Reviews for Pound/Joyce: The Letters of Ezra Pound to James Joyce, with Pound's Critical Essays and Articles about Joyce

The average rating for Pound/Joyce: The Letters of Ezra Pound to James Joyce, with Pound's Critical Essays and Articles about Joyce based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2017-12-15 00:00:00 Albert Baur This was damn illuminating if remarkably heartbreaking. Back as an undergrad I was deeply heartbroken by the parting of ways between Sartre and Camus. Oh I lamented it , began to explore political nuance and was still largely oblivious to the multitude of being an adult. I think about my sorrows 25 years after the fact. These are Modernist titans. I still burdens to ponder how they diverged. Biographies had illuminated the arcs but it is the intimate exchanges here which allow one to lapse and consider. Pound was working as Yeats' secretary and broached Joyce for samplings of his verse. This continues as Joyce establishes himself through Dubliners and Portrait. Throughout Pound is tireless in searching for grants and publishing opportunities. Then during the Great War Pound began editing sections of Ulysses. Rifts began to appear and then both men relocated to Paris. Matters dimmed. Pound appeared restless in most endeavors, finding the appeal of economics and chamber music while allowing his literary opinions to perhaps calcify. He wanted a sequel to Ulysses, not the Wake. Anecdotally the last meeting between them occurred when Joyce asked Hemingway to accompany him to dinner where Papa said Pound spoke erratically. This is likely my last book of 2017 and one that might just prompt a Joyce/Pound project for the new year.

Review # 2 was written on 2018-12-18 00:00:00 Robert L. Wendt Well, this is entertaining. Pound in full throttle as the literary enthusiast and "village explainer'' as Gertrude Stein called him ("excellent if you're a village...) He certainly helped Joyce's early efforts as also for Eliot, others, after being introduced to him by Yeats, to whom he was serving as secretary for awhile. Later, the friendship sours over EP's dislike of "Finnegan's Wake'' - not an easy work to digest, no doubt, but it did not necessarily fall to Joyce's friend and one-time advocate to insist on his objections to Joyce, who had enough on his hands with chronic health and financial problems, and battles with prudish publishers/editors trying to change his copy. Things further devolved during Pound's dubious "Social Credit'' and Fascist infatuations - Joyce was resolutely apolitical, but still - and his not coincidental advocacy of writers like e.e. cummings , who shared his anti-Semitism, and Wyndham Lewis, who once wrote a positive book about...Hitler. Still, perhaps unfair to judge a man from the perspective of a different time, and Pound's energetic efforts, particularly early on, to spread the Word of Art, are admirable, and reminiscent of later admirers like Allen Ginsberg (cf., Kerouac) who were more forgiving of his lapses than Ezra, who latterly repented of "the stupid bourgeois sin of anti-Semitism). It would have been nice to see more of Joyce's responses, though they could hardly have been lengthier - or as filled with Pound's eccentric punctuation and lapses into folksy slang - than his correspondent. I believe the editor here is a Pound scholar inclined to let him off the hook, and the ending, which I won't share here, is lovely. Overall, an intriguing document of its time, with all its excesses and achievements.