A. David Moody (2014). Ezra Pound Poet. Volume II, The Epic Years Oxford, Oxford University Press

“The Cantos of Ezra pound would be the foundation myth of a universal civilization”(p79).

I will get round to reviewing A. David Moody’s second volume in his life of Ezra Pound, but before I do that I want to consider at least two paragraphs to support what I’m going to say about the book as a whole.

The following paragraph, which leads up to the striking claim I’ve quoted above, is disturbing.  As a survey of literary history it is so obviously incoherent. What’s troubling is that the flaws in the argument should be obvious to anyone who has read the texts Moody mentions. And that should be anyone with a serious interest in Poetry. (I admit I haven’t read 'Clarissa'). Why such a prestigious figure as Moody thinks it’s acceptable, or why his editor didn’t point out the problems, is a question I have no answer for. 

Discussing the first book publication of the Cantos, both ‘A Draft of XXI Cantos’ and the deluxe edition of ‘A Draft off XVI Cantos’, Moody writes: 

 “In its beginnings an epic was the foundation myth, the once and future story of a tribe, a nation or people.” [So far so good but then watch how the definition gets left behind and changed by the random assortment of texts.]

Ancient Greece had its 'Iliad' and 'Odyssey' [neither are foundation myths] and its classic tragedies; Rome had its 'Aeneid' [a genuine foundation myth]; Medieval England had the Arthurian Romance [not so, the foundation myths are the ‘Bruts’ which trace the English back to Troy after Geoffrey of Monmouth turned the story into a medieval best seller, or the stories in Bede and the AS Chronicle which tell of the coming of the Anglo-Saxons] and the mystery plays [which are dramatizations of the Bible???); Elizabeth’s England had Shakespeare’s Histories [why not the Fairy Queen as well?]; and England after the civil war had ‘Paradise lost’”.

We’ve already skidded from Epic as foundation myth, to Epic as long story, to Paradise Lost and the Mystery Plays which are retelling of Christian Narratives. From collectively shared stories retold to make sense of the world and passed on,  to the work of individual writers giving their particular take on a well known story.  The definition is now going to be stretched even further as the list becomes increasingly strange.

Then the story changed, with ‘Pilgrim’s Progress’ and became concerned rather with the life of the individual than the fate of a people [This too is debatable, as Pilgrim represents the Medieval Everyman, a point made by the allegorical frame of the story: his challenges on the way to salvation are everyone’s]. England’s epic in the 18^th century was Richardson’s ‘Clarissa’ and after that came ‘Don Juan’ and Wordsworth’s ‘The Prelude or The Growth of the Poet’s mind” and next Browning’s ‘Sordello’.

As a list of disparate texts this can hardly be bettered.  Browning’s ‘Sordello’, ‘Don Juan’ and ‘The Prelude’ are long poems but what else do they have in common other than they were written by English poets?  'Sordello' is there presumably because Pound will refer to it in the Cantos, but it has no claim to be ‘England’s epic’ nor does ‘Don Juan’ or the ‘Prelude’.  You could make a good case that Tennyson’s rewriting of the Arthurian cycle is the nearest thing 19^th century England got to a national ‘epic’, given the way it participates in the British rediscovery of its medieval past.  

So Moody has developed his definition, and by illustrating it with such a scattered range of poems, has emptied his terms so that Epic and Myth now mean nothing more than  “long poem regardless of genre, readership, content, reception or usage”.

He continues. 

In the mid-nineteenth century, in a United States still inventing itself, Whitman felt the need to reconnect the individual poet with his people and asserted that his experience must be the common, democratic experience of everyone in America. [If he did the arrogance of that claim is either staggering or reduces ‘democratic experience’ to sleeping eating excreting and possibly reproducing.] Pound went on from that to create an epic in which an individual poet would again tell the tale of the tribe, only his tribe would be all of humanity that one man could comprehend; and his tale would not be of himself but be a universal story; and it would shape a future not for any one nation but for all. ‘The Cantos of Ezra Pound’ would be the foundation myth of a universal civilization. The global order capitalism has been busily creating is quite possibly the antithesis of what he had in mind’ (p.79).  

1) Because the history here is not good, I think it undermines any confidence in what the writer is about to say next. Pound said he believed that right naming was the root of justice. There is no right naming here.

