Robert Frost on the Pound-Abercrombie duel that never was

Peter Howarth’s November 6 LRB review of Robert Frost’s recently published Notebooks mentions the first draft of his unpublished play about the duel to which Ezra Pound challenged the poet Lascelles Abercrombie in 1913, “after Abercrombie had proposed that modern poetry could learn from Wordsworth’s interest in contemporary speech” — a suggestion that could have just as easily been made by Frost.

In any event, the play’s comparison between metrical form and free verse, as they concern ‘mass production’ - the one of poems, the other of poets, – seems to suggest that these two poetic modes have much more in common than they would each like to believe.

The drama fails to ignite, as did the duel (Abercrombie neatly bested Pound by suggesting as his choice of weapon that they pelt each other with copies of their unsold books), but it’s interesting for the scenario Frost embeds it in. Pound is Ezekiel Poise (a name poking fun at Pound’s Idaho medievalism by combining poesy and Boise) who has set up a poetry bureau in which rich young idiots are coached in free verse, which Poise then supplies to tame editors who would ‘publish anything Ezekiel sends them’. Imagists made much of the similarities between metrical form and production-line values, but the implication here is that it’s free verse which allows the ‘mass production of poets’, by simply making things too easy.