R.J. MacSween

Ezra Pound: A Personal Estimate

This man has spent most of his life abroad, has been looked upon as a traitor to America and her way of life, and yet he is the most American of all modern writers. His countrymen forget that their nation was settled and founded in revolution by one of the most exciting, most critical, most independent races the world has ever seen - the English Puritan. The early American was a man who had lost moral elbow room in England and had to get out. He flourished when he was free, when he could make the world truly his world. He was not at home in anyone else's world. He believed in God but his eyes were on material wealth. He destroyed other races and changed the face of nature in order to make himself master. Wherever he looked and saw something different from his own, he desired passionately to change or destroy it. This has made him the scourge and blessing of the world. And that is what descendant Ezra Pound is: the scourge and blessing of the world. He is so because the Puritan temper is his, whether he admits it or not.

Pound, born in 1885, reacted violently against his America very much as the Puritan reacted against his England. Their revolts are not so different as they seem. It is true that Pound's is expressed primarily in poetry, but it is also true that it takes in economics, politics, and all the arts. He was a man uncomfortable in the midst of an unpleasant world, where dullness masqueraded as creativity and sham masqueraded as culture. He thought he saw the same deceit in every facet of American life. He could not smash what he saw, but he could leave. He went to London, Paris and Rapallo, and in these places whirlpools of energy boiled into being by his presence. America had unleashed into the world the bug that made her itch, and he made many people itch. And in their itching and scratching, most good writing in English was born and most modem thinking in the arts was done.

Pound's greatest contribution to his century is his emphasis upon the technique of poetry. This emphasis has repercussions far beyond the world ofliterature. From it stems all modern efforts to communicate well, to pass ideas from language to language unimpaired, to educate the people to the facts of economics as they truly are, and to keep the intelligence in touch with the live culture of the past. Pound sees the poet not as a mere fiddler with words. He sees him, in Shelley's phrase, as one of the "legislators of the world."

In order to make the poet's work effective, Pound brushed aside as useless the efforts of the late Romantic poets. He returned to earlier and better ages of inspiration and made gods again of such men as Homer, Chaucer, Viflon, and Dante. He declared that the poet had to be once more not only the instrument upon which his emotions played but the "maker," the creator of the work, the technician of a craft. He effectively killed the old poetry in its tracks. There is not an important poet of the century who does not in various ways owe his worth to Pound.

Americans are a race of collectors. Whatever strikes their fancy must be captured and brought back home. In this attitude there is the pride of the wealthy and the wonder of the child. They have always known their own wealth as a secret shame and have freely adored the product of superior cultures. Pound is a master collector. Not rich enough to buy art works, he has robbed the world ofits greatest literary treasures. He has translated home some of the master works of the past. The AngloSaxon, the Provencal, the Latin, the Greek, the Chinese, thejapanese, even the ancient Egyptian, have felt his robber's hand. His versions of old literature are among the finest ever made. In fact, looking back into our own past, one can't find a writer who even approaches his equal. And all his translations have an immediate impact, a modernity, an incisiveness of phrase - qualities that are a miracle to the professional mind. One has only to take a single poem from The Classic Anthology of Confucius in his version and compare it with a similar effort on the part of Arthur Waley to see his value. For forty years Waley has been acknowledged as our greatest translator from the Chinese. He is a great scholar. But Pound has thrown his poetic attempts into the discard - where they belong. A mind so far ranging as Pound's is seldom met with. He is like a bird of prey, safling high, his eye on the watch for any important movement below, intensely alive, immensely assimilative, quick to turn away into any fruitful land.

He has the terrible impatience of the reformer. This platonic poet feverishly wills to change the economic structure of the world. His father worked in the United States Mint and the son grew up in the vernacular of money. For him all the ills of the world stem from the wronguse ofmoney, thatis, from'usury."Usuryhas debased men and destroyed art and must be destroyed in turn. Pound the would-be money changer, has espoused the causes of Mussolini and Major Douglas in an effort to outlaw usury. His failure has made him frantic and his Rome broadcasts during the forties put him in Alliedjail and finally in an asylum. But misfortunes do not change him. They did not change his ancestors and they will not change him. He sincerely believes in his theories, he is willing to die for them, he thinks they can save the world from destruction. Here one sees again the Puritan, the Old Testament prophet, using force and violence to turn the world to good. This is one aspect ofpound that his critics have never appreciated; he is an intensely moral poet; he is the last of a line going through Milton into ancient judaism.

In surveying Pound's work, the critic must pause upon his translations from the Chinese. Chinese ideograms are stunning to the unprepared mind and the names of Chinese dignitaries sound like the inventions of a comedian. It was Pound more than anyone else who dragged this great civilization across the Pacific into our backyards. It is no sneer at the great scholars, his predecessors, to give Pound such credit. With them, Chinese culture remained a scholar's curiosity; with Pound it has come within reach of any inquiring student.

It is hard for us to realize at the moment what Pound has done in this matter. Homer and Dante were always ours to a very great extent, and even the uneducated were saturated with the cultural atmosphere generated by those two great minds. But now a new dimension is on the way to being added to Western culture. In Pound's eyes, the exponents of Eastern culture, especially Confucius, have a sanity, a balance, a clear grasp of reality, an intense concentration upon human wellbeing, which will fill the gaps in the wilder and more erratic Western mentality. Nothing could have seemed less probable than this achievement. That Pound, a student of Western culture, should escape that beautiful snare and deal equally well with the past of Asia is an astonishing thing.

When everything possible has been said about his life and the influence of that life upon others, there still remains the greatest task of all: the evaluation of his great poem, The Cantos. This is the greatest long poem of the century and the most controversial. It is the stumbling block for friends and enemies alike. It frightens away the badly-read man, and the busy man, and the man with Victorian habits of poetry, and the too-Western Western man, and the too-modern modern man. It bristles with quotations from Latin, Greek, Provencal, Spanish, French, German. It bristles with names of the great and of the small, ofcultural heroes and of private acquaintances, of classical cities and of African villages. Worst of all, there is a peppering of Chinese written characters. And, finally, in the later Cantos, Egyptian hieroglyphics take their stately and esoteric stand.

Contemporaiy (St. F.X Alumni News) Vol. 1, No. 1, April 11, 1963

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The Antigonish Review is a quarterly literary journal published by St. Francis Xavier University. The Review features poetry, fiction, reviews and critical articles from all parts of Canada, the US and overseas, using original graphics to enliven the format.

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