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Make It New

Make It New The Ezra Pound Society Little Mag

vol I, no. 2, July 2014

CONTENTS

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EDITORIAL

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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

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CONFERENCE: The ALA – Washington DC, May 2014 Robert Kibler

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BOOK IN CONTROVERSY

Matthew Feldman. Ezra Pound’s Fascist Propaganda, 1935-1945.

Reviews by: Leon Surette Alec Marsh Greg Barnhisel

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PORTRAIT OF A SCHOLAR - RON BUSH Ezra Pound’s Pisan Cantos A Genetic And Critical Edition.

A Report of Research. Ron Bush

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A Scholar’s Kitchen. Ron Bush In Conversation. interview by Roxana Preda

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THE MUSIC COLUMN “Al poco giorno” for solo violin.

Margaret Fisher

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POETS’ CORNER John Gery, Have at you Now!

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THE WORLD IN POUND’S WORK The World of the Na-Khi Zhaoming Qian

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38 Robert Stark: Ezra Pound’s Early Verse and Lyric Tradition: A Jargoner’s Apprenticeship review by Justin Kishbaugh ARTICLES IN JOURNALS AND COLLECTIONS 42 summaries by Jared Young and Dylan Hock BOOKS OF CRITICAL INTEREST 45 Eric B. White: Transatlantic Avant-Gardes: Little Magazines and Localist Modernism. review by John Allaster REVIEWS AND SUMMARIES

PUBLICATIONS IN EZRA POUND STUDIES, 2013

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THE EZRA POUND SOCIETY LITTLE MAG

EDITORSHIP Managing editor Justin Kishbaugh Senior editors Roxana Preda Barry Ahearn Society officers: Demetres Tryphonopoulos Alec Marsh Tim Redman Ira Nadel Submissions: Please email your submissions to the editors: Justin Kishbaugh and/or Roxana Preda.

Alternatively, use the email address on our website for submissions and enquiries: info@ezrapoundsociety.org Please format your submission according to MLA7 guidelines.

Cover photo © Marianne Huntington, 2013.

Fine artist, fashion designer and independent scholar, Marianne Huntington combined her talents and love of modern literature with this painting of Ezra Pound for a special collection presented at the Poets House on October 26th, 2013 in New York City.

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EDITORIAL This issue of Make it New will have the winner of the first society article award in focus and honor his lifetime achievement in Pound studies: Professor Ron Bush. The society website features his article, “Young Willows” the latest in a long string of contributions derived from his large-scale project on the Pisan Cantos. In our little mag we have included a research report and a longish interview showing both the story of Professor Bush’s interest in Pound’s work as well as his more immediate concerns and future projects.

Our readers may take a particular interest in a controversial book published in 2013—Matthew Feldman’s Ezra Pound’s Fascist Propaganda, 1935-1945. The book brings to our attention many archive materials that have been hitherto neglected, showing Pound as a much more active and “creative” propagandist than we have known. Our little mag is publishing three new reviews on the book, thus illuminating it from three points of view.

In this way we can reach a better evaluation of what we know on the darkest part of Pound’s life and career.

The Music Column in this issue draws our attention to what is, arguably, Pound’s most beautiful instrumental melody: his piece for violin designed on the text of Dante’s “Al poco giorno.” In her article, Margaret Fisher argues the ways in which the genre of the poem (a sestina) and its prosody scheme determine the structural coordinates and the detail features of the music. Her text is innovative in the sense that it is structured as a possible template for teaching Pound’s music. This format has never been attempted before; since our little mag is now the only place where Pound’s music receives continuous attention, the article will hopefully assist our readers not only in the better understanding of Pound’s music, but also in developing methods of teaching it to our students.

In this issue we are launching a new series, which we hope to be of interest to our readers—The World in Pound’s Work. In the series we focus on places to which Pound refers in his poetry—we will show new photos and maps together with short articles on the significance of the particular place in Pound’s work. We start with a journey that Professor Zhaoming Qian has recently taken to the Na-Khi region.

Our Poet’s Corner showcases two poems from John Gery’s latest collection, Have at You Now! (February 2014). John has often shown his interest in Pound’s aesthetics, especially Imagism. His poetry improves on the concept—it is visceral, a mode of vision that entails not just the eyes, but the whole body. It is painfully sincere, holding the reader in a tight imaginary embrace.

Roxana Preda 20 July 2014

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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS: __________________

JOHN ALLASTER – PhD student at McGill’s University, Canada. John took his MA on the topic of the aesthetic of the luminous detail in Pound’s early work.

GREG BARNHISEL – Associate Professor of 20th century American literature, book history, and writing at Duquesne University Pittsburgh, PA. He is the author of James Laughlin, New Directions, and the Remaking of Ezra Pound (2005) and the forthcoming Cold War Modernists: Art, Literature, and American Diplomacy (2015).

RON BUSH – Drue Heinz Professor Emeritus of American Literature and Fellow of St. John’s College, Oxford University. He is the author of The Genesis of Ezra Pound's Cantos (1977), T.S. Eliot: A Study in Character and Style (1984) and of more than forty articles on a variety of aspects of modernism. His current project is a critical edition of Pound’s Pisan Cantos. Ron is the winner of the article prize of the society for his essay “‘Young Willows’ in Pound’s Pisan Cantos. ‘Light as the branch of Kuanon.’”

MARGARET FISHER - independent researcher, musicologist and choreographer who has published extensively on all aspects of Pound’s musical compositions and their relationship to his poetry. She is the winner of the society prize for 2003 for her book Ezra Pound's Radio Operas: The BBC Experiment 1931-1933. Her most recent publications are The Echo of Villon in Ezra Pound's Music and Poetry. Towards a Theory of Duration Rhyme and The Transparency of Ezra Pound's Great Bass (2013).

DYLAN HOCK – independent scholar, poet and novelist. He is currently shopping his debut novel, Heyoka, and his essay, “Tempus Loquendi / Tempus Tacendi: The Muzzling of Ezra Pound” is forthcoming this August in the anthology, Star Power: The Impact of Branded Celebrity.

ROBERT KIBLER – Professor of English at Minot State University. Robert wrote his dissertation on Pound and Chinese philosophy; he published several articles on Pound and Taoism, Confucianism, and on his translations from the Chinese. His current project is a translation of the "Har la Lluo k'o" ceremony as part of a book length study that will include Pound's use and understanding of Naxi culture.

JUSTIN KISHBAUGH – Assistant Professor of literature, composition and creative writing at Duquesne University. He has published articles in Imagism: Essays on Its Initiation, Impact and Influence (2013) and the Florida English special issue, “Ghosts in the Background Moving: Aldington and Imagism.” He also authored the poetry chapbook, For the Blue Flash (2012), and is the managing editor of Make it New. ALEC MARSH – Professor of American Literature at Muhlenberg College. He is the author of Ezra Pound (2011) and of Money and Modernity: Pound, Williams, and The Spirit of Jefferson (1998), which won the first Ezra Pound Prize in 1998. Marsh is also the editor of Small Boy: The Wisconsin Childhood of Homer L. Pound (2003).

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ROXANA PREDA – Associate Lecturer of American literature at the University of Edinburgh. She is the author of (Post)modern Ezra Pound (2001) and editor of Ezra Pound's Economic Correspondence, 1933-1945 (2007). She currently serves as the President of the Ezra Pound Society and is senior editor of Make It New. ZHAOMING QIAN – Professor emeritus of the University of New Orleans. Among his books we mention Orientalism and Modernism: The Legacy of China in Pound and Williams (1995) and The Modernist Response to Chinese Art: Pound, Moore, Stevens (2003). These helped inspire the 1996 Yale conference on “Modernism and the Orient” and the 2004 Cambridge conference on “Orientalism and Modernism,” respectively. Zhaoming is the editor of Ezra Pound's Chinese Friends and Modernism and the Orient (2013).

LEON SURETTE – Professor Emeritus of the University of London Ontario. In his distinguished career he published A Light from Eleusis: A Study of the Cantos of Ezra Pound, (1979), The Birth of Modernism: Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot and The Occult: (1993), I Cease Not to Yowl: Ezra Pound’s Letters to Olivia Rossetti Agresti. (Co-edited with Demetres Tryphonopoulos 1998), Pound in Purgatory: Ezra Pound’s Descent from Economic Radicalism into Anti-Semitism. (1999), Dreams of a Totalitarian Utopia: Literary Modernism and Politics (2011), and Art in the Age of the Machine (2013).

JARED YOUNG – teaches English at Capitol Hill High School. He received an MA in American literature from the University at Albany. His most recent publication can be found in the Florida English collection of critical essays, “Ghosts in the Background Moving: Aldington and Imagism” (2013).

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CONFERENCE The ALA Convention, May 21-25, Washington DC ___________________ Report by Robert Kibler Washington DC—the city where more men wear ties and women dresses than anywhere else in the U.S.—clicks its way onwards to work amid blue skies, whizzing weedwackers, whirring cars, and the aromatic mix of diesel, blooming dogwoods, and fresh cut grass. I run into an impassioned protest group accompanied by beating drums, everyone shouting “Eritrea’s sovereignty is not subject to compromise,” while homeless men and women blearily wake up from their park benches. Another man with a long beard and a sign asserts that immigrants have collectively distracted Obama from his job and have him, robot-like, under their hypnotic control. This must stop, he tells me, and I think how much he looks like John Brown. So it is business as usual in the Nation’s Capitol, though unlike most weekends, I am headed to the American Literature Association annual conference, held in the downtown Hyatt, and more pointedly, to the two afternoon sessions.

I am one of the presenters, and my comrades in the first session, entitled “Ezra Pound and Other World Cultures,” have lunch together beforehand. We share talk of jobs, kids, and modernism, later making our collective way to Congressional Rooms A and B to set up our digital projectors, iPads, and to find our Buddha calm before presenting.

Once in session, Demetres Tryphonopoulos announced Ron Bush’s “‘Young Willows’ in

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Pound’s Pisan Cantos. ‘Light as the Branch of Kuanon’” as the first winner of the “Best Article” award of the Pound society. Long-time Pound scholar Ira Nadel introduced us, then Miranda Hickman (MacGill U) spoke of Pound, H.D., and Eliot in relation to the Latin Pergilium Veneris. Chris McVey (Boston U) made the connection between Pound’s ideograms and citizenship, and I tried to carve out a space between Peck and Mitchell concerning Pound’s understanding of Naxi religious culture in the later Cantos. Wellreceived presentations, all.

I chaired the next session concerning the correspondence between Pound and Archibald MacLeish. Demetres (U of New Brunswick) and Donna Hollenberg (U of Connecticut Emerita) considered the two poets in relation to the Great War. Demetres suggested that in works written during and after the war, Pound sublimated his anger by choosing metrically percussive bits from other poets, regardless of content, wanting only the effect as a kind of statement. Hollenberg focused on MacLeish’s changing relationship to the war, one that found him early immersed in the rhetoric of honor, duty, and country, and later, one more centered on loss. Christa Fratantoro (F.S. Davis Publishers) shared letters of MacLeish seeking Pound’s approval as a poet over many years. He never seems to have gotten it, and when MacLeish finally tells Pound that he no longer values his opinion about poetry and poets, we in the audience agreed that the response seemed long overdue.

That evening, the ALA reception paused to honor long time organizer Alfred Bendixen, who moves on. Afterwards, a group of Poundians settled into a nearby French bistro for dinner. Emerging from more conversation of kids, education, and technology was the belief that all of us have the greater task before us of saving modernism and through the modernist venue, saving the world. What more appropriate conclusion could we reach after two Ezra Pound sessions and a springtime evening in the Nation’s capital?

Henri Gaudier Brezska – Heratic Head of Ezra Pound National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

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BOOK IN CONTROVERSY

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Matthew Feldman: Ezra Pound’s Fascist Propaganda, 1935-1945 Review by Leon Surette The title page identifies Matthew Feldman as “Reader in Contemporary History and Co-Director of the Centre for Fascist, Anti-fascist and Post-fascist Studies, Teesside University.” He has edited thirteen essay collections (3 still at-press at the time of publication), seven of which are concerned with Samuel Beckett, who presumably falls under the anti-fascist rubric. Ezra Pound’s Fascist Propaganda appears to be his first monograph.

Feldman belongs to the school of fascist study founded by Roger Griffin, and his definition of fascism is recognizably Griffinesque: Here is his definition in a selfquotation from his edited collection, A Fascist Century: Since it first emerged in the wake of World War One, fascism can be profitably conceptualised as a specifically modern form of secular ‘millenarianism’ constructed culturally and politically, not religiously, as a revolutionary movement centring upon the ‘renaissance’ of a given people (whether perceived nationally, ethnically, culturally, or religiously) through the total reordering of all perceivedly ‘pure’ collective energies towards a realisable utopia; an ideological core implacably hostile to democratic representation and socialist materialism, equality and individualism, in addition to any specific enemies viewed as alien or oppositional to such a programme. (xi, original emphasis) Following this citation, he quotes Griffin as (belatedly) in agreement about the “pivotal role of ‘political religion’ as a ‘secular, state religion to encourage the mass experience of national rebirth from decadence and collapse’” (xi).

