COMPANION TO CANTO XXVIII

CITATION FORMATS

Annotations in the List of Works Cited:

Author’s last name, first name. “Title of the Article or Individual Page.” Title of the Website, Name of the Publisher [if different from website name], Date of Publication in Day Month Year format, URL. [MLA 8 format].

Example: Preda, Roxana. “Companion to Canto IV.” The Cantos Project, 5 August 2016.
 thecantosproject.ed.ac.uk/index.php/a-draft-of-xvi-cantos-overview/canto-iv/companion-to-canto-iv

In–text references

Abbreviation

OCCEP – The Online Companion to The Cantos of Ezra Pound

(Contributor name, OCCEP IV: n.no).

Example: (Bressan, OCCEP IV: n.3). If no name is indicated, the gloss was written by Roxana Preda. In this case, the citation will have this format: (OCCEP IV: n.13). 

References to The Cantos

As The Cantos Project is numbering the lines of The Cantos, references to cantos already glossed will be by canto number and line number(s), as standard with classical works. Example: III: ll.7–17.

For cantos that are not yet glossed within the project, the references will be by canto number slash page number, as standard in the research on the poem. Example: III/12. The page number refers to the American edition of The Cantos by Ezra Pound. New York: New Directions, 1998.

© Roxana Preda. Companion to Canto XXVIII, 11 August 2018

Updated 7 September 2023

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

1. Boja d’un Dio – I. “Gard, yeh bloody 'angman!” (Pound’s translation, l.9). The Italian expletive is to be found in the last line of Aldo Spallicci’s poem “E rumagnùl” written in the local dialect of Romagna. The Romagnolo has “rude manners,” is born in “shirtsleeves,” “unbuttoned at the chest” and blasphemes as soon as he is created. See poem.

2. Romagnolo – Inhabitant of the Italian province of Romagna, which includes Ferrara, Rimini, Cesena, Ravenna and Bologna. Both Sigismondo Malatesta and Benito Mussolini were from this region.

3. Aso iqua me – I. “here I am.” Last line of Aldo Spallicci’s poem “E rumagnùl”: “A so qua mè, ciò, boia ded’ S…… !” (“Here I am, damn it!”). See also n.1. See poem.

4. All Essimo – It. “All’ Esimio.” (“To the esteemed”).

5. Dottor Walluschnig – Public thanks of a happy family from Cesena to a Doctor Wallushnig for the birth of a Romagnolo of today. The archetypal “rude manners” of Romagna are shown to be considerably improved in the 20^th century. 

   According to Anne Conover, Manlio Dazzi drew Pound’s attention to the article (60).

   Olga Rudge considered the allusion to Walluschnig to be Pound’s covert thanks for the expertise that assisted the difficult birth of their daughter Mary on 9 July 1925 (Bacigalupo, 350; Conover 60-61).

6. Item – Pound quotes from Sebastian Cabot’s Ordinances, a document drawn up in 1553 for King Edward VI of England. Cabot was at the head of the Company of Merchant Adventurers, which was set up to seek a northern sea route to Russia and China.

   Though it is not a catalogue, Cabot’s Ordinances are structured as a list of items.     

   Position 31 warns about the dangers of interaction with natives:          
   “31 Item there are people that can swimme in the sea, havens, & rivers, naked, having bowes and shafts, coveting to draw nigh your ships, which if they shal finde not wel watched, or warded, they wil assault, desirous of the bodies of men, which they covet for meate: if you resist them, they dive, and so will flee, and therefore diligent watch is to be kept both day & night, in some islands.” (See Hakluyt, ed. II: 203. Internet Archive)
   Sebastian was the son of John Cabot, who had made the first successful voyage of discovery across the Atlantic for the English Crown. John reached Newfoundland from Bristol in 1497, five years after Columbus had discovered Hispaniola. Sebastian took part in his father’s expeditions so that his description of the natives’ behaviour was based on what he had seen in his travels. Pound may present the archetypal American behaviour, much as he had presented the romagnolo at the start of the poem. This parallelism is reinforced by Pound’s list of vignettes of modern Americans he met in his own travels. Unlike the contemporary inhabitants of Romagna, who had left their archetypal rude manners behind, Pound’s samples of American behaviour are always critical.

