Readings in the Cantos [1, 1 ed.] 1942954409, 9781942954408

Table of contents :
Dedication
Contents
Acknowledgments
Foreword • John Gery
Introduction • Richard Parker
1 The Ur-Cantos • Helen Carr
2 Canto 1 • Catherine Paul
3 Canto 2 • Peter Liebregts
4 Canto 4 • Henry Mead
5 Canto 5 • Caterina Ricciardi
6 Canto 7 • Walter Baumann
7 Canto 8 • Anderson Araujo
8 Canto 11 • Ronald Bush
9 Canto 12 • Aaron Jaffe
10 Canto 13 • Alexander Howard
11 Cantos 14–15 • Andrew Thacker
12 Canto 17 • Sean Pryor
13 Cantos 18–19 • Alec Marsh
14 Canto 20 • Réka Mihálka
15 Canto 21 • James Dowthwaite
16 Canto 25 • John Gery
17 Canto 26 • David Barnes
18 Canto 29 • Alex Pestell
19 Canto 30 • LeeAnn Derdeyn and Tim Redman
20 Canto 32 • Eric White
21 Canto 35 • Richard Parker
22 Canto 36 • Mark Byron
23 Canto 37 • Roxana Preda
Notes
Index

Citation preview

Readings in the Cantos

Volu m e 1

Edited by Richard Parker

at the University of New Orleans The Ezra Pound Center for Literature Book Series is a project dedicated to publishing a variety of scholarly and literary works relevant to Ezra Pound and Modernism, including new critical monographs on Pound and/or other Modernists, scholarly studies related to Pound and his legacy, edited collections of essays, volumes of original poetry, reissued books of importance to Pound scholarship, translations, and other works. Series Editor: John Gery, University of New Orleans Editorial Advisory Board Barry Ahearn, Tulane University Massimo Bacigalupo, University of Genoa A. David Moody (Emeritus), University of York Ira B. Nadel, University of British Columbia Marjorie Perloff, University of Southern California Tim Redman, University of Texas at Dallas Richard Sieburth, New York University Demetres P. Tryphonopoulos, Brandon University Emily Mitchell Wallace, Bryn Mawr College Also Available in the Ezra Pound Center for Literature Book Series William Pratt, Editor, The Imagist Poem: Modern Poetry in Miniature Patrizia de Rachewiltz, Trespassing Caterina Ricciardi, John Gery, and Massimo Bacigalupo, Editors, I poeti della Sala Capizucchi/The Poets Of The Sala Capizucchi Zhaoming Qian, Editor, Modernism and the Orient John Gery, Daniel Kempton, and H. R. Stoneback, Editors, Imagism: Essays on Its Initiation, Impact and Influence Catherine E. Paul, Fascist Directive: Ezra Pound and Italian Cultural Nationalism

Readings in the Cantos

Vo l u m e 1

edited by Richard Parker

© 2018 Clemson University Press/Liverpool University Press All rights reserved First Edition, 2018

print ISBN 978-1-942954-40-8 epdf ISBN 978-1-942954-41-5 Published by Clemson University Press in association with Liverpool University Press

For information about Clemson University Press, please visit our website at www.clemson.edu/press.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Parker, R. T. A. (Richard T. A.), 1978- editor. Title: Reading the Cantos / edited by Richard Parker. Description: First edition. | Clemson, SC : Clemson University Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017032476 (print) | LCCN 2017043282 (ebook) | ISBN 9781942954415 (e-book) | ISBN 9781942954408 (hard cover : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Pound, Ezra, 1885-1972. Cantos. Classification: LCC PS3531.O82 (ebook) | LCC PS3531.O82 C28766 2017 (print) | DDC 811/.52--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017032476 Typeset in Minion Pro by Carnegie Book Production.

In memory of Robert Rehder and Ivan Juritz, valued former members of the London Cantos Reading Group, now “to earth o’ergiven.”

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Contents

Acknowledgments xi Foreword John Gery

xiii

Introduction 1 Richard Parker 1  The Ur-Cantos Helen Carr

9

2  Canto 1 Catherine Paul

33

3  Canto 2 Peter Liebregts

43

4  Canto 4 Henry Mead

57

5  Canto 5 Caterina Ricciardi

73

6  Canto 7 Walter Baumann

85

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7  Canto 8 Anderson Araujo

95

8  Canto 11 Ronald Bush

109

9  Canto 12 Aaron Jaffe

121

10  Canto 13 Alexander Howard

135

11  Cantos 14–15 Andrew Thacker

145

12  Canto 17 Sean Pryor

155

13  Cantos 18–19 Alec Marsh

165

14  Canto 20 Réka Mihálka

187

15  Canto 21 James Dowthwaite

201

16  Canto 25 John Gery

213

17  Canto 26 David Barnes

227

18  Canto 29 Alex Pestell

237

19  Canto 30 LeeAnn Derdeyn and Tim Redman

249

20  Canto 32 Eric White

263

Contents

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21  Canto 35 Richard Parker

273

22  Canto 36 Mark Byron

285

23  Canto 37 Roxana Preda

297

Notes 311 Index 369

Acknowledgments

Many thanks to Massimo Bacigalupo, Mark Byron, Roxana Preda, and Sean Pryor for reviewing portions of this volume, and John Gery for overall editing and supervision. Material from published works by Ezra Pound reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. Journal and periodical material by Ezra Pound reprinted from Ezra Pound’s Poetry and Prose: Contributions to Periodicals (Garland Press), copyright © 1991 by The Trustees of the Ezra Pound Literary Property Trust. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. Previously unpublished letters and manuscript drafts by Ezra Pound, from New Directions Pub. acting as agent, copyright 2018 by Mary de Rachewiltz and the Estate of Omar S. Pound. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. All Louis Zukofsky material copyright Paul Zukofsky; the material may not reproduced, quoted, or used in any manner whatsoever without the explicit and specific permission of the copyright holder. Parts of Aaron Jaffe’s essay on Canto 12 appeared in different form in Ezra Pound in the Present: Essays on Pound’s Contemporaneity, edited by Paul Stasi and Josephine Park (London: Bloomsbury, 2016).

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Parts of Réka Mihálka’s essay on Canto 20 appeared in different form in HUSSE 11: Proceedings of the 11th Conference of the Hungarian Society for the Study of English, edited by Veronika Ruttkay and Bálint Gárdos (Budapest: L’Harmattan, 2014). Parts of David Barnes’s essay on Canto 26 appeared in different form in his book The Venice Myth: Culture, Literature, Politics 1800 to the Present (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2014). Part of Eric White’s essay on Canto 32 originally appeared in Transatlantic Avant-Gardes: Little Magazines and Localist Modernism by Eric White (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013).

Foreword John Gery, Series Editor, Ezra Pound Center for Literature Book Series

As much as or quite possibly more than any other American poetic work of the twentieth century, The Cantos of Ezra Pound is essentially a social poem. Despite its being composed, often in isolation, by one of the century’s most complex, iconoclastic sensibilities, it has primarily realized itself as a work of art (and, as some argue, of individual genius) in the writings, debates, colloquia, explications, arguments, and dissertations of others—namely, Pound’s readers and critics. From the time Pound started publishing drafts of his Cantos a century ago, readers across the globe who have found themselves enmeshed in the rich, complex, sometimes inscrutable, and challenging poetry of the epic have benefited from an ever-growing library of resources, critical analyses, scholarship, variety of approaches, and interpretive or creative responses, comprising a veritable library that has helped both guide readers through the poem’s many channels or abysses and sustained the life of the poem itself. In other words, despite its formidable impact as the epic poem of a solitary mind, like all significant works it remains interdependent on its readership. Besides the fortunate resilience of Pound’s work—namely, that his primary publishers, New Directions and Faber, continue to keep much of his work in print, widely available, and affordable—the sustained

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efforts of four different kinds of readers have resulted in a generous cache of illuminating materials on Pound, his work in a variety of genres and art forms, and the wide circle of Modernists of every ilk who have come within his sphere of influence. Initially, the critical interpretations of The Cantos (added to the criticism of his other poetry, critical prose, translations, cultural commentaries, music, opera, volumes of letters, and journalism) range from the earliest, groundbreaking studies by the likes Hugh Kenner, Harold H. Watts, Emery Clark, George Dekker, Donald Davie, Eva Hesse, Walter Baumann, Christine Brooke-Rose, George Bornstein, Daniel Pearlman, Hugh Witemeyer, and others to the lucid textual readings that followed by Ronald Bush, Richard Sieburth, James Wilhelm, Leon Surette, Michael Alexander, Marjorie Perloff, Wendy Flory, Massimo Bacigalupo, Peter Makin, and others. Together with the works of many others like them, these critical readings remain invaluable for anyone wishing to get a grasp of Pound’s intrinsic poetic practices. Second, the steady accumulation of reference works on The Cantos, beginning with John Hamilton Edwards and William V. Vasse’s indispensable Annotated Index to the Cantos of Ezra Pound (1959) and including (though not limited to) reference works compiled by Christine Froula, William Cookson, Peter Brooker, George Kearns, K. K. Ruthven, Demetres P. Tryphonopoulos, and Stephen J. Adams, and crowned by Carroll F. Terrell’s comprehensive A Companion to The Cantos of Ezra Pound (1980), have all helped to make Pound’s intimidating application of his literary, historical, and religious sources accessible to generations of readers who might otherwise shun his poetry, whether out of deference or fear. Third, the biographies, memoirs, and tributes, as well as historical works, that portray Pound and his writing—most prominently, The Cantos—in the context of his vigorous and tempestuous era all emphasize his integral role not only in articulating what we have come to call modernism, but in shaping how we understand contemporary experience in everything from economics to cults. These works include (but are not limited to) biographies by Noel Stock, David Heymann, Humphrey Carpenter, John Tytell, E. Fuller Torrey,

Foreword

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Ira B. Nadel, and, most recently, David Moody, and the many edited collections of Pound’s letters, interviews, and journalism, as well as scores of comparative works across the spectrum of the arts and culture that consider Pound in the context of other arts and disciplines. Finally, there has by now amassed an invaluable archive of scholarly, analytical, and collaborative criticism on Pound’s vast range of reading and his eclectic source materials—whether considered from Classical Greek and Roman, Classical Chinese, Egyptian, Arabic, medieval, Provençal, Italian Renaissance, British, French, or American contexts, or from postmodernist, avant-garde, transnational, cross-cultural, interdisciplinary, or performative perspectives. There are simply too many important works of this kind to name even a sampling here, and to these works can be added a growing body of new original Pound criticism on the internet, to which The Cantos seem singularly adaptable. As younger critics and scholars have continued to contribute to and deepen the impressive supplementary work on Pound since his death in 1972, and as other innovative, often brilliant studies of him have appeared throughout the world, it has increasingly required, especially for new readers of his poetry, if not an itinerary and map of The Cantos, at least a guide to (to use Pound’s own term) the “periplum” of possible readings and approaches, in order to train a careful reader’s eye and ear to stay focused on The Cantos itself. It is not that Pound’s epic is a rigid text. To the contrary, as recent work by Richard Sieburth and Ronald Bush, as well as by Mary de Rachewiltz, has revealed, the poem is fluid, sometimes indiscernible, yet it endures as a dynamic work whose odd presence, documentary style, multilingual shifting, craggy turns and disruptions, lyrical flights, and relentless series of surprises and obscure allusions inevitably stir the unsuspecting reader as often to abandon the text as to marry it to everyday life. While it is certainly the case that an intrepid reader can as easily dip into the poem as to dip out of it, almost at random, and while it is equally true that the poem’s memorable passages provide as much humor and entertainment as wisdom, the one thing The Cantos does not offer is a casual

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reading experience—at least not until after one has expended considerable time and effort grappling with its idiosyncratic voices. Nevertheless, the more familiar a reader becomes with Pound’s unforgettable touchstones and landmarks, the more deeply moving can become both the engagement with his vision and the pleasure taken in his music and rhetorical flourish. Readings in the Cantos means to foster just such a familiarity in each reader, first by taking as its premise the value of a detailed discussion of each Canto, one at a time or, in some cases, in small, closely related clusters. This three-volume series of essays takes as its mission less to convince a reader to accept a particular critical approach or interpretation of each Canto than to establish an interactive reading of each, by a kind of textual osmosis, as taken together with each separate author. Indeed, the series originated from the idea of a group of young Pound students in London who, to enrich their understanding of Pound’s seemingly incomprehensible poem, began inviting speakers from across the spectrum of modernist studies to present close readings of individual Cantos that required no specified approach or thematic argument, per se. This irregular series of talks took on the appellation of the London Cantos Reading Group. As more and more of Pound’s readers across the globe became aware of this group, soon the enthusiasm grew to publish these relatively informal talks into short, readable essays, not to counter the valuable resources and reference works already extant on The Cantos, but to give it a milieu, because, in fact, despite the remarkably high achievement in individual works by Pound’s critics, it is finally this social dimension of those encountering and interpreting The Cantos that most poignantly brings forth its vitality and, for lack of a better term, its magic as an epic poem. To be sure, Readings in the Cantos is a collaborative collection, not only in its development and compositing under Richard Parker’s unflagging editorial oversight, but in its distinct orientation toward its community of readers.

Introduction Richard Parker

The Cantos remain powerfully contemporary. They are multicultural and transnational, full of different languages, scripts, histories, and cultural perspectives. They are also disorienting in their privileging of found texts, their reordering of literary canons, and their radical reorientation of hierarchies of information. These elements dictate the form of The Cantos, making them a central poetic model for today: a useful example of how form can challenge hegemony in the internet age. Pound’s heterogeneity is well served by the ethos we follow in Readings in the Cantos: by focusing on individual Cantos a mosaic of different Pounds emerge, highlighting the capaciousness of this poet’s genius and the almost unfathomable variety of his sources and perspectives. At the same time, as we pass through the early Cantos, the depth of focus in this volume will help us to discern the foundations of Pound’s political and economic understanding, and note how ineluctably melded they are with his aesthetics. While the essays in this collection share a critical approach to Pound’s long poem—with sources and references balanced by illumination and discussion of important critical directions in Pound studies—the understandings of the impressive and diverse range of contributors to Pound are often distinct. These “readings” are

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Readings in the Cantos

intended to serve as a useful resource for researchers wishing to find information on particular Cantos and are thus a companion for those attempting to read The Cantos, the most comprehensive such project since Carroll F. Terrell’s A Companion to the Cantos of Ezra Pound (1980)—a work that is key to the scholarship contained in this volume, though it is also corrected at numerous points. Readings in the Cantos is not intended to supersede Terrell’s work, however, because of the amount of space a comprehensive review of the sources of The Cantos would require and the sidelining of interpretation that such source-gathering entails.1 Rather, Readings in the Cantos aims to provide a compendium of ways to approach Pound’s forbidding project, offering readers not just the chance to understand Pound’s sources but also to gain insight into the manifold options for reading this most ambivalent text and the diverse strategies available for thinking and writing about The Cantos. The essays herein are “readings,” then: they perform the act of reading as they guide, insisting on the importance of analysis and scholarly conversation in addition to source-hunting. In “The Music of a Lost Dynasty: Pound in the Classroom,” Donald Carne-Ross addresses the kind of collaborative reading which this project represents. Carne-Ross describes how Pound might be taught in a modern seminar room, illustrating the difficulties the poet’s historiographical, referential style poses to readers new to the text, as well as the plurality of readings that his poetics encourages. A group reading of a Canto insists upon the radical nature of Pound’s organizing strategies: Pound distrusts hypotaxis which by subordinating one element to another disposes them in a hierarchical order which tends to weaken their natural force. Parataxis is more egalitarian. Though that isn’t really the point. Pound’s typical maneuver is to lay his elements side by side [. . .] It is a matter—though Pound may not have seen this at the time—of ceasing to treat things as mere objects to be pushed round by an all-important subject. It means giving things back their autonomy.2

Introduction

3

There is perhaps a danger of reinstating this “hypotaxis” in some critical approaches to Pound. By extracting the “information” that Pound works into The Cantos and re-inserting it into historical, cultural, lexical, and other narratives, the paratactical egalitarianism of The Cantos is lost. Carne-Ross demonstrates this aspect of parataxis in the collegial setting of his Canto reading, with the various members of a seminar group each contributing divergent but valid readings. As he insists to one of his interlocutors, “Don’t ask me, ask the poem. Or rather, let it ask you. If your conversation this afternoon is to lead anywhere, it must be the poem that is guiding us.”3 Readings in the Cantos will unfold over three volumes, each of which revolves around a moment of creative crisis that left permanent marks on the text and changed the direction of the poem. This first volume covers the period from the beginning of Pound’s project, with the radical and repeated re-versioning of the Ur-Cantos, to Eleven New Cantos XXXI–XLI (1934). The second volume will begin with The Fifth Decad of the Cantos XLII–LI (1937) and end with The Pisan Cantos (1948). It will cover the cataclysm of the Second World War, a period marked by the interruption of Cantos 72–73: the Italian Cantos, which were left out of reprints of Pound’s poem while he was alive and which still feel like a fissure in the text. The third volume begins with Section: Rock-Drill, 85–95 de los cantares (1956) and concludes with Pound’s last work on his long poem, the uncomfortably collaborative Drafts & Fragments of Cantos CX–CXVII (1968/69)—final Cantos which return to the “drafts” designation of its first sections and leave the poem as open-ended as its outset. The Ur-Cantos, the Italian Cantos and Drafts and Fragments all show Pound reimagining his poem and setting off in new directions, becoming fulcra for each of these volumes. “Three Cantos,” the first versions of what has come to be known as the Ur-Cantos, and which are read by Helen Carr in the first essay of this volume, were published in June 1917 in Poetry, in the midst of the Great War.4 They track Pound’s search for and arrival at a

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recognizable Cantos-voice, while also introducing many of the themes and methods that would come to characterize the project. Thus we see, even at this early stage, a multiplicity of sources, voices, languages, and cultural milieus, with almost all the project’s major themes present. Shortly after “Three Cantos,” Pound, through his editor at The New Age, A. R. Orage, met C. H. Douglas, the originator of the economic doctrine of Social Credit. Douglas’s economic analysis became of great importance to Pound in the wake of the war, quickly becoming one of the dominant ideas in Pound’s poem and completing the basic ideas of Pound’s “tale of the tribe.”5 After the War, as these Ur-Cantos were repeatedly revised and his political and economic understanding developed, Pound left London for Paris, publicly announcing the move in December 1920. As The Cantos started to evolve, Pound worked on his opera Le Testament de Villon, as well as his shorter works, “Homage to Sextus Propertius” (1919) and Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920)—two sequences of poems that explored voices and loose, serial forms that would become central in his vision, both technically and thematically. The first book edition of any part of The Cantos appeared in 1925: A Draft of XVI Cantos for the Beginning of a Poem of Some Length, which was published in Paris by the Three Mountains Press. This is one of the most dynamic sections of The Cantos, although, as Hugh Kenner suggests, it has a “relatively simple unity,”6 with the theme of metamorphosis to the fore as different sources and traditions echo off one another, as Pound considers different models upon which to construct his emerging long poem. We begin, then, with Homer and Anglo-Saxon, pass through Ovid, Sordello, El Cid, The Lusiads, and many more texts and types of texts. Banking and credit, Confucius, and the wayward contemporary world are also introduced in a section that reads like an overture to the rest of the poem, with nearly every theme and concern which are approached in detail later in the work found here for the first time. Cantos 8–11, the Malatesta Cantos—written shortly after Pound helped T. S. Eliot edit the long poem which would become The Waste Land—also introduce Pound’s more textually focused, historiographical mode, making

Introduction

5

extended use of materials relating to the life of the fifteenth-century condottiere Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta. In a 1922 letter to his old professor (and nemesis) at the University of Pennsylvania, Felix Schelling, Pound describes these first eleven Cantos as “preparation of the palette. I have to get down all the colours or elements I want for the poem. Some perhaps too enigmatically and abbreviatedly. I hope, heaven help me, to bring them into some sort of design and architecture later.”7 Much of this “preparation” is covered in this volume, with essays from Catherine Paul, Peter Liebregts, Henry Mead, Caterina Ricciardi, and Walter Baumann on the opening seven, with the Malatesta Cantos read here by Anderson Araujo and Ronald Bush. The remainder of A Draft of XVI Cantos is approached by Aaron Jaffe, who considers Canto 12, arguably the first Canto treating economics, Alexander Howard, who looks at Canto 13, which introduces Confucius into Pound’s epic, and Andrew Thacker, who concludes the pieces in this section by considering Pound’s twentieth-century Dantean Inferno in the Hell Cantos, 14–15. In 1927, Pound would, for the only time in his career, edit his own journal, The Exile, which ran for four numbers, the magazine offering a venue for a collaborative exploration of the ideas that were energizing The Cantos. Significant contributors include Joe Gould, John Rodker, William Carlos Williams, W. B. Yeats, and Louis Zukofsky. In addition to all of this, Pound still turned more of his attention to the East, working on the Fenollosa manuscripts from which Cathay had been drawn in 1915, producing Ta Hsio (“The Great Learning”) in 1928. That same year A Draft of the Cantos 17–27 also appeared. As Pound’s second book-length publication of Cantos material, A Draft of the Cantos 17–27 was later added to A Draft of XVI Cantos along with three new Cantos to make up A Draft of XXX Cantos (1930), through Caresse Crosby’s Black Sun Press. In tone, this considerable collection is similar to A Draft of XVI Cantos, with the variety of Pound’s sources still wide-ranging and the subject rhyme the primary arranging principle, though the new pieces display a gradual move

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towards homogeneity that continues through the next few volumes of The Cantos. Introducing A Draft of XXX Cantos when it was reissued in 1997, A. Walton Litz writes: Along the way Pound had thought of his long poem as a fresco of many scenes, a fugue of intertwined melodies, an arena in which the drama of past and present is enacted; but in the end it turned out to be a personal voyage “as the wind veers,” a record of the richest and most complex poetic life the twentieth century has witnessed.8 Sean Pryor, Alec Marsh, Réka Mihálka, James Dowthwaite, John Gery, and David Barnes have provided readings that chart that process through a series of Poundian journeys and other divagations that continue to expand the many threads laid down in A Draft of XVI Cantos, while Alex Pestell, and LeeAnn Derdeyn and Tim Redman examine the closing Cantos of this first major section. The early years in Rapallo saw a new phase in Pound’s Svengali-like collaboration with and encouragement of younger poets, especially with the opening of the first “Ezuversity,” an informal institution which would see writers such as Basil Bunting, Zukofsky, and James Laughlin passing through and taking brief and intensive courses in the thinking and techniques behind The Cantos. This period would also see the beginning of Pound’s involvement with Italian Fascism. In 1931, he began to use the Fascist dating system in his correspondence and in 1933 he would meet Mussolini himself, a moment addressed by Roxana Preda in her essay here. The effects of this political engagement are first fully felt in Eleven New Cantos (1934), which is represented here with analysis by Eric White, myself, Mark Byron, and Preda. At the same time as he readied the sections of this volume for publication he was working on the political treatises Social Credit: An Impact and Jefferson and/or Mussolini (both 1935), and the poet’s increasingly profound interest in the economic and political is clear in this transitional volume, with elements that had always been important parts of

Introduction

7

the warp and woof of The Cantos now receiving greater attention, and some earlier concerns partially falling away. As this volume finishes, then, Pound’s engagement with the Italian state is established and the conditions for the coming cataclysm are in place. Pound’s next volume would be published during the Second World War, Cantos LII–LXXI (1940), while the Italian Cantos (written between 1944 and 1945) and The Pisan Cantos (1948) would follow— the next volume of Readings in the Cantos will chart the development of Pound’s long poem in these sections, all variously colored by the chaos of war. The readings here demonstrate the value of The Cantos as an intricate record of a modernist thinker’s mind, and insist on the poem as a dynamic, profoundly influential work of art. The poem is also shown to offer a poetics of the political that pulls in numerous directions, more variously than many would admit. In this the poem can be troubling, but also prescient. Though the terms of Pound’s economic critique are now unfamiliar to many readers, the distrust of finance capitalism which is central to his poem has reached as high a peak today as at any point since Pound broached the subject in The Cantos. His resistance to the liberal world order also seems more mainstream today than at any time in the last half-century. At the same time, The Cantos are also a record of prejudice, of political populism and pig-headedness close to today’s political currents: a poem that insists on a combination of political progressivism and intolerance that is discomfiting, but the study of which is more necessary now than ever before.

1

The Ur-Cantos Helen Carr

The Ur-Cantos, Pound’s original beginning for what he called his “long poem,” or “poem of some length,” first appeared in Poetry in 1917, under the title of Three Cantos. They were published again later that same year, slightly changed and cut, in the American edition of Pound’s Lustra, then, still further pared down, in the London magazine Future in 1918, and again, in a version close but not identical to that in Lustra, in his 1919 collection Quia Pauper Amavi.1 In this essay I look particularly at that first publication in Poetry, but those repeated republishings suggest that, in spite of Pound’s radical uncertainty about the detail of his text, he knew that he had something there he wanted.2 He never entirely abandoned those beginnings. Many of the images, places, poems, themes, and stories he evoked then reappear in The Cantos. The last half of the third Ur-Canto would eventually become the beginning of Canto 1, and the beginning of the first the start of Canto 2, while the final Canto 3 is made up of assorted, rewritten elements from the first two Ur-Cantos. Other remnants resurface later—as Daniel Albright notes, “Pound would keep an eye on the unused parts of Three Cantos for the rest of his life.”3 Pound began work on his first drafts of the Ur-Cantos in the latter half of 1915, writing that August to Alice Corbin Henderson, assistant editor of Poetry, “I am working on a long

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poem, that will resemble Divina Commedia in length but in no other matter. It is a huge, I was going to say, gamble, but shan’t, it will prevent my making any money for the next forty years, perhaps.”4 He had been thinking about a long poem for some time, claiming later that he first planned to write an epic when still an undergraduate.5 In 1914, he had added a note to his essay on “Vorticism” in the Fortnightly Review, “I am often asked whether there can be a long imagiste or vorticist poem. The Japanese who evolved the hokku, also evolved the Noh plays. In the best ‘Noh’ the whole play may consist of one image [. . .] I see nothing against a long vorticist poem.”6 Pound was reworking Ernest Fenollosa’s translations of the Noh plays at that time, and they would be a recurring point of reference both for the Ur-Cantos and later for The Cantos themselves, particularly for what Pound described in July 1915 as their “sense of past in the present,” something already central to his poetic imagination, and foundational for his epic.7 During the first half of 1915, he had experimented with longer poems than before, “Provincia Deserta” and “Near Perigord,” both of which in different ways drew on his recollections of his 1912 walking tour in south-west France, which would also feature significantly in the Ur-Cantos. Yet it was perhaps, James Longenbach suggests, the war and its impact on his understanding of art and politics that made that larger, epic canvas imperative, and what Longenbach has said of Hugh Selwyn Mauberley applies even more to the Cantos, “Pound’s effort to write a long poem was coterminous with his effort to write a poem addressing the social catastrophe of the war.”8 In 1915–17, Pound had not yet formed the analysis of war that underlies the Cantos in their final form, where bankers and arms manufacturers are the cynical inciters and profiteers of war, and economics a central concern. If there are many continuities between these beginnings and the later Cantos, there are significant differences too. As Mary Ellis Gibson among others notes, Pound’s thinking in these years had considerable debts to late nineteenth-century aestheticism and to a Ruskinian belief in the importance of art and artists to society, something he arguably never entirely lost.9 In the 1914 Blast,

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Pound had in fact cited Pater as an ancestor of Vorticism, and was thus disconcertingly at odds with Lewis’s anti-passéisme.10 The poet’s intense aesthetic experience, the Paterian moment at the heart of Imagism, his visionary heritage from the poets of the past, forms the moral touchstone in the Ur-Cantos. Pound uses his “method of Luminous Detail” to evoke this past, the method which he had advocated in “I Gather the Limbs of Osiris” (1911) as an alternative to the philological accumulation of “multitudinous detail,” the approach taught in his American universities; the enemy, Pound insisted, of individual delight in the arts, and thus morally at one with the regimenting forces responsible for war.11 The Ur-Cantos assert the vital centrality of art in the face of a destructive war that threatened European civilization and was killing so many artists—not only soldiers, but civilians like Remy de Gourmont and, later, Henry James, both, Pound believed, victims of war.12 Pound’s polyglot text and range of sources constitute a refusal of the nationalisms exposed by the Great War—as Longenbach puts it, in the Ur-Cantos, “Pound’s visionary rendering of the past is not only a riposte to his philological training but an attempt to forge a common language that would unite the antagonistic factions of Europe.”13 Yet if the Ur-Cantos move towards the possibility of the artist transforming society, art overcoming war, they start with the poet himself. The Ur-Cantos are strikingly more personal, more uncertain and more discursive than either Pound’s earlier Imagist poetry or the later Cantos. As Ronald Bush points out, they are by no means as fiercely avant-garde as one might expect from an aficionado of Vorticism, and largely eschew the ugly and the contemporary.14 But, as Pound’s uneasy, jejune attempts at satire in Blast in 1914 and 1915 show, he had yet to find a voice for outrage, let alone one to register in any direct way the trauma of the war. Pound was embarking uncertainly on his own ambitious new enterprise, while simultaneously battling on behalf of his fellow revolutionary artists and poets, but in many ways he felt at bay at this point in his career—refused publication in the London press, in 1915 even by the usually supportive New Age, ousted from control of Imagism, with the Vorticist movement threatening to fall

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apart in the face of the war, their Blast defeated by even louder blasts.15 The mood of desolation and loss in Cathay had also been his own, as Pound would later acknowledge,16 and that was before the devastating death that June of his fellow Vorticist, the sculptor Henri GaudierBrzeska, for Pound the “worst calamity of the war.”17 There is perhaps a parallel between his Ur-Cantos and the poetry he wrote on his walking tour in south-west France in 1912, also written at a period of loss and setback, similarly uncharacteristically discursive and autobiographical, showing Pound feeling his way towards a new beginning, then that of Imagism, and a new faith in his vocation, his “métier,” as he calls it there.18 The Ur-Cantos dramatize another such struggle. Longenbach reports Bush saying to him of these Ur-Cantos that in them Pound is “groping for a new life,” and while Longenbach himself describes them as “tentative and somewhat immature, a testing ground for structures and concerns [he] would treat with greater power,” he also argues that they are an affirmation of Pound’s belief in the vital power of poetry, “a paean to the poetic imagination and its ability to envision distant realities.”19 Like the poetry Pound wrote on his walking tour, they point the way to a new beginning, and in their final lines, they find it. Much of the Ur-Cantos wrestles, in one way or another, with the question of how to write a modern epic. From the beginning, Pound’s canvas was to be expansive in time and space: in a 1915 essay he had pointed out that while the Renaissance humanists had only the European classical world to rediscover, his generation had, in addition, the great pasts of China and Egypt, and the Ur-Cantos include the poles of Confucius and the Mediterranean love religion he would later identify with Eleusis, blending East and West.20 But how to shape this wealth or welter of histories? As he began, Pound was exploring several possible models.21 As well as the Noh plays, with their central unifying image and “sense of past in the present,” there was Robert Browning’s long, difficult, early poem, Sordello (1840) and, in spite of his denial to Henderson, Dante’s Divina Commedia, both works that Pound highlights in his 1914 essay on “Vorticism” to illustrate the two different

