Going to Europe: Eliot and Pound
Falling towers
Jerusalem Athens Alexandria
Vienna London
Unreal
ELIOT, The Waste Land
It is quite obvious that we do not all of us inhabit the same time.
POUND, Make It New
When Thomas Stearns Eliot sailed for Germany in 1914 on a Harvard fellowship (the war soon drove him to Oxford) he no more wished to become an expatriate than did Henry Adams. By 1914 Adams was spending a large part of every year in France, but he sailed for home as soon as war was declared in August. Henry James came down from Rye to see him off. Both men knew it would be their last meeting, and they talked together on shipboard most of the night.
It was no great thing for American writers to live and work in Europe. Even Mark Twain had done it for years at a time. Still in England when America went to war in 1917, the twenty-nine-year-old Eliot tried to join the United States navy, was rejected for health reasons, and when he obstinately tried again, became ensnarled in red tape. An American civilian, he was fated to make London his home and to find in wartime London the purgatory—with the merest hope of salvation—that led to his most famous poem, The Waste Land (1922). Read for decades as “criticism of the contemporary world … as an important bit of social criticism,” it was actually, Eliot ruefully admitted in later years, “to me … only the relief of a personal and wholly insignificant grouse against life; it is just a piece of rhythmical grumbling.”
The Waste Land was all of that. It was vibrantly so much more that the relaxed and mellow Eliot of the midcentury, the mystic of the Four Quartets, now shielded by his immense fame and happy second marriage, understandably had no desire to descend from the delectable mountain he had finally reached.
He had married in 1915 Vivien Haigh-Wood, an Englishwoman of unstable temperament. Defying his businessman father in St. Louis, who had expected him to return home and receive his Harvard doctorate, Eliot stuck it out in London as a schoolteacher, reviewer, bank clerk, assistant editor of The Egoist. For three years he regularly journeyed out of London to conduct workmen’s evening classes in Southall. “I settled over here,” he wrote after the war, “in the face of strong family opposition, on the claim that I found the environment more favorable to the production of literature.” Eliot’s claim was not good enough for his father, who died in 1919 believing that his son had made a mess of his life, and in his will he discriminated against this youngest of his seven children. Eliot broke down after the war while working on The Waste Land and had to be sent off to Switzerland; he felt that he suffered from “an aboulie” (abulia), a now old-fashioned psychiatric term for “absence of will-power or wish-power.”* The highly unsettling Vivien had proved to be more of a stimulus than he expected when he married her.
Whatever Eliot’s reasons for staying on in wartime London, his defiance of his family in St. Louis seems to have surprised him. This was the first significant act of his bookish life and highly introverted character. Though Eliot turned out to be more traditionalist than his family, a great believer in institutions as long as they were British, his move to England was a rebellious American act that parallels the “infidel” Emerson’s leaving the church.
Still, it was perhaps only the more conservative Americans, like Henry James, who could live out their lives in England. Even in his twenties, Thomas Stearns Eliot was definitely conservative. Ralph Waldo Emerson had gloried in America as the promised country that would release the freeborn individual from all unnecessary ties. The American scholar could make it to God on his own. The young Eliot from St. Louis, the Harvard major in philosophy who barely tolerated the influence of William James in favor of Irving Babbitt’s hatred of romanticism, would turn out to be a traditionalist à outrance. One of his many traditions was the Eliot family. As Ezra Pound was to say of his own family, American history was virtually a family connection. Even the first Eliot in New England, Andrew Eliot, is rumored to have been less a radical Protestant than his fellow Puritans. He may have been a judge in the Salem witchcraft trials.
The Eliots in St. Louis looked upon the West as a colony of New England. The Reverend William Greenleaf Eliot had settled in backward St. Louis to spread the Unitarian gospel. He had founded Washington University, which he had refused to have named after him. In 1852, lecturing in St. Louis, Emerson had nothing but admiration for this “Saint of the West” but was certain that “no thinking or reading man” was to be found “in the 95000 souls.” The Reverend Eliot’s grandson was to complain that he had been brought up “outside the Christian fold.” Christianity was the Incarnation. But too shallowly liberal as Unitarianism may have been for T. S. Eliot, he respected his family as New England personified, as missionaries engaged in good works. The Eliots supplied lasting images of authority to a poet who certainly believed in authority.
This youngest of seven children was a sickly, much-protected boy whom Lyndall Gordon, documenting Eliot’s early years, describes as having been “fortified by a guard of grown-up sisters.” His father considered public instruction in sex “tantamount to giving children a letter of introduction to the Devil. Syphilis was God’s punishment and [the father] hoped that a cure would never be found. Otherwise, it might be necessary to emasculate our children to keep them clean.” Other Eliots had less restrictive views of society. The poet’s eldest sister, Ada, wrote case histories and worked in New York’s Tombs prison. Marian enrolled at a school for social service in Boston. His cousin Martha became a physician specializing in child care and public health. Cousin Abigail’s school in Roxbury became the precursor of all “head-start” programs for underprivileged children. Eliot’s Harvard poems mildly lampooning the genteel tradition in Boston, the Boston Evening Transcript, “Cousin Harriet,” “Aunt Helen,” “Cousin Nancy,” were mild satires understandably concerned with a fear of experience outside the tradition. He was to experience this fear at a depth not familiar to his sisters, his cousins, and his aunts.
Eliot in his beatific period after World War II genially let it be known in a lecture at his grandfather’s university that he was “very glad to have been born in St. Louis.” He never put St. Louis into his poems. He had been sheltered from a city notorious for the corruption of its businessmen, its inadequate sewers, its sulphurous fumes. Dreiser as a reporter in St. Louis and Lincoln Steffens, the muckraker touring “hell with the lid lifted,” had noted its degenerate prosperity. The German enclave and what Eliot in England was to call its “nigger” cast encouraged his Puritan race pride. When he lectured in Virginia in the 1930s he emphasized that “race” as well as “religion” promoted a wholly Christian society. The model for Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s famous statue The Puritan in Springfield was one of Eliot’s maternal ancestors. Eliot’s mother was a derivative poet-dramatist who described certain “figures” as saints of culture. When Eliot in the 1920s became a public seer as well as the dominant poet in the English-speaking world, he easily fell into the family tone when alluding to cultural inferiors.