7. Mr. Lourpee – pseudonym for an older painter Pound may have met on his research trip to Madrid in 1906 (C XXVIII: n. 9). This speculation is extrapolated from the poem context, as we have no factual information on Mr Lourpee’s existence from letters or biographies.

   See Three Cantos II for Pound’s portrait of the American painter Fred Nelson Vance and the influence that the style of Pierre Puvis de Chavannes had on him; for Pound, Vance was a symbol of artistic defeat and a failure of nerve: he was determined that his own poetic world would be “never so pale” (OCCEP TC I: n.44; TC II: n. 48). Vance had died in 1926 at 46. Pound’s first drafts of the canto show that he indeed thought of refashioning the passage about Vance from Three Cantos II. See drafts 72/3227.

8. Sage of Concord – Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), American philosopher who lived in Concord Massachusetts.

9. dramatic critic – Alan Dale (Alfred Cohen), whom Pound met and socialized with in Gibraltar and later Madrid on his research trip to Spain in 1906. He wrote to his father on 24 May 1906: “I was interrupted yesterday by the arrival of the Dales. They had gotten rooms somewhere else & not speaking Spanish were in being swindled & made miserable generally” (L/HP 79; Bacigalupo 351).

10. Ladies from West Virginia – probably the sisters Ida and Adah Mapel from Georgetown, West Virginia, whom Pound met on his trip to Spain in 1906 (Wilhelm 242-43; C XXVIII: n.14).

11. Chiasso – town and point of transit at the border between Italy and Switzerland. It is possible to cross the border not only by rail through the station in Chiasso, but also by tram from nearby Como, as Pound did on his way to Paris during the Italian railway strike:

    “Ezra and Dorothy left Sirmione with Joyce on June 10 [1920]. A strike started half an hour after they got to Milan, ‘& many trains stopped where they were at the stroke of 12.’ ‘I came out of Italy on a tram-car & reckon the next man will come out in a cab’ – so Pound wrote from Paris to Thayer and to Quinn as an indication of the state of affairs in Italy at the time.” (EPP I: 394-95; see also L/TW 40; SL 153).

12. By the last – by the last train. The beginning of the strike (12 o’clock on 9 June 1920) caught the Pounds on the train, barely out of Milan on their way to Paris. The train probably stopped in Como, leaving them stranded before they reached the border.

13. Como – Italian town at the southern tip of Lake Como, around 8 km away from the Swiss border at Chiasso. By train, the distance is made in 4 mins. Ezra and Dorothy took the tram.

14. A dutchman – a look at the map will make clear Pound’s sarcasm as to the hyperactivity of the Dutchman who wanted to reach Holland from Chiasso via Trieste. As the Italian railways were on strike, he could not reach Trieste, even if he had tried. The mention of “a boat” makes the Dutchman’s travel home even more ludicrous. Taking the boat from Trieste on the way to Holland would have seen him sail south around the Italian peninsula, cross the Mediterranean, pass through the straits of Gibraltar and then North along the Atlantic coast. 
    All he had to do was cross by tram or cab from Chiasso into Switzerland and continue his journey north from there, as the Pounds did.

15. cigar store Indian – ever since the introduction of tobacco into Europe, a stereotype figure of a Native American warrior was used as a symbol of smoking. Painted wooden statues, sometimes almost life-size stood in front of tobacco shops as advertisements, first in Europe and then in America.

    On 7 February 1930, Pound wrote to E.E. Cummings, who lived in Greenwich Village, to send him a photo: “If you have a photo of a Cigar Store Indian or can get one, it wd. be deeply appreciated. Our autochtonous sculpture is comparatively unknown in Yourup, though I suspect the c.(or segar) s.i. was possibly of Brit. or colonial origin.” Cummings sent him one of a “woodlady” in March. See Calendar.

16. Bowery – street in Southern Manhattan.

17. bleeding Kansas– “Bleeding Kansas” was an expression coined by Horace Greely in the New York Tribune to refer to the violent conflicts in the new territory of Kansas in 1854-1861. They issued out of the controversy on whether Kansas should start its existence as a slave or a free state. These conflicts made Kansas the stage of one of the first acts in the American civil war.

