Ezra Pound the Critic

The Literary Essays of Ezra Pound edited with an Introduction by T. S. Eliot. New Directions, 1954. $6.00.

Five years ago, in 1949, Ezra Pound received the Bollingen Prize for the Pisan Cantos. The resultant furor, in some quarters almost hysterical, has not been allowed to pass into our more-than-literary history, but is still fitfully revived and rehearsed by both the popular and literary presses, and is even yet capable of furnishing a whipping-post for Mr. Peter Viereck and others. There is evident irony, to say the least, in the fact that a man who has devoted his career to, among other things, a search for precise definition should have the real nature of his endeavor obscured by a mass of irrelevant confusion. The difficulty, I think, is that the source of the confusion is not as irrelevant as it might appear, since Mr. Pound’s extra-literary interests, primarily his orientation towards politics and economics, form an essential component of his later literary work. The chief cause of the popular misconception, at any rate, is largely due to the inconsonance of Mr. Pound’s activities with the vulgar conception of what is the proper realm for the artist: a realm, it might be said, including neither actions nor ideas but only ornamentation.