Re Where to Shelve Pound's Letters:
 
Among the best-selling literary works of the 1890s were the "local color"
(now more politely known as "regional") writers.  We've started to
see what we ought to about Pound's relation to Black English (even as
mediated by Joel Chandler Harris), but I rarely see any interest out there
in Pound's debts to representations of vernacular English from the South
(Chopin) or the Northeast (Jewett).  That's two female writers,  by the
way, which might provide another point of entry into discussions of
Pound and gender.
 
This is not, I think, simply a matter of eloquence in the vernacular, but
a question of the representation of the nation in and through its
languages.
 
As for Pound's wonderful Yiddish accent (admittedly a phenomenon of his
mature career), newspaper cartoons from turn of the century seem to
provide a likelier source.
 
Jonathan Gill
Columbia University