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Ezra Pound
Ezra
Pound, in full Ezra Loomis Pound (b.
Oct. 30, 1885, Hailey, Idaho, U.S.—d.
Nov. 1, 1972, Venice, Italy), American
poet and critic, a supremely discerning
and energetic entrepreneur of the arts
who did more than any other single
figure to advance a “modern” movement in
English and American literature. Pound
promoted, and also occasionally helped
to shape, the work of such widely
different poets and novelists as William
Butler Yeats, James Joyce, Ernest
Hemingway, Robert Frost, D.H. Lawrence,
and T.S. Eliot. His pro-Fascist
broadcasts in Italy during World War II
led to his postwar arrest and
confinement until 1958.
Early life and career
Pound was born in a small mining
town in Idaho, the only child of a
Federal Land Office official, Homer
Loomis Pound of Wisconsin, and Isabel
Weston of New York City. About 1887 the
family moved to the eastern states, and
in June 1889, following Homer Pound’s
appointment to the U.S. Mint in
Philadelphia, they settled in nearby
Wyncote, where Pound lived a normal
middle-class childhood.
After
two years at Cheltenham Military
Academy, which he left without
graduating, he attended a local high
school. From there he went for two years
(1901–03) to the University of
Pennsylvania, where he met his lifelong
friend, the poet William Carlos
Williams. He took a Ph.B. (bachelor of
philosophy) degree at Hamilton College,
Clinton, N.Y., in 1905 and returned to
the University of Pennsylvania for
graduate work. He received his M.A. in
June 1906 but withdrew from the
university after working one more year
toward his doctorate. He left with a
knowledge of Latin, Greek, French,
Italian, German, Spanish, Provençal, and
Anglo-Saxon, as well as of English
literature and grammar.
In the
autumn of 1907, Pound became professor
of Romance languages at Wabash
Presbyterian College, Crawfordsville,
Ind. Although his general behaviour
fairly reflected his Presbyterian
upbringing, he was already writing
poetry and was affecting a bohemian
manner. His career came quickly to an
end, and in February 1908, with light
luggage and the manuscript of a book of
poems that had been rejected by at least
one American publisher, he set sail for
Europe.
He had
been to Europe three times before, the
third time alone in the summer of 1906,
when he had gathered the material for
his first three published articles:
Raphaelite Latin, concerning the Latin
poets of the Renaissance, and
Interesting French Publications,
concerning the troubadours (both
published in the Book News Monthly,
Philadelphia, September 1906), and
Burgos, a Dream City of Old Castile
(October issue).
Now,
with little money, he sailed to
Gibraltar and southern Spain, then on to
Venice, where in June 1908 he published,
at his own expense, his first book of
poems, A lume spento. About September
1908 he went to London, where he was
befriended by the writer and editor Ford
Madox Ford (who published him in his
English Review), entered William Butler
Yeats’s circle, and joined the “school
of images,” a modern group presided over
by the philosopher T.E. Hulme.
Success abroad
In England, success came quickly to
Pound. A book of poems, Personae, was
published in April 1909; a second book,
Exultations, followed in October; and a
third book, The Spirit of Romance, based
on lectures delivered in London
(1909–10), was published in 1910.
After a
trip home—a last desperate and
unsuccessful attempt to make a literary
life for himself in Philadelphia or New
York City—he returned to Europe in
February 1911, visiting Italy, Germany,
and France. Toward the end of 1911 he
met an English journalist, Alfred R.
Orage, editor of the socialist weekly
New Age, who opened its pages to him and
provided him with a small but regular
income during the next nine years.
In 1912
Pound became London correspondent for
the small magazine Poetry (Chicago); he
did much to enhance the magazine’s
importance and was soon a dominant
figure in Anglo-American verse. He was
among the first to recognize and review
the poetry of Robert Frost and D.H.
Lawrence and to praise the sculpture of
the modernists Jacob Epstein and Henri
Gaudier-Brzeska. As leader of the
Imagist movement of 1912–14, successor
of the “school of images,” he drew up
the first Imagist manifesto, with its
emphasis on direct and sparse language
and precise images in poetry, and he
edited the first Imagist anthology, Des
Imagistes (1914).
A shaper of modern literature
Though his friend Yeats had already
become famous, Pound succeeded in
persuading him to adopt a new, leaner
style of poetic composition. In 1914,
the year of his marriage to Dorothy
Shakespear, daughter of Yeats’s friend
Olivia Shakespear, he began a
collaboration with the then-unknown
James Joyce. As unofficial editor of The
Egoist (London) and later as London
editor of The Little Review (New York
City), he saw to the publication of
Joyce’s novels Portrait of the Artist as
a Young Man and Ulysses, thus spreading
Joyce’s name and securing financial
assistance for him. In that same year he
gave T.S. Eliot a similar start in his
career as poet and critic.
He
continued to publish his own poetry
(Ripostes, 1912; Lustra, 1916) and prose
criticism (Pavannes and Divisions,
1918). From the literary remains of the
great Orientalist Ernest Fenollosa,
which had been presented to Pound in
1913, he succeeded in publishing highly
acclaimed English versions of early
Chinese poetry, Cathay (1915), and two
volumes of Japanese Noh plays (1916–17)
as well.
Development as a poet
Unsettled by the slaughter of World
War I and the spirit of hopelessness he
felt was pervading England after its
conclusion, Pound decided to move to
Paris, publishing before he left two of
his most important poetical works,
“Homage to Sextus Propertius,” in the
book Quia Pauper Amavi (1919), and Hugh
Selwyn Mauberley (1920). “Propertius” is
a comment on the British Empire in 1917,
by way of Propertius and the Roman
Empire. Mauberley, a finely chiseled
“portrait” of one aspect of British
literary culture in 1919, is one of the
most praised poems of the 20th century.
During
his 12 years in London, Pound had
completely transformed himself as a
poet. He arrived a Late Victorian for
whom love was a matter of “lute
strings,” “crushed lips,” and “Dim tales
that blind me.” Within five or six years
he was writing a new, adult poetry that
spoke calmly of current concerns in
common speech. In this drier
intellectual air, “as clear as metal,”
Pound’s verse took on new qualities of
economy, brevity, and clarity as he used
concrete details and exact visual images
to capture concentrated moments of
experience. Pound’s search for laconic
precision owed much to his constant
reading of past literature, including
Anglo-Saxon poetry, Greek and Latin
classics, Dante, and such 19th-century
French works as Théophile Gautier’s
Émaux et camées and Gustave Flaubert’s
novel Madame Bovary. Like his friend T.S.
