[In the following essay, originally published in the Partisan Review in April 1949, Berryman attempts to mark the influences underlying the various phases of Pound's work from his early roots in Imagism to his later Fascist views.]

Since Pound has been for several generations now one of the most famous of living poets, it may occasion surprise that an introduction to his poetry, such as I was lately invited to make for New Directions, should be thought necessary at all. It may, but I doubt that it will. Not much candor is wanted for the observation that though he is famous and his poetry is famous his poetry is not familiar, that serious readers as a class have relinquished even the imperfect hold they had upon it fifteen years ago, and regard it at present either with hostility or with indifference. The situation is awkward for the critic. Commonly, when the object of criticism is at once celebrated, unfamiliar, and odious, it is also remote in time; the enquiry touches no current or recent passion. Our case is as different as possible from this enviable condition.

In a few years no one will remember the buffo,
No one will remember the trivial parts of me,
The comic detail will be absent.

After thirty-five years neither comic nor tragic detail is absent. Whatever the critic may wish to say of the poetry runs the risk of being misunderstood as of the poet; one encounters eager preconceptions; and no disclaimer is likely to have effect. I make, however, no disclaimer just yet. Let us only proceed slowly—remembering that it is the business of criticism to offer explanations—towards the matter of hostility, beginning with the matter of indifference.

It is very surprising, perhaps, that readers of poetry should remain indifferent to the verse of a poet so influential as Pound has been. As one of the dominant, seminal poetries of the age, one would expect readers to want to become acquainted with it as a matter of course. That many do not want to, suggests that they do not in fact so regard it, or regard it as only in some special sense an influence; and I think this is the case. They regard Pound as a dominant influence. They are quite right, of course. But even this is often disputed or ignored, so we cannot avoid some discussion. It is necessary to see Pound under two aspects: as he worked upon poetry and as he worked upon the public. The notion of him as publicist for Joyce, Eliot, Frost, a hundred others, being still current, I feel free to select instances displaying rather the first aspect, and take his relations with W. B. Yeats, with Imagism, and with ‘The Waste Land’—with the major poet, that is, the major movement, and the major poem, of the century so far.

Pound went to London in 1908, at twenty-three, to learn from Yeats how to write poetry, in the belief that no one then living knew more about it. Swinburne was just alive (when he died the following April, ‘I am the King of the Cats,’ said Yeats to one of his sisters meeting her in the street), inaccessible behind Watts-Dunton.

Swinburne my only miss
and I didn't know he'd been to see Landor
                                                            and they told me this that an' tother
and when old Mathews went he saw the three teacups
          two for Watts Dunton who liked to let his tea cool
So old Elkin had only one glory
          He did carry Algernon's suit once
when he, Elkin, first came to London. …

Pound was a most odd disciple; he regarded himself as the heir of Browning, he was stirring free of Fitzgerald and the Nineties, he had already begun the war on the iamb and the English heroic line that would never end (consider the two opening dactyls here and then the spondee-two-dactyls-and-trochee of the beautiful sixth line), he was full of the Troubadours, and he was becoming obsessed with the concept of verse-as-speech. He had as much energy as Yeats. The older poet has recorded his debt to the younger for advice against abstractions, underlinings of them, help in revision, and so on. But the change that began to move in Yeats' verse about this time was towards speech, the beginning of his famous development, and like one or two others I have always supposed Pound the motor. What seems to have happened was this. Pound was going in the afternoons to see Ford Madox Hueffer (Ford), and in the evenings to see Yeats; the older men did not get on. Of four ‘honourable debts’ he acknowledged later, the chief was Hueffer, who ‘believes one should write in a contemporary spoken or at least speakable language’—not the same thing, it will be observed, as Pound's famous earlier formulation of ‘Mr. Hueffer's realization that poetry should be written at least as well as prose.’

So old Ezra had only one glory

here, that he passed on without source in the evening what he had heard in the afternoon.

