Ezra Pound: His Metric and Poetry | Page 5

are, here and there, deliberate archaisms or oddities (e.g., "herward"); there are deliberately arbitrary images, having their place in the total effect of the poem:
Red leaf that art blown upward and out and over?The green sheaf of the world ...
The lotos that pours?Her fragrance into the purple cup ...
Black lightning ... (in a more recent poem)
but no word is ever chosen merely for the tinkle; each has?always its part in producing an impression which is produced always through language. Words are perhaps the hardest of?all material of art: for they must be used to express both?visual beauty and beauty of sound, as well as communicating a grammatical statement. It would be interesting to compare Pound's use of images with Mallarmé's; I think it will be found that the former's, by the contrast, will appear always sharp in outline, even if arbitrary and not photographic. Such images as those quoted above are as precise in their way as
Sur le Noel, morte saison,?Lorsque les loups vivent de vent ...
and the rest of that memorable Testament.
So much for the imagery. As to the "freedom" of his verse, Pound has made several statements in his articles on Dolmetsch which are to the point:
Any work of art is a compound of freedom and order. It is perfectly obvious that art hangs between chaos on the one side and mechanics on the other. A pedantic insistence upon detail tends to drive out "major form." A firm hold on major form makes for a freedom of detail. In painting men intent on minutiae gradually lost the sense of form and formcombination.?An attempt to restore this sense is branded as?"revolution." It is revolution in the philological sense of the term....
Art is a departure from fixed positions; felicitous?departure from a norm....
The freedom of Pound's verse is rather a state of tension due to constant opposition between free and strict. There are not, as a matter of fact, two kinds of verse, the strict and the free; there is only a mastery which comes of being so well trained that form is an instinct and can be adapted to the particular purpose in hand.

After "Exultations" came the translation of the "Sonnets and Ballate of Guido Cavalcanti." It is worth noting that the writer of a long review in the "Quest"--speaking in praise of the translation, yet found fault with the author not on the ground of excessive mediaevalism, but because
he is concerned rather with the future than with a somewhat remote past, so that in spite of his love for the mediaeval poets, his very accomplishment as a distinctly modern poet makes against his success as a wholly acceptable translator of Cavalcanti, the heir of the Troubadours, the scholastic.
Yet the Daily News, in criticising "Canzoni," had remarked that Mr. Pound
seems to us rather a scholar than a poet, and we should like to see him giving his unusual talent more to direct?translation from the Proven?al.
and Mr. J. C. Squire (now the literary editor of the _New?Statesman_), in an appreciative review in the New Age, had counselled the poet that he would
gain and not lose if he could forget all about the poets of Dante's day, their roses and their flames, their gold and their falcons, and their literary amorousness, and walk out of the library into the fresh air.
In "Ripostes" there are traces of a different idiom.?Superficially, the work may appear less important. The diction is more restrained, the flights shorter, the dexterity of?technique is less arresting. By romantic readers the book would be considered less "passionate." But there is a much more solid substratum to this book; there is more thought; greater depth, if less agitation on the surface. The effect of London is?apparent; the author has become a critic of men, surveying them from a consistent and developed point of view; he is more?formidable and disconcerting; in short, much more mature.?That he abandons nothing of his technical skill is evident from the translation from the Anglo-Saxon, the "Seafarer." It is not a slight achievement to have brought to life alliterative verse: perhaps the "Seafarer" is the only successful piece of alliterative verse ever written in modern English; alliterative verse which is not merely a clever tour de force, but which suggests the possibility of a new development of this form. Mr. Richard Aldington (whose own accomplishments as a writer of vers libre qualify him to speak) called the poem "unsurpassed and unsurpassable," and a writer in the New Age (a literary organ which has always been strongly opposed to metrical innovations) called it "one of the finest literary works of art produced in England during the last ten years." And the rough, stern beauty of the Anglo-Saxon, we may remark, is at the opposite pole from that of the Proven?al and Italian poets to whom Pound had?previously devoted