Pound and Eliot

i Ezra Pound

Highlights of the year in Pound studies include essay collections by two longtime Pound scholars and a special issue of Agenda. "The Bibliographic Project," the online bibliography of English-language scholarship on Ezra Pound, assembled and edited by Archie Henderson and Roxana Preda and among the resources of the Ezra Pound Society website (https://ezrapoundsociety.org), identifies a further 50 articles and book chapters on Pound and 36 other books with Pound-related material, the most significant of which are also discussed here.

a. Digital Resources

The Ezra Pound Society website has added a "Poetry about Ezra Pound" page, also the effort of Archie Henderson and Roxana Preda. It joins the suite of pages documenting creative writing about Pound in specific genres. Gathered on the page are citations, arranged by the poet's last name, to poems written in any language that either mention Pound in passing or that focus on him as the main or a principal subject. A preliminary list of approximately 50 poems has already grown to well over 1,000 and includes links to the full text for the majority of the poems and translations for some of them. Also included in the citations are links to recorded readings by the poets or by others and descriptions of archival holdings. While most of the poems are written in English, a great many other languages are represented, including most European languages as well as Arabic, Chinese, Hebrew, Japanese, and Marathi, among others.

b. Aesthetics

Ezra Pound's Aesthetics and the Origins of Modernism (Brighton, UK: Edward Everett Root) is Jo Brantley Berryman's first book on Pound since her Circe's Craft: Ezra Pound's "Hugh Selwyn Mauberley" (1983; see AmLS 1983, p. 137). In the intervening years Berryman has written a number of essays and conference papers on Pound, some of them collected here. No introduction has been added to explain the arrangement of chapters or the book's overall thesis, nor is a conclusion presented to tie the chapters together. The author's focus, however, is clearly on the early Pound, up to and including the London years, and the chapters appear in rough order of selected aesthetic developments in Pound's life. Berryman is right to argue that Pound's aesthetics began to develop early, but they also developed slowly. Much still remains in the shadows about his pre-London years. One of his early influences seems to have been the French critic and literary historicist Hippolyte Taine, who is almost never mentioned in Pound scholarship. Berryman's Chapter 1 is largely devoted to Taine, in whose Philosophy of Art (1865) Pound found, as early as 1904, "an aesthetic system that provided a way to evaluate the origins and characteristics of art at various times and places through history." According to a preface written for the English translation of Taine's book, his system was based on the "application of the experimental method to art, in the same manner as it is applied to the sciences." Taine "credited the artist with acquiring specialized knowledge and developing skilled techniques"—techniques that can be studied and compared—and rejected the Romantic view of the artist as merely a vehicle for divine inspiration. Pound as critic came to express similar views, comparing his method of analyzing poetry to that of a biologist comparing slides or a chemist making a spectral analysis. Pound went still further, insisting that the artist, like the critic, is himself a kind of scientist: "The serious artist is scientific in that he presents the image of his desire, of his hate, of his indifference as precisely that." Berryman's second chapter contrasts Taine's aesthetic philosophy with that of the philosophers of intuition such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henri Bergson. The pace of Pound's artistic growth picked up in London, where he "was undergoing rapid development of his aesthetic ideas as well as his sense of language." Pound would meet Ford Madox (Hueffer) Ford in 1911, at which time Ford prompted Pound to modernize his poetic language by ridiculing him with his well-known roll on the...