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  • Pound and Eliot
  • Alec Marsh and Matthew Hofer

Previously unpublished material, a New Selected Poems, two major letter collections, and a compendious book of essays on every facet of Pound's life and work make 2010 a robust year in Ezra Pound scholarship. Evolving critical discussion threatens two important theses concerning Pound's politics, Tim Redman's influential characterization of Pound as a "left-fascist" and Leon Surette's diagnosis of the etiology behind Pound's mid-30s turn to the idea of history as a Jewish conspiracy. Although T. S. Eliot scholarship seems to be largely immune not only to the cycles that affect critical attention to other major authors but also to the general downturn in scholarly publishing, this year's work showcases a particularly conservative and British Eliot whose contentious and, to some, unattractive commitments as a classicist, royalist, and Anglo-Catholic are paramount, even in poetic terms.

Alec Marsh is responsible for the first section of this essay, and Matthew Hofer for the second.

i Ezra Pound

a. Notebooks and Poetry

Through cooperation between Mary de Rachewiltz and Marcella Spann Booth, bookseller Glenn Horowitz has issued Drafts and Fragments: Facsimile Notebooks, 1958-1959, a limited facsimile edition (500 copies) of the notebooks Pound kept in Italy after his return in 1958. These notebooks, of the kind used by Italian schoolchildren, preserve in colored ballpoint the scrawled notes, perceptions, and [End Page 161] phrases that would make up Drafts and Fragments of Cantos CX-CXVII as well as other material "not cantabile"—not canto-ready. Reproduced in high-resolution color, they have an uncanny reality—the ink looks fresh and seems carved into the paper; one wants to put a fingernail under a postage stamp glued to a page. As happens, many of the pages were not used by Pound, so let the well-moneyed buyer beware: here is a good deal of exquisitely reproduced blank lined paper. But seen another way, these empty pages emphasize Pound's Promethean anguish. There are in total six notebooks plus a pamphlet, accompanied by remarks by Booth and Horowitz telling how the notebooks were kept and how they were separated and finally brought together here.

Long awaited, long overdue, and generous (281 pages of poems and 70 pages of notes), New Selected Poems and Translations (New Directions) has arrived to replace the thin Selected Poems (1949) and Pound's even thinner self-selected Cantos made in 1966. Edited by Richard Sieburth, the volume should be attractive to teachers and students of the poet, because it gives a sense of the full range of Pound's inventiveness, including poems from the Classic Anthology of Confucius and late translations of Rimbaud, Catullus, and Horace, lots of Lustra, most of Cathay, and 21 complete Cantos, with lusters (chiefly lyrical) selected from 14 others. These last choices are the most interesting aspect of the collection: they cull the mad static out of the poem. Cantos LII-LXXI, bulky and unreadable in its entirety, is reduced to a few pages; no full canto from the Pisan Cantos is included, and Thrones is represented by a few pages from Canto 99. On the other hand we get a good bit of the beautiful Drafts and Fragments, so the epic swings a redemptive arc, from initial descent, the wandering, the dark night of the soul during his military confinement in 1945, and up again, following two mice and a moth back toward splendor. Sieburth has made the politic decision to give us Pound the earnest guru, not the angry Jeremiah.

Ezra Pound in Context, ed. Ira B. Nadel (Cambridge), presents 42 pithy essays in less than 500 pages, from archives and anti-Semitism to vorticism and the visual arts, written by the cream of Pound scholars A-Z, from Barry Ahearn to Serenella Zanotti. The book is divided into three sections, "Biography and Works," "Historical and Cultural Context," and "Critical Reception." Space prohibits a detailed inventory; suffice it to say that anyone writing on Pound will want to consult this volume, which includes a helpful chronology. [End Page 162]

b. Cantos

"Like all modern epics the Cantos is pre-eminently a textual production, fundamentally and ostentatiously a...

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