The New American Poetry 1945–1960 is a poetry anthology edited by Donald Allen and published in 1960. It aimed to pick out the "third generation" of American modernist poets, and included quite a number of poems fresh from the little magazines of the late 1950s. In the longer term it attained a classic status, with critical approval and continuing sales. It was reprinted in 1999. As of 2024, Edward Field and Gary Snyder are the only contributors still living.
128-565: In 1958, Allen began work on The New American Poetry anthology. Following the Pound / Williams tradition, Allen hoped to present the range of experimental writing produced in the United States since the Second World War. The project took two years to complete and required extensive correspondence with poets, editors, and literary agents. The book was finally published in 1960, and, in addition to
256-526: A Boston Tea Party for Ezra" and an end to his despotic rule. Upset at Lowell, Pound began to call Imagisme "Amygism"; he declared the movement dead and asked the group not to call themselves Imagistes . Not accepting that it was Pound's invention, they refused and Anglicized the term. When war was declared in August 1914, opportunities for writers were immediately reduced; poems were now expected to be patriotic. Pound's income from October 1914 to October 1915
384-511: A "Compensated Price" and a "National (or Consumer) Dividend", a National Credit Office would be charged with the task of calculating the size of the rebate and dividend by determining a national balance sheet , and calculating aggregate production and consumption statistics. The price rebate is based upon the observation that the real cost of production is the mean rate of consumption over the mean rate of production for an equivalent period of time. where The physical cost of producing something
512-624: A PhD thesis on the jesters in Lope de Vega 's plays; a two-year Harrison fellowship covered his tuition and a $ 500 grant, with which he sailed again to Europe. He spent three weeks in Madrid in various libraries, including in the Royal Library . On 31 May 1906 he was standing outside the palace during the attempted assassination of King Alfonso and left the city for fear of being mistaken for an anarchist. After Spain he visited Paris and London, returning to
640-647: A blend of folkloric Celtic twilight with a paranoid hatred of the money economy and a dire suspicion about an ancient faith." In May 1911, H.D. left Philadelphia for London. She was accompanied by the poet Frances Gregg and Gregg's mother; when they returned in September, H.D. stayed on. Pound introduced her to his friends, including Aldington, who became her husband in 1913. Before that, the three of them lived in Church Walk, Kensington—Pound at no. 10, Aldington at no. 8, and Doolittle at no. 6—and worked daily in
768-588: A book, it was the first of five Imagist anthologies and the only one to contain work by Pound. It included ten poems by Richard Aldington , seven by H. D. , followed by Flint, Skipwith Cannell , Lowell, Carlos Williams, James Joyce ("I Hear an Army", not an example of Imagism), six by Pound, then Hueffer (as he was known as the time), Allen Upward and John Cournos . Shortly after its publication, an advertisement for Lewis's new magazine, Blast promised it would cover " Cubism , Futurism , Imagisme and all Vital Forms of Modern Art." Described by Pound as "mostly
896-576: A breath of fresh air; another said he was "exhibitionist, egotistic, self-centered and self-indulgent". He was dismissed after a few months. Smoking was forbidden, but he would smoke cigarillos in his room in the same corridor as the president's office. He was asked to leave the college in January 1908 when his landladies, Ida and Belle Hall, found a woman in his room. Shocked at having been expelled, he left for Europe soon after, sailing from New York in March on
1024-593: A campaign by his fellow writers, he was released from St. Elizabeth's in 1958 and returned to Italy, where he posed for the press giving the Fascist salute and called America "an insane asylum". Pound remained in Italy until his death in 1972. His economic and political views have ensured that his life and literary legacy remain highly controversial. Pound was born in 1885 in a two-story clapboard house in Hailey , Idaho Territory,
1152-629: A collection of 25 poems, including a contentious translation of The Seafarer , that demonstrate his shift toward minimalist language. In addition to Pound's work, the collection contains five poems by Hulme. Ripostes includes the first mention of Les Imagistes : "As for the future, Les Imagistes , the descendants of the forgotten school of 1909, have that in their keeping." While in the British Museum tearoom one afternoon with Doolittle and Aldington, Pound edited one of Doolittle's poems and wrote "H.D. Imagiste" underneath; he described this later as
1280-569: A copy of A Lume Spento , and Yeats had apparently found it "charming". Pound wrote to William Carlos Williams on 3 February 1909: "Am by way of falling into the crowd that does things here. London, deah old Lundon, is the place for poesy." According to Richard Aldington , London found Pound amusing. The newspapers interviewed him, and he was mentioned in Punch magazine, which on 23 June 1909 described "Mr. Ezekiel Ton" as "the most remarkable thing in poetry since Robert Browning ... [blending]
1408-752: A distinct literary movement, making them recognized figures in what was then an emerging countertradition . Allen originally planned to publish revised anthologies every two or three years. However, he produced only two such books over the next twenty years: New American Writing (Penguin, 1965), and The Postmoderns (Grove, 1965). The anthology was also influential in Canada. "It affected the writing of at least one generation of Canadian poets", according to The Canadian Encyclopedia . The anthology influenced many Canadian poets to turn away from British influences and toward American models. Ezra Pound Ezra Weston Loomis Pound (30 October 1885 – 1 November 1972)
SECTION 10
#17330862769171536-487: A good is $ 100, and the ratio of consumption to production is 3/4, then the real cost of the good is $ 100(3/4) = $ 75. As a result, if a consumer spent $ 100 for a good, the National Credit Authority would rebate the consumer $ 25. The good costs the consumer $ 75, the retailer receives $ 100, and the consumer receives the difference of $ 25 via new credits created by the National Credit Authority. The National Dividend
1664-512: A habit that upset her, in part because his writing touched on private aspects of their relationship. She and Aldington decided to move several miles away to Hampstead . The appearance of Des Imagistes, An Anthology (1914), edited by Pound, "confirmed the importance" of Imagisme , according to Ira Nadel . Published in the American magazine The Glebe in February 1914 and the following month as
1792-589: A house at 39 Addison Road North , W11 . By November A. R. Orage , editor of the socialist journal the New Age , had hired him to write a weekly column. Orage appears in The Cantos ( Possum is T. S. Eliot): "but the lot of 'em, Yeats, Possum and Wyndham / had no ground beneath 'em. / Orage had." Pound contributed to the New Age from 30 November 1911 to 13 January 1921, attending editorial meetings in
1920-731: A job as an assayer at the Philadelphia Mint . After a move to 417 Walnut Street in Jenkintown, Pennsylvania , the family bought a six-bedroom house in 1893 at 166 Fernbrook Avenue, Wyncote . Pound's education began in dame schools : Miss Elliott's school in Jenkintown in 1892 and the Heathcock family's Chelten Hills School in Wyncote in 1893. Known as "Ra" (pronounced "Ray"), he attended Wyncote Public School from September 1894. His first publication
2048-399: A law that intensified production means a progressively higher ratio of overhead charges to direct labour cost, and, apart from artificial reasons, this is simply an indication of the extent to which machinery replaces manual labour, as it should. If overhead charges are constantly increasing relative to income, any attempt to stabilize or increase income results in increasing prices. If income
2176-571: A movement stressing precision and economy of language. Working in London as foreign editor of several American literary magazines, he helped discover and shape the work of contemporaries such as H. D. , Robert Frost , T. S. Eliot , Ernest Hemingway , and James Joyce . He was responsible for the 1914 serialization of Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man , the 1915 publication of Eliot's " The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock ", and
2304-684: A painter's magazine with me to do the poems," and bearing the heavy influence of Futurism, Blast was the magazine of a London art movement formed by Lewis with Pound's collaboration. Pound named the movement Vorticism . Vorticism included all the arts, and in Blast "the Imagist propaganda merged into the Vorticist." In the end, Blast was published only twice, in 1914 and 1915. In June 1914 The Times announced Lewis's new Rebel Arts Centre for Vorticist art at 38 Great Ormond Street . Lowell, who
2432-615: A particular kind of Victorian verse—stirring, pompous, and propagandistic—popular. According to modernist scholar James Knapp, Pound rejected the idea of poetry as "versified moral essay"; he wanted to focus on the individual experience, the concrete rather than the abstract. Pound at first stayed in a boarding house at 8 Duchess Street, near the British Museum Reading Room ; he had met the landlady during his travels in Europe in 1906. He soon moved to Islington (cheaper at 12s 6d
2560-417: A period to time of articles produced by factories making consumable goods divided up into A1 costs which refer to money paid to individuals by means of salaries, wages, dividends, etc., and B1 costs which refer to money paid to other institutions. Let A2, B2 be the corresponding costs of factories producing capital equipment. The money distributed to individuals is A1+A2 and the cost of the final consumable goods
2688-453: A problem and needed to abandon a Messianic view of themselves as the "dominating race". According to Colin Holmes , the New Age itself published antisemitic material. It was within this environment, not in Italy, according to Tim Redman , that Pound first encountered antisemitic ideas about "usury". "In Douglas's program," Christopher Hitchens wrote in 2008, "Pound had found his true muse:
SECTION 20
#17330862769172816-429: A railway which was constructed a year, two years, three years, five or ten years ago, where charges are still extant), cannot be liquidated by a stream of purchasing power which does not increase in volume and which has a period of three weeks. The consequence is, you have a piling up of debt, you have in many cases a diminution of purchasing power being equivalent to the price of the goods for sale. According to Douglas,
2944-436: A standard, or measure, of value. Douglas believed that money should act as a medium of communication by which consumers direct the distribution of production. Closely associated with the concept of cultural inheritance as a factor of production is the social credit theory of economic sabotage. While Douglas believed the cultural heritage factor of production is primary in increasing wealth, he also believed that economic sabotage
3072-435: A superfluous accumulation of them. Douglas believed that excessive capital production is only a temporary correction, because the cost of the capital appears in the cost of consumer goods, or taxes, which will further exacerbate future gaps between income and prices. In the first place, these capital goods have to be sold to someone. They form a reservoir of forced exports. They must, as intermediate products, enter somehow into
3200-521: A third time—Ezra!", Dorothy wrote in her diary on 16 February 1909. Pound mixed with the cream of London's literary circle, including Hewlett, Laurence Binyon , Frederic Manning , Ernest Rhys , May Sinclair , Ellen Terry , George Bernard Shaw , Hilaire Belloc , T. E. Hulme , and F. S. Flint . Through the Shakespears, he was introduced to the poet W. B. Yeats , Olivia Shakespear's former lover. He had already sent Yeats
3328-599: A thousand times, I never looked back. At fifteen, I stopped scowling, I desired my dust to be mingled with yours Forever and forever and forever. Why should I climb the look out? The 1915 poem Cathay contains 25 examples of Classical Chinese poetry that Pound translated into English based on the notes of the Orientalist Ernest Fenollosa . Fenollosa's widow, Mary McNeill Fenollosa , had given Pound her husband's notes in 1913, after Laurence Binyon introduced them. Michael Alexander saw Cathay as
3456-561: A three-month tour with his mother and Aunt Frank, who took him to England, Belgium, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Spain, and Morocco. He attended CMA until 1900, at times as a boarder, but it seems he did not graduate. In 1901, at 15 years old, Pound was admitted to the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia . Years later he said his aim was to avoid drill at
3584-483: A week board and lodging ), but his father sent him £4, and he was able to move back into central London, to 48 Langham Street, near Great Titchfield Street . The house sat across an alley from the Yorkshire Grey pub, which made an appearance in "Canto LXXX" ( The Pisan Cantos ), "concerning the landlady's doings / with a lodger unnamed / az waz near Gt Tichfield St. next door to the pub". Pound persuaded
3712-535: Is A1+B1. If money in the hands of the public is to be equal to the costs of consumable articles produced then A1+A2 = A1+B1 and therefore A2=B1. Now modern science has brought us to the stage where machines are more and more taking the place of human labour in producing goods, i.e. A1 is becoming less important relatively to B1 and A2 less important relatively to B2. In symbols if B1/A1 = k1 and B2/A2 = k2 both k1 and k2 are increasing. Since A2=B1 this means that (A2+B2)/(A1+B1)= (1+k2)*A2/(1+1/k1)*B1 = (1+k2)/(1+1/k1) which
3840-506: Is any charge in respect of which the actual distributed purchasing power does not still exist, and that practically this means any charge created at a further distance in the past than the period of cyclic rate of circulation of money. There is no fundamental difference between tools and intermediate products, and the latter may therefore be included. In 1932, Douglas estimated the cyclic rate of circulation of money to be approximately three weeks. The cyclic rate of circulation of money measures
