by Paul Dean
from The New Criterion, January 2008
Any biographer of Ezra Pound needs a clear head, a cool and dispassionate style, and first-rate literary-critical powers. Of David Moody's two predecessors, Noel Stock (1960) had only the first two, and was inhibited by the control exercised over his work by Pound's widow, while Humphrey Carpenter (1988) had the first two, but not consistently—his readability coming at the price of some journalistic slickness—and did not pretend to the third. Moody has all three. His book, the first of two volumes, will be a godsend to people like myself, who have spent decades feeling obscurely guilty about their lack of enthusiasm for Pound, and wondering why others, whose judgment they admire, hold him in high regard. If I concentrate here on what Moody says about Pound's writing, that must not cloud the fact that the purely narrative parts of the book are splendidly done.
The mind of Pound, as it burst upon London in 1908, seemed to come from nowhere. His background and elementary education had been unremarkable, yet his declaration at the age of fifteen—the year he enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania—of his ambition "to write before I die the greatest poems that have ever been written" expressed an unshakeable purpose. Like Milton, whom he detested, he set himself to acquire the necessary skills, and allowed nothing and nobody to obstruct his path. Finding Pennsylvania wanting, he transferred after two years to Hamilton College, in upstate New York, whose faculty were more indulgent towards his impatience with curricular niceties. Classical, medieval, and modern languages were his speciality; apart from these, he ignored what did not interest him. He obtained his bachelor's and master's degrees, but his proposal to do postgraduate work on Renaissance Latin authors was vetoed by one professor on the remarkable grounds that "We should have to do so much work ourselves to verify your results." Despite having done work on Cavalcanti, which was more than good enough for a doctoral thesis, he never amassed sufficient credits. This rankled all his life, fueling his suspicion of the academic establishment and his belief in himself as a one-man "Ezuversity" educating anyone who would listen about what he considered important. He reserved particular venom for Felix Schelling's classes on Elizabethan drama, quoting with justified contempt Schelling's dismissal: "The University is not here for the exceptional man." (This may help to explain his otherwise puzzling lack of interest in Shakespeare.) Conventional scholarship, he concluded, was a busted flush; that a reader should respond intelligently to the "luminous details," the really central works, mattered more than inert background knowledge. Eliot had become an eminent critic only "by disguising himself as a corpse."
Pound's later solipsism is here in embryo, but at this period what matters is his energy, his vision, and his altruism on behalf of artists he admired: Cummings, Joyce, Frost, Lawrence, Wyndham Lewis, and Eliot. It also needs stressing that his linguistic gift was genuine, despite the faux-philistine sixshooter prose style he tediously affected. Whatever he cared to learn, he learned thoroughly, and professorial sneers at his lack of "scholarship" simply miss the point. He certainly knew far more than the few dozen lines of the languages he breezily prescribed for others in How to Read and elsewhere. Provençal was the most important, and if he over-estimated the poetic value of the troubadours, he at least accepted the discipline of technique. Pound's poetry evolves tortuously, asking our patience; unlike Eliot, who allowed only fourteen items to be printed as "Poems Written in Early Youth," he rushed into print and only later decided whether the results were worth preserving.
One of Moody's greatest services is to enable us to see the inner logic of the separate volumes Pound published in such astonishingly rapid succession, which is obscured if we read his poems in selections. (The 2003 Library of America edition of his Poems and Translations, which prints everything except The Cantos, is an indispensable adjunct to the biography.) "This shaping up a book," Pound wrote, "is almost as important as the construction of a play or a novel." Hilda's Book, put together in 1907 when Pound was twenty-two, and addressed to Hilda Doolittle, is awash with Celtic Twilight and Pre-Raphaelite idiom, all sound and no sense. A Lume Spento (1908), dismissed by Pound in 1964 as "a collection of stale creampuffs," is read by Moody as a concerted attempt to combat the enervating atmosphere of contemporary poetry with a mixture of Dante, Villon, Browning, and Swinburne: "The essential concern . . . is with poetry as a mode of being," and even though the note of fin-de-siècle melancholy reasserts itself after the firecracker opening sequence of poetic personae, it is itself countered by the concluding group of lyrics. Personae (1909) reprints about half its contents from A Lume Spento; in their new context they contribute to a dialectic between the active and the contemplative modes of life, brought to a head in "Revolt Against the Crepuscular Spirit in Modern Poetry," with its preference of "shapes of power" over "the lethargy of this our time." Dreams can be strong and purposeful; they need not be lotus-eating reveries. Pound's dream was of Beauty, love of which "belongs to the permanent part of oneself," and for him this was no abstraction.
