Dancing in the Dark

Abstract

Page 12 American Book Review Detail from cover Blaisdell continued from previous page as the finest critic of poetry he had ever known: “‘Ezra,’he told Lady Gregory, ‘helps me to get back to the definite and the concrete away from modern abstractions. To talk over a poem with him is like getting you to put a sentence into dialect.All becomes clear and natural.’” Moody then shows us some of the radical editing Pound dared (and Yeats accepted!) on Yeats’s “The Two Kings,” and reminds us that this is the same kind of extensive editing Pound will perform in 1922 on T.S. Eliot ’s The Waste Land. Moody notes not only the ideas and experiences that will appear in The Cantos, which seem to be Moody’s specialty, but also Pound’s rotten ideas and sentiments. He also reminds us that, yes, Pound’s going to get nasty and stupid about this and that and the other thing, but not yet, not yet! (Stay tuned for volume II and Pound’s tragic fall into anti-Semitism, fascism, and economics.) In the 1900s and 1910s, however, Pound was working at the speed of Albert Einstein: “Pound would go on to argue, very much as Hueffer had, that the artist is the scientist of the human spirit. ‘What the analytical geometer does for space and form,’he wrote in ‘The Wisdom of Poetry,’ ‘the poet does for states of consciousness’…. His permanent function in his world is to awaken minds to the mysteries latent in their experience.” He burned through idea after idea, creating and promoting them, but always valued and appreciated individual geniuses over his own ideas. Imagism was his idea of a moment in 1913–14, of interest to him only while it yielded new poems: “There must be intense emotion before language simplifies itself to the point of Imagism,” he toldAlice Henderson, one of Poetry’s editors; as soon as Imagism became programmatic, as soon as Amy Lowell, with little else under her feet, claimed it as her territory, he renounced it. (He renounced and rued his own misdirected verse as quickly as he renounced that of others.) Pound was continuously raising money for literary projects and deserving artists and never seemed to resent the financial or literary success that his beneficiaries achieved sooner or bigger than he— James Joyce, for one, who by Pound’s fundraising was able to enjoy the selfish artistic life he needed to finish Ulysses (while Pound scraped by on editing, agenting, and reviewing): “Joyce’s first impression of Pound was of ‘a large bundle of unpredictable electricity,’‘a miracle of ebulliency , gusto, and help.’” That is, Pound helped any great artist who needed it or anybody who asked, as long as that disciple would work with gusto at the temple of poetry. As Moody says, “There was probably no better teaching to be found in any world or time, if you happened to be the right neophyte for this new master of the art. Iris Barry was fascinated, and willing to be instructed….” He took his students seriously (unlike those he taught during his short stint as a professor atWabash College in 1907: “There was also the matter of sixty-one papers to look over four times a week, but it was ‘perfectly ridiculous’to expect him to do that”), and he respected young writers enough to give them his full attention and criticism: “Ah well,” he tells Barry, “you may have got a worse overhauling than you wanted, but one can’t criticize and be tactful all at once.” He saw enough in her work to get her published in serious journals. (His most involving correspondence-tutorial with a young poet, Mary Barnard, will come in the 1930s: “If you really learn to write proper quantitative Sapphics in the Amurikan langwidge I shall love and adore you all the days of my life…eh…provided you don’t fill ’em with trype.”) The most lackluster love letters you’ll ever read, however, are those of Dorothy Shakespear and Pound, but Moody tells the story of their long tepid courtship and early married years well and gives it about as...