To bring Ezra Pound under this definition is possible only if one ignores, or is ignorant of, all of Pound’s literary activity apart from his radio and journalistic propaganda in favour of Fascism, Nazism and anti-Semitism. Unhappily, Feldman meets that necessity. Despite his pro forma mention of several biographical studies of Pound, Feldman has no idea of the genesis of the views and beliefs that Pound embraced between his college years in New England, his poetic apprenticeship in Old England, his early cultural and literary criticism and his radicalization by Major Douglas’ Social Credit ideas during and immediately after World War I. His opening sentence in the preface declares: “It is high time to start taking Ezra Pound’s fascism seriously” (viii), falsely implying that it is a subject that has been much neglected. That he should begin in this way is odd since throughout the text Feldman is

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generous in his praise (richly deserved in my view) of Tim Redman’s 1992 study, Ezra Pound and Italian Fascism. And, of course, Redman did take Pound’s Fascism seriously—as Feldman acknowledges in the last sentence of his introduction: “this study builds upon the intellectual and methodological framework used to such powerful effect by the principal book in this area to date, Tim Redman’s 1991 Ezra Pound and Italian Fascism, which argued that “Pound’s activity on behalf of Italian [F]ascism needs to be understood historically and with a great deal of specificity” (7).

After a further 126 pages detailing Pound’s propaganda activities on behalf of the Fascist regime, Feldman concludes that “one can only concur with Redman’s summation that the period between Pearl Harbor and his indictment for treason witnessed Pound “almost exclusively engaged in the preparation of his radio speeches and in giving aid to Italian propaganda” (133). Feldman certainly provides more details about the contents of Pound’s radio fulminations than Redman did—and even more than can be found in Leonard Doob’s 1978 “Ezra Pound Speaking”: Radio Speeches of WWII, which transcribed 120 typescripts produced by the American Army’s monitoring of Pound’s broadcasts.

Feldman reproduces and comments upon a considerable number of previously unexamined texts for broadcast in the Beinecke collection—although it is not known if they were ever broadcast—and consults other files from British and American intelligence agencies.

Another principal source that Feldman cites frequently is Roxana Preda’s 2007 collection, Ezra Pound’s Economic Correspondence, 1933-40, which he justifiably describes as “outstanding.” As for scholarly commentary on Pound’s political opinions and behaviour, his coverage is rather spotty. He cites Carpenter and Wilhelm a couple of times; praises Noel Stock and cites Alec Marsh’ s recent Ezra Pound once (and thanks him in the preface). He even mentions my Dreams of a Totalitarian Utopia (2011) and Pound in Purgatory: From Economic Radicalism to Anti-Semitism (1999), but does not engage the argument of those studies. Massimo Bacigalupo’s 1980 study, The Forméd Trace: The Later Poetry of Ezra Pound is dismissed with the remark that the “neglected insights” offered by Ezra Pound’s Fascist Propaganda “were also raised, now more than three decades ago, by a leading Pound scholar named Massimo Bacigalupo, who described The Cantos as ‘among other things the sacred poem of the Nazi-Fascist millennium’” (x). However, The Formed Trace is never mentioned again, and—like my own books—does not find its way into Feldman’s bibliographic note. The most cited biography is C. David Heyman’s idiosyncratic, The Last Rower.

Generally speaking, most of the relevant Pound scholarship gets at least a mention or a footnote in Ezra Pound’s Fascist Propaganda with the notable exceptions of Robert Casillo’s The Genealogy of Demons Anti-Semitism, Fascism and the Myths of Ezra Pound (1988) and—more damagingly—“I Cease not to Yowl”: Ezra Pound’s Letters to Olivia Rossetti Agresti (1998). The latter is a collection of Pound’s letters written to a fellow Fascist, between the years 1937 and 1963. ORA, as Pound called his correspondent, although a Fascist, was not an anti-Semite, and castigated Pound for his racist attitudes. Had Feldman consulted this collection, his simplistic view of Pound’s mentality might have been modulated.

However, I suspect that exposure to a less Manichean view of human nature would not have had much effect on Feldman’s posture. His only concern is to document

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the fact of Pound’s undoubted commitment to Mussolini’s Fascism and the Axis cause during World War II, and his equally undoubted anti-Semitism. Such documentation—as he concedes—had already been undertaken years, and even decades, before he took up the cause. What then is the purpose of the one hundred and fifty or so pages of his study?

Apart from occasional swipes at identified (Carpenter 50 & 156) and unidentified (139 & 150) scholars who have scanted or denied Pound’s Fascism and/or anti-Semitism, except for recurrent mentions of Tim Redman’s accuracy and wisdom on the issue, Feldman does not engage Pound scholarship on the issues of Fascism and Anti-Semitism.

Admirable as Redman’s 1991 study is, he does not provide any account of how Pound fell into such egregious error about the merits of Fascism and Nazism, nor his moral blindness on the issues of racism and the brutality of the totalitarian states. That is an issue that I have addressed in both of the books Feldman mentions—but very likely did not read. It is also addressed—in a rather different way—by Massimo Bacigalupo, and in a still different and more accusatory way by Robert Casillo. Feldman, however, does not see it as an issue at all. He is only concerned to demonstrate that Pound embraced Fascism, Nazism and anti-Semitism – as, indeed, he did.

Unfortunately, such failings were shared by literally millions of other men and women in Europe in those years. Why should Feldman, or anyone else, be especially concerned with the moral and intellectual failings of an expatriate American living in Italy who wrote poetry? Perhaps because as a putative intellectual he ought to have known better? Other intellectuals made similar “errors”—Martin Heidegger and Paul de Man, to mention only the most notorious. My point is not that Pound’s guilt is diminished because others were just as bad, but rather that it behoves us to try to understand why intelligent and engaged men and women embraced such vicious and immoral doctrines as racism and militarism. And we should not suppose that the thirties and forties of the last century were a unique period and that such moral and intellectual failures are behind us.

The justification—such as it is—for Feldman’s choice of Pound is that he is representative of European fascists: “Even as an expatriate in Fascist Italy, Pound’s commitment to the ‘Fascist faith’ was far from idiosyncratic; it was representative” (xiii).

Accordingly, Feldman claims that “Pound’s fascist propaganda offers remarkable insight into the propagation of ideological faith by the devotee of a totalitarian political religion” (xiv). In short, Pound’s “case” is offered as representative of the typical fascist ideologue.

It would be difficult to imagine a less representative Italian Fascist than an expatriate, avant-garde and eccentric American poet.

If one is to take the content of Ezra Pound’s Fascist Propaganda, 1935-45 as an indication of the true motivation of Feldman’s choice of subject, it is not that Pound is representative of anything, but rather that Pound has left a massive documentation of his devotion to the fascist cause in typescripts of the radio broadcasts and his print journalism. However, Feldman’s examination of these sources reveals nothing more than what has been well established—Pound was for an extended period a loyal supporter of Fascism and of the Axis cause. Feldman, who restricts his study to the ten years 1935-45, ignores that such loyalty continued into the St. Elizabeth years. Nor is he concerned with Pound’s formative years in London beyond a casual (and erroneous) mention of his association with “Douglas’s exchange rate disparity” theory (16).

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Matthew Feldman: Ezra Pound’s Fascist Propaganda, 1935-1945 Review by Alec Marsh Matthew Feldman’s Pound’s Fascist Propaganda: 1935-1945 will change the way Pound is viewed. It fulfils perfectly the goals of Palgrave–Pivot for relatively short, timely, archive-based research that “changes the boundaries” of scholarly fields of study. In this case the boundaries of Pound’s political commitments to Fascism have now been shifted several more degrees to the Right. Evidently, Pound’s heroic efforts on behalf of a bad cause have a religious basis, which accounts for their persistence till near the end of his writing life.

Matthew Feldman brings a new and, as it happens, badly needed perspective to Pound and to Pound studies. Feldman is an expert on European Fascism. He is a student and collaborator of preeminent figures in the field, like Roger Griffin, having co-edited a massive five-volume study, Fascism: Critical Concepts (Routledge, 2004) with him. For Feldman, the Pound case is just that, a “case study” in Fascism. “For too long,” he argues, “Pound’s fascist activism has been …dismissed as either mad or bad, the product of political naiveté or misplaced political idealism” (2). As his most recent biographer, I am one of those Feldman refers to. Although I have worked hard to get to the bottom of Pound’s fascism and to find the worst I could find, I confess to being unprepared for what Feldman has uncovered; it appears that “Pound was a committed and significant English-language strategist and producer of fascist propaganda for nearly a decade:” 19351945 (ix).

Feldman begins his study by looking at Pound’s considerable efforts on behalf of British fascism in the years immediately before the war. They were impressive. Pound first wrote for the British-Italian Bulletin, a publication underwritten by the Fascist government specifically to influence British public opinion. During the year it was in existence, Pound appears to have composed 29 texts for the 42 issues printed, including front-page leaders.

After the cessation of the Bulletin in October 1936, Pound shifted his propaganda to the British Union of Fascists, contributing to the Fascist Quarterly, the British Union Quarterly from its inaugural issue as well as to Action—all in all, some 65 texts contributed by Pound without payment.

Feldman’s evidence is unequivocal. And most of it comes from the Beinecke rather than squirreled away in obscure archives. Bolstered by FBI and MI5 files, Feldman has discovered that Pound’s radio propaganda 1940-1945 includes not hundreds, but thousands of items, from the relatively well-known speeches collected by Doob and Mary de Rachewiltz in the 1960s to a plethora of speeches to be read by others or performed by “personae” that Pound invented, to give his radio-work variety. There are also squibs, fake pro-Axis letters and, perhaps most damning of all, letters that show Pound actively crafting his propaganda efforts to the needs of the regime. Pound was not doing his own propaganda, as Hugh Kenner claimed, but crafting his propaganda to meet the needs of the state. For those of us who have wondered how Pound supported himself during the war years when royalties and remittances were stopped from coming into Italy, the answer is that Pound was working steadily for EIAR, the Axis radio, his first steady employment

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since being fired from The Dial in the twenties. Feldman reports that “at a conservative estimate” Pound earned about 250,000 lire between 1940 and 1945 as a fascist radio propagandist, worth about $185,000 today (108).

Feldman’s empirical evidence is enough to have convicted Ezra Pound of treason had he ever been tried. If anything like the evidence that Feldman has marshalled in this relatively brief volume had been made available to the Justice Department in time for Pound’s trial in the winter of 1945-6, Pound could have said little in his defense. Julian Cornell defended Pound better than he could have known when he went for the insanity plea. Pound was certainly non compos mentis by the time he was tried, but Feldman’s research shows the poet putting all of his considerable energy and literary savvy into his broadcasts.

Their quirks, dialect and other oddities were calculated effects. Their literary content did not make the speeches literary; to the contrary, they reveal the political commitments in the literature.

Although the bulk of Pound’s Fascist Propaganda is archival and empirical, Feldman’s greatest contribution to Pound studies may be theoretical. By bringing over to our field the new consensus in Fascist Studies that fascism is a kind of secular religion concerned with cultural, national and spiritual rebirth, we can now begin to re-evaluate Pound’s “hard Right turn” of 1934-5, identified by Leon Surette as the moment when Pound became an open and inveterate anti-Semite, as a religious conversion, rather than, say, a mental collapse. Evidently precipitated by Pound’s meeting with Mussolini in January 1933, a religious motive may account for the sudden and sustained release of almost illimitable energy on behalf of the regime. It also accounts for the religious language Pound used to describe the death of his hero (“the twice crucified”) and Hitler (a Joan of Arc). In St. Elizabeths he remained “Saint Adolf” to Pound’s right wing admirers and no doubt, to the Master himself.

Feldman’s new book is a major piece of scholarship, which will change forever the way Pound’s political commitments are viewed and assessed. Pound Studies will have to readjust, as will those of us who have devoted our lives to this flawed genius, this ‘blind seer’ as David Moody called him. It’s much worse than that; it’s heart-breaking.

Matthew Feldman: Ezra Pound’s Fascist Propaganda, 1935-1945 Review by Greg Barnhisel Matthew Feldman would like us to face up to the facts: Ezra Pound was a fascist and an anti-Semite. In Ezra Pound’s Fascist Propaganda, 1935–45 (Palgrave), Feldman, a scholar of “fascist ideology and the contemporary far right” at Teesside University in north-eastern England, shovels some new manure on top of the stinking heap of Pound’s political beliefs and activities before and during World War II. By doing so, he seeks to force readers—and, more importantly, scholars—to confront just how feculent that pile really is. He seems to think that this is news.

“Pound’s fascist activism” has for too long, Feldman argues, “been dismissed as either mad or bad, the product of political naïveté or misplaced economic idealism.”

