Rendezvous at the Ezra Pound Centennial Conference (1985)
Book Edited by Hank Nuwer (Henry Nuwer) & Robert Waite for Idaho State University Press
excerpt below:
An Appreciation of Ezra Pound, Editor
by Hank Nuwer
A sign posted on a Ball State University department of
journalism bulletin
board reads: "The strongest drive is neither love nor hate;
it is the
urge to change another's copy." Someone has crossed out the
word "change"
and scrawled the word "alter" above it. I'd like to think
Ezra Pound
would have appreciated that effaced sign. Other than his
drive to write,
perhaps Pound's strongest creative drive was his compulsion to alter
the
lines of his fellow writers. An able editor and an energetic
supporter
of fellow artists, Pound profoundly affected the lives and works of the
best
twentieth century writers. He was literature's equivalent of a baseball
talent
scout, a bird dog at recognizing promise in aspiring poets and
novelists.
From 1908 to 1920, the period that Pound lived in England, he worked
for
several literary periodicals, and he influenced many young
poets. He
contributed verse and served in various editorial positions
at Poetry,
The Dial, The Egoist and The Little Review.
Pound--like Ezra, his biblical namesake--was a lifelong reformer. Pound
became
impatient with the progress of poetry during the first decade of the
twentieth
century, claiming what was written lacked intellectual depth and
stylistic
grace. Most poets, he believed, aspired to mediocrity and
fell short
of that. "Serious people" of the time did not write poetry,
said Pound
biographer Noel Stock, regarding such work "as balderdash."
Pound, in the 15 February 1912 issue of The New Age , emphatically made
his
editorial stand clear. "As far as the 'living arts' goes, I
should
like to break up cliché, to disintegrate these magnetized
groups that
stand between the reader of poetry and the drive of it, to escape from
lines
composed of two very nearly equal sections, each containing a noun and
each
noun decorously attended by a carefully selected epithet gleaned,
apparently,
from Shakespeare, Pope, or Horace." Moreover, in that issue,
Pound
attacked the pomposity and excess he recognized in too many
now-forgotten
bards of the day. "We must have a simplicity of utterance,"
he declared,
"which is different from the simplicity and directness of daily
speech....
This difference, this dignity, cannot be conferred by florid
adjectives
or elaborate hyperbole; it must be conveyed by art and by the art of
the
verse structure, by something which exalts the reader, making him feel
that
he is in contact with something arranged more finely than the
commonplace."
Pound believed that the ideal poem was one in which a "twofold vision
can
be recorded" form a marriage of "the perfect rhythm joined to the
perfect
word" (Stock, 117). He maintained that when a poet's
technique was
unpraiseworthy, not even the most wonderful imagery could salvage a
work.
"Don't chop up your stuff into separate iambs," he once said.
"Don't
make each line stop dead at the end, and then begin again every next
line
with a heave. Let the beginning of the next line catch the
rise of
the rhythm wave, unless you want a definite longish pause."
Pound exhorted poets to strive for plainness of expression, urging them
to
strip the suet from the steak. He said that poetry achieved a
heightened
effect when derived from economy of expression.
"Twentieth-century
poetry," he predicted, "will, I think, move against
poppy-cock." He
hoped the genre would become "harder and saner [and] as much like
granite
as it can be." He predicted, "We will have fewer painted
adjectives
impending the shock and stroke of it." The perfect poem,
believed the
poet, was "austere, direct, free from emotional slither" (Stock,
109).
In addition, as a spokesman for the Imagists, Pound argued for the need
to
strive for precision and "an exact rendering of things" (Stock 127).
The young Pound shared Edgar Allan Poe's conviction that any word
unessential
to a work should vacate the premises. Nor did Pound tolerate
the use
of indefinite language. "Use no superfluous word, no
adjective which
does not reveal something," he wrote in a Poetry essay in
1913. "Don't
use such an expression as 'dim as lands of peace'," he
advised. "It
dulls the image. It mixes an abstraction with the
concrete. It
comes from the writer's not realizing that the natural object is always
the
adequate symbol. Go in fear of abstractions. Do not
tell in mediocre
verse what has already been done in good prose."
Pound not only rendered advice, he also possessed a talent for
detecting
flaws in poetry manuscripts, making him the ideal
pre-publication reader.
When poets asked him to inspect their new poems, he compulsively
dragged
his pencil like a rake across each page, stopping only when scattered
leaves
were stacked in neat piles. Moreover, according to biographer Eustace
Mullins,
Pound frequently failed to wait for an invitation before editing
manuscripts.