Eliot, Pound wanted a modernism that
brought back to life the highest
standards of the past. Modernism for its
own sake, untested against the past,
drew anathemas from him. His progress
may be seen in attempts at informality
(1911):
Have
tea, damn the Caesars,
Talk of
the latest success. . .
in the
gathering strength of his 1911 version
of the Anglo-Saxon poem “Seafarer” :
Storms,
on the stone-cliffs beaten,
fell on
the stern
In icy
feathers. . .
and in
the confident free verse of “The Return”
(1912):
See,
they return; ah, see the tentative
Movements, and the slow feet. . .
From
this struggle there emerged the short,
perfectly worded free-verse poems in
Lustra. In his poetry Pound was now able
to deal efficiently with a whole range
of human activities and emotions,
without raising his voice. The movement
of the words and the images they create
are no longer the secondhand borrowings
of youth or apprenticeship but seem to
belong to the observing intelligence
that conjures up the particular work in
hand. Many of the Lustra poems are
remarkable for perfectly paced endings:
Nor has
life in it aught better
Than
this hour of clear coolness,
the
hour of waking together.
But the
culmination of Pound’s years in London
was his 18-part long poem Hugh Selwyn
Mauberley, which ranged from close
observation of the artist and society to
the horrors of mass production and World
War I; from brilliant echo of the past:
When
our two dusts with Waller’s shall be
laid,
Siftings on siftings in oblivion,
Till
change hath broken down
All
things save Beauty alone.
to the
syncopation of
With a
placid and uneducated mistress
He
exercises his talents
And the
soil meets his distress.
The Cantos
During his stay in Paris (1921–24)
Pound met and helped the young American
novelist Ernest Hemingway; wrote an
opera, Le Testament, based on poems of
François Villon; assisted T.S. Eliot
with the editing of his long poem The
Waste Land; and acted as correspondent
for the New York literary journal The
Dial.
In 1924
Pound tired of Paris and moved to
Rapallo, Italy, which was to be his home
for the next 20 years. In 1925 he had a
daughter, Maria, by the expatriate
American violinist Olga Rudge, and in
1926 his wife, Dorothy, gave birth to a
son, Omar. The daughter was brought up
by a peasant woman in the Italian Tirol,
the son by relatives in England. In
1927–28 Pound edited his own magazine,
Exile, and in 1930 he brought together,
under the title A Draft of XXX Cantos,
various segments of his ambitious long
poem The Cantos, which he had begun in
1915.
The
1930s saw the publication of further
volumes of The Cantos (Eleven New
Cantos, 1934; The Fifth Decad of Cantos,
1937; Cantos LII–LXXI, 1940) and a
collection of some of his best prose
(Make It New, 1934). A growing interest
in music caused him to arrange a long
series of concerts in Rapallo during the
1930s, and, with the assistance of Olga
Rudge, he played a large part in the
rediscovery of the 18th-century Italian
composer Antonio Vivaldi. The results of
his continuing investigation in the
areas of culture and history were
published in his brilliant but
fragmentary prose work Guide to Kulchur
(1938).
Following the Great Depression of the
1930s, he turned more and more to
history, especially economic history, a
subject in which he had been interested
since his meeting in London in 1918 with
Clifford Douglas, the founder of Social
Credit, an economic theory stating that
maldistribution of wealth due to
insufficient purchasing power is the
cause of economic depressions. Pound had
come to believe that a misunderstanding
of money and banking by governments and
the public, as well as the manipulation
of money by international bankers, had
led the world into a long series of
wars. He became obsessed with monetary
reform (ABC of Economics, 1933; Social
Credit, 1935; What Is Money For?, 1939),
involved himself in politics, and
declared his admiration for the Italian
dictator Benito Mussolini (Jefferson
and/or Mussolini, 1935). The obsession
affected his Cantos, which even earlier
had shown evidence of becoming an
uncontrolled series of personal and
historical episodes.
Anti-American broadcasts
As war in Europe drew near, Pound
returned home (1939) in the hope that he
could help keep the peace between Italy
and the United States. He went back to
Italy a disappointed man, and between
1941 and 1943, after Italy and the
United States were at war, he made
several hundred broadcasts over Rome
Radio on subjects ranging from James
Joyce to the control of money and the
U.S. government by Jewish bankers and
often openly condemned the American war
effort. He was arrested by U.S. forces
in 1945 and spent six months in a prison
camp for army criminals near Pisa.
Despite harsh conditions there, he
translated Confucius into English (The
Great Digest & Unwobbling Pivot, 1951)
and wrote The Pisan Cantos (1948), the
most moving section of his long
poem-in-progress.
Returned to the United States to face
trial for treason, he was pronounced
“insane and mentally unfit for trial” by
a panel of doctors and spent 12 years
(1946–58) in Saint Elizabeth’s Hospital
for the criminally insane in Washington,
D.C. During this time he continued to
write The Cantos (Section: Rock-Drill,
1955; Thrones, 1959), translated ancient
Chinese poetry (The Classic Anthology,
1954) and Sophocles’ Trachiniai (Women
of Trachis, 1956), received visitors
regularly, and kept up a voluminous and
worldwide correspondence. Controversy
surrounding him burst out anew when, in
1949, he was awarded the important
Bollingen Prize for his Pisan Cantos.
When on April 18, 1958, he was declared
unfit to stand trial and the charges
against him were dropped, he was
released from Saint Elizabeth’s. He
returned to Italy, dividing the year
between Rapallo and Venice.
Pound
lapsed into silence in 1960, leaving The
Cantos unfinished. More than 800 pages
long, they are fragmentary and formless
despite recurring themes and ideas. The
Cantos are the logbook of Pound’s own
private voyage through Greek mythology,
ancient China and Egypt, Byzantium,
Renaissance Italy, the works of John
Adams and Thomas Jefferson, and many
other periods and subjects, including
economics and banking and the nooks and
crannies of his own memory and
experience. Pound even convinced himself
that the poem’s faults and weaknesses,
inevitable from the nature of the
undertaking, were part of an underlying
method. Yet there are numerous passages
such as only he could have written that
are among the best of the century.
