by Ezra Pound
European civilization or, to use an abominated word, ‘culture’ can be perhaps best understood as a mediaeval trunk with wash after wash of classicism going over it. That is not the whole story, but to understand it, you must think of that series of perceptions, as well as of anything that has existed or subsisted unbroken from antiquity.
This book can’t be the whole history. Specifically we are considering the development of language as a means of registration.
The Greeks and Romans used one set of devices, one set of techniques. The Provençals developed a different one, not in respect to phanopoeia, but in respect to melopoeia, AFTER a change in the language system (from inflected, to progressively less inflected speech).
The quantitative verse of the ancients was replaced by syllabic verse, as they say in the school books. It would be better to say that the theories applied by grammarians to Latin verse, as the descendant of Greek, were dropped;
And that fitting, motz el son, of words to tune replaced the supposedly regular spondees, dactyls, etc.
The question of the relative duration of syllables has never been neglected by men with susceptible ears.
I particularly want to keep off these technical details. The way to learn the music of verse is to listen to it.
After that the student can buy a metronome, or study solfège to perfect his sense of relative duration and of pitch. The present booklet is concerned with language.
For the specific difference between Provence and Italy or the ‘progress’ from Arnaut Daniel to Sordello, to Cavalcanti and Dante, the reader who cannot and will not read Italian, can, if he like, refer to my descriptive criticism.
Without knowing Dante, Guido Cavalcanti and Villon, no one can judge the attained maxima of certain kinds of writing.
Without the foregoing MINIMUM of poetry in other languages you simply will not know ‘where English poetry comes’.
Chapter Six
For those who read only English, I have done what I can.
I have translated the TA HIO so that they can learn where to start THINKING. And I have translated the Seafarer; so that they can see more or less where English poetry starts.
I don’t know how they can get an idea of Greek. There are no satisfactory English translations.
A Latin crib can do a good deal. If you read French you can get the STORY of the Iliads and of the beginning of the Odyssey from Salel and Jamyn, or rather you could if their books weren’t out of print. (I know no edition more recent than 1590.) Chapman is something different. See my notes on the Elizabethan translators.
You can get Ovid, or rather Ovid’s stories in Golding’s Metamorphoses, which is the most beautiful book in the language (my opinion and I suspect it was Shakespeare’s).
Marlowe translated the Amores.
And before that Gavin Douglas had made something of the Aeneids that I, at any rate, like better than Virgil’s Latin.
From Chaucer you can learn (1) whatever came over into the earliest English that one can read without a dictionary, but for which a glossary is needed; (2) and the specifically ENGLISH quality or component. Landor’s dialogues of Chaucer, Petrarch and Boccaccio, are the best real criticism of Chaucer we have.
There are anthologies of early English verse. Sidgwick has made the best one I half remember.
After Chaucer, come Gavin Douglas, Golding and Marlowe with their ‘translations’.
Then comes Shakespeare in division: the sonnets where he is, I think, practising his craft. The lyrics where he is learning, I believe from Italian song-books in which the WORDS were printed WITH the music.
The plays, especially the series of history plays, which form the true English EPOS,
as distinct from the bastard
Epic, the imitation, the constructed counterfeit.
It would be particularly against the grain of the whole ideogrammic method for me to make a series of general statements concerning Elizabethan katachrestical language.
The way to study Shakespeare’s language is to study it side by side with something different and of equal extent.
The proper antagonist is Dante, who is of equal size and DIFFERENT. To study Shakespeare’s language merely in comparison with the DECADENCE of the same thing doesn’t give one’s mind any leverage.
There is Shakespearian song. There is the language made to be SPOKEN, perhaps even to be ranted.
Felix Schelling has evolved or quoted the theory that Shakespeare wanted to be a poet, but that when he couldn’t make a career of it, he took to writing stage plays, not altogether liking the form.
If the student can’t measure Shakespeare against Dante, the next alternative is possibly to measure his language against the prose manifestation of Voltaire, Stendhal, Flaubert, or of Fielding—if you cannot read French.
You can’t judge any chemical’s action merely by putting it with more of itself. To know it, you have got to know its limits, both what it is and what it is not. What substances are harder or softer, what more resilient, what more compact.
You can’t measure it merely by itself diluted with some neutral substance.
. . . . .
TO BREAK UP THE BOREDOM, I have suggested the great translators … for an anthology, shall we say, of the poems that don’t put me to sleep.
There are passages of Marlowe. Donne has written the only English poem (‘The Ecstasy’) that can be set against Cavalcanti’s Donna mi Prega. The two are not in the least alike. Their problems are utterly different.
The great lyric age lasted while Campion made his own music, while Lawes set Waller’s verses, while verses, if not actually sung or set to music, were at least made with the intention of going to music.
Music rots when it gets too far from the dance. Poetry atrophies when it gets too far from music.
There are three kinds of melopoeia, that is, verse made to sing; to chant or intone; and to speak.
The older one gets the more one believes in the first.
One reads prose for the subject matter.
Glance at Burton’s ‘anatomy’ as a curiosity, a sample of NON VERSE which has qualities of poetry but that cannot be confounded with it.
English prose is alive in Florio’s Montaigne; Urquhart’s Rabelais;
Fielding; Jane Austen; the novelists that everyone reads; Kipling; H. James. James’ prefaces tell what ‘writing a novel’ means.
Chapter Seven
It doesn’t matter which leg of your table you make first, so long as the table has four legs and will stand up solidly when you have finished it.
Mediocre poetry is in the long run the same in all countries. The decadence of Petrarchism in Italy and the ‘rice powder poetry’ in China arrive at about the same level of weakness despite the difference in idiom.
Chapter Eight
Coming round again to the starting-point.
Language is a means of communication. To charge language with meaning to the utmost possible degree, we have, as stated, the three chief means:
I throwing the object (fixed or moving) on to the visual imagination.
II inducing emotional correlations by the sound and rhythm of the speech.
III inducing both of the effects by stimulating the associations (intellectual or emotional) that have remained in the receiver’s consciousness in relation to the actual words or word groups employed.
(phanopoeia, melopoeia, logopoeia)
Incompetence will show in the use of too many words.
The reader’s first and simplest test of an author will be to look for words that do not function; that contribute nothing to the meaning OR that distract from the MOST important factor of the meaning to factors of minor importance.
. . . . .
One definition of beauty is: aptness to purpose.
Whether it is a good definition or not, you can readily see that a good deal of BAD criticism has been written by men who assume that an author is trying to do what he is NOT trying to do.
Incredible a
s it now seems, the bad critics of Keats’ time found his writing ‘obscure’, which meant that they couldn’t understand WHY Keats wrote.
Most human perceptions date from a long time ago, or are derivable from perceptions that gifted men have had long before we were born. The race discovers, and rediscovers.
TESTS AND COMPOSITION EXERCISES
I
1 Let the pupils exchange composition papers and see how many and what useless words have been used—how many words that convey nothing new.
2 How many words that obscure the meaning.
3 How many words out of their usual place, and whether this alteration makes the statement in any way more interesting or more energetic.
4 Whether a sentence is ambiguous; whether it really means more than one thing or more than the writer intended; whether it can be so read as to mean something different.
5 Whether there is something clear on paper, but ambiguous if spoken aloud.
II
IT is said that Flaubert taught De Maupassant to write. When De Maupassant returned from a walk Flaubert would ask him to describe someone, say a concierge whom they would both pass in their next walk, and to describe the person so that Flaubert would recognize, say, the concierge and not mistake her for some other concierge and not the one De Maupassant had described.
SECOND SET
1 Let the pupil write the description of a tree.
2 Of a tree without mentioning the name of the tree (larch, pine, etc.) so that the reader will not mistake it for the description of some other kind of tree.
3 Try some object in the class-room.
4 Describe the light and shadow on the school-room clock or some other object.
5 If it can be done without breach of the peace, the pupil could write descriptions of some other pupil. The author suggests that the pupil should not describe the instructor, otherwise the description might become a vehicle of emotion, and subject to more complicated rules of composition than the class is yet ready to cope with.
In all these descriptions the test would be accuracy and vividness, the pupil receiving the other’s paper would be the gauge. He would recognize or not recognize the object or person described.
Rodolfo Agricola in an edition dating from fifteen hundred and something says one writes: ut doceat, ut moveat ut delectet, to teach, to move or to delight.
. . . . .
A great deal of bad criticism is due to men not seeing which of these three motives underlies a given composition.
The converse processes, not considered by the pious teachers of antiquity, would be to obscure, to bamboozle or mislead, and to bore.
The reader or auditor is at liberty to remain passive and submit to these operations if he so choose.
FURTHER TESTS
LET the pupil examine a given piece of writing, say, the day’s editorial in a newspaper, to see whether the writer is trying to conceal something; to see whether he is ‘veiling his meaning’; whether he is afraid to say what he thinks; whether he is trying to appear to think without really doing any thinking.
Metrical writing
1 Let the pupil try to write in the metre of any poem he likes.
2 Let him write words to a well-known tune.
3 Let him try to write words to the same tune in such a way that the words will not be distorted when one sings them.
4 Let the pupil write a poem in some strophe form he likes.
5 Let him parody some poem he finds ridiculous, either because of falsity in the statement, or falsity in the disposition of the writer, or for pretentiousness, of one kind or another, or for any other reason that strikes his risible faculties, his sense of irony.
The gauging pupil should be asked to recognize what author is parodied. And whether the joke is on the parodied or the parodist. Whether the parody exposes a real defect, or merely makes use of an author’s mechanism to expose a more trivial content.
Note: No harm has ever yet been done a good poem by this process. FitzGerald’s Rubaiyat has survived hundreds of parodies, that are not really parodies either of Omar or FitzGerald, but only poems written in that form of strophe.
Note: There is a tradition that in Provence it was considered plagiarism to take a man’s form, just as it is now considered plagiarism to take his subject matter or plot.
Poems frankly written to another man’s strophe form or tune were called ‘Sirventes’, and were usually satirical.
FURTHER TESTS
1 Let the pupils in exchanging themes judge whether the theme before them really says anything.
2 Let them judge whether it tells them anything or ‘makes them see anything’ they hadn’t noticed before, especially in regard to some familiar scene or object.
3 Variant: whether the writer really had to KNOW something about the subject or scene before being able to write the page under consideration.
The question of a word or phrase being ‘useless’ is not merely a numerical problem.
Anatole France in criticizing French dramatists pointed out that on the stage, the words must give time for the action; they must give time for the audience to take count of what is going on.
Even on the printed page there is an analogous ease.
Tacitus in writing Latin can use certain forms of condensation that don’t necessarily translate advantageously into English.
The reader will often misjudge a condensed writer by trying to read him too fast.
The secret of popular writing is never to put more on a given page than the common reader can lap off it with no strain WHATSOEVER on his habitually slack attention.
Anatole France is said to have spent a great deal of time searching for the least possible variant that would turn the most worn-out and commonest phrases of journalism into something distinguished.
Such research is sometimes termed ‘classicism’.
This is the greatest possible remove from the usual English stylist’s trend or urge toward a style different from everyone else’s.
BASIS
THERE is no use, or almost none, in my publisher’s asking me to make English Literature as prominent as possible. I mean, not if I am to play fair with the student. You cannot learn to write by reading English.
If you are affected by early poets you produce ‘costume of the period’. Chaucer is incomprehensible without a glossary. Elizabethanisms are easily recognizable as ancient finery.
Chaucer did not MAKE his art. This doesn’t detract from his glory as a great and very human writer. He took over his art from the French. He wrote about the astrolabe. Dante wrote On the Common Tongue, a treatise on language and versification.
The language of the Elizabethans is upholstered. The age of Shakespeare was the GREAT AGE par excellence, it was the age when the language was not cut and dried, when the auditor liked the WORDS; he got, probably, as much kick out of ‘multitudinous seas incarnadine’, as the readers of the Yellow Book got out of a twisted epigram.
This wasn’t a class interest; in Spain at that time the most effective critic of plays was a cobbler. But the language was a made-up artificial speech; it was the age of Euphues in England and of Gongora in Spain.
How did it get that way?
The cult of Latin. After the thinness, the ‘transparency’, of mediaeval authors, the reading world was once again drunk on antiquity, Greece and Rome; the most educated wrote in Latin; each writer wanted to show that he knew more Latin than the other; there are bales of their Latin poems; the Italians took over the style and extended the vocabulary, the Spaniards and English imitated the Italians; Camoens tried it in Portugal. It was the gold rush for the largest vocabulary. I suspect that Marlowe started to parody himself in Hero and Leander. He had begun with serious intentions.
I recognize that this suspicion may be an error.
The next phase in France and England was to attempt to squeeze the katachrestical rhetoric into a strait-waist-coat.
This doesn’t mean that the reader can afford to be
ignorant of the best work of either period. He can look for real speech in Shakespeare and find it in plenty IF he knows what to look for.
The so-called prose of several centuries is concerned with—or at least your teachers will recommend it for—‘sentence structure’.
If you can read only English, start on Fielding. There you have a solid foundation. His language is neither strait-laced nor all trimmings.