For sheer chutzpah, nothing beats Ezra Pound's letters. Pound wrote to Louis Zukofsky in a Yiddish-English that rarely stopped short of offense, addressed James Joyce in a mock Irish-English, and communicated with his publisher James Laughlin in an ornery Yankee-English. Nowhere, though, did Pound test the patience of a correspondent more than with Langston Hughes. Pound not only addressed the premier African American poet of the twentieth century in black English, but at one point in a 1951 letter went so far as to correct as inauthentic Hughes's own language—the phrase “I ain't got another thing in the U.S.A. on which to lean,” from Hughes's book Simple Speaks His Mind (178). Pound took Hughes to task for allowing artistic sensibilities to interfere in what ought to have been a simple transcription of a natural language: “Dazz L. H.'s musical sense buttin' in” (qtd. in Rampersad 2. 185). However, the comment betrays not the ignorance or arrogance that so often characterizes Pound's letters, but a genuine insight into the workings of Hughes's language. That Pound could “black up” with such ease suggests unexplored alliances between the two poets; indeed, I would go so far as to argue that unpublished letters between the two poets show that Pound's Modernism and Hughes's role in the Harlem Renaissance function as more than merely analogues or allied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.

It is only in recent years that scholars have allowed the writings of the Harlem Renaissance specifically, and black English and African American culture in general, anything more than a peripheral role in the Modernism for which Pound served as parent, midwife, and offspring. Even so, a segregation between the two movements prevails. Houston Baker has taken a “separate but equal” position, claiming that “Africans and Afro-Americans—through conscious and unconscious designs of various Western ‘modernisms’—have little in common with Joycean or Eliotic projects” (xvi). More recently, Michael North has focused on the letters of Pound and T. S. Eliot, claiming that their playful use of black dialect serves as Modernism's “private double” (57), and therefore remains outside the proper bounds of the modernist experiment. In fact, questions of race in America, explored through a direct and committed engagement with African American culture, pervade the modernist canon, from Pound's Cantos and Gertrude Stein's The Making of Americans, to Eliot's “Fragment of an Agon” and William Carlos Williams's Paterson. Despite persistent genuflections to Europe, the American modernists drew from African American culture no less than the writers of the Harlem Renaissance drew from white culture. For Pound to correct Hughes's black English or play Brer Rabbit to Eliot's Possum, or for Hughes to address Pound in “white” English or write Shakespearean sonnets, signified not the putting on, but the taking off of a mask.

The first contact between Hughes and Pound occurred in 1931 in the pages of Contempo, a liberal journal run by two students at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In the early 1930s Pound sat on Contempo's editorial board, and on September 15, 1931, his essay “Publishers, Pamphlets, and Other Things” shared the front page with Hughes's poem “House in This World.” The day after Christmas of the same year, Pound wrote what was apparently a blind letter to “Langston Hughes Esq,” in care of the Contempo offices. Pound may not have shown much interest thus far in the developments of the Harlem Renaissance beyond a 1922 dig at the producers of “native negro phoque melodies” (Eliot 505), but he was convinced that Hughes was in an ideal position to help disseminate the works of Leo Frobenius, the German anthropologist who claimed that European civilization derives from Africa. As Pound explained to Hughes, black colleges in the United States had a particularly obvious and important stake in making sure Frobenius's studies of African folk tales were translated and studied—an unrealistic proposition, if the difficulties in translating Frobenius's term “paideuma,” taken up with such vigor by Pound, are any indication.

Hughes responded in April 1932 with warmth, particularly as regards Pound's plans for the use of Frobenius in black colleges. As Arnold Rampersad details, during Hughes's Southern reading tour of late 1931 and early 1932—which included a visit to Chapel Hill—he saw how hard the Depression had hit African Americans, and he noted how poorly black colleges, then largely timid and conservative in matters of racial protest, were responding. Hughes even allowed Pound to excerpt, in Nancy Cunard's 1934 Negro Anthology, a provocative Hughes letter to Pound calling Negro schools “highly imitative of the ‘best’ white models, and mostly controlled by white gentlemen who live in Boston and New York and never heard of Benin” (“Letter to EP” 141). As the correspondence makes clear, Hughes diligently but fruitlessly forwarded Pound's suggestions to the heads of several black colleges.

