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Two legendary poets formed friendship at Penn that would change the course of American Poetry.

By Samuel Hughes
Sidebar | Pound’s Letters to Dr. Felix Schelling


AN APRIL EVENING, 1903. The gloaming of an era. High up in Philadelphia’s Academy of Music, a handsome, olive-skinned medical student sits by himself, taking in the scene before him with dark, calmly observant eyes. Far below, on stage, a Chorus of 15 “captive maidens” sways in a circular dance, singing. It is the University’s production of Iphigenia Among the Taurians, and every detail, from the maidens’ gowns to the scenery, has been carefully interpreted from antiquity by the Department of Greek. The entire play is in Greek, for that matter, and while the program does contain an English-prose translation for hoi polloi, a reviewer would claim that “a more select and cultivated audience never crowded the Academy.” 
   The medical student, William Carlos Williams, M’06, Hon’52, is focusing on one of the Greek maidens — who is actually his good friend Ezra Pound, C’05, G’06, then a 17-year-old sophomore. Pound and his fellow Chorus girls have spent months rehearsing their movements and honing their Greek, but although The Pennsylvanian’s reviewer will conclude that they went through their dances with “care and some grace,” Williams is not quite so reverent. Almost half a century later, he would recall in his Autobiography that his friend Pound “tore” at his “great blond wig” as he “waved his arms about and heaved his massive breasts in ecstacies of extreme emotion.” Now that’s entertainment.


BEFORE THEY BEGAN reinventing poetry in earnest, long before they became famous and infamous, fixed in the public mind as the Saint and the Sinner of modern American verse, Williams and Pound were students and close friends at Penn. It was a tempest-tossed friendship that would last for 60 years, somehow surviving not just their divergent poetic worldviews but also their very different personalities — not to mention Pound’s later political ravings and ugly bouts of anti-Semitism, his trial for treason and 12-year confinement in St. Elizabeth’s mental hospital. As friends, they fought and argued and called each other names. (“Dear Assen Poop,” begins one letter from Williams. “You’re too damned thickheaded to know you’re asleep — and have been from the beginning.” Pound, for his part, would call Williams “stupider than a mud-duck” for his published attack of Pound’s work.) “I could never take him as a steady diet,” Williams wrote later. “He was often brilliant but an ass. But I never (so long as I kept away) got tired of him, or, for a fact, ceased to love him …” The affection, and the respect, ran deeper than the rancor. And after them, poetry would never be the same.


MODERNISM, n: The use of nontraditional innovative forms of expression characteristic of many styles in the arts and literature of the 20th century. Thought by some to have been invented at the University of Pennsylvania circa 1906. 
   
All right, so the second part is not in Webster’s. And the notion does sound, at first blush, like a boosterish fiction, based on the coincidence of two of the movement’s most important poets having crossed paths here. But start asking scholars about it, and a funny thing happens: When it comes to American poetry, they agree. Even those who feel that the claim may be a bit hyperbolic acknowledge that it has a good deal of basis in fact.

“If you have Pound and Williams at the same place at a very formative time in their careers — there’s no parallel for that,” says Hugh Kenner, author of The Pound Era and many other books and articles on modern poetry. “Between them, they define a good deal of modernism.” 
   By the time they were at Penn, argues Dr. Alan Filreis, professor of English, “both Pound and Williams were energetically modern, theatrical, exciting, already innovative personalities. I am sure they galvanized what must have been already pretty exciting, heady late-night student conversations in the various literary nooks and crannies. It does well to think of them very much together.”
   Yet Pound was mostly writing overblown troubadour-style verse in those days — “I think of him as a sort of American Pre-Raphaelite poet then,” says Dr. Jean-Michel Rabaté, professor of English — while Williams was trying to emulate Keats, and losing something in the emulation. Both knew they wanted to write great poetry; neither had figured out how to do it. And they didn’t get any encouragement from the faculty. 
   But they did get unique — if very different — educations at Penn that would greatly influence the style and content of their writing. And they met each other. That friendship — and their friendship with another young poet, Hilda Doolittle, CCT’09, a student at Friends Central and Bryn Mawr who would become better known as H.D. — would soon have a catalytic effect on poetry. 
   “It is true that not a whole lot of modern poetry was getting written at Penn,” says Jane Penner, a graduate student writing her dissertation on Williams. “Even Pound was doing pretty derivative stuff at that point. What was crucial was that network of friendships. For a long time, modernism was taught as something created by isolated individuals. In fact, a more productive idea of modernism was the idea of the group and the network of friendships. And in that sense, Penn becomes very crucial as a background for modernism.” 
   “They were not modernists when they were at the University,” agrees Dr. Emily Wallace, former professor of English at Penn and author of numerous articles on Williams and Pound and H.D. “But they were embarking on that endeavor, without quite knowing what road they would take.”


