 How many of you have ever read Pound before? Unlike Frost, you are unlikely to have read much Pound, I think, up to this point in your educations. And probably you are unlikely to have much of a view of him in contrast to Frost or even Yates, who cuts such a particular and remarkable public figure. Pound can be hard to put together. He can be hard to get a picture of. What is Pound like? What was he like? Well, this is a hard question for some of the same reason that the poems are hard. That is, Pound's poetry projects no determinate identity, no determinate poetic voice, unlike those distinctive voices of Yates and Pound, sorry, excuse me, Yates and Frost. Instead, in Pound you encounter a multiplicity of identities, a multiplicity of voices. There's an interesting contradiction in this. Pound is a kind of fierce individualist. He believes in, he wants to honor as a political thinker and as a poet, as a reader, he wants to honor a heroic and sovereign idea of the individual. At the same time, in his writing, Pound repeatedly divests himself of identity, of particular identity, in order to enter or to be entered by other identities, other poets, other voices, creators, heroes. This is what he wants to give us access to as readers. Pound's centrality in modern poetry repeats the kind of paradox I'm describing. That is, he is the one poet on the syllabus whom all the other poets knew, had some kind of relationship with, some kind of contact. On the one hand, Pound was an individual of extraordinary personal charisma and force, someone who liked to and who had the power to tell other people what to do, tell other people what to think and what to value. On the other hand, when you study Pound, you're studying someone who's possibly open to others in friendship as a reader, as a thinker. He's someone who openly seeks alliance with others. He has, we've already talked in our first lecture, had an important relationship to Frost. You remember Frost speaking of his sometime friend, who wants to write, as he puts it, caviar to the crowd. Well, Pound is credited, as I also suggested, with in many ways modernizing Yeats, helping Yeats become the particular voice that he did in the teens and twenties. In Beinecke, there's a little letter, handwritten pencil, letter from Pound to Hart Crane, which Hart Crane received when he was eighteen, I think, around your age, after he had sent his poems to the little review. And this is a letter from Pound which says about Crane's poems, it is all very egg. There is perhaps better egg, but you haven't the ghost of a setting hen or an incubator about you. I'm not sure what that means, but this was a rejection slip, and Crane kept it all his life like a kind of diploma that, you know, in some way he was a member of modern poetry because he had gotten a rejection as a Pound. In fact, Crane's first book, if you go over to Pound, and you turn it over, it has a picture, it has a portrait, not of Hart Crane, but of Ezra Pound, because it has an ad for Pound and his book Personae. And I like this fact, because it's representative, I think, of Pound's importance and dominance and prominence in the poetic culture of the 1920s and 30s. He was part of the world that a younger poet like Hart Crane had to get to know and make his place in. One of the famous books about modern poetry, one by Hugh Kenner, is called simply The Pound Era, as if modern poetry was all about as a Pound. Ezra Pound, born in Haley, Idaho, in 1908. I like it that this wildly cosmopolitan expatriate intelligence was born in Idaho. He left the United States – oh, he wasn't born in 1908. When was Pound born? He left the United States in 1908. Look in your 1885, thank you. He left the U.S. in 1908 and lived mostly in London, where, at that point, where he acted as the foreign editor of Poetry Magazine and the little review, two little magazines that I've shown you pictures of and that were important in bringing modern poetry to the United States. Pound is the central figure in that process. He goes out and finds and interprets and explains, and even in the case of images and names, the poetry that he is bringing to American readers. He is the entrepreneur, if you like, behind imageism, and then when Amy Lowell takes over imageism, vorticism becomes his thing, and the magazine Blast becomes, for a while, his organ. He writes manifestos. He organizes groups, all the time abandoning his poem, Hugh Selwyn Moberly, composed in 1920, looks back on this whole period in London and is a kind of, well, summary of the poetry of this period and his involvement in it, and it is itself a kind of early model for another great poem, The Wasteland, which Eliot would, as he composed it, bring to Pound to edit, and we'll talk about that process in a bit. In 1924 Pound moved to Italy. There he became urgently concerned with economic reform in the United States and in the West generally. He is in this period working on his great poem, his long poem, which I'll be discussing today, The Cantos. He became increasingly involved in Italian fascism, which he found a powerful vehicle of his own economic ideas in particular. He made broadcasts in support of Mussolini's government, on fascist radio, in the 1940s and in 1945 at the conclusion of the war was arrested for treason by the army. The charge of treason was dropped when he was found to be insane and hospitalized at St. Elizabeth's Hospital in Washington, D.C., where he would in a very peculiar way hold court a great man of letters at the center of the American capital, entertaining Elizabeth Bishop and other figures whom we will read. At the time of Pound's institutionalization, his poem, The Peace in Cantos, a late stage of the Cantos, was selected as the first winner of the Bollingen Prize and awarded initially given by the Library of Congress when Pound, a traitor to the nation, was awarded this prize for the best American poetry, an enormous literary and cultural controversy sprang up, which people go on arguing about. Well, here is a poet who, by his own declaration, an example seems to be a fascist sympathizer, an anti-Semite. Could he write great poetry? Even great poetry that expressed fascistic and anti-Semitic views? If he could write that great poetry of that kind, should we honor it? If he was mad, is there some way in which his poetry might not be mad? Well, these are questions that have persisted, and as I say, people go on arguing about them. The controversy created so much trouble, the Library of Congress didn't want anything to do with the award anymore, and it moved to Yale. And the Beinecke Library has been administrating this, arguably the most prestigious of poetry prizes ever since, and in fact the judging for this year's award is going strong at the moment, and there will be a new winner at the end of the week. Well, Pound's anti-capitalism, his economic ideas, I think, are in some ways the intellectual origin of both his interest in fascism and the anti-Semitic views that he expresses both in poetry and often in prose. Anti-capitalism, for Pound, this derives from really a specific cultural setting. That is late nineteenth-century American culture, a culture where, as Pound experienced it and sought, art was conceived as a decorative art subject to the editorial tastes of popular magazines like the Atlantic or Harper's, a culture in which poetry was a kind of commodity which status destroyed the potential for originality. And which subordinated art to money. When Pound expatriates, when he leaves the United States, he's fleeing not only America, but as he understands it, he's fleeing American money. And what he is entering, what he's going to, he conceives as a particular kind of tradition, a kind of historical community, which he describes in that first quotation on your handout, a quotation that in which Pound replies in a wonderfully haughty way to the motto of poetry magazine, a motto that comes from the great American poet Whitman, to have great poetry there must be great audiences, to which Pound says, it is true that the great artist always has a great audience even in his lifetime, but it is not the vulgo that's us, but rather the spirits of irony and of destiny and of humor, the great authors of the past sitting beside him. Pound, I think in a very almost literal sense, conceived of his audience as a kind of distinguished community of readers and writers existing across time, a kind of trans-historical community of artists, ideas that we'll want to compare with Eliot's ideas of tradition, which are related but a little different next week. Well, let me move to the second quotation, also from this same period, 1914. Pound says, there's no use in a strong impulse in poetry, strong impulse, I think he means strong feeling, strong motive, emotion, if it is nearly all lost in bungling transmission and technique. This obnoxious word that I'm always brandishing about, technique, means nothing but a transmission of the impulse intact. In Pound there is an emphasis, as we saw last time in looking at his rules for writing imagist poetry, there is an emphasis on the priority of poetic technique and the importance of technical knowledge. But as this quotation suggests, and it's important to keep in mind, technique in Pound is always in the service of intensity and mediacy, or what he calls the impulse. There are further quotations from Pound describing his technical aims. As I suggested a few minutes ago, Pound moves on from imagism to what he calls vorticism. Now, instead of wanting to get at a poetry that is centered on the image, he imagines a poetry centered on now the vortex, as he calls it, and there's a kind of definition of the vortex there in the third quotation. Not so much later he would