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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.
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