Ezra Pound: Poet

by A. David Moody

  Even so, it was perhaps an error on his part to pay no attention to what might have driven Dorothy to act as she had. Given her previous determination not to have a child, and given the conventions by which she lived, it might have occurred to him that she had acted out of furious hurt and outrage, and that this child, conceived, to all appearances, in reaction to Olga’s having his child, was intended to cancel out that other child. There were the makings here of a Greek tragedy, only it would prove to be a tragedy in which the Fury wore the mask of the perfect lady, and in which the flawed hero would accept his fate without protest or self-pity, as if in a state of godlike detachment.

  Saving the world by pure form

  In the autumn of 1927 Pound was busy about many things. In September he sent off the twenty-seventh canto to John Rodker for his de luxe A Draft of the Cantos 17–27, and was already blocking in 28–30. He was making a ‘new American version’ of the ‘testament’ of Confucius, the Ta Hio—that went off in November to be published by the University of Washington Book Store in Seattle. He was trying to get together his thinking on Great Bass, or ‘how to RHYTHM’, and his thinking about the aesthetics of engineering machines; and he was studying the philosophy behind Guido Cavalcanti’s poems. He was writing ‘How to Read’, a new Poetics, ‘the summa of all I have learned about literchoor’. He was editing his own little magazine, The Exile. And he had time to converse with Joseph Bard about the meaning of the word paideuma in the work of Leo Frobenius, the German anthropologist; to play daily tennis, sometimes up to six sets in a session; and to go to the cinema—Rapallo by then had three, and Pound could ‘carry dissipation to THE howling limit, i.e. leaving bad one and finish the serrata at the other’.

  Running through that seeming miscellany of activities was a constant preoccupation with the inner, shaping forms of things. This was not a new preoccupation, of course. The Imagiste complex and the dynamic forms of Vorticism were directed to the shaping of the mind and its world. But now Pound was concerning himself more explicitly with the forms of social and political life, as with the organization of work in a machine-shop, and of individuals in the state. He had always had the conviction, even in his idealizing youth, that the forms of art had, or should have, a social function, even a biological function. ‘Art for life’s sake’, was his cry, never ‘art for art’s sake’. Now he was seeking to engage his art with the public life of his time.

  At the end of 1926 he had written to the editors of New Masses, an American Communist-affiliated magazine, saying that he had read five numbers ‘with a good deal of care’, and was prepared to be further educated by them, specifically on such matters as labour struggles, the Russian Revolution, and US dollar diplomacy. The editors headed his letter, over-hopefully, ‘POUND JOINS THE REVOLUTION!’ He did then contribute an article on how the workers on the factory floor might so orchestrate the noise of their machines as to give rhythm to their day and thus free themselves from the condition of robots. But he also sent a letter in which he protested against Hugo Gellert’s mistaking Brancusi for an ‘art for art’s sake’ aesthete just because his work was detached from wars and politics. Brancusi, he declared, ‘is trying to save the world by pure form’. To which Gellert replied in mockery, ‘“to save the world by pure form…” Tra la.’ He didn’t want to know, and Pound didn’t stop to explain, just how art which ‘has no political opinion’ could ‘save the world’.

  Pound’s most revealing remark on that occasion was probably the extraordinary statement that ‘Art is part of biology’. That would have been intended to set art apart from political arguments and abstract ideas, and to set it with the genetic processes which sustain, conserve, and evolve individual and social organisms. In thus identifying art with the formative processes by which we live Pound might well have had in mind what de Gourmont had written about instinct in Physique de l’amour. Taking as an example the sphex, an insect which instinctively paralyses ‘with three perfectly placed stabs the cricket which is to feed its larvae’, de Gourmont argued that the ‘genius’ which enables the insect to do this must be ‘the sum of intellectual acquisitions slowly crystallised in the species’; or, as Pound later paraphrased it, ‘After the intellect has worked on a thing long enough the knowledge becomes faculty—There is one immediate perception or capacity to act instead of a mass of ratiocination.’ That was what Pound now wanted art to be doing, to be crystallizing useful intelligence into instinct, habit, custom, and tradition.

  He found support for his thinking in the work of Leo Frobenius, particularly in Frobenius’ concept of the paideuma of a people or a culture. Pound understood that term to mean ‘the mental formation, the inherited habits of thought, the conditionings, aptitudes of a given race or time’; and these as ‘the active element in the era, the complex of ideas which is in a given time germinal, reaching into the next epoch, but conditioning actively all the thought and action of its own time’. A particular instance, in the case of America at the time of its revolution, would be the conviction that ‘All men are born free and equal’. The accumulated intelligence of enough people, crystallized in that formulation, had come to command instinctive assent and so had become an active principle in the conduct of the nation’s affairs.

