A Primer Of Ezra Pound

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A Primer of Ezra Pound

By M. L Rosenthal:

A Primer of Ezra Pound

Exploring Poetry (WITH A. j. M, SMITH)

A Primer of

EZRA POUND

l)y M. L. Rosenthal

The Macmillan Company New York 1960

M. L. Rosenthal 1960

All rights reservedno part of this book may be
reproduced in any form without permission in writ-
ing from the piiblishcr, except by a reviewer who
wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a
review written for inclusion in magazine or news-
paper.

First Printing

The Macmillan Company) New York
Rrett-Macmillan Ltd., Gait, Ontario

Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress catalog card mimber: 60-7281

Grateful acknowledgment is herewith made to The
Nation, in which a few pages of this loook appeared
in their original form; and to the following for per-
mission to quote from copyrighted publications:

New Directions and Arthur V, Moore The Cantos
of Ezra Pound, copyright 1934, 1937, 1940, 1948 hy
Ezra Pound; Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, all rights
reserved; and Pcrsonac: the Collected Poems of Ezra
Pound, copyright 1926 hy Ezra Pound.

New Directions and Faber & Paber, Ltd. Hugh
Kenner f The Poetry of Ezra Pound, all rights re-
served.

Random House, Inc. The Autobiography of Wil-
liam Carlos Williams, copyright 1948, 1949, 1951
by William Carlos Williams.

Contents

1. The Early Poetry i

2. Basic Frames of Thought 1 5

3. The Mauberley Sequence 29

4. The Cantos 42

5. Envoy 52

Selected Bibliography 54

The Early Poetry

Ezra Pound's career is so interlaced with the whole of
modern letters and politics that one might devote many
pages to it and never touch on his poetry. For a time at
least this man of genuine learning and humanity put his
great talents to the service of Mussolini and his Fascist party.
Yet long before, even while being attracted to ideas which
finally led him to this service, he had established himself
as a prophet of the open spirit. "My province/' he might
have declared, "is all creative thought," for he began early
to cultivate an eclecticism disciplined by rich understanding
of a number of living traditions. His mind and sensibilities
darted everywhere, and he encouraged many other writers
of promise, whether Communist, Bohemian, proto-Nazi,
or whatever, to do the best that was in them. His intel-
ligence, indeed, has been a flowering of Western self-

2 A PRIMER OF EZRA POUND

awareness, with life-bestowing and poisonous blossoms
intermingled, as if all the beautiful vitality and all the
brilliant rottenness of our heritage in its luxuriant variety
were both at once made manifest in it.

Therefore, despite the considerable attention paid him
by critics and scholars, relatively little has been said to
distinguish Pound the poet from Pound the thinker, propa-
gandist, and literary man of action. It is obvious, we must
grant, that poet and man are in the long run inseparable.
Nevertheless, the artists reputation has suffered from the
activist-thinker's vagaries and even from his achievements.
In the Cantos especially, that great and complex enterprise
of the last several decades, the two Pounds have interfered
with each other. The interference, perhaps inevitable, has
understandably confused all but the most devoted and
professionally informed readers and them also often enough.
Hence their laudable concern to explain his unorthodox
principles and his subtleties of method and allusion.

And yet this concern can be pushed too far. A normal
reader who undertook, simply and innocently, to read
Personae: The Collected Poems l from the beginning could
go quite a distance without having to scream for the police
or whistle for the experts. Here, among the poems written
before Pound was twenty-five, one finds many direct, musi-
cal, lively pieces of fresh excellence still. The first of them,
"The Tree," opens the book with a curious yet lucid
imaginative projection, one incidentally which augurs the
poet's later fascination with the motif of metamorphosis,
so vital to the Cantos:

I stood still and was a tree amid the wood,
Knowing the truth of things unseen before;
Of Daphne and the laurel bow
And that god-feasting couple old
That grew elm-oak amid the wold.

1 New York: Horace Liveright, 1926; New Directions, 1949. All
verse quotations, except from the Cantos, are from the 1949 edition.

The Early Poetry 3

The early poems, too, give frank evidence of his study of
the Provencal troubadours, and of Browning and his vigor-
ous, idiomatic roughnesses as well. Thus, "Na Audiart"
begins as pure song and word-play:

Though them well dost wish me ill

Audiart, Audiart . . .

But later in the same poem, we hear the unmistakable ring
of old R. B.:

Just a word in thy praise, girl,

Just for the swirl

Thy satins make upon the stair ....

Even these brief snatches, with their melodic variations
of line-length, their skillful play on certain vowels and
consonants, their certainty of phrasing, will show how
precocious a student of his masters Pound was. At this point
he was still in the grip of the late-Romantic tradition as it
had come to him by way of the British nineties. The themes
are all familiar: the sentimental egocentrism of the artist
in "Famam Librosque Cano"; the yearning for spiritual
freedom and the company of kindred sensibilities of "In
Durance" ("But I am homesick after mine own kind");
the mingled pathos, romance, and comedy of "Marvoil."
Even when he is most derivative and imitative, however,
Pound's style is charged with a certain essential, idiosyncratic
energy. Witness the boisterously insulting epithets of
"Marvoil":

All for one half-bald, knock-knee'd king of the Aragonese,
Alfonso, Quattro, poke-nose.

The best known of the earlier pieces, probably, are
"Sestina: Altaforte" and "Ballad of the Goodly Fere." In
"Altaforte," a work of pure exuberant bombast in a tricky
Provencal pattern, Bertrans de Born raves gorgeously of

4 A PRIMER OF EZRA POUND

war's delights and the swinishness of peace-lovers. "For the
death of such sluts I go rejoicing," he shouts, and Pound's
introduction to the poem has equal gusto: "Dante Alighieri
put this man in hell for that he was a stirrer up of strife.
Eccovi! Judge ye! Have I dug him up again?" The poem
is a brilliant, intentionally one-dimensional composition,
studded with clanging monosyllables that hammer out the
obsession of a blood-drunk brute. Bertrans' outcries are spec-
tacularly spondaic and alliterative. "Damn it all!" he bel-
lows; "all this our South stinks peace." His black piety is
uncompromising: "May God damn for ever all who cry
'Peace!' " He "prays" indiscriminately to Heaven and to
Hell, and with onomatopoeic fervor: "Hell grant soon we
hear again the swords clash!" Pound is said to have roared
out the "Sestina" in a Soho restaurant when it was first
written, shocking the genteel bourgeois patrons of the place.
Its self-evident technical virtuosity, praised highly by T. S.
Eliot among others, thus contributed incidentally and in a
small way to the disconcertment of British philistinism: one
of the poet's minor aims at least.

The much-anthologized, virile-posturing "Ballad of the
Goodly Fere" presents Jesus as "No capon priest" but a
"man o' men" especially fond of other "brawny men" and of
"ships and the open sea," a scornfully laughing Nietzschean
Robin Hood (with dashes of Whitman and Kipling) who
drives out the money-changers "Wi' a bundle o' cords swung
free." He resembles the risen Dionysus rather more than
the gentle Christ. Alien to gentility, he is of the implacable,
pre-Classical host of divinities:

I ha' seen him eat o* the honey-comb
Sin' they nailed him to the tree.

Though forced and overextended, the ballad illustrates
Pound's extraordinary ease with traditional forms and his
never-ending search for ways to bring these forms, and
traditional themes as well, into renewed if unexpected life.

The Early Poetry 5

He turns them to his own use, making a triumph of what
might otherwise he a mere exercise and creating, as the critic
Ronald Duncan has said of "Altaforte," "a boisterous vitality
within the confines of the form." 2

Pound gives his game away more vulnerably in
"The Flame," which reveals the depth and implications of
his commitment to medieval Provencal values as he found
them in Arnaut Daniel and others. 3 In the greatness of
Provence he found a reinforcement of the revived Ro-
mantic idealism he shared with Yeats and Joyce, among
many other writers. Indeed, "The Flame" begins as though
composed by Yeats, Joyce, and Pound in committee:

'Tis not a game that plays at mates and mating,

Provence knew;

'Tis not a game of barter, lands, and houses,

Provence knew;

We who arc wise beyond your dream of wisdom,

Drink our immortal moments; we "pass through."

We have gone forth beyond your bonds and borders,

Provence knew;

And all the tales of Oisin say but this:

That man doth pass the net of days and hours, . . .

While each of these three writers has a strain of unrelent-
ing materialism in his make-up, each has also this softer
idealism in his work, especially in his earlier writings. All
have shown enormous faith in the symbol-making power of
art as a gift enabling us to "pass through" toward the in-
effable. If eventually theirs is a secular way of thought, it
remains a secular religiosity which substitutes aesthetic
creativity for godhead. "Provence knew" that there is more
to love than its sensual and its socially practical aspects; the
added dimension, the "more," was the creation of the poetic

2 "Poet's Poet," in Ezra Pound, ed. Peter Russell (London: Peter
Nevill Ltd., 1950), p. 1 60.

3 See Ezra Pound, Literary Essays (Norfolk, Conn. : New Direc-
tions, 1954), pp. 91-200.

6 A PRIMER OF EZRA POUND

imagination. It was the troubadours who had made religious
vision of the profane, blasphemous rituals of the Court of
Love:

Search not my lips, O Love, let go my hands,
This thing that moves as man is no more mortal.

Certain passages in "The Flame" glow beyond the rest of
this uneven poem, with its sentimental spiritualities in awk-
ward places. (The passage just quoted is one illustration of
such bogging-down.) On the whole, though, it remains a
program-poem that is, one written primarily to clarify the
writer's perspectives to himself. Pound's craftsmanship comes
off better in the graceful "Ballatetta": a vision of the Beloved
in the best troubadour tradition, and without the overreach-
ing preachments of "The Flame." First we see her as a living
being, surrounded by an aureole that "doth melt us into
song." And thereupon the song itself takes over the poem:

The broken sunlight for a healm she beareth
Who hath my heart in jurisdiction. . . .

"Ballatetta" gives us one of the earliest of the shining
moments of exultant vision, suffused with imagery of light,
in Pound's poetry. Its success in adapting formal achieve-
ments outside the English tradition to the needs of our
language is directly related to his never-ending involvement
with problems of translation and his boldness in dealing
with them.

Perhaps, though, we should not speak of Provencal or any
other European poetry as "outside the English tradition." To
Pound as to Eliot "the tradition" is something antedating
and transcending any one national or linguistic segment of
it. At one time, after all, he had been a student of great
promise in the Romance languages, a graduate fellow and
instructor at the University of Pennsylvania. His purpose in
first going abroad in 1906 had been to gather materials for
a doctoral dissertation on Lope de Vega. It was natural for

The Early Poetry 7

him, as natural as for any person of effective education, to
think of tradition not as narrow conventionalism but as a
driving force in the modern spirit: "a beauty which we pre-
serve and not a set of fetters to bind us," he wrote in ipis- 4
But it took rare understanding to see just how this force can
leap across the barriers of language and in what sense, ex-
actly, the melic poets of seventh and sixth century Greece
(B.C.) and the Provencal poets might be considered the
founders of the two great lyric traditions of the West. "From
the first arose practically all the poetry of the 'ancient world/
from the second practically all that of the modern." r> In botrt
these great sources "the arts of music and verse were most
closely knit together" and "each thing done by the poet had
some definite musical urge or necessity bound up within it."
Thus, Pound's interest in such poets as Sappho, Arnaut
Daniel, Cavalcanti, and Dante (the full list goes beyond
Greek and Provencal poetry; an entire curriculum of reading
is outlined in The ABC of Reading and elsewhere) grows
out of a need for models of organic composition. That is, he
sought poetry in which sound, sense, and image must be
functions of one another. Like Picasso with his thorough
classical grounding, Pound has made his knowledge of tradi-
tion count toward the originality of his own artistry. One of
the great experimentalists of our century is thus, almost in-
evitably, in another sense the foremost traditionalist of our
day. Pound's essay on Cavalcanti (which he developed and
modified from 1910 to 1931, maintaining a constant goal
while his writing was undergoing its most important
changes) defines the kind of poetic vision he has always
been after:

We appear to have lost the radiant world where one thought
cuts through another with clean edge, a world of moving
energies . . . , magnetisms that take form, that arc seen, or
that border the visible, the matter of Dante's paradiso, the

4 Ibid., p. 91.

5 Ibid.

8 A PRIMER OF EZRA POUND

glass under water, the form that seems a form seen in a mirror.
. . . Not the pagan worship of strength, nor the Greek percep-
tion of visual non-animate plastic, or plastic in which the being
animate was not the main and principal quality, but this
'harmony in the sentience* or harmony of the sentient, . . .
where stupid men have not reduced all 'energy' to unbounded
undistinguished abstraction.

For the modern scientist energy has no borders, it is a shape-
less 'mass' of force; even his capacity to differentiate it to a
degree never dreamed by the ancients has not led him to think
of its shape or even its loci. The rose that his magnet makes
in the iron filings, does not lead him to think of the force
in botanic terms, or wish to visualize that force as floral and
extant. . . .

A medieval 'natural philosopher' would find this modern
world full of enchantments, not only the light in the electric
bulb, but the thought of the current hidden in air and in
wire would give him a mind full of forms. . . . The medieval
philosopher would probably have been unable to think the
electric world, and not think of it as a world of forms. ... Or
possibly this will fall under the eye of a contemporary scientist
of genius who will answer: But, damn you, that is exactly
what we do feel; or under the eye of a painter who will answer:
Confound you, you ought to find just that in my painting. 6

Now all these ideas about past and present, about science
and Provence and the neglected universe of forms, converge
for Pound in certain crucial attitudes toward craftsmanship.
The poet's created world is, ideally, that of Dante: a
"radiant" world in which "one thought cuts through another
with clean edge, a world of moving energies." Whatever the
feelings and ideas he expresses, they must be embodied in a
form precise in outline but crackling with the living con-
ception which has given them birth. As these attitudes de-
velop, Pound begins to lay enormous emphasis on the single
image, insisting that properly understood it "is an intel-
lectual and emotional complex in an instant of time" and
becoming the dynamic instigator of the Imagist movement.

G lbid., pp. 154-155-

The Early Poetry 9

The classic example of Imagism is generally held to be
H. D.'s "Oread," but Pound's own "In a Station of the
Metro" is a richer, more compressed example:

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

The effect of this pure, direct image of fragile, destroyed
beauty against its dark background the aftermath of a rain-
storm, perhaps is compounded of a fusion of numerous
nearly invisible "hints": first, a combined affection, helpless
"appreciation," and dismay at all these glimpses of faces
("apparitions") in their subway-world of semidarkness; at
the same time, a related, elusive suggestion of shades of the
damned in Avernus; and along with these impressions, an
implied criticism of modern civilization.

Here in miniature is the visualization of "force in botanic
terms," the provision of "borders" to define the "shape" and
"loci" of contemporary experience. Another example, com-
pletely removed this time from a particular urban setting yet
bearing much the same meaning, is the poem "April":

Three spirits came to me

And drew me apart

To where the olive boughs

Lay stripped upon the ground:

Pale carnage beneath bright mist.

As in the "Metro" poem, the final line brings the whole
to a sharp point of pregnant concentration. (In both poems,
incidentally, Pound uses the consonants p and fo to help pre-
pare us for, and then to plunge us into, this intensification at
the end.) The "stripped" boughs beneath the blossom-laden
tree arouse the same kind of compassion that the blown
petals stuck on the slick black bough do in "Metro." The
"spirits" resemble the faces in the "apparition" there, and the
"bright mist" of flowers suggests something infinitely delicate
and desirable, now lost forever. Contemplating both poems,

10 A PRIMER OF EZRA POUND

we will perhaps recall Homer's description of the multi-
tudinous dead in the Odyssey, an abbreviated translation of
which Pound was to provide in the first of the Cantos:

Souls out of Erebus, cadaverous dead, of brides
Of youths and of the old who had borne much;
Souls stained with recent tears, girls tender . . J

In "April" itself Pound underlines the tragic juxtaposition of
"pale carnage" with bright loveliness by his Latin epigraph:
"Nympharum membra disjecta' (scattered limbs of the
nymphs).

"April" and "In a Station of the Metro" are from the
volume Lustra, containing poems written between 1912 and
1915. Pound's mastery, by his late twenties, of poetic line
and metaphor is well illustrated by the two poems just ex-
amined. In the volume as a whole, he tries many modes of
writing Catullan satire, light impressionist pieces, rhetorical
forays (including an address to Walt Whitman as his "pig-
headed father" with whom he is now ready to make a "pact"),
witticisms and manifestoes of various sorts. Here is the
arresting "Coitus," its startling initial figure one instance
among many of the sexual and phallic motifs central to
much of Pound's most serious work:

The gilded phaloi of the crocuses

are thrusting at the spring air.

Here is "The Coming of War: Actaeon," with its restless,
ominous movement:

A sea

Harsher than granite,

unstill, never ceasing . . .

And here is the perfect classicism of 'The Spring," intro-

7 The Cantos of Ezra Pound (New York: New Directions, 1948),
p. 3. All quotations from Cantos 1-84 are from this edition.

The Early Poetry n

during its nostalgic theme of lost love with a Sapphic sure-
ness:

Cydonian Spring with her attendant train,

Maelids and water-girls,

Stepping beneath a boisterous wind from Thrace . . .

After this start the poem speeds through its description of
how Spring "spreads the bright tips" of newness everywhere.
Then suddenly the personification is dropped in a rush of
bitter memory:

And wild desire
Falls like black lightning.
O bewildered heart,

Though every branch have back what last year lost,
She, who moved here amid the cyclamen,
Moves only now a clinging tenuous ghost.

The difference between a poem like this one and a poem
like "The Flame" docs not lie in any absence of feeling in
the former. But the feeling of "The Spring" is rooted in the
poem's physical, sensuous imagery rather than in abstract
Romanticism. A few years later, in 1917, Pound was to pro-
claim, a little stridently, that the genuine poetry of this cen-
tury would "move against poppycock":

it will be harder and saner, it will be ... 'nearer the bone/
It will be as much like granite as it can be, its force will lie
in its truth, its interpretative power (of course, poetic force
does always rest there). . . . We will have fewer painted
adjectives impending the shock and stroke of it. At least for
myself, I want it so, austere, direct, free from emotional
slither. 8

It was this rejection of "emotional slither" that led to
Pound's parody of Housman:

8 Literary Essays, p. 1 2.

12 A PRIMER OF EZRA POUND

O woe, woe,

People are born and die,
We also shall be dead pretty soon
Therefore let us act as if we were
dead already.

It helps account, too, for the appeal to him of Heine, like
Pound a rebel armoring his sensitivity in the ironic mail of
a lively intelligence. Thus, Pound's translation from Die
Heimkehr:

The mutilated choir boys
When I begin to sing
Complain about the awful noise
And call my voice too thick a thing.

And it throws light on Pound's ambivalent feelings toward
Whitman. If it be true that many sons spend their lives
revising, in their own behavior, the images of their fathers,
we may say, allowing ourselves the license of Pound's own
simile in "A Pact/' that he took over Walt's vision of the
poet-prophet and poet-teacher and recast it in a more sophis-
ticated and Europeanizcd, a more formally demanding mold.
Yet, though we can glance at the question only in passing
here, there remains a closer kinship between these two than
at first would appear likely. The largeness of their concerns,
the sprawling epic character of their major efforts, their
attempts to encompass a multitude of contradictory elements
through main force, and the revolutionary quality of their
careers lock them into undeniable kinship.

Still, Pound's interest in "hardness," in "the tradition,"
and in the poetry of pure vision do conceal this kinship very
efficiently. His growth toward realization of this combined
interest had been perfectly evident even before Lustra, cer-
tainly at least as early as the 1912 Ripostes. By this time he
had undergone an arduous apprenticeship in translation, and
it now bore fruit in one of his best known successes, the
rendering of the Anglo-Saxon "The Seafarer" into modern

The Early Poetry 13

English. Though it contains more Wardour Street English
than it should, the poem is vastly successful in its opening
section, and in isolated later portions. The success is due in
part to Pound's marvelous ear, in part to the fact that Old
English metric and alliteration are unusually congenial to
his special talents. The Anglo-Saxon kenning may be seen
as a frozen Imagist metaphor, and the plaintive melancholy
of the monologue, crammed with detail but held to a single
emotional pitch, is not far removed from the characteristic
modern lyric-contemplative poem. The failure of the transla-
tion to sustain interest at every point is not altogether
Pound's fault; the original was always, in our temerarious
view, too long for its own good. In Ripostes also we find the
mysterious "Portrait d'une Fcmme," a compassionate yet
satirical characterization which is at the same time a remark-
able example of what skillful accenting and the bravura
manipulation of a few sounds (especially the pivotal yu-
sound here) can accomplish. "The Return," one of Pound's
most beautiful and economical poems, is a triumph of ac-
centual variation in its wavering opening notes, its gathering
of full-blooded speed and strength, and then its hesitant
falling-off again. Finally, "The Alchemist," a "chant for the
transmutation of metals," is one of our great incantatory
poems. As in "The Return," where the hero-gods of the past
are through an effort of poetic conjuring brought up into the
foreground of consciousness, the vision emerges with the
strange clarity of aesthetic transformation fully realized:

As you move among the bright trees;

As your voices, under the larches of Paradise

Make a clear sound ....

The Pound we have been reviewing is the ardent and
committed young poet who believed in the life of art as few
men have ever believed in it. He is the man of whom Carl
Sandburg could once say that he was "the best man writing
poetry today" while T. S. Eliot, whose direction was so

14 A PRIMER OF EZRA POUND

thoroughly different from Sandburg's, could echo Dante's
praise of Arnaut Daniel by calling Pound "il miglior jatibro"
the finest craftsman. Of Pound's poem "The Return" Yeats
wrote that "it gives me better words than my own/' The
work of the later Pound, author of Hugh Selwyn Maiiberley
and the Cantos, is solidly based on what he had done by
1915, when he became thirty years old.

Basic Frames of Thought

Ezra Pound's commitment to his art is the rationale of
that art. Out of it comes the impulse to the longer works, in
large degree, and to his larger theoretical interests. It is the
key to his fundamental belief in the importance of literature
to the state:

Has literature a function in the state . . . ? It has. ... It
has to do with the clarity and vigour of 'any and every* thought
and opinion. It has to do with maintaining the very cleanliness
of the tools, the health of the very matter of thought itself. . . .
The individual cannot think and communicate his thought, the
governor and legislator cannot act effectively or frame his laws,
without words, and the solidity and validity of these words is in
the care of the damned and despised litterati. When their
work goes rotten by that I do not mean when they express
indecorous thoughts but when their very medium, the very

'5

l6 A PRIMER OF EZRA POUND

essence of their work, the application of word to thing goes
rotten, i.e. becomes slushy and inexact, or excessive or bloated,
the whole machinery of social and of individual thought and
order goes to pot. This is a lesson of history. . . . 9

Now whether Pound was right in saying that the health
of individual and state depends on the soundness of the
language, which it is the writer's sacred task to maintain, or
whether perhaps the relationship is just the reverse, or
whether, finally, both literature and the state depend on
unfathomable, or only partly fathomable, sources we need
not try to determine here and now. Whatever the ultimate
truth of the matter, there should certainly be general assent
to the proposition that the status and integrity of letters is
vitally related to the condition of society. Simply to begin
thinking about this relationship is to raise the poet out of
the musical-doll category to which he is usually relegated.

Pound has always been sharply conscious of the way in
which poetry bespeaks the values of whole peoples, bringing
to the surface not only their more cheerful wisdom but also
their deeply, often secretly and inarticulately felt unor-
thodoxies of real sentiment. Moreover, he believes literally
that the loyalty of genuine poets to sound workmanship and
to the meanings of tradition is a kind of guardianship of
principled standards in the republic at large, whether in
general communication, in the economic life, or in the func-
tioning of government.

We must bear these attitudes in mind most especially
when we come to Mauberley and the Cantos. The first por-
tion of the Mauberley sequence is in large part a denuncia-
tion of our society 's denial to the dedicated poet of his right-
ful place. Academic and editorial stuffiness and venality, it
argues, shoddiness in every phase of human activity, and
that final criminal betrayal, the World War, have made for
a "botched civilization." At the war's end, the poet-speaker
sizes up what is left of this civilization, noting above all the

Basic Frames of Thought 17

triumph of insensitivity and mass-production tinnincss over
responsibility and true craftsmanship. The bureaucratic ex-
propriation of literature by businesslike "operators" is, he
sees, marked also, and quite logically, by the serious poet's
loss of most means of livelihood, literary patronage having in
any case passed out of the picture some while back. The
speaker considers retreat or self-exile, but summons up his
own courage for the time being at least. Against "liars in
public places" and the triumphs of "usury age-old" he sets
the memory of "Young blood and high blood" sacrificed in
the War:

Charm, smiling at the good mouth,
Quick eyes gone under earth's lid ....

Against the new type of professional who gives him practical
tips on the literary game

And give up verse, my boy,

There's nothing in it-
he sets the poets of the nineties, Yeats's friends Dowson and
Johnson, who stuck by their poetic guns at all costs (and the
costs were cruel), and the whole great literary tradition from
Homer and Bion through Villon, Shakespeare, and Waller
to such moderns as Flaubert, Gautier, and Henry James. 10
His own role he defines as that of a contemporary Odysseus
who has either mistaken his heroic mission or undertaken it
in the wrong century:

For three years, out of key with his time,
He strove to resuscitate the dead art
Of poetry; to maintain "the sublime"
In the old sense. . . .

10 John Espey, Ezra Pound's Mauberley (Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 1955)* traces the literary
ancestry informing Mauberley painstakingly and convincingly. This
volume also contains a superior text of me sequence, although our
quotations are taken from Personae for the reader's convenience.

l8 A PRIMER OF EZRA POUND

But we shall have a fuller look at Mauberley and its
ironies shortly. If we turn now to the Cantos, Pound's chief
work-in-progress for a great many years, we find the function
of literature and the other arts in the state a central point of
focus in it again and again, a critical element in the entire
problem of cultural stability. Canto 13 shows Rung (Con-
fucius) saying to his disciples:

. . , "When the prince has gathered about him

"All the savants and artists, his riches will be fully employed."

A corollary of this principle is Rung's warning to the lute-
player Tian :

. . . "Without character you will

be unable to play on that instrument
Or to execute the music fit for the Odes. . . ."

In shocking, purposeful contrast to the ordered Confucian
reasonableness of such pronouncements, the next canto, with
Swiftian violence, explodes a nightmare picture of our
modern inferno of corruption and profiteering, dominion of
that deadliest evil, Usury. Integral to the scene are the howl-
ing, stinking "betrayers of language/' those "perverts, who
have set money-lust before the pleasure of the senses":

The slough of unamiable liars,

bog of stupidities,

malevolent stupidities, and stupidities,
the soil living pus, full of vermin,
dead maggots begetting live maggots,

slum owners,

usurers squeezing crab-lice, pandars to authority,
pets-de-loup, sitting on piles of stone books,
obscuring the texts with philology,

hiding them under their persons,
the air without refuge of silence,

the drift of lice, teething ....

Basic Frames of Thought 19

Here is the very opposite of the voices heard "under the
larches of Paradise" in "The Alchemist" and also, again, else-
where in the Cantos. Subtle in detail, the rhythm is obvious
enough in its general pattern, which has two basic character-
istics. First, there is a line of rising force, often mounting to
a hovering accent (a succession of two or more stressed
syllables giving the effect of unremitting emphasis) toward
the middle and then shifting to a falling rhythm at the very
end (liars, vermin, and so on). Second, there is a series, with
exceptions and variations, of alternating longer and shorter
phrases. Alliteration and the repetition of key words, a pro-
fusion of spitting sibilants and stop-sounds, and the echoing
of vowels and of the dyings-off of line-endings support this
pattern. Together these effects create an atmosphere of
absolute revulsion and contempt for the "usurers" and their
hangers-on.

"Usury" is the black particular enemy in this war-chant
of hate, as it is throughout the Cantos. In an essay which
sums up Pound's economic theories fairly clearly and alto-
gether sympathetically, Max Wykcs-Joyce writes:

. . . it is a fact that our banking systems are based on usury,
no matter by what sweeter name we call it to salve our troubled
consciences, or to shrive ourselves of some atavistic condemna-
tion. Hence Pound's first modification of the commonly held
view of the function of banks. The levying of interest whether
at two per cent, or twenty per cent, is usurious, and usury
stands condemned as strongly in this American's view as it did
in the teaching of the medieval Fathers.

In all his economic writings, he makes the basic distinction
between banks founded for the good of their shareholders and
regardless of the wellbeing of any and everyone else, which
means almost all banks as we now know them; and banks
founded primarily for the good of the whole people. . . . 11

To illustrate, Wykcs-Joycc calls our attention to Canto 71,

1 * Max Wykes- Joyce, "Some Considerations Arising from Ezra
Pound's Conception of the Bank," in Ezra Pound, p. 218.

2O A PRIMER OF EZRA POUND

in which John Adams is quoted in a passage Pound himself
marks by a bold vertical line along the margin:

Every bank of discount is downright corruption
taxing the public for private individuals* gain.

and if I say this in my will
the American people wd/ pronounce I died crazy.

Pound's thinking on economics is thus not without very
respectable antecedents. Though strongly influenced by
C. 1 1. Douglas, it is like all his thinking even more strongly
individual than derivative. In a sense, the viewpoint is an
aesthetic one: If economic relationships arc bound within
limiting, non-organic forms, change the forms. "Make it
new!" The conception is primarily of a functional adaptation
of currency and credit procedures to the realities of a people's
needs and potential productivity in such a way that irre-
sponsible, destructive money-speculation becomes impossible.
The program is certainly attractive, but obviously it presents
very great difficulties and allows room for as much cynical
jargonizing and rhetorical manipulation as the market will
bear and more. Hence its attractiveness to the theorists and
apologists of the Fascist state. But though it would take an
expert economist and student of semantics to pursue this
question to its ultimate implications beyond all the crack-
potism, double talk, and vaguenesses, clearly it does open up
certain real possibilities of social reform and justice and
derives from an idealistic and honorable tradition.

It is impossible to say that Pound's record in these matters
is without stain. His specific commitments to Mussolini's
methods and his anti-Semitism (see Canto 52, for instance),
which not even admirers as intelligent and well informed as
Wykes-Joyce, Hugh Kenner, and Brian Soper can very con-
vincingly discount or explain away, remain the terrible
aberrations of a man of genius. Yet in the face of these im-
ponderables and of his own insufferable dogmatism, we are
compelled to recognize, in his poetry at its best, the humane
motives and the moral and intellectual power of his essential

Basic Frames of Thought 21

outlook. It is then, we feel, that he is a child of the En-
lightenment after all, of Voltaire and the Encyclopaedists,
and that his satires and harangues are quite something else
than special pleading for a vicious system of thought and
behavior. There is in them the hard ironic honesty and
anger against chicanery of Swift's "A Modest Proposal" or,
in their less ferocious moments, of Thomas Love Peacock's
Crotchet Castle, in which we read: "I have always under-
stood . . . that promises to pay ought not to be kept; the
essence of a safe and economical currency being an in-
terminable series of broken promises." (See, in this connec-
tion, the closing section of Canto 88.)

