Robert Baynard
Brooker/ Yeats Journal #1
26 March 2008
Pound
and “The Tradition”
The
essay called “The Tradition” by Ezra Pound, is a manifesto of sorts, tracing
modern English poetry back to its origins. Pound deals with the role of the tradition in art, and how
poetry should not try to destroy or react against the tradition. In Pound’s mind art should not think of
the tradition as the “fetters to bind us” (Literary
Essays 91). The artist needs
to understand the tradition, in order to appropriate its proper use. Tradition for Pound is not just any set
of past works, rather it is the origins of modern poetry, “when the arts of
verse and music were most closely knit together” (91). More importantly, the artist, and
especially the poet, should make use of the tradition because the “tradition is
a beauty which we preserve” (91).
Pound sees English verse as having its origins in the “two great lyric
traditions,” which are the “Melic poets and that of Provence” (91). Pound sees these two periods as a point
of reference for modern poetry.
The Greek and Provencal artists unified culture by blending music and
verse into a melodious flow of rhythm and voice. Poetry declined “from the date of divorce” between the two
arts, until the times of “renaissance fashions” where art was restored in the
old ways (91). Pound values this
period in art because it brought back the traditions of the Melic and Provencal
poets, reviving culture through language and meter. He explains that “the Italians of that century had renewed
the art, they had written in Latin, and some even a little Greek, and had used
the Hellenic meters” (92). Pound
sees looking back to the great traditions of the past as a way of finding out
how to carry on the tradition and how to make it better.
The
second section of this essay deals with the benefits of rooting art in the
tradition. Pound writes, “A return
to origins invigorates because it is a return to nature and reason” (92). Reason here is not meant in the modern
notion of discursive rationality and the reason of the scientific
revolution. Reason here means to
“behave in the eternally sensible manner [...] naturally, reasonably,
intuituively” (92). This idea of
intuition that is accessed sensibly, that is by the senses, is a mode of participating
in the experience of something overarching in art, some design. Pound seems to come very close to
sympathizing with Plato’s idea of the over-soul, where we are all connected by
a force that transcends space and time.
Pound’s friend and colleague, William Butler Yeats, is also concerned
with this idea that he calls the spiritus
mundi, the collective consciousness of human beings that allows access to
eternal truths.
In
the tradition of verse, Pound respects and values poetry that harmonizes emotion,
language, and time. He explains
that the Melic poets “composed to the feel of the thing, to the cadence, as
have all good poets since” (92-93).
Rhythm and feeling must coexist in good poetry and music. Pound also explains how poetry should
pay close attention to how speech affects the timing of the lines and how the
words affect the harmony of the whole.
He writes, “The movement of poetry is limited only by the nature of
syllables and of articulate sound, and by the laws of music, or melodic rhythm”
(93). The tradition can and should
be looked to by artists so that they can pursue beauty at its highest
points. Artists should study how
their origins can reveal access points to purer forms of beauty, ones that are
more in harmony with nature, history, and human experience. Pound would not want someone to reject
or react against tradition, but he is calling for a look at the heights of art
in order to push them even higher.
Robert Baynard II
Brooker/ Pound Journal #2
02 April 2008
Pound
and “The Serious Artist”
The
morality of art is a question that is often debated from Plato to the present
day. Ezra Pound addresses this
question of art’s worth in respect of the individual and also society as a
whole. Good or true art can bring
an understanding of the nature of the world and of man himself. Art has an essential role in helping
humans understand what makes them happy, thereby allowing people to form a
society that will be pleasurable to the greatest number of people. Pound professes that art must have a
relation to the utilitarian idea espoused by Bentham of the “good of the
greatest number” (41). Bad art
distorts the nature of things and people.
“Bad art is criminal” because it misleads people to value things that
are of no worth to the individual or society, id est have no connection with what is good (41). The treatise on the value of art in
“The Serious Artist” takes Plato as a starting point. He expands Plato’s question of “what position the arts are
to hold in the ideal republic,” by trying to “define the relation of the arts
to economics” (41). In The Republic, Plato would not allow the
poet into his beloved republic because he felt that poetry was a further
distortion from the world of the invisible and universal to the world of the
visible and even more to the realm of shadows.
