Ezra Pound: Poet

by A. David Moody

  is constantly interrupted, broken, twisted into nothing by its direct opposite, nervous obsession, nightmare, stammering confusion; he is an economist, poet, politician, raging at malignants with inexplicable characters and motives, grotesque figures out of a child’s book of beasts. This loss of self-control, common among uneducated revolutionists, is rare—Shelley had it in some degree—among men of Ezra Pound’s culture and erudition.

  Yeats’s baffled account of the cantos shows how very far beyond his comprehension they were; but his views on both the cantos and Pound in general were becoming commonplace.

  Pound was irritated by Yeats’s negativity towards his work to the extent of saying that Yeats would not know ‘a fugue from a frog’. He may also have been reassured by it. The true revolutionary finds confirmation of his project in the resistance it provokes. At the least he must accept that it is in the nature of things that those who stand by the established order will put down any nascent new order as disorderly; and that a liberation from convention will be felt by the conventional as a loss of control. Any genuine intellectual revolution will be, according to the received forms of reason and logic, irrational, illogical, and a menace to society. Only those who have a vital interest in changing the existing social and intellectual order are likely to respond positively to a radically new way of thinking.

  Ford could accept in his breezy way that ‘Melopoeia, Phanopoeia and the rest of the screw-wrenches and claw-hammers of Mr Pound’s engineering bench are merely his formidable tools for monkeying with the screw-nuts of human consciousness’. That, after all, was what good writing did—monkeyed with human consciousness! It was Williams, though, almost alone of Pound’s friends and contemporaries, who really took up the radical challenge of the cantos fearlessly and without prejudice. He perceived that in them the intelligence was seeking to penetrate ‘a closed mind which clings to its power’, and that in order to do this it had to ‘move…away from the word as symbol toward the word as reality’. ‘The word as symbol’ would have been aimed at Yeats and at Eliot, and at one tendency of English poetry; and it would have been aimed through them at those habits of ‘logical discourse’ which serve to maintain the hold of the closed mind on language. Among those habits would be such preconceived ‘forms and categories of the intellect’ as Eliot’s ‘belief’, and Yeats’s ‘plot and character’. There would also be the poets’ habit of glancing off things in themselves into subjective associations, of thinking ‘what is it like’ and thus avoiding the challenge to observe exactly what it is and does; and there would be the related habit of thinking ‘what does it stand for’ and thus thrusting off into abstraction and generality. The opposing term, ‘the word as reality’, would have had behind it ‘the principal move in imaginative writing today’—Williams might as well have said in American writing—for which his own favoured formulation was ‘no ideas but in things’; and for which there was also Wallace Stevens’s ‘not ideas about the thing, but the thing itself’—Stevens’s ‘thing’ being invariably and overtly the thing in the mind; and of course there was Pound’s own ‘direct treatment of the “thing”, whether subjective or objective’. This was a move to reform the language in poetry in order to free the mind from mediating preconceptions and conventions and to open it to a more direct apprehension of the facts of its world. Of necessity the process of forming a new intelligence of things involved breaking up the existing frame of mind.

  Pound was far from being alone or ‘isolated’ in this intellectual revolution. Williams and Wallace Stevens and Marianne Moore, each in their own way, were committed to it. And a new generation of poets was going on from them in pursuit of ‘the revolution of the word’, some of them even as, loosely speaking, disciples of Pound. The most advanced of these was Louis Zukofsky. 2 Zukofsky submitted his deeply unconventional ‘Poem Beginning “The”’ for publication in The Exile in August 1927, and Pound accepted it immediately as ‘First cheering mss. I have recd. in weeks, or months’. That was the beginning of a warm and sustained literary relationship, in which Pound encouraged and gave confidence to Zukofsky as he went beyond Pound on his own line of invention, while Zukofsky was ready to acknowledge Pound as his father in poetry, as Browning had been Pound’s, without ever turning Oedipal on him. The basis of their relationship was a common understanding of what poets could and should be doing in their particular world and time.

  In a review of cantos 1–27 published in 1929 Zukofsky took in his stride a number of things which other readers were balking at. There was the ‘problem’ of Pound’s mixing up times and places and persons without regard to where historians had shelved them, as in his shifting straight from Odysseus to Sordello, from Proteus to the Dogana’s steps in Venice, and from Sigismondo Malatesta in Rimini to Baldy Bacon in New York. How was a reader supposed to know where he was! But to Zukofsky Pound could do this quite safely ‘because all new subject matter is ineluctably simultaneous with “what has gone before”’—that is, it is so in the mind thinking these things. In the mind, ‘the living them at once…is as much a fact as those facts which historians have labelled and disassociated’. The poet’s business, Zukofsky implied, was with the particular facts actually present to the mind, lived facts bound up with their historical and human contingencies yet still free from the arbitrary constructions of historians or of any other authorities. In the perspective of the poetic mind Dionysos might be nearer than Odysseus, and Confucius might be a contemporary. On a deeper level, an inferno, a purgatorio, and a paradiso could be realized as states of the intensely observing mind and be manifest ‘as hate, comprehension and worship rather than as religious geometry’; and these states, moreover, could be ‘continually intersecting’. It was evident to Zukofsky as to few others that it was those states of mind and those emotions—hate, comprehension, and worship—which were the driving force of the cantos, and the organizer of form in them. Certainly, he did not find them formless or incoherent. In the preface to his ‘Objectivists’ Anthology he judged them ‘the greatest poem of our time’. And he dedicated the anthology to Pound as ‘still for the poets of our time | the | most important’.

  Pound did not want to ‘make disciples’. He wanted the new generation to ‘make it new’ in their own way, and as his influence grew he used it to urge the young to organize themselves and make their own revolution. In December 1931 he told Zukofsky to pay no attention to his doubts about whether A could be sustained as a long poem. ‘Every generation has to do something its granpap can’t quite make out’, he wrote, ‘If you think you are right, go ahead, and don’t listen to me or any of yr/ other damnd ancestors.’ He could see that Zukofsky was ‘working out a new musical structure’, ‘an abstracter kind of poesy than my generation went in for’, and that he needed to concentrate on his ‘own aesthetic’. ‘There is no REASON’, he wrote. ‘why I shd. be able to be any more use to you (as critic) 1930 to 1950 than yeats to me 1910 to 1930.’

  At the same time he placed remarkable faith in Zukofsky as an editor of the new generation—remarkable because until then he had never trusted anyone’s judgement but his own. In the fall of 1930 he persuaded Harriet Monroe to have Zukofsky edit an ‘Objectivists’ number of Poetry. (After the event she noted how in ‘the arrogance of youth’ he had swept away all the poets she had celebrated in Poetry; yet she still bravely offered ‘the glad hand to the iconoclasts’ who had ‘resisted and overthrown’ numerous tyrannies, among them ‘the tyranny of the comma, the capital, the verb, the sentence, of syntax, so long sacrosanct’.) Pound ‘gave over to younger poets the space offered him’. He also lavished advice in a series of long letters—four in as many days in October—on what should and should not be included, all the while protesting that he did not want to ‘insert my point of view’. Zukofsky was urged to ‘produce something that…will stand against Des Imagistes’ and emphasize ‘progress made since 1912’; he should ‘give your decade’, ‘make it a murkn number’, and aim for ‘the DRIVE | or driving force or xpression
of same’. ‘AND the verse used MUST be good. | preferably by men under 30.’

  Pound was constantly telling young editors and writers to organize themselves into groups. ‘A group is very useful, for gathering information, etc., both enlightenment, and stimulus to action,’ he advised Zukofsky in August 1928. He was urging him to ‘form some sort of gang’ around the idea of getting interesting books printed and distributed ‘without too damnd much bother’ from commercial considerations; and, secondly, of mounting ‘simultaneous attacks in as many papers as poss. on abuses definitely damaging la vie intellectuelle’. ‘Find some cheap restaurant and dine together once a week’, he wrote; ‘make a NEW grouping’; ‘avoid tired and worn out personalities’, also ‘definite party men (like Mike Gold)’; ‘NOT too many women, and if possible no wives’; ‘got to have a busy man’; ‘must have some access to journals’—and so on, at length. ‘Always 60% of group duds’, he acknowledged, ‘but it don’t matter’. Zukoksky dutifully contacted some of Pound’s nominations, but no group materialized as a result. He, and the other Objectivists, were not group minded.

  In these years Pound was in touch with any number of little and mostly fugitive magazines, with New Review (Americans in Paris), Blues (Mississippi), Contempo (North Carolina), Morada (New Mexico), New Masses (New York), Front (The Hague), Bifur (Paris), Variétés (Brussels), Stream (Melbourne), Midland (Iowa), Frontier (Montana); and with the ‘most solid’ of the small magazines, Hound and Horn (Cambridge, Mass.), which saw itself as a successor to The Dial. ‘Every generation or group must write its own literary program’, he told Charles Henri Ford, editor of Blues—and then asked him to print Pound’s own ‘Program’ as enclosed. However, he was not expecting the editor to agree with it. ‘My son’, he wrote to another editor, Lincoln Kirstein of Hound and Horn, ‘elucidate thine own bloody damn point of view by its contrast to others, not by trying to make the others conform.’ What he wanted was some definite point of view with the drive to make its impact. It was always time for some new ‘group move’ to be made, ‘to stir up the animals and in general put some life into the “corpse”’, i.e. into the US body politic and its culture.

  Pound had his reasons for investing so much energy in advising, encouraging, and hectoring the editors of little magazines for very little measurable return. There was the ‘need for intellectual communication unconditioned by considerations as to whether a given idea or a given trend in art will “git ads” from the leading corset companies’. And there was the fact, as he had observed over twenty years, that

  The work of writers who have emerged in or via [the impractical or fugitive] magazines outweighs in permanent value the work of the writers who have not emerged in this manner. The history of contemporary letters has, to a very manifest extent, been written in such magazines.

  Big magazines with their heavier ‘overheads’ could not ‘afford to deal in experiment’. There had to be little magazines if there was to be uncommercial new writing. The revolution depended on them.

  Towards the end of 1926 Pound was considering starting up an independent little magazine of his own. He had a publicity card printed on which he declared,

  EXILE will appear three times per annum until I get bored with producing it. It will contain matter of interest to me personally, and is unlikely to appeal to any save those disgusted with the present state of letters in England…

  To Aldington he added that its existence would be justified by ‘mss.…which cdn’t appear elsewhere’. To John Price, who was helping to launch the magazine in America, he was more ambitious, telling him that his ‘new show ought to bring force to a focus’. He was thinking back to the ‘push that was in the ideogram: Joyce–Lewis–Eliot–E.P. in 1917’; but he had to admit that any force equivalent to that ‘“vortex” doth NOT at the present date yet appear’. That was on 12 January 1927. Just a week later he was persuaded ‘to go ahead AT ONCE’ by John Rodker’s ‘novel or “nouvelle”’, Adolphe 1920: ‘The Rodker is a definite contribution to literature, and it is the quality of that and nothing else that has decided me,’ he told Price.

  Adolphe 1920 took up two-thirds of Exile no. 1 (‘primavera | 1927’), was continued in no. 2 (Autumn 1927), and concluded in no. 3 (Spring 1928). It gave one answer to Pound’s wondering what could be done in prose after Ulysses. Along with it Pound published in the four numbers of Exile quite a miscellany of other prose, most of it realism by Americans about Americans, with Robert McAlmon’s ‘Truer Than Most Accounts’ the longest and most impressive. No. 3 contained mainly verse: two of Yeats’s new poems, ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ and ‘Blood and the Moon’; Zukofsky’s long and strikingly innovative ‘Poem Beginning “The”’; a substantial part of Pound’s own ‘Canto XXIII’; and then, after these most advanced poems of the day, twenty-five pages featured R. C. Dunning’s finely crafted and charmingly old-fashioned prose and poems. William Carlos Williams’s The Descent of Winter, a notebook sequence in verse and prose, took up forty pages of no. 4. There was more prose and verse from Zukofsky, poems by Carl Rakosi, and a piece by McAlmon on (and against) Gertrude Stein. The remaining forty-odd pages contained various editorial comments and short articles by Pound which he had had to hold over from the other numbers.

  There had been no contributions from Joyce, Lewis, Eliot, or Ford; but then their work was appearing elsewhere. The justification of the short-lived magazine, on Pound’s own terms, would have been its publishing Rodker’s Adolphe 1920, Williams’s The Descent of Winter, and above all its introducing Zukofsky’s new poetic. Beyond that the remarkable thing is that Pound for once had no defining programme or principle in mind, and no idea of organizing a literary movement. His editorial choices do seem to have been governed simply by what interested him personally, namely realism both objective and subjective, experiment and innovation, and the condition of America. And his prose blasts, which one would expect to have been directed towards bringing his chosen forces into some particular focus or vortex, were directed instead towards other preoccupations and a distinctly non-literary agenda.

  In the sphere of action

  When he accepted the Dial Award in 1928 Pound said that it would have to be for his verse, since his prose was ‘mostly stop-gap; attempts to deal with transient states of murkn imbecility or ignorance’. ‘Occasionally one has to kick a traffic cop. (verbally)’, he had told John Price, ‘My verbal boot has cleared a few spaces. The “prose” if you want to call it that belongs to the sphere of action, not to “art and letters”.’ He had of course written no end of ‘critical prose’ in the sphere of ‘art and letters’ but that was intended simply ‘to make people think’. Now his ‘social or political prose’ was meant ‘to make people act’, like Lenin’s short and effective speeches which helped get the Russian Revolution going in 1917. Its function was to get across some basic, ‘root’ idea that would stir people into action, ‘preferably after they have been booted into thinking’, against the unenlightenment and oppression of the moment.

  He was not unaware that such prose was a deflection, for the artist, into agitation and propaganda—a deflection, for him, from poetry into agitprop. In ‘Dr Williams’ Position’ (1928) he explicitly contrasted himself with Williams in this respect. Whereas he could not ‘observe the nation befouled by Volsteads and Bryans without anger’, or ‘see liberties that have lasted for a century thrown away for nothing…without indignation’, Williams could contemplate such things without feeling driven to immediate action. ‘Where I want to kill at once’, Pound wrote, Williams would meditate on his dissatisfactions and not be goaded into ‘ultra-artistic or non- artistic activity’.

  Pound really did believe in the efficacy of indignation and disgust. ‘Improvements in human conditions are mainly due to disgust,’ he told a ‘lady from Omaha’ who appeared to be calling for a more tolerant disposition towards ‘public imbecility’. ‘America lacks it’, i.e. disgust, he lamented, ‘oh, abysmally lacks it!’ ‘Personally’, he declared, ‘I experience strong
desire to annihilate certain states of mind and their protagonists.’ What that often meant in practice, however, was merely a rhetoric of cussing and calling out, as in this ‘lyric’ response to a request for his autograph from Judge Beals of the Supreme Court in the state of Washington:

  Damnation to bureaucrats

  Damn the betrayers of the national

  constitution. Hell take the

  souls of Wilson & the flea-headed

  Coolidge.

  God DAMN those responsible

  for copyright evils, passport

  idiocy, red tape,

  article 211 of penal code made

  by gorillas for the further stultification