New Scholarship in Beinecke Collections

In his essay “‘Lest some little thing of the real world should intrude itself’: Ezra Pound’s Dream City in Collision with the Real,” Edgar Garcia considers Pound 1906 travel essay, “Burgos: A Dream City of Old Castile.” Using archival materials in the Ezra Pound Papers to contextualize the essay, Garcia argues that “Pound’s travel essay represents place as an imaginary cultural map…in an unsteady relationship to the restless, often catastrophic material of the real world”(1). Employing various visual and textual references, Garcia demonstrates that “the intertextual geography of the essay spatializes several medieval Romance epics into a dreamscape of old Spain”(6), in which “Burgos arises like the mountain of Purgatory between hell and heaven.” In this way, “the poet fortifies his vision with the work of poetic production [while] the material reality of modernity collides more intensely with the boundaries of the poet’s Burgos ‘of old song glory’ and of the rising mountain of Purgatory” (11).  A PDF of the complete essay can be found online here: “Ezra Pound’s Dream City in Collision with the Real.”

Edgar Garcia is a graduate student in the English department, working on poetry. He is also a poet and his current project treats the archeoastronomical charting of the skies by the Maya. A sampling of this work, “Mayan Texts: A Galactic Birth Canal,” is forthcoming (preview it online here: “Mayan Texts”). Other iterations of this desire for the immense immediacy of interstellar consciousness can be found in his writings on arts and culture at http://www.thehydramag.com/ an online magazine. “Ezra Pound’s Dream City in Collision with the Real” was written for Professor Langdon Hammer’s Fall 2010 research seminar in Modernist Poetics.

Image: Ezra Pound, undated passport photo.

Beinecke Collections: Ezra Pound Papers; Pound Papers Image Guide; Olga Rudge Papers; Rudge Papers Image Guide; to locate related manuscript collections at Yale, search the Yale Library’s Finding Aid Database; to locate images from this collection, search the Beinecke’s Digital Library; search Orbis, the Yale Library catalog, to find related books, journals, and other printed materials.

Bahlmann Papers Relating to Wharton

The Anna Catherine Bahlmann Papers Relating to Edith Wharton are now available for research; a descriptive guide to the papers is online:  Anna Catherine Bahlmann Papers Relating to Edith Wharton, YCAL MSS 361.

The papers feature correspondence and personal effects relating to author Edith Wharton, including over 130 letters to Bahlmann from Wharton, dating from Bahlmann’s employment with the Wharton family in 1874, as Edith’s German language tutor, to 1915. The letters document a significant, long-standing relationship and shed light on Wharton’s personal and literary affairs; early correspondence in the collection dates from Wharton’s adolescence and reveals aspects of her development as a reader and writer.

In addition to the Wharton correspondence, there are single and small groups of letters between Bahlmann and family members, friends, and acquaintances, including William Morton Fullerton and Henry James. Bahlmann’s personal effects include legal and financial documents, notebooks, and writings, as well as material relating to Wharton. Other materials relating most directly to Wharton include clippings, documents on her work during World War I, photographs, and postcards. Photographs consist of studio portraits of people and images of Wharton’s residences. There are photographs of Wharton, Bahlmann family members, and friends, including Mary Cadwalader Jones. Wharton residences include “Reef Point” in Bar Harbour, Maine and the estate (“The Mount”) in Lenox, Massachusetts. (MF)

Related Collections: Edith Wharton Collection (YCAL MSS 42); Wharton Collection Image Guide; other related materials can be found by searching the Library’s Finding Aid Database and Orbis, the Library’s catalog for books and printed materials.  Images from the collections are available through the Beinecke’s Digital Library.

Image:[Cabinet photograph: Sita, A[nna] C[atherine] B[ahlmann], Isuna, Marietta], Havana (Cuba), ca. 1870; [Photograph of Edith Wharton ca. 1889-1890]