replace the idea of the vortex with another related image, which is the ideogram. We talked about some of Pound's translations from the Chinese and Japanese last time. Pound was interested in Chinese writing systems, as you can imagine how the poet appealed to a poet who wanted to imagine a poem as an image of a thing. Here, as Pound understood it, not always with superb scholarly precision, the Chinese word was in fact an image of a thing, and this is very much a kind of aesthetic ideal for Pound, who wanted language to give us a kind of immediate access to the things of the world. Well, I asked you to read for class today one of Pound's poems from the teens, one of his famous poems, a poem called The Seafarer identified in your RIS packet as from the Anglo-Saxon. I'll read just the beginning of it for you. May I, for my own self, songs truth reckon, journeys jargon, how I, in harsh days, hardship endured oft. Bitter breastcares have I abided, known on my keel, many a cares hold, and dire sea-surge. And there I off spent, narrow night watch, nigh the ship's head, while she tossed close to cliffs, coldly afflicted, my feet were by frost benumbed, chill its chains are, chafing sighs, hue my heart round, and hunger begot, mere weary mood. Lest man know not that he on dry land, loveliest liveth, list how I, care wretched, on ice cold sea, weather'd the winter wretched outcast, deprived of my kinsmen, and so on. Iambic pentameter? You've been working on it. No, it's not. What you're listening to is something very different. The sound is rough, like frost, and, too, like frost. In this poetry, Pound is writing against the beautiful, sonorous forms of late nineteenth-century poetry. But Pound's poem, Unlike Frost, is the very furthest from the vernacular that we could possibly get. What we have here is Pound translating from the Anglo-Saxon and providing a contemporary equivalent of old English alliterative verse, a particular verse form, a dead poetic form, you could say, although Pound revives it, and in fact brings it into usage in twentieth-century poetry. This verse form, I've given you John Hollander's helpful self-descriptive definition at the bottom of your handout where Hollander says, The oldest English accented meter of four unfailing, fairly audible, strongly struck stresses seldom attended to anything other than definite downbeats. In other words, in old English verse you don't count syllables, you just count strong stresses, and there are, as a rule, four per line. And the lines, like Hollander's here, like Pound's that I just read, tend to divide in the middle. There's a caesura that breaks the line in two, and Hollander goes on to write it. In addition to these strong stresses, the line is held together by alliterative links that join the words, you know, strongly and audibly in the across the caesura. Pound is an avant-garde poet, he's an experimentalist. Here we have the strange and interesting spectacle of the self-consciously modernist, avant-gardist, artist writing in an archaic, dead poetic form. In the teens, Pound is writing a kind of experimental poetry that, in many different ways, seeks alternatives to nineteenth century norms of poetic practice, seeks alternatives to romantic sentiment, poetic diction, smooth musicality, all of the virtues and vices that you find in early Yates. What he does is open poetry to a range of styles and forms, many of them archaic, many of them from languages outside of English. You see Pound writing his version of the Provençal Troubadour song, Canzone. We talked last time about Pound's version of Chinese or Japanese poems. He writes his own versions of Roman poetry, Old English. Through technical means, through Pound's technique, he gains access to cultures and voices. He revives past voices, like the Seafarer poets. Revives and implicitly identifies with them. Here is an expatriate poet writing about a writing in the voice of the Anglo-Saxon wanderer, a figure deprived of his kinsmen, who is out in the elements, far from land, far from his nation and home. Writing in the voice of the Seafarer Pound allies himself with what is historically prior, and in fact, in English he allies himself with what is historically primary, with the oldest English poetry. Here he claims it for himself, carries it forward, or as he would put it, transmits the impulse in an act of translation. Pound's slogan, make it new, a kind of motto for modernism, it's important to hear that injunction, to make it new, as a specifically historical mission to revive and transmit the past in a living way. The phrase itself, make it new, was translated from the ancient Chinese, and is itself, in that sense, an instance of what it describes. Pound's conception of the poet is as one who brings the impulse, as he calls it, forward across time, does so in a kind of imaginative act of seafaring, if you like, leaving home, going out, crossing over. Pound is a distinctive and, in a sense, quite peculiar thing. He's a visionary scholar. He is an epic poet of the library. There's a certain kind of contradiction in this. That is, a contradiction or tension at any rate between Pound's drive towards immediacy, towards his wish to convey an emotional impulse, and the highly mediated nature of his vision. Pound's poetry is full of learned and abstruse reference. Unlike the Norton anthology, if you pick up a volume of Pound, you'll find no footnotes. He just gives you the thing. He gives you no help with it because, I think, there is an intention in the poetry to somehow give you a kind of unmediated access to the materials that Pound is drawing on. He wants us to feel the excitement he feels when he sits down in the library and opens a book. Directness, intensity, purity, immediacy. These are all Pound's aims and he achieves them through an intensely mediated display of technique. Well, you might contrast again Frost. Frost is always concealing, as it were, his expertise, his technical knowledge, whereas Pound is always showing it. In the case of the Seafarer, Pound has used Sweets, Anglo-Saxon Reader, his college textbook, to write this poem. It's one he's taken to Europe with him. Now, there are several consequences for all of this. One, in Pound, there is the idea that there are no dead forms. There are no dead languages. There are only derivations, variations, translations, through which the past is continuously being made present. Two, that is, the past is continuously available for those who can recognize it and seize it, specifically through technical powers. Technical powers, which yet in the process must be transcended in order to achieve the kind of immediacy and power that he seeks. In effect, Pound makes technique a form of inspiration. This is an interesting turn in literary history. The visionary poet in Pound is a scholar poet. Literary technique is in Pound a secular means of evoking literary inspiration, literary inspiration in the form of prior literature, prior literature seen and felt as sacred, not as in Milton's Divine Authority, but rather an authority to be recognized and felt and seized in books. The footnote, the scholarly index, the library archive, these are the muses that Pound appeals to, the used bookstore. These are the places that his poems come from. The result is a body of work that is always returning us its readers to its sources. In the very first lecture, I referred to what I see as two very general and different competing drives or forces in modern poetry, one centripetal, the other centrifugal, one kind of will on the part of modern poets to order poetry itself. On the other hand, a will to order the world, order society. The artist must be concerned with art's own problems on the one hand. On the other hand, in Pound and in others, the artist is a kind of legislator to use Shelley's image. He has a truth that he wants to promulgate that will order society properly. Pound embodies these two drives, as I'm calling them, more clearly better than anybody, and they're part of his interest and power and some of the challenge that he gives us, both aesthetic challenges and moral and political ones, as we think about his career. On the one hand, in Pound, there's a kind of drive to identify that which is most essential to literature and to tell Pound's readers how to write poems. This is the Pound who wrote those remarks about imageism that we talked about last time. On the other hand, there is the Pound who wants to extend the reach of literature, who writes letters to the craftsmen, who goes on fascist radio to tell the world how things should be. This is also the poet who, in his poem The Cantos, wished to create a poem that would, as he calls it, include history. What an ambition, right? Extraordinary. On the one hand you have the poet in a station of the metro, the shortest poem in modern poetry, and then you have the poet of The Cantos, the longest poem in modern poetry. Pound is both of these things. These impulses that we see in that poem, in that short poem and in that long poem, they don't just compete in him, they exist, I think, in some kind of collaboration. In a station of the metro identifies the image as the primary unit of poetry, and in Pound's practice it becomes a kind of building block for larger forms and for the epic itself. He says here, in your handout in a letter to Joyce, I have begun an endless poem of no known category. True. Phenopea or something or other, all about everything. True. I wonder what you, Joyce, will make of it. Well, Phenopea means specifically image making, and you could understand the cantos as they unfold as a kind of series of images poems as the image becomes this fertile principle that produces and generates more and more images, more and more voices. The