Gettin' you offn th' groun

Twentieth Century Literature, Fall, 2004 by Steven Yao

Ezra Pound and African-American Modernism

edited by Michael Coyle

Orono, Maine: National Poetry Foundation, 2001. 272 pages

In the early 1990s, writers and scholars such as Toni Morrison and Michael North broke from established modes of African-American literary criticism. During the previous decade, Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Houston Baker, among others, had successfully legitimated modernist African-American literary expression by demonstrating its internal logic and broader significance as a tradition distinct from canonical Anglo-American high modernism. Pushing such thinking to the next logical step, Morrison's Playing in the Dark (1992) and North's The Dialect of Modernism: Race, Language, and Twentieth-Century Literature (1994) showed how ideas of "blackness" and an engagement with African-American culture informed that movement (and in Morrison's case, American literature as a whole) in all its most familiar forms and achievements. These works have cast a long shadow, and their influence has helped to broaden approaches to a range of canonical writers. Pursuing avenues opened up by the work of Morrison and North, Ezra Pound and African-American Modernism features a wide variety of contributions that trace the extended and diverse connections between the most controversial of canonical modernist writers and various aspects and representatives of African-American culture during the early part of the twentieth century.

If at first glance this pairing seems unlikely, perhaps even strained, we should remember that Pound made a career as well as a poetic out of surprising and productive juxtapositions. Moreover, as Coyle notes in his introduction, "Because Ezra Pound took on so much, Pound scholarship is punctuated by the kind of title 'Pound and ...'" (3). Another installment in the informal (and still growing) "Pound and ..." series, then, Ezra Pound and African-American Modernism includes essays that touch on several different phases of the poet's long career as well as trace interesting connections and intersections with various African-American writers. Together, these essays exhibit an admirable coherence, achieving a strikingly high and uniform level of overall quality. In addition, the volume presents a brief selection of primary documents in the form of the intermittent though nevertheless revealing correspondence between Pound and Langston Hughes. Most important, perhaps, the essays in the collection do not stop at merely documenting Pound's racism (a simple enough task to perform on practically any white writer of the period, given the political realities of American society at the time) and then proceed to condemn his work on that basis. Instead, they go on to trace the function and consequences, for both his own poetry and his relationship to some major black modernist and even contemporary poets, of Pound's ambivalent mixture of admiration and condescension toward African-Americans and African-American culture over the course of his career.

A passage from an undated, unpublished essay called FOR THE AFRO=AMERICAN LANGUAGE (quoted in both Jonathan Gill's and Alec Marsh's contributions) gives the flavor of Pound's mixed attitude explored in the volume:

     God damn it I wish the yellow octaroons quadroons and spittoons wd.
     stop talking like the cheap whites.... There is only one time I
     really want to kick a black man and that is when I hear him blahing
     like a Haavud sophomore. Damn it, nigguh; when you got som'thin'
     better n the white man; why the hell can't you keep it. (qtd. in
     Gill 84; see also Marsh 130)

While the book bears some marks of its beginnings as a special edition of Paideuma (a journal that only recently expanded its focus beyond the strict confines of scholarship on Pound), it successfully demonstrates the potential appeal of its chosen subject to readers of a variety of critical stripes and historical persuasions.

Two major sections, each with four contributions, comprise the main body of the volume. The first section, "Pound and the Poets of African-American Modernism," traces the complex and often vexed relationship between Pound and some of the most notable black American writers of the twentieth century. For example, Kathryne Lindberg's extended essay discusses the shared interest in the political movement and rhetorical strategies of syndicalism exhibited by Pound and Claude McKay in the early teens. Building on this common fascination, dating from 1912, Lindberg goes on to show both "an important link as well as a disconnect" (12) between the two poets, arguing that

     "Syndicalism," as class warfare with complex ties to violence,
     riots, masses and the declasse, covers both McKay's adoption of
     black Jamaican resistance culture and Pound's aesthetic pretensions
     among the racist and elitist circles spun out from The New Age.
     (13)

The depth and range of her treatment usefully brings together two major poets who have heretofore been relegated to separate spheres by established critical practices. In a comparably nuanced, if less sustained, way, Jonathan Gill examines the correspondence between Pound and Langston Hughes (the full text of which also appears in the volume, compiled and usefully annotated by David Roessel). Tracing misreadings by both poets of each other's work and taking into account their different subject positions and political agendas, Gill nevertheless argues that "Pound's Modernism and Hughes's role in the Harlem Renaissance function as more than merely analogues or allied projects, but as something approaching a single literary enterprise" (79). Next, C. K. Doreski moves forward in time to discuss "the immediacy and significance of Pound's politicized aesthetic" (90) through its ostensible influence on Melvin Tolson, a younger African-American contemporary of Pound's. Like Pound, Tolson also produced highly politicized journalism along with poetry, and Doreski parallels the ideas and positions expressed in such prose works as Jefferson and/or Mussolini, L'Ideale Statale, and Fascism as I Have Seen It with Tolson's in the "Caviar and Cabbage" columns written for the Washington Post (1937-44) and his first book of poetry, Rendezvous with America (1944). For Doreski, these texts "provide an engaging exploration of and resistance to the anxiety of Poundian influence as they reconfigure the aesthetic and political complicity of Modernism, fascism, and democracy during the Second World War" (90). In direct contrast to one strain of Pound criticism at least, Doreski further asserts that and Pound and Tolson each demonstrate through their political prose writings "a literary sensibility comfortable with a Bakhtinian, centrifugal authority that denies the fascistic unitary force inherent in modernist aesthetics and politics" (90-91). In the last essay of the first section, Reed Way Dasenbrock traces connections between Pound and Caribbean poet and recent Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott. Explicitly taking up issues of postcoloniality, postmodernity, and their troubled relationship, Dasenbrock argues for the fundamental aesthetic connection between modernist and postcolonial writing, setting both directly against the strategies of postmodernism. Such a configuration, Dasenbrock asserts, not only more accurately reflects the careers of such writers as V.S. Naipaul, Salman Rushdie, Ngugi wa Thinog'o, Anita Desai, and Chinua Achebe, among others, but it also enables us to see modernism as "the product of the margins reacting to Western culture as it moves to and to an extent is incorporated in the center or defines a new center" (115). To instantiate such a claim, Dasenbrock goes on to draw broad parallels between the epic ambitions of Pound and Walcott and their mutual engagements with Homer and Dante. In his view, it was Pound "who showed Walcott how a contemporary epic was possible through a dialogue with the great poets of the past" (118). Thus he highlights Walcott's classical and European references in Omeros (1990), emphasizing the poet's admiration for works in the classical Western canon. If this view repeats some of the work already done on Walcott in other critical circles, it nevertheless usefully raises such concerns for an audience more accustomed to a canonical modernist focus, thereby providing avenues for further, more detailed discussions. In fact, collectively, the essays in the first section of the book succeed most at demonstrating the productivity of actively relating Pound to writers in other traditions and circumstances, hinting at ways to further expand and complicate the modernist canon.