Ezra Pound

Ezra Pound

I hear Ezra Pound’s name everywhere. In all the literary journals he’s been at least mentioned. And, from what I hear, he has been instrumental in helping get Joyce’s Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man published. I’d like to take this sentence to thank Pound for getting, in my opinion, one of the best young writers work to the public rather than having such genius sit unpublished at a time where I think we need new good writing more than ever (I think Pound would agree). But I’ve come across some Ezra Pound poems and can’t say I’m overly impressed. I think Pound’s poetry is, generally, filled with platitudes and not as original (despite claiming to be part of the new literary movement Imagism) as some other poets of the time like Eliot and HD or Sandburg and Jeffers, but Pound’s essays for some reason usually strike some chord in me and his criticism causes an electric tingle in my spine when I hear him so eloquently yet audaciously tear apart some squeamish contemporary writer. Here’s an example of a poem I actually semi-enjoyed by Pound that possesses a lighter tone and gives a humorous portrait of a struggling writer (it doesn't surprise me Pound would choose this topic for a poem), but I don’t think it could be considered great or contend with some of the work of Yeats or Eliot. I also found an excerpt from a critical essay Pound wrote on Joyce's play Exlies called "Mr. James Joyce and the Modern Stage"(1916) where he describes Joyce just the way I would describe him that gives me pleasure every time I read it.

"The Lake Isle" by Ezra Pound

O God, O Venus, O Mercury, patron of thieves, 

Give me in due time, I beseech you, a little tobacco-shop, 

With the little bright boxes

piled up neatly upon the shelves

And the loose fragment cavendish

and the shag, 

And the bright Virginia

loose under the bright glass cases, 

And a pair of scales

not too greasy, 

And the votailles dropping in for a word or two in passing, 

For a flip word, and to tidy their hair a bit. 

O God, O Venus, O Mercury, patron of thieves, 

Lend me a little tobacco-shop, 

or install me in any profession

Save this damn'd profession of writing, 

where one needs one's brains all the time.

Excerpt from "Mr. Joyce and the Modern Stage"

"Mr. Joyce is undoubtedly one of our best contemporary authors. He has written a novel, and I am quite ready to stake anything I have in this world that that novel is permanent. It is permanent as are the works of Stendhal and Flaubert. Two silly publishers have just refused it in favor of froth, another declines to look at it because “he will not deal through an agent” —yet Mr. Joyce lives on the continent and can scarcely be expected to look after his affairs in England save through deputy. And Mr. Joyce is the best prose writer of my generation, in English. So far as I know, there is no one better in either Paris or Russia. In English we have Hardy and Henry James and, chronologically, we have Mr. James Joyce. The intervening novelists print books, it is true, but for me or for any man of my erudition, for any man living at my intensity, these books are things of no substance."