Ezra Pound: His Metric and Poetry | Page 2

and before he had settled in England, and here, in 1908, "A Lume Spento" appeared. The?volume is now a rarity of literature; it was published by the author and made at a Venetian press where the author was able personally to supervise the printing; on paper which was a?remainder of a supply which had been used for a History of the Church. Pound left Venice in the same year, and took "A Lume Spento" with him to London. It was not to be expected that a first book of verse, published by an unknown American in Venice, should attract much attention. The "Evening Standard" has the distinction of having noticed the volume, in a review summing it up as:
wild and haunting stuff, absolutely poetic, original,?imaginative, passionate, and spiritual. Those who do not consider it crazy may well consider it inspired. Coming after the trite and decorous verse of most of our decorous poets, this poet seems like a minstrel of Proven?e at a suburban musical evening.... The unseizable magic of poetry is in the queer paper volume, and words are no good in?describing it.
As the chief poems in "A Lume Spento" were afterwards?incorporated in "Personae," the book demands mention only as a date in the author's history. "Personae," the first book?published in London, followed early in 1909. Few poets have undertaken the siege of London with so little backing; few books of verse have ever owed their success so purely to their own merits. Pound came to London a complete stranger, without either literary patronage or financial means. He took "Personae" to Mr. Elkin Mathews, who has the glory of having published Yeats' "Wind Among the Reeds," and the "Books of the Rhymers' Club," in which many of the poets of the '90s, now famous, found a place. Mr. Mathews first suggested, as was natural to an unknown?author, that the author should bear part of the cost of?printing. "I have a shilling in my pocket, if that is any use to you," said the latter. "Well," said Mr. Mathews, "I want to publish it anyway." His acumen was justified. The book was, it is true, received with opposition, but it was received. There were a few appreciative critics, notably Mr. Edward Thomas, the poet (known also as "Edward Eastaway"; he has since been killed in France). Thomas, writing in the "English Review" (then in its brightest days under the editorship of Ford Madox Hueffer), recognized the first-hand intensity of feeling in "Personae":
He has ... hardly any of the superficial good qualities of modern versifiers.... He has not the current melancholy or resignation or unwillingness to live; nor the kind of?feeling for nature which runs to minute description and decorative metaphor. He cannot be usefully compared with any living writers;... full of personality and with such power to express it, that from the first to the last lines of most of his poems he holds us steadily in his own pure grave, passionate world.... The beauty of it (In Praise of Ysolt) is the beauty of passion, sincerity and intensity, not of beautiful words and images and suggestions ... the thought dominates the words and is greater than they are. Here?(Idyll for Glaucus) the effect is full of human passion and natural magic, without any of the phrases which a reader of modern verse would expect in the treatment of such a?subject.
Mr. Scott James, in the "Daily News," speaks in praise of his metres:
At first the whole thing may seem to be mere madness and rhetoric, a vain exhibition of force and passion without beauty. But, as we read on, these curious metres of his seem to have a law and order of their own; the brute force of Mr. Pound's imagination seems to impart some quality of?infectious beauty to his words. Sometimes there is a strange beating of anapaests when he quickens to his subject; again and again he unexpectedly ends a line with the second half of a reverberant hexameter:
"Flesh shrouded, bearing the secret."
... And a few lines later comes an example of his favourite use of spondee, followed by dactyl and spondee, which comes in strangely and, as we first read it, with the appearance of discord, but afterwards seems to gain a curious and?distinctive vigour:
"Eyes, dreams, lips, and the night goes."
Another line like the end of a hexameter is
"But if e'er I come to my love's land."
But even so favourable a critic pauses to remark that
He baffles us by archaic words and unfamiliar metres; he often seems to be scorning the limitations of form and?metre, breaking out into any sort of expression which suits itself to his mood.
and counsels the poet to "have a little more respect for his art."
It is, in fact, just this adaptability of metre to mood,?an adaptability due to an intensive study of