Better poetry than politics
Politically, Ezra Pound was either grotesquely evil or simply insane. There is really no middle ground here. The Holocaust, the fate of the Jews in Europe was as a direct result of the forces that Pound and other fellow travellers cheered onward in Italy and Germany.
Pound and his more weird friends, enthusiasts of Social Credit, believed that faceless bankers had caused the tribulations of the Great War. Be careful how you incite a righteous hatred is the lesson here.
Poets are humane and fair by nature, but they are not necessarily well-reasoned: they resist the real in order to confer unity upon it, as Camus wrote. Pound’s misfortune was that he found himself in the wrong place with the wrong kind of mental equipment. He paid a heavy price for that misfortune, though not as high a price as six million others.
But Pound didn’t begin in misfortune. In truth he began in great good fortune with splendid personal energy and unique music. To read his early poetry is to discover that the reading of poems is a transcendental acceptance of gifts:
She walks by the railing of a path in Kensington Gardens,
And she is dying piece-meal
His boundless verbal energy created masterly effects;
Lhude sing Goddamm,
Rain drop and staineth slop,
And how the wind doth ram!
Sing: Goddamm.
Skiddeth bus and sloppeth us,
In 1924 Pound settled at Rapallo in Italy from where he continued his campaign to change the world, both literary and political. By this time his range of associates and projects is simply bewildering: the poet ‘HD’, WB Yeats, Ford Madox Ford, Joyce, Hemingway, contributions to The New Age, The Little Review, publication of Personae and Exultations by Elkin Mathews, the promotion of his Imagist movement through Harriet Monroe of Poetry, the publication therein of the iconic In a Station of a Metro, the editing of TS Eliot’s The Waste Land, the promotion of Joyce’s Ulysses, a de-cluttering of the mental drawing-room of Yeats, and the fatal meeting with Major Douglas, theorist of Social Credit.
Cathay, an astonishing book, had been published in 1915. It was based on the 17 notebooks of the Chinese scholar, Ernest Fenollosa, presented to Pound by Fenollosa’s widow, Mary. The book was, as TS Eliot remarked, the creation of a Chinese voice in English poetry; a voice that has created the dominant verbal expectation of Chinese poetry for the English language reader up to the modern era:
Over the grass in the West Garden;
They hurt me. I grow older.
If you are coming down through the narrows of the river Kiang,
Please let me know beforehand,
And I will come out to meet you
These are the words of the River Merchant’s Wife, whose hair had been cut straight across her forehead, and stopped scowling at 15. So far, it has been impossible to break Chinese poetry free from the cadences of Ezra Pound: China still awaits a translator of Pound’s stature and genius. When a truncated version of his Homage to Sextus Propertius was published in Poetry he was attacked by a University of Chicago classicist: “Mr Pound is incredibly ignorant of Latin ... For sheer magnificence of blundering, this is unsurpassable.” Pound replied in kind: “That fool in Chicago took Propertius for a translation.”
What Pound had aimed to do was not to translate but to “bring a dead man to life”. Thus he opened the great argument about the translation of poetry, an argument that rages to this day. Pound knew that to make a great translation one must have an exquisite command of one’s own language: the foreign language, as source material, must always remain secondary.
Language was at the core of every Pound project, from translation to verbiage-free Imagism, from poetry as clear speech to poetic line as anti-iambic; as non-linear, primal, instinctive anti-history. Pound was a genius in his infinite capacity to take pains over language; his dedication as an artist is exemplary and Joycean in scale. His work is the power-source of every kind of modernism on both sides of the Atlantic.
From 1920 Pound published virtually no single lyric poems, concentrating instead on his great work-in-progress, The Cantos. The initial Three Cantos had been published in Poetry in 1917 but Pound, influenced by Joyce, revised the entire opening over the years. Three Mountains Press published the first efforts in Paris in 1925, followed by A Draft of XXX Cantos in 1930. Faber of London published The Fifth Decad of the Canto in 1937.
For the gondolas cost too much, that year
And there were not ‘those girls,’ there was one face,
Thus begins Canto III with its echoes of Browning, its shadow of Byron and its sourcebook in Homer and El Cid. As John Berryman noted in his 1949 essay (reprinted here) Pound saw himself as the successor of Robert Browning, an unjustly neglected poet. Canto XLV gives us his view of money and economy:
usura blunteth the needle in the maid’s hand
and stoppeth the spinner’s cunning.
Pietro Lombardo came not by usura
Duccio came not by usura
Money was the root of all evil, but this great work absorbs every kind of evil and blessing. Like Finnegan’s Wake it is limitless in its meanings: it is both a symphony and an encyclopedia. In this Selected Poems and Translations, Richard Sieburth’s notes and annotations are masterful. The Cantos are deciphered and the reading of them is enhanced by his precise and apt explanations and timeline. This new book is indeed an indispensable revaluation of Ezra Pound, beautifully designed and bound for permanence in the timeless Faber tradition.
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