The H.D. Book

by Coleman, Victor, Duncan, Robert, Boughn, Michael

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  “Dichten = condensare,” Pound notes in his ABC of Reading: “Basil Bunting, fumbling about with a German-Italian dictionary, found that this idea of poetry as concentration is as old almost as the German language. ‘Dichten’ is the German verb corresponding to the noun ‘Dichtung’ meaning poetry, and the lexicographer has rendered it by the Italian verb meaning ‘to condense’.”

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  “The first thing that becomes clear to anyone who compares the dream-content with the dream-thoughts,” Freud writes in The Interpretation of Dreams (1896), “is that a work of condensation on a large scale has been carried out.”

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  Ezra Pound has the daemon of a poet and has described the genius of a poem not as a descending spirit or inspiration but as a welling-up of a spring or emotion. So, in his “Retrospect” of 1918 he inscribes: “Only emotion endures.” “We might come to believe that the thing that matters in art,” he writes in “The Serious Artist” (1913), “is a sort of energy, something more or less like electricity . . . transfusing, welding, and unifying. . . . ” Then: “A force rather like water when it spurts up through very bright sand and sets it into swift motion.” But Pound is a man of divided mind, and a mind, further, impressed during his years as a would-be candidate for his doctorate with the concerns and ambitions of a would-be professor of literature. The poetic emotion which Pound experiences as being a truth of his own nature is complicated by considerations of a different order, the concern for literary opinion, for changing established standards and reading lists. In “The Serious Artist,” the arts “bear witness and define for us the inner nature and conditions of man” and are falsified if they be altered to “conform to the taste of the time, to the proprieties of a sovereign, to the conveniences of a preconceived code of ethics.” In Guide to Kulchur, as in The Cantos of the 1930s, the ideogram which presented in configuration the inner responses of the man became confused with the ideogram of a proper sovereignty. Ideas in action became idées fixes acting upon a recalcitrant world. “As the man, as his mind, becomes a heavier and heavier machine, a constantly more complicated structure,” Pound observes in “The Serious Artist,” “it requires a constantly greater voltage of emotional energy to set it into harmonious motion.” Only with the upsurge of emotional crisis that came at Pisa, where in the death-camp Pound came at last into the destiny of his poetic identity, did the conglomerate that had gathered in The Cantos begin to move again, and then it was to be a breaking up of fixed ideas into drifts and debris in the creative currents.

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  In certain works of his pre-War London period, in The Spirit of Romance, “Religio,” “Aux Étuves de Wiesbaden,” “Genesis (after Voltaire),” and “Cavalcanti,” Pound derives from the neo-Platonic cult of Helios, from the Provençal cult of Amor, from the Renaissance revival of pagan mysteries after Gemistos Plethon, and from the immediate influence of the theosophical revival in which Yeats was immersed, an analogous tradition of poetry as a vehicle for heterodox belief, a ground in which the divine world may appear (with the exception of the Judaeo-Christian orders). At the thought of Jesus, Pound has all the furious fanaticism of the Emperor Julian; he is a pagan fundamentalist. Aphrodite may appear to the poet, and even Kuanon, but not Mary; Helios and even Ra-Set may come into the poem, but not Christ. Yet these gods of the old world are not only illustrations of a living tradition; they are, Pound testifies thruout The Cantos, presences of a living experience. Does the poet cast them as images upon our minds or do they use the medium of the poem to present themselves? They come to the poet or he calls them up. So, in the first draft of Canto I: “Gods float in the azure air . . . ”

  ‘It is not gone.’ Metastasio

  Is right, we have that world about us.

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  Even as H.D. testifies in The Walls Do Not Fall in 1942 to the attendance or Presence of Ammon-Ra-Christos and of Mary in London, so in The Pisan Cantos Pound in 1945 testifies he was attended in his tent by his familiar gods—Helios, Hermes, Aphrodite, and the Lady of the Pomegranate. It was a heterodox religion to hold, and Pound in other works of the pre-War London period, particularly in “The Serious Artist,” strove to rationalize or make respectable the content of this tradition in terms of a natural philosophy of poetry, after the models of Remy de Gourmont’s Natural Philosophy of Love or of Allen Upward’s The Divine Mystery, appealing to the authority of Fabre and Frazer, to give his adherence a biological and anthropological reality, but also to uphold the poetic intuition itself against the attack of what he knows cultural and religious orthodoxy to be. To hold the poetic intuition in the face of his own professorial or professional righteousness, the rationalizing authority, Pound often writes to cover for the shamanistic poet he is at heart. But this Super-Ego could disapprove too of Pound’s delite in pedantry. This is the poetic pathos in Thrones where, pursuing lexicographical speculations, Pound breaks with impatience to answer the impending voice of an inner adversary:

  If we never write anything save what is already understood, the field of understanding will never be extended. One demands the right, now and again, to write for a few people with special interests and whose curiosity reaches into greater detail.

  Not only must the poet cover for the devotional character of the poem but he must defend the scholarly character too against some shadowy critical authority.

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  Only by interrupting the imagination can Pound incorporate certain “worlds” of his individual reality. The texture of the poem must allow for the contention of the mind. Abrupt interjections appear, dramatizing the conflict between two drives: one, akin to that of William James or William Carlos Williams or H.D.—“to extend the field of understanding”; the other, after Dryden, akin to Eliot, to appeal to “what all reasonable men have long since concluded.” The problem thruout is one of translation between the individual experience, which is repressed in the official culture or banished to the realm of madness, and the body of what is taken as authoritative. Fenollosa’s Chinese written character, Gaudier-Brzeska’s vortex of energy in sculpture, Frobenius’s culture-morphology, Gesell’s justice and freedom in the exchange of goods—all these correspond to the poet’s inspiration to extend the field of understanding in a new poetics. Ideogram, vortex of energies, form as meaningful and organic, and equilibrium in the circulation of goods (feelings and thoughts) are basic terms of what happens in The Cantos. Just as, significantly, they, like The Cantos, are rejected by the taste and opinion of reasonable men or relegated to the peripheries of the culture where harmless fantasies, or worse, madness and vagary begin to appear. The form of The Cantos, like the ideal form of a democratic government, must allow for the authority of the individual—here the authority of the individual response or impulse—within a community of differing responses. Of all contemporary poetries it has the greatest inner tolerance for even conflicting tones, certainties, doubts—the texture of a widely, even wildly, multiphasic personality.

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  For there is another voice, corresponding perhaps to the regular-guy voice of Williams, that breaks thru, as in the transitions of puberty the voice breaks between boyhood and manhood, and the personality breaks too, between the familial and the communal consciousness, making dramatic the conflict between the new sexual nature and the forces of authority in custom and government that forbid its expression and would compel its expression. The bold-face emphatic, the rant, the caricature of voice, the contentious mode appears, where another Pound roars and pounds on the table to bring Fenollosa or Frobenius, Gaudier-Brzeska or Gesell, whatever had opened the way for new inspiration and life-sense for the poet, to the consideration of government officials and university professors of literature, or reasonable men, to become part of the authoritative. There is hysteria, but we see too that it rises, most markedly in the irritations of Pound and D. H. Lawrence, men who, like H.D., testify to elements in experience that are not accepted in the social norms, just where the man strives to b
ring his individual awareness and the communal awareness into one.

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  The voices of Eliot or of Wallace Stevens do not present us with such disturbances of mode. They preserve thruout a melodious poetic respectability, eminently sane in their restriction of poetic meaning to the bounds of the literary, of symbol and metaphor, but at the cost of avoiding facts and ideas that might disturb. Both the individual and the communal awareness are constricted to fit or adapted to the convenience of an accepted culture. Writing in The Dial, January 1928, Eliot finds that Pound might actually believe what is suspect or outside the terms of proper English belief simply unbelievable:

  He retains some mediaeval mysticism without belief, this is mixed up with Mr. Yeats’ spooks (excellent creatures in their native bogs); and involved with Dr. Berman’s hormones; and a steam-roller of Confucian rationalism (the Religion of a Gentleman, and therefore an Inferior Religion) has flattened over the whole. So we are left with the question (which the unfinished Cantos make more pointed) what does Mr. Pound believe?

  Pound, as well as D. H. Lawrence, belonged to the side of those who hankered after strange gods. In the ranks of Poetry itself, and in those ranks among poets who were surely their peers, Pound and Lawrence were heterodox in their cult of the daemonic both in terms of the old orthodoxy of the consensus of religious beliefs within the society and in terms of the new orthodoxy of the consensus of rationalist scientism. From the beginning H.D. had been of the pagan party, and with The War Trilogy she moved as a poet to the battlefront. The full roster of Mr. Eliot’s accusations against Pound, carefully loaded to excite the prejudices of right-thinking critics, was to be applied against her by her critics. Mysticism without the sanction of any church, daemonic and ghostly personae, biological and sexual coordinations, and, in H.D.’s case, Freudian in place of Confucian rationalism.

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  It is just the discordant note—the rant of Pound, the male bravado of Williams, the bitter anger of Lawrence, the feverish exaltation and heightened concern with adverse arguments—it is this not only being aware of the loss of community but being involved in the heart of the trouble, undertaking the trouble, that gives to the heterodox their vital meaning, beyond the special culture of the times, in the process of our own art, for they challenge what we would take for granted. The rant, the bravado, the sarcasm, the exaltation are purposeful overcharges that touch again and again to keep our sense alive to the disorder, the demand of experience for a higher order of form. The discord of their modes to the social norm is a therapeutic art.

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  Where the individual protest is vehement and then, as with Pound and Lawrence, out raging against the “democratic” norms that oppose and confine the development of man’s inner nature, there is the seed of the totalitarian reaction. Where the individual despairs of his living his own life or finding his own life within the society under the domination of established proprieties, he may give over the struggle for liberation and seek a design for privilege within conformation or strike out for the domination of his own will. A Hitler or a Mussolini, a Lenin or a Stalin, successfully find the way to dominion; surrendering all inner freedom they become possessed and impersonate the absolute authority of the state that was once the enemy. Where a democracy is composed of a people in which the individual conscience and nature is not liberated, so that a common standard or consensus of the majority rules and not the union of each in free volition, the state is already totalitarian.

  Pound must protest his right to write “for a few people with special interests.” The hostility of a popularist democracy for “special interests” may be politically directed towards the overweening powers of industrial tycoons, Papist plots, and military lobbies, but it extends too to any sensibility, science, or art, that is not readily available as a commodity to all interests and uses. It is the unpopular sensitivity of the poet, for one thing, that is under attack. Complex or obscure considerations threaten the security and self-esteem of men who take pride in their common sense against any uncommon concern. “They claimed, or rather jeered in Provence, remonstrated in Tuscany, wrangle today, and will wrangle tomorrow—and not without some show of reason—that poetry must be simple.” That’s part of it. The popular mind resists and resents any extension of awareness beyond the use of public polity, for thought and feeling must cope there with new complexities and obscurities.

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  “Could beauty be done to death,” H.D. cries in 1916, during the First World War, in “The Tribute”:

  Could beauty be caught and hurt

  they had done her to death with their sneers . . .

  That, too, is part of it. The beauty of the poem, the poet’s sense of beauty, in itself, that cannot be bought and sold. Beauty, in a society based upon commodity-profit is ambivalently praised and despised. The popular mistrust, the industrial and commercial mistrust, opposes and destroys where it can individual sensitivity, as out of place in the “democracy” of big party politics or in the “community” of the modern city as individualist architecture with its romantic and expressive form, even ornament, is in the plans of the new functionalism.

  But the mistrust is within too. The poets turn upon each other and themselves in accusation and guilt—Lawrence accuses Joyce of obscenity; Pound finds Lawrence’s erotic poems “disgusting or very nearly so”; H.D. strikes out against the bravado of Williams; Williams hits back with exacerbated sensitivity against H.D.’s exaltation of the “sacred” (“her real beauty is a rare and sacred thing in this generation”).

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  “So what good are your scribblings?” the partisans of the Sword demand in The Walls Do Not Fall. The immediate contention means “of what good for the War Effort?,” but the accusation gives rise to answers in the poem that it is her very way of life, her ultimate individuality that is under question. Not only in wartime conditions but thruout the society living for love or living for experience is heretical, so contradictory to the common persuasion of the use of life—to career, to comfort, to security—that it gives rise to defensive affirmations where we feel the “I know, I feel” transcends the question, pushed, in order to survive as a life-purpose, to the ultimate. But the voices of disapproval remain, for they are part of what the poet knows and feels. Deeper, they have been incorporated in the poet’s psyche, taken-to-heart. The old arguments against the cult of beauty, against Imagism, against the ecstatic, against the occult and mytho-poeic, crowd in to impersonate the poet’s own duality between doubt and conviction in writing.

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  What I am getting at here is that the man individualizes himself, deriving his individuality from the ideas and possibilities at large of manhood in a community that includes all that we know of what man is (“Grandeur, horror!” Victor Hugo cries out in his vision of that Leviathan). And the desire to know more of what man is, extending the idea of man beyond the limitations of particular nationalities, races, civilizations, the taking of self in the species, or in the life force, or in the cosmos, is the need for self beyond what can be granted by whatever known community, the need for a manhood big enough to live freely in. The poetic urge, to make a poetry out of the common language, is to make room for the existence of the poet, the artist of free speech. As in the beginning, the sky was divided from the earth below, or Heaven from Hell, to give space, a height and a depth, in human life. He differentiates the area of existence, creating his “own” area, deriving the individuality as much from dissociation as from identification, disowning as well as owning possibilities of his being, making a place for self in the community of his total consciousness which is an inner counterpart of his awareness of the outer community in which he lives. He recognizes in the world about him those contentions he feels within.

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  Pound in Canto XIV not only attacks in society at large but attacks in his own mind “the betrayers of language . . . those who had lied for hire . . . the perverters of language,” disowning the corrupt language of th
e press even as he strikes out in the very excesses of that language, having the bigotry to damn “bigots, Calvin and St. Clement of Alexandria,” allowing them no more understanding than they allowed their enemies, inflamed against inflammatory words. In contrast, the famous Usura Canto (XLV) has a grandeur of tone that would seem to indicate that the poet has no such secret temptation to use his art for profit as he has to use his art for public persuasion and attack, for defamation of character. In the troubled flux of the late Cantos “the temple is not for sale” stands with equanimity.

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  In The Walls Do Not Fall, H.D. gives some assent to the “we fight for life” terms of the Sword’s claim, for she answers here only that Writing too is part of the fight for life. But the communal pronoun “we” proper is used thruout the poem to refer to the community of a mystery within the larger society: “we know not nor are known,” “we passed the flame,” “they were angry when we were so hungry,” “we reveal our status / with twin-horns, disk, erect serpent,” “we, authentic relic / bearers of the secret wisdom,” “we take them with us [our writings] / beyond death,” “we are proud, / aloof, indifferent to your good and evil,” “we know each other / by secret symbols,” “we know our Name / we nameless initiates”—this is the language of the Holy Spirit cults of the sixteenth and seventeenth century Reformation, where community as well as self has been dissociated from the society at large and created anew in order to survive as a living reality in the consciousness. H.D. would create not only a life of her own but she would fuse elements of the community of poets, the community of the psychoanalyzed, and the community of Christ, to have a community of her own. In the light of what that community means by Life, the War is not all, mostly is not at all, a fight for life. “I am hungry, the children cry for food / and flaming stones fall on them,” she returns in answer to the Sword’s claim: “our awareness leaves us defenseless.” In Tribute to the Angels, those who suffer in the bombings of London are not victims of a fight for their life but of a contention that is not theirs. “Never in Rome / so many martyrs fell,” yes, but the war in the sky is “the battle of the Titans.” In The Flowering of the Rod, her dissociation from the purposes of the war, like Pound’s from the purposes of the peace in the Usura Canto, is clear: