Pound the poet, the propagandist, the editor, the talent scout, all dutifully reported and examined by A.David Moody, a literature professor and literary biographer. William Carlos Williams had opined that the self-created Pound was certainly a genius but added that he was, as well, “an ass”. His biography and considered study of the poet, Ezra Pound: Poet. Volume I: The Young Genius 1885-1920 , is a potent examination of this man's progression to maximum bad faith.
I was grateful to read this in this slow moving biography , if only to know that it wasn’t just me that thought him as someone who it was more work than it was worth to know.Moody's thesis seems to confirm my suspicions that the greater part of Pound's genius, as it were, lay in his massive appreciation in the genius of others. He was, in my view, a first rate talent scout and an enthusiastic supporter of new and revolutionary work. I will admit that there are those few poems written by his hand that I've actually liked, but as the review suggests, his most radical writing wasn't just dense difficult by a daunting erudition, but because the writing was a melange of styles , emulations, parodies and voices that collectively couldn't pierce the veil of self-imposed obscurity.
The difficulty seems a self-fulfilling prophecy; purposefully abstruse verse with little aid to the curious, and a built in rationale for further lacerating the rubes for their failure to "get" what he was getting at. Like Ayn Rand, Pound's central belief was in genius that was dictatorial and not obliged to make the new ideas comprehensible . One got with the program or be trampled by the revolution to follow. Pound is one of the most fascinating men in American literature, and he'll no doubt continue to vex generations of bright poets to come. But that is something we who think literature should , by default, have "progressive" leanings will have to grin and bear. Like or not, Pound revolutionized Poetry coming into the 20Th century just as D.W.Griffith created the modern film narrative style with his epic and naively racist Birth of a Nation. Much of the time great work doesn't come from morally unambiguous personalities
A significant movement in modernist poetry was the effort to slough off the well-worn devices of the last three hundred years of poetic devices and the creaking, rusting, swerving structures that gave them purchase and replace them with more direct address things. One could also maintain that there was a concentrated effort to make the idea behind poems and their subjects clearer and less abstract. What was once valuable in a world where God was the prime mover, and quite nearly everything and event that was beheld was the result of His good graces, and undisclosed plan was now a quaint murmur of suffocating clichés and half-hearted apologies that obscured the actual world; the phenomenal world was hidden from view, what was considered wisdom was only a means to contain the masses. In an intriguing blog entry, Robert Pinsky brings to our attention the two poets, Emily Dickinson and Ezra Pound, who had done more than any other in creating the style and means of a very succinct, blunt modernist verse. One wanted to maintain an internal equilibrium with what she wrote on paper; the other wanted to change the world in something very much like his own image.
This is an exciting connection between Dickinson and Pound, with two, unlike personalities. Dickinson didn’t care to make her thoughts clear for public consumption or to see the world differently; what she poems were noted to herself, where the solitary but active mind’s penchant for irony, contradiction, and a changing personal outlook on mortality, over time, were all the mattered to her. This was the poetry of a mind that, by the need for personal preference, was solitary much of the time, dwelling, thinking, abstracting on much of the insoluble vicissitudes of life, those matters being nothing less than the self in the world and arguing whether one were merely existing or if the fact of one’s flesh and blood constituted a benefit to the world.
This is the unending introspection that is seamless, without end or beginning, a stream, and her writing, I believe, was a project to pare the overlapping ontologies that might have driven lesser minds to variations of unhinged utterances and present them as clear perceptions, jewels of irony and reductionist wit. Hers wanted to make her own notions clear, concise, beyond the confusion studied rhetoric brings. She was so direct that hers was an abstract art that rejected Abstraction for its own sake. I’ve always thought of her poems as akin to a view through a microscope, or at least an intense focused magnifying glass.
She suggests I think, the writings of Wallace Stevens decades later, and John Ashbery more decades later still, with her world so closely observed and tersely addressed that her estimations constitute a category of Ideal Types; indeed, her work seems dedicated to the short summations of proposed notions and how those notions come up short; the elision in her career, for me, is an absent middle section where the theory was applied and where it had failed. The third part of the poem is the results, the moral, the larger irony of expectation meeting the unfathomable truth that is existence, replete with a result quite unexpected. I don’t think Dickinson’s poems were mere jottings; they are, I believe, products of hard, concentrated reflection, and it is the poet’s genius that made those leaps of perception into the dense, difficult poems that are her legacy. Hers was a clarity meant for herself alone, a method of reaching conclusions on matters her imagination would not leave alone. Her shorthand taught contemporary, by direct readings or the influence of other poets who arrived in Dickinson’s wake, how to turn introspection into an enticingly evocative sort of poetry, a system of insight that challenges philosophy as the best method as to why life is so difficult and why we make ourselves so unhappy with the given strata of existence.
To the other extreme, Pound was very public, dynamic, restless with his notions and had a lifelong desire Pound, to the other extreme, was very public, dynamic, restless with his notions and had a life long desire to change how the masses saw the world. Rid of the culture of outmoded, old, obsolete, incorrect, and purposefully deceitful cosmologies, and you will improve our collective. His inventions took much from the Chinese poets he admired and claimed to have translated — whether he really understood what they were doing or saying or whether he did any actual translation is another matter. Pound wanted poems to have the ability to get things exactly; there was the appealing idea in the kind of Modernism he proposed that we have to shed the baggage of the past, the useless and irrelevant inventions of antique times and make for ourselves a new way of using language that can pierce the veil between us and the actual world; he wanted to break the shackles of the overly -referenced Plato’s Cave so we can enter the light, figuratively (I suppose) with a native language that was means of witnessing, defining and molding reality, not masking it in excuses and daydreams.
“Society for me my miserySince Gift of Thee — ”
As I understand her, Dickinson was not a fan of humanity and preferred her thoughts, and she privately considered things to the clamor and debate of the many who would battle over the right to name the world and its contents as they think it should be. She kept her own counsel and had no patience for what others thought or thought of her. Being public was a burden beyond what her personality desired; in this couplet, which I suspect is indeed a couplet, she considers the state of being noted, notable, famous for any reason a misery that she ought not to suffer. Being known beyond Amherst was an undeserved gift to the world, as the reputation accompanying fame presented the world with a ready-made narrative of someone’s life and presented her with the problem of having to live up to a plot line that she felt had nothing to do with her. Being comprehended or understood by the masses was a useless option for her. While Dickinson wanted everyone to mind their own set of affairs while she tended her own piece of the earth, Pound, again, wanted to have language be capable of getting an image exactly, as would a photograph; the thinking, I think, is that he tried to get beyond the metaphysical conceits that an older poetics contained. On the face of it, this seems admirable, but what he wanted to do was to have the world see the world as he saw it, precisely, without romantic resonance and the nuanced variations that come with the habit (and the political tumult as well). He wanted to settle matters quickly and have folks move into a new, dynamic direction. Essentially, I believe his basic goal with his project of boiling down the language was to turn whole populations into cattle.
More or less, this was the intention of the Imagists from the start, to write manifestos, argue actively and loudly against older literary conceits and rich cultures, and purify the senses and the words used to define the world and to remake a world for the future. This is an attractive pitch on the face of it, that art must create new ways of seeing the world, but Pound’s poetics were mixed up with his politics which were, we remember, racist, anti-Semitic, and was attractive to various Avant gard movements that were obsessed with machines, speed, destruction; the world must be destroyed by virtually any means and available technology so that new ideas of how society is to be structured can arise. ‘Structured” is the operative word, as Pound wanted power over people more than control of his own writing; Imagism, it seems to me, was only a start of a growing set of ideas that the world could only be changed through violent dynamics.
He blamed many groups for what he considered to be the decline of Western culture, and it’s not surprising that he found a patron in the Italian Fascists, for whom he made propaganda broadcasts during WW2. He had an agenda, though, and he is the case where we can give thanks that poets are not the literal legislators of the world. Brief, clear, concise descriptions of objects , the hallmarks of Imagist poetry, remain strong evidence in younger poets' more contemporary work.
Pound is a traitorous, spunk stained groin polisher who had at least two ideas that have traveled well through the decades. He is otherwise a ball of congealed grease, dust, and hair you pull out of your brush, an utterly unusable poet. Pound was a bad writer besides. Reading him is like taking a bullet in the bidness.Eliot, however, was a terrific poet quite apart from his grouchy affectations of upper-class Royalism. The writing remains evocative, ironic, with a tangible melancholy and despair that makes one want to live life fuller than they had been. He might have gained much by having a hard one crease his private channel, but then we will never know; all I know is that Eliot's poems still get the heat to the meat.
One hears arguments in support of imperfect heroes that genius will carry their reputations above and over and far, far away from the corrosive and unforgivable aspects and deeds of their lives, a notion I take under advisement for this reason: it depends on the art they create. Pound fails this simplistic criterion for reasons more subjective than they are objectively sustainable, those being that his motivation really wasn't to create things of beauty that even the boob, the numskull, and the drooling poltroon could relate to, but rather power. Bob Perelman, poet and especially astute critic of modernism, pointed out that the difficulty of Pound, Gertrude Stein and others who operated under the assumption that their icon-smashing, perspective dashing, syntax relaxing experiments were going to be the death of the old filters and provide populations with new ways of seeing. Pound, I am sure, wanted the world to see things his way, complexly, nuanced, infinitely connected to the real roiling subject of humanity, which was godless and unguided by nothing else other the critical desire to kick a homeless man in the throat, steal the pennies off a dead uncle's eyes and, most loathsome of all, desire to rule the world for reasons no more significant than what a meal at the cornet spittoon saloon will give you.
But this was something of a bad bet--the more original his vision, the harder it was for him to make people see. So it became more about power, power embedded in a charismatic man who could, through major feats of willpower, transform the landscape, in the world and of the psyche. Readers, viewers, butchers, wives, teachers, witless dregs no longer had a choice to vote with their feet or let their tastes guide their selection; great historical forces were at play. Or at least Pound was running his mouth and sucking up to fascist powers on whom he sought common cause and a large stipend. His poetry seemed odious and thick as bales of mildewed hay, bloodless examples of what his theories were elaborating on. He was a Rush Limbaugh for those intellectuals who fancied themselves better than the rest of the population, who existed solely to annoy them, slow them down.Eliot, though, is a more slippery fucker to get a handle on. He is negative capability incarnate, the brooding and sad sack Methuselah of the generation that didn't have the patience to wait the years it usually took to be jaded, aristocratically bored, permanently and fashionably melancholic, and on the other hand a closeted racist, homophobic, Jew-baiting ass hole. Anti-semite he was, but he could make you feel his weariness, his loneliness, his sadness that the world was ending badly, becoming a fetid stew of mediocre thinking and piecemeal achievement. He was a great poet and a real pill as a human being. He is someone you would compliment for the stunning brilliance of his language and then try to slam into with your truck as he left work. He was a man you wanted to admire and then spit on. That is greatness.
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If Pound's poems work for reasons other than how he wanted them work, fine, that can be explicated interestingly enough with entirely new criteria extraneous to the author's aesthetic/political agenda, but it begs the question, really. It confirms my belief that Pound was talking through his hat most of the time. In this case, based admittedly on my learned dislike of his poetry, I think he gussied up his theories in order to usurp the critical commentary he knew would follow his work: no matter what, all critics had to deal with Pound's flummoxing prose before they could render an assessment, a trick he garnered from Poe, and one deployed by Mailer, a somewhat more successful artist/philosopher/critic (though failed poet).
Eliot had better luck combining the two virtues: The Sacred Wood and some of his other critical assessments have merit as purely critical exercises, self-contained arguments that don't require Eliot's work to illustrate the point. The problem with his criticism was that it was less a system of thought than it was a nice articulation of resentments or one liners that weren't further developed. Eliot, the Royalist, the Anglo-Catholic, the anti-modern Modernist, thought himself too busy to explain himself, and reveals the conservative impatience for inclusiveness; things simply have gotten worse in our culture once alien hordes began infiltrating our borders. It seemed to him so obvious a matter of cause and effect that the relative succinctness of his views, articulated in aesthetics, needn't dwell on what everyone already knows. The criticism would be the equivalent of how he described "The Waste Land", a species of rhythmic grumbling.
It's less about what one can call his "despair" than what his operating premise has in common with the postmodern aesthetic: Eliot, the Modernist poet extraordinaire, perceives the world the universe has having any sort of definable center, any unifying moral force formally knowable by faith and good works. There is despair in the works, behind the lines--one responds to them emotionally and intellectually--and the power behind the images, the shimmering surfaces the diminished, de-concretized narrator feels estranged from, comes from a felt presence, a real personality. Eliot , though, turns the despair into a series of ideas, and makes the poetry an argument with the presence day.
There is pervasive sense of everything being utterly strange in the streets, bridges over rivers, strangeness at the beach, and we, it sounds, a heightened sense of voices, media, bombs, headlines competing for the attention of some one who realizes that they're no longer a citizen in a culture where connection to a core set of meanings, codes and authority offers them a security, but are instead consumers, buyers, economic in a corrupt system that only exploits and denudes nature, culture, god.Eliot conveys the sense of disconnection brilliantly, a modernist by his association with the period, though at heart he was very much a Christian romantic seeking to find again some of the Scripture surety to ease his passage through the world of man and his material things. There has always been this yearning for a redemption of purpose in the vaporous sphere, and much of his work, especially in criticism, argued that the metaphysical aspect could be re-established, recreated, re-imagined (the operative word) through the discipline of artistic craft. Modernists, ultimately, shared many of the same views of postmodernism with regards of the world being an clashing, noisy mess of competing, unlinked signifiers, but post modernism has given up the fight of trying to place meaning in the world, and also the idea that the world can be changed for the better. Modernists , as I take them in their shared practice and aesthetic proclamations, are all romantics, though their the angle and color of their stripes may vary. Romanticism, in fact, is an early kind of modernism: the short of it is that there is a final faith in the individual to deign the design of the world, and in turn change its shape by use of his imagination .
Eliot's poems, as well, stand up well enough without his criticism to contextualize them for a reader who might otherwise resist their surface allure. The language in both genres is clear and vivid to their respective purposes. Pound, again, to my maybe tin-ear, really sounded, in his verse, like he were trying to live up to the bright-ideas his theories contained: The Cantos sound desperate in his desire to be a genius.
Pound the poet, the propagandist, the editor, the talent scout, all dutifully reported and examined by A.David Moody, a literature professor and literary biographer. William Carlos Williams had opined that the self-created Pound was certainly a genius but added that he was, as well, “an ass”. His biography and considered study of the poet, Ezra Pound: Poet. Volume I: The Young Genius 1885-1920 , is a potent examination of this man's progression to maximum bad faith.
