Chapter 2

"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...!

Then turn at once to "To a Friend Writing on Cabaret Dancers."

It is easy to say that the language of "Cathay" is due to the Chinese. If one looks carefully at (1) Pound's other verse, (2) other people's translations from the Chinese (e.g., Giles's), it is evident that this is not the case. The language was ready for the Chinese poetry. Compare, for instance, a passage from "Provincia Deserta":

I have walked into Périgord I have seen the torch-flames, high-leaping, Painting the front of that church,-- And, under the dark, whirling laughter, I have looked back over the stream and seen the high building, Seen the long minarets, the white shafts. I have gone in Ribeyrac, and in Sarlat. I have climbed rickety stairs, heard talk of Croy, Walked over En Bertran's old layout, Have seen Narbonne, and Cahors and Chalus, Have seen Excideuil, carefully fashioned.

with a passage from "The River Song":

He goes out to Hori, to look at the wing-flapping storks, He returns by way of Sei rock, to hear the new nightingales, For the gardens at Jo-run are full of new nightingales, Their sound is mixed in this flute, Their voice is in the twelve pipes here.

It matters very little how much is due to Rihaku and how much to Pound. Mr. Ford Madox Hueffer has observed: "If these are original verses, then Mr. Pound is the greatest poet of this day." He goes on to say:

The poems in "Cathay" are things of a supreme beauty. What poetry should be, that they are. And if a new breath of imagery and handling can do anything for our poetry, that new breath these poems bring....

Poetry consists in so rendering concrete objects that the emotions produced by the objects shall arise in the reader....

Where have you better rendered, or more permanently beautiful a rendering of, the feelings of one of those lonely watchers, in the outposts of progress, whether it be Ovid in Hyrcania, a Roman sentinel upon the great wall of this country, or merely ourselves, in the lonely recesses of our minds, than the "Lament of the Frontier Guard"?...

Beauty is a very valuable thing; perhaps it is the most valuable thing in life; but the power to express emotion so that it shall communicate itself intact and exactly is almost more valuable. Of both these qualities Mr. Pound's book is very full. Therefore, I think we may say that this is much the best work he has done, for, however closely he may have followed his originals--and of that most of us have no means of judging--there is certainly a good deal of Mr. Pound in this little volume.

"Cathay" and "Lustra" were followed by the translations of Noh plays. The Noh are not so important as the Chinese poems (certainly not so important for English); the attitude is less unusual to us; the work is not so solid, so firm. "Cathay" will, I believe, rank with the "Sea-Farer" in the future among Mr. Pound's original work; the Noh will rank among his translations. It is rather a dessert after "Cathay." There are, however, passages which, as Pound has handled them, are different both from the Chinese and from anything existent in English. There is, for example, the fine speech of the old Kagekiyo, as he thinks of his youthful valour:

He thought, how easy this killing. He rushed with his spearshaft gripped under his arm. He cried out, "I am Kagekiyo of the Heike." He rushed on to take them. He pierced through the helmet vizards of Miyanoya. Miyanoya fled twice, and again; and Kagekiyo cried: "You shall not escape me!" He leaped and wrenched off his helmet. "Eya!" The vizard broke and remained in his hand, and Miyanoya still fled afar, and afar, and he looked back crying in terror, "How terrible, how heavy your arm!" And Kagekiyo called at him, "How tough the shaft of your neck is!" And they both laughed out over the battle, and went off each his own way.

The "Times Literary Supplement" spoke of Mr. Pound's "mastery of beautiful diction" and his "cunningly rhythmically prose," in its review of the "Noh."

Even since "Lustra," Mr. Pound has moved again. This move is to the epic, of which three cantos appear in the American "Lustra" (they have already appeared in "Poetry"--Miss Monroe deserves great honour for her courage in printing an epic poem in this twentieth century--but the version in "Lustra" is revised and is improved by revision). We will leave it as a test: when anyone has studied Mr. Pound's poems in _chronological_ order, and has mastered "Lustra" and "Cathay," he is prepared for the Cantos-- but not till then. If the reader then fails to like them, he has probably omitted some step in his progress, and had better go back and retrace the journey.

BIBLIOGRAPHY OF BOOKS

AND PARTIAL BIBLIOGRAPHY OF NOTABLE CRITICAL ARTICLES BY EZRA POUND

POEMS

A LUME SPENTO (100 copies). Antonelli, Venice, June, 1908.

A QUINZAINE FOR THIS YULE. First 100 printed by Pollock, London, December, 1908.

Second 100 published under Elkin Mathews' imprint, London, December, 1908.

PERSONAE. Mathews, London, Spring, 1909.

EXULTATIONS. Mathews, London, Autumn, 1909.

PROSE

THE SPIRIT OF ROMANCE. Dent, London, 1910.

POEMS

PROVENÇA (a selection of poems from "Personae" and "Exultations" with new poems). Small Maynard, Boston, 1910.

CANZONI. Mathews, London, 1911.

THE SONNETS AND BALLATE OF GUIDO CAVALCANTI (translated). Small Maynard, Boston, 1912.

A cheaper edition of the same, Swift and Co., London, 1912. The bulk of this edition destroyed by fire.

RIPOSTES. Swift, London, 1912. (_Note_.--This book contains the first announcement of Imagism, in the foreword to the poems of T. E. Hulme.)

OTHER PUBLICATIONS

"A FEW DON'TS BY AN IMAGISTE," in "Poetry," for March, 1913.

"CONTEMPORANIA" (poems), in "Poetry," April, 1913.

POEMS

PERSONAE, EXULTATIONS, CANZONI, RIPOSTES, published in two volumes. Mathews, London, 1913.

FIRST OF THE NOTES ON JAMES JOYCE, "Egoist," January, 1914.

FIRST OF THE ARTICLES CONCERNING GAUDIER-BRZESKA, "Egoist," February, 1914.

OTHER PUBLICATIONS

"DES IMAGISTES," poems by several authors selected by Ezra Pound, published as a number of "The Glebe," in New York. February, 1914.

Alfred Kreymborg was at this time editor of "The Glebe." The first arrangements for the anthology were made through the kind offices of John Cournos during the winter of 1912-13.

The English edition of this anthology published by The Poetry Book Shop. London, 1914.

ARTICLE ON WYNDHAM LEWIS, "Egoist," June 15, 1914.

CONTRIBUTIONS TO FIRST NUMBER OF "Blast," June 20, 1914.

"VORTICISM," an article in "The Fortnightly Review," September, 1914.

"GAUDIER-BRZESKA," an article in "The New Age," February 4, 1915.

CONTRIBUTIONS to second number of "Blast," 1915.

POEMS

CATHAY. Mathews, London, April, 1915. (Translations from the Chinese from the notes of Ernest Fenollosa.)

OTHER PUBLICATIONS

THE CATHOLIC ANTHOLOGY, edited by Ezra Pound. Mathews, London, December, 1915.

GAUDIER-BRZESKA, a memoir. John Lane, London and New York, 1916.

LUSTRA (poems) public edition, pp. 116. Mathews, London, 1916. 200 copies privately printed and numbered, pp. 124.

CERTAIN NOBLE PLAYS OF JAPAN. Cuala Press, Dundrum, Ireland, 1916. Translated by Ernest Fenollosa and Ezra Pound, with an introduction by William Butler Yeats.

NOH, or Accomplishment. A study of the Classical Stage of Japan, including translations of fifteen plays, by Ernest Fenollosa and Ezra Pound. Macmillan, London, 1917. Knopf, New York, 1917.

PASSAGES FROM THE LETTERS OF JOHN BUTLER YEATS, selected by Ezra Pound, with brief editorial note. Cuala Press, 1917.

LUSTRA, with Earlier Poems, Knopf, New York, 1917. (This collection of Mr. Pound's poems contains all that he now thinks fit to republish.)

There is also a privately-printed edition of fifty copies, with a reproduction of a drawing of Ezra Pound by Henri Gaudier-Brzeska (New York, 1917).

PAVANNES and DIVISIONS (Prose), in preparation. Knopf, New York.

End of Project Gutenberg's Ezra Pound: His Metric and Poetry, by T. S. Eliot