Ezra Pound’s Blue Plaque

by Walter Baumann

It was after the third Ezra Pound conference held at University College London in September 1977 that I sent the following letter to the Greater London Council:

Dear Sir,

At our recent Conference in University College London we discussed the absence of any commemorative plaque in London for Ezra Pound, and I have been asked to find out whether the G.L.C. would be willing to rectify this situation.

              The house which would qualify most of all to bear one of your blue plaques is No. 10, Church Walk, Kensington, situated between St. Mary Abbot’s Church and Holland Street. Ezra Pound lived there from 1909 to 1914. For the next five years he lived at No. 5, Holland Place Chambers. These facts can be verified in The Oxford Literary Guide to the British Isles, ed. D. Eagle and H. Carnell (Oxford, 1977).

              I should be grateful if you would let me know your normal procedure in connection with such commemorative plaques. The Ezra Pound Conference, which has so far met three times and enjoys international support, feels that the time is right for Ezra Pound to be thus remembered.               [Dated 15 September 1977]

On 22 September 1977 I received the following reply:

COMMEMORATIVE PLAQUE: EZRA POUND

Thank you for your letter of 15 September 1977, suggesting the erection of a plaque to commemorate Ezra Pound’s residence in Kensington.

I am afraid that the historic Buildings Committee’s firm criteria (a copy of  which I enclose) preclude the erection of a plaque to a person who has been dead for less than 20 years or whose centenary of birth has not passed. There would, thus, be little point in reporting the suggestion to them until 1984 (at the earliest) for possible erection in 1985.

I am sorry to have to disappoint you in this matter.   [signed John Earl for the Architect]

On 26 April 1984 I wrote to the G.L.C.:

I wish to refer to our correspondence in 1977 about the erection of a plaque to commemorate Ezra Pound’s residence in Kensington (My letter of 15 and yours of  22 September 1977).

According to the rules which you outlined to me at that time Ezra Pound would first qualify for such a plaque on his hundredth birthday on 30 October 1985. At the Ninth International Ezra Pound Conference held from 16 to 18 April this year at the University of York I was asked to raise this matter with you now, so that all the necessary steps might be completed before the Ezra Pound Centenary next October.

I received the following reply on 1 May 1984:

Thank you for your letter of 26 April renewing the suggestion for a plaque to Ezra Pound. I shall present the suggestion to the appropriate committee during this year so that, if approved, a plaque can be ready for erection at Pound’s centenary. 

The council recently erected a plaque to Percy Wyndham Lewis, and the proposer of this plaque (Mr. M.D. Wood of Bircham and Co., 1 Dean Farrar Street, London SW1H ODY) has also written to suggest a plaque to Pound.  [signed Frank Kelsall for Director of Architecture]

After receiving this reply I was no longer active in this matter. It was only when Robert Richardson sent me an invitation to the unveiling of the plaque on 11 August 2004 that I realized that English Heritage had dropped their objections to honouring Pound. But I had not seen the letter of protest published in The Times dated 12 December 1988:

A plaque for Pound?

 From Dr Alastair Niven and others

 Sir, It has come to our attention

 that the London Advisory 

Committee of English Heritage

 has declined to make a decision 

on a proposal to put up a blue 

plaque to Ezra Pound on the house 

where he lived in Kensington 

Church Walk from 1909 to 1914.

Pound enlarged the scope of the 

English language. 

As Donald Davie has written,

Dryden and Keats and, yes, 

Shakespeare are the appropriate 

fellows for this poet of our time 

who magnanimously lent his energies 

to the language that we all share, rather 

than bending that language to his own 

egotistical purposes. Also, by his 

generosity of spirit, during the period 

that he lived in London, Pound had 

an enormous and beneficial influence 

on the development of the arts in England. 

We should be able to dissociate his later 

political excesses from what is of 

permanent value in his work.

We, the undersigned, therefore ask 

English Heritage to reconsider this 

proposal with the urgency and 

sympathy which it merits.

Yours faithfully,

ALASTAIR NIVEN (Director of Literature,

Arts Council of Great Britain),

MICHAEL ALEXANDER, GEORGE BARKER,

WILLIAM BEDFORD, ANNE BERESFORD,

 ALAN BROWNJOHN, WILLIAM COOKSON, 

PETER DALE, VALERIE ELIOT, D.J. ENRIGHT, 

GAVIN EWART, ROY FULLER, DAVID GASCOYNE, 

MICHAEL HAMBURGER, IAN HAMILTON, 

SEAMUS HEANEY, JOHN HEATH-STUBBS, 

A.L. HENDRIKS, PETER JAY, ROLAND JOHN,

 P.J. KAVANAGH, LOTTE KRAMER, PETER LEVI, 

JOHN LOVEDAY, JEAN MACVEAN, DEREK MAHON, 

W. MOELWYN MERCHANT, W.S. MILNE, 

PETER PORTER, F.T. PRINCE, CRAIG RAINE, 

DACHINE RAINER, JEREMY REET, PETER RUSSELL, 

MICHAEL SCHMIDT, TOM SCOTT, JON SILKIN, 

CLIFFORD  SIMMONS, C.H. SISSON, 

STEPHEN SPENDER, CHARLES TOMLINSON.

5 Cranbourne Court, Albert Bridge Road, SW11.

The address is that of William Cookson, the founder of the Pound-inspired magazine Agenda. It is sad to think that Cookson died on 2 January 2003, a year and seven months before the unveiling of Ezra Pound’s Blue Plaque. 

Unfortunately there is no access to the minutes of the committee which dropped the objection to a plaque for Pound, but it must have been the result of  changes in the membership. 

Robert Richardson, a poet published in Cookson’s Agenda and co-author with William Pratt of Homage to Imagism (1992) was approached by David Moody, on behalf of English Heritage, to act as organizer of the Blue Plaque ceremony. So he looked up the then owner of 10 Kensington Church Walk, Mrs. Christine Cochrane, a retired Jungian physiotherapist, who was glad to show him Pound’s room and voiced no objection to the erection of a Blue Plaque. When Pound lived there, the house was owned by a grocer, Sam Langley, whose wife let out the rooms, and who would cook for Ezra if he were in. The Langleys, Pound said, were positively the best that England can produce at ANY level. Incidentally, Pound wasn’t in residence there on 2 April, the day of the 1911 Census. He was in Paris. 

These are the people who attended from a guest list Robert put together with William Pratt for the unveiling.

Mary de Rachewiltz

William and Anne Pratt

Tom Busha

Dr Alastair Niven

Christopher Logue

Peter Dale

Margaret Cookson

Emma Cookson

Dr Peter Nicholls

Emily Cole

Dr Rebecca Beasley

Dennis Wolf

John Gross

Walter and Margaret Baumann

David and Joanna Moody

Jacqueline Kaye

Valerie Eliot

Dr Tracy Borman

Lord Grey Gowrie

Mrs Christine Cochrane

Rosamond Rose

Dr Susan Skedd

Robert Richardson

Alan Cameron

Oriana Pound

Stephen Bradfield

Fernando Carpanini

Prof. G. Singh

Gabriel Barfoot

James Campbell

Ian Duckworth

It was Robert who liaised with the guest of honour, Mary de Rachewiltz, and collected her from Gatwick Airport. He also organized a reception, immediately after the ceremony, at the nearby Kensington Town Hall, whose total cost was very kindly taken care of by Valerie Eliot, who attended the unveiling, but not the reception. 

              Since 10 Church Walk was Pound’s abode when Imagism was born, it was most appropriate to have the two historians of Imagism, Robert Richardson and William Pratt, speaking about its importance. They also gave recitations of some Imagist poems such as “Liu Ch’e,” “Gentildonna” and “The Encounter.” Sadly, William Pratt has been unable to retrieve his lecture. Neither is there a record of what Ezra Pound’s daughter said before she parted the curtains in front of the plaque. But it is plain from my photograph that it was a very happy moment for her, after all the condemnations of her father in print. It was equally a pleasure for Mary to talk to Valerie Eliot.

Luckily, David Moody has found the words he spoke on 11 August 2004 and I think they are a fitting close to the Blue Plaque story: 

A few words for EP's Blue Plaque (11 August 2004)

1. English Heritage to be thanked, and congratulated
           for giving EP his place among its London immortals ;
    I seem to remember this being in the air at the International Pound Conference here in London, oh 20 years or more ago – but then time stops for the immortals,
and for the cultural heritage : what lasts is always a present moment of the past,
so now is as good a moment as any for according Pound his Blue Plaque.

2. Back in September 1909 when he first rented his room here at 10 Church Walk

Pound was a 23-year-old unknown beginner in poetry, but a beginner
              determined to perfect himself in the craft of poetry
              and to become a good, if possible a great poet:

he had come over to London from America
              because London seemed to him then the great metropolis of poetry;
     And also because he wanted to sit at the feet of Yeats
              the living master from whom he meant to learn his craft.

He was poor, of course – his father, Homer, was sending him $20 a month,
              worth £1 a week – and the difference between a one penny and a threepenny
              bus fare to the B.M. where he worked really mattered;
here in Church Walk he found 'his own proper corner ... where it is more cheap
                            and more comfortable than any place in London' –
Except for the church bells – the bell-ringing was a wicked cacophony to his ears.

Pound published 5 slim volumes of poems while he was living here,
              his Personae, his Exultations, his Canzoni, his Ripostes
                            and his translation of Cavalcanti:

But we think of these years now, the years 1909-1914, as his Imagiste moment –
             And his Imagist Movement began right here in 1912
                           when HD and Richard Aldington
                           moved into rooms across the court from his.

3. Here then is where Pound began his long career as a poet, and as a force for the renewal
           and the re-cnergising of poetry in the C20th :
Now, nearly a century later, we remember and honour him
           for what came of these beginnings, for all that he achieved in his lifetime,
                       and most of all for his Cantos,   a modern epic   40 years in the writing
                                   and a major addition to the cultural heritage.

It is on account of The Cantos above all that Pound stands now among the immortals –
       and that means that he has become like any other immortal   a figure of myth,
                   to be wondered at,   to have tales told about him,   to be praised
                               and to be blamed,   and
                   by those who truly know his work, to be greatly honoured –

Our thanks then to English Heritage for this consecration of his own proper corner in London.

Middle row: Mary and Valerie Eliot, Christine Cochrane, Peter Brooker, Peter Nicholls

Bottom row: Robert Richardson, William Pratt and A. David Moody 

Note: I am most grateful to Robert Richardson for providing me with details from his Blue Plaque files, and many thanks to David Moody for his closing words. Bill Pratt might still find his script.