Pound
died in Venice in 1972. Out of his 60
years of publishing activity came 70
books of his own, contributions to about
70 others, and more than 1,500 articles.
A complete listing of his works is in
Donald Gallup, A Bibliography of Ezra
Pound (1963; rev. ed 1983). Most of the
writing on which Pound’s fame now rests
may be found in Personae (The Collected
Poems; 1926, new ed. 1949), a selection
of poems Pound wished to keep in print
in 1926, with a few earlier and later
poems added in 1949; The Cantos (1970),
cantos 1–117, a collection of all the
segments published to date; The Spirit
of Romance (1910); Literary Essays
(1954), the bulk of his best criticism,
ed. with an introduction by T.S. Eliot;
Guide to Kulchur (1938); and The Letters
of Ezra Pound, 1907–1941, ed. by D.D.
Paige (1950), an excellent introduction
to Pound’s literary life and inimitable
epistolary style.
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Ezra Pound
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Ezra Pound
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Ezra Weston Loomis Pound (October 30, 1885 – November 1, 1972) was an
American expatriate poet, critic and intellectual who was a major figure
of the Modernist movement in the first half of the 20th century. He is
generally considered the poet most responsible for defining and
promoting a modernist aesthetic in poetry.[1] In the early teens of the
twentieth century, he opened a seminal exchange of work and ideas
between British and American writers, and was famous for the generosity
with which he advanced the work of such major contemporaries as Robert
Frost, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, H. D., Ernest Hemingway,
and especially T. S. Eliot. Pound also had a profound influence on Irish
writers W. B. Yeats and James Joyce.
His own significant contributions to poetry begin with his promotion
of Imagism, a movement in poetry which derived its technique from
classical Chinese and Japanese poetry—stressing clarity, precision, and
economy of language, and forgoing traditional rhyme and meter in order
to, in Pound's words, "compose in the sequence of the musical phrase,
not in the sequence of the metronome."
His later work, for nearly fifty years, focused on the encyclopedic
epic poem he entitled The Cantos.
The critic Hugh Kenner said of Pound upon meeting him: "I suddenly
knew that I was in the presence of the center of modernism."
Life
Pound was born in Hailey, Idaho Territory, to Homer Loomis and Isabel
Weston Pound. His grandfather was the Lieutenant Governor of Wisconsin,
Thaddeus C. Pound.When he was 18 months old, his family moved to the
suburbs of Philadelphia. In 1901 at the age of 15, he entered the
University of Pennsylvania, but after studying there for two years
transferred to Hamilton College, where he received his Ph.B. in 1905. He
then returned to Penn, completing an M.A. in Romance philology in 1906.
During his studies at Penn, he met and befriended William Carlos
Williams and H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), to whom he became engaged for a
time. Afterward, Pound taught at Wabash College in Crawfordsville,
Indiana, but when he allowed a stranded actress to spend the night in
his room, the resulting scandal caused him to leave his teaching post
after only four months, "all accusations", he later claimed, "having
been ultimately refuted except that of being 'the Latin Quarter type.'"
He had been taken to Europe by relatives in 1898 and again traveled to
Europe and Morocco in 1902. In 1908 he moved to Europe, settling in
London after spending a brief stint working as a tour guide in
Gibraltar, and several months in Venice, where he self-published A Lume
Spento.
London
Pound's early poetry was inspired by his reading of the
pre-Raphaelites and other 19th century poets and medieval Romance
literature, as well as much neo-Romantic and occult/mystical philosophy.
After moving to London, the influence of Ford Madox Ford and T. E. Hulme
encouraged Pound to cast off overtly archaic poetic language and forms
and begin to remake himself as a poet. Pound believed William Butler
Yeats was the greatest living poet, and befriended him in England.[7]
Pound eventually became Yeats' secretary, and soon became interested in
Yeats's occult beliefs. During World War I Pound and Yeats lived
together at Stone Cottage in Sussex, England, studying Japanese,
especially Noh plays. They paid particular attention to the works of
Ernest Fenollosa, an American professor in Japan, whose work on Chinese
characters fascinated Pound. Eventually, Pound used Fenollosa's work as
a starting point for what he called the Ideogrammic Method. In 1914,
Pound married Dorothy Shakespear, an artist, and the daughter of Olivia
Shakespear, a novelist and former lover of W. B. Yeats.
In the years before the World War I, Pound was largely responsible
for the appearance of Imagism, and coined the name of the movement
Vorticism, which was led by Wyndham Lewis of whom Pound was also a
friend. Pound contributed to Lewis' short-lived literary magazine BLAST
whose two numbers appeared in 1914 and 1915. These two movements,
Imagism and Vorticism, can be seen as central events in the birth of
English-language modernism. They helped bring to notice the work of
poets and artists like James Joyce, Lewis, William Carlos Williams,
H.D., Jacob Epstein, Richard Aldington, Marianne Moore, Rabindranath
Tagore, Robert Frost, Rebecca West and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska. Later,
Pound also edited his friend T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, the poem that
was to force the new poetic sensibility into public attention.
In
1915, Pound published Cathay, a small volume of poems that he described
as "For the most part from the Chinese of Rihaku (Li Po), from the notes
of the late Ernest Fenollosa, and the decipherings of the professors
Mori and Ariga."[8] The volume includes works such as The River
Merchant's Wife: A Letter and A Ballad of the Mulberry Road. Unlike
previous American translators of Chinese poetry, who tended to work with
strict metrical and stanzaic patterns, Pound offered readers free verse
translations celebrated for their ease of diction and conversationality.
Many critics consider the poems in Cathay to be the most successful
realization of Pound's Imagist poetics. Whether the poems are valuable
as translations continues to be a source of controversy. Neither Pound
nor Fenollosa spoke or read Chinese proficiently, and Pound has been
criticized for omitting or adding sections to his poems which have no
basis in the original texts, though many critics argue that the fidelity
of Cathay to the original Chinese is beside the point. Hugh Kenner, in a
chapter "The Invention of China" from The Pound Era contends that Cathay
should be read primarily as a work about World War I, not as an attempt
at accurately translating ancient Eastern poems. The real achievement of
the book, Kenner argues, is in how it combines meditations on violence
and friendship with an effort to "rethink the nature of an English
poem". These ostensible translations of ancient Eastern texts, Kenner
argues, are actually experiments in English poetics and compelling
elegies for a warring West.