From the start, however, Hughes was anxious to speak as more than simply the representative of his race. In his very first letter to Pound, in April 1932, Hughes gushed:

I have known your work for more than 10 years and many of your poems insist on remaining in my head, not the words, but the mood and the meaning, which, after all, is the heart of a poem.¹

(Pound 43/21/796)

Despite Hughes's perhaps overly enthusiastic effort here to establish a poet-to-poet bond with Pound, these are the words of someone who had not read Pound's work very carefully. Pound's early poetry strenuously opposes a poetics of inwardness in favor of “direct treatment of the thing” (LE [Literary Essays of Ezra Pound] 3); the whole thrust of Pound's writing from Imagism to the start of The Cantos emphasizes the poem itself, and the words from which the poem is so painstakingly sculpted. Despite an increasing density of reference, there is never the sense that the words on the page are only signposts to some inner, hidden or otherwise secretive meaning.

This is not to say that Hughes was uninfluenced by Pound, or that his poetic project was unrelated to Pound's; in fact, Hughes's most significant contribution to the poetry of the Harlem Renaissance—the use of black English instead of the stilted dialect voices that had dominated Negro poetry thus far—may be seen as a typically modernist rejection of the artificial in favor of the natural. Poems like “Elevator Boy” show off a voice that is positively lyrical in its plainness:

I got a job now
Runnin' an elevator
In the Dennington Hotel in Jersey.
Job ain't no good though.
No money around.

(Fine Clothes 38)

Like much of Hughes's early work, this poem seems to have been written under the sign of Pound's 1912 call for a new poetics—the poem's directness of treatment, spareness of presentation, and irregular musicality make the poem a textbook illustration of “A Few Don'ts” (LE 3). Further, consider Hughes's practice of constructing poems out of the “real” voices of his friends and neighbors, as in “Prize Fighter”:

If I wasn't dumb
I wouldn't be fightin'
I could make six dollars a day
On the docks
And I'd save more than I do now

(Fine Clothes 33)

Such poems have no clearer precedent than in the vernacular masking Pound had perfected in the poems collected in Personae (1926), where characters so often simply rise and speak:

So much barren regret,
So many hours wasted!
And now I watch, from the window
                              the rain, the wandering busses

(P 158)

Hughes has simply substituted the unadorned voices of African American elevator boys, prostitutes, blues singers, gamblers, and porters for Pound's British clerks, Provençal warriors, and Chinese courtesans.

However much Hughes wished to link his poetry to that of Pound in April 1932, he also had a political agenda of his own: gathering financial and moral support for nine African Americans who had recently been arrested for rape after a racial brawl on a train near Scottsboro, Alabama. Hughes visited the jailed suspects, known as the Scottsboro boys, in the midst of his 1931-1932 reading tour, wrote poems and a play about the case, and asked for support from figures such as Countee Cullen, John Dos Passos, W. C. Handy, Anita Loos, Claude McKay, George Bernard Shaw, and Ezra Pound, who responded with a statement that should confound those who would blithely dismiss Pound as a racist:

no govt. can go on forever if it allows the worst men in it to govern and if it lends itself repeatedly to flagrant injustice. There is no doubt in my mind that the extreme Southern states are governed by the worst there is in them […] All of which you are welcome to quote if you think it will do any good. I am not hiding my opinion.

(L [Ezra Pound, Selected Letters, 1907-1941] 241)

Significantly, this letter came in response not merely to Hughes's explicit call for assistance in the Scottsboro boys trial, but because Pound had received Scottsboro Limited, Hughes's volume of poetry denouncing the racism that led to the trial. Nonetheless, Pound dismissed Hughes's verse with a polite expression of thanks and quickly moved on to more important matters, namely the above statement. It was not until July of that year that Pound would offer his comments on the volumes that had made Hughes's reputation in America: The Weary Blues (1926) and Fine Clothes to the Jew (1927).

Pound may have been late in offering his opinion, but once he did, it was clearly after a sympathetic and respectful reading: “Now about yr / poems. I don't know whether you want yr / great granddad's opinion or not” (JWJ/Hughes 126/6/1). Pound, who as far as I can tell never remarked on the notorious title of Fine Clothes to the Jew, was particularly pleased with Hughes's use of the blues in that volume:

The strength of folk song gets into it because everything unnecessary is forgotten in the oral transmission. and simply drops out. I think you were dead right in starting with the “blues” as a model. AND there is nothing harder than to do a folk song once one has touched any sort of sophistication.

