It is inconceivable that a collected edition of Pound’s letters will be published within the next twenty, thirty, or forty years, if by “collected” we mean all the letters, displayed in chronological order with full annotation. This assertion is not refuted by the fact that Oxford University Press is publishing W. B. Yeats’s collected letters in an edition of at least fourteen large volumes with copious scholarly apparatus. The first volume of Yeats’s letters, in that uniform edition, appeared in 1986. The most recent one, the fourth, was published a few months ago. Four volumes in twenty-five years: at that rate, the edition will be complete about sixty years from now. To deal with those “deserts of vast eternity,” oup has made available to scholars an InteLex electronic gathering of the remaining letters in their raw, unannotated state. Enough to be going on with while the printed volumes are being readied—slowly, impeccably—for the press. Perhaps a similar arrangement might be made for Pound’s letters, but the project would be immensely burdensome. Pound wrote far more letters than Yeats did, often a dozen a day, even in his relatively quiet times a thousand or more a year, and to scores of correspondents. I wonder that he could afford the stamps.
Publication of Pound’s letters is in the hands of New Directions, Mary de Rachewiltz, and the estate of the late Omar S. Pound. Many years ago, New Directions adopted a policy of publishing, or making an arrangement by which