Personae brought good reviews from Edward Thomas—later retracted in the face of outrage from the London literary establishment—and F. S. Flint, who praised Pound's rhythmical innovations. Pound himself was beginning to distinguish the "apparent" form of a line from the "real" or "inner" form. In Exultations (1909), some of the affectation and much of the self-centeredness of the previous volumes is purged, and alongside imitations of Dowson, whom Pound respected for his part in "knocking bombast, & rhetoric & Victorian syrup out of our verse," there are debts to the Yeats of The Wind Among the Reeds (1899), which Pound admired for its "syntactical simplicity." I had not realized, before I read Moody, that Pound and Yeats had been so close; Pound even edited some of Yeats's poems as he was to do Eliot's.
Up to this point, Pound later judged, his own work had been "trapped, fly-papered, gummed and strapped down" in stilted diction. He was like those eighteenth-century poets, subsequently identified by Eliot, who knew that they had something new to say but wrote in an idiom in which it could not be said. It was Ford Madox Ford (then Hueffer), editor of the new journal The English Review, with his demand for a clarity in English poetry akin to that of the best French prose (represented, for Pound, by Flaubert and Stendhal), who prompted the change of direction from Canzoni (1911)—in reading which, Hueffer fell onto the floor and writhed in agony—through Ripostes (1912) to Cathay (1915). Moody, though, is admirably just to Canzoni, rightly singling out the Heine translations as a notable success, and he suggests that Ripostes be seen as "a series of slides" like Rimbaud's Illuminations, inspecting various states of the human soul.
Besides Hueffer's pained reaction, the catalyst for Pound's breakthrough was of course the Imagist movement and his discovery of Chinese poetry. On these matters the essential guide remains that work of critical genius, the Mimesis of Modernism, Hugh Kenner's The Pound Era, but Moody is characteristically clear and helpful. As London correspondent of Harriet Monroe's Chicago-based magazine Poetry, Pound laid down the law uncompromisingly: "There just IS nothing alive here except W. B.
Y[eats] and Les Imagistes." The latter included, besides himself, H. D., Richard Aldington, Frost, Lawrence, and (for a while) Amy Lowell. Their famous manifesto, printed in Poetry in 1913, consisted of three principles, the most important being the last: "As regarding rhyme or rhythm," the poet should "compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in the sequence of a metronome." This is to ally Imagism with vers libre as practiced by Laforgue and his predecessors, which always, I feel, went deeper with Eliot than with Pound (who urged Eliot, rather, to study Gautier). The image was defined as "that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time," or in another statement as a "vortex or cluster of fused ideas. . . endowed with energy." A poem, to use post-Poundian terminology, should be a kind of Big Bang, nothing less than a mode of grasping reality and liberating the self for significant action—and not just in literary matters, for Pound believed that the health of a political system depended upon the health of its culture, as Confucian China showed. Pound's involvement in Vorticism was a means of promoting socio-cultural revolution: "A nation that cannot write clearly cannot be trusted to govern, nor yet to think."
At this distance, Vorticism seems a remarkably silly movement, and one may well think it a mercy that it was swept away by World War I. The achievement represented by Cathay and Homage to Sextus Propertius (1917 according to Pound, but Moody thinks 1919 in fact) goes well beyond anything a Vorticist literature could have produced, and, as Moody makes clear, obsession with their supposed defects as "translations" (at a point when Pound couldn't read Chinese, and could read Latin perfectly fluently) obscured, then and since, the fact that they are obliquely books of war poetry—what the ancients might have written had they experienced the contemporary situation. (As Kenner observes, Pound is no more, but no less, faithful to his original than Jonson or Pope were to the classical poets they imitated.) The fourteen poems in Cathay, mostly by Rihaku (Li Po), are selected from the 150 in the notebooks of Ernest Fenollosa to "make up a single, multifaceted image of a great empire in a dysfunctional phase" as Moody puts it. Homage to Sextus Propertius is in similar vein, an ironic abstention from imperial toadying in favor of the private poetry of the boudoir. Moody writes excitingly here:
The bright energy of this mind comes from its disintegrating, splintering under the pressure of baffling conditions it can do nothing about; and beneath the bold mockery, and the self-mocking comedy and farce, and at the heart even of the celebration of love, there is a persistent undertone of defeat in love and by Rome. Death will be the common factor to resolve this conflict of personal love and a public world given over to war.
