ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS AND COPYRIGHT NOTICE

When one works on Pound one does not work alone. I have enjoyed support both material and moral, together with encouragement, incitement, and provocation from many persons and institutions, and it is a pleasure to recall once again what I owe to them and to record my gratitude.

There are the great libraries which collect, conserve, and make available to researchers the vast treasury of Pound’s unpublished writings and drafts. I am most grateful for the courteous welcome, the frequent kindness, and the willing and expert assistance accorded me at Yale University’s Beinecke Library, at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center of the University of Texas at Austin, at the Lilly Library of Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana, and at the Daniel Burke Library of Hamilton College, Clinton, New York.

Next I must thank the phalanx of scholars who have edited valuable resources from those archives, to the great benefit of other readers and researchers: D. D. Paige, Richard Reid, Noel Stock, Forrest Read, William Cookson. Eric Homberger, Michael John King, R. Murray Schafer, Leonard W. Doob, Harriet Zinnes, Vittoria I . Mondolfo, Margaret Hurley, Brita Lindberg-Seyersted, David Anderson, Donald Pearce, Herbert Schneidau, Omar Pound, A. Walton Litz, Timothy Materer, Mary de Rachewiltz, Barry Ahearn, Sanehida Kodama, Robert Spoo, Thomas L. Scott, Melvin J. Friedman, Jackson R. Bryer, Lea Baechler, James Longenbach, Richard Sieburth, Richard Taylor, Ira B. Nadel, David M. Gordon, Walter Sutton, Hugh Witemeyer, E. P. Walkiewicz, Philip J. Burns, Maria Luisa Ardizzone, Demetres Tryphonopoulos, Leon Surette, Sarah C. Holmes, Robert Hughes, Margaret Fisher, Massimo Bacigalupo, Roxana Preda, Joanna Moody, Miranda B. Hickman, and Alec Marsh. Here the late Carroll F. Terrell deserves a special honourable mention for his outstanding services to Ezra Pound scholarship, as founding editor of Paideuma, compiler of A Companion to the Cantos of Ezra Pound, animator of conferences, and generous instigator, supporter, and publisher of others’ work, especially that of younger scholars. In another special category is Donald Gallup—his Ezra Pound: A Bibliography (1983) is an indispensable resource always at hand. I have reason to be grateful also for Volker Bischoff’s Ezra Pound Criticism 1905–1985: A Chronological Listing of Publications in English (Marburg, 1991); and for Archie Henderson’s thesaurus of ‘new notes on the Pound/Agresti correspondence’, ‘I Cease Not to Yowl’ Reannotated (Houston, Tex., 2009).

The good and useful critics and interpreters of Pound’s work are legion, and though it is invidious to single out individuals, I must name a few to whom I feel especially indebted. Foremost is Hugh Kenner, the inventor of literary modernism in his time. Then I would name as they come to mind, each for some particular donation: Donald Davie, Eva Hesse, Hugh Witemeyer, George Kearns, David Gordon, M. L. Rosenthal, Walter Baumann, Ian Bell, Guy Davenport, Christine Brooke-Rose, Jean-Michel Rabaté, Richard Sieburth, Massimo Bacigalupo, Peter Makin, Marjorie Perloff, Michael Alexander, James Longenbach, Wendy Flory, Emily Mitchell Wallace, Kay Davis, Ronald Bush, Tim Redman, William McNaughton, Christine Froula, Peter Nichols, Leonardo Clerici, Leon Surette, Demetres Tryphonopoulos, Luca Gallesi, Maria Luisa Ardizzone, Colin McDowell, Scott Eastham, Robert Hughes, and Margaret Fisher. More generally, I have enjoyed being a member of a lively, contentious, and collaborative community of scholars at the biennial International Ezra Pound Conferences, from the first in 1976, and have profited from innumerable discussions in various agreeable settings with fellow scholars and critics.

‘Biography, a minor form of fiction’, Hugh Kenner wrote somewhere, not altogether dismissively, though with reason; yet, as a biographer, I have been glad to be able to check out the facts of Pound’s life against the biographies of Noel Stock, J. J. Wilhelm, and Humphrey Carpenter. Mary de Rachewiltz’s memoir Discretions: Ezra Pound, Father and Teacher has been an inimitable inspiration. Anne Conover’s Olga Rudge & Ezra Pound has been a mine of information.