Marrying in England and braving out the war as an American civilian, the unknown and isolated Eliot was making his protest not only against family and background but against America itself. More than he then realized, it was America’s essential secularism and uplift that he was rejecting. (Secular America was to become his most avid audience; although Eliot’s conversion did not convert many admirers, the complexity and allusiveness of his poems gave them the sense of a tradition.) After meeting Eliot in London and reading the now-famous early poems which no one had been willing to publish, Pound, urging them upon Poetry in Chicago, excitedly wrote Harriet Monroe that Eliot “has actually trained himself and modernized himself on his own.” Apparently it was only in the Old World that Eliot could prolong and develop his “modernization.” His innate sense of style, as mimicry and provocation, would not have suited the importance of being a Harvard Ph.D. In 1916, when Eliot moved from High Wycombe Grammar School (salary one hundred forty pounds per annum, with dinner) to High-gate Junior School (salary one hundred sixty pounds, with dinner and tea), he admitted that although his wife had been very ill, his great friend Jean Verdenal had been killed, and he had been so “taken up with worries of finance and Vivien’s health” that he had “written nothing lately,” “I am having a wonderful time nevertheless. I have lived through material for a score of long poems in the last six months. An entirely different life from that I looked forward to two years ago. Cambridge seems to me a dull nightmare now.”
At this moment, however, “Europe” visibly destroying itself became an embodiment of his personal trial—one he would link to the “universal cataclysm” and for which he would find the needed style. He and his wife were often ill, evidently making each other ill. The marriage was a constant trial. Eliot was apparently a virgin when he married, and his sexual difficulties were a shock to both of them. Although he had not even been sure at first that he liked England, he had been glad to be free of Harvard and “the college bell.” Now hard pressed by his marriage, overworked and exhausted as he tried to keep up his writing after a day at the bank, Eliot in the midst of the war experienced a breakdown that left him with the deep conviction of the existence of a personal hell. It was somehow too late for him to go home. The difficulties of obtaining a passage in wartime, his reluctance to introduce his wife into the family circle, were convenient excuses. London itself was a constant test, like his marriage, and like his marriage it hypnotized him. To his father in 1917 he could write:
Everyone’s individual lives are so swallowed up in the one great tragedy that one almost ceases to have personal experiences or emotions, and such as one has seem so unimportant.… It’s only very dull people who feel they have more in their lives now—other people have too much. I have a lot of things to write about if the time ever comes when people will attend to them.
He was gasping for time, for the freedom that he would find only when he broke down after the war and had to be sent off to Switzerland. Pound, who from the first days in London had been Eliot’s mainstay, would after the war raise the money for Eliot’s rest cure. And of course it was Pound who turned a mass of incongruous fragments into the brilliant mosaic of The Waste Land. But London even during Eliot’s worst moments through the war contributed to his future poem by bombarding him with sensations that derived from the history around him. London gave him “the tone of time,” the “pitch of association,” as Henry James called them with the special appeal of England to an American of Eliot’s background and temper. Eliot made even his assiduous, old-fashioned learning a form of sensation. There was in him an extraordinary conjunction of the sufferer and the scholar—each finding its voice in the other—that made of London the perfect state for personal expression. Any walk summoned back the most wonderful lines in English poetry and supplied the ironic retort.
Sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song,
Sweet Thames, run softly, for I speak not loud or long.
But at my back in a cold blast I hear
The rattle of the bones, and chuckle spread from ear to ear.
Wartime London, its crowds, monuments, and war profiteers, its constant reminder of the crumbling past, its trembling before the terrible casualty lists, did even more for Eliot than the violence of the Italian front did for Hemingway, the “enormous room” for Cummings. Those writers who stayed at home during the war and were easily indifferent to it missed its world significance as Eliot did not. The unredeemed wasteland of the century began with 1914, that onset of all our woe.
The tremulous noncombatant Eliot had some unexpected advantages over those who “saw action.” He could identify his intense anxieties with a “fallen” world that provided a framework and myth—religious thirst—for his perturbations. Not even Henry Adams, with his unequalled sense of history, made such a “personal universe” out of the world’s running down. For Eliot orchestrated the highs and lows of some irresistible personal emotion, as Stravinsky did in Le Sacre du printemps. This use of anxiety was to be grasped by many readers without their knowing why they were moved by The Waste Land as by no other poem of the period. A city has many voices. Eliot assembled them in echoes, fragments, and parodies because he heard them first in his own fear and trembling:
Unreal City,
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
…
Unreal City
Under the brown fog of a winter noon
…
O City city, I can sometimes hear
Each motif was particular; each, as the residue of strong emotion, would be carefully discriminated from another, and artfully repeated. Eliot always insisted on a specific emotion. This, his strong point as a poet, probably saved his sanity in the storm of his many troubles. Eliot buttressed his tale of a man blindly wandering a city with a fertility myth, carefully laid out in his notes, of desiccation and hope, of a dying land and rebirth by at least a thirst for faith. But as he cheerfully admitted much, much later, The Waste Land was forced out of so much personal urgency that he did not always know what he was saying. He did not always have to know. Armies of scholiasts, reading the poem from the top down as a myth, by the light of the references so grandly suggested in Eliot’s notes, furthered not their artistic education but their (perhaps envious) image of Eliot’s orthodoxy. The modern world was fallen, all fallen. But it was not Eliot’s learned allusions that took many readers where they did not expect to go—the real effect of The Waste Land. What made the effect was Eliot’s skill in combining “precision of emotion” with the “auditory imagination.” He appreciated the moral genius of Catholicism for construing certain emotions as grand occasions when the soul really listens to itself.
