“The most disliked periodical in England1” : Ezra Pound in Ronald Duncan’s Townsman
p. 221-232
Texte intégral
1Ezra Pound’s interaction with Ronald Duncan’s Townsman serves as a case study of both the helpful and negative effects of Pound’s influence in the late 1930s. The direction of this most influential poet would shape this distinctive journal in two important ways : firstly, Pound put his contacts and experience fully at Duncan’s disposal, as he had for Blast and the Vorticists, for the Imagists, the Objectivists and the many other groups and artists he had championed in the teens, 1920s, and early 1930s. Secondly, he also simultaneously introduced ideas and tendencies that were specific to this middle-period Pound and that would, eventually, compromise Duncan’s publication. Pound’s involvement with Townsman and its eccentric British coterie is initially reminiscent of those early projects, securing a handful of worthwhile and unconventional contributions from an international range of writers, but it also predicted his interactions with the ne’er-do-wells that would congregate around him in St Elizabeths. A.T. Tolley identifies Townsman’s central concerns as derived directly from Pound’s “Confucian conception of the relation of purity of language to rightness of action2,” and Townsman’s pre-eminent voice was Pound’s, who appears in every regular number through to August 1941, and whose presence is felt indirectly through Duncan’s stridently Poundian editorials, the contributions of various British satellite Poundians such as J. P. Angold, Henry Swabey and John Drummond, and through the poet’s editorial assistance. It was of course Pound that secured E. E. Cummings for the first number of Townsman, and Pound that put Duncan in contact with C. H. Douglas for its last ; he was responsible for most of the journal’s worthwhile content as well as the prevalence of politically unpleasant material. Townsman occupies a mid-point in a series of Poundian journals, and features some typically helpful and productive Poundian incitements reminiscent of his work for Blast, The Egoist and the other early modernist journals he briefly supported. It follows the failure of Exile and predicts the intemperance that would tincture late Poundian interests such as Noel Stock’s Australian Edge and John Kasper and David Horton’s Square Dollar series of publications.
2When, in December 1936, Duncan first wrote to Pound about Townsman he stated that “Leavis, Middleton-Murray, Auden & Britten have promised to write for first number3”. None would. Instead, Pound introduced Duncan to a range of first- and second-generation modernist writers, visual artists and composers that would make the journal, for a brief period, the most excitingly inter-disciplinary British magazine since Blast. Pound insisted on the need for a core of writers for Townsman ; a vortex : a “successful (intellectually) review is MADE by a small compact group of writers/Should be at least FOUR4”. The members of this vortex would be familiar, and Pound also offered extensive suggestions as to who should write and who should be written about in Townsman. A letter of the 10th of March 1937 from Pound alludes to projected numbers of Townsman dedicated to Wyndham Lewis and Cummings, rather surprisingly, paired with Walter Savage Landor and George Crabbe respectively. Pound put Duncan onto James Laughlin as “American edtr. or correspondent or whatever5,” but warned him off accepting Laughlin’s New Directions writers wholesale, and put Hilaire Hiler his way. Pound wrote to Hiler of Townsman as the “[f] irst real mag since Little Review (if you except transition and Exile, which were each partial in one way or other). At any rate kid [Duncan] has got sense and is quick, not Brit. suet6”. In 1937 Pound invited Duncan to Rapallo “for talk, that wd. clear up more than two dozen letters7”. Duncan’s account of this meeting, in his autobiography All Men Are Islands (1964), presents a view of a Pound bustling with enthusiasm and generosity, pointing Duncan in more directions than he could pursue and sending him off holding “notes of introduction to Brancusi, Cocteau, Stravinsky, Léger, Max Jacob, Hilary Hiller [Hilaire Hiler], and […] William Joyce8. and the promise to ‘twist a few tails9‘‘ for the benefit of Townsman. Hiler was to be the subject of the first annual art number of Townsman, with Fernand Léger and Ernst-Dali-Arp-Miro numbers planned, but not finally appearing, though a Brancusi reproduction would find its way into a late Townsman, as well as drawings by Henri Gaudier-Brzeska10.
3Pound also introduced Duncan to Basil Bunting and Louis Zukofsky, pushing their work enthusiastically, though Duncan would print neither. Duncan, while apparently keen, was unable to track the itinerant Bunting down and rejected a series of submissions from Zukofsky. In contrast to Pound, Zukofsky offered Townsman works which were central to his œuvre, including the first half of “A”-9 along with an explanation of the mathematics used in its construction. Zukofsky also submitted “Che di lor suona su nella tua vita,“ “To Ben Jonson on Music,” “Further Than” (these poems would appear as sections of Anew [1946]) and “A”-8, all of which were rejected. Openly hostile regarding Zukofsky in letters to Pound, Duncan also allowed a vituperative attack on Zukofsky to appear in Townsman. Richard March (the future backer and editor of Poetry London) wrote, in a review of James Laughlin’s New Directions (1938) :
It was not re-assuring […] to find over fifty pages (I had to count them myself, for the editor evidently despises pagination) devoted to an epic of Mr. Louis Zukofsky. Now Mr. Zukofsky, it seems, has been busily reading the Cantos with what must have been quite abnormal incomprehension, and drools on about the injustices of society, Karl Marx, strikes, economics, May Day processions and, of course, that wonderful myth specially invented for the jaded intellectual of the adolescent poet, the divinity of the Workers. I am sure Mr. Zukofsky’s heart is in the right place, but his verse is as dead as mutton11.
4March sneers at Zukofsky’s “carefully cerebrated” verse and goes on to suggest that he might be “far more usefully employed as [a] pamphleteer12”. The scorn heaped upon Zukofsky’s work seems politically motivated (criticisms of W H. Auden in the magazine would follow a similar pattern), and the glee with which March emphasises Zukofsky’s interest in Marx is redolent of an underlying anti-Semitism that becomes increasingly apparent in Townsman.
5In July 1937 Pound wrote to John Drummond to ascertain Duncan’s financial position, expressing indifference as to the ideological identity of the magazine, and suggesting that he saw Townsman primarily as a place for publishing those things that he wished to see in print but could not get published elsewhere : “the Tnsmn will contain particularly notable E/P/that cant be moved thru ordinary commerce13”. Drummond’s detective work turned up the following information :
Afraid I didn’t gather much about the financial position of Duncan. He was living in not exactly a garret, but in one room at the top of a respectable block of flats in Notting Hill. An American ( ?) youth with him whose name I forget. Two shabby suit cases, one with a recent label of a Calcutta hotel […]14.
6Providing Duncan with sundry other items of interest, like the Japanese Vou poets, one of Townsman’s high points, was a pragmatic move designed to maximise the distribution of his own productions and extend the longevity of the magazine.
7The first number of Townsman was finalised towards the end of 1937 and published in January 1938. In addition to Pound’s work in developing Duncan’s vortex, Pound’s influence can also be read in Duncan’s editorial rhetoric (which ended with this statement of intent : “OUR FUNCTION is to present valid work. Creative work is criticism15”), and the Poundian style can be discerned throughout the first number of Townsman, both in its critical positions and in its editorial choices. Duncan’s rather Poundian introductory editorial, which serves as a kind of manifesto for Townsman, is followed by a series of three poems by Cummings, the second of which matches Townsman’s attack on the British critical establishment with a satire on the corresponding American version. Pound’s first contribution to Townsman was, “M. Pom-Pom,” a minor poem which Pound felt should be printed in the first issue of Townsman “as giving the NOTE16,” which is overwhelmingly anti-war ; a kind of satirical, militant pacifism :
(Caf’ Conc Song
The Fifth, or Permanent International)
M. Pom-POM allait en guerre
Per vendere cannoni
Mon beau grand frere
Ne peut plus voir
Per vendere cannoni.
M. Pom-POM est au senat
Per vendere cannoni
Pour vendre des canons
Pour vendre des canons
To sell the god damn’d frogs
A few more cannon17.
8Pound’s major contribution to the first Townsman (and the entire run) follows several pages later : a grouping of three items that together form a collaborative critical essay on Clement Janequin’s “Chant des oiseaux” that would eventually become an enigmatic section of The Pisan Cantos (1948) when remodelled as the 75th canto. An article by Pound that links Janequin to Cavalcanti precedes a printing of the violin part of Gerhart Munch’s setting of this piece, while an article by Olga Rudge, Pound’s mistress and the violinist for whom Munch wrote his setting, follows. Entitled ‘‘Music and a Process’’ it investigates the various options open to those wishing to mechanically reproduce musical scores–a matter that was of concern to Pound throughout the period of his most intense collaboration with Duncan. The selection becomes an ideogram on poetry, music and mimesis : the sound of birds, with an admixture of Cavalcanti, is manifested in the music of Janequin, which, as Pound explains in his introduction, was then preserved in a lute setting by Francesco di Milano which was finally recast as Munch’s setting for violin and piano. Rudge then performs and Pound promulgates the work, which Duncan publishes to the present while the nascent technology of microphotography transmits to the future. This arrangement is wholly Pound’s, though Duncan should be credited for having the foresight to offer up the space required for such a singular intervention.
9Duncan summarised the final figures for the first Townsman : “Cost of producing No 1 = £59 Copies sold 35. (many more still out on sale or return) Loss on No 1 £5318”. The first number had optimistically included the circulation figures of the Daily Telegraph, the Evening News, the Sunday Dispatch, the Daily Mail and the Daily Express on its inside back cover, with a question mark for the still undecided circulation of Townsman. Thirty-five does not compare overly well with the 2,410,844 readers the Daily Express is listed as attracting in 1937, though Pound was impressed nonetheless, rating it “good enough to sell when it has become a rarity, and impurities are not there to rot it. I guess yew boyes have pulled one19”. Pound was particularly pleased with Townsman’s appearance, and William Johnstone’s cover, which “looks active/at any rate USEFUL20”. At this time Pound suggested to Montgomery Butchart, Townsman’s associate editor, that “[a]t present rate, TNS/deserves a Canto21,” though no cantos would ever appear in Townsman, and of Pound’s prose only four brief squibs (amounting to about a page and half of text) would find their way from Townsman into William Cookson’s edition of Pound’s Selected Prose22. Instead, he pushed Bunting and Angold’s poetry for the second number23, as well as more Cummings for consistency and discussions of Lewis, censored material and further investigation of the techniques of microphotography.
10This issue marked a radicalisation of Duncan’s project–with Duncan insisting on the importance of a satirical, destructive intent familiar from Blast, a magazine that Duncan referred to as “a purge, the effects still being felt. Blast produced Art, helped Art. […] Blast was an orgasm : to-day conspicuous by lack of24”. In March 1938 he revealed some similarities in the magazine’s reception : “In days of ‘Blast,’ there was no red or black monopoly. Townsman is the most disliked periodical in England25”. As with Blast, the unpopularity of Townsman was, at least in part, a conscious strategy, and was for that reason relished and encouraged by Pound, who went so far as to tell Duncan that ‘‘more people got to know that they HATE Townsman26‘‘. Duncan’s position was not comfortable, however, and the isolating effects of his unconventional political opinions can be read in the fear of persecution expressed throughout his correspondence with Pound. Townsman was neither obviously left nor right wing at this stage : for Blast, much as that magazine was disapproved of, such a position was tenable because of the less polarised political milieu at the outset of the Great War. By the late 1930s, with Europe poised at the brink of another, even greater, conflagration, it was not so easy to raise a publication above the political maelstrom. Pound, for one, continued to try and push Duncan towards the right, though he offered, on occasion, ambiguous praise of Duncan’s lack of fixed political affiliation : ‘‘Townsman not anti=semite or political27,’’ a fact that apparently should have allowed Duncan greater access to London’s purportedly Jewish booksellers.
11The second number of Townsman, dated April 1938, contained the Hiler work and less sundry Poundiana, though a reproduction of Pound’s score of “Heaulmiere” from his opera on Francois Villon Le Testament (1923-1933) was included, continuing the musical theme from the January number. The way in which Pound was thinking about music at this time–effectively as a vehicle for the dissemination of literary and political information–accords closely with Duncan’s conception of art as a whole, and with the way he imagined the literature of Townsman as a mouthpiece for political analysis. Pound’s statement in Townsman that “music is […] a comment on, or an elucidation of, the form of the words and possibly of their meaning, or, if you like, of the emotive contents28” expresses very much the sentiment Duncan strove for in his manifesto editorial in the first Townsman when he wrote that “Creative work is criticism29”. Such ideas appear so regularly in Townsman that they begin to approximate an ethos for the magazine ; in “Some Personal Affirmations Regarding Painting,” Hiler expresses a view of the plastic arts that agrees with Pound and Duncan’s material approach to music and literature, while Raymond Spottiswoode contributes an article that detects a similar process in the cinema. As we see in those Pound-sponsored articles on microphotography by Rudge, Pound’s most substantial contribution to the aesthetics of Townsman is to be found in this concentration upon the material means of artistic production, a strain of thought that feeds directly to the way Duncan understands language and reference : in a late Townsman Duncan would rail against those that sort to split reason from conscience,’’ theory from practice, dogma from doing, religion from politics, spirit from sense and, most importantly, words from things30. Close to the end of Townsman Duncan would explicitly link this formulation with his agrarianism : ‘‘The reality behind words is things. The reality behind things is soil31‘‘. The cohesiveness of Townsman’s program around this subject is remarkable, even in its later, rusticated incarnation, and it is unlikely that Duncan would have been able to achieve it without so strong a character as Pound at its centre ; the poet’s thought the model for the “unified consciousness” Duncan postulated at his organ’s outset32, proving Tolley’s contention of the centrality of a ‘‘Confucian conception of the relation of purity of language to rightness of action33‘‘ in Townsman.
12October 1938’s fourth number was the last truly Poundian edition of Townsman. Pound’s series on music came to an end, Rudge contributed another ‘‘Music Chronicle,’’ three poems by Mary Barnard appeared at Pound’s recommendation and a black-bordered notice was inserted to mark the death of Leo Frobenius, one of Pound’s culture-heroes in The Cantos34. Duncan contributed his ‘‘Rexist Party Manifesto’’ : a Swiftian satirical broadside with a distinctly Poundian economic thesis. Perhaps through dissatisfaction regarding the magazine, or because of the developing crisis in world affairs, no future numbers would feature Pound’s voice or the work of notable associates of his so prominently, an ominous development for Duncan. Through the early numbers Pound’s intemperate ideology was held in check by the presence of other vigorous talents, but as Pound began to cut off his supply of talent from 1939 the positive influence he brought to Duncan’s magazine was largely removed, leaving a residue of intolerance and Poundian rhetoric, along with an accelerating impetus towards the right. Though Pound was no longer helping Duncan to access high-grade material, Duncan was still a Poundian and would imitate Pound ever more slavishly as the poet began to distance himself from the magazine.
13The fifth number included a pair of minor squibs by Pound, the first was ‘‘Abu Salammamm-A Song of Empire’’ reprinted from the August 1914 edition of Poetry and the second, “Slice of Life (Fable),” a nasty dramatisation of a discussion with a nameless Jew on economic matters :
I sat with the jew in Paradise. It is written
if you eat this fruit. This fruit is NESCHEK.
Under the still air the hills lay calm as the sea
without wind. Thou shalt not take usury of thy neighbour.
If ye eat of this fruit ye shall die.
But he turned the talk and said, “Men are violent,
These conquests are conquests of a few,
The great plutocracies have not been violent.”
In his calm terazza the air was soft as peach-down.
If ye eat of this fruit ye shall die.
And this jew had written fine books, he is a jew of unusual
talent, but he would not think of neschek
nor would he consider the end.
“Is there,” said Mencius, “any difference between
killing a man with a sword and killing him with a system of government35 ?”
14The “jew of unusual talent” is likely to be Leone Vivante, a Jewish philosopher mentioned in canto 5236. The inclusion of this poem is a sign of the lack of quality material that Pound was offering, but it also implicates Duncan and Townsman in Pound’s prejudices more than anything that had appeared in Townsman up to this point. The few things that Pound would contribute after this tended towards the unblushingly racist : in November 1939 Pound’s offerings are “Religio37” and “Ecclesia,” the second an ill-tempered attack on the “semitic” influence in the Christian church in which Pound claims that “When the church was real it was anti-semite38”. As supply slowed, however, the magazine did not draw back from such excesses. In fact, as Pound removed himself more completely from the magazine Duncan’s rhetoric would seek to outstrip Pound’s both in terms of insensitivity and offensiveness.
15Duncan found various ways to assert his commitment to Pound’s cause. In “News Poem,” a piece by Duncan but credited to “Jesse Howard,” Duncan marked his willingness to do the master’s duty in bald, sexualised terms, telling Pound : “You hold the set square./I’ll grease the saw39”. Such comments imply a loss of the restraint that kept the more unpleasant elements of Pound’s circle out ; along with “A Slice of Life” the fifth Townsman finds Drummond berating the pacifists for their fear “of Hitler’s being supposed to be naughty to Jews40,” as well as articles by such inconsequential Poundian acolytes as the Reverend Henry Swabey, who would become a Townsman stalwart through the period of the magazine’s decline.
16Through the war years Townsman largely abandoned the arts and became more interested in the propagation of a hardening set of, rather unusual, hierarchical beliefs that crossed Duncan’s agriculturalism and Eliotic agnostic-Anglicanism with a dose of Poundian paranoia and economic concerns, and a dash of anti-Semitism. Starting with the June 1940 number’s editorial, distinctly anti-Semitic overtones begin to appear in Duncan’s prose, along with a hysterically reiterated analysis of the war that is clearly derivative of Pound’s public writings (predicting his wartime broadcasts) and is nuanced only by Duncan’s interest in agriculture. The pieces accepted in these wartime issues also betray Duncan’s intensely Poundian vision : the poetry is second-rate and either pastoral or political or economic satire (exactly the kind of verse Pound was interested in by this point in his career), while Swabey and Duncan’s various pseudonyms continue to attack the allies and their “backers”. Pound contributes little of value through these war numbers, in the June 1940 number defending the fascist agricultural collectivisation policy of “ammassi,” still hoping that the Italians might be persuaded to his idiosyncratic vision of finance, and the only Pound in the next number, November 1940, was another brief gloss on ammassi, “taken from a letter to the editor41”. Duncan printed Pound’s slogan “Free speech without freedom of radio is a mere goldfish in a bowl42” in this issue, a prophetic statement for Pound in mid-1940, before America had fully entered the war and before his eventual treason charge would have been possible. A laudatory review of Cantos LII-LXXI (1940) also appears by one K. Noel Weston, a frequent contributor to the wartime Townsman and possibly a pseudonym for Duncan, while Henry Swabey’s review of Willis A. Overholser’s The History of Money in the United States referenced The Cantos as an authority in such matters. Though Pound’s voice had disappeared his influence was still substantial.
17Pound and Duncan corresponded with less frequency through the early war years and Duncan embarked on an epiphanic conversion to agrarianism, suggesting in 1940 that he cannot “see why Townsman shouldnt attempt a CONSTITUTION for Agriculture based on ‘Share of Fruits’ and to Own equals to Use43”. In 1940 he sent a draft constitution, “Charter : Agriculture,” to Pound, to which the poet responded at length. Throughout 1940 Pound explained his agricultural economics to Duncan in a series of letters which reveal the agricultural basis of his fascism and advocate a reversion to a rural economy that would have very much appealed to Duncan. Pound, tellingly, appreciates the development in Duncan’s thinking, writing “I cd/pretty well swop my motto […] for <your> No taxes before the harvest44”. Pound’s “motto,” at the head of his letter paper at this time, was taken from Mussolini : “Liberty is not a right but a duty”. Duncan’s agrarianism illuminates the foundational agricultural element in Pound’s fascism, and the fact that these ideas exist in such proximity suggests how far Duncan had travelled toward the political right. In November 1940 Duncan calls for “DIRECT REPRESENTATION IN GOVERNMENT FARMERS TO BE REPRESENTED BY FARMERS45” : a kind of political representation that sounds suspiciously like Italian corporatism.
18As the war continued Townsman appeared sporadically, its presentation and content poor, the contributions dominated by Poundian thinking associates of Duncan and his various pseudonyms, the magazine stridently focused on the idée fixe of agrarianism. Pound’s last, underwhelming, contribution appeared in March 1941, after which Townsman declined rapidly, becoming simultaneously more focused on the practicalities of husbandry and more hostile to the Jews. The last Townsman, dated Spring 1944, contained no poetry and no significant creative work, and was for the most part made up of “Agricultural Bulletins” “Issued by the U.S.A., Soviet, Brazilian and Chinese embassies46”. Economic analysis by C. H. Douglas, the father of social credit, followed. The next issue would appear as The Scythe, dealt almost solely with agricultural issues and, after a final year of publication, was purchased by Land and Home Publications, publishers of Country Living, to limp on for a final four numbers. No Pound, nor any significant literature, music or visual art would appear in The Scythe : Duncan’s middling offerings marked the artistic heights of the new journal.
19After the war Pound wrote from St Elizabeths expressing his “regret [at the] demise [of] Townsman47”. Duncan replied that he :
didn’t stop the Townsman because M.I.5. were proof-reading it when they found you were one of the contributors. Nor did I get discouraged when they shoved me in clink. As a matter of fact it went on for 26 Nos the last being 1944. Rose Marie and Bunny were printing it on their Gestetner machine and it had just got a subscription list which paid for its production. I packed it up when I found that I was writing 9 pages out of ten. There’s no point in creating a vehicle if you are the only person to take a ride : or laying a telephone line and speaking at both ends.
20You can’t run a quarterly without 4 active contributors who meet regularly48.
21The need of an active group of contributors echoes Pound’s earliest advice to Duncan : a dearth of those strong personalities that had made the early issues such a success would eventually lead to Townsman’s undoing, for without the pool of talent Pound accessed for Duncan his influence became destructive. Pound’s vituperative ideology was accepted unquestioningly in the late numbers, while Duncan’s developing agrarianism was coloured and exaggerated by Pound’s economic and Confucian interests, and incubated in their epistolary exchange. The kind of monological thinking that came close to poisoning The Cantos irretrievably compromised Townsman.
Notes de bas de page
1 Duncan in an unpublished letter dated 28th March 38, held at the Yale collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. YCAL MSS43, Box 14, Folder 632.
2 A. T. Tolley, British Literary Periodicals of World War II & Aftermath, Kemptville, Golden Dog Press, 2007, 98.
3 From an unpublished letter dated 30th December 1936, held at the Yale collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. YCAL MSS43, Box 14, Folder 628.
4 From an unpublished letter dated 27 Jan 1937, held at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas at Austin, The Pound Archive, Box 6, Folder 4.
5 The Selected Letters of Ezra Pound, D. D. Paige (ed.), London, Faber & Faber, 1971, 290. I have retained Pound’s idiosyncratic abbreviations, syntax and spelling throughout.
6 The Selected Letters of Ezra Pound, op. cit., 291.
7 From an unpublished postcard postmarked 19 Feb. 1937, held at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas at Austin. The Pound Archive, Box 6, Folder 4.
8 Ronald Frederick Henry Duncan, All Men Are Islands, London, Hart-Davis, 1964, 160.
9 Idem.
10 The Brancusi reproduction would appear in Townsman, III, 12, November 1940, while Gaudier’s work appears in II, 6, April 1939 and III, 11, June 1940.
11 Townsman, II, 6, April 1939, 18.
12 Ibid., 19.
13 From an unpublished letter dated 11 Dec XVI (1937), held at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas at Austin. The Ezra Pound archive, Box 6, Folder 4. The fascist calendar begins on the 28th of October 1922, thus letters written after the 28th of October 1937 appear as XVI, and should not be confused with letters between the 1st of January and the 27th of October 1938, which will also be dated XVI.
14 From an unpublished postcard dated 20 Jul. 1937, held at the Yale collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. YCAL MSS43, Box 13, Folder 616.
15 Townsman, I, 1, January 1938, 1.
16 From an unpublished letter dated 18 Lug 1937 held at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas at Austin, The Ezra Pound archive, Box 6, Folder 4.
17 Townsman, I, 1, January 1938, 3.
18 From an unpublished, undated letter, held at the Yale collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. YCAL MSS43, Box 14, Folder 633.
19 The Selected Letters of Ezra Pound, op. cit., 302.
20 From an unpublished letter dated 11 Dec. XVI (1937) held at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas at Austin. The Ezra Pound archive, Box 6, Folder 4.
21 From an unpublished letter dated 13 Dec. XVI (1937), held at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas at Austin. The Pound Archive, Box 5, Folder 10.
22 “Religio,” “Statues of Gods” and “Deus est Amor” appear as independent items [70-72] while the statement “Free speech without freedom of radio is a mere goldfish in a bowl” from the June 1940 number of Townsman (a complete contribution) is appended to the longer essay “Freedom de Facto” [273], which would be published in Agenda in 1971.
23 Angold would not appear in Townsman at this stage, though Duncan would eventually edit his Collected Poems in 1952 in a small edition for Peter Russell.
24 Townsman, I, 1, January 1938, 27.
25 From an unpublished letter dated 28th March 38, held at the Yale collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. YCAL MSS43, Box 14, Folder 632.
26 From an unpublished letter dated 25 March XVI (1938) held at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas at Austin. The Ezra Pound archive, Box 6, Folder 4.
27 From an unpublished letter dated, rather improbably, 39 Marzo XVI (1938) held at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas at Austin. The Ezra Pound archive, Box 6, Folder 4.
28 Townsman, I, 2, April 1938, 17.
29 Townsman, I, 1, January 1938, 1.
30 Townsman, III, 11, June 1940, n. p.
31 Townsman, IV, 16, May 1942, 1. [I follow Duncan’s inconsistent modulation between Roman and Arabic numerals in the numbering of Townsman.]
32 Townsman, I, 1, January 1938, 1.
33 A. T. Tolley, British Literary Periodicals of World War II & Aftermath, op. cit., 98.
34 Townsman, I, 4, October 1938, 2.
35 Townsman, II, 5, January 1939, 5.
36 “And Vivante was there in his paradise, the mild air/the fields rolling eastward, and tower half ruin’d/with a peasant complaining that her son was taken for war/and he said ‘plutocracies were less violent’’’. Ezra Pound, The Cantos, New York, New Directions, 1998, 257.
37 Townsman, II, 8, November 1939, 4.
38 Idem.
39 Townsman, II, 5, January 1939, 16.
40 Ibid., 18.
41 Townsman, III, 12, November 1940, 26.
42 Townsman, III, 11, June 1940, n.p.
43 From an unpublished letter dated April 4th 1940, held at the Yale collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. YCAL MSS43, Box 14, Folder 636.
44 From an unpublished letter dated 14 Mrach [sic] XVIII (1940) held at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas at Austin, The Ezra Pound archive, Box 6, Folder 4.
45 Townsman, III, 12, November 1940, 3.
46 Townsman 20 (Spring 1944) front cover. This number of Townsman and all numbers of The Scythe were printed without a volume number.
47 From an unpublished, undated letter held at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas at Austin. The Ezra Pound archive, Box 6, Folder 5.
48 From an unpublished letter dated 29th June 1953, held at the Yale collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, YCAL MSS43, Box 14, Folder 638.
Auteur
Le texte seul est utilisable sous licence Licence OpenEdition Books. Les autres éléments (illustrations, fichiers annexes importés) sont « Tous droits réservés », sauf mention contraire.
Comparer l’étranger
Enjeux du comparatisme en littérature
Émilienne Baneth-Nouailhetas et Claire Joubert (dir.)
2007
Lignes et lignages dans la littérature arthurienne
Christine Ferlampin-Acher et Denis Hüe (dir.)
2007
