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Louise Pound (1872-1958)
by B. A. Botkin
Western Folklore, Vol. 18, No. 3 (Jul., 1959), pp. 201-202
LOUISE POUND MEMORIAL NUMBER
Louise Pound (1872-1958)
LOUISE POUND, 1872-1958 Courtesy friends of Louise Pound
WITH THE DEATH of Louise Pound, following a heart attack, on June 28, 1958, two days before her eighty-sixth birthday, a whole generation of pioneer folk song scholars and collectors, including John Harrington Cox, George Pullen Jackson, John A. Lomax, and Reed Smith, came to an end. Unlike these others, she was equally at home in the fields of American literature,
linguistics, folklore, and folk song. Her broad interests are reflected in the wide range of subjects and the twelve-page bibliography in Selected Writings of Louise Pound (1949), from "Whitman and Italian Music" to "Lowell's 'Breton Legend,'" from "Alice French" (Octave Thanet) to "Word-Coinage and Moder Trade-Names." When the Modern Language Association of America made her its first woman president in 1955, it also memorialized her achievements in an unprecedented resolution of congratulations, not only as a scholar but "in addition, a social creature, a wit, and, mirabile dictu, a champion in athletic sports."
What kept her versatility from becoming dilettantism was her dynamic view of "moder historical study" and literature and language as the "whole activity" of man, and especially the expression of the "general activity" of the "average man," in the "common book" and the common speech. She exerted her greatest influence in the work of the American Dialect Society
(of which she was vice-president from 1927 to 1937 and president from 1938 to 1944), the Linguistic Society of America (vice-president, 1939), and American Speech (co-founder and senior editor from 1925 to 1933). But her approach was essentially a folklore approach, regarding dialect as a branch of folklore and taking all forms of oral, vernacular, traditional, and "floating"
usage as her province. Her folklore activities and writings were considerable.
She was president of the American Folklore Society, 1925-1927, and a member of its Council thereafter, advisory editor of Folk-Say, 1929-1930, and of Southern Folklore Quarterly, 1939-1958, member of the executive council of the National Folk Festival, 1935-1958, and was made an honorary life member of the Texas Folklore Society in 1924.
She came naturally by her folklore interests, as part of her frontier heritage. At the same time she was a staunch opponent of mystical and romantic theories of the "folk mind" and communal origins, to the systematic and documented refutation of which she devoted her Poetic Origins and the Ballad (1921). Her position is stated with equal vigor in her chapter on "Oral Literature" in the Cambridge History of American Literature (1921), her introduction to American Songs and Ballads (1922), and her MLA paper "The Term 'Communal'" (1922; published 1924).
In her own life, continuity and stability of tradition-family and regional- played an important part. "It is not only that she is a first-rater," her girlhood friend Dorothy Canfield Fisher wrote of her, "but that she stayed in Lincoln and became one." Born in the prairie capital and university city, June 30, 1872 (five years after statehood and one year after the opening of the university), she lived in the Pound home at 1632 L Street from the time of its purchase in 1891 until her death. And except for summer study at the University of Chicago in 1897 and 1898, a year at Heidelberg, where she took her doctorate magna cum laude in 1900, and summer jobs at California, Yale, Chicago, Columbia, and Stanford universities, she remained continuously at the University of Nebraska, as student and teacher, from 1886, when she entered the two-year preparatory school, to her retirement in 1945.
At the same time she remained loyal to the Middlewest in her folklore writing. Her first publication was Folk Song of Nebraska and the Central West: A Syllabus (1915), the first state collection of its kind. Her last volume was Nebraska Folklore, published posthumously by the University of Nebraska Press in April, 1959. Most of the papers in this volume (four of them reprinted from this journal) were originally read at the Western Folklore Conference at the University of Denver. Her fifteen jaunts to Denver, with side trips to the Central City Opera House, were her favorite summer excursions.
But it was as a teacher that Louise Pound will be remembered longest and best. She was a great teacher because she was a great person rather than, as in other cases I have known, because she exploited her personality. With her, teaching was a way of life that became a part of the lives of her graduate students, who treasure her memory as a guide, philosopher, and friend. And the devotion and loyalty of the "Louise Pound Alumni Association" meant more to her than all her academic achievements and accolades. "I believe the pleasantest thing that has happened to me," she told a reporter on her retirement, "is that I've had a number of books dedicated to me." And as a measure of the woman-her warm, simple, generous, and unassuming humanity- these grateful, gracious words may serve as her epitaph.
Croton-on-Hudson, New York
B. A. BOTKIN