Harry Ransom Center Scores Ezra Pound Materials

Ezra Pound, courtesy Harry Ransom Center

The Harry Ransom Center at UT Austin is literature's mecca, a near-sacred temple of the textual where one can venture to seek wisdom, inspiration, and, chief among others, context from their vast collection of letters, manuscripts, and assorted relics of past and present cultural icons.

Just this year alone, at the ripe young age of 50, they managed to acquire the archive of acclaimed British author Jim Crace, letters from Tennessee Williams and John Steinbeck, and an ancient Bible written in parallel in Latin, Hebrew, Greek, Syriac, Aramaic.

What's doubly impressive is that even as it extends its curatorial grasp to reach deeper into history, the Ransom Center has concurrently sought out contemporary mixed-media means by which to enrich their audience's interactions with their collections—take, for instance, the Beat Film Series they hosted at the Drafthouse in tandem with their "On the Road with the Beats" exhibition, or the myriad audio and video content they incorporated into their website earlier this year. If we wax enthusiastic about the HRC, it's because they bring to our city a cultural cachet that's hard to find anywhere else in Texas, or most of the country, for that matter.

Add to this a substantial collection of materials related to Ezra Pound, the famous American expat poet and pillar of the Modernist movement who dallied with the Dadas during his tenure in pre-war Paris and later gained infamy after being accused of treason against the United States.

The acquisition, donated by Marcella Spann Booth, a good friend of Pound's and UT Austin alumna, consists of over a dozen boxes filled with letters, photographs, and various and sundry random personal effects—including, writes the HRC, "his walking stick, a lock of his baby hair, two chess sets... and a scrapbook documenting Pound's release from St. Elizabeth's [hospital], his voyage to Italy and his homecoming."

From the HRC:

Pound, living in Italy during World War II, broadcast speeches on Rome Radio in favor of Mussolini. In May 1945, he was detained for treasonous activity in a U. S. military camp near Pisa, where despite harsh conditions and his troubled mental state, he composed “The Pisan Cantos.”
After the war ended, Pound was found unfit to stand trial and ordered institutionalized at St. Elizabeth’s. Over the years he entertained many visitors, including young people eager to learn from the eminent poet.

Spann Booth wrote to Pound in 1956, asking to visit him at St. Elizabeth's. Soon after, she became a student at the so-called "Ezraversity" there.

With other admirers, she listened to Pound discuss his work and completed her own "assignment," to co-edit with Pound the anthology "From Confucius to Cummings" (1964).

After Pound's release from St. Elizabeth's in 1958, Spann Booth, working as the poet's secretary, traveled to Italy with Pound and his wife Dorothy. Later, she enrolled in The University of Texas, where she earned a Ph.D. degree in English.

Pound, to his credit, later renounced his earlier beliefs, saying, "The worst mistake I made was that stupid, suburban prejudice of anti-Semitism." Personal biases aside, Pound left behind a substantial body of work and played a significant role in the evolution of modern literature—to the point where our own literary hero, Vladimir Nabokov, denounced him as a "total fake" alongside Brecht, Faulkner, and Camus.

"It is rare that a collection would become available today that could add so much to the scholarly record about arguably the most ubiquitous of the moderns," said Thomas F. Staley, director of the Ransom Center. "This untapped collection will be a remarkable resource for scholars of 20th-century literature."