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 Mallarmé'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 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.
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.
In 1913, someone writing to the New York _Nation_ from the
University of Illinois, illustrates the American, more serious,
disapproval. This writer begins by expressing his objections to
the "principle of Futurism." (Pound has perhaps done more than
anyone to keep Futurism out of England. His antagonism to this
movement was the first which was not due merely to unintelligent
dislike for anything new, and was due to his perception that
Futurism was incompatible with any principles of form. In his
own words, Futurism is "accelerated impressionism.") The writer
in the _Nation_ then goes on to analyze the modern "hypertrophy
of romanticism" into
The exaggeration of the importance of a personal emotion.
The abandonment of all standards of form.
The suppression of all evidence that a particular composition
is animated by any directing intelligence.
As for the first point, here are Mr. Pound's words in answer to
the question, "do you agree that the great poet is never
emotional?"
Yes, absolutely; if by emotion is meant that he is at the
mercy of every passing mood.... The only kind of emotion
worthy of a poet is the inspirational emotion which
energises and strengthens, and which is very remote from the
everyday emotion of sloppiness and sentiment....
And as for the platform of Imagism, here are a few of Pound's
"Don'ts for Imagists":
Pay no attention to the criticisms of men who have never
themselves written a notable work.
Use no superfluous word and no adjective which does not
reveal something.
Go in fear of abstractions. Don't retail in mediocre verse
what has already been done in good prose.
Don't imagine that the art of poetry is any simpler than the
art of music or that you can please the expert before you
have spent at least as much effort on the art of verse as
the average piano teacher spends on the art of music.
Be influenced by as many great artists as you can, but have
the decency either to acknowledge the debt outright or try
to conceal it.
Consider the definiteness of Dante's presentation as
compared with Milton's. Read as much of Wordsworth as does
not seem to be unutterably dull.
If you want the gist of the matter go to Sappho, Catullus,
Villon when he is in the vein, Gautier when he is not too
frigid, or if you have not the tongues seek out the
leisurely Chaucer.
Good prose will do you no harm. There is good discipline to
be had by trying to write it. Translation is also good
training.
The emphasis here is certainly on discipline and form. The
Chicago _Tribune_ recognized this as "sound sense," adding:
If this is Imagism ... we are for establishing Imagism by
constitutional amendment and imprisoning without recourse to
ink or paper all "literary" ladies or gents who break any of
these canons.
But other reviewers were less approving. While the writer in the
_Nation_, quoted above, dreads the anarchy impending, Mr.
William Archer was terrified at the prospect of hieratic
formalisation. Mr. Archer believes in the simple untaught muse:
Mr. Pound's commandments tend too much to make of poetry a
learned, self-conscious craft, to be cultivated by a guild
of adepts, from whose austere laboratories spontaneity and
simplicity are excluded.... A great deal of the best poetry
in the world has very little technical study behind it....
There are scores and hundreds of people in England who could
write this simple metre (i.e. of "A Shropshire Lad")
successfully.
To be hanged for a cat and drowned for a rat is, perhaps,
sufficient exculpation.
Probably Mr. Pound has won odium not so much by his theories as
by his unstinted praise of certain contemporary authors whose
work he has liked. Such expressions of approval are usually
taken as a grievance--much more so than any personal abuse,
which is comparatively a compliment--by the writers who escape
his mention. He does not say "A., B., and C. are bad poets or
novelists," but when he says "The work of X., Y., and Z. is in
such and such respects the most important work in verse (or
prose) since so and so," then A., B., and C. are aggrieved.
Also, Pound has frequently expressed disapproval of Milton and
Wordsworth.
After "Ripostes," Mr. Pound's idiom has advanced still farther.
Inasmuch as "Cathay," the volume of translations from the
Chinese, appeared prior to "Lustra," it is sometimes thought
that his newer idiom is due to the Chinese influence. This is
almost the reverse of the truth. The late Ernest Fenollosa left
a quantity of manuscripts, including a great number of rough
translations (literally exact) from the Chinese. After certain
poems subsequently incorporated in "Lustra" had appeared in
"Poetry," Mrs. Fenollosa recognized that in Pound the Chinese
manuscripts would find the interpreter whom her husband would
have wished; she accordingly forwarded the papers for him to do
as he liked with. It is thus due to Mrs. Fenollosa's acumen that
we have "Cathay"; it is not as a consequence of "Cathay" that we
have "Lustra." This fact must be borne in mind.