THE REIGN OF Queen Victoria had just ended when Pound and Williams enrolled at the College and the Medical School in 1901 and 1902, respectively. Theodore Roosevelt was in the White House. Sugar magnate Charles Custis Harrison, C1862, was the provost, and was pouring a good deal of his own money into new buildings, including the Medical Laboratories Building (now the John Morgan Building), whose opening in 1904 would signal an increasingly scientific approach to medicine. (Until then, the Medical Department was at the center of campus in Medical Hall, which would be renamed Logan Hall in 1905.) West Philadelphia, which only extended to about 48th Street, was a handsome residential neighborhood, connected with the rest of the city by trolleys. Horse-drawn cabs brought spectators to Franklin Field, where the leather-helmeted football team ran roughshod over its opponents. Houston Hall, the nation’s first student union, was essentially a gentlemen’s club, with a swimming pool in the basement. 
   Compared with many of its peer universities, Penn was “extremely elegant and in a sense luxurious,” says Emily Wallace. “At Harvard, they were still using a pump in the yard, and they had only one john per floor. It was a very austere and puritanical existence. But the University of Pennsylvania had these gorgeous new dormitories designed by Cope & Stewardson. Houston Hall was in mint condition. The Furness library was in mint condition. It must have been an exceptionally handsome campus.” 
   When Pound moved into the ground floor of the Memorial Tower Arch (what is now the Quad’s reception area and mailroom), the building was so new it didn’t even have a name. Williams lived at 303 Brooks, on the south side of what was known as the Triangle, overlooking Hamilton Walk; in the room next door a student named Morrison Van Cleve had a grand piano. Williams himself played the violin, but when he told Van Cleve that he was more interested in poetry, Van Cleve replied that he knew a “crazy guy” who also liked to write, and he thought the two of them “would get along marvelously.” He returned with Pound in tow, and according to Williams, “It took just one look, and I knew he was it!” 
   Freshmen in the College were required to take English composition, public speaking, algebra, German grammar, American Colonial history, principles of government in the United States, and Latin. That curriculum is in itself “a scenario for long stretches of the Cantos,” points out Kenner, referring to Pound’s often-arcane, epic-length poem. In fact, he says, “we may remark on its likeness to an extended elective curriculum and reflect that there is more to college than the freshman year.” 
   Medical students in those days studied physics, chemistry, anatomy, physiology, pathology, embryology, histology, and neurology, and their effect on young Bill Williams was profound. “It may have been my studies in medicine; it may have been my intense feeling of Americanism; anyhow I knew that I wanted reality in my poetry and I began to try to let it speak,” he wrote in I Wanted to Write a Poem. Hugh Crawford, author of Modernism, Medicine, and William Carlos Williams, says: “Without doubt, Williams was initiated into a particular thought style while at the University of Pennsylvania and while practicing” medicine in New Jersey. 
   Blackboards, with their cryptic, half-erased fragments of esoterica, were just beginning to function as a sort of modern palimpsest, argues Kenner in an essay on Pound and Williams titled “Poets at the Blackboard.” They were thus an inspiration for the modernist technique of fusing seemingly disparate subjects. The reason there are ideograms and hieroglyphics in the Cantos, and “a reproduction of a neon sign with the word SODA and some asterisks around it on a page of an early poem by Williams, the reason letters are, as it were, pinned to the pages of Paterson can be traced to that sort of connoisseurship — the connoisseurship of the enigmatic, emblematic sign, the sort of thing that is left on a blackboard by somebody else.” 
   Dr. Felix Schelling, a brilliant Elizabethan scholar with a distinctly Victorian sensibility, was chairman of the English department when Pound arrived. By then, the graduate section of the department had only been in existence for a decade. “It was quite revolutionary to grant Ph.D.’s in vernacular literature,” says Dr. Daniel Hoffman, the poet and emeritus professor of English who edited a collection of essays titled Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams: The University of Pennsylvania Conference Papers. “But in order to gain acceptance of that project, Schelling, like other scholars at Harvard and Yale and Columbia, had to present literary study as being verifiable as work in science. Hence the exclusive emphasis in those days on linguistics and historical studies. 
   “Pound — and Williams, too — found these approaches intolerant of the creative imagination, a situation which may in fact have persisted into later decades,” he adds. “And so one must conclude that it was fortunate for modern American poetry that they both enrolled at Penn. Because they were both contrarian from the word go.”