18. Topeka – capital city of Kansas.

19. Clara Leonora – Pound continues the list of annoying American women in the canto with the example of a student he met in Hugo Rennert’s class in Romance languages and literatures while studying for an MA at the University of Pennsylvania, 1905-06.

20. Old Rennert – Hugo Rennert (1852-1927), professor of Romance studies at the University of Pennsylvania and specialist in Lope de Vega. Pound was his doctoral student and mentions him in canto XX. See OCCEP XX: n.9.

    

21. Grillparzer – Franz Grillparzer (1791-1872), Austrian playwright and poet. His work shows the influence of Spanish playwrights, Lope de Vega and Calderón de la Barca, a fact that made him relevant to Rennert’s course on Spanish drama (Wilhelm American Roots 144). In the professor’s opinion, Grillparzer re-established Lope’s reputation throughout Europe (Rennert, Life of Lope de Vega quoted in L/HP n. p.82)

    On his research tour in Europe in 1906, Pound wrote to his mother on 13 June from Paris: “Have my thesis so I can roll it out in a month’s more home work provided I can get hold of Grillparzer & Farinelli here” (L/HP 82).

22. Mr Liszt – Franz Liszt (1811-1886), the most celebrated pianist of the 19^th century. As Liszt did not tour the U.S., Clara Leonora must have visited Europe in her childhood.

23. Ought never to be destroyed – Pound had taken the decision to write a sonnet a day and destroy them after a year (Williams Autobiography 53; C XXVIII: n. 22). Pound did not have a good opinion on sonnets, maintaining that a sonnet is what results whenever a poet tries and fails to write a canzone (LE 168). It was natural for him to regard sonnets as exercises to school himself in fixed form and prosody. Clara Leonora’s quasi-religious appreciation of sonnets was therefore particularly annoying.

    

24. Loica – Florence Farr (1860-1917), British actress, composer and director. She was also a women’s rights activist, journalist, educator, singer, novelist, and leader of the occult order, The Golden Dawn. She was a friend and collaborator of Yeats, Pound, Wilde, and Aubrey Beardsley. Farr was a “First Wave” Feminist of the late 19th and early 20th centuries; she publicly advocated for suffrage, workplace equality, and equal protection under the law for women.

    Pound was especially appreciative of her declamations of Yeats’ poetry and plays to the accompaniment of a psaltery (EPP I: 98).

    Through the Theosophical Society in London, she met Sir Ponnambalam Ramanathan, a spiritual teacher and future member of the Tamil parliament in Ceylon. Farr was greatly impressed by his plans for the education of young women in his native country, and she committed herself to helping him when he was ready. In 1912, Farr learned that Ramanathan had established his Uduvil Ramanathan Girls College, and at the age of fifty-two, she sold all her possessions and moved to Ceylon. Farr was appointed Lady Principal by Ramanathan and the administration of the school was turned over to her. In 1917, she died of breast cancer in Ceylon. Wikipedia.

25. Ibsen – Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906), Norwegian playwright. Florence Farr played the part of Rebecca West in Ibsen’s play Rosmersholm in 1891. Wikipedia.

26. Smith’s room – William Brooke Smith (1884-1908), American painter and Pound’s friend while a student at the University of Pennsylvania. Pound dedicated his first volume of verse, A Lume Spento, to Smith. (See Wilhelm 1990.)

27. Tribune – article in Chicago Tribune, Paris edition. A clipping of the Tribune article has been preserved among Pound’s papers (see source). The occasion was the national convention of the American Legion in September 1927, held in Paris. The American Legion was the Association of American veterans of WWI, created in Paris in 1919. Its mission was to lobby for veterans’ interests and to promote American values and patriotism. 

    The article announced a “secret service” whose mission it was to keep the veterans on their best behaviour while in Paris, especially that they came from a U.S. chained by the Prohibition to the French capital, where alcohol was sold freely.

28. Frank Robert Cherokee – Frank Robert Cheroka was arrested by the French police on drug charges, according to a newspaper clipping preserved among the drafts of the canto.

