Monday, Mar. 20, 1933

Unpegged Pound

A DRAFT OF XXX CANTOS--Ezra Pound--Farrar & Rinehart ($2.50).

Though Thomas Stearns Eliot is now the mummified god of a large school of present-day poetasters, where two or three literary lights are gathered together the name of another U. S. poet-expatriate is apt to be murmured with more respect. Less popular, less memorably chantable than Poet Eliot's neatly allusive threnodies, poems by Pound are trademarked by no less scholarship, by language that is both more violent and more obscure. A cat that walks by himself, tenaciously unhousebroken and very unsafe for children, Pound has been given a wide berth by U. S. publishers and U. S. critics, but his European reputation is nothing to sneeze at. In bringing out the first U. S. edition of Pound's magnum opus alert Publisher Farrar shows that he has heard a thing or two. On the jacket of A Draft of XXX Cantos he quotes:

James Joyce: "Nothing could be more true than to say that we all owe a great deal to him. But I, most of all, surely." Ford Madox Ford: "The first word you have to say about them [the Cantos] is: Their extraordinary beauty. And the last word will be: Beauty." Ernest Hemingway: "Any poet born in this century or in the last ten years of the preceding century who can honestly say that he has not been influenced by or learned greatly from the work of Ezra Pound deserves to be pitied rather than rebuked. . . . The best of Pound's writing--and it is in the Cantos--will last as long as there is any literature." T. S. Eliot (who dedicated his famed The Waste Land to Pound): ". . . There is no other contemporary . . . whom I ever want to reread for pleasure." Allen Tate: "One of the three great works of poetry in our time." Hugh Walpole: "He is a beautiful mingler of dead worlds and live ones to me--one of the few poets who bridges the gulf between the Renaissance and Lenin." Archibald MacLeish: "Pound, more than any other man, is responsible for the emancipation of modern English poetry from the prose tradition of the 19th Century." A large section of serious critics think Pound is not only best of living U. S. poets but the only one since Walt Whitman to exert a great influence in Europe.

Of Robert Browning's most obscure poem, Sordello, it was said that only one person understood it--the author--and that later even he forgot what it all meant. Whether or not the Cantos have a "meaning," Author Pound seems to realize that his readers may have the same difficulty:

Hang it all, Robert Browning,

There can be but the one "Sordello."

But Pound does nothing to help his readers. He once told a friend that the key to the Cantos was "the presentness of the past," but if there is any connected idea (there is no story) in the Cantos, it is too elusive for amateur readers, too buried under Greek, Latin, Provencal, Italian, French, German, Spanish, Japanese allusions. Stunned by the almost continuous avalanche of changing subjects, the plain reader may be too dizzied to get far, but if he perseveres and keeps his eyes open he should find some picture-passages to please him:

Glide of water, lights and the prore,

Silver beaks out of night,

Stone, bough over bough, lamps fluid in water,

Pine by the black trunk of its shadow

And on hill black trunks of the shadow

The trees melted in air.

One of the scenes is a scatological Inferno, in which Poet Pound has left blank the obscene names of the inhabitants while printing the most outspoken Anglo-Saxon unprintables. Even drummers might recognize his well-told tale of the man who was not a father but a mother. Omni-audacious, Pound thus transliterates the sound of a waterfall:

hah hah ahah thmm, thunb, ah

woh woh araha thumm, bhaaa.

The Author is as widely known for his scholarly translations, for his wildly inimitable letters-to-editors, as for his poetry. In the 47 years since his birth in Hailey, Idaho, Ezra Loomis Pound has published 15 books of poetry, nine prose, six translations (from Italian, Japanese, Provencal, French). He entered the University of Pennsylvania at 15, afterwards taught romance languages there. When he was 22 he went to Europe and has not been back since, living in Venice. London, Paris and now (for the last seven years) in Rapallo. He regards Fascist Italy as "freer than anywhere else in the Occident." Always identified with left-wing magazines, Pound co-edited Wyndham Lewis' short-lived Blast, was correspondent for the late Little Review, Dial, and edited the now defunct Exile. In 1927 he was awarded the Dial prize of $2,000 for distinguished service to U. S. letters. Tall, redhaired, red-bearded, high-voiced, nervous, he hates the U. S., hates "Americanization," says: "It is perhaps no more foolish to go at a hermit's bidding to recover an old sepulchre than to make new sepulchres at the bidding of finance." Champion of new names, he has helped put on the map the late Sculptor Gaudier-Brzeska, James Joyce, Rabindranath Tagore, Musician George Antheil.

Other books: Persona, Ripostes, Quia Pauper Amavi, Imaginary Letters, Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, Indiscretions.

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