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.
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