Pound the Poet

The most famous of Ezra Pound's poems－Mauberley, the Cantos－are also the most difficult to understand directly from the test itself. The knowledge of biographical facts and sources are needed or help greatly. Reading Mauberley and the Cantos without such information becomes a painful plodding through an unknown country in the middle of the night. A few facts in Pound's life, his theory of writing, his use of sources, once known by the reader, can transform a muddle of words into valuable insights, and give pleasure, even fun, for Ezra Pound often mixes high seriousness with clownishness.

A few illustrations will suffice. As a translation-adaptation of Homer's description of Odysseus' voyage to the underworld, Canto I reads with great ease until the reader comes to "Lie quiet Divus . . ." Knowledge of an earlier version of this canto makes things clear:

We learn here that Pound found Andreas Divus' Renaissance (Latin) translation of the Odyssey in a Paris bookstall together with the florid translation of Homeric hymns to the gods by a certain Cretan. In his final version Pound suppressed the information and the critical judgment on the two translators' style in order to preserve the sweeping movement of his verse.

The cantos on Chinese history (53-71) read easily as an English translation/summary of an 18th century French translation of the 通鑑綱目 by Mailla. The Chinese names of persons and places are French transliterations of the Chinese pronunciation at the time and place Mailla wrote. Similarly, the American cantos (62-71) are often called the Adams cantos because they are a collection of quotations from the writings of John Adams, especially of his correspondence with Jefferson. The American cantos follow the Chinese cantos because Mailla ended his history in the 1770's, the beginning of America as a nation.

The Pisan cantos (74-84) are clear enough when one knows that Pound was kept prisoner in a cage near Pisa after his capture as a traitor to America immediately following the surrender of Italy at the end of World Was II. The books he had with him were Legge's studies of Confucius' The Great Digest〔大學〕and The Unwobbling Pivot〔中庸〕, the Bible, and a Pocket Book of Verse.

As we have seen, Pound's method was to put into verse a condensation of history, an accumulation of facts, or what he saw as facts, which seemed meaningful to him. What makes his histories poems and not simply a sequence of past events, is the lack of logical connection between his selected facts. He explained clearly his principle of selection: "In the material sciences the observed data have no syllogistic connection with one another. . .You don't necessarily expect the bacilli in one test tube to "lead to" those of another by mere logical or syllogistic line. . . The scientist now and then discovers similarities, he discovers family groups, similar behavior . . . .I see no reason why a similar seriousness should be alien to the critic of letters." His method is to juxtapose facts or supposed facts as far apart in time and space as can be a hope that some insight will be born from this union.

This method is the result of his study of Chinese characters, which he discovered in Ernest Fenollosa's The Chinese Character as a Medium for Poetry, which appeared in The Little Review in 1919. Pound was fascinated by the new way of looking at things that the observation of ideograms allowed him to discover. In the character 新, for instance, he saw an axe resting against a standing tree, and from this observation concluded how newness implied cutting down. In his tent in Pisa, such musings may well have preserved his sanity. He remembered the opening of the Analects〔論語〕："The Master said: is it not pleasant to learn with a constant perseverance and application? "Noting the character for perseverance, at least as interpreted by Legge, was 習, that is "wings," implying frequent motion, repetition, practice, and "white", he could write the line in Canto 74:

But Pound's study of ideograms goes deeper than these ingenuities. As he wrote in Guide to Kulchur: "The ideogrammatic method consists of presenting one fact and then another until at some point one gets off the dead and desensitized surface of the reader's mind, onto a part that will register." This explains his choice of facts in the Chinese and American cantos, facts which, as the elements in the Chinese characters, seem quite unconnected, but are found to have an unexpected relationship to the close and imaginative observer. Pound's poems, especially the cantos, are vast, complex ideograms with disparate elements, which the reader must interpret in his own way, using his heart, mind, and imagination. The passage quoted above from Canto 74: "To study with the white wings of time passing. . ." comes immediately after the description of his surroundings in the Detention Camp near Pisa where he experiences the great night of the soul:

Hugh Selwyn Mauberley is no less an ideogram of disparate elements which were linked in the poet's mind and that the reader must put together in his own mind.

