William Brooke Smith (died 1908) was an American painter and friend of Ezra Pound. His death from tuberculosis greatly affected Pound, who dedicated his first poetry collection, A Lume Spento , to Smith.
William Brooke Smith was living in Philadelphia by 1901. In a 1921 letter to William Carlos Williams, Smith's friend Ezra Pound wrote "How in Christ's name he came to be in Phila.—and to know what he did at age 17–25—I don't know." [1] Pound's friend Hilda Doolittle recalled that Smith was "tall, graceful, with a 'butterfly bow' tie", and that a letter he had sent Pound was "poetic, effusive, written, it appeared, with a careful spacing of lines and unextravagant margin". [2]
Smith met Pound, then a freshman at the University of Pennsylvania, in 1901 or 1902, when the latter was aged sixteen. [3] The two became friends, in one of Pound's first true friendships. As Smith was an avid reader, he introduced Pound to the works of English decadents such as Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley; [4] [5] this included gifting Pound a copy of Wilde's Salome . [6] Smith's sister had given him a copy of Edward FitzGerald's The Rubaiyat , containing works by Sufi writer Omar Khayyam. As such, Pound's daughter Mary de Rachewiltz suggests that the two may have discussed "Soufi and Mystics, wine, beauty, Pantheism, and painting". [7]
From 1902 to 1905 Smith studied at the Philadelphia College of Art, living on Diamond Street. Pound would sometimes attend classes with him. [3] After graduation, Smith and Pound kept in touch. One letter from Smith, from 1907, was posted from a home on Franklin Street. [3]
Smith died in 1908 of tuberculosis. When news of this reached Pound, he was devastated. He soon renamed the poetry collection he had been working on, meant to be titled La Fraisne (The Ash Tree) after one of its first poems, as A Lume Spento (With Tapers Spent). In his dedication, Pound wrote:
... sith one of has gone out from amongst us it [is] given
A LUME SPENTO
(WITH TAPERS QUENCHED)
in memoriam eius mihi caritate primus
WILLIAM BROOKE SMITH
Painter, Dreamer of dreams [8]
The title of the collection, A Lume Spento, is a reference to the third canto of Dante's Purgatorio , is an allusion to the death of Manfred, King of Sicily, and his funeral procession in the earlier work. [9] [4] Pound critic Hugh Witemeyer writes that, overall, the implication is that Smith had led an unorthodox life like that of Manfred, [4] a conclusion with which Daniel Tiffany agrees, writing that the dedication implied Smith was "a heretic of sorts, a renegade". [10]
Smith's death continued to weigh on Pound; he wrote in 1922 that "thirteen years are gone; I haven't replaced him and shan't and no longer hope to". [8] Tiffany finds that, in Canto 77, Pound refers to Smith as "the wraith of my best friend", an allusion to Dante's description of his best friend, Guido Cavalcanti; [1] Mary Paterson Cheadle concurs with this conclusion, though she suggests sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska as another possibility. [11] Tiffany describes Smith as still "haunting" Pound in Hugh Selwyn Mauberley , as Elpenor to Odysseus, [12] and writes that, ultimately, Pound was unable to put the "ghost" to rest. [13]
Letters between Smith and Pound were rediscovered by James J. Wilhelm and published in 1990. Tiffany writes that these letters show "the closeness of their friendship – and perhaps something more than friendship": in these 1907 letters, Smith refers to Pound as "my dear boy", writes that Pound is "very dear to me", and reminds him to "take the best care of yourself, especially the part that isn't seen". [1]
Ezra Weston Loomis Pound was an expatriate American poet and critic, a major figure in the early modernist poetry movement, and a fascist collaborator in Italy during World War II. His works include Ripostes (1912), Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920), and his 800-page epic poem, The Cantos (c. 1917–1962).
Imagism was a movement in early-20th-century Anglo-American poetry that favored precision of imagery and clear, sharp language. It is considered to be the first organized modernist literary movement in the English language. Imagism is sometimes viewed as "a succession of creative moments" rather than a continuous or sustained period of development. The French academic René Taupin remarked that "it is more accurate to consider Imagism not as a doctrine, nor even as a poetic school, but as the association of a few poets who were for a certain time in agreement on a small number of important principles".