cantos had, well, he says, of no known category. It's true. It's hard to identify the genre of the cantos, although I've been calling it an epic so far. There's a sense in which in each canto Pound is inventing the poem anew, inventing it in response to the demands of new materials. The way to understand this great and maddening and somewhat mad poem, which is one of the great works of modern poetry in which we're reading just the smallest fragment, one way to understand it is as the record of one man's encounter with many voices and his incorporation of them and engagement and conversation with them. The title of the poem is worth perhaps dwelling on for a moment the cantos, the songs really, that's what it means. The title Foregrounds Literary Activity Itself, Foregrounds Acts of Pound, which are here, as Pound imagines it, a kind of renewable practice or process that can't be reduced to a particular image or symbol. In that sense, this poem is unlike The Wasteland or The Bridge, which produced these specific central symbols around which all of the poem's ideas and images are organized. Pound instead gives us something more like a process. Pound, as I say, spoke of it as a poem including history. Well, this makes it sound as if the poem were larger than history, somehow a kind of frame for history that would help us understand and order it. Well, maybe Pound wished this, but that's not what he produced. The poem lacks an organizing view of history such as you find in Milton or Virgil or Homer or Dante. It would be therefore much more accurate to call it a poem that is in some sense continuous with history that's like history. In that sense, a poem that is structurally unbounded, this is, I think, the view of history it projects. History not as a story of progress or Yatesian apocalypse and cycles, but history rather as something like the poem itself, something that accumulates and repeats itself with variations and without a definite aim and view. History, in this sense, is something that can be entered but not begun, and it can't ever be completed either, and this is true of this poem. And then went down to the ship, set keel to breakers, forth on the godly sea, and we set up mast and sail on that sword ship, bore sheep aboard her, and our bodies also heavy with weeping and winds from sternward bore us onward with belly and canvas. Cersei's this craft, the trimmed coft, got us. Then sat we amidships, wind jamming the tiller, thus with stretch sail we went over sea till day's end. Sun to his slumber, shadows o'er all the ocean, came we then to the bounds of deepest water, to the Camarion lands and peopled cities covered with close webbed mist, unpierced ever with glitter of sun rays, nor with stars stretched, nor looking back from heaven, swordous nights stretched over wretched men there. The ocean flowing backward came we then to the place of foresaid by Cersei. When I was a student, I said to my teacher, I don't really get pound, and it's not very beautiful either, and he said, well, take a look at this, and produced those lines I just read, which are magnificent, heroic poetry. They begin with that word and. They begin with the conjunction and. They begin with the conjunction and without a grammatical effect, and then went down to the ship. Who went down to the ship? Pound doesn't say. He introduces the poem with an action, an action that is itself part of a series. The action that we are being introduced to here is Odysseus' Journey to Hell in search of Odysseus the prophet among the souls of the dead. He wants to learn, Odysseus wants to learn his future course and decide how to act. Odysseus, we learn as the poem unfolds, is the first speaker pound accesses and gives to us, which is to say that we're reading a translation again. And how does Odysseus speak? Not like Tennyson's Ulysses in sonorous blank verse, but rather, as I think you could hear readily enough, in the Anglo-Saxon alliterative verse form of the Seafarer. Pound is doing something very interesting and exhilarating. He is translating what he conceives of as the oldest passage in the Odyssey, that most archaic of poetry in the West, and translating it using that poetry most archaic in English, the language and rhythms and patterning of the Seafarer. This is a kind of overlay in technique, again, of Old English alliterative verse and Homer's Greek. These linguistic forms in the poem are merged, as if by a kind of parataxis, which I talked about last time, to produce what Pound calls when he's writing about the image as a complex, a complex of elements that are held together in an instant, an instant that, as he understood it, transcends space and time limits. This is all set out again in the doctrine of the image. And we talked about another instance of that kind of cultural overlay of materials in the little poem, in a station of the Metro. Contrast