Early Writings

by Ezra Pound

  To recapitulate, then, the vorticist position; or at least my position at the moment is this:

  Energy, or emotion, expresses itself in form. Energy, whose primary manifestation is in pure form, i.e., form as distinct from likeness or association can only be expressed in painting or sculpture. Its expression can vary from a ‘wall of Troy pattern’ to Wyndham Lewis’s ‘Timon of Athens’, or a Wadsworth woodblock. Energy expressing itself in pure sound, i.e., sound as distinct from articulate speech, can only be expressed in music. When an energy or emotion ‘presents an image’, this may find adequate expression in words. It is very probably a waste of energy to express it in any more tangible medium. The verbal expression of the image may be reinforced by a suitable or cognate rhythm-form and by timbre-form. By rhythm-form and timbre-form I do not mean something which must of necessity have a ‘repeat’ in it. It is certain that a too obvious ‘repeat’ may be detrimental.

  The test of invention lies in the primary figment, that is to say, in that part of any art which is peculiarly of that art as distinct from ‘the other arts’. The vorticist maintains that the ‘organising’ or creative-inventive faculty is the thing that matters; and that the artist having this faculty is a being infinitely separate from the other type of artist who merely goes on weaving arabesques out of other men’s ‘units of form’.

  Superficial capability needs no invention whatsoever, but a great energy has, of necessity, its many attendant inventions.

  CHINESE POETRY

  It is because Chinese poetry has certain qualities of vivid presentation; and because certain Chinese poets have been content to set forth their matter without moralizing and without comment that one labours to make a translation, and that I personally am most thankful to the late Ernest Fenollosa for his work in sorting out and gathering many Chinese poems into a form and bulk wherein I can deal with them.

  I do not think my views on poetry can be so revolutionary and indecent as some people try to make out, for some months ago I heard Selwyn Image1 talking of Christmas Carols and praising, in them, the very qualities I and my friends are always insisting on. Selwyn Image belongs to an older and statelier generation and it is not their habit to attack traditional things which they dislike, and for that reason the rather irritating work of revising our poetical canon has been left for my contemporaries, who come in for a fair share of abuse.

  I shall not, in this article, attempt any invidious comparisons between English and Chinese poetry. China has produced just as many bad poets as England, just as many dull and plodding moralizers, just as many flaccid and over-ornate versifiers.

  By fairly general consent, their greatest poet is Rihaku or “Li Po,” who flourished in the eighth century A.D. He was the head of the court office of poetry, and a great “compiler.” But this last title must not mislead you. In China a “compiler” is a very different person from a commentator. A compiler does not merely gather together, his chief honour consists in weeding out, and even in revising.

  Thus, a part of Rihaku’s work consists of old themes rewritten, of a sort of summary of the poetry which had been before him, and this in itself might explain in part the great variety of his work. Nevertheless, when he comes to treat of things of his own time he is no less various and abundant. I confine myself to his work because I can find in it examples of the three qualities of Chinese poetry which I wish now to illustrate.

  The first great distinction between Chinese taste and our own is that the Chinese like poetry that they have to think about, and even poetry that they have to puzzle over. This latter taste has occasionally broken out in Europe, notably in twelfth-century Provence and thirteenth-century Tuscany, but it has never held its own for very long.

  The following four-line poem of Rihaku’s has been prized for twelve centuries in China:THE JEWEL-STAIRS GRIEVANCE2

  The jewelled steps are already quite white with dew,

  It is so late that the dew soaks my gauze stockings,

  And I let down the crystal curtain

  And watch the moon through the clear autumn.

  I have never found any occidental who could “make much” of that poem at one reading. Yet upon careful examination we find that everything is there, not merely by “suggestion” but by a sort of mathematical process of reduction. Let us consider what circumstances would be needed to produce just the words of this poem. You can play Conan Doyle if you like.

  First, “jewel-stairs,” therefore the scene is in a palace.

  Second, “gauze stockings,” therefore a court lady is speaking, not a servant or common person who is in the palace by chance.

  Third, “dew soaks,” therefore the lady has been waiting, she has not just come.

  Fourth, “clear autumn with moon showing,” therefore the man who has not come cannot excuse himself on the grounds that the evening was unfit for the rendezvous.

  Fifth, you ask how do we know she was waiting for a man? Well, the title calls the poem “grievance,” and for that matter, how do we know what she was waiting for?

  This sort of Chinese poem is probably not unfamiliar to the reader. Nearly every one who has written about Chinese has mentioned the existence of these short, obscure poems. In contrast to them, in most rigorous contrast, we find poems of the greatest vigour and clarity. We find a directness and realism such as we find only in early Saxon verse and in the Poema del Cid, and in Homer, or rather in what Homer would be if he wrote without epithet; for instance, the following war poem. The writer expects his hearers to know that Dai and Etsu are in the south, that En is a bleak north country, and that the “Wild Goose Gate” is in the far northeast, and the “Dragon Pen” is in the very opposite corner of the great empire, and probably that the Mongols are attacking the borders of China. Given these simple geographical facts the poem is very forthright in its manner.

  The Dai horse,3 from the south, neighs against the north wind,

  The birds of Etsu have no love for En, in the north.

  Emotion is of habit.

  Yesterday we went out of the Wild Goose Gate,

  To-day from the Dragon Pen.

  Surprised. Desert Turmoil. Sea sun.

  Flying snow bewilders the barbarian heaven.

  Lice swarm like ants over our accoutrements,

  Our mind and spirit are on getting forward the feather-silk

  banners.

  Hard fight gets no reward.

  Loyalty is difficult to explain.

  Who will be sorry for General Rishogu, the swift-moving,

  Whose white head is lost for this province.

  There you have no mellifluous circumlocution, no sentimentalizing of men who have never seen a battlefield and who wouldn’t fight if they had to. You have war, campaigning as it has always been, tragedy, hardship, no illusions. There are two other fine war poems which are too long to quote here, one reputed to be by Bunno: a plodding of feet, soldiers living on fern-shoots, generals with outworn horses; another by Rihaku, supposedly spoken by a sentinel watching over a long-ruined village. There are no walls, there are decaying bones, enduring desolation.

  (To be concluded) 4

  CHINESE POETRY-II

  There are two other qualities in Chinese poetry which are, I think, little suspected. First, Chinese poetry is full of fairies and fairy lore. Their lore is “quite Celtic.” I found one tale in a Japanese play; two ghosts come to a priest to be married, or rather he makes a pilgrimage to their tomb and they meet him there. The tale was new to me, but I found that Mr. Yeats had come upon a similar story among the people of Aran. The desire to be taken away by the fairies, the idea of souls flying with the sea-birds, and many other things recently made familiar to us by the Celtic school, crop up in one’s Chinese reading and are so familiar and so well known to us that they seem, often, not worth translating.

  If the reader detests fairies and prefers human poetry, then that also can be found in Chinese. Perhaps the most interesting form of modern poetry is to be found in Browning’s
“Men and Women.” This kind of poem, which reaches its climax in his unreadable “Sordello,” and is most popular in such poems as “Pictor Ignotus,” or the “Epistle of Karshish,” or “Cleon,” has had a curious history in the west. You may say it begins in Ovid’s Heroides,” which purport to be letters written between Helen and Paris or by CEnone and other distinguished persons of classical pseudo-history; or you may find an earlier example in Theocritus’ Idyl of the woman spinning at her sombre and magic wheel. From Ovid to Browning this sort of poem was very much neglected. It is interesting to find, in eighth-century China, a poem which might have been slipped into Browning’s work without causing any surprise save by its simplicity and its naive beauty.

  THE RIVER-MERCHANT’S WIFE4 (A LETTER)

  While my hair was still cut straight across my forehead

  I played about the front gate, pulling flowers.

  You came by on bamboo-stilts, playing horse.

  You walked about my seat, playing with blue plums.

  And we went on living in the village of Cho-kan;

  Two small people, without dislike or suspicion.

  At fourteen I married you, My Lord,

  I never laughed, being bashful.

  Lowering my head, I looked at the wall.

  Called to, a thousand times, I never looked back.

  At fifteen I stopped scowling,

  I desired my dust to be mingled with your dust

  Forever, and forever, and forever.

  Why should I climb the look-out?

  At sixteen you departed,

  You went into far Ku-to-yen, by the river of swirling eddies.

  And you were gone for five months.

  The monkeys make sorrowful noise overhead.

  You dragged your feet, by the gate, when you were departing.

  Now the moss is grown there; the different mosses,

  Too deep to clear them away.

  The leaves fall early this autumn, in wind.

  The paired butterflies are already yellow with August,

  Over the grass in the west garden.

  They hurt me.

  I grow older.

  If you are coming down through the narrows of the river

  Kiang

  Please let me know beforehand

  And I will come out to meet you,

  As far as Cho-fu-sa.

  I can add nothing, and it would be an impertinence for me to thrust in remarks about the gracious simplicity and completeness of the poem.

  There is another sort of completeness in Chinese. Especially in their poems of nature and of scenery they seem to excel western writers, both when they speak of their sympathy with the emotions of nature and when they describe natural things.

  For instance, when they speak of mountainous crags with the trees clinging head downward, or of a mountain pool where the flying birds are reflected, and

  Lie as if on a screen,

  as says Rihaku.

  The scenes out of the marvellous Chinese painting rise again and again in his poems, but one cannot discuss a whole literature, or even all of one man’s work in a single essay.

  THE CHINESE WRITTEN CHARACTER AS A MEDIUM FOR POETRY

  [This essay was practically finished by the late Ernest Fenollosa; I have done little more than remove a few repetitions and shape a few sentences.

  We have here not a bare philological discussion, but a study of the fundamentals of all aesthetics. In his search through unknown art Fenollosa, coming upon unknown motives and principles unrecognised in the West, was already led into many modes of thought since fruitful in ‘new’ Western painting and poetry. He was a forerunner without knowing it and without being known as such.

  He discerned principles of writing which he had scarcely time to put into practice. In Japan he restored, or greatly helped to restore, a respect for the native art. In America and Europe he cannot be looked upon as a mere searcher after exotics. His mind was constantly filled with parallels and comparisons between Eastern and Western art. To him the exotic was always a means of fructification. He looked to an American renaissance. The vitality of his outlook can be judged from the fact that although this essay was written some time before his death in 1908 I have not had to change the allusions to Western conditions. The later movements in art have corroborated his theories. E.P. 1918.]

  This twentieth century not only turns a new page in the book of the world, but opens another and a startling chapter. Vistas of strange futures unfold for man, of world-embracing cultures half-weaned from Europe, of hitherto undreamed responsibilities for nations and races.

  The Chinese problem alone is so vast that no nation can afford to ignore it. We in America, especially, must face it across the Pacific, and master it or it will master us. And the only way to master it is to strive with patient sympathy to understand the best, the most hopeful and the most human elements in it.

  It is unfortunate that England and America have so long ignored or mistaken the deeper problems of Oriental culture. We have misconceived the Chinese for a materialistic people, for a debased and worn-out race. We have belittled the Japanese as a nation of copyists. We have stupidly assumed that Chinese history affords no glimpse of change in social evolution, no salient epoch of moral and spiritual crisis. We have denied the essential humanity of these peoples; and we have toyed with their ideals as if they were no better than comic songs in an ‘opéra bouffe.’

  The duty that faces us is not to batter down their forts or to exploit their markets, but to study and to come to sympathize with their humanity and their generous aspirations. Their type of cultivation has been high. Their harvest of recorded experience doubles our own. The Chinese have been idealists, and experimenters in the making of great principles; their history opens a world of lofty aim and achievement, parallel to that of the ancient Mediterranean peoples. We need their best ideals to supplement our own—ideals enshrined in their art, in their literature and in the tragedies of their lives.

  We have already seen proof of the vitality and practical value of Oriental painting for ourselves and as a key to the Eastern soul. It may be worth while to approach their literature, the intensest part of it, their poetry, even in an imperfect manner.

  I feel that I should perhaps apologizeal for presuming to follow that series of brilliant scholars, Davis, Legge, St. Denys and Giles,1 who have treated the subject of Chinese poetry with a wealth of erudition to which I can proffer no claim. It is not as a professional linguist nor as a sinologue that I humbly put forward what I have to say. As an enthusiastic student of beauty in Oriental culture, having spent a large portion of my years in close relation with Orientals, I could not but breathe in something of the poetry incarnated in their lives.

  I have been for the most part moved to my temerity by personal considerations. An unfortunate belief has spread both in England and in America that Chinese and Japanese poetry are hardly more than an amusement, trivial, childish, and not to be reckoned in the world’s serious literary performance.2 I have heard well-known sinologues state that, save for the purposes of professional linguistic scholarship, these branches of poetry are fields too barren to repay the toil necessary for their cultivation.

  Now my own impression has been so radically and diametrically opposed to such a conclusion, that a sheer enthusiasm of generosity has driven me to wish to share with other Occidentals my newly discovered joy. Either I am pleasingly self-deceived in my positive delight, or else there must be some lack of aesthetic sympathy and of poetic feeling in the accepted methods of presenting the poetry of China. I submit my causes of joy.

  Failure or success in presenting any alien poetry in English must depend largely upon poetic workmanship in the chosen medium. It was perhaps too much to expect that aged scholars who had spent their youth in gladiatorial combats with the refractory Chinese characters should succeed also as poets. Even Greek verse might have fared equally ill had its purveyors been perforce content with provincial standards of English rhymin
g. Sinologues should remember that the purpose of poetical translation is the poetry, not the verbal definitions in dictionaries.

  One modest merit I may, perhaps, claim for my work: it represents for the first time a Japanese school of study in Chinese culture. Hitherto Europeans have been somewhat at the mercy of contemporary Chinese scholarship. Several centuries ago China lost much of her creative self, and of her insight into the causes of her own life; but her original spirit still lives, grows, interprets, transferred to Japan in all its original freshness. The Japanese today represent a stage of culture roughly corresponding to that of China under the Sung dynasty. I have been fortunate in studying for many years as a private pupil under Professor Kainan Mori, who is probably the greatest living authority on Chinese poetry. He has recently been called to a chair in the Imperial University of Tokio.

  My subject is poetry, not language, yet the roots of poetry are in language. In the study of a language so alien in form to ours as is Chinese in its written character, it is necessary to inquire how these universal elements of form which constitute poetics can derive appropriate nutriment.

  In what sense can verse, written in terms of visible hieroglyphics, be reckoned true poetry? It might seem that poetry, which like music is a time art, weaving its unities out of successive impressions of sound, could with difficulty assimilate a verbal medium consisting largely of semi-pictorial appeals to the eye.