(JWJ/Hughes 126/6/1)

Pound clearly recognized the affinities between his own use of Provençal song forms and Hughes's use of the blues—in both cases, a vernacular, “closed” form was being used to produce a surprising vitality and freshness. As Pound had written in a 1930 letter to Louis Zukofsky:

Latin words do have a hackscent on some syllables more'n on others, like in English and amerikun but mostly you have to learn it a word at a time. The fun comes when it pulls against the verse accent, alle samme jazz etc. depending on whether the guy has nigger blood undsoweiter.

(L/LZ [Pound/Zukofsky: Selected Letters of Ezra Pound and Louis Zukofsky] 74)

Pound apparently heard in the language of African Americans a natural vitality and vernacular spontaneity that he felt standard English lacked—indeed, Pound seems to have considered black English the model for a contemporary vernacular.

Pound's definitive statement on black English is contained in an undated, unpublished essay—possibly a radio script from the early 1940s—called FOR THE AFRO=AMERICAN LANGUAGE. Here Pound claims that “one race and one race only” has resisted the “various caucasian and semi=eastern strains” that have “thineed [sic] out the vowel sounds” (Pound 43/94/3548). In this essay, the noise of racist interference cannot quite drown out a legitimate admiration:

God damn it I wish the yellow octaroons quadroons and spitoons 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 sophmore. Damn it, nigguh; when you got som'thin' better n the white man; why the hell can't you keep it.

(Pound 43/94/3458)

Pound wrote, however, from longstanding interest in African American culture. Among Pound's earliest letters preserved in his papers at Yale is an 1891 request for Santa Claus to bring Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (Pound 53/41/1560). Although Pound grew up in an all-white suburb of Philadelphia, he seems to have had enough exposure to African Americans, both in Philadelphia and on visits to New York, to claim, forty years later: “I wuz riz among nigguhs” (qtd. in Flory 76). In the 1920s and 1930s Pound contributed to periodicals celebrating the black arts, he proselytized unceasingly on behalf of Frobenius and the value of African culture, and he even planned to set an African rock drawing of a “negro on the hop” (L/JL [Ezra Pound and James Laughlin: Selected Letters] 153-4) beside a Chinese ideogram on the title page of The Cantos. Perhaps most famously, there were the black voices:

          “doan yu tell no one I made it”
                              from a mask fine as any in Frankfurt
“It'll get you offn th' groun”

(81/519)

that Pound heard while imprisoned near Pisa in the summer of 1945, and whose natural grace he celebrated in The Pisan Cantos.

However, Pound's celebration of black English and African culture—he often elided the two—was not as benign as it sometimes seems; the modernist embrace of black English depended on a distance that made the claim of sameness safe. Pound prided himself on a liberal view of non-European cultures, especially in comparison to that of Eliot—“how you gwine ter keep deh Possum in his feedbox,” he wrote to F. V. Morley in 1937, “when I brings in deh Chinas and blackmen?? He won't laaak fer to see no Chinas and blackmen in a bukk about Kulchur” (L 288). Nonetheless, three years later Pound wrote to Eliot, “I know you jib at China and Frobenius cause they ain't pie church; and neither of us likes sabages, black habits, etc.” (L 336). Indeed, while Pound's affection for black culture allowed him to understand Hughes's use of the blues as a legitimately modernist transformation of folk material, Pound's ideas about “sabages, black habits etc.” prevented him from recognizing the ways in which Hughes was striving after long forms.

In his initial response to Hughes's poems in 1932, Pound ignored the sense in which both The Weary Blues and Fine Clothes to the Jew are more than collections of short verses. As such, Pound's initial misreading of Hughes was almost as blatant as Hughes's initial misreading of Pound. Pound wrote:

If it means anything to you that I find the stuff toward the end of the second vol. better made. A poem, especially in vers libre, but ANY poem ought to be like a steel spring with the ends held firm so that the whole thing is kept tense. I think you're firmer in poems like Railroad Ave. and Ruined Gal than in most of the earlier poems. Every word that don't work ought to be put out “sinister” does no good in Ruby Brown.

(JWJ/Hughes 126/6/1)

As of 1932, Pound had clearly not lost his sharp editorial sense, at least for close reading; to leave the “sinister” out of the line “And the sinister shuttered houses of the bottoms” (CP [The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes] 73) in “Ruby Brown” keeps the line taut and powerful. Like an obedient “great-grandson” of the modernists, Pound suggested, Hughes ought to allow the bare image, not an authorial intervention, to do the work. But the vision that allowed Pound a decade earlier to see The Waste Land's larger shape was nowhere in evidence when Pound read Hughes. The only defense I can offer is the fact that most of Hughes's contemporaries, black and white, failed or refused to see Fine Clothes to the Jew as a long poem. Perhaps Hughes himself doubted his larger vision; after all, in his 1959 Selected Poems he broke up the sequence, destroying the sense of progress and redemption in the six-section poem, which begins in uncertainty and hard luck at sunset, passes through the dark night of religion, sex, and love, and ends with a bluesy but hopeful sunrise.

