Ezra Pound: Poet

by A. David Moody

  The canto carries a pertinent epigraph from Dante’s Paradiso, in which the Just Rulers speak of the woe brought upon Paris by Philip the Fair’s debasing the currency to finance a war. Its first line then names ‘Metevsky’ who figured in canto 18 as the type of the arms dealer who created his own military–industrial complex. What happens then, however, is disconcerting. A recapitulation of Metevsky’s way of selling arms to both sides is intercut with several unrelated items—the Pope’s curiosity about Marconi’s wire-less radio, Lucrezia wanting a rabbit’s foot, ‘(three children, five abortions and died of the last)’, and Dexter Kimball’s account of cigar-makers being read to ‘for the purpose of providing mental entertainment’ as they worked ‘almost automatically’. The canto goes on like that for the first one hundred lines, in the most extreme instance so far of Pound’s ‘not proceeding according to Aristotelian logic but according to the ideogrammic method of first heaping together the necessary components of thought’.

  The ‘thought’ in this case turns out to be an ideogram composed of what was in the news in the mind of Europe in the 1920s and early 1930s, and signifying the lack of vital intelligence in that news. The immediate effect of the passage is rather like glancing through a newspaper and registering one miscellaneous item after another—the day’s news, gossip, titbits of interest, information both relevant and useless, opinions informed and misinformed, sheer silliness—all are indiscriminately thrown together. The news that the Italian marshes have been drained at last is buried in a brief item, with no thought given to how it was done or what it might signify. Ghandi’s revolutionary thought, ‘if we don’t buy any cotton | And at the same time don’t buy any guns’, receives no more attention than ‘the soap and bones dealer’s’ precisely wrong assurance, in May 1914, that there would be no war, ‘“On account of bizschniz relations”’. There are disconnected indications of the drift towards another war—Metevsky’s dealings, two Afghans at the Geneva Disarmament Conference looking to pick up ‘some guns cheap’, money in Persian oil-wells, ‘So-and-So’ with shares in Japan’s Mitsui corporation—but no conclusions are drawn as to what is happening and why. The culminating item concerns a modern Juliet being prepared for burial and knowing that her Romeo was suiciding outside her door, a stark image of failed communications amidst warring factions.

  In all that heap of news one looks in vain for a European paideuma to set alongside Jefferson’s American paideuma, for a sense of values held in common, for some basis for constructive action beyond the business of making money from guns. And one looks in vain for what Pound clearly considered the most vital news, first, Douglas’s potentially life-saving and civilization-saving revelation of the economic cause of depressions and wars, and then intelligence of the war against humanity being carried on by the military–industrial complex. There is the ironic suggestion that the Africans who ‘spell words with a drum beat’ may be more efficient at getting their message through, and the further suggestion that there may be more intelligence in primitive ‘languages full of detail | Words that half mimic action; but | generalization is beyond them’. After a tailor’s wonderful assertion, at the close of the first movement, that ‘“Sewing machines will never come into general use”’, the poet breaks away to spell out the real news from Douglas and about the cannibals of Europe being at it again.

  He then turns, in canto 39, from the contemporary shambles and goes right back to his starting point, Odysseus’ epic wandering after the shambles of Troy, and his being shown his way home by Circe, the bewitching goddess. Circe (like Aphrodite), born of Sun and the Sea, is a force of divine nature, seductively beautiful and wise in her ways, fatal to some men and to others life-enhancing.

  Odysseus’ men, war-weary and hungry, thoughtlessly take what she offers and instantly she makes swine of them. That happens in the first movement of the canto, where Circe is the young witch, her ‘Song sharp at the edge, her crotch like a young sapling’; she is surrounded as if in a Titania’s brothel by ‘fucked girls and fat leopards’, ‘All heavy with sleep’; and she feeds the sailors ‘honey at the start and then acorns’. The rhythm of this movement is heavy, as if with her drug. Its first line is ‘Desolate is the roof where the cat sat’; and its last, ‘illa dolore obmutuit, pariter vocem’, tells how Hecuba, wife of King Priam of Troy and now an item in Odysseus’ spoils from that war, is struck speechless by the grief of coming upon the corpse of the one child she thought had survived. In Ovid’s account the line marks the ultimate desolation of that war fought for possession of a Circean woman. The first movement thus enforces the alienated view—an essentially male view—and the bestial experience of Circe’s powers.