3968-495: Is constant or increasing, and overhead charges are continuously increasing due to technological advancement, then prices, which equal income plus overhead charges, must also increase. Further, any attempt to stabilize or decrease prices must be met by decreasing incomes according to this analysis. As the Phillips Curve demonstrates, inflation and unemployment are trade-offs, unless prices are reduced from monies derived from outside
The New American Poetry 1945–1960 - Misplaced Pages Continue
4096-520: Is from the third canto of Dante 's Purgatorio , alluding to the death of Manfred, King of Sicily . Pound dedicated the book to the Philadelphia artist William Brooke Smith , a friend from university who had recently died of tuberculosis . In "Canto LXXVI" of The Pisan Cantos , he records that he considered throwing the proofs into the Grand Canal , abandoning the book and poetry altogether: "by
4224-482: Is justified by the displacement of labour in the productive process due to technological increases in productivity. As human labour is increasingly replaced by machines in the productive process, Douglas believed people should be free to consume while enjoying increasing amounts of leisure, and that the Dividend would provide this freedom . Critics of the theorem, such as J. M. Pullen, Hawtrey and J. M. Keynes argue there
4352-426: Is no difference between A and B payments. Other critics, such as Gary North, argue that social credit policies are inflationary. "The A + B theorem has met with almost universal rejection from academic economists on the grounds that, although B payments may be made initially to "other organizations," they will not necessarily be lost to the flow of available purchasing power. A and B payments overlap through time. Even if
4480-539: Is not that we shall be put into somebody else's Utopia , but we shall be put in a position to construct a Utopia of our own." The idea of social credit attracted considerable interest in the interwar period , with the Alberta Social Credit Party briefly distributing "prosperity certificates" to the Albertan populace. However, Douglas opposed the distribution of prosperity certificates which were based upon
4608-470: Is not the only cause of inflation, and inflation is systemic according to the rules of cost accountancy given overhead charges are constantly increasing relative to income. In other words, inflation can exist even if consumers have insufficient purchasing power to buy back all of production. Douglas claimed that there were two limits which governed prices, a lower limit governed by the cost of production, and an upper limit governed by what an article will fetch on
4736-486: Is provided by loan credit (bank overdrafts) or export credit. Beyond empirical evidence, Douglas claims this deductive theorem demonstrates that total prices increase faster than total incomes when regarded as a flow . In his pamphlet entitled "The New and the Old Economics", Douglas describes the cause of "B" payments: I think that a little consideration will make it clear that in this sense an overhead charge
4864-637: Is short of credits. He studied the Provençal dialect and read Dante and Anglo-Saxon poetry , including Beowulf and the 8th-century Old English poem The Seafarer . After graduating from Hamilton in 1905 with a PhB , he returned to Penn, where he fell in love with Hilda Doolittle (who later wrote under the name " H.D. "). She was then a student at Bryn Mawr College , and he hand-bound 25 of his poems for her, calling it Hilda's Book . After receiving his MA in Romance languages in 1906, he registered to write
4992-450: Is something we call a price opposite to it." Money is effective demand, and the means of reclaiming that money are prices and taxes. As real capital replaces labour in the process of modernization, money should become increasingly an instrument of distribution. The idea that money is a medium of exchange is related to the belief that all wealth is created by the current labour of the world, and Douglas clearly rejected this belief, stating that
5120-525: Is that a man shall believe that he can get what he wants by the aid of it." According to economists, money is a medium of exchange . Douglas argued that this may have once been the case when the majority of wealth was produced by individuals who subsequently exchanged it with each other. But in modern economies, division of labour splits production into multiple processes, and wealth is produced by people working in association with each other. For instance, an automobile worker does not produce any wealth (i.e.,
5248-414: Is the explanation of the increasing necessity of what has come to be called economic sabotage; the colossal waste of effort which goes on in every walk of life quite unobserved by the majority of people because they are so familiar with it; a waste which yet so over-taxed the ingenuity of society to extend it that the climax of war only occurred in the moment when a culminating exhibition of organised sabotage
The New American Poetry 1945–1960 - Misplaced Pages Continue
5376-415: Is the materials and capital that were consumed in its production, plus that amount of consumer goods labour consumed during its production. This total consumption represents the physical, or real, cost of production. where Since fewer inputs are consumed to produce a unit of output with every improvement in process, the real cost of production falls over time. As a result, prices should also decrease with
5504-495: Is the primary factor decreasing it. The word wealth derives from the Old English word wela , or "well-being", and Douglas believed that all production should increase personal well-being. Therefore, production that does not directly increase personal well-being is waste, or economic sabotage. The economic effect of charging all the waste in industry to the consumer so curtails his purchasing power that an increasing percentage of
5632-550: The New Age began to make him unpopular, to the alarm of Orage. Samuel Putnam knew Pound in Paris in the 1920s and described him as stubborn, contrary, cantankerous, bossy, touchy, and "devoid of humor"; he was "an American small-towner", in Putnam's view. His attitude caused him trouble in both London and Paris. English women, with their "preponderantly derivative" minds, were inferior to American women who had minds of their own, he wrote in
5760-461: The New Age . The English sense of what was right was based on respect for property, not morality. "[P]erched on the rotten shell of a crumbling empire", London had lost its energy. England's best authors— Conrad , Hudson , James , and Yeats—were not English. English writers and critics were ignorant, he wrote in 1913. Ezra and Dorothy were married on 20 April 1914 at St Mary Abbots in Kensington,
5888-522: The Paris Underground . "I got out of a train at, I think, La Concorde ", he wrote in "How I began" in T. P.'s Weekly on 6 June 1913, "and in the jostle I saw a beautiful face, and then, turning suddenly, another and another, and then a beautiful child's face, and then another beautiful face. All that day I tried to find words for what this made me feel. ... I could get nothing but spots of colour." A year later he reduced it to its essence in
6016-830: The RMS Slavonia . Pound arrived in Gibraltar on 23 March 1908, where he earned $ 15 a day working as a guide for an American family there and in Spain. After stops in Seville, Grenada, and Genoa, by the end of April he was in Venice , living over a bakery near the San Vio bridge. In the summer he decided to self-publish his first collection of 44 poems in the 72-page A Lume Spento ("With Tapers Quenched"), 150 copies of which were printed in July 1908. The title