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Although he equivocates here by using the passive voice, his implication is that scholars of “Pound studies” are the apologists who downplay Pound’s fascism. In reality, though, “Pound was a committed and significant English language strategist and producer of fascist propaganda before, and during, Europe’s most destructive war” (ix) and Feldman wants to make it impossible for future scholars to ignore or minimize this fact.

Feldman’s accusations are right, up to a point. Beginning in 1948, for twenty years New Directions (Pound’s American publisher after 1939) successfully taught scholars and readers to divorce Pound’s work from his politics. Through the 1970s and 1980s, much scholarship on Pound was formalist, and the work that did touch upon his biography tended to focus most heavily on the earlier, pre-Italian years. Moreover, he was undeniably mentally ill by the time of his capture and for some years later, allowing Pound scholars to read his madness backward, to the beginning of his fascination with Fascism.

But after Tim Redman’s authoritative 1991 Ezra Pound and Italian Fascism, nobody has seriously disputed that Pound was deeply attached to Fascism and pervasively antiSemitic. For that reason Feldman’s study puzzles me. Exactly which contemporary scholars is he arguing against? Who are these blinkered “commahunters” (to use a Poundian term) or cynical apologists who want us to look past Pound’s ugly language, to ignore the man giving the fascist salute? They never appear in person in this book.

Feldman cites and quotes Redman repeatedly, but he’s certainly not taking much issue with him, whose book he rightly calls the “gold standard” on Pound and Fascism. (It remains so.)

Feldman does complain that Redman “is chained to the fallacy that Pound’s radio propaganda was somehow disconnected from the ‘battles of the real war’” (116) and that “critics have consistently marginalized Pound’s engagement with wartime developments” (118). Here lies his actual argument. Pound scholars today do not deny that he was a dedicated Fascist and anti-Semite, and that these beliefs not only colored but by the mid1930s actually drove all of his work. But, Feldman charges, Pound scholars treat his fascist involvement as a personal idiosyncrasy, possibly stemming from mental illness, but probably just the regrettable and erroneous conclusion to which his heterodox economic beliefs led him.

Pound was not, though, a fascist by accident or circumstance, Feldman forcefully counters. He was a deliberate and well-informed believer and operative. Pound was not just steeped in Fascist ideology and language (as one might expect from an impractical poet) but involved in the Fascist movement, particularly its propaganda wings, both in Italy and the U.K. Fascism and anti-Semitism were not incidental to or unfortunately resultant from his other ideas about culture; Fascism and anti-Semitism, Feldman insists, were the very core of his beliefs by the mid-1930s.

It wasn’t just talk, either; it was Action! Pound was in close communication with the British Union of Fascists, contributing frequently to the party’s newspaper (Action!) and proposing propaganda strategies to its leaders, including Oswald Mosley (who then, tellingly, started talking up Social Credit). Feldman demonstrates that Pound was deeply involved in Radio Rome, from which his infamous wartime broadcasts emanated. The common understanding of Pound’s wartime work for Minculpop—the irresistibly named propaganda arm of the Italian Fascist government—is that he was a kind of independent

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contractor who trekked to Rome periodically, recorded a number of spots over a few days, and then retreated to Rapallo.

But Feldman shows that this wasn’t true, that Pound should instead be viewed as a Minculpop official. According to materials from Pound’s papers at Yale, Pound frequently attended strategy meetings for Radio Rome and took a lead role in crafting the Italian propaganda program. Perhaps most damningly, from 1940 to 1945 EIAR, the Italian radio monopoly, paid Pound 250,000 lire—almost $185,000 in today’s dollars, a sum hardly befitting a dilettante or dabbler. Pound was, Feldman avers, not a naïve fellow-traveller but a Fascist ideologue, a staff mouthpiece for Mussolini’s government.

Using Pound’s FBI file, materials from the British National Archives’ War Office, and Pound’s papers at Yale, Feldman proves that Pound wrote and recorded far more broadcasts than the 120 reproduced in Leonard Doob’s Ezra Pound Speaking. Furthermore, many of his additional speeches, written or delivered under pseudonyms, increasingly use not just Italian Fascist but Nazi doctrine and language. Feldman shows that after he read Mein Kampf in 1942, Pound expressed enthusiasm for Hitler’s ideas about propaganda and urged his contacts at EIAR to adopt them. Provocatively, Feldman implies (although doesn’t actually state) that Pound considered becoming a propagandist for Hitler after Mussolini fell in 1943: a forged Italian passport was held for Pound at the German embassy in Rome in case he decided to decamp for Berlin to continue his work.

He didn’t, though, and Feldman concludes by recounting Pound’s continued enthusiasm for Mussolini’s rump government (the Repubblica Sociale Italiana, or RSI), headquartered in the Lago di Garda community of Salò. If Pound’s unnamed apologists characterize this period of the poet’s life as a sad and purposeless one in which he came to realize that the Fascist dream was an illusion, Feldman insists that Pound was re-energized by the new challenge and by the prospect of even closer linkages between Nazi Germany and the RSI. In a fascinating and disturbing detail, Feldman shows that Pound’s scripts for a Salò radio program called “Jerry’s Front Calling” became leaflets printed by the Germans and dropped over RSI-controlled territory.1 Relying on many underused archives, Feldman has made it impossible to believe that Pound was not a committed Fascist, dedicated to the movement not just intellectually but as a day-to-day job, or that Pound was fully devoted to, active in, and entirely cognizant of the full scope of the Fascist cause not only in Italy but also in the U.K. and later in Germany. As an addition to what we know about Pound’s beliefs and activities during one of Europe’s darkest decades, it’s well-researched, informative, and original. But Feldman’s combative and indignant tone is baffling. Apart from Redman, and to some extent Humphrey Carpenter (in whose lengthy biography of Pound Feldman finds little to praise), Feldman appears to be taking on a battalion of straw men. Very little Pound criticism and biography published in the last twenty or thirty years underplays the central importance of Fascism and anti-Semitism to Pound’s legacy and later poetry. It’s a shame

1

See in this MIN number Young’s summary of Bradshaw’s and Smith’s article “Ezra Pound, James Strachey Barnes ('The Italian Lord Haw-Haw') and Italian Fascism” for further scholarly clarification of both the passport and “Jerry’s Front Calling” issues.

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that Feldman sets his slim book up primarily as a rebuttal, because, lacking an adversary, it fails on those terms.

Ezra Pound’s Fascist Propaganda, moreover, overreaches not just in its project to rebut a ghost argument, but also in its contention that Pound was one of the most influential propagandists at Radio Rome and EIAR. Feldman grounds this case entirely on English-language sources, primarily Pound’s own papers. Pound certainly thought he was a big man in Minculpop; but he generally saw himself as a key figure in anything. It’s one thing to report Pound’s own take, but responsible scholarship demands that one check what Pound’s employers had to say about the matter. Bizarrely, Feldman cites absolutely no Italian sources on the question; gives no overview of how Minculpop, EIAR, or Radio Rome actually worked; and in effect takes Pound at his word. Would Pound inflate the importance of his own service to “the Boss”? Ya think?

Finally, the book itself reflects the shakiness of some of its arguments. It’s a sloppy product that needed another draft from the author and a better in-house copyeditor at Palgrave. The book ends abruptly, without anything suggesting a conclusion, almost as if Feldman’s deadline arrived unexpectedly. Stylistically, it’s at best undistinguished, and at times just garbled, like this paragraph on page 35: Fascism’s ‘empire of the spirit’ quickly turned corporeal following Italy’s undeclared war on Abyssinia Africa Orientale Italiana between 1935 and 1941, or Italian East Africa; now Ethiopia and parts of present-day Eritrea), in contravention of a 20-year ‘Treaty of Friendship’ signed in 1928.

That—the opening sentence of a chapter—is the worst, but by no means the only ugly or just incomprehensible sentence in the book. Numerous mistranslations and grammatical errors fuel my suspicion that Feldman has little or no Italian (and thus could not consult original sources from Minculpop) and that his editors don’t either. I was more surprised to note that Feldman missed many details—such as the fact that the 1937 collection is called the Fifth Decad (not Decade) of Cantos—that any Poundian would know.

Feldman is quite perceptive about Fascist imagery, language, and even typesetting in Pound’s correspondence, so his carelessness with or ignorance of other such matters is jarring.

Feldman’s book is part of Palgrave’s new “Pivot” series, which promises to publish shorter scholarly works—original research longer than articles but shorter than monographs. This is a welcome development with real potential as an e-publishing platform, and an exciting new model for disseminating research. However, if Palgrave is saving money by truncating the editing process, as this book evidences on every level, I’m not certain that it serves readers, the profession, or Palgrave well.

Feldman’s book makes some significant contributions to our understanding of Pound and fascism, Pound’s activities during the war years, and the relationship of modernism to fascism. His pioneering research should inspire future scholars to tell this story more fully—and to include Italian and even German sources. Unfortunately, viewed on its own merits, Feldman’s book just isn’t as good as it should have been.

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PORTRAIT OF A SCHOLAR __________________

Ron Bush

EZRA POUND’S PISAN CANTOS A GENETIC AND CRITICAL EDITION A Report of Research A number of years ago I was doing work in the Pound archive in the Beinecke Library at Yale and stumbled upon rough fragments in Italian that turned out to be a previously unsuspected Ur-version of Ezra Pound’s Pisan Cantos. As it turned out, Pound had already written the equivalent of an entire unpublished suite in Italian in the war’s closing days. However, in part because moments in the Italian suite were politically offensive in the extreme, most of the Italian drafts had never seen the light of day.

As Pound’s archives were unsealed, the full development of these unpublished Italian drafts emerged along with scattered MS materials of the Pisan Cantos themselves.

Together, these preliminary texts strongly suggested that the standard political and confessional readings of the poem had been inadequate, and that future readings would have to allow for the poem’s divergent aims and genetic fault lines. In fact, the cumulative evidence of Pound’s manuscript and typescript pages (many of which were corrected by the author differently on different copies), including the existence of gaps left by materials the publisher never received or did not entirely understand, make it clear that for fifty years readers have been responding to a text transmitted from poet to publisher in a rough and provisional form and then finished by the publisher faut de mieux—a text in many significant ways that Pound never finished.

Thanks to grants from St. John’s College and the AHRB, I was subsequently able to take on an editorial assistant (Dr. David Ten Eyck of the University of Lorraine) and to extend the scope of my genetic project to include producing a full critical text of the poem. The entire project including the critical text is now nearing completion and is contracted by OUP to be published in two (or perhaps three) volumes.

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The first volume(s), amounting now to a thousand manuscript pages, will be divided into four sections: 1) an intellectual, critical, and historical account of the poem’s gestation from the late twenties to 1945; 2) a fully annotated presentation of Pound’s Italian Ur-version of the poem as it evolved from December 1944 to April 1945, both in the original Italian and in English translation; 3) a textual and critical narrative history of the notebook composition and typescript revision of the English Pisan Cantos that Pound began to compose in the camp with his Italian drafts still ringing in his ears; and 4) a set of textually and substantively annotated facing transcriptions of Pound’s manuscripts and typescripts, reproduced toward the aim of establishing a new setting copy of the poem.

The last volume of the edition—the critical edition itself—consists of two hundred pages of introduction and tables as well as two hundred and fifty pages of a critical text that includes a full textual apparatus and accounts for every document in the line of descent of the text from the manuscript onwards.

I have presented and published pieces of this work in progress in various international venues, and these publications include more than twenty essays published since 1995 that (to quote Peter Nicholls, Henry James Professor of American Letters, NYU) “have shaped in fundamental ways the ongoing reception of Pound’s major poem.”

In 2011 David Ten Eyck and I presented an all-day workshop to the International Pound Conference in London on the last difficult cases remaining in the text of the critical edition.

There still remain, however, the last stages of the work, including what will probably amount to a year or more of tying up the loose ends of various narratives and checking and proofing the material before sending it off to OUP. There will then follow at least another year devoted to shepherding an enormously complicated TS and a text composed in two primary and four subsidiary languages (including Ancient Greek and Mandarin Chinese) through the press.

Articles derived from the project: 1. “A Critical Edition of Ezra Pound’s Pisan Cantos: Problems and Solutions.”

Textual Cultures 8.2 (forthcoming).

2. “‘Young Willows’ in the Pisan Cantos: ‘Light as the Branch of Kuanon.’”

Modernism and the Orient. Ed. Zhaoming Qian. New Orleans: UNO Press, 2013.

185-213. Print.

3. “Between Religion and Science: Ezra Pound, Scotus Erigena and the Beginnings of a Twentieth-Century Paradise.” Rivista di Letterature d'America. XXXII.141/42 (2012): 95-124. Print.

4. “La Filosofica Famiglia: Cavalcanti, Avicenna, and the ‘Form’ of Ezra Pound's Pisan Cantos.” Textual Practice 24.4 (2010): 669-705. Print.

5. “Pisa.” Ezra Pound in Context. Ed. Ira Nadel. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2010: 261-73. Print.

