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I'm sure A. David Moody has asked
himself more than once whether the world needs another biography of Ezra
Pound. What is Pound to us, precisely a century after the publication of his
first book? If you're past fifty and read him in your youth you're likely to
remember what a giant he seemed, his work a master key to the reading and
practice of modern poetry. Perhaps you wonder now whether you too easily
succumbed to his didacticism. If you're younger then I suspect you find him
a little bemusing, if not be-mused. The 'hyperaesthesia' (as he himself
came to
call it) of his early work sits so uneasily with his concurrent claim to
'modernity' while his obsession with the archaeology of poetic form fuels his
passion for archaic diction to the point that he can at times look far less
'modern' than some poets of the fin-de-siecle. What exactly did the striving
'to resuscitate the dead art / Of poetry' have to do with the shaping of a
modernist poetic in any way comparable with, say, the contemporary revolution
in the visual arts? In this long retrospect Stein's dismantling of the sentence
and description and narrative, or the Dadaists' demolition of syntax and the
semantic element in poetry, not to mention the blazing artillery of Enemy
of the Stars, seem more relevant
to a literature looking for survival in a self-styled 'culture' guzzling its
own spew of text and image. The young Pound seems by contrast a distant
figure, a weathered statue on a sepulchre commemorating '"the sublime" / In
the old sense' - he envisaged it himself, with an irony which does not
entirely convince. Even in the more ferociously 'modern' Cantos the image persists. Does this mean that Pound has
now to be regarded as a strictly 'historical' figure, an undoubtably
fascinating and complex subject but of a distinctly other time - or is he as
relevant to our current practice of poetry as he did once seem? 2008 may be
as good a time as any to consider such a thing and certainly it's the
question a new biography must address.
Moody is not a biographer who indulges in speculative gossip. His book is in
some respects a chronicle, proceeding year by year and sometimes month by
month; he stays close to his sources, whether poems or letters, published or
preserved in manuscript, all usefully identified in the endnotes. This
procedure makes his work invaluable to a non-specialist. I didn't know for
example that Pound's notebook of his walking tour through Provence had been
preserved and published; Moody's excerpts throw considerable light on the
poems 'Near Perigord' and 'Provincia Deserta' which can be seen as both the culmination
of a decade's study of the troubadours and a bridge to the Cantos.
The Cantos lie largely beyond
the scope of Moody's first volume but he has them in view from the start. He
offers illuminating analyses of the arrangements of the pre-Cantos collections, seeing most of them as divisible
structures prefiguring the tripartite architecture of Pound's 'forty-year
epic', foreshadowed as early as Scriptor Ignotus in A Lume Spento (1908). A Lume Spento probably does not appear to most 21st Century
eyes as a work of 'revolutionary intent' but Moody's exposure of its 'covert
and ambitious plotting' will strike a familiar note to readers of the Cantos. '[...] for the first third of the collection the
states of mind being studied are those of poets in their poems. [...] The
second part [...] has twenty poems in three sets. The first set of six poems is
dominated by recessions from life and love into dream and death. [...] The
second set has eight poems forming a kind of ascending chain of poetic being.
[...] In the third set, again of six poems, the gloom and death of the
decadence are confronted and overcome by the affirmative powers of poetry.'
Similar structural breakdowns of Personae, Exultations and Canzoni enable
Moody to reveal an internal continuity among poems we might easily dismiss as
a hotchpotch of apprentice work or (as Pound later had it) 'stale
creampuffs'. It is notable however that Moody finds the broader themes of the
later work most evident in the prose - he sees 'the matrix of Pound's own
long poem' in The Spirit of Romance and in the New Age
articles 'I gather the limbs of Osiris' hears Pound 'declaring his ambition
to recover and renew the vital principle of his civilization.'
It is also notable that Moody detects no such structural arrangement in Lustra, in which a reader begins to discern the foggy
outlines of the 'modern' world. Perhaps Pound had for a time to release
himself from his 'ambitious plotting'. Lustra's 'Salutation' mode now tends to embarrass with
its self-conscious rebellion - Pound's co-agitator Wyndham Lewis had a
happier knack of blasting and blessing. Nevertheless the Martial-like
epigrams come as some relief, as do the brief poems in the anecdotal style
which would finally embed itself in the more comic passages of the Cantos. Moody offers some sound comments on this period,
always with the suggestion that Pound's vision of poetry ran ahead of his
practice. 'This is certainly "realistic literature",' he writes of Lustra, 'yet it lacks the "solidity" and the coherent
grip on "things as they are" that Pound was demanding. In fact Cathay [...] is the larger work with a far deeper and more
comprehensive grasp on life.' I would add that Cathay is the work in which Pound settled into his
distinctive verse-line, the line which stands so powerfully on its own, in
and of itself - in his own words but in an earlier and unfulfilled context,
'austere, direct, free from emotional slither' and 'as much like granite as
it can be'. He told James Joyce that he was 'perhaps better at digging up corpses
of let us say Li Po, or more lately Sextus Propertius, than in preserving
this bitched mess of modernity.' And yet - this is the paradox of Pound - in
the personae of Li Po and Propertius he did find his focus on the 'mess'.
Moody calls Homage to Sextus Propertius 'a thoroughly modern, Vorticist "portrait"; the refraction of the
ancient poet through a modern intelligence.' I'm sure Moody is right that the
Propertius was also the work which enabled Pound finally to hit on the
dominant mode of the Cantos which
we see for the first time in The Fourth Canto. Here, Moody remarks, Pound 'invented a wholly new
kind of poetry in English.' 'The canto is [...] one great ideogram.' (The other
enabling medium had of course been Fenollosa's The Chinese Written
Character as a Medium for Poetry.)
But Moody is also surely right to say that 'still it lacked realism, lacked
the direct engagement with the conditions of contemporary living which he had
been calling for in his criticism and celebrating in the works of Joyce and
Eliot and Lewis. The canto's method was modern, but its bearing on the modern
world was oblique. Composed as it was out of myth and legend and poetry, it
was not grounded in ordinary reality.' Perhaps Pound's own recognition of the
fact underwrites Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, one of his most likeable and yet in many respects imponderable
sequences. Moody's explication of the Mauberley persona's complexities is
exemplary, and I was particularly struck by his remark that 'This is writing
in which anything that is said may be unsaid in the saying; in which
statements may be turned against themselves; in which nearly everything
becomes equivocal, and meanings are hard to pin down.' This account seems to
me to locate Pound's work in an aspect of 'modernity' (if not 'post-modernity')
which 21st Century readers will instantly recognise, and in doing so it
demonstrates the work's continuing relevance. It is nonetheless curious that
it is Hugh Selwyn Mauberley
rather than The Fourth Canto
which gives rise to the reflection, for we can also feel that Pound had a
point when he remarked to Thomas Hardy that 'The Mauberley is thin.'
The contextualisation of Pound's poetry in his London years is the backbone
of Moody's first volume. He has a firm fix (and sometimes a wry aside) on the
frenetic activity Pound constantly maintained. Probably no egotist was ever
such a selfless promoter of others' work. Anyone must be astonished at the
sheer amount of prose Pound turned out on practically any subject and under
this or that pseudonym. 'My present existence is that of a highly mechanized
typing volcano' he wrote to Joyce with a touch of not entirely undeserved
self-glory. But while the articles paid the rent they also provided a channel
for Pound's propagandist inclinations. The teacher all too often becomes
preacher. Pound the moralist is ever willing to tick the world off. He cannot
only be the poetry resuscitator convinced that the pursuit of le mot juste
will restore his beloved art to health: he has to believe that the resuscitation
will extend throughout the body politic and lay the foundations of the
earthly paradise. 'A nation that cannot write clearly cannot be trusted to
govern, nor yet to think' - such a statement seems mostly misguided in its
apparent expectation that it will be acted on soonish. 'We artists who have
been so long the despised are about to take over' - perhaps it is the notion
of the artist-ruler which feels so alien, particularly in the general current
of modernist art. We must be aware too that Pound's later career, as the
poetry resuscitator became the Fascist apologist, would be a dreadful lesson
in the pitfalls of any such ambition. Moody will have to wrestle with these
matters in his second volume and I look forward to it.
© Alan
Halsey 2008
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