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
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.