WEBVTT 00:01.950 --> 00:06.590 Pound. How many of you have ever read 00:06.586 --> 00:11.766 Pound before? Some? Yes. 00:11.770 --> 00:17.600 Unlike with Frost, you are unlikely to have read 00:17.600 --> 00:23.060 much Pound, I think, up to this point in your 00:23.059 --> 00:28.089 educations, and probably you are unlikely 00:28.094 --> 00:34.444 to have much of a view of him, in contrast to Frost or even 00:34.444 --> 00:39.734 Yeats, who cuts such a particular and 00:39.726 --> 00:43.446 remarkable public figure. 00:43.450 --> 00:49.700 Pound can be hard to put together, he can be hard to get 00:49.696 --> 00:53.426 a picture of. What is Pound like? 00:53.430 --> 00:57.370 What was he like? 00:57.370 --> 01:03.760 Well, this is a hard question for some of the same reasons 01:03.756 --> 01:09.896 that the poems are hard; that is, Pound's poetry 01:09.903 --> 01:17.493 projects no determinate identity, no determinate poetic 01:17.494 --> 01:26.074 voice, unlike those distinctive voices of Yeats and Frost. 01:26.069 --> 01:32.259 Instead, in Pound you encounter a multiplicity of identities, 01:32.256 --> 01:35.036 a multiplicity of voices. 01:35.040 --> 01:38.450 There's an interesting contradiction in this. 01:38.450 --> 01:43.500 Pound is a kind of fierce individualist. 01:43.500 --> 01:47.510 He believes in, he wants to honor – as a 01:47.513 --> 01:53.293 political thinker and as a poet, as a reader – he wants to 01:53.288 --> 01:58.768 honor a heroic and sovereign idea of the individual. 01:58.769 --> 02:02.089 At the same time, in his writing, 02:02.087 --> 02:06.957 Pound repeatedly divests himself of identity, 02:06.959 --> 02:12.479 of particular identity, in order to enter or to be 02:12.480 --> 02:17.320 entered by other identities, other poets, 02:17.324 --> 02:21.234 other voices, creators, heroes. 02:21.229 --> 02:27.389 This is what he wants to give us access to as readers. 02:27.389 --> 02:32.689 Pound's centrality in modern poetry repeats the kind of 02:32.694 --> 02:35.154 paradox I'm describing. 02:35.150 --> 02:39.860 That is, he is the one poet on the syllabus whom all the other 02:39.859 --> 02:43.409 poets knew, had some kind of relationship with, 02:43.410 --> 02:45.340 some kind of contact. 02:45.340 --> 02:50.170 On the one hand, Pound was an individual of 02:50.169 --> 02:55.229 extraordinary personal charisma and force, 02:55.229 --> 03:00.099 someone who liked to, and who had the power to tell 03:00.098 --> 03:05.478 other people what to do, tell other people what to think 03:05.481 --> 03:07.231 and what to value. 03:07.229 --> 03:11.279 On the other hand, when you study Pound, 03:11.276 --> 03:16.356 you're studying someone remarkably open to others, 03:16.360 --> 03:19.060 in friendship, as a reader, 03:19.058 --> 03:24.208 as a thinker. He's someone who openly seeks 03:24.208 --> 03:26.618 alliance with others. 03:26.620 --> 03:32.140 He had, as we already talked about in our first lecture, 03:32.143 --> 03:35.863 an important relationship to Frost. 03:35.860 --> 03:40.400 You remember Frost speaking of his sometime friend Pound who 03:40.395 --> 03:42.615 wants to write, as he puts it, 03:42.624 --> 03:44.704 "caviare to the crowd"? 03:44.699 --> 03:49.359 Well, Pound is credited, as I also suggested, 03:49.357 --> 03:53.377 with in many ways modernizing Yeats, 03:53.379 --> 04:00.239 helping Yeats become the particular voice that he did in 04:00.241 --> 04:03.361 the teens and twenties. 04:03.360 --> 04:07.170 In the Beinecke, there's a little letter, 04:07.174 --> 04:12.424 a handwritten pencil letter from Pound to Hart Crane, 04:12.419 --> 04:15.159 which Hart Crane received when he was eighteen, 04:15.158 --> 04:18.428 I think, around your age, after he had sent his poems to 04:18.433 --> 04:20.163 The Little Review. 04:20.160 --> 04:26.780 And this is a letter from Pound which says about Crane's poems: 04:26.780 --> 04:29.130 "It is all very egg. 04:29.130 --> 04:31.810 There is perhaps better egg. 04:31.810 --> 04:34.840 But you haven't the ghost of a setting hen or an incubator 04:34.839 --> 04:35.529 about you." 04:35.530 --> 04:40.050 04:40.050 --> 04:41.850 I'm not sure what that means. 04:41.850 --> 04:47.990 But this was a rejection slip, and Crane kept it all his life, 04:47.992 --> 04:53.732 like a kind of diploma that in some way he was a member of 04:53.732 --> 04:59.372 modern poetry because he had gotten a rejection from Ezra 04:59.371 --> 05:03.751 Pound. In fact, Crane's first book, 05:03.752 --> 05:09.642 if you go over to the Beinecke, and you turn it over, 05:09.644 --> 05:11.914 it has a picture. 05:11.910 --> 05:15.280 It has a portrait, not of Hart Crane but of Ezra 05:15.280 --> 05:18.870 Pound, because it has an ad for Pound and his book, 05:18.865 --> 05:23.425 Personae. And I like this fact because 05:23.427 --> 05:29.007 it's representative, I think, of Pound's importance 05:29.011 --> 05:35.941 and dominance and prominence in the poetic culture of the 1920s 05:35.936 --> 05:40.606 and '30s. He was part of the world that a 05:40.606 --> 05:46.516 younger poet like Hart Crane had to get to know and make his 05:46.517 --> 05:50.247 place in. One of the famous books about 05:50.248 --> 05:53.128 modern poetry, one by Hugh Kenner, 05:53.125 --> 05:58.435 is called simply The Pound Era, as if modern poetry was 05:58.443 --> 06:00.713 all about Ezra Pound. 06:00.709 --> 06:09.069 Ezra Pound, born in Hailey, Idaho in 1908. 06:09.069 --> 06:14.789 I like it that this wildly cosmopolitan expatriate 06:14.794 --> 06:18.654 intelligence was born in Idaho. 06:18.650 --> 06:22.380 He left the United States. 