Ezra Pound: Poet

by A. David Moody

  The latter part of this canto belongs to a completely different mental world from that of the Medici. It is made up of a rather hectic sequence of apparently random images, mostly natural images, and most of them charged with suggestions of ‘the discontinuous gods’, of Dionysos, Artemis, and Pallas Athene, an ‘Owl-eye amid pine boughs’. ‘Confusion’ is the apt comment, but with the emphasis ‘Confusion, source of renewals’. The passage is like a welling up of what has no place in the banking business, a return of the repressed in a confused dream. And as can happen in a dream one statement stands out, ‘“Damned to you Midas, Midas lacking a Pan!”’ King Midas, according to Ovid, being an initiate in the Orphic orgies, recognized old Silenus as a fellow member when he was brought to him in a drunken state, and entertained him well before conducting him to Dionysos, his foster-son. To reward Midas the god said he might have whatever he wished, and, out of his mind with greed, the king asked that everything he touched should turn to gold. When he discovered his mistake and confessed it the god removed the unnatural power, and Midas, now hating riches, spent his days with Pan in his groves and mountains. That tie with nature, the dream warns, is what the money-making Medici had lost.

  Pound’s treatment of Renaissance Venice in cantos 25 and 26 is closely related to his treatment of the Medici and Nic d’Este. The great ‘BOOK OF THE COUNCIL MAJOR’ records petty regulations—‘1255 be it enacted; | That they musn’t shoot crap in the hall | of the council’—and another book records for posterity as if it were the wonder of all wonders that the Doge’s lioness gave birth to three cubs. Otherwise, what the Council mainly enacted through the fourteenth century appear to have been a series of improvements to the Doge’s palace, including building a grand new council hall for themselves ‘out over the arches’ by the Grand Canal. Ruskin, in The Stones of Venice which Pound would surely have known, says that the Doge’s palace was the focal building of Venetian culture as the Parthenon was of Athens, and that what it expressed was, first, that Venice was no longer governed by its best individual but by an oligarchy, and second that its public policy was determined only by commercial self-interest with religion playing no part. For those reasons Renaissance Venice, in Ruskin’s view, lost its creative energy around 1423 when the new council hall was first used, and thereafter fell into luxury and decadence. Pound’s vision of the palace with the new hall appearing to hang ‘baseless’ in the dawn mist could accord with that, if one reads the image as not just a fine aesthetic effect after Turner, but as declaring that the culture and government of Venice had no ground under it, no virtù, no individual genius, and no enlightened vision.

  The central passage of canto 25 weaves together several themes, some new and some repeated from previous cantos, to make explicit what Venice lacked. ‘Sulpicia’, a minor Roman poet who sang out her love in clear direct speech, is introduced as a still living natural phenomenon, ‘green shoot now, and the wood | white under new cortex’. Then the art of a Gaudier is evoked, ‘“sculptor sees the form in the air | before he sets hand to mallet”’. Sulpicia again, now ‘As ivory uncorrupted’, sings to the man she loves ‘“Pone metum Cerinthe”’, put away fear Cerinthus—

  Lay there, the long soft grass,

  and the flute lay there by her thigh,

  Sulpicia, the fauns, twig-strong,

  gathered about her;

  The fluid, over the grass

  Zephyrus, passing through her,

  ‘deus nec laedit amantes’.

  —the god does no harm to lovers. Against that is heard ‘from the stone pits’, as from those who made over the Doge’s palace, ‘heavy voices’ saying,

  ‘Nothing we made, we set nothing in order,

  ‘Neither house nor the carving,

  ‘And what we thought had been thought for too long…’

  Sulpicia’s song breaks in, now from the chorus of young fauns moving to the notes of a Pan pipe. The heavy theme resumes, ‘the dead words keeping form |…The dead concepts, never the solid, the blood rite’. At the end of the passage Sulpicia’s song of life leads back to the sculptor’s vision,

  And thought then, the deathless,

  Form, forms and renewal, gods held in the air,

  Forms seen, and then clearness…

  —as Aphrodite might be seen taking form in the sea, with the fluid waves holding that form, ‘as crystal’. But what Venice asked of its greatest painter Titian—so the canto continues—was to paint in the ‘fourth frame from the door on | the right of the hall of the greater council…The picture of the land battle’; and when he hadn’t fulfilled the commission after twenty years the Council asked for their money back. Canto 26 mainly documents the decline of Venice into sumptuous luxuria, dead concepts, cautious intrigues, and prosperous commerce, with the epitaph ‘And they are dead and have left a few pictures’.

