The air flings downward from its four-quartered tower Him whom the flames devour; At the full tide, at the flood, The sea is mingled with his salty blood: The traveler dust, although the dust be vile, Ezra Pound NE of the most controversial figures of the period and unquestionably the most belligerent expatriate of his generation, Ezra (Loomis) Pound was born at Hailey, Idaho, October 30, 1885. A precocious reader, he entered the University of Pennsylvania at the age of fifteen. At sixteen, unbeknown to the faculty, he began studying comparative literature; before he was seventeen (in 1902) he enrolled as special student "to avoid irrelevant subjects." He continued the process at Hamilton College (1903-5) and from 1905 to 1907 was "Instructor with professorial functions" at the University of Pennsylvania. His next move brought him to Crawfordsville, Indiana-"the Athens of the West,' a town with literary traditions, Lew Wallace having died there." Pound was dismissed from Wabash College after four months— "all accusations," he says, "having been ultimately refuted save that of being ‘the Latin Quarter type."" Though a born educator, actually burning to teach, Pound was compelled to seek less academic circles. In 1908 he landed in Gibraltar with eighty dollars and lived on the interest for some time. The same year found him for the first time in Italy, which was to become his future home. A Lume Spento (1908) was printed in Venice. A few months later he was established in London, where he lived until 1920. Convinced of the aridity of England, he crossed over to Paris, from which, after four years, he moved to Rapallo, on the Italian Riviera, where he has lived since 1924. Shortly after Pound's arrival in London he published Personae (1909), a work which, though small, contains some of his most arresting verse. Although the young American was a total stranger to the English literary world, his book made a definite impression on critics of all shades and tastes. Edward Thomas, one of the most cautious appraisers, wrote, "The beauty of it is the beauty of passion, sincerity and intensity, not of beautiful words and images and suggestions. . . . The thought dominates the words and is greater than they are." Another critic (Scott James) placed the chief emphasis on Pound's metrical innovations, saying, "At first the whole thing may seem to be mere madness and rhetoric, a vain exhibition of force and passion without beauty. But as we read on, these curious meters seem to have a law and order of their own." Exultations (1909) was printed in the autumn of the same year that saw the appearance of Personae. It was received with even greater cordiality; a new force and freedom were manifest in such poems as "Sestina: Altaforte," "Ballad of the Goodly Fere," and the stark "Ballad for Gloom." Both books were republished in a single volume, with other poems, as Personae, in 1926. In these books there is evident Pound's erudition—a familiarity with medieval literature, Provençal singers, Troubadour ballads-an erudition which, later, was to degenerate into pedantry. Too often Pound seemed to become theory-logged, to sink himself in an intellectual Sargasso Sea, to be more the archeologist than the artist. Canzoni (1911) and Ripostes (1912) contain much that is sharp and living; they also contain the germs of desiccation and decay. Pound began to scatter his talents; to start movements which he quickly discarded for new ones; to spend himself in poetic propaganda for the Vorticists and others; to give more and more time to translation (The Sonnets of Guido Cavalcanti appeared in 1912) and arrangements from the Chinese (Cathay, paraphrased from the notes of Ernest Fenollosa, was issued in 1915); to lay the chief stress on technique, shades of color, verbal nuances. The result was a lassitude of the creative faculties, an impoverishment of emotion. In the later books, Pound seemed to suffer from a decadence which appraises the values in life chiefly as esthetic values. Lustra appeared in 1916. In this collection, as in the preceding volumes, Pound struggled with his influences; accents of Swinburne, Browning, Lionel Johnson, and Yeats mingled with those of the Provençal poets. From his immediate predecessors Pound learned the value of "verse as speech" while, as Eliot has pointed out, from the more antiquarian studies Pound was learning the importance of "speech as song." It was not until Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920) and the Cantos that Pound integrated his own inflection, form, and philosophy. The Cantos, as yet unfinished, must be recognized as Pound's chief work. The poem (for the Cantos are parts of a loosely connected major opus) when and if completed will comprise about one hundred "chapters." More than seventy cantos have been published: Cantos I-XVI in 1925; XVII-XXVII in 1928; A Draft of XXX Cantos in 1930; Eleven New Cantos: XXXI to XLI in 1934. Complex in tone, bewildering in their shiftings of time and space, of many languages and multiple accents, the Cantos are easier to grasp in theory than in practice. Only a scholar versed in many cultures can pretend to follow the digressions, the obscure references, the selfinterrupted narratives, comments, myths, legends, imprecations, jokes, the whole curious ambivalence which worships and destroys the poetic tradition in the same movement. Yet the scheme of the Cantos is reasoned and even formal: Pound is attempting to write a Human Comedy in several dimensions and many voices, using the repetitions of history as recurring leitmotifs. The structure is intended to be fugual (with subject, response, and counter-subject) and Pound, who has written music as well as words, has conceived the work on a huge scale. It juxtaposes the jargon of the modern world with disrupted quotations and a vast, even violent, scholasticism. Critical opinion of the Cantos was sharply divided. To many the indicated pattern was a masterpiece of obfuscation, a jig-saw puzzle with the important pieces missing. "About the poems," wrote Edward Fitzgerald, "there hangs a dismal mist of unresolved confusion. Through that mist we can see fact, but fact historically stated, enlivened in no way by either a creative or a critical process." Some found it a garble of literature and nothing else, composed of scraps from newspapers, oddments from documents difficult of access, and the minor classics, all piled upon each other without an original idea or an experience outside of print. To others it was a modern Gospel. "One of the three great works of poetry of our time," wrote Allen Tate. Ford Madox Ford's enthusiasm was even less guarded. "The first words you have to say about the Cantos," said Ford, "is: Their extraordinary beauty. . . They form an unparalleled history of a world seen from those shores which are the home of our civilization." John Crowe Ransom's estimate was more temperate. He concluded, "Mr. Pound, in his capacity of guide to literature, never wearies of telling us about the troubadour songs of Provence, which he reveres. He lays down the law that, the further the poem goes from its original character of song, the more dubious is its estate. But what if we apply that canon to the Cantos? The result is that we find ourselves sometimes admiring in Mr. Pound's poetry an effect of brilliance and nearly always missing the effect of poetry." Whatever differences arose concerning the finality of Pound's performance, none could dispute the power of his influence. The accent of the Cantos can be traced through Eliot's The Waste Land, Hart Crane's The Bridge, and MacLeish's longer poems, particularly his Conquistador. Moreover, any attempt to do justice to Pound must take account of the chronology of his work in relation to others. He invented the term “Imagism” and organized the Imagist school long before the ensuing period of exploitation. He published Cathay in 1915, and rendered Certain Noble Plays of Japan from the Fenollosa Manuscripts, anticipating the flood of Chinese and Japanese translations that, soon after, inundated the country. He "placed" Tagore as literary artist, not as messiah, and saw the Bengalese poet become a cult. He fought for the musician George Antheil; wrote a study of Gaudier Brzeska, when that sculptor was unknown; created a controversy by his Provençal paraphrases, expanded his Italian studies into The Poems of Guido Cavalcanti. Besides his poetry Pound wrote, translated, and edited more than fourteen volumes of prose, the most characteristic being A B C of Reading (1934), an exposition of a critical method; Make it New (1935), which is a deceptive title since all but one of the essays appeared in Pavannes and Divisions (1918) and Instigations (1920); and the little known Imaginary Letters. Pound's voluminous and highly personal prose Culture (1939) was followed by Cantos LII-LXXI (1940). The two volumes complement each other in their inconsistencies: in historical oddities and elliptical references, in erratic philosophy and objectionable politics. Pound's increasing bias against America developed into an attack on all democracies; he championed Fascism, even to the extent of becoming its protagonist via the official Italian short-wave radio. The Cantos grow pedantic and petulant. They represent an ever-growing flux of Greek myth, Chinese culture, medieval usury and local history. Hitherto it was conjectured that the architecture of the Cantos was that of a fugue; but the latest annotator (with Pound's sanction) refers to it as a Commedia. We are told that the Greek, Renaissance, and World War episodes are the Inferno; the history of money and banking form the Purgatorio; while the Cantos to come will construct the Paradiso. Finally we are gravely informed that, whereas most English verse is written in iambic meter, the Cantos have a great number of feet which are trochaic, dactylic, anapestic, and spondaic, and that this results in "nothing less than a revolution in English versification, a new basis for the writing of poetry." In his argumentative introduction to The Oxford Book of Modern Verse Yeats maintained that, although Eza Pound had more style than any contemporary poet, his style was constantly broken and "twisted into nothing by its direct opposite: nervous obsession, nightmare, stammering confusion." Conceding Pound's influence, Yeats concluded that Pound was "a brilliant improvisator translating at sight from an unknown Greek masterpiece." It is an apt epigram if an incomplete disposal. In all of Pound's work, from the clipped products of his Imagist period to the gathering bulk of the Cantos there is the feeling of brilliant (if inaccurate) translation, the air of antiquity lovingly disguised as advanced thinking. Too special to achieve permanence, too arrogant and erudite to become popular, Pound's contribution to the period should not be underestimated. He was a pioneer in the new forms; he fought dullness wherever he encountered it; he experimented in a poetic speech which was alive and essentially his own. This new tone and technique helped broaden a path recognized by a few and unacknowledged by many who followed the trail nonchalantly, unconscious of who had blazed it. Much of Pound's art is difficult, much of it is poetry in pantomime, but even the dumbshow and the difficulties are significant. AN IMMORALITY Sing we for love and idleness, Though I have been in many a land, And I would rather have my sweet, Than do high deeds in Hungary A VIRGINAL No, no! Go from me. I have left her lately. To sheathe me half in half the things that sheathe her. No, no! Go from me. I have still the flavor, As white their bark, so white this lady's hours. BALLAD FOR GLOOM For God, our God is a gallant foe That playeth behind the veil. I have loved my God as a child at heart That seeketh deep bosoms for rest, I have loved my God as a maid to man But lo, this thing is best: To love your God as a gallant foe that plays behind the veil; I have played with God for a woman, I have staked with my God for truth, I have lost to my God as a man, clear-eyed— For I am made as a naked blade, Who loseth to God as man to man I have drawn my blade where the lightnings meet |