YANKEE SUPERMAN

New Zealand Listener, Volume 25, Issue 634, 24 August 1951, Page 12

YANKEE SUPERMAN

THE LETTERS OF EZRA POUND, 19071941; edited by D. D. Paige; ABC OF READING, by Ezra Pound; Faber and Faber; Enélish prices, 25/- and 8/6.

(Reviewed by

P.J.

W.

E left Pennsylvania University with an angry roar and hit literary London like a New England hurricane, blowing down the Georgian idols with oldfashioned Yankee’ vituperation. Contemporary poetry was compounded of "verse-slush and too many adjectives,’ Chesterton was "slop," Meredith "chiefly a stink." By his demand for absolute purity and precision of expression, in his talk, his written criticism, and the example of his poetry, Ezra Pound did more than anyone to create the poetic revolution of the ‘twenties. The most apt of his. young disciples was T. S. Eliot. His telent was so great that he thought he was Superman. But if he was arrogant, irascible, and unpredictable, the great light shining through these letters and the advice to young poets in ABC of Reading (a reprint) is his passionate concern for literature. It is seen in the formation of the Bel Esprit society "to help civilisation to survive through better literature and art by releasing certain artists." Thirty guarantors were to provide £10 a year for life for the first potential recipient, T. S. Eliot, who had twice broken down while working at his London bank. Again and again in both of these books he makes penetrating comments on the craft of writing poetry. He hated mediocrity, dullness, and woolly writing: "Literature is news that stays news"; "There must be no book words, no periphrases, no inversions"; "Rhythm MUST have meaning"; "Would to God I could see a bit more Sophcclean severity in the ambitions of mes amis et mes confréres, the general weakness of the writers of the new school is looseness, lack of rhythmical construction and intensity." He became the god of the younger writers, who sent him manuscripts to be criticised, told him their worries, and ‘received in reply staccato typewritten advice that cut to the bone: "Dear F/ Yrz/ to hand. Partly horse sense en’ pawtly NUTS. Poetical prose??? Hell// The ine writing in either p or p consists getting the SUBJECT matter onto paper with the fewest possible folderols 'and antimacassars.’" But gradually egomenia began to replace the early scintillating brilliance. He named his son Homer Shakespeare Pound for "the crescendo effect," and became the champion of Mussolini and Douglas Credit. For his wartime broadcasts on Rome Radio he was imprisoned in a cage, tried for treason, dubbed the American Lord Haw Haw, and placed in a lunatic asylum. These writings show little of the tragedy of Pound's career. They display him mainly in his full glory as the cantankerous, red-bearded young expatriate who dined with Henry James and lived in Surrey with W. B. Yeats. Among the score of then obscure writers he boosted were T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Amy Lowell, "H.D.," Wyndham Lewis, Richard Aldington, and Robert Frost. He started a poetic movement called the Imagists, and shoved

down the public throat his pet subjects -Greek and Provencal poetry, Dante, Chinese and Japanese literature. His domination was enormous. Not even the Olympian Yeats escaped his influence. There is much here on Eliot’s early poems (Eliot addressed him as Cher Maitre), and on the "imbecile suppression" of Ulysses; dozens of bullying and cajoling letters to Harriet Monroe in his attempt to set up an American magazine which would publish only the best in modern writing. After London and Paris he went to Rapallo. Here his letters, to people like George Santayana, H. L. Mencken, or Ronald Duncan, contain much about his own poems and their remarkable experiments in technique. But the decline is setting in. The vitality of his Yankee slang turns more and more into affectation. He knew that his big oracular hour had passed, and significantly, his last letters are addressed to Katue Kitasono, an admirer in distant Japan.