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One still sees the composer Alfredo Casella given credit for early stages of the Vivaldi revival in the 1930s and ‘40s, both by general writers and musicologists who ought to know better. The credit belongs with Ezra Pound and Olga Rudge, as my article demonstrates.
I am always sceptical about loose analogies between literary and musical concepts of form. Here is my argument, and I am grateful to Nancy Cluck for thinking it “important.”
The last requirement for my PhD under Toronto’s old regulations was an undergraduate course in Old English. I was worried because my attempts to satisfy it in Toronto were taught by impossible old-school fuddy-duddies interested only in grammar. I had a taste of old-school philology there. In 1970 I married and moved to London, dissertation done, jobless; but at Western I was able to take the course from Prof. Connie Hieatt, a truly inspiring teacher. For my term paper, I decided to do a job on Pound’s version of “The Seafarer,” which was then still being derided by philologists for its “errors.” This is the result (and Connie Hieatt loved it).
This piece on Pound’s many attempts to translate poems from the Provençal (or Occitan as it’s now called) was revised from my dissertation and for a variety of reasons had difficulty finding publication. So when some friends in Toronto started a new journal on the origins of Modernism called Four Decades and asked me to contribute, I offered this. The journal failed and I don’t know where it can now be found, but I was gratified to see the reviewer in A Year’s Work in English Studies describe it as “surprisingly good.”
This is a precursor to the more comprehensive later article on Pound’s “metrical contract.” It deals more closely than the later article with metrical quantity in English.
This is a somewhat impressionistic piece on the surface value of soundscape in Pound’s poetic world.
At the time, Antheil’s music was largely unplayed and forgotten, a situation happily improved since then. “Neofism” was his contraction for “neo-futurism,” and the article aligns both Antheil and Pound with the noise music of Luigi Russolo and the Italian Futurists – a movement that is also more widely known now than when I wrote.
A note identifying one of Pound’s pseudonyms and identifying Carl Sandburg’s presence in The Cantos.
This essay brings together my two greatest fascinations, the poetry of Pound, and the prosodic workings of free verse. It is the work on Pound that I am most proud of.
When this article appeared, the understanding of Pound’s “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley” was seriously obfuscated by a reading proposed by Donald Davie in an essay widely used in England by students swatting up for exams and then elaborated in a book by Davie’s own student Jo Brantley Berryman. I found this reading impossible – not a supplementary understanding of the poem but bluntly wrong. “Mauberley” is difficult enough, and quite poetically satisfying, without these specious complications. I am glad to say that Davie’s reading has died a natural death since this appeared.
I was honored to be given the Pound essay in this collection by two of the finest Pound scholars. My own interest in the “occult tradition,” unlike theirs, is tangential, but Pound’s operas are imbued with his study of the Noh, and thus directly tied to his collaboration with Yeats. Pound had more interest in the theater than he is given credit for, since it was expressed in work outside The Cantos – the operas, the two translations from Sophokles, four unpublished short plays. But he used the mask of theater for deeply personal purposes (see “Reflections on Pound’s Operas).
I was asked to write on Pound’s operas for the M.L.A. Conference in 19xx. By that time, my work had moved on, supplanted by the expert scholarship of Robert Hughes and Margaret Fischer, so my response was a series of questions and suggestions for placing the operas in the overall context of Pound’s work. While scholars continue to see The Cantos as Pound’s creative focus after 1920, I am convinced that his work was divided, the public, impersonal Pound given to his epic Cantos, and his personal emotions spoken through the masks of Villon, Cavalcanti, Catullus, and the Sophoclean Herakles in The Women of Trachis. Bob and Margaret were kind enough to include my paper in the final volume of their publication of Pound’s music, but I offer it again here.
The books are by Jo Brantley Berryman, Guy Davenport, Peter d’Epiro, and Ron Thomas.
Reviews of Robert Hughes and Margaret Fisher, works on Pound and Music. Paideuma, forthcoming.