Ezra Pound: His Metric and Poetry
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EZRA POUND
HIS METRIC AND POETRY
BOOKS BY EZRA POUND
PROVENCA, 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 Provence 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, as 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, disconcerted 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
Provencal form or on Provencal 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
Provencal 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 Provence; 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 Provencal 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 Provencal 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 Provencal 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 Provencal 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 Mallarme, 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 Mallarme'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 and 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 Provencal.
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 Provencal 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.
The tree has entered my hands,
The sap has ascended my arms,
The tree has grown in my breast--
Downward,
The branches grow out of me, like arms.
Tree you are,
Moss you are,
You are violets with wind above them.
A child--_so_ high--you are,
And all this is folly to the world.
"The Return" is an important study in verse which is really
quantitative. We quote only a few lines:
See, they return; ah, see the tentative
Movements, and the slow feet,
The trouble in the pace and the uncertain
Wavering!
"Ripostes" belongs to the period when Mr. Pound was being
attacked because of his propaganda. He became known as the
inventor of "Imagism," and later, as the "High Priest of
Vorticism." As a matter of fact, the actual "propaganda" of Mr.
Pound has been very small in quantity. The impression which his
personality made, however, is suggested by the following note in
"_Punch_," which is always a pretty reliable barometer of the
English middle-class Grin:
Mr. Welkin Mark (exactly opposite Long Jane's) begs to
announce that he has secured for the English market the
palpitating works of the new Montana (U.S.A.) poet, Mr.
Ezekiel Ton, who is the most remarkable thing in poetry
since Robert Browning. Mr. Ton, who has left America to
reside for a while in London and impress his personality on
English editors, publishers and readers, is by far the
newest poet going, whatever other advertisements may say. He
has succeeded, where all others have failed, in evolving a
blend of the imagery of the unfettered West, the vocabulary
of Wardour Street, and the sinister abandon of Borgiac
Italy.