At literary gatherings he jerked new work from the hands of poets
reading
new work aloud, amending lines that ruptured his
sensibilities. No
reputation was too established for Pound to criticize. In his role of
foreign
editor with Poetry, he persuaded William Butler Yeats to send him
unpublished
work. Yeats, then in his late forties and an acclaimed poet,
gave his
young friend a poem entitled "Fallen Majesty"; Not the least
bit star
struck, Pound cleaned up Yeats' final line, changing it from
"Once
walked a thing, that seemed as it were, a burning cloud"; to "Once
walked
a thing that seemed a burning cloud." Pound printed the latter.
After Harriet Monroe, Poetry's founder, named Pound foreign editor in
1912,
he told her that he desired to publish "modern stuff"; with "the
laconic
speech of the Imagistes.” Specifically, he demanded work with
"no excessive
use of adjectives, no metaphors that won't permit examination" (Stock,
112).
He also wrote an essay in 1911 for the Poetry Review that expressed
similar
views on what constituted good verse. “I believe in an
`absolute rhythm,”;,
which corresponds exactly to the emotion or shade of emotion to be
expressed.”
He stressed in that essay “`that the `proper and perfect
symbol,’
was the natural object and that if a poet used symbols he should so use
them
that their symbolic function did not obtrude; so that `the poetic
quality
of the passage’ was not lost to those who did not understand
the symbol
as such, to whom, for instance, a hawk was simply a hawk.” He
maintained
that the content of a poem was either “solid or
fluid,” meaning--according
to Noel Stock--that “a poem might have form as a tree has
form or as
water poured into a vase.”
That Pound followed his own dictum is seen in an examination of his
tightknit,
powerful body of work during the decade preceding his 1920 publication
of
Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, a collection of eighteen poems that marked a
shift
in Pound’s emphasis--moving from aestheticism to social
commentary.
During this period the poet achieved desired directness and cast off
stilted
mannerisms. Writes Stock, “His diction [was] clearer and he
applied
more art with less…effort.” At that time in
Pound’s career,
the poet consciously and ruthlessly tried, in his words, “to
new-mint”
language, eliminating “such encumbrances” as set
moods, set ideas,
conventions.” The result of Pound’s application of
his own strict
principles to his work was the creation of compelling, yet simple poems
such
as his colorful and emotional two lines “In a Station of the
Metro.”
The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.
Pound was a good self-editor. He set ruthless standards whether
composing
lines or editing them. “Mastering an art does not consist in
trying
to bluff people,” he declared in The Little Review.
“Work shows;
there is no substitute for it; holding one theory or another
doesn’t
in the least get a man over the difficulty.”
* * *
One of the strongest influences upon Ezra Pound’s writing and
editing
was Ford Madox Ford, a titan of a literary critic and a titanic
business
failure who saw all his enterprises sink. Ford edited the English
Review,
a London magazine whose December 1908 maiden issue carried the work of
Thomas
Hardy, Joseph Conrad, H.G. Wells, John Galsworthy, W.H. Hudson, and
Henry
James. The archives in the English Review must have pleased young Pound
to
be around, for he loved all things literary, and he manufactured the
“look”
of a poet with his preference for pince-nez spectacles, a cape, and a
walking
cane he used to make imaginary rapier thrusts at passersby. Ford kept
up
similar appearances. He threw extravagant dinners at the
magazine’s
offices at 84 Holland Park Avenue, piling additional debt that
eventually
deprived him of English Review ownership. Such a life was heady stuff
to
Pound and Ford, who seemed blind to the drunkards passed out below the
publication’s
gilt-plated name plaque and impervious to the odors of decaying garbage
and
stale fish. Located in one of the city’s seedier districts,
The English
Review conducted business one flat above a fishmonger’s shop.
Despite his faults in business, Ford recognized literary
genius.
As a publisher, he paved the way for big breaks for not only Pound but
also
D.H. Lawrence. Pound published his experimental
“Sestina: Altaforte”
in the June 1909 English Review, sharing billing with Galsworthy,
Wyndham
Lewis, Conrad, and Hilaire Belloc. Ford, theatrical as he
was, nonetheless
taught Pound an enduring lesson. When Pound brought his
less-than-polished
Canzoni collection to the English Review offices, Ford shocked the
poet,
after reading, by gasping and then rolling on the floor. Pound amended
his
copy, and later he claimed Ford’s acrobatics saved him two
years of
misspent work.
