Ezra Pound: His Metric and Poetry | Page 7

the writer in the Nation, quoted above, dreads the anarchy impending, Mr.?William Archer was terrified at the prospect of hieratic?formalisation. Mr. Archer believes in the simple untaught muse:
Mr. Pound's commandments tend too much to make of poetry a learned, self-conscious craft, to be cultivated by a guild of adepts, from whose austere laboratories spontaneity and simplicity are excluded.... A great deal of the best poetry in the world has very little technical study behind it.... There are scores and hundreds of people in England who could write this simple metre (i.e. of "A Shropshire Lad")?successfully.
To be hanged for a cat and drowned for a rat is, perhaps,?sufficient exculpation.
Probably Mr. Pound has won odium not so much by his theories as by his unstinted praise of certain contemporary authors whose work he has liked. Such expressions of approval are usually taken as a grievance--much more so than any personal abuse, which is comparatively a compliment--by the writers who escape his mention. He does not say "A., B., and C. are bad poets or novelists," but when he says "The work of X., Y., and Z. is in such and such respects the most important work in verse (or prose) since so and so," then A., B., and C. are aggrieved. Also, Pound has frequently expressed disapproval of Milton and Wordsworth.
After "Ripostes," Mr. Pound's idiom has advanced still farther. Inasmuch as "Cathay," the volume of translations from the?Chinese, appeared prior to "Lustra," it is sometimes thought that his newer idiom is due to the Chinese influence. This is almost the reverse of the truth. The late Ernest Fenollosa left a quantity of manuscripts, including a great number of rough translations (literally exact) from the Chinese. After certain poems subsequently incorporated in "Lustra" had appeared in "Poetry," Mrs. Fenollosa recognized that in Pound the Chinese manuscripts would find the interpreter whom her husband would have wished; she accordingly forwarded the papers for him to do as he liked with. It is thus due to Mrs. Fenollosa's acumen that we have "Cathay"; it is not as a consequence of "Cathay" that we have "Lustra." This fact must be borne in mind.
Poems afterward embodied in "Lustra" appeared in "Poetry," in April, 1913, under the title of "Contemporanea." They included among others "Tenzone," "The Condolence," "The Garret,"?"Salutation the Second," and "Dance Figure."
There are influences, but deviously. It is rather a gradual development of experience into which literary experiences have entered. These have not brought the bondage of temporary?enthusiasms, but have liberated the poet from his former?restricted sphere. There is Catullus and Martial, Gautier,?Laforgue and Tristan Corbière. Whitman is certainly not an?influence; there is not a trace of him anywhere; Whitman and Mr. Pound are antipodean to each other. Of "Contemporanea" the?Chicago Evening Post discriminatingly observed:
Your poems in the April Poetry are so mockingly, so?delicately, so unblushingly beautiful that you seem to have brought back into the world a grace which (probably) never existed, but which we discover by an imaginative process in Horace and Catullus.
It was a true insight to ally Pound to the Latin, not to the Greek poets.
Certain of the poems in "Lustra" have offended admirers of the verse of the "Personae" period. When a poet alters or develops, many of his admirers are sure to drop off. Any poet, if he is to survive as a writer beyond his twenty-fifth year, must alter; he must seek new literary influences; he will have different?emotions to express. This is disconcerting to that public which likes a poet to spin his whole work out of the feelings of his youth; which likes to be able to open a new volume of his poems with the assurance that they will be able to approach it exactly as they approached the preceding. They do not like that constant readjustment which the following of Mr. Pound's work demands. Thus has "Lustra" been a disappointment to some; though it?manifests no falling off in technique, and no impoverishment of feeling. Some of the poems (including several of the?"Contemporanea") are a more direct statement of views than?Pound's verse had ever given before. Of these poems, M. Jean de Bosschère writes:
Everywhere his poems incite man to exist, to profess a?becoming egotism, without which there can be no real?altruism.
I beseech you enter your life.?I beseech you learn to say "I"?When I question you.?For you are no part, but a whole;?No portion, but a being.
... One must be capable of reacting to stimuli for a moment, as a real, live person, even in face of as much of one's own powers as are arrayed against one;... The virile complaint, the revolt of the poet, all which shows his emotion,--that is poetry.
Speak against unconscious oppression,?Speak against the tyranny of the unimaginative,?Speak against bonds.
Be against all forms of oppression,?Go out and defy opinion.
This is the old cry