6144-560: The 17th century. On his father's side, the immigrant ancestor was John Pound, a Quaker who arrived from England around 1650. Ezra's paternal grandmother, Susan Angevine Loomis , married Thaddeus Coleman Pound. On his mother's side, Pound was descended from William Wadsworth , a Puritan who immigrated to Boston on the Lion in 1632. Captain Joseph Wadsworth helped to write the first Connecticut constitution . The Wadsworths married into
6272-576: The 1920s and 1930s by C. H. Douglas . Douglas attributed economic downturns to discrepancies between the cost of goods and the compensation of the workers who made them. To combat what he saw as a chronic deficiency of purchasing power in the economy, Douglas prescribed government intervention in the form of the issuance of debt-free money directly to consumers or producers (if they sold their product below cost to consumers) in order to combat such discrepancy. In defence of his ideas, Douglas wrote that "Systems were made for men, and not men for systems, and
6400-425: The A + B theorem in his book, Credit-Power and Democracy , in critique of accounting methodology pertinent to income and prices. In the fourth, Australian Edition of 1933, Douglas states: A factory or other productive organization has, besides its economic function as a producer of goods, a financial aspect – it may be regarded on the one hand as a device for the distribution of purchasing-power to individuals through
6528-534: The Alberta Agricultural Committee of the Alberta Legislature in 1934, Douglas said: Now we know there are an increasing number of charges which originated from a period much anterior to three weeks, and included in those charges, as a matter of fact, are most of the charges made in, respect of purchases from one organization to another, but all such charges as capital charges (for instance, on
SECTION 50
#17330862769176656-471: The B payments are received and spent before the finished product is available for purchase, current purchasing power will be boosted by B payments received in the current production of goods that will be available for purchase in the future." A. W. Joseph replied to this specific criticism in a paper given to the Birmingham Actuarial Society, "Banking and Industry": Let A1+B1 be the costs in
6784-657: The British Museum Reading Room. At the British Museum, Laurence Binyon introduced Pound to the East Asian artistic and literary concepts Pound used in his later poetry, including Japanese ukiyo-e prints. The visitors' book first shows Pound in the Prints and Drawings Students' Room (known as the Print Room) on 9 February 1909, and later in 1912 and 1913, with Dorothy Shakespear, examining Chinese and Japanese art. Pound
6912-626: The British fascist Sir Oswald Mosley , embraced Benito Mussolini 's fascism , and expressed support for Adolf Hitler . During World War II , Pound recorded hundreds of paid radio propaganda broadcasts for the fascist Italian government and its later incarnation as a German puppet state , in which he attacked the United States federal government , Franklin D. Roosevelt , Great Britain , international finance, munitions makers , arms dealers , Jews , and others, as abettors and prolongers of
7040-399: The Shakespears' parish church, despite opposition from her parents, who worried about Ezra's income. His concession to marry in church had helped. Dorothy's annual income was £50, with another £150 from her family, and Ezra's was £200. Her father, Henry Hope Shakespear, had him prepare a financial statement in 1911, which showed that his main source of income was his father. After the wedding
7168-601: The U.S. again. After three days in London he went to Paris, where he worked on a new collection of poetry, Canzoni (1911), panned by the Westminster Gazette as "affectation combined with pedantry". He wrote in Ford Madox Ford's obituary that Ford had rolled on the floor with laughter at its "stilted language". When he returned to London in August, he rented a room in Marylebone at 2A Granville Place, then shared
7296-572: The United States in July 1906. His first essay, "Raphaelite Latin", was published in the Book News Monthly that September. He took courses in English in 1907, where he fell out with just about everyone, including the department head, Felix Schelling , with silly remarks during lectures and by winding an enormous tin watch very slowly while Schelling spoke. In the spring of 1907 he learned that his fellowship would not be renewed. Schelling told him he
7424-457: The WIENER CAFÉ". Ford Madox Ford described Pound as "approach[ing] with the step of a dancer, making passes with a cane at an imaginary opponent": He would wear trousers made of green billiard cloth, a pink coat, a blue shirt, a tie hand-painted by a Japanese friend, an immense sombrero, a flaming beard cut to a point, and a single, large blue earring. At a literary salon in 1909, Pound met
7552-524: The Westons of New York; Harding Weston and Mary Parker were Pound's maternal grandparents. After serving in the military, Harding remained unemployed, so his brother Ezra Weston and Ezra's wife, Frances Amelia Wessells Freer (Aunt Frank), helped to look after Isabel, Pound's mother. Isabel Pound was unhappy in Hailey and took Ezra with her to New York in 1887 when he was 18 months old. Her husband followed and found
7680-409: The amount of time required for a loan to pass through the productive system and return to the bank. This can be calculated by determining the amount of clearings through the bank in a year divided by the average amount of deposits held at the banks (which varies very little). The result is the number of times money must turnover in order to produce these clearing house figures. In a testimony before
7808-436: The automobile) by himself, but only in conjunction with other auto workers, the producers of roads, gasoline, insurance, etc. In this opinion, wealth is a pool upon which people can draw, and money becomes a ticketing system . The efficiency gained by individuals cooperating in the productive process was named by Douglas as the " unearned increment of association" – historic accumulations of which constitute what Douglas called
SECTION 60
#17330862769177936-497: The basement of a grimy ABC tearoom in Chancery Lane . There and at other meetings he met Arnold Bennett , Cecil Chesterton , Beatrice Hastings , S. G. Hobson , Hulme, Katherine Mansfield , and H. G. Wells . In the New Age office in 1918, he also met C. H. Douglas , a British engineer who was developing his economic theory of social credit , which Pound found attractive. Douglas reportedly believed that Jews were
8064-451: The best poem I have yet had or seen from an American ... He has actually trained himself and modernized himself on his own ." Monroe did not like Prufrock's "very European world-weariness", according to Humphrey Carpenter , but she published it anyway, in June 1915. At fourteen I married My Lord you. I never laughed, being bashful. Lowering my head, I looked at the wall. Called to,
8192-668: The bookseller Elkin Mathews on Vigo Street to display A Lume Spento , and in an unsigned article on 26 November 1908, Pound reviewed it himself in the Evening Standard : "The unseizable magic of poetry is in this queer paper book; and words are no good in describing it." The following month he self-published a second collection, A Quinzaine for this Yule . It was his first book to have commercial success, and Elkin Matthews had another 100 copies printed. In January and February 1909, after
