Subtitle

A CONFLUENCE OF DAYS, WEEKS AND YEARS

by Jonathan Vold

Friday, March 18

TWL, Dedication: Opening Allusions

0.4 For Ezra Pound
il miglior fabbro.

0.4. DEDICATION: See Longfellow’s translation of Dante, Purgatorio 26:115, 117, interpreting “il miglior fabbra” as “a better smith.”:

“‘O brother,’ said he, ‘he whom I point out,..
...Was of the mother tongue a better smith.’”

This is Dante’s tribute to 12th century Provencal poet Arnaut Daniel, also described by Petrarch as a “grand master of love” (see Petrarch, Triumphus Cupidinis, ca. 1350).  For Eliot’s further tribute to Daniel, see line 428.

See also Ezra Pound’s first book on literary criticism, The Spirit of Romance (1910), in which he translated Dante’s phrase for Daniel as “the better craftsman” and commended Daniel for his “refusal to use the ‘journalese’ of his day.”

EZRA POUND was a strong influence on Eliot, who added this dedication to him in 1925, in Poems, 1909-1925 (Faber); this was also the first edition in which Eliot included his explanatory endnotes. After they met in 1914, Pound was influential in getting Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock published in Poetry Magazine in 1915. See Eliot, Letters.

See notes 141, 198 and 219 for other Prufrock references.

Pound was even more actively involved as a reader and editor for The Waste Land.  See note 69, and for a sample of Pound’s editing see notes 167, 212, 219 and 293; for a fuller effect, see F&T.

See also Pound’s 1921 letter to Eliot just before The Waste Land was published (also in Eliot, Letters). In a 48 line poem he called “Sage Homme,” Pound congratulated his friend for creating the poem but took his due credit for helping with the delivery. Pound’s poem begins:

“These are the poems of Eliot
By the Uranian Muse begot;
A Man their Mother was,
A Muse their Sire.
How did the printed Infancies result
From Nuptials thus doubly difficult?
If you must needs enquire
Know diligent Reader
That on each Occasion
Ezra performed the Caesarean Operation.”

For a delayed response, see Eliot, Ezra Pound (Poetry, Sept. 1946):

“I have sometimes tried to perform the same sort of maieutic task; and I know that one of the temptations against which I have to be on guard, is trying to rewrite somebody's poem in the way I should have written it myself if I had wanted to write that poem. Pound never did that: he tried first to understand what one was attempting to do, and then tried to help one do it in one's own way.”

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