Ezra_Pound_His_Metric_and_Poetry I̥\I̥\ BOOKMOBI * : J Z j z ʝ ڟ K MOBI h( ! P EXTH d T.S. Eliot )Ezra Pound: His Metric and Poetry l 7calibre (0.5.2) [http://calibre.kovidgoyal.net] Ezra Pound: His Metric and Poetry
Project Gutenberg's Ezra Pound: His Metric and Poetry, by T.S. Eliot
5 in our series by T.S. Eliot
Copyright laws are changing all over the world. Be sure to check the copyright laws for your country before downloading or redistributing this or any other Project Gutenberg eBook.
This header should be the first thing seen when viewing this Project Gutenberg file. Please do not remove it. Do not change or edit the header without written permission.
Please read the "legal small print," and other information about the eBook and Project Gutenberg at the bottom of this file. Included is important information about your specific rights and restrictions in how the file may be used. You can also find out about how to make a donation to Project Gutenberg, and how to get involved.
Welcome To The World of Free Plain Vanilla Electronic Texts
eBooks Readable By Both Humans and By Computers, Since 1971
These eBooks Were Prepared By Thousands of Volunteers!**
Title: Ezra Pound: His Metric and Poetry
Author: T.S. Eliot
Release Date: January, 2005 [EBook #7275] [Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule] [This file was first posted on April 6, 2003]
Edition: 10
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-Latin-1
START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK EZRA POUND: HIS METRIC AND POETRY
Produced by Andrea Ball, David Starner, Charles Franks, Juliet Sutherland, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team
EZRA POUND
HIS METRIC AND POETRY
BOOKS BY EZRA POUND
PROVENĂA, being poems selected from Personae, Exultations, and Canzoniere. (Small, Maynard, Boston, 1910)
THE SPIRIT OF ROMANCE: An attempt to define somewhat the charm of the pre-renaissance literature of Latin-Europe. (Dent, London, 1910; and Dutton, New York)
THE SONNETS AND BALLATE OF GUIDO CAVALCANTI. (Small, Maynard, Boston, 1912)
RIPOSTES. (Swift, London, 1912; and Mathews, London, 1913)
DES IMAGISTES: An anthology of the Imagists, Ezra Pound, Aldington, Amy Lowell, Ford Maddox Hueffer, and others
GAUDIER-BRZESKA: A memoir. (John Lane, London and New York, 1916)
NOH: A study of the Classical Stage of Japan with Ernest Fenollosa. (Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1917; and Macmillan, London, 1917)
LUSTRA with Earlier Poems. (Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1917)
PAVANNES AHD DIVISIONS. (Prose. In preparation: Alfred A. Knopf, New York)
EZRA POUND
HIS METRIC AND POETRY
I
"All talk on modern poetry, by people who know," wrote Mr. Carl Sandburg in Poetry, "ends with dragging in Ezra Pound somewhere. He may be named only to be cursed as wanton and mocker, poseur, trifler and vagrant. Or he may be classed as filling a niche today like that of Keats in a preceding epoch. The point is, he will be mentioned."
This is a simple statement of fact. But though Mr. Pound is well known, even having been the victim of interviews for Sunday papers, it does not follow that his work is thoroughly known. There are twenty people who have their opinion of him for every one who has read his writings with any care. Of those twenty, there will be some who are shocked, some who are ruffled, some who are irritated, and one or two whose sense of dignity is outraged. The twenty-first critic will probably be one who knows and admires some of the poems, but who either says: "Pound is primarily a scholar, a translator," or "Pound's early verse was beautiful; his later work shows nothing better than the itch for advertisement, a mischievous desire to be annoying, or a childish desire to be original." There is a third type of reader, rare enough, who has perceived Mr. Pound for some years, who has followed his career intelligently, and who recognizes its consistency.
