Ezra Pound: His Metric and Poetry | Page 3

metre, that?constitutes an important element in Pound's technique. Few?readers were prepared to accept or follow the amount of?erudition which entered into "Personae" and its close successor, "Exultations," or to devote the care to reading them which they demand. It is here that many have been led astray. Pound is not one of those poets who make no demand of the reader; and the casual reader of verse, disconcerted by the difference between Pound's poetry and that on which his taste has been trained, attributes his own difficulties to excessive scholarship on the part of the author. "This," he will say of some of the poems in Proven?al form or on Proven?al subjects, "is archaeology; it requires knowledge on the part of its reader, and true poetry does not require such knowledge." But to display knowledge is not the same thing as to expect it on the part of the reader; and of this sort of pedantry Pound is quite free. He is, it is true, one of the most learned of poets. In America he had taken up the study of Romance Languages with the intention of?teaching. After work in Spain and Italy, after pursuing the Proven?al verb from Milan to Freiburg, he deserted the thesis on Lope de Vega and the Ph.D. and the professorial chair,?and elected to remain in Europe. Mr. Pound has spoken out?his mind from time to time on the subject of scholarship in American universities, its deadness, its isolation from genuine appreciation, and the active creative life of literature. He has always been ready to battle against pedantry. As for his own learning, he has studied poetry carefully, and has made use of his study in his own verse. "Personae" and "Exultations"?show his talent for turning his studies to account. He was?supersaturated in Proven?e; he had tramped over most of the country; and the life of the courts where the Troubadours?thronged was part of his own life to him. Yet, though "Personae" and "Exultations" do exact something from the reader, they do not require a knowledge of Proven?al or of Spanish or Italian. Very few people know the Arthurian legends well, or even Malory (if they did they might realize that the Idylls of the King are hardly more important than a parody, or a "Chaucer retold for Children"); but no one accuses Tennyson of needing footnotes, or of superciliousness toward the uninstructed. The difference is merely in what people are prepared for; most readers could no more relate the myth of Atys correctly than they could give a biography of Bertrand de Born. It is hardly too much to say that there is no poem in these volumes of Mr. Pound which needs?fuller explanation than he gives himself. What the poems do require is a trained ear, or at least the willingness to be trained.
The metres and the use of language are unfamiliar. There are certain traces of modern influence. We cannot agree with Mr. Scott-James that among these are "W. E. Henley, Kipling,?Chatterton, and especially Walt Whitman"--least of all Walt Whitman. Probably there are only two: Yeats and Browning. Yeats in "La Fraisne," in "Personae," for instance, in the attitude and somewhat in the vocabulary:
I wrapped my tears in an ellum leaf?And left them under a stone,?And now men call me mad because I have thrown?All folly from me, putting it aside?To leave the old barren ways of men ...
For Browning, Mr. Pound has always professed strong admiration (see "Mesmerism" in "Personae"); there are traces of him in "Cino" and "Famam Librosque Cano," in the same volume. But it is more profitable to comment upon the variety of metres and the original use of language.
Ezra Pound has been fathered with vers libre in English, with all its vices and virtues. The term is a loose one--any verse is called "free" by people whose ears are not accustomed to it--in the second place, Pound's use of this medium has shown the?temperance of the artist, and his belief in it as a vehicle is not that of the fanatic. He has said himself that when one has the proper material for a sonnet, one should use the sonnet form; but that it happens very rarely to any poet to find?himself in possession of just the block of stuff which can?perfectly be modelled into the sonnet. It is true that up to very recently it was impossible to get free verse printed in any periodical except those in which Pound had influence; and?that now it is possible to print free verse (second, third, or tenth-rate) in almost any American magazine. Who is responsible for the bad free verse is a question of no importance, inasmuch as its authors would have written bad verse in any form; Pound has at least the right to be judged by