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Pound / Cummings: The Correspondence of Ezra Pound and E. E. Cummings

Ed. Barry Ahearn. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1996.


Pound Cummings cover

Sometime in 1914, S. Foster Damon loaned a copy of Ezra Pound's anthology Des Imagistes to Cummings (Kennedy, Dreams 78-79). Around this time, too, Cummings acquired a copy of Pound's Ripostes (1912, 1913). Both of these volumes contain "The Return," a poem that immediately impressed the younger poet. Even as late as the mid-1950s, Cummings still viewed his early encounter with "The Return" as a breakthrough moment, writing in his notes that the poem "made me(for better or worse)the writer I am today." He was impressed by the poem's modern treatment of a classical subject, but he noted further that the "inaudible poem--the visual poem,the poem for not ears but Eye--moved me more" (qtd. in Kennedy 106).

Cummings first met Pound in July of 1921. Two years later, Cummings wrote to his mother: "I have for some years been an admirer of Pound's poetry:personally,he sometimes gives me a FatherComplex" (Selected Letters 104). In that same year, Scofield Thayer, no great fan of Pound's poetry, reported in a letter that "Cummings . . . considers Pound mad— 'getting more Idaho day by day'" (qtd. in Sutton 264). As Pound grew more fanatical, Cummings always tried to separate the failings of the man from the virtues of the poet. In 1957 Cummings wrote to Charles Norman that "not EEC but EP is the authentic 'innovator';the true trailblazer of an epoch . . . --nor shall I ever forget the thrill I experienced on first reading "The Return'" (Selected Letters 241). After meeting the raving Pound on his visit to the U.S. in 1939, Cummings wrote in his notebooks that there seemed to be two Pounds: the poet "whom M[arion] and I met in Paris;to whom Scofield Thayer years before that,introduced me—VS an incoherent bore . . . from whom,after many efforts to make him human,M & I ran away(leaving NY)" (quoted in Sawyer-Lauçanno 464). Cummings' later letters to Pound are often slyly subversive attempts to make Pound human. (See Webster 53-66.)

Further Reading:

  • Dupee, F. W. and George Stade, eds. Selected Letters of E. E. Cummings. New York: HBJ, 1969.
  • Rosenblitt, J. Alison. E. E. Cummings' Modernism and the Classics: Each Imperishable Stanza. Oxford / New York: Oxford UP, 2016.
  • ---. "Pretentious Scansion, Fascist Aesthetics, and a Father-complex for Joyce: E. E. Cummings on Sapphics and Ezra Pound." Cambridge Classical Journal 59 (December 2013): 178-198.
  • Webster, Michael. "Pound Teaching Cummings, Cummings Teaching Pound." Ezra Pound and Education. Eds. Steven Yao and Michael Coyle. Orono, ME: National Poetry Foundation, 2012. 47-66.

Links:

Notes: Below are a few additions and corrections to Barry Ahearn's almost uniformly excellent notes.

(22-24) Aragons bolcheviko poEM / Aragon's Red Front --Cummings translated this poem as a favor to Louis Aragon for helping him with a visa and introductions for his trip to the Soviet Union, chronicled in EIMI (1933). Charles Norman quotes Cummings as saying that the translation was undertaken "as a friendly gesture of farewell" (256). In EIMI, Cummings comments upon the poem while translating it (145-46 / 142-3). Aragon's poem and Cummings' translation appear on facing pages in the Complete Poems (880-897).

(24 / 25) Jacobean brow / S. A. Jacobs = Samuel Aiwaz Jacobs (1890–1971), Cummings' personal typesetter. For more on Jacobs and Cummings, see the headnote to ViVa, Walker Rumble's short piece "Reclaiming S. A. Jacobs: Polytype, Golden Eagle, and Typographic Modernism" as well as Rumble's recent article from Spring "The Persian Typesetter: S. A. Jacobs, E. E. Cummings, and the Golden Eagle Press." See also Michael Webster's "An Old Door, Cummings' Personal Printer, and W [ViVa]" at the EEC Society Blog.

(42) "Thumbs Up" = A musical revue in two acts, with music by James Hanley and Henry Sullivan, book by Harold Atteridge, Alan Baxter, and H. I. Phillips and lyrics by Earle Crooker and Ballard MacDonald, with additional music by Vernon Duke, Gerald Marks and Steve Child and additional lyrics by Vernon Duke, Ira Gershwin, Karl Stark, Jean Herbert, James Hanley, John Murray Anderson, and Irving Caesar (IBDB). Brooks Atkinson's New York Times review of the show notes that "the entire production [was] directed and devised by John Murrary Anderson." Atkinson's review begins: "In honor of the end of the year and the depression, Eddie Dowling [the producer] has recently been assembling one of those handsome revue circuses, Thumbs Up! which was put on at the St. James last evening. It is so good-looking and it is played with such spirit that you are surprised to discover that it does not live up to the promise of the names in the program." Atkinson mentions no anti-Semitic or "anticommunist skit," noting only the matierial's "lack of taste," "sketches of no great brilliance," and "humorless production numbers" (24). Among the tunes in the show were "Zing, Went the Strings of My Heart" and "Autumn in New York."

(42) Paul Draper = dancer who is the subject of Cummings' poem "floatfloafloflf" (CP 431). Brooks Atkinson said of his perfomance in Thumbs Up: "Paul Draper transmutes tap-dancing into elaborate patterns of story-telling and imagery" (24). In the 1920s, Cummings had a brief affair with his mother Muriel Draper (Kennedy, Dreams 273). Cummings' book EIMI caused many of his leftist friends to break with him, including Muriel Draper (Kennedy, Dreams 360-361). Ruth Draper (1884-1956) was a brilliant monologuist and pioneer of the one-woman show.

(42) hay shatch should read "hay shatoh" [i.e., "he has a chateau"]. And unless Cummings is making some sort of dental pun, for Cariolanus read "Coriolanus." [Cf. Dupee and Stade, Selected Letters 133.]

(47) For conceive a man,should have have anything read "conceive a man,should he have anything."

(59) The quote comes from a footnote in Flammarion's text (529).

(65) damn it all, 56 worth more than the prix nobel —Pound refers to poem #56 in No Thanks, "this mind made war" (CP 440-41). Pound assumes that he is the subject of the poem extolling "this self with life / this poet." Cummings does not contradict him.

(69) Doomer Fees = "Doom et fils" or "Doom and son."

Here are some additional notes to the poems and prose passages mentioned by Cummings from Pound's Active Anthology:
179-181 = A passage from the "June 8" chapter of EIMI beginning "O have you seen a prophylactic station?" (EIMI 366-368 / 351-353). (While Cummings is waiting for his ship to leave Odessa, an enthusiastic American woman gushes about the Soviet Union's efforts to reform (On pages 173-178, the Active Anthology also reprints a passage from the "June 4" chapter EIMI beginning "soon rain" (EIMI 314-317 / 304-307). (The passage narrates Cummings' visit to his Russian teacher's mother.) The Active Anthology also reprints Cummings' translation of Louis Aragon's "The Red Front" (157-169). (Pound gives his reasons for wanting to publish the translation on pages 22-24. See also Ahearn's note on page 23.)

45 = William Carlos Williams, "The Red Wheelbarrow." In a 1951 letter to his daughter Nancy, Cummings writes that "the only poem of Doctor WCWilliams . . . which ever truly pleased me as a poem should(from finish to start and vv)is one affectionately concerning a red wh-b" (Letters 214).

185-6 = Ernest Hemingway, "They All Made Peace--What Is Peace?" The poem is a satrical look at the negotiators at the the Peace Conference of Lausanne, 1922-1923, convened to rewrite the Treaty of Sèvres, which partitioned the Ottoman Empire after World War I. Of all the characters at the conference, perhaps Mussolini (who Hemingway says, had "his picture taken reading a book upside down") comes in for the most ridicule.

189-209 = Marianne Moore, "Camellia Sabina" (Poems 201-203), "The Jerboa" (Poems 190-194), "The Plumet Basilisk" (Poems 196-200), "No Swan So Fine" (Poems 189), and "The Steeplejack" (Poems 183-184).

(70) the lucid movements of the royal yacht upon the learned scenery of Egypt --from Marianne Moore's poem "Novices" (Poems 152), first published in The Dial 74 (Feb. 1924) and reprinted in Observations. (See Becoming Marianne Moore 113-114, 278-279.)
the shadows of the Alps / imprisoning in their folds like flies in amber the rhythms of the skating-rink --from Marianne Moore's poem "Snakes, Mongooses, Snake-Charmers, and the Like" (Poems 148), first published in Broom 1.3 (Jan 1922) and reprinted in Observations. (See Becoming Marianne Moore 111, 274.)

Notty = Stanley Nott, British publisher. (See Ahearn's note on a pub'r/ on page 48.)
Jacobs = Samuel Aiwaz Jacobs (1890–1971), Cummings' personal typesetter. (See the note above to pages 24 / 25.)

(76) Prof Chas Barbe announces war in Scribner's = Prof. Charles A. Beard. Most likely, Cummings refers to Beard's article "National Politics and the War" [Scribner’s Magazine (Feb. 1935): 70]. Historian David S. Brown writes: “Among his efforts to keep . . . wars at bay, Beard wrote the "Declaration of Policy" for American Neutrality Inc., a national organization headquartered in Washington, DC. This statement pledged the organization to 'maintain a staff for the constant study of pro-war propaganda' and proposed measures to prevent 'Government looking in the direction of war'" (199, note 18).

(156) camp mil ser should read "comp mil ser" [i.e., "compulsory military service"]. [Cf. Dupee and Stade Selected Letters 158.]

(214) late Jz —Ahearn speculates that Pound refers to Henry James, but a more likely candidate would be the recently deceased James Joyce, one of the four "men of 1914" who attempted to "write frankly what they thought." When Pound writes that "fer over 20 yr. noWHERE that 4 did or cd/ -," he apparently refers to the modernists' difficulty in publishing in establishment venues, most notably his own exclusion from the Quarterly Review after his association with Blast (cf. Materer 216-219). Pound "promoted" Cummings to this group when he declared that EIMI was the "3rd of 3 large vols" (P/C 176). (The first two volumes are Joyce's Ulysses and Wyndham Lewis' Apes of God.) Pound attempts to clarify his comment on Cummings' promotion in a following letter, where he says that Cummings is now "the ever so slightly . . . junior" member of the "once quadrumvirate" [Joyce, Pound, Eliot, Lewis] men of 1914, a group which has now been reduced to "3 items . . . the oirish item [Joyce] having passed on" (P/C 217).

(264) teacher @ Haaavud Ahearn’s note is in error. The back flap of the dust jacket to XAIPE (1950) reads: "E. E. Cummings was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1894, the son of a teacher at Harvard." Cummings' father taught Sociology at Harvard from 1891 to 1900 (Kennedy 13-14; Sawyer-Lauçanno 3, 11-12).

(296) the enclosed clipping —no doubt Harvey Breit's interview of Cummings, published in the New York Times Book Review, December 31, 1950. The quote is KOrekt —The relevant portion of Breit's interview is as follows:

Mr. Cummings, thinking on the question of belief, said, as he wandered about his room: "Pound once wrote a magnificent thing. 'What matters is not the idea a man holds, but the depth at which he holds it'."

The interview is reprinted in Breit's The Writer Observed.

(309) Old Bridge = Cummings probably refers to Florence's Ponte Vecchio rather than Venice’s “Bridge of Sighs.” Cummings refers to the crocodile atop the column in St. Mark's square in Venice in "MEMORABILIA": "believe // thou me cocodrillo— // mine eyes have seen / the glory of // the coming of / the Americans" (CP 254).

(329) Pound,pound,pound While it is true that a later section of this poem (not sent by Cummings to Pound) parodies Tennyson's "Tears, Idle Tears" (1847), this section parodies Tennyson's "Break, Break, Break" (1842). Later strophes parody T. S. Eliot's "Sweeney Among the Nightingales" (1919), and John Keats' "Ode to a Nightingale" (1819). The longer version of the poem can be found at CP 987. The cogent corona refers to Pound’s typewriter. (In the version given in Complete Poems, this line reads "on thy cold grey corona oh P.") For a discussion of this poem as forming part of a Waste Land parody, see "Tears Eliot" in Alison Rosenblitt's E. E. Cummings' Modernism and the Classics (215-222).

(363) as whoosis said to Mrs. Barbauld: sieze the damn thing and wring itz neKK. Ahearn directs the reader to letter 240 (P/C 266-267), where he correctly notes that Pound refers to a poem by John Aikin (1747-1822) addressed to his sister, Anna Letitia Barbauld (1743-1825): "Seize, seize the lyre! resume the lofty strain!" However, Pound also refers to a line from Paul Verlaine's "Art Poétique" (1874, 1884): "Prends l’éloquence et tords-lui son cou!" ["Grab eloquence and wring its neck!"].

(367) myKuntry tis of Lydia pink HAM—Pound refers to lines from two Cummings poems: "next to of course god america i" (CP 267) ["my / country 'tis of centuries come and go / and are no more what of it we should worry"] and "Poem, Or Beauty Hurts Mr. Vinal" (CP 228) ["my country,'tis of // you,land of the Cluett / Shirt Boston Garter . . . / of you i / sing:land of Abraham Lincoln and Lydia E. Pinkham"].

(367) with a mu fer a upSilon Ahearn’s note says that "in later editions of the anthology, the mu was replaced by a phi" (P/C 368). More likely, the mu [ μ ] had been replaced by an upsilon [ υ ]. In a successful effort to dodge the censors, Cummings wrote "φυκ" [phi, upsilon, kappa] for "fuck" in line 23 of "Jehovah buried,Satan dead" (CP 438; cf. P/C 54-55, 66). More recent editions simply print the Anglo-Saxon obscenity.

(409) on him they shat / they shot encore —Pound quotes (with one orthographical variation) lines 9-10 of "this mind made war" (CP 440-41):

on him they shat
they shat encore
he laughed and spat
(this life could dare

In letter 33 (28 April 1935) Pound asserts that he is the subject of the poem (cf. P/C 65). On the next page he asks for permission to reprint the two lines in Charles Norman's Ezra Pound, but I cannot find them quoted in that book. In his reply, Cummings does not refer to Pound's permission request.


Works Cited

  • Ahearn, Barry, ed. Pound / Cummings: The Correspondence of Ezra Pound and E. E. Cummings. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1996. Abbreviated P/C.
  • Atkinson, Brooks. "Thumbs Up, a Revue, Is Staged by Eddie Dowling at the St. James." ProQuest Historical Newspapers. New York Times (28 Dec. 1934): 24. Web.
  • Breit, Harvey. "E. E. CUMMINGS." New York Times Book Review (31 Dec. 1950). Rpt. in The Writer Observed. Cleveland and New York: World Publishing, 1956. 159-161.
  • Brown, David S. Beyond the Frontier: The Midwestern Voice in American Historical Writing. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2009.
  • Cummings, E. E. Complete Poems, 1904-1962. Ed George J. Firmage. New York: Liveright, 1994. Abbreviated CP.
  • ---. EIMI: A Journey Through Soviet Russia. 1933. Ed. George James Firmage. New York: Liveright, 2007.
  • ---. EIMI. New York: Covici, Friede, 1933. Reprinted. New York: William Sloane, 1949. Reprinted with an introduction by EEC, New York: Grove Press, 1958.
  • ---. XAIPE: seventy one poems. New York: Oxford UP, 1950.
  • Dupee, F. W. and George Stade, eds. Selected Letters of E. E. Cummings. New York: HBJ, 1969.
  • Kennedy, Richard S. Dreams in the Mirror: A Biography of E. E. Cummings. New York: Liveright, 1980.
  • Materer, Timothy. Vortex: Pound, Eliot, Lewis. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1979.
  • Moore, Marianne. The Poems of Marianne Moore. Ed. Grace Schulman. New York: Viking, 2003.
  • ---. Becoming Marianne Moore: The Early Poems, 1907-1924. Ed. Robin G. Schulze. Berkeley: U of California P, 2002.
  • ---. Observations: Poems. 1925. Ed. Linda Leavell. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2016.
  • Norman, Charles. E. E. Cummings, The Magic-Maker. 3rd ed. Boston: Little, Brown, 1972.
  • Piepenbring, Dan. "Ultrarumpus: A Letter from e.e. cummings to Ezra Pound." [8 Oct. 1941] From the Archive: Paris Review blog. (14 Oct. 2014). Web.
  • Pound, Ezra. "Small Magazines." The English Journal 19 (1930): 689-704. Print and Web.
  • Pound, Ezra, ed. Active Anthology. London: Faber & Faber, 1933.
  • Rosenblitt, Alison. E. E. Cummings' Modernism and the Classics: Each Imperishable Stanza. Oxford / New York: Oxford UP, 2016.
  • ---. "Pretentious Scansion, Fascist Aesthetics, and a Father-complex for Joyce: E. E. Cummings on Sapphics and Ezra Pound." Cambridge Classical Journal 59 (December 2013): 178-198.
  • Sawyer-Lauçanno, Christopher. E. E. Cummings: A Biography. Naperville, IL: Sourcebooks, 2004.
  • Sutton, Walter, ed. Pound, Thayer, Watson, and The Dial: A Story in Letters. Gainesville: UP of Florida, 1994.
  • Rumble, Walker. "The Persian Typesetter: S. A. Jacobs, E. E. Cummings, and the Golden Eagle Press." Spring: The Journal of the E. E. Cummings Society 20 (2013): 37-45.
  • ---. "Reclaiming S. A. Jacobs: Polytype, Golden Eagle, and Typographic Modernism." American Printing History Association (20 March 2014). Web.
  • Webster, Michael. "An Old Door, Cummings' Personal Printer, and W [ViVa]." EEC Society Blog (29 June 2015). Web.
  • ---. "Pound Teaching Cummings, Cummings Teaching Pound." Ezra Pound and Education. Eds. Steven Yao and Michael Coyle. Orono, ME: National Poetry Foundation, 2012. 47-66.