ANOTHER APRIL EVENING, this time in 1906. Williams sits down in his dormitory room (he had moved from 303 Brooks to 318 Joseph Leidy Hall, overlooking the lily pond, as the bio pond was then called) to write his mother a letter about a recent visit to the Pound family home in Wyncote, just north of Philadelphia. Pound, by then, was a graduate student, having returned from two years at Hamilton College in upstate New York, to which he transferred in 1903. 
After supper Pound and I went to his room where we had a long talk on subjects that I love yet have not time to study and which he is making a life work of. That is literature, and the drama and the classics, also a little philosophy. He, Pound, is a fine fellow; he is the essence of optimism and has a cast-iron faith that is something to admire. If he ever does get blue nobody knows it, so he is just the man for me. But not one person in a thousand likes him, and a great many people detest him and why? Because he is so darned full of conceits and affectation. He is really a brilliant talker and thinker but delights in making himself just exactly what he is not: a laughing boor. His friends must be all patience in order to find him out and even then you must not let him know it, for he will immediately put on some artificial mood and be really unbearable. It is too bad, for he loves to be liked, yet there is some quality in him which makes him too proud to try to please people. I am sure his only fault is an exaggeration of a trait that in itself is good and in every way admirable. He is afraid of being taken in if he trusts his really tender heart to mercies of a cruel crowd and so keeps it hidden and trusts no one … 
   
It’s a remarkable portrait of one artist as a young man by another. If Pound comes across as a brilliant, tender-hearted, insecure poseur, well, that’s probably what he was in those days. (He only really went off the deep end some 30 years later, and for what it’s worth, he later told the poet Allen Ginsberg that his greatest regret was succumbing to that “stupid, suburban prejudice of anti-Semitism.” Before that, he was known as an extraordinarily generous, if cantankerous, man — a “sort of saint,” in the words of Ernest Hemingway — who helped further the careers and improve the work of everyone from T. S. Eliot to James Joyce to William Butler Yeats.) 
   “Williams was very careful in drawing conclusions,” says Emily Wallace, “and he had been a friend of Pound’s since 1902. So by the time he wrote that letter, he had had a lot of time to diagnose the patient.” 
   Later, after several decades of diagnosis, Williams would write: 
I was fascinated by the man. He was the livest, most intelligent and unexplainable thing I’d ever seen, and the most fun — except for his often painful self-consciousness and his coughing laugh … And he had, at bottom, an inexhaustible patience, an infinite depth of human imagination and sympathy. Vicious, catty at times, neglectful, if he trusted you not to mind, but warm and devoted … 
   
Pound’s “early rekolektn” of Williams, he told him in a letter filled with his idiosyncratic spellings, “is you in a room on the South side of the triangle, and me sayin come on nowt, and you deciding on gawd an righteousness and the pursuit of labour in the form of Dr. Gumbo’s treatise on the lesions of the bungbone, or some other therapeutic compilation.” 
   “Before meeting Pound,” recalled Williams many years later, “is like B.C. and A.D. I had already started to write and was putting down my immortal thoughts daily. Little poems, pretty bad poems … He was not impressed. He was impressed with his own poetry; but then, I was impressed with my own poetry, too, so we got along all right.”


