Crooning emerged as a style that contemporaneous audiences, black and white, read as “white”: it wasn’t until the early 1930s that African American crooners appeared on record. This delay is unusual in American music, where innovations in vernacular music ordinarily have African American origins. That delay is explicable, however, once we recover what crooning signified for black audiences and how that signified meant something different to white audiences. More interesting still is the fact that crooning continues to play a role in contemporary African American music, long after white audiences abandoned it as old-fashioned. The apotheosis of this pattern can be heard in the 1963 record, John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman. Trane then made his one record with a vocalist for fairly obvious reasons, but it is less clear why he chose to do so, not with a jazz singer, but a crooner.

THE BIOGRAPHICAL LITERATURE that has accumulated around Ezra Pound for more than half a century is vast and diverse. Retrospectively speaking, it could not have been otherwise. Pound was a bohemian and a rebel; he insisted on his individual point of view in the face of governments and war; was deprived of liberty for thirteen years without trial; locked up in a mental hospital, he was denied personhood: he was deemed incurably insane, in spite of the steady stream of original poetry and translations from Greek and Chinese that poured from his typewriter in the asylum years. Pound had chosen to fight the world—the world fought back and conquered. From 1945 onwards, his life was turned into a cause célèbre and opinions among academics and non-professionals alike have been sharply divided. There were those whose interest was born of compassion, who witnessed or read accounts of his tribulations as an old man, and looked upon him as a poet of genius whom America had treated unconstitutionally and unjustly. There were others who saw him as a monster guilty of betraying his country in time of war and deserving execution— shooting or hanging, whichever was most practical. In this view, the mental hospital was not only inadequate punishment; it was no punishment at all. Pound had privileges, he received visitors and held court; he even continued his outrageous anti-Semitic rants and placed himself as an éminence grise behind right-wing radicalism in the US. The telling of Pound's life has always hinged on his biographers’ political and moral commitments, and the writing of a Pound biography cannot but be a political act, inscribing a certain moral position that the biographer makes clear in his text.

The Pound Wars Get Institutionalized

PUBLIC ATTENTION WAS STILL LINGERING over l'affaire Pound in the summer of 1951 when Hugh Kenner's The Poetry of Ezra Pound dismissed it for good. It did not do so by overtly hostile gestures, or by presenting incontrovertible arguments about the Bollingen controversy. It was instead silent about Pound's political activities, reticent about Pound's biography, and studiously inattentive to the concerns available to most middle-class readers. It was a splendid performance that never for an instant allowed the relevance of anything besides aesthetic and strictly poetic questions. It was also a performance the reception of which would have been impossible at any earlier moment, let alone in the heat of the Bollingen controversy. The Poetry of Ezra Pound was as perfectly the creature of its historical moment as it was the creator of academic discourse on Ezra Pound.

The anxious justifications of Tate, Berryman, and Carruth prepared Kenner's ground, and informed not only what Kenner argued but how. Most dramatically, perhaps, the terms in which the Library Fellows defended their judgment bristle just underneath Kenner's opening, a first chapter entitled “A Prefatory Distinction,” which dismisses the passion of the previous two years in two short sentences:

A disarming representation to be sure: the scare quotes around “in the news,” and the suggestion that “a committee of fellow poets” cannot but be harmless, render bathetic the indignation and high feeling previously exhibited on both sides of the Bollingen question. Pisan Cantos were not merely “in the news,” but the basis of Kenner's saying so is evident in that parenthesis tossed off en passant: “(for irrelevant reasons).” That is, the parenthesis assumes that the appreciation of poetry has little to do with political apperception, and does not submit this assumption to discussion.