The war shattered Pound's belief in modern western civilization and
he abandoned London soon after, but not before he published Homage to
Sextus Propertius (1919) and Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920). If these
poems together form a farewell to Pound's London career, The Cantos,
which he began in 1915, pointed his way forward.
Paris
In 1920, Pound moved to Paris, where he moved among a circle of artists,
musicians, and writers who were revolutionizing the whole world of
modern art. He was friends with notable figures such as Marcel Duchamp,
Tristan Tzara, Fernand Léger and others of the Dada and Surrealist
movements. He was also good friends with Basil Bunting and Ernest
Hemingway, whom Pound asked to teach him to box. (Hemingway would later
write, in A Moveable Feast: "I was never able to teach him to throw a
left hook.") He continued working on The Cantos, writing the bulk of the
"Malatesta Sequence", which introduced one of the major personas of the
poem. The poem increasingly reflected his preoccupations with politics
and economics. During this time, he also wrote critical prose and
translations and composed two complete operas (with help from George
Antheil) and several pieces for solo violin. In 1922 he met and became
involved with Olga Rudge, a violinist. Together with Dorothy Shakespear,
they formed an uneasy ménage à trois which was to last until the end of
the poet's life.
Italy
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Ezra Pound's annotations on his copy of James Legge's translation of
the Book of Poetry (Shih Ching), in the Sacred Books of the East.On 10
October 1924, Pound left Paris permanently and moved to Rapallo, Italy.
He and Dorothy stayed there briefly, moving on to Sicily, and then
returning to settle in Rapallo in January 1925.] In Italy he
continued to be a creative catalyst. The young sculptor Heinz Henghes
came to see Pound, arriving penniless. He was given lodging and marble
to carve, and quickly learned to work in stone. The poet James Laughlin
was also inspired at this time to start the publishing company New
Directions which would become a vehicle for many new authors.
At this time Pound also organized an annual series of concerts in
Rapallo, where a wide range of classical and contemporary music was
performed. In particular this musical activity contributed to the 20th
century revival of interest in Vivaldi, who had been neglected since his
death. Pound also became alarmed at the importation taxes levied by the
United States on what Pound believed to be works of art.] In addition
to lobbying the US Customs and the House of Representatives, Pound wrote
an essay in 1928 entitled "Article 211", where he related a trial to the
recent decision to categorise the Nassak Diamond as a work of art, and
therefore let it into the United States without payment of an import
duty.
Pound made his first trip back home to the U.S. in many years in
1939, on the eve of World War II, and considered moving back
permanently, but in the end he chose to return to Italy. "Pound was a
passionate supporter of Mussolini." He had a personal audience with
Il Duce in 1933. In a radio broadcast in June 1942 he would say "Every
man of common sense, including the odd British MP, knows that every man
of common sense prefers Fascism to Communism, from the moment that he
learns a few concrete facts about both of them."
Pound also had personal reasons for staying in Italy. His elderly
parents had retired to Italy to be with him, and were in poor health and
would have difficulty making the trip back to America even under
peacetime conditions. He also had an Italian-born daughter by his
mistress Olga Rudge: Mary (or Maria) Rudge was a young woman in her late
teens who had lived in Italy her whole life and who might have had
difficulty relocating to America (even though she had American as well
as Italian citizenship).
Pound remained in Italy after the outbreak of World War II, which
began more than two years before his native United States formally
entered the war in December 1941 after Pearl Harbor. He became a leading
Axis propagandist, but also continued to be involved in scholarly
publishing, and wrote many newspaper pieces. He disapproved of American
involvement in the war and tried to use his political contacts in
Washington D.C. to prevent it. He spoke on Italian radio and gave a
series of talks on political and cultural matters. Pound believed that
economics was the core issue at hand. Specifically, his talks were
largely about usury and the notion that representative democracy has
been usurped by bankers' infiltration of governments through the
existence of central banks, which made governments pay interest to
private banks for the use of their own money. He maintained that the
central bank's ability to create money out of thin air allowed banking
interests to buy up American and British media outlets to sway opinion
in favor of the war and the banks. Pound was not the first prominent
American to make this assertion; for example New York City Mayor John
Hylan had publicly said the same thing back in 1922 when he said "these
international bankers control the majority of the magazines and
newspapers in this country." Pound believed that economic freedom was a
prerequisite for a free country. Inevitably, he touched on political
matters, and incorporated Antisemitism into his denunciations of the
war.
It is not clear if anyone in the United States ever actually heard
Pound's radio broadcasts, since Italian radio's shortwave transmitters
were weak and unreliable, though obviously his writings for Italian
newspapers (as well as a number of pamphlets) were read in Italy.
However, according to his biographer Humphrey Carpenter "The broadcasts
were 'a masterly performance'.". Carpenter wrote "Certainly there
were Americans who, in 1941, would have agreed with virtually every word
Ezra said at the microphone about the United States Government, the
European conflict, and the power of the Jews." The broadcasts were
monitored by the Foreign Broadcast Monitoring Service of the United
States government, and transcripts, now stored in the Library of
Congress, were made of them. Pound was indicted for treason by the
United States government in 1943.
On July 10, 1943, the Allied forces landed in Sicily and rapidly
began to overrun the southern part of Italy. On July 25, 1943 King
Victor Emmanuel III summoned Mussolini and dismissed him as the premier
of the Kingdom of Italy. Upon leaving the palace, Mussolini was arrested
and sent to Gran Sasso, a mountain resort in central Italy (Abruzzo).
About two months after he was stripped of power, Mussolini was rescued
by the Germans in Operation Oak and relocated to the north, where he
declared himself the President of the new Salò Republic.
Pound played a minor role in cultural and propaganda activities in
the new puppet republic, which lasted till the spring of 1945. On May 3,
1945, he was arrested by Italian partisans, and taken (according to Hugh
Kenner) "to their HQ in Chiavari, where he was soon released as
possessing no interest." At his request, he was then brought to the U.S.
command in Lavagna, whence he was driven to the C.I.C. in Genoa. On May
24 he was transferred from Genoa to a United States Army detention camp
north of Pisa. He spent 25 days in an open cage before being given a
tent, and appears to have suffered a nervous breakdown. He drafted the
Pisan Cantos in the camp. This section of the work in progress marks a
shift in Pound's work, being a meditation on his own and Europe's ruin
and on his place in the natural world. The Pisan Cantos won the first
Bollingen Prize from the Library of Congress in 1949.
