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Frost and Pound, lost and found

It's easy to lose an afternoon on the fifth floor of Mugar Memorial Library, pulling original bound volumes of Poetry magazine from the open stacks and watching literary history unfold in your hands. The early numbers read like the minutes of a meeting at which modern poetry was plotted. In the volume that spans October 1913 to March 1914, you can find Yeats' long poem "The Two Kings," Frost's "The Code - Heroics," and Edwin Arlington Robinson's masterpiece, "Eros Turannos." You can also find two poems by H. D. (Hilda Doolittle), seven by Ezra Pound, and eight by D. H. Lawrence, none of whom was yet 30.

It's especially interesting to see so many titanic reputations still waiting to be made. Or unmade. The Helen Haire Levinson Prize, for the best poem or group of poems published between October 1913 and October 1914, went not to Frost or Robinson but to Carl Sandburg for his "Chicago" sequence - poems that have not aged nearly so well in the eyes of most literary scholars. In the June 1915 issue, while the magazine's critic was swooning over Spoon River Anthology, a curious poem called "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," by T. S. Eliot, made its quiet first appearance.

That it appeared at all was thanks to the lobbying of Ezra Pound, Poetry's flamboyant foreign correspondent. Pound would eventually discover James Joyce as well, securing his status as the pivotal figure in the development of modernism before starting down the road to mental illness and abhorrent profascist politics. The May 1913 issue of Poetry contains what may be the first hard evidence of Pound's literary prescience.

"There is . . . in the realm of verse another American, found, as usual, on this side of the water," wrote Pound, who was then living in England. "David Nutt publishes at his own expense A Boy's Will, by Robert Frost, the latter having been long scorned by the 'great American editors.' It is the old story."

Despite "a number of infelicities," Pound concluded that Frost's poetry "has the tang of the New Hampshire woods, and it has just this utter sincerity. . . . This man has the good sense to speak naturally and to paint the thing, the thing as he sees it. And to do this is a very different matter from gunning about for the circumplectious polysyllable. . . . He is without sham and without affectation."

That review, by contrast, may have been the only piece of Pound's writing that Frost ever admired. In a letter dated October 10, 1913 - one of nearly 250 featured in The Less Traveled Road, a Special Collections exhibition of Frost papers that opened recently on Mugar's first floor - Frost offered this unsparing assessment:

"Ezra Pound, my fellow countryman, is one of the most describable of [the young poets Frost had met in England]. He is six inches taller for his hair and hides his lower jaw in a delicate gold filagree [sic] of almost masculine beard. His coat is of heavy black velvet. He lives in Grub Street, rich one day and poor the next. His friends are the duchesses. And he swears like a pirate and he writes what is known as vers libre and he translates from French Provincial, Latin, and Italian. He and I have tried to be friends because he was one of the first to review me well, but we don't hit it off very well together. I get on better with fellows like [Wilfrid] Gibson who are less concerned to dress the part of poet. Gibson is a much greater poet, too."

That's one pronouncement that hasn't aged quite as well as Frost's poems.

6 April 2001
Boston University
Office of University Relations