8 Pound and Eliot

This year's criticism features a major book-length meditation by Denis Donaghue detailing his lifelong entanglement with Eliot, and for Poundians an equally important and long-anticipated publication of Walter Baumann's collected essays on Ezra Pound. The rigor and honesty of these critics, their principled respect for the words on the page should make those more ideologically driven critics, much in evidence in this year's scholarship, blush. It should be noted that for perhaps the first time in its distinguished history Paideuma, the central organ of Pound studies, has slipped out of phase: the Fall and Winter 1999 number of volume 28 did not appear until the end of the year 2000. Alec Marsh is responsible for the Pound commentary in this essay, Ben Lockerd for the Eliot.

i Pound

a. General Studies

Walter Baumann's collected essays, entitled Roses from the Steel Dust (National Poetry Foundation), brings together 16 essays and lectures by the great Pound scholar, 5 of them printed for the first time. The volume completes the scholarly quest begun by the critic with the appearance of the classic The Rose in the Steel Dust (1967). In a charming introductory essay about his life as a Pound scholar Baumann describes his own method as "close reading" and in his modest way denies any theorizing. "It is now over thirty years" since the first publication of The Rose in the Steel Dust, he writes, "but I have gone on searching for 'roses' ever since." But Baumann is no Arnoldian luster-hunter. His rigorous scholarship and urge to follow up Pound's array of hints and echoes is a tribute to "the Leo Spitzer–like explication de texte" technique that is his intellectual heritage. His essays are devoted to the assembly of details, to the opening of passages that become passageways into the heart of The Cantos. Philological, densely annotated, always intensely alive to the poem, never pedantic, these essays make wonderfully rewarding reading.

A Swiss by birth and training, Baumann spent most of his career teaching German literature in Great Britain. One result is an unusual and highly illuminating "German" angle on Pound's poem. Two essays began as lectures in Munich and Zurich, so in them Baumann situates Pound in relation to well-known German writers, especially Goethe, who is not much noticed in Pound studies. In essays like "The German-Speaking World in The Cantos" and "Ezra Pound's Reception in the German Speaking World" Baumann confronts this underexplored side of Pound. Two essays about Pound and Heine and Hermann Broch complete the picture. Baumann also likes to bring German-language critics into his conversation, helpfully translating them for the rest of us. As might be expected, he is especially helpful on those not infrequent German moments in The Cantos, whether they be major statements about Frobenius or minutiae about H. L. Mencken; whether correcting the famous "DICHTEN = CONDENSARE" canard first pointed out by Noel Stock (dichten to draw in, tighten does not equal dichten poetry) or pointing out equivalent, yet kindred, dissimilarities between Pound and Hermann Broch (The Death of Virgil). He can tell us all about the old soldier Fritz von Unruh and explain the intermittent value of Pound's Heine translations. At all times Baumann is the kind of critic who sends you scurrying to annotate your copy of the poem. If ever Carol Terrell's Companion is updated to reflect subsequent scholarship, these essays will be a powerful resource for the emendator.

Baumann spent much of his career at the University of Ulster in Northern Ireland, and two essays, one on "Yeats and Ireland in The Cantos" and the other on the obscure Belfast-born poet Joseph Campbell, reflect his deep knowledge of and feeling for Irish literature. The first of these essays is not fixated on Yeats, but actually more interested in the heroic Desmond FitzGerald and on Arthur Griffith, whose "you can't move 'em with a old thing like economics" is a leitmotif of The Cantos. As is typical with Baumann's essays, obscure nooks of Pound's epic spring to life under his...