Hilda Doolittle was an American poet, novelist, and memoirist, associated with the early 20th-century avant-garde Imagist group of poets, including Ezra Pound and Richard Aldington. She published under the pen name H.D.
This article contains information about the literary events and publications of 1908.
Eustace Clarence Mullins Jr. was an American white supremacist, antisemitic conspiracy theorist, propagandist, Holocaust denier, and writer. A disciple of the poet Ezra Pound, his best-known work is The Secrets of The Federal Reserve, in which he alleged that several high-profile bankers had conspired to write the Federal Reserve Act for their own nefarious purposes, and then induced Congress to enact it into law. The Southern Poverty Law Center described him as "a one-man organization of hate".
Dorothy Shakespear was an English artist. She was the daughter of novelist Olivia Shakespear and the wife of American poet Ezra Pound. One of a small number of women vorticist painters, her art work was published in BLAST, the short-lived but influential literary magazine.
Boris de Rachewiltz (1926–1997) was an Italian-Russian Egyptologist and writer on Africa and the ancient world.
Mary de Rachewiltz is an Italian-American poet and translator.
Ira Bruce Nadel is an American-Canadian biographer, literary critic and James Joyce scholar, and a distinguished professor at the University of British Columbia. He has written books on the twentieth-century Modernists, especially Ezra Pound and Joyce, biographies of Leonard Cohen and Leon Uris, and on Jewish-American authors. He has won Canadian literary awards, and has edited and written the introduction to a number of scholarly books and period pieces. He is a critic of the Olympic torch relay as a legacy of the Nazis.
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.
John Kasper was a Ku Klux Klan member and segregationist who took a militant stand against racial integration during the civil rights movement.
Blasting and Bombardiering is the autobiography of the English painter, novelist, and satirist Percy Wyndham Lewis. It was published in 1937. It was in this work that Lewis first identified the critically oft-mentioned "Men of 1914" group of himself, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and James Joyce.
"The Parable of the Sunfish" is an anecdote with which Ezra Pound opens ABC of Reading, a 1934 work of literary criticism. Pound uses this anecdote to emphasize an empirical approach for learning about art, in contrast to relying on commentary rooted in abstraction. While the parable is based on students' recollections of Louis Agassiz's teaching style, Pound's retelling diverges from these sources in several respects. The parable has been used to illustrate the benefits of scientific thinking, but more recent literary criticism has split on whether the parable accurately reflects the scientific process and calls into question Pound's empirical approach to literature.
A Lume Spento is a 1908 poetry collection by Ezra Pound. Self-published in Venice, it was his first collection.
Cathay (1915) is a collection of classical Chinese poetry translated into English by modernist poet Ezra Pound based on Ernest Fenollosa's notes that came into Pound's possession in 1913. At first Pound used the notes to translate Noh plays and then to translate Chinese poetry to English, despite a complete lack of knowledge of the Chinese language. The volume's 15 poems are seen less as strict translations and more as new pieces in their own right; and, in his bold translations of works from a language he was unfamiliar with, Pound set the stage for modernist translations.
The Spirit of Romance is a 1910 book of literary criticism by the poet Ezra Pound. It is based on lectures he delivered at the Regent Street Polytechnic in London between 1908 and 1909 and deals with a variety of European literatures. As with Pound's later, unfinished poem The Cantos, the book follows "a pattern, at once historical and atemporal, of cultural beginnings and rebeginnings".
Petr Mikeš was a Czech poet, translator, and editor. In the 1970s and 1980s he took part in the samizdat edition Texty přátel. From 1993–1997 he was the influential editor-in-chief of the Moravian publishing house Votobia, and from 2000–2004 at the Periplum publishing house. He was a significant translator of Ezra Pound into Czech. He translated members of Pound's "circle", including Basil Bunting, T.E. Hulme, and James Joyce, and even wrote a screenplay for a biopic on the life of Ezra Pound, Solitary Volcano (unproduced).
A Quinzaine for this Yule is a collection of poetry by Ezra Pound.
Harriet Zinnes was an American poet, fiction writer, translator, art critic, literary scholar and professor. She is associated with poets such as Karl Shapiro, Delmore Schwartz, and Allen Ginsberg, and the writer Anaïs Nin.