Pound.
How many of you have ever read Pound before?
Some? Yes. Unlike with Frost,
you are unlikely to have read much Pound, I think,
up to this point in your educations,
and probably you are unlikely to have much of a view of him,
in contrast to Frost or even Yeats,
who cuts such a particular and remarkable public figure.
Pound can be hard to put
together, he can be hard to get a picture of.
What is Pound like? What was he like?
Well, this is a hard question
for some of the same reasons that the poems are hard;
that is, Pound's poetry projects no determinate
identity, no determinate poetic voice, unlike those distinctive
voices of Yeats and Frost. Instead, in Pound you encounter
a multiplicity of identities, a multiplicity of voices.
There's an interesting
contradiction in this. Pound is a kind of fierce
individualist. He believes in,
he wants to honor – as a political thinker and as a poet,
as a reader – he wants to honor a heroic and sovereign
idea of the individual. At the same time,
in his writing, Pound repeatedly divests
himself of identity, of particular identity,
in order to enter or to be entered by other identities,
other poets, other voices,
creators, heroes. This is what he wants to give
us access to as readers. Pound's centrality in modern
poetry repeats the kind of paradox I'm describing.
That is, he is the one poet on
the syllabus whom all the other poets knew, had some kind of
relationship with, some kind of contact.
On the one hand,
Pound was an individual of extraordinary personal charisma
and force, someone who liked to,
and who had the power to tell other people what to do,
tell other people what to think and what to value.
On the other hand,
when you study Pound, you're studying someone
remarkably open to others, in friendship,
as a reader, as a thinker.
He's someone who openly seeks alliance with others.
He had, as we already talked
about in our first lecture, an important relationship to
Frost. You remember Frost speaking of
his sometime friend Pound who wants to write,
as he puts it, "caviare to the crowd"?
Well, Pound is credited,
as I also suggested, with in many ways modernizing
Yeats, helping Yeats become the
particular voice that he did in the teens and twenties.
In the Beinecke,
there's a little letter, a handwritten pencil letter
from Pound to Hart Crane, which Hart Crane received when
he was eighteen, I think, around your age,
after he had sent his poems to The Little Review.
And this is a letter from Pound
which says about Crane's poems: "It is all very egg.
There is perhaps better egg.
But you haven't the ghost of a
setting hen or an incubator about you."
I'm not sure what that means.
But this was a rejection slip,
and Crane kept it all his life, like a kind of diploma that in
some way he was a member of modern poetry because he had
gotten a rejection from Ezra Pound.
In fact, Crane's first book, if you go over to the Beinecke,
and you turn it over, it has a picture.
It has a portrait,
not of Hart Crane but of Ezra Pound, because it has an ad for
Pound and his book, Personae.
And I like this fact because it's representative,
I think, of Pound's importance and dominance and prominence in
the poetic culture of the 1920s and '30s.
He was part of the world that a younger poet like Hart Crane had
to get to know and make his place in.
One of the famous books about modern poetry,
one by Hugh Kenner, is called simply The Pound
Era, as if modern poetry was all about Ezra Pound.
Ezra Pound, born in Hailey,
Idaho in 1908. I like it that this wildly
cosmopolitan expatriate intelligence was born in Idaho.
He left the United States.
Oh, he wasn't born in 1908.
When was Pound born?
He left the United States in
1908. Look in your--yes,
he was born in 1885, thank you.
He left the U.S. in 1908 and lived mostly in
London where at that point he acted as the foreign editor of
Poetry magazine and The Little Review,
two Little Magazines that I've shown you pictures of and that
were important in bringing modern poetry to the United
States. Pound is the central figure in
that process. He goes out and finds and
interprets and explains and even, in the case of Imagism,
names the poetry that he is bringing to American readers.
He is the entrepreneur,
if you like, behind Imagism and then when
Amy Lowell takes over Imagism. Vorticism becomes his thing and
the magazine Blast becomes, for a while,
his organ. He writes manifestos,
he organizes groups, all the time abandoning them,
too. His poem Hugh Selwyn
Mauberley, composed in 1920,
looks back on this whole period in London and is a kind of
summary of the poetry of this period and his involvement in
it. And it is itself a kind of
early model for another great poem, The Waste Land,
which Eliot would, as he composed it,
bring to Pound to edit. And we'll talk about that
process in a bit. In 1924 Pound moved to Italy.
There, he became urgently
concerned with economic reform, in the United States and in the
West generally. He is in this period working on
his great poem, his long poem which I'll be
discussing today, The Cantos.
He became increasingly involved
in Italian Fascism, which he found a powerful
vehicle of his own economic ideas, in particular.
He made broadcasts in support
of Mussolini's government, on Fascist radio in the 1940s,
and in 1945 at the conclusion of the War was arrested for
treason by the United States Army.
The charge of treason was dropped when he was found to be
insane and hospitalized at St. Elizabeth's Hospital in
Washington, D.C., where he would in a very
peculiar way hold court, a great man of letters at the
center of the American capitol, entertaining Elizabeth Bishop
and other figures whom we will read.
At the time of Pound's institutionalization,
his poem The Pisan Cantos,
a late stage of The Cantos, was selected as the
first winner of the Bollingen Prize,
an award initially given by the Library of Congress.
When Pound, traitor to the
nation, was awarded this prize for the best American poetry,
an enormous literary and cultural controversy sprang up,
which people go on arguing about.
Well, here is a poet who by his own declaration and example
seems to be a Fascist sympathizer, an anti-Semite.
Could he write great poetry,
even great poetry that expressed Fascistic and
anti-Semitical views? If he could write great poetry
of that kind, should we honor it?
If he was mad,
is there some way in which his poetry might not be mad?
Well, these are questions that
have persisted and as I say people go on arguing about them.
The controversy created so much
trouble the Library of Congress didn't want anything to do with
the award anymore and it moved to Yale,
and the Beinecke Library has been administrating this,
arguably the most prestigious of poetry prizes ever since.
And in fact,
the judging for this year's award is going strong at the
moment and there will be a new winner at the end of the week.
Well, Pound's anti-capitalism,
his economic ideas, I think, are in some ways the
intellectual origin of both his interest in Fascism and the
anti-Semitic views that he expresses,
both in poetry and often in prose.
Anti-capitalism: for Pound this derives from
really a specific cultural setting;
that is, late nineteenth-century American
culture, a culture where, as Pound experienced it and saw
it, art was conceived as a
decorative art, subject to the editorial tastes
of popular magazines like The Atlantic,
Harper's; a culture in which poetry was a
kind of commodity, which status destroyed the
potential for originality and which subordinated art to money.
When Pound expatriates,
when he leaves the United States, he's fleeing not only
America but he's, as he understands it,
he's fleeing American money. And what he is entering,
what he's going to, he conceives as a particular
kind of tradition, a kind of historical community,
which he describes in that first quotation on your handout;
a quotation in which Pound replies in a wonderfully haughty
way to the motto of Poetry magazine,
a motto that comes from the great American poet Whitman:
"To have great poetry, there must be great audiences,
too." To which Pound says,
"It is true that the great artist always has a great
audience, even in his lifetime; but it is not the vulgo
but rather the spirits of irony and of destiny and of humor,
the great authors of the past, sitting beside him."
Pound, I think,
in an almost literal sense conceived of his audience as a
kind of distinguished community of readers and writers existing
across time, a kind of trans-historical
community of artists; ideas that we'll want to
compare with Eliot's ideas of tradition, which are related but
a little different, next week.
Let me move to the second
quotation, also from the same period, 1914.
Pound says, "There's no use in a strong impulse if it is nearly
all lost in bungling transmission and technique.
This obnoxious word that I'm
always brandishing about means nothing but a transmission of
the impulse intact." In Pound, there is an emphasis,
as we saw last time in looking at his rules for writing Imagist
poetry, there is an emphasis on the
priority of poetic technique and the importance of technical
knowledge. But, as this quotation
suggests, and it's important to keep in mind,
technique in Pound is always in the service of intensity,
immediacy, or what he calls "the impulse."
There are further quotations from Pound describing his
technical aims. As I suggested a few minutes
ago, Pound moves on from Imagism to what he calls Vorticism.
Now, instead of wanting to get
at a poetry that is centered on the image, he imagines a poetry
centered on now "the vortex," as he calls it;
and there's a kind of definition of the vortex there
in the third quotation. Not so much later he would
replace the idea of the vortex with another related image,
which is the ideogram. We talked about some of Pound's
translations from the Chinese and Japanese last time.
Pound was interested in Chinese
writing systems as--Well, you can imagine how the
ideogram appealed to a poet who wanted to imagine the poem as an
image of a thing. Here, as Pound understood it,
not always with superb scholarly precision,
the Chinese word was, in fact, an image of a thing,
and this is very much a kind of aesthetic ideal for Pound who
wanted language to give us a kind of immediate access to the
things of the world. Well, I asked you to read for
class today one of Pound's poems from the teens,
one of his famous poems, a poem called "The Seafarer,"
identified in your RIS packet as "From the Anglo-Saxon."
I'll read just the beginning of
it for you.
May I,
for my own self, song's truth reckon,
Journey's jargon, how I in harsh days
Hardship endured oft. Bitter breast-cares have I
abided, Known on my keel many a care's
hold, And dire sea-surge,
and there I oft spent Narrow nightwatch nigh the
ship's head While she tossed close to
cliffs. Coldly afflicted,
My feet were by frost benumbed. Chill its chains are;
chafing sighs Hew my heart round and hunger
begot Mere-weary mood.
Lest man know not That he on dry land loveliest
liveth, List how I, care-wretched,
on ice-cold sea, Weathered the winter,
wretched outcast Deprived of my kinsman;
And so on. Iambic pentameter?
You've been working on it.
No, it's not.
What you're listening to is something very different.
The sound is rough, like Frost.
And too, like Frost,
in this poetry Pound is writing against the beautiful,
sonorous forms of late nineteenth-century poetry.
But Pound's poem,
unlike Frost, is the very furthest from the
vernacular that we could possibly get.
What we have here is Pound translating from the Anglo-Saxon
and providing a contemporary equivalent of Old English
alliterative verse, a particular verse form;
a dead poetic form you could say, although Pound revives it
and, in fact, brings it into usage in
twentieth-century poetry. This verse form--I've given you
John Hollander's helpful self-descriptive definition at
the bottom of your handout where Hollander says:
The oldest English accented meter
Of four, unfailing, fairly audible
Strongly struck stresses seldom Attended to anything other than
Definite downbeats… In other words,
in Old English verse you don't count syllables.
You just count strong stresses. And there are,
as a rule, four per line, and the lines,
like Hollander's here, like Pound's that I just read,
tend to divide in the middle. There's a caesura that breaks
the line in two, and Hollander goes on
describing it. In addition to these strong
stresses, the line is held together by alliterative links
that join the words strongly and audibly across the caesura.
Pound is an avant-garde poet.
He's an experimentalist.
Here we have the strange and
very interesting spectacle of the self-consciously modernist,
avant-gardist artist writing in an archaic, dead poetic form.
In the teens,
Pound is writing a kind of experimental poetry that in many
different ways seeks alternatives to
nineteenth-century norms of poetic practice,
seeks alternatives to romantic sentiment, poetic diction,
smooth musicality, all of the virtues and vices
that you find in early Yeats. What he does is open poetry to
a range of styles and forms, many of them archaic,
many of them from languages outside of English.
You see Pound writing his
version of the Provençal troubadour song and
canzone. We talked last time about
Pound's version of Chinese or Japanese poems.
He writes his own versions of Roman poetry or here Old
English. Through technical means,
through Pound's technique, he gains access to cultures and
voices. He revives past voices,
like the seafarer poet's; revives and implicitly
identifies with them. Here is an expatriate poet
writing in the voice of the Anglo-Saxon wanderer,
a figure deprived of his kinsmen, who is out in the
elements, far from land, far from his nation and home.
Writing in the voice of the
seafarer, Pound allies himself with what is historically prior,
and, in fact, in English he allies himself
with what is historically primary,
with the oldest English poetry. Here, he claims it for himself,
carries it forward or, as he would put it,
transmits the impulse in an act of translation.
Pound's slogan, "make it new," a kind of motto
for modernism; it's important to hear that
injunction, to "make it new," as a specifically historical
mission to revive and transmit the past in a living way.
The phrase itself,
"make it new," was translated from the ancient Chinese and is
itself in that sense an instance of what it describes.
Pound's conception of the poet
is as one who brings the impulse, as he calls it,
forward, across time; does so in a kind of
imaginative act of seafaring, if you like,
leaving home, going out, crossing over.
Pound is a distinctive and,
in a sense, quite peculiar thing.
He is a kind of visionary scholar.
He is an epic poet of the library.
There's a certain kind of contradiction in this;
that is, a contradiction or tension at any rate between
Pound's drive towards immediacy, towards his wish to convey an
emotional impulse and the highly mediated nature of his vision.
Pound's poetry is full of
learned and abstruse reference. Unlike in The Norton
Anthology, if you pick up a volume of
Pound you'll find no footnotes. He just gives you the thing.
He gives you no help with it
because, I think, there is an intention in the
poetry to somehow give you a kind of unmediated access to the
materials that Pound is drawing on.
He wants us to feel the excitement he feels when he sits
down in the library and opens a book.
Directness, intensity, purity, immediacy:
these are all Pound's aims, and he achieves them through an
intensely mediated display of technique.
Well, you might contrast,
again, Frost. Frost is always concealing,
as it were, his expertise, his technical knowledge,
whereas Pound is always showing it.
In the case of "The Seafarer," Pound has used Sweet's
Anglo-Saxon Reader, his college textbook,
to write this poem. It's one he's taken to Europe
with him. Now, there are several
consequences for all this. One: in Pound,
there is the idea that there are no dead forms,
there are no dead languages. There are only derivations,
variations, translations, through which the past is
continuously being made present.
Two: that is,
the past is continuously available for those who can
recognize it and seize it, specifically through technical
powers – technical powers which yet in the process must be
transcended in order to achieve the kind of immediacy and power
that he seeks. In effect, Pound makes
technique a form of inspiration. This is an interesting turn in
literary history. The visionary poet in Pound is
a scholar poet. Literary technique is in Pound
a secular means of evoking literary inspiration –
literary inspiration in the form of prior literature,
prior literature seen and felt as sacred;
as sacred, not as in Milton, a divine authority but rather
an authority to be recognized and felt and seized in books.
The footnote,
the scholarly index, the library archive:
these are the muses that Pound appeals to.
And the used bookstore: these are the places that his
poems come from. The result is a body of work
that is always returning us, its readers,
to its sources. In the very first lecture I
referred to what I see as two very general and different,
competing drives or forces in modern poetry:
one centripetal, the other centrifugal – one a
kind of will on the part of modern poets to order poetry
itself; on the other hand,
a will to order the world, order society.
The artist must be concerned with art's own problems,
on the one hand. On the other hand,
in Pound and in others, the artist is a kind of
legislator, to use Shelley's image.
He has a truth that he wants to promulgate that will order
society properly. Pound embodies these two
drives, as I'm calling them, more clearly,
better than anybody, and they're part of his
interest and power, and some of the challenge that
he gives us, both aesthetic challenges and
moral and political ones, as we think about his career.
On the one hand,
in Pound there's a kind of drive to identify that which is
most essential to literature and to tell Pound's readers how to
write poems. This is the Pound who wrote
those remarks about Imagism that we talked about last time.
On the other hand,
there is the Pound who wants to extend the reach of literature,
who wants to--who writes letters to statesmen,
who goes on Fascist radio to tell the world how things should
be. This is also the poet who in
his poem The Cantos wished to create a poem that
would, as he calls it, include history.
What an ambition, right? Extraordinary.
So, on the one hand, you have the poet of "In a
Station of the Metro," the shortest poem in modern poetry,
and then you have the poet of The Cantos,
the longest poem in modern poetry.
Pound is both of these things. And these impulses that we see
in that poem, in that short poem and in that
long poem, they don't just compete in him,
they exist, I think, in some kind of collaboration.
"In a Station of the Metro"
identifies the image as the primary unit of poetry,
and in Pound's practice it becomes a kind of building block
for larger forms and for the epic itself.
He says here, on your handout,
in a letter to Joyce: "I have begun an endless poem,
of no known category. Phanopoeia or something or
other, all about everything… I wonder what you will make of
it." Well "phanopoeia" means
specifically image-making, and you can understand The
Cantos as they unfold as a kind of series of Imagist poems,
as the image becomes this fertile principle that produces
and generates more and more images, more and more voices.
The Cantos are,
he says, "of no known category."
It's true, it's hard to identify the genre of The
Cantos, although I've been calling it an epic so far.
There's a sense in which in
each canto Pound is inventing the form of the poem anew,
inventing it in response to the demands of new materials.
The way to understand this
great and maddening and somewhat mad poem, which is one of the
great works of modern poetry, from which we're reading just
the smallest fragment--one way to understand it is as the
record of one man's reading, one man's encounter with many
voices and his incorporation of them and engagement and
conversation with them. The title of the poem is worth
perhaps dwelling on for a moment: The Cantos –
"the songs," really. That's what it means.
The title foregrounds literary
activity itself, foregrounds acts of singing,
which are here, as Pound imagines it,
a kind of renewable practice or process that can't be reduced to
a particular image or symbol. So, in that sense,
this poem is unlike The Waste Land or The
Bridge, which produced these specific,
central symbols around which all of the poem's ideas and
images are organized. Pound instead gives us
something more like a process. Pound, as I say,
spoke of it as a poem including history.
Well, this makes it sound as if the poem were larger than
history, somehow a kind of frame for history that would help us
understand and order it. Well, maybe Pound wished this
but that's not what he produced. The poem lacks an organizing
view of history, such as you find in Milton or
Virgil or Homer or Dante. It would be,
therefore, much more accurate to call it a poem that is in
some sense continuous with history, that's like history.
In that sense,
a poem that is structurally unbounded.
This is, I think, the view of history it
projects: history not as a story of progress or Yeatsian
apocalypse and cycles, but history rather as something
like the poem itself, something that accumulates and
repeats itself, with variations and without a
definite aim in view. History, in this sense,
is something that can be entered but not begun,
and it can't ever be completed either.
And this is true of this poem: And then went down to the
ship, Set keel to breakers,
forth on the godly sea, and
We set up mast and sail on that swart ship,
Bore sheep aboard her, and our bodies also
Heavy with weeping, and winds from sternward
Bore us onward with bellying canvas,
Circe's this craft, the trim-coifed goddess.
Then sat we amidships,
wind jamming the tiller, Thus with stretched sail,
we went over sea till day's end.
Sun to his slumber, shadows o'er all the ocean,
Came we then to the bounds of deepest water,
To the Kimmerian lands, and peopled cities
Covered with close-webbed mist, unpierced ever
With glitter of sun-rays Nor with stars stretched,
nor looking back from heaven Swartest night stretched over
wretched men there. The ocean flowing backward,
came we then to the place Aforesaid by Circe.
When I was a student I said to my teacher, "I don't really get
Pound and it's not very beautiful either."
And he said,
"Well, take a look at this" and produced those lines I just
read, which are magnificent heroic poetry.
They begin with that word, "and."
They begin with the conjunction "and."
They begin with the conjunction and without a grammatical
subject. "And then went down to the
ship." Who went down to the ship?
Pound doesn't say.
He introduces the poem with an
action, an action that is itself part of a series.
The action that we are being
introduced to here is Odysseus' journey to hell in search of
Tiresias, the prophet, among the souls of the dead.
He wants to learn--Odysseus
wants to learn his future course and decide how to act.
Odysseus, we learn,
as the poem unfolds, is the first speaker Pound
accesses and gives to us, which is to say that we're
reading a translation, again.
And how does Odysseus speak? Not like Tennyson's Ulysses in
sonorous blank verse, but rather, as I think you
could hear readily enough, in the Anglo-Saxon alliterative
verse form of "The Seafarer." Pound is doing something very
interesting and exhilarating. He is translating what he
conceives of as the oldest passage in The Odyssey,
that most archaic of poetry in the West, and translating it
using that poetry most archaic in English,
the language and rhythms and patterning of "The Seafarer."
This is a kind of overlay in
technique, again, of Old English alliterative
verse and Homer's Greek. These linguistic forms in the
poem are merged as if by a kind of parataxis,
which I talked about last time, to produce what Pound calls –
when he's writing about the image – a complex,
a complex of elements that are held together in an instant;
an instant that, as he understood it,
transcends space and time limits.
This is all set out again in the doctrine of the image.
And we talked about another
instance of that kind of cultural overlay of materials in
the little poem "In a Station of the Metro."
Contrast what Pound is doing here with what Joyce does in
Ulysses. In Ulysses Joyce is,
in a sense, carrying Homer's text into contemporary Dublin.
He's naturalizing it and
modernizing it. Pound, in a sense,
is doing just the opposite. He is going back,
and indeed here the sea flows backward and it takes us back
to, again, primary terms: archaic Greek,
archaic English. He is seeking to re-appropriate
the heroic mode through translation in yet a
contemporary idiom. This is a kind of raising of
the dead, a kind of journey to the literary and cultural
underworld that brings Pound's adventure as a poet into line
with Odysseus'. And you can see,
in other words, what Odysseus is doing now as
he goes to the underworld and seeks prophetic speech from
Tiresias as a version of what Pound is doing as he seeks to
translate the Greek at the inception of his epic.
Pound's own display of
technique you could understand as a kind of version of the
ceremony to honor and pay tribute,
through blood sacrifice, that Odysseus practices here in
the passages that follow as he induces Tiresias to appear and
speak. Literary tradition here has
itself taken the place of the transcendental source of
authority that was the classical or the Christian muse.
Here Pound, in a sense,
turns back upon poetry itself as a sacred source;
here, at a moment in the epic where invocation would
ordinarily stand, at that point of inception.
Here, technique is imagined as
a kind of process of translation through which speech from
elsewhere is brought forward in time and in some sense carried
across the waters. Again there's a sense of
contradiction, however, or tension.
Pound wants to elicit speech
from the dead to make the tradition's language new.
He wants to transmit the
impulse. He also insists,
however, cannily and provocatively on the mediated
quality of his words. Tiresias speaks at the top of
page 370, towards the end of the poem.
He says to Odysseus when he sees him:
"A second time? why?
man of ill star, "Facing the sunless dead and
this joyless region? "Stand from the fosse [that is,
the ditch], leave me my bloody bever
"For soothsay." And I stepped back [and that
"I" there is the "I" of Odysseus],
And he strong with the blood, said then: "Odysseus
"Shalt return through spiteful Neptune, over dark seas,
"Lose all companions." And then Anticlea [Odysseus'
mother] came.
And then a remarkable thing happens.
Someone says: Lie quiet Divus.
I mean [and now the "I" is the "I" of Pound,
the narrator, the speaker,
not Odysseus], that is Andreas Divus,
In officina Wecheli, 1538, out of Homer.
This is Pound stepping into the poem saying, "I have been
translating all of this from Homer,
and I have been using the Latin translation of Andreas Divus
that I bought in a Paris bookstand.
And this has been my source for this text, and it is Divus that
I have, the translator, that has been my muse and who
has been speaking here through Tiresias, if you like.
And it's his soul that is laid
back and to rest." And at this moment Pound
continues, now speaking of Odysseus in the third person,
and he says: "And he sailed,
by Sirens and thence outward and away / and unto Circe."
Finally, the journey continues.
Here, again,
Odysseus' journey being analogized implicitly to the
journey that the translator is affecting as he brings the text
forward in time, across from oral culture to
print, from Greek to Latin and Latin to English and Old
English. And then in a remarkable
efflorescence that ends this First Canto, with a macronic
display of languages, Pound says:
Venerandam, In the Cretan's phrase…
Again, he's opened his book, and at the back of Divus's
translation he's found the Homeric hymns and now he's going
to give them to us: …with the golden crown,
Aphrodite, Cypri munimenta sortita est,
mirthful, orichalchi, with golden
Girdles and breast bands, thou with dark eyelids
Bearing the golden bough of Argicida.
So that: Colon.
The poem ends here with a prayer to the goddess of beauty,
Aphrodite, who is invoked in Greek and Latin;
who is brought forward and who is named Argicida,
"killer of the Greeks, slayer of the Greeks,"
presumably because she has had her hand in the abduction of
Helen and the war in Troy. Here, Pound has invoked the
goddess in these ways and then concluded his Canto with the
interesting grammatical form, "So that," and the interesting
punctuation, a colon. In effect, if the poem began
with "and," it now ends with "so that," where the colon is a kind
of gateway through which the rest of the poem,
and implicitly following Homer, the rest of history will pass.
And here Pound has established
his poem and established his own role as, in some sense,
a mediator, conducting a process by which the sources of
the past are brought forward into the future,
relaying what he calls "the impulse," and in the process
"making it new." Well, let's stop and we will go
on to, as I say, the related and different
poetry of T.S.
