by Ezra Pound
1 guerdon: “Reward” (see “Villonaud,” note 1).
BALLAD OF THE GOODLY FERE
From Exultations (1909), the poem appears to have been written in April 1909, according to a letter to Pound’s father, and appeared in both book form and in The English Review in October 1909. In “How I Began,” Pound describes how he wrote the poem one afternoon at the British Museum reading room, provoked by “a certain sort of irreverence that was new to me.” He also realized that it was the first poem he had written that “everyone could understand.” Yeats would celebrate it in a speech in 1914 as a work of permanent value, although Eliot excluded it from Pound’s Selected Poems (1928) “because it has a much greater popularity than it deserves” (SP., 21).
1 Simon Zelotes: The apostle.
“BLANDULA, TENULLA, VAGULA”
First published in Canzoni (1911), the title refers to the dying words of the emperor Hadrian, suggesting the wandering, tenuous soul. Pound includes his own adaptation of the first line of the Latin—“Animula vagula blandula”—at the end of his obituary on Rémy de Gourmont (SP, 393) and will repeat the “vagula, tenulla” phrase in Canto CV of The Cantos.
1 Sirmio: Latin name for Sirmione, a promontory on the southern shore of Lago di Garda, in northern Italy, where Catullus had a villa. Sirmione was favored by Pound, who first visited in March 1910. He returned many times and met Joyce for the first time there in 1920.
2 triune: Three in one.
3 Riva: A town to the north of Lago di Garda.
UND DRANG
Pound’s first long poem appeared in Canzoni (1911); it is also his first to employ sequence as a formal device, a technique that he will extend in Homage to Sextus Propertius and Hugh Selwyn Mauberley. The work anticipates in its structure and subject Pound’s later efforts to define the role of the poet and the place of poetry in the modern world. Pound never republished the first six sections of the poem after their appearance in the American edition of Lustra (1917), only the last six (sections seven through twelve), although without section numbers to indicate that they were part of a sequence (see Personae, 47-52). In the poem, the ironic, casual, and urbane confront visionary affirmation undercut by world-weary despair through the juxtaposition of moods and the shadow of detachment.
1 Binyon: Laurence Binyon (1869-1943), writer, art expert, poet, translator of Dante, and keeper of prints and drawings at the British Museum. In 1908, he published Paintings in the Far East in four volumes. In the 1930s he became a friend of Pound’s, who was then translating The Divine Comedy. It was Binyon who advised Yeats that “slowness is beauty” (Canto LXXXVII). Binyon variously appears in The Cantos.
2 Aengus: Pound borrows the figure of the wanderer from Yeats’s “Song of the Wandering Aengus,” in The Wind Among the Reeds.
3 “Far buon tempo e trionfare”: “To have fine weather and triumph.” “I have ... mind”: Swinburne, “The Triumph of Time,” 1. 49.
4 Oisin: Pound alludes to Yeats’s “The Wanderings of Oisin” (1889) and the idea that man is independent of time and space.
5 beryl: A hard mineral occurring in green, bluish green, yellow, pink, or white hexagonal prisms.
6 chrysoprase: An apple green translucent quartz valued as a gem.
7 Benacus: Lago di Garda in northern Italy, where Pound spent the spring of 1910 working on his translations of Cavalcanti. Via its association with Catullus and the Renaissance Latin poet Pound most admired, Marc Antony Flaminius, Lago di Garda was a sacred space for Pound. It became a recurrent setting in The Cantos, especially the Pisan sequence, and was where Pound first met Joyce.
8 HORAE BEATAE INSCRIPTIO: Inscription for an “Hour of Happiness.”
9 Sir Roger de Coverley: Imaginary country gentleman created by the eighteenth-century English prose writer Joseph Addison.
10 sic crescit gloria mundi: “Thus the glory of the world increases,” an ironic adaptation of the Latin motto “Sic transit gloria mundis” (“So the glory of the world fades”).
11 aegrum vulgus: Diseased rabble.
12 cari laresque, penates: Dear family and household gods.
