Word: pound
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Biographer Martin Seymour-Smith handles much of the fiction as inspired entertainments and a good deal of the criticism as counterattacks in the literary wars. Graves' targets were not insignificant. Vachel Lindsay: "jazz Blake, St. Francis of Assisi playing the saxophone at the Firemen's Ball." Ezra Pound: bad rhythms and "a wet handshake." Dylan Thomas: "a Welsh demagogic masturbator who failed to pay his bills." T.S. Eliot: "a marvelous satirist with a true poetic sense who had sold out to institutionalized religion...
...letters of this extraordinary man. The impressive range of correspondents reflects MacLeish's wide-ranging interests and his knack for getting involved with the public of his time. He was particularly close to Amy Lowell, Dean Acheson, and Ernest Hemingway. He wrote often to Henry Luce, Ezra Pound, Robert Frost, and T. S. Eliot '10, and occasionally to Felix Frankfurter. J. Robert Oppenheimer and F.D.R. And the letters are full of MacLeish's articulate and often beautifully phrased observations on everything from political campaign strategies to the function of poetry. What emerges is a cohesive portrait of a powerful...
MacLeish himself never regretted the decision, though there certainly were--and are--many who would call him a less than first-rate poet. His early work was justly criticized as overly derivative of T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, a weakness MacLeish himself partially acknowledges. And though his voice became more distinctive in his poetry of the 1930s, even his best work was criticized as unoriginal. But the observations on poetry and criticism scattered through these letters indicate a coherent and convincing defense against such charges...
...MOST DRAMATIC series of letters involves MacLeish's efforts to free Ezra Pound. In 1955 he visited Pound in St. Elizabeth's mental hospital, where Pound had been held since the war as unfit to stand trial for treason. He writes to Hemingway, "What I saw made me sick and I made up my mind I wouldn't rest till he got out. Not only for his sake but for the good name of the country: after ten years it was beginning to look like persecution." For the next few years, MacLeish worked through his contacts in the Justice...
...Pound had helped and advised MacLeish in his early years as a poet, and MacLeish remained loyal to him despite an apparently continuous stream of insults and attacks from Pound. Hemingway, too, tested his loyalty. A letter full of praise for Hemingway but with a few criticisms will be followed by another trying to assuage an apparently enraged and resentful Pappy. He writes to Pound after years of insults. "I send you my affectionate regards and to hell with you if you won't accept them." And to Hemingway. "So you go & compose a long letter full of various ways...