SOURCE: “Very Much Afraid of Virginia Woolf,” in New Statesman, Vol. 115, No. 2975, April 1, 1988, pp. 24–5.

In the following essay, Turner examines the literary and social contexts of the gender conflict presented in No Man's Land: The War of the Words.

Hitting London in 1908, Ezra Pound looked forward to a career of ramming imagism's “phallic direction” right into the city's “great passive vulva.”

His good friend William Carlos William's long poem “Paterson” was padded out and/or enriched with letters quoted verbatim, without permission, from Marcia Nardi, an ex-lover and herself a fine but struggling poet. These letters refer hysterically to private matters and to Williams’ “complete damning of my creative capacities.”

Today Pound, and even more Williams, are still looked up to for pointing ways away from Eliot-type mystification and into the concrete, into spoken language, poetry as industry, as technic, as Tool. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar see...