Rediscovering Ezra Pound

Ezra Pound (1885 - 1972)

A year or so ago I told Jo Grigg, leader of the Stanza poetry group I attend in Brighton, that I was reading Pound's Cantos in full for the first time.  She confessed she had never read Pound properly.  Our more erudite next-door neighbour, Tony Sillem, noticed my copy when he called by one day and said "I thought I was the only person I knew who'd ever read those".

I laboured away, with the aid of William Cookson's Guide.  There were flashes of brilliance, but quite a lot of obscurity; also a lot of affectation of language that now seems childish - pseudo-phonetic spelling to mimic accents, for example.  I finally gave up when it came to Chinese history, with the 85th.

But Pound himself remained a puzzle, and more recently I took down Noel Stock's biography of him, which has been sitting on my shelf for a very long time.  It's now rather dated, and is the work of an academic rather than a natural biographer: details, for example, of Pound's son - whisked away from his parents in Italy virtually at birth and deposited with his grandmother in England - and of Pound's natural daughter are sparse in the extreme, so that one gets little idea of Pound's relationship with his nearest and dearest.  But what does come across loud and clear is the key part that Pound played in what is now called Modernism, in the early part of the last century.  He was at university with William Carlos Williams, with whom he remained in close contact for the rest of his life; an intimate of Yeats and of T.S. Eliot (the present form of The Waste Land is largely due to Pound's revisions); and a friend and benefactor of James Joyce.  Indeed, Dubliners and Ulysses would probably never have seen the light of day had it not been for Pound's financial and moral support.  He also championed the younger generation: Hemingway and E.E. Cummings, whom he met in Paris in the early 1920s, and the now largely forgotten Louis Zukofsky, a key influence on the later so-called Black Mountain poets.  

Pound himself had a brilliant mind, although its very brilliance, coupled with his fondness for the arcane (the poetry of the French troubadours, for example, would probably have remained the province of academics without his translations) led him to believe that his opinions were self-evidently right.  It was not so much a case of not tolerating fools gladly; those who disagreed with his trenchant opinions tended also to be dismissed.  

His consignment to obscurity is largely due to his straying from literature into the fields of economics and politics in the 1930s and later.  He demonstrated lamentable judgment in supporting the Fascist movements in Italy and Germany, which led to his being arrested and deported for treason at the end of the War, and to his commitment to a mental hospital until 1958, when he was allowed to return to Italy. 

Posterity is fickle.  It may well be that in the final analysis his poetic reputation will rest more firmly on his translations than on his own original work.  But it's been an eye-opener for me to appreciate the extent to which he was not only at the hub, but indeed the hub itself, of what was happening in literature a hundred years ago.  

Antony Mair