SAY IT: No ideas but in things! (Williams, Paterson
The natural object is always the perfect symbol. (Pound) 
   They were obsessed with things, those two: tangible objects from the physical world. (Though Pound, in his Penn days, was somewhat more mystical in his verse.) What things, I wonder, might they have taken from their time here? Well, the Flower Astronomical Observatory had to linger in the memories of both men, since it was there, in then-bucolic Upper Darby, that they would go to visit Hilda Doolittle, whose father was Penn astronomy professor Eric Doolittle. (“Ezra was wonderfully in love with her and I thought exaggerated her beauty ridiculously,” wrote Williams in his Autobiography. “To me she was just a good guy and I enjoyed, uncomfortably, being with her.”) 
   For Williams, I think of Thomas Eakins’s The Agnew Clinic, which he passed every time he entered the Medical Laboratories Building. (He was also a contributing art editor of the Scope, the Medical School’s yearbook, which used that painting as the frontispiece.) Skunk cabbage, since he wrote an ode on that pungent spring swamp-plant for Doolittle. (Bad move: “She listened incredulously and then burst into a guffaw, catching her breath the way only Hilda could — almost hysterical,” Williams recalled in I Wanted to Write a Poem. “I never tried it with her again.” Both Rabaté and Wallace delicately suggest that she was the better poet in those days.) Prunes, since it was over a bowl of that sweet fruit that he met another important modernist-to-be, the painter Charles Demuth, at a boarding house at 3615 Locust Street. A stethoscope, for listening and diagnosing, since as Kenner points out, “A surprising number of his poems were based on conversations, sometimes with patients.” A scalpel, for dissecting. (“Surely the similarity between the positions in which one holds a pen and a scalpel was not lost on Williams,” writes Crawford. “Neither was the importance of reading the body.” Williams himself recalled “falling in love” with the corpse of a light-skinned black woman, naked on the Medical School dissecting table.) 
   So much depends upon a wild, white beard, the one he wore as Polonius in the Mask & Wig’s production of Mr. Hamlet of Denmark. (When the Wiggers took their show to Washington, D.C., Williams ad-libbed a reference to President Theodore Roosevelt: “Has your Majesty been moose hunting?” It brought down the house.) Maybe a porcelain washbasin; Crawford points out that Williams the pediatrician had a strong interest in “sanitary management” that cropped up repeatedly in his work. 
   I pause at the last item — a nightshirt — but somehow I think he would agree that it belongs on this list. One night when he had visited Hilda Doolittle in Upper Darby and missed the last trolley back to campus, she invited him to sleep on the couch downstairs — whereupon, while wearing one of her father’s nightshirts, Williams proceeded to have an embarrassingly, um, amorous dream. 
   And for Pound? Well, Jean-Michel Rabaté suggests a maple bud, since Pound always had a deep, almost mystical attachment to trees. (He and Doolittle — whom he called “Dryad,” a spirit of the wood — spent passionate moments in the treehouse of a maple tree in her Upper Darby yard.) Rabaté also suggests a coin, since Pound’s father was an assayer at the U.S. Mint in Philadelphia, and Pound had a long (and often crackpot) interest in monetary matters. 
   I would add to that a big tin watch, which he was remembered for taking out and winding, very deliberately, in the back of one of his classes at Penn; and a pair of bright-colored socks, since it was his “loudness in half-hose” that prompted a group of students to throw the rebellious freshman into the lily pond one April day in 1902, giving him a coat of mud and the nickname “Lily” Pound. (It was later recalled that he “cursed his classmates in seven languages and returned the next day wearing the offending socks” — and if he had known seven languages at that time he probably would have.) 
   Take a football, and tell him to go deep: Pound enjoyed watching games at Franklin Field, even serving as an usher for a while. (A few years later, when he was living in London, he would compare his delight in meeting famous writers and hearing stories about them with the “sort of thrill that I used to have in hearing of the deeds of T. Truxtun Hare [C1900]; the sort that future freshmen will have in hearing how ‘Mike’ Bennett [C’03] stopped Weeks.”) 
   Hand them both a fencing foil, and watch out. Pound once said that he learned more from Signor Terrone, the Penn fencing instructor, than anybody else at the University, but Terrone found him too impulsive, and unlike Williams, he was never good enough to make the varsity team. One afternoon at his parents’ house in Wyncote, Pound plucked a couple of walking canes from the umbrella stand and challenged Williams to be en garde. After a few brief thrusts and easy parries, Williams recalled, Pound suddenly “came plunging wildly in without restraint, and hit me with the point of the cane above my right eye to fairly lay me out.” In William Carlos Williams: A New World Naked, Paul Mariani says that Williams was “still smarting” about that shot more than three decades later, grumbling that if he had wanted to he “could have shoved the stick through [Pound’s] mouth and out at his ass hole if it had been important enough to do so … I should have knocked hell out of him — but didn’t.” Mariani suggests that the incident may have been touched off by Pound not liking “the sense of covert rivalry he was smelling” in Williams’s attitude toward Doolittle. 
   I ask Daniel Hoffman for a thing, and he responds with an idea. What the two really took away from Penn, he says, “was the sense of there being a fixed and seemingly immutable canon and literary tradition — which both of them felt they would be damned if they didn’t blast apart.”


