Ezra Pound (1885-1972)

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Ezra Pound(1885-1972)
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• Biography
• Reception
• Poetics
• Canto 1

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Biography
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Pound and Friends
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Pound in Pisa
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Pound, late in life
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Reception
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Eliot on Pound, 1917

• Few readers were prepared to accept or
  follow the amount of erudition which entered into
  Personae and its close successor, Exultations, or
  to devote the care to reading them which they
  demand. It is here that many have been led
  astray. Pound is not one of those poets who make
  no demands of the reader and the casual reader
  of verse, disconcerted by the difference between
  Pound's poetry and that on which his taste has
  been trained, attributes his own difficulties to
  excessive scholarship on the part of the author.
  'This', he will say of some of the poems in
  Provençal form or on Provençal subjects, 'is
  archaeology it requires knowledge on the part of
  its reader, and true poetry does not require such
  knowledge.' But to display knowledge is not the
  same thing as to expect it on the part of the
  reader and of this sort of pedantry Pound is
  quite free. He is, it is true, one of the most
  learned of poets.

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Louis Untermeyer, 1919

• Pound's poems "remain for the delight of the
  cognoscenti, the delicately attuned, the
  nuance-worshippers. It is a false erudition that
  has misled Pound he mistakes 'the flicker for
  the flame.
• "The gross total of his erudition seems
  staggering, the net result infinitesimal."

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Robert Nichols, 1920

• But our author is inclined to confuse the
  profound and the obscure. The reader feels he has
  passed no mild literary examination if he can
  instantly catch every literary allusion in these
  'Three Cantos,' including, as they do, references
  to or quotations from Joics, the Tolosan, 'The
  Late Girl's Song,' of Po-Chuin (or was it
  Li-Po?--I forget), Catullus, Mallarmé, 'The
  Chronicles of the Cid,' Lopes 'Inez de Castro,'
  Doughty's 'Titans,' and Pierre Cardinal. And when
  all is over, what has been precipitated--of what
  have we become aware? Story? soul? wit?
  psychology? No, only of Mr. Pound's potential
  erudition, of an emotion chopped off short
  whenever he began, and, alas, ceased so finickly
  but so pertinently to render choice scraps of
  other poets.

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Max Bodenheim, 1922

• Coolly immersed in the meanings, deeds,
  designs, lustres, and peoples of past ages, he
  regards the present civilization only for
  moments, and then with a dryly satirical chuckle.
  His poetry is equally separated from the
  understanding and appreciation of his generation.
  The Dadaists dislike his mental coherence. and
  the conservatives feebly attack him, a little
  frightened at his erudition and vicious sneer.

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Aesthetics
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Credo

• No good poetry is ever written in a manner
  twenty years old, for to write in such a manner
  shows conclusively that the writer thinks from
  books, convention and cliché, not from real life.

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Pound on Imagism, 1913

• 1. Direct treatment of the thing whether
  subjective or objective.
• 2. To use absolutely no word that does not
  contribute to the presentation.
• 3. As regarding rhythm to compose in the
  sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence
  of a metronome.

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Spirit of Romance, 1910

• 'The apt use of metaphor, arising, as it does,
  from a swift perception of relations, is the
  hall-mark of genius' thus says Aristotle. I use
  the term 'comparison' to include metaphor, simile
  (which is a more leisurely expression of a
  kindred variety of thought), and the 'language
  beyond metaphor,' that is, the more compressed or
  elliptical expression of metaphorical perception,
  such as antithesis suggested or implied in verbs
  and adjectives for we find adjectives of two
  sorts, thus, adjectives of pure quality, as
  white, cold, ancient and adjectives which are
  comparative, as lordly.

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Review of Poesies, by Jean Cocteau1921

• The life of a village is narrative you
  have not been there three weeks before you know
  that in the revolution et cetera, and when M le
  Comte et cetera, and so forth. In a city the
  visual impressions succeed each other, overlap,
  overcross, they are cinematographic, but they
  are not a simple linear sequence. They are often
  a flood of nouns without verbal relations.

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Canto I

• "But thou, O King, I bid remember me, unwept,
  unburied,
• "Heap up mine arms, be tomb by sea-bord, and
  inscribed
• "A man of no fortune, and with a name to come.
• And set my oar up, that I swung mid fellows."
• And he strong with the blood, said then
  "Odysseus
• "Shalt return through spiteful Neptune, over dark
  seas,
• "Lose all companions." And then Anticlea came.
• Lie quiet Divus. I mean, that is Andreas Divus,
• In officina Wecheli, 1538, out of Homer.
• And he sailed, by Sirens and thence outward and
  away
• And unto Circe.