2) Having moved through a paragraph that has no logical sequential coherence except for the chronological, we arrive at a final claim that is not underwritten by historical precedent and surely questions Pound’s grasp of reality and raises suggestions of megalomania.  That an ability to rearrange words might give any individual any kind of privileged position and or inherent understanding or insight is ridiculous. Which means the understanding and insight on offer must be judged on their own, stripped of any baggage anyone might attach to the word ‘Poet’ or attempts to redefine ‘truth’ or ‘accuracy’.

3) So the question I suggest should be asked is how and why anyone of any intelligence or perception could be so deluded, then or now, to believe that a poem in the real world could “shape the future” of humanity.  Pound was guilty of taking Shelley seriously, but why should anyone else?

4) The reality of the claim can and should be also evaluated against the realties of its production and reception: How was writing poems released in limited, sometimes expensive editions, written in a style that was off putting to almost all readers, going to be able to change the world the poet lived in?

5) If, on the other hand, the claim is taken seriously, then the poems should be evaluated against their ability to achieve their intended purpose, and as such they are a monstrous failure and the waste of a man’s writing life. They are not, cannot be, a foundation myth for a universal civilization. So they fail.  So why are we bothering with them or the man who wrote them?

To be continued.

Bunting on Pound's Anti-Semitism

Bunting to Pound, 16 December 1938.

[Pound had written to Louis Zukofsky, blaming the Rothschilds, rather than the Nazis, for the persecution of the Jews in Germany. Bunting had been arguing with Pound against Pound’s politics for some time, but when he saw the letter he exploded. What follows is a reconstruction of Bunting’s letter from extracts in Makin, Burton and Moody. Each of them quotes slightly differently and this is an attempt to fill in their ellipses.  I’m not sure of the positioning of the first two paragraphs. Anyone who knows better or has seen the letter I’d be grateful for any corrections.]

No, I’m sorry, and Thankyou; but I can’t take it. I wish I were not as much indebted to you as I am.

You know as well as any man that a Jew has the same physique and a similar amount of grey matter as the rest of us. You know as well as my man that to hold one man guilty of the sins of another is an abomination. You know as well as any man that that the non-jews have contributed their fair share, or more than their fare share, of the bankers and other millionaires of doubtful honesty. You have the relevant facts without any need of information that cannot be found in Italy. I can find no excuse, no way of considering your activities as anything else than willful and thought-out perversion of what you know to be true.   

Every anti-Semitism, anti-niggersim, anti-moorism, that I can recall in history was base, had its foundations in the meanest kind of envy and in greed. It makes me sick to see yourself covering yourself in that filth. It not an arguable question, has not been arguable for at least nineteen centuries. Either you know men to be men and not something else, or you make yourself an enemy of mankind at large.  

To spue [sic] out anti-semite bile in a letter to Louis, as I yesterday accidentally discovered you to be doing-to Louis who has shown his devotion to you over many years, and who even now insists that you are to be forgiven because after all you are Ezra-to write such a letter is not a mere lapse of taste it is uncommonly close to what has got to be called the behavior of a skunk.

I suppose if you devote yourself long enough to licking the arses of blackguards you stand a good chance of becoming a blackguard yourself.  It is hard to see how you are going to stop the rot of your mind and heart without a thorough going repudiation of what you have spent a lot of work on. You ought to have the courage for that; but I confess I don’t expect it from you. (Makin 1992, Burton 2013, Moody 2014)

Burton, R. (2013). A Strong Song Tows Us. Oxford, Infinite Ideas.

           

Makin, P. (1992). Bunting: the shaping of his verse. Oxford, Clarendon Press.

           

Moody, A. D. (2014). Ezra Pound Poet.Vol II Oxford, Oxford University Press.

           

Pound, Eliot, After Strange Gods and A. David Moody's 'Ezra Pound Poet Voume II'.

This is not a critique or a review of A. David Moody’s new book, the second volume in his biography of Ezra Pound. I haven’t finished it yet. But there’s something I want to consider.

Moody Wrote:

‘Mr. Pound’s Hell’, Mr. Eliot objected in his notorious and yet very curious put down in After Strange Gods, ‘is a hell for the other people…not for oneself and one’s friends.” One must allow that Pound did not share his friend’s taste for damnation. More to the point, Eliot’s remark is a doubtless deliberate attempt to place Pound’s Hell within his own Christian frame of reference, which Pound had very deliberately exercised. (p82)

Ignore the positioning of ‘curious’ and ‘notorious’. How many of Moody’s readers would know the whole quotation?  After Strange Gods is a hard book to come by.  Moody does not mention the fact that Eliot’s opening comments  include,  ‘Mr. Pound is probably the most important living poet in our language….’

