Ezra Pound « The Literary Table

Following yesterday’s correspondence between Melville and Hawthorne, today I am posting the reading of a letter by Ernest Hemingway to Ezra Pound. The Yale Library gives a nice lead in to the letter here. There is also a project titled the Letters of Hemingway.

As the story goes, Hemingway met Pound in Paris in the early 1920’s. Hemingway taught Pound how to be a boxer, while Pound taught Hemingway how to write. Hemingway spoke of Pound on other occasions. In 1925 he wrote: “He defends [his friends] when they are attacked, he gets them into magazines and out of jail. He loans them money. … He writes articles about them. He introduces them to wealthy women. He gets publishers to take their books. He sits up all night with them when they claim to be dying”

Wow! It seems like I’ve been gone for a while. I’m sorry to have been gone so long, though the good news is that I have a enormous amount to post…

For those of you that have been wondering where I have been, I have been researching a project I am writing on the way property norms transcend property law — that is, how we transfer our expectations of private property into areas where the law won’t protect private property. I am looking forward to sharing much of my work in the next few weeks. But, to give you some hints, I have been riding metro-trains, sitting on surf boards, hanging out with the homeless, visiting roach coaches, visiting mosques, talking to street performers, and more.

In the mean time, to make up for my absence, here is a poem by Ezra Pound…

The Return

See, they return; ah, see the tentative
Movements, and the slow feet,
The trouble in the pace and the uncertain
Wavering!

See, they return, one, and by one,
With fear, as half-awakened;
As if the snow should hesitate
And murmur in the wind,
and half turn back;
These were the “Wing’d-with-Awe,”
Inviolable.

Gods of the wingèd shoe!
With them the silver hounds,
sniffing the trace of air!

Haie! Haie!
These were the swift to harry;
These the keen-scented;
These were the souls of blood.

Slow on the leash,
pallid the leash-men!