what Pound is doing here with what Joyce does in Ulysses. In Ulysses, Joyce is, in a sense, carrying Homer's text into contemporary Dublin. He's naturalizing it and modernizing it. Pound, in a sense, is doing just the opposite. He is going back and indeed here the sea flows backward, and it takes us back to, again, primary terms, archaic Greek, archaic English. He is seeking to reappropriate the heroic mode through translation in yet a contemporary idiom. This is a kind of raising of the dead, a kind of journey to the literary and cultural underworld that brings Pound's adventure as a poet into line with Odysseuses. You can see, in other words, what Odysseus is doing now as he goes to the underworld and seeks prophetic speech as a version of what Pound is doing as he seeks to translate the Greek at the inception of his epic. Pound's own display of technique you could understand as a kind of version of the ceremony to honor and pay tribute to through blood sacrifice that Odysseus practices here in the pages that follow as he induces Tiresias to appear and speak. Literary tradition here has itself taken the place of the transcendental source of authority that was classical or the Christian muse. Here Pound, in a sense, turns back upon poetry itself as a sacred source. Here, at a moment in the epic where invocation would ordinarily stand at the point of inception. Here technique is imagined as a kind of process of translation through which speech from elsewhere is brought forward in time and in some sense carried across the waters. Again, there's a sense of contradiction, however, or tension. Pound wants to elicit speech from the dead to make the traditions language new. He wants to transmit the impulse. He also insists, however, cannily and provocatively on the mediated quality of his words. Tiresias speaks at the top of page 370, towards the end of the poem. He says to Odysseus, when he sees him, a second time, why, man of ill star, facing the sunless dead in this joyless region, stand from the Foss, that is the ditch, leave me my bloody beaver for soothsay, and I stepped back and that eye there is the eye of Odysseus. And he, strong with the blood, said then, Odysseus shall return through spiteful Neptune, over dark seas, lose all companions. And then, Antichlia, Odysseus' mother, came. And then a remarkable thing happens. Someone says, lie quiet, Daivus. I mean, and now the eye is the eye of Pound, the narrator, the speaker, not Odysseus. I mean, that is, Andreas Daivus, in a Fikina, Veccholi 1538, out of Homer. This is Pound stepping into the poem saying, I have been translating all of this from Homer, from using the first, well, the Latin translation of Andreas Daivus that I bought in a Paris book stand. And this has been my source for this text, and it is Daivus that I have, the translator that has been my muse and who has been speaking here through Tiresias, if you like. And it's his soul that is laid back and to rest. And at this moment, Pound continues, now speaking of Odysseus in the third person, and he says, And he sailed by sirens and vents outward and away and unto Cersei. Finally, the journey continues here. Again, Odysseus' journey being analogized implicitly to the journey that the translator is affecting as he brings the text forward in time across from oral culture to print, from Greek to Latin and Latin to English and Old English, and then in a remarkable efflorescence that ends this first canto with a macaronic display of languages. Pound says, Venorandum in the Cretans phrase. Again, he's opened his book and at the back of Daivus' translation he's found the Homeric hymns, and now he's going to give them to us with the golden Aphrodite, Cipri munimenta sortita est, mirthful oricalchi, with golden girdles and breast bands, thou with dark eyelids bearing the golden bow of Argosida, so that, Colin, the poem ends here with a prayer to the goddess of beauty Aphrodite who is invoked here in Greek and Latin, who is brought forward and who is named Argosida, killer of the Greeks, slayer of the Greeks, presumably because she has had her hand in the abduction of Helen and the war in Troy. Here Pound has invoked the goddess in these ways and then concluded his canto with the interesting grammatical form so that and the interesting punctuation, Colin. In effect, if the poem began with and, it now ends with so that, where the colon is a kind of gateway through which the rest of the poem and implicitly following Homer, the rest of history, will pass. And here Pound has established his poem and established his own role as in some sense a mediator conducting a process by which the sources of the past are brought forward into the future, relaying what he calls the impulse and in the process making it new. Well, let's stop and we will go on to, as I say, the related and different poetry of T.S. Eliot next week.