Abstract
The first published version of Pound’s Cantos opened with what Pound called ‘a barrelfull of allusions to Sordello’1 (Browning’s notoriously ‘incomprehensible’ long poem):
Hang it all, there can be but one Sordello!
But say I want to, say I take your whole bag of tricks,
Let in your quirks and tweeks, and say the thing’s an art-form,
Your Sordello….2
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Notes
To his father, quoted M. Slatin, American Literature XXXV (1963–4) p. 185; hereafter cited as Slatin.
C. K. Stead, Pound, Yeats, Eliot and the Modernist Movement (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1986) p. 240.
See Robert Langbaum, The Poetry of Experience (1957; reprinted London: Chatto and Windus, 1972) pp. 77, 81–2, 94–5.
Loy D. Martin, Browning’s Dramatic Monologues and the Post-Romantic Subject (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985) pp. 228,229; hereafter cited as Martin, Dramatic Monologues. Martin’s point is that whereas Browning’s characters have relatively fixed identities, Pound’s are constitutionally incomplete. In fact, Langbaum makes a related point in citing ‘Pound’s singular lack of interest in psychological characterisation’ as ‘what distinguishes his Browningesque dramatic monologues from Browning’s dramatic monologues’ (The Word from Below [Madison: Wisconsin University Press, 1987] p. 203; hereafter cited as Langbaum).
On this see, for example, H. Witemeyer, The Poetry of Ezra Pound: Forms and Renewals, 1908–20 (Berkeley: California University Press, 1969) pp. 60–86; and Nagy, pp. 105–33.
In a letter to Henry Eliot, Pound refers to Browning’s ‘Dramatis Personae and… Men and Women’, giving priority to the collection whose title contains the word ‘personae’. See T. S. Eliot, Letters, vol. I, edited by Valerie Eliot (London: Faber, 1988) p. 100; hereafter cited as Eliot, Letters.
To Zukovsky, 27 November 1930, P/Z 76; and to Theobald, 4 October 1957, in D. Pearce and H. Scheidau (eds), Pound/Theobald (Redding Ridge, Conn.: Black Swan Books, 1984) p. 101; hereafter cited as P/T.
In The Ring and the Book, which Pound also admired, Browning speaks of ‘fanciless fact’ (PW VIII, 7). Of his intention in that poem he said: ‘the business has been… to explain fact’ (to Julia Wedgwood, 19 November 1868, in R. Curle (ed.), Robert Browning and Julia Wedgwood: A Broken Friendship as Revealed in their Letters [London: John Murray & Jonathan Cape, 1937] p. 158).
Henry James, The Middle Years (London: Collins, 1917) p. 106.
Epigraph to ‘Mesmerism’. Pound also used this phrase as the title of an unpublished story: see J. Laughlin, ‘Walking Around a Water-Butt’, Paris Review c (Paris: Summer-Fall 1986) pp. 303–18.
Martin, Literary Styles, p. 54. 65. Remy de Gourmont, The Natural Philosophy of Love, edited by Ezra Pound (1922; reprinted London: Spearman, 1957), hereafter cited as NPL; Pound’s introduction, p. xi.
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Woolford, J. (1993). ‘What’s left for me to do?’: Pound, Browning and the Problem of Poetic Influence. In: Gibson, A. (eds) Pound in Multiple Perspective. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-11194-7_2
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