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In the last half of the nineteenth century, the depth of symbol in French poetry all but eclipsed linearity. Poetry became abstract when continental painting developed in the same direction--Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Rimbaud, Manet, Monet, Renoir, Cézanne, and Picasso are members of a single family. Occasionally, the time-honored attempt to represent objective reality through logical structure or visualization faded away altogether and we witnessed the ultimate successors of Beethoven in poetry and painting--a poem by Mallarmé, a painting by Picasso.
At first, English poetry failed to show a similar development: Browning, Rossetti, Swinburne, Landor, Masefield.
As late as mid-twentieth century, John Crowe Ransom insisted to a massive audience of English-speaking critics that a poem required a logical structure. Yet by then at least abstract English poetry had begun to display its greatness in the works of Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, later Yeats, Dylan Thomas, and Wallace Stevens. Someone had shaken the faith of English-language poetry readers in the invincibility of logical structure. That person was Ezra Pound. There were others, of course, who sought alternatives but they did not threaten conventionality as Pound did. The more a sympathetic reader experiences of his poetry and prose the more he can argue that (1) throughout his career as a poet he was at least partly nuts, and (2) English poetry needed exactly what he offered.
On what evidence can one cast suspicion on Pound's sanity? It appears that this brilliant, widely read, self-educated man often failed at his own attempts at logical structure, and so, forever struggled, with questionable success, to make a telling point.
For example, in the ABC of Reading, the purpose is to teach us about literature. Pound defines his approach: "As it were, you start on a sphere, or a cube; you must keep on until you have seen it from all sides. Or if you think of your subject as a stool or table, you must keep on until it has three legs and will stand up, or four legs and won't tip over too easily."
Thus, Pound walks round and round his subject but fails to give it the suggested fourth leg, (e.g.):
'A canzone is a composition of words set to music.'[Pound quotes Dante] I don't know any better point to start from.
"Coleridge or De Quincy said the quality of a 'great poet is everywhere present, and nowhere visible as a distinct excitement,' or something of that sort.
"This would be a more dangerous starting-point. It is probably true.
"Dante's statement is the better place to begin because it starts the reader or hearer from what he actually sees or hears, instead of distracting his mind from that actuality to something which can only be approximately deduced or conjectured FROM the actuality, and forwhich the evidence can be nothing save the particular and limited extent of the actuality."
If Dante's comment is an excellent starting point, why does not Pound discuss it further until, what seems more accident than intent, some thirty pages later in the middle of a different chapter? What is the significance of any of Dante's works? What is the significance of Dante? Why is Pound vague about whether it is Coleridge's or De Quincy's quote? Does not a scholarly work merit exact quotes? And why does he call that quote a dangerous starting-point, say it is probably true, and not bother to tell us why? If poetry is such a "particular and limited. . .actuality." why bother with it at all? The quote from Dante is not an illuminating quote and Pound failed to rise above it, although the logic of his entire book depends upon it. After all, his whole point is to persuade us to read literature.
In Guide to Kulchur, he criticizes "educated people" who are stuffed with trivial facts, but Pound himself is stuffed with trivial facts. He defines "style" as assigning each subject the importance it deserves. However, his own important subjects--such as his definition of style, or his definition of the educated man as the one who understands that his life is ruled by large processes--fail to receive the importance they would receive from telling discussion. His stimulating prose style, which wins its readers by endlessly shifting the topic with only weak transition, recklessly brings his own criticism back upon himself. For example, he called universities "beaneries" because he felt that professors did not communicate well with each other and in particular, did not respond to his correspondence. He also felt that they dealt in trivia and taught subjects that did not help students lead an enlightened life. As a result, the emphatic insults he loves, such as "boor," "pimp," and "usurer," lack weight.
Nevertheless, Pound's personal brand of incoherence opened our eyes to new literary stimuli. In the ABC of Reading: "Spoken language is noise divided up into a system of grunts, hisses, etc. They call it 'articulate' speech." This humorous statement reminds us of our animal origins. (ABC of Reading); "Discoveries are made by gluttons and addicts." (Guide to Kulchur) This is a colorful way of looking at scholarly theoreticians as clones of Pound.