Then Imagism. There were two ‘Imagist’ movements (besides a dilution of the second, conducted by Amy Lowell, which reached the public), both in London. The first was started in March 1909 by T. E. Hulme who was insisting on ‘absolutely accurate presentation and no verbiage’, F. S. Flint who had been advocating ‘vers libre,’ Edward Storer who was interested in ‘the Image,’ and others, all strongly under the influence of French Symbolist poetry. Pound joined the group on April 22nd—Elkin Mathews had published the week before a third collection of poems, Personae, his first book proper, which would establish him. Pound read out to the startled Soho cafe a new poem ‘Sestina: Altaforte.’ Exultations, issued later that year and Canzoni (1911), continuing his Provençal investigations, display no Imagist affiliation; Ripostes (1912) does, and at the end of it he printed Hulme's five poems and named the movement, which had passed away meanwhile, perhaps because none of its other members could write poetry. Through Pound personally the first movement reached the second. The second consisted of H. D. and Richard Aldington, who were inspired not by French but by Greek verse, in 1912; Pound got their work printed, wrote the movement's essential documents (in Poetry for March 1913, ‘A Few Don'ts’ and an interview with him signed by Flint), and edited Des Imagistes which appeared in March of 1914. By the time Miss Lowell arrived with her retinue that summer, Pound, joined now with Wyndham Lewis and the sculptor Gaudier-Brzeska, had launched Vorticism, in the opening Blast. The importance of literary movements is readily exaggerated; conceivably in the end Imagism will seem valuable above all as it affected Pound's verse. Still, with a doubtful exception for the unnamed movement of the Auden group about 1930, it is the migration to a new position, for our time, that retains most interest, and is a fair sample of Pound's activity.

His now celebrated operation some years later upon ‘The Waste Land’, disengaging that work as we know it from what its author describes as a sprawling, chaotic poem twice as long, is another. Keeping our wits and facts in order, we need not follow a critic sometimes so penetrating as Yvor Winters in seeing Pound as the ‘primal spirit’ behind every gesture, every deplorable gesture, of the deplorable Mr. Eliot. ‘The principal influence’ upon Eliot's verse, Mr. Winters writes, ‘is probably that of Laforgue, whose poetry Pound had begun to champion at least as early as 1917.’ This is very early indeed, only seven years after Eliot's ‘Humouresque, After J. Laforgue’ in the Harvard Advocate. No, Eliot started alone. The two poets met first, and Pound persuaded Poetry to print ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,’ in 1915, by which date Eliot was nearly through with Laforgue. Mr. Winters' remark neglects also the serial character of the influences on Eliot's poetry, which include Laforgue, Webster, James, Baudelaire, Pound, Gautier, Joyce, Apollinaire, Dante. It is emphatically not a mistake, however, to regard Pound's personal influence as great from 1915 on; and great on the period as a whole.

The reader who is not a student of poetry has another ground for indifference. Pound, he has always heard, has no ‘matter.’ Granting the ‘importance’ of his verse, granting the possibility that having been for poets fertile it might prove on acquaintance agreeable or beautiful, what has he to do with this sport, a matterless poetry? This is a much more sophisticated dissatisfaction, and can claim the highest critical support. ‘I confess,’ Mr. Eliot once wrote, ‘that I am seldom interested in what he is saying, but only in the way he says it’; and R. P. Blackmur, ‘he is all surface and articulation.’ We notice Mr. Eliot's qualification (‘seldom’) and we are puzzled by an ambiguity in Mr. Blackmur's ‘articulation’ (is this jointing or merely uttering?); but on the whole they put authoritatively the established view. Now there can be no question of traversing such authorities directly. But it is a violent and remarkable charge; I think we are bound to look into it a little.

If his critics are right, Pound himself misconceived his work from the beginning and has continued to do so. This is of course not impossible; in fact I shall be arguing presently, in another sense, that it is just what he has done. But let us hear what he has said. In a very early poem, ‘Revolt Against the Crepuscular Spirit in Modern Poetry,’ he says:

I would shake off the lethargy of this our time, and give
For shadows—shapes of power
For dreams—men.

If the poem is bad, the programme is distinct. Then one of his debts, he records later, ‘may be considered as the example of or hint from Thomas Hardy, who, despite the aesthetic era, has remained interested in his subject, i.e. in distinction to being interested in “treatment.”’ Among other passages to the same effect, I give one more, later still, which readers must have come on with surprise. Speaking of Mr. Eliot and Miss Moore, Pound remarks, ‘Neither they nor anyone else is likely to claim that they have as much interest in life as I have, or that I have their patience in reading.’

