[In the following review of Thrones de los Cantares, Schwartz concludes that although the poem has many self-indulgent aspects to it, there is still inherent beauty within its verses.]

As one reads these thirteen new cantos of Ezra Pound's long poem and then rereads the ninety-five which have preceded it, one's first strong impression is that little change or genuine development of these and attitude have occurred throughout the entire work. Through the years Pound has remembered a great deal, but he has learned nothing—nothing that could be called a new insight into the attitudes with which he began to write. Thus Canto 100 begins with

Has packed the Supreme Court
          so they declare anything he does
                    constitutional.

—Senator Wheeler, 1936

Here, in this denunciatory reference to Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, as elsewhere in these cantos, it is clear that Pound's view of the New Deal and the Second World War have not been altered since the lamentable attempt to pack the Supreme Court. And this is but one instance of the fact that Pound has not reviewed, in the light of recent experience and recent knowledge, his attitude toward the Second World War: he has not asked himself what would have happened to Western civilization, America, modern literature and his own poetry, if Germany had won the Second World War. And yet Pound must know—in some sense—that to the Nazis his own kind of work and the creative work he admired and helped to bring into being was regarded as an intolerable and barbaric manifestation of Kulturbolscheivismus and decadent cosmopolitanism.

Since the Cantos as a whole aspire to be a kind of philosophy of history, it is necessary to point out how, despite their frequent passages of great beauty, learning, metrical invention and prophetic significance, they are often no more than Pound's discursive monologue about his own personal experience of history, particularly 20th Century history, and particularly in relation to his own understandable obsession with the relationship of the creative artist and the statesman. This is perhaps the chief reason that he writes so often about economics and politics.

As a poet whose theme is the nature of history, Pound is inadequate in two important ways: he has an intense tendency to overinterpret and overgeneralize experience from a purely personal point of view or from the point of view very often of the assumed supremacy of the creative artist (as if other human beings were not necessary to the existence of creativity); and this inadequacy is made worse, time and again, by Pound's undisciplined and very often uninformed abstractions.

Here is a somewhat elaborate example: if the Cantos had been concerned with the fall of the Roman Empire as they are concerned again and again with the rise and fall of other great civilizations, Pound clearly would have blamed the fall of Rome upon the weakness and stupidity of a Caesar, or the personal strength of a Barbarian general, or perhaps upon the rise of debt and usury in Rome and the corruption of the aristocracy. What actually happened to cause the fall of Rome, according to J. B. Bury, was something seemingly trivial and implausable: the extraordinary advent of historical coincidence or historical luck. For centuries, the Barbarians had attacked Rome in great strength: it was only when the unique moment of Barbarian attack and Roman weakness occurred at the same time that the huge event of Rome's fall occurred and a great civilization perished. It can be argued that sooner or later this unique historical coincidence was bound to occur unless a great and wise Caesar extirpated the deeply-rooted causes of Roman weakness, and thus that political leadership is very important. But nowhere in this long poem about the nature of history is a sustained effort made to rise to the level of generality necessary to the extreme ambition of the poem; nor is there very much evidence of the intellectual awareness necessary to deal with the questions Pound raises about the nature of history.

The new cantos have many interesting passages, some passages of unique lyrical beauty, and too many passages when inspiration and excited self-indulgence have been confused with one another.

Thus, at one point, in a passage dealing, I think, with the Byzantine Empire, Pound writes

Some sort of embargo, Theodora died in the 19th Justinian.
And the money sellers Ablavius and Marcellus
Thought they would just bump off Justinian.
A flood of fads swelled over Europe.
But there could have been two Abduls
And it would not have annoyed one.
That is something to note. I mean as personality, when one says “oriental.” The third bahai
Said nothing remarkable. Edgar Wallace had his kind of modesty.

Here Edgar Wallace, a detective story writer once as well-known as Agatha Christie and Erle Stanley Gardner, suddenly emerges, and as suddenly departs from the 20th Century and appears in Byzantium as part of a discussion of the virtues and defects of an obscure historical regime's political luminaries. The relevance of a popular mystery story writer to a political discussion of a distant and for the most part very obscure historical period is, I think, tenuous but real. Edgar Wallace, of whose mystery fiction Pound avowed himself to be very fond in a book published more than twenty years ago, probably was modest, and it is probably true that Pound believes in and likes modesty—in other human beings. But the entire passage which is fairly characteristic of Pound's political discourses in the cantos, is a good example of how easy it is to confuse inspiration and self-indulgence, and childishness.

The reference to Edgar Wallace's personal modesty in a passage dealing with Byzantine politicos is not bad in itself, but it is, in addition, quite self-indulgent and personal in the worst way. It does not matter that Pound takes a childish pride in being fond of Wallace and knowing him and bringing his character into an epic poem; and the passage is not bad because of the sudden transition to Wallace's modesty or because of the obscurity of Byzantine history. It is bad because some other and better embodiment or touchstone of modesty would have made the poetic point less tangential and lessened the strain upon the reader who not only has to find out or know who the third bahai and the two Abduls are, and in what way Edgar Wallace possessed the same kind of modesty as his predecessors. To be self-indulgent myself for a moment, I am willing to entertain the possibility that the third bahai was a really important personage, but I don't see what Wallace had to be modest about, although I am sure he did the best he could and received adequate compensation.

Nevertheless it must immediately be added that what is bad and self-indulgent in this passage is inseparable from Pound's poetic genius at its best: in other passages, the suddenness of transition and apparent randomness of historical juxtaposition and range are necessary to create the historical perspective of the cantos, the sense that all history is relevant to any moment of history, and the profound belief that the entire past, at any moment and in any place, is capable of illuminating the present and the whole nature of historical experience.

The prose of the book jacket of Thrones de los Cantares can serve as a summary of what is good and what is bad in this new section of the cantos. As a description of the new cantos, it is neither better nor worse than most book jacket prose. This is how the preceding section of the cantos, Rock Drill, is described:

‘The human soul is not love, but love flows from it … it cannot, ergo, delight in itself, but only in the love flowing from it’. This is the major theme as the Cantos move into their final phase: ‘The domination of benevolence’. Now the great poem has progressed into the realms of the ‘permanent’; the poet has passed through ‘the casual’ and ‘the recurrent’ and come to values that endure like the sea.

The Cantos are a poem containing history; it is their purpose to give the true meaning of history as one man has found it: in the annals of China, in the Italian Renaissance, in the letters and diaries of Jefferson, the Adamses and Van Buren, in the personalities and currents of his own time. The truth must be hammered home by reiteration, with the insistence of a rock drill ‘Drilling it into their heads … much in the way that a composer does in music’.

As a description of Cantos 85-95 and the new Cantos this is not only adequate, it has a good deal of the obscurity of unavoidable truth and the immense confusion of reality. And it participates in the barbarous contempt for most human beings—unless they are creative artists or patrons of the arts—which recurs throughout Pound's great poem. For it should be clear, by inspection, that the domination of benevolence, is a bad and impractical description of both love and statesmanship. It was, I think, Tallyrand who said to Napoleon, pointlessly enough: “Sire, you cannot sit on bayonets.” And it should not be necessary to say, at this late date, that power which is maintained through domination of any kind—benevolent paternalism, for example—is worthless because it is temporary and must be sustained by tyranny. It should be a truism by now that genuine power depends upon consent, just as genuine love requires requited love. Finally to say that the truth must be hammered home by reiteration, with the insistence of a rock drill is revealing in ways which the author of the jacket did not intend: revealing and novel. This must be the first time that the acetylene torch has been advocated as a method of teaching the truth to human beings or writing poetry. One might just as well try out the surgeon's scalpel, psychoacoustical bombing, brainwashing and all the other forms of psychological warfare. And to compare the insistence of a rock drill with the repetition of musical phrases is to reveal a complete ignorance of music and to show how metaphor may be a means of justifying anything, if one is also eager to deceive oneself. If the insistence of a rock drill and the repetition of musical phrases resembled each other in any whatever, the interest in good music, which is small enough as it is, would not exist at all.

I have dwelt at length on the book jacket for several reasons. One is that it is a good summary of Pound's intention and what is wrong with it. But there is a more important reason. In recent years, for extra-literary reasons of all sorts, Pound's work has been praised too often and for the wrong reasons, without qualification or reservation, by ardent admirers and friends, in such a way as to antagonize readers who are not very well acquainted with his work. Indeed, Pound has been praised by his friends—sometimes, perhaps, out of sympathy for his personal plight, rather than his poetry—in so lavish and uncritical a way as to have exactly the reverse of the effect which was intended. The mixed feelings of the reading public toward complicated new poetry are such that uncritical praise is at best merely bewildering. Indeed, the effort and ardor of most of Pound's friends is unfortunate enough to make one think, again: any human being who has friends of this kind has no need of enemies.

There is also an unfortunate and unnecessary antagonism to Pound's work which takes a variety of forms and which, whatever its form, is unjustified. Sometimes the antagonism is purely personal; sometimes the antagonism is political; sometimes it is literary; sometimes it is literary and asserts itself as political liberalism and sometimes it is political and literary; as in the critics who dislike modern poetry and Pound's kind of modern poetry and his political views which Pound makes explicit, from time to time in his poetry. The reference to Roosevelt and the New Deal which I have already quoted is but one of a good many in the present volume. Here is another explicit passage concerning Hitler:

Adolf furious from perception.
          But there is a blindness comes from inside—
they try to explain themselves out of nullity.

This is enough to make the uninformed reader—or the reader who has been told that Pound is a Fascist and an Anti-Semite—dismiss Pound as a bad poet, or dismiss that which is valuable and beautiful in Pound's writing as trivial when the basic attitude of his work is anti-human. But here is another passage from an early Canto which should illustrate, among other things, the way in which Pound became a great poet:

The boughs are not more fresh
where the almond shoots
take their March green.
          And that year I went up to Freiburg,
And Rennert had said: “Nobody, no, nobody
Knows anything about Provençal, or if there is anybody
It's old Levy.”
And so I went up to Freiburg,
And the vacation was just beginning,
The students getting off for the summer,
Freiburg im Breisgau
And everything clean, seeming clean, after Italy.

There is a great deal more to be said about Pound's work and about the passages which disfigure it. For example there are several other passages—the description of a synagogue in Italy and its religious ceremonies and cantos which contain the passionate denunciations of modern war which show that if Pound is, at times, anti-Semitic, he is also, at other times, philo-Semitic; and if he is anti-human, it is, at least, in part, partly through a disappointed and embittered love of mankind. Certainly no one who was wholly misanthropic could be so avidly interested in what happens to human beings and to so many forms of human art and culture. But this is a complicated subject which cannot be discussed with brevity. The first and most important thing to say about Pound's Cantos is that they ought to be read again and again by anyone interested in any form of literature.