As might be expected from Pound, especially in a later edition, written after the war, this is a complex and hectoring work. It is designed as a textbook of sorts, an introduction to the art of reading and writing poetry, but even that modest premise conceals a little hidden density.
Pound wrote this book to put into practice a theory he developed and advocated in a pamphlet called How to Read, which I have not read and which I cannot afford. Early in this book, he refers to the unerring critical sensibility of Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, an artist who died very young and of whom Pound wrote a short biography, Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir, in 1916. I had not heard of the artist; I have not read the book.
This was not an auspicious start. And in some sense it’s par for the course. Any reader of this book will face a blizzard of references they will not know. In the midst of a treatise on reading poetry, we have close to the full gamut of Pound’s obsessions: from the inadequacy of modern translations, the necessity of learning languages, the particular (assumed) character of Chinese pictographic script, the survival and peculiarities of classical Japanese Noh theatre, the failure of much modern poetry in terms of musicality and ‘singibility’, and so on. Everything that vexed Pound save fascism, although this book was written in 1931 — not early enough, perhaps, for his admiration for Mussolini to take full charge.
A few interesting and idiosyncratic ideas emerge from the first chapters. Of great interest to Pound is the discussion of where ideas originate. He does not begrudge imitation per se; instead, what frustrates him is bad imitation: the degradation of perfectly good conventions and forms in the hands of the unskilled. Homer is a genius and Sappho as true as any who came after her. Virgil is, by contrast, a bit of a phony. The imitators of Petrarch were inferior copyists.
Continuity is just fine, says Pound: he claims that Chaucer is a great European poet, not the ‘father of English poetry’ at all, and that Chaucer and Dante and Villon and more are united in a continent-spanning ‘Provençal’ poetic tradition that later English writers cannibalised and hived off from. Shakespeare, according to Pound, was possibly a dramatist because he could not be a poet outright, and in any case, what Shakespeare did in the sixteenth century was done better by Italians a hundred years before. Fair Verona, indeed. (Milton, corrupted by Latin, was inferior to Shakespeare, Pound claims. Meanwhile, Arthur Golding’s Metamorphosis, a vernacular English reworking of Ovid, is the most beautiful book in the language.)
Pound stresses that critics must understand poetry in a variety of ways -- only some of which relating to enjoyment and the extent to which its lines are memorable. The critics who focus on the poet rather than the poem attract his particular ire.
Quite correctly, Pound sneers at the critics who labelled Robert Browning ‘difficult’ — Browning is of course fondly beheld, as much for the depth of his description and capacity for conjuring a scene as for his approachability. Pound defends even Sordello, a poem of Browning’s which is reputed to have foxed Tennyson save for two lines, but which is seen — at least in the extract Pound prints — to be entirely intelligible with little extra effort.
Amusingly and truly enough, Pound notes that much of Pope’s most biting satires are robbed of their potency by the sheer obscurity of his targets, whom history has comprehensively forgotten. (There’s some irony there; even my copy of the Dunciad, which Pound thinks holds up rather well without drowning in editorial explanation, is at least 90 per cent footnotes by volume, and 99 per cent by density of text.)
Pound wants poets to have a musical sensibility, like those jongleurs of old, but he also hopes that they waste as few words as possible, and avoid contorting lines to fit the requirements of rhyme and scansion. In short, Pound’s ideal poet writes because he has something to say; something that is true; something that can be said well and without waste or pretension.
That is not a new observation; and indeed contemporaries of Pound were saying so with even more force and even less tolerance. Hemingway, in France between the wars (as relayed in A Moveable Feast, posthumously published 30 years later): ‘I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, “Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.” So daily I would write one true sentence, and then go on from there.’ Hardly a new idea.
Nonetheless, if one separates out these quite stark and sweeping judgements, Pound’s view is worthwhile. Maintaining the schoolbook conceit, for example, leads to a few charming summaries in simpleish language of why poetry which stands the test of years lives on, and a few exercises — to be done at home or in the schoolroom — either to improve the student's capacity for true description of physical things (trees, leaves, other people), or ultimately poems themselves.
All this is charming and useful, even if the ultimate conclusion reached is little more than poetry is written by poets because they understand prosody and have something to say. The best of them are musical and memorable. The survival and fashion of poems is a mystery. But the best of them live long, and possibly for ever.
Finally, the chief joy of Pound’s book is one of the latter sections, in which he prints, with minimal notation, a selection of verse of note. His tastes are catholic and a little out of the way. (Who reads Walter Savage Landor, the author of a moddish series of Imaginary Conversations, today? Not I.) Pound laments that he must provide commentary for these works rather than let them stand alone. ‘I am afraid that would be too revolutionary’. But I am under no such pressure, from a publisher or a public, and so, for the latter half of this review, I will include poems entirely alone, without comment. They were selected by Pound, and approved of by me.
Geoffrey Chaucer:
O prince desire for to be honourable,
Cherish thy folk and hate extorcioun!
Suffre no thing, that may be reprevable
To thyn estat, don in thy regioun.
Shew forth thy swerd of castigacioun,
Dred God, do law, love trouth and worthynesse
And dryve they folk ageyen to stedfastnesse.
Gavin Douglas:
The byisning heist the serpent Lema
Horribill quhissilland, and queynt Chimera,
With fire enarmyt on hir toppis hie,
The laithlye Harpies, and the Gorgonis thre
Of thrinfald bodyis, gaistly formes did grone
Baith of Erylus and of Gerione.
Arthur Golding:
While Cadmus wondered at the hugenesse of the vanquisht foe,
Upon the sodaine came a voyee : from whence he could not know.
But sure he was he heard the voyee, which said : Agenor's sonne,
What gazest thus upon this Snake? The time will one day come
That thou thy selfe shalt ba a Snake. He pale and wan for feare
Had lost his speech : and ruffed up stiffe staring stood his heare.
Behold (mans helper at his neede) Dame Pallas gliding through
The vacant Ayre was straight at hand and bade him take a plough
And east the Serpents teeth in ground as of the which should spring
Another people out of hand.
Golding again:
Now while I underneath the Earth the Lake of Styx did passe
I saw your daughter Proserpine with these same eyes. She was
Not merie, neyther rid of feare as seemed by hir cheere
But yet a Queene, but yet of great God Dis the stately Feere :
But yet of thai same droupie Realme the chiefe and sovereigne Peere.
Mark Alexander Boyd:
Fra hank to hank, fra wood to wood I rin
Ourhailit with my feeble fantasie
Like til a leaf that fallis from a tree
Or til a reed ourblawin with the wind,
Two gods guides me, the ane of them is blin,
Yea, and a bairn hrocht up in vanitie,
The next a wife ingenrit of the sea
And Iichter nor a dauphin with her fin.
Unhappy is the man for evermair
That tills the sand and sawis in the air,
But twice unhappier is he, I lairn,
That feidis in his heart a mad desire
And follows on a woman throw the fire
Led by a blind and teachit by a bairn.
George Crabbe:
No haughty virtues stirr'd his peaceful mind,
Nor urged the priest to leave the flock behind;
He was his Master's soldier, but not one
To lead an army of his martyrs on:
Feu was his ruling passion: yet was love,
Of timid kind, once known his heart to move ;
It led his patient spirit where it paid
Its languid offerings to a listening maid;
She, with her widow'd mother, heard him speak,
And sought a while to find what he would seek:
Smiling he came, he smiled when he withdrew,
And paid the same attention to the two;
Meeting and parting without joy or pain,
He seem' d to come that he might go again.
W. S. Landor:
'Twas far beyond the midnight hour
And more than half the stars were falling,
And jovial friends, who'd lost the power
Of sitting, under chairs lay sprawling;
Robert Browning:
In Mantua territory half is slough,
Half pine·tree forest, maples, scarlet oaks
Breed o'er the river-beds, even Mincio chokes
With sand the summer through, but 'til morass
In winter up to Mantua walls. There was,
Some thirty years before this evening's coil,
One spot reclaimed from the surrounding spoil ;
Goito, just a castle built amid
A few low mountains ; firs and larches hid
Their main defiles and rings of vineyard bound
The rest …
And finally Pound himself, not included in the book:
But age fares against him, his face paleth,
Grey-haired he groaneth, knows gone companions,
Lordly men are to earth o'ergiven,
Nor may he then the flesh-cover, whose life ceaseth,
Nor eat the sweet nor feel the sorry,
Nor stir hand nor think in mid heart,
And though he strew the grave with gold,
His born brothers, their buried bodies
Be an unlikely treasure hoard.