What was it about the sentimental James Whitcomb Riley that appealed to
Pound? One obvious answer: Riley was a skillful technician (the analogy
from another art would be Norman Rockwell), and Pound left the United
States in 1908, when dialect poetry was taken more seriously than it's been
taken since. Fifty years later, when Pound included Riley in _From
Confucius to Cummings_, the works of the Hoosier poet were a dead letter,
but by then (as recordings demonstrate) Pound's own speech had become a
dead language, completely cut off from the changing American idiom. The
cringe-making Old Ez persona of the letters is a survival from the Riley
era, a linguistic Piltdown Man.
 
All this is by way of asking whether anyone has read Gavin Jones's _Strange
Talk: The Politics of Dialect Literature in Gilded Age America_ (University
of California Press, 1999). I haven't, yet, but a couple of sentences in
the publisher's advertisement make me think I should, for Pound's sake. The
passage reads:
 
"Late-nineteenth-century America was crazy about dialect. . . . But dialect
was also at the heart of anxious debates about the moral degeneration of
urban life, the impact of foreign immigration, the black presence in white
society, and the female influence on masculine authority."
 
Jonathan Morse