Dear David,

Thanks for this.

I wasn't challenging the impact of TWL. The suggestion i was making was that Pound's role in the shaping of TWL is a mediation of his influence on modernist poetry.

Pound might have needed Hardy's letter of introduction, but, once he got to France, he still continued moving and shaking.

I would agree that Ulysses is the great work of this period, but I think we are comparing apples and pears: Pound's role as a literary facilitator and promoter - and the impact of Joyce's achievement as a writer.

The other figure i would want to bring in is Ford: as editor of the English Review (publishing unpublishable Hardy, discovering Lawrence and others); as editor of the transatalntic review in Paris; as a poetic mentor to Pound 1908-1914; and as a transatlantic figure through the 20s and 30s.

I am not sure about icons. Pound did a lot of work in relation to early modernism, but Joyce and Ford were probably nicer men. Certainly, they had much better politics.

Robert

Hi Robert

>I am intrigued that you cite Eliot of The Waste Land and Yeats of The Tower as more influential than Pound. <

Historically, in terms of impact on contemporaries, that was the case. I am old enough to have grown up reading accounts by those contemporaries. The Waste Land was the poem of its generation for them, not Mauberly or the early Cantos. In Europe young poets like Seferis or Montale looked to that version of Eliot as an inspiration, not il miglior fabbro. (as an aside, Ungaretti, a modernist and a thoroughgoing fascist to boot, sometimes speech writer to Il Duce himself, seems to have had little or no relationship with Pound)

Yes, Pound was a mover and shaker in the literary scene when based in London. But he famously had to rely on a letter from Thomas Hardy for his introduction to French literary circles and when you read accounts by contemporaries of the literature of the time the English language book that was the centrepiece of modernism wasn't even The Waste Land it was Joyce's Ulysses.

Racist elements in Jones' writing ????

I would heavily emphasis that it don't disregard Pound's work, but I do resist the iconic status and centrality that is being conferred on it.

best

David

On 6 March 2018 at 16:28, Hampson, R <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

Dear David,

I am intrigued that you cite Eliot of The Waste Land and Yeats of The Tower as more influential than Pound.

Eliot felt embarrassed by the citing of The Waste Land as his masterpiece - and wanted to direct attention to The Four Quartets, instead - because of Pound's role as midwife: it is Pound's editing of TWL that made it into the Modernist icon.

Yeats and Pound had been meeting regularly since 1908, and they spent the winter of 1913-14 at Stone Cottage. My understanding is that this period at Stone Cottage with Pound led to a shift in Yeats's poetics. Pound passed on to Yeats some of the principles that he had picked up from Ford Madox Ford whom he had also met regularly since 2008).

Pound has horrible politics, but he was an important mover and shaker in early Modernist circles. Was he peripheral in Paris? He was an important link to magazines - especially in the US - and helped Joyce in this respect.

The racist and nationalist elements run right through Jones's work permeating it ... Is it really better that they are a little more hidden than the fascist elements of the Cantos?

Robert

From: British & Irish poets <[log in to unmask]AC.UK> on behalf of David Bircumshaw <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: 06 March 2018 07:16:20

To: [log in to unmask]AC.UK
Subject: Re: Ezra Pound will remain in the literary canon I expect

I have some sympathy with Sean here in the respect that I have seen plenty of instances of Pound being referenced as an iconic artist with the reality of his views being airbrushed out of the picture, a frequent tendency is to ascribe them to his 'illness'; while there certainly have been and are acolytes of Pound coming from similar points of the political spectrum - remember, the Cantos were intended as didactic poetry, Pound somewhere used the phrase 'totalitarian poetry'. On another note, I have lately seen a strange rewriting of literary history going on, whereby Pound is mounted as the key figure in the history of 20th century modernism, which is nonsense. When he moved to Paris in 1920 he was a peripheral figure: the English language writer who was feted by the French avant was of course James Joyce, while the English language poets who did have international impact among the forward guard in the 20s were the Eliot of The Waste Land and the Yeats of 'The Tower'.

I think fragments of the Cantos are wondrous writing, but as a whole they are an artistic failure, not only because his political views but because his technique wasn't actually adequate to presenting the half-digested chunks of history he quarried, because he continually lapses into private reference, because it doesn't 'all cohere', to adapt a phrase from his translation of Women of Trachis.

I can well understand poets finding a resource in elements of the Cantos for their own writing, it is inarguable that Pound has been a fruitful influence despite his being a cracked bell, but the limitations of his technique are real. David Jones, in his late poems, possibly employs similar methods more effectively, partly because he adapts them to liturgical antiphony. Jones, too, had extreme political views, but he avoids making them explicit in his poems.

This is only scratching the surface of the subject, and I have no wish to upset those who hold Pound's writing in aesthetic affection.

Best

david

On 5 March 2018 at 23:46, Mark Weiss <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

As best I know, nobody else who teaches the Cantos can either. This is really a non-argument.

-----Original Message-----
From: "Hampson, R"
Sent: Mar 5, 2018 6:40 PM
To: [log in to unmask]C.UK
Subject: Re: Ezra Pound will remain in the literary canon I expect

For me, coming to Pound in the late 60s, part of the interest was precisely the fact that the fascism was inescapable. With Pound, any engagement with the Cantos had to be in the light of his fascism - whereas with Eliot and Yeats, the way they were taught, the material available on them, there were all kinds of escape routes into myth and symbol - avoidances of the political - despite, for example, Eliot's interest in Corioloanus.

The volume Pound/Olson was instructive: Olson's visits to St Elizabeth's and his efforts to negotiate the poetry and the politics.

I can't imagine teaching Pound without mentioning his anti-semitism and fascism.

Robert

From: British & Irish poets <[log in to unmask]AC.UK> on behalf of Sean Carey <00000758a731f3ca-dmarc-reques [log in to unmask]>
Sent: 05 March 2018 23:24:59
To: [log in to unmask]C.UK
Subject: Re: Ezra Pound will remain in the literary canon I expect

but those who teach his work should not avoid his activities during World War Two or up until his death. To gloss over Pound’s words & deeds is to let the dead and wounded down in a macro war that killed millions. As the memories of WW2 fade from the folk memory the lessons of it all are also being lost. Our species sank to depths of depravity & brutality which surfaced again in the Balkans. Then on Europe’s shores are the graves of those trying to flee the Syrian war & in The Med their bones lie under the sea.

To look at various nations in Europe the popular mood veers to populism with Britain or Ireland no exceptions. We have failed the refugees with our inability to embrace the suffering masses in a crisis. The endless surge of hard right parties air brushed and well funded has denied our hopes of ‘constant progress’.

The Ezra Pound that promoted racial & religous hatred is indeed beyond punishment but his work must not be taught out of context. To make no stance on Pound is to avoid his behaviour as as ‘of its time’. World War One did not become an object lesson or ‘the war to end all wars’. Instead we ended up with another war that spread well beyond Europe all over again.

What emerged from the Italian elections yesterday is sobering & worrying & we must not assume it will never happen overhere. There is no point in championing Paul Celan while teaching Ezra Pound on the same literary platform. Casa Pound have brought home to us the risks of not imposing a moral basis in our views on Ezra. We do it in other areas of thought & discourse & must not let Pound off the hook.

sc

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On Monday, 5 March 2018, Tim Allen <0000002899e7d020-dmarc-[log in to unmask]> wrote:

I mostly agree with this Peter. I think people tend to forget the mental demolishing that WW1 caused among intellectuals - and for every one that went one way (left) another went right. Despite my own lefty politics I have never gone in for black and white retrospective moralising.

Cheers

Tim

On 5 Mar 2018, at 01:07, Peter Riley wrote:

To put it as briefly as possible: a number of European intellectuals artists and writers engaged with fascism including anti-semitism in the 1920s and early 1930s. If you look at their birth dates and careers most of them had been directly involved in the 1914-18 war and had recognised it as the worst thing that had ever happened, and as a result of this unbelievable, soul-destroying experienced knew that it must never happen again. Lewis blamed the drift of European philosophy in the first decade of the century towards the validation of instinct (rather than either reason or emotion) for the 14-18 war. From the information received at the time German national socialism seemed like an offer of stability and an alternative to a mounting global instinctive primitivism and thus might assure peace. They were wrong, of course, as they mostly soon realised, and retracted and withdrew. To treat these errors as simply pieces of nastiness for which they must be for ever punished, is very unrealistic.