pound is to migraine as ______ is to ______?

Selected Poems by Ezra Pound

How about a word or two on the modernist poets, first? Centre ourselves, shall we? Pound was considered the spokesman of the Modernist movement and the thrust towards experimentation, as noted by his famous phrase, “Make it New!” He demanded the use of large ideas and specific details to show fresh observation and fresh thought. Many critics considered this to be a kind of deliberate obtuseness, but for the Modernists their movement was a serious argument against many features of modern life. Pound objected to what he called the “Victorian Slither,” a tendency to allow one’s comfortable and preset attitudes to lead attention away from what is most pressing or illusive. These tendencies were thought to be caused by the routines brought about through industrialization and urbanization. The artist, then, was the be the “antenna of the race,” separated by mass society — as a result, much of the experimentation was linked to the experience of alienation, and the two states together formed the core of Modernism.

Modernism = experimentation + alienation — I like that! Cole’s Notes for Modernism!

Artists at the time argues that their mental and psychological states could not be recorded using traditional forms developed for “normal” writers. In fact, as a group Modernists opposed anything considered “the norm.” Some did this antisocially, like H.D. and e.e. cummings, and others were able to be literary modernists while retaining their social respectability, like William Carlos Williams and Marianne Moore. Society itself, for these artists, was the alienating structure, creating a pervasive and invisible unhappiness for everyone. The Modernists used irony as a device to unsettle the foundation of claim and statement, and to try and start a new perspective on the world they lived in.

Ezra Pound (1885-1972) was born in Idaho and raised in Pennsylvania. He decided to be a poet at 15, and determined at that age that by 30 he would know more about poetry than any living man. He received his B.A. in 1905 and his M.A. in 1906, and then taught until 1908 when he was summarily fired from his college for harboring a “lady-gent impersonator” in his chambers. At this point, Pound fled for Europe, never to voluntarily return.

Pound became the central literary figure of London and sought to cause a renaissance of art in England and America. In 1913, he announced the Modernist manifesto — their poetics would emphasize precision, concision, and metrical freedom. WWI marked a turn away from his earlier aestheticism and Pound began to see an importance for “the poem including history.” Here we see a political Pound entering his poetry — this was the Pound who blamed war and malaise on bankers, munition makers, usury… and Jews. He kind of gets you going — Yeah! I’m mad at the bank!! Damn those gun manufacturers and their killing machines!!! Usury is really bad — just check out my student loans!!!! And the Je– wait, what?! So, yeah. Anti-semite. It’s not surprising, we all knew it about Pound, but it is unsettling to read. Anyway, Pound believed in a relationship between good government, good art, and good life, which is why (twisted as his values were) he fought for the political in his poetry. And in his life. From 1941 to 1943, Pound gave pro-fascist radio addresses from Italy to the English-speaking world. He was arrested for in in 1945 and incarcerated for six months in Pisa before being extradited to the US. In America, Pound was found mentally unfit to stand trial (possibly because had just spent six months in a wire cage) and found himself committed to a mental hospital for 12 years. (He was finally released due to the efforts of Frost and Hemmingway, among others.)

In 1949, in the midst of all the chaos, Pound was awarded the Bolingen Prize by the US Congress, thus beginning the neverending Pound debate: can you love the poetry and hate the politics, can you love the poetry and ignore the politics, or is it a package deal situation? Pound himself believed he was a package — he criticized the “mere aesthete” who didn’t understand his social/regenerative role in society (where does the Jew-hating come in? I’m confused) — it is this “aesthetic Pound,” however, who has survived, as people try to ignore the unsavoury in favour of his poetry. Studies today seem to split Pound in half: he is either a celebrated poet OR a condemned politician, and the two halves are very rarely woven together. Pound, though, was of America, and his fascist views were rooted in a kind of American idealism. The American Dream seems to be internalized in two ways: immigrants hear that anything is possible, look at their own lot, and determine that they have failed in some way; native-born Americans hear that anything is possible, look at their own lot, and determine that someone must be standing in their way. For Pound, it was Jews. For today’s bible-belt Christian, it’s atheists. For everyone else, it’s those immigrants who are blaming themselves.

