Ezra Pound: Poet

by A. David Moody

  The Cantos, of course, were not designed to have immediate effect in ‘the sphere of action’. They belong to that other sphere of art in which Pound was a master of his medium. But he was not a master of the medium of political action. He was a more or less isolated individual, without a power base, without an organization, with no place in nor any leverage upon any political institution, with no political or diplomatic standing, without even an effective platform from which to hold forth. His prose ‘Poundings’ were scattered ineffectually among small magazines and the letters columns of newspapers, or were addressed as private instigations to senators, editors, authors, to anyone who caught his attention.

  The prose itself, his only instrument in the sphere of action, was often such as to antagonize rather than persuade. It was characteristically charged with anger, contempt, and the will to kill (verbally). ‘Certain kinds of mental slop, certain kinds of drivveling imbecility, do not survive…acquaintance with my better productions,’ he boasted in the New York Sun’s ‘The Bear Garden’ section under his own, possibly self-mocking heading, ‘That Messianic Urge’. At least one ‘public enemy’ did survive that attack, however, and counter-attacked the following week with a scornful dismantling of Pound’s person, works, and reputation. It was all in the spirit of a bear garden, full of ‘strife and tumult’, and signifying very little. Moreover, the more aggressive Pound became in his prose, the more applicable to himself was the distinction he made in a private letter to Mike Gold, the editor of New Masses. As against effective writing ‘where you are talking facts about what you know’, there was the quite distinct ‘mere blow off of egotism & irritation & impatience with everyone who don’t kowtow to your particular…set of ideas’. That was the sort of writing Pound could lapse into, and it was not the likeliest way to change or to improve anyone else’s mind, let alone to change the ways of governments.

  The merely egotistical sounding off in Pound’s more impatient activist prose, and its tendency to use language as a blunt instrument, must have been due to his feeling disempowered, to his inability to get an objective grip upon such complex actualities as the democratic process under capitalism and to act effectively upon them. It sounds like the protest of the individual who feels he must speak out but cannot make himself heard in the crowd. And here perhaps we come upon the solution to the nagging paradox of Pound being a passionate advocate of individuality and of the freedom of the individual, and yet being at the same time disposed to think better of dictatorship than of democracy. The powerless individual may look to an all-powerful individual to do what he would if only he could, and to manage the intractable masses who don’t want to know what’s best for them. It is individuality itself, when driven to desperation or carried to excess, that is the fraught bond between the free individual and the dictator.

  There is another paradox to be teased out, if it is not an irreducible contradiction. How could Pound be such a master of words in his art and yet so ill-use them in his activist prose? He was fully aware that ‘propagandist literature’ was not ‘serious literature’, and that it was only the latter which had the power to renovate minds and thence governments. He had defended Brancusi’s detachment from political action and insisted on the possibility of his saving the world ‘by pure form’. He insisted on that again in 1929 when he was translating Boris de Schloezer’s Igor Stravinsky for The Dial and was provoked into appending a striking note to the statement that ‘the classic work [of art] does not come back into life, its action remains purely aesthetic’. ‘So far as I can see’, he wrote,

  the setting up of such an [art-made] order comes back upon life very violently. The assertion or presentation of such an order in itself being the strongest possible attack on human imbecility, and the most effective means of disgusting the auditor with the idiocy that the millions of ape-men accept.—E.P.

  Now what is striking about this is the assertion of the power of pure art in the language of the crude propagandist. Even more striking is the attempt to conscript that power into the agitprop attack, as if the contemplative artist might after all be serving the murderous activist’s ‘ultra-artistic or non-artistic’ desires. Is it possible for the artist’s ‘rage for order’ to be at one with the activist’s rage to destroy whatever gets in the way of that order? They may have this in common, that both desire a right ordering of things. Yet their methods are so opposed that surely the negative must cancel out the positive, unless it be subordinated to the creative impulse. In the Cantos there is that subordination. But when one takes Pound’s writings as a whole, prose and poetry together, one is confronted by the unresolved coexistence in him of the will to create and the will to destroy. This has been seen as evidence of self-contradiction, even of a schizophrenic or split personality. We are accustomed to thinking in binary terms, either this or that, and have difficulty allowing for both at the same time. It is possible nevertheless to conceive of creation and destruction, or of the contemplative and the warring, as phases of the one life. I rather think that the evidence will increasingly require us to think of Pound as (like Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita) willing both destruction and creation, as being both a destroyer and a maker. It is a problematic combination, and often a tragic one.

  Cavalcanti: the intelligence of love

  In the autumn of 1927, along with his other activities, Pound was deepening his understanding of the poetry of Guido Cavalcanti (1250–1300), and especially of the difficult ‘Donna mi prega’, a philosophical canzone defining the intelligence that is born of love. In mid-September Pound was in Venice and mentioned in a letter to Dorothy in London that he was working on ‘Guido’. In October he mentioned in a letter to Olga in Paris that he was working on ‘Guido’s philosophy’, and had been finding out, mostly from Étienne Gilson’s book on medieval philosophy, about ‘natural dimostramento’. That was a phrase in ‘Donna mi prega’, which Pound would make much of. If it meant, as he took it to mean, ‘proof by natural reason’ or even ‘proof by experiment’, or still further ‘biological proof’, then it would show that Guido’s mind was not subject to the authority of medieval theology and to the syllogisms of Aquinas, as his young friend Dante’s was. His thinking about love would have instead the authority of knowing it truly ‘from nature’s source’.

  Pound was in Florence in November, studying early commentaries on Cavalcanti’s poetry in the libraries there, and ‘by miracle found and bought’ from Orioli for just 300 francs a copy of the 1527 (Di Giunta) first printed edition of his works. Shortly after he formed the intention of putting together a new edition ‘with full text in reproduction of original mss. etc.’ He submitted a proposal to T. S. Eliot at Faber & Gwyer for a book to have this title page:

  Guido Cavalcanti | Le Rime | His Poems | Critical Text, with Translation and Commentary and Notes by | Ezra Pound | with a Partial Translation of the Poems by D. G. Rossetti | and with 48 Reproductions of the More Important Codices | Giving a Full Text of the Works in Facsimile…

  ‘Specimen pages were prepared’, Gallup notes in his Ezra Pound: A Bibliography, ‘but it soon became evident that Pound’s stipulations as to type-size and the inclusion of additional material would make the book much too expensive for Faber and Gwyer to undertake.’ The small Aquila Press in London then agreed to take it over and in spring 1929 announced ‘a monumental and definitive edition of the works of Guido Cavalcanti’.

  Through 1928 and 1929 Pound worked away at his edition. In the libraries which held the early manuscripts—the Ambrosiana in Milan, the Capitolare in Verona, the Quirini Stampalia and the Marciana in Venice, the Riccardiana and Laurenziana in Florence, the Communale in Siena, the Vatican in Rome—he noted the variant readings and the explications of the various commentators. He marked up for the printer the translations of Cavalcanti in a 1908 Temple Classics edition of Rossetti’s Early Italian Poets—these were to go on the right-hand pages facing the originals. He translated ‘Donna mi prega’ for the first time, and devoted his commentary and notes to
elucidating it. This new work, the translation and commentary, appeared in sections in the Dial in March and July 1928, and, with the addition of ‘Guido’s Relations’ (from the Dial of July 1929), became the ‘Cavalcanti’ essay in Make It New and Literary Essays. The photographic reproductions of the most important manuscripts were commissioned, and the printing of what was now to be called ‘The Complete Works of Guido Cavalcanti’ was begun. Fifty-six pages were type-set by hand in a truly ‘monumental’ format and printed off, and then, in the summer of 1930, the Aquila Press failed.

  Pound recovered the five hundred or so sets of completed sheets, had the forty plates of reproductions printed off in Germany at his own expense, and paid Edizioni Marsano of Genoa to print the Italian text of Cavalcanti’s poems with the variant readings given as marginal glosses, and also to print the very detailed apparatus concerning the manuscripts. The new pages containing the Italian text were numbered 1 to 56, as were the fifty-six pages salvaged from the Aquila Press. Both sets of pages were bound with the apparatus (pages numbered I–XVI) and the plates (numbered 1 to 40) in stiff paper covers, clear red in colour, to make up the book published in January 1932 as Guido Cavalcanti Rime/Edizione rappezzata fra le rovine, that is, an edition patched together from the ruins. 3

