Pound and Eliot

Abstract

photographic experiments with Pound have more to do with the fourth dimension than with rock-drills. Coburn was a theosophical, not philosophical, modernist, best linked to Katherine Heyman (Coburn too was a devotee of Alexander Scriabin), Margaret Cravens, and William Butler Yeats. Pound employed Coburn to photograph Gaudier’s sculptures for John Quinn. Pound’s relationship with Quinn is well known, but Vivien Greene’s “John Quinn and Vorticist Art: The Eye (and Purse) of an American Collector” ( pp. 175–96) includes Quinn’s testimony. It seems that Quinn acquired a good deal of Vorticist art at bargain prices and that he also risked a good deal of money in these edgy, problematic works, now seen as among an era’s vital signs. Vibratory Modernism, ed. Anthony Enns and Shelley Trower (Palgrave), includes Andrew Logeman’s “Physics as Narrative: Lewis, Pound, and the London Vortex” ( pp. 80–95), which suggests that Sir William Thompson’s “vortex atom” bruited in 1867 provided the leading metaphor and model for Vorticism. Logeman’s essay supplements the one by Puhak discussed above but takes a broader, physicist’s view, arguing that Lewis and Pound “translated the vortex atom’s knots of physical energy and ethereal vibrations into Vorticist concerns with cultural energy and aesthetic vibrations, making the vortex the intersection point for all artistic praxis,” thereby “placing the artist at the radiant central node of modernity.” This essay is a concise presentation of the application of physics of art, explaining how artistic power is a form of energy. Incidentally, it includes a fine reading of Tarr as a novel of vortices. c. Translations Tom Dolack’s “Imitation, Emulation, Influence, and Pound’s Poetic Renewal” (ILS 15: 1–24) is a “psychology-based approach toward imitation” that uses two translations by Pound, “The Girl” (out Alec Marsh and Patrick R. Query 151 of Ovid and Petrarch) and “Taking Leave of a Friend” (from Li Po), as case studies gesturing toward a larger attempt to “study literary imitation from an evolutionary/cognitive perspective.” The ability to imitate is a fundamental human attribute, the will to imitate a fundamental human imperative. Following certain anthropologists, Dolack contends that imitation becomes emulation when social status influences what is to be imitated. In literature, imitation covers a spectrum of practices, from faithful copying, simple translation, emulation (the attempt to achieve “the same effect through different linguistic or formal means”), adaptation (“using the source-text as an initial conceit and innovating beyond it”), and finally innovation, which Dolack shows can never “totally leave behind concerns of imitation, innovation, intertextuality or influence.” Such a broad discussion necessarily involves various theories of influence and culture. For some reason Dolack finds the critical emphasis on readings of individual poems is “unmoored and adrift from broader questions such as why influence should be so predominant or even why poets should be influenced at all”; he feels that “by folding the idea of influence into the idea of imitation . . . we can ground it in the workings of the human mind and gain a practical model for literary production.” Dolack seems to think that literary scholars study “selfenclosed” texts. Specifically, he worries that “Pound studies has been reading his poetry as texts, and not as literature.” So far as I can make out, he defines literature as some aspect of “a long and complex interaction of evolutionary history, cognitive development, societal influences and social connections.” His bibliography suggests some familiarity with literature, so it is hard to credit his obtuseness. Perhaps his point has been lost in translation. It is with something akin to relief to turn to Giovanna Epifania’s oldfashioned, sensible look at Pound’s version of “The Seafarer” (“Translating the Middle Ages into a Modernist Context: Ezra Pound and ‘The Seafarer,’ ” CLIN 16: 33–47), a useful work of scholarship. d. General Studies Robin Schultze’s interesting Degenerate Muse contains a 50-page chapter on Pound’s early poetry. Schultze’s book is about “discourses of nature” at the turn of the 20th century and how they help make sense of the ambivalence three modernist poets—Harriet Monroe, Pound, and Marianne Moore—harbored toward the debilitation of modern urban life and the supposed restorative powers of nature. They were wary of culture—or was it the other way around?