Plato
and Pound do seem to agree on at least one part of this: bad art is a kind of treacherous
deceit, robbing people of what is natural and sensible. Pound’s “dogwood,” or cross to bear, is
to show the worth of art in its ability to make one more fully human, by
providing a sensibility “regarding the nature of man, of immaterial man, of man
considered as a thinking and sentient creature” (41-42). Pound claims this is the science of
art, and this science is just as valid or may even have more worth to the world
than the science of Newton and the Enlightenment. The arts provide a culture with reason and intuition that
values human life and both its spiritual and worldly potential. “They begin where the science of
medicine leaves off” (42). Art is
the science of ethics, in that it explores what man wants and what he does not
want. Art provides a framework for
testing and evaluating ideas on who man is and how he relates to others. “If any science save the arts were able
more precisely to determine what the individual does not actually desire, then
that science would be of more use in providing the data for ethics” (43). But there is no higher science than the
arts for determining these things, therefore Pound would agree that art has an
immeasurable value to the world in man and morality.
Art
can only be of value if it is good art.
Plato may have missed this part of the argument, as their is no
discussion of art as good or bad.
Art is only abstraction from the visible realm in Plato, a kind of
perversion of the visible—the lowest type of existence denigrated to the world
of illusion and shadow. Aristotle
felt very differently. Aristotle
felt that the actual thing in Plato’s visible realm was a lower form than the
poem about the thing. The poem can
point to its form—not its individual, spatio-temporal existence, but the form
that the thing in the world is fashioned from. Pound would agree more with Aristotle in saying, “By good
art I mean art that bears true witness, I mean the art that is most precise”
(44). Art has a moral
responsibility to deal with the true nature of things, no matter how terrible
or beautiful they may be.
By
discovering life, nature, and emotion in their true light, the light of the sun
(to continue Plato’s cave metaphor), we can discover ourselves as human beings
with the power to reorient ourselves in what will serve the greatest good. The rest of the essay deals with particulars
about how one becomes an artist, how to acquire sensibility, and the nature of
the true critic. The qualities and
relationship of prose and poetry is also discussed later on in this essay. What has been explored above deals with
the heart of the essay: people must be able to distinguish good art from bad
and then appropriate that knowledge to further investigate what is still not
known. The tradition of art should
be studied closely so that we may know what has already been discovered and
where to go from here.
Pound’s
“Portrait D’Une Femme”
Your mind and you are our Sargasso Sea,
London has swept about you this score years
And bright ships left you this or that in fee:
Ideas, old gossip, oddments of all things,
Strange spars of knowledge and dimmed wares of price.
Great minds have sought you- lacking someone else.
You have been second always. Tragical? No. You
preferred it to the
usual thing: One dull man, dulling and uxorious, One
average
mind- with one thought less, each year.
Oh, you are patient, I have seen you sit Hours, where
something
might have floated up.
And now you pay one. Yes, you richly pay.
You are a person of some interest, one comes to you
And takes
strange gain away: Trophies fished up; some curious
suggestion;
Fact that leads nowhere; and a tale for two, Pregnant
with
mandrakes, or with something else That might prove
useful and
yet never proves, That never fits a corner or shows
use, Or finds its
hour upon the loom of days: The tarnished, gaudy,
wonderful old
work; Idols and ambergris and rare inlays, These are
your riches,
your great store; and yet For all this sea-hoard of
deciduous things,
Strange woods half sodden, and new brighter stuff: In
the slow
float of differing light and deep, No! there is
nothing! In the whole
and all, Nothing that’s quite your own.
Yet
this is you.
The
title of Pound’s “Portrait D’Une Femme” means portrait of a lady. This alludes to the Henry James novel
called by the same name, The Portrait of
a Lady. Thomas Stearns Eliot
later wrote his own “Portrait of a Lady,” which followed “The Love Song of J.
Alfred Prufrock.”
The
opening line, “Your mind and you are our Sargasso Sea,” describes how unwilling
the lady was to consent to Caspar Goodwood’s marriage proposal. She was afraid that she would lose her
freedom. The Sargasso Sea is an
area where sargasso seaweed accumulates in large quantities, making the water
congested and stagnant (Oxford Reference Online).
The
next line, “London has swept about you this score years,” refers to how the
young American lady, Isabel, has been in London, having men try to sweep her
off her feet, control her, and take her for there own. “Score years” here is not like in a
musical score; rather, score here is meant to convey about twenty years (Oxford).
Skipping
down a bit to the seventh, eighth and ninth line, the poem says, “You have been
second always. Tragical?/ No. You
preferred it to the usual thing:/ One dull man.” This is Pound’s satire. Isabel wanted to maintain her independence in London but
married Osmond in Italy. Pound
notes that she has been second always, and she has, especially with her
egotistical husband. She might
have had a different life settling for Caspar Goodwood whom she liked in London
so much and who never let go of his love for her. She also passed up the opportunity for security in the
social realm by not marrying Lord Warburton.
She
was a woman with a reputation for being intellectual and people were usually
impressed with her. Pound may be
suggesting that this sacrificed her integrity because she was like a novelty
item. Lines fourteen and fifteen
say, “you are a person of some interest, one comes to you/ And takes strange
gain away.” This is later
explained in more detail, but Pound makes a satire out of her intellect. People come to her acting like they are
interested in her mind, but all they really want is her beautiful hand in
romance.
This
line has a double meaning as well; it refers to the portrait and the painter as
well. Pound ends the poem saying,
“Nothing that’s quite your own./ Yet this is you.” These closing lines show how she is used and pushed into so
many different directions, and by marrying Osmond she has lost what made her so
unique in the first place: her free spirited independence. The one thing that she fears the most
has engulfed her life: She has
lost her self.
Pound
compresses a novel into thirty lines.
This is not an easy task, but I think he performs it beautifully. The language creates images that paint
pictures of relationships, feeling, and external pressures or influences. This work has so much depth in so much
brevity. The lady has no life to
call her own. She is driven by
cultural and societal pressures, which leave her stuck in a life that is
controlled by others.
Robert Baynard II
Brooker/ Pound Journal #3
09 March 2008
Pound’s
“The Garden”
En robe de parade.
Samain.
Like a skein of loose silk blown against a wall
She walks by the railing of a path in Kensington
Gardens,
And she is dying piece-meal
of
a sort of emotional anemia.
And round about there is a rabble
Of the filthy, sturdy, unkillable infants of the very
poor.
They shall inherit the earth.
In her is the end of breeding.
Her boredom is exquisite and excessive.
She would like some one to speak to her,
And is almost afraid that I
will
commit that indiscretion.
------------------------------------------------------
Ezra Pound’s poem “The Garden” displays the
contempt he holds for the middle class.
The woman in the poem is walking through Kensington Gardens, which is a fashionable
park in the West End, including flowers, the Palace Gardens, the Albert
Memorial, and statues of Queen Victoria, William III, and Peter Pan
(RPO.com). This park is a symbol
of class for Pound. The gardens
hold a special place in the life of Pound because it was at Kensington Gardens
that Pound first declared Hilda Doolittle to be an imagist. Pound was looking over Doolittle’s work
when he wrote at the bottom of her poem “H.D., Imagiste.” Des Imagistes is the anthology that contains the poetry edited by
Pound that included the works of H.D., Richard Aldington, James Joyce, Amy
Lowell, William Carlos Williams, and Pound himself. Pound uses images in “The Garden” from the very beginning,
“Like a skein of loose silk blown against a wall,” in describing the
bourgeoisie woman. Pound writes in
the essay “A Retrospect” that “An ‘Image’ is that which presents an
intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time” (Literary Essays 4).
Pound uses the silk, Kensington Gardens, the filthy children, all as
images to convey emotional and intellectual ideas on the middle class. These images build what Pound would
consider to be precise presentation of his subject—showing not telling. The imagist influence left its mark on
American poetry yet was appropriated differently in the poetry of William
Carlos Williams, who unlike Pound, used common language to paint images with
words rather than use highly allusive diction. “The Garden” and other early Pound have more enduring
influence on the use of images than the later erudite poetry of The Cantos.
“The
Garden” begins with a French inscription, “En
robe de parade,” which comes from the verse preface to Au Jardin de l’Infante (1893), by Albert Samain (RPO.com). The full line from the poem is “Mon ame
est une infante en robe de parade,” meaning something like my soul is an infant
in fine clothes. Pound shows
contempt for children in the poem—not all children, but especially the
“unkillable infants of the very poor” (line 5). The lower class is uneducated and works hard labor, so they
reproduce like rabbits in order for their children to help out with the work.
Satire
enters the poem from the very beginning with the French quote from Samain, but
it really becomes poignant when Pound is talking about the children causing a
ruckus, saying “They shall inherit the earth” (line 6). This comes straight from the Beatitudes
in Matthew, where the line reads, “Blessed are the meek for they shall inherit
the earth.” This is obviously not
a view Pound supports because he cannot see how these “filthy” little vermin
could ever inherit the earth.
The
woman is “dying piece-meal of a sort of emotional anaemia” (line 3). Piece-meal is a compound word which may
have its influences from Gerard Manley Hopkins who frequently used such words
in his poetry. She is “dying
piece-meal,” meaning by small amounts at a time. The “emotional anaemia” she is suffering from is that of not
knowing her place in society. She
is suffocating from a lack of emotion in her life, probably disowned by the
lower class for her fine clothing and “exquisite and excessive” taste and
shunned by the upper class for her nerve of not knowing her place (line
8). She does not fit in with the
lower class, the “very poor,” but she is in close proximity to them in the
poem.
She
certainly could not associate with the upper class, Pound in particular because
he will not “commit that indiscretion” (line 10). She is lonely and has no one to talk to because she is stuck
in the middle with no solid grasp of her own identity. She may be just a child wrapped in fine
clothes like the Samain poem suggests, but she cannot ever find her
place—cannot grow into those clothes and become a member of the elite. Pound is certainly an elitist with a
strong distaste for the middle class because “In her is the end of breeding”
(line 7). To associate with this
woman would be highly improper for a gentleman like Pound. He makes several other stabs at the
middle class in his poetry, especially in the poem “Salutation” that
immediately follows “The Garden”.
Pound calls them the “generation of the thoroughly smug,” showing that
they think they can move up the social ladder and that they are on the same
level as Pound and other upper class members of society. Pound amazing use of precision and
concision in “The Garden” packs ten lines with this much of a story. The poem is social and political with
harsh implications and a serious disdain for the middle and lower classes.
Pound’s
“A Retrospect”
Ezra
Pound’s “A Retrospect” discusses his ideas on what poetry should be and how one
can prepare himself to write good poetry.
Pound also suggests that in order to read poetry, and especially to
critique it, one must train themselves in the traditions preceding the work. Pound writes of his ideas on Imagism,
criticism, language, and rhythm.
Pound
gives three guidelines to his style of poetry:
1. Direct treatment of the ‘thing’ whether
subjective or objective.
2. To use absolutely no word that does not
contribute to presentation.
3. As regarding rhythm: to compose in the
sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence
of the metronome. (Literary Essays 3)
Images are supposed to treat the
‘thing’ naturally with precision.
“An ‘Image is that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex
in an instant of time” (4). Images
are not to be used as symbols that have figurative meanings that usurp the
literal image (9). For Pound a
“hawk is a hawk” (9). Precision
means to deal with the ‘thing’ as accurately as possible by presentation rather
than proclamation.
Concision
was just as important for Pound.
Words are to be used sparingly and ejected if they do not necessarily
have to be in the poem. Pound
reacts against the flowery, insignificant poetic diction filled with
excesses. Rhythm for Pound must
not be confined to the sing-song verse of iambic pentameter and other English
forms; it should hearken back to the great poetry of the Provencal and Greek
poets whose meters were much more concerned with the musical sounds of the
words and how they interact in song.
Rhythm could also take on significance in the poem as another way of
treating the ‘thing’ directly and accurately—“an ‘absolute rhythm’, a rhythm,
that is, in poetry which corresponds exactly to the emotion or shade of
emotions to be expressed” (9).
Pound
has a distaste for discussing art, and “All that the critic can do for the
reader or audience or spectator is to focus his gaze or audition” (13). Pound believes that trying to explain
art is a process that undermines its intention. Pound describes criticism in the context of decomposing art
into something that makes art less pure, explaining art away to the unlearned. The critic and the artist must
understand what has come before themselves before they can understand how art
should be and where it should be headed.
Pound shows this in two passages:
My
pawing over the ancients and semi-ancients has been one struggle to find out what has been done, once for all, better
than it can ever be done again, and to find out
what remains for us to do, and plenty does remain. (11) Also, he equates his project with
that of a scientific experiment:
The
scinetist does not expect to be acclaimed as a great scientist until he has discovered something. He begins by learning what has already
been discovered. He goes from that point
onward. He does not bank on being
a charming fellow personally. He does not expect his friends to
applaud the results of his freshman class
work. (6) Pound applies these lines more to
poetry than criticism, yet this idea of being well-read or well-studied (in the
traditions of literature, painting, music, and sculpture) is very important to
how he believes people can understand a work of art.
Robert Baynard II
Brooker/ Pound Journal #4
16 March 2008
Pound’s
“Hugh Selwyn Mauberly”
Ezra
Pound bids farewell to London in “Hugh Selwyn Mauberly”. The inscription above the first stanza
reads “Ode pour l’election de son sepulchre,” which means, ode for the
selection of his tomb. Pound saw
his time in London a failure. All
of his efforts to renew art were “out of key with his time” (line 1). Pound tried to revive Greek, Latin and
Chinese poetry by translating and reshaping it into modern English verse. “He strove to resuscitate the dead art/
Of poetry; to maintain “the sublime”/ In the old sense” (lines 2 to 4).
Giving
new life to art meant going back to when art was its most beautiful, and above
all most accurate, where music and verse coexisted in the affects of the
words. He strived to make things
better, “wringing lilies from the acorn”, harvesting beauty from the seed of
the tradition (line 7). He tried
to renew the tradition of the ancients, of Longinus and “the sublime”. Pound looked backward to the beauty of
“Circe’s hair”, instead of trying to be trendy with the “mottoes on sun-dials”
(lines 15 and 16). But, he
failed. “He passed from men’s
memory” without bearing fruit “to the Muses’ diadem” (lines 18 and 20).
He
felt that the age did not care for serious art. The people wanted instead “Something for the modern stage,”
and not the savior of Pound’s “Attic grace” (lines 23 and 24). They wanted entertainment, rather than
the deep rooted beauty of Pound’s visionary verse. Pound saw art in decline. “The ‘age demanded’ chiefly a mould in plaster” (line
29). They wanted something cheap
that could be mass produced and sold without regard to quality. Pound tried to restore purity to art
and prevent it from being commercialized into a “tawdry cheapness” (line 43).
Pound
is troubled by the effects of World War I. He sees life cheapened and society in the gutter. People died “For a botched
civilization” (line 91). He
thought that through his art he could restore Europe to its glorious past—a
European culture where life and beauty were valued above all else. Europe saw division and destruction on
a scale it never before had seen.
What was left now in this tattered state of affairs? Pound cries, “What god, man, or hero/
Shall I place a tin wreath upon!” (lines 59 and 60). Who can bring them something to believe in? Pound thought he could be the one to
restore a common bond in the people through art and a love of beauty. The skepticism of scientific and
industrialized England could not receive his message into their cold
dispassionate framework. Pound
truly was “out of date” with little ability to affect anything (line 6). And so, he must leave England for Italy
and try there to revive the Roman Empire with the artist, editor and dictator
Mussolini.
Robert Baynard II
Brooker/ Pound Journal #5
23 April 2008
Pound’s
“Hell”
In
“Hell”, Ezra Pound deals mainly with the issues of translation and
criticism. He discusses these
terms by using Binyon’s English version of Dante’s Inferno as a kind of treatise by example. Many difficulties arise in translating Italian verse into
English, and Pound wanted to show how to properly begin the process of
translating. He holds his
reservations about the amount to which a translation can be truly accurate, but
accuracy is what he strives for above all else. Choice of words, their order, the original’s imperfections,
must all be maintained. One must
take care to prepare themselves properly for translation, and especially for
criticism, because they must be able to understand where the origins of the
work lie and how they are appropriated.
Pound
stressed the importance of long study and hard work to be able to properly
understand the original work before one attempts translating it. Of course, he believes that no one is
better qualified to write or evaluate translations than him. He explains:
I
cannot imagine any serious writer being satisfied with his own work in this
field, or
indeed any serous writer being satisfied with his own produce in this field or in
any other [...] However drastically I hack at the present translation, I warn
the rash
novice that I can probably make a fool of any other critic who rushes in without
similar preparation. (Literary Essays 202) Pound saw the importance of
spending many years on learning the tradition of what is being translated. He wanted people to take this kind of
work more seriously and give credit where it is do. He says that the translator ought to preserve the original
to the best of their ability. Most
important for Pound is that the work maintains its original faults when brought
into translation, and he stressed the importance of giving an honest portrayal
of the original. “A literary
decadence can proceed not only from a bad colossal author, but from a small
man’s trying to avoid the defects in the work of a great man” (208).
Pound
thought that a translation, however accurate it may be from the original,
creates a new work that brings to life the original in the new context of
modernity. This renaissance
attitude toward art is a staple of Pound’s aestheticism. Binyon’s translation of Dante is
celebrated by Pound for “having his eye on the word and not the thing makes for
the honesty of the version, or transparency in the sense that one sees through
to the original” (209). Pound
rejoices at the sight of reaching back to the past from the present to unlock
the skilled craft of the classic masters.
This
is Pound in his element. He always
thinks of himself as the authority on every possible subject. As much as he continually states that he
dislikes writing about matters of art, he seems to never hesitate to make his
case heard. He considers most
people unable to address pressing issues of culture because of their own
incompetence in not having prepared themselves properly. Good art is only what Ezra Pound sees
as good, and the opinions of others hardly affect his decision-making or
sensibility. However, his invaluable
guidance and instruction shine through his aggressive ranting.
Pound’s
“Canto I”
Ezra
Pound takes an Andreas Divus 1538 translation of Homer’s Odyssey as his point of departure on his epic poem, The Cantos. “Canto I” starts in
medias res, beginning in Book XI of the Odyssey
where Odysseus goes down to hell to find the way home from Tiresias, the
soothsayer. In this way, Pound has
begun his journey to the land of the dead to find knowledge. He wants to find a way to bring the
world home through art. Pound is
trying to write the ‘tale of the tribe,’ hoping that he can solve the world’s
problems by bringing the highest points of culture into the modern world. He wants to establish a common belief
for civilization to unite under.
“Canto I”, in short, outlines his journey.
Continuing
the tradition is important for Pound, yet he brings himself into the context of
“Canto I”. He wants to know what
the ancients have found, and then he hopes that what is needed in his own time
will reveal itself. Pound begins
the poem with, “And then went down to the ship,/ Set keel to breakers, forth on
the godly sea, and/ We set up mast and sail on that swart ship” (lines 1 to
3). Pound has adjusted and
compressed Book XI, making it no more Homer than Pound. The “And then” is worth attention
because it shows a continued story, one that has been going on longer than
Pound, longer than Divus, and even longer than Homer. This is different then the opening lines of Book XI, which
starts “Now to the shores we bend”.
Pound is making a new journey to the dead to hear what Tiresias has to
tell him. He brings with him the
blood of his labor and study that will give a voice to the dead masters. As he says in “Date Line”, “I have at
all times desired to know the demarcation between what I do know and what I do not
know” (Literary Essays 85). Pound also wants to know what the great
artists of the past knew and what they did not know. Once he has discovered their secrets, he can go from there
to ‘find his way home’—a home where destruction, decay and death will fall to
the beauties of art.
Pound
wants to know the new knowledge.
When “Canto I” arrives in Hades and finds Tiresias, the soothsayer
begins with, “A second time?
why? man of ill star” (line
62). Pound has lost his way,
“Facing the sunless dead and this joyless region” (line 63). This image undoubtedly is attributed to
Hades, but it could have a double meaning for Pound’s present age. Tiresias begins his speech the same way
he did for Odysseus. Pound interrupts,
“Lie quiet Divus” (line 70). He
stops the translator, Andreas Divus, because he does not want to know what
Tiresias told Odysseus, for it is well-known through the Odyssey. Pound wants
to find out what guidance and direction Tiresias may give him.
“Canto
I” ends with the mysterious unfinished phrase, “So that:” (line 78). It seems impossible to decipher exactly
Pound’s usage of this ending, but Pound disliked wasting words. The ending must be essential to the
poem. The “So that:” may be what
he now must do once “he sailed, by Sirens and thence outward and away” (line
72). Pound does not say what
Tiresias told him or whether or not Tiresias gave him any insight. At any rate, the “So that:” means that
the epic continues. Pound works on
The Cantos for the remainder of his
life, fighting to find the answers to his pressing questions. He hopes to ‘right the ship’, give the
world back its belief in culture and humanity, and above all, art.