This essay is not written for the first twenty critics of literature, nor for that rare twenty-second who has just been mentioned, but for the admirer of a poem here or there, whose appreciation is capable of yielding him a larger return. If the reader is already at the stage where he can maintain at once the two propositions, "Pound is merely a scholar" and "Pound is merely a yellow journalist," or the other two propositions, "Pound is merely a technician" and "Pound is merely a prophet of chaos," then there is very little hope. But there are readers of poetry who have not yet reached this hypertrophy of the logical faculty; their attention might be arrested, not by an outburst of praise, but by a simple statement. The present essay aims merely at such a statement. It is not intended to be either a biographical or a critical study. It will not dilate upon "beauties"; it is a summary account of ten years' work in poetry. The citations from reviews will perhaps stimulate the reader to form his own opinion. We do not wish to form it for him. Nor shall we enter into other phases of Mr. Pound's activity during this ten years; his writings and views on art and music; though these would take an important place in any comprehensive biography.
II
Pound's first book was published in Venice. Venice was a halting point after he had left America and before he had settled in England, and here, in 1908, "A Lume Spento" appeared. The volume is now a rarity of literature; it was published by the author and made at a Venetian press where the author was able personally to supervise the printing; on paper which was a remainder of a supply which had been used for a History of the Church. Pound left Venice in the same year, and took "A Lume Spento" with him to London. It was not to be expected that a first book of verse, published by an unknown American in Venice, should attract much attention. The "Evening Standard" has the distinction of having noticed the volume, in a review summing it up as:
wild and haunting stuff, absolutely poetic, original,
imaginative, passionate, and spiritual. Those who do not
consider it crazy may well consider it inspired. Coming
after the trite and decorous verse of most of our decorous
poets, this poet seems like a minstrel of Provençe at a
suburban musical evening.... The unseizable magic of poetry
is in the queer paper volume, and words are no good in
describing it.
As the chief poems in "A Lume Spento" were afterwards incorporated in "Personae," the book demands mention only as a date in the author's history. "Personae," the first book published in London, followed early in 1909. Few poets have undertaken the siege of London with so little backing; few books of verse have ever owed their success so purely to their own merits. Pound came to London a complete stranger, without either literary patronage or financial means. He took "Personae" to Mr. Elkin Mathews, who has the glory of having published Yeats' "Wind Among the Reeds," and the "Books of the Rhymers' Club," in which many of the poets of the '90s, now famous, found a place. Mr. Mathews first suggested, a s was natural to an unknown author, that the author should bear part of the cost of printing. "I have a shilling in my pocket, if that is any use to you," said the latter. "Well," said Mr. Mathews, "I want to publish it anyway." His acumen was justified. The book was, it is true, received with opposition, but it was received. There were a few appreciative critics, notably Mr. Edward Thomas, the poet (known also as "Edward Eastaway"; he has since been killed in France). Thomas, writing in the "English Review" (then in its brightest days under the editorship of Ford Madox Hueffer), recognized the first-hand intensity of feeling in "Personae":
He has ... hardly any of the superficial good qualities of
modern versifiers.... He has not the current melancholy or
resignation or unwillingness to live; nor the kind of
feeling for nature which runs to minute description and
decorative metaphor. He cannot be usefully compared with any
living writers;... full of personality and with such power
to express it, that from the first to the last lines of most
of his poems he holds us steadily in his own pure grave,
passionate world.... The beauty of it (In Praise of Ysolt)
is the beauty of passion, sincerity and intensity, not of
beautiful words and images and suggestions ... the thought
dominates the words and is greater than they are. Here
(Idyll for Glaucus) the effect is full of human passion and
natural magic, without any of the phrases which a reader of
modern verse would expect in the treatment of such a
subject.
Mr. Scott James, in the "Daily News," speaks in praise of his metres:
At first the whole thing may seem to be mere madness and
rhetoric, a vain exhibition of force and passion without
beauty. But, as we read on, these curious metres of his seem
to have a law and order of their own; the brute force of Mr.
Pound's imagination seems to impart some quality of
infectious beauty to his words. Sometimes there is a strange
beating of anapaests when he quickens to his subject; again
and again he unexpectedly ends a line with the second half
of a reverberant hexameter:
"Flesh shrouded, bearing the secret."
... And a few lines later comes an example of his favourite
use of spondee, followed by dactyl and spondee, which comes
in strangely and, as we first read it, with the appearance
of discord, but afterwards seems to gain a curious and
distinctive vigour:
"Eyes, dreams, lips, and the night goes."
Another line like the end of a hexameter is
"But if e'er I come to my love's land."
But even so favourable a critic pauses to remark that
He baffles us by archaic words and unfamiliar metres; he
often seems to be scorning the limitations of form and
metre, breaking out into any sort of expression which suits
itself to his mood.
and counsels the poet to "have a little more respect for his art."
It is, in fact, just this adaptability of metre to mood, an adaptability due to an intensive study of metre, that constitutes an important element in Pound's technique. Few readers were prepared to accept or follow the amount of erudition which entered into "Personae" and its close successor, "Exultations," or to devote the care to reading them which they demand. It is here that many have been led astray. Pound is not one of those poets who make no demand of the reader; and the casual reader of verse, disconcert ed by the difference between Pound's poetry and that on which his taste has been trained, attributes his own difficulties to excessive scholarship on the part of the author. "This," he will say of some of the poems in Provençal form or on Provençal subjects, "is archaeology; it requires knowledge on the part of its reader, and true poetry does not require such knowledge." But to display knowledge is not the same thing as to expect it on the part of the reader; and of this sort of pedantry Pound is quite free. He is, it is true, one of the most learned of poets. In America he had taken up the study of Romance Languages with the intention of teaching. After work in Spain and Italy, after pursuing the Provençal verb from Milan to Freiburg, he deserted the thesis on Lope de Vega and the Ph.D. and the professorial chair, and elected to remain in Europe. Mr. Pound has spoken out his mind from time to time on the subject of scholarship in American universities, its deadness, its isolation from genuine appreciation, and the active creative life of literature. He has always been ready to battle against pedantry. As for his own learning, he has studied poetry carefully, and has made use of his study in his own verse. "Personae" and "Exultations" show his talent for turning his studies to account. He was supersaturated in Provençe; he had tramped over most of the country; and the life of the courts where the Troubadours thronged was part of his own life to him. Yet, though "Personae" and "Exultations" do exact something from the reader, they do not require a knowledge of Provençal or of Spanish or Italian. Very few people know the Arthurian legends well, or even Malory (if they did they might realize that the Idylls of the King are hardly more important than a parody, or a "Chaucer retold for Children"); but no one accuses Tennyson of needing footnotes, or of superciliousness toward the uninstructed. The difference is merely in what people are prepared for; most readers could no more relate the myth of Atys correctly than they could give a biography of Bertrand de Born. It is hardly too much to say that there is no poem in these volumes of Mr. Pound which needs fuller explanation than he gives himself. What the poems do require is a trained ear, or at least the willingness to be trained.
The metres and the use of language are unfamiliar. There are certain traces of modern influence. We cannot agree with Mr. Scott-James that among these are "W. E. Henley, Kipling, Chatterton, and especially Walt Whitman"--least of all Walt Whitman. Probably there are only two: Yeats and Browning. Yeats in "La Fraisne," in "Personae," for instance, in the attitude and somewhat in the vocabulary:
I wrapped my tears in an ellum leaf And left them under a stone, And now men call me mad because I have thrown All folly from me, putting it aside To leave the old barren ways of men ...
For Browning, Mr. Pound has always professed strong admiration (see "Mesmerism" in "Personae"); there are traces of him in "Cino" and "Famam Librosque Cano," in the same volume. But it is more profitable to comment upon the variety of metres and the original use of language.
Ezra Pound has been fathered with vers libre in English, with all its vices and virtues. The term is a loose one--any verse is called "free" by people whose ears are not accustomed to it--in the second place, Pound's use of this medium has shown the temperance of the artist, and his belief in it as a vehicle is not that of the fanatic. He has said himself that when one has the proper material for a sonnet, one should use the sonnet form; but that it happens very rarely to any poet to find himself in possession of just the block of stuff which can perfectly be modelled into the sonnet. It is true that up to very recently it was impossible to get free verse printed in any periodical except those in which Pound had influence; and that now it is possible to print free verse (second, third, or tenth-rate) in almost any American magazine. Who is responsible for the bad free verse is a question of no importance, inasmuch as its authors would have written bad verse in any form; Pound has at least the right to be judged by the success or failure of his own. Pound's vers libre is such as is only possible for a poet who has worked tirelessly with rigid forms and different systems of metric. His "Canzoni" are in a way aside from his direct line of progress; they are much more nearly studies in mediaeval appreciation than any of his other verse; but they are interesting, apart from their merit, as showing the poet at work with the most intricate Provençal forms--so intricate that the pattern cannot be exhibited without quoting an entire poem. (M. Jean de Bosschere, whose French is translated in the "Egoist," has already called attention to the fact that Pound was the first writer in English to use five Provençal forms.) Quotation will show, however, the great variety of rhythm which Pound manages to introduce into the ordinary iambic pentameter:
Thy gracious ways, O lady of my heart, have O'er all my thought their golden glamour cast; As amber torch-flames, where strange men-at-arms Tread softly 'neath the damask shield of night, Rise from the flowing steel in part reflected, So on my mailed thought that with thee goeth, Though dark the way, a golden glamour falleth.
