A Penny Gets a Pound
Ezra Pound’s short early collection
A Quinzaine for this Yule by Ezra Pound
One of the first glimpses into the mind of Ezra Pound and we see yet this early many of his obsessions and tics. We see his obsession with seeing or pretending to have seen the world (at least the European world), with the fantasy of visiting everywhere and drinking it all in and speaking every language. We have his cod mediaevalism, his determination that he is not Ezra Pound from middle America but François Villon, or perhaps Dante, redivivus. And we have the idea, no doubt twinned with all of this, that while other men fall and fail and finally die, Pound will go on — will be a light unto the nations. With his difficult verse, with his sure and certain knowledge of his own greatness, and with the timeless, boundless wisdom that he possessed.
All of this is written as if it is beyond question or dispute.
What is it that we see? Visions, perhaps, of Italy.
We have strange almost sepulchral little odes, descriptions of strange wasted places. Stories of vistas, mostly, which appear to gaze upon old and ruined places. Venice is a living city — was a living one in Pound’s own day. But as he wanders its streets and traverses its canals, he is duetting with ghosts. Living in a world of his own baroque fantasies. Casting himself as poet supreme, euphonic polyglot, saviour of mankind.
Jesus may save, but Pound alone purifies. Purify our hearts, he writes (of course, and needlessly, in French). Purify our hearts.
Pound is a difficult poet and a difficult figure in part because he intended to be difficult. He wanted his work to be hard to understand unless the reader was precisely as educated as he thought they ought to be. Learned in the things Pound alone thought best. Ideally the reader arrived familiar with French, Italian and Spanish at a minimum. Possibly a little Chinese and Japanese; although it’s long been debated how much Pound knew of either, and I think, personally, that he knew none. And the reader ought to have been around a bit. Not necessarily to Paris and Avignon, but to Provence, of course, and most of Italy, including the communes hard to reach and impervious to all who do not talk the local language like a native. Perhaps to Nippon and Cathay, also, although Pound demurs a little on doing all that himself. A smattering of Noh theatre; a few glimpses into the Chinese classics. And then the reader is prepared, like Pound, to read the fourteenth century manuscripts he claims to be finding and translating — which talk about about dead and beautiful women — and to imagine falling to one’s knees in front of a monument or before a mossed-over tomb.
This is not necessarily what the reader wants from Pound, or from poetry. But it is what the poet thinks the reader most obviously ought to desire and do.
What Pound offers to those willing and eager is the pretence and claim of absolute knowledge. The assimilation of everything into a grand world system of arcana and experience where everything makes sense. Our lives are not our own. There are no small and personal moments. Everything is linked and interlaced; everything is related. Rather than writing personally, say, about love or heartbreak, Pound wants to invoke it. He works to spread dust and cobwebs on everything. He wishes everything he says and sees to be ancient and unfathomable. Every book of his, though new, though vital and exciting and different, desperately, violently harks back to an ancient past, a deep past. To something beyond time.
No wonder, then, that Pound was so eager and so obvious a fascist. Fascism was both the wave of the future and something meant to be ancient, blood-deep. The modernists, the futurists: all of them thought the knew the twentieth century’s terrifying speed. Telephone and radio changed the world. Photography and the cinema forever diverted the arts from their usual course. The theatre flailed; the three volume novel was an ancient thing. The magazines (the ones worth reading and writing for) published a handful of issues before dissolving in a rush of bad debts and acrimony. And the short stories were all experimental.
Poetry must be new. It must be remade. And Pound’s solution to novelty, to the pace of change, to the making of the future, was the imagined past. The past of troubadours. The Song of Roland.
Those ancient poets that Pound praised were often subtle. They strained for the smallest effects, even unnoticed by their readers. This is not Pound’s way. Instead, his pieces of inside knowledge are displayed widely and stand stark in his verses, jammed in. Endless references to other events, real or imagined. So many poems exist only in allusion to something his readers will never have heard.
He writes in more than one language; he quotes without acknowledgement. Phrases (old phrases, phrases he made up) get caught in his mind; he cannot but repeat them almost unceasingly.
And all of this brief book (more readable and less dense than much of Pound’s major works) is made up of selections from his Venetian sketch book entitled San Trovaso. That must be why here Pound is almost reined in, almost straightforward, almost ready to be handed out to, or set loose upon, the public, the general reader.