Robert Baynard II
Brooker/ Pound Journal #6
30 April 2008
Pound’s
WWII Broadcasts
Ezra
Pound attacks England, America, capitalism and the Jewish people in his World
War II broadcasts. He sees usury,
the charging of excessive interest for money on loan, as the biggest problem in
the face of the world. Usury has
made people loose their common bond.
He boldly proclaims, “You have lost your tradition” (March 15,
1942). He blames the Jewish people
and their money lending for bringing about the downfall of civilization. He cries, “You let in the Jew and the
Jew rotted your empire, and you yourselves out-jewed the Jew” (March 15, 1942). Pound sees that making money ex nihilo leaves people without a regard
for the labor of others. He
considers usury to be an institutionalized form of slavery, destroying culture
and leading to wars.
The
Great War, World War II, and even the American Civil War, he blames on the
Jewish people and their “FINANCIAL HOUSES” (1942). He sees people making big money off of going to war. The rich man sits in his lavish estate,
getting fat from the death of millions.
He defends Germany and aligns himself with Mussolini. He calls for people to stop fighting
against these forces because they are trying to save the world. Pound wants England to maintain its
Anglo tradition. He says, “The
white remnants of England, the white remnant of the races of England must be
FOUND and find means to cohere; otherwise you might as well lie down in your
grave yards” (1942).
He
sees a ruin of quality. Empirical
governments use cheap labor and resources of their colonies for economic gain,
but at what cost? Pound believed
that people were losing their way of life and their pride in the quality of
their country. He says:
You
have for years had cheap goods DUMPED in from Russia [...] Your Jews have ruined your home manufacturers. Loans from the city of London, loans to
the Orient,
interest paid in cheap cotton goods, loans to the South American countries,
interest paid in beef from the Argentine, and ruin of English grazing [...] Cheap grain dumped from Egypt, ruin of
the Italian farming, usury, and more usury.
(1942) Pound is especially concerned with
economics. He believes that
economic problems cause a decay of culture, and he sees usury as the problem
with economics. There is no pride
left for the common Englishmen.
Pound thinks they do not realize what they are fighting for. He sees only one solution, “a purge”
(1942). Pound wants England and
America to throw down their arms and join the Great Fuhrer and Il Duce in the
fight to purge the world from the enemy.
“Your Enemy is Das Leihkapital, international, wandering Loan
Capital. Your enemy is not
Germany, your enemy is money on loan” (1942). Pound wants to people to help purge the world of the Jews
and their age-old practice of usury.
Pound’s
ranting shows very clearly how he is losing touch with reality. He has become so obsessed with the
ideology of fascism that he cannot see his own blindness. These broadcasts got him arrested and
tried for treason. His powerful
friends petitioned his case so that he may be left in an insane asylum instead
of being hung. Pound was a famous
poet at this time, and his words were so misguided and full of hate that one
must question the morality of art.
When does poetry, art and especially rhetoric become murderous and
evil? Pound certainly pushes the
threshold of this question, calling people to consider the effects that art can
have on people, on a culture and in a war.
Pound’s
“Cantos XLV”
“Cantos
XLV” is Ezra Pound’s assault on usury.
The morality of usury seems particularly important to him. In his World War II broadcasts, he
rages against usury and particularly the main culprit, who he sees as the
Jewish people. He focuses on the
problems with usury in this canto, claiming that it leads to a loss of security,
tradition and home, while leading to murder, decay and destruction.
The
poem shows how usury causes a loss of foundation, of culture, and ultimately,
of life. He says, “With usura hath
no man a house of good stone” (line 2).
This phrase means a loss of security and homeland, but also it may have a
double meaning. Having property
with a loan on it is like not having a house made of good stone. The land can be snatched away from its
owner if he cannot pay the exorbitant debt inflated with interest.
Pound
is concerned for the present state of the world, and he sees economics and
specifically usury, as the direct cause of its problems. There is no common belief left: man has
disregarded the wisdom of the past in the interest of the almighty dollar. He says, “With usura/ hath no man a
painted paradise on a church wall” (lines 4 and 5). With usury, there is no remembrance of paradise, no value in
belief, and no worth in preserving tradition. Man has lost paradise, blinded by capitalism.
Pound
calls usury a “sin against nature,” and sees this as the true evil in the
world. It is against nature
because it is unnatural for man to make money ex nihilo. Making
money ought to presuppose labor.
One should not be rewarded for being lazy and making slaves out of
men.
The
biggest offence of usury for Pound seems to be its affects on art. Usury has cheapened art, made it
commercialized. Art is devalued
because it does not fit easily into a cost-benefit analysis, and more people
are caught up with the triumphs of industrialization than in the interest of
beauty. Pound claims that with
usury the, “Stone cutter is kept from his stone/ weaver is kept from his loom”
(lines 21 and 22). Even the tools
to create art have lost their use:
Usura
rusteth the chisel
It
rusteth the craft and the craftsman
It
gnawed the thread in the loom
None
learneth to weave gold in her pattern. (lines 37 to 40)
This last line shows how Pound was
also concerned with education and how people learn about the world. People are no longer learning how to
create beautiful art. The only
thing of value is what can be mass-produced. Pound saw literature cheapened and people valuing the
second-rate writing of the daily newspaper. Industrialization and globalization have led to
dehumanization. Even in work,
there is no pride in production; it’s just working for money. Money that usury will eventually
take. Usury corrupts the world,
which Pound saw in direct relation to the corruption of art. The corruption of art meant the
corruption of culture and a loss of what makes us human.
Robert Baynard II
Brooker/ Pound Journal #7
07 May 2008
Ezra
Pound’s “Canto LXXXI”
In
“Canto LXXXI”, Ezra Pound shows a much milder spirit and voice than in some of
the earlier cantos. It was written
after World War II while he was imprisoned in Pisa. Pound shows more humbleness than ever before, and starts to
see how his own ideologies (though they may be perfectly correct) are
responsible for his downfall. He
cries, “Pull down thy vanity” many times in the later section of the poem. Paul Smith in Pound Revised, writes that this line “is given to the reader as the
utterance of an enlightened oracle, as the lesson
that has been rescued from historical process by careful and privileged
contemplation, so that it is now available for transmission as truth. “Pull down thy vanity” becomes the
wisdom that Pound learns from his descent into Hades and his questioning
Tiresias (“Canto I”). Pound thinks
that this is the key to finding the way ‘home’ to paradise. By returning to humility, one can look
upon the face of their brother with love and compassion. Art undoubtedly has a humbling quality
to it when the audience or reader beholds a masterpiece and is struck by the
terrible beauty found in the work.
This was Pound’s goal in The Cantos.
The
voice is certainly shows Pound in mea
culpa, yet one gets the sense that Pound felt that he had to do what he
did. He tried to save civilization
through the beauty of art, by restoring the wisdom of the ancients,
establishing a common belief that would bind people together, and purging
society of the filth of corruption.
He had to try, even if it was a failure. He writes:
But
to have done instead of not doing
this
is not vanity
To
have, with decency, knocked
That
a Blunt should open
To
have gathered from the air a live tradition
or
from a fine old eye the unconquered flame
This
is not vanity.
Here
error is all in the not done,
all
in the diffidence that faltered, (lines 70 to 78)
He does not regret his efforts,
although he feels like he did not do enough. However misguided his politics and theories (on art being
able to save society) were, his task was a noble one. His triumphs lie in reclaiming “from the air a live
tradition” and rescuing “the unconquered flame”. His “error” comes from the “diffidence that faltered”. Diffidence means lacking confidence in
one’s own ability, and faltered means to be unsteady in purpose, as from loss
of courage or confidence. He has
lost his confidence in his project.
His arrogant start did not revived culture and restore humanity. His aggressive participation in war
propaganda has landed him in fetters, hands now tied to do any more. The vanity of his poetry made people miss
his message and disregard his unquestionable genius. In an age of death, decay and destruction, Pound “rose
through the aureate sky” to find a saving ‘Attic grace’ (line 4 and
“Mauberly”). Yet this triumph will
not be recognized and enacted by a public who despises his arrogance. Pound is losing his touch with the
external world, and this may have caused his ultimate loss of reality in his
senses. He will spend the
remainder of his days in St. Elizabeth’s insane asylum, writing The Cantos unceasingly until the day he
dies. The world may hate him for
his morality, but they must respect him for his unassailable influence.
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