Ezra Pound

These lectures are very difficult. What makes this particular lecture so difficult is that Pound is extremely famous for complexity and those people who have discussed Pound have discussed him in increasing complexity so that there's a whole pyramid of complication, so that if one stands back and looks at a wall of two or three thousand books on Ezra Pound you get the impression that he conjured up the very hieroglyphic of complication which he set out to do which is not bad from a boy from Idaho. And he was born in a little tiny town, Hailey, Idaho. In fact, October 30th, 1885, so the Ezra Pound centenary is coming up in 20 days. He had a very peculiar background. His father and his grandfather and so on were real American pioneers. Born in log cabins and used to the wide open spaces of the American West when there were still buffalo. And Pound in his mind, in his imagination, romanticized this as a youngster. But as he grew older and began to become at first suspicious of romanticism and then finally rejecting it he did his best to bury his origins in a mythopoetic cocoon so that his origins were no longer personal but were what we would call today archetypal. And this was an extraordinary happening because it put Ezra Pound in the position of a prophet of the 20th century because this is exactly what the 20th century has done with individual human beings to suppress our individuality. To push down the personal. And to wrap it up in the grandiose cocoons of historical avalanches of meaning of great titanic events. And increasingly the sense of who we are as a human being has been dropped like some magical pin to the very bottom of our selves there to radiate and be irradiated by energies which are in fact quite transpersonal. We have talked about this in the Tuesday night series about how we carry around within ourselves a very deep stream of subconscious imagery which seems to have all of the indications of focusing in a time frame which is roughly about six centuries old and that below this stream of the subconscious is an oceanic pool of collective imagery which is about twenty-one hundred years old. And as we live as individuals we carry this geology of the psyche, or perhaps we should not call it geology of the psyche, but geology of the spirit because the psyche is just a mirroring projection of the mind which when the psyche as a mirroring projection of the mind catches the reflections of these images it tries to appropriate it for itself, and failing to find real contact then transfers the objectiveness to the outer world. And this is the origins of the Hellenic fallacy. Of thinking that the objective world needs to be manipulated in order to establish one's identity. These people, these things, these events, these places are what I need to be real for myself. And this Ezra Pound is really a prophet of this whole complication and was in fact one of the individuals in the 20th century who became electrocuted by divine fire for having contacted this energy having exposed his ego to this kind of stress and to have had the doggedness of a Western American pioneer never to let go. It finally sent him to a mental hospital from which he was released only late in life. And we'll get to that story.

One of the peculiar images for Pound as a four, five year old child, his father, named Homer Pound - Homer the great Greek poet, Homer. Homer Pound moved the family to a suburb of Philadelphia. And the job that Homer Pound had there was working as an assistant assayer for the United States Mint in Philadelphia. Now get this. He took the young Ezra Pound, impressionable boy used to the wide open Idaho spaces, suddenly put into the Philadelphia of 1889. Sensitive, natural. And he took him to his job one day in this large huge cavernous space where men naked to the waist under the gaslight flares of open flares were shoveling old dirty money into counting machines. It was an image of hell associated with money that never left Pound. And later on when his stability as a poet was jeopardized by great cultural upheavals - the First World War, the Second World War, the rise of fascism - Pound instinctively searched back and found a scapegoat in money. And Pound's economics became a defense against the horrors of this hell which would be unloosed upon mankind if they were to misunderstand money, if they were to take money not as a variable gauge of human activities and human products, but as some abstract measurement by which all reality was arbitrarily valued. That money in this form was demonic. And one can understand this.

The young Ezra Pound became a very quiet boy and this quietness was not a part of his personality but was kind of like the pressures that are enfolded and folded again. And Pound's personality during his adolescence reminds me of nothing less, nothing short of the process by which a master steelsmith makes a samurai sword - by folding over the metal and pounding it out and folding it again and pounding it out and again and these hundreds and hundreds of folds produce a very complex molecular layering. But each time the sword, the metal, is honed and made into a sword until the final process sharpens it until it is all of the layerings are brought to a cutting edge which is one of the finest in the world. Pound’s mind was exactly like this kind of a structure and by the time that it was folded into a complexity that would become mind boggling and sharpened and honed to an edge which was almost intolerable to himself. Pound’s wit cut through every human personality that he came into contact with just like a samurai sword. No one was able to hold their own with Pound. The only individuals who really got along with Pound were these titanic personalities like W. B. Yeats who gave him all kind of room or his eventual wife Dorothy Shakespear who just for 40, 50 years let him develop and be what he was at great sacrifice to herself. She was called both saintly and naive.

Pound's personality as a samurai sword is very much honed during his adolescence and as a youngster, about 16, he was admitted to the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia and there he met his first lifelong companion the great American poet William Carlos Williams. And it began to perk in Pound that this is what he wanted to do more than anything else was to become the greatest poet in history. Not just a good poet, not just a great American poetm but a beacon because he sensed through taking his courses in medieval literature he sensed that the last great universal poet in world history was Dante some 700 years back and that civilization walks on the legs of the great epic poets - Homer, Virgil, Dante - and mankind had been poised in limbo for 700 years. No one had taken the next step that it was up to some 20th century poet to construct an epic to allow for mankind to take the next great step that the new age will not happen until some great epic monumental poem is delivered. And Pound intended to do that. But Pound intended to do this in a very serious way. Too serious. Much much too serious. He began laying the foundation that in order to have a poem appreciated one had to conjure up and create an audience while one was working on the poem. And so it occurred to Pound, the young man, that he would have to cultivate a whole civilization, a whole audience, to go along with his great poet writing. And to do this Pound became, trained himself to be, almost what we would call a schizophrenic personality. He was extraordinarily hard, extraordinarily cold, calculating and he covered it up with charm and oozing and malleability. A description of Pound - this is from Ford Madox Ford - this is how Pound dressed when he was finally into London society. If I can find the quotation in here. Perhaps I can't find it. Oh here it is. This is a description of Ezra Pound and you can just see the surface.

“Ezra… would approach with the step of a dancer, making passes with a cane at an imaginary opponent. He would wear trousers made of green billiard cloth, a pink coat, a blue shirt, a tie hand-painted by a Japanese friend, an immense sombrero…” Are you getting all that? “...a flaming beard cut to a point, [with] a single, large blue earring,” and he would come in telling people that he was working on the master esthetic for the new age and they'd better listen.

Not bad for an Idaho boy in London. This personality of Pound’s began to open up when he was probably in his last year working on his master's degree and Pound began to become ridiculous in many people's eyes because of this incredible fluorescence. And of course one has difficulty having fluorescence without the ladies. And so Pound developed a taste for the ladies. And when Pound was given his first teaching assignment at Wabash College in Crawfordsville, Indiana he of course had wine by candlelight with his favorite young actress visiting in town. And for this Pound was thrown out of the university as a degenerate. And Pound went back to Philadelphia saying these people are no damn good. They don't understand culture. But in Philadelphia the scene had blown up and everyone condemned Pound, and Pound found that the whole of the United States wasn't much better than Wabash College. He would leave it all behind. He would go to Europe. Because he had been to Europe a couple of times on travel visits and he thought they'll appreciate me there. After all, America really is pretty provincial. And so he left for Europe and the place that he went to, the first place in Europe, the most appropriate place, he went to Venice. He went to one of those really stinking dirty sections of Venice - the San Trovador section of Venice - and while he was there he - San Trovaso - he decided that since he was going to be the greatest poet of the last 700 years he'd better publish something. He checked his pocket - I think he had 80 bucks. But in those days you could do a lot. And he published 100 copies of a little volume called A Lume Spento meaning that the candle is snuffed out. And having these in hand - he published them in June of 1908. In September he left Venice for London carrying with him copies of his work published in Venice and began parading himself as a European poet somebody who was coming from Venice and not from America someone who was already published and was looking for other publishers who might be interested in getting on his bandwagon and the first response in London was at a bookstore - Matthew's Bookstore - and in a few conversations with the owner, the owner decided that this was a prize individual and he better publish it. He asked Pound if he was going to help pay for it and Pound said, “me? you people are the publishers. I am the arbiter of civilization. This is, this is not right.”

And so his poems were then published for him. And in order to make the investment back the bookseller had to cover his bets by introducing to Pound to all the literateurs in London. And in this way Pound in just a few short months invaded literary London, stormed it became in fact the most outrageous person in London. Early in 1909 he took over W. B. Yeats Monday night soirees where all the literary and occult people of London came together and Pound began distributing all of the cigarettes, the Chianti, the goodies, the poetic esthetics and he became the center, ostensibly, of literary London. On this basis because of this contact spread of individuals Pound began finding himself increasingly consulted about new authors coming up and because of this he established a relationship with a woman named Harriet Monroe in the United States who had a magazine called Poetry - just starting out. And he became the European, the London editor correspondent for Poetry magazine which published all of the great writers of the early 20th century. And in this way Pound made true, his dream, his ambition and he became exactly what he had imagined himself to be what he had set himself out to be. But the most important thing to Pound at the very center, the campfire of his personality, in order to write this great poem, in order to cultivate this audience to appreciate this great poem, he needed to have the one indispensable item. He needed to have a new esthetic of poetry.

Now Pound was tremendously learned at this time and later on became even more tremendously learned. And his contention was that we have never had a worldwide esthetic. No one has ever consulted the entire civilization of the world. And so Pound began to inform himself on all the varieties of poetry there were throughout human history throughout every culture and every background. And in this way Pound sought to be universal and to bring together all of the different traditions together into one jewel. Because the meeting of this would not be a blur but would be a prismatic, multi-dimensional reflection - jewel-like. And so Pound's esthetic became more and more a symbolic idea in his mind and it found a lot of individuals in London who were sympathetic to this. And so many of these individuals came together, and they began to call themselves - or to be called by others would be more apt - imagists, imagists. And the central esthetician for the images at the beginning was not Pound, although he took over the show later on, but was a man named T. E. Hulme - H-U-L-M-E. In 1915 in an article in the magazine Egoist in an article called The History, entitled The History of Imagism, F. S. Flint one of the great Imagist poets and writers talked about Imagist ideals in this way. “I think that what brought the real nucleus of this group together was a dissatisfaction with English poetry as it was then (and is still, alas!) being written. We proposed at various times to replace it by pure vers libre” - free verse, instead of having rhymes, instead of having stanzas. Instead of having these quatrain after quatrain let's junk the line. Let's junk the quatrain. Let's go to a whole new poetic form. And of course to go with this poetic form we can no longer talk about rowing one sweetheart and Sunday afternoons and expecting the world to be harmonized by our reflections together in the water. This will no longer do. We have to have new things to talk about. And the images said we have to dry up the old sentimentalism. We have to quit having this sopping oozing sentimentalism. And so the words, the verse, should become very spare and very sparse which will allow in fact for them to be juxtaposed into clear, new juxtapositions.

