Old Poets

Reminiscences and Opinions

Donald Hall

• Publisher: David R. Godine, Publisher
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781567926965
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism in Poetry
• Index: Literature

Intimate portraits of great poets in old age, giving new insight to their work and their lives, and context to the often flawless art created by flawed human beings. The best of themselves endure, and the old poets' existence and endurance gives readers courage to pursue their own vision. Donald Hall ( Essays After Eighty and A Carnival of Losses: Notes Nearing Ninety ) knew a great deal about work, about poetry, and about age. Each of those things come together in this unique collection. We hear about Robert Frost as Hall knew him: vain and cruel, a man possessed by guilt. But, as Hall writes, "The poet who survives is the poet to celebrate; the human being who confronts darkness and defeats it is the one to admire. For all his vanity, Robert Frost is admirable: He looked into his desert places, confronted his desire to enter the oblivion of the snowy woods, and drove on."
Hall's essays are once both intimate portraits and learned treatises. He takes us on a pub crawl through the Welsh countryside with the word-mad Dylan Thomas; to the Faber & Faber office of T. S. Eliot, who had discovered more happiness in age than in youth; to a reading where Robert Frost's public persona hid the truth; to Brooklyn for lunch with the enigmatic Marianne Moore; and to Italy and for a visit with the notorious Ezra Pound. By the time Hall met them, each poet was, he observed, "old enough to have detached from ongoing poetry, to feel alien to the ambitions of the grandchildren."
Also included are portraits of the poets who taught Hall as a writer: the unfailingly kind Archibald MacLeish and Yvor Winters, from whom he learned the most about poetry. Along the way are observations about many other poets and the literary cultures that sustained them.
Contents include: "Vanity, Fame, Love, and Robert Frost," "Dylan Thomas and Public Suicide," "Notes on T. S. Eliot," "Rocks and Whirlpools: Archibald MacLeish and Yvor Winters," "Marianne Moore: Valiant and Alien," and "Fragments of Ezra Pound."
For lovers of literature, this is a gorgeous remembrance and likely to compel an immediate visit to the poetry section of the nearest bookstore—as Hall writes, "Their presences have been emblems in my life, and I remember these poets as if I kept them carved in stone."

Fragments of Ezra Pound

rome: sunday

In 1960, while I was spending a year in England, the Paris Review sent me to Italy to interview Ezra Pound. When I knocked on the door of the Roman apartment where Pound was staying with a friend, I was apprehensive. In awe of his poetry, aghast at his politics, I understood that he talked politics more than he talked poetry. A few years back the Paris Review had nearly scheduled an interview while Pound was still in Washington. (Pound spent the years from 1945 to 1958 in the United States, mostly in the insane asylum at St. Elizabeths Hospital in the District of Columbia, where he had been confined as mentally unfit to stand trial for treason; during the Second World War, he had remained in Italy and broadcast for Mussolini’s Italian radio.) In 1956 he first agreed to be interviewed, then suddenly reneged, declaring that the magazine was part of the “pinko-usury fringe.” Usury was the Devil in Pound’s theology; the race of the Devil was mostly Semitic. In 1956 the Paris Review’s masthead included two Jewish names. At St. Elizabeths, friends of mine had told me, Pound had railed about “the most dangerous man in the world,” whose name appeared to be “Weinstein Kirchberger”; it took me a while to translate.

When I knocked on the door, I feared what would answer my knock: madness, rebuff, cruelty, arrogance.

There was no mistaking him. His face was large and jagged, constructed in sharp triangular sections like modular architecture. This was the face that his friend Gaudier-Brzeska carved in marble in 1914, and that Wyndham Lewis painted in 1938 as if it were metal. Both sculpture and painting appeared influenced by cubism; now I saw that, Pound’s face looked as if it were influenced, as if it had learned its shape by admiring Cézanne’s geometry. The beard, which was gray and came to a point, continued the angles of the face; his long hair flared to the sides and rose thickly on top: a magnificent head. But his eyes, which looked into me as we stood at the door, were watery, red, weak. “Mr. Hall,” he said to me in the doorway, “you—find me—in fragments.” As he spoke he separated the words into little bunches, like bursts of typing from an inexperienced typist: “You have driven—all the way—from England—to find a man—who is only fragments.”

He beckoned me down a long corridor into a pleasant corner room, full of sunlight and books, where we sat opposite each other. Looking in his eyes, I saw the fatigue. Later I watched his eyes and mouth gather from time to time a tense strength as he concentrated his attention on a matter gravely important. Fragments assembled themselves in half a second, turned strong, sharp, and insistent; then dissipated quickly, sank into flaccidity, depression, and silence. In 1960—though I could not know it then—Pound was verging on the brink of silence, that private cold inferno where he lived out the last decade of his life.

In his sunny room—heavy with tables, two sofas, and big comfortable chairs—suitcases lay under a desk in a corner. Three books spread themselves out on a lamp table next to an easy chair: a Confucius in Chinese, a copy of Pound’s own Women of Trachis, and the new edition of Robinson’s Chaucer. (Robert Frost kept the Robinson in his Vermont cabin, the last time I saw him.) Pound sat on a sofa and told me about his friend Ugo Dadone, owner of this flat on the Via Angelo Poliziano, formerly a general in an African campaign, injured and left for dead in the desert; Dadone, Pound said, was nearly as fragmented as he was. Over one of the sofas I noticed a signed photograph of Gabriele D’Annunzio in his aviator costume.

As Pound rambled, I listened to the voice more than to the word. Theatrical, flashy, he rolled his r’s grandly, and at the end of each sentence kept the pitch high until the final word or two, which he dropped in pitch while retaining volume. This melody lent a coda to every sentence, a coda I remembered from 16 r.p.m. records in Harvard’s Poetry Room. (From time to time this melody sounded disconcertingly like W. C. Fields.) As an undergraduate I had spent hours listening to this voice, rapt inside great earphones in a blue chair at the Lamont Library. Pound made the recordings on May 17, 1939, on a brief visit to the United States undertaken in his megalomania with the hope and expectation that by talking to the right people he could prevent the Second World War.

When Pound recorded I was ten and perfectly ignorant of him. When we declared war on Italy I was thirteen and daydreamed of becoming a writer. By the time American and Italian soldiers actually shot at each other, I wanted to be a poet for the rest of my life, I loved Ezra Pound’s poetry, and I reviled him as a traitor and a Fascist sympathizer.

The Second World War—which began in Europe when I was almost eleven and ended in Japan when I was almost seventeen—was the bread of my adolescence, the milk of my growing up. When I hayed in New Hampshire in the summer months, I cocked the point of my scythe toward the hairy ditches, where I imagined that escaped Nazi prisoners of war hid by day. When I read the newspaper, I could not conceive that a peacetime paper could find enough news to fill its pages. Every night on the farm we listened to a radio shaped like a cathedral as Gabriel Heatter told us that the skies were black over Europe with young Americans bombing German cities in just vengeance. Every movie was a war movie, every radio show was performed before servicemen, every Book-of-the-Month Club Selection was dedicated to the war effort. At high school the thermostat went down to 40 degrees at noon, even in the dead of winter. In gym we boys all learned to box, toughening ourselves for war, and the finals of the heavyweight division took place in the auditorium in front of the whole school. A large blond senior named George Taubel knocked out an awkward, strong young man, a good athlete named Bill Herbert, knocked him cold on the auditorium stage, and a year later Bill Herbert was dead in a wave of Marines invading a Pacific island.

Although I tested the possibilities of pacifism, although when I was fourteen or fifteen I shocked my friends by calling myself a socialist, I knew that the United States was right and that Germany, Japan, and Italy were wrong. Like almost everyone of my generation—and like no one fifteen years younger—I never doubted my country’s general virtue. Perhaps the Great War had been a trade war—like Troy, like the Russo-Japanese—but this was a war for justice. Evil was Hitler, and Hitler was evil. I feel embarrassed to write it—after Guatemala and Chile, after Korea, after Vietnam, after Grenada, Panama, and Iraq—but the evil we apprehended was entirely out there; none of it was in here. When in Boston one day I watched a parade—I think it was Memorial Day 1944—and watched wiry, lean, intense young men march past who were the only survivors of the first wave that waded onto the tiny atoll of Tarawa, I wept and could not stop weeping, aware of Bill Herbert and the other dead whom I had known, aware also of my own fears. For I was sure that I would myself go into the army and fight in the same war, which I assumed would go on forever.

Therefore, when I bought T. S. Eliot’s Collected Poems, at fourteen, for two dollars, I drew a circle around Ezra Pound’s name in the dedication to “The Waste Land”—“For Ezra Pound il miglior fabbro”—and in the white space of the page wrote the word that signified my political judgment: “Nerts!” My politics belong to this story not because they were sensitive or unusual. They were (and are) conventional, naïve, ill informed, and mercurial. Although my view of the morality of nations has suffered some sophistication, unavoidable in the last forty-five years, I have not rid myself of prejudices acquired in youth. I find it difficult to behave politely to Germans; I avoid setting foot in that country. Although I do not retain conviction of general moral superiority, I retain suspicion; I want to growl at Germans, and the hair stands up on my back, like a cat seeing a dog.