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forms of poetry he himself wrote, personae or mask poems on the one hand, and “impersonal,” Imagistic ones on the other. The former, he explains, were a “search for oneself [. . .] for the real [. . .] casting off [. . .] complete masks of the self,” the kind of poems, he says, that are in his 1909 collection Personae and in his translations. He contrasts these with his “impersonal” poetry, which could, like “The Return” (1912), show “an objective reality.” The “impersonal” poems, he says, are “Imagisme” and “fall in with the new pictures and the new sculpture”—he compares “The Return” to Epstein’s Sun God and Gaudier’s Boy with a Coney. He goes on: “Browning’s ‘Sordello’ is one of the finest masks ever presented,” while “Dante’s ‘Paradiso’ is the most wonderful image.”22 In the Ur-Cantos, he would try out both mask and image as ways of shaping his long poem. Although Pound might seem to suggest in this essay that his personae or mask poems are pre-Imagist, not part of the revolutionary art movement that he felt Vorticism to be, he was not leaving them behind: he would go on to create other important personae: “The Exile’s Letter,” Homage to Sextus Propertius, Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, and a range throughout the Cantos themselves. And in the Ur-Cantos he begins by debating the use of such a persona, and his model remains Sordello. Browning’s dramatic monologues, spoken by figures from the past, had already been a crucial influence on much of Pound’s early personae poetry, and in Sordello Pound was fascinated by the way Browning revitalizes a past figure as a living consciousness through which to illuminate the present. But Pound also wants to work imagistically, as he argues Dante does, citing his repeated, coalescing images of the spheres and of light.23 Pound’s images do not yield a tightly ordered structure like Dante’s, though he retains the Dantean frame of Paradiso and Inferno. Pound’s Paradiso brings together the earthly and the visionary, as he believes Dante’s also does, and while Pound has nothing as structured as Dante’s four levels of meaning, his images also evoke and fuse multiple and metamorphic meanings, through what he calls in the “Vorticism” essay “super-position, that is to say [. . .] one idea set on top of another.”24 Dante’s religious core is

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important to Pound, but his reading of it, as Bush argues, transforms it into something compatible with his own mythopoeia.25 Pound believes that Dante has “scant regard for [. . .] ecclesiastical lumber,” and in “Psychology and the Troubadours” (1912), he argues that Dante’s “glorification of Beatrice” is the “consummation” of the troubadours’ cult of Amor, so that, like “Provençal song,” the Commedia is “never wholly disjunct from the pagan rites of May,” interpreted through Pound’s own maverick, syncretic blend of primitivism, the occult, and Neoplatonism.26 Since 1913–14, Pound had spent his winters with Yeats at Stone Cottage, and the rest of the year in London with his fellow Vorticists, and both milieus made their mark on Pound’s Ur-Cantos. As Longenbach shows, the Ur-Cantos’ preoccupation with the visionary and with ghosts from the past owes much to this time with Yeats and the texts they read together. The Vorticists, on the other hand, Bush argues, influenced Pound through their very different version of the widespread modernist rejection of scientific rationalism, their desire to endue their art with the “power and energy in the archaic mind.”27 In “Psychology and the Troubadours,” Pound’s primitivism had been primarily concerned with the classical world, albeit seen through its early beginnings in the Eleusinian Mysteries, and considerably tinged by his reading of James Frazer. While the Mysteries would remain central to his mythic vision, his sense of the archaic world and its power was intensified by Vorticist works that drew on Assyrian, Ancient Chinese, or African art—a starker, harsher, more “virile,” in GaudierBrzeska’s term, version of modernist primitivism than the springtime charm of the “pagan rites of May.”28 There is no Vorticist harshness in the Ur-Cantos, but a similar return to the archaic underlies them, emerging most strikingly in the third. Most importantly, however, the Vorticist artists, Pound said, had awoken his “sense of form.”29 This new conviction of the importance of form perhaps lies behind his analysis in “Vorticism” of the way his own poetry worked, especially of how Imagism, the poetic arm of Vorticism, had found its form. What he identifies in that essay as “super-position” made possible his move

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towards a long, still highly concentrated poem, the piling up of multiple echoing elements.30 Pound’s distinctively modernist parataxis was the feature of his epic that was most strikingly avant-garde from the start, building on his haiku-influenced Imagist poems, echoing the juxtaposition of modernist collage, and the quality he praises in Gaudier of “the feeling of masses in relation.”31 Conceptually and imaginatively, his parataxis makes possible his layering of past and present, myth and history, metamorphosis and recurrence, his syncretism or “superposition,” fundamental to his artistic vision, and to his Cantos project from the beginning.

Ur-Canto 1 Pound had wanted his Three Cantos to appear together in one issue of Poetry, as unlike the later Cantos, the Three Cantos are overtly linked, with an underlying continuity, as the poet searches for the language and exemplary figure to launch his long poem, a quest only resolved at the end of the third Ur-Canto. But Harriet Monroe, deeply unsure about Pound’s latest experiment, felt that one Canto per issue would alarm her readers quite enough (“I can’t pretend to be much pleased at the course his work is taking,” she had written to Henderson).32 So Three Cantos I appeared by itself in June 1917, beginning, as Pound told his father, with “a barrel full of allusions” to Sordello, the poet wrestling with the question of whether he should follow Browning and write his long poem as a mask poem, seizing a figure from the past to bring fresh light to the present.33 Ever since publication Sordello had been denounced as obscure and historically inaccurate, but it was, Pound thought, “the greatest poem in English since Chaucer.”34 It tells—imagines might be a better word—the story of the thirteenthcentury Italian troubadour and soldier, Sordello da Goito, who figures in Dante’s Purgatorio, but is also much concerned with Browning’s own dilemmas as a modern poet. Sordello the troubadour serves only as a partial mask for Browning, who also appears as the modern narrator, a “sort of professor dressed as a clown,” as Albright describes him.35

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Pound would move away from Sordello as a model, but the use of such half-masks would remain. Ur-Canto I deals very explicitly with the question of a suitable persona to frame Pound’s poem, but it also more subtly underlines the importance of the archaic “old gods” to his epic. The Canto veers between two very different registers. One is a jerky, impassioned and unresolved debate, a series of unanswered questions addressed to Browning about the form Pound’s poem should take. The other register is the lyrical evocation of Pound’s own potent memories of the earthly paradise that he found at Sirmione, the small town on Lake Garda in which he had spent some time before the war. The language of the first, the address to Browning, is rumbustious and talkative. The language of the second is visionary yet poetically direct, full of images of light and movement. Sirmione, rich in literary associations, was also associated by Pound with great personal happiness. He first went there in 1910, immediately after gaining a patron, Margaret Cravens, an idealistic American pianist studying in Paris, who would, it seemed then, make possible his career as a poet by giving him a generous yearly allowance. It was here too that his relationship with his future wife Dorothy Shakespear first blossomed, until her mother whisked her home. The poetic associations emerge in the Canto, the personal only through the paradisal evocation of the place. Unlike Dante, Pound begins with his Paradiso, found in his memories of youth and of place, apparently closer to the Romantic than the medieval paradigm. Neither paradigm would do for Pound’s modern epic, one reason why he would eventually have to find a different beginning to his long poem. Ur-Canto 1 opens in what can only be called anti-epic, though vigorous, tones: “Hang it all, there can be but one Sordello!”—a line that conjures up Browning’s own disconcerting fusion of the colloquial (“Hang it all”) and the faintly archaic (“but one”). Yet this beginning, apparently dismissing the idea of Sordello as a model for Pound’s poem, is immediately equivocated. There follows a series of inconclusive speculations, the poet-persona wondering if he should try something similar: “say I take your whole bag of tricks,” as perhaps

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“the modern world / Needs such a rag-bag to stuff all its thought in.”36 Commentators like Gibson have seized on the “rag-bag” image as a metaphor for one aspect of Pound’s final Cantos (the modern poet, in Benjamin’s term, as ragpicker)37 and the image was picked up by T. S. Eliot in an early review, where he notes gleefully that the “Three Cantos” are in “appearance [. . .] a rag-bag of Mr Pound’s reading in various languages.”38 But after the mention of the rag-bag, Pound switches image: “Say that I dump my catch, shiny and silvery / As fresh sardines”—tipped out of a net on to the ground.39 This “catch,” he makes explicit in an earlier version, would be elements trawled from the past to pour into his poem, not, as it happens, a bad description of the final Cantos, which fuse elements from his own personal past, past literature, and history. (In the earlier draft it is also clear that the image of the sardines is of fish from Lake Garda seen tipped on the cobbles in pre-war Sirmione.)40 But now Pound switches image again, likening Browning’s narrator to a showman, an image Browning himself employs in Sordello; Pound, so often the showman himself, realizes that, all the same, “the truth / Is inside this discourse [. . .] the marrow of wisdom.”41 Should he “Give up th’intaglio method,” drop the delicate etching out of his imagist verse (a metaphor later echoed by Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, whose “tool” was the “engraver’s”).42 It is another unanswered query. Although this opening disappeared from the final Cantos, many years later Pound quoted it (bar the last line) in his preface to his Selected Cantos as still the best introduction to The Cantos as a whole. In the three following verse paragraphs Pound turns to Browning’s cavalier treatment of setting, costume, and historical fact: “half your dates are out, you mix your eras,” which, he says, matters “[n]ot in the least.” Suddenly the tone shifts; he understands Browning’s sense of imaginative connection with these different eras, he says, because for him too, “Ghosts move about me / Patched with histories.”43 In the final version of Cantos 1–3, Pound would cut this evocative line, so suggestive of his method, but he brought it back in The Pisan Cantos (1948) some thirty years later (74/466). And here, after that moment of

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self-insight, he drops the combative, half mocking tone and acknowledges that what Browning is doing is “To paint, more real than any dead Sordello / The half or third of your intensest life / And call that third Sordello.” Browning had famously described Sordello as the “development of a soul,”44 and Pound asserts it is the development of Browning’s soul, any modern poet’s soul, Pound’s soul. There would be no point, he says, in “setting figures up,” if they “Were not our life, your life, my life extended.”45 But, he then suggests, it’s no longer possible to have, as Browning did, “one whole man.” Pound has only “many fragments, less worth? Less worth?” That insistent repeated question is followed by more: Ah, had you quite my age, quite such a beastly and cantankerous age? You had some basis, had some set belief. Am I let preach? Has it a place in music?46 What worked for Browning can no longer work for Pound. How will he find a way of passing on his message through poetry? This next section provides an answer. Pound may not have “some set belief,” but he has his own profound, if unorthodox, sense of the power of the old gods, and a belief that through his poetry—as in “The Return”—the gods can come back, resurface in the present. He turns to the time he spent in Sirmione, “my chosen and peninsular village,” about which he had said in 1910, “I know paradise when I see it”; “the gods have returned [. . .] or to be more exact they have never left.”47 Sirmione is one of Pound’s sacred places, where, as in the Noh, he can meet with the ghosts associated with the spot, in this case especially that of the poet Catullus, who had lived there in the first century BCE—though Dante is in the background, evoked via his patron, Can Grande, who protected him in exile in nearby Verona. Pound begins by recalling the feast of Corpus Domini, “your ‘great day’,” he says, referring to Browning’s description of the feast in Sordello, when he had seen in Sirmione the “cobbles flare with the poppy spoil.”48 As Bush

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has noted, that marvelously resonant image of the flame-like poppies indicates that this apparently Christian festival is threaded with pagan survivals, the poppy, according to Frazer, being a symbol of Demeter, and thus the Eleusinian Mysteries.49 Those links back to the ancient gods are, for Pound, what gives those old customs their power: “some old god eats the smoke, ’tis not the saints,” he comments. Then the scene moves to an old chapel, which Bush identifies as San Pietro in Mavino, built on the “ruins of an antique pagan temple,” emblematic of this sacred site’s rootedness in the old gods.50 “As well begin here,” Pound claims, and continues with an evocation of the poem in which Catullus expressed his joy at returning home to Sirmione and the beauties of Lake Garda. Over the next six lyrical lines, Pound recalls Catullus’s imagery of sunlight on the water, rain mingled with sunshine, and he quotes Arnaut Daniel, “Lo soleils plovil,” Pound’s favorite Provençal troubadour echoing Catullus’s visual image, just as, for Pound, the Provençal religion of love echoed or intuited the pagan Mysteries.51 Pound’s Paradiso, like Dante’s, is always associated with light. The “place is full of spirits,” not “dark and shadowy ghosts” like lemures, vengeful spirits of the dead, but the “ancient living, wood-white [. . .] Light on the air [. . .] The air is full of solid sunlight.” “Sun-fed we dwell there,” he adds, before swinging back abruptly to Browning, mocking his use of autobiographical background, though acknowledging that he “worked out new form, the meditative, / Semi-dramatic, semi-epic story.”52 But, he asks, who will he find for his Sordello? Again there are no answers. The poet-persona returns to carping at the “hodge-podge” and contorted language of “your damn’d Sordello.” Browning should have learnt to use “straight simple phrases” like himself, and showing how poetically powerful these can be, he again invokes Sirmione, where “Gods float in the azure air, / Bright gods, and Tuscan, back before dew was shed.” He emphasizes the bright light once more—his vision is not like the pale, fresco-like allegorical scenes painted by Puvis de Chavannes, but woods at dawn, alive with little Pans and tree nymphs, while “olive Sirmio / Lies in its burnished mirror.”53 He ends this visionary recollection of Sirmione by returning to the lake, full

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of “silvery almond-white swimmers,” while the underlying eroticism surfaces in the final image of the section, when the “silvery water glazes the up-turned nipple.”54 From here to the end of the Canto, Pound swings back to the problem of his poem: “How shall we start hence”?55 He has his paradisal vision, but how, where, and when to start his epic story in this poem which, as he had told James Joyce, would be “all about everything”?56 He signals the future importance of China to his long poem’s embrace of East and West by suggesting he should start by “Exult[ing] with Shang in squatness.” (The ancient Shang dynasty, second millennium BCE, had been both praised and emulated by Gaudier-Brzeska.) He slips in a mention of Confucius, who “later taught the world good manners, / Started with himself, built out perfection.”57 Bush suggests that the references that follow, on the one hand to the Egyptian “blue of scarabs” and on the other to the “grey gradual steps” that lead up to a Japanese temple, are “motifs of the vital relation to the gods” in those ancient cultures, echoing the Sirmione passages’ emphasis on the old gods.58 Equally, the imagery on the screens in the temple, “sea waves curled high / Small boats with gods upon them, / Bright flame above the river,” taken from Pound’s version of the Noh play, Tamura, is, like the earlier descriptions of Sirmione, a visionary evocation of water bathed in light.59 But this visionary moment is followed by new doubt. Can he imaginatively enter a past life, even that of a figure he has studied as much as Guido Cavalcanti? Is it a “[s]weet lie” to say, “I lived beside him”? Is it truer to say, “I have but smelt this life, a whiff of it.”60 The next few lines refer to the central core of Pound’s own version of Neoplatonism, when he asks if he might “Confuse my own phantastikon [. . .] confuse the thing I see / With actual gods behind me? / Are they gods behind me?”61 He had talked of the “phantastikon” in “Psychology and the Troubadours,” a term, Peter Liebregts notes, that he found in an essay by G. R. S. Mead, for whose Quest Society he had written that essay.62 The “phantastikon” is the Greek term for the imagination, in the medieval rather than the modern sense of that term, the faculty which holds

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the images one receives from the world. Ordinary souls simply remain with these earthly images; the gifted, the poetic or, as Pound puts it there, those with a “germinal” consciousness, are led by earthly beauty to “heavenly splendours,” the “actual gods” themselves.63 “How many worlds we have!,” the poet exclaims, and illustrates this through Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus, which simultaneously depicts the goddess, the power of love, the coming of spring and the human beauty of his model, Simonetta—super-position, to use Pound’s Imagist/Vorticism term, of the earthly and transcendent.64 Yet the reference to Botticelli is also the occasion of another swerve in the poem, a return to the question of the form of his long poem. Laurence Binyon had identified Botticelli’s use of what Pound describes here as his “clear-outlined” style as a model for the new art, and Pound goes on to praise Mantegna, with his “sterner line,” much admired by Lewis.65 Then he evokes the modern art revolution itself, “the new world about us [. . .] new form, Picasso or Lewis,” artists Pound wanted to emulate. He offers a final unresolved possibility: “If for a year man write to paint, and not to music—.”66 In Ur-Canto 2, Pound will experiment with this, turning to what he describes as “phanopoeia,” or the “casting of images upon the visual imagination.”67

Ur-Canto 2 Both the approach and the tone of this second Canto are very different from the first. Paradise has been left behind, and the mood switches to something much more melancholy, woven together by what Herbert Schneidau, and more recently Nick Selby, suggest is foundational to the Cantos, Pound’s “poetics of loss,” epitomized here by the ruins of the great Ducal Palace at Mantua, home for four centuries to the politically powerful Gonzaga family, then left to decay.68 Pound had visited it in 1911 along with William Carlos Williams’s brother Edgar, and here he recalls the “Drear waste, great halls, / Silk tatters still in the frame.”69 He doesn’t actually say he has seen this himself, he just presents the remembered scene. As Bush argues, this second Ur-Canto

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moves much closer to Pound’s mode of writing in the later Cantos, presenting, not describing. The poet-persona is less obtrusive and the argument with Browning vanishes. What is given is, for the most part, a series of paratactic images, elliptical stories; they are Pound’s personal memories or memories of his reading, but the personal connection isn’t highlighted. In Three Cantos I Pound foregrounds and dramatizes his search for a persona, Sordello-like, to frame his epic, but here he works much more with Imagism as he defined it in “Vorticism.” The example he gave there, “In a Station of the Metro,” takes the classic form: two lines, two pictures, one image created by the electric charge of their meeting. Here there are a series of echoing imagistic vignettes, examples perhaps of what Pound sees as “writ(ing) to paint,” but emblematizing loss, pain, betrayal, and disappointment. Many of the figures are Provençal, and at the heart of the Canto Pound returns obliquely to that walking tour in south-west France when he had felt the living presence of the troubadours around him, more “Ghosts mov[ing] about [him] / Patched with histories.” Here the Dordogne offers the visionary moments that he finds in Sirmione in Ur-Canto 1. Yet when the reader reaches the end of the Canto, it emerges that each of the figures has been put forward, and implicitly dismissed, like those in Ur-Canto 1, as potential Sordellos. Though the war is never mentioned in this canto, “drear waste” evokes the desolate mud of the battlefields, and chimes with the poignant losses at the front. Gaudier-Brzeska’s death had appeared in drafts of the Ur-Cantos, but, in the published version, in Longenbach’s words, direct “reference to the war disappears; only the melancholic sense of waste remains.”70 Both Bush and David Moody describe this Canto as an Inferno, in contrast to the Paradiso of Three Cantos I, and certainly, as Moody notes, images of sunlight give way to gloom.71 Although these two Ur-Cantos represent antithetical poles, this “inferno” is nothing like the “hell-rot [. . .] great arse-hole” of Cantos 14 and 15, howls of rage against the “perverts, who have set money-lust / Before the pleasures of the senses” (14/61). Here there are gradations of loss, possibly, but not inevitably, associated with culpability, more

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a sense of mourning for a lost world, lost happiness, lost love, or lost hope—even a lost manuscript or a lost kingdom—than a conventional hell. Though Pound is sure about his Paradiso, he remains, at this stage, hazy about what part an Inferno will play. And though apparently less personal, this Ur-Canto is perhaps the one that Eliot had particularly in mind when in 1917 he described the Three Cantos as “objective and reticent autobiography.”72 While Pound’s walking tour had given him a rich and unforgettable sense of the troubadours’ living presence, he had learnt of his friend and patron Margaret Craven’s suicide while walking, a fact that was deeply traumatizing in itself, and that threw his whole future as a poet in doubt, much as Gaudier’s death, the shadow of war, and a hostile press threatened as he worked on the Ur-Cantos. Much of the pain here is caused by love gone awry, sexual disappointments of one kind or another: Eliot, his brother-in-law said, found Pound the only person with whom he could talk about his own sexual marital misery, so he may have known that though Pound was intensely loyal to Dorothy in word if later not in deed, there is no way Pound’s marriage had lived up to his ecstatic, quasi-mystical view of sexual fulfilment.73 Women are largely a source of pain here: Mary Ellis Gibson has analyzed Pound’s problematic “doubled feminine” and if, in Ur-Canto 1, the feminine was idealized, particularly in the figure of Venus/Simonetta, here there is a more hostile and disturbing view.74 Yet if this Canto is an Inferno, it is not just about Pound’s condemnation of others, but his own pain. As Bush perceptively notes, the figures here are “stranded in midlife, dreaming of their renascence” like the “confused poet-narrator,” seeking to “write a poem transfused with divine light in an age when the gods are hidden.”75 The deserted Mantuan palace is the first of this Canto’s brief vignettes of loss, “Gonzaga’s splendour / Alight with phantoms.”76 Mantegna, mentioned at the end of Ur-Canto 1, had painted the frescos there: as in much of this Canto, a kind of free association seems to link the images that appear, almost stream of consciousness, a term first applied to literature just a year later.77 Unlike the poet’s powerful sense of the ghosts that hover about him in the previous Canto, it is

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the doubts expressed towards its end and the difficulty of contact that are stressed here. “What have we of them? Or much or little? / Where do we come upon the ancient people?”78 The enigmatic answer takes the form of the opening line (slightly misquoted) of Browning’s poem “My Star,” “All that I know is that a certain star.”79 In Browning’s poem, he knows only the intermittent but intoxicatingly colored darts of light that flash out from the star, not much perhaps, but at least the poet sees those flashes of light: others can’t. Pound in this Canto is similarly presenting his visionary glimpses of past lives, more tentatively than in Ur-Canto 1, mourning what is lost, yet capturing an essence. The artist’s vision, albeit fragmented, is still the touchstone. More of these fragmentary glimpses follow, with Pound evoking particular troubadours or singers whom he associates with loss. Pound had read in an illuminated manuscript in Paris the one remaining melancholy song by Joios of Tolosa, and he mourns the loss of his copy.80 There too he had seen the only two scores that remained of Arnaut Daniel’s many songs, and he has a line evoking the delicate beauty of that music, “The rose-leaf casts her dew on the ringing glass.” This is the lost music Arnold Dolmetsch is working to resurrect through his recreation of early musical instruments: he “will build our age in witching music. / Violas da Gamba, tabors, tympanons,” mirroring Pound’s own endeavor to recapture this past beauty.81 Pound turns to the “Song of the Lute” by the T’ang poet Po-Chü-i (772–846); the poet is going into exile, and as he bids goodbye to his friend (“the maple leaves blot up their shadows, / The sky is full of autumn”) they hear “troubling lute music.”82 The singer recalls her life as an acclaimed performer and musician, beautiful as well as gifted, “my hair was full of jade, / And my slashed skirts, drenched in expensive dyes,” until she “faded out and married.”83 In Pound’s version, the poem ends with her weeping; he leaves implicit that in the original the poet recognizes her as a fellow artist, whose melancholy song echoes his own sadness at rejection and exile. The resonances for Pound’s position are doubly distanced, but undoubtedly there, though Pound’s

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emphasis on her pleasure in expensive gifts converts sympathy to misogyny, and undermines any overt identification, just as earlier the sensitive Joios had been undermined when we are of told that while he was weeping merely “for a flare of color,” “Coeur de Lion was before Chalus” where he would meet his death.84 Neither Joios nor the lute girl are possible Sordellos. The next two verse paragraphs follow Catullus from adoration to abhorrence of his lover Lesbia. In the first Ur-Canto, Catullus is in paradise, here in hellish misery. “So much for him who puts his trust in woman” is the black comment that ends that story, but, surprisingly, it is followed by the line, “So the murk opens.”85 Catullus’s bitter disillusionment is so immediately present through his poetry that the dark mists that hide the past open, and the poet goes back to the Dordogne, another of his sacred places, and home for the poetic spirit.86 He had been conscious there of the poets on the roads around him, just as, he recalls here, he had earlier been aware of “Procession on procession” on Salisbury Plain, when he had visited Maurice Hewlett for Christmas in 1911, an incident that reappears in Canto 80 (535). There, as in the Dordogne, Pound had been aware that “Ply over ply of life still wraps the earth.” Reverting to his image in Ur-Canto-1, Pound comments, “Catch at Dordoigne” (he always uses the medieval spelling), a rich trawl of memories and remembered figures to weave his epic.87 Pound recalls another not quite satisfactory figure, the tragicomic troubadour Raimon Jordan, Viscount of St Antoni, whose song, “As the rose in the trellis / Winds in and through and over,” eventually wins him a lady, through not the one for whom it was written.88 The story brings back a vivid memory of how “the blue Dordoigne / Stretches between white cliffs, / Pale as the background of a Leonardo.”89 Pound remembers the St John’s Eve celebrations with their pagan undertones and mock battles that he had seen there in 1912, which in turn suggest stories of men of action rather than poets, figures from poetic works Pound particularly admired. Some of the scenes are ones he had praised for their poetic force in The Spirit of Romance, such as the scene from the Poema del Cid that would reappear in Canto 3. In the later Cantos,

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the “masks” or “half-masks” Pound put forward would more often be doers like Malatesta than poets, but the battles described here with “piled men and bloody rivers” are horrific rather than glorious.90 War in this Ur-Canto, fought honorably or not, is a terrible thing, a parallel to Pound’s contemporary moment. The most disturbing vignette, which also has a vestigial appearance in Canto 3, is the Portuguese poet Camoens’ story of Pedro and Ignez. Ignez was murdered through court intrigue while her lover Pedro was still heir to the throne, and when he succeeded as king, Pedro exhumed her dead body, sat her corpse beside him on the throne, “a wedding ceremonial He and her dug-up corpse in cerements,” and the courtiers were obliged to pay her homage, “who winked at murder kisses the dead hand.”91 Longenbach suggests this story encapsulates Pound’s critique of philologists; like the courtiers, all they can do is “kiss the hand of the rotted corpse of the past.”92 Pound moves to modern times and to a further slide in Portugal’s fortunes, with the liaison of the last Portuguese monarch, Manuel II, and the dancer Gaby Deslys, whom he plied with extravagant jewels, helping to hasten the end of the monarchy, “Another crown, thrown to another dancer,” a return to the theme of “So much for him who puts his trust in woman.” This liaison, which lasted from 1908 till 1911 (Manuel was deposed in 1910) was widely reported in the British and Continental press, so Pound has moved away from his literary sources, and his final vignette is a personal memory, that of Fred Vance, whom he had met in the Midwest during his first and only academic post.93 Vance had “hankered after painting,” escaped to Paris, “Ten years of life, his pictures in the salons” before being summoned home, “Painting the local drug-shop and soda bars,” while still dreaming of Europe and his “renaissance.” Vance “ador[es] Puvis,” clearly a weakness, but his fate was one the younger Pound had often feared—a return to America, the blighting of his talent—and he ends ironically, “Take my Sordello!”94

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Ur-Canto 3 In the third Canto, the mood changes once more. The melancholy vanishes, and, as the Canto develops, there is a new sense of resolution and a path forward. It begins quite light-heartedly, with Pound introducing another possible Sordello, this time the comically eccentric figure of the seventeenth-century English astrologer, alchemist, and Neoplatonist, John Heydon, “a half-cracked fellow [. . .] dealer in levitation [. . .] Seer of pretty visions,” as well as self-designated “servant of God and secretary of nature.”95 While at Stone Cottage, Yeats and Pound had read Heydon’s Holy Guide (1662), which recounts his visionary experiences, and which, Heydon claims, offers “Knowledge of all things, Past, Present and to Come.”96 Pound had been particularly fascinated by Heydon’s mystical theory of “the joys of pure form,” which he references in Gaudier-Brzeska as a way of understanding Vorticist abstraction as a path to “the calm realm of truth, into the world unchanging.”97 He would reintroduce Heydon and his theories in Canto 91 (91/651), and many of his ideas would remain important to him, but here he is set up only to be dismissed, being merely “Full of plaintive charm [. . .] lacking the vigor of gods.” Nonetheless, Pound at first suggests he might follow Heydon and “Take the old way” of the dream-vision, “plungèd deep in swevyn.” He sees Layamon, Chaucer and others, and finally Heydon, who pronounces the words “Omniformis / Omnis intellectus est” (translated by Pound as “every intellect is omniform”) and “spouting half of Psellus.”98 Those last words, so Poundian in their fusion of the colloquial and the esoteric, introduce a turning point in the Ur-Cantos, a move away from the Yeatsian influence of the time at Stone Cottage to something that for Pound is more in keeping with the Vorticist transformation of the arts. Pound goes on: “Then comes a note, my assiduous commentator: / Not Psellus’ De Daemonibus, but Porphyry’s Chances.” Peter Liebregts argues that if these words had come from the first of these Neoplatonist philosophers, the eleventh-century Michael Constantine Psellus, they would have implied that spirits could take on any shape

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they wanted, giving support for a belief like Yeats’s in spiritism and seances, and for the practices of those Pound described as “the charlatans of Bond Street.”99 But the phrase comes from Marsilio Ficino’s Latin translation of the third-century Porphyry’s De Occasionibus (Pound’s Chances), as a heading for a section that says “the nous of each individual contains the whole of Reality”; in other words, each of us has the potential to access ultimate reality, the One, the divine light.100 This is the belief that Pound had already implied in his reference to the phantastikon in Ur-Canto 1, the doctrine that he believes is fundamental to both Dante and Cavalcanti, and which in the Commedia makes it possible for the Dante figure to see God in Beatrice’s eyes, human passion leading to a vision of the eternal and divine, or perhaps, for Pound, human love at its most ecstatic being what is eternal and divine. As with the phantastikon, for Pound only the finest minds can perceive this ultimate light. Yet Pound’s translation, “every intellect is omniform,” perhaps also suggests the way Pound the poet will be able to enter into so many other figures and times in the Cantos in his quest for understanding. He had asked in Ur-Canto 1 if his “many fragments” were “less worth” than Browning’s “one whole man”; here we perhaps find the answer.101 After this brief, dense passage, with the turn from Psellus to Porphyry, the Ur-Cantos take on a new directness and vigor. In fact, though Heydon is rejected as a Sordello, the mention of his theory of “pure form” earlier was perhaps already a hint at the move to Pound’s own Neoplatonically inflected version of Vorticism.102 And although Pound has not overtly mentioned Ficino, he now turns to him as one of the handful of figures who, he had argued in February 1915, had produced the Renaissance, and with whom he had compared himself and the small band of revolutionary artists he saw bringing about a comparable transformation. The Renaissance figures invoked here stand both for themselves and for the Vorticist project. In that article Pound had written of Ficino’s translations of Neoplatonist texts that he had “mess[ed] up” Christian, Pagan, and occult texts “into a most eloquent and exhilarating hotchpotch, which ‘did for’ the medieval fear

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of ‘dies irae’ and for human abasement generally.”103 “A most eloquent and exhilarating hotchpotch” could be another description of the Cantos and their synthesizing project, which also aims to reject “fear of ‘dies irae.’” Pound was, like Pater, fascinated by the art and poetry of the late middle ages and the early Renaissance, though he thought the later Renaissance went off into rhetorical excess, a fault for which he was simultaneously castigating the British wartime press. He gives an example here of what he sees as regrettable Renaissance rhetoric, another dream vision, Lorenzo de’ Medici’s long philosophical poem, The Supreme Good, written, Pound says, in “some Wordsworthian, false-pastoral manner,” recounting “deep platitudes about contentment / From some old codger with an endless beard.”104 The poem paraphrases two letters written to Lorenzo by Ficino, his former tutor, but Pound has the poem brusquely interrupted and dismissed by Ficino himself. Pound turns to another Renaissance figure, the one he particularly admires, Lorenzo Valla, “more earth and sounder rhetoric” as he describes him here (just, Longenbach points out, what Pound is seeking in this Canto).105 In 1915, Pound had called Valla, who taught the Italian humanists to write classical rather than Church Latin, the “finest force of the age,” with a “great passion for exactness” and appreciation of the “Roman vortex.”106 Now he describes Valla’s language in the terms he used of Imagism, as “cut clear and hard,” and says that, while other Renaissance figures “wept for the buildings” of Ancient Rome, already then in ruins, Valla argued that what made Rome great was its use of language. For a moment Pound returns to Sordello, to a speech he made to his wavering troops, where he tells them he would like to feed their princes with the courageous heart of the heroic dead Sir Blacatz;107 likewise, Pound says, with appropriately Latinate syntax, “Valla, the heart of Rome, / Sustaining speech, set out before the people.”108 Valla, early on craftily subverting papal claims through philology (the only use of philology, I believe, Pound ever commends), eventually took a papal post, an act which, Pound notes here, the historian Villari interpreted as a defeat and retreat into conformity, though

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Burckhardt, whom Pound considers more reliable, does not agree.109 Translating Valla’s Latin, which he had given in the original in his 1915 essay “The Renaissance,” he quotes his pronouncement, “Wherever the Roman speech was, there was Rome,” and adds, “Wherever the speech crept, there was mastery.”110 The correlation between the exact use of language and good governance would become an important theme for The Cantos, later given a Confucian gloss. If the first Ur-Canto had been focused on a personal, artistic quest, and the second moved from poets to men of action, from the loss of lovers and of manuscripts to the loss of battles and kingdoms, this third Ur-Canto hints even more at the role Pound’s socio-political concerns would come to play. And in terms of form, if Ur-Canto 1 had signaled that Pound’s “poem of some length” would use multiple, shifting masks or half masks, and Ur-Canto 2 that it would work through the layering of past and present, imagistic super-position, the theme of this Canto is a return to a past more powerfully in touch with vital energies, and to a vigorous language “cut clean and hard,” the poet as sculptor. This quest leads Pound to the passage that will ultimately open the final version of Canto 1. “Doughty’s ‘divine Homeros’,” he writes, “Came before sophistry,” and he turns to a Renaissance Latin translation of the Odyssey by “uncatalogued” Andreas Divus, again written before the Renaissance succumbed to rhetoric, Pound translating it into a version of his The Seafarer’s AngloSaxon-inflected modern English, whose consonantal form necessitates language “cut clear and hard.”111 As Humphrey Carpenter comments, Pound is incorporating “ply over ply” of voices, English written for a modern audience but evoking Anglo-Saxon diction, translating a Renaissance Latin translation of an ancient Greek original, itself a writing down of earlier oral versions.112 The Renaissance, Pound maintained, led to a “revival of the sense of realism,” a turn from Virgil to Homer, from “snivelling Aeneas” to the pragmatic, wily Odysseus.113 And the passage Pound chooses is the Nekuia, Odysseus’s descent to the underworld, liberating the dead, most crucially Tiresias, to speak through blood-sacrifice, the episode Pound said later “cries out that it is the earliest part,” and which he presents as in touch with archaic

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forces, chthonic and visceral.114 He had found his eventual beginning, a beginning which like Dante’s is the descent to the underworld, learning from what Pound called “all the energised past, all the past that is living and worthy to live,” but also, Surette suggests, the descent to the depths that the initiate must make in the Eleusinian Mysteries.115 Since the rest of Ur-Canto 3, slightly cut, forms Canto 1, discussed in this volume by Catherine Paul, I will keep my comments on it brief. Longenbach has pointed out that in this first version, there are two slightly different translations of the passage’s opening lines, destabilizing the idea of any authoritative accurate translation in favor of a lived, imaginative attempt to make contact with the past. The Ur-Canto ends, as does the final Canto 1, with some lines translated from a version of a hymn to Venus that Pound had found printed in the same volume as the Divus, and which he denounced elsewhere for its excessive rhetoric, and here, more mildly, for its “florid mellow tone.” Yet he clearly wanted to indicate that the dark descent should lead to ultimate sexual ecstasy, returning to Ur-Canto 1’s evocation of Botticelli’s Venus and its paradisal imagery of glimmering water, “Light on the foam, breathed on by zephyrs.”116 Pound had been working on other Cantos, which would begin to appear from 1919, but after the publication of the Three Cantos he turned to a new and powerful persona poem, Homage to Sextus Propertius, in which Bush suggests Pound hones his narrative voice in ways that would enable an important move forward with his long poem. And, in 1919, he made a breakthrough in his Cantos project. Visiting France for the first time since before the war, returning to many of the places he had visited in 1912 and recalled in the Ur-Cantos, he completed Canto 4, a major step in evolving the paradigmatic form for his long poem, a further intensification of the form of the imagistic Ur-Canto 2, where the narrator now vanishes from the poem, allowing the paratactic imagistic fragments to speak for themselves. The impersonality is only apparent; as Bush argues, the “façon de voir” remains his.117 But, if imagistic, it is also, Moody argues, in the range of mythic and poetic figures invoked, the “culmination of his early personae.”118

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Canto 4 would appear, scarcely altered, in Draft of XVI Cantos in 1925, where Canto I began, as it does now, with the Nekuia. But though many of the Cantos’ core mythic elements were already in place in the Ur-Cantos, as Pound worked on the Cantos, their direction would be reshaped by the ideas of Social Credit and the gradual embrace of Italian Fascism. Longenbach laments that Pound “forsook the humanist ideal of the individual [. . .] embodied in the Three Cantos [. . .] and picked the banner of more unattractive causes.”119 Yet the aestheticism of the Ur-Cantos was already an elitist one, and Pound’s view of sexuality already firmly male-centered, even if not as hyper-masculinist as his fellow-Vorticists or the Fascists. All the same, the Ur-Cantos’ defense of the value of the arts and culture in the face of an increasingly barbarous world seems remarkably prescient of the forces that would shape Pound’s long poem, and increasingly relevant a hundred years on.

2

Canto 1 Catherine Paul

In Canto 1, Pound attempts an appropriately epic opening for his “poem of some length,” rooting himself in the subject matter of Homer’s Odyssey and the diction of Beowulf, combining principal epic traditions of English verse to which he will join Vergil’s Aeneid later in the poem. The poem establishes thematic concerns for the entire Cantos, a poetics of syncresis that will drive the project. While much of the poem’s material appeared in the Ur-Cantos in only slightly different form, its presence as the beginning noticeably shifts the way The Cantos are to be read. Telling first the story of Odysseus’s venture to the gates of the underworld to gain guidance from Tiresias, Pound also establishes echoes of Dante’s Commedia and its journey through the realm of the dead. The poem closes with a brief section drawn largely from the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite. Together, these elements initiate the combinations of elements that drive The Cantos, and establish writing and a negotiation of a textual past as epic acts. When Pound reprinted Ur-Cantos 3 in Future (London, 1918), where he retitled the poem “An Interpolation taken from The Third Canto of a Long Poem,” he added the note, “The above Passages from the Odyssey, done into an approximation of the metre of the AngloSaxon ‘Sea-farer’,” a form shared with the Old English long poem

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Beowulf.1 Canto 1 achieved its current form by 1923, in publication in the deluxe illuminated volume, A Draft of XVI Cantos of Ezra Pound for the Beginning of a Poem of Some Length.2 Forrest Read suggests that Pound’s decision to open with a passage from The Odyssey may have come from his reading of James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), and Ronald Bush proposes that Pound’s interactions with T. S. Eliot and his reading and editing of The Waste Land (1922) offered Pound a way of incorporating the methods of Ulysses into The Cantos—new approaches from those deployed in the Ur-Cantos.3 The poem’s status as opening of The Cantos was solidified in A Draft of XXX Cantos, first published in Paris in 1930 by Nancy Cunard’s Hours Press.4 Now, the poem introduces readers to the massive project of The Cantos. The first 67 lines of the poem translate the Nekuia episode from Book XI of the Odyssey, in which Odysseus and his crew consult spirits in the underworld for help returning home to Ithaca. The Canto opens in the middle of things, but Homer’s text has told us that Odysseus and his men had ventured from Aeaea in a ship provided by Circe, a sorceress who had bewitched Odysseus’s men into swine, but also hosted them for a year of feasting—and Odysseus in her bed—before giving directions to Hades. The Canto’s early lines describe in the first person their setting forth and sea journey to the land of the Cimmerians, whose land of fog and darkness is understood to be the entryway to Hades. Odysseus recounts his crew members Perimedes and Eurylochus performing the rites for evoking speech from the dead—sacrifice of sheep, saying of prayers, and pouring of libations, “First mead and then sweet wine, water mixed with white flour” (1:3). These rites draw a crowd of spirits who long to speak, and Odysseus and his men multiply their ritual efforts in order to fend off the “impetuous impotent dead” while preserving resources to secure the prophecy of the blind prophet Tiresias, who they hope can offer them a way home. Those shades include Elpenor (the youngest of Odysseus’s men, inadvertently abandoned to a drunken death and left unburied) and Anticlea (Odysseus’s mother, who had died during his absence). Odysseus wants only to hear from Tiresias, however, who foresees: “‘Shalt return through

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spiteful Neptune, over dark seas, / ‘Lose all companions’” (1/5).5 Anticlea comes forward again, but, unlike the Ur-Cantos version, Pound’s translation ends before there is any interaction with her. A few lines later, Pound’s speaker narrates, “And he sailed, by Sirens and thence outward and away / And unto Circe” (1/5). Soon the voice of the poem shifts from that of Odysseus to Pound as poetic translator. Indeed, David Moody offers that the poet is the “true protagonist” of The Cantos, and that the real action here is “the poet’s editing, performing and interpreting Odysseus’ story.”6 Between Anticlea’s second appearance and the summary of Odysseus’s departure, we read: “Lie quiet Divus. I mean, that is Andreas Divus, / In officina Wecheli, 1538, out of Homer” (1/5). Pound writes, in a section of “Translators of Greek: Early Translators of Homer” (1918), that “In the year of grace 1906, 1908, or 1910 I picked from the Paris quais a Latin version of the Odyssey by Andreas Divus Justinopolitanus (Parisiis, In officina Christiani Wecheli, MDXXXVIII), the volume containing also the Batrachomyomachia, by Aldus Manutius, and the Hymni Deorum rendered by Georgius Dartona Cretensis.”7 These hymns provide material for the final lines of Canto 1, about which more below. In “Translators of Greek,” Pound also comments that “Divus’ Latin has, despite its wems, its quality,” and that “a crib of this sort may make just the difference of permitting a man to read fast enough to get the swing and mood of the subject, instead of losing both in a dictionary.”8 Divus becomes the medium through which Pound can converse with Homer, and so The Cantos, too, participate in this mediumship for their reader, pouring libations and opening channels of communication. In that same essay, Pound quotes the entirety of Divus’s rendering of the Nekuia episode, followed by his own translation as published in Ur-Cantos 3—very similar to the text of now Canto 1.9 That this citation interrupts—and even abridges—Pound’s translation of Homer indicates how important is this textually rooted engagement with the Odyssey. It is a literary extension of the kind of scene narrated in the Nekuia. Pound’s own publication of Cantos—and particularly the deployment of fine-print elements of illustration and red-and-black

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printing of the early book forms of A Draft of XVI Cantos (1925), A Draft of Cantos 17–27 (1928), and inclusion of Dorothy Pound’s Vorticist capitals of A Draft of XXX Cantos (1930)—has led such scholars as Jerome McGann, Miranda Hickman, and George Bornstein to emphasize the material textuality of Pound’s own poetry.10 What his Cantos enact in their literary engagement with history and textuality they replicate on the level of the material page, so that books, like the blood of sheep, enable conversation with the dead. Pound is both invested in evoking the spirits of the dead and leery of the practice. His choice of the Nekuia episode establishes a belief in communication with shades, suggesting that he, like Odysseus, will seek their council. Wearing the mask of Odysseus, Pound’s narrator seeks counsel from Tiresias. In the same Canto, however, he reveals himself searching through the texts of the past, grappling with tradition and how to negotiate it. The back and forth suggests that the ancient Theban prophet could similarly provide insight into the unfolding of this long poem. Is the poem likewise destined for rough sailing “over dark seas”? Will the poem’s speaker find himself isolated by his endeavor? What will he find if he ever reaches the home he seeks? For this long poem, which Pound says must include history, to begin with a dire prophecy signals that the going will be rough. Knowing now how The Cantos have unfolded, it is tempting to read the losses and ends of eras chronicled in The Pisan Cantos and the uncertain endings of Drafts and Fragments into Tiresias’s prophecy. The reference to Divus reminds readers that Pound’s speaker’s encounter with shades is very literary, and clearly textual. He is no Soho medium, prone to table-rapping, but a bookish man using a particular translation to make his own—to get at Homer. The long poem encounters history, poetry, the very tradition of epic— certainly not the casual raising of ghosts. Still: “Lie quiet Divus,” as though the shade of Andreas Divus himself were present, too, in this encounter, connecting the living speaker and the long dead Homer. And if Divus must be cautioned to lie quiet, then perhaps raising his spirit, as Pound’s speaker has done, brings risks. Does Divus’s shade

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have grievances to bear? Might he bristle at Pound’s rendering of his Latin into very Germanic English? Might he, like Elpenor, interrupt Pound’s narrative with concerns of his own? Could an encounter with him, like Odysseus’s with his mother’s ghost, distract from Pound’s literary purpose? In Ur-Cantos 3, the long translated passage from Homer begins with a citation of Divus, and a more direct rendering of his translation, before Pound mentions his own struggle with translation and offers his own version: “I’ve strained my ear for –ensa, –ombra, and –ensa / And cracked my wit on delicate canzoni— / Here’s but rough meaning: / ‘And then went down to the ship. . . .’”11 Foregrounding the act of translation, Pound explicitly roots his story’s origin in an older text and other attempts to carry it across from one language to another, one time to another. In Canto 1, however, the poem—and the entirety of The Cantos—begins with the text itself, the reference to translation arriving only afterwards. The action of Homer’s story becomes the action of Pound’s story. The in medias res opening, “And then . . . ,” to be matched by the Canto’s concluding, “So that:” (1/5), which will be repeated as the first words of Canto 17. This is a beginning less about beginning than about already being there, and the bare opening allows the semblance of an unmediated encounter with Pound’s language, Homer’s story, and Odysseus’s encounter with the dead. Pound’s foregrounding the ancient Greek cult practice of necromancy also establishes the occult in The Cantos, a poem in which possession of secret knowledge delineates a select group who can negotiate the poem and make use of it. James Longenbach has recounted the joint and mutually influential work undertaken by Pound and W. B. Yeats during their time spent at Stone Cottage in 1913–16. For Yeats, their reading of the likes of Charles Doughty’s Travels in Arabia Deserta (1888), Fenollosa’s renderings of Noh plays (which Pound more fully translated), William Morris’s translations of Icelandic sagas, and John Heydon’s Holy Guide (1662) helped lead to the composition of such explicitly occult and spiritualist texts as Per Amica Silentia Lunae (1917), The Dreaming of the Bones (1919), and

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his first published version of A Vision (1925).12 These readings helped Pound shape such poems as “Provincia Deserta” and “Villanelle: The Psychological Hour” (both published 1915), his translations from Fontenelle’s Nouveaux Dialogues des mortes (published in the Egoist 1916–17), the Ur-Cantos and, finally, Canto 1. Yeats’s negotiations with the spirit of Leo Africanus—whom he had originally encountered in a seance of May 1909, but whom he subsequently met again at a seance in July 1915—led to the “doctrine of ‘the mask’ which has convinced me that every passionate man . . . is, as it were, linked with another age, historical or imaginary, where alone he finds images that rouse his energy.”13 Longenbach notes that these encounters “forced Yeats to consider the possibility that the anti-self might be the spirit of someone who had once walked the earth,” so that “a psychological theory was transformed into a theory of history.”14 This theory exerts itself repeatedly in The Cantos, beginning with the speaker of Canto 1 giving voice to Odysseus seeking council from the dead. Early on, Canto 1’s journey into the underworld took on a crucial role in the overall structure of The Cantos. Pound describes this scheme to his father in April 1927 as “[r]ather like, or unlike subject and response and counter subject in fugue.” He continues: A. A. Live man goes down into world of Dead C. B. The “repeat in history” B. C. The “magic moment” or moment of metamorphosis, bust thru from quotidian into “divine or permanent world.” Gods, etc.15 Demetres P. Tryphonopoulos correlates these subjects to the three states of palingenesis, or rebirth: (1) katabasis, or descent, the initial stage of initiation; (2) dromena, the stage of wandering that precedes revelation; and (3) epopteia, the revelation itself.16 Revelation and rebirth were not to be achieved until later in The Cantos, but as a poem written over more than five decades—and which necessarily includes not just that history that is its subject, but also the history unfolding

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in its writing—The Cantos do not necessarily fulfill this scheme. Although a reader unfamiliar with these occult and spiritualist echoes can discern from the poem a highly literary engagement with the past, only a reader possessing this rare knowledge will recognize the spiritualist and ritual elements of the Nekuia, and therefore of The Cantos. Pound’s translation practice deploys diction and verse structure to create echoes of Old English poetry and older incarnations of English. He had published his translation of the Old English “The Seafarer” in 1911, planting the sounds of this poetry in his ear. Words like “swart” (1/3; from Old English sweart, meaning “dark,” but reserved in Modern English for antiquating usage), “fosse” (1/3; Middle English, meaning “ditch”), “dreory” (1/4; Old English, meaning “bloody”— Pound had “dreary” in the Ur-Cantos version), “ingle” (1/4; Lowland Scots meaning “fire,” but intended to denote “chimney corner,” and a word Pound may have borrowed from Gavin Douglas’s translation of Aeneid), “bever” (1/4; Lowland Scottish for “drink”), and “soothsay” (1/4; an early modern English back-formation from “soothsayer,” but evocative of Old English sóðsecgan meaning “to say or speak truly,” and whose presence is again the product of post-Ur-Cantos revision). Even Pound’s own coinage “pitkin” (1/3; meaning “little pit”) sounds like it could derive from an earlier time. The poems’ lines are rife with alliteration—the principal structuring device of Old and some Middle English poetry. Frequent inversions of standard Modern English word order evoke the Germanic grammar of Old English. These poetic elements place Canto 1 in a tradition looking back to the earliest remnants of poetry in English—Pound’s interest in what Hugh Kenner calls “how a bard breathes.”17 The poem’s investment in sound revives dead versions of English, thereby participating in yet another kind of attempt to revive and listen to the spirits of the dead. How does the Nekuia function here, and in The Cantos more generally? For one thing, it establishes the theme of nostos, or the longing for a homecoming, in the long poem. While Odysseus wants to return home to Ithaca and Penelope, Pound’s speaker seems to have a less clearly defined home, so that while his path is (like Odysseus’) quite

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circuitous, his longing remains unsatisfied. Gelpi reads the Nekuia as a “symbolic engagement with the unconscious,” so that The Cantos become “an epic of consciousness,” and the literary and historical past a kind of Jungian collective consciousness.18 Pound himself emphasized the antiquity of this story, commenting to W. H. D. Rouse in a letter of May 1935, “The Nekuia shouts aloud that it is older than the rest, all that island, Cretan, etc., hinter-time, that is not Praxiteles, not Athens of Pericles, but Odysseus.”19 Additionally, this story presents the poetic speaker delving into the past through literary remnants, acts of translation and quotation, and even a metaphorical resuscitation of the dead. Pound had initiated this approach in his multi-part essay, “I Gather the Limbs of Osiris” (1911–12), where he imagined himself as the goddess Isis, combining roles of historian and poet to create living art by blowing life into the past’s remains. Peter Liebregts suggests that Canto 1 is one way that Pound differentiates his encounter with the dead from Yeats’s spiritualist interests, stressing “the textuality of the ghostly encounter rather than the nature of the encounter itself.”20 Liebregts reads the larger purpose of The Cantos as a Neoplatonic attempt to present particulars “as Ideas in action, as direct presentations of eternal truths.”21 In this way, Odysseus and Tiresias become “inflections of Pound’s personality as well as general representations of man’s divided nature,” so that the particular is the universal is the particular.22 Leon Surette and Tryphonopoulos read this resuscitation less metaphorically, seeing The Cantos as an enactment of the mysteries of Eleusis, the initiation rites of the Athenian cult of Demeter and Persephone. Tryphonopoulos notes that while these rites had an agrarian origin “designed to maintain and increase the fertility of the land, the mysteries were later modified and . . . became charged with metaphysical meanings, most especially the immortality of the soul.”23 So read, Canto 1 begins the worshippers’ ritual encounter with death, marking the descent into the underworld as a mode of goddess worship. Such an understanding, Surette notes, “introduces the reader immediately into the divine metamorphic world of Canto [2].”24 Whether this descent is read literally or metaphorically, ritualistically or historiographically, in

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terms of worship or translation, it establishes how a reader will understand the rest of The Cantos. The final five lines of Canto 1 turn to “the Hymni Deorum rendered by Georgius Dartona Cretensis,” appended to Andreas Divus’s Latin translation of the Odyssey in the 1538 edition Pound had found in the Paris quais.25 These thirty-three Homeric Hymns, written in epic measure and attributed in antiquity to Homer, are now considered to be of unknown authorship, and they differ widely in date. Pound draws heavily on the Second Hymn to Aphrodite (the beginning of which Latin version he replicates in “Translators from Greek”), mixing Dartona’s (1/5; “the Cretan’s”) medieval Latin with his own English translation—a continuation of the linguistic blending of his AngloSaxon-inflected Nekuia.26 Of the Latin, he retains “Venerandam” (1/5; “worthy of veneration”), “Cypri munimenta sortita est” (1/5; “held sway over the Cyprian heights”), and “orichalchi” (1/5; “of copper”). The poem offers an interesting mistranslation of Dartona’s Latin habens auream virgam Argicida from the First Hymn to Aphrodite, transforming “the golden wand of the Argus-slayer” (or Hermes) into “Golden bough of Argicida,” thereby giving the goddess a role typically assigned to Hermes.27 In The Aeneid, Aphrodite’s golden bough is an offering for the gate of Proserpine’s palace, parallel Hermes’s moly in The Odyssey, which provides Odysseus safe access to Circe. Carroll F. Terrell reads this story of the birth of Aphrodite from the sea as rhyming with Persephone’s ascent from the underworld, as celebrated at Eleusis.28 These changes and combinations, as Tryphonopoulos notes, deploy “Poundian techniques of using, transforming, and conflating traditional myths into his own syncretic mythos.”29 The transition from a translation of The Odyssey to a riffing on the Homeric Hymns makes not just bibliographic but also thematic sense. Kenner reminds us that “we may discover by later structural analogies how relevant is Aphrodite’s appearance from the sea to the feat of syncretism Canto 1 has performed, and how often such a glimpse culminates such a passage.” Another Homeric Hymn, he notes, dedicated to Dionysos, figures in Canto 2, and still others figure in Cantos

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23–25.30 Surette notes that “in [Pound’s] version of Eleusis it is by means of the rites of the goddess of love that one procures entry into the Underworld.”31 That Odysseus’ journey as recounted in the poem began when he left Circe’s bed means that this glorification of Aphrodite in the end of the poem evokes the sexuality of his encounter with Circe, and Cantos 17, 39, and 47 develop and complicate this theme. Yet conflict is present in this closing section, as we remember Aphrodite’s role in initiating the Trojan War and in championing the Trojans and especially her son Aeneas. While she is best known as the goddess of love, Aphrodite becomes here, like Persephone, associated also with death. As will be true for the rest of The Cantos, no image or story is only itself: it is also its connections with other images or stories that make the larger meaning of the poem. The poetics of syncresis—so important to The Cantos—is already at play here, as Pound joins hymns with epic, prophecy with adoration, worship with initiation, ritual enactment with literary interpretation, Greek and Latin with Old English, immersion in story with insistence on citation. In a poem so invested in ritual activity, reading is no light task, as it involves initiation into a world both just beginning and already well established. For a reader to venture into the land of shades is risky, overlaid with implications that reader does not yet understand. As Canto 1 begins “And then,” it closes “So that:” its meaning contained not in itself but in its searching back and gesturing forth.

3

Canto 2 Peter Liebregts

The first four lines of Canto 2 are a condensed version of the opening verse paragraph of the first Ur-Canto, in which Pound struggles with the question of the relation between himself as speaker-author and his poetic material, and the form he should give it. He discusses the possibility of taking as his model for his own epic Robert Browning’s long narrative poem Sordello (1840). This text mixes fact and fiction, past and present, in an attempt to produce a biography of a historical character, the Provençal troubadour Sordello (ca. 1180–1255), as well as a veiled autobiography, using the earlier poet as a mask for himself. At the same time, the poem self-reflectively deals with questions of the self and problems posed in interpreting and resurrecting history. In Canto 2, Pound seems to have come to terms with Browning’s example: Hang it all, Robert Browning, There can be but the one “Sordello.” But Sordello, and my Sordello? Lo Sordels si fo di Mantovana. (2/6)1

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Adopting his predecessor’s vivid manner of speaking, Pound in the first three lines distinguishes between Browning’s text, Sordello as a historical character, and his own (subjective) perspective on him. Pound grudgingly admits that Sordello is perhaps inimitable and no longer suitable as a model, but also makes clear that no text can ever give a full and truly objective account of history. The historical character of Sordello (“But Sordello”) will always escape any attempt at description, as he did in the case of Browning’s text, since there are as many Sordellos as there are perspectives on him by historians and poets, including Pound’s (“my Sordello”). What one can offer are facts, and let any readers decide for themselves what to make of these, and, more importantly, how to connect all the facts into a meaningful whole. Therefore the fourth line quotes from a Provençal vida of the poet, stating that “Sordello is from the region of Mantua,” thereby supplying us with a piece of factual information from an original source, which takes us as close as possible to the historical “fact” (as translation in itself would again be a form of interpretation). From there on, it is the historian and poet’s perspective and imagination that may create a pattern arising out of the welter of factual details. In this manner, Pound seems to have solved the relation between himself as a poet and his material. On occasion, he himself will be present as a lyrical speaker or adopt the guise of a lyrical “I,” while very often he will let his material speak for itself (“Lo Sordels si fo di Mantovana”), though we are constantly made aware there is an arranger behind it all who has made these selections (“my Sordello”). In this way, the poet is able to move freely in and out of his own material, and also assume masks, which accounts for the many different voices in the poem. These opening lines also introduce the two main themes of this Canto, namely, metamorphosis and vision. It is the gift of the visionary poet to see the essence of facts, or events, and to be able to perceive and express how much these essences are interconnected: how the same basic archetypes recur throughout history and in art in ever-changing forms as variations upon a theme. This comes to the fore in what seems

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at first sight a line standing on its own without any explicit connection to the lines preceding and following: “So-shu churned in the sea” (2/6). As the Canto progresses, it will become clear that the image of water and of the sea dominates the entire Canto and in many instances represents the power of transformation or metamorphosis. Water is, of course, a fitting symbol since this natural phenomenon is always changing yet in a way also stays the same continuously. So-shu has been variously interpreted as a Japanese transliteration of the name of a Chinese poet or of a philosopher.2 In either case, we are dealing with someone trying to come to grips with this power of metamorphosis, just as Browning and Pound try to give a solid shape to what is highly elusive material (and in which one could easily lose oneself). The “sound-image” of the sea is taken up in the next line through a description of a seal, the name of which already suggests that it is a being connected to water. The power of metamorphosis is underlined by linking the animal to both Celtic and Greek mythology through the phrases “daughter of Lir,” referring to Fionualla, daughter of the Celtic sea-god, who was changed into a swan, and the “lithe daughter of Ocean” (note how Pound reinforces the link through “Lir” and “lithe”). The more contemporary reference to the “eyes of Picasso” links the Modernist painter to the seal, as Pound told his daughter Mary that Picasso had eyes like a seal.3 As such the phrase describes the artist’s ability to express the particular way he perceives reality, offering his own vision and changing the shape of reality, just as the Modernist painter did in, for example, his cubist works. In this regard it must be noted that in the Odyssey (used extensively by Pound in the previous Canto) the seal is closely linked to the sea god Proteus who can take on all sorts of shapes, and who appears in the last verse paragraph of this Canto. What connects the three separate “images” of Sordello, So-shu, and the seal is that they are all part of what one may call a “soundscape” very much dominated by sibilance. Apart from “Sordello” and “So-shu” themselves, we may see or rather hear “churned,” “sea,” “Seal,” “sports,” “spray-whited circles of cliff-wash,” “Sleek,” “eyes,” “Picasso,”

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“Ocean.” And, as we read on, the dominance of sibilants continues for another thirteen lines (until the end of the Homeric passage, ending with “among Grecian voices”). This is the most fitting way of evoking the sounds made by water and the sea, so that, not only in terms of content but also in terms of musical expression, the power of metamorphosis rules on all levels. This notion of endless change while essences remain untransformed is exemplified in the lines: “And the wave runs in the beach-groove: / ‘Eleanor, έλέναυς and έλέπτολις!’” (2/6). This famous line will recur with a variation in Canto 7, and refers us to Eleanor of Aquitaine, “Eleanor (she spoiled in a British climate) / ‘Έλανδρος and ‘Έλέπτολις!” (7/24). The Greek words are an adaptation of the Aeschylean pun in Agamemnon 689–90, “‘Έλέναυς, ‘έλανδρος, ‘έλέπτολις” (helenaus, helandros, heleptolis), “ship-wrecking, man-killing, city-destroying,” a description of Helen of Troy. In Canto 2, Pound links Helen to Eleanor of Aquitaine (1124–1204), wife of Louis VII of France, whom she divorced to marry Henry, Duke of Normandy, and the future King Henry II of England. This marriage led to constant warfare between England and France. Here it must be noted that Pound had dealt with some of this story in the first version of Canto 6, and that Canto 2 originally was published as “The Eighth Canto” in The Dial in 1921. As such the original Cantos 6–8 have references to Homer, Aeschylus, Helen, and Eleanor in common, as a sort of hall of echoes. By moving Canto 8 into the second position in the final version of A Draft of XXX Cantos, Pound underlined the link between Homer in Canto 1 as the origin and source of these echoes, while also emphasizing the major theme of metamorphosis by presenting both women with semi-similar names as actualizations of the archetypal idea of the femme fatale, as well as the notion of the “repeat in history.” This leads to an extended description of the reaction of the Trojan elders to Helen’s beauty, introduced by two of the most musical lines in the entire Canto: “And poor old Homer blind, blind, as a bat, / Ear, ear for the sea-surge, murmur of old men’s voices” (2/6). Here we get not only a sense of what the mumbling speech (“murmur”) of the old

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men discussing Helen sounds like, but Pound also expresses through the phrase “ear for the sea-surge” his admiration for the Greek poet’s melopoeia. As he claimed in “Early Translators of Homer” (1918): Of Homer two qualities remain untranslated: the magnificent onomatopoeia, as of the rush of the waves on the sea-beach and their recession in: παρ̀ α θι ν̃ α πολυφλοίσβοιο θαλάσσης untranslated and untranslatable; and secondly, the authentic cadence of speech4 The Homeric line para thina poluphloisboio thalassês, “along the shore of the loud-sounding sea” (Iliad I.34), was for Pound a touchstone of poetry, and may well account for the dominance of sibilants in the opening verse paragraph of Canto 2 and its evocation of the sea. He also recreates the ‘authentic speech’ of the Trojan elders in his free rendering of Iliad III.146–60, a passage discussed at some length in “Early Translators of Homer,”5 and in his rendition marked by repetition of words, phrases, and sounds. It is also noteworthy that Pound inserts two references to two Roman epic poets within his Homeric speech. The line “she moves like a goddess” (2/6) is taken from Virgil’s description of Venus in Aeneid I. 405, vera incessu patuit dea, “and in her step she revealed herself as a goddess.” And the phrase “Schoeney’s daughters” (2/6) refers us to Atalanta, another femme fatale and daughter of Schoeneus, whose name was given as “Schoenyes” in Arthur Golding’s Elizabethan translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, much admired by Pound. In this manner metamorphosis is not only demonstrably present in history, but is also directly linked to the notion and practice of translation and intertextuality, which is another manifestation of transformation, but now in textual terms. It again demonstrates how in this Canto content and form are inextricably tied.