"The tower like a one-eyed great goose
cranes up out of the olive-grove.." (CANTO II)
"goose" and "crane" constitute a mixed though interesting metaphor.
"The slough of unamiable liars,
bog of stupidities,
malevolent stupidities, and stupidities,
the soil living pus, full of vermin,
dead maggots begetting live maggots,
slum owners,
ususers squeezing crab-lice, pandars [sic] to authority..."
(CANTO XIV)
These lines have the echo of a schizophrenic street person's monologue with a brilliant ear for sound.
"Artemis singing, Artemis, Artemis. . .
It is on account of Pity forbideth them slaye.
All things are made foul in this season,
This is the reason, none may seek purity
Having for foulnesse pity
And things growne awry:
No more do my shaftes fly
his is the reason, none may seek purity
Having for foulnesse pityAnd things growne awry: No more do my shaftes fly
(CANTO XXX)
To slay. Nothing is now clean slayne
But rotteth away." |
(CANTO XXX)
The association of cleanliness with killing and foulness with pity is disturbingly psychotic, yet shakes the senses; and,
"Who even dead, yet hath his mind entire!"
(CANTO XLVII)
These lines in context look even stranger, but because of Pound's enormous influence on Modernist and Postmoderinst poets and poetry, we accept it.
Reading Pound forces one to believe in the ability of the illogical to create art--what he said and what he wrote urged English language poets to read the great continental poets and try their hand at abstract art--and for some, avoiding linearity became a favorite pastime. They proved that English poets could write with as much beauty and incoherency as the French.
His own poetry was not as successful as that of the unquestionably great --Eliot, Yeats, Thomas, and Stevens. As Hugh Kenner, the well-known Pound scholar, points out in his volume The Poetry of Ezra Pound "He achieved incoherence and at its best his
incoherence created another reality." Evenso, Pound's lines often achieved only sparkling local effects and sometimes incoherence predominated as incoherence.
Consider, though, the contribution Ezra Pound made to the development of modern abstract poetry in English. An abstract poem requires loose ends. Loose ends are what keep the sometimes oppressive linearity of logical structure at bay. A loose end is a discontinuity--". . .of this/A few words, an and yet, and yet, and yet" (Stevens). In our daily lives, which are filled with loose ends, we attempt to make sense of more than we can make sense of. Ultimately, we assume that everything makes sense or will make sense. We forget the dream images that fade into nonsensicality. We overlook the non sequitur in conversation. No matter that the current paradoxical discussions of quantum mechanics urge us to believe that light has knowledge or that someday free will and determinism will coexist simultaneously in the same syllogism--we proceed as best we can to make sense of everything using our own current tools for thinking to create clear, rational linearity. And before abstract art came into being, these habits of ours, more or less, reigned in the art world.
Looking back over the history of English poetry, let us say why not let symbol and metaphor run the whole show--if only to see what happens? For metaphor and symbol to run the whole show, you have to invent loose ends and not tie them up; you have to leave them where they are--as Ezra Pound did.
Other poets observed him, muttering through their imagined beards as current readers still do when reading Pound, "I see a loose end in this poem. Hummm. Oh, and another. This is very confusing. Of course if I ignore them and just listen to the music of the lines. He's changed his topic again. And in spite of those comments about Chinese ideograms, this Confucian-style story still doesn't make any sense. Let us beginning of the Cantos. I did not notice chaos there. Everything so proud and Iliadic." Did he know what he was doing? What was he was doing?!
Pound was defeating the tendency of logic to run the show.
Other poets endured the uneasiness he sometimes gave them. A few of them possessed an unusual capacity for unifying poems--so Eliot, Stevens, and Thomas after learning the lesson of loose ends, started constructing their poems around them. They wrote poems that ignored the old ability of logic to unify. Loose ends became metaphors and symbols, and played a dual role.
