A Storm in His Luggage

C.K. Stead

  • Ezra Pound and James Laughlin: Selected Letters edited by David Gordon
    Norton, 313 pp, £23.00, June 1994, ISBN 0 393 03540 9
  • ‘Agenda’: An Anthology. The First Four Decades edited by William Cookson
    Carcanet, 418 pp, £25.00, May 1994, ISBN 1 85754 069 7

In a letter dated 22 January 1934 to his protégé James Laughlin, Pound makes passing reference to R.P. Blackmur, who had written a long unflattering essay, ‘Masks of Ezra Pound’, in an issue of the periodical Hound and Horn (which Pound renamed Bitch – Bugle). Next day he refers to it again – ‘24 depressing pages’. A year later there is an angry letter to Blackmur on the subject, sent, however, to Laughlin, perhaps to be sent on. Blackmur is accused of ‘placid and conceited ignorance’: ‘you pups who are born omniscient ... and utterly indifferent to FACT never never never will understand the need for data before assumption.’ Three years later there is a reference to Blackamoor; and in 1949 the article was still not forgotten.

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