‘My Music is Your Disharmony’: 1908–14

Abstract

Preceded by Proust and followed by Thomas Mann, Ezra Pound arrived in Venice in April 1908. That same year, Hugo von Hofmannsthal published an essay about a late summer stop in the dreamlike and alluring city, while Claude Monet settled for two-and-a-half months to paint. That same summer, Rilke sat in Paris and wrote three poems about the world Ruskin called ‘the amphibious city.’¹ Pound arrived in Venice after stops in Gibraltar, Tangiers, Cadiz and Seville. The trip across had been stormy but his characteristic restlessness took on a lyrical tone: ‘here today & on the wind tomorrow’ he wrote his mother from Gibraltar (Am Rt 192). He at first thought his trip to Europe would be brief, an exit not an exile from America, but he would not return for two years.

Venice struck me as an agreeable place.… I announced an intention to return.

(Pound, Indiscretions)