Moreover, we must remember that Pound's fundamental
criticism of modern society has the profound assent, ad-
mittedly with every conceivable variation of ideological
shading, of almost the whole contemporary artistic com-
munity. An instance is the comment of his old friend Wil-
liam Carlos Williams, generally aware as he was of
Pound's shortcomings, on a conversation with him during a
visit in St. Elizabeth's Hospital (Washington, D.C.).
Pound was confined there as a paranoiac after World War II
until 1958, and it was only because of this commitment that
he was not tried for treason because of his wartime propa-
ganda broadcasts from Italy to American troops. Williams
writes:

Do we have to be idiots dreaming in the semi-obscurities of
a twilight mood to be poets? The culmination of our human
achievement, all that we desire, can't be achieved by closing
our eyes to a veritable wall barring our path. The theme of
the poem must at such a point be the removal of the block
to everything we might achieve once that barrier is removed.
If we are to be taxed out of existence to feed private loans,
the revenue from which is used by an international gang to
perpetuate armed conflicts, at private profit- to further enrich
the same gang that, the inferno of the Cantos, must be one
of the poet's nearest concerns.

So we talked, of who is in the know, as against the self-

22 A PRIMER OF EZRA POUND

interested mob of "legislators," the pitiful but grossly ignorant
big-shots who play in with the criminals in city, state and
nations; of our first duty as artists, the only semi-informed
men of the community, whose sweep is the whole field ol
knowledge. It is our duty at all costs to speak; at all costs, even
imprisonment in such isolation, such quarantine, from the
spread of information as a St. Elizabeth's affords. 1 -

"Usury," to return now to our consideration of Pound's
leading ideas, is in Pound's thought the sin around which
all others cluster. Sometimes he prefers the Latin form
Usura, because of its medieval connotations. "With Usura"
Canto 45 tells us,

no picture is made to endure nor to live with

but it is made to sell and sell quickly

with usura, sin against nature,

is thy bread ever more of stale rags

is thy bread dry as paper,

with no mountain wheat, no strong flour

with usura the line grows thick

with usura is no clear demarcation ....

The incantatory, rhetorical, insistent beat of the argument
and the parallelisms rises and rises in intensity until, by
another path but with equal overbearing concentration of
passion, it comes at the very end to a climax like that of
Blake's "London." The similarity to Blake is in fact so
striking as to throw a blazing light upon Pound's Canto 16
also, as we shall soon see. Blake's catalogue of the evils
rotting away the city of London because of the triumph of
property exploitation ("chartering") over love and fraternity
culminates in one final staggering accusation:

But most thro* midnight streets I hear

How the youthful Harlot's curse

Blasts the new born Infant's tear,

And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse.

l *The Autobiography of William Carlos Williams (New York:
Random House, I95*)> PP- 337-338.

Basic Frames of Thought 23

And Pound's Canto 45 concludes:

Usura slaycth the child in the womb
It stayeth the young man's courting
It hath brought palsey to bed, lyeth
between the young bride and her bridegroom

CONTRA NATURAM
They have brought whores for Eleusis
Corpses are set to banquet
at behest of usura.

That is to say: The sacred mysteries of love and sex, the
cycles of nature, and the rituals of pagan tradition derived
from these mysteries and cycles, all inherited in altered form
by us together with the most hallowed taboos preserving the
untouchableness of human privacy, are now violated in the
name of money-power. Such is the final effect of the destruc-
tion of meaning and communication. Pound uses all his
great skill successfully here in bringing together his feeling
for these neglected sources of value and his location of their
betrayal in a false principle of social order.

Against the hell of the usurers' dominions the poet re-
peatedly opposes his vision of the Earthly Paradise. It is a
composite vision, drawn from Biblical, Grecian, Provencal,
and Dantean imagery and from a wide acquaintance with
mythologies and literatures. But its outstanding features are
purity and clarity of color and light, together with the
classically calm dignity of the figures that move upon its
eternally luminous landscape:

Then light air, under saplings,
the blue banded lake under aether,

an oasis, the stones, the calm field ....
(Canto 1 6)

Grove hath its altar

under elms, in that temple, in silence
a lone nymph by the pool.

(Canto 90)

24 A PRIMER OF EZRA POUND

The light now, not of the sun.

Chrysophrase,
And the water green clear, and blue clear ....

Zagreus, feeding his panthers,

the turf clear as on hills under light.
And under the almond-trees, gods,

with them, choros nympharum. Gods ....

(Canto 17)

The dream of repose and quiet projected in this enchanted
light no doubt reflects a deeply psychological need on the
poet's part. But it is much more than his private "escape"
through self-indulgent revery. Pound's visions are conceived
as completely serious and relevant to life's most pressing
meanings; they even have "scientific" validity in the sense
advanced in his Cavalcanti essay, the sense of the "radiant"
and significant "world of forms" or of "moving energies"
which creates those meanings. The secular and aesthetic
religiosity they express is built around the "life-force," to use
a term now somewhat hackneyed but still much to the point.
At the heart of all the values, therefore, which "Usura" seeks
to slay is that same life-force. Its patron-divinity is Zagreus
(Dionysus, Bacchus), seen "feeding his panthers" in the
passage just quoted from Canto 17. Son of Zeus and Ceres,
he is the god of fertility and of allied mysteries, and is
celebrated directly or by implication in Yeats's The Resur-
rection, in Lawrence's The Man Who Died, and in many
other works of this century, becoming a recurrent symbol of
the sustained modern attempts to repaganize religious tradi-
tion. In his original mythical career, he suffers dismember-
ment, is made whole and reincarnated and then received
with love by the shades in Hades, and is reborn in the spring
as Dionysus, favored son of Zeus. Pound's Elysium is
Zagreus' also, a haven of pure, unabashed sexuality as in
Cantos 39 and 47. Elysium in the Cantos, however, is some-
what more cosmopolitan than Homer ever imagined. It has
room for gods, heroes, and nymphs from all cultures, for a

Basic Frames of Thought 25

Renaissance figure like Sigismundo Malatesta whom Pound
presents as having fought a losing but unflagging battle
against the rise of the modern usury-dominated state, and
for thinkers like Confucius and the founding fathers of the
American Constitution. (Sec, for example, the great incanta-
tory paean in Canto 106.)

The poet himself appears in the Cantos as a wandering
sensibility, seeking like Zagreus to reunite the essential self.
Even more, he is an Odysseus of the spirit, here as in
Mauberley seeking his true home and his true cultural mis-
sion and finding his bearing, amid the welter of historical
and ethical fragmentation, only by keeping forever in the
foreground of his consciousness the difference between the
life-bearing tradition and the death-dealing blight of Usura.
Canto i, as we have noted, is a condensed translation of
The Book of the Dead: Book XI of the Odyssey. Here at the
start Pound identifies himself symbolically with Odysseus at
the point where the worlds of the living and the dead come
together (and by an easy enough association with Zagreus
also and with Dante on the verge of his explorations into the
horrors of his own day, projected in the Inferno*).

Throughout the remaining cantos, the poet's moral sense,
as acute as and indeed of the same order as his other senses,
encompasses the whole of being, both experienced and im-
agined: life and death, mortals and immortals, heaven and
hell and earth, past and present. In Canto 16 we have a
concentrated Dantcaii view of the human condition, be-
tween Hell on the one hand and Purgatory and Paradise on
the other:

And before hell mouth; dry plain

and two mountains;
On the one mountain, a running form,

and another

In the turn of the hill; in hard steel
The road like a slow screw's thread,
The angle almost imperceptible,

so that the circuit seemed hardly to rise.

2.6 A PRIMER OF EZRA POUND

Four figures of poets are discerned on this symbolic land-
scape; they are the Provencal troubadours Peire Cardinal
and Sordello of Mantua (Dante's admired guide for part of
the Purgatorio) y Dante himself, and Blake. All are in their
several ways possessed by the inclusive meaning, awesome
in its implications for mankind, of the scene. But it is Blake,
the one modern among them and perhaps the poet before
Pound most deeply engaged by these awesome implications,
whose form we first see and who is described in most detail :

And the running form, naked, Blake,
Shouting, whirling his arms, the swift limbs,
Howling against the evil,

his eyes rolling,
Whirling like flaming cart-wheels,

and his head held backward to gaze on the evil
As he ran from it,

to be hid by the steel mountain,
And when he showed again from the north side;

his eyes blazing toward hell mouth,
His neck forward ....

Despite this moral purview, Pound does little talking
about "humanity" in general. The Cantos has been accused
of various aesthetic and intellectual derelictions but never of
"emotional slither." Its impersonality of method forestalls
such criticism. The intricately designed play of its voices and
the shifts of space, time, and personae (speaking-characters)
make it a dynamic presentation, closer to a motion picture
expertly and unsentimentally directed than to a simple cry
of the heart. By impersonality we do not mean absence of
feeling and viewpoint, but their objective presentation; mod-
ern literature has long been concerned to find ways to use
the raw materials of experience and imagination without
becoming merely confessional, whimsical, or arbitrary. Per-
haps the best known statements of this aim are Yeats's poem
"Sailing to Byzantium" and Eliot's essay "Hamlet and His
Problems," which deals with the expression of emotion in

Basic Frames of Thought 27

poetry and advances the famous definition of the "objective
correlative" as a guide to such expression. But Pound is
equally with the other two poets an exponent and exemplar
of the deliberate transformation of personal motives into
objectified projections that go beyond their psychological
origins.

His method is clear enough, and can be understood and
enjoyed by the reader long before the literal sense of many
passages is grasped. Pound achieves dramatic impersonality
as the playwright or the film director does, by letting his
characters, his settings, his rhythms do the talking while,
strictly speaking, he himself usually "stays out of it." He
employs many spokesmen, as we have already suggested
Odysseus, Malatcsta, Kung, Adams, and the others to set
up a composite, actively moving consciousness that emerges
in varied forms and circumstances. Also, he sets styles against
one another, each evocative of a whole complex of mean-
ings: lyrical passages against satirical ones, rhetoric against
anecdote, coarseness against elegance. Now he speaks in the
idiom of Divus' fifteenth-century Latin translation from
Homer, now in that of Ovid or Cavalcanti, and now in the
drawl of a shrewd Yankee engineer or the bawdy brogue of
an old Irish sailor. Again, the poem may shift into boisterous
parody of Browning ("Oh to be in England now that
Winston's out") or veer sharply into an echo of the speech in
Eleanor of Aquitainc's court. The poem is kept moving by
an alert, witty mind stocked with allusions and cross refer-
ences, a mind so interesting that it holds attention even at
its least appealing. As Yeats writes of the characters of
Shakespearean tragedy, Pound never "breaks up his lines to
weep." There are horror and terror, yes, but sentimentality
is held to be a fraudulcnce of communication, the stylistic
counterpart of usury. A striking instance of this viewpoint is
Artemis' song against "pity" in Canto 30. Pity is a latter-day
softmindedness, she cries, which "spareth so many an evil
thing" that "all things are made foul in this season" of a
liberal humanitarianism incapable of clear-cut moral distinc-

28 A PRIMER OF EZRA POUND

tions or of root-solutions to the problems of suffering and
evil:

This is the reason, none may seek purity

Having for foulnesse pity

And things growne awry;

No more do my shaftes fly

To slay. Nothing is now clean slayne

But rotteth away. , . .

