History

Paideuma was founded in 1971 by University of Maine English Professor Carroll F. Terrell. Its primary mission was to focus on Ezra Pound’s life and work. The word “Paideuma” is a Poundian coinage, adapted from German scholar and ethnologist Leo Frobenius, meaning “the tangle or complex of the inrooted ideas of any period.” Terrell’s hope was that the scholarship published in Paideuma would reestablish Ezra Pound as the defining poet of modernism. He invited leading Pound scholars Hugh Kenner and Eva Hesse to serve as the journal’s Senior Editors. Other Editors included British poet and scholar Donald Davie (Stanford University), Pound and Eliot Bibliographer Donald Gallup (Yale University), and author of the first full-length work on Pound’s Cantos, Lewis Leary (University of North Carolina), as well as a host of Associates Editors from eight different countries and a variety of academic institutions. In addition to scholarship, Paideuma provided a venue for manuscripts, letters, and other primary documents previously unavailable to scholars, and a bibliography of primary and secondary sources. There were also pages devoted to biographical ephemera, a feature called “The Gallery” for photographs and sketches of Pound and his associates, and one called “The Biographer” for “memories of people who have known Ezra Pound personally” or “brief, Pound-oriented, biographical sketches of a number of people named in The Cantos.”

In addition to scholarship on Pound, Paideuma soon became invested in promoting modernist poets who had been influenced by Pound, especially poets upon whom scant scholarly attention had been paid. Issues were devoted to a reexamination of the poets Louis Zukofsky, Basil Bunting, and George Oppen.

English Professor Joseph Brogunier co-edited Paiduema from 1984-2004. From 1997-2007 University of Maine English Professor and modernist scholar Laura Cowan served as the journal’s co-editor or editor, broadening the magazine’s purview to “Studies in American and British Modernist Poetry.” Under its current editor, English Professor Benjamin Friedlander, Paideuma has broadened even further to include contemporary poetry and poetics.

Sagetrieb 1982-2013

In 1982 the Center (NPF) began publication of a second journal, Sagetrieb, edited by English Department professor Burton Hatlen. Originally subtitled “A Journal Devoted to Poets in the Pound-Williams Tradition,” Sagetrieb would eventually adopt the broader descriptor of “American Poetry After Modernism.” Like Paideuma, Sagetrieb had national and international sponsorship and reach and included scholarship on the Objectivists, Black Mountain poets, and the Language poets. Basil Bunting and George Oppen were Senior Editors; University of Maine Professor and poet Constance Hunting was Managing Editor. Marjorie Perloff, Cid Corman, Robert Creeley, Buckminster Fuller, Donald Hall, and Denise Levertov were among the Associate and Contributing Editors. Sagetrieb ran for twenty issues before stopping publication in 2013. Its final volume (published simultaneously as Paideuma 40) was a festschrift for Burton Hatlen guest edited by Demetres Tryphonopoulos, who had been Associate Editor since 1997.