And so they proposed at times to replace the old poetry with a new free verse and they chose as the model for this the Japanese poetic forms - the haiku and the tanka. The haiku is a seventeen syllable form, and the tanka - I believe - is a 31-syllable form. “We all wrote dozens of the haiku as an amusement.” And it was almost as if it were a new sacred literature that was coming out because in order to write this one had to hone one's perception to see in the spare way. And of course this was at the time when Japanese prints had already made their way. For two generations in the Impressionist circles Monet had a collection of Japanese prints that numbered more than 300 - Monet, Renoir, and finally Cezanne. And just about this time as the images were coming out the Cubists were coming out. And so a tremendous new esthetic was trying to be born and Pound wanted to be, needed to be, at the very center of this. So they had rhymeless poems which were pared down to the very sparsity so that the esthetic that was there was no longer the old criterion of beauty but the new criterion of reality.

We are presenting not what is beautiful but what is real. And if the horror is presented in a realistic way then it is poetry. If the barrenness is presented in a realistic way it is poetry. And this of course began to mount up and Pound found himself increasingly the individual that was drawn into the center of this. But Pound was interested not only in poetry as a literary phenomenon - no matter how worldwide or how far back in history - he was interested in changing human civilization. And so the esthetic had to appeal not only to poetry but equally to poetry and sculpture and painting; that those three arts together if they could be brought together in a triad that was focused around a single esthetic this was something that had not been done since the Renaissance. The Renaissance in Italy was the last time that there was a sharing of the esthetics of sculpture, painting, and poetry in the same mode. And out of this desire to bring in sculpture and painting along with poetry was born a movement which was called Vorticism, from vortex, from the angle made by juxtapositions. And of course when there are many angles brought together one has a vortex of not a single angle but of many many angles so that what is important in writing or in painting or in sculpture is to present primordial angles of vision juxtaposed together to produce a sense of magnificent multidimensionality. But the difficulty is if this is not done right one produces a fragmented, a shattered, ordinary image. The ordinary image the simple reflection of the mundane world in the mind is destroyed. It is shattered. This is a very difficult form to work with. And of course we'll see that Pound increasingly lost control, and increasingly shattered the forms rather than made them multi-dimensional. In fact the first book to ever understand Ezra Pound the first critical study didn't appear until 1951 by Hugh Kenner, simply called The Poetry of Ezra Pound dedicated to Marshall McLuhan.

He writes in here, of the vortex, “planes in relation…” and the angle is made not by lines but by planes coming together. So each plane is controlled by an image and the image is coming into juxtaposition make the intersection. “Planes in relation reminds us that these words are roughly contemporary with analytic cubism, with Gaudier's sculpture, and with the very first impact of Wyndham Lewis: a period of visual discovery which succeeding painters and sculptors have largely failed to consolidate, but which remains closely related to Pound's procedures with language, precisely because its practice was to seek ways of penetrating the particularity of the object under scrutiny.” Not to represent it but to penetrate it and by penetrating it go to its essence and reveal through all the planes of possible perception the reality of the image, not its appearance. Its appearance is what is sloppy and sentimental - what leads us astray, what leads us to consider things in a dream of beauty which must now be rejected for the penetrating search for reality at any cost. Notice the precariousness in this. What is precarious in this most of all is not the work of art but the mind of the artist. For it takes a great discipline to be able to do this. One does not practice diamond cutting with the mind in some naive fashion. It backfires on you more often than not. And in fact the 20th century is a junkyard of shattered minds unable to perceive reality and unable to stomach beauty, both.

The way that Kenner writes, “[seeking] ways of penetrating the particularity of the object under scrutiny, rather than divagating into that object's likeness to some other. Under the burning-glass of Vorticist scrutiny pine-trees and suits of armor yielded up their formal secrets in muscular arrangements of pigment into flying wedges. To ‘generalize’ the suit of armor - to paint it as a massive ‘type’ - or else to focus on the merely haphazard ‘individuality’ of its contingent dents and rust-spots, would be equally far from the Vorticist idea of realizing in arrangements of color the peculiar energy of its special mode of being.”

The shift goes from the object to the mode of perception which is transferred to the object that it has a mode of being, it has a phenomenological ontology which must be addressed and that that's its reality, and anything else is a daydream. In order to have this kind of mentality one needs to school oneself constantly not to see in the normal way not to use common sense not to have naturalism but to have a kind of frame of reference, a template of mentality, which one has to school oneself to use. And it is like drilling into oneself a habitual comportment. And of course human beings can do this. We can delude ourselves in a million ways. We can drill in ourselves ways of ignoring even the variety of our own selves. And Pound devoted himself to this.

About this time he discovered the perfect symbol for the Vorticist language and the perfect symbol was the Chinese language, the Chinese ideogram, the Chinese character, the characters of the Chinese language. These ideograms were the perfect symbolic vehicle and Pound thought he had discovered at long last a secret esthetic which if brought into Western civilization would provide the revolutionary fulcrum upon which the next great epic step could be taken. And in fact Pound found this courtesy of an American Chinese scholar named Ernest, Ernest Fenollosa, and Fenollosa came out with a volume called The Chinese Character as a Medium of Written Poetry. And Fenollosa was one of the really great masterful minds of the early 20th century. But Pound on purpose misread him. I say on purpose misread him because when one looks at Fenollosa's writings before they were edited by Pound one can see that Fenollosa is speaking as someone who is a very great scholar, who understands the esthetic not only of China but of the Japanese version of Chinese art. In fact the two great volumes of Fenollosa's epochs of Chinese and Japanese art is still in print, almost 90 years later because his understanding is very good and his understanding of the Chinese language was adequate at the time. Pound had no understanding of the Chinese language. He moved from character to character from ideogram to ideogram with a mentality that was looking for something that he could use. Damn the language, it will do what I want it to do because I have an overriding purpose. Here's two views of the ideogram. One is from Kenner and one is from a recent study on history of aquatic method ideograms. Kenner:

“Ideogram, at least as a poetic principle, is not a Sinophile…” - that means a Chinese, one who loves Chinese culture - “...is not a Sinophile fad. It inheres in Aristotle on metaphor. Nothing could more conclusively document the capture of Aristotle by the thirteenth-, seventeenth-, and twentieth-century dialecticians than the fact that it took Ernest Fenollosa's essay on ‘The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry’ to bring a useful theoretical basis of poetics squarely once more before the attention of the West.”

This was all done by Ezra Pound. He's the one who did this. He made the fanfare. He wrote the books. He did the reviews. He produced this. Here is the nature of the Ideogrammic method as presented in two paragraphs by Kenner:

“(1) The mind lays hold only on particular things. It can NOT know an abstraction it has not itself made.” Any individual mind can only know an abstraction which it has made. So if you wish to convey an abstraction from one mind to another you have to do it not through abstractions but through a cluster of particulars. If you want to convey ‘red’ from my mind to your mind you have to say ‘cherry’, ‘rust’, ‘lollipop’. Maybe you get red. That just saying red sets a mind up for the kind of sentimental common sense schmear and schmaltz that has bedeviled Western man and allowed him to take that next epoch step. So the Chinese ideogram was the perfect symbolic vehicle for Pound, and Pound would go deeply into trying to become a translator from the Chinese. He finally settled upon Confucius and made a translation of the classic anthology defined by Confucius - The Analects, The Lunyu - published by Harvard University Press. He tried to translate all of the Confucian classics. He called the doctrine of the mean the unwobbling pivot. So that the mind cannot know an abstraction which it has not made itself so that the senses are what we use to make intelligence out of. And if intelligence moves to intelligence it has to move by the senses. “(2) You can NOT pour ‘clear and distinct ideas’ into another man's head. You can try, but the result will surprise you. One of three things will happen. He will ask for examples.” What do you mean? “Or he will consult his own storehouse of examples, taking your statement as a directing-rod for his own perceptions.” Hmm, that doesn't make sense to me. “Or he will make an assenting noise and forever after parrot your formulation, thinking he knows ‘all about horses’ from hearing [your] definition.”

And all of these lead into illusion. And the one thing that Pound did not want to have was illusion. He wanted to have reality. But the difficulty is monumental. The problems are legion in this. This is not simple at all. This new logic of depiction does not follow casual predetermined lines. As opposed to syllogistic knowledge it proceeds from the particular towards the general in accordance with natural perceptual processes. Our real knowledge of Confucius, for example, comes about through seeing Confucius engaged in a variety of actions. Fenollosa would say Confucius is all that he does. It’s an existential statement. You are not what you are, you are what you do. And the summing of your actions constitutes your being not some essence. And these actions are depicted tactically that is in a tactical sense which comes to a focus in an abstraction based upon the tactical understanding of the relations so that we have then a juxtaposition, which happens in the mind, which is really at its basis antithetical. They're not supposed to blend together. They're supposed to clash together in the sense of intersect. And so the mind then schools itself to see and to understand in this kind of antithetical juxtaposition. And this of course is a classic technique which is used in certain disciplines - Sufism or Zen Buddhism - to get rid of the mundane mind of the normal everyday perceptions. But all within a religious context to then reinstate the everyday mind, reinstate the normal natural perceptions, later on. But for Pound there was no return. One burns these bridges, one stays in the antithetically juxtaposed mind and builds upon that. And of course this was playing with dynamite because this is just what the schizophrenic does. But the schizophrenic cannot help himself, does not understand, does not understand that he is drowning in the same ocean that the mystic swims in because he hasn't learned to swim, has not learned the very simple fact of compassion that one can float quite adequately upon such an oceanic series of images because what one contacts in this method one penetrates not the mind but one penetrates the subconscious stream. One penetrates through the subconscious stream to the oceanic archetypal collective unconscious. And this is where the energy comes and wells up from. This is the new context. But the difficulty is that when you contact that naively, when you force aside the stream of consciousness to yield up these images, you do not have them, they have you. And so the only way to guarantee one’s safety in this way is to, before you penetrate through the stream of consciousness, to have the stream of consciousness sealed into itself in a sense of eternal return.

