‘We Discuss Guido Cavalcanti and Only Quarrel a Little’ – Yeats on Pound
YEATS, William Butler. A Packet for Ezra Pound. Dublin: Cuala Press. [June] 1929.
8vo. Publisher’s linen-backed boards with blue paper sides, upper board lettered in black, printed spine label, blue endpapers, bookseller’s ticket to front pastedown; pp. [1], [3 (blank)], 37, [2]; woodcut vignette to title by Thomas Sturge Moore; slight discolouration to spine, a few small stains to cloth; a very good, clean copy.
First edition, one of 425 copies, of Yeats’s musings on his complex relationship with Pound, later forming the introduction for his 1937 revision of A Vision, print-ed by Elizabeth ‘Lolly’ Corbet Yeats, Yeats’s sister and co-founder of the Cuala Press in Dublin.
Yeats and his wife arrived in Rapallo, near Genoa – a reflection on which opens the present work – in February 1928 for William’s health. Ezra and Dorothy Pound had been there since 1924. Here, Yeats characterises Pound’s ‘art as the opposite of mine’; his ‘criticism con-demns what I most condemn, a man with whom I should quarrel more than with anyone else if we were not united by affection. Here, Yeats describes, inter alia, his lengthy conversations with Pound in Rapallo on the structure and development of the Cantos, Pound feeding the stray cats of Rapallo, his conflicted and shifting reception of Pound’s work (‘I had never understood until now that the translations from Chinese, from Latin, from Provençal, are as much a part of his original work … as the vituperation, the railing, which I had hated but which now seem a necessary balance’), and a long letter to Pound.
Elizabeth Yeats had trained at the Women’s Printing Society in London at the suggestion of Emery Walker of the Doves Press, and in 1908 she and her sister Lily set up Cuala Industries, an embroidery workshop and printing house. ‘In total she published seventy-seven volumes […] each corresponding to their earliest ideal of 14 point Caslon old style font, light ivory-toned rag, mould-made paper manufactured near Dublin, bound in a small quarto format between blue- or grey-covered boards with a linen spine. Her clearly legible, slender volumes with their distinctive paper labels may be seen as the sole survivors of the handcrafted ideal established in 1900 by Walker and T. J. Cobden-Sanderson’s Doves Press’ (ODNB). W. B. Yeats was the press’s editor, and the Cuala Press published more than twenty of his works.
Wade 163; postdates Ransom (see pp. 238–41).
SKU: 2124690