06:22.380 --> 06:25.750 Oh, he wasn't born in 1908. 06:25.750 --> 06:28.300 When was Pound born? 06:28.300 --> 06:31.260 He left the United States in 1908. 06:31.259 --> 06:35.459 Look in your--yes, he was born in 1885, 06:35.455 --> 06:38.725 thank you. He left the U.S. 06:38.730 --> 06:45.560 in 1908 and lived mostly in London where at that point he 06:45.556 --> 06:52.376 acted as the foreign editor of Poetry magazine and 06:52.383 --> 06:58.823 The Little Review, two Little Magazines that I've 06:58.815 --> 07:03.995 shown you pictures of and that were important in bringing 07:03.995 --> 07:07.505 modern poetry to the United States. 07:07.509 --> 07:10.039 Pound is the central figure in that process. 07:10.040 --> 07:14.730 He goes out and finds and interprets and explains and 07:14.731 --> 07:19.781 even, in the case of Imagism, names the poetry that he is 07:19.782 --> 07:22.762 bringing to American readers. 07:22.759 --> 07:26.149 He is the entrepreneur, if you like, 07:26.150 --> 07:32.060 behind Imagism and then when Amy Lowell takes over Imagism. 07:32.060 --> 07:37.960 Vorticism becomes his thing and the magazine Blast 07:37.958 --> 07:41.538 becomes, for a while, his organ. 07:41.540 --> 07:46.610 He writes manifestos, he organizes groups, 07:46.609 --> 07:51.059 all the time abandoning them, too. 07:51.060 --> 07:56.150 His poem Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, 07:56.146 --> 08:02.746 composed in 1920, looks back on this whole period 08:02.746 --> 08:10.306 in London and is a kind of summary of the poetry of this 08:10.308 --> 08:15.668 period and his involvement in it. 08:15.670 --> 08:21.520 And it is itself a kind of early model for another great 08:21.521 --> 08:26.421 poem, The Waste Land, which Eliot would, 08:26.415 --> 08:31.305 as he composed it, bring to Pound to edit. 08:31.310 --> 08:34.340 And we'll talk about that process in a bit. 08:34.340 --> 08:38.680 In 1924 Pound moved to Italy. 08:38.679 --> 08:45.169 There, he became urgently concerned with economic reform, 08:45.165 --> 08:50.835 in the United States and in the West generally. 08:50.840 --> 08:55.840 He is in this period working on his great poem, 08:55.842 --> 09:00.632 his long poem which I'll be discussing today, 09:00.627 --> 09:03.017 The Cantos. 09:03.019 --> 09:10.189 He became increasingly involved in Italian Fascism, 09:10.185 --> 09:17.635 which he found a powerful vehicle of his own economic 09:17.637 --> 09:21.217 ideas, in particular. 09:21.220 --> 09:27.750 He made broadcasts in support of Mussolini's government, 09:27.750 --> 09:33.920 on Fascist radio in the 1940s, and in 1945 at the conclusion 09:33.923 --> 09:38.433 of the War was arrested for treason by the United States 09:38.425 --> 09:42.525 Army. The charge of treason was 09:42.527 --> 09:50.937 dropped when he was found to be insane and hospitalized at St. 09:50.938 --> 09:56.448 Elizabeth's Hospital in Washington, D.C., 09:56.453 --> 10:03.903 where he would in a very peculiar way hold court, 10:03.899 --> 10:11.699 a great man of letters at the center of the American capitol, 10:11.700 --> 10:19.370 entertaining Elizabeth Bishop and other figures whom we will 10:19.370 --> 10:23.420 read. At the time of Pound's 10:23.415 --> 10:29.815 institutionalization, his poem The Pisan 10:29.820 --> 10:33.190 Cantos, a late stage of The 10:33.190 --> 10:37.390 Cantos, was selected as the first winner of the Bollingen 10:37.389 --> 10:41.509 Prize, an award initially given by the 10:41.513 --> 10:43.883 Library of Congress. 10:43.879 --> 10:49.979 When Pound, traitor to the nation, was awarded this prize 10:49.975 --> 10:56.235 for the best American poetry, an enormous literary and 10:56.243 --> 11:03.123 cultural controversy sprang up, which people go on arguing 11:03.115 --> 11:08.525 about. Well, here is a poet who by his 11:08.531 --> 11:15.241 own declaration and example seems to be a Fascist 11:15.238 --> 11:19.568 sympathizer, an anti-Semite. 11:19.570 --> 11:25.390 Could he write great poetry, even great poetry that 11:25.394 --> 11:30.874 expressed Fascistic and anti-Semitical views? 11:30.870 --> 11:35.710 If he could write great poetry of that kind, 11:35.714 --> 11:38.084 should we honor it? 11:38.080 --> 11:43.910 If he was mad, is there some way in which his 11:43.913 --> 11:47.363 poetry might not be mad? 11:47.360 --> 11:52.500 Well, these are questions that have persisted and as I say 11:52.496 --> 11:55.556 people go on arguing about them. 11:55.559 --> 12:00.819 The controversy created so much trouble the Library of Congress 12:00.823 --> 12:06.003 didn't want anything to do with the award anymore and it moved 12:06.001 --> 12:10.051 to Yale, and the Beinecke Library has 12:10.052 --> 12:15.902 been administrating this, arguably the most prestigious 12:15.902 --> 12:19.262 of poetry prizes ever since. 12:19.259 --> 12:22.569 And in fact, the judging for this year's 12:22.570 --> 12:27.490 award is going strong at the moment and there will be a new 12:27.493 --> 12:30.383 winner at the end of the week. 12:30.379 --> 12:37.269 Well, Pound's anti-capitalism, his economic ideas, 12:37.270 --> 12:45.710 I think, are in some ways the intellectual origin of both his 12:45.707 --> 12:53.157 interest in Fascism and the anti-Semitic views that he 12:53.160 --> 12:58.170 expresses, both in poetry and often in 12:58.165 --> 13:00.985 prose. Anti-capitalism: 13:00.990 --> 13:07.980 for Pound this derives from really a specific cultural 13:07.979 --> 13:10.689 setting; that is, late 13:10.694 --> 13:15.754 nineteenth-century American culture, a culture where, 13:15.753 --> 13:19.453 as Pound experienced it and saw it, 13:19.450 --> 13:22.380 art was conceived as a decorative art, 13:22.376 --> 13:27.356 subject to the editorial tastes of popular magazines like The 13:27.360 --> 13:30.050 Atlantic, Harper's; 13:30.049 --> 13:36.939 a culture in which poetry was a kind of commodity, 13:36.937 --> 13:44.667 which status destroyed the potential for originality and 13:44.669 --> 13:49.729 which subordinated art to money. 