Ezra Pound and Dorothy Shakespear: Their Letters

by Ezra Pound

“’Ezra.’ Listen to it––Ezra! Ezra!––And a third time––Ezra!… Some people have complained of untidy boots––how could they look at his boots, when there is his moving, beautiful face to watch!” These words from the notebook of Dorothy Shakespear, dated February 16, 1909, record the entry into her life of the energetic young American, recently arrived in London, who was to become her husband––Ezra Pound. Their correspondence, begun the following year, extends over more than six decades, until the poet’s death in 1972. All of these letters are of unusual literary interest, but those from before their marriage in April 1914 have a special importance, since few from this period have been published. The standard edition of The Selected Letters of Ezra Pound, edited by D. D. Paige, includes none from 1910-1911 and only a handful from 1912-1913, yet these were the crucial years in Pound’s literary development and in the shaping of early modernism. The over two hundred letters and diary entries in Ezra Pound and Dorothy Shakespear: Their Letters 1909-1914 are published here for the first time. Taken together, they provide a detailed record of the poet’s search for a new style and give a full portrait of a dynamic young expatriate who was simultaneously involved in two literary generations, the companion and close friend of Yeats and Ford Madox Hueffer as well as of Wyndham Lewis and the sculptor Gaudier-Brzeska. They also shed a poignant light on The Pisan Cantos of 1945, where amid the ruins of his life Pound recalled again and again the events and people described in these letters, as if the memory of 1909-1914 was the only stable point left in a disintegrating personal universe. The letters have been thoroughly annotated by Omar Pound, translator, and bibliographer of Wyndham Lewis, and by A. Walton Litz of Princeton University, the author of studies of James Joyce, Wallace Stevens, and other modern writers. The book includes: a biographical appendix, with particular emphasis on lesser-known people mentioned in the letters; some unpublished early poems by Pound transcribed by Dorothy into one of her notebooks; family charts, one of which shows Pound’s ancestral origins; numerous unpublished illustrations; and an extensive index.

399 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1984

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.

Reviews

[Mat · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the fourth and final book of letters I will read this summer - this time the early letters between Ezra Pound and Dorothy Shakespear, whom he later married.

I can't believe I am the first person to review the book here on Goodreads. Unlike other books of letters collected the letters of Pound/Quinn, Pound/Zukofsky, Pound/Ford or Pound/Lewis (just to name a few), this book contains more personal letters between the young lovers. Therefore, it was a breath of fresh air to see another side of Pound, sometimes romantic, brilliant as ever, and always witty.

What I also loved about this book was you get a feel for what the literary milieu of London must have been like in the early 20th Century, where most of these letters were either written or received. Other great figures are often referred to in passing - William Butler Yeats, Ford Madox Hueffer (later to become Ford Madox Ford), Hulme, Synge, Lady Gregory, Frederic Manning, brilliant concert pianist Walter Rummel and many others. Also this book overlaps with another book of letters I read earlier this summer - Pound/Cravens. Margaret Cravens, a friend of Pound's and Rummel's, commit suicide in 1912 and you can see how devastated and upset Pound and Rummel were around this time, mostly through the lens of Dorothy's letters to Ezra.

While most of this book is more light-hearted than other books of Pound's letters which get into heavy discussions about literature and language, this book did also show how much Dorothy was interested in literature and art as well. Being a landscape painter like her father, she is often talking about various paintings she is working on and also her own comments and thoughts on Ezra's poetry - often being one of the first people to read them and comment on them. You can see that Ezra confides in her and trusts her opinions greatly.

The final years for Dorothy must have been tough on her after she gave up on trying to be with Ezra and went back to England and I think that her son Omar, one of the editors of this book, wanted to preserve a beautiful moment in time when these two lovers, were in the prime of their life, enjoying their life, coping with various struggles as everyone does, but ultimately sticking together, at least initially. "Behind every great man there is a great woman" my mother used to say and I assume it is pretty safe to say "and vice versa." Dorothy was just such a woman and someone who provided Ezra with a great bedrock of support. Ezra was very strong and confident but this book of letters between the two lovers shows that she was indeed one of the earliest of his Muses, the only earlier Muse being possibly H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) who is called the 'Hamadryad' in this book.

This is quite a long book of letters but it is never heavy nor overly academic so highly recommended.