In the decades that followed, Pound continued to deny Hughes anything more than the lyric sensibility of a latter-day minstrel. In his readings of Hughes's subsequent work, Pound consistently focused on individual words at the expense of larger patterns—precisely the opposite of Hughes's initial sycophancy. Just as he completely missed the sense of Fine Clothes to the Jew as more than a simple collection of light verses, Pound denied the seriousness of the achievement of Montage of a Dream Deferred (1951), this time sweetening his dismissal in a compliment: “am ylad to git some po'try I can read” (Pound 53/21/796), Pound wrote Hughes in March 1951. In fact, Montage of a Dream Deferred presents itself as a High Modernist long poem, missing not a trick from the repertoire: fragmentation, the primacy of form, the integration of non-poetic material, and the sense of a culture in crisis, not to mention an ultimately redemptive “narrative.” However, in Pound's eyes, it seems that the best that Hughes could hope for was the clarity and simplicity of “po'try”—as opposed to Pound's own “poetry,” in which a readable vernacular could properly express the universal values of high culture. The highest tribute Pound could come up with a month later was a playful imitation of the rhythm that opens and closes Montage, but with a hidden barb comparing Hughes to one of the most famous of American “po'tasters”:

Have yu heard
Vachel L.
                              did n'
                                                  say deh
                                                                      las' word

(Pound 53/21/796)

Given Pound's low opinion of Vachel Lindsay, this is small praise indeed.

Perhaps in the end, it was not distance, but proximity that might account for the ways in which these two poets so misread one another. Consider Hughes's contribution running alongside Pound's essay in that September 1931 issue of Contempo:

I'm looking for a house
In the world
Where the white shadows
Will not fall.
There is no such house,
Dark brothers,
No such house
At all.

(CP 138)

Here Hughes invents the notion of “white shadows” to rethink the roles of those who supposedly give light, and those who supposedly live in darkness—suggesting that “poetry” and “po'try” in Pound's terms, are not only related, but interdependent. After all, in every way that counts—the mask, the fragment, the vernacular, the myth, the reworking of genealogies—the literary movements that Pound and Hughes spear-headed are truly distinguishable only in terms of race. Even there, the “other” voices that both Pound's Modernism and Hughes's Harlem Renaissance so depended on for their subjects and poetics were not something far “out there,” but something deep “in here.”

Note

1. Most of the surviving correspondence between Ezra Pound and Langston Hughes is held at Yale University's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, New Haven, CT, in the Ezra Pound and James Weldon Johnson/Langston Hughes collections. Where possible, I have retained the punctuation, spelling, and page layout of these materials and cited them by collection, box, and file number.

Works Cited

Baker, Houston A. Jr. Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987.

Flory, Wendy Stallard. The American Ezra Pound. New Haven: Yale UP, 1989.

Hughes, Langston. The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes. Ed. Arnold Rampersad. New York: Knopf, 1994.

———. Fine Clothes to the Jew. New York: Knopf, 1927.

———. Selected Poems. New York: Vintage, 1959; repr. 1974.

———. Simple Speaks His Mind. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1950.

North, Michael. “The Dialect in/of Modernism.” American Literary History 4/1 (Spring 1992): 56-76.

Pound, Ezra. Ezra Pound and James Laughlin: Selected Letters. Ed. David M. Gordon. New York: Norton, 1994.

———. Ezra Pound, Selected Letters, 1907-1941. Ed. D. D. Paige. New York: New Directions, 1950.

———. “A Letter to Ezra Pound,” in Negro Anthology, ed. Nancy Cunard. London, 1934; repr. New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969. 141.

———. Literary Essays of Ezra Pound. Ed. T. S. Eliot. New York: New Directions, 1954.

———. Personae: The Collected Poems of Ezra Pound. New York: Boni and Liveright, 1926; repr. New York: New Directions, 1971.

———. Pound/Zukofsky: Selected Letters of Ezra Pound and Louis Zukofsky. Ed. Barry Ahearn. New York: New Directions, 1987.

———. The Cantos. New York: New Directions, 1983.

Rampersad, Arnold. The Life of Langston Hughes. 2 vols. New York: Oxford UP, 1986.