Artemis' "compleynt" epitomizes one of Pound's major
themes, hut the poet does not state that theme directly. It is
enough that the goddess is an embodiment of the ancient
Grecian values, and the form of her song an embodiment
of the medieval values, which we know he cherishes. She
does his work for him, far more reverberatingly than his own
haranguing could do it, and typifies the success of his
presentational, or objective method.

The Mauberley Sequence

We have labeled the Mauberley poems and the Cantos
"sequences/* and it may help the general reader to be re-
minded of the implications of this label. Long poem-se-
quences are as familiar as, and much older than, the Eliza-
bethan sonnet cycles, or as that cumbersomely unfolded
series of allegorical narratives The Faerie Queene. In more
recent times, to skip over innumerable other instances, we
have Whitman's sequences, most notably his Song of Myself;
and we must bear in mind Whitman's conception of the
whole of his poetry as organically unified, the Self writ
large: "Who touches these poems touches a man." A number
of modern poets have turned to the sequence as a rough
equivalent for the most ambitious traditional forms, and for
the epic particularly. It may well have been Whitman who
called this turn most decisively. At any rate, one has only to

29

30 A PRIMER OF EZRA POUND

look at the song cycles of Yeats and the sequences of Eliot,
Hart Crane, and a large number of other writers besides
Pound to confirm this development.

The sequence is not a fixed form, and through this fact
alone becomes very different from the classical elegy, ode, or
epic. But we can say of it that in the work of the moderns
from Whitman on it consists of a larger structure made up
of more or less self-sufficient units, each contributing both
conceptually and stylistically to the organic life of the whole.
Some units, poems like the "Envoi" of Mauberley and
Canto 13, arc able to stand alone. Others are relatively more
dependent on the rest, though they may be essential to the
sequence. While the order of parts is as necessary as the poet
can make it, the principle of the design may not make itself
felt at first; on the other hand, though in theory any work
of art will rearrange itself, so to speak, around whatever in
it initially seizes upon our attention, the sequence (like the
mural painting) seems to give us more freedom than other
poetic forms to start from any point within it that we find
convenient. With Pound especially the reader ought to take
advantage of this characteristic. For instance, most of us
would find the first part of Mauberley more quickly avail-
able than the second to our understanding, and within it we
would find the second, fourth, and fifth poems, and probably
the "Envoi," less demanding than the rest. Similarly 13 and
45 are certainly among the most readily intelligible of the
Cantos. These six poems, therefore, are poems we can fruit-
fully read first in their respective sequences, together with
whatever passages elsewhere along the line take our fancies.

Looking at the first section of Mauberley from this stand-
point, we shall quickly light upon some salient characteris-
tics. Poem II begins with a little battery of nervous rhymes
contrasting the machine age's "aesthetic" with that of
classicism :

The age demanded an image
Of its accelerated grimace,

The Maubcrley Sequence 31

Something for the modern stage,
Not, at any rate, an Attic grace ....

The nervous effect is created partly by the two feminine
endings that follow upon one another, partly by the rhyming
of stressed and unstressed syllable in alternate lines. The
distorted picture called up by "accelerated grimace" shows
the speaker's contempt for what the "age demanded." Pound
underlines his contempt in the next two stanzas, coining a
slogan for the age:

Better mendacities

Than the classics in paraphrase!

Our epoch, he says, "assuredly" prefers plaster to alabaster,
a mass-produced art to "the 'sculpture' of rhyme."

Poem II is therefore an assault on the age. Moving on to
Poem IV we find an even more typical piece of Poundian
rhetorical verse. This poem must be read aloud if the full
value of its cumulative compassion and anger is to be felt,
but as a poem of profound disillusionment, one of the early
literary reactions against the War and a forerunner of the
many postwar novels expressing the same responses, what it
has to say is perfectly clear. The young, whatever their mo-
tives for going to war, are the victims of "wastage as never
before." Those who survive must return

home to old lies and new infamy;
usury age-old and age-thick
and liars in public places. . . .

Though the mood here is a continuation of that in Poem II,
bitterness and irony are progressively deepened right up to
the final, climactic line: "laughter out of dead bellies." The
next poem, the fifth, then makes another turn on the same
subject: the War. The contrast between the young in all
their quickness and fresh zest (described in two lines that
have the restrained pathos of a Greek epitaph) and the

32 A PRIMER OF EZRA POUND

civilization for which they have died is restated with superb
poetic economy. Much of the work of contrast is done
through an alliterative device, the linking of words begin-
ning in fc. First there is the word "best," to suggest the youth-
ful dead themselves, and then in angry machine-gun bursts
the words for a rotten society "an old fcitch gone in the
teeth," "a Notched civilization" and for its neglected heritage
recalled only as a cynical pretext for inspiring the young in
war: "two gross of fcrokcn statues" and "a few thousand
Mattered fcooks."

"Envoi," which brings the 1919 section of Mauberley to
a close, is not an assault on the times but an affirmation of
artistic principle. Modeled on Edmund Wallers seventeenth-
century poem "Go lovely rose," which was set to music by
his contemporary Henry Lawcs, it expresses the poet's desire
to catch in an eternal moment one essence of both life and
art in the image of a loved woman who sings out "that song
of Lawes." There is an echo of Shakespeare when the
speaker says he would bid "her graces" live

.As roses might, in magic amber laid,

Red overwrought with orange and all made

One substance and one colour

Braving time.

And there is a carry-over from the aesthcticism of the
nineties in the thought with which the poem concludes, that
immortality is to be gained only through artistic means which

Might, in new ages, gain her worshippers,
When our two dusts with Waller's shall he laid,
Sif tings on si f tings in oblivion,
Till change hath broken down
All things save Beauty alone.

These four less difficult poems in the sequence throw
enough light on the others to lead us directly to the perspec-
tive of the whole: We have moved into an age in which

The Mauberlcy Sequence 33

cheap standards of workmanship, anti-aestheticism, and the
betrayal of beauty and tradition are the order of the day; but
the poet does not accept this order. Rather, he lashes out
against it, seeing in the destructiveness of the War its true,
annihilating meaning. Through the perfection of his own
craftsmanship in these poems, as well as through what he
says, he affirms the superiority of his own vision.

Here, then, is the essence of the first section of Mauberley.
But the sequence consists not merely of a few poems whose
attitudes support and complement one another. It also takes
the form of a kind of literary (but not literal) autobiography,
in which the poet sizes up the state of the world of letters
and his own place in it after three years of attempting to
make himself and his viewpoint felt. In another sense, it
takes the form of a voyage of literary exploration in con-
temporary England, with attention also to the condition of
society at large and to the past circumstances out of which
the present situation, at the end of the Great War, has de-
veloped. "The sequence/* writes Pound, is "distinctly a fare-
well to London." It is also a crucial statement of the relation
between poetry and Anglo-American culture as he sees it,
and in the final balance it would seem to be a farewell to the
illusion that there is any hope for poetry in that culture.

Going back to the beginning, we can see that although
the protagonist of the sequence is the fictitious "Hugh
Selwyn Mauberley" the first poem is titled "E. P. Ode pour
FElection dc Son Sepulchre." Translated, this is "Ezra
Pound, Ode on the Occasion of Choosing His Burial Place."
(The self-ironic title is borrowed from a poem by Ronsard.)
So Mauberley is Pound's conception of himself at one re-
move and in whatever dimensions these poems provide.
Now who is Mauberley-Pound in this first poem? He is a
man, the first two stanzas tell us, who has fought in vain
against the drift of the times to "resuscitate the dead art/
Of poetry." But England has regarded him as hopelessly "out
of key" with the age, especially as he has come from the
United States, "a half savage country." Like Capaneus, who

34 A PRIMER OF EZRA POUND

defied Zeus and was destroyed by lightning, he is a would-be
hero victimized by his own hubris. The reference (to a
figure in Aeschylus' play The Seven Against Thebes') leads
to another classical allusion, this time to Book XII of the
Odyssey, where the Sirens are shown singing their seduc-
tively compassionate song to Odysseus. The comparison be-
tween E. P. and Odysseus is developed over two stanzas,
establishing an identification like that of the Cantos. He has
lingered in the dangerous, choppy seas of the "rocks" of
English culture; presumably he had cherished hopes that
the superficial classical sophistication of the British literary
and academic world was the real thing, and that he would
find his true home, his Ithaca and Penelope, there. But his
"true Penelope" was not the pretentious show-classicism of
England but the dedicated, stylistically precise, unsqueam-
ishly truthful art of Flaubert the true classicism of the mod-
ern world. This point established, the last stanza returns to
the mock-humble tone of the first with an echo from Villon's
Grand Testament in which the poet talks of his own "pass-
ing away" in "the thirtieth year of his age" and with a final
pompous comment on that event, in the voice of the chair-
man of some imaginary committee of literary stuffed shirts:

. . . the case presents

No adjunct to the Muses' diadem.

On the surface, this supremely ironic opening poem con-
cedes defeat; actually, in various subtle ways, it asserts the
continuing value of the poet's frustrated mission. Almost
every line, by virtue of its very phrasing, proclaims the glory
of "the tradition"; and the Homeric quotation near its center
becomes, not only through what it says literally "for we
know all the things that are in Troy" but also because of
its cultural connotation as a Homeric quotation, a symbol in
its own right. Even untranslated, it would serve as a symbol
of the mystery behind the tradition, undefined though ap-
parently related to the associations connected with Capaneus
and Odysseus. Hence it should not surprise us that in the

The Mauberley Sequence 35

next four poems the speaker breaks loose from the pretense
that he has been wrong to make his great effort. Rather, he
has been entranced by the Siren-song, and after locating
himself more accurately he can shift into the specifics of his
complaint against the world his art has been unable to affect.
Poem II is transitional, but Poem HI is a complete list of
grievances, against the decadence of fashionable women's
clothing and their musical education as well as against the
loss of mystery in modern religion and the supposed empti-
ness of modern democracy. Lines 15-16 tell us once more
that nowadays we see The Beautiful "decreed in the market
place," and the poem ends with a mock-despairing cry to
Apollo which includes a quotation from Pindar translated
for us in the next line. (The "tin" of the last line is a flip
pun on the interrogative repeated three times in the Greek
quotation.)

The reader will notice somewhere along the line that most
of the Mauberley poems are written in approximately the
same kind of stanza, a quatrain with alternating rhymes,
sometimes in the second and fourth lines only. There are
inconsistencies of line-length and rhyme-arrangement, but
the basic pattern holds even in Poem IV; "Envoi," it is true,
departs more than the others from it, but "Go lovely rose,"
on the form of which "Envoi" is a free variation, comes very
close to it. The "inconsistencies," of course, are deliberate
modulations to serve particular purposes, as when in Poem
IV the shortened lines and piled-up, almost doggerel rhymes
help to build up a quick emotional charge and an incantatory
rhythm, whereupon rhyme is dropped except for repetitions
and the stanzas are broken up into rhetorical units. In "E. P.
Ode," on the other hand, the lines are of uniform length and
the rhymes, though occasionally polylingual, are all exact.
The tone of elegant, subtle, literate intellectual control here
demands such exactness. "Envoi," in which the poet bursts
into a song whose mood counteracts the cutting, critical
drive of the sequence as a whole, is quite properly furthest
from the norm set up by the opening "Ode."

36 A PRIMER OF EZRA POUND

After the elegiac and savage climax of the fifth poem, the
sequence shifts to some close-ups of the nineties and before.
Here we see the beginnings of the modern predicament of
the poet the stuffiness of the late nineteenth century, the
attack on the "fleshly school of poetry" by Robert Buchanan
in 1871, the "stillbirth" twelve years before that of the
English Rubaiyat, the abuse of Rossetti and Swinburne, and
the relegation of the Muse to prostitute-status. The "Yeux
Glauques" of the sixth poem refers to the "thin, clear gaze"
of the Muse, here identified with the model for the Burne-
Jones paintings alluded to in the third stanza, and also, by a
shift of association, with the girl so compassionately pre-
sented in Rossetti's poem "Jenny." (Mrs. Rossetti was Burnc-
Joncs's model.) In this period the dedicated artist not only
saw his work disregarded, we are told; he also saw himself
condemned as immoral. And so in the seventh poem, whose
title alludes to the pathetic outcry in the Purgatorio of La
Pia, we see, through the eyes of M. Verog (actually Victor
Plarr, Dowson's biographer), how Dowson and Johnson met
the hostile indifference to poetry in the nineties. In these
poems Pound employs a number of allusions at first bc-
wilderingly unfamiliar in order to recall the exact atmos-
phere of the times. But what stands out is the imagery
connoting the defeat of art in England:

Foetid Buchanan lifted up his voice
When that faun's head of hers
Became a pastime for
Painters and adulterers.

Even the incidental background descriptions carry this con-
notation of defeat:

Among the pickled foetuses and bottled bones ....

And here too we have echoes of the poet's ironic "confession"
of error in Poem I:

The Mauberley Sequence 37

M. Verog, out of step with the decade,
Detached from his contemporaries,
Neglected by the young,
Because of these reveries.

The portrait of "Brennbaum," a modern assimilated Jew
who has all but forgotten his Hebraic heritage in his stiff,
uncommunicatively British gentility, gives us yet another
view of a society every phase of which reflects loss of mean-
ing. Like Mr. Nixon, the literary businessman, and like the
"conservatrix of Milesicn" (in Poem XI) who lacks taste and
the appreciation of tradition despite her pretensions, he sym-
bolizes a condition which has made retreat or escape vir-
tually a physical necessity for "the stylist" of Poem X. Nor
can he look for literary patronage of the sort which came to
an end in Dr. Johnson's day. As Poem XII shows, "The
Lady Valentine" may use him to enhance her own social
prestige, or to stimulate some incidental sexual excitement
in her life, or, "in the case of revolution," as "a possible friend
and comforter." But her "well-gowned approbation" will
bring him no more real support than the world of profes-
sional letters will bring him now that, in Fleet Street,

The sale of half-hose has

Long since superseded the cultivation

Of Pierian roses.

In the second portion of the Mauberley sequence (1920),
all the themes we have noted are recapitulated, but with a
difference. Whereas the speaker in the 1919 group had con-
centrated attention on specific points of attack in the "out-
side world" of society and of the cultural situation, bluntly
challenging it with his own aesthetic values, his attention is
now directed almost wholly inward. Mauberley (1919) is
externalized, objective; Mauberley (1920) gives us the sub-
jective dimension. Here the speaker is sure of his sensitivity
but not of his strength as an artist; he discounts himself and
withdraws, communicating his uncertainties and fear of

38 A PRIMER OF EZRA POUND

failure. The epigraph, modified from Ovid's Latin, gives us
an image of pure frustration: "mouths snapping at empty
air." Poem I in this section, though it parallels its counter-
part in the first movement, is developed in a series of ellipti-
cal sentences except for stanza two, in which the antecedent
poem is quoted directly:

"His true Penelope
Was Flaubert/'
And his tool
The engraver 's.

Whereas the first part of the sequence had spoken out for a
virile, classically precise art in the great tradition, here the
poet describes himself as having turned from delicate etch-
ing in the nineteenth century manner of Jaquemart to the
skill of Roman and Renaissance medalists. That is, though
he has turned from more effeminately ornamental minor
artistry to a method informed by classical criteria, he is still
working in a minor mode. He may approach the successes of
a Pisanello, but he feels, or fears, he cannot approach the
robust success of the great Greek masterpieces, cannot "forge
Achaia" in the image of his Homeric visions. These thoughts
come through as half-statements, expressing syntactically a
dread of ultimate failure not unlike that of Browning's
Andrea del Sarto or Eliot's Prufrock.

The speaker's fears are carried over subtly and somewhat
ambiguously into Poem II. However, the French epigraph,
actually Pound's own composition, extends the theme by
introducing a new consideration: the relation between
aesthetic sensitivity and the ability to know love in terms
suggesting both delicate idealism and sensuality. The poem
itself, introspective and elusive, employs a partly stream-of-
consciousness method to describe and account for the failure
of Mauberley's mission during the three lost years. He has
been moving among phantasmagoria, among fantastic, il-
lusory images of the night ("NUKTIS 'AGALMA"), find-
ing his bearings and closing in on the "orchid" of his vision

The Mauberley Sequence 39

of ideal beauty. But given his limited kind of talent, a talent
for making, in poetry, "curious heads in medallion," it is to
be doubted whether he can in any case realize his ideal. And
between the phantasmagoria on the one hand and this
newly recognized predicament on the other, he has some-
how let go by the opportunity for love in its most full-blown
sense.

He had passed, inconscicnt, full gaze,
The wide-banded irides
And botticellian sprays implied
In their diastasis. . . .

Both a failure of sexual awareness (and perhaps perform-
ance) and a failure to see deeply enough into the orchid's
"botticellian" meaning (the reference is to the famous paint-
ing of the birth of Venus) to give it richly sensuous embodi-
ment seem to be implied in this phrasing. The psychological
components of his failure to impress the public and of his
dismissal by his "self-styled 'his betters* " arc a stale sensa-
tion of having missed out on the main chance and a distrust
of his own powers. In this poem Pound adds greatly to the
authority of his sequence, by giving Mauberley introspective
depth and body. It will be clear that the shadings and quali-
fications that so profoundly modify our understanding of the
speaker's whole nature here could not have been given be-
fore we had come to grips with the "outer" Mauberley-
Pound of the first part. We have seen him dressed for the
forum; now we see him naked and alone. "Envoi," which
presents the ideal he would live by, bridges the gap between
the two Mauberleys revealed with such moving and startling
faithfulness. But after the confession of Poem II and the
revisions of the Odysseus-image that follow in the next two
parts (" The Age Demanded' " and Poem IV), "Medallion"
the closing poem throws a new light on the speaker's re-
lation to the tradition as it was bravely proclaimed in
"Envoi."

But we are moving too quickly perhaps. To go back now

$0 A PRIMER OF EZRA POUND

and follow through in order, " 'The Age Demanded' " takes
its title, as the author's note reminds us, from the opening
line in Poem II of Mauberley 1919. However, it focuses less
on "the age" than on what the earlier piece, in its half-mimi-
cry of Philistine criticism, calls "the ohscurc reveries of the
inward gaze/* Retreat to the world of these reveries is the
poet's response to the age's demand for cheap, time-serving
workmanship. As unfit for such drudgery as the doves that
draw Aphrodite's chariot would be for a "chain bit/' he has
put on an "armour/ Against utter consternation": the armour
of imperviousness, impassive regression, and isolation. What
Maubcrley says of himself is of course true generally for the
drift of modern poetry. Things, though, are not what they
seem, for we know that the motives and meanings in which
he deals, and in which the poets (like Pound) for whom he
speaks deal, are anything but irrelevant. His fears are real
but not finally decisive in his self-evaluation, a fact we need
to remember as we see this psychological poetic novella in
action and watch Mauberley's heroically active image of
himself dwindle into that of the merest passive resistance
and private self-delighting with "imaginary /Audition of the
phantasmal sea-surge." Poem IV carries the dwindling of the
image to its logical conclusion short of zero:

"I was

And I no more exist;

Here drifted

An hedonist."

Finally, "Medallion" portrays the singing lady of "Envoi"
in a similarly shrunken imagery. The lovely singer at the
piano is still conceived in terms of the service of Aphrodite.
But the goddess herself (as Poem II showed) is not revealed
in the full "diastasis" of Botticelli's conception; instead, she
is seen through the medium of a lesser art, a Luini painting
or the illustration in an archaeological study:

As Anadyomene in the opening
Pages of Remach.

The Mauberley Sequence 41

The Muse of "Yeux Glauques," though degraded and be-
wildered, had been more immediately womanly. Now, pro-
tected by glaze or a "suave bounding-line," she has a frozen
quality, is all unrealized potentiality in "metal, or intractable
amber/'

But the potentiality remains; the strong and the weak
Mauberley are after all one and the same: a single persona
seen in opposing yet interactive lights. 13 Just as the method
of the Initial "Ode" counteracts its surface confession of
failure, so also does the extraordinary felicity of color, sound,
and nuance in the 1920 movement correct, if it does not
belie them entirely, the speaker's self-abnegations. Mauber-
ley's confessions are really a charge of cultural failure from
the standpoint of the culture's own most cultivated sensibil-
ities, and his psychological crisis becomes an expression of
despair for the future of social imagination and integrity. It
is not, finally, himself and his art that he denies but the
promise of his civilization. Mauberley (1920) is thus the
purest example we have of Pound's irony.

13 Espey differs considerably from us on this point, although we
would certainly both agree that, as he says, "in the person of
Mauberley Pound was rejecting though . . . this is altogether out-
side the limits of the poem . . .a mask of what he feared to
become as an artist by remaining in England." (p. 83) The greatest
irony of Mauberley is the strength it gains from confessing vulner-
ability. The bawdy suggestiveness of Mauberley-Pound's language,
to which Espey calls our attention repeatedly, is one more instance
of his audacity and defiance in the midst of apparent confused
retreat.