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Pound applies Homeric ring-composition when, after his rendering of the passage from the Iliad, he offers a variation on line 10 (“And the wave runs in the beach-groove”) in his introduction of another myth in line 23, “And by the beach-run, Tyro” (2/6), a girl who was in love with the river god Enipeus. One day Poseidon, who was lusting after her, assumed the shape of Enipeus, made her fall asleep, and had sex with her, while he created a dark wave as a cover to conceal them (Odyssey XI.235–59). In his adaptation of this myth, Pound thus presents the sea, symbol of the permanently changing world, as taking on a more solid shape:    Twisted arms of the sea-god, Lithe sinews of water, gripping her, cross-hold, And the blue-gray glass of the wave tents them, Glaze azure of water, cold-welter, close cover. (2/6) There is a great deal of assonance of the vowels -a- and -o- here, in which the first set is linked to water, and the second to the shape it has taken. This is the first use of a crystalline imagery that will become a dominant feature in The Cantos. We find it, for example, in Canto 25, “and saw the waves taking form as crystal” (25/119), and in 76, “the crystalline, as inverse of water” (76/477). Crystal as a solidified form of water represents a moment of revelation and/or an encounter between the divine and human worlds. Canto 2 thus expresses through a use of Neoplatonic Lichtmetaphysik the “‘magic moment’ or moment of metamorphosis, bust thru from quotidien into ‘divine or permanent world.’ Gods, etc.”6 That Pound read the myth of Tyro in this Neoplatonic sense is evident from a reference in Canto 74/463, in which she and Alcmene, two of the women Odysseus saw in Hades, are part of a vision of the divine, while in Canto 90 (628–29), these women rise up into paradise. The first verse paragraph of Canto 2 ends with yet another depiction of a seascape (2/6–7), which serves both as an extension of the setting of the myth of Tyro as well as an introduction to the main narrative of

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the Canto (Dionysus).7 At the same time it also creates an ambiguity as to the presence of the narrator, and the poem’s perspective and timeframe. Before we discuss this passage in more detail, let us first look at the second and third verse paragraphs. These form the heart of the Canto and are largely devoted to a story about Dionysus (2/7–8, “lynxpurr amid sea”). This narrative contains Pound’s extended paraphrase and adaptation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses III.511–733, in turn based on the Homeric Hymn to Dionysus that deals with that god’s powers of transformation. The sailors’ metamorphoses into fish in Canto 2 represent a consequence of their misdirection of the will: instead of acknowledging the presence of the divine they willfully turn away from intelligible reality and are too taken up by sensible reality and worldly gain. Only the pilot Acoetes recognizes the god as “an eternal state of mind,” and he now tells King Pentheus of Thebes about his encounter as a warning not to disregard the divine force. Acoetes informs us how Dionysus took over the ship by covering it with ivy and vine, and by magically conjuring up beasts: And, out of nothing, a breathing,   hot breath on my ankles, Beasts like shadows in a glass,   a furred tail upon nothingness. (2/8) These animals appear in “void air taking pelt,” as a result of which “Lifeless air becomes sinewed” (2/8; note the analogy with Poseidon’s “lithe sinews of water”). Next to these beasts the god brings forth “grapes with no seed but sea-foam” (2/7). As such, Canto 2 illustrates the ex nihil(o) motif which will become a major theme throughout The Cantos. In order to assess its meaning and significance here, we must briefly look at Pound’s specific interpretation of the phrase. As I have argued elsewhere,8 for Pound, creation out of nothing seems a divine prerogative and as such he uses the phrase “ex nihil” in its Judaeo-Christian sense, as this view on creation as the bringing into existence out of nothing is directly derived from the biblical account

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of God’s creation of the world (Genesis 1:1–3). However, the phrase “ex nihil” is also a shorthand phrase for another, older, and more widespread conception of creation, namely the fashioning of the cosmos out of pre-existing matter by some divine being or principle. We find this notion in classical philosophy, but also in the works of early Jewish and Christian theologians. This notion of “creation not out of nothing” is often summarized as “ex nihilo, nihil fit,” “nothing can come out of nothing.” We know that Pound was familiar with this phrase too, because he uses it in an early, unpublished draft of his first Ur-Canto, the very same in which he is considering Browning’s Sordello as a model for his long poem: “Well you’ll be my Virgil, for you had the form, / Ex nihil, nihil fit.”9 In literary history, both these phrases “creatio ex nihilo” and “ex nihilo, nihil fit” have been linked to different approaches to the act of artistic creation, which one can crudely summarize as the classical and the romantic. The phrase “ex nihilo, nihil fit” may be connected to the classical notion of creation in which the artist is an imitator of nature and thus does not create something new, just as the demiurge in Plato’s Timaeus merely imposes form on the raw material of chaos. In Christian post-classical and medieval times, the notion of “creation” would be reserved for God’s ability to bring something new into being ex nihilo, while human art was still regarded as mimesis, as what men are able to create out of existing materials. During the Renaissance, the word “imitation” also came to mean the imitation of literary forms, genres and other poets. Originality, then, came to be seen in terms of the inventio by the artist, that is, the ability to discover an idea and to produce new combinations of traditional elements, which could still be summarized as creation of “ex nihilo, nihil fit.” Romanticism, however, called received traditions and authority into question, and championed the subjective and new expression of the self. Thus the method of creation shifted from creative imitation to inspired expression, using “creatio ex nihilo” as a metaphor to denote the concept of Romantic originality in the production of artworks. The emphasis in the act of creation, then, moved from the re-arrangement

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of pre-existing building blocks to that of the perceiving mind, each of which is unique and therefore produces unique transformations. It is this same struggle between the subjective and the objective, between the Romantic and the neoclassical, between the “creatio ex nihilo” and the “ex nihilo, nihil fit,” that Pound faced between 1915 and 1922 when he began to work on The Cantos. In the first Ur-Canto, for example, we get a description of a vision of the gods of the “vital universe,” experienced at Sirmio. Pound openly wondered whether he now had to solve the question of the ontological status of immediate experience, that is, whether he had to state whether this vision did objectively appear to him from without, or whether it was a mere subjective projection from within. As I have argued at length in my Ezra Pound and Neoplatonism, Pound in The Cantos adapted the Neoplatonist Plotinus’s worldview which allowed him never to have to make this explicit.10 And this brings us back to Canto 2 and its story of Dionysus. Here Pound/the narrator dramatizes his visionary abilities through the persona of Acoetes as the only one able to perceive the divine, while the sailors’ failure to recognize the god and treat him with respect leads to their being changed into animals. Acoetes’s report of how Dionysus conjured up beasts, seemingly out of nowhere, seems an expression of the notion of “ex nihilo” in its Christian sense as a sign of divine creation. At the same time, however, the poet also underlines that many transformations are the result of one thing being made out of another throughout the Canto. To give but one example: And where was gunwale, there now was vine-trunk, And tenthril where cordage had been,   Grape-leaves on the rowlocks (2/8) Pound here is not so much confusing the “creatio ex nihilo” with the “ex nihil, nihil fit,” but is conflating them, taking a sort of Plotinian angle. Plotinus considered matter, the substratum of the sensible universe, indeterminate “non-being” (Ennead II.4.6; II.5.4). Matter in itself is

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measureless and formless, and form is imposed upon it. In that sense matter is literally no-thing unless it is given a shape. When Dionysus brings forth his beasts, he is doing this in a Plotinian vein by giving form to matter which in itself does and does not exist. Pound here has found his compromise between “ex nihilo” and “ex nihil, nihil fit” as expressions of creative acts. Secondly, he also connects this to the notion of human creativity by letting Acoetes repeatedly say: “I have seen what I have seen” (2/9). Before he gives us the story of Dionysus, Pound begins and ends his vision with a description of the surroundings. I will only quote the beginning: And by Scios,   to left of the Naxos passage, Naviform rock overgrown,   Algæ cling to its edge, There is a wine-red glow in the shallows,   A tin flash in the sun-dazzle. (2/7) Even before Dionysus reveals himself and exercises his powers to punish the sailors, including making the ship stand “still upon the waves, as if held dry in dock” (Metamorphoses III.660–61), we may already see the stilled ship in the rock. Yet who is giving us this specific passage in Canto 2? Who is the focalizer: is it the narrator/Pound who sees the stone in the shape of a ship and gives us the story of that vessel’s transformation? Or is it Acoetes, the only “survivor,” who first shows us the effect of Dionysus’s power and then recounts to King Pentheus what has happened? Or has the narrator’s perspective merged with that of Acoetes, underlining how the passage adapted from Ovid is a depiction of both vision and the “mood of transformation” itself? In any case, the light of the vision (“tin flash”) allows whoever is speaking to become aware of the presence of the divine (the “wine-red glow”), while the vines that will garland the ship are also already present in the image of the “algæ.” Pound’s use of the myth thus serves to underline

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the visionary ability of the poet, and how creation and imagination are elements of a vicious circle: the visions are not real unless we perceive them and make them real in our minds. Only then will divine reality take a visible shape, which seems to arise out of nothing. This myth of Dionysus, then, is on one level a rendition of a classical myth about vision and metamorphosis, but it can also be read as a meditation on nature, the divine, and art. The ability of the artist to see and transform is further strengthened by the closing lines of the third verse paragraph, where we find the same sort of setting which introduced us to the main narrative, but where the speaker also “sees” (a natural remnant of) another transformation, that of the girl Ileuthyeria, “fair Dafne of sea-bords” (2/9), changed into coral while fleeing some lusty tritons. The name of that sea nymph does not occur in classical mythology and is Pound’s own invention.11 In fact, it is a transformation of a famous myth of metamorphosis, that of Daphne who was changed into a laurel tree when pursued by Apollo. The difficulty, rarity, and fleeting nature of vision (which is stressed several times through Acoetes’s claim “I have seen what I have seen,” as if not only to convince Pentheus but also himself) is underscored by the speaker’s struggle to see the essence amid the sea of metamorphosis: “The smooth brows, seen, and half seen, / now ivory stillness” (2/9). The fourth verse paragraph offers us a repetition of lines and images from the first part of the poem, transforming themselves into new combinations against the background of a setting sun and the rise of the evening star Hesperus, giving the natural world a grey hue, as opposed to the dazzling lights we witnessed before. This paragraph spills over into the fifth and penultimate one, in which we see a tower, which may be identified with Apollo, called “Phoibos, turris eburnea,” “Phoebus, tower of ivory,” in Canto 21 (99), and thus is linked to the “ivory stillness” that concluded the third verse paragraph. Apollo as the god of poetry is the force enabling any poet to express or transform visions (in themselves manifestations of metamorphosis) into words. In this way, the two major divine forces present in Canto 2 are Dionysus and Apollo in a poem devoted to metamorphosis, vision,

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and art. And although we read what the poet and various speakers such as the Trojan elders and Acoetes have seen, Pound does remind us in the last paragraph that words and narratives are auditory, and need to be heard. Thus, against Acoetes’s “I have seen what I have seen” we now get “And we have heard” (2/10). What we hear are the “fauns chiding Proteus,” the creature being able constantly to change shape and difficult to get a grip on, as Odysseus experienced in the Odyssey. This last paragraph contains another ambiguity in that the poet may be transforming natural sounds, made by frogs, into yet another mythical description, or he may be translating myths about divine metamorphosis into more natural terms. This vicious cycle of the objective versus subjective, the “seen, and half seen,” cannot be broken up, hence the final word “And. . .” to indicate its endlessness. And, at the same time, this final word of Canto 2 directly connects us to the following Canto, just as the final words of Canto I—“So that:”—led us straight into this one. Such connections suggest that the stories and revelations of Canto 2 have a personal dimension, since Canto 3 is distinctly autobiographical. As we have seen, this Canto is very much dominated by the image of the sea and sibilant sounds as representative of that symbol of change. The many compound adjectives and nouns throughout the entire text are also noteworthy: “spray-whited” and “fur-hood” at the beginning, and “rock-slide” and “Salmon-pink” at the end. This continues the use of such compounds from Canto 1, where they occurred as kennings as part of an Anglo-Saxon idiom. In the context of Canto 2, where their use is even more frequent, they supply the text with a great deal of spondaic weight, often set off against a more dactylic or anapaestic rhythm, as if to evoke changeability as opposed to solidity. We may see this in lines such as “Seal sports in the spray-whited circles of cliffwash” (2/6), where a more spondaic opening and ending envelops an anapaestic rhythm. Pound uses spondees to great effect as when, for example, he wants to stress the power of Dionysus and the immovability of the ship: “God-sleight then, god-sleight: / Ship stock fast in sea-swirl” (2/7). This “spondaic” solidity is also caught in the depiction

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of the transformations: “And where was gunwale, there now was vinetrunk,” “void air taking pelt” (2/8). The changeability of the natural world and of the “repeat in history” is also emphasized through the repetition of images, and certain lines and phrases, thus enacting in the inextricable link between image/word and sound the connection between Dionysus and Apollo.

4

Canto 4 Henry Mead

While the conception of The Cantos can be traced back to 1915, if not earlier, it was in 1919 that Pound’s work gained assurance, with a technical breakthrough that galvanized the writing of the fourth Canto.1 The results represent, as Christine Froula puts it, a “threshold of the modernist mode in English poetry” which “made even Eliot’s ‘Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ look conservative.”2 The strength of Pound’s new material prompted him to rewrite the three published Cantos using his new method, and to rearrange the materials he had gathered for those that followed. Pushing beyond the experimentation of the Ur-Cantos, Pound’s new manuscript drafts homed in on a key new method, the “subject rhyme”—the juxtaposition of historical or literary data in a larger poetic structure.3 This device, first named in a letter to Pound’s father, dated April 11, 1927, has been identified by Hugh Kenner as the key to understanding The Cantos and Pound’s literary aesthetic as a whole.4 While Kenner places a greater emphasis on the term “subject rhyme” than Pound did himself, and identifies its presence in his work prior to its explicit theorization, it is undeniable that such a method comes to the fore in the fourth Canto and would become crucial to the larger work.

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While Canto 4 went through several manuscript revisions, it was the first of the Cantos to remain largely unaltered after its first publication, and thus appears to mark a moment of satisfaction after a phase of stylistic uncertainty.5 That said, the work contains loose ends, apparently unresolved in the writing process. Draft sketches of a second movement of “subject rhymes” were abandoned, so that around this device’s first effective usage elements remain that are not worked out fully. Among Pound’s abbreviated juxtapositions of colors, names, words, myths, lie the leftover components of a larger architecture: indeed, the poem seems to describe itself in a reference to a “heap of [. . .] boundary stones” (4/13).6 Despite its formal innovation, the raw materials of this text have much in common with the Ur-Cantos. Pound draws again upon Homeric myth, evoking the fall of Troy.7 Preliminary to his subject rhyme Pound uses myth to establish an emotional palette, introducing themes of desire and destruction, the hubristic transgression of divine law and resulting punishment. Terrell suggests that Pound’s brisk fusion of classical references draws most directly on Euripides’s Trojan Women and Virgil’s Aeneid, both of which hark back to Homer’s Iliad.8 The opening line was laboriously honed from more elaborate apostrophes, variations on the form “Rise, palace in a smoky light.”9 Pound’s efforts over several drafts to remove all superfluous words recall his insistence, particularly from 1913 onwards, upon concision, and the hard curtailment of descriptive passages in his translations published as Cathay (1915).10 The third line presents a compressed assertion of the poem’s aesthetic priorities. In two words, Pound establishes the classical models that he will follow, and those he will disdain: “ANAXIFORMINGES! Aurunculeia!” (4/13). The Greek apostrophe is Pindar’s opening to his “Olympian Ode II,” “Anaxiphormigges hymnoi,” “Hymns that are lords of the lyre.” As Baumann points out, Pound expressed his dislike for Pindar in a letter to Iris Barry, and opined in the March/April number of The Egoist that “Pindar is a pompier and . . . ought to be sent to the dustbin,” so this allusion appears to have a satiric import.11 In the source

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text Pindar’s line is followed by the question: “What god, what hero, what man, shall we sing of?” Pound omits this, but provides an answer by ending the line with a reference to a text by Catullus. Thus, Pindar’s bombast is undercut and supplanted by a quiet but definite assertion of the true subject of the poem, Aurunculeia—the family name of the girl immortalized by Catullus in Collis o Heliconii (Epithalamium LXI 86–87). The theme of the poem, then, is “a girl” (the subject of so many of Pound’s earlier shorter poems) or, as Baumann puts it, “the ways of love and women.”12 The fifth and sixth lines, collocating images of light, switch Pound’s focus. Bright stones and flare remind us of the fire among the fallen city ruins; but this tableau, like a magic lantern image, fades and dissolves into another, one of a pastoral dawn. “Silver mirrors” (4/13) stand for the refracting method of the poem itself, a technique of visual juxtaposition reminiscent of Imagism. Thus, the light of conflagration gives way to that of springtime renewal; Dionysian destruction is followed by what Baumann has called the “dawn lyric”—a mood recurring across The Cantos, where the phrase “chorus nympharum” reappears several times.13 It brings associations with a joyous sexuality, particularly in the image of a dance: “Dew-haze blurs, in the grass, pale ankles moving” (4/13). Thus, from effect we move to cause; from the destruction of the city to the behavior that was its provocation. “Beat, Beat, whir, thud, in the soft turf / under the apple trees” (4/13) echoes Whitman’s “Drum-taps” (1865) (“Beat, Beat, whir, pound”). It is telling, given Pound’s ambivalent admiration for Whitman, that he adopts a similar metric, a broken, searching rhythm, switching prepositions in wayward pursuit of specificity.14 In a fleeting image of two pairs of feet: one “pale,” the other “goat-foot” (4/13), the presence of nymphs and centaurs is sparely conveyed: this is a secret rite, which the intrusive viewer can only glimpse. The delights of the dance seem far removed from scenes of war, but, as the poem as a whole suggests, they stand in causal relation to that destruction. Amid soft turf and apple trees, this fecund pastoral space suddenly acquires a “crescent” of coast and sea, “green-gold,” setting the scene

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for the arrival of Venus, a symbol of erotic femininity. Instead, a “black cock” erects itself to greet her, a dark note erupting against the greengold backdrop (4/13). The arrival of the goddess of love, disrupted by a crude, threatening potency, recalls the destructive side of male desire, the assertion of possession—an association looping back to the start of the poem, and the pursuit of Helen ending in the razing of a city. These lines announce that the poem will deal with a feminine allure from which all the light images of the poem proceed, but that it also recounts a responsive priapic violence. Together these result in atrocities that are unbearable to behold, and thus demand revenge and/or release through metamorphosis: crises originating in the provocative power of the feminine subject. Another abrupt transition introduces an aged storyteller seated by an ornate couch, partaking in its baroque grandeur (“curved, carved . . . claw-foot and lion head” [4/13]). Recalling Pound’s many admired elders, this is a sage akin to Browning or James, both of whom cast long shadows over The Cantos. The old man speaks in a low drone, perhaps anticipating James’s appearance in Canto 7 (“the old voice lifts itself / weaving an endless sentence” [7/24]). Baumann suggests that this is Pandion, King of Athens, mourning his two daughters and grandson.15 Indeed, the storyteller could be any number of speakers—perhaps the old men of Troy, perhaps Homer himself.16 The remaining text of the Canto, including its major subject rhyme, may be his utterance, just as Tiresias in Eliot’s The Waste Land serves as an implied framingconsciousness—recounting, among other things, another version of the Itys myth. Indeed, Eliot, who began writing The Waste Land in 1921, may well have seen and drawn on Pound’s Canto, explaining their similar technique and use of the myth of Procne. With the single word “Ityn,” the speaker introduces this tale, the first full narrative component of the poem, the root and strongest element of its proliferating subject rhymes (4/13). “Ityn” is the accusative Latin case for “Itys,” the son of King Tereus and his wife Procne, whose fate is most vividly recounted in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, which describes Tereus’s rape of his wife’s sister Philomela, after which he

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cut out her tongue to prevent her reporting the crime. In retaliation, Procne killed her own son, and served his body to Tereus; finally, Tereus pursued Procne and Philomela, who, escaping through an open window, were transformed—Philomela into a nightingale, and Procne into a swallow.17 The cry of the swallow is transcribed by Pound as “Itys, Itys”—this is a triple pun because the word also calls to mind the moment of revelation: “It is Ityn.” “Et ter flebiliter” (“and thrice with tears”) redirects us from Ovid to Horace’s ode on “The Delights of Spring,” which recounts the same myth with a different emphasis, suggesting that the guilty intonation of the swallow’s cry reflects the excessive cruelty shown by Procne in her human form (4/13).18 The first line of specific narrative then arrives, with deictic suddenness: “And she went toward the window and cast her down” (4/13). It may seem as if we are “tuning in” to a story halfway through, but all that came before is provided in the preceding two lines: the myth compressed into a few syllables, a name and a Latin tag. At this point, an uncredited utterance is given in quotations: “‘All the while, the while, the swallows crying: / Ityn!’” (4/13). This first use of speech marks indicates the beginning of a second story, as yet not identified specifically—the tale of Guillems de Cabestanh, an ascetic troubadour and lover of Seremonda, wife of Ramon, lord of the Castle of Rossillon. The essence of the subject rhyme linking these two stories is that Ramon, on discovering his wife’s infidelity with Cabestan, killed her lover, and served his cooked heart for her to eat unknowingly.19 Thus, the first main subject rhyme takes shape in the recurrence, in two literatures and two historic moments, of this grotesque form of revenge. The tales are quickly and deftly intertwined; Froula shows how Pound honed down the original description of the confrontation between Ramon and Seremonda, removing all extraneous words before arriving at this crystallized rhyme. The line “It is Cabestan’s heart in the dish” is repeated twice, followed by: “No other taste shall change this”—an extreme condensation of Seremonda’s full speech (4/13). The anaphora of the first two lines is followed by the half rhyme of “dish” and “this,” and “taste” and “change”—the entire story

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compressed into a three-line chant. This utterance, we are told, was followed by Seremonda’s measured steps towards her doom; where the original tale describes how she “ran to a balcony [and] let herself fall,” Pound describes an elegant, graceful movement (4/13).20 Although the rapid associations of the Canto’s first lines also work by blurring mythic source material, lines 16–32 mark the first use of the subject rhyme in its fully fledged form. Its contrasting images clash as well as chime, active agents becoming passive victims. Vengeful wives become adulteresses; killers are rhymed with victims. We are asked to find similarities in blocks of data, rather than the small visual units that Pound had contrasted in his Imagist poems. In these larger juxtapositions, there are more variables: we seek a greater common quality beyond the presence of male violence, a wronged woman, and a macabre form of revenge. Thus, the reader’s attention is drawn to a larger, more complex chain of cause and effect, wrongdoing, and vengeance. Procne did not initiate the cycle of violence, but Seremonda did; Procne’s revenge is infanticide, her counterpart’s, suicide. The plight of the adulterous Seremonda is blurred with the punishment of the rapist Tereus. The resolution of these perplexing half-likenesses may lie in the stories’ respective motive forces. Recurrent from the initial image of a ruined Troy, the common factor is male lust or jealousy, acts of violence perpetrated by powerful men in response to female allure, betrayal, or unavailability: a thwarted wish to possess female beauty. What sets the Itys myth in motion is the violation and mutilation of a woman to satisfy a man’s lust. The tale of Seremonda involves a similar chain of horrors, but the two cases do not map upon each other precisely. The passage is marked by the repetition of hesitant and probing half-sentences (“And she went toward the window” [4/13], “All the while, the while” [4/13]), yet, at this moment of emotional intensity, Pound introduces a note of measured calm, recalling the austerity of form demanded in his earliest literary criticism. In lines that recall the Imagist fascination with a “classical” hardness, Pound describes how Seremonda’s “Firm even fingers held to the firm pale stone” (4/13). He

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thus draws attention to the rhythm itself, the close stresses that begin and end the line, while “held,” a stressed caesura, emphasizes the poet’s grasp of his material. “Even fingers” might refer to the precise meter with which Pound works, measuring out the spondaic exactness of the “Slim white stone bar.” Pound’s attention to the double arch suggests an analogous admiration of such clarity in writing—the balance of the stonework is echoed both by Seremonda’s movement—“balanced for a moment” at the window—and the balance of the line. Set against the most extreme of emotional prompts, Seremonda’s equilibrium suggests a mind moved by intense feeling, but strictly controlled. A similar state of being was pursued by Pound’s allies in the formation of a “classicist” aesthetic—for example, T. S. Eliot, for whom intense emotion inspires, but is sublimated within, the highly wrought work of art.21 Indeed, the arched window recalls a similar portal described in Eliot’s version of the same scene in The Waste Land, in which the transformation and escape of the violated Philomela is witnessed through an archway (“As though a window gave upon the sylvan scene”).22 For Pound too, the stone window’s classical solidity contrasts with the extreme emotional prompts of his subject matter. It echoes the convention of Renaissance painting to use a window or arch as a framing device, often through which to depict a pastoral landscape.23 Within a more specific art-historical moment, it is attuned to the renewed austerity of interwar visual arts across Europe (identified by Jean Cocteau as the “rappel d’ordre”).24 Indeed, Pound’s crisp, measured detail (“Caught in the full of her sleeve” [4/13]) recalls an earlier Victorian neoclassical aesthetic—for example, Leighton or Alma-Tadema’s virtuoso rendering of flowing draperies and gowns. This slow beauty conveys a cleansing purity, chiming with the firmness of the stone. Human evil is counterpointed first by the neutral solidity of the tower’s fabric and then by the insistent vacuity of the wind, which pulls Seremonda to her graceful suicide. The aural delicacy touching many of Pound’s shorter poems comes to the fore here, and the compelling effect of the wind upon a female form recalls specifically “Shop Girl” (1913) and “The Garden” (1915), both collected in Lustra (1916).25

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The swallows’ song is both an accusation and a revelation—the punning refrain “It Is” followed suddenly by the answer “Actaeon”—a single word introducing the second major myth-component of the Canto, linked thematically to the first as a tale of gendered confrontation and transformation. The rhythms here are incantatory, built upon internal repetitions and half-rhymes: “The valley is thick with leaves, with leaves, the trees” (4/14), and “glitters, glitters a-top” (4/14). This effect is hesitant but exploratory, recalling the pull of the wind, whose derivation, “of Rhodez” (4/13), transports the moment from Greece back to Provence, which Pound had visited in the summers of 1912 and 1919.26 Just as the initial scenes of a burning city were followed by a “green, cool light,” the poem now escapes from horror enclosed within stone walls to the softness of the Provençal forest. Indeed, green becomes the dominant color as the poem’s point of view moves into the air with the transformed Procne. Leaving her behind, it descends to glimpse a figure stumbling in a wood: the troubadour Peire Vidal, who inspired Pound’s “Piere Vidal Old” (1909). As Pound put it, Vidal “ran mad, as a wolf, because of his love for Loba of Penautier,” a prominent lady of the Languedoc region. According to Provençal tradition, Vidal dressed in wolf-fur, and allowed himself to be hunted as a tribute to Loba (the “she-wolf ”). He was chased almost to death by Loba’s hunting dogs; on learning of his fate, she received the troubadour into her house and nursed him back to health.27 With the introduction of Actaeon and Vidal, Pound established the second subject rhyme of the Canto, roughly in homology with the first. The theme of transformation remains, but the focus is transferred from a female to a male protagonist. The male becomes the victim, or rather the one punished through enforced transformation for a transgression or act of violation. Pound’s insistent anaphora inches forward, sharpening its focus at each line with cumulative phrasal adjustments, stressing the density of the obscuring greenery: “not a shaft, not a sliver,” “Not a splotch, not a lost shatter” (4/14). The fish-scale roof is intricate and complete: a metaphor, perhaps, for the relation of Pound’s “subject rhymes,” or

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“units,” which overlap only in part. Similarly, Pound’s mythic allusions touch at their corners, together forming a whole canopy, enfolding an unknowable, sanctified energy. We are back in France again, specifically in Poitiers. Pound had visited the Notre-Dame la Grande at Poitiers in 1912.28 Under the dark covering of the forest, the lack of light is not, however, complete, given these female spirits’ otherworldly radiance: “the air, the air, / Shaking, air alight with the goddess” (4/14), a divine brightness, like “Ivory dipping in silver” (4/14), emanates from the “white-gathered” nymphs (4/14). Actæon’s stumbling entrance into this sacred bathing spot amounts to another violation of feminine sanctity. Pound dramatizes the story through fragmented, repeated lines, culminating in the slant rhyme of “Blaze, blaze in the sun, / The dogs leap on Actæon” (4/14). Such is the punishment of the mortal male who stumbles upon a divine female beauty. For Pound, the cosmic energy that is the spur and subject of his poetry reaches a point of crisis or fruition in the phenomenon of physical metamorphosis. The resulting transformative energy is generated from within the desired female body.29 The nymphs’ whiteness stands for a kind of Neoplatonic radiance. It anticipates a significant image that occurs slightly later: that of white sand swirling in water. Diana herself is associated with a golden light, glimpsed through the foliage: “Gold, gold, a sheaf of hair, / Thick like a wheat swath / Blaze, blaze in the sun” (4/14). Now it is the turn of the male to fly and to transform. While the female rushing from the male transformed into the swallow, the male discovering the female is transformed into a stag (Actæon) or a wolf (Vidal). Whether women in flight from men, or men overpowered by female allure or anger, the symmetry of these figures recalls the image of the dance: the chorus nympharum, “pale foot” and “goat-foot” (4/13). Sequences of abuse and retribution echo in darker tones the reciprocal steps of male and female dancers. The first half of the Canto recorded the “pale foot”: women becoming swallows or nightingales, creatures of the air; the second switches focus to the “goat-foot”: men becoming stags or wolves, creatures of the earth.

