[In the following essay, Stock warns that the literary biographer's standard approach to analysis—to explore an author's letters, essays, and other related materials to gain insight into his writing—may not provide accurate critical insight into Pound's poetry.]

There was an immense amount of purely prosodic training and general preparation that went into the production of Ezra Pound's verse. His maturity as a poet occurred, it will be noted, about 1920, when he was thirty-five years old; and up to this time his work holds together as an unmistakable unity, despite possible flaws or shortcomings. Of the poetry and prose up to 1920 it is possible to say that it makes sense both on and below the surface, and there is no need for us to go hunting for out-of-the-way explanations to substantiate this claim. When, however, we turn to the second half of Pound's career—from the time he left London in 1921 until the Thrones Cantos in 1959—we are faced with something different. There is still much that is great in his poetry after 1920—and the Cantos is a major work, no matter how harshly we may have to treat certain aspects of it—but the prose begins to disintegrate and there are ominous signs on the surface of the poetry which suggest that all is not well below. The young man who at the age of twenty-five measured out the roads of Provence and wrote so compellingly of the poetry of the Romance languages, has been replaced, by the time he is forty, by another who at the drop of a hat will lecture the world on almost any subject from monetary systems to the real meaning of Confucius; and there is a corresponding turn in his poetry. He begins to insert, here and there, lines which cannot bear the weight of meaning he intends, and while individual passages, and whole cantos, taken by themselves, may be perfectly lucid, the meaning of the whole work becomes no clearer as he passes Canto 50, and then Canto 70, and actually begins to recede after he passes into the Rock-Drill section (Cantos 85-95). It is not that the poetry weakens—in some ways it is stronger, and firmer, and better, than the poetry up to and including Mauberley—but that the job of giving a major form to such a vast undertaking is beyond him, and when cracks begin to show he tries to fill them with hasty and inferior material. Something obviously has happened, the real meaning of which may be impossible to discover. But one thing at least is clear: in moving through the second half of Pound's career we must tread very carefully. …

There is nothing which prejudices Pound more in the eyes of those who have a fairly detailed knowledge of his work than his tinkering with subjects he was not equipped to handle. In his books, his pamphlets, isolated articles or letters it is possible to find, in addition to expressions of undoubted good sense, others which look like evidence that Pound has once again been jumping to conclusions which he could not support for a moment if he were challenged. The reader who would untangle completely Pound's errors and bad guesses from his good sense and good guesses must make the examination for himself, even if it is only to discover that the quest was not quite what he had expected, and that some at least of Pound's errors of fact and judgement, especially in his literary essays, are merely annoying rather than fundamental. It is, in fact, a mark of the second-rate writer that he burdens his subject with his own ignorance. The important writer, like Pound, even if he does not always achieve complete lucidity, tends towards it and towards the establishment of unity; the errors in Pound's earlier prose are marginal, and even some of those in the later prose, errors which inhere not only in what he is saying but in the style as well, are still marginal in the sense that they do not interfere with his main drift—about clarity of expression, for instance, or the importance of literature to society. The reader who will profit most is the one who keeps an eye on the main direction of Pound's thought, rather than on the errors, the exuberant illustrations, the careless or wrong-headed asides or apparent switches of subject matter, which by causing irrelevant annoyance or delight may deflect the reader's mind from an underlying and important truth.

Like most artists born since that great change in European sensibility which included the Romantic ‘revolution’, Pound has not always been clear about how to interpret his own intuitions or sudden and unaccountable realizations. He has sometimes read into them more than was perhaps there, or confused mental constructions based on these intuitions, or desires produced or stimulated by them, with the intuitions themselves. But where we find them free from, or not too encumbered by, these later additions of thought or emotion, they sometimes prove to be of greater use than pronouncements on the same subject by those who are scholastically impeccable, for the reason that whereas the scholar's remarks, no matter how just in themselves, inevitably relate to a vast and impersonal subject without any real definition, and over which he has no control, those of the artist relate to a world over which he has, in proportion to his greatness perhaps, strict personal supervision. I am not suggesting that they are necessarily contradictory, for the world of the artist, although it obeys the logic of imagination, is not unconnected with the world of the scholar; but the difference is important. One of the troubles with literary biography is that it does not take this difference into account: it cannot, because it is dealing with parts which can never equal the whole. By literary biography I mean, of course, books which ‘explain’ a work of art by constant reference to what passes for the biography of its creator.