In Homer the esoteric way in which he expressed it was that, the world of man is surrounded by the river of the world, which was called in Archaic Greek, ‘Oceanus’. The idea of the ocean was not an ocean which was indefinite in Homer but that it was a huge river that encircled the world of man like a uroboros, like an eternal return. And only by guaranteeing the stream of consciousness its eternal return - giving it a full cycle, a full circle of reality - can a man then step through that magic circle of his subconscious and swim in that ocean of cosmic images.

This is why someone like James Joyce, who was a protegé of Pound. Pound for ten years touted everyone that Joyce is one of the great masters of language. And if you look at Joyce's work, all of his great epic works come back around too so that the end starts at the beginning again - Ulysses, Finnegan’s Wake - because Joyce understood that this is what a man must do. First of all you do not challenge this universe. It's egotistical; it's arrogant; it's dangerous. You don't walk out into the starry night and say “you're mine, universe.” One can go moonstruck, not to even mention the stars, not to even mention the enormous gulfs in between the galaxies. It's no place to think that someone who is six feet or even seven feet tall means anything in that scale.

I guess they want to stop. Let's stop.

[Mr. Weir opened the second half of his lecture by playing a recording of Mr. Ezra Pound reading his own poetry.]

[Recording of Ezra Pound reading his poetry]
…second daughter was undergoing a novel,
The young American pilgrim
Exclaimed:
‘This is a darn’d clever bunch!’

Sketch 48 b. 11
At the age of 27
Its home mail is still opened by its maternal parent
And its office mail may be opened by
its parent of the opposite gender.
It is an officer,
and a gentleman,
and an architect.

‘Nodier raconte…’

At a friend of my wife's there is a photograph,
A faded, pale brownish photograph,
Of the times when the sleeves were large,
Silk, stiff and large above the lacertus,
That is, the upper arm,
And décolleté…
It is a lady,
She sits at a harp,
Playing,

And by her left foot, in a basket,
Is an infant, aged about 14 months,
The infant beams at the parent,
The parent re-beams at its offspring.
The basket is lined with satin,
There is a satin-like bow on the harp.

And in the home of the novelist
There is a satin-like bow on an harp.
You enter and pass hall after hall,
Conservatory follows conservatory,
Lilies lift their white symbolical cups,
Whence their symbolical pollen has been excerpted,
Near them I noticed an harp
And the blue satin ribbon,
And the copy of ‘Hatha Yoga’
And the neat piles of unopened, upopening books,

And she spoke to me of the monarch,
And of the purity of her soul.

Column.

After years of continence
he hurled himself into a sea of six women.
Now, quenched as the brand of Meleager,
he lies by the poluphloisboius sea-coast.

Par Thina Polyfloisvoio Thalassis.

Siste Viator.

I Vecchii.

They will come no more,
And the old men with beautiful manners.

Il était comme un tout petit garçon
With his blouse full of apples
And sticking out all the way round;
Blagueur! “Con gli occhi onesti e tardi,”

And he said:
“Oh! Abelard,” as if the topic
Were much too abstruse for his comprehension,
And he talked about, “the Great Mary,”
And said: “Mr. Pound is shocked at my levity,”
When it turned out he meant Mrs. Ward.

And the other was rather like my bust by Gaudier,
Or like a real Texas colonel,
He said: “Why flay dead horses?
“There once was a man called Voltaire.”

And he said they used to cheer Verdi,
In Rome, after the opera,
And the guards couldn't stop them,

And that was an anagram for Vittorio
Emanuele Re D' Italia,
And the guards couldn't stop them.

Old men with beautiful manners,
Sitting in the Row of a morning;
Walking on the Chelsea Embankment.

Ritratto.

And she said:
“Do you remember Mr. Lowell,
“He was your ambassador here?”
And I said: “That was before I arrived.”
And she said:
“He stomped into my bedroom….
(By that time she'd got onto Browning.)
“... stomped into my bedroom…”
“And said: ‘Do I,
“ ‘I ask you, Do I
“ ‘Care too much for society dinners?’
“And I wouldn't say that he didn't.
“Shelley used to live in this house.”

She was a very old lady.
I never saw her again.

The thought of what America would be like
If the Classics had a wide circulation
Troubles my sleep,
The thought of what America,
The thought of what America,
The thought of what America would be like
If the Classics had a wide circulation
Troubles my sleep.

