Amazing Poetry: Cantos of Ezra Pound

A Draft of XVI Cantos of Ezra Pound for the Beginning of a Poem of Some Length
Three Mountains Press, Paris,1925.

It is necessary to emphasize the words “draft” and “beginning” in the printed above. The poem may be taken neither as a concluded whole nor as a finished part. Nothing ultimate, then, can be said; no grand summary, no cathedral dismissal or acceptance can be made.

As they have appeared, whether in books or magazines, singly or in small lots, these Cantos have met consistent misfortune. Where they have been mentioned at all they have been accused of unintelligibility or even stupidity. Readers of refused to tolerate such work in a poet who, with respect to reputation, is no beginner. And yet to tolerate is to misunderstand; and to patronise is grossly to miss the point. Where the proportion of delight is proportional, and when both delight and labor and mental agility go to any amount of high art, Mr. Pound’s Cantos at last obtain a position of value. It is at once obvious; it is my experience that in the degree the labor and agility were willingly supplied, the enjoyment was great.

The subject, the crux, knot, and nut of the matter, has already been noted several times by Pound, both in verse and prose. I quote from Canto XI:

De litteris et de armis, præstantibusque ingeniis,
Both of ancient times and our own; books,
arms,
And of men of unusual genius,
Both of ancient times and our own,
in short the usual subjects
Of conversation between intelligent men.

So in a sense this is Pound having a conversation with someone, but doing all the talking himself; it is Pound dragging out a half-hundred styles and usages and centuries, flavoring it all with a little of himself. Catcalls and hosannahs, hoorahs, curses, and benedictions, the image of pure form: the form of words, and the making of them taking on a shell of meaning.

As in Dante it is the world that is given; and the problem is to order and contrast, to assemble the parts of that world in a living whole. Dante, to record in a theology very exact effect, find in a scaffold ready-made and capable of any weight. The difference in ultimate scope and strength between the “Divine Comedy” and the “Cantos” is due perhaps precisely to the fact that no such elastic convention exists today.

But it is observable that as Pound remodels and adds to his “Cantos,” he more nearly approaches such a convention. The general rule is apparent. When the sum of any kind of material has been thoroughly digested, then any part may be set against the whole and thereby judged. By successive operations all the parts achieve an order.

The value, the effect, of such an order, is most evident in Canto VII, which may be taken as the centre of the poem. It contains in retto the whole. The old men under the wall talking (an image running through all the Cantos) who get up after age in their long talk and set them all against the present. The Canto ends with an invocation to Alesandro Medici which gathers everything in the Cantos, either before or after it, to one point.

What is perhaps the most “solid” group (VIII–XI) constructs fifteenth-century Italy through the doings of Sigismundo Pandolfo Malatesta de Malatesti, Lord of Rimini… etc., a man who should have had, like Burton, “the brow of a god and the jawbone of a devil.”

We have the tale set forth of his wars and pacifications, of his loves and hates, his rapes and murders. He becomes a symbol, the creation of history.
Canto XI we end on Sigismundo sitting in his temple, alone, in the shadow, on a cornice “too narrow to fit his big beam.” He has grown old, his lands and fortune have been despoiled. He mutters out the long catalogue of war and love and the vigor and cruelty and treachery, which had made up his own life and the life of his age. Suddenly these words come:

And we sit here. I have sat here
For forty-four thousand years.

That is a civilization gathered in one mind and speaking; that and—

In the gloom the gold gathers the light again, it is
the fail fathers, the high language.

At least gestures in the grand manner.

Quite different is the content of Cantos XIV–XV, where foolishness is in Ulysses and perhaps Dante, is used to some purpose. At any rate the “group” has an amazing energy of toadstool. It is this foolishness which turns out, like that of the Yahoos, to be an old friend. Unknown’ that lowly gestation sometimes did not terminate for action. After two hundred years Jonathan Swift has achieved a paternity, in Pound and Joyce, he might not have bid for.

There are certain qualities of style which make the work of Pound peculiarly valuable. They are qualities only inadequately generalized under the headings of wit and compressed levity. In the simple line “Varchi of Florence steeped in a different year,” the word steeped gives the line a value. And the use of the word distinguishes two characteristics of the “wit” we here speak of.

One is the exaggeration which is not distortion; a thought is lifted just enough out of its natural position to give it that strangeness, truly to emphasize its nature. The other characteristic is perhaps a faculty for the translation of sensations and thoughts from one order of being to another. Examples are in the old days; in the new. Example on example might be given until the line comes and quickens these Cantos, as if the old days were enlivened and sharpens in a little elegance:

The silver mirrors catch the bright moving
Dawn, to our waking, drifts in the green
cool light,
Dew-haze blurrs, in the grass, pale ankles
moving,
Beat, beat, whirr, thud, in the soft turf
under the apple tree.
Choros Nympharum, goat-foot with the
white foot glimmered,
Crescent of blue-shot waters, green-gold in the
shallows,
A black cock crows in the sea-foam,
And the curved carved foot of the
couch,
claw-foot and lion head, an old man
seated
Speaking in the low drone.

Amazing as the work may be—and surely it is the most amazing poem of our time—it is as classical in spirit and manner as Dante or T. S. Eliot. Which is to say that, above all, the work is mature, mature and completely honest.

I quote from the first Canto:

But thou, O King, I bid remembrance of
thwmp, unburied,
Heap up mine arms, my arms to be had,
In remembrance of me.
Thwmp, unburied,
and my arms to be had.
And thou no working.

And in our day, that I swung mid
fellows.

____
From The Saturday Review of Literature 2, no. 28, December 5, 1925.