Early Writings

by Ezra Pound

  And on the home stretch, when our present author is feeling more or less relieved that the weight of the book is off his shoulders, we find if not gracile accomplishments, at any rate such acrobatics, such sheer whoops and hoop-las and trapeze turns of technique that it would seem rash to dogmatize concerning his limitations. The whole of him, on the other hand, lock, stock, and gunny-sacks is wholly outside H. J.’s compass and orbit, outside Proust’s circuit and orbit.

  If it be charged that he shows “that provincialism which must be forever dragging in allusions to some book or local custom,” it must also be admitted that no author is more lucid or more explicit in presenting things in such a way that the imaginary Chinaman or denizen of the forty-first century could without works of reference gain a very good idea of the scene and habits portrayed.

  Poynton with its spoils forms a less vivid image than Bloom’s desired two story dwelling house and appurtenances. The recollections of In Old Madrid are not at any rate highbrow; the “low back car”3 is I think local. But in the main, I doubt if the local allusions interfere with a general comprehension. Local details exist everywhere; one understands them mutatis mutandis, and any picture would be perhaps faulty without them. One must balance obscurity against brevity. Concision itself is an obscurity for the dullard.

  In this super-novel our author has also poached on the epic, and has, for the first time since 1321, resurrected the infernal figures; his furies are not stage figures; he has, by simple reversal, caught back the furies, his flaggellant Castle ladies. Telemachus, Circe, the rest of the Odyssean company, the noisy cave of Aeolus gradually place themselves in the mind of the reader, rapidly or less rapidly according as he is familiar or unfamiliar with Homer. These correspondences are part of Joyce’s mediaevalism and are chiefly his own affair, a scaffold, a means of construction, justified by the result, and justifiable by it only. The result is a triumph in form, in balance, a main schema, with continuous inweaving and arabesque.

  The best criticism of any work, to my mind the only criticism of any work of art that is of any permanent or even moderately durable value, comes from the creative writer or artist who does the next job; and not, not ever from the young gentlemen who make generalities about the creator. Laforgue’s Salomé is the real criticism of Salammbô; Joyce and perhaps Henry James are critics of Flaubert. To me, as poet, the Tentation is jettatura, it is the effect of Flaubert’s time on Flaubert; I mean he was interested in certain questions now dead as mutton, because he lived in a certain period; fortunately he managed to bundle these matters into one or two books and keep them out of his work on contemporary subjects; I set it aside as one sets aside Dante’s treatise De Aqua et Terra, as something which matters now only as archaeology. Joyce, working in the same medium as Flaubert, makes the intelligent criticism: “We might believe in it if Flaubert had first shown us St. Antoine in Alexandria looking at women and jewellers’ windows.”

  Ulysses contains 732 double sized pages, that is to say it is about the size of four ordinary novels, and even a list of its various points of interest would probably exceed my alloted space; in the Cyclops episode we have a measuring of the difference between reality, and reality as represented in various lofty forms of expression; the satire on the various dead manners of language culminates in the execution scene, blood and sugar stewed into clichés and rhetoric; just what the public deserves, and just what the public gets every morning with its porridge, in the Daily Mail and in sentimento-rhetorical journalism; it is perhaps the most savage bit of satire we have had since Swift suggested a cure for famine in Ireland. Henry James complained of Baudelaire, “Le Mal, you do yourself too much honour ... our impatience is of the same order as ... if for the ‘Flowers of Good’ one should present us with a rhapsody on plum-cake and eau de cologne.” Joyce has set out to do an inferno, and he has done an inferno.

  He has presented Ireland under British domination a picture so veridic that a ninth rate coward like Shaw (Geo. B.) dare not even look it in the face. By extension he has presented the whole occident under the domination of capital. The details of the street map are local but Leopold Bloom (né Virag) is ubiquitous. His spouse Gea-Tellus the earth symbol is the soil from which the intelligence strives to leap, and to which it subsides in saeculum saeculorum. As Molly she is a coarse-grained bitch, not a whore, an adulteress, il y en a. Her ultimate meditations are uncensored (bow to psychoanalysis required at this point). The “censor” in the Freudian sense is removed, Molly’s night-thoughts differing from those versified in Mr. Young’s once ubiquitous poem4 are unfolded, she says ultimately that her body is a flower; her last word is affirmative. The manners of the genteel society she inhabits have failed to get under her crust, she exists presumably in Patagonia as she exists in Jersey City or Camden.

  And the book is banned in America, where every child of seven has ample opportunity to drink in the details of the Arbuckle case,5 or two hundred other equodorous affairs from the 270,000,000 copies of the 300,000 daily papers which enlighten us. One returns to the Goncourt’s question, “Ought the people to remain under a literary edict? Are there classes unworthy, misfortunes too low, dramas too ill set, catastrophies, horrors too devoid of nobility? Now that the novel is augmented, now that it is the great literary form ... the social inquest, for psychological research and analysis, demanding the studies and imposing on its creator the duties of science ... seeking the facts ... whether or no the novelist is to write with the accuracy, and thence with the freedom of the savant, the historian, the physician?”

  Whether the only class in America that tries to think is to be hindered by a few cranks, who cannot, and dare not interfere with the leg shows on Broadway? Is any one, for the sake of two or three words which every small boy has seen written on the walls of a privy, going to wade through two hundred pages on consubstantiation or the biographic bearing of Hamlet? And ought an epoch-making report on the state of the human mind in the twentieth century (first of the new era) be falsified by the omission of these half dozen words, or by a pretended ignorance of extremely simple acts. Bloom’s day is uncensored, very well. The foecal analysis, in the hospital around the corner, is uncensored. No one but a Presbyterian would contest the utility of the latter exactitude. A great literary masterwork is made for minds quite as serious as those engaged in the science of medicine. The anthropologist and sociologist have a right to equally accurate documents, to equally succinct reports and generalizations, which they seldom get, considering the complexity of the matter in hand, and the idiocy of current superstitions.

  A Fabian milk report is of less use to a legislator than the knowledge contained in L’Education Sentimentale, or in Bovary. The legislator is supposed to manage human affairs, to arrange for comity of human agglomerations. Le beau monde gouverne—or did once—because it had access to condensed knowledge, the middle ages were ruled by those who could read, an aristocracy received Macchiavelli’s treatise before the serfs. A very limited plutocracy now gets the news, of which a fraction (not likely to throw too much light upon proximate markets) is later printed in newspapers. Jefferson was perhaps the last American official to have any general sense of civilization. Molly Bloom judges Griffith derisively by “the sincerity of his trousers,”6 and the Paris edition of the Tribune tells us that the tailors’ congress has declared Pres. Harding to be our best dressed Chief Magistrate.

  Be it far from me to depreciate the advantages of having a president who can meet on equal trouserial terms such sartorial paragons as Mr. Balfour and Lord (late Mr.) Lee of Fareham (and Checquers) but be it equidistant also from me to disparage the public utility of accurate language which can be attained only from literature, and which the succinct J. Caesar, or the lucid Macchiavelli, or the author of the Code Napoleon, or Thos. Jefferson, to cite a local example, would have in no ways despised. Of course it is too soon to know whether our present ruler7 takes an interest in these matters; we know only that the late pseudo-intellectual Wilson did not, and that the la
te bombastic Teddy did not, and Taft, McKinley, Cleveland, did not, and that, as far back as memory serves us no American president has ever uttered one solitary word implying the slightest interest in, or consciousness of, the need for an intellectual or literary vitality in America. A sense of style could have saved America and Europe from Wilson; it would have been useful to our diplomats. The mot juste is of public utility. I can’t help it. I am not offering this fact as a sop to aesthetes who want all authors to be fundamentally useless. We are governed by words, the laws are graven in words, and literature is the sole means of keeping these words living and accurate. The specimen of fungus given in my February letter shows what happens to language when it gets into the hands of illiterate specialists.

  Ulysses furnishes matter for a symposium rather than for a single letter, essay, or review.

  Explanatory Notes

  POEMS

  TO THE RAPHAELITE LATINISTS

  First published in Book News Monthly in January 1908, while Pound was an instructor at Wabash College in Crawfordsville, Indiana, the poem illustrates Pound’s early application of classical myth and allusion through artificial, slightly archaic language. Pound used the pseudonym “Weston Llewmys” for several of his earliest publications, including two prose statements on beauty in A Quinzaine for This Yule (London, 1908). In the first statement, introducing the volume, he declares that “beauty should never be presented explained,” believing it is “Marvel and Wonder.” The second, following his lyric “Fortunatus,” celebrates the “current of strange happiness” similar to the winds Dante “beheld whirling the passion-pale shapes in the nether gloom.”

  CINO

  Published in 1908, the title refers to a fictitious troubadour of fourteenth-century Provence, Cino Polnesi, but may be linked to the Italian poet, jurist, and friend of Dante’s, Cino da Pistoia (1270-1337). Dante included him, with Arnaut Daniel and Bertran de Born, as pre-eminent love poets in De Vulgari Eloquentia. In The Spirit of Romance (1910), Pound credits Cino, along with Cavalcanti and Dante, with bringing the “Italian canzone form to perfection” (SR, 109).

  Written in 1907 while at Wabash College, the poem appeared in Pound’s first printed book, the self-published A Lume Spento (150 copies), which he had printed in Venice in July 1908. The subtitle refers to Cino’s exile from Pistoia in 1307. In an October 1908 letter to William Carlos Williams, Pound characterizes the poem as “banal. He [Cino] might be anyone. Besides he is catalogued in his epitaph” (SL, 6). A possible source is Arthur Symon’s “Wanderer’s Song” (1899), which Pound had read and admired in America (see LE, 367). T. S. Eliot, in his earliest essay on Pound (“Ezra Pound, His Metric and Poetry”), cites “Cino” as one of the poems showing Browning’s influence. Cino also appears in Browning’s Sordello, which was an early influence on Pound (see SR, 132).

  1 Wind-runeing: Pound’s attempt at an Old English kenning.

  2 Luth: Old French, “lute.”

  3 Peste!: Italian, “plague” or “pestilence.”

  4 Sinistro: Sinister or left-handed.

  5 ’Pollo Phoibee: Phoebus Apollo, designating the sun.

  6 aegis-day: Shield day.

  7 boss: Convex projection at the center of the shield.

  8 rast-way: Path.

  NA AUDIART

  Written at Wabash College and published in A Lume Spento (1908). The poem was inspired by the fifth stanza of Bertran de Born’s “Dompna Pois de Me No’us Cal,” which Pound would translate in 1914 (see Personae, 1990:107-8). “Na Audiart” is Provençal for “Lady Audiart.” The title and epigram make up line I of stanza 5 of de Born’s poem.

  1 Que be-m vols mal: A slightly altered line from Bertran de Born’s poem, which reads “Though thou wished me ill.” The line reappears as an epigram at the end of the poem.

  2 Note: Pound’s headnote refers to the Provençal nobleman and poet Bertran de Born (c. 1140-1215). De Born ended his life in a monastery. Dante describes him in the Inferno.

  3 “Miels-de-Ben”: In French, rather than Provençal, it is “Mieux que Bien,” and means “better than good.”

  4 gold: In illuminated manuscript.

  5 lays: A short lyric or narrative meant to be sung; Old French, lai.

  6 Aultaforte: Provençal, “Autefort”; French, “Hautefort,” the castle of Bertran de Born.

  7 limning: Embellishing with a bright color or gold, often in illuminated manuscripts.

  8 wry’d: Twisted.

  VILLONAUD FOR THIS YULE

  Written in 1907 and published in 1908 in A Lume Spento, the poem has its source in François Villon (1431-1463?). A criminal who frequented the demimonde, Villon was sentenced to hang in 1463, but was, instead, banished for ten years. Villon appears in SR, chapter VIII; for Pound, he was the example of both the end of medieval writing and the beginning of modern. Pound admired his directness of speech. Dante’s vision is real because he saw it, but Villon’s “verse is real, because he lived it,” writes Pound (SR, 178).

  Villon’s life and testament became the focus of Pound’s 1920-21 opera written in Paris, Le Testament. A reference to Villon appears in Mauberley at 1. 18 of “E. P. Ode.” The sources for “Villonaud for This Yule” are two poems by Villon, “Ballade des dames du Temps Jadis” and “Ballade de la Belle Heaumière,” translations of which appear in Pound’s anthology, Confucius to cummings. The parentheses in “Villonaud for This Yule” refer to events surrounding the Nativity but may evoke Villon’s mockery of religion, an element Pound noted in Villon’s work in SR, 168.

  1 gueredon: Old French, “reward” or “requital.”

  2 foison: Old French, “plentiful” or “powerful.”

  3 feat: Old French, “fitting,” “apt.”

  HISTRION

  From A Quinzane for This Yule (1908), subtitled “Being selected from a Venetian sketch-book—‘San Trovaso,’” published by Pound in London in 1908. The poem first appeared in the Evening Standard & St. James Gazette, October 25, 1908. A footnote of Pound’s in the typescript reads, “I do not teach—I awake” (CEP, 299).

  1 . the Florentine: Dante Alighieri (1265-1321), admired by Pound. See chapter VII, “Dante,” SR.

  IN DURANCE

  Written in 1907 but not published until Personae (1909), the work is a personal poem disclosing, in a more conversational manner, the desires of the speaker. The poetic decorum of Pound’s earlier poems is here relaxed.

  REVOLT

  From Personae (1909). The subtitle, “Against the Crepuscular Spirit in Modern Poetry,” suggests an attack against the derivative language of the Pre-Raphaelites and the Decadents, which the poem upholds. “Crepuscular” means pertaining to twilight; dim or obscure.

  SESTINA: ALTAFORTE

  In “How I Began” (1913), Pound outlines the composition of the poem published in Ford Madox Ford’s English Review II in June 1909, Pound’s first appearance in an English magazine. Comprised of seven stanzas with an epigraph, it is based on a war song by the twelfth-century troubadour Bertran de Born. Pound provides a translation of the song in SR, 47-48. The vignettes that make up de Born’s poem are each introduced with the phrase “e platz mi,” “it pleases me.” Pound echoes this repetitive structure, but through the form of the sestina, a form that rotates a set of six six-line stanzas and a three-line envoi, linked by an intricate pattern of repeated line endings. It is the most elaborate of the medieval French fixed forms using only six end words, normally unrhymed. According to Pound, it was invented by Arnaut Daniel (SR, 26); Sir Philip Sidney introduced it into English in his Arcadia (1590). The sestina offered Pound what he describes in his article “How I Began” as “the curious involution and recurrence” of form. He wrote the first strophe of “Sestina: Altaforte” and then “went to the British Museum to make sure of the right order of the permutations ... I did the rest of the poem at a sitting.”

  Pound’s first reading of the poem in public, at the Poets’ Club at the Tour Eiffel restaurant in Soho on April 22, 1909, was as memorable a
s it was voluble. Spoons jumped on the table and a screen had to be placed around the gathering so as not to disturb other diners. He also “opened fire” with the poem for his friend, the sculptor Gaudier-Brzeska, commenting that “I think it was the ‘Altaforte’ that convinced him that I would do to be sculpted” (GB, 43).

  1 Loquitur: Latin, “he speaks.”

  2 En: Provençal, “Sir” or “Lord.”

  3 Dante: Dante placed Bertran in the Ninth Circle of Hell in The Inferno as a “Sower of Discord” for setting Prince Henry against his brother Richard and their father Henry II. Pound translated this passage from Dante in SR, 45.

  4 Eccovi!: Italian, “Here you are.”

  5 jongleur: The troubadour’s singer, Papiols.

  6 destriers: War horses trained to rear up before the enemy.

  PIERE VIDAL OLD

  Appearing first in Exultations (1909), the poem is based on the life of the Provençal troubadour Piere Vidal (1175-1215), who supposedly sang better than any man in the world (LE, 95). Pound also translated Vidal’s “Song of Breath,” SR, 49. “Piere Vidal Old” is a persona, not a translation; however, it is based on an incident in Vidal’s life (which Pound records in his epigraph) that he located in an early Provençal biography of the poet. The story is apocryphal.