6. “Ezra Pound’s Fascist ‘Europa’: Toward the Pisan Cantos.” Europa! Europa? The Avant-Garde, Modernism and the Fate of a Continent. Eds. Sascha Bru et al. Berlin: De

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7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

19.

20.

21.

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Gruyter, 2009. 210-28. Print.

“Poetic Metamorphosis: Ezra Pound’s Pisan Cantos and Prison Poetry.” Rivista di Letterature d'America XXIX.126-7 (2009): 37-60. Print.

“Art Versus the Descent of the Iconoclasts: Cultural Memory in Ezra Pound’s Pisan Cantos.” Modernism/modernity 14.1 (2007): 71-95. Print.

“Pound, Emerson, and Thoreau: The Pisan Cantos and the Politics of American Pastoral.” Paideuma: Studies in American and British Modernist Poetry 34.2-3 (2005): 271-92. Print.

“The Expatriate in Extremis: Caterina Sforza, Fascism, and Ezra Pound’s Pisan Cantos.” Rivista di Letterature d'America XXV.108-9 (2005): 27-43. Print.

“The Pisan Cantos.” The Ezra Pound Encyclopedia. Eds. Stephen J. Adams and Demetres P. Tryphonopoulos. New York: Greenwood Press, 2005. 41-3. Print.

“The Pisan Cantos.” The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature. Ed. Jay Parini.

Vol. III. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. 415-18. Print.

“Confucius Erased: The Missing Ideograms in The Pisan Cantos.” Pound and China.

Ed. Zhaoming Qian. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003. 163-92.

Print.

“Towards Pisa: Ezra Pound’s Roman ‘Emperors’.” Rivista di Letterature d'America.

XXIII.98-99 (2003): 135-59. Print.

“Remaking Canto 74.” Paideuma: Studies in American and British Modernist Poetry 32.13 (2003): 157-86. Print.

“Science, Epistemology, and Literature in Ezra Pound’s Objectivist Poetics (With a Glance at The New Physics, Louis Zukofsky, Aristotle, Neural Network Theory, and Sir Philip Sidney).” Literary Imagination 4.2 (2002): 191-210.

“Late Cantos LXXII-CXVII.” The Cambridge Companion to Ezra Pound. Ed. Ira Nadel. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999. 109-138. Print. “‘Quiet, not scornful’?: the Composition of The Pisan Cantos,” in A Poem Containing History: Textual Studies in The Cantos. Ed. Lawrence Rainey. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997. 169-212. Print.

“Towards Pisa: More from the Archives about Pound's Italian Cantos,” Agenda 34.3/4 (1996/7): 89-124. Print.

“Modernism, Fascism, and the Composition of Ezra Pound's Pisan Cantos.”

Modernism/modernity 2.3 (1995): 69-87. Print.

“Excavating the Ideological Faultlines of Modernism: Editing Ezra Pound's Cantos.” Representing Modernist Texts: Editing as Interpretation. Ed. George Bornstein.

Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1991. 67-98. Print.

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A SCHOLAR ’ S KITCHEN : R ON B USH IN CONVERSATION Interview by Roxana Preda Date: 27 June 2014, after the session on large projects in Ezra Pound studies at the conference Modernism Now! in which Ron had presented his work on the critical edition of Pound’s Pisan Cantos.

Scene: at the kitchen table in Ron’s London flat, over tea and Oreos.

RP: Looking back on your academic career, how did you come to like and study Pound?

RB: I wanted to know something about the poetry my older contemporaries were writing. I was an undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania and there were no courses on contemporary poetry, or even on American modernism. Yeats and Eliot were taught, but Pound wasn’t. And so I persuaded our resident poet Daniel Hoffman to do a special reading course leading toward contemporary poetry, and we started with Pound. So that’s when I first read him. I had grown up probably about a mile and a half from Pound’s house in Philadelphia, so he was a “presence,” though one that was not much talked about, especially at Penn. When I first started reading Pound I realized that he played tennis in Cheltenham, where I played myself, and I thought “Aha, at least I know something about that!” (laughs). And I liked his irreverent attitude, I gobbled up the ABC of Reading.

Then I went to England for two years and I did not have much to do with Pound, though I had a very painful conversation with the senior tutor (Tony Camps) at my college, who turned out to be one of the world’s experts on Propertius. He didn’t tell me that, but he asked me what I liked reading, and I mentioned Pound’s Propertius.

RP: Did he explode?

RB: He said: “Hmm, tell me about it” (laughs). It was only afterwards that I discovered what he had written, and nearly died of retrospective embarrassment. In any case Pound had led me to other things that I enjoyed reading and I went back to Princeton to do a PhD. When I finished my assigned courses I had to find a thesis topic. I asked my thesis advisor Walt Litz, who was a wonderfully helpful man, if there was something involving Pound that we might do—Walt was the one who set me onto the early Cantos. He said, you know, the material is there, no one is looking at it. So I took his advice. The material WAS there, he was very sure-footed about these things, he knew what needed to be done, what could be done within a certain amount of time, he tried to match what was available to people’s interests, he was definite when you asked him a question. As I was working through the material I became interested in what Pound read, as everyone does—he leads you to the world’s great literature and when you come back to him it doesn’t matter if you think he himself is a master—he’s been your channel to the masters of the past, so you are grateful.

I published my thesis as it was more or less, and I started teaching Pound at Harvard and that was a great reinforcement because I first taught him as part of the tradition of the Odyssey. I devised a course that was three times too long and we all

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somehow laboured through it, it was the first course I ever taught and it was great fun. I still keep in contact with some of the students in that class, among whom were some very fine poets. I discovered that because of Pound’s reputation as a poet’s poet, the seminar attracted some of the best students—poets who wanted to know how Pound did it. Which was more than I knew—but I didn’t get in the way and they seemed as appreciative as I had been to have a chance to read The Cantos.

I did not expect to work on Pound again. I started a project on Eliot that became my second book. It took me a while, until after I had left Harvard, to finish that, but while I was doing it I did a few more essays on Pound—once you write on a subject, people want you to write more. I’m going to collect them at some point—the essays on major poems other than the Pisan Cantos. And while I was writing those essays and working at the Beinecke, I came across the Italian fragments, and they pointed to a bigger and bigger project that involved me with history in a central way, it involved learning Italian and going through the archives of Italian newspapers …

RP: So you found traces of him in Italian newspapers?

RB: No, I found the background to what he had written in Italian newspapers—a background that had been largely blacked out. The Corriere for example was in fascist hands till the end of the war. Rome was taken in June ’44 but Milan and even Bologna weren’t taken until ’45. So the newspapers that Pound was reading maintained a fascist perspective on the war until the very end; that was his information. The story, though, was even on its own terms very odd—if you read the Corriere, you would think that the Italians won every battle, and then always ended up farther behind their own lines!

The unpublished Italian fragments talk about the destruction caused by allied bombings, churches being blown up. Well, there is very little information about that, even in current books. I was going through the most recent material in Rome and there are conservationists who work on different things in different cities but it is very difficult to get a full compilation of what was damaged in the war. The damage was not reported immediately. The reports appeared a day or a week later, and they were filtered through censors so that the damage was diminished or aggrandized depending on what propaganda it might serve. In some cases it is very difficult to determine what actually happened.

In one case the Allies bombed Zoagli, the beach town just beyond Rapallo. The Germans had installed anti-aircraft guns along the beach to protect Genoa. And there was a railroad that ran from Genoa down the coast to Rapallo and the Allies knocked out the railroad’s trestles and the antiaircraft guns, and also destroyed a church near the beach.

And there was a Madonna in the church, I discovered, whose motto says more

or less what the Madonna says in the The ruined vault of the church of St. Martin unpublished fragments. But hardly anyone after the bombing of Zoagli in December 1943. remembered.

Ezra Pound Society Little Mag I 2 21

I had found a book in which the destruction of the church is documented, yes that was confirmed, but whether the Madonna was damaged or what had happened to it—it was just a detail and no one took the pains to record it except the church. So I went to the town historian and he didn’t know and then he went to the administrator of the church who confirmed the statue wasn’t damaged but it had to be moved—so it was very possible that Pound ran into it on the road. And there was an inscription that ended up in the Canto.

RP: And you are saying these things in the introduction!

RB: Yes, these are the kinds of things that I’ve been writing about, but I wouldn’t have predicted them when I started.

RP: I see, you have thoroughly expanded what we mean by scholarship. What is David [Ten Eyck] doing in the project? How do you split the task?

RB: We play it by ear. Unfortunately we have time available at different moments and he has a heavy teaching load. David and I together developed the editorial principles and he has done much of the heavy lifting for the critical text itself. He started well after I found the first Italian scraps, many of which were still sequestered when I stumbled across notes for them at the Beinecke.

RP: When was that?

RB: Who knows!

RP: Please! There must have been some sort of beginning to this massive undertaking.

RB: It was sometimes in the late eighties but quite honestly, I’ve forgotten.

Because I went there for other things and I happened on these. I didn’t know what they were but they seemed important. And as I kept going back for other things, more and more documents became unrestricted.

RP: Why were they restricted at all?

RB: Because Olga’s papers at the Beinecke weren’t available and catalogued until well after Pound’s had been acquired. I suspect there was some hesitation about making the Italian notes public because of their content, but that is just speculation. So I began to work on a genetic study beginning with those early fragments through the longer Italian drafts and then to when the material was revived in the camp. By then I had assembled so much material from the archive that I realized that I had enough for a critical edition of the poem, which badly needed doing. But I couldn’t do it myself: people who do these things have many assistants and big grants and I had none of that. But I did get a little money for an assistant from St. John’s College just after David had finished his dissertation on the Adams Cantos. So it seemed reasonable to expand the project. After David came on board we had to talk through what kind of edition it would be because all complex editions differ according to the history of their texts. And it took us some time to work out the procedures I was talking about today [at the conference, n.ed]. It wasn’t immediately obvious that we should go use Pound’s own typescripts as the copy text for the edition, but we finally realized that was the right thing to do. Well into the research we even had a moment of confirmation. It turned out that when Hugh Kenner was thinking about doing a “corrected edition” of the Pisan Cantos he was a visitor at the University of Virginia and he related his project to the great textual scholar Fredson Bowers. And the

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first thing Bowers said was ‘go back to the manuscripts’ because the poem’s transmission was too corrupt to start from the published text; you have to go back to Pound’s own documents. Kenner couldn’t do that, though, because the manuscripts and typescripts were then unavailable. But that’s more or less what David and I had decided to do on our own. Even then it wasn’t straightforward because rather than producing one finished master set of typescript pages Pound had incorporated different variants on the several leaves of each page. A lot of head-scratching and a lot of detail work ensued.

RP: What is your work on Eriugena and how does it relate to your project on the Pisan and to Mark Byron’s new book?2 RB: Eriugena and Avicenna (whom I have also written about) were two of Pound’s many stations on the way to the Cantos’ paradise, all of which required individual research. Pound derived what he knew about Eriugena from Francesco Fiorentino’s Manuale di Storia della Filosofia (1879-1881) but in the winter of 1939 when he went to see George Santayana in Venice, he finally located the Patrologiae edition of Eriugena in the Marciana library. We have his notebook on that occasion, recorded over two sessions. Then he went back to Rapallo and asked a friend to get him the same volume out of the Genoa public library and he made a longer set of notes. Within the space of a few weeks in other words he had raced through twelve hundred pages (double columns) of Eriugena’s Latin! What kept him going was the knowledge that Eriugena had translated (and wrote a commentary on) the Celestial Hierarchies of the so-called Pseudo-Dionysus, and that Dante drew on the translation for his Neoplatonic spheres in the Paradiso. Pound’s reading starts there, as it would! But he also goes through this enormous work The Divisions of Nature. And to go through so many pages in Latin in a few days is eye-opening. He’s looking for the terms that Cavalcanti deploys in Donna mi prega. Every time he sees ‘formato,” for instance, he makes a note of it and beside the note puts a GC in the margin—he wants to confirm his ideas about Cavalcanti’s Neoplatonic philosophy.

RP: Did Peter3 cover this terrain in his book?

RB: Of course. That’s a great book. But Peter didn’t have the space to talk about Pound’s notes, which is what Mark Byron’s book does, or to talk about the poetic drafts— Reading room at the Marciana the kernels of a paradise—that Pound inscribed Library, Venice in those notes.

2 3

Mark Byron. Ezra Pound’s Eriugena. London: Bloomsbury, 2014.

Peter Liebregts. Ezra Pound and Neoplatonism. Madison, NJ: Farleigh Dickinson, 2004.

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RP: So what Pound hopes to find in Eriugena is the Neo-platonic philosophy behind Dante’s paradise!

RB: Yes, he wants to find Dante’s source, which must be even better than Dante!

RP: Does he use it at all? What does he find in Eriugena?

