7. This couplet is inserted here in the manuscript with no explanation: “One of the low on whom assurance sits/Like a silk hat on a Bradford millionaire.”
LETTERS
To Ezra Pound
73 Washington Place
New York City
April 9, 1938
Dear Mr. Pound,
It was a very great pleasure to receive your letter. I am idolatrous or perhaps the word is “superstitious,” and one of my superstitions is the great poet, especially the three or four who are not yet dead. Your corrections of my piece in Poetry are thus very welcome, and I hope that you will be moved to correct me in the future.1 But you will not mind, I am sure, if I try to explain more exactly the notions to which you are objecting.
First, however, to answer your question about George Dillon and Poetry. Dillon is a very weak poet and not in the least intelligent. He was Harriet Monroe’s pet child, he won the Pulitzer Prize once, and he translated with Edna St. Vincent Millay all of Baudelaire very poorly (using an alexandrine in English because Baudelaire used it in French). It is no exaggeration to say that he knows nothing. This obviously puts him in the same class as Harriet Monroe, and he seems to have like her one saving virtue, only one, the willingness to give all parties a chance to speak their pieces, and I should guess that he will be more or less as amenable to your desires as Harriet Monroe was. I for one have never been able to understand how you could tolerate so foolish a woman for so many years even with an ocean between the two of you. As for whether I was writing against the editor or with his consent, this question perplexes me. At any rate, I asked him to let me review your new book, expecting only two or three pages and he told me to write a long article, probably because he had read my long piece in the Southern Review in which I put Yvor Winters in his place. When the piece was finished, he said it was very good, and this probably means that I was writing with his consent. As for what I as contributor intend to do about the sabotage of your labors, let me know what you would like me to do and I will probably do it. But I actually cannot see why you should be concerned at all about Poetry. It has had its day and that day is long past, was over in 1920, so far as exercising a genuine influence goes, and the future for that sort of thing belongs or is going to belong to J. Laughlin IV. He has the interests, the energy, the ability and the intelligence which are needed where Harriet Monroe seems to me to have had nothing but a vague desire to be helpful, and it is obvious to me that you can go on with your useful labors with much more ease and satisfaction now than ever before.
Now for your objections. “suppose you Read some of these writers before telling grandpa he ain’t been fotografted in his dress suit.” This is only a shot in the dark and a pretty poor one at that. I have read with much care and attention Dante, Homer and Shakespeare, and also, though not as fully, Ovid. One reason, in fact, that I studied Greek was your own translation from the Odyssey—if Homer was like that, I wanted to read all of him. I found out that he was not really like that and as a matter of fact even better. All literary judgement seems to me to be comparative and on this basis it still seems clear to me that the best “frame” for a long poem is narrative. I may be very naive and literal about it, but when you say that “The Divina Commedia has practically no narration and no plot/it presents a scheme of values/merely a walk upstairs to a balloon landing,” I can only keep in mind the literal fact that the poem in question is about a man who was lost in a dark wood where he met various animals and then a great poet’s ghost and learned that in order to escape from the wood and the animals, he would have to travel thru Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven. And thus the enormous exaltation of the cantos toward the end of Purgatorio derives from the character of the story, the narrative that Dante is going to meet the lady with whom he was very much in love for a long time and who has been dead for ten years. I do not expect you to take over broken-down values from fat Aquinas nor in fact do I suppose that the absence of narrative in your poem as a whole is a simple thing, a pure matter of choice. It seems to me that narrative began to go out of poetry when Coleridge had to write marginal summaries for The Ancient Mariner and by the time we get to Sordello it has become even harder to tell a story and again there are marginal summaries (at least in some editions) and all this is, I think, a part of a whole complex of both history and literature, partly the increasing quest of certain poetic effects which must of necessity eliminate or at least halt the story narrative — could Mallarmé, for example, conceivably have told a story using his style; and partly the development of the novel as a way of getting everything about a character into a medium; and partly the very breakdown of those values which focus interest upon the life and death of the individual soul — thus even the novel now tells almost no story and the leading beliefs on all sides are, as in Marxism, beliefs about classes, not individuals, about history as a whole.
I do not know how clear this is, and perhaps it is superfluous, but what I mean to say is that the very virtues of your writing necessitate the absence of narrative — at least some of those virtues, such as the wonderful excitement one gets as The Cantos move about the centuries. But given these virtues and with full awareness of your situation, I mean situation in a definite time, the contrast still exists as an objective fact, the contrast between what one gets in Dante and Shakespeare and Homer, and what one gets in The Cantos. It works both ways, of course, and there are, I need hardly tell you, effects in The Cantos which have never before been heard of. I said this in my piece. It also seemed worth saying that there is the correlative lack.
“NEXT/as to the seereeyus and solemp and perlite/‘A tailor might scratch her where ere she did itch,’ ‘cul far tombetta.’” It is right after this that you tell me to read some of these writers, so that it is only in fairness to the quotations that I point out that you seem to have misquoted both, if you are referring to “ed egli avea cul fatto trombetta” (Inf. XXI, 139) and that song from The Tempest. But really, you are mistaking me. By serious I do not mean solemn and polite. T. E. Hulme — there was a serious man, and that is what I mean by being serious, and I was trying to say that no matter what you, Ezra Pound, believe, the fact is that very estimable persons have all kinds of beliefs about life and death and uncontrollable mysteries which you as a poet sometimes (sometimes, I say, not always and who knows what the next 49 cantos will bring except yourself) sometimes neglect or pass over because you are more interested for the time being in some uproarious story (they are really uproarious). The marvellous comedy which takes place at the end of Iliad I, and the comedy in Shakespeare are proportionately less important in the structure of their writing than in yours. But notice this — perhaps I am repeating myself again — this kind of judgement and comparison is made only with the assumption that your poem is good enough to bear such a contrast.
At any rate, you can see that I have not been speaking without also thinking about what I was saying — not that that ever saves a stupid one from his own stupidity. There is a good deal more which I would like to say to you, but this letter is already too long.
Sincerely yours,
Delmore Schwartz