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“I’ve seenPoundsomemoreandwonhisheartbytellinghimthat Iwasacollateral descendent of Aaron Burr, whose only mistake was [in Pound’s words] not having shot Hamilton twenty years earlier,” Robert Lowell writes Elizabeth Bishop on November 20, 1947. And he goes on: “He remembers your work before the war as having more‘address’[againPound’s word,whateveritmeans] thanMary Barnard and some New Directions’ woman whose name he can’t recall” (WIA 15). In the tenure of his poetry consultantship at the Library of Congress, Robert Lowell would quite certainly “win” Pound’s heart, while conversely, his own heart was “won” by the older poet and inmate of St. Elizabeths mental hospital. Lowell would strongly support Pound’s Pisan Cantos during the controversy surrounding the assignation of the first Bollingen Prize in 1949. It was also very typical of Lowell, and perhaps it went beyond the poetry consultant’s “unwritten duty” to pay regular visits to Pound, to invite his friends and fellow poets to share in his growing affection for the author of the Cantos. And it was also typical for him to promote their verse with the older poet, perhaps fostering the kind of list making and ranking of poets—the game of who’s best, who’s second-best, and so on—for which he was so competitively keen. Lowell and Bishop’s friendship—recently brought into sharper focus by the publicationof WordsinAir,theircompletecorrespondence—wassoontodevelop into what is perhaps the most complex and significant literary relationship of the second half of the twentieth century. It had begun only a few months before, with the exchange of some letters and two meetings. The second of these meetings, in Washington, took place on the very weekend (October 14–17, 1947) that Lowell had arranged for William Carlos Williams to visit Pound. On that occasion Bishop hadlunchwithLowell andWilliams,butdidnotfollow avery nervousWilliamsin the taxi to St. Elizabeths; nor did Lowell, who spent the afternoon with Bishop in “A World of Books Gone Flat” Elizabeth Bishop’s Visits to St. Elizabeths Francesco Rognoni “A WORLD OF BOOKS GONE FLAT” 171 the National Gallery, gallantly carrying her shoes for her when she changed into a pair of flat ones (WIA 810). Poised between compassion and revulsion, amusement and unease, Bishop’s memoriesofvisitingPound,scatteredthroughoutherlettersandprose,andshaped into her nursery-rhyme poem “Visits to St. Elizabeths,” are perhaps the most complex example of what may almost amount to a midcentury literary subgenre of “resolution and guarded independence.” This would include at least Lowell’s own reminiscences of and two sonnets on Pound, Berryman’s striking description of hisNovember3,1948,visittoSt.Elizabeths1andhisuncollectedpoem“TheCage” (Poetry 1950), Williams Carlos Williams’s quite unfriendly “To My Friend Ezra Pound” (in his Pictures from Brueghel), and Louis Zukofsky’s cryptic third poem in the sequence Song of Degrees (1950); but also, among many others, H. D.’s memoir of Pound, End to Torment (written in 1958 but published only in 1979), David Rattay ’s article “Weekend with Ezra Pound” (1957), and the pages on Pound in Mary Barnard’s, Diane Di Prima’s, and Al Alvarez’s respective autobiographies, Assault on Mount Helicon (1984), Recollections of My Life as a Woman (1988), and Where Did It All Go Right? (1999). Bishop’s firstvisitto Poundwouldtake place inMay1948,whenshestoppedby the capital on her way back from Key West to New York. A few weeks before, perhaps in preparation for this encounter, she was reading, as she writes to Lowell on April 8, “Pound’s collected poems, 1926. I just noticed they are dedicated to Miss Moore’s mother. It’s really hard to see how important a lot of them were, now—” (WIA 32). This is a surprising aside, which may be unconsciously addressed less to Pound than to Marianne Moore, her poetic mentor, whose authority over her was now on the wane: since, of course, Pound’s Personae is not dedicated to Marianne Moore’s mother (as Bishop seems to believe), but to the homonymous but unrelated “Mary Moore of Trenton, if she wants it” (as Pound’s dedication reads in both the 1909 and 1926 editions of that book). No certain record is left of Bishop and Lowell visiting Pound together. “I don’t know whether it was the time I went to see him with you or later,” Bishop would write on May 20, 1955—when Pound gave an imitation “of Yeats’ singing, to show how tone-deaf he was. The imitation was so strange & bad, too, that I decided they were both tone-deaf” (WIA 182). The...

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