BK. Ezra Pound

184. Reviews of Ezra Pound and Japan (82), 1988, 1991, 1996.

In addition to work noted, other reviews found the book valuable, but did not offer critical comment about Pound’s response to Japan. These include Fukuda Rikutarô, ‘Pound to Nippon musu kichô bunken’ (Precious documents that link Pound with Japan, Gakutô 85/5 [1988]: 14-17); J. R. Igo, Jr. (Choice 25 [1988]: 769; Donald Richie, ‘Portrait of a Literary Love Affair’ (Japan Times, 26 June 1996); and Charles Trueheart, ‘The Men Who Made Modernism’ (Washington Post Book World, 3 January 1988, p. 5).

a. Burkman, Greg. ‘Reading Pound, Writing History’. Bloomsbury Review 8 (1988): 19. Burkman finds a contradiction in the fact that Pound ‘could hold in London an exhibition of Tami Koume’s innovative “modern art,” and could admire Kitasono’s surrealist experiments’, while at the same time he ‘remained convinced that China and Japan once harbored a material, political paradise based on harmony with traditional social structures . . . that were dependent on the historical authority of a ruler’.

b. MacGregor-Hastie, Roy. ‘The Master Meets the Land of the Rising Sun’. Daily Yomiuri, 26 May, 1991, p. 7. Notes based on a long friendship with Pound. MacGregor-Hastie suggests that Pound’s first interest in Japan came through Margaret Cravens, who according to MacGregor-Hastie in 1910 offered Pound ‘half of her income’ if he would go to Japan, to be looked after by her friend, a son of the last Tokugawa shogun (Yoshinobu); though Pound did not go, MacGregor-Hastie notes that he was interested enough in the offer that he wrote to the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo asking the names of prominent Japanese writers, and that this interest led to his interest in Noguchi (see D15). Among other details noted here, MacGregor-Hastie suggests that after the Second World War Pound was ‘upset’ by the ‘general pacifist tone’ of Japanese literary journals such as Arechi and the ‘general left-wing allegiance’ of Japanese writers, and particularly that the poet Shiraishi Kazuko was among Pound’s ‘pet hates’.