ABSTRACT

After the book on Japanese drama had been well received by the reviewers Pound went to Watt with a new proposal for Macmillan. It was for a ten-volume anthology of world poetry, to contain all the inventive work from Homer and the early Chinese down to 1916. Greek, Latin and other European poetry would be given in the original language with a translation opposite j oriental poems would be represented by translations where such translations were of literary interest. When Watt asked for an outline of the plan Pound sat down at an office typewriter and made a list of some three hundred items with comments. Watt was amazed at this feat and barely glanced at the list before sending it immediately to Macmillan. He had not seen that it contained the statement, ‘It is time we had something to replace that doddard Palgrave.’ Within two days Pound received a hurried note from Watt asking him to call at once. Macmillan, he said, had rejected the proposal; and pointing to Pound's comment about the doddard asked him didn't he know that the whole fortune of Macmillan & Co. was founded on Sir Francis Turner Palgrave's Golden Treasury of English Songs and Lyrics? Thereafter Pound was convinced that Macmillan had refused the idea because of their investment in Palgrave; any other possibility, such as a doubt about the project itself, does not seem to have occurred to him. With Macmillan ruled out he tried the Oxford University Press who professed interest in the idea but said the outlay would be too great for wartime. He took up the matter with them again during the early 1920s but without success: if they did anything in the international line it ‘would be more in the nature of gems’.