Now line after line, whether as observation, quotation, or lament, expressed a separate movement of the soul and nothing else. Line after line, whether observation, quotation, or lament, expressed a specific turbulence and pressure. Each line took over from printed sources, half-forgotten reading still ringing in the mind, classical personages, to express the sensation of having to carry so much in the mind. Eliot’s framework, the breaking up of the modern world, was no more haunting than the spread and variation of these many voices. What was most beautiful was their spacing, alternation, and eventual harmonization in a playful rhythm seemingly offhand. Eliot had learned a certain derisive style from the jeering, throwaway humor of des âmes damnées like Corbière, Laforgue, and of course Baudelaire. But he was no longer making grisly fun of himself, as in “Prufrock”; he was trying to put into one framework the desperate voices of a war-torn civilization.
This was a journey within the city of man and the mind of a single man, a haunted journey hovering on the edge of the past, such as is possible to a modern man only in an ancient city like London. It was a journey with ghosts that in Eliot’s antic bitterness descended to the routine of domestic life, pub talk, the moment of release from the bank.
At the violet hour, when the eyes and back
Turn upward from the desk, when the human engine waits
Like a taxi throbbing waiting …
A city is the junction of so many irreconcilable experiences! And each in The Waste Land was to leave its clanging reverberation.
“My nerves are bad to-night. Yes, bad. Stay with me.
”Speak to me. Why do you never speak. Speak.
“What are you thinking of? What thinking? What?
“I never know what you are thinking. Think.”
And crossing the ever-present sense of deprivation, the “dryness” that reaches some shuddering hope of relief only in the closing din of thunder, we keep butting up against the strangest voices from the classic past, prophets and accusers:
I Tiresias, though blind, throbbing between two lives,
Old man with wrinkled female breasts, can see
…
I Tiresias, old man with wrinkled dugs
Perceived the scene, and foretold the rest …
Every significant writer-participant—Barbusse, Graves, Céline, Ernst Junger, David Jones, Hemingway—was able by the 1920s to describe the war as a moral landslide. The terror of the war was generally left to the novelists and memoirists. Not many poets, and certainly none with a noncombatant’s diffidence and such exhausting personal problems, was able to put into personal epic what Eliot did. This was the sense of being trapped between an almost vanished tradition and an eroding present. Salvation was a distant hope, but for Eliot it was somehow more urgent than for anyone else of his generation. What “saved” him—as an artist—was the obsessive particularity that comes with sickness. What he was to insist on as “precision of emotion” turned the war into a metaphor of the whole modern period. This emotion equalled a devaluation of the life principle, a desert, a rubbish heap indeed.
A rat crept softly through the vegetation
Dragging its slimy belly on the bank
…
White bodies naked on the low damp ground
And bones cast in a little low dry garret …
The voice within the poem lamented a sense of restriction.
Here is no water but only rock
Rock and no water and the sandy road
The road winding above among the mountains
Which are mountains of rock without water
If there were water we should stop and drink
Amongst the rock one cannot stop or think
The disparity of past and present, the seeming profanation that was the present, were cleverly assembled and even appeared brilliantly jocular in relation to each other. But as Eliot admitted to Bertrand Russell, only part V of The Waste Land, “What the Thunder Said,” seemed to him really successful. For there the sense of dread of which the poem is composed emerged into the light. The apprehension Eliot had expressed through repetition,
became extraordinary in its urgency, its felt suffering—and swept self and history into the tide joining the reader to Eliot’s anguish:
What is that sound high in the air
Murmur of maternal lamentation
Who are those hooded hordes swarming
Over endless plains, stumbling in cracked earth
Ringed by the flat horizon only
What is the city over the mountains
Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air
Falling towers
Jerusalem Athens Alexandria
Vienna London
Unreal
The Waste Land, formally resting on myth, became the favorite myth of one postwar generation after another. Eliot quoted Hermann Hesse in his notes: “Already half Europe, at least half of East Europe, is on the way to chaos, stumbles drunkenly in a holy delusion toward the abyss.” “Chaos,” one of Henry Adams’s prime terms for what he saw in modern civilization, was what the modernist had to dispel in the secret, subtle unity of his work of art. Yet just as Eliot wrote The Waste Land “without always knowing what I was saying,” the reader could be moved by it without always understanding it. Eliot as a boy was able to experience poetry in a foreign language he could barely read. Many a reader’s emotional and instinctive experience of The Waste Land was a matter of experiencing the primitive emotions that had guided Eliot in writing it. His gift for relating his total experience to the reader was one that colder poets never possessed. Eliot’s gift was more in keeping with Whitman’s instinct for making personal epic out of a city’s “ensemble” and “paradoxical unity” than with the ambiguous return to “classicism” that Eliot invoked in his criticism. Ezra Pound, who cut and edited The Waste Land so brilliantly that he became a virtual collaborator, was to say that “epic is a poem including history.” History calls for a lot of skilled representation; one of Eliot’s signal feats in The Waste Land was to represent himself struggling with the age. The age paid Eliot the compliment of seeing itself in the poem. This was another reason why it was able to absorb the poem without fully understanding it. Decade after decade The Waste Land represented “an attitude toward history” that went deeper than Hemingway’s In Our Time, Spengler’s The Decline of the West, Robert Graves’s Goodbye to All That. More and more fashionably, Eliot’s modernist poem came to represent the human failure of modern civilization.
For Eliot in England, surrounded by associations with the Establishment, the failure was really America. It was a failure of the isolated, supposedly “self-reliant” American self on which Emerson had rested his faith. In the 1930s Virginia Woolf was to note of Eliot in her diary: “How he suffers!… He seemed to have got so little joy or satisfaction out of being Tom … he revealed his passion, as he seldom does. A religious soul: an unhappy man: a lonely very sensitive man, all wrapt up in fibres of self torture, doubt, conceit, desire for warmth & intimacy.”