  For his own time, Pound declared in one of his editorial notes in The Exile, ‘the organizing thought is concerned with the emergence or the resurgence of the idea of a cooperative state’, that is, one constituted of consenting and cooperating individuals. The ‘18th century’, by which he evidently meant what came to be called the French Enlightenment, had found ‘the formula for the right amount of individual liberty compatible with civilized institutions: The right to do anything “que ne nuit pas aux autres”’, anything that does no harm to others. Now, in 1928, ‘We need possibly another fifty years of hard thought (and a lot of people busy at it) to find the true equation for the extent of state power compatible with civilization’. He noted that there was the ‘soviet idea’, as expressed in making banking a state monopoly; and the ‘Fascist idea’ as expressed in holding individuals in government responsible. Those, he said, were ‘interesting phenomena’; but his preferred idea, the one he was promoting in The Exile, was that ‘The republic, the res publica means, or ought to mean “the public convenience”.’ He would put that on his letterhead, ‘Res publica: the public convenience’. It was a variant of the idea of ‘government for the people’, and projected a government which both safeguarded the rights of the individual by its social justice, and served the common good through its public works—well-constructed buildings, roads, intelligent afforestation—and through fostering useful scientific discoveries and enduring works of art. Judged by these measures, however, the modern ‘capitalist imperialist state’—and it was clearly the American state that was foremost in Pound’s mind—‘will not bear comparison with the feudal order; with the small city states both republican and despotic’. Instead of being a convenience, therefore, it is ‘an infernal nuisance’.

  For a model of the cooperative state Pound looked away to Confucian China, and to its governing idea as formulated in the Ta Hio, a work which he had translated, he said in 1927, in order to remedy ‘the present state of national and international imbecility’. He introduced his 1945 version with this note:

  Starting at the bottom as market inspector, having risen to be Prime Minister, Confucius is more concerned with the necessities of government, and of govern-mental administration than any other philosopher. He had two thousand years of documented history behind him which he condensed so as to render it useful to men in high official position…

  His analysis of why the earlier great emperors had been able to govern greatly was so sound that every durable dynasty, since his time, has risen on a Confucian design and been initiated by a group of Confucians. China was tranquil when her rulers understood these few pages. When the principles here defined were neglected, dynasties waned and chaos ensued. The proponents of a world order will neglect at their peril the study
of the only process that has repeatedly proved its efficiency as social coordinate.

  That is a remarkable recommendation given that, generally speaking, a paideuma would be culture-specific—it would be ‘the aptitudes of a given race or time’; yet Pound evidently considered the Confucian paideuma to be of universal utility, unlike the American Constitution or the Christian Ten Commandments.

  Even more remarkable, when we come to consider the first chapter of the Ta Hio which is thought to preserve Confucius’ own words, is how few pages he needed to hold the crystallized intelligence of those two thousand years of documented history. It all comes down to seven brief paragraphs which set out, not the abstract principles of good government, but rather the method or process necessary to bring about good government. The development of a certain kind of intelligence is the key, specifically the intelligence which ‘increases through the process of looking straight into one’s own heart and acting on the results’, and which is at the same time ‘rooted in watching with affection the way people grow’. In its more advanced formulation the process is a continuous loop with constant feedback:

  The men of old wanting to clarify and diffuse throughout the empire that light which comes from looking straight into the heart and then acting, first set up good government in their own states; wanting good government in their states, they first established order in their own families; wanting order in the home, they first disciplined themselves; desiring self-discipline they rectified their own hearts; and wanting to rectify their hearts, they sought precise verbal definitions of their inarticulate thoughts [the tones given off by the heart]; wishing to attain precise verbal definitions, they set to extend their knowledge to the utmost. This completion of knowledge is rooted in sorting things into organic categories.

  When things had been classified in organic categories, knowledge moved toward fulfilment; given the extreme knowable points, the inarticulate thoughts were defined with precision [the sun’s lance coming to rest on the precise spot verbally]. Having attained this precise verbal definition [aliter, this sincerity], they then stabilized their hearts, they disciplined themselves; having attained self-discipline, they set their own houses in order; having order in their own homes, they brought good government to their own states; and when their states were well governed, the empire was brought into equilibrium.

  From the Emperor, Son of Heaven, down to the common man, singly and all together, this self-discipline is the root.

  That is the Confucian paideuma in its pure form, stripped of all particulars. There are no commands to do this and not do that; no indications of specific rights and wrongs; no moral teachings or required rites; no guidance at all on the practicalities of living and governing.

  The only definite value is that there should be order throughout the empire. But then that would be not just any order, certainly not an order imposed from above or by force. It would be one which comes about when all the things of which the empire is constituted are in order; and that would be when all things are attuned to the individual heart’s tones. However, to translate that into the Christian principle of individual conscience would be misleading; and to associate it with Western individualism would be quite wrong. There is no suggestion of a Holy Spirit prompting the Confucian heart; nor is there any suggestion that the individual should be fulfilling his or her personal desires. No value is being accorded to the private life or to personal feelings and interests. The orientation of the Confucian paideuma is altogether away from the individual and towards the common good. The heart that is rectified in the process of intelligence grows to know and to be at one with others and with its world; and it thus comes to desire not its own private ends but the good of all. ‘Know and act thyself’ grows into ‘know and act according to the truth of all that you can know’.