The Emergence of New Modernist Studies

THE EXPLANATORY EBULLIENCE of Pound studies in 1970s, driven by Kenner's The Pound Era and Terrell's Paideuma, was cut off by the theoretical and political turn of deconstruction, whose ideological critique was strongly felt all through the 1980s. Understanding in detail and structurally relating what Pound had written in his poetry, early and late, ceased to be the priority of the day. The second volume of Terrell's Companion to The Cantos of Ezra Pound, published in 1984, proved to be not only the summing up of the scholarship produced by a whole generation, but the swansong of an era. Source hunting, clarifying allusions, and literary interpretation had become suspect: political facts and attitudes had been swept under the carpet for the sake of aesthetics; Pound scholars were (not innocently) promoting a poet whose moral values were appalling, whose politics was totalitarian, and whose economics was mad. An emphasis on the literary meant a turning away from the ugly truth: no amount of poetic innovation could justify anti-Semitism after the Holocaust. The feeling that Pound had not been properly punished, that he had had it easy at St. Elizabeths and cheated the system of its rightful retribution was running like a silent undercurrent in the detailed ideology critique of the postmodern era. The turn away from purely literary interpretation in the 1980s meant a reorientation towards theoretical tools that could be best used to face up to the scholar's responsibility: to chastise Pound as an anti-Semite, to dismiss his work as fascist.

More generally, postmodernism had critically conceived modernism as part of a binary opposition, and the inferior part at that. Modernism was bad: formalist, essentialist, elitist, fascist, or at least authoritarian, difficult, even abstruse, conservative of cultural values, in short genteel and anti-democratic.1 Modernism was genteel because it was committed to Eurocentric high culture and to the imperative of preserving and contributing to it; racism and sexism had continued, unquestioned; elitism, exclusions, and inhuman politics had been promoted beyond reason.

The View after Mid-Century

WALTER SUTTON's EDITED COLLECTION, Ezra Pound: A Collection of Critical Essays (1963), sought to balance Pound's reception without speaking to partisan issues. Marking an important moment in what was the still comparatively new field—the volume testified to a new self-consciousness of Pound research as a legitimate area in the profession of literary studies. Included in the popular series “Twentieth Century Views,” it did well enough to be reprinted in 1965. Sutton included essays from poets as well as scholars, and from British scholars as well as American. He included, for instance, essays by both Watts and Kenner, an inclusiveness not repeated in any later twentieth-century collection, Watts's opposition to Kenner's more New Critical approach having largely been forgotten along with Watts's briefly important status as “Pound's Expounder.” Sutton included Watts even while pointedly declining to revisit the Pound wars of the late forties and early fifties. As his jacket blurb puts it, this volume “reflect[s] the fresh surge of interest in Ezra Pound since World War II,” but “does not, however, reopen the Pound ‘case.’” If Rosenthal's work holds the impress of previous studies, Sutton's collection overtly displays that body of work as the context for its own activity.

In fact, Rosenthal's chapter on The Cantos is the first in the volume to focus on the poem as the place where the question of Pound's greatness will finally be decided. Generally, Sutton's table of contents could serve as an index to this transitional period in Pound studies—to what the jacket blurb calls “a turning point in twentieth-century poetry and criticism.” The language of the blurb is meant to apply to Pound but, more trenchantly, the phrase “turning point” applies to changes in literary study. The volume opens by reprinting essays from poet-peers Yeats, Williams, and Eliot, but all subsequent essays are written by academic critics.

IN ORALITY AND LITERACY: The Technologizing of the Word (1982), Walter Ong developed his theory of “secondary orality,” a condition whereby the written word ceases to be the primary means by which a culture exchanges ideas and information. Ong couldn't, in 1982, have foreseen our twenty-first-century world where readers spend more time in front of screens than they do in the pages of books; a world where literature survives, but—almost reverting to its condition in the medieval or ancient worlds—increasingly does so as an art valued principally by elite culture. Ong couldn't have foreseen it, but in a curious way Pound did. The epigraph above comes from a letter he sent to his mother, at a time when his aspirations still absolutely eclipsed his accomplishments. The letter caught the attention of Mary Ellis Gibson, who quotes it at length:

In 1910, a twenty-five-year-old Pound was already imagining himself as a kind of Mauberley, born too late, a kind of relic living in a society that no longer values the art to which he has dedicated his life (“He strove to resuscitate the dead art / of Poetry”). He was also imagining that an epic poem for his time would necessarily include politics, economics, and history. He was anticipating, in other words, the kinds of trouble that awaited him, and awaited us. The story of Pound's reception is very much the story of our arguments with ourselves. We continue to debate the power of his work in large part because we remain uncertain about what it is we want from a great poet.

