No doubt this active will,
So bravely steeped in sun,
This will has vanquished Death
And foiled oblivion.
But this indifferent clay,
This fine, experienced hand
So quiet, and these thoughts
That all unfinished stand,
Feel death as though it were
A shadowy caress;
And win and wear a frail
Archaic wistfulness.
_Ezra Pound_
Ezra (Loomis) Pound was born at Hailey, Idaho, October 30, 1885;
attended Hamilton College and the University of Pennsylvania; and
went abroad, seeking fresh material to complete a thesis on Lope de
Vega, in 1908. After visiting Spain on a roundabout journey to
England, where he took up his residence and where he has lived ever
since, Pound halted for a while in Italy. It was there, in Venice,
to be precise, that Pound’s first book, _A Lume Spento_ (1908), was
printed. The following year Pound went to London and the chief poems
of the little volume were incorporated in _Personæ_ (1909), a small
collection containing some of Pound’s finest work.
Although the young American was a total stranger to the English
literary world, his book made a definite impression on critics of
all shades and tastes. Edward Thomas, one of the most careful
appraisers, wrote “the beauty of it 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.” Another critic (Scott James) placed the chief emphasis on
Pound’s metrical innovations, saying, “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 meters seem
to have a law and order of their own.”
_Exultations_ (1909) was printed in the autumn of the same year that
saw the appearance of _Personæ_. It was received with even greater
cordiality; a new force and freedom were manifest in such poems as
“Sestina: Altaforte,” “Ballad of the Goodly Fere,” “Francesca” and
“Histrion.”
In both of these books there was evident Pound’s erudition—a
familiarity with mediæval literature, Provençal singers, Troubadour
ballads—that, later on, was to degenerate into pedantry and become
hard and dry. Too often in his later work, Pound seems to be more
the archaeologist than the artist, digging with little energy and
less enthusiasm. _Canzoni_ (1911) and _Ripostes_ (1912) both contain
much that is sharp and living; they also contain the germs of
desiccation and decay. Pound began to scatter his talents; to start
movements which he quickly discarded for new ones; to spend himself
in poetic propaganda for the Imagists and others (see Preface); to
give more and more time to translation (_The Sonnets of Guido
Cavalcanti_ appeared in 1912) and arrangements from the Chinese
(_Cathay_, paraphrased from the notes of Ernest Fenollosa, was
issued in 1915); to lay the chief stress on _technique_, shades of
color, verbal _nuances_. The result was a lassitude of the creative
faculties, an impoverishment of emotion. In the later books, Pound
begins to suffer from a decadence which appraises the values in life
chiefly as æsthetic values. And this decadence expresses itself in a
weariness, a sterility of the imagination. Real feeling becomes
rarer in his work and the poet descends to flashy trivialities,
vagaries of assertion or sheer _bravado_ of expression—wasting much
of his gift in a mere tilting at convention.
But though this is true of a great quantity of his recent work,
though he often seems a living anachronism, drawing life not from
life itself but only from books, many of the poems in _Lustra_
(1917) yield a hard brightness. The influence of Browning and the
pre-Raphaelites is less pronounced and reflections of his earlier
energy stand out with a peculiar brilliance.
Too special to achieve permanence, too intellectual to become
popular, Pound’s contribution to his age should not be
underestimated. He was a pioneer in the new forms; he fought
dullness wherever he encountered it; under his leadership the
Imagists became not only a group but a protest; he helped to make
many of the paths which a score of unconsciously influenced poets
tread with such ease and nonchalance. Much of his poetry
gesticulates instead of speaking, a great portion of his art is
poetry in pantomime. And yet, without Pound, American poetry would
scarcely have been the many-voiced, multi-colored thing that it is.