REDONDILLAS, OR SOMETHING OF THAT SORT
Originally to be set in page proof for Canzoni (1911) as “Locksley Hall, forty years further,” this poem of 114 lines mirrors Tennyson’s “Locksley Hall, Sixty Years After.” In it, Pound imitates the meter and material of Tennyson with acknowledgment to Byron and Whitman. A redondilla is a Spanish verse form, an octo-syllabic quatrain with a rhyme scheme of abba. Pound found the poem, his first attempt at creating poetry out of history while offering his own opinions of the world, too serious when he reviewed page proof of Canzoni and, after attempting to rewrite it, withdrew it. The volume without the poem appeared in July 1911. Pound gave the poem to a friend and it was acquired by the Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin in 1958.
The poem first appeared in 1967 in Poetry Australia (XV) and then in a separate edition of 110 copies signed by Pound and printed by Robert Grabhorn and Andrew Hoyem. This edition contains Pound’s “Notes on the Proper Names in the Redondillas.” The title echoes a passage in The Spirit of Romance where, after Pound quotes and translates four lines from Lope de Vega, he writes, “those lines are at the beginning of some careless redondillas, presenting the thoughts he takes with him journeying” (SR, 208). Below is Pound’s “Notes on the Proper Names in the Redondillas”:Yeats (W. B.), specialist in the renaissances.
T. Roosevelt (Theodore), president of one of the American republics early in the twentieth century. Not to be confused with Theodoric, Gothorum imperator.
Plarr (V.G.), of the Rhymers’ Club.
Vance, an American Painter, chief works: “Christ appearing on the Waters” (Salon, Paris ‘03) and the new bar-room in San Diego.
Whiteside, an American landscape painter.
Bergson, French postpragmatical philosopher.
Klimt of Vienna and Zwintscher of Leipzig. Two too modern painters.
Spinoza, the particular passages I had in mind run as follows: “The more perfection a thing possesses the more it acts, and the less it suffers, and conversely the more it acts, the more perfect it is.”—On the power of the intellect or human liberty, Proposition, xi. “When the mind contemplates itself and its power of acting, it rejoices, and it rejoices in proportion to the distinctness with which it imagines itself and its power of action.”—Origin and nature of the affects, xiii.
And another passage for which I cannot at the moment give the exact references, where he defines “the intellectual love of anything” as “the understanding of its perfections.”
1 Garda: Lago di Garda in northern Italy, where Pound visited often and the location of Catullus’s villa.
2 Desenzano: A town on Lago di Garda.
3 “Mi Platz”: “It pleases me,” an allusion to one of Bertran de Born’s war songs.
4 Plarr: Victor Plarr (1863-1929), Librarian of the Royal College of Surgeons, London, and author of an 1896 collection of poems, In the Dorian Mood.
5 Nietzsche: Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), German philosopher trained as a classical philologist, author of The Birth of Tragedy, Beyond Good and Evil, The Genealogy of Morals, Thus Spake Zarathustra, and other works.
6 risorgimenti: Revival or renaissance.
7 Paul Verlaine: French poet (1844-1896) who appears at the end of Canto LXXIV.
8 rôti de dindon: Roast turkey.
9 Tamlin: Tam Lin, a Scottish fairy ballad.
10 Arma ... ab oris: Parallel to the opening line of Virgil’s Aeneid.
11 Nascitur ordo: “Order is born.”
12 Ehrlich: Paul Ehrlich (1854-1915), German bacteriologist who won the Nobel Prize for physiology/medicine in 1908 for his work on immunology.
13 Fracastori ... “De Morbo”: Possibly “De Morbo Gallico,” a study of syphilis.
14 Admiror, sum ergo: “I admire, therefore I am.”
15 Schopenhauer: Arthur Schopenhauer (178
8-1860), German philosopher who emphasized pessimism.
16 Lucretius: C. 95-55 B.C.E. Roman poet and Epicurean philosopher.
17 tornata: A return, although in Provençal it is similar to an envoi.
18 saeculum in parvo: “Century in miniature.”
19 Steibelt: Daniel Steibelt (1765-1823), German composer and pianist.
TO WHISTLER, AMERICAN
The poem first appeared in Poetry (October 1912), and was reprinted in the 1949 edition of Personae: The Collected Poems of Ezra Pound. The occasion for writing the poem was an exhibition of Whistler’s paintings at the Tate Gallery in September 1912. Pound early admired Whistler, who in his move to Europe anticipated Pound’s own expatriate act. To Harriet Monroe at Poetry, Pound wrote that he counted Whistler as “our only great artist” and that his “informal salute,” his poem, might not be out of place at “the threshold of what I hope is an endeavor to carry into our American poetry the same sort of life and intensity which he [Whistler] infused into modern painting” (SL, 10). In his critique of America, Patria Mia (1912; reprint, Chicago: R. Seymour, 1950), Pound cites Whistler with Henry James as the only two great artists from the United States (47). He elaborates his comments on Whistler on pp. 50-51, 64 of the work.
PORTRAIT D’UNE FEMME
Pound sent the poem to the North American Review in January 1912, where it was rejected on the grounds that he had used the letter r three times in the first line and that it was difficult to pronounce. Pound understood this reasoning as proof of the compliance of American editors to fixed formulas of literary success (see Patria Mia). It appeared in Smart Set for November 1913, reprinted from Ripostes (1912). Eliot has a poem with a similar title, “Portrait of a Lady,” in Prufrock and Other Observations (1917).
1 Sargasso Sea: This sea lies between the Azores, the Canaries, and the Cape Verde Islands in the North Atlantic.
N.Y.
First published in Ripostes (London, 1912) and reprinted in Smart Set the following year, the poem marks Pound’s disappointment upon his return to America in June 1910 and time spent unproductively in New York. He departed for Europe in February 1911. The version of the poem that appears in Umbra (London: Mathews, 1920) includes the note “Madison Ave. 1910.”
THE SEAFARER
Published in the New Age (November 30, 1911), as the opening example in a series of twelve articles entitled “I Gather the Limbs of Osiris,” the poem is Pound’s rendering, rather than translation of the well-known Anglo-Saxon poem. Reprinted in Ripostes (1912). Pound freely treated the original text, omitting the fourth, moralizing section of the extant poem and excluding the Christian references in the text of the poem he does present. He freely renders “englum” as “English” rather than “angels.” The poem, some argued, had been “edited” by Pound into a kind of hedonism by excluding the Christian and the moral. Asked in 1912 how much of the poem was his and how much was the original, he replied, “As nearly literal, I think, as any translation can be” (SP, 39).
Pound saw a connection between the theme of “The Seafarer” and the outsider, the wanderer, and the “Exile’s Letter” by Li Po, which would appear in his next volume, Cathay (1915). Indeed, he believed that there was no eighth-century poem equal to “Exile’s Letter” except “The Seafarer,” which displays “the West on a par with the Orient” (ABC, 51). Some felt, however, that Pound was ignorant of Anglo-Saxon and mistranslated a great deal of the original. But Pound follows a homophonic system of translation, one that re-creates the Anglo-Saxon reading tradition through a kind of “phonetic simulacrum” (Michael Alexander, Earliest English Poems, 117).
THE RETURN
Meaning expressed by form is part of the intent of “The Return,” which first appeared in The English Review of June 1912, reprinted in Ripostes (1912) a few months later. The poem is the equivalent of the Vorticist technique of sculpture represented by Gaudier-Brzeska and Jacob Epstein: planes in relation to each other. Gaudier-Brzeska described this as the arrangement of his emotions “SOLELY FROM THE ARRANGEMENT OF SURFACES. I shall present my emotions by the ARRANGEMENT OF MY SURFACES, THE PLANES AND LINES BY WHICH THEY ARE DEFINED” (GB, 28). Impressed, Yeats remarked that the poem seemed as if Pound “were translating at sight from an unknown Greek masterpiece” (Oxford Book of Modern Verse, 1892-1935 [1935]). He also valued its use of rhythm, remarking that in its free verse structure, it was “the most beautiful poem that has been written in the free form, one of the few in which I find real organic rhythm” (Stock, 191). Pound included the poem in his 1914 anthology, Des Imagistes.
FRATRES MINORES
From BLAST (vol. 1, June 20, 1914), with the first two and last lines canceled in ink in most copies. The poem indicts the limpidity and failure of nerve among English poets to confront directly the harsh reality of the war and suffering.
THE COMPLETE POETICAL WORKS OF T. E. HULME
Originally appearing at the end of Ripostes (1912), these five poems with a “Prefatory Note” satirize the poetic output of the philosopher and aesthetician T. E. Hulme (1883-1917), who helped to organize the Poets’ Club, then broke away to form a counter group in 1909, which Pound joined that April. Hulme met Henri Bergson in 1907 and became an important supporter, translating and publishing his Introduction to Metaphysics a few years later. Hulme’s call for a “visual, concrete” language made an impression on the young Pound. Canto XVI from Pound’s Cantos refers to Hulme’s experiences in World War I.
SALUTATION THE THIRD
An aggressive satire unfavorably attacking reviewers from the Times of London, which appeared in BLAST (vol. 1, June 20, 1914).
SONG OF THE BOWMEN OF SHU
Appearing first in Cathay (1915), a set of poems drawn from Pound’s work with the notebooks of Ernest Fenollosa (1853-1908), American scholar of the Far East. In London, in 1913, Fenollosa’s widow presented Pound with sixteen notebooks and other manuscripts belonging to her husband. The notebooks contained the Chinese characters for the original poems, followed by Japanese pronunciations and rough translations. Pound chose Japanese names for the Chinese poets. The 1915 edition of Cathay contained eleven poems, including Pound’s translation of “The Seafarer,” to show the similarity of T’ang Dynasty and Anglo-Saxon views of exile. When the volume appeared as a section of Lustra, Pound added five more poems and dropped “The Seafarer,” which appeared elsewhere in the collection.
1 fern-shoots: Gaudier-Brzeska, who sent this poem and two others while at the Front, wrote to Pound that “the poems depict our situation in a wonderful way. We do not yet eat the young nor old fern-shoots but we cannot be over-victualled where we stand” (GB, 58).
2 Ken-nin: Chinese, Hsien-yün (the Huns).
3 sorrow: Gaudier-Brzeska wrote to John Cournos in December 1914, “when you have turned to a warrior you become hardened to many evils ... like the Chinese bowmen in Ezra’s poem we had rather at fern shoots than go back now” (in Kenner, 203).
4 Bunno: Wen-Wang, that is, King Wen of the Chou Dynasty. Supposedly, Wen, the commander in chief of the western provinces dispatched against the Huns, composed the poem in the persona of a common soldier to show his sympathy.
THE RIVER SONG
A translation of two separate poems by Li Po. Likely confused by the pagination in Fenollosa’s notebook, Pound conflated the two poems into one. The translation of the title in Chinese is actually “Chanting on the river.”
1 shato-wood: Chinese, Sha-t’ang, spice wood.
2 Sennin: Described by Pound as “the Chinese spirits of nature or of the air” (SL, 180).
3 Kutsu: Chinese, Chü Yuan.
4 King So: Chinese, King Ch’u.
5 Han: The Han River, which flows from northeast-central China into the Yangtze at Hankow.
6 And I have moped: Here Pound dissolves the title of a second poem by Li Po into the continuous text of a single poem. This was Pound’s infamous mistake in Cathay, possibly traced to his confusing a blank, left-hand page in the Fenollosa notebook with
the absence of comment rather than the beginning of a new poem.
7 “Kwan, Kuan”: Onomatopoetic bird call.
8 Ko: Chinese capital Hao, capital of the kings Wen and Wu of the Chou Dynasty.
9 Jo-run: The Shang-lin Park, famous for its court life.
THE RIVER-MERCHANT’S WIFE: A LETTER
First published in Cathay (1915), the poem in Chinese translates as “The Song of Ch’ang-kan.” In a 1918 essay, “Chinese Poetry—II,” Pound suggests that this eighth-century poem could easily “have slipped into Browning’s work without causing any surprise save by its simplicity and its naive beauty.” George Steiner in After Babel praises the closeness of Pound’s version to Li Po’s original, communicating “precisely the nuance of ceremonious innocence” (358).
1 Ku-to-yen: An islet called Yen-yu-tui; original allusion is to a song on the dangers of sailing by the Yen Yü rocks in the Chu-t’ang River.
2 Kiang: Chiang, but generally the word for river itself.
3 Cho-fu-Sa: A beach several hundred miles upriver from Nanking.
EXILE’S LETTER
First published in Poetry in March 1915 with a note that partly read “from the Chinese of Rihaku (Li Po), usually considered the greatest poet of China: written by him while in exile about 760 a.d.” The Chinese title translates as “Remembering our Excursion in the Past: A Letter sent to Commissary Yen of Ch’ao County.” Pound favored this poem, reprinting it in Cathay (see SL, 64). In Umbra (1920), Pound cited “Exile’s Letter” with “The Seafarer” and “Homage to Sextus Propertius” as his major works. In the first edition of Cathay, “Exile’s Letter” immediately preceded “The Seafarer” to emphasize their contemporaneity.