Freda Bedi, by Wikipedia

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Re: Freda Bedi, by Wikipedia

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Alfred Richard Orage
by Wikipedia
Accessed: 4/7/19

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Orage was born on January 22, 1873, in Yorkshire, England. His father died when he was one year old and his mother was forced to support the family by taking in washing. A wealthy local patron sent Orage to a teacher's college, leading him to become a schoolmaster in Leeds. Here Orage joined various intellectual and socialist groups. Orage moved to London in 1906, where he became active in the socialist Fabian Society. Orage sought to convince his fellow Fabians to pay greater attention to aesthetic concerns and, with help from friends, purchased The New Age periodical, turning it into a leading journal of eclectic literary style and economic beliefs. As editor he published work by such leading figures as George Bernard Shaw and Ezra Pound. Orage also published specifically socialist journalism, particularly expositions of the theory of social credit, which demanded government programs to increase workers' purchasing power so that they might be less dependent on their own labor. Orage also published essays on mysticism and his own spiritual leanings influenced much of his work. He resigned as editor in 1922 to become a disciple of the mystic Georgy Gurdjieff in France and New York. He returned to England and in 1932 founded another journal, The New English Weekly, which he ran much as he had The New Age until his death on November 5, 1934.

-- Alfred Richard Orage 1873-1934, by enotes.com


Image
Alfred R. Orage
Born 22 January 1873
Dacre, West Riding of Yorkshire, England
Died 6 November 1934 (aged 61)
London, England
Nationality English
Occupation teacher, lecturer, writer, editor, publisher
Known for Editor of The New Age
Spouse(s) Jean Walker (first spouse maiden name), Jessie Richards Dwight (second and last spouse maiden name)
Children Richard and Ann
Parent(s) William Orage, Sarah Anne McGuire (mother's maiden name)
Relatives David, Marcus, Linnet, Carolyn, Piers, Toby and Peregrine (grandchildren)

Alfred Richard Orage (22 January 1873 – 6 November 1934) was a British intellectual, now best known for editing the magazine The New Age. While he was working as a schoolteacher in Leeds he pursued various interests, including Plato, the Independent Labour Party and theosophy. In 1900 he met Holbrook Jackson and three years later they co-founded the Leeds Arts Club, which became a centre of modernist culture in Britain. In 1905 Orage resigned his teaching position and moved to London. There, in 1907, he bought and began editing the weekly The New Age, at first with Holbrook Jackson, and became an influential figure in socialist politics and modernist culture, especially at the height of the magazine's fame before the First World War.[1]

In 1924 Orage sold The New Age and went to France to work with George Gurdjieff, the spiritual teacher whom P. D. Ouspensky had recommended to him. After spending some time on preliminary training in the Gurdjieff System Orage was sent to America by Gurdjieff himself to raise funds and lecture on the new system of self-development, which emphasised the harmonious work of intellectual, emotional and moving functions. Orage also worked with Gurdjieff in translating the first version of Gurdjieff's All and Everything as well as Meetings with Remarkable Men from Russian to English, but neither book was ever published in their lifetimes.

In 1927 Orage's first wife, Jean, granted him a divorce and in September he married Jessie Richards Dwight (1901–1985), the co-owner of the Sunwise Turn bookshop where Orage first lectured on the Gurdjieff System. Orage and Jessie had two children, Richard and Ann. While they were in New York Orage and Jessie often catered to celebrities such as Paul Robeson, fresh from his London tour. In 1930 Orage returned to England and in 1931 he began publishing the New English Weekly. He remained in London until his death on 6 November 1934.[2]

Early life

James Alfred Orage was born in Dacre, near Harrogate in the West Riding of Yorkshire, into a Nonconformist family. He was generally known as Dickie, and he eventually dropped the name James and adopted the middle name Richard.

In 1894 he became a schoolteacher in an elementary school in Leeds and helped to found the Leeds branch of the Independent Labour Party (ILP). He wrote a weekly literary column for the ILP's paper, the Labour Leader, from 1895 to 1897. He brought a philosophical outlook to the paper, including in particular the thought of Plato and Edward Carpenter. Orage devoted seven years of study to Plato, from 1893 to 1900. He also devoted seven years of his life to the study of Nietzsche's philosophy, from 1900 to 1907, and from 1907 to 1914 he was a student of the Mahabharata.[3]

By the late 1890s Orage was disillusioned with conventional socialism and turned for a while to theosophy. In 1900 he met Holbrook Jackson in a Leeds bookshop and lent him a copy of the Bhagavad-Gita. In return Jackson lent him Friedrich Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra, which led Orage to study Nietzsche's work in depth. In 1903 Orage, Jackson and the architect Arthur J. Penty helped to found the Leeds Arts Club with the intention of promoting the work of radical thinkers including G. B. Shaw, whom Orage had met in 1898, Henrik Ibsen and Nietzsche. During this period Orage returned to socialist platforms, but by 1906 he was determined to combine Carpenter's socialism with Nietzsche's thought and theosophy.

In 1906 Beatrice Hastings, whose real name was Emily Alice Haigh and who hailed from Port Elizabeth, became a regular contributor to the New Age. By 1907 she and Orage had developed an intimate relationship. As Beatrice Hastings herself later put it, ″Aphrodite amused herself at our expense.″[4] Orage's involvement with Beatrice Hastings was too much for Orage's wife Jean, who had shared his theosophical and aesthetic interests until then. She went to live with Holbrook Jackson and spent the rest of her life as a skilled craftswoman in the tradition of William Morris.

Orage explored his new ideas in several books. He saw Nietzsche's Übermensch as a metaphor for the "higher state of consciousness" sought by mystics and attempted to define a route to this higher state, insisting that it must involve a rejection of civilisation and conventional morality. He moved through a celebration of Dionysus to declare that he was in favour, not of an ordered socialism, but of an anarchic movement.[5]

In 1906 and 1907 Orage published three books: Consciousness: Animal, Human and Superhuman, based on his experience with theosophy; Friedrich Nietzsche: The Dionysian Spirit of the Age; and Nietzsche in Outline and Aphorism. Orage's rational critique of theosophy evoked an editorial rebuttal from The Theosophical Review and in 1907 he terminated his association with the Theosophical Society. The two books on Nietzsche were the first systematic introductions to Nietzschean thought to be published in Britain.[6]

Editor in London

In 1906 Orage resigned his teaching post and moved to London, following Arthur Penty, another friend from the Leeds Art Club. In London Orage attempted to form a league for the restoration of the guild system, in the spirit of the decentralised socialism of William Morris. The failure of this project spurred him to buy the weekly magazine The New Age in 1907, in partnership with Holbrook Jackson and with the support of George Bernard Shaw. Orage transformed the magazine to fit with his conception of a forum for politics, literature and the arts. Although many contributors were Fabians, he distanced himself from their politics to some extent and sought to have the magazine represent a wide range of political views. He used the magazine to launch attacks on parliamentary politics and argued the need for utopianism. He also attacked the trade union leadership, while offering some support to syndicalism, and tried to combine syndicalism with his ideal of a revived guild system. Combining these two ideas resulted in Guild socialism, the political philosophy Orage began to argue for from about 1910, though the specific term "guild socialism" seems not to have been mentioned in print until Bertrand Russell referred to it in his book Political Ideals (1917).[7]

Between 1908 and 1914 The New Age was the premier little magazine in Britain. It was instrumental in pioneering the British avant-garde, from vorticism to imagism, and its contributors included T.E. Hulme, Wyndham Lewis, Katherine Mansfield, Ezra Pound and Herbert Read. Orage's success as an editor was connected with his talent as a conversationalist and a ″bringer together″ of people. The modernists of London had been scattered between 1905 and 1910, but largely thanks to Orage a sense of a modernist ″movement″ was created from 1910 onwards.[8]

Orage's politics

Orage declared himself a socialist and followed Georges Sorel in arguing that trade unions should pursue an increasingly aggressive policy on wage deals and working conditions. He approved of the increasing militancy of the unions in the era before the First World War and seems to have shared Sorel's belief in the necessity of a union-led General Strike leading to a revolutionary situation.[9] However, for Orage economic power precedes political power, and political reform was useless without economic reform.[10]

In the early issues of The New Age Orage supported the women's suffrage movement, but he became increasingly hostile to it as the Women's Social and Political Union became more prominent and more militant. Pro-suffragette articles were not published after 1910, but heated debate on this subject took place in the correspondence columns.

During the First World War Orage defended what he saw as the interests of the working class. On 6 August 1914 he wrote in Notes of the Week in The New Age: ″We believe that England is necessary to Socialism, as Socialism is necessary to the world.″ On 14 November 1918 Orage wrote of the coming peace settlement (embodies in the Treaty of Versailles): "The next world war, if unhappily there should be another, will in all probability be contained within the clauses and conditions attaching to the present peace settlement."

By then Orage was convinced that the hardships of the working class were the result of the monetary policies of banks and governments. If Britain could remove the pound from the gold standard during the war and re-establish the gold standard after the war, then the gold standard was not as necessary as the monetary oligarchs wanted the proletariat to believe it was. On 15 July 1920 Orage wrote: ″We should be the first to admit that the subject of Money is difficult to understand. It is 'intended' to be, by the minute oligarchy that governs the world by means of it."[11]

After the First World War Orage was influenced by C. H. Douglas and became a supporter of the social credit movement. On 2 January 1919 Orage published the first article by C. H. Douglas to appear in The New Age: ″A Mechanical View of Economics″.[12]

With Gurdjieff

Orage had met P. D. Ouspensky for the first time in 1914. Ouspensky's ideas had left a lasting impression and when he moved to London in 1921 Orage began attending his lectures on "Fragments of an Unknown Teaching", the basis of his book In Search of the Miraculous. From this time onwards Orage became less and less interested in literature and art, and instead focused most of his attention on mysticism. His correspondence with Harry Houdini on this subject moved him to explore ideas of the afterlife. He returned to the idea that there are absolute truths and concluded that they are embodied in the Mahabharata.

In February 1922 Ouspensky introduced Orage to G. I. Gurdjieff. Orage sold The New Age and moved to Paris to study at the Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man. In 1924 Gurdjieff appointed him to lead study groups in the United States, which he did for seven years. Soon after Gurdjieff arrived in New York from France, on 13 November 1930, he deposed Orage and disbanded his study groups, believing that Orage had been teaching them incorrectly: they had been working under the misconception that self-observation could be practised in the absence of self-remembering or in the presence of negative emotions. Members were allowed to continue their studies with Gurdjieff himself, after taking an oath not to communicate with Orage. Upon hearing that Orage had also signed the oath Gurdjieff wept. Gurdjieff had once considered Orage as a friend and brother, and thought of Jessie as a bad choice for a mate. Orage was a chain smoker and Jessie was a heavy drinker.[13] In the privately published Third Series of his writings Gurdjieff wrote of Orage and his wife Jessie: ″his romance had ended in his marrying the saleswoman of 'Sunwise Turn,' a young American pampered out of all proportion to her position...″[14]

Orage, Ouspensky and C. Daly King emphasised certain aspects of the Gurdjieff System while ignoring others. According to Gurdjieff, Orage emphasised self-observation. In Harlem, New York City, Jean Toomer, one of Orage's students at Greenwich Village used Gurdjieff's work to confront the problem of racism.[15]

The Orages sailed back to New York from England on the S.S. Washington on 29 December 1930, and arrived on Thursday 8 January 1931. The next day, while they were staying at the Irving Hotel, Orage wrote a letter to Gurdjieff unveiling a plan for the publication of All and Everything before the end of the year and promising a substantial amount of money.[16] At lunch in New York City on 21 February 1931 Achmed Abdulla, a.k.a. Nadir Kahn, told the Orages that he had met Gurdjieff in Tibet and that Gurdjieff had been known there as Lama Dordjieff, a Tsarist agent and tutor to the Dalai Lama.[17]

Last years

In London Orage became involved in politics again through the social credit movement. He returned to New York on 8 January 1931 in an attempt to meet Gurdjieff's new demands, but he told his wife that he would not be teaching the Gurdjieff System to any group past the end of the Spring. Orage was on the pier on 13 March 1931 to bid Gurdjieff farewell on his way back to France and the Orages sailed back to England on 3 July.

In April 1932 Orage founded a new journal, The New English Weekly. Dylan Thomas's first published poem, And Death Shall Have No Dominion, appeared in its issue dated 18 May 1933, but by then the magazine was not selling well and Orage was experiencing financial difficulties.

In September 1933 Jessie gave birth to a daughter, Ann. In January 1934 Senator Bronson M. Cutting presented Orage's Social Credit Plan to the United States Senate, proposing that it become one of the tools of Roosevelt's economic policy.

At the beginning of August 1934 Gurdjieff asked Orage to prepare a new edition of The Herald of Coming Good. On 20 August Orage wrote his last letter to Gurdjieff: "Dear Mr Gurdjieff, I've found very little to revise ..."[18]

Towards the end of his life Orage was attacked by severe pain below the heart. This ailment had been diagnosed a couple of years before as simply functional and he did not again seek medical advice. While he was broadcasting a speech, "Property in Plenty", once again expounding the doctrine of social credit, he experienced excruciating pain, but he continued as if nothing was happening. After leaving the studio he spent the evening with his wife and friends, and made plans to see the doctor next day, but he died in his sleep that night.[19] Orage's former students of the Gurdjieff System arranged for the enneagram to be inscribed on his tombstone.

Works

• Friedrich Nietzsche: The Dionysian Spirit of the Age (1906)[20]
• Nietzsche in Outline and Aphorism (1907)[21]
• National Guilds: An Inquiry into the Wage System and the Way Out (1914) editor; a collection of articles from The New Age
• An Alphabet of Economics (1918)
• Readers and Writers (1917–1921) (1922) as RHC[22]
• Psychological Exercises and Essays (1930)
• The Art of Reading (1930)
• On Love: Freely Adapted form the Tibetan (Unicorn Press 1932)
• Selected Essays and Critical Writings (1935) edited by Herbert Read and Denis Saurat
• Political and Economic Writings from 'The New English Weekly', 1932-34, with a Preliminary Section from 'The New Age' 1912 (1936), edited by Montgomery Butchart, with the advice of Maurice Colbourne, T. S. Eliot, Philip Mairet, Will Dyson and others
• Essays and Aphorisms (1954)
• The Active Mind: Adventures in Awareness (1954)
• Orage as Critic (1974), edited by Wallace Martin
• Consciousness: Animal, Human and Superman (1978)
• A. R. Orage's Commentaries on Gurdjieff's "All and Everything", edited by C. S. Nott

Notes

His family name was pronounced locally as if written "Orridge" (/ˈɒrɪdʒ/).[23] The man himself preferred a French-like pronunciation: /oʊˈrɑːʒ/.[24] The British may prefer the former variant; Americans, the latter.[25]

References

1. Mairet, Philip (1966). A. R. Orage. University Books Inc. p. 63. No better 'argumentative' English was ever written.
2. Mairet, Philip (1966). A. R. Orage. University Books. p. 121. The man who, as Bernard Shaw said, was the most brilliant editor...
3. The Purchase of The New Age Archived 30 May 2008 at the Wayback Machine p. 17
4. Carswell, John (1978). Lives and Letters. New Directions Publishing. pp. 28–31. ISBN 0-8112-0681-5. ...his little book introducing the philosophy of Nietzsche... appeared in 1906...
5. Luckhurst, Roger (2002). The Invention of Telepathy (1870-1901). Oxford University Press. p. 257. ISBN 0-19-924962-8. ...the main problem of the mystics of all ages has been the problem of how to develop the superconsciousness, of how to become supermen.
6. Orage, A. R. (1975). Wallace Martin, ed. Orage as Critic. Routledge. pp. 6–7. ISBN 0-7100-7982-6. ...Orage did not lack activities to engage his intellectual interests.
7. Ironside, Philip (1996). The Social and Political Thought of Bertrand Russell. Cambridge University Press. p. 104. ISBN 0-521-47383-7.
8. Rooms in the Darwin Hotel pp. 98-127
9. Ferrall, Charles (2001). Modernist Writing and Reactionary Politics. Cambridge University Press. p. 16. ISBN 0-521-79345-9. Thus Orage remembered that...
10. Redman, Tim. Ezra Pound and Italian Fascism. p. 49.|
11. Redman, Tim (1991). Ezra Pound and Italian Fascism. Cambridge University Press. pp. 24, 33, 45–47. ISBN 0-521-37305-0.
12. Hutchinson, Frances; Burkitt, Brian (1997). The Political Economy of Social Credit and Guild Socialism. Routledge. ISBN 0-415-14709-3. Douglas's birth... and his meeting with Orage in 1918 remain the subject of mystery and speculation...
13. Gurdjieff, George (1978). Life Is Real Only Then, When I Am (2nd private ed.). New York: Triangle Editions, Inc. p. 67. LCCN 75-15225. On the first evening of my arrival in New York...
14. Gurdjieff, George (1978). Life is Real Only Then, When I Am (2nd Private ed.). New York: Triangle Editions Inc. p. 95. LCCN 75-15225. ...Mr Orage ... realising the necessity and at the same time all the difficulties of getting means on the one hand for sending money to me, and on the other hand for meeting the excessive expenditures of his new family life...
15. Woodson, Jon (1999). To Make a New Race. Univ. Press of Mississippi. pp. 38–41. ISBN 1-57806-131-8. Jean Toomer...was encouraged by Orage to undertake groups of his own.
16. Taylor, Paul Beekman (2001). Gurdjieff and Orage. Weiser. p. 173. ISBN 1-57863-128-9. Dear and kind author of The Tales of Beelzebub...
17. Taylor, Paul Beekman (2001). Gurdjieff and Orage. Weiser. p. 178. ISBN 1-57863-128-9. On St Valentine's day ...bootleg whisky Gurdjieff had offered them in honor of the Saint of Love.
18. Taylor, Paul Beekman (2001). Gurdjieff and Orage. Weiser. pp. 179–194. ISBN 1-57863-128-9. There has been a great fight here over the question of Orage. Now I understand Orage has returned to the fold.
19. Philip Mairet A. R. Orage: A Memoir, pp. 118-120, University Books, 1966 ASIN: B000Q0VV8E; 1st ed. 1936
20. Friedrich Nietzsche, the Dionysian spirit of the age
21. Nietzche in Outline and Aphorism
22. Readers and Writers (1917-1921)
23. Curtis, Anthony (1998). Lit Ed: On Reviewing and Reviewers. Carcanet Press Limited. p. 163.
24. Carswell, John (1978). Lives and Letters: A. R. Orage, Beatrice Hastings, Katherine Mansfield, John Middleton Murry, S. S. Koteliansky: 1906-1957. New Directions Publishing. p. 16.
25. Wilhelm, J. J. (2010). Ezra Pound in London and Paris, 1908-1925. Penn State Press. p. 83.

External links

• A. R. Orage: A Memoir (1936) Philip Mairet
• Alfred Orage and the Leeds Arts Club (1893–1923) (Scolar Press 1990) Tom Steele
• Gurdjieff and Orage: Brothers in Elysium (2001) Paul Beekman Taylor,
• English 480/680: Modernism In and Beyond the "Little Magazines", Winter 2007, Professor Ann Ardis, Brown University
• "Orage and the History of the New Age Periodical," Brown University, Modernist Journals Project
• Brown University, Modernist Journals Project main index
• Encyclopædia Britannica article on Orage
• Complete archive of The New Age under Orage's editorship
• Archival Material at Leeds University Library
• C. Daly King: "The Oragean Version" (1951) A record of Orage's transmission of Gurdjieff's ideas in New York City during the 1920s
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Re: Freda Bedi, by Wikipedia

Postby admin » Sun Apr 07, 2019 8:12 pm

Part 1 of 2

Ezra Pound
by Wikipedia
Accessed: 4/7/19

NOTICE: THIS WORK MAY BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT

YOU ARE REQUIRED TO READ THE COPYRIGHT NOTICE AT THIS LINK BEFORE YOU READ THE FOLLOWING WORK, THAT IS AVAILABLE SOLELY FOR PRIVATE STUDY, SCHOLARSHIP OR RESEARCH PURSUANT TO 17 U.S.C. SECTION 107 AND 108. IN THE EVENT THAT THE LIBRARY DETERMINES THAT UNLAWFUL COPYING OF THIS WORK HAS OCCURRED, THE LIBRARY HAS THE RIGHT TO BLOCK THE I.P. ADDRESS AT WHICH THE UNLAWFUL COPYING APPEARED TO HAVE OCCURRED. THANK YOU FOR RESPECTING THE RIGHTS OF COPYRIGHT OWNERS.


Image
photograph of Ezra H. Pound. Ezra Pound photographed in 1913 by Alvin Langdon

Ezra Weston Loomis Pound (30 October 1885 – 1 November 1972) was an expatriate American poet and critic, and a major figure in the early modernist poetry movement. His contribution to poetry began with his development of Imagism, a movement derived from classical Chinese and Japanese poetry, stressing clarity, precision and economy of language. His works include Ripostes (1912), Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920) and the unfinished 120-section epic, The Cantos (1917–1969).

Pound worked in London during the early 20th century as foreign editor of several American literary magazines, and helped discover and shape the work of contemporaries such as T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Robert Frost and Ernest Hemingway.[a] Angered by the carnage of World War I, Pound lost faith in Great Britain and blamed the war on usury and international capitalism. He moved to Italy in 1924 and throughout the 1930s and 1940s embraced Benito Mussolini's fascism, expressed support for Adolf Hitler, and wrote for publications owned by the British fascist Sir Oswald Mosley. During World War II, he was paid by the Italian government to make hundreds of radio broadcasts criticizing the United States, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Jews, as a result of which he was arrested in 1945 by American forces in Italy on charges of treason. He spent months in detention in a U.S. military camp in Pisa, including three weeks in a 6-by-6-foot (1.8 by 1.8 m) outdoor steel cage, which he said triggered a mental breakdown: "when the raft broke and the waters went over me". The following year he was deemed unfit to stand trial, and incarcerated in St. Elizabeths psychiatric hospital in Washington, D.C., for over 12 years.[2]

Pound began work on sections of The Cantos while in custody in Italy. These parts were published as The Pisan Cantos (1948), for which he was awarded the Bollingen Prize in 1949 by the Library of Congress, leading to enormous controversy. Largely due to a campaign by his fellow writers, he was released from St. Elizabeths in 1958 and returned to live in Italy until his death. His political views ensure that his work remains as controversial now as it was during his lifetime; in 1933, Time magazine called him "a cat that walks by himself, tenaciously unhousebroken and very unsafe for children". Hemingway wrote: "The best of Pound's writing—and it is in the Cantos—will last as long as there is any literature."[3]

Early life (1885–1908)

Background


See also: Homer Pound House

Image
Thaddeus Pound, Pound's grandfather, in the late 1880s

Pound was born in a small, two-story house in Hailey, Idaho Territory, the only child of Homer Loomis Pound (1858–1942) and Isabel Weston (1860–1948). His father had worked in Hailey since 1883 as registrar of the General Land Office.[4]

Both parents' ancestors had emigrated from England in the 17th century. On his mother's side, Pound was descended from William Wadsworth (1594–1675), a Puritan who emigrated to Boston on the Lion in 1632.[5] The Wadsworths married into the Westons of New York. Harding Weston and Mary Parker were the parents of Isabel Weston, Ezra's mother.[6] Harding apparently spent most of his life without work, with his brother, Ezra Weston, and his brother's wife, Frances, looking after Mary and Isabel's needs.[7]

On his father's side, the immigrant ancestor was John Pound, a Quaker, who arrived from England around 1650. Ezra's grandfather, Thaddeus Coleman Pound (1832–1914), was a Republican Congressman from northwest Wisconsin who had made and lost a fortune in the lumber business. Thaddeus's son Homer, Pound's father, worked for Thaddeus in the lumber business until Thaddeus secured him the appointment as registrar of the Hailey land office. Homer and Isabel married the following year and Homer built a house in Hailey.[6] Isabel was unhappy in Hailey and took Ezra with her to New York in 1887, when he was 18 months old.[7] Homer followed them, and in 1889 he found a job as an assayer at the Philadelphia Mint. The family moved to Jenkintown, Pennsylvania, and in 1893 bought a six-bedroom house in Wyncote.[6]

Education

Image
Pound, in his Cheltenham Military Academy uniform, with his mother in 1898

Pound's education began in a series of dame schools, some of them run by Quakers: Miss Elliott's school in Jenkintown in 1892, the Heathcock family's Chelten Hills School in Wyncote in 1893, and the Florence Ridpath school from 1894, also in Wyncote.[8] His first publication 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: "There was a young man from the West, / He did what he could for what he thought best; / But election came round, / He found himself drowned, / And the papers will tell you the rest."[9]

Between 1897 and 1900 Pound attended Cheltenham Military Academy, sometimes as a boarder, where he specialized in Latin. The boys wore Civil War-style uniforms and besides Latin were taught English, history, arithmetic, marksmanship, military drilling and the importance of submitting to authority. Pound made his first trip overseas in mid-1898 when he was 13, a three-month tour of Europe with his mother and Frances Weston (Aunt Frank), who took him to England, Belgium, Germany, Switzerland and Italy.[10] After the academy he may have attended Cheltenham Township High School for one year, and in 1901, aged 15, he was admitted to the University of Pennsylvania's College of Liberal Arts.[11]

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H.D., c. 1921. She followed Pound to London and became involved in developing Imagism.

