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Letters to James Joyce and Essays on Joyce
The letters of Ezra Pound to James Joyce with Pound's critical essays and articles about Joyce. This is the record of one of the most interesting personal relationships of modern literature. Between 1913, when Yeats first called Joyces's work to Pound's attention, an 1920 there was a steady flow of letters, in which we see Pound finding publishers for Joyce, collecting money for him, defending him against censorship, even sending spare clothes. More than sixty letters from Pound to Joyce have survived, while those from Joyce to pound will be found in the Viking Press Joyce correspondence volumes.
320 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1967
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Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
December 31, 2017
This was damn illuminating if remarkably heartbreaking. Back as an undergrad I was deeply heartbroken by the parting of ways between Sartre and Camus. Oh I lamented it , began to explore political nuance and was still largely oblivious to the multitude of being an adult. I think about my sorrows 25 years after the fact.
These are Modernist titans. I still burdens to ponder how they diverged. Biographies had illuminated the arcs but it is the intimate exchanges here which allow one to lapse and consider. Pound was working as Yeats' secretary and broached Joyce for samplings of his verse. This continues as Joyce establishes himself through Dubliners and Portrait. Throughout Pound is tireless in searching for grants and publishing opportunities. Then during the Great War Pound began editing sections of Ulysses. Rifts began to appear and then both men relocated to Paris. Matters dimmed. Pound appeared restless in most endeavors, finding the appeal of economics and chamber music while allowing his literary opinions to perhaps calcify. He wanted a sequel to Ulysses, not the Wake. Anecdotally the last meeting between them occurred when Joyce asked Hemingway to accompany him to dinner where Papa said Pound spoke erratically.
This is likely my last book of 2017 and one that might just prompt a Joyce/Pound project for the new year.
These are Modernist titans. I still burdens to ponder how they diverged. Biographies had illuminated the arcs but it is the intimate exchanges here which allow one to lapse and consider. Pound was working as Yeats' secretary and broached Joyce for samplings of his verse. This continues as Joyce establishes himself through Dubliners and Portrait. Throughout Pound is tireless in searching for grants and publishing opportunities. Then during the Great War Pound began editing sections of Ulysses. Rifts began to appear and then both men relocated to Paris. Matters dimmed. Pound appeared restless in most endeavors, finding the appeal of economics and chamber music while allowing his literary opinions to perhaps calcify. He wanted a sequel to Ulysses, not the Wake. Anecdotally the last meeting between them occurred when Joyce asked Hemingway to accompany him to dinner where Papa said Pound spoke erratically.
This is likely my last book of 2017 and one that might just prompt a Joyce/Pound project for the new year.
August 29, 2023
This book is a terrific collection which brings together the correspondence (letters, postcards and telegram cables) shared between two great minds of 20th Century letters, Pound and Joyce, and also features about 16 essays written by Pound extolling the virtues of his great Irish novelist friend, James Joyce.
Interspersed between the letters, the editor Forrest Read provides extremely useful commentary of what was transpiring at the time in the lives of these two great writers, as well as in the world of literature as a whole, and here and there I really enjoyed reading his analysis of their works, especially towards the end when Read identifies, quite convincingly, which parts of Joyce's Finnegans Wake allude to Pound himself. I did not realize that Pound himself was one of the 'hidden characters' of the Wake but it makes sense, considering how fundamental and crucial a player Pound was in bringing Joyce's work before an audience and getting it published in The Little Review and elsewhere.
Most of the letters in this collection are from Pound to Joyce as most of Joyce's letters to Pound were lost during the war or during one of the moves to Paris or to Zurich or elsewhere. While Joyce's letters were witty, they were more-or-less conventionally written letters, which came as surprise. Pound does not disappoint here, with his usual ol' "hickory style" as cummings once called it, and his great wit really comes alive in this correspondence by the man who once said that "the book should be a ball of light in one's hand."
Highly, highly recommended. I found this collection not only fascinating but deeply inspiring. Both men show that persistence, hard work and sticking to one's guns (and instincts) are the keys to producing a lasting work of art, which remains faithful to your own original vision.
Interspersed between the letters, the editor Forrest Read provides extremely useful commentary of what was transpiring at the time in the lives of these two great writers, as well as in the world of literature as a whole, and here and there I really enjoyed reading his analysis of their works, especially towards the end when Read identifies, quite convincingly, which parts of Joyce's Finnegans Wake allude to Pound himself. I did not realize that Pound himself was one of the 'hidden characters' of the Wake but it makes sense, considering how fundamental and crucial a player Pound was in bringing Joyce's work before an audience and getting it published in The Little Review and elsewhere.
Most of the letters in this collection are from Pound to Joyce as most of Joyce's letters to Pound were lost during the war or during one of the moves to Paris or to Zurich or elsewhere. While Joyce's letters were witty, they were more-or-less conventionally written letters, which came as surprise. Pound does not disappoint here, with his usual ol' "hickory style" as cummings once called it, and his great wit really comes alive in this correspondence by the man who once said that "the book should be a ball of light in one's hand."
Highly, highly recommended. I found this collection not only fascinating but deeply inspiring. Both men show that persistence, hard work and sticking to one's guns (and instincts) are the keys to producing a lasting work of art, which remains faithful to your own original vision.
December 19, 2018
Well, this is entertaining. Pound in full throttle as the literary enthusiast and "village explainer'' as Gertrude Stein called him ("excellent if you're a village...) He certainly helped Joyce's early efforts as also for Eliot, others, after being introduced to him by Yeats, to whom he was serving as secretary for awhile.
Later, the friendship sours over EP's dislike of "Finnegan's Wake'' - not an easy work to digest, no doubt, but it did not necessarily fall to Joyce's friend and one-time advocate to insist on his objections to Joyce, who had enough on his hands with chronic health and financial problems, and battles with prudish publishers/editors trying to change his copy.
Things further devolved during Pound's dubious "Social Credit'' and Fascist infatuations - Joyce was resolutely apolitical, but still - and his not coincidental advocacy of writers like e.e. cummings , who shared his anti-Semitism, and Wyndham Lewis, who once wrote a positive book about...Hitler.
Still, perhaps unfair to judge a man from the perspective of a different time, and Pound's energetic efforts, particularly early on, to spread the Word of Art, are admirable, and reminiscent of later admirers like Allen Ginsberg (cf., Kerouac) who were more forgiving of his lapses than Ezra, who latterly repented of "the stupid bourgeois sin of anti-Semitism).
It would have been nice to see more of Joyce's responses, though they could hardly have been lengthier - or as filled with Pound's eccentric punctuation and lapses into folksy slang - than his correspondent. I believe the editor here is a Pound scholar inclined to let him off the hook, and the ending, which I won't share here, is lovely.
Overall, an intriguing document of its time, with all its excesses and achievements.
Later, the friendship sours over EP's dislike of "Finnegan's Wake'' - not an easy work to digest, no doubt, but it did not necessarily fall to Joyce's friend and one-time advocate to insist on his objections to Joyce, who had enough on his hands with chronic health and financial problems, and battles with prudish publishers/editors trying to change his copy.
Things further devolved during Pound's dubious "Social Credit'' and Fascist infatuations - Joyce was resolutely apolitical, but still - and his not coincidental advocacy of writers like e.e. cummings , who shared his anti-Semitism, and Wyndham Lewis, who once wrote a positive book about...Hitler.
Still, perhaps unfair to judge a man from the perspective of a different time, and Pound's energetic efforts, particularly early on, to spread the Word of Art, are admirable, and reminiscent of later admirers like Allen Ginsberg (cf., Kerouac) who were more forgiving of his lapses than Ezra, who latterly repented of "the stupid bourgeois sin of anti-Semitism).
It would have been nice to see more of Joyce's responses, though they could hardly have been lengthier - or as filled with Pound's eccentric punctuation and lapses into folksy slang - than his correspondent. I believe the editor here is a Pound scholar inclined to let him off the hook, and the ending, which I won't share here, is lovely.
Overall, an intriguing document of its time, with all its excesses and achievements.
July 13, 2021
first half is almost exclusively the two schemeing to find publishers who will pay them & who won't censor them, and the second half is mostly dedicated to the apparent development of Pound's total mental breakdown (at their last meeting Joyce had to bring Hemingway for protection). Probably neither the best way to learn their biographies, nor the best way to learn Pound's critical analysis of Joyce (better to get Pound's Literary Criticism volume and compare the Joyce essays to the Henry James one). these guys are always entertaining, though, in anecdote and in style, and the editor does a good job of maintaining the narrative. NB that almost none of joyce' letters to him still exist, so this is just a Pound book rly
January 12, 2015
History's biggest bromance, followed by history's saddest break-up. The end of the book talks about the many, many passive-aggressive references to Pound that Joyce puts in Finnegans Wake. It's the sad end to a decades-long friendship, but somehow it's still a little beautiful, even in the breakdown.
