From Villain to Visionary: Pound and Yeats on Villon

Abstract

HE OPENING plea of the epitaph of FranCois Villon, Freres humains qui apres nous vivez, / N'ayez les cuers contre nous endurcis, must have seemed superfluous to Ezra Pound and W. B. Yeats. They celebrated him frequently in their critical writings as an embodiment of the artistic conceptions underlying their own poetry. To compare their two Villons and to trace their evolution is, therefore, to provide a paradigm of major principles and developments in the literary theories of Pound and Yeats. Their statements about him are of primary interest, not as independent criticism, but as practical examples of their general theories in various stages of formulation and action. We are, in short, more concerned with the personal use to which Pound and Yeats put Villon than we are with their contributions to the study of Villon per se. The interaction of these two Villons demands that they be treated in conjunction. For Pound's view influenced Yeats before the 1914 war, and was the point of departure for Yeats's new and independent conception of Villon after the war. The chronology of the matter may be sketched briefly at the outset. Yeats had read Villon sympathetically before he met Pound; in 1904-06 he associated the French poet with the popular and dramatic poetry which he was then advocating for Ireland. Pound, meanwhile, had encountered Villon in America, probably through his studies in the Romance languages at Hamilton College and the University of Pennsylvania. Villon figures as a persona in Pound's first book, A Lume Spento (1908), and he is given a lengthy and important chapter in Pound's first major critical work, The Spirit of Romance (1910). Pound met Yeats in 1909, and his conception of Villon definitely influenced the older poet in 1911-13. In addition to the evidence of this in their critical writings, Yeats's letters suggest that