August 1923: Ezra Pound's third walking tour in southern France
This article was first published in Make It New , the Ezra Pound Society Magazine, Volume 5 no. 2-3 (December 2019). © 2019 Gordon McKechnie Ezra Pound in southwest France, photographed by Olga Rudge [1] In August 1923 Ezra Pound and Olga Rudge travelled south from Paris to the lands of the troubadours in southwest France. Pound had twice previously visited this region - on his 1912 walking tour and again in 1919 with his wife Dorothy. In 1919 he was joined for some of the time by T.S. Eliot. The 1923 trip is covered by a single sentence in David Moody's biography of Pound - "In August Olga and Ezra went walking together in the Dordogne, ‘25 kilometers a day with a rucksack’, and visited Ventadour, Ussel, and villages pictured but not identified in Olga’s 1923 photograph album." (Moody 54). His source is Anne Conover who devotes only a little more space to the 1923 walking tour (Conover 7) - In late summer, while Dorothy was in London to assis