Folks:
Unfortunately not included in this otherwise commendable short
biographical note is the fact that Pound and Cather remained life-long
friends (some might say lovers) and that Pound had a profound influence on
Cather's post-journalism novels.
Ed
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Fri, 19 May 2000 08:34:35 -0500
From: "Mott, Jim" <[log in to unmask]>
Reply-To: "NEWDEAL: USA, 1929-1952" <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: NEW DEAL - Louise Pound, folklorist
Pound, Louise (30 June 1872-28 June 1958), folklorist, was born
in Lincoln, Nebraska, the daughter of Stephen Bosworth Pound,
an attorney, state senator, and district court judge, and Laura
Biddlecombe, a former schoolteacher who studied German language
and literature at the University of Nebraska and was also an
avid botanist. Educated at home by her mother until 1886, Pound
took undergraduate (1892) and master's (1895) degrees at the
University of Nebraska, where she coedited the literary magazine
with Willa Cather and also distinguished herself as an athlete.
She was a renowned cyclist and golfer (the 1916 Nebraska champion),
played on and later coached the women's basketball team, and
defeated opponents of both genders to win the University of Nebraska
tennis championship in 1891 and 1892.
Unable to enroll at Berlin or Leipzig because of her sex, Pound
took her doctorate at Heidelberg, completing her degree in two
semesters instead of the standard seven, and graduating magna
cum laude in 1900 with a dissertation comparing fifteenth- and
sixteenth-century English adjectives. She returned to Lincoln
as an adjunct professor in the Department of English at the University
of Nebraska, where she had been teaching as a fellow and instructor
since 1894.
Pound lived the rest of her life with her sister Olivia in the
Victorian house near the state capitol that had been their childhood
home. She taught five courses each semester for a half-century
and produced a large body of scholarship devoted to subjects
ranging from Old English, Middle English, and American literature
to folklore, linguistics, and regional studies. She claimed to
value most of all her accomplishments as a teacher, noting with
special pride that several scholarly books had been dedicated
to her. But it was her scholarship, especially in balladry and
American language studies, that brought her national and even
international fame. During the 1920s and 1930s she served as
visiting professor during summer sessions at the Universities
of California (1923), Yale (1928), Chicago (1929), Columbia (1930),
and Stanford (1931).
Pound's scholarly work had a triple focus from the beginning--in
literature, language, and folklore. By 1915 she had already published
studies devoted to Arnold, Tennyson, and Emerson in the first
area, articles on British and American pronunciation and Nebraska
dialect in the second, and studies of cowboy songs and English
ballads in the third.
Pound first achieved national recognition for her studies of
American and Nebraska speech. In 1925 she was one of the founders
of American Speech, which she edited until 1933, and she also
served the American Dialect Society as vice president (1927-1937)
and president (1938-1944). In 1936 the fourth edition of H. L.
Mencken's The American Language offered a summary of her work:
"Of the few American scholars who took the national language
seriously," Mencken wrote, "the work of Louise Pound, of Nebraska,
was especially productive" for its investigation of "the general
speechways of the country. Her first contribution to Dialect
Notes was published in 1905; thereafter, for twenty years, she
or her pupils were represented in almost every issue."
Pound's contributions to folklore studies were no less numerous
and certainly no less significant. She was president of the American
Folklore Society from 1925-1927 and served as advisory editor
of the Southern Folklore Quarterly (1939-1958) and Folk-Say (1929-1930).
Folk Song of Nebraska and the Central West: A Syllabus, published
in 1915, was an early product of an abiding interest in balladry
and poetic origins that led her into battle in 1921 with the
dominant wisdom of the day and its highly placed academic proponents
in her book Poetic Origins and the Ballad. Pound maintained that
ballads were not in all cases associated with dance, as other
scholars believed, and that they were characteristically the
work of individual composers, not "communal" compositions. Poetic
Origins and the Ballad was an openly controversial book, described
later as "Louise Pound at her feistiest taking on men who were
regarded as giants in the field" (Haller in McCleery, p. 45).
Pound opened with a brief description of "the accepted view of
primitive song" and then moved immediately to demolish that view:
"That it is an absurd chronology which assumes that individuals
have choral utterance before they are lyrically articulate as
individuals, seems--extraordinarily enough--to have little weight
with theorists of this school." The communal theory's prominent
defenders--George Lyman Kittredge, Francis Barton Gummere, Gordon
Hall Gerould--were at first disdainful, with Gerould complaining
in print in 1921 that Pound was "obviously incapable of orderly
thought" (Literary Review, 5 Mar. 1921, p. 6). By the late 1930s,
however, the communalists were in retreat, with Pound continuing
to press her attacks into the 1950s.
Pound's lifelong work in Nebraska folkways was not published
in one volume until after her death (Nebraska Folklore, 1959),
but the earlier Selected Writings of Louise Pound, issued in
1949, contains a broad sampling of her literary criticism, language
studies, and work in folklore. It also includes several pieces
devoted to educational subjects, especially the teaching of English
and the promotion of opportunities for women in graduate schools
and in research positions.
Pound was for many years an active member of the American Association
of University Women, and she was a charter member of the American
Association of University Professors, where she served on the
national council from 1929 to 1932. Pound and her sister have
also been remembered for encouraging and assisting the artistic
and scholarly aspirations of many younger women in Nebraska.
She was a frequent speaker to women's groups in various Nebraska
towns, and worked throughout her long career in support of improved
opportunities for women at the University of Nebraska. In 1955
Pound was the first woman elected president of the Modern Language
Association, and in the same year she was the first woman inducted
into the Nebraska Sports Hall of Fame. She died in Lincoln, Nebraska.
Bibliography
The major collection of Pound's papers is held by the Nebraska
State Historical Society. Additional materials are in the Special
Collections Division of the Love Library at the University of
Nebraska in Lincoln. There is as yet no full biographical study.
A thorough bibliography, compiled by Mamie Meredith and Ruth
Odell, is included in Selected Writings of Louise Pound, pp.
349-61. Brief biographical sketches include the entry by Evelyn
Haller in Notable American Women: The Modern Period, ed. Barbara
Sicherman and Carol Hurd Green (1980), pp. 557-59, and Elizabeth
A. Turner, "Legacy Profile: Louise Pound," Legacy 9 (1992): 59-64.
Haller also contributed an essay on Pound to Resource Guide to
Six Nebraska Authors, ed. David McCleery (1992), pp. 40-47. Obituaries
are in Western Folklore 18 (July 1959), and Southern Folklore
Quarterly 23 (July 1959).
Robert B. Cochran
----------------
Suggested citation:
Robert B. Cochran. "Pound, Louise";
http://www.anb.org/articles/09/09-00606.html;
American National Biography Online May, 2000.
Copyright Notice
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From American National Biography, published by Oxford University
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