Nadel - The Cambridge Companion to Ezra Pound

This Cambridge Companion to Ezra Pound contains fifteen chapters by leading international scholars, who together reflect diverse but complementary approaches to the study of Ezra Pound's poetry and prose. They consider the poetics, foreign influences, economics, politics and publication history of Pound's entire corpus, and reveal his importance in developing some of the key movements in twentieth-century poetry. The book also situates Pound's work in the context of modernism, illustrating his influence on contemporaries such as T. S. Eliot and James Joyce. Taken together, the chapters offer a sustained examination of one of the most versatile, influential and certainly controversial poets of the modern period.

THE CAMBRIDGE
COMPANION TO

EZRA POUND

THE CAMBRIDGE
COMPANION TO

EZRA POUND

EDITED BY

IRA B. NADEL

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, So Paulo

Cambridge University Press
The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 2RU, UK

Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York

www.cambridge.org
Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/0521431174

Cambridge University Press 1999

This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press.

First published 1999
Reprinted 2001

A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library

ISBN-10 0-521-43117-4 hardback
ISBN-10 0-521-64920-X paperback

Transferred to digital printing 2005

CONTRIBUTORS

DANIEL ALBRIGHT, Richard L. Turner Professor in the Humanities at the University of Rochester, has edited Yeats's poems and authored seven books, most recently Quantum Poetics: Yeats, Pound, Eliot and The Science of Modernism (1997).

MASSIMO BACIGALUPO, Professor of American Literature at the University of Genoa, is the author of The Formd Trace: The Later Poetry of Ezra Pound (1980) as well as L'ultimo Pound (1981), and editor of Ezra Pound: Un poeta a Rapallo (1985). His numerous essays on Pound appear in English and Italian.

IAN F. BELL is Professor of American Literature at the University of Keele. Among his many books are Ezra Pound: Critic and Scientist (1981) and Henry James and the Past (1991). He has also edited Ezra Pound: Tactics for Reading (1982) and Henry James: Fiction as History (1985).

GEORGE BORNSTEIN, C. A. Patrides Professor of Literature at the University of Michigan, is the author of Poetic Remaking: The Art of Browning, Yeats and Pound (1988) and The Postromantic Consciousness of Ezra Pound (1977), as well as editor of Ezra Pound Among the Poets (1985) and Representing Modernist Texts, Editing as Interpretation (1991). He has also edited The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Early Poems to 1895 by W. B. Yeats for the Cornell Yeats (1987).

RONALD BUSH is the author of The Genesis of Ezra Pound's Cantos (1976) and T. S. Eliot: A Study in Character and Style (1984). He is completing a study of The Pisan Cantos and is currently Drue Heinz Professor of American Literature at Oxford.

REED WAY DASENBROCK is Professor of English at New Mexico State University and the author of The Literary Vorticism of Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis (1985) and Imitating the Italians, Wyatt, Spenser, Synge, Pound and Joyce (1991).

HELEN M. DENNIS teaches in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies and at the Centre for the Study of Women and Gender at the University of Warwick. She has published on Pound and Medieval Provenal, gender in American literature and culture, and on Anglo-American modernism. Her book A New Approach to the Poetry of Ezra Pound through Medieval Provenal appeared in 1996.

WENDY STALLARD FLORY, Professor of English at Purdue University, has published Ezra Pound and The Cantos, A Record of Struggle (1980) and The American Ezra Pound (1989).

MICHAEL INGHAM, in addition to being Professor of Music and Chair of the Music Department of the University of California at Santa Barbara, is a professional singer. He has been featured as a recitalist or soloist with orchestras at a variety of European and North American festivals. He has also performed with such ensembles as the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra and Vienna's Die Reihe and recorded for Orion, Pro Viva and Amcam Records.

IRA B. NADEL is Professor of English at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. He has edited The Letters of Ezra Pound to Alice Corbin Henderson (1993) and written Biography: Fiction, Fact & Form (1984) and Joyce and The Jews (1989). He has also published a biography of the poet/singer Leonard Cohen entitled Various Positions (1996).

PETER NICHOLLS is Chair of the Department of English at the University of Sussex and the author of Modernisms, A Literary Guide (1995). He earlier published Ezra Pound: Politics, Economics and Writing (1984).

TIM REDMAN is Associate Professor of Literary Studies in the School of Arts and Humanities at the University of Texas at Dallas, where he teaches courses in American, British and Irish modernism, American Literature and Dante. He is the author of Ezra Pound and Italian Fascism (1991) and is currently completing a biography of Pound.

RICHARD TAYLOR, Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the Universitat of Bayreuth, has published Variorum Edition of Three Cantos, A Prototype (1991) and co-edited Ezra Pound in Europe (1993). He is preparing a detailed chronology of the publication of The Cantos and a variorum edition of the poem.

HUGH WITEMEYER, Professor of English at the University of New Mexico, is the author of The Poetry of Ezra Pound: Forms and Renewal, 19081920 (1969) and editor, most recently, of Pound/Williams, Selected Letters (1996). He is also co-editor of Ezra Pound and Senator Bronson Cutting, A Political Correspondence 19301935 (1995).

MING XIE is a member of the Department of English at Beijing University. A graduate of the University of Nanjing, he received his PhD from Cambridge. His articles have appeared in ELH and Paideuma; his book on Pound and the translation of Chinese poetry is forthcoming.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Numerous Poundians in various countries have assisted in the completion of this project and it is a pleasure to acknowledge their help. Mary de Rachewiltz in Italy willingly supported the Companion from its inception, as did the Ezra Pound Literary Trust through Peggy Fox of New Directions in New York. Kevin Taylor, and later Ray Ryan, both of Cambridge University Press, were continual enthusiasts who guided the work through its gestation and completion.

Individual contributors showed patience and determination in completing their essays and providing frequent guidance, George Bornstein, Ronald Bush, Tim Redman and Hugh Witemeyer among the most supportive of my numerous Virgils. James Laughlin and Donald Gallup, premier Poundians, were important through their earlier efforts to publish Pound and record his publications. Professors Hugh Kenner and A. Walton Litz were in different ways instrumental in establishing and sustaining the critical study of Pound. Brenda Maddox and her London dining room, site of an important meeting in the summer of 1996 regarding the volume, are also to be thanked. Finally, I wish to acknowledge those many scholars who have directly and indirectly contributed to the elucidation of Pound's work, a task that is far from complete. Their support, as noted throughout these pages, remains ever valuable.