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> This article from NYTimes.com
> has been sent to you by pyramid@boshotmalt.com.
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> \----------------------------------------------------------/
>
> Ezra Pound’s Black Jacket
>
> February 1, 2004
> By DAVID GATES
>
>
>
> His distant relative Longfellow beat him by four years, but
> at last Old Ez has gotten his Library of America moment:
> the black dust jacket with the red-white-and-blue stripe,
> the little ribbon thingie, the whole deal. ''Ezra Pound:
> Poems and Translations'' officially puts him in the company
> of Whitman (with whom he cheekily made a ''A Pact'' in the
> 1910's, having ''detested'' him long enough), Poe, Emerson,
> Frost and Stevens, and of course this is where he belongs.
> Except those for whom his anti-Semitism will always be a
> deal breaker, nobody these days would think to question
> either Pound's place in the canon or his posthumous
> conscription into American uniform. If he never quite
> became the colossus he sometimes persuaded himself he was,
> he came close for a while. And despite his lifelong exile,
> he's as American as any of them: from the James Whitcomb
> Riley-meets-Joel Chandler Harris dialect he affected when
> he was doing his Old Ez number to his autodidactic ambition
> to swallow up the whole world of literature and make it
> new.
>
> Before his economic and political crankery turned his
> career into a sideshow in the 1930's, Pound was the central
> instigator and publicist of literary modernism, and one of
> its central practitioners. He hounded editors to publish
> Joyce and Eliot, did a heavy, masterly edit on ''The Waste
> Land,'' helped the middle-aged Yeats liven himself up and
> championed Frost, Hemingway and William Carlos Williams.
> His ''Cantos,'' the epic ''rag-bag'' that he spent half a
> century stuffing with everything from Homer to Confucius to
> John Adams, is still up there on the Mount Rushmore of High
> Modernism, next to ''The Waste Land,'' ''Ulysses'' and
> ''Finnegans Wake.'' (It's the oddball Teddy Roosevelt,
> perhaps, but still.) He experimented restlessly with the
> tricky verse forms of Provencal poets, the accentual
> cadences of the Anglo-Saxons and the foursquare quatrains
> of Theophile Gautier, before he settled on a catchall vers
> libre for most of the ''Cantos.'' His immersion in Chinese
> and Japanese literature -- oddly like Longfellow's
> immersion in Dante and the Finnish national epic poem, the
> ''Kalevala'' -- helped rescue English-language poetry from
> Anglo-American provincialism. In 1912, he coined the term
> ''imagism'' to describe the clean, visual, minimalist
> poetry he championed, and had the sense to jump ship when
> the movement got precious. His tart pronouncements -- ''Use
> no superfluous word,'' ''Go in fear of abstractions,''
> ''Don't be descriptive,'' ''Every literaryism, every book
> word, fritters away a scrap of the reader's patience,''
> ''Only emotion endures'' -- still belong on index cards
> above every writer's desk.
>
> But here comes the ''and yet'': there was always something
> deeply bogus about Pound. He resolved at 15 that when he
> was 30 he ''would know more about poetry than any man
> living.'' He was 28 when he wrote about that early
> resolution, and still had two years of wiggle room, but his
> learning remained scattershot and superficial. Those
> contrarian recommendations in ''The ABC of Reading,'' which
> omit the major Romantics and boost such figures as the Earl
> of Dorset and Walter Savage Landor, illustrate his dodgy
> belief that ''a man can learn more about poetry by really
> knowing and examining a few of the best poems than by
> meandering about among a great many.'' Yet scholars exposed
> the howlers in his translations and quotations from his
> personal sacred texts, forcing him to justify himself with
> bluster and double talk. (Though he also had scholarly
> enablers: S. V. Jankowski, in his 1969 preface to Pound's
> translation of Sophocles' ''Women of Trachis,'' noted that
> Pound ''refuses to recognize the Greek syntax as a
> determining factor.'') Even the long-sufferingly loyal
> Eliot was amused by his pose of erudition. Humphrey
> Carpenter, in his definitive 1988 biography, ''A Serious
> Character,'' treats even Pound's anti-Semitism, however
> abhorrent, as another form of playacting. ''A naughty
> schoolboy might do as much, and really there seems to be
> something essentially childish in his whole interest in
> Jews and Jewry.'' Except in words, Pound was never violent
> and seldom unkind; his radio rants about ''kikes'' seem
> solipsistically disconnected from the real world, in which
> Hitler was actually exterminating the Jews of Europe. We
> can't dismiss Pound as either a dilettante or a charlatan
> -- he worked too hard, and took his self-assigned missions
> too seriously -- but much of what he wrote betrays an
> undercurrent of willed self-delusion, and a
> sub-undercurrent of suppressed self-doubt.
>
> In a 1967 Paris Review interview, Vladimir Nabokov scoffed
> at ''the pretentious nonsense of Mr. Pound, that total
> fake.'' You wonder how much of that pretentious nonsense
> Nabokov actually bothered to check out, but the creator of
> such posturing self-deluders as Humbert Humbert and Charles
> Kinbote had a keen nose for (and a suspicious sympathy
> with) intellectual impersonations. Now that Pound's
> innovations are taken for granted, he reads less like a
> poet than like a writer first doggedly, then desperately,
> imitating a poet. What he called the ''ideogramic method''
> of the ''Cantos'' -- juxtaposing images and texts, ideas
> and allusions, without the connective tissue of sequential
> logic -- too seldom communicated to readers what he hoped
> it would. In old age, he essentially admitted he'd been
> faking it: not to fool anybody else, but to fool himself.
> ''I knew too little about so many things,'' he once told
> his friend Daniel Cory. ''I picked out this and that thing
> that interested me, then jumbled them into a bag. But
> that's not the way . . . to make a work of art.'' Hard-core
> Poundians can explain this away as late-life depression,
> but its stern lucidity sounds like that fierce young
> teacher and theorist who did his damnedest to purge poetry
> of artiness -- which he hated in part because it was always
> his own besetting sin.
>
> The 1,363-page ''Poems and Translations'' collects most of
> Pound's early creative work, including 76 previously
> unpublished or uncollected poems, much of it produced
> between 1905 and 1923, when he began pouring all his
> serious verse into the 802-page ''Cantos.'' Compared with
> equivalent stretches of ground-clearing and throat-clearing
> by Frost or Yeats, little remains readable. This is partly
> because, thanks to the modernist emphasis on subjective
> experience, poetry has largely come to mean their sort of
> post-Romantic personal lyric. The archmodernist Pound had a
> premodernist idea of what it was to be a poet: for him, as
> for Pope -- or Longfellow -- poetry was less private and
> organic than public and imitative, constantly in discourse
> with the reader and the tradition. (Yeats and Frost worked
> that side of the street too, but ''Among School Children''
> and ''To Earthward'' are more to our taste now than ''Under
> Ben Bulben'' and ''Build Soil.'') So Pound labored away at
> his translations and imitations, homages and ripostes,
> evocations and provocations; he tried on genres, formal and
> metrical schemes, attitudes and personae -- as he pointedly
> titled the collected non-''Cantos'' poems he published in
> his lifetime. He offered up war chants, aubades, songs,
> ballads, satires, parodies, dramatic monologues: long on
> bile but short on juice. Where was the man himself? To
> Pound, caught up in his role as the Prospero of Poetry
> Island, the merely personal must have seemed self-indulgent
> and irrelevant. Or unfaceable. Or unreachable. His reading
> taught him that only emotion endured, but unlike Yeats, he
> had little inclination for ''walking naked.'' And this
> impersonality put him, for all his prescience, on what now
> seems the wrong side of literary history.
>
> Still, that doesn't account for why Pope is still fun,
> while reading Pound is such a slog. The earliest poems
> traffic in the tin-eared archaism he later dismissed as
> ''stale cream puffs'': ''So hath the boon been given, by
> the poets of old time / (Dante to Beatrice -- an I profane
> not). . . .'' Though his characteristic religious mode was
> paganism, the jog-trot ''Ballad of the Goodly Fere'' evokes
> muscular Christianity -- what was he thinking? -- in
> cringe-inducing dialect: ''Ha' we lost the goodliest fere
> o'all / For the priests and the gallows tree? / Aye lover
> he was of brawny men, / O' ships and the open sea.'' The
> much-admired (at least by Pound) ''Sestina: Altaforte,'' in
> which he channels the bloodthirsty Bertrans de Born, starts
> off with a bang that turns into a clunk: ''Damn it all! all
> this our South stinks peace.'' In his love poems, women
> disappear into a mist of melancholy mannerism: ''She, who
> moved here amid the cyclamen, / Moves only now a clinging
> tenuous ghost.'' And when he shucks the fusty
> sentimentality to reveal himself as the artist aggrieved --
> a favorite theme -- the tone sets your teeth on edge,
> whether he goes for archness (''Come, my songs, let us
> speak of perfection -- / We shall get ourselves rather
> disliked'') or ham-handed abuse: ''Let us deride the
> smugness of 'The Times': GUFFAW! / So much for the gagged
> reviewers, / It will pay them when the worms are wriggling
> in their vitals; / These are they who objected to
> newness.''
>
> The 1920 sequence ''Hugh Selwyn Mauberley,'' Pound's
> self-styled ''farewell to London'' and his pre-''Cantos''
> masterwork, holds up better. In what seems intended as a
> portrait of a literary wannabe, he's dried off the language
> and bundled the fury in crisp quatrains:
>
> The age demanded an
> image
> Of its accelerated
> grimace,
>
> Something for the modern stage,
> Not, at any rate, an Attic grace. . . .
>
>
>
>
> Poundians
> rightly point to this poem when they talk about his
> technical mastery: notice the way he plays the eye rhymes
> (''image'' / ''stage,'' ''grimace'' / ''grace'') against
> the slant ear-rhymes (''image'' / ''grimace,'' ''stage'' /
> ''grace'') to give the illusion of couplets. Yet even this
> controlled performance, which gave Eliot clues for ''The
> Waste Land,'' meanders into satirical sketches, and ends on
> a random, if evocative, note:
>
> The face-oval beneath
> the glaze,
> Bright in its suave bounding-line, as
> Beneath
> half-watt rays
> The eyes turn topaz.
>
>
>
>
> A far cry from ''The Waste Land'' and its resounding
> ''shantih shantih shantih'' -- the ending, by the way, on
> which Pound the editor insisted. In his own work, the
> larger structure eluded him.
>
> Nearly half of this collection is translations, some surely
> untrustworthy, most surely skippable. Pound puts old
> Italian and Provencal into antiquated poetryese -- ''Me
> hath she cast from high, / In fell disease / I lie'' -- and
> Sophocles into bizarro vernacular American: ''When someone
> says Orestes is comin' / then she gets scared and blows her
> top proper / goes shoutin' frantic.'' His more
> straightforward treatment of Japanese Noh plays and
> Confucian treatises wears better; no one should mind his
> Confucius coming out with the occasional n'est-ce pas. But
> Pound never wrote anything better than his versions of
> Chinese poems in the 1915 volume ''Cathay'': ''Lament of
> the Frontier Guard,'' ''The Jewel Stairs' Grievance'' and
> the much-anthologized ''The River-Merchant's Wife: A
> Letter'': ''The paired butterflies are already yellow with
> August / Over the grass in the West garden, / They hurt
> me.''
>
> This is just the poetry he wanted in his Imagist days, back
> when he was prescribing enduring emotion with no
> superfluous words. That these poems weren't originally his,
> but graceful adaptations, matters less than their effect
> and their influence. They show him at his best: as the
> tireless talent scout, the pitiless editor and the great
> impersonator. If after 1,300 pages we still know Ezra Pound
> only as a collage of voices and attitudes, mannerisms and
> masks -- well, that was Ezra Pound. His ultimate
> centerlessness, more than his rants and his hatreds, more
> than his ultimate self-derailment, makes him an uncanny
> presence among the Library of America's black-jacketed
> eminences, despite the credentials he earned. As to the
> credentials he faked, discriminating readers will detect
> those. But he's in the club now, and if we can live with
> Longfellow, we can live with him.
>
>
>
> David Gates's most recent book is ''The Wonders of the
> Invisible World,'' a collection of stories.
>
>
From: <pyramid@boshotmalt.com>
To: <NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU>
> ---------------- Message requiring your approval (308
lines) ------------------
> This article from NYTimes.com
> has been sent to you by pyramid@boshotmalt.com.
>
>
> \----------------------------------------------------------/
>
> Ezra Pound’s Black Jacket
>
> February 1, 2004
> By DAVID GATES
>
>
>
> His distant relative Longfellow beat him by four years, but
> at last Old Ez has gotten his Library of America moment:
> the black dust jacket with the red-white-and-blue stripe,
> the little ribbon thingie, the whole deal. ''Ezra Pound:
> Poems and Translations'' officially puts him in the company
> of Whitman (with whom he cheekily made a ''A Pact'' in the
> 1910's, having ''detested'' him long enough), Poe, Emerson,
> Frost and Stevens, and of course this is where he belongs.
> Except those for whom his anti-Semitism will always be a
> deal breaker, nobody these days would think to question
> either Pound's place in the canon or his posthumous
> conscription into American uniform. If he never quite
> became the colossus he sometimes persuaded himself he was,
> he came close for a while. And despite his lifelong exile,
> he's as American as any of them: from the James Whitcomb
> Riley-meets-Joel Chandler Harris dialect he affected when
> he was doing his Old Ez number to his autodidactic ambition
> to swallow up the whole world of literature and make it
> new.
>
> Before his economic and political crankery turned his
> career into a sideshow in the 1930's, Pound was the central
> instigator and publicist of literary modernism, and one of
> its central practitioners. He hounded editors to publish
> Joyce and Eliot, did a heavy, masterly edit on ''The Waste
> Land,'' helped the middle-aged Yeats liven himself up and
> championed Frost, Hemingway and William Carlos Williams.
> His ''Cantos,'' the epic ''rag-bag'' that he spent half a
> century stuffing with everything from Homer to Confucius to
> John Adams, is still up there on the Mount Rushmore of High
> Modernism, next to ''The Waste Land,'' ''Ulysses'' and
> ''Finnegans Wake.'' (It's the oddball Teddy Roosevelt,
> perhaps, but still.) He experimented restlessly with the
> tricky verse forms of Provencal poets, the accentual
> cadences of the Anglo-Saxons and the foursquare quatrains
> of Theophile Gautier, before he settled on a catchall vers
> libre for most of the ''Cantos.'' His immersion in Chinese
> and Japanese literature -- oddly like Longfellow's
> immersion in Dante and the Finnish national epic poem, the
> ''Kalevala'' -- helped rescue English-language poetry from
> Anglo-American provincialism. In 1912, he coined the term
> ''imagism'' to describe the clean, visual, minimalist
> poetry he championed, and had the sense to jump ship when
> the movement got precious. His tart pronouncements -- ''Use
> no superfluous word,'' ''Go in fear of abstractions,''
> ''Don't be descriptive,'' ''Every literaryism, every book
> word, fritters away a scrap of the reader's patience,''
> ''Only emotion endures'' -- still belong on index cards
> above every writer's desk.
>
> But here comes the ''and yet'': there was always something
> deeply bogus about Pound. He resolved at 15 that when he
> was 30 he ''would know more about poetry than any man
> living.'' He was 28 when he wrote about that early
> resolution, and still had two years of wiggle room, but his
> learning remained scattershot and superficial. Those
> contrarian recommendations in ''The ABC of Reading,'' which
> omit the major Romantics and boost such figures as the Earl
> of Dorset and Walter Savage Landor, illustrate his dodgy
> belief that ''a man can learn more about poetry by really
> knowing and examining a few of the best poems than by
> meandering about among a great many.'' Yet scholars exposed
> the howlers in his translations and quotations from his
> personal sacred texts, forcing him to justify himself with
> bluster and double talk. (Though he also had scholarly
> enablers: S. V. Jankowski, in his 1969 preface to Pound's
> translation of Sophocles' ''Women of Trachis,'' noted that
> Pound ''refuses to recognize the Greek syntax as a
> determining factor.'') Even the long-sufferingly loyal
> Eliot was amused by his pose of erudition. Humphrey
> Carpenter, in his definitive 1988 biography, ''A Serious
> Character,'' treats even Pound's anti-Semitism, however
> abhorrent, as another form of playacting. ''A naughty
> schoolboy might do as much, and really there seems to be
> something essentially childish in his whole interest in
> Jews and Jewry.'' Except in words, Pound was never violent
> and seldom unkind; his radio rants about ''kikes'' seem
> solipsistically disconnected from the real world, in which
> Hitler was actually exterminating the Jews of Europe. We
> can't dismiss Pound as either a dilettante or a charlatan
> -- he worked too hard, and took his self-assigned missions
> too seriously -- but much of what he wrote betrays an
> undercurrent of willed self-delusion, and a
> sub-undercurrent of suppressed self-doubt.
>
> In a 1967 Paris Review interview, Vladimir Nabokov scoffed
> at ''the pretentious nonsense of Mr. Pound, that total
> fake.'' You wonder how much of that pretentious nonsense
> Nabokov actually bothered to check out, but the creator of
> such posturing self-deluders as Humbert Humbert and Charles
> Kinbote had a keen nose for (and a suspicious sympathy
> with) intellectual impersonations. Now that Pound's
> innovations are taken for granted, he reads less like a
> poet than like a writer first doggedly, then desperately,
> imitating a poet. What he called the ''ideogramic method''
> of the ''Cantos'' -- juxtaposing images and texts, ideas
> and allusions, without the connective tissue of sequential
> logic -- too seldom communicated to readers what he hoped
> it would. In old age, he essentially admitted he'd been
> faking it: not to fool anybody else, but to fool himself.
> ''I knew too little about so many things,'' he once told
> his friend Daniel Cory. ''I picked out this and that thing
> that interested me, then jumbled them into a bag. But
> that's not the way . . . to make a work of art.'' Hard-core
> Poundians can explain this away as late-life depression,
> but its stern lucidity sounds like that fierce young
> teacher and theorist who did his damnedest to purge poetry
> of artiness -- which he hated in part because it was always
> his own besetting sin.
>
> The 1,363-page ''Poems and Translations'' collects most of
> Pound's early creative work, including 76 previously
> unpublished or uncollected poems, much of it produced
> between 1905 and 1923, when he began pouring all his
> serious verse into the 802-page ''Cantos.'' Compared with
> equivalent stretches of ground-clearing and throat-clearing
> by Frost or Yeats, little remains readable. This is partly
> because, thanks to the modernist emphasis on subjective
> experience, poetry has largely come to mean their sort of
> post-Romantic personal lyric. The archmodernist Pound had a
> premodernist idea of what it was to be a poet: for him, as
> for Pope -- or Longfellow -- poetry was less private and
> organic than public and imitative, constantly in discourse
> with the reader and the tradition. (Yeats and Frost worked
> that side of the street too, but ''Among School Children''
> and ''To Earthward'' are more to our taste now than ''Under
> Ben Bulben'' and ''Build Soil.'') So Pound labored away at
> his translations and imitations, homages and ripostes,
> evocations and provocations; he tried on genres, formal and
> metrical schemes, attitudes and personae -- as he pointedly
> titled the collected non-''Cantos'' poems he published in
> his lifetime. He offered up war chants, aubades, songs,
> ballads, satires, parodies, dramatic monologues: long on
> bile but short on juice. Where was the man himself? To
> Pound, caught up in his role as the Prospero of Poetry
> Island, the merely personal must have seemed self-indulgent
> and irrelevant. Or unfaceable. Or unreachable. His reading
> taught him that only emotion endured, but unlike Yeats, he
> had little inclination for ''walking naked.'' And this
> impersonality put him, for all his prescience, on what now
> seems the wrong side of literary history.
>
> Still, that doesn't account for why Pope is still fun,
> while reading Pound is such a slog. The earliest poems
> traffic in the tin-eared archaism he later dismissed as
> ''stale cream puffs'': ''So hath the boon been given, by
> the poets of old time / (Dante to Beatrice -- an I profane
> not). . . .'' Though his characteristic religious mode was
> paganism, the jog-trot ''Ballad of the Goodly Fere'' evokes
> muscular Christianity -- what was he thinking? -- in
> cringe-inducing dialect: ''Ha' we lost the goodliest fere
> o'all / For the priests and the gallows tree? / Aye lover
> he was of brawny men, / O' ships and the open sea.'' The
> much-admired (at least by Pound) ''Sestina: Altaforte,'' in
> which he channels the bloodthirsty Bertrans de Born, starts
> off with a bang that turns into a clunk: ''Damn it all! all
> this our South stinks peace.'' In his love poems, women
> disappear into a mist of melancholy mannerism: ''She, who
> moved here amid the cyclamen, / Moves only now a clinging
> tenuous ghost.'' And when he shucks the fusty
> sentimentality to reveal himself as the artist aggrieved --
> a favorite theme -- the tone sets your teeth on edge,
> whether he goes for archness (''Come, my songs, let us
> speak of perfection -- / We shall get ourselves rather
> disliked'') or ham-handed abuse: ''Let us deride the
> smugness of 'The Times': GUFFAW! / So much for the gagged
> reviewers, / It will pay them when the worms are wriggling
> in their vitals; / These are they who objected to
> newness.''
>
> The 1920 sequence ''Hugh Selwyn Mauberley,'' Pound's
> self-styled ''farewell to London'' and his pre-''Cantos''
> masterwork, holds up better. In what seems intended as a
> portrait of a literary wannabe, he's dried off the language
> and bundled the fury in crisp quatrains:
>
> The age demanded an
> image
> Of its accelerated
> grimace,
>
> Something for the modern stage,
> Not, at any rate, an Attic grace. . . .
>
>
>
>
> Poundians
> rightly point to this poem when they talk about his
> technical mastery: notice the way he plays the eye rhymes
> (''image'' / ''stage,'' ''grimace'' / ''grace'') against
> the slant ear-rhymes (''image'' / ''grimace,'' ''stage'' /
> ''grace'') to give the illusion of couplets. Yet even this
> controlled performance, which gave Eliot clues for ''The
> Waste Land,'' meanders into satirical sketches, and ends on
> a random, if evocative, note:
>
> The face-oval beneath
> the glaze,
> Bright in its suave bounding-line, as
> Beneath
> half-watt rays
> The eyes turn topaz.
>
>
>
>
> A far cry from ''The Waste Land'' and its resounding
> ''shantih shantih shantih'' -- the ending, by the way, on
> which Pound the editor insisted. In his own work, the
> larger structure eluded him.
>
> Nearly half of this collection is translations, some surely
> untrustworthy, most surely skippable. Pound puts old
> Italian and Provencal into antiquated poetryese -- ''Me
> hath she cast from high, / In fell disease / I lie'' -- and
> Sophocles into bizarro vernacular American: ''When someone
> says Orestes is comin' / then she gets scared and blows her
> top proper / goes shoutin' frantic.'' His more
> straightforward treatment of Japanese Noh plays and
> Confucian treatises wears better; no one should mind his
> Confucius coming out with the occasional n'est-ce pas. But
> Pound never wrote anything better than his versions of
> Chinese poems in the 1915 volume ''Cathay'': ''Lament of
> the Frontier Guard,'' ''The Jewel Stairs' Grievance'' and
> the much-anthologized ''The River-Merchant's Wife: A
> Letter'': ''The paired butterflies are already yellow with
> August / Over the grass in the West garden, / They hurt
> me.''
>
> This is just the poetry he wanted in his Imagist days, back
> when he was prescribing enduring emotion with no
> superfluous words. That these poems weren't originally his,
> but graceful adaptations, matters less than their effect
> and their influence. They show him at his best: as the
> tireless talent scout, the pitiless editor and the great
> impersonator. If after 1,300 pages we still know Ezra Pound
> only as a collage of voices and attitudes, mannerisms and
> masks -- well, that was Ezra Pound. His ultimate
> centerlessness, more than his rants and his hatreds, more
> than his ultimate self-derailment, makes him an uncanny
> presence among the Library of America's black-jacketed
> eminences, despite the credentials he earned. As to the
> credentials he faked, discriminating readers will detect
> those. But he's in the club now, and if we can live with
> Longfellow, we can live with him.
>
>
>
> David Gates's most recent book is ''The Wonders of the
> Invisible World,'' a collection of stories.
>
>