{"id":2080,"date":"2018-10-28T14:23:00","date_gmt":"2018-10-28T14:23:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/?p=2080"},"modified":"2018-10-28T14:23:00","modified_gmt":"2018-10-28T14:23:00","slug":"pound-yeats-remorse-pounds-canto-cxvi-and-yeats-man-and-the-echo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/?p=2080","title":{"rendered":"POUND, YEATS, REMORSE \u2013 Pound\u2019s Canto CXVI and Yeats\u2019 \u201cMan and the Echo\u201d."},"content":{"rendered":"

I\u2019ve been dipping into Ezra Pound again, moving from the Selected Poems<\/em> edited and introduced by Eliot, which I devoured as a sixth former in the late sixties to the very useful New Selected Poems and Translations<\/em> edited by Richard Sieburth. The selection from The Cantos<\/em> in the latter brought me to Canto CXVI, which excited me enormously in the early seventies. I seem to remember seeing it cited as showing that Pound finally \u201cgot it\u201d in the sense of feeling remorse at his role as Mussolini\u2019s propagandist in the Second World War. I\u2019m not sure about that, at least on the evidence of this passage, though there may be a mountain of evidence elsewhere.<\/p>\n

The precision and power of the writing is immense, both in splendour and defeat:<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

I have brought the great ball of crystal;
\n……………………..<\/span>who can lift it?
\nCan you enter the great acorn of light?
\n……………<\/span>But the beauty is not the madness
\nTho’ my errors and wrecks lie about me.
\nAnd I am not a demigod,
\nI cannot make it cohere.
\nIf love be not in the house there is nothing.
\nThe voice of famine unheard.
\nHow came beauty against this blackness,
\nTwice beauty under the elms \u2013
\n……………<\/span>To be saved by squirrels and bluejays?<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

I can only feel awe at the first of those lines, with its simplicity and clarity, its calm exhilaration, the smooth and beautiful flow of its phonemes. I find the modulation between that line and the next even more beautiful in its economy and understatement, in the control of cadence that makes a sense of great spaces of unspoken implication open around the four simple words, and in the way the words themselves shimmer between open invitation, challenge and perhaps a doubt that anyone reading him now actually could lift such a weight. Another modulation makes the invitation an intimate and personal address to the individual reader. How wonderfully rich and simple the metaphors are, too \u2013 the great ball of crystal suddenly felt as a challenging weight, then the acorn<\/em> of light that we might enter, with the suggestion that to do so would be to make ourselves part of a vast growth of illuminated life, the oak tree of light that the acorn might become.\u00a0 And then how poignantly such aspirations both crumble to and are heightened by contrast with the bleak admissions, the humble hopes and joys of what follows. \u201cIf love be not in the house there is nothing\u201d is unforgettable in the way it trembles between celebrating love and evoking the bleakness of the loveless house. \u00a0Yes, this is writing of genius, beautiful in its mastery, humanly moving in its aspiration and acceptance of defeat.<\/p>\n

And yet I do find myself responding to it in an uncomfortably divided way. This is partly to do with the fundamental method of The Cantos<\/em>. Reading them I find myself swinging from joyful excitement at individual lines or passages to a sense of disappointment as the imaginative impulse they\u2019ve generated fails to be followed through or gathered into a sufficiently coherent field of force. This perhaps means no more than that in the end I\u2019m too wedded to other kinds of structure to be properly attuned to Pound\u2019s methods of working.<\/p>\n

There are more specific problems with this Canto and particular passage though. Coming to terms with The Cantos<\/em> generally, one can enjoy the lyrical beauty, humour, visionary idealism or personal pathos of particular passages without too much regard for Pound\u2019s overall cultural, historical and economic theories or his Fascist commitments. And indeed there is intense personal pathos in the passage I\u2019ve quoted. However, for me this pathos is complicated and vitiated by the sense that he\u2019s still<\/em> failing to see the ugliness and horror of Mussolini\u2019s rule and of his own extraordinarily virulent anti-Semitism. He makes it almost inevitable that the reader will bring such a context to this passage by referring near the start of the Canto to \u201cMuss., wrecked for an error\u201d. \u201cMuss.\u201d, of course, is Mussolini. \u201cAn error<\/em>\u201d? Whatever Pound thinks of the error as being, the line suggests pity for Mussolini himself<\/em>, not for his victims. Worse, when he says \u201cmy errors and wrecks lie about me\u201d there\u2019s no specific confrontation of his extreme anti-Semitism or the anti-Semitic writing for Italian newspapers that no doubt had dreadful consequences for individual Jews.[1]<\/a> Rather than remorse for moral failure what we seem to have is something balancing between self-blame and self-pity for failure of an intellectual and aesthetic kind \u2013 failure in the great artistic project of making it all cohere<\/em>. Even this is confession of failure is vitiated by the extraordinary explanation he gives: \u201cI am not a demi-god\u201d. Who but Pound and perhaps his most infatuated admirers would mistake him for one? Even in abjection and professed humility he can\u2019t shake off fantasies of grandeur. And yet \u2013 going back to my comment about humble joys \u2013 there is something deeply touching in the pleasure he takes in the squirrels and jays. It puts me in mind of the last two stanzas of Mahon\u2019s moving sequence \u201cA Kensington Notebook\u201d[2]<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Yeats\u2019s \u201cMan and the Echo\u201d couldn\u2019t be more different. This is a haunting poem, despite or perhaps even in part because of the exhausted, thumping quality of its rhythms and the peculiarity of the situation it posits. The old and ill poet has come to a rocky cleft that he thinks of as a possible site of communication with the spirit world. He\u2019s looking for answers to tormenting questions about his own responsibility in various situations. All that comes is a dismal echo of the last phrase of each of his speeches. I think it\u2019s illuminating to compare this extract with my quotation from Pound:<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

All that I have said and done,
\nNow that I am old and ill,
\nTurns into a question till
\nI lie awake night after night
\nAnd never get the answers right.
\nDid that play of mine send out
\nCertain men the English shot?
\nDid words of mine put too great strain
\nOn that woman\u2019s reeling brain?
\nCould my spoken words have checked
\nThat whereby a house was wrecked?
\nAnd all seems evil until I
\nSleepless would lie down and die.<\/p>\n

Nothing here has the dazzling beauty of so many lines in Canto CXVI. What there is is a compelling sense of the responsibility not just of the artist but of the man, not just to art but to the people he lives among. Where Pound focuses on purely artistic failure to \u201cmake it cohere\u201d, the Yeats of \u201cMan and the Echo\u201d is racked by fears that both his actions and his inaction may have had disastrous consequences in what we can call the real lives of the people he lived among. However tempted he may have been by fantasies of the superiority of the artist to ordinary life \u2013 the kind of posture shrilly indulged in in \u201cLapis Lazuli\u201d or beautifully and very ambivalently floated in \u201cSailing to Byzantium\u201d \u2013 in the end he was inescapably rooted in and passionately involved with a solid social world. That gives his writing a depth that I think Pound\u2019s lacks. It supplies the coherence underlying his struggles against himself. It makes \u201cMan and the Echo\u201d a deeply moving poem despite the drabness of its expression. In fact that drabness is integral to the idea and feeling of the poem, and though I don\u2019t imagine many people would think of this as one of the great poems I think it\u2019s expressed with considerable skill. The beauty of image and cadence in Pound\u2019s poem, in contrast can seem an aspect of its evasiveness.<\/p>\n

This may seem a facile thing to say, but I do wonder whether what seems to me the fundamental weakness of Pound\u2019s poetry as compared to that of Yeats relates to the way Pound always seems in a sense to have escaped full engagement with his conflicts. That may seem an odd thing to say about someone who was such an energetic, aggressive polemicist and entrepreneur in the cultural wars, but as far as I can see after he left America at twenty-three he lived a happily rootless life, struggling with poverty, making huge contributions to the life of literature and the arts, but with no social commitments deeper than intellectual friendships and affinities and with no sense of having to justify himself in the eyes of people who might think of his poetic passions as airy fairy nonsense.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

[1]<\/a> I\u2019m not sure if he\u2019d come to see any of these things as wrong at the point when he wrote Canto CXVI, though I know he remained virulently anti-Semitic throughout his imprisonment in St Elizabeth\u2019s lunatic asylum between 1945\u00a0 and 1958 and that he gave a Fascist salute on arrival in Italy in 1958. When he did declare a sense of the wrongness of his anti-Semitism in 1967 he did so in what seem strikingly inadequate terms: ‘Any good I’ve done has been spoiled by bad intentions\u2014the preoccupation with irrelevant and stupid things,’ [he] replied. Then very slowly, with emphasis, surely conscious of Ginsberg’s being Jewish: ‘But the worst mistake I made was that stupid, suburban prejudice of anti-semitism.’ I can\u2019t remember where I first read this but it appears in Wikipedia, which cites Humphrey Carpenter\u2019s 1988 biography, A Serious Character: The Life of Ezra Pound<\/em>, which I haven\u2019t read. For most of us, I imagine, \u201cstupid, suburban prejudice\u201d grossly trivializes his offence. I suppose in his terms it marks a devastating collapse of self-belief, given his apparent earlier sense of being one of the tiny handful of creative geniuses who saw into and shaped reality and were the only people who really mattered. This sense is reflected in many comments scattered through A. David Moody\u2019s Ezra Pound: Poet<\/em>, Volume I, The Young Genius 1885 \u2013 1920<\/em>. I haven\u2019t read the later volumes but I imagine it only grew on him in succeeding years.<\/p>\n

[2]<\/a> Collected in Antarctica<\/em> and in the 1999 Collected Poems<\/em> but incomprehensibly omitted from the Collected Poems<\/em> of 2011.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019ve been dipping into Ezra Pound again, moving from the Selected Poems edited and introduced by Eliot, which I devoured as a sixth former in the late sixties to the very useful New Selected Poems and Translations edited by Richard Sieburth. The selection from The Cantos in the latter brought me to Canto CXVI, which […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[111,58],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2080","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ezra-pound","category-w-b-yeats"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2080"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2080"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2080\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2085,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2080\/revisions\/2085"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2080"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2080"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2080"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}