[End of Ezra Pound recording]

…Immunity before you are admitted to the deeper levels. And the classical western way was in Homer. Only when one has seen the flow of the Oceanus, the river surrounding the whole life of man, and has been able to come full round, is able to have achieved your homecoming to come back again, can you then be admitted to the Olympian dimensions, the Olympian amphitheater of the gods.

So it's little wonder that Ezra Pound, whose father was named Homer, whose whole poetic ambition was to make the next step in the Homeric tradition, should begin the Cantos at a place where Homer would have left off. And he begins with the word, ‘And’.

“And then went down to the ship,
Set keel to breakers, forth on the godly sea, and
We set up mast and sail on that swart ship,
Bore sheep aboard her, and our bodies also
Heavy with weeping, [and] winds from sternward
Bore us out onward with bellying canvas,
Circe’s this craft, the trim-coifed goddess.”

And that's how the Cantos begin.

If it were Homer the stream would flow, but this is a man for whom the Vorticist experience was culminated in a magazine called BLAST. The second canto begins - and notice the abrupt shift.

“Hang it all, Robert Browning,
there can be but the one ‘Sordello.’
But Sordello, and my Sordello?
Lo Sordels si fo di Mantovana.
So-shu churned in the sea.
Seal sports in the spray-whited circles of cliff-wash,
Sleek head, daughter of Lir,
eyes of Picasso
Under black fur-hood, lithe daughter of Ocean;”

More. Canto ten.

“And the poor devils dying of cold, outside Sorano,
And from the other side, from inside the château,
Orsini, Count Pitigliano, on the 17th of November:
‘Siggy, darlint, wd. you not stop making war on
‘insensible objects, such as trees and domestic vines, that have
‘no means to hit back…”

More and different. Canto 13.

Kung walked
by the dynastic temple
and into the cedar grove,
and then out by the lower river,
And with him Khuei, Tchi
and Tian the low speaking
And ‘we are unknown,’ said Kung,
‘You will be taking up charioteering?
Then you will become known,
‘Or perhaps I should take up charioteering, or archery?
‘Or the practice of public speaking?’
And Tseu-lou said, ‘I would put the defenses in order,’
And Khieu said, ‘If I were lord of a province
I would put it in better order than this is.’

The first 30 cantos were published. They were monumentally a puzzle, a labyrinth. The critical intelligence of a whole generation around the world was challenged. What is he after? What is he doing? And the legend grew that the madman genius was working upon the great next epic. And so confident was he that he was helping other poets write their epics: James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats even, anybody, even E. E. Cummings. Because he was confident that he was the one. He was the one touched by the gods. Or as Pound would have said, perhaps I'm touched by the gods, I'll take it anyway.

Here's a letter to Harriet Monroe about the time that The Cantos first came out. She was the owner and editor of the magazine Poetry. This is an excerpt from the letter.

“I am sorry Sandburg didn't like ‘Three Cantos’. F––– is too low in the scale of God's creatures to bother about. I can't see how anyone can see the thing in such small sections. However, the printing it in three parts has given me a chance to emend, and the version [of] the book is, I think, much improved. Eliot is the only person who proffered criticism instead of general objection. I discount Sandburg's objection, by the fact that he would probably dislike anything with foreign quotations in it.”

Pound rejecting the old, rejecting the sentimental, rejecting anybody who has contact with it, and lunging toward the unusual. Here's the beginning of a letter to T. E. Lawrence, Lawrence of Arabia, just a few years later.

“My dear Hadji ben Abt el Bakshish, Prince de Mecque, Two-Sworded Samurai, Old Bird, Young Bird, Magister (?) Artium, etc. [and] et quid tibi licet, libet, decet, lubet, etc.: Thou hast in thee an exceeding hot, intemperate, swift and precipitate manner of judging thy fellowe men, and in the present case mightest have weighed against six or eight pages of BLAST the dozen or more volumes and thousands or more scattered pages of my other labors and opusculi.”

Trying to get him to contribute. If you lunge with one hand and push away with the other hard enough you'll sprain your ribs. And Pound consistently did this kind of pirouette. The next bunch of Cantos that came out concerned Thomas Jefferson and John Adams. Oh it's got to be universal; everything's got to be in there. He begins Canto 31, A letter from TJ to General Washington, 1787.

“Tempus loquendi,
Tempus tacendi.
Said Mr. Jefferson: It wd. have given us time.
‘modern dress for your statue…
‘I remember having written you while Congress sat at Annapolis,
‘on water communication between ours and the western country,
‘particularly the information… of the plain between
‘Big Beaver and Cuyahoga, which made me hope that a canal
…navigation of Lake Erie and the Ohio. You must have had
‘occasion of getting better information on this subject
‘and if you have you wd. oblige me
‘by a communication of it. I consider this canal,
‘if practicable, as a very important work.’ ”

And so the whole tone, not just the subject matter but the syntax because there is no single syntax that will do, don't you see? It's an esthetic of juxtaposition, of radical antitheses because one is not concerned with the beautiful at all. “Hang it all, Robert Browning.” We've had enough schmaltzy beauty and man is stagnant. We need to break out of the stagnant at any cost and then the break really did come. It's difficult to understand what happened unless one reviews the 19th century like we did once over at the Gnostic Society in a lecture series and saw that what bedeviled the 19th century European mind was that they were progressively refining the empirical perception that reality was dissolving before their eyes, that materiality was dissolving before their mind, that what was being left at the end of the century was a mathematical fantasia where man was no longer at home and needed to make himself at home. And in that European nightmare one could no longer lean upon the natural world for life sustenance or nourishment. One had to lean upon the arcane structures of the mind alone, and only those who mastered the arcane structures of the mind would be able to produce the new age. This was turning human life inside out. This was reaching down the throat of man and grabbing hold of his skeleton and pulling it out and making the skeleton on the outside. This is the bare bones technique and implode his fleshy-ness his personableness inside, stuff it in and hide it.

Well this is all very well if you're becoming a shaman but you can't very well put a civilization through this. And what happened was, is that the genie came out of the bottle and the First World War was not a war, it was a nightmare. It was not a war. It was a long drawn out nightmare that was projected on a landscape and it has never ended. There has never been an end to that war. Only very great artists like William Faulkner have really understood the twentieth century. Speaking once about his great epic novel, A Fable, he set it in the First World War. And somebody said, “Why didn't you set it in the Second World War?” He said, “There's only been one World War and it's still going on.” It's a delusion to think that there was a peace, a truce, an armistice, an end, a victory. There is no victory in a nightmare. It only goes on. The only resolution of a nightmare is to wake up. There's no winning in a nightmare. Pound is one of these great artists, individuals who lived the nightmare without end and was unable to resolve it because it had no resolution. There was no amount of cleverness, there was no amount of genius that could resolve the dream because the veracity of the archetypal ocean of dream image energy is that it is endless. And to conjure that up specifically is letting the genie out of the bottle. Now the magic is everywhere, but it's an uncontrolled magic.

He wrote in a poem - if I can find it - about this kind of a magic coming to be. It was a poem written in 1907 called “In,” the preposition “In,” and then the word “Durance”. This is taken from Henri Bergson's notion of time as duration. And so this is In Durance.

I am homesick after mine own kind,
Oh I know that there are folks about me,
friendly faces,
But I am homesick after mine own kind.

‘These sell our pictures’! Oh well,
They reach me not, touch me some edge or that,
But reach me not and all my life's become
One flame, that reaches not beyond
My heart's own hearth,
Or hides among the ashes there for thee.
‘Thee’? Oh, ‘Thee’ is who cometh first
Out of mine own soul-kin,
For I am homesick after mine own kind.
And ordinary people touch me not.
And I am homesick
After mine own kind that know, and feel
And have some breath for beauty and the arts.

Aye, I am wistful for my kin of the spirit
And have none about me save in the shadows
When come they, surging of power, ‘DAEMON,’
‘Quasi KALOUN.” S. T. says Beauty is most that, a
‘calling of the soul.’
Well then, so call they, the swirlers out of the mist
of my soul,
They that come mewards, bearing old magic.

And the poem ends. I have to curtail it because of time. The poem ends with this.

And yet my soul sings ‘Up!’ and we are one.
Yea thou, and Thou, and THOU, and all my kin
To whom my breast and arms are ever warm,
For that I love ye as the wind the trees
That holds their blossoms and their leaves in cure
And calls the utmost singing from the boughs
That ‘thout him save the aspen, were as dumb
Still shade, and bade no whisper speak the birds of
how
‘Beyond, beyond, beyond, there lies…’

And the poem ends with an ellipse, an indefinite, a mystery. Pound was 22 years old. He lived to be 87 years old. And he was relentless. One of the apexes of Pound's genius was not in his own poetry but in making translations. He was particularly great in making translations from the Middle English. In fact the reason why he was particularly great was that he was so open, so transparent. He was not there as a person as much as we are. He was transparent to the stream of consciousness which six hundred years back from 1907, back to 1307, Pound was really there. And that's why he's so great about the troubadour poets because he was more there than where he was. But the troubadour poets were not where they were. They were in the timeframe six hundred years before themselves. And when one looks at one of Pound's great translations, from the medieval classic, The Seafarer, its heyday is back in the old Anglo-Saxon at the very origins of the English poetic language - two jumps back from Pound. He was so perceptive. He was so capable of projecting himself, his personality, into that stream of subconscious that he contacted the subconscious of that stream. And in his translation of The Seafarer is one of the world's great translations from one language into another, from Anglo-Saxon into contemporary English. It's unbelievably great. Here's the beginning of it.

