Ezra Pound: His Metric and Poetry Part 1

Ezra Pound: His Metric and Poetry.

by T. S. Eliot.

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 Cla.s.sical Stage of j.a.pan with Ernest Fenollosa. (Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1917; and Macmillan, London, 1917)

l.u.s.tRA 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 cla.s.sed 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 advertis.e.m.e.nt, 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, pa.s.sionate, 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 s.h.i.+lling in my pocket, if that is any use to you," said the latter. "Well," said Mr. Mathews, "I want to publish it anyway." His ac.u.men 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 editors.h.i.+p 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, pa.s.sionate world.... The beauty of it (In Praise of Ysolt) is the beauty of pa.s.sion, 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 pa.s.sion 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 pa.s.sion 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 const.i.tutes 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 scholars.h.i.+p 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 scholars.h.i.+p 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 att.i.tude 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 s.h.i.+eld 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":