  The second movement is framed by Circe’s directions to Odysseus, given here in the original Greek—they will be given in translation in canto 47—and, at its close, by Odysseus’ awed response to being told he must go by way of Persephone’s bower, this in Divus’ Latin with a colloquial rendering, ‘Been to hell in a boat yet?’ This movement is relatively light and quick, and associates Circe with a series of light-bringing mother-figures. Egyptian Hathor, ‘bound in that box | afloat on the sea wave’, is a divinity of many benign aspects, mother of the sun, goddess of love and joy, of dance and music, and protector of the dead on their arrival in their other world. After Hathor come two lines from Dante’s Paradiso. In the first Dante declares that the delight of the circle of illuminated spirits surrounding the mother of Christ and singing ‘Regina coeli’, ‘O Queen of Heaven’, will never leave him; in the second, Beatrice, herself a resplendent light, empowers him to perceive as a fiery river of light, ‘fulvida di folgore’, the perfected forms of all that divine Love generates. And Circe, taking Odysseus into her bed, will initiate him into her mystery. He is prepared for the initiation by Hermes who gives him a herb to keep his mind and senses clear of Circe’s charm, yet bids him not refuse the pleasures of her bed. ‘Coition, the sacrament’, Pound had noted, ‘The door to knowledge of nature’; and in canto 36 he had followed Cavalcanti’s philosophical canzone with the statement, ‘Sacrum, sacrum, inluminatio coitu’. The illumination of mind is the saving grace, the becoming conscious of ‘the unity with nature’ and actually seeing nature alive.

  The vision of Circe’s mystery comes in the song and dance of the third movement, a rite of Spring out of Catullus and the Pervigilium Veneris. Instead of ‘fucked girls’ there is ‘“Fac deum!”’, and the bride’s song, ‘“His rod hath made god in my belly”’. These girls are not ‘leery with Circe’s tisane’, rather they are ‘Beaten from flesh into light’. The flame and the lightning that is in them is implicitly the god Dionysos, but this is the women’s rite under Circe. The vision of Dionysos was in canto 2, and that was all male. Here in both the initiation and the vision the manifest powers are all female, and all, including Circe when approached intelligently, would initiate the male protagonist into the realm and the process of generative love.

  Against the chorus of girls making the spring, and against the bride’s ‘Beaten from flesh into light’, the opening lines of canto 40 sound harshly ironic:

  Esprit de corps in permanent bodies

  ‘Of the same trade,’ Smith, Adam, ‘men

  ‘never gather together

  ‘without a conspiracy against the general public.’

  Those lines state the main theme of the canto. There follows the counter-theme, that the nation’s money should be held by the nation’s own bank, a notion advanced in medieval Venice but only carried into practice two centuries later. The rest of the canto down to ‘Out of which things seeking an exit’, pivots on the isolated line restating the counter-theme, ‘“If a nation will master its money”’. Both the passage preceding that line and the one following—each of thirty-four lines—develop the main theme through variations upon ‘conspiracy against the general public’. J. P. Morgan figures prominently, for selling the government its own arms (condemned arms) in the Civil War at extortionate profit; business in general took advanta
ge of that war and prospered by its failures; the banks (with the Rothschild bank leading) got control of treasury bonds to their own profit, and made a killing by buying up depreciated Civil War bonds then having them redeemed in gold, the price of which Morgan had forced up; then there were the cheating manipulations of bonds for railway construction. And all this was for private luxury, ‘Toward producing that wide expanse of clean lawn | Toward that deer park’, ‘With our eyes on the new gothic residence, with our | eyes on Palladio, with a desire for seignieurial splendours’. The statement and the restatement of this third theme enclose the passages developing the main theme, and expose the vanity of anti-social greed. Its monument might be a list of the accumulated objects to be auctioned when the failed seignieur’s residence is sold up, ‘haberdashery, clocks, ormoulu, brocatelli, | tapestries, unreadable volumes bound in tree-calf, |…flaps, farthingales, fichus, cuties, shorties, pinkies | et cetera’.

