SOURCE: Fraser, G. S. “Pound and His Critics.” In Ezra Pound, pp. 86-114. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1960.

[In the following essay, Fraser charts the critical perception of Pound, particularly that of Wyndham Lewis, and in what way his politics may have colored his legacy.]

Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot have had more written about them, in their own lifetimes, than any previous poets in the English language one can think of. Of writers more or less contemporary with them, also writing in English, the three who compete with them in this respect are James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, and W. B. Yeats and a good deal of the writing about these three is biographical; a good deal, also, of the more elaborate expository or appreciative writing dates from after their deaths. In Pound's case, for instance, there is one book, Hugh Kenner's, devoted to his work as a whole, at least three books devoted to the Cantos and a volume of essays by various hands on the same subject, there is a book of essays and tributes collected by Peter Russell for Pound's sixty-fifth birthday, and there is a little expository volume on Hugh Selwyn Mauberley.

There is a book on the influence of Japan on Western culture of which the liveliest parts are concerned with what Pound and the Imagists generally learned from the haiku. T. S. Eliot's introduction to the Selected Poems and F. R. Leavis's pages on Hugh Selwyn Mauberley in New Bearings in English Poetry are classically just and generous fairly early appreciations of the poetry up to the Cantos. Two close confrères of Pound's, Wyndham Lewis and Yeats, wrote about him (Lewis in various places but most importantly in his great book of literary-philosophical polemical criticism, Time and Western Man, Yeats most importantly in The Oxford Book of Modern Verse) intimately, as equals; allowing themselves the expression not only of admiration but of irritation, even exasperation.

This familiar intimacy of tone gives their criticism a special value which it seems to me that even that of Eliot (a younger man, in a sense a disciple, very much moved by the desire to express gratitude) does not quite possess. Joyce disliked Pound's political fieriness, and found the Cantos quite unreadable, as Pound found Finnegan's Wake. There are good essays on Pound by fellow poets a little younger like Allen Tate and R. P. Blackmur. Ronald Bottrall, in Scrutiny, in the early 1930's, had a fine essay on the first thirty Cantos. Donald Davie and A. Alvarez are two young English poets and critics who have written about Pound particularly well. The finest contemporary poet whose attitude to Pound has been consistently hostile and contemptuous is Robert Graves. Other critics who have expressed a pretty firm dislike of Pound include Raymond Mortimer, Sir Maurice Bowra, and Richard Aldington. One might, broadly, say that no contemporary poet has been more discussed and more disagreed about.

It is natural to attribute this disagreement among critics about the value of Pound's work to political or ideological disagreement. But I think this theory does not work. I am, for instance, myself an old-fashioned Pictish liberal, and yet I did a great deal from about 1945 onwards, when Pound was under a very dark cloud indeed, to see that he got fairly treated in English literary journals; and I know people who, sharing some of his more violent prejudices, detest his poetry. The disagreement also existed (not only between critics, but in a single critic's mind) long before Pound had involved himself, self-hurtingly, in politics. It existed, for instance, in the minds of Wyndham Lewis and of Yeats: I shall come to Yeats later: but some of Wyndham Lewis's passages, in Time and Western Man, seem to me to sum up in what is still a very vivid and contemporary way the mixed feelings which Pound's work arouses in any open, honest, and disinterested lover of fine literature.

Lewis was a violent and, no doubt, a cantankerous man. He was not an example of serene and easy balance. But still he was something as near as our century has produced to a Renaissance man: a painter, a critic of art and literature and philosophy, a writer of novels and stories and philosophical fantasies, a social theorist, a poet even, of surprisingly uneven and sometimes slapdash but sometimes superlative quality, a man, in short, in an old-fashioned term, of genius. His very lack of care for the ordinary social amenities and for the delicacies and reticences sometimes imposed by personal friendship, when a friend writes critically about a friend, help to give his purely critical work an extraordinary penetration and vigour. And he is penetrating and vigorous (though not, perhaps, finally just) in Time and Western Man about Pound.

Time and Western Man came out in 1927, rather more than ten years after Wyndham Lewis's collaboration with Pound in the Blast period. It has two chapters, Chapter IX, “Ezra Pound, etc.” and Chapter XV, “A Man in Love With the Past,” largely devoted to Pound. Their tone might be called one of affectionate exasperation (allowing that Lewis, perhaps, had not much of a natural gift for affection, and that for the brilliant expression of exasperation he had a very splendid gift, indeed). In Chapter IX, there is a preliminary tribute to Pound's generosity as a person. Lewis had turned to Pound, for money, for sympathy, for hospitality, in some time of trouble: he had got it: Pound was a “generous and graceful person” and “a kinder heart never lurked beneath a portentous exterior than is to be found in Ezra Pound.” He goes on to say that Pound is not a “vulgar humbug” even in his “purely propagandist activities” but “a revolutionary simpleton.”¹ He describes his collaboration with Pound on Blast:

That group was composed of people all very ‘extremist’ in their views. In the matter of fine art, as distinct from literature, it was their policy to admit no artist disposed to technical compromise, as they regarded it. … [Pound's] poetry to the mind of the more fanatical of the group was a series of pastiches … Its novelty consisted largely in the distance it went back, not forward; in archaism, not in new creation. That was how they regarded Pound's literary contributions. But this certain discrepancy between what Pound said—what he supported and held up as an example—and what he did, was striking enough to impress itself on anybody.²

