Sant’Ambrogio in the Half-Light

A personal account of Pound’s final years (1962-72) in Rapallo and of the crucial role his companion Olga Rudge played in his rehabilitation.

End to Torment?— E.P., H.D., and La Martinelli

H.D.’s memoir of Ezra Pound, End to Torment, written late in her life, was published posthumously with omissions and changes to the text for legal reasons. This chapter reconstructs the work’s genesis, quotes suppressed passages, and considers the correspondence surrounding it, especially the moving and revealing letters Pound wrote H.D. after reading it.

“And Some Climbing”—Dante

A survey of Pound’s relation to Dante, the great model on which he based The Cantos and his poetics. This is placed in the context of earlier and later responses to Dante (from Longfellow and Rossetti to Eliot and Lowell). Pound’s writings on Dante were also read with interest in Italy.

Poet as Anthropologist—“European Paideuma”

In 1939 Pound was planning a finale for The Cantos that would present religious elements. In the process he wrote a paper, “European Paideuma,” which remained unpublished because of the war. This article is reprinted here and mined for the rich information it offers about notions and particular rituals alluded to in The Cantos.

The Pisan Cantos in Progress

An interpretation and survey of Pound’s most famous poem and its processes of composition.

The Green World

In September 1943 Pound travelled by foot and other means from Rome to the Tyrol. He often referred to this journey through a country in disarray as an epic experience of people and natural landscapes. This chapter considers Pound’s fascination with nature and vegetation and his insistence on memory of privileged moments of communion with places, a sentiment comparable to Hemingway’s fondness for recollections of cities, landscapes and people.

Afterword

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Moscardino and Enrico Pea

In 1941 Pound discovered a novella by Enrico Pea, Moscardino, decided that it was a masterpiece, and proceeded to translate it erratically. The translation was published after the war and is here considered for the light it throws on Pound’s scant knowledge of Italian, impatience with minutiae, and literary interests. Moscardino presents a rural, half-savage, community, dominated by primitive passions, reminiscent of D. H. Lawrence, a writer with whose primitivism Pound has much in common.

City vs. Country—Venice

In Venice Pound, following the steps of Ruskin and James, found an enchanting city. Many passages in the poetry are concerned with topographical details, plangent memories of sites, people, events. There is also a danger in the city’s beauty and decadence, and Pound eventually chose to live in a less charged setting, near Genoa. The ambiguous role in the poem of financier John Law, who died in Venice in poverty, reflects this ambivalence.

“I wish he would explain his explanation”

Pound occasionally provided explications of his Cantos and of his general view of them, rationalizing what was more like an intuitive process. This chapter surveys his general statements on the poem and explications of single passages. His comments are compared with Wallace Stevens’s extensive explications to his correspondents, revealing the different approaches to explication of the two poets. Both finally believed that explanations were superfluous. For Stevens it was the reader’s response that counted, whatever the intention of the poet, while Pound believed he was writing for insiders who had taken the trouble to follow his instructions and reading lists and shared his attitudes.