ezra pound, «lopista»

This article reveals Ezra Pound’s deep, early engagements with the works of Lope de Vega. A young Pound studied Lope de Vega in graduate school and began a doctoral thesis on the gracioso figure in his plays, under the direction of famed lopista Hugo Rennert. But Pound abandoned his dissertation and, instead, translated small parts of Lope de Vega’s works (including a poem from Los pastores de Belén) and, more important, used scenes and quotations from Las almenas de Toro to structure the early parts of what would become The Cantos. My focus is on the ways in which these translations and quotations helped Pound discover his governing themes for what are called his «Ur-Cantos» —the first three poems of his Cantos that he published in 1917, before he would revise them heavily and republish them in his first book, A Draft of XVI. Cantos (1925). To understand this, I analyze his chapter on Lope de Vega in his textbook of translations and scholarly commentaries, The Spirit of Romance (1910). Pound ultimately rejects Lope de Vega’s Baroque style, I argue, and stages his rejection across The Cantos, where he dismisses the Baroque as too heavily «ornamental» and not sufficiently suspended across literary time, and thus not the style he will use in developing The Cantos across the remainder of his life.