Events

Event Description

Please join us for a lecture by Dr. Robert Spoo, Princeton University, entitled, Ezra Pound’s Cantos, Literary Piracy, and Marital Monopoly.

Ezra Pound, author of the major modern poem The Cantos, had a mixed view of literary piracy. On the one hand, he condemned it; on the other, he saw it as a way of expanding readerships and disseminating writings across borders. When his own late sequence, Drafts & Fragments of Cantos CX-CXVII (1968), was pirated in a mimeograph format by Ed Sanders of New York, he was too old and frail to respond. But Drafts & Fragments itself contains a response in its theme of traditional marriage as a monopoly form of property. The theory of monogamy found in these poems does more than analogize marriage to property; it deems marriage to be a form of property. Canto CXIV honors “the man of Oneida” as one of the “simple men who have fought against jealousy.”  This was John Humphrey Noyes (1811-1886), founder in 1848 of the utopian Oneida Community in upstate New York, a Perfectionist phalanstery described by Noyes as a “religious Socialism” and as “anti-Legality” in its substitution of divine grace for human law.  Oneida’s bounded communism replaced traditional marriage with “complex marriage,” rejecting any essential difference between “property in persons and property in things” and affirming, as Noyes wrote, that “the same spirit which abolished exclusiveness in regard to money, would abolish … exclusiveness in regard to women and children.” Pound’s linking of marriage and monopoly was consistent with his skepticism of all forms of property, including literary property and copyrights.

Robert Spoo is the Leonard L. Milberg ’53 Professor in Irish Letters at Princeton University and Director of Graduate Studies in English there. Formerly, he was the Chapman Distinguished Professor of Law and Professor of English at the University of Tulsa, where he edited and (later) co-edited the James Joyce Quarterly. Spoo’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in numerous journals, including the Stanford Law Review, UCLA Law Review, Law & Literature, Modernism/modernity, Journal of Modern Literature, James Joyce Quarterly, Joyce Studies Annual, Journal of Modern History, and ELH. His books include James Joyce and the Language of History: Dedalus’s Nightmare; Ezra and Dorothy Pound: Letters in Captivity, 1945-1946 (with Omar Pound); and Without Copyrights: Piracy, Publishing, and the Public Domain—all published by Oxford University Press. In 2016, he was awarded a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in the Humanities, which supported his writing of Modernism and the Law, published in 2018 by Bloomsbury Academic. In 2020-2021, he held a Law and Public Affairs (LAPA) Fellowship at Princeton. Spoo has recently edited and published, with Simon Stern, the Elgar Concise Encyclopedia of Law and Literature (2025).