I WATCHED EZRA POUND go through college. I was in the Medical School without academic degree, studying physics, chemistry, anatomy, physiology, pathology. I watched Ezra — by direct effect — suffering the thrusts of his professors. That was the difference between us. 
   
Their educations at Penn were as different as their personalities. Williams had decided he would support himself financially — and help humanity at the same time — by becoming a doctor, and he had come straight to the Medical School from the Horace Mann School in New York (he had also studied abroad). His literary education at Penn consisted mainly of sneak-reading Keats and Victor Hugo between anatomy courses — and whatever he learned from Pound. 
   “The writing Williams did in Penn courses consisted mostly of case histories, a not-uninteresting discipline,” writes Kenner. “The case history is dense, it is cryptic, it is crisp, and it is factual. That is not a bad way to be writing day in, day out if God is determined to drive Keats from your mind.” In fact, Kenner adds, most of Williams’s work “can be gathered under those two rubrics: the Case History (see ‘To Elsie’), the Comparative Anatomy.” 
   “The fact that Williams was a medical student connected him to things, to ‘no ideas but in things,’ notes Emily Wallace“That’s what a medical doctor had to work with, and that’s a major factor in modernism — the exact tone, the precise color.” 
   Pound, not quite 16 when he enrolled, had already decided he would devote his life to art, though he hoped he might support himself in the academy as well. “Pound thought he was headed for an academic career,” says Kenner. “He was going to divide his time between making money from teaching and writing poetry on the side until William Butler Yeats talked him out of it and told him he should be a poet full-time.” 
   By temperament, though, he was not cut out to be a member of anyone’s faculty but his own. (After earning his M.A. at Penn, he accepted a position as professor of Romance languages at Wabash College in Indiana, where he was dismissed for allowing a young woman to spend the night in his room, and for otherwise annoying his colleagues.) And while the academy’s refusal to accept him on his own terms rankled him for years, he also never stopped trying to get the approval of Schelling, his most disapproving professor. Eventually, he became a self-appointed professor at the one-man “Ezuversity” in Rapallo, Italy. 
   “For all Pound’s anti-university rhetoric, he is very much a university product,” writes Gail McDonald in Learning to be Modern: Pound, Eliot, and the American University. “The texts and languages he studied at Hamilton and Pennsylvania provided material for poetry throughout his life, and the limitations of Germanic educational methods gave him a foil against which to define his poetic identity.” 
   And yet, says Rabaté: “I think Pound actually learned a lot from the way English was taught then at Penn. I’ve got a little book published in 1917 by Professor Schelling, and in it one can see a sort of pre-Eliotan approach to the English tradition … Swinburne is his model, so he’s very Victorian in matters of taste, but one can see this very wide range of interests — and also a comparative spirit, having to do with Italian poetry and so on. What interests me is the way Schelling’s and Pound’s taste, when they interacted at Penn, was Victorian — but with all the ambiguities of the Victorian spirit as we know it.” 
   It’s true, he acknowledges, that Pound was “very critical of the way English was taught” at Penn. “But he learned a lot from suggestions, and after all, one of his best critical pieces, The Spirit of Romance, was originally an M.A. written for Schelling. So I think one should distinguish between personal encounters with a number of people he admired and a dissatisfaction with the institution as such.” Oddly enough, Rabaté says, much of Pound’s anti-university rhetoric was directed at Harvard, even though he never went there himself. 
   “It is unsurprising that Pound and Williams should have left Penn feeling they had been taught trivially, much of the time, by people they could respect only intermittently,” writes Kenner. “That was a natural consequence of not becoming some teacher’s apprentice … Seeing what they became, though, they were well taught. It is hard to specify anything they should have been taught instead. Especially, it is doubtful that creative writing courses would have been a good idea. God help Williams if he’d been flypapered by such a course. And if Pound had been enrolled in one, God help the instructor.” 
   Pound’s friends probably could have used some divine intervention, too. “Ezra, even then, used to assault me (as he still does) for my lack of education and reading,” sighed Williams in his Autobiography. “He would say that I should become more acquainted with the differential calculus — like himself, of course. I’d reply that a course in comparative anatomy wouldn’t at all harm him, if it came to that.” 
   
“The nature of their friendship was certainly didactic,” says Jane Penner. “For Pound, the virtual chalkboard was with him at all times.” 
   “Pound was trying to educate everybody around him, including himself,” adds Rabaté with a laugh. “This is not always pleasant.” But Rabaté also points out that Pound — “the first to be totally interdisciplinary” — was way ahead of his time. “A lot of what the University is today would correspond to what Pound had in mind.” 
   After two years at Penn, Pound transferred to Hamilton — either because he wasn’t doing that well at Penn or because his father didn’t care for the company he was keeping or because he wanted to study languages not available at the University in those days. He returned to Penn in 1905 to earn his master’s degree, and went to Spain the following year on a Harrison Fellowship in Romanics. He got the M.A., but the fellowship that he had thought he would use to finish his thesis was, unexpectedly, not renewed. He also flunked a course in the history of literary criticism taught by Josiah Penniman, who later became provost of the University. (“So far as I know I was the only student who was making any attempt to understand the subject of literary criticism,” he wrote later, “and the only student with any interest in the subject.”) Although he later submitted an expanded version of The Spirit of Romance in lieu of a dissertation, Schelling refused to give him the Ph.D., arguing that he had not done the necessary work for it. Unlike most dissertations, points out Hoffman, that book is still in print. 
   “Young Mr. Pound has a certain repute in the new poetry, which I have reason to believe is very considerable, but I do not remember him as anything but an idle student,” wrote Schelling to a colleague in 1920, after Pound’s father had inquired into the possibility of his son’s receiving a Ph.D. To another colleague, Schelling wrote that apart from earning the master’s degree, Pound had “not done any of the additional work towards his Ph.D. … I remember him as … absolutely evading all work to such an extent that I recall saying to him, ‘Mr. Pound, you are either a humbug or a genius’ … The question of an honorary degree for Mr. Pound upon the basis of his eccentric and often very clever verse is quite another matter and one which I hardly feel that I am competent to raise.” 
   Pound never did get an honorary degree from Penn, though Schelling would have some second thoughts about the young man he had snubbed. In 1938, he wrote an article for Penn’s General Magazine and Historical Chronicle in which he quoted his own response to a letter from Pound suggesting that the University start awarding no-strings-attached fellowships for creative ability. “I have often wished that I might have the personal power to send two types of men away from the university,” Schelling recalled telling his former student. “One is the extraordinary man, the one in a thousand, who usually takes himself away as you did. The others are the stragglers who loaf along at the end of the procession. They, too, are better out of it. College, after all, is for mediocrity and as we are overweighted with mediocrity in the world, there is justification for it.” 
   “Pound should have been treated fairly by Schelling and he was not,” says Emily Wallace indignantly. “Schelling lied about Pound’s record. Schelling himself wanted to be a poet, and did write poems, and was not good at it. He was terrified of having Pound around, don’t you think? How else to explain his refusal to treat Pound the way any mediocre student was treated? I can’t agree that it was a wonderful service to Pound not to give him the Ph.D. He’d certainly done the work.” 
   She sighs. “But I’m not interested in trying to demean Schelling. He was at the top of his profession as a professor. In that sense, he was an academic titan.” 
   And as Hoffman has argued: “To be a Prometheus requires a Titan against whom to rebel. Pound may well have been lucky in his antagonist.” 
   There were other professors at Penn whom Pound did like and admire. He remembered Dean Child, who taught him Chaucer, as “an ideal companion for the young barbarian” and a “man with real love of letters & true flair.” He apparently enjoyed Walton Brooks McDaniel, who taught him Latin and later wrote in the Harvard Alumni Bulletin that he had been “challenged by Pound’s exuberance and brilliance.” And when Herman Ames, a history professor, died in 1936, Pound wrote to Ames’s colleague Roy Nichols expressing his regret that Ames never had the “minor entertainment of knowing that his patiences and indulgences of 30 years ago hadn’t been wholly wasted on one of his most cantankerous pupils.” And the idea that a student “might have a legitimate curiosity,” he added, “was in no way alien to [Ames’s] sensibilities.” 
   Williams, too, had a favorite professor: neurology professor Robert Spiller. “I loved the man with his big round head and the prominent temporal arteries like twin snakes upon his temples,” he wrote in his Autobiography. “Had I felt myself stable enough, nothing would have pleased me more than to have gone in then and there for neurology.” 
   But no one on the faculty, Hoffman notes, “was ready to accept, much less understand, the new kind of poetry that Pound and Williams felt in their nerves and marrow to be necessary.” 


EZRA POUND would come to my room to read me his poems, the very early ones, some of those in A Lume Spento. It was a painful experience. For it was often impossible to hear the lines the way he read them, and of all things in the world the last I should have wanted to do would have been to hurt him — no matter how empty I myself might have felt, and worthless, as a critic. But I listened; that’s all he wanted, I imagine, from anyone. His voice would trail off in the final lines of many of the lyrics until they were inaudible — from his intensity. (Williams, Autobiography.) 
   
“What matters ultimately is the poetry that was written,” says Rabaté. “I don’t think Williams would have written what he wrote without Pound. Pound learned from Williams, but more on the human plan.” Pound also appreciated Bill’s fluency in French and Spanish, not to mention “as a very good friend, a very good ear, a good listener, and so on.” But at that time, Rabaté notes, “Williams’s own poetic models were too romantic for Pound. Pound was writing a sonnet a day and then destroying them. He had this notion that one could train for the big work. And I’m not sure whether Williams had this idea.” 
   Pound, Williams acknowledged, “was always far more precocious than I and had gone madly on, even to Yeats — who passed through Philadelphia and read to the Penn students in 1903. I did not hear him.” 
   While Williams was “a little stuck” at the level of a Keats-wannabe — “a direct outpouring, gushing of the heart,” in Rabaté’s words — “he saw in Pound somebody who had the same impulse but was already training himself in the technique. This idea of training oneself — this was the idea that somehow pushed Williams forward. 
   “It’s technically what they learned from each other that’s really amazing,” Rabaté adds, citing Pound’s early work as an example: “There was this notebook that he wrote for Hilda Doolittle — Hilda’s Book. It’s very bad. Very very very bad. What’s surprising is how fast he matured to write the first of the Personae poems by 1912. That was just a few years later. Completely different, having mastered a lot.” 
   “From a literary standpoint,” writes Crawford, “Williams’s desire for clear vision and articulation can best be traced to the early influence of Ezra Pound, whose famous rules for Imagism include ‘Direct treatment of the “thing” whether subjective or objective,’ and ‘To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation.'” 
   “Pound gave me the original lesson,” Williams told an interviewer in the late 1950s. “Never use two words where one will do.”


LATER THIS MONTH there will be a small celebration of Williams and his work in the Ware College House library, where there is a permanent exhibition of Williams memorabilia. It’s being organized by Dr. Rita Barnard, associate professor of English; the theme is “Seeing America.” About 10 people — students, faculty, staff — will read their favorite Williams poems or prose pieces; among them will be a graduate student who has translated Spring and All into Arabic. Through the window overlooking the Quad, the great old elm tree will be swelling with new leaves. 
   It’s a fine way to remember Williams, who in his later years was treated pretty well by the University. He received an honorary degree, gave a talk on campus, had a few poems published in the General Magazine and Historical Chronicle, and kept up a warm correspondence with English professor Sculley Bradley, whom he called “my best rooter” at Penn. 
   There is no celebration of Pound, even though he, not Williams, lived in the building now known as Ware, and even though Pound was easily the more influential of the two. (Without Pound, the critic George Steiner once said, “twentieth-century literature is inconceivable.”) Even before his wartime broadcasts, he was never invited back to Penn to teach, or to read; he never received an honorary degree. There is only one small literary prize in his name, for translation. 
   It’s his own damn fault, of course — unless you accept the premise that he really was mentally ill, and thus not entirely responsible for his actions. Pound himself told Allen Ginsberg, a few years before his death: “At seventy, I realized that instead of being a lunatic, I was a moron.” The admission might have brought a certain poignant satisfaction to his old friend Bill Williams, who had often told him pretty much the same thing. But still … 
   “It’s a shame, really,” says Rabaté, who hates Pound’s wartime politics and prejudices as much as anyone. “The University has never really acknowledged Pound in any way. There is no plaque here, nothing like that. And I don’t think there ever will be.” 
   Williams died in 1963, after a long series of strokes. When the news reached Pound in Venice, he sent a telegram to Williams’s wife, Flossie: 
A magnificent fight he made of it for you. He bore with me sixty years, and I shall never find another poet friend like him.

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