Lines of Division

This chapter opens by acknowledging Nancy Cunard’s and Ezra Pound’s divided views on the Spanish Civil War but then argues for the importance of their collaborative associations before and afterwards. Considering Pound’s influence on both Cunard’s poetry and her publishing ventures, as well as her introducing Pound to Langston Hughes’s poetry, Jennifer Kilgore-Caradec recounts others important to Cunard, such as the African American jazz pianist Henry Crowder, to whom Pound pays tribute in The Pisan Cantos. Cunard’s The Hours Press (founded 1928) published known and unknown authors, including Pound and the anthology, NEGRO (1934), which featured contributions from Hughes and an anonymous letter to Pound. From 1936 on, as a journalist, Cunard reported on the Spanish Civil War, then assisted refugees after the war. She also commissioned writers across Europe to state their positions on the war for the Left Review, to which both T. S. Eliot and Pound replied, unconventionally. Concerning Cunard’s writing, Kilgore-Caradec examines her and Hughes’s differences with Pound yet documents the three writers’ regard for each other, noting Pound’s and Cunard’s later friendship, and Hughes’s visit to Pound at St. Elizabeths.