8320-504: The consumer is forced to pay for all the costs of production, including waste. The economic effect of charging the consumer with all waste in industry is that the consumer is forced to do much more work than is necessary. Douglas believed that wasted effort could be directly linked to confusion in regard to the purpose of the economic system, and the belief that the economic system exists to provide employment in order to distribute goods and services. But it may be advisable to glance at some of
8448-408: The couple moved into an apartment with no bathroom at 5 Holland Place Chambers, Kensington, next door to the newly wed H.D. and Aldington. This arrangement did not last. H.D. had been alarmed to find Ezra looking for a place to live outside the apartment building the day before his wedding. Once Dorothy and Ezra had moved into the building, Ezra would arrive unannounced at H.D.'s to discuss his writing,
8576-448: The cultural heritage. The means of drawing upon this pool is money distributed by the banking system. Douglas believed that money should not be regarded as a commodity but rather as a ticket, a means of distribution of production. "There are two sides to this question of a ticket representing something that we can call, if we like, a value. There is the ticket itself – the money which forms the thing we call ' effective demand ' – and there
8704-433: The cultural inheritance is the property of all of us, without exception." Adam Smith , David Ricardo and Karl Marx claimed that labour creates all value . While Douglas did not deny that all costs ultimately relate to labour charges of some sort (past or present), he denied that the present labour of the world creates all wealth. Douglas carefully distinguished between value , costs and prices . He claimed that one of
8832-409: The cultural inheritance of society is the primary factor in the creation of wealth, which makes money a distribution mechanism, not a medium of exchange. Douglas also claimed the problem of production, or scarcity , had long been solved. The new problem was one of distribution. However, so long as orthodox economics makes scarcity a value, banks will continue to believe that they are creating value for
8960-630: The death of John Churton Collins left a vacancy, Pound lectured for an hour a week in the evenings on "The Development of Literature in Southern Europe" at the Regent Street Polytechnic . Mornings might be spent in the British Museum Reading Room, followed by lunch at the Vienna Café on Oxford Street , where Pound first met Wyndham Lewis in 1910. "There were mysterious figures / that emerged from recondite recesses / and ate at
9088-406: The factors resulting in a misdirection of thought in terms of the nature and function of money was economists' near-obsession about values and their relation to prices and incomes. While Douglas recognized "value in use" as a legitimate theory of values, he also considered values as subjective and not capable of being measured in an objective manner. Thus he rejected the idea of the role of money as
9216-415: The first group--Creeley, Blackburn, Duncan, Eigner, Levertov, Olson, Oppenheimer, Dorn, Wieners and Jonathan Williams. Among the second: Ashbery, Guest, O'Hara, Schuyler, Koch. From San Francisco: Spicer, Ginsberg, Whalen, Welch, Snyder, Meltzer, Lamantia, Loewinsohn, Everson (Brother Antoninus), Broughton, McClure, etc. Also present, though perhaps slightly less affiliated: Field, Corso, Sorrentino. So divided
9344-483: The first, but is simpler. It assumes that the primary objective of the industrial system is the provision of employment. 3. And the third, which is essentially simpler still, in fact, so simple that it appears entirely unintelligible to the majority, is that the object of the industrial system is merely to provide goods and services. Douglas believed that it was the third policy alternative upon which an economic system should be based, but confusion of thought has allowed
9472-535: The following year he transferred to Hamilton College in Clinton, New York , possibly because of his grades. Again he was not invited to join a fraternity, but this time he had hoped to do so, according to letters home, because he wanted to live in a fraternity house , and by April 1904 he regarded the move as a mistake. Signed up for the Latin–Scientific course, he appears to have avoided some classes; his transcript
9600-422: The founding of a movement in poetry, Imagisme . In the spring or early summer of 1912, they agreed, Pound wrote in 1918, on three principles: Poetry published Pound's "A Few Don'ts by an Imagist" in March 1913. Superfluous words, particularly adjectives, should be avoided, as well as expressions like "dim lands of peace". He wrote: "It dulls the image. It mixes an abstraction with the concrete. It comes from
9728-505: The imagery of the unfettered West, the vocabulary of Wardour Street , and the sinister abandon of Borgiac Italy". "Thank you, whatever comes." And then she turned And, as the ray of sun on hanging flowers Fades when the wind hath lifted them aside, Went swiftly from me. Nay, whatever comes One hour was sunlit and the most high gods May not make boast of any better thing Than to have watched that hour as it passed. In April 1909 Elkin Mathews published Personae of Ezra Pound (half
9856-577: The industrial system to be governed by the first two objectives. If the purpose of our economic system is to deliver the maximum amount of goods and services with the least amount of effort, then the ability to deliver goods and services with the least amount of employment is actually desirable. Douglas proposed that unemployment is a logical consequence of machines replacing labour in the productive process, and any attempt to reverse this process through policies designed to attain full employment directly sabotages our cultural inheritance. Douglas also believed that
9984-405: The interest of man which is self-development , is above all systems, whether theological, political or economic." Douglas said that Social Crediters want to build a new civilization based upon " absolute economic security " for the individual, where "they shall sit every man under his vine and under his fig tree ; and none shall make them afraid." In his words, "what we really demand of existence
10112-487: The long-term consequence of this policy is a trade war , typically resulting in real war – hence, the social credit admonition, "He who calls for Full-Employment calls for War!", expressed by the Social Credit Party of Great Britain and Northern Ireland , led by John Hargrave . The former represents excessive capital production and/or military build-up. Military buildup necessitates either the violent use of weapons or
10240-517: The major consequence of the problem he identified in his A+B theorem is exponentially increasing debt. Further, he believed that society is forced to produce goods that consumers either do not want or cannot afford to purchase. The latter represents a favorable balance of trade , meaning a country exports more than it imports. But not every country can pursue this objective at the same time, as one country must import more than it exports when another country exports more than it imports. Douglas proposed that
10368-414: The media of wages, salaries, and dividends; and on the other hand as a manufactory of prices – financial values. From this standpoint, its payments may be divided into two groups: Now the rate of flow of purchasing-power to individuals is represented by A, but since all payments go into prices, the rate of flow of prices cannot be less than A+B. The product of any factory may be considered as something which
10496-574: The military academy. His one distinction in first year was in geometry, but otherwise his grades were mostly poor, including in Latin, his major; he achieved a B in English composition and a pass in English literature. In his second year he switched from the degree course to "non-degree special student status", he said "to avoid irrelevant subjects". He was not elected to a fraternity at Penn, but it seemed not to bother him. His parents and Aunt Frank took him on another three-month European tour in 1902, and
10624-455: The modern economy is a monetary one. Initially, money originated from the productive system, when cattle owners punched leather discs which represented a head of cattle. These discs could then be exchanged for corn, and the corn producers could then exchange the disc for a head of cattle at a later date. The word "pecuniary" comes from the Latin pecunia , originally and literally meaning "cattle" (related to pecus , meaning "beast"). Today,
10752-515: The money they produce by making it scarce. Douglas criticized the banking system on two counts: The former Douglas identified as being anti-social in policy. The latter he claimed was equivalent to claiming ownership of the nation. According to Douglas, money is merely an abstract representation of the real credit of the community, which is the ability of the community to deliver goods and services , when and where they are required. In January 1919, "A Mechanical View of Economics" by C. H. Douglas
10880-500: The most attractive of Pound's work. There is a debate about whether the poems should be viewed primarily as translations or as contributions to Imagism and the modernization of English poetry. English professor Steven Yao argued that Cathay shows that translation does not need a thorough knowledge of the source language. Pound's translations from Old English, Latin, Italian, French and Chinese were highly disputed. According to Alexander, they made him more unpopular in some circles than
11008-463: The novelist Olivia Shakespear and later at the Shakespears' home at 12 Brunswick Gardens, Kensington, was introduced to her daughter, Dorothy , who became Pound's wife in 1914. The critic Iris Barry described her as "carrying herself delicately with the air, always, of a young Victorian lady out skating, and a profile as clear and lovely as that of a porcelain Kuan-yin". "Listen to it—Ezra! Ezra!—And
11136-529: The only child of Homer Loomis Pound and Isabel Weston, who married in 1884. Homer had worked in Hailey since 1883 as registrar of the United States General Land Office . Pound's grandfather, Thaddeus Coleman Pound , a Republican Congressman and the 10th Lieutenant Governor of Wisconsin , had secured him the appointment. Homer had previously worked for Thaddeus in the lumber business. Both sides of Pound's family emigrated from England in
11264-423: The open market. Douglas suggested that this is the reason why deflation is regarded as a problem in orthodox economics because bankers and businessmen were very apt to forget the lower limit of prices. Douglas proposed to eliminate the gap between purchasing power and prices by increasing consumer purchasing power with credits which do not appear in prices in the form of a price rebate and a dividend. Formally called
11392-418: The people displaced from the industrial system through the process of mechanization should still have the ability to consume the fruits of the system, because he suggested that we are all inheritors of the cultural inheritance, and his proposal for a national dividend is directly related to this belief. Douglas criticized classical economics because many of the theories are based upon a barter economy , whereas
11520-752: The poems were from A Lume Spento ) and in October a further 27 poems (16 new) as Exultations . Edward Thomas described Personae in English Review as "full of human passion and natural magic". Rupert Brooke complained in the Cambridge Review that Pound had fallen under the influence of Walt Whitman , writing in "unmetrical sprawling lengths that, in his hands, have nothing to commend them". But he did acknowledge that Pound had "great talents". In or around September, Pound moved into new rooms at Church Walk, off Kensington High Street , where he lived most of
11648-435: The poems, included a brief Preface by Allen, position-statements by some of the contributors, biographical notes, and an Index . Other considerations were taken into account in the organization of this anthology, as the following quotation illustrates: Those included in this ground-breaking anthology were chosen from among about three distinct groupings: Black Mountain , New York School , and San Francisco Renaissance . In
11776-401: The price of subsequent ultimate products and they produce a position of most unstable equilibrium, since the life of capital goods is in general longer than that of consumable goods, or ultimate products, and yet in order to meet the requirements for money to buy the consumable goods, the rate of production of capital goods must be continuously increased. The replacement of labour by capital in
11904-419: The printers objecting to words like "fart" and "ballocks", and fearing prosecution over Stephen Dedalus 's thoughts about prostitutes. On the basis of the serialization, the publisher that had rejected Dubliners reconsidered. Joyce wrote to Yeats: "I can never thank you enough for having brought me into relation with your friend Ezra Pound who is indeed a miracle worker." Around this time, Pound's articles in
12032-413: The product of industry must be exported. The effect of this on the worker is that he has to do many times the amount of work which should be necessary to keep him in the highest standard of living, as a result of an artificial inducement to produce things he does not want, which he cannot buy, and which are of no use to the attainment of his internal standard of well-being. By modern methods of accounting,
12160-441: The productive process implies that overhead charges (B) increase in relation to income (A), because "'B' is the financial representation of the lever of capital". As Douglas stated in his first article, "The Delusion of Superproduction": The factory cost – not the selling price – of any article under our present industrial and financial system is made up of three main divisions-direct labor cost, material cost and overhead charges,
12288-486: The productive system and the monetary system are two separate entities. Douglas demonstrated that loans create deposits , and presented mathematical proof in his book Social Credit. Bank credit comprises the vast majority of money, and is created every time a bank makes a loan. Douglas was also one of the first to understand the creditary nature of money. The word credit derives from the Latin credere , meaning "to believe". "The essential quality of money, therefore,