St. Elizabeths
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After the war, Pound was brought back to the United States to face
charges of treason. The charges covered only his activities during the
time when the Kingdom of Italy was officially at war with the United
States, i.e., the time before the Allies captured Rome and Mussolini
fled to the North. Pound was not prosecuted for his activities on behalf
of Mussolini's Saló Republic, evidently because the Republic's existence
was never formally recognized by the United States. He was found
incompetent to face trial by a special federal jury and sent to St. Elizabeths
Hospital in Washington, D.C., where he remained for 12 years from 1946
to 1958. His insanity plea is still a matter of controversy, since in
retrospect his activities and his writings during the war years do
appear to be those of a sane person.
Following his release, Pound was asked his opinions on his home
country. He famously quipped: "America is a lunatic asylum."
Subsequently he returned to Italy (first to Castle Brunnenburg near
Merano, in Bolzano-Bozen, then later to Rapallo and Venice). He remained
in Italy until his death in 1972.
E. Fuller Torrey believed that Pound was given special treatment by
colluding authorities, specifically Winfred Overholser, the
superintendent of St. Elizabeths. According to Torrey, Overholser
admired Pound's poetry and allowed him to live in a private room at the
hospital, where he wrote books, received visits from literary figures
and enjoyed conjugal relations with his wife. The reliability of
Torrey's allegations has been questioned; other scholars have presented
Overholser as behaving solely in a humane way to his famous patient,
without allowing him special privileges. At St. Elizabeths, Pound was
visited by poets and other admirers and continued working on The Cantos
as well as translating the Confucian classics.
Pound was also frequently visited by his protegé, a Library of
Congress researcher named Eustace Mullins. Pound commissioned Mullins to
write a book about the history of the Federal Reserve and to tell it
like a detective story. Pound believed that the bankers in charge of the
Federal Reserve and their associates in the Bank of England were
responsible for getting the United States into both World Wars, in an
effort to drive up government debt beyond sustainable levels (the
national debt indeed rose astronomically because of the wars). The book,
Secrets Of The Federal Reserve, charges that bankers hide behind the
screen of the central banks and pull political strings to drive
countries into the war, creating immense profits for themselves as the
principal beneficiaries of wartime debt. Pound advocated an abandonment
of the current system of money being created by private bankers. He
favored government issued currency with no interest to pay,
preventing the need for an income tax and national debt, much like the
system used by the Pennsylvania Colony from 1723 to 1764. Pound argued that his views on money aligned with those of
Thomas Jefferson, as well as with Benjamin Franklin's Colonial Scrip.
Pound was also befriended there by Hugh Kenner, whose The Poetry of
Ezra Pound (1951) was highly influential in causing a reassessment of
Pound's poetry. Other scholars began to edit the Pound Newsletter, which
eventually led to the publication of the first guide to The Cantos,
Annotated Index to the Cantos of Ezra Pound (1957). Pound had many
friends and admirers among his fellow poets, like Elizabeth Bishop, who
recorded her response to Pound's situation in the poem "Visits to St.
Elizabeth's", and Robert Lowell, who visited and corresponded
extensively with Pound. The artist Sheri Martinelli, meanwhile, is
believed to have inspired the love poetry in Cantos XC–XCV. Both William
Carlos Williams and Louis Zukofsky were among Pound's visitors, as was
Guy Davenport, who subsequently wrote his Harvard dissertation on
Pound's poetry (published as Cities on Hills in 1983), and the Colonial
French nonfigurative painter René Laubies, the first translator of the
work of Pound into French (Cantos et poèmes choisis / Ezra Pound, Paris:
P.J. Oswald, 1958. 77 pages). In his Portraits et Aphorismes (2001)
Laubies writes that he did not remember having any "difficulties
returning to visit Pound at the Asylum of St. Elisabeths." He asked
Pound whether the surroundings obstructed him: "Not at all, they are the
only acceptable Americans." When Laubies told Pound that he was born in
Saigon: "Ah, that's why! Only Europeans with a master key to the Suez
Canal are worth something...." Charles Olson was a frequent visitor
(Pound wrote in a note to his attorney that "Olson saved my life" by
providing sane conversation). Olson eventually became disgusted with
Pound's anti-Semitic statements and stopped his visits. Pound was
finally released after a concerted campaign by many of his fellow poets
and artists, particularly Robert Frost and Archibald MacLeish. He was
still considered incurably insane, but not dangerous to others.
Rudd Fleming, a professor at the University of Maryland, visited
Pound often. They collaborated on a translation of Sophocles' Electra,
which was published by Princeton University Press in 1989. Fleming
stated, when asked about Pound's anti-semitism, that Pound considered it
a mistake. A statement from Pound's foreword to a collection of his
prose writings (written on July 4, 1972) would seem to support Fleming's
assertion: "In sentences referring to groups or races 'they' should be
used with great care. re USURY: I was out of focus, taking a symptom for
a cause. The cause is AVARICE." Pound also declared in 1967, "The worst
mistake I made was that stupid, suburban prejudice of anti-Semitism."
Death
Grave of Pound on the cemetery island of San Michele, Venice.On his
release, Pound returned to Italy continuing work on The Cantos. In 1972,
two days after his 87th birthday, Pound died in Venice, where he is
buried.
Poetry
Pound's The Cantos contains music and bears a title that could be
translated as The Songs—although it never is. Pound's ear was tuned to
the motz et sons of troubadour poetry where, as musicologist John
Stevens has noted, "melody and poem existed in a state of the closest
symbiosis, obeying the same laws and striving in their different media
for the same sound-ideal - armonia."
In his essays, Pound wrote of rhythm as "the hardest quality of a
man's style to counterfeit." He challenged young poets to train their
ear with translation work to learn how the choice of words and the
movement of the words combined. But having translated texts from 10
different languages into English, Pound found that translation did not
always serve the poetry: "The grand bogies for young men who want really
to learn strophe writing are Catullus and François Villon. I personally
have been reduced to setting them to music as I cannot translate them."
While he habitually wrote out verse rhythms as musical lines, Pound did
not set his own poetry to music.
In 1919, when he was 34, Pound began charting his path as a novice
composer, writing privately that he intended a revolt against the
impressionistic music of Claude Debussy. An autodidact, Pound described
his working method as "improving a system by refraining from obedience
to all its present 'laws'..." With only a few formal lessons in music
composition, Pound produced a small body of work, including a setting of
Dante's sestina, "Al poco giorno", for violin. His most important output
is the pair of operas: Le Testament, a setting of François Villon's long
poem of that name, written in 1461; and Cavalcanti, a setting of 11
poems by Guido Cavalcanti (c. 1250–1300). Pound began composing the
Villon with the help of Agnes Bedford, a London pianist and vocal coach.
Though the work is notated in Bedford's hand, Pound scholar Robert
Hughes has been able to determine that Pound was artistically
responsible for the work's overall dramatic and acoustic design.
During his years in Paris (1921–1924), Pound formed close friendships
with the American pianist and composer George Antheil, and Antheil's
touring partner, the American concert violinist Olga Rudge. Pound
championed Antheil's music and asked his help in devising a system of
micro-rhythms that would more accurately render the vitalistic speech
rhythms of Villon's Old French for Le Testament. The resulting
collaboration of 1923 used irregular meters that were considerably more
elaborate than Stravinsky's benchmarks of the period, Le Sacre du
Printemps (1913) and L'Histoire du Soldat (1918). For example, "Heaulmiere",
one of the opera's key arias, at a tempo of quarter note = M.M. 88,
moves from 2/8 to 25/32 to 3/8 to 2/4 meter (bars 25–28), making it
difficult for performers to hear the current bar of music and anticipate
the upcoming bar. Rudge performed in the 1924 and 1926 Paris preview
concerts of Le Testament, but insisted to Pound that the meter was
impractical.
In Le Testament there is no predictability of manner; no comfort zone
for singer or listener; no rests or breath marks. Though Pound stays
within the hexatonic scale to evoke the feel of troubadour melodies,
modern invention runs throughout, from the stream of unrelenting
dissonance in the mother's prayer to the grand shape of the work's
aesthetic arc over a period of almost an hour. The rhythm carries the
emotion. The music admits the corporeal rhythms (the score calls for
human bones to be used in the percussion part); scratches, hiccoughs,
and counter-rhythms lurch against each other—an offense to courtly
etiquette. With "melody against ground tone and forced against another
melody", as Pound puts it, the work spawns a polyphony in polyrhythms
that ignores traditional laws of harmony. It was a test of Pound's ideal
of an "absolute" and "uncounterfeitable" rhythm conducted in the
laboratory of someone obsessed with the relationship between words and
music.
After hearing a concert performance of Le Testament in 1926, Virgil
Thomson praised Pound's accomplishment. "The music was not quite a
musician's music", he wrote, "though it may well be the finest poet's
music since Thomas Campion. . . . Its sound has remained in my memory."
Robert Hughes has remarked that where Le Testament explores a
Webernesque pointillistic orchestration and derives its vitality from
complex rhythms, Cavalcanti (1931) thrives on extensions of melody.
Based on the lyric love poetry of Guido Cavalcanti, the opera's numbers
are characterized by a challenging bel canto, into which Pound
incorporates a number of tongue-in-cheek references to Verdi and a
musical motive that gestures to Stravinsky's neo-classicism. By this
time his relationship with Antheil had considerably cooled, and Pound,
in his gradual acquisition of technical self-sufficiency, was free to
emulate certain aspects of Stravinsky. Cavalcanti demands attention to
its varying cadences, to a recurring leitmotif, and to a symbolic use of
octaves. The play of octaves creates a surrealist straining against the
limits of established laws of composition, history, physiology, reason,
and love.
Pound's statement, "Rhythm is a FORM cut into TIME", distinguishes
his 20th century medievalism from Antheil's SPACE/TIME theory of modern
music, which sought pure abstraction. Antheil's system of time
organization is inherently biased for complex, asymmetric, and fast
tempi; it thrives on innovation and surprise. Pound's more open system
allows for any sequence of pitches; it can accommodate older styles of
music with their symmetry, repetition, and more uniform tempi, as well
as newer methods, such as the asymmetrical micro-metrical divisions of
rhythm created for Le Testament.
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CANTOS
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Туре of work: Poetry
Author: Ezra Pound (1885-1972)
First published: Canto I, 1925; Canto CXX, 1969
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The common conceptions of Ezra Pound's Cantos, that they are obscure
exhibits in the museum of Pound's prodigious memory rife with references
to archaic cultures and unfamiliar languages, or that they are fatally
infected with the pox of Pound's Fascist politics, are not entirely
without truth but are also oversimplifications which distort the much
greater truth that the Cantos contain some of the finest poetry and most
fascinating and influential literary experiments of the twentieth
century. Just as Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass (1855) is a kind of epic
of nineteenth century American life and a demonstration of the origins
of poetry in American English, the Cantos are an epic of modernist
thought in American life in the twentieth century and a measure of the
growth of American poetic form to the middle of the century.
Building on Whitman's realization that an epic conception of a legendary
hero was no longer viable, and acting in accordance with the Romantic
emphasis on the creating artist as a cultural exemplar and heroic focus
of a song of himself, Pound envisioned a work that would record the
collision of an evolving poetic sensibility with the crucial historical
events of his time. He believed that his essentially self-directed
education was sufficient preparation for the project, and he believed as
an article of faith that his mental energies were of significant
proportions equal to the implicit demand that the mind of an epic poem
is a concentration of the voices of history. Both "detesting" and
admiring Whitman, he wanted to reach beyond the autobiographical vortex
of Whitman's poem so that the convergence of scholarship, cultural
theory, and poetic imagery in his own consciousness would range beyond
an examination of the self not only to record history and its
consequences but also to shape it. As a result, the Cantos have an
open-ended aspect; Pound, unlike Dante, one of his most important
precursors, had no specific charts for the unknown country he was
entering.
Yet, even without a definite map in mind, Pound had extensive experience
in a variety of poetic forms by the time he started, and he was
convinced that structure was possible through, as Hugh Kenner explains,
"the electrification of mute experiential filings into a manifestation
of form." In addition to what Pound called "a coherent splendor"
reachable through a poetic process that stressed the juxtaposition of
related images, Pound was intensely aware of the work of painters,
composers, and sculptors in Europe whose techniques led him to develop a
method akin to what filmmaker Sergie Eisenstein called "ideological
montage," in which diverse materials and languages are arranged so as to
coalesce into new patterns of meaning. The organizing principle behind
Pound's data-collages derived from what Kenneth Rexroth describes as a
"radical dissociation and recombination of elements," and while the
connections between the various elements sometimes depended on a logic
of association inherent in Pound's mind and not clear to anyone outside,
from the perspective of an entire sequence of cantos, unifying patterns
are clearly discernible. Another method of structural arrangement
involves the use of voice—a prophetic voice that is primarily visionary
in form and a pedagogic voice that is essentially summary in substance.