This poem was written in two parts. Our Study Guide annotates only the first part made up of thirteen sections.

The first question that arises is whether Mauberley and Pound are identical. Critical interpretations vary greatly on this point. The most sensible seems to be the one that takes Mauberley as a mask of the minor artist of the 1910's expressing what he could expect from the Anglo-Saxon milieu of his time.

The sequence of poems opens with an "Ode" on Ezra Pound himself revealing his character and his hopeless career as an artist who fled the cultural waste land of America in the hope of finding a rich cultural soil in England. He only finds another wasteland in which his poetic ideal dies.

The second poem exposes the reason why Pound almost had to fail in England and in America－the age demanded an art that only reflected its ugliness and not classical beauty. The third poem treats of the same topic contrasting the "cheap tawdriness" of these days to the beauty of classical times. Poems IV and V show commercial tawdriness culminating in a devastating war where young men die for a civilization that is corrupt.

These five poems deal with the present, that is, the 1910's. The next two poems go back a generation earlier and show the cause of the present tawdriness in Victorian official morality, which crushed the pre-Raphaelite movement and the values, it represented. It also caused the artist of the 1890's to die morally as Ezra Pound is shown to die in Poem I. Poems VIII to XII are scenes of contemporary life illustrating the kind of contacts left for the serious artist. Brennbaum, the Jew, suppresses all appearances of Jewishness in himself in order to fit in the time. Nixon sacrifices serious art for popular success as a best seller. In Poem X the real artist is ostracized from society and so lives alone in the countryside in great poverty, married to an uneducated wife who does not understand what he is doing. In Poem XI the educated woman has only acquired a tradition, which she does not understand and is unable to help evolve. In Poem XII the artist is reduced to begging from fashionable ladies who have no appreciation for his art but find a sort of excitement or security in helping poor artists.

The sequence of the first part ends with an envoi, a sending away of his book into the English public, in the form of a beautiful musical poem gathering allusions to the best poetry of the past, the time when England had not yet entered the period of cheap tawdriness. It ends with the hope that someday England will become again the merry England of old. The envoi is at the same time a farewell to England where the speaker had come to find a living tradition and found only deadness.

The whole sequence of Mauberley opens with a poem expressing the speaker-poet's ambition in coming to England and his failure; it ends with a farewell poem on his leaving England for other shores, Odysseus-like, never ceasing on his quest for the living tradition to which he belongs. Inside this framework are contained poems describing contemporary life in England, the very scenes that cause his disappointment and his leaving.

The first poem of the sequence tells us how he came to England from a half-savage country, attracted by the sirens, the songs he had read in English poetry of the past, hoping to find his ideal, an and like that of Flaubert, laboriously looking for the right word, the accurate word. For three years he tried in spite of all odds to bring lilies out of acorns, or force his way into Thebes against the god's will like Capaneus, or being caught by a fishing fly like a trout. Finding a wasteland in England, he fished, like the fisher-king, for three years, then gave up his art, morally died in the thirtieth year of his age, leaving no poetic monument to posterity. He had been unaware of the march of events towards decadence, tawdriness, too much preoccupied with ideal beauty to notice the passing of time and change.

The last poem, the envoi, is written in the style of Waller, the poet who wrote for music in the time of merry England, and gathers allusions to the greatest English writers of the past: Waller, Chaucer, Milton, Shakespeare, all representatives of the better tradition which he had tried to revive.

The word "canto" is an Italian word meaning "song." Besides this common meaning in Italian, it has been used since Dante to designate the major sections of a long poem like the Divine Comedy, Orlando Furioso, Jerusalem Delivered, Byron's Childe Harold, etc. It is supposed to mark a rest for the singer or reciter of a long poem and plays the role of books in Homer and the ancient epics.

