Calendar of composition

Page 4 of 5

CANTO II

CALENDAR OF COMPOSITION

First published as “The Eighth Canto” in The Dial in May 1922 - pdf

Reworked and repositioned as Canto II in July 1923.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

Correspondence by Ezra Pound: (c) Mary de Rachewiltz and the Estate of Omar S. Pound. Reproduced by permission.

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

A	“Annals.” Variorum Edition of Three Cantos. A Prototype. Ed. Richard Taylor. Bayreuth: Boomerang, 1991.
L/FMF	Pound/Ford: The Story of a Literary Friendship. Ed. Brita Lindberg-Seyersted. New York: New Directions, 1982.
L/HP	Ezra Pound To His Parents: Letters 1895-1929. Eds. Mary de Rachewiltz, A David Moody and Joanna Moody. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2010.
L/JQ	The Selected Letters of Ezra Pound to John Quinn: 1915-1924. Ed. Timothy Materer. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1991.
L/TSE	The Letters of T. S. Eliot. Vol. I: 1898-1922. Ed. Valerie Eliot. London: Faber, 1988.
L/TW	Pound, Thayer, Watson and The Dial. Ed. Walter Sutton. Gainesville: UP of Florida, 1994.

1922

To Ford Madox Ford, 13 January 1922

L/FMF 63; A 18

Dear Ford,

[…]

I dont know whether you have had a shot at my bloody cantos. You wont have liked much of 'em. I wish however your infinite patience could persuade you to go through the enclosed* with a red, blood-red, green, blue, or other pencil and scratch what is too awful.

I've done fifteen or more versions, all worse or less or more. I wonder if the things I think will draw your "My Gawds" are the same things that I fear will do so.

At any rate, as you know, there is no possible way of getting any criticism, and one goes blind, deaf after a time.

Dido and the, 'elenaus, 'eleptolis, have to stay, are the links with the preceding canto.** Up to now it has been mainly hash, necessary beginning if I am to reconstruct the various ichthyosauri that I need later in the poem. Hope to confine it to American language from now on (with possibly a very verreeee few lapses into Chinese, choctaw, greek, provençal etc.)

However, not for me to say what I want to do, but, if you are so amiable, for you to say what has got onto the paper. It damn well needs a fresh eye. And les jeunes, etc. are no use, (to me for these matters. All see less than I do.)

Notes:

* the enclosed - the draft of The Eighth Canto, the first version of canto II published in The Dial in May 1922. The letter to Ford is the earliest proof we have that the canto was finished by 13 January 1922.

** links with the preceding canto – the preceding canto is Canto VII.

To Scofield Thayer, 8 February 1922

L/TW 227

Dear S.T.

Eliot’s poem is very important, almost enough to make everyone else shut up shop. I haven't done so... have sent Canto VIII to Watson... but then....

To John Quinn, 21 February 1922

L/JQ 205-6

Cher Ami

[…]

Eliot came back from his Lausanne specialist looking O.K.; and with a damn good poem [19 pages] in his suit case, same finished up here; and shd. be out in Dial soon, if Thayer isn’t utterly nutty. Wadsworth in yesterday on way to Marseilles reported that Eliot was again ill.

About enough, Eliot’s poem, to make the rest of us shut up shop. I haven’t done so; have in fact knocked out another Canto (not in the least à la Eliot, or concerned with “modern life”), that also may appear in the Dial.

To Agnes Bedford, 9 March 1922

A 18

[…]

I have done a decent VIIIth canto, which the Dial will print in due course.

To Homer Pound, March 1922

L/HP 495

[…]

Dial has sent me 50 bones for VIIIth Canto, which you may, therefore, see some time in the not infinitely distant future.

To Isabel Pound, 22 March 1922

L/HP 495

Dear Mother

[…]

Also Canto VIII has been paid for by Dial.

From Ford Madox Ford, 21 March 1922

L/FMF 64-65; A 18-19

Dear Ezra

I put yr. m.s. away in an exceptionally safe place while I was finishing my novel-& have spent the fortnight or so since I finished in searching for the m.s.. Here it is at last however, pencilled according to yr. commands.

Pardon if the suggestions are mostly zoological. That is how it falls out. Zoological mistakes don't matter a damn, serving to give Reviewers a few more pence for a few more lines—but zoological questionabilities (.A.) do because they arrest the attention of the Reader of Good Will & that arresting of the attention blurs the effect of the poem. One says: “Do waves, wirling [sic] or billowy things run in the valleys between hillocks of beach—beach-grooves? I don’t think they do: they are converted into surf or foam as soon as they strike the pebbles & become wash or undertow in “receding & then run.”

Per se that does not matter-- but the weakening of the attention does.

It is the same with your compound words like “spray-whited” & “cord-welter.”-- But as to these I am not so certain: my dislike for them may be merely personal distaste for Anglo-Saxon locutions which always affect me with nausea & yr. purpose in using them may be the purely aesthetic one of roughening up yr. surface. I mean that, if you shd. cut them out you might well get too slick an effect.

A. applies of course to Snipe: vine-must: lynx & slung oxen & pulling seas:

i.e: the vine is the stock, tendrils, leaves etc on wh. grow the grapes from wh. the must is made.

Pulling seas would not matter if you did not have oarsmen in the next line

Slung oxen ditto, if there were no shipyard in the line before suggesting oxen being taken aboard an At. transport liner in slings

The same with lynx & tail

_____________________

I wouldn’t bother you with these verbal minutiae if you hadn’t asked for them; the latter part of the poem--of the first page & a half is a very beautiful of impressionism, as good as anything as you have ever done & that is what really matters. I do hope you'll go on & get the whole thing together in volume form as soon as possible. It'll get onto the world a feeling of big achievement.