  David Anderson records that Rime received good reviews in England and the United States, while ‘Italian scholarly journals failed to show any interest’. In Italy, apparently, only Mario Praz wrote on it at any length, ‘and he ridiculed its disorderly appearance and suggested that Pound was not a good philologist’. Pound’s meticulous work on the manuscripts seems not to have been taken into account by later editors. Étienne Gilson, reviewing the work in Eliot’s Criterion, welcomed it warmly as a critical edition in his first paragraph, and then disagreed at length and fundamentally with ‘the general interpretation of Cavalcanti which is everywhere implied’ in it. He agreed that the ‘Canzone d’amore’ was very obscure; but he also thought certain parts more intelligible and simpler in the original than in Pound’s version, and that the translation sometimes bore ‘no relation whatever to the text’. As for Guido’s philosophy, he feigned ignorance of it while asserting that it must have been simply what ‘was commonly known and accepted by any man who had attended schools in his time’. In short, writing as an orthodox authority on Scholastic philosophy, he could not see and was not even interested by what Pound wanted to make of the ‘Canzone d’amore’.

  Pound was attempting to recover that ‘very complicated structure of knowledge and perception, the paradise of the human mind under enlightenment’, which he believed ‘had run from Arnaut [Daniel] to Guido Cavalcanti’ but had been ‘hammered out of’ François Villon. The word ‘paradise’ in that sentence, it should be noted, is delimited by ‘knowledge and perception’ and by ‘the human mind’: it would be a paradise of the mind, not of an immortal soul.

  At the time of his first immersion in Cavalcanti, in 1910–12, Pound had celebrated him as a supreme ‘psychologist of the emotions’. He particularly valued Guido’s keen understanding and precise expression

  of pain itself, or of the apathy that comes when the emotions and possibilities of emotion are exhausted, or of that stranger state when the feeling by its intensity surpasses our powers of bearing and we seem to stand aside and watch it surging across some thing or being with whom we are no longer identified.

  None of that is what the word ‘emotions’ would ordinarily bring to mind, especially not in the context of love poetry. Well, yes, the pain of love is a commonplace. ‘Apathy’, however, and even more ‘that stranger state’ point away from the commonplace to what Pound noted in Cavalcanti’s ‘psychological’ ‘Ballata XII’, that Guido, ‘Exhausted by a love born of fate and of the emotions’, turns away to an intellectual love born out of that first love, and in this intellectual love ‘he is remade’, becoming another person.

  He is changed, as one might say after Eliot, from a man who suffers into a mind which contemplates. But without the initial and initiating emotions there would be no change. ‘It is only when the emotions illumine the perceptive powers that we see the reality’, Pound declared, and then added this further emphasis, ‘It is in the light of this double current that we look upon the face of the mystery unveiled.’ That it is a ‘double current’, with the emotions lighting up the perceptive powers and the clarified perceptions intensifying the emotions, means that the ‘new person’ formed of and by desire is the same lover only in a different state of being. It is not the orthodox case of the intellectual soul rising above the physical body. It is rather that the mind has come to know and to understand what the lover’s emotions have to tell of the nature of things. One might say that his emotions are what have made him intelligent. Pound, in Cavalcantian mode, would go further and say (with all that the words imply) that the intelligence that is born of love is the intelligence of creation itself.

  What Pound had made of Cavalcanti in 1910–12 was most fully worked out at that time in the part of his own Canzoni which followed a mystic cult of love from its origins in the rites of Persephone at Eleusis, through the fin amor of Provence, to its culmination in the poetry of Dante and Cavalcanti. ‘The Flame’ in that volume was a celebration of what he then understood to be the rite by which a follower of that cult, rapt in the ecstasy of sunlit nature, might find a new identity in the light that is the life of the world, and so pass beyond the love of mortals. When he returned to Cavalcanti fifteen years later he came at him rather through his philosophy. It is important to note, however, that he was coming at the philosophy ‘not as platonic formulation…but as psychology’. He was pursuing still a paradisal state of consciousness to be attained through the refinement of love. But he could speak of it now as a ‘super-in-human refinement of the intellect’, thus implying that it was a state of mind to be entered into through philosophy; and yet at the same time he maintained that this Cavalcantian paradise had been lost in the philosophical speculations of Cavalcanti’s time. The only way to resolve the apparent contradiction is to conclude that for Pound the philosophy does not matter, as Eliot could say at the heart of East Coker, ‘The poetry does not matter.’ That is, the philosophy is a means to an end beyond itself, not what the mind should remain caught up in. It is the attainment of the paradisal state of mind that matters, not the mere thinking about it, instrumental as that may be.

  In ‘Mediaevalism’ (1928), the first section of his ‘Cavalcanti’ essay, Pound set out to isolate the specific new quality or virtù which distinguished the medieval Tuscan poets from ‘the Greek aesthetic’ and also from the troubadours of Provence. The ‘Greek’ or ‘classic aesthetic’ he characterized as ‘moving toward coitus’ and ‘immediate satisfaction’. The troubadours had broken with that world by valuing ‘the fine thing held in the mind’ above ‘the inferior thing ready for instant consumption’. The Tuscan aesthetic went on from that to demand something more than the heartening image in the mind’s eye of the absent beloved. It cultivated ‘the residue of perception, perception of something which requires a human being to produce it—which may even require a certain individual to produce it.’ That involved ‘an interactive force’, and in that ‘interactive force’ was the Tuscan virtù.

  But what exactly is this ‘interactive force’? One gathers that it has to do with the ‘Effect of a decent climate where a man leaves his nerve-set open, or allows it to tune in to its ambience’, as Pound had tuned in (one reflects) to his ambience at Sirmione. Then there is ‘The conception of the body as perfected instrument of the increasing intelligence’, that is, as a receptive instrument. And what is to be received is ‘the radiant world…of moving energies’, of ‘magnetisms that take form’; a world in which things are perceived as radiant energies, in which light moves from the eye, and in which ‘one thought cuts through another with clean edge’. At the back of this there is the idea of light as informing every living thing. Pound cites Gilson’s summary of the thinking of Robert Grosseteste (c.1170–12
53) to the effect that light is an extremely rarefied physical substance which gives off of itself perpetually in every direction; and that it is the stuff of which all things are made, and their primal form. Pound read Cavalcanti’s ‘risplende in sè perpetuale effecto’, which he translated in canto 36 as ‘shineth out | Himself his own effect unendingly’, as identifying Love’s action with that of light; and thought it ‘quite possible that the whole of [“Donna mi prega”] is a sort of metaphor on the generation of light’. Love then, in the Canzone, is Light; and Light is Love, that which animates and moves desire and thence illuminates ‘the increasing intelligence’. The Canzone in Pound’s reading is altogether concerned with the formative action of light upon the mind in love, and with the mind’s interaction with it as it comprehends the light and reflects its shaping forms upon its world. At one point he questions the meaning of ‘intenzion’, asking does it mean ‘intention (a matter of will)? does it mean intuition, intuitive perception?’ He leaves the question open, but might well have answered it by referring to Dante’s line addressed to the spirits filled with love in his Paradiso, ‘Voi che intendendo il terzo ciel movete’—‘You who by understanding move the third heaven’. Those spirits are not only illuminated by the light of divine love but understand it, and understanding it they will its action upon their sphere.

  Pound quite deliberately stops short of any suggestion of Dante’s paradise of beatified souls, as does Cavalcanti’s Canzone. Its light is wholly natural, and works to perfect nature, and particularly to perfect natural intelligence. There is no hint of an immortal soul or of an eternal heaven, nor indeed of a Deity; and with those foundations removed Dante’s whole system, and the entire Catholic system, would fall apart. One is in another mind-set; one is in, roughly speaking, the modern mind—which is, presumably, what Pound meant when he observed that Cavalcanti was ‘much more “modern” than his young friend Dante Alighieri, qui était diablement dans les idées reçues’. As if to emphasize that difference Pound looked not to Aquinas but to Arab philosophers to help explicate the more difficult technical terms of the Canzone. In his copy of Ernest Renan’s Averroës et l’Averroïsme (Paris, 1925) he particularly noted passages concerning the active intellect and the passive intellect and their relations. One might roughly transpose that into what Coleridge, defining Imagination in his very different world and time, called ‘the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM’—that would be the active intellect—and the passive intellect would be its ‘repetition in the finite mind’ where it is ‘the living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception’. The Arab philosophers, in Renan’s account, sought the union of their receiving intelligence with the informing and shaping intelligence of the universe. One wrote, ‘the perfection of the rational soul is to reflect the universe’, meaning to reflect it by actively knowing its process. All agreed that this felicity was to be attained only in this life: there was no question for them of a paradise out of this world or anywhere save in the mind.