Because of [the] cavalier disregard of ascertainable facts and documents we can be offered, as a portrait of the youthful Pound, a figure who [according to George Quasha] "was seeking a radical redefinition of poetic possibilities and returning to the roots of civilization in order to show how much had been lost in the watery conventions handed over to us by the nineteenth century." The ascertainable records present us on the contrary with a man who admired Swinburne and Thomas Hardy and D. G. Rossetti, Beddoes and Landor and Browning, Gautier and Heine and Leopardi, Stendhal and Remy de Gourmont and Flaubert; a man who had virtually no views of American nineteenth-century literature, since he appears not to have read attentively (nor was he to read) Emily Dickinson or Melville or Hawthorne, Fenimore Cooper or Thoreau; who thought on the other hand that "there is more wisdom, perhaps more 'revolution' in Whistler's portrait of young Miss Alexander than in all the Judaic drawings of the 'prophetic' Blake", in short, a man who carried more nineteenth-century baggage than any comparably gifted contemporary among writers in English. If Pound is a master and founding father of twentieth-century modernism in the arts, it is certainly not by virtue of having exploded, and persuaded us to reject, nineteenth-century pretensions.

we may reach back further, and consider not the nineteenth century but the eighteenth…. As with nineteenth century "romantic" culture, so with eighteenth-century "Enlightenment" culture, we find Pound cast in a role of iconoclast which an unprejudiced scrutiny of his recorded opinions simply will not support.

Accordingly, when we hear it happily declared of the United States in the 1970s, "Our scene is very different from the cultural vacuum at the turn of the century which drove Ezra Pound heroically to seek to 'resuscitate the dead art of poetry,'" we ought to be on our guard. And sure enough the documents make it clear that, for the young Ezra Pound, London between 1908 and 1912 was anything but a "cultural vacuum"…. Moreover, many readers of Pound's Hugh Selwyn Mauberley take the line, "resuscitate the dead art of poetry," ironically, as a gibe at anyone who is damfool enough to think that the art of poetry is, or could be, "dead." In short, everywhere we turn, so long as we have some scruples about evidence, we encounter in the young Pound not a revolutionary or iconoclast but a sometimes militant conservative.

Indeed, it is possible to argue that Pound was at bottom an Edwardian man of letters …, and that the provocative oddities of his later poetry and his later opinions reflect merely the increasingly desperate straits to which a man formed in that milieu was compelled, as political and social developments destroyed any possibility of that kind of milieu being reconstituted. Certainly Pound's Edwardianism, if we may call it that, was something that he never wholly outgrew. And so when he died, there disappeared not only the last surviving specimen of one sort of twentieth-century modernist but also, odd as it must seem, the last survivor of a still older breed, formed by the century before. (pp. 7-9)

The European "confederation" that Pound thought he spoke for throughout his life was effectively a Europe that spoke Latin and its Romance derivatives, including English as the most remote and partial of those derivatives, and making special provision for classical Greek as in important ways the original source of them all, even of Latin. And the sanities and wisdoms that Pound conceived of himself as promoting against the evermore impudent barbarians were carried—so he thought, and was to think—pre-eminently in Latin and the Romance languages…. (p. 13)

But if the language trusted by the young Pound is Romance language in this respectable, technical, and well-defined sense, what's to be said of language like this?

  Aye, I am wistful for my kin of the spirit
  And have none about me save in the shadows
  When come they, surging of power, 'DAEMON'
  'Quasi KALOUN'. S.T. says Beauty is most that, a 'calling to the soul.'
  Well then, so call they, the swirlers out of the mist of my soul,
  They that come mewards, bearing old magic.

Here we have "Romance language" in an altogether less reputable sense, which has more to do with romanticism (and with Victorian late-romanticism) than with the harshly direct language of a genuine "Romance" poet like Villon. The lines above are from "In Durance" (1907), which appeared in Pound's third collection, Personae (… 1909); and what they are struggling to say is after a fashion in keeping with the language that Pound tries to say it in. "S.T." is Coleridge, and the Coleridge text appealed to is the essay "On the Principles of Genial Criticism," which advances a Platonic or neo-Platonic idea of the nature and function of poetry, as Pound's poem does also. Moreover, the neo-Platonic matter of these lines is something that persisted in Pound's thought. And if, as historians of ideas, we were to concentrate on the paraphrasable content of Pound's poetry, we could see such an early poem as saying things which he will still be saying at the end of his life. But it is precisely the radical difference in the manner of saying, early and late, which is crucial. For the experience of reading Pound's Cantos isn't remotely like the experience of reading neo-Platonic romantic poets like Shelley or D. G. Rossetti…. "Pseudo-archaic" is exact for "Aye, I am wistful," and "They that come mewards."… This is romance language in the sense that it is the language of historical romances written in late-Victorian and Edwardian England; it is not a medium in which anything can be communicated forcefully or crisply.

This is, however, only one component in the language of these lines. "Surging of power" belongs in some different idiom altogether, which is impossible to name; the notetaker's telegraphese of "S.T." belongs in another idiom again; and the Greek expressions, "DAEMON" and "Quasi KALOUN," belong in yet another. These last are syntactically quite without anchorage in what offers itself as a normal English sentence. And this abandonment of grammar mirrors accurately the desperation of the poet, who can manage no more than to have these disparate idioms jostle helplessly one against another, though he is possessed of a conviction that they could be articulated one with another, if only he could find the key. At this stage he cannot; and so all that is conveyed is the desperation of the effort and the need. The language is a chronically unstable mix of linguistic elements from the European past, held together by will, by nothing more than the urgency of the poet's need. Their coherence is something wished for and vehemently gestured at, certainly not demonstrated or achieved. The vehemence of the need is quite without parallel among poets writing and publishing in London in the first decade of this century…. (pp. 13-16)

[Pound's peculiar rashness and impetuosity] had everything to do with the fact that [he] was American; that is to say, a poet of the English tongue to whom it came naturally to regard English as just one of the princely dialects of Europe. An American like Pound came to Europe; and if he came to England, it was to one of the provinces of that larger cultural entity. No Edwardian Englishman thought of England that way…. [He] defined himself in his national identity as that which Continental Europe was not. But to a devoted American Europeanist like the young Pound, what was precious about England was not what marked her off from the Continent but what bound her to the Mediterranean heartlands. Hence the unconvincing impetuosity with which the poet of "In Durance" moves from mock-archaic English to Greek…. [Pound] wanted to create or re-create a lingua franca of Greco-Roman Christendom in which English would operate as a sister language with French and Spanish and Italian. The mere mix of "In Durance" was to become the compound language of The Cantos—a compound still perhaps unstable, but not so easily dissoluble.

The author of "In Durance" and of The Spirit of Romance was the author also of Patria Mia (1912), in which he wrote consciously and explicitly as a citizen of the United States, addressing himself specifically to the state of culture, and the prospects for culture, in his native land. (pp. 17-18)

It is in any case highly significant that [Patria Mia], Pound's most obviously and explicitly American book, should have a Latin title. He attempts to foresee a future for America according to paradigms he had learned about in Europe. Neither at this time nor afterward does Pound share the conviction and the hope which as a matter of historical record have fired the cultural achievements of the white man in North America ever since Plymouth Plantation—the hope and belief that the new continent offered a new start, a new Eden for a new Adam, liberated from the corruptions and errors of Europe and forewarned by European history of how to avoid European mistakes. On the contrary, Pound takes it for granted that if America is ever to produce or become a noble civilization, it can do so only by modeling itself on European precedents, precedents that are ultimately or originally Greek and Roman. (pp. 20-1)

Imagism (originally "imagisme," as if by French spelling to borrow the required Parisian éclat) was an exclusively literary movement, whereas the later vorticism claimed to comprehend all the arts and was strongest in painting and sculpture. Yet Pound himself seems to have thought of vorticism as only a prolongation and theoretical elaboration of what he had fought for under the banner of imagism, until imagism was taken away from him, and trivialized, by Amy Lowell. If we ask for the theory of imagism, it is otherwise hard to find; though it can be put together out of certain speculations of T. E. Hulme as early as 1909, at which time the movement had had a sort of aborted birth. But the imagism of 1913, when Pound's energy and impudence made it a talking point in London and Chicago, was not theoretical at all but came across as two or three punchily expressed rules of thumb, as in the famous "A Few Don'ts for an Imagist":

Use no superfluous word, no adjective, which does not reveal something.

Don't use such an expression as "dim lands of peace." It dulls the image. It mixes an abstraction with the concrete. It comes from the writer's not realizing that the natural object is always the adequate symbol.

Go in fear of abstractions. Don't retell in mediocre verse what has already been done in good prose. Don't think any intelligent person is going to be deceived when you try to shirk all the difficulties of the unspeakably difficult art of good prose by chopping your composition into line lengths….

Don't imagine that the art of poetry is any simpler than the art of music, or that you can please the expert before you have spent at least as much effort on the art of verse as the average piano teacher spends on the art of music.

Be influenced by as many great artists as you can, but have the decency either to acknowledge the debt outright, or to try to conceal it.

Don't allow "influence" to mean merely that you mop up the particular decorative vocabulary of some one or two poets whom you happen to admire….

Use either no ornament or good ornament.

This is a striking change from the "Romance language" of only a few months before. And with pronouncements in this impatient plain-man idiom there emerged the figure of Pound the iconoclast, a rhetorical illusion which still too often obscures the lineaments of the man who fabricated and deployed the rhetoric for certain short-term purposes; who chose for those temporary purposes to conceal the far from "plain-man" perspectives that he nonetheless had in mind…. In Pound's mind imagism was, perhaps centrally, a program [derived from convictions of Ford Madox Ford] for bringing into poetry the Flaubertian mot juste. In other words, it was, despite appearances, just one more program in, or out of, "Romance languages." (pp. 32-5)

The mot juste that Ford and Pound admired was to be found as readily in Catullus or Villon or indeed George Crabbe as in Flaubert. And a Catullus or a Villon was more instructive than Flaubert because, like any poet of any century, each had had to deny himself the cumulative effect with which a Flaubert could recreate a whole milieu by a multitude of exactly registered particulars. Upon the poet there was imposed the further task of selecting, from among the array of significant particulars, that one, or those one or two, which could be made, by judicious deployment of a specifically poetic resource like cadence, to stand for all the rest. And so there enters into Pound's thinking the principle of "the luminous detail," the single particular which, chosen with enough care and rendered with enough exactness, can impel the reader to summon up for himself all the other particulars implied by that salient one. It is a principle crucial to all poetic structures, as Pound realized…. In later life Pound was to suppose, perilously, that this principle which worked for poetic structures applied to intellectual structures also…. (pp. 35-6)

Pound was in trouble, in any case. For the valuable prosaicism which Ford had taught him to look for and demand is much more readily attainable, perhaps also more important, in poetry written for the speaking voice than in poetry that aspires to be sung. And yet Pound's natural bent and talent had always been for poetry that should be sung, rather than for such spoken genres as epigram, lampoon, epistle. Apart from anything else, these genres call for a sure grasp of social tone, whereas there is much evidence that Pound was socially maladroit. Accordingly, in the years of imagism and vorticism we find him painstakingly attempting, in epigram and lampoon, niceties of urbane insolence and Jamesian nuance such as he could not command. (pp. 36-7)

[There] is no question of making Pound out to be "classical" or a "classicist," as against "romantic" or "romanticist."… Pound was, despite appearances, conservative; and to be conservative in his generation meant prolonging some romantic attitudes as well as prolonging or reviving preromantic ones. (p. 38)

Pound had little patience with the central endeavor of symbolisme, which explored the analogy [of words] not with sculpture but with music. It is easy to get this wrong. Have I not just insisted that Pound wanted to write poems for singing rather more than poems for speaking? And do we not find him at every possible opportunity telling poets how much a study of music will do for them? Yes; but the music that Pound has in mind is real sounds in sequence, an actual melody, whereas the idea of music which fascinated Mallarmé and Valéry was precisely that—the idea of music, the idea of a poetic art that should be nonreferential or self-referential like the art of music. Pound seemingly had no interest in that. What Pound had in mind was a marriage of the two arts, not an analogy between them…. [The] momentousness of imagism as Pound conceived of it lies just in its being not a variant of symbolisme or a development out of it, but a radical alternative to it…. Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir (1916) is overtly concerned with vorticism, not imagism—which only shows how the two movements were, in Pound's sense of the matter, really one. Gaudier-Brzeska is a work of theory; and so the difference between symbolisme and imagism can there be presented as philosophical, epistemological. It should not by this time surprise us that in this perspective imagism is revealed as the conservative and traditional rejoinder to symbolisme's dangerous innovations. The traditional authority that Pound appeals to is Aquinas. Like Aquinas, the imagist holds that a proposition—for instance, "the pine tree in mist upon the far hill looks like a fragment of Japanese armor"—is either true or false; true or false, not just to the state of mind or angle of vision of the perceiver but to the real appearance, the real relations in real space, of what is perceived. Either what is reported of pine trees and plates of armor is a true account of the spatial and other relations asserted, or else it is not true, however honestly it may reproduce the impression produced upon a perceiver who may be abnormally situated or in an abnormal state of mind. The idea of "normality" is unphilosophical, in the sense that one takes on faith the existence of a norm in perceiving. But the imagist will make that act of faith, just as common sense does, and as the symboliste does not. Pound, like Gautier, is one of those "pour qui le monde visible existe"; and the best pages of Gaudier-Brzeska are those in which Pound most exultantly justifies that proclivity, and insists on the impoverishment that comes as soon as we begin to doubt that the perceivable world truly exists as something other than ourselves, bodied against us. On the other hand, we must not suppose that our organs of perception are limited to the five senses; Pound was sure—for some of us, excessively sure—that they were not. (pp. 39-41)