The Pound Era

THE CONFIDENCE THAT FORTY YEARS AGO enabled Hugh Kenner to announce “The Pound Era” is almost unthinkable today. While it was Kenner's The Poetry of Ezra Pound (1951) that had first found the terms to successfully present Pound as candidate for academic status, The Pound Era (1971) attempted to define modernism with Pound at its very center. What is remarkable is not that Kenner failed, but that he came as close as he did to realizing at least part of his ambition. The twenty years that separated his two books is less than half of the time that separates The Pound Era from our own moment, but in many ways academe has changed less in these forty-plus than it did in the twenty years following the Bollingen controversy. The Pound Era was published at precisely the moment that poststructuralist criticism was beginning to shake the foundations of the Anglo-American academy, and though Kenner's paratactic presentation at the time struck many as partaking in that disruption of New Critical hegemony, it had in fact nothing to do with it. For all his stylistic pyrotechnics, Kenner was decidedly old school, still adhering to formalist insistences on the hegemony of the author's text. For all of his contextualizing forays into science, art, economics, and history, the emphasis of Kenner's title was on “Pound” and not on “the era.”

Two decades into the next century Kenner's book still remains the benchmark against which all others are measured. Thus, in 2008, when reviewing the latest in a succession of unsatisfactory literary surveys of modernism for the pages of the New Yorker (which in 2007 had a decidedly un-academic circulation of 1.062 million readers), Louis Menand still closed with a reference to The Pound Era.

THE RECEPTION HISTORY of Ezra Pound arguably entails the history of academic criticism itself. To make that argument is not necessarily to reaffirm Hugh Kenner's vision of “the Pound era,” but rather to recognize that, after the Second World War, Pound's work became the decisive battleground upon which the new critics initially established their dominance, and over which subsequently swept successive forms of feminist and poststructuralist theory. Pound's work was and remains a challenge to all critical models. At once inviting and resisting exegesis, The Cantos in particular has been for three quarters of a century the ultimate proving ground. By the second decade of the twenty-first century, questions of canonicity came to seem less urgent, but Pound's work continues to attract new approaches, even if these no longer accelerate more general professional anxieties and concerns. In other words, without ever having achieved unchallenged canonical status, Pound's work has long been central to questions of what disciplinarity in English might mean.

Professional attention, in the context of Anglo-American departments of English, is shaped and regulated by the dynamic rules of disciplinarity. These rules have changed over time, are changing still, and doubtless should change with the evolving role of academic writing and authority in the culture at large. But at any particular moment rules and conventions— both explicit codes and regulations like double-blind referees—as well as implicit conventions about fairness or avoiding merely ad hominem attacks—govern critical behavior. Academic communities are formed with inner dissensions and agreements—the strength lies in numbers and in the endless revision of accepted and shared knowledge. Moreover, such expectations govern not just what is said, and how, but also where such work is suitably published.

Amateurs, Experts, and Professionals

POUND's “A FEW DON'TS,” one of the pre-war manifestos with which he fomented poetic revolution, opens with a warning to poets and writers to “pay no attention to the criticism of men who have never themselves written a notable work” (200). The force of this advice might, a century and more later, be mistaken for a caution about academic criticism. It wasn't. In 1913 academic culture in general was still inchoate and English—which continued to focus more on philological than on hermeneutic, or even stylistic questions—as a particular discipline was just beginning to move from its Arnoldian mission. In the first quarter of the twentieth century, English criticism was still essentially a gentleman's affair and had yet to define itself in professional terms. If Pound's mature poetry challenged that establishment, his early criticism actively militated against it.

Each of the installments of Pound's first important critical essay, “I Gather the Limbs of Osiris” (serialized in the New Age from November 30, 1911, through February 22, 1912) ran under the standing rubric, “Mr. Pound will continue expositions and translations in illustration of ‘The New Method in Scholarship.’” A. Walton Litz and Lawrence Rainey have identified this serial essay as an important moment in the development of Pound's distinction between the professional and the expert: “Taking up the question of who should assess poetry, amateurs or professionals, Pound writes: ‘I should not discriminate between the “amateur” and the “professional,” or rather I should discriminate quite often in favour of the amateur, but I should also discriminate between the amateur and the expert.’” For Litz and Rainey, this discrimination is important, not least because it was struggling against a mainstream that was already gathering force—and this struggle portended trouble for Pound in future: