Dada's martyr Baroness Elsa

The Life of the Baroness Else von Freytag-Loringhoven

Throughout his Cantos, Ezra Pound (1885-1972) interlaces his text with allusions to obscure events in history and to minor writers whose names are thoroughly unfamiliar to most readers. In part, Pound thought that the minutiae of history – the backroom conversation recorded in a memoir, the telling epistle of an Italian soldier-prince – reveal the true circumstances behind a larger, more public event. Thus, for instance, Pound quotes bank records in Canto XLIII as part of his history of usury. He also turns parts of the Cantos into a running commentary on the literary scene of his age. One of the completely forgotten names – but a name well-known among the literati of the 1920′s – is that of “The Baroness,” who appears briefly in Canto XCV.

The immense cowardice of advertised litterati
& Elsa Kassandra, “the Baroness”
von Freitag etc. sd/ several true things
in the old days /
driven nuts,
Well, of course, there was a certain strain
on the gal in them days in Manhattan
the principle of non-acquiescence
laid a burden.

The Baroness Else von Freytag-Loringhoven (sometimes printed with another ‘von’ after ‘Freytag’) was one of the most bizarre characters seen in Greenwich Village during the ’20s. In many ways the Baroness’s life was so tragic and ridiculous that it is difficult to understand what interest Pound took in her. Until recently, very little was known of her day-to-day life. Since the publication of her autobiography by Paul Hjartarson and Douglas O. Spettigue in 1992, much more of her life is known. Earlier printed accounts generally tell a few legendary stories about her but little else, and even many of these stories have the air of rumor.

This recent scholarship, spearheaded by the FPG (Frederick Philip Grove/Felix Paul Greve) Research Endowment Fund (University of Manitoba), has uncovered some details about her life before she came to New York. She was born in Swinemünde (now Swinoujscie) a Polish-German border town on the joined island of Usedom, lying on the Pomeranian Bay of the Baltic Sea. Her maiden name was Elsa Hildegard Plötz. Her German father was a mason and her mother, according to her autobiography, was Polish. Her father brutalized her in her childhood, a circumstance that led her later in life into prostitution, venereal disease, and an endless series of affairs. For a short time, she worked as an art student in Munich. In 1901, became the wife of the architect August Endell, living in Berlin, and called herself Else Endell. Endell, who was impotent, eventually accepted a professorship in Breslau. But in 1902, because her sexual needs were unmet, she became involved with Frederick Philip Grove (1872-1948), a friend of Endell’s. Their somewhat confusing story is related in an essay by Gaby Divay, “Fanny Essler’s Poems: Felix Paul Greve’s or Else von Freytag-Loringhoven’s?” in Arachne (V.I, No. 2, 1994):

Frederick Philip Grove came to Manitoba in December, 1912. He claimed to be of Anglo-Swedish descent and made himself seven years older, but he was actually born in 1879 in Radomno, “a Russian-German border town.” Raised in Hamburg, he graduated from the famous Gymnasium Johanneum in 1898. He then studied classical philology and archaeology in Bonn and Munich where he frequented circles surrounding Stefan George, the leading poet of his time. In Berlin he became involved with Else, wife of his friend, the architect August Endell, and all three set out for Palermo in January, 1903. After Greve had served a prison term for fraud in Bonn in 1903/04, “the Greves” lived in Switzerland, France, and Berlin until the now a highly prolific translator abruptly left for America in 1909. Else joined him in Pittsburgh a year later. Greve left her on a farm near Sparta, Kentucky, in 1911, and made his way towards Canada. Else posed in Cincinnati, Philadelphia and New York where she married and became known as the dadaist Baroness von Freytag-Loringhoven.

Between August 1904 and March 1905, seven poems by an author named Fanny Essler appeared in the weekly literary magazine Die Freistatt. In a letter to André Gide, Felix Paul Greve claims authorship of these poems, acknowledging his choice of a pseudonym identical to the title of his first novel. The subject of the novel and the narrating persona of the poems are modelled on Greve’s companion Else Endell, who later acquired notoriety in New York as the avant-garde artist Baroness von Freytag-Loringhoven. Greve is better known today in his second identity as the Canadian author Frederick Philip Grove.

Freytag-Loringhoven’s archives at the University of Maryland contain not only Else’s autobiography (written in English from Berlin, 1913¬26), which offers a mirror-image of Greve’s two novels Fanny Essler (1905) and Maurermeister Ihles Haus [The Master Mason's House] (1906), but also a considerable number of German poems.

(1) Several of these are inspired by her decade of living with Greve, and two are directly related to the Fanny Essler complex to be explored here: one echoes Fanny Essler’s last poem, another combines elements of her central three sonnets with the impetuous Fall theme of Greve’s poem “Erster Sturm” (1907).
(2) Furthermore, Else describes in her autobiography an imperative need for poetic expression precisely on the three occasions which provide the setting for the Fanny Essler poems: dreaming about Greve on the Frisian island Föhr before they became lovers, missing him in Palermo after his unexpected imprisonment in Bonn, and in Rome on her way to meet him upon his release. Obvious questions arise from this evidence: to what extent were the Fanny Essler publications really Greve’s? What was Else’s role in their creation? And, since a collaborative effort seems indicated, what was its nature?

Greve disappeared from Germany in 1909 and assumed his Canadian identity as Frederick Philip Grove in 1912. To Gide, Greve had claimed authorship of the poetry of a certain Fanny Essler. That name is also the title of his first novel (1905), a roman-à-clef of the Stefan George circle based on the biography of his companion Else Endell (later known in New York as Baroness von Freytag-Loringhoven). Seven poems by Essler appeared in the journal Die Freistatt between 1904 and 1905. Else’s papers suggest that they were a collaborative effort published under a joint pseudonym. Two poems written by Else in the 1920s are directly related to the Freistatt poems, and her autobiography reveals why, when, and how they came about.

After Else eloped with Greve to Italy, he occasionally signed hotel registers as “Baron Volkbein.” According to Phillip Herring, Djuna: The Life and Work of Djuna Barnes (1892-1982), Greve is probably the origin of Felix Volkbein’s name in Nightwood. Oddly enough, in the Collected Stories of Djuna Barnes, published in 1996, the Baroness is found in Phillip Herring’s introduction, quoted as saying, “I cannot read your stories, Djuna Barnes… I don’t know where your stories come from. You make them fly on magic carpets – what is worse, you try to make pigs fly.” After his stint in prison in Bonn, Felix Paul Greve apparently faked his own suicide, after which he spirited Else to Kentucky, where they lived as farmers in 1909. Greve’s novel The Master Mason’s House is based entirely on Elsa’s adolescence in Pomerania, and Fanny Essler largely expands on her autobiography, detailing her sexual exploits in her teens and early twenties. Much of her early life is explicitly detailed. Her mother fell into madness resulting from syphilis, which her husband gave her on her wedding night. She was too ashamed of it to seek medical attention. After she died of cancer, which she likewise left untreated until it was too late, Elsa’s father remarried a woman she hated. At 18, Elsa ran away to Berlin and had many lovers among the local artistes.


Elsa made her way to Greenwich Village in New York, by way of Cincinnati. In 1913, she married Leopold Freiherr von Freytag-Loringhoven, an itinerant German with a family title but little money. He was born in Berlin in 1885 and was dismissed from the army, possibly for being an “antiwar protester.” According to contemporary accounts, they lived at the uptown Ritz “in old world splendor” – but Irene Gammel disputes this claim in Baroness Elsa, saying that the stay at the Ritz was more likely a one-night honeymoon. Upon the outbreak of World War I, the Baron departed for Europe, was almost immediately taken as a prisoner of war, and in 1919, committed suicide in St. Gallen, Switzerland, an act the Baroness would term “the bravest of his life.” As her money ran out, she drifted from one situation to another until she finally ended up in a two-room tenement apartment. To keep from starving, she found employment in a cigarette factory, which represented a devastating reduction of her previous station in life. On one occasion, she so provoked a fellow-worker at the factory that he knocked out two of her side teeth.

Attracted by the artistic scene, she found some work as a nude model for the Futurist and Expressionist painters, among them Marcel Duchamp, who appreciated her “lean masculine figure and gaunt ravaged face.” (A certain strong parallel with today’s fashion modeling scene suggests itself.) She composed a poem in his honor, titled, “Marcel, Marcel, I Love You Like Hell, Marcel.”
According to her autobiography, most of her art objects were produced out of other people’s rubbish: sequins, buttons, bits of cloth, metal, and wood. The Baroness’s sculpture also gained notoriety among the New York Dada movement. Even today, her work attracts comment. In a September 1996 Time magazine review of an exhibition of Dada art at the Whitney Museum, “dada invades new york at the whitney museum,” Alan Moore says,

The poet Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven is one of the great revelations of the show, producing work in anything-but-traditional media. Her best-known sculptures look like cocktails and the underside of toilets. Baroness Elsa’s exquisite woven/beaded/painted portrait of Berenice Abbott (owned by MOMA) is included here, as is a fascinating group of the exotic, insect-like visages emerging from the Baroness Elsa’s “beadwork” portraits.
In another review of the Dadaist exhibition, “Days of Antic Weirdness: A Look Back at Dadaism’s Brief, Outrageous Assault on the New York Scene,” Robert Hughes says,
Manhattan Dada also contained an element (though a very small one, compared with French Surrealism) of blasphemy. Its main relic is God, 1917, once attributed to a machine-painting follower of Picabia named Morton Schamberg, but more likely by their friend the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven. It consists of a cast-iron plumbing trap turned upside down and mounted on a wooden miter box. An angry little object, an American parallel to Duchamp’s L.H.O.O.Q., the mustache on the Mona Lisa.

Carolyn Burke in her biography Becoming Modern: The Life of Mina Loy reports that “Loyís whimsy was surpassed perhaps only by the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, who often appeared at Dada soirees wearing a bird cage or a bustle fully equipped with a taillight.”
But the Baroness’s aggressive and increasingly deranged manner allowed her to keep few friends. William Carlos Williams (1883-1963) relates that one evening she turned up naked under the bed of a Russian painter, and that she then refused to leave unless he followed her home. And Wallace Stevens (1879-1955) “at one time was afraid to come below Fourteenth Street when he was in the city because of her.” The full chapter about Williams encounters with the Baroness can be read in his Autobiography, in the chapter titled “The Baroness”.


Williams had sought to meet the Baroness through Margaret Anderson and jane heap (sic), the editors of The Little Review magazine. Williams had been interested in a piece of her sculpture. The editors sent him to meet her in the Tombs, the name given to the New York City jail, where she was being held for theft of an umbrella.


As their acquaintance grew, she offered to give Williams syphilis because, she asserted, it would “free his mind for serious art.” But as he resisted her overtures, he too soon found himself the brunt of her attacks. On two occasions she came to his home in Rutherford, New Jersey, and accosted him. The first time he received a call (apparently a set-up) to see a sick baby, and when he stepped out to his car, the Baroness appeared and announced, “You must come with me.” When he protested, she clobbered him “alongside the neck with all her strength.” Matthew Josephson in Life Among the Surrealists elaborates this story and adds some otherwise unsubstantiated dialogue, “‘Villiam Carlos Villiams’ she cried hoarsely, ‘I vant you!’” At the second encounter, Williams was ready for her and punched her in the mouth. As the police dragged her away, she shouted, “What are you in this town? Napoleon?” When Williams came to see her in jail the next day, she promised never to harass him again.

As the aggressiveness of what Pound terms her “principle of non-acquiescence” grew, the Baroness found herself in trouble with authorities. She was, according to some reports, a kleptomaniac, almost by necessity. The outrageous displays of her Dada fashion sense as she paraded around the streets frequently drew the attention of the police. A certain policeman named Officer Campbell often chased her around Washington Square. According to Margaret Anderson, when she was arrested, “she leaped from the patrol wagons with such agility that policemen let her go in admiration.” The incitement for most of her trouble with the law was in her weird appearance, by all accounts the most outlandish of all her dadaist mannerisms. Margaret Anderson describes her first meeting with the Baroness thus:
She wore a red Scotch plaid suit with a kilt hanging just below the knees, a bolero jacket with sleeves to the elbows and arms covered with a quantity of ten-cent-store bracelets – silver, gilt, bronze, green and yellow. She wore high white spats with a band of decorative furniture braid around the top. Hanging from her bust were two tea-balls from which the nickel had worn away. On her head was a black velvet tam o’shanter with a feather and several spoons – long ice-cream-soda spoons. She had enormous earrings of tarnished silver and on her hands were many rings, on the little finger high peasant buttons filled with shot. Her hair was the color of a bay horse. (My Thirty Years’ War, New York: Covici, Friede, 1930)

Another observer of the times, Allen Churchill, relates that her head was shaved and painted with a “bright vermillion lacquer” (The Improper Bohemians: A Re-creation of Greenwich Village in Its Heyday, New York: E. P. Dutton, 1959). In “CAMPING UNDER GLASS: The ghost of Florine Stettheimer, remote and glittering, evokes a period between the wars in a new show at the Whitney” (Time Magazine, September 18, 1995), Robert Hughes recounts, “The Arensbergs had bizarre figures of the Greenwich Village avant-garde like Baroness Elsa von Freytag Loringhoven, the first New York punkette, who made public appearances with her hair shaved off and her scalp dyed purple.” Matthew Josephson recounts having seen her marching around Washington Square, wearing an inverted coal scuttle for a hat, a vegetable grater as a brooch, long ice-cream spoons for earrings, and metal teaballs attached to her pendulant breasts. Thus adorned and clad in an old fur coat, or simply a Mexican blanket, and very little underneath, she would saunter forth. (Life Among the Surrealists New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1962)

Robert Hughes in “Days of Antic Weirdness: A Look Back at Dadaism’s Brief, Outrageous Assault on the New York Scene,” his review of the Whitney Dadaist exhibition, says
God [i.e., her sculpture, shown above] pales, however, beside the Dada artifact that the Baroness (ne Elsa Plötz in Germany in 1874) became after moving to New York. Slender, long-backed, penniless and as mad as a March hare, she survived as an artists’ model. She would be seen visiting the salon of Walter and Louise Arensberg, the city’s first Dada collectors, or stalking through Greenwich Village in black lipstick with postage stamps stuck to her cheeks, her head shaved and stained purple, and dozens of metal toys and lead soldiers sewn to her skirts. She was New York’s first punk persona 60 years before their time. Some of her delicate, wacky, homemade jewelry survives and is in the Whitney show. The Baroness seems vivid today because of the interest in gender play and “acting out” in the ’90s art world, as though she were a very distant great-aunt of feminist performance art. But she remains an irrecuperable figure, faint and weird, like much of the Dada spirit itself.


In one of her own notebooks, the Baroness listed what she wore on a visit to the French embassy in Berlin: wearing a large wide, sugarcoated birthday cake upon my head with 50 flaming candles lit—I felt just so spunky and afluent! In my ears I wore sugar plums or match boxes—I forget wich. Also I had put on several stamps as beauty marks on my emerald painted cheeks and my eyelashes were made of gilded porcupine quills—rustling coquettishly—at the consul—with several ropes of dried figs dangling round my neck to give him a suck once and again—to entrance him.

