Poets: Ezra Pound

I have sung women in three cities.
But it is all one.
I will sing of the sun.

… eh? … they mostly had grey eyes,
But it is all one, I will sing of the sun.

It is much harder to write about 20th century poets than poets from any other century. It is probably because the history of this century is most recorded and least understood, as significant parts of the movements whose politics shaped it still are with us, and are still fighting to tell history their way, with the 20th century as a great prize: to whom may we assign the blame for the millions upon millions dead? If the past is a foreign country, the not-quite-past is the neighboring country you still have a territorial dispute with. And so we approach the life of a very controversial poet – not in the Cathedral, Krokodil sense of “they still scream while we crush them,” but in the genuine sense of a poet that Time Magazine in 1933 called “very unsafe for children.” We can imagine them calling Lena Dunham “not safe for children” in the hope of creating a tantalizing taboo (there’s hardly anything else to consider in that case), but with Pound I think the admonition is wholly sincere.

Pound was an American of English extraction, from Idaho, both Puritans and Quakers in his lineage. He was educated at first by Quakers, but went to military school (for what reason, I’ve not found). Early on, he traveled to Europe, as his mother had a tendency to take off on her own without her husband. He went to college at 15 (University of Pennsylvania) and did nothing, more or less, than try to learn as many languages and as much about poetry as he could.

Like Coleridge, Pound came from the right cultural and social background to be literati. He did not have the right political connections to be boosted without critique; also like some others (Keats, for example), he started his enterprise very young, having gotten a poem published when he was but 11. Like Coleridge, he had horizontal connections who formed a group of poets of whom he was more or less the most famous (or infamous, as they might say.) How then did he get himself publishable? On the internet we have a fable, and it goes like this, “On the internet, anyone can be a published author.” In physical publishing, risk requires a reason to publish someone, which is generally one of two reasons: the first is the published believes the work to be salable, and the second is that the work belongs to the same political movement (less in the sense of party and more in the sense of ideology) as the publisher. In the latter case, some recognition is almost guaranteed, and in any case minimum quality levels are usually required.

For Pound, he directly convinced a bookseller, Charles Elkin Mathews, to display his first collected work, A Lume Spento. It was good enough – despite being printed for $8 on leftover paper from the Venetian press’ latest run of recent history of the church, to catch the notice of more important writers in that area. The story is slightly more complex than I’ve given, and the sympathy he managed to attain among the literary classes was similar to that of Yeats – romanticism had not yet broken itself on the Great War and there was still great sympathy for ideas that were dreamlike but reactionary in spirit. A Lume Spento ends with the phrase, “Make strong old dreams lest this our world lose heart”, which could apply both to Reaction and to Radicalism.

As an example of this style, which is hard to find, I had to dig very deep. A Lume Spento is, at this point, a mere collector’s item and does not seem to be much used for its content. Why then it is worth anything is a mystery to me, but then, I’ve never sold a painted toilet as serious work of art.

The Tree

I stood still and was a tree amid the wood
Knowing the truth of things unseen before,
Of Daphne and the laurel bow
And that god-feasting couple olde
That grew elm-oak amid the wold.
’twas not until the gods had been
Kindly entreated and been brought within
Unto the hearth of their heart’s home
That they might do this wonder-thing.
Nathless I have been a tree amid the wood
And many new things understood
That were rank folly to my head before.

A writer whom I found excerpted some of this, complained of the need for footnotes to understand the poetry. Personalist poetry, with its individuality, must needs lose connection to the outer world and only use the things immediately available. Pound in this early work uses (and perhaps over-uses– but he was young and well read) allusions of a very erudite nature. The author in question who complained, whom I will not link or name, is clearly – on the first part – reacting to the inaccessibility of the poetry to them. This poem is not at all inaccessible, and certainly with some education in their OWN tradition this writer (provided they are indeed European) would understand such a work better and actually be able to judge it. The degree of inaccessibility of older works is often merely our own ignorance and arrogance, in a world where not one ‘educated’ person has read Ovid, and not to ‘enjoy’ his weird poetry but merely to know the stories, what will be accessible to them? Perhaps Care Bears is on the TV again, and they can watch it. For the rest of us, when we run into an odd allusion we can look it up; the poem has educated us without the NEA’s approval!

About Ezra Pound’s life three things are important to consider. The first is his connection and influence in reactionary modernism. The second is his involvement in Fascism, and the third is the political ramifications for him after the war.

Pound went through the process most young European men did in the early 20th century: reactionary romanticism followed by disillusion at the massive and almost comical loss of life in WWI, usually with a focus on someone talented they knew who was blown up in the trenches. For the Europeans, it was the United States that decided their fates, and so ultimately nothing was gained for any party and much was lost. That’s definitely a prelude to what was going to come.

It was at this point of disillusion that divisions occurred; the split between Jacobin-like ‘ugly truth’ art and reactionary-like ‘beauty will save the world’ art took a hard turn and is at this point no longer clearly distinguishable. Imagism, like Vorticism and the works of men such as Wyndham Lewis, a contemporary  is not on the side of the Jacobins and yet, it is no longer dreamy art fixated on beauty.

The key point here, at least with Pound, was to reinvigorate or “make new” the English style of poetry via fusion with say, traditional Japanese styles, rather than “Orientalism” (wholesale adoption of those styles.) This was modernist (note that ‘modern’ means ‘new’) and in particular, minimalist. This poetry does not interest me, as although I have written reams of haiku, I consider the important point in haiku strict adherence to its rule (5:7:5, images of the natural) and not its simplicity. The simplicity is a function of the rule, but the modernism in Imagism seems to prevent it from adopting a syllabic or metrical rule of a very minimalist nature that works well with our language. William Carlos William’s “Red Wheelbarrow” poem is an example of this style, which now to me seems far more dated than Victorian style verse. But your mileage may vary.

Regarding Imagism as reactionary modernism, however, (and note the contrast with W.B.Yeats…) this is what Pound said of it, as a style applied to art in general: “The image is a radiant node or cluster; it is … a VORTEX, from which, and through which, and into which, ideas are constantly rushing.” You may not know this, but I treat this as an important principle of a visionary poem; and although this speaks of the idea in a much more forceful and almost militaristic fashion (it is reactionary, after all–) this is similar at heart to Coleridge’s idea in the Aeolian Harp; in that case, the harp serves as the vortex. (You might say that Pound distills the strength of our poetic style in this single statement, which points it in the direction of power, strength and vision, and away from agnostic and aesthetic excess.) Even the old conceits behave this way, but again, less forcefully.

At least as a principle of modern reactionary poetry, it shows how to produce works that seem ‘new’ to the uneducated and yet, are deeply connected with our traditions, do not break them, and perhaps form for us a bridge back to a world of restored art.

The magazine of Vorticism, Blast, and the movement itself did not survive WWI, mainly because T.E.Hulme was killed. But it did more than that, it caused most of the contributors to question modernism itself. Richard Cook wrote:

But the whole context of pre-war experimentation had been dispersed by the destructive power of mechanized warfare, which persuaded most of the former Vorticists to pursue more representational directions thereafter.

Note that there is a chain of support between Yeats, Pound and Eliot – Pound’s prominence in the pre-war art scene of Britain as a modernist gave him the clout to get Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” printed. It may be perhaps Pound alone we have to thank for Eliot’s prominence (whether good or bad!)

At this point, however, there is nothing really to connect Pound with Fascism; all of these people were modernists, and Pound was as likely to write positively about Confucius as he was about Lenin. Pound’s connection was, you may be surprised (or not), his questions about finance capitalism, or ‘usury’ (Moldbug has himself dealt with the issue – a reactionary must) which he felt was the cause of WWI. He came to see fascism itself as the vehicle of reform, and wished to reform it under the idea of ‘social credit‘. This led him to meet eventually (in 1933) with Benito Mussolini.

Note that when you read about “Social Credit” how much it seems similar to Coleridge’s Pantistocracy. The Eternal Anglo strikes again! But more than this, two things are evident: The first is that the division of support between what would become the Axis and Allies does not fall simply under the divide we are used to; for reasons that might seem obvious now, Mussolini rejected these ideas, but loved his ideas about art and aesthetics. The second is that poets are bad at economics.

Regardless, in this process Pound became not merely a poet, but a rather important public figure. For example, in 1939 he came to New York (for he was residing in Italy) to try to convince the USA to stay out of WWII. More on his political involvement can be discovered by a cursory search; he was not chary with his words in opposition to the war, but not from a pacifistic stance, but an anti-capitalist stance, believing it to be the result of an international banking conspiracy. He even claimed the English were a slave race governed, since Waterloo, by the Rothschilds. (There is a bit of overfit to this analysis.)

Regardless, the Axis lost the war. Pound was, during the war, indicted in absentia for treason, and would you be surprised to find that after the war he was not given a trial? How about being kept for three weeks in a six by six foot steel cage? “Obviously, Gnon favors constitutions and responsibility, which is why separation of powers is prevalent,” one Leftist said. And yet, whenever we look carefully at how these supposedly ‘responsible’ and ‘constitutional’ governments won, it never had a lick to do with constitutions or responsibility.  Heck, even after they win there isn’t… one begins to suspect that Carlyle was right about shams.

He was, of course, eventually given a trial – though of course, after having been held in a steel cage for three weeks outdoors. This ended up working in his favor only because he was able to be declared insane; process as punishment perhaps. What remains for us is this. Like the rest of 20th century poetry, it is not exactly ‘available’ online; your robot will direct you to pay a fee to view the words, so we may not do a detailed analysis of them. As it is written, “they have their reward.”

If you wish to seek out the Cantos, they are yours to find, for a fee. As Pound would have said:

(CANTO XLV)

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