12416-463: The productive system. According to Douglas's A+B theorem, the systemic problem of increasing prices, or inflation, is not "too much money chasing too few goods", but is the increasing rate of overhead charges in production due to the replacement of labour by capital in industry combined with a policy of full employment. Douglas did not suggest that inflation cannot be caused by too much money chasing too few consumer goods, but according to his analysis this
12544-427: The progression of time. "As society's capacity to deliver goods and services is increased by the use of plant and still more by scientific progress, and decreased by the production, maintenance, or depreciation of it, we can issue credit, in costs, at a greater rate than the rate at which we take it back through prices of ultimate products, if capacity to supply individuals exceeds desire." Based on his conclusion that
12672-555: The proximate causes operating to reduce the return for effort; and to realise the origin of most of the specific instances, it must be borne in mind that the existing economic system distributes goods and services through the same agency which induces goods and services, i.e., payment for work in progress. In other words, if production stops, distribution stops, and, as a consequence, a clear incentive exists to produce useless or superfluous articles in order that useful commodities already existing may be distributed. This perfectly simple reason
12800-432: The public ought to be able to buy, although in many cases it is an intermediate product of no use to individuals but only to a subsequent manufacture; but since A will not purchase A+B; a proportion of the product at least equivalent to B must be distributed by a form of purchasing-power which is not comprised in the description grouped under A. It will be necessary at a later stage to show that this additional purchasing power
12928-469: The publication in London of his first book of literary criticism, The Spirit of Romance , based on his lecture notes from the polytechnic. Patria Mia , his essays on the United States, were written at this time. In August he moved to New York, renting rooms on Waverly Place and Park Avenue South , facing Gramercy Square . Although he loved New York, he felt alienated by the commercialism and newcomers from Eastern and Southern Europe who were displacing
13056-522: The ratio of which varies widely, with the "modernity" of the method of production. For instance, a sculptor producing a work of art with the aid of simple tools and a block of marble has next to no overhead charges, but a very low rate of production, while a modern screw-making plant using automatic machines may have very high overhead charges and very low direct labour cost, or high rates of production. Since increased industrial output per individual depends mainly on tools and method, it may almost be stated as
13184-455: The real cost of production is less than the financial cost of production, the Douglas price rebate (Compensated Price) is determined by the ratio of consumption to production. Since consumption over a period of time is typically less than production over the same period of time in any industrial society, the real cost of goods should be less than the financial cost. For example, if the money cost of
13312-436: The role of these factors in production, he considered the " cultural inheritance of society " as the primary factor. He defined cultural inheritance as the knowledge, techniques and processes that have accrued to us incrementally from the origins of civilization (i.e. progress ). Consequently, mankind does not have to keep " reinventing the wheel ". "We are merely the administrators of that cultural inheritance, and to that extent
13440-503: The serialization from 1918 of Joyce's Ulysses . Hemingway wrote in 1932 that, for poets born in the late 19th or early 20th century, not to be influenced by Pound would be "like passing through a great blizzard and not feeling its cold". Angered by the carnage of World War I , Pound blamed the war on finance capitalism , which he called " usury ". He moved to Italy in 1924 and through the 1930s and 1940s promoted an economic theory known as social credit , wrote for publications owned by
13568-454: The soap-smooth stone posts where San Vio / meets with il Canal Grande / between Salviati and the house that was of Don Carlos / shd/I chuck the lot into the tide-water? / le bozze "A Lume Spento"/ / and by the column of Todero / shd/I shift to the other side / or wait 24 hours". In August 1908 Pound moved to London, carrying 60 copies of A Lume Spento . English poets such as Maurice Hewlett , Rudyard Kipling , and Alfred Tennyson had made
13696-550: The style of a Japanese haiku . In the summer of 1913 Pound became literary editor of The Egoist , a journal founded by the suffragette Dora Marsden . At the suggestion of W. B. Yeats , Pound encouraged James Joyce in December of that year to submit his work. The previous month Yeats, whose eyesight was failing, had rented Stone Cottage in Coleman's Hatch , Sussex, inviting Pound to accompany him as his secretary, and it
13824-531: The theories of Silvio Gesell . Douglas' theory of social credit has been disputed and rejected by most economists and bankers. Prominent economist John Maynard Keynes references Douglas's ideas in his book The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money , but instead poses the principle of effective demand to explain differences in output and consumption. Douglas disagreed with classical economists who recognised only three factors of production : land , labour and capital . While Douglas did not deny
13952-432: The time until 1914. He visited a friend, Walter Rummel , in Paris in March 1910 and was introduced to the American heiress and pianist Margaret Lanier Cravens. Although they had only just met, she offered to become a patron to the tune of $ 1,000 a year, and from then until her death in 1912 she apparently sent him money regularly. In June 1910 Pound returned for eight months to the United States; his arrival coincided with
14080-681: The title, in his view. During the subsequent row, Pound left the table and returned with a tin bathtub on his head, suggesting it as a symbol of what he called Les Nagistes , a school created by Lowell's poem "In a Garden", which ends with "Night, and the water, and you in your whiteness, bathing!" Apparently his behavior helped Lowell win people over to her point of view, as did her offer to fund future work. H.D. and Aldington were moving away from Pound's understanding of Imagisme anyway, as he aligned himself with Lewis's ideas. Lowell agreed to finance an annual anthology of Imagiste poets, but she insisted on democracy; according to Aldington, she "proposed
14208-435: The treason charge. Robert Graves wrote in 1955: "[Pound] knew little Latin, yet he translated Propertius; and less Greek, but he translated Alcaeus; and still less Anglo-Saxon, yet he translated The Seafarer . I once asked Arthur Waley how much Chinese Pound knew; Waley shook his head despondently." Pound was devastated when Henri Gaudier-Brzeska , from whom he had commissioned a sculpture of himself two years earlier,
14336-467: The utter confusion of thought which has undoubtedly arisen from the calm assumption of the book-keeper and the accountant that he and he alone was in a position to assign positive or negative values to the quantities represented by his figures is one of the outstanding curiosities of the industrial system; and the attempt to mould the activities of a great empire on such a basis is surely the final condemnation of an out-worn method. In 1920, Douglas presented
