Isolated Superiority: Ezra Pound

By publishing his “collected poems”—a collection remarkable because it represents also a rigorous selection and omission—Mr Pound provokes us to another attempt to estimate his work. I am doubtful whether such a valuation is, or will ever be, quite possible for our generation; but even if not, it is worth while at least to enquire into the nature of our difficulty in criticizing his work.

Pound has had, and has an immense influence, but no disciples. For the absence of the latter, I think he is to be felicitated; or perhaps it does not matter an atom. He has been a great deal imitated, but that matters still less; and with his imitators neither I nor any one else can be concerned. But apart from imitation and plagiarism, there are these two things which are not the same: influence and discipleship. Sometimes they are united in the same persons; but I have suggested that Pound has great influence but no disciples. And I think that the reason is this: that influence can be exerted through form, whereas one makes disciples only among those who sympathize with the content. To illustrate by a very different case, Cardinal Newman has influenced a great number of people, but his disciples, if there are any, must be very few. But of Pound I believe that in form he foreran, excelled, and is still in advance of our own generation and even the literary generation after us; whereas his ideas are often those of the generation which preceded him.

It is an interesting anomaly, but perhaps not curious. What is curious is his complete and isolated superiority as a master of verse form. No one living has practised the art of verse with such austerity and devotion; and no one living has practised it with more success. I make no exception of age or of country, including France and Germany; what there may be in other languages I cannot judge. Nor do I limit the “art of verse” by the necessary but dangerous word technique. A man who devises new rhythms is a man who extends and refines our sensibility; and that is not merely a matter of “technique.” I have, in recent years, cursed Mr Pound often enough; for I am never sure that I can call my verse my own; just when I am most pleased with myself, I find that I have only caught up some echo from a verse of Pound’s.

The term vers-libres, never a happy one, is happily dying out. We can now see that there was no movement, no revolution, and there is no formula. The only revolution was that Ezra Pound was born with a fine ear for verse. He has enabled a few other persons, including myself, to improve their verse sense; so that he has improved poetry through other men as well as by himself. I cannot think of any one writing verse, of our generation and the next, whose verse (if any good) has not been improved by the study of Pound’s. His poetry is an inexhaustible reference book of verse form. There is, in fact, no one else to study. One or two eminent writers have tried to take their lessons direct from Whitman. But (as their work shows) Whitman is not a safe model unless you have a better, or at least a more reliable ear than Whitman; it is wiser to absorb your Whitman through Pound.

From this point of view, I regret that the new volume should be a selection. Mr Pound has written some poems which I find rub me the wrong way; but I would not have any of them omitted, for there is something to be learned from every one. And besides, to tell the truth, the poems that annoy me are here: Moeurs Contemporaines. Mr Pound has an exquisite sense of humour, and his epistolary style is masterly; but the wit and humour in his verse. . . . But that question would lead us to another aspect of the matter. Meanwhile, where are In Tempore Senectutis and the Lament for Glaucus? Another collection must be made after Mr Pound is dead.

There is another thing to be said about Pound’s Art of Verse. As many persons prefer his early poems, I must record my conviction that his verse has steadily improved, and that the Cantos are the most interesting of all. This gives me the opportunity to make a gentle transition to the second part of my subject. Mr Wyndham Lewis, in The Enemy, has handled these Cantos rather roughly. (Where the Cantos are humorous or colloquial, I sympathize with him.) I think that the trouble is this: Mr Lewis, being a philosopher, is impatient with the content; not being a poet, he is not sufficiently interested in the form. Hence Mr Lewis is a little hasty, and might lead the inexperienced reader to believe that Pound’s rhythms spring from the same source as those of Miss Stein. And this is wholly untrue: they have nothing in common.

The only criticism which could be made of the Cantos is that Pound’s auditory sense is perhaps superior to his visual sense. His eye is indeed remarkable, it is careful, comprehensive, and exact; but it is rare that he has an image of the maximum concentration, an image which combines the precise and concrete with a kind of almost infinite suggestion. His verse, on the other hand, does everything that he wants it to do; it has the uniform rhythm running through it, combined with unlimited variability of mood. As for the meaning of the Cantos, that never worries me, and I do not believe that I care. I know that Pound has a scheme and a kind of philosophy behind it; it is quite enough for me that he thinks he knows what he is doing; I am glad that the philosophy is there, but I am not interested in it.

This brings us to the second problem about Pound. I confess that I am seldom interested in what he is saying, but only in the way he says it. That does not mean that he is saying nothing; for ways of saying nothing are not interesting. Swinburne’s form is uninteresting, because he is literally saying next to nothing, and unless you mean something with your words they will do nothing for you. But Pound’s philosophy, I suspect, is just a little antiquated. He began as the last disciple of the Nineties, and was much influenced by Mr Yeats and Mr Ford Madox Ford. He added his own extensive erudition, and proceeded to a curious syncretism which I do not think he has ever set in order. He is, of course, extremely Romantic. His Romance has enabled him to revive much that needed to be revived; he has made people read Dante who might never have read him; he has fought successfully the English conventions of good poetry, and has made his point that there are vital qualities of style which are found in Provençal and Italian verse and which are not always found in English verse. He has induced a more critical attitude towards Shakespeare; he has put Guido Cavalcanti and Arnaut Daniel back “on the map,” even for those who cannot read them. For all these gifts, and others, we cannot be too grateful: Pound’s critical influence is immense, and beneficial. (I wish he would let me edit his critical essays, instead of doing it himself.) My own critical debt to him is as great as my debt in versification. Yet I feel that there is a muddle somewhere. Pound has gone on, and will go on, with vast and restless curiosity in everything that is said and written; it is not that he does not keep up with the times. But I sometimes wonder how he reconciles all his interests: how does he reconcile even Provençal and Italian poetry? He retains some mediaeval mysticism, without belief; this is mixed up with Mr Yeats’s spooks (excellent creatures in their native bogs); and involved with Dr Berman’s hormones; and a steam-roller of Confucian rationalism (the Religion of a Gentleman, and therefore an Inferior Religion) has flattened over the whole. So we are left with the question (which the unfinished Cantos make more pointed) what does Mr Pound believe?

Personae: The Collected Poems of Ezra Pound. 8vo. 231 pages. Boni & Liveright. $3.50.


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From The Dial, Vol. 84, no. 1, January 1928.