  That is a view of what became of America during and after the Civil War. ‘We were diddled out of the heritage Jackson and Van Buren left us’, Pound had complained in Jefferson and/or Mussolini, ‘The de facto government became secret, nobody cared a damn about the de jure.’ That had led him on to propose that the governing ideas of Jeffersonian and Jacksonian democracy were now to be found in Mussolini’s Fascism, and that is the starting point of canto 41. Taking an overview of the cantos from 31 up to this point one might say that the thesis of the sequence is the democratic heritage of Jefferson, Jackson, and Van Buren; that the antithesis is the rule of private greed in Europe and the falling off from Jeffersonian democracy into private greed in the United States; and that now Mussolini is to be put forward as the synthesis, that is, as a European proponent of democratic values with an active and exemplary sense of civic responsibility. (Cantos 36 and 39, representing the life of the spirit, appear to stand rather apart from the rest, while having a significant bearing upon them.)

  Formally canto 41 is a fugue, that is, its thematic materials are organized as they might be in a musical fugue. Fugue is not a set form—as Yeats may have thought, and so failed to understand what Pound was trying to tell him in 1928—but is rather a set of procedures for developing two or more melodic lines in interaction with each other. Thus one episode of the canto is in strict counterpoint; and there is, as is common practice in musical fugues, an accelerated stretto passage preceding the final cadence. The first theme (or subject, in musical terms) is good government as exemplified by Mussolini at the start of the canto and Jefferson at its close. The second theme, which grows out of the first, is good intelligence or news concerning the management of the economy. Then there is the inversion of each theme, misgovernment, and misinformation or ignorance. Those have been the leading preoccupations of the preceding ten cantos, and this fugue is the way of drawing them together into a concluding statement.

  Each canto has been a new experiment in form, a new invention, and this one, while following a classic musical form, is at the extreme of innovation in English poetry. It is difficult, as it needs to be given its ambition, but probably no more difficult than a Bach fugue once one has made out the themes and the process of their development.

  A.1 1st subject Mussolini, ‘the Boss’, is introduced as the man of quick intelligence and efficient action in the common interest—draining the marshes, causing grain to grow there, providing water supply and housing;

  B.1 response a story of the Boss’s dealing with ‘the potbellies’ who want their cut from the public works by sending them into internal exile;

  C.1 counter-subject the commandante della piazza’s ‘we’d let ourselves be scragged for Mussolini’, demonstrating popular devotion to the Boss.

  (25 lines, 1–25)

  D.1 2nd subject The ignorance of the people (out of the mouth of a babe);

  E.1 response Messire Uzzano’s advice, in 1442, on how to manage the money supply, thus overcoming ignorance and its ill-effects;

  F.1 counter-subject ‘and you must work…| to keep up your letters’.

  (20 lines, 26–45)

  1st episode (related to 1st and 2nd subjects: the Boss, and formation of the young) Details of the Boss’s youth and training—his being exploited and underpaid as a mason in Switzerland, then trained for mountain warfare (in the 1914–18 war), and deliberately bombed (so it was said) while wounded in hospital—these details counterpointed against the formation of ‘the young Uhlan officer’ (i.e. a German cavalry lancer), ‘never out of uniform from his | eighth year until the end of the war’, and trained up in a militarism characterized by a book depicting the ‘Renewal of higher life | in the struggle for German freedom’, a book presented to him by the empress in 1908 ‘with a tender and motherly dedication’.

  (31 lines, 46–76)

  2nd episode (inversion of 1st episode: military commanders lacking intelligence) ‘Feldmarschall Hindenburg’ (the young Uhlan’s General in command), characterized by his ignorance of music—‘Mozart…all this god damned cultural nonsense’—and his concern for his pension; the (presumably French) high command being on vacation in the summer of 1914, a minor bureaucrat files ‘the Hun ultimatum’; and Winston Churchill (being in 1914 First Lord of the Admiralty) at least ‘had the fleet out’, according to his ‘mama’ (cp. the ‘motherly dedication’ of the German empress), though he would not ‘waste time having ideas’.

  (23 lines, 77–99)

  D.2 2nd subject (a natural modulation from the 2nd episode into) ‘That llovely unconscious world’ of European decadence;

  E.2 response what it has for news is ‘“Pig and Piffle”’, (highly profitable); The Times, which it ‘Pays to control…for its effect on the markets’; and a press free from state censorship, but with ‘a great deal of manipulation’— (this is an inversion of E.1);

  F.2 counter-subject (a return to E.1) a proper ‘news sense’ notes ‘Cosimo First’s’ banking (see canto 21); the self-regulation of the bank of Siena, Monte dei Paschi (see cantos 42–4 in the following decad); also Douglas; and ‘Woergl in our time’.

  (22 lines, 100–21)

  B.2 1st response As Mussolini dealt with the profiteers, Jefferson exposed the tobacco tax racket in France (see canto 31);

  A.2 1st subject as Mussolini’s good government is manifest in his public works, Jefferson governed by his ‘verbal manifestations’, represented in a stretto passage climaxing in ‘Independent use of our money…toward holding our bank’.

  (26 lines, 122–47)

  Cadence A sequence of closely related news items concerning the arms trade and its indiscriminate arming of belligerents—‘120 million german fuses used by the allies to kill Germans’ etc. (cf. canto 38 and the two war episodes above)—this being the consequence of not mastering the nations’ money for the benefit of the whole people.

  (5 lines, 148–52)

  At the end of the canto is a dateline, ‘ad interim 1933’, equivalent to ‘up to now’ or ‘this is the state of affairs in 1933’. It is a reminder both of the time in which Cantos XXXI–XLI were being written, and of the fact that their historical leads always come out at what is going on in the present. The American story from its revolution to the post-Civil War robber barons and bankers runs in counterpoint with the European story over the same period and on through its Great War up to the present moment, a moment at which it appears that America’s revolutionary will to secure life, liberty, and happiness to all the people is now to be found at work in Europe in the person of the Boss, Il Duce. The root of good government is shown firmly planted in the American Revolution, and these cantos are unequivocally committed to the American idea of democracy. But then that idea of democracy evidently transcends America, since the United States can lapse from it into the reign of private greed, while it can be seen to be more effectively practised by the Italian dictator.

  It has to be recognized, if we are to get on, that Mussolini is as much an invented or mythical figure in these cantos as Jefferson, or Van Buren, or indeed as Odysseus. He is just as
much transfigured out of history into the poem Pound is making up, and he plays his part there in an ethical drama which may be not at all an accurate fit with the political drama of the era. Pound is not writing Mussolini’s story, nor Jefferson’s nor Van Buren’s. He is writing, as it will turn out, the epic of the capitalist era, in which the will to social justice, as embodied in some few heroic individuals, must contend against the greed of the wealthy and powerful and the abuleia of the many. It is a story based on real persons and real practices, and its credibility does depend in some degree on its truth to what is commonly known of those persons and practices. Beyond that believability, though, there is another order of reality, that of meanings and values; it is with these that the epic poet is most engaged, and in creating images of what is to be admired or hated he will bend history to his ends. But then the nearer a reader is to the history in question, the more problematic this can be. There is a problem, and there will be so long as the actual Mussolini is remembered, in accepting the Mussolini of the Cantos as a hero of the struggle for universal social justice. It is a problem that anyone who wants to read the work must just learn to live with. History may instruct us that the myth has grievously simplified the facts; and the myth may reveal things facts alone can never tell. We need both history and myth, but should take care not to confuse either with the other.