Allen Churchill describes her practice of decorating her face with postage stamps and of strolling in the park “with a peach basket for a hat.” Churchill claims that the Baroness was often mentioned in the Quill and the Liberator magazines. One of her most provocative public demonstrations may have been at the reception for a famous opera singer, Marguerite d’Alvarez (who is the prototype for Carmen La Tosca in Djuna Barnes’ short story, “A Boy Asks a Question of a Lady”):
The Baroness had adorned herself in a trailing bright blue-green dress. She kept the air circulating about her by languidly waving a peacock fan. On her head she wore the lid of a coal scuttle for a hat, strapped on under her chin like a helmet. Two mustard spoons at the side of this gave the effect of feathers. One side of her face was decorated with canceled postage stamps (two-cent American, pink). Her lips were painted black, her face powdered bright yellow. When the prima donna, already flustered by the goings-on, announced “My art is only for humanity, I sing only for humanity,” the Baroness rejoindered in a loud shriek, “I wouldn’t lift a leg for humanity.” So, at least one high-brow party was up-ended by the Baroness’s unseemly “non-acquiescence.” Her fashion-sense also seems oddly prescient of our contemporary phenomenon, “punk” fashion, which has maintained a small but dedicated following since the late 1970′s.

Djuna Barnes gives the Baroness a cameo appearance in “How the Villagers Amuse Themselves” (a piece of journalism that appeared in New York in 1916:
She alights from a cab with seventy black and purple anklets clanking about her secular feet, a foreign postage stamp—canceled—perched upon her cheek; a wig of purple and gold caught roguishly up with strands from a cable once used to moor importations from far Cathay; red trousers—and catch the subtle, dusty perfume blown back from her—an ancient human notebook on which has been written all the follies of a past generation.

George Biddle, in An American Artist’s Story, recounts meeting Elsa in Philadelphia in the spring of 1917, when she approached him to inquire if he needed a model:
With a royal gesture she swept apart the folds of a scarlet raincoat. She stood before me quite naked—or nearly so. Over the nipples of her breasts were two tin tomato cans, fastened with a green string around her back. Between the tomato cans hung a very small bird-cage and within it a crestfallen canary. One arm was covered from wrist to shoulder with celluloid curtain rings, which later she admitted to have pilfered from a furniture display in Wanamaker’s. She removed her hat, which had been tastefully but inconspicuously trimmed with gilded carrots, beets, and other vegetables. Her hair was close cropped and dyed vermilion.

Like medieval romance cycles, the stories about the Baroness were endless, tending to draw from each other and to distort and exaggerate as they went along. For instance, Andrew Clearfield, represents the Baroness as “wearing pots, pans, and bits of hardware in lieu of clothing” (“Pound, Paris, and Dada”). However, this statement is not substantiated by any source I have seen, although several writers document her habit of wearing a couple of recycled tomato cans strung together as a brassiere. Allen Churchill’s account in The Improper Bohemians resembles George Biddle’s story of her “short hair dyed vermilion” but Churchill has her “shaved head… painted with a bright vermillion lacquer.”

Williams, at one point in his Autobiography of William Carlos Williams (New York: Random House, 1951), reminisces that “the Little Review was protecting her.” Indeed, nearly all the Baroness’s published art appeared in the pages of that magazine – for few others would have anything to do with her. After her poems began appearing, readers poured in letters of protest to “The Reader Critic” section. Each letter was usually followed by a bracketed rebuff from “jh” (jane heap). Harriet Monroe, in an editorial in Poetry magazine, lamented the Little Review’s lack of taste. Max Bodenheim, with sardonic tongue in cheek, wrote, “It is refreshing to see someone claw aside the veils and rush forth howling, vomiting, and leaping nakedly… in half-articulate frenzy – the sensualist frankly screaming over his flesh” (Letter to The Little Review, November 1919). Djuna Barnes told Hank O’Neal that Anderson “was always drinking perfume and toilet water, and that’s why the Baroness put dogshit on her doorstep” (Herrig: Djuna).

In the January 1920 issue of The Little Review the poem titled “Cast-Iron Lover” occasioned an intense debate between Evelyn Scott and “jh” over the Baroness’s sanity. Scott believed that she had reached a state “beyond which the vision of delirium melts into the blank of self-enwrapped exaltation of trance.” (“The Art of Madness, I”) On the other side, “jh” claimed that the Baroness had “created her madness,” and had adjusted “every form and aspect of her life to fit this state,” and thus showed no evidence of disorder. Furthermore, even if the Baroness were mad, there was “Art in her Madness.” (“The Art of Madness, II”) The Baroness herself essentially agrees with “jh” but then goes on to complain about costume balls as a manifestation of the death of beauty in America. (“The Art of Madness, III”) Finally, in a later issue, John Rodker seems to settle the debate over insanity, pointing out that her poems closely resemble those of other Dadaists (showing parallels to Tristan Tzara). Rodker pronounced on the question of “Art” by labeling the Baroness merely “sentimental.” (“‘Dada’ and Else von Freytag von Loringhoven,” The Little Review, July-August 1920)

I cannot help thinking that all the attention she received in the pages of The Little Review fuelled her delusions – and pretensions – about “Art,” but ultimately it also fed her despair. For one thing, the editors were growing exasperated with the Baroness’s demanding and disturbing behavior. Many of the avant-gardists were departing New York to find a new cultural vortex in Paris. Among them was Margaret Anderson, one of the Baroness’s few remaining supporters, who left the editing of The Little Review in the hands of jane heap. After Anderson’s exit, the Baroness appeared less and less in the magazine. Then jane heap also moved to Paris.

Times grew worse for the Baroness. Finally in April 1923, with some money given to her by Williams, she bought a ticket home to Germany. Shortly after her arrival there, she learned that her father had disinherited her and left her penniless. She hoped to find peace in Berlin, peace she needed to pursue her art. Instead, what she found was even more desperate poverty in the midst of the German post-war inflation. She was forced to take a job selling newspapers on the streets between 1923 and 1926. She hated this job venomously because it exhausted her and kept her from pursuing her art. Although the details of her life during this period are very sketchy, her state of mind is vividly portrayed in a series of letters to Djuna Barnes. Excerpts from these letters were published by Barnes in the February 1928 issue of transition magazine as “Selections from the Letters of Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven.” They are at times merely ranting, self-pitying, and entreating. Oddly her prose becomes more lucid as her decline deepens. At their best they present a terribly befuddled and despairing mind trying to bring itself to grips with an incredibly debased reality. Near the end of the sequence, she describes visions of a Sphinxlike spectre descending over her, which she believes is Death attempting to drive her to suicide. Though her delusions intensify, she seems to grow more self-aware. Through it all she persists in her belief that deep within her was “glittering wealth.”

In 1926, Barnes and others (the letters allude to “Pauline” and “Fitzi”) in Paris made a last-minute rescue attempt. They raised enough money to bring the Baroness from Berlin to Paris and settle her into a flat. She apparently did find peace and companionship once again, but it lasted only a few months. After a lifetime of insomnia and nightmares, she finally slept soundly in her apartment on December 14, 1927. Someone had either entered her room and turned on the gas, or she had turned it on herself, forgotten and fallen asleep. No one really knows exactly what happened. She died, in Barnes’s words, as the result of “a stupid joke that had not even the decency of maliciousness.”
I do not wish to belabor the point, but in a sense, the Baroness both inverted and reflected back all the absurd pretensions of the twenties artiste. She was a walking grotesque, a lunatic parody of the literati. She herself began to believe the rhetoric others spewed about her, for example, Margaret Anderson’s describing her work as “perhaps the best of any woman of our time.” Although “Art” may have seemed like serious business, those who goaded the Baroness along – even when, as in Anderson’s case, it arose from sympathy – ultimately contributed to her demise. Steven Watson says, in Strange Bedfellows: The First American Avant-Garde, “Unlike other artists associated with New York Dada, the Baroness did not keep herself at one remove from her art, and nothing she did was mediated by irony.” Of all the New York literati, Djuna Barnes alone seems to have “recognized her untutored genius and understood her fanatical commitment to the cause of art.”… “Essentially, Elsa’s total commitment to art implied a value system… that ultimately could produce a self-consuming artist” (Herring: Djuna).

There is no direct evidence that Ezra Pound ever met the Baroness, but in his capacity as foreign editor of The Little Review, he undoubtedly followed the debates about her. Publically, he shows little sign of interest in, indeed every sign of wishing to avoid, the argument over her “Art” – except once. His one sally into the arena occurs anonymously in the “Brancusi Number” of The Little Review (January-March 1921), in the guise of an announcement of “The Poems of Abel Sanders.” In the disguise of this nom de plume Pound addresses his travesty “To Bill Williams and Else von Johann Wolfgang Loringhoven y Fulano” and mockingly imitates the styles both of Williams’ Kora in Hell and the Baroness’s long, incoherent, Dadaist review titled, “Thee I call ‘Hamlet of Wedding-Ring.’” Here is an excerpt from Pound’s “poem”:


Codsway bugwash
Bill’s way backwash
FreytagElse 3/4arf an’arf
Billy Sunday one harf Kaiser Bill one harf
Elseharf Suntag, Billsharf Freitag
Brot with thranen, con plaisir ou con patate pomodoro
Bill dago resisting U.SAgo, Else ditto on the verb

Even here, Pound depicts her as a “resister” in the final line, which perhaps is a faint foreshadowing of Canto XCV. In fact, Pound makes three appearances in the “Brancusi Number”:
• First, “a sober introduction to the works of that great formalist” (i.e., Brancusi)
• In the middle of the issue, “a rambling, frequently absurdist essay he apparently wrote to attack misconceptions about his use of the classics” (Andrew Clearfield, “Pound, Paris, and Dada,” Paideuma, Spring and Fall 1978)
• Finally, in the dadaist pastiche titled “The Poems of Abel Sanders”
Pound thus seems almost to apologize for the pretensions of his formal pose in the Brancusi article by assuming a dadaist persona in the satire. At any rate, he seems to take none of it seriously, preferring instead to snicker slyly up his sleeve under various pseudonyms.
But in Canto XCV Pound’s perception of the Baroness has changed. He not only views her more sympathetically, attributing “a few true things” to her, but he also calls her “Elsa Kassandra” – after the prophetess whose curse was always to speak the truth but never to be believed. Pound implicitly makes the comparison with himself and his situation as he is composing the lines:

driven nuts,
Well, of course, there was a certain strain
on the gal in them days in Manhattan
the principle of non-acquiescence
laid a burden.

Pound himself had been “driven nuts” – driven to a mental breakdown at Pisa and confined at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital for the criminally insane. He was perceived by the world not as a prophetic thinker but as a silly and dangerous old crank. Pound, of course, thought of himself as embodying “the principle of non-acquiescence” by virtue of his championing unpopular economic and aesthetic theories. He too paid the price of “a certain strain” when his countrymen threw him into the cage in Pisa and adjudged him mentally incompetent. Perhaps, in his somewhat bemused remembrance of “the old gal,” Pound saw a foreshadowing of his own clear and present predicament.

But in another sense Pound seems not to reach this recognition. The Baroness section of Canto XCV opens with the carping line, “The immense cowardice of advertised litterati,” which is echoed thirty lines later in “the enormous organized cowardice.” This phrase also occurs in a letter Pound wrote to Louis Dudek in January 1955. This was the same time period when Pound would have been finishing the Rock Drill Cantos. In the context of this letter, it is clear that Pound meant the line to refer to his distinction between a “major” and a “minor” poet:
The ENormous organized cowardice. The pretense that basic ethics is mere politics and ” unpoetic”/ Minor poets evade, hide , do NOT face / what Dant and Shx/ did / no one supposes Dant uncivic/ Shx/ was SO civic that any amount of tosh has been writ to shove idea that only Bacon, Lord Chancellor cd/ have done it. That is the line between major and minor verse. (Louis Dudek, ed. Dk/ Some Letters of Ezra Pound, Montreal: DC Books, 1974)

Clearly, Pound thinks the distinction between the major and minor poet is defined by the degree of political commitment. Thus Dante and Shakespeare are “major” only in so far as they involve politics with their poetics. In later Cantos Pound nags his contemporaries about their lack of civic passion (“Possum” is, of course, T. S. Eliot, author of “Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats,” the source of the recent Broadway play “Cats”):

But the lot of ‘em. Yeats, Possum and Wyndham
had no ground beneath ‘em
. . .
Uncle William two months on ten lines of Ronsard
But the salt works. . . (Canto XCVIII)
But the lot of ‘em, Yeats, Possum, Old Wyndham
had no ground to stand on
. . .

Yeats two months on a sonnet of Ronsard’s. . . (Canto CII)
Pound harps on the same obsessive themes – haranguing his friends for not taking up the cause of social credit, for being on the “wrong side” in World War II, for failing to perceive the true nature of injustice, and finally, for simply not agreeing with Pound. If by some peculiar twist of logic, the Baroness Else von Freytag-Loringhoven emerges as a “major figure” by Pound’s definition – by virtue of her “principle of non-acquiescence” – then she may at last find her place in the sun.


A Selection of Some of the Baroness’s Writings


Appalling Heart
The Little Review, 7 (September-December 1920)


City stir——wind on eardrum——
dancewind : herbstained——
flowerstained——silken——rustling——
tripping——swishing——frolicking——
courtesing——careening——brushing——
flowing——lying down——bending——
teasing——kissing : treearms——grass——
limbs——lips.
City stir on eardrum—— .
In night lonely
peers—— :
moon——riding !
pale——with beauty aghast——
too exalted to share !
in space blue——rides she away from mine chest——
illumined strangely——
appalling sister !
Herbstained——flowerstained——
shellscented——seafaring——
foresthunting——junglewise——
desert gazing——
rides heart from chest——
lashing with beauty——
afleet——
across chimney——
tinfoil river——
to meet——
another’s dark heart——
Bless mine feet !


Blast
The Little Review, 7 (September-December 1920)


Take spoon——scalpel——
Scrape brains clear from you——
how it hurts to be void !
blast flew
over twin hillocks
emeroyd.
singeing——seering satanic stink——
flew——blew——
blushroses !
barren grew——
to you——
annoyed
protruding
sharp :
pointed pyramids
silence——drums——
——sphinx——
I smother——
pranked mother——
from stark things ! ! !
stark kings in rockchamber
mockeye set amber
within mine chest ! ! !
to rest——
no !
ripple——glide——quiver :
Nile
river !
overflow !
hillocks inundated
abated
blush
blushroses !
on twin hillocks
smaragd isle !
awhile——awhile—— !


Moonstone
The Little Review, 7 (September-December 1920)


Lake——palegreen——shrouded——
skylake——clouded——shrouded——
yearning——blackblue——
sickness of heart——
pomgranate hue——
sickness of longing——
——! you !
In cloud——nay——ach——shroud——
nay——ach——shroud—— !
of——breast——
sickness of longing
gulps
pomegranate hue
from heart in chest——
palegreen lake in chest !
—— you !


Heart (Dance of Shiva)
The Little Review, 7 (September-December 1920)


Around me hovers presence that thou art,
secretely atmosphere draws cloudy——dense——
perfume athwart mine cheekbone swings intense——
smile on mine lip——
I kiss thee——
with mine heart !

Ja——with mine heart——
that can perform fine tricks
since it is housed with wizzardry and art—— !
soul——how enchanted art thou——
by such heart ! !

Ho !——lover far——


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