The sense of fright within The Waste Land, its haunting ability to pull in the reader, explains the way it works on us as some irresistible discord. This sense of discord became, in Eliot’s rebuttal of “self-reliance” and “the inner light,” a succession of fragments that is really a mysterious striving within ourselves to eliminate fragmentation. We aspire to reach a unity that in the same breath we despair of.
Eliot was writing about the hope of God, “waiting for God,” as one of his future admirations, Simone Weil, was to put it. But for many readers who were irredeemably sceptical, Eliot’s fear and trembling were to emerge as a longing for authority, a contempt for democracy, a disdain for the “bugs,” the “swarming creatures,” as he called them in the original draft of The Waste Land. What Eliot could never admit about his own unhappiness in his many self-accusations in London, even when he was lecturing to workers’ classes, was his lack of sympathy for the masses. He was made just as solitary by his politics as he was by his priggishness. In the street, as his Harvard poems stressing the “sordid” aspects of Boston made clear, he was a prickly Brahmin, the perennial outsider. He absorbed what Emerson praised as “the language of the street” without enjoying it. He never responded to the sense of possibility recurrent in democracy, the buoyancy that Whitman gained from living in a great city.
Eliot, born five years after Emerson died, sometimes wrote as if he had come into the world to roll back Emerson’s work. This was not why he had come into the world, and in the end he was Emerson’s double just as much as he was Emerson’s adversary. For Eliot, too, made the perilous journey to faith all on his own. He, too, was a natural “isolato,” an American. But unlike Emerson, Eliot could not trust his isolation and selfhood. Needing God, he settled for authority. “Authority” was what Europe alone could supply—in the form of culture.
Emerson in 1837 had confidently assured the American scholar that “our day of dependence, our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands, draws to a close. The millions that around us are rushing into life, cannot always be fed on the sere remains of foreign harvests.”
Eliot in “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919), the essay that made him as celebrated a traditionalist as The Waste Land made him a poet, was not talking to scholars. He felt he was reconstituting war-broken Europe (and no doubt himself). His principal edict involved not self-trust, not oneself at all: “The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.” The appeal was not to the soul’s hidden powers but to the manifest sacredness of tradition. In Sophocles’s Oedipus at Colonus the self-tortured hero found peace only in the sacred wood embodying divine powers. The sacred wood could be reached only by returning to tradition, but nowadays this demanded “great labour.” And, what surely could not be left to labor alone, it demanded “the historical sense,” which
involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order.
No European, no seasoned Catholic intelligence, could have delivered such a paean to the past. No one inheriting Europe’s religious wars and its many cultural divisions could have believed for a moment that “the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order.” It was an American who was to ask: “Was Europe a Success?” It was an American who wrote that America’s entrance into the Great War “made the world a single event.” It was an American who now wrote in “Tradition and the Individual Talent” that “the existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered;… and this is conformity between the old and the new.”
This was the language not of Europe but of a visitor. Only an American—and this in 1919—could have wished any “existing order” to be “complete.” Religion now was less a matter of God than of culture. Emerson’s direct experience of divinity had indeed been replaced by the sacred wood. But only the visitor, the outsider, importuning the sacred wood for refuge, would have sensed so well that this ground was shaking and its towers were about to fall.
The Gods have not returned.
They have never left us.
They have never returned.
POUND, Canto CXIII
but at least she saw damn all Europe.
POUND, The Pisan Cantos
Nineteen hundred eight was the year (more or less), as Virginia Woolf was to remember with the authority of the modernists, when “human nature changed.” Ezra Pound from Wyncote, Pennsylvania (though born in Idaho), is in Venice, sitting on the steps of the customs house. In Canto III, written sometime in the 1920s, he says he was sitting on the steps
For the gondolas cost too much, that year,
And there were not “those girls,” there was one face,
And the Buccentoro twenty yards off, howling “Stretti,”
And the lit cross-beams, that year, in the Morosini,
And peacocks in Koré’s house, or there may have been.
Gods float in the azure air,
Bright gods and Tuscan, back before dew were shed.
Light: and the first light, before ever dew was fallen.
Panisks, and from the oak, dryas,
And from the apple, maelid,
Through all the wood, and the leaves are full of voices,
A whisper, and the clouds bow over the lake,
And there are gods upon them,
And in the water, the almond-white swimmers,
The silvery water glazes the upturned nipple,
As Poggio has remarked.
Green veins in the turquoise,
Or, the gray steps lead up under the cedars.
These lines are so exquisite that even if we do not get all the Venetian references, or understand why the scene will suddenly shift from Venice (where there are surely no almond-white swimmers in the Grand Canal, for the water is notoriously not silvery) to Spain, we are aware of the poet’s rapture in Mediterranean Europe. There have been many rapturous travel passages in our literature, but this one is different. Poor puritanical Lambert Strether in The Ambassadors discovered at a splendid garden party in Paris how little he had “lived.” He had come to Europe to take Chad Newsome back to America, but there was “that striking truth about Chad of which he had been so often moved to take note: the truth that everything came happily back with him to his knowing how to live.” Hemingway’s passion for French-Italian-Spanish landscape was to express itself through Jake Barnes in The Sun Also Rises.
Looking back we saw Buerguete, white houses and red roofs, and the white road with a truck going along it.… Ahead the road came out of the forest and went along the shoulder of the ridge of hills. The hills ahead were not wooded, and there were great fields of yellow gorse. Way off we saw the steep bluffs dark with trees and jutting with gray stone, that marked the course of the Irati River.