  It could be that in commending this Confucian ethic to the American and European ‘proponents of a world order’ Pound intended that it should act as a corrective to the contradictions and excesses of their individual-centred, Christian-sanctioned, and notionally democratic culture; a corrective, that is, to its making the individual everything, and nothing; to its putting private profit before public benefit, and putting corporate and national self-interest above considerations of natural justice and natural law. The challenge was even more radical than that, however, a challenge not merely to the democracies’ failures to live up to their idea but to the very foundations of that idea. The Confucian ethic has no place for any divine authority or revelation; nor does it vest authority in the state. And while it looks to the individual heart as the source of order, the desired order is not of or by or for the individual person, but of and by and for the whole people in harmony with the Cosmos. In canto 52 Pound will express that as ‘the abundance of nature | with the whole folk behind it’. Its order would be, if it were ever to be realized, one form of totalitarianism.

  It would not be the same as the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century, Soviet Communism, Italian Fascism, and German National Socialism; ideally, indeed, it would be their opposite, since power would genuinely be with the whole people. But it probably would be anathema to the European and American democracies, because it did not value the individual person for his or her own sake. Yet Pound, who would define himself as a Jeffersonian democrat, would also practise that Confucian discipline. In Western terms, he would cultivate a mind attuned not to the human personality but to the Cosmos, to the ordered totality of the vital universe. He would be of a mind with Osiris, or Dionysos.

  To be of such a mind means to see the world and to articulate one’s vision of it in ways that are strange to European thought. It means of course de-centring the ‘I’, the subjective, self-regarding self. Then it means, as Fenollosa observed in his essay on The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, concentrating the attention upon particular, concrete things, and seeing them as acting themselves, or acting the forces that pulse through them; and then as acting upon and interacting with other things. It means seeing the natural processes going on in and through everything we take in, and going on too within ourselves. An adequate articulation of that vision must involve preserving the specific qualities of things while presenting them in their multilateral relations and interactions—in a total vision such as canto II is working towards.

  That way of thinking which respects and seeks to follow the processes of nature both within and around us is quite contrary to the method which has made European thought so efficient in its determination to master nature. This was Darwin at work:

  When we see leaf-eating insects green, and bark-feeders mottled grey; the alpine ptarmigan white in winter, the red grouse the colour of heather, we must believe that these tints are of service to these birds in preserving them from danger.

  So he proceeded by logic and reason from the particulars towards the general law of the survival of the fittest, and in the process refined out everything his eye had observed. The abstraction he was left with proved immensely powerful, but at the cost of removing the mind from the rich complexity of his birds and insects.

  Pound deprecated such ‘talk of science as if it were a desiccation not an enrichment’, but then he was looking to science to provide ‘ways of thinking and thought instruments’ that would be adequate to the rich complexities of things. In the fourth and last number of The Exile he wrote:

  We continue with thought forms and with language structures used by monolinear mediaeval logic, when the aptitudes of the human mind developed in course of bio-chemical studies have long since outrun such simple devices. By which I mean that the biologist can often know and think clearly a number of things he can not put in a simple sentence; he can dissociate things for which there is as yet no dissociated language structure.

  And writing, he went on, should no longer pretend ‘that it cannot think (or express) perfectly comprehensible things that don’t happen to fit the syllogism’. In a related note he insisted that ‘Familiarity with the perceived complex of visu
al or sensuous data…must inevitably beget something more apt for its conveyance than is the simple monolinear sentence’. The challenge was to devise a ‘sentence’ that would hold together in the mind several things at once, or several aspects of a thing, without reasoning them into some single idea or line of argument. By 1930 he had become confident that ‘We are as capable or almost as capable as the biologist of thinking thoughts that join like spokes in a wheel-hub and that fuse in hyper-geometric amalgams.’ That was the form of sentence he was then constructing in his cantos, a sentence that was in the Confucian mode, and definitely not Aristotelian or Scholastic.

  It was a mode of writing and a form of art designed to accord with the Confucian paideuma, that is, a mode and a form which would be true, not to an abstract idea, a theory, or an ideology, but to ‘human consciousness and the nature of man’, and to ‘the motions of “the human heart”’; and which would thus feed the mind, biologically, ‘as nutrition of impulse’.

  A sextant for ‘A Draft of XXX Cantos’

  A Draft of XXX Cantos, with initials in her Vorticist style by D[orothy] S[hakespear] P[ound], was published by Nancy Cunard at her Hours Press in Paris in August 1930, in an edition of 212 copies. It brought together and superseded John Rodker’s A Draft of the Cantos 17–27 ‘with Initials in red and black ink by Gladys Hynes’, published in London in September 1928 in an edition of 101 copies, and William Bird’s A Draft of XVI Cantos of Ezra Pound for the Beginning of a Poem of some Length now first made into a Book ‘with Initials by Henry Strater’, published in Paris at his Three Mountains Press on the Île Saint-Louis in January 1925 in an edition of 90 copies.