Policing Louise Pound

Abstract

In a scathing 1922 review of Louise Pound’s The Poetic Origins of the Ballad in The Literary Review of The New York Evening Post, Gordon Hall Gerould—a leader of the Harvard coterie of ballad scholars—attacked Miss Pound’s work as “practically worthless” and deserving of “no praise,” and claimed that she had no understanding of “the real nature of folk-ballads.” Later in his review, he stated that she was “obviously incapable of orderly thought” and ended by pronouncing her anathema: “[w]herefore, I submit, she should not be writing about ballads at all.” This article tests the validity of Gerould’s outrage through an examination of three of Pound’s early essays. It demonstrates that Gerould’s criticism had little to do with Pound’s scholarly ability but had a great deal to do with her attacks on Francis Barton Gummere’s communal composition theory alongside her questioning of the veneration of Francis James Child and his collection.