    Pound noted the number of the Court order (128/137) on the clipping and dated the deportation as July 24 (probably 1927). See source.

29. Je suis … poids – Fr. “I am … stronger than … Buddha… I am … stronger than … Christ… I will have abolished gravity.”

30. dining room in the Pyrenees – Pound’s drafts indicate the room to be in Montrejeau, which Pound visited with his wife Dorothy in 1919, once on 6 June and once on 12-16 July 1919. On a postcard sent on 6 June, Dorothy wrote that “we have a room with a view of dozens of Pyrénees” (Bressan 2016). Draft 72/3227.

31. Martinique – French colony in the Caribbean since 1635, used for the production of sugar. It is now one of the French overseas departments and EU member.

    

32. sont l’in… fan… terie koh-lon-iale – Fr. “are… colonial infantry.” The French naval infantry (since 1822 called “marsouins” (“porpoises”) were troops whose mission it was to defend the ships in naval confrontations (thereby relieving the crew of military tasks), as well as to defend harbours and ports. They were exclusively used in France’s colonial enterprises in South-East Asia, Africa and the Caribbean. During WWI, les marsouins also fought at Gallipoli, April to December 1915.

33. voce tinnula – L. “with resounding voice.”

34. les vieux Marsouins – Fr. “old porpoises,” a name used for the French naval infantry. Technically, a “vieux marsouin” is a porpoise who, by ingenuity and experience manages to escape the drive hunts by finding its way out of enclosures, poles and fishing nets, a true “fox of the sea” (Casgrain, 1873).

35. feitz Marcebrus – Prov. “Marcabru made it.”  The expression recalls the medieval artist signatures that Pound saw at San Zeno in Verona (marble column with inscription “Adaminus de S Giorgio me fecit”) or the cathedral in Ferrara (“‘Glielmo ciptadin’ says the stone,/ ‘the author,/ ‘and Nicolau was the carver” (XXVII 59-60)). The quotation is the second line of Marcabru’s poem “Pax in Nomine Domini” (“Peace in the name of the Lord”), a political satire. Marcabru (fl. 1130-1150) was a 12^th century troubadour from Gascony. Brief references in SR (53, 62) and LE (102-103) show that Pound was familiar with aspects of Marcabru’s work. The invocation of this troubadour is especially apposite as it marks the poet’s role as a commentator of the wars of his day. See poem. Pound may have chosen Marcabru as an analogy because he was a troubadour from the Pyrenees region, the same as his acquaintance in Montrejeau, the French marine infantry officer who had been in Martinique and Tibet. In his drafts, Pound mentions not only that he painted (“the harbour of Martinique, drawn every house, and in detail”), but also that he composed “Poèmes aux fleurs” (Draft 72/3227, p.4).

36. Peace Day – Pound may be referring to the day the Versailles treaty was signed, 28 June 1919. He was in Southern France at the time.

37. Dr. Wymans – Though we know nothing about Dr. Wymans and the time that Pound talked to him, we may infer that he was a medical officer of the British Army who fought at Gallipoli and helped secure the retreat of troops from the Turkish peninsula in December 1915-January 1916. The proportion of sick soldiers who had to be evacuated compared to military casualties at the Gallipoli front was unusually high, almost 1:1 (90,000 sick to 97,000 casualties on the Allied side alone). Wikipedia.

38. Gallipoli – disastrous military campaign of the British and French troops against the Ottoman Empire in order to secure naval transit to Russia through the Black Sea during WWI. This transit could be won by controlling the straits of the Dardanelles (Gallipoli) and further of the Bosphorus (Istanbul). As the military aggression through the Dardanelles would have made possible an attack on the Ottoman capital, Istanbul, either at sea or on land, the Turkish resistance on the Gallipoli peninsula was fierce and ultimately successful. The Allied troops retreated after a war of attrition between February 1915 and January 1916 had resulted in half a million overall casualties. Winston Churchill was made personally responsible for this disaster. Gallipoli campaign video.

39. Retreat … secret – Pound may be referring to William Scurry's self-firing rifle, which had been rigged to fire by water dripped into a pan attached to the trigger. The device was used to disguise the Allied departure. (Broadbent 260).Wikipedia.

    

40. That man – Pound’s grandfather, Thaddeus Coleman Pound. Thaddeus was a prime mover in the creation of the Chippewa Falls Railroad in the state of Wisconsin, as Pound mentioned in cantos XXI: 42 and XXII: 1-3. Here, Pound recounts two other anecdotes related to the difficulties his grandfather had with his project (Marsh 175-77; Wilhelm American Roots 16-19; Thaddeus Pound 1913).

41. pornoboskos – Gr. Πορνοβοσκός, “brothel keeper.”

42. Pa Stadtvolk – Pound gives another example of American entrepreneurship. Money was to be made with the invention of gadgets, tools for everyday use.

43. Prince Oltrepassimo – pseudonym for Prince Filippo Massimiliano Massimo (1843-1915) scion of the oldest aristocratic family in Rome.

44. saccone – I. Member of an aristocratic family who was buried in sackcloth as a sign of religious commitment and penitence for sins (Ickstadt 1235).

    

45. Discobolus – A Roman marble copy of the bronze statue of the Disc-Thrower by the Greek sculptor Myron (5^th century BC) was discovered on the grounds of the Palombara villa on the Esquiline Hill in Rome in March 1781 (Anguissola 71). The villa belonged to the Massimo family, one of the oldest in Rome. The family jealously guarded it in its palace in Rome, Palazzo Lancellotti ai Coronari, whose doors were closed from 20 September 1870 to February 1929 when the Lateran Pacts were concluded.

    The Discobolus is to be admired today in the Palazzo Massimo alle Terme in Rome.

46. since ’70 – Pound refers to the so-called “capture of Rome” on 2o September 1870 when the Italian army led by General Raffaele Cardona defeated the papal troops, thus ending the temporal power of the Pope in Italy. The papal states had included Rome and Lazio, Romagna, parts of Emilia, Umbria and Marche, which were all lost. From 1870 onwards, the Pope considered himself a prisoner in the Vatican, until in 1929, by means of the Lateran Treaty negotiated by Benito Mussolini, the Vatican was established as a token state.          

    It is clear that in this conflict, Prince Filippo Massimiliano Massimo was on the side of the Pope, against the national secular forces modernizing Italy. He closed the doors of his palace in sign of protest, thus blocking public access to the treasures of Antiquity that his family possessed.

47. funny looking buk – Bayle’s dictionary has a very complex page structure, combining full-width text with two column layout, main article with extensive critical footnotes and marginalia.

48. Bayle – Pierre B Bayle, French philosopher and humanist, author of Dictionnaire historique et critique, 1697. This was a biographical dictionary and lexicon whose anti-religious agenda, usually hidden in the footnotes, was a precursor to the French encyclopaedists of the Enlightenment fifty years later, Denis Diderot and Jean d’Alembert. By mentioning the four volumes, Pound implicitly draws attention to the edition, probably the third of 1720, or the fourth of 1730. Bayle online.

49. Sic loquitur eques – L. “Thus speaks a knight.”

    The speaker could be Captain John Harvey Blunt, 9^th Baronet (1872-1938), who had a distinguished military career: Blunt fought both in the Boer War and in WWI. Pound pencilled Blunt’s name in his first typed draft of XXVIII-XXX, connecting it with “Mtrejeau” and “Massimo.” 72/3227 p.16r. Geni.com

50. official pet – Charles A. Lindbergh (1902-1974), the first American pilot to make a successful nonstop flight across the Atlantic between New York and Paris on his plane The Spirit of St. Louis 20-21 May 1927. This feat made Lindbergh both a celebrity and the quintessential American hero, as Kenneth S. Davis commented:

    

    “Then there flashed before the jaundiced public eye, unheralded, this slim, clean-cut, single-minded youth who seemed to stand for everything in which the Jazz Age had lost faith. In an era of synthetic public personalities, he was clearly authentic. In an era of greed, he spurned commercialism. In an era of sensationalism, he neither drank nor smoked. In an age of the mass man, he was solitary. And far from being crushed by the Machine, he used the machine as a means of self-expression. In his flight, and even more in his fame, he proved that personal dignity were yet possible in the world. Americans, by identifying with him, could again regain some of their self-respect” (Davis 243-44, quoted by Baumann 240).