In the same chapter, Lewis describes Pound as a “sensationalist half-impresario, half-poet.” But Pound is being used mainly as a stick to beat other people. In Chapter XV of Time and Western Man, Pound is the main subject. I will try, renouncing the pleasure of quoting Lewis's magnificent punch-to-the-jaw, sadistic sergeant-major's prose, to summarise the argument. Pound, says Lewis, in his first paragraph, is not an originator, but a slave of fashion, and a parasite on originators; though there could not be a “cleaner and sweeter” parasite. He is similarly a parasite on the creators of the past.³ Yet he is not a nobody; yet in a queer sense he is not a person either. There is nothing original about him. And, after all, one must quote:

He sees people and things as other people would see them; there is no direct contact between Ezra and an individual person or thing. Ezra is a crowd; a little crowd. People are seen by him only as types. There is the ‘museum official’, the ‘norman cocotte’, and so on. By himself he would seem to have neither any convictions nor eyes in his head. There is nothing that he intuits well, certainly never originally. Yet when he can get into the skin of somebody else, of power, he becomes a lion or a lynx. This sort of parasitism is with him phenomenal.⁴

Lewis goes on to say that if there were something basically false and unpleasant in Pound's nature, he would be “unable to enter into the renowned and noble creatures whom he has passed his time in entering”—for instance, the author of The Seafarer, Arnaut Daniel, Cavalcanti, Propertius. The genius in the host would detect any falsity in the parasite. But he sees Pound as a poet wholly concerned with the past: “He has never loved anything living as he has loved the dead.”⁵ Lewis obviously either never read, or never understood, Hugh Selwyn Mauberley. (What living person or thing, anyway, from Lewis's circlingly destructive point of vantage, his free captain's machine-gun post in no-man's-land swivelling round at both the entrenched armies, was worth loving? Lewis?) Lewis goes on to criticise, more technically, a quality in much of Pound's verse which he describes as a kind of “mock-bitter, sententious terseness,” “a melodramatic, chopped ‘bitter’ tone suggested by the abrupt clipping and stopping to which he is addicted. It is the laconicism of the strong silent man.”⁶ And Lewis notes that this terseness is even more tiresome in Pound's prose than in his verse:

In his journalism, his terseness … is of a breezy and boisterous order. For example, such violent expressions as ‘bunk, junk, spoof, mush, slush, tosh, bosh’, are favourites with him; and he remains convinced that such over-specifically manly epithets are universally effective, in spite of all proof to the contrary.⁶

What worries Lewis more, however, is the terseness in the verse:

Were he a novelist, you would undoubtedly find the description ‘He broke off’ repeatedly used. In his verse he is always ‘breaking off.’ And he ‘breaks off’, indeed, as a rule, twice in every line.⁶

Lewis goes on to give technical examples of this from the early Cantos, examples which do not convince me of the justice of his hostile criticism (there is a sense in which one could say that Lewis had a coarse ear), but which are worth quoting as one of the very few examples I have found of detailed hostile technical criticism of Pound. He quotes this:

Cave of Nerea
She like a great shell curved,
And the boat drawn without sound
Without odour of ship-work,
Nor bird-cry, nor any noise of wave moving,
Nor splash of porpoise, nor any noise of wave moving,
Within her cave, Nerea,
She like a great shell curved.

These were Wyndham Lewis's strictures on this passage:

This actually seems to belong to the repetitive hypnotic method of Miss Stein and Miss Loos [the great Gertrude Stein, Lewis means, and Anita Loos, the author of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, a sweetly funny book to which Lewis had taken an irrational scunner]. ‘She like a great shell curved’ and ‘any noise of wave moving’, both repeated, are in any case swinburnian stage-properties. The whole passage with its abrupt, sententious pauses is unpleasantly reminiscent of the second-rate actor accustomed to take heavy and emotional parts. [May I remind the reader here of the little dialogue in another chapter, between myself and a young French girl, listening in to Pound's Third Programme broadcasts. “Un comédien?” “Pas un comédien, un tragédien.” Anglice: “An actor?” “Not an actor, a ham.”]⁶

Lewis goes on to quote some colloquial Americanese from the early Cantos, to this effect:

He tried to pull me on Marx, and he told me
About the ‘romance of his business’… So I sez:
Waal haow is it you're over here, right off the Champs Elyza?
And how can yew be here? Why dont the fellers at home
Take it all off you? …
‘Oh’ he sez ‘I ain't had to rent any money …
It's a long time since I had tew rent any money.’

Lewis comments on this, in his sharpest fashion:

All Pound's comic reliefs speak the same tongue; they are all jocose and conduct their heavy german-american horseplay in the same personal argot of Pound. … Their thick facetiousness is of the rollicking slap-on-the-back order, suggesting another day and another scene than ours. … They are a caricature of Pound attempting to deal with real life—they are Pound at his worst.⁷

Lewis goes on to say, however, that the very failure of such passages proves the existence in Pound of an authentic naïveté. “And a simpleton is what we are left with. That natural and unvarnished, unassimilable, Pound, is the true child, which so many people in vain essay to be. But some inhibition has prevented him from getting that genuine naïf (which would have made him a poet) into his work. There, unfortunately, he always attitudinizes, frowns, struts, looks terribly knowing, ‘breaks off’, shows off, puffs himself out, and so obscures the really simple, charming creature that he is.”⁷

Wyndham Lewis seems to me one of the very greatest critics of this century chiefly because he had this extraordinary gift of, as it were, transferring directly to the page (I imagine him as sitting by the typewriter with possibly a glass of whisky by his right hand) the blurted and indiscreet conversational insights of an artist, to artists, about artists. He is not an academic making things clear to students, or a literary journalist being polite at a party, or a lecturer to a lot of old ladies being purring and condescending, but just a man, at once alert and excited, amusing himself about equals, among equals. I put these remarks of his first in this chapter, because it is better, in any court case, to hear the evidence for the prosecution before hearing the evidence of the defence, and the summing up. And the manner is more genial than brutal, after all; Lewis leaves us laughing at Pound, but liking him.

And yet to call Lewis a great critic is not necessarily to call him, in detail, a good critic. His genius as a critic was to state, in an unforgettable fashion, the permanently damaging things that could be said; as in the essay on Faulkner, in Men Without Art, with the passage about Faulkner's whip-poor-will machine, with which he pumps magnolias and sourceless moonlight into his prose whenever, for lack of these dense, synthetic atmospherics, the narrative seems to be flagging. He misses out, in Time and Western Man, all Pound's greatest earlier achievements, Cathay, “Near Perigord,” “Homage to Sextus Propertius,” Hugh Selwyn Mauberley; it is ridiculous to call the author of these poems, or sets or sequences of poems, in any really damaging sense (in any sense other than that in which all genius has a terrifying simplicity) a simpleton. The kind of attack which Lewis himself made, in a splendid piece of rapid polemics like The Doom of Youth, on the corruptions, fatuities, and sinister directions of a journalistic-commercial culture, Pound does as art, with the most lovely economy, in Mauberley. What Lewis has done is simply, with brilliant tactlessness, to crystallise, for ever, the most sympathetic reader's deliberately suppressed doubts and reservations.

Yeats, the next major contemporary of Pound's whom we are to consider as one of his critics, is not ordinarily considered a very good critic of literature. Few readers, for instance, share his admiration for Dorothy Wellesley or W. J. Turner and it is only fairly recently that youngish English critics like Frank Kermode and Iain Fletcher have begun to see what Yeats saw in, and what he learned from, his confrères of the 1890's, like Arthur Symons, Ernest Dowson, and Lionel Johnson. On the whole, though a wonderful piece of character-acting, Yeats's introduction to The Oxford Book of Modern Verse is a very eccentric critical document, indeed. A natural generosity of temperament (in this he was at the opposite pole from Wyndham Lewis), a dislike of wishing to appear the master of a school (he never liked the minor poets who imitated him), and a modesty, far deeper than his surface arrogance, that made him admire things that he could not do himself, all these conspired to make Yeats, as a critic, turn geese into swans. But here and there in this introduction, where he is able to combine admiration with a certain sense of personal detachment, he writes like a very great critic indeed. Thus, there are a couple of sentences about Housman and Hardy (the first is famous, but the second is even profounder criticism):

The Shropshire Lad is worthy of its fame, but a mile further and all had been marsh. Thomas Hardy, though his work lacked technical accomplishment, made the necessary correlation through his mastery of the impersonal objective scene.⁸

And there is the unforgettable judgment on a lyric by Bridges:

Every metaphor, every thought a commonplace, emptiness everywhere, the whole magnificent.⁹

Where Pound was concerned, Yeats was admirably placed to bring into play this intermittent gift of his for penetrating and unforgettably just criticism. If the introduction to The Oxford Book of Modern Verse is, on the whole, a critical curiosity, nevertheless the pages on Pound are as memorable in their way as some of Coleridge's pages on Wordsworth. Yeats liked Pound, was amused and sometimes irritated by him, admired him, and owed him a certain debt of gratitude. At the same time, he never wanted to write in Pound's manner, as he wanted, for instance, to write in Turner's or Dorothy Wellesley's; and Pound did not belong to the magical inner circle of his friends. Unlike Synge and Lionel Johnson and Augusta Gregory, Pound never comes into a poem, is never transformed by Yeats into a heroic profile. There were aspects of Pound, also, which stimulated Yeats's wit, which is another name for his intelligence. His own gift for creating complex form makes him sympathetic, also, to the ambitious formal complexity of the Cantos:

Ezra Pound has made flux his theme; plot, characterization, logical discourse, seem to him abstractions unsuitable to a man of his generation. He is mid-way in an immense poem in vers libre called for the moment The Cantos, where the metamorphosis of Dionysus, the descent of Odysseus into Hades, repeat themselves in various disguises, always in association with some third that is not repeated. … Like other readers I discover at present merely exquisite or grotesque fragments … Can impressions that are in part visual, in part metrical, be related like the notes of a symphony; has the author been carried beyond reason by a theoretical conception? His belief in his own conception is so great that since the appearance of the first Canto I have tried to suspend judgement.¹⁰

Yeats, however, has not really suspended judgment. The judgment in the next paragraph is the most magisterial general judgment on Pound that I know:

When I consider his work as a whole I find more style than form; at moments more style, more deliberate nobility and the means to convey it than in any contemporary poet known to me, but it is constantly interrupted, broken, twisted into nothing by its direct opposite, nervous obsession, nightmare, stammering confusion; he is an economist, poet, politician, raging at malignants with inexplicable characters and motives, grotesque figures out of a child's book of beasts. This loss of self-control, common among uneducated revolutionists, is rare—Shelley had it in some degree—among men of Ezra Pound's culture and erudition. Style and its opposite can alternate, but form must be full, sphere-like, single. Even where there is no interruption he is often content, if certain verses and lines have style, to leave unbridged transitions, unexplained ejaculations, that make his meaning unintelligible. … Even where the style is sustained throughout one gets an impression, especially when he is writing in vers libre, that he has not got all the wine into the bowl, that he is a brilliant improvisator translating at sight from an unknown Greek masterpiece …¹⁰

Yeats seems to me to have hit in those passages both on the central aesthetic problem about Pound's work (the alternation of style and anti-style) and on some of the psychological factors underlying it. It should be noticed where he coincides with Wyndham Lewis.

For Lewis, Pound is essentially the child or the “revolutionary simpleton.” For Yeats he resembles the “uneducated revolutionary” and rages at figures out of “a child's book of beasts.” The critical problem which they both raise about Pound is not at all unlike the central critical problem that people raise about Blake. Blake, too, was a “child” and he might be described either as an “uneducated revolutionary” or a “revolutionary simpleton.” Blake's own crowning achievement, from his own point of view, must have been the long prophetic books, in which he managed to make a myth, coherent within his own terms, of his unique and personal vision of the world; the Cantos are a myth, coherent within its own terms, of the same sort. But ordinary readers of Blake prefer his short lyrics to the prophetic books; by the ordinary reader, there, I mean the reader who is primarily a literary critic, not primarily a disciple of Blake's ideas. Rather similarly, a first-rate literary critic like F. R. Leavis sees Mauberley as Pound's crowning achievement; the Cantos on the whole repel and baffle him. A critic, like Kathleen Raine, who sees the prophetic books as Blake's crowning achievement accepts them also as a sort of sacred book, a new bible; rather similarly, I think, the critic who is quite whole-heartedly to accept the Cantos must have wholeheartedly accepted, also, many major elements in Pound's vision of the world. The stress, particularly in the Cantos after the first thirty or so, is more and more didactic, on teaching by examples. The diction is often extremely prosaic or that of an exhortation. You must, if you are to persevere with this illustration of “ideas in action,” have some faith (you must at least assume a provisional one) in the soundness of the ideas; Yeats and Wyndham Lewis though both, like Pound, in a sense Men of the Right, see all the difficulties involved in assuming, even provisionally, such a faith.

The third writer whom one can think of as an equal who has written critically about Pound is T. S. Eliot. His introduction to the volume of Pound's Selected Poems, which Faber and Faber first brought out in 1928, is, even among Eliot's critical writings, a model of tact and tone. It was this introduction which first made me excited about Pound, when I came across it as a schoolboy in 1931 or 1932. Eliot points out, first of all, that to follow Pound's poetry from its beginnings makes the Cantos much more comprehensible. He points out that vers libre as, for instance, he himself wrote it in his early poems, influenced by the Jacobean dramatists and by Laforgue, and as Pound wrote it (influenced, for instance, though Eliot does not say, by the haiku and experiments in translation from Latin, Chinese, and Anglo-Saxon) is not the same sort of thing as the free verse of Whitman.

Eliot goes on to note the obvious influences on Pound's earliest, non-free verse poetry, Browning, Yeats, the Pre-Raphaelites, the 1890's. He makes the interesting point that these masters taught Pound how to use the speaking voice in verse, whereas it was, for instance, translating from Provençal that taught him to sing. He notes the paradox that people object to Pound both for being too modernistic (in his form), and too old-fashioned (in his subject-matter). But Pound's great and real originality for Eliot is, like all true originality, a development of tradition:

Poets may be divided into those who develop technique, those who imitate technique, and those who invent technique. When I say ‘invent’, I should use inverted commas, for invention would be irreproachable if it were possible. ‘Invention’ is wrong only because it is impossible. I mean that the difference between the ‘development’ and the ‘sport’ is, in poetry, a capital one. There are two kinds of ‘sports’ in poetry, in the floricultural sense. One is the imitation of development, and the other is the imitation of some Idea of originality. The former is commonplace, a waste product of civilization. The latter is contrary to life. The poem which is absolutely original is absolutely bad, it is, in the bad sense, ‘subjective’, with no relation to the world to which it appeals. … Now Pound's originality is genuine in that his versification is a logical development of the verse of his English predecessors. Whitman's originality is both genuine and spurious. It is genuine in so far as it is a logical development of certain English prose; Whitman was a great prose writer. It is spurious in so far as Whitman asserted that his great prose was a new form of verse.¹¹

The earlier part of this passage seems to me one of Eliot's really notable contributions to theoretical criticism, as worthy of fame, in its way, as (though less famous than) “the objective correlative” and “a certain dissociation of sensibility.” The point about Whitman's free verse not being really verse, nor D. H. Lawrence's either, is developed in more detail by Sir Herbert Read in his essay on Pound in The True Voice of Feeling. Whitman and Lawrence, for Read, are writing biblical prose, with a rhetoric of parallelism; a similar interesting contemporary case is David Jones, the author of The Anathemata and In Parenthesis. Like Whitman and Lawrence, Jones is a man of genius, but it is more convenient to describe what he writes as liturgical prose, broken up on the page into convenient verse units, than as even very free verse. (I would tend also to agree with Saintsbury that the very long lines in some of Blake's prophetic books are really Biblical or Ossianic prose, and verse only by a kind of courtesy.)

It is the technical excellence of Eliot's essay which has led me into this technical digression. But it is not merely technical. Eliot notes, as Wyndham Lewis, too, had, that the specifically modern liveness of Pound's early poems is not necessarily to be found in his poems on twentieth-century themes: “His Bertrand de Born is much more living than his Mr. Hecatomb Styrax (Moeurs Contemporaines).”¹² He traces with beautiful subtlety the growth in Pound's work of the complete fusion of personal feeling and personal technique that we find in Mauberley. He points out how the advances in technical mastery, the advances in grasp of a personal tone, of original feeling, do not proceed step by step but, as it were, play leapfrog over each other. In a fine passage on Cathay, he praises Pound as “the inventor of Chinese poetry for our time.” His translations seem “translucencies.”¹³ This will prove an illusion; in time they will be important mainly as magnificent specimens of twentieth-century poetry; just as North's Plutarch is important mainly as a magnificent specimen of Tudor prose. Pound's originality is, Eliot also rightly insists, as fully present in his translations as in his original poems; and in his little squibs or epigrams (Eliot does not distinguish these from haiku-like poems) in Lustra as in longer or more ambitious-looking pieces. He notes:

Pound's epigrams and translations represent a rebellion against the romantic tradition which insists that a poet should be continually inspired, which allows the poet to present bad verse as poetry, but denies him the right to make good verse unless it can also be great poetry.¹⁴

At the end of the essay, developing an idea of which he has already planted the germ, Eliot points out that every good poet's work develops along two lines, towards increasing technical excellence, and towards what one might call (though this is not the phrase Eliot uses) a mature grasp of experience. “Now and then the two lines may converge at a high peak, so that we get a masterpiece.”¹⁴ Pound is peculiarly interesting in that his shorter poems give us examples of (I am condensing Eliot, but I hope not seriously misrepresenting him) form developing rather in advance of mature feeling, mature feeling still rather groping for an adequate form, and sometimes a very close approximation of form and feeling. This, in the early work, Eliot finds above all in Mauberley:

It may give surprise that I attach so much importance to Hugh Selwyn Mauberley. This seems to me a great poem.

Eliot goes on to explain that the apparent “roughness and naïveté” of the versification of Mauberley is the result of “many years of hard work.” But he appreciates Mauberley not only for the “sophistication and the great variety of the verse,” but because it is a “positive document of sensibility. It is compact of the experience of a certain man in a certain place at a certain time; and it is also a document of an epoch; it is genuine tragedy and comedy; and it is, in the best sense of Arnold's worn phrase, a ‘criticism of life’.”¹⁵

I have dealt at what may seem excessive length with these criticisms of Pound by Wyndham Lewis, Yeats, and Eliot, because they are criticisms by men of equal or comparable genius, and because they were the writings which, when I was myself a schoolboy or an undergraduate, first excited my own interest in Pound. Lewis's book came out in 1927, Eliot's essay in 1928, Yeats's anthology at the end of 1936. Of these three writers, Eliot was the only one likely to secure a respectful hearing for Pound in academic circles, or among, say, the Sunday reviewers; Lewis was a wild man; Yeats was greatly admired as a poet, but not taken very seriously as a critic. Even Eliot himself in the late 1920's and early 1930's was by no means the firmly established figure that he is today. I remember in my own undergraduate days at St Andrews in the 1930's that an interest in “this modern poetry” was rather severely frowned on; one was told to go back to the tradition of R. L. Stevenson and Andrew Lang. Things were better, no doubt, at Oxford and Cambridge, but there was still a strong entrenchment, in the English schools and elsewhere, of embattled conservatives. And when Dr F. R. Leavis of Downing College, Cambridge, published in 1932 New Bearings in English Poetry, with the central purpose of making (in particular) Pound, Hopkins, and Eliot academically viable, he was being very bold. He takes Eliot's introduction to The Selected Poems as the point of departure for his essay on Pound.

Leavis begins his essay by noticing that, in spite of Eliot's tributes to Pound as il miglior fabbro, “the influence of Mr Pound that can be observed from outside is secondary to Mr Eliot's.” He thinks that Eliot's gratitude to Pound has rather unhappily affected the tone of the introduction. He suggests, rather brusquely or briskly, that the fact that Pound's early work technically leads up to Mauberley does not necessarily make the early work interesting in itself. Why not start with Mauberley itself? Leavis notes, like Eliot, the debt in the early work to the 1890's, Browning, the Pre-Raphaelites, but he is less happy about it. Even the Browningesque handling of Provence, in “Near Perigord,” is “a form of evasion.”¹⁶ The passion for translation bespeaks a certain amateurishness, or the mood of the amateur, and even Pound's modern themes are often mainly an occasion for verse practice (one is reminded here of the remark of Wyndham Lewis, whom, however, Leavis does not approve of or admire, that Pound never, as a person, really sees anything). Pound's “dropping of archaisms and poeticisms, and his use of modern speech-idiom, are particularly interesting,” but nobody, from the earlier poetry, could have foreseen Mauberley:

In Mauberley we feel a pressure of experience, an impulsion from deep within. The verse is extraordinarily subtle, and its subtlety is the subtlety of the sensibility that it expresses. No one would think here of distinguishing the way of saying from the thing said. It is significant that the pressure seems to derive (we are reminded of Mr Yeats) from a recognition of bankruptcy, of a devoted life summed up in futility.¹⁷

This, which is indeed in some sense the central theme of Mauberley, is hardly likely today to remind us of “Mr Yeats”; it may have looked so in 1932, from Cambridge.

Leavis goes on to summarise some of the topics that give Mauberley a “representative value,” topics, for instance, like the shapelessness and drift of modern culture, its lack of styles and standards; the isolation and the “dubious status” of the artist; the obvious element of something like autobiography in the poem, combined with “the impersonality of great poetry,” “complete detachment and control.”¹⁷ He then makes a kind of “running commentary” on the poem, noting the affinity between some of the rhythms of the opening poem and some of Eliot's in “A Song for Simeon”:

… it is not surprising that two poets, in the age that has been described, should have to learn to express so subtly by rhythmic means the break-down of rhythm.¹⁸

He notes, however, that in Pound's poetry there are none of “Mr Eliot's complex intensities of concern about soul and body”:

Mr Pound's main concern has always been art; he is, in the most serious sense of the word, an aesthete. It is that makes the peculiar nature of Mr Eliot's plea for the earlier work necessary. But here, in Mauberley, there is the pressure of personal experience … The poet is looking back on a life devoted to the cultivation of aesthetic fastidiousness, technical perfection, exquisite eclecticism. … What is the outcome? … The poems together form one poem, a representative experience of life—tragedy, comedy, pathos and irony. And throughout there is a subtlety of tone, a complexity of attitude, such as we associate with seventeenth-century wit.¹⁹

For those who think Pound's most important poem is Mauberley, Dr Leavis's chapter on Pound in New Bearings in English Poetry is the most important essay on Pound; he has gone over the poem with a great economy of words, but with such a thorough sensitiveness, that he leaves subsequent critics nothing to do but expand him. It is surprising, indeed, how much one writes about modern poetry tends to be something that one has remembered from this little book of Leavis's, without remembering that one remembered it.

He is sharply doubtful about the Cantos. He quotes a statement of Eliot's about the Cantos from an article called “Isolated Superiority”: “I know that Pound has a scheme and a kind of philosophy behind it; it is quite enough for me that he thinks he knows what he is doing; I am glad that the philosophy is there, but I am not interested in it.”²⁰ He quotes also a critic who after praising the Cantos highly suddenly turns on himself, or on Pound, and says, “Throughout the book, he has substituted book-living for actual living.” Leavis finds this just and I am not aware that any of the subsequent Cantos that have appeared, even The Pisan Cantos which have certainly more than “book-living” behind them, have led him to retract or qualify this verdict; but the point, he explains, of this dismissal of the Cantos is to get a proper emphasis put on Mauberley. The Cantos, he says, are Pound's The Ring and the Book; perhaps that verdict, now that so many critics and scholars are going back with growing sympathy to long Victorian poems, sounds a good deal less finally dismissive than it once did. Like all the best critics of poetry, like Eliot also, for instance, Leavis carries most conviction when he quotes. He has the art of choosing a quotation that exactly illustrates sets of qualities, or sets of defects, or balances of strength and weakness, that he is talking about; he quotes nothing, in New Bearings in English Poetry, from the Cantos.

Leavis's dislike of the Cantos might be connected, perhaps, with his dislike of Paradise Lost and, perhaps, more widely of the epic style and intention generally. I have found a good and sympathetic statement of Pound's rather special, rather typically American epical intentions in an article by Roy Harvey Pearce in The Hudson Review for autumn, 1959. He connects Pound with two earlier American poets, Joel Barlow, the author of The Columbiad, and Walt Whitman. The Columbiad is, from what Pearce quotes of it, a very bad poem, indeed, but it is exciting to Pearce because of its typically American utopian vision. Pearce quotes some lines of The Columbiad:

At this blest period, when the total race
Shall speak one language, and all truths embrace,
Instruction clear a speedier course shall find,
And open earlier on the infant mind,
No foreign terms shall cloud with barbarous rules
The dull unmeaning pageantry of schools;
Nor dark authority nor names unknown
Fill the learnt head with ignorance not its own;
But wisdom's eye with beams unclouded shine,
And simplest rules her native charms define;
One living language, one unborrowed dress
Her boldest flights, with fullest force express;
Triumphant virtue in the garb of truth
Win a pure passage to the heart of youth …

This vision of these naïve lines, Pearce suggests, is relevant to what Whitman and to what in a different way Pound have been trying to do; to create

a radically new kind of epic—an epic which, in its very directness and overwhelming clarity, would have not subordinated poetic to moral purpose but have made them one … one which, lacking a traditional hero in which to centre, would create him and make the reader participate in that creation.²¹

He says of Whitman:

The end of Song of Myself, the moral object which synchronizes with its poetic object, is to know that the world is there, and in the knowing, to know itself as there; in effect, through such a transaction to create itself and the possibility for readers to create themselves.²²

Pearce says also of Whitman:

He looks when he wills and interprets as he wills. There is a dialectic here, but not a form. It is essential for the meaning of the poem that the dialectic be unique; for the dialectic derives from the very motion of the protagonist's sensibility.²³

Whitman has, for Pearce, a dialectic but no form. The Cantos have neither dialectic nor form:

rather [they consist] of decorously managed, ideogrammatically set down instants of insight which are to force themselves beyond abstractness into the reader's conscious and so make him new. … If it is but done powerfully enough, there will be no longer a need to tell the tale. For it would be ours—ours in such a way that we would not have to have it told to us. As in Barlow's vision, and as in Whitman's practice, the end of poetry is that reconstitution of man which will entail the withering away of poetry.²⁴

Pearce notes two things: firstly, that in this kind of epic, in Pound as much as in Whitman, the poet is his own hero, “as his epic is the struggle of his creative forces to bring into being something which constitutes his central subject.” The author of such a kind of poetry cannot afford to be critical and selective about himself. He forces all his compulsions on the reader, Whitman his “homosexuality and his political sentimentality”²⁵, Pound much more disturbingly his “paranoia and anti-semitism.”²⁶ An indirect implication of this, though Pearce does not bring it explicitly out, is that a poet of this kind, with this perhaps megalomaniac or at least messianic ambition, cannot fruitfully engage in intercourse with critics, with critics in the proper sense of the word; Whitman would have been unable to “use” Matthew Arnold, Pound, at the stage of The Cantos, to “use” Dr Leavis. Instead, they gather round them disciples and explicators, who often express themselves with an embarrassing fulsomeness. Pearce quotes a passage from a piece by Louise Myers, in Pound Newsletter, 1955:

It would seem that [Pound] has his fingers on the pulse of creation, and like the poet-philosopher Goethe, bequeaths more than he states: a myriad of facets of existence to be explored in coming years, an attempt to understand what this fire is that he … kindles in one.²⁷

