Ezra Pound (1885–1972)

This was damn illuminating if remarkably heartbreaking. Back as an undergrad I was deeply heartbroken by the parting of ways between Sartre and Camus. Oh I lamented it , began to explore political nuance and was still largely oblivious to the multitude of being an adult. I think about my sorrows 25 years after the fact.

These are Modernist titans. I still burdens to ponder how they diverged. Biographies had illuminated the arcs but it is the intimate exchanges here which allow one to lapse show more and consider. Pound was working as Yeats' secretary and broached Joyce for samplings of his verse. This continues as Joyce establishes himself through Dubliners and Portrait. Throughout Pound is tireless in searching for grants and publishing opportunities. Then during the Great War Pound began editing sections of Ulysses. Rifts began to appear and then both men relocated to Paris. Matters dimmed. Pound appeared restless in most endeavors, finding the appeal of economics and chamber music while allowing his literary opinions to perhaps calcify. He wanted a sequel to Ulysses, not the Wake. Anecdotally the last meeting between them occurred when Joyce asked Hemingway to accompany him to dinner where Papa said Pound spoke erratically.

This is likely my last book of 2017 and one that might just prompt a Joyce/Pound project for the new year. show less

You are very idle, my songs.
I fear you will come to a bad end.

Though it required a fair amount of research, this collection is really worth the read. The translations of Occitan troubadours, Tang poets, and epigrams from Greek and Latin are especially good, though they are more interpretations or collaborations than proper translations. Pound is certainly as prickly as ever, and there is a certain pervasive tone of bitterness, but, like [author:Baudelaire|13847] and other poets who tend show more towards the acrid, his bile is tempered by beauty. show less

There hardly seems to be a more direct way to describe this book than to call it a somewhat snobby defense of the literary canon … the WESTERN literary canon. In this book, Pound lays out an argument for a "scientific" way to discover those works that belong to the canon and those that do not. Authors and poets who fall outside of Pound’s ordering of quality writing go mostly unnamed (except for Whitman) and those who do represent the best are largely presented self-evidently as such. show more All that was interesting but not really what I was after.

I was interested in Pound’s book as a critical reflection on the practice of reading, a skill that is in decline today. A 2024 report from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) noted that in 2022 “48.5 percent of adults reported having read at least one book in the past year, compared with 52.7 percent five years earlier, and 54.6 percent ten years earlier” (https://www.arts.gov/stories/blog/2024/federal-data-reading-pleasure-all-signs-show-slump). It was a decline that even the pandemic did not reverse. And this decline in the amount of reading is correlated with a decline in reading skill, which is really the more worrisome trend. In an age of Gen AI, when the bar for generating text has been so lowered, we are swamped with texts, an increasing number of which are being produced not by people recording or orienting readers to an outlook on the world but by machines generating texts from models. When we read AI generated texts, we are not encountering a mind at work. We, readers, must be the ones who supply the thinking.

This is the reason why I picked up Pound, because he offers a guide to critical, systematic reading that I can appreciate even if I disagree with the ends to which the work was put. He notes that “[T]he good writer chooses his words for their ‘meaning’, but that meaning is not a set, cut-off thing like the move of knight or pawn on a chess-board. It comes up with roots, with associations, with how and where the word is familiarly used, or where it has been used brilliantly or memorably” (36). Although Pound is referencing a literary history or a poetic tradition out of which words reach us, I think we can read this more broadly: the roots and associations and places where words are used familiarly are places, situations, contexts of life that we embody, live in, and perhaps live in, vicariously, through the work of poetry and fiction.

Pound describes his approach to critical reading as "scientific." He wants to resist the temptation to describe poetry and prose that retreats to abstractions that are themselves retreating from the realm of human experience (19). Instead, he wants to elevate writing that speaks truth and does so with efficiency and still grounds out in the distinctness of human experience (26). “Good writing” Pound says “is coterminous with the writer’s thought, it has the form of the thought, the form of the way the man feels his thought” (113). And readers can be trained to investigate this efficiency and profundity of expression across three aspects of language: phanopoeia (visual meaning), melopoeia (meaning through sound or rhythm), and logopoeia (meaning through denotative word usage) (37, 47). Some aspects (e.g., melopoeia) apply more readily to poetry, but I would argue that all three aspects can and do apply to other kinds of writing, even the humblest of texts.

What makes Pound’s approach scientific is in the careful selection and exclusion of texts that allow one to sample and catalog diversity, sketch the edges of genres or literary traditions, identify exemplars, and use those bodies of texts to designate eras and traditions of a (Western) literary past. Careful readers need diversity because one “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 and softer, what more resilient, what more compact” (60). He argues that pieces that do not expand these boundaries are of no use. Again, I can’t agree with this exclusionary look at literature and poetry unless we were to adopt a more inclusive sense of what meaningful diversity is. The point, however, is that it is on readers to approach texts systematically and with an eye toward identifying value and truth, a skill worth cultivating and preserving. I just happen to think that one builds up a skill through practice, lots of practice, with texts that are similar and different.

Although I disagree that one would develop reading skills in order to elevate one kind of writing or writer above others, I have to say that I’m sympathetic to Pound’s project of cultivating an ability to tell a difference between writing that speaks truth and does it well or that engages readers effectively in thinking for themselves and writing that doesn't. I’m way less interested, however, in reading as a practice of “appreciation” of what is true and beautiful than I am in reading that is a critical practice of engagement. “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” (63). show less

This collection of 35 poems and short pieces of prose, published in 1914 was a delight from start to finish. It is stretching a point to call it an anthology as it would be more accurate to say it was a bunch of poems collected by Ezra Pound from friends and acquaintances on the literary scene, but, be that as it may, there are some gems here. Ezra worked hard to make this collection appear as a new movement in poetry; going in to print to define what it was to be an Imagiste.

Pound explains show more the tenets of imagism as the following:

"Direct treatment of the ‘thing’ whether subjective or objective.
To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation.
As regarding rhythm: to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in the sequence of a metronome."

Of course not all the poems have all or any of these things in common, although the overriding one is concentration on a single image. Most are written in free verse, most are fairly short, and many allude to the classics. I can also detect an underlying feeling of sensuality and even perhaps eroticism.

The first ten poems are by Richard Adlington and his use of classical allusions gives much of his work a feel of loss for a time now passed. (He would have been difficult to read for many people before the age of google, but now we can discover who or what those Greek Gods were at the touch of a button). There are some beautiful images in his poems that create an atmosphere, sometimes of sorrow, sometimes of death, sometimes of peace and tranquility, but underneath a sensual yearning for love or antiquity. His wife H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) who has seven poems uses the classical illusions for a more direct effect. Gods of the sea, Gods of fertility are at play in her poems, which are more adventurous in form. There are echoes, repetitions, short lines that sing most beautifully, she is particularly adept at catching the atmosphere of a shore line:

"Where sea-grass tangles with/shore-grass" are the final two lines of "Hermes of the Ways" which is one of my favourite poems in the collection.

Ezra Pound has included six of his own poems many of which reflect his interest in Japanese art and literature, they read like Haikus. Some are very fine indeed:

LIU CH'E
The Rustling of silk is discontinued,
Dust drifts over the courtyard,
There is no sound of footfall, and the leaves
Scurry into heaps and lie still,
And the rejoicer of the heart is beneath them:

A wet leaf that clings to the threshold.

There are a couple of curiosities; "Postlude" an early poem by William Carlos Williams does not seem to fit and it is one of the most puzzling. However the inclusion of James Joyce's "I Hear an Army" is an inspired decision. This is from the first manuscript published by Joyce in 1907 entitled "Chamber Music", which was a collection of poems that Joyce felt could be set to music and so fits well with some of the other poems in the Imagists collection. It is a fine poem with a haunting last line that might bring a resolution to what has gone before. We cannot be at all certain that "I Hear an Army" published as early as 1907 was any sort of a reference to the coming great war, but "The Rose" by John Cournos a prose poem I think does, with it's reference to proud Prussians and ships that founder in the waste. This poem has a beautiful central image of a rose flung into the sea and washed into the shore.

There is much to enjoy in this collection, and I think it would appeal to many readers, especially as it is free to dip into on the internet. It has made me want to explore further the work of H.D. and Richard Aldington and so for that alone it was worthwhile. The imagistes produced some fine images and for me this was a four star read. show less