The ‘literary’ or ‘aesthetic’ view taken of Pound now for many years will not be much disturbed by such assertions, until we observe how oddly they are confirmed by the opinions expressed in 1909 about Personae. These opinions are worth attention, because Pound's literary personality became known as a leader's thereafter, and most reviews his books have received, since, show the impress of this knowledge; they are impure. It is hardly too much to say that the first Personae was the last volume of Pound's that was widely judged on its merits. What did the old reviewers say? ‘He writes out of an exuberance of incontinently struggling ideas and passionate convictions. … He plunges straight into the heart of his theme, and suggests virility in action combined with fierceness, eagerness, and tenderness’—so R. A. Scott-James whose excitement, by the way, about ‘the brute force of Mr. Pound's imagination’ did not prevent his noticing the unusual spondee-dactyl use which he exemplified with a lovely line from ‘Cino’:

Eyes, dréams, / líps, and the / níght góes.

It is absolutely unnecessary, and appears to a scholar probably very ridiculous, to patronize the reviewers of an earlier age. The ‘beauty of (“In Praise of Ysolt”) is the beauty of passion, sincerity and intensity,’ wrote Edward Thomas, ‘not of beautiful words and images and suggestions … the thought dominates the words and is greater than they are.’ One hardly recognizes here the ‘superficial’ or ‘mindless’ Pound whom critics have held up to us since. Faced with a welter of Provençal and Browning and early Yeats, not to mention Villon, the reviewers nevertheless insisted upon the poet's strong individuality: ‘All his poems are like this, from beginning to end, and in every way, his own, and in a world of his own.’ Faced with this learning (the notes quote Richard of St. Victor, etc.), they admired ‘his fearlessness and lack of selfconsciousness,’ ‘the breath of the open air.’ ‘He cannot be usefully compared,’ Thomas went on, ‘with any living writers … full of personality and with such power to express it, that’ and so on. The Oxford Isis agreed that ‘physically and intellectually the verse seems to reproduce the personality with a brief fullness and adequacy.’ Instead of pursuing the engaging themes thrown up by this medley of exaggeration and justice, culled mostly from the back leaves of Exultations, let me pass to a third, more serious difficulty with the view that Pound has no ‘matter’.

Pound's poetry treats of Provence, China, Rome, London, medieval living, modern living, human relationships, authors, young women, animals, money, games, government, war, poetry, love, and other things. This can be verified. What the critics must mean, then, is that they are aware of a defect, or defects, in the substance of the poetry. About one defect they have been explicit: the want of originality of substance. Pound has no matter of his own. Pound—who is even in the most surprising quarters conceded to be a ‘great’ translator—is best as a translator. ‘The “Propertius” is a sturdier, more sustained, and more independent poem than “Mauberley,”’ writes Mr. Blackmur. ‘Craftsmanship may be equally found in both poems; but Mr. Pound has contributed more of his own individual sensibility, more genuine personal voice, in the “Propertius” where he had something to proceed from, than in “Mauberley” where he was on his own. … This fact, which perhaps cannot be demonstrated but which can be felt when the reader is familiar enough with the poems, is the key-fact of serious judgment upon Mr. Pound.’ I do not feel sure that time is bearing out the first part of this careful judgment; the finest sections of Pound's postwar farewell to London, where the grotesquerie of Tristan Corbière is a new element in the complex style, naive and wily, in which he celebrates the modern poet's difficulties and nostalgia, seem to me somewhat more brilliant, solid, and independent, than the finest sections of the Roman poem. But my objections to the point of view begin well behind any value-judgment. All the ambitious poetry of the last six hundred years is much less ‘original’ than any but a few of its readers ever realize. A staggering quantity of it has direct sources, even verbal sources, in other poetry, history, philosophy, theology, prose of all kinds. Even the word ‘original’ in this sense we find first in Dryden, and the sense was not normalized till the mid-century following. A few hours, or days, with several annotated editions of Lycidas will transform the reader's view of this matter, especially if he will bear in mind the likelihood that the serious modern poet's strategy resembles Milton's—exceptional as Milton was—far more closely than his (the reader's) attitude and knowledge resemble Milton's contemporary reader's attitude and knowledge. Poetry is a palimpsest. ‘The old playwrights took old subjects,’ remarks a poet who has not been accused of want of originality, ‘did not even arrange the subject in a new way. They were absorbed in expression, that is to say in what is most near and delicate.’ So Yeats; but our literary criticism, if at its best it knows all this well enough, even at its best is inclined to forget it and to act as if originality were not regularly a matter of degree in works where it is worth assessing at all. A difficulty is that modern critics spend much of their time in the perusal of writing that really is more or less original, and negligible. This African originality is very confusing. One of the writer's favourite poems is perfect Thomson in manner as well as perfect Wordsworth, the substance is all but purely Wordsworth's, and how are we accustomed to deal with this? The answer is that we are not. It clearly troubles Mr. Eliot that the two first sections of ‘Near Perigord’ resemble Browning, Pound's master, though the poem seems to him (as to me) beautiful and profound; this poem is extremely original in substantial development. Now though Mr. Blackmur is preferring derivation and Mr. Eliot is deprecating it, they appear to illustrate an identical disorder of procedure, that of a criticism which is content to consider in isolation originality of either matter or manner, without regard to the other, and with small regard to degree. I term this a disorder rather than a defect because with regard to a poetry as singular as Pound's, and with such diverse claims upon our attention, it is all but fatal to criticism. The critics were writing, one fifteen years ago, the other twenty, but I do not know that our situation has much improved, and it goes without saying that the best criticism of the period has addressed itself almost exclusively to manner, except for the proliferation in the last decade of an exegetical criticism similarly limited and comparatively abject. Until we get a criticism able to consider both originalities, in degree, Pound's achievement as a poet cannot be finally extricated from the body of his verse; and prepossessions should be avoided. That he has translated so much has no doubt cost him many readers, who (despite Dryden and Pope) cannot imagine that a ‘real poet’ would be content to translate so much; but criticism should be wiser.

Why has Pound translated so much? The question is an important one, and the answers usually given ignore the abyss of difference between his just-translations, like the Cavalcanti (the Canzone aside, of which his final version opens Canto XXXVI), such as might have been made by another poet of superlative skill, and renderings like those in Cathay and ‘Propertius’, which are part of Pound's own life-poetry. The first class may be considered as exercise, propaganda, critical activity, taken in conjunction with his incoherent and powerful literary criticism. The second class requires a word about Pound's notion of personae or masks, which issued successively in the masks of Cino, Bertran de Born, various Chinese poets, Propertius, Mauberley, fifty others. They differ both from Yeats's masks and from the dramatizations, such as Prufrock and Auden's ‘airman,’ that other poets find necessary in a period inimical to poetry, gregarious, and impatient of dignity.

We hear of the notion in two of his earliest poems, a sonnet ‘Masks’ about

          souls that found themselves among
Unwonted folk that spake a hostile tongue,
Some souls from all the rest who'd not forgot
The star-span acres of a former lot
Where boundless mid the clouds his course he swung,
Or carnate with his elder brothers sung
E'er ballad makers lisped of Camelot. …

and ‘In Durance’:

But for all that, I am homesick after mine own kind
And would meet kindred even as I am,
Flesh-shrouded bearing the secret.

The question is, what the masks are for.

Does any reader who is familiar with Pound's poetry really not see that its subject is life of the modern poet?

It is in ‘Faman Librosque Cano’ and ‘Scriptor Ignotus’ of Personae—

And I see my greater soul-self bending
Sibylwise with that great forty-year epic
That you know of, yet unwrit
But as some child's toy 'tween my fingers.
If my power be lesser
Shall my striving be less keen? …

It is in ‘Histrion’ of Exultations—

'Tis as in midmost us there glows a sphere
Translucent, molten gold, that is the ‘I’
And into this some form projects itself
And these, the Masters of the Soul, live on.

It is in one of the few good lines of Canzoni—

Who calls me idle? I have thought of her.

It is in ‘N. Y.’ of Ripostes (1912), the volume in which Pound established his manner and the volume with which modern poetry in English may be felt to have begun—

My City, my beloved, my white! Ah, slender …
Delicately upon the reed, attend me!
Now do I know that I am mad,
For here are a million people surly with traffic:
This is no maid.
Neither could I play upon any reed if I had one.

It is everywhere (as well as in the Chinese work) in the more ‘original’ poems and epigrams of Lustra, written 1913-1916. (A lustrum is ‘an offering for the sins of the whole people, made by the censors at the expiration of their five years of office.’ It has not perhaps been sufficiently observed that Pound is one of the wittiest poets who ever wrote. Yet he is serious enough in this title. In certain attitudes—his medieval nostalgia, literary anti-semitism, others—he a good deal resembles Henry Adams; each spent his life, as it were, seeking an official post where he could be used, and their failure to find one produced both the freedom and the inconsequence that charm and annoy us in these authors.) It is in the elaborate foreign personae that followed, Cathay (1915)—

And I have moped in the Emperor's garden, awaiting
          an order-to-write!

and ‘Propertius’ (1917)—

I who come first from the clear font
Bringing the Grecian orgies into Italy
                                                                                                              and the dance into Italy.

