Cambridge Companion to Pound

ELT 44 : 4 2001 In her eloquent chapter on Wilde in The House Beautiful: Oscar Wilde and the Aesthetic Interior, Charlotte Gere points out that he himself did not follow his own precepts when furnishing his house. Rather he was the advocate of the house beautiful. We have in Charlotte Gere's book the wider world that the Holland Park Circle was part of and helped shape. The usual suspects, discussed in an intelligent and insightful way, are here such as the Grosvenor Gallery, William Morris, the influence of Japan, Whistler, E. W Godwin, and the guide books written about how to furnish. The Wyndhams play a role as well, with a beautiful photograph of the White Drawing Room at Clouds. Lesley Hoskins's final chapter in the book on the aesthetic interior discusses the actual furniture to be found in such homes. Some of the rooms, such as the morning room of 1 Holland Park, the home of the Ionides, does appear to be too jammed. Aestheticism could easily be excessive and be parodied. But both the Holland Park artists and the occupants of aesthetic houses were attempting to create a more beautiful world. These books document and analyze their frequently successful steps in that direction. Peter Stansky ______________ Stanford University Cambridge Companion to Pound Ira B. Nadel, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Ezra Pound. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999. xxxi + 318 pp. Cloth $54.95 Paper $19.95 AS IRA NADEL states at the very beginning of the prefatory chapter to this collection, "Understanding Ezra Pound has never been easy." Beginning with Hugh Kenner, over the years a number of scholars have endeavored to contribute to the effort to understand the American poet by providing general or introductory guides to his life and works. In its way, The Cambridge Companion to Ezra Pound is one of the most comprehensive of such attempts, including as it does fifteen different chapters by eminent Poundians and/or experts on literary modernism that focus on a wide range of texts and topics. The book contains, for instance , individual chapters on the early poetry and on the early, middle, and late Cantos, as well as one recounting the textual history of Pound's modern epic. Two essays concentrate on Pound's roles as critic and translator, while two others assess the nature and extent of his influence , detailing the part he played in "the making of modernism" and "the impact of The Cantos on a generation of younger writers," including not only Creeley, Duncan, and Olson, et al., but also John Ashbery and 510 book reviews Susan Howe. Finally, the volume concludes with what Nadel refers to as "a series of essays on Pound and extra-literary topics," focusing, in order, on "Pound and the visual arts," "Pound and music," "Pound's politics and economics," "Pound, women and gender," and "Pound and antisemitism." Encompassing "a variety of critical approaches," the collection, according to Nadel, is designed "to present the work of Pound from complementary perspectives: descriptive, analytical, historical, cultural, and textual." Despite the sometimes disparate rhetorical and critical tactics employed by the contributors, the essays, for the most part, manage not only to complement one another but also to interweave at times in somewhat subtle ways. Concluding his chapter on the early Cantos (I-XLI), for instance, Daniel Albright reminds us of the "provisional," improvisational nature of Pound's major project and of its dramatic inconsistencies . Even "the ideogrammatic method—like the rag-bag method, the Noh play method, and the fugal method—did not," finally, "solve all Pound's problems," producing as it did both moments when the language achieves a "devastating clarity" and "occasions when the reader is more likely to discover ... a futile mishmash." "[B]ut Pound's strength as a poet," Albright asserts, "lay in his astonishing capacity for creating problems , without necessarily solving them." Albright's formulation is echoed in a manner in Ronald Bush's analysis of the late Cantos (LXXII-CXVII), which he calls "a model for dialogical discourse that poets in succeeding generations have ignored at their peril." Blending biography and textual scholarship, Bush traces the radical vacillation in Pound's ideological affiliations in...