Pound’s velvety, silky tone reminds us of James and Hemingway. His language describes pleasures: we are at a celebration. But even when we link Pound’s and Hemingway’s very inventory of Europe, we can see that the opening of Pound’s Canto III is not exclusively concerned with the pleasures of the eye. In Pound, gods float in the azure air before the Grand Canal, Bright gods and Tuscan, back before the dew was shed. We have been shuttled in Pound’s abruptly moving mind from Venice to Tuscany, from Tuscany to Greece, where little Pans and wood nymphs issue from the trees, and where the leaves are full of voices. The invocation is less of the Mediterranean than of its paganism. This is solemn stuff. This American poet, for all his love of medieval Romance, is intellectually outside Christianity, like the Fascists he will come to admire. Distinctly nonreligious, unlike his great friend the “Reverend Eliot,” as he liked in varying tones of admiration and condescension to call that vulnerable—because so highly personal—poet, Pound will show a poetic sensibility bewilderingly impersonal, slashing, hard. His subject is not the Romantic Ego, as you might think from his passion for word association, but History as the warnings imparted by one great mind after another. Everything about the herd, the “bullet-headed many,” passes like so much dirt. What the great mind dwells on is what will last. Literature is news “that stays news.” Art alone offers some hint of immortality. The Judaeo-Christian God never sufficed Pound. Paganism is certainly closer, he thought, to the original sources of poetry.
Paganism, polytheism, culture fastening on culture to seek some common root: Greek, Chinese, Latin, even American! The key word in Pound’s code became paideuma, the energy pattern of a particular culture. Pound was anything but the usual American literary tourist seeking something more restful than his own commercial civilization. His was the intoxication of returning to the roots of poetry, to an ancient world in Asia even more than to pagan Greece and Rome. Paganism: the living out of roles in nature, first by the gods and then by men. Paganism: an identification with the energy patterns in nature, not the modern habit of seeking to study nature by dominating it. Pound easily separated himself from America, for he did not regard nature as inherently different from oneself, as something to manipulate. He would not suffer from the bourgeois ignorance of the sources of vital energy, from the recurrent mental fatigue ultimately due to the split between subject and object.
The twenty-three-year-old poet was to publish a first volume in Venice, A lume spento, in that year he travelled via Gibraltar, Spain, and Southern France to Venice—1908. When it was reprinted in 1964, the poet recently returned to Italy from thirteen years in a Washington madhouse called it “a collection of stale creampuffs.” There is indeed something flaky, very 1890-ish—as Wallace Stevens was to complain of Pound’s total output—in many of these poems. But Pound, who at fifteen had announced himself a poet and in many respects never outgrew his view of the poet as public adversary, began by practicing every kind of poetry he could find. The early poems of his 1909 collection, Personae, astonish us by the absolutely faultless ear that will remain with Pound even in the most discursive sections of the Cantos and in his unaccountable intimacy with poetry in every language and of every period. The fluency with which Pound assimilates other poets, other languages, every “alien” sound somehow made friendly and absorbable by Pound’s ear, was to give us that exquisite love poem “The River Merchant’s Wife: A Letter” and such doubles of Anglo-Saxon verse as “The Seafarer.”
Bitter breast-cares have I abided,
Known on my keel many a care’s hold,
And dire sea-surge, and there I oft spent
Narrow nightwatch nigh the ship’s head
While she tossed close to cliffs. Coldly afflicted,
My feet were by frost benumbed.
This is certainly the polar world of the Anglo-Saxons in all the harsh stormy alliterative stresses of a world with little human relief. By contrast, the silky shy tenderness of the young Chinese wife writing to her absent husband the river merchant, a poem Pound tells us is “by Rihaku,” eighth century:
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.
Pound the “translator” does what the gifted poet alone can do: he “imitates” the sounds and rhythm of a poem in a language otherwise foreign to him. Pound very early extracted an extraordinary but delusional sense of authority from his ability to reproduce other men’s styles. Personae he called one collection of his poems outside the Cantos; they were all his roles. As a critic he was of course determined, like Eliot, to clear the ground for his own kind of poetry. But that kind was never so narrowly characteristic as Eliot’s poetry. Pound’s startling empathy with other men’s work, his genius as a critic, is shown as much in his wildly linked poetry as in his often distracted essays. He was an assimilationist of genius, a ventriloquist able to reproduce alien and ancient voices, cadences, styles—often in wilful ignorance of the actual substance. Only an American, someone perpetually dreaming “Europe” as a whole, could have performed Pound’s series of metamorphoses. From book to book, sometimes from line to line, Pound became in turn every poet he admired. He was to admit that he did not always know what he was doing as sound, quotation, fantasy, real dreams, and irrepressible pastiche moved ungraspably in metaphoric relation to each other.
Poetry, said Jean Cocteau, is a separate language. This must be so, since poets often reproduce each other’s subtlest effects without knowing what instinct leads them to it. Eliot as a young man wondered that he could respond to poetry in a language he did not know. Pound never wondered. He knew the “language” in all its subtle strength as no other American poet has ever known it. He had an extraordinary natural endowment: perfect adaptability to other poets anywhere. He was the early supporter in England of Frost; the providential editor and “better artificer” behind The Waste Land. He never doubted that he could teach a whole generation the art of poetry by darting from moment to moment of insight. His instinct vis-à-vis poetry was so complete that poetry possessed him to the point of autointoxication. Pound did not need drugs or alcohol; poetry drugged him, blurred the distinction between poetry and the active world. It was just as much other people’s lines as his own that drugged him—he was past the point of being able to distinguish between the beauty of a line from Provençal, a Chinese ideogram, and poetry’s application to the economic distress of the 1930s. He could be almost unconscious of the slashing, domineering self-confidence that his absorption of poetry gave him. Shelley said that poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world; Pound would have said not unacknowledged but unread—by the multitude.
Pound was to become an amazing seismograph of the force hidden in language, a kind of early warning system: he was to link his gift to tremors he sensed in the body politic. A poet born in Idaho emerged from a historical America to live and write in Europe as if Europe’s poetry were its true history. Since poetry is not older than prose but stands in the same relation to it as the origins of life stand to the emergence of man on the planet, Pound detected in himself powers of divination, attributes of the shaman, the medium through which he touched a great mystery.
The mystery Pound touched was the secret of style—not, as he eventually thought, the damnable tendency of history to lapse from some great tradition or model furnished by Confucius, Dante, John Adams. Pound became the great exemplar and teacher of modernism by restricting it (whether he knew this or not) to a matter of style. And he was on safe ground as long as he insisted on its energy, its physicality. The physician and poet Oliver Wendell Holmes heard meter in the binary rhythm of the heart. Poetry can have such an effect on us as to seem expected by the body.
The authority of poetry over us does in fact rest on physical signs—of stresses and the intermittent relief from stresses. Emerson said of Dante that his verse was the nearest thing to hands and feet. When we look at the characteristic cross-rhythms of long lines and upspringing half lines that Pound developed into such concentration of emotion as visual fact on the page—poetry as sculpture, Donald Davie called it—we recognize an energy at work in the typographical arrangement of the lines, an energy that can become the theme of a poem. The spaces, the sudden springing, the iconic letters in Chinese and Greek—all this is like the art of the dance to which Nietzsche, that other totally spontaneous lyric thinker, compared his own style as poet-philosopher. Thus, from Ripostes (1912), “The Return”:
See, they return; ah, see the tentative
Movements, and the slow feet,
The trouble in the pace and the uncertain
Wavering!
…
Haie! Haie!
These were the swift to harry;
These the keen-scented;
These were the souls of blood.
Slow on the leash,
pallid the leash-men!
Pound the restless instigator of modernism was not afraid of using obsolete words; his innate tie with the language materials of poetry in any language he encountered, even when he depended on a crib, as with Chinese, or when his own knowledge of it, as with Greek, was not so much imperfect as impatient, persuaded him that words in themselves, as Emerson said, were fossil poetry.
The romantic theory of poetry as being germane to the race, its unconscious resources already lying in the mind like separate pieces of type waiting to be put into rightly organized lines by means of the highest possible art, is one from which we have never really departed. What Pound added to this—or brought out of it—was the belief that the language of poetry is not primitive emotion but secret knowledge. The shaman was more important to Pound than the bard. “Poet” equals maker; how the poem is made denotes such an extraordinary amount of contraction, condensation, acceleration of human experience within a single context, that Pound came to believe that the highly contracted words were occult. So the function of the poet was to teach the way back to this arcane knowledge—as poet, by displaying all the verbal shimmer he could line up in his words and all the force he could reproduce in the structure of his verse.
The real Muse is History—but History buried in words: History as an excavation made possible only to those who know the lay of the land and where the old wisdom is hidden.
Pound’s most famous work outside the 117 Cantos is his monument, Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, sculptured indeed in memory of the artist Gaudier-Brzeska, dead in the war. Mauberley is dear to the modernist public created by Pound and Eliot, which learned from them to accept nothing not in their image, because it displays Pound’s total disdain “For an old bitch gone in the teeth, / For a botched civilization.” Mauberley, like all of Pound’s key works, is an experiment in style, detached and technical to maximum chilliness.
Christ follows Dionysus,
Phallic and ambrosial
Made way for macerations;
Caliban casts out Ariel.
All things are a flowing,
Sage Heracleitus says;
But a tawdry cheapness
Shall outlast our days.
…
There died a myriad,
And of the best, among them,
For an old bitch gone in the teeth,
For a botched civilization,
Charm, smiling at the good mouth,
Quick eyes gone under earth’s lid,
For two gross of broken statues,
For a few thousand battered books.
Here is the familiar post-trenches theme: contempt for Christianity, lament over forgotten ideals, fury at the pointless obliteration of a whole generation. Then the expatriate elite saluting itself, exasperated for having “been born / In a half-savage country, out of date.” The most exact art alone will suffice.
His true Penelope was Flaubert,
He fished by obstinate isles;
Observed the elegance of Circe’s hair
Rather than the mottoes on sun-dials.
Unaffected by “the march of events,”
He passed from men’s memory in l’an trentuniesme
De son eage; the case presents
No adjunct to the Muses’ diadem.
Oh but it does! What Pound added to the Muses’ diadem was the interweaving of Greek and Latin with English, just as in his first lyric poems he “imitated” Anglo-Saxon, Provençal, Chinese, Dante, and Dante’s friend Guido Cavalcanti. All this was to have an intimidating and even comic effect on an audience without those languages. This interflow of languages represented one thing in the mind of Ezra Pound, who dreamed in languages, for the languages came. It represented a totally fictitious authority in the minds of the audience.
Eliot’s sense of tradition, he told us in the tumultuously experimental twenties, was Anglo-Catholic, classical, royalist. Eliot, who took his time admitting that The Waste Land was a poem about his personal sterility, and that he might have turned Buddhist as easily as Christian, nevertheless acquired a greater authority over literature in English than anyone since Dr. Johnson. Pound, who did far more for other poets than anyone else, and was forever pushing poets, prodding poets, and instructing everyone at large in books typically entitled Instigations, Make It New, How to Read, ABC of Reading, Guide to Kulchur, scattered his forces in London, Paris, Rapallo, was soon too heated an agitator for Social Credit and other favorite nostrums, and was never to achieve the same lofty dignity as the Possum. The great work of his life, the Cantos, turned out for some of us to be the great failure as the epic it proclaimed itself to be—and ultimately a work of such obscene hatred as to make one weep over the manic flaw in Pound, his overbearing illusion that through his innate tie to poetry he could instruct a disordered world.
Edgar Allan Poe said that a long poem could not sustain itself; especially, he might have added, at the hands of lyricists like himself and Ezra Pound, with an ideal vision not only of the classical world but of their own intellectual powers. The Cantos are full of miraculously beautiful lyrics; the work as a whole, if you can call it a whole, proceeds from Pound’s inner ecstasy at poetry in all languages rushing out of each other into a mind driven to frenzy by the acceleration of words and images within it. What you find in the Cantos, above everything else, is this inner vortex of sounds and associations, all these buried quotations and anecdotes, these pages and pages lifted without discernible order from Renaissance history, American political documents, the conversation of Benito Mussolini, newspaper articles, economic lore, etc.
