Olga Rudge & Ezra Pound: "What Thou Lovest Well..."

x Preface
Cody, a psychiatrist who studied Pound, observed that Ezra acted like his
own definition of the Vortex, ‘‘sucking everything and everyone into his
omnivorous intellect. He used people . . . but the manipulation was sometimes
unperceived by either side in the drama.’’ The evidence suggests
that Olga would not have been sucked into Ezra’s Vortex had she not
wanted to be.
In her eighties, Rudge wrote to Faber & Faber, Pound’s British publisher,
to propose ‘‘A Story of the Days,’’ a collage of family records,
letters, and memorabilia—in her words, ‘‘all very Henry Jamesy.’’ But she
never completed the project, and she refused to consider herself a proper
subject for biography when cornered in her mountain retreat. ‘‘Write
about Pound,’’ she said.
In art as in life, Pound was a Victorian struggling to become a modern.
As a student at the University of Pennsylvania, he immersed himself in
medieval and Renaissance poetry, later writing The Spirit of Romance
about the troubadours and courtly love. In the first years of the new
century, he was indisputably a moving force in the creation of the Modernist
movement. The Great War hastened the transition to a new age.
‘‘Make it new,’’ Pound said, and his influence on the next generation of
poets and writers was both far-reaching and lasting. T. S. Eliot dedicated
The Waste Land to Pound, ‘‘il miglior fabbro.’’ ‘‘But for him,’’ wrote James
Joyce, ‘‘I should still be the unknown drudge he discovered.’’
Thomas Carlyle has said, ‘‘Next to possessing genius one’s self is the
power of appreciating it in others.’’ Olga was the keeper of the flame who
preserved Pound’s legacy for posterity.
In this work, I have let Olga and Ezra speak for themselves through
their correspondence and her diaries, without correcting errors of style
and syntax. Some are written in the imperfect Italian of two people whose
mother tongue was English. All reveal a spirited battle of the sexes between
two highly intelligent and articulate human beings.