[Hugh Selwyn Mauberley] is, and has proved to be, the most accessible of Pound's longer poems, the one that it is easiest to start with. For just that reason it is a poem that one must grow through, and grow out of, though the literary world is full of people who got this far and no further—for whom, accordingly, this is Pound's best poem, or the only one of his poems that is "an assured achievement." Pound's word for it, when he sent it to Hardy, was "thin"—"the Mauberley is thin." And "thin" may well be the right word, which explains why thin and constricted and rancorously distrustful sensibilities can respond to this poem by Pound as to no other.

Hugh Selwyn Mauberley consists of two sequences, one of thirteen poems dated 1919, followed by one of five poems dated 1920. The appearance of intricate interlinkings and cross references between the sequences and between the poems is, I now think, largely illusory. But one that is not an illusion is the relationship between the poem that closes the second sequence, "Medallion," and the poem that closes the first, "Envoi." It has been proved that these two poems are companion pieces…. (p. 50)

[Hugh Selwyn Mauberley] is the elaborate culmination of Pound's attempts to be urbane, but urbanity did not come naturally to him; on the contrary, he rather often adopted the wrong strategems in social situations. Among such stratagems was a range of expedients subsumed by Pound under the name of persona or mask. His protégé Eliot had made brilliant use of the strictly verbal persona J. Alfred Prufrock; and his Anglo-Irish mentor, Yeats, was to make brilliant histrionic use of masks called Michael Robartes and Owen Aherne and Crazy Jane. Pound seems to have intended Hugh Selwyn Mauberley to serve him in the same way. But his temperament was quite different from either Eliot's or Yeats's; his treatment of Villon in The Spirit of Romance reveals that he responded readily in his reading to a quality of robust self-exposure in poets, precisely what the doctrines of persona and mask were designed to obviate. Accordingly, Hugh Selwyn Mauberley is a mask that continually slips…. What is the mask for, if, as often as not, the poet throws it off and speaks vulnerably as and from himself? More distractingly still, since we are advised of the mask in the very title, how are we to know in which poems Pound speaks through the mask, in which he doesn't? Hugh Selwyn Mauberley remains a very important poem; apart from anything else, it has proved to be the most insidiously and aptly quotable of Pound's poems, and it has very great merit as an Englishing of Gautier. But it looks as if it will figure in Pound's oeuvre … as a relatively early piece which unsympathetic readers can use as a stick with which to beat later work that the poet set more store by. (pp. 53-4)

[The] language of Homage to Sextus Propertius, or … much of it, is "translatorese."… [It exemplifies] the English of the bored schoolboy lazily construing his Latin homework but, equally, the proudly pompous clerk (Pakistani, Cypriot, or whatever) using the language of those who were lately his imperial masters. The point is a crucial one, for Homage to Sextus Propertius is often presented as a model of how to translate, whereas much of the time it is a deliberate model of how not to! So far from being a model for translators to follow, it deliberately and consistently incorporates mistranslation…. It is most often a case of unsuitably heightened diction; and this accounts for hilarious passages in an idiom which we have learned to call, since Pound's day, "camp." But sometimes … the comical oddity is not in the vocabulary so much as in word order and syntax…. (pp. 58-9)

Every [example] of mistranslation can be detected as such by an attentive and halfway sophisticated reader of the English. There is no need to check back to the Latin text of Propertius. But Pound, for good measure, deliberately planted ludicrous howlers, to amuse those who knew the Latin or chose to consult it. This was a miscalculation…. [All] the manifold ironies of Homage to Sextus Propertius are directed ultimately at the reader, who is convicted, line by line, of having only pompously imperial, [elaborately mistranslated] English, into which to render a poem that derides and deflates imperial pretensions. Thus it appears that by wholly transposing "imperialism" into language, into the texture of style, by forgetting his own existence "for the sake of the lines," Pound has effected a … wounding and penetrating critique of imperialism in general…. (pp. 60-1)

Those who know [The Cantos] by hearsay—and few know them any other way—will think they can declare at least some of the ideas of the poem. That usury is a vicious and desolating force in both public and private life; that it may be defined in such-and-such a way; that it has operated in recorded history after such-and-such a fashion; that international Jewry has played, and continues to play, such-and-such a crucial part in its operations; that Mussolini, unlike Roosevelt, had a grasp of what usury was and had a practicable plan for containing and disinfecting it—such, hearsay reports, are among the ideas which The Cantos incorporate, if indeed they are not the ideas which The Cantos were written to promote.

And yet these, it may be said, are not ideas at all, but opinions. For "opinions" read "convictions," and the case is not altered…. One may feel that in Pound's poem, when Roosevelt grapples with Mussolini, the bout is rigged; that one of the wrestlers is prevented from exerting his full strength; and accordingly that the fixity of the fixed opinion in favor of Mussolini lacks the vibrancy of the hard-earned fixities we esteem in other poems by other hands. (pp. 62-4)

What is crucial is that we should understand by "idea" in The Cantos the whole of [a] process of circling round and throwing out. (An idea, we might say, is thrown out, whereas an opinion is held by or held on to.) The whole of this process, and indeed a little more; for [there is a] turning inside-out, [a] switch into [an] inverted spiral…. (p. 74)

What is fatal, though it is very common, is to regard the idea as having been stated in the initial proposition; and the verses which follow … as supplying no more than embroidery upon the idea, at best illustrations or elaborations of it. Read in that way, the Cantos are merely boring. They were found so by the late Yvor Winters, who, conceiving of an idea as that which could be stated in the form of a proposition, recorded his experience of reading The Cantos by saying, "We have no way of knowing whether we have had any ideas or not." Winters meant to be dismissive and disparaging; but in fact, if we take account of what he understood "idea" to be, Winters' remark is one of the few valuably exact formulations that we have, of what reading The Cantos amounts to, and feels like.

As we start to read The Cantos, we float out upon a sea where we must be on the lookout for waterspouts. These, when they occur, are ideas, the only sort that this poem is going to give us. And meanwhile we can forget about such much-debated nonquestions as whether this poem has a structure, and if so, what it is: or again, why the poem isn't finished, and whether it ever could have been. Does a sea have a structure? Does a sea finish anywhere? (pp. 74-5)

Though the Cantos are "epic," rather few of them display "the surge and sway of the epic music." (Canto I displays it, as does [part of] Canto 47; and so we respond to these without much trouble.) For the most part the rhythms of the Cantos … are the sung rhythms of Burns, not the intoned or chanted rhythms of Swinburne.

And so the verse lines of the Cantos have to be read fast for their meanings, but slow for their sounds. It is a miracle that they find any responsive readers at all…. (pp. 92-3)

In English there is no other poet of the twentieth century, and few of any century, with an ear fine enough to have managed [progressions as Pound has]. And in demonstrating it we've taken note only of those principles which our notation can register. The haunting musicality depends equally on other principles at work, which we detect at work but have no way of registering. (p. 98)

To Pound it seemed, as it has to others, that in Protestant cultures it was the Hebraic component which instilled fear and distrust of sensuous pleasure; and so he threw his weight always on the side of the Hellenic voice which called on sculptors to make images of the gods, as against the Hebraic iconoclasm which was set against "graven images." (p. 101)

[Poetry] composed so as to be spoken aloud, or to be chanted or sung to a suitably scrupulous accompaniment, does address itself directly to one of the senses. It addresses itself directly to the ear, by creating discernible and pleasurable audible rhythms. And this, as one might expect, is a dimension of literature with which Pound concerned himself very assiduously throughout his career…. Nothing marks Pound off so sharply from the avant-garde of the past thirty years, which tries to sail under his colors; for this avant-garde, if it does not explicitly abandon audible rhythms in poetry as a traditional indulgence which it will no longer tolerate, concerns itself with them not at all so as to give pleasure to reader or auditor but on the contrary only so as to stay purportedly more true to the mood, and the sensitive or even physical constitution, of the poet. It was not thus, nor on those grounds, that Pound declared: "To break the pentameter, that was the first heave."… [It] was because Pound knew himself capable of creating for his reader rhythmical pleasures which the expectation of the pentameter prevented both him and his reader from realizing. Many critics who would deny to Pound any other achievement have allowed him at least this one—that he had "an ear," that he truly could command a range of audible rhythms which only a liberation from the authority of the pentameter permitted him first, and his reader afterward, to recognize, positively to hear. (pp. 101-02)

Donald Davie, in his Ezra Pound (copyright © 1975 by Donald Davie; all rights reserved; reprinted by permission of Viking Penguin Inc.), Viking Penguin, 1976.