Pound delivered similar harsh judgments upon new work by writers,
albeit
never by leaving his heels as Ford did. So scathing was his reaction to
poet
William Carlos Williams’ first book that Pound prefaced a
21May 1909
letter with comments by leading with a warning: “I hope to
God you
have no feelings. If you have, burn this before reading.”
After coldly
assaulting the book’s flaws, Pound, in that same letter,
urged his
disciple to study certain poets of first and second rank (in
Pound’s
estimation).”Learn your art thoroughly,” advised
Pound. “Remember,”
he told Williams, destined to win the Bollingen Award and a Pulitzer
Prize
for poetry, “a man’s real work is what he is going
to do, not
what is behind him.” Eleven years after this letter, Pound
wrote another
scathing letter to Williams, informing him that strong editorial
criticism
was critical if literature was to flourish. “If you
weren’t stupider
than a mud-duck,” Pound wrote Williams, “you would
know that
every kick to bad writing is by that much a help for the
good.”
Likewise, Pound berated editors who delivered what he considered to be
foolish
or uninformed judgments of his work or that of other poets. Like other
writers,
Pound suffered much stupidity at the hands of editors. T he North
American
Review rejected Pound’s modern poem on a modern subject,
“Portrait
d’une Femme,” because the opening line supposedly
trilled too
many r’s, violating Tennyson’s rule forbidding
consonant repetition
(Stock 111).
After absorbing too many ill-advised editorial rejections, Pound wrote
a
letter that referred to editors as “swine” who
“do more
harm to contemporary letters in America than all the public bad taste
and
ignorance put together.” He proposed that books should
“be compiled
by impartial patient students, having no personal ax to
grind.” He
concludes. “It would be of great national service”
and provide
the students with fodder for their doctoral dissertations.
Pound became an editor in 1912 when a Chicago poetry enthusiast named
Harriet
Monroe hired him as foreign correspondent and editor of her Poetry
without
having interviewed him. She hired him on the say-so of Elkin Matthews,
an
editor and early proponent of Pound’s work. Pound proved to
be a good
choice. He possessed energy and patience for developing young writers,
and
he somehow had the stomach to forge literary relationships with other
editors
and even with critics. “I do see nearly everyone that
matters,”he
boasted to Monroe.
Pound’s dreams for Poetry were grand or perhaps grandiose. He
hoped
to inspire an “American Risorgimento,” an
“awakening,”
he said, that “will make the Italian Renaissance look like a
tempest
in a teapot!” Energetically, he recruited submission for
poetry with
the benefit of experience gained watching Ford hustle for potentially
publishable
work for The English Review. Unlike Ford, Pound sometimes had divided
loyalties
to more than one publication. In addition to Poetry, in1913 Pound
served
as literary editor of The New Freewoman, a feminist
publication that
Pound succeeded in getting renamed The Egoist in 1914. Pound published
the
work of such Imagists as Amy Lowell in The Egoist, but eventually he
put
his passion into Poetry because The Egoist devoted insufficient space
to
poetry and criticism, in Pound’s opinion.
To judge Pound as editor, it is crucial to know what he considered to
be
the characteristics of a good editor. In one letter, Pound insisted
that
certain “cardinal points” determined who is and who
is not a
good editor. Two of his criteria certainly describe his accomplishments
as
foreign editor of I namely, “Whom do they print?”
and “Whom
did they print before the author had a reputation.”
Among the contributors Pound lured to Poetry were Yeats, Rabindranath
Tagore,
and Ford. Pound thought Tagore’s translations of the Indian
poet’s
own work to be “very beautiful” in English (Stock,
120). Tagore
asked Pound to edit all his translations before forwarding to Monroe in
the
United States. “Please do not hesitate to make corrections
when necessary,”
Tagore once wrote Pound. “I do not know the exact value of
your English
words. Some of them may have their souls worn out by constant use and
some
others may not have acquired their souls yet.”
Of more importance to literature than the aid and comfort Pound gave
established
writers such as Tagore was his ability to promote little knowns and
unknowns
possessing talent. Pound’s self-proclaimed
“captious and ultrabilious
eye” read, with appreciation if not always approval, the work
of emerging
writers Williams, Ernest Hemingway (accepting six poems), Robert Frost,
Hilda
Doolittle (H.D.), Richard Aldington, Carl Sandburg, D.H. Lawrence
(“detestable
person but needs watching,” Pound told Monroe), and T.S.
