For over a decade he had done his best to advise Mussolini; in he had attempted to advise Roosevelt; so now he would naturally seek to address Truman and Stalin. A less charitable interpretation would be that this was a further manifestation, taken to an absurd extreme, of the self-importance that had characterised Pound from his youth.
He had to tell everybody. He maintained that he had not committed treason, and Moody seems ready to go along with his technical defence. Laughlin worked with a legal team to have Pound found unfit to plead on grounds of insanity. Other friends and supporters, including Eliot, took the view that this was the course of action most likely to keep their misguided friend alive.
It was a pragmatic decision. He seems to think Pound could have been defended successfully against the treason charge, but this is debatable at best. Though senior psychiatrists may have colluded in pronouncing Pound mad, Moody provides evidence that other often more junior staff disagreed. But Moody makes it clear that, while he was in St Elizabeths, visited by the great and good some of whom, including Robert Lowell, wrote about his plight with deep insight and attracting acolytes, apprentice-poets, journalists and hangers-on, Pound continued to bring damage to his circle.
While Pound was in St Elizabeths, Dorothy lived in poverty nearby so that she could visit him constantly; most of the time Olga waited in Italy — but Pound fell in love with one of his admiring young visitors, the artist Sheri Martinelli. In his seventies and eighties, after his relationship with Spann petered out, Pound lived with Dorothy, then for the last ten years of his life with Olga.
Dorothy remained married to him and, as a result of an American court ruling, continued to exercise control over much of his literary income. Moody describes in some detail the understandably fractious dealings between Dorothy Pound and Olga Rudge, but has nothing to say about what happened to Marcella Spann after her relationship with Pound ended. Spann was an important muse in his final Cantos , though with characteristic ruthlessness he revised his drafts so that she often vanishes or morphs into Olga Rudge.
If we take a step back, and refuse to reduce Pound to an argument about anti-Semitism, it becomes clear that his greatest poetic achievements were bound up with translation. That is where his Imagist aesthetic came from: poems with the telling brevity of classical fragments and the delicacy of Tang Dynasty lyrics. His most perfect book, Cathay , published in , is the most beautiful volume of translated poetry in the English language. It is also — as Chinese scholars may have realised more fully than Western ones — a milestone in cultural relations between the Anglophone world and Chinese culture.
What about Troy, Agamemnon, Cadmus, and so on makes for significance? The perception of relations is anything but swift. This seems a promise to get language up to the level of experience: artifice and verbiage are shorn away, and words point directly to the objects they name. Language becomes transparent; we experience the world itself. This is a correspondence theory of language with a vengeance. We might doubt the promise by noting that in ordinary speech we repeat, retract, contradict, embellish, and digress continually in order to make our meaning more precise.
No one likes to be required to answer a question yes or no, because things are never that simple. They can mean too many things. So we add more words, and embed our clauses in more clauses, in order to mute language, modify it, and reduce it to the modesty of our intentions. This seems fair. His claims for literature were free of supernatural mystification, and he believed that the proper organization of language was supremely important.
Getting the words right is, at a minimum, part of the therapy. The hopes of the pre-war avant-garde, the artistic excitement of the years between and , when the modernist movement spread throughout Europe, died in the trenches and the camps.
Pound was, in a way, a war casualty, too; but he outlived almost all his literary and artistic contemporaries. He died in , in Venice, at the age of eighty-seven. In his last years, he did not speak. The apparition of these faces in the crowd; Petals on a wet, black bough. Hear me. With his own money, Pound paid for the publication of his first book of poems, "A Lume Spento. Despite the fact that the work did not create the kind of fireworks he had hoped for, it did open some important doors for him.
His friendship with Yeats, in particular, was a close one, and Pound eventually took a job as the writer's secretary, and later served as best man at his wedding. In , Pound found the kind of success as a writer that he had wanted. Over the next year, he produced three books, Personae , Exultations and The Spirit of Romance , the last one based on the lectures he had given in London.
All three books were warmly received. Wrote one reviewer that Pound "is that rare thing among modern poets, a scholar. In addition, Pound wrote numerous reviews and critiques for a variety of publications, such as New Age , The Egoist and Poetry. As his friend T. Eliot would later note, "During a crucial decade in the history of modern literature, approximately —, Pound was the most influential and in some ways the best critic in England or America.
In , Pound helped create a movement that he and others called "Imagism," which signaled a new literary direction for the poet. At the core of Imagism, was a push to set a more direct course with language, shedding the sentiment that had so wholly shaped Victorian and Romantic poetry. Precision and economy were highly valued by Pound and the other proponents of the movement, which included F. With its focus on the "thing" as the "thing," Imagism reflected the changes happening in other art forms, most notably painting and the Cubists.
Pound's maxims included, "Do not retell in mediocre verse what has already been done in good prose" and "Use no superfluous word, no adjective which does not reveal something.
After just a few years, he stepped aside, frustrated when he couldn't secure total control of the movement from Lowell and the others. Pound's influence extended in other directions. He had an incredible eye for talent and tirelessly promoted writers whose works he felt demanded attention. He introduced the world to up-and-coming poets like Robert Frost and D. Lawrence , and was Eliot's editor. After a vacation in Egypt, Dorothy conceived in a child, Omar.
Disenchanted with English life and culture, Pound created an alter ego, Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, through whose voice Arnold Bennett says, "No one knows, at sight a masterpiece.
Hulme to the war. In Pound started his relationship with the violinist Olga Rudge, with whom he had a daughter, born five months before Omar. From this period date one of Pound's most widely read poems, Homage to Sextus Propertius Pound has been called the "inventor" of Chinese poetry for our time.
Beginning in with the notebooks of the Orientalist Ernest Fenollosa, he pursued a lifelong study of ancient Chinese texts, and translated among others the writings of Confucius. Pound's translations based on Fenollosa's notes, collected in Cathay , are considered among the most beautiful of his writings.
Dante and Homer became other sources for inspiration, and especially Dante's journey through the realms have parallels with his examination of individual experiences in the Cantos. In Pound moved to Paris - Britain had become him "an old bitch, gone in the teeth. Pound make it a small museum and gallery. Ford Madox Ford met Hemingway there. Pound lived in Italy over 20 years, comfortable with his role as an outsider.
David Moody, , pp. Banknotes were for him a symbol of phoniness. The Fascists dismissed Pound's Utopia as "the botched plan of a nebulous mind devoid of any sense of reality". Although in America he was perceived as un-American, Pound was loyal to the Constitution of the United States and its democratic ideal. Provocately, he saluted the Fascist revolution as the heir of the American revolution. He praised Mein Kampf for its "keen historical analysis," advised his hearers to read the Protocols of the Elders of Zion , and suggested that "if some man had a stroke of genius, and could start a pogrom against Jews Pound later defended his actions, stating that freedom of speech is a hollow sham if that does not include the right of free speech over radio.
A special six foot by six foot "gorilla cage," as Pound would call it, was constructed for the poet, to prevent him from escaping or hurting himself. Surrounded by barbed wire and exposed to the harsh sun and dust, Pound was deprived of everything except his life and two volumes of the Chinese text of Confucius.
Poems, assembled in Cantos of that period, poured out of him. The opening lines were written down in pencil on two sheets of toilet paper.
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