Among the various insertions of speeches by historical figures, Pound
also employs a kind of maverick Yankee dialect to contrast with the
staggering erudition of the epic, and in moments of special feeling,
what Kenner calls "lyric passages of intoxicated vision." The use of
these different voices controls the tone of the poem and permits Pound
to modulate mood and develop dramatic tension, another means of
establishing structure within an essentially elastic frame.
The first announcement of Pound's intention to begin the Cantos came in
1915, when he wrote in a letter, "I am also at work on a cryselephantine
poem of immeasurable length which will occupy me for the next four
decades." Drafts of the three cantos were published in Poetry magazine
in 1917, and much of what originally appeared in Canto III was revised
into the opening lines of Canto I in the early 1920's. The poem begins
with a descent into an under or inner world patterned after book 11 of
Homer's Odyssey; the beginning of a mental voyage back into myth to
recapitulate literary and cultural sources, which also moves inward
toward the center of the poet's subconscious mind, the source of his
image-making power. The poet's journey is intersected in medias res,
specifically in the continuation of a sentence with no preliminary part
("And then went down to the ship ..."), suggesting a mid-life launching.
Canto II introduces key figures in Pound's cultural pantheon (Dionysus),
crucial techniques (his use of the ideogra-matic method for fashioning
images), and special texts (Ovid's Metamorphoses). Canto III deals with
the flow of history and visionary moments in time, anticipating other
important moments in later cantos, while Canto IV extends this idea by
examining the ruins of ancient cities with archaeological insight.
Cantos V and VI consider the intersection of sexual power and political
action, an important psychological theme, in Renaissance Europe and
ancient Greece, while Canto VII establishes an autobiographical
connection to the historical material by shifting the focus to the
London that Pound and T. S. Eliot knew during the years of World War I.
The first six cantos are primarily designed to establish a context and
generate an energy field—to place the poet's consciousness into a realm
in which an epic assessment of an epoch might become possible.
Pound published Cantos VIII to XI in Eliot's The Criterion in 1923 under
the title "Maletesta Cantos" after Sigismundo Maletesta, a Renaissance
artist and economic planner whose aesthetic integrity and political
principles Pound saw as a model for an exceptional man living amid
mundane times and hostile forces. Pound's admiration for Maletesta
foreshadows his almost blind obeisance before other men of power and
will, but in the poem, his questionable judgment was often balanced by
an instinctive interest in figures who provided correction and balance.
In Canto XIII, Pound introduced Confucius (Kung-fu-tsu) as another model
of reason, insight, and refinement. This canto is one of Pound's
clearest, an inventive translation of the Chinese classic The Great
Digest, in which a just society is carefully and soberly described in
stately cadences:
If a man have not order within him
He cannot spread order about him
And if a man have not order within him
His family will not act with due order;
And if a prince have not order within him
He cannot put order in his dominions.
As the canto concludes, Kung warns, "Without character you will be
unable to play on that instrument" (in other words, the poet will not be
able to write), and he shows some of the consequences of a world in
which character is notably absent among social leaders by describing a
version of hell which he told his friend Wyndham Lewis was "a portrait
of contemporary London." The urban landscape is full of people who
represent the worst of the modern world—their names included in Pound's
original manuscript but inked out to avoid libel suits— exploiters,
speculators, and avaricious financiers who have produced an economic
inferno that Albert Gelpi calls "a fetid, cloacal nightmare of oozing
mud, pus, and excrement." These demons are the first in a long list of "obstructors
of distribution" or "liars and loan lice" who have perverted Western
economic systems so that commerce was not an extension of a natural
process. They are, instead, the promoters of usura, Pound's root cause
for economic malfunction, and are depicted in a nightmare region, since
for Pound usury is " the power of hell." Cantos XV and XVI further
illustrate this growing obsession, while Cantos XIII and XVII, which
bracket the hellish modern world, offer alternatives. Canto XVII is an
elevated vision of Venice, a city presented in positive images of light,
air, water, and clean crafted stone, where a dream of Utopia enters
history, actualized by Venetian artisans who temporarily overcame the
usurers who tried to exploit their work. That canto concludes, however,
with another return to the course of a history in which usurious
oppressors ruin the efforts of craftsmen.
The poem continues with a rough alternation of groups of cantos
documenting the effects of usury and groups illustrating heroic
resistance to it. Throughout the 1930's, Pound, acting in what he
considered to be the spirit of Confucius, celebrated early American
politicians (Thomas Jefferson and John Adams in Cantos XXXI and XXXII)
who governed with wisdom and direction or those (John Quincy Adams in
Canto XXXIV, Andrew Jackson and Martin Van Buren in Canto XXVII) who
acted with practical sense, and he described responsible monetary
institutions which made credit available to all citizens (the Monte dei
Paschi bank in Siena in Cantos XLIII and XLIV). Paralleling his accounts
of heroic action by virtuous men, Pound celebrated the powers of light,
which he often used as a symbol for the powers of love, in lyric paeans
(almost prayers) to Aphrodite or Artemis, and investigated what he
believed were both the destructive and the restorative powers of the
feminine in passages concentrating on Odysseus and Circe. In one of the
most famous sections of the poem, Canto XLV. he delivers a kind of
sermon against usury, a rhetorical statement of what Gelpi calls
"sustained outrage that usury has corrupted both economic and natural
process, both Confucian order and Dionysian creativity." The field of
the poem narrows here, as it did in the Kung canto, as it will in future
cantos which concentrate energy into very specific concerns. With
mounting intensity. Pound chants in bardic indignation:
with usura the line grows thick
with usura is no clear demarcation
and no man can find site for his dwelling.
Stone cutter is kept from his stone
weaver is kept from his loom
WITH USURA
It is CONTRA NATURAM, a plague against the natural order, Pound
proclaims. This canto is followed by further examinations of the psychic
voyage of Odysseus, as the archetypal explorer seeks knowledge that will
permit self-expression through his encounters with Circe (sexual
passion) and Tiresias (reflective wisdom). Odysseus continues to be a
symbolic figure for Pound, his adventures a reflection of Pound's
personal struggles with the artistic, intellectual, and social
circumstances of his life.