Eliot, author
of what Pound called “the most interesting contribution
I’ve
read from an American.”
Pound, according to Hemingway, was only able to devote about twenty
percent
of his time to his own writing. The rest of the time he was caught up
with
the affairs of emerging writers, many with little of Pound’s
talents.
“With the rest of his time he tries to advance the fortunes,
both material
and artistic, of his friends,” Hemingway said in a 1925
essay. “He
defends them when they are attacked, he gets them into magazines and
out
of jail. He loans them money. He sells their pictures. He arranges
concerts
for them. He writes articles about them. He introduces them to wealthy
women.
He gets publishers to take their books. He sits up all night with them
when
they claim to be dying and he witnesses their wills. He advances them
hospital
expenses and dissuades them from suicide. And in the end a few of them
refrain
from knifing him at the first opportunity.”
Patient as he might be with questionable talent, or so Hemingway said,
Pound
nonetheless quarreled with Monroe when she dared print inferior work
sent
her by Poetry friends and benefactors. “Good editing, as I
see it,
means the most effective presentation of whatever is on
hand,” said
Pound, chiding Monroe in a post. “If I stay on the magazine
it has
got to improve;. I will not have my name associated with it unless it
does
improve.” Pound told poet Amy Lowell (letter of 8 Jan. 1914)
that he
had protested against what he considered shoddy practices by quitting
his
editorship but then reconsidered. “I resigned from Poetry in
accumulated
disgust, and they axed--a.x.e.d--me back. I consented to return on
condition
of general improvement of the magazine,”;--which
won’t happen--so
I shall be compelled to resign permanently sometime or
other.” Sometime
came November 1, 1918, when Pound mailed his final outraged letter to
Poetry.
By that date, Pound’s new allegiance was with the Little
Review , a
Chicago periodical financed and edited by Margaret Anderson since she
founded
it in March, 1914. Pound agreed to become Anderson’s
unsalaried foreign
editor, no doubt impressed with the slogan: “A magazine of
the arts,
making no compromise with the public taste.”
Pound’s most significant achievement as an editor with the
Little Review
is that he persuaded Irish author James Joyce to submit his
serialization
of Ulysses. In addition, he published the work of Wyndham Lewis and
other
members of Pound’s own Vorticist movement. By January 1918,
Pound also
became disenchanted with the Little Review, robbing him, he noted, of
the
energy that ought go into his own writing. “I am, for the
time being,
bored to death with being any kind of editor,” he wrote
Anderson.
In 1919 Pound departed the Little Review, but the urge to edit
remained.
In 1921 and 1922, Pound performed what he called his
“Caesarean Operation”
on friend T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. Pound’s
influence upon
Eliot has inspired numerous critical studies. Suffice to note here that
Eliot
enthusiastically adopted Pound’s editorial changes in The
Waste Land
manuscript and dedicated that most influential poem to his
mentor/editor.
Eliot said that Pound not only helped him improve his “verse
sense,”
but influenced him in subtle ways. “I have in recent years
cursed Mr.
Pound often enough; for I am never sure that I can call my verse my
own;
just when I am most pleased with myself, I find that I have caught up
some
echo from a verse of Mr. Pound’s,” admitted Eliot.
Pound edited even the critical prose of his pupil. On one occasion,
disturbed
upon reading some ill-tempered commentary by the usually moderate
Eliot,
Pound admonished him. “That’s not your style at
all,” clucked
Pound. “You let me throw the bricks through the front window.
You go
in at the back door and take out the swag.”
Pound’s interest in editing declined steadily over the next
four decades,
but he occasionally collected his energies for editing project she
deemed
worth his time. In 1928, Pound and his wife Dorothy published a
magazine,
The Exile, which is best remembered for publishing a cryptic poem by
Hemingway
(“Neo-Thomist Poem”), contributions from William
Carlos Williams
and Gertrude Stein, a part of canto 20, and Pound’s writings
on politics
and economic issues. The Exile lasted four issues. In 1931, Pound
became
a contributing editor to The New Review--circulation 73--but left that
doomed
publication after writing just one essay. Not surprisingly, Pound was
unable
to get along with one of The New Review’s chief editors.
The last thing needing to be said here is that even if Ezra Pound never
had
written one word of poetry, he contributed much to literature with his
editing.
It was said of Shakespeare that he never blotted a line, but those who
appreciate
good writing should give thanks that Ezra Pound blotted so many.
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Campus Box 8265
Pocatello, ID 83209
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