It is in ‘Mauberley’, of course—

Dowson found harlots cheaper than hotels;
So spoke the author of ‘The Dorian Mood,’
M. Verog, out of step with the decade,
Detached from his contemporaries,
Neglected by the young,
Because of these reveries.

Meanwhile Pound's concept of method had been strongly affected by Ernest Fenollosa's essay on The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry (‘Metaphor, the revealer of nature, is the very substance of poetry. … Chinese poetry gets back near to the process of nature by means of its vivid figure. … If we attempt to follow it in English we must use words highly charged, words whose vital suggestion shall interplay as nature interplays. Sentences must be like the mingling of the fringes of feathered banners, or as the colors of many flowers blended into the single sheen of a meadow … a thousand tints of verb’) and for years he had been trying to work out a form whereby he could get his subject all together; by the time of ‘Mauberley’ he had succeeded, in the final version of the opening Cantos. And it is, as we shall see, in the Cantos also.

Above all, certain themes in the life of the modern poet: indecision-decision and infidelity-fidelity. Pound has written much more love-poetry than is generally realized, and when fidelity and decision lock in his imagination we hear extraordinary effects, passionate, solemn. A lady is served her singer-lover's heart, eats, and her husband tells her whose:

‘It is Cabestan's heart in the dish.’
‘It is Cabestan's heart in the dish?
No other taste shall change this.’

(Canto IV)

She hurtles from the window.

And in south province Tchin Tiaouen had risen
and took the city of Tchang tcheou
offered marriage to Ouang Chi,
who said: It is an honour.
I must first bury Kanouen. His body is heavy.
His ashes were light to carry
Bright was the flame for Kanouen
          Ouang Chi cast herself into it, Faithful forever
                    High the hall Timour made her.

(Canto LVI)

‘His body is heavy.’ The theme produces also the dazzle and terror of the end of ‘Near Perigord,’ where we finally reach Bertran through Maent, whom we'd despaired of. If there are a passion and solemnity beyond this in poetry—

Soul awful! if the earth has ever lodg'd
An awful soul—

we have to go far to find them. If Pound is neither the poet apostrophized here nor the poet apostrophizing, not Milton or Wordsworth, his place will be high enough. These themes of decision and fidelity bear on much besides love in his poetry, and even—as one would expect with a subject of the poet-in-exile (Ovid, Dante, Villon, Browning, Henry James, Joyce, Pound, Eliot, as Mann, Brecht, Auden) whose allegiance is to an ideal state—upon politics:

homage, fealty are to the person
          can not be to body politic. …

(Canto LXVII)¹

Of course there are other themes, strong and weak, and a multiplicity of topics, analogies to the life of the modern poet, with or without metaphor the interests of the poet. But this would appear to characterize any poet's work. I mean more definitely ‘Life and Contacts,’ as the sub-title of ‘Hugh Selwyn Mauberley’ has it.

It is not quite Ezra Pound himself. Yeats, another Romantic, was also the subject of his own poetry, himself-as-himself. Pound is his own subject qua modern poet; it is the experience and fate of this writer ‘born / In a half savage country, out of date,’ a voluntary exile for over thirty years, that concern him. Another distinction is necessary. Wallace Stevens has presented us in recent years with a series of strange prose documents about ‘imagination’ and ‘reality.’ If Mr. Stevens' poetry has for substance imagination, in this dichotomy Pound's has for substance reality. A poem like ‘Villanelle: the Psychological Hour’ or the passage I have quoted about Swinburne could have been made only by Pound, and the habit of mind involved has given us much truth that we could not otherwise have had. Two young friends did not come to see the poet! The poet missed a master! This is really in part what life consists of, though reading most poetry one would never guess it.

And we say good-bye to you also,
For you seem never to have discovered
That your relationship is wholly parasitic;
Yet to our feasts you bring neither
Wit, nor good spirits, nor the pleasing attitudes
          Of discipleship.

It is personal, but it is not very personal. The ‘distance’ everywhere felt in the finest verse that treats his subject directly has I think two powerful sources, apart from the usual ones (versification and so on). First, there is the peculiar detachment of interest with which Pound seems to regard himself; no writer could be less revelatory of his passional life, and his friends have recorded—Dr. Williams with annoyance—the same life-long reticence in private. Second, his unfaltering, encyclopedic mastery of tone—a mastery that compensates for a comparative weakness of syntax. (By instinct, I parenthesize, Pound has always minimized the importance of syntax, and this instinct perhaps accounts for his inveterate dislike for Milton, a dislike that has had broad consequences for three decades of the twentieth century; not only did Milton seem to him, perhaps, anti-romantic and anti-realistic, undetailed, and anti-conversational, but Milton is the supreme English master of syntax). Behind this mastery lies his ear. I scarcely know what to say of Pound's ear. Fifteen years of listening have not taught me that it is inferior to the ear of the author of Twelfth Night. The reader who heard the damage done, in my variation, to Pound's line—So old Elkin had only one glory—will be able to form his own opinion.

We write verse—was it Renoir, ‘I paint with my penis’—we write verse with our ears; so this is important. Forming, animating, quelling his material, that ear is one of the main, weird facts of modern verse. It imposes upon the piteous stuff of the Pisan Cantos a ‘distance’ as absolute as upon the dismissal of the epigram just cited. The poet has listened to his life, so to speak, and he tells us that which he hears.

Both the personality-as-subject and the expressive personality are nearly uniform, I think, once they developed. In Yeats, in Eliot, we attend to re-formations of personality. Not really in Pound; he is unregenerate. ‘Toutes mes pièces datent de quinze ans,’ he quoted once with approval from a friend, and the contrast he draws between the life of the poet as it ought to be (or has been) and as it is, this contrast is perennial. But if this account of the poet's subject is correct, what can have concealed it from most even sympathetic and perceptive critics and readers? With regard to critics, two things, I believe. All the best critics of Pound's work themselves write verse, most of them verse indebted to Pound's, much of it heavily; they have been interested in craft, not personality and subject. Also they have been blinded, perhaps, by the notion of the ‘impersonality’ of the poet. This perverse and valuable doctrine, associated in our time with Mr. Eliot's name, was toyed with by Goethe and gets expression in Keats's insistence that the poet ‘has no identity—he is continually in, for, and filling some other body.’ For poetry of a certain mode (the dramatic) this is a piercing notion; for most other poetry, including Pound's, it is somewhat paradoxical, and may disfigure more than it enlightens. It hides motive, which persists. It fails to enable us to see, for instance, that the dominant source of inspiration in Keats's sonnet on Chapman's Homer is antagonism, his contempt for Pope and Pope's Homer. (This view, which I offer with due hesitation, is a development from an industrious and thoughtful biography of the sonnet by a British scholar in Essays and Studies for 1930.²)

The reader is in one way more nearly right than the majority of critics. He is baffled by a heterogeneity of matter, as to which I shall have more to say in a moment, but he hears a personality in Pound's poetry. In fact, his hostility—we reach it at last—is based upon this. The trouble is that he hears the personality he expected to hear, rather than the one that is essentially there. He hears Pound's well-known prose personality, bellicose, programmatic, positive, and he resents it. Mr. Pound is partly responsible. This personality does exist in him, it is what he has lived with, and he can even write poetry with it, as we see in ‘Sestina: Altaforte’ and elsewhere early and late. A follower of Browning, he takes a keenly active view of poetry, and has, conceivably, a most imperfect idea both of just what his subject is and of what his expressive personality is like.

This personality is feline, supra-delicate, absorbed. If Browning made the fastest verse in English, Pound makes the slowest, the most discrete and suave. He once said of a story in Dubliners that it was something better than a story, it was ‘a vivid waiting,’ and the phrase yields much of his own quality. There is restlessness; but the art of the poet places itself, above all, immediately and mysteriously at the service of the passive and elegiac, the nostalgic. The true ascendancy of this personality over the other is suggested by a singular fact: the degree in which the mantic character is absent from his poetry. He looks ahead indeed, looks ahead eagerly, but he does not feel ahead; he feels back. (Since writing the sentence, I come on the phrase in Fenollosa, an impressive remark, ‘The chief work of literary men in dealing with language, and of poets especially, lies in feeling back along the ancient lines of advance.’) It is the poetry of a late craftsman; of an expatriate—

Moaneth alway my mind's lust
That I fare forth, that I afar hence
Seek out a foreign fastness.

(‘The Seafarer’)

Here we are, picking the first fern-shoots
And saying: When shall we get back to our country?
Our sorrow is bitter, but we would not return to our
          country.

(Cathay's first lines)

—of a failing culture. The personality is full already in ‘The Return’ from Ripostes,—return of the hunters, or literary men, for like others of Pound's poems this is a metaphor: those who in an earlier poem had cried

‘Tis the white stag, Fame, we're ahunting,’

now come back illusionless.

