Aims and Egos

Liesl Olson has a wonderful retrospective on the women who made Poetry great. She also talks just a little smack about Ezra Pound, as one does:

In the middle of “major men,” to use Wallace Stevens’s phrase, Harriet Monroe is a figure who worked behind the scenes, as did many of the women who followed her at Poetry. Monroe contrasts sharply with Poetry’s foreign correspondent, Ezra Pound, who ambitiously sought to inhabit the center of an avant-garde literary scene. (“I do see nearly everyone that matters,” he wrote in his first letter to Monroe in 1912.) However, in terms of discovering new poets, cultivating their work, and choosing when and how their poems would appear, Monroe was Pound’s equal. She realized that “who matters” meant more than Yeats, Eliot, and Pound; it included poets from the Midwest and West, African American writers, and minor poets who wrote a few important poems. It also included Wallace Stevens — whose work Monroe published when he was still unknown — a poet whom Pound never once acknowledged in his letters to Monroe. In the profuse correspondence between Monroe and Pound, Pound’s voice is voluble and dominant: he often takes credit for Monroe’s significant achievements as editor, and he violently disagrees with her about how to cultivate an audience for poetry.

Oh, Wallace Stevens. Wallace Stevens is the poet for people with seriously un-poetic jobs who want to write poetry. He was in insurance law, you guys. He was a successful insurance man! And he’d be all type-type-type-insurance, and then he’d write a wonderful poem. And then he had kids, which was the kiss of death. Just when they were little, though. Then he wrote more wonderful poems.

It must have been such a curious thing to be Harriet Monroe, though, and to be an Okay Poet and a Genius Editor. But, then, if people who write Okay Poetry found it too painful to read and write about Great Poetry, we’d all hurl ourselves into the abyss, no?