Pound and Unamuno

This chapter provides a detailed history of Ezra Pound’s correspondence with Spanish existentialist philosopher and writer, Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936), a representative of the so-called Generation of ’98 and later Rector of the University of Salamanca, who ardently admired Anglo-American literature. In 1920, as a “foreign agent” for The Dial, Pound tried to open the journal to Spanish Literature and started corresponding with Unamuno. Miriam Borham-Puyal introduces the two poets’ brief correspondence and considers the implicit connections in thought and literary taste between them, as evidenced in previously unpublished material from Unamuno’s archives at the University of Salamanca. She discusses both the influence of literature in English on Unamuno’s writing and his influence on the English-speaking writer. She concludes that, although the full exchange that Pound may have envisioned having with Unamuno never materialized, nonetheless the two poets share significant convictions about the cross-cultural, cross-linguistic, transnational role of modern poetry.