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ELT 40:3 1997 want to supplement their reading of his work with a standard biography. Nevertheless, one hopes that a carefully edited book dedicated to the memory of a writer as fascinating and courageous as Robert Louis Stevenson will find a "fit audience, though few." Jim Barloon ________________ University of Kansas Pound & the Victorians Mary Ellis Gibson. Epic Reinvented: Ezra Pound and the Victorians. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996. 240 + xviii pp. $37.50 IN HER LATEST BOOK, Mary Ellis Gibson wishes to demonstrate "how politics were aestheticized in the modernist movement" by examining in detail "the ways construction of literary tradition and experiments with poetic form themselves entailed a politics." Professor Gibson possesses a formidable mastery of the nineteenth-century British (and Continental) antecedents to Pound's poetry, and her discussion in the first half of this book of the literary and historiographical traditions that inform Pound's poetic experiments is detailed, illuminating, and sometimes groundbreaking. Her attempt in the second half of the book to approach Pound's politics through a "tropological analysis" of the formal contradictions she finds within The Cantos succeeds less well. For Gibson, Browning was Pound's "most significant predecessor." She writes: "in his encounter with Browning, Pound came to ask the questions about poetic authority, epic, and history for which The Cantos became an answer." Pound's early poetry, in this view, can be seen "as a repeated working out of positions created and deconstructed in Browning 's Sordello." "Browning's historicism," she adds, "provided Pound with a way of constructing his own poetic past." Gibson also links Pound's historicism to that of Carlyle, Burckhardt, and Pater, observing correctly that for Pound "the impulse to write is deeply connected to the imaginative encounter with the past." Gibson might also have noted yet another way in which Browning provided a model for Pound, as a great verse experimenter ("say the thing's an art-form, / Your Sordello, and that the modern world / Needs such a rag-bag to stuffall its thought in," Pound wrote in the first published version of Canto I). Browning's "rag-bag," Sordello, as Clyde De L. Ryals has pointed out, was "conceived as [an] example of a genre inclusive of many genres," a phrase that could usefully apply to The Cantos. 338 BOOK REVIEWS Browning was also useful for Pound in overcoming his American belatedness. Gibson demonstrates how with the guidance of Ford Madox Ford, Pound was able to move away from his early aestheticist leanings, towards what he would come to call "the prose tradition in verse." When Pound arrived in London in 1908 he was, as Louis Martz has aptly noted, "except for Yeats . . . the best poet of the 'Nineties!" Citing Ford's 1921 memoir, Thus to Revisit, Gibson shows how "Browning's language . . . provided the modern poet with a living possibility for the use of language . In contrast, Tennyson, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and Swinburne were, as inheritors of the used up language of Keats and Shelley, dead 'before they were even born.'" Rossetti was an especially powerful early influence for Pound, "his father and his mother" as Basil Bunting would say. This influence was partly due to Pound's sympathy for the aestheticism of the 'Nineties, but it was also due to Rossetti's translations of Dante and His Circle. The one flaw in this account of Pound's early poetry and the project of The Cantos lies in its underestimation of the importance of Dante to Pound. Dante, not Browning, provided the template for Pound's career, sparking his epic ambition. Gibson's first three chapters rely on extensive archival research, but in her research she has either missed or dismissed the import of such letters as Pound's to his mother in January 1905 and July 1909. Certainly it is true, as she notes following Miles Slatin, that by December 1915 Pound was following Browning as a guide (in a letter to his father ofthat date he recommends Sordello and states that he is at work on the first three cantos). But as Gibson also notes, in the typescript ofthat first printed canto Pound "addresses Browning as the Virgil to his own Dante...

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