Ezra Pound: Poet

by A. David Moody

  The ‘China Cantos’ told the story, for the benefit of Pound’s Europe and America, of how an enlightened idea of government persisted in China through several millennia—the idea that the government of the people should be for the good of the people, with the correlatives that those in office should not be self-serving, and that private greed should be constrained in the public interest. The moral of the story would be that while this idea of good government had been tried out and proved practicable time and time again, its being put into practice depended always upon there being governors ‘who had responsibility in their hearts and willed the good of the people’.

  This fairly elementary lesson in the fundamental principle of Western democracy has been well taken by some but by no means by all. For Robert Fitzgerald, the translator of Homer and Virgil, Pound’s rendering of China’s entire dynastic history was ‘one of [the poem’s] most sustained and fascinating stretches’, making palpable in elaborate metre and rich imagery ‘the essentials: whatever in men, deeds and policies casts light on the practice of wise government.’ George Dekker wrote that for him ‘this survey of the human condition and the bases of humane government’ was ‘more moving and more instructive than Milton’s story of mankind’. But Randall Jarrell, in 1940 a brilliant young poet and critic, complained of ‘the monotonous didacticism’ and declared the history ‘almost unreadable’. ‘Unreadable’ is of course a common way of saying, ‘I can’t read them’, but Jarrell would not be alone in saying that of these cantos. Some would say worse. ‘There is no alternative’, declared Donald Davie, a devoted Poundian in his way, ‘to writing off this whole section of Pound’s poem as pathological and sterile’.

  Part of Davie’s problem was that he could not follow Pound’s method of making music of history. Failing to make out that the detail of Hoang Ti ‘contriving the making of bricks’ was one note in a progression of cultural achievements, he looked for an explanation in terms of Pound’s supposed disapproval of bricks as a building material, and when that didn’t work concluded that Pound’s selection of detail was ‘wholly arbitrary’. What made Davie altogether lose patience was the way ‘the non-Confucian (Buddhist and Taoist) influences on Chinese history are consistently condemned in strident language’. Others have found this problematic. Hugh Kenner, in an otherwise illuminating chapter of The Pound Era, was struck by the apparent contradiction between Pound’s going along with the Confucian historians’ wholly negative view of Taoists while endorsing the other Confucian books in which Confucian thought is infused with Taoism. The paradox is readily resolved if only one remembers, as it is essential to remember, that the ‘China Cantos’, like the Comprehensive Mirror, are a rather specialized guide for governors, and that the defining virtue of the good governor is that his will is unswervingly directed to the welfare of his people. When it is government that is in question it is only reasonable to insist that a man who would rather be writing contemplative poems, and painting distant lakes and mountains, lacks that particular direction of the will and is therefore not fitted for the active life of government.

  Two books for governors: (2) cantos 62–71

  If we are a nation, we must have a national mind.—EP

  John Adams, in Pound’s vision of him in cantos 62–71, was an exemplary governor, but more than that, he was to America what Confucius was to China, the man who most enlightened and formed the nascent mind of his nation. He did this, as Confucius and his followers had done it, by gathering together, and digesting and refining into clear principles, the tradition of common law and of natural law available to him; and by working out how the powers inherent in English law could be made to serve the cause of American independence. In his writings he defined in exact terms the ideas that would become, in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, the new nation’s animating and governing principles. Then, as a practising lawyer and statesman he carried those principles into action, and did this so effectively that he, more than any of the other founding fathers, is to be honoured, so these cantos would have it, as the progenitor of a free and democratic America—

  the clearest head in the congress

  1774 and thereafter

  pater patriae

  the man who at certain points

  made us

  at certain points

  saved us

  by fairness, honesty and straight moving (62/350)

  Pound’s part, as the poet of the cantos, is like that of the Confucian scholars who kept alive in their own time and passed on to future generations the shaping idea of their civilization. His ‘John Adams Cantos’ are all at once an Analects or sayings of Adams, a Ta Hio or digest of his wisdom, a history book for the guidance of America’s governors, and a book of odes in which all this is given musical form. 3

  Pound’s method of composition, it does have to be recognized, is at its most disconcerting in these cantos. His notebooks and drafts show him skim-reading the ten volumes of the Works of John Adams, jotting down phrases and fragments, a half-line from here and a line or two from further on, and then typing up these bits and pieces into cantos, taking the fragments just as they came with little or no revision or rearrangement and with no respect for their original contexts. The result can seem to make, as Donald Davie thought, ‘a nonsensical hurly-burly of Adams’s life’. It helps, indeed it is probably imperative, to have at least a moderate knowledge of the received narrative of American history. Pound’s attitude would be that if his readers, especially his American readers, don’t already know in some detail the story of the founding of the United States then they should be driven to go and learn it. He is not going to tell over again the historians’ tale of what happened and who was who, being committed beyond that to drawing out of the historical record the active virtue of his protagonist. To that end he reads over the top of the plain sense of his source-materials, and picks out just the details, the sequence of notes as it were, that he can combine to create a new and deeper vision of Adams as a shaping force in the life of his nation.

  There is a five-part overall structure deriving from the arrangement of the Works of John Adams:

  1. an overview of Adams’s life—canto 62 with the first page of 63, drawn from the biography in volume 1 by his son John Quincy Adams and his grandson Charles Francis Adams;

  2. Adams’s own view of his life and public service (up to 1796 when he became president)—canto 63 through to the second page of 66, drawn from his diaries and autobiographical writings in volumes 2 and 3;

  3. his pivotal ideas of government as he wrote them out in his political essays—canto 66 through to the beginning of 68, from volumes 3, 4, and 6;

  4. the official record of his public service (from 1771 to the close of his presidency in 1801)—canto 68 through to the second page of 70, drawn from his official correspondence and papers in volumes 7–9;

  5. Adams’s retrospective views of his career, as in ‘the mirror of memory’—cantos 70 and 71, drawn from his private correspondence (up to 1818) in volumes 9 and 10.

  This arrangement provides a layering of different perspectives on certain episodes, and also a narrative progression from Adams’s beginnings as a young lawyer in Boston through to his last years when he was out of office.

  The theme of canto 62 is given in these early lines, ‘for the planting | and ruling and ordering of New England’, words from the charter granted by King Charles I in 1629 ‘TO THE GOVERNOR AND THE COMPANIE’ of the Massachusetts Bay Company. That is, the work John Adams is to be committed to in his own time, ‘planting and ruling and ordering’, in Massachusetts primarily, then increasingly for all the colonies. He is shown first arguing in a Boston case that the law, properly understood and applied, should be subject to reason and so should take account of human nature, of our emotions and passions; and yet at the same time it must be dispassionate, ‘not bent to wanton imagination and temper of individuals’. Next he is arguing for the natural rights and liberties of the colonists against the unlawful oppr
essions and tyrannies of the British parliament. ‘Are we mere slaves of some other people?’, he demands, as he makes the case against the colony’s judges being in the King’s pay; and Pound comments, ‘These are the stones of foundation |…| These stones we built on.’ From 1774 until Lexington, the first battle in the war for independence, he guides the public mind in the formation of self-governing state constitutions, and is recognized as the ‘Clearest head in the Congress’ as it moves reluctantly towards its declaration of independence and prepares for the war that will follow. ‘THUMON’ is Pound’s salute at that point, the Greek word meaning ‘that which animates, the breath, the energy, the force of mind and will’ which drove forward the revolution in the minds of the people and brought about the ‘Birth of a Nation’. Adams completes the process in Europe by securing diplomatic recognition of the United States of North America as a sovereign nation, and by obtaining the loans and treaties of commerce necessary for it to maintain itself as an independent and prosperous nation.

  Then ‘a new power arose, that of fund holders’. This was the enemy within, financial interests looking to profit from the banking system set up by Alexander Hamilton while he was Washington’s secretary of the treasury (1789–95), a system modelled upon the Bank of England and designed to allow the few fund-holders or private bankers to profit from the public credit while accumulating ‘perpetual DEBT’ to the nation. Adams had to contend throughout his presidency with the manoeuvres of Hamilton and his faction to entangle the United States in wars which would ‘create a paradise for army contractors’. Pound emphatically condemns Hamilton on his own authority, ‘(my authority, ego scriptor cantilenae)’, as ‘the Prime snot in ALL American history’, thus setting him up to be the anti-type of John Adams, the subverter of his ‘active Virtue’ and of the just order he had conceived and fought for.

  The cantos which give Adams’s own view of his part in winning independence for America run to twice the length of that first outline, twenty-one pages as against ten, and they give a much fuller and more complex narrative of the revolution that took place first in the mind and then in the state of the nation. The most significant new element, a theme which counterpoints Adams’s legal and political activity, is his appreciation of the abundance of nature, and of the agriculture and useful arts and manufactures which improve it. In canto 63 his following ‘the study | rather than the gain of the law’ is balanced by his noting Franklin’s care for ‘propagating Rhine wine in these provinces’ (63/352, 353). In the next canto he sketches an ideal scene in which the cultivation of nature and of the art of glass-blowing go together—

  Beautiful spot, am almost wholly surrounded by water

  wherein Deacon (later General) Palmer

  has surrounded himself with a colony

  of glass-blowers from Germany

  come to undertake that work in America, 1752,

  his lucerne grass

  whereof 4 crops a year, seed he had of Gridley of Abingdon

  about 70 bushels of 1/4th an acre of land

  his potatoes (64/355)

  A little later we have Adams improving his own land,

  lopping and trimming

  walnut trees, and for felling of pines and savins

  An irregular misshapen pine will darken

  the whole scene in some places (64/357)

  Those lines stand against, ‘we saw five boxes of dollars | going in a horse cart to Salem for Boston | FOR England’, an indication of how England’s interest is in taxing, not improving America. Adams manifests a growing concern for the useful arts by which Americans can make themselves independent financially as well as politically. He remarks that ‘in Connecticut every family has a little manufactury house | and make for themselves things for which they were used | to run into debt to the merchants’ (64/360). (Pound rhymes that with Adams himself proving a homegrown match for the English in law.) Then he is struck by such industry on a larger scale, ‘6 sets of works in one building, hemp mill, oil mill, and | a mill to grind bark for tanners’, also ‘a fuller’s | mill for both cloth and leather’ (65/365); and in 1776 he actively advances on that by having one of his Congressional committees resolve

  To provide flax, hemp, wool and cotton

  in each colony a society for furtherance

  of agriculture, arts, manufacturies

  and correspondence between these societies

  that natural advantages be not neglected (65/367)

  —and also that the colonies may be not dependent upon foreign manufactures.

