Pound & The Dial

ELT 39:3 1996 an epistemology and a "political attitude." His reading of the Alexander Del Mar cantos tends to repeat previous arguments that Pound treats words as if they were nomisma, objects of value in themselves. While Coyle is hardly unique in stressing Pound's multifarious subject matter and his practice of quoting lengthy passages from his source texts, in tying them to the discussion of the epic, he opens useful avenues for consideration of the generic character of the Cantos. It is, therefore, a shame that it is not until the last chapter that he turns to Lukács's Theory of the Novel, for it is in the Romantic concepts of epic and novel— above all in the writings of Friedrich Schlegel—that the richest thinking on genre is still to be found. In Schlegel, Coyle would have found an argument for the novel as the encyclopedic or inclusive genre of genres that bears fruitful suggestions for a study of the Cantos. Nevertheless, Coyle's emphasis on Pound's organicism is noteworthy, particularly because the coupling of totality and organicism has often been linked to fascist ideology. Coyle proclaims that he has gotten beyond the limitations of literary history and cultural studies by "treating discourse generically" and "insisting on the historicity of 'culture.'" I dare say that such obeisance to "historicity" is commonplace today, even if an equal attention to history is not. Moreover, "generic analysis" is less a methodology than it is an ill-defined version of culture as ideology. These criticisms aside, Coyle has a number of valuable things to say about the kind of poem Pound wrote and the extent to which he remained a creature of the nineteenth century. His scholarship stands on its own without the theoretical framework. Joseph G. Kronick Louisiana State University Pound & The Dial Pound, Thayer, Watson and "The Dial": A Story in Letters. Walter Sutton, ed. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1995. xxx + 383 pp. $49.95 THE IMPORTANCE of this volume cannot be denied; it makes available for the first time a substantial amount of crucial primary materials about the inner workings of the Dial, one of the pre-eminent literary magazines from 1915 to its final closing with the July 1929 issue. The artistic world and literary scene both here and in Europe during this period was one of excitement, experimentation, and significant achievements. To recall just a few of the names that inform this era, one 396 BOOK REVIEWS has but to think of T. S. Eliot, Maurice de Vlaminck, James Joyce, Anatole France, Thomas Hardy, Aristide Maillol, Marc Chagall, Thomas Mann, Pablo Picasso, and Marianne Moore, and these were but some of the many distinguished contributors to the Dial. The new primary materials consist of two blocks of letters that have enabled Sutton to establish the story of the Dial and its editorial management that is much closer to the truth. First, the letters from the Sibley Watson Archive have made it possible to fill in and "correct" the accepted opinion that Scofield Thayer played the "dominant editorial role" in directing and publishing the Dial. Materials from the Archive provide clear evidence that Sibley Watson "exerted a significant editorial influence" in editing the Dial. Second, from a trunk found in Thayer's hometown of Worcester, Massachusetts, more than ninety of Pound's letters were discovered; these letters take up more than 350 pages, and most were "written during 1920 and the spring of 1921, the period of his [Pound's] most intensive early solicitation and promotion on behalf of the magazine." Sutton uses these new primary materials in conjunction with the already known Beinecke Dial collection to "tell for the first time the story of Pound and the Dial from the inside, through the letters of the three persons most closely involved in establishing its literary character." When the Chicago Dial even after its transfer to New York in 1918 went bankrupt, James Sibley Watson, Jr. and Scofield Thayer bought the magazine with the intent of making it over into a "cosmopolitan monthly of literature and the arts." They turned to Ezra Pound: he was a successful poet and had earned a reputation of being...