If an epic “is a poem including history,” we had better remember that as we drift through the Cantos. History turns out to be anything that interests Ezra Pound, that he suddenly thinks of in connection with something else, that he has read, that he can quote, that he can in fact repeat. But this total recall and assemblage is the reverse of arbitrary; it is as natural to Pound as eating drinking copulating defecating, and it slides onto a page as if he were doing just that.
The great epic—the Odyssey, the Aeneid, the Divine Comedy, Paradise Lost—is the poem of a whole civilization. Pound assumes the authority behind such an epic, and although the Cantos are at times not so much written as accumulated, Pound does take on more than one civilization. Which is not why he fails as an epic poet: there he fails, as long poems in America mostly fail, because they are not content with great narratives of the existing world; they want to leave that world. Pound wants to take us out of the wasteland, the charnel house, the Heartbreak House of finance capitalism.
His way of doing this is to stun us: the language museum without walls; the past of China, Greece, Latin Europe in all the culture-splendor of their original words. The infliction of obscurity is so unyielding that sometime, if he is honest, the reader of the Cantos must ask (a) how much all these quotations and references are just disdain for the ordinary world in which we live, (b) how much the poem therefore corresponds to the gap between the shaman and the tribe, (c) how much, in fact, none of this is consciously demonstrative but Pound’s language intoxication. In the Cantos this process rises to a delirium of cross-references just as in Finnegans Wake Joyce is so absorbed in a language entirely his own that it becomes self-reproducing.
Knowing that this intoxication is the essence does not relieve us from the contempt that shines proudly through the brilliancies of Mauberley. There is a frivolity in great artists—Joyce and Picasso come to mind—who take their endlessly inventive hand as the measure of reality. Yeats sadly reported his impression of the Cantos: “nervous obsession, nightmare, stammering confusion.” Jung said of Ulysses that Joyce would have gone mad if he had not written it. It is true that Pound was an only child, famously spoiled, who kept his parents with him in Europe. But his belief in his own rightness was not just psychological, for like Beethoven he finally heard nothing but what he remembered. To this extent, not being deaf, he was “mad.” We can see the extent and limits of this “madness” in the Cantos as well as in his Fascist pamphlets and radio broadcasts from Italy during the war.
Pound’s problem was never conflict with himself but an excessiveness, an incessancy of verbal self-stimulation; isolated in Rapallo from much of what was happening in the great cities of Europe, and as always living on his reading, he could be more excited by anything in print than by strong drink. There has simply been no other mind like Pound’s for the energy with which he assimilates, the sputtering impatience with which he turns from episode to quotation to anecdote. The shiftings of his mind are such that one feels changed by the extraordinary lyric bursts, usually in a water context which provides an extension of ordinary human sight.
glass wave over Tyro,
Close cover, unstillness,
bright welter of wave-cords,
…
Glass-glint of wave in the tide-rips against sunlight,
pallor of Hesperus
Then one feels positively jostled by the inevitable shift.
The difficulty lies not in the huge blocks of Greek, Latin, Provençal, and Chinese flung at us—or in the elusive garbled quotations relating to the plunderings and escapades of the Renaissance swashbuckler Sigismundo da Malatesta, obviously admired for his cruel Renaissance “energy.” Even if we knew everything that Pound knows, we still would not know why in Canto VII we go from Eleanor (presumably of Aquitaine) to
poor old Homer blind,
blind as a bat,
Ear, ear for the sea-surge;
rattle of old men’s voices
to Pound quoting himself on Henry James—“And the great domed head, con gli occhi onesti e tardi.”
All we know is that this is the order in which the voices of Pound’s cherished inscriptions, memories, etc., are heard by him. They occur on the page as they occur to Ezra Pound. If the reader, informed with all of Pound’s references, nevertheless asks of this automatic writing, Where am I going with all this?—the answer is something that has to be given him by a critic; he will not decipher it himself from the dizzily shifting references.
We can all use instruction. How many of us now look at Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, hear Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du printemps, know that e = mc2, or even follow the historians’ arguments about the origins of the Cold War without having been instructed by authority? Are we against interpretation, do we want to take the bread out of Hugh Kenner’s mouth if we wonder just what his instruction does for us when he writes in The Pound Era:
Later 1–16 and 17–27 were joined without division, and three more cantos added to make a first block of 30. The span of this no longer reaches from the Renaissance to modern times but makes a closed loop within the Renaissance, with modern extrapolations. We commence with Divus, 1538, and close with the death of Pope Alexander Borgia, 1503; close, moreover, despite this death, on a note of hope, for Hieronymous Soncinus is initiating the kind of printing activity that will bring Divus’ Homer into the public domain. Even the wreck of the Malatesta is subsumed; the quotation from Soncinus concludes.…
But this is supposed to be an epic, and an epic is a poem that includes history! In fact the Cantos are Pound’s diary, the record of his amazing reading, disgorged when and how he feels like it. So the final authority of this epic belongs not to Ezra Pound but to his commentators. Whom we cannot choose but hear. The Cantos are not to be dismissed, bewildering as their many turns can be. To anyone sensitive to poetry and at the same time aware that “modern times” are equivalent to the sense of History as a problem inviting a solution—the Enlightenment legacy which only in our day has begun to discourage intellectuals—the Cantos are shattering in the insistency of Pound’s mind, and finally they are tragic. Tragic because, like all ambitious efforts to present History within a single book, they yield us just another image of ourselves.
Eliot told us that the order of the past is transformed by every new work; everything past becomes an aspect of present taste. The greatest effect of “Eliot-Pound” was to abolish among the literary all historicism and to coerce the whole past into the fashions of the present. African masks are viewed by the museum crowd as a stimulant to Picasso’s roving imagination, Confucius the perfect teacher becomes a metaphor of the “wise ruler” in Pound’s myth of the perfect society, Jefferson is a counterpart to Mussolini, and his great hero John Adams becomes absolutely meaningless in the so-called Adams Cantos, 62–71. As Peter Shaw has shown in a devastating examination of what Pound did to the works of John Adams, Pound transcribed so mechanically that he reproduced even the misprints.† But one of the marks of what Harold Rosenberg called the herd of independent minds, the culture vultures who nervously pace the modern museum gathering impressions, who expertly compare one recording with another without knowing how to read music, is the lack of attentiveness that Pound’s ransacking method invites.