Within the iambic limits, there are no two lines in the whole poem that have an identical rhythm.
We turn from this to a poem in "Exultations," the "Night Litany":
O God, what great kindness have we done in times past and forgotten it, That thou givest this wonder unto us, O God of waters?
O God of the night What great sorrow Cometh unto us, That thou thus repayest us Before the time of its coming?
There is evident, and more strongly in certain later poems, a tendency toward quantitative measure. Such a "freedom" as this lays so heavy a burden upon every word in a line that it becomes impossible to write like Shelley, leaving blanks for the adjectives, or like Swinburne, whose adjectives are practically blanks. Other poets have manipulated a great variety of metres and forms; but few have studied the forms and metres which they use so carefully as has Pound. His ballad of the "Goodly Fere" shows great knowledge of the ballad form:
I ha' seen him cow a thousand men On the hills o' Galilee, They whined as he walked out calm between Wi' his eyes like the grey o' the sea.
Like the sea that brooks no voyaging With the winds unleashed and free, Like the sea that he cowed at Genseret Wi' twey words spoke suddently.
A master of men was the Goodly Fere A mate of the wind and sea, If they think they ha' slain our Goodly Fere They are fools eternally.
I ha' seen him eat o' the honey-comb Sin' they nailed him to the tree.
And from this we turn to a very different form in the "Altaforte," which is perhaps the best sestina that has been written in English:
Damn it all! all this our South stinks peace. You whoreson dog, Papiols, come! let's to music! I have no life save when the swords clash. But ah! when I see the standards gold, vair, purple, opposing, And the broad fields beneath them turn crimson, Then howl I my heart nigh mad with rejoicing.
In hot summer have I great rejoicing When the tempests kill the earth's foul peace, And the lightnings from black heaven flash crimson, And the fierce thunders roar me their music And the winds shriek through the clouds mad, opposing, And through all the riven skies God's swords clash.
I have quoted two verses to show the intricacy of the pattern.
The Provençal canzon, like the Elizabethan lyric, was written for music. Mr. Pound has more recently insisted, in a series of articles on the work of Arnold Dolmetsch, in the "Egoist," on the importance of a study of music for the poet.
* * * * *
Such a relation between poetry and music is very different from what is called the "music" of Shelley or Swinburne, a music often nearer to rhetoric (or the art of the orator) than to the instrument. For poetry to approach the condition of music (Pound quotes approvingly the dictum of Pater) it is not necessary that poetry should be destitute of meaning. Instead of slightly veiled and resonant abstractions, like
Time with a gift of tears, Grief with a glass that ran--
of Swinburne, or the mossiness of MallarmĂŠ, Pound's verse is always definite and concrete, because he has always a definite emotion behind it.
Though I've roamed through many places, None there is that my heart troweth Fair as that wherein fair groweth One whose laud here interlaces Tuneful words, that I've essayed. Let this tune be gently played Which my voice herward upraises.
At the end of this poem the author appends the note:
The form and measure are those of Piere Vidal's "_Ab
l'alen tir vas me l'aire_." The song is fit only to be
sung, and is not to be spoken.
There are, here and there, deliberate archaisms or oddities (e.g., "herward"); there are deliberately arbitrary images, having their place in the total effect of the poem:
Red leaf that art blown upward and out and over The green sheaf of the world ...
The lotos that pours Her fragrance into the purple cup ...
Black lightning ... (in a more recent poem)
but no word is ever chosen merely for the tinkle; each has always its part in producing an impression which is produced always through language. Words are perhaps the hardest of all material of art: for they must be used to express both visual beauty and beauty of sound, as well as communicating a grammatical statement. It would be interesting to compare Pound's use of images with MallarmĂŠ's; I think it will be found that the former's, by the contrast, will appear always sharp in outline, even if arbitrary and not photographic. Such images as those quoted above are as precise in their way as
Sur le Noel, morte saison, Lorsque les loups vivent de vent ...
and the rest of that memorable Testament.
So much for the imagery. As to the "freedom" of his verse, Pound has made several statements in his articles on Dolmetsch which are to the point:
Any work of art is a compound of freedom and order. It is
perfectly obvious that art hangs between chaos on the one
side and mechanics on the other. A pedantic insistence upon
detail tends to drive out "major form." A firm hold on major
form makes for a freedom of detail. In painting men intent
on minutiae gradually lost the sense of form and form-
combination. An attempt to restore this sense is branded as
"revolution." It is revolution in the philological sense of
the term....
Art is a departure from fixed positions; felicitous
departure from a norm....
The freedom of Pound's verse is rather a state of tension due to constant opposition between free and strict. There are not, as a matter of fact, two kinds of verse, the strict a nd the free; there is only a mastery which comes of being so well trained that form is an instinct and can be adapted to the particular purpose in hand.
* * * * *
After "Exultations" came the translation of the "Sonnets and Ballate of Guido Cavalcanti." It is worth noting that the writer of a long review in the "_Quest_"--speaking in praise of the translation, yet found fault with the author not on the ground of excessive mediaevalism, but because
he is concerned rather with the future than with a somewhat
remote past, so that in spite of his love for the mediaeval
poets, his very accomplishment as a distinctly modern poet
makes against his success as a wholly acceptable translator
of Cavalcanti, the heir of the Troubadours, the scholastic.
Yet the Daily News, in criticising "Canzoni," had remarked that Mr. Pound
seems to us rather a scholar than a poet, and we should like
to see him giving his unusual talent more to direct
translation from the Provençal.
and Mr. J. C. Squire (now the literary editor of the New Statesman), in an appreciative review in the New Age, had counselled the poet that he would
gain and not lose if he could forget all about the poets of
Dante's day, their roses and their flames, their gold and
their falcons, and their literary amorousness, and walk out
of the library into the fresh air.
In "Ripostes" there are traces of a different idiom. Superficially, the work may appear less important. The diction is more restrained, the flights shorter, the dexterity of technique is less arresting. By romantic readers the book would be considered less "passionate." But there is a much more solid substratum to this book; there is more thought; greater depth, if less agitation on the surface. The effect of London is apparent; the author has become a critic of men, surveying them from a consistent and developed point of view; he is more formidable and disconcerting; in short, much more mature. That he abandons nothing of his technical skill is evident from the translation from the Anglo-Saxon, the "Seafarer." It is not a slight achievement to have brought to life alliterative verse: perhaps the "Seafarer" is the only successful piece of alliterative verse ever written in modern English; alliterative verse which is not merely a clever tour de force, but which suggests the possibility of a new development of this form. Mr. Richard Aldington (whose own accomplishments as a writer of vers libre qualify him to speak) called the poem "unsurpassed and unsurpassable," and a writer in the New Age (a literary organ which has always been strongly opposed to metrical innovations) called it "one of the finest literary works of art produced in England during the last ten years." And the rough, stern beauty of the Anglo-Saxon, we may remark, is at the opposite pole from that of the Provençal and Italian poets to whom Pound had previously devoted his attention.
May I for my own self song's truth reckon, Journey's jargon, how I in harsh days Hardship endured oft.
But we can notice in "Ripostes" other evidences than of versatility only; certain poems show Mr. Pound turning to more modern subjects, as in the "Portrait d'une femme," or the mordant epigram, "An Object." Many readers are apt to confuse the maturing of personality with desiccation of the emotions. There is no desiccation in "Ripostes." This should be evident to anyone who reads carefully such a poem as "A Girl." We quote it entire without comment.