RB: I talk about it in the “Between Religion and Science” article. 4 In the unpublished Italian drafts several vignettes are given the title Eriugena. Eriugena speaks with an Irish accent and refers to Dante as a wilful schoolboy who goes off to Florence and gossips while Eriugena has to keep reminding him of what’s important. But the drafts also have dark moments—they were written as the world was going to war and I think Pound uses Eriugena as a figure of the philosopher in a dark time, in a cosmopolitan court that is not going to last very long, at the apex of a tradition that will soon decline.

RP: Have you considered that he might be a type of a dangerous thinker who was allowed to be at court unmolested because people did not understand the implications of what he’s saying?

RB: Yes, certainly Pound is intrigued that Eriugena is censored after the fact, that people in his time did not understand him well enough to censor him.

RP: It is incredible how much philosophical research he did—and very arcane too.

RB: The more arcane the better!

RP: So did he write a paradise in the Pisans, or not?

RB: Yes, in so far as he was going to write a paradise. He was reluctant to call it that because he didn’t want to be seen to follow the Dantescan schema too closely. But the moment in Canto 81 when the sun rises is much more steeped in Neo-platonism than I suspected.

RP: The splendour of light!

RB: The sun doesn’t rise until the middle of the Canto 81 and when it does rise, Pound invokes Kuanon as the light dissolves the mist. The paradisal moment.

RP: So this is the present—for the future, do you have other projects running on the side?

RB: I have suspended a large project on Joyce.

RP: Is it at the beginning?

RB: I have a hundred pages written, which turned out to be an overlong introduction. I had a contract for a small book, a critical biography, but I didn’t want to write a biography as much as a book about Joyce’s presence in his work.

RP: Joyce in his fiction… so he’s not God paring his fingernails. He does not really disappear.

RB: Joyce was very aware of the dangers of pretending that a work of art is utterly self-sufficient. He knew what happened to Flaubert, who had some difficulties maintaining that illusion. So the phrase about God paring his fingernails in Portrait is more than a little ironic.

RP: So your introduction was rather about his presence in the Portrait, in Ulysses?

4

Ron Bush. “Between Religion and Science: Ezra Pound, Scotus Erigena and the Beginnings of a Twentieth-Century Paradise.” Rivista di Letterature d'America. XXXII.141/42 (2012): 95-124.

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RB: It was about his relationship with the trials and tribulations of the previous century’s modernism, starting with Flaubert, and his awareness of the unintended consequences of art for art’s sake. I published a version of it in J. M. Rabate’s Palgrave Advances in James Joyce Studies. [“Joyce’s Modernisms.” Palgrave Advances in James Joyce Studies.

Ed. Jean-Michel Rabaté. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. 10-38.]

RP: And you’d like to return to this project…

RB: I would, yes. But at a certain point I realized that there were too many details still to be attended to in the Pisans’ work; that had to be my focus, so I put the Joyce on the back burner.

RP: So this is what we will be waiting for in the first instance: the massive edition of the Pisans and your collected essays on Pound’s poetry. Thank you for this interview, Ron.

Zoagli - La Chiesa di San Martino today.

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THE MUSIC COLUMN ___________________

Margaret Fisher

AL POCO GIORNO FOR SOLO VIOLIN Dante’s poem without the words: An introduction with suggested student projects

Al poco giorno – The Poem Pound’s last and most advanced work for solo violin is based upon the rhythms, the tonal leadings of the words when spoken and the sestina structure of Dante’s Al poco giorno e al gran cerchio d’ombra [To the short day and its great arc of shadow], part of a group of poems called Rime Petrose because they are addressed to a lady assigned the epithet Petra [rock].

Poems for the Stone Lady Al poco giorno e al gran cerchio d’ombra Al poco giorno e al gran cerchio d’ombra son giunto, lasso, ed al bianchir de’ colli, quando si perde lo color ne l’erba: e ‘l mio disio però non cangia il verde, sí è barbato ne la dura petra che parla e sente come fosse donna.

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To the Short Day and Its Great Arc of Shadow (Translation by Joseph Tusiani) To the short day and its great arc of shadow, I’ve come, alas, and to the paling hills, now that all colors vanish from the grass; yet this my longing does not change its green, rooted as it is still in the hard stone 5 that speaks and hears as though it were a woman.

For full text: http://www.italianstudies.org/poetry/st2.htm In a sestina, the end words of the lines of the first sestet are repeated in a specified different order in each of the subsequent five stanzas: ABCDEF, FAEBDC, CFDABE, ECBFAD, DEACFB, BDFECA. The line end rhyme words—ombra, colli, erba, verde, petra, donna [shadow, hills, grass, green, stone, woman]—contrast the poet’s passionate devotion,

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allegorized as the verdant green grass hills, with the lady’s implacable coldness of shadow on stone. Dante scholars differ in opinion about whether a specific woman was intended, or an allegorical love such as the Church or the City of Florence. Although the “lady’s” hard heart will not admit the fervid supplications of her poet-suitor, Pound’s music focuses on a rising florid surge of emotions alternated against the rock lady’s adamant refusal to respond.

Al poco giorno – the violin composition Robert Hughes, editor of Pound’s music, has found one manuscript of Al poco giorno which is reproduced in the frontispiece to Complete Violin Works of Ezra Pound: “It is in a heavily detailed composer’s working state, but with all choices completed and evidencing a convincing finality” (Complete Violin Works 35). No evidence has surfaced that the work was performed in Pound’s lifetime, though light pencil marks indicate Olga Rudge may have played it.

Two of Pound’s earlier violin works, Sestina: Altaforte and Sestina in Homage, use the sestina for a musical scaffolding (with Sestina in Homage, no text has been identified). Al poco giorno demonstrates an entirely different approach from the earlier two works. It was most likely composed in 1932 between the completion of the Sonate Ghuidonis, related to the Cavalcanti opera, and the start of a third opera, Collis O Heliconii. The fluidity of the music profits from liberties taken for the Larghetto of the Sonate Ghuidonis and the Frottola, Pound’s penultimate violin work. Al poco giorno is a stylistically cohesive and original work, arguably Pound’s most musically accomplished piece. It can be considered part translation, with the word rhythms traduced (though not strictly) into music, and part setting of words to music, the florid patterns in this late work breaking with the composer’s earlier practice of assigning one syllable to one pitch. Pound instead assigned the individual lines of the poem to a dedicated bar of music and indicated the line numbers to which the music corresponds in each sestet in the left margin of his score.

What Pound said: Pound compared the sestina form to a “thin sheet of flame folding and infolding upon itself” (Spirit of Romance 27).

“I do think musical notation is the damndest thing to get simple facts from ever invented. Perfectly simple AFTER the fact, but impenetrable before it.” (Pound letter to Agnes Bedford, 1921 (?) in Hughes and Fisher Cavalcanti xv).

Music and Vorticism Pound honors Dante by setting his poem, just as Dante has honored Arnaut Daniel with Al poco giorno. Daniel is credited with inventing the sestina form with his poem Lo ferm voler [full text here: http://www.trobar.org/troubadours/arnaut_daniel/arnaut_daniel_09.php].

Miranda Hickman’s chapter “Vorticism” in Ezra Pound in Context targets Pound’s interest in the sestina form to show how the sestina relates to his changing perspective on

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the role of the image in poetry; this, at a time of great disaffection with Imagism as a movement. Hickman argues that Pound sought to imbue the image with energy and “prowess” (Hickman 291). The underlying concept of Vorticism, the arts movement named by Pound and announced by Wyndham Lewis in the 1914 literary journal Blast, appeared at the beginning of Pound’s essay “Vortex” (Blast 153): “The vortex is the point of maximum energy.” Hickman goes on to say that Pound found precedence for such robust poetry in the life and work of the troubadours in general, and in Arnaut Daniel and Bertran de Born specifically, poets of the sestina form, and “figures who joined extraordinary aesthetic skill with dynamic warrior prowess” (Hickman 291).

After Hickman’s description of the relations between the sestina, certain poets and Vorticism, we might consider Pound’s musical foray into the sestina form, with his use of melodicles to fuel the noun-image at the end of each line (more on this below), as an effort to resist the noun-image as a static object or concept and to create a Vorticist music.

That resistance started with Imagism in 1912, with Pound’s emphasis on musically inflected rhythms (versus rocking horse rhythms). Vorticism followed in 1914, ramping the idea of movement in music up to the generation of maximum energy: putting everything in motion around a central theme, pattern, idea, sound, shape or word. When Pound began to set François Villon’s words to music in 1920 he emphasized horizontal movement in both melody and rhythm. In 1921, he directed his attention to melopoeia where the word relations impart musical properties. He began his musical composition Sestina: Altaforte in 1924, a high-octane virtuosic piece left in rough copy and the most Vorticist of his musical works. It is built upon short musical phrases that bear a similarity to each other, asymmetric rhythms and triple- and quadruple-stops, which on the violin must be played as broken chords. These techniques lend the work a flickering quality.

With the composition of Al poco giorno in 1932, the composer solves the problem of a musical sestina by means of the “melodicle,” which moves forward, backward and in retrograde, resembling “the thin sheet of flame folding and infolding upon itself.”

The full score for Al poco giorno is published in Complete Violin Works of Ezra Pound (frontispiece and pp. 126–129). Portions of the above text are drawn from this work. All rights reserved.

Melodicles Composer Lou Harrison gave us the word melodicle to refer to “short motifs which are turned backwards and upside down to create a musical mode the piece is based on” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lou_Harrison). Melodicles are horizontal constructs as opposed to harmonic ones; they are melody and not harmony. The intervals and direction of movement in a melodicle set the pattern, rather than specific pitches or note durations. Pound’s prescient use of melodic phrases to structure a musical work, ubiquitous in his works of the 1931– 1933 period, fits well within Harrison’s definition. Chief among Pound’s melodicles in Al poco giorno is a rising group of three or four notes, their intervals generally incorporating a major or minor third and then a whole or half step. In the first sestet printed below, the first melodicle appears once in bar 1. The horizontal bracket indicates which notes belong

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to the melodicle. The same melodicle (not always the same pitches or rhythms) occurs twice in bars 2 and 4.

Example

The opening or first sestet of Pound’s setting of Dante’s sestina Al poco giorno (55 seconds) Recording: Nathan Rubin, violin, track 13, Ego scriptor cantilenae: The Music of Ezra Pound, OM 2005-2 CD ! 2003. All rights reserved. Used by permission. Purchase.

This melodicle also appears backwards, (called an “inversion”), in bars 2 and 3.

Where the original rises a third at the beginning, in an inversion it falls a third at the beginning. The same melodicle appears in “retrograde” at the end of bar 1, in the middle of bar 2 and 3. Retrograde indicates that the melodicle is written upside down; that is, if the original melodicle ends with a half or whole step, the retrograde will begin with a half or whole step. (The term “inversion” is also used in harmonic construction, but a chord structure in a first or second inversion is not relevant in this discussion of melodicles.)

Listen to the audio excerpt while following the music graphic, with attention on bar 4 (it continues onto the next line of music). This florid figure at the end of bar 4 puts the final noun of the fourth line, il verde, into action.

There is no time signature. The time is on a basis of “eighth note = eighth note always.” This gives Pound greater freedom. Whereas the Villon opera was filled with time signatures for each bar that had to be justified by the note durations inside the bar, here Pound places one entire verse line inside a bar of music and is free to assign note

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durations without having to add them up. Suggested tempo is “quarter note = 54.” This will keep the eighth notes moving with equal value to each other—all other notes are multiples of or fractions of the eighth note at this tempo. By not sticking to his usual oneword-to-one-pitch assignment, Pound embarks on something new in this work.

The music is not intended to be sung, though word assignment for the first sestet is not difficult to guess. Regarding rhythmic development, all the subsequent stanzas or sestets are unique in their horizontal rhythmic presentation. There is no attempt by Pound to relate the measure or rhythmic quantity to the previous sestet. The melodicles give the work its cohesive structure. In this piece you hear the play back and forth of the melodicles that move from triple to duple rhythms and this coheres the six sections.

Student Project: How would you assign the words to Dante’s poem to the music?

Are the melodicles related to units of verse? Dante’s word rhythms?

Want to dig deeper?

Follow Pound’s preference regarding notating rhythm and prosody: Emmanuel, Maurice, "Grèce," Encyclopédie de la Musique et Dictionnaire du Conservatoire, Albert Lavignac and Lionel de la Laurencie. Paris: Librairie Delagrave, 1921: 377–537.

Music as literary criticism Pound chose music as his favored method by which to know a work of poetry and to conserve the “live part” of that poetry of the past. His music reiterates a poem’s structure and its rhythms as well as the “the tonal leadings of the words” as they were spoken; that is, tones or pitches commonly associated with spoken words and with their groupings. These were his guiding principles for setting words to music. (Pound, “Song,” unpublished essay, YCAL 43, Box 136, Folder 5938, Beinecke Library). The violin works, as well as the first two operas, demonstrate Pound’s conclusion that music composition may function as a comparative poetics of form. Pound set to music many texts representing a diversity of poetic idioms—ballad, canzone, lay, frottola, sestina, roundel, strambotto, among others.

Student Project: Define each of these idioms. How would you create a musical structure to represent three of them?

Student Project: Given the above discussion, how would you test whether Sestina in Homage is based on a source text, as yet unnamed?

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Timeline 1296–1297 (?) - Dante writes Al poco giorno 1924 - Composition of Sestina Altaforte [Pound’s only known setting of his own words].

1924–25 (?) - Composition of Sestina in Homage.

1932, mid-August - Composition of Al poco giorno.

1983, March 28 - World premiere, Nathan Rubin, violin, Herbst Theatre, San Francisco, with Olga Rudge in attendance, produced by the Arch Ensemble for Experimental Music.

2001, March 9 - Nathan Rubin, violin, Other Minds Festival 7, Fort Mason Center.

2003 - Audio recording released: “Al poco giorno.” Ego Scriptor Cantilenae. The Music of Ezra Pound. Track 13. Nathan Rubin, violin. OtherMinds label OM 1005-2 CD. 2004 - Engraved music score with analysis/commentary by Robert Hughes: Complete Violin Works of Ezra Pound, Second Evening Art (Emeryville CA).

Source manuscript: Ezra Pound Papers, YCAL 53 Box 44 Folder 988, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

Bibliography: Alighieri, Dante. Dante’s Lyric Poems. Tr. Joseph Tusiani. Ottawa: Legas Publishing, 1999.

Durling, Robert M. and Ronald L. Martinez. Time and the Crystal. Studies in Dante's Rime Petrose. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990.

Hickman, Miranda. “Vorticism.” Ezra Pound in Context. Ed. Ira Nadel. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2010.

Hughes, Robert, ed. Complete Violin Works of Ezra Pound with engraved music scores and commentary. Emeryville CA: Second Evening Art, 2004.

Hughes, Robert, and Margaret Fisher, eds. Cavalcanti: A Perspective on the Music of Ezra Pound. Emeryville CA: Second Evening Art, 2003.

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POETS’ CORNER ____________ John Gery As the Secretary for the Ezra Pound International Conference (EPIC) and the Director of the Center for Literature at Brunnenburg, Dorf Tirol, Italy, John Gery is familiar to most Poundians. John is, however, a Research Professor of English and Seraphia D. Leyda Teaching Fellow at the University of New Orleans. His books of poetry include, among others, Charlemagne: A Song of Gestures (1983), The Enemies of Leisure (1995), American Ghost: Selected Poems (1999), Davenport's Version (2003), A Gallery of Ghosts (2008), and Lure (2012). We are proud to offer two poems from John’s recent collection, Have at You Now! (2014).

We reproduce these poems by permission.

Grief offers no comparisons and teaches no lessons.

It sits across from you in this dark room or passes by on the street, and if you should lean toward it or attempt to exchange a word or two, slowly it will maneuver out of your way, its back turned as though it hasn’t noticed you. You try but can never pick it out in a crowd down at the station house, although someone you hardly know, maybe met only once, keeps coming into your mind, causing you to question why you seem so unlike yourself, like nothing else you can remember: You forget to seek relief in the usual ways, a glass of water or evening light. Even stranger, you imagine returning from an errand or brief sleep, only to find grief in a new hat parked on your doorstep with a basket of fresh figs! It doesn’t matter, really, that it has a name, too,

that can be spelled out on a sheet of paper, then erased, as haply as I, the one typing this meek escape.

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Miracoli She counted the steps to the chancel, then slid to one side, maybe to hide, maybe to emerge from the stream of those who’d climbed before and after, away from the gilded red runner newly draped there and the sign, “No visitors beyond here.”

Her fair hair, fallen to her shoulders, in the off-light from the rafters, grew paler than heaven. No one knew what language two worshippers spoke in one pew while the others, like spry flowers in neat rows, threw glances at the railings either side of the stairs, the ivory-faced sirens beneath them abruptly aglow, and above them the small figure flecked by the sky.

Before we withdrew, the scarf over her shoulders, blue and red, slipped, though not indecorously, exposing the delicate line of her neck. Only whispers, of an undecipherable nature, broke from the nave, cool as a cave, stark in spite of its speckled design.

Outside in the glimmer of day, after another moment, she mentioned not the carvings we had entered to see, nor the rose swirl in the green-gray marble I treasure, but the unearthly music that had arisen from the choir, no choir present, a music she must have suddenly imagined, flooding that space where little air escapes: It was silence I had sought, where she had found, among the quiet parishioners, a fray of song.

I, who like to sing, pass on this memory, sprung like a shout of sprigs in spring, from one now gone.

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THE WORLD IN POUND’S WORK _________ The World of the Na-Khi

by Zhaoming Qian

Lijiang Today A grant from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences has enabled me to travel to Lijiang (Li Chiang) in southwest China, the earthly paradise in Pound’s final Cantos.

“Canto 112” has been found to precisely describe the natural beauty of the Lung Wang’s pool (Jade Dragon God pool), now known as the Black Dragon pool, at the foot of Hsiang Shan or the Elephant Hill: By the pomegranate water, in the clear air over Li Chiang The firm voice amid pine wood, many springs are at the foot of Hsiang Shan By the temple pool, Lung Wang's the clear discourse as Jade stream

玉 Yu 河 ho

4

2

(CXII/804)

Hsiang Shan or Xiang Shan is indeed in the shape of an elephant.

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Photos by May Wang Nowhere in China is the air so blue or the water so green, vividly reflecting the trees, the bushes, the pavilions, and the hill. Half a century has passed since Pound imagined Lijiang as an earthly paradise in southwest China, and yet, amazingly, the air over Lijiang remains as limpid and the water that runs through it remains as translucent.

The Lung Wang’s Pool or the Black Dragon Pool at the northern outskirts of the Lijiang Old Town, a World Heritage Site, is now a public park attracting large crowds of tourists all the year round.

Photo by Zhaoming Qian

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As a plaque at the entrance indicates, the pool “established in the second year of the Qianlong Emperor Qing dynasty (1737)” is “the water-head of the water system in Lijiang Old Town, a World Cultural Heritage Site.” In spring, “it wells up with water as clear as crystal and contains the pearl of all waterfalls.”

Standing by the pool one can see behind the Elephant Hill (as from Photo #2) the Jade Dragon Snow Range of Canto 101: With the sun and moon on her shoulders, the star-discs sewn on her coat at Li Chiang, the snow range, a wide meadow (CI/746) Where did Pound learn that a Naxi (Na-khi) woman wore a sheepskin cape with seven round discs representing the Pleiades cluster? In Rock’s The Ancient Na-Khi Kingdom in Southwest China, there is a photograph of three Naxi women, one of them “with the sun and moon on her shoulders / the star-discs sewn on her coat.” Its caption offers no clue whatsoever to the large discs on her shoulders as the sun and moon or the smaller discs on her back as stars.

Amazingly, Naxi women still wear costumes with seven “star-discs,” expressive of their desire to be one with nature.

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Photos by Zhaoming Qian A close reading of the text reveals “Canto CXI” as a poem representing Pound’s visualized ecocriticism. Here the poet not only admires the natural and environmental beauty of an earthly paradise, but also expresses his views on the prerequisite for the ultimate realization of harmony between humanity and nature. Lijiang, 2400-5596 meters above the sea, is claimed to be closer to the sky than most other places in the world. The Naxi language, a living pictographic language, is claimed to be closer to nature than most other languages.

Surprisingly, “Canto CXII’s” last three lines involve Naxi both pictographically and phonetically. The Naxi word for “fate’s tray” is depicted as a sieve and pronounced mu. The Naxi word for the moon is depicted as a crescent moon and pronounced lei. So there is near rhyme across English and Naxi (“lei” for the moon with “fate’s tray”) as well as alliteration (“luna lei”) across Latin and Naxi. For Pound, poetic language should be “charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree” (LE 3); and a poet should “fill his mind with the finest cadences he can discover, preferably in a foreign language” (5). By rhyming across Latin and Naxi he seems to have brought together Venice, the earthly paradise in early Cantos, and Lijiang, the paradise in late Cantos.

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Try to imagine Pound’s amazement at finding a living pictographic language in the last decade of his life. The Naxi pictographs were at the brink of extinction during and shortly after China’s “Cultural Revolution” of 1966-1976 when they were rescued by the Lijiang local government by requiring that they be taught along with Chinese at all primary schools in the region. Those who plan to visit Lijiang should also go to the Beisha Mural of Naxi Pictographs (created in the 15th-17th centuries) at the foot of the Jade Dragon Snow Mountain.

Photo by Zhaoming Qian As is shown in the photo taken at Beisha, the four pictographs above respectively represent chain bridge, hunter, love, and beat grain. And the five pictographs below signify to hunt, to go fishing, to be born, to mount, and to lay bamboo spikes.

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R EV IEW S

AN D

S UM M ARIES

_________________ BOOKS Robert Stark. Ezra Pound’s Early Verse and Lyric Tradition: A Jargoner’s Apprenticeship. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2012. _____________ Review by Justin Kishbaugh

In his book, Ezra Pound’s Early Verse and Lyric Tradition: A Jargoner’s Apprenticeship, Robert Stark traces Pound’s developmental use of specialized and deliberately opaque poetic vocabularies that utilize their aurality and linguistic heterogeneity to defamiliarize and, thereby, create direct and authentic relationships with their subjects. To accomplish that task, Stark begins by offering a dichotomous but not mutually exclusive definition of “jargon.” He writes: The word [“jargon”] originally meant ‘birdsong’ and was not thought of as meaningless gibberish at all, but as a powerful and eloquent natural language bespeaking the disposition of the gods and proscribing, therefore, the lives of mortals. Subsequently, the significance prized by augurs and poets came to be disregarded, and the word came simply to designate ‘the inarticulate utterance of birds’.” (15) Due to that evolution of meaning, “jargon” can now refer to “poetic devices that, by virtue of their musical qualities, resemble birdsong,” “‘unintelligent, meaningless talk,’” “language deemed ‘barbarous, rude or debased’ which is usually foreign and is often of hybrid or polyglot form,” or “‘a conventional method of writing or conversing by means of symbols otherwise meaningless’” (15). Apart from its appendix, the remainder of Stark’s book braids together several illustrations of Pound employing those various types of jargon as he progresses from his early work into his mature style. Among the pieces discussed are “Hilda’s Book,” “The Seafarer,” Pound’s translations of Arnaut Daniel, “The River Merchant’s Wife: A Letter,” and “Canto LXXV.” Despite the many applications of “jargon,” Stark seems eager to emphasize its original etymological connection to birdsong and Pound’s expression of it through the sonic or “melopoeic” attributes of his verse. Four epigrams appear in the front matter to the book and each focuses upon the language and wisdom of birds (ix). In the “Introduction” Stark argues, “Pound’s melopoeia is founded upon a … Platonic understanding of language and its operation, wherein the sound of language is irremediably part of its signifying apparatus, arguably the most decisive part” (3). At points, the book’s prioritization of Pound’s melopoeia—in not just the early verse— seems to occlude the poet’s desire to integrate it with logopoeia and phanopoeia.

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Moreover, Stark’s wish to connect Pound’s poetry and its sonic elements with birdsong is uneven and sometimes feels a bit forced. Stark appears to recognize the limits of and difficulties inherent in his argument, however, and consistently attempts to ground it by making concessions (which really add a palpable charm to the book and are a refreshing trait in today’s academic scholarship). He balances his stress on melopoeia by acknowledging that “Pound, unlike Yeats, found no problem in writing for the eye as well as for the ear, as The Cantos makes clear on every page” (43). Most notably, though, Stark admits very early on that “what will be most apparent by the end of this study will be the fundamental opacity of all talk about sources and originals where Pound is concerned.

This is a point that Pound himself is always pained to convey – in his muddling of En Arnaut and Bishop Douglas, de Gourmont and Fenollosa, Homer and Andreas Divus. At some risk, I will stake out a similarly dialectical train” (7). Thus, despite the overt insistence on the pre-eminence of melopoeia across Pound’s verse and its relationship to birds, one understands that Stark dramatizes his points to make them explicit. More importantly, I think that Stark is aware that, due to its many threads, his argument may fray at points, but that the overall consistency of the pattern that emerges still makes it an argument worth making.

Stark most successfully connects Pound’s melopoeia to birdsong in his discussion of Pound’s translations of Arnaut Daniel. In Chapter 6, “Pound Among the Nightingales: From the Troubadours to a Cantabile Modernism,” Stark notes that troubadour poetry ubiquitously features birdsong and that Arnaut, in particular, aspired to use its acoustic properties as a model for his verse. In studying and translating Arnaut’s work, then, Pound encountered a veritable textbook of prosodic forms based on the clear and distinct notes and patterns of various types of birds and their unique sequences of chirps, coos, and warbles. Notably, both Stark and Hugh Kenner attribute Pound’s own prosodic desire to emphasize and enunciate each individual word in his poetry to Arnaut’s style that approximates bird-language (134). Stark also posits that the consistent yet flexible nature of Arnaut’s bird-influenced poetic forms may have significantly affected Pound’s concept of free verse that was not “free” by any means, but instead worked to sonically evoke or concretize its subject matter and its concomitant emotions (135-136). Even though I am not certain I agree that Kenner “is consciously observing its consistency with Arnaut’s avian aesthetic” when he “famously describes Imagism as a combination of ‘specifications for a technical hygiene’ and a ‘doctrine of the Image’” (in fact, Kenner stresses the separateness of those two elements) (133), I do believe that Stark convincingly locates Arnaut as a major influence on those aspects of Pound’s Imagism. By stressing the sound qualities of discrete words in the same manner as Arnaut’s “ornitho-logie,” Pound both “use[s] no word that does not contribute to the presentation” and “compose[s] in the sequence of the musical phrase.” Even more interestingly, though, is that Arnaut’s mimetic use of onomatopoeia and cadence may have not only provided a precedent for “[d]irect treatment of the ‘thing’,” but also the type of sonic imagery that Pound uses to audibly concretize his subjects into “intellectual and emotional complex[es]” (Pound, “A Retrospect” 3). Connecting Arnaut to Imagism in that manner sheds light on and brings attention to an important element in Pound’s Imagism that scholarship on the subject frequently overlooks.

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Along with his examination of Pound’s use of melopoeic jargon, Stark does an excellent job identifying Pound’s “barbarous” jargon as well. One of the more interesting cases occurs when Stark investigates the relationship between Pound and Caliban. Caliban appears, of course, in “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley” and Stark reminds his readers, “For the Victorians, Caliban was the quintessential foreigner, and typically American; both Pound and Caliban hailed from the same ‘half-savage country’” (82). In addition to identifying those biographical similarities, though, Stark positions Caliban and his barbarism as modeling for Pound the necessity of remaining authentic to one’s self and one’s modes of self-expression rather than deferring to commonly accepted standards of decorum (84).

One finds Pound, therefore, often attempting, like Caliban, to manifest his own brash individualism through forms of idiosyncratic language. As Stark keenly points out, Pound uses a “preponderance of ’st elisions throughout Ripostes (1912) – ‘mak’st, ‘brav’st’, ‘thou’st’, ‘know’st’, ‘knew’st’, ‘call’st’, ‘dar’dst’ and ‘mad’st’, for instance –” that “evidently originate in [The Tempest], where they often serve to indicate the distinct speech of the islanders, Caliban especially” (97). Notably, “Caliban’s language is primal and percussive rather than limpid and grandiloquent” and, thereby, offers Pound a means to disrupt both the habitualized signifiers and sonorities of his contemporaries’ verse. Moreover, by stressing its consonantal values, Caliban’s language and elisions emphasize the same melopoeic features as Arnaut Daniel’s verse, which would then further reinforce Pound’s continued use of those sound elements and further add to their allusive referentiality.

While Stark’s book does a fine job providing examples of Pound employing various forms of jargon, it is certainly at its best when it isolates a singular work in which Pound utilizes the full spectrum of jargon types. One such instance comes in Chapter 5 when Stark focuses on Pound’s version of “The Seafarer.” Fittingly, Stark analyzes Pound’s use of the word “jargon” and explains that, in translating the “hemistich ‘sipas secgan’” to “journey’s jargon,” Pound “captures” not only the prosody of the original, but also the “virtuosic, cantabile gamesmanship” of the Seafarer-poet (110). Likewise, when the Seafarer hears birds overhead, Pound’s “alliteration,” “grave spondees,” “consonantal congestion,” and “resolution” allow the Seafarer to audibly present the “hideous crying” of those birds in his own “‘living tongue,’” which is “the solipsistic speech of a friendless margin-alien” (112-113). In particular, Stark notes Pound’s qualification of the sea eagle’s speech as a “scream” and explains that “the word ‘scream’ initially refers to a high-pitched, piercing noise that is expressive of pain, or other sudden emotion; it is also etymologically related to ‘weep’. In Old English, moreover, the word is already used in a special sense for the cries of certain birds.” Thus, he concludes: [Pound’s translation] works, much as the original works, by inviting informed readers to consider the philological sense of the language in addition to the contemporary and habitual senses; supplementing the meaning in a recondite and condensed fashion, it offers ‘access’ to an unfamiliar but significant realm of meaning. At the same time, of course, this word is onomatopoeic, and so claims our attention as jargon in the manifold sense. (114) In his explication of “The Seafarer,” then, Stark shows his readers how, even early in his career, Pound strove to combine sound with sense in his poetry and could do so by

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layering the varied denotive and conative types of jargon on top of one another to present an opaquely substantive and four-dimensional reification of his subject matter.

Admittedly, after reading back through Ezra Pound’s Early Verse and Lyric Tradition: A Jargoner’s Apprenticeship and writing this review, I have a clearer sense of the book’s argument and can, with greater confidence, “affirm the gold thread in the pattern” so to speak (Pound, “Canto CXVI” 817). Yet, despite its overall coherence, I can’t escape the feeling that Stark did not originally intend to apply his theories regarding jargon to a study of Pound. Instead, it seems he saw that, without much difficulty, he could correlate a separate consideration of jargon with the poetry of Ezra Pound and that, in doing so, could add some very useful analysis to the poet’s very individualized and complicated relationship with opaque vocabularies. What contributes most to that sense is that Stark’s Appendix, “‘Barbarians and Dark Words of God’: Poetic Jargon in Greek Drama,” does not deal directly with Pound, runs thirteen pages longer than the longest chapter on Pound, and—through its explication of Aristophanes’ play, Birds—explains the many variant forms of jargon and their relationship to birdsong so interestingly and clearly that I wish I had read it before reading the actual chapters on Pound. Prior to reading that appendix and then rereading the chapters on Pound, I found it a bit difficult to negotiate through the sheer variety of jargon’s sub-definitions and consistently resolve them and their bearing on Pound’s poetry with their origins in birdsong. Once again, however, Stark seems to have anticipated such a reaction and concludes his book proper on a (much appreciated and commendable) humble note. He writes, “I hope in the foregoing study of Pound’s early aesthetic, for all the foreignness, abstraction and stubborn erudition (mostly Pound’s I hope) to account for a delightful and humane kind of poetry.” Then, with his final words, he outlines his goal for his book, and, if that goal was truly “to not to have deciphered but, on the contrary, and rather more plainly, to have come to know [Pound’s] myriad voices somewhat better, to have become more comfortable with his still strange jargoning” (174), it is certainly a success.

Works Cited Pound, Ezra. “A Retrospect.” Literary Essays of Ezra Pound. Ed. T. S. Eliot. New York: New Directions, 1935. 3-14. Print.

---. “Canto CXVI.” The Cantos of Ezra Pound. New York: New Directions, 1971. 815-17.

Print.

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ARTICLES IN JOURNALS

AND

COLLECTIONS

________________________ Bradshaw, David, and James Smith. "Ezra Pound, James Strachey Barnes ('The Italian Lord Haw-Haw') and Italian Fascism."

The Review of English Studies 64.266 (2013): 672-93.

Oxford Journals Online. Web. 03 June 2014. ___________________ Summary by Jared Young In their article, Bradshaw and Smith aim to shed light on Pound’s propagandistic endeavors in Italy during WWII. To achieve that end, they offer readers a look into Pound’s activities through James Strachey Barnes’ life. Barnes, a friend and collaborator of Pound’s, also broadcast for Rome radio at that time.

The article, which is composed of three sections, stakes its claim that Pound had made major contributions to promote Italian Fascism, which the writers prove through his friendship with Barnes. After a brief introduction, the article moves into its two primary sections. The first focuses on Barnes’ biography and political efforts. The second section provides a detailed account of Pound and Barnes’ relationship. All this information creates a background for Pound’s political work during the least-known period of his life, 194345.

In section one, “A Paladin in the Making,” Bradshaw and Smith provide readers with Barnes’ personal history. The writers note that Barnes’s activity for Mussolini can be traced back to his early interest in philosophy and economics. Before becoming a central broadcast figure, Barnes, an Englishman, developed his love for Italy while serving on the Italian front as a liaison officer during WWI. Bradshaw and Smith then discuss Barnes’s work between the wars, his growing dedication to Fascism as well as the political discontent he stirred up on his way to working for Mussolini. Barnes’ political views ultimately led to his “most notorious role, as an English-language radio propagandist for the Fascist state, with unbridled zeal” (678).

Section II, titled “Renegades on the Run,” brings Barnes’s relationship with Pound into focus. The writers use three particular sources, the Pound-Barnes correspondence at Beinecke, various records related to both in the National Archives, and most importantly Barnes’s unpublished diary of 1943-45. At this point in the article, readers are guided back to the beginning of the war as Ezra Pound struggled to become a broadcaster, showing through the use of the letter exchange that Pound knew Barnes since 1940, visited him on his trips to Rome and discussed his views on economics with him. Through Barnes’s diary, Bradshaw and Smith present new information of military efforts to provide both Barnes and Pound with sanctuary and false papers as well as arrange propaganda activity for them in Germany. Though both refused this assistance, the diary then goes on to show that Barnes played a crucial role in convincing Pound to work for the Salo Republic in the spring of 1944. Shortly after Barnes’ final diary entry concerning Pound, Mussolini was executed and Pound was taken into custody. Barnes went into hiding.

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As section II comes to a close, it examines Barnes’ final attempt to communicate with Pound. Bradshaw and Smith briefly mention a letter Barnes drafted to Winston Churchill that cites several political reasons why Pound deserved to be free. Specifically, Barnes mentioned Pound’s poetic reputation as justification for his release. Unfortunately, that letter would never reach Churchill because of Barnes’s death in 1955. After discovering the letter, Barnes’s wife sent Pound the draft. Pound responded bitterly that Barnes had got much more credence for his political opinions than he, Pound, had ever had. The authors provide a fragment from a letter of support Pound wanted Barnes’s wife to send to The Times in her name: it delineated his attempts to distance himself from the accusations of Fascism. To Olivia Rossetti Agresti, Pound wrote at the same time: “Jim for fascism as principle/ E.P recognizing it as the possible IN ITALY, despite its difference from Jefferson’s aim/ AND considering VOCATIONAL representation as constitutional for U.S lower house.” (Bradshaw and Smith 692) In the article’s final moments, the authors remind readers that although Pound sought to clear his name from the effects of his propaganda efforts, Barnes’s biography and personal records indicate he and Pound had enough in common to work together closely. The article provides readers with meticulous correspondence between Barnes and Pound, as well as new insights into a darker area of the American poet’s life.

Estrade, Charlotte. “Transatlantic Crossroads: Ezra Pound’s 1933 Active Anthology.”

Anglophonia: French Journal of English (2013): 123-132. Print. __________________ Summary by Dylan Hock Charlotte Estrade’s article, “Transatlantic Crossroads: Ezra Pound's 1933 Active Anthology,” approaches Pound’s fourth anthology through the comparison of a metaphorical crossroads. Much like William Robert’s painting, The Vorticists at the Restaurant de la Tour Eiffel, Spring 1915, where “a gathering of poets and artists [are] meeting in order to discuss the Vorticist agenda of the magazine Blast” (126), Estrade contends that Pound's Active Anthology (AA) served as a nexus in which extensive swaths of the world’s best and most innovative poets shared a common space. Whether it be through the work it contained or the conversation it generated, Estrade posits that a “transatlantic crossroads” is exactly what Pound's Active Anthology offers its readers.

Estrade's nine-page article is broken up into five sections, including the introduction, that place Pound’s Active Anthology in its historical context and discuss the nature of crossroads (good and bad, as well as the tension and alliances that can form in such a space both intentionally and unintentionally), and how they relate to both AA and anthologies in general. Finally, Estrade puts AA into perspective by offering the context in which Pound published it in 1933—the same year he met Mussolini.

Pound had already edited three previous anthologies, 5 been a foreign correspondent for both Poetry and The Dial, acted as foreign editor for the Little Review,

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Des Imagistes (1914), Catholic Anthology (1915) and Profile (1932)

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worked as tireless promoter for his fellow poets, and helped T.S. Eliot with The Waste Land by the time he published the Active Anthology. Pound had also worked as an editor and publisher in London throughout the 1920s and served as a European contact for several American magazines. The longest of his anthologies at the time of its publication, the Active Anthology is, a synthesis of Pound’s career to that point. That he would collate and edit another three anthologies after Active Anthology,6 means that AA served as the literal centerpiece of his work on anthologies.

