The Books: “The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry” – Ezra Pound

“Do not retell in mediocre verse what has already been done in good prose.” – Ezra Pound

I grew up hearing stories of Ezra Pound, not just of his fascism and his time in a cage in Italy, or being indicted for treason, or his breakdown. Pound was a character in my childhood lexicon because of his support and promotion of James Joyce. Welcome to the O’Malley Household. His name came up all the time. Ezra Pound. Even the name calls up the rows and rows of books on my father’s shelves, and my father’s gravelly voice talking to me about these titanic clashes of the 20s and 30s, spearheaded by Pound.

Ezra Pound. The name is an onomatopoeic device. The man was tireless. He didn’t just do it for Joyce, he did it for all of the Modernists. He was generous with new talent, ferocious and relentless. He promoted people until the public really had no choice but to accept the new voices. The relationship with Joyce is fascinating to me – but it is just the tip of the iceberg with Ezra Pound. Pound wasn’t a rich man. He couldn’t afford to be a Renaissance-era-type benefactor. But he had pull and power. He used his power wisely and well, yanking new writers into the spotlight, forcing them to stand still so that they could be fully regarded. Pound’s dictum “make it new” is famous, and perhaps overused now – it is an oversimplification of Pound’s general philosophy. Pound was a poet too, of course, but I think his true legacy lies in how he promoted other people. We owe him a great debt for that. His poems are controversial to this day, mainly because of his political beliefs and his eventual insanity. He was an anti-Semite, and worked against the United States openly during WWII. He paid for that, obviously.

Pound’s poetry can be dense, difficult – and his contemporaries (like Eliot, Yeats) were conflicted about how good it was. I guess I am, too. Some of it blazes off the page with a truth that sears right through me – there are times (like the poem I post today) when his voice is clear, open, with nothing in between it and the reader. Pound can be awfully clever, and that can act as a smokescreen, or a barrier … his cleverness … but when he is NOT clever, when he speaks from the heart – I don’t know, I find him to be pretty damn powerful. His engagement seems to me to be with abstractions. I could be wrong about that. I don’t know much about Pound – although because he is such a giant figure to my father he resonates for me on that level as well. But it seems to me that Pound had that gift-slash-curse of the insane – which is to inflate abstractions into something almost unlivably austere. It is when people strive to live by their theories – come hell or high water – that they lose their humanity. The great political cataclysms of the 20th century, the genocides and slaughter, can all be somehow explained (again, oversimplifying) by heaving apocalyptic love affairs with theory. Let us take this THEORY of politics and force it into being. Abstractions imposed from above on a living breathing populace. It is amazing how powerful those delusions really are. One of the harbingers of living-by-theory is a belief in utopia (on the left-wing as well as the right-wing side), a true belief that the world can actually be perfected … and it is my general belief that anyone who talks about utopia is someone to be feared. I’ve written about that before. Utopians may have the best intentions, but LOOK OUT for people with good intentions. Utopia requires the mess of humanity to be ironed out, eradicated. That is the only way it can work.

Now, again, I’m not a Pound scholar, so I don’t want to go too off on a tangent here, because I am not on certain ground. But his insanity was obviously something clinical, a mental illness – but much of its manifestation had to do with the rigidity of abstractions. Rigidity cannot hold. There will be a snap sooner or later. There’s controversy too surrounding Pound’s eventual retraction of his fascism and anti-Semitism … but all of that doesn’t interest me as much as his poetry does. And even more than his poetry – his BELIEF in people of talent. James Joyce MUST find a wide audience. Pound was a dog with a bone when it came to his contemporaries with talent. My dad loves him for that, and so do I.

I also love Pound because that very tendency towards abstraction – which was so detrimental to his mental health, and led him down some very unsavory philosophical paths – also helped him be a master theorist of verse. He really engaged with poetry (that is also shown in the poem I posted below). He wrestled with it. He tried to divorce himself from his influences. He hated anything that was passively received. Everything must be examined, pulled apart, and evaluated on its own merits. Accept NOTHING at face value. He wrote about writing, he wrote about poets and poetry and what a poem SHOULD be (again with the dogmatic certainty, the pushing towards abstraction – which loves rules) … and if he couldn’t do it himself in his own work, he recognized the genius of others. He was not a bitter Salieri. Or who knows, maybe he was – but the impression I get of him is not of mediocrity, seething at the grandiose talents of his contemporaries. What I get from him is that he understood his poetry to be at the level it was at … he worked hard at it, he was ambitious … but his “mediocrity” (and please, I would count my lucky stars if I could be as “mediocre” as Ezra Pound) did not cause him to be ungenerous or stingy. Quite the opposite.

Modernism needed a champion. That champion was Ezra Pound.