13:49.730 --> 13:53.400 When Pound expatriates, when he leaves the United 13:53.404 --> 13:56.934 States, he's fleeing not only America but he's, 13:56.926 --> 14:01.056 as he understands it, he's fleeing American money. 14:01.059 --> 14:06.499 And what he is entering, what he's going to, 14:06.500 --> 14:12.700 he conceives as a particular kind of tradition, 14:12.700 --> 14:19.180 a kind of historical community, which he describes in that 14:19.182 --> 14:27.152 first quotation on your handout; a quotation in which Pound 14:27.149 --> 14:35.189 replies in a wonderfully haughty way to the motto of 14:35.190 --> 14:41.490 Poetry magazine, a motto that comes from the 14:41.494 --> 14:45.744 great American poet Whitman: "To have great poetry, 14:45.740 --> 14:48.530 there must be great audiences, too." 14:48.529 --> 14:52.419 To which Pound says, "It is true that the great 14:52.420 --> 14:57.410 artist always has a great audience, even in his lifetime; 14:57.409 --> 15:02.899 but it is not the vulgo but rather the spirits of irony 15:02.899 --> 15:08.119 and of destiny and of humor, the great authors of the past, 15:08.120 --> 15:10.280 sitting beside him." 15:10.279 --> 15:16.129 Pound, I think, in an almost literal sense 15:16.134 --> 15:24.854 conceived of his audience as a kind of distinguished community 15:24.845 --> 15:31.695 of readers and writers existing across time, 15:31.700 --> 15:36.200 a kind of trans-historical community of artists; 15:36.200 --> 15:39.910 ideas that we'll want to compare with Eliot's ideas of 15:39.909 --> 15:43.479 tradition, which are related but a little different, 15:43.480 --> 15:44.460 next week. 15:44.460 --> 15:47.760 15:47.759 --> 15:54.929 Let me move to the second quotation, also from the same 15:54.928 --> 16:02.048 period, 1914. Pound says, "There's no use in 16:02.054 --> 16:10.964 a strong impulse if it is nearly all lost in bungling 16:10.955 --> 16:16.085 transmission and technique. 16:16.090 --> 16:22.000 This obnoxious word that I'm always brandishing about means 16:22.000 --> 16:27.300 nothing but a transmission of the impulse intact." 16:27.299 --> 16:33.659 In Pound, there is an emphasis, as we saw last time in looking 16:33.660 --> 16:38.040 at his rules for writing Imagist poetry, 16:38.039 --> 16:42.689 there is an emphasis on the priority of poetic technique and 16:42.694 --> 16:45.854 the importance of technical knowledge. 16:45.850 --> 16:50.640 But, as this quotation suggests, and it's important to 16:50.636 --> 16:54.606 keep in mind, technique in Pound is always in 16:54.610 --> 17:01.270 the service of intensity, immediacy, or what he calls 17:01.273 --> 17:07.563 "the impulse." There are further quotations 17:07.564 --> 17:13.634 from Pound describing his technical aims. 17:13.630 --> 17:21.670 As I suggested a few minutes ago, Pound moves on from Imagism 17:21.665 --> 17:25.545 to what he calls Vorticism. 17:25.549 --> 17:31.809 Now, instead of wanting to get at a poetry that is centered on 17:31.806 --> 17:38.266 the image, he imagines a poetry centered on now "the vortex," as 17:38.268 --> 17:41.238 he calls it; and there's a kind of 17:41.244 --> 17:44.744 definition of the vortex there in the third quotation. 17:44.740 --> 17:50.760 Not so much later he would replace the idea of the vortex 17:50.759 --> 17:56.349 with another related image, which is the ideogram. 17:56.349 --> 18:01.709 We talked about some of Pound's translations from the Chinese 18:01.714 --> 18:03.954 and Japanese last time. 18:03.950 --> 18:09.550 Pound was interested in Chinese writing systems as--Well, 18:09.553 --> 18:14.963 you can imagine how the ideogram appealed to a poet who 18:14.956 --> 18:20.356 wanted to imagine the poem as an image of a thing. 18:20.359 --> 18:28.439 Here, as Pound understood it, not always with superb 18:28.444 --> 18:35.424 scholarly precision, the Chinese word was, 18:35.420 --> 18:40.590 in fact, an image of a thing, and this is very much a kind of 18:40.591 --> 18:45.501 aesthetic ideal for Pound who wanted language to give us a 18:45.503 --> 18:50.333 kind of immediate access to the things of the world. 18:50.329 --> 18:59.479 Well, I asked you to read for class today one of Pound's poems 18:59.480 --> 19:04.660 from the teens, one of his famous poems, 19:04.659 --> 19:11.339 a poem called "The Seafarer," identified in your RIS packet as 19:11.341 --> 19:14.191 "From the Anglo-Saxon." 19:14.190 --> 19:17.180 I'll read just the beginning of it for you. 19:17.180 --> 19:20.260 19:20.259 --> 19:22.499 May I, for my own self, 19:22.500 --> 19:26.100 song's truth reckon, Journey's jargon, 19:26.102 --> 19:30.992 how I in harsh days Hardship endured oft. 19:30.990 --> 19:34.060 Bitter breast-cares have I abided, 19:34.059 --> 19:37.309 Known on my keel many a care's hold, 19:37.309 --> 19:42.239 And dire sea-surge, and there I oft spent 19:42.240 --> 19:45.090 Narrow nightwatch nigh the ship's head 19:45.089 --> 19:47.879 While she tossed close to cliffs. 19:47.880 --> 19:52.900 Coldly afflicted, My feet were by frost benumbed. 