51. Levine – Two weeks after Lindbergh, Charles A. Levine, an American millionaire, crossed the Atlantic between 4 and 6 June 1927 on the Miss Columbia, a plane piloted by Clarence Duncan Chamberlin. His aim was initially to compete with Lindbergh for the Orteig prize applied to the New York-Paris route, but because he dismissed his navigator two weeks before take-off, his plane was grounded. Then Levine decided to beat Lindbergh’s long distance record by flying from New York to Berlin.      
    It is rather difficult to gauge exactly what Pound knew of Levine’s mishaps in his flight adventure. There were several: the loss of his navigator and of the prize; the fire that broke out in the hangar next to the plane; or Levine’s impromptu decision to fly as a passenger ten minutes before take-off. At the very least, Pound must have concluded that Levine had a “lucky button” because his plane ran out of gas, but landed safely at Eisleben ca. 200 km away from Berlin (NY Times. See also Baumann 237; lindbergh.com).

52. a bathing beauty – reference to Ruth Elder and her unsuccessful attempt to fly across the Atlantic from New York to Paris on 11 October 1927. Her flight as a passenger on the monoplane The American Girl ended when her pilot, George Haldeman, was forced down by technical difficulties 360 miles west of the Azores. Haldeman landed the plane on water and the two were rescued by a tanker which was fortunately nearby. Haldeman, who had actually flown the plane, won no recognition, whereas Ruth garnered all the celebrity. (See NY Times; Baumann 237-40).

53. code of Peoria – Peoria is a town in Illinois. The “code of Peoria” was Pound’s shorthand designation for the values of the American Midwest, for which Lindbergh was the prime example, as he had plainly shown by calling his plane Spirit of St. Louis (C n. 64). Pound had clashed with the values of American provincialism while teaching in Crawfordsville, Indiana in 1907 and abhorred them for a lifetime (Baumann 241; see also n. 48).

    

54. One-eyed Hinchcliffe – Walter Raymond Hinchcliffe (1894-1928), distinguished British pilot. Though he had lost an eye in WWI, Hinchcliffe piloted several long-distance flights, including a transatlantic one on Levine’s Miss Columbia in September 1927. He thus could be persuaded to cross the Atlantic with an airplane bought by Elsie MacKay in America. The plane, called Endeavour, was to make a non-stop British transatlantic flight with Elsie as the first ever female co-pilot. Unlike the American ventures, which were done for the sake of money and celebrity, the projected crossing was to be kept secret.

    The flight was an unhappy one: after taking off on 13 March 1928, the Endeavourdisappeared into the night without reaching its destination.

55. Elsie – Elsie MacKay (1894-1928), English actress, interior decorator and sportswoman. Her father was Viscount of Inchcape James Lyle MacKay (1853-1932), chairman of the Peninsular and Oriental, and British India Steam Navigation Companies and owner of two banks. Unlike Ruth Elder, Elsie trained as a pilot and gained flight experience for five years before attempting to be the first woman to fly across the Atlantic. The first woman to succeed was the American pilot Amelia Earhart, who flew from Newfoundland to Southampton on 19 June 1928, three months after Elsie’s attempt.

56. married dear Dennis – Elsie Mackay met actor Dennis Wyndham in 1917 when he was a wounded soldier of WWI and she was a nurse. They eloped to Scotland and married. For five years, her stage name was Poppy Wyndham. However, the marriage strongly displeased her father who had it annulled in 1922 on a bureaucratic detail. Elsie’s transatlantic flight looked like a second elopement: by extreme compression, Pound presents it as her renewed attempt to defy her father.

57. annulment – After eloping together to Scotland, Elsie MacKay and Dennis Wyndham probably married in haste, before fulfilling the residence requirement. The cause for the annulment, granted by a court in Edinburgh was thus “False declaration as to residence” and made headlines in the Times, 2 February 1922. (Baumann 242).

    It was after the annulment that Elsie took up flying as a new life project, gaining her pilot licence in 1923.