(Neither group is realistic, obviously. Blogger disclaimer: I’m not even American, so if you hate me you at least can’t blame me for getting in the way of your dreams.)

On to the poetry.

In “Salutation the Second,” Pound shows his powers of encouragement to a new generation of poets of his new school, pushing them to challenge the literary establishment in all its guises (like John Strachey at “The Spectator,” for instance). The poem is an encouragement to confront people with the Modernist aesthetic — especially “practical people” — and “say that you do no work / and that you will live forever.” In short, shake up expectations and challenge people to think. Make it new. Likewise, in “A Pact,” we see Pound making an agreement with the image of Walt Whitman: it is an acceptance of the importance of history to poetry and an acknowledgment of Whitman’s role in founding an American poetic identity. Pound may not like his ethos, but he owes him for tilling the ground into which he plants his new ideas. Pound and Whitman share “sap” and “root,” and the poem ends with Pound saying that he will carve what Whitman has created.

“Retrospect” lays out the rules of Modernism that I mentioned earlier. They are threefold: (1) “direct treatment” of subject matter, (2) precise diction, and (3) not relying on traditional metre, but instead an internal musicality. The new method, Pound tells us, is not flawless, but instead represents a much-needed ploughing of the field. Whitman tilled the ground, a bunch of crappy poets planted junk, and the Modernists are here to plough everything under and Make It New. He cautions readers to take criticism as a point of departure, rather than a prescription of how to read a book. He explains what “imagism” is (sort of) by saying that an image presents an intellectual/emotional complex in an instant of time — it is better, then, to create one single image in a career than to produce voluminous works. He interestingly cautions that we should ignore critics who are not themselves great writers. Hear that? It’s the sound of dozens of you taking Pound’s advice and clicking over to YouTube to see a guy get kicked in the groin.

My favourite of Pound’s works is “Hugh Selwyn Mauberly (Life and Contacts).” This was Pound’s farewell to his aesthete self and his movement towards the more politicized poet I was talking about earlier (who we see in the cantos). In Mauberly, he illustrates how the times have become faster and more material, but he is full of ambivalence about these changes. For example, in discussing freedom he points out how we are free of Pisistratus, who was a tyrant… but he was also an art-patron. So we are left with freedom at the expense of the arts, which Pound obviously values. He references the waste of WWI (and echos Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum Est” quite beautifully) fought over “old men’s lies” and resulting in “wastage as never before,” all to prop up “a botched civilization.” He talks about being told to accept literature for what it is and his reforms falling on deaf ears. “Mauberly” becomes his farewell to that audience as he moved away to make the changes he so needed to see and to fight for his own twisted political ideals in the Cantos. “Mauberly,” like all of Pound, demands a literate and literary audience, and sometimes it feels more directly written for his own crowd than for an audience of outsiders as it requires such a massive knowledge of that circle in order to wade through it. In so doing, Pound forces the emergence of a community (those who get him) and an enemy (those who don’t), and the audience sort of self-defines whether they will move to the Cantos, or whether they are members of the deaf masses.

I’m at 1500 words with that alone, and would prefer to leave the Cantos for another day (another life?), but I will briefly discuss two of them. “Canto XLV” is where we get uber-political, blaming the difficulties of the world upon usury and detailing the woes caused by it and the artistry created where usury had been outlawed (ie. by the Catholic Church). He notes that usury is against nature, and causes death, and forces man to commit sin. (I feel a compelling urge to tack this Canto to the window of a Money Mart.) In later life, interestingly, Pound revised his thoughts on usury and blamed instead avarice. Interesting because “usury” blames the lender and the mechanism of the loan, but “avarice” could blame either side — the greedy interest-rate setter, or the borrower of an inessential loan. Just sayin’. “Canto XX” is most interesting to me because it stands at the end of the Cantos and seems to be an apology from Pound — is it for his politics, or his poetry, or both? He seems to come to an almost Emersonian conclusion, suggesting that his writing was futile in the face of nature’s brilliance — that trying to “write paradise” was futile, when he could have just “let the winds speak,” because “that is paradise.” He asks the Gods and his friends to forgive him for his efforts.

And with that, I ask your forgiveness for my futile efforts to unravel Pound.