The first fifty-two cantos move toward a kind of reconciliation, a state
of calmness (or still point) in which the processes of the natural world
provide the poet with images of visual beauty and psychological truth to
be used against destructive external events and disruptive inner forces.
In his own life, however, the fracture between the situation of the poem
and Pound's personal turmoil as World War II approached prevented him
from moving beyond a momentary serenity toward the projected Par-adiso
that would balance his Inferno. The Fifth Decad of Cantos (1937) was
followed by three years of almost frantic poetic and political activity
as Pound tried to influence the direction of American involvement in the
flux of history by arranging an audience with Franklin Roosevelt so that
he could explain to the president how to handle events in Europe. In
1940, Pound published Cantos LII-LXXI, ten cantos on Chinese history and
ten on John Adams. Drawing on Joseph de Mailla's Histoire Generate de la
Chine (1777-1785), Pound tried to explain how throughout Chinese
history, whenever Confucian order controlled government, the state
prospered. When Pound's enemies (militants, merchants, financiers)
opposed order, "decadence supervened." In roughly parallel fashion,
Pound yoked John Adams to Kung, Adams who left a "line of descendants
who have steadily and without break felt their responsibility" and
instituted Confucian principles in the American republic. The relatively
undistinguished quality of the writing detracted from Pound's attempts
to make Adams a pivotal figure in the middle of the entire sequence. The
Kung and Adams cantos, though, while not covering new ground, are a kind
of attempt to establish a strong historical foundation for the projected
paradisiacal conclusion.
By 1940, Pound believed that the poem was essentially complete, lacking
only a section that dealt with his spiritual beliefs. At the same time,
he had doubts about the unity of his vision, writing, "As to the form
ofThe Cantos: All I can say or pray is: wait till it's there." Yet his
determination to convince Americans not to support capitalist corrupters
against Benito Mussolini's new economic order turned, as Gelpi observes,
"the prophet into a crank, if not a dupe, if not a crackpot." Pound
spent the World War II years in Rapallo, making broadcasts on Rome radio
which were considered treasonous by American authorities, and at the
conclusion of the war he was incarcerated in a detention camp in Pisa
for six months. A psychiatric evaluation in Washington determined that
he was not sane enough to stand trial for his actions, and he was placed
in St. Elizabeths Hospital for the next thirteen years. During the first
three years of his confinement, he wrote The Pisan Cantos (1948), in
which he stepped out from behind the various literary and historical
masks through which he spoke to become the undisguised protagonist of
his epic.
The Cantos had been derailed by the war. Aside from two unpublished
cantos, LXXII and LXXIII. which he wrote in Italy, Pound's literary
productivity was subordinated almost entirely to political invective
from 1940 to 1945, a period in his life that could accurately be
designated by his later term for the entire poem, "a botch." In St.
Elizabeths, however, chastened by his treatment and forced to consider
the dominant role of his ego in his life, he began to rebuild both his
mind and his poetic vision. In his first descriptions of his life in
prison, he identified with slaves and criminals, an unprecedented act of
humility and compassion. He confronted the need to recognize, admit, and
confess his failures and mis-perceptions, most prominent among which was
his inability to offer love unselfishly, and recognized vanity as a
cause for his blindness—an especially adept formulation, considering his
previous equation of love with light. As the sequence concluded with
Canto LXXXI, in one of his finest passages, Pound offered the wisdom he
had drawn from his experiences in a hell he deserved:
What thou lovest well remains,
the rest is dross
What thou lov'st well shall not be reft from thee
What thou lov'st well is thy true heritage
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Pull down thy vanity, I say pull down.
Learn of the green world what can be thy place
In scaled invention or true artistry,
Pull down thy vanity,
In accordance with one of his earliest and firmest precepts, the
operation of the poet's mind over the material of his life lifts him
"out of hell, the pit/ out of dust and glare evil" in the direction of
paradise, the early goal of the entire poem.
The next two segments of the Cantos were written while Pound was still
in prison, and Section: Rock-Drill (1955) and Thrones (1959) recall his
early attempts to outline an ideal society. "I've got to drill it into
their beans," Pound wrote to his publisher James Laughlin, and in an
unusually explicit explanation of his plans for Thrones (Cantos XCVI-CIX),
he said, "The thrones in The Cantos are an attempt to move out from
egoism and to establish some definition of an order possible or at any
rate conceivable on earth." Ironically, these two books did not reach
out very far, but represented Pound's enclosure within the proscribed
bounds of his mind and vast educational experience. The pattern of
arcane references and inward-directed linkages tended to seal the
material away from easy external scrutiny. Pound may have realized that,
and that realization, combined with the other frustrations of his life,
may have led to a radically different style in the last cantos, which he
called Drafts and Fragments and which he did not present for publication
until 1969, several years after their completion.
Pound had returned to Europe after his release from confinement, but he
found a very different land from the one he left. "The shock of no
longer feeling oneself in the center of something is probably a part of
it," he remarked. Combined with his awareness of how conventional
critics had misunderstood and dismissed his work and the encroachments
of old age, Pound offered the last cantos as hesitant and tentative
gestures. "I cannot make it cohere," he lamented in Canto CXVI, and in
the 1960's
he settled into almost complete (but attentive) silence. Throughout the
final, fragmentary poems, a feeling of placidity, of the calm vision of
the ancient seer, balances the moods of discouragement. The questions he
asks in Canto CXVI—"I have brought the great ball of crystal;/ who can
lift it?/ Can you enter the great acorn of light?"— are answered by
implication when Pound asserts, "it coheres all right/ even if my notes
do not cohere." In other words, even if the poem did not fulfill the
epic aim of explaining order on earth, the effort itself leads to a
vision of beauty in poetic light. Moments of lyric radiance ("the great
acorn of light") exhibit cohering propensity, just as there is a version
of unity in "the replacement of paraphraseable plot by rhythmic
recurrence," as Kenner comments. The final canto, the shortest of the
entire poem, is like a summary prayer of farewell and forgiveness:
I have tried to write Paradise
Do not move
Let the wind speak
that is paradise.
Let the Gods forgive what I
have made
Let those I love try to forgive
what I have made.
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