Mark Ford

Figuring oneself as Hamlet in the middle of the 19th century was a perilous business. Think of Mr Wopsle, who performs the role in a hilariously bad production in Great Expectations. When he agonisedly wonders whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings etc he is assailed by contradictory cries from the audience: ‘Some roared yes, and some no, and some inclining to both...

All that glitters is not glass, but lots and lots of it is, mused the helmeted cyclist … o you fast- spinning tyres, so delicately ridged, so like the scales of a young crocodile – avoid whatever sparkles, and that flap-hatted woman weaving her way briskly against the traffic, her hands a jiving blur as she belts out snatches of We’re justtwo little girls from Little Rock...

By my count, though I may have missed a few, this is the 25th volume of Ezra Pound’s highly distinctive correspondence to see the light of day. The first selection of his letters, edited by D.D. Paige and culled from the years 1907-41, was published in 1950, when Pound was four years into what would be a 12-year sojourn in St Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, to which he’d been confined indefinitely after pleading insanity at his trial for treason in 1946. Paige’s selection introduced to the world madcap Ez the compulsive letter-writer, all hectoring capitals and italics.

When he was 23, A.S.J. Tessimond (Arthur Seymour John, Jack to his family, but known as John in later life) wrote to Ezra Pound, who had recently settled in Rapallo, enclosing some poems and an article on George Bernard Shaw. Tessimond’s letter does not survive, but Pound’s reply does. ‘Dear Sir,’ he wrote,

If you were in the least familiar with my work you wd. know...

‘Let Spades be trumps!’ she said, and trumps they were; it leaves us free to cry, and whisper to their souls to go. Nor wilt thou then forget where are the legs with which you run, Hurroo! Hurroo!, or wake and feel the fell of dark. Like an angel came I down, when my dream was near the moon, the crux left of the watershed, and the stars that usher evening rose. He is not here; but...