Example: Madame Sosostris in Eliot's The Waste Land pops up like a loose end, but she plays a tonal role. Very different and seemingly random images can cluster for tonal effects. Madam Sosostris and her "wicked pack of cards" foretell the future--wicked and predetermined and for these reasons all the more a waste land. But when she appears in the poem we do not know her role. Even after we have read the poem, she maintains her random energy and remains something of a loose end Example: In Stevens' poem Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction, the appearance of "major man." Metaphoric major man is a momentary attempt at a supreme fiction--a fictive creation that answers our need for a god or hero--but he is a fleeting, tentative loose end that unifies one part of a long poem.Example: In Thomas' poem "Light Breaks Where No Sun Shines," the terms "glow worms" and "windy blood." And so on and so on.
Eliot, Stevens, and Thomas discovered that having created loose ends, the abstract poem can achieve unity in several ways. This lesson about unity is really an old lesson Shakespeare, Keats, and company knew about in their more linear ages with their non-abstract poetry. For example, a poem can achieve unity through a single tone, image, symbol, metaphor or other trope. One of these elements can predominate and organize. Of course, each of their poems has a logical structure, which one can paraphrase. Thus, everyone can read and appreciate it.
What can be said about the work of Ezra Pound himself, apart from its contribution to the development of modern, abstract English poetry? Almost immediately, we discover a loose end. In spite of the fact that he is probably the first modern, iconoclastic, abstract English-language poet, Ezra Pound's work celebrates the inestimable value of great, ancient art. His prose holds up the ancients for our admiration. The Cantos is stocked with allusions to and quotes from ancient and early modern cultures. Along with his love of great, ancient art, his works exhibit a disenchantment with the twentieth-century artist and scholar and with society at large. The ABC of Reading is full of examples. His disgust is evident in his poetry as well as his prose. The effect of his best passages is that their excellence as modern poetry ironically emphasizes the grandeur of the ancient. But this is only an historical accident. Do the ancient works seem better than our own? We know how good the old works are because two thousand years of readers testify to their greatness. The closer to the present we look, the less confident we are of our judgments until, for a certain type of mind, the present viewed in all its detail appears shabby indeed. The Cantos are unintentionally about this accident of time. Beyond the past/present dichotomy, his work exhibits a love of brilliant, local, stylistic effects. This was his forte. In his work before 1920, Pound earned recognition for his stylistic definitions--Imagism, Vorticism. He spearheaded literary movements that paralleled the proliferating schools of painting and he defined these movements in terms of their styles. In fact, his long list of suggested readings for the aspiring young man-of-letters contained few or no references to structure in a larger sense or to content because Pound loved stylistics--those characteristics that mark a work as of a certain time and place and hand. He loved signing his name by writing a poem that displayed his individuality and he loved his own preoccupations. He knew how to create an impressive, unique signature for himself or for a group of artists.
In addition, Pound's work exhibits a welter of half-thoughts, unusual perceptions, and last, his escape into the past--into history. Paradoxically, yes, eventually Ezra Pound becomes history--but not the kind he loves--not the great artist--no--he becomes the artist-in-search-of-the-past forever!
Ezra Pound, therefore, will always partly despise his present. He will never descend into the gorgeousness of great past art because he is too much prey to his own preoccupations including his own hate. Portions of the Cantos may represent the first hip political rant. Possibly too the Cantos is the first major modern poem proudly and unabashedly partly lunatic. Pound allows the driven underself of his deepest bigotries to intrude. Thus his work is either the poetry of a lunatic or poetry that respects and welcomes his lunatic aspect. Do lunatic poets, or poets who are part lunatic, typically edit their lunatic self out of their poems? or throw their most lunatic poems away? Well, apparently not in Pound's case. One can note that in the earliest appearances of contemporary poetry--so much the product of sense impression, emotion, and connotation, all of which enjoy special enrichening in the unbalanced logic and fattened affect of the lunatic mind--the lunatic self, which many of us admit plays a large role in the creation of our best work, appears naked as a jaybird! ". . .The soil living pus, full of vermin,/dead maggots begetting live maggots, /slum owners,/usurers squeezing crab-lice, pandars to authority. . ."
If the present, as Pound constantly implies, is so poor that we should rejoice that most of it will be eternally forgotten, why does he not let us forget it? Because he wanted to play an important role in changing the course of poetry, and also the course of civilization? Uneasy but predictable loose end there? |