The Cantos seem to be a metaphor also. This immense poem, as yet untitled and unfinished, is seriously unfinished: two cantos are missing, and sixteen are to come, if the poet recovers sufficiently to be able to write verse again. Since Canto LXXIV alone is twenty-five pages long, it is clear that the last sixteen of the hundred may alter radically views we have formed of the work as a whole from the part we know; and we want to avoid the error (if it was one) of Mr. Pound when he hazarded in 1933, of the still untitled and unfinished Finnegans Wake, ‘It can hardly be claimed … that the main design emerges above the detail.’ Nevertheless I must say something of the subject and form of this epic. I believe the critical view is that it is a ‘rag-bag’ of the poet's interests, ‘A catalogue, his jewels of conversation.’ It can be read with delight and endless profit thus, if at any rate one understands that it is a work of versification, that is, a poem. The basal rhythm I hear is dactylic, as in the Swinburne and Ouang Chi passages and in the opening line ‘And then went dówn to the ship,’—in this line we see the familiar tendency of English dactyls to resolve themselves into anapests with anacrusis, but the ambiguity seems to me to be progressively avoided as the poem advances. But the rag-bag view depends for support upon lines that Pound cut out of the primitive printed versions of the earliest Cantos; the form greatly developed, the form for the subject. For a rag-bag the poem sets out very oddly. I will describe the first three Cantos.

• I. The Poet's, the Hero's, physical and mental travel: what can ‘I’ expect? Persona, Odysseus-in-exile; antagonist, Poseidon (the ‘godly sea’—an ironic pun). Material: escape-from-transformation, sacrifice, descent to Hell, recognition of an obligation to the Dead (parents, masters), prediction of return alone over the seas, ‘Lose all companions.’ (This is exactly, thirty years later, what happened to the poet.) Form: a depth-introduction, heroic Greek (Odyssey xi) through Renaissance Latin (Divus) in old-heroic-English-style as modified by modern style. So the first Canto, about sacrifice to the enemy, acknowledgment of indebtedness, and outset.
• II. The orchestra begins, the poet's nineteenth-century English master to Provençal to Chinese to ancient British to modern Spanish (another exile) to ancient Greek, very rapidly; then the Poet's theme and temptation, Beauty, a faithless woman (Helen); then an exquisite, involved color- and sense-lyric (the first of dozens) in honor of Poseidon's beloved; then the Canto proper, about betrayal, the metamorphoses into ‘Sniff and pad-foot of beasts’ of all those who do not recognize and wish to sell (sell out) the God—Dionysus and Poseidon are linked as having power each over the sea, and those false to them are the ‘betrayers of language’ of Canto XIV, Mr. Nixon of ‘Mauberley’—‘I’ (Acoethes, the persona) alone have not. Exilic Ovid is the fable's source.
• III. Three themes: (1) A stronger sea-ceremony than sacrifice, embracing of difficulties, the Venetian ‘sponzalizio de mar’ (‘to wed the sea as a wife,’ Canto XXVI), ‘voce tinnula’ below being Catullus' ‘with ringing voice’ for nuptial songs; (2) enmities and poverty that beset the Poet or Hero (persona, the Cid), proscription; (3) artistic mortality, a Mantegna fresco flaking, and just before, an opposite example, Ignez da Castro stabbed by her lover's order (Pedro I of Portugal) in 1355, then avenged by her son, exhumed and crowned (‘here made to stand’)—

Time is the evil. Evil.
                                                                                A day, and a day
Walked the young Pedro baffled,
                                                                                a day, and a day
After Ignez was murdered.
Came the Lords in Lisboa
                                                                                a day, and a day
In homage. …

(Canto XXX)

This kind of interpenetration of life and art, in metaphor, is one of the poem's triumphs, a Coleridgean ‘fusing.’

Such, according to the notes I once made in my margin, is the beginning of this famous ‘formless’ work which is, according to one critic of distinction, ‘not about anything.’ Reviewers of The Pisan Cantos have showed surprise that they were so ‘personal,’ and yet very fine,—fine,—it is the most brilliant sequence indeed since the original thirty. The Cantos have always been personal; only the persona increasingly adopted, as the Poet's fate clarifies, is Pound himself. The heterogeneity of material every reader remarks seems to have three causes. The illusion of Pound's romanticism (‘—if romanticism indeed be an illusion!’ he exclaims in Indiscretions) has given him an inordinate passion for ages and places where the Poet's situation appears attractive, as in the Malatesta cantos, where Sigismondo is patron as much as ruler and lover (VIII-XI), and the Chinese cantos (XIII, XLIX, LII-LXI); here he is sometimes wonderful but sometimes ungovernable. Then he is anxious to find out what has gone wrong, with money and government, that has produced our situation for the Poet; several of the money-cantos, XLV and LI, are brilliant, but most of the American historical cantos (XXXI-IV, XXXVII-VIII, LXII-LXXI) are willed, numb, angry—the personae Jefferson and John Adams are not felt and so the material is uncontrolled. The rest of his heterogeneity is due to an immoderate desire, strong in some other modern artists also, for mere conservation—