19:52.900 --> 19:56.700 Chill its chains are; chafing sighs 19:56.700 --> 19:59.590 Hew my heart round and hunger begot 19:59.590 --> 20:03.630 Mere-weary mood. Lest man know not 20:03.630 --> 20:06.690 That he on dry land loveliest liveth, 20:06.690 --> 20:10.280 List how I, care-wretched, on ice-cold sea, 20:10.279 --> 20:13.499 Weathered the winter, wretched outcast 20:13.500 --> 20:17.540 Deprived of my kinsman; And so on. 20:17.540 --> 20:21.730 Iambic pentameter? 20:21.730 --> 20:23.280 You've been working on it. 20:23.280 --> 20:28.710 No, it's not. What you're listening to is 20:28.713 --> 20:30.693 something very different. 20:30.690 --> 20:36.560 The sound is rough, like Frost. 20:36.559 --> 20:42.559 And too, like Frost, in this poetry Pound is writing 20:42.561 --> 20:47.741 against the beautiful, sonorous forms of late 20:47.739 --> 20:51.269 nineteenth-century poetry. 20:51.269 --> 20:54.099 But Pound's poem, unlike Frost, 20:54.098 --> 20:59.098 is the very furthest from the vernacular that we could 20:59.096 --> 21:03.226 possibly get. What we have here is Pound 21:03.232 --> 21:09.082 translating from the Anglo-Saxon and providing a contemporary 21:09.075 --> 21:13.745 equivalent of Old English alliterative verse, 21:13.750 --> 21:19.750 a particular verse form; a dead poetic form you could 21:19.748 --> 21:24.508 say, although Pound revives it and, in fact, 21:24.506 --> 21:30.256 brings it into usage in twentieth-century poetry. 21:30.259 --> 21:35.559 This verse form--I've given you John Hollander's helpful 21:35.555 --> 21:41.515 self-descriptive definition at the bottom of your handout where 21:41.524 --> 21:45.284 Hollander says: The oldest English 21:45.277 --> 21:48.667 accented meter Of four, unfailing, 21:48.666 --> 21:53.266 fairly audible Strongly struck stresses seldom 21:53.270 --> 21:56.170 Attended to anything other than Definite downbeats… 21:56.170 --> 22:00.450 In other words, in Old English verse you don't 22:00.448 --> 22:05.538 count syllables. You just count strong stresses. 22:05.539 --> 22:08.839 And there are, as a rule, four per line, 22:08.839 --> 22:11.889 and the lines, like Hollander's here, 22:11.885 --> 22:17.295 like Pound's that I just read, tend to divide in the middle. 22:17.299 --> 22:22.069 There's a caesura that breaks the line in two, 22:22.065 --> 22:26.085 and Hollander goes on describing it. 22:26.089 --> 22:33.029 In addition to these strong stresses, the line is held 22:33.027 --> 22:41.137 together by alliterative links that join the words strongly and 22:41.142 --> 22:45.202 audibly across the caesura. 22:45.200 --> 22:48.870 22:48.870 --> 22:50.740 Pound is an avant-garde poet. 22:50.740 --> 22:53.030 He's an experimentalist. 22:53.029 --> 22:57.449 Here we have the strange and very interesting spectacle of 22:57.450 --> 23:04.740 the self-consciously modernist, avant-gardist artist writing in 23:04.736 --> 23:09.306 an archaic, dead poetic form. 23:09.309 --> 23:12.979 In the teens, Pound is writing a kind of 23:12.978 --> 23:17.868 experimental poetry that in many different ways seeks 23:17.869 --> 23:21.819 alternatives to nineteenth-century norms of 23:21.820 --> 23:27.230 poetic practice, seeks alternatives to romantic 23:27.229 --> 23:32.349 sentiment, poetic diction, smooth musicality, 23:32.349 --> 23:38.259 all of the virtues and vices that you find in early Yeats. 23:38.259 --> 23:45.039 What he does is open poetry to a range of styles and forms, 23:45.035 --> 23:50.635 many of them archaic, many of them from languages 23:50.643 --> 23:53.333 outside of English. 23:53.329 --> 23:58.389 You see Pound writing his version of the Provençal 23:58.387 --> 24:02.127 troubadour song and canzone. 24:02.130 --> 24:07.290 We talked last time about Pound's version of Chinese or 24:07.294 --> 24:12.324 Japanese poems. He writes his own versions of 24:12.317 --> 24:16.297 Roman poetry or here Old English. 24:16.299 --> 24:23.869 Through technical means, through Pound's technique, 24:23.871 --> 24:30.081 he gains access to cultures and voices. 24:30.079 --> 24:35.289 He revives past voices, like the seafarer poet's; 24:35.289 --> 24:39.729 revives and implicitly identifies with them. 24:39.730 --> 24:47.720 Here is an expatriate poet writing in the voice of the 24:47.721 --> 24:53.801 Anglo-Saxon wanderer, a figure deprived of his 24:53.798 --> 24:59.448 kinsmen, who is out in the elements, far from land, 24:59.450 --> 25:03.790 far from his nation and home. 25:03.789 --> 25:11.759 Writing in the voice of the seafarer, Pound allies himself 25:11.763 --> 25:17.413 with what is historically prior, and, in fact, 25:17.406 --> 25:21.016 in English he allies himself with what is historically 25:21.019 --> 25:25.529 primary, with the oldest English poetry. 25:25.529 --> 25:30.739 Here, he claims it for himself, carries it forward or, 25:30.738 --> 25:35.648 as he would put it, transmits the impulse in an act 25:35.652 --> 25:39.412 of translation. Pound's slogan, 25:39.406 --> 25:45.186 "make it new," a kind of motto for modernism; 25:45.190 --> 25:52.240 it's important to hear that injunction, to "make it new," as 25:52.241 --> 25:58.811 a specifically historical mission to revive and transmit 25:58.814 --> 26:02.284 the past in a living way. 26:02.279 --> 26:07.569 The phrase itself, "make it new," was translated 26:07.568 --> 26:14.658 from the ancient Chinese and is itself in that sense an instance 26:14.657 --> 26:17.467 of what it describes. 26:17.470 --> 26:24.330 Pound's conception of the poet is as one who brings the 26:24.331 --> 26:30.431 impulse, as he calls it, forward, across time; 26:30.430 --> 26:35.270 does so in a kind of imaginative act of seafaring, 26:35.268 --> 26:37.738 if you like, leaving home, 26:37.736 --> 26:40.596 going out, crossing over. 26:40.600 --> 26:44.280 26:44.279 --> 26:51.569 Pound is a distinctive and, in a sense, quite peculiar 26:51.569 --> 26:54.849 thing. He is a kind of visionary 26:54.853 --> 26:59.103 scholar. He is an epic poet of the 26:59.103 --> 27:02.333 library. There's a certain kind of 27:02.329 --> 27:06.929 contradiction in this; that is, a contradiction or 27:06.932 --> 27:13.222 tension at any rate between Pound's drive towards immediacy, 27:13.220 --> 27:23.040 towards his wish to convey an emotional impulse and the highly 27:23.039 --> 27:28.189 mediated nature of his vision. 27:28.190 --> 27:37.780 Pound's poetry is full of learned and abstruse reference. 27:37.779 --> 27:39.969 Unlike in The Norton Anthology, 27:39.973 --> 27:43.533 if you pick up a volume of Pound you'll find no footnotes. 27:43.530 --> 27:46.240 He just gives you the thing. 27:46.240 --> 27:50.600 He gives you no help with it because, I think, 27:50.602 --> 27:56.032 there is an intention in the poetry to somehow give you a 27:56.030 --> 28:02.140 kind of unmediated access to the materials that Pound is drawing 28:02.137 --> 28:04.797 on. He wants us to feel the 28:04.803 --> 28:09.723 excitement he feels when he sits down in the library and opens a 28:09.716 --> 28:12.426 book. Directness, intensity, 28:12.433 --> 28:16.713 purity, immediacy: these are all Pound's aims, 28:16.714 --> 28:22.424 and he achieves them through an intensely mediated display of 28:22.422 --> 28:23.852 technique. 28:23.850 --> 28:27.620 28:27.619 --> 28:33.419 Well, you might contrast, again, Frost. 28:33.420 --> 28:39.780 Frost is always concealing, as it were, his expertise, 28:39.784 --> 28:46.394 his technical knowledge, whereas Pound is always showing 28:46.389 --> 28:49.589 it. In the case of "The Seafarer," 28:49.590 --> 28:53.370 Pound has used Sweet's Anglo-Saxon Reader, 28:53.367 --> 28:56.827 his college textbook, to write this poem. 28:56.829 --> 28:59.979 It's one he's taken to Europe with him. 28:59.980 --> 29:05.370 Now, there are several consequences for all this. 29:05.369 --> 29:09.949 One: in Pound, there is the idea that there 29:09.948 --> 29:15.288 are no dead forms, there are no dead languages. 29:15.289 --> 29:19.939 There are only derivations, variations, translations, 29:19.937 --> 29:25.297 through which the past is continuously being made present. 29:25.300 --> 29:28.460 29:28.460 --> 29:32.150 Two: that is, the past is continuously 29:32.148 --> 29:37.728 available for those who can recognize it and seize it, 29:37.730 --> 29:43.180 specifically through technical powers – technical powers 29:43.181 --> 29:49.211 which yet in the process must be transcended in order to achieve 29:49.207 --> 29:53.987 the kind of immediacy and power that he seeks. 29:53.990 --> 29:59.990 In effect, Pound makes technique a form of inspiration. 29:59.990 --> 30:05.030 This is an interesting turn in literary history. 30:05.029 --> 30:10.699 The visionary poet in Pound is a scholar poet. 30:10.700 --> 30:16.370 Literary technique is in Pound a secular means of evoking 30:16.369 --> 30:22.039 literary inspiration – literary inspiration in the form 30:22.039 --> 30:27.439 of prior literature, prior literature seen and felt 30:27.440 --> 30:31.890 as sacred; as sacred, not as in Milton, 30:31.885 --> 30:38.835 a divine authority but rather an authority to be recognized 30:38.835 --> 30:42.665 and felt and seized in books. 30:42.670 --> 30:46.600 The footnote, the scholarly index, 30:46.599 --> 30:52.549 the library archive: these are the muses that Pound 30:52.553 --> 30:56.403 appeals to. And the used bookstore: 30:56.400 --> 31:00.610 these are the places that his poems come from. 31:00.609 --> 31:07.049 The result is a body of work that is always returning us, 31:07.049 --> 31:10.499 its readers, to its sources. 31:10.500 --> 31:19.820 In the very first lecture I referred to what I see as two 31:19.815 --> 31:28.835 very general and different, competing drives or forces in 31:28.841 --> 31:33.191 modern poetry: one centripetal, 31:33.187 --> 31:41.587 the other centrifugal – one a kind of will on the part of 31:41.590 --> 31:47.530 modern poets to order poetry itself; 31:47.529 --> 31:55.079 on the other hand, a will to order the world, 31:55.083 --> 32:00.443 order society. The artist must be concerned 32:00.442 --> 32:04.362 with art's own problems, on the one hand. 32:04.359 --> 32:08.149 On the other hand, in Pound and in others, 32:08.154 --> 32:12.874 the artist is a kind of legislator, to use Shelley's 32:12.874 --> 32:18.164 image. He has a truth that he wants to 32:18.164 --> 32:24.504 promulgate that will order society properly. 32:24.500 --> 32:30.150 Pound embodies these two drives, as I'm calling them, 32:30.154 --> 32:34.074 more clearly, better than anybody, 32:34.069 --> 32:38.459 and they're part of his interest and power, 32:38.458 --> 32:43.158 and some of the challenge that he gives us, 32:43.160 --> 32:49.460 both aesthetic challenges and moral and political ones, 32:49.455 --> 32:53.065 as we think about his career. 32:53.069 --> 32:57.499 On the one hand, in Pound there's a kind of 32:57.502 --> 33:04.152 drive to identify that which is most essential to literature and 33:04.150 --> 33:09.110 to tell Pound's readers how to write poems. 33:09.109 --> 33:13.709 This is the Pound who wrote those remarks about Imagism that 33:13.714 --> 33:15.904 we talked about last time. 33:15.900 --> 33:20.000 On the other hand, there is the Pound who wants to 33:19.999 --> 33:25.309 extend the reach of literature, who wants to--who writes 33:25.312 --> 33:30.522 letters to statesmen, who goes on Fascist radio to 33:30.522 --> 33:34.672 tell the world how things should be. 33:34.670 --> 33:39.840 This is also the poet who in his poem The Cantos 33:39.843 --> 33:44.633 wished to create a poem that would, as he calls it, 33:44.633 --> 33:49.423 include history. What an ambition, right? 33:49.420 --> 33:53.320 Extraordinary. So, on the one hand, 33:53.317 --> 33:58.277 you have the poet of "In a Station of the Metro," the 33:58.277 --> 34:03.847 shortest poem in modern poetry, and then you have the poet of 34:03.850 --> 34:07.390 The Cantos, the longest poem in modern 34:07.386 --> 34:11.266 poetry. Pound is both of these things. 34:11.269 --> 34:15.609 And these impulses that we see in that poem, 34:15.610 --> 34:19.950 in that short poem and in that long poem, 34:19.949 --> 34:26.979 they don't just compete in him, they exist, I think, 34:26.979 --> 34:31.389 in some kind of collaboration. 34:31.389 --> 34:38.229 "In a Station of the Metro" identifies the image as the 34:38.225 --> 34:43.945 primary unit of poetry, and in Pound's practice it 34:43.946 --> 34:49.846 becomes a kind of building block for larger forms and for the 34:49.845 --> 34:53.075 epic itself. He says here, 34:53.084 --> 34:58.114 on your handout, in a letter to Joyce: 34:58.105 --> 35:05.565 "I have begun an endless poem, of no known category. 35:05.570 --> 35:12.580 Phanopoeia or something or other, all about everything… I 35:12.579 --> 35:16.809 wonder what you will make of it." 35:16.809 --> 35:21.279 Well "phanopoeia" means specifically image-making, 35:21.277 --> 35:26.657 and you can understand The Cantos as they unfold as a 35:26.657 --> 35:33.557 kind of series of Imagist poems, as the image becomes this 35:33.555 --> 35:41.935 fertile principle that produces and generates more and more 35:41.942 --> 35:46.572 images, more and more voices. 35:46.570 --> 35:54.330 The Cantos are, he says, "of no known 35:54.325 --> 35:58.235 category." It's true, it's hard to 35:58.237 --> 36:02.647 identify the genre of The Cantos, although I've been 36:02.646 --> 36:04.846 calling it an epic so far. 36:04.849 --> 36:10.999 There's a sense in which in each canto Pound is inventing 36:10.998 --> 36:17.258 the form of the poem anew, inventing it in response to the 36:17.256 --> 36:20.436 demands of new materials. 36:20.440 --> 36:25.220 The way to understand this great and maddening and somewhat 36:25.221 --> 36:30.251 mad poem, which is one of the great works of modern poetry, 36:30.250 --> 36:35.300 from which we're reading just the smallest fragment--one way 36:35.295 --> 36:40.165 to understand it is as the record of one man's reading, 36:40.170 --> 36:46.380 one man's encounter with many voices and his incorporation of 36:46.379 --> 36:51.449 them and engagement and conversation with them. 36:51.449 --> 36:56.459 The title of the poem is worth perhaps dwelling on for a 36:56.456 --> 37:01.186 moment: The Cantos – "the songs," really. 37:01.190 --> 37:02.120 That's what it means. 37:02.119 --> 37:06.249 The title foregrounds literary activity itself, 37:06.247 --> 37:10.197 foregrounds acts of singing, which are here, 37:10.203 --> 37:14.583 as Pound imagines it, a kind of renewable practice or 37:14.584 --> 37:20.064 process that can't be reduced to a particular image or symbol. 37:20.059 --> 37:22.739 So, in that sense, this poem is unlike The 37:22.742 --> 37:25.062 Waste Land or The Bridge, 37:25.059 --> 37:30.439 which produced these specific, central symbols around which 37:30.444 --> 37:35.184 all of the poem's ideas and images are organized. 37:35.179 --> 37:40.619 Pound instead gives us something more like a process. 37:40.619 --> 37:45.439 Pound, as I say, spoke of it as a poem including 37:45.443 --> 37:48.663 history. Well, this makes it sound as if 37:48.656 --> 37:52.676 the poem were larger than history, somehow a kind of frame 37:52.678 --> 37:56.768 for history that would help us understand and order it. 37:56.769 --> 38:01.379 Well, maybe Pound wished this but that's not what he produced. 38:01.380 --> 38:05.200 The poem lacks an organizing view of history, 38:05.196 --> 38:10.136 such as you find in Milton or Virgil or Homer or Dante. 38:10.139 --> 38:13.129 It would be, therefore, much more accurate 38:13.134 --> 38:17.084 to call it a poem that is in some sense continuous with 38:17.079 --> 38:19.489 history, that's like history. 38:19.489 --> 38:23.849 In that sense, a poem that is structurally 38:23.845 --> 38:27.175 unbounded. This is, I think, 38:27.175 --> 38:33.705 the view of history it projects: history not as a story 38:33.705 --> 38:39.625 of progress or Yeatsian apocalypse and cycles, 38:39.630 --> 38:43.420 but history rather as something like the poem itself, 38:43.415 --> 38:46.905 something that accumulates and repeats itself, 38:46.909 --> 38:51.379 with variations and without a definite aim in view. 38:51.380 --> 38:56.060 History, in this sense, is something that can be 38:56.062 --> 39:01.242 entered but not begun, and it can't ever be completed 39:01.244 --> 39:05.744 either. And this is true of this poem: 39:05.739 --> 39:08.439 And then went down to the ship, 39:08.440 --> 39:12.320 Set keel to breakers, forth on the godly sea, 39:12.319 --> 39:15.429 and We set up mast and sail on that 39:15.434 --> 39:18.674 swart ship, Bore sheep aboard her, 39:18.670 --> 39:22.570 and our bodies also Heavy with weeping, 39:22.574 --> 39:27.604 and winds from sternward Bore us onward with bellying 39:27.599 --> 39:30.069 canvas, Circe's this craft, 39:30.073 --> 39:32.383 the trim-coifed goddess. 39:32.380 --> 39:35.840 Then sat we amidships, wind jamming the tiller, 39:35.840 --> 39:39.740 Thus with stretched sail, we went over sea till day's 39:39.739 --> 39:42.049 end. Sun to his slumber, 39:42.053 --> 39:46.843 shadows o'er all the ocean, Came we then to the bounds of 39:46.836 --> 39:49.576 deepest water, To the Kimmerian lands, 39:49.582 --> 39:53.242 and peopled cities Covered with close-webbed mist, 39:53.244 --> 39:55.914 unpierced ever With glitter of sun-rays 39:55.909 --> 40:00.359 Nor with stars stretched, nor looking back from heaven 40:00.360 --> 40:04.370 Swartest night stretched over wretched men there. 40:04.369 --> 40:11.199 The ocean flowing backward, came we then to the place 40:11.200 --> 40:17.070 Aforesaid by Circe. When I was a student I said to 40:17.071 --> 40:22.561 my teacher, "I don't really get Pound and it's not very 40:22.563 --> 40:24.703 beautiful either." 40:24.699 --> 40:28.679 And he said, "Well, take a look at this" and 40:28.682 --> 40:33.682 produced those lines I just read, which are magnificent 40:33.683 --> 40:39.603 heroic poetry. They begin with that word, 40:39.596 --> 40:43.726 "and." They begin with the conjunction 40:43.733 --> 40:46.293 "and." They begin with the conjunction 40:46.288 --> 40:48.408 and without a grammatical subject. 40:48.409 --> 40:51.619 "And then went down to the ship." 40:51.620 --> 40:53.080 Who went down to the ship? 40:53.080 --> 40:56.720 Pound doesn't say. 40:56.719 --> 41:04.759 He introduces the poem with an action, an action that is itself 41:04.764 --> 41:07.234 part of a series. 41:07.230 --> 41:13.290 The action that we are being introduced to here is Odysseus' 41:13.293 --> 41:18.433 journey to hell in search of Tiresias, the prophet, 41:18.431 --> 41:21.721 among the souls of the dead. 41:21.719 --> 41:26.939 He wants to learn--Odysseus wants to learn his future course 41:26.944 --> 41:29.074 and decide how to act. 41:29.070 --> 41:33.850 Odysseus, we learn, as the poem unfolds, 41:33.848 --> 41:40.098 is the first speaker Pound accesses and gives to us, 41:40.097 --> 41:45.977 which is to say that we're reading a translation, 41:45.979 --> 41:50.839 again. And how does Odysseus speak? 41:50.840 --> 41:56.280 Not like Tennyson's Ulysses in sonorous blank verse, 41:56.276 --> 42:02.136 but rather, as I think you could hear readily enough, 42:02.139 --> 42:08.959 in the Anglo-Saxon alliterative verse form of "The Seafarer." 42:08.960 --> 42:12.500 Pound is doing something very interesting and exhilarating. 42:12.500 --> 42:17.620 He is translating what he conceives of as the oldest 42:17.624 --> 42:25.204 passage in The Odyssey, that most archaic of poetry in 42:25.201 --> 42:33.631 the West, and translating it using that poetry most archaic 42:33.634 --> 42:38.754 in English, the language and rhythms and 42:38.754 --> 42:42.064 patterning of "The Seafarer." 42:42.059 --> 42:46.959 This is a kind of overlay in technique, again, 42:46.955 --> 42:52.825 of Old English alliterative verse and Homer's Greek. 42:52.829 --> 42:59.099 These linguistic forms in the poem are merged as if by a kind 42:59.104 --> 43:04.024 of parataxis, which I talked about last time, 43:04.019 --> 43:10.069 to produce what Pound calls – when he's writing about the 43:10.066 --> 43:15.466 image – a complex, a complex of elements that are 43:15.466 --> 43:19.926 held together in an instant; an instant that, 43:19.925 --> 43:24.015 as he understood it, transcends space and time 43:24.020 --> 43:27.270 limits. This is all set out again in 43:27.266 --> 43:29.516 the doctrine of the image. 43:29.519 --> 43:34.849 And we talked about another instance of that kind of 43:34.851 --> 43:41.541 cultural overlay of materials in the little poem "In a Station of 43:41.541 --> 43:45.481 the Metro." Contrast what Pound is doing 43:45.476 --> 43:49.276 here with what Joyce does in Ulysses. 43:49.280 --> 43:55.720 In Ulysses Joyce is, in a sense, carrying Homer's 43:55.721 --> 43:59.471 text into contemporary Dublin. 43:59.469 --> 44:02.699 He's naturalizing it and modernizing it. 44:02.699 --> 44:07.139 Pound, in a sense, is doing just the opposite. 44:07.139 --> 44:12.779 He is going back, and indeed here the sea flows 44:12.782 --> 44:19.412 backward and it takes us back to, again, primary terms: 44:19.406 --> 44:23.696 archaic Greek, archaic English. 44:23.699 --> 44:31.539 He is seeking to re-appropriate the heroic mode through 44:31.541 --> 44:37.641 translation in yet a contemporary idiom. 44:37.639 --> 44:42.829 This is a kind of raising of the dead, a kind of journey to 44:42.834 --> 44:47.764 the literary and cultural underworld that brings Pound's 44:47.761 --> 44:52.151 adventure as a poet into line with Odysseus'. 44:52.150 --> 44:54.200 And you can see, in other words, 44:54.195 --> 44:58.015 what Odysseus is doing now as he goes to the underworld and 44:58.023 --> 45:01.723 seeks prophetic speech from Tiresias as a version of what 45:01.719 --> 45:05.349 Pound is doing as he seeks to translate the Greek at the 45:05.349 --> 45:07.329 inception of his epic. 45:07.329 --> 45:11.619 Pound's own display of technique you could understand 45:11.615 --> 45:15.895 as a kind of version of the ceremony to honor and pay 45:15.901 --> 45:19.611 tribute, through blood sacrifice, 45:19.606 --> 45:26.506 that Odysseus practices here in the passages that follow as he 45:26.512 --> 45:31.042 induces Tiresias to appear and speak. 45:31.039 --> 45:36.489 Literary tradition here has itself taken the place of the 45:36.485 --> 45:41.925 transcendental source of authority that was the classical 45:41.931 --> 45:44.461 or the Christian muse. 45:44.460 --> 45:50.220 Here Pound, in a sense, turns back upon poetry itself 45:50.222 --> 45:55.262 as a sacred source; here, at a moment in the epic 45:55.263 --> 45:58.913 where invocation would ordinarily stand, 45:58.912 --> 46:01.722 at that point of inception. 46:01.719 --> 46:09.659 Here, technique is imagined as a kind of process of translation 46:09.660 --> 46:16.830 through which speech from elsewhere is brought forward in 46:16.832 --> 46:23.622 time and in some sense carried across the waters. 46:23.619 --> 46:26.839 Again there's a sense of contradiction, 46:26.837 --> 46:28.697 however, or tension. 46:28.699 --> 46:34.539 Pound wants to elicit speech from the dead to make the 46:34.543 --> 46:37.523 tradition's language new. 46:37.519 --> 46:39.659 He wants to transmit the impulse. 46:39.659 --> 46:43.899 He also insists, however, cannily and 46:43.903 --> 46:50.153 provocatively on the mediated quality of his words. 46:50.150 --> 46:59.090 Tiresias speaks at the top of page 370, towards the end of the 46:59.093 --> 47:02.503 poem. He says to Odysseus when he 47:02.500 --> 47:04.900 sees him: "A second time? 47:04.900 --> 47:06.710 why? man of ill star, 47:06.710 --> 47:09.700 "Facing the sunless dead and this joyless region? 47:09.699 --> 47:14.189 "Stand from the fosse [that is, the ditch], leave me my bloody 47:14.194 --> 47:15.904 bever "For soothsay." 47:15.900 --> 47:20.940 And I stepped back [and that "I" there is the "I" of 47:20.943 --> 47:24.543 Odysseus], And he strong with the blood, 47:24.542 --> 47:28.342 said then: "Odysseus "Shalt return through spiteful 47:28.335 --> 47:31.695 Neptune, over dark seas, "Lose all companions." 47:31.699 --> 47:37.029 And then Anticlea [Odysseus' mother] 47:37.033 --> 47:40.683 came. And then a remarkable thing 47:40.679 --> 47:44.189 happens. Someone says: 47:44.190 --> 47:49.440 Lie quiet Divus. I mean [and now the "I" is the 47:49.437 --> 47:52.307 "I" of Pound, the narrator, 47:52.309 --> 47:54.769 the speaker, not Odysseus], 47:54.769 --> 47:59.119 that is Andreas Divus, In officina Wecheli, 47:59.118 --> 48:03.658 1538, out of Homer. This is Pound stepping into the 48:03.656 --> 48:06.796 poem saying, "I have been translating all of this from 48:06.796 --> 48:11.096 Homer, and I have been using the Latin 48:11.098 --> 48:17.418 translation of Andreas Divus that I bought in a Paris 48:17.419 --> 48:21.779 bookstand. And this has been my source for 48:21.779 --> 48:26.799 this text, and it is Divus that I have, the translator, 48:26.800 --> 48:32.990 that has been my muse and who has been speaking here through 48:32.991 --> 48:35.511 Tiresias, if you like. 48:35.510 --> 48:39.750 And it's his soul that is laid back and to rest." 48:39.750 --> 48:44.740 And at this moment Pound continues, now speaking of 48:44.737 --> 48:48.917 Odysseus in the third person, and he says: 48:48.922 --> 48:52.842 "And he sailed, by Sirens and thence outward 48:52.838 --> 48:55.568 and away / and unto Circe." 48:55.570 --> 49:00.450 Finally, the journey continues. 49:00.449 --> 49:04.019 Here, again, Odysseus' journey being 49:04.024 --> 49:09.954 analogized implicitly to the journey that the translator is 49:09.948 --> 49:15.258 affecting as he brings the text forward in time, 49:15.260 --> 49:19.910 across from oral culture to print, from Greek to Latin and 49:19.912 --> 49:22.772 Latin to English and Old English. 49:22.769 --> 49:28.169 And then in a remarkable efflorescence that ends this 49:28.165 --> 49:33.245 First Canto, with a macronic display of languages, 49:33.249 --> 49:36.419 Pound says: Venerandam, 49:36.420 --> 49:41.320 In the Cretan's phrase… Again, he's opened his book, 49:41.317 --> 49:46.637 and at the back of Divus's translation he's found the 49:46.644 --> 49:52.384 Homeric hymns and now he's going to give them to us: 49:52.380 --> 49:54.780 …with the golden crown, Aphrodite, 49:54.780 --> 49:59.260 Cypri munimenta sortita est, mirthful, orichalchi, 49:59.261 --> 50:01.821 with golden Girdles and breast bands, 50:01.824 --> 50:05.594 thou with dark eyelids Bearing the golden bough of 50:05.585 --> 50:07.995 Argicida. So that: 50:08.000 --> 50:12.670 Colon. The poem ends here with a 50:12.667 --> 50:18.677 prayer to the goddess of beauty, Aphrodite, who is invoked in 50:18.684 --> 50:23.184 Greek and Latin; who is brought forward and who 50:23.182 --> 50:26.642 is named Argicida, "killer of the Greeks, 50:26.639 --> 50:32.539 slayer of the Greeks," presumably because she has had 50:32.536 --> 50:39.506 her hand in the abduction of Helen and the war in Troy. 50:39.510 --> 50:47.280 Here, Pound has invoked the goddess in these ways and then 50:47.280 --> 50:55.460 concluded his Canto with the interesting grammatical form, 50:55.460 --> 51:00.120 "So that," and the interesting punctuation, a colon. 51:00.119 --> 51:05.969 In effect, if the poem began with "and," it now ends with "so 51:05.971 --> 51:11.821 that," where the colon is a kind of gateway through which the 51:11.822 --> 51:17.512 rest of the poem, and implicitly following Homer, 51:17.514 --> 51:21.164 the rest of history will pass. 51:21.159 --> 51:26.329 And here Pound has established his poem and established his own 51:26.326 --> 51:32.166 role as, in some sense, a mediator, conducting a 51:32.174 --> 51:41.434 process by which the sources of the past are brought forward 51:41.429 --> 51:47.169 into the future, relaying what he calls "the 51:47.169 --> 51:51.869 impulse," and in the process "making it new." 51:51.869 --> 51:57.749 Well, let's stop and we will go on to, as I say, 51:57.747 --> 52:02.997 the related and different poetry of T.S.