I am especially grateful to the following for their generosity in providing me with books, articles, unpublished results of their own research, or critical dialogue: Michael Alexander, Massimo Bacigalupo, Stefano Maria Casella, Danilo Breschi, Bernard Dew, Scott Eastham, Margaret Fisher, Leah Flack, Luca Gallesi, Dryden Gilling-Smith, Robert Hughes, A. Walton Litz, Charles Lock, Alec Marsh, Marie-Noelle Little, Philippe Mikriammos, Alan Navarre, Catherine Paul, Caterina Ricciardi, Richard Sieburth, Richard Taylor, Noel Stock, Demetres Tryphonopoulos, Emily Mitchell Wallace, William Watt.

Poets, like those who write about them (and those who would read them), need publishers. Beyond the copyright acknowledgements below, we must be grateful to Elkin Mathews, Pound’s first publisher in London; to Charles Granville, Harriet Shaw Weaver, John Rodker, William Bird, and Nancy Cunard, who brought out his early and wholly uncommercial poetry through their private presses; to Alfred A. Knopf, Boni and Liveright, and Farrar and Rinehart, his first publishers in New York; to Faber & Faber, who became his publishers in London after 1933; to Stanley Nott; and above all to James Laughlin, whose New Directions became his American publisher, and ultimately the leading publisher of his work. Other publishers helped keep his work in print in his later years, notably Peter Owen of London. In recent years we owe edited collections of his correspondence and prose to the enterprise of a number of North American and British university presses. To Garland Publishing we owe the invaluable ten-volume collection of Pound’s contributions to periodicals. To the Library of America we owe Richard Sieburth’s comprehensive selection of Pound’s poems and translations. And to Robert Hughes and Margaret Fisher we owe the now complete series of editions of his music.

There are more personal debts. To the late Hugh Kenner for opening his personal Pound archive to me and for generous hospitality. To Hugh Witemeyer for his conversation and kindness. To the late George Kearns and to Cleo Keams, for their hospitality and conversation, and to George in particular for a gift of books from his Pound collection. To Noel Stock for his warm hospitality and informed conversation. To Geoffrey Wall, biographer and translator of Flaubert, for his close attention to my prose and for his constructive advice. To Declan Spring at New Directions for extraordinary courtesies and helpfulness. To Mary de Rachewiltz for permission to quote from Pound’s published and unpublished writings; for generous practical assistance, including giving access to her library and making freely available her collection of photographs; also for her wholly Poundian principle of placing no restriction on the use of her father’s work. To Elizabeth Pound and the estate of Omar S. Pound for generous and unrestricted permission to quote from Pound’s published and unpublished writings and from Dorothy Pound’s letters and diaries.

I owe much to the impressive expertise and enthusiasm of all who have worked on the book at Oxford University Press.

I am grateful for the skilled photographic work of Paul Shields of York University’s Photographic Unit.

Visits to the archives in the United States were supported by a British Academy Leverhulme Visiting Professorship, and by two British Academy research grants. Yale University’s Beinecke Library awarded me its Donald C. Gallup Visiting Fellowship, and the Lilly Library of Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana awarded me its Everett Helm Visiting Fellowship. This book owes a great deal of its substance to those grants and awards.

COPYRIGHT

Grateful acknowledgment is given to New Directions Publishing Corporation, New York, and to Faber & Faber Ltd., London, for permission to quote from the following copyrighted works of Ezra Pound:

The Cantos. Copyright © 1934, 1937, 1940, 1948, 1956, 1959, 1962, 1963, 1966, 1968, 1970 by Ezra Pound; Copyright © 1969, 1972 by the Estate of Ezra Pound; Copyright © 1973, 1986, 1993 by the Trustees of the Ezra Pound Literary Property Trust,

Correspondence:

Excerpts from Ezra Pound’s contributions to periodicals as reprinted in Ezra Pound’s Poetry and Prose: Contributions to Periodicals (Garland Publishing Inc., 1991). Copyright © 1991 by The Trustees of the Ezra Pound Literary Property Trust.

Excerpts from published works by William Carlos Williams used by permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation.

Excerpts from The Letters of T. S. Eliot, i: 1898–1922, and The Letters of T. S. Eliot, ii: 1923–1925. Copyright © Set Copyrights Limited 1988, 2009, used by permission of Faber & Faber Limited

I am grateful to the following holders of copyright material who have granted access and permission to quote:

The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University

Daniel Burke Library, Hamilton College

The Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas, Austin

The Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana

Illustrations from the collection of Mary de Rachewiltz reproduced by courtesy of Mary de Rachewiltz.