The difference between us who nowadays accumulate too many impressions and Pound is that although he shares many of our touristy traits, he collects them at the pitch of genius, as Henry Adams did in the historical scene shifts of the Education and Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres. Perhaps more than Adams, who cultivated a weary detachment, Pound is visibly tormented. History has become his agony. Joyce said: history is the nightmare from which I am trying to awaken. Joyce fled history into the interstices of language. Pound did just the opposite: he moved from the withinness of the poem out into the terror of twentieth-century history. Yet the terror is not the authoritarian state—Pound is noticeably indulgent to Lenin, as an admirer of Mussolini should be; he ignores the slaughter of so many innocents by Hitler-Stalin-Mussolini-Franco, he is obsessed by finance capitalism and the admitted lunacy and unfairness of the credit system. Usura (as he calls it) is his Inferno, not imperialism, racism, the ever-accelerating avalanche of war. The classical past, embodied in perfect language, has become the sacred icon. The present is by definition without value.
Pound the would-be epic writer has a driving sense of history but is really without history. Over and again he refers in the Cantos to Mussolini’s draining the marshes and establishing corporate guilds for labor and capital; in The Pisan Cantos, written with gallantry in the appalling cage of an American army disciplinary unit, he refers to Mussolini as the “twice-crucified” and describes Italians as “maggots eating off a dead bullock.” Did he not know how little the draining of the Pontine marshes represents in the history of Fascism? That the so-called Fascist corporations never really existed? When Hitler made his state visit to Mussolini, Italian submarines were ordered to make instant maneuvers that put whole crews in jeopardy; Pound quotes an informed source on the danger without recognizing what this implies.
The Second World War as most Europeans lived it and the war that Pound in Rapallo read about in Fascist newspapers bear no relation to each other. Pound was capable of saying in St. Elizabeth’s that no man named Ezra could be an anti-Semite. But in the great work of his life, the Cantos, that self-announced successor to the great epic poems of Western man, we read of “fresh meat on the Russian steppes” and that the slaughter of the Jews was unfair only because so many poor Jews had to pay for the guilt (Schuld) of the Rothschilds, whose name means Red Shield. Schuld, Schild, what’s the difference so that you get a pun in? “Poor yitts paying for / a few big jews’ vendetta on goyim.” This apparently is how the Second World War started, and Hugh Kenner confirms and expands on this in The Pound Era.
Pound’s broadcasts on the Fascist radio are all available through the Library of Congress, and although the lawyers of the Pound estate have tried to keep people from quoting them, the broadcasts were published by the United States government and so are out of copyright. Hemingway said that Pound was crazy, “all poets are,” and it is a fact that Pound’s broadcasts were so disordered that one Italian official suspected that he was really an American agent broadcasting to the United States in code.
Pound’s Fascist writings and broadcasts, his thirteen years in St. Elizabeth’s in Washington, all belong to the past; no need to go over it all again, is there? Besides, everything passes so quickly nowadays, the war has been over for so long, that a student of Pound’s genius may properly affirm that the Pound case, taken entire, with the flood of commentary dripping over it, represents the last act in that nineteenth-century drama of the poet as the unacknowledged legislator, the poet who presumed, once, to lead us from history as blood and tears, mere history, to the delectable mountains.
Eliot, saluting Ulysses in April 1921, said that
in using the myth, in manipulating a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity, Mr. Joyce is pursuing a method which others must pursue after him.… It is simply a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history.
Eliot was on his way to a religious solution of his personal longing for authority: the “immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history” had to be checked now. None of this was useful to Joyce, who had begun by withdrawing from the two empires of Britain and the church, or to Pound, who was bored by Christianity. For a while, for quite a long while, modernism became a kind of church, and students, who knew nothing of poetry but what their teachers told them, recited in unison the wonders of myth, tension, paradox, and ambiguity, to say nothing of the horrors of “heresy.” All that is over now, in a culture so speeded up in disposing of last year’s cultural models that freshmen have never heard of Norman Mailer. Poor Ezra Pound, who believed in the authority of history as transmitted to us through the unique authority of literature.
Pound failed himself, not the masses who never really knew or cared about History as enchantment, idol, sorrow, trap—the History that only intellectuals can afford to worry about. In the end, in Italy, this formerly quenchless mouth snapped itself shut. Tempus loquendi, tempus taciendi was one of his favorite sayings. There is a time to speak and a time to shut up. And indeed he had much to be silent about. Pound spoiled his own dreams. But the anticlimax of his old age should not blind us to the radiance with which he started. Pound was the last to believe that the poet does have authority. His manic power reminds us why Plato feared the poets and wanted them out of the perfect Republic.
*“The term implies that the individual has a desire to do something but the desire is without power or energy. Abulia itself is rare and with few exceptions occurs only in the schizophrenias. The more frequent disturbance in the will is a reduction or impairment … rather than a complete absence.…
“Inactivity, focal or diffuse, of an individual toward the environment, due to inability to settle on a plan of action. There may be a desire to contact the environment, but the desire has no power of action.” (Campbell, Psychiatric Dictionary, fourth edition.)
†The Works of John Adams, Partisan Review, 1977. Just how dotty Pound could get when the word “Adams” swam into view is suggested by the following: “[Eliot] has renounced America ever since the time of his first departure, but if he would consider the dynasty of the Adamses he would see that it was precisely because it lacked the Confucian law that this family lost the Celestial Decree.” (“A Visiting Card,” No. 4 of the Money Pamphlets, London, 1952.)