If my politics were primitive, my poetics were not. About the time I wrote “Nerts!” in Eliot’s Collected Poems, I began to read Pound. I read him in anthologies like Louis Untermeyer’s, who wrote angry introductions to Ezra Pound but printed him nonetheless. I read his own collections published by New Directions. When the war was ending I met someone who had known Pound a little and who supported my growing admiration. At the same time, his anecdotes encouraged me to dismiss the politics as madness. This man had visited Rapallo in the mid-thirties on his honeymoon. After a vigorous game of tennis, Pound confided to him that the hills above the tennis courts were inhabited by spies with binoculars, sent from Wall Street to keep an eye on E. P., whose economic ideas, when they became public knowledge, would ruin the Wall Street bankers’ conspiratorial hold on the world’s wealth.

For me, poetry is first of all sounds. I discovered early that Pound, who could do other things as well, had the grandest ear among modern poets. For the sheer pleasure of sound—the taste of it in the mouth—no one comes near him. Early in life I discovered Pound’s “The Return,” a perfect symbolist poem, but what I loved most was the noise it made, rubbing its syllables together as a grasshopper rubs its legs.

See, they return; ah see the tentative

Movements, and the slow feet,

The trouble in the pace and the uncertain

Wavering!

See, they return, one, and by one,

With fear, as half-awakened;

As if the snow should hesitate

And murmur in the wind,

and half turn back;

These were the “Wing’d-with-Awe,”

Inviolable.

Gods of the wingèd shoe!

With them the silver hounds,

sniffing the trace of air!

Haie! Haie!

These were the swift to harry;

These the keen-scented;

These were the souls of blood.

Slow on the leash,

pallid the leash-men!

Maybe we say something about the symbolism of “The Return” if we mention a defeated pantheon, but a symbolist poem is not an allegorical poem—the symbol, it has been noted, is a new word—and I would as lief think of tired hunters, or Greece replaced by Rome, or Rome defeated by Goths, or Pennsylvania overwhelmed in the fourth quarter by Cornell. I print this poem here not in order to paraphrase it but to chew and suck upon it. (I embarrass the reader, who has put away childish things.) How the diphthongs and long vowels move together, a slow march down the page, dip and pause and glide. I can read it again and again, each time with vast refreshment of senses and world-love—as I can look again and again at Matisse’s The Red Studio.

Early on, I found and enjoyed Pound’s vigorous ballad about Christ, “Ballad of the Goodly Fere,” and his Provençal and Renaissance monologues, like the violent “Sestina: Altaforte”: “Damn it all! all this our South stinks peace.” Later I discovered his energetic translation of the “Seafarer,” then the quietness of the Chinese poems and imitations, and realized that Pound’s ear had found yet another music: He had discovered the lyric potential of flatness. If he found this quality in translating from the Chinese, in Japanese poetry he found the tiny lyric as quick as a fly, like “In a Station of the Metro.” He invented the free verse epigram, writing about “Les Millwins” or about sexual satisfaction as a bathtub draining. Later he constructed the quatrains of “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley,” academically the most accepted of Pound’s poems, with its eloquent stanzas on the Great War. At about the same time, he invented the looser line of “Homage to Sextus Propertius,” where he became a sarcastic Whitman who could instantly switch tone into a lyric beauty. In his whole life as a poet, which the Cantos extends and replicates, Ezra Pound discovered a thousand ways to make a noise. Although he was not innovative as an iambic poet, on the whole his ear is the most inventive in modern literature. With the Propertius, Pound invented a discursive narrative noise that can fly to lyric touchstone-lines and accommodate narrative or reflective passages together. Useful to the Cantos, this diction accommodates and includes, can turn ironic or ecstatic, lyric o...

Table of contents

• Books by Donald Hall
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Editor’s Note
• Preface by Wesley McNair
• Introduction
• Vanity, Fame, Love, and Robert Frost
• Dylan Thomas and Public Suicide
• Notes on T. S. Eliot
• Rocks and Whirlpools: Archibald MacLeish and Yvor Winters
• Marianne Moore Valiant and Alien
• Fragments of Ezra Pound
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author