William Butler. A Packet for Ezra Pound.

by YEATS

£500 · Offered by Henry Sotheran Ltd

‘We Discuss Guido Cavalcanti and Only Quarrel a Little’ – Yeats on Pound YEATS, William Butler. A Packet for Ezra Pound. Dublin: Cuala Press . [June] 1929. 8vo. Publisher’s linen-backed boards with blue paper sides, upper board lettered in black, printed spine label, blue endpapers, bookseller’s ticket to front pastedown; pp. [1], [3 (blank)], 37, [2]; woodcut vignette to title by Thomas Sturge Moore; slight discolouration to spine, a few small stains to cloth; a very good, clean copy. First edition, one of 425 copies, of Yeats’s musings on his complex relationship with Pound, later forming the introduction for his 1937 revision of A Vision , print-ed by Elizabeth ‘Lolly’ Corbet Yeats, Yeats’s sister and co-founder of the Cuala Press in Dublin. Yeats and his wife arrived in Rapallo, near Genoa – a reflection on which opens the present work – in February 1928 for William’s health. Ezra and Dorothy Pound had been there since 1924. Here, Yeats characterises Pound’s ‘art as the opposite of mine’; his ‘criticism con-demns what I most condemn, a man with whom I should quarrel more than with anyone else if we were not united by affection. Here, Yeats describes, inter alia , his lengthy conversations with Pound in Rapallo on the structure and development of the Cantos , Pound feeding the stray cats of Rapallo, his conflicted and shifting reception of Pound’s work (‘I had never understood until now that the translations from Chinese, from Latin, from Provençal, are as much a part of h

• Binding: Hardcover

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