What Eliot wrote or said is at the bottom of this post.  His criticism raises three linked questions:

1) A moral point which shades into art, which you may or may not agree with.

I resent/reject the idea of Original Sin, however, if you secularize the argument it is worth considering: if you remove the idea of moral or spiritual struggle, you are left with the belief that life is as simple as good people doing good stuff and bad people doing bad stuff. It’s not a question of people making choices that are bad or good. A writer who believes in that is going to create characters which lack sophistication. On a moral level, the argument is going to lead inexorably to some ugly places.  The ability to casually ‘Other’ whole groups is evidence of the kind of simplistic thinking which might not inevitably lead to racism and other forms of intolerance,  but is certainly going to be a logical development of a predisposed mind. 

2) There is an artistic point.  

Pound’s hell cantos are tedious, they sound like the lonely child in the play ground, ostracized and getting its own back by sneering at everyone. Artistically they don’t compel because there is no attempt to make the readers feel they could be in hell, because this hell is a place for them. Not us. And it’s not a place where you arrive after a series of choices, so there is no disturbance, just the smug gratification of knowing lady golfers are going to hell. (???) 

3) By implication, there’s a personal one with general implications which links back to art.  

Eliot knew his man.  Pound’s habit of setting himself up as expert and judge, without necessarily questioning his own opinions or actions, without accepting anyone else’s evaluation of his opinions, is also being called into question.  By what right does Pound put these people in Hell? He really did think that by writing the cantos, issued in a small, expensive edition, so that few people could afford them, and written in a way even fewer people could understand, he could rewrite the world.  This is a delusional behavior. No amount of conceptual hocus pocus can change this. The Cantos don’t work. Either as sustained poetry or a political document. Measured against Pound's claims for them, or as a demonstration of the function he claimed for poetry in the modern world: they fail. They did not stop the second world war, they did not bring about the Renaissance, and no amount of special pleading is going to change that.

The emperor was naked, but his strategy was to claim to understand nakedity better than anyone else. There was no basis for this. He was the self-appointed, self-elected genius of his own universe. And anyone who dared to say he was naked was going to be buried under a counter blast of faux scholarship, faux criticism and vitriol. Disagree and you end up in hell.

Almost a hundred years later, the trick is wearing thin. And it seems strange that the acolytes are still playing the party line and dismissing criticism on the grounds that the critic just isn’t clever enough to understand what he’s criticising.

In After Strange Gods Eliot wrote or said:

At this point I shall venture to generalize, and suggest that with the disappearance of the idea of Original Sin, with the disappearance of the idea of intense moral struggle, the human beings presented to us both in poetry and in prose fiction to-day, and more patently among the serious writers than in the underworld of letters, tend to become less and less real. It is in fact in moments of moral and spiritual struggle depending on spiritual sanctions, rather in those ‘bewildering minutes’ in which we are all very much alike, that men and women come nearest to being real. If you do away with this struggle, and maintain that by tolerance, benevolence, inoffensiveness, and a redistribution or increase of purchasing power, combined with a devotion, on the part of an elite to Art, the world will be good as anyone could require, then you must expect human beings to become more and more vaporous. This is exactly what we find in the society which Mr. Pound puts in Hell, in his Draft of XXX Cantos. It consists (I may have overlooked one or two species) of politicians, profiteers, financiers, newspaper proprietors, and their hired men, agents provocateurs, Calvin, St Clement of Alexandria, the English, vice-crusaders, liars, the stupid, pedants, preachers, those who do not believe in Social Credit, Bishops, lady golfers, Fabians, conservatives and imperialists: and ‘all those who have set money-lust before the pleasures of the senses’. It is, in its way, an admirable Hell, ‘without dignity, without tragedy’.  At first sight the variety of types –for these are types, and not individuals- may be a little confusing; but I think it becomes a little more intelligible if we see at work three principles, (1) the aesthetic, (2) the humanitarian, (3) the Protestant. And I find one considerable objection to a Hell of this sort: that a Hell altogether without dignity implies a Heaven without dignity also. If you do not distinguish between individual responsibility and circumstances in Hell, between essential Evil and social accidents, then the Heaven (if any) will be equally trivial and accidental. Mr. Pound’s Hell, for all its horrors, is a perfectly confortable one for the modern mind to contemplate, and disturbing to no one’s complacency: it is a Hell for the other people, the people we read about in the newspapers, not for oneself and one’s friends’(After Strange Gods, p.43).

The Poet as Makar, Tom Pickard's Hoyoot.

First a quote, not from the book:

The poet as makar[sic]. Not as sage or seer, or recorder of the human condition or shaper of texts suitable for the educational system, or cultural analyst or popular entertainer, or even as spy. These, and many other activities are all valid but peripheral.

 The poet as someone who makes or composes poems. Poems as constructions, as patterns of words which when heard (or in our culture, predominantly read, but nevertheless finally heard in what might be called ‘the Inner ear’) give us the experience of something we label as poetry. And which other sorts of verbal expression do not. (Gael Turnbull, 'The Poet as Makar' )

What might poetry have looked like before the rules made it a pedant’s game to misquote.  One answer is Tom Pickard’s Hoyoot (2014), his collected poems and songs published by Carcanet.

And before going further, not only do Carcanet need to be applauded for publishing this but whoever saw to the back cover got the blurb right.  He or she wisely kept the ringing endorsements from Bunting and Ginsberg that graced the back of Tiepin Eros, Pickard’s selected, and then added comments from Paul Macartney and Annie Lennox. This might look like a grab for a different market, but in reality it’s a testimony to the breadth of the collection.  

What characterizes Pickard’s poems as a reading experience is that you’re never sure what’s going to be on the next page. Most single author collections settle to a recognizable form and subject matter, but Pickard’s don’t.  He is one of the few English poets who can write directly about sex in all its forms and variations without sounding coy or crude or clinical. The political poems rage beside carefully observed pieces that let the wind and the birds into the landscape, and the intricate mess of human relationships is dealt with in all its baffling complexities.

His style is his own, but like any well-developed style evokes its own ghosts.  There’s occasionally a whiff of the Mersey poets, without their self-conscious desperation to be wry.  Most often he writes like a hard core imagist from 1912, except it’s hard to imagine a hardcore imagist with a sense of humor or rage and a willingness to write directly about the world as it is. 

He had the minimalistic style under control from the start.

Adultery

sitting in firelight

your face in shadow

the little gold glint

of your ring.

At times the ghosts of the high modernists drift in the background, but Pickard writes poems with both feet in the daylight world of jobs and joblessness and messy relationships and blackberry picking, not in a theoretical library or a seminar room. This is not poetry that deliberately references other poetry with a knowing wink.  

Holding this all together is the pared down traditional ballad, with its economy and rhythm, obvious in “The Ballad of Jamie Allan” his ballad opera which closes out the book, but throughout the collection.

These three elements combine to make something that is stripped down and spare, but moving rhythmically and at its best melodically.

Before the fools made poetry a pedant’s game, to misquote, a poet might not need to carry a whole baggage of cultural references and academic expectations; or spend its time worrying about conceptualizing the art: a poet might be an intelligent, eloquent, independent human, full of curiosity with a gift for arranging words into memorable patterns. The makar lives outside the library, reflects on life, and organizes those reflections into patterns of words.  So the poems are angry or tender, bemused, political, personal, a way of responding to and organizing a life.  The skill and knowledge are in the craft and the making, and it would be a horrible mistake to think Pickard is artless.   

The poems are then offered to the reader, with out apology. They offer a space for thinking through and in language, which requires nothing from the reader but an honest openness to the words on the page.

Somewhere in this book each reader, if he or she is honest, is going to find poems he or she finds offensive, or dull or pointless. This is not a euphemism for that old reviewers tic:  the collection is uneven.  I think  this is a good thing. Poetry that is always being polite and clever, soliciting quiet poetry orgasms from those in the know, the kind of poetry you need a library or a degree in poetry to explain, is all very well for writing essays about in a library or for buying for your elderly maiden aunt, but it’s becoming an utterly pointless self-perpetuating exercise.  

Finally one of the many things I have admired about Pickard’s poems since I first encountered them is a strange ambivalence. On the one hand these are often very personal poems. It’s difficult not to read them as personal responses to personal situations. We’re light years away from Eliot’s claim that the aim of art is to escape from personality.

But despite this, the poems are not what Geoffrey Hill recently described as the poetic equivalent of a selfie. The pared down language, the rhythm and the melody seem to be heading towards a hard won anonymity. The non-Pickard poem which reminds me most of Pickard is:

Westron Wynde when wyll thow blow

The smalle rayne downe can Rayne

Cryst yf my love were in my Armys

And I yn my bed agyne.

The words can be used, reused, and passed into memory whether or not the poet's name remains attached to them. I suspect that might be the highest form of art.