He wrote in 1915:

Poetry must be as well written as prose. Its language must be a fine language, departing in no way from speech save by a heightened intensity (ie. simplicity). There must be no book words, no periphrases, no inversions. It must be as simple as De Maupassant’s best prose, and as hard as Stendahl’s … Objectivity and again objectivity, and expression: no hindeside-beforeness, no straddled adjectives (as ‘addled mosses dank’), no Tennysonianness of speech; nothing – nothing that you couldn’t, in some circumstance in the stress of some emotion, actually say. Every literaryism, every book word, fritters away a scrap of the reader’s patience, a scrap of his sense of your sincerity.

This was a revolution at the time.

Pound was breaking away from the Victorian stylings of the former generation. His belief was that Yeats was the greatest writer in English (and I can’t disagree with him) and it was because of Yeats’s emotional yet stark language, its lack of fripperies and embellishments (at least in his later great work) … its sense that it was something “new”. And indeed it was. Yeats began with lots of fripperies, lots of fancy-pants language, and while it always feels sincere – you can sense the struggle in Yeats. You can sense him trying to wrench himself out of the 19th century into the unknown 20th. Pound was instrumental in pushing him in that direction, encouraging him, saying, “yes, yes, yes, THAT way … THAT is where you need to go …” If you read Yeats’s work in chronological order, the development is startling. It’s like you are reading the works of two entirely separate poets. You wonder where that second guy, the guy who wrote poems like “Among School Children” came from. Pound was part of that breaking-free of the past for Yeats.

A fascinating man. There’s a new biography out (the first volume of what promises to be a giant work) and I am looking forward to reading it.

It sits on my father’s shelf right now, taking its place beside all the other Pound books.

Pound’s politics may have been controversial, and they certainly ruined him (along with a host of other factors). His reputation has not recovered, and maybe it shouldn’t. Who knows. It’s not my place to worry about Pound’s reputation, or to try to explain to annoyed people who ONLY know him for his politics why he is such a giant figure in the world of 20th century literature, and why he must not be discounted. To discount him, to ignore him, is to render the entire Modernist movement opaque. He is too big. He cannot be gotten out of the way.

Here’s a poem he wrote that I really like. Any artist must grapple with his influences – either accepting or rejecting. It is a process. Once upon a time I hated Herman Melville. Now I love him. Ironically, after all of this talk about Pound’s political rigidity … what I am struck most in this poem is its flexibility. Its willingness to accept, to change.

His reputation has not surpassed those of his friends whom he championed. Eliot, Joyce, and many many others … they loom far larger on the literary map, casting shadows that are far longer. But if you look into their journeys on even a superficial level, one name comes up again and again and again.

Ezra Pound.

A Pact

I make a pact with you, Walt Whitman –
I have detested you long enough.
I come to you as a grown child
Who has had a pig-headed father;
I am old enough now to make friends.
It was you that broke the new wood,
Now is a time for carving.
We have one sap and one root –
Let there be commerce between us.

Quotes about Ezra Pound

” – T.S. Eliot:

“Then in 1914, I think, [Conrad Aiken and I] were both in London in the summer. He said, ‘You go to Pound. Show him your poems.’ He thought Pound might like them. Aiken liked them, though they were very different from his…I think I went to call on him first. I think I made a good impression, in his little triangular sitting room in Kensington. He said, Send me your poems. And he wrote back, This is as good as anything I’ve seen. Come around and have a talk about them. Then he pushed them on Harriet Monroe, which took a little time…When I went to see Pound, I was not particularly an admirer of his work, and though I now regard the work I saw as very accomplished, I am certain that in his later work is to be found the grand stuff…He was a marvelous critic because he didn’t try to turn you into an imitation of himself. He tried to see what you were trying to do. There was a long section about a shipwreck. I don’t know what that had to do with anything else, but it was rather inspired by the Ulysses canto in The Inferno, I think. Then there was another section that was an imitation Rape of the Lock. Pound said, It’s no use trying to do something that somebody else has done as well as it can be done. Do something different.”

T.S. Eliot, letter to Conrad Aiken, on Pound’s poems

“Touchingly incompetent”

Ezra Pound:

“I respect Mr. Joyce’s integrity as an author in that he has not taken the easy part. I never had any respect for his common sense or for his intelligence, apart from his gifts as a writer.”

Ezra Pound on Ulysses:

“Joyce — pleasing; after the first shell of cantankerous Irishman, I got the impression that the real man is the author of Chamber Music, the sensitive. The rest is the genius; the registration of realities on the temperament, the delicate temperament of the early poems. A concentration and absorption passing Yeats’ — Yeats has never taken on anything requiring the condensation of Ulysses.”