I sense that this question may
be unanswerable, but it occurs to me that in 'A Retrospect' in Literary
Essays, Pound sets out his 'credo', suggesting again that he was
deliberately, if facetiously, setting up a new 'Poetry-as-Religion' with himself
as 'god', or at least demigod, a role he denounced later, in Canto CXVI; 'And I
am not a demigod'.
James.
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Saturday, February 12, 2000 8:26
PM
Subject: Re: "The Pound Era" (Michael
Coyle)
>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.