Ezra Pound: The Contemporary Reviews (review)

Beginning with A Lume Spento (1908) and ending with The Cantos of Ezra Pound (1970), this useful book gathers about a quarter of the reviews published in reaction to Pound's many books. It is the eighteenth volume of the American Critical Archives Series, which provides scholars with a proportionate (positive and negative) mix of reviews written in response to the works of important figures. Of great value is the inclusion of a checklist of other known reviews of the works examined. An appendix usefully gives a checklist of reviews of volumes by Pound not included in the volumes, such as The ABC of Economics.

By gathering contemporary reviews for such key American authors as Emerson and Thoreau, Edith Wharton, Langston Hughes, Flannery O'Connor, and T. S. Eliot, among the nineteen authors considered to date, the series provides a data treasure trove that should inform all future studies of literary critical practice in the United States over the past two hundred years—not the anemic results of theorizing about such practice, but the kind of materially dense understanding that comes from immersion in actual practice. A further collateral benefit to this particular volume is that it provides real insight into the evolution of the important and often revolutionary American poetics that have enriched English-language poetry. In brief, this volume is an indispensable guide to twentieth-century poetry.

Clear themes emerge from considering the critical response to Pound over a sixty-year period. Reactions to his early work establish that belatedly, he was the second-best Anglophone poet of the 1890s (after Yeats). Cathay is universally admired as a masterpiece. When the unfortunate Latin professor W. G. Hale mistakenly believes that an "Homage to Sextus Propertius" is a translation of Propertius, members of the Church of Ezra come to the rescue, with T. S. Eliot voicing the canonical view (Pound's own) that the poem is his greatest work to date. Pound's reading of Propertius as a master ironist has prevailed. What surprises and refreshes is the largely successful attempts by contemporary critics to engage with The Cantos. New to me were the perceptive essays by Delmore Schwartz (Saul Bellow's fictionalized Humboldt). We come away with the lesson that if you are a confirmed experimentalist, like Pound, your reputation is always contingent.

Trouble begins with the appearance of Jefferson and/or Mussolini. Has the great pioneer of poetry ended up as a camp follower of fascism? Even critics highly sympathetic to Pound are hard pressed to deal with that issue. The result was the unsustainable dichotomy enshrined by the Bollingen controversy between Pound the consummate poetic technician and Pound the bloody fool. Many of the reviews appearing after the Second World War have as their subtext the international effort to free Pound from his confinement in "St. Elizabeths" [sic]. The majority of Pound readers today have not informed themselves sufficiently to get beyond this simplistic dichotomy. But Hugh Kenner had it precisely right. It was The Pound Era. Get used to it.

Scholarship of this caliber and this care is an act of extraordinary generosity, and we all have reason to be grateful to Professor Erkkila for this volume. She has chosen, correctly, to restrict her choices to reviews appearing in English, though a few reviews appearing in French are mentioned. There are a fair number of reviews in Italian appearing in the 1950s and 1960s but these do not participate in this important conversation, which is about poetry in English. To facilitate further work in this area, Professor Erkkila has deposited copies of many of the reviews cited in this volume in the rare book collections of Northwestern University and the University of Pennsylvania.

Without question, this book is one of the most important contributions to Pound scholarship of the last ten years.