The Correspondence of Ezra Pound and Senator William Borah

by Ezra Pound (Editor), William Borah (Editor), Sarah C. Homes (Editor)

Already one of the most famous of American poets, Ezra Pound (1885-1972) was an expatriate living in Rapallo, Italy, by the time he began his six-year correspondence with Idaho senator William Borah (1865-1940). These thirty-one previously unpublished letters document Pound's efforts to educate, for the role of the presidency, one of the few Republican statesmen he believed could beat Roosevelt if nominated. Pound worked feverishly to recruit Borah as an advocate of the radical economic theories he believed would solve his homeland's problems. In a series of letters that continued throughout the 1930s, Pound hammered home to Borah his convictions about political and economic reforms. Prime among his pet proposals was stamp scrip, a self-taxing currency that discouraged hoarding by means of a monthly stamp that progressively reduced its value by 1 percent. Pound's correspondence with Borah reveals the split persona that characterizes his letters as a whole. On the one hand, his letters depict an advisor confident of possessing the necessary savvy to beat FDR and successfully end the Depression while also keeping the United States out of a looming European war. On the other hand, Pound emerges as a man in turmoil, frantic to influence from his distant post the course of American politics by convincing those in power of the theories he espoused. Borah, then chair of the Foreign Relations Committee, responded politely to Pound's diatribes and met with him briefly when Pound returned to the States in 1939. The correspondence, though mainly one-sided, reflects how strongly each man adhered to his personal convictions, Pound in favor of and Borah increasingly opposed to fascism. Enhanced by Sarah C. Holmes's generous annotations on the individuals, organizations, legislative bills, and theories Pound mentions--often cryptically--in his letters, this volume broadens our understanding of Pound's convictions, especially his admiration for Mussolini, and raises new questions about mixing poetry with politics.

95 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2001

About the author

Ezra Weston Loomis Pound was an American expatriate poet, critic and intellectual who was a major figure of the Modernist movement in early-to-mid 20th century poetry.

Pound's The Cantos contains music and bears a title that could be translated as The Songs—although it never is. Pound's ear was tuned to the motz et sons of troubadour poetry where, as musicologist John Stevens has noted, "melody and poem existed in a state of the closest symbiosis, obeying the same laws and striving in their different media for the same sound-ideal - armonia."

In his essays, Pound wrote of rhythm as "the hardest quality of a man's style to counterfeit." He challenged young poets to train their ear with translation work to learn how the choice of words and the movement of the words combined. But having translated texts from 10 different languages into English, Pound found that translation did not always serve the poetry: "The grand bogies for young men who want really to learn strophe writing are Catullus and François Villon. I personally have been reduced to setting them to music as I cannot translate them." While he habitually wrote out verse rhythms as musical lines, Pound did not set his own poetry to music.