May I for my own self song's truth reckon,
Journey’s jargon, how I in harsh days
Hardship endured oft.
Bitter breast-cares have I abided,
Known on my keel many a care’s hold,
And dire sea-surge, and there I oft spent
Narrow nightwatch nigh the ship's head
While she tossed close to cliffs. Coldly afflicted,
My feet were by frost benumbed.
Chill its chains are; chafing sighs
Hew my heart round and hunger begot
Mere-weary mood. Lest man know not
That he on dry land loveliest liveth,
List how I, care-wretched, on ice-cold sea,
Weathered the winter, wretched outcast.
Deprived of my kinsmen;
Hung with hard ice-flakes, where hail-scur flew,
There I heard naught save the harsh sea
And ice-cold wave, at whiles the swan cries,
Did for my games the gannet’s clamor,
Sea-fowls, loudness was for me laughter,
The mews’ singing all my mead-drink.
Storms, on the stone-cliffs beaten, fell on the stern
In icy feathers; full oft the eagle screamed
With spray on his pinion.

But when it came to himself, when it came to Ezra Pound, he was increasingly a labyrinth of jumble even unto himself, which he encouraged constantly and which became a model for twentieth century culture and cultivated man. So that the cultivated person in our time prizes the ambiguity for its own sake. Not for the mystery of unity which it should more properly disclose but for the ambiguity for its own sake. Be clear and have people understand me and ridicule me because they understand me. I will hide in infinite complexity. They will be ashamed of their own ignorance and not be able to approach me. This is the thought of our time. This is the arrogance of the mind in our time. Pretend to understand the real, we’ll show you the infinity of hierarchies of the mind. The only way to the real then is if you listen to us. This is the demagogue of our time. It's said over and over again.

Cantos 52 to 71 embraced China fully and he tried to present an esoteric archetypal history of China in American poetry. He prefaced the whole Canto section with the statement, “No one is going to be content with a transliteration of Chinese names when not making a desperate effort at mnemonics or differentiating in vain hope of distinguishing one race from another. I mainly use the French form. Our European knowledge of China has come via Latin and French and at any rate the French vowels as printed have some sort of uniform connotation.” Then he gives a table and he tells us that he's going to begin with the Li Qi, as he says, the Book of Rites. And then he's going to go on through the great emperors of China, through all the various dynasties, into Genghis Khan, and right up to the present day. He's going to go up in fact to 1736 and then he's going to jump over to John Adams from Chinese history. Because one must have complexity. One must have labyrinthine mentality. One can only approach the real through this antithetical juxtaposition of everything.

And so the dematerialization of nature proceeds apace and dematerializes the mind and presents only, what we would call a ‘mystification’, not a sense of mystery, that would be romantic. And one must reject the romantic at all costs. Because the romantic conjures up the heroic. And we must not be heroic. That's the wrong tack. One must be real. One must be bare bones down to the skeleton and then the skeleton rearranged into a new man. If you walk like people walk before it's mundane. We need to be different, we need to learn to amble with our collarbones. That would be new.

So you can see this almost demonic electrocuting mentality that rises and rises and is adored and envied and argued about and criticized and used, by now four different generations of people and all their pell mell blindness embracing the ambiguity. Some Cantos were music, some Cantos were even juxtaposed like the end of Canto 84.

John Adams, the Brothers Adam
that is our norm of spirit
our [and then he gives the Chinese character for Middle] chung
whereto we may pay our
homage
Saith Micah:
Each in the name of…
So that looking at the sputtering tank of nicotine and stale whiskey
(on its way out)
Kumrad Koba remarked:
I will believe the American.
Berlin 1945
the last appearance of Winston P. M. in that connection.
e poi io dissi alla sorella
della pastorella dei suini:
e questi americani?
si conducono bene?

You get the sensation in Pound as he puts in quotations from Greek or Italian or Chinese or French. What is being disassembled is any understanding based on any traditional esthetic - it must be new, it must be unheard of. The Cantos were never finished. They trail off and at the very end fragments of Cantos yet unwritten. At the very last notes for Canto 117 and following.

For the blue flash and the moments
benedetta
The young for the old
that is tragedy
And for one beautiful day there was peace.
Brancusi's bird
in the hollow of pine trunks.
or when the snow was like sea foam
Twilit sky leaded with elm boughs.
Under the Rupe Tarpeia.
weep out your jealousies—
To make a church
or an altar to Zagreus [And then Zagreus, written in Greek] Zagreus

Son of Semele [Semele written in Greek]
Without jealousy
like the double arch of a window
Or some great colonnade.

Zagreus is a name for Dionysius, for the god of dismemberment, for the god of nature in a dismemberment mode, for a return to the primordial where all of man's structures are dissolved by the experience of the all. But unprepared, the experience of the all, does dissolve a man, dissolves civilizations and leaves them as a wasteland. In the constellation of figures that Pound brought out and evoked as much by the irascibility by which he offended them as with the courage and encouragement which he gave to them. One of the very most perceptive and greatest was T. S. Eliot. And T. S. Eliot, trying to intuitively pull together this swirl of nightmare of the New Age, produced in 1921 while he was working for a bank in London, one of the world's great poems called The Wasteland. And we're going to look at Eliot next week. And we're going to see how a whole two or three generations of poets tried to make some sense out of the labyrinth which Pound exposed actually is occurring in our time. That, like it or not, the world of ambiguity, the labyrinth of complexity that Pound writes about is not a private universe. It's in fact the very conditions under which we have had to live. It is an accurate presentation and portrayal of the twentieth century. And we'll look at Eliot next week.