We blush at such writing, Pearce suggests, and yet after all we are all looking for someone to kindle a fire in us. And, struggling as we all do, to find at least sometimes the “real hero” in ourselves, we can be taught and heartened, in an odd way, by the failures and weaknesses of Pound and Whitman, as well as by their strengths. We have our own failures and weaknesses, but we do sometimes “find” ourselves, as Whitman and Pound sometimes do. The writing of Whitman and Pound is as if the traditional hero of epic had been forced to write his own story and as if the writing, in an odd sense, had been the making; indeed, one comprehensible way of describing the Cantos is (though again, Pearce does not bring this out explicitly) to say that they are a very prolonged account of the occasions, in Pound's reading, his experiences of life and art and society, his loving and hating, his insights and bewilderments, that brought them into existence; the epic is, in a sense, about writing an epic; and Odysseus is Homer. Pearce's concluding remarks are:

I am reminded of some words of Robert Penn Warren in the prefatory note to Brother to Dragons: “… if poetry is the little myth we make, history is the big myth we live, and in our living, constantly remake.” The struggle to make the big myth into the little one—this is as good a definition as any of the American epic.²⁸

Pearce seems to me to have provided as good a general account as exists of the special kind of charity we need if we are to read the Cantos with profit, and of the ways in which traditional definitions of what an epic is have to be revised to fit the Cantos. What he does seem to bypass is ordinary literary criticism. The wish, by a piece of sacred writing, to recreate the self and the world, to make all new, is a noble one, of course; but, of course, it has never been achieved, even when sacred writings had led to the foundations of churches or sects or communities. I once had the job of revising, for Unesco, the English translation of portions from the sacred scriptures of the Sikhs, the Adi Granth. I found these, like the Cantos, in places noble and inspiring, in places pedestrian and boring; there was a great deal of repetition, the same images, the same key ideas, plugged in again and again. These writings have created and they sustain a great religious community, a community opposed to caste, idols, pilgrimages, yogi, keen on good works and the family virtues, but they have not, on the whole, transformed the world or even India. One finds “literature” in them, but it would seem pointless to judge them, as a whole, as literature. Must one say something of the same sort about the Cantos as a whole?

Let me take some hostile views of the Cantos as a whole, held by some of Pound's fellow poets. In 1940, reviewing Cantos LII-LXXL, those about China and early American history, a fine poet and a brilliant reviewer, Louise Bogan, wrote pettishly:

The dullness and brutishness of the Ming and Manchu rulers described in the first section, are equalled only by the fustiness and mustiness of John Quincy Adams' [she means John Adams'] notations on life and business conditions with which Pound deals in the second.²⁹

And she is pettish also, and I think unfair, about the metrics:

As for the metrics, they are often those of prose (which is a mixture of iambs, trochees, and spondees).³⁰

Later, in 1948, reviewing The Pisan Cantos, Miss Bogan was much more generous. On the Cantos as a whole, she wrote:

The poet was breaking down prejudices against forgotten or neglected cultures. He was striking across the lines of specialist scholars, so strict and so snobbish in our own day. He was presenting the past as though it were all simultaneous and were still going on; he was making the point that in art this synchronization and timelessness actually exist.³¹

But she has this reservation to make:

Pound's streak of charlatanry, in The Cantos as a whole, was so interwoven with valuable insight that it was fairly negligible. What became really annoying was his growing tendency towards obsession. The obsessed always lack that final ingredient of greatness, humility. They are also invariably bad-tempered and vituperative. They hammer and scold.

But, like many critics who have strong reservations about The Cantos as a whole, and in particular about the chunks of summarised history, Miss Bogan is impressed by the Pisan Cantos:

Pound's imprisonment in Pisa seems to have brought him back to art and life. The Pisan Cantos shows a new sense of proportion. He begins to feel pity and gratitude, and he begins to smile wryly, even at himself. I cannot think of any other record by an artist or a man of letters, in or out of prison, so filled with a combination of sharp day-to-day observation, erudition, and insight.³²

The one notable poet who has been totally hostile all along to Pound is Robert Graves. In Modernist Poetry, which he wrote with Laura Riding in 1926, he described Pound as “modernist only in the historical sense” but conceded that some of his work, like that of Carl Sandburg, with whom he classed Pound, had at least “widened the limits of reference, diction and construction in poetry.” He also devoted a furious paragraph to a tiny squib of Pound's from Lustra:

PAPYRUS

Spring …
Too long …
Gongula …

When this, Graves wrote,

is seriously offered as a poem, there is some justification of the plain reader and orthodox critic who shrinks from anything that may be labelled ‘modernist’ either in terms of condemnation or approbation. Who or what is Gongula? Is it the name of a person? Of a town? Of a musical instrument? Or is it the obsolete botanical word meaning ‘spores’? Or is it a mistake for Gongora, the Spanish poet from whose name the word ‘gongorism’ is formed, meaning an affected elegance of style? Is the poem a fragment from a real papyrus? Or from an imaginary one? Or are these Mr Pound's thoughts about either a real or imaginary fragment? Or about spring seeming too long because of the gongula of the papyrus-reeds? Rather than answer any of these questions and be driven to the shamefaced bluff of making much out of little, the reader retires to safer ground. Better, he thinks, that ten authentic poets should be left for posterity to discover than that one charlatan should be allowed to steal into the Temple of Fame.³³

This is a splendid piece of invective but, carried away, perhaps, by temperamental antipathy (he met Pound once in the 1920's and disliked him because “he was plump, hunched, soft-spoken and ill-at-ease, with the limpest of handshakes”). Graves is surely making heavy weather of what is a simple but rather good little joke. The poem is the imaginary translation of an imaginary papyrus, most of which has been torn away, so that we have only the first word of each line. Gongula must be a girl's name. The papyrus, if we had it complete, would translate something like this:

Spring (has come again).
Too long (have I been away from thee),
Gongula (my dearest).

The little joke is that simple love lyrics are monotonously the same in any civilisation: “In the spring a young man's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love.”