Pound met Hilda Doolittle (later known as the poet H.D.) at Pennsylvania in 1901, and she became his first serious romance.[12] In 1911 she followed Pound to London and became involved in developing the Imagism movement. Between 1905 and 1907 Pound wrote a number of poems for her, 25 of which he hand-bound and called Hilda's Book,[13] and in 1908 he asked her father, the astronomy professor Charles Doolittle, for permission to marry her, but Doolittle dismissed Pound as a nomad.[14] Pound was seeing two other women at the same time—Viola Baxter and Mary Moore—later dedicating a book of poetry, Personae (1909), to the latter. He asked Moore to marry him too, but she turned him down.[15]

His parents and Frances Weston took Pound on another three-month European tour in 1902, after which he transferred, in 1903, to Hamilton College in Clinton, New York, possibly because of poor grades. Signed up for the Latin–Scientific course, he studied the Provençal dialect with William Pierce Shephard and Old English with Joseph D. Ibbotson; with Shephard he read Dante and from this began the idea for a long poem in three parts—of emotion, instruction and contemplation—planting the seeds for The Cantos.[16] He wrote in 1913, in "How I Began":

I resolved that at thirty I would know more about poetry than any man living ... that I would know what was accounted poetry everywhere, what part of poetry was 'indestructible', what part could not be lost by translation and—scarcely less important—what effects were obtainable in one language only and were utterly incapable of being translated.

In this search I learned more or less of nine foreign languages, I read Oriental stuff in translations, I fought every University regulation and every professor who tried to make me learn anything except this, or who bothered me with "requirements for degrees".[17]


Pound graduated from Hamilton College with a BPhil in 1905, then studied Romance languages under Hugo A. Rennert at the University of Pennsylvania (Penn), where he obtained an MA in early 1906 and registered to write a PhD thesis on the jesters in Lope de Vega's plays. A Harrison fellowship covered his tuition fees and gave him a travel grant of $500, which he used to return to Europe.[18] Pound spent three weeks in Madrid in various libraries, including one in the royal palace. There, on 31 May 1906, he happened to be standing outside when the attempted assassination of King Alfonso took place, and Pound subsequently left the country for fear he would be identified with the anarchists. After Spain he spent two weeks in Paris, attending lectures at the Sorbonne, followed by a week in London.[19]

In July he returned to the United States, where in September his first essay, "Raphaelite Latin", was published in Book News Monthly. He took courses in the English department at Penn in 1907, where he fell out with several lecturers; during lectures on Shakespeare by Felix Schelling, the department head, he would wind an enormous tin watch very slowly while Schelling spoke. His fellowship was not renewed. Schelling told him that he was wasting everyone's time, and Pound left without finishing his doctorate.[20]

Teaching

In Durance
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.

— Personae (1909), written in Crawfordsville, Indiana, 1907[21]


From late 1907 Pound taught Romance languages at Wabash College in Crawfordsville, Indiana, a conservative town that he called "the sixth circle of hell". The equally conservative college dismissed him after he deliberately provoked the college authorities. Smoking was forbidden, but he would smoke cigarillos in his office down the corridor from the president's. He annoyed his landlords by entertaining friends, including women, and was forced out of one house after "[t]wo stewdents found me sharing my meagre repast with the lady–gent impersonator in my privut apartments", he told a friend.[22]

He was asked to leave the college in 1908 after offering a stranded chorus girl tea and his bed for the night when she was caught in a snowstorm. When she was discovered the next morning by the landladies, Ida and Belle Hall, his insistence that he had slept on the floor was met with disbelief. Glad to be free of the place, he left for Europe soon after, sailing from New York in March 1908.[23]

London (1908–1920)

Introduction to the literary scene


Pound arrived in Gibraltar on 23 March 1908, where for a few weeks he earned $15 a day working as a guide to American tourists. By the end of April he was in Venice, living over a bakery near the San Vio bridge.[24] In July he self-published his first book of poetry, A Lume Spento (With Tapers Quenched). The London Evening Standard called it "wild and haunting stuff, absolutely poetic, original, imaginative, passionate, and spiritual".[25] The title was from the third canto of Dante's Purgatorio, which alluded to the death of Manfred, King of Sicily. The book was dedicated to his friend, the Philadelphia artist William Brooke Smith, who had recently died of tuberculosis.[26]

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48 Langham Street, London W1

In August Pound moved to London, where he lived almost continuously for the next 12 years; he told his university friend William Carlos Williams: "London, deah old Lundon, is the place for poesy." English poets such as Maurice Hewlett, Rudyard Kipling and Alfred Lord Tennyson had made a particular kind of Victorian verse—stirring, pompous and propagandistic—popular with the public. 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.[27]

Arriving in the city with just ₤3, he moved into lodgings at 48 Langham Street, near Great Titchfield Street, a penny bus ride from the British Museum.[28] 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".[29]

Pound persuaded the bookseller Elkin Mathews to display A Lume Spento, and by October 1908 he was being discussed by the literati. In December he published a second collection, A Quinzaine for This Yule, and after the death of a lecturer at the Regent Street Polytechnic he managed to acquire a position lecturing in the evenings, from January to February 1909, on "The Development of Literature in Southern Europe".[30] He would spend his mornings in the British Museum Reading Room, then lunch at the Vienna Café on Oxford Street.[31] Ford Madox Ford wrote:

Ezra ... would approach 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.[32]


Hemingway described Pound as "tall ... [with] a patchy red beard, fine eyes, strange haircuts and ... very shy": "But he has the temperament of a toro di lidia from the breeding establishments of Don Eduardo Miura. No one ever presents a cape, or shakes a muleta at him without getting a charge."[33]

Meeting Dorothy Shakespear, Personae

At a literary salon in January 1909, Pound met the novelist Olivia Shakespear and her daughter Dorothy, who became his wife in 1914. Through Olivia Shakespear he was introduced to her former lover W. B. Yeats, in Pound's view the greatest living poet. Pound had sent Yeats a copy of A Lume Spento the previous year, before he left for Venice, and Yeats had apparently found it charming. The men became close friends, although Yeats was older by 20 years.[34]

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Pound met Dorothy Shakespear in 1909, and they were married in 1914.

Pound was also introduced to sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, painter Wyndham Lewis and to the cream of London's literary circle, including the poet T. E. Hulme. The American heiress Margaret Lanier Cravens (1881–1912) became a patron; after knowing him a short time she offered a large annual sum to allow him to focus on his work. Cravens killed herself in 1912, after the pianist Walter Rummel, long the object of her affection, married someone else. She may also have been discouraged by Pound's engagement to Dorothy.[35]

In June 1909 the Personae collection became the first of Pound's works to have any commercial success. It was favorably reviewed; one review said it was "full of human passion and natural magic".[36] Rupert Brooke was unimpressed, complaining that Pound had fallen under the influence of Walt Whitman, writing in "unmetrical sprawling lengths".[37] In September a further 27 poems appeared as Exultations.[38] Around the same time Pound moved into new rooms at Church Walk, off Kensington High Street, where he lived most of the time until 1914.[39]

In June 1910 Pound returned to the United States for eight months; his arrival coincided with the publication of his first book of literary criticism, The Spirit of Romance, based on his lecture notes at the polytechnic.[40] His essays on the United States were written during this period, compiled as Patria Mia and not published until 1950. He loved New York but felt the city was threatened by commercialism and vulgarity, and he no longer felt at home there.[41] He found the New York Public Library, then being built, especially offensive and, according to Paul L. Montgomery, visited the architects' offices almost every day to shout at them.[42]

Pound persuaded his parents to finance his passage back to Europe.[43] It was nearly 30 years before he visited the United States again. On 22 February 1911 he sailed from New York on the R.M.S. Mauretania, arriving in Southampton six days later.[44] After a few days in London he went to Paris, where he worked on a new collection of poetry, Canzoni (1911), panned by the Westminster Gazette as a "medley of pretension". When he returned to London in August 1911, A. R. Orage, editor of the socialist journal The New Age, hired him to write a weekly column, giving him a steady income.[45]

Imagism

Further information: Des Imagistes

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10 Church Walk, Kensington

Hilda Doolittle arrived in London from Philadelphia in May 1911 with the poet Frances Gregg and Gregg's mother; when they returned in September, Doolittle decided to stay on. Pound introduced her to his friends, including the poet Richard Aldington, whom she would marry in 1913. Before that the three of them lived in Church Walk, Kensington—Pound at no. 10, Doolittle at no. 6, and Aldington at no. 8—and worked daily in the British Museum Reading Room.[39]

At the museum Pound met regularly with the curator and poet Laurence Binyon, who introduced him to the East Asian artistic and literary concepts that inspired the imagery and technique of his later poetry. The museum's visitors' books show that Pound was often found during 1912 and 1913 in the Print Room examining Japanese ukiyo-e, some inscribed with Japanese waka verse, a genre of poetry whose economy and strict conventions likely contributed to Imagist techniques of composition.[46][47] 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.[48] He realized with his translation work that the problem lay not in his knowledge of the other languages, but in his use of English:

What obfuscated me was not the Italian but the crust of dead English, the sediment present in my own available vocabulary ... You can't go round this sort of thing. It takes six or eight years to get educated in one's art, and another ten to get rid of that education. Neither can anyone learn English, one can only learn a series of Englishes. Rossetti made his own language. I hadn't in 1910 made a language, I don't mean a language to use, but even a language to think in.[49]


While living at Church Walk in 1912, Pound, Aldington and Doolittle started working on ideas about language. While in the British Museum tearoom one afternoon, they decided to begin a 'movement' in poetry, called Imagism. Imagisme, Pound would write in Riposte, is "concerned solely with language and presentation".[50] The aim was clarity: a fight against abstraction, romanticism, rhetoric, inversion of word order, and over-use of adjectives. They agreed on three principles:

1. Direct treatment of the "thing" whether subjective or objective.
2. To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation.
3. As regarding rhythm: to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome.[51]


Superfluous words, particularly adjectives, should be avoided, as well as expressions like "dim lands of peace", which Pound thought dulled the image by mixing the abstract with the concrete. He wrote that the natural object was always the "adequate symbol". Poets should "go in fear of abstractions", and should not re-tell in mediocre verse what has already been told in good prose.[51]

In a Station of the Metro
The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

— Poetry (1913)


A typical example is Pound's "In a Station of the Metro" (1913), inspired by an experience on the Paris Underground, about which he wrote, "I got out of a train at, I think, La Concorde, 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." He worked on the poem for a year, reducing it to its essence in the style of a Japanese haiku.[52]

Like other modernist artists of the period, Pound was inspired by Japanese art, but the aim was to re-make—or as Pound said, "make it new"—and blend cultural styles, instead of copying directly or slavishly. He may have been inspired by a Suzuki Harunobu print he almost certainly saw in the British Library (Richard Aldington mentions the specific prints he matched to verse), and probably attempted to write haiku-like verse during this period.[47]

Ripostes and translations

Ripostes, published in October 1912, begins Pound's shift toward minimalist language. Michael Alexander describes the poems as showing a greater concentration of meaning and economy of rhythm than his earlier work.[53] It was published when Pound had just begun his move toward Imagism; his first use of the word Imagiste appears in his prefatory note to the volume.[54][55] The collection includes five poems by Hulme and a translation of the 8th-century Old English poem The Seafarer, although not a literal translation.[56] It upset scholars, as would Pound's other translations from Latin, Italian, French and Chinese, either because of errors or because he lacked familiarity with the cultural context. Alexander writes that in some circles, Pound's translations made him more unpopular than the treason charge, and the reaction to The Seafarer was a rehearsal for the negative response to Homage to Sextus Propertius in 1919.[53] His translation from the Italian of Sonnets and ballate of Guido Cavalcanti was also published in 1912.[57]

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In 1913 Pound was given Ernest Fenollosa's unpublished notes, which led to Cathay (1915).

Pound was fascinated by the translations of Japanese poetry and Noh plays which he discovered in the papers of Ernest Fenollosa, an American professor who had taught in Japan. Fenollosa had studied Chinese poetry under Japanese scholars; in 1913 his widow, Mary McNeil Fenollosa, decided to give his unpublished notes to Pound after seeing his work; she was looking for someone who cared about poetry rather than philology.[58] Pound edited and published Fenellosa's The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry in 1918.[59]

The title page of the collection Cathay (1915), refers to the poet "Rihaku", the pronunciation in Japanese of the Tang dynasty Chinese poet, Li Bai, whose poems were much beloved in China and Japan for their technical mastery and much translated in the West because of their seeming simplicity. Alexander thinks this is the most attractive of Pound's work.[60] Chinese critic Wai-lim Yip writes of it: "One can easily excommunicate Pound from the Forbidden City of Chinese studies, but it seems clear that in his dealings with Cathay, even when he is given only the barest details, he is able to get into the central concerns of the original author by what we may perhaps call a kind of clairvoyance."[61]

Pound could not understand Chinese himself, yet some critics see his translations of Chinese poetry as among the best (others complain of their mistakes).[60] Cathay was the first of many translations Pound would make from the Chinese. Pound often followed the translations made by Herbert Giles in his History of Chinese Literature [62] and used Fenollosa's work as a starting point for what he called the ideogrammic method, which proceeded on Fenollosa's entirely mistaken but fruitful idea that each character represented an image or pictograph, based on sight rather than sound.[63] Robert Graves recalled "I once asked Arthur Waley how much Chinese Pound knew; Waley shook his head despondently."[64] Steven Yao, scholar of American and Asian literature, sees Cathay as a "major feat"; a work where Pound shows that translation is possible without a thorough knowledge of the source language. Yao does not view Pound's lack of Chinese as an obstacle, and states that the poet's trawl through centuries of scholarly interpretations resulted in a genuine understanding of the original poem.[65]

Marriage, Blast

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W. B. Yeats invited Pound to spend the winter of 1913–1914 with him in Sussex.

In August 1912 Harriet Monroe hired Pound as a regular contributor to Poetry. He submitted his own poems, as well as poems by James Joyce, Robert Frost, D. H. Lawrence, Yeats, H.D. and Aldington, and collected material for a 64-page anthology, Des Imagistes (1914). The Imagist movement began to attract attention from critics.[66] In November 1913 Yeats, whose eyesight was failing, rented Stone Cottage in Coleman's Hatch, Sussex, and invited Pound to accompany him as his secretary. They stayed there for 10 weeks, reading and writing, walking in the woods and fencing. It was the first of three winters they spent together at Stone Cottage, including two with Dorothy after she and Pound married on 20 April 1914.[67]

The marriage had proceeded despite opposition from her parents, who worried about Pound's meager income, earned from contributions to literary magazines and probably less than £300 a year. Dorothy's annual income was £50, aided by £150 from her family. Her parents eventually consented, perhaps out of fear that she was getting older with no other suitor in sight. Pound's concession to marry in church helped convince them. Afterward he and Dorothy moved into an apartment with no bathroom at 5 Holland Place Chambers, Kensington, with the newly wed Hilda (H.D.) and Richard Aldington living next door.[68]

Pound wrote for Wyndham Lewis' literary magazine Blast, although only two issues were published. An advertisement in The Egoist promised it would cover "Cubism, Futurism, Imagisme and all Vital Forms of Modern Art". Pound took the opportunity to extend the definition of Imagisme to art, naming it Vorticism: "The image is a radiant node or cluster; it is ... a vortex, from which, and through which, and into which, ideas are constantly rushing."[69] Reacting to the magazine, the poet Lascelles Abercrombie called for the rejection of Imagism and a return to the traditionalism of William Wordsworth; Pound challenged him to a duel on the basis that "Stupidity carried beyond a certain point becomes a public menace".[70] Abercrombie suggested their choice of weapon be unsold copies of their own books.[71] The publication of Blast was celebrated at a dinner attended by New England poet Amy Lowell, then in London to meet the Imagists. But Hilda and Richard were already moving away from Pound's understanding of the movement, as he aligned more with Wyndham Lewis's ideas. When Lowell agreed to finance an anthology of Imagist poets, Pound's work was not included. Upset at Lowell, he began to call Imagisme "Amygism", and in July 1914 he declared the movement dead and asked that the group not continue to call themselves Imagists. They dissented, not believing that the movement was Pound's invention, and Lowell eventually Anglicized the term.[72]

World War I, disillusionment

Further information: Lost Generation

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T.S. Eliot in 1923. Pound persuaded Poetry to publish Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock".

Between 1914 and 1916 Pound assisted in the serialisation of James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in The Egoist, then helped to have it published in book form. In 1915 he persuaded Poetry to publish T. S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock". Eliot had sent "Prufrock" to almost every editor in England, but was rejected. He eventually sent it to Pound, who instantly saw it as a work of genius and submitted it to Poetry.[73] "[Eliot] has actually trained himself AND modernized himself ON HIS OWN", Pound wrote to Monroe in October 1914. "The rest of the promising young have done one or the other but never both. Most of the swine have done neither."[74]

After the publication in 1915 of Cathay, Pound mentioned he was working on a long poem, casting about for the correct form. He told a friend in August: "It is a huge, I was going to say, gamble, but shan't", and in September described it as a "cryselephantine poem of immeasurable length which will occupy me for the next four decades unless it becomes a bore". About a year later, in January 1917, he had the first three trial cantos, distilled to one, published as Canto I in Poetry.[75] He was now a regular contributor to three literary magazines. From 1917 he wrote music reviews for The New Age under the pen name William Atheling, and weekly pieces for The Egoist and The Little Review; many of the latter were directed against provincialism and ignorance. The volume of writing exhausted him. He feared he was wasting his time writing outside poetry,[76] exclaiming that he "must stop writing so much prose".[77]

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Pound commissioned this sculpture from Henri Gaudier-Brzeska in 1913.

Pound was deeply affected by the war. He was devastated when Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, from whom he had commissioned a sculpture of himself two years earlier, was killed in the trenches in 1915. He published Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir the following year, in reaction to what he saw as an unnecessary loss.[78] In the autumn of 1917 his depression worsened. He blamed American provincialism for the seizure of the October issue of The Little Review. The New York Society for the Suppression of Vice applied the Comstock Laws against an article Lewis wrote, describing it as lewd and indecent. Around the same time, Hulme was killed by shell-fire in Flanders, and Yeats married Georgie Hyde-Lees.[79] In 1918, after a bout of illness which was presumably the Spanish influenza, Pound decided to stop writing for The Little Review, mostly because of the volume of work. He asked the publisher for a raise to hire 23-year-old Iseult Gonne as a typist, causing rumors that Pound was having an affair with her, but he was turned down.[77]

In 1919 he published a collection of his essays for The Little Review as Instigations, and in the March 1919 issue Poetry, he published Poems from the Propertius Series, which appeared to be a translation of the Latin Poet Sextus Propertius. When he included this in his next poetry collection in 1921, he had renamed it Homage to Sextus Propertius in response to criticism of his translation skills. "Propertius" is not a strict translation; biographer David Moody describes it as "the refraction of an ancient poet through a modern intelligence". Harriet Monroe, editor of Poetry, published a letter from a professor of Latin, W. G. Hale, saying that Pound was "incredibly ignorant" of the language, and alluded to "about three-score errors" in Homage. Monroe did not publish Pound's response, which began "Cat-piss and porcupines!!" and continued, "The thing is no more a translation than my 'Altaforte' is a translation, or than Fitzgerald's Omar is a translation". Moore interpreted Pound's silence after that as his resignation as foreign editor.[80]

Hugh Selwyn Mauberley

Further information: Wikisource:Hugh Selwyn Mauberley

There died a myriad
And of the best, among them,
For an old bitch gone in the teeth,
For a botched civilization,

Charm, smiling at the good mouth,
Quick eyes gone under earth's lid,

For two gross of broken statues,
For a few thousand battered books.

— Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, Section V (1920)


His poem Hugh Selwyn Mauberley consists of 18 short parts, and describes a poet whose life has become sterile and meaningless.[81] Published in June 1920, it marked his farewell to London. He was disgusted by the massive loss of life during the war and was unable to reconcile himself with it. Stephen J. Adams writes that, just as Eliot denied he was Prufrock, so Pound denied he was Mauberley, but the work can nevertheless be read as autobiographical. It begins with a satirical analysis of the London literary scene, before turning to social criticism, economics, and an attack on the causes of the war; here the word usury appears in his work for the first time. The critic F. R. Leavis saw the poem as Pound's major achievement.[82]

The war had shattered Pound's belief in modern western civilization. He saw the Vorticist movement as finished and doubted his own future as a poet. He had only the New Age to write for; his relationship with Poetry was finished, The Egoist was quickly running out of money because of censorship problems caused by the serialization of Joyce's Ulysses, and the funds for The Little Review had dried up. Other magazines ignored his submissions or refused to review his work. Toward the end of 1920 he and Dorothy decided their time in London was over and resolved to move to Paris.[83]

The New Age published Pound's Axiomata in January 1921, a statement of his views on consciousness and the universe: "the intimate essence of the universe is not of the same nature as our own consciousness."[84] Orage wrote in the same issue:

Mr. Pound has shaken the dust of London from his feet with not too emphatic a gesture of disgust, but, at least, without gratitude to this country. ... [He] has been an exhilarating influence for culture in England; he has left his mark upon more than one of the arts, upon literature, music, poetry and sculpture, and quite a number of men and movements owe their initiation to his self-sacrificing stimulus ... With all this, however, Mr. Pound, like so many others who have striven for advancement of intelligence and culture in England, has made more enemies than friends ... Much of the Press has been deliberately closed by cabal to him; his books have for some time been ignored or written down; and he himself has been compelled to live on much less than would support a navvy. His fate, as I have said, is not unusual ... Taken by and large, England hates men of culture until they are dead.[85]

Paris (1921–1924)

Further information: Le Testament de Villon

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Pound met Olga Rudge in 1922.

The Pounds settled in Paris in January 1921, and several months later moved into an inexpensive apartment at 70 bis Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs.[86] Pound became friendly with Marcel Duchamp, Tristan Tzara, Fernand Léger and others of the Dada and Surrealist movements, as well as Basil Bunting, Ernest Hemingway and his wife, Hadley Richardson.[87] He spent most of his time building furniture for his apartment and bookshelves for the bookstore Shakespeare and Company, and in 1921 the volume Poems 1918–1921 was published. In 1922 Eliot sent him the manuscript of The Waste Land, then arrived in Paris to edit it with Pound, who blue-inked the manuscript with comments like "make up yr. mind ..." and "georgian".[88] Eliot wrote: "I should like to think that the manuscript, with the suppressed passages, had disappeared irrecoverably; yet, on the other hand, I should wish the blue pencilling on it to be preserved as irrefutable evidence of Pound's critical genius."[42]

In 1924 Pound secured funding for Ford Madox Ford's The Transatlantic Review from American attorney John Quinn. The Review published works by Pound, Hemingway and Gertrude Stein, as well as extracts from Joyce's Finnegans Wake, before the money ran out in 1925. It also published several Pound music reviews, later collected into Antheil and the Treatise on Harmony.[89]

Hemingway asked Pound to blue-ink his short stories. Although Hemingway was 14 years younger, the two forged a lifelong relationship of mutual respect and friendship, living on the same street for a time, and touring Italy together in 1923. "They liked each other personally, shared the same aesthetic aims, and admired each other's work", writes Hemingway biographer Jeffrey Meyers, with Hemingway assuming the status of pupil to Pound's teaching. Pound introduced Hemingway to Lewis, Ford, and Joyce, while Hemingway in turn tried to teach Pound to box, but as he told Sherwood Anderson, "[Ezra] habitually leads with his chin and has the general grace of a crayfish or crawfish".[87]

Pound was 36 when he met the 26-year-old American violinist Olga Rudge in Paris in late 1922, beginning a love affair that lasted 50 years. Biographer John Tytell believes Pound had always felt that his creativity and ability to seduce women were linked, something Dorothy had turned a blind eye to over the years. Shortly after arriving in Paris, he complained that he had been there for three months without having managed to find a mistress. He was introduced to Olga at a musical salon hosted by American heiress Natalie Barney in her home at 20 Rue Jacob, near the Boulevard Saint-Germain. The two moved in different social circles: Olga was the daughter of a wealthy Youngstown, Ohio, steel family, living in her mother's Parisian apartment on the Right Bank, socializing with aristocrats, while his friends were mostly impoverished writers of the Left Bank.[90] They spent the following summer in the south of France, where Pound worked with George Antheil to apply the concept of Vorticism to music, and managed to write two operas, including Le Testament de Villon. He wrote pieces for solo violin, which Olga performed.[91]

Italy (1924–1945)

Children


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The Pounds moved to Rapallo in 1924.[92]

The Pounds were unhappy in Paris; Dorothy complained about the winters and Ezra's health was poor. At one dinner, a guest randomly tried to stab him; to Pound this underlined that their time in France was over.[92] Hemingway saw how Pound "indulged in a small nervous breakdown", leading to two days in an American hospital.[93] They decided to move to a quieter place, choosing Rapallo, Italy, a town of 15,000. "Italy is my place for starting things", he told a friend.[92] During this period they lived on Dorothy's income, supplemented by dividends from stock she had invested in.[94]

Olga Rudge, pregnant with Pound's child, followed them to Italy. She had little interest in raising a child, but may have felt that having one would maintain her connection to him. In July 1925 she gave birth to their daughter, Mary. Olga placed the child with a German-speaking peasant woman whose own child had died, and who agreed to raise Mary for 200 lire a month.[95]

When Pound told Dorothy about the birth, she separated from him for much of that year and the next.[96] In December 1925, she left on an extended trip to Egypt. She was pregnant by her return in March.[97] In June she and Pound left Rapallo for Paris for the premiere of Le Testament de Villon, without mentioning the pregnancy to his friends or parents. In September, Hemingway drove Dorothy to the American Hospital of Paris for the birth of a son, Omar Pound. In a letter to his parents in October, Pound wrote, "next generation (male) arrived. Both D & it appear to be doing well".[98] Dorothy gave the baby son to her mother, Olivia, who raised him in London until he was old enough to go to boarding school. When Dorothy went to England each summer to see Omar, Pound would spend the time with Olga, whose father had bought her a house in Venice. The arrangement meant his children were raised very differently. Mary had a single pair of shoes, and books about Jesus and the saints, while Omar was raised in Kensington as an English gentleman by his sophisticated grandmother.[99]

In 1925 the literary magazine This Quarter dedicated its first issue to Pound, including tributes from Hemingway and Joyce. Pound published Cantos XVII–XIX in the winter editions. In March 1927 he launched his own literary magazine, The Exile, but only four issues were published. It did well in the first year, with contributions from Hemingway, E. E. Cummings, Basil Bunting, Yeats, William Carlos Williams and Robert McAlmon; some of the poorest work in the magazine were Pound's rambling editorials on Confucianism and or in praise of Lenin, according to biographer J. J. Wilhelm.[100] He continued to work on Fenollosa's manuscripts, and in 1928 won The Dial's poetry award for his translation of the Confucian classic Great Learning (Dà Xué, transliterated as Ta Hio).[101] That year his parents Homer and Isabel visited him in Rapallo, seeing him for the first time since 1914. By then Homer had retired, so they decided to move to Rapallo themselves. They took a small house, Villa Raggio, on a hill above the town.[102]

Pound began work on The Cantos in earnest after relocating to Italy. The poems concern good and evil, a descent into hell followed by redemption and paradise. Its hundreds of characters fall into three groupings: those who enjoy hell and stay there; those who experience a metamorphosis and want to leave; and a few who lead the rest to paradiso terrestre. Its composition was difficult and involved several false starts, and he abandoned most of his earlier drafts, beginning again in 1922.[103] The first three appear in Poetry in June–August 1917. The Malatesta Cantos appeared in The Criterion in July 1923, and two further cantos were published in The Transatlantic Review in January 1924. Pound published 90 copies in Paris in 1925 of A Draft of XVI. Cantos of Ezra Pound for the Beginning of a Poem of some Length now first made into a Book.[104]

Turn to fascism, World War II

Pound came to believe that the cause of World War I was finance capitalism, which he called "usury", that the solution lay in C. H. Douglas's idea of social credit, and that fascism was the vehicle for reform. He had met Douglas in the New Age offices and had been impressed by his ideas.[105] He gave a series of lectures on economics, and made contact with politicians in the United States to discuss education, interstate commerce and international affairs. Although Hemingway advised against it, on 30 January 1933 Pound met Benito Mussolini. Olga Rudge played for Mussolini and told him about Pound, who had earlier sent him a copy of Cantos XXX. During the meeting Pound tried to present Mussolini with a digest of his economic ideas, but Mussolini brushed them aside, though he called the Cantos "divertente" (entertaining). The meeting was recorded in Canto XLI: "'Ma questo' / said the boss, 'è divertente.'" Pound said he had "never met anyone who seemed to get my ideas so quickly as the boss".[106]

When Olivia Shakespear died in October 1938 in London, Dorothy asked Pound to organize the funeral, where he saw their 12-year-old son Omar for the first time in eight years. He visited Eliot and Wyndham Lewis, who produced a now-famous portrait of Pound reclining. In April 1939 he sailed for New York, believing he could stop America's involvement in World War II, happy to answer reporters' questions about Mussolini while he lounged on the deck of the ship in a tweed jacket. He traveled to Washington, D.C., where he met senators and congressmen. His daughter, Mary, said that he had acted out of a sense of responsibility, rather than megalomania; he was offered no encouragement, and was left feeling depressed and frustrated.[107]

In June 1939 he received an honorary doctorate from Hamilton College, and a week later returned to Italy from the States and began writing antisemitic material for Italian newspapers. He wrote to James Laughlin that Roosevelt represented Jewry, and signed the letter with "Heil Hitler". He started writing for Action, a newspaper owned by the British fascist Sir Oswald Mosley, arguing that the Third Reich was the "natural civilizer of Russia".[108] After war broke out in September that year, he began a furious letter-writing campaign to the politicians he had petitioned six months earlier, arguing that the war was the result of an international banking conspiracy and that the United States should keep out of it.[109]

Radio broadcasts

You let in the Jew and the Jew rotted your empire, and you yourselves out-jewed the Jew. Your allies in your victimized holdings are the bunyah, you stand for NOTHING but usury.

— Pound radio broadcast, 15 March 1942[110]


Tytell writes that, by the 1940s, no American or English poet had been so active politically since William Blake. Pound wrote over a thousand letters a year during the 1930s and presented his ideas in hundreds of articles, as well as in The Cantos. His greatest fear was an economic structure dependent on the armaments industry, where the profit motive would govern war and peace. He read George Santayana and The Law of Civilization and Decay by Brooks Adams, finding confirmation of the danger of the capitalist and usurer becoming dominant. He wrote in The Japan Times that "Democracy is now currently defined in Europe as a 'country run by Jews,'" and told Sir Oswald Mosley's newspaper that the English were a slave race governed since Waterloo by the Rothschilds.[109]

Pound broadcast over Rome Radio, although the Italian government was at first reluctant, concerned that he might be a double agent. He told a friend: "It took me, I think it was, two years, insistence and wrangling etc., to get hold of their microphone."[111] He recorded over a hundred broadcasts criticizing the United States, Roosevelt, Roosevelt's family and the Jews, his poetry, economics and Chinese philosophy. The first was in January 1935, and by February 1940 he was broadcasting regularly; he traveled to Rome one week a month to pre-record the 10-minute broadcasts, for which he was paid around $17, and they were broadcast every three days. The broadcasts required the Italian government's approval, although he often changed the text in the studio. Tytell wrote that Pound's voice had assumed a "rasping, buzzing quality like the sound of a hornet stuck in a jar", that throughout the "disordered rhetoric of the talks he sustained the notes of chaos, hysteria, and exacerbated outrage". The politics apart, Pound needed the money; his father's pension payments had stopped—his father died in February 1942 in Rapallo—and Pound had his mother and Dorothy to look after.[112]

The broadcasts were monitored by the United States Foreign Broadcast Monitoring Service listening station at Princeton University, and in July 1943 Pound was indicted in absentia for treason. He answered the charge by writing a letter to Attorney General Francis Biddle, which Tytell describes as "long, reasoned, and temperate", defending his right to free speech.[113] He continued to broadcast and write under pseudonyms until April 1945, shortly before his arrest.[114]

Arrest for treason

Further information: Allied invasion of Italy

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Taken at the Army Disciplinary Training Center

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Pound spent three weeks in an outdoor steel cage in Pisa.[115]

The war years threw Pound's domestic arrangements into disarray. Olga lost possession of her house in Venice and took a small house with Mary above Rapallo at Sant' Ambrogio.[116] In 1943 Pound and Dorothy were evicted from their apartment in Rapallo. His mother's apartment was too small, and the couple moved in with Olga. Mary, then 19 and finished with convent school, was quickly sent back to Gais in Switzerland, leaving Pound, as she would later write, "pent up with two women who loved him, whom he loved, and who coldly hated each other."[117]

Pound was in Rome early in September when Italy surrendered. He borrowed a pair of hiking boots and a knapsack and left the city, having finally decided to tell Mary about his wife and son. Heading north, he spent a night in an air-raid shelter in Bologna, then took a train to Verona and walked the rest of the way; he apparently traveled over 450 miles in all. Mary almost failed to recognize him when he arrived, he was so dirty and tired. He told her everything about his other family; she later admitted she felt more pity than anger.[ b]

He returned home to Rapallo, where on 3 May 1945, four days after Mussolini was shot, armed partisans arrived at the house to find Pound alone. He stuffed a copy of Confucius and a Chinese dictionary in his pocket before he was taken to their headquarters in Chiavari. He was released shortly afterwards, then with Olga gave himself up to an American military post in the nearby town of Lavagna.[119]

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Sheet of toilet paper showing start of Canto LXXXIV, c. May 1945, suggesting Pound began it in the steel cage[120]

Pound was transferred to U.S. Counter Intelligence Corps headquarters in Genoa, where he was interrogated by Frank L. Amprin, an FBI agent assigned by J. Edgar Hoover. Pound asked to send a cable to President Truman to offer to help negotiate peace with Japan. He also asked to be allowed a final broadcast, a script called "Ashes of Europe Calling", in which he recommended peace with Japan, American management of Italy, the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine, and leniency toward Germany. His requests were denied and the script was forwarded to Hoover.[119]

On 8 May, the day Germany surrendered, Pound told an American reporter, Ed Johnston, that Hitler was "a Jeanne d'Arc, a saint", and that Mussolini was an "imperfect character who lost his head".[121] On 24 May he was transferred to the United States Army Disciplinary Training Center north of Pisa, where he was placed in one of the camp's "death cells", a series of six-by-six-foot outdoor steel cages lit up at night by floodlights; engineers reinforced his cage with heavier steel for fear the fascists would try to break him out.[122]

Pound spent three weeks in isolation in the heat, sleeping on the concrete, denied exercise and communication, except for conversations with the chaplain. After two and a half weeks he began to break down under the strain. Richard Sieburth wrote that Pound recorded it in Canto LXXX, where Odysseus is saved from drowning by Leucothea: "hast'ou swum in a sea of air strip / through an aeon of nothingness, / when the raft broke and the waters went over me." Medical staff moved him out of the cage the following week. On 14 and 15 June he was examined by psychiatrists, one of whom found symptoms of a mental breakdown, after which he was transferred to his own tent and allowed reading material. He began to write, drafting what became known as The Pisan Cantos.[119] The existence of a few sheets of toilet paper showing the beginning of Canto LXXIV suggests he started it while in the cage.[123]

United States (1945–1958)

St Elizabeths Hospital


Further information: Visits to St. Elizabeths

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St. Elizabeths Hospital (photographed c. 1909–1932)

On 15 November 1945 Pound was transferred to the United States. An escorting officer's impression was that "he is an intellectual 'crackpot' who imagined that he could correct all the economic ills of the world and who resented the fact that ordinary mortals were not sufficiently intelligent to understand his aims and motives".[123] He was arraigned in Washington, D.C., on the 25th of that month on charges of treason. The charges included broadcasting for the enemy, attempting to persuade American citizens to undermine government support of the war, and strengthening morale in Italy against the United States.[124]

He was admitted to St. Elizabeths Hospital, and in June the following year Dorothy was declared his legal guardian. He was held for a time in the hospital's prison ward—Howard's Hall, known as the "hell-hole", a building without windows—in a room with a thick steel door and nine peepholes to allow the psychiatrists to observe him as they tried to agree on a diagnosis. Visitors were admitted for only 15 minutes at a time, while patients wandered around screaming and frothing at the mouth.[124]

Pound's lawyer, Julien Cornell, whose efforts to have him declared insane are credited with having saved him from life imprisonment, requested his release at a bail hearing in January 1947.[125] The hospital's superintendent, Winfred Overholser, agreed instead to move him to the more pleasant surroundings of Chestnut Ward, close to Overholser's private quarters, which is where he spent the next 12 years.[124] 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. Kutler believes that Overholser protected Pound from the criminal justice system because he was fascinated by him.[126]

Tytell writes that Pound was in his element in Chestnut Ward. He was at last provided for, and was allowed to read, write and receive visitors, including Dorothy for several hours a day. He took over a small alcove with wicker chairs just outside his room, and turned it into his private living room, where he entertained his friends and important literary figures. He began work on his translation of Sophocles's Women of Trachis and Electra, and continued work on The Cantos. It reached the point where he refused to discuss any attempt to have him released. Olga Rudge visited him twice, once in 1952 and again in 1955, and was unable to convince him to be more assertive about his release. She wrote to a friend: "E.P. has—as he had before—bats in the belfry but it strikes me that he has fewer not more than before his incarceration."[124]

The Pisan Cantos, Bollingen Prize

is it blacker? was it blacker? Nυξ animae?
Is there a blacker or was it merely San Juan with a belly ache
writing ad posteros
in short shall we look for a deeper or is this the bottom?

— The Pisan Cantos, LXXIV/458


James Laughlin had "Cantos LXXIV–LXXXIV" ready for publication in 1946 under the title The Pisan Cantos, and gave Pound an advance copy, but he held back, waiting for an appropriate time to publish. A group of Pound's friends—Eliot, Cummings, W. H. Auden, Allen Tate, and Julien Cornell—met Laughlin to discuss how to get him released. They planned to have Pound awarded the first Bollingen Prize, a new national poetry award by the Library of Congress, with $1,000 prize money donated by the Mellon family.[127]

The awards committee consisted of 15 fellows of the Library of Congress, including several of Pound's supporters, such as Eliot, Tate, Conrad Aiken, Katherine Anne Porter and Theodore Spencer.[c] The idea was that the Justice Department would be placed in an untenable position if Pound won a major award and was not released.[127] Laughlin published The Pisan Cantos on 30 July 1948, and the following year the prize went to Pound.[d] There were two dissenting voices, Francis Biddle's wife, Katherine Garrison Chapin, and Karl Shapiro, who said that he could not vote for an antisemite because he was Jewish himself. Pound responded to the award with "No comment from the bughouse."[127]

There was uproar. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette quoted critics who said "poetry [cannot] convert words into maggots that eat at human dignity and still be good poetry". Robert Hillyer, a Pulitzer Prize winner and president of the Poetry Society of America, attacked the committee in The Saturday Review of Literature, telling journalists that he "never saw anything to admire in Pound, not one line".[130][131][132] Congressman Jacob K. Javits demanded an investigation into the awards committee. It was the last time the prize was administered by the Library of Congress.[127]
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Views and relationships

Although Pound repudiated his antisemitism in public, he maintained his views in private. He refused to talk to psychiatrists with Jewish-sounding names, dismissed people he disliked as "Jews", and urged visitors to read the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (1903), a forgery claiming to represent a Jewish plan for world domination.[124] He struck up a friendship with the conspiracy theorist and antisemite Eustace Mullins, believed to be associated with the Aryan League of America, and author of the 1961 biography This Difficult Individual, Ezra Pound.[133]

Even more damaging was his friendship with John Kasper, a far-right activist and Ku Klux Klan member. Kasper had come to admire Pound during literature classes at university, and after he wrote to Pound in 1950 the two had become friends. Kasper opened a bookstore in Greenwich Village in 1953 called "Make it New", reflecting his commitment to Pound's ideas; the store specialized in far-right material, including Nazi literature, and Pound's poetry and translations were displayed on the window front.[134] Kasper and another follower of Pound's, David Horton, set up a publishing imprint, Square Dollar Series, which Pound used as a vehicle for his tracts about economic reform.[135] Wilhelm writes that there were a lot of conventional people visiting Pound too, such as the classicist J.P. Sullivan and the writer Guy Davenport, but it was the association with Mullins and Kasper that stood out and delayed his release from St Elizabeths.[133][135]

Release

Pound's friends continued to try to get him out. Shortly after Hemingway won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954, he told Time magazine that "this would be a good year to release poets".[136] The poet Archibald MacLeish asked Hemingway in June 1957 to write a letter on Pound's behalf. Hemingway believed Pound was unable to abstain from awkward political statements or from friendships with people like Kasper, but he signed a letter of support anyway and pledged $1,500 to be given to Pound when he was released.[137] In an interview for the Paris Review in early 1958, Hemingway said that Kasper should be jailed and Pound released.[138] Kasper was eventually jailed, for inciting a riot in connection with the Hattie Cotton School in Nashville, targeted because a black girl had registered as a student. He was also questioned relating to the bombing of the school.[139]

Several publications began campaigning for Pound's release in 1957. Le Figaro published an appeal entitled "The Lunatic at St Elizabeths". The New Republic, Esquire and The Nation followed suit; The Nation argued that Pound was a sick and vicious old man, but had rights. In 1958 MacLeish hired Thurman Arnold, a prestigious lawyer who ended up charging no fee, to file a motion to dismiss the 1945 indictment. Overholser, the hospital's superintendent, supported the application with an affidavit saying Pound was permanently and incurably insane, and that confinement served no therapeutic purpose.[140] The motion was heard on 18 April 1958 by the judge who had committed Pound to St Elizabeths. The Department of Justice did not oppose the motion, and Pound was free.[141][142]

Italy (1958–1972)

Pound arrived in Naples in July 1958, where he was photographed giving a fascist salute to the waiting press. When asked when he had been released from the mental hospital, he replied: "I never was. When I left the hospital I was still in America, and all America is an insane asylum."[143] He and Dorothy went to live with Mary at Schloss Brunnenburg, near Merano in the Province of South Tyrol, where he met his grandson, Walter, and his granddaughter, Patrizia, for the first time, then returned to Rapallo, where Olga Rudge was waiting to join them.[144]

They were accompanied by a teacher Pound had met in hospital, Marcella Spann, 40 years his junior, ostensibly acting as his secretary and collecting poems for an anthology. The four women soon fell out, vying for control over him; Canto CXIII: alluded to it: "Pride, jealousy and possessiveness / 3 pains of hell." Pound was in love with Spann, seeing in her his last chance for love and youth. He wrote about her in Canto CXIII: "The long flank, the firm breast / and to know beauty and death and despair / And to think that what has been shall be, / flowing, ever unstill." Dorothy had usually ignored his affairs, but she used her legal power over his royalties to make sure Spann was seen off, sent back to the United States.[144]

By December 1959, Pound was mired in depression. He saw his work as worthless and The Cantos botched. In a 1960 interview given in Rome to Donald Hall for Paris Review, he said: "You—find me—in fragments." Hall wrote that he seemed in an "abject despair, accidie, meaninglessness, abulia, waste". He paced up and down during the three days it took to complete the interview, never finishing a sentence, bursting with energy one minute, then suddenly sagging, and at one point seemed about to collapse. Hall said it was clear that he "doubted the value of everything he had done in his life".[145]

Those close to him thought he was suffering from dementia, and in mid-1960, Mary placed him in a clinic near Merano when his weight dropped. He picked up again, but by early 1961 he had a urinary infection. Dorothy felt unable to look after him, so he went to live with Olga in Rapallo, then Venice; Dorothy mostly stayed in London after that with Omar. Pound attended a neo-Fascist May Day parade in 1962, but his health continued to decline. The following year he told an interviewer, Grazia Levi: "I spoil everything I touch. I have always blundered ... All my life I believed I knew nothing, yes, knew nothing. And so words became devoid of meaning."[146]

William Carlos Williams died in 1963, followed by Eliot in 1965. Pound went to Eliot's funeral in London and on to Dublin to visit Yeats's widow. Two years later he went to New York where he attended the opening of an exhibition featuring his blue-inked version of Eliot's The Waste Land.[147] He went on to Hamilton College where he received a standing ovation.[148]

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Pound's grave on the Isola di San Michele

Shortly before his death in 1972 it was proposed that he be awarded the Emerson-Thoreau Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, but after a storm of protest the academy's council opposed it by 13 to 9. The sociologist Daniel Bell, who was on the committee, argued that it was important to distinguish between those who explore hate and those who approve it. Two weeks before he died, Pound read for a gathering of friends at a café: "re usury/ I was out of focus, taking a symptom for a cause. / The cause is avarice."[148]

On his 87th birthday, 30 October 1972, he was too weak to leave his bedroom. The next night he was admitted to the Civil Hospital of Venice, where he died in his sleep of an intestinal blockage on 1 November, with Olga at his side. Dorothy was unable to travel to the funeral. Four gondoliers dressed in black rowed the body to the island cemetery, Isola di San Michele, where he was buried near Diaghilev and Stravinsky.[149] Dorothy died in England the following year. Olga died in 1996 and was buried next to Pound.[147]

Style

Critics generally agree that Pound was a strong yet subtle lyricist, particularly in his early work, such as "The River Merchant's Wife".[150] According to Witmeyer a modern style is evident as early as Ripostes, and Nadel sees evidence of modernism even before he began The Cantos, writing that Pound wanted his poetry to represent an "objective presentation of material which he believed could stand on its own" without use of symbolism or romanticism.[151]

Drawing on literature from a variety of disciplines, Pound intentionally layered often confusing juxtapositions, yet led the reader to an intended conclusion, believing the "thoughtful man" would apply a sense of organization and uncover the underlying symbolism and structure.[152] Ignoring Victorian and Edwardian grammar and structure, he created a unique form of speech, employing odd and strange words, jargon, avoiding verbs, and using rhetorical devices such as parataxis.[153]

Pound's relationship to music is essential to his poetry. Although he was tone deaf and his speaking voice is described as "raucous, nasal, scratchy", Michael Ingam writes that Pound is on a short list of poets possessed of a sense of sound, an "ear" for words, imbuing his poetry with melopoeia.[154] His study of troubadour poetry—words written to be sung (motz et son)—led him to think modern poetry should be written similarly.[154] He wrote that rhythm is "the hardest quality of a man's style to counterfeit".[155] Ingham compares the form of The Cantos to a fugue; without adhering strictly to the traditions of the form, nevertheless multiple themes are explored simultaneously. He goes on to write that Pound's use of counterpoint is integral to the structure and cohesion of The Cantos, which show multi-voiced counterpoint and, with the juxtaposition of images, non-linear themes. The pieces are presented in fragments "which taken together, can be seen to unfold in time as music does".[156]

Imagism and Vorticism

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Dorothy Shakespear designed the Vorticism-inspired cover art for Pound's 1915 Ripostes.

Opinion varies about the nature of Pound's writing style. Nadel writes that imagism was to change Pound's poetry.[151] Like Wyndham Lewis, Pound reacted against decorative flourishes found in Edwardian writing, saying poetry required a precise and economic use of language and that the poet should always use the "exact" word, stripping the writing down to the "barest essence".[157] According to Nadel, "Imagism evolved as a reaction against abstraction ... replacing Victorian generalities with the clarity in Japanese haiku and ancient Greek lyrics."[151] Daniel Albright writes that Pound tried to condense and eliminate "all but the hardest kernel" from a poem, such as in the two-line poem "In a Station of the Metro".[158] However, Pound learned that Imagism did not lend itself well to the writing of an epic, so he turned to the more dynamic structure of Vorticism for The Cantos.[158]

Translations

Pound's translations represent a substantial part of his work. He began his career with translations of Occitan ballads and ended with translations of Egyptian poetry. Yao says the body of translations by modernist poets in general, much of which Pound started, consists of some of the most "significant modernist achievements in English".[159] Pound was the first English language poet since John Dryden, some three centuries earlier, to give primacy to translations in English literature. The fullness of the achievement for the modernists is that they renewed interest in multiculturalism, multilingualism, and, perhaps of greater importance, they treated translations not in a strict sense of the word but instead saw a translation as the creation of an original work.[160]

Michael Alexander writes that, as a translator, Pound was a pioneer with a great gift of language and an incisive intelligence. He helped popularize major poets such as Guido Cavalcanti and Du Fu, and brought Provençal and Chinese poetry to English-speaking audiences. He revived interest in the Confucian classics and introduced the west to classical Japanese poetry and drama. He translated and championed Greek, Latin and Anglo-Saxon classics, and helped keep them alive at a time when poets no longer considered translations central to their craft.[161]

In Pound's Fenollosa translations, unlike previous American translators of Chinese poetry, which tended to work with strict metrical and stanzaic patterns, Pound created free verse translations. Whether the poems are valuable as translations continues to be a source of controversy.[162] Hugh Kenner contends that Cathay should be read primarily as a work about World War I, not as an attempt at accurately translating ancient Eastern poems. The real achievement of the book, Kenner argues, is in how it combines meditations on violence and friendship with an effort to "rethink the nature of an English poem". These ostensible translations of ancient Eastern texts, Kenner argues, are actually experiments in English poetics and compelling elegies for a warring West.[163] Pound scholar Ming Xie explains that Pound's use of language in his translation of "The Seafarer" is deliberate, in that he avoids merely "trying to assimilate the original into contemporary language".[162]

The Cantos

Further information: List of cultural references in The Cantos

And then went down to the ship,
Set keel to breakers, forth on the godly sea, and
We set up mast and sail on that swart ship,
Bore sheep aboard her, and our bodies also
Heavy with weeping, and winds from sternward
Bore us out onward with bellying canvas,
Circe's this craft, the trim-coifed goddess.
Then sat we amidships, wind jamming the tiller,
Thus with stretched sail, we went over sea til day's end.

— Canto I (1917)


The Cantos is difficult to decipher. In the epic poem, Pound disregards literary genres, mixing satire, hymns, elegies, essays and memoirs.[164] Pound scholar Rebecca Beasley believes it amounts to a rejection of the 19th-century nationalistic approach in favor of early-20th-century comparative literature. Pound reaches across cultures and time periods, assembling and juxtaposing "themes and history" from Homer to Ovid and Dante, from Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, and many others. The work presents a multitude of protagonists as "travellers between nations". The nature of The Cantos, she says, is to compare and measure among historical periods and cultures and against "a Poundian standard" of modernism.[165]

Pound layered ideas, cultures and historical periods, writing in as many as 15 different languages, using modern vernacular, Classical languages and Chinese ideograms.[166] Ira Nadel says The Cantos is an epic, that is "a poem including history", and that the "historical figures lend referentiality to the text". It functions as a contemporary memoir, in which "personal history [and] lyrical retrospection mingle"—most clearly represented in the Pisan Cantos.[164] Michael Ingham sees in The Cantos an American tradition of experimental literature, writing about it, "These works include everything but the kitchen sink, and then add the kitchen sink".[167] In the 1960s William O'Connor described The Cantos as filled with "cryptic and gnomic utterances, dirty jokes, obscenities of various sorts".[168]

Allen Tate believes the poem is not about anything and is without beginning, middle or end. He argues that Pound was incapable of sustained thought and "at the mercy of random flights of 'angelic insight,' an Icarian self-indulgence of prejudice which is not checked by a total view to which it could be subordinated".[169] This perceived lack of logical consistency or form is a common criticism of The Cantos.[170] Pound himself felt this absence of form was his great failure, and regretted that he could not "make it cohere".[171]

Literary criticism and economic theory

Pound's literary criticism and essays are, according to Massimo Bacigalupo, a "form of intellectual journal". In early works, such as The Spirit of Romance and "I Gather the Limbs of Osiris", Pound paid attention to medieval troubadour poets—Arnaut Daniel and François Villon. The former piece was to "remain one of Pound's principal sourcebooks for his poetry"; in the latter he introduces the concept of "luminous details".[172] The leitmotifs in Pound's literary criticism are recurrent patterns found in historical events, which, he believed, through the use of judicious juxtapositions illuminate truth; and in them he reveals forgotten writers and cultures.[173]

Pound wrote intensively about economic theory with the ABC of Economics and Jefferson and/or Mussolini, published in the mid-1930s right after he was introduced to Mussolini. These were followed by The Guide to Kulchur, covering 2500 years of history, which Tim Redman describes as the "most complete synthesis of Pound's political and economic thought".[174] Pound thought writing the cantos meant writing an epic about history and economics, and he wove his economic theories throughout; neither can be understood without the other.[175] In these pamphlets and in The ABC of Reading, he sought to emphasize the value of art and to "aestheticize the political", written forcefully, according to Nadel, and in a "determined voice".[176] In form his criticism and essays are direct, repetitive and reductionist, his rhetoric minimalist, filled with "strident impatience", according to Pound scholar Jason Coats, and frequently failing to make a coherent claim. He rejected traditional rhetoric and created his own, although not very successfully, in Coats's view.[177]

Reception

Critical reception


In 1922, the literary critic Edmund Wilson reviewed Pound's latest published volume of poetry, Poems 1918–21, and took the opportunity to provide an overview of his estimation of Pound as poet. In his essay on Pound, titled "Ezra Pound's Patchwork", Wilson wrote:

Ezra Pound is really at heart a very boyish fellow and an incurable provincial. It is true that he was driven to Europe by a thirst for romance and color that he could scarcely have satisfied in America, but he took to Europe the simple faith and pure enthusiasm of his native Idaho. ... His sophistication is still juvenile, his ironies are still clumsy and obvious, he ridicules Americans in Europe not very much simpler than himself ...[178]


According to Wilson, the lines in Pound's poems stood isolated, with fragmentary wording contributing to poems that "do not hang together". Citing Pound's first seven cantos, Wilson dubbed the writing "unsatisfactory". He found The Cantos disjointed and its contents reflecting a too-obvious reliance on the literary works of other authors, and an awkward use of Latin and Chinese translations as a device inserted among reminiscences of Pound's own life.[178]

The rise of New Criticism during the 1950s, in which author is separated from text, secured Pound's poetic reputation.[179] Nadel writes that the publication of T.S. Eliot's Literary Essays in 1954 "initiated the recuperation of Ezra Pound". Eliot's essays coincided with the work of Hugh Kenner, who visited Pound extensively at St. Elizabeths.[180] Kenner wrote that there was no great contemporary writer less read than Pound, adding that there is also no one to appeal more through "sheer beauty of language".[181] Along with Donald Davie, Kenner brought a new appreciation to Pound's work in the 1960s and 1970s.[182] Donald Gallup's Pound bibliography was published in 1963 and Kenner's The Pound Era in 1971.[180] In the 1970s a literary journal dedicated to Pound studies (Paideuma) was established, and Ronald Bush published the first dedicated critical study of The Cantos, to be followed by a number of research editions of The Cantos.[180]

Following Mullins' biography, described by Nadel as "partisan" and "melodramatic", was Noel Stock's factual 1970 Life of Ezra Pound, although the material included was subject to Dorothy's approval. The 1980s saw three significant biographies: John Tytell's "neutral" account in 1987, followed by Wilhelm's multi-volume biography. Humphrey Carpenter's sprawling narrative, a "complete life", built on what Stock began; unlike Stock, Carpenter had the benefit of working without intervention from Pound's relatives. In 2007 David Moody published the first of his multi-volume biography, combining narrative with literary criticism, the first work to link the two.[183]

In the 1980s Mary de Rachewiltz released the first dual-language edition of The Cantos, including "Canto LXXII" and "Canto LXXIII".[184] These cantos had originally been published in fascist magazines, and are characterized by 21st-century literary scholars as no more than war-time propaganda.[185] In 1991 a complete facsimile edition of Pound's prose and poetry was published, now considered a "fundamental research tool", according to Nadel.[184] Scholarship in the 1990s turned toward in-depth investigations of his antisemitism and Rome years. Tim Redman writes about Pound's fascism and his relationship with Mussolini, and Leon Surrette about Pound's economic theories, especially during the Italian period, investigating how Pound the poet became Pound the fascist.[186] In 1999 Surrette wrote about the state of Pound criticism, that "the effort to uncover coherence in a ... crazy quilt of verse styles, critical principles, crankish economic theories and distasteful political affiliations has made it difficult to perceive the genesis and development of any of these components". He emphasized that Pound's "economic and political opinions have not been properly dated, nor has the suddenness of his radicalization been appreciated".[187]

Nadel's 2010 Pound in Context is a contextual literary approach to Pound scholarship. Pound's life, "the social, political, historical, and literary developments of his period", is fully investigated, which, according to Nadel is "the grid for reading Pound's poetry".[188] In 2012 Matthew Feldman wrote that the more than 1,500 documents in the "Pound files" held by the FBI have been ignored by scholars, and almost certainly contain evidence that "Pound was politically cannier, was more bureaucratically involved with Italian Fascism, and was more involved with Mussolini's regime than has been posited".[189]

Legacy

Pound helped advance the careers of some of the best-known modernist writers of the early 20th century. In addition to Eliot, Joyce, Lewis, Frost, Williams, Hemingway and Conrad Aiken, he befriended and helped Marianne Moore, Louis Zukofsky, Jacob Epstein, Basil Bunting, E. E. Cummings, Margaret Anderson, George Oppen and Charles Olson.[190] Hugh Witemeyer argues that the Imagist movement was the most important in 20th-century English-language poetry because it affected all the leading poets of Pound's generation and the two generations after him.[191] In 1917, Carl Sandburg wrote in Poetry: "All talk on modern poetry, by people who know, ends with dragging in Ezra Pound somewhere. He may be named only to be cursed as wanton and mocker, poseur, trifler and vagrant. Or he may be classed as filling a niche today like that of Keats in a preceding epoch. The point is, he will be mentioned."[192]

I have tried to write Paradise

Do not move
Let the wind speak.
that is paradise.
Let the Gods forgive what I
have made
Let those I love try to forgive
what I have made.

— Canto 120[193][194]


The outrage after Pound's wartime collaboration with Mussolini's regime was so deep that the imagined method of his execution dominated the discussion. Arthur Miller considered him worse than Hitler: "In his wildest moments of human vilification Hitler never approached our Ezra ... he knew all America's weaknesses and he played them as expertly as Goebbels ever did." The response went so far as to denounce all modernists as fascists, and it was only in the 1980s that critics began a re-evaluation. Macha Rosenthal wrote that it was "as if all the beautiful vitality and all the brilliant rottenness of our heritage in its luxuriant variety were both at once made manifest" in Ezra Pound.[195]

Pound's antisemitism has soured evaluation of his poetry. Pound scholar Wendy Stallard Flory writes that separating the poetry from the antisemitism is perceived as apologetic. She believes the positioning of Pound as "National Monster" and "designated fascist intellectual" made him a stand-in for the silent majority in Germany, occupied France and Belgium, as well as Britain and the United States, who, she argues, made the Holocaust possible by aiding or standing by.[196]

Later in his life, Pound analyzed what he judged to be his own failings as a writer attributable to his adherence to ideological fallacies.[197] Allen Ginsberg states that, in a private conversation in 1967, Pound told the young poet, "my poems don't make sense." He went on to say that he "was not a lunatic, but a moron", and to characterize his writing as "stupid and ignorant", "a mess". Ginsberg reassured Pound that he "had shown us the way", but Pound refused to be mollified:

'Any good I've done has been spoiled by bad intentions—the preoccupation with irrelevant and stupid things,' [he] replied. Then very slowly, with emphasis, surely conscious of Ginsberg's being Jewish: 'But the worst mistake I made was that stupid, suburban prejudice of anti-semitism.'[197][198]


Works

• 1908 A Lume Spento. Privately printed by A. Antonini, Venice, (poems).
• 1908 A Quinzaine for This Yule. Pollock, London; and Elkin Mathews, London, (poems).
• 1909 Personae. Elkin Mathews, London, (poems).
• 1909 Exultations. Elkin Mathews, London, (poems).
• 1910 The Spirit of Romance. Dent, London, (prose).
• 1910 Provenca. Small, Maynard, Boston, (poems).
• 1911 Canzoni. Elkin Mathews, London, (poems)
• 1912 The Sonnets and Ballate of Guido Cavalcanti Small, Maynard, Boston, (cheaper edition destroyed by fire, Swift & Co, London; translations)
• 1912 Ripostes. S. Swift, London, (poems; first announcement of Imagism)
• 1915 Cathay. Elkin Mathews, (poems; translations)
• 1916 Gaudier-Brzeska. A Memoir. John Lane, London, (prose).[199]
• 1916 Certain Noble Plays of Japan: From the Manuscripts of Ernest Fenollosa, chosen and finished by Ezra Pound, with an introduction by William Butler Yeats.
• 1916 Ernest Fenollosa, Ezra Pound: "Noh", or, Accomplishment: A Study of the Classical Stage of Japan. Macmillan, London,
• 1916 Lustra. Elkin Mathews, London, (poems).
• 1917 Twelve Dialogues of Fontenelle, (translations)
• 1917 Lustra Knopf, New York. (poems). With a version of the first Three Cantos(Poetry, vol. 10, nos. 3, June 1917, 4, July 1917, 5, August 1917).
• 1918: Pavannes and Divisions. Knopf, New York. prose
• 1918 Quia Pauper Amavi. Egoist Press, London. poems
• 1919 The Fourth Canto. Ovid Press, London
• 1920 Hugh Selwyn Mauberley. Ovid Press, London.
• 1920 Umbra. Elkin Mathews, London, (poems and translations)
• 1920 Instigations of Ezra Pound: Together with an Essay on the Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, by Ernest Fenollosa. Boni & Liveright, (prose).
• 1921 Poems, 1918–1921. Boni & Liveright, New York
• 1922 Remy de Gourmount: The Natural Philosophy of Love. Boni & Liveright, New York, (translation)
• 1923 Indiscretions, or, Une revue des deux mondes. Three Mountains Press, Paris.
• 1924 Antheil and the Treatise on Harmony. Paris, (essays). As: William Atheling.
• 1925 A Draft of XVI Cantos. Three Mountains Press, Paris. The first collection of The Cantos.
• 1926 Personae: The Collected Poems of Ezra Pound. Boni & Liveright, New York
• 1928 A Draft of the Cantos 17–27. John Rodker, London.
• 1928 Selected Poems, edited and with an introduction by T. S. Eliot. Faber & Gwyer, London
• 1928 Confucius: Ta Hio: The Great Learning, newly rendered into the American language. University of Washington Bookstore (Glenn Hughes), (translation)
• 1930 A Draft of XXX Cantos. Nancy Cunard's Hours Press, Paris.
• 1930 Imaginary Letters. Black Sun Press, Paris. Eight essays from the Little Review, 1917–18.
• 1931 How to Read. Harmsworth, (essays)
• 1932 Guido Cavalcanti Rime. Edizioni Marsano, Genoa, (translations)
• 1933 ABC of Economics. Faber, London, (essays)
• 1934 Eleven New Cantos: XXXI-XLI. Farrar & Rinehart, New York, (poems)
• 1934 Homage to Sextus Propertius. Faber, London (poems)
• 1934 ABC of Reading. Yale University Press, (essays)
• 1935 Alfred Venison's Poems: Social Credit Themes by the Poet of Titchfield Street. Stanley Nott, Pamphlets on the New Economics, No. 9, London, (essays)
• 1935 Jefferson and/or Mussolini. Stanley Nott, London, Liveright, 1936 (essays)
• 1935 Make It New. London, (essays)
• 1935 Social Credit. An Impact. London, (essays). Repr.: Peter Russell, Money Pamphlets by Pound, no. 5, London 1951.
• 1936 Ernest Fenollosa: The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry. Stanley Nott, London 1936. An Ars Poetica With Foreword and Notes by Ezra Pound.
• 1937 The Fifth Decade of Cantos. Farrar & Rinehart, New York, poems
• 1937 Polite Essays. Faber, London, (essays)
• 1937 Confucius: Digest of the Analects, edited and published by Giovanni Scheiwiller, (translations)
• 1938 Culture. New Directions. New edition: Guide to Kulchur, New Directions, 1952
• 1939 What Is Money For?. Greater Britain Publications, (essays). Money Pamphlets by Pound, no. 3, Peter Russell, London
• 1940 Cantos LXII-LXXI. New Directions, New York, (John Adams Cantos 62–71).
• 1942 Carta da Visita di Ezra Pound. Edizioni di lettere d'oggi. Rome. English translation, by John Drummond: A Visiting Card, Money Pamphlets by Pound, no. 4, Peter Russell, London 1952, (essays).
• 1944 L'America, Roosevelt e le cause della guerra presente. Casa editrice della edizioni popolari, Venice. English translation, by John Drummond: America, Roosevelt and the Causes of the Present War, Money Pamphlets by Pound, no. 6, Peter Russell, London 1951
• 1944 Introduzione alla Natura Economica degli S.U.A.. Casa editrice della edizioni popolari. Venice. English translation An Introduction to the Economic Nature of the United States, by Carmine Amore. Repr.: Peter Russell, Money Pamphlets by Pound, London 1950 (essay)
• 1944 Orientamini. Casa editrice dalla edizioni popolari. Venice (prose)
• 1944 Oro et lavoro: alla memoria di Aurelio Baisi. Moderna, Rapallo. English translation: Gold and Work, Money Pamphlets by Pound, no. 2, Peter Russell, London 1952 (essays)
• 1948 If This Be Treason. Siena: privately printed for Olga Rudge by Tip Nuova (original drafts of six of Pound's Rome radio broadcasts)
• 1948 The Pisan Cantos. New Directions, (Cantos 74–84)
• 1948 The Cantos of Ezra Pound (includes The Pisan Cantos). New Directions, poems
• 1949 Elektra (started in 1949, first performed 1987), a play by Ezra Pound and Rudd Fleming
• 1950 Seventy Cantos. Faber, London.
• 1950 Patria Mia. R. F. Seymour, Chicago Reworked New Age articles, 1912, '13 (Orage)
• 1951 Confucius: The Great Digest; The Unwobbling Pivot. New Directions (translation)
• 1951 Confucius: Analects (John) Kaspar & (David) Horton, Square $ Series, New York, (translation)
• 1954 The Classic Anthology Defined by Confucius. Harvard University Press (translations)
• 1954 Lavoro ed Usura. All'insegna del pesce d'oro. Milan (essays)
• 1955 Section: Rock-Drill, 85–95 de los Cantares. All'insegna del pesce d'oro, Milan, (poems)
• 1956 Sophocles: The Women of Trachis. A Version by Ezra Pound. Neville Spearman, London, (translation)
• 1957 Brancusi. Milan (essay)
• 1959 Thrones: 96–109 de los Cantares. New Directions, (poems)
• 1968 Drafts and Fragments: Cantos CX-CXVII. New Directions, (poems).[200]

Notes

1. ^ Ernest Hemingway wrote in 1925: "[W]e have Pound the major poet devoting, say, one fifth of his time to poetry. With the rest of his time he tries to advance the fortunes, both material and artistic, of his friends. He defends them when they are attacked, he gets them into magazines and out of jail. He loans them money. He sells their pictures. He arranges concerts for them. He writes articles about them. He introduces them to wealthy women. He gets publishers to take their books. He sits up all night with them when they claim to be dying and he witnesses their wills. He advances them hospital expenses and dissuades them from suicide. And in the end a few of them refrain from knifing him at the first opportunity."[1]
2. ^ Stock (1970): "In a letter written in October 1966 Mrs Pound recalled the period in these words: 'E.P. was in Rome when it was taken and he walked out (in a pair of Degli Uberti's heavy boots, many years later restored to owner) along the only road going north not infested by troops—spent a night in the open and with some peasants—got to a junction where there was a train going north with a herd of the dismantled Italian army ...' In an article published in 1966 his daughter said that during the long journey he slept in farms, in dormitories, and in the open, receiving food from kindly women on the way. Altogether Pound travelled more than 450 miles, arriving at Gais, his daughter said, 'one late afternoon, exhausted, his feet all blisters'."[118]
3. ^ The Associated Press reported the list of judges as Conrad Aiken, W. H. Auden, Louise Bogan, Katherine Garrison Chapin, T. S. Eliot, Paul Green, Robert Lowell, Katherine Anne Porter, Karl Shapiro, Allen Tate, Willard Thorp and Robert Penn Warren. Also on the list were Leonie Adams, the Library of Congress's poetry consultant, and Theodore Spencer, who died on 18 January 1949, just before the award was announced.[128]
4. ^ "At their [the committee's first] meeting [in November 1948], and to no one's great surprise, given [Allen] Tate's behind-the-scenes maneuverings and the intimidating presence of recent Nobel Laureate T. S. Eliot, The Pisan Cantos emerged as the major contender ..."[129]

See also

• Ezra Pound portal

References

Citations


1. Hemingway, "Homage to Ezra", This Quarter, 1, Spring 1925, 221–225, in Hemingway (2006), 5–6
2. The Pisan Cantos (80.665–67), Sieburth (2003), xiii
3. "Books: Unpegged Pound", Time, 20 March 1933; Hemingway (2006), 25, from The Cantos of Ezra Pound: Some Testimonies by Ernest Hemingway, Ford Madox Ford, T. S. Eliot, Hugh Walpole, Archibald McLeish, James Joyce, and Others, Farrar & Rinehart, March 1933
4. Moody (2007), 4; Ridler, Keith. "Poet's Idaho home is reborn", Associated Press, 25 May 2008; for Idaho Territory, see Wilson (2014), 14.
5. Tytell (1987), 11
6. Moody (2007), xiii–13
7. Cockram (2005), 238
8. Moody (2007), xiii
9. Rachewiltz, Moody and Moody (2011), x
10. Moody (2007), 8–9
11. Moody (2007), 14; for Cheltenham Township High School, see McDonald (2005), 91, and Stock (1970), 11
12. Nadel (2004), 18; Barnstone (1998), 202
13. Doolittle (1979), 67–68; Hilda's Book is in the Houghton Library at Harvard; see "Poems and Translations", Library of America.
14. Nadel (2004), 31
15. Tytell (1987), 24–28; for dedication of Personae, see Nadel (1999), xviii
16. Moody (2007), 18–25
17. Stock (1964), 6
18. Moody (2007), 19, 27–28
19. Moody (2007), 28–29
20. Moody (2007), 29–31
21. Stock (1970), 37.
22. Moody (2007), 58–59
23. Moody (2007), 60–62; Wilhelm (1985), 177; Carpenter (1988), 80; Nadel (2004), 30
24. Moody (2007), 62, 63; for the bakery, Tytell (1987), 35
25. Eliot (1917), 5
26. Zinnes (1980), xi; for information about Brooke Smith, see Carpenter (1988), 91, 95
27. Knapp (1979), 25–27
28. Stock (1970), 53–54
29. Wilhelm (2008), 4; Pound (2003), 80, lines 334–336; also see Campbell, James. "Home from home", The Guardian, 17 May 2008.
30. Wilhelm (2008), 5–11
31. Wilhelm (2008), 7
32. Ford 1999, 277.
33. Hemingway (2006), 6
34. Tytell (1987), 46
35. For the money from Cravens, see Moody (2007), 124–125; for the speculation that they were lovers, see Carpenter (1988), 155; Dennis (1999), 264; Pound, Omar (1988), 66
36. Moody (2007), 91; Elek, Jon. "Personae", The Literary Encyclopedia, 8 April 2004.
37. Moody (2007), 93
38. Wilson, Peter. "Exultations", The Literary Encyclopedia, 20 April 2004.
39. Moody (2007), 180
40. Stock (1970), 70, 81–89
41. Wilhelm (2008), 62–65
42. Montgomery, Paul L. "Ezra Pound: A Man of Contradictions", The New York Times, 2 November 1972
43. Tytell (1987), 59–62
44. Stock (1970), 95
45. Elek, Jon. "Canzoni", The Literary Encyclopedia, 8 March 2005. Orage was referred to in The Cantos (Possum refers to T. S. Eliot): "But the lot of 'em, / Yeats, Possum and Wyndham / had no ground beneath 'em. / Orage had." See Wilhelm (2008), 83, citing Canto 98/685.
46. Arrowsmith (2011), 103–164; also see Arrowsmith (2011), 27–42, 118, and Dennis (2000), 101
47. Arrowsmith, Rupert Richard (March 2012). "Cosmopolitanism and Modernism" (video of a lecture discussing the importance of Japanese culture to Pound's early poetry), London University School of Advanced Study.
48. Witemeyer (1961), 112.
49. Venuti (1979), 88; Knapp (1979), 54
50. Moody (2007), 180, 222
51. Pound, Ezra. "A Retrospect", in T. S. Eliot. (1968). Literary Essays of Ezra Pound. New York: New Directions Publishing (first published 1918), 3–5.
52. Witemeyer (1969), 34; for its description as theclassic Imagist poem, see Witemeyer (1999), 49
53. Alexander (1979), 62
54. Pound, Ezra, Ripostes, Stephen Swift & Co Ltd, London, 1912; Pound (1918), 4
55. For submission and publication dates, see Pound, Ezra. Poems and translations, Library of America, (2003), 1239
56. For the original text of The Seafarer, see "The Seafarer", Anglo-Saxons.net; for Pound's interpretation, see Pound, Ezra. "The Seafarer", Representative Poetry Online, University of Toronto.
57. Sieburth (2010), xv
58. Moody (2007), 239
59. The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry: A Critical Edition (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008).
60. Alexander (1979), 95
61. Yip, Wai-lim. Ezra Pound's Cathay. Princeton University Press, 1969, cited in Alexander (1979), 99
62. Kern, Robert (1996). Orientalism, Modernism, and the American Poem. Cambridge University Press. pp. 186–189. ISBN 978-0-521-49613-1.
63. "The Fenollosa Papers" in Stock (1965), 177–179
64. Graves, from "These Be Your Gods, O Israel" (138–139)
65. Yao (2010), 36–39
66. Stock (1970), 143–147; Tytell (1987), 97
67. Moody (2007), 240; Longenbach (1988); Longenbach, James. "The Odd Couple: Pound and Yeats Together", The New York Times, 10 January 1988.
68. Moody (2007), 246–249
69. Moody (2007), 230, 256
70. Stock (1970), 159
71. Campbell, James. "Home from home", The Guardian, 17 May 2008.
72. Moody (2007), 222–225
73. Aiken (1965), 4–5
74. Mertens, Richard. "Letter by letter", University of Chicago Magazine, April 2001.
75. Moody (2007), 306–307
76. Moody (2007), 330, 334
77. Moody (2007), 342
78. Stock (1970), 174, 180–182
79. Moody (2007), 334–335
80. Kenner (1971), 286
81. Pound, Ezra. "Hugh Selwyn Mauberley", Project Gutenberg, 18 November 2007.
82. Adams (2005), 149; Leavis (1932), 134, 150.
83. Moody (2007), 394–396
84. Witemeyer (1969), 25; Orage (1921), 201
85. Orage (1921), 199–200; Stock (1970), 235; Moody (2007), 410
86. Wilhelm (2008), 287.
87. Meyers (1985), 70–74
88. Bornstein (1999), 33–34
89. Carpenter (1988), 430–431, 448
90. Tytell (1987), 180; Wilhelm (2008), 251
91. For his operas, see Kenner (1973), 390; for his pieces for violin, see Stock (1970), 252–256
92. Tytell (1987), 191–193
93. Baker (1981), 127
94. Tytell (1987), 225
95. Tytell (1987), 198
96. Wilhelm (1994), 13–15
97. Carpenter (1988), 450–451
98. Carpenter (1988), 452–453
99. For the house in Venice, see Tytell (1987), 198, and Mamoli Zorzi (2007), 15, 23; for Mary's memoir, see de Rachewiltz (1971), 1
100. Wilhelm (1994), 22–24
101. Nadel (1999), xxi–xxiii
102. Tytell (1987), 215
103. Terrell (1980), vii
104. Bush (1976), xiii–xv
105. Preda (2005), 90
106. Tytell (1987), 228–232
107. Tytell (1987), 250–253
108. Tytell (1987), 254
109. Tytell (1987), 253–265
110. "Selected World War II Broadcasts", Modern American Poetry, citing "Ezra Pound Speaking": Radio Speeches of World War II. Ed. Leonard W. Doob. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1978.
111. Tytell (1987), 260
112. Tytell (1987), 264–266
113. Tytell (1987), 268–270
114. Gill (2005), 115–116
115. Sieburth (2003b), xiv
116. Gery (2010), 222
117. Tytell (1987), 262
118. Stock (1970), 401; also see Tytell (1987), 264–273
119. Sieburth (2003), ix–xiv
120. Sieburth (2003), xxxvi
121. Sieburth Stock (1970), 408; Sieburth (2003b), xi
122. Stock (1970), 408
123. Kimpel (1981), 470–474
124. Tytell (1987), 289–297, 304–305
125. For Cornell's efforts, see "Julien Cornell, 83, The Defense Lawyer In Ezra Pound Case", The New York Times, 7 December 1994.
126. Mitgang, Herbert. "Researchers dispute Ezra Pound's 'insanity'", The New York Times, 31 October 1981; also see Kutler, Stanley I. (1983). American Inquisition: Justice and Injustice in the Cold War. Hill & Wang.
127. Tytell (1987), 293, 302–303; Tytell cites MacLeish, Archibald. Riders on the Earth, Houghton Mifflin, 1978, 120; Winnick, R. H. (ed.) Letters of Archibald MacLeish, 1907 to 1982. Houghton Mifflin, 1983, and in particular a letter from MacLeish to Milton Eisenhower, which is in the Library of Congress. For more details of who supported and opposed, see McGuire (1988).
128. "Pound, in Mental Clinic, Wins Prize for Poetry Penned in Treason Cell", Associated Press, 19 February 1949.
129. Sieburth (2003), xxxviii–xxxix
130. "Canto Controversy" Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 22 August 1949.
131. Hillyer, Robert. "Treason's Strange Fruit" and "Poetry's New Priesthood", in The Saturday Review of Literature, 11 and 18 June 1949.
132. McGuire, William. Poetry's Catbird Seat, Library of Congress, 1998.
133. Wilhelm (1994), 286, 306
134. Hickman (2005), 127
135. Tytell (1987), 306–308
136. Stock (1970), 437
137. Reynolds (2000), 303
138. Hemingway, Ernest. "The Art of Fiction", Paris Review, No. 21.
139. "Police Firmness in Nashville", Life magazine, 23 September 1957, 34; Tytell (1987), 308; Webb (2011), 88–89
140. Lewis, Anthony. "U.S. asked to end Pound indictment", The New York Times, 14 April 1958.
141. Tytell (1987), 325–326
142. Arnold, Thurman (1965). Fair Fights and Foul: A Dissenting Lawyer's Life (1 ed.). New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc. pp. 236–242.
143. "Pound, in Italy, Gives Fascist Salute; Calls United States an 'Insane Asylum'", The New York Times, 10 July 1958.
144. Tytell (1987), 328–332; for the reference to "Canto 113", see Sieburth (2003), xl
145. Tytell (1987), 347; Hall, Donald. "Ezra Pound, The Art of Poetry No. 5", The Paris Review, 28, Summer–Fall 1962.
146. Tytell (1987), 333–336
147. Nadel (2007), 18
148. Tytell (1987), 337–339
149. Tytell (1987), 339; "Ezra Pound Dies in Venice at Age of 87", The New York Times, 2 November 1972.
150. O'Connor (1963), 7, 19
151. Nadel (1999), 1–6; Witmeyer (1999), 47
152. Coats (2009), 87–89
153. Ingham (1999), 236–237
155. Pound (1968), 103
156. Ingham (1999), 244–245
157. Oliver (2011), 87
158. Albright (1999), 60
159. Yao (2010), 34–35
160. Yao (2010), 33–36
161. Alexander (1997), 23–30
162. Xie (1999), 204–212
163. Kenner (1971), 199
164. Nadel (1999), 1–6
165. Beasley (2010), 662
166. Xie (1999), 217
167. Ingham (1999), 240
168. O'Connor (1963), 7
169. Tate (1965), 87
170. Nadel (1999), 8
171. Nicholls (1999), 144
172. Bacigalupo (1999), 188–191
173. Bacigalupo (1999), 203
174. Redman (1999), 258
175. Redman (1999), 255–260
176. Nadel (1999), 10
177. Bacigalupo (1999), 203; Coats (2009), 80, 83
178. Wilson, Edmund (2007). "Ezra Pound's Patchwork", Literary Essays and Reviews of the 1920s & 30s. Library of America, 44, 45; the essay was first published on 19 April 1922.
179. Beasley (2010), 651
180. Nadel (1999), 12
181. Kenner (1983), 16
182. Alexander (1997), 15–18
183. Nadel (2010b), 162–165
184. Nadel (1999), 13
185. Feldman (2012), 94
186. Coats (2009), 81
187. Surrette (1999) 13
188. Nadel (2010a), 1–6
189. Feldman (2012), 90–91
190. Bornstein (1999), 22–23
191. Witemeyer (1999), 48
192. Eliot (1917), 3
193. Canto 120, the final canto, first published in Threshold, Belfast, and in The Anonym Quarterly, New York, 1969. See Pound, Ezra. The Cantos of Ezra Pound. New Directions Books, 1983, 802
194. There is a debate about the placement of the final canto. See "Late Cantos LXXII–CXVII" Bush (1999), 132; also see Stoicheff, Peter. The Hall of Mirrors: Drafts & Fragments and the End of Ezra Pound's Cantos. University of Michigan Press, 1995, 66
195. For Arthur Miller's quote, see Torrey (1984), 200. For Rosenthal, see her A Primer of Ezra Pound. Macmillan, 1960, 2
196. Flory (1999), 285–286, 294–300
197. Carpenter (1988), 898–899
198. Kashner, Sam (2005). When I Was Cool. New York: HarperCollins Perennial. p. 86. ISBN 006000567-X. Allen explained how he tried to deal with anti-Semitic remarks. He said that he even got Ezra Pound to "take it back," to admit that it was a dumb, suburban prejudice.
199. Translated into French by Margaret Tunstill and Claude Minière Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Tristram éd., Auch, France, 1992
200. Ackroyd, Peter. (1980). Ezra Pound. Thames and Hudson Ltd., 121. For early publications, see Eliot, T. S. (1917). Ezra Pound, His Metric and Poetry. Alfred A. Knopf, 1917, 29–31

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• Gery, John. (2010). "Venice". in Ira Nadel (ed). Ezra Pound in Context. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-51507-8
• Gill, Jonathan. (2005). "Ezra Pound Speaking: Radio Speeches on World War II", in Demetres P. Tryphonopoulos and Stephen Adams (eds). The Ezra Pound Encyclopedia. Westport, CT: Greenwood. ISBN 978-0-313-30448-4
• Hall, Donald. (1992). Their Ancient Glittering Eyes: Remembering Poets and More Poets. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. ISBN 978-0-89919-979-5
• Haller, Evelyn. (2005). "Mosley, Sir Oswald" in Demetres P. Tryphonopoulos and Stephen Adams (eds). The Ezra Pound Encyclopedia. Westport, CT: Greenwood. ISBN 978-0-313-30448-4
• Hemingway, Ernest. Bruccoli, Matthew and Baughman, Judith (eds.). (2006). "Hemingway and the Mechanism of Fame. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press. ISBN 978-1-57003-599-9
• Hickman, Miranda B. (2005). The Geometry of Modernism: The Vorticist Idiom in Lewis, Pound, H.D., and Yeats. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. ISBN 978-0-292-70943-0
• Ingham, Michael. (1999). "Pound and Music", in Ira Nadel (ed). The Cambridge Companion to Ezra Pound. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-64920-9
• Kenner, Hugh. (1983 ed.) The Poetry of Ezra Pound. Omaha, NE: University of Nebraska Press; first published 1951. ISBN 978-0-8032-7756-4
• Kenner, Hugh. (1973). The Pound Era. Berkeley: University of California Press. ISBN 978-0-520-02427-4
• Kimpel, Ben D. and Eaves, Duncan. (1981). "More on Pound's Prison Experience". American Literature. Volume 53, No. 1.
• Knapp, James F. (1979). Ezra Pound. Boston: Twayne Publishers. ISBN 978-0-8057-7286-9
• Leavis, F. R. (1932). New Bearings in English Poetry. London: Chatto & Windus. ISBN 978-0-571-24335-8
• Longenbach, James (1988). Stone Cottage. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• McGuire, William. (1988). Poetry's Catbird Seat. Washington: Library of Congress. ISBN 978-0-16-004004-7
• Mamoli Zorzi, Rosella et al. (2007). In Venice and in the Veneto with Ezra Pound. Venice: Supernova. ISBN 978-88-88548-79-1
• Meyers, Jeffrey (1985). Hemingway: A Biography. New York: Macmillan. ISBN 978-0-333-42126-0
• Moody, A. David (2007). Ezra Pound: Poet: A Portrait of the Man and His Work, Volume I, The Young Genius 1885–1920. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-957146-8
• Nadel, Ira. (1999). "Introduction", in Ira Nadel (ed).Introduction: Understanding Pound. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-64920-9
• Nadel, Ira. (2004). Ezra Pound: A Literary Life. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 978-0-333-58257-2
• Nadel, Ira. (2010a). "Introduction". in Ira Nadel (ed). Ezra Pound in Context. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-51507-8
• Nadel, Ira. (2010b). "The Lives of Pound". in Ira Nadel (ed). Ezra Pound in Context. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-51507-8
• Nicholls, Peter. (1999). "Beyond the Cantos: Ezra Pound and recent American poetry". in Ira Nadel (ed).The Cambridge Companion to Ezra Pound. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-64920-9
• O'Connor, William Van. (1963). Ezra Pound. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press
• Orage, A. R. (1921). "A. R. Orage on Pound's Departure from London". in Eric Homberger (ed.). Ezra Pound. Routledge (first published as R.H.C., "Readers and Writers", New Age, 31 January 1921, xxviii, 126–127).
• Pound, Ezra. (1926). Personæ. New York: New Directions. 1990 edition. ISBN 978-0-8112-1120-8
• Pound, Ezra. (2005 ed). The Spirit of Romance. New York: New Directions ISBN 978-0-8112-1646-3
• Pound, Ezra. (2006). "Horace" (edited by Caterina Ricciardi). Rimini (Italy): Raffaelli. ISBN 978-88-89642-78-8
• Pound, Ezra. (2006). "The Fifth Decade of Cantos " (translated into Italian by Mary de Rachewiltz). Rimini (Italy): Raffaelli. ISBN 978-88-89642-19-1
• Pound, Omar, ed., (1988). Ezra Pound and Margaret Cravens: A Tragic Friendship, 1910–1912. Duke University Press. ISBN 978-0-8223-0862-1
• Preda, Roxana. (2005), in Demetres P. Tryphonopoulos and Stephen Adams (eds). The Ezra Pound Encyclopedia. Westport, CT: Greenwood. ISBN 978-0-313-30448-4
• Rachewiltz, Mary de. (1971). Discretions: A memoir by Ezra Pound's daughter. New York: New Directions.ISBN 978-0-8112-1647-0
• Rachewiltz, Mary de; Moody, A. David; and Moody, Joanna (2011). Ezra Pound to His Parents: Letters 1895–1929. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-958439-0
• Redman, Tim. (1991). Ezra Pound and Italian Fascism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-37305-0
• Redman, Tim. (1999). "Pound's politics and economics", in Ira Nadel (ed). Introduction: Understanding Pound. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-64920-9
• Reynolds, Michael (1999). Hemingway: The Final Years. New York: Norton. ISBN 978-0-393-32047-3
• Sieburth, Richard. (2003b). The Pisan Cantos. New York: New Directions. ISBN 978-0-8112-1558-9
• Sieburth, Richard. (2003a). Poems and Translation. New York: The Library of America. ISBN 978-1-931082-42-6
• Sieburth, Richard. (2010). New Selected Poems and Translation. New York: New Directions. ISBN 978-0-8112-1733-0
• Stark, Robert. (2001). "Pound Among the Nightingales – From the Troubadours to a Cantible Modernism". Journal of Modern Literature. Volume 32, No. 2.
• Stock, Noel. (1964). Poet in Exile. Manchester: University of Manchester.
• Stock, Noel. (1970). The Life of Ezra Pound. New York: Pantheon Books.
• Surrette, Leon. (1999). Pound in Purgatory: From Economic Radicalism to Anti-Semitism. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. ISBN 978-0-252-02498-6
• Tate, Allen. (1965). "Ezra Pound and the Bollingen Prize", in Noel Stock (ed.). Ezra Pound Perspectives. Chicago: Henry Regnery Company.
• Terrell, Carroll F. (1980). A Companion to The Cantos of Ezra Pound. Berkeley: University of California Press. ISBN 978-0-520-03687-1
• Torrey, Edwin Fuller. (1984). The Roots of Treason and the Secrets of St Elizabeths, New York: McGraw-Hill. ISBN 978-0-07-064983-5
• Tytell, John. (1987). Ezra Pound: The Solitary Volcano. New York: Anchor Press. ISBN 978-0-385-19694-9
• Venuti, Lawrence. (2004). The Translation Studies Reader, London: Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-31919-5
• Webb, Clive. (2011). Rabble Rousers: The American Far Right in the Civil Rights Era. Athens: University of Georgia Press.
• Wilhelm, J. (1985). The American Roots of Ezra Pound. New York: Garland Publishing, 1985. ISBN 978-0-8240-7500-2
• Wilhelm, James J. (1994). Ezra Pound: The Tragic Years 1925–1972. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press. ISBN 978-2-7101-0827-6
• Wilhelm, James J. (2008). Ezra Pound in London and Paris, 1908–1925. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press. ISBN 978-0-271-02798-2
• Wilson, Peter (2014) [1997]. A Preface to Ezra Pound. Abingdon and New York: Routledge. ISBN 978-0-582-25867-9
• Witemeyer, Hugh (ed). (1996). Pound/Williams: Selected letters of Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams. New York: New Directions. ISBN 978-0-8112-1301-1
• Witemeyer, Hugh. (1999). "Early Poetry 1908–1920", in Ira Nadel (ed). The Cambridge Companion to Ezra Pound. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-64920-9
• Witemeyer, Hugh (ed.). (1969). The Poetry of Ezra Pound. Berkeley: University of California Press.
• Yao, Steven G. (2010). "Translation", Ira B. Nadel (editor), in Ezra Pound in Context. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-51507-8
• Xie, Ming. (1999). "Pound as Translator". in Ira Nadel (ed). The Cambridge Companion to Ezra Pound. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-64920-9
• Zinnes, Harriet (ed). (1980). Ezra Pound and the Visual Arts. New York: New Directions. ISBN 978-0-8112-0772-0

External links

• The Ezra Pound Society
• Ezra Pound at Curlie
• Works by Ezra Pound at Project Gutenberg
• Works by or about Ezra Pound at Internet Archive
• Works by Ezra Pound at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)
• "Ezra Pound in his Time and Beyond", University of Delaware Library.
• Ezra Pound papers, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
• Still photographs of Ezra Pound, Beinecke Library
• Ezra Pound collection at University of Victoria, Special Collections
• Frequently requested records: Ezra Pound, United States Department of Justice.
• Records of Ezra Pound are held by Simon Fraser University's Special Collections and Rare Books
Audio/video
• Ezra Pound recordings, University of Pennsylvania.
• "The Four Steps", Pound discussing bureaucracy, BBC Home Service, 21 June 1958.
• Hammer, Langdon. Lecture on Ezra Pound, Yale University, February 2007.
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Re: Freda Bedi, by Wikipedia

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The World Congress of Faiths – An Overview
by Marcus Braybrooke
July 15, 2013

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Renewing his contact with the University of Oxford Buddhist Society, at 8.15 p.m. on 5th May, the Ven. Sayadaw spoke to the group on "Meditation" returning on 12th May to conduct a discussion relating thereto. At 7.30 p.m. on 8th May, he addressed the World Congress of Faiths 23 Norfolk Square, W.2, and at 7 p.m. on the following evening the Theosophical Society, Tavistock Square, W.C.2; his subjects were, respectively, "The Practical Aspect of Buddhism" and "Buddhist Psychology".

-- Tour of Ven. Sayadaw U Thittila, Aggamahapandita, to Western Europe, by myanmarnet.net


NUDGING RELIGION TOWARDS INCLUSIVENESS

Image
Participants at the 1933 World Fellowship of Faiths. Photo: Mahanam.org

Studying the history of the interfaith movement, one finds an indirect link from the 1893 World Parliament of Religions to the World Congress of Faiths (WCF). In 1933 The World Fellowship of Faiths held an International Congress in Chicago. It was also called a ‘Second Parliament of Religions.’ One of those who attended was Francis Younghusband (profiled last month in TIO). Younghusband was encouraged by the organizers to arrange a second World Fellowship of Faiths’ congress in London, although Younghusband soon made clear that he was in charge of plans for what became known as the World Congress of Faiths.

Just as the then Archbishop of Canterbury refused to support the 1893 World Parliament of Religions, so in 1936 Archbishop Cosmo Lang advised King Edward VIII not to preside at the World Congress of Faiths, because Christianity was the only ‘true religion.’ Most of those who attended the Congress were scholars, such as Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, Yusuf Ali, and D. T. Suzuki.
Religious leaders wanted to hold on to their followers.

Inspired by a sense of Oneness that transcends particular religions and inspires active service of others, members of WCF have continued to be gadflies urging faith communities to come together and to be more adventurous and socially concerned.

Overcoming Exclusivism

Pioneers such as Bishop Bell (a friend of Dietrich Bonhoeffer), Ninian Smart, Geoffrey Parrinder, George Appleton, and John Hick, all members of the World Congress of Faiths, encouraged Christians to risk an ‘inclusive’ attitude even if ‘pluralism’ was still too dangerous. WCF members who belonged to other religions were also challenging the exclusivism of their traditions.

The resistance was now working in three fields. The Kreisau Circle was holding its endless talks to work out the millennium. The Beck group, more down to earth, was striving in some way to kill Hitler and take over power. And it was making contact with the West in order to apprise the democratic Allies of what was up and to inquire what kind of peace they would negotiate with a new anti-Nazi government. [iii] These contacts were made in Stockholm and in Switzerland.

In the Swedish capital Goerdeler often saw the bankers Marcus and Jakob Wallenberg, with whom he had long been friends and who had intimate business and personal contacts in London. At one meeting in April 1942 with Jakob Wallenberg, Goerdeler urged him to get in touch with Churchill. The conspirators wanted in advance an assurance from the Prime Minister that the Allies would make peace with Germany if they arrested Hitler and overthrew the Nazi regime. Wallenberg replied that from what he knew of the British government no such assurance was possible.

A month later two Lutheran clergymen made direct contact with the British in Stockholm. These were Dr. Hans Schoenfeld, a member of the Foreign Relations Bureau of the German Evangelical Church, and Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer, an eminent divine and an active conspirator, who on hearing that Dr. George Bell, the Anglican Bishop of Chichester, was visiting in Stockholm hastened there to see him -- Bonhoeffer traveling incognito on forged papers provided him by Colonel Oster of the Abwehr.

Both pastors informed the bishop of the plans of the conspirators and, as had Goerdeler, inquired whether the Western Allies would make a decent peace with a non-Nazi government once Hitler had been overthrown. They asked for an answer -- by either a private message or a public announcement. To impress the bishop that the anti-Hitler conspiracy was a serious business, Bonhoeffer furnished him with a list of the names of the leaders -- an indiscretion which later was to cost him his life and to help make certain the execution of many of the others.

This was the most authoritative and up-to-date information the Allies had had on the German opposition and its plans, and Bishop Bell promptly turned it over to Anthony Eden, the British Foreign Secretary, when he returned to London in June. But Eden, who had resigned this post in 1938 in protest against Chamberlain's appeasement of Hitler, was skeptical. Similar information had been conveyed to the British government by alleged German plotters since the time of Munich and nothing had come of it. No response was made. [4]

-- The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany, by William L. Shirer


WCF’s first and continuing task has been to reduce the ignorance and prejudice with which people viewed other faiths. As late as the 1960s, Archbishop of Canterbury Ramsey visited a Hindu temple for the first time, and no one had advised him to take off his shoes! From the 1950s WCF campaigned for children to be taught about all religions – not just Christianity – a change that eventually happened in the eighties.

Sixty years ago WCF held perhaps the first public ‘All Faiths Service,’ when Queen Elizabeth II was crowned and asked people to pray for her. Even now interfaith prayer is controversial. It is still an open question whether the Church of England will want to monopolize the next coronation.

By the seventies, immigrants in Britain wanted to find places to meet and worship. A colleague and I offered the use of our church hall to the local Sikh community, who were meeting in the back room of a pub – never thinking it would spark a debate in the national press. Even today, plans to build a mosque will anger some local residents.

As late as 1980, the Religious Affairs correspondent of the Times said that church leaders knew nothing about other faith communities, although WCF had ensured there were friendly relations between them. But by the mid-eighties change was on its way. Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs were building their own religious centers; Christians at last were acknowledging that centuries of anti-Jewish teaching had prepared the seed-bed in which Nazism could grow; the shadow cast by Barthian theology was disappearing; the Inter Faith Network for the UK was established in 1987; and the government was taking steps to counter racial prejudice.

By the nineties, the ending of the Cold War and hopes for the new Millenium created a mood of optimism. With growing trust, faith communities began to cooperate in prayer and work for peace and in defense of human rights. Indeed on January 3rd, in a moving ceremony at the Palace of Westminster, with Royalty and the Prime Minister Tony Blair present, leaders of faith communities committed themselves

To work together for the common good,
Uniting to build a better society,
Grounded in values and ideals that we share.


All too soon hopes for a new Millennium were shattered by 9/11 and other acts of violence. Interfaith activists had to struggle to prevent the ‘War against Terror’ becoming a new crusade. The dangers have led to greater support for interfaith work by many governments and by the United Nations.

Representing Yourself, not Your Faith

Because members of the World Congress of Faiths join on an individual basis, not as representatives of a religion, WCF has been able to pioneer and take risks. It has welcomed members of minority groups and seekers, as well as the major faiths. Today dialogue between those who call themselves ‘spiritual’ and committed members of a faith community is becoming more significant. Equally, all faiths in the West are increasingly challenged by more aggressive secularism – especially over traditional teaching on sexuality and gender equality.

Image
The 2013 WCF Executive Committee

Although British based, WCF has strong links with other international interfaith organisations and took the initiative in convening meetings in 1985 and 1988 which led to them jointly observing the centenary of the 1893 Parliament as a ‘Year of Inter-religious Understanding and Co-operation.’ The journal Interreligious Insight has an international readership, and WCF has arranged interfaith tours to many countries.

Even today, when interfaith is endorsed by governments and religious leaders, WCF has still to remind people that despite the practical benefits of interfaith activity, the primary motivation is spiritual and springs from an experience of Oneness with the Source of All Life, which transcends particular religions and is the deepest wellspring of compassion and the commitment to human rights, peace building, non-violence, and reverence for all life.

This history of the World Congress of Faiths is explored in detail in Marcus Braybrooke’s Widening Vision: The World Congress of Faiths and the Growing Interfaith Movement (2013), available in print or as an e-book from http://www.worldfaiths.org or http://www.lulu.com.
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Re: Freda Bedi, by Wikipedia

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Our History [World Conference/Congress of Faiths]
by worldfaiths.org
Accessed: 4/7/19

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In 1970 it was decided to take steps to re-absorb the Movement Trust, which was formed to administer the affairs of the Union for the Study of the Great Religions, into the parent Trust which originally endowed it, and which had financed its projects. From that date the Union was to function as before, with its branches, book-lists, and news letters, but after the amalgamation there was to be one set of Trustees and one set of accounts instead of two (NUSGR 27, Summer 1970, p. 1). The history of the two trusts was outlined in a lecture delivered at Younghusband House in London, in December 1969. The lecture was printed in World Faiths, the journal of the World Congress of Faiths, Spring number (79), 1970....

KDDH's outline of the history of the two Trusts was given in a lecture at Younghusband House, the centre of the World Congress of Faiths in Norfolk Square, London, on 1 December 1968. It was published in World Faiths, Spring number (79), 1970....

A.J. Arberry in his obituary of H. N. Spalding, in Forum, published by the World Congress of Faiths, no. 19, December 1953, p. 17....


In the Summer of 1975 ... Henderson wrote the following note:

I have been used to think how remarkable it was that a Hindu philosopher should have proved a more successful statesman than Plato or Aristotle, and when I was asked last February to draft a citation for the bestowal on Dr Radhakrishnan of the Templeton Award I tried to illustrate this side of his message by a quotation which I shall repeat below. Its keynote is Relevance, the relevance of reason to the interpretation of religious experience and the relevance of that interpretation to the human condition. Zaehner's last book, Our Savage God, stresses both these relevances, ranging as freely through the slums and alleys of our contemporary conturbations as over the high citadels of metaphysics. It is perhaps not strange that two such different men should have reached similar conclusions. [39]


The quotation to which Henderson refers above was taken from something Radhakrishnan said as Spalding Professor elect. In the discussion that followed his talk on Religion and Religions at the first World Congress of Faiths (held in London from July 3-17, 1936, and organised by Sir Francis Younghusband), Radhakrishnan said:

The question has been raised that those who believed in intuition tried to exclude the operation of the intellect. The way the leader of the debate put it was that those who practise do not investigate, and those who investigate do not practise. But if you go to the really great mystics, whether in the Upanishads, or to a man like Buddha, or one like Plato, or any of the great mystics of the world who may be regarded as examples of saintly life, you will find in them an intellectual eminence and comprehensive knowledge. And it would have been impossible for them to practise those things unless their intellects had been satisfied. The life of the spirit is an integral life, a life where you sanctify your body, illuminate your intellect, and obtain a complete kind of manhood. There should, in any complete life, be an equal emphasis on the intellect and the intuitions. [40]
....

On 12 June 1972 he [K. D. D. Henderson, Spalding Trust] attended an 'All Faiths Service' organised by the World Congress of Faiths (WCF) in the Central Baptist Church in Bloomsbury. The WCF was founded by Sir Francis Younghusband in 1936.... H. N. Spalding was a member of the Continuation Committee. Both HN and Henderson supported its work. Henderson ... was to become its Associate President in 1966. He was sometimes referred to as a 'Vice-President' of the WCF. The Inaugural Younghusband Memorial Lecture was delivered by Henderson in King's College, the Strand, London, on 11 May 1976. The title of the lecture was 'Francis Younghusband and the Mysticism of Shared Endeavour'....

In 1975 Henderson attended the remarkable 'Spiritual Summit Conference', One is the Human Spirit organised in New York City by the Temple of Understanding to mark the thirtieth anniversary of the founding of the United Nations....

One of the lesser known but most devoted servants of the Union's cause was Henderson's colleague, Fr Lev Gillet, 'a Monk of the Eastern Church' [one of 5 original Spalding Union Trust area secretaries, Lev Gillet in the Near East] It was he who was responsible for producing the 'Book Lists' and the book reviews, which first appeared as appendices to so many of Henderson's Union News Letters and then as publications in their own right. The amount of reading necessary to fulfil this task, in what Fr Gillet was in the habit of calling 'the world of compared religion', was prodigious. His last contribution to the series appeared shortly before his death on 29 March 1980. Fifty of Fr Lev's 'Book Lists' were to appear. A highly competent linguist, he was able to review books in several different languages..... For some years the Trust had helped to provide him with accommodation in retirement in St Basil's House, Ladbroke Grove, London ... For some time he had been assisted by Miss Joan Dopping, librarian of the World Congress of Faiths and a keen supporter of the Union for the Study of the Great Religions. In the 1950s Henderson arranged for Fr Lev to help her in the library at Younghusband House in Norfolk Square....

For some years he [Fr Lev Gillet] had felt what he called 'a violent attraction' for the Slav world and for Russia in particular. This was the land of Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Soloviev and other writers, whose works he so much admired. The conviction grew in him that he was called to work for the restoration of unity between Eastern and Western Christians. Much of his life henceforward was to be spent in the Ukraine, France, Switzerland, and other parts of the Near and Middle East. His work as a spiritual counsellor and a leader of retreats was highly regarded. Few in this country knew of his tireless efforts with the Uniate Churches, with Youth movements in the Near East, with the World Council of Churches, with the World Congress of Faiths, or of his personal contacts with men such as Louis Massignon and Martin Buber.

-- The Spalding Trust and the Union for the Study of the Great Religions: H.N. Spalding's Pioneering Vision, by Edward Hulmes


WCF has been leading the way in building a community of individuals who want to create and enjoy the benefits of interfaith dialogue since 1936. In the early days its slogan was 'Faith Meeting Faith: a rich resource for life', and this still holds true.

The organisation has its roots in the Parliament of World Religions, first held in Chicago in 1893 and the Religions of Empire Conference, held in London in 1924. Inspired by these movements and his own spiritual experiences, explorer Sir Francis Younghusband, once described as ‘the last great imperial adventurer’, organised two international conferences in London, and after the second of these, in the shadow of a looming World War, WCF became established as an independent body.

Younghusband stressed that the primary aim of the initiative was to promote fellowship between faiths: there was no intention of formulating a new religion through convergence, nor of seeking the lowest common denominator, nor of appraising the value of existing religions and discussing respective merits and defects. Through discussion and reflection, and by coming closer to each other, members of different religions would deepen their own spiritual communion and the concept of God was strengthened.

The 1936 event from which WCF came into being was remarkable for attracting a galaxy of distinguished speakers from around the world, and from all the main faiths. Many of the papers emanating from it were groundbreaking, and remain of great interest today.

Particularly enlightening are the different attitudes which they display towards the relationship between religions. Several speakers, such as the Chief Rabbi and Canon Barry, stressed the differences between faiths, whereas others such as Ranjee G Shani believed these were trivial.

Some people claimed that their faiths must be accepted by the whole of mankind while by contrast, the paper prepared by Professor Haldane, who had died shortly before the conference, included this passage:

‘Many Christians entertain the ideal of converting non-Christian peoples to Christianity. I think that a much higher ideal is to understand and enter into sympathy with the religions which exist in other countries and to use this understanding and sympathy as a basis for higher religion’.


Of Haldane, Buchan wrote: "What chiefly attracted me to him was his loyalty to Milner. Milner thought him the ablest man in public life, abler even than Arthur Balfour, and alone of his former Liberal allies Haldane stood by him on every count." Haldane, with Rosebery, Asquith, and Edward Grey, had formed the Liberal League to support liberal imperialism, with which Milner was closely associated.

-- The Anglo-American Establishment: From Rhodes to Cliveden, by Carroll Quigley
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Re: Freda Bedi, by Wikipedia

Postby admin » Mon Apr 08, 2019 5:26 am

Wembley’s Conference of Living Religions 1924 [Religions of Empire Conference]
by Wikipedia
Accessed: 4/7/19

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Wembley's Parliament of Living Religions was part of the British Empire Exhibition of 1924, inviting famous representatives of important Living Religions within the British Empire. Although the Exhibition was held at Wembley Park in north-west London the Conference was held at the Imperial Institute, between 22 September and 3 October 1924.[1]

The tradition of this and similar World Fairs go back to the early 18th century. Some of the more famous ones have been The Great Exhibition of 1851 in London and Parliament of the World's Religions in Chicago in 1893.

Proposed Objectives

William Loftus Hare described the following ten objectives of such International Conferences.

1. To bring together in conference, for the first time in history, the leading representatives of the great Historic Religions of the world.

2. To show to men, in the most impressive way, what and how many important truths the various religions held and teach in common.

3. To promote and deepen the spirit of human brotherhood among religious men of diverse faiths, through friendly conference and mutual good understanding, while not seeking to foster the temper of indifferentism, and not striving to achieve any formal and outward unity.


4. To set forth, by those most competent to speak, what arc deemed the important distinctive truths held and taught by each religion, and by the various chief branches of Christendom.

5. To indicate the impregnable foundations of theism and the reasons for man's faith in immortality, and thus to unite and strengthen the forces which are adverse to a materialistic philosophy of the universe.

6. To secure from leading scholars, representing the Brahman, Buddhist, Confucian, Parsee,
Mohammedan, Jewish and other faiths, and from representatives of the various churches of Christendom, full and accurate statements of the spiritual and other effects of the religions which they hold upon the literature, art, commerce, government, domestic and social life of the peoples among whom these faiths have prevailed.

7. To inquire what light each religion has afforded, or may afford, to the other religions of the world.

8. To set forth, for permanent record to be published to the world, an accurate and authoritative account of the present condition and outlook of religion among the leading nations of the earth.

9. To discover, from competent men, what light religion has to throw on the great problems of the present age, especially the important questions connected with temperance, labor, education, wealth and poverty.

10. To bring the nations of the earth into a more friendly fellowship, in the hope of securing permanent international peace.[2]


Main Participants and Religious Representatives

• Mirza Bashir-ud-Din Mahmud Ahmad (Islam)
Sir Francis Young-Husband
• Pandit Shyam Shankar
• Al-Haj Khwaja Kamal-ud-Din
• Mustafa Khan
• Sheikh Kahdim El Dojaily
• Sufi Hafiz Raushan Ali
• Dr. W.A. de Silva
Mr. G.P. Malalasekera
• Mr. Shoson Miyamoto
• Shams-ul-Ulema Dastur Kaikobad Adarbad Noshirvan
• Rai Bahadur Jagmander Lal Jaini
• Sardar Kahan Singh
• Mr. Hsu Ti-Shan
• Mr. N.C. Sen
• Professor S.N. Pherwani
• Mr. Mountford Mills
• Mr. Ruhi Afnan
• The Venerable Archdeacon Williams
• Mr. Richard St. Barbe Baker
• Mr. Albert Thoka
• Mr. L.W.G. Malcom
• Professor J. Arthur Thomson
• Mr. Victor Branford
• Professor H.J. Fleure
• Rachel Annand Taylor
• Mr. Christopher Dawson
• Mr. William Loftus Hare
• Professor Patrick Geddes
• Reverend Tyssul Davies

References

1. An Account of the Parliament of Living Religions, Wembley, London 1924
2. An Account of the Parliament of Living Religions, Wembley, London 1924
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Re: Freda Bedi, by Wikipedia

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James Martineau
by Wikipedia
Accessed: 4/8/19

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Our perceptions may well mislead us about the nature of 'reality'. Despite this uncertainty, it is confidently asserted -- with the vigour of an unchallengeable dogmatism -- that 'truth' is relative, especially when it comes to religion. How can all the religions of the world be 'true'? How are we to evaluate such claims? How is one religion to be judged 'truer' than another? Is the attempt to make such value-judgements merely another example of a human predilection for the absurd? More sensible, perhaps, to remain silent or to take the line that all religions can, at best, be only relatively true. Comparisons are seldom so odious as they are when made about religion. Is it 'true' that we do not know, and can not know, the 'truth'? The word agnosticism is used almost exclusively today to express scepticism about revealed religion. Agnostics may include among their number those who are uncertain about the claims advanced for any institutionalised religion, but it may be truer to say that they are convinced about the irrelevance of such claims. To put it another way, their agnosticism is selective, in that their 'not-knowing' does not extend to social ideals, values, politics, business, or education. On these matters they are usually as certain as the most devout believers are about their religious convictions. In theory, agnosticism is not an absolute position, but when it comes to the world's religions, agnostics and atheists have much in common. For much of the Agnosticism of the age, the Gnosticism of theologians is undeniably responsible. 'They have inconsiderately overstrained the language of religion till its meaning breaks; and the coherent thinker easily picks up its ruins to show they can contain nothing.'33 -- [33. James Martineau, 1888, A Study of Religion: Its Sources and Contents, Clarendon Press, Oxford, vol. I, p. xi.]

-- The Spalding Trust and the Union for the Study of the Great Religions: H.N. Spalding's Pioneering Vision, by Edward Hulmes


Image
James Martineau
Born 21 April 1805
Norwich, England
Died 11 January 1900 (aged 94)
London, England
Nationality British
Alma mater Manchester College, York
Notable work
The Rationale of Religious Inquiry (1836)
The Seat of Authority in Religion (1890)
Region British Unitarianism
Institutions Manchester New College

James Martineau (/ˈmɑːrtənˌoʊ/; 21 April 1805 – 11 January 1900)[1] was an English religious philosopher influential in the history of Unitarianism.

For 45 years he was Professor of Mental and Moral Philosophy and Political Economy in Manchester New College, the principal training college for British Unitarianism.

Many portraits of Martineau, including one painted by George Frederick Watts, are held at London's National Portrait Gallery. In 2014, the gallery revealed that its patron, Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge, was related to Martineau. The Duchess' great-great-grandfather, Francis Martineau Lupton, was Dr James Martineau's grandnephew.[2][3] The gallery also holds written correspondence between Martineau and Poet Laureate, Alfred, Lord Tennyson - who records that he "regarded Martineau as the master mind of all the remarkable company with whom he engaged". William Ewart Gladstone said of Martineau; "he is beyond question the greatest of living thinkers".[4]

One of his children was the Pre-Raphaelite watercolourist Edith Martineau.

Early life

The seventh of eight children, James Martineau was born in Norwich, England, where his father Thomas (1764–1826) was a cloth manufacturer and merchant. His mother, Elizabeth Rankin, was the eldest daughter of a sugar refiner and grocer. The Martineau family were descended from Gaston Martineau, a Huguenot surgeon and refugee, who married Marie Pierre in 1693, and settled in Norwich. His son and grandson — respectively the great-grandfather and grandfather of James Martineau — were surgeons in the same city. Many of the family were active in Unitarian causes, so much so that a room in Essex Hall, the headquarters of British Unitarianism, was eventually named after them. Branches of the Martineau family in Norwich, Birmingham and London were socially and politically prominent Unitarians; other elite Unitarian families in Birmingham were the Kenricks, Nettlefolds and the Chamberlains, with much intermarriage between these families taking place.[5][6][7] Essex Hall held a statue of Martineau.[8] His niece, Frances Lupton, who was close to his sister Harriet, had worked to open up educational opportunities for women.[9]

Education and early years

James was educated at Norwich Grammar School where he was a school-fellow with George Borrow under Edward Valpy, as good a scholar as his better-known brother Richard, but proved too sensitive for school.[10] He was sent to Bristol to the private academy of Dr. Lant Carpenter, under whom he studied for two years. On leaving he was apprenticed to a civil engineer at Derby, where he acquired "a store of exclusively scientific conceptions," but also began to look to religion for mental stimulation.

Martineau's conversion followed, and in 1822 he entered the dissenting academy Manchester College, then at York - his uncle Peter Finch Martineau was one of its Vice-Presidents.[11] Here he "woke up to the interest of moral and metaphysical speculations." Of his teachers, one, the Rev. Charles Wellbeloved, was, Martineau said, "a master of the true Lardner type, candid and catholic, simple and thorough, humanly fond indeed of the counsels of peace, but piously serving every bidding of sacred truth." The other, the Rev. John Kenrick, he described as a man so learned as to be placed by Dean Stanley "in the same line with Blomfield and Thirlwall," and as "so far above the level of either vanity or dogmatism, that cynicism itself could not think of them in his presence." On leaving the college in 1827 Martineau returned to Bristol to teach in the school of Lant Carpenter; but in the following year he was ordained for a [12] Unitarian church in Dublin, whose senior minister was a relative of his.

Image
James Martineau at a younger age.

Martineau's ministerial career was suddenly cut short in 1832 by difficulties growing out of the "regium donum", which had on the death of the senior minister fallen to him. He conceived it as "a religious monopoly" to which "the nation at large contributes," while "Presbyterians alone receive," and which placed him in "a relation to the state" so "seriously objectionable" as to be "impossible to hold." The invidious distinction it drew between Presbyterians on the one hand, and Catholics, members of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers), other nonconformists, unbelievers, and Jews on the other, who were compelled to support a ministry they conscientiously disapproved, offended his conscience. His conscience did, however, allow him to attend both the Coronation of Queen Victoria in 1837 and the her Golden Jubilee half a century later. A year prior to the coronation, at St James's Palace, Martineau had "kissed the hand" of the queen at the Deputation of British Presbyterians ministers.[13]

Work and writings

From Dublin, he was called to Liverpool. He lodged in a house owned by Joseph Williamson. It was during his 25 years in Liverpool that he published his first work, Rationale of Religious Enquiry, which caught the attention of many religious and philosophical figures.

In 1840 Martineau was appointed Professor of Mental and Moral Philosophy and Political Economy in Manchester New College, the seminary in which he had been educated, and which had now moved from York back to Manchester. This position, and the principalship (1869-1885), he held for 45 years.[14] In 1853 the college moved to London, and four years later he followed it there. In 1858 he combined this work with preaching at the pulpit of Little Portland Street Chapel in London, which for the first two years he shared with John James Tayler (who was also his colleague in the college), and then for twelve years as its only minister.

In 1866, the Chair of the Philosophy of Mind and Logic at University College, London, fell vacant when the liberal nonconformist Dr John Hoppus retired. Martineau became a candidate, and despite strong support from some quarters, potent opposition was organised by the anti-clerical George Grote, whose refusal to endorse Martineau resulted in the appointment of George Croom Robertson, then an untried man. Martineau, however, sidestepped Grote's opposition, much as Hoppus had learnt to do during his Professorship, and developed a cordial friendship with Robertson.

Martineau was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1872.[15] He was awarded LL.D. of Harvard in 1872, S.T.D. of Leiden in 1874, D.D. of Edinburgh in 1884, D.C.L. of Oxford in 1888 and D. Litt. of Dublin in 1891.

Life and thought

Martineau described some of the changes he underwent; how he had "carried into logical and ethical problems the maxims and postulates of physical knowledge," and had moved within narrow lines "interpreting human phenomena by the analogy of external nature"; and how in a period of "second education" at Humboldt University in Berlin, with Friedrich Adolf Trendelenburg, he experienced "a new intellectual birth". It made him, however, no more of a theist than he had been before, and he developed Transcendentalist views, which became a significant current within Unitarianism.[16]

Early years

Image
James Martineau by Elliott & Fry, circa 1860s

Martineau was in his early life a preacher. Although he did not believe in the Incarnation, he held deity to be manifest in humanity; man underwent an apotheosis, and all life was touched with the dignity and the grace which it owed to its source. His preaching led to works that built up his reputation:Endeavours after the Christian Life, 1st series, 1843; 2nd series, 1847; Hours of Thought, 1st series, 1876; 2nd series, 1879; the various hymn-books he issued at Dublin in 1831, at Liverpool in 1840, in London in 1873; and the Home Prayers in 1891.

In 1839 Martineau came to the defence of Unitarian doctrine, under attack by Liverpool clergymen including Fielding Ould and Hugh Boyd M‘Neile. In the controversy, Martineau published five discourses, in which he discussed "the Bible as the great autobiography of human nature from its infancy to its perfection," "the Deity of Christ," "Vicarious Redemption," "Evil," and "Christianity without Priest and without Ritual."

In Martineau's earliest book, The Rationale of Religious Enquiry, published in 1836, he placed the authority of reason above that of Scripture; and he assessed the New Testament as "uninspired, but truthful; sincere, able, vigorous, but fallible."[17] The book marked him down, among older British Unitarians, as a dangerous radical, and his ideas were the catalyst for a pamphlet war in America between George Ripley (who favored Martineau's questioning of the historical accuracy of scripture) and the more conservative Andrews Norton. Despite his belief that the Bible was fallible, Martineau continued to hold the view that "in no intelligible sense can any one who denies the supernatural origin of the religion of Christ be termed a Christian," which term, he explained, was used not as "a name of praise," but simply as " a designation of belief."[18] He censured the German rationalists "for having preferred, by convulsive efforts of interpretation, to compress the memoirs of Christ and His apostles into the dimensions of ordinary life, rather than admit the operation of miracle on the one hand, or proclaim their abandonment of Christianity on the other."

Transcendentalism

Image
James Martineau - Replica (National Portrait Galley) by George Frederic Watts, 1873

Martineau came to know German philosophy and criticism, especially the criticism of Ferdinand Christian Baur and the Tübingen school, which affected his construction of Christian history. French influences were Ernest Renan and the Strassburg theologians. The rise of evolution compelled him to reformulate his theism. He addressed the public, as editor and contributor, in the Monthly Repository, the Christian Reformer, the Prospective Review, the Westminster Review and the National Review. Later he was a frequent contributor to the literary monthlies. More systematic expositions came in Types of Ethical Theory and The Study of Religion, and, partly, in The Seat of Authority in Religion (1885, 1888 and 1890). What did Jesus signify? This was the problem which Martineau attempted to deal with in The Seat of Authority in Religion.[19]

Image
Memorial to Martineau, near Aviemore, Scotland

Martineau's theory of religious society, or church, was that of an idealist. He propounded a scheme, which was not taken up, that would have removed the church from the hands of a clerical order, and allowed the coordination of sects or churches under the state. Eclectic by nature, he gathered ideas from any source that appealed. Stopford Brooke once asked A. P. Stanley, Dean of Westminster, "if the Church of England would broaden sufficiently to allow James Martineau to be made Archbishop of Canterbury".[20]

Although he had opposed the removal (1889) of Manchester New College to Oxford, Martineau took part in the opening of the new buildings, conducting the communion service (19 October 1893) in the chapel of what is today Harris Manchester College, University of Oxford.[21] A wide circle of friends mourned his death on 11 January 1900 — Oscar Wilde references him in his prose.[22]

Bibliography

• Endeavours after the Christian Life (1843);
• Miscellanies 1852;
• The Rationale of Religious Enquiry: or, The question stated of reason, the Bible, and the church; in six lectures(1853);
• Studies of Christianity : a series of papers (1858);
• A Study of Spinoza (1882)
• Types of Ethical Theory (1885)

See also

• Free Christians (Britain)
• General Assembly of Unitarian and Free Christian Churches
• Unitarianism

References

1. "Obituary - Dr. James Martineau, London - January 12, 1900". The West Australian. 15 January 1900. p. 5. Retrieved 15 Jan 2014.
2. Furness, Hannah. "Duchess of Cambridge visits National Portrait Gallery - home of little known Middleton family paintings". UK Daily Telegraph - page 3. UK Daily Telegraph - February 11th, 2014. Retrieved 9 May 2014.
3. Gallery, London, National Portrait. "George Frederick Watts,- Portrait of James Martineau, 1873". NPG, London, 2014. Retrieved 15 January 2014.
4. Jackson, A.W. (1901). "James Martineau - A biography and Study". Little, Brown and Co, Boston, Mass. Retrieved 15 January 2014.
5. Tree, Chamberlain Family. "Chamberlain Family". Graham Wall copyright 2001. Retrieved 20 Jan 2014. Note connection of Martineau, Kenrick, Nettleford and Chamberlain families (1862-1945)
6. Ruston, Alan. "Joseph Chamberlain". UUDB. c2011. Retrieved 20 January2014.
7. (Rowe 1959, chpt. 6)
8. (Rowe 1959, chpt. 8)
9. Edited by Elisabeth Sanders Arbuckle, Harriet Martineau (1 January 1983). "Harriet Martineau's Letters to Fanny Wedgwood". Stanford University Press. p. 150. Retrieved 15 May 2015. (May 1857) My (H. Martineau) niece, Mrs (Frances) Lupton and her husband came for two days
10. Hooper, James (1913). Souvenir of the George Borrow Celebration. Jarrold & Sons. p. 14.
11. Ronalds, B.F. (February 2018). "Peter Finch Martineau and his Son". The Martineau Society Newsletter. 41: 10–19.
12. (Rowe 1959, chpt. 1)
13. Carpenter, J. Estlin. James Martineau, theologian and teacher; A study of his life in thought. Philip Green, Essex Steet, London, 1905, Chapter VII.
14. University of Oxford, Harris Manchester College -. "Archives and History - Harris Manchester College, University of Oxford". hmc.ox.ac.uk. Harris Manchester College Pty Ltd. Archived from the original on 18 October 2014. Retrieved 22 September 2014.
15. "Book of Members, 1780–2010: Chapter M" (PDF). American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Retrieved 23 September 2016.
16. Tiffany K. Wayne, Encyclopedia of Transcendentalism (2006), p. 179.
17. James Martineau, The Rationale of Religious Enquiry (London, 1836), p. 17.
18. James Martineau, The Rationale of Religious Enquiry (London, 1836), "Preface to the Second Edition", p. x.
19. Martineau, James. The Seat of Authority in Religion
20. Waller, Ralph. "(Entry) - James Martineau". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford University Pty. Ltd. 2004. Retrieved 21 January 2014.
21. A.G. "Entry - James Martineau". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford University Press - (Date of original publication - 1901). Retrieved 22 January 2014.
22. Wilde, Oscar (2005-01-01) [1st. pub. Cosmopolitan Book Cor. 1916]. The Prose of Oscar Wilde. ISBN 9781596050969. Retrieved 15 January 2014.

Sources

• J. Hunt, Religious Thought in England in the 19th Century (1896) pages 246-250;
• A. W. Jackson, James Martineau, a Biography and a Study (Boston, 1900);
• J. Drummond and C. B. Upton, Life and Letters (2 volumes, 1901);
• Henry Sidgwick, Lectures on the Ethics of Green, Spencer and Martineau (1902);
• A. H. Craufurd, Recollections of James Martineau (1903);
• J. E. Carpenter, James Martineau, Theologian and Teacher (1905);
• C. B. Upton, Dr. Martineau's philosophy, a survey (1905);
• Rowe, Mortimer, B.A., D.D. The History of Essex Hall. London:Lindsey Press, (1959) full text reproduced here;
• Frank Schulman, James Martineau: This Conscience-Intoxicated Unitarian (2002).
Attribution
• This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Andrew Martin Fairbairn (1911). "Martineau, James" . In Chisholm, Hugh. Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press.
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Re: Freda Bedi, by Wikipedia

Postby admin » Mon Apr 08, 2019 10:05 pm

Religion and Religious Freedom in International Diplomacy
by United Nations Human Rights, Office of the High Commissioner
22-23 September 2016

NOTICE: THIS WORK MAY BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT

YOU ARE REQUIRED TO READ THE COPYRIGHT NOTICE AT THIS LINK BEFORE YOU READ THE FOLLOWING WORK, THAT IS AVAILABLE SOLELY FOR PRIVATE STUDY, SCHOLARSHIP OR RESEARCH PURSUANT TO 17 U.S.C. SECTION 107 AND 108. IN THE EVENT THAT THE LIBRARY DETERMINES THAT UNLAWFUL COPYING OF THIS WORK HAS OCCURRED, THE LIBRARY HAS THE RIGHT TO BLOCK THE I.P. ADDRESS AT WHICH THE UNLAWFUL COPYING APPEARED TO HAVE OCCURRED. THANK YOU FOR RESPECTING THE RIGHTS OF COPYRIGHT OWNERS.


On 22 September 2016, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on freedom of religion or belief in collaboration with the World Council of Churches and Finnish Ecumenical Council organised a workshop on “Religion and Religious Freedom in International Diplomacy”. The main objectives of the workshop were:

1. To understand the use of religion in foreign policies including in development and humanitarian aid;
2. To sensitize the need of both “literacies” on religions and religious freedom in international diplomacy and foreign policies;
3. To find ways to contribute to the advancement of religious literacy and freedom of religion or belief.


See Summary Brief of the Workshop.

Following the workshop, on 23 September 2016, the Special Rapporteur on freedom of religion or belief with the sponsorship of the delegation of the European Union to the UN in Geneva and the World Council of Churches (WCC) organized a panel discussion “Religion and Religious Freedom in International Diplomacy” during the 33rd Session of the UN Human Rights Council.

See flyer.

Image

See press releases*

Religion in International Diplomacy: Promoting Religious Literacy
by Delegation of the European Union to the UN and other international organisations in Geneva
23/09/2016 - 16:42

News stories

The EU Delegation to the UN in Geneva jointly with the Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Religion or Belief and the World Council of Churches organised today an event on "Religion and Religious Freedom in International Diplomacy". The aim of the event was to address the role of religious literacy and freedom of religion or belief in international diplomacy and foreign policy.

"Freedom of religion or belief is a high priority under the EU’s human rights policy," explained Ambassador Peter Sørensen, Head of the EU Delegation to the UN in Geneva. "The EU defends and promotes the principled position that freedom of religion or belief is a fundamental right to which everyone is entitled, everywhere," he added. Making reference to the EU Guidelines on the promotion and protection of Freedom of Religion or Belief he underlined: "The EU is committed to promoting a human rights approach based i.a. on the principle of equal promotion and protection of all human rights, including freedom of religion or belief and freedom of expression, in all their aspects. Actions in this field should be strongly anchored in the human rights framework. But legislation alone is not enough. We believe that a comprehensive approach is needed, including preventive measures, dialogue, education, promotion of tolerance and pluralism."

Baroness Elizabeth Berridge, Member of the British House of Lords, described her work as Chair of the International Panel for Parliamentarians on Freedom of Religion or Belief, an informal network of parliamentarians and legislators from around the world. Lord Indarjit Singh, Member of the British House of Lords, made the point that "marginalising religion doesn't do any good at all, as they become unknown. It is difficult to trust your neighbour if you are not familiar with his religion."

"Religious diversity and religious minorities are crucial for healthy and sustainable societies" underlined Peter Prove of the World Council of Churches, adding that it is important to bring the situation of religious minority communities to the centre of international affairs, acknowledging the equal rights for all.

As the final speaker of the panel, Heiner Bielefeldt, UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Religion or Belief, underscored that "freedom of religion doesn't protect religion, but it protects human beings." Specifying that "the whole purpose of freedom of religion is creating space in which diversity can unfold freely."

The panel debate was moderated by Ahmed Shaheed, Professor of Human Rights at the University of Essex. Professor Shaheed has been appointed new Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Religion or Belief. He will hence succeed Professor Bielefeldt in this mandate, which was prolonged in March 2016 by an EU-led resolution at the Human Rights Council.

http://eeas.europa.eu/delegations/un-ge ... iteracy_en


WCC holds discussion on religious freedom literacy and diplomacy
by World Council of Churches: A worldwide fellowship of churches seeking unity, a common witness and Christian service
23 September 2016

Image
Peter Prove (CCIA) presenting at the discussion panel. Photo: Ivars Kupcis/WCC

Advancement of religious literacy and religious freedom literacy in international diplomacy is increasingly needed, a panel on religious freedom and international diplomacy stated on 23 September in Geneva.

A panel discussion “Religion and Religious Freedom in International Diplomacy” was organized during the 33rd session of the UN Human Rights Council by the United Nations special rapporteur on freedom of religion or belief, the delegation of the European Union to the UN in Geneva and the World Council of Churches (WCC).

The meeting was moderated by Ahmed Shaheed, professor of human rights at the University of Essex’s School of Law and its Human Rights Centre. Participants of the meeting, including representatives of diplomatic missions in Geneva, international and faith-based organizations and non-government organizations (NGOs), were welcomed by Ambassador Peter Sørensen, Head of the European Union (EU) Delegation to the UN in Geneva. "The EU defends and promotes the principled position that freedom of religion or belief is a fundamental right to which everyone is entitled, everywhere," stated Ambassador Sørensen in his opening remarks.

Baroness Elizabeth Berridge, member of Britain’s upper parliamentary chamber, the House of Lords, addressed the meeting, describing the work of the International Panel of Parliamentarians for Freedom of Religion or Belief, an informal network of parliamentarians and legislators from around the world committed to advancing freedom of religion or belief and combatting religious persecution. The panel also featured Lord Indarjit Singh, Baron Singh of Wimbledon, who raised concern that in foreign diplomacy, greed and economic interests should not trump human rights: "There will be no peace in the world unless we are even-handed in human rights. God is not interested in our different labels. He is interested in how we behave."

Peter Prove, director of the Commission of the Churches on International Affairs (CCIA) of the World Council of Churches, stated that the WCC has never seen religion as being purely a matter for the private realm - but rather as a reference point and basis for public advocacy for justice, peace, human dignity and care for creation. Respect for freedom of religion is a fundamental prerequisite for democratic and peaceful progress of human society. "The difficult situation of religious minorities in many parts of the world has increasingly become a concern for the WCC - especially in the Middle East region. Religious diversity and religious minorities are crucial for healthy and sustainable societies. Our concern is to bring the situation of religious minority communities to the centre of international affairs, acknowledging the equal rights of all."

Heiner Bielefeldt, UN special rapporteur on freedom of religion or belief, noted that we need to understand the secularity as an open space, not an empty space. "Religion should be visible and audible in public space, rather than silenced or pushed out of it. Therefore international diplomacy should not move away from the secularity paradigm." Referring to human rights, Bielefeldt said: "I do believe in human dignity, but human rights are not a religion, and must not be turned into religion. Because the function of human rights is to provide equal rights for members of all religions and beliefs."

The CCIA, an advisory body of the WCC providing a platform for joint advocacy and support initiatives for peace-making, justice and overcoming poverty, was founded in 1946. “As we mark this year the 70th anniversary of the CCIA, it was important to highlight the work, contribution and engagement of the WCC/CCIA on questions of freedom of religion or belief through a public event at the UN,” said Semegnish Asfaw, programme executive at the WCC, and a co-organizers of the public event. “The contribution of religious literacy to religious freedom literacy in foreign diplomacy is a contemporary issue in an increasingly secularized world.”

The public event was preceded by a consultation involving the CCIA and diplomatic representatives from ministries of foreign affairs, developmental aid agencies, permanent missions in Geneva, UN Agencies and NGOs, on 22 September.

Longstanding member of CCIA Duleep DeChickera, Anglican bishop of Colombo, Sri Lanka, who participated in both days of the discussions, noted the meeting was a valuable contribution in advancement of understanding freedom of religion in international diplomacy. "The meeting was a success in setting out the agenda for the future work in advancement of religious literacy and religious freedom literacy more clearly," said DeChickera. "To our future work in this area I commend the principle from the tradition of Bodhisatva: Go slowly, go carefully, go mindfully."

The WCC has been deeply engaged in espousing and defending freedom of religion and belief since the end of World War II. In part, to celebrate its 70th anniversary, the CCIA has compiled a comprehensive anthology of more than 500 pages of documents on religious freedom. Under the title Freedom of Religion: Statements and Issues of the Commission of the Churches on International Affairs, the resource is available at http://www.oikoumene.org.

More information on the Commission of the Churches on International Affairs

Commission of the Churches on International Affairs
by World Council of Churches

Image
CCIA vice-moderator Emily Welty presents interfaith statement at NPT Review Conference, 2015. © Daniela Varano/ICAN

The tasks of the Commission of the Churches on International Affairs (CCIA) include:

1. advice on public policy and advocacy
2. advice on programmatic directions, including analysis of systemic issues that underlie injustice and social transformation
3. addressing particular programmatic and policy issues, with a special emphasis on the aim of promoting a peaceful and reconciling role of religion in conflicts and on the promotion of inter-religious dialogue as a framework for community building, faith sharing and understanding.

The CCIA dates back to 1946. However, its scope was much extended in 2006, when its merger with three other WCC advisory bodies was decided: the Commission of the Churches on Diakonia and Development (CCDD), the Commission of the Churches on Justice, Peace and the Integrity of Creation (CJPC), and the Reference Group on Inter-religious Relations and Dialogue (IRRD).

Structure

The Commission of the Churches on International affairs (CCIA) comprises 35 people nominated by churches and regional ecumenical organizations to advise the WCC. These men and women from around the world are church leaders, pastors, laypersons and academics with expertise on areas relevant to the commission. They usually meet once a year.

Working groups on specific topics come together and stay in contact in-between commission meetings, mainly through the internet. They thus respond to the challenge of providing WCC staff and governing bodies with timely advice despite the complexity of issues.

Working groups are not established on a permanent basis but respond to urgent challenges faced by the WCC and the ecumenical movement. Currently, there are eight working groups:

Africa;
Economic justice;
Human rights & freedom of religion or belief;
Middle East;
Nuclear disarmament;
Reform of international governance;
Religion and violence;
Statelessness, refugees & migration.

Methods

Particularly in the WCC programme areas of public witness and diakonia, and inter-religious dialogue and cooperation, the CCIA offers an ecumenical forum, information and leadership on national and international problems to WCC member churches, their agencies and other ecumenical partners.

The CCIA provides a platform for information-sharing and joint advocacy on critical situations and on opportunities to support initiatives for peacemaking, justice and overcoming poverty.

The CCIA also assists the WCC in preparing public statements, appeals to state authorities and messages of support and solidarity to churches and others engaged in struggles for justice and peace. It helps the WCC governing bodies identify challenges to the churches and to guide them to shape a coherent ecumenical response.


Freedom of Religion: Documents of the CCIA
by World Council of Churches
22 September 2016

The World Council of Churches (WCC) has been deeply engaged in espousing and defending freedom of religion and belief since the end of World War II. In part to celebrate its 70th anniversary, the Commission of the Churches on International Affairs (WCC-CCIA) has compiled a nearly comprehensive anthology of documents pertaining to religious freedom. The 550-page collection includes statements, letters, reports and background studies that specifically address such issues as religious conflict and intolerance, violations of freedom of religious expression, country-by-country statements, blasphemy laws and treatment of religious minorities, anti-Semitism, conscientious objection, religious pluralism and the coexistence of religions.

The resource is available in PDF form through the link below. The documents themselves are arranged in reverse chronological order, with the newest first. To use the resource by topic rather than chronologically, use the search function in the PDF to locate all the mentions of the search term, for example, conscientious objection or blasphemy laws or Pakistan.

Freedom of Religion Freedom of Religion: Statements and Issues of the Commission of the Churches on International Affairs


Religion and Religious Freedom in International Diplomacy: Workshop Summary Brief
by World Council of Churches
24 October 2016

On 22 September 2016, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on freedom of religion or belief in collaboration with the World Council of Churches and Finnish Ecumenical Council organized a workshop on “Religion and Religious Freedom in International Diplomacy”.

The main objectives of the workshop were:

(1) To understand the use of religion in foreign policies including in development and humanitarian aid;
(2) To sensitize the need of both “literacies” on religions and religious freedom in international diplomacy and foreign policies;
(3) To find ways to contribute to the advancement of religious literacy and freedom of religion or belief.

Religion and Religious Freedom in International Diplomacy: Workshop Summary Brief


http://www.oikoumene.org/en/press-centr ... -diplomacy
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Re: Freda Bedi, by Wikipedia

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The Magic Mountain [Mt. Shasta]
by Alexa van Sickle
5/13/2015

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On her last trip to the United States, exhausted, she managed to find time for a solitary two-week meditation retreat at Mount Shasta. Eyewitnesses reported that she emerged quite radiant. The retreat coincided with her tenth anniversary as a nun, after which she was regaled with a large party, complete with cake, candles, and musicians. Allen Ginsberg and Lama Karma Thinley were among the guests.

-- The Revolutionary Life of Freda Bedi, by Vicki Mackenzie


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A journey to Mt. Shasta City, the New Age capital of California, where ancient enlightened beings dwell in underground cities and humans squabble over who truly represents them.

I was right around Whiskeytown at the edge of the forest when I got my first glimpse of Mount Shasta. I was driving on highway 299 about to join the I-5 North at Redding, CA, 70 miles and more than an hour away from the mountain’s foothills. This 14,162ft cone of an extinct volcano is half the size of Everest, and because it stands alone, it looks more like Mt. Fuji. It’s not foreboding like Himalayan mountains, and it doesn’t loom with a stern, steep face like the Eiger. There’s something about its gradual slopes that gives it an accessible, intimate feel. That intimacy, perhaps, explains why so many here feel like Shasta is more than a mountain, that it almost has a personality of its own, that actively calls them to live and worship in its shadow.

Mount Shasta is a center of mystical, paranormal and metaphysical activity like no other in America. The mountain was worshipped for millennia by the Wintu and Hopi and other Native American tribes, but over the last century and change, they have been joined by believers in aliens, UFOs, Bigfoot, and lizard-people.

Mount Shasta’s weather system forms lens-shaped clouds around the dome that look uncannily like flying saucers, clouds that believers says are meant to hide the alien mothership.
But there are also more traditional spiritual seekers here. Mount Shasta City, a town of only 3,300, supports a Buddhist monastery and over 20 centers of worship, from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints to the Abundant Life Church of the Nazarene.

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Mount Shasta Boulevard, one of Mount Shasta City’s main drags. Photo by: Alexa van Sickle

It has also inspired writers. The Shangri-La in James Hilton’s Lost Horizons, though set in the Himalayas, was inspired by Mount Shasta. Bram Stoker wrote The Shoulder of Shasta, a romance set on the slope of the “old volcano”, two years before Dracula came out. Jim Morrison crowned himself the Lizard King because his girlfriend, who grew up in the shadow of Mount Shasta, told him about the Reptilians who supposedly live in the mountain.

But no myth is as striking to me as the story of the Lemurians. Living deep inside the mountain, they are the descendants of refugees from the sunken continent of Lemuria, who left their ancient civilization to take refuge in the mountain after a cataclysmic event 12,000 years ago. If the mountain calls some to move here, it was the Lemurians, or at least those who believe in them, who made me want to visit.

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Mount Shasta from the road leading up to the mountain. Photo by: Alexa van Sickle

Mount Shasta is visible from most points in the towns in its foothills—but after my first glimpse, for most of my stay in Mount Shasta City, clouds of the non-Lenticular variety obscure it. It’s like being at a party where the host is always in a different room, but there are portraits of them all over the place.

Mount Shasta City clings to the mountain’s foothills nine miles from its peak, a few clustered blocks around the L-shaped Mount Shasta Boulevard. The town is a small clearing in miles of black forest; it could be in the Alps, but for the dry, red tint to the soil and the manzanitas. Siskiyou County is not the California of Prius and Tesla; this is Big Truck country. Except there are more crystal stores than bars, and townspeople divide the town into rednecks and “purplenecks” (the color purple is revered by one of the new age groups in town). I get no cell phone signal with my carrier, and have to resort to actual printed maps to get around for the first time in a decade.



Elizabeth Clare Prophet on Saint Germain's violet flame mantra I AM a being of violet fire, I AM the purity God desires. You are affirming that God is where "I AM" and I am that God in manifestation and God in me is right now manifesting the violet flame.

"I AM a being of violet fire." That means that is the nature of my being:

"I AM a ray of God of the seventh ray, I AM saturated with the violet light, my aura is expanding to include my entire household, my family, my community, my state, nation, and planet.

"I am seeing the violet flame penetrating the ocean, transmuting the oil spills. I am seeing the detoxification of the environment of all toxic waste—all substance that is harmful to life.
I know the violet flame in concentration can transmute all of this.

"I am seeing the purification of the air, the water, the uses of the atoms, of all animal life who are burdened by mans' misuses of the synthetically produced chemicals. I am seeing the violet flame heal the rent in the ozone layer. I am seeing the violet flame saturate everywhere bringing the ecosystem back into alignment.

"I call to the nature spirits of fire, air, water and earth, as I affirm that where I AM God is—that God is everywhere in the heart of the earth and on earth and I go with God."


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Black Butte at 6,334 ft elevation is a cluster of dacite lava domes and a satellite cone of Mount Shasta. Photo by: Alexa van Sickle

My first morning in Mount Shasta, a misty Sunday, it seems deserted. (I guess they must be at their 20-plus places of worship.) But I first pick up the Lemurian trail at the Mount Shasta Brewery, six miles up I-5 in Weed.

On the menu, along with Shastafarian Porter and Weed Ale, there is a Lemurian Golden Lager. The head brewer keeps a Lemurian Quartz crystal near the vats. And it turns out one of the brewery employees, Charlotte Kalayjin, a 23-year-old native of Weed, CA, has a Lemurian story.

“I was with my dad hiking on Mount Shasta. I was about 12, and I don’t remember which route. But I remember it was summer because there was no snow. Something just appeared in front of us—and it was grey, small and round.”

It disappeared a few seconds later, without having said a word. She alternately describes it as an alien and a Lemurian—the two are often conflated, though Mount Shasta Lemurians are thought to be the descendants of an ancient, advanced, earth-bound race, and are generally reported to be not small and grey but tall, with white hair and flowing robes.

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Vaune Dillmann’s brewery tasting room in Weed, CA. Photo by: Alexa van Sickle

Charlotte’s boss, Vaune Dillmann is a gregarious, grey-haired Milwaukee-born cop with large features who relocated here from Oakland. (In 2008, Dillmann got a some nationwide notoriety or as he puts it, free advertising, when his “Try Legal Weed,’ beer marketing campaign got him in trouble with federal regulators.)

“A lot of strange things happen here—you wouldn’t even be able to make them up,” says Dillmann. His office is dark, but illuminated by one picture window—the snow of Mount Shasta is just visible from behind Black Butte, a bizarre structure that looks like a gravelly pyramid but is actually a pile of lava domes. He says he once had a man in his office who claimed to be a “slider”—someone who causes electrical systems to short. At one point, the slider spread out his arms, but didn’t touch anything. Dillmann shows me a couple of beer cans on the shelf. They are empty, and look slightly bent. “When he spread his arms out, those exploded open. Beer went all over my ceiling, my paperwork, everything.”

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Vaune Dillmann, ex-cop, raconteur, and proud brewery owner. Photo courtesy of Mount Shasta Brewing Co.

Dillmann’s office and brewery is stuffed with souvenirs of his life, from bottle caps to grand pianos made for the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, and twice as many stories to go with them. He says he has never seen one himself, but Lemurians are iconic enough in Shasta to warrant their own beer.

In November 2004, Dillmann ran a contest to design the label of his Lemurian Golden Lager, encouraging locals who had seen Lemurians to send in their artist’s impressions and descriptions: “We had the body, but we needed a face,” he says.

He asks me to take a fat zipped-up folder down from the shelf, from which he takes out a thick sheaf of papers. These are the responses to his call-out, about 80 entries for the label, with renderings of Lemurians varying from comic to intricate. There are also accounts of encounters, entire histories, and other strange reflections about the mountain. One described encountering a tiny man next to the basement of his house, who shrunk him down to 12 inches and showed him around the tunnels of an underground city (this city, Telos, is central to Lemurian lore).

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Vaune Dillmann’s favorite entry from his contest to design a Lemurian Lager label, asking locals to send in their drawings from Lemurian sightings. Photo by: Alexa van Sickle

Dillmann framed his favourite one, and it sits on his shelf. The contest won him some local fame, but also ruffled some feathers.

“It was 6pm, I was finishing up for the day, and through the window I saw this bright pink-purple Mercedes pull up in the parking lot. I thought it was a door-to-door saleswoman or something. Out comes this older lady with a beehive so big, it swayed as she walked. She was really angry. She wagged her finger in my face and started barking at me: how dare I demean ‘our people’. ‘We don’t even drink!’ She even insinuated she would take me to court.”

This beehive and pink Benz did not belong to a Lemurian, but to Aurelia Louise Jones, a native Quebecer who moved to Mount Shasta in the ‘90s and called herself the human representative of the Lemurian race.


Dillmann managed to talk Jones down, explaining that his was a family business and that he was in tune with the community. Jones was won over and by the end of the encounter, she gave him copies of her books and inscribed them, “To my dear friend, Vaune.”

“After that, we were golden.”

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Photo by: Alexa van Sickle

The idea of Lemurians has a complex pedigree—rooted in science, pseudoscience, science fiction and various esoteric beliefs.

In the 18th century, a palaeontologist named J. Sclater came up with Lemuria—a theoretical land bridge—to explain how Lemurs got from Asia to Madagascar. Plate tectonics pretty much ended the vogue for lost continents in science, but Lemuria was co-opted into a popular theory of a lost, pre-Atlantean continent called Mu that explains common mythology and symbology between disparate cultures. The concept evolved in different directions, but in certain circles of thought Lemuria-Mu morphed to incorporate much of the Pacific, and eventually, California and the entire West Coast of the U.S. A great flood, or thermonuclear war, depending on who is doing the telling, caused the Lemurians to take refuge in Mount Shasta.

Their descendants still live there, although according to Lemuria believers, they are not inside the mountain on earth’s physical space: they exist in a fifth dimension, but they can travel freely back and forth between that dimension and ours.


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Theosophist Willam Scott-Elliot’s map of Lemuria superimposed over the modern continents from his book, The Story of Atlantis and the Lost Lemuria. He envisioned Lemuria as a large continent that sank, leaving only small islands. Photo courtesy of Wikipedia.

The Theosophists took up Lemuria in the 1880s. In her writings, Theosophical Society founder Madame Blavatsky furnished the Lemurians with the metaphysical properties they still have today. To her, they were not just ancient refugees; they were a spiritually advanced civilization. Blavatsky’s writings were influential, an appealing mix of ancient religious ideas and new concepts borrowed from Darwin and modern science, but Lemuria was not linked to Mount Shasta until the publication of Frederick Spencer Oliver’s A Dweller on Two Planets in 1904. Oliver—who grew up in the gold rush town of Yreka not far from Mount Shasta—claimed his writing was channelled through visions and “mental dictation” from Phylos the Tibetan, of the Great White Brotherhood, who once lived on the ancient continent of Lemuria but now lived in the depths of Mount Shasta. The book incorporates many Theosophical ideas.

But the most decisive chapter for Lemurians came in 1931 when Harvey Spencer Lewis, a founder of the San-Jose-based Order of the Rosicrucians, published under the pseudonym Wishar Cerve, Lemuria: The Lost Continent of the Pacific. It tied various strands of Lemurian lore together by rehashing other books and articles, cementing the link between Lemuria’s ancient civilization and archaeological ruins in the western United States, and trying to support his claim that Lemurians were a common ancestor to all mankind. The book draws heavily on Dweller on Two Planets and Blavatsky’s writings, with some added shopkeeper testimony about tall, slender men in robes who paid in gold nuggets. But it goes a step further in asserting that Lemuria and Mu are the same thing.

What truly ensured its impact was the claim that the descendants of the Lemurian Garden of Eden were to be found in California, not Asia or Africa; and, just as curiously, that California was the oldest territory on earth. The notion that California was the true cradle of mankind was impossible for Golden Staters (narcissists even then!) to resist. California was already a haven for new religions and thought; this new belief in Californian Lemurians just added to the mosaic.

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Lemurian swag at Mount Shasta City’s Visitor Center. Photo by: Alexa van Sickle

In the 1930s, the spiritual influx began in earnest—thanks both to Cerve’s book and the I AM movement, which was founded in the wake of a 1934 book, Unveiled Mysteries, which was written by a Midwestern mining engineer named Guy Ballard.

Ballard was a fan of Theosophist ideas, and he claimed in his book that while on a hike on Shasta in 1930, he met Saint Germain, a common figure in New Age beliefs who is alleged to be an 18th century alchemist, referred to by followers as “the Wonderman of Europe” and “the man who knows everything and never dies”. St. Germain called himself an Ascended Master and began training Ballard to be a “messenger”. Based on these teachings, Ballard and his wife founded the St. Germain Foundation— a group (classified as a cult by J. Gordon Melton in his Encyclopaedic Handbook of Cults in America) that is still active today. It remains guided by “I AM” activity—the acronym comes from Ascended Masters and the religion includes a series of affirmations such as “I AM the spirit”. (The I AM concept had already appeared in A Dweller on Two Planets). The idea of Ascended Masters (St. Germain is one, Jesus is another) like the Theosophy that influences it, blends Christianity, Buddhism, and other spiritual threads. It is essentially a guide to life based on Ascension–achieving an individual higher spiritual consciousness.

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The I AM Reading Room—the St Germain Foundation’s education center and book store. Photo by: Alexa van Sickle

Ballard also described the visions of his and St. Germain’s past lives in Atlantis and Lemuria when he was at Mount Shasta—and soon, the mountain was besieged by Lemuria seekers—many of whom were I AM followers.

The St. Germain Foundation bought a lot of land around Mount Shasta. Not everyone was thrilled with the area’s spiritual makeover. When the foundation bought the historic Shasta Springs Resort in the 1950s, in Dunsmuir, it made what had been beloved public land, including two waterfalls, off-limits to the locals.

Frank Barr was seven years old when he came to Dunsmuir in 1949, when his father got work at a lumber mill. Sipping on barley wine at Dunsmuir Brew House in a pair of denim Dickies overalls, he had plenty of complaints: “They took away our free country! Bought up the retreat, painted it white, and put up No Trespassing signs. They don’t contribute anything to the community.”

PEOPLE SAID YOU DON’T HAVE TO GO TO INDIA, JUST GO TO MOUNT SHASTA


Today, many I AM adherents live at the Dunsmuir complex. There is an I AM Reading Room and a temple in Mount Shasta—and a yearly ‘I AM COME’ pageant. I AM adherents revere the color purple; the Violet Ray is divine love. (Before I visited the Reading Room, Barr told me not to wear red or black.).

Another influx—not just of I AM followers—began in the 1960s, with the cultural appetite for spiritual alternatives and expanding consciousness: “A lot of people were travelling to India,” says a spiritual guide and coach named Andrew Oser. “But people said you don’t have to go to India, just go to Mount Shasta.”

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A view from Mount Shasta. Photo by: Alexa van Sickle

Aurelia-Louie Jones was a public face for Lemuria-Telos, and gave it a global footprint; her books were translated into 17 languages and there is a worldwide Telos network that is still active. Jones died of cancer in 2009.

But Jones was not the first to channel from Telos: that was Diane Robbins, a schoolteacher from Rochester, NY.

Robbins lives in a dark-wood house at the base of Mount Shasta; one more left turn, and you are on the road that takes you up and into the mountain’s dense forest.

In 1990, Adama, the High Priest of Telos, contacted Robbins telepathically and began to dictate. “I didn’t even question why—I just did it. I took messages for 2 or 3 years, word for word.”

When finally, sitting in her kitchen in Rochester, she asked Adama what to do next, he told her to bind and market the book, which she did. Telos: Original Transmissions from the Subterranean City beneath Mount Shasta was published in 1992. The current edition features a blurb by Shirley MacLaine: “I read this book and found it to be fascinating.”

Telos, she explains to me, means “communicating with the spirit”.The book’s purpose was for others to make their own connections with Adama and to attain higher consciousness. In this iteration, Adama is an Ascended Master in the tradition of the I AM movement. The book reveals details of Telos’ advanced society, such as the Telosian Justice System; it also says Lemuria ended not in a flood, but thermonuclear war.

In Robbins’ reading, Telos is one of 100 subterranean cities inside the earth called the Agarthan Network – the book also contains a diagram of the Hollow Earth. The Hollow Earth theory has waxed and waned for centuries, but is present in many ‘alternative history’ beliefs and conspiracy theories, including the Illuminati. It appeared in in two of Blavatsky’s books, and she may have cribbed it from the holy city underground found in some Buddhist ideas.

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Diane Robbins on Mount Shasta. Photo courtesy of Diane Robbins.

Robbins insists that she does not read about other people’s experiences with Lemuria or Telos. “I could never read them; I don’t want to hear about them, otherwise I don’t know what’s coming from me, or from the Ascended Masters. I never even watch movies, because I have to be clear. I can’t do what I do if I fill my mind with other people’s information.”

Robbins says she had however, listened to the revelations of Sharula Dux – a supposed Princess of Telos inside Mount Shasta, born in 1725, who said she came to the surface through Mount Shasta’s tunnel systems in 1988. Sharula Dux spoke at conferences and gave a few interviews, revealing that Atlantis and Lemuria were two great continents that fought a war; that Telos is an underground city in the Agarthan Network governed by 12 Ascended Masters, with Adama its high priest. These revelations are the root of the modern channelers, it seems.

It appears that Dux, also known as Bonnie Condey, ended up in Santa Fe with her husband. (Santa Fe is also a St. Germain hub—and was also, in some books, the location of Telos.) According to an investigative journalist in Austin, TX, Sharula/Bonnie was born in Utah in 1952 and worked as a stripper in Hollywood under the name Atlantis. The name Sharula had also appeared in a 1978 Romance novel.

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The Mount Shasta Gateway Peace Garden was set up by a local family in their private garden but is open to all, and has shrines of several religions and a labyrinth. Photo by: Alexa van Sickle

A few months after Robbins’ book came out, Aurelia Louise Jones contacted Robbins and offered to help publish and promote a second edition. Jones then moved to Mount Shasta in 1997, and started channelling for her own messages from Adama and Telos.

Robbins and Jones worked together for a time: Jones was in the dedications in Robbins’ second and third editions. But they differed in their approaches, particularly on the correct way to channel Adama: “I wrote down word-for-word what Adama said to me, and Aurelia wanted me to edit my sentences, so we would argue.”

Robbins explains that Jones performed what she called a “co-creative process” in her books by editing Adama’s channelings, which Robbins believes diluted and disrupted Adama’s true “vibration”.

Even a spiritual mecca is not immune to small-town politics.

At Adama’s insistence, Robbins moved to Mount Shasta in 2007, expecting to join a welcoming community, but found that fellow Lemuria/Telos believers in Jones’ circle would have nothing to do with her.

“Aurelia [Jones] really did not want me to move here. She sent me emails telling me not to move here. She didn’t want anyone to know,” says Robbins. “And when I came here, nobody talked to me. I can only imagine what she told people about me. Her ego got in the way. And those people are not following the teachings of Telos. It’s really sad.”

Robbins is not sure what to make of the alleged encounters around the mountain; “People tell me all the time they’ve seen Lemurians… but Adama made it clear that they weren’t showing themselves right now.”

For her part, Jones claimed to have encountered Telosians only once; two tall gentlemen showed up at her door and bought $400 worth of her health products. She had complained to Adama about cash flow problems. She suspected the men were from Telos, not Tahoe as they said, but one of the rules is that Telosians, while they surface from time to time, cannot reveal they are from there. Although Adama did confirm to her afterwards that he had sent them.

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Mount Shasta from the lake, hiding behind clouds. Photo by: Alexa van Sickle

Ashalyn, who runs Shasta Vortex Adventures, says she is not an adherent of any of the movements in Mount Shasta. When I ask he if she has had a Lemurian encounter, she responds, “I don’t see Lemurians, I channel them.” She is currently working on her own book with Adama. Her previous book was written with Thoth the Atlantean, another Mount Shasta inhabitant.

There are other spiritual vortex locations, such as Arizona’s Sedona Valley, and other New Age centers like Santa Fe. But the mountain makes it easier for people to tune in to whatever they’re trying to hear.

So what are people seeing when they have encounters with odd people? Some tell me it’s more about the feeling, not seeing; many of the strangest stories contained in books from the last century seem to have been taken as second-hand gospel by others.

Saranam (birth name: Mark Greenberg), who works at Mount Shasta’s Crystal Room, has another theory: people who have meditated a lot and have themselves tapped in to a higher consciousness might seem otherworldly to others who hike on the mountain. “People might just go there and meet people there that have a presence – and think they’ve had an encounter with a mystical being.”

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Shasta Vortex Adventures – one of many businesses servicing spiritual pilgrims. Photo by: Alexa van Sickle

Mount Shasta was settled in the 1820s, and became a busy stop en route to Yreka during the Gold Rush. From the early 1900s came Italian immigrants. Many also visited for the pure spring water; there are still ruins of an old sanatorium where tuberculosis sufferers would recuperate, which is now being reclaimed by the forest.

But then the sanatorium business died off, and lumber and other extractive industries sank. The region is still economically depressed. Jim Mullins, CEO of the Mount Shasta Chamber of Commerce, says they are working on getting more tourists to come, hopefully by advertising outside of the region. In any given year, between 2000-4000 visitors per month come to the Center, and the summer is the peak season for both recreational and spiritual visitors.

Lemuria believers are a loose collection of individuals, but many of them make a living doing it. Some, like Jones, are channelers – conduits between humans and the city of Telos inside Mount Shasta. The practice of contacting Lemurians draws much from Theosophy and the I AM movement, particularly the idea of spiritual hierarchy.

ABOUT ONE-THIRD OF MOUNT SHASTA’S POPULATION IS INVOLVED IN THE METAPHYSICAL


In this reading, Lemurians live in Telos, and Adama, their High Priest, is an Ascended Master who speaks through human messengers. Some lead meditation sessions with visitors; some sell books online or in the book stores around Mount Shasta; some travel the globe to speak about their experiences; another might do weekly Ascension sessions, or do the same thing on Skype. This also draws visitors interested in the subject to Mount Shasta – spiritual tourists.

Ashalyn estimates about one-third of Mount Shasta’s population is involved in the metaphysical in some way. The city’s Chamber of Commerce literature lists a couple dozen Spiritual or Alternative Health businesses – but there are many more business cards and pamphlets in restaurants advertisings similar services, plus a clairvoyant chiropractor. The mountain is a local industry; people come to hike or fish, but also for spiritual retreats, and there is a loose collection of spiritual entrepreneurs who serve this industry. “New Age” is a baggy term these days, but its original meaning—an alternative way of living in spirituality, finding God within oneself and practicing a mixture of spiritual beliefs rather than following one doctrine – is not far off from what happens here.

But for all the mountain’s broad appeal, it’s not a close-knit community.

Ashalyn says she came here in 1988 “to be a part of the metaphysical community, but when I got here I found there was none. Everyone just operated out of their own house.“

“You ever hear of the expression, Too many chiefs, not enough Indians? Well, there are a lot of chiefs in Mount Shasta.”

There’s a sort of spiritual segregation in town as well. Mount Shasta’s various spiritual groups have their own hangouts, according to Oser. The Coffee Connection is where Christians get coffee. “Spiritual, non-religious” residents linger with coffee at Seven Suns, and shop at Berryvale, the organic produce store. The rest shop at Ray’s Food Place.

Many people are drawn here, but everyone’s experience of the mountain’s energy is personal.

Something I hear frequently, is that people who live here do so at the pleasure of the mountain:

“Either the mountain accepts you, or it doesn’t,” says a friendly woman behind large framed glasses named Ann, who crafts Native American drums. She came here full-time in 2005 after dividing time in Mount Shasta and Sedona. She wanted to be closer to the vortex. “If you have baggage, the mountain amplifies it.”

“Many people who came here answer a call of some kind, but being here is too intense for some people,” says Saranam of the Crystal Room.

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Photo by: Alexa van Sickle

Andrew Oser, the spiritual guide, takes me to see some of the mountain’s sacred sites; places for contemplation, or ceremony, where the energy is especially pronounced. Oser organizes vision quests and mediation sessions for visitors. He says his clients come from all kinds of beliefs and backgrounds.

Oser is a lean, soft-spoken character in his 50s, with curly brown hair and just a hint of grey. He came to Mount Shasta full-time from San Diego in 2006, but had been coming since the 1970s. He was raised in an atheist Jewish home. A Princeton summa cum laude graduate and long-time tennis coach, he started a non-profit in D.C. called Joy of Sport, which was honored as a Point of Light by President Clinton, after the idea sparked at a meditation session at one of his favorite spots on the mountain. He has a laminated portrait, the size of a playing card, of the Archangel Michael in his car.

As we drive up the winding road towards the snow line, the temperature palpably dropping with each turn, trees covered with lichen; the green, white, and silence, is eerie.

One of the sites Oser brings me to, a short walk from a road into the trees, is a sort-of secret rock formation that is supposedly also a nexus of sacred geometry. Some report feeling high here. It is beautiful and peaceful, but for me at least, it is only that. I do feel that being at this spot alone it might be overwhelming and kind of scary; I have a healthy fear of getting lost in deep forests. Or maybe it’s the remoteness that unsettles me. Then again, maybe you need to do this kind of thing alone to tune in.

Our last stop is a headspring of the Sacramento River. Locals come here to fill up water bottles and gallons jugs; the water is known to be some of the purest known to man – or at least to the U.S. There are two signs next to it; one says to drink at your own risk; the other, that this water fell as precipitation on the mountain 50 years ago.

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A headspring of the Sacramento River – where locals get their water. Photo by: Alexa van Sickle

We mull the question of what draws people to the mountain.

“The question is to what extent people’s experiences are based on some energy here, independently of their beliefs, and to what extent it’s their expectations that form their experience,” says Oser.

We agree it’s probably a little of both.

Perhaps it’s the centuries of consecration that makes the mountain feel sacred; people could be responding to this accumulated reverence in the same way – but inverted – that some report feeling when visiting Cambodia’s Killing Fields or Gallipoli. But there too, people’s knowledge of the events informs their experience.

Nevertheless, I leave Mount Shasta 15 hours earlier than planned. I had intended to leave early Thursday morning, but on Wednesday evening as I was finishing up my notes at the Wayside Inn, I’m struck by an overwhelming urge to hit the road. Maybe the idea of driving South through the Trinity forest bathed in late-afternoon sun—and going to sleep in my own bed—is far more appealing than one more night in my cold motel room. Or maybe I’m being gently exiled. Maybe a little of both.

[Header image: Lenticular Cloud and Mt. Shasta by Brad Greenlee, used under CC BY 2.0]
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Secrets of the Seventh Ray: 21st Century Science Meets an Ancient Prescription for Change
by Josefine Stark
Atlantis Rising, #86
March/April 2011

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In his article for Atlantis Rising #84 (“Politics and Psychic Manipulation in Romania”), Boston University professor and author of The Parapsychology Revolution (Tarcher/Penguin, 2008), Dr. Robert Schoch, wrote about a phenome­non called “The Violet Flame,” which he said had played an important role in the history of Romania. “The color vio­let is unlike any other color,” he explained, “and has long been a focus of attention by alchemists and occultists. Seen as the boundary between the physical and the spiritual, with the ability to promote transmutations between the realms, in modern terms the color violet does indeed have unique properties. Of the visible spectrum, violet has the highest frequency… and in its representation and manifestation spiritually can be harnessed and channeled as a pow­erful force…”

Just weeks afterward, scientists at Scotland’s University of Strathclyde reported that a special, yet visible, violet light is enough to make bacteria “commit suicide.” Clinical trials have now proven the HINS-light Environmental Decontamination System is effective in getting rid of bacterial pathogens in the hospital setting. In other words, vio­let light makes a great disinfectant, a fact which may not surprise those who have, for years, used ultraviolet (UV) light in water purification technology. Incidentally, Washington State University researchers have found that UV im­pacts gene repair and also activates the creation of defense proteins. Although UV and colored light are not to be con­fused with the violet flame of esoteric lore, they are thought to be its physical counterpart and to provide uses which, some feel, might indicate what could be achieved were the actual thing to be properly harnessed.

Early in the twentieth century, Edgar Cayce (The Sleeping Prophet) recognized the power of the violet light. In many of his recorded readings, he recommended a “violet-ray” electrical device that emits a violet-colored charge to treat a number of ailments. At the heart of this device was a Tesla coil. It was widely used in the first half of the twen­tieth century and is still available today.

The violet flame theme has even made it into popular culture. The Inn of the Seventh Ray is the name of a restau­rant near Los Angeles frequented by many Hollywood types who live nearby.

In Romania even presidential politics, it seems, is influenced by the Violet Flame. In 2009, defeated candidate Mir­cea Geoana publicly charged he had been attacked by “violet flames.” Traian Basescu, the winning candidate, might view this as yet another example of the disinfecting capabilities of the seventh ray.

Vibrating at between 785 and 665 terrahertz, the “Seventh Ray,” or, alternatively, the Violet Flame or light, is said by some to be one of the best-kept secrets of the twentieth and previous centuries. The proverbial cat, though, it now seems, may be out of the bag. An Internet search for “violet flame” produces over six million results. Doctors, nurses, teachers, architects, engineers, and even heads of state outside of Romania—a former President of the Philippines for one—have reportedly attempted to deploy it.

So what is the truth of the matter? Is there more to the subject of the Violet Flame than meets the untrained eye? To gain some perspective we need to look at the larger picture, one familiar for ages to initiates in the spiritual mys­teries—the “Seven Rays.”

Seven Rays of Creation

For centuries the concept of “The Seven Rays” has been part of many mainstream religions, as well as esoteric philosophies. Wikipedia says it has been around since at least the sixth century BCE, in both Western culture and in India. In the west, the notion can be seen in early mystery traditions, such as Gnosticism and Roman Mithraicism, and in the texts and iconic art of the Catholic Church as early as the Byzantine era. In India, the idea has been part of Hindu religious philosophy and scripture since at least the Vishnu Purana, dating from the post-Vedic era.

The Seven Rays appeared in a modified and elaborated form in the teachings of Theosophy, starting in the late nineteenth century, first presented by Helena P. Blavatsky. The Theosophical concept of the Seven Rays was further developed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the writings of C. W. Leadbeater, Alice Bailey, Manly P. Hall, and others, and in the philosophies of organizations, such as, The ‘I AM’ Activity, The Bridge to Freedom, The Summit Lighthouse, and various other organizations promulgating what are called the teachings of the ascended masters—the immortalized saints and sages of all ages, East and West.

In the mid-to-late twentieth century, as the New Age movement developed, the Seven Rays concept appeared as an element in metaphysical healing techniques such as Reiki and other modalities and in esoteric astrology.

The idea is that all that exists emerges from the original white light of creation. The seven rainbow rays—into which that light can be separated by a prism—all possess unique properties which can and should be nurtured and developed for the advancement of creation on both the individual and collective level. These fundamental seven color rays have been depicted in religious iconography as rainbow auras around the heads or hearts of saints, or around sa­cred relics. The Seven Rays also correspond roughly to the seven days (or stages) of creation, as well as the days of the week, the seven chakras, the seven churches in the Book of Revelations, etc.

Mastery over the Seven Rays is still considered by some groups to be a requirement for the evolution of conscious­ness. The process—also known as the spiritual path—is said to lead to expansion of the “rainbow body,” or aura, of the saints. One focuses (or “majors”) on developing the skills or virtues associated with one of the rays while advanc­ing generally with the others. Mastery of the green ray, for example, involves the use of healing energies and precipi­tation (making the spiritual physical). We see this color used often in hospitals or in surgical garments as well as with alternative therapies, etc. Violet is usually associated with alchemy or transmutation, and as the Seventh Ray it corre­sponds to the seventh day of creation; or the day of rest when the creation—to that point—is set free. In New Age cir­cles it is usually associated with the Aquarian Age.

Transmutation means change, of course, and “alchemy” (derived from the Arabic word al-kimia) was an ancient philosophy and practice (some would say a science) devoted to changing base metal, or lead, into gold. That, at least, was the popular view. Secretly though, say scholars, the alchemists were interested more in changing themselves than any mere lead; and the gold they sought was the elevation of their own human consciousness to the level of the divine—a change perhaps more akin to metamorphosis, as when the caterpillar becomes a butterfly. They did, though, by some accounts, do the lead/gold thing, too.

One name that comes up frequently when the violet flame is discussed is St. Germain. Known to some as the Wonderman of Europe, the Comte de Saint Germain is believed to have lived in seventeenth and eighteenth century Transylvania and to have been an important behind-the-scenes figure in the Enlightenment. Many credit him with the founding of Freemasonry and Rosicrucianism. Some, including Manly Palmer Hall, have claimed he acted to in­spire the founding fathers of the United States. Hall, along with the Theosophists and other groups, regarded St. Ger­main as an ascended master whose many embodiments on Earth included the Biblical prophet Samuel, the Greek philosopher Plato, Merlin of Camelot fame, as well as Francis Bacon (believed to have secretly authored the Shake­spearean plays). A few years ago the television series, In Search Of, featured his story in an episode entitled, “The Man Who Would Not Die.”

St. Germain, it is said, taught the invocation of the Violet Flame to alchemists as a means of facilitating the kind of personal transmutation which was their goal.

Scientific Theory

Is there a scientific basis for using the Violet Flame? Some argue, that since it is the color wave with the highest frequency, it can act upon matter and substance of lower frequencies. Since energy can neither be created nor de­stroyed, it can only be transformed from one state to another. According to this line of thinking, all energy we have ever used (including presumably our thought and emotional energy) continues to exist—it doesn’t just disappear.

According to quantum theory, matter is also a form of energy. Atoms aren’t material substance at all; they are merely little packets of energy. Even though an electron is described as a particle, when its wave function has “col­lapsed,” it remains a form of energy. This energy, of which everything is composed, is in the form of waves that can be encoded with information. In fact, waves have an infinite capacity for information storage, and all the energy we have ever used remains encoded with our unique, individual frequency signature.

In Lynn McTaggart’s compilation of fascinating discoveries in quantum physics, The Field, she writes, “On our most fundamental level, all living beings, including human beings, are packets of quantum energy constantly ex­changing information with this inexhaustible energy sea.” This sea of energy is also known as the Zero Point Field and is described as “an ocean of microscopic vibrations in the space between all things.” Some scientists call it a huge reservoir of energy information.

Physicists have also discovered the quantum property called nonlocality. This refers to the ability of subatomic particles to influence other particles instantaneously over any distance without apparent energy expenditure. Once connected, always connected—no matter how vast the distance. This is known as quantum entanglement.

Like all colors, violet is a wave, and waves can alter other waves through resonance entrainment or by creating an interference pattern. Waves with an opposing pattern of alignment of peaks and valleys will cancel each other out. Vi­olet is composed of two colors: rose, from pink to dark ruby, depending on the shade (accentuating, it is suggested, the action of love from gentle to intense expression) and blue (amplifying the power of alignment with cosmic princi­ples).

The rose frequency purportedly erases the negative-record overlays held by electrons, possibly through the oppo­site-wave-pattern cancellation effect. The blue wave aspect ostensibly re-polarizes the energies to their original “blue­print of perfection.”

At the quantum level, it doesn’t matter whether the energy records are stored in our atoms, cells, the electromag­netic biofield around our bodies, or on the other side of the galaxy. Because of non-locality and entanglement, change can occur instantaneously.

Sometimes teachers will refer to the Violet Flame as a higher dimensional frequency working as the “Holy Spirit” on different dimensional levels. A dimension can be described as a frequency field within a specified range of oscilla­tions.

A materialist scientist could say Violet Flame doesn’t exist because his instruments can’t identify it. He could also say that love, forgiveness and compassion don’t exist because his instruments can’t detect them either. Yet, we know they do exist because of our direct experience with them and their effects on our lives.

Application of the Violet Flame

Seventh-Ray energy, according to most schools, is accessed through four modalities: intention, visualization, feel­ings, and sound. When all four are employed, it is said, the greatest action is achieved, though some people report suc­cess using as few as one.

INTENTION: Many researchers have studied the effects of intention on outcomes, and Lynn McTaggart has docu­mented some of these in her books. Dr. Gary Schwartz, a professor at the University of Arizona, studied the effect of intention on plants in his research lab. With bio-photon imaging equipment, using a super-cooled camera to record the aura of light emitted by plants, he showed that a group of 400 people in England, sending the intention to one particular leaf on a lab plant in Tucson, was able to cause the leaf to increase its light output.

VISUALIZATION: Intention and visualization are not quite the same. A few people are able to put the intention of a goal into the field and achieve the desired outcome. Others have to add visualization, which probably relates to the observer effect in physics. It has long frustrated scientists that subatomic particles like electrons will behave differ­ently and cause different outcomes in experiments when they are being observed. Which begs the question: how do electrons know they are being observed? Such ‘knowledge’ implies consciousness, and many researchers now think that the basic fabric of the universe is one all-pervading consciousness. Nobel Prize winning physicist Erwin Schro­dinger said, “Mind, by its very nature, is a singular entity. I should say the overall number of minds is just one.” Forming a mental image of one’s goal and intent adds another dimension of action upon the “one mind.”

FEELING: Feeling is another key to activating the power of the violet ray. Violet contains the shades of pink and/ or ruby, which are believed to resonate vibrationally with the frequencies of love. The “love vibes” of compassion, mercy, and forgiveness are known to create healing on many levels. Most people have discovered this by direct experi­ence. Gregg Braden calls feeling the language of the universe. In our work with the ancient healing mantras of Kuan Yin, the Goddess of Mercy, we have coined the phrase HeartSound™ to emphasize the powerful multiplication factor of the effectiveness of sounding her mantras combined with intention, visualization, and devotional feelings.

SOUND: As explored in Sol Luckman’s groundbreaking work, Sound, Intention and Genetic Healing, scientists have long established that light (photons) and sound (phonons) have a direct influence on matter, even on the DNA. Sounding can include the use of seed syllables, such as the “OM,” or worded and repeated phrases in the form of prayers, invocations, affirmations, and mantras. An invocation to increase the action of the Seventh Ray could be as simple as “I am calling the violet light to blaze through me and through all the earth now!”

Our observable world is a world of forms, and many experiments have shown that form is related to and sustained by sound. In his book, Cymatics, Swiss physician and scientist Hans Jenny showed how he created various geometric shapes in substances like powders, pastes, metal filings, and liquids by applying various sounds to the media. As some became spirals, flower-like patterns, and so on, he demonstrated that the world of form can be changed and shaped by sound and that dissonant sounds create chaotic shapes. He also experimented with the intoning of ancient Hebrew and Sanskrit syllables which caused vibrating sand to form their written symbols—evidence that the ancient languag­es were based on what we today would call the optical manifestation of a sonic interference pattern. This also points to the fact that ancient seers and linguists understood that sounds and their symbols were keys to unlocking certain actions in the physical.

Jonathan Goldman, sound researcher and author of The Seven Secrets of Sound Healing, argues that “vocaliza­tion plus visualization equals manifestation,” and that sound can be a carrier wave for consciousness.

Unlike light, which is electromagnetic in nature, sound is a pressure wave that doesn’t travel very far; yet, say the adherents, it can still effectuate change at a distance because the waves can be transformed, just as sound waves that enter the ear are converted to electrical impulses in the brain. Sound conversion is also employed with the use of ra­dio waves and even the digitizing and reamplification of music onto CDs and into other media.

More research and study is warranted, but that shouldn’t stop today’s would-be alchemists in their explorations of this powerful high-frequency agent of positive change—keeping in mind that changing the baser aspects of our hu­man nature into the gold of our higher nature is the true goal of Seventh-Ray alchemy.

Josefine Stark lives in Bozeman, Montana and is author of the recently published e-book, Kuan Yin’s Miracle Mantras: Awakening the Healing Powers of the Heart. Contact her by e-mail at josefinestark@yahoo.com. Web site: http://www.kuanyinsmiraclemantras.com
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