>From: "Michael Coyle" <[log in to unmask]>
>To: <[log in to unmask]>
>Subject: Re: "The Pound era": source?
>Date: Mon, 24 Jan 2000 09:23:30 +0300
 
>Vision*? Even here, however, I don't remember EP referring to "the Pound
>Era." If you would kindly forward this post too to the list, perhaps Leon
>Surette can put us straight. I'm pretty sure that Leon would know. In any
>case, and one really would here want to know the context of that possible
>iteration, it's not a phrase that Pound repeated. It's especially unlikely
>that he could have offered that phrase seriously in 1922, when his
>astonishment over Eliot's "The Waste Land" and Joyce's "Ulysses" brought
>work on the *Cantos* to a temporary but still significant halt.
 
In my opinion, it is precisely because of the publication of "The
Wasteland" and "Ulysses" that E.P. might have momentarily and probably
semi-facetiously have proclaimed a "Pound era."
 
We are used to thinking of Pound as an arrogant megalomaniac, which in
many ways he was, especially in the later part of his life.  Strangely
enough though, although certainly not self-deprecatory, he seemed to be
(as far as I can tell) almost modest in respect to his own poetry.  Most
of his arrogant abuse was directed toward those who disagreed with him
about the literary work of others (and, of course later, about politics
and economics).
 
I'm no Pound scholar, but as I see it if we look at Pound's body of
work in 1922, we find that although he had published a number of books,
most of them had been issued in extremely small editions.  Several of
them, including PERSONAE (the original version) and CATHAY, had been
published in editions about about 100 copies by Elkin Mathews,
primarily for sale in his own bookstore.  Of course now we make a big
deal of these books, because they are by Ezra Pound, but at the time,
Ezra Pound as we know him did not exist.  The only thing of
world-shaking significance, judged from within the context of its own
time, was CATHAY.  HOMAGE TO SEXTUS PROPERTIUS was at the time an
embarrassment, because Pound was perceived as having made a number of
serious errors in translation (which in at least a few cases he almost
certainly had).  Harriet Monroe had agreed to publish only four of
the twelve poems from PROPERTIUS in POETRY because of the sexual
explicitness (for that time) of the material.  HUGH SELWYN MAUBERLY
(published by E.P.'s friend, the poet John Rodker) was admired for its
technique by a few fellow poets, but at the time did not seem nearly as
significant as Eliot's poetry, especially THE WASTELAND.  The few
Cantos that had been published were not very successful and Pound
worried that they were overly obscure and at this point was not at all
certain that the project would be worth continuing.
 
Of course looking at books is a little misleading, because Pound's poems
gained most of their attention via publication in POETRY and THE LITTLE
REVIEW.  Still, one expects that widespread success for a poet will be
confirmed by success for his poetry in book form.
 
By 1922, Pound had definitely made his mark on the literary world, not as
a poet but as an impressario of poetry and serious literary work.  His
critical articles were very well known and very influential.  And he had
created Imagism, which people paid a lot of attention to (and took much
more seriously than Pound himself originally had), according to the usual
rule that artistic movements and schools attract more attention than
individual artists.
 
For a while, everything of any value that appeared in POETRY and THE
LITTLE REVIEW passed through Pound's hands, and because of his
friendship with Ford Madox Ford, he was also very influential within
THE ENGLISH REVIEW.  He had played a decisive role in getting ULYSSES
and Eliot's poetry published, as well as a great deal of other literary
work.  Without his influence, H.D. would never have been seen as a
serious poet, probably not even by herself, and it is arguable (or so
it seems to me) that the same is true of Eliot.  He had even been
influential in gaining recognition for Hemingway, although certainly
Hemingway needed the help much less than many of the other writers E.P.
championed.
 
And finally, his true forte at the time seemed to be that of a poetry
doctor (in the same way that certain writers in Hollywood are known as
"script doctors").  He could have rightly claimed credit as co-author
of THE WASTELAND (although it is the sort of thing he would never have
done) and he also helped Eliot shape the poems in PRUFROCK into a form
that made that volume successful (although in this case I think he
didn't do any significant amount of editing on the individual poems).
 
It seems clear that E.P. never seriously made a big deal of a "Pound
Era," but when we look back on the literary history of the first two
decades of the century and see the number of literary pies that Pound had
his finger in, we can see that the term is not inappropriate.