November 27, 2015
Interesting.
November 1, 2011
4.5
a lot of good stuff here. would have liked to have seen joyce's replies, too.
a lot of good stuff here. would have liked to have seen joyce's replies, too.
March 26, 2015
Want to a glimpse into literary genius, this is your book. Not to be passed up; two of my favorite authors.
January 13, 2025
The four published volumes of James Joyce’s correspondence are legendary among men (and women) of letters. First published in 1970, Pound/Joyce: The Letters of Ezra Pound to James Joyce, closes the circle on Joyce’s vital exchanges with Ezra Pound. Edited by Forrest Read, Pound/Joyce also contains Pound’s critical essays and articles written about Joyce in the early years of the latter’s rise as a literary legend. Pound was an early champion of Joyce, and in no small part he is personally responsible for Joyce’s rise to prominence. Joyce’s other most important boosters include Harriet Shaw Weaver and Sylvia Beach. By serendipity, all three individuals entered Joyce’s life at just the right time to keep him afloat financially and, especially in Pound’s case, to sustain the conversation about Joyce’s artistic importance in the public arena.
Emerging from this subset of Pound’s letters alone, one soon discerns that he was an eccentric and energetic powerhouse of a man. Terminally dissatisfied with what he viewed as the cultural wasteland of America, Pound was living in London and ardently trying to build up a new artistic movement at precisely the moment that WB Yeats called his attention to young James Joyce. The year was 1913. Because of the timing of the beginning of their correspondence, Joyce was able to send Pound a typescript of Dubliners, an early chapter of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and word that he was finishing a play. In Joyce’s prose Pound identified the power of an author whom he wanted in the coterie which he was trying to assemble.
As in so many aspects of life, timing is everything or, if not everything, as much as 90% of everything. The Great War forestalled the meeting of the two trailblazers until June 1920, yet a vast tide of information and support nevertheless flowed between the two in their letters. Pound became Joyce’s conduit: Joyce would send new work first to Pound, who would pass it on to a series of editors for serialization. This meant Pound was an early reader of all the chapters of Portrait, of the play Exiles, and of Ulysses. Pound thus was able to provide feedback to Joyce about all of these in near real time. (How Joyce took this feedback is another matter.) This continuing reading and reflection and consolidation of coherent criticism was an aid in Pound’s evolving analysis of Joyce’s work and its importance, much in the same way all first-time readers experience Joyce’s work if read (as it usually is) in chronological order. This germinating and flowering criticism also entered the public forum by way of Pound’s many essays about Joyce and his works. Pound was the greatest promo man Joyce could ever have dreamed of.
This is peculiar because the personalities of the two men could scarcely have been more at odds. Pound was a bewildering, dynamic, overwhelming American expatriate, while Joyce was a disaffected Irishman sheltering on the continent, in possession of an intricate and obsessively orderly medieval mind. In his time Pound became maybe the greatest champion Modernism ever had, avidly promoting artists while striving to create poetry of his own to meet the moment. Joyce did not disparage Pound’s own artistic efforts, but then Joyce never praised Pound’s poetry, either. It is impossible to imagine that it could have moved Joyce.
Pound outlived Joyce, who died in Zurich in January 1941. The Blitz was still on in England at the time. The first bombing had struck Dublin eleven days earlier; Franklin D Roosevelt had made his Four Freedoms speech a week before Joyce’s death. The Great War had revealed that 19th Century culture and traditions were unsustainable in 20th Century realities, and at the time of Joyce’s death World War II was still in its initial stages of driving the point home definitively and wiping much of the slate clean. As Pound later pointed out, Joyce’s Ulysses was a bookend for the 19th Century: not the novel to end all novels, but to allow for new kinds of expression to follow.
