Summary of Jefferson Morley's The Ghost

By IRB Media

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Book Preview:

#1 In 1938, Jim Angleton met the expatriate American poet Ezra Pound. He knew of Pound’s interest in economics, and he was impressed by his political writings as well as his poetry.

#2 Angleton’s childhood was shaped by his parents’ ambition for him. He had lived in three countries by the time he graduated from Yale in 1937, and he had spent summers with his family in Milan. He was an outdoorsman with a refined taste in poetry.

#3 Pound was a great admirer of Angleton, and he was looking for wisdom. He wanted to find coherence in the world, and Pound’s mythic poetry offered a place where he could speak a higher language.

#4 Angleton took a room at 312 Temple Street with his best friend from freshman year, another aspiring poet named Reed Whittemore. Whittemore had led a more prosaic childhood as a doctor’s son in New Haven. He recommended T. S. Eliot’s poem Gerontion to his roommate, and Angleton loved it.

• Language: English
• Publisher: IRB Media
• Release date: May 18, 2022
• ISBN: 9798822520844

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Insights on Jefferson Morley's The Ghost

Contents

Insights from Chapter 1

Insights from Chapter 2

Insights from Chapter 3

Insights from Chapter 4

Insights from Chapter 1

#1

In 1938, Jim Angleton met the expatriate American poet Ezra Pound. He knew of Pound’s interest in economics, and he was impressed by his political writings as well as his poetry.

#2

Angleton’s childhood was shaped by his parents’ ambition for him. He had lived in three countries by the time he graduated from Yale in 1937, and he had spent summers with his family in Milan. He was an outdoorsman with a refined taste in poetry.

#3

Pound was a great admirer of Angleton, and he was looking for wisdom. He wanted to find coherence in the world, and Pound’s mythic poetry offered a place where he could speak a higher language.

#4

Angleton took a room at 312 Temple Street with his best friend from freshman year, another aspiring poet named Reed Whittemore. Whittemore had led a more prosaic childhood as a doctor’s son in New Haven. He recommended T. S. Eliot’s poem Gerontion to his roommate, and Angleton loved it.

#5

Angleton was a mystery man. He was a mixture of pixiness and earnestness, and he was very at home in Italian literature. He never saw a single catch while fly-fishing.

#6

Yale College was a high position in American intellectual life in the 1950s. The New Criticism, a cohort of literature professors who converged on Yale in the 1930s, favored a canon of English poetry centered on Shakespeare, the metaphysical poets of the seventeenth century, and select moderns.

#7

Angleton and Whittemore launched a new magazine called Furioso in 1939. It cost just 30 cents, and it was a literary bargain. In its 28 pages, there was Pound’s odd contribution and a letter from the poet Archibald MacLeish arguing that the new communications medium of broadcast radio would be the salvation of poetry.

#8

In May 1939, Angleton returned to Milan. The ten-day voyage took him from New York to Genoa. A train took him to Milan and a reunion with his parents and siblings. Hugh Angleton, then fifty years old, was not a poet or a writer. He was a man of business. He had installed his family in the Palazzo Castiglioni, an art nouveau palace in the center of Milan.

#9

In 1939, Angleton and Whittemore moved into room 1456 of Pierson College, a pleasant enclosed quadrangle in the heart of the Yale campus. They went to work on the second issue of Furioso, which was even better than the first.

#10

Pound’s speeches over Radio Rome were extremely racist and anti-Semitic, and Angleton was not comfortable with them. He was ready to graduate from Yale College in the spring of 1941, and never corresponded with Pound again.

#11

Cicely d’Autremont, Vassar class of 1944, was out on a date with a Yale boy who wanted her to meet a friend who had just started at Harvard Law School. She fell madly in love at first sight.

#12

Angleton was not interested in returning Cicely’s passion, at least not immediately.