The situation was relatively simple in 1923 when T. S. Eliot pointed out that ‘the multiplication of critical books and essays may create … a vicious taste for reading about works of art instead of reading the works themselves, it may supply opinion instead of educating taste’. This is still true, but we have to face now a more formidable network of interests pandering to this taste, and a literary public still more barbarous than that of the 1920's, given to belief in superstitions harder to pierce than before and supported by ‘scientific’ assertions increasingly null by people who are farther and farther removed from an awareness of their nullity. Among these superstitions is the one that biography is woven in such a way into a man's creative work that it need only be disentangled by an expert in order to provide the lay reader with all necessary clues and keys to a full and satisfying enjoyment of its artistic merit. Or in other words the best way to make sense out of the work is by first of all making sense out of the life. There appears at first sight to be a considerable difference between the entertaining biographer with a journalist's flair and the serious scholar who will track his facts down even if it takes him years to do it. And yet, I believe that the difference between them is usually not one of kind, but simply that the scholar digs much deeper; he is not necessarily getting any closer to the meaning of the artist's work than the other, any more than a scientist is closer to the meaning of the universe than his predecessor simply by obtaining a bigger and better microscope. It is possible for a critic who already knows a poet's creative work to return to that work refreshed and with some new ideas by virtue of a spell with his biography and peripheral work: he may use a little biography to reinforce his point that the poetry is in the poems and not the life, no matter how much of the life may have got into the poems. But to approach creative work by way of biography and the periphery, to see the creative achievement through these latter, is a perversion and ought to be treated as such.

Now while Pound's biography may be regarded as an extreme case, it may be possible, because it is extreme, to illustrate more clearly from it some of the dangers inherent in the biographic approach to literature. In Pound's case the difficulties stand out, whereas in an outwardly less eventful life, they may be more dangerous because less obvious. Literary biographers often rely a great deal on letters in order to explain the man or the work, ignorant of, forgetting, or misunderstanding the fact that all men are liars in their correspondence: it is a social convention, a necessary evil. As Pound says in his essay ‘The Economic Nature of the United States’, ‘A signed letter proves what the writer wanted the recipient to believe on such and such a day’. In recent years I have examined Pound's own files containing his correspondence and papers, both published and unpublished, including many uncollected and inferior articles and letters published in fly-by-night periodicals; and I feel compelled to say that it would be next to impossible to do justice to such material simply by printing large quantities of it and ‘explaining’ it on the way by means of editorial comment and footnotes. In the case of many letters written with private purposes in view it is impossible for the scholar, no matter how painstaking, to restore them from the dead. To publish even a selection of his correspondence without carefully relating the method of selection to the meaning of his work would be to present a distorted picture. It is known, in a rough sort of way, that quite apart from his activities with and on behalf of Joyce, Lewis, Eliot, Yeats, Gaudier-Brzeska and a number of other artists, Pound in his role as catalyst and stimulant encouraged a host of lesser known creative, critical and other activities of a serious nature. But in order to draw any real meaning out of a great mass of letters written to others during the past half century, urging them to do this, that, or the other, one would have to know certain outside facts which are not mentioned in the letters at all; one would have to know that Pound's assistance is acknowledged, for instance, in such widely different books as R. McNair Wilson's Mind of Napoleon and Raymond Preston's Chaucer, that he turns up in Marianne Moore's introductory note to her translation of La Fontaine or in H. A. Mason's Humanism and Poetry in the Early Tudor Period; and one would have to know something about these books and the nature of the poet's influence, and about a great number of other books as well; and from there one might be able to attach some real meaning to a selection of letters. I happen to know, quite by chance, of two books on the diplomatic history of the present century, written and published because of two men, one an acknowledged academic historian in the United States, the other a European writer, brought together by Pound's correspondence during his detention in St Elizabeth's Hospital, Washington, D.C., after the Second World War. But it would be very difficult to link him with these books unless one happened to know about the matter independently. I certainly do not understand his poetry any better for knowing about this, although the knowledge may help me in a negative way and prevent me from jumping to a wrong conclusion.

It was during my examination of Pound's unpublished correspondence that I was brought face to face with the enormous dangers involved in publishing letters, and the unreliability of letters as a guide to an artist's work. There are a few men—not many artists among them—whose lives would encourage us to rely upon their letters as a safe guide to history; but they are exceptions. People generally, including artists, write to other people for many different reasons and the reasons sometimes die the day the letter is posted, leaving for the future scholar, a letter, yes, nicely phrased perhaps, carrying with it some special quality such as an air of urgency, and yet, the real reason for its origin having been lost, it becomes a false document even where no falsity was intended. This is even true, up to a point, of some published work; but generally speaking the man who sits down to write a book, even a book for his own entertainment, is quite different from the man who sits down to write a letter.

The danger with letters so often lies in the fact that so many of them have a plain surface meaning which is not necessarily the one they originally carried, or were intended to carry, to the person they were written to. Nor is it sufficient to reply that it is precisely the job of the future scholar to rescue the hidden and real meaning; this may be the ideal, but it is unlikely ever to be carried out in fact. Even the principals themselves forget and sometimes begin to believe the surface meaning of their own notes and letters. Also, biographers and critics rely too heavily on the letters and published comments of a poet's friends and contemporaries. A number of people who knew Pound personally in 1914 have been critical of some of the poems on contemporary life in Lustra, unable to match Pound's own unsure or sometimes eccentric behaviour at that time with the calm voice at the centre of the poems. These critics have read into the poems something that was not there and which does not, so far as I know, occur to later readers who did not know the poet when he wrote Lustra.

