Spent the morning attempting to create a written description of Ezra Pound’s 1919 passport. When you see how many consulate visits it took to gain permission to travel from the UK to Italy in 1920 (American, French, Swiss, and Italian) it’s no wonder he wrote in to The New Age railing against the passport, complaining “let us have one photo printed on the right shoulder…another deposited in each of the main rogues’ galleries in Europe.”
Anyways, the best bit of Pound’s passport comes in the “Personal Description” section (despite the passport photo’s introduction around the start of WWI, American passports included physical descriptions of their bearers until about 1925). I’ve had a long running obsession with the description of things like forehead and mouth as “medium,” but am pretty sure this description of Pound’s chin as “imperial” is my new favorite adjectival critique.
Ready to write a treatise on Pound, empire, and the implications of the chin being the imperial feature, I went to the OED to find out if there was some meaning of “imperial” I was missing. Of course, there was: Definition 8, “A small pointed beard growing beneath the lower lip.” There’s much to be made, I suppose, of the fact that Pound sported a style known as imperial, and that “chin” and “beard” are interchangeable in a physical description, but less to say about colonial physiognomy than there might have been.
Nissa Ren Cannon 