Ezra Pound: Poet

by A. David Moody

  Nature, genius, and the state of the world

  That genius is a force of nature, and that this force of nature is, or should be, the shaping power in human society, these were convictions Pound had long held. He had tried various ways of formulating them. He had invoked the myth of Isis and Osiris; he had invoked myth and science together to present Imagisme as the work of ‘germinal mind’ interpreting the vital universe and projecting its intellectual and emotional complexes into the minds of its readers; he had promoted Vorticism as manifesting the Dionysiac genius of the race in abstract forms which should have the same power to reveal order in the world as those of geometry or the equations of pure mathematics. Through all his various formulations he was seeking to bind together the creative workings of the mind and those of nature or the vital universe, and to conceive of them as not distinct the one from the other, but as driven by one and the same life force.

  In 1921 he was speculating about a possible proof from natural science for his conviction that the mind was energized by the power of sex. He had previously found in de Gourmont’s study of the reproductive mechanisms and habits of insects, birds, and beasts, Physique de l’amour (1903), a ‘biological basis in instinct’ for the conception, which he had drawn from the love poetry of the troubadours and of Dante and Cavalcanti, ‘of love, passion, emotion as an intellectual instigation’. Ingenium nobis ipsa puella fecit, he repeated from Propertius, ‘our genius is a girl’s doing’; with the variation from the King of Navarre, ‘science and beauty are from refining love’, De fine amor vient science et beauté.

  Some time after his return to Paris in 1921 he picked up a commission to translate Physique de l’amour for the New York publisher Horace Liveright, a ‘rush order’ carried through in June at the rate of ‘25 pages per diem’. ‘If I do it quick enough it will pay the rent’, he told Agnes Bedford; to Dorothy, then in London, he wrote on 23 July, ‘Speak not evil of Jews. Liveright has paid up already.’ As part of the commission he wrote ‘a supplementary chapter for U.S. edtn’, and this appeared at the end as ‘Translator’s Postscript’ to The Natural Philosophy of Love.

  In this ‘Postscript’ Pound took off from Gourmont’s suggestion that ‘There might be, perhaps, a certain correlation between complete and profound copulation and the development of the brain.’ What if, he speculated, what if the ‘genital fluid’ of sexual reproduction functioned also as the ‘cerebral fluid’ of the image-making, form-projecting brain? ‘The individual genius’ might then be ‘the man in whom the new access, the new superfluity of spermatozoic pressure (quantitive and qualitative) up-shoots into the brain, alluvial Nile-flood, bringing new crops, new invention’. He went on to note

  the similarity of spermatozoides and ovules and brain cells in their capacity to contain or project a form. That is to say, the spermatozoide compels the ovule to evolve along certain predetermined lines; the ovule receives the pattern and evolves. The brain-cell also holds an image; a generalisation may be considered as a superposition of such images.

  And ‘creative thought’, the projection of the brain’s images and universal forms, ‘is an act like fecundation, like the male cast of the human seed’. ‘Genius’, Gourmont had written, ‘fecundates a generation of minds.’ That is, by implication, it compels the individual minds or the society which receives its pattern ideas, its seed-gestalten, ‘to evolve along certain predetermined lines’.

  The science strikes us now as primitive. But had Pound known about DNA and the further advances in genetics he might well have used them in the same speculative fashion to underpin his argument that genius is a natural function and a function of nature, and that it acts as a formative, shaping power in its world. Behind his appeal to science, to Gourmont’s natural philosophy in this case, was his conviction, dating back to 1912 at least, that the utility of the poet to the world’s consciousness is ‘scientifically demonstrable’. And behind that lies the fundamental, and still revolutionary, conception that there is one life in all things in our universe, and that ‘mind’ and ‘body’ are one as ‘the human realm’ and ‘the natural world’ are one.

  By March of 1922 Pound was happy to dismiss most of the scientific or pseudo-scientific postulates of his ‘Postscript’ as ‘various statements now antiquated’ and ‘speculations neither supported nor disproved’. He had discovered the relatively new science of the endocrine glands, and was speculating about a possible chemical basis of intelligence as suggested by Dr Louis Berman’s book The Glands Regulating Personality (1922). In place of the ‘genital fluid’ he now postulated the pineal gland as the source of image-making intelligence and original thought. From Berman he learnt that the pineal gland contains ‘cells filled with a pigment like that in the eye’s retina, and little piles of lime salt crystals’. He took this to indicate that it had to do with the sense of light, and with intelligence developed from seeing, specifically with the power of orderly visualization. He termed it the ‘gland of “lucidity”’, of ‘luminosity in vision’; and, again, the ‘gland of metamorphosis, of original thought’ and of ‘the new juxtaposition of images’—at the same time seeking the physical cause in the secretion of the lime salt crystals, ‘not as a slow effusion, but ejected suddenly into sensitised area [of the brain cells], analogy to the testes’.

  These antiquated speculations are of interest now as background to Pound’s next canto. But they serve also to show just how far Pound would go in search of a basis in natural science for his idea of creative intelligence; and they give a measure of how very far he was from associating, as Yeats would, a poet’s inspiration with occult powers.

  It must be noted in passing how Pound even while writing about originating genius was yet subject to the limited knowledge and the conventional prejudices of his time, for he held creativity, whether in sexual reproduction or in thought, to be the male function, and the female to be simply the passive receiver of his sperm or his intellectual gestalt. The female was allowed to be the conservatrix of useful instincts and traditions. But he could not see, though he did try to allow for a feminist view of the matter, that she was equipped for original creation. When he encountered original creativity in a woman, as in Marianne Moore or Mina Loy, or, initially, in H.D., he had to attribute it to the possibility that the ovaries did also have a ‘male’ function—something, he said, he could ‘hardly be expected to introspect’—or else to the possibility that ‘the ejection of lime salt particles in a female’ would free her ‘from the general confusions of her sex’.

  Canto II: seeing the light

  Pound’s next canto was published in the Dial in May 1922 as ‘Eighth Canto’, but later, with a different lead-in, it was placed definitively as canto ‘II’. Its centre is an epiphany, a visionary manifestation of Dionysos, the ancient Greek idea of the single force that drives all living things. As a son of Zeus Dionysos was associated with the divine light which is at once the light of life and the light of intelligence; and he was held to generate both the myriad forms of living beings and their powers to sense things and to make sense of their experience. He would figure then as the cause of our responsiveness to light and of the intelligence that is developed from seeing; thence of its power of orderly visualization, and of its further power of original thought (‘the new juxtaposition of images’). He would be active in the ‘germinal mind’ interpreting his vital universe.

  Dionysos first appears in the canto as ‘a young boy loggy with vine-must’, suggesting the most common perception of him as the god that is in wine, and hence, in the eye of the drinker, appearing as ‘in his cups’. Later he is called ‘Lyaeus’ by the sailor who recognizes the god in him, a name given because wine (as Lemprière quaintly put it) ‘gives freedom to the mind’. Dionysos was in fact held to be a force for every kind of liberation. Bringing forth new life was seen as a liberation; shape-shifting and metamorphosis, as in the transformation of flower to fruit or grub to butterfly, were seen as liberations; to be rapt in ecstasy, from honeyed wine or in a
visionary trance, was to be liberated from one’s ordinary self and the common world. In this latter aspect, as liberator from normal behaviour and custom and convention, he could change minds and perceptions and values and so threaten the established social order, sometimes comically, as in Pound’s ‘Salutation the Second’, sometimes tragically, as in The Bacchae of Euripides. Generous and potentially violent frère ennemi to Apollonian reason, Dionysos represented the fluid, ever-changing, interacting, and uncontrollable energies that give rise to and sustain every living thing and are confined by none.

  Everywhere present he is yet unseen by the mind in its everyday state. In the canto the piratical sailors who come upon him see just a lad they can seize and sell into slavery. In The Bacchae young King Pentheus, intent on keeping order in Thebes and seeing him only as a trouble-maker and a misleader of the women of his city, thinks to shut him away in prison and to ban his orgiastic rites. Blind Tiresias who sees what is hidden from ordinary sight tells Pentheus that this Dionysos is a powerful god not to be denied and that all Thebes, even the king himself, should join in his dance of life. ‘You rely on force’, he tells him, ‘but it is not force that governs human affairs.’ Pentheus of course does not believe that. Blinded by his own powers, he continues to oppose them, fatally, to the god’s. His end is to be torn apart by the maenads, the god-possessed women led by his own mother. Euripides would have no one doubt that the god who liberates his followers and opens their eyes to his presence also destroys those who deny or resist his power.

  Pound follows the emphasis of marvelling Ovid’s version of the god’s story, rather than that of moral Euripides. Instead of having Tiresias explain to Pentheus why he should recognize the god, he has Acoetes, the one sailor who saw the god in the young boy, attempt to make Pentheus see the danger he is in by reliving his own visionary experience. The wood of the ship comes alive in his telling—‘where was gunwale, there now was vine-trunk, | And tenthril where cordage had been, | grape-leaves on the rowlocks’. The empty air becomes animate with crowding forms of Dionysos’ wild cats, lynxes, panthers, and leopards—

  out of nothing, a breathing,

  hot breath on my ankles,

  Beasts like shadows in glass…

  fur brushing my knee-skin,

  Rustle of airy sheaths,

  dry forms in the aether

  And the god thus manifest assures Acoetes that from now he may worship at his altars ‘Fearing no bondage’. Pentheus, heedless of Acoetes’ testimony will attempt to bind the god.

  The canto does not go into Pentheus’ doom. Its Dionysos, in this following the Homeric hymn and the archetypal idea, is the god of indestructible life. His law is not death followed by a possible transcendence but metamorphosis, unceasing change through successive forms of being. Thus his way of punishing the mindless greed of the sailors who think to catch and sell him is to transform them into fish—

  Medon’s face like the face of a dory,

  Arms shrunk into fins…

  Fish scales over groin muscles

  The ‘John Dory’ makes a fine-tasting dish and would be a much sought-after catch.

  In its origins the story of Dionysos is archaic, as ancient and archaic as the tale of Odysseus calling up Tiresias from among the sunless dead. Pound said of the latter when discussing the Odyssey that ‘it shouts aloud that it is older than the rest’, that it belongs to ‘that island, Cretan, etc., hinter-time’. This is equally true of Dionysos, and yet Pound’s manner of treating the two stories could not be more different. In canto I he emphasized the remoteness of the rite, by intervening only as editor and translator, thus keeping his distance from it, and then by giving it a somewhat Anglo-Saxon stylization, as if placing it back in the heroic Dark Ages. But with Acoetes’ story he does everything possible to make it an immediate experience, vividly actual, even contemporary. He is not now the mere editor and translator of another’s book, but as it were Acoetes himself caught up in the very act of perceiving the god in his manifestations. In full sunlight he sees ‘the godly sea’ as Odysseus, in the dark of canto I, could not.

  The entire canto, it now becomes apparent, is concerned with seeing the divine energies in the sea and elsewhere; or, to put it another way, it is concerned with the varieties of the visible and with the different kinds and degrees of vision. A seal is seen—‘Seal sports in the spray-whited circles of cliff-wash, | sleek head…lithe daughter of Ocean’—and there the vision shifts from the seen to the intuited and the mythical. There is a further development with ‘eyes of Picasso | Under black fur-hood’, a doubling, shifting, unfixable image. There are the seal’s eyes; and Picasso’s that had about them the look of a seal’s; and there is his artist’s eye for the precise line of its object, so that for a moment the eyes might be his vision of the seal’s. Thus sight comes alive to two or three different ways of seeing the world, with the archaic and the modern juxtaposed. Later, Tyro, in love with a river, is caught up by Poseidon—

  Twisted arms of the sea-god,

  Lithe sinews of water, gripping her, cross-hold,

  And the blue-gray glass of the wave tents them,

  Glare azure of water, cord-welter, close cover.

  It may be merely a myth of divine possession and generativeness, yet it is so fully visualized and so much a vision of known natural phenomena that the mind’s eye really sees and credits it, mythopoetically. In contrast, what follows is a naturalist’s objective observation—‘Snipe come for their bath, | bend out their wing-joints, | Spread wet wings to the sun-film’. Then the mind’s associations come into play upon such observations, as in seeing a rock as ‘Naviform’, shaped like a ship; and still more in ‘a wine-red glow in the shallows’. It may be only the algae that give that glow, but ‘wine-red’ to the responsive mind will suggest the hidden presence of Dionysos.

  Between the visions of the ‘lithe daughter of Ocean’ and of Tyro there is a more extended passage presenting the very different vision the old men of Troy have of Helen, daughter of Zeus and cause of their war. Blind Homer, hearing their thin grasshopper voices, picks up their fear of her, their clear-sighted foreboding that Troy’s holding her from the Greeks is dooming the city to destruction. This both parallels and contrasts with the central episode of the canto. In both cases the capture of the divine being proves disastrous, but for the old men there is to be no liberating revelation. They can see how ‘like a goddess’ Helen is in her face and moving, but they cannot worship, overcome as they are by a wholly justified fear. She will be the destruction of Trojans and Greeks alike, for both have regarded her as a possession and a prize.

  There is another parallel and contrasting passage following on directly from the central episode. This time we are invited to look down from the ‘naviform rock’ and to see ‘in the wine-red algae’ and the rose-pale coral a face and a ‘swimmer’s arms turned to branches’, and we are told that this was ‘Ileuthyeria, fair Dafne of sea-bords’, changed into coral as she fled some ‘band of tritons’. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses Daphne, daughter of a goddess, is pursued by Apollo and changed into a laurel tree as he seizes her. Here the depth of the violence against nature is encoded in the unknown name, ‘Ileuthyeria’. It combines ‘Eleutheria’, Greek festivals of liberty, and ‘Eileithyia’, the Minoan goddess of childbirth—she who frees the child. It is as if an attempt to seize and ravish the life-force itself had turned her to stone.

  The metamorphosis of ‘Ileuthyeria’ was Pound’s own invention, an act as we say of pure imagination, and it is a triumph of dramatic visualization. But is it also, from a scientific viewpoint, doing violence to the real nature of coral, which lives and grows, after all, by its own metamorphic process? Does the moral of the tale turn back on the Apollonian imagination and convict it of wanting too much to have its own way with nature?

  The canto’s answer, if it gives one, is in its next moves. First there is this: ‘And So-Shu churned in the sea, So-Shu also, | Using the long moon for a churn-stick.’ So-Shu—‘a Ch
inese mythological figure’, or so Pound said for those who must ask—evidently imagines himself, possibly having drunk too much rice-wine, to be a divine being in a creation myth churning the sea into a butter from which to fashion earth and its creatures. That amounts to a drunken parody of the Dionysiac mystery. And the ‘also’ equates with it the imagination which would see, or half see, living coral as a fair Dafne in ‘ivory stillness’. So-Shu’s churning gives way to a variation upon the Tyro motif—

  Lithe turning of water,

  sinews of Poseidon

  Black azure and hyaline,

  glass wave over Tyro,

  Close cover, unstillness,

  bright welter of wave-cords

  The ‘unstillness’ and the energy in every detail there go against the imagined ‘ivory stillness’, and also against So-Shu’s illusory churning.

  The unfamiliar ‘hyaline’ can tease the mind’s eye into discovering more in the natural phenomena than it had looked for. From the Greek for glass it is applied, in Greek poetry, to the crystalline sea; and in modern anatomy and biology to translucent sinew or cartilage, and also to the membrane and vitreous liquid of the eye. In the phrase ‘Black azure and hyaline’—compare the earlier ‘blue-gray glass’, and think too of ‘eyes of Picasso’—it seems that the sea is being seen, fleetingly, as itself an eye taking in and reflecting back the light of heaven. That reciprocity mirrors the reciprocity of a light-illuminated world and an intelligent eye reflecting back upon it what it is making of it. The process of perception is then, when it is precisely focused on its object, a continuation of the process of light-energies in nature.

  The motif of the naturalist’s observation is now repeated—‘Sea-fowl stretching wing-joints’—and there is then a modulation, as the evening star is seen (‘pallor of Hesperus’), into painterly discriminations against the fading light: