Sorry for the length of my message:

Thanks for your replies re: atonal music. I'm very surprised that being
an admirer of Stravinksy Pound never had much of an encounter with the
other half of the beast: Schoenberg. Max Ernst was also an admirer and
admired by Igor, listed to him very loudly on a record player while
building his home in America and dedicated a painting to him.

Webern's compact phrases, strength of architecture and learning, and
confident method might have been an inspiration to Pound. I know that
Webern's music wasn't often performed tho.


Two more question marks:

Did pound ever seriously discus Darwin? I haven't noticed anything, and
it almost seems like an oversight on his part. Darwin had a whole theory
of metamorphosis that might have appealed to Pound's naturalism. I do
know that Pound was sympathetic to a kind of saltationism, (that
evolution was not gradual, but happened through sudden transformations).

I'm also interested in any connections Pound might have had to
Surrealism and Dada, and where I can follow those connections up more
rigorously. I'm not expecting to discover much in terms of resonances,
but I'm just as interested in conflicts. Surrealist always find some
ancestry in Rimbaud, who Pound confusedly admired. My feeling is that
Pound can have little to do with the "systematic disorientation of all
the senses". Maybe someone can surprise me with an incisive book on the
subject. The indirect connections to Futurism through Vorticism are
obvious, but I'm more interested the Dada, Surrealist connection. Also,
Pound mentions Max Ernst in an extremely complimentary light in ABC of
Reading, something about his rendering psychological literature
obsolete. I also know that he had some contact with Picabia and that he
answered Breton and Eluard's (or maybe Aragon's) sex survey.

Is it polite for me to launch all these questions? I have many more.

-- Jesse Huisken.