And lest it pass with the day's news
Thrown out with the daily paper.

(Canto XXVIII)

Once the form, and these qualifications, are understood, Pound's work presents less difficulty than we are used to in ambitious modern poetry. Pieces like ‘A Song of the Degrees’ (an anti-Psalm) and ‘Papyrus’ (a joke, for that matter a clear and good one) are rare. Occasionally you have to look things up if you don't wish to be puzzled; and it does no harm to use the index volume of Britannica Eleventh, and various dictionaries, and to be familiar with Pound's prose, when you read the Cantos; the labor is similar to that necessary for a serious understanding of Ulysses, and meditation is the core of it. To find out what a modern poet has done we have often to ask why he did it.

The poet's own statements must be accepted with a certain reserve, which neither his admirers nor his detractors have always exercised. Thus the Cantos are said to be written in an equivalent for ideogram. We have recognized their relation to parts of Fenollosa. But Fenollosa's technical center is an attack on the copula; I observe that four of the lines about Ouang Chi successively employ the copula without loss to characteristic beauty, and I reason that we must inquire into these things for ourselves. More interesting, far, are the equivalents for musical form, and the versification. So with Pound's remark that the Cantos are ‘the tale of the tribe’; they seem to be only apparently an historical or philosophical epic, actually a personal epic—as he seems to understand himself elsewhere in Culture³ when he suggests that the work may show, like Beethoven's music, the ‘defects inherent in a record of struggle.’ Mr. Pound too may really, like his critics, regard the work as nearly plotless and heroless. Writing of Dr. Williams he says, ‘I would almost move … to the generalization that plot, major form, or outline should be left to authors who feel some inner need for the same; even let us say a very strong, unusual, unescapable need for these things; and to books where the said form, plot, etc., springs naturally from the matter treated.’ ‘Almost,’ and he is not speaking of the Cantos directly, but the passage is a very striking and heretical one. I put in evidence against it his long labors on the opening Cantos, and the Cantos themselves in my simple analysis, where the arraying of themes is quite different from casuality. The Hell-allusions in the first half of the work, with the allusions to Heaven in recent Cantos, also strongly imply a major form. But all present discussion must be tentative. I have the impression that Pound allowed, in whatever his plan exactly was (if it exactly was, and if it was one plan), for the drift-on-life, the interference of fate, inevitable in a period of violent change; that this may give us something wholly unpredictable in the Cantos to come, as it has given us already the marvellous pages of The Pisan Cantos. Here we feel the poet as he felt D'Annunzio in 1922: D'Annunzio, he wrote from Paris to the Dial, ‘lies with a bandaged eye in a bombarded Venice, foaming with his own sensations, memories, speculations as to what Dante might or might not have done had he been acquainted with Aeschylus.’ Foaming, yet always with the limpidity, clarté, the love against rhetoric, for which his poetry is our model in this century. It would be interesting, if the Cantos were complete, to compare the work with another poem, not more original in conception, exhibiting, if a smaller range of material and technical variety, greater steadiness, a similar substance and a similar comprehensive mastery of expression, ‘The Prelude’; but the argument of my very limited essay is ended. Let us listen to this music.

Notes

1. Without allusion to the poet's personal situation, which is rather a matter for courts, which have reached no verdict, and psychiatrists, who have declared the poet insane, than for literary criticism, it will be recalled as a gloss for these lines that when the Irish patriot Sir Roger Casement was tried for treason a war ago he had to be tried under a statute centuries old, the charge being based upon a conventional oath of personal loyalty to the King made when Casement was knighted for services ‘to the Crown’ as a civil servant investigating atrocities in the Putomayo.

2. B. Ifor Evans, ‘Keats's Approach to the Chapman Sonnet’, Essays and Studies (1930), xvi, 26-52.

3. The genteel title of the New York edition of Guide to Kulchur.