Same Old Ez

THE CANTOS (536 pp.)--Ezra Pound--New Directions ($5).

When the American Army drove the Germans out of Italy in 1945, it took among other prisoners Ezra Pound, expatriate poet, radio propagandist for Mussolini and self-made pundit who thought Hitler a "martyr" comparable to Joan of Arc. After a short stay in a prison camp near Pisa, where he continued to write poetry, the aging (63), rheumy-eyed poet was brought back to the U.S. to face treason charges. The case never came to trial; instead he was declared insane, and still languishes in St. Elizabeth's Hospital in Washington.

The eleven poems Pound wrote behind U.S. barbed wire have since become known as the "Pisan Cantos" and bring up the rear of his life work, The Cantos. The Cantos, now totaling 84, are a chaotic grab-bag in which the reader can find whatever he wishes, for Pound is both a poetic genius whose work influenced Eliot, Joyce and Yeats, and an intellectual crank who toadied to political cutthroats.

Rambling Variety. For many readers brought up on conventional diet, Pound's Cantos may not seem like poetry at all. They are rambling, fragmentary, written in a bewildering variety of languages; sometimes they degenerate into mere sputtering diatribes.

Like a sailor come home, Pound tells the folks about the marvels he knows. He delves into the intrigues of Renaissance Italy and renders Greek myths in his own way; gives a long narrative of Chinese history and satirizes the visit to Europe of a lady from Kansas; comments on philosophical problems and wanders off into topical harangues. He loves to indulge in the old Bohemian game of scandalizing the bourgeoisie (he once wrote: "The thought of what America would be like/If the Classics had a wide circulation/ Troubles my sleep."). But though he is desperately eager to appear the European sophisticate, there is always in Pound's work a strong tinge of the small-town American crank--the kind who spits on the stove in the general store and spouts about "guvment" and "money changers."

Even in these passages, the poet in Pound often goes hand-in-hand with the crank:

With usury has no man a good house made of stone, no paradise on his church wall

With usury the stone cutter is kept from his stone . . .

Wool does not come into market the peasant does not eat his own grain the girl's needle goes blunt in her hand . . .

Usury brings age into youth; it lies between the bride and the bridegroom

Usury is against Nature's increase.

"Pull Down Thy Vanity." The "Pisan Cantos" continue in much the same vein as their predecessors; it's still the same old Ez. He still rants against the capitalists and remembers old friends--T. S. Eliot with acerbity, William Butler Yeats with fondness. At times, he is his old brash and raucous self, praising Benito and gleefully shouting:

Oh to be in England now that Winston's out

Now that there's room for doubt

And the bank may be the nation's ...

But at other times, he seems subdued, moaning, "Oh let an old man rest" and admitting that too late, too late has he learned the meaning of sadness. The best lines in the Cantos are very good indeed:

What thou lovest well remains, the rest is dross

What thou lov'st well shall not be reft from thee . . .

What thou lovest well is thy true heritage.

The ant's a centaur in his dragon world.

Pull down thy vanity, it is not a man

Made courage, or made order, or made grace,

Pull down thy vanity, I say pull down . . .

'Master thyself, then others shall thee beare'

Pull down thy vanity

Thou art a beaten dog beneath the hail,

A swollen magpie in a fitful sun,

Half black half white

Nor knowst'ou wing from tail

Pull down thy vanity . . .

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