And there is the danger also of relying too much on a man's secondary work, a great deal of which in Pound's case is in the nature of range-finding. We find him firing off one day a statement that is excessive. Later he publishes a similar statement, this time undershooting the mark; and then another and another until he gets somewhere near the meaning he is seeking. The final statement, the one that really matters, supple and natural, with an unexpected twist, or a qualification or new context, turns up two or twenty years later in the Cantos. All the earlier attempts may be said to have played a part in the final statement, but to accept them, as critics have done, uncritically, at their face value, as throwing light upon Pound's thought or poetry is obviously dangerous and sometimes defeats the commentator's purpose.

In the same way Pound's many and sometimes bewildering interests must be seen not as final products with a life of their own, although some of them may have this independent life, but as part of the same process of range-finding and exploration. What distinguishes Pound is not that he took an interest in Vortographs, Fr Coughlin, the Just Price, Communism, Swedenborg, the Noh drama, New Democracy, endocrine glands, Confucius, Schwundgeld, Vivaldi, Fascism (and the variety of opinions and ideas inside the Italian party), the ironwork above certain London doorways, A. G. Street on Piccadilly or Sir Montagu Webb on Indian currency, but that he was able in some cases to make use of these interests—to draw together threads which had not previously been appreciated, and by range-finding and refining of his notation to set down a record of certain areas of meaning or coherence not previously visible or for which others had not been able to find the right words. What distinguishes Eliot and Pound from lesser poets who remain for the most part in the limbo of understatement, or overstatement, or even non-statement, is that they have so often hit the target dead centre.

When one comes to consider the relationship between Pound and Fascism, the field is strictly limited by the temper of our time. My own view is that there is little that can usefully be said on this subject at the moment, nothing certainly which deals with Fascism directly, for this is a topic upon which one is expected to utter a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’ whether one knows anything about it or not, which puts it outside the bounds of rational and civilized discussion. Rather, I invite the reader to consider several points which seem to have been neglected in the welter of discussion on Pound and Fascism. The following paragraphs are in no sense offered as an ‘answer’ to this question, but may be thought to clear a little of the dead wood.

There is no doubt in my mind that Pound as publicist, because he was trying to publicize certain economic ideas from the realm of ideas towards action, slipped into the realm of practical politics; but what should not be overlooked is that his usefulness to us has been in the direction of clarification of terminology, the clearing away of clichés and in pointing out relationships previously ignored. A little chronology may help towards a more accurate assessment than has so far been offered in respect of his interest in politics. He gave thought to the problem of war, peace and disarmament just after the First World War when the world might conceivably have come to some arrangement and been saved some of its later excesses, without the complete loss of national sovereignty in World Government. He was also interested in the part played in world affairs by the manufacturers of armaments, before that matter was turned into a political and ideological instrument with which to hook the unwary. Again, during the 1920's and 1930's he contributed to all manner of publications: to Communist and Fascist papers, to monetary reform journals, to musical journals, to the Biosophical Review and many others. Nor, when we consider what he was trying to do, was there necessarily any inconsistency in the fact that he was interested in the American negro, for which interest he was thanked by the negro poet Langston Hughes, while at the same time he was conscious of a need to preserve certain elements of white civilization that might still have existed in the southern states of the U. S. If Pound was interested in Mussolini, he was also interested, though to a lesser extent, in Stalin and Congressman George Holden Tinkham of Massachusetts. In Italian Fascism he saw two things which engaged him at the core of his mental life: (1) The idea that in modern industrial societies it is better for a man to be represented in Parliament by one of his own trade or profession rather than by geographic area; and (2) The idea that it is good for a nation to stay out of debt. At times he thought he saw also a healthy tendency towards genuine local control in matters purely local.

It is true that towards the beginning of the Second World War, when he saw the America and the Europe which he loved heading towards what he thought was certain destruction, he lost control of his own situation and became involved in something which he was powerless to control or even modify to the slightest degree, and that he was swept along by the current. It is true also that his Rome Radio broadcasts look rather foolish to us when we read them at ease, ten or twenty years after, despite the fact that they contain some enjoyable literary criticism and shrewd comment on other matters, among the nonsense; but of course the broadcasts and the rest of the Pound paraphernalia of the late 1930's and early 40's have been welcomed as an opportunity to keep the spotlight on Pound the ranting, puritanical, ‘do-gooding’ American, born of Rousseau and I don't know what else—an opportunity to keep the spotlight upon the eccentric showman rather than on the poet and his achievement.

As a result what is truly remarkable and of abiding interest has been lost: the fact that the same man could, and did, at the same time, preserve at the centre of his faculties a firm critical spirit which rescued, and continued to rescue throughout these troubled years, unity and order and beauty from the chaos both around him and in him.