Poems afterward embodied in "Lustra" appeared in "Poetry," in
April, 1913, under the title of "Contemporanea." They included
among others "Tenzone," "The Condolence," "The Garret,"
"Salutation the Second," and "Dance Figure."
There are influences, but deviously. It is rather a gradual
development of experience into which literary experiences have
entered. These have not brought the bondage of temporary
enthusiasms, but have liberated the poet from his former
restricted sphere. There is Catullus and Martial, Gautier,
Laforgue and Tristan Corbière. Whitman is certainly not an
influence; there is not a trace of him anywhere; Whitman and Mr.
Pound are antipodean to each other. Of "Contemporanea" the
_Chicago Evening Post_ discriminatingly observed:
Your poems in the April _Poetry_ are so mockingly, so
delicately, so unblushingly beautiful that you seem to have
brought back into the world a grace which (probably) never
existed, but which we discover by an imaginative process in
Horace and Catullus.
It was a true insight to ally Pound to the Latin, not to the
Greek poets.
Certain of the poems in "Lustra" have offended admirers of the
verse of the "Personae" period. When a poet alters or develops,
many of his admirers are sure to drop off. Any poet, if he is to
survive as a writer beyond his twenty-fifth year, must alter; he
must seek new literary influences; he will have different
emotions to express. This is disconcerting to that public which
likes a poet to spin his whole work out of the feelings of his
youth; which likes to be able to open a new volume of his poems
with the assurance that they will be able to approach it exactly
as they approached the preceding. They do not like that constant
readjustment which the following of Mr. Pound's work demands.
Thus has "Lustra" been a disappointment to some; though it
manifests no falling off in technique, and no impoverishment
of feeling. Some of the poems (including several of the
"Contemporanea") are a more direct statement of views than
Pound's verse had ever given before. Of these poems, M. Jean de
Bosschère writes:
Everywhere his poems incite man to exist, to profess a
becoming egotism, without which there can be no real
altruism.
I beseech you enter your life.
I beseech you learn to say "I"
When I question you.
For you are no part, but a whole;
No portion, but a being.
... One must be capable of reacting to stimuli for a moment,
as a real, live person, even in face of as much of one's own
powers as are arrayed against one;... The virile complaint,
the revolt of the poet, all which shows his emotion,--that
is poetry.
Speak against unconscious oppression,
Speak against the tyranny of the unimaginative,
Speak against bonds.
Be against all forms of oppression,
Go out and defy opinion.
This is the old cry of the poet, but more precise, as an
expression of frank disgust:
Go to the adolescent who are smothered in family.
O, how hideous it is
To see three generations of one house gathered together!
It is like an old tree without shoots,
And with some branches rotted and falling.
Each poem holds out these cries of revolt or disgust, but
they are the result of his still hoping and feeling:
Let us take arms against this sea of stupidities. Pound ...
has experience of the folly of the Philistines who read his
verse. Real pain is born of this stupid interpretation, and
one does not realize how deep it is unless one can feel,
through the ejaculations and the laughter, what has caused
these wounds, which are made deeper by what he knows, and
what he has lost....
The tone, which is at once jocund and keen, is one of
Pound's qualities. Ovid, Catullus--he does not disown them.
He only uses these accents for his familiars; with the
others he is on the edge of paradox, pamphleteering, indeed
of abuse....
This is the proper approach to the poems at the beginning of
"Lustra," and to the short epigrams, which some readers find
"pointless," or certainly "not poetry." They should read, then,
the "Dance Figure," or "Near Périgord," and remember that all
these poems come out of the same man.
Thine arms are as a young sapling under the bark;
Thy face as a river with lights.
White as an almond are thy shoulders;
As new almonds stripped from the husk.
Or the ending of "Near Périgord":
Bewildering spring, and by the Auvezère
Poppies and day's-eyes in the green émail
Rose over us; and we knew all that stream,
And our two horses had traced out the valleys;
Knew the low flooded lands squared out with poplars,
In the young days when the deep sky befriended.
And great wings beat above us in the twilight,
And the great wheels in heaven
Bore us together ... surging ... and apart ...
Believing we should meet with lips and hands ...
There shut up in his castle, Tairiran's,
She who had nor ears nor tongue save in her hands,
Gone, ah, gone--untouched, unreachable!
She who could never live save through one person,
She who could never speak save to one person,
And all the rest of her a shifting change,
A broken bundle of mirrors...!