Review

Reviewed Work(s): Ezra Pound: Poet; A Portrait of the Man and His Work by Moody
Review by: Lawrence Rainey
Source: Modern Philology, Vol. 113, No. 1 (August 2015), pp. E50-E52
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/681210
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 BOOK REVIEW

Ezra Pound: Poet; A Portrait of the Man and His Work, vol. 2, The Epic
Years, 19211939. A. David Moody. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.
Pp. xvii421.

When Hugh Kenner published The Pound Era in 1971, he assumed the
role of eager contrarian, relishing the occasion to turn the tables on those
who thought they had been living through the age of Eliot. But since 1995
Pounds fortunes have been in decline. Yes, it is conceded, he did much to
shape The Waste Land and bring Ulysses to a wider audience through its
serial publication, but The Cantos remain a daunting proposition, and youn-
ger audiences can scarcely understand why Pound adopted political posi-
tions that strike all but a few as very wrongheaded.
Moody has produced a very thorough investigation into Pounds many
activities during the years 1921 to 1939. He provides exact dates for all of
Pounds many journeys, a genuinely difficult task. He underscores Pounds
musical compositions and theories, evaluating them more highly than pre-
vious biographers and critics. He picks through the vast supply of Pounds
journalism and correspondence, noting the economic obsessions and
mounting anti-Semitism. He traces the evolution of Pounds Cantos and of-
fers deft analyses of various groupings. But there are also some problems.
Consider his treatment of the Malatesta cantos, or cantos 811, named
after Sigismondo Malatesta (141768), who ruled over Rimini, Italy, and
who is remembered chiefly for his reconstruction of the church of San
Francesco (or Saint Francis), sometimes referred to as the Tempio Malates-
tiano. Discussing canto 8, the first of the Malatesta cantos, Moody writes:
At the exact centre of the canto is a single verse from a love song Sigis-
mondo wrote for Isotta, and this is given in Pounds translation a most
musical measure which sets it utterly apart from the documentary style
which it interrupts. In its invocation of the pagan spirits who of old were in

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E50

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 Book Review E51

this land, and its directing them to awaken / The summer within her
mind, it represents what moved him to build the Tempio (49). This ac-
count entails several difficulties. The first is its claim that Sigismondo wrote
this love song for Isotta, a claim first advanced by the French journalist
Charles Yriarte, who found the poem in a manuscript in the Vatican Library
and called it la plus caracteristique of Sigismondos works.1 Alas, already
in 1911 the scholar Aldo Francesca Masse`ra noted that eleven other manu-
scripts attributed the same poem to Simone Serdini, a poet from Siena who
had enjoyed close relations with Rimini and its rulers. The mistaken attri-
bution in the Vatican manuscript was an error characteristic of later collec-
tions, which typically assigned works by lesser-known writers to others better
known, often their patrons.2 Much worse, Serdini had died in 1419 or
1420, making it unlikely that his poem referred to Sigismondo Malatesta
(then three years old) or Isotta degli Atti (then not yet born). Pound, who
never came across the essay by Masse`ra, evidently accepted Yriartes attribu-
tion of the poem to Sigismondo. But why does Moody do so now, over a
century after Masse`ras essay first appeared?
A more serious error is concealed in the phrase what moved him to
build the Tempio. Moody spells this out more explicitly when, for example,
he describes Sigismondos love of Isotta . . . that moved him to refound
the world (i.e., build the Tempio; 42) or mentions the Tempio with . . . its
honouring Isottas divinity (45) or notes Sigismondos effort to build a fit-
ting monument to his love (51) or refers to Sigismondos temple for Isotta
and the pagan gods (84) or cites Sigismondos odd and wonderful monu-
ment to his love for Isotta and to the gods (88). In short, Moody believes
that the Tempio was constructed in order to honor Isotta degli Atti and the
pagan gods. But he offers no evidence for this claim, largely because there is
none to offer. The inscriptions on both sides of the church clearly state that
it is dedicated to God and the city. The six bishops and two abbots who
attended the consecration ceremony for the chapel of San Sigismondo,
which took place on March 1, 1452, certainly did not think they were attend-
ing an event secretly honoring pagan gods or Isotta.
Both terms, pagan gods and Isotta, require further elucidation. The
church of San Francesco, after Sigismondos interventions in the period
144858, was left with a vast (though incomplete) program of sculptural
decorations by Agostino di Duccio. Bas-reliefs depict a Sybil, the rape of
Ganymede, and the triumph of Diana, to name only a few. Their signifi-
cance has been a source of much speculation. It was not until 1958 that

1. Charles Yriarte, Un Condottiere au XVe sie`cle: Rimini, etudes sur les lettres et les arts a` la cour des
Malatesta (Paris, 1882), 139.
2. Aldo Francesca Masse`ra, I poeti isottei, Giornale storico della letteratura italiana 57 (1911):
132.

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E52 MODERN PHILOLOGY

M. Shapiro wrote a PhD thesis that placed the sculptures in relation to

Macrobius and his Commentary on the Dream of Scipio, a dream-vision that Cic-
ero inserted into book 6 of his De re publica. Since Sigismondo claimed to
be a descendant of Scipio, the material by Cicero and Macrobius could be
adapted to advance a program of dynastic self-aggrandizement of the sort
celebrated by the decorations of the church of San Francesco. But because
the building was abruptly left incomplete, later and more overtly Christian
bas-reliefs were not used (see, for example, the Virgin and Child, by Agos-
tino di Duccio, held at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London). The
idea that the church was devoted to pagan gods is absurd.3 Pound may well
have believed it, but why does Moody?
No contemporary documents suggest that the church was dedicated to
Isotta. This was a late Romantic notion that thrived between 1850 and
1900. The only evidence adduced in its favor was the entwined letters S and
I found in the church, held to be abbreviations for Sigismondo and Isotta.
But as Giovanni Soranzo demonstrated in 1909, using the first two letters of
someones name as an abbreviation was commonplace in quattrocento
Italy; Sigismondos son, Roberto, deployed the seal RO everywhere, and he
was not married to anyone named Oriana.4 Besides, the most common
spelling of Isottas name during her lifetime was Ysotta or Yxotta, rather
than Isotta. The late Romantic myth that turned the church into a temple
dedicated to her was just thata myth. That Pound believed in it was an
interpretive choice that he self-consciously made. But why does Moody
want to present it as historical fact, rather than fantasy?
These are some of the many questions that arise from this book. Moody
details Pounds deepening devotion to Mussolini but warns, There is a
problem, and there will be so long as the actual Mussolini is remembered,
in accepting the Mussolini of the Cantos as a hero of the struggle for univer-
sal social justice (180). One could argue with several of these terms, but the
most astounding may well be universal social justice. Was that really the
aim of the Cantos? Is that not a bit grandiose? Or does it point to a deeper
problem in Pounds psychology, an all-or-nothing attitude that consigns
everything to the categories of good or evil? In reality, the difficult ethical
decisions require choosing between competing goods and lesser evils.
Lawrence Rainey
University of York

3. But the Tempio, evidently, is not a pagan sanctuary: its a Christian church, a sacred
monument dedicated to God and the city for the worship of Christians (Charles Mitchell, Il
Tempio Malatestiano, in Studi malatestiani, ed. Philip James Jones et al. [Rome: Istituto storico
italiano per il medio evo, 1978], 96).
4. Giovanni Soranzo, La sigla SI di Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta, La Romagna 6
(1909): 30624.

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