Time in Ezra Pound's Work

William Harmon

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781469622897
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism in Poetry
• Index: Literature

Throughout nearly sixty-five of writing, Pound specialized on the suffocating effects of time on poetry, aesthetic form, and history. Harmon examines Pound's strategies for dealing with time and arrives at a persuasive reading of Pound's works in general and of the The Cantos in particular. By concentrating on a single theme and technique, the author demonstrates a coherence in the writing that elucidates the corpus for both the specialist and the casual reader. Originally published in 1977. A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.

1. POUND’S EARLIER CRITICAL WRITINGS ON CULTURAL TIME AND VALUE

For Ezra Pound, as for T. S. Eliot, the domain of poetry is the area where a general literary tradition meets the personal and social circumstances of an individual poet.¹ Poetry displays social backgrounds and honors social responsibilities: The Cantos, Pound says, is “the tale of the tribe,”² and one job of poetry, as Eliot suggests, is “to purify the dialect of the tribe.”³ To understand the context in which Pound’s criticism and poetry are designed to operate, therefore, it is useful first to examine his ideas about culture, society, and history.

Needless to say, Pound was never a systematic political or social philosopher. Even when he was well into his fifties he could write in a letter to Santayana, “Premature to mention my ‘philosophy,’ call it a disposition. In another 30 years I may put the bits together, but probably won’t.”⁴ This disposition, however inchoate, consistently led Pound to handle certain recurrent problems in certain characteristic ways. The unreality of historical time, for example, preoccupied him for decades. As early as 1910, in The Spirit of Romance, he refuses to accept time as a circumstance that can limit the continuity of culture:

It is dawn at Jerusalem while midnight hovers above the Pillars of Hercules. All ages are contemporaneous. It is B.C., let us say, in Morocco. The Middle Ages are in Russia. The future stirs already in the minds of the few. This is especially true of literature, where the real time is independent of the apparent, and where many dead men are our grandchildren’s contemporaries, while many of our contemporaries have been already gathered into Abraham’s bosom, or some more fitting receptacle.

What we need is a literary scholarship, which will judge Theocritus and Yeats with one balance, and which will judge dead men as inexorably as dull writers of today, and will, with equity, give praise to beauty before referring to an almanack.⁵

It is a commonplace exaggeration, of course, to say that such powerful figures as Dante are “immortal” or, conversely, that some living man is effectively “dead.” But Pound means more than that. Not only is Dante a living contemporary, unconfined by mortality, he is also not limited by the borders of his own personality; instead, he is “many men, and suffers as many” (SR, p. 177). These two radical concepts—the contemporaneity of culture and the continuity of personality—are keys to much of Pound’s thought.

In “Histrion,” one of his earliest poems, Pound presents the same ideas even more strongly, for here the poet’s own personality is introduced; the idea of “the living Dante” is not a worn metaphor at all but an instance of something like metempsychosis:

No man hath dared to write this thing as yet,

And yet I know, how that the souls of all men great

At times pass through us,

And we are melted into them, and are not

Save reflexions of their souls.

Thus am I Dante for a space and am

One François Villon, ballad-lord and thief,

Or am such holy ones I may not write

Lest blasphemy be writ against my name;

This for an instant and the flame is gone.

’Tis as in midmost us there glows a sphere

Translucent, molten gold, that is the “I”

And into this some form projects itself:

Christus, or John, or eke the Florentine;

And as the clear space is not if a form’s

Imposed thereon,

So cease we from all being for the time,

And these, the Masters of the Soul, live on.⁶

This awkward poem, which was dropped from Pound’s collections of verse after 1910,⁷ is the most straightforward expression of his denial of the essential reality of both time and self. By the same creed he imagines a communal tradition that links certain extraordinary minds across space and time and permits the poet to conduct a running dialogue, not only with his contemporaries, but with his ancestors and descendants as well. In such a universe where events follow no necessary sequence, Pound can maneuver easily in patterns of anachronism. Villon, he says, “is a lurid canto of the Inferno, written too late to be included in the original text” (SR, p. 177). At times, when dealing with strictly historical matters, he gets tangled in his own vocabulary. He says, for example, “Adams lived to see an ‘aristocracy of stock-jobbers and land-jobbers’ in action and predicted them ‘into time immemorial’ (which phrase an ingenious grammarian can by great ingenuity catalogue and give a name to, by counting in a string of ellipses).”⁸ By a similar procedure, something in Jefferson’s writings “sounds almost like an echo of the Duce (hysteron proteron).”⁹

