OVER THE LONG RANGE of Ezra Pound’s productive years, his language and concerns evolved:
And then went down to the ship,
Set keel to breakers, forth on the godly sea, and
We set up mast and sail on the swart ship …
From these Homeric opening lines of the Cantos, he carries us through the Confucian Odes and into the modern age:
Disney against the metaphysicals
The language of Hart Crane—another Significant Precursor—is similarly filled with what we now call archaisms: “thee” and “thou,” “doth” and “dost.” Nevertheless, though similarly constrained in language, he broke an opening into the modern world:
Dream cancels dream in this new world of fact
From which we wake in the dream of act …
(In my first book, Will West, published in 1956, I used traditional English spellings: “centre,” “theatre.” In the new edition, in my Collected Works (1996), these have been brought up to date.)
As Pound’s horizons expanded, it became apparent that in his conception of the poem, and subject only to the poem’s own internal discipline, anything might be included. Anything. This is the most significant lesson that I learned from Ezra Pound—a lesson learned when I was young, struggling to find my way, a lesson I was unable to use for many years—but a lesson learned.
More and more as the Cantos progressed, Pound pulled apart the curtain of the “creative” and quoted directly from sources.
And 600 more dead at Quemoy—
they call it political.
—and there were, of course, the diatribes against usury, Buddhists and Jews. How does one deal with these? In a late-life interview with Allen Ginsberg, Pound apologized. Leonardo da Vinci, a lifelong atheist, is said to have accepted Christianity on his deathbed. To which set of words do we give credence? Those spoken in the fullness of maturity, or those that came near the end of life? This is a question that each individual must contemplate for him or herself.
In all of this Pound is refuting the notion that history is boring … the facts we had to learn in school … whereas fiction is the wonderful world of “the imagination.” This is the Land-of-Oz illusion, and one forgets that the Wizard turned out to be a fraud, and all Dorothy wanted, throughout the book, was to get back to the grubby little farm in Kansas.
Still another lesson I picked up from Pound was his insistence on the specific, the particular. “Go in fear of abstractions,” sez Ez.
*
At one point Pound referred to himself as “a seereeyus kerakter.” He was, above all, a man of action. When he and William Carlos Williams were students at the University of Pennsylvania they took up fencing. Williams realized one day, this man is serious—he means to kill me! From one of Pound’s troubadour poems:
I have no life save when the swords clash.
A philosopher named Horace Rackham wrote: “ … the life of Action has no absolute value: it is not a part of, but only a means to, the End, which is the life of Thought.” Pound read this and made a marginal comment: “Nuts.”
In a letter to a friend: “Why the hell don’t you have a bit of real fun before you get tucked under?”
I never entertained Pound’s notion that by bringing ideas into the realm of politics, the course of history might be changed. I never, as Pound did, tried to get the ear of FDR. I never suffered, as Pound did, political failures. For me, going into action has meant cutting firewood. For Pound, it meant pounding the political typewriter: “I am held up, enraged by the delay needed to change the typing ribbon … ”
His vision of misery:
No more do my shaftes fly
To slay. Nothing is now clean slayne
But rotteth away.
*
For all that he engorged European and Asiatic cultures, he was quintessentially American:
… for us, I mean
Who bear the brunt of our America
And try to wrench her impulse into art …
And always the pedant. His historical references are allusive, his intention being to drive the reader back to original sources. “If we never write anything save what is already understood, the field of understanding will never be expanded.”
*
What would Pound and Melville have made of each other? (Their lives overlapped by a few years.) There is evidence that Pound thought Melville overblown. When Charles Olson published Call Me Ishmael, Pound, at Olson’s instigation, wrote to Eliot suggesting that Faber & Faber bring out an English edition. “It’s a labor-saving device. You don’t have to read Melville.”
To an extent, their lives followed similar courses, leading to late-life despair:
Pound: “Tho’ my errors and wrecks lie about me.”
Melville: “With wrecks in a garret I’m stranded … ”
*
I share Pound’s skepticism about formal religion. My wife and I lived for many years in the hills of western North Carolina, and to reach our house, in a somewhat remote area, we drove along Concord Road. A ramshackle country church, with outhouse, came into view at a bend in the road, and I often thought of Pound’s line, from the Cantos:
Shit and religion stinking in concord.
*
At times old Ez could come off his perch, be wonderfully civilized:
It rests me to converse with beautiful women,
Even though we talk nothing but nonsense …
And civilized, too, in responding to his place in nature: “ … the humane man has amity with the hills … ” And the hills around Pisa were “the breasts of Helen.”
Did he see these hills from the iron cage in which he was imprisoned?
*
William Carlos Williams on Ezra Pound:
“He doesn’t know a damn thing about China … That’s what makes him an expert. He knows nothing about music, being tone deaf. That’s what makes him a musician … And he’s batty in the head. That’s what makes him a philosopher.”
“ … not one person in a thousand likes him, and a great many people detest him … ”
And yet … and yet:
“It’s the best damned ear ever born to listen to this language.”
Ah, it is that magnificent ear of his! When I read through the Cantos, when the content becomes dense and obscure, unintelligible, I read on, let the impeccable speech rhythms carry me through, until the light filters up—which it always does.
Pound:
“It is mainly for the sake of the melopoeia that one investigates troubadour poetry.”
*
Late in life: “I will never learn discretion.”
He is often linked with T. S. Eliot, but in some ways he makes more sense in company with Henry Ford and W. C. Fields.
Perhaps he’s a cross between Dante Alighieri and Rush Limbaugh.
But I learned from him. I learned.