Harriet Monroe, who published a truncated version of the Homage in Poetry, forwarded to Pound the "expert" verdict she had obtained from Professor Hale of Chicago ("Mr. Pound is incredibly ignorant of Latin. . ."). Pound's reply began, magnificently, "Catpiss and porcupines!!" and that was the end of his connection with the magazine.
Pound had begun the Cantos in 1915, forecasting that they would occupy him for four decades, an underestimate as things turned out. As is well-known, the first three Cantos were revised out of recognition, but Moody points out that Pound had solved his technical problem at the outset: up to now he had used a series of Browningesque personae, as Eliot was also to do, but how was he to be present in this new epic work? The answer was to "exclude from his poem both the person of the poet and the feigned hero," affording an Imagist directness and concreteness by conceiving "the poet's intelligence as operating independently of a particular self or soul, and as wholly engaged in comprehending its objects." Consequently, the Cantos have for subject-matter "the struggle of the poetic intelligence to inform, to present and to relate all the fragments of its world in its effort to make a unified whole of it." They are Pound's Prelude, his poem on the growth of his own mind.
We should note the difference from Eliot—and also note Eliot himself, who appears in Pound's life (in September 1914) in typically equivocal fashion. The story of Pound's instant approval of "Prufrock" and "Portrait of a Lady," and of his later editorial work on The Waste Land, requires no more than mention; of more interest is Eliot's canny distancing of himself from Pound. He wrote to Conrad Aiken that although Pound's "remarks are sometimes good . . . his verse is well-meaning but touchingly incompetent," and to his father that Pound, while useful, "is not the sort of person whom I wish to be intimate with my affairs. . . . My acquaintance with him is primarily professional." Eliot had divined that too close association with the truculent, swashbuckling Pound would hinder him from acceptance into the echelons of English society to which he aspired to belong. He did what he felt he could to promote Pound's poetry, but was given more than he gave. Moody reasonably points to the greater variety of material in Pound's prose collection Instigations (1919), with essays on Arnaut Daniel, Renaissance translators of the classics, Voltaire, James, Laforgue, de Gourmont, Eliot, Joyce, and Wyndham Lewis, than in Eliot's Sacred Wood of the following year; moreover, Pound is showing the practical implications of what Eliot had only theorized in "Tradition and the Individual Talent" (1919). Yet it was Eliot who was noticed, with his policy of Olympian pronouncements which created, he informed his mother, "a small and select public which regards me as the best living critic, as well as the best living poet, in England." Well, he had his reward.
Passing thankfully over Pound's first meeting with that economic maverick Major C. H. Douglas, and regretfully over The Fourth Canto, in which Pound applied Fenollosa's rule that "Relations are more real and more important than the things which they relate" by jettisoning, in Moody's words, "any evident mediating and interpreting consciousness," we come to Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920), with which Pound bade farewell to England. Here one must speak as one finds, and for my part I agree with Pound's own verdict, expressed when he sent the poem to Thomas Hardy (of all people!): "The Mauberley is thin." It does not move me as "Prufrock" does, and it always reads like an attempt to imitate "Prufrock" and Eliot's quatrain poems. Pound wrote in his review of Prufrock and Other Observations: "The method is Mr Eliot's own, but as soon as one has reduced even a fragment of it to a formula, some one else. . . will at once try to make poetry by mimicking his external procedure. And this indefinite 'some one' will, needless to say, make a botch of it." Mauberley is not a botch, but nor, I feel, is it a first-rate poem. The uncertainty over its structure is distracting. I am sympathetic to Donald Davie's judgment: "Hardly anything is lost, and much is gained, if the poems are read one at a time, as so many poems by Pound, and if the Mauberley persona is dismissed as a distracting nuisance." The attack on the War in poems IV and V, the "Envoi" (1919), and poem IV in the "Mauberley" sequence, appeal to me most; I admire the finish and pith of much else; the whole leaves me cold. If Mauberley is a persona, it is one which Pound had to put behind him. The future, for good and ill, lay with the Cantos. After this brilliant opening instalment, David Moody's treatment of the sequel cannot come too soon.
About the Author
Paul Dean is head of English at Dragon School, Oxford.
New York
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Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission
