Jonathan Ullyot - Ezra Pound and His Classical Sources: The Cantos and the Primal Matter of Troy

Ezra Pound and His Classical Sources

Historicizing Modernism

Series Editors

Matthew Feldman, Professorial Fellow, Norwegian Study Centre, University of York, UK; and Erik Tonning, Professor of British Literature and Culture, University of Bergen, Norway Assistant Editor: David Tucker, Associate Lecturer, Goldsmiths College, University of London, UK

Editorial Board

Professor Chris Ackerley, Department of English, University of Otago, New Zealand; Professor Ron Bush, St. Johns College, University of Oxford, UK; Dr Finn Fordham, Department of English, Royal Holloway, UK; Professor Steven Matthews, Department of English, University of Reading, UK; Dr Mark Nixon, Department of English, University of Reading, UK; Dr Julie Taylor, Northumbria University; Professor Shane Weller, Reader in Comparative Literature, University of Kent, UK; and Professor Janet Wilson, University of Northampton, UK.

Historicizing Modernism challenges traditional literary interpretations by taking an empirical approach to modernist writing: a direct response to new documentary sources made available over the last decade.

Informed by archival research, and working beyond the usual European/ American avant-garde 190045 parameters, this series reassesses established readings of modernist writers by developing fresh views of intellectual contexts and working methods.

Series Titles

Arun Kolatkar and Literary Modernism in India, Laetitia Zecchini

British Literature and Classical Music, David Deutsch

Broadcasting in the Modernist Era, Matthew Feldman, Henry Mead and Erik Tonning

Charles Henri Ford, Alexander Howard

Chicago and the Making of American Modernism, Michelle E. Moore

Christian Modernism in an Age of Totalitarianism, Jonas Kurlberg

Ezra Pounds Adams Cantos, David Ten Eyck

Ezra Pound and His Classical Sources, Jonathan Ullyot

Ezra Pounds Eriugena, Mark Byron

Ezra Pounds Washington Cantos and the Struggle for Light, Alec Marsh

Great War Modernisms and The New Age Magazine, Paul Jackson

Historical Modernisms, Jean-Michel Rabat and Angeliki Spiropoulou

Historicizing Modernists, Edited by Matthew Feldman, Anna Svendsen and Erik Tonning

James Joyce and Absolute Music, Michelle Witen

James Joyce and Catholicism, Chrissie van Mierlo

James Joyce and Photography, Georgina Binnie-Wright

Jean Rhyss Modernist Bearings and Experimental Aesthetics, Sue Thomas

John Kasper and Ezra Pound, Alec Marsh

Judith Wright and Emily Carr, Anne Collett and Dorothy Jones

Katherine Mansfield and Literary Modernism, Edited by Janet Wilson, Gerri Kimber and Susan Reid

Katherine Mansfield: New Directions, Edited by Aime Gasston, Gerri Kimber and Janet Wilson

Late Modernism and the English Intelligencer, Alex Latter

The Life and Work of Thomas MacGreevy, Susan Schreibman

Literary Impressionism, Rebecca Bowler

The Many Drafts of D. H. Lawrence, Elliott Morsia

Modern Manuscripts, Dirk Van Hulle

Modernist Authorship and Transatlantic Periodical Culture, Amanda Sigler

Modernist Lives, Claire Battershill

Modernist Wastes, Caroline Knighton

The Politics of 1930s British Literature, Natasha Periyan

Reading Mina Loys Autobiographies, Sandeep Parmar

Reframing Yeats, Charles Ivan Armstrong

Samuel Beckett and Arnold Geulincx, David Tucker

Samuel Beckett and the Bible, Iain Bailey

Samuel Beckett and Cinema, Anthony Paraskeva

Samuel Beckett in Confinement, James Little

Samuel Beckett and Experimental Psychology, Joshua Powell

Samuel Becketts German Diaries 19361937, Mark Nixon

Samuel Becketts More Pricks than Kicks, John Pilling

Samuel Beckett and the Second World War, William Davies

T. E. Hulme and the Ideological Politics of Early Modernism, Henry Mead

Virginia Woolfs Late Cultural Criticism, Alice Wood

Ezra Pound and His Classical Sources

The Cantos and the Primal Matter of Troy

Jonathan Ullyot

Contents

This book grew out of an article I wrote for Unattended Moments: The Medieval Presence in the Modernist Aesthetic (Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2018). An expanded version of this article appears as the first chapter, The Spirit of Romance and the Debt to Philology. I am grateful to have received an Everett Helm Visiting Fellowship at the Lilly Library, Indiana University of Bloomington; a Research Fellowship in the Humanities to study at the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas Austin; and an MSA Research Fellowship to study at the Beinecke Library, Yale University. The Modernist Research and Readings Group at the University of Toronto helped me clarify the argument of my early chapters. Others who offered significant feedback or helpful advice include Massimo Bacigalupo, Katarzyna Bartoszynska, Walter Baumann, Ronald Bush, Mark Byron, Marjorie Froula, Maud Ellmann, Michael Kindellan, Richard Sieburth, Leon Surrette, Demetres Tryphonopoulos, and Robert Von Hallberg.

Works by Pound

Archives

Homeric scholars and comparative mythologists tell us that the stories with which the Odyssey is thick-strewn were not invented by Homer; that he took the folk-lore that lay ready to hand, and wove its diverse legends into an epic whole; that many of his myths are the common property of both Aryan and non-Aryan peoples.

I have thought of the second Troy

Some little prized place in Auvergnat

Late in 1934, Ezra Pound asked W. H. D. Rouse, the founding editor of the Loeb Classical Library, to undertake a plain prose translation of Homers Odyssey. Rouse was a retired principal who had pioneered the Direct Method of teaching Latin and Greek to his ten- and eleven-year-old students, in which the target language is also the language of instruction. Pound wanted Rouse to resurrect Homers clear and precise Greek from the Latinate style of George Chapman and the King James fustian of the Leaf-Lang translation. No poppy cock / that is the Homeric quality. Pounds letters to Rouse illuminate both the role Homer plays in