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     In 1949, the Fellows of the U.S. Library of Congress awarded the Bollingen Prize in poetry to Ezra Pound’s Pisan Cantos. Pound had been declared insane and confined to St. Elizabeth’s mental hospital in 1945 in order to avoid his facing the death penalty for treason. Anti-modernist poet and critic Robert Hillyer attacked the award as immoral, given Pound’s pro-fascist past; a variety of American poets and critics responded. Asked for an essay on Pound and the Bollingen Prize, Randall Jarrell began, but never finished, an essay he called ‘The Pound Affair’.

     Probably slightly later, in 1950, Jarrell began a larger essay, tentatively called ‘Notes on Pound’, which never progressed beyond the stage of outlines and sentences in notebooks. Jarrell had conceived that essay as a review of Pound’s 1949 Selected Poems, and as a response to recent essays on Pound by Eliot, R.P. Blackmur and John Berryman, who in Jarrell’s view “overestimate [Pound’s] poetry: potentially he seems quite as good as they say, but actually he rarely is”. Other notes concern Pound’s overlooked and substantial, in Jarrell’s view, debts to Heine, and the origins of Pound’s allusive prose style. Parts of ‘Notes on Pound’ (but not of ‘The Pound Affair’) made it into Jarrell’s later reviews and essays concerning Pound, notably in his 1962 ‘Fifty Years of American Poetry’. Jarrell’s other admiring and critical views on Pound may be found in his reviews of successive volumes of The Cantos, collected in Kipling, Auden & Co. (1980) and excerpted in No Other Book (1999).

     Presented here is Jarrell’s last draft of ‘The Pound Affair’, along with paragraphs from notebooks and earlier drafts that seem both relatively finished and clearly intended for ‘Notes on Pound’ or ‘The Pound Affair’. All that remains of ‘The Pound Affair’, along with ‘Notes on Pound’, can be found in Jarrell’s notebooks and papers at the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library.

     My thanks to the Berg Collection for their assistance, and to Mary von S. Jarrell for allowing this material to be published.