The Cantos

Space forbids our going into the Cantos in even as
much detail as we have into Mauberley. We have already,
however, noted some of the leading ideas behind this more
involved and ambitious work, and though we cannot here
trace their handling throughout its winding, Gargantuan
progress, a few suggestions concerning its character as a
poetic sequence may be useful. First of all, we may take as
our point of departure the fact that in motivation and out-
look the Cantos are a vast proliferation from the same con-
ceptions which underlie Mauberley. The difference lies
partly in the multiplicity of 'Voices'' and "cross-sections,"
partly in the vastly greater inclusiveness of historical and
cultural scope, and partly in the unique formal quality of
the longer sequence; it is by the very nature of its growth
over the years a work-in-progress. Even when the author at

42

The Cantos 43

last brings it to conclusion, reorganizing it, supplying the
withheld Cantos 72 and 73, completing his revisions, and
even giving his book a definitive title, it will remain such a
work. Each group of cantos will be what it is now a new
'phase of the poem, like each of the annual rings of a living
tree. The poet has put his whole creative effort into a
mobilization of all levels of his consciousness into the service
of the Cantos; there has been a driving central continuity,
and around it new clusters of knowledge and association
linked with the others by interweavings, repetitions, and
over-all perspective. Pound has staked most of his adult
career as a poet on this most daring of poetic enterprises;
literary history gives us few other examples of comparable
commitment.

The Cantos has been called Pound's "intellectual diary
since 1915," and so it is. But the materials of this diary have
been so arranged as to subserve the aims of the poem itself.
Passage by passage there is the fascination of listening in on
a learned, passionate, now rowdy, now delicate intelligence,
an intelligence peopled by the figures of living tradition but
not so possessed by them that it cannot order their appear-
ances and relationships. Beyond the fascination of the sur-
face snatches of song, dialogue, and description, always
stimulating and rhythmically suggestive though not always
intelligible upon first reading, there is the essential over-
riding drive of the poem, and the large pattern of its over-
lapping layers of thought. The way in which the elements
of this pattern swim into the reader's line of vision is well
suggested by Hugh Kcnner, one of Pound's most able and
enthusiastic interpreters:

The word 'periplum/ which recurs continually throughout
the Pisan Cantos [74-84], is glossed in Canto LIX:

periplum, not as land looks on a map
but as sea bord seen by men sailing.

Victor Brerard discovered that the geography of the Odyssey,
grotesque when referred to a map, was minutely accurate ac-

44 A PRIMER OF EZRA POUND

cording to the Phoenician voyagers' periploi. The image of
successive discoveries breaking upon the consciousness of the
voyager is one of Pound's central themes. . . . The voyage
of Odysseus to hell is the matter of Canto I. The first half of
Canto XL is a periplum through the financial press; 'out of
which things seeking an exit/ we take up in the second half
of the Canto the narrative of the Carthagenian Hanno's voyage
of discovery. Atlantic flights in the same way raise the world
of epileptic maggots in Canto XXVIII into a sphere of swift
firm-hearted discovery. . . . The periplum, the voyage of dis-
covery among facts, ... is everywhere contrasted with the
conventions and artificialities of the bird's eye view afforded by
the map. . . . 14

Thus, the successive cantos and layers of cantos must be
viewed not so much schematically as experientially. Here we
see how the early Pound's developing idealization of the
concrete image, the precise phrase, the organically accurate
rhythm are now brought to bear on this vast later task. The
many voices, varied scenes and personae, and echoes of other
languages and literatures than English reflect this emphasis
on experience itself: something mysterious, untranslatable,
the embodied meaning of life which we generalize only at
peril of losing touch with it. So also with Pound's emphatic
use of Chinese ideograms, whose picture-origins still are
visible enough, he believes, so that to "read" them is to think
in images rather than in abstractions. His use of them is
accounted for by the same desire to present "successive dis-
coveries breaking upon the consciousness of the voyager/'
The first effect of all these successive, varied breakings is not
intended to be total intellectual understanding, any more
than in real experience we "understand" situations upon
first coming into them. But by and by the pattern shapes up

14 Hugh Kenner, The Poetry of Ezra Pound (Norfolk, Conn.:
New Directions, 1951), pp. 102-103. Kenner's use of Roman
numerals follows Pound, but the latest groups of cantos (Rock-Drill
and Thrones), published after Kenner's book, change to Arabic
numerals. For consistency's sake we have followed the latter usage
throughout.

The Cantos 45

and the relationships clarify themselves, though always there
remains an unresolved residue of potentiality for change, in-
tractable and baffling.

Pound's "voyager/' upon whose consciousness the dis-
coveries break, is, we have several times observed, a com-
posite figure derived first of all from the poet-speaker's
identification with Odysseus. A hero of myth and epic, he is
yet very much of this world. He is both the result of creative
imagination and its embodiment. He explores the worlds of
the living, of the dead, and of the mythic beings of Hades
and Paradise. Lover of mortal women as of female deities,
he is like Zagreus a symbol of the life-bringing male force
whose mission does not end even with his return to his
homeland. Gradually he becomes all poets and all heroes
who have somehow vigorously impregnated the culture. He
undergoes (as do the female partners of his procreation and
the personae and locales in time and space of the whole se-
quence) many metamorphoses. Hence the importance of the
Ovidian metamorphosis involving the god Dionysus, the sea
(the female element and symbol of change), and the inter-
mingling of contemporary colloquial idiom and the high
style of ancient poetry in Canto 2. The first canto had ended
with a burst of praise for Aphrodite, goddess of love and
beauty, and in language suggesting the multiple allusiveness
of the sequence: to the Latin and Renaissance traditions, as
well as the Grecian-Homeric, and to the cross-cultural impli-
cations suggested by the phrase "golden bough." The second
canto takes us swiftly backward in the poetic tradition,
through Browning, then Sordello and the other troubadours,
and then to the classical poets and the Chinese tradition.
All poets are one, as Helen and Eleanor of Aquitaine and
Tyro (beloved of Poseidon) and all femininity are one and
all heroes are one.

In the first two cantos, then, the "periplum" of the se-
quence emerges into view. Three main value-referents are
established: a sexually and aesthetically creative world-view,
in which artistic and mythical tradition provides the main

46 A PRIMER OF EZRA POUND

axes; the worship of Bacchus-Dionysus-Zagreus as the best
symbol of creativity in action; and the multiple hero poet,
voyager, prophet, observer, thinker. The next four cantos
expand the range of allusiveness, introducing for instance
the figure of the Cid, a chivalric hero, to add his dimension
to the voyager-protagonist's consciousness. Also, various
tragic talcs are brought to mind, extending the initial horror
of Odysseus' vision of the dead and thus contributing to the
larger scheme of the poet in the modern wasteland. In abso-
lute contrast, pagan beatitudes are clearly projected in
Canto 2 in the pictures of Poseidon and Tyro:

Twisted arms of the sea-god,
Lithe sinews of water, gripping her, cross-hold,
And the blue-gray glass of the wave tents them ....

and, at the scene's close, in the phallic "tower like a one-
eyed great goose" craning up above the olive grove while
the fauns are heard "chiding Proteus" and the frogs "singing
against the fauns." This pagan ideal comes in again and
again, sharp and stabbing against bleak backgrounds like the
"petals on the wet, black bough" of the "Metro" poem. Thus,
in Canto 3:

Gods float in the azure air,
Bright gods and Tuscan, back before dew was shed.

In Canto 4:

Chores nympharum, goat-foot, with the pale foot alternate;
Crescent of blue-shot waters, green-gold in the shallows,
A black cock crows in the sea-foam ....

In 4 and 5 both there are deliberate echoes of such poets as
have a kindred vision (Catullus, Sappho, and others), set
against the notes of evil and damnation. The lines from
Sordello in 6 serve the same purpose:

The Cantos 47

"Winter and Summer I sing of her grace,
As the rose is fair, so fair is her face,
Both Summer and Winter I sing of her,
The snow makyth me to remember her/*

The Lady of the troubadours, whose "grace" is a secularized
transposition from that of Deity, is another manifestation of
"the body of nymphs, of nymphs, and Diana" which Actaeon
saw, as well as of what Catullus meant: "'Nuces!' praise,
and Hymenaeus 'brings the girl to her man. . . / "

After these archetypal and literary points of reference
have been established, Cantos 8-19 move swiftly into a
close-up of the origins of the modern world in the Renais-
sance, and of the victory of the anticreative over the active,
humanistic values represented by Sigismundo Malatesta and
a few others. (Canto 7 is transitional; in any case we can
note only the larger groupings here.) The relation between
the "Renaissance Cantos" (8-n) and the "Hell Cantos"
(14-16), with their scatological picturings of the contem-
porary Inferno, is organic: the beginning and the end of the
same process of social corruption. The beautiful dialogue on
order in 13 provides a calm, contrasting center for this por-
tion of the sequence, and is supported by the paradisic glow
and serenity of Elysium, revealed in 16 and 17. The earlier
cantos had given momentary attention to Oriental poetry
and myth and, as we have seen, Elysian glimpses also. Now
these motifs are expanded and related to a new context,
bringing the sequence into revised focus but carrying all its
earlier associations along. This leaping, reshuffling, and re-
ordering is the organizational principle behind the growth,
the "annual rings," of the Cantos.

The next ten cantos interweave the motifs of these first
two groups and prepare us for the next leap (in Cantos 30-
41) of perspective. There are various preparations for this
leap, even as early as Canto 20, in which there is a moment
of comment from the "outside" as if to take stock before
hurtling onward. From their remote "shelf," "aerial, cut in

4 A PRIMER OF EZRA POUND

the aether/ 7 the disdainful lotus-eaters question all purpose-
ful effort:

"What gain with Odysseus,
"They that died in the whirlpool
"And after many vain labours,

"Living by stolen meat, chained to the rowingbench,
"That he should have a great fame

"And lie by night with the goddess? . . ."

Is the question wisdom or cynicism? No matter. The poem,
given the human condition and the epic tasks that grow out
of it, is held in check but an instant before again plunging
ahead. The Cantos accepts the moral meaning and the moral
responsibility of human consciousness. The heroic ideal re-
mains, as on the other hand the evil of our days remains
even after the goddess' song against pity is heard at the
beginning of 30.

The new group (30-41) is, like the later Adams cantos
(62-71), in the main a vigorous attempt to present the
fundamental social and economic principles of the Found-
ing Fathers as identical with Pound's own. Adams and
Jefferson are his particular heroes, and there is an effort to
show that Mussolini's program is intended to carry these
basic principles, imbedded in the Constitution but perverted
by banking interests, into action. Pound works letters and
other documents, as well as conversations real and imagined,
into his blocks of verse, usually fragmentarily, and gives
modern close-ups of business manipulations. The method
has the effect of a powerful expose, particularly of the
glimpsed operations of munitions-profiteers. The cantos of
the early 1930*8 have, indeed, a direct connection with the
interest in social and historical documentation and rhetoric
that marks much other work of the same period, and at the
end of Canto 41 (in which Mussolini is seen) we should
not be surprised to find an oratorical climax similar in effect
to that of Poem IV in Mauberley (1919). As in the earlier
groups, however, we are again given contrasting centers of

The Cantos 49

value, especially in Canto 36 (which renders Cavalcanti's A
lady asks we) and in Canto 39, whose sexually charged in-
terpretation of the spell cast over Odysseus and his men on
Circe's isle is one of Pound's purest successes.

