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EZRA POUND: HIS METRIC AND POETRY

By T. S. Eliot




BOOKS BY EZRA POUND


PROVENCA, being poems selected from Personae, Exultations, and
Canzoniere. (Small, Maynard, Boston, 1910)

THE SPIRIT OF ROMANCE: An attempt to define somewhat the charm
of the pre-renaissance literature of Latin-Europe. (Dent,
London, 1910; and Dutton, New York)

THE SONNETS AND BALLATE OF GUIDO CAVALCANTI. (Small, Maynard,
Boston, 1912)

RIPOSTES. (Swift, London, 1912; and Mathews, London, 1913)

DES IMAGISTES: An anthology of the Imagists, Ezra Pound,
Aldington, Amy Lowell, Ford Maddox Hueffer, and others

GAUDIER-BRZESKA: A memoir. (John Lane, London and New York,
1916)

NOH: A study of the Classical Stage of Japan with Ernest
Fenollosa. (Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1917; and Macmillan,
London, 1917)

LUSTRA with Earlier Poems. (Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1917)

PAVANNES AHD DIVISIONS. (Prose. In preparation: Alfred A. Knopf,
New York)




EZRA POUND: HIS METRIC AND POETRY



I


"All talk on modern poetry, by people who know," wrote Mr. Carl
Sandburg in _Poetry_, "ends with dragging in Ezra Pound
somewhere. He may be named only to be cursed as wanton and
mocker, poseur, trifler and vagrant. Or he may be classed as
filling a niche today like that of Keats in a preceding epoch.
The point is, he will be mentioned."

This is a simple statement of fact. But though Mr. Pound is well
known, even having been the victim of interviews for Sunday
papers, it does not follow that his work is thoroughly known.
There are twenty people who have their opinion of him for every
one who has read his writings with any care. Of those twenty,
there will be some who are shocked, some who are ruffled, some
who are irritated, and one or two whose sense of dignity is
outraged. The twenty-first critic will probably be one who knows
and admires some of the poems, but who either says: "Pound is
primarily a scholar, a translator," or "Pound's early verse was
beautiful; his later work shows nothing better than the itch for
advertisement, a mischievous desire to be annoying, or a
childish desire to be original." There is a third type of
reader, rare enough, who has perceived Mr. Pound for some years,
who has followed his career intelligently, and who recognizes
its consistency.

This essay is not written for the first twenty critics of
literature, nor for that rare twenty-second who has just been
mentioned, but for the admirer of a poem here or there, whose
appreciation is capable of yielding him a larger return. If the
reader is already at the stage where he can maintain at once the
two propositions, "Pound is merely a scholar" and "Pound is
merely a yellow journalist," or the other two propositions,
"Pound is merely a technician" and "Pound is merely a prophet of
chaos," then there is very little hope. But there are readers of
poetry who have not yet reached this hypertrophy of the logical
faculty; their attention might be arrested, not by an outburst
of praise, but by a simple statement. The present essay aims
merely at such a statement. It is not intended to be either a
biographical or a critical study. It will not dilate upon
"beauties"; it is a summary account of ten years' work in
poetry. The citations from reviews will perhaps stimulate the
reader to form his own opinion. We do not wish to form it for
him. Nor shall we enter into other phases of Mr. Pound's
activity during this ten years; his writings and views on art
and music; though these would take an important place in any
comprehensive biography.



II


Pound's first book was published in Venice. Venice was a halting
point after he had left America and before he had settled in
England, and here, in 1908, "A Lume Spento" appeared. The
volume is now a rarity of literature; it was published by the
author and made at a Venetian press where the author was able
personally to supervise the printing; on paper which was a
remainder of a supply which had been used for a History of the
Church. Pound left Venice in the same year, and took "A Lume
Spento" with him to London. It was not to be expected that a
first book of verse, published by an unknown American in Venice,
should attract much attention. The "Evening Standard" has the
distinction of having noticed the volume, in a review summing it
up as:

    wild and haunting stuff, absolutely poetic, original,
    imaginative, passionate, and spiritual. Those who do not
    consider it crazy may well consider it inspired. Coming
    after the trite and decorous verse of most of our decorous
    poets, this poet seems like a minstrel of Provence at a
    suburban musical evening.... The unseizable magic of poetry
    is in the queer paper volume, and words are no good in
    describing it.

As the chief poems in "A Lume Spento" were afterwards
incorporated in "Personae," the book demands mention only as a
date in the author's history. "Personae," the first book
published in London, followed early in 1909. Few poets have
undertaken the siege of London with so little backing; few books
of verse have ever owed their success so purely to their own
merits. Pound came to London a complete stranger, without either
literary patronage or financial means. He took "Personae" to Mr.
Elkin Mathews, who has the glory of having published Yeats'
"Wind Among the Reeds," and the "Books of the Rhymers' Club," in
which many of the poets of the '90s, now famous, found a place.
Mr. Mathews first suggested, as was natural to an unknown
author, that the author should bear part of the cost of
printing. "I have a shilling in my pocket, if that is any use to
you," said the latter. "Well," said Mr. Mathews, "I want to
publish it anyway." His acumen was justified. The book was, it
is true, received with opposition, but it was received. There
were a few appreciative critics, notably Mr. Edward Thomas, the
poet (known also as "Edward Eastaway"; he has since been killed
in France). Thomas, writing in the "English Review" (then in its
brightest days under the editorship of Ford Madox Hueffer),
recognized the first-hand intensity of feeling in "Personae":

    He has... hardly any of the superficial good qualities of
    modern versifiers.... He has not the current melancholy or
    resignation or unwillingness to live; nor the kind of
    feeling for nature which runs to minute description and
    decorative metaphor. He cannot be usefully compared with any
    living writers;... full of personality and with such power
    to express it, that from the first to the last lines of most
    of his poems he holds us steadily in his own pure grave,
    passionate world.... The beauty of it (In Praise of Ysolt)
    is the beauty of passion, sincerity and intensity, not of
    beautiful words and images and suggestions... the thought
    dominates the words and is greater than they are. Here
    (Idyll for Glaucus) the effect is full of human passion and
    natural magic, without any of the phrases which a reader of
    modern verse would expect in the treatment of such a
    subject.

Mr. Scott James, in the "Daily News," speaks in praise of his
metres:

    At first the whole thing may seem to be mere madness and
    rhetoric, a vain exhibition of force and passion without
    beauty. But, as we read on, these curious metres of his seem
    to have a law and order of their own; the brute force of Mr.
    Pound's imagination seems to impart some quality of
    infectious beauty to his words. Sometimes there is a strange
    beating of anapaests when he quickens to his subject; again
    and again he unexpectedly ends a line with the second half
    of a reverberant hexameter:

      "Flesh shrouded, bearing the secret."

   ... And a few lines later comes an example of his favourite
    use of spondee, followed by dactyl and spondee, which comes
    in strangely and, as we first read it, with the appearance
    of discord, but afterwards seems to gain a curious and
    distinctive vigour:

      "Eyes, dreams, lips, and the night goes."

    Another line like the end of a hexameter is

      "But if e'er I come to my love's land."

But even so favourable a critic pauses to remark that

    He baffles us by archaic words and unfamiliar metres; he
    often seems to be scorning the limitations of form and
    metre, breaking out into any sort of expression which suits
    itself to his mood.

and counsels the poet to "have a little more respect for his
art."

It is, in fact, just this adaptability of metre to mood,
an adaptability due to an intensive study of metre, that
constitutes an important element in Pound's technique. Few
readers were prepared to accept or follow the amount of
erudition which entered into "Personae" and its close successor,
"Exultations," or to devote the care to reading them which they
demand. It is here that many have been led astray. Pound is not
one of those poets who make no demand of the reader; and the
casual reader of verse, disconcerted by the difference between
Pound's poetry and that on which his taste has been trained,
attributes his own difficulties to excessive scholarship on the
part of the author. "This," he will say of some of the poems in
Provencal form or on Provencal subjects, "is archaeology; it
requires knowledge on the part of its reader, and true poetry
does not require such knowledge." But to display knowledge is
not the same thing as to expect it on the part of the reader;
and of this sort of pedantry Pound is quite free. He is, it is
true, one of the most learned of poets. In America he had taken
up the study of Romance Languages with the intention of
teaching. After work in Spain and Italy, after pursuing the
Provencal verb from Milan to Freiburg, he deserted the thesis
on Lope de Vega and the Ph.D. and the professorial chair,
and elected to remain in Europe. Mr. Pound has spoken out
his mind from time to time on the subject of scholarship in
American universities, its deadness, its isolation from genuine
appreciation, and the active creative life of literature. He has
always been ready to battle against pedantry. As for his own
learning, he has studied poetry carefully, and has made use of
his study in his own verse. "Personae" and "Exultations"
show his talent for turning his studies to account. He was
supersaturated in Provence; he had tramped over most of the
country; and the life of the courts where the Troubadours
thronged was part of his own life to him. Yet, though "Personae"
and "Exultations" do exact something from the reader, they do
not require a knowledge of Provencal or of Spanish or Italian.
Very few people know the Arthurian legends well, or even Malory
(if they did they might realize that the Idylls of the King are
hardly more important than a parody, or a "Chaucer retold for
Children"); but no one accuses Tennyson of needing footnotes, or
of superciliousness toward the uninstructed. The difference is
merely in what people are prepared for; most readers could no
more relate the myth of Atys correctly than they could give a
biography of Bertrand de Born. It is hardly too much to say that
there is no poem in these volumes of Mr. Pound which needs
fuller explanation than he gives himself. What the poems do
require is a trained ear, or at least the willingness to be
trained.

The metres and the use of language are unfamiliar. There are
certain traces of modern influence. We cannot agree with Mr.
Scott-James that among these are "W. E. Henley, Kipling,
Chatterton, and especially Walt Whitman"--least of all Walt
Whitman. Probably there are only two: Yeats and Browning. Yeats
in "La Fraisne," in "Personae," for instance, in the attitude
and somewhat in the vocabulary:

  I wrapped my tears in an ellum leaf
  And left them under a stone,
  And now men call me mad because I have thrown
  All folly from me, putting it aside
  To leave the old barren ways of men...

For Browning, Mr. Pound has always professed strong admiration
(see "Mesmerism" in "Personae"); there are traces of him in
"Cino" and "Famam Librosque Cano," in the same volume. But it is
more profitable to comment upon the variety of metres and the
original use of language.

Ezra Pound has been fathered with vers libre in English, with
all its vices and virtues. The term is a loose one--any verse is
called "free" by people whose ears are not accustomed to it--in
the second place, Pound's use of this medium has shown the
temperance of the artist, and his belief in it as a vehicle is
not that of the fanatic. He has said himself that when one has
the proper material for a sonnet, one should use the sonnet
form; but that it happens very rarely to any poet to find
himself in possession of just the block of stuff which can
perfectly be modelled into the sonnet. It is true that up to
very recently it was impossible to get free verse printed in any
periodical except those in which Pound had influence; and
that now it is possible to print free verse (second, third, or
tenth-rate) in almost any American magazine. Who is responsible
for the bad free verse is a question of no importance, inasmuch
as its authors would have written bad verse in any form; Pound
has at least the right to be judged by the success or failure of
his own. Pound's vers libre is such as is only possible for a
poet who has worked tirelessly with rigid forms and different
systems of metric. His "Canzoni" are in a way aside from his
direct line of progress; they are much more nearly studies in
mediaeval appreciation than any of his other verse; but they are
interesting, apart from their merit, as showing the poet at work
with the most intricate Provencal forms--so intricate that the
pattern cannot be exhibited without quoting an entire poem. (M.
Jean de Bosschere, whose French is translated in the "Egoist,"
has already called attention to the fact that Pound was the
first writer in English to use five Provencal forms.) Quotation
will show, however, the great variety of rhythm which Pound
manages to introduce into the ordinary iambic pentameter:

  Thy gracious ways,
                    O lady of my heart, have
  O'er all my thought their golden glamour cast;
  As amber torch-flames, where strange men-at-arms
  Tread softly 'neath the damask shield of night,
  Rise from the flowing steel in part reflected,
  So on my mailed thought that with thee goeth,
  Though dark the way, a golden glamour falleth.

Within the iambic limits, there are no two lines in the whole
poem that have an identical rhythm.

We turn from this to a poem in "Exultations," the "Night
Litany":

  O God, what great kindness
            have we done in times past
            and forgotten it,
  That thou givest this wonder unto us,
            O God of waters?

  O God of the night
            What great sorrow
  Cometh unto us,
            That thou thus repayest us
  Before the time of its coming?

There is evident, and more strongly in certain later poems, a
tendency toward quantitative measure. Such a "freedom" as this
lays so heavy a burden upon every word in a line that it becomes
impossible to write like Shelley, leaving blanks for the
adjectives, or like Swinburne, whose adjectives are practically
blanks. Other poets have manipulated a great variety of metres
and forms; but few have studied the forms and metres which they
use so carefully as has Pound. His ballad of the "Goodly Fere"
shows great knowledge of the ballad form:

  I ha' seen him cow a thousand men
  On the hills o' Galilee,
  They whined as he walked out