A Carthaginian Peace

Michael Coyle revisits the work of the now almost forgotten Harold H. Watts, who in 1947 was the first to give Pound’s work “professional attention.” Even before the uproar over awarding the first Bollingen Prize for Poetry to The Pisan Cantos in 1949, there appeared the first academic study of Pound’s work. But the 1951 appearance of Hugh Kenner’s astutely designed book, The Poetry of Ezra Pound, with its expressly aesthetic reading of Pound, undermined Watts’s criticism, eventually relegating his work to obscurity. Watts took the doomed position that, as Coyle puts it, “in order to understand Pound better we need to leave Poundian locutions behind,” while in “dramatic contrast,“ he notes, “Kenner strove wherever possible to adhere to Pound’s own figures and formulations.” Not only did Kenner manage “practically to obliterate” Watts’s work, but he became the architect of the foundation of the academic discussion of Pound ever since.