One of the gains of “Literary theory” over
the past fifty years has been the fact that it’s now easier to talk about the
contingency of literary value. This may be no more than the fact that at any
given time of place the terms poet and poem can mean radically different things
and the qualities that define a poet or a poem as good vary widely and wildly.
This doesn’t mean that there is no value: in any given period some people do “it”
better than others whatever ‘it’ is and how ever you define ‘better’.
What Ezra Pound’s career seems to prove is
that value is so contingent, so little tied into anything objective, that it
can be manipulated.
It’s worth pointing out that Pound would
probably have disagreed with this. From his writings, the ABC, his essays, he
seems to have believed that Poetic Quality was a trans historical standard
which could be identified by someone like himself even if the poem was written
a thousand years ago in a language he didn’t know very well. And because of
this he was able to make whacky statements about the cultural value of poetry and
the political and historical importance of the poet.
Strategy.
Set yourself up as an expert.
Define and then proclaim your expertise.
It helps if you are either an expert on the obscure and unknown (In
Pound’s case Provencal poetry) or a generalist. If the former, you’re unlikely
to have to deal with criticism, and if you do it is likely to be so specialized
that no one else will understand it.
If the latter, you will always be vulnerable to the specialist, but you
can respond by attacking the specialist where he or she is most vulnerable: his
or her lack of wider knowledge.
Make yourself important as a an arbiter of taste and as a
discoverer and promoter of new talent …It helps if you have a good track
record, and Pound certainly did.
Defend yourself by attacking
your critics where they are most vulnerable. So in the case of translation when
the specialists say: ‘You don’t understand translation, your Latin is not good’,
Pound responds with “I say you
don’t understand poetry. I am a
poet, only a poet really understands poetry and you have misunderstood Propertius”.
Write enough straightforward,
good poetry to establish yourself. Then do what you want but create poems that
allow for critical discussion. To the uneducated the Cantos are a sprawling
mess and mostly very very tedious. To the scholar they are a site where issues of sexuality,
ideology and genre are in play but in play in such a way that’s it’s impossible
to come up with a definitive description. This allows for critical disagreement.
The institutional demands of
academic scholarship, the need to publish, can be fed by the cantos. And being
a “Poundian” could be a badge of the elect. Anyone can fall in love with Yeats’
poems; it takes much more something to love Pound’s. Create the possibility of a small group of cognoscenti whose arcane religion (Your poetry)
excludes lesser beings. To the scholar the Cantos question the
boundaries of poetry; to the uneducated they contain great tedious swathes of
second hand prose.
It takes courage or childish naivety
to say the emperor is unclothed, but attack your critics at their most
vulnerable point: their fear that you really do know more than they do. Hammer
your claim that you know more about poetry than anyone else, and then dare anyone
to say you are not a genius. Exploit the lurking fear that the critic doesn’t understand
and in condemning you he or she is parading his or her own ignorance. Exploit this. Don’t dare them to say you
are naked, tell them that you are naked and only a genius can understand the nudity
you have defined on your own, invented terms.
And if you do all this you can manipulate
poetic value in your own lifetime.
If,
And perhaps only if, you can also produce
poetry that people who have nothing to gain from its recognition will accept as
great and interesting poetry. Anyone who thinks Pound was a charlatan is forced
to confront the fact that writers like Bunting and Eliot thought he was worthy
of their critical attention and respect.
And that doesn’t even begin to get at the
complexity of the issue.
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