Unfortunately for Pound, either he had spiraled into a form of actual madness, or a lifetime’s theorizing about economics and artistry and American backwardness had led him down dark alleyways toward a fascist nightmare. Maybe both were true. The end of his life is not well-documented in this book about his correspondence with Joyce but, having peeked over his shoulder as he wrote his letters, we readers must feel at least a little saddened about Pound’s decline.
Emerging from this subset of Pound’s letters alone, one soon discerns that he was an eccentric and energetic powerhouse of a man. Terminally dissatisfied with what he viewed as the cultural wasteland of America, Pound was living in London and ardently trying to build up a new artistic movement at precisely the moment that WB Yeats called his attention to young James Joyce. The year was 1913. Because of the timing of the beginning of their correspondence, Joyce was able to send Pound a typescript of Dubliners, an early chapter of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and word that he was finishing a play. In Joyce’s prose Pound identified the power of an author whom he wanted in the coterie which he was trying to assemble.
As in so many aspects of life, timing is everything or, if not everything, as much as 90% of everything. The Great War forestalled the meeting of the two trailblazers until June 1920, yet a vast tide of information and support nevertheless flowed between the two in their letters. Pound became Joyce’s conduit: Joyce would send new work first to Pound, who would pass it on to a series of editors for serialization. This meant Pound was an early reader of all the chapters of Portrait, of the play Exiles, and of Ulysses. Pound thus was able to provide feedback to Joyce about all of these in near real time. (How Joyce took this feedback is another matter.) This continuing reading and reflection and consolidation of coherent criticism was an aid in Pound’s evolving analysis of Joyce’s work and its importance, much in the same way all first-time readers experience Joyce’s work if read (as it usually is) in chronological order. This germinating and flowering criticism also entered the public forum by way of Pound’s many essays about Joyce and his works. Pound was the greatest promo man Joyce could ever have dreamed of.
This is peculiar because the personalities of the two men could scarcely have been more at odds. Pound was a bewildering, dynamic, overwhelming American expatriate, while Joyce was a disaffected Irishman sheltering on the continent, in possession of an intricate and obsessively orderly medieval mind. In his time Pound became maybe the greatest champion Modernism ever had, avidly promoting artists while striving to create poetry of his own to meet the moment. Joyce did not disparage Pound’s own artistic efforts, but then Joyce never praised Pound’s poetry, either. It is impossible to imagine that it could have moved Joyce.
Pound outlived Joyce, who died in Zurich in January 1941. The Blitz was still on in England at the time. The first bombing had struck Dublin eleven days earlier; Franklin D Roosevelt had made his Four Freedoms speech a week before Joyce’s death. The Great War had revealed that 19th Century culture and traditions were unsustainable in 20th Century realities, and at the time of Joyce’s death World War II was still in its initial stages of driving the point home definitively and wiping much of the slate clean. As Pound later pointed out, Joyce’s Ulysses was a bookend for the 19th Century: not the novel to end all novels, but to allow for new kinds of expression to follow.
Unfortunately for Pound, either he had spiraled into a form of actual madness, or a lifetime’s theorizing about economics and artistry and American backwardness had led him down dark alleyways toward a fascist nightmare. Maybe both were true. The end of his life is not well-documented in this book about his correspondence with Joyce but, having peeked over his shoulder as he wrote his letters, we readers must feel at least a little saddened about Pound’s decline.
June 7, 2023
from the early letters one can see why people stuck to pound for so long, he's energetic, attentive, always determined to help (sometimes overdetermined if anything) and damn funny. but then he goes and cracks up, and his overreacting to fwake may be latent jealousy, a rejection of joyce's influence which was stronger than he realised? dear jimmy comes out better as always, he may have been apolitical but that's a damn sight better than being a fascist. read's editing is mostly good, but some of the transcriptions and commentary are a little sloppy, and the 'allegedly's in front of the 'fascist's to describe pound are doing a hell of a lot of legwork, the man collaborated with mussolini for god's sake!
August 2, 2025
"When Joyce was making progress I ballyhooed him. Not since he retrogressed." Ezra Pound's final verdict on James Joyce, 1939. When you consider that this voluminous correspondence consists only of the letters Pound wrote to Joyce, and not vice-versa, you have some measure of how Pound played unofficial editor to the greatest novelist of the twentieth century. But, then, Pound did raise the money to support Joyce while he was writing ULYSSES, so he had every right to hector.
July 18, 2017
3 1/2 stars
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews