Ezra Pound
This article has been graciously provided by THT featured poet T.
Merrill.
Since [THT Editor] Michael Burch seemed to think it would be interesting
to have a piece from me on Ezra Pound, I decided I might as well be
daring and accommodate.
As much as anyone I can think of, Pound--quite ironically really,
considering the style of many of his own effusions--deserves to
be regarded as the "Father Of Modern Poetry." As an acquaintance of mine
used to like saying, "Some mothers have strange children," and perhaps
the same could be said of some fathers.
Pound was sent by his own father to military school, where his
bookishness drew ridicule from other students but where, nonetheless, he
shone as a scholar and also got his first exposure to ancient languages,
which were to become an invaluable and much-used tool in his later
literary career. He went on to the University of Pennsylvania, where he
kept up his language studies, and where he met and courted Hilda
Doolittle and also began a lifelong friendship with William Carlos
Williams, who in time would become famous in NY literary circles as a
proponent and champion practitioner of the New Poetry. From 1903 to
1906, Pound continued language studies at Hamilton College, where he
focused mainly on Anglo-Saxon and Romance languages.
In 1907 he began teaching French and Spanish at Wabash, a small
Presbyterian college in Indiana, but his incipient teaching career was
nipped in the bud when he was discovered, for a second time, in his
lodgings with a female impersonator he had invited to spend the
night. In a letter to a college friend in 1907 about his first time
being discovered with his exotic guest, he amusingly relates how he was
"...found...sharing my meagre repast with the lady-gent impersonator in
my privut apartments...find me a soft immoral place to light in when the
she-faculty-wives git hold of that jewcy morsel." It was a different
era, especially in deeply conservative Crawfordsville where Wabash was
located, and with his repetition of the ungodly association, Pound's
professorial debut abruptly ended with his dismissal from the
college after only four months there.
In 1908 we find him in Europe as a journalist, and in the same year
appeared his first volume of verse, a collection of about forty poems
called A Lume Spento (literally, To A Candle Snuffed), which was
privately published in Venice and whose title was inspired by the death
of W. B. Smith, an artist with whom he'd had a deep friendship in his
student days in Philadelphia. He then went to London to chase down
Yeats, whom he regarded as the last word in matters poetic, and there,
joining forces with poet Richard Aldington and others, he adopted and
became a principal advocate for the school of poetic thought known as
"Imagism," first conceived by English philosopher and critic T. E. Hulme,
and also edited his first anthology, Des Imagistes
(1914). Japanese poetry, haiku in particular, with its stark imagery
capsulized into a tight free-verse form, was this school's main model
and inspiration, and strict economy of language, and non-monotonous
rhythms were accordingly two of its principal dictums. "In A Station At
The Metro," presented below, is a good example of the favored style. But
Pound fairly quickly lost interest in his conceptual adoptee after some
quarrels with its main American proponent, Amy Lowell, and subsequently
referred to the school as "Amygism."
In collaboration with two others, author Wyndham Lewis and sculptor
Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, he helped conceive another brainchild,
"Vorticism," which primarily was a movement in the visual arts, and
which eschewed sentimentalism and aimed at depicting, through a sort of
fragmented lens, the harsh realities of the new industrial culture that
came to be known as The Machine Age. He and his literary allies wrote
numerous articles about this new movement.
In 1913 he became the secretary of his poetic idol, Yeats, and in the
same year began corresponding with James Joyce, whom he went to great
lengths in helping to gain an audience and recognition, writing many
articles about him, and evidently holding him in high esteem. He even
raised money for him and sent him clothes.
Poetry in Pound's view was not "entertainment," and he boasted of his
literary elitism and publicly avowed his disdain for the common
reader. It is perhaps no wonder then that he favored Joyce so
much. While poetry can at times serve as a passably satisfying pastime
for the poet himself, it is hard not to agree that poetry
isn't "entertainment," since its sources and aims would suggest
otherwise. Poetry is primarily, it seems to me, a sort of
self-translation, a more or less labored reflection of what matters most
to the poet, of some idea or feeling that urges itself on his or her
consciousness and may even cry out for expression, and for preservation
in a memorable form. But if poetry is not really born of any desire to
please an audience--even if the poet may entertain a hope that
there still might be one--it is by no means evident that poetic
concerns never touch, nor in some degree coincide with, commonly shared
ones, nor ever speak by chance to people not poets themselves in a way
that is pleasing to them. Love, mortality, illness, separation,
heartbreak, grief, loss, loneliness, disillusion, for just a handful of
widely shared afflictions of the human condition, are after all quite
natural and appropriate poetic themes, if it yet remains entirely likely
that the poet will express his feelings in a style more powerful and
compelling than is commonly encountered, and indeed in a language not
commonly spoken.
Pound's own definition of great literature was "....simply language
charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree." Probably this is
just another way of expressing one of Imagism's principal tenets, that
in composition of any kind, every word should be selected with
particular attention to its potential for deepening and enriching one's
theme, and all superfluous language should be rigorously avoided, and
excised from a work when found. This is a reasonable enough proposition,
I think, and when observed, can really only help make writing more
concentrated and condensed.Among the most admired of all Pound's
writings are his Chinese translations, which can be found in his book Cathay,
published in 1915.
Pound was variously labeled by different writer-friends. Wyndham
Lewis called him "the Trotsky of literature," Yeats called him "a
solitary volcano," and Eliot, whose "Wasteland" Pound is famous for
having edited and trimmed down, called him "the miglior fabbro" (the
superior maker).
Pound had a wife and concurrently a mistress, and had a child by
each.
Jumping far ahead, in 1945 Pound, who had been an admirer of
Mussolini, was arrested and taken prisoner in Italy by American forces
for pro-Axis propaganda he had spewed on Italian radio during the war--much
of it quite anti-semitic--and on his return to the US he was
charged with treason. His case went to trial, but since psychiatrists
that were summoned to deliver medical testimony declared him paranoid,
instead of possibly receiving a death sentence he ended up in a hospital
for the criminally insane. During his twelve-year residency at this
hospital he received the Bollingen Prize from Yale, in 1949, for his
Pisan Cantos. After his release, which in part was due to letters
written on his behalf by various influential authors, including Robert
Frost, he returned to Italy, and in 1972, reminiscently of Thomas Mann's
famous work, he died in Venice, a virtual hermit.
My own favorite Pound poem, of the fair sampling of his works I've
read, is "Histrion," which relates an experience often ascribed to
poets, that of helplessly assuming a voice not unlike that of poets they
have admired. And readers may indeed notice this principle at work in
much of Pound's own poetry.
["Histrion"
and a number of other poems by Ezra Pound are available at this
link.]
Ancient Music
Winter is icumen in,
Lhude sing Goddamm,
Raineth drop and staineth slop,
And how the wind doth ramm!
Sing: Goddamm.
Skiddeth bus and sloppeth us,
An ague hath my ham.
Damm you; Sing: Goddamm.
Goddamm, Goddamm, 'tis why I am, Goddamm,
So 'gainst the winter's balm.
Sing goddamm, damm, sing goddamm,
Sing goddamm, sing goddamm, DAMM.
The Garden
En robe de parade.
Samain.
Like a skein of loose silk blown against a wall
She walks by the railing of a path in Kensington Gardens,
And she is dying piece-meal
of a sort of emotional anemia.
And round about there is a rabble
Of the filthy, sturdy, unkillable infants of the very poor.
They shall inherit the earth.
In her is the end of breeding.
Her boredom is exquisite and excessive.
She would like some one to speak to her,
And is almost afraid that I
will commit that indiscretion.
In A Station Of The Metro
The apparition of these faces in the crowd:
Petals on a wet, black bough .
An Immorality
Sing we for love and idleness,
Naught else is worth the having.
Though I have been in many a land,
There is naught else in living.
And I would rather have my sweet,
Though rose-leaves die of grieving,
Than do high deeds in Hungary
To pass all men's believing.
The River-Merchant's Wife: a Letter
While my hair was still cut straight across my forehead
I played about the front gate, pulling flowers
You came by on bamboo stilts, playing horse,
You walked about my seat, playing with blue plums
And we went on living in the village of Chokan:
Two small people, without dislike or suspicion.
At fourteen I married My Lord you.
I never laughed, being bashful.
Lowering my head, I looked at the wall.
Called to, a thousand times, I never looked back.
At fifteen I stopped scowling,
I desired my dust to be mingled with yours
Forever and forever, and forever.
Why should I climb the look out?
At sixteen you departed,
You went into far Ku-to-Yen, by the river of swirling eddies,
And you have been gone five months.
The monkeys make sorrowful noise overhead.
You dragged your feet when you went out.
By the gate now, the moss is grown, the different mosses,
Too deep to clear them away!
The leaves fall early this autumn, in wind.
The paired butterflies are already yellow with August
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,
As far as Cho-fu-Sa.
Meditatio
When I carefully
consider the curious habits of dogs,
I am compelled to admit
That man is the superior animal.
When I consider the curious habits of man,
I confess, my friend, I am puzzled.