Early Writings by Ezra Pound
1 Beardsley: Aubrey Beardsley (1872-1898), English erotic illustrator favoring an Art Nouveau style influenced by Japanese art, who provided drawings for Oscar Wilde’s Salome. Beardsley was known for his stylized, elongated figures of a sensuous character.
2 jongleur: Singers of others’ songs in Provençal tradition. In Pound’s “Near Perigord,” Bertran de Born addresses his jongleur Papiol, his singer-deputy, to convey a song for him to another.
3 Plarr: Possibly the poet and librarian of King’s College, London, Victor Plarr (1863-1929), who would become librarian of the Royal College of Surgeons and edit the eight-volume biographical dictionary of the fellows, which would include various mathematicians. He was a member of the Rhymers’ Club and Pound often attended to hear Plarr’s anecdotes of such Decadents as Lionel Johnson and Ernest Dowson.
PSYCHOLOGY AND TROUBADOURS
The essay first appeared in Quest (IV, October 1912, 37-53) and was reprinted as chapter V of The Spirit of Romance in editions published in 1932 and after. In it, Pound elaborates his ideas of the poet and the role of art in culture, divided into two schools: those who understand poetry as song and those who perceive it as ritual. In his discussion, he draws on his usual panoply of authors, including Horace, Catullus, Dante, Arnaut Daniel, and Peire Vidal. Science and religion, in competition with poetry, also figure importantly in the discussion, as do romance and sexuality. The essay was commissioned by G. R. S. Mead, one of Yeats’s occult-minded friends. Pound wrote the essay in 1911 and delivered it as a lecture to the Quest Society. The major source of its ideas was the Rosicrucian book Le Secret des Troubadours, which Pound reviewed in September 1906 in Book News Monthly. Essentially, Pound argues that the canzoni of the troubadours were not vague love songs but allusions to a specific “love code” or “love cult” originating in the Eleusinian mysteries of ancient Greece.
1 divagation: A wandering or straying from the subject. To divagate is to wander.
2 “trobar clus”: Troubadours of Provence who wrote or sang hermetic compositions, works that had hidden meanings.
3 Arnaut: Arnaut Daniel, thirteenth-century Provençal poet, who flourished from 1180 to 1200; favored by Pound and the subject of a lecture in The Spirit of Romance. He supposedly invented the sestina, a poem of six six-line stanzas and a three-line envoi linked by an intricate pattern of repeated line endings. Praised by Dante, Arnaut appears in the Purgatorio section of The Divine Comedy. Petrarch called him the Grand Master of Love.
4 Herrick or Decker: Robert Herrick (1591-1674), Cavalier poet and admirer of Ben Jonson best known for his poems “Delight in Disorder” and “To the Virgins to Make Much of Time.” Herrick published Hesperides, his collection of twelve hundred poems, in 1648. Thomas Decker (or Dekker), Elizabethan playwright (c. 1570-1632), best known for The Spanish Moor’s Tragedy and The Gentle Craft.
5 Guinicelli: Guido Guinicelli (c. 1230—1276), Italian poet who wrote of love as inner spirituality or nobility without courtly connotations. Stylistically, he was a precursor to Cavalcanti and Dante, who called him their literary father.
6 Trecento: Italian term meaning the 300s, referring to the fourteenth century, the 1300s, the age of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio.
7 Remy de Gourmont: Rémy de Gourmont, French essayist, novelist, poet, playwright, and philosopher who lived from 1858 to 1915. Involved with the Symbolist movement, he also cofounded the important French magazine the Mercure de France. Pound edited an issue of The Little Review in 1919 devoted to Gourmont and translated Gourmont’s The Natural Philosophy of Love (1903) in 1922, in which Gourmont argued that aesthetic emotion prepares man for the reception of erotic emotion. “Art is the accomplice of love,” he believed. Le Latin Mystique (1892) was Gourmont’s first book of criticism; it focused on medieval hymnology.
8 “prose di romanzi”: “Prose romances.”
9 “passada folor”: “Folly of the past.” A contrite Arnaut admits his folly of the past to Virgil and Dante at line 143 of Canto XXVI of Purgatorio.
IMAGISME
This important statement about Imagism first appeared in Poetry (I, March 1913, 198-200). F. S. Flint is listed as author but Pound drafted the essay, which Flint partly rewrote. The essay is done as an interview with an Imagiste who sounds much like Pound. The assertive if not dogmatic speaker is also at times comic. Pound will repeat several of these maxims in “A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste” in the same issue, immediately following on pp. 200-206. For an account, see H. Carpenter, A Serious Character, The Life of Ezra Pound (1988), 196-97.
HOW I BEGAN
First published in 1913 in T. P.’s Weekly (London: XXI, 552, June 6, 1913, 707), the article includes accounts of Elkin Mathews’s acceptance of Personae and the composition of the “Ballad of the Goodly Fere,” “Sestina: Altaforte,” and “In a Station of the Metro.”
1 T. Truxton Hare: A four-time all-American football player at the University of Pennsylvania from 1897 to 1900, T. Truxton Hare (1878-1956) could play almost any position—and did play guard, punter and dropkicker, and sometimes running back. He was team captain for his final two seasons and in his last game ran thirty-five yards for a touchdown against Harvard, dragging five opponents across the goal line. He won the silver medal in the hammer throw at the 1900 Olympics.
2 “Goodly Fare”: This is Pound’s “Ballad of the Goodly Fere,” which first appeared in Ford Madox Hueffer’s (later Ford) English Review, (III, October 1909, 382-84); that same month it appeared in the Literary Digest (New York): XXXIX, October 30, 1909, 730-31. The following year it appeared in the alumni issue of the Hamilton [College] Literary Magazine.
TROUBADOURS—THEIR SORTS AND CONDITIONS
This lengthy essay, which first appeared in the Quarterly Review (CCXIX, 437, October 1913, 426-40), reprinted in Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. T. S. Eliot, and as “Appendix I” in Pound, A Walking Tour in Southern France, ed. Richard Sieburth (1992, 87-98), is Pound’s defense of the troubadours as crucial figures in the evolution of love poetry and modern verse forms. He further states that their lives were not so different from our own. Money was missed and boredom was everywhere. After beginning with a tapestry of Provençal writers, he complains of their contemporary neglect, many readers unaware that “the poetic art of Provence paved the way for the poetic art of Tuscany,” notably Dante. Rather than use established collections as his sources, Pound preferred to study manuscripts at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, where he worked in May 1912. Indeed, much of the essay grows out of Pound’s walking tour of southern France in the summer of 1912, guided by The Troubadours at Home, by Justin H. Smith, a two-volume travel book published in 1899, and the 1907 edition of Baedeker’s Southern France. The trip included a climb through the Pyrenees to Arles and Nîmes.
1 a man may walk: Pound began his important walking trip on May 27, 1912, taking the train to Poitiers, traveling on that night to Angouleme. The final leg of the trip took him through the Auvergne, ending at Clermont on July 19, 1912. See Pound, A Walking Tour of Southern France, ed. R. Sieburth (1992).
2 Miquel de la Tour: Also known as Miquel de la Tor, late-thirteenth-century biographer of the troubadour Peire Cardinal. There is some dispute over Pound’s reference because Pound read a manuscript in the Bibliothèque Nationale that said la Tour wrote it, not realizing it was a partial copy made a few years later than the original.
3 Sordello: Browning’s Sordello, which Pound first read in 1904, became an influential work that he reread in 1915 as he began to think of The Cantos. To his father, he wrote “it is probably the greatest poem in English,” and it provided a model for his new long poem, which was “all about everything” (in Carpenter, 287). Sordello is a medieval Provençal poet mentioned in the Purgatorio; Browning’s long and complex poem is a narrative experiment where the narrator accompanies the subject. Pound considers imitating this device in the first of his “Three Cantos” (1917), opening with “Hang it all, there can be but one Sordello!” suggesting that he may wa
4 Andreas Divus Justinopolitanus: Pound purchased Divus’s medieval Latin translation of The Odyssey at a Parisian bookstall; the volume became one of the key works for Pound’s Cantos. He translated the opening lines in Canto III (1917) and then restructured the work to make them the new opening of the entire work.
THE SERIOUS ARTIST
The essay appeared in New Freewoman (I, October-November 1913) in three parts: parts I and II were published in October 1913 (161-63); part III was published in November 1913 (194—95; reprinted in Literary Essays, ed. Eliot, 41-57). This is Pound’s early defense of writing poetry as an art, not an indulgence, and outlines his essential poetics: good writing reflects control, and poetry should possess the clarity that we see in prose. Clarity and intensity are its best features: “no interjections. No words flying off to nothing ... objectivity and again objectivity,” as he wrote Harriet Monroe in 1915 (SL, 48-50). Furthermore, the serious artist “is scientific in that he presents the image of his desire,” as Pound writes in the essay where he also argues that “the touchstone of an art is its precision” in its search for “passionate simplicity.”
1 Sydney Webbs: Sydney Webb (1859-1947) was an early Socialist and, with his wife Beatrice Webb and George Bernard Shaw, a member of the Fabian Society. He favored fact over imagination and criticized the role of the arts in society. He cofounded the London School of Economics.
2 Aucassin: Hero of the thirteenth-century French fabliau, Aucassin and Nicolette, a mixture of prose and poetry telling of thwarted love, war, loss, and recovery.
3 the Victory of Samothrace and the Taj of Agra: The Winged Victory, a winged female statue over eight feet in height, was found in 1863 in pieces on the island of Samothrace. It was reassembled at the Louvre in Paris, where it now stands. The Taj of Agra is the Taj Mahal in Agra, India, completed in 1648 and built over twenty-two years with approximately twenty thousand workers. Taj Mahal means “Crown Palace.”
4 ægrum vulgus: “Diseased public.”
5 Parnassiads: Pound refers to the Parnassians, a group of French nineteenth-century poets so-called because of their journal Parnasse contemporain (1866-1876). Théophile Gautier was an important influence on these writers, who included Leconte de Lisle, Sully Prudhomme, and Verlaine.
A RETROSPECT
This work combines a series of early essays and notes under this title gathered in Pavannes and Divisions (1918). “A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste,” Poetry 1.6, March 1913, 200-206. Reprinted as “A Retrospect” in Pavannes and Divisions (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1918) and in Literary Essays, ed. T. S. Eliot (London: Faber and Faber, 1954, 3-14). These essays didactically articulate Pound’s ideas on Imagism and precise poetry, including his maxim: “Go in fear of abstractions.”
1 Mr. Flint: Pound refers to F. S. Flint (1885-1960), a poet and critic who met Pound in 1909 and was a member of T. E. Hulme’s Thursday-night poetry group, the Poets’ Club, which met at the Tour Eiffel restaurant in Soho. Flint would review Pound’s canzoni in the first issue of the Poetry Review (I [January 1912]: 28-29), complaining that much of his inspiration seemed “bookish.”
2 Harold Monro’s magazine: Harold Monro (1879-1932) owned the Poetry Bookshop in London and edited the Poetry Review, which published Flint’s article “Contemporary French Poetry” in number VII (August 1912, 355-414). Pound, who gives the wrong year, refers to Flint’s lengthy survey that opens with “The Generation of 1900” and ends with “F. T. Marinetti and Le Futurisme.” In the first several pages, Flint describes Symbolism as a reaction against the flamboyance of the Romantics, the impassive descriptiveness of the Parnassians, and disgust with the “slice of life” of the naturalists. The essence of Symbolism is its intuitiveness, he argues.
3 Duhamel’s notes: Georges Duhamel (1884—1966) and Charles Vildrac (1882-1971) published their seventy-one-page book, Notes sur la technique poétique, in 1910.
4 Man and Superman: George Bernard Shaw’s play was published in 1903 and first performed in 1905, but without scene 2 of act 3. Subtitled A Comedy and a Philosophy, the work incorporates Nietzsche’s idea of the superman in the conflict between man as a spiritual creator and woman as a guardian of the biological continuity of the human race. The third act is a dream episode entitled “Don Juan in Hell,” based on the Don Juan legend, especially as it appears in Mozart’s Don Giovanni.
5 Metastasio: Pietro Metastasio (1698-1782), eighteenth-century Italian poet, librettist, and composer who began his education as a goldsmith, then turned to law before becoming known as a composer of musical melodramas, ballets, cantatas, and canzonette. His musical drama Attilio Regolo is generally considered to be his masterpiece.
6 S. S. McClure: Samuel Sidney McClure (1857-1949) was an Irish-born American editor and publisher and the founder of America’s first successful literary syndicate that would buy an author’s article and then resell the rights to papers and magazines across America. In 1894, he and a partner began McClure’s Magazine, which in four years had a circulation of 400,000 and soon began to publish muckraking articles by Lincoln Steffens and Ida Tarbell. By 1912, McClure lost control of his company. Willa Cather ghostwrote his autobiography.
7 Amyclas: Mythical figure and king of Sparta, son of Lacedaemon; Amyclas marries Diomede and becomes the father of Argalus, Cynortas, and Hyacinthus.
8 Catullus’ parlour floor: Catullus’s villa was at Sirmione at Lago di Garda, the largest of northern Italian lakes and one of Pound’s favorite spots in Italy, where he preferred to stay at the Hotel Eden. He went there first in 1910 to complete The Spirit of Romance. He would meet Joyce for the first time there in 1920 and would refer to the locale several times in The Cantos.
9 The Provost of Oriel: C. L. Shadwell—the provost of Oriel College in Oxford, at the time Pound’s essay appeared. Charles Lancelot Shadwell (1849-1919) published a literal verse translation of Purgatory in two volumes between 1892 and 1899 containing, in volume 1, an introduction by Walter Pater. His second translation of The Paradise of Dante Alighieri appeared in 1915.
10 John Yeats: The painter John B. Yeats (1839-1922), father of W. B. Yeats, trained as a lawyer but chose to become a portrait painter. After his wife died, in 1900, he decided to move to New York in 1907 with his daughter Lily; he died there in 1922. Pound first met him in 1910 during a visit to New York. Later, at Yeats’s boardinghouse, he met the lawyer John Quinn, who would eventually become Pound’s patron, for the first time.
11 battistrada: Italian for trailblazer.
THE TRADITION
The essay appeared first in Poetry III. 4 (January 1914) 137-41; it was reprinted in Literary Essays, ed. Eliot 91-3.
1 Penitus enim tibi O Phoebe attributa est cantus: Corrected to “attributus est cantus” because “attributa,” feminine singular or neuter plural, has no corresponding noun, the phrase means “Because, O Phoebus, song has been entirely attributed to you.”
2 Melic: Greek, melos—“song”; of or pertaining to verse intended to be sung, especially Greek lyric verse of the seventh to fifth centuries B.C.E.
3 Cythera and the Barbitos: The cythera (or cithara) is an ancient stringed instrument resembling a harp; the barbitos is a stringed instrument of the lyre family, also of the classical period.
4 Baif and the Pléïade: Jean Antoine de Baïf (1532-1589) was a French poet of the Pléiade group who wrote sonnets, didactic and satiric poetry, and plays. The Pléiade was a group of seven French poets circa 1533 who modeled themselves after the original Pléiade group of seven poets from Alexandria around 280 B.C.E. The French group, who encouraged the writing of literature in French rather than Latin to enrich their language and literature, included de Ronsard, Joachim du Bellay, Belleau, and Baïf.
5 Dr Ker: W. P. Ker (1855-1923), Scottish-born professor of literature at University College in London, author of Epic and Romance (1891), Dante, Guido Guinicelli an
6 Jannaris: A. N. Jannaris (1852-1909), from Crete, was a distinguished scholar who held what was likely the first appointment at a British university in modern Greek when he became lecturer in Greek at Saint Andrew’s University in Scotland in 1896. In 1895, he published a Concise Dictionary of English and Modern Greek Language and, in 1897, An Historical Greek Grammar.
MR. HUEFFER AND THE PROSE TRADITION IN VERSE
Appearing in Poetry IV.3 (June 1914, 111—20), under this title, the essay was reprinted as “The Prose Tradition in Verse” in Literary Essays, ed. T. S. Eliot, 371-77. This review of Hueffer’s Collected Poems outlines Pound’s admiration for Hueffer’s (later Ford’s) critical foresight and precise poetry, which he hopes achieves the clarity of prose. “Poetry” Hueffer asserts and Pound praises, “should be written at least as well as prose.”
1 Allen Upward: Upward (1863-1926) was an English lawyer and traveler interested in folklore and anthropology, especially that of Nigeria. Pound reviewed his book The Divine Mystery (1907) in the New Freewoman of November 15, 1913. Upward’s sequence of poems, “Scented Leaves—from a Chinese Jar,” appeared in Poetry (1913), secured by Pound, who visited Upward that year. In turn, Upward introduced Pound to Chinese literature and culture, ostensibly through H. A. Giles’s History of Chinese Literature (1901). At about the same time, Pound met Mrs. Ernest Fenollosa, who would soon present him with her husband’s papers, encouraging Pound’s work on Cathay (1915) and then on “The Chinese Written Character” (1919).