Of course, I think that, in essence, you’re a medieval gargoyle, Idaho or no! And it’s not a bad thing to be.

To Ford Madox Ford, [21 March] 1922

L/FMF 65-67; A 19-20

Dear Hesiod:

Thanks orfully. It is only the minute crit. that is any good, or that prods one. First to rebuttals. Ox is slung. At least my recollection is that I saw in Excideuil a sling and wondered wottell it was until I actually saw an ox in it. D[orothy]. also thinks I told her at THAT time of seeing the ox. I don't believe this is an hallucination born of seeing the sling and building hypothesis that it was for ox.

Can't think everyone has seen army transports, or that they wd. superpose modern derrick & classic ship.

Thank heaven the points that worried ME, have got by your eagle optic; that's some relief.

Now Snipe?, arent they the damn longlegged barstards that scurry along the sand in NJ.? I can hardly go in for reed-birds or more scientificly differintiated orniths. I wuz told as a kid that the damn things were snipe. BATHIAN BRIMFUGL BRAEDAN FAETHRA, is the general text.

I tried a smoother presentation and lost the metamorphosis, got to be a burley burley, or no one believes in the change of the ship. Hence mess of tails, feet, etc. will condier [?i.e., conduire, "suggest"] shifting the tail, but it don't need to be taken as part of next animal. some of the other mammifera are certainly tailed. That not the pint, I know.

Re/ The double words, and rep. of cadence. The suffering reader is supposed to have waded through seven cantos already: MUST bang up the big-bazoo a bit, I mean rhythm must strengthen here if he is to be kept going.

KHRRRIST, To make a man read forty pages of poetry, and with prospect of 300 to follow????

As to Gargoyles, some one has got to make the plunge, decide whether the Epic, or wottell of cosmographic volcano is extinct or not. It will take me another thirty years at least. Shall probably do vol. of first ten or fifteen cantos.

The problem of Coeur Simple and the Gt. American desert is still before me.

If you remember the VIIth at all, you will remember that I did get as far as Soho and Bayswater. Am not really interested in anything that hasn't been there all the time.

That probably dif. between prose and poetry. Prose can be made of something that merely occurs once in a given setting, or if you Flaubert-eneralize, of something that a lot of people are doing “in a given way”, Feinaigle, Amoros, etc .

[...].

Surely one speaks of “receding wave”. It may be a technical looseness of phrase, but it is certainly "english". "Wash" is impos. Homophone with laundry. (which is used both of the institution and of the wash).

No use old bean. There is def. an association or aroma of words, apart from the justness.

English simply hasn't the mot juste in the french meaning. And French is abs. paralyzed and dying from a too strict logicality [...].

///

Re/ pulling. Surely, you must have been at sea in storm and know how the bloody wave pulls the whole boat. Boat makes a heave at wave, cuts in a bit, then gets dragged off course.

Gorm, I’ve spewd eleven times onto the broad gray buttocks of the swankin Atlantic.

It is anything but a “run”, its a pull,

Are you thynxxing of a lynx or a hyena?

Thanks eturnully, for going over the thing.

Snipe, long legs, long beaks, certainly on Jersey shore, lepping about the pools left in the sand. Fond memory of cheeildhood.

Will have another go at the matter.

///

[...]

Dont see that “surf runs in beach groove” wd. do. surf is definitely the curving over and the foam,. Wave runs up beach, and then runs back, “receding wave” is surely english.

Can’t read your note on splay. The bird spreads wing, and nips with beak. Preen, I suppose, is verb you want. To preen IS to nip at feathers with beak.

///

Question of “joints”, not of bird but of poem. Cant be really determined until the thing is done, and one goes back over it. I know there is waste in the “get away” at beginning of this, but main incident, has got to set in the whole. Lynx with preceding. Poor old Dido is the coupling.

May be able to eliminate some of these things later. It helps in a way to print the single cantos, and get ’em out of the shop. Also one sees better on printed page.

AND the damn thing acts as accusation much more strongly than if it were in desk in typescript. Also draws more objections.

Disadv. of starting in Idaho, one never hears of 20th. or XIXth century, until one is too old. Joyce lucky in copping form of Odyssey. But it wd.nt have done for me ANNYhow.

I dare say it wd. be easier to cut the 7 preceding cantos & let Acoetes continue = only I dont see how I ed. get him to Bayswater.

Note: BATHIAN BRIMFUGL BRAEDAN FAETHRA, is the general text – the seabirds bathing, spreading their feathers (wings). From The Wanderer l.47-8 (L/FMF n.28 190).

	Ðonne onwæcneð eft	Then the friendless man
	wineleas guma,	wakes up again,
	gesihð him biforan	He sees before him
	ealwe wegas,	fallow waves
	baþian brimfuglas,	Sea birds bathe,
	brædan feþra,	preening their feathers,
48a	hreosan hrim ond snaw	Frost and snow fall,
	hagle gemenged.	With hail mingled

Thorpe, Benjamin, ed. Codex Exoniensis: A Collection of Anglo-Saxon Poetry... with An English Translation, Notes and Indexes.London: The Society of Antiquaries of London, William Pickering, 1842.

1923

To Dorothy Pound, [13 July 1923]

Lilly Library, Pound mss. III, Box 1; A 20

Am rewriting the first three cantos; trying to weed out and clarify; etc, a BHLoody JHobb.

To Dorothy Pound, [17 July 1923]

Lilly Library, Pound mss. III, Box 1; A 20

also have been trying to rewrite Cants I. II. III. so haven't been back to museum myself.

From Dorothy Pound, [21? July 1923]