Contributors to Active Anthology include a “red wheelbarrow” full of American writers: Marianne Moore, T.S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, E.E. Cummings, Louis Zukofsky, William Carlos Williams, George Oppen and Pound himself, as well as the British poet, Basil Bunting, and the Irish (though London-based) poet, William Butler Yeats, among others. If AA is indeed a sort of crossroads where poets meet, strike up conversations, friendships, and assorted frictions, Estrade’s title “Transatlantic Crossroads” points accurately to the anthology’s open bias for promoting (often even introducing) American writers to the European literary circuit. At the same time, Pound takes care to promote the lesser-known and under-appreciated British poet, Basil Bunting, as well as the more established Yeats—one of the few London poets from the previous generation whom Pound felt still held the mantle of creation within his grasp. In many ways, Active Anthology is one editor’s representation of literary London as it marched into the 20th century—both a time capsule for a particular period in poetry as well as a communication between eras for readers and poets today. Estrade refers to that period in London as “the literary, modernist crossroads par excellence, the birthplace of AngloAmerican literary modernism and its forerunners such as Imagism and Vorticism” (126), and such a “crossroads” is exactly what Pound presents in his anthology.

Estrade’s article traces Pound’s editorial evolution to a point both poetic and geographic wherein Pound pulled together a vast range of poets and promoted their work through his anthology. The crossroads that Pound created between the covers of Active Anthology was a consciously transatlantic one that served to kickstart an international dialogue between poets. Estrade’s “Transatlantic Crossroads” highlights how Pound’s Active Anthology served as an announcement of the next poetic generation’s arrival, and how the collision of literary thoughts and voices captured in that one book bloomed into entire movements and artistic trajectories from which poetry (and poets!) have continued to grow for generations—just as Pound intended.

Read more at http://www.pnreview.co.uk/cgi-bin/scribe?item_id=9009 (F.R. Leavis’s review of AA in Scrutiny) http://www.unz.org/Pub/Scrutiny-1933dec-00299?View=PDF On Pound as anthologist http://www.lib.udel.edu/ud/spec/exhibits/pound/anthology.htm

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ABC of Reading (1934), Shih-Ching: The Classic Anthology Defined by Confucius (1954) and Confucius to Cummings (1964)

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BOOKS OF CRITICAL INTEREST _________________

Eric B. White.

Transatlantic Avant-Gardes: Little Magazines and Localist Modernism. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2013. ____________ Review by John Allaster

Eric B. White’s Transatlantic Avant-Gardes: Little Magazines and Localist Modernism questions the canonical division between “homemade” and “cosmopolitan” writing by using a geographically materialist approach and what he calls “locational” readings of modernist works (2). His study focuses on the little magazines, in which much of modernism was created because they were able to maintain the avant-garde works of art contained within them and the networks of communication through which much of the dialogue of modernism was exchanged (1). These discourse networks across the Atlantic and print culture have been of particular interest to scholars; White, however, seeks to offer a “contrapuntal” reading of these transnational networks in order to trace their development and to “triangulate” the configurations of modernism that grew out of them at a local level (1-2). While White’s study focuses particularly on modernists who stayed within their respective home nations, his study does include many expatriate poets as well, including Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, and Robert McAlmon; at a smaller level he also includes many other fellow writers, editors, and writer-editors, from Dadaism to the New Negro Renaissance (3). Despite the broad range of local stay-at-home poets such as Williams, the focus of the study is to show how those local avant-garde artists depended on the transatlantic dissemination of little magazines to create a presentation of their “homemade worlds” to the intercontinental discourse network of artists participating in the discussion (15).

Key to the study is the distinction between “locational” and “localist” iterations of modernism (4). White asserts that in transatlantic studies, “locational” readings focus on the methods writers use to explore the concepts of place, time, and geopolitics in relation to the broader “global” movement of literary modernism (4). That is to say, “locational” readings seek to situate and investigate concepts of locality in relation to the broader pattern or “design” of modernism (4). Whereas a “localist” reading is a geographical materialist reading that focuses on a writer’s relation to particular physical and cultural markers, such as natural landscape and geography, as well as social and cultural markers like language and music, as well as visual culture that includes art and man-made landscapes such as cities (5).

Although Pound is featured often in White’s study, the main section on the poet titled, “A Walking Tour in Southern France: Ezra Pound’s Journey from Image to Vortex,” appears in the book’s second chapter, “The Vortex of the Page: Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Wyndham Lewis and the Modernist Problem of Place.” This section,

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then, offers a “localist” reading of Pound’s early poetry that interacts with location and creates its own relationship to a specific sense of place. As the title of the section makes clear, White’s focus is on Pound’s 1912 trip to Provence where he toured the locations featured in the poetry of the troubadours (51). Combined with the studies on Williams and Lewis, White attempts to demonstrate how the early works of these three modernists symptomatically feature a disconnection between an empirical sense of geography and the subjective or “subject-oriented” poetics of early modernism (50). Furthermore, White argues that the transatlantic travel of many of the modernists had an effect on their sense of poetics, especially in relation to space, which was echoed in the little magazines they published in, thereby shaping the avant-garde art and discourse networks that they took part in, as well as those which followed (51).

Recognizing Pound’s attempts to create a precise sense of poetics and history in his Imagist and Vorticist writings, White asserts that the interdependencies between the two foreshadow the two sides of Imagism: an empirical sense of actual detail on the one hand and an appeal to multiple traditions of poetry on the other (51). White is more concerned, however, with Pound’s early attempts to deal with his relationship to the physical geography and history/mythos of Provence and the troubadours that lived there (51). In those early encounters published in Poetry and Blast, White asserts that the most significant product of Pound’s travel writings from Provence was his “heuristic diagnosis” of the incompatibility between the artist’s perception and the “objective reality” of the world around him (52). Thus, from this “failure in synthesis” (52), the image provided a middle ground between the subjective and objective, or what White refers to as “idea and thing” and “textual space and geographical place” (52). Furthermore, White argues that Pound’s Vorticist writings produce the most sophisticated expression of the mediation between the two “spaces,” especially through the conceits of crowds and rituals (52), figures that became fundamental to Pound’s interaction with American culture (52).

Moreover, emphasizing the geographical materialist approach, White posits that the walking tour notes reveal to the reader that the triangulation of the microcosmic and macrocosmic forces of physical space is a difficult and often almost impossible task filled with contradictions (54).

As White moves away from the walking tour itself and towards the poetry that emerged from it, he differs from Richard Sieburth who argued that “Near Perigord,” “Provincia Deserta,” and “The Gipsy” were the only poems to come from Pound’s walking tour in Provence (57). White argues, instead, that this assertion is too restrictive, as the March 1915 publication of Poetry magazine featured several poems that deal with the poetics of location and people (57). Those poems included “Provincia Deserta,” “Image from d’Orleans,” “The Spring,” “The Coming of War: Actaeon,” “The Gipsy,” “The Game of Chess,” and “Exile’s Letter.” Along with linking those poems to Pound’s walking tour and its geographically materialist implications, White also traces the emergence of Pound’s Vorticist poetics in relation to those ideas as the trajectory of the movement towards Vorticism drew him towards physical locations and the forces that moved across them (59).

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PUBLICATIONS ON EZRA POUND – 2013 _______________________ ARTICLES IN JOURNALS AND COLLECTIONS Bacigalupo, Massimo. “The Law and How to Break It: Reading and Translating Ezra Pound’s Canto 22.” Publif@rum 18 (2013). Web. 30 July 2013.

Bacigalupo, Massimo. “Ezra the Troubadour.” Provence and the British Imagination. Ed. Claire Davison, Béatrice Laurent, Caroline Patey, Nathalie Vanfasse. Milan: Università degli Studi, Dipartimento di Lingue e letterature straniere, 2013. 175-92.

Bradshaw David and James Smith. “Ezra Pound, James Strachey Barnes (‘The Italian Lord Haw-Haw’) and Italian Fascism.” The Review of English Studies 64.266 (2013): 67293.

Estrade, Charlotte. “Transatlantic Crossroads: Ezra Pound’s 1933 Active Anthology.”

Anglophonia: French Journal of English Studies 33 (2013). 123-132.

Zamsky, Robert. “Ezra Pound and Charles Bernstein: Opera, Poetics, and the Fate of Humanism.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 55.1 (2013). 100-124.

Paideuma 2013 vol. 40 Stauder, Ellen Keck. “Of Rhythm, Image and Knowing: Burton Hatlen as a Reader of Pound.” 63-70.

Nadel, Ira. “Ezra Pound and MI5.” 327-348.

ESSAY COLLECTIONS: Antliff, Mark, and Scott W. Klein, eds. Vorticism. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2013. Print.

Antliff, Alan. “Ezra Pound, Man Ray and Vorticism in America, 1914-1917.” 139-155.

McCauley, Anne. “Witch Work, Art Work, and the Spiritual Roots of Abstraction: Ezra Pound, Alvin Langdon Coburn, and the Vortographs.” 156-174.

Greene, Vivien. “John Quinn and Vorticist Art: the Eye (and Purse) of an American Collector.” 175-198.

Gery, John, Daniel Kempton, and H. R. Stoneback, eds. Imagism: Essays on Its Initiation, Impact and Influence. New Orleans: UNO Press, 2013.

Contents: Christos Hadjiyiannis, “Ezra Pound, T.E. Hulme, Edward Storer: Imagism as AntiRomanticism in the Pre-Des Imagistes Era.” 17-30.

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Justin Kishbaugh, “Editorial Images: Des Imagistes and Ezra Pound’s Imagist Presentation of Imagism.” 31-46.

Anderson D. Araujo, “‘I cling to the spar’: Imagism in Ezra Pound’s Vortex.” 47-62.

Shelley Puhak, “Image, Vortex, Radiant Node: Ezra Pound as Lens.” 63-78.

Alex Shakespeare, “‘Poetry Which Moves by Its Music’: Keeping Time with Pound’s Imagism.” 79-92.

Max Saunders, “Imagism vs. Impressionism: Ezra Pound and Ford Madox Ford.” 93-108.

John Gery, “‘Radiance to the White Wax’: The Imagist Contradiction between Logopoeia and Phanopoeia.” 109-22.

Brad McDuffie, “An Art of ‘Pure Sound Bound Through Symbols’: Ezra Pound’s Tutelage of Ernest Hemingway.” 135-48.

Pratt, William, and Caterina Ricciardi, eds. ROMA/AMOR: Ezra Pound, Rome, and Love. Brooklyn: AMS Press, 2013.

Table of Contents: I. Pound and Rome Stephen Wilson, “‘Greeks to Their Romans’: Ezra Pound’s Visions of Empire.” 3-14.

Stephen Romer, “Venus at Terracina, or the ‘Mediterranean Sanity.’” 15-26.

Massimo Bacigalupo, “Ezra Pound’s Rome: Greeting the Returning Gods and Sponsa Christi.” 27-36.

Anne Conover, “‘Beyond civic order, l’AMOR’: Olga, Ezra, and Benito Mussolini.” 37-50.

Catherine E. Paul, “Ezra Pound in Mussolini’s Rome.” 51-64.

Serenella Zanotti, “Pound and the Mussolini Myth: An Unexplored Source for Canto 41.”

65-80.

Stefano Maria Casella, “‘Ez, Franz, and Ninì’: Pound and the Monottis in Rome, 1935– 2000.” 81-94.

Caterina Ricciardi, “Ezra Pound and the Foundation of the Centro Italiano di Studi Americani: 1936.” 95-108.

Tim Redman, “Ezra Pound and Roman Catholicism: An Overview.” 109-22.

II. Pound and Love Nephie Christodoulides, “‘A Wondrous Holiness Hath Touched Me’: Amor and Alchemy in ‘Hilda’s Book.’”123-32.

Peter Liebregts, “Between Alexandria and Rome: Ezra Pound, Augustine, and the Notion of Amor.” 133-44.

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Giovanna Epifania, “Cavalcanti’s ‘Canzone d’Amore’ and Pound’s Translation Strategies in Canto 36.” 145-58.

William Pratt, “More Lasting than Bronze: Pound’s True Heritage.” 159-70.

III. Pound and Other Poets Mary de Rachewiltz, “Manfredi and Dante in Purgatory.” 171-74.

Rosella Mamoli Zorzi, “Love and Hate: Ezra Pound and a Contemporary Africadian Poet.” 175-84.

Jennifer Kilgore-Caradec, “Humming/Vortices of History and Love, or Geoffrey Hill’s Telegram to Ezra Pound.” 185-96.

Réka Mihálka, “He Do Elektra in Different Voices: Pound and Fleming’s Translation of Elektra.” 197-214.

Miho Takahashi, “Herakles on the Blazing Pyre: A Reading of The Women of Trachis.” 21528.

IV. Pound and Other Contexts Giuliana Ferreccio, “Ezra Pound and Aby Warburg: Nymphs and Luminous Details.”

229-40.

Walter Baumann, “Ezra Pound’s Belfast Connection: Allan Seaton (1916–2007).” 241-252.

P. Sanavio, “The Exile Returns: Pound in Paris 1965–66. A Personal Recollection.” 25358.

Ira B. Nadel, “‘And Pounds and Pounds and Pounds’: The Many Lives of Ezra Pound.”

259-68.