber & Faber, 1951).
The Pound Era (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971).
Kodama, Sanehide, Ezra Pound and Japan: Letters and Essays (Redding Ridge:
Black Swan Books, 1987).
McCauley, Anne, ‘Witch Work, Art Work, and the Spiritual Roots of
Abstraction: Ezra Pound, Alvin Langdon Coburn, and the Vortographs’, in
Vorticism: New Perspectives, ed. Mark Antliff and Scott W. Klein, 156–74
Mao, Douglas, Solid Objects: Modernism and the Test of Production (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1998).
Murphet, Julian, Multimedia Modernism: Literature and the Anglo-American
Avant-Garde (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
The Visual Field 87
North, Michael, The Final Sculpture: Public Monuments and Modern Poets (Ithaca:
Paul, Catherine E., Fascist Directive: Ezra Pound and Italian Cultural Nationalism
(Clemson, SC: Clemson University Press, 2016).
Poetry in the Museums of Modernism: Yeats, Pound, Moore, Stein (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 2002).
Perloff, Marjorie, The Futurist Moment: Avant-Garde, Avant Guerre, and the
Language of Rupture (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1986).
The Poetics of Indeterminacy: From Rimbaud to Cage (Princeton: Princeton
Pound, Ezra, ‘Affirmations, IV: As for Imagisme’, New Age 16 (1915), 349–50.
Antheil and the Treatise on Harmony (Chicago: Covici, 1927).
‘Date Line’, in Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. T. S. Eliot, 74–87 (New York:
‘Vorticism’, Fortnightly Review 96 (1914), [461]–71.
Pressman, Jessica, Digital Modernism: Making It New in New Media (Oxford:
Qian, Zhaoming, The Modernist Response to Chinese Art: Pound, Moore, Stevens
(Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003).
Orientalism and Modernism: The Legacy of China in Pound and Williams
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995).
Rainey, Lawrence, Institutions of Modernism: Literary Elites and Public Culture
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998).
Schaum, Melita, ‘The Grammar of the Visual: Alvin Langdon Coburn,
Ezra Pound, and the Eastern Aesthetic in Early Modernist Photography
and Poetry’, Paideuma 24.2–3 (1995), 79–106.
Sherry, Vincent, Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, and Radical Modernism (Oxford:
Siraganian, Lisa, Modernism’s Other Work: The Art Object’s Political Life (Oxford:
Swiss, Thom, ‘“Distance, Homelessness, Anonymity, and Insignificance”: An
Interview with Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries’, The Iowa Review Web
(15 December, 2002), accessed 21 December 2017, http://thestudio
.uiowa.edu/tirw/TIRW_Archive/tirweb/feature/younghae/interview.html.
Tate Gallery, Pound’s Artists: Ezra Pound and the Visual Arts in London, Paris and
Italy (London: Tate Gallery, 1985).
Walter, Christina, Optical Impersonality: Science, Images and Literary Modernism
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014).
Williams, John R., The Buddha in the Machine: Art, Technology and the Meeting of
East and West (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014).
Wu, Qiyao, Ezra Pound and Chinese Culture (Shanghai: Shanghai Foreign
Language Education Press, 2006).
Xie, Ming, Ezra Pound and the Appropriation of Chinese Poetry (New York:
Garland, 1999).
chapter 6
Texts of The Cantos and Theories of Literature

Michael Kindellan
Textual Conditions
The textual history of Pound’s Cantos is among the most complex of any
work commonly (or indeed uncommonly) associated with Anglo-American
modernism.1 Notwithstanding the intricate problems facing any scholar
keen on tracing the development of Pound’s poem through its stages of
composition and revision, the record of published texts alone presents
serious obstacles. As Lawrence Rainey notes, written over a period of almost
fifty years, published discretely in more than twenty-five magazines and at
least as many different collected volumes across seven countries, ‘no reader
other than Pound could ever have traced all the parts of The Cantos’, nor
even does any library in world contain copies of every published version.2
For numerous reasons owing both to the poet’s personal temperament and
to the social nature of literary production, non-identical changes were made
to different in-print versions. The moment a reader, for whatever reason,
decides to consult any pre-1975 Cantos text, they will realize that to look at
earlier versions is also usually to look at different versions. Such a protracted
publication history of The Cantos, resulting in substantial internal discord,
makes it impossible to speak of the text; we must speak of texts.3 In what
follows, I do not attempt to delineate in detail the absolute textual mess that
is Pound’s Cantos, but to consider some implications arising therefrom.
Before I do, however, it behoves me to speak at least in outline about the
range of textual confusions at hand. So, for example, by the time New
Directions, Pound’s American publisher, and Faber, his British one,
brought out their first collected editions in 1948 and 1950 respectively,
there were several hundred discrepant readings between these two editions
alone.4 Furthermore, no matter which text one has to hand, one will most
likely suspect orthographic, grammatical or factual errors therein. Eva
Hesse, Pound’s German translator and consultant editor for New
Directions, found some eight hundred incidents of suspected error in
88
Texts of The Cantos and Theories of Literature 89
Faber’s 1954 edition of Cantos;5 Achilles Fang, working independently but
in parallel, found a similar number.6 And these are just errors in the
published versions of the poem. Ron Bush and David Ten Eyck, for
example, have counted some five hundred corruptions of Pound’s type-
script text for The Pisan Cantos alone.7 Though Pound and his publishers
took extraordinary steps to keep things accurate, the intricacy of the verse
and, with regard to collected editions the scale of the project, meant that
attempted corrections were at times both uncoordinated and necessarily
imperfect. Owing to the logistical hardships involved in bringing such
heteroclite poetry into print, suspect passages often passed through several
reprints before being put right, if ever. A March 1949 letter from Pound to
Laughlin is hilariously instructive in this respect. Pound wrote:
and god DAMN it get that FISH correct into canto
Canto 51 galley 42 /
as I told whatever loony lubber was in
the office to get into the BIG Cantos.
f i s h / not FLY godbloodydamn their
halyards.
AND put the KAO*YAO ideogram right side up / there are
probably two on one cliche / and the whole thing
should be put the other way up.8
Furthermore, Pound is on record admitting to several correspondents that
a combination of astigmatism and an inability ‘to spell correctly in ANY
language, let alone seven’ made him ‘the WORST proof-reader natr / ever
let liv’.9 When otherwise not attributable to medical conditions, Pound’s
carelessness betrays a wilful abandon borne from his lifelong antipathy for
the mundanities of philological attention to textual details.10 And yet, such
questionable passages are made even harder to assess on account of the fact
that Pound was sometimes as careful as he was at other times careless about
the integrity of his texts. When Pound was careful, his attention sprang from
an abiding respect for the exigencies of historical transmission, what Rainey
once called ‘the routes of reference’.11 Time and again he resisted suggestions
that he bring his text, particularly intertextual references, in line with
accepted readings.
Ontology of Text
Pound’s oscillations between carefulness and carelessness might be
reframed as expressive of a tension between a materialist fascination with,
90 michael kindellan
and an idealist suspicion of, the ontology of text. To my mind, a radical
ambivalence over the nature of textuality is a principal feature of Pound’s
poetics. Ultimately an essentialist, whether it be politically or
aesthetically, Pound was not in the end especially concerned by or inter-
ested in concrete experience, especially that of printed texts. Now, this is
a bold claim that some readers might find contentious; others might find it
downright mistaken. What about Pound’s deluxe editions? What about
the evident ‘materiality’ – meant in this ventriloquism to mean the printed
word’s anti-absorptive resistance to transparent signification – of The
Cantos? What about Pound’s careful attention to, and philological recon-
stitution of, the Cavalcanti manuscripts? By way of response to such
eminently reasonable objections, I must stress that I am trying to describe
a disposition, not an absolute condition. That said, Pound is on record as
having claimed severally that he found the physical action of reading
anathema to him, telling Michael Reck bluntly: ‘I have always loathed
reading’.12 Here he repeats a point made some twenty years before: ‘To read
and be conscious of the act of reading is for some men (the writer among
them) to suffer. I loathe the operation’.13
As it would for any poet, the way Pound understood and approached the
act of reading bears intrinsically upon his ideas and attitudes towards
writing and its reception. One particularly telling and frequently quoted
moment of self-reflexive poetic rumination comes towards the end of
Canto CXVI. Pound writes:
to ‘see again,’
the verb is ‘see,’ not ‘walk on’
i.e. it coheres all right
even if my notes do not cohere.
Many errors,
a little rightness,
to excuse his hell
and my paradiso.
And as to why they go wrong,
thinking of rightness
And as to who will copy this palimpsest? (C 816–17)
The subject of many numerous critical evaluations, this passage has not yet
been read as a comment specifically on textual scholarship and materialist
criticism. So, to add another (rather unsophisticated) reading to the pile:
by ‘it’, Pound means the literary ‘work’ known as The Cantos, ‘that forméd
trace in his mind’, or what Peter Shillingsburg named ‘the imagined whole
implied by all differing forms of a text that we conceive as representing
a single literary creation’.14 Conversely, the ‘notes’ that Pound finds ‘do not
cohere’ comprise the texts of the numerous artefactual documents of The
Cantos, or what Shillingsburg also calls ‘the actual order of words and
punctuation contained in any one physical form’.15 Such a reading might
come across as reductive, especially in comparison to, say, Jean-Michel
Rabaté’s more exuberant detection of indeterminacy in the reference
implied by the pronoun ‘it’: ‘the world? the dream? the thing? logos?
language? the revelation of truth? love?’16 The passage’s question about
‘this palimpsest’ for me renders its subject matter much less inexactly,
suggesting Pound here conceives of his ‘notes’ as bearing the residues of
older, now effaced writing events, but events whose traces still can be
gleaned despite their erasure.
Lines like these situate The Cantos within a set of concerns central to
post-war Anglo-American textual criticism, explicitly promulgating what
James Thorpe once called a theory of literature in which ‘the reality of
the work of art is independent of its written or printed form’.17 Though
‘see again’ probably does not mean ‘re-vise’ in the editorial sense, nor
would typographical mistakes, backwards ideograms or missing Greek
diacritics rank highly among the ‘many errors’ admitted to (and dis-
missed) here, Pound does imply his poem goes wrong textually because,
for him, its principal achievement lay in the basic rightness of its moral
precepts. In other words, and in ways remarkably consistent with
G. Thomas Tanselle’s theories of textuality, Pound is distinguishing
between the ‘work’ itself and its physical instantiation. For Tanselle,
‘the verbal statement is not coequal with its oral or written
presentation’;18 ‘the medium of literature is the words’ of any given
language, the arrangement of which ‘can exist in the mind, whether or
not they are reported by voice or writing’.19 The underlying rationale
here is a separation between what Tanselle calls those arts ‘that use
solids as media’, such as painting or sculpture, and those others, like
poetry and music, he believes ‘sequential’.20 Pound thought so too: ‘the
poet cuts his design in TIME’ (ABCR 199). In solid media, the work is
identical with an historic object: ‘the pieces are at once art and artefact’.
A poem, however, although it can be performed, remains fundamentally
intangible. More impressively, verbal works, being immaterial, ‘can
never be damaged physically’.21 Essence is divorced from contingency.22
Pound’s placing of poetry in an ideational category cuts against both the
particularist, anti-subjective thrust of much modernist ideology, that of the
‘no ideas but in things’ variety, and against the materialist hermeneutics
that have emerged as an influential mode of critical reception. As
D. C. Greetham put it, for essentialist textual theorists like Tanselle (as for
essentialist writers like Pound often is in The Cantos), the ontology of
literary work is ‘never assuredly present in historical, particularized text, for
it can be achieved only at the unattainable level of nous rather than
phenomenon’.23 The same goes for ideogrammic writing, whose telos is
always the larger or more general idea extrapolated from the arranged
particulars. Greetham goes on to note a peculiar irony in Tanselle’s posi-
tion, ‘a theorist whose writings on the concrete features of text, on the
technical aspects of analytical and descriptive bibliography, have made him
one of the leading authorities on the intractably physical’.24 The same
irony pervades Pound’s writing in The Cantos. When our attention is not
being drawn to the accurate portrayal of textual records such as in Canto
LIV (‘and the books were incised in stone / 46 tablets set up at the door of
the college / inscribed in 5 sorts of character’ (C 281)) or to the correct
pronunciation or spelling of words or names as in Canto CIV (‘Wolff
Henry (double ff)’ (C 758)), its self-reflexive intertextuality nevertheless
reminds us that we are dealing with written text of a most peculiar kind.
Pound’s Exceptional ‘Materialism’

Thus textuality and the transmission of text constitute not just the subjects
of the poem, but also the realities it attempts to transcend. The translated
crib of Greek text that opens the poem’s first canto breaks off towards the
end with a well-known apostrophe to Andreas Divus, one that shows the
poet actively working with, and acting in opposition to, his source text: ‘Lie
quiet Divus. I mean, that is Andreas Divus, / In officina Wecheli, 1538, out
of Homer’ (C 5). This aside acknowledges the specificity of its source while
simultaneously asserting an authority over it. That Pound recognized the
philological unsoundness of Divus’s translation is evident from Tiresias’s
remarks to the poem’s speaker: ‘A second time? why? man of ill star’ (C 5).25
While Pound clearly revelled in exploiting scholarly mistakes – such as his
boastful ejaculation in Canto LXXXV regarding an outlandish etymo-
graphic character analysis of the (withheld) sinograph chueh 厥: ‘no, that
is not philological’ (C 564); or his rather spoilsport goading of Jules Nicole
in Canto XCVI: ‘rather nice use of aveu, Professor, though you were
looking at ἄνευ (C 687) – his departures from textual conventions mainly
express a core belief that, as he told W. H. D. Rouse in 1935, ‘Tain’t what
a man sez, but wot he means that the traducer has got to bring over’ (SL
271). Pound made a similar claim to Michael Reck some twenty years later:
‘don’t bother about the WORDS, translate the MEANING’.26 It was
always Pound’s prerogative to behave as though the ‘real work’, that is to
say, the poem’s ‘real statement’, were ‘hovering somehow behind the
physical text’.27 When James Laughlin of New Directions suggested in
1956 that Pound work with various scholars to agree revisions for
a ‘definitive cantares’, Pound balked at the proposal. Since the present
text allowed the reader to ‘git the ideaHHHHH’, they could leave the
‘canto text as printed’.28 That same year he told Norman Holmes Pearson,
a professor of modern literature at Yale who was keeping tabs on potential
corrections, that the text of The Cantos was ‘as accurate as the natr of the
goodam [sic] author permits. wotterELL, CIV/N aint a one man chop’.29
While Pound would undoubtedly agree that although ‘every verbal text,
spoken or written down, is an attempt to convey a work’, he seems also of
the opinion that the work (or, his own work at least) is also more a question
of authorial intention than authorial action.30 Or: ‘nothing matters but the
quality / of the affection – in the end – that has carved the trace in the
mind’ (C 477). But in the realm of literary production, such author-centric
thinking reveals a deep – perhaps irreconcilable – disjunction between the
kind of writing exhibited in The Cantos and the kind of reading imposed by
it. From a hermeneutical standpoint, a writer who believes that authorial
intention (‘wot he means’) not authorial action (‘what a man sez’) should
be key to a reader’s comprehension will naturally expect a reader to identify
and accept (which is not to say endorse or believe) the poet’s ideas,
assumptions, viewpoints and prejudices. But Canto I enacts a rather dif-
ferent model of reading.31 It shows, I believe, Pound’s commitment as
a writer to what Walter Benn Michaels has called ‘the materiality of the
signifier’. For Michaels, someone committed to this ideology will identify
‘the idea of the text’s meaning (and the project of interpreting that mean-
ing) with the idea of the reader’s experience’.32 In other words, either we
read with full reference to the maker’s purpose – this is how Pound wants
and expects us to read his poem – or we read without such reference, and so
construe a text’s meaning mainly along subjective lines – this is how Pound
reads in order to write.
Responding in 1951 to Eva Hesse, after she had queried the philolo-
gical accuracy of his opening canto, Pound said he was ‘NOT taking
Canto 1, back to Homer. but looking at it for wot is there on the
page’.33 Not going ‘back to Homer’ means not searching for either
Homer’s intentions or for texts more faithful to them (a dubious
plausibility at best); instead, looking at ‘wot is there on the page’
makes close attention to the material scene of reading a kind of cover
for the imposition his own ideas: what is there for Pound. Which is fine;
no one is suggesting that Pound was more of a scholar than a poet, nor
contesting the license afforded to writers of that kind. This sort of
misreading, upsetting to so many proper scholars at the time, is
a function of Pound’s genius. But the point is, as Michaels goes on to
argue, ‘if you find yourself committed to the materiality of text’, you
also, because of that commitment, find yourself committed to the
‘subject position of the reader’; and if you find yourself committed to
the subject position of the reader, then a question about what is there on
the page will always really be a question about ‘what’s there to you,
a question about what you see’.34 So, despite all the apparent objectivity
of The Cantos, its presentation of myriad facts and figures divorced from
lyric argument, no line can be discerned according to a schedule other
than ‘what does this mean to Pound’? The Cantos, in other words, is
a work that fits Lyn Hejinian’s definition of a ‘closed text’, ‘one in
which all the elements of the works are directed towards a single reading
of it’. Such a text does not ‘invite interpretation’ insofar as it endorses
the ‘the authority of the writer over the reader and thus, by analogy, the
authority implicit in other (social, economic, cultural) hierarchies’.35
Nowhere is Pound’s brand of readerly ‘materialism’ more apparent than
in his engagement with Chinese texts. When Thomas Grieve, in his
pioneering ‘Annotations to the Chinese in Section: Rock-Drill’, described
‘Pound’s non-philological breakdown’ of characters, he identified
a reading practice wherein, to put it ungenerously but also unequivocally,
the reader (in this case Pound) decides willy-nilly what the text means by
purposefully ignoring philological convention.36 Indeed, Pound decided
early on that looking at Chinese on his own terms, without much apparent
training, was not only more expedient, but afforded him clearer ethical and
aesthetic insights than were available to someone blinkered by their own
expertise. The anecdote in Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir about the inspired
amateur’s innate ability to read primitive Chinese serves to conceal an
otherwise pretty sweeping suggestion that the only true understanding
belongs to a handful of specially qualified artists (GB 46).37 Such faith in
the perceptual acuity of certain readers with the right sensibility, like
himself, persisted through his career. Even in the 1950s, Pound was still
staunchly refusing to accept Achilles Fang’s corrective definitions of ideo-
grams central to his political and poetic thinking. Pound much preferred
his own fanciful readings to Fang’s more measured ones, keeping faith in
his own interpretations.38
Although ideogrammic writing is basically a form of transhistorical
imagination, one that chafes against a wide array of material limitation,39
it is also prosodically energetic, intellectually impatient, rhythmically
idiosyncratic and personally determined. Such writing produces
a textuality that tends to foreground its material ‘quiddity’ – Pound’s
Cantos is a conspicuously written artefact in this respect. But it does a
contingently. Meanings inhere despite not because of the flagrantly material
aspect of this writing. Pound’s highly abbreviated style has the opposite
effect of minimizing the impositions of the written word. This simple and
obvious truth is that Pound’s suppression of the ligatures of logical sense
throughout The Cantos – a.k.a. the ideogrammic method – does not save
his readers either the time or the trouble of having to traverse them: on the
contrary, much of the labour of reading involves painstaking restoration of
at least some of the missing contextual information.40
Jerome J. McGann has argued that ‘one of Pound’s greatest contribu-
tions to poetry lies concealed in his attentiveness to the smallest details of
his texts’ bibliographic codes’.41 This is a persuasive claim. (It is, however,
no accident that McGann tends to draw his examples from earlier instal-
ments of Cantos, especially those of its ‘deluxe’ period. Up until about
1930, Pound was quite concerned with the material format of his books.42)
The unspoken assumption operating throughout McGann’s writing on
bibliographic codes is that they always add, enforce, enrich or somehow
complement a work’s meanings. This is because for McGann, a ‘work’ is
coterminous with its material representation: ‘textuality cannot be under-
stood except as a phenomenal event’; ‘reading itself can only be understood
when it has assumed specific material conditions’.43 In Canto
XXVIII, Pound satirized such ‘thick’ materiality:
‘Buk!’ said the Second Baronet, ‘eh . . .
‘Thass a funny lookin’ buk’ said the Baronet
Looking at Bayle, folio, 4 vols. in gilt leather, ‘Ah . . .
‘Wu . . . Wu . . . wot you goin’ eh to do with ah . . .
‘ . . . ah read-it?’
Sic loquitur eques (C 139)
This sceptical attitude might be made most explicit towards the conclusion
of Canto XCIX – a deeply intertextual canto that, despite its intense
‘written-ness’, aspires to an orality exempt from such documentary trans-
mission – when Pound writes as an aside: ‘no, that is not textual’ (C 732),
by which he means to convey the fact that though he is commenting on
and at times incorporating others’ texts into his poem, he does not seem
particularly interested in specific marks on specific pages, or in the ways
these have been received hitherto.44
Critical Effects
And just as the way in which Pound read texts had a measurable impact
upon the kinds of texts he wrote, so too does the way he produced his texts
impact upon our reception of them. This is probably true for every text in
existence, but it is particularly true of modernist writing like Pound’s,
where ‘its subject is often the act and process of writing itself’.45 The
‘processual’ nature of Pound’s poetic is commonly understood as
a function of his enthusiasm for the direct treatment of the ‘thing’,
where by ‘direct’ is meant something like im-mediate. Over and against
the settled finality of gilt leather folios, the notational prosody of The
Cantos points to its author’s deep-seated ambivalence about inscription
tout court. Formally, the poem appears conjectural, quite literally thrown
together, or what George Santayana described as a ‘mental grab-bag’ in
need of ‘latent classification’ in order to avoid ‘utter miscellaneousness’.46
Certainly readers will observe the preponderance of the word ‘draft’ in
numerous titles of Cantos groupings: A Draft of XVI. Cantos, A Draft of the
Cantos 17–27, A Draft of XXX Cantos, A Draft of Cantos XXXI-XLI and of
course Drafts & Fragments. That many of these ‘drafts’ were first published
deluxe or semi-deluxe editions indicates an on-going contradiction
in Pound’s work between the permanent and the transitory.47 ‘Drafts’ is
not a metaphorical assignation; it is an instance of right naming: many
cantos look like drafts because they quite literally are drafts.48 This renders
them susceptible to subsequent revisions that left such a complicated
textual history. But it points, I would suggest, to something deeper, namely
an abiding respect for the absolute authenticity and authority of the
original writing event.
Mary de Rachewiltz recently reported that, were it possible, her father
would have preferred to publish facsimiles of his notebooks rather than
submit his writing to the more intrusive processes of mediation also known
as print publication.49 Pound put this preference into action with his 1932
edition of Guido Cavalcanti Rime, insofar as it includes numerous photo-
reduplications of actual archival material: the idea being that a poet’s
original manuscripts are the closest any reader can get to an editorially
uninterpolated (which is to say unsocialized) presentation of authorial
intentions. And since Pound’s aim is to bring readers into as close an
agreement with his intentions as possible, publishing drafts has a sort of
logic behind it. His 1937 essay ‘Totalitarian Scholarship and the New
Paideuma’ makes his position clear. Calling for a primitive kind of facsi-
mile edition of Vivaldi, Pound declares:
By all means let us have editors: let our . . . lyric and predatory Nachez lay
open, interpret, rewrite and renow [sic] this treasure. . . . BUT let us also
have, and for a reasonable price, the verification, the ten inch strip of
photographic print which will enable us to distinguish . . . Vivaldi from
the great Johann Sebastian where Bach has put new foundations under the
swift-writing, inspired Venetian.50
An idea mooted here – one widely shared by textual scholars – is
that there is no act of textual transmission that is not also an act of
textual corruption. Notwithstanding a certain fetishization of the ori-
ginal compositional scene, Pound’s ideal but impossible solution seems
to be, I suppose, to get rid of textual transmission altogether – that is,
to have a work that coheres without being degraded by the notes that
do not. He aspires instead to create work that need not be read in
order to be understood; understanding should, however logistically
improbable, precede interpretation, if not rescue us from hermeneutic
obligations entirely. Failing this unrealizable ideal, we are left with
a situation far more problematic, because if every writing event is
provisional, then the grounds upon which we base our critical evalua-
tions are neither as solid nor as significant as we think.
Notes
1. Much of this history has been told in the indispensable work of a handful of
scholars. See Barbara Eastman, Ezra Pound’s Cantos: The Story of the Text
(Orono: National Poetry Foundation, 1979); Christine Froula, To Write
Paradise: Style and Error in Pound’s Cantos (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1984); Ronald Bush, The Genesis of Ezra Pound’s Cantos (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1989); Lawrence Rainey, Ezra Pound and the
Monument of Culture: Text, History and the Malatesta Cantos (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1991); Peter Stoicheff, The Hall of Mirrors:
Drafts & Fragments and the End of Ezra Pound’s Cantos (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 1995); Lawrence Rainey, ed., A Poem
Containing History: Textual Studies in The Cantos (Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 1997), especially Richard Taylor’s essay ‘The History and State
of the Texts’, 235–65; and Richard Taylor, ‘The Texts of The Cantos’, The
Cambridge Companion to Ezra Pound, ed. Ira B. Nadel (Cambridge,
Cambridge University Press, 1999), 161–87. For a recent overview of the state
of Pound’s texts generally, not just those of The Cantos, see Mark Byron,
‘Textual Criticism’, in Ezra Pound in Context, ed. Ira B. Nadel (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2010), 136–47.
2. Rainey, Poem Containing History, 3.
3. Peter Stoicheff begins Hall of Mirrors with an anecdote about the nature and
the extent of textual discrepancies across different editions of The Cantos. Hall
of Mirrors, 1–3. Froula recounts the particularly complex, but not a-typical,
genetic history of the texts of ‘Canto 4’ in her To Write Paradise, 53–136. For
a demonstration of the deep complexity involved in rationalizing ‘merely’ the
different published versions of Pound’s early Cantos texts (i.e., excluding
manuscripts and other prepublication material), see Variorum Edition of
‘Three Cantos’ by Ezra Pound: A Prototype, ed. Richard Taylor (Bayreuth:
Boomerang Press / Norbert Aas, 1991).
4. Guy Davenport counted 248 variants. See ‘A Collation of Two Texts of The
Cantos’, The Pound Newsletter 4 (April 1955): 5–13. In Ezra Pound’s Cantos,
Eastman tracks and compares these as manifest in subsequent editions.
5. Hesse marked these in triplicate and sent them to New Directions for
a proposed revised edition, which never materialized. She was using Faber’s
texts because both she and Laughlin recognized its superiority; eventually
Laughlin was forced to abandon plans to adopt Faber’s British text on account
of the fact that US copyright law required books be not just bound but
physically typeset domestically in order to be afforded legal protection. In
subsequent reviews of cantos not included in this edition (i.e., Rock-Drill 1955,
Thrones 1959 and Drafts & Fragments 1969), Hesse found and noted scores
more suspect readings.
6. Achilles Fang, ‘Materials for the Study of Ezra Pound’s “Cantos”’, PhD
dissertation, Harvard University, 1958.
7. Ronald Bush and David Ten Eyck, ‘A Critical Edition of Ezra Pound’s Pisan
Cantos: Problems and Solutions’, Textual Cultures 8.2 (2013), 122.
8. Ezra Pound, Letter to James Laughlin, March 1949, New Directions
Publishing Corp. Records, circa 1932–97 (MS Am 2077), Item #1371,
Houghton Library, Harvard University.
9. Pound, Letter to Mary de Rachewiltz, 11 January 1955, Ezra Pound Papers,
YCAL MSS 43, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book
and Manuscript Library, Box 62, Folder 2739; Pound, Letter to Norman
Holmes Pearson, 9 February 1955, Normal Holmes Pearson Papers, YCAL
MSS 899, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and
Manuscript Library, Box 78.
10. See chapter 1 of Michael Kindellan, The Late Cantos of Ezra Pound:
Composition, Revision, Publication (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 1–51.
11. Rainey, Monument of Culture, 69.
12. Michael Reck, Ezra Pound: A Close-Up (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967), 99.
13. Pound, Guide to Kulchur, 55. Pound goes on, advocating instead a non-
material, absorptive model of reading – one made effortless by a text’s quasi-
magical revelatory powers: ‘Man reading shd. / be man intensely alive. The
book shd. be a ball of light in one’s hand’.
14. Peter L. Shillingsburg, Scholarly Editing in the Computer Age: Theory and
Practice, 3rd ed. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), 42.
15. Shillingsburg, Scholarly Editing, 43.
16. Jean-Michel Rabaté, Language, Sexuality and Ideology in Ezra Pound’s Cantos
(Houndmills: Macmillan, 1986), 27.
17. James Thorpe, The Principles of Textual Criticism (San Marino, CA:
Huntington Library, 1972), 6.
18. Thomas G. Tanselle, A Rationale of Textual Criticism (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992), 15.
19. Tanselle, Rationale, 17.
20. This line of Tanselle’s thinking is, some might say, decidedly old-fashioned,
taking its cue from a set of presumed commonsense truths popularized in
1766 by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing in his Laocoon: An Essay on the Limits of
Painting and Poetry. I take Pound’s implicit agreement with such thinking as
a part of his adversarial modernity – make it new and so on.
21. Tanselle, Rationale, 30.
22. See D. G. Greetham, Textual Transgressions: Essays Towards the Construction
of a Bibliography (London: Routledge, 2011).
23. D. C. Greetham, Theories of the Text (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 40.
24. Greetham, Theories of the Text, 40.
25. Divus translates the word δίγονος, meaning twice-born, where most modern
scholarly texts invariably give διογενὲς, meaning sprung from Zeus. Here,
a character in the text is expressing surprise about the state of the text.
26. Reck, Ezra Pound: A Close-Up, 99. The reader might object that these remarks
pertain properly to translation only, but I find this attitude pervasive
throughout Pound poetic writing. And as Steven G. Yao has rightly
shown, Pound ‘bestow[ed] upon translation, over and above so-called original
composition, an explicitly primary and generative, rather than a derivative or
supplementary, role in the process of literary culture formation’, in
‘Translation’, Ezra Pound in Context, ed. Ira B. Nadel (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2010), 34.
27. Tanselle, A Rationale of Textual Criticism, 15. Tanselle does concede, as Pound
would also, that though unreliable, the text is also an indispensable guide to
the work as such.
28. Pound, Letter to James Laughlin, 17 May 1956, New Directions Publishing
Corp. Records, circa 1932–97 (MS Am 2077) Houghton Library, Harvard
University, Item 1371. Pound’s dismissal is pretty rich given the that fact,
according to a 20 December 1953 letter from Hugh Kenner, efforts to realize
a fully revised text were begun at Pound’s own behest. Suffice it to say
that Pound’s thinking about textual matters was thoroughly inconsistent.
My suggestion is that this indicates his deeper or more fundamental concerns
lay elsewhere. If given a choice between a correct but delayed text and
a corrupt but published one, he always opted for the latter. Getting the
word right was important, but not as important as getting the word out.
29. Pound, Letter to Norman Holmes Pearson, 15 February 1956, Pearson Papers,
Box 78.
30. Tanselle, A Rationale of Textual Criticism, 68, 78.
31. Cf. Stoicheff’s remark: ‘The always unstable, or only vaguely demarcated,
boundary between reader and writer has persisted through The Cantos from its
first poem, where Pound’s translation of the Nekuia is both a reading and
a writing of it’. Hall of Mirrors, 155.
32. Michaels, Shape of the Signifier, 13. Michaels means ‘materiality’ in a rather
different manner than the one I briefly summarized earlier.
33. Pound, Letter to Eva Hesse, 20 June 1951, Eva Hesse Archiv, Munich.
34. Michaels, Shape of the Signifier, 11.
35. Lyn Hejinian, ‘The Rejection of Closure’, in The Language of Inquiry
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).
36. Thomas Grieve, ‘Annotations to the Chinese in Section: Rock-Drill’,
Paideuma 4.2/3 (Fall and Winter 1974), 398.
37. For a later, slightly altered version of this anecdote, see CWC, 59.
38. Ezra Pound and Achilles Fang, in Ezra Pound’s Chinese Friends, ed. Zhaoming
Qian (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 81ff.
39. Charles Olson put this most succinctly when he described The Cantos as
material driven through by ‘the beak of [Pound’s] ego’, in Mayan Letters, ed.
Robert Creeley (London: Jonathan Cape, 1968), 27.
40. There’s a poignant irony in the fact that a text in many ways written against
philology ends up creating so many more philologists.
41. Jerome J. McGann, The Textual Condition (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1991), 137.
42. For an extended discussion of this aspect of both McGann’s preferences
and Pound’s shifting attitudes, see Miranda B. Hickman, ‘“To Facilitate the
Traffic” (Or, “Damn Deluxe Edtns”): Ezra Pound’s Turn from the Deluxe’,
Paideuma 28.2/3 (1999), 173–92.
43. McGann, Textual Condition, 11. Cf. Greetham’s comments on Tanselle, cited
previously.
44. By ‘that’ Pound refers to his gloss of another withheld ideogram, and by
‘textual’ Pound means philologically justifiable or empirically based.
45. Jerome J. McGann, ‘Ulysses as a Post-Modern Text: The Gabler Edition’,
Criticism 27 (1985), 182.
46. George Santayana, Letter to Ezra Pound, 20 January 1940, quoted in Noel
Stock, The Life of Ezra Pound (New York: Penguin, 1974), 477. It is tempting
to redeem The Cantos on the grounds that it is ideologically closed but
formally open, as though the latter undermines the former. I am suggesting
there is less of a contradiction here than there seems.
47. For more detailed discussions of Pound’s deluxe outputs, see, in addition to the
work by Hickman and McGann noted previously, Olga Nikolova,
‘Ezra Pound: Cantos Deluxe’, Modernism/Modernity 15.1 (January 2008),
155–77; and Michael Kindellan, ‘Ownership and Interpretation: on
Ezra Pound’s Deluxe First Editions’, in Reconnecting Aestheticism and
Modernism: Continuities, Revisions, Speculations, ed. Bénédicte Coste,
Catherine Delyfer and Christine Reynier (London: Routledge, 2017), 187–201.
48. Cf. Pound’s offhand 1918 remark: ‘It has been complained, with some justice,
that I dump my note-books on the public’ (LE 9). It must be stated that Rock-
Drill and Thrones are the most textually stable of cantos.
49. Mary de Rachewiltz, in discussion with the author, 5 April 2014. Glenn
Horowitz Bookseller’s stunning, uncannily lifelike publication Drafts &
Fragments: Facsimile Notebooks (2010) might therefore in some senses fulfil
one of Pound’s artistic ambitions.
50. Ezra Pound, ‘Totalitarian Scholarship and the New Paideuma’, ed. Douglas
Fox, Germany and You 7.4/5 (25 April 1947), 123–4.
W OR KS CI T ED
Bush, Ronald, The Genesis of Ezra Pound’s Cantos (Princeton: Princeton
Bush, Ronald, and David Ten Eyck, ‘A Critical Edition of Ezra Pound’s Pisan
Cantos: Problems and Solutions’, Textual Cultures 8.2 (2013), 121–41.
Byron, Mark, ‘Textual Criticism’, in Ezra Pound in Context, ed. Ira B. Nadel,
136–47 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
Davenport, Guy, ‘A Collation of Two Texts of The Cantos’, The Pound Newsletter
4 (April 1955): 5–13.
Eastman, Barbara, Ezra Pound’s Cantos: The Story of the Text (Orono: National
Poetry Foundation, 1979).
Fang, Achille, ‘Materials for the Study of Ezra Pound’s “Cantos”’, PhD disserta-
tion (Harvard University, 1958).
Greetham, D. G., Textual Transgressions: Essays Towards the Construction of
a Bibliography (London: Routledge, 2011).
Theories of the Text (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).
Grieve, Thomas, ‘Annotations to the Chinese in Section: Rock-Drill’, Paideuma
4.2/3 (Fall and Winter 1974), 361–508.
Hejinian, Lyn, The Language of Inquiry (Berkeley: University of California Press,
2000).
Hickman, Miranda B., ‘“To Facilitate the Traffic” (Or, “Damn Deluxe Edtns”):
Ezra Pound’s Turn from the Deluxe’, Paideuma 28.2/3 (1999), 173–92.
‘Ownership and Interpretation: on Ezra Pound’s Deluxe First Editions’, in
Reconnecting Aestheticism and Modernism: Continuities, Revisions,
Speculations, ed. Bénédicte Coste, Catherine Delyfer and Christine Reynier,
187–201 (London: Routledge, 2017).
McGann, Jerome J., The Textual Condition (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1991).
‘Ulysses as a Post-Modern Text: The Gabler Edition’, Criticism 27 (1985),
283–305.
Nikolova, Olga, ‘Ezra Pound: Cantos Deluxe’, Modernism / Modernity 15.1
(January 2008), 155–77.
Olson, Charles, Mayan Letters, ed. Robert Creeley (London: Jonathan Cape,
1968).
Pound, Ezra, Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir (New York: New Directions, 1970).
Letter to Eva Hesse, 20 June 1951, Eva Hesse Archiv, Munich.
Letter to James Laughlin, March 1949, New Directions Publishing Corp.
Records, circa 1932–1997 (MS Am 2077), Item #1371, Houghton Library,
Harvard University.
Letter to James Laughlin, 17 May 1956, New Directions Publishing Corp.
Records, circa 1932–1997 (MS Am 2077) Houghton Library, Harvard
University, Item 1371.
Letter to Mary de Rachewiltz, 11 January 1955, Ezra Pound Papers, YCAL MSS
43, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and
Manuscript Library, Box 62, Folder 2739.
Letter to Norman Holmes Pearson, 9 February 1955, Normal Holmes Pearson
Papers, YCAL MSS 899, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke
Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Box 78.
Letter to Norman Holmes Pearson, 15 February 1956, Normal Holmes Pearson
Papers, YCAL MSS 899, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke
Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Box 78.
‘Totalitarian Scholarship and the New Paideuma’, ed. Douglas Fox, Germany
and You 7.4/5 ( 25 April 1947), 95–6, 123–4.
Qian, Zhaoming, ed., Ezra Pound’s Chinese Friends (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2008).
Rabaté, Jean-Michel, Language, Sexuality and Ideology in Ezra Pound’s Cantos
(Houndmills: Macmillan, 1986).
Rainey, Lawrence, Ezra Pound and the Monument of Culture: Text, History and the
Malatesta Cantos (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).
ed., A Poem Containing History: Textual Studies in The Cantos (Ann Arbor:
Reck, Michael Ezra Pound: A Close-Up (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967).
Shillingsburg, Peter L., Scholarly Editing in the Computer Age: Theory and Practice,
3rd ed. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996).
Stock, Noel, The Life of Ezra Pound (New York: Penguin, 1974).
Stoicheff, Peter, The Hall of Mirrors: Drafts & Fragments and the End of
Ezra Pound’s Cantos (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995).
Tanselle, Thomas G., A Rationale of Textual Criticism (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 1992).
Taylor, Richard, ‘The History and State of the Texts’, in A Poem Containing
History: Textual Studies in The Cantos, ed. Lawrence Rainey, 235–65 (Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997).
‘The Texts of The Cantos’, in The Cambridge Companion to Ezra Pound, ed. Ira
B. Nadel, 161–87 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1999).
ed., Variorum Edition of ‘Three Cantos’ by Ezra Pound: A Prototype (Bayreuth:
Boomerang Press / Norbert Aas, 1991).
Thorpe, James, The Principles of Textual Criticism (San Marino, CA: Huntington
Library, 1972).
Yao, Steven G., ‘Translation’, Ezra Pound in Context, ed. Ira B. Nadel, 33–42
chapter 7
Pound and Influence

Richard Parker
Told him that the younger poets all learned from him, all derived
from him, and were in a sense developing forms that he opened up.
And he said, ‘That’s very flattering, but would be very difficult to
prove or substantiate’.
Allen Ginsberg, Allen Verbatim 1
Ezra Pound has influenced many poets in many ways, both during his
lifetime and posthumously. He brought great influence to bear upon his
peers about how poetry should be written, establishing and broadcasting
the tenets of poetic modernism in English, offering models for how poems
could be both far shorter and far longer at the same time as achieving
greater focus and covering a broader range of subject than the pre-
modernists imagined. Pound’s interventions around T. S. Eliot’s verse
offer the most direct example of that influence. Despite acknowledging
that Eliot, uniquely among American writers, ‘had actually trained himself
and modernized himself on his own’ (SL 80), Pound worked extensively
on Eliot’s work, perhaps most directly in the transition between Eliot’s
Poems (1920) and The Waste Land (1922), which saw Eliot initially
interpreting Pound’s Imagist concision in Poems, through their shared
interest in Théophile Gautier, before adopting a more expansive
Poundian ideogrammic method in The Waste Land.2 Arguments have
been made for a similarly direct influence on W. B. Yeats and other writers
in Pound’s sphere, while seminal essays like ‘A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste’
(1913) and ‘How to Read’ (1929) carried these critical ideas outside
of Pound’s peer-group.3
As he was recasting short and long modernist poems, Pound was also
establishing the parameters of creative translation, a practice that brought
his critical exactitude and poetic sense together. His own work and central
influence in this field would focus principally on the Romance languages
he studied at university and the poetries of the far east. Among those
104
Pound and Influence 105
strongly influenced by these experiments we might think of Louis
Zukofsky, Basil Bunting, Paul Blackburn, W. S. Merwin, Richmond
Lattimore and Michael Alexander. For all of these Pound both introduced
new sonorities and revalued the role of the translator to that of creator.
During Pound’s lifetime, his ability to get others published was perhaps
his keenest influence. He was practically involved in the launching of
careers by diverse poets and movements in the early decades of the
twentieth century – his naming of Imagism(e), the professional help he
gave to Eliot, H. D. and the Imagists, William Carlos Williams, James
Joyce, Robert Frost, Ernest Hemingway, Wyndham Lewis and Louis
Zukofsky and the Objectivists are each enough on their own to secure
his position in literary history. In this Pound’s influence is singular, as for
many of these writers he exerted little to no discernible aesthetic influence
while intervening in their careers. Frost and Joyce had no need of Pound’s
dicta on writing, but both benefited greatly from his assiduous professional
support.
Pound’s gift for the promotion of others came together with his aes-
thetic influence during his work around the launch of the Objectivist poets
in the early 1930s. Through this period Pound worked in great detail and
with vigorous interest with the younger poet Louis Zukofsky on almost
every aspect of Zukofsky’s fledgling movement. As detailed in their
correspondence, Pound spoke to Zukofsky about how to write, how to
attract writers, how to boost his project and how to secure maximum
effective publicity. Pound secured Poetry as the venue of Objectivists, and
brought numerous poets into the fold – including established Poundian
collaborators like Williams and Eliot. As the Pound/Zukofsky letters show,
throughout the process Pound was by turns patrician and collaborative,
helpful and demanding, cynical and enthusiastic.4
Another kind of influence which emerges from the Zukofsky correspon-
dence, however, is Pound’s habit of influencing writers away from writing
like him. In 1928, for example, Pound tells Zukofsky ‘Where accusation
probably false, that reminiscence of E. P. . . . alter, when possible’ (L/LZ
25), with the evidence of ‘A’ suggesting that the younger poet listened and
really did move his project away from The Cantos after Pound’s interven-
tions. K. L. Goodwin also detects a similar dynamic with Eliot, musing
that Eliot ‘avoided putting into print work that showed traces of Pound’s
influence . . . partly because Pound disapproved of the practice’.5
The models of influence above are broadly apolitical. Pound influenced
the verse of, and professionally boosted, some poets with politics somewhat
in line with his, like Eliot, and did the same for others, like Bunting and
106 richard parker
Zukofsky, whose politics opposed his own. This tendency extends
throughout Pound’s life and into his posthumous influence. While Pound’s
politics are widely discussed in critical readings today, the possibility that
those politics might be connected to his contemporary influence is rarely
broached.6 Even in his lifetime evidence of Pound’s political understanding
influencing other poets is scarce. Goodwin reads Pound’s influence in
Williams’s approach to ‘usury’ in parts II and IV of Paterson and, less
persuasively, in antisemitism in the poetry of E. E. Cummings.7 In spite of
this scant evidence of his direct political influence, however, I would argue
that Pound is the preeminent example for political poetry in our time, with
the model of a politically-engaged but formally experimental poetry that he
arrived at in The Cantos greatly influential for his generation and those that
succeeded him. Of writers who have been influenced by Pound’s model of
political writing, we might include Zukofsky in the early, Marxist-Leninist
sections of ‘A’, Bunting, Hugh MacDiarmid, Allen Ginsberg and the poets
I will address below.
I will read, then, three political poets who have been influenced
by Pound in three markedly different ways. One, Ed Sanders,
uses Pound’s methods for self-promotion to provide an effective critique
of the poet, his methods and politics. Another, Amiri Baraka, employs
Poundian personae to reflect his profound ambivalence about the
Poundian inheritance. The third, Keston Sutherland, employs Pound’s
invective both to persuade in a Poundian sense and to question the violence
in Pound’s verse and his own. None of these poets were influenced
by Pound’s politics, yet all of them were influenced by Pound’s political
poetry.
This model of Pound-influenced political poetry emerges in the mid-
1960s. Pound was still alive, disconnected from contemporary poetics but
occasionally engaging with younger poets, while the critical machinery of
the Pound industry was already in movement and the process of
embalming Pound’s reputation and oeuvre already beginning.8 This was
the last period in which the two sides of Pound’s influence existed at the
same time, and the way that they came together at this moment would
colour Pound’s practical influence since his death.
A clear example of the complexity of Pound’s influence in the counter-
cultural generation can be read in the Fuck You Press edition of Cantos
110–116. In 1967 the poet, musician and activist Ed Sanders produced
a pirated edition of a series of cantos that had appeared in unfinished
versions in various journals, but which Pound was in no hurry to finalize
for publication. The poems that would make up this volume passed
through Donald Hall’s and Tom Clark’s hands before finding their way
into Sanders’s, who then quickly published a rough-and-ready volume on
his own mimeograph machine ‘at a secret location / in the lower east
side’.9 Peter Stoicheff plays down the significance of the Fuck You
edition, seeing it as an errant precursor to the established volume Drafts
and Fragments of Cantos CX-CXVII (1968) and only commenting that
‘except for a couple of visual misreadings in its Canto CX, no substantive
errors were introduced into the edition’.10 That Cantos 110–116 had little
direct input on the poems is beside the point. It is the action of this
intervention that is the point, with Pound’s practical genius offering
Sanders the model for his intervention, and the activist poetics of
which it is a part. Daniel Tiffany wonders whether Andy Warhol,
a Fuck You collaborator, ‘was the new Pound?’11 This question could
also be asked of Sanders, whose career and strategies run even closer to the
modernist’s than Warhol’s, providing a direct link between Pound’s
practices and the counterculture.
Sanders’s aesthetic/activist programme often seems an updated version
of Pound’s frenetic activity. Pound, in essays like ‘The Serious Artist’ (1913)
and the social poetics of The Cantos, insists on the political and cultural
commitment of the worthwhile poet – positions that align closely with
Sanders’s practice and his concept of the ‘Total Assault on the Culture’,
which sought to bring cultural and political activism together into a less
nihilistic version of Warhol’s Happening.12 Sanders’s programme was wide-
ranging: from sit-ins protesting nuclear weapons13 – itself a question that
appears when ‘The scientists are in terror’ in Canto 115 / ‘From Canto CXV’
in Cantos 110–11614 – to the vibrant political and cultural discourse of Fuck
You / A Magazine of the Arts, a publication that, from 1962 to 1965, served to
launch, boost and support Sanders’s circle in the Poundian fashion.15
Sanders also made a moderate success of his band, the Fugs, offering
a countercultural twist on Pound’s musical interventions of the 1920s and
1930s. Beyond these broad similarities, however, concrete influence can be
traced. Sanders uses explicitly Poundian terms to characterize his youthful
careerism, writing that in the early 1960s he ‘was chasing what Ezra Pound
called “the white stag of fame”’.16 He also returns to Pound for the terms of
his political invective, quoting from the Hell Cantos (1925) in ‘A Fuck You
Position Paper: Resistance Against Goon Squads’ (1964) – which is partly
written in the form of an exchange with Ginsberg – in enthusiastic defence
of hippy New York: ‘If a city or state official lacks a very liberal sensitivity
toward sex, cocksucking, dope & welfare, then the fuckhate should be
zapped off the set. It’s hard not to be bitter against these . . . “vice crusaders
108 richard parker
farhting [sic] through silk” waving their penny whistle censor’s flags’.17 Sanders
quotes and then paraphrases from Canto XIV, the original reading: ‘the vice-
crusaders, fahrting through silk, / waving the Christian symbols, / frigging a tin
penny whistle’ (C 63). The hypocrites who preached moral sanctity while
taking the people into the Great War are Pound’s target in the 1920s and are
here comparable in 1964 to the ‘military-industrial-surrealist complex’ that was
pursuing war in Vietnam.18 These themes are combined with a typically
Poundian intertextuality and a disorientingly ideogrammic arrangement of
tones and themes, while both Pound and Sanders treat their subject with
a deeply moral, proselytizing anger. This combination of formal juxtapositions
and moral condemnation is at the root of Pound’s political method, and central
to his legacy for the activist poets who have followed him.
Yet while Sanders agrees with Pound’s pacifism and excoriating anger at
the profiteers, he remains profoundly ambivalent about Pound’s later
politics. In 1963 Sanders visited the Library of Congress to read transcripts
of Pound’s wartime radio broadcasts and happened to encounter a group of
American neo-Nazis during his visit.19 Sanders characterizes this moment
as an epiphany regarding Pound’s influence, and is candid about the depth
of their disagreement, expressing ‘serious second thoughts’ throughout,
while continuing to engage in poetic and organizational strategies that are
fundamentally Poundian.20 Pound’s political method, however, is effective
enough to accommodate differing political outlooks. Sanders’s book-
length poem 1968: A History in Verse (1997), for example, applies
a distinctively Poundian line and habits of reference to a history of
progressive politics and the Yippy movement, while the multivolume
America: A History in Verse (2000–4) similarly employs Poundian methods
towards Sanders’s own ends. This ambivalence can be seen as one of the
defining elements of the countercultural influence of Pound, in distinction
to Pound’s New Critical and institutional rehabilitations, which sought to
minimize the poet’s politics and thus his political-poetic methods. Poets
like Sanders and Ginsberg sought to understand Pound even as they
disagreed with him, their distance from Pound’s understanding of history
generating a productive dialectical potentiality in their work.
When we turn to Cantos 110–116, we can see this position imbricated
into the book-object itself. It is large format, 215 mm by 280 mm, printed
on cheap paper stock and crudely stapled down one edge. Its style is that of
the ‘zine’ – cheap and easily distributable, far from the kinds of canon-
conscious luxury printing Pound engaged in with the early decades of The
Cantos.21 Likewise, the aesthetics of this object refute the establishment
claims of authenticity of the New Directions editions of the last sections of
The Cantos, with their staid emphasis on monochrome and text-heavy
cover design. Sanders’s methods, however, are not so far from the strategic
uses of the material of printing that Pound employed. Sanders goes with
a homoerotic collage cover design by Joe Brainard, and a hand-drawn
colophon that features an image of ‘Gash Cow’ lactating flowers alongside
an ejaculating penis.22 This is calculatedly provocative – though it is
perhaps no more calculated than Pound’s material strategies in works
like A Draft of XVI Cantos (1925) and A Draft of the Cantos 17–27 (1928).
This is printing as critique in that Sanders establishes a ‘bibliographical
code’ that incorporates both the example of Pound and countercultural
ambivalence towards him.23 Chelsea Jennings sees Sanders’s edition, in its
bringing together of the mimeograph revolution with Pound’s indetermi-
nate authorship and modernist aesthetics, as insisting on The Cantos as ‘an
evolving project whose reach extends into the next generation of American
poetry’.24 The text evolves in that it insists on Pound’s position while
actively reimagining it – building on the work done throughout this long
project.
M. L. Rosenthal writes that ‘[n]o American poet since Pound has come
closer to making poetry and politics reciprocal forms of action’ than Amiri
Baraka, a poet who attempts a very different application of Pound’s activist
poetics than Sanders, though Pound is as present in this work as he is in
Sanders’s editing.25 As with Sanders, Baraka’s Poundian inheritance is
dialectical and will entail a working through of his attitudes towards his
poetic forebear, though in this case the dialectics will be more transitional,
leading to a poetics that, in a fashion, come to lay Pound’s influence aside.
Pound’s protégé John Kasper – who offers another model of Poundian
influence during this period – appears in ‘Hymn for Lanie Poo’, the second
poem of Baraka’s first volume of poetry, Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide
Note (1961).26 In some ways Kasper’s early career mirrors Sanders’s: he
founded a countercultural bookstore, Make It New, in 1953, a decade
before Sanders opened his Peace Eye Bookstore. It became a key locale in
the New York underground while his Square $ book series promulgated
Poundian ideas through a distribution system somewhat similar to Fuck
You.27 But Kasper would turn from the cultural sphere to direct political
engagement in support of Poundian positions – agitating aggressively in
support of segregation during the 1960s.
Up to the mid-1950s at least, Kasper’s attitude towards African Americans
seems to have remained relatively unprejudiced, but by the time Baraka
came to write ‘Hymn for Lanie Poo’, his white supremacists politics were
notoriously in place.28 The mention in ‘Hymn for Lanie Poo’ is brief – ‘Oh
110 richard parker
I knew / John Kasper when he hung around with shades . . . ’ – though it
speaks to some important dialectics in Baraka’s early verse.29 In this poem
and throughout his first two volumes, the poet problematizes unspoken
tensions in the bohemian community of the period. ‘Hymn for Lanie Poo’ is
made up of a collage of voices communicating different aspects of hip,
Bohemian and black bourgeoise experiences – experiences which are revealed
as tense and powerfully ambiguous. Kristen Gallagher writes that this poem
‘seems to critique both bohemians and the black bourgeoisie’, but that the
‘poem is less about Jones making a critique, and more about the discourse
landscape he finds himself trapped in as a black poet and intellectual. He
wants a life in art, not in politics, but politics follows him everywhere’.30
Here a certain type of politics is personified in Kasper, who also stands
for Pound and his model of a political poetics that is unavoidable and
undesirable in equal measure.
‘A Contract. (For the Destruction and Rebuilding of Paterson)’,
from Baraka’s 1964 collection The Dead Lecturer, evidences an inten-
sely ambivalent relation to Pound and modernism. The inclusion of
Paterson in the title references both Baraka’s home state and William
Carlos Williams’s long modernist poem, left incomplete in 1963 at his
death. Baraka’s poem points up the financial skulduggery and institu-
tional corruption destroying Paterson; the ‘rude hierarchy of money’
that Baraka perceives at work in the city certainly sounds Poundian.31
We can see here, in the reuse of Pound’s and Williams’s methods, an
implicit dialectical critique – one that runs right through Baraka’s
détournement of Pound. As William J. Harris writes, ‘[i]n rewriting
white texts, in criticizing white visions of reality, Baraka creates a new
vision that fuses the forms and ideas he learned from others with the
realities of his experience as a black man in America’.32
Other moments in Baraka’s early work suggest Poundian cultural con-
siderations, including ‘Rhythm & Blues (1)’, with its screams of
‘“Economics” my God, “Economics”’,33 recalls the irony of Arthur
Griffith’s cameo in Canto XIX (1928): ‘Can’t move ’em with a cold thing
like economics’ (C 85). ‘The Politics of Rich Painters’ posits, with its
‘whimpering pigment of a decadent economy’,34 an economy of the con-
temporary arts that recalls Pound’s early criticism and the regretful ennui
of Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920). Both of these moments, like ‘A
Contract’, are from The Dead Lecturer, a volume that recalls the sentiments
and analysis of Pound’s Mauberley throughout. ‘Politics’ gives Baraka’s
book its title and offers a self-obituary reminiscent of Pound’s ‘E. P. / Ode
Pour L’Élection de Son Sépulchre’, the first section of Mauberley in
which Pound imagines an alter-ego trapped in 1890s aestheticism. Pound
closes his poem with his character’s demise:
Unaffected by ‘the march of events’,
He passed from men’s memory in l’an tretiesme
De son eage; the case presents
No adjunct to the Muses’ diadem. (PT 549)
The tone of ‘Politics’ is angrier, but no less defeatist:

Undone by the logic of any specific death. (Old gentlemen)
who still follow fires, tho are quieter
and less punctual. It is a polite truth
we are left with. Who are you? What are you
saying? Something to be dealt with, as easily.
The noxious game of reason, saying, ‘No, No,
you cannot feel’, like my dead lecturer
lamenting thru gipsies his fast suicide.35
The dead lecturer is Baraka’s Mauberley, his death as necessary for his
poetic rebirth as Pound’s character. Pound uses Mauberley to both criticize
himself and the decadence of the society around him, clearing the ground
for political commitment and The Cantos. The Dead Lecturer performs the
same transitional function for Baraka’s oeuvre, with the poet exploring
anxieties to do with race and class in relation to an autobiographical
persona, laying the groundwork for the radical social analysis that
follows.36 Mauberley preceded Pound’s move away from London and
turn towards political verse, while The Dead Lecturer precedes Baraka’s
name change from LeRoi Jones; the poet ends the volume with the
comment ‘When they say, “It is Roi / who is dead?” I wonder / who will
they mean?’37 In 1967 he would change his name to Imamu Amear Baraka
(later becoming Amiri Baraka), an expression of his growing concern with
Black Nationalism and the forging of a commensurate poetics.
Similarly, Pound was in his midthirties when he imagined Mauberley’s
death at thirty and Baraka was in his thirtieth year as he published The
Dead Lecturer. The book can be seen, then, as a clearing of the decks,
addressing the particular anxieties of this particular poet as he sought to
ready himself for his major task, and using Poundian methods to move
away from the Poundian white Bohemian Beat scene. At the end of the
volume, LeRoi Jones ceases to exist, the poet sloughs off an old identity
while preparing to move on to a more focused social critique, moving away
from the Poundian tradition to create a distinctively Black American
poetics, though the new poetry would retain Poundian influence.
112 richard parker
As William J. Harris writes, ‘rejecting the white avant-garde artists was also
to be true to them; turning their weapons against them was still to use the
weapons they gave him’.38
Baraka’s mature work – the poetry of his Black Nationalist and Marxist
Leninist phases – is characterized by an ideogrammic proselytizing that
tracks back to Pound. It is also, at moments, intensely antisemitic, employ-
ing a violence of expression in his use of racially charged language that bears
some comparison with Pound. Baraka discusses the particulars of his
antisemitism in ‘Confessions of a Former Anti-Semite’ in The Village
Voice (1980). There Baraka explicitly links his prejudice to an encounter
with black nationalists in 1967, and reads his antisemitism through the
paradigm of his blackness throughout.39 The extent to which Pound’s
politics and racial language offered Baraka a model for his verse is impon-
derable. It is clear, however, that the ambiguities around Pound’s politics
were useful for Baraka in his exploration of the Bohemian mid-century
poetry scene – allowing him to expose unspoken attitudes towards race in
the white counterculture, and thus creating the space in which his mature
poetry would develop. Ginsberg asserts that ‘Baraka came a great deal out
of Pound with the particularism of his Black revolution’, and while
Baraka’s second and third poetic periods do not retain the Poundian
sonorities of his first volumes, it is clear that Pound’s example is key in
the dialectics that leads to that poetry.40
Of the next generation of American writers, the Language Poets would
seem most committed to the Poundian-activist tradition. Their combina-
tion of political commitment with avant-garde formalism and group-
building tends towards the Poundian, though it is an influence mediated
through Zukofsky and balanced by Gertrude Stein. Perhaps Ron Silliman’s
attempt to demonstrate historical materialism through the technique of the
‘New Sentence’ in poems likes Tjanting (1981), with his stipulation that in
this new arrangement of meaning the ‘[p]rimary syllogistic movement is
toward the paragraph as a whole, or the total work’, can be read as
ideogrammic and derived from the subject-rhymes of Pound’s technique
in The Cantos.41 Similarly, the long-form ideogrammic / Vorticist poetics
of The Cantos can be discerned in the ten-volume group-autobiography of
The Grand Piano by Rae Armantrout, Steve Benson, Carla Harryman, Lyn
Hejinian, Tom Mandel, Ted Pearson, Bob Perelman, Kit Robinson,
Silliman and Barrett Watten, as well as in Silliman’s ongoing enormous
Ketjak project (1974–). These poets’ concentration on post-structuralist
understandings of language seems a long way from Pound’s poetics,
however.
Across the Atlantic versions of Pound’s political poetics were promul-
gated through the British Poetry Revival and the Cambridge School
through the 1970s, with the Cambridge version descended through
Charles Olson and Ed Dorn to J. H. Prynne.42 For Prynne the extended
ideogrammic method is the central Poundian inheritance. A letter to
Charles Olson in May 1963 details the manner in which the Englishman
reads Pound’s organizational strategies in The Cantos:
the monolinear sequence allows too little breadth of narrative, too little
space in which to deploy the larger patterns of awareness. The locus, that is,
as well as the vector (or, as I revert to it, the noun as well as the verb). The
overall Poundian structure, even, as a form of parallelistic gerundial
patternment.43
Josh Kotin and Ryan Dobran have shown how integral Poundian methods
are to Prynne’s poetics and the ways in which his poems deal with
knowledge.44 Laura Kilbride, meanwhile, makes a provocative case for
a Poundian influence in the work of British poet-activist Anna
Mendelssohn – emphasizing the extent to which ambivalence and influ-
ence are intertwined in the reception of this poet.45
Second-generation Cambridge poet Keston Sutherland’s ‘In Memory of
Your Occult Convolutions’ (2011) offers a rubric for the understanding
of Pound as poet and critic for contemporary poet-activists.46 Sutherland’s
text is principally a collage of quotes from the essays ‘How to Read’ (1929),
‘The Serious Artist’ (1913), ‘The Teacher’s Mission’ (1934) and ‘The
Constant Preaching to the Mob’ (1916), with an epistrophe, ‘it shall be
you’, from section 24 of Walt Whitman’s ‘Song of Myself’, while the title
gestures towards Frank O’Hara’s ‘In Memory of My Feelings’ and ‘Occult
Convolutions’ also taken from section 24 of ‘Song of Myself’. Pound’s
essays are quoted in the same unchronological order in which they are
collected in T. S. Eliot’s edition of the Literary Essays of Ezra Pound (1963).
Sutherland’s poem forms a provocatively Poundian détournement of the
original texts, the poet selecting Pound’s barbed insults apparently without
concern for the critical context in which they are placed. Thus the begin-
ning of the piece opens with the following extracts from ‘How to Read’:
Low-brow reader, it shall be you; those who try to make a bog, a marasmus,
a great putridity in place of a sane and active ebullience, from sheer simian
and pig-like stupidity; half-knowing and half-thinking critics with one
barrel of sawdust to each half-bunch of grapes; out-weariers of Apollo
continuing in Martian generalities, it shall be you; all those with minds
still hovering above their testicles; less determinate sorts of people who
114 richard parker
comprise the periphery; the diluters whose produce is of low intensity, some
flabbier variant, some diffuseness in the wake of the valid; those who add but
some slight personal flavour, some minor variant of a mode, without
affecting the main course of the story; those who at their faintest do not
exist, it shall be you.47
This is an act of violent appropriation of Pound’s words that bears
comparison with Sanders’s treatment of Cantos 110–116. The names of
those Pound insults are excised, as is much of the material of his ire and
the historical contexts of his essays. We are left with a distillation of the
American’s invective that makes a mockery of Pound’s vaunted critical
specificity, and offers an irreverent challenge to the wider contextualities of
the ideogram celebrated by Prynne, Silliman and others. This pure anger is
related to those elements of Pound’s practice inherited by Sanders and
Baraka, with Sutherland offering something of a caricature of their influ-
ences – asking, in a way which is as self-reflexive as the poems of The Dead
Lecturer – whether the contemporary inheritance from Pound is simply
sound and fury and, consequently, where that might leave late modernist
poetics. In The Odes to TL61P (2013) Sutherland warns the reader that ‘[i]t’s
not enough to do Pound in indifferent voices’, which seems very much like
what he does in ‘In Memory of Your Occult Convolutions’.48 This
dilemma is present through Sutherland’s verse, which is both committed
to revolutionary invective and anxious about the efficacy and unintended
consequences of the wielding of that righteous anger.
Among those Sutherland-influenced Poundians we might include Joe
Luna, whose volume Ten Zones contains an epigraph from Pound’s trans-
lation of Cavalcanti’s canzone ‘Donna mi priegha’, with the philosophic
love poetry of Cavalcanti – as imagined into being by Pound in his various
translations – forming a machine for looking with that works effectively
with Luna’s austere and careful poetics. In this application of Cavalcanti we
immediately think of Zukofsky’s detournings of ‘Donna mi priegha’ in his
multiple versions of ‘A’-9 – a locale for an intense agon around the
problematics of influence. Meanwhile, Luna’s Data for Ethics (2015) takes
its title from ‘The Serious Artist’.49 This volume, typically for these later
generations of Pound-influenced poets, takes up argument with Pound at
the same time as offering partial endorsement of his educative aims. Luna
wonders at Pound’s insistence that poetry can provide this kind of ‘data for
ethics’, both insisting on poetry’s ethical project and responsibility, while
focusing on the failure of poetry to offer meaningful ethical models. Here
the moment of ethical failure is highlighted by the failure of Europe to
deal ethically with the Mediterranean refugee crisis, a historical particular
carefully unfolded in a poetics which fails again and again to offer the
aesthetic certainty of Pound’s conception of ‘ethics’ in ‘The Serious Artist’.
Other parts of the American poetic world have continued to
employ Pound’s methods to different ends from The Cantos. Claudia
Rankine’s long poem Citizen: An American Lyric (2014) is perhaps the
most prominent recent example of these. Rankine’s long, hybrid text bears
remarkable similarities to The Cantos – with its sections mixing genres,
types of texts and critical portrait of American society, it is ideogrammic in
its construction. Her application of these techniques to a thorough-going
critique of American society feels close to The Cantos – and, once again,
wholly opposed to his politics. It can be argued that Pound’s demarcation
of the kinds of roles a Svengali-like figure of Pound’s ilk can play in the
creation and construction of poetic scenes is still influential. Perhaps recent
developments which push back against the phallocentric modernist tradi-
tion of provocation, such as the ‘No Manifesto for Poetry Readings and
Listservs and Magazines and “Open Versatile Spaces Where Cultural
Production Flourishes”’, mark the passing of a century of Poundian
careerism and canon building.50
Having said this, an extensive range of contemporary poetic activity is
indebted to Pound’s influence well beyond the Anglo-American poetic
scene. The Cantos have been translated into several Slavic languages in
recent years (by Czeslaw Karkowski into Polish, Ihor Kostets’kyi into
Ukrainian, Vojo Sindolic into Serbo-Croatian and Ian Probstein into
Russian51), and his influence on such writers as Tadeusz Rozewicz, Halina
Poświatowska and Tadeusz Pióro (who wrote his doctoral dissertation
on Pound and James Joyce) has shaped Slavic poetics in recent years. This
extensive influence should be measured alongside Pound’s impact upon
Latin American poetics, such as the work of the Nicaraguan poet Ernesto
Cardenal and the Peruvian poet Antonio Cisneros. Rodolfo Jaruga has
written on Pound’s continuing influence in Brazil through the
Noigandres movement and other cultural manifestations,52 while
Fernando Pérez Villalón has written on the poet’s reception in Chile.53
Pound’s near-global influence on poetry and poetic practice over the last
half-century takes on particular resonance in the context of Chinese
poetry from the Cultural Revolution onwards. Yunte Huang has trans-
lated The Pisan Cantos into Mandarin and other translation projects
followed, while Pound’s influence on the Misty poets and the post-
Tianenmen generation is sufficiently significant to warrant separate
treatment. Make It New’s occasional ‘Ezra Pound in the World’ section
continues to shed light on Pound’s reception around the globe:
116 richard parker
Mohammad Shaheen has written on Pound’s place in contemporary
Arabic literature and Seda Şen Alta has complied a bibliography
of Pound studies in Turkey.54
The three poets I have concentrated on – Sanders, Baraka and
Sutherland – offer applications of Pound that are profoundly different,
though the manner in which each of them appropriates Pound connects
these disparate oeuvres. For Sanders Pound is the organizer, a promoter
suited to the counterculture whose works must be reclaimed, repack-
aged and critiqued through activist poetics. For Baraka the oppressive
ubiquity of Pound’s poetic presence at mid-century offers an opportu-
nity for creating complicatedly Poundian personae that serve to work
through Baraka’s Poundian inheritance, laying the groundwork for
a poetry of intense political commitment. Sutherland’s poem risks
greater proximity to Pound’s words, forcing the reader to consider the
efficacy and violence of both Pound’s and Sutherland’s activist poetics.
The dialectics of each of these models of influence offers an insight into
the complexity of Pound’s wider influence today – each poet uses
elements of Pound’s method to critique the poet’s political poetics,
a factor that speaks to the continued necessity of engagement with
this most controversial poet.
Notes
1. Allen Ginsberg, Allen Verbatim: Lectures on Poetry, Politics, Consciousness, ed.
Gordon Ball (New York: McGraw Hill, 1975), 187.
2. See K. L. Goodwin, The Influence of Ezra Pound (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1966), 117–22.
3. See James Longenbach, Stone Cottage: Pound, Yeats and Modernism (Oxford:
4. See Ezra Pound and Louis Zukofsky, Pound/Zukofsky: Selected Letters of
Ezra Pound and Louis Zukofsky, ed. Barry Ahearn (New York: New
Directions, 1987). Much of this volume is dedicated to the frenetic activity
preceding the launch of the Objectivists, with the many letters between 1930
and 1931 offering most detail about Pound’s strategies.
5. Goodwin, The Influence of Ezra Pound, 142.
6. Recent publications, including Alec Marsh’s John Kasper and Ezra Pound:
Saving the Republic (London: Bloomsbury, 2015) and Matthew Feldman’s
Ezra Pound’s Fascist Propaganda, 1935–45 (London: Palgrave Pivot, 2013),
have expanded our knowledge of the facts of Pound’s political engagement,
while Michael Kindellan, The Late Cantos of Ezra Pound: Composition,
Revision, Publication (London: Bloomsbury, 2017) insists on the centrality of
those politics to Pound’s late poetics.
7. Goodwin, The Influence of Ezra Pound, 35, 175.
8. D. D. Paige’s Letters of Ezra Pound was published in 1950, Hugh Kenner’s The
Poetry of Ezra Pound was published in 1951, John Hamilton Edwards and
William V. Vasse’s Annotated Index to the Cantos of Ezra Pound was published
in 1959 and a gradually increasing number of other monographs and articles
appeared throughout the 1960s.
9. The location is taken from the colophon of Cantos 110–116 and appears
throughout the run of Fuck You Press pamphlets and Fuck You /
A Magazine of the Arts. It is notable how quickly most accounts of this
moment have passed over Sanders’s intervention. Peter Stoicheff, in The
Hall of Mirrors: Drafts and Fragments and the End of Ezra Pound’s Cantos
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), the fullest account of
the poetry of Drafts and Fragments, dedicates just a couple of pages
(58–60) to the Fuck You Press, with only glancing references to
Sanders, while A. David Moody, in Ezra Pound: Poet: A Portrait of the
Man and His Work, Vol. 3, The Tragic Years 1939–1972 (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2015), passes over the episode entirely. The
fullest accounts can be found in Sanders’s own Fug You: An Informal
History of the Peace Eye Bookstore, the Fuck You Press, the Fugs, and
Counterculture in the Lower East Side (New York: Da Capo, 2011) and
Chelsea Jennings’s ‘Pirating Pound: Drafts and Fragments in 1960s
Mimeograph Culture’, Journal of Modern Literature 40.1: Poetry: New
Discoveries, New Interpretations (Fall 2016), 88–108.
10. Stoicheff, Hall of Mirrors, 60.
11. Daniel Tiffany, My Silver Planet: A Secret History of Poetry and Kitsch
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), 169–70.
12. Sanders, Fug You, xiv.
13. Sanders, Fug You, 10–14.
14. Ezra Pound, The Cantos of Ezra Pound (New York: New Directions, 1996),
814; Pound, Cantos 110–116, unpaginated. This late fragment became some-
thing of a favorite of the counterculture. Ginsberg calls it ‘[t]he last great
Canto’, Allen Verbatim, 185.
15. ‘I sent copies of F. Y. [Fuck You / A Magazine of the Arts] to Pablo Picasso,
Samuel Beckett in Ussy-sur-Marne, Nikita Kruschev, Jean Paul Sartre,
Charles Olson in Gloucester, Fidel Castro in Cuba, and Allen Ginsberg
care of an American Express office in India. . . . I also sent the magazine to
Edward Dahlberg, Gary Snyder, Robert Duncan, and others’. Sanders, Fug
You, 16. This list closely resembles the types of lists Pound would send to
young editors as he coached them in scene building.
16. Sanders, Fug You, 15. Ezra Pound, ‘The White Stag’, in Poems and
Translations, ed. Richard Sieburth (New York: Library of America, 2003), 101.
17. Fuck You / A Magazine of the Arts 5.7 (September 1964), quoted in Sanders,
Fug You, 100.
18. Sanders, Fug You, 241.
19. Sanders, Fug You, 47–8.
118 richard parker
20. Sanders, Fug You, 49, 86.
21. See Jerome J. McGann, Black Riders: The Visible Language of Modernism
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 79–80.
22. Stoicheff, The Hall of Mirrors, 59.
23. Jerome J. McGann writes of ‘bibliographical codes’ that ‘both linguistic and
bibliographical texts are symbolic and signifying mechanisms. Each generates
meaning, and while the bibliographical text commonly functions in
a subordinate relation to the linguistic text, “meaning” in literary work results
from the exchanges these two great semiotic mechanisms work with each
other’. See Jerome J. McGann, The Textual Condition (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1991), 67.
24. Jennings, ‘Pirating Pound’, 91.
25. Quoted in William J. Harris, ‘Introduction’, in The LeRoi Jones / Amiri
Baraka Reader, ed. William J. Harris (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press,
1991), xxi.
26. Clive Webb is helpful in establishing the extent of Pound’s direct influence on
Kasper. See Rabble Rousers: The American Far Right in the Civil Rights Era
(Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011), 50–3.
27. See Alec Marsh, John Kasper and Ezra Pound, 36–43. Marsh reports that
‘Kasper found that his shop attracted Black Nationalists – who were unfazed
by the shop’s anti-Semitic politics’, 41.
28. See Alec Marsh, John Kasper and Ezra Pound, 47–51 for discussion of Kasper’s
attitudes during his Bohemian phase.
29. Amiri Baraka, SOS: Poems 1961–2013 (New York: Grove Press, 2014), 10.
30. Kristen Gallagher, ‘On LeRoi Jones, “Preface to A Twenty-Volume Suicide
Note”’, Jacket2, http://jacket2.org/article/leroi-jones-preface-twenty-volume-
suicide-note, accessed 26 February 2018.
31. Baraka, SOS, 52.
32. William J. Harris, The Jazz Aesthetic: The Poetry and Poetics of Amiri Baraka
(Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1985), 22–3.
35. Baraka, SOS, 107–8.
36. Michael Coyle, Daniel Tiffany and Peter Wilson all call Mauberley
a ‘transitional’ poem: Michael Coyle, ‘Ezra Pound: Hugh Selwyn
Mauberley’, in A Companion to Modernist Literature and Culture, ed. Peter
Bradshaw and Kevin J. H. Dettmar (London: John Wiley, 2008), 439; Daniel
Tiffany, Radio Corpse: Imagism and the Cryptaesthetic of Ezra Pound
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 55; Peter Wilson,
A Preface to Ezra Pound (London: Routledge, 2014), 152. The LeRoi Jones /
Amiri Baraka Reader – which is organized in sections established in collabora-
tion with Baraka himself – categorizes The Dead Lecturer as a part of ‘The
Transitional Period’ (vi), a designation which various critics have found
central to the text, including Daniel Matlin in On the Corner: African
American Intellectuals and the Urban Crisis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2013), 147; James Campbell in Syncopations: Beats,
New Yorkers, and Writers in the Dark (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2008), 140; and Walton M. Muyumba in The Shadow and the Act:
Black Intellectual Practice, Jazz Improvisation, and Philosophical Pragmatism
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 133.
38. William J. Harris, The Jazz Aesthetic: The Poetry and Poetics of Amiri Baraka
(Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1985), 30.
39. See Amiri Baraka, ‘Confessions of a Former Anti-Semite’, The Village Voice
25.50 (17–23 December 1980), 1. Baraka, later in the same article, triangulates
his prejudice with ‘suburban prejudice’ (Michael Reck, Ezra Pound: A Close
Up [New York: McGraw Hill, 1973], 154) of whites like Pound: ‘Jews were
different from other white people. They were more lowly regarded than other
white people, at least by white people. Though in my childhood and adoles-
cence there were no teachings of anti-Semitism within my family or in the
Black neighbourhood I lived in, there was always an undercurrent of feeling
that the Jews were something “other”’. ‘Confessions’, 19.
40. Ginsberg, Allen Verbatim, 182.
41. Ron Silliman, ‘The New Sentence’, The New Sentence (New York: Roof,
2003), 91.
42. The material collected in Certain Prose of The English Intelligencer, ed.
Neil Pattison, Reitha Pattison and Luke Roberts (Cambridge: Mountain
Press, 2014) makes Olson’s importance to the Cambridge inheritance
clear. More broadly, the application of Pound’s practices in contempor-
ary avant-garde poetics in the UK can be traced to two main dissemi-
nators, Eric Mottram at Kings College London and J. H. Prynne in
Cambridge. See Richard Parker, ‘“Here’s Your Fucking Light Shithead”:
Ezra Pound and Contemporary British Poetry’, in News from Afar:
Ezra Pound and Some Contemporary British Poetries, ed. Richard Parker
(Bristol: Shearsman, 2015), 9–20, for an overview of this bifurcated
influence. For material relating to Mottram’s impact, see also in the
same volume Robert Hampson’s ‘Eric Mottram and Ezra Pound: “There
is no substitute for a life-time”’ (53–85), and Gavin Selerie’s ‘Pound and
Contemporary British Poetry: The Loosening of Form’ (212–28).
Anthony Mellors’s Late Modernist Poetics: From Pound to Prynne
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005) also contains material
on this topic.
43. Charles Olson and J. H. Prynne, The Collected Letters of Charles Olson
and J. H. Prynne (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press,
2017), 63.
44. See Josh Kotin, ‘Blood-Stained Battle-Flags: Ezra Pound, J. H. Prynne and
Classical Chinese Poetry’, in News from Afar: Ezra Pound and Some
Contemporary British Poetries, ed. Richard Parker (Bristol: Shearsman, 2015),
133–41, and Ryan Dobran, ‘Myth, Culture and Text: Ezra Pound’s Homer
and J. H. Prynne’s Aristeas’, in News from Afar, 142–60.
120 richard parker
45. Laura Kilbride, ‘“Real Games with Books”: On Anna Mendelssohn and
Ezra Pound’, in News from Afar, 184–93.
46. For a detailed gloss on the Pound materials collected in this poem, see Richard
Parker, ‘On In Memory of Your Occult Convolutions’, Glossator 8
(November 2013), 317–44.
47. Keston Sutherland, ‘In Memory of Your Occult Convolutions’, in News from
Afar, 21.
48. Keston Sutherland, The Odes to TL61P (London: Enitharmon, 2013), 31.
49. Pound writes: ‘As our treatment of man must be determined by our
knowledge of what man is, the arts provide data for ethics’. Ezra Pound,
Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. T. S. Eliot (New York: New Directions,
1968), 46.
50. The Chicago Review, Fall 2014–Winter 2015, 221–32.
51. The Pound Society’s quarterly newsletter has recently published a selection of
articles on the subject of ‘Pound in Russia’, in Make It New 4.3
(December 2017), http://makeitnew.ezrapoundsociety.org/pound-in-russia.
52. ‘Ezra Pound’s Arrival in Brazil’, Make It New 4.1–2 (September 2017),
http://makeitnew.ezrapoundsociety.org/volume-iv/4-1-2-september-2017/
ezra-pound-in-the-world.
53. ‘Versions, Variations, and Reverberations: Ezra Pound in Chile’, Make It New
3.4 (April 2017), http://makeitnew.ezrapoundsociety.org/volume-iii/3-4/pou
nd-in-the-world.
54. ‘Teaching Pound’, Make It New 3.2 (September 2016), http://makeitnew
.ezrapoundsociety.org/volume-iii/3–2-september-2016/shaheen-article-ma
ke-it-new-3-2, and ‘Ezra Pound in Turkey: A Bibiliography, 1961-2016’,
Make It New 3.3 (December 2016), http://makeitnew.ezrapoundsociety.org
/volume-iii/3-3-december-2016/documentary. Thanks to Mark Byron for
providing much of the material for this review of Pound’s international
influence.
W OR KS C I T ED
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3.3 (December 2016), http://makeitnew.ezrapoundsociety.org/volume-iii/
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(17–23 December 1980), 1.
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Modernist Literature and Culture, ed. Peter Bradshaw and Kevin
J. H. Dettmar, 431–9 (London: John Wiley, 2008).
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Aristeas’, in News from Afar: Ezra Pound and Some Contemporary British
Poetries, ed. Richard Parker, 142–60 (Bristol: Shearsman, 2015).
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Gender Forum Collective, ‘No Manifesto for Poetry Readings and Listservs and
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The Tragic Years 1939–1972 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015).
Muyumba, Walton M., The Shadow and the Act: Black Intellectual Practice, Jazz
Improvisation, and Philosophical Pragmatism (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2009).
Olson, Charles, and J. H. Prynne, The Collected Letters of Charles Olson
and J. H. Prynne (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press,
2017).
Parker, Richard, ‘“Here’s Your Fucking Light Shithead”: Ezra Pound and
Contemporary British Poetry’, in News from Afar: Ezra Pound and Some
Contemporary British Poetries, ed. Richard Parker, 9–20 (Bristol: Shearsman,
2015).
‘On In Memory of Your Occult Convolutions’, Glossator 8 (November 2013),
317–44.
Pattison, Neil, Reitha Pattison and Luke Roberts, eds., Certain Prose of the English
Intelligencer (Cambridge: Mountain Press, 2014).
Pound, Ezra, The [Selected] Letters of Ezra Pound, 1907–1941, ed. D. D. Paige (1950;
New York: New Directions, 1971).
Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. T. S. Eliot (New York: New Directions, 1968).
Poems & Translations, ed. Richard Sieburth (New York: Library of America,
2003).
Pound, Ezra, and Louis Zukofsky, Pound/Zukofsky: Selected Letters of Ezra Pound
and Louis Zukofsky, ed. Barry Ahearn (New York: New Directions, 1987).
Reck, Michael, Ezra Pound: A Close Up (New York: McGraw Hill, 1973).
Sanders, Ed, ‘A Fuck You Position Paper: Resistance Against Goon Squads’, Fuck
You / A Magazine of the Arts 5.7 (September 1964), 1–4.
Fug You: An Informal History of the Peace Eye Bookstore, the Fuck You Press, the
Fugs, and Counterculture in the Lower East Side (New York: Da Capo, 2011).
Selerie, Gavin, ‘Pound and Contemporary British Poetry: The Loosening of
Form’, in News from Afar: Ezra Pound and Some Contemporary British
Shaheen, Mohammad, ‘Teaching Pound’, Make It New 3.2 (September 2016),
http://makeitnew.ezrapoundsociety.org/volume-iii/3–2-september-2016/
shaheen-article-make-it-new-3–2.
Silliman, Ron, The New Sentence (New York: Roof, 2003).
Stoicheff, Peter, The Hall of Mirrors: Drafts and Fragments and the End of
Ezra Pound’s Cantos (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995).
Sutherland, Keston, ‘In Memory of Your Occult Convolutions’, News from Afar:
Ezra Pound and Some Contemporary British Poetries, ed. Richard Parker, 21–4
(Bristol: Shearsman, 2015).
The Odes to TL61P (London: Enitharmon, 2013).
Tiffany, Daniel, My Silver Planet: A Secret History of Poetry and Kitsch (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014).
Radio Corpse: Imagism and the Cryptaesthetic of Ezra Pound (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1995).
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Chile’, Make It New 3.4 (April 2017), http://makeitnew.ezrapoundsociety.org
/volume-iii/3-4/pound-in-the-world.
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University of Georgia Press, 2011).
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part ii
Ezra Pound and Asia
chapter 8
Pound’s Representation of the Chinese Frontiers

From the War Zone to the Green World
Akitoshi Nagahata
Sinocentrism
In his London years, Pound had ambivalent feelings about the marginal
status of the country of his origin, the United States. On the one hand, he
had a strong desire to position himself in the centre of Western civilization;
on the other hand, he could not help being conscious of his origin in the
margin – the frontier – of that civilization. For example, at the beginning of
‘What I Feel about Walt Whitman’, published in 1909, he wrote, ‘From
this side of Atlantic I am for the first time able to read Whitman, and from
the vantage of my education and . . . my world citizenship’ (SP 145), but in
his poem ‘A Pact’, published in 1916, he addressed to his imaginary
Whitman, ‘We have one sap and one root – / Let there be commerce
between us’ (PT 269). In ‘Patria Mia’, published in 1912, he wrote, ‘there is
no man now living in America whose work is of the slightest interest to any
serious artist’ (SP 109), but in a letter to Harriet Monroe dated
11 November 1912, he wrote, ‘England hasn’t yet accepted [a
Weltlitteratur standard], so we’ve plenty of chance to do it first’ (SL 25).
His mixed feelings about the frontier, it seems, are reflected in the
positions he takes regarding the frontiers in his poems. While he selected
topics related to the political, economic and cultural affairs within the
civilizations, he also wrote poems using the exile motif, as well as the theme
of expedition, such as Canto XL, which features the expedition of Hanno,
a Carthaginian explorer who led an expedition off the coast of West Africa.
‘Periplum’, the word Pound coined, meaning a geography ‘as a coasting
sailor would find it’ (ABCR 43), also indicates his interest in a position on
the periphery.
In Pound’s poems about China, however, it is the centralist viewpoint
that is more prominent than the viewpoint from the periphery. Certainly,
there are numerous references to the Chinese frontiers in his poems.
127
128 akitoshi nagahata
Cathay (1915), a collection of translations of classic Chinese poems based on
Ernest Fenollosa’s manuscripts, for example, includes poems depicting the
life and feelings of soldiers dispatched to the borderland. In ‘the Chinese
History Cantos’, Cantos LIII to LXI, there are also references to the
frontier regions in China or its outer areas, such as Mongolia, Tibet,
Japan and Korea, among others. However, in these poems, the frontiers,
as well as the lands beyond them, are viewed from the Chinese point of
view. Peoples beyond the borders are treated as barbarians and as China’s
enemies.
One might argue that the centralist viewpoint in his poems, especially in
‘the Chinese History Cantos’, is derived from the Sinocentric view of the
world in its source text, Joseph-Anne-Marie Moyriac de Mailla’s L’Histoire
générale de la chine, a history of China based on the Manchu translation of
Tong-Kien-Kang-Mou [Tongjian Gangmu], the extract of Chinese annals
compiled by Zhu Xi, a twelfth-century Confucian philosopher. According
to the traditional Sinocentric view of the world, China was at the centre of
the earth, and the peoples in the outer rim were viewed as barbarians. They
were classified in different ways, but they were generally called derogatory
names, such as the ‘Four Barbarians’ (Dongyi [Eastern Barbarians],
Nanman [Southern Barbarians], Xirong [Western Barbarians] and Beidi
[Northern Barbarians]).1
According to Miyoko Nakano, in the ‘Zhuixing’ (Forms of the Earth)
chapter of the Huainanzi, a collection of essays compiled in the period of
Han (second century BCE), there is a map showing the ‘Nine Regions’
(Jiu Zhou [九州]), where Chinese people live in the centre of the entire
world, surrounded by concentric, increasingly larger squares: the Eight Yin
(八殥), the Eight Hong (八紘) and the Eight Ji (八極). The Eight Yin,
which surrounds the Nine Regions, is mostly ‘the sea and the swamp
lands’, the Eight Hong is ‘the frontier lands that surround the sea and
the swamp lands’, and the Eight Ji is ‘the point of contact with the
universe’.2 In the geography shown in this map, one can see not only the
ancient Chinese perception of the world but also their Sinocentric hier-
archical world order, which was accepted in various schools of Chinese
philosophy, including Confucianism, and was the basis of China’s foreign
relations: non-Chinese regimes could interact with China only ‘by accept-
ing their own subordination and presenting tribute to the Chinese ruler’.3
Pound’s representation of the Chinese frontiers in many of his poems
replicates this Sinocentric view of the world. The frontiers are viewed as
the places of Barbarians, who are treated as China’s enemies. Of the
poems included in Cathay, for example, ‘Song of the Bowmen of Shu’,
Pound’s Representation of the Chinese Frontiers 129
‘Lament of the Frontier Guard’ and ‘South-Folk in Cloud Country’
highlight the feelings of the soldiers sent to the frontier to defend the
country against the enemies, the equestrian nomads. ‘Song of the
Bowmen of Shu’, attributed to Wen Wang of the Zhou Dynasty, repre-
sents frontier guards (‘bowmen’) wondering when they can go home,
while ‘picking the first fern-shoots’ (PT 249). ‘Lament of the Frontier
Guard’, by Li Bai, also represents a soldier sent to the North Gate as
a frontier guard to watch against the ‘barbarian land’ (PT 254) – that is,
the land of the Xiongnu. In this poem, the speaker laments the extreme
weather condition (‘the wind blows full of sand’), loneliness (‘lonely from
the beginning of time until now’) and the desolation of the place
(‘Desolate castle, the sky, the wide desert’; ‘Bones white with thousand
frosts’; PT 254). Asking who brought about this situation, he blames
‘Barbarous kings’, predicting a grim future of themselves: ‘we guardsmen
fed to the tigers’ (PT 254); eventually they will be killed by the enemies
and their bones will be left unheeded in the desert. Likewise, in ‘South-
Folk in Cold Country’, also by Li Bai, the narrator, a soldier sent to guard
the Northern frontier, reports about the desert, the ‘flying snow’, the lice
that ‘swarm like ants over [their] accouterments’ and the hard fight with
no reward (PT 259).
The frontier is thus represented as a war zone in these poems. It is
characterized by hardship, desolation, loneliness, death, futility and des-
pair. The soldiers are faced with the fearsome enemies of China, the
Barbarians, and the great soldiers like Li Mu in the Spring and Autumn
Time or General Li Guang of the Han Dynasty are viewed as China’s long-
dead superheroes.
Frontiers in ‘The Chinese History Cantos’

The frontiers and the lands beyond them are also viewed with a strong
sense of Sinocentrism in ‘the Chinese History Cantos’, composed in the
later 1930s. This is attested by various historical fragments included in the
cantos, but it can also be seen in a fragmentary passage in Canto LIII
(C 267–268), which refers to the funeral of King Cheng of Zhou and the
enthronement of his son, King Kang. This passage is based on a Confucian
classic, Shujing, or Book of Documents, in which it is shown that both
ceremonies were performed in the innermost area of the court, located in
the middle of the city that is considered to be in the centre of the world.
There the pieces contributed by the wild tribes are placed, and during the
ceremony the new king receives the mandate from Heaven; and in the
speech to the princes, the new king says, ‘Thus did great Heaven . . . give
them the four quarters (of the land)’ (‘Announcement of King Kan’, Book
of Documents).4
While ‘the Chinese History Cantos’ reflect the Confucian Sinocentric
view of world order, Pound also shows that it is in constant threat; the
threat of the nomadic peoples from outside China is one of the key topics.
A significant number of lines in these cantos are concerned with their
invasions across the borders and the attempts of resistance by the Han
Chinese.5 In Canto LIII, for example, it is mentioned that King Cheng of
Zhou appointed Duke Mu of Shao (Chaomoukong [C 270]) to be the
general to fight against ‘the west tartars’ (C 270). In Canto LIV, there is
a line showing that Shihuangdi, the founder of the Qin Dynasty, made
the Great Wall built to protect the land of China (‘WALL rose in the time
of TSIN CHI’ [C 275]). In the same canto, there is also a mention of
General Li Guang of the Han Dynasty – the general also mentioned in
‘South-Folk in Cold Country’ in Cathay – who fought against the
Xiongnu (C 281). In Canto LIV, Pound shows the Chinese had dom-
inance over the nomads in the time of Emperor Xuan of the Han
Dynasty, introducing the episode of Chanyu, chief of the Xiongnu,
kneeling to the Emperor (‘And the Tchen-yu knelt to HAN SIEUN /
and stayed three days there in festival / whereafter he returned to his
border and province’ [C 279]). But later in the same canto, Pound
indirectly shows the invasions of China by five non-Han peoples – that
is, Xiongnu, Xianbei, Jie, Di and Qiang. As demonstrated in the episode
of Emperor Min (‘MIN TI’ [C 282]) of the Jin Dynasty who was ‘taken by
tartars / made lackey to Lieou-Tsong of Han [Former Zhao]’ (C 282),
Sinocentrism is now beyond recognition.
In the subsequent Sui and the Tang Dynasties, however, China regained
power, and in Canto LIV, Pound features Taizong of the Tang Dynasty,
who carried out a series of campaigns against Eastern and Western Turks,
along with attempted but unsuccessful invasions of Korea. The land was
expanded, and ‘an embassy came from north of the Caspian’ (C 286), and
when Taizong died, Pound reports, there were Tartars who ‘wanted to die
at his funeral’ (C 287). Nevertheless, this seemingly peaceful relation
between China and non-Han nomads did not last, as indicated in such
lines as ‘And more goddam Tartars bust loose again / better war than peace
with these tartars’ (C 289). In Canto LV, Pound shows that the Tang
Dynasty could not stop their invasions any more by mentioning their
repeated raids: ‘and more Tou-san (tartars) / were raiding’ (C 291) and
‘Tartars still raidin’ (C 291).
The conflict between China and the non-Han nomads continues to be
a major topic in the cantos covering the times of the Song Dynasty and
the Conquest Dynasties. The relation between Chinese and nomadic
peoples was reversed, with the non-Han people, Qidan, who established
Liao, now being dominant over Song. In order to secure peace, Song had
to seal a treaty with Liao (the Treaty of Chanyuan), by which Song gave
annual tributes to Liao, and their mutual relationship came to be viewed
as that of a younger and an elder brother, which was humiliating to the
Chinese. Near the fall of Song Dynasty, the invasion of non-Han nomads
into Song land is summarized in such lines as ‘tartars more tartars / tartars
pass over Hoang-ho’ and ‘Hoang ho, Hoang ho, tartars pass over Hoang
ho’ (C 299). When the Mongols conquered China and established the
Yuan Dynasty, as reported in Canto LVI, the idea of Sinocentrism was
crushed. Although the next dynasty, Ming, restored the land from the
Mongols, its history summarized in Canto LVII is dominated by various
episodes regarding the conflicts with nomadic peoples invading from
beyond the border. Ming was harassed not only by the Mongols and
Jin but also by Japan, whose ruler Toyotomi invaded Korea, as reported
in Canto LVIII. In the North, the Jurchens (the later Manchus)
expanded their sphere of influence and, joining with the Mongols, closed
in upon the Chinese border.
It should be mentioned that the historical fragments concerning the
relations between China and the non-Han nomadic peoples in ‘the
Chinese History Cantos’ are generally written in a factual style, without
the romanticism associated with the Western Region and the Silk Road;
the lands beyond the borders are simply viewed as places of terror and the
frontier as the place of wars. Although the history of those relations could
include episodes that incite readers’ imagination about the frontier and the
Western Regions, Pound generally avoids them. For example, there is no
mention of Wang Zhaojun, who was sent by Emperor Yuan of the Han
Dynasty to marry a Xiongnu Chief, or Chanyu, so that they could establish
friendly relations. Also absent is the story of the Buddhist monk
Xuangzang, who, in the seventh century, travelled from China to India
and came back with Buddhist scriptures after visiting 125 countries and
territories – a historical journey that inspired the composition of Journey to
the West, the famous Ming Dynasty novel by Wu Cheng.
Certainly, there is an occasional romanticism in ‘the Chinese History
Cantos’. For example, the arrival of embassies from north-western and
northern kingdoms across the borders are reported with a touch of
exoticism:
And an embassy came from north of the Caspian
from Koulihan of short nights
where there is always light over horizon
and from the red-heads of Kieï-kou
Blue-eyed and their head man was Atchen or Atkins Chélisa (C 286)
Also, in Canto LVI, the lines reporting the expedition of Mongke, the
fourth Great Kahn of the Mongol Empire, resonate with frontier exoti-
cism, with the mention of ‘Kutano’, or Koko Nor (the Blue Sea Lake; ‘And
Megko went into Bagdad, went into Kutano / and died by the wall at
Ho-tcheou’ [C 303]). The expedition to discover the sources of the Yellow
River mentioned in the same canto (‘Hoang-ho’s fount in a sea of stars’
[C 304]), is, as Nakano shows, a topic that had long incited the curiosity of
the Chinese.6 However, Pound moves on to other episodes, without going
into the details of these topics concerning the Western Regions, possibly
because his interest lies in examining the rise and fall of dynasties in
connection with the observance of Confucian moral and political
philosophy.
Emperor Kangxi in the Pastureland

In Canto LIX and Canto LX, two of the three cantos dealing with the
history of the Qing Dynasty, the frontier is represented with more details
and new implications. In Canto LIX, for example, a long passage sum-
marizes the Qing ambassadors’ journey to Nerchinsk, where they signed
a treaty with Russia and determined the border between Qing and Russia.
The embassy, including two Jesuit missionaries, Jean-François Gerbillon
and Thomas Pereira, took the route to Tibet, and then went on towards the
Khans of Khalkas, but there they received an order to return because of the
war between the Oirat and the Khalkas. The next year, they started on
a new journey and reached Nerchinsk, where they signed the agreement.
Although the description of this journey is focused on the two Jesuit
missionaries who served as interpreters and assisted the negotiation
between the Chinese and the Russians (Pound mentions that Gerbillon
kept the tempers of the ambassadors [C 327]), the passage includes such
episodes as seeing a Living Buddha who ‘blessed them with tea
and a luncheon’ (C 326), and another who said ‘he didn’t see how he
cd/ have lived in another body / before this’ (C 326). There is also a brief
description of the Amur frontiers, over which there had been disputes and
conflicts between China and Russia – the land which the Manchus
considered to be part of their homeland: ‘we wanted our martin sables,
our huntin’ / that was on the north side of the Amur / where are mountains
and great lakes’ (C 327).
The lines portraying the toilsome journey of the ambassadors in the
mountain areas – which Pound calls ‘Mt Paucity’ (C 326) – are reminiscent
of other journeys, such as the one made by Xuangzang in the seventh
century. There is an element of frontier exoticism in this canto. And yet, as
the description of the north side of the Amur indicates, they are also seen as
a part of the Empire, lands of profit-making and hunting.
Moreover, in Canto LX, featuring the life and deeds of Emperor Kangxi,
the frontiers are given a still new meaning; they are portrayed as a green
world associated with robust equestrian activities of nomadic life. Kangxi is
known to have been an open-minded emperor who protected Jesuit mis-
sionaries in China, and helped introduce various scientific knowledge of
the West to China, in such fields as astronomy, mathematics, natural
sciences and music. Kangxi also expanded the Imperial territory. He
suppressed the Revolt of the Three Feudatories; forced the Tungning
Kingdom of Taiwan to submit to Qing rule; intervened in a dispute
between Mongolian tribes, the Khalkas and the Dzungars; and defeated
Galdan Khan, who led the Dzungars, in the first Oirat-Manchurian War.
He also took control of Lhasa, Tibet, by defeating again the Dzungars who
had occupied it.
In Canto LX, Pound’s focus is on the activities of the Jesuit missionaries
in China in connection with Kangxi. There are textual fragments referring
to such historical events as the persecution of the missionaries in Zhejiang
Province and the government’s decision to protect them (C 328), the
treatment of the Emperor’s illness with quinine the missionaries provided
(C 328), the government’s permission for them to build a church in Beijing
(the North Church; C 328), the Rites Controversy (C 329–30), and Chin
Mao’s petition that accused Europeans and Christianity as a threat to
China (C 330–1).7 Among these episodes, Pound inserts a passage related
to the first Oirat-Manchurian War and Emperor Kangxi’s expedition
(C 328–9). While this passage includes a reference to General An
Fiyanggu (Pound calls him ‘General Feyenkopf’ [C 328]), who led the
expedition along with the Emperor, it is mostly composed of excerpts of
Kangxi’s letters to the Crown Prince, his second son, who stayed in Beijing
to take care of the governmental business. Interestingly, instead of the war
or fighting, the Emperor’s letters – at least, those Pound selected – refer to
the land he passed and to the hunting he enjoyed there. For example, the
letters report, the Emperor ‘shot six quail with six arrows’ (C 328), sent the
Crown Prince a horse and sheep, and crossed the Yellow River, which was
frozen. The Emperor also reports his observations of the land. He says, for
example, that the land of the Ordos (now in Inner Mongolia) seems to be
good for hunting, with ‘a lot of pheasants and hares’ (C 329), that its
pasturage is excellent, and that people there are good at ‘lookin’ after their
animals’ (C 329). One also learns from the letters that the Emperor carried
out a survey of the sun and delayed his return to the capital in order to
enjoy hunting in Paichen, or Baicheng (in the north-western part of the
present Jilin Province), because he was ‘pleased with the pasture land’
(C 329). The pastures in the frontiers, Mongolia and Northern China,
described in the Emperor’s letters, are thus represented as places where he
was freed from the political and military affairs of the empire. The letters
are personal and intimate in tone, the tone not expected of an Emperor but
of a father. They represent the Emperor’s joy, happiness and familial love,
and they make a striking contrast with the lines that refer to politics and
military campaigns in this canto and throughout ‘the Chinese History
Cantos’.
This contrast would be all the more striking given the fact that the
Emperor’s letters were originally written in Manchu, the language of his
people. Qing was a Dynasty founded by the Manchus. When they became
the rulers of China, the majority of Qing’s population was Han Chinese.
Although the ruling Manchu forced their custom of wearing pigtails and
Manchurian costumes on the Han Chinese and other peoples, they
adopted a multi-lingual policy, making Manchu, Chinese and
Mongolian their official languages. Even though Manchu was a primary
language in the court, the Chinese language was still the dominant lan-
guage in the Empire, and as the Sinification of Manchu officials pro-
gressed, the Manchu language began its decline.
The Manchus had been indebted to Chinese and its literature and
culture even before they began to rule China. For example, as shown in
Canto XLVIII, Tai Tsong or Hong Taiji, the second Emperor of Qing,
brought laws and letters from China (‘TAI TSONG of Manchu took them
the law from China / forbade manchus marry their sisters’ [C 319]; ‘I take
letters from China / which is not to say that I take orders from any man’
[C 320]). The absorption of the Chinese language and culture continued
even after Qing became the rulers of China. The third Emperor, Shunzhi,
who attached great importance to Confucianism, promulgated ‘Six Edicts’,
and had the Confucian classics translated into Manchu, as shown by the
excerpts of his preface to the translation of Shijing, or Book of Odes, placed
at the beginning of Canto LIX. Kangxi, the fourth emperor, promulgated
the ‘Sacred Edicts’, and had numerous Chinese classics translated into
Manchu. The fifth emperor, Yongzheng, as shown in Canto XCVIII and
Canto XCIX (in Thrones), made Kangxi’s ‘Sacred Edict’ available for
ordinary people who lacked proficiency in the classical Chinese in which
it was written. Under the strong influence of the Chinese language, in
which the Confucian classics were written, the Manchu language was fated
to decline, even if it was the language of the rulers. Yongzheng said, ‘If
some special encouragement . . . is not offered, the ancestral language will
not be passed on and learned’.8
Kangxi’s letters to his son, written in Manchu, and sent from the
frontiers, thus not only offer a glimpse of the Emperor’s private life and
fatherly affection; they also indicate the ethnic roots and the cultural
position of the Manchu in China. His description of the pastures in
Mongolia and northern China highlights these significances, because
they suggest the link between the rulers who adopted Confucianism and
their original nomadic lifestyle in the north. The references to horses and
hunting are especially significant in this context. The line ‘Ortes very
orderly, have lost none of their mongol habits’ (C 329), although it refers
to the Mongols, not the Manchus, suggests that the Ordos people still kept
the traditional habit of hunting, as opposed to the sophisticated city life in
China, which the Manchu officials were in the process of adopting,
forgetting their original simple but robust lifestyle. In addition, the horse
references in the canto – that is, the horse the Emperor sent to the Crown
Prince with a comment ‘I don’t know that chinese bean fodder will suit
him’ (C 328), and the horse that ‘sweat pink’ (C 329), which reminded his
followers of the legendary ‘Taouen’ or Pergamon horses – also serve as
a critique of the Sinification of the former equestrian nomads, including
the Manchus.
The references in Canto LX to the pasture, horses and hunting in
Kangxi’s letters, written in Manchu, thus provide the frontiers with
a new image: the place associated with terror, desolation and loneliness is
now represented as a peaceful pastureland where the equestrian nomads’
robust life is still kept. Furthermore, it should also be pointed out that this
peaceful image of pastureland is in contrast to the pastoral image of the
green farmland presented in Shijing, or Book of Odes, a Confucian classic,
which Pound later translated into English. ‘Kiung MuMa’, a poem about
horses, begins with the lines, ‘Wild at grass the bull horses / move over
moor-land, / black-rump’d and roans, / all-blacks and bays, / a splendour
for wagons, unwinded. / Phang! Phang! I’ll say some horses!!’ (PT 979). As
the phrase ‘splendour for wagons’ suggests, the horses here are for farm
work and transportation, not for hunting. While Kangxi was an advocate
of Confucianism and the Manchu officials were rapidly absorbing the
Chinese language and culture, the image of the Emperor hunting in the
pastureland in Canto LX serves to characterize the frontier not only as
a secure Chinese territory but also as that of the equestrian nomads, the
Manchus.
Naxi’s Pastoral Space

Pound continued to write cantos based on Confucian texts. In Section:
Rock Drill, he took up Shujin, or Book of Documents, and the focus of
Cantos XCVIII and XCIX is Kangxi’s ‘Sacred Edict’ and Wang Youpu’s
explication of it for the ordinary people. Then, towards the end of Thrones
and in Drafts and Fragments (Cantos CI, CIII, CX, CXII and
CXIII), Pound introduces the topic of the Na-khi (Naxi), an ethnic
minority group in Southwest China. The Naxi are not Han-Chinese.
Traditionally, they believed in Dongba (Tompa) religion and used
Dongba pictorial symbols. Regarding their relations with China, from
the thirteenth century they were under the indirect rule of the Yuan and
the Ming Dynasties, and in the eighteenth century, they came under the
direct rule of Qing Dynasty. In these cantos, Pound describes the places,
landmarks, people and religious rites of the Naxi, using Joseph F. Rock’s
ethnographic writings, and juxtaposing them with anecdotes about mod-
ern society and politics.
Unlike the frontier poems in Cathay and ‘the Chinese History Cantos’,
the Naxi cantos represent the frontier as a pastoral space of serenity and
spiritual consolation, secluded from politics and war. Pound highlights
harmony between men and nature, using folklore and religious motifs. In
Canto CI, for example, based on the photographs taken by Rock in Li
Chiang (Lijiang) and reproduced in his text, Pound describes a peasant and
a priest (2dto-1mba), being one with the landscape, exhibiting the folklore
symbols, and anticipating the performance of the religious rite:
With the sun and moon on her shoulders,
the star-discs sewn on her coat
at Li Chiang, the snow range,
a wide meadow
and the 3dto-1mba’s face (exorcist’s)
muy simpático (C 746)
The image of nature-human harmony presented in this and other passages

in the Naxi cantos is different from the robust, manly image of Emperor
Kangxi hunting in the pasture, even if they both represent the frontier in
peace. Here the tone is calmer, suggesting the spiritual aspect of the place,
which is shown more clearly at the end of the canto with the quotations
from the priest’s words of prayer:
‘May their pond be full;
The son have his father’s arm
and good hearing;
(noun graph upright; adjective sideways)
‘His horse’s mane flowing
His body and soul are at peace.’ (C 746–7)
The prayer for the well-being of a family and that for the funeral of
a warrior are put together here. In the latter, the spirit of the dead warrior
is appeased by the prayer. The requiem tone is prominent, and it continues
in Canto CX, where the lines are quoted from ‘2Hăr-2la-1llü 3k’ö’
(Harlallu), the thirteen ceremonies for expiating the spirits of suicides
(C 797). Whether the serenity in which the theme of expiation is pursued
reflects Pound’s old age, or his wish for appeasing the spirits of his deceased
friends, Pound’s representation of the frontiers as natural and spiritual
places is in a remarkable contrast with his earlier works related to the
frontiers.
Despite this serenity, however, we cannot overlook Pound’s tacit
reference to the political background of the Naxi. For example, in
Canto CI, a line stating that Temur, Emperor Chengzong of the Yuan
Dynasty, visited a temple in Naxi (‘Te Te of Ch’eng, called Timur, 1247,
came hither’ [C 743]) serves as a reminder of the indirect rule of the Naxi
by the Mongols.9 The mention of the letters and gifts used in the
ceremonies held by Yuan and Ming to invest their chiefs to govern (‘4
letters patent, 5 seals / after the 4th year of Yung-lo / 12th May, 1406, and
a gold belt / inlaid with flowers’ [C 743]) also indicates the rule of the
Naxi by the Yuan and the Ming Dynasties. Furthermore, the lines quoted
above that introduce the 2dto-1mba (priest) is followed by a quotation
from the inscription on the Stone Drum (‘by the waters of Stone Drum, /
the two aces’ [C 746]), which commemorates a sixteenth-century victory
of the Naxi over a Tibetan army,10 a military exploit achieved in the time
of the Ming rule.
These reminders of Naxi’s subjugation to China may be linked to the
portrayal of the frontiers as the territories of Chinese Dynasties seen in the
frontier poems in Cathay and in Canto LX in ‘the Chinese History
Cantos’. However, even if these references evoke the memory of conquests,
the sense of territorial occupation is suppressed in these cantos. Instead,
with the folklore and religious motifs, and the inclusion of the pictorial
symbols, the Naxi cantos present an indigenous world of its own, apart
from the traditional Chinese or Manchu culture. Pound’s apparent empa-
thy with the cultural tradition of this ethnic community hints at
a supposition that nearly at the end of his life, Pound has returned to
a position on the periphery, possibly one closer to nature.
Notes
1. For more detailed account of the classifications of the ‘Barbarian’ peoples, see:
Liu Junping and Deyuan Huang, ‘The Evolution of Tianxia Cosmology and
Its Philosophical Implications’, Frontiers of Philosophy in China 1.4 (2006),
517–38; and Chen Zhi, ‘From Exclusive Xia to Inclusive Zhu-Xia: The
Conceptualisation of Chinese Identity in Early China’, Journal of the Royal
Asiatic Society 14.3 (2004), 185–205.
2. Nakano Miyoko, Henkyō no fūkei: Nihon to Chūgoku no kokkyo ishiki [The
Frontier Landscape: The Border Consciousness in Japan and China] (Sapporo:
Hokkaido University Press, 1979), 138–9. The translation of the quotations
from Nakano is mine.
3. Nicolas Tackett, ‘The Great Wall and Conceptualizations of the Border under
the Northern Song’, Journal of Song-Yuan Studies 38 (2008), 100.
4. See also John J. Nolde, Blossoms from the East: The China Cantos of Ezra Pound
(Orono, ME: National Poetry Foundation / University of Maine, 1983), 54–57;
and the French translation by S[éraphin] Couvreur of the Chou King: Texte
chinois avec une double traduction en Français et en Latin des annotations et un
vocabulaire par S. Courvreur S. J. (Ho kien Fou: Imprimerie de la Mission
Catholique, 1897), 344–62.
5. See Nolde for the passages in de Mailla’s translation of Tongjian Gangmu
corresponding to Pound’s historical episodes. For more recent historical
views on the relations between China and the nomadic peoples, see John
K. Fairbank, ed., The Chinese World Order: Traditional China’s Foreign
Relations (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968); Nicola Di
Cosmo, Ancient China and Its Enemies: The Rise of Northern Power in East
Asian History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); and Jonathan
Karam Skaff, Sui-Tang China and Its Turko-Mongol Neighbors: Culture, Power,
and Connections, 580–800 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).
6. Nakano, [‘The Frontier Landscape’], 180–200.
7. Chen Mao’s petition, or memorial, translated into French, can be found in de
Mailla Vol. 11, 321–5. A partial English translation is in Nolde 386–387. For the
original Chinese text, see Susumu Murao, ‘“Tokuni issho wo mōkete”: Kesseki-
chin sōheikan Chin Mao no sōshū to Nagasaki, Kōshū’ [‘Establishing a Special
Spot: A Memorial from the Brigadier General Chen Mao and the Nagasaki-
Guangzhou Connection’], Chūgoku bunka kenkyū [Chinese Cultural Research
(Tenri University)] 29 (2012): 3–4.
8. Edward J. M. Rhoads, Manchus and Han: Ethnic Relations and Political Power
in Late Qing and Early Republican China, 1861–1928 (Seattle: University of
Washington Press, 2000), 53.
9. It is possible that Pound confused Timur for Kublai. See Terrell 653.
10. Emily Mitchell Wallace, ‘“Why Not Spirits?” – “The Universe Is Alive”:
Ezra Pound, Joseph Rock, the Na Khi, and Plotinus’, in Ezra Pound & China,
ed. Zhaoming Qian (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003), 240.
W OR KS CI T ED
Chen Zhi, ‘From Exclusive Xia to Inclusive Zhu-Xia: The Conceptualisation of
Chinese Identity in Early China’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 14.3
(2004), 185–205.
Couvreur, Séraphin, trans., Chou King: Texte chinois avec une double traduction en
Français et en Latin des annotations et un vocabulaire par S. Courvreur S. J. (Ho
kien Fou: Imprimerie de la Mission Catholique, 1897).
De Mailla, Joseph Anne Marie de Moyriac, L’Histoire générale de la chine, ou
annales de cet empire, traduites du Tong-Kien-Kang-Mou, par Joseph-Anne
Marie de Moyriac de Mailla Jesuite François, 13 vols. (Paris: D. Pierres,
1777–85).
Di Cosmo, Nicola, Ancient China and Its Enemies: The Rise of Northern Power in
East Asian History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
Fairbank, John K., ed., The Chinese World Order: Traditional China’s Foreign
Relations (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968).
Legge, James, trans., Book of Documents (Kindle ed. Dragon Reader, 2014).
Liu Junping and Deyuan Huang, ‘The Evolution of Tianxia Cosmology and Its
Philosophical Implications’, Frontiers of Philosophy in China 1.4 (2006),
517–38.
Murao, Susumu, ‘“Tokuni issho wo mōkete”: Kesseki-chin sōheikan Chin Mao no
sōshū to Nagasaki, Kōshū’ [‘Establishing a Special Spot: A Memorial from the
Brigadier General Chen Mao and the Nagasaki-Guangzhou Connection’],
Chūgoku bunka kenkyū [Chinese Cultural Research (Tenri University)] 29
(2012), 3–4.
Nakano Miyoko, Henkyō no fūkei: Nihon to Chūgoku no kokkyo ishiki [The
Frontier Landscape: The Border Consciousness in Japan and China]
(Sapporo: Hokkaido University Press, 1979).
Nolde, John J., Blossoms from the East: The China Cantos of Ezra Pound (Orono,
ME: National Poetry Foundation / University of Maine, 1983).
Pound, Ezra, ABC of Reading (New York: New Directions, 1960).
The Cantos, 15th printing (New York: New Directions, 1995).
Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. T. S. Eliot (New York: New Directions, 1968).
Poems and Translations, ed. Richard Sieburth (New York: Library of America,
2003).
Selected Letters of Ezra Pound 1907–1941, ed. D. D. Paige (New York: New
Directions, 1950).
Selected Prose 1909–1965, ed. William Cookson (New York: New Directions,
1973).
Rhoads, Edward J. M., Manchus and Han: Ethnic Relations and Political Power in
Late Qing and Early Republican China, 1861–1928 (Seattle: University of
Washington Press, 2000).
Skaff, Jonathan Karam, Sui-Tang China and Its Turko-Mongol Neighbors: Culture,
Power, and Connections, 580–800 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).
Tackett, Nicolas, ‘The Great Wall and Conceptualizations of the Border under the
Northern Song’, Journal of Song-Yuan Studies 38 (2008): 99–138.
Terrell, Carroll F., A Companion to the Cantos of Ezra Pound (Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 1993).
Wallace, Emily Mitchell, ‘“Why Not Spirits?” – “The Universe Is Alive”:
Ezra Pound, Joseph Rock, the Na Khi, and Plotinus’, in Ezra Pound and
China, ed. Zhaoming Qian, 213–77 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press, 2003).
chapter 9
‘A Treasure Like Nothing We Have in the Occident’

Ezra Pound and Japanese Literature
Andrew Houwen
Pound’s relationship with Japanese literature can be broadly divided

into three areas: the influence of ‘hokku’ on his work, his interest in
‘Noh’ drama and his own impact on Japanese literature. The first of
these has, until recently, dominated in English-language Pound
scholarship about Japan. This is likely due to the popularity of ‘In
a Station of the Metro’, his most well-known poem, composed
before 13 October 1912 and first published in Poetry in April 1913:
The apparition of these faces in the crowd:
Petals on a wet, black bough.1
Its connection with ‘hokku’ was established when Pound himself compared
it to ‘sixteen-syllable’ [sic] Japanese poetry in ‘How I Began’ (June 1913) and
described it as a ‘hokku-like sentence’ in ‘Vorticism’ (September 1914).2
After receiving the manuscripts of the Japanologist Ernest Fenollosa in the
autumn of 1913, Pound published fifteen nō plays in various literary
magazines from May 1914, in Certain Noble Plays of Japan in
September 1916, and in ‘Noh’ or Accomplishment in January 1917. He also
wrote four unpublished ‘Noh’ of his own in 1916 and incorporated ele-
ments of nō in Le Testament de Villon (1924) and The Women of Trachis
(1954).3 Pound’s reception in Japanese literature has been given the least
coverage of these three areas. Two major Japanese poets, Nishiwaki
Junzaburō and Kitasono Katué, introduced his poetry and poetics in
Japan before the Second World War. Soon after the war, Iwasaki Ryōzō
translated the first book of Pound’s poetry into Japanese; Pound’s ‘ideo-
grammic method’, meanwhile, influenced the work of the internationally
acclaimed concrete poet Niikuni Seiichi in the 1960s. This chapter will
explore recent developments in these three areas before concluding on
possible directions for future research.
141
142 andrew houwen
In addition to Pound’s own description of ‘In a Station of the Metro’ as
a ‘hokku-like sentence’, F. S. Flint’s apparent role in introducing this poetic
form to Pound has also been frequently noted due to Flint’s praise of it in
his review in The New Age of 11 July 1908, which discussed Kimura Shōtarō
and Charlotte Peake’s Sword and Blossom Songs and also included examples
of two ‘haikai’ that did not appear in this book. One of these, by the
sixteenth-century Japanese poet Arakida Moritake, was later also translated
by Pound in ‘Vorticism’. Flint’s version reads:
A fallen petal
Flies back to its branch:
Ah! A butterfly!4
Flint’s account of Imagism’s formation in 1915, in which he describes the
group of poets that included himself and Pound writing ‘dozens’ of ‘tanka
and haikai’, is also often cited.5 The question of Flint’s source for haikai
appeared to have been settled by J. B. Harmer in 1975.6 According to
Harmer, the Japanologist Basil Hall Chamberlain’s 1902 essay, ‘Bashō and
the Japanese Poetical Epigram’, was read by the French translator Paul-
Louis Couchoud, who in 1906 discussed several ‘haïkaï’ in his Les Lettres
article, ‘Les haïkaï (Epigrammes poétiques du Japon)’.7 Flint, in turn, then
read Couchoud’s article. Harmer’s account of Flint’s source for his interest
in ‘haikai’ formed the basis of Helen Carr’s description of the link between
Imagism and ‘hokku’ in The Verse Revolutionaries, which appeared in
2009.8 Harmer points out, however, that Flint cannot have been the
only source for Pound’s understanding of this form, as Pound only ever
used the word ‘hokku’ rather than ‘haikai’, the term Flint always used.
In the same year in which Carr’s The Verse Revolutionaries came out,
Yoshinobu Hakutani proposed an alternative view in Haiku and Modernist
Poetics.9 Hakutani also observes that Pound only used ‘hokku’ and suggests
that this constitutes evidence for the Japanese poet Yone Noguchi, who
also used the term ‘hokku’, as ‘most likely’ to be Pound’s source rather than
Flint.10 Kiuchi Toru, building on Hakutani’s suggestion, even claims that
‘none other than Noguchi’ was Pound’s inspiration.11 It is true that
Noguchi and Pound corresponded from 1911, and that Noguchi wrote an
article, ‘Hokku’, published in The Academy in July 1912, which Pound
might have read before 13 October 1912, when he submitted ‘In a Station of
the Metro’ to Harriet Monroe.12 Kiuchi adds that Noguchi’s thrice-
repeated error in ‘What Is a Hokku Poem?’ of January 1913 in describing
hokku as having ‘sixteen syllables’ also appears in Pound’s ‘How I Began’ of
that June, which discusses hokku’s role in the composition of ‘In a Station
‘A Treasure Like Nothing We Have in the Occident’ 143
of the Metro’.13 Both Hakutani and Kiuchi omit to mention, however, that
Chamberlain also used the term ‘Hokku’ (as did W. G. Aston, Lafcadio
Hearn, F. V. Dickins and William N. Porter before 1912). Furthermore,
neither explains why Pound arranged both of his translations of hokku as
well as ‘In a Station of the Metro’ in two lines, rather than the three that
Noguchi, and most others, used. The only translators to have done so until
then were Chamberlain and Dickins. The latter slightly adapted a few of
Chamberlain’s versions to make them rhyme in 1906; Chamberlain’s
translations reappeared in his Japanese Poetry of 1910.14
As Carr observes, Chamberlain’s ‘Japanese epigrams’ take a more
‘literal’ approach than his earlier translations of Japanese poetry into
‘rhymed stanzas’: this allows him to emphasize ‘the qualities that would
make this poetry so important for modernist poetry – its fragmentary,
elliptical nature, its intense condensation of meaning’.15 This ‘fragmen-
tariness’ results from Chamberlain’s understanding of the ‘Hokku’, for
which he provides in parentheses the alternatives ‘Haiku’ (the first time
this term appears in English) and ‘Haikai’.16 A ‘Hokku’, Chamberlain
notes, is the ‘starting verse’ first of a tanka, then of a renga (‘linked verse’).
One form of the latter, haikai renga (‘comic linked verse’), had arisen in
the sixteenth century with different rules from previous linked-verse
forms and, initially, a comic (‘haikai’) tendency. Because a hokku ‘is
part only of a complete stanza’, Chamberlain explains, ‘it is essentially
fragmentary’.17 Others such as Aston, Couchoud and Flint used ‘haikai’
to refer to an independent hokku. As Yamazaki Kagotarō’s 1893 essay
Haikaishidan (‘A Discussion of Haikai’s History’) makes clear, this has
a Japanese precedent: ‘What is generally called haikai by people today is
very different from the haikai of the past’: independent ‘starting verses’
(‘hokku’) had themselves also become known as ‘haikai’.18 Yamazaki
proposed using the until then rarely used term ‘haiku’ to refer to an
independent hokku, a proposal taken up by the Japanese writer and critic
Masaoka Shiki that year; Shiki and his disciples are Chamberlain’s source
for the introduction of this term. It was the ‘fragmentary’ quality of the
‘Hokku’, however, that particularly appealed to modernist poets
like Pound.
Most of Chamberlain’s ‘Hokku’ translations consist of two four-stress
lines (a few are given in prose). One example, which Harmer incorrectly
states was ‘not one of the poems translated by Chamberlain’, is his version
of Arakida Moritake’s sixteenth-century ‘butterfly’ hokku.19 Chamberlain
discovered this hokku in Aeba Kōson’s 1893 essay Haikairon
(‘On Haikai’).20 Kōson sees it as one of Moritake’s ‘finest works’.21 It
144 andrew houwen
was later also translated by Aston, Couchoud, Flint, Pound and Noguchi
(the latter in March 1914, some months before Pound’s ‘Vorticism’ essay).
Chamberlain’s translation still includes archaisms, and some awkward
contractions to fit his four-stress rule, but it avoids rhyme:
Fall’n flow’r returning to the branch, –
Behold! it is a butterfly.22
This version’s lineation and punctuation clearly call attention to the juxta-
position of the two compared objects, the ‘flow’r’ and the ‘butterfly’. Unlike
Couchoud, Flint, Noguchi and all other translators except Chamberlain and
Dickins up to that point, Pound also gives Moritake’s hokku in two lines:
The fallen blossom flies back to its branch:
A butterfly.23
Pound emphasizes what he calls the ‘super-position’, or ‘one idea set on top
of another’, of the two compared objects through lineation and punctua-
tion, as Chamberlain’s translation of Moritake’s hokku does. Pound also
uses this approach for his version of the hokku apparently composed by the
‘Japanese naval officer’ as related to him by Victor Plarr and, more
famously, for his own ‘hokku-like sentence’.
Noguchi’s ‘Hokku’ article criticizes Chamberlain’s term ‘epigram’ for
‘hokku’; if Pound had indeed read it (which would also have meant that he
at least knew Chamberlain to be a hokku translator), he evidently agreed, as
he only used the latter term. Noguchi also shows ‘very little satisfaction even
with the translations of Professor Chamberlain and the late Mr. Aston’ as
well as the ‘defects’ of Porter’s A Year of Japanese Epigrams of 1911: he is
particularly scathing about the latter’s forced use of rhyme, which ‘cheapens’
the original.24 Instead, he presents one of his own English ‘hokku’, which also
appears in The Pilgrimage, the collection he sent to Pound in 1911:
My love’s lengthened hair
Swings o’er me from Heaven’s gate:
Lo, Evening’s shadow!25
This contains even more archaisms and awkward contractions than
Chamberlain’s: in addition to the archaic ‘Lo’, ‘lengthened’ is itself
a forced lengthening of the more natural ‘long’ to fit the five-syllable
count Noguchi imposes on his opening line, while ‘over’ is shortened to
make the second line seven syllables. Most noticeably, however, Noguchi
employs precisely the kind of concrete-abstract combinations (‘Heaven’s
gate’) condemned in Pound’s ‘A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste’.26 Like most
of his English ‘hokku’ – and unlike Chamberlain or Pound – it attempts to
adhere to a strict five-seven-five-syllable pattern. In both form and diction,
then, Noguchi’s ‘hokku’ seem a less convincing possibility as a model for
‘In a Station of the Metro’.
In addition to the question of Pound’s sources for the form of ‘In
a Station of the Metro’, that of its subject matter’s origins has also
continued to attract numerous explanations. Rupert Richard Arrowsmith
has recently proposed as another possible influence one of the Japanese
prints Pound may have seen on his frequent visits to the British Museum,
particularly from 1909 after he had met Laurence Binyon, the Keeper of
Prints and Drawings in its Japanese Department. Hokusai’s woodblock
print, given the English title ‘Poem by Ono no Komachi’ in the catalogue,
is accompanied by one of Komachi’s tanka translated on an index card by
Inada Hogitarō and Arthur Waley:
While I have been sauntering through
the world, looking upon its vanities, lo!
My flower has faded and the time of the long rains come.27
Arrowsmith suggests that ‘“In a Station of the Metro” offers in its closing
line an image strikingly similar to this contrast between the pale, fallen
hanami petals and rain-wet cherry wood’.28 Pound had returned to the
Japanese Department of the British Museum in September 1912 after his
summer walking tour of France; it is thus plausible that, when composing
‘In a Station of the Metro’, Pound had seen this print and its translated
tanka. Any, all or none of these propositions for the source of Pound’s
Metro poem may be true; it remains an unresolved question.
Perhaps it is fitting that Pound used the term ‘hokku’ rather than ‘haikai’ or
‘haiku’: although his hokku experiments constituted a pivotal moment in his
poetic development, they functioned as a starting point from which he soon
moved away towards longer poetic forms. As David Ewick notes, Pound only
uses the term ‘hokku’ eight times in all written material that has seen print –
four of those in his ‘Vorticism’ essay of September 1914.29 By the time of that
essay’s publication, Pound had received Ernest Fenollosa’s manuscripts and
was translating nō plays, one of which – Nishikigi – had already been published
in May. At the end of ‘Vorticism’ Pound writes:
I am often asked whether there can be a long imagiste or vorticist poem. The
Japanese, who evolved the hokku, evolved also the Noh plays. In the best
‘Noh’ the whole play may consist of one image. I mean it is gathered about
one image. Its unity consists in one image, enforced by movement and
music. I see nothing against a long vorticist poem.30
146 andrew houwen
Pound clearly saw a link between the ‘one image’ hokku and the ‘one image’
nō play. Despite the dominance of hokku in discussions of Pound’s relation-
ship with Japanese literature, however, it was ‘Noh’, not hokku, that served
from then on as the most influential Japanese literary form for Pound, as
Ewick observes.31 Indeed, following ‘Vorticism’, Pound’s translations of the
nō plays appeared in various periodicals and two books; he wrote ‘Noh’
himself; above all, nō was of great importance to The Cantos from its
beginnings in 1915 to the concluding Drafts and Fragments.32
The last few years have witnessed a marked turn towards re-examining
Pound’s interest in nō and its influence on The Cantos. My article on
‘Ezra Pound’s Early Cantos and his Translation of Takasago’ of
August 2013 focuses on the connection between Pound’s statement in
a letter of January 1917 to Harriet Monroe that the ‘theme’ of The Cantos
would be based ‘roughly’ on that of Takasago and the discovery that,
despite Hugh Kenner’s claim to the contrary, Pound did translate this
play.33 Moreover, in his letter to Monroe’s assistant editor Alice Corbin
Henderson of 7 July 1915, sent with his translation, some six weeks after he
had told her he had started on his ‘long poem’, he praised Takasago as
having a ‘flawless structure’ and constituting ‘the very core of the “Noh”’.34
It was one of the nō plays Pound considered to be ‘built into the intensi-
fication of a single Image’, a notion he likely derived about nō from
Binyon’s The Flight of the Dragon.35 That ‘single Image’ was ‘the pines in
Takasago’: the play centres on two pine trees said to be paired, one at
Takasago and the other at Sumiyoshi, whose spirits appear as an old
married couple.36 They represent the prosperous imperial reigns and
literature of the play’s past and present. Pound emphasized the political
aspect of this prosperity: in his writing on nō, he prioritized its patronage
by the shōgun and the aristocracy.37 The ‘unity of Image’ and the ‘flawless
structure’ Pound discovered in Takasago was supported by, and paralleled,
a political system structured around the dominant political centre of the
shōgun and the emperor. It thus anticipates his own turn towards ‘the
totalitarian’.38
Pound’s translation of Takasago enabled him to develop his poetics of
‘super-position’ in The Cantos. The reference to Takasago in Canto IV is
well-known; its centrality to the canto is further clarified, however, by its first
appearance in Pound’s drafts, in which it is inserted in pencil between two
compared scenes (Actaeon and Vidal’s pursuit by hounds).39 It is a focal
point of transition in the canto, connecting sections together, thus corre-
sponding with Takasago’s own super-position of two elements across space
and time. Takasago thus functions as the canto’s structural method.
Kenner claimed that this is the only reference to Takasago, but it reappears
in Canto XXI, in which Pound compares the rule of Lorenzo de’ Medici
and Thomas Jefferson before concluding on the depiction of the
Eleusinian Mysteries, a vegetal regeneration rite that, in Pound’s view,
resembles that of Takasago. In A Draft of Cantos 17–27, published in 1928,
four marginal notes appear alongside sections of Canto XXI. The entire
‘Eleusinian’ section falls under the marginal note ‘Takasago and Ise’.40
What no article has yet touched on is that this reference to Takasago also
recurs in Canto XXIX: the images of the ‘Brookwater over brown sand’
and ‘the white hounds on the slope’ from the ‘Eleusinian’ sections of
Cantos IV and XXI again reappear; shortly afterwards, the canto con-
cludes on the ‘Pine by the black trunk of its shadow / And on hill black
trunks of the shadow / The trees melted in air’ (C 146). During this time,
the ‘single Image’ of Takasago’s pine trees thus still produced for Pound
a vital culminating vision for his paradiso.
Another nō play that remained important for Pound’s paradiso at
this time was Hagoromo, in which a tennin (‘heavenly being’) asks
a fisherman for her ‘feather-mantle’ (‘hagoromo’) to be returned to her
so she can fly back to heaven. When he returns it, she performs the
‘dance of the rainbow-feathered garment’ and disappears into the sky
over Mount Fuji.41 Hagoromo celebrates the longevity of imperial rule
by comparing it to how long it would take for the ‘rock of earth’ to
be worn away by the ‘feather-mantle’.42 This celebration is also
expressed in the tennin’s dance, which was first passed to the
Chinese Emperor Xuanzong.43 The dance represents the movements
of the sun and moon, ‘here where the moon is unshadowed, here in
Nippon, the sun’s field’.44 Previous commentators have noted refer-
ences to Hagoromo in the ‘Three Cantos’, the Pisan Cantos and Drafts
and Fragments; but none has yet observed its appearance in what
Kenner described as the ‘still point’ of The Cantos, Canto XLIX,
composed between 1928 and 1937.45 In this canto, the rule of bene-
ficent emperors is also represented by the sun and moon’s movements:
the ‘Autumn moon’ is balanced with the ‘Sun blaze’ and the ‘light’ on
the ‘north sky line’ with that on the ‘south sky line’ (FDC 46). Pound
then transcribes lines from what was China’s national anthem until
1928, which itself also emphasizes the importance of the sun and
moon’s movements as a metaphor for imperial order. Two
of Pound’s typescript drafts for this canto preserve an explicit refer-
ence to Hagoromo: in these, ‘Yodai’ (Emperor Yangdi), the builder of
the ‘canal’ that ‘goes still to TenShi’, watches ‘the dance that is still
148 andrew houwen
called Hagormo Hagoromo’.46 While the published version omits this
explicit reference, the play’s depiction of the sun and moon’s ordered
movements representing harmonious imperial rule remains at the
heart of the canto.
As Diego Pellecchia’s article of fall 2013 on ‘Ezra Pound and the
Politics of Noh Film’ demonstrates, Pound’s interest in nō continued
into the 1930s and 1940s.47 In London and Paris, Pound’s Japanese
acquaintances, the artist Kume Tamijūrō and the playwright Kōri
Torahiko, both of whom were deeply familiar with nō, and the dancer
Itō Michio, who was not, had provided him with an understanding of nō
as it was performed.48 Pound’s viewing in Rapallo of a scene from a nō
play in the 1937 film Atarashiki tsuchi (‘New Land’) reinvigorated his
fascination for nō. ‘I have (had strong) nostalgia for Japan’, Pound wrote
to the Japanese poet Kitasono Katué on 3 March 1939, ‘induced by the
fragment of Noh in Mitsuco [a translated title of Atarashiki tsuchi]’.49
‘ALL the Noh plays ought to be filmed’, he told Kitasono; ‘It must be 16
years since I heard a note of Noh (Kumé and his friends sang to me in
Paris)’.50 During his return to the United States from April to June
that year ‘with the intention of convincing President Roosevelt not to
embark on war with Japan’, he first saw a sound film of another nō play he
had translated from Fenollosa’s notes, Aoi no ue.51 This further encour-
aged his nō enthusiasm: on 25 March 1941, he wrote to Kitasono propos-
ing that ‘We shd/give you Guam but INSIST on getting Kumasaka and
Kagekiyo in return’.52 For Pound at this time, nō was ‘a treasure like
nothing we have in the occident’.53 Pellecchia contrasts Pound’s percep-
tion of nō with the ‘imperialist nostalgia’ of earlier translators such as
Chamberlain and Hearn.54 In light of Pound’s evident view of nō as
a celebration of imperial rule, however, it is also possible to see his
understanding of it as ‘imperialist nostalgia’ of another kind.
The proposition that Pound’s conception of the ‘unity of Image’ in nō
was political as well as aesthetic is further developed in Christopher
Bush’s article, ‘“I am all for the triangle”: The Geopolitical Aesthetic
of Pound’s Japan’ of 2016.55 He considers nō to be central to Pound’s
political and aesthetic projects: ‘the noh was not simply to be included in
his vision of world culture. In very important ways, it provided a kind of
model for how the history of culture might be organized, kept alive, and
remain politically vital’.56 The Cantos can be compared to Takasago in
particular because ‘it is about the building of networks of association
between different historical eras, but also about creating “rhymes”
between different places, a kind of translatio imperii’.57 Bush
convincingly outlines the contradictions between the cosmopolitanism
of such intercultural ‘rhymes’ and Pound’s embrace of fascism; such
contradictions, Bush rightly contends, are inherent in fascism itself.
The article also argues that Pound saw nō, and Japanese literature more
generally, as ‘modern’.58 This view was reinforced by his correspondence
with Kitasono: ‘I know of no group of poets in Europe or America as alert
as Mr. Kitasono’s Tokio friends’.59 Pound thus did not merely conceive
of Japan as a repository of ancient source material to be plundered for the
development of his modernist poetics; he considered it an equal partner
in what he saw, in Fenollosan terms, as the coming ‘serious fusion’ of
‘Oriental and Occidental cultures’.60
Kitasono was one of very few poets in Japan, however, to take an interest
in Pound before the Second World War. The earliest Japanese accounts of
Imagism, such as that of the poet and English literature scholar Sangū
Makoto in 1918 and the poet Momota Sōji in 1929, present Amy Lowell as
the movement’s founder. Sangū mentions him last in his list of Imagist
poets, also mistakenly describing him as a British poet; in Momota’s list, he
is not included at all.61 Three of Pound’s poems appeared in Sangū’s
Anthology of New English Verse in 1921.62 The following year, at the start
of a three-year stay in England when he also befriended Kōri, the promi-
nent poet and critic Nishiwaki Junzaburō read H. D.’s ‘Oread’ (which had
also appeared in Sangū’s introduction to Imagism) and Pound’s introduc-
tion of it as the best example of a ‘vorticist’ poem in the first issue of
BLAST.63 Soon after his return to Japan in 1925, Nishiwaki had four
Vorticist-inspired poems published in Momota’s poetry magazine
Sekitoku (‘Letters’), including his famous poem ‘Ame’ (‘Rain’).64 In 1933,
one of Nishiwaki’s former students at Keiō University, Kinoshita
Tsunetarō, translated Pound’s How to Read under the title Bungaku seishin
no gensen (‘The Origins of the Spirit of Literature’); it is this publication
that likely spurred Kitasono to contact Pound some three years later.65
From August 1936 to August 1939, six of Pound’s poems were translated
and published in VOU by Kitasono; his articles continued to be published
in VOU and its successor, Shin gijutsu ('New Art'), until March 1941.66 As
Niikura Toshikazu suggests, though, Pound only began receiving signifi-
cant attention as a poet in Japan after the war.67
This attention was first demonstrated by Kitasono’s translation and
publication of seven of Pound’s poems in the August 1951 issue of
VOU; among these is the first-ever Japanese version of ‘In a Station of
the Metro’.68 Pound’s new poetry publications were also advertised in
later issues. Iwasaki edited the first book of Pound’s poetry in Japanese
150 andrew houwen
five years later.69 John Solt contends, however, that Pound’s poetry had
little effect on Kitasono’s, noting that their relationship was one of
‘pretended familiarity and real indifference’.70 Kitasono did, though,
play a part in the foundation of the concrete poetry movement through
his connection, via Pound, with the Brazilian poets Haroldo and
Augusto de Campos. One Japanese concrete poet, Niikuni Seiichi,
took a particular interest in Pound’s ‘ideogrammic method’ via the
de Campos brothers’ concrete poetry manifesto in their magazine
Noigandres. ‘What I particularly took note of in the Noigandres “man-
ifesto”’, Niikuni reflects, ‘was the attention paid, via E. F. Fenollosa
and Ezra Pound, to the way of writing Chinese characters and the
function of individual Chinese words’.71 This led to Niikuni’s compo-
sition of concrete poems such as ‘Rain’ (1966) that took apart the
constituent elements of Chinese characters in order to call attention to
what Niikuni considered to be their visual etymologies. Niikuni’s
concrete poems were exhibited across the world and published in
several anthologies, including the Penguin Post-War Japanese Poetry
in 1972. By the time of Pound’s death, then, the influence of his
‘ideogrammic method’ can thus also be gauged by its journey from
the west back to the east.
Although the dominant recent trend in scholarship concerning Pound’s
relationships with Japanese literature has been a turn towards nō, there is
still scope for more research on Pound and hokku. As Kōson’s influence
on Chamberlain already suggests, what Flint and Pound encountered in
‘haikai’ or ‘hokku’ was partly shaped by fundamental reforms to it in the
1890s led by Masaoka Shiki (another influence Chamberlain
acknowledges).72 A study of these changes in relation to Pound’s interest
in ‘hokku’ might illustrate the extent to which his conception of it as
embodying a poetics of concretion and ‘super-position’ is merely his
projection or, instead, shares an affinity with Japanese precedents.
Similarly, research on the political role of nō in late-nineteenth-century
Japan, especially of Takasago and Hagoromo, could shed further light on
how their promotion of imperialism anticipated Pound’s fascism. Recent
scholarship that has challenged the narrative of Pound’s interest in nō as
relatively minor could be further extended: in light of the discovery
of Pound’s Takasago translation, for example, Kenner’s contention that
this play’s ‘hymn to vegetal powers became the whole of Rock-Drill’
merits further investigation.73 Niikuni’s concrete poems, meanwhile,
offer a potentially valuable contribution to the discussion of Pound’s
‘ideogrammic method’, and Pound’s impact on contemporary Japanese
poets such as Kido Shuri, who is also a translator of Pound, and the
senryū poet Aota Senryū remain as yet unexplored. Pound’s relationships
with Japanese literature can thus still provide much as yet undiscovered
treasure.
Notes
1. Ezra Pound, ‘In a Station of the Metro’, Poetry 2/1 (April 1913), 12.
2. Pound, ‘How I Began’, T. P.’s Weekly (6 June 1913), 707; Pound, ‘Vorticism’,
Fortnightly Review, n. s. 573 (1 September 1914), 467.
3. This chapter uses the spelling ‘nō’, rather than Pound’s ‘Noh’, because
the former is the standard Latin-script spelling for the term in Japanese.
For a relatively recent discussion of nō elements in Pound’s The Women
of Trachis, see Miho Takahashi, ‘Herakles on the Blazing Pyre: A Reading
of The Women of Trachis’, in ROMA/AMOR: Ezra Pound, Rome, and
Love, ed. William Pratt and Caterina Ricciardi (Brooklyn: AMS, 2013),
215–28.
4. F. S. Flint, ‘Book of the Week: Recent Verse’, The New Age, 3/2 (11 July 1908),
212–13.
5. Flint, ‘The History of Imagism’, The Egoist 2/5 (1 May 1915), 70–71.
6. J. B. Harmer, Victory in Limbo: Imagism, 1908–1917 (London: Secker and
Warburg, 1975).
7. Paul-Louis Couchoud, ‘Les haïkaï (Épigrammes poétiques du Japon)’, Les
Lettres 3 (April 1906), 189–98.
8. Helen Carr, The Verse Revolutionaries: Ezra Pound, H. D. and The Imagists
(London: Jonathan Cape, 2009).
9. Yoshinobu Hakutani, Haiku and Modernist Poetics (Basingstoke; Macmillan,
2009).
10. Hakutani, Haiku, 73.
11. Kiuchi Toru, ‘Noguchi Yonejirō – haiku wo sekai ni hirometa hito’
(‘Noguchi Yonejirō – The Person Who Spread Haiku around the World’),
Kadokawa haiku 65/10 (September 2016), 118–29 (118). Except where specified,
all translations are my own.
12. Rupert Richard Arrowsmith, Modernism and the Museum; Asian, African and
Pacific Art and the Avant-Garde (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 122.
However, Andrew Thacker claims, like Hakutani, that Noguchi’s ‘What Is
a Hokku Poem?’ Rhythm, 12 (January 1913), 354–9, is the proposed inspiration
for ‘In a Station of the Metro’. Thacker, The Imagist Poets (Tavistock:
Northcote, 2011), 62.
13. Kiuchi, ‘Noguchi Yonejirō’, 128.
14. F. V. Dickins, Primitive and Medieval Texts (Oxford: Clarendon, 1906); Basil
Hall Chamberlain, Japanese Poetry (London: John Murray, 1910).
15. Carr, The Verse Revolutionaries, 192.
16. Chamberlain, Japanese Poetry, 147.
152 andrew houwen
17. Chamberlain, Japanese Poetry, 164.
18. Yamazaki Kagotarō, Haikaishidan (‘A Discussion of Haikai’s History’)
(Tokyo: Hakubunkan, 1893), 14–15.
19. Harmer, Victory in Limbo, 133.
20. Aeba Kōson, Haikairon (‘On Haikai’) (Tokyo: privately printed, 1893), 3.
21. Kōson, Haikairon, 3.
22. Chamberlain, ‘Bashō and the Japanese Poetical Epigram’, Transactions of the
Asiatic Society of Japan 30 (1902), 312; Chamberlain, Japanese Poetry, 212.
23. Pound, ‘Vorticism’, 467.
24. Noguchi, ‘Hokku’, The Academy 83 (July 1912), 58.
25. Nogushi, ‘Hokku’, 58.
26. The ‘mixing of an abstraction with the concrete’, such as ‘dim lands of peace’,
‘dulls the Image’ – Pound, ‘A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste’, Poetry 1/6
(March 1913), 201.
27. Arrowsmith, Modernism and the Museum, 121.
28. Arrowsmith, Modernism and the Museum, 121.
29. David Ewick, ‘Imagism Status Rerum and a Note on Haiku’, Make It New 2/1
(2015, 55).
30. Pound, ‘Vorticism’, 471.
31. Ewick, ‘Imagism Status Rerum’, 55.
32. For a recent analysis of Pound’s own ‘Noh’, Tristan, see Mikhail Oshukov,
Representation of Otherness in Literary Avant-Garde of Early Twentieth
Century: David Burliuk’s and Ezra Pound’s Japan [sic] (PhD thesis,
University of Turku, 2017), 273–90.
33. Andrew Houwen, ‘Ezra Pound’s Early Cantos and His Translation of
Takasago’, Review of English Studies 65/269 (April 2014), 322. The online
version appeared in August 2013. The existence of Pound’s translation of
Takasago has been noted in Réka Mihálka’s Japonism and Modernism:
Ezra Pound and His Era (PhD thesis, Eötvös Loránd University, 2010), 141–4.
34. Pound, letter to Alice Corbin Henderson (7 July 1915), in Ira Nadel (ed.),
Ezra Pound’s Letters to Alice Corbin Henderson (Austin: University of Texas
Press, 1993), 109.
35. Pound, ‘The Classical Stage of Japan’, The Drama 5/18 (May 1915), 224.
36. Pound, ‘Classical Stage’, 224.
37. Pound, ‘Classical Stage’, 205.
38. Houwen, ‘Ezra Pound’s Early Cantos and His Translation of Takasago’, 341.
39. Houwen, ‘Takasago’, 333.
40. Houwen, ‘Takasago’, 336.
41. Fenollosa and Pound, ‘Noh’ or Accomplishment (London: Macmillan,
1916), 172.
42. Fenollosa and Pound, ‘Noh’ or Accomplishment, 174.
43. Fenollosa’s notes explain this: he calls Emperor Xuanzong ‘Genso Kotei’,
which approximates the Japanese transliteration (‘Gensō kōtei’) of the
Chinese ‘Xuanzong huangdi’ (‘Emperor Xuanzong’). See Akiko Miyake,
Sanehide Kodama and Nicholas Teele, eds., A Guide to Ezra Pound and
Ernest Fenollosa’s Classic Noh Theatre of Japan (Orono, MN: National Poetry
Foundation, 1994), 189. Pound almost certainly read an account of this dance
in Noguchi’s nō play ‘The Everlasting Sorrow’, based on the poem of that
name by Bai Juyi, in which the Emperor’s famous consort Yang Guifei
performs ‘the dance of the Rainbow Skirt and the Feather Jacket’ at its
conclusion. Noguchi, ‘The Everlasting Sorrow’, The Egoist 4/9
(October 1917), 142.
44. Fenollosa and Pound, ‘Noh’ or Accomplishment, 174.
45. Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971),
432. Pound’s reference to Hagoromo in the drafts of Canto XLIX is similarly
not noted in Carrie J. Preston’s Learning to Kneel: Noh, Modernism, and
Journeys in Teaching (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), which
devotes a chapter to Pound and Hagoromo.
46. Ezra Pound Papers, YCAL MSS 43, Yale Collection of American Literature,
Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Box 74, Folder 3314.
47. Diego Pellecchia, ‘Ezra Pound and the Politics of Noh Film’, Philological
Quarterly 92/4 (Fall 2013), 499–516. The significance for Pound of view-
ing nō in Atarashiki tsuchi had previously been discussed in Akitoshi
Nagahata’s conference paper, ‘Revisiting the Fenollosa Manuscripts in
The Japan Times: Pound’s Language of Nostalgia and International
Affairs’, given at the XXIVth Ezra Pound International Conference,
London, 7 July 2011.
48. For a detailed account of Pound’s interactions with Kōri, Kume and Itō, see
Ewick, ‘Notes toward a Cultural History of Japanese Modernism in
Modernist Europe, 1910–1920. With Special Reference to Kōri Torahiko’,
The Hemingway Review of Japan 13 (June 2012), 19–36; Tateo Imamura,
‘Hemingway, Pound, and the Japanese Artist, Tamijuro Kume’, The
Hemingway Review of Japan 13 (June 2012), 37–47; and Dorsey Kleitz,
‘Michio Ito and the Modernist Vortex’, The Hemingway Review of Japan 13
(June 2012), 49–57.
49. Sanehide Kodama, ed., Ezra Pound and Japan: Letters and Essays (Redding
Ridge: Black Swan Books, 1987), 32.
50. Kodama, ed., Ezra Pound and Japan, 32.
51. Pellecchia, ‘Ezra Pound and the Politics of Noh Film’, 503.
54. Pellecchia, ‘Ezra Pound and the Politics of Noh Film’, 512–13.
55. Christopher Bush, ‘“I am all for the triangle”: The Geopolitical Aesthetic
of Pound’s Japan’, in Ezra Pound in the Present: Essays on Pound’s
Contemporaneity, ed. Paul Stasi and Josephine Park (London: Bloomsbury,
2016), 75–106.
56. Bush, ‘Pound’s Japan’, 93.
154 andrew houwen
61. Sangū Makoto, Shibun kenkyū (‘Poetry and Literature Studies’) (Tokyo:
Sekibundō, 1918), 3–18; Momota Sōji, Atarashii shi no kaishaku to tsukurikata
(‘The Interpretation and Ways of Writing New Poetry’) (Tokyo: Kōseikaku,
1929), 183–4.
62. Pound, ‘The Garret’, ‘Salutation’ and ‘A Pact’, in Sangū (ed.), An Anthology of
New English Verse (Osaka: Suzuya, 1921), 112, 112–13 and 113, respectively.
63. Niikura Toshikazu, Shijintachi no seiki: Nishiwaki Junzaburō to Ezura Paundo
(‘The Poets’ Century: Nishiwaki Junzaburō and Ezra Pound’) (Tokyo:
Misuzu, 2003), 33.
64. Niikura, Shijintachi no seiki, 33. ‘Rain’ appears in English translation in
Geoffrey Bownas and Anthony Thwaite’s Penguin Book of Japanese Verse,
3rd ed. (London: Penguin, 2009), 189.
65. Pound, Bungaku seishin no gensen (‘The Origins of the Spirit of Literature’),
trans. Kinoshita Tetsutarō (Tokyo: Kinseidō, 1933).
66. Pound, ‘Itarii tsūshin’ (‘Letter from Italy’), Shin gijutsu (‘New Art’) 32
(March 1941), 22–24.
67. Niikura, Shijintachi no seiki, 48.
68. Pound, ‘Metoro no teishaba nite’ (‘In a Station of the Metro’), trans.
Kitasono, VOU 35 (August 1951), 16.
69. Iwasaki Ryōzō, Ezura Paundo Shishū (‘Selected Poems of Ezra Pound’)
(Tokyo: Arechi, 1956).
70. John Solt, Shredding the Tapestry of Meaning: The Poetry and Poetics of
Kitasono Katué (1902–1978) (Cambridge, MA: Harvard East Asian
Monographs, 1999), 135.
71. Niikuni Seiichi, ‘Konkuriito poetorii jūnen – ASA no seiritsu to sono tenkan’
(‘Ten Years of Concrete Poetry – ASA’s Foundation and Development’), in
Niikuni Seiichi shishū (‘The Poems of Niikuni Seiichi’), ed. Kamimura Hiroo
(Tokyo: ASA, 1979), 61.
72. Kita Yoshiko is the first to mention Shiki’s reforms in passing in an article
on Pound and hokku, though no connection between these and English
translations of hokku or Pound is yet made. Kita Yoshiko, ‘Ezra Pound and
Haiku: Why Did Imagists Hardly Mention Basho?’, Paideuma 29/1–2 (Spring
and Fall 2000), 182. I first proposed the possibility of such links in my article
‘“Thinking by Images”: Kamo no Chōmei’s Hōjōki and Basil Bunting’s
Chomei at Toyama’, Translation and Literature 25/3 (Autumn 2016), 364.
73. Kenner, The Pound Era, 284.
W OR KS C I T ED
Aeba Kōson, Haikairon (‘On Haikai’) (Tokyo: privately printed, 1893).
Arrowsmith, Rupert Richard, Modernism and the Museum: Asian, African and
Pacific Art and the Avant-Garde (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).
Bush, Christopher, ‘“I am all for the triangle”: The Geopolitical Aesthetic of Pound’s
Japan’, in Ezra Pound in the Present: Essays on Pound’s Contemporaneity , ed. Paul
Stasi and Josephine Park, 75–106 (London: Bloomsbury, 2016).
Carr, Helen, The Verse Revolutionaries: Ezra Pound, H. D. and The Imagists
(London: Jonathan Cape, 2009).
Chamberlain, Basil Hall, ‘Bashō and the Japanese Poetical Epigram’, Transactions
of the Asiatic Society of Japan, 30 (1902), 243–362.
Japanese Poetry (London: John Murray, 1910).
Dōgen, Shōbōgenzō zenyaku dokkai (‘Treasury of the True Dharma Eye with
Complete Translation and Commentary’), ed. Masutani Fumio, 8 Vols.,
Vol. 3 (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 2004).
Ewick, David, ‘Imagism Status Rerum and a Note on Haiku’, Make It New 2/1
(2015), 42–57.
‘Notes Toward a Cultural History of Japanese Modernism in Modernist
Europe, 1910–1920. With Special Reference to Kōri Torahiko’, The
Hemingway Review of Japan, 13 (June 2012), 19–36.
Fenollosa, Ernest, and Ezra Pound, ‘Noh’ or Accomplishment (London: Macmillan,
1916).
Flint, F. S., ‘Book of the Week: Recent Verse’, The New Age, 3/2 (11 July 1908),
212–13.
‘The History of Imagism’, The Egoist, 2/5 (1 May 1915), 70–1.
Hakutani, Yoshinobu, Haiku and Modernist Poetics (Basingstoke: Macmillan,
2009).
Harmer, J. B., Victory in Limbo: Imagism, 1908–1917 (London: Secker and
Warburg, 1975).
Houwen, Andrew, ‘Ezra Pound’s Early Cantos and His Translation of Takasago’,
Review of English Studies, 65/269 (April 2014), 321–41.
‘Thinking by Images: Kamo no Chōmei’s Hōjōki and Basil Bunting’s
Chomei at Toyama’, Translation and Literature, 25/3 (Autumn 2016),
363–79.
Imamura, Tateo, ‘Hemingway, Pound, and the Japanese Artist, Tamijuro Kume’,
The Hemingway Review of Japan, 13 (June 2012), 37–47.
Kenner, Hugh, The Pound Era (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971).
Kita Yoshiko, ‘Ezra Pound and Haiku: Why Did Imagists Hardly Mention
Basho?’, Paideuma, 29/1–2 (Spring and Fall 2000), 179–91.
Kiuchi Toru, ‘Noguchi Yonejirō – haiku wo sekai ni hirometa hito’ (‘Noguchi
Yonejirō – The Person Who Spread Haiku Around the World’), Kadokawa
haiku 65/10 (September 2016), 118–29.
Kleitz, Dorsey, ‘Michio Ito and the Modernist Vortex’, The Hemingway Review of
Japan, 13 (June 2012), 49–57.
Kodama, Sanehide, Ezra Pound and Japan: Letters and Essays (Redding Ridge:
Black Swan Press, 1987).
Mihálka, Réka, Japonism and Modernism: Ezra Pound and His Era (PhD thesis,
Eötvös Loránd University, 2010).
156 andrew houwen
Miyake, Akiko, Sanehide Kodama and Nicholas Teele, ed., A Guide to Ezra Pound
and Ernest Fenollosa’s Classic Noh Theatre of Japan (Orono, MN: The
National Poetry Foundation, 1994).
Momota Sōji, Atarashii shi no kaishaku to tsukurikata (‘The Interpretation and
Ways of Writing New Poetry’) (Tokyo: Kōseikaku, 1929).
Nadel, Ira, ed., Ezra Pound’s Letters to Alice Corbin Henderson (Austin: University
of Texas Press, 1993).
Niikuni Seiichi, ‘Konkuriito poetorii jūnen – ASA no seiritsu to sono tenkan’
(‘Ten Years of Concrete Poetry – ASA’s Foundation and Development’), in
Niikuni Seiichi shishū (‘The Poems of Niikuni Seiichi’), ed. Kamimura
Hiroo, 57–63 (Tokyo: ASA, 1979).
Niikura Toshikazu, Shijintachi no seiki: Nishiwaki Junzaburō to Ezura Paundo (‘The
Poets’ Century: Nishiwaki Junzaburō and Ezra Pound’) (Tokyo: Misuzu, 2003).
Noguchi, Yone, ‘Hokku’, The Academy, 83 (July 1912), 57–8.
‘What Is a Hokku Poem?’, Rhythm, 12 (January 1913), 354–59.
‘The Everlasting Sorrow’, The Egoist, 4/9 (October 1917), 141–43.
Pellecchia, Diego, ‘Ezra Pound and the Politics of Noh Film’, Philological
Quarterly, 92/4 (Fall 2013), 499–516.
Pound, Ezra, ‘The Classical Stage of Japan’, The Drama 5/18 (May 1915), 199–247.
A Draft of XXX Cantos (Paris: Hours Press, 1930).
‘A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste’, Poetry 1/6 (March 1913), 200–6.
The Fifth Decad of Cantos (New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1937).
‘How I Began’, T. P.’s Weekly (6 June 1913), 707.
‘In a Station of the Metro’, Poetry, 2/1 (April 1913), 12.
‘Vorticism’, Fortnightly Review, n. s. 573 (1 September 1914), 461–71.
Sangū Makoto, An Anthology of New English Verse (Osaka: Suzuya, 1921).
Shibun kenkyū (‘Poetry and Literature Studies’) (Tokyo: Sekibundō, 1918).
Solt, John, Shredding the Tapestry of Meaning: The Poetry and Poetics of
Kitasono Katué (1902–1978) (Cambridge, MA: Harvard East Asian
Monographs, 1999).
Takahashi, Miho, ‘Herakles on the Blazing Pyre: A Reading of The Women of
Trachis’, in ROMA/AMOR: Ezra Pound, Rome, and Love, ed. William Pratt
and Caterina Ricciardi, 215–28 (Brooklyn: AMS, 2013).
Thacker, Andrew, The Imagist Poets (Tavistock: Northcote, 2011).
Yamazaki Kagotarō, Haikaishidan (‘A Discussion of Haikai ’s History’) (Tokyo:
Hakubunkan, 1893).
chapter 10
Ezra Pound and Chinese Poetry

Jeffrey Twitchell-Waas
On the publication of the Chinese translation of the Pisan Cantos, the poet
Yang Lian observed that now, in the Chinese language, The Cantos had
achieved its full realization.1 For those of us who can read The Cantos only
in English and a smattering of Western tongues, this is a somewhat dis-
heartening proposition, yet the very suggestion resonates with a whole
cluster of issues bound up with the central role that China came to play
in Pound’s work. One might think the topic of China in Pound’s writings
had been exhaustively covered, especially discussions of Cathay and Ernest
Fenollosa’s essay on written Chinese as a medium for poetry, yet there is no
abatement in the seemingly inexhaustible re-treading of old ground along
with new approaches. To focus the spiralling questions and relations
inevitable in any discussion of Pound, the following will stick to the
obvious nodal points of Cathay, Fenollosa’s essay, the Seven Lakes Canto
(Canto XLIX) and the Confucian Odes, but there will also be an attempt to
turn this around to briefly address the relation of Pound with contempor-
ary Chinese poetry.
Cathay
Cathay is the rare intersection of a decisive work in the development of
Anglo-American verse and a seminal, highly influential translation into
English. These vectors are inextricable, yet the mountain of critical com-
mentary on this slim volume tends to emphasize one approach or the other.
On the one hand, Cathay is seen as crystalizing Pound’s ongoing efforts to
modernize English verse, above all the campaign for free verse, so that the
poems represent his major contribution as an Imagist poet. On the other
hand, there are those who insist that the poems of Cathay must be read as
translations, which after all is how Pound himself presented them, albeit
somewhat ambiguously. From this perspective, Pound’s versions are read
against their originals, although considerably complicated by the fact
157
158 jeffrey twitchell-waas
that Pound knew no Chinese and little about Chinese poetry so that
a proper discussion must be triangulated with Fenollosa’s notebooks.2 In
between there is ample space for a diversity of cultural translation
approaches focusing on Cathay’s representation of China and its various
forms of mediation. These too can emphasize how the poems replicate or
counter certain Western Orientalist traditions of the day or how Chinese
sources influenced, were even formative in the development of the mod-
ernist values Pound propagated.3 Then there is the complicated and some-
what under-studied question of Cathay’s long shadow on subsequent
poetry, whether as a certain style of free verse, as a model of translation
or as a poetic representation of China.4
Usually, one can tell at a glance whether a given translation from
classical Chinese poetry is pre- or post-Cathay. Pound’s decisive decisions,
probably made out of ignorance as much as conscious choice, were to
ignore the form and the metonymic or allusive network of the originals, so
we end up with the paradox of an ancient, highly traditionalist and
formalist poetry dressed up in a seemingly limpid free verse. Any reader
of China’s greatest novel, Hong lou meng (Story of the Stone, A Dream of Red
Mansions), which incorporates extensive discussions and performances of
poetry, will recognize how integral the formal and technical complexities
were to the Chinese conception of poetry, as well as the allusive and
allegorical echo chamber that was taken for granted and based on what
we would consider prodigious feats of memorization. For precisely these
reasons, most Western experts prior to Cathay considered Chinese poetry
untranslatable and very often not worth the effort.5 Virtually all subsequent
translators have adhered to Pound’s basic decisions. Post-Cathay transla-
tions usually claim at least implicitly a greater familiarity with the original
poetry than Pound, or even than Fenollosa, and therefore feel obliged to at
least gesture at the formal elements of the original. Yet these translations,
considerable in number, remain almost entirely a free verse and Imagistic
province, and it is as such that they have come to occupy a place in modern
Anglo-American poetry, with a significantly higher profile than any other
non-Western poetic tradition.6
No one today is likely to read Cathay as authoritative or representative of
Chinese poetry generally, although a remarkable amount of recent critical
commentary would give the impression that the volume exists in isolation
and has had an almost magical influence we still need to shake off. The
numerous critical examinations of this or that Pound version against the
details of the original text often obscure the larger issues of translation
beyond questions of semantic equivalence: on the one hand, a rigorous
Ezra Pound and Chinese Poetry 159
comparative consideration of the linguistic resources and poetic assump-
tions between classical Chinese and contemporary English, while on the
other, the examination of the act of translation as a reciprocal interaction
within specific socio-historical contexts.7 To an astonishing degree,
authoritative readings of Pound’s translations, often by native Chinese
speakers, conclude that, whatever inevitable errors and embarrassments in
details, Pound often intuits the sensibility and inner form of the originals
better than those with greater expertise. Such readings necessarily assume
certain interpretations of the original Chinese poems that more pedantic
sinologists presumably miss, assumptions which readers of modernist
poetry are rarely in a position to adjudicate. Beyond the intrinsic ambiguity
for which classical Chinese poetry is noted and often prized, the object of
study is in a dead language formed and perpetuated within state institu-
tions and an educational system now extinct. The latter would have
sustained reading habits and assumptions that went a long way towards
stabilizing the understandings of the poems – understandings that modern
Western readers might find unpalatably moralistic or abstrusely allegorical.
Today there is a strong consensus for the superiority of Cathay over the
translations of Pound’s primary contemporaries – by Amy Lowell and
Florence Ayscough, Witter Bynner and Kang-hu Kiang, and above all
Arthur Waley – which is to say, as poems in English Pound’s still remain
highly readable whereas the others seem increasingly less so, in part
because Pound played such a determining role in forming modern poetic
values and tastes.8 However, it is still worth reading Cathay alongside these
contemporaneous translations, particularly those of Waley, because they
sprang seemingly spontaneously in the immediate wake of Cathay’s micro-
selection, greatly expanding the representation of classical Chinese poetry
and, in turn, creating a larger context within which Cathay could be read.9
In the post–World War II period, English translations of classical Chinese
poetry, especially in the United States, have given increasing emphasis to
the reclusive tradition, a Taoist-Buddhist countercultural inflection that is
often presented as the authentic heart of Chinese poetry more generally, in
addition to justifying a perpetuation of the Cathay’s Imagistic manner of
apparent directness and avoidance of poetic rumination. One of the
curious sidelights of the argument for Cathay’s intuitive recognition of
the inner form of the originals has been the claim or implication
that Pound was a closet Taoist, despite his stated allegiance to
Confucianism.10 This smacks of trying to save Pound from himself.
Again, such readings are premised on identifying a stable poetic essence
that is invariably reductive, and the reclusive tradition in China can hardly
be understood, except as thoroughly imbricated within a Confucian
context.
Curiously, after Cathay Pound never pursued further translations from
the Fenollosa notebooks, despite tinkering with the possibility on
a number of occasions, nor did he in any major way incorporate the
manner of these translations into his subsequent work.11 It is plausible to
detect, as many have, vestiges of Chinese poetry in the various landscape
vignettes scattered throughout The Cantos, but it is equally plausible to
attribute these to any number of Pound’s multitudinous interests and
influences – after all, he himself claimed that ‘all the verbal constructions’
of Cathay had already been road tested in ‘Provincia Deserta’ (SL 101).
Canto XLIX (the ‘Seven Lakes’ Canto) represents Pound’s major transla-
tion from Chinese poetry after Cathay, aside from the late renderings of the
Confucian Book of Odes. Compared with Cathay, the translations in Canto
XLIX evidence the impact of Fenollosa’s essay or at least Pound’s direct
involvement with Chinese characters, at this stage still quite rudimentary,
as these translations are notably more telegraphic in manner, emphasizing
the presentation of discrete imagistic units (predominately substantive)
and suppressing syntactical connections, which are then enacted by the
reader, thus mimicking Fenollosa’s claim for a poetry of natural force and
relations.12 This canto’s ideographic gesturing is reinforced by the odd
inclusion of a phonetic transcription from Japanese of an archaic Chinese
poem, which highlights the poem’s pre-literate roots, which for the
Western reader is encountered as pure sound poetry.13 But then, it is also
a visual or concrete poem, which has a similarly primitivistic effect, as the
layout attempts to visually suggest an ideographic text. In large part, this
peculiar intrusion of an unreadable block of text serves a heuristic function
to clue the reader into eyeing and mouthing the text as if estranged, to see-
hear it anew. Although some commentators have highlighted the Taoism
in the painterly landscape renditions of the opening two-thirds of the
canto, the larger poem contextualizes this as explicitly political – that is,
the utopian expression of imperial power felt as no government at all and
where a life of basic manual labour is experienced as simply natural.14 The
ultimate historical act of this ideal is the Emperor’s construction of a canal
for his pleasure that benefits his people, a thoroughly Confucian ideal in
which the personal acts of the Emperor are spontaneously communal.
Finally, this canto functions as a reminder of the poet’s utopian impulse
going back to those archaic communal songs as the assertion of a hope in
a present dominated by Geryon (usura). We will see how this anticipates
assumptions behind Pound’s late versions of the Confucian Odes.
Fenollosa
The common supposition is that after Cathay Pound shifts his attention to
Ernest Fenollosa’s essay on the Chinese written character, which would
have far-reaching consequences for his poetics and practice. Despite
numerous detailed discussions, the precise relationships remain slippery
between the intentions of Fenollosa’s original essay, its public version as
edited by Pound and, especially, just what Pound took from it.
It is widely claimed that the essay represents a foundational statement of
American modernist poetics, and is often taken as a definitive, albeit
retrospective, statement of Pound’s Imagist, as well as post-Imagist, posi-
tion. Yet despite Pound’s vigorous promotion one has to look very hard to
find any mention of the essay, much less any critical discussion, until after
World War II.15 In the early 1950s, Charles Olson, when he was still an
unknown in the shadow of Pound, declared the seminal importance of
Fenollosa’s essay, and at roughly the same time both Hugh Kenner and
Donald Davie, key figures in the formative period of Pound studies,
advocated the essay as a fundamental statement of Pound’s poetics and
therefore of American poetic modernism.16 The essay’s profile was only
enhanced by attacks from sinologists, beginning especially with a 1958 essay
by George A. Kennedy.17 From this cluster of authorities, the importance
of Fenollosa’s essay has been taken for granted, particularly because aca-
demic exegesis, when confronted with the challenges of modernist verse,
requires statements of poetics that tend to be reified out of their polemical
and strategic contexts as eternal principles of poetics that can then be
applied to demystify the primary texts. Often the so-called ideogrammic
method is evoked as central to a broad Poundian tradition, but as
a compositional practice this is simply a variation on collage or paratactic
construction that was already widely and diversely practiced throughout
modernism and beyond.18
We have long known that we should be embarrassed by the conception
of the Chinese written character set forth in Fenollosa’s essay – that is, the
claim that the characters are a non-phonetic script whose residual picto-
graphic origins can still be read, however precariously.19 Yet Fenollosa’s
ghost remains remarkably alive judging from the burgeoning, often sym-
pathetic attention he has received lately, which was affirmed by the pub-
lication on the centennial of his death of an elaborate critical edition of his
essay. While the essay as edited by Pound is necessarily given pride of place
as the first exhibit, this is very much a Fenollosa book – presenting an
unedited version of his essay with a handful of further lectures and essays to
help contextualize his larger project, which is further enhanced by
a typically lucid introduction by Haun Saussy.20 The editors particularly
emphasize the impact of the specifically Japanese intellectual milieu,
notably Fenollosa’s engagement with certain schools of Buddhism, on
the essay and his larger project, which envisions a necessary marriage
between East and West. What comes through forcefully is the intrinsic
interest of Fenollosa as a transcultural mediating figure during the tumul-
tuous and fateful period of the Meiji reforms, a figure who deserves further
attention. It is also clear that Pound, as one would expect, was a heavy-
handed editor of Fenollosa’s essay in pursuit of his own ends. In any case,
we now must distinguish carefully between Fenollosa’s essay, and the larger
project of which it is a part, and the essay as presented by Pound within the
context of his own concerns, and the latter will be what I refer to in the
following discussion.
One might wonder why the essay seems to drive many sinologists to the
verge of apoplexy. The answer is that its argument, its use by Pound and
subsequent influence (somewhat exaggerated) was an easy target for
inveighing against and demystifying the ‘ideographic myth’ at a time
when sinological studies had come to a consensus, based on scholarship
beginning in the 1920s and 1930s, on the pervasive, if complex, role of
phonetic components in Chinese writing. Therefore, the point of attack is
on the pictographic reading of characters. It is not often highlighted that
such interpretations have a long and venerable tradition among the
Chinese themselves and the ideographic myth is by no means solely
a Western fantasy. While we must take on-board the fact that Chinese
characters cannot reliably be read in a pictographic-etymological manner,
the simple dismissal of this myth can be obfuscating and beside the point
with regard to Fenollosa’s main argument, which is concerned with poetic
effects. After all, even the well educated do not usually dwell in their
language according to the protocols of scholarly correctness, and this is
perhaps especially the case with poets and their readers. Recently an
increasing number of sinologically trained scholars have been setting
Fenollosa’s essay within broader and more complex discursive fields, such
as the long heritage of Western intellectual analysis and speculations on
Chinese writing as a critical counterpoint to Western scripts and modes of
thought, or within Chinese traditions of character reading and non-
dualistic conceptions of writing, or as a node of intercultural exchange
and translation.21
Fenollosa’s basic model posits a state of language that is vital, relatively
fluid and open-ended that maps natural forces or the real of experience set
over against a static state of language – that of abstract logic, grammar and
complete statements. As such, this model can be widely found across
modernism, or for that matter going back at least to the Romantics and
up to the present day. The appeal of this model is obvious for artists, poets
and intellectuals, especially those advocating radical or innovative proce-
dures, since it implies the possibility and necessity of their exploratory
endeavours with strong epistemological and even socio-political implica-
tions. Whatever influence Fenollosa’s essay has had, it is not primarily
because it offers a theory of the Chinese written language, but because of its
suggestiveness about language generally. That the object of discussion is
the Chinese character has obvious advantages because, for the Western
reader, it has a built-in alienation effect, thus offering glimpses of
a different and truer relationship between signifiers and the fluid state of
the real, which the ideographic conception of the characters obviously
enhances. Despite the prominence that Fenollosa and even more so Pound
give to the pictographic reading of the characters, it is not at all clear that
the basic model or argument relies on such discernment, as long as the
script effectively suggests and heightens its graphic element and thus
gestures at a counter-dualistic reading process. Modernist works along
with their critical exegesis have been much preoccupied with strategies of
textual estrangement and foregrounding the material signifier. Fenollosa
himself overtly anticipated that ‘sinologues’ would be out of sympathy
with his views, since after all they dwell strictly within the realm of
grammar and sentences which defines their criteria of knowledge.22
But the most problematic question is determining just what Pound took
from Fenollosa’s essay, and it should not surprise us if that proves to be
variable, not necessarily consistent and not necessarily plausibly adhering
to Fenollosa’s actual arguments.
In the first instance the essay convinced Pound that he must engage
directly with the Chinese text, that he could not rest content with a second-
hand knowledge as he had for Cathay and Canto XIII. In other words, he
must enter into the force field of the Chinese text. While we can read the
heavy larding of The Cantos with foreign language quotations and tags as
symptomatic of an aspiration or gesturing towards a concept of world
poetry and culture, the retention of the original text remains crucial, since
even when translated they retain an irreducible and thus untranslatable
tang or trace of their particularity. This view fits neatly with Fenollosa’s
argument in which the distinctness of the script is integral to what is
distinct about the language and its sensibility. In this sense, as Chinese
cultural and texts take on such a central role in Pound’s image of a possible
redeemed society, the Chinese characters must enter directly into the
poem, as they do so insistently with Rock-Drill.
The second effect of Fenollosa’s essay was on Pound’s propensity for
pictographic-etymological readings of the characters, particularly in his
later translations from Confucius. Pound was perfectly aware that such
readings were ‘not philological’ and was quite explicit that when he
was dissatisfied with a definition or explanation from an authoritative
source, he felt free to explore other possibilities (SP 82). Again, the
interpretations Pound seeks are determined by his larger project for cul-
tural regeneration and therefore by how Confucius can be brought over for
that purpose. Canto I sets a paradigm for historical textual transmission
and translation, which is to say for the act of writing generally, which in
this case reaches back well before Homer to archaic ritual that Pound is
now performing in the present as an act of cultural renewal. The text has to
be performed in order to act in the present of the West. Therefore, the
ideogrammic reading is a method of engaging intimately with the Chinese
text, a performative attempt to recover as a contemporary something like
the reading experience of the original, which is not a matter of matching
definitions but an ethical and social engagement. This can be seen within
the larger propensity for etymological thinking characteristic of so much of
modernism, for which Heidegger is paradigmatic. Pound readily used and
consulted other translations and authoritative resources, but, however
suggestive, they were not to be trusted because the very nature of their
enterprise was mummification, the hypostatizing of the texts as critical
objects distinct from their possibilities as cultural agents, in other words the
translation of texts into the abstract state and grammar that Fenollosa’s
argument was posed against.23
The most confusing impact of Fenollosa’s essay on Pound was with
regard to the ‘ideogrammic method’. It is not plausible that Pound devel-
oped the formal method of the Cantos on the basis of the essay, which
emphasizes verbal syntax rather than juxtaposition, and it is not until the
early 1930s that he begins to speak regularly on this ‘method’, which
coincides with the turn to China as the major paradigm for a redeemed
society and his advocacy of the Confucian doctrine of cheng ming or the
rectification of names.24 In his own explanations, the context is usually
explicitly pedagogic, and the ‘ideogrammic method’ is presented primarily
as a critical rather than a specifically poetic practice. Pound invariably
insists that Fenollosa’s central insight is that the ideogram manifests the
epistemology of science as opposed to logic – that of experiment and
exploration with specifics rather than the assumption of abstract rules or
grammar. In other words, Pound presents what is a basic inductive
method: generalities must arise from particulars and their comparisons
(ABCR 17–27; GK 27–8, 51; SP 77–9). The invariable example he gives of
defining ‘redness’ as a compound of the relatively concrete words ‘rose’,
‘cherry’, ‘iron rust’ and ‘flamingo’ does not correspond to any ideogram,
nor do Chinese characters function in this manner – that is, their ‘meaning’
is not determined by nor does it arise from what is common among the
individual radicals. Nor does this appear a very plausible explanation of the
method of The Cantos or how one reads the poem. Nevertheless, we can
recognize a nominalist impulse here, an insistence on particulars in their
uniqueness as the basis for reading, authentic experience and knowledge.
As Pound finally got The Cantos rolling, the critical establishment and
most poets wrote it off as a hodgepodge without method or structure. Thus
the ideogrammic method with its authority in the unjustly ignored
Fenollosa was in part an attempt to respond to such accusations, although
few were persuaded at that time.
With regard to the internal trajectory of The Cantos, what Fenollosa
offered Pound was less a theory of language per se than the authority of
China. The implication is that the inductive mode of thought that
Fenollosa’s argument claimed was manifest in and perpetuated by the
Chinese written language, with poetic thought taken as its highest form,
made possible and supported Chinese culture and its remarkable sustain-
ability. This thinking was by no means uniquely Chinese, and The Cantos
is much preoccupied with presenting the manifold instances throughout
Western history and culture of similar modes of experience and expression,
but in China this mode predominated, with fluctuations, over an extre-
mely long period of time and managed to establish institutions that
perpetuated rather than repressed it. This is what the larger ambitions
of Pound’s project required. But, of course, for this purpose Fenollosa was
helpful but of less importance compared with the role of a renewable and
adaptable Confucian tradition.
The Confucian Odes

Pound’s rendition of the Confucian Book of Odes has received nothing like
the acclaim and attention of Cathay, but at the very least it complicates
many of the generalizations and judgements made about Pound as
a translator of Chinese poetry.25 If we have Cathay in mind, the
Confucian Odes appear in every respect its antithesis: whereas
previously Pound ignored the formal and allusive dimensions of the
originals, here it is precisely these that are foregrounded. Here the old
champion of innovative verse comes up with a razzle-dazzle assortment of
rhymed and metered poems in an attempt to bring over the archaic and
folk qualities of the Chinese. He rummages the English tradition not only
for forms but for an array of dictions – Renaissance, Biblical, dialect. But
this is a redeployment of traditional resources in the wake of modernism so
that past templates are aggressively reworked such that any given poem
may have irregular line lengths, stanza forms, rhyme schemes, shifts of
meter, yet always strongly evoking traditional patterns. It is as if Pound is
groping back to the moment when spontaneous expression has not yet
entirely submitted to conventionalized conceptions and grammar in order
to create the effect of a poetry with roots in folk creations and ritual
ceremony. It is useful to read Pound’s versions alongside those of Waley,
still taken as the standard, where one can typically expect the shape and
sense of the originals to be reliably replicated but read in quantity can be
a deadening experience.26 Pound’s poems jump off the page in their
aspiration towards song and dance, even if not infrequently they fall
down too.
The available text of Pound’s Confucian Odes is a very truncated version
of the grandiose project he conceived and prepared, which much to his
exasperation was never published.27 This edition was to include a complete
‘singing key’ or phonetic transcription of all the poems along with two
versions of the Chinese text – a standard Chinese text plus an archaic seal
script version that would enhance the pictographic aspect of the characters
as well as being contemporaneous with Confucius. While the conception is
somewhat boggling, the implication that his translations should be read
against the phonetic texts is suggestive and completely at odds with many
of the standard assumptions based on the translations in Cathay. This
touches on the deeper significance of this project for Pound, because
beyond resorting to conventional poetic forms as a translation of the
formalism of the Chinese poems, Pound wants to present an effectively
social or communal poetry, which is how he understands the status of the
anthology as a Confucian classic – that is, Confucius’s critical act in
selecting and arranging the poems. They are socially performative with
roots in various archaic social rites and festivals, both folk and courtly. In
some respects, Pound’s Confucian Odes anticipates ethnopoetics’ deploy-
ment of modernist forms to suggest the performative essence of archaic,
often pre-literate ‘poetries’. As has frequently been noted, the Cathay
poems are the expression or depiction of isolate individuals and separation
is their defining setting; therefore, the pervasive mood of melancholy and
alienation was readily accessible to readers brought up on nineteenth-
century verse. The Confucian anthology taps into the more primal roots
of poetry as an enactment and affirmation of the collective, which is not
just a matter of the individual poems but of the total collection concerned
with manifold aspects of society. This brings up the other problem that
Cathay simply repressed – that of the allusive or metonymic network
Chinese poetry inhabits. To a certain degree, the mere presentation of
a large body of traditional forms would give this impression, but Pound
makes various small interpolations, most often as epigraphs, suggesting
links with Western themes and poems to at least hint at this contextualiz-
ing effect. In contrast to Cathay, the Confucian Odes are arguably best read
in bulk or skipped around, rather than focusing on discrete poems.
Pound’s emphasis on the performative in his renditions and their
socially affirmative presentation indicates the seriousness with which he
took the project as a contribution to the regeneration of contemporary
Western civilization. Of course, hardly anyone paid attention, and Pound’s
Confucianism has found little appeal among poets, translators or even
Poundians.28 As mentioned, the predominant development of translations
of Chinese poetry in English, especially by poets, has tended to repress
Confucianism in preference for a reclusive, spiritual version.
Pound and Chinese Poetry Now

Pound is a natural subject for recent interest in ‘world literature’ and
transnational or trans-Pacific modernisms. Clearly China’s geopolitical
rise has had its effects on Pound studies, as on Western literary-cultural
studies generally, with a dramatic increase in cross-cultural exchange, the
presence of Chinese-born scholars in the field, the presence of Western
scholars with expertise in China studies, and the availability in English of
authoritative information on Chinese literature, history and culture. In
China itself, the huge investment in translation studies guarantees
that Pound receives considerable attention, much of it quite critical,
although it has to be noted that within English few of these foreign voices
are heard unless assimilated into Anglo-American academic protocols.
In the wake of Mao Zedong’s death in 1976 and the official, if halting,
adoption of a policy of ‘opening to the outside world’, all manner of
modernisms, including China’s own still-born versions, trickled and then
poured into mainland China. These usually arrived with what we would
consider inadequate framing and via highly uneven translations (very few
poets at the time were fluent in English or other Western languages), but
this higgledy-piggledy influx had its advantages in being immensely
suggestive to younger writers and artists accompanied by little anxiety
as to whether they were getting it right. The young poets of this period
achieved remarkable cultural celebrity during the decade of the 1980s and
were labelled by their official detractors as Menglong (misty or obscure)
poets. It is often stated that these poets were strongly influenced by
Imagism and related modernisms from the West, which is certainly
true, but more to the point these poets adopted various strategies to
counter the hortatory strictures of the Maoist period – strategies that can
be succinctly summarized as self-expression and indirection. Of course,
for several millennia Chinese poets have been practicing such arts within
an imperial context where a wrong step, even if based on a wilful mis-
reading, could cost one one’s head as well as those of one’s family. If the
post-Mao period saw a tumult of outside influences enter into mainland
China, it was also a period of recovering its own cultural riches – not only
the standard classical tradition, but also a highly influential ‘root seeking’
movement explored versions of Chinese localism, primitivism and exotic
traditions often on the fringes of Han culture, both as renewing resources
and as an implicit critique of the centre. Within China the Menglong
poets and the innumerable offshoots they generated defined themselves
against ‘official’ poets, but aside from the inevitable blurring of the
precise distinction between ‘official’ and ‘unofficial’ poets and
their support systems, both sides of the divide are always in a fierce
state of contention – primarily ideological and political in the former,
aesthetic and intellectual in the latter. All of this is merely to gesture at
a situation where if we pose the question of Pound’s influence, we should
not expect that its presence, when detected, will appear to us as properly
Poundian.29
Yang Lian’s suggestion that The Cantos aspires to realize itself as
a Chinese poem may allow us a glimpse beyond our habitual assump-
tions. His larger argument suggests that The Cantos desires to leave
behind history, to achieve a synchronic vision, but was shackled by
being written in English with its propensity for semantic and gramma-
tical specificity, whereas Chinese, especially classical poetry, tends
towards indefiniteness, an openness that the reader must meet at least
halfway. This may strike us as directly counter to our usual assumptions
about The Cantos as a ‘poem including history’ and its concern with
particulars, but it has to be admitted that Pound’s extreme commitment
to specificity and polemical interpretations of history are problematic for
even his most sympathetic readers. Yang attempts to read the poem as
a ‘record of struggle’ on the level of its linguistic medium, between the
natural propensities of Pound’s native tongue and other possibilities
intuited by his engagement with Chinese. Underlying Yang’s argument,
one might discern an often asserted model among comparativists:
a Western poetics or aesthetics founded on a Platonic tradition of mim-
esis and thus focused on questions of representation and the true as
opposed to a Chinese tradition of non-dualistic correlatives that focuses
on questions of balancing antitheses, harmonization and affects – the
aesthetic object as participating in rather than as always a more or less
inadequate representation of larger realities.30 On this model, Pound
studies, as one would expect, have been strongly dominated by the
representational perspective, so one might consider the value of
a reorientation less obsessed with evaluating to what degree Pound accu-
rately represents Chinese poetry, Confucianism or history, which invari-
ably assumes there is a stable or authentic original. Can we imagine The
Cantos as struggling to become a Chinese poem?
Yang himself was a key figure among the Menglong poets and also
associated with the root seeking movement, and for the past few decades
has been in self-imposed exile in the West – all phases of what he would
consider his evolving poetic identity and self-consciousness. Indeed, he
takes these phases as encapsulating the development of post-Mao Chinese
poetry generally, which he provocatively correlates with Pound’s own
development from Cathay (Imagism) to the Chinese History cantos (root
seeking) to the late Cantos – a movement back into the heart of classical
Chinese poetry that then realizes itself as global. There is more than a dash
of cultural chauvinism in Yang’s claim, and he is far from alone in implying
the Chinese language’s superiority as a poetic medium, in part because the
unique qualities of the written characters are so much more suggestive and
multidimensional than the alphabetic scripts on which Western poets must
rely. So we encounter a curious return of the Fenollosa-Pound thesis from
voices where there is little question of Orientalist bias, but in a context
where again the desire is to counter the abstracting tendencies of modernity
by recouping a supposedly lost sensibility latent in one’s language.
Pound’s engagement with China is more than yet another case of high-
handed modernist appropriation of exotic materials since its presence in
the latter two-thirds of The Cantos, as well as virtually all his late non-
Cantos creative projects, is structurally so pervasive and integral to the
poem’s overall intentions. It is nothing less than an effort at grafting China
with complimentary roots within Western culture. China is thus not
a subject of the poem but a defining presence and force within it. At the
very least Yang Lian has taken this more seriously than most Poundians
have been able to. So perhaps his suggestion is not so outlandish, and in an
uncanny sense the China of Cathay, the Confucian Odes and The Cantos is
at the moment expanding and even taking over the poems’ readings.
Notes
1. Lian Yang, ‘“In the Timeless Air”: Chinese Language, Pound and The Cantos’,
trans. Liping Yang, Paideuma, 30 (2001), 101–5. See also John Cayley and Lian
Yang, ‘Hallucination and Coherence’, Positions: Asia Critique, 10 (2002),
773–84. Strictly speaking, Yang is not overly impressed with the specific
translation into Chinese by Yunte Huang (Guilin: Lijiang Publishing House,
1998), but it is the occasion for a claim about the deeper aspiration of Pound’s
poem, which I will discuss further as follows.
2. For the former emphasis, the canonical argument is that of Hugh Kenner,
The Pound Era (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 192–231,
289–98. The case for Cathay as translations was initially explored by Wai-lim
Yip, Ezra Pound’s Cathay (Pricenton: Princeton University Press, 1969) with-
out the benefit of direct access to Fenollosa’s notebooks, which has been
followed up by, among many others, Zhaoming Qian, Orientalism and
Modernism: The Legacy of China in Pound and Williams (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 1995) and The Modernist Response to Chinese
Art: Pound, Moore, Stevens (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press,
2003). A mediate position attempting to balance the advantages of both is
offered by Ming Xie, Ezra Pound and the Appropriation of Chinese Poetry:
Cathay, Translation, and Imagism (New York: Garland, 1999).
3. For the former, see Robert Kern, Orientalism, Modernism, and the American
Poem (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Yunte Huang,
Transpacific Displacement: Ethnography, Translation, and Intertextual Travel
in Twentieth-Century American Literature (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2002), 60–92; Eric Hayot, Chinese Dreams: Pound, Brecht, Tel Quel
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003), 1–53. For the latter position,
see particularly Qian and, more speculatively, Christopher Bush, Ideographic
Modernism: China, Writing, Media (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2010), 3–71.
4. See Steven G. Yao, Translation and the Languages of Modernism: Gender,
Politics, Language (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 25–51. On Cathay in
relation to Asian American poetry, see Josephine Nock-Hee Park, Apparitions
of Asia: Modernist Form and Asian American Poetics (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2008), 23–56, and Steven G. Yao, Foreign Accents: Chinese American Verse
from Exclusion to Postethnicity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 39–62.
5. For example, see Arthur Waley’s 1962 preface to 170 Chinese Poems (originally
published 1919) in Madly Singing in the Mountains: An Appreciation and
Anthology of Arthur Waley, ed. Ivan Morris (New York: Harper Torchbooks,
1972), 133; Ernest Fenollosa and Ezra Pound, The Chinese Written Character as
a Medium for Poetry, A Critical Edition, ed. Haun Saussy, Jonathan Stalling
and Lucas Klein (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 43. In China
there is a significant cottage industry of translating classical Chinese poetry
into English and other Western languages motivated by the widespread
assumption that only a native speaker has the sensibility to properly interpret
such poetry. A high percentage of these renditions insist on conventional
meter and rhyme, as well as artificial poetic diction, the awkwardness of
which will strike most native English speakers as unintentionally parodic, yet
the point of interest here is the conviction that the predominate approach to
translating classical Chinese poetry in English since Pound is fundamentally
flawed.
6. A. C. Graham gives the classic statement of this argument in his introduction
to Poems of the Late T’ang (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965, 1977), which
remains the best brief overview of the problems of translating classical
Chinese poetry into English.
7. For a good example of the former, see Charles Kwong, ‘Translating Classical
Chinese Poetry into Rhymed English: A Linguistic-Aesthetic View’,
Traduction, terminologie, rédaction 22 (2009), 189–220.
8. Lowell and Ayscough, Fir-Flower Tablets: Poems Translated from the Chinese
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1921); Bynner and Kiang, The Jade Mountain:
A Chinese Anthology (New York: Knopf, 1929); Waley, 170 Poems from the
Chinese (London: Constable & Co., 1918), More Translations from the Chinese
(New York: Knopf, 1919), The Temple and Other Poems (New York: Knopf,
1923), the bulk of these three volumes are conveniently gathered into Chinese
Poems (London: Allen & Unwin, 1946).
9. For a fine critical consideration of Waley’s translations, see Zeb Raft, ‘The
Limits of Translation: Method in Arthur Waley’s Translations of Chinese
Poetry’, Asia Major, 3rd series 25 (2012), 79–128.
10. For example, Kenner, 454–8, and Qian, Orientalism and Modernism, 65–109,
and The Modernist Response, 64–80.
11. On Pound’s tentative work on further poems in the Fenollosa notebooks, see
Qian, Orientalism and Modernism, 88–109.
12. In a tail note to the original publication of Cathay, Pound gives two lines of
a translation rendered in a similar manner but not included in the main text
because he claimed it would not be acceptable to the reading public. See
Cathay (London: Elkin Mathews, 1915), 32; a facsimile edition augmented
with relevant pages from Fenollosa’s notebooks is available as Cathay: The
Centennial Edition, ed. Zhaoming Qian (New York: New Directions, 2016).
13. As Hugh Kenner points out, the apparent explanation for this seeming oddity
is Fenollosa’s claim, by no means eccentric, that the Japanese pronunciation
of Chinese characters is closer to their ancient phonetic values than modern
Mandarin. Kenner, The Pound Era, 226; Fenollosa and Pound, The Chinese
Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, 134–5; see also SL 347.
14. Much of the commentary on Canto XLIX has focused on the complicated
question of Pound’s source text for his Chinese renditions, a set of
Japanese landscape paintings in the Chinese style each accompanied by
poems which were hastily rendered at Pound’s request by a Chinese
acquaintance. See Sanehide Kodama, American Poetry and Japanese
Culture (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1984), 105–20; Qian, The
Modernist Response, 123–37; Wai-lim Yip, Pound and the Eight Views of
Xiao Xiang (Taipei: National Taiwan University Press, 2008); Ezra Pound’s
Chinese Friends: Stories in Letters, ed. Zhaoming Qian (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2008), 9–17.
15. On the early reception of Fenollosa’s essay, see David Ewick, ‘The
Instigations of Ezra Pound by Ernest Fenollosa, I: The Chinese Written
Character, Atlantic Crossings, Texts Mislaid, and the Machinations of
a Divinely-Inspired Char Woman’, and ‘The Instigations of Ezra Pound by
Ernest Fenollosa, II, Larceny: Pound, the Telluric Mass of Miss Lowell, and
the Pilfering of “The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry,”
1914–1921’, Essays and Studies in British American Literature 66 (2015), 53–72,
and 61 (2015), 15–32, http://twcu.academia.edu/DavidEwick. The primary
exception to the early critical silence on Fenollosa is John Gould Fletcher,
‘The Orient and Contemporary Poetry’, The Asian Legacy and American Life,
ed. Arthur E. Christy (New York: Asia Press, 1945), 145–74.
16. Olson, ‘Projective Verse’ (1950), and ‘The Gate and the Center’ (1951) in
Collected Prose, eds. Donald Allen and Benjamin Friedlander (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1997), 169, 244; Hugh Kenner, The Poetry of
Ezra Pound (London: Faber & Faber, 1951), 62–95; Donald Davie, Articulate
Energy: An Inquiry into the Syntax of English Poetry (London: Routledge &
Kegan Paul, 1955), 33–42.
17. George A. Kennedy, ‘Fenollosa, Pound and the Chinese Character’, Yale
Literary Magazine 126 (1958), 24–36, www.pinyin.info/readings/texts/ezra_
pound_chinese.html. This remains a fine critique, if not to be taken
uncritically.
18. Pound himself suggested that he and others were practicing the ‘ideogrammic
method’ before they encountered Fenollosa (SP 453). For the argument that
the ‘ideogrammic method’ underwrites an entire tradition within Anglo-
American poetic modernism, see Laszlo Géfin, Ideogram: History of a Poetic
Method (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982).
19. Aside from Kennedy, the most frequently referenced authority for the demys-
tification of the ideogram is John DeFrancis, The Chinese Language: Fact and
Fantasy (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1984). Authoritative, admir-
ably lucid and written with considerable wit, this work is highly recom-
mended but is not the last word as a number of commentators on Pound
and Fenollosa seem to assume. It should be kept in mind that DeFrancis’s
underlying argument is for Chinese language reform, involving especially the
eradication of Chinese characters in favour of the complete adoption of
a romanized system for writing Chinese. This was a Maoist project adopted
in the late 1950s but derailed, and thus an incomplete revolution that none-
theless, so DeFrancis assures us, the inexorable laws of history will sooner or
later bring to fruition, speeded by the technological demands of using
computers. This ultra-utilitarian view colours every aspect of DeFrancis’
argument and presentation, from the dedication to the end notes, and so it
is not surprising that he does not entirely approve of Mao’s dabbling in poetry
and, even worse, in the classical manner. See DeFrancis, ‘The Prospects for
Chinese Writing Reform’, Sino-Platonic Papers 171 (2006), http://sino-
platonic.org/complete/spp171_chinese_writing_reform.pdf.
20. Fenollosa and Pound, The Chinese Written Character. This volume is impor-
tantly augmented by two chapters on Fenollosa in Jonathan Stalling, The
Poetics of Emptiness: Transformations of Asian Thought in American Poetry
(New York: Fordham University Press, 2010).
21. See Haun Saussy, Great Walls of Discourse and Other Adventures in Cultural
China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2001), 35–74, and
also Kern; Zong-qi Cai, Configurations of Comparative Poetics: Three
Perspectives on Western and Chinese Literary Criticism (Honolulu: University
of Hawaii Press, 2002), 171–202; Andrea Bachner, Beyond Sinology: Chinese
Writing and the Scripts of Culture (New York: Columbia University Press,
2014), 57–73. For a rigorous comparative historical and philosophical con-
sideration of the ideographic tradition, see Timothy Michael O’Neill,
Ideography and Chinese Language Theory: A History (Berlin: De Gruyter,
2016).
22. Fenollosa and Pound, The Chinese Written Character, 43. Wai-lim Yip
defends the Fenollosa-Pound understanding of the Chinese written character
as accurately intuiting essential elements of classical Chinese poetics
(see Pound’s Cathay, esp. 158–65), and this perspective pervades his more
expansive comparative discussions of classical Chinese and modern
American poetry, which he grounds on a Taoist inflected poetics. See
Diffusion of Distances: Dialogues Between Chinese and Western Poetics
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). Yip has been an influential
figure in Chinese poetry over the past half century both as a practitioner of
modernist verse and an exponent of a classical-modernist poetics.
23. For a critical defence of Pound’s ‘etymographic’ translations, see Feng Lan,
Ezra Pound and Confucianism: Remaking Humanism in the Face of Modernity
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005), esp. 29–37.
24. During the mid-1930s Pound reedited Fenollosa’s essay for republication,
primarily adding editorial comments including an appendix that offers sub-
stantial further examples of ideograms with pictographic-etymological inter-
pretations. This addition was entitled, ‘Appendix: With Some Notes by
a Very Ignorant Man’, which they amply demonstrate.
25. Pound, The Classic Anthology Defined by Confucius (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1954). For a comprehensive consideration of Pound’s inter-
est in Confucius with substantial examination of his translations of the Odes,
see Mary Paterson Cheadle, Ezra Pound’s Confucian Translations (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 1997). For sinological comparative analysis
of Pound’s versions with those of other translators, see Eugene Chen Eoyang,
The Transparent Eye: Reflections on Translation, Chinese Literature, and
Comparative Poetics (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1993), 190–209.
26. The Book of Songs, originally published 1937; this volume has been reissued in
a thoroughly reedited version (Grove Press, 1996), dispensing with Waley’s
arrangement and relegating his notes to the back.
27. Ezra Pound’s Chinese Friends, 107–60.
28. A number of the more prominent scholars on Pound and Chinese poetry
(e.g., Yip, Qian) have generally steered clear of his Confucianism and, given
the pervasiveness of the latter in The Cantos and other late projects, the
paucity of full-scale studies is striking, all the more so given the strong renewal
of interest in Confucianism among Chinese intellectuals. On the latter, see
Feng Lan, 123–7.
29. The closest thing to a one-stop manifesto for the Menglong poets, published
under the pseudonym of ‘Hong Huang’, is a good sample of the melange of
half-digested modernisms (including mention of Pound and Imagism)
together with an even more eclectic if better digested list of classical
Chinese authors, see ‘The New Poetry – A Turning Point?’ trans. Zhu
Zhiyu and John Minford, Renditions 19 and 20 (1983), 191–4. For some idea
of the complex polemical situation in which Menglong poetry and its adapta-
tion of Western modernisms was situated, see Xiaomei Chen, Occidentalism:
A Theory of Counter-Discourse in Post-Mao China (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1995), 69–98. The best thick description in English of the contemporary
Chinese poetry scene, although it focuses on the decade of the 1990s, is
Maghiel van Crevel, Chinese Poetry in Times of Mind, Mayhem and Money
(Leiden: Brill, 2008); https://brill.com/view/title/14399. It should be men-
tioned in passing that traces of Pound’s influence, direct or indirect, can be
detected at the very outset of modern Chinese literature early in the twentieth
century, specifically on the seminal manifestos of Hu Shi; see John J. Nolde,
‘The Literary Revolution of Hu Shih and Ezra Pound’, Paideuma 9 (1980),
235–48; and Jenine Heaton, ‘Gained in Translation: Ezra Pound, Hu Shi, and
Literary Revolution’, Journal of Cultural Interaction in East Asia 3 (2012),
35–55. For a skeptical view of this link, however, see Michelle Yeh, Modern
Chinese Poetry: Theory and Practice Since 1917 (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1991), 56–8.
30. See, for example, Cai, Configurations of Comparative Poetics; Stephen Owen,
Traditional Chinese Poetry and Poetics: Omen of the Word (Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press, 1985); Cecile Chu-chin Sun, The Poetics of
Repetition in English and Chinese Lyric Poetry (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2011), or more philosophically, the many works of François Jullien – for
a short sample, see ‘Did Philosophers Have to Become Fixated on Truth?’
Critical Inquiry 28 (2002), 803–24. For a critique of such models’ tendency to
rigidly define ‘the other’ as an antithetical mirror image of the West, see
Saussy, Great Walls of Discourse, especially 91–117.
W OR KS CI T ED
Bachner, Andrea, Beyond Sinology: Chinese Writing and the Scripts of Culture
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2014).
Bush, Christopher, Ideographic Modernism: China, Writing, Media (Oxford:
Bynner, Witter, and Kang-hu Kiang, The Jade Mountain: A Chinese Anthology
(New York: Knopf, 1929).
Cai, Zong-qi, Configurations of Comparative Poetics: Three Perspectives on
Western and Chinese Literary Criticism (Honolulu: University of Hawaii
Press, 2002).
Cayley, John, and Lian Yang, ‘Hallucination and Coherence’, Positions: Asia
Critique, 10 (2002), 773–84.
Cheadle, Mary Paterson, Ezra Pound’s Confucian Translations (Ann Arbor:
Chen, Xiaomei, Occidentalism: A Theory of Counter-Discourse in Post-Mao China
Crevel, Maghiel van, Chinese Poetry in Times of Mind, Mayhem and Money
(Leiden: Brill, 2008).
Davie, Donald, Articulate Energy: An Inquiry into the Syntax of English Poetry
(Abingdon: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1955).
DeFrancis, John, The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy (Honolulu: University
of Hawaii Press, 1984).
‘The Prospects for Chinese Writing Reform’, Sino-Platonic Papers 171 (2006);
online: http://sinoplatonic.org/complete/spp171_chinese_writing_reform
.pdf.
Eoyang, Eugene Chen, The Transparent Eye: Reflections on Translation, Chinese
Literature, and Comparative Poetics (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press,
1993).
Ewick, David, ‘The Instigations of Ezra Pound by Ernest Fenollosa, I: The
Chinese Written Character, Atlantic Crossings, Texts Mislaid, and the
Machinations of a Divinely-Inspired Char Woman’, Essays and Studies in
British American Literature 66 (2015), 53–72.
‘The Instigations of Ezra Pound by Ernest Fenollosa, II, Larceny: Pound, the
Telluric Mass of Miss Lowell, and the Pilfering of “The Chinese Written
Character as a Medium for Poetry,” 1914–1921’, Essays and Studies in British
American Literature 61 (2015), 15–32.
Fenollosa, Ernest, and Ezra Pound, The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for
Poetry, A Critical Edition, ed. Haun Saussy, Jonathan Stalling and
Lucas Klein (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008).
Fletcher, John Gould, ‘The Orient and Contemporary Poetry’, in The Asian Legacy
and American Life, ed. Arthur E. Christy, 145–74 (New York: Asia Press, 1945).
Géfin, Laszlo, Ideogram: History of a Poetic Method (Austin: University of Texas
Press, 1982).
Graham, A. C., trans., Poems of the Late T’ang (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965,
1977).
Hayot, Eric, Chinese Dreams: Pound, Brecht, Tel Quel (Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 2003).
Heaton, Jenine, ‘Gained in Translation: Ezra Pound, Hu Shi, and
Literary Revolution’, Journal of Cultural Interaction in East Asia 3 (2012),
35–55.
Huang, Hong, ‘The New Poetry – A Turning Point?’ trans. Zhu Zhiyu and John
Minford, Renditions 19 and 20 (1983), 191–4.
Huang, Yunte, trans., 比萨诗章 / Bisa shi zhang (Guilin: Lijiang Publishing
House, 1998).
Transpacific Displacement: Ethnography, Translation, and Intertextual Travel in
Twentieth-Century American Literature (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2002).
Jullien, François, ‘Did Philosophers Have to Become Fixated on Truth?’ Critical
Inquiry 28 (2002), 803–24.
Kennedy, George A., ‘Fenollosa, Pound and the Chinese Character’, Yale Literary
Magazine 126 (1958), 24–36.
Kenner, Hugh, The Poetry of Ezra Pound (London: Faber & Faber, 1951).
The Pound Era (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971).
Kern, Robert, Orientalism, Modernism, and the American Poem (Cambridge:
Kodama, Sanehide, American Poetry and Japanese Culture (Hamden, CT: Archon
Books, 1984).
Kwong, Charles, ‘Translating Classical Chinese Poetry into Rhymed English: A
Linguistic-Aesthetic View’, Traduction, terminologie, rédaction 22 (2009),
189–220.
Lan, Feng, Ezra Pound and Confucianism: Remaking Humanism in the Face of
Modernity (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005).
Lowell, Amy, and Florence Ayscough, Fir-Flower Tablets: Poems Translated from
the Chinese (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1921).
Nolde, John J., ‘The Literary Revolution of Hu Shih and Ezra Pound’, Paideuma 9
(1980), 235–48.
O’Neill, Timothy Michael, Ideography and Chinese Language Theory: A History
(Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016).
Olson, Charles, Collected Prose, eds. Donald Allen and Benjamin Friedlander
Owen, Stephen, Traditional Chinese Poetry and Poetics: Omen of the Word
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985).
Park, Josephine Nock-Hee, Apparitions of Asia: Modernist Form and Asian
American Poetics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).
Pound, Ezra, Cathay: The Centennial Edition, ed. Zhaoming Qian (New York:
The Classic Anthology Defined by Confucius (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
Qian, Zhaoming, ed., Ezra Pound’s Chinese Friends: Stories in Letters (Oxford:
The Modernist Response to Chinese Art: Pound, Moore, Stevens (Charlottesville:
University of Virginia Press, 2003).
Orientalism and Modernism: The Legacy of China in Pound and Williams
Raft, Zeb, ‘The Limits of Translation: Method in Arthur Waley’s Translations of
Chinese Poetry’, Asia Major, 3rd series 25 (2012), 79–128.
Saussy, Haun, Great Walls of Discourse and Other Adventures in Cultural China
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2001).
Stalling, Jonathan, The Poetics of Emptiness: Transformations of Asian Thought in
American Poetry (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010).
Sun, Cecile Chu-chin, The Poetics of Repetition in English and Chinese Lyric Poetry
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011).
Waley, Arthur, 170 Poems from the Chinese (London: Constable & Co., 1918).
The Book of Songs (London: Allen & Unwin, 1937); rev. ed. Joseph Roe Allen
(Grove Press, 1996).
Chinese Poems (London: Allen & Unwin, 1946).
Madly Singing in the Mountains: An Appreciation and Anthology of Arthur Waley,
ed. Ivan Morris (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1972).
More Translations from the Chinese (New York: Knopf, 1919).
The Temple and Other Poems (New York: Knopf, 1923).
Xie, Ming, Ezra Pound and the Appropriation of Chinese Poetry: Cathay,
Translation, and Imagism (New York: Garland, 1999).
Yang, Lian, ‘“In the Timeless Air”: Chinese Language, Pound and The Cantos’,
trans. Liping Yang, Paideuma, 30 (2001), 101–5.
Yao, Steven G., Foreign Accents: Chinese American Verse from Exclusion to
Postethnicity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).
Translation and the Languages of Modernism: Gender, Politics, Language
(London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002).
Yeh, Michelle, Modern Chinese Poetry: Theory and Practice since 1917 (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1991).
Yip, Wai-lim, Diffusion of Distances: Dialogues between Chinese and Western Poetics
Ezra Pound’s Cathay (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969).
Pound and the Eight Views of Xiao Xiang (Taipei: National Taiwan University
Press, 2008).
part iii
Culture and Politics
chapter 11
The Transnational Turn

Josephine Park
The ‘transnational turn’ has cycled from its establishment within the social
sciences in the 1990s, its dissemination across the humanities in the 2000s,
to its reassessment in our present decade. It is the contention of this chapter
that to reread Ezra Pound’s comparatist aesthetic and political labours
within this presently contested framework demonstrates anew the signifi-
cance of Pound’s methods of literary and cultural appraisal – and that this
exercise can illuminate, too, the critical affordances and limitations of the
transnational turn itself.
The 1990s ‘transnational moment’1 was largely instantiated by social
scientists weary of the theoretical abstractions of late-twentieth-century
cultural studies. At the heart of this shift was an indictment of universaliz-
ing theories of globalization, which were deemed not only vacuous but
pernicious. Looking back at this moment, we may fit transnationalism
within a broader post-theory turn, characterized by an aversion to post-
structuralist abstraction. This reaction sought to restore zones and relations
seemingly lost to the ether of concepts like ‘hybridization’2 and pointedly
argued for an agency that had been theorized away. Social science practi-
tioners of transnationalism made quick work of shedding a generation of
abstraction to insist on sociological use-value, and the humanities took
heed.
The literary uptake of transnationalism was highly visible in the
2000s. Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih’s edited volume Minor
Transnationalisms (2005) significantly positioned the concept within
comparative literature and spelled out the expanded spaces of transna-
tional literary study, which reconsidered ‘border-crossing agents,
whether dominant or marginal’, but particularly emphasized periph-
eral actors unmediated by the global centre.3 This commitment to
peripheries was a critical legacy of the social scientific elaboration of
transnationalism, but one that has been particularly vexed for moder-
nist literary study, in large part because modernist internationalism
181
182 josephine park
bears a formal – and sometimes confounding – resemblance to trans-
nationalism. Indeed, modernist literary study has been defined by
critical efforts at signifying and resignifying modernist international-
ism, and the transnational turn instigated what editors Laura Doyle
and Laura Winkiel identified as a new ‘self-consciousness about posi-
tionality’ in the preface to their major volume Geomodernisms, also
published in 2005.4 Modernist literary study has thus been particularly
ripe for the transnational turn, which layers a new awareness onto its
internationalist scope.
In fact, contemporary modernist scholarship has staked its present
relevance on the transnational turn, both by newly charting peripheries
and by seeking postcolonial impulses within canonical modernist works.
Douglas Mao and Rebecca Walkowitz’s 2008 elaboration of ‘The New
Modernist Studies’ in the PMLA heralded a sea-change instigated by the
transnational turn: surveying the recent wave of modernist scholarship,
they identified spatial and vertical expansions that cut against both mod-
ernism’s Eurocentrism and its predilection for high culture. Mao and
Walkowitz named politics as the point where these expansive critical
tendencies met, explaining that ‘the new transnationalism, if it is to be
new at all, must probe much further the effects of the state on modernist
production’. Such probes call forth ‘the echo of Foucault’, and their
discussion concludes with the prevalence of ‘issues of nation and mass
politics’.5 That the transnational turn leads back to poststructuralist and
nationalist critique is neither surprising nor especially contradictory, but
the particular elaboration of this return here reveals that ‘The New
Modernist Studies’ returns to the disciplinary political mechanisms that
high modernist cultural production tended to obscure. Mao and
Walkowitz’s discussion culminates in ‘politics as itself’6 – echoing Doyle
and Winkiel’s ‘self-consciousness about positionality’ – to distinguish the
new modernist studies from modernist internationalism.
The effects of this turn in our present decade are evident in major
scholarly reassessments of cosmopolitanism and a more expansive modern-
ism, both scaled up to insist upon a planetary consciousness. Bruce
Robbins’s 2012 re-evaluation of cosmopolitanism invokes a planetary
scale as a critical means of addressing the very real fact of transnational
warfare: arguing that nation-framed politics are simply unable to
access a responsible worldview, Robbins insists upon cosmopolitanism as
a detachment from national self-interest, pitched towards a ‘transnational
domain [that] is, after all, a zone of real political struggle and real political
belonging’.7 Susan Stanford Friedman’s massive Planetary Modernism
The Transnational Turn 183
(2015) dramatically expands the time and space of modernism to call for
comparative literary study across centuries and the globe. Friedman’s
planetary turn is explicitly pitched against ‘modernism’s parochial
internationalism’,8 fatally compromised as it is by Western colonialism.
Each of these major exhibits offers an apotheosis of the transnational turn,
radically expanded to face global war and map a global cultural history.
It is at this present juncture that Ezra Pound’s aesthetic arguments against
provincialism and his fascination with Far Eastern poetics resonate anew.
From this opening genealogical sketch, this chapter reconsiders Pound’s
anti-provincial aesthetics within the context of a planetary consciousness,
and then turns to a telling instance of Pound’s sustained aesthetic contact
with the orient. Critical reappraisals of Pound’s China proceeded alongside
the transnational turn, and the recent wave of scholarship devoted to this
material has demonstrated the methodological significance of his oriental-
ism. The bulk of this chapter considers a contested oriental allusion early in
The Cantos, in which a curious, turning figuration reveals a transnational
imagination central to Pound’s poetic method.
Gathering
Friedman explains that Planetary Modernisms ‘treats modernism as the
aesthetic domain of modernity’, understood ‘on a planetary scale, across
time’.9 This approach necessitates a different method:
we ought first to turn to the specificities of a given modernity and then ask
what creative forms it produced – in the Tang Dynasty, for example, or the
Abbasid Caliphate, Al-Andalus, the Songhay Empire, Renaissance Florence,
Enlightenment Paris, colonial Calcutta, or imperial London.10
For readers of Pound’s literary disquisitions, this approach is a familiar one.
In a recent reappraisal of Pound’s Spirit of Romance (1910), for example,
Jean-Michel Rabaté discusses a characteristic global collocation, in
which Pound maps together Jerusalem, Gibraltar and Russia. It is
Rabaté’s significant claim that in Pound’s ‘wish to establish solid cross-
references across different regions and nations’, we encounter ‘a whole
program for scholarship still in the making’11 – in which Friedman’s
planetary overhaul may be readily, if uneasily, incorporated.
A perusal of Pound’s prose throughout his career reveals persistent globe-
ranging efforts, as in this particularly illustrative moment from his twelve-part
series of articles titled ‘I Gather the Limbs of Osiris’, published in The New Age
from 1911 to 1912:12
184 josephine park
Let us suppose a man, ignorant of painting, taken into a room contain-
ing a picture by Fra Angelico, a picture by Rembrandt, one by
Velasquez, Memling, Rafael, Monet, Beardsley, Hokusai, Whistler,
and a fine example of the art of some Egyptian. He is told that this is
painting and that every one of these is a master-work. He is, if
a thoughtful man, filled with confusion. These things obey no common
apparent law. (SP 24)
Like Friedman’s litany, this gallery presents vastly different styles from
multiple periods and regions, and both are deeply invested in a creative
exemplarity, which privileges masterworks – as evidenced in Pound’s
placeholder, the ‘art of some Egyptian’, which gestures towards the titular
Osiris and reveals a principle of civilizational representation. Pound shifts
to a further, and core, analogy to sketch out an intelligent appreciation of
these varied forms:
If, however, he is a specialist, a man thoroughly trained in some other
branch of knowledge, his feelings are not unlike mine when I am taken
into the engineering laboratory and shown successively an electric engine,
a steam-engine, a gas-engine, etc. I realize that there are a number of devices,
all designed for more or less the same end, none ‘better’, none ‘worse’, all
different. . . .They all ‘produce power’ – that is, they gather the latent energy
of Nature and focus it on a certain resistance. (SP 25)
To ‘gather the limbs of Osiris’ is to ‘gather the latent energy of Nature’: we
are in the realm of planetary consciousness.
Pound’s literary criticism remains exhilarating and disturbing because of its
hunger for power, and the telling allegory of the engineering laboratory
demonstrates that this drive incorporates and indeed requires diverse engines –
and, further, their differences do not indicate their value: ‘none “better”, none
“worse”’. Indeed, the efforts of gathering and focusing energy are in fact more
visible in less familiar engines; hence, for Pound, more distant temporal and
geographical examples of aesthetic power were especially crucial for exhibiting
this process. The ideogram, of course, was Pound’s central and enduring
showcase for the operation of wresting artistic power from nature, especially
prized because he deemed it to be highly visible, swift and economical. He was
famously impatient with the slow work of reading (indeed, his various guides
to reading are all about reading less) and ‘I Gather the Limbs of Osiris’ endures
as Pound’s key elaboration of ‘“the new method” – that of luminous detail’
(25), in which, as he puts it at the conclusion of the series, ‘the critic or
professor presents the energetic part of his knowledge’ (43). The method of
luminous detail is a gallery of energetic parts, a kind of exalted shorthand for
a global history of art.
The spatial and temporal expanse of this knowledge is part and parcel of
its utility and necessity for Pound, and it is pitched against, as he put it,
‘Provincialism the Enemy’, the characteristic title of another series of pieces
he published for The New Age in 1917.13 Proclaiming that provincialism is
‘ignorance plus a lust after uniformity’, Pound rails against ‘the yelp of
“nationality”’ (SP 190) to welcome multiplicity within and across nations,
emphasizing that, for example, ‘England is so many races, even “Little
England”, that she has kept some real respect for personality, for the
outline of the individual’ (190). Pound’s defence of civilization over
nationality rests on cosmopolitan encounters: ‘Peace, our ideas of justice,
of liberty, of as much of these as are feasible, the immaterial, as well as
material things, proceed from a metropolis’ (200). A concrete proposal
emerges from the series: a tunnel between England and France, because ‘a
closer union of the two capitals [would] make for a richer civilization’
(202). It is this tunnel that makes Pound’s civilizational order particularly
amenable to transnationalism as it has been conceived in our era: the
expansions he envisioned always specified the terms of the movement
between differing times and spaces, from this proposed actual tunnel to
the close work of translation – and to the astonishing variety of formal
modes he employed to rhyme subjects across history and the globe.
‘A tunnel is more than a dynasty’, Pound proclaims in ‘Provincialism the
Enemy’ – a ringing line that brings out the particular crisis that instigated
this series: ‘A tunnel would almost be worth part of this war, or, at least,
a resultant tunnel would leave the war with some constructiveness directly
to its credit, and no single act of any of the Allies would have so inhibitive
an effect on all war parties whatsoever’ (199). The First World War, of
course, was an instance of devastating internationalism, and Pound’s
exhortation to construct a material connection argues for the tunnel as
not only a positive legacy but an anti-war action. Pound’s belief in 1917 that
a tunnel between metropolises could counteract world war echoes
a century later, in Robbins’s call for cosmopolitanism as a bulwark against
transnational wars. Robbins’s trenchant critique of nationalism, too, clo-
sely parallels Pound’s dismissal of nationality: both seek to leverage active
transnational bonds against conflicts that overrun national boundaries.
That Pound’s literary and cultural efforts resonate with these recent
efforts to outrun the scope of internationalism – not least in the open and
highly mobile style of Friedman’s study – demonstrates the promiscuity of
a planetary consciousness: such large-scale efforts may be hitched to
repressive or emancipatory political ambitions. Pound’s 1917 arguments
for civilization were in the service of peace, and he continued to imagine
186 josephine park
himself as a peace broker into the next war – even as he aligned himself with
repressive regimes. Pound’s anti-parochialisms mark the other end of the
political spectrum to these contemporary studies: while Pound circled the
globe in the service of consolidating power, whether aesthetic or political,
both Friedman and Robbins seek to counter repressive political legacies.
Despite their opposing political attitudes, Pound’s internationalism echoes
with these more recent transnationalisms, and this critical resemblance
indicates the possibilities and limits of this shared method.
Further, alongside the heroic methodological efforts of Robbins and
Friedman, contemporary reassessments of the turn mark a concurrent scep-
ticism, whether by exposing the deployment of cultural internationalism as
a means towards securing political nationalisms14 or by unmasking imperial
pretensions behind the new cosmopolitanism.15 Such critiques demonstrate
how readily transnationalism collapses into modernist internationalism.
Ezra Pound’s internationalism was an aesthetic revolution that bolstered
both his pacifist and later bellicose intentions; these recent and trenchant
critiques of cosmopolitan and planetary turns demonstrate that these critical
efforts themselves risk effacing difference and elevating abstraction.
Matthew Hart’s recent discussion of transnationalism as ‘more method
than theory’ astutely critiques the layering of an emancipatory politics onto
literary presentations of transnational contact.16 And yet the transnational
turn is distinct from its sibling formations precisely because of its emancipa-
tory ascriptions; this politics is transnationalism’s most salient distinguishing
feature and the source of its critical availability. Perhaps in this exercise of
reading Pound’s modernist internationalism with the transnationalism of the
new millennium, then, we may identify both the isomorphic tendency of the
method of comparison across time and space and comprehend the necessity
of today’s self-consciousness. The new modernism is a political self-
awareness – ‘politics as itself’ – that comprehends the transnational turn as
a means of superseding politically retrograde concepts of modernist inter-
nationalism. The troubling fact that transnationalism calls forth the spectre
of this internationalism may in fact underscore the political utility of the
turn: because of the ever-present danger of recapitulating imperial designs,
transnationalism must perpetually expose them.
Churning
Jahan Ramazani’s A Transnational Poetics intertwines method and politics
to theorize an inherent transnationalism legible in the form of modern
poetry: as a product of global modernity, the poem’s ‘complex texture’
reveals ‘the interconnecting cultural traces wound into the DNA of poetic
forms and poetic language’.17 Ramazani turns to Eliot, Yeats and Pound for
foundational evidence of modernist poetic transnationalism by identifying
a nodal point ‘between exoticism and historicity’ in their eastern fascina-
tions. Returning to ‘In a Station of the Metro’ in particular, Ramazani
identifies ‘an orientalism that is also antiorientalist, that is cross-cutting
and counterdiscursive’.18 It is worth noting that Pound’s ‘orientalism that
is antiorientalist’ vouchsafes his oeuvre for transnationalism in a way that
his continent-wide time travel across the literatures of Europe does not.
The anticolonial contours of the transnational turn thus retrieve and
reposition modernist orientalism, and for Pound in particular, his orient
has come to offer a striking counterbalance to the demons of imperial
fascism that have clouded but also defined his pre-eminence. For Pound’s
critical legacy, his orient has become his saving grace.
Studies of Pound’s orient date back to the first readings of his oeuvre,
and this significant scholarly thread examines the deep imbrication of this
material within his formal revolutions. The recent generation of scholar-
ship that maps onto the rise of the transnational turn has established the
centrality of the Far East to Pound’s poetics, from his early lyrics all the way
to the late, fragmentary cantos. One pivotal and controversial instance of
oriental apparition will serve as my primary exhibit for comprehending the
function of the transnational turn in Pound’s poetics: the so-called ‘So-shu
controversy’ of Canto II.
On the heels of Canto I’s epic descent, Canto II turns to protean figures
of metamorphoses. While Homer presides over Canto I, Canto II is
governed by Ovid, and this second poem is an entirely different reading
experience, which features rhapsodic morphologies of bodies and
language. Pound famously launched the poem by announcing his poetic
intent vis-à-vis Robert Browning (‘my Sordello?’), and then the poem
quickly dives into a cluster of femmes fatales (Helen, Eleanor of
Aquitaine, Tyro) pitched into oceanic movement before turning to an
intoxicating, twisting translation of an Ovidian episode, in which
Dionysus, lured onto a ship by pirates, stills and transforms the ship and
his captors; the poem concludes by settling into a charged calm. Guy
Davenport identified the central play of this canto as ‘a pattern of radiance
introduced in a context ignorant of it’,19 and the poem sustains sinuous,
waterborne movements throughout.
After the initial elaboration of the Sordello question, the poem presents
an unknown character: ‘So-shu churned in the sea’ (C 6). This figure
reappears immediately after the Dionysus episode:
188 josephine park
And So-shu churned in the sea, So-shu also,
using the long moon for a churn-stick . . . (C 9)
20
As Davenport put it, ‘The provenance of So-shu is dark’, and it remains
so: scholarly efforts to identify and explicate this character have long
occasioned dispute. These scholarly exchanges foreground Pound’s well-
known confusions about Chinese and Japanese sources as well as his
broader tendencies of loose and highly refracted references.
The first published instance of this figure appeared in the 1917 ‘Three
Cantos’: the material that would evolve into the So-shu of Canto II
concludes a passage in which Pound judges his own verse as ‘too plain, /
Too full of footnotes’: ‘And Ka-hu churned the sea, / Churning the ocean,
using the moon for a churn-stick’.21 Christine Froula’s rigorous analysis of
‘the beginnings’ of The Cantos turns to Pound’s early manuscripts to puzzle
through this figuration, and her analysis identifies a shift in poetic method:
What is interesting about coming upon it here in the early manuscripts is
precisely that here too it has no illuminating thematic context. It is as
though Pound conjured it out of the air. In its very gratuitousness, its lack
of a particular thematic meaning in the context of the passage in which it
occurs, the Ka-hu image bespeaks an impulse toward a change of poetic
method rather than the introduction of a new subject: it is an image of the
Image. Its meaning has to do not with reference to any specific moment in
oriental poetry but with the ‘paradisal’ language which Pound is seeking and
which this image, in contrast to the Browningesque bombast that precedes
it, embodies.
Froula pitches this elaboration against attempts at ‘scholarly source-
hunting’ and, in a footnote, offers a rebuke to such efforts: ‘The premise
that everything in Pound’s poem must refer to a source, with respect to
which it is either an accurate rendering or a mistake, allows no room for the
creative and interpretive play in which the poem, even in the act of citation,
is always engaged’.22
The Cantos, of course, send us source-hunting, and the searches instigated
by So-shu demonstrate the archival pleasures and live debates instigated
by Pound’s epic. The more ingenious explications have linked So-shu to the
Noh materials from the Fenollosa manuscripts, including a captivating
recent suggestion featured in The Cantos Project online, which turns to the
Noh play Shojo:
Shojo means monkey and appears to the mortal eye as a man, but he is really
the god of sake whose cup never runs dry. . . . In the play, Shojo is waiting
for a friend on the bank of the Yangtze River: ‘The moonlight fills the tilted
sake cup, waiting’. Beyond the play, Pound seems to have been aware of the
iconography of the shojo, which shows him standing on a sake cup on the
sea and rowing or churning with a ladle.23
Shojo’s resonances with Dionysus are compelling, and the moonlit scene is
especially fitting for the second reference to So-shu in the canto, ‘using the
long moon for a churn-stick’. The disguised god in the moonlight, churn-
ing the sea: how ably Shojo links the clusters of transformations in the
canto, all set in the waves.
Between the felicitous resonance of Shojo, on the one hand, and Ka-hu
as ‘an image of the Image’, on the other, we may locate the method and
significance of Pound’s transnational turn. The hunt for So-shu has
periodically reopened Pound’s early encounters with and receipt of oriental
sources, and the discovery of Shojo in particular beautifully encapsulates
and expands the sphere of references, not only in our comprehension
of Pound’s sources, but of the images that were both available and circulat-
ing in his time and place. To cite Froula’s reproach differently, the
scholarly labour that uncovered the myth and representation of Shojo
extends ‘the creative and interpretive play’ of the poem to its reception,
all the way to the present.
Froula’s methodological consideration of the So-shu material as an
imagistic ‘impulse toward a change in poetic method’ is pointedly
detached from ‘reference to any specific moment in oriental poetry’,
but Pound, of course, ‘conjured’ this figure out of a particular
air: Pound’s image is inseparable from his oriental interests and, critically,
the new ‘medium’ of the ‘Chinese Written Language’. In Canto II, So-
shu ushers in the poem’s oceanic gestures and transformations; his figure
shifts the frame of the poem beyond what Friedman terms ‘modernism’s
parochial internationalism’. By layering the discoveries of ‘scholarly
source-hunting’ onto Froula’s insight, I believe we can gesture towards
the significance of Pound’s transnationalism, in which the incorporation
of peripherical global sources entailed a metamorphosis in poetic
method.
So-shu’s appearance in Canto II accords with Ramazani’s ‘orientalism
that is also antiorientalist’, and the self-reflexive awareness built into So-
shu’s transnational presence is visible in his literal churning, which
instigates a methodological turn. It is worth noting, too, a different
order of reflexivity: So-shu is both the agent and object of the churning
motion. In the earlier ‘Three Cantos’, ‘Ka-hu churned the sea’, but in
Canto II, remarkably, ‘So-shu churned in the sea’: in The Cantos, So-shu
190 josephine park
first appears captive to the natural motion of the sea. Canto II preserves
the object-sense of So-shu in his second appearance, but then appends
a more agential position: ‘And So-shu churned in the sea, So-shu also, /
using the long moon for a churn-stick’. The end-stopped emphasis on
‘also’ underscores the secondary nature of So-shu’s more godlike gesture
of ‘using the long moon’: So-shu is at the mercy of nature before he is
a master of it. Reading So-shu in this position, we may see, too, that the
radiant patterning of this canto requires surrender, from Tyro’s ravishing
within the glassy wave to the oarsmen Dionysus covers over with fish
scales.
So-shu governs the broader gestures of this poem even as he is a figure
plunged within it – and his place in the poem echoes, too, the figure of
Acoetes in the Ovidean material: the captain of the ship, Acoetes serves as
the witness to Dionysus’s ‘god-sleight’, and in his testimony he famously
repeats, ‘I have seen what I have seen’ (C 9). The recursive quality of this
line, in which ‘what I have seen’ serves as the object of ‘I have seen’, recalls
the doubled sense of So-shu’s churning: in both cases, their gestures of
encasing the action fold back into the action. This imbrication of the seer,
or what So-shu does ‘also’, resonates with the order of self-reflexivity
Ramazani identifies in modernist orientalism, in which Eastern method
reveals Western self-consciousness.
I’d like to indulge in a little source-hunting of my own, by turning to
what has long been deemed an unrelated instance of So-shu in Pound’s
oeuvre: ‘Ancient Wisdom, Rather Cosmic’, published in his groundbreak-
ing Lustra (1917; part of a cluster of poems composed between 1913 and
1915). Here is the brief poem in its entirety:
So-shu dreamed,
And having dreamed that he was a bird, a bee, and a butterfly,
He was uncertain why he should try to feel like anything else,
Hence his contentment.24
Carroll F. Terrell’s notes to Canto II in his comprehensive companion to
The Cantos issues a clear injunction: ‘Not to be confused with “So-shu” in
“Ancient Wisdom, Rather Cosmic” which is a Japanese transliteration of
the name of the Chinese philosopher Chuang Chou (more commonly
known as Chuang Tzu)’.25 I propose to dive into this confusion, however,
by reading these evidently distinct figures together in order to explore the
depth of Pound’s plunge into the Far East.
‘Ancient Wisdom, Rather Cosmic’ is likely a riff on a poem by Li Po –
a handful of the poems in Lustra are reworkings of Tang Dynasty poems
that precede the receipt of Fenollosa’s papers – featuring the Chinese
philosopher Zhuangzi (Chuang Tzu in Wade-Giles romanization) and
his famous dream. Herbert Giles translated Zhuangzi’s dream episode in
1886:
Once upon a time, I, Chuang Tzu, dreamt I was a butterfly, fluttering hither
and thither, to all intents and purposes a butterfly. I was conscious only of
following my fancies as a butterfly, and was unconscious of my individuality
as a man. Suddenly, I awaked, and there I lay, myself again. Now I do not
know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am
now a butterfly dreaming I am a man.26
Pound’s poem undoes this ‘ancient wisdom’: his So-shu is content; he
experiences none of the existential doubts that are the hallmark of
Zhuangzi’s insight. Instead, the alliteration of ‘a bird, a bee, and
a butterfly’ reduces the postulated inhuman imagination to a menagerie,
readily contained and then dismissed.
Between the flat wisdom of this first So-shu and the churning inde-
terminacy of So-shu in Canto II, however, we find preserved a sense of
contentment that eludes everyone else in Canto II, including the voice
of Pound himself (‘Hang it all’). The earlier So-shu absorbs and settles
the dream-lesson of becoming fauna; the So-shu of Canto II is no more
unsettled by his object status. Hence, though Pound opens the canto
with his frustration at attempting to discover his own poetic subject, So-
shu’s ‘ancient wisdom’ offers a critical shift that opens into metamor-
phosis, whose governing logic is a tautology, ‘I have seen what I have
seen’. This action of looping back suggests a telling revelation of Pound’s
transnational turn: Pound is transformed by the orient, but his orient is
his own. The odd contentment of his So-shu mirrors Pound’s own
encounter with oriental sources, in which Chinese dreams confirm that
one need not ‘try to feel like anything else’; instead, Pound revels in
having had the dream.
Considering these two instantiations of So-shu together, it is tempting
to read the oriental sage as the dreamer of the canto. From Pound’s open-
ing frustration in Canto II, the appearance of So-shu portends a different
and foreign imagination in which, citing Davenport again, ‘a pattern of
radiance [is] introduced in a context ignorant of it’. Considering, too,
Froula’s reading of this material as an elaboration of Pound’s imagistic
192 josephine park
method, we recall the patterned radiance of Pound’s ideogram, forever his
‘image of the Image’. Perhaps, then, the dizzying reflection of subject and
object that So-shu instigates can be extended to Pound and So-shu: each
dreams the other.
A manifestation of Pound’s search for new radiance, So-shu marks
a methodological sea change, in which the seer revels in what he has
seen. Acoetes, the seer in the Ovid episode, is shattered by what he has
seen, but So-shu, churning and being churned, frames and illuminates the
episode. In the moonlight of his gestures, the speech of the bewildered
witness acquires oracular tones. The multiply self-reflexive turns
embedded within the figuration of So-shu indicates the methodological
significance of the transnational turn, which entails a transformative con-
tact with peripheral materials. The governing force of such material
in Pound’s oeuvre has been critical to his present reception, and Pound’s
orient has had a redemptive value for his poetic legacy.
Ezra Pound’s globe-spanning methods resonate with recent critical
expansions of the transnational turn – and all such efforts have occasioned
thoroughgoing critique. This chapter has attempted to map out the
relevance of Pound’s poetics for our present critical landscape, and the
particular resonances elaborated here suggest both the promise of turning
away from the imperial centre and the perils of methodological expansion-
ism, itself charged with imperial echoes.
Notes
1. Anita Patterson provides a lucid overview of this dissemination in the opening
of Race, American Literature, and Transnational Modernisms (New York:
2. In their introduction to the volume Transnationalism from Below (New
Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1998), editors Michael Peter Smith
and Luis Eduardo Guarnizo insist upon wresting transnationalism from ima-
ginary or abstract conceptual spaces, 11.
3. Lionnet and Shih, Minor Transnationalism (Durham: Duke University Press,
2005), 5.
4. Doyle and Winkiel, Geomodernisms: Race, Modernism, Modernity
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), 3.
5. Mao and Walkowitz, ‘The New Modernist Studies’, PMLA 123.3 (2008),
745–6, 746.
6. Mao and Walkowitz, ‘The New Modernist Studies’, 745. Thanks to Mark
Byron for pointing out the dangers of a new abstraction, which are particularly
evident in the planetary gestures that follow.
7. Robbins, Perpetual War: Cosmopolitanism from the Viewpoint of Violence
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), 26.
8. This phrase is from Friedman’s ‘World Modernisms, World Literature, and
Comparativity’, The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms (New York:
9. Friedman, Planetary Modernisms: Provocations on Modernity across Time
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), 4.
10. Friedman, Planetary Modernisms, 5.
11. Rabaté, ‘Ezra Pound and the Globalization of Literature’, Ezra Pound in the
Present: Essays on Pound’s Contemporaneity, edited by Paul Stasi and Josephine
Park (New York: Bloomsbury, 2016), 116.
12. Pound, ‘I Gather the Limbs of Osiris’, Ezra Pound: Selected Prose, 1909–1965,
ed. William Cookson (New York: New Directions, 1973).
13. Pound, ‘Provincialism the Enemy’, Ezra Pound: Selected Prose, 1909–1965, ed.
William Cookson (New York: New Directions, 1973).
14. See Roland Vegso’s ‘The Mother Tongue of Modernity: Modernism,
Transnationalism, Translation’, Journal of Modern Literature 33.2 (2010),
24–46, for a trenchant critique of cultural internationalism as a cover for
political nationalism which effaces immigrant experience.
15. See Michael Spiegel’s ‘Is Modernism Really Transnational?: Ulysses, New
Cosmopolitanism, and the Celtic Tiger’, Cultural Critique 90 (2015),
88–114, for a particularly bracing critique of new cosmopolitanism as
a reiteration of neoliberal globalization.
16. Matthew Hart, ‘Transnationalism at the Departure Gate’, in A Handbook of
Modernism Studies, edited by Jean-Michel Rabaté (Hoboken: Wiley,
2013), 158.
17. Ramazani, A Transnational Poetics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2009), 8, 13.
18. Ramazani, A Transnational Poetics, 112, 113.
19. Guy Davenport, ‘Ezra Pound’s Radiant Gists: A Reading of Cantos II and
IV’, Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature 3.2 (1962, 55).
20. Davenport, ‘Ezra Pound’s Radiant Gists’, 54.
21. Massimo Bacigalupo’s recently compiled Posthumous Cantos (Manchester,
England: Carcanet, 2015) reprints the 1917 ‘Three Cantos’ that ‘remained
forgotten in the back files of Poetry . . .to be reprinted only after Pound’s
death’, xi, 22.
22. Froula, To Write Paradise: Style and Error in Pound’s Cantos (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1984), 19. It is worth noting, too, Pound’s play with
pseudonyms in his early poetry, quoting from non-existent authors such as
‘Weston St. Llewmys’, an obvious play on family names from his mother’s
and father’s side. My thanks to the anonymous reader of this chapter for
underscoring this practice.
23. http://thecantosproject.ed.ac.uk/index.php/a-draft-of-xvi-cantos-overview/c
2-in-a-draft-of-16/ii-poem.
24. Pound, Personae (New York: New Directions, 1990), 123.
194 josephine park
25. Terrell, A Companion to The Cantos of Ezra Pound (Orono, ME: National
Poetry Foundation, 1980), 5.
26. Herbert Giles, Chuang Tzu: Mystic, Moralist, and Reformer (London: Bernard
Quaritch, 1889), 32.
W OR KS C I T ED
Davenport, Guy, ‘Ezra Pound’s Radiant Gists: A Reading of Cantos II and IV’,
Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature 3.2 (1962), 50–64.
Doyle, Laura, and Laura Winkiel, Geomodernisms: Race, Modernism, Modernity
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005).
Friedman, Susan Stanford, ‘World Modernisms, World Literature, and
Comparativity’, in The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms, ed.
Mark Wollaeger and Matt Eatough, 499–524 (New York: Oxford
Giles, Herbert, Chuang Tzu: Mystic, Moralist, and Reformer (London: Bernard
Quaritch, 1889).
Hart, Matthew, ‘Transnationalism at the Departure Gate’, in A Handbook of
Modernism Studies, ed. Jean-Michel Rabaté, 157–72 (Hoboken: Wiley,
2013).
Lionnet, Françoise, and Shu-mei Shih’s, Minor Transnationalism (Durham: Duke
Mao, Douglas, and Rebecca Walkowitz, ‘The New Modernist Studies’, PMLA
123.3 (2008), 737–48.
Patterson, Anita, Race, American Literature, and Transnational Modernisms
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
Pound, Ezra, ‘I Gather the Limbs of Osiris’, in Ezra Pound: Selected Prose,
1909–1965, ed. William Cookson, 19–44 (New York: New Directions, 1973).
Personae, ed. A. Walton Litz and Lea Baechler (New York: New Directions,
1990).
Posthumous Cantos, ed. Massimo Bacigalupo (Manchester, UK: Carcanet,
2015).
‘Provincialism the Enemy’, in Ezra Pound: Selected Prose, 1909–1965, ed.
William Cookson, 189–203 (New York: New Directions, 1973).
Rabaté, Jean-Michel, ‘Ezra Pound and the Globalization of Literature’,
Ezra Pound in the Present: Essays on Pound’s Contemporaneity, ed. Paul Stasi
and Josephine Park, 107–34 (New York: Bloomsbury, 2016).
Ramazani, Jahan, A Transnational Poetics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2009).
Robbins, Bruce, Perpetual War: Cosmopolitanism from the Viewpoint of Violence
Smith, Michael Peter, and Luis Eduardo Guarnizo, eds., Transnationalism from
Below (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1998).
Spiegel, Michael, ‘Is Modernism Really Transnational?: Ulysses, New
Cosmopolitanism, and the Celtic Tiger’, Cultural Critique 90 (2015),
88–114.
Terrell, Carroll, A Companion to The Cantos of Ezra Pound (Orono, ME: National
Poetry Foundation, 1980).
Vegso, Roland, ‘The Mother Tongue of Modernity: Modernism,
Transnationalism, Translation’, Journal of Modern Literature 33.2 (2010),
24–46.
chapter 12
Pound, Gender, Sexuality

Carrie J. Preston
Most previous discussions of Ezra Pound, gender and sexuality have

focused on Pound’s poetic depictions of women and his relationships
with women artists, patrons and muses. The fascinating biographical
stories include such figures as the poet H. D., perhaps Pound’s first
love; the pianist and patron Margaret Cravens, who took her life after
playing a song Pound and Walter Rummel wrote for her; Pound’s
wife, Dorothy (Shakespear) Pound; and his long-time mistress, Olga
Rudge, a concert violinist.1 When critics focus on sexuality and Pound,
the result tends to be ‘paranoid’ rather than ‘reparative’ readings, to
use Eve Sedgwick’s famous formulation.2 The paranoid position is
based in suspicion, anticipation of generalized misogyny and bigotry,
and the desire to expose homophobia. Pound’s work offers ample
support for paranoid readings as, for example, when he overtly
‘coupled’ sodomy and usury with sides of antisemitism and misogyny
in both prose and poetry:
By great wisdom sodomy and usury were seen coupled together. If there
comes ever a rebirth or resurrection of Christian Church . . . it will come
with a recognition and an abjuration of the great sin contra naturam, of the
prime sin against natural abundance.3
Usura slayeth the child in the womb
It stayeth the young man’s courting
It hath brought palsey to bed, lyeth
between the young bride and her bridegroom
CONTRA NATURAM
They have brought whores for Eleusis (C 230)
Usury, defined by Pound in Canto XLV as ‘[a] charge for the use of
purchasing power’, murders fetuses, destroys the virility of young men,
infects the conjugal bed and sends ‘whores’ rather than initiates to the
sacred Eleusinian mysteries. Each of these horrors is more logically
196
Pound, Gender, Sexuality 197
associated with sexualities that were considered ‘against nature’ than with
economic activity, making sodomy the true criminal of the poem.
Homophobia in Pound’s Canto XLV is abundantly evident without the
kinds of paranoid readings that have been the norm in the field of sexuality
studies, a field that regularly seeks to identify and avoid normativity.
Recognizing that paranoid readings were ubiquitous and occasionally
reductive, Sedgwick encouraged reparative readings that are ‘additive and
accretive’, approaches that focus on the capacity of individuals to find
satisfaction and even joy in practices emerging from bigoted cultures
(i.e., all cultures).4 Sedgwick presented both paranoid and reparative read-
ings as flexible and necessary strategies, yet a new dichotomy has emerged
in the wake of her important work, one that sets reparative in opposition to
paranoid readings. This essay will draw on both paranoid and reparative
strategies to promote a reconsideration of Pound, gender and sexuality.
I focus on the famous sequence, the Pisan Cantos (1948), as an example of
the contradictions in Pound’s poetic representation of gender and sexuality
throughout The Cantos that can productively be read across the paranoid /
reparative divide. Discussions of gender in the Pisan Cantos have often
focused on deciphering Pound’s veiled references to women in his life,
partly because the sequence is so poignantly biographical and the relation-
ships so fascinatingly complex. A new approach to the Pisan Cantos will
point to future directions in analyzing gender and sexuality across Pound’s
oeuvre.
First, I want to clarify that a reparative reading should not echo the early
apologetics issued by the Library of Congress when it awarded Pound its
first (and only) Bollingen Prize for the Pisan Cantos (1948).5 The award
committee’s press release insisted, ‘The fellows are aware that objections
may be made to awarding a prize to a man situated as is Mr. Pound [in
St. Elizabeths Hospital for the Criminally Insane] . . .To permit other
considerations than that of poetic achievement to sway the decision
would destroy the significance of the award and would in principle deny
the validity of that objective perception of value on which civilized society
must rest’.6 Feminist theorists have long questioned notions of an ‘objec-
tive perception of value’ along with a ‘civilized society’ when that society
continues to devalue sexual and racial minorities, women, Jews and other
groups – as does Pound throughout The Cantos. Far more concerned
with Pound’s indictment for treason than his bigotry, Robert Hillyer,
then president of the Poetry Society of America, published his outrage in
the Saturday Review of Literature, arguing that the Bollingen Prize had been
given to a traitor who had ‘served the enemy in direct poetical and
198 carrie j. preston
propaganda activities against the United States’.7 In a more recent state-
ment on the controversy, Marjorie Perloff insisted that by now, ‘most
critics would agree that, whatever else the [Pisan] sequence was or wasn’t, it
was certainly the best book of poems published in 1948 and hence well
deserved the much disputed prize’.8 Her ‘one caveat’ turned, once again,
to Pound’s biography as a bigamist who never even mentions women ‘by
name’.
Perloff is right that women in Pound’s life are not named in the Pisan
Cantos, but in this chapter I focus on the contradictory and tangled
polyerotics of Pound’s construction of the poet/artist in the Pisan Cantos.
A depiction of the dissolution of poetic identity set against the backdrop of
widespread cultural destruction, the Pisan segment asks how a self and
a culture can be reconstructed through poetry. The speaker of the poem is
closely linked to Pound, who wrote the section while imprisoned at the
U.S. Army’s Disciplinary Training Center (DTC) north of Pisa and under
indictment for treason. But even when the poetry seems most personal, we
should recognize its performative work and acknowledge the distance
between speaker and poet. Pound’s speaker presents a series of intimate
relationships with male writers and artists as part of a search for aesthetic
and personal guidance. The excavation of these relationships produces
lyrical, echoic phrases that structure the poem’s longing for friendship,
love and beauty. Conventional, normative erotic or gendered identities are
insufficient for the poem’s project of self- and world-building. While a new
self cannot be clearly established, the speaker’s search is centred in mascu-
line power, but also male-male erotic and aesthetic intimacy that produces
contradictory, messy investments in non-normative gender and sexuality.
Neither the Pisan Cantos nor any of Pound’s other work presented
a coherent theory of gender and sexuality. When discussing Pound, gender
and sexuality, we need to clarify which work, which moment and for which
audience he was writing. The most theory-like statements of sexuality he
produced were in his ‘Translator’s Postscript’ to Remy de Gourmont’s
argument for sexual liberation, The Natural Philosophy of Love
(1922). Pound presented the brain as ‘a sort of great clot of genital fluid
held in suspense or reserve’ and suggested that ‘creative thought is an act
like fecundation, like the male cast of the human seed . . . that ejaculation’.9
Regularly linking creativity and masculine virility, Pound pointed to ‘the
symbolism of phallic religions, man really the phallus or spermatozoid
charging, head-on, the female chaos; integration of the male in the male
organ. Even oneself has felt it, driving any new idea into the great passive
vulva of London, a sensation analogous to the male feeling in copulation’
(NPL 207). Pound was not interested in, as he wrote, ‘any digression on
feminism’, but claimed that women are ‘better than man in the “useful
gestures”’ while men have ‘the “inventions”, the new gestures’ (NPL 207).
This is familiar misogyny, but a ‘paranoid’ reading of Pound’s ‘Translator’s
Postscript’ risks overlooking his more surprising investment in non-
normative sexualities. While he celebrated virility in many
passages, Pound associated the ascetic who ‘has tried to withhold all his
sperm’ in the attempt to ‘super-think’ with ‘the dope-fiend’, ‘the mystics’,
‘priestesses in the temple of Venus’ and ‘stray priestesses in the streets’
(prostitutes?; NPL 218). Pound presented these types as if they were all
seeking heightened states of consciousness through the pursuit of alter-
native sexualities. The list could be the basis of an unusual and queer
coalition of cultural outcasts, although Pound used it to celebrate indivi-
dual genius rather than political coalition.10
Pound’s speaker in the Pisan Cantos does not assert a masculine virility
and genius but represents an identity under extreme duress. Twenty-three
years after his experience in ‘the great vulva of London’, Pound was living
in Sant’Ambrogio, in the hills above Rapallo, Italy in a small cottage that,
due to wartime circumstances, he shared with both his wife,
Dorothy Pound, and his mistress, Olga Rudge. Pound delivered more
than 120 broadcasts on Rome radio during the war, some of which were
pro-fascist and antisemitic, and on 3 May 1945, he was captured and
accused of treason. After about seventeen days of solitary confinement in
a six-by-six-foot ‘death cell’ at the U.S. Army’s DTC, he was overwhelmed
by the heat of the Italian summer sun and the glare of floodlights trained
on him and experienced a breakdown, or a ‘lesion’ as he termed it.11 Army
psychiatrists intervened, and Pound was moved to a private tent in the
medical compound, where, after several weeks of recovery, he resumed his
writing and began drafting the Pisan Cantos.
Pound drew up a ‘paradisal scenario’ for this section of his Cantos,
imagining ‘the erotico-mystical encounters of the wandering Odysseus-
Dante-Pound with a series of goddesses’ (xvii). Canto LXXIV, the first
poem of the sequence, features several such encounters with the Japanese
moon angel ‘Hagoromo’ (C 450); Buddhist goddess of mercy ‘Kuanon’
(C 448, 455, 463); Greek goddesses of fertility, Demeter (C 451); and love,
Venus (C 455, 463, 464), among others. Some of these feminine deities
probably have real-life correlates: Richard Sieburth suggests that Olga
Rudge is referenced in the description ‘she did her hair in small ringlets,
á la 1880 it might have been, / red, and the dress she wore Drecol or
Lanvin / a great goddess, Aeneas knew her forthwith’ (C 455). Poetically
turning women into inspiring and comforting goddesses or muses is
a time-worn masculinist practice, but none of the goddess encounters are
particularly salvatory for Pound’s speaker. The true saviour in the poem
appears:
and Mr Edwards superb green and brown
in ward No 4 a jacent benignity,
of the Baluba mask: ‘doan you tell no one
I made you that table’ (C 454)
Henry Hudson Edwards was a black GI trainee who, against regulations,

made a writing desk for Pound out of a medical supply box. Racist
primitivism is evident in the description of Edwards’s facial features as an
African mask. Still, Pound’s speaker recognizes the power of the act of
reappropriating a writing table in his statement, ‘and the greatest is charity /
to be found among those who have not observed / regulations’ (C 454).
Two pages later, ‘Mr Edwards, Hudson, Henry’ is described as a ‘comes
miseriae’ – companion in misery – after he states, ‘I don’t know how
humanity stands it / with a painted paradise at the end of it / without
a painted paradise at the end of it’ (C 456). The goddesses featured in
innumerable paintings and sculptures seem part of a paradise that does not
help humanity ‘stand it’, certainly not as helpful as Henry Hudson
Edwards and a regulation-bending medical supply box turned desk.
While the efficacy of the goddesses is questionable in the Pisan Cantos,
the speaker states that ‘filial, fraternal affection is the root of humaneness’
(C 457). The speaker’s references to ‘coon’ (C 456) and ‘nigger’ (C 475, 505)
indicate a less than filial attitude towards Edwards and the other black
Americans who were overrepresented in the prison population at the DTC,
the only racially integrated command in the Mediterranean.12 The speak-
er’s acknowledged [white] brothers are named in his invocations of ghosts,
‘Lordly men are to earth o’ergiven / these the companions’: Ford Madox
Ford, W. B. Yeats, James Joyce, Victor Plarr, Edgar Jepson, Maurice
Hewlett, Henry Newbolt and Henry James (C 452–3). These brothers
discuss art and culture with variations of the phrase, ‘beauty is difficult’,
first attributed to ‘Mr [Aubrey] Beardsley’ (C 464), an English illustrator
associated with Symbolism and Decadence and perhaps most famous for
illustrating Oscar Wilde’s 1891 play Salome. After Wilde was arrested in
1895 for gross indecency with men, Beardsley lost his job as the first art
editor of the Decadent journal The Yellow Book, a title that may have been
inspired by the yellow-covered book that exerts a corrupting influence on
Dorian in Wilde’s novel A Picture of Dorian Gray (1890). Beardsley’s
phrase, ‘beauty is difficult’, is repeated three times in the next twenty-two
lines, then revised twenty-five lines later as the epithet ‘lover of beauty’ with
homoerotic implications:
and old Rhys, Ernest, was a lover of beauty
and when he was still engineer in a coal mine
a man passed him at high speed radiant in the mine gallery
his face shining with ecstasy
‘A’hv joost. . . . . . . . Tommy Luff.’
and as Luff was twice the fellow’s size, Rhys was puzzled. (C 465)
The ellipses stand for ‘buggered’. Ernest Rhys, an English editor, is

described as ‘puzzled’, not horrified or titillated, to wonder how the man
could have been so ecstatic or successful, given Luff’s size. The speaker, far
from insisting that anal sex was ‘against nature’ or akin to usury (although
there is a later reference to a ‘buggering bank’ [C 488]), also seems primarily
puzzled by the homoeroticism that attends poets, artists and other lovers of
beauty:
and as for the vagaries of our friend
Mr Hartmann,
Sadakichi a few more of him,
were that conceivable, would have enriched
the life of Manhattan
or any other town or metropolis
the texts of his early stuff are probably lost
with the loss of fly-by-night periodicals
and our knowledge of Hovey,
Stickney, Loring,
the lost legion or as Santayana has said:
They just died They died because they
just couldn’t stand it
and Carman ‘looked like a withered berry’
20 years after
Whitman liked oysters
at least I think it was oysters (C 515)
This passage composes a unique history of American poetry, beginning

with Sadakichi Hartmann, a German-Japanese critic and poet who pub-
lished a book based on his relationship and conversations with Walt
Whitman.13 The ‘vagaries’ and desire for ‘a few more of him’ might
reference the fact that he occasionally lectured and wrote as a genteel alter-
ego ‘Sidney Allan’. Among the few American poets Pound mentioned with
Whitman as positive influences were Bliss Carman and Richard Hovey,
largely forgotten figures who collaboratively published the Vagabondia
volumes in 1894, 1896 and 1900. Pound read these volumes and wrote in
an unpublished essay of 1909, ‘I see him [Walt Whitman] as America’s
poet. The only Poet before the artists of the Carman-Hovey period, or
better, the only one of the conventionally recognized “American Poets”
who is worth reading’.14 Hovey’s ‘Comrades’, the last poem in Songs
from Vagabondia (1894), celebrates homosocial, filial camaraderie:
‘Comrades, watch the tides to-night . . . With a shout of glee, / When
strong men roam together!’15 Whitman’s nonnormative sexuality is
invoked when Pound’s poetic history alludes to his purported fondness
for oysters, a food frequently associated with Aphrodite, mythic aphro-
disiacs and sexual taste.16
The reappearance of the phrase ‘beauty is difficult’ in Canto LXXX is
prompted by an anecdote about a Kommandant who refused to play Bach
to the regiments because it was too ‘mathematical’, even an indication of
a ‘loose taste in music’ (C 530). The phrase is given in French:
Les hommes ont je ne sais quelle peur étrange,
said Monsieur Whoosis, de la beauté
La beauté, ‘Beauty is difficult, Yeats’ said Aubrey Beardsley
when Yeats asked why he drew horrors
or at least not Burne-Jones
and Beardsley knew he was dying and had to
make his hit quickly (C 531)
Monsieur Whoosis (who is this?) exclaims, ‘Men have I know not what
strange fear . . . of beauty’, suggesting that there is something to be feared in
Beardsley’s phrase and the related epithet ‘lover of beauty’, linked in the
poem to anal sex between men. Beardsley, dying of tuberculosis, tells Yeats
again that beauty is difficult and the pre-Raphaelite art of Sir Edward
Burne-Jones (1833–98) will not catch the difficult beauty that the doomed
young illustrator must draw.
In Canto LXXX, Pound’s speaker also feels himself to be near death,
describing how ‘the raft broke and the waters went over me’ (C 533).
Whitman (with Lovelace this time) reappears at this crisis
in M. E. Speare’s The Pocket Book of Verse: Great English and American
Poems that Pound discovered in the DTC latrine: ‘that from the gates of
death: Whitman or Lovelace / found on the jo-house seat at that / in
a cheap edition!’ (C 533).17 The anthology contains eighteen pages of
Whitman’s poetry, Richard Lovelace’s ‘To Althea, from Prison’ and selec-
tions from the King James Bible, including a passage from Job (38)
referencing ‘the gates of death’.18 The quotes seem to ground the drowning
speaker, and allusions to this anthology of poetry now join scraps of
ancient Greek, Chinese and Japanese literary materials. The allusiveness
of the Pisan Cantos is all the more remarkable, given that before finding
The Pocket Book of Verse, Pound had access to few books or articles aside
from the copy of the Confucian Classics and the Chinese Dictionary he
had slipped into his pockets when he was captured.19
Oscar Wilde’s ‘Ballad of Reading Goal’, also included in The Pocket
Book of Verse, inspires the lyrical closing sequence of Canto LXXXI. As if in
response to Wilde’s famous line, ‘And all men kill the thing they
love’, Pound’s speaker insists, ‘What thou lovest well remains . . . What
thou lovest well is thy true heritage / What thou lov’st well shall not be reft
from thee’ (C 540, 541). ‘What thou lovest . . . ’ leads into another refrain,
the famous and controversial ‘Pull down thy vanity’. Critics have debated
whether the passage addresses the U.S. military, mankind more generally
or Pound himself, in an indication of his shame and repentance (C 541).20
I read the phrase as a choric chant aimed at multiple groups and expressing
an ambivalent mixture of shame, doubt and arrogance. Significantly, the
speaker claims it was not vanity when a committee of poets including Yeats
and Pound paid homage to another poet and anti-imperialist activist,
Wilfred Scawen Blunt, on 18 January 1914:
But to have done instead of not doing
this is not vanity
To have, with decency, knocked
That a Blunt should open
To have gathered from the air a live tradition
or from a fine old eye the unconquered flame
This is not vanity. (C 541–2)
The committee of poets organized by Pound had lunch at Blunt’s estate

and presented him with a marble reliquary engraved by Gaudier-Breszka
and filled with their poems. The memory of the event and the chant, ‘Pull
down thy vanity’, may have been provoked by Blunt’s lines from ‘With
Esther’, included in The Pocket Book of Verse: ‘Till I too learn’d what dole of
vanity / Will serve a human soul for daily bread’.21 The very ‘decent’ poets,
far from doling up ‘daily bread’, ate a peacock served on a tray arranged
with the bird’s plumage, then stood for a famous photograph in front of
a vine-covered stone wall at Blunt’s estate.22 The group of male poets and
intellectuals posing with hands in pockets or across the breast of a three
piece suit might be described as vain, certainly conveying an elite poetical
masculinity. The photograph, anecdote and its recollection in the Pisan
Cantos more effectively emphasizes that Pound constructs his speaker’s
poetic masculinity and identity more generally on a foundation of intimate
homosocial relationships with other male poets, artists, teachers and
mentors.
The intimate aesthetic and erotic male-male relationships appearing
in the Pisan sequence are described with repetitive chants that provide
a structure for the poem. Descriptions of these relationships contain
references to Pound’s actual friends and literary inspirations. Compare
the throngs of male friends that appear in the Pisan Cantos, offering
succour and comfort, to the few actual women referenced in the poem.
Allusions to lovers from Pound’s life tend to be oblique, with ‘real’
women turned into goddesses or mythic figures. One of the lyrical
choric lines that is not provoked by homosocial intimacy is the serial
reference to the Dryad in Canto LXXXIII:
Δρυάς, your eyes are like clouds (C 550)
Δρυάς, your eyes are like the clouds over Taishan (C 550)
Dryad, thy peace is like water

There is September sun on the pools (C 550)
Dryad may refer to the poet H. D., as it was Pound’s nickname for
her when they were young lovers.23 Yet, H. D. is never named in the
Pisan Cantos, and there is nothing in the poem that requires linking
the invocation of the dryad to her identity. ‘Beauty is difficult’, and
the other lyrical passages I have discussed, name the identities of male
friends.
A paranoid reading of the Pisan Cantos points us to the misogyny and
masculine privilege in the poem. A reparative reading emphasizes poetic
moments that challenge versions of virile, self-determining, misogynistic
masculinity. Such a proud identity was obviously challenged by Pound’s
biographical imprisonment in a ‘gorilla cage’, but it is also poetically under
attack. The poem repeatedly represents salvation, human intimacy and
artistic accomplishment as dependent on intense relationships between
men. Committees of poets honouring an elder man, artistic groups and
mentors, even editors and publishers haunt The Pisan Cantos with their
homosocial but taboo erotics. Homosexual sex produces confusion rather
than horror in this section of The Cantos. Homosocial intimacy produces
some of the most plaintive and beautiful lyrical moments in all of The
Cantos.
Notes
1. See Helen Dennis, ‘Gender and Sexuality’, in Ezra Pound in Context, ed. Ira
B. Nadel (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 402–11.
2. Eve Sedgwick, ‘Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, You’re So
Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is about You’, in Touching
Feeling (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 123–51.
3. ‘John Buchan’s “Cromwell”’, The New English Weekly (6 June 1935), in
Ezra Pound, Selected Prose: 1909–1965, ed. W. Cookson (New York: New
Directions, 1973), 265–6.
4. Sedgwick, ‘Paranoid Reading’, 149.
5. Wai Chee Dimock’s ‘Aesthetics at the Limits of the Nation: Kant, Pound,
and the Saturday Review’, in American Literature 76.3 (2004), 525–47, points
out that the Bollingen Prize has, since 1949, been sponsored not by the Library
of Congress but by Yale University (544–45, n. 28).
6. Qtd. in Richard Sieburth, ‘Introduction’, The Pisan Cantos (New York: New
Directions, 2003), xxxix. All quotations from the Pisan Cantos will be cited
parenthetically from The Cantos, 15th printing (New York: New Directions,
1996).
7. Dimock, ‘Aesthetics’, 535, 537. Robert Hillyer, ‘Treason’s Strange Fruit: The
Case of Ezra Pound and the Bollingen Award’, Saturday Review of Literature
(11 June 1949), and ‘Poetry’s New Priesthood’, Saturday Review (18 June 1949).
8. Marjorie Perloff, ‘Pound Ascendant’, Boston Review (April/May 2004).
Accessed on 7 July 2012 at http://bostonreview.net/BR29.2/perloff.html.
See also Perloff’s ‘Fascism, Anti-Semitism, Isolationism: Contextualizing
the Case of EP’, Paideuma 16 (1987), 7–21.
9. Remy de Gourmont, The Natural Philosophy of Love [1903], trans. Ezra Pound
(New York: Boni & Liveright, 1922), 206, 210.
10. Cathy Cohen issued an early and important call for ‘a politics where the non-
normative and marginal position’ of various outcasts could be ‘the basis for
progressive transformative coalition work’ in ‘Punks, Bulldaggers, and
Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics’, GLQ 3 (1997),
438. Cohen’s list of ‘punks, bulldaggers, and welfare queens’ was more race-
and class-conscious than Pound’s ascetics, addicts, mystics and prostitutes,
but they both cite a mix of minorities.
11. Sieburth, Pisan, xiii–xiv.
12. Sieburth, Pisan, xix.
13. Sadakichi Hartman, Conversations with Walt Whitman (New York:
E. P. Coby & Co. 1895).
14. Quoted by Leon Surette in ‘Ezra Pound, Bliss Carman and Richard Hovey’,
Canadian Poetry 43 (Fall–Winter 1998), 44–69.
15. Richard Hovey, ‘Comrades’, in Songs from Vagabondia (Boston: Copeland
and Day, 1894), 54. I compare Hovey’s ‘Comrades’ to Pound’s ‘Ballad of the
Goodly Fere’ (1908–11) in Modernism’s Mythic Pose: Gender, Genre, Solo
Performance (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 127–8.
16. The passage foreshadows the famous ‘oysters and snails’ scene that was
censored from Stanley Kubric’s 1960 film, Spartacus. Roman General
Marcus Crassus (Laurence Olivier) quizzes his body slave, Antoninus (Tony
Curtis), who happens to be giving the general a bath, about the differences
between morality and taste before declaring, ‘My taste includes both snails
and oysters’.
17. M. E. Speare, ed., The Pocket Book of Verse: Great English and American Poems
(New York: Washington Square, 1940).
18. Sieburth, Pisan, 150, n. 661–4.
19. Sieburth, Pisan, ix.
20. Peter D’Epiro summarizes responses to this question and argues that the
lesson is meant for his captors, the U.S. Military, in ‘Whose Vanity Must Be
Pulled Down’, Paideuma 29.3 (1984), 248–52.
21. Sieburth, Pisan 153–4, n. 169.
22. Lucy McDiarmid also describes the literary homosociality represented by the
event in Poets and the Peacock Dinner: The Literary History of a Meal
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2015). See also Dan Chiasson,
‘When Pound and Yeats Ate a Peacock’, The New Yorker
(24 February 2015), https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/pound-
yeats-ate-peacock.
23. Sieburth, Pisan, 156 n 64.
W OR KS C I T ED
Chiasson, Dan, ‘When Pound and Yeats Ate a Peacock’, The New Yorker
(24 February 2015), https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/po
und-yeats-ate-peacock.
Cohen, Cathy, ‘Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential
of Queer Politics’, GLQ 3 (1997), 437–65.
D’Epiro, Peter, ‘Whose Vanity Must be Pulled Down’, Paideuma 29.3 (1984),
248–52.
Dennis, Helen, ‘Gender and Sexuality’, in Ezra Pound in Context, ed. Ira B. Nadel,
402–11 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
Dimock, Wai Chee, ‘Aesthetics at the Limits of the Nation: Kant, Pound, and the
Saturday Review’, American Literature 76.3 (2004), 525–47.
Gourmont, Remy de, The Natural Philosophy of Love, trans. Ezra Pound (1903;
New York: Boni & Liveright, 1922).
Hartman, Sadakichi, Conversations with Walt Whitman (New York: E. P. Coby &
Co. 1895).
Hillyer, Robert, ‘Poetry’s New Priesthood’, Saturday Review (18 June 1949): 7–9.
‘Treason’s Strange Fruit: The Case of Ezra Pound and the Bollingen Award’,
Saturday Review of Literature (11 June 1949): 9–11.
Hovey, Richard, Songs from Vagabondia (Boston: Copeland and Day, 1894).
McDiarmid, Lucy, Poets and the Peacock Dinner: The Literary History of a Meal
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2015).
Perloff, Marjorie, ‘Fascism, Anti-Semitism, Isolationism: Contextualizing the case
of EP’, Paideuma 16 (1987), 7–21.
‘Pound Ascendant’, Boston Review (April/May 2004). Accessed on 7 July 2012 at
http://bostonreview.net/BR29.2/perloff.html.
Pound, Ezra, ‘John Buchan’s “Cromwell”’, The New English Weekly (6 June 1935),
in Selected Prose: 1909–1965, ed. W. Cookson, 265–66 (New York: New
Directions, 1973).
The Pisan Cantos, ed. Richard Sieburth (New York: New Directions, 2003).
Preston, Carrie J., Modernism’s Mythic Pose: Gender, Genre, Solo Performance
Sedgwick, Eve, ‘Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, You’re so
Paranoid, You Probably Think this Essay is About You’, in Touching
Feeling, 123–51 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003).
Sieburth, Richard, ‘Introduction’, in Ezra Pound, The Pisan Cantos, ix–xliii
Speare, M. E., ed., The Pocket Book of Verse: Great English and American Poems
(New York: Washington Square, 1940).
Surette, Leon, ‘Ezra Pound, Bliss Carman and Richard Hovey’, Canadian Poetry
43 (Fall–Winter 1998), 44–69.
chapter 13
Italian Fascism
Anderson Araujo
It is a curious accident of history that 1922 marks the annus mirabilis of

both aesthetic modernism and Italian Fascism.1 Mussolini’s epoch-making
March on Rome on 28 October came on the heels of Virginia Woolf’s
Jacob’s Room, published by Hogarth Press just two days earlier. Other
landmarks of modern art and literature to arrive on the scene that year
include T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, James Joyce’s Ulysses, Jean Cocteau’s
Antigone, Edith Sitwell’s Façade and Pablo Picasso’s Two Women Running
on the Beach, to name but a few. None of these modernist mavericks
supported Fascism, of course – quite the contrary. Radical politics was
stirring nonetheless in the ashes of the First World War. The avant-garde
would not remain on the sidelines for long. The Italian Futurists led the
way on the right. F. T. Marinetti, the movement’s founder and leader, met
frequently with Mussolini only a year after the Armistice and was present at
the birth of Italian Fascism on 23 March 1919, at an assembly in Piazza San
Sepolcro in Milan.2 A slew of writers and intellectuals would increasingly
engage the motley assortment of fascisms spreading across Europe. Even
the winner of the 1922 Nobel Prize for Literature, conservative-leaning
centrist and celebrated Spanish playwright Jacinto Benavente, would in
time collaborate with Falangist intellectuals, writers and other supporters
of Franco’s para-fascist regime.3 If Ezra Pound was in no small measure
responsible for monumentalizing 1922,4 this was not, strictly speaking, one
of his most notable publication years. Aside from several contributions to
periodicals his only book was a translation of Remy de Gourmont’s The
Natural Philosophy of Love (1903). It is hard to fathom a title more at odds
with the political juggernaut rising in the Italian peninsula.
Yet even here, in Pound’s postscript, we find the poet already railing
against the ‘money fetish’ of his era, a pre-echo of his eventual obsession
with the economics of usury, the nemesis lurking behind much of his
political thought.5 He also probes the nature of genius, ‘a sudden out-spurt
of mind which takes the form demanded by the problem’.6 His conception
208
Italian Fascism 209
of genius would in time find a local habitation and a name in none other
than Mussolini. The roots of his devotion to mussolinismo, or the myth of
the Italian strongman, can thus be traced at least as far back as the apex of
high modernism. While conducting research on the fifteenth-century
condottiere Sigismondo Malatesta in Rimini in the spring of 1923 Pound
was granted access to restricted manuscripts by the city’s Fascist
Comandante della Piazza.7 The experience convinced him that
Mussolini was a modern-day Malatesta and ‘marked his first real engage-
ment with Italian Fascism’.8 Pound’s visit to the Mostra della Rivoluzione
Fascista in Rome in December 1932 would trigger even deeper connections.
The massive exhibition celebrating the Fascist decennial showcased
a reconstructed version of Mussolini’s office at Il Popolo d’Italia, the
newspaper he founded in 1914. In Canto XLVI, Pound likens the recon-
structed office to ‘ours’ (C 231), alluding to A. R. Orage’s New Age office on
Cursitor Street in London, one of the founding sites of Anglo-American
modernism. As Alec Marsh notes, Pound relished the parallel timelines of
early modernism and Fascism – 1914–22 – signifying that ‘Fascism is, in
fact, a modernist politics’.9 The Duce would come to typify for Pound the
‘force of will’, taking the form, as it were, demanded by ‘the problem of
civilisation’ (SP 262). The politician had become the poet’s messiah,
Fascism his panacea. At stake for Pound was nothing less than the cultural
and economic salvation of Italy. Just a few months before the outbreak of
the Second World War, he would hold no punches in his pamphlet What Is
Money For? (1939): ‘USURY is the cancer of the world, which only the
surgeon’s knife of Fascism can cut out of the life of nations’ (SP
300). Pound’s fascism had reached a pathological pitch, and there would
be no turning back.
The foregoing serves to preface this essay’s contribution to the ongoing
critical reassessment of Pound’s deep and abiding fascination with Italian
Fascism. As suggested, the poet’s path to the political movement predates
his formal adherence to it by a wide margin. Yet it is important to avoid
facile assumptions and misleading labels. To say that he was a reactionary
modernist who combined experimental techniques with crypto-fascist
ideas, as Edward Timms alleges,10 implies a subterranean fascistic strain
in Pound. As we shall see, however, he was nothing if not explicit about the
interface between aesthetic and politics. Nor was he coy about his radical
politics, Italian Fascism being no exception. ‘As fast as possible I put my
cards and beliefs on the table’, he boasts in Jefferson and/or Mussolini (1935;
J/M 34). Among the beliefs Pound voices in the book is his firm conviction
that Mussolini is an artist. The Duce’s achievements as philosopher-king of
210 anderson araujo
the Fascist state amount to a kind of artistic performance, ‘the artwork in
the civic sense’ (J/M 100). In keeping with Pound’s assessment, I contend
that Italian Fascism itself needs to be taken more seriously as a formidable
cultural-political force to be reckoned with, rather than just as ‘a fuzzy form
of totalitarianism’11 or as ‘a total historical negativity, an aberration away
from the development of European society and culture’,12 the once-
prevailing interpretations of the movement.
Pound would come to see his own cultural-aesthetic project in Guide to
Kulchur (1938) as ‘the new synthesis, the totalitarian’ (GK 95). His usage
parrots Mussolini’s conception of the all-embracing nature of Fascism.
‘Fascism, is totalitarian’, the Duce proclaims in The Doctrine of Fascism, co-
written with Giovanni Gentile, ‘and the Fascist State – synthesis and a unit
inclusive of all values – interprets, develops, and potentiates the whole life
of a people’.13 Pound evidently immersed himself in Fascist ideology. Even
its heavily hemmed-in notions of individual liberty and agency would
come to resonate with him. The mass politics of Fascism was predicated
on the cultic glorification of sacrifice and heroism, subordinating every
institution and individual to the superstate. The fascio emblematized the
collectivism of the movement. Italian for a bundle of rods or sticks tied
together, the fascio became a symbol of strength through unity. Pound
would play on this iconography in A Visiting Card (1942). The image of
a thousand candles blazing intensely together illustrates ‘the liberty of the
individual in the ideal and fascist state’ (SP 119). This is a far cry from his
early tribute in 1913 to the American ethos of personal freedom and self-
development in Patria Mia (SP 119). In 1935, Pound would go so far as to
say that he felt freer in Fascist Italy than he ever did in London or Paris or,
presumably, America (J/M 74).
It is beyond doubt that Pound was a Fascist. There is nothing to be
gained by treading softly around this once-controversial point. We are still
left with a galling conundrum, of course. How could the mind that
conceived the sublime lyricism of the Pisan Cantos simultaneously accom-
modate the technocratic corporatism of Italian Fascism? To chalk it up to
compartmentalization alone seems all too tidy an answer. It is the error of
thinking of Fascism as an aberration, a monstrous dimension in the poet’s
life. As Primo Levi reminds us, one of the most frightening aspects of
fascism was precisely the fact that even its most brutal enforcers were not,
for the most part, monsters: ‘they were ordinary people’.14 Pound may not
have been ordinary in any conventional sense, but neither was he
a monster. His loathsome views nonetheless would see him locked up
like one in an open-air steel cage at the U.S. Army’s Detention and
Italian Fascism 211
Training Centre near Pisa in 1945. Long before his downfall, however, his
exposure to Fascism would have been all but inevitable once he left Paris
for the seaside resort town of Rapallo, on the Italian Riviera, just two years
after Mussolini’s rise to power. Years would pass before Fascism made
inroads with him. Yet the unrelenting stream of Fascist propaganda would
surely have seeped into his political consciousness by the time his meeting
with Marinetti in Rome in 1932 sparked his interest in Mussolini and
Fascism.15 Hence, I see Fascism as part of a continuum in Pound’s psy-
chopolitical and aesthetic development. It might not be too far-fetched to
see his Fascist turn as a logical outcome, given his long-standing antipathy
to the two dominant political choices available to him at the time: Soviet
communism and liberal capitalist democracy.
What follows rests on a key premise – Pound’s fascism and art engaged
in a dialectic that is as fraught as it is complicated. Hence, if we are to reach
a new understanding of his cultural politics we must move beyond Walter
Benjamin’s programmatic definition of fascism as the aestheticization of
politics.16 Pound’s aesthetics and the politics of Fascism were not stuck in
a static double helix. Rather, both evolved into darker versions of their
former selves. To wit, a New York Sun article dated 8 October 1933
describes Margherita Sarfatti as the co-author of Fascist ideology, noting
that ‘the beautiful, Titian blonde and Junoesque’ Mussolini’s mistress ‘is
a Jewess, and Rome recalls, happily, that there has been no hint of anti-
Semitism in the Italian Fascist Regime’.17 Without racial prohibitions to
restrict Fascist affiliation, membership was open to virtually anyone until
1938. Even during the Second World War ‘Jews felt much less in danger in
Nice or Haute-Savoie, areas under Italian occupation, than in Marseilles,
which was under the control of the Vichy government’.18 The composite
nature of Pound’s fascism, too, makes it hard to pin down. Rebecca Beasley
has neatly summed up his worldview by the end of the 1930s as ‘an unlikely
synthesis of Italian fascism, Social Credit economics, and Confucian social
values’.19 It is as difficult to atomize his fascism into its constituent parts as
it is to define the political experiment itself. Instead, what we find in his
political philosophy may be likened to the ‘messy mixture’ David
D. Roberts locates in Fascism, with its many ‘elements in motion, coales-
cing and reacting against each other’, making it ‘an uncertain, unstable
field of forces’.20 However, as Roberts also acknowledges, ‘the Fascist
accent on Italian cultural primacy, based on the originality and superiority
of Latin Civilization, remained central until the fall of the regime in 1943’.21
Without Mussolini’s celebration of Italian cultural nationalism, the staying
power of Fascism in Pound’s political ken would likely have been limited.
212 anderson araujo
Perhaps it might even have fizzled out. Instead, it grew in leaps and bounds
from the early 1930s onward. Nearly one hundred years after Mussolini’s
black-shirted squadristi marched on Rome, how might we in the early
decades of the twenty-first century begin to reconsider Pound’s fascistic
commitments? The widening scope of Pound scholarship and Fascist
studies has yielded numerous instrumental approaches to the political
phenomenon and the poet enthralled by it.
Matthew Feldman prefaces his probing archival study of Pound’s con-
tributions to the propaganda efforts of Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, and Sir
Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists (BUF) by throwing down the
gauntlet, ‘It is high time to start taking Ezra Pound’s fascism seriously’.22
On the face of it, the challenge seems ironclad. While Pound’s antisemit-
ism is relatively easy to spot and condemn, Fascism remains the most vexed
and vexing of his preoccupations. Yet reams of evidence suggest that Pound
scholars and modernist critics have taken the poet’s fascism seriously for
quite a while, since at least the publication of Tim Redman’s indispensable
Ezra Pound and Italian Fascism (1991). Monographs by Robert Casillo,
Paul Morrison, Leon Surette, Luca Gallesi and, most recently, Feldman
and Catherine E. Paul – to cite only works that examine Pound’s fascism at
length or exclusively – have greatly enhanced our understanding of the
complexities of the poet’s involvement with the movement. David
Moody’s magisterial three-volume biography of Pound (2007–15) has
furnished a richly researched background against which to situate the
poet’s creative and political exploits. My own newly-published
A Companion to Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur (2018) characterizes his
most difficult and far-reaching prose venture as ‘fundamentally a Fascist
document’ that ‘is built on a small but forceful set of totalizing
principles’.23 Scholarly essays and book chapters by David Barnes, David
Bradshaw and James Smith, Michael North, Lawrence Rainey, among
many others, also have shed new light on lesser-known aspects of the
cultural impact of Fascist politics on Pound’s poetry, prose and the
propaganda networks to which he contributed in the service of Italian
Fascism and the Republic of Salò.
Fascist studies is undergoing a thorough reassessment. Long-held
assumptions are being interrogated, challenged, overhauled and, at times,
discarded altogether.24 Everything from Mussolini’s sex life to fashion and
cinema in Fascist Italy is now open to consideration. While some of the
topics broached recently have been covered for decades, it is the turn to the
interrelatedness of phenomena within Fascism that sets apart the studies
published in the last dozen years. Perhaps nowhere is this collective shift
Italian Fascism 213
more apparent than in Fascism: Journal of Comparative Fascist Studies,
a biannual open-access periodical founded in 2012. Opening the inaugural
issue, Roger Griffin, one of the world’s leading historians of fascism, writes
of the ‘new consensus’ that emerged in comparative fascist studies in the
1990s. The consensus was based on the primacy of palingenetic or regen-
erative myth in fascist thought. It also established the practice to examine
fascism as not only ideology, but as ‘unique concrete manifestations and
developmental (narrative arcs)’.25 Lately, the emergence of a ‘new wave’ of
interdisciplinary research on extremism in all its forms has moved the study
of Fascism ‘far beyond the narrowly political understanding of the phe-
nomenon that enjoyed a stultifying hegemony for decades’.26 My purpose
here is not to provide an exhaustive synopsis of these new approaches, but
to enlist those that seem most promising to a re-examination of Pound’s
Fascist proclivities.
The growing interdisciplinary entente between historians and literary
critics betokens a cross-pollination of ideas that can greatly enrich the study
of Fascist-era Pound. The most sweeping transformation in the past two
decades has doubtless been the near-universal rejection of the cavalier view
expressed in 1982 by the influential Italian political philosopher Norberto
Bobbio, ‘There never was a Fascist culture’.27 Scholars may never agree on
a clear-cut definition of Fascism, but the cultural artifacts produced and
archeologically recovered in Fascist Italy can no longer be overlooked or
treated in isolation from the movement. The Fascist fusion of modernism
and traditionalism, underlain by the cult of romanità (Romanness), fuelled
an architectural and archaeological renaissance in Mussolini’s Italy, parti-
cularly in Rome. Fascist archaeology, as Joshua Arthurs remarks, ‘was
informed by the aggressive desire to reclaim space and bodies, erase the
visible passage of time from the face of the Eternal City and blur the
boundaries – spatial, temporal, and experiential – between the Roman past
and Fascist present’.28 The Fascist valorization of a seamless continuity
between Rome’s imperial glory and Roman modernity cohered
with Pound’s famous slogan for the renovation of ancient wisdom for
current use, ‘Make It New’. Like Mussolini, Pound construed the past as
a transhistorical manifold as early as 1910 in The Spirit of Romance: ‘It is
dawn at Jerusalem while midnight hovers above the Pillars of Hercules. All
ages are contemporaneous. It is B.C. let us say, in Morocco. The Middle
Ages are in Russia. The future stirs already in the minds of the few’ (SR 6).
That the first part of his statement borrows freely from Canto II of Dante’s
Purgatorio only further reinforces his argument for temporal simultaneity
by suggesting that the Florentine poet’s insight remains as fresh as the day
214 anderson araujo
it was inked. For Pound, Fascist Italy would be the locus of a sustained
endeavour to ally culture, tradition and modernity in a constitutive rela-
tionship. Fascist leader Giuseppe Bottai spoke virtually in the same register
as Pound. Fascism entailed a vision of modern Italy predicated ‘not on
a restoration but a renovation, a revolution in the idea of Rome’.29
Pound’s investment in the cultural project of Fascism has recently
received compelling critical attention in Catherine E. Paul’s Ezra Pound
and Italian Cultural Nationalism (2016). The study skilfully uncovers the
connections between Pound’s most important prose works, Italian mod-
ernism, and the nationalist cultural practices of the Fascist period. With
ample references to the most influential historical studies of Fascism, Paul
explores ‘Pound’s imagining of Fascism – a project as creative as it is
ideological’.30 A far more complicated picture emerges of the movement’s
attraction for the poet than the stereotype of a Fascist crank would allow
for. Quoting from an unpublished essay by Pound from the mid-1930s,
Paul shows how Pound understood Fascism as fundamentally a struggle for
the cultural heritage of Italy.31 Rather than paper over the heinous implica-
tions of his Fascism, a wider critical and historical engagement allows for
a more capacious and thus more comprehensive interpretation.
The entry for Pound in World Fascism: A Historical Encyclopedia also
makes the link between Italian Fascism and culture explicit. On
25 July 1943, the day the Duce was deposed, Pound is said to have
exclaimed, ‘Our culture lies shattered in fragments’.32 Fascism and
Mussolini had become synonymous with culture. The fall of one entailed
the fall of the other. Violence marched in lockstep with Fascism, from the
earliest stirrings of the pre-First World War fasci to the thuggery of the
squadristi. Yet therein, too, lay the lasting appeal of Fascism for Pound.
He admired Mussolini’s uncanny ability to wrest order from chaos. The
Duce’s knack for picking out ‘the element of immediate and major
importance in any tangle’ (J/M 66) blinded Pound to the hard-line bigotry
and belligerence of Fascist cultural politics. Its stranglehold on Pound was
felt keenly by his fellow American poet, William Carlos Williams. In
a letter to James Laughlin dated 7 June 1939, Williams expressed serious
doubts as to whether Pound would be able to ‘shake the fog of Fascism out
of his brain during the next few years’.33 Williams’s prediction that it would
soon kill Pound was off the mark, but he was certainly on target about the
depth of the poet’s commitment. Even as late as 1958, as Pound disem-
barked from a liner in Naples following his release from a lengthy incar-
ceration at St. Elizabeths Hospital, in Washington, D.C., he posed
smilingly for photographers with his left hand on his hip and the other
Italian Fascism 215
raised in the Fascist salute. While Marinetti would come to recognize the
racist and imperialist project of Fascism as essentially unsustainable,34
Pound’s commitment neither flagged nor wavered. Rather, his brand of
fascism eventually enmeshed itself wholly with his cultural politics. His
interest in Fascism was arguably less political than it was cultural-aesthetic,
however. As it happens, his discourse of culture – unlike his
Confucianism – contains very little of state theory. Nor can his fascism
be reduced, as Eco believes, to ‘a radical anti-capitalism’.35 Above
all, Pound saw Italian Fascism as instantiating a new paideuma, his ideal
manifestation of culture.
The year 1922 once again yields further clues towards the odd synergy
between the poet and the Duce. A letter Pound sent to Williams from his
Paris studio on 18 March sketches out his Bel Esprit scheme to provide Eliot
with enough financial security to allow the poet unfettered time to write.
The episode has become the stuff of legend in modernist literary history
and need not be recounted here.36 For our purposes, what stands out is the
carbon outline enclosed with the letter. It begins with a startling claim,
‘There is no organized or coordinated civilization left, only individual
scattered survivors’ (SL 172). Pound’s vision of a Western civilization in
ruins is of a piece with his trenchant indictment of a botched, toothless
civilization in Hugh Selwyn Mauberley two years earlier (P 188). Pound’s
despair was widely shared in a world still reeling from the wholesale
slaughter of the First World War. The trope would recur several years
later in Eleven New Cantos XXI–XLI (1934), where ‘[t]he last crumbs of
civilization . . .’ trails off into an inauspicious ellipsis (C 129). Still, in his
letter to Williams, the image of ‘individual scattered survivors’ rising out of
a post-apocalyptic Europe lets in a ray of hope. It signals the possibility of
a civilizational resurgence, a Risorgimento. Pound here seems to be echo-
ing and complicating his earlier hankering for a renaissance in his own
country. In Patria Mia, he had put forth with revolutionary fervour that
‘[a] Risorgimento implies a whole volley of liberations; liberations from
ideas, from stupidities, from conditions and from tyrannies of wealth or of
army’ (SP 112).
Paradoxically perhaps, this longing is also the ground zero for Pound’s
fascism. At its core is his steadfast belief in the power of extraordinary
individuals to salvage and revitalize a moribund culture and civilization.
His discovery of the Tempio Malatestiano in Rimini in the summer of 1922
would bolster his conviction.37 A ‘jumble and a junk shop’ of Christian and
neo-Pagan traditions, the Church of San Francesco built by Sigismondo
Malatesta registers a cultural concept so monumental that ‘there is no other
216 anderson araujo
single man’s effort equally registered’ (GK 2). As chronicled in Canto VIII,
Malatesta accomplished the feat despite intense opposition from the
Church. The power of genius against all odds, the virtù of the ‘strong-
minded’, became paramount for Pound.38 His belief in exceptional ‘survi-
vors’ was evidently shared by Mussolini as early as the nineteen teens.
Closing a lengthy speech delivered at the Teatro Comunale in Bologna
on 24 May 1918, the Duce-to-be prefigures Pound’s language even as the
war still raged on. ‘We, the survivors – we the returned, vindicate our right
to govern Italy’, he boasts, ‘to make her – in thought and deed – worthy to
take her place among the great nations which will build up the civilisation
of the world to-morrow’.39 The stage was set for the Fascist takeover four
years later. Mussolini would spearhead a cultural (‘thought’) and political
(‘deed’) renaissance. Pound’s hero worship of the dictator rests upon these
twin articles of faith. His near-religious belief would only grow in the years
ahead. In Jefferson and/or Mussolini, he would go so far as to assert that any
thorough appraisal of Mussolini calls for ‘an act of faith’ (J/M 33).
Although Pound would never be fully enthralled by Fascist hyper-
nationalism, he would pin his hopes for a new age onto national heroes.
He telegraphs as much in the title of his 1935 polemic. The two titans,
Thomas Jefferson and Mussolini, are placed on equal footing across time
and space.
Pandering to peasants and poets alike, Mussolini would become ever
more significant for Pound. In the same Bologna address of 1918, the Duce
singles out poets for special acclaim, ‘they grasp truths which remain half
veiled to the ordinary person’.40 Not surprisingly, Pound thought precisely
along the same lines. ‘Artists are the antennae of the race’, he would pithily
put it in the Little Review in August 1918 (LE 297). The metaphor is eerily
prophetic of his controversial broadcasts for Radio Rome in the early 1940s.
Radicalized by the Great Depression and Social Credit theory in the mid-
1930s, he would interpret Mussolini’s totalitarian style of governance as
approaching the plenitude of aesthetic wholeness. Cheering his ‘passion for
construction’, Pound urges us to ‘[t]reat him as artifex and all the details
fall into place. Take him as anything save the artist and you will get
muddled with contradictions’ (J/M 33–34). The art of politics and politics
as art would become virtually interchangeable for the poet. Fascist mythol-
ogy, too, as Paul demonstrates, ‘imagined Mussolini as a “new man” and
a “national renewer”, and added the idea of the Duce as a “savior of the
fatherland” and “great artist [artifice] of its glory and future greatness”’.41
Like Jefferson and John Adams, architects of the American experiment,
Italian Fascism 217
Mussolini had effectively created the Fascist state. Pound envisaged the
state as an artefact that can be created, expanded and revised.
Mussolini would exploit the demiurgic agency of the autocrat with
unflinching focus. In The Doctrine of Fascism (1935), he defines Fascism
as the expression of ‘the whole group ethnically moulded by natural and
historical conditions into a nation, advancing, as one conscience and one
will, along the self-same line of development and spiritual formation’.42 In
a grotesque caricature of the social contract in a democratic-republican
system of government whereby the electorate invests the leader with
contingent and negotiated power, the Fascist strongman typifies the
nation’s will by fiat. Mussolini merges the national consciousness and
volition with his own. Predicated on a charismatic and messianic totalitar-
ianism, Italian Fascism could brook no other outcome. In seeking a middle
way between the decadence of bourgeois liberal capitalism and the tyranny
of Communism, Pound would come to see Fascist absolutism as a unifying
and stabilizing force and Mussolini as the only man stout enough to wield
it. ‘The great man is filled with a very different passion, the will toward
order’, he writes with the Duce foremost in mind (J/M 99). Mussolini’s
directio voluntatis, reified in Italian Fascism, would ‘remagnetize the will
and the knowledge’ (J/M 95). His purposeful control of the will was also
seen as manifesting itself in the material world. In an essay published in Il
Mare in January 1933, Pound hails the Duce’s construction of the via
dell’Impero (present-day via dei Fori Imperiali) as an act of the ‘WILL
[VOLONTÀ]’.43 That Pound thought any means would be the right means
for Mussolini to accomplish his vision of the Fascist polis helps bracket the
poet’s silence (though not exculpate him for it) in the face of the increas-
ingly violent and racist measures carried out by Fascists in the late 1930s
and early 1940s. As a cultural cartographer, Pound drew a road map to
kulchur – ‘the history of ideas going into action’ (GK 44) – by propagan-
dizing (‘propaganda’ signifying for him the spreading of good news). He
became a de facto evangelist for the gospel of Italian Fascism. Broadly
speaking, he ‘wanted to politicize the aesthetic and – more disturbingly –
aestheticize the political’.44 Accordingly, Pound saw Mussolini’s agenda as
directly intersecting his own.
In Guide to Kulchur, Pound once again dubs Mussolini ‘a great man’ and
praises his ‘swiftness of mind’ (GK 105). Astonishingly, he sets the Duce on
a par with four prime movers of modernist art: Brancusi, Picabia, Gaudier
and Cocteau. The unvarnished candidness of Pound’s declaration of
admiration for Mussolini encodes his profound allegiance to the project
of Italian Fascism at this juncture. Earlier, too, in his ABC of Economics
218 anderson araujo
(1933), he plays down the tyrant’s militancy to spotlight his aphoristic
intelligence (SP 261). Most of all, it was his meeting with Mussolini in
the Palazzo Venezia in Rome on 30 January 1933 (the same day Hitler was
sworn in as chancellor of Germany) that would forever enshrine the
politician in his mind as an enlightened philosopher-king. The meeting
was made possible in part by Olga Rudge, an accomplished violinist who
herself had once met and performed for the Italian leader, and who also
was Pound’s mistress and the mother of their daughter, Mary.45 Canto XLI
registers Mussolini’s glib appraisal of A Draft of XXX Cantos (1930), a copy
of which the ruler is said to have held in his hand when Pound entered his
office:
‘MA QVESTO,’
said the Boss, ‘è divertente.’
catching the point before the aesthetes had got
there; (C 202)
Pound grossly misjudged Mussolini’s offhand quip, ‘But this is amusing’,
as a sign of his innate shrewdness and penetrating insight into The Cantos.
Consequently, he also overestimated his own prospects as court poet in the
Fascist state. The brief tête-à-tête would have been all but inconsequential
for a busy politician accustomed to fielding dozens of appointments on any
given day.46 But for Pound it had the force of a mystic revelation. The
meeting consolidated his faith in Italian Fascism as a tool ‘to renovate
civilization, to conquer modernity in the name of order’.47 He would go on
to publish a series of works informed by his newly-found Fascist creed:
ABC of Economics (1933), Make It New (1934), Social Credit (1935), Jefferson
and/or Mussolini (1935) and Guide to Kulchur (1938), among others.
Mussolini’s famous question for Pound, ‘Perchè vuol mettere le sue idee in
ordine?’ (‘Why do you want to put your ideas in order?’) (GK 105), elicits
a rather coy reply in Canto XCIII, ‘Pel mio poema’ (‘For my poem’; i.e.,
The Cantos) (C 646). In Mussolini he saw the benevolent despot with the
soul of a poet. Pound goes so far as to place him on equal footing with
Confucius, given that ‘[t]he Duce and Kung fu Tseu equally perceive that
their people need poetry’ (GK 144).
The intense aesthetic and ideological kinship Pound felt with the Italian
strongman means that any attempt to overlook or whitewash the connec-
tions between Pound’s politics and his art during the Fascist period,
especially from the 1930s onward, is doomed to fall short as a heuristic
and critical tool. Nor should we fear the often shocking confrontation with
his bêtes noires, lest it mar our appreciation of his poetry and poetics. Zeev
Italian Fascism 219
Sternhell aptly calls this inseparability ‘the Fascist synthesis’, a new scale of
ethical and aesthetic values in the service of a new vision of culture in which
‘aesthetics became an integral part of politics and economics’.48 That said,
it would be facile to use Pound to peg literary modernism as inherently
totalitarian. While acknowledging the ease with which ‘a connection
between an aesthetic drive for reconciliation and authoritarian politics’
may be established, Michael North notes that ‘this connection . . . is not
sufficient reason to reject either politics or the aesthetic project of
reconciliation’.49 More recent studies of the plurality of fascisms, as well
as studies of Pound, confirm that historians and literary critics alike are
increasingly shifting towards an inclusive approach to the interface
between radical politics and art. I subscribe to the position Griffin articu-
lates in his latest overview of the cultural revolution in Fascist Italy. For
Griffin, a thorough understanding of Fascism’s totalitarian modernism can
only take place when Italian Fascism itself is seen ‘as a collective project of
total cultural renewal and not just the emanation from the fevered brain of
a narcissistic leader’.50 Crucially, he also stresses the need to logically
extend the concept of modernism itself. It should encompass ‘not just
formal experimentalism in literature, art, and architecture, but a wide
range of experimental, innovative phenomena in the spheres of intellectual
and spiritual life, social reform, applied science, and radical or revolution-
ary politics’.51 In sum, the integrated study of modernism needs to cast
a transhistorical, transnational, and cross-disciplinary net.
Pound’s fascism was consistent with his commitment to help create and
promote an inclusive modernist aesthetic. Fascist culture would not only
cradle a burgeoning modern civilization informed by romanità in the
Mediterranean basin, but it would also help jumpstart a new cultural
awakening. Pound’s fantastic ideation of Italian Fascism reflected the
movement’s core mythology, as inscribed in Latin in the Codex Fori
Mussolini, a parchment containing the history of the movement. The
document, buried under a colossal obelisk of white marble in Rome in
1932 to celebrate the first decade of Fascist rule, or Decennale, promoted the
relationship between ancient Rome and the modern Italian nation, while
crystallizing the Fascist dream of a novus ordo, a new world order.52 It is
little wonder that Pound fell in thrall to this grandiose fantasy. This is not
to say that he bears no responsibility in his own descent into political
extremism. Since the diagnosis of his clinical psychosis postdates his Fascist
affiliations, it cannot excuse his wilful blindness to the wanton violence and
eugenic racism of the Axis powers. His odious antisemitism, too, has
caused irreparable harm to his reputation. There is no doubt that his
220 anderson araujo
Fascist affiliation will always haunt him. However, it bears remembering
that the full scale of brutalities carried out by fascist regimes could not
possibly have registered in the popular political consciousness of Europe in
the 1930s. Pound was very much a creature of his own time. His downfall,
then, might owe less to his initial support of Italian Fascism than to his
stubborn refusal to shun it once its racial policies took hold after 1938.
Fascist aesthetics and politics, initially hailed as the means to free Europe
from the rationalist and humanist heritage of the Enlightenment, would
prove to be the twin means to promote Mussolini’s imperialist vision,
while the fascist war machines exacted a fearsome toll. Pound, the poet-
cum-propagandist, would become not only one of Italian Fascism’s fiercest
defenders, but also one of its most notorious casualties.
Notes
1. The capitalization of ‘Fascism’ is typically used in academic practice to refer to
the movement’s specifically Italian variant. This essay follows suit, employing
lowercase ‘fascism’ as a general term.
2. Paul Ginsborg, Family Politics: Domestic Life, Devastation and Survival,
1900–1950 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), 146–7.
3. Stanley G. Payne, Fascism in Spain, 1923–1977 (Madison: University of Wisconsin
Press, 1999), 160–1; Francisco Linares, ‘Theatre and Falangism at the Beginning of
the Franco Régime’, in Fascism and Theatre: Comparative Studies on the Aesthetics
and Politics of Performance in Europe, 1925–1945, ed. Günter Berghaus, trans.
R. I. MacCandless (Providence: Berghahn Books, 1996), 214.
4. Tim Armstrong, Modernism: A Cultural History (Cambridge: Polity, 2005),
34. See also Bill Goldstein, The World Broke in Two: Virginia Woolf,
T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, E. M. Forster and the Year That Changed
Literature (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2017).
5. Ezra Pound, ‘Translator’s Postscript’, in The Natural Philosophy of Love, by
Remy de Gourmont (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1922), 209.
6. Pound, ‘Translator’s Postscript’, 212.
7. A. David Moody, Ezra Pound: Poet, A Portrait of the Man and His Work, II.
The Epic Years 1921–1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 47.
8. Matthew Feldman, Ezra Pound’s Fascist Propaganda, 1935–45 (Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 12.
9. Alec Marsh, Ezra Pound (London: Reaktion Books, 2011), 106. See also
Miranda B. Hickman, The Geometry of Modernism (Austin: University of
Texas Press, 2005), 100–5.
10. Edward Timms, ‘From the Hapsburg Empire to the Holocaust: Die Fackel
(1899–1936) and Der Brenner (1910–54)’, in The Oxford Critical and Cultural
History of Modernist Magazines: Volume III: Europe 1880–1940, ed. Peter
Brooker et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 1022.
Italian Fascism 221
11. Umberto Eco, Five Moral Pieces, trans. Alastair McEwen (New York:
Harcourt, 2001), 73.
12. Emilio Gentile, ‘A Provisional Dwelling: The Origin and Development of the
Concept of Fascism in Mosse’s Historiography’, What History Tells: George
L. Mosse and the Culture of Modern Europe, ed. Stanley G. Payne, David Jan
Sorkin and John S. Tortorice (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press,
2004), 54.
13. Benito Mussolini, The Doctrine of Fascism (Firenze: Vallechi, 1936), 11.
14. Primo Levi, The Reawakening, trans. Stuart Woolf (New York: Simon and
Schuster, 1995), 228.
15. Humphrey Carpenter, A Serious Character: The Life of Ezra Pound (London:
Faber, 1988), 489.
16. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn
(New York: Random House, 1968), 241.
17. Qtd. in Philip V. Cannistraro and Brian R. Sullivan, Il Duce’s Other Woman:
The Untold Story of Margherita Sarfatti, Benito Mussolini’s Jewish Mistress, and
How She Helped Him Come to Power (New York: Morrow, 1993), 413.
18. Zeev Sternhell, Mario Sznajder and Maia Ashéri, The Birth of Fascist Ideology:
From Cultural Rebellion to Political Revolution, trans. David Maisel
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 5.
19. Rebecca Beasley, Theorists of Modernist Poetry: T. S. Eliot, T. E. Hulme,
Ezra Pound (London and New York: Routledge, 2007), 7.
20. David D. Roberts, Fascist Interactions: Proposals for a New Approach to Fascism
and Its Era, 1919–1945 (New York: Berghahn, 2016), 16.
21. Roberts, Fascist Interactions, 17.
22. Feldman, Fascist Propaganda, viii.
23. Anderson Araujo, A Companion to Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur (Clemson,
NC: Clemson University Press; Liverpool: Liverpool University Press,
2018), 11.
24. See Caroline Moorehead, A Bold and Dangerous Family: The Remarkable Story
of an Italian Mother, Her Two Sons, and Their Fight against Fascism (Toronto:
Random House, 2017); R. J. B. Bosworth, The Italian Dictatorship: Problems
and Perspectives in the Interpretation of Mussolini and Fascism (New York:
Arnold, 1998); Paul E. Gottfried, Fascism: The Career of a Concept (DeKalb:
Northern Illinois University Press, 2016); Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Italian Fascism’s
Empire Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015); A. James
Gregor and Antonio Messina, Reflections on Italian Fascism: An Interview
with Antonio Messina (Berlin: Logos Verlag, 2015); David I. Kertzer, The Pope
and Mussolini: The Secret History of Pius XI and the Rise of Fascism in Europe
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014); António Costa Pinto and A. Kallis,
Rethinking Fascism and Dictatorship in Europe (London: Palgrave, 2014);
Constantin Iordachi, ed., Comparative Fascist Studies: New Perspectives
(London and New York: Routledge, 2010); Mario Lupano and A. Vaccari,
eds., Fashion at the Time of Fascism: Italian Modernist Lifestyle, 1922–1943
(Bologna: Damiani, 2009); Steven Ricci, Cinema and Fascism: Italian Film
222 anderson araujo
and Society, 1922–1943 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California
Press, 2008); Claudia Lazzaro and Roger J. Crum, eds., Donatello among the
Blackshirts: History and Modernity in the Visual Culture of Fascist Italy (Ithaca:
25. Roger Griffin, ‘Studying Fascism in a Postfascist Age. From New Consensus
to New Wave?’, Fascism: Journal of Comparative Fascist Studies 1.1
(1 January 2012), 11–13.
26. Griffin, ‘Studying Fascism’, 14.
27. Qtd. in R. J. B. Bosworth, The Italian Dictatorship: Problems and Perspectives
in the Interpretation of Mussolini and Fascism (New York: Arnold, 1998), 155.
28. Joshua Arthurs, Excavating Modernity: The Roman Past in Fascist Italy (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 2012), 60.
29. Giuseppe Bottai, ‘Roma e Fascismo’, Roma: Rivista di studi e di vita romana
15.10 (1937), 352.
30. Catherine E. Paul, Fascist Directive: Ezra Pound and Italian Cultural
Nationalism (Clemson: Clemson University Press, 2016), 17.
31. Paul, Fascist Directive, 47.
32. Cyprian Blamires and Paul Jackson, eds., World Fascism: A Historical
Encyclopedia, Vol. 2: L–Z (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2006), 532.
33. William Carlos Williams, The Selected Letters of William Carlos Williams, ed.
John C. Thirlwall (New York: New Directions, 1984), 184.
34. Rosetta Giuliani Caponetto, Fascist Hybridities: Representations of Racial
Mixing and Diaspora Cultures under Mussolini (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2015), 72.
35. Eco, ‘Ur-Fascism’, The New York Review of Books, 22 June, 1995,
http://nybooks.com/articles/1995/06/22/ur-fascism.
36. See Moody, Ezra Pound: Poet, II, 35ff.
37. Lawrence S. Rainey, Ezra Pound and the Monument of Culture: Text, History,
and the Malatesta Cantos (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 191–7.
38. Pound, ‘Translator’s Postscript’, 206.
39. Mussolini, Mussolini as Revealed in His Political Speeches (November
1914–August 1923), trans. Bernardo Quaranta di San Severino
(London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1923), 48.
40. Mussolini, Political Speeches, 40.
41. Paul, Fascist Directive, 92.
42. Mussolini, Doctrine of Fascism, 44.
43. Ezra Pound, ‘Ave Roma’, Il Mare 26, 1243 7 (January 1933), 3–4.
44. Michael Coyle, Ezra Pound, Popular Genres, and the Discourse of Culture
(University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995), 5.
45. J. J. Wilhelm, Ezra Pound: The Tragic Years, 1925–1972 (University Park:
Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994), 69–72. See also Anne Conover,
Olga Rudge and Ezra Pound: ‘What Thou Lovest Well . . .’ (New Haven: Yale
46. Tim Redman, Ezra Pound and Italian Fascism (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1991), 95; Feldman, Fascist Propaganda, 15ff.
Italian Fascism 223
47. Alec Marsh, Money and Modernity: Pound, Williams, and the Spirit of Jefferson
(Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1998), 108.
48. Sternhell, Birth of Fascist Ideology, 29.
49. Michael North, The Political Aesthetic of Yeats, Eliot, and Pound (Cambridge:
50. Griffin, ‘Fascism’s Modernist Revolution: A New Paradigm for the Study of
Right-Wing Dictatorships’, Fascism 5.2 (27 October, 2016), 127.
51. Griffin, ‘Fascism’s Modernist Revolution’, 110.
52. Han Lamers and Bettina Reitz-Joosse, The Codex Fori Mussolini: A Latin Text
of Italian Fascism (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 17–19.
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Barnes, David. ‘“Ct/ Volpe’s Neck”: Re-Approaching Pound’s Venice in the
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from the Ezra Pound International Conference Venice, 2007, ed. John Gery
and William Pratt, 17–30 (New York: AMS Press, 2011).
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Helped Him Come to Power (New York: Morrow, 1993).
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and Diaspora Cultures under Mussolini (New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
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224 anderson araujo
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Jan Sorkin and John S. Tortorice, 41–109 (Madison: University of Wisconsin
Press, 2004).
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(New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2017).
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New Wave?’ Fascism: Journal of Comparative Fascist Studies 1.1 (1 January
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Italian Fascism (London: Bloomsbury, 2016).
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R. I. MacCandless, 210–28 (Providence: Berghahn Books, 1996).
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Young Genius 1885–1920 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).
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1921–1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).
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1939–1972 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).
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trans. Bernardo Quaranta di San Severino (London: J. M. Dent & Sons,
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(Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2014).
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Cantos (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).
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Its Era, 1919–1945 (New York: Berghahn, 2016).
226 anderson araujo
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From Cultural Rebellion to Political Revolution, trans. David Maisel
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(Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s Press, 2011).
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(1899–1936) and Der Brenner (1910–54)’, in The Oxford Critical and
Cultural History of Modernist Magazines: Volume III: Europe 1880–1940, ed.
Peter Brooker, Sascha Bru, Andrew Thacker and Christian Weikop, 1014–31
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C. Thirlwall (New York: New Directions, 1984).
chapter 14
Late Cantos, ‘Aesopian Language’, States’ Rights

and John Randolph of Roanoke
Alec Marsh
In the summer of 1952, Ezra Pound told Guy Davenport that ‘the poet
looks forward to what’s coming next in the poem’,1 as though the poem,
not the poet, dictated the work. One way of interpreting this Delphic
remark is to suppose that Pound meant pending events, whether in the
poet’s head or out in the world, would determine the content of the later
Cantos. Noel Stock called the late cantos ‘the diary of a mind’;2 therefore
they inevitably comment on current events.
Recall that from Canto LXXIV on, from 1945 to 1958, when virtually all
of the later cantos were written, Pound was a prisoner, his correspondence
subject to censorship.3 He rarely signed letters while in St. Elizabeths, for
fear it might compromise him.4 Paranoia? As Pound was incarcerated
unconvicted of any crime, it was reasonable to consider himself
a political prisoner. Recall too, that for all of their gestures towards
paradise, Pound is most interested in a ‘Paradiso / terrestre’ (C 822).
Therefore these poems are political – he told Noel Stock that The Cantos
were a ‘political weapon’.5 Pound and even James Laughlin worried that
‘Jews’ and unnamed political ‘enemies’ in the printing plants – presumably
Communists – stood ready to ruin the poem in production in order to
block its political message: ‘A fear of sabotage in the printing presses might
help explain the rampant obscurity of Pound’s late cantos’, Michael
Kindellan suggests.6 Fear of censorship, sabotage and the Jewish ‘blackout’
meant that their radical political content would appear in coded
form. Pound acknowledged the situation in Canto C. The lines about
‘Aesopian Language’ taken from the ‘Preface to the Russian Edition’ of
Lenin’s Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (1917), written in exile
in 1916 and published a year later in revolutionary Petrograd, are crucial to
understanding how to read Rock-Drill and Thrones.
And Lenin: ‘Aesopian language (under censorship)
Where I wrote “Japan” you may read “Russia”’ (C 733)
227
228 alec marsh
Lenin actually refers to ‘that accursed “Aesopian language”’ (my emphasis)
and remarks how ‘painful it is in these days of liberty to reread the
passages . . . which have been distorted, cramped, compressed in an iron
vice on account of the censor’.7 Just so, the unhappy reader often finds the
later Cantos ‘distorted, cramped and compressed’ as well as heavily coded.
Read ‘Aesopianly’ as directed, the phrase ‘“not a trial but a measure”
committed Danton’ (C 733) just a few lines down this same page can be
taken as referring to Pound himself. Likewise we are free to read the opening
of Canto C where Senator Wheeler criticizes FDR for ‘packing the Supreme
Court’ as code for Eisenhower’s practice of using ‘recess appointments’ to
bypass Congress and get his own judges on board – most glaringly and
fatefully, Governor Earl Warren of California, his principal rival in the
Republican party.8 Once installed, Warren and the ‘Warren Court’ became
notorious in right-wing circles for making public policy.
Pound and his fellows on the Right saw Warren and the rest of the court
taking direction from Moscow and ultimately the Jews. This was evident
by the court’s 1954 ruling in Brown v. Board of Education mandating the
racial integration of the public schools. Brown led to a series of decisions
eroding ‘Jim Crow’ in the segregated south while at the same time the court
made a series of rulings that appeared favourable to accused Communist
subversives, on occasion reversing lower court convictions, thereby infuri-
ating and frightening an American public.9
The code we are concerned with here conceals resistance to the racial
integration of schools and inevitable ‘mongrelization’ of society once racial
equality was achieved. The Jewish/Communist conspiracy directing the
Warren Court could fulfil its long-term desire to destroy the white race and
the so-called ‘American way of life’. A major coded theme in these poems
is Pound’s covert politicking in favour of the rights of states to resist the
federal mandates abolishing racial segregation.
‘States’ Rights’ is marked in Canto CIII. Near the end of the
canto, Pound twice quotes remarks from President James Buchanan’s
inaugural address, given in March 1857 and directed at the issue of expan-
sion of slavery into the western territories of Kansas and Nebraska. Thanks
to the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, the question was to be decided by the
voters of the new states themselves (when they became states), not by the
federal government.
The catastrophic ‘Kansas-Nebraska Act’, the brainchild of Stephen
Douglas and seconded by President Franklin Pierce, effectively abro-
gated the ‘Missouri Compromise’ of 1820, which had served for
a generation to keep slavery confined to the southern areas of the
Late Cantos, ‘Aesopian Language’, States’ Rights 229
country below the Mason-Dixon line at longitude 36’30’. The 1854
Act repealed the 1820 compromise and reopened the possibility of
slavery north of the line by making it a local issue. Predictably, pro-
slavery and anti-slavery elements moved into the Kansas and
Nebraska territories hoping to influence the vote, eventually resulting
in two territorial governments, one legal and pro-slavery, the other
illegal and anti-slavery. Soon Kansas was involved in a violent civil
struggle and at odds with the federal government, earning the title
‘Bleeding Kansas’. Pound quotes Buchanan in support of States’
Rights, and implicitly holds up the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 as
a model for how to handle the current crisis of the 1950s.
That men have sunk to consider the mere material value
of the Union
a grant from States of limited powers (C 756)
Nothing could be more clearly in support of States’ Rights than this
formula used by Buchanan to defend the Kansas-Nebraska Act, so where’s
the ‘code’? Pound is using Aesopian language: where we discern historical
controversies about slavery, Pound wishes us to consider contemporary
controversies about racial integration broached by Brown v Board of
Education. Pound’s Aesopian point is that the states should decide if they
wish to integrate themselves, not the federal government.
For Pound the Brown decisions abrogated Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) with
its ‘separate but equal’ formula, which had served to contain the racial
problem in the United States for half a century by providing a cover for Jim
Crow laws. The Brown decisions were equivalent to the Kansas-Nebraska
Act: equivalent – but opposite. Kansas-Nebraska did the right
thing, Pound thought, by returning power to the states, whereas Brown
was usurping the rights of states to govern themselves. Were he voting in
1860, it is probable that Pound would have voted for Stephen Douglas,
whose mantra was the ‘sovereign rights’ of states.10
We begin to see why Buchanan gets so much space in Canto CIII, along
with two other ante-bellum Presidents who interpreted the Constitution as
strictly limiting Federal power to interfere in the ‘domestic relations’ of the
States: Franklin Pierce and Millard Fillmore (misspelled ‘Fillimore’ at
C 754). These men worked to avoid, delay and, if possible, to stop a civil
war between north and south. In this they resemble King Edward VIII,
who, in Pound’s view expressed in Cantos LXXXVI and LXXXIX, bought
‘three years’ peace’ by negotiating with the Germans in 1936 (C 577, 621).
For that, and because the war-mongers feared the King ‘would balk and
230 alec marsh
not sign mobilization’ Pound tells us, Edward was forced to abdicate
(C 793).
Using selective quotations from a biography of the fourteenth
President, Pound gives the impression that Franklin Pierce suffered
a similar fate in the opening lines of Canto CIII – although, typically,
Pierce is not mentioned by name. Thus:
1850: gt objection to any honesty in the White House
’56 an M.C. from California
killed one of the waiters at the Willard
22nd. Brooks thrashed Sumner in Camera Senatus
‘respectful of our own rights and of others’
For which decent view he was ousted. (C 752)
Somehow, Pound manages to praise South Carolina Congressman Preston

Brooks for clubbing the abolitionist Senator Charles Sumner of
Massachusetts nearly to death in the Senate in 1856 for telling the truth
about slavery. The passage is deliberately garbled so that words spoken by
Pierce supporting States’ Rights and the Fugitive Slave Law urging aboli-
tionist hotheads to be ‘respectful of our own rights and of others’ seem to
be ascribed to Brooks, thereby giving the impression that Pierce, not
Brooks, was ‘ousted’ from office,11 much like Edward VIII. In fact, the
unpopular Pierce could not stand for re-election. The nomination fell to
James Buchanan and not because Pierce upheld the Constitution, but
because the Democratic Party had splintered over the slavery issue, its free-
soil faction splitting off to become the new Republican party. Meanwhile,
to avoid being ousted, Brooks resigned from Congress after a farewell
speech upholding the South – making him wildly popular in his home
state, South Carolina, which promptly re-elected him.12 At the same
time, Pound insists that ‘the slaves were red herring’ as cause of the Civil
War (C 752) because, as we have seen, ‘the Union’ is merely ‘a grant from
States of limited powers’ (C 756) – the ‘States’ Rights’ position revived by
southern resistance to Brown.13 Lest we misunderstand the larger global,
even cosmic, issues at stake, Pound follows the Pierce/Brooks tangle with
a kind of equation:
Homestead versus kolschoz
Rome versus Babylon (C 752)
We should read this as assigning Homestead and Rome to the realm of

virtue where coexist the American dream of individual independence and
Roman (including Fascist) order. These are opposed to Soviet agricultural
collectives and ‘Babylon’ – a consistent metonym for ‘the Jews’ from the
Pisan Cantos forward. In brief: freedom and order versus a Jewish/
Communist tyranny.
Noel Stock observed that ‘we are better able to follow what is going on in
Thrones’ if we know something about the numerous ‘unsigned or pseudon-
ymous items Pound contributed’ to dissident publications directed by his
acolytes when they were being composed.14 Carroll Terrell’s notes eluci-
dating the ‘Homestead versus kolschoz’ passage above are exceptionally
useful because they draw on remarks Pound published in Bill
McNaughton’s Strike 5 (October 1955). In his Strike piece, Pound used
Mencius’s ‘nine field’ system to criticize Soviet land policy and asked, in
regard to American China policy, whether ‘The Voice of America’ was
using Mencius’s ‘idea in the fight against Communism in China.
Bolshevism started off as an attack against loan-capital and quickly shifted
into an attack against the homestead’.15 Although Joe McCarthy had lost
his power by this time, it is significant that Pound attacks two of the
Senator’s favourite targets, ‘The Voice of America’ and the State
Department ‘China hands’, in addition to using Hitler’s term ‘loan-
capital’ (Liehkapital) to score against the Bolsheviks. ‘Loan-capital’ signifies
the preferred mode through which economic imperialism as practiced by
Anglo-American finance worked; loan capital seeks ‘investment opportu-
nities’ abroad, leading, Lenin argued, to inevitable global conflict. Pound
correctly saw Lenin’s heirs trying to exacerbate global tensions by ‘dump-
ing’ goods abroad, while enslaving the Soviet masses at home – it is
a recurrent theme in his Axis radio speeches. The temporary alliance
between Great Britain, the USA and the USSR (1941–5) remains one of
the most unlikely events of the time, fertile ground for the worst sort of
speculation about a global conspiracy – the ‘conspiracy so immense’ –
invoked by McCarthy.
But another ‘States’ Rights’ strand running through the late Cantos,
starting in Rock-Drill, is carried by the figure of John Randolph. The arch-
republican John Randolph of Roanoke is something of a leitmotif from
Canto LXXXVIII onward. He figures prominently in Cantos LXXXVIII
and LXXXIX as a figure in Senator Thomas Hart Benton’s recollections of
Andrew Jackson’s ‘bank war’. There, Pound links Randolph with his then
allies, Benton, Martin van Buren and Andrew Jackson (C 610). In Canto
C Pound quotes Randolph (though he coyly assigns his words to Andrew
Jackson) ‘That Virginia be sovreign’ (C 735), leaving scholars to finish the
quote: ‘That Virginia “is and of right, ought to be a free, sovereign and
independent state”’.16 In Canto CVII Pound remarks that Randolph has
232 alec marsh
been a victim of the historic ‘blot-out’, listing Randolph with Alexander
the Great (because he paid his soldiers) and Antoninus Pius (who kept
marine insurance to a minimum) as historical non-persons for practicing
economic sanity.17
Randolph surfaces in these cantos for three reasons. One, he is an
ancestral connection of Dorothy’s, standing as a tribute to her perseverance
during the years of Pound’s incarceration. Randolph was a close cousin of
Dorothy’s maternal great-grandfather, St. George Tucker, who married
Randolph’s widowed mother and raised the boy, a fact alluded to in Canto
LXXXVIII (C 599). Two, Randolph was a radical republican of the
Jeffersonian persuasion, a firm believer in ‘the principles of 1798’, as
expressed in the Virginia and Kentucky resolutions that interpreted the
US Constitution to be a voluntary compact, not a binding contract,
between states that could be repudiated at the States’ discretion. This
position underlies all States’ Rights interpretations of the Constitution
and was used to justify the secession of the southern states in 1860. Pound
would have known that James Kilpatrick of The Richmond News Leader
had revived them and published the resolutions in full in the autumn of
1955 to support resistance to Brown.18 Third, and consequently, in Canto
C, Randolph becomes as Aesopian figure for more contemporary States’
Rights agitators reacting to the Supreme Courts’ ‘encroachments’ onto
state sovereignty. Pound covertly deploys Randolph’s States’ Rights creed
as both a critique of the Warren Court and the Brown decisions as support
for the ‘massive resistance’ then being organized in Virginia to defy
federally mandated integration of schools, which would lead, Pound
thought, to the destruction of the United States, through the inevitable
racial mixing that would occur once young people got to know each other
socially at school.19
James J. Kilpatrick, his vocal segregationist past forgotten, would
later become a nationally known TV commentator. Harry Meacham,
the poetry reviewer for his paper, The Richmond News Leader, became
interested in Pound the poet. Meacham wrote Pound and agitated for
his release. To look ahead, Meacham persuaded Kilpatrick to write
a significant editorial about Pound’s situation, ‘EZRA POUND: SET
HIM FREE!’ in February 1958, that concluded: ‘No possible useful
purpose is served by keeping Pound locked up in St. Elizabeths. To
all intents and purposes, he remains a political prisoner—in a nation
that prides itself on political freedom. What does it take to get him
free’.20 The editorial may have helped Pound’s release in April
that year.
Kilpatrick’s interest in Pound was reciprocated by the poet. When the
Warren Court threatened to put the federally mandated integration of
schools into practice, Kilpatrick pushed the 1798 Virginia and Kentucky
resolutions, advocating resistance to the federal government through the
doctrine of ‘interposition’ drawn directly from the ‘legacy of Jefferson and
Madison and the “principles advocated so forcefully”’. Kilpatrick argued
that they had ‘“great validity today” in the present school crisis’.21
‘Interposition’ ‘was the doctrine once held in one form or another by
Southern leaders that a state had the right to “interpose its sovereignty
between the federal government and its people”’.22 It is akin to antebellum
legal strategies of Constitutional ‘nullification’ and other discredited
States’ Rights doctrines, which were revived in the 1950s as the South’s
best hope to avoid the law of the land. Kilpatrick’s editorializing was
designed to influence the Virginia legislature, which in September was
considering revising its Constitution to preserve their dual school system at
any cost, including abolishing the public schools altogether. Pound himself
would also be involved in efforts to revise the Constitution of Virginia
through the thirty-two-page pamphlet that he co-authored with Dave
Horton, John Kasper and others called Virginians On Guard!, distributed
in Charlottesville by Kasper and the Seaboard White Citizens Council
(SWCC) in August of 1956.23 With these three factors in play – the
personal connection through Dorothy’s family, Randolph’s radical brand
of Jeffersonian politics and his usefulness as a Aesopian cover name
for Pound’s own politicking via his Cantos – we can begin to appreciate
Randolph’s position in the poem.
In his mock autobiography, Indiscretions (1923), Pound bragged that
‘one could write the whole history of the United States from one’s family
annals’ (PD 6), an important strategy in The Cantos, which make regular
references (often in Aesopian code) to family and friends. In Rock-Drill
Pound attends to the appearance of John Randolph with a shout-out to
Dorothy, interrupting the narrative of Randolph’s duel with Secretary of
State Henry Clay to remind us that ‘[h]is (R’s) stepfather / brought out
a “Blackstone”’ (C 599), an edition of the British legal Bible in 1803.24 This
stepfather was St. George Tucker, Dorothy’s ancestral connection. On the
next page, Pound quotes from this edition, establishing Tucker’s work as
part of the source-field for The Cantos. ‘My wife’s connections go back to
that Tucker who married John Randolph’s ma and brought out
a Blackstone’, as Pound noted in a September 1957 letter to Meacham.25
Dorothy explained more fully to Meacham that her grandfather’s father
was first cousin to St. George Tucker (1752–1827), a Virginia notable and
234 alec marsh
patriot who fought against Cornwallis in the Yorktown campaign and later
became a distinguished judge. Her own branch of the family returned to
England before the American Revolution, but Dorothy’s connection to
one of Virginia’s first families (‘The Tuckers are to Virginia what the
Lowells are to Massachusetts’, Meacham remarks26) was important enough
that one of the first things the Pounds did together after Ezra’s release from
St. Elizabeths was to visit the Tucker house in Williamsburg in Meacham’s
company at the end of May 1958.
St. George Tucker married John Randolph’s widowed mother when John
was five, and John was raised on the Tucker plantation – wonderfully named
‘Bizarre’ – which he inherited. An extreme republican and anti-Federalist, an
explicator of ‘States’ Rights’ doctrine, a slave-owner who as Pound notes
twice in his poem freed his slaves after his death – ‘liberavit masnatos’ – in
Cantos LXXXIX (C 610) and XC (C 620), Randolph was aristocratic,
charming, brilliant, bad-tempered, in constant ill-health (possibly from
syphilis) and, by the end, of doubtful sanity. An owner of enormous estates
and hundreds of slaves, like Jefferson he preached the virtues of agriculture.
Like Jefferson, he was burdened by debt and like all Virginians hated banks
and bankers. Henry Adams marked his politics as follows:
Dread of the Executive, of corruption and patronage, of usurpations by the
central government; dread of the Judiciary as an invariable servant of
despotism; dread of national sovereignty altogether, were the slogans of
this creed. All these men foresaw what the people of America would be
obliged to meet; they were firmly convinced that the central government,
intended to be the people’s creature and servant, would one day make itself
the people’s master, and, interpreting its own powers without asking per-
mission, would become extravagant, corrupt, despotic.27
These same fears define American populism to this day and are perfectly
consistent with Pound’s own views in the 1950s. The poet was a devoted
Jeffersonian from early on, and, as I have shown in John Kasper and
Ezra Pound, influenced by anti-Reconstruction pro-southern
revisionism.28 In letters to Meacham, Pound wrote of his lifelong interest
in Virginia, in Jefferson and in Jefferson’s University of Virginia, hinting
that he might like to live there if and when he was ever released, even
enquiring of Meacham if the stables at Monticello might be available as
living quarters.29
Randolph first enters The Cantos through Senator Thomas Hart
Benton’s memoir of his public life, My Thirty Year’s View (1854), part of
which Pound redacted to form the hearts of Cantos LXXXVIII and
LXXXIX, published in The Hudson Review in the summer of 1955. His
source chapters appeared in a Square $ book, Bank of the United States
(1954), obviously intended as a useful gloss on the poems.30 These cantos
are mostly concerned with the recharter of the Bank of the United States,
which Benton, a true-blue Jeffersonian, opposed. Nonetheless, Canto
LXXXVIII begins with an extensive account of Randolph’s duel with
Secretary of State Henry Clay on 8 April 1826 – Randolph had offended
the Secretary in Senate debate implying he was a ‘white slave’ doing his
master’s bidding; the master being the Bank of the United States. Pound
uses the action to show Randolph asking for his money at the local bank
preparatory to crossing the Potomac for his combat. Randolph refuses the
paper bills offered him and demands real money, hard money, gold.
Fortunately, the combat ended without injury to either party.
The point of this extended story, which takes up much of Canto
LXXXVIII, is the Aesopian parable of the Virginian in combat with the
Federal Government: Randolph v. Clay. It shows that the Virginian has
a Jeffersonian concept of money, as opposed to the bank’s (implicitly,
Clay’s and the government’s) view. The Federal government is corrupt, as
Randolph claimed with all but pathological vehemence, and Pound
implies that it is because of its financial arrangements. This is important
because Pound argues in The Cantos and elsewhere that the Civil War was
caused by northern financial machinations, not slavery. ‘J[ohn] Q[uincy
A[dams] objecting to slavery’, he complains in Canto LXXXIX (C 613),
leaving his real meaning unsaid, which is, ‘when he should have been
objecting to usury’. To be clear, later, in Canto CIII he states: ‘The slaves
were red herring / land not secure against issuers’ (C 746) of bonds and
mortgages.
Cantos LXXXVIII and LXXXIX, about Benton and the Bank War,
were designed to call attention to the Jeffersonian interpretation of the
United States at precisely the same time and for the same reasons as
Kilpatrick’s editorials espousing States’ Rights. This can be seen in two
ways: by the publication of the chapters from Benton’s Thirty Years
View from which the cantos are redacted, and by the invention of the
‘Benton Award’ given by the Defenders of the American Constitution
to honour the member of Congress who had best defended the US
Constitution from judicial and executive usurpation.31 The point is
that Cantos LXXXVIII and LXXXIX were composed not as historical
curiosities, but as activist poetry. ‘The cantos are a political
implement’, Pound told a correspondent in 1957.32
236 alec marsh
In Canto C, Randolph comes in under Aesopian cover when Pound
assigns to Andrew Jackson language Terrell shows is Randolph’s. The
poem reads: ‘“That Virginia be sovreign”, said Andy Jackson / “never
parted with . . . ”’ (C 735). At the end of his life, John Randolph offered
some States’ Rights resolutions in the Charlotte courthouse to the effect,
‘That Virginia is, and of right, ought to be, a free sovereign and indepen-
dent state . . . when Virginia joined the other twelve colonies . . . she parted
with no portion of her sovereignty’.33 Ironically, as T. C. Duncan Eaves
and Ben Kimpel noted years ago, these resolutions were made against
Jackson, but from the 1930s Pound preferred ideological consistency to
historical accuracy in his rendition of history, especially American history.
He found these resolutions in Martin Van Buren’s Autobiography34 and
alludes to them in Canto LXXXVIII (C 612).35 They were part of the
political discussion at St Elizabeths, which was clearly a hotbed of States’
Rights talk from 1954 on.
When indictments against Pound were dismissed on 18 April 1958, he
was released as incompetent in charge of ‘the Committee’ (his wife
Dorothy). On 30 April Harry Meacham brought Pound down for drinks
and dinner at the exclusive Rotunda Club in the Jefferson Hotel in
Richmond. Present, among others, was James J. Kilpatrick, Meacham’s
friend and editor who wrote up the evening in a sympathetic and touching
article for William F. Buckley’s The National Review on 24 May 1958.36
Kilpatrick admits they did not talk serious politics – ‘it is useless’, he
conceded, ‘to talk serious politics with Ezra Pound. He is the last statesman
of a lost cause – a cause lost a thousand years ago – and most of his enemies
are dust’.37 Pound’s political table talk, in short, was much too much like
The Cantos. Nonetheless, Kilpatrick does mention in passing that Pound
brought him a personal message of greeting from ‘Mrs. Lane of Arlington’,
a segregationist member of the Arlington, Virginia, School Board, a guest
on Dave Horton’s right-wing radio show, and a supporter of George
Lincoln Rockwell, Führer of the American Nazi party.38 If this was the
evening’s only nod to contemporary politics, it does suggest the direct
ideological linkage between past and present, Randolph and Pound, in
these late cantos.
Pound’s ‘Washington Cantos’ are casually said to be ‘paradisal’ gestures,
but they may be best read as utopic poems; that is, as political, even activist
poetry. As the poet told Donald Hall, ‘The thrones of Dante’s Paradiso are
for the spirits of the people who have been responsible for good government.
The thrones in The Cantos are an attempt to move out from egoism and to
establish some definition of order possible or at any rate conceivable on
earth’ (my emphasis).39 As I’ve shown, Pound told correspondents The
Cantos were a ‘political implement’, even a ‘weapon’. Pound’s Aesopian
tactics, and other, subtler forms of coded speech explored by Peter Nicholls
in a number of articles40 and most recently by Michael Kindellan in The
Late Cantos of Ezra Pound, suggest that these poems’ relation to current
events, including the predicament of the poet as a political prisoner are well
worth teasing out. Pound’s turn to American nineteenth-century politics
and politicians in these poems is an intervention into current events, just
as, when he turns to Edward Coke in the final poems of Thrones, he is
enlisting the great ‘oracle of the law’ in his own defence: a topic, perhaps,
for another day.
Notes
1. Lewis Leary, ed., Motive and Method in The Cantos of Ezra Pound (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1961), 33.
2. Noel Stock, Reading The Cantos (New York: Pantheon, 1966), 104.
3. Eustace Mullins says Pound was not subject to censorship – but only because
he entrusted his outgoing mail to Dorothy, not to the hospital mailroom. See
Mullins, This Difficult Individual, Ezra Pound (New York: Fleet, 1961), 331.
4. ‘SHUT UP’, he chided Louis Dudek, in a letter in December 1956. Dudek
had tried to be helpful by urging Pound’s release in his journal, CIV/n, No.4.
‘You are not supposed to receive any letters from E.P. They are
UNSIGNED / and if one cannot trust one’s friends to keep quiet re / the
{supposed} source / whom can one trust’. See Dk / Some Letters of Ezra Pound,
ed. Louis Dudek (Montreal: DC Books, 1974), 105–6.
5. Stock, Reading The Cantos, 91.
6. Michael Kindellan, The Late Cantos of Ezra Pound: Composition, Revision,
Publication (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 111.
7. Vladimir Lenin, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (1917;
New York: International Publishing, 1939), 7.
8. Peter Nicholls, ‘Thrones de los cantares: XCVI-CIX’, in The Ezra Pound
Encyclopaedia, ed. Demeters P. Tryphonopoulos and Stephen J. Adams
(Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2005), 47.
9. Bernard Schwartz and Stephan Lesher, Inside the Warren Court 1953–1969
(New York: Doubleday, 1983), 103–21.
10. Douglas’s refusal to compromise on this issue is what split the Democratic
Party in 1860 in the face of the Republican threat and Abraham Lincoln. The
South was for enforcement of the law – both the Kansas Nebraska Act and the
Fugitive Slave Law. In short they wanted protection of their slave property
over the protests and non-acquiescence of the free states. This is what the
Dred Scott case was all about. Thus the South seceded from the Democratic
Party before seceding from the Union. By nominating John C. Breckenridge
238 alec marsh
as a ‘southern’ Democrat and refusing to accept Douglas, the ‘northern’
Democratic nominee, they fatally split the party along sectional lines, guar-
anteeing a Republican victory solely through northern votes intolerable to the
South.
11. The facts and Pound’s attitude can be untangled by reference to Pound’s
source, Roy Nichols’s Franklin Pierce: Young Hickory of the Granite Hills
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1931), 464.
12. Carroll F. Terrell, A Companion to The Cantos of Ezra Pound, Vol. II
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 663.
13. For example, ‘The Southern Manifesto’ of 12 March 1956, which deplores the
‘trend in the federal judiciary undertaking to legislate in derogation of
Congress, and to encroach upon the reserved rights of the States and the
people’, qtd. in Waldo E. Martin Jr., ed., Brown v Board of Education: A Brief
History with Documents (Boston: Bedford St. Martin’s, 1998), 220.
Incidentally, Virginians on Guard! attacked ‘The Southern Manifesto’ as so
much senatorial bluster that needed to be backed up with violent action; see
Martin, Brown v Board, 13.
14. Stock, Reading The Cantos, 104.
15. Terrell, Companion, 663–4.
16. Terrell, Companion, 648.
17. This despite a recent 1951 biography of Randolph by Russell Kirk, Randolph:
A Study in Conservative Thought (Washington, D.C.: Regnery, 1951). Kirk’s
publisher Henry Regnery was one of Pound’s correspondents and later the
publisher of Impact. Randolph had had two other biographies, Henry Adams’
hostile John Randolph (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1882 and 1888),
and Pound’s main source besides Benton’s My Thirty Years View, the defini-
tive two-volume biography by William Cabell Bruce, John Randolph,
1773–1833 (New York: Putnam, 1922). There have been others since Pound’s
time.
18. Benjamin Muse, Ten Years of Prelude (New York: Viking, 1964), 70–1.
19. Alec Marsh, Money and Modernity: Pound, Williams and the Spirit of Jefferson
(Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1998), 88.
20. Qtd. in Harry M. Meacham, The Caged Panther: Ezra Pound at St. Elizabeths
(New York: Twayne, 1967), 68.
21. George Lewis, Massive Resistance: The White Response to the Civil Rights
Movement (London: Hodder Arnold, 2006), 63.
22. Muse, Ten Years of Prelude, 20.
23. See Alec Marsh, John Kasper and Ezra Pound: Saving the Republic (London:
Bloomsbury, 2015), 133–49.
24. Meacham, Caged Panther, 156.
25. Qtd. in Meacham, Caged Panther, 51.
26. Meacham, Caged Panther, 155–6.
27. Adams, John Randolph, 56–7.
28. Marsh, Saving the Republic, 9–24.
30. Thomas Hart Benton, Thirty Years View, 2 vols. (New York: D. Appleton,
1854); and Bank of the United States (New York: Square $, 1954).
31. Marsh, Saving the Republic, 105–13.
32. Donald Pearce and Herbert Schneidau, eds., Pound / Theobald Letters
(Redding Ridge: Black Swan, 1984), 44.
33. Qtd. in Terrell, Companion, 648.
34. Martin Van Buren, Autobiography (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing
Office, 1920), 424–5.
35. Ben Kimpel and T. C. Duncan Eaves, ‘American History in Rock-Drill and
Thrones’, Paideuma IX.3 (Winter 1980), 424–5. They cite the discussion in
Bruce’s John Randolph (425):
Benton naturally reminded Pound of his earlier source for the Bank war, Martin
Van Buren, and there are a good many references to Van Buren’s Autobiography [16]
in Canto LXXXIX. On pages 458–59 the Autobiography has a flattering picture of
Talleyrand, who also appears as one of the heroes of the later cantos: ‘Van Buren
already in ’37 unsmearing Talleyrand’ (p. 597). Actually it was five years before 1837
that Van Buren formed his favorable opinion. He has a full account of the resolu-
tions which Randolph of Roanoke got adopted at a meeting in 1833 at Charlotte
Court House, resolutions against Jackson’s opposition to South Carolina’s
Nullification Act (pp. 424–25), and Pound alludes to these in ‘Randolph of
Roanoke: Charlotte Court House, ‘32’ (p. 598). In Canto C, page 715, part of
Randolph’s resolutions (‘That Virginia is, and of right, ought to be, a free, sovereign
and independent state . . . when . . . Virginia entered into a strict league of amity and
alliance with the other twelve colonies . . ., she parted with no portion of her
sovereignty’ [17]) strangely gets assigned to the man they were directed against.
36. Reprinted in Meacham, Caged Panther, 137–42.
38. Vide the letter from Horton to Pound of 11 November 1958, Ezra Pound
Collection, YCAL MSS 43, Box 23, Folder 1002, Beinecke Rare Book and
Manuscript Library, Yale University.
39. Donald Hall, Their Ancient Glittering Eyes: Remembering Poets (New York:
Ticknor & Fields, 1992), 333.
40. See ‘The Allusive Allusion: Poetry and Exegesis’, in Teaching Modernist
Poetry, ed. Peter Middleton and Nicky Marsh (London: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2010), 10–24; and ‘“Two Doits to a Boodle”: Reckoning with
Thrones’, Textual Practice 18.2 (June 2004), 233–49.
W OR KS CI T ED
Adams, Henry, John Randolph (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1898).
Benton, Thomas Hart, Bank of the United States (New York: Square $, 1954).
Thirty Years View, 2 vols. (New York: D. Appleton, 1854).
Bruce, William Cabell, John Randolph, 1773–1833 (New York: Putnam, 1922).
Dudek, Louis, ed., Dk / Some Letters of Ezra Pound (Montreal: DC Books, 1974).
Hall, Donald, Their Ancient Glittering Eyes: Remembering Poets (New York:
Ticknor & Fields, 1992).
240 alec marsh
Kimpel, Ben, and T. C. Duncan Eaves, ‘American History in Rock-Drill and
Thrones’, Paideuma, IX.3 (Winter 1980), 417–39.
Leary, Lewis ed., Motive and Method in The Cantos of Ezra Pound (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1961).
Lenin, Vladimir, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (1917; New York:
International Publishing, 1939).
Lewis, George, Massive Resistance: The White Response to the Civil Rights Movement
(London: Hodder Arnold, 2006).
Marsh, Alec, John Kasper and Ezra Pound: Saving the Republic (London:
Bloomsbury, 2015).
Money and Modernity: Pound, Williams and the Spirit of Jefferson (Tuscaloosa:
University of Alabama Press, 1998).
Martin, Waldo E., Jr., ed., Brown v Board of Education: A Brief History with
Documents (Boston: Bedford St. Martin’s, 1998).
Meacham, Harry M., The Caged Panther: Ezra Pound at St. Elizabeths (New York:
Twayne, 1967).
Mullins, Eustace, This Difficult Individual, Ezra Pound (New York: Fleet, 1961).
Muse, Benjamin, Ten Years of Prelude (New York: Viking, 1964).
Nicholls, Peter, ‘The Allusive Allusion: Poetry and Exegesis’, in Teaching
Modernist Poetry, ed. Peter Middleton and Nicky Marsh, 10–24 (London:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).
‘Thrones de los cantares: XCVI–CIX’, in The Ezra Pound Encyclopaedia, ed.
Demetres P. Tryphonopoulos and Stephen J. Adams, 46–8 (Westport, CT:
Greenwood, 2005).
‘“Two Doits to a Boodle”: Reckoning with Thrones’, Textual Practice 18.2 (June
2004), 233–49.
Nichols, Roy, Franklin Pierce: Young Hickory of the Granite Hills (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1931).
Pound, Ezra, Pavannes and Divigations (New York: New Directions, 1958).
Schwartz, Bernard, and Stephan Lesher, Inside the Warren Court 1953–1969
(New York: Doubleday, 1983).
Stock, Noel, Reading The Cantos (New York: Pantheon, 1966).
Pearce, Donald, and Herbert Schneidau, eds., Pound / Theobald Letters (Redding
Ridge: Black Swan, 1984).
Terrell, Carroll F., A Companion to The Cantos of Ezra Pound, Vol. II (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1984).
Van Buren, Martin, Autobiography (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing
Office, 1920).
chapter 15
Copyright
Archie Henderson
When Ezra Pound launched his writing career in London in 1908, English
copyright was governed by an Act of 1844, which required registration of
works at Stationers’ Hall in order for copyright to be secured. The Act was
soon replaced, however, by the Imperial Copyright Act of 1911, under
which copyright protection was extended to works upon creation without
the need for registration.1 Notable among the changes effected by the Act
of 1911 was the extension of the term of copyright to life plus fifty years
(subject to certain exceptions). Previously, the law fixed the term of copy-
right at either forty-two years from first publication or the life of the author
plus seven years, whichever proved the longer. Two provisions allowed for
compulsory licenses as a limitation on copyright. First, during the last
twenty-five years of the term of copyright (i.e., after twenty-five years after
the death of the author), any person may reproduce a work without
consent on payment of a 10 per cent royalty. Second, at any time after
the death of the author, any person may apply for a compulsory license
with the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council on refusal of the copy-
right holder to republish or to allow the republication of the work in
question.2 The purpose of the compulsory license provisions was to
encourage the availability and circulation of creative works.
In the United States, where Pound also published some of his early
books, the terms of copyright did less to protect the author’s monetary
returns and less to ensure the continued public availability of copyrighted
material. Article I, section 8, clause 8 of the US Constitution grants
Congress the power ‘to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts,
by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right
to their respective Writings and Discoveries’.3 The first implementing
legislation was passed by Congress on 31 May 1790. Entitled ‘An Act for
the encouragement of learning, by securing the copies of maps, charts, and
books to the authors and proprietors of such copies, during the times
therein mentioned’, the Act granted copyright protection only to citizens
241
242 archie henderson
or residents of the United States who satisfied the formal notice and
deposit requirements of the Act. The period of protection was fourteen
years, with the option for renewal for a like term of years provided that the
author was living at the end of the first term.4 In the third general revision
of the copyright laws, signed by President Theodore Roosevelt on
4 March 1909, the maximum term of protection was extended to fifty-six
years, but the limitation to citizens or residents of the United States was
retained. As contrasted with English law, compulsory licenses were
restricted to the recording of copyrighted musical compositions.
Proprietors of musical compositions were granted initial mechanical
recording rights, subject to a compulsory licensing provision.5
The new Copyright Act of 1909 imposed technical requirements of a kind
that were not required under English copyright law, including book man-
ufacture by an American typesetter and/or printer – a protectionist measure –
and timely deposit of two copies of the book with the Library of Congress.
As a resident of a country with which the United States had no reciprocal
copyright legislation, Pound – although an American citizen and otherwise
eligible for American copyright – could not use English publication as
a means of satisfying American copyright requirements. Furthermore, he
would have had no legal recourse against unauthorized reprinting of his
work in the United States. Pound was blithely, or perhaps naively, uncon-
cerned with the risks of unauthorized American reprints of some of his earlier
volumes of poems. Personae (1909) and Exultations (1909) were published in
London by Elkin Mathews, with no contracts with American publishers for
corresponding American editions. The risks, however, were mitigated by the
American printing of a new volume in 1910 collecting the best of the
previous year’s volumes. Provença: Poems Selected from Personae,
Exultations, and Canzoniere of Ezra Pound was published in Boston by
Small, Maynard and Company on 22 November 1910, with two copies
received for American copyright deposit on 12 December 1910.6
By 1916, Pound contracted with publishers on both sides of the Atlantic
for the printing of many of his books and, for those books, obtained
copyright in both countries. As such, a change in American copyright
law would not in his view have worked to his immediate personal advan-
tage any more than removal of the American import tariff on books –
another protectionist measure – about which he was to write in 1918: ‘The
present writer is no longer in a position personally to benefit by removal of
the tariff as his work is now published in both countries, and his American
publication for the present rather ahead of his English publication’.7
Despite his lack of a personal stake in the matter, Pound pointed to the
Copyright 243
damage to American cultural progress caused by the tariff on books and the
backward state of the copyright law. These protectionist measures, as he
saw it, kept America provincial by restraining the circulation of the latest
literature from the Continent. As Pound wrote to John Quinn at the end of
February 1916:
THE REAL TROUBLE WITH A LOT OF OUR COM-PATRIOTS IS
IGNORANCE just BONE Abyssinian ignorance. And that two things that
would help slowly but still help a lot are.
A. abolition of prohibitive tariff on books all tariff on all books.
B. International copyright. Old Putnam began on this last strain in 1830,
but it aint been brought off yet.8
In another letter to Quinn in late July 1916, Pound pressed the urgency of
the copyright and tariff issues:
There ought to be a decent copyright law in the U.S. AND there should be
no tariff on books. I don’t know whether I have written you all the why, or
whether you have come on any notes of mine on the matter. I won’t write
the case at length until I know whether you are already convinced of the
importance of the matter, or whether you want convincing. old Putnam has
been fighting for this all his life/ also he must be a distant relation of mine.
for what thats worth.9
In the same year, responding in the affirmative to an invitation to
sign a protest against the suppression of Theodore Dreiser’s novel The
‘Genius’ (1915), Pound took the opportunity to ask Harold Hersey, an
assistant acting on behalf of the Authors’ League of America, about
the League’s efforts, if any, to eliminate the tariff on books or to
reform copyright law:
Can you inform me whether [the Authors’ League of America, the sponsor
of the protest] has ever before attempted to do anything for the freedom of
American letters; for getting a decent copyright law; for getting rid of the
tariff of books, or, in short, whether it has until the present date been
typically ‘American’ after the fashion of the older magazines and the general
religiose dunginess of American ‘associations’ . . .
You are the first person among my correspondents who has ever shown
a flicker of sense re/ tariff and internat. copyright. (Save of course old
Putnam who has been hammering on ’em for years.) I have recently sent
a letter to the Little Review, and some notes to Poetry on these matters.
I dont know what good it will do. I never can get anyone to send me
information, detailed information re/ the tariff and copyright law texts etc.
on which I might base more forceful criticism.10
His ‘notes to Poetry’ probably refers to ‘Things to Be Done’, a list of five
ideas to fight American provincialism and to encourage American
civilization. Pound writes second on the list (after tariff reform), that ‘we
should get a good copyright law. The present law, framed in the interest of
a few local mechanics, is also an obstacle to the free circulation of thought.
Is there any reason why the United States should lag behind other countries
in a matter of this sort?’11 The ‘letter to the Little Review’ is likely Pound’s
open reply to the American writer of a letter to the Little Review
accusing Pound of writing propaganda. Pound retorts, ‘If I were propa-
ganding I should exhort you to get a decent international copyright law –
though as my own income will presumably never equal that of a plumber,
or stir the cupidity of the most class-hating, millionaire-cursing socialist,
I have very little interest in this matter’.12
Pound’s ‘propaganding’ for American tariff and copyright reform
began in earnest as World War I drew to a close. Pound saw that
reciprocal copyright legislation, beyond pulling America out of the
provinces, would further the post-war unity of the United States and
England. He probably took his cue from A. R. Orage, editor of The New
Age. In September 1918, Orage laid out the ‘facts which constitute the
real difficulties in the way of a League, even of America and England,
not to say of all the nations of the world’.13 Orage cited examples given
by Dr. Charles Eliot in his correspondence to Professor Frederick C. De
Sumichrast. Eliot ‘affirms that to the extent to which America and
Britain desire to co-operate in world-responsibility, a common policy
must be pursued by the two Governments as regards foreign invest-
ments, the relations of Capital and Labour, the treatment of alcoholism
and venereal disease, tariffs and preferences, the conditions of military
service and armaments, to which we may add, as quite as vital, the
matter of literary copyrights and mutual intellectual commerce’.14 It is
almost certain that Pound read Orage’s column, particularly the passages
referring to tariffs and literary copyrights. In the very next number of
The New Age, Pound contributed an essay on ‘Tariff and Copyright’, in
which he wrote that hindrance to communication represented by
American copyright regulations ‘calls for reciprocal intelligence and
reciprocal action between England and America’.15
In the following number, Orage responded to Pound’s article in agree-
ment, writing:
As far as I have been able to discover, I must agree with Mr. Pound that the
literary relations of our two countries are bad, and that much of this
Copyright 245
estrangement, if not all of it, is due to remediable causes lying at present on
the American book of statutes. The actual facts of the situation are simple.
The copyright laws of America unlike those of any other civilised country,
with the exception of ex-Tsarist Russia, require as a condition of extending
the protection of its copyright to any work of foreign publication that the
latter shall be set up, printed and published in America within a period of 30
to 60 days after its publication in the country of its origin. Failing such
practically simultaneous publication in America, not only is any American
publisher thereafter entitled to publish the work in question without the
permission of the author, but the author and his national publisher are not
entitled to demand any royalties or fees on the sale of the same. In other
words, as far as the original author and publisher are concerted, they are
non-existent in America unless they have made arrangements for the pub-
lication of their work in America within one or, at most, two months of its
original publication in their own country.16
Orage went on to say:
Every author and publisher in this country knows how difficult it is to
arrange for the simultaneous publication of the majority of works at home
and in America. . . . The American Copyright Law is thus seen to be
a modern example of Morton’s fork. By requiring that the foreign author
shall publish his work in America within one or two months of its publica-
tion at home, it compels him to make a choice (in the majority of cases)
between forfeiting his copyright in America, or delaying, at his own cost, the
publication of his book in his own country. Upon either prong he is
impaled. If he elects for American publication he must forgo the chance
of the immediate market at home; and if he elects for immediate publication
at home he must forgo the prospect of the protection of American
copyright.17
Orage then turned to the matter of the tariff on books imported in
America. Against the presumed protectionist argument in favour of the
tariff, he answered that the tariff was counterproductive:
Now, if books were like other commodities, their sale, like the sale of other
commodities, would fall under the economic law of diminishing returns.
Thereunder, as their supply increased, the demand for books would tend to
decrease, as is the case with cotton, say, or wooden spoons. And upon such
an assumption there might be some reason for prohibiting the free importa-
tion of printed books, since the imported articles would compete in the
home market for a relatively inelastic demand. But books, it is obvious, are
not a commodity in this sense of the word. They do not satisfy demand, but
stimulate it; and their sale does not, therefore, fall under the economic law of
diminishing returns, but under the very contrary, that of increasing
returns. . . . The free importation of books is not, therefore, a means of
contracting the home-production of books; it is the very opposite, the most
effective means of stimulating home-production to its highest possible
degree. If I were an American author, resident in America, and concerned
for the prosperity of the American book-making profession, craft and
industry, I should not be in the least disposed to thank the American
Copyright Law for the protection it professed to give me.18
Using similar language, Pound pointed to the ‘immaterial’ component
of books in arguing against the tariff on books as an everyday commodity:
America’s tariff on books should be removed because it is a hindrance to
international communication, serious at any time, and doubly serious now
when we are trying to understand France and England more intimately. The
question, however, should be wholly dissociated from the question of tariffs
in general. Books have an immaterial as well as a material component, and
because of this immaterial component they should circulate free from
needless impediment, and should not be hindered in their migrations,
even for the sake of material gain. After all, the Government’s income
from import duty on serious literature is negligible; and the sole solid result
is to handicap American authors, and to preserve a provincial tone in
American literature.19
Responding both to Pound and Orage, British publisher Sir Stanley
Unwin (1884–1968), founder of the George Allen and Unwin Ltd UK
publishing house in 1914, lamented the obstacles erected by the American
Copyright Act:
With the mournful exception of Tsarist Russia, the U.S.A. was at the
outbreak of war in 1914 the only civilised country of importance that
remained outside the Berne Convention – a Convention that secures copy-
right in literary work in all the countries of the signatories – a convention
that Germany has respected even throughout the War. The one obstacle
that prevents the adherence of the U.S.A. is now, as it always has been, the
‘Manufacturing clause’ of their Copyright Act – a requirement peculiar to
America, which involves the actual type-setting, printing and production of
a book in the U.S.A. within thirty (or under certain circumstances sixty)
days of its publication in Great Britain. Unless this condition is complied
with, British literary property is at the mercy of anyone who cares to print it
in the States; and although, it is true, no reputable American publisher
would think of doing so, there are American firms which make a practice of
pirating English books.20
In a letter of 15 March 1918 to the Special Commissioner, US Treasury
Department, Unwin condemned the legalized theft of British intellectual
property under American copyright law and urged uniform protection for
American and British authors:
Copyright 247
On the very day of your visit we received a communication which you will
remember we produced for your inspection showing that the rights in three
of our books are being pirated by one firm alone. You do not we know
defend this and all the reputable publishers in the U.S.A. (amongst whom
Major George Haven Putnam is one of the most active) unite in condemn-
ing it, but your Government none the less permits literary property to be
stolen and has done so for many years past. Representations have continu-
ally been made but without effect. Even within the last few months
Mr. Herbert Putnam, Librarian of Congress, and Mr. Thorvald Solberg
of the Register of Copyright of the U.S., have signed a report advocating
equality of treatment for American and British authors and expressing the
opinion that ‘literary and artistic property protection in the States should be
uniform and equal with no difference or distinctions based upon the
nationality of the author, and should be free from inequality in the condi-
tions or formalities imposed upon the author or his publishers’. They state
that: ‘The present most urgent need is some remedy for the serious defects in
our copyright relations with Great Britain’. But nothing has been done and
feeling on this side is apt to grow bitter.21
On the point of tariffs, Unwin concluded: ‘The U.S.A. and Great Britain
are reaping the fruits of co-operation in war. Both are conscious of the need
of a greater mutual understanding. Is there a more effective road than the
free interchange of thought? Are any barriers desirable in the Literary
field?’22
It was not only English publishers and authors who supported
reform of the American copyright laws. Their American counterparts
were equally in favour of reform.23 As Unwin points out, Thorvald
Solberg (1852–1949), the Register of Copyrights at the Library of
Congress from 1897 to 1930, was himself an advocate of copyright
reform; as early as 1918, he had signed a report ‘advocating equality of
treatment for American and British authors’ and expressing the opi-
nion that ‘literary and artistic property protection in the States should
be uniform and equal with no difference or distinctions based upon
the nationality of the author, and should be free from inequality in the
conditions or formalities imposed upon the author or his publishers’.24
The solution put forward by Unwin and others was the removal of the
manufacturing clause of the Copyright Act of 1909. Pound’s proposed
remedy went much further. For the sake of promoting post-war
American-British unity more than for personal interest, Pound offered
his own copyright statute for the United States.25
In his ‘sketch of what the copyright law ought to be’, Pound calls for
presumptive and perpetual American copyright protection for all printed
books wherever printed.26 Formalities for obtaining and maintaining
copyright would be eliminated, as copyright would be automatic and
perpetual. Perpetual copyright – and with it, the perpetual payment of
royalties as a cost built into the price of the books – would mean that books
by long-dead authors, to whose estates royalties were not owed, could not
undercut those of living authors in price. This provision, designed to
protect living authors, would in effect freeze the public domain such that
no newly printed books would ever enter it. As a ‘safeguard’ to prevent
books from falling out of distribution and circulation on account of the
lack of a public domain to absorb them, Pound adds a compulsory license
provision: ‘If the heirs neglect to keep a man’s work in print and at a price
not greater than the price of his books during his life, then unauthorised
publishers should be at liberty to reprint said works, paying to heirs
a royalty not more than 20 per cent and not less than 10 per cent’.27
Pound probably borrowed the idea of compulsory license from the
Copyright Act of 1911, under which a similar provision could be triggered
after the death of the author. Pound adds a second compulsory license
provision for books by living authors which have not found an American
publisher and whose authors fail to respond to a publisher’s request for
permission to publish or otherwise give notice of intent to publish with
another publisher.28 A third compulsory license provision allows for rep-
rinting of very popular works subject to royalty payments.29 Pound’s
copyright proposal ensures both an ample public sphere of cultural treas-
ures (all books can be kept in print) and a stream of income to living
authors and their heirs. Beyond these cultural values, Pound sees a political
benefit as well: the improvement of international relations, vital in the
aftermath of the world war. In Pound’s words, ‘no person who has given
the matter any thought, and who desires freer and more cordial commu-
nication between America and the rest of the world can remain indifferent
to the need of reciprocal copyright between America and her allies’.30
The potentially fatal weakness of Pound’s proposal for perpetual copy-
right is, of course, the constitutional requirement that copyright laws must
be granted ‘for limited Times’. A grant of perpetual copyright is incon-
sistent with granting a copyright for ‘limited Times’.31 Some possible ways
around the constitutional restriction have been proposed. While Congress
could not grant perpetual copyright under the authority of the
Constitution’s Copyright Clause, it might have such authority under
other grants of power to Congress, such as the power to regulate interstate
and foreign commerce.32 Another argument is that, if copyrights were
made subject to extension by means of periodic renewal, then, since
Copyright 249
Congress could cut off the right of renewal at any time, a law authorizing
renewals without limit would be less vulnerable to a constitutional chal-
lenge than a grant of perpetual copyright.33 There are also practical
limitations. Pound’s proposal leaves open the question of what happens
when rights holders cannot be found.
Pound took steps to publicize his proposal for copyright reform. To give
a boost to his propagandizing efforts, Pound sought out the London office
of the US Government Committee on Public Information (USCPI),
which was charged with disseminating official news for the United States
of America. The London office, at 11 Ebury Street, was established in
April 1918.34 His first contact was either Charles Edward Russell, the
director until October 1918, or, more likely, his son John Russell, who
served as office manager while his father was away on his frequent speaking
engagements.35 Whichever Russell it was told Pound that ‘[i]f we don’t get
to know these people [i.e., English, French, Italian, our allies] better, this
war is a failure’. Pound considered these words to be ‘the finest words
spoken by any American official since the death of Abraham Lincoln’.36
His next contact at USCPI was Paul Victor Perry (ca. 1867–1944), a well-
known newspaperman and formerly the telegraph editor of the Detroit Free
Press. In late October or early November 1918, Perry succeeded Charles
Edward Russell as head of the London office, becoming the fifth director in
seven months.37 George Creel, the head of USCPI, was later to write that
Perry served ‘with distinction to the end’.38 Pound wrote to G. Herbert
Thring, Secretary of the Society of Authors, indicating:
Mr. Paul Perry . . . promised to send my two articles to Washington with
recommendation that the suggestions be acted upon, by proper Senate
Committee. They covered both copyright and the import duty on
books. . . . I took it up with him on the grounds of U. S. A. propaganda;
the line to take with him, and the only line on which he can work officially is
that America will improve her position with European intellectuals, and via
them with all the public, by getting rid of two mediaeval imbecilities, the
rotten copyright regulation and the import duty on books.39
Pound was fully aware of the difficulty of persuading Congress to pass

copyright legislation. In another letter, Pound wrote Thring that ‘the
commercial loss to Britain is no argument to congressmen who have to
please “hecker” constituencies. They’ve got to be told why it will benefit
America to refrain from committing acts of barratry, piracy, etc. against
British authors, and why their aesthetic gain more than balances the loss
occasioned by civilized honesty. . . . It is only for the sake of one book in
two hundred that there is any intellectual gain to be had from fair copy-
right or freedom from import duty’.40 Pound and Thring stood in agree-
ment on ‘old Putnam’s shortcomings’. In Pound’s view, ‘like all other “old
houses” his firm fears like hell a new movement or a new standard’.41
George Haven Putnam (1844–1930), in his capacity as Secretary of the
American Publishers’ Copyright League, had travelled to England in the
spring of 1918, seeking ways of securing and maintaining copyright for
American authors in Great Britain and the British Commonwealth in the
face of the dislocation of the mails during wartime. The Authors’ League of
America, however, considered the proposal of American publishers to be
one-sided rather than reciprocal. Thring was appointed to represent the
League in London for the purpose of presenting its suggestions to the
British government. On 4 June, Thring wrote to Putnam to notify him of
his appointment. After meeting with Putnam, Thring found the American
publisher’s proposals both inequitable and useless for authors.42 These
proposals may have been what Thring termed the ‘stupid suggestion’
that Putnam made to him, as he described it in a letter to Pound.43
As a result of the lobbying efforts on both sides of the Atlantic, the two
nations passed reciprocal retrospective copyright relief from wartime dis-
ruption. On the American side, what emerged was H.R. 3754, ‘A bill to
amend sections 8 and 11 of the copyright act’, which was approved by the
House on 4 March 1919, passed the Senate without change on
8 December 1919, and was signed into law on 18 December 1919.
Covered under the Copyright Act of 1919 were works published abroad
after 1 August 1914, and before the date of the President’s Proclamation of
Peace, and not previously copyrighted in the other country.44 The only
permanent provision of the Act was a mild relaxation of registration
formalities. The Act provided, among other amendments, for an increase
from thirty days to sixty days for deposit of a copy for the registration of
the ad interim copyright after first publication abroad of a book in the
English language. The ad interim term of protection was extended from
thirty days to four months.45 No provision was made for permanent
American recognition of reciprocal copyright between America and her
allies, as Pound desired.
Between 1931 and 1932, more than a decade later, Pound supported the
efforts of Senator Bronson M. Cutting on behalf of copyright legislation to
make copyright automatic and divisible and to permit the United States to
join the International Copyright Union. Regretfully, Cutting’s efforts
came to naught, and it was not until 1 May 1989, that the United States
joined the Berne Convention.46
Copyright 251
Notes
1. ‘Copyright Records of the Stationers’ Hall’, The National Archives, http://
nationalarchives.gov.uk/help-with-your-research/research-guides/copyright-
records-stationers-hall/.
2. E. J. Mac Gillivray, The Copyright Act, 1911, Annotated. With Appendix
Containing the Revised Convention of Berne (London: Stevens and Sons,
Limited, 1912), iv, 45, 50, 51, https://ia902704.us.archive.org/7/items/copy
rightact191100grearich/copyrightact191100grearich.pdf.
3. US Constitution Art. I, § 8, cl. 8.
4. Act of May 31, 1790 § 1, 1 Stat. 124, 124; Benjamin W. Rudd, ‘Notable Dates in
American Copyright 1783–1969’, https://copyright.gov/history/dates.pdf.
5. Rudd, ‘Notable Dates in American Copyright 1783–1969’. On the legis-
lative history of the 1909 Copyright Act, see Harry G. Henn, The
Compulsory License Provisions of the U.S. Copyright Law (Study No.6)
(July 1956), https://copyright.gov/history/studies/study5.pdf, and
Legislative History of the 1909 Copyright Act, ed. and compiled by
E. Fulton Brylawski and Abe Goldman, 6 vols. (South Hackensack,
NJ: Fred B. Rothman & Co., 1976).
6. Library of Congress, Copyright Office, Catalogue of Copyright Entries, Part 1,
Group 1. Books 1910. New Series, Volume 7, Group 1, No. 54, Published Jan. 12,
1911 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, Library Division, 1911),
1536, https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=hvd.32044049966617;view=1up;
seq=854.
7. Ezra Pound, ‘Tariff and Copyright’, Little Review V.7 (November 1918), 22.
Copies of Pound’s contributions to periodicals are online at the Ezra Pound
Society website, http://ezrapoundsociety.org/.
8. Pound to Quinn, 29 February 1916, The Selected Letters of Ezra Pound to John
Quinn: 1915–1924, ed. Timothy Materer (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 1991), 64.
9. Pound to Quinn, 27 July 1916, L/JQ 78.
10. Pound to Harold Hersey, [ca. late August 1916] and 24 October 1916, as
quoted in ‘Two Unpublished Pound Letters: Pound’s Aid to Dreiser [Edited]
by Louis Oldani’, Library Chronicle, University of Pennsylvania 42.1 (Summer
1977), 68.
11. Pound, ‘Things to Be Done’, Poetry 9.6 (March 1917), 312.
12. Pound, ‘Letters from Ezra Pound’, Little Review IV.6 (October 1917), 38.
13. A. R. Orage, ‘Notes of the Week’, New Age 23.21 [no. 1358] (19 September
1918), 326.
14. Orage, ‘Notes of the Week’, 326.
15. Pound, ‘Tariff and Copyright’, The New Age 23.22 [no. 1359] (26 September
1918), 348.
16. R. H. C. [i.e., A. R. Orage], ‘Readers and Writers’, The New Age 24.1 [no.
1365] (7 November 1918), 10.
17. R. H. C. [i.e., A. R. Orage], ‘Readers and Writers’, 10.
18. R. H. C. [i.e., A. R. Orage], ‘Readers and Writers’, 10.
19. Pound, ‘Tariff and Copyright’, The New Age 23.22 [no. 1359]
(26 September 1918), 348. Pound uses practically identical language in an
essay for the Little Review: Pound, ‘Tariff and Copyright’, Little Review V.7
(November 1918), 21.
20. Stanley Unwin, ‘British Literature and the United States’, The New Age 24.4
[no. 1368] (28 November 1918), 56–7, reprinted in The Publishers’ Weekly XCV
(11 January 1919), 95–96, and The Bookseller, Newsdealer and Stationer
(New York) L.4 (15 February 1919), 151–3.
21. [Stanley Unwin], ‘An English Publisher on American Revenue Methods’, The
Publishers’ Weekly (New York) XCIII.16 [Whole No. 2411] (20 April 1918), 1215.
The report is Report of the Register of Copyrights for the Fiscal Year 1916–1917
(Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1917), 21, 22, https://copy
right.gov/reports/annual/archive/ar-1917.pdf.
22. [Stanley Unwin], ‘An English Publisher on American Revenue Methods’,
1215.
23. Stanley Unwin, ‘More English Comment on American Copyright Matters’,
The Publishers’ Weekly 95 (22 March 1919), 852.
24. [Stanley Unwin], ‘An English Publisher on American Revenue Methods’;
Stanley Unwin, ‘British Literature and the United States’, 56, reprinted in The
Publishers’ Weekly (11 January 1919), 95, and The Bookseller, Newsdealer and
Stationer (15 February 1919), 152.
25. Pound’s proposals were printed in his essay ‘Copyright and Tariff’, New Age
23.23 [no. 1360] (3 October 1918), 363–4, and largely reprinted (from ‘The
copyright of any book printed anywhere . . .’ to ‘Royalty on same payable at
rate of 20% to author or heirs’) in the section on ‘Copyright’ in ‘Tariff and
Copyright’, Little Review V.7 (November 1918), 24–5. On the statute, see
generally Robert Spoo, ‘Ezra Pound’s Copyright Statute: Perpetual Rights and
Unfair Competition with the Dead’, Without Copyrights: Piracy, Publishing, and
the Public Domain (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 116–52.
26. Pound, ‘Copyright and Tariff’, 363.
27. Pound, ‘Copyright and Tariff’, 363; Pound, ‘Tariff and Copyright’, 25.
28. Pound, ‘Copyright and Tariff’, 363–4; Pound, ‘Tariff and Copyright’, 25.
29. Pound, ‘Copyright and Tariff’, 364; Pound, ‘Tariff and Copyright’, 25.
30. Pound, ‘Copyright and Tariff’, 364.
31. Richard A. Posner and William M. Landes, ‘Indefinitely Renewable
Copyright’, University of Chicago Law Review 70.2 (2003), 471, 493.
32. Posner and Landes, 473.
33. Posner and Landes, 493.
34. James R. Mock and Cedric Larson, Words That Won the War: The Story of the
Committee on Public Information 1917–1919 (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1939), 244; The Anglo-American Year Book (London: American
Chamber of Commerce in London, 1918), 11. The Cross-Reference Index to
the Series ‘General Correspondence, 1917–1919’ of the records of the
Committee on Public Information (Record Group 63), at the National
Copyright 253
Archives, contains no mention of Pound. Information courtesy of archivist
Tom McAnear (email of 25 September 2017).
35. George Creel, How We Advertised America: The First Telling of the Amazing
Story of the Committee on Public Information that Carried the Gospel of
Americanism to Every Corner of the Globe (New York and London: Harper
& Brothers Publishers, 1920), 298.
36. Pound (mis)remembered the name of the official as George Russel. Pound,
‘Tariff and Copyright’, 21.
37. ‘American Newspaper Man Heads London Bureau’, The Fourth Estate 1288
(2 November 1918), 12; Complete Report of the Chairman of the Committee on
Public Information (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1920),
118; Foreign Relations of the United States, 1917–1972. Public Diplomacy, World
War I (Washington, D.C., United States Government Printing Office,
2014), 28.
38. Creel, 298.
39. British Library, Society of Authors Archive, ADD 63317, Vol. cxii ff. 215,
ff. 1–9 Ezra Pound, f.2, stamped 12 November 1918 [photocopy]; as quoted in
RR Auction, Catalog 434, 13 August 2014 (Boston, 2014), lot 668, p. 168,
https://rauction.com/PastAuctionItem/3329455 and https://issuu.com/rrauc
tion/docs/434vc.
40. Pound, letter to G. Herbert Thring [late October 1918], as quoted in Sotheby
Parke Bernet & Co. Catalogues of Sales Jul 21–Oct 17, 1983 (1983), lot 479,
p. 171. The Dictionary of American Regional English lists ‘hecker’ as a rather
uncommon regionalism for a rustic or countrified person; a boob or provin-
cial. (The Dictionary of American Regional English, 6 vols. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1985–2013.) Examples of this usage, however, are
common in Pound. Pound wrote an article on ‘Hecker-nomiks’ (1933–4).
41. Pound, letter to G. Herbert Thring, [late October 1918].
42. ‘War Copyrights’, The Authors’ League Bulletin 6.8 (November 1918), 6–10.
43. Pound to Thring, stamped 12 November 1918.
44. Thorvald Solberg, ‘Copyright Report for the Fiscal Year 1920–21’, The
Publishers’ Weekly CI (28 January 1922), 208; ‘Copyright Act, Approved
December 18, 1919’, Library of Congress Copyright Office, Catalogue of
Copyright Entries. Part 1: Books, Group 1. New Series, Volume 16
(Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1919), 55–6;
‘Copyright Bill’, Report of the Register of Copyrights for the Fiscal Year
1918–1919 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1919), 141–2;
the President’s Proclamation of April 10, 1920, Report of the Register of
Copyrights for the Fiscal Year 1919–1920 (Washington, D.C.: Government
Printing Office, 1920), 141–5; the Copyright Order in Council,
Buckingham Palace, 9 February 1920, Report of the Register of Copyrights
for the Fiscal Year 1919–1920 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing
Office, 1920), 145–7.
45. Report of the Register of Copyrights for the Fiscal Year 1918–1919 (Washington,
D.C., Government Printing Office, 1919), 130–1.
46. Ezra Pound and Bronson Cutting, Ezra Pound and Senator Bronson Cutting:
A Political Correspondence 1930–1935, ed. E. P. Walkiewicz and Hugh
Witemeyer (Albuquerque: University Press of New Mexico, 1995), 28, 29.
W OR KS C I T ED
Act of May 31, 1790 § 1, 1 Stat 124 ‘American Newspaper Man Heads London
Bureau’, The Fourth Estate 1288 (2 November 1918), 12.
The Anglo-American Year Book (London: American Chamber of Commerce in
London, 1918).
Brylawski, E. Fulton, and Abe Goldman, ed. and compilers, Legislative History of
the 1909 Copyright Act, 6 vols. (South Hackensack, NJ: Fred B. Rothman &
Co., 1976).
C., R. H. [i.e., A. R. Orage], ‘Readers and Writers’, The New Age 24.1 [no. 1365]
(7 November 1918), 10–11.
Complete Report of the Chairman of the Committee on Public Information
(Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1920).
‘Copyright Act, Approved December 18, 1919’, Library of Congress Copyright
Office, Catalogue of Copyright Entries. Part 1: Books, Group 1. New Series,
Volume 16, 55–6 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1919).
‘Copyright Bill’, Report of the Register of Copyrights for the Fiscal Year 1918–1919,
141–2 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1919), https://copy
right.gov/reports/annual/archive/ar-1919.pdf.
The Copyright Order in Council, Buckingham Palace, 9 February 1920, Report of
the Register of Copyrights for the Fiscal Year 1919–1920, 145–7 (Washington, D.
C.: Government Printing Office, 1920), https://copyright.gov/reports/annu
al/archive/ar-1920.pdf.
‘Copyright Records of the Stationers’ Hall’, The National Archives, http://natio
nalarchives.gov.uk/help-with-your-research/research-guides/copyright-
records-stationers-hall/.
Creel, George, How We Advertised America: The First Telling of the Amazing Story
of the Committee on Public Information that Carried the Gospel of Americanism
to Every Corner of the Globe (New York and London: Harper & Brothers
Publishers, 1920).
The Dictionary of American Regional English, 6 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1985–2013).
Foreign Relations of the United States, 1917–1972. Public Diplomacy, World War I
(Washington, D.C.: United States Government Printing Office, 2014).
Henn, Harry G., The Compulsory License Provisions of the U.S. Copyright Law
(Study No.6) (July 1956), https://copyright.gov/history/studies/study5.pdf.
Library of Congress Copyright Office, Catalogue of Copyright Entries. Part 1,
Group 1. Books 1910. New Series, Volume 7, Group 1, No. 54, Published
Jan. 12, 1911 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, Library
Division, 1911).
Copyright 255
Mac Gillivray, E. J., The Copyright Act, 1911, Annotated. With Appendix Containing
the Revised Convention of Berne (London: Stevens and Sons, Ltd., 1912).
Mock, James R., and Cedric Larson, Words That Won the War: The Story of the
Committee on Public Information 1917–1919 (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1939).
Orage, A. R., ‘Notes of the Week’, New Age 23.21 [no. 1358] (19 September 1918),
325–7.
Posner, Richard A., and William M. Landes, ‘Indefinitely Renewable Copyright’,
University of Chicago Law Review 70.2 (2003), 471–518.
Pound, Ezra. ‘Copyright and Tariff’, New Age 23.23 [no. 1360] (3 October 1918),
363–4.
‘Letters from Ezra Pound’, Little Review 4.6 (October 1917) 37–9.
The Selected Letters of Ezra Pound to John Quinn: 1915–1924, ed.
Timothy Materer (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991).
‘Tariff and Copyright’, Little Review V.7 (November 1918) 21–5.
‘Tariff and Copyright’, The New Age 23.22 [no. 1359] (26 September 1918),
348–9.
‘Things to Be Done’, Poetry 9.6 (March 1917), 312–14.
‘Two Unpublished Pound Letters: Pound’s Aid to Dreiser’, ed. Louis Oldani,
Library Chronicle, University of Pennsylvania 42.1 (Summer 1977), 67–70.
Pound, Ezra, and Bronson Cutting, Ezra Pound and Senator Bronson
Cutting: A Political Correspondence 1930–1935, ed. E. P. Walkiewicz
and Hugh Witemeyer (Albuquerque: University Press of New Mexico,
1995).
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for the Fiscal Year 1919–1920 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing
Office, 1920), 141–5, https://copyright.gov/reports/annual/archive/ar-1920
.pdf.
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Government Printing Office, 1917), https://copyright.gov/reports/annual/ar
chive/ar-1917.pdf.
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Government Printing Office, 1919), https://copyright.gov/reports/annual/ar
chive/ar-1919.pdf.
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copyright.gov/history/dates.pdf.
Solberg, Thorvald, ‘Copyright Report for the Fiscal Year 1920–21’, The Publishers’
Weekly CI (28 January 1922), 207–8.
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479, 171.
Spoo, Robert, Without Copyrights: Piracy, Publishing, and the Public Domain
US Const Art. I, § 8, cl. 8.
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Publishers’ Weekly (New York) XCIII.16 [Whole No. 2411] (20 April 1918),
1215.
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1368] (28 November 1918), 56–7, reprinted in The Publishers’ Weekly XCV
(11 January 1919), 95–6, and The Bookseller, Newsdealer and Stationer L.4
(15 February 1919), 151–3.
More English Comment on American Copyright Matters’, The Publishers’
Weekly XCV (22 March 1919), 852.
‘War Copyrights’, The Authors’ League Bulletin 6.8 (November 1918), 6–10.
chapter 16
The Temple and the Scaffolding

The Cantos of Ezra Pound and Digital Culture
Roxana Preda
The Cantos on the Web – a Historical Review

As the impact of the internet has rippled in ever larger circles over the past
twenty-seven years, Pound’s presence on the web has slowly made itself
felt: as web aggregators started anthologizing poetry, selections from his
work, particularly the shorter poems, were showcased on websites like
Poetry Foundation, Bartleby.com or Poetry Archive. Universities,
in their turn, began hosting modernist literature projects, such as
PennSound in Philadelphia,1 where parts of Pound’s work are presented
and commented on next to that of other modernist writers. Online
libraries or book clubs hold scanned versions of the New Directions edition
of The Cantos in closed access. Commentators publish their own work with
extensive quotations in blogs or digital magazines, and artists upload art-
work inspired by Pound and his poem. Wikipedia now boasts a long article
on Pound himself, one on The Cantos and one on a ‘List of Cultural
References in The Cantos’.
As these developments were taking place, a decline in the number of
studies on The Cantos in print could be observed through the late 1990s and
2000s, most prominently the disappearance of a whole genre of scholarly
work – the monograph on the poem as a whole.2 This development had
less to do with the internet and more with the emergence of new modernist
studies, which apart from marking a sociological and historicist direction
in modernism research also implied a turn away from the focused study of
individual authors. If years like 1983 or 1991 had miraculously been rich in
publications, for the twenty years between 1997 and 2017, there were just
eight monographs in all. Book-length studies, such as Peter Liebregts’s
Ezra Pound and Neoplatonism (2004), or even collections of studies such as
Peter Makin’s Ezra Pound’s Cantos: A Casebook (2006),3 became few and
far between. The work on the poem continued, albeit in a low-key way.
257
258 roxana preda
Prominent scholars published articles in collections; they translated and
edited, rather than engaging in full monograph studies. The poem was
rarely critiqued in and for itself and even less in its entirety: scholars chose
to focus on a single cycle or compared the poem with epics or drama.4 This
trend has continued in the dissertations of the past two decades:
grouping Pound with other modernist authors and The Cantos with the
epics of Homer, Olson, Williams, Seferis and so forth has been the recent
dominant practice.
Kenner’s The Pound Era (1972) and Terrell’s Companion to The Cantos
of Ezra Pound (1984) have maintained their established position as the gates
to and pillars of Pound scholarship on the poem.5 During this same period,
however, digital culture began to make itself felt ever more forcefully. From
the very first website uploaded at CERN by Tim Berners Lee in 1991 to the
World Wide Web as we know it today, digital culture has affected
modernist studies in thousands of ways and Pound Studies with it.
Nevertheless, there was a privileged domain in which it influenced
the Pound scholars most and that was in research on The Cantos. The
development of interactive platforms, first within institutions and then for
individuals, made it conceivable that new projects and dreams could thrive
in the digital domain.
The year 1997 can be considered a benchmark in which the importance
of digital developments for Pound scholarship first became unmistakable.
In 1997, Pound scholars showed real interest in theorizing the possibilities
of hypertext as a model for understanding The Cantos. A first instance was
proposed in the two articles published in Paideuma by William Cole and
Patricia Cockram.6 Both these articles used ‘hypertext’ as a methodological
concept describing the formal organization of the poem. Cole’s article
clarified how the notion of hypertext reformulates the poem’s method as
a network of textual blocks connected by links and gave a contemporary
colour to established concepts like the ideogrammic method, subject
rhyme and luminous detail. Cockram’s contribution was a meditation on
the model of power underlying hypertext. A generation before, Hugh
Kenner had compared modernism with the linotype, whose complex,
unnatural logic was geared towards best functionality and visibility.7
Now Cockram warned that despite the illusion of convenience and free-
dom that hypertext promised, readers were not actually empowered, since
the programming behind the text was invisible, ever changing and impene-
trable to the uninitiated.8
Hypertext was indeed a useful conceptual tool in thinking about The
Cantos, offering a suggestive image of its textual organization and Pound’s
The Temple and the Scaffolding 259
working method. Nevertheless, a more fruitful line of inquiry consisted in
rethinking the model of reading that hypertext offered: a freedom to
cross Pound’s poetic sequences as a surfer crosses the wave, traversing the
poem from link to link, from node to node: readers could thus become
aware of the changes of context that each particular position afforded and
of possible choices and alternate routes within the poem. Tim Redman’s
article, ‘An Epic is a Hypertext Containing Poetry’, explained it best:
readers would find a quotation or a name – clicking on it would bring
a page explaining it and including another significant name, which could
also be clicked for an explanation – every reading could thus follow varying
trajectories. Redman affirmed that a simple glossing of references in the
poem would not be spectacular and a true departure. This would emerge
when readers would be empowered to add glosses and create links and
paths.9 There was a certain enthusiasm in this period for creating an
electronic instance of the poem like a huge network where a reader could
skip around from gloss to gloss, link to link, be free to wander away from
the poem to scholarship on various topics and back; each reading could
thus be unique and produce different results, even if the starting points of
the journey were the same. Apart from this giddying freedom in choosing
readings, interactivity and continuous updates of the critical apparatus
were also strong reasons why a digital annotated edition of the poem was
a desirable goal.
These were dreams and speculations on paper. In reality, copyright
restrictions were in place, forbidding the digital display of the whole
poem – without the full text, no real hypertextual model of reading
could take place. Moreover, the technology of the 1990s was not advanced
enough to handle The Cantos: Richard Taylor’s account of his Variorum
Project saga proved it in the clearest terms.10 Nevertheless, several small-
scale projects and one-canto prototypes were published on the internet at
various times. The first was ‘Kybernekia’, Ned Bates’ website at the
University of North Carolina, Queensboro, which in 1997 published
Canto LXXXI with linked annotations.11 The model was simple: the reader
could find the poem on one webpage; annotated words and phrases were
marked in blue, to signal they were links. The gloss was on a different page;
the reading model was thus a simple route of a step away and back, not
much different from the experience of reading the poem with Carroll
Terrell’s print Companion.
Kybernekia’s model was followed by Jeff Grieneisen’s annotated
‘Canto 31’ of 2004. Another example was Canto XLV, published in the
digital magazine Flashpoint in 2008.12 The principle was the same: poem
260 roxana preda
text on one page, gloss on another and the only step towards the free and
creative reading that Redman envisaged was the simple movement of away
and back. The situation began improving after 2009, when several cantos
(I, XLV, LXXII and LXXXI) were uploaded on the ‘Genius’ platform –
glosses appeared on request, on the same page as the poem, which was
a definite improvement, though the text had to contend with both annota-
tion and advertising to catch the reader’s attention.13 However, all these
practical applications were done as one-canto efforts, student work, maga-
zine articles, Wikipedia-like community contributions: uncoordinated,
contingent, incomplete and provisional. All the annotated cantos apart
from the ones of Genius have now been deleted and their traces effaced.
However, the situation began to change again as the idea of online
‘platform’ began to take root and spread: Drupal was launched in 2001,
Wordpress in 2003 and Joomla in 2005. These platforms, which are
bundles of software meant to enable non-programmers to design and
manage content online, made possible the creation of complex websites
dedicated to writers and artists. Online editions, presentations of facsimile
pages and multimedia resources could be managed by IT professionals in
an academic context, but also by ordinary people who were willing to learn
how a platform works so as to use its capabilities imaginatively. These
recent possibilities, as well as the rise of digital humanities as an academic
discipline after 2010, made it possible that ambitious students became
willing to combine technological knowledge with a project on The
Cantos. Trevor Sawler was the first to complete such an amphibious project
at the University of New Brunswick in 2012.14 His PhD consisted in
a written dissertation on poetic allusion in The Cantos combined with an
online application. As Sawler had programming knowledge, he built
a special platform just for the poem. In it, he presented the text of the
Pisan Cantos with the annotation published by Richard Sieburth in 2003.15
It was the first time that a digital presentation went beyond a single canto
into a more comprehensive attempt to annotate and link the poems
together. Sawler also thought of categories of possible readers and distin-
guished between a connoisseur and a student: the links to his glosses could
be visible if a student needed them, and hidden for readers who wanted to
meet the text on their own terms, without any mediation. Sawler has not
yet published his dissertation on The Cantos, but created another website,
‘The Modernist Web’, in 2014, in which Pound’s poetic works in the
public domain are presented alongside that of other modernist writers.
Around 2012, when Sawler finished the first doctoral work which could
properly be called an application of ‘digital humanities’ to The Cantos, the
first gazetteer of the poem created by James Cocola was published at the
Worcester Polytechnic Institute. Cocola’s curriculum vitae indicates that
he started the Gazetteer with around eight hundred place marks in 2010. In
2014, it was a functioning resource, which could be profitably consulted.
Cocola’s Gazetteer displayed maps keyed to each section of The Cantos,
showing the toponymical concentrations in the poem. Each place mark
was linked to its webpage in Wikipedia. This stage of the gazetteer, useful
as it was, would have required further work to connect the place marks to
the toponymical occurrences in the poem and explain their relevance to
their immediate poetic contexts. A report Cocola published in the digital
quarterly Make It New in March 2015 seemed to be the last act of
a functioning resource that spanned all the cantos and looked promising.
Shortly afterwards, the gazetteer was withdrawn from its website and
Cocola redirected his interest towards other writers. At the time of writing
(January 2018), the gazetteer is slowly being revived after a few years’
absence: Cantos I–XVI and LXXIV–LXXXIV can now be consulted.16
While Cocola was drafting and publishing his gazetteer, two students of
the emerging digital humanities discipline were reconceptualizing the
digital approach to The Cantos. The question of ‘platform’ that had been
defining for Sawler’s approach around 2011 was no longer pressing, quite
the contrary. Responding to the most recent developments of the Text
Encoding Initiative (TEI) – a consortium started at the University of
Virginia to provide a standard for the encoding of text in XML – Kent
Emerson at the University of Tulsa and Robin Seguy at the University of
Pennsylvania took upon themselves the enormous task of encoding The
Cantos in the xml language according to TEI protocols, as practical
application of their doctoral work. While Emerson concentrated on
A Draft of XXX Cantos in a dissertation on multiple authors, Seguy encoded
the whole poem in TEI and centred his discussion on the textual and
philological issues highlighted by this work.17 By this approach, the poem
was converted into an xml document which could be interrogated for facts,
relationships, statistics, visualizations, much like a refined, multifunctional
electronic concordance.
However, encoding the poem in TEI did not necessarily mean that
humanities scholars also had access to a website, or at least a search box
where they could interrogate the poem for information. TEI describes
a text and categorizes its components through editorial mark-up, but does
not provide a layout, or an interface for users. For that, the scholar has to
learn XSLT, a program that turns the xml lines into a formatted document
that can be displayed. Then, of course, one would need additional software
262 roxana preda
to make that layout accessible through a website. At the time of writing,
neither of the two TEI versions of The Cantos have a website to provide the
interface between the user and the poem. Copyright, which has to be
negotiated with every new project presenting the poem to the public, acts
to prevent the set-up of full online archives, or digital editions like those of
say, Swinburne or Rossetti. Though contemporary software like EXist does
offer a platform for TEI documents, both these dissertations have yet to be
built into a website which users can access and interrogate.
Neither Sawler in 2011, nor Seguy or Emerson in 2016 planned to
develop the annotation to The Cantos from the bases laid out by scholars
like Terrell or Sieburth – they used the annotations as they found them.
Yet, re-annotating The Cantos was a scholarly task that was not only timely,
but overdue.
Re-Annotating The Cantos: The Cantos Project

The project of re-annotating The Cantos was made possible by the rise
and development of digital humanities as an academic discipline after
2010. Universities and research councils started routinely sponsoring
new projects: digital editions, archives of correspondence, databases,
ensuring not only the high scholarly quality of internet platforms in
the humanities, but also their technological perfectibility, sustainability
and security over time. This favourable context indicated that the time
was ripe for the task of adapting both The Cantos and the studies
around it to the electronic medium. It was in 2014, with my
design and implementation of The Cantos Project18 platform, that
a comprehensive professional effort to follow up on Tim Redman’s
vision of the possibilities of hypertext led to the creation of a digital
research environment for The Cantos. It was decided at start that the
site would adopt the New Directions edition to ensure continuity with
the current print text and that only six cantos could be displayed at
any one time (this permission was extended to twelve cantos in 2017).
Negotiations thus ruled out the possibility of creating a new digital
edition of the poem, but allowed a necessary adjustment to the initial
idea. If readers could not yet have an electronic text of The Cantos in
open access, they could have a record of the research on the poem,
a gathering together of all the dispersed sources of information and
interpretation, a virtual place where they could enjoy and/or study the
poem on their own. The Cantos Project was designed as a ‘go to’ place
for anyone wishing to find out all the available information on each
canto. The full text of a canto is published on the site together with
new digital annotation, serially, at the rhythm of approximately once
a month. After the twelfth canto is annotated, a ‘companion’ page
containing just the annotation replaces the first full-text canto so that
annotation can move on. The goal is to create virtual study centres for
each, trusting the search function of the website to provide the
necessary indexing for the review of relationships. Serial annotation
goes against the idea of the printed book: information is not gathered
and perfected in bulk before publication, but rather released as a series
in time, refined, supplemented and corrected quickly in an implicit
running dialogue between annotator and her community of readers.19
The idea underlying the project owed more to the emergence of general
use platforms than to the newer developments in digital humanities around
the use of TEI. A platform such as Joomla could perform all the functions
needed in matters of architecture of the site, search capabilities, annotation
software and inclusion of multimedia. The Cantos Project was thus not
encoded in TEI, with which Joomla is at present incompatible, but in
HTML5 and CSS. The priority was not to describe The Cantos by encod-
ing the poem in xml, since copyright had barred the presentation of the
whole poem, but rather to concentrate on new annotation and publish
results immediately, so that the website grows under the public eye and
becomes usable from day one.
Taking account of The Cantos as a whole, collecting relevant exegesis,
providing full access to sources, connecting Pound’s poem to his journal-
ism and correspondence were bold advances at spanning a bridge over the
three decades that had passed since the publication of Carroll F. Terrell’s
Companion to The Cantos of Ezra Pound in 1980 and 1984. The goal was
implicitly an investigation into how the digital medium could provide an
enhancement and corrective to the understanding of the poem we had
inherited.
Annotation, or Digital Annotation?

Online annotation has to rest on theoretical choices responding to practical
questions: do digital-born glosses obey different constraints than print
ones? Can the digital medium correct the defects of print and does it create
new problems as it solves old ones? Does annotation rest on a different or
extended type of research? What principles should rule in the annotation of
poetry in general and Pound’s Cantos specifically?
264 roxana preda
Annotation, as a method of research and criticism, has been understood
for centuries to be a form of mediation between writer and reader, a tool for
self-study and a prerequisite of interpretation. The annotator’s professional
attention is focused on every line, every word, indeed every punctuation
mark and provides a foundational deep reading that is the starting point for
every other hermeneutic effort.
A first difficulty faced by the annotator in the print medium is that she is
forced to invade the poet’s page and divert the reader’s attention from page
to gloss. Here, the digital medium offers a few options for designing the
poem page so that the annotator’s mediation becomes quasi invisible. In
the case of The Cantos Project, the page is structured as a one-to-one
encounter between reader and the poem: the critical apparatus is moved
away in the wings, glosses are hidden, links are subtly provided in grey
underline, the top menu on white background does not assert its presence.
Moreover, since the poem is displayed on a single webpage, it is not cut by
the arbitrary segmentation of book pages. In any collage poem like The
Cantos, where both ‘cuts’ and ‘continuities’ are units of design, the print
medium interferes with the writing, going against the formatting intended
by the poet and spoiling both his typographical and rhetorical effects.
The reader’s difficulties in managing the balance between poem and
gloss are also alleviated. The gloss appears only on demand, when the user
hovers with the mouse over its link. The reader does not need to leave the
poem, turn pages or squint at small print: since the gloss appears as a pop-
up, it still has the canto page as a general background, as an implicit
reminder of the need to return. Digital glossing per definition encourages
what Jerome McGann called ‘radial reading’: annotation contains multi-
media and links that do take the reader away from the page in the quest for
more contextual information. Nevertheless, in The Cantos Project bifur-
cations cease after the first link, casual browsing and hopping from canto to
canto are discouraged; the reader, while at any time able to choose
to interrupt reading a canto to try another, has to use at least two links
to switch. While browsing across cantos is easy, the whole architecture of
the site is designed to encourage readers to stay on the poem’s page to the
end, read and study a canto for its own sake.
The gloss is managed according to invisible guidelines: essential infor-
mation is provided at the top; further down, an interested reader might
find an interpretation, or a source. This division responds to the need of
addressing several categories of readers: the informal poetry lover will
choose to open a gloss or not; the student will choose to read the text at
the top only, so as not to be overwhelmed; the passionate scholar will
follow the links, read all the material provided and possibly return for
a second reading without assistance. Such readers might even choose to
write the editor to point out an error, or add a new item of information. In
this way, The Cantos Project is aimed to go beyond Terrell’s ‘handbook for
students’ and respond to the needs of every conceivable reader.
Addressing the needs of the reader leads to a different method of
managing information than Terrell’s Companion. To minimally impede
the reading flow, a gloss should be short: it is therefore reasonable to
separate large chunks of information from the gloss and build them into
a framing architecture20 in the antechambers of the canto: its ‘title page’
has an image and an introductory paragraph, a calendar of composition,
audio readings, images from first editions and canto bibliography; over-
views, sources, resources and references are placed in the side menus. The
framing architecture includes Pound’s own effort to repeat, explain and
point out: articles from the press, passages from earlier and later poems,
translations, music.
So, what remains for us to do and how can we improve on the situation
we have inherited? First, a contemporary annotator working in the digital
medium will recognize that a pioneering approach, clearly a requirement
in Terrell’s time, has become both a useless and potentially harmful
methodology in ours. Contemporary annotation of this sort is already
done, not only by Terrell, but also independently of Pound research by
Google and Wikipedia. This standard, general sort of information is
inappropriate because in time, and by myriad scholarly efforts, we have
come to recognize that Pound rarely used standard information: he
always selected, modified and reshaped it to fit what he wanted to say
in the poem. Pound’s ‘source’ is only a starting-point: the annotator has
to chart the poet’s changes to elucidate their role in the poem. This of
course presupposes that the annotator has views on the meaning of the
whole canto – contextualization is only possible if the annotator already
has done interpretive research, correlated partial commentaries with
sources and Pound’s own collateral comments and reached
a conclusion about the meaning of the whole canto. The task of glossing
The Cantos is thus a hermeneutic circle, going from the elucidation of
detail to the view of the whole and back. General information is almost in
all cases irrelevant or insufficient to the poem and gives the impression
that Pound’s fragments are unrelated, assuming, as Terrell seemed to do,
that fragmentation in the poem is arbitrary and insurmountable. The
pioneer approach is therefore insufficient in providing assistance to
a meaningful reading. By concentrating on local passages without an
266 roxana preda
insight about the links between them, we will be unable to read a canto,
any canto as a unified whole. We have been led to assume, by our own
particular fragmentary understanding, that a canto’s ideogram does not
even exist, that all we have is a grab bag of details. Even worse, our
inability to provide correlations has led to our views of Pound as a sort of
intellectual harpy, a collector of exotica who put into his poem whatever
happened to strike his fancy. A silly poet, with a scattered mind.
Yet the digital medium presupposes a culture of correlating details.
Google does this in mechanical way by pointing out proximities of
keywords. Contemporary digital research makes it not only easier, but
unavoidable that we look for relationships and spaces where a certain
item of information becomes meaningful. This leads to delicate points of
balance, redefinition and adjustment in the position of the annotator vis-
à-vis the commentator and theoretician. An annotator’s responsibility is
to provide a foundation for interpretation, an integrative view that not
only identifies particulars but also works to provide a rationale for how
they are correlated.
In this sense, our world is much richer than Terrell’s: Pound’s
Contributions to Periodicals are accessible, electronic copies of rare
books Pound read are published by Internet Archive and Project
Gutenberg; drafts of the cantos at the Beinecke Library have been digi-
tized – this electronic accessibility makes the work of integration possible.
As these new diverse sources of information are at hand, the information in
the glosses becomes more specific: the annotator is like a photographer
adjusting his camera lens to get from a blurry impression to a sharp picture.
Generality was a necessary evil at the time of pioneers, so was speculation;
both can become a thing of the past.
In being sensitive to the annotation activity as perceived in the
tradition of print culture, we may shift our understanding of annota-
tion in the digital age to correct the shortcomings and negative impli-
cations of this work as it was embedded into the print medium. We
need to balance the potential abundance of information that hypertext
makes possible with the requirements for validity and relevance tradi-
tionally associated with ideal annotation. Hypertext and framing archi-
tecture enable the annotator to respond to various categories of readers
and provides the platform for a flexible reading geared to individual
preference. It helps the scholar withdraw from an aggressive stance
towards author, text and reader and teaches her the additional skills of
managing information, as well as strategies of placement and deferral.
In the question of annotating Pound, we stand on the shoulders of
giants – our task is huge and consists in reassessment, complexity and
refinement. In overcoming our solitude and collaborating on a large-
scale project, we can place ourselves in an ideal position to understand
the poem while preserving its mystery and majesty.
Notes
1. The PennSound archive, directed by Charles Bernstein and Al Filreis and run
from the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing at the University
of Pennsylvania, hosts poetry recordings, podcasts, and other resources. See
http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/.
2. This is a phenomenon we may witness by checking the bibliography of
monographs on The Cantos published on The Cantos Project site (http://th
ecantosproject.ed.ac.uk/index.php/bibliography/secondary), as well as the
current digital bibliography by Archie Henderson and Roxana Preda pub-
lished on the Ezra Pound Society website: http://ezrapoundsociety.org/index
.php/english-language-scholarship-on-ezra-pound/the-bibliographic-project.
3. Peter Liebregts, Ezra Pound and Neoplatonism (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh
Dickinson University Press, 2004); Peter Makin, Ezra Pound’s Cantos:
A Casebook (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).
4. Ursula Shioji, Ezra Pound’s Pisan Cantos and the Noh (Frankfurt: Peter Lang,
1997); Line Henricksen, Ambition and Anxiety: Ezra Pound’s ‘Cantos’ and
Derek Walkott’s ‘Omeros’ as Twentieth-Century Epics (Amsterdam: Rodopi,
2007); Leah Culligan Flack, Modernism and Homer: The Odysseys of H.D.,
James Joyce, Osip Mandelstam, and Ezra Pound (Cambridge: Cambridge
5. Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era (London: Faber, 1972); Carroll F. Terrell,
A Companion to The Cantos of Ezra Pound (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1993).
6. William Cole, ‘Pound’s Web: Hypertext in the Rock-Drill Cantos’, Paideuma
26.2–3 (Fall–Winter 1997), 137–50; Patricia Cockram, ‘Hypertextuality
and Pound’s Fascist Aesthetic’, Paideuma 26.2–3 (Fall–Winter 1997), 151–63.
7. Hugh Kenner, The Mechanic Muse (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1988), 9–15.
8. Cockram, ‘Hypertextuality’, 160–1.
9. Tim Redman, ‘An Epic Is a Hypertext Containing Poetry. Eleven New
Cantos (31–41)’, in A Poem Containing History. Textual Studies in The
Cantos, ed. Lawrence Rainey (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,
1997), 117–50.
10. Richard Taylor, ‘The Tragi-Comical History of the Variorum Project and Its
Ongoing Betrayal – Especially by Cambridge University Press’ (2005), www
.richard-dean-taylor.de/index.php?id=14.
268 roxana preda
11. Ned Bates, ‘A Hypervortex of Ezra Pound’s Canto LXXXI’. See Gail
McDonald, ‘Hypertext and the Teaching of Modernist Difficulty’, Pedagogy
2.1 (Winter 2002): 17–30 for a full rationale and description of the site. It was
created as a student project to a Pound seminar that McDonald taught at the
University of Queensboro, North Carolina, and has now been unpublished –
the link that MacDonald gave in her article now leads to the homepage of the
English Department.
12. See Jeff Grieneisen, ‘The Ezra Pound Project: Canto 31’, State College of
Florida, http://faculty.scf.edu/GrieneJ/cantoproject/primarypoundpage
.htm. Though I am familiar with Grieneisen’s website on Canto XXXI, it
has not survived: the bibliographic record provided is taken from his curri-
culum vitae. The annotation to Canto XLV was published in the digital
magazine Flashpoint (Winter 2008, extra issue 11), but has since been deleted.
That was a salutary move on the editor’s part, as the glosses were full of errors.
13. See Cantos I, XLV, LXXII and LXXXI on the Genius platform: https://genius
.com/Ezra-pound-canto-i-annotated.
14. Trevor Craig Sawler, ‘Hypertexting High Modernism: Ezra Pound’s Pisan
Cantos as Hypertext’, PhD dissertation, University of New Brunswick, 2012.
As the Henderson/Preda bibliography indicates, neither Ned Bates, the
creator of ‘A Hypervortex’, nor William Cole, the author of the ‘Pound’s
Web’ article in Paideuma, developed their technological approach to submit
doctoral work on The Cantos.
15. Ezra Pound, The Pisan Cantos, ed. with annotation by Richard Sieburth
16. Cocola, Jim, ‘Notes Toward a Draft of “A Gazetteer of Ezra Pound”’, Make It
New 1.4 (March 2015): 50–4, http://makeitnew.ezrapoundsociety.org/volum
e-i/vol-i-no-4/the-world-and-the-work-cocola. See also the URL of the gazet-
teer, accessed 30 January 2018, http://users.wpi.edu/~jcocola/poundiana/ind
ex.html.
17. Kent Emerson. ‘Database Modernism: Literary Information Media’, PhD
dissertation, University of Tulsa, 2016; Robin Seguy, ‘Prolegomena to the
Automated Analysis of a Bilingual Poetry Corpus, with Particular Reference
to an Annotated Edition of The Cantos of Ezra Pound’, PhD dissertation,
University of Pennsylvania, 2016.
18. The Cantos Project was launched as a project sponsored by the Ezra Pound
Society in October 2014. Funding obtained from the Leverhulme Foundation
in February 2016 allowed the project to be integrated into the software
package of the University of Edinburgh, allowing me to devote myself to
the work full time, for an initial period of five years.
19. The idea of serial digital annotation was born as a corrective to the research
situation around 2011–14. At that time, two gigantic projects, Richard
Taylor’s Variorum Edition of Ezra Pound’s Cantos and Ronald Bush’s genetic
edition of the Pisan Cantos, started in the era of print (at the beginning of the
1980s) and conceived as books, were still unpublished. They still are, at the
moment of writing.
20. John Whittier Ferguson, Framing Pieces: Designs of the Gloss in Joyce, Woolf,
and Pound (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).
W OR KS CI T ED
Bates, Ned, ‘A Hypervortex of Ezra Pound’s Canto LXXXI’, www.uncg.edu/eng
lish/pound/canto.htm (dead weblink).
Cockram, Patricia, ‘Hypertextuality and Pound’s Fascist Aesthetic’, Paideuma
26.2–3 (Fall–Winter 1997), 151–63.
Cocola, Jim, ‘A Gazetteer of Ezra Pound’, http://users.wpi.edu/~jcocola/poundi
ana/index.html, accessed 30 January 2018.
‘Notes toward a Draft of “A Gazetteer of Ezra Pound”’, Make It New 1.4 (March
2015): 50–4, http://makeitnew.ezrapoundsociety.org/volume-i/vol-i-no-4/th
e-world-and-the-work-cocola.
Cole, William, ‘Pound’s Web: Hypertext in the Rock-Drill Cantos’, Paideuma
26.2–3 (Fall–Winter 1997), 137–50.
Emerson, Kent, ‘Database Modernism: Literary Information Media’, PhD dis-
sertation, University of Tulsa, 2016.
Ferguson, John Whittier, Framing Pieces: Designs of the Gloss in Joyce, Woolf,
and Pound (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).
Flack, Leah Culligan, Modernism and Homer: The Odysseys of H.D., James Joyce,
Osip Mandelstam, and Ezra Pound (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2015).
Grieneisen, Jeff, ‘The Ezra Pound Project: Canto 31’, State College of Florida,
http://faculty.scf.edu/GrieneJ/cantoproject/primarypoundpage.htm.
Henricksen, Line, Ambition and Anxiety: Ezra Pound’s ‘Cantos’ and Derek Walkott’s
‘Omeros’ as Twentieth-Century Epics (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007).
Kenner, Hugh, The Mechanic Muse (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988).
The Pound Era (London: Faber, 1972).
Liebregts, Peter, Ezra Pound and Neoplatonism (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson
McDonald, Gail, ‘Hypertext and the Teaching of Modernist Difficulty’, Pedagogy
2.1 (Winter 2002): 17–30.
Makin, Peter, Ezra Pound’s Cantos: A Casebook (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2006).
Pound, Ezra, ‘Cantos I, XLV, LXXII and LXXXI’, Genius, https://genius.com/
Ezra-pound-canto-i-annotated.
The Pisan Cantos, ed. with annotation by Richard Sieburth (New York: New
Directions, 2003).
Redman, Tim, ‘An Epic Is a Hypertext Containing Poetry. Eleven New
Cantos (31–41)’, in A Poem Containing History: Textual Studies in The
Cantos, ed. Lawrence Rainey, 117–50 (Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 1997).
Sawler, Trevor Craig, ‘Hypertexting High Modernism: Ezra Pound’s Pisan Cantos
as Hypertext’. PhD dissertation, University of New Brunswick, 2012.
270 roxana preda
Seguy, Robin, ‘Prolegomena to the Automated Analysis of a Bilingual Poetry
Corpus, with Particular Reference to an Annotated Edition of The Cantos of
Ezra Pound’, PhD dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 2016.
Shioji, Ursula, Ezra Pound’s Pisan Cantos and the Noh (Frankfurt: Peter Lang,
1997).
Taylor, Richard, ‘The Tragi-Comical History of the Variorum Project and
Its Ongoing Betrayal – Especially by Cambridge University Press’ (2005),
www.richard-dean-taylor.de/index.php?id=14.
Terrell, Carroll F., A Companion to The Cantos of Ezra Pound (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1993).
Afterword
‘read him’
Mark Byron
A collection of essays titled The New Ezra Pound Studies cannot help but
deploy the currency of Transatlantic modernism. Indeed the coin Pound
himself fashioned in the imperative mood, to ‘Make It New’, directs us to
chart where new avenues of inquiry are to be found, and where more
familiar terrain may enjoy renewal by virtue of newly available archival
sources, methodological advances, developments in various discourses
since Pound’s day, and different kinds of reception in a range of geogra-
phical, linguistic and cultural spheres. Each essay presents a case for
reconsidering what we think we know about Pound, but also what we
think we know about modernism, the Greek and Roman classics, Italian
Fascism, Queer discourse, post-Mao Chinese poetics, copyright law, and
United States political culture, among numerous other topics, and the way
these intersect with Pound’s own cultural production. His translations,
dramatic adaptations, operas and other musical compositions; his inter-
ventions on behalf of other poets and artists; his recuperation of lost or
forgotten poets, artists and composers; his energetic promotion of prosodic
experimentation; his music and art criticism; his attempts at political
intervention – all of these dimensions shape a formidable artistic profile
and give Pound a cultural force to which few other modernists approach,
and none surpass. Pound’s failings are as stark as his achievements are
astonishing, and any sense of scholarly renewal in Pound studies is com-
pelled to take up the ethical imperative to address all aspects of this
complex and paradoxical force of culture.
In the era of the New Modernism studies of the past two decades, Pound
studies has enjoyed a resurgence as his texts, composition methods and
biographical complexities have come under greater scrutiny. On the face of
it this state of affairs is a curious one: Pound’s politics, for example, have
always provided a big stumbling block to the dispassionate study of his
poetics, but on the other hand his formidable archive stands near the centre
of the so-called documentary turn in modernism studies. The better his
271
272 mark byron
composition processes are understood, the more able scholars are to
place Pound within the complex ecologies across which his life and work
traversed. The current state of Pound scholarship demonstrates very sig-
nificant work being done in the archives to produce new texts and editions
of his work, as well as providing new ways of thinking about the inter-
pretive strategies we might bring to his poetry as well-informed readers.
The introduction to this volume gave a very brief sketch of the abundant
new work on Pound resulting from assiduous archival research and its
careful calibration with the documents, sources and texts already circulat-
ing in the field. The replenishing force of the Pound archive is comple-
mented by advances in particular fields, such as scholarly work in English
on Chinese and Japanese poetics (historical and contemporary), early
medieval philosophy and digital scholarly methods. Just in the past few
months new primary materials as well as collections of essays on Pound
have appeared.1
As Timothy Billings’s critical edition of Cathay demonstrates, by return-
ing to Ernest Fenollosa’s notebooks in the Pound archive,2 many of the
poems in Cathay retain the historical residues of generic affiliation, form-
alism built into uses of image and metaphor, and other perennial features
of Chinese prosody. This retention is deeply inherent in Chinese poetics,
but is also evident in large part due to the scholarship of Mori and Ariga,
passed down to Pound via Fenollosa. As is often noted, Pound was only
aware in the most general way of the specific conventions and allusions at
work in the poems he drew from Fenollosa’s notebooks. Yet not only was
he correct in his intuitive grasp of a ‘sense of history’ inhering in the poetry,
a good deal of this poetical history was recorded in Mori’s lectures and cribs
provided to Fenollosa in the course of their collaboration. A wider (non-
sinological) readership can now know this because of Billings’s brilliant
edition.
As Haun Saussy perceptively points out, the choice of the volume’s title
is significant: ‘Cathay would be China desired, anticipated, or vicariously
experienced, and thus not simply China.’3 This way of seeing Pound’s
volume promotes matters of historical adaptation, poetic invention and
emulations of tone and poetic form. In Christopher Bush’s formulation:
‘Cathay might better be understood not as a translation of a set of originals,
but rather as a link in a series of compilations, glosses, and creative
rewrites.’4 This new edition of Cathay provides non-specialists with foun-
dational knowledge of Chinese poetics as well as a sense of how such a body
of knowledge was absorbed by Anglophone translators – if not repelled or
ignored – and thus shows how careful archival work, allied with expertise
Afterword 273
in cognate disciplines, still has plenty to tell us of Pound’s own poetic
practices. The example of Cathay is germane due to the fundamental role it
played in establishing a certain modernist poetics, thus shaping the dis-
cipline of modernism studies from its earliest iterations in the post-war
period. This history is counterbalanced by the role of Chinese aesthetics
in Pound studies – in my view there may be no more significant cultural
field still to explore in Pound studies and in modernism generally.
Another recent publication drawing heavily of the Pound archive is the
manuscript critical edition of The Blue Spill,5 an unfinished clue-puzzle
detective novel co-authored by Pound and Olga Rudge in 1929 or 1930 in
Rapallo – just at the moment Golden Age detective writers such as Agatha
Christie and Dorothy Sayers were being translated into Italian. At first
glance, one might wonder what such an undertaking can tell us about two
avant-garde artists choosing to write in a popular genre. Rudge and Pound
composed the novel in Italy in the aftermath of Black Friday, 1929 and the
Great Depression. Specific scenes in the novel set in Soho recall the
Imagiste and Vorticist era that was so violently interrupted by the First
World War, and the offending document, a ‘purloined letter’ or
MacGuffin at the centre of the mystery, the eponymous blue spill, bears
crucial stock information pertaining to Corradium Cylinders Ltd., an
investment concern implicating several characters and a plot device that
gives Pound the opportunity to expand on his critique of stock-market
capitalism. Contained within an unfinished typescript the plot is never
resolved, but it does signal some of the historical concerns and cultural
themes pressing upon both authors during a turbulent time.
These two examples of Cathay and The Blue Spill – ‘out of the archive’ as
it were – provide supporting material for scholarship and arguments
about Pound’s writing activities and how he came by the source material
that allowed him to pursue the agendas seen in these texts. But in the
end, Pound’s significance and influence, profound as it might be in more
general terms, rests squarely upon his poetry, and principally The Cantos.
Through all the scholarly peaks and troughs Pound’s work has endured
over the decades, the scandals of radical political association and anti-
Semitism, his poetry is simply unavoidable for any comprehension of
Anglophone poetry of the past century, and much other poetry besides
(perhaps especially Chinese poetry of the last half-century). As Basil
Bunting put it so starkly in his poem ‘On the Fly-Leaf of Pound’s Cantos’:
There are the Alps,
fools! Sit down and wait for them to crumble!6
274 mark byron
This oft-quoted homage to Pound, expressive of Bunting’s impatient awe,
only tells part of the story. As Bob Perelman points out, mountain chains
are prone to weathering and erosion: ‘the increasingly bald fact is that
without an ongoing present tense – students, teachers, critical interest – the
Alps-like Cantos would be slowly crumbling in high-density storage’.7 Like
all poems The Cantos needs its readers, its students and its scholars.
The foregoing essays provide many lines of inquiry for deeper and
broader reading of the poem, and yet further dimensions of the poem
and its contexts are still emerging. Some of the most important poetic
resources in the Pound archive are yet to be published, and a number of
projects are underway that aim to resolve this state of affairs to the greatest
possible extent. As the field of modernism studies has expanded – from
close reading of the mandarins of high modernism to middlebrow and
popular texts; from a Eurocentric and Transatlantic hegemony to sub-
altern, postcolonial and global literary formations; ‘bad’ modernisms, late
modernisms, and competing theories of modernity each inflecting the
cultural field in different ways – Pound’s role of impresario, literary editor,
advisor and confidante to many of his peers in poetry and across the arts
still registers as an index of the cultural movement at the outset of the last
century. Yet his poetry, and its crucial role in post-Mao Chinese poetry, in
Brazilian and Chilean poetry of the past thirty years, to name just these few
examples, demonstrates its continuing valency. Pound’s poetry is also set to
benefit from resurgent interest in historical poetics, and the rise of New
Formalism: these critical practices have trained scholarly attention on close
reading of poetry in ways that offer new contexts and new methods by
which to process poetic material, but that engage the kinds of reading
methods native to scholars educated in New Criticism, New Historicism,
deconstruction and other methodologies grounded in close reading
practices.
These ‘field effects’ are important, but close attention to Pound’s own
poetics, his techniques and negotiations of history, is equally so. Few poets
have taken their artistic patrimony so much to heart, to the extent that the
history of poetry comprises much of Pound’s subject matter and presents
a guiding line through the bewildering array of The Cantos. To
know Pound is to know much of literary production in the classical,
medieval, early modern, and modern West, and to receive an advanced
beginner’s guide to East Asian literary and artistic production. His influ-
ence on Anglophone poetry is a complex matter to define, since for every
poet bearing direct lines of influence from Pound there are others that react
to Pound in ways that produce entirely different poetic tropes and prosodic
Afterword 275
techniques. For a poet around whom so much mythology seems to hang,
there are manifold ways to discover his enduring influence, to find tangible
effects as though in a magnetic field.
As all who have listened to the various recordings of Pound reading his
poetry are acutely aware, his recital voice both invites imitation and
inscribes its inimitability in the aural medium. Instead, by way of conclu-
sion, I return to the written text, a text marked with verbal emphasis as the
last word, an epitaph or curtal elegy paying tribute to the enduring force of
the poet. As Pound wrote on the death of his friend T. S. Eliot, I echo in
response to Pound himself: ‘I can only repeat, but with the urgency of 50
years ago: read him’.8
Notes
1. Two recent collections are Roxana Preda, ed., Ezra Pound and the Arts
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019); and Ralph Lüfter and
Roxana Preda, eds., A Companion to Ezra Pound’s Economics (Nordhausen:
Verlag Traugott Bautz, 2019).
2. Ezra Pound, Cathay: A Critical Edition, ed. Timothy Billings (New York:
Fordham University Press, 2019).
3. Haun Saussy, ‘Foreword: The Archive of Cathay’, in Cathay: A Critical Edition,
ed. Timothy Billings (New York: Fordham University Press, 2019), xii.
4. Christopher Bush, ‘Introduction: “From the Decipherings”’, in Cathay:
A Critical Edition, ed. Timothy Billings (New York: Fordham University
Press, 2019), 5.
5. Mark Byron and Sophia Barnes, eds., Ezra Pound’s and Olga Rudge’s The Blue
Spill: A Manuscript Critical Edition (London: Bloomsbury, 2019).
6. Basil Bunting, ‘On the Fly-Leaf of Pound’s Cantos’, in Complete Poems
(New York: New Directions, 2004), 130.
7. Bob Perelman, Modernism the Morning After (Tuscaloosa: University of
Alabama Press, 2017), n. 9, 123.
8. ‘For T. S. E.’ in Selected Prose 1909–1965, ed. and intro. William Cookson
(London: Faber, 1973), 434. Pound originally had this note published in The
Sewanee Review 74.1 (Winter 1966), 89.
W OR KS CI T ED
Bunting, Basil, Complete Poems (New York: New Directions, 2004).
Bush, Christopher, ‘Introduction: “From the Decipherings”’, in Ezra Pound,
Cathay: A Critical Edition, ed. Timothy Billings, 1–13 (New York: Fordham
Byron, Mark, and Sophia Barnes, eds., Ezra Pound’s and Olga Rudge’s The Blue
Spill: A Manuscript Critical Edition (London: Bloomsbury, 2019).
276 mark byron
Lüfter, Ralph, and Roxana Preda, eds., A Companion to Ezra Pound’s Economics
(Nordhausen: Verlag Traugott Bautz, 2019).
Perelman, Bob, Modernism the Morning After (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama
Press, 2017).
Pound, Ezra, Cathay: A Critical Edition, ed. Timothy Billings (New York:
Fordham University Press, 2019).
Preda, Roxana, ed., Ezra Pound and the Arts (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press, 2019).
Saussy, Haun, ‘Foreword: The Archive of Cathay’, in Ezra Pound, Cathay:
A Critical Edition, ed. Timothy Billings, xi–xvii (New York: Fordham
Index
1922 (year), 208, 215 Antliff, Mark, and Vivien Greene, 82

Antoninus Pius, 232
Abbasid Caliphate, 183 Aphrodite, 202
abolition, 230 Aquinas, Thomas, 15, 28
abstract art, 75 Arakida Moritake, 142, 143
abstract painting, 82 architecture, 34, 72, 74, 219
Acoetes, 190, 192 archive, 1, 4, 42, 48, 77, 79, 271, 272, 273, 274
acousmatic sound, 58 Ardizzone, Maria Luisa, 31
Actaeon, 146 Ariga Nagao, 272
Adams, Henry, 234 Arikada Moritake, 144
Adams, John, 32, 216 Aristotelianism, 31, 32
Adams, John Quincy, 235 Armantrout, Rae, 112
Adorno, Theodor, 67, 76 Armstrong, Tim, 80
Aeba Kōson Arrowsmith, Rupert Richard, 79, 145
Haikairon (‘On Haikai’), 143 art gallery, 77, 78, 79
Aeneas, 199 Arthurs, Joshua, 213
Aesopian language, 227, 229, 232, 233, 235, Aston, W. G., 143, 144
236, 237 Authors’ League of America, 243, 250
aestheticism, 111 avant-garde, 208
Al-Andalus, 183 avant-garde poetics, 75, 112
Albright, Daniel, 57, 58 Averroes (Ibn Rushd), 31
Alexander the Great, 232 Avicenna (Ibn Sina), 31
Alexander, Michael, 105 Ayscough, Florence, 159
Alfarabi, 31
Alta, Seda Şen, 116 Babcock, Robert, 31
Altieri, Charles, 74 Babylon, 230
American far right politics, 3, 4, 108 Bach, Johann Sebastian, 97, 202
American Nazi Party, 236 Baechler, Lea, 44
American Publishers’ Copyright League, 250 Baghdad, 132
American Revolution, 234 school of translation, 33
annotation, 259, 260, 262, 263, 264, 265, 266 Bank of the United States, 235
Antheil, George, 57, 59, 61, 63, 64, 65, 67, 80 Bank War, 235
Ballet Mécanique, 59, 60, 62 Baraka, Amiri, 106, 109, 114, 116
Mechanisms, 59 ‘Confessions of a Former Anti-Semite’, 112
pianola, 65 ‘Hymn for Lanie Poo’, 109
Antheil, George, et al Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note, 109
Ballet Mécanique (film), 80 The Dead Lecturer, 110, 111, 114
anthology, 78 Barnes Foundation, 79
Georgian poetry, 78 Barnes, David, 75, 76, 212
Imagist poetry, 78 Barnhisel, Gregory, 75, 77
anti-Semitism, 106, 112, 196, 199, 211, 219, 227, 273 Barr, Alfred H., 75, 77
277
278 Index
Bartleby.com, 257 British Union of Fascists (BUF), 212
Bates, Ned Brooks, Preston, 230
Kybernekia, 259 Brown v. Board of Education, 228, 229, 230,
Battle of the Bulge, 46 232
Baynes, Norman H., and H. Moss, 32 Browning, Robert, 187
BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation), 11 Brunnenburg, 50
Beardsley, Aubrey, 184, 200, 202 Buchanan, James, 228, 229, 230
Beasley, Rebecca, 211 Buckley, William F., 236
Bechstein, 58 Bucknell, Brad, 58
Beckwith, Osmond, 11 Buddhism, 131, 132, 159, 162
Bedford, Agnes, 59, 63, 65, 67 Bunting, Basil, 105, 106, 273
Beijing, 133 Burne-Jones, Edward, 202
Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, 1, Bush, Christopher, 148, 272
22, 35, 43, 54, 98, 153, 239, 266 Bush, Ronald, 31, 89
Additional Ezra Pound Papers, 43 Bynner, Witter, 159
Ezra Pound Papers, 43 Byzantine studies, 28, 32
Olga Rudge Papers, 43, 44 Byzantium, 32
Bel Esprit, 215 history, 27, 33
Bell, Clive, 73 Lex Rhodia, 32
Benavente, Jacinto
1922 Nobel Prize for Literature, 208 Cairns, Huntington, 13
Benda, Julien, 76 Calcutta, 183
Benjamin, Walter, 62, 211 Cambridge School of Poetry, 113
Benson, Steve, 112 Canova da Milano, Francesco, 26
Benton, Thomas Hart, 231, 234, 235 Canzone degli Uccelli, 26
Bernstein, Charles, 41 Cantos Project, The (online), 188
bibliographic codes, 95, 109 Capella, Martianus, 3
Billings, Timothy Marriage of Philology and Mercury, 3, 31
Cathay critical edition, 272 Cardenal, Ernesto, 115
Binyon, Laurence, 79, 145 Carman, Bliss, 201
Flight of the Dragon, The, 73, 146 Carolingian Empire
Bird, Otto, 12 textual production, 27
Bird, William, 43 Carolingian studies, 28, 29, 30, 31
Black American poetics, 111 Carr, Helen, 142
Black Mountain College, 72 Carter, Huntly, 73
Black Nationalism, 111, 112 Casillo, Robert, 212
Black, Jonathan, 82 Caspian Sea, 132
Blackburn, Paul, 105 Catullus, 57
Blast, 62, 81, 82, 149 Cavalcanti, Guido, 27, 29, 30, 31, 35, 64
Blunt, Wilfred Scawen, 203 ‘Donna mi prega’, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 114
Bobbio, Norberto, 213 poetry manuscripts, 90
Bollingen Prize, 3, 11, 197 censorship, 227
Bologna, 216 Chamberlain, Basil Hall, 143, 144, 145, 148, 150
Bolshevism, 231 ‘Bashō and the Japanese Poetical Epigram’, 142
Boston, 242 Japanese Poetry (1910), 143
Bowers, Fredson, 50 Charlottesville, 233
Braddock, Jeremy, 78 China, 231
Bradshaw, David, and James Smith, 212 Chinese characters, 50, 150, 160, 163, 164
Brainard, Joe, 109 phonetic component, 162
Brancusi, Constantin, 73, 217 Pisan Cantos, 48
Brecht, Bertolt Chinese History, 167
Threepenny Opera, 63 ‘Four Barbarians’, 128
British Museum, 78, 79, 145 Ch’eng T’ang (Shang Dynasty Emperor), 1
Japanese Department, 145 Chanyu (Xiongnu chief), 130
Reading Room, 77 Cheng (Zhou Dynasty Emperor), 129, 130
Index 279
Chengzong (Yuan Dynasty Emperor), 137 Zedong, Mao, 167
Chuang Chou (Chuang Tzu, Zhu Xi, Tong-Kien-Kang-Mou, 128
philosopher), 190 Chinese literature, 167
Duke Mu of Shao (Zhou Dynasty), 130 Hong lou meng (Story of the Stone, A Dream of
frontier, 127, 128, 129 Red Mansions), 158
Amur (Heilongjiang), 132 Wu Cheng, Journey to the West, 131
General An Fiyanggu (Qing Dynasty), 133 Chinese poetry, 1, 2, 166, 169, 271, 272, 273, 274
General Li Guang (Han Dynasty), 129, 130 classical, 128, 168, 169
Great Wall, 130 Li Bai (Tang Dynasty), 129, 191
Han Dynasty, 130 Menglong (Misty) poets, 115, 168, 169
Huainanzi (Han Dynasty), 128 metonymy, 167
Jesuit missionaries (Qing Dynasty), 133 root seeking movement, 168, 169
Jurchens (Manchu), 131 Shijing, Book of Odes, 134, 135
Kang (Zhou Dynasty Emperor), 129 Wen Wang (Zhou Dynasty), 129
Kangxi (Qing Dynasty Emperor), 32, 133, Chinese written language, 165, 169
135, 137 seal script, 166
Li Mu, soldier (Spring and Autumn), 129 chorus, Greek, 17, 18
Min (Jin Dynasty Emperor), 130 Christie, Agatha, 273
Ming Dynasty, 131, 136 cinema, 67
nomadic peoples, 130 Cisneros, Antonio, 115
Di, 130 Clark, Tom, 107
Dzungar Mongols, 133 classical reception, 19, 21
Jie, 130 classical reception studies, 9, 10
Khalka Mongols, 132, 133 classical scholarship, 10, 27, 271
Manchu, 136 Clay, Henry, 233, 235
Oirat Mongols, 132 Clearfield, Andrew, 74
Ordos, 134, 135 close reading, 274
Qiang, 130 Coburn, Alvin Langdon
Qidan (Liao Dynasty), 131 ‘vortography’, 80
Turks, 130 Cockram, Patricia, 258
Xianbei, 130 Cocola, James
Xiongnu, 130 Gazetteer, 261
Oirat-Manchurian War (Qing Dynasty), 133 Cocteau, Jean, 57, 217
Qing Dynasty, 132, 136 Antigone, 208
Sacred Edict, 32, 134, 136 Coke, Edward, 237
Shang Dynasty, 1 Institutes of the Laws of England, 32
Shihuangdi (Qin Dynasty Emperor), 130 Cold War, 75, 77
Shu, Classic of History, 19 Cole, William, 258
Shujing, Book of Documents, 129, 136 collage, 74, 82, 110, 161, 264
Shunzhi (Qing Dynasty Emperor), 134 colophon, 109
Silk Road, 131 commodity, 76
Song Dynasty, 131 communism, 217, 227, 228, 231
Tai Tsong (Qing Dynasty Emperor), 134 concrete poetry, 150
Taizong (Tang Dynasty Emperor), 130 Confucian Classics, 203
Tang Dynasty, 130, 183 Confucianism, 128, 132, 134, 135, 136, 159, 160, 165,
threat of Christianity, 133 167, 169, 211, 215
Treaty of Chanyuan (Song Dynasty), 131 cheng ming (‘rectification of names’), 164
Xiongnu, 129 Confucius, 19, 59, 164, 166, 218
Xuan (Han Dynasty Emperor), 130 Four Books, 32
Xuangzang (Buddhist monk, Tang Dynasty), copyright, 259, 262, 263
131, 133 copyright law, 1, 98, 242, 243, 244, 245, 246, 247,
Xuanzong (Tang Dynasty Emperor), 147 249, 271
Yangdi (Sui Dynasty Emperor), 147 Berne Convention, 246, 250
Yuan (Han Dynasty Emperor), 131 compulsory license, 241, 242, 248
Yuan Dynasty (Mongol), 131, 136 English Act (1844), 241
280 Index
copyright law (cont.) digital edition, 262, 272
Imperial Copyright Act (1911), 241, 248 digital humanities, 260, 261, 262
international, 244 digital media, 81
International Copyright Union, 250 digitization, 2
perpetual copyright, 248 Dionysus, 187, 189, 190
piracy, 246, 247, 249 directio voluntatis, 217
protection, United States, 241, 247 Divus, Andreas, 92
reciprocal, 250 Odyssey translation, 81
US Copyright Act (1909), 242, 246, 247 Dobran, Ryan, 113
US Copyright Act (1919), 250 Dolmetsch, Arnold, 60, 62, 63, 64
US-British retrospective relief, 250 Doolittle, Hilda, ‘H.D.’, viii, 10, 105, 149, 196,
copy-text, 50 204, 267
Cornwallis, Earl Charles, 234 Dorn, Ed, 113
Corriere della sera, 46 Douglas, Stephen, 228, 229
cosmopolitanism, 182, 185, 186 Doyle, Laura, and Laura Winkiel, 182
Couchoud, Paul-Louis, 143, 144 Dreiser, Theodore, 243
‘Les haïkaï (Epigrammes poétiques du Dunn, Margaret, 67
Japon)’, 142
counterculture, 107, 108, 116 early medieval history, 27, 272
Couvreur, Séraphin East Asian art, 79
Chou King, 19 East-West Modernism, 3, 162
Cravens, Margaret, 196 Eaves, T. C. Duncan, and Ben Kimpel, 236
Creel, George, 249 Eco, Umberto, 215
Cubism, 74 economics, 110
Cummings, E. E., 106 Edwards, Henry Hudson, 200
Cunard, Nancy Einstein, Albert, 65
Negro Anthology, 60 Eisenhower, Dwight, 228
Cutting, Bronson M., 250 El Chiek, Nadia Maria, 32
Eleanor of Aquitaine, 187
d’Arezzo, Guido, 66 Eleusinian Mysteries, 147, 196
Daniel, Arnaut, 26, 35 Eleusis, 26
Dante, 13, 20, 199 Eliot, Charles, 244
Commedia, 31 Eliot, T. S., 10, 13, 104, 105, 113, 187, 215, 275
Paradiso, 30, 236 Poems, 104
Purgatorio, 213 The Waste Land, 104, 208
Daoism/Taoism, 159 Ellmann, Richard, 81
Dasenbrock, Reed Way, 74 Emerson, Kent, 261, 262
Davenport, Guy, 187, 191, 227 encyclopaedism, 32
Davie, Donald, 161 England, 185, 246
De Sumichrast, Frederick C., 244 epigraphy, 30
Debussy, Claude, 60 Eriugena, John Scottus, 28, 29, 30, 31, 35
Pelléas et Mélisande, 63 Periphyseon, 28
Decadence, 200 Estorick Collection, London, 82
deconstruction, 274 Eurocentrism, 182
Deegan, Marilyn, 51 Ewick, David, 79, 145, 146
Defenders of the American Constitution exile, 127
(DOAC), 235
deluxe editions, 90, 96 Faber and Faber, 49, 50, 88, 89
Demeter, 199 Falangism, 208
democracy, 211, 217 Fang, Achilles, 49, 89, 94
Dickey, Frances, 74 fascism, 219
Dickins, F. V., 143, 144 palingenesis, 213
digital annotated edition, 259 Federico Secondo, 33
digital culture, 258, 266 Sicilian School of, 34
Index 281
Feldman, Matthew, 212 Gourmont, Remy de, 76
Fenollosa, Ernest, 79, 128, 141, 145, 149, 150, 157, Natural Philosophy of Love, The (1903), 198, 208
158, 160, 161–5, 272 gramophone, 58, 62
Fétis, Francois-Joseph, 63 Great Britain, 231, 246
Fillmore, Millard, 229 Great Depression, 216, 273
film/cinema, 81, 82, 212 Greek tragedy, 11
Fiorentino, Francesco, 31 Greek, untranslated, 17, 18, 21
Manuale di storia della filosofia, 30 Greenberg, Clement, 75, 80
First World War/Great War, 108, 185, 208, 215, Greenwood, Emily, 9
244, 273 Greetham, D. C., 92
President’s Proclamation of Peace, 250 Grieneisen, Jeff, 259
Fisher, Margaret, 57, 64 Grieve, Thomas, 94
Fitts, Dudley, 73, 74 Griffin, Roger, 213, 219
Fitzgerald, Robert, 10 Griffith, Arthur, 110
Fleming, Rudd, xii, 10, 11, 12, 17, 22 Grosseteste, Robert
Flint, F. S., 142, 143, 144, 150 De Luce, 31
Florence, 46, 183 Guam, 148
Ford, Ford Madox, 41, 200
Forlì, 45, 46 haiku, 143
formato locho, 31 haikai, 142, 143, 145, 150
Foucault, Michel, 182 hokku, 141, 142, 143, 144, 145, 150
Fra Angelico, 184 Hakutani, Yoshinobu, 143
fragmentation, 265 Haiku and Modernist Poetics, 142
France, 185, 246 Hale, W. G., 9
Franco, Francisco, 208 Hall, Donald, 107, 236
Frank, Joseph, 74 Hamilton College, 29, 43, 44
Friedman, Susan Stanford, 182, 183, 184, 185, 189 Hanno the Carthaginian, 127
frontier, 127, 131, 132, 135, 136, 137 Hardwick, Lorna, 9
frontier theory, 1 Hardy, Thomas, 66
Frost, Robert, 105 Harmer, J. B., 142, 143
Froula, Christine, 188, 189, 191 Haroldo and Augusto de Campos
Fry, Roger, 73 Noigandres, 150
Fugitive Slave Law, 230 Harris, William J., 110, 112
Harry Ransom Center, Austin, Texas, 1
Gallagher, Kristen, 110 Harryman, Carla, 112
Gallesi, Luca, 212 Hart, Matthew, 186
Gallup, Donald, 43 Hartmann, Sadakichi, 201
‘The Ezra Pound Archive 1947–1987’, 43 Haynes, Kenneth, 42
Gaudier-Brzeska, Henri, 73, 203, 217 Hearn, Lafcadio, 143, 148
Gautier, Théophile, 104 Heidegger, Martin, 164
gender, 196, 198 Hejinian, Lyn, 94, 112
genetic analysis, 42 Helen of Troy, 187
George Allen and Unwin, 246 Hemingway, Ernest, 105
Gerbillon, Jean-François (Jesuit missionary), 132 Henderson, Alice Corbin, 146
Germany, 246 Herakles, 22, 23, 151, 156
Geryon (usura), 160 hermeneutic circle, 265
Gibraltar, 183 hermeticism, 41
Giles, Herbert, 191 Hersey, Harold, 243
Ginsberg, Allen, 106, 108, 112 Hesse, Eva, 49, 88, 93
Goble, Mark, 80 Hewlett, Maurice, 200
gold currency, 235 high modernism, 10, 274
Golden Age detective fiction, 273 Hillyer, Robert, 197
Goodwin, K. L., 105 historical materialism, 112
Google, 266 Hitler, Adolf, 218, 231
282 Index
Hogarth Press, 208 Jackson, Andrew, 231, 236
Hokusai, 145 Jacobus, Mary, 72, 74
Homer, 15, 72, 92, 93, 164, 187, 258 James, Henry, 200
homoeroticism, 201 Janequin, Clément, 26, 35, 61, 67
homophobia, 197 Le Chant des oiseaux, 26, 66
homosexuality, 204 Japan, 128, 131, 149, 227
homosociality, 202, 204 Meiji Era, 162
Horton, David, 233, 236 Toyotomi Hideyoshi, 131
Houghton Library, Harvard University, 43 Japanese film
Hound & Horn, 74 Atarashiki tsuchi (‘New Land’), 148
Hovey, Richard, 201 Japanese literature, 141, 149, 150, 151,
Huang, Yunte 272
translation of the Pisan Cantos Japanese prints (ukiyo-e), 145
(Mandarin), 115 Hokusai, 184
Hudson Review, 11, 19, 235 Jaruga, Rodolfo, 115
Hughes, Robert, 57 Jefferson, Thomas, 147, 216, 233, 234
hypertext, 82, 258, 259, 262, 266 Monticello, 234
University of Virginia, 234
ideogram, 19, 40, 89, 91, 92, 94, 108, 112, 114, 115, Jenkins, John, 61
164, 184, 192, 266 Jennings, Chelsea, 109
ideogrammic method, 95, 104, 113, 141, 150, 161, Jepson, Edgar, 200
164, 165, 258 Jerusalem, 183, 213
ideology, 41, 79, 82, 91, 93, 210 Jim Crow, 228, 229
Il Mare, 217 Joyce, James, 10, 105, 115, 200
Imagism, 81, 105, 142, 149, 157, 158, 159, 161, 168, Ulysses, 208
169, 189, 191, 273 Justinian, Byzantine Emperor, 32
import tariff, 242, 243, 244, 245, 246, 247 Corpus Juris Civilis, 28, 32
Inada Hogitarō, 145 Pandectae (Legal Digests), 32
intelletto agente, 31
intelletto possible, 31 Kaldellis, Anthony, 32
internationalism, 185, 186 Kansas-Nebraska Act (1854), 228, 229
internet, 259 Kasper, John, 109, 110, 233
Internet Archive, 266 Make It New (bookstore), 109
Islamic culture Square $ (book series), 109, 235
medieval learning, 34 white supremacists politics, 109
medieval philosophy, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32 Kennedy, George A., 161
medieval science, 34 Kenner, Hugh, 12, 49, 50, 73, 80, 146, 147, 150,
textual transmission, 27 161, 258
Italian Fascism, 4, 44, 45, 46, 48, 76, 77, 149, 208, The Pound Era, 258
209, 210, 211, 213, 214, 217, 218, 220, 230, 271 Kentucky, 232
archaeology, 213 Kiang, Kang-hu, 159
Bottai, Giuseppe, 214 Kido Shuri, 151
Codex Fori Mussolini, 219 Kilbride, Laura, 113
cultural nationalism, 211, 214, 216, 219 Kilpatrick, James J., 232, 236
fascio (symbol), 210 Kimura Shōtarō, 142
Mostra della Rivoluzione Fascista Kindellan, Michael, 42, 48, 51, 227, 237
(1932), 209 King Edward VIII, 229, 230
racism, 217 King James Bible, 202
Republic of Salò, 212 Kinoshita Tsunetarō, 149
romanità (Romanness), 213, 219 Kitasono Katué, 141, 148, 149, 150
Sarfatti, Margherita, 211 Kiuchi Toru, 142, 143
squadristi (blackshirts), 212, 214 Kodama, Sanehide, 79
Italian Futurism, 60, 73, 82, 208 Komachi, 145
Itō Michio, 148 Korea, 128, 130, 131
Iwasaki Ryōzō, 141, 149 Kōri Torahiko, 148, 149
Index 283
Kōson, 150 Mailla, Joseph-Anne-Marie Moyriac de
Kotin, Josh, 113 Histoire générale de la Chine, 128
Kovacs, George, and C.W. Marshall, 10 Make It New (journal), 115, 261
Kuanon/Guanyin, 199 Make It New (motto), 1, 2, 213, 271
kulchur, 217 Makin, Peter, 257
Kume Tamijūrō, 148 Malatesta, Sigismondo, 47, 59, 209, 215
Manchu (language), 134, 135
L’Herbier, Marcel Mandel, Tom, 112
L’Inhumaine, 67 manuscript, 40, 96, 273
Lamarr, Hedy, 65 manuscript revision, 50, 51, 88
Language Poets, 112 Mao, Douglas, 75, 76, 78, 81, 182
The Grand Piano, 112 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso, 47, 208, 211, 215
Lattimore, Richmond, 105 Marsh, Alec, 209
Laughlin, James, 13, 21, 43, 49, 50, 75, 89, 93, Marxism Leninism, 112
214, 227 Masaoka Shiki, 143, 150
Lawes, Henry, 61 Masaya Saito, 151
Lee, Tim Berners, 258 masculinity, 204
legal codes, 27 Mason-Dixon line, 229
Léger, Fernand, 80 Massachusetts, 234
Lenin, V. I., 231 Mathews, Elkin, 242
Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism Maximus the Confessor, 30
(1917), 227 McCarthy, Joseph, 231
Lenya, Lotte, 63 McConnell, Justine, 9
Leo the Wise, Byzantine Emperor McGann, Jerome J., 95
Eparch’s Book, 32 radial reading, 264
LeRoi Jones. See Baraka, Amiri McLuhan, Marshall, 80
Levi, Primo, 210 McNaughton, William, 231
Lewis, Wyndham, 73, 75, 81, 82, 105 Meacham, Harry, 232, 233, 234, 236
Li Chiang (Lijiang), 136 Medici, Lorenzo de’, 147
Library of Congress, 108, 197, 242, 247 Mediterranean refugee crisis, 114
Liebregts, Peter, 31, 257 Méliès, Georges, 68
Lilly Library, Indiana, 1, 22, 43 Le Mélomane, 67
Lincoln, Abraham, 249 Memling, Hans, 184
Lind, L. R., 10, 12 memoria, 31
linotype, 258 Mencius, 231
Lionnet, Françoise, and Shu-mei Mendelssohn, Anna, 113
Shih, 181 Merwin, W. S., 105
Little Review, 216, 243, 244 metronome, 58, 65
Little, Matthew, 31 Michaels, Walter Benn, 93, 94
Litz, A. Walton, 44 microfilm, 50
London, 111, 127, 148, 183, 198, 199, 210, 241, 242, middlebrow literature, 274
249, 250 Milan
Soho, 273 Piazza San Sepolcro, 208
Longenbach, James, 44 mimeograph, 109
Lovelace, Richard, 202 mimesis, 169
Lowell, Amy, 149, 159 Ministry of Popular Culture (Minculpop), 46
luminous detail, 184, 258 misogyny, 196, 199, 204
Luna, Joe, 114 Missouri Compromise (1820), 228
lute, 63 Modernism, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 80, 88, 96,
lyric poetry, 20 110, 158, 161, 163, 164, 166, 169, 181, 182,
183, 208, 209, 213, 214, 219, 257, 258,
MacDiarmid, Hugh, 106 271, 273
Machiavelli, Niccolò, 45, 47 Chinese, 167
Discourses, 45 New Modernism Studies, 182, 257, 271
Madison, James, 233 documentary turn, 271
284 Index
Modernism (cont.) Nicholls, Peter, 20, 237
Transatlantic, 271 Nicole, Jules, 92
transnational, 167 Niikuni Seiichi, 141, 150
modernist poetics, 3, 149, 161, 273 Niikura Toshikazu, 149
Momoda Sōji, 149 Nikoloutsos, Konstantinos, 10
Monet, Claude, 184 Nishiwaki Junzaburō, 141, 149
Mongolia, 128, 134, 135 nō (Japanese classical drama), 1, 11, 72, 141, 146,
Mongke, fourth Great Khan, 132 148, 150, 188
Monroe, Harriet, 127, 142, 146 Aoi no ue, 148
Moody, A. David, 4, 12, 13, 212 Hagoromo, 147, 150
Moore, Marianne, 41 Kagekiyo, 148
Mori Kainan, 272 Kumasaka, 148
Morocco, 213 Nishikigi, 145
Morrison, Paul, 212 Shojo, 188
Mosley, Sir Oswald, 212 Takasago, 146, 147, 148, 150
Mostra Augustea della Romanità, 78 tennin (‘heavenly being’), 147
Mostra della Rivoluzione Fascista, 78 Noguchi, Yone, 142, 143, 144, 145
motz el son, 59 ‘Hokku’, 142, 144
Mount Fuji, 147 ‘What is a Hokku Poem?’, 142
Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 59 The Pilgrimage, 144
Münch, Gerhart, 26, 27, 59, 60, 61, 66, 67 North, Michael, 74, 212, 219
Murphet, Julian, 81
Murphy, Dudley, 80 O’Hara, Frank
museum, 77, 78, 79 ‘In Memory of My Feelings’, 113
Museum of Modern Art, New York, 75, 77 Objectivism, 105
music, 91 Occitan poetry, 27
musical notation, 66 Odysseus, 81, 199
musique concrète, 58 Olson, Charles, 72, 113, 161, 258
Mussolini, Benito, 44, 47, 78, 209, 211, 212, 214, online platform, 260
216, 217, 220 Oppen, George, 80
and Giovanni Gentile, The Doctrine of Orage, A. R., 244, 245, 246, See New Age, The
Fascism, 210 Orientalism, 169, 183, 187, 190
Il Popolo d’Italia (newspaper), 209 Ortega y Gasset, José, 76
March on Rome, 208 Overholser, Dr. Winfred, 12
mussolinismo, 209 Ovid, 187, 192
The Doctrine of Fascism (1935), 217
Paichen/Baicheng (Jilin Province), 134
Nakano, Miyoko, 128 paideuma, 58, 215
Na-khi/Naxi, 136, 137, 138 Paideuma (journal), 258
2
Hăr-2la-1llü 3 k’ö (Harlallu ceremony), 137 painting, 72, 76, 80, 91, 184, 200
Dongba (religion), 136 Palermo, 34
Dongba pictogram, 136 paranoid reading, 196, 197, 204
Naples, 214 Paris, 59, 148, 183, 210, 211, 215
Nasher Museum of Art, Duke University, 82 Paterson, New Jersey, 110
Nazi Germany, 212 Patrologia Latina, 30, 32
Neoplatonism, 29, 30, 31, 32 Paul the Deacon
Nerchinsk, Russia, 132 History of the Lombards, 32
New Age, The, 58, 60, 142, 183, 185, 244 Paul, Catherine E., 77, 78, 212, 214, 216
New Criticism, 74, 75, 76, 78, 80, 108, 274 Peachy, Frederic, 9
New Directions, 43, 48, 49, 50, 88, 93, 108, Peake, Charlotte, 142
257, 262 Pearson, Norman Holmes, 93
New Formalism, 274 Pearson, Ted, 112
New Historicism, 274 pedagogy, 41, 75
New York, 109 Peggy Guggenheim Museum, Venice, 82
Newbolt, Henry, 200 Pellecchia, Diego, 148
Index 285
PennSound Archive, 257 ‘Three Cantos’, 147, 188, 189
Pereira, Thomas (Jesuit missionary), 132 ‘Totalitarian Scholarship and the New
Perelman, Bob, 40, 41, 48, 112, 274 Paideuma’, 42, 96
periplum, 127 ‘Translator’s Postscript’. See Gourmont, Remy
Perloff, Marjorie, 74, 198 de, 76, 198, 208
Perry, Paul Victor, 249 ‘Vorticism’, 141, 142, 144, 145, 146
Perspectives USA, 75 ‘What I Feel about Walt Whitman’, 127
Phillips Memorial Gallery, 79 A Draft of Cantos XXXI-XLI, 96
philology, 29, 30, 77, 89, 92, 93 A Draft of the Cantos 17–27, 96, 109, 147
piano, 61, 62 A Draft of XVI Cantos, 96, 109
pianola, 62, 63, 64, 66 A Draft of XXX Cantos, 73, 96, 218, 261
Picabia, Francis, 217 ABC of Economics, 217, 218
Picasso, Pablo ABC of Reading, 29, 72
Two Women Running on the Beach, 208 Adams Cantos, 4, 5, 24
pictograph, 162, 163, 164, 166 Antheil and the Treatise on Harmony, 60, 73
Pierce, Franklin, 228, 229, 230 Canto I, 21, 81, 93, 164, 187, 260
Pióro, Tadeusz, 115 Canto II, 81, 187, 189, 190
Pisa, 15 So-shu, 187, 188, 189, 191
Pisan DTC, 45, 47, 49, 198, 199, 200, 202, 211 Canto IV, 146, 147
Plarr, Victor, 144, 200 Canto VIII, 216
Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), 229 Canto XIII, 163
Pocket Book of Verse, The, 202 Canto XIV, 29, 108
poem including history (motto), 27, 30, 74, 168 Canto XIX, 110
Poetry (Chicago), 12, 105, 141, 243 Canto XXI, 147
Poetry Archive, 257 Canto XXVIII, 95
Poetry Foundation, 257 Canto XXIX, 147
Poetry Society of America, 197 Canto XXXI, 259
Pope Sixtus IV, 45 Canto XXXVI, 28
Porter, William N., 143 Canto XL, 127
A Year of Japanese Epigrams (1911), 144 Canto XLI, 218
post-structuralism, 112 Canto XLV, 61, 196, 197, 259, 260
Poświatowska, Halina, 115 Canto XLVI, 209
Pound, Ezra Canto XLVIII, 134
‘A Few Don’ts By an Imagiste’, 104, 144 Canto XLIX, 147, 157, 160
‘A Pact’, 127 Canto LI, 89
‘Ancient Wisdom, Rather Cosmic’, 190 Canto LIII, 129, 130
‘Cavalcanti 1910 / 1932’, 29 Canto LIV, 92, 130
‘Dolmetsch’, 62 Canto LV, 130
‘Fragment 1966’, 21 Canto LVI, 131, 132
‘Homage to Sextus Propertius’, 9 Canto LVII, 131
‘How I Began’, 141, 142 Canto LVIII, 131
‘How to Read’, 104, 113 Canto LIX, 132, 134
‘I Gather the Limbs of Osiris’, 183, 184 Canto LX, 132, 133, 135, 136, 137
‘In a Station of the Metro’, 141, 142, 143, 145, Canto LXXII, 44, 47, 260
149, 187 Cantos LXXII-LXXIII, 44
‘Itarii tsūshin’ (‘Letter from Italy’), 149 Canto LXXIII, 46
‘Noh’ or Accomplishment, 141 Canto LXXIV, 29, 47, 59, 61, 64, 199, 227
‘Patria Mia’, 127, 210, 215 Canto LXXV, 26, 61, 66, 67
‘Provincia Deserta’, 160 Canto LXXVI, 46, 47
‘Provincialism the Enemy’, 185 Canto LXXVIII, 32
‘Tariff and Copyright’, 244 Canto LXXIX, 66
‘The Constant Preaching to the Mob’, 113 Canto LXXX, 202
‘The Hellenists’, 9, 11 Canto LXXXI, 61, 203, 259, 260
‘The Serious Artist’, 107, 113, 114 Canto LXXXII, 66
‘The Teacher’s Mission’, 113 Canto LXXXIII, 204
286 Index
Pound, Ezra (cont.) Drafts & Fragments of Cantos CX-CXVI, 13, 96,
Canto LXXXV, 19, 92 107, 136, 146, 147
Canto LXXXVI, 229 Elektra, 11, 12–13, 14–21
Canto LXXXVIII, 231, 232, 234, 235, 236 Eleven New Cantos XXI-XLI, 215
Canto LXXXIX, 229, 231, 234, 235 essays in Italian, 44
Canto XC, 20, 234 Exultations, 242
Canto XCIII, 218 Ezra and Dorothy Pound: Letters in Captivity
Canto XCIV, 32 1945–1946, 44
Canto XCVI, 19, 32, 92 Ezra Pound to His Parents: Letters 1895–1929,
Canto XCVIII, 32, 135, 136 43, 44
Canto XCIX, 32, 95, 135, 136 Ezra Pound’s Poetry and Prose: Contributions to
Canto C, 227, 228, 231, 232, Periodicals, 44
236 Fenollosa notebooks, 43, 158, 160, 188, 272
Canto CI, 136, 137 Gaudier-Brzeska, 15, 94
Canto CIII, 136, 228, 229, 230, Guide to Kulchur, 4, 26, 29, 59, 71, 77, 78, 98,
235 210, 212, 217, 218, 221
Canto CIV, 92 Guido Cavalcanti Rime, 96
Canto CV, 13, 20 Hell Cantos, 107
Canto CVII, 231 How to Read, 149
Cantos CVII-CIX, 32 Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, 60, 62, 100, 111,
Canto CX, 107, 136, 137 215
Canto CXII, 136 Indiscretions, 233
Canto CXIII, 136 Italian Cantos LXXIV and LXXV, 45, 47, 48
Canto CXV, 107 Jefferson and/or Mussolini, 209, 216, 218
Canto CXVI, 90 late Cantos, 19, 231
Cantos 110–116 (Fuck You Press), 106, 107, Le Testament, 57, 58, 59, 63, 64, 65, 66, 141
108, 114 letters, general, 44
Cantos, The, 19, 20, 21, 27, 29, 30, 31, 40, 41, 42, Literary Essays, 113
44, 49, 50, 57, 67, 73, 74, 76, 77, 78, 80, Lustra, 190
81, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 105, Make It New, 29, 218
106, 107, 108, 109, 111, 112, 113, 115, 146, musicology, 65, 66
148, 157, 160, 163, 164, 165, 168, 169, 183, absolute rhythm, 58, 60, 61
188, 197, 199, 204, 218, 227, 228, 233, 234, Great Bass, 58
236, 257, 258, 259, 260, 261, 262, 263, 264, Personae, 242
265, 273, 274 Pisan Cantos, 15, 19, 29, 42, 44, 45, 47, 48, 49,
annotation, 262 50, 78, 89, 147, 157, 197, 198, 199, 200, 203,
paradiso, 147 204, 210, 231, 260
Cathay, 128, 136, 137, 157–60, 161, 163, 165, 166, genetic and critical edition, 42
167, 169, 170, 272, 273 Pisan notebooks, 43, 49
‘Lament of the Frontier Guard’, 129 political essays, 44
‘Song of the Bowmen of Shu’, 128 pre-publication documents, 42, 43, 91, 146,
‘South-folk in Cloud Country’, 129 147, 188
‘South-Folk in Cold Country’, 130 Provença, 242
Catholic Anthology, 78 radio broadcasts, 3, 44, 58, 108, 199, 216, 231
Cavalcanti (opera), 57, 63, 64, 67 Rock-Drill, 16, 32, 40, 94, 136, 150, 164, 227,
Certain Noble Plays of Japan, 141 231, 233
Chinese History Cantos LIII-LXI, 128, 129, Social Credit, 218
130, 131, 134, 136, 169 Spirit of Romance, The, 28, 29, 183, 213
Classic Anthology Defined by Confucius, The, 12 Thrones, 32, 34, 40, 135, 136, 227, 231, 237
Collis o Heliconii, 57 Visiting Card, A, 210
Confucian Odes, 157, 160, 165–7, 170 wartime activities, 44
Contributions to Periodicals, 266 What Is Money For?, 209
copyright statute, 247 Women of Trachis, The, 9, 11, 12, 13–14, 141
Des Imagistes, 78 Yongzheng (Qing Dynasty Emperor), 135
didacticism, 13, 77 Pound, Ezra, and Ernest Fenollosa
Index 287
The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for late-classical, 27
Poetry, 79, 161, 162, 189 Palazzo Venezia, 218
Pound, Ezra, and Olga Rudge Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 148, 228
The Blue Spill, 273 Roosevelt, Theodore, 242
Pound, Omar, 43, 44 Rosenthal, M. L., 109
Preda, Roxana Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 262
The Cantos Project, 262, 263, 264 Rouse, W. H. D., 10, 92
Pressman, Jessica, 80, 81 Rousselot, L’Abbé, 65
print culture, 266 royalties, 245, 248
Priscian, 30 royalty, 241
Privy Council, 241 Rozewicz, Tadeusz, 115
Project Gutenberg, 266 Rudge, Olga, 21, 26, 43, 44, 59, 60, 67, 196, 199,
propaganda, 217 218, 273
prosody, 32, 33, 34, 166 Rummel, Walter, 196
Prynne, J. H., 113, 114 Russell, Charles Edward, 249
Pseudo-Dionysius, 30 Russell, John, 249
The Celestial Hierarchy, 30 Russell, Peter, 42
Putnam, George Haven, 243, 247, 250 Russia, 132, 183, 213, 227, 245, 246
Putnam, Herbert, 247 Moscow, 228
Pythagoras, 58 Petrograd, 227
Qian, Zhaoming, 79 Saint-Amour, Paul, 62

Quinn, John, 79, 243 Sanders, Ed, 106, 107, 108, 109, 114, 116
1968: A History in Verse, 108
Rabaté, Jean-Michel, 91, 183 America: A History in Verse, 108
Rachewiltz, Mary de, 43, 96, 218 Fuck You Press, 109
racial integration, 228, 229 Fuck You/ A Magazine of the Arts, 107
schools, 233 Peace Eye (bookstore), 109
racial segregation, 228 Sangū Makoto, 149
radio, 58, 64, 66, 68 Anthology of New English Verse (1921), 149
Rainey, Lawrence, 44, 46, 78, 88, 212 Sekitoku (‘Letters’), 149
Ramazani, Jahan, 186, 189, 190 Sant’Ambrogio, Liguria, 199
Randolph, John, 231, 232, 233, 234, 235, 236 Santayana, George, 96, 201
Rankine, Claudia Sanzio, Raphael, 184
Citizen, An American Lyric, 115 Sappho, 3, 29
Rapallo, 59, 148, 199, 211, 273 Satie, Erik, 57
Ravenna, 46 Saturday Review of Literature, 197
Ray, Man, 80 Saussy, Haun, 162, 272
Reck, Michael, 90, 92 Sawler, Trevor, 260, 261, 262
Redman, Tim, 44, 259, 260, 262 Sayers, Dorothy, 273
Renan, Ernest, 31 Schafer, R. Murray, 57, 58, 59
renga, 143 Schaffer, Pierre, 58
haikai renga, 143 scholarly editing, 2, 272, 273
reparative reading, 196, 197, 204 sculpture, 72, 74, 76, 80, 82, 91, 200
Rhys, Ernest, 201 Seaboard White Citizens Council (SWCC), 233
Riding, Laura, and Robert Graves, 78 Second World War, 149, 161, 209, 211
Rimini, 46, 209 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 196, 197
Risorgimento, 215 Seferis, Giorgos, 258
Robbins, Bruce, 182, 185 Seguy, Robin, 261, 262
Roberts, David D., 211 setting copy, 49
Robinson, Kit, 112 sexuality, 196, 197, 198
Rock, Joseph F., 136 non-normative, 199, 202
Rockwell, George Lincoln, 236 Sforza, Caterina, 45, 47
Romance philology, 28, 29, 104 Sforza, Galeazzo, 45
Rome, 209, 211, 213, 219, 230 Shaheen, Mohammad, 116
288 Index
Shakespear, Dorothy, 44, 196, 199, 232, 233, 236 Pound’s Artists, 74
Shepard, William P., 29 Taylor, Richard, 259
Sherry, Vincent, 75, 76 technology, 79, 80, 81
Shillingsburg, Peter, 51, 90 and art, 80
Sicily, 33, 34 and new media, 80
Islamic heritage, 33 telegraph, 68
Norman Kingdom, 35 Tempio Malatestiano, 215
Rashidun Caliphate, 34 Ten Eyck, David, 42, 89
Siculo-Arabic poetry, 34 Terrell, Carroll F., 190, 231, 236, 259, 262
Sieburth, Richard, 199, 260, 262 Companion to The Cantos of Ezra Pound, 258,
Silliman, Ron, 112, 114 263, 265
Ketjak, 112 text as process, 42, 96
Tjanting, 112 Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), 261
Sinocentrism, 127, 128, 129, 130, 131 textual corruptions, 48, 89, 91, 94, 97
Siraganian, Lisa, 75, 76, 78, 81 textual criticism, 30, 90
Sitwell, Edith, 60 Anglo-American, 91
Façade, 208 textual estrangement, 163
slavery (United States), 228, 229, 230, 234, 235 textual gloss, 259, 260, 263, 264, 265, 272
Small, Maynard and Company, 242 Thorpe, James, 91
Social Credit, 211, 216 Thring, G. Herbert, 249, 250
Society of Authors, 249 Tibet, 128, 132, 137
sodomy, 196, 197 Lhasa, 133
Solberg, Thorvald, 247 Tiffany, Daniel, 107
Solt, John, 150 Tigullian concerts (Rapallo), 26
Songhai Empire, 183 Timms, Edward, 209
Sophocles, 9, 11, 13, 14, 16 Toledo, school of translation, 33
Sordello, 28, 187 toponym, 261
soundscape, 57, 58, 65, 68 totalitarianism, 217, 219
South Carolina, 230 translation, 17, 104
Soviet communism, 211 translation of The Cantos
St Elizabeths Hospital, Washington, D. C., 12, Karkowski, Czeslaw (Polish), 115
14, 15, 197, 214, 227, 232, 234, 236 Kostets’kyi, Ihor (Ukrainian), 115
States’ Rights, 228, 229, 230, 231, 232, 234, 235, 236 Probstein, Ian (Russian), 115
Stauder, Ellen Keck, 67 Sindolic, Vojo (Serbo-Croatian), 115
Stein, Gertrude, 112 transnationalism, 181, 182, 183, 185, 186, 187, 189,
Sternhell, Zeev, 219 191, 192
stilnovisti, 30, 33, 34, 35 treason, 197, 198, 199
Stock, Noel, 40, 227, 231 Troubadours, 30, 33, 34, 35, 59, 63
Stoicheff, Peter, 13, 107 Tucker, St. George, 232, 233, 234
Stravinsky, Igor, 57 Tungning Kingdom of Taiwan, 133
Sumner, Charles, 230 Twombly, Cy, 72, 74
Surette, Leon, 212 Tyro, 187, 190
Sutherland, Kathryn, 51
Sutherland, Keston, 106, 113, 114, 116 United States Civil War, 230, 235
‘In Memory of Your Occult Convolutions’, 113 United States Congress, 228, 230, 248, 249
Odes to TL61P, 114 United States Constitution, 229, 232, 241
Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 262 Copyright Clause, 248
Symbolism, 200 United States Government Committee on Public
Information (USCPI), 249
tanka, 142, 145 United States of America, 127, 148, 159, 210,
Tanselle, G. Thomas, 91, 92 231
Taoism, 160 United States Supreme Court, 232
Tate Britain, 82 United States Treasury Department, 246
Tate Gallery University of New Brunswick, 260
Index 289
University of North Carolina, 259 Weill, Kurt
University of Paris, 31, 33 Threepenny Opera, 63
University of Pennsylvania, 27, 28 Whistler, James McNeill, 73, 184
University of Texas at Austin, 43 Whitman, Walt, 127, 201, 202
University of Virginia, 261 ‘Song of Myself ’, 113
Unwin, George, 247 Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, 82
Unwin, Sir Stanley, 246 Wikipedia, 257, 261, 265
USSR, 231 Wilde, Oscar
usury, 106, 196, 201, 208, 209, 235 ‘Ballad of Reading Gaol’, 203
Picture of Dorian Gray, The (1890), 200
van Buren, Martin, 231, 236 Salome (1891), 200
van Rijn, Rembrandt, 184 Williams, John R., 79
Vega, Lope de, 27 Williams, William Carlos, 76, 80, 105, 110, 214,
Velasquez, Diego, 184 215, 258
Venice, 76 Paterson, 106
Venus (Greek god), 199 Woolf, Virginia
Vichy government, 211 Jacob’s Room, 208
Vidal, Piere, 146 Worcester Polytechnic Institute, 261
Vietnam War, 108 world literature, 167
Village Voice, The, 112 World Wide Web, 258
Villalón, Fernando Pérez, 115 Worringer, Wilhelm, 76
Villon, François, 57, 61, 63 Wu, Qiyao, 79
Virginia, 231, 232, 233, 234, 236
Constitution, 233 Xie, Ming, 79
Rotunda Club, Richmond, 236
Williamsburg, 234 Yamazaki Kagotarō
virtù, 30, 31, 216 Haikaishidan (‘A Discussion of Haikai’s
visual culture, 79 History’), 143
visual field, 72, 74, 75, 76, 77, 79, 82 Yang Lian, 157, 168, 169, 170
Vivaldi, Antonio, 59, 96 Yangtze River, 188
Vorticism, 15, 73, 74, 79, 81, 82, 112, 149, 273 Yeats, W. B., 104, 187, 200, 202,
VOU, 149 203
Yellow Book, The, 200
Wagner, Richard, 60, 61, 73 Yellow River, 133
Waley, Arthur, 145, 159, 166 Yolande (Isabella) of Jerusalem, 33
Walkowitz, Rebecca, 182 Young-hae Chang Heavy Industries, 81
Wanjina, 15
Warhol, Andy, 107 Zhejiang Province, 133
Warren Supreme Court, 228, 232, 233 Zinnes, Harriet, 74
Warren, Earl, 228 Zukofsky, Louis, 105, 112, 114
Watten, Barrett, 112 ‘A’, 106

(Twenty-First-Century Critical Revisions) Mark Byron - The New Ezra Pound Studies-Cambridge University Press (2019)

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T H E NE W E Z R A P O U N D ST U D I E S

This book develops key advances in Pound studies, responding to

mark byron is Associate Professor in the Department of English at

Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge.

Notes on Contributors page vii

part i pound’s texts

part iii culture and politics

anderson araujo is Associate Professor in the Department of

ABCE ABC of Economics (London: Faber, 1933)

Ezra Pound’s rallying call to ‘Make It New’ became a powerful modernist

Pound’s Elektra appears to the audience ﬁrst as a ﬁgure of a translator – she

Early Medieval Philosophy and Textuality

Pound’s inclusion of a musical score in Canto LXXV (C 470–71) asserts

Ezra Pound’s Pisan Cantos

‘Scoured and Cleansed’

What does an ‘opera of mankind’ sound like? It depends on what mankind

‘The process’ is an expression of multiple forces at once – the raw material

Figure 1 From George Méliès, Le Mélomane (1903)

casting’ (ABCR 54), as Pound wrote of Münch’s Janequin reduction, the

The Visual Field

In the introduction to her recent study Reading Cy Twombly, Mary Jacobus

That ABC of Reading can be used as a tool to highlight ‘poetry’s diasporic

Texts of The Cantos and Theories of Literature

Pound’s Exceptional ‘Materialism’

Pound and Inﬂuence

The tone of ‘Politics’ is angrier, but no less defeatist:

Pound’s Representation of the Chinese Frontiers

Frontiers in ‘The Chinese History Cantos’

Emperor Kangxi in the Pastureland

Naxi’s Pastoral Space

The image of nature-human harmony presented in this and other passages

‘A Treasure Like Nothing We Have in the Occident’

Pound’s relationship with Japanese literature can be broadly divided

Ezra Pound and Chinese Poetry

The Confucian Odes

Pound and Chinese Poetry Now

The Transnational Turn

Pound, Gender, Sexuality

Most previous discussions of Ezra Pound, gender and sexuality have

Henry Hudson Edwards was a black GI trainee who, against regulations,

The ellipses stand for ‘buggered’. Ernest Rhys, an English editor, is

This passage composes a unique history of American poetry, beginning

The committee of poets organized by Pound had lunch at Blunt’s estate

Dryad, thy peace is like water

It is a curious accident of history that 1922 marks the annus mirabilis of

Late Cantos, ‘Aesopian Language’, States’ Rights

Somehow, Pound manages to praise South Carolina Congressman Preston

We should read this as assigning Homestead and Rome to the realm of

Pound was fully aware of the difﬁculty of persuading Congress to pass

The Temple and the Scaffolding

The Cantos on the Web – a Historical Review

Re-Annotating The Cantos: The Cantos Project

Annotation, or Digital Annotation?

1922 (year), 208, 215 Antliff, Mark, and Vivien Greene, 82

Qian, Zhaoming, 79 Saint-Amour, Paul, 62

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