Ezra Pound and Dorothy Shakespear: Their Letters, 1909-1914

Any reader even peripherally interested in the work and life of Ezra Pound will take delight in Omar Pound and A. Walton Litz's masterful selection and editing of Ezra Pound and Dorothy Shakespear: Their Letters, 1909-1914. To hear the authentic voices of the letters is to meet again but anew the youthful Pound. The facts of Pound's growth as an artist and critic during these years are not altered, but a new perception of the inner workings of his mind and personality is gained. More important, the volume serves as a concise but fully detailed picture of the social and cultural life of late Edwardian and early Georgian England, an era unknowingly on the brink of irrevocable destruction within a year of the end of this chronicle.

In contrast to the manner in which the structures and conventions of late Edwardian and early Georgian society hindered Pound's courtship with Dorothy Shakespear, the existence in London of serious reviews, of clubs and societies, of bookshops and small publishers, of well-attended artistic salons such as Olivia Shakespear's worked as an advantage for a newly arrived but promising young poet such as Pound. The key to opening all of these doors was William Butler Yeats, and the key to Yeats was Olivia Shakespear. Within a year of arriving in London, Pound found his way to her literary salon, where he read Yeats's poetry aloud in what Dorothy describes as a “strong, odd, accent, half American, half Irish,” even imitating Yeats's own intonations. Pound praised Yeats's verse and spoke of the great mystical experience he expected to have and of his willingness to starve for Art and Truth. A blatant ploy, but one which worked. Of his own early poems, those which he read to Dorothy and her mother were full of early Yeatsian tone, theme, subject matter, and archaic diction, in marked contrast to the poetic standards he argued with William Carlos Williams and Harriet Monroe, back in America, and even less advanced than his own efforts in Personae and Exultations (both 1909). His ruse worked; as Olivia and Dorothy showed more and more of Pound's work to Yeats, the more entrenched Pound became in London's literary circles. By January of 1913, Pound reports that Yeats said, “[Pound's] criticism was much more valuable than Sturge Moore's: I should hope so!!!” That winter of 1913-1914, Pound was living with Yeats at Stone Cottage, where he nominally served as the great poet's secretary. Already he believed that Yeats had more to learn from him than he from Yeats.

The most fruitful work to come