Ezra Pound in London

“I want to write before I die the greatest poems that have ever been written,” wrote the young Pound to his parents, and he did publish several volumes of verse, including his long rambling Cantos. Critics have discussed his writings in detail, but have somehow failed to lift Pound to the pedestal of his major contemporaries—Yeats, Eliot, Williams, and Frost. In a new biography, subtitled The Young Genius, David Moody hopes to alter the picture. Oddly he has chosen the medium of biography for establishing Pound’s poetic credentials. He dutifully elucidates Pound’s verse at great length, but in the process he almost derails his narrative, which charts the well-known details of Pound’s life in London; consequently the portrait of the man slips into the shade. Ezra Pound flits through Moody’s pages, but we seldom encounter his real breathing personality. We do not really meet the son whom his parents adored—or the man whom Dorothy Shakespear loved and eventually married. What we meet, instead, is the public persona of a loud brash man who announced to William Carlos Williams: “I happen to be a genius and deserve audience.”

Having been a student of romance languages and the classics in college, Pound began writing erudite and pedantic poems about the “Beauty in the Celtic Twilight” in the manner of the 1890s, but they were ignored by publishers. He decided to go to Europe because he felt that his own “half-savage country” was incapable of appreciating his talents. He arrived in London on 14 August 1908. Pound knew nobody and had only fifteen dollars, but he was confident that he would “get a literary position” in London that would take him “ten years at home” to get. His first port of call was Elkin Mathews, a bookseller and publisher who had printed books and periodicals that promoted the decadent and symbolist poets of the 1890s. Mathews liked this self-confident, if eccentric, young American. He encouraged him by introducing him to the literati who frequented his shop. Pound soon got to know such people as T. E. Hulme, F. S. Flint, Wyndham Lewis, and Richard Aldington. He also was introduced to Mrs. Olivia Shakespear, who had been the lover of W. B. Yeats. This meeting had a lasting effect on Pound’s life since she not only introduced him to Yeats but also to her daughter Dorothy, whom Pound would marry.

Soon Elkin Mathews agreed to publish his poems but often without payment. Although some of the reviewers in the popular press were agreeably startled by this “extremely modern American poet” who used “exotic metrical forms” and Provençal allusions, serious critics were seldom favorably impressed. Unfazed, Pound went on to promote himself and his poetry by bizarre means. According to Ford Madox Ford, he “would wear trousers made of green billiard-cloth, a pink coat, a blue shirt, a tie painted by a Japanese friend, an immense sombrero, a flaming beard cut to a point, and a single, large blue-earring.” Hilda Doolittle, who had been briefly engaged to Pound, presented a terse portrait: “Ezra is kind but blustering and really stupid. He is adolescent. He seems almost ‘arrested’ in development.” Punch parodied him by hailing the “palpitating works” of “the new Montana (USA) poet, Mr Ezekiel Ton.” But Pound took it as a compliment and told his mother, “London has offered to me its ultimate laurel. . . . ‘Punch’ has taken cognisance of my existence.” Pound presented himself as a fierce, contentious, and anarchic personality who was engaged in avant-garde movements in order to drown the remnants of the Victorian legacy in poetry; yet the poems that he wrote were archaic. But in 1911, under the influence of Ford Madox Hueffer (Ford), Pound radically altered his diction from stilted language to a live spoken idiom. It was not easy, but he made a determined effort. In an article in Poetry Review (1912) he argued that...