Ezra Pound: His Metric and Poetry Part 2

Pound has been very small in quant.i.ty. The impression which his personality made, however, is suggested by the following note in "_Punch_," which is always a pretty reliable barometer of the English middle-cla.s.s Grin:

Mr. Welkin Mark (exactly opposite Long Jane's) begs to announce that he has secured for the English market the palpitating works of the new Montana (U.S.A.) poet, Mr.

Ezekiel Ton, who is the most remarkable thing in poetry since Robert Browning. Mr. Ton, who has left America to reside for a while in London and impress his personality on English editors, publishers and readers, is by far the newest poet going, whatever other advertis.e.m.e.nts may say. He has succeeded, where all others have failed, in evolving a blend of the imagery of the unfettered West, the vocabulary of Wardour Street, and the sinister abandon of Borgiac Italy.

In 1913, someone writing to the New York _Nation_ from the University of Illinois, ill.u.s.trates the American, more serious, disapproval. This writer begins by expressing his objections to the "principle of Futurism." (Pound has perhaps done more than anyone to keep Futurism out of England. His antagonism to this movement was the first which was not due merely to unintelligent dislike for anything new, and was due to his perception that Futurism was incompatible with any principles of form. In his own words, Futurism is "accelerated impressionism.") The writer in the _Nation_ then goes on to a.n.a.lyze the modern "hypertrophy of romanticism" into

The exaggeration of the importance of a personal emotion.

The abandonment of all standards of form.

The suppression of all evidence that a particular composition is animated by any directing intelligence.

As for the first point, here are Mr. Pound's words in answer to the question, "do you agree that the great poet is never emotional?"

Yes, absolutely; if by emotion is meant that he is at the mercy of every pa.s.sing mood.... The only kind of emotion worthy of a poet is the inspirational emotion which energises and strengthens, and which is very remote from the everyday emotion of sloppiness and sentiment....

And as for the platform of Imagism, here are a few of Pound's "Don'ts for Imagists":

Pay no attention to the criticisms of men who have never themselves written a notable work.

Use no superfluous word and no adjective which does not reveal something.

Go in fear of abstractions. Don't retail in mediocre verse what has already been done in good prose.

Don't imagine that the art of poetry is any simpler than the art of music or that you can please the expert before you have spent at least as much effort on the art of verse as the average piano teacher spends on the art of music.

Be influenced by as many great artists as you can, but have the decency either to acknowledge the debt outright or try to conceal it.

Consider the definiteness of Dante's presentation as compared with Milton's. Read as much of Wordsworth as does not seem to be unutterably dull.

If you want the gist of the matter go to Sappho, Catullus, Villon when he is in the vein, Gautier when he is not too frigid, or if you have not the tongues seek out the leisurely Chaucer.

Good prose will do you no harm. There is good discipline to be had by trying to write it. Translation is also good training.

The emphasis here is certainly on discipline and form. The Chicago _Tribune_ recognized this as "sound sense," adding:

If this is Imagism ... we are for establishing Imagism by const.i.tutional amendment and imprisoning without recourse to ink or paper all "literary" ladies or gents who break any of these canons.

But other reviewers were less approving. While the writer in the _Nation_, quoted above, dreads the anarchy impending, Mr.

William Archer was terrified at the prospect of hieratic formalisation. Mr. Archer believes in the simple untaught muse:

Mr. Pound's commandments tend too much to make of poetry a learned, self-conscious craft, to be cultivated by a guild of adepts, from whose austere laboratories spontaneity and simplicity are excluded.... A great deal of the best poetry in the world has very little technical study behind it....

There are scores and hundreds of people in England who could write this simple metre (i.e. of "A Shropshire Lad") successfully.

To be hanged for a cat and drowned for a rat is, perhaps, sufficient exculpation.

Probably Mr. Pound has won odium not so much by his theories as by his unstinted praise of certain contemporary authors whose work he has liked. Such expressions of approval are usually taken as a grievance--much more so than any personal abuse, which is comparatively a compliment--by the writers who escape his mention. He does not say "A., B., and C. are bad poets or novelists," but when he says "The work of X., Y., and Z. is in such and such respects the most important work in verse (or prose) since so and so," then A., B., and C. are aggrieved.

Also, Pound has frequently expressed disapproval of Milton and Wordsworth.

After "Ripostes," Mr. Pound's idiom has advanced still farther.

Inasmuch as "Cathay," the volume of translations from the Chinese, appeared prior to "l.u.s.tra," it is sometimes thought that his newer idiom is due to the Chinese influence. This is almost the reverse of the truth. The late Ernest Fenollosa left a quant.i.ty of ma.n.u.scripts, including a great number of rough translations (literally exact) from the Chinese. After certain poems subsequently incorporated in "l.u.s.tra" had appeared in "Poetry," Mrs. Fenollosa recognized that in Pound the Chinese ma.n.u.scripts would find the interpreter whom her husband would have wished; she accordingly forwarded the papers for him to do as he liked with. It is thus due to Mrs. Fenollosa's ac.u.men that we have "Cathay"; it is not as a consequence of "Cathay" that we have "l.u.s.tra." This fact must be borne in mind.

Poems afterward embodied in "l.u.s.tra" appeared in "Poetry," in April, 1913, under the t.i.tle of "Contemporanea." They included among others "Tenzone," "The Condolence," "The Garret,"

"Salutation the Second," and "Dance Figure."

There are influences, but deviously. It is rather a gradual development of experience into which literary experiences have entered. These have not brought the bondage of temporary enthusiasms, but have liberated the poet from his former restricted sphere. There is Catullus and Martial, Gautier, Laforgue and Tristan Corbiere. Whitman is certainly not an influence; there is not a trace of him anywhere; Whitman and Mr.

Pound are antipodean to each other. Of "Contemporanea" the _Chicago Evening Post_ discriminatingly observed:

Your poems in the April _Poetry_ are so mockingly, so delicately, so unblushingly beautiful that you seem to have brought back into the world a grace which (probably) never existed, but which we discover by an imaginative process in Horace and Catullus.

It was a true insight to ally Pound to the Latin, not to the Greek poets.

Certain of the poems in "l.u.s.tra" have offended admirers of the verse of the "Personae" period. When a poet alters or develops, many of his admirers are sure to drop off. Any poet, if he is to survive as a writer beyond his twenty-fifth year, must alter; he must seek new literary influences; he will have different emotions to express. This is disconcerting to that public which likes a poet to spin his whole work out of the feelings of his youth; which likes to be able to open a new volume of his poems with the a.s.surance that they will be able to approach it exactly as they approached the preceding. They do not like that constant readjustment which the following of Mr. Pound's work demands.

Thus has "l.u.s.tra" been a disappointment to some; though it manifests no falling off in technique, and no impoverishment of feeling. Some of the poems (including several of the "Contemporanea") are a more direct statement of views than Pound's verse had ever given before. Of these poems, M. Jean de Bosschere writes:

Everywhere his poems incite man to exist, to profess a becoming egotism, without which there can be no real altruism.

I beseech you enter your life.

I beseech you learn to say "I"

When I question you.

For you are no part, but a whole; No portion, but a being.

... One must be capable of reacting to stimuli for a moment, as a real, live person, even in face of as much of one's own powers as are arrayed against one;... The virile complaint, the revolt of the poet, all which shows his emotion,--that is poetry.

Speak against unconscious oppression, Speak against the tyranny of the unimaginative, Speak against bonds.

Be against all forms of oppression, Go out and defy opinion.

This is the old cry of the poet, but more precise, as an expression of frank disgust:

Go to the adolescent who are smothered in family.

O, how hideous it is To see three generations of one house gathered together!

It is like an old tree without shoots, And with some branches rotted and falling.

Each poem holds out these cries of revolt or disgust, but they are the result of his still hoping and feeling:

Let us take arms against this sea of stupidities. Pound ...

has experience of the folly of the Philistines who read his verse. Real pain is born of this stupid interpretation, and one does not realize how deep it is unless one can feel, through the e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.ns and the laughter, what has caused these wounds, which are made deeper by what he knows, and what he has lost....

The tone, which is at once jocund and keen, is one of Pound's qualities. Ovid, Catullus--he does not disown them.

He only uses these accents for his familiars; with the others he is on the edge of paradox, pamphleteering, indeed of abuse....

This is the proper approach to the poems at the beginning of "l.u.s.tra," and to the short epigrams, which some readers find "pointless," or certainly "not poetry." They should read, then, the "Dance Figure," or "Near Perigord," and remember that all these poems come out of the same man.

Thine arms are as a young sapling under the bark; Thy face as a river with lights.

White as an almond are thy shoulders; As new almonds stripped from the husk.

Or the ending of "Near Perigord":

Bewildering spring, and by the Auvezere Poppies and day's-eyes in the green email Rose over us; and we knew all that stream, And our two horses had traced out the valleys; Knew the low flooded lands squared out with poplars, In the young days when the deep sky befriended.