Ez-Ray Vision

Abstract

Page 11 September–October 2008 Ez-ray Vision Bob Blaisdell Ezra Pound: Poet: A Portrait of the Man and His Work Volume I: The Young Genius 1885–1920 A. David Moody Oxford University Press http://www.oup.com/us 507 pages; cloth, $47.95 is more of the human comedy; and in his end there is a tragedy to arouse horror, compassion, and awed comprehension.” That’s the life Moody suggests but of which doesn’t give us enough. Pound’s stature as a poet is, it seems to me, of more limited interest and importance than the certain astoundingly wide and discriminating good he did for American and English literature. Moody describes but dramatizes less well than Pound’s most wonderful letters the energy and literary momentum Pound created in the 1910s in London. That is, in 1920, he had “the extraordinary conviction that he was, and indeed had been for some time, the sole entrepreneur of intellectual renewal in England—an outrageous delusion, one might think, until one thinks of his part in what has endured from those years.” Pound didn’t even personally like some of the writers he helped promote and publish (D. H. Lawrence and Robert Frost among them), but his fidelity was not to cronies (he was often brutally critical of the work of his close friend William Carlos Williams) but to literature: “‘He was as free from petty jealousy as from the least trace of servility to the Established and, like Ford [Madox Hueffer], he had a wholly disinterested love of good writing,’” recalled Hueffer’s English Review editorial assistant, who was initially leery of the American. The greatest, most famous, and influential poet of the age, William Butler Yeats, knew young Pound for This Yule, Moody writes: What the artist wills, in Pound’s idea, is to pass on to others the ecstasy of the soul in ascent…Lucifer, who would be his own master, represents the temptation of the artist to direct action—the temptation of a noble but self-willed spirit to try to carry the light of the beautiful to others by force of his will and by means other than art. That would be great temptation of Pound’s later life. Moody’s analyses are wise and sometimes witty, but it seems to me he’s sneaked them in at the expense of the life, the life! Can’t we have more of the life? Moody is a measured man, and he balances the details of the life lived and quotations from Pound’s electrifying letters with readings of the poems, which may need the illumination and better readings Moody provides, but why here, in the midst of the most compelling life in American literature? In English-language literary history, Pound is the vortex and the most generous person who ever lived. “There is a great deal more to the full story of Ezra Pound than is allowed for in the received ideas which would make of him simply an outcast or an icon, or both,” argues Moody in the preface. “There The first chapter of Ezra Pound, Volume I, which provides background on Pound’s parents and childhood, with illuminating musings on family photographs , is so weirdly thrilling and interesting (“He was known as ‘Ra’ [pronounced Ray], a shortening of ‘Ezraaa’or ‘Ezray’initiated by Grandma Weston’s friend Mrs. P. T. Barnum”) I thought I was going to have to call in sick and read the book through in one delirious sitting. Ezra Pound: Poet: A Portrait of the Man and His Work: Volume I: The Young Genius 1885–1920, however, is less a biography than a semester-long course in Pound (part 1) taught by the smart and sympathetic Professor EmeritusA. David Moody ofYork University. As he shifts from biographical to critical mode, Moody slows the pace to an appreciative and patient discussion (with occasional apt biographical foreshadowings). Of the 1908 collection A Quinzaine Blaisdell continued on next page Gorlée continued from previous page (1913–1914, 1936–1937, 1950), although he spent the summer of 1921 and 1931 there. During most of his stays, the landscape was covered with snow, the earth was frozen...