Yeats, Pound & Eliot

by Dennis Green

Ezra Pound scholar Hugh Kenner was teaching the class. It was early 1961, and I was still single, going back and forth between two lovers — Linda Barge at UC Santa Barbara and Chris Van Fleet at UC Berkeley. Somehow, in the midst of all that sex and romantic intrigue, I managed to squeeze in a class called “Yeats, Pound & Eliot,” taught by Professor Kenner.

I was enchanted by the work of these giants of modern poetry — Yeats Irish, Eliot British-American, (born in St. Louis Missouri but took on British citizenship,) Pound born in Idaho but emigrated to Europe — encouraged in my studies by a man who had met and partied with all three of them. I became convinced that the soul of William Butler Yeats, who died a few months before I was born, had migrated into the embryo that I was.

And all three of them were part of the esoteric “London Circle” of Madame Blavatsky and Aleister Crowley, who practiced the “Magick” and Gnosis of ancient cultures they had revived. All three of the poets shared certain occult experiences and incorporated them into their work — including Illuminati grail lore from The Golden Bough and From Ritual to Romance, as well as Buddhist and Confucian texts and the Hindu Upanishads.

Thus began an intellectual adventure that would take me into Ireland, Confucianism, The Unwobbling Pivot, A Vision, astrology, the Tarot, Runes, the I Ching, divination, and ultimately see me initiated as a member of the Illuminati Order and Io Pan! Today, I began revisiting Eliot’s epic poem, The Waste Land, with a degree of comprehension and appreciation I’ve never been armed with before this.

“Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song.”

Kenner was an imposing figure in that small classroom of 20 students, chair of the English department, on his way to greatness and a position at Johns Hopkins, who had served as best man at his friend William F. Buckley, Jr.’s wedding. He spoke with a curious Eastern seaboard accent, (to California ears), sounding at times as if he had a mouthful of mush.

But I was fascinated. He told us how T.S. Eliot’s wife had run off on their wedding night with Bertrand “Bertie” Russell, how Pound had broadcast propaganda for the Italian fascists, for Mussolini, been captured by American forces, kept in a lion cage for a week beside a dusty road, and was about to be shot for treason when an outcry from patriotic American writers and artists won him a reprieve and a near lifetime sentence as an inmate at St. Elizabeth’s mental hospital in Washington, D.C. (His sentence overlapping with John Hinkley’s…)

There, Kenner had spent many hours interviewing Pound, whom he had met many years earlier at a garden party in London, where, in the back yard, Kenner, Yeats, Pound & Eliot, all quite drunken, had gotten into a pissing contest, literally, seeing who could piss the highest up the garden wall. Stories like these merely confirmed my commitment to the study of literature.

Years later, I took a graduate seminar in Pound’s Cantos from Kenner, and did some important research, acquiring copies of old, out-of-print books Pound had studied at St. Elizabeth’s, including a translation of the I Ching by James Legge, and found traces of that text in the Chinese Cantos. Imagine my surprise when my article wound up verbatim in Kenner’s book The Pound Era!

But I tired of Ezra Pound, his anti-Semitism and general narrow-mindedness, and dropped out of the PhD program to pursue other interests. Had I completed my dissertation on Pound, I would have no doubt wound up being stuck teaching his poetry, and I had found his translation of the Confucian Odes, completed at St. Elizabeth’s after he learned Chinese, so awful I could not imagine such a fate.

Eventually, Pound was released, returned to his wife and mistress in Rappallo, Italy, to the villa where he had made his radio broadcasts, railing against the Americans, Usura and the Jews. And he died in Venice in 1972.

©2010 Dennis Green