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The following is an archived discussion of a featured article nomination. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the article's talk page or in Wikipedia talk:Featured article candidates. No further edits should be made to this page.

The article was promoted by Ian Rose 10:01, 13 March 2014 (UTC) [1].[reply]

Ezra Pound

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Ezra Pound (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs)

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Nominator(s): Victoria, Slim Virgin, Ceoil

The major American poet Ezra Pound helped develop the early careers of James Joyce, T. S. Eliot and Ernest Hemingway, among others, but was charged with treason and spent 12 years in an asylum. In other words, a complicated man. This has been a difficult page to write and wouldn't have been possible without SlimVirgin. Furthermore, in my view, this article has brought out best of the collaborative spirit of Wikipedia, with editors from around the world pitching in. Huge thanks to Crisco 1492 and Curly Turkey for their excellent peer reviews, here; to Deor who has tended the page tirelessly, to Modernist, whose voice has been invaluable, and to everyone else who helped along the way. Victoria (tk) 21:52, 22 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Image review

  • Shakespear, Ripostes and Yeats captions should end in period; plaque caption should not
  • File:Thaddeus_C._Pound_-_Brady-Handy.jpg needs a US PD tag
  • File:EzraPound%26IsabelPound1898.jpg has a PD and MoveToCommons tag, but a fair-use claim and rationale - these two are incompatible
  • File:Hdpoet.jpg: Open Yale link is broken
  • File:DorothyPound.jpg: was the given source the earliest publication found for this image? Does that source include any information on source/copyright of images?
  • File:William_Butler_Yeats_by_George_Charles_Beresford.jpg, File:T.S._Eliot,_1923.JPG: when/where was this first published?
  • File:Ezra_Pound_1945_May_26_mug_shot.jpg: source link is broken

In general, it seems like there are an awful lot of fair-use images...Nikkimaria (talk) 00:16, 24 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

SlimVirgin (talk) 01:12, 24 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]
  • Thanks for the review Nikkimaria. I've updated File:DorothyPound.jpg, which is identified as having been taken between 1910 and 1920 in Harwood, John. Olivia Shakespear and W.B. Yeats: After Long Silence. St. Martin's, 1989. ISBN 0-312-03458-X (page vi). Whether it was published, perhaps in the society pages or as a wedding announcement, is unknown. As a general question, what is the number of fair use images allowed? We're now down to three. Victoria (tk) 19:44, 25 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Comments

I've read till the beginning of Imagism

  • Do we need two Hemingway quotes in the lead? The second one, I think, is more suitable for The Cantos rather than Pound himself. Plus we just learned that they were good buddies, so they may not be the most impartial of views. Further, I think we'd be better served by a quote that illustrates *what* about Pound's poetry is immortal.
  • "such as T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Robert Frost and Ernest Hemingway"—given that we go on to mention three of these four people in the next few sentences, I wonder if this quoted bit is redundant and can be excised.
  • "His contribution to poetry began with his promotion of Imagism,"—this makes it seem that he supported the movt from the outside, rather than being an Imagist poet himself. I'd also like to see a line about the style of his later poetry.
  • Alliteration alert: "attempted assassination by anarchists of King Alfonso" and "pompous and propagandistic – popular with the public".
  • Is this article written in British English (Second World War instead of World War II, British date style) or American (two-story, traveled)?
  • Must there be so many nbsps? I find that they render the wikitext illegible for minimal benefit. Even then, their use here is far more than recommended—"T.;nbsp&S. Eliot" and before all the ellipses, for eg.
  • Speaking of ellipsis, they too are often excessively used, breaking the flow of the text. Their number can be reduced by breaking quotes into two ("culture in England ... [but] ... has made more") or removing the first few words out of the quote ("protaganists who ... are travellers", "E.P. has ... bats in the belfry"). I also wonder if the choppiness of that final, tragic quote to Ginsberg can be reduced by restoring Pound's words to some extent.
  • In several places there are hidden comments. Please resolve/remove those.
  • I found only one major issue while reading so far: the sheer density of exact street addresses. For me (a non-European/American reader), these not only utterly disrupt the flow of the prose, but also I don't really get the areas' significance just by reading the addresses (is it a posh area or a middle-class one or is it a cultural centre?).
For eg: "Arriving in the city with ₤3, he rented a room at 8 Duchess Street in the West End, then at 48 Langham Street, near Great Titchfield Street, a penny bus-ride from the British Museum."—Here you don't even realise the significance of the museum until its reading room is mentioned later. (Also which of these is "The house" of the next sentence?)
Another: is "Pound at no. 10, Doolittle at no. 6, and Aldington at no. 8" necessary when you could just say "the three were practically next-door neighbours"?
Another eg is "The family moved to 417 Walnut Street in Jenkintown, Pennsylvania, and in 1893 bought a six-bedroom house at 166 Fernbrook Avenue, Wyncote." How does this add to the article?
  • Similarly, I wonder if the prose gets bogged down by other kinds of excess detail—names of people (Carlos Tracey Chester, Paul L. Montgomery, Walter Rummel, Rupert Brooke—all from one subsection) and publications (I count 13 different books and magazines in that short Meeting Dorothy section). It would've been fine in any other biography, but given that here we have somebody who famously befriended several important people and was also a prolific writer, it can quickly become overwhelming.
  • Ripostes and translations from the Italian—why a separate section for a small paragraph?
  • Some sentences need untangling: "Pound was at that time working on the poems that became Ripostes (1912), trying to move away from his earlier work, which he wrote later had reduced Ford Madox Ford in 1911 to rolling on the floor laughing at Pound's stilted language." (what made Ford ROFL, the Ripostes or the earlier work?)

There is no doubt about the research work that has gone into this, but I wonder if the prose can be smoothed by weeding out some extraneous detail.—indopug (talk) 16:56, 26 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Hi Indopug, addressing a few points in the order you raised them:
  • I've changed promotion of Imagism to development of Imagism in the lead. [2] I've left the rest of the lead, as it seems to flow fairly well, but perhaps others can comment on that.
  • The article is written in American English with day-month-year date format.
  • I've made a few tweaks re: the ellipsis issue, though for the final quote that's mostly how it's written in the source.
  • The hidden comments can be helpful, so I've left them for now.
  • Moved British Museum Reading Room sentence closer to British Museum, so the significance isn't lost. The house referred to is 48 Langham Street, and there's a photograph of it. That bit now reads:
"Arriving in the city with ₤3, he moved into lodgings at 48 Langham Street, near Great Titchfield Street, a penny bus-ride from the British Museum.[20] The house sat across an alley from the Yorkshire Grey pub, which made an appearance in the Pisan Cantos, "concerning the landlady's doings / with a lodger unnamed / az waz near Gt Titchfield St. next door to the pub".[21] He would spend his mornings in the British Museum Reading Room, followed by lunch at the Vienna Café on Oxford Street."[22]
  • Personally I like "Pound at no. 10, Doolittle at no. 6, and Aldington at no. 8".
  • I've removed three addresses from the first section (where he was born and two of the houses he lived in), [3] and one from the London section. [4]
  • I've removed some of the publication and other details from the "Meeting Dorothy Shakespear, Personae" section, [5] and a detail about a publisher from the "Introduction to literary scene" section. [6]
  • Joined the Ripostes section with the one after it about translation work (both sections contain material about translations). [7]
  • I've tweaked the sentence you highlighted, which now reads: "He was working at the time on the poems that became Ripostes (1912), trying to move away from his earlier work; he wrote that the "stilted language" of Canzoni had reduced Ford Madox Ford to rolling on the floor with laughter." [8]
SlimVirgin (talk) 22:27, 26 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Hi Indopug, thanks for taking the time to read and review. Your comments, as usual, as useful. A few replies:
  • Non-breaking spaces: Thank you for mentioning these. I'd meant to weed those out but forgot. I've taken a first pass and will return.
  • Ellipses - I think I agree about that. Particularly when I really look at that final quote instead of zooming by in edit mode to do something else to the page. This will need a bit of work and time, but I think some weeding is in order.
  • American English - funnily the construction of First World War, Second World War, seemed off but I couldn't put my finger on the reason. I've changed to World War I and World II but will probably make further tweaks. I'd first like to check a few other articles I've worked on.
  • Addresses: the Church Walk numbers seem to me okay because there's no way to better way to explain that Pound, H.D. and Aldington lived in the same building in adjacent and across-the-hall apartments; further down we mention Pound's Paris address which too seems okay (same street as Hemingway in the Latin quarter, if I remember correctly).
I won't get to anything else tonight. Victoria (tk) 01:08, 27 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Update:
  • Hidden comments resolved and removed.
  • Working on weeding out excessive detail.
  • Ginsberg quote sorted.
  • A few other quotes fixed or removed - the "bats" quote had endashes in the source, so fixed that
I'm taking these slowly because they are thoughtful and helpful comments. Victoria (tk) 17:18, 28 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Late to the party as usual: Typically perceptive Indopug, thanks for going through in such detail. Ceoil (talk) 16:47, 1 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]
The article has been heavily trimmed since Indopug's input; but I hope judiciously. Close details left behind are intentional, to give insight into his circumstances at the paticular time. I dont see excessive detail as a problem from here. Ceoil (talk) 00:32, 2 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]
I agree. We've worked through, discussed, and in agreement about the trimming. Thanks again Indopug. Victoria (tk) 17:34, 3 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Support – I missed the peer review, but if the article was in anything like the shape it's in today I shouldn't have had much to contribute. No comment on images (I know little of WP's arcane rules on them), but as to the text, it seems to me first class. Comprehensive without excess, well balanced, properly referenced and very readable. I have read the article through twice, the second time looking for something to quibble at, but found nothing worth mentioning, which I think may be a first for me. A top flight piece of work, and I am glad to support its promotion. I didn't much care for Pound as a person or as a poet when I started reading and I still don't, but this article does him full justice in my view. – Tim riley (talk) 18:41, 4 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you Tim for the support and for your honesty. It's been a difficult page to balance and that you came away thinking the article does him justice is what we've wanted to achieve. Victoria (tk) 00:32, 6 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, thank you, Tim, for your support and for taking the time to read through the article (twice!). SlimVirgin (talk) 04:00, 6 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Comment by Fowler&fowler: Delighted that this is at FAC review. I will only comment on one sentence in St Elizabeth section, "The historian Stanley Kutler was given access in the 1980s to military intelligence and other government documents about Pound, including his hospital records, and wrote that the psychiatrists believed Pound had a narcissistic personality, but they considered him sane."

  • One, although Freud and other psychoanalysts had written about narcissism, the diagnosis of a disorder, esp. narcissistic personality disorder, wasn't really around in the mid-1940s (it appeared later in the late 60s and 70s with the work of Kohut, Kernberg etc. and even later in DSM)
  • Two, as someone who knew Jerome Kavka, the psychiatric resident at St E who had the most contact with Pound, (i.e. knew Kavka much later in his life, but well enough to know that he was very smart, psychodynamically sophisticated and upright), the sentence doesn't ring true. I don't know how reliable I would consider Kutler (a legal historian) writing in a popular magazine, Psychology Today, as reported by the NY Times in 1981). See for example: Wilhelm, 1994, p260 where Kavka says (in 1991): "I firmly believed then, as I believe now, that Ezra Pound was insane when he was admitted to the hospital." Although some others sources do quote Kavka as saying that Pound was not insane.
  • Three More importantly, from my perspective, the psychiatrists' understanding of Pound's mental condition was more sophisticated than the prosecution's. In other words, whether he was insane or not (by the book), they saw him as impossible to treat, and impossible therefore bring to trial-worthy state of mind. See Wilhelm, 1994, p 262:" Dr Kavka would add further that any attempt to reduce the highly complex mind of a person like Ezra Pound to some simplistic, all-encompassing, abstract psychological term was doomed to failure. If the "mad" Hamlet refused to be summed up in a nutshell, so did the poet. Pound was insane in parts of his mind and at some times more than others; that is what made him so difficult to deal with——far more than psychiatrists could handle, much less cure."

These are the thoughts that quickly come to mind. I'm pressed for time, so I can't really offer more than this. Best regards, Fowler&fowler«Talk» 16:12, 5 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

  • Hi Fowler, thanks for the comment. Just a note about the source. The New York Times interviewed Stanley Kutler for the article; he wrote a book that referred to the issue, American Inquisition: Justice and Injustice in the Cold War. The Psychology Today article is a separate issue: that was by E. Fuller Torrey, a psychiatrist at St. Elizabeths, who made the same or a similar point as Kutler. Torrey also wrote a book, The Roots of Treason: Ezra Pound and the Secret of St. Elizabeths. SlimVirgin (talk) 18:06, 5 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]
My mistake. Apologies. Well, why don't you source the statements to the books? Fowler&fowler«Talk» 18:37, 5 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Kutler's book isn't online so someone would have to borrow it to check that one point, but I think an interview with Kutler is a good-enough source given that we don't go into detail. At some point a separate article on Pound's time in St Elizabeths would be good, in which case we could summarize it in this article and offer more detail about the diagnosis. SlimVirgin (talk) 18:48, 5 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]
PS The last sentence, the quote, "'But the worst mistake I made was that stupid, suburban prejudice of anti-semitism." sounds a bit off-handed. Were suburbs in America really as blatantly anti-semitic as Pound, even in the 50s? Besides, Pound never lived in a suburb (unless by "suburban" he meant "small town" in the late 19th century). Ending with that sentence seems to suggest the dawnings of self-awareness and regret about anti-semitism. Is there other evidence in the sources? Fowler&fowler«Talk» 18:37, 5 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]
I checked what I have at hand: three major biographies and the essays in the books Ira Nadel edited, and I'm not finding any evidence in the sources. The meeting with Ginsberg and some form of the quote shows up in all the biographies but I'm not seeing any speculation as to what Pound meant. I took the quote from Humphrey Carpenter because the quote is in context of the conversation (he devotes almost three pages to the conversation in quoted form) but he doesn't opine and I'm not finding others opining either. Victoria (tk) 00:46, 6 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]
OK. Thanks for looking and replying. I have only skimmed through the article, but you have my support. All the best, Fowler&fowler«Talk» 10:51, 6 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you for reading and for the support! Victoria (tk) 01:16, 7 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Notes

  • I don't think I saw a source review for formatting/reliability, so will list a request at WT:FAC unless someone beats me to it.
  • I spotted a few duplicate links using Ucucha's script -- in an article of this length they might well be justified but just let me know you've reviewed them pls. Cheers, Ian Rose (talk) 14:29, 7 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]
  • Source review The references appear to be organized consistently. All sources look reliable. I'd note the following:
  • Consider adding OCLC numbers for the books that lack ISBNs. Those may easily be obtained at Worldcat, just scroll down the page once you've found the book there.
  • The de Rachewiltz ref lacks a location for the publisher. Yes, I know it's the OUP, but it could be Oxford or New York. Sources by de Rachewiltz are listed under both "D" and "R". Evenhanded.
  • The capitalisation in the Omar Pound ref title looks odd.
  • The O'Brien source needs a publisher.
  • "Bruccoli, Matthew and Baughman, Judith" Worldcat and Open Library list Hemingway as an additional author. Also, the title should be italicised, not in quotes.
  • The Eliot ref needs a location
  • In the Feldman ref, you have nested quote marks.
  • In the 1983 Kenner source, the ISBN should be labeled as such.
On a quick glance, the article looked quite good (I confess to having looked at his college years, as a fellow Penn alumnus!) I have the impression it's pending promotion so shall not do a full review but instead distribute rain checks. Congratulations. Quite an achievement.--Wehwalt (talk) 00:51, 9 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]
  • Thanks Wehwalt. I got almost all except adding OCLC numbers, which I've never done before. The O'Brien book was added by an IP and I can't find any information about it so I've commented it out. Victoria (tk) 02:35, 9 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]
  • Leaning Support
  • I think earlier reviewers have worked out most of the rough spots. One thing that I noticed -- where you write that he asked Hilda Doolittle to marry him, it's not clear whether she turned him down, or accept but her father wouldn't allow it.
  • That's all that stands out in the first read. I'll give it another going-over to see if there's anything I missed. --Coemgenus (talk) 19:08, 9 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]
  • Hi Coemgenus; her father kiboshed the idea; when Pound went to him to ask permission he was met with "Why, you’re nothing but a nomad". Our article states "her father refused permission". I might make this a bit more explicit. Ceoil (talk) 21:42, 9 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]
  • Yes, we could do that. I'd just found that quote when you posted it here. Coemgenus, I've checked the biographies I have at hand and they're vague about her response to his proposal, focusing more on the father's attitude toward Pound. Victoria (tk) 23:31, 9 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]
  • Done, but its derived from a number of places. I dont want to upset the apple cart by introducing new ones at this stage, so Victoria or SV can ye verify with existing sources pls. Plus her father seems to have been quite a character, though *not* in a good way. That might be worth dragging out further. Ceoil (talk) 01:19, 10 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Support My comments have largely been addressed. This is a fine article. Congrats to the authors.—indopug (talk) 16:59, 11 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Many thanks, Indopug (for the support and for coming back), and also thank you to Coemgenus, Wehwalt and Fowler&fowler. SlimVirgin (talk) 17:03, 11 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]
The above discussion is preserved as an archive. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this page.
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