Pound's Cantos are a sort of journal in verse of the poet's intellectual epic search for meaningful moments in the cultural past. Pound put in verse a great deal of his readings in classical poetry, Provencal poetry, Renaissance writings, Chinese history, Confucius, American history, Economics, his personal tragic experience at Pisa after World War II, and, finally, his own views of the present world.

His method is ideogrammatic. He chooses from his readings or personal experiences the telling details (a method he learned from Flaubert) and puts them side by side as in the composition of a Chinese character, leaving to the reader the labor of linking them into sense. He explained himself clearly on this score: "Any fact is, in a sense, 'significant.' Any fact may be 'symptomatic,' but certain facts give one a sudden insight into circumjacent conditions into their causes, their effects, into sequence, and law . . .when in Burckhardt [Renaissance historian] we come upon a passage: 'In this year the Venetians refused to make war upon the Milanese because they felt that any war between buyer and seller must prove profitable to neither,' we come upon a portent, the old order changes, one conception of war and of the State begins to decline. The Middle Ages imperceptibly give ground to the Renaissance. A ruler owning a State and wishing to enlarge his possessions could, under one regime, in a manner opposed to sound economy, make war; but commercial sense is sapping this regime. In the history of the development of civilization or of literature, we come upon such interpreting detail. A few dozen facts of this nature gave us intelligence of a period-a kind of intelligence not to be gathered from a great array of facts of the other sort. These facts are hard to find. They are swift and easy of transmission. They govern knowledge as the switchboard governs an electric circuit." (The New Age for Dec. 1911 p. 130). This is the exact method Pound followed in the Chinese and American cantos. He justifies his using the Adams-Jefferson papers in the latter by saying: "If one wished an intimate acquaintance with the politics of England or Germany at certain periods, would one be wiser to read a book of generalities and then read at random through the archives, or to read through, let us say, first the state papers of Bismarck or Gladstone? Having become really conversant with the activities of either of these men, would not almost any document of this period fall, if we read it, into some sort of orderly arrangement? Would we not grasp its relation to the main stream of events? (The New Age for Feb. 1912 p. 370)."

The Cantos were begun in 1915 and were continued throughout Pound's life. Canto I is introductory, presenting the speaker as the explorer, an Odysseus figure, going first into the underworld to talk to the dead, and then beginning his exploration: "so that:". The next six cantos are mainly concerned with the ancient pagan world of Greece. Cantos 8-19 deal with the modern world beginning with the Renaissance and ending in the hell of contemporary time as pictured in Mauberley. In the middle of these cantos stands Canto 13 on Confucius as the model for moral order. Cantos 19-29 revise a great deal of what has been seen before and are perhaps the least unified. Cantos 30-41, on the other hand, treat of social and economic problems with relaxation in sex through allusions to Circe and Italian love poetry. Cantos follow on various topics up to Canto 53 where Chinese history begins and lasts until Canto 61. Cantos 62-73 pick up history where Pound left off in the Chinese cantos and continues with American history (62-73). Cantos 74-84 are called the Pisan cantos dealing with Pound's experience as a prisoner. Cantos 85-95 entitled Rock-Drill appeared together in 1956 as a sort of picture of Utopia. The last cantos (96-109) which appeared in 1959 review history again, that of Rome, Byzantium, East and West, with glimpses of an earthly paradise.

The work, by its very nature, cannot be finished and could go on forever, as long as new readings, new insights, new dreams fill the poet's creative mind.

This Study Guide presents Canto I in its entirety as a remarkable introduction to a lifetime work, which, though formless in many ways, contains insights that are worthwhile sharing with Pound. What follows are from the first Chinese history canto (53), excerpts from the first American canto (62), and excerpts from the first Pisan canto (74). These seem enough to give a good idea of Pound's method and may well lead the reader to further studies of the controversial poet.

These two early poems by Pound show his capacity to write as he said he tried to write in Mauberley. They show a sense of the music of past poetry together with original imagery and rhythmic technique.