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Pound / Lewis: The Letters of Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis
The friendship of Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis began in London in 1909, survived two European wars and the rise and fall of the totalitarian governments both men misguidedly supported, and lasted through Pound's years of confinement at St. Elizabeths, to Lewis's death in 1957. In Pound/Lewis, their correspondence of five decades is gathered for the first time; it proves a revealing reflection of their intense, always professional, mutual regard.
- GenresPoetry
Hardcover
First published January 1, 1985
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August 12, 2020
Simply brilliant and fantastically edited.
This book is a collection of letters between two literary giants and amazing artists.
I have probably written enough about Ezra Pound elsewhere - the "solitary volcano" or "Rock Drill" (as Lewis once called him, which Pound then used as a title for his Cantos 85-95), one of the best (if not the best) poets of the Twentieth Century, along with T. S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, e. e. cummings, and Dylan Thomas, just to name a few. Letters penned by Pound are idiosyncratic, to put it mildly, borderline incomprehensible, to put it bluntly. Pound's intellectual brilliance and wit are a joy to read, especially in his early letters to Lewis but from the mid-1930s onwards, after his unfortunate embrace of Mussolini fascism, his letters suddenly become quite hardcore, offensive and frankly repugnant to read.
After Pound's arrest in 1945, detention at Pisa (where he wrote the incredibly esoteric, obscure but beautiful Pisan Cantos) and his incarceration at St. Elizabeths (after being deemed 'unfit to stand trial'), his anti-Semitism does not abate until after he returns to Rapallo in the late 1950s and early 1960s when he apologizes to Allen Ginsberg for his anti-Jewish comments.
Having read a few books by or on Pound now, this did not come as a surprise but the wonderful and fascinating career of Wyndham Lewis did.
“Ezra Pound met Wyndham Lewis in 1909 during what he called the “British Museum era,” a golden though rather stuffy age when scholars, artists, and museum officials would meet beneath the glass ceiling of the Vienna Café on New Oxford Street." (Pound/Lewis: p. 3)
Wyndham Lewis was not only a groundbreaking and revolutionary painter, who along with Pound, Gaudier-Brzeska and a few other artists, launched a movement called 'Vorticism', and one of the best portrait-painters (portraitist) that England has ever seen, but also an incredibly talented and prolific novelist, occasional poet and playwright. In his life, he completed more than 40 novels, on top of his large output as a painter.
“Lewis founded the journal BLAST to attack the decaying aesthetic ideas left over from the Victorian age. Dependence on nature imagery and mimetic form were to be replaced with mechanistic and urban scenes and a move, still rather tentative, to abstract form.” (Pound/Lewis: p. 4)
The first two sections of this book mostly cover Lewis's times in the trenches of WWI. He 'paints' a harrowing and quite simply terrifying account of what it must have been like to be on the front lines. Lewis partly decided to enlist because he needed money to support his two illegitimate children, whom his mother looked after while he went to war. Shells explode yards away from his tent, soldiers in his regiment get practically wiped out and he even visits the lonely location where Gaudier-Brzeska met his tragic end a few years earlier.
You get a feeling from reading these early letters that this was perhaps the beginning of the deep, scathing irony that permeated Lewis' work from thereon. I am SO glad that he wasn't killed in the war - it would have been a dreadful loss for the world of art and literature. “Like Yeats in writing of Wilfred Owen, Lewis could not consider “passive suffering” a worthy response to the war. He felt a more aggressive and sardonic reaction was needed to the spectacle of mass slaughter.” (Pound/Lewis: p. 67)
Together Pound and Lewis formed an avant-garde Vorticist publication called BLAST, which only lasted for about 3 issues. Lewis reflected on these times later on: “I feel that in Blast, to begin with, we were a trifle too conscientious.” (Pound/Lewis: p. 54) Yet Pound frequently refers back to the BLAST days, even during his incarceration at St. Elizabeths Hospital (Washington D. C.), back to a simpler, happier time.
This collection is a tribute to the lives of both men and a celebration of their relationship through letters. Lewis seemed to understand Pound better than most: “By himself he would seem to have neither any convictions nor eyes in his head …. Yet when he can get into the skin of somebody else, of power and renown, a Propertius or an Arnaut Daniel, he becomes a lion or a lynx on the spot.” (Pound/Lewis: p. xii) Here, Lewis is of course talking about Pound's ability to get into the skin (or to be more precise VOICE) of other poets, 'pick up their masks' or 'personae' (a title of his collection of poems). Because Pound adopted so many personae, which one is the REAL Pound one wonders when all the masks drop? Bob Dylan's recent song, "I Contain Multitudes" while not being about Ezra Pound in any specific way, immediately makes me think of him and all the voices of poetry past that he embodied and absorbed. As the editor of this book puts it: “Pound’s character is like that of the poet as John Keats describes it: “he has no Identity – he is continually … filling some other body.”” (Pound/Lewis: p. xii)
While Pound's major poetic achievements, The Cantos, his scholarly review of the medieval troubadours, The Spirit of Romance, and some of his 'translations' (a term used rather loosely here considering the liberties Pound took when he 'translated') such as Cathay, are well-known and have received the acclaim that they deserve, Lewis' canon has been largely and sadly overlooked or forgotten it seems. The original edition of his first novel Tarr (first published in 1918) and his novel Apes of God (published in 1930) are probably his two major achievements, along with his drama Enemy of the Stars and his numerous autobiographical writings such as Blasting and Bombarding. These all deserve to be and will be republished. (I just heard yesterday that Birmingham University is working on bringing out a massive 40-volume reissue of Lewis's writings).
While it is certainly enjoyable and conducive to our sound mental health to read such optimistic writers as Paulo Coellho, we also need to temper and balance out this optimism with the heavy irony of writers who remind us of some of the stark and difficult realities in life such as war, vanity and grief and Lewis is a writer who present such sober reflections to us as readers. Lewis once said, “Perpetual War may be our next civilization” (Wyndham Lewis: BLAST 1915) and given the situation at the moment the "perpetual fear of a virus or sickness" may be "our next civilization" for which we should be prepared.
Lewis one said in a letter to Pound (contained in this collection):“Life as you know is only justifiable as a spectacle: the moment at which it becomes harrowing and stale, & no aesthetic purpose is any longer served, War would be better exchanged for Diplomacy, Intelligence! – or something else.” (Pound/Lewis: p. 86) It is up to us to find out what this "something else" exactly is.
This book is a collection of letters between two literary giants and amazing artists.
I have probably written enough about Ezra Pound elsewhere - the "solitary volcano" or "Rock Drill" (as Lewis once called him, which Pound then used as a title for his Cantos 85-95), one of the best (if not the best) poets of the Twentieth Century, along with T. S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, e. e. cummings, and Dylan Thomas, just to name a few. Letters penned by Pound are idiosyncratic, to put it mildly, borderline incomprehensible, to put it bluntly. Pound's intellectual brilliance and wit are a joy to read, especially in his early letters to Lewis but from the mid-1930s onwards, after his unfortunate embrace of Mussolini fascism, his letters suddenly become quite hardcore, offensive and frankly repugnant to read.
After Pound's arrest in 1945, detention at Pisa (where he wrote the incredibly esoteric, obscure but beautiful Pisan Cantos) and his incarceration at St. Elizabeths (after being deemed 'unfit to stand trial'), his anti-Semitism does not abate until after he returns to Rapallo in the late 1950s and early 1960s when he apologizes to Allen Ginsberg for his anti-Jewish comments.
Having read a few books by or on Pound now, this did not come as a surprise but the wonderful and fascinating career of Wyndham Lewis did.
“Ezra Pound met Wyndham Lewis in 1909 during what he called the “British Museum era,” a golden though rather stuffy age when scholars, artists, and museum officials would meet beneath the glass ceiling of the Vienna Café on New Oxford Street." (Pound/Lewis: p. 3)
Wyndham Lewis was not only a groundbreaking and revolutionary painter, who along with Pound, Gaudier-Brzeska and a few other artists, launched a movement called 'Vorticism', and one of the best portrait-painters (portraitist) that England has ever seen, but also an incredibly talented and prolific novelist, occasional poet and playwright. In his life, he completed more than 40 novels, on top of his large output as a painter.
“Lewis founded the journal BLAST to attack the decaying aesthetic ideas left over from the Victorian age. Dependence on nature imagery and mimetic form were to be replaced with mechanistic and urban scenes and a move, still rather tentative, to abstract form.” (Pound/Lewis: p. 4)
The first two sections of this book mostly cover Lewis's times in the trenches of WWI. He 'paints' a harrowing and quite simply terrifying account of what it must have been like to be on the front lines. Lewis partly decided to enlist because he needed money to support his two illegitimate children, whom his mother looked after while he went to war. Shells explode yards away from his tent, soldiers in his regiment get practically wiped out and he even visits the lonely location where Gaudier-Brzeska met his tragic end a few years earlier.
You get a feeling from reading these early letters that this was perhaps the beginning of the deep, scathing irony that permeated Lewis' work from thereon. I am SO glad that he wasn't killed in the war - it would have been a dreadful loss for the world of art and literature. “Like Yeats in writing of Wilfred Owen, Lewis could not consider “passive suffering” a worthy response to the war. He felt a more aggressive and sardonic reaction was needed to the spectacle of mass slaughter.” (Pound/Lewis: p. 67)
Together Pound and Lewis formed an avant-garde Vorticist publication called BLAST, which only lasted for about 3 issues. Lewis reflected on these times later on: “I feel that in Blast, to begin with, we were a trifle too conscientious.” (Pound/Lewis: p. 54) Yet Pound frequently refers back to the BLAST days, even during his incarceration at St. Elizabeths Hospital (Washington D. C.), back to a simpler, happier time.
This collection is a tribute to the lives of both men and a celebration of their relationship through letters. Lewis seemed to understand Pound better than most: “By himself he would seem to have neither any convictions nor eyes in his head …. Yet when he can get into the skin of somebody else, of power and renown, a Propertius or an Arnaut Daniel, he becomes a lion or a lynx on the spot.” (Pound/Lewis: p. xii) Here, Lewis is of course talking about Pound's ability to get into the skin (or to be more precise VOICE) of other poets, 'pick up their masks' or 'personae' (a title of his collection of poems). Because Pound adopted so many personae, which one is the REAL Pound one wonders when all the masks drop? Bob Dylan's recent song, "I Contain Multitudes" while not being about Ezra Pound in any specific way, immediately makes me think of him and all the voices of poetry past that he embodied and absorbed. As the editor of this book puts it: “Pound’s character is like that of the poet as John Keats describes it: “he has no Identity – he is continually … filling some other body.”” (Pound/Lewis: p. xii)
While Pound's major poetic achievements, The Cantos, his scholarly review of the medieval troubadours, The Spirit of Romance, and some of his 'translations' (a term used rather loosely here considering the liberties Pound took when he 'translated') such as Cathay, are well-known and have received the acclaim that they deserve, Lewis' canon has been largely and sadly overlooked or forgotten it seems. The original edition of his first novel Tarr (first published in 1918) and his novel Apes of God (published in 1930) are probably his two major achievements, along with his drama Enemy of the Stars and his numerous autobiographical writings such as Blasting and Bombarding. These all deserve to be and will be republished. (I just heard yesterday that Birmingham University is working on bringing out a massive 40-volume reissue of Lewis's writings).
While it is certainly enjoyable and conducive to our sound mental health to read such optimistic writers as Paulo Coellho, we also need to temper and balance out this optimism with the heavy irony of writers who remind us of some of the stark and difficult realities in life such as war, vanity and grief and Lewis is a writer who present such sober reflections to us as readers. Lewis once said, “Perpetual War may be our next civilization” (Wyndham Lewis: BLAST 1915) and given the situation at the moment the "perpetual fear of a virus or sickness" may be "our next civilization" for which we should be prepared.
Lewis one said in a letter to Pound (contained in this collection):“Life as you know is only justifiable as a spectacle: the moment at which it becomes harrowing and stale, & no aesthetic purpose is any longer served, War would be better exchanged for Diplomacy, Intelligence! – or something else.” (Pound/Lewis: p. 86) It is up to us to find out what this "something else" exactly is.
Displaying 1 of 1 review