The Chinese cantos (53-61) and the Pisan group (74-
84) are the two most important remaining unified clusters
within the larger scheme. Again, the practical idealism of
Confucianism, like that of Jefferson and Adams, becomes an
analogue for Pound's own ideas of order and of secular
aestheticism. Canto 13 was a clear precursor, setting the
poetic stage for this later extension. "Order" and "brotherly
deference" are key words in Confucius' teachings; both
princes and ordinary men must have order within them,
each in his own way, if dominion and family alike are to
thrive. These thoughts are not cliches as Pound presents
them. We hear a colloquy that has passion, humor, and
depth, and what our society would certainly consider un-
orthodoxy. Kung "said nothing of the life after death,' "
he considered loyalty to family and friends a prior claim to
that of the law, he showed no respect for the aged when they
were ignorant through their own fault, and he advocated a
return to the times "when the historians left blanks in their
writings,/! mean for things they didn't know." The Chinese
cantos view Chinese history in the light of these principles
of ordered intelligence in action, with the ideogram ching
ming (name things accurately) at the heart of the identity
between Confucian and Poundian attitudes. "The great
virtue of the Chinese language," writes Hugh Gordon
Porteus, "inheres in its written characters, which so often
contrive to suggest by their graphic gestures (as English does
by its phonetic gestures) the very essence of what is to be
conveyed." 15 The development of Pound's interest in Chi-
nese poetry and thought, as well as his varied translations
from the Chinese, is in itself an important subject. This
interest, like every other to which he has seriously turned his

15 "Ezra Pound and the Chinese Character: A Radical Examina-
tion/' in Ezra Pound, p. 215.

50 A PRIMER OF EZRA POUND

attention, he has brought directly to bear on his own poetic
practice and on his highly activistic thinking in general.

With the Pisan Cantos and Rock-Drill 10 we are brought,
first, into the immediately contemporary world of the poet
himself, in Fascist Italy toward the close of World War II,
in a concentration camp at Pisa, during the last days of Mus-
solini; and second, into a great, summarizing recapitulation
of root-attitudes developed in all the preceding cantos: in
particular the view of the banking system as a scavenger and
breeder of corruption, and of ancient Chinese history as an
illuminating, often wholesomely contrasting analogue to
that of the post-medieval West. Even more than before, we
see now how the Cantos descend, with some bastardies along
the line, from the Enlightenment. They conceive of a world
creatively ordered to serve human needs, a largely rationalist
conception. Hence the stress on the sanity of Chinese
thought, the immediacy of the Chinese ideogram, and the
hardheaded realism of a certain strain of economic theory.
The Pisan Cantos show Pound's vivid responsiveness as he
approached and passed his sixtieth birthday: his aliveness
to people, his Rabelaisian humor, his compassion. The
Lotus-Eaters of Canto 20, aloof and disdainful, have missed
out on the main chances. Canto 81 contains the famous
"Pull down thy vanity" passage in which the poet, though
rebuking his own egotism, yet staunchly insists on the
meaningfulness of his accomplishment and ideals. As the
sequence approaches conclusion, the fragments are shored
together for the moral summing-up. In the Rock-Drill sec-
tion, Cantos 85-95, the stocktaking continues and we are
promised, particularly in Canto 90, an even fuller revelation
than has yet been vouchsafed us of the Earthly Paradise.

Cantos 96-109 17 begin to carry out this promise, though
after so many complexities, overlappings, and interlocking

16 Section: Rock-Drill: 85-95 de los cantares (New York: New
Directions, 1956). This was the first group of cantos to be published
separately since the Cantos appeared in 1948.

17 Thrones: 96-109 de los cantares (New York: New Directions,

1959).

The Cantos 51

voices it must be nearly impossible to bring the work to an
end. It is essentially a self-renewing process rather than a
classical structure, and there is no limit to the aspects of
history and thought the poet has wished to bring to bear on
the poem. Canto 96, for instance, touches on certain devel-
opments after the fall of Rome, especially two decrees in
the Eastern Empire by Justinian and Leo VI concerning
standards of trade, workmanship, and coinage. The special
emphasis in this canto on Byzantine civilization is particu-
larly appropriate because of Byzantium's historical and geo-
graphical uniting of East and West as well as its mystical
associations pointing to a new and dramatic paradisic vision.
Although the memory of earlier glimpses of "paradise" and
the recapitulative, self-interrupting method militate against
an effect of a revelation overwhelmingly new, the pacing of
the whole sequence has made this difficulty at the end in-
evitable. Pound's conclusion must be introduced as emergent
from the midst of things, still struggling from all in life and
consciousness that makes for disorder.

5

Envoy

Pound's career has been a long one and a various one.
We have attempted a brief review of his early development,
of his basic attitudes, and of his two major sequences.
Clearly, a very great deal still remains to be said, not only
about the poetry we have been able to touch on but also
about work not even mentioned thus far, such as Cathay
and Homage to Sextus Properties. The interested reader
will find detailed exposition in a number of valuable studies,
among them Hugh Kenner's The Poetry of Ezra Pound,
John Espey's Ezra Pound's Mauberley, Harold H. Watts's
Ezra Pound and the Cantos, and Clark Emery's Ideas into
Action. Peter Russell's collection Ezra Pound contains useful
essays by numerous authors on important aspects of Pound's
writing, and elsewhere there are valuable scattered pieces
and passages by Louis Zukofsky, T. S. Eliot, William

5*

Envoy 53

Butler Yeats, F. R. Leavis, Horace Gregory, R. P. Blackmur,
and others. Two mimeographed periodicals, The Analyst
(Northwestern University) and The Pound Newsletter
(University of California), and Edwards and Vasse's An-
notated Index to the Cantos of Ezra Pound provide indis-
pensable scholarly aids. But the best commentary on Pound
is his own prose (including his letters) and verse. These
remain the expression of one of our truly creative spirits, a
poet who, not only a true "maker" in his own right, has been
the begetter of creativity in countless others.

Selected Bibliography
WORKS

POETRY

The Cantos of Ezra Pound (N.Y.: New Directions, 1948).

Cantos 1-71 and 74-84.
Personae: The Collected Poems of Ezra Pound (N.Y.: Horace

Liveright, 1926; reprinted with additional poems, N.Y.:

New Directions, 1949).
Section: Rock-Drill: 85-95 de los cantares (N.Y.: New Direc-

tions, 1956). Cantos 85-95.
The Selected Poems of Ezra Pound (N.Y.: New Directions,

1949).
Thrones: 96-109 de los cantares (N.Y.: New Directions, 1959).

Cantos 96-109.
The Translations of Ezra Pound (N.Y.: New Directions, n. d.

54

Selected Bibliography 55

PROSE

ABC of Reading (London: G. Routledge and Sons, 1934; New

Haven: Yale University Press, 1934; Norfolk, Conn.: New

Directions, 1951).
Jefferson and/or Mussolini (London: S. Nott, 1935; N.Y.:

Liveright, 1935).
The Letters of Ezra Pound: 1907-1941, ed. D. D. Paige (N.Y.:

Harcourt, Brace, 1950).

Literary Essays, cd, T. S. Eliot (Norfolk, Conn.: New Direc-
tions, 1954)-
Money Pamphlets by , 6 v. (London: Peter Russell, 1950-

1952).
The Unwobbling Pivot and the Great Digest (N.Y.: New

Directions, 1947).

COMMENTARY

The Analyst, ed. Robert Mayo. Evanston: Northwestern Uni-
versity, Department of English, 1953- . This mimeo-
graphed publication, appearing "at intervals," has been in
the main devoted to annotation of the Cantos, prepared by
various hands.

Blackmur, R. P. Language as Gesture (N.Y.: Harcourt, Brace,
1952).

Edwards, John H. A Preliminary Checklist of the Writings of
Ezra Pound (New Haven: Kirgo-Books, 1953).

Edwards, John H. and William W. Vasse. Annotated Index
to the Cantos of Ezra Pound (Berkeley and Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 1957).

Eliot, T. S. Ezra Pound, His Metric and Poetry (N.Y.: A. A.
Knopf, 1917).

Emery, Clark. Ideas into Action: A Study of Pound's Cantos
(Coral Gables, Fla.: University of Miami Press, 1958).

Espey, John. Ezra Pound's Mauberley (Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 1955).

Gregory, Horace, and Zaturenska, Marya. A History of Amer-
ican Poetry 1900-1940 (N.Y.: Harcourt, Brace, 1946).

Kenner, Hugh. The Poetry of Ezra Pound (Norfolk, Conn.:
New Directions, 1951; London: Faber and Fabcr, 1951).

56 A PRIMER OF EZRA POUND

Leavis, F. R. New Bearings in English Verse (London: Chatto
and Windus, 1932).

O'Connor, William Van and Edward Stone. A Casebook on
Ezra Pound (N.Y.: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1959).

The Pound Newsletter, ed. John H. Edwards (Berkeley: Uni-
versity of California, 1954-1956). Ten issues of this
mimeographed publication appeared, providing invaluable
information and comment on Pound bibliography, various
aspects of Pound's thought and career, aspects of the Cantos,
and so on. See Number 10 (April, 1956) for Index to
series.

Russell, Peter, ed. Ezra Pound (London: Peter Nevill, 1950;
Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions, 1950). Published also by
New Directions as An Examination of Ezra Pound.

Watts, Harold H. Ezra Pound and the Cantos (Chicago: H.
Regnery, 1952).

Williams, William Carlos. The Autobiography of William
Carlos Williams (N.Y.: Random House, 1951).

Yeats, William Butler. A Packet for Ezra Pound (Dublin: The
Cuala Press, 1929). Reprinted in A Vision (London: Mac-
millan, 1937; N.Y.: Macmillan, 1938, 1956).

Zukofsky, Louis. "The Cantos of Ezra Pound," The Criterion,
X (April, 1931), pp. 424-440.

This book is a gift to the library by
Dr.Pasupuleti Gopala Krishnayya,

President, Krishnayya 1 s News

Service, New York City, as part of a

collection of American books given

in memory of

Ills, llrlou'il Twin ttrotlwrs
Itolft (iW, Sta.) & Ma KriiAnayyi (Dnj.>