Pound Ezra - The Pound era

CONTENTS

About the Author

Hugh Kenner is Franklin and Callaway Professor at the University of Georgia. He was previously at The Johns Hopkins University and at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Canadian born, he attended the University of Toronto, then Yale University. Since 1947 he has published more than 20 books, concentrating on the great Modernists (Pound, Joyce, Eliot, Beckett). Pound enjoined him, about 1949, that he had an obligation to visit the great men of his own time; that injunction he has scrupulously fulfilled.

Hugh Kenner

IN MEMORIAM M.J.K.

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

About the Book

A critical discussion of Pounds poetry and an insightful analysis of his sources.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Ezra Pound, to start with. When I first met him he was 62. As these words are written he approaches 86. Mine was the third generation he had taught, and owes him its testimony. So this book was planned as an X-ray moving picture of how our epoch was extricated from the fin de sicle.

It led me long journeys. And having sat in a Venetian noon at the behest of three words

mermaids, that carving

waiting for the doors of Santa Maria dei Miracoli to be unlocked, having then seen the mermaids (sirenes) Tullio had carved in the tradition, and watched the custodians wooden pick pass behind the minute stonework of their frieze to demonstrate its cunning detachment from its base; having visited Rimini drawn by a few more words, and Montsgur (sacred to Helios) on account of words still fewer, I cannot but endorse the accuracy of perception that set in array the words that drew me on.

No one knows enough to undertake a book like this, but generous help has made good much ignorance. For information and shafts of specialized judgment the reader and I are indebted to Ezra and Dorothy Pound, Mr. Omar S. Pound, Miss Olga Rudge, Prince Boris and Princess Mary de Rachewiltz; Eva Hesse and her husband Mike ODonnell; Guy Davenport (polumetis); Mr. R. Buckminster Fuller, Miss Marianne Moore, Robert Lowell, Charles Tomlinson, Samuel Beckett, George and Mary Oppen, Louis and Celia Zukofsky; Mrs. T. S. Eliot, Mrs. Wyndham Lewis, Mrs. William Carlos Williams; Fred Siegel, Christine Brooke-Rose, Geoffrey and Joyce Bridson, Mr. Joseph Bard, William Cookson, Christopher Middleton, Richard G. Stern, Joan Fitzgerald, Walter Michaels; my colleagues Herbert N. Schneidau, Alan Stephens, Marvin Mudrick, Mary Slaughter, David Young, Immanuel Hsu, Wai-Lim Yip and Chalmers Johnson; Mrs. Alice Leng and Miss Anne Freudenberg; Donald Davie, John Frith, Laurence Scott; Mr. James Laughlin, Mr. Harry M. Meacham; Mr. Reno Odlin and his anonymous correspondent; Mrs. Gatter of Wyncote, Pa.; Mrs. Gay of Excideuil (Dordogne); Prof. D. S. Carne-Ross, Prof. Leon Edel, Prof. A. Walton Litz, Prof. David Hayman; Mr. Fritz Senn; Rev. Walter J. Ong, S.J.; Miss Barbara Tuchman; Mr. David E. Scherman; Mr. Peter du Sautoy of Faber & Faber Ltd., Mr. August Frug, Director of the University of California Press; my diligent editor Mr. Joel Walters; andfor getting me in touch with Ezra Pound in the first placeMarshall McLuhan and the late Felix B. Giovanelli.

Many who helped and whom I had hoped to please are dead: T. S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Wyndham Lewis, Henry Rago, Miss Agnes Bedford, Mr. Frank Budgen, Mr. John Cook Wylie. It was my tacit understanding with the late W. K. Rose that our projected books would complement one another, but his, on the personal interactions in the days of the London Vortex, will never be written now. And I was too late to discuss Social Credit with the late Gorham Munson, or Chinese History with the late Joseph Levenson, and have had to be content with learning from their books.

A letter from Mr. John Reid catalyzed the book years ago, though it is not the book he suggested. Mr. William F. Buckleys logistical resourcefulness was indispensable. So was the help of the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Philosophical Society, the Committee on Research of the University of California, Santa Barbara, the library staffs there and at the Universities of Virginia, Texas, Chicago, Buffalo and Wisconsin (Milwaukee), and the New York Public Library. And finally, the patience and advice of my wife Mary Anne; there are no fit words.

Portions of this book, often in earlier versions, have appeared in Agenda, Arion, Canadian Literature (and the reprint of its articles, Wyndham Lewis in Canada), College English, Eva Hesses New Approaches to Ezra Pound, Kentucky Review, National Review, Poetry, James Joyce Quarterly, St. Andrews Review, Shenandoah, Sou Wester, Spectrum, Stony Brook, Sumac, Texas Quarterly.

Quotations from the writings of Ezra Pound appear through the courtesy of Dorothy Pound, Committee for Ezra Pound, New Directions Publishing Corp., and Faber & Faber Ltd. Unpublished Pound material is used by Mrs. Pounds courtesy and is fully protected by copyright. Mrs. Pound owns the Gaudier-Brzeska panther drawing that appears on the title-page and elsewhere; it is reproduced with her permission. Quotations from William Carlos Williams poems are used by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. and Laurence Pollinger Ltd. The quotation from Success and Failure of Picasso by John Berger (Penguin Books) is used by permission of Hope Leresch & Steele.

References to the Cantos

Commencing with the 1970 printing, the American (New Directions) collected edition of the Cantos was paginated continuously, as the British (Faber) edition had been since 1964. I give references to the Cantos in the form (74/447:475). This means Canto 74, page 447 of the repaginated New Directions edition, page 475 of the Faber.

The reader who wishes to locate a passage in the earlier New Directions edition, which is paginated by separate volume, may subtract from the New Directions page number in the reference the corrections from the following table: