The Odd Couple: The Correspondence between Marianne Moore and Ezra Pound, 1918-1939

Abstract

To call Marianne Moore and Ezra Pound odd couple is to understate bizarre, often comic, contrasts in sensibility and style displayed in hundreds of letters they wrote one another over a period of forty-nine years. On other hand, term does capture other pole of their paradoxical relationship; this unlikely pair, at first correspondents, then friends, were joined by an enduring link of mutual admiration and laser-sharp aesthetic integrity that bridged what to ordinary eye were unfathomable gaps in outlook and values. Pound, ebullient, rambunctious, irreverent, and profane, would seem to be epitome of excess which is common substitute for energy' that Moore so deplored in other contexts. And if she says in her reluctant criticism of The Cantos, Unprudery is overemphasized and secularity persists, or Stock oaths and result is ennui,2 what shall we say of letters? Moore, with her talk of unprudery and secularity might well have served as target of Pound's fury over prunes and prismites3 whereas she escaped with a series of joshing admonitions distinctly affectionate in tone. Theirs was a relationship that abundantly illustrates uncanny ability of great artists to discern in one another, through all static of mundane, the helpless sincerity which precipitates a poem,4 precision [which] is a thing of imagination.5 The secret of link between them was dual: coincidence of