At this pole of the temporal axis, with all events potentially contemporaneous and all figures potentially coeval, Pound’s own position is ambiguous. Although he lives in the present, he acts as a focus that gathers the spirits of “Masters of the Soul” and projects their image onto the future. He seems to be a vestige—a “man in love with the past”—and at the same time an antenna.¹⁰ A poet who prizes order above all other values produces works that seem to be extremes of disorder; a critic who promotes renovation is stubbornly dedicated to repeating, often in deliberately archaic language, the triumphs of the past.

Two of Pound’s closest associates, Wyndham Lewis and W. B. Yeats, tried to understand his relation to time and reached conclusions that could not be more divergent. To Lewis he was “the time-bound Ezra” and “a great time-trotter.!”¹¹ Lewis says, “Life is not his true concern, his gifts are all turned in the other direction. ‘In his chosen or fated field he bows to no one,’ to use his words. But his field is purely that of the dead. As the nature mortist, or painter essentially of still-life, deals for preference with life-that-is-still, that has not much life, so Ezra for preference consorts with the dead, whose life is preserved for us in books and pictures. He has never loved anything living as he has loved the dead.”¹²

Richard Ellmann, tracing the changes in Yeats’s attitude toward Pound in the characterological terms of A Vision, shows how pointedly Yeats’s analysis of Pound’s relation to time is opposed to Lewis’s treatment of the same question. For Yeats, Pound is a man of “Phase 23,” a placement explained by Ellmann: “Technical mastery offers the man of this phase his only refuge from master-less anarchy. Denying its subjective life, the mind delights only in the varied scene out the window, and seeks to construct a whole which is all event, all picture. Because of this submission to out-wardness, the man of Phase 23 wishes to live in his exact moment of time as a matter of conscience, and, says Yeats, defends that moment like a theologian. He has in mind here Pound’s imagist predilection, as well as his forever and dogmatically ‘making it new’”¹³

Since both Lewis and Yeats were considering Pound at roughly the same time (when he was in his thirties and forties), it seems odd that their judgments differ so greatly. Perhaps their ideas can be reconciled if Pound’s relation to historical time is seen as a dialectical phenomenon with transcendent timelessness at one pole and immediate historical time at the other. If the extreme of timelessness is emphasized, Pound seems to be a man in love with everything but the present; if the extreme of immediate time is emphasized, he seems to be in love with nothing but the present. Lewis and Yeats agree on two points, in any event. Pound is clearly in love with something, and, whatever its object, this love is realized in terms of time and timelessness.

Pound’s belief that “all ages are contemporaneous” in no way diminishes his belief in the importance of careful attention to immediate experience. The integral side of his thought is balanced by the differential side. “The proper METHOD for studying poetry and good letters,” he says, “is the method of contemporary biologists, that is careful first-hand examination of the matter, and continual COMPARISON of one ‘slide’ or specimen with another” (ABC, p. 17). A timeless idea exists only as manifest in a time-bound action; the temporal and spatial contingencies of an action are nearly as important as the unconditional idea that the action realizes. Pound’s work as a whole can be seen as a powerfully sustained (but often frustrated) attempt to realize the ideals of beauty and order. The realization succeeds or suffers according to a variety of local and personal circumstances, and the ideals themselves undergo many metamorphoses.

I think one can distinguish a few major fluctuations in Pound’s general attitude toward the possibility of realizing his ideals here and now. His goals, normally stated as “civilization” or “culture,” are signalized by “public works” in both the civic and the aesthetic sense; correspondingly, the disintegration of the ideal is represented by images of ruin and fragmentation. I shall try to show that his early social thought begins with patriotic exuberance but turns during the First World War to a denial of the possibility of any general culture, and in the next chapter I shall examine a similar pattern of optimism and disappointment in his later writings.

The spirit of Romance is not only an ideal but also a Zeitgeist and a spirit of certain related languages at a particular time. In The Spirit of Romance, Pound uses metaphors to describe how the spirit of art is realized in local materials. He says, “Art is a fluid moving above or over the minds of men. . . . Art or an art is not unlike a river, in that it is perturbed at times by the quality of the river bed, but is in a way independent of that bed. The color of the water depends upon the substance of the bed and banks immediate and preceding. Stationary objects are reflected, but the quality of motion is of the river. The scientist is concerned with all of these things, the artist with that which flows” (SR, pp. 7–8). Fluidity is again invoked toward the end of the book: “The spirit of the arts is dynamic. The arts are not passive, nor static, nor, in a sense, are they reflective, though reflection may assist at their birth” (SR, p. 222). Originally subtitled “An Attempt to Define Somewhat the Charm of the Pre-Renaissance Literature of Latin Europe,” the book connects the literary arts of the past and the present by attempting “to examine certain forces, elements or qualities which were potent in the medieval literature of the Latin tongues, and are, I believe, still potent in our own” (SR, p. 7).

Pound met T. E. Hulme before the completion of The Spirit of Romance; it may be that he absorbed from Hulme the Bergsonian image of a fluid spirit of art interacting with static local conditions. Another spirit—a “sort of permanent basis in humanity” (SR, p. 92)—enables certain sensitive men to communicate with their predecessors and contemporaries by means of a kinship that Pound suggests in the essay “Psychology and the Troubadours” (published in 1912 and included in later editions of The Spirit of Romance):

Let us consider the body as pure mechanism. Our kinship to the ox we have constantly thrust upon us; but beneath this is our kinship to the vital universe, to the tree and the living rock, and because this is less obvious—and possibly more interesting—we forget it.

We have about us the universe of fluid force, and below us the germinal universe of wood alive, of stone alive. Man is—the sensitive physical part of him—a mechanism, for the purpose of our further discussion a mechanism rather like an electric appliance, switches, wires, etc. Chemically speaking, he is ut credo, a few buckets of water, tied up in a complicated sort of fig-leaf. As to his consciousness, the consciousness of some seems to rest, or to have its center more properly, in what the Greek psychologists called the phantastikon. Their minds are, that is, circumvolved about them like soap-bubbles reflecting sundry patches of the macrocosmos. And with certain others their consciousness is “germinal.” Their thoughts are in them as the thought of the tree is in the seed, or in the grass, or the grain, or the blossom. And these minds are the more poetic, and they affect the mind about them, and transmute it as the seed the earth. And this latter sort of mind is close on the vital universe; and the strength of the Greek beauty rests in this, that it is ever at the interpretation of this vital universe, by its signs of gods and godly attendants and oreads.

[SR, pp. 92–93]

Here, in figures that suggest Coleridge as well as Bergson, is the condensed statement of the “disposition” that served the young Pound as ontology and epistemology and provided his poetry and criticism with one of their most durable problems. How does the essence of the world of ideal forms enter the existing world of real matter?

To the Zeitgeist, which falls between the individual and the macrocosm, a writer can be attuned in a greater or lesser degree. The harmonious relation is partly a question of genre, according to Pound; so lyric poets and playwrights are less bound to their times than are writers of epic. Pound says, “Both Lope and Shakespeare add their incalculable selves to any expression of the Time Spirit; they owe much to it, but are not wholly dependent. Till now we have treated only of the generative forces in literature: Camoens is not a force, but a symptom. His work is utterly dependent upon the events and temper of his time; and in it, therefore, we may study that temper to advantage” (SR, pp. 214–15). Concerning the variable relation between genre and Zeitgeist, Pound at an early age holds ideas that are clearly important to his own subsequent poetry: “An epic cannot be written against the grain of its time: the prophet or the satirist may hold himself aloof from his time, or run counter ...