[Andrew Frisardi]

Great post, Gregory. The humane equanimity of Richard Wilbur is something Pound sorely lacked. However, the Housman example doesn’t address the question of what place there is in modern poetry for epic scope and encyclopedic content. Pound’s references are centrifugal because we lack unity of culture, and he mistakenly thought that epic-scale poetry was possible simply through juxtaposition and compilation.

Also, whatever one thinks about Pound or his poetry, he sure had a huge influence on some very good poets. An old Milanese poet I know, a Communist Party member from way back, and his parents were in the thick of the Resistance, nonetheless loves and emulates Pound. Go figure. Then again, there’s a neofascist organization, based in Rome, called CasaPound. A polarizing figure if there ever was one in po-biz.

About ten years ago I became friends with an old English poet living in Tuscany, Peter Russell, who’d known Pound well in his last years in Venice. Peter founded a journal in the late 1940s and ’50s called Nine, which published Graves, Cummings, Tom Scott, Allen Tate, Edith Sitwell, Wyndham Lewis, Roy Campbell, and others, with Pound’s ideas about poetry having a lot to do with it. William Cookson’s Agenda was a spinoff of it. Geoffrey Hill, Derek Walcott . . . The list is long.

I did an interview with Peter in which he talked a bit about Pound’s anti-Semitism. Admirers of Pound do gloss over the nasty bits, and Peter was no exception, but I have never had the impression that Pound was an incarnation of evil. An arrogant rank blowhard who said some stupid and evil things, but not “evil” as I take that word.

There’s a story that when he was in St. Elizabeth’s, some poets came to visit him with a young guy who was about to go off to be a soldier in Vietnam. When they left, Pound said to the kid, “God be with you . . . if you can stand the company.” For me, that combination of wit, cheekiness, and off-the-cuff profundity captures something of the good of Pound the man.

[Gregory Dowling]

So you knew Peter Russell, Andrew. That’s fascinating. I have a number of friends in Venice who remember him well. I attended a reading he gave once, on a return visit to the city, and found him very engaging.

And there are, of course, many people here who remember Pound well, and many of them with affection. Pound’s daughter, Mary de Rachewiltz, has devoted her life to promoting her father’s works and translating them into Italian, and she rents out the house he lived in near the Zattere to Pound scholars. She is horrified by the use that CasaPound has made of her father’s name, although it can’t be said that they are entirely wrong in so appropriating it.

There are a number of poets, whose works I respect, who are devoted to Pound. Clive Wilmer is one such person. Donald Davie another. I remain somewhat baffled.

On Pound in St. Elizabeth’s the last word must go to Elizabeth Bishop, of course.

[Gregory Dowling]

This review of the Posthumous Cantos is worth taking a look at. Massimo Bacigalupo is a very eminent figure in Pound scholarship here in Italy; interesting to see that he knew Pound as a boy.

[Bill Carpenter]

Thanks, Gregory and Andrew, for your informative and informed posts. "Humane equanimity," a valuable commodity! I met Omar Pound when I was in graduate school. He was an unpretentious man who cordially encouraged any interest in Pound's work.

Here is the Bishop poem. http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/237932

[Andrew Mandelbaum]

Originally Posted by Gregory Dowling

There is a brilliant essay by Richard Wilbur entitled "Round About a Poem of Housman's"...

Great last few posts everyone. I regret my fooling around yesterday as this is good chat.
I found this poem by Pound. Is it about this same Housman? Just thought it interesting that it was the first piece I opened on after your post.

Song in the Manner of Housman

by Ezra Pound



O woe, woe,
People are born and die,
We also shall be dead pretty soon
Therefore let us act as if we were
dead already.

The bird sits on the hawthorn tree
But he dies also, presently.
Some lads get hung, and some get shot.
Woeful is this human lot.
Woe! woe, etcetera . . . .

London is a woeful place,
Shropshire is much pleasanter.
Then let us smile a little space
Upon fond nature's morbid grace.
Oh, Woe, woe, woe, etcetera . . . .

[Gregory Dowling]

Yes, that's the same Housman. It's quite funny but I think this one by by Hugh Kingsmill is better:

What - still alive at twenty-two,
A clean, upstanding chap like you?
Sure, if your throat is hard to slit,
Slit your girl's, and swing for it.

Like enough you won't be glad,
When they come to hang you, lad:
But bacon's not the only thing
That's cured by hanging from a string.

So, when the spilt ink of the night
Spreads o'er the blotting-pad of light,
Lads whose job is still to do
Shall whet their knives, and think of you.

Apparently Housman himself said this was the best parody he had seen of himself.

[W.F. Lantry]

O GOD, O Venus, O Mercury, patron of thieves,
Give me in due time, I beseech you, a little tobacco-shop,
With the little bright boxes
piled up neatly upon the shelves
And the loose fragrant cavendish
and the shag,
And the bright Virginia
loose under the bright glass cases,
And a pair of scales
not too greasy,
And the volailles dropping in for a word or two in passing,
For a flip word, and to tidy their hair a bit.

O God, O Venus, O Mercury, patron of thieves,
Lend me a little tobacco-shop,
or install me in any profession
Save this damn’d profession of writing,
where one needs one’s brains all the time.

[Andrew Mandelbaum]

Originally Posted by Michael Juster

These videos don't move me. I think of Pound's work as mostly falling into three categories: 1) his early poems--generally pretentious, often laughably anachronistic, imitations of poems of the past; 2) his "translations"---primarily his racist pillaging of the great Chinese shih tradition, although he didn't really know Propertius either; and 3) his later incoherent poems--which are invariably infused with the venom and incoherence of his loathesome worldview.

I know that's heresy for modernists, so prepare the stake and gather the logs. The Ezperor has no clothes--that's what I believe.

I don't know from orthodoxies on ex-pat fascist cub scouts who also happen to write pretty interesting poetry but as I wade in I find your first proposition to be hard to defend as I find a great deal that I like without even wanting to.

I have been dragging my feet getting around to a close look at Ezra's pounds. The relation to deep error and high hopes here reminds me of the Heidegger problem. I do have to say that your declaration of complete waste is hard to buy.

[Andrew Frisardi]

Lucky you, Gregory, to have heard Peter Russell read in Venice. Am I remembering right that you are from Bristol? That was Peter’s home city as well.

When I met him, he was in his last years, living in an old mill house on a back road in the Valdarno. His clothes were full of holes, he was penniless, his house was a disaster area, but his books and papers were impeccably arranged. And he was a fascinating conversationalist, with a great sense of humor.

This poem he wrote for Pound’s birthday in 1965 seems especially apt, given it is its fiftieth anniversary


For Ezra Pound’s Eightieth Birthday

San Trovaso

You walk alone along the road like God,
Grey-bearded, ancient, like a mad old king;
And you proclaim with absent-minded nod
That you’ve lost interest in everything.

Le Zattere

Becalmed, old man, step out upon the rafts
And start your marvellous journey once again!
Each day the world is new, and new bronze shafts
Drive new Odysseuses around the brain.

La Dogana

Becalmed upon what rocks, old man,
Are you bewitched and stay?
The hot Mediterranean intoxicates your brain
And the white dolphins play.

Giudecca

A gull stands motionless upon a buoy—
Old man, you seem to float upon great waves
Far out from the abandoned coast of Troy
And farther still from all the abandoned graves.


—Peter Russell, Venice, 29 October 1965

[Gregory Dowling]

Yes, Andrew, I remember talking briefly to Russell about Bristol after the reading. I've just pulled down a copy of All for the Wolves, his selected poems (which includes those pieces on Pound in Venice), and inside I found I'd preserved a photocopy of an essay by Richard Burns on meeting Peter Russell in Venice. However, stupidly I didn't write down where the essay came from. All I can see that it occupies pages 107-123 of a book. It is very interesting, even if I disagree with some of the premises it is based on: he compares Russell's "Dream Song" with Larkin's "This Be the Verse" to show how "Larkin's piece is full of inner emptiness" while "Russell's is an outpouring, even an emptying out, of an overbrimming inner life." What he says about Russell may well be true, but I see no reason for the denigration of Larkin.

Maybe you already know about this essay by Burns. If so perhaps you can tell me where I got it...