  The Venetian oligarchy are not made to appear evil, any more than are the Medici or the Este. All of them are credited with a preference for peace over war and for intelligence over brute force, even if for self-interested motives; also with having had some sense of civic responsibility, though again only so far as it served their own interests. But that self-servingness is their radical defect: they were not moved to serve the larger life of the spirit. Their famed Renaissance, therefore, was no renaissance at all from Pound’s point of view.

  Where then in these cantos is the life of the spirit in evidence as the main motive of conduct? One thinks again of Acoetes in the mythopoesis of canto 2, attempting to open Pentheus’ eyes to energies beyond his comprehension; and of Bernart de Ventadorn’s song to free his lady of Eblis; and of Cunizza who lived in love, and who set free her slaves. But after Cunizza, that is, after the time of Cavalcanti and Dante, there is only Sigismundo’s odd and wonderful monument to his love for Isotta and to the gods. Otherwise, down to the present day, one finds only the poet’s own attempts to recreate the lost vision and motive.

  In canto 29 some fun is had at the expense of this poet as a young and innocent student all at sea in his American milieu, a ‘Lusty Juventus’ sublimating his desire in ‘a burning fire of phantasy’, and not yet aware that actually it seeks fulfilment in the seemingly alien ‘biological process’. The young poet and his world are that far removed from the culture of Cunizza and Sordello, and from the fulfilment of his desire. But then the distance, the tension between the desire by which he lives and its possible paradise intensifies the desire and makes it the driving force of his poem. The poem must give form and substance to what he seeks but can find in his actual world only in hints and vestiges and fragments. He knows of a world that seems responsibly ordered, in Confucius’ China as caught in the mirror of Canto 13, but that is a world elsewhere governed by a different if complementary vision. His own world, that of the hell and the other contemporary cantos, has lost all coherence and is in the dark of ignorant passion. To remake it he must somehow grow into the role of Zagreus, lord of life in the world of the dead.

  That is what canto 17 is about—or it is about the difference between the mind that is ever at the interpretation of the vital universe and the mind (such as that of Venice) in which the universe is not alive. This is the formal structure of the canto:

  ll. 1–6 1st subject: ‘So that the vines burst from my fingers…IO ZAGREUS!’

  ll. 7–12 response: Diana moving in the dawn woods with her hounds;

  ll. 13–18 counter-subject: stone Venice, ‘marble trunks out of stillness’;

  ll. 19–42 response: Cave of Nerea, seeing the principle of life even in stone by a ‘light not of the sun’ (meaning the light of the mind?);

  ll. 43–55 development of 1st subject: Zagreus & Co. in full light;

  ll. 56–7 the keynote image as central pivot: ‘the great alley of Memnons’ where the stone sings when the first light strikes it;

  ll. 58–84 development of counter-subject: an alley of cypress, then stone Venice and its crafts by torch-light;

  ll. 85–103 variation on the main theme
: envisioning gods in their splendour;

  ll. 104–12 repeat of counter-subject: the stone place, unliving and deadly;

  l. 113 resolving chord: ‘Sunset like the grasshopper flying’—the live creature flares crimson for its moment in the air.

  The whole canto is a musical composition of images and their tensile associations, formulated in firm rhythmic phrases, and organized into a complex which calls for contemplation, not monolinear explication. The ear, the inner eye, and the intelligence are all engaged here, and the contemplation needs to be just as active as the composition in envisioning and critically discriminating one image against another, the oak woods on the green slope against the forest of marble, the sea cave shaped and coloured by waves against the still waters reflecting ‘Dye-pots in the torch-light’. From this process a definite structure will emerge, amounting overall to a setting of natural energies against artefacts—against even beautiful artefacts. The canto itself asks to be taken not as an aesthetic object but as an act of mind, an act, that is, of the hearer’s and reader’s mind as much as of the poet’s. Further, this act is necessarily critical, judgemental, though not according to any code. The discriminations are based upon the simpler and fundamental preference for energies in action as against stasis, for ‘Zagreus’ against ‘arbours of stone’.

  The final canto of the first thirty applies something of a reality check to that feeling for energies in action. It has Artemis/Diana damning things foul and ‘growne awry’, and complaining that because Pity preserves them ‘Nothing is now clean slayne | But rotteth away’. She would have only healthily growing trees in her forests, and would cut away all rotting and dead wood. In that spirit Venus (the canto implies) should not keep old Vulcan’s embers warm, but play with young Mars instead; and there is something terribly wrong in young King Pedro’s enthroning beside him his murdered and long dead bride.

  Though she may seem opposed to life-giving Zagreus/Dionysos, ruthless Artemis would also serve the life-principle, as surgery, and antibiotics, do. Or, as in the hell and Metevsky cantos, satire and realist writing would. Pound found the idea expressed in a Confucian ideogram, hsin1, which brought together ‘the growing tree…the orderly arrangement above it, and the axe for cutting away encumbrance’, and which meant ‘to cut down wood, to renew, to renovate’. Pound read the ideogram as MAKE IT NEW and adopted it as his emblem.

  Set with and/or against Venus and Pedro—how to discriminate here?—is the wicked Lucrezia Borgia, who was at least a force of nature in her time, manifesting (like Lorenzaccio de’ Medici in canto 5) a fearsome resolution. ‘Madame ῞ϒΛΗ’ she is called in the canto, that being the Greek, according to Pound, for ‘uncut forest, the stuff of which a thing is made, matter as a principle of being’. Defective as she was in intellectual and spiritual virtue, a real mafiosa, Lucrezia had yet the virtue of crude energy. And that, even as it subsists in a jungle wilderness, was affirmed as the ‘Basis of renewal’ in canto 20 following Nic d’Este’s breakdown into delirium. This would suggest that the renewing energies of a renaissance are not primarily spiritual or intellectual but are from the raw basis of life.

  Still, beyond the raw material of a Lucrezia there is the carving of it into intelligible forms, as in the cutting of letters for the printing of books—and as in the making out of such matters ‘something to think about | objects worth contemplation’.

  Literary relations old and new

  In January 1928 The Dial, in giving its annual Award to Pound, declared him ‘one of the most valuable forces in contemporary letters’. However Eliot, his old friend in letters, when invited to endorse the award was rather equivocal about Pound’s poetry and seemed intent on playing down its relevance. Under the heading ‘Isolated Superiority’, with his emphasis falling on the first of the two words, he granted that Pound was immensely influential, on account of his superior mastery of verse forms; and yet he had made no disciples, he claimed, because ‘one makes disciples only among those who sympathise with the content’, and with the ‘content’ of Pound’s poetry he himself was wholly out of sympathy, and so too, he appeared to assume, would be all the world. ‘I am seldom interested in what he is saying’, he wrote in his best putting down manner, ‘but only in the way he says it.’ Eliot knew perfectly well that this form/content dichotomy was untenable, that form, to be at all interesting, had to be the form of something of interest; but he was now attempting to criticize literature from the point of view of his Anglo-Catholic faith—in other words he was heresy-hunting—and what he was really after was ‘what does Mr Pound believe?’ Pound’s short answer to his inquisitor was, ‘read Confucius and Ovid’. In due course Eliot would declare him a heretic, a follower of alien gods, an outsider; and Pound would riposte that to return to the bosom of the one God of Judaeo-Christianity was to give up the struggle for enlightenment. Their differences now set such a distance between them intellectually.

  Yet they were not personally estranged. Pound could tell the American agent for The Exile that he was ‘on the best possible personal terms with Eliot, though our literary camps do not coincide’. He even tried to persuade Williams to send Eliot ‘a nice little note of welcome’ upon his appointment as Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard, hoping that opposition to what Eliot stood for ‘might be cordial and amiable’. ‘A difference of belief CAN among decent human beings be conducted’ with decency, he suggested. While he would have nothing to do with Eliot’s royalism and his Anglo-Catholicism, he could still recognize his literary discernment, ‘discriminating retroactive academicism’ though it might be, as solid enough to be worth rebelling against.

  Wyndham Lewis also cast off Pound intellectually in these years and did all he could to denigrate him as a poet. In 1927, in his short-lived magazine The Enemy, and then in his book Time and Western Man, he put Pound down as a kind-hearted, well-meaning ‘revolutionary simpleton’. His poems, he declared, were parasitic upon a romanticized past with which Pound was too much in love; and Pound simply did not have the intelligence and the originality to be the revolutionary modernist he set up to be. Lewis registered that he had been always generous and graceful to him personally, and had helped him out financially. He might have made more of Pound’s unflagging support for and promotion of his work, as in recommending him in the strongest terms to the new Guggenheim Foundation in 1925, but then he no longer wanted to be associated with him as an artist or writer. Pound was to him now ‘an intellectual eunuch’. The charge that he was altogether bound up with the past and incapable of understanding the present, let alone of grasping the enduring forms of things, would have touched Pound where he was most ambitious as a poet. Yet he took no offence. When his father showed concern Pound advised him, ‘Don’t worry about Lewis—all large fauna shd. be preserved.’ And he could say to Williams in 1929 that ‘ole Wyndham getting out and kussing everyone (me included)’ showed a ‘healthy tendency’. His devotion to what he thought Lewis’s best interests was unaffected, and he continued to count him as one of the ‘large and vivid mental animals’ of his generation who had saved him from feeling that he lived in an intellectual desert.

  There remained Joyce from his wartime vortex, and here it was Pound who became disaffected. He declined to sign a protest against the pirating of Ulysses in America on the ground that the protest should be directed, not against the unscrupulous publisher, but against the copyright and decency laws which gave him his opportunity. He may have been right in principle, but Joyce felt it as a personal disloyalty. More serious was Pound’s making nothing whatever of a fragment of Work in Progress Joyce had asked him to read. ‘Nothing short of divine vision or a new cure for the clapp can possibly be worth all the circumambient peripherization’, was the verdict he promptly returned. And that remained his judgment upon what became Finnegans Wake. In 1933 he pronounced it deficient in awareness of what was going on in the contemporary world—in the operations, for example, of ‘the network of french banks and international munition sellers’—and to
be therefore not the work of a great writer. ‘I never had any respect for his common sense or for his intelligence’, he wrote in a review published in Paris in 1931, ‘I mean general intelligence, apart from his gifts as a writer’. Joyce, so far as Pound was concerned, was now history.

  Pound’s relations with Yeats were at once closer and more antagonistic than with the men of his own generation. In 1928 Yeats and his wife, Dorothy’s close friend George, decided to spend much of each year in Rapallo and took an apartment there. ‘I shall not lack conversation’, Yeats reflected after an hour on Pound’s rooftop listening to his efforts to lay out the system of his ‘immense poem’. He seems to have felt a need to make up his mind about Pound, ‘whose art is the opposite of mine, whose criticism commends what I most condemn, a man with whom I would quarrel more than with anyone else if we were not united by affection’. The affection shows in his account of going out with Pound into the seafront garden at night where Pound would call the cats of Rapallo and feed them bones and pieces of meat and relate each one’s history. Yeats’s narrative, however, turns to reflection upon the scene, and he thinks that really Pound has no fondness for cats but feeds them out of some general pity for the outcast and oppressed; and that same pity, or ‘hysteria’, he suggests, may be what inclines him in his criticism to become violent against injustice. In the same way there is a sceptical undercurrent subverting his account of Pound’s explanations of how he was structuring the cantos. The whole poem when complete, he reports, will ‘display a structure like that of a Bach Fugue’; but then he puts in a series of negatives, ‘There will be no plot, no chronicle of events, no logic of discourse’, no ‘conventions of the intellect’ at all. A footnote draws in Lewis’s attack on Pound’s art in Time and Western Man, saying that it ‘sounds true to a man of my generation’ that ‘If we reject, [as Lewis] argues, the forms and categories of the intellect there is nothing left but sensation, “eternal flux”’. The footnote is qualified by the recognition that ‘all such rejections stop at the conscious mind’; but Yeats does not follow through to the corollary that there may be orders other than the conscious mind’s logic. By 1936 these reflections in Rapallo had hardened into unqualified judgements. ‘Ezra Pound has made flux his theme’, Yeats stated flatly in the Introduction to his Oxford Book of Modern Verse: 1892–1935, ‘plot, characterization, logical discourse, seem to him abstractions unsuitable to a man of his generation’. And in consequence, ‘Like other readers I discover at present merely exquisite or grotesque fragments.’ As for his work as a whole, Yeats now found ‘more style than form’ in it; and then that its sometimes noble style