  This second part of the decad closes with a diary entry made in 1796 when Adams was in waiting for the presidency. At this critical time, approaching the culmination of his political career, he presents himself as at home on his farm harvesting what he had cultivated—one is reminded of the austere Roman general Cincinnatus who was found ploughing when the call came to assume supreme command and save Rome from its enemies—

  July 18th , yesterday, mowed all the grass in Stony Hill field

  this day my new barn was raised

  their songs never more various than this morning

  Corn by two sorts of worm

  Hessian fly menaces wheat

  Where T. Has been trimming red cedars

  with team of 5 cattle brought back 22 cedars (66/381)

  Breaking into this pastoral episode with its counterpoint of abundance and blight there is talk of the forthcoming election, and pressure is put upon Adams to make Hamilton his Vice-President, Hamilton whose funding scheme menaced the nation’s harvest. ‘I said nothing’, Adams recorded, but he took Jefferson as Vice-President. He had observed in his time as minister in London what decadent ‘magnificence’ could come from a national debt such as Hamilton proposed to create—his account of this is in the passage immediately before that diary entry. Adams had made visits to country estates, Woburn Farm, Stowe, Blenheim, and among them ‘the seat of the banker Child’—

  three houses, in fact, round a square

  blowing roses, ripe strawberries plums cherries etc

  deer sheep wood-doves guinea-hens peacocks etc (66/381)

  This banker’s seat, with its three houses wonderfully circling the square, its stuffing of hothouse flowers and fruits, and its decorative deer and peacocks, is in every way the inverse of the rational and useful cultivation Adams practised and promoted in America. And it is the product of a financial and social system which greedily if not corruptly appropriates the natural wealth of the land for private luxury. Pound’s Adams takes his stand against all such hogging of harvest.

  The third part of the decad, an abstract of Adams’s arguments in his legal and political writings, has him making new the old laws of England by applying them to the unforeseen conditions of the American colonies, and then, after 1776, developing a system of law adapted to the new free and sovereign nation. He goes back to Magna Charta of 1215, and further back as far as ‘memory of man runneth…| Dome Book, Ina, Offa and Aethelbert, folcright | for a thousand years’ (67/387). He invokes the Bill of Rights won in the Glorious Revolution of 1688, when the English parliament deposed James II and brought in William of Orange to protect the rights of the people against the authoritarianism of the Stuarts. He discovers the neglected Act which protected American sailors from impressment into the English Navy. He fights the Stamp Act, which ‘wd/ drain cash out of the country’, and forces its repeal as ‘UNconstitutional’ (66/382). He exposes one scheme after another whereby parliament seeks to tax the colonies, and argues point by point from his law books for the rights and liberties of free men in their own country. All this he did ‘in the course of fifteen years…before Lexington’ to bring about the revolution ‘in the minds of the people’. Then it was time to seize the unique opportunity ‘to make election of government’. ‘When before’, Adams marvelled, ‘have 3 million people had option | of the total form of their government?’ He was ready with a plan, providing for a representative body which should be ‘in miniature a portrait of
the people at large’, with separation of ‘legislative, executive and judicial’ powers to ensure checks and balances, and with the general ‘happiness of society’ as its aim (67/391–4). From those ideas came the United States Constitution with this proud ‘Preamble’:

  We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquillity, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and to our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

  That the representatives of the people were of one mind in this foundation document was largely John Adams’s doing.

  The history books tell us that the Constitution sealed America’s victory in the war for independence, and laid down the laws by which it should govern itself into a glorious future. In Pound’s special version of the story the victory which it sealed was the one that had been fought and won by Adams, with his law-books for weapons along with his clear head and constant will. Yet there is in these pivotal cantos of the decad little sense of the drama of Adams’s legal battling, and the reason for this is that the story is told almost exclusively in his own words and from his own point of view. The essence of courtroom drama, and of legislative debates, is the clash of opposing arguments and interests with something vital at stake and with the outcome uncertain. Here, though, we have only one side of the argument, the side that won and no doubt had right on its side; but the opposing side, the ‘party for wealth and power | at expense | of the liberty of their country’, is allowed no voice or force in the argument and remains a silent shadow cast by Adams’s brilliance. Properly instructive as this may be, it is unlikely to move the American reader to a more passionate observance and defence of the Constitution.