Leon Surette wrote (22 May):

"And, in any case, the British are much inclined to scorn and neglect of
foreigners."

As you could probably tell my last message wasn't finished. What I meant to
do was protest against these remarks. Surely every country, the USA
included, has its fair share of narrow-minded people who "scorn and neglect
foreigners", and I'm not pretending that there are no such people in
Britain. But I cannot help resenting the suggestion that Britain is
particularly afflicted by this problem.

Britain has produced a number of Poundian poets: some very explicitly, such
as Basil Bunting and Peter Russell, others acknowledging a more indirect
affinity, such as David Jones and Hugh MacDiarmid. Many other poets whose
work is less overtly comparable stylistically with Pound's have nonetheless
declared their admiration for and indebtedness to Pound's work in their
critical writing: Donald Davie, C.H. Sisson, Charles Tomlinson, Geoffrey
Hill, Michael Alexander, and Peter Robinson to name but a few. Peter
Robinson was also closely involved in the Tate Gallery exhibition "Pound's
Artists" in 1984.

Many people would agree that the two most important and influential poetry
magazines in Britain in the post-war years have been Agenda and PN Review.
Apart from Paideuma, there is surely no magazine more Poundian than Agenda.
PN Review is not particularly Poundian but along with its publisher the
Carcanet Press it has been tireless in its promotion of foreign writing,
both from the USA and elsewhere. You can verify this if necessary by going
to www.carcanet.co.uk .

So far as scholarly and biographical writing is concerned, there is of
course the copious work of Donald Davie; Carpenter's biography, and another
one by AD Moody expected off the press at any moment; there is Peter Makin's
excellent monograph on The Cantos (I think he's British - my apologies if
I'm wrong); William Cookson's Guide; and plenty of other items. Good
academic bookshops can usually be relied on to display a choice of works
like these as well as several books by "foreigners" from US university
presses.

Professor Surette gracefully acknowledges the presence of a "strong
contingent" of British scholars at the Pound conferences, and admits that
some of the have "even" written responsible books about Pound. I do not know
whether any of the people I have mentioned attend or attended such
conferences, although I suspect that most of them do not; I do not mean that
there is anything wrong with going to conferences, but that conference-goers
are not the only people who appreciate poetry, even poetry as difficult and
as appealing to specialists as Pound's. Perhaps if Professor Surette were to
look around him a little he would realise that his British colleagues on the
conference circuit are not merely pitiable exceptions to some general rule
of arrogant insularity.

In the Preface to the first collected edition of The Dream Songs (1969),
Berryman wrote: "British hospitality to foreign poetry, especially American,
makes a bright spot in a sickening world". There is an irony here, because
The Dream Songs were not published in the UK until 1990 (although they were
available in the Farrar Straus edition). Even so, that didn't stop an
English publisher from taking on John Haffenden's "Life" and "Commentary" in
the 1980s.


Richard Edwards
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