In the wonderfully readable Clark Lectures of 1955, Graves was especially sharp on Pound's “sketchy education” and his lack of “an inkling of English tradition.” It is the English scholar and gentleman putting the half-baked Yankee intruder in his place. Here is his most slashing sentence about the Cantos:

It is an extraordinary paradox that Pound's sprawling, ignorant, indecent, unmelodious, seldom metrical Cantos, embellished with esoteric Chinese ideographs—for all I know, they may have been traced from the nearest tea-chest—and with illiterate Greek, Latin, Spanish, and Provençal snippets (the Italian and French read all right to me, but I may be mistaken) are now compulsory in many ancient centres of learning.³⁴

For Graves, in any case, Pound's ambition in the Cantos, like Milton's in Paradise Lost, to write a “great” poem is a mistake. It is enough to try to write good poetry, and good poetry is inspired by love, not love of art; by the Muse, not Apollo. And Pound is celebrating always father-figures, Odysseus, Confucius, John Adams, Mussolini; he is the poet of a patriarchal conception of society, the powers and energies which he thinks of as divine emanations, light, intelligence, are traditionally associated with a Father God. For Graves, all Father God religions are evil; Pound would therefore be wrong, in the Cantos, in treating Circe as merely an experience, a delay, a temptation. Pound, for Graves, would be celebrating mainly the insane pride of the male animal, his destructiveness, his herd instinct, his impossible wish for self-sufficiency apart from woman, on whom he ultimately depends. These two great poets are, in a sense, “mighty opposites,” like Hamlet and Claudius; when I was young, and lonely, and sought above all things the male companionship of the tribe, my natural sympathy in this quarrel would have been with Pound; as I grow older, and my male friends drift away or repeat themselves, while my women friends are not only incurably loyal but always new in themselves and renewing to me, my feelings are more with Graves. The sand has shifted to the other half of the hour-glass. I think the future of civilisation depends, very largely indeed, on an enhanced prestige for women and the breaking down, which may be a cruel breaking down, of male self-sufficiency and self-conceit.

I have in this chapter confined myself to the consideration of writers who, as themselves creative, could in a sense speak of Pound as equals. I have ignored the work of enthusiastic disciples, patient expositors, political enemies, political friends. I have included one pure critic, F. R. Leavis, because his criticism at its best displays the same kind of intimate fusion of intelligence and sensibility that, with luck or grace, sometimes produces an important poem; and I have included Roy Harvey Pearce because he gives a very good general explanation of the nature of the Cantos. I should, I know, conclude with some brief statement on my own behalf. No poet of our time, or perhaps of any time, has combined greatness and vulnerability as Pound has. He can be seen, as probably by Eliot, as the major poet of our age; as by Leavis, as essentially the author of one very great poem, Mauberley; as by Yvor Winters, as an influential poet of the third rank, to be set, say, beside John Masefield; as by Robert Graves, as an impostor.

I think myself that he is an innovator of the utmost importance, a superlative verse technician, a poet with from the beginning to the end of his work an impeccable ear; an explorer of genius; a man bitterly and exactly sensitive to the pressures in a democratic society that kill instinctual life, rather as D. H. Lawrence was; a man, in all his personal relationships, of the utmost generosity of heart; a poet more splendidly and largely concerned than any poet of our time with the disparate yet similar essences of human civilisation; the poet, perhaps, as amateur cultural anthropologist. I think also that the great strength, and the great weakness, of all his writing stems from his Odyssean life, from having known so many men and cities, and having never really “belonged” anywhere; and from that, too, comes one of the vulnerable elements in him, the staginess, the show-off side. He has taken upon himself the history of the world, the wreck and the ancientness; crushed by this, but never losing the new voice of America. Ruin and failure and waning away are around him from his beginnings, but surmounting them, more importantly, the basic creative impulse and the basic creative power: “Make it new.”

Notes

1. Wyndham Lewis, Time and Western Man, 1927, p. 54.

2. T. W. M., p. 55.

3. T. W. M., p. 85.

4. T. W. M., pp. 85-6.

5. T. W. M., p. 87.

6. T. W. M., pp. 88-9.

7. T. W. M., pp. 89-90.

8. The Oxford Book of Modern Verse, edited by W. B. Yeats. London 1936. Introduction, p. xiii.

9. O. M. V., p. xviii.

10. O. M. V., pp. xxiii-xxiv, xxv.

11. Ezra Pound, Selected Poems. Introduction by T. S. Eliot. Faber paper-covered edition, 1959, pp. 9-10.

12. S. P., p. 11.

13. S. P., pp. 14, 15.

14. S. P., p. 17.

15. S. P., p. 20.

16. F. R. Leavis, New Bearings in English Poetry, 1932. New Edition, 1954, p. 136.

17. N. B. E. P., p. 138.

18. N. B. E. P., p. 140.

19. N. B. E. P., p. 141.

20. N. B. E. P., p. 152.

21. Roy Harvey Pearce, “Towards an American Epic,” in The Hudson Review for autumn 1959, p. 365.

22. H. R., p. 366.

23. H. R., p. 366.

24. H. R., p. 374.

25. H. R., p. 376.

26. H. R., p. 376.

27. H. R., p. 377.

28. H. R., p. 377.

29. Louise Bogan, Selected Criticism, London 1957, p. 179.

30. S. C., p. 180.

31. S. C., p. 182.

32. S. C., p. 183.

33. Robert Graves, The Common Asphodel: Collected Essays on Poetry, 1922-1949. London 1949, pp. 137, 148.

34. Robert Graves, The Crowning Privilege: The Clark Lectures, 1954-1955, also Various Essays on Poetry and Sixteen New Poems, London 1956, p. 123.