14464-620: The war. He also praised both eugenics and the Holocaust in Italy , while urging American GIs to throw down their rifles and surrender. In 1945, Pound was captured by the Italian Resistance and handed over to the U.S. Army 's Counterintelligence Corps , who held him pending extradition and prosecution based on an indictment for treason . He spent months in a U.S. military detention camp near Pisa , including three weeks in an outdoor steel cage. Ruled mentally unfit to stand trial, Pound
14592-593: The white Anglo-Saxon Protestants. The recently built New York Public Library Main Branch he found especially offensive. During this period his antisemitism became apparent; he referred in Patria Mia to the "detestable qualities" of Jews. After persuading his parents to finance his passage back to Europe, he sailed from New York on the RMS Mauretania on 22 February 1911. It was nearly 30 years—April 1939—before he visited
14720-613: The writer's not realizing that the natural object is always the adequate symbol." Poets should "go in fear of abstractions". He wanted Imagisme "to stand for hard light, clear edges", he wrote later to Amy Lowell . The apparition of these faces in the crowd: Petals on a wet, black bough. An example of Imagist poetry is Pound's " In a Station of the Metro ", published in Poetry in April 1913 and inspired by an experience on
14848-536: Was an American poet and critic, a major figure in the early modernist poetry movement, and a collaborator in Fascist Italy and the Salò Republic during World War II . His works include Ripostes (1912), Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920), and his 800-page epic poem The Cantos ( c. 1917 –1962). Pound's contribution to poetry began in the early 20th century with his role in developing Imagism ,
14976-446: Was during this visit that Yeats introduced Pound to Joyce's Chamber Music and his "I hear an Army Charging Upon the Land". This was the first of three winters Pound and Yeats spent at Stone Cottage, including two with Dorothy after she and Ezra married in 1914. "Canto LXXXIII" records a visit: "so that I recalled the noise in the chimney / as it were the wind in the chimney / but
15104-476: Was in reality Uncle William / downstairs composing / that had made a great Peeeeacock / in the proide ov his oiye." In his reply to Pound, Joyce gave permission to use "I hear an Army" and enclosed Dubliners and the first chapter of his novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man . Pound wrote to Joyce that the novel was "damn fine stuff". Harriet Shaw Weaver accepted it for The Egoist , which serialized it from 2 February 1914, despite
15232-617: Was incarcerated for over 12 years at St. Elizabeths psychiatric hospital in Washington, D.C. , whose doctors viewed Pound as a narcissist and a psychopath , but otherwise completely sane. While in custody in Italy, Pound began work on sections of The Cantos , which were published as The Pisan Cantos (1948), for which he was awarded the Bollingen Prize for Poetry in 1949 by the Library of Congress , causing enormous controversy. After
15360-427: Was killed in the trenches in June 1915. In response, he published Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir (1916), writing "A great spirit has been among us, and a great artist has gone." Two months before he died, Gaudier-Brzeska had written to Pound to say that he kept Cathay in his pocket "to put courage in my fellows". Social credit Social credit is a distributive philosophy of political economy developed in
15488-406: Was necessary to preserve the system from spontaneous combustion. Douglas claimed there were three possible policy alternatives with respect to the economic system: 1. The first of these is that it is a disguised Government, of which the primary, though admittedly not the only, object is to impose upon the world a system of thought and action. 2. The second alternative has a certain similarity to
15616-498: Was on 7 November 1896 in the Jenkintown Times-Chronicle ("by E. L. Pound, Wyncote, aged 11 years"), a limerick about William Jennings Bryan , who had just lost the 1896 presidential election . In 1897, aged 12, he transferred to Cheltenham Military Academy (CMA), where he wore an American Civil War-style uniform and was taught drilling and how to shoot. The following year he made his first trip overseas,
15744-413: Was the first article to be published in the magazine New Age , edited by Alfred Richard Orage , critiquing the methods by which economic activity is typically measured: It is not the purpose of this short article to depreciate the services of accountants; in fact, under the existing conditions probably no body of men has done more to crystallise the data on which we carry on the business of the world; but
15872-578: Was the literary politics of the day that not one of these voices appeared in its parallel anthology, the Hall-Pack-Simpson volume . A tribute to Allen's prescience is that nearly every poet in this gathering is now a familiar figure. At the time of its publication, it increased the recognition for the Black Mountain poets - especially Robert Duncan, Robert Creeley, Denise Levertov, Paul Blackburn, and Charles Olson - by identifying their contributions to
16000-744: Was to win the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1926, was unhappy that only one of her poems had appeared in Des Imagistes . She arrived in London in July 1914 to attend two dinners at the Dieudonné restaurant in Ryder Street, the first to celebrate the publication of Blast and the second, on 17 July, the publication of Des Imagistes . At the second, Ford Madox Hueffer announced that he had been an Imagiste long before Lowell and Pound, and that he doubted their qualifications; only Aldington and H.D. could lay claim to
16128-500: Was wasting everyone's time, and he left without finishing his doctorate. I am homesick after mine own kind, Oh I know that there are folk about me, friendly faces, But I am homesick after mine own kind. From September 1907 Pound taught French and Spanish at Wabash College , a Presbyterian college with 345 students in Crawfordsville, Indiana , which he called "the sixth circle of hell ". One former student remembered him as
16256-612: Was working at the time on the poems that became Ripostes (1912), trying to move away from his earlier work. "I hadn't in 1910 made a language", he wrote years later. "I don't mean a language to use, but even a language to think in." In August 1912 Harriet Monroe hired Pound as foreign correspondent of Poetry: A Magazine of Verse , a new magazine in Chicago. The first edition, in October, featured two of his own poems—"To Whistler, American" and "Middle Aged". Also that month Stephen Swift and Co. in London published Ripostes of Ezra Pound ,
16384-411: Was £42.10.0, apparently five times less than the year before. On 22 September 1914 T. S. Eliot traveled from Merton College, Oxford , with an introduction from Conrad Aiken , to have Pound read Eliot's unpublished " The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock ". Pound wrote to Harriet Monroe, editor of Poetry , on 30 September to say that Eliot—who was at Oxford on a fellowship from Harvard —had "sent in
#916083