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The following lines consist of quick references to three stories from Ovid (4/15): “Pergusa” alludes to the lake where Persephone was carried off into the underworld by Dis; “Gargaphia” was the deep valley (already evoked) where Diana was surprised by Actæon while bathing; “Salmacis” refers to the water nymph who attempted to rape the boy Hermaphroditus. In four words, Pound brings together several other stories in rapid, shorthand reiteration of his theme.30 These stand in accompaniment to the four main tales—two classical, two Provençal— of Procne, Actæon, Cabestan, and Vidal. The sequence of references ends with Cygnus, the son of Neptune, who came up against Achilles, son of Thetis (a marine goddess). Under Neptune’s spell, Cygnus proved invulnerable, and when finally thrown to the ground escaped from his armor in the guise of a swan. This flurry of mythic “colors” bookends the major subject rhyme, just as the initial palette-setting references to Troy, the chorus nympharum, and Venus and the Cock, opened it. At this point, as Froula has noted, Pound’s drafts show him attempting to expand a series of further “subject rhymes,” linking the Trojan War to the feud between de Tierci and the Dauphin of Auvergnat and Peire de Maensac, for whom de Tierci’s wife left him. He was also interested in rhyming Catullus 58, about Lesbia’s promiscuity, with “the story of Gaubert de Poicebot, who left his wife to go to Spain and returned to find her a prostitute.”31 These correlations had occurred to Pound much earlier: he notes the Troy/Auvergne rhyme in his essay “Troubadours: Their Sorts and Conditions” (1913). However, his attempts to develop these materials into the larger form of the Canto failed, and he replaced them with a faltering, renewed enquiry into the nature of his enterprise. It is as if, after perfecting his method with such powerful results in the rhymes of Procne/Seremonda and Actaeon/Vidal, Pound found his remaining material recalcitrant, and he began again to question his purpose and method.32 Thus, as if in answer to his own query, surveying what he had so far achieved, he took stock of his creative process. Thus, we find a crucial line, taken from a poem by Arnaut Daniel: “e lo soleills plovil”—“thus the light rains” (4/15). This is Pound’s rendering

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of Daniel’s “on lo soleills plovil,” from the last line of the song “Lancan son passat li giure,” which he had translated elsewhere as “Where the rain falls from the sun.”33 Pound, as scholars have recounted in detail, was attentive to currents of Neoplatonism prevalent in his London circle.34 Daniel’s line recalls the ancient doctrine that identified divinity with light. Peter Liebregts has recently shown definitively how Pound’s understanding of the spiritual revolved around a sense of scattered energy, manifest in human history, which he would seek to re-gather—at first through those glancing moments of luminosity which preoccupied his early career, but later through the larger project of The Cantos. The phrase “ply over ply” recurs several times in The Cantos; it appears here for the first time (4/15). The phrase has a significance regarding the form of Pound’s long poem: the method of juxtaposition, layers of images, texts, voices, woven over one another, binding together historical data hitherto separated by time and perceptual category into a new aesthetic unity. The term also recalls the “fish-scale roof ” of the church “at Poictiers” (4/14).35 Allusions in the following lines recall Pound’s insistence, in a letter to Harriet Monroe, that the Japanese Noh play Takasago would be the model for his epic.36 The story echoes Ovid’s tale of Baucis and Philemon—a couple who, transformed into intertwined trees, grow old together. In Takasago, a similar couple are symbolized by two pine trees, one growing on the shore of Takasago Bay, the other at Sumiyoshi. Thus, another glancing East–West identification hints at Pound’s belief that the Noh plays were not only akin to Imagism in their qualities of stasis and visuality, but also that they were equivalent in religious, as well as cultural, significance to Greek drama.37 More importantly, the theme of transformative male–female relationships that runs through the Canto is present again here. Meanwhile, the image of water moving, a “shallow eddying fluid,” introduces one of Pound’s favorite notions—that some profounder energy or attraction operates through nature and humanity, and provides the deepest source for literary inspiration (4/15). In “The Serious Artist” (193) he writes that

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Readings in the Cantos We might come to believe that the thing that matters in art is a sort of energy, something like electricity or radioactivity, a force transfusing, welding, and unifying. A force rather like water when it spurts up through very bright sand and sets it in swift motion.38

A recurring image to convey this creative energy is that of liquid swirling into a plughole. This was an energy already present in the world—a natural force of the kind very recently on Pound’s mind as he conceived of the “vortex.” Pound’s friend, Allen Upward, in two unclassifiable treatises, The New Word (1908) and The Divine Mystery (1913), had set out a theory that united occultist and spiritualist ideas with modern science. For him, the most fundamental form of energy, constituting the fabric of the universe, was most visibly apparent in the form of the water-spout; a form he also described as a “whirl-swirl.”39 For Yeats, a similar phenomenon was identified as a “gyre.”40 In Imagist and Vorticist writing, Pound had described a “node” of energy— perhaps sexual in nature. The image is traceable back to his description of the poet as acting like a metal cone emanating energy from its tip in his New Age article series “I Gather the Limbs of Osiris” (1911–12).41 These meditations on creativity do not entirely disguise a loss of assurance, a relapse from the clear architectural forms Pound achieved in his earlier lines to a search, reminiscent of the Ur-Cantos, for models and explanations for his work. Rhymes are found in fleeting likenesses or the proximity of certain ideas, but it is harder to fix on larger forms to analyze. For example, another intermediary passage refers to “Gourdon that time” (4/15). Pound had traveled to the Provencal city of Gourdon in 1912. An image of a torch-lit procession can be visualized, and Pound rhymes this glimpsed ritual with Catullus’s invocation to the God of marriage: “Hymenæus Io! / Hymen, Io Hymenæe!” (4/15).42 There follows an image of lost virginity: “One scarlet flower is cast on the blanch-white stone.” Terrell associates it with a medieval topos of blood drops in the snow, recalling the loss of virginity.43 Signs of lost innocence resonate with

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the larger thematic patterns of v­ iolation and transformation, but are now less developed. The following ten lines (4/15–16) consist of a loose translation of a “Chinese wind-poem.”44 Manuscript drafts show this portion of the Canto to stand independently as a work of both scholarship and poetic flair, but whether the project was complete in itself, or fully assimilated to the Canto’s larger architecture, is arguable. The original text is “Feng Fu” (“Rhapsody on the Wind”), attributed to the poet Song Yu (ca. 319–298 BC).45 Notes on this poem were discovered by Pound among the Fenollosa manuscripts. In the original passage, King Hsiang of Ch’u was addressed directly by the poet on the timeless theme of human powerlessness over nature. Intended to convey a certain peace following the traumas of the Ovidian and Provençal material, the insertion of this Eastern mythology is abrupt, but the juxtaposition is smoothed by points of connection. Pound’s reference to the Jesuit priest has already introduced the suggestive echo between Hellenic myth, Provençal folklore, and Eastern mythology. Pound seeks to reintegrate the broken “limbs” of his material by introducing a new geographical specification, not Rhodez now but Ecbatan, where the “camel drivers sit in the turn of the stairs” (4/16).46 This great city, capital of Medes, was founded in the sixth century BC by the legendary king Deoices. As Terrell puts it, “Ecbatana is archetypal as a concept of perfect human order, a reconciliation of nature and civilization, as paralleled in other Cantos by Ithaca, Troy, Mt. Segur, Thebes, Rome, Wagadu, and later Trinovant (=London).”47 We are directed once more to Hellenic sources by reference to the mythic story of Danaë, held in a tower by her husband King Acrisius, but impregnated by Zeus through a golden rain. This tale may be the strongest of Pound’s later additions in the wake of the first two subject rhymes: it strongly echoes the Canto’s initial theme of male– female energies in collision: Danaë’s son, Perseus, conceived against Acrisius’s wishes, finally kills him. Pound thus presents another tale of how claims to power by mortal men are thwarted by larger forces: the Wind, or indeed Zeus, who defies the control of the mortal man. We

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have been reminded how, through metamorphosis, the will of mortal men has been defied, in the cases of Tereus, Solemena, and Actæon; here again a female force, or the force of nature, or the will of Gods, defies and punishes the will of mortal men. Pound’s scattered references entwine West and East: Ovid and the Chinese “wind-poem”: “‘Danaë! Danaë! / What wind is the king’s?’” (4/16), and the oriental associations of “peach-trees shed bright leaves in the water,” in a hushed, hazy dusk (4/16). “Père Henri Jacques,” who climbs the mountain Rokku to consult “the Sennin” (4/16) is emblematic of Pound’s syncretic view of religion, while another set of condensed subject rhymes (4/16), return the motif of gendered violence to the fore: tales from troubadour lore (“Polhonac”) and Greek myth (“Gyges”) lead us back to the “Thracian Platter” presented to Tereus. There follows a recapitulation of the major theme, the stories of Cabestan and Tereus (4/16). Pound’s striving to sustain a creative moment continues in the last section, a late addition composed during Pound’s 1919 walking tour in Provence. A subject rhyme links Danaë to Mary, but also recalls the divine status of Diana, and the divine intervention that saved Procne and Philomela (4/16). The figure of Danaë in turn rhymes with that of Seremonda: both were confined in towers by male tyrants. Danaë’s subjection to the powers of kings and Gods rhymes with Procne’s rape and transformation. Moreover, the respective sons of Danaë, Procne, and Mary play an important role: Procne’s murder of Itys, and her appearance before Tereus holding their son’s head, presents a kind of inverse, or indeed perverse, Pieta. Danaë’s son conceived with Zeus eventually kills Acrisus, her imprisoner. The descent of Zeus to Danaë meanwhile recalls the Annunciation, and the hubristic attempt by a king to prevent his predestined downfall recalls Herod’s massacre of the innocents. The fate of Itys rhymes with Christ’s words at the Last Supper and the rite of the Eucharist. The Garonne (4/16) is another location Pound recalled from his walking tour in 1919. Here he had been struck by a procession to mark a Christian feast day, and remarked on the image of the Madonna being borne by a chanting crowd along the riverside. Pound wrote to his father:

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This worm of a procession had three large antennae . . . Not merely mediaeval but black central African superstition and voodoo energy squalling infant, general murk and . . . epileptic religious hog wash with chief totem being magnificently swung over whole.48 There is something both pathetic and base about this unrefined religiosity. Chanting in a crude Latin: “Hail, Hail the Queen,” the participants’ voices are harsh; their grating tones are conveyed by Pound’s reading of the piece in the Caedmon recording of 1958, in which the line is delivered in a rasping yell.49 This religion is a “thick” one. Its raw fervor is set in opposition to the “thin images” of the same faith witnessed elsewhere. Pound compares the Garonne procession with the passage of the River Adige, running from the Alps through Verona and into the Adriatic. Later, on his walking tour, at Verona, he had seen another image of the Madonna, this time in a painting by Stefano of Verona, titled Madonna in hortulo (“Madonna in the little garden”). He saw this in 1912 at the Palazzo Laveozzola Pompei, which is located by the Adige, near San Zeno.50 Having moved from the mariolators’ procession at Garonne to the Madonna next to the Adige, Pound further associates the latter with the lady described by Cavalcanti in Sonnet 35. It was his belief that Cavalcanti would have seen the painting by Stefano, and responded to it in his own poetic celebration of a divine female beauty, chiming with the theme of Canto 4 itself. Retyping the Canto for A Draft of XVI Cantos (1925), a final addition reflected progress made in Pound’s conceptualization of the whole. New concluding lines describe the poet and a companion sitting together “in the arena,” as if watching the various events and personalities appear before them (4/16). This is a reference to the arena in Verona, which Pound visited with Eliot in 1922. As he later told Louis Dudek, “Four of them had ‘sat there’ [about 1920 or 1921], one of the group being T. S. Eliot, and . . . they had felt that past time, history, was present around them.”51 This was a period of clarification in both Eliot’s and Pound’s method, and amid their ambitious cultural project, sexual

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violation, violence, and transformation were surely central themes—as can be seen in The Waste Land’s similar use of the Procne myth. The impact of Eliot’s work on Pound is clear in later Cantos, for example in Canto 8, where it is misquoted (“These fragments we have shelved [shored]”). The image of the two poets sitting in the arena recurs, for example, in Cantos 11 (50), 12 (53), 21 (98), 29 (145), among others. As William Cookson suggests, “the arena thus makes a kind of setting for the early Cantos.”52 It stands for the scope of Eliot and Pound’s ambitions in pursuing the “historical sense,” or “the mind of Europe,” to use Eliot’s terms of the same period.53 Primordial images of desire, sexual trauma, and violent retribution are at the heart of both poets’ major works, and, by implication, the heart of European culture. What better site for this vision than the Verona Arena, where crowds once enjoyed acts of gladiatorial carnage.54 Canto 4 thus marks the beginning of Pound’s project proper. He would, in 1923, rush on to write several more Cantos in rapid succession, and, having established his method, revise the first three thoroughly. While the technique of the subject rhyme would be central throughout, Pound continued to experiment with his method. In this first instance, the potency of Pound’s subject matter—a series of violent, primal confrontations between men and women—wholly supplants the uncertain experimentation that marked the draft Cantos up until this point. Yet Pound was still not assured in his use of the new device, and the second half of the poem, from about line 32, seems to echo, with decreasing effect, the power of his earlier mythic juxtapositions. This does not diminish the interest of Pound’s renewed inquiry into how he should write his poem, and what kind of work it will be: the scale of Pound’s ambition to tap into a creative energy both divine and sometimes terrible in nature is clear. In his final lines, added late in the creative process, we see the intimacy of his project and Eliot’s, and his belief that the two of them might, through their poetry, take front-row seats in the arena of world history itself.

5

Canto 5 Caterina Ricciardi

Pound had been planning a Canto 5 since December 1915.1 He was working on the Ur-Cantos and reading “Roscoe’s ‘Life of Leo X’,” which he finished at Stone Cottage in February 1916 as he was “also through Heroditus [sic], and mostly through Landor.”2 This plunge into historiography would strongly impinge on the turn the Canto was to take a few years later. In fact, it was not until April 1919 that in a letter to his father he wrote: “Fifth is begun.”3 He and Dorothy were leaving for a tour in southern France, where T. S. Eliot joined them in August. By December 13, 1919, Cantos 5 to 7 were done, “each more incomprehensible than the one preceding it.”4 Deeply motivated by post-war disillusion and an overwhelming sense of the historical heritage, these Cantos were conceived as a unit, and as such they appeared in the August 1921 issue of The Dial, to be shortly collected with Canto 4 in Poems 1918–1921 as “Four Cantos.”5 David Moody asserts that they bring about a “revival” in Pound’s elaboration of the long poem’s form and objective. If the “‘Fourth Canto’,” he argues, “established a method by which the live intelligence could contend for enlightenment in human affairs,” in Cantos 5 to 7 Pound “was descending deeper into the realities of the historical record in which the light of intelligence prevails only rarely and fitfully,

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with his quest for that light still the dynamic principle.”6 Ronald Bush analyzes their genesis by setting them in their literary context and highlighting the way in which the perception of the past was being dealt with by Joyce and Eliot as they were being written. As Pound had stated in the VIII and IX instalments of the series called “Pastiche:— The Regional,” published in The New Age in August 1919, history was not “a dream” from which he was “trying to awake.”7 Its dynamics and imposition upon the present were rather to be deduced by “snippets” and “violently contrasted facts,” capable of revealing its complex and often falsified phenomena, a tenet which appears to confirm the impression that these Cantos were taking a new direction, concerned with “the manner in which discrete moments build accurate history as well as genuine art.”8 The baffling muse of history does indeed enter Canto 5 without banishing previous themes. Walter Baumann’s analysis of Canto 4 is still an excellent introduction to a number of them, namely Ecbatan, Danaë, Aurunculeia, the ideal city, and the duality of “the carnal horrors of passion” versus “the mysteries of divine love.”9 Daniel Pearlman deals with time as “evil,” questionably proposing an interpretation of Ecbatan as a “city of injustice” and “artificial order.”10 Peter Liebregts elucidates the Neoplatonic tradition, reading the earthly material—love as lust in Provence, the dark forces of history—against the light of Iamblichus’s ecstatic “fire.”11 Ira Nadel locates the meaning of the Canto in Pound’s first tackling the “unreliable” historical “facts,” by introducing a “secondary intelligence,” in this case the sixteenthcentury historian Benedetto Varchi, so that “[h]istory itself begins to speak in the poem.”12 Daniel Albright, however, is very skeptical as to a thorough understanding of Canto 5: “Pound admired Varchi for his impartiality, his refusal to assert more than he knew,” but there is some peril, he argues, in writing a poem “so reticent about assertion.”13 Actually, the Canto has never been a favorite with Poundians and, with few exceptions, its sources (William Roscoe, for example)14 have not been investigated accurately enough to throw more light on the material assembled, on the “fact over fact” technique, and on

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Pound’s moral and didactic intentions in his first approach toward history and the Renaissance. From the vantage point of the panoptical Roman “arena,” introduced at the end of Canto 4 together with the “Centaur’s heel” of poetry planted in the “earth loam” (4/16),15 Canto 5 gives access to the fleetingness of chronological time as grounded on historiography. Here Pound tackles for the first time accuracy in reporting the “facts,” anticipating a documentary method he later refines in the Malatesta cycle. Conjointly with the sense of time, the huge bulk of a city opens the Canto: Great bulk, huge mass, thesaurus; Ecbatan, the clock ticks and fades out; The bride awaiting the god’s touch; Ectaban, City of patterned streets; again the vision (5/17) The mechanical ticking of the clock is set off by Herodotus, the “father of history,”16 with his description of Ecbatan, relocated here from Canto 4 as a “City of patterned streets.”17 Founded by Deioces of Media, a king devoted to justice, Ecbatan was fortified by seven circularly “contrived” walls, painted in different colors, a work “produced by art, since the circles are in all seven in number,”18 as to reflect the planetary configuration of Persian astronomy.19 On the highest wall of pure gold, where the Median “thesaurus” was contained, Pound places the “bride,” Danaë, awaiting the impregnating touch of Zeus. Whereas the golden rain pouring down on her harks back to Arnaut Daniel’s “e lo soleills plovil” (4/15), Danaë’s expected role here is that of re-enacting (a second time, following Canto 4) the sacred marriage between the divine and the human world, a renewal of a fertility rite (Zeus fathering Perseus upon her), consumed upon the innermost platform of a man-constructed city. From that terrace, a twofold vision leads us first down to the “viæ stradæ” and into a verbally Latinate world of a “toga’d” and “arm’d” crowd rushing on “populous business” (5/17). “Stradæ” seems to

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be a misremembering for “stratæ.” In connection with newly built Ecbatan, Pound may have had in mind the busy “strata viarum” of Virgil’s rising Carthage (Aeneid I, 422). Unlike the earlier levelled earth “viae terranae,” the “viae stratae” were both the lava-paved streets of Rome and the straight consular roads radiating from the metropolitan center20 for trade or military purposes. The vision from the parapet of Ecbatan directs us also to the “celestial Nile, blue deep” (5/17), a symbolic blue which may refer to the power of the river of providing a “barren land” with annual fertility, a gift negated to the Greeks, who, to avoid droughts and famine, had to depend on Zeus’s rain.21 The “water-wheels” worked by old men and camels (5/17) stand here for the revolutions of time. According to Herodotus, the Egyptians were the first “to find out the course of the year, having divided the seasons into twelve parts to make up the whole; and this they said they found out from the stars.”22 Pound is gradually moving away from myth and, like the historian, traveling into time and geographical space, bringing about “a new creation, and a new kind of creation, or at least a speeding up of the method of ‘The Fourth Canto.’”23 Paradoxically, the ascending Neoplatonic “Iamblichus’ light” (5/17) illuminates the downward movement the Canto undertakes. The whole world is “partible,” Iamblichus says, and “divided about the one and impartible light of the Gods.” This inspiring light is connected by Pound “to Porphyry’s tag et omniformis to describe how light is the Neoplatonic single principle from which the plurality of things derive,”24 as in Dante’s “ciocco” game (from which fools draw auguries), a burning log that gives off innumerable sparks when struck. But in Dante’s vision the rising sparks in Jupiter’s heaven are the souls of the just who, like “uprising birds,” ascend in several shapes to converge in one golden fire, which spells out the words “DILIGITE IUSTITIAM QUI IUDICATIS TERRAM” (“Love justice, you who judge the earth” [Paradiso XVIII.73–108]): an exhortation addressed to earthly rulers. Pound uses the image of the “ciocco” to suggest the idea of the generation of multiplicity from one single entity (Ecbatan, Danaë, gold, celestial blue), and a plurality of lights from one light. In fact,

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unlike Dante, the speaker can manage light and colors only from a non-paradisiacal platform in so far as he is time-bound, like a foolish reader of auguries: “Topaz I manage, and three sorts of blue; / but on the barb of time” (5/17).25 Consequently, his vision (the “fire”) is fragmented, “flitting / And fading at will” (5/17), and the three shades of blue26 express different dimensions of time: the divine continuum, or collective memory (azure); personal memory (sapphire); oblivion (cobalt). Topaz stands for Hymen, the Greek god of wedding ceremonies, invoked by Catullus in his epithalamium for Junia Aurunculeia and Manlius Torquatus (Carmen 61) as “boni / coniugator amori” (“the leader of good Venus, / the one who conjoins true love”). The “bride” is indeed the radiating focus of the first part of Canto 5. Danaë’s sacred marriage is mirrored in the wedding of Aurunculeia, a ceremony woven “with points of gold, / Gold-yellow, saffron,” picturing a declining transmutation of Zeus’s golden rain into saffron, the color of both Hymenæus and the shoe of the Roman bride. It is Hymenæus who “‘brings the girl to her man’,” escorted by the crowd, shouting augural obscenities, beating the ground with their feet (“And come shuffling feet”), and handling out walnuts in connotation of fertility: “‘Da nuces!’” (5/17). These are indications of marriage folklore and values in Rome, including the advice imparted by Catullus to both bride and groom: honest love and procreation, and no homoor heterosexual extramarital affairs. His recommendation seems to be addressed to Propertius as well (“‘here Sextus had seen her’” [5/17]), as poem X from Homage to Sextus Propertius reminds us. The flaming Roman wedding festival used to take place at dusk: “and from ‘Hesperus . . .’” (“Vesper adest” in Carmen 62). Venus, the evening star, grants Pound (and Catullus) a view into ancient times to “(H)espere panta pherōn” (“Hesperus everything you bring back” [fragment 120D]) from Sappho’s “older song” (5/17), a montage of Sappho’s poems to her lover Atthis, who, “In satieties . . .” (fragment 137D), was to desert her for another girl. The light fades here and merges into barrenness. As in Catullus’ Carmen 62 (ll. 51–55), without Hymenæus: “the vine stocks lie untended” (5/18). Richard Aldington

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too is partly responsible for this change of mood, since in his version of fragment 98D Atthis is not “gentle,” but “sterile,”27 a mistranslation that in Canto 5 qualifies Sapphic love in terms of an unrequited and unfulfilled longing: “Atthis, unfruitful” (5/18). In contrast with the blooming scenery of fragment 98D, she is a would-be ‘bride’ in a barren landscape. Aurunculeia’s “eugenic” marriage, praised as a ritualistic “sacrificial concept,”28 stands out as a perfect, worldly archetype. In the next section, drawing from “Troubadours: Their Sorts and Conditions,” Pound constructs a dual narrative set in Provence where “Hymen” is replaced by untrue love and lust. For “desire of woman,” the monk Poicebot becomes a “joglar” under the patronage of Sir Savaric de Mauleon.29 He sets out wandering through Spain (“lust of travel on him, of romerya” [5/18]), leaving behind a newlywed wife fated to be abused by an English knight. On his return, he finds her in a brothel where he seeks illicit favors. “Sea-change, a grey in the water” (Venus’s water) marks Poicebot’s story as a garbled version of marital love (5/18). Time and love run clockwise in this poem. Through the prism of history, Catullus’s advice to Aurunculeia and Manlio is shattered into infidelity, while echoes from the story of Odysseus and Penelope clashingly reverberate on Provençal wanderlust. Accordingly, lust drives Pieire de Maensac to play the role of Paris in his abduction of Tyndarida, Bernart de Tierci’s wife, the new “Helen” who recreates “Troy in Auvergnat,” with the Dauphin of Alvernhe supporting de Maensac rather than the new “Menelaus” (5/18). The story could be interpreted as a “repeat in history”30 were it not that ill-doing in Provence remains unhealed. “Things tend to break down from their visionary perfection into the complexities of life as we know it.”31 Thus, we are confronted with a general sense of disarray: the image of Danaë on Ecbatan’s golden terrace peters out into the dissolution of marital bonds, and Eros is wasted by violent passion and betrayal. Glimpses of “time as evil” enter the poem, as Pound speeds up to bring the Renaissance into focus, and the bride exits the stage.

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Fratricidal war among ruling families such as the Borgias and the Medicis dominates the second part of the Canto. Pound grounds his arguments on historiography, with echoes from Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, a tragedy that intertwines marriage relations and the murder of relatives. But the motif of the two competing brothers had been introduced by a snippet (5/18) from de Maensac’s biography where Pound tells how Pieire and his brother “were in concord that one [Austors] should take the castle and the other [Pieire] the trobar.”32 Such friendly terms have disappeared by the time of the Renaissance, introduced by the Borgia murder: John Borgia is bathed at last. (Clock-tick pierces the vision) Tiber, dark with the cloak, wet cat gleaming in patches (5/18) One may think of Agamemnon stabbed in his bathtub by his wife Clytemnestra on his return from Troy, were it not that Giovanni Borgia (the Duke of Gandia), whom his father, Pope Alexander VI, preferred to Cesar for a political career, is “bathed” together with the city garbage: Click of the hooves, through garbage, Clutching the greasy stone. “And the cloak floated.” Slander is up betimes.     But Varchi in Florence, Steeped in a different year, and pondering Brutus, Then “Σίγα μαλ’ αΰθις δευτέραν! “Dog-eye!!” (to Alessandro) (5/19) The alliterative clock-cloak (“cat,” “click”) ticking and clutching tells us that history is in action. On the night of June 14, 1497, while riding through the dark lava-paved streets of Rome on his way to his mistress, John Borgia was stabbed (nine times) by two men in the “Schiavoni” (the Greek community in Rome) city-quarter, and there dumped into the Tiber, his cloak floating upon and darkening the water. Pound

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gives us piercing “facts” but apparently against “Slander”: was Cesar Borgia guilty of having ordered the assassination of his brother? Slander requires a pause, and the narration unexpectedly shifts to the “pondering” Florentine historian Benedetto Varchi who takes us to Florence where, in 1537, Duke Alessandro de’ Medici was murdered by his kinsman Lorenzino, or Lorenzaccio. Aeschylus commenting: “Silence, once more a second time” (Agamemnon, ll. 1344–45). Again, a “repeat in history”:     “Whether for love of Florence,” Varchi leaves it, Saying “I saw the man, came up with him at Venice, “I, one wanting the facts, “And no mean labour . . . Or for a privy spite?” Our Benedetto leaves it, But: “I saw the man. Se pia? “O empia? For Lorenzaccio had thought of stroke in the open But uncertain (5/19) The libertarian Lorenzaccio pondered (was “uncertain”) as to where and how he should have Alessandro murdered (he initially planned to have him thrown from a wall [5/19]), convinced nonetheless of the political necessity of the murder: “tyranny,” he claimed in his Apology, “is contrary to political life.”33 He came to be known as the “Tuscan Brutus,”34 after the nobleman who killed his adoptive father Cesar. Pound extends the connection with the classical world by comparing him to Achilles, who called Agamemnon “dog-eyed” (Iliad I.159), just as Alessandro is a “‘dog-faced’ chicken-hearted Agamemnon.”35 Alessandro knew by a horoscope (and had “dreamed out beforehand”) of his fated death (5/19).36 But he lived in “abuleia” (5/19), unable to exercise will power, and, as a “watcher, / Eternal watcher of things,” he dies in Canto 7, his eyes “floating in dry, dark air” (7/27), harking back to John Borgia’s cloak floating in the Tiber. Lorenzaccio, on the contrary, is depicted as a man of action: “‘O se credesse / ‘If when the foot slipped, when death came upon him, / ‘Lest cousin Duke Alessandro

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think he had fallen alone’” (5/19), he obsessively ruminates on this in Canto 5 and in Canto 7, as quoted by Varchi: “O se morisse, credesse caduto da se.”37 In the IX instalment of “Pastiche:—The Regional,” Pound wrote: “There is an undoubted recurrence of comparable phenomena, and precedent begins with fratricide,” and in some cases “inquest” is “improbable.”38 A year later he comments: “The relation of two individuals is so complex that no third person can pass judgement upon it. Civilization is individual. The truth is the individual. The light of the Renaissance shines in Varchi when he declines to pass judgement on Lorenzaccio.”39 It is indeed the historian, pondering the morality of the crime, who demands the most attention in Canto 5. Did Lorenzaccio act against tyranny or for personal ambition? The vacillating Varchi is aiming at accuracy rather than airing slander or ungrounded suspicions: “I, one wanting the facts” (5/19), the reason why he meets Lorenzaccio in Padua and his accomplice in Venice.40 And yet, before going back to the Borgia murder, Pound apparently passes judgment on “fratricide” by quoting from Inferno (V.107): “Caina attende. / The lake of ice there below me” (5/19). Francesca da Rimini reminds Dante that “Caina” (named after Cain), where the traitors and the murderers of blood relatives are placed, awaits (“attende”) her husband, Gianciotto Malatesta, as a future inhabitant for having killed her together with her lover, his own brother Paolo. When visiting Caina (Inferno XXXII), Dante’s attention is drawn first to two brothers, the Ghibelline Napoleone and the Guelph Alessandro di Mangona, who murdered one another for disagreements over politics and their inheritance, and then to the shades of Brutus and Judas (Inferno XXXIV). Varchi, however, ponders (“leaves it”) on his own Brutus and Alessandro:      But Don Lorenzino Whether for love of Florence . . . but: “O se morisse, credesse caduto da sè” Σίγα, σίγα

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Readings in the Cantos Schiavoni, caught on the wood-barge, Gives out the afterbirth, Giovanni Borgia, Trails out no more at nights, where Barabello (5/19)

Again “a second time” from Aeschylus: a second flash both on fratricide. Nonetheless, Pound is not ready yet to return to the Roman facts. Postponing judgment again, a procession of rhymesters, mostly affiliated with the court of Leo X, intrudes (5/20): Barabello, Fracastoro, Cotta, book-destroyer Navagero, even D’Alviano, suspected for a while of the murder of John Borgia, and the excellent Sannazzaro, who knew about incestuous Pope Alexander, are all confined to Dante’s “Al poco giorno e al gran cerchio d’ombra” (“To the dim light and the large circle of shadow” [Rime I.I]), along with Mozarello “smothered beneath a mule, / a poet’s ending”: the end of a poet who sold out history, disregarding or distorting the “facts.” According to John Burchard’s Diary,41 only one man, Giorgio Schiavo (or Schiavoni), woke when he heard the splash, and later reported he had seen a “white horse,” four men, a saddled corpse hurled into the river, a “dark cloak floating,” and one of the men throwing “a stone upon it,” causing it “to sink.” On being asked “‘why he had not informed the authorities of the occurrence,’ Schiavoni answered that he had, during his lifetime, seen over a hundred corpses thrown into the Tiber, and had never heard of any inquiry made about them.” The historian A. H. Matthew comments on Burchard thus: “This remark was truly significant of the shocking state of Rome under Alexander VI.”42 The “Duke’s throat had been cut,” Burchard continues, “and there were eight ghastly wounds on other parts of the body.”43 Pound makes the Papal “inquest” shorter and, through cautious Varchi, conflates both fratricides, ending on a note of determination: And the next comer says “Were nine wounds, “Four men, white horse. Held on the saddle before him . . .” Hooves click and slick on the cobbles. Schiavoni . . . cloak . . . “Sink the damn thing!”

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[. . .]     “Se pia,” Varchi, “O empia ma risoluto “E terribile deliberazione.”       Both sayings run in the wind, Ma se morisse! (5/20) William Roscoe also devotes a number of pages to the death of John Borgia in his Life and Pontificate of Leo the Tenth (1805), quoting Burchard (“the only authentick information that remains”),44 as Matthew does. But their conclusions are different. Roscoe excludes the possibility that Cesar had any part in the infamous deed: “it might not be difficult to shew, that so far from this being, with justice, admitted as a proof, that Cesar was the perpetrator of the murder of his brother, the imputation is in itself, in the highest degree improbable.”45 After serious evaluation of the facts, Roscoe conjectures that a “jealous rival,” or an “injured husband,” might be responsible for the crime. Throughout Burchard’s narrative he argues “there is not the slightest indication that Cesar had any share in the transaction.”46 This is both a defence of Cesar and a hypothetical interpretation of the murder. A century later Matthew (“the next comer”?) confutes him: “Roscoe assumes that Gandia was attacked and murdered by a jealous rival, because, in Schiavoni’s account of the event, there is no hint of Caesar’s guilt [. . .] But there is little evidence to support the theory. Even if it is true that Caesar did not leave his palace that night, this is no proof of innocence.” Matthew does not demur at passing his judgment: “Caesar undoubtedly felt that his brother stood in the way of his worldly advancement [. . .] it was only through the Duke’s death that he could hope one day to attain the position of an independent Prince, the summit of his ambition.”47 It might be significant that in the Canto Pound never mentions Cesar Borgia, who, like Lorenzaccio, seems to look to the willful Malatesta. The downward movement into time and the relationship between historical facts and historiography are the foundation for the didactic

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project of Canto 5. Pound admires Varchi for leaving open his own puzzling query: “lascerò che ognuno ne giudichi a senno suo” (“I leave it to each one to express his judgement according to his own mind”).48 One is reminded of Confucius saying: “I can remember / A day when the historians left blanks in their writings, / I mean for things they didn’t know” (13/60). What Varchi certainly knew is that Lorenzaccio’s was a “terrible and resolute decision” (“non so se pia [noble] o empia [ignoble], ma certo terribile e risoluta deliberazione”).49 Pound turns it the other way round: “‘ma risoluto / E terribile deliberazione.’” As to whether the resolute, more than terrible, decision was pia or empia: “Both sayings run in the wind” (5/20). History, and the readings of history, remain a puzzling heritage. In Canto 5 poetry has planted its heel in the clock-ticking “earth loam.”

6

Canto 7 Walter Baumann

As we know from Ezra Pound’s letter to his father of December 13, 1919, Canto 7 was drafted in 1919: “Have done cantos 5, 6, and 7, each more incomprehensible than the one preceding it.”1 But on October 9, 1920, he wrote to John Quinn: “I at any rate think Canto 7 the best thing I have done.”2 All three of them were first published in the Dial of August 1921.3 In the layout as used by the current New Directions printing, Canto 7 has, in addition to the 127 lines of text, eight blank lines. Five of these seem to be intended to mark the beginning of new movements or sections (before ll. 57, 79, 87, 99 and 106). The remaining three occur before line 16, before line 17 and after line 18. Lines 16 to 18 are the ones taken up by Pound’s quotations from Gustave Flaubert’s Un cœur simple. Does this mean that Pound wanted to give these fragments special significance? As a look at the original reveals, Pound did not reproduce them in the order in which they appear in Flaubert. As to the fragments themselves, they confirm Donald Davie’s observation that Pound’s “use of his sources, classical or other, was always both hasty and high-handed.”4 Here is Flaubert’s text—the fragments used in Canto 7 are given in bold and are numbered to show Pound’s rearrangements:

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Readings in the Cantos Un vestibule étroit séparait la cuisine de la salle où Mme Aubain se tenait tout le long du jour, assise près de la croisée dans un fauteuil de paille (4). Contre le lambris (3), peint en blanc, s’alignaient huit chaises d’acajou. Un vieux piano (5) supportait, sous un baromètre (6) un tas pyramidal de boîtes et de cartons. Deux bergères de tapisserie flanquaient la cheminée en marbre jaune et de style Louis XV. La pendule, au milieu, représentait un temple de Vesta, – et tout l’appartement sentait un peu le moisi (1) car le plancher était plus bas que le jardin (2).5

It so happens that Pound’s mentor, Ford Madox Ford, published an article in the Outlook of June 5, 1915 about Un cœur simple, in which he dwelt extensively on this very passage.6 Contrary to Carroll F. Terrell, who thought that “Such objects begin to assume for Flaubert a dead weight that arrests the subjective movement of the mind,”7 Ford did not see anything negative in Flaubert’s tale and even maintained (extravagantly, but understandably, in the middle of the Great War) that “The salvation of the world, if it is to be saved, will come from Mme Aubain and her servant Félicité.”8 There is no denying, however, that Pound regarded most of the furniture and the houses he describes in Canto 7 as bad imitations: “columns of false marble” (l. 19), “The house too thick, the paintings / a shade too oiled” (ll. 24–25) and “between walls of a sham Mycenian, / ‘Toc’ sphinxes, sham-Memphis columns” (ll. 79–80). It is therefore tempting to consider the six Flaubert fragments on a par with the sham, but, since they appear without any judgment from Pound, they may be meant to be a positive presence in this canto, as an example of precise representation. A very adverse event lies behind lines 41–42: Damn the partition! Paper, dark brown and stretched, Flimsy and damned partition.

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David Farley9 and Robert Spoo10 have pointed out that this refers to the trouble Pound had in 1919 at the American passport office in Paris. In line 19 (“[. . .] beneath the columns of false marble”), Louis L. Martz perceives a “turn to a different room. Some kind of large, formal meeting hall, where the poet-prophet hears again the ‘old men’s voices.’”11 Apart from Fritz, none of the names in Canto 7 has anything to do with contemporary history, except for the “live man, out of lands and prisons” in line 109, whose name was given in the margin in the Faber editions between 1950 and 1975 as “FitzGerald.” The six opening lines are repeats, with slight variations, from Canto 2: in line 1 we have Eleanor of Aquitaine languishing in the “British climate,” in line 2 the puns on the destructive nature of Helen from Aeschylus, which H. Weir Smyth translated ingeniously as “a Hell she proved to ships, Hell to men, Hell to cities,”12 and in lines 3–6 the blind Homer listening to the sea surge and the “rattle” of the old Trojans’ “voices.” Line 7 starts with the narrative “And then” and moves us from Britain and Greece to “the phantom Rome” where Ovid gives advice for the amorous circus goer, which is, in English: “If by chance a speck of dust falls in the girl’s lap, as it may, let it be flicked away by your fingers: and if there’s nothing, flick away the nothing.”13 Beginning with “Then,” lines 11–14 transport us to the world of medieval processions and to Bertran de Born’s world of pageantry and fighting. It is hard to understand line 14, with its “sightless narration,” after the splendid sights presented in line 13: “Pennons and standards y cavals armatz.” It is even more difficult to work out a connection between de Born’s rejoicing and what concludes this section: Dante’s sparks from the burning logs (“ciocchi arsi”),14 which fools use to tell the future. The words “brand struck in the game “(l. 15) are repeated from Canto 5 (17). The seven lines after the Flaubert quotation, 19–25, give us “old men’s voices” for the second time. Unlike the old Trojans, the old men are not on a wall, but in a house where everything is viewed by Pound as in bad taste. As to the word “leasehold” in line 22, a Guide to Kulchur passage provides the answer:

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Readings in the Cantos The London ground rents and entails, lease system etc. have defiled English buildings. A man will be hesitant to build permanent beauty if he knows that someone else can bag it at the end of 9 or 99 years.15

Lines 26–30 are devoted to Pound’s portrait of Henry James. It is a condensation of what we find at the beginning of the first Little Review article on James in 1918.16 In addition to “con gli occhi onesti e tardi” (l. 26), the description which Pound transferred from Sordello17 to James—“with honest and slow-moving eyes”—he added a further Dantescan phrase: “Grave incessu” (should be “Gravi”)18—“with solemn movement.” The prose equivalent of “the old voice lifts itself / weaving an endless sentence” (ll. 29–30) is “the long sentences piling themselves up in elaborate phrase after phrase, the lightning incision, the pauses, the slightly shaking admonitory gesture with its ‘wu-a-wait a little, wait a little, something will come.’”19 In lines 31–40 Pound describes his return to post-World War I Paris as the kind of “ghostly visit” Henry James is dealing with in the tale which Ford Madox Ford was keen to publish in the first issue of the English Review, “The Jolly Corner.” But the search for “buried beauty” (l. 33) is in vain: no “well-formed fingers” (l. 34) move the “Empire handle” (l. 35), and even the old “gouty-footed” concierge (l. 37) has gone. In his search for “the living,” Pound is being “Stubborn against the fact” (l. 39) because it has been “Brushed out” like the “wilted flowers” (ll. 40 and 39). After the angry outburst about the already mentioned passport trouble at the American consulate, Pound inserts a dirge for what “Time blacked out with a rubber” (l. 45): for the dancer Ione de Forest, who is also the subject of Pound’s poem, “Ione, Dead the Long Year”20 and for the mistress in Liu Che’s poem, which Pound emulated in “Liu Ch’e.”21 The name “Elysée” (l. 46) must not make us think of the Avenue des Champs-Elysées, but of the Hotel de l’Elysée, at which Pound was an occasional guest. The sight of a motor-bus (l. 47) reminds Pound that he is not in Elysium, but in post-World War I Paris, in fact at

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“treize rue Gay de Lussac” (80/530), the apartment of the Belgian poet, novelist and art critic, Fritz-René Vanderpyl (b. 1876), whom Pound remembered at Pisa as “still roaring” and saying that Vlaminck was “a great brute sweating paint” (74/455). The Analyst reproduced part of Vanderpyl’s 1955 letter dealing with his friendship with Pound: The Fritz in Canto 7 is certainly me, and I remember that, many a time, on my balcony overlooking a corner of the Luxembourg Gardens, Pound was standing—as once he said—“between two Fritzes,” my bust and myself [In Pisa this became: “with his stone head still on the balcony” (80/530)].22 This leaves the matter of the “Beer-bottle” (l. 51). It appears that Pound used the word to rubbish the pieces of sculpture in the Luxembourg Gardens, but they can’t have been the only things provoking his sweeping comment to his friend: “That, Fritz, is the era, to-day against the past, / ‘Contemporary’” (ll. 52–53). This dismissal of the contemporary world tallies with what we read in Hugh Selwyn Mauberley about the “tawdry cheapness” which “Shall outlast our days.”23 What the early commentators of this canto couldn’t know was that the Paris scene Pound describes may, with its circular “stair” and the Erard piano, recall his visits to his American patron and pianist, Margaret Cravens, who shot herself when Pound was traveling in the wake of the Troubadours, all of which is detailed in Omar Pound’s and Robert Spoo’s Ezra Pound and Margaret Cravens: A Tragic Friendship 1910–1912.24 From the middle of line 53 to “Eleanor!” in line 62 we first have precious stones (“Smaragdos, chrysolithos” l. 55), then the vision of Vasco da Gama in Africa wearing pants with gold stripes25 and the unattributable but miraculous image of “Mountains of the sea gave birth to troops” (l. 56). This is followed by one-line repeats. The first is Flaubert and his mahogany furniture, “en acajou” (57). In line 58 there is the second appearance of the “beer-bottle,” in the plural, and “of various strata.” Line 60 adds “’elenaus” (“ship-destroying”) to the other

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two Aeschylean puns on Helen’s name. “The sea runs in the beachgroove, shaking the floated pebbles” in line 61 echoes and extends “And the wave runs in the beach-groove” of Canto 2 (6). The repeats end with a call on Eleanor (l. 62). In the middle of these repeats, however, there is a new question: “But is she dead as Tyro? In seven years?” (l. 59) According to Canto 2 there is a “glass wave over Tyro” (10) and in lines 90–91 we read “It is ten years gone, makes stiff about her a glass, / A petrefaction of air.” Line 63 is the exact middle of Canto 7. It is inspired by what Pound called in ABC of Reading “the most beautiful book in the language”:26 Ovid’s Metamorphoses in Arthur Golding’s translation. Golding’s version of Book X, lines 594–96, “As when a scarlet curtaine streynd against a playstred wall / Dooth cast like shadowe, making it seem ruddye therewith all,” is turned by Pound into the highly imagistic “The scarlet curtain throws a less scarlet shadow.” The simile is used by Ovid to depict what happened to Atalanta’s skin tone while running, which A. K. Kline rendered as: “and a blush spread over the girlish whiteness of her body, just as when a red awning over a white courtyard stains it with borrowed shadow.”27 Line 64 is a return to Provence: “Lamplight at Buovilla, e quel remir.” Arnaut Daniel’s passion for Buovilla’s wife, as expressed in “Doutz brais e critz,”28 is reduced here to his wish to see her (naked) in the lamplight. Terrell’s comment is very helpful, as it also applies to the Nicea passage: “Pound returns here to the theme of the desire to discard the accoutrements of civilization.”29 His overlong lamentations about the lifelessness of everything and everybody except for himself and naked Nicea were triggered by Remy de Gourmont (1858–1915). Though Pound had already included a discussion of Gourmont in “The Approach to Paris II” in 191330 and a brief mention of him in “The Prose Tradition in Verse,”31 it was in the very year he drafted Canto 7 that he published “De Gourmont: A Distinction (Followed by Notes).”32 In Instigations: Ezra Pound and Remy de Gourmont, Richard Sieburth says: “‘most men,’ Pound noted with Gourmont, ‘think only husks and shells of the thoughts that have already been lived over by others.’ In

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Canto 7 he presented precisely such a ghostly world, peopled by hollow men and their exoskeletal words, ‘shells given out by shells.’”33 Lines 65 to 86 represent three different days. The first is devoted to following Nicea in “all her naked beauty” (l. 68). And strangely enough this isn’t taking place on a beach in the South, but in northern city streets. Is Nicea, whose name is Pound’s invention, simply a personification of true beauty? In any case, the poet goes so far as to say: “We alone having being” (l. 71). The thought that beauty is only beauty when it is naked, free from any epoch’s restrictions in manners and fashions, Pound also adopted from de Gourmont. Eva Hesse has called Gourmont’s ideas the “Kristallkern” (the core) of Canto 7.34 In lines 71–86, Pound describes the very opposite: there is “no inner being” (l. 77). Those he knew “as men” are now, on “another day” (l. 72), just “husks” (l. 73), “Dry casques of departed locusts,” and “speaking a shell of speech . . .” (l. 75). This is a “dryness calling for death” (l.78). On “Another day,” it is Pound seeing nothing but “Toc,” which is French for a cheap imitation, and the absence of a feel for color: “Brown-yellow wood, and the no colour plaster” (l. 83). There is also a job for Pound the music critic. For him jazz has no being either, as he makes out “a stiffness or stillness” beneath it (“a cortex,” i.e. an impenetrable shell or husk). He appears to call it “the ill beat music” (l. 85), which is “stilled” by something even less lively, by “Dry professorial talk . . .” (l. 84). After line 86, “House expulsed by this house,” which in Massimo Bacigalupo’s bilingual edition of XXX Cantos is extended by “but not extinguished,”35 and the description of “the dancing woman,” who still has “Square even shoulders and the satin skin” (l. 87), but “Gone cheeks” (l. 88), the damning criticism continues. We must bear in mind that when Pound first arrived in England he very successfully conquered literary London and was delighted to accept invitations to teas and dinners. By the time he wrote Canto 7 he was completely disillusioned and couldn’t tolerate “the old dead dry talk” (l. 89) any more, but realized that the rules were, as ever, made in “The old room of the tawdry class” (l. 92), against which “The young men” were always powerless

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(l. 93). In line 94 the word “husk” occurs for the second time. Here it is “the husk of talk,” whereas in line 73 it was the encounter with husks who used to be men. In Drafts and Fragments the old despairing Pound uses “husk” to describe himself: “A blown husk that is finished” (“From Canto CXV”/ 814). In line 95, a complete line from Dante’s Paradiso (II.1) is quoted: “O voi che siete in piccioletta barca.” Terrell thought that Pound inserted Dante’s advice to the readers in the tiny boat to turn back to pick up “the original Odyssean theme of the sea voyage in order to link this canto with the preceding six.36 But Pound may also have wanted to hint that his pursuit of enlightenment was much like Dante’s. In lines 96–98 and 104–5, we have an elliptical version of the Dido and Aeneas story. Line 97 gives us a most unsympathetic Aeneas: “Lies heavy in my arms, dead weight,” while in line 96, “Dido [is] choked up with sobs, for her Sicheus,” thus “Drowning, with tears, [the] new Eros” (l. 98). Lines 104 and 105 are a mere variation on lines 98 and 99: “But Eros drowned, drowned, heavy-half dead with tears / For dead Sicheus.” Donald Davie, in his essay about “Virgil’s Presence in Ezra Pound and Others,” comments: “Dido’s sobbing for her old lover even as she lies in the arms of her new one [. . .] is for Pound deathly, it precludes the genuinely ‘new,’ which he urgently wants to find and to celebrate.”37 Lines 99–103 are surrounded by the lines dealing with Dido’s tears. They proclaim that “the life goes on,” not in the drawing rooms, but “upon bare hills,” and it is only “mooning” (l. 99), i.e. moving aimlessly. The four unusually “surrealist” lines that follow seem to describe a desperate attempt to create a form: Flame leaps from the hand, the rain is listless, Yet drinks the thirst from our lips,      solid as echo, Passion to breed a form in shimmer of rain-blur (ll. 100–103) In lines 109–11 the one and only “live man” appears. In the three lines before and the three and a half lines afterwards we have “the living

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dead” once more: life-mocking “husks” that move and whose “words rattle: shells given out by shells” (l. 98) and “big locust-casques” (l. 111) at “the tawdry table” (l. 112) lifting up “their spoons to mouths,” putting “forks in cutlets” (l. 113) and making “sound like the sound of voices” (l. 114). As the readers of the Faber text saw in the margin, The live man, out of lands and prisons,      shakes the dry pods, Probes for old wills and friendships . . . (ll. 109–11) is Desmond FitzGerald (ca. 1888–1947), the Irish revolutionary and statesman. He was indeed in more than one prison, first in 1915 for six months in Ireland, and after the Rising in Dartmoor and Maidstone. His life sentence was later commuted to 20 years. He was released after his election as Sinn Fein MP for Pembroke, Dublin, in 1919. It was then that FitzGerald came to London as director of publicity for the Dublin government, to shake “the dry pods” and to probe “for old wills and friendships” (ll. 110–11). As can be seen from the Pound–FitzGerald correspondence, which Mary FitzGerald published in Paideuma,38 the two men never lost touch. Desmond FitzGerald was really the first contemporary man of action that Pound admired. Line 115 takes us to Renaissance Florence, to Lorenzino de’ Medici (1514–48), known as Lorenzaccio, “bad Lawrence,” and to his distant cousin, Alessandro de’ Medici (1510–37). In Canto 5, Pound had devoted almost a full page (29 lines) to the Florentine historian Benedetto Varchi’s speculations about the assassination of Alessandro by Lorenzaccio. Varchi, who was also a classical scholar, likened it to the murder of Agamemnon. He also compared it to the murder of Caesar by Brutus. It is in this light that we have to read line 116: “Being more live than they, more full of flames and voices.” Pound appears to grant Lorenzaccio the status of a hero because his action was motivated by inner “flames and voices.” As the Italian “Ma se morrisse! / Credesse caduto da sè [. . .]” (ll. 117–18) implies, Lorenzaccio wants to make

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sure that Alessandro realizes who his murderer is, and therefore kills him in his bed. In line 119, Pound speaks enigmatically about the moving “tall indifference,” which Terrell equated with abulia (5/19 has “abuleia”), the psychiatrist’s term for “an absence of willpower or an inability to act decisively” (Concise Oxford Dictionary). Lines 120–21 seem to continue what has been said in line 116 about Lorenzaccio: unlike the shells earlier in the canto, this shell is a “more living” (l. 120) one. The line, “Drift in the air of fate, dry phantom, but intact” (121) may suggest that when there is a lack of willpower, fate and the phantom world will take over. Line 122 starts with “O Alessandro, chief and thrice warned,” but ends with the word “watcher,” which, like the two lines that follow, “Eternal watcher of things, / Of things, of men, of passions” (ll. 123–24), have been taken as applying to Henry James. The only part that can be identified in the final three lines:      Eyes floating in dry, dark air, E biondo, with glass-grey iris, with an even side-fall of hair The stiff, still features. (ll. 125–27) is “E biondo.” It comes from Inferno (XII.110) and describes the fairhaired Obizzo d’Este (d. 1293), “one of the most homicidal tyrants of Italy.”39 William Cookson thought that Canto 7 “ended with the ‘stiff, still features’ of the indifferent tyrant Alessandro.”40 James J. Wilhelm said: “Once again, the section ends with Renaissance brutality and violence.”41 In The Forméd Trace, Bacigalupo writes that Canto 7, “closes with the announcement of the Time of the Assassins: while deferring to Henry James, ‘eternal watcher of things,’ somewhat awkwardly travestied as Alessandro de’ Medici [. . .] Pound sympathizes largely with his murderer Lorenzino, who is none but the poet and stands for vitality and action, which are to Pound valuable for their own sakes: he is ‘more full of flames and voices.’”42

7

Canto 8 Anderson Araujo

The beginning of the first Canto in the four-poem suite known as the Malatesta Cantos speaks to one of the most fecund collaborations in literary modernism. That is, Canto 8 knowingly misquotes from T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, a poem now impossible to imagine without Ezra Pound’s editorial interventions up until its publication in 1922. Significantly, this was also the year Pound began working on the Malatesta Cantos. The parenthetical displacement of Eliot’s “shored” for Pound’s “shelved” (8/28)1 at once subverts and pays tribute to the famous line from the end of The Waste Land, “These fragments I have shored against my ruins.”2 The citation casts both poets as archivists of sorts, “shelving” vast layers of history in their epochal poems. It also hints at their kinship with the star of the Malatesta Cantos, Sigismondo Malatesta (1417–68), the storied condottiere of Rimini. Just as Eliot and Pound created poetic monuments out of mythico-historical fragments, so did Malatesta, as borne out in the palimpsestic architecture of the Tempio Malatestiano, the church he built over a much older Gothic structure in Rimini. Yet the church of San Francesco ended up, like The Cantos, an unfinished venture or, as Pound puts it, “a jumble and a junk shop.”3 Amid statues of Christian saints the myriad bas-reliefs in the Tempio depict zodiac signs, Neoplatonic allusions,

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and mythological figures, including Pallas Athena, Minerva, Apollo, Diana, and the sibyls, among many others, a “daring synthesis” that Pound would praise in Eliot’s The Criterion (1934).4 For Pound the Tempio typifies the kind of cultural bricolage that registers a crucial effort toward civilization-building. Poundian culture, too, is composed of materials retrieved ready-made from the midden heap of history. My chapter enlists the Greek goddesses Clio and Calliope to situate Canto 8 at a crossroad in Pound’s poetics, marking a turn from his original vision of The Cantos as a long poem to a modern epic. As in The Waste Land, history and myth often entwine in Canto 8. For Pound the epic is a poem that includes history, but one that also looks to the future instead of merely “shoring up” the decayed edifices of the past.5 The graphic quarrel between Truth and Calliope stems from the rift between fact and fiction, history and art. Clio is the muse of history (“Truth”) while Calliope is the muse of epic. To Clio, Calliope is a “Slut” because she does not adhere to the strict truth, while Clio is a “Bitch” in Calliope’s eyes because she complains of any deviation from strict historical accuracy. The Romantic locus coded in the French “sous les lauriers” (“under the laurels”)6 is comically deflated in the “Slanging” of the muses. Too often lost sight of in critical readings of Canto 8, however, is the kinship between Clio and Calliope, both daughters of Mnemosyne (Memory). While Clio signifies fame (kleos), especially the fame of heroic exploits transmitted to future generations by the poet, Calliope expresses the richness of sung speech that endows poetry with vitality.7 Hence, the clash between the muses is less dire than it might seem at first glance. After all, both employ the epic poem as a vehicle to inscribe memory. The laurel, Apollo’s tree, evokes the sacralization of poetic memory in the Hesiodic tradition. The rod of wisdom or skeptron that the daughters of Mnemosyne give to Hesiod when they teach him the truth and the divine melody is cut from a laurel tree.8 By poeticizing fragments of the Malatesta archive within his own poem Pound stands as a modern-day Hesiod—a more skeptical and evidence-minded Hesiod—mediating between history and epic poetry.

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Engaging Clio and Calliope to bring his Hesiodic project to fruition, while incorporating Malatesta—a historical, political, and, more importantly, mythico-heroic figure—Pound seeks to bring history and epic together in creative tension. However flawed Pound’s hero may be he fascinates us by his excesses. By virtue of his boundless ingenuity, even if he is at times “a bit too POLUMETIS” (9/36), or “manyminded,” Malatesta typifies Pound’s paideuma, the cultural program defined in “Date Line” as “general and overreaching, overstressing the single man.”9 In this way Pound would create a virtual pantheon featuring, among others, Malatesta, Confucius, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and, increasingly in the 1930s, Mussolini. These Poundian heroes become archetypes of the revolutionary will and intelligence in action, resetting, as it were, civilization in motion. Yet there is little at the beginning of Canto 8 to teach us anything specific about Malatesta. What we do find are fragmented transcriptions of a letter from the condottiere to “Giohanni of the Medici” (Giovanni de’ Medici) (1421–63) in Florence, “...hanni de / ..dicis / ...entia” (8/28). Citing the letter’s precise date, 7 April 1449, and place, “contra Cremonam” (“before Cremona”) (8/29), Pound situates the missive in time and space, even as Malatesta’s epistolary prose takes on a poetic form in the Canto. In his indispensable study of the Malatesta Cantos, Lawrence Rainey notes the “aggressively quotidian and antiliterary” nature of the quotations in these four Cantos, the first time Pound would deploy the technique in this long poem.10 I am, however, less willing than Rainey to term Pound’s citation of historical documents “intransigent.” I contend that by shuffling the Malatesta narratives he derived from historical and literary sources11 Pound disrupts the traditional, Hegelian form of history that Foucault sees as always assuming a “suprahistorical perspective,” a “totality fully closed upon itself.”12 In lieu of chronology, Pound compresses and, at times, accelerates or even misplaces Malatesta’s exploits. In essence, then, he creates a metachronic historiography. Once gathered, these bits and pieces are deployed as “luminous details,” an antidote to the error of historians “in presenting all detail as if of equal import.”13 Pound’s

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heuristic cherry-picking enables him to assemble a mosaic of gists and piths, which he hopes the discerning reader will make out as a coherent image. The nekuia of Canto 1, the calling forth of the dead, is a metaphor for resurrecting the past. Throughout The Cantos, Pound ventriloquizes the past, revamping forgotten traditions. His personae, or literary masks, do not simply invoke the shades of cultures past; they radically alter them. Pound participates in the kind of literary history that Frank Shuffelton deems meaningful “precisely because it is the authentication of possible human voices.”14 Yet, following a passage in Canto 8 on the shifting political alliances of Francesco Sforza (1401–66), Malatesta’s on-again, off-again foe, the poet wavers, “Or something of that sort” (8/32). Pound’s hedging is significant, revealing his skepticism toward the historical record. As Michael Bernstein puts it, “it is history itself that constitutes the essential fiction” of the Canto.15 Indeed, aside from Malatesta’s eagerness to broker a peace deal between the Medici and the King of Ragona the letter is shockingly prosaic. It ruminates on service monies owed and reminds the “Maestro di pentore,” likely Piero della Francesca (ca. 1412–92), to refrain from painting a fresco in the Tempio until the mortar dries (8/28). But beneath the letter’s mundaneness lurks a startling revelation. Malatesta aims to keep the cash-strapped maestro in his employ for life. Patronage of the arts or, more to the point, patronage in the arts with no strings attached, emerges as a key notion in this first letter. Pound goes so far as to provide the Italian original to Malatesta’s design for della Francesca “to work as he likes, / Or waste time as he likes,” “(affatigandose per suo piacere o no / non gli manchera la provixione mai)” (8/29). The condottiere’s eagerness to sponsor a painter even as he marshalled Venetian forces under his command outside Cremona against the Sforzas clearly made quite an impression on Pound, then a struggling poet in Paris. Even more striking is the aesthetic kinship hinted at between della Francesca and Malatesta. As the letter from the front line suggests, the painter’s art will not embellish the Tempio alone. A preliminary piece, possibly commissioned

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for Castel Sismondo, Malatesta’s primary residence, will do in the meantime, “So that both [della Francesca] and I shall / Get as much enjoyment as possible from it.” Malatesta’s delight in the arts telegraphs his innate aesthetic sensibility. It also nods to his myth-making ethos, as an ever-expanding array of commissioned frescoes, portraits, sculptures, and commemorative medals (hundreds of which he deposited in the walls and foundations of his most important buildings, including the Tempio)16 contributed to securing his place among the foremost condottieri of the Italian Renaissance. Pound promotes the idea that Malatesta is not only a patron of the arts and a humanist ruler, but an artist of sorts, an out-and-out Renaissance man. The short poem-within-a-poem introduced after the poet bids a “lyra” be played (8/30) invokes a tradition of lyric love poetry hearkening to sources as wide-ranging as Ovid, Catullus, Sappho, and the Old Testament. The lyrical interpolation of Pound’s invention bears out the avant-garde experimentalism of Canto 8, as shown in the Canto’s radical break with poetic convention. His poetic pastiche simulates the kind of canzone he imagines Malatesta might have written to his mistress and later third wife, Isotta degli Atti (1432–74). Pound borrows snippets from one of his chief sources for the Malatesta Cantos, Charles Yriarte’s Un condottiere au XVe siècle (1882), while possibly also riffing off lines in translation from Edward Hutton’s 1906 novel on Malatesta’s life.17 Yet, unlike Yriarte, who misattributes poems to Malatesta, and Hutton, who parrots the French art historian, Pound makes no such claims.18 The short poem nonetheless echoes tropes often found in the near-cultic movement of love poetry dedicated to Isotta in Malatesta’s literary court. She became a leitmotif in the work of the Poeti Isottei, a cadre of humanist poets who mythologized and celebrated Rimini’s power couple. Of note among these works are Porcellio de’ Pandoni’s collection of twelve elegies, De amore Iovis in Isotta, and Basinio di Parma’s Ovid and Virgil-inspired epistolary elegies, Liber Isottaeus, a likely prelude to the construction of Isotta’s tomb in the Tempio Malatestiano.19 Pound’s lyric includes classical, medieval, and biblical references to

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Helen of Troy, “Yseut” or Iseult (the ill-fated lover of Tristan), and “Batsabe” or Bathsheba (King David’s mistress and later wife). Pound’s syncretism in these verses mirrors Malatesta’s polymathic exploits. The Tempio, too, synthesizes classical and Judeo-Christian traditions. That the Canto features the poem between military missives buttresses the image of Malatesta as an artifex-warrior. To wit, it is the excerpted letter to Giovanni de’ Medici, and not the poem, that is seen as an “interruption.” Nor should we lose sight of the fact that Malatesta is battling both Sforza and torrential rains, which delay his setting up the cannons or “bombards.” Such grace under fire unsettles contemporary caricatures by the likes of Pope Pius II (1405–64). These portrayed Malatesta as a rapist, heretic, murderer, and traitor, to name a few epithets.20 The intimate confession of love and devotion we witness in Pound’s song seems to confirm Malatesta’s standing in The Cantos as polumetis, a ruler who, like Odysseus in his amorous trysts, finds time for love and courtship amid battle and statecraft. Canto 8 suggests moreover that the condottiere upholds the tradition of troubadour lyric. The reader may infer this Poundian invention in the reference to Guillaume Poictiers (1071–1127), IX Duke of Aquitaine, in the final stanza. A courtly warrior-poet in Carolingian France, Guillaume composed the earliest surviving troubadour lyrics and profoundly influenced love poetry in his native Provence.21 As early as 1913, Pound dubbed the troubadour in the Quarterly Review, “a man of many energies,”22 a pre-echo of Malatesta’s portrayal as polumetis. Having introduced the Provençal poet in Canto 6 (6/21), Pound cites Guillaume’s seminal act of bringing “the song up out of Spain / With the singers and viels” (viols) (8/32). The Canto thus sets up a trans-Mediterranean line of transmission from Iberian trovadores to Occitan jongleurs to Malatesta and his fiefdom, “By Marecchia, where the water comes down over the cobbles.” Hardly worthy of encomium, this “mud-stretch” of the Romagna was the crux and crucible of Malatesta’s exploits. The early drafts of Canto 8 take pains to single out the prime movers of troubadour poetry: Simone di Montfort, Cavalcanti, and

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Raimbaut, among others.23 That Pound excised references to other troubadours in the printed version of the Canto hints strongly at Guillaume’s significance, perhaps flagging parallels between the troubadour and Malatesta. While Pound links the philandering of Guillaume and Odysseus in Canto 6,24 in Canto 8 the juxtaposition is more overtly political. William of Malmesbury, the twelfth-century Wiltshire chronicler, paints an unflattering sketch of Guillaume as a “voluptuary warlord, a hissing villain scornful of the church’s moral authority.”25 Malatesta meets much the same fate in the Commentaries of his ecclesiastical arch-nemesis, Pope Pius II. The scathing diatribes against the condottiere in the Commentaries go so far as to breach clerical decorum. Pound understates this enmity in Canto 8, saying simply, “With the church against him” (8/32). In reality, both Guillaume and Malatesta were excommunicated by popes Pascal II (1099–1118) and Pius II, respectively. Guillaume’s companho (“fellow-knight”) lyrics conflate the prince and the poet, a device that Pound also employs in the Malatesta Cantos. In a letter to Felix E. Schelling of 8 July 1922, Pound refers to Guillaume as “satyric.”26 Malatesta’s antiauthoritarian panache runs in tandem with Guillaume’s. The reference to the Provençal poet in Canto 105 in a series of fragments alluding to the conflict between church and state in the reigns of Pope Pascal II and Henry I of England (1068–1135) (105/769–71) betokens the hardiness that made Guillaume and Malatesta so alluring for Pound. In The Spirit of Romance, he would praise the modernity of Guillaume, a troubadour “just as much of our age as of his own.”27 Pound regarded Malatesta likewise. This affinity comes into view in the Tempio’s pastiche of mythologies and architectural styles. Its preChristian aesthetic impressed Pound as a hallmark of the classical revival in the quattrocento. So monumental was Malatesta’s project that even Pius II grudgingly acknowledged the feat, as rehearsed in Canto 8, “He, Sigismundo, templum ædificavit” (8/32). But that is only half the story. Pound conveniently elides Pius’s scathing condemnation of Malatesta for filling the Tempio with pagan works.28 For Pound, Guillaume and Malatesta embody Susan Stanford Friedman’s “recurrent

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modernities,” the idea that “human history cycles unevenly through periods of relative stasis and then explosive kinesis.”29 This also coincides with Pound’s rendering of history in Canto 116 as [. . .] the record     the palimpsest— a little light     in great darkness— (116/815) The passage echoes Pound’s allusion to Dante’s Inferno in Canto 8, “And the wind is still for a little / And the dusk rolled / to one side a little” (8/32–33). In Canto 5 of the Inferno Dante enters Minòs’s circle of hell to converse with, among other lustful sinners, the adulterous couple Francesca da Rimini and Paolo Malatesta, both slain by Francesca’s betrayed husband and Paolo’s older brother, Gianciotto Malatesta. The lovers whirl about in an everlasting dark and stormy wind. The dramatic moment when Gianciotto discovers and slaughters Francesca and Paolo is brought forth in elliptical fragments in Pound’s Canto 8, “and the sword, Paolo il Bello’s, / caught in the arras” (8/32). The Dantean intertext not only adds tragic pathos to the saga of the Malatesti, but also mirrors the synthesis of history and poetry that Pound performs in the Malatesta Cantos. Dante fictionalizes the star-crossed love triangle in Rimini by having Francesca trace “the root of our first love” to Arthurian romance in the story of Lancelot and Guinevere.30 It is only after reading the book that the coy lovers give in to desire. Elsewhere in Canto 8, however, not every effect appears as finely tuned. The specter of race emerges in Pound’s explicit reference to the African heritage of Alessandro de Medici, Duke of Florence (1510– 37), “That Alessandro was negroid” (8/28). He was rumored to have been the illegitimate son of Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici, later crowned Pope Clement VII, and a Moroccan slave woman (though publicly presented as the pope’s nephew and the son of Lorenzo di Piero, the

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Duke of Urbino).31 In 1531, Alessandro was made Duke of Florence by the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, evidently a sign that his biracial background did not hinder his ascension to power. In Canto 7, Alessandro comes on the scene as “chief and thrice warned, watcher, / Eternal watcher of things, / Of things, of men, of passions” (7/27). In turn, “thrice warned” echoes Canto 5, where the phrase “dreamed out beforehand” (5/19) alludes to the account in Varchi’s Storia Fiorentina (1721) of the repeated foretellings of Alessandro’s assassination through dreams and astrology. However, absent any gloss of his portrayal as “negroid,” the racial politics of Canto 8 remains open-ended. Is the reader meant to see the murdered Alessandro as a hapless victim of prejudice or as a hero-martyr or, still, as a racialized cipher for quattrocento biopolitics? The line resists a tidy construal. But its meaning may lie in where it is situated. That is, it puts to rest a probable bone of contention between Clio and Calliope, as it is syntactically connected by a colon to their “slanging each other sous le lauriers.” It is plausible, then, to infer from the italics in “That Alessandro” that the muses might have been arguing about different Alessandros. In any event, what appears to foreclose their row in the end also underscores the contingency of language and the misreadings always already present in the borderlands between history and poetry. The excerpted condotta (contract) of August 5, 1452 also lets the reader fill in the blanks. Of the 1,000-word-plus document, Pound translates but key snippets, . . . . . and because the aforesaid most illustrious Duke of Milan Is content and wills that the aforesaid Lord Sigismundo Go into the service of the most magnificent commune of the Florentines For alliance defensive of the two states (8/29) The legal agreement, tendered by the Florentine ambassador, Agnolo della Stufa, to engage Malatesta’s services in defense of the Tuscan

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commune marks a radical reversal from the letter of 1449 excerpted in the Canto. Malatesta and Francesco Sforza, the “Duke of Milan” cited in the treaty, will now be allies under the aegis of the “Ten of the Baily” or Dieci di Balia, a Florentine war council. Yet no light is shed on the events leading up to this startling alliance. Nor is it apparent that, in throwing in his lot with Florence, Malatesta is once again turning against Alfonso of Aragon (1396–1458), the “King of Ragona” cited in the first letter (8/28). Within a single Canto, our condottiere will have put aside his longstanding enmity with Sforza while taking up arms against Alfonso, whom he had already betrayed two years earlier.32 Rather than parse Malatesta’s political maneuvers as, say, a historian might, Pound simply presents the translated excerpt as a fait accompli. Though perhaps alienating, Pound’s method is not as aleatory as it might seem. Claudette Sartiliot has suggested that for modernists “quotation represents a definite break with the tradition as well as a means of questioning the nature of the literary text.”33 I would contend that Pound is not so much breaking with as reviving tradition, making it new by means of literary-historical collage. It follows that in blurring the lines between poetic and legal language he performs a textual experiment that revises the boundaries and contours of discursive categories. As Ronald Bush aptly notes, the Cantos modeled after Browning’s Sordello “intend to be a new kind of narrative poetry—a poetry that portrays not just an action but an authentically modern dramatization of the way an action acquires significance within the individual intelligence.”34 The modernity of Canto 8 manifests at the nexus of language and translation. Pound performs a double act of translation: he translates the Italian into English, while also “translating,” or transferring, bits of the original Italian to give authenticity to the poem. In doing so, he also reminds us of the contingent nature of the relation between quoted text and translation. At the end of the stanza he peels back his “horsemen” and “footmen” to uncover the linguistic otherness of the source-text, “(gente di cavallo e da pie)” (8/30). He bridges past and present by bringing forth translation as

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a creative act. For Pound, to quote Robert Spoo, “an indispensable condition of creativity was the artist’s ability to move about freely in time and space.”35 It is in this spirit that Pound wants to immerse us in Malatesta’s world: Canto 8 rips history at the seams and rejoins it as patchwork. Following the 1449 showdown in which Malatesta lay siege to the Sforza stronghold of Cremona the Canto leaps back in time to 1442, showcasing the newlyweds Sforza and Bianca Visconti parading through Rimini. The contrast is stark. From the rain-drenched battle scene that closes the preceding stanza we now turn to a cinematic spectacle of quattrocento pomp. Malatesta has pulled out all the stops to welcome the Sforzas “Under the plumes, with the flakes and small wads of colour / Showering from the balconies” (8/30). The event marks a high point in what would turn out to be a fragile two-year alliance between the condottieri against their common foes. That Malatesta had wed Sforza’s daughter, Polissena (1428–49), just a month earlier renders the festive scene all the more fateful. Tinkering with the historical archive Pound engineers a sensational tale reminiscent of Sophoclean tragedy, for at this stage we already know that the honors being lavished on the “peasant’s son and the duchess” (8/31) will soon wither and fade. Amid the pageantry and hedonistic pleasures, the twice-cited rumblings of “wars southward” look to clashes in the offing. Intimations of mortality emerge soon thereafter in reference to “the pest” or Black Death in Ferrara. As always, the Canto continually shifts its gaze. Pound parenthetically alludes to the 1438–39 Council of Ferrara, a harried bid by the Byzantine emperor John VIII Palaeologus (1392– 1448) and Pope Eugenius IV (1383–1447) to end the schism between the Greek and Latin Churches and defend Christendom against the Ottoman Empire. Pound irreverently recaps the ecumenical event in Canto 26 as a decision “on the holy ghost / And as to the which begat the what in the Trinity” (26/123). Fears of the Black Death in Ferrara drove delegates to move the Council to Florence. To commemorate the Council, Malatesta’s medallionist, Pisanello, produced a medal of Palaeologus, now in the British Museum. The oblique reference to the

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Council foreshadows the clash of civilizations that would see Constantinople fall to the Ottomans in 1453. Yet this epochal shift gets no mention in the Canto. Nor is Palaeologus in much evidence here, as shown in the low-key reference to the “Greek emperor” (8/31). Pound is keen to feature a more alluring figure in attendance at the Council— the Byzantine philosopher, Giorgios Gemistos Plethon (1355–1452). No figure embodied Malatesta’s syncretic ethos as vigorously as Plethon. Amid the theological proceedings of the Council in Florence, he gave public lectures advocating that Plato be substituted for Aristotle as the foundation of speculative metaphysics. Malatesta may have heard Plethon lecture in Italy, but there is no evidence that they ever met.36 Busy fortifying Rimini and only 22 years old in 1439, Malatesta might have heard of the Neoplatonic philosopher from acquaintances who were in Florence that year, including Leon Battista Alberti (1404– 72), the polymathic architect of his Tempio.37 The condottiere would eventually inter Plethon’s remains in a sarcophagus in one of its outer walls. In the Canto we find the philosopher discoursing on subjects seemingly far removed from the ecclesiastical and scholastic concerns of the Council: “the war about the temple at Delphos,” Poseidon, and Plato (8/31). For Pound, this evinces, in the words of historian Warren T. Treadgold, Plethon’s “virtually pagan philosophy.”38 The reference to “Delphos” or Delphi also evokes a much older tradition. Delphi was the site of the panhellenic sanctuary that housed Apollo’s oracle and cult since the time of Homer. As Roxana Preda points out, Plethon referred to the “sacred wars” among the ancient Greek city states for the control of the Temple to Apollo to illustrate the need to end the current sectarian schisms.39 Hence, “Delphos” functions both as a call for ecumenical harmony and as a pre-Christian counterpoint to the Council of Ferrara-Florence. Plethon’s mention of Poseidon holds an even deeper meaning for Pound. In Guide to Kulchur Pound notes that the figure of the Olympian god complicates Plethon’s stereotype as a polytheistic philosopher, “His gods come from Neptune, so that there is a single source of being, aquatic.”40 Plethon’s theogony probably struck many among the

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Council clergy as heretical. Spurning Christian creationism, Plethon’s Nomoi (Book of Laws) assigns a generative role to Poseidon akin to the Neoplatonic nous (“world-soul”). Plethon was denounced as an apostate for taking his Hellenism beyond aesthetics. In his ontology, Poseidon, an active principle second only to Zeus, conceived “gods/ species (εἴδη) that are composed of soul and body and are responsible for rendering matter into a cosmos.”41 Hence the implicit connection in Canto 8 between Poseidon and “concret Allgemeine,” German for “concrete universal” (8/31). Fritz Schultze, Pound’s main source for Plethon, argues that the philosopher, too, was a Platonic realist in precisely this sense of privileging the concrete over the abstract.42 The checkered historiography of Malatesta that emerges in Canto 8 entails a recursive poetics, a poetics of fragments. Shunning chronology, Pound cherry-picks snippets of history and myth to animate the Canto with drama and suspense. The poem sets a near-frenzied tone that lasts for the rest of the Malatesta Cantos, which are told, to borrow Line Henriksen’s phrase, in “rhapsodic diegesis.”43 Pound’s Malatesta fears virtually nothing. So described, he is also a consummate gambler. And the odds eventually catch up to him, as we have seen. His “game,” to be sure, is “never quite lost till the end, in Romagna” (8/32). Which is to say, until his death in Rimini in 1468. But that is not where the Canto ends. If anything, it picks up the pace at this point. We are given scattered snapshots of Malatestan history. “And Mastin had come to Verucchio,” for one, takes us to its genesis. Malatesta da Verucchio (1212–1312), Dante’s “il Mastin vecchio” (“the old Mastiff ”) in the Inferno, founded the Rimini dynasty and was buried in Franciscan habit in the church that would become his great-great-grandson’s Tempio.44 The allusion to Malatesta’s Guelf ancestor revisits the age-old unruliness of the Malatesti. In 1288, Verucchio’s quest for power in the Romagna eventually drove him to rebel openly against papal authority: the history of the Malatesti is a history of violence. Like the fate of the already discussed adulterous lovers, Paolo and Francesca, Parisina Malatesta (1404–25) also “paid” for her alleged infidelity (8/32). As Pound learned from Yriarte and Byron, Parisina was beheaded by her husband, Niccolò

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III d’Este (1383–1441), Marquis of Ferrara. Her transgression was no trifle. She allegedly carried on a quasi-incestuous affair with Niccolò’s own illegitimate “beau-fils” Ugo, who also lost his head in 1425.45 The seemingly cyclical nature of Malatestan tragedy bodes ill for our condottiere. “For this tribe paid always,” Pound reminds us, “and the house / Called also Atreides’” (8/32). The intersection of the “tribes” of Malatesta and Atreides lends an Aeschylean edge to Malatesta’s saga. For just as Agamemnon and Clytemnestra are tragically haunted by a “history of murder, deception, treason and even cannibalism in the house of Atreides,”46 Malatesta, too, Canto 8 suggests, is doomed to meet as grim an end as his forebears. Yet the Canto moves toward a conclusion with no trace of a whimper. Nor is the style subdued. A surge of anaphoras pile up on the page. As James Longenbach says, this gives the impression that the events alluded to “happen simultaneously.”47 Leaping to and fro in time, the coda marks Malatesta’s coming of age in the dog-eat-dog world of the quattrocento. Pound’s hero is the antithesis of both his pious elder brother, Galeotto Roberto, and his austere younger brother, Domenico Novello (the “lame Novvy” of Canto 11) (11/49). Above all, his enterprising spirit typifies Renaissance virtù. The final snapshot of the young warrior crossing the river Foglia under cover of darkness makes for a cliffhanger. Crystallized here is the paramount significance of the 1430 event. Only 13 at the time, Sigismondo and his troops routed the papal army camped in Serrungarina, near Pesaro. His stealth victory is two-pronged. It marks both his precocious ascent to power and his near-ceaseless strife with the Church. Thus the Canto ends much as it began. Malatesta puts on a show of chutzpah and pluck. The elliptical fragment at the end of the Canto looks forward to the episodic overture of Canto 9. But, in the interim, it leaves us with a range of possibilities, somewhere between Clio and Calliope.

8

Canto 11 Ronald Bush

Canto 11, the last of four Malatesta Cantos, pits the valor of Sigismondo Malatesta’s resistance to a burgeoning economic and cultural modernity against the pathos of his inevitable defeat. While foregrounding historiographical concerns, the Canto’s considerable poetic intensity stamps it a significant elegiac moment in an essentially elegiac work. Pound’s use of extended blocks of documentary prose in the Malatesta Cantos has been rightly called “one of the decisive turningpoints in modern poetics,” blurring the line between truth and fiction, factual history and literary art by “opening for verse the capacity to include domains of [historical] experience long considered alien territory.”1 Pound knew what taboo he was violating, and flamboyantly prefaced the sequence (see Anderson Araujo’s treatment of Canto 8) with a proem in which the muses of history and epic poetry mock each other’s solemn pretentions (“Truth and Calliope / Slanging each other sous the lauriers” [8/28]).2 In the event, these Cantos synthesize history and literature into a new kind of narrative, to make any sense of which we must become critical readers of their foregrounded sources.3 However, even after book-length studies by Peter D’Epiro and Lawrence Rainey, there still exists no consensus about whether to understand the Malatesta Cantos primarily as science or art. A case in

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point is the vehement exchange between Rainey and Marjorie Perloff, in which Perloff asserts that “you would hang yourself ” if you tried “to read the Malatesta Cantos for their thematic interest” and that their true literary interest lies in the way Pound’s “history becomes the impetus for the play of language.”4 To which Rainey counters that these Cantos instead show how “fiction” is “repeatedly transformed into fact” through the process by which “social actuality is constituted by a network of real and discursive practices.”5 These quarrels inevitably revert to the “postbag” of documents incorporated in Canto 9, where the poem’s historiographical discourse is most pronounced. But the same kind of markers impinge upon Canto 11 in a less explicit way through the intrusion of the archival documents (in their original language or a simulation thereof) on which the Canto is purportedly based. “Quali lochi sono questi,” for example, provides just enough Italian to mime the official pronouncement of an enforced peace, and “sexaginta quatuor nec tentatur habere plures” supplies a snatch of Latin to authenticate the already provided English (“64 and no more”) of a similar decree (11/49, 51). Analogous fragments begin and end the Canto, framing its story with antecedent texts and gesturing toward sustained historical analysis. A similar historical ambition can be felt in the pressure of judgments that, defining Malatesta’s creative intelligence against the onslaught of the economic priorities of European modernity, pervade the Malatesta Cantos. Although Pound was instinctively attracted to the figure of Sigismondo Malatesta he encountered in Burckhardt, Symonds, and D’Annunzio, it was only in 1922, after he read Giovanni Soranzo’s depiction of Pope Pius II’s antagonism to Malatesta on grounds of greed rather than religion (Pio II e la politica italiana nella lotta contro i Malatesti, 1911), that his understanding of Malatesta’s importance crystallized.6 In Lawrence Rainey’s words “Soranzo’s claim in Pio II that the pope had been motivated by self-interest enabled Pound to reconsider the Malatestan story through the prism of the nineteenth-century experience with capitalism and materialism”—an experience that Pound understood to originate in the Renaissance and

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“reac[h] its culmination in the Great War.” For this reason, in a crucial early draft, Pius is said to be “speaking like the shits in our own day” and the pope’s “religion” is revealed as “(i.e. papal monopoly).”7 Canto 11 depicts the last instalment of Malatesta’s heroic but ultimately futile resistance against this modern formation of power and ideology—a power that ultimately renders Malatesta’s opposition unsustainable. Malatesta, for instance, must personally intervene even to ensure that one of his peasants does not fall into destitution for lack of “a decent price for his horses” (11/50). He himself, though, falls victim to the corruption of the age in the form of the financial calculation of his enemies, which lies behind their imposing on him (emphasis mine) “the mos’ bloody rottenes’ peace” (11/49). This historiographic emphasis notwithstanding, Pound constructs Canto 11 by means of recognizable literary techniques including traditional narrative mediations and a quintessentially modernist musical structure. Prior to both, however, lies the grain of his poetic medium. In an epic whose most urgent theme opines that “Time is the evil” of the human condition (30/147), the rhythmic thud of temporal succession provides the systolic heartbeat that from the very first Canto drives the poem’s signature rhythm in wave after wave of anaphora (and . . . and . . . and). Nowhere is that tidal pressure as vivid as in Canto 11’s account of Malatesta’s diminishing fortunes. Against the first two lines’ perhaps authentic, perhaps suspect suggestion of an antique “fed” (faith) in the supernatural reality behind omens, the Canto begins almost a half (60 of 136) of its lines with the word “and,” including the first verse paragraph, in which alone 16 out of 26 lines start with that word or its Italian equivalent. The sweep of Pound’s anaphora is relentless, and is compounded by the Canto’s persistent specification of the numbers of Malatesta’s holdings and troops as they shrink ineluctably during the last phase of his career. So, in the first verse paragraph, 9 out of 26 lines incorporate numerical terms, announcing an anxious awareness of Malatesta’s diminishing hopes even while the narrative depicts the unlikely and provisional victory of his 1,300 cavalry over the “papishes” 3,000. And in succeeding parts of the chronicle itself where the balance

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of troops becomes ever worse, the drumbeat continues, as the narrative notes “5,000 against 25,000” in the fourth verse paragraph, and “64 lances” (“and no more”) in the sixth. The persistence of this successiveness is also reinforced by the Canto’s catalogues and lists (which occupy 10 of 26 lines in the first verse paragraph, 12 out of 31 lines in the second, 6 out of 19 lines in the fourth) and by an apparently unmotivated inclination toward exact numbers in other unexpected places (the specification of “forty four thousand years” of historical awareness at line 86, for example, or of “three horses” once repeated in lines 119–20, or of “a guard of seven cardinals” at line 122). And inevitably the pressure of successiveness also touches the Canto’s economic anxieties, with the reference in line 107 to Malatesta’s pay of “8,000 a year.” These manifestations of temporal process are, however, also mediated by other features of Pound’s narrative. The poem couches its catalogues in a series of epic arrays—in the list of squadron chiefs in the first verse paragraph, in the list of towns lost in the second, and most solemnly in the accounting (formalized by papal seal) of property once owned by the Malatestas (“OLIM de Malatestis”) in the fourth. Such epic gestures, although they are (as Peter D’Epiro notes) sometimes “deflated” by the “irony, humor, and bathos” that the Canto summons by way of its “comic juxtaposition of styles and levels of diction” (“Renaissance pomposities side by side with modern American slang, nicknames, and name-calling”), nevertheless highlight “Sigismondo’s heroic stature by contrasting it with the slightly ludicrous and certainly nonheroic milieu” in which he features. D’Epiro also reminds us that the sequence’s four-canto structure “calls to mind the short epic” of four books established in Milton’s Paradise Regained (and parodied in Pope’s The Dunciad).8 Alongside its suggestions of historical and epic narration, Canto 11 features an individualized narrative voice identified in an early draft as Sigismondo’s brother Malatesta Novello and in the published version simply as one of Sigismondo’s ordinary soldiers.9 This is the voice that tells the tale of Sigismondo’s declining fortunes. It is this voice that in the third line of Canto 11 differentiates itself as part of a

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group (“us”) from the singular “he” (Malatesta), who “put us under the chiefs,” and whose common humanity registers the effects of Malatesta’s decline. The Canto thus owes to the soldier’s voice the colloquial directness of its address (“we broke them and took their baggage”), the passionate vehemence of its attachment to Malatesta (“Damn pity he didn’t / (i.e. get the knife into him) / Little fat squab ‘Formosus’”), the comedy associated with its wry under- and overstatements (“And the Venetians sent in their compliments”), and the poignance of its attempt to minimize Malatesta’s losses (“But we got it next August”). Above all, it is the solicitude and loyalty in this voice that inclines us to care for Malatesta as if he were one of our own (“And he was in the sick wards, and on the high tower / And everywhere, keeping us at it”). The sympathies of this soldier-narrator are amplified by the impersonal pattern of the Canto’s arrangement. The highly wrought structure of the Canto—sharpened and simplified from its overpacked early drafts—alternates the incidents of Malatesta’s decline with a series of vignettes in which his core virtues are noticed by different observers.10 So, following the fortitude and self-sacrifice that Pound’s soldier-narrator praises in the Canto’s opening sections, the third verse paragraph shows Malatesta taking “his mind off ” (11/49) his losses by attending to the misfortunes of his vassals (“And he thought: / Old Zuliano is finished, / If he’s left anything we must see the kids get it”). And in the fifth section, the humanist Platina describes (11/51) the intelligence of Malatesta’s conversation, which in the midst of deep adversity outshines even Virgil by concerning itself not just with arms and the man but with “books, arms, / And of men of unusual genius, / Both of ancient times and our own” (11/51). The way the Canto alternates demonstrating Malatesta’s appeal and chronicling his decline is meant to wring out the latter’s pathos, and it does. Canto 11 is the most elegiac poem in the sequence, and it builds toward one of The Cantos’ great images of elegiac intensity. The fourth verse paragraph, for example, which ends with a soldier’s blunt statement of (as it turns out momentary) defeat11 (“And they trapped him down here in the marsh land” [11/51]), frames the loss

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with a solemnly retrospective long view of Malatesta’s story. It begins with a modern voice contemplating what has been reduced to the dusty papal records of Malatesta’s loss (“And the writs run in Fano, For the long room over the arches / Sub annulo piscatoris, palatium seu curiam OLIM de Maltestis”), continues with a Villonesque lament over the passing of Malatesta’s legacy (“Gone, and Cesena, Zezena d’’’e b’’’e colonne”), and proceeds to a lament of the ages over the melancholy transience of human achievement: “And we sit here. I have sat here / For forty four thousand years.” (This last is a remnant of a much longer passage in which Pound’s meetings with T. S. Eliot near the Roman arena in Verona in late May or early June 1922 set the scene for a vision of human history that provokes the two poets’ resolve to redeploy, Malatesta-like, the fragments of the past in a construction for the future.)12 Deepening Canto 11’s elegiac drift, the emotional associations of a musical pattern of visual images charge the narrative from below. In Canto 11 this emotional logic telescopes images of architectural strength and weakness with intimations of light and darkness. So, in the first verse paragraph, which describes a battle “from dawn to sunset,” the Canto poses Malatesta against a “dyke-gate” (11/48) and suggests both the ordering force that willed the gate into being and the potential chaos it restrains. Similarly, the second verse paragraph sites Malatesta “on the high tower” of the “castello” (11/49), keeping out the attackers as the dyke kept out the tide. Yet again the narrator contemplates the real possibility of Malatesta’s protection failing, first in terms of plague (“they got the sickness outside / As we had the sickness inside”) and then in connection with the perfidious calculation of a treaty that advances the opposing forces “Right up to the door-yard” (11/49). In the third verse paragraph, Malatesta’s new vulnerability finds him sitting in his Tempio on a marble shard whose usefulness is in several ways put into question: “On a bit of cornice, a bit of stone grooved for a cornice / Too narrow to fit his big beam” (11/49). “[T]here in the dark,” amid a creeping obscurity, he abjectly suffers the judgment of an old woman. It is this counterpoint between the darkness of his fate and the splendor

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that will outlast it that shapes the emotional substance of the rest of the Canto. So, the end of the fourth verse paragraph contrasts the cold of the marsh land with Malatesta’s youthful desire—couched in imagery of light—that no luxury laws interfere with the adornment of Rimini’s women “for the city’s glory thereby” (11/50, emphasis added). And the sixth verse paragraph contrasts Malatesta’s impasse as he faces Paul II and a guard of cardinals with a defiance seconded by “the people,” who “Lit fires, and turned out yelling: ‘PANDOLFO’!” (11/51).13 It is this orchestrated opposition between the disappointments of time and the endurance of heroic virtue that is finally distilled in the phrase that in some of Pound’s late drafts ends the Canto,14 and even after Pound adds a coda to it remains the Canto’s emotional climax: “In the gloom, the gold gathers the light against it.” Pound’s intuitive sense of the value of such lines is embedded in his habits of revision, which regularly strip away excess historical specificity to maximize the underlying power of freestanding images. In some early drafts of Canto 11, for example, Malatesta’s wish in the fourth verse paragraph that “le donne, go ornate” is followed by reference to luxury laws under consideration by the “Fanesi,” which Malatesta understands would undermine “the pearl-sellers and broiderers.” Deleting this reference, Peter D’Epiro suggests, deemphasizes the economic realities of the time, but also humanizes him, promoting our visceral identification with Malatesta’s “emotional and aesthetic sensitivity,” his dislike of prudery, and his “respect for freedom of choice.”15 In just such a transformation, Pound derived the Canto’s culminating cri de cœur from an earlier draft in which it was hedged in by a similar set of historical specifics. Originally it formed part of the excised account of Pound and Eliot contemplating the transience of human achievement near the arena at Verona, in a section in which Pound’s friend Bride Scratton inspires him to imagine the empress Galla Placidia in her tomb:   and she’s buried in Ravenna lit by the alabaster panes,

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Revising the Canto, Pound extracted “in the gloom the gold” from even these specifics, freeing it, as D’Epiro observes, “to gravitate toward the lines immediately before [and after] it” and allowing the now unmoored image to be absorbed into a musical organization through which it is infused with a more intense lament for lost glory.17 Sometimes, though, Pound’s poetic condensations afterwards insinuated more than he bargained for. Consider an early draft of Malatesta sitting in the darkness of his church: pare che ’l Messire Sigismondo non e piu     di questo mondo18 f that he lounges about the town      unable to put his hand     to anything He’s seated on an unfinished block for cornizza support cut for supporting a cornizza & the groove too narrow     for his beam in the Chiexa     noting the bad taste         of the sculptures save the putti & puttini in squarciato19      & he says of the skill abbozzi20 drowning his ungracious pleurs & an old woman bundles

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    in through the door f stumbling almost against him     starts & chuckles – at her excitement21 Here Malatesta has almost been reduced to despair, yet instinctively applies his intelligence to his surroundings, begins to remaster his world, and exudes a force of personality that (sexually?) “excites” the old woman who stumbles across him. After the episode was condensed, polished, and permitted “to gravitate toward the lines immediately before [and after] it,” though, the tableau tells a different story. Resonating with the Canto’s elegiac tone, the fact of Malatesta “sitting there in the dark” crowds out the reduced show of his internal resources. These shadows are then compounded by the enhanced presence of the old woman, who is no longer bundling and stumbling, but now a judging observer, standing in the light and giggling. The two changes together tilt the passage away from an admiration for Malatesta’s unquenchable personality and toward the sadness of his plight. Similarly, the half-completed decoration of the unfinished church now seems to figure not Malatesta’s creative energy but rather his disarray. Pound would likely have resisted this reading of the revised tableau and attempted to recuperate the more “constructive” implications of his earlier draft. But his compulsion to reduce a passage to its core had imposed a logic of its own. The image of the dark church only reinforces a strong elegiac chord that was there from the beginning. Nor are such examples of the tale overtaking the teller uncommon elsewhere in The Cantos, where the poem’s spare vignettes often sound a furtive identification with suffering victims even while the narrator strains to celebrate heroism.22 Finally, there is the matter of the Canto’s coda, an excerpt from the text of a mock “contract” Pound discovered late in composition in a Florentine journal.23 In it Malatesta promises his steward Enricho (“Henry”) de Aquabello the gift of an expensive cloak on the condition that “You’ll stand any reasonable joke that I play on you” (11/52).

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The vignette is usually taken to suggest Malatesta’s resilience—his “ability to retain a sense of fun, even after the shattering defeats he has suffered”—or his magnanimity.24 The contract illustrates the genial and democratic relations of a lord to his vassal and contrasts with the harsh terms of Pope Paul’s niggardly contract with his own vassal Malatesta on the previous page, in which the latter is granted “64 lances in his company [. . .] / 64 and no more, and he not to try to get any more / And all of it down on paper” (11/51). Malatesta’s recognition of the value of the cloak also recalls his aesthetic pleasure in seeing “le donne, go ornate.” None of these readings, however, accounts for the specificity of the cloak’s color or for the fact that the poem delays its actual description (“for a green cloak with silver brocade”) until the last English line, as if the image somehow were intended to disclose something that had merely been implied before. To the reader of Dante, however, both the color of the cloak and its position at the end of the Canto ring a bell. Years earlier, Pound had marked for special attention in his copy of the 1903 Temple Classics Edition of the Inferno the “drappo verde” that functions as an emblematic conclusion to the story of Brunetto Latini in Inferno XV.122: Poi si rivolse, e parve di coloro     che coronno a Verona il drappo verde     per la campagna; e parve di costoro quegli che vince e non colui che perde. Then he turned back, and seemed like one of     those who run for the green cloth at Verona     through the open field; and of them seemed he who gains, not he who loses.25 This passage is frequently singled out in Dante scholarship as a masterpiece of Dante’s ambivalence and his skill at indirect comment. In it we find Dante’s affection for a predecessor whose work trained Dante in

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the ways of “earthly fame and glory” by which “l’uom s’eterna” (“man makes himself eternal”) balanced against a more severe judgment implied by the Canto’s suggestion that Latini’s efforts are ultimately undermined by their misplaced aspirations.26 The Canto’s final lines recall an annual footrace (the palio) held on the first Sunday in Lent in Verona, in which naked runners competed for the token honor of a green cloth. It is a prize associated with Dante’s preoccupation with civic recognition27 and steeped in the secular values of what Latini in the Canto calls the “vecchia fama” (old fame) of a world that owes its origins to Rome. Outside the context of those values it is, however, a trivial and unworthy thing, the dubious value of which Dante brings out by weighing it in the balance of an eternity in hell and subtly repeating the word “parve” (seemed), which in the Canto’s final phrase sternly qualifies Dante’s fading admiration: “and of them seemed he who gains and not he who loses.” To quote the commentary that prefaces the Canto in Pound’s Temple Classics edition, despite the tribute to Latini that dominates the episode, “their colloquy has a dark background, which could not be altered.”28 Is it not possible that the last glimpse we have of Malatesta before he fades into the mists of the past is meant to suggest a similar ambivalence? Pound, of course, had long since dismissed Dante’s religious values and replaced them with his own. So, rather than signifying a sinful diversion of the will from the divine ends of human life, Canto 11’s “green cloak with silver brocade” invokes the modern culture of materialism that Sigismondo valiantly resisted and yet—a true Renaissance man—could not escape. No less than our last sight of Latini, the display of Malatesta’s prize possession marks him as one of those who “seemed he who gains, not he who loses.” His gains, though, however remarkable, have no power to compensate for the misdirected values of his time (and, Pound insists, of our own).

9

Canto 12 Aaron Jaffe

Compared to Sigismondo Malatesta and Confucius—the heroes Pound introduces in Cantos 8–11 and Canto 13, respectively—the figures of Canto 12—Baldy Bacon, dos Santos, and the Honest Sailor—don’t seem to stack up. And, 12 is the first Canto that readers tend to overlook. It isn’t in Selected Poems. Nor is it included in New Selected Poems and Translations. Compared with its neighbors, the Canto’s references are even more idiosyncratic and yet also somehow more ordinary. The relevance of these materials to the heroic dimensions of Pound’s projected “poem including history” seems remote.1 Still, it merits a second look. Composed in several spurts, in 1922 and 1923, in the aftermath of a period of vigorous promotional exertion for Joyce, Eliot, and others, and close on the heels of Ulysses and The Waste Land, the Canto took its final published form in late 1924, after Pound’s last meeting with John Quinn, the important modernist booster—it’s the Canto in which Pound comes to terms with his poetics as an aesthetic practice including both research and development.2 That Pound’s project includes research—in the sense of archival discovery and historical rescue—was clear from the start. Yet, it is only in Canto 12 where Pound attempts to make poetic sense of all the development work—all the hustling and blustering needed

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for “making the modern world possible for art”—to cite Eliot’s somewhat Poundian formulation from this period.3 Consequently, Canto 12 is less about highlighting particular personae in the familiar sense—though it does offer a few masks—and more about the function of particular platforms for the “osmosis of persons,” as he calls the procedure in Canto 29, and for his poetic project, more broadly (29/145).4 These strata serve as durable metaphors for the Poundian project specifically. In addition to the continued importance of the seaborne craft (“the periplum, not as land looks on a map / but as sea bord seen by men sailing”) and the Tempio Malatestiano, three crucial topoi come to the surface: the table, the arena, and the cave (59/324). Significantly, Canto 12 is not emblazoned with a roman numeral in either of its two original printed forms, the version published by Ford Madox Ford in the transatlantic review in January 1924 or the one published by William Bird and illustrated with suggestive capitals by Henry Strater in A Draft of XVI Cantos in late 1924. Indeed, the absence of roman numerals in all but two of the first sixteen Cantos (the Hell Cantos excepted) is a signal that Pound’s pivot towards Rome and fascism happened later.5 Mussolini only marched on Rome at the end of 1922. It was in the early part of that same year—modernism’s annum mirabilis, in fact—that Pound first visited the Tempio in Rimini and began to delve into the Malatesta materials. By 1930, the year A Draft of XXX Cantos appeared, Pound had fully embraced Roman numerals. But, Twelve begins as a Canto of 1922, squarely in that year, Pound and Eliot at a café table in Verona—in the Café Dante, as it happens—a short walk to the arena, a scene he also inserts in the Canto 4 and cross-references in several other places: And we sit here    under the wall, Arena romana, Diocletian’s, les gradins   quarante-trois rangees en calcaire. (12/53)

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Lawrence Rainey settles the date for the scene as the first week of June of 1922.6 Pound was still living in Paris, Eliot was established in London, and both were then vacationing in Verona, a detail signaled by the Baedeker French that references the number of limestone steps in the arena.7 According to several sources—including a subsequent mention in Canto 78—Pound and Eliot are together in Verona, accompanied at the table at the café by at least one more person, invisible here, Pound’s other other woman, Bride Scratton.8 It is impossible to know precisely what was talked about. Yet, the fact of this conversation— between Pound, Eliot, and other invisible or absent discussants—is important. Scratton recalls Eliot thumping down the finished manuscript of The Waste Land, the “justification of our ‘movement,’ of our modern experiment,” Pound wrote elsewhere.9 Others speculate that they may have been arguing about the Bel Esprit, Pound’s scheme to raise money for artists and authors. Eliot was to be the test case, the subscription kick-starter promising to free him from the drudgery of non-artistic employment.10 This flash of contemporary poetic business is a long way from Pound’s seat at the Vorticist cenacle at the Restaurant de la Tour Eiffel in London, or the back of Sylvia Beach’s bookstore in Paris—and still not far enough away from Eliot’s banker desk in London. In Canto 78, when Pound remembers this scene, he complains that “the program (Cafe Dante) a literary program 1920 or / thereabouts was neither published nor followed” (78/501). My hypothesis is that this event was the site of an epic conversation—a heated argument about the nature of modern aesthetic practice, the same one which gets cross-referenced in the Eighth Canto: “These fragments you have shelved (shored). / ‘Slut!’ ‘Bitch!’ Truth and Calliope / Slanging each other sous les lauriers” (8/28). Laurel trees are still there, planted by the arena, ornamental ones in pots, separating the café tables, adding greenery to second floor balconies. Furthermore, Pound calls Eliot a bitch elsewhere in this period, in a well-known letter written just after his intense editorial

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and promotional intercession on behalf of Eliot (“Complimenti, you bitch. I am wracked by the seven jealousies”).11 The corrosive, misogynist invective—slut, bitch—is telling given the figuration of male pregnancy that comes later in the Canto (recalling Pound’s notion of his “midwifery” of The Waste Land) as well as all the invisible women throughout.12 In Canto 8, Pound takes pains to distinguish his approach from Eliot’s: the way the world ends is not by prostituting one’s talents for companions but by publicly shaming them under the wall before the arena. Here, he calls Eliot out for trading in a private poetics composed merely of fragments; Pound’s proposed revision of Eliot’s Waste Land line (“These fragments I have shored against my ruins”) suggests that the Eliotic citational method risks leading others to bookshelves alone.13 When tradition serves merely as a display of erudition, it becomes but a means of shoring up the damaged poetic self with shoddy literary-citational plaster. Pound wants to let everyone know that deep aesthetic time—the Anthropocene Era, as he sees it—remains open for business. Whatever the two thought of the popular entertainer playing on stage inside the arena is irrelevant.14 The arena itself counts most. What matters is not transient contents found inside but that the stage remains open for business. With this reference, the mise-en-scène of the development of Pound’s method enters the poem proper. Jean-Michel Rabaté flags it as the decisive event in The Cantos when “the showman’s techniques come to the fore.”15 Indeed, the theatre of Canto 12 comes readyloaded with uncertain sources, which, as Carroll F. Terrell puts it, emanate “mostly [from] nonliterary and personal experience.”16 Much of Canto 12 is leveraged on the obscurities of EP’s life and contacts and in a sense it is the Canto that fully signals the formative eruption of his particular brand of speech—the rhythms, invective, and habits of affect familiar from his correspondence—into the epic space of the poetic arena proper. Next to heated café table talk by the ruined arena, there is also the matter of the cave. It comes up at the start of the Canto 12, when Pound remixes these lines from the previous Canto:

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And we sit here. I have sat here       For forty four thousand years (11/50) The anthropology is now obsolete—but, in Pound’s day, forty-four thousand years was the state of knowledge (in some quarters, at least) for estimating the recession of the last ice age.17 The cross-reference indexes this deep timeline to the event of Pound sitting down with Eliot discussing the arena with its forty-three limestone strata. The count is decisively off; the Verona arena has, in fact, not 43 steps but 44. Pound acknowledged the discrepancy later in life, explaining that he had not counted the floor.18 The point of the missing step, in effect, is that the stage of the arena is up for grabs. It’s pure conjecture, but 43 may well have signified the number of names of subscribers Pound already had in place for Bel Esprit—or else, the magic number needed for Eliot to act on the plan. The massive PR campaign was well under way, even landing in Popular Mechanics, of all places.19 The idea was not to attract aristocratic patrons of yore—but to engage economies of scale, directly raising funds from people of small or smallish means, at least 30 subscribers, each pledging £10 or $50 per year.20 In a letter from earlier that spring, Pound underscores two main principles: 1. That the reader is a consumer and that quality is a luxury . . . 2. As there is no aristocracy, one must form a combine of simple particulars to pay. It is a risk. So is an oil well.21 Risk is central to the business model. By the end of 1922, Eliot began to have second thoughts about Bel Esprit in part because he was reluctant about its risks, embarrassed of the boomerang effect publicity would have on the security of his employment at Lloyds Bank.22

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In the late spring, however, Bel Esprit was still a going proposition. Instead of incremental bean counting, the hypothetical conversation in the Café Dante charted bold aesthetic risk in terms of thousand-year strata. Pound had been talking in grandiose, revolutionary-millennial terms for some time, long before resetting his calendar to Year One with the arrival of Ulysses.23 Ten years earlier, he was writing in similar ways about a proposed “American Risorgimento” “that [would] make the Italian Renaissance look like a tempest in a teapot!”24 The café dispute hinged on the missing stratum; the place for the long now in the forty-four-thousand-year range of human aesthetic activity.25 In mid-August of 1919, three years before Verona, Pound walked Eliot ragged across southern France on the trail of the troubadours of the High Middle Age, a trail that also led them to Paleolithic cave art. Eliot went on alone to see the cave paintings.26 In “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” published the very next month, Eliot refers to “the rock drawing of the Magdalenian draughtsmen” as the first citable instance of the literary mind of Europe.27 For him, “tradition,” the accumulated cultural wealth of humankind, meant a fixed annuity for the present, a store of value created in the past providing immediate payout: “the difference between the present and the past is that the conscious present is an awareness of the past in a way and to an extent which the past’s awareness of itself cannot show.”28 Eliot’s point is that the artistic mind—Paleolithic, Homeric, or Shakespearean—did not fundamentally change; what changed is the accumulation of cultural wealth. Whereas Eliot’s cave is a lager for the aesthetic introvert, Pound takes a different approach. In Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir, for instance, he describes a more extroverted encounter: “the PALEOLITHIC VORTEX resulted in the decoration of the Dordogne caverns” where the “driving power was life in the absolute” and “his energy brutal— HIS OPULENT MATURITY WAS CONVEX.”29 In The Pisan Cantos, Pound is still thinking about the caves, remembering travels with Eliot—wave-cut stone and Eliotic fears of Christological damnation— but also encounters with cave art:

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But the caverns are less enchanting to the unskilled explorer     than the Urochs as shown on the postals, we will see those old roads again, question,    possibly but nothing appears much less likely. (74/448) The cave hails him, promising an ecstasy in backwards descent—a vertical analog to Walter Benjamin’s ninth thesis on the philosophy of history.30 “To the cave art thou called, Odysseus,” he writes earlier (47/237). Urochs—or, Aurochs, the ancestral Ur-livestock, graze at the limit. The ones on stamps—like the special issue from the Principality of Monaco—may be less disputed—and better circulated—but the ones on cave walls issue brutal aesthetic energies. For Pound, the cave is a medium for permeating past and present, a cavernous altar for the “osmosis of persons,” as he describes this method in Canto 29 (145). As Peter Liebregts observes, Pound’s Hell is always pagan—always Hades—and, as Sean Pryor notes, “the Eleusinian initiate must descend into hell for blissful illumination.”31 In short, the ice sheet recedes, Caveman Pound comes down, sits on his haunches, tries to convince the tribe to start making art, fails, and then climbs back up into the cave and squints at the read-outs on the ancestral, Anthropocene “registering instrument.”32 In Canto 12, the ticker tape from the instrument reads both boom and bust. The Cantos as a whole are full of ups and downs, and it’s constitutively hard to tell if Canto 12 signals ascent or descent. More to the point: 12 confronts readers with anecdotes about risk-taking business schemes, models, and motives: Baldy Bacon finding the margins on storing unwanted copper pennies, dos Santos’s speculation in undesired water-soaked corn, and the Honest Sailor’s unlikely establishment of a shipping concern. Each anecdote provides an economic fable about improbable investors and investment that critics tend to interpret through Pound’s burgeoning economic concerns. Through a method of poetic-osmosis, he’s thinking about idiosyncratic investors snatching opportunities from garbage. Bacon’s question is: is there

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more than one kind of business, or is all business money business? This hovers over The Cantos as whole and has certain resonance for Pound’s biographical situation as he is contemplating the wreckage of the money business of Bel Esprit and discovers new energies for his own poetic efforts. Canto 12 is ambivalent about many things. It contains specimens of the toxic racism, homophobia, anti-Semitism, and misogyny that make Pound such an unresolved figure for literary history. There’s no apology for this offensiveness; if it is judged mostly incidental to Pound’s aims, it is never accidental either. The offensive undertone is integral to the archly Poundian insight seized in each of the three case studies: like a rose in the steel dust, or the mixture of Mud and Light Kenner seizes on, dubious information is crucial to aesthetic possibility.33 Most of the names listed in Canto 12 are unknown, unknowable, and possibly disreputable. The Canto references people Pound knew personally: a man named Henry; someone called Apovitch associated with Chicago; someone else named Quade, “elsewhere recorded,” who conspicuously wore a monocle. People he heard about from others, or read of in the newspapers, such as one Nicholas Castano, a Cuban capitalist, or “two buck niggers” chained to Bacon in his story, or the various characters in Jim X’s joke. It is a Canto of minor firsts: the entrance of anecdotes, rumors, jokes, bets, and bad taste into the materials of Pound’s heteronymous project. Tim Redman flags the Canto as “the first extended presentation of economic themes.”34 It is the first time he mentions his economic bugbear, Usury, which, Rainer Emig observes, thereafter “spreads like an epidemic over the entire poem.”35 In a related vein, the Canto announces the arrival of commodities and the attendant problems of valuation, scarcity, and luxury—that less might be somehow more. It exposes us to a questionable joke about pregnant men and how the joke’s awkward recirculation ignites suspicions about the character of Pound’s judgment.36 The Canto doesn’t introduce the arena trope for the first time in Pound’s poem—or, ships, caves, tables, steps, or strata—but it cements the importance of cross-reference as an engine of poetic meaning and

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the lure of referentiality and false connectors in poetic method. In Canto 12, right from the start, the information circulating as Pound’s economy of reference becomes uncertain, overwhelming, and unmanageable. Baldy Bacon provides the cardinal example. Readers have long taken him as an exemplar of Pound’s burgeoning economic preoccupations—but, perhaps somewhat overzealously, have condemned him as an engine of economic vice (as an avatar of “financial malpractice,” in Earle Rosco Davis’s phrase) or praised him as an agent of economic virtue (as a salutary agent of “profit-making and entrepreneurial activity,” in Peter Nicholls’s words).37 From the poetry alone, it is decidedly unclear whether Bacon’s activities are good or bad. Indeed, the Canto fashions a kind of experimental test case for comparing the activities of the “serious artist” and the work of certain speculative agents who trade in nuances of knowledge, information, and risk.38 So what exactly is Baldy Bacon’s business scheme in Cuba? Frankly, it is difficult to understand, given the scant information supplied, but perhaps achievement in the face of poor information is precisely the point. Here’s what can be pieced together: some time after the SpanishAmerican war Bacon is in Cuba buying all the centavos he can. He finds many sellers of these copper pennies, so many, in fact, that he rapidly gains monopoly control of the supply. Thereafter, anyone who needs pennies—anyone for whom making small change is a matter of course—is obligated to buy from Bacon, who charges a premium on top of face value. The fee is “Baldy’s interest,” as Pound puts it, it runs him afoul of the authorities, and he is ignominiously deported (12/53). Readers have been often tempted to read the villain in this—the modern Croesus squatting on his horde of gold—but Centavos are not made of precious metal. You can’t corner the market on copper; it is far too cheap; there is far too much of it.39 The anecdote actually highlights the problem of seigniorage not usury—how the state controls monetary instruments and generates income from the discrepancy between face value and the costs of producing and distributing currency. In Bacon’s example, the inefficiency and incompetence of the monetary system lets an individual, an entrepreneurial hustler who has the

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right information, wrest the seigniorage racket from the state. Bacon’s angle—the illumination in his cave, in essence—is the centavo shack. It is important to note that Bacon—who knew the ways of many men, like Odysseus—was a real person Pound actually knew. He met Bacon in New York in 1910.40 When Bacon vacationed in Europe, in the summer of 1922, right after Pound was in Verona with Eliot, the two renewed their acquaintance. As late as 1939, Pound was sending Wyndham Lewis to Bacon in New York as a potential contact.41 Whether Bacon invested in Bel Esprit in 1922 is unclear, but, even if he never fronted any “bones,” Pound admires him. For Pound, Bacon provides example of the kind of ex nihilo, freewheeling effort that modern art needs to provide for its development and continuation. In a similar vein, the Canto turns to another scheme and schemer, whose case Pound chances on in a book: the Portuguese merchant, Jose Maria dos Santos. Dos Santo buys a ship full of seemingly ruined grain on the cheap on a hunch that its cargo hasn’t been spoiled by seawater. The critical information is that the spill happened in an estuary and dos Santos mortgages his patrimony and all his possessions on it, buying quantities of suckling pigs, fattening them on moistened grain, and thus takes a risk and establishes his legacy. Dos Santos spots an opportunity and makes use of timely information. Upon scrutiny, the information itself is dicey, the estuary water is probably fresh. In fact, dos Santos got lucky, he could easily have lost his bet. The Tagus Estuary is partly brackish (Wikipedia).42 The name dos Santos—Portuguese for two saints—is a clue that the Canto isn’t about a trinity of sureties but about a certain dualist wager inherent in the enterprise. Pound asks us, in effect, which two of these three are saints? Or else, thinking of the final example in the Canto: of these three seafarers, which two are most honest about the value of their information and contacts? The Honest Sailor material, concerning a joke Pound was told by John Quinn, details the improbable establishment of another legacy. In paraphrase, it runs as follows: a dissolute sailor goes into the hospital, has an operation, and afterwards is presented with an unwanted baby from the maternity ward as his son. We found this baby in your belly, the

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doctors tell him. The shocking news reforms him. He quits drinking and is suddenly charged with new energies. To provide for his child’s care and education, he establishes a formidable shipping concern. At the end of his long life, now a wealthy man, he calls his heir to his death bed and informs him that, despite appearances, he is not his true father: I am not your fader but your moder: quod he, Your fader was a rich merchant in Stambouli. (12/57) The crudity of the joke often deflects attention from one of its key interpretive questions: what makes the Honest Sailor so honest? Compared with the other two cases—which turn on apparently decisive business acumen, this anecdote is rife with bad information. To read it only as a fable of can-do entrepreneurial spirit ignores that the Honest Sailor is more Phlebas than Odysseus.43 And nothing about the sailor’s personality accounts for his success, except for the desire he discovers to nurture and provide for imagined progeny. The arena is everything: Jim X’s joke getting lobbed like a hand grenade on a tedious meeting of bankers. This audience is comprised of “usurers in excelsis, / the quintessential essence of usurers,” writes Pound—enter the fateful word (12/55). Hypocritical slumlords gathering in a boardroom, lit only by their cigars, they may pose as “deacons in churches” on Sundays, but in this context they only complain of bad returns on their predatory investments (12/55). The cave is not illuminated, and the moral of the last of Pound’s cases is the role of dumb luck in all success. Accident is certain. Most telling is the status of the anecdote as a tribute to the anonymous benefactor. The joketeller stands for one such benefactor, John Quinn, for whom Pound reserved his highest esteem. Quinn visited Europe for the final time in the fall of 1923— spending time with Pound, Joyce, and other modernist contacts. In 1922, Quinn had declined Pound’s invitation to join the walking tour of Italy (“Padua, Siena, Verona, Venice and other places”) and it is

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easy to imagine Quinn as one of the invisible parties to conversation with Eliot at the table in the Café Dante.44 The last part of 12, appended after the rest, printed in A Draft of XVI Cantos, shortly after Quinn’s death, serves as an unlikely tribute. Quinn’s efforts as a supporter of modernist literature and art were extraordinary—Pound, Eliot, Joyce, Lewis, Yeats, Ford, Conrad, and others all received his generous support—but their immediate legacy was uncertain and obscure. When Conrad visited the USA in 1923, he had snubbed Quinn, till then one of his most forceful supporters. The event spoiled modernist speculation for “Jim X” somewhat, leading him to put his massive collection of Conrad items on the auction block as well as much of the rest of his tremendous treasure trove.45 And, when Quinn died the following year, his will made no effort to preserve the collection intact; instead, it required that the entire hoard be liquidated for assorted provisions for family relations and lovers.46 However dogged the generosity on behalf of the cause, however keen his sense for the investments or contacts with experts—Pound most of all—ultimately the legacy he left behind was to cast it all to the wind. The testament made clear, in the words of his biographer, that Quinn’s “success was a thing accomplished for the benefit of his immediate family and no one else.”47 Pound wrote Quinn’s trustees to volunteer his services to help preserve the collections, invoking Nero’s last words in praise of Quinn: that the world has lost an artist, that the collector is equal to what he had collected.48 As efforts to keep Quinn’s collection intact were rebuffed by squabbling heirs, Pound’s inclusion of Jim X and his story of the Honest Sailor in the Canto serves as an ironic commentary on these developments. He says as much to Quinn’s companion, Jeanne Robert Foster: You may be faintly cheered to see John’s honest sailor in the capital of CANTO XII backside to the audience. . . . You can threaten the family that if they don’t behave I will print it J. Q. instead of lightly veiling the narrator. On the whole you’d

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better not, as they wd. Get the hole book put on the HINDEX and stopped at customs.49 In this regard, Quinn represents not only Jim X but also his double, the Honest Sailor. The Strater illustrations in A Draft of XVI Cantos, which fashion the Sailor returning to the rising Manhattan vortex from the southern European one, the estuary-soaked grain fattening the suckling pigs, and a cornucopia of centavos spilling downwards, all solidify the connections in Canto 12’s osmosis of persons: Pound, Eliot, the Cunning Sailor, the Honest Sailor, Bacon, dos Santos, and Quinn, the Man from New York. The money gets spent and something different from money remains. To the cave art thou called, Odysseus.

10

Canto 13 Alexander Howard

Critical opinion suggests that “[n]o literary figure of the past century—in America or perhaps in any other Western country—is comparable to Ezra Pound (1885–1972) in the scope and depth of his exchange with China.”1 Throughout his long career, “Pound made China part of his general project to rethink the nature of the West, to discover in poetry the best that humans had ever said or thought, painted or sung, and renew it.”2 Pound’s interest in the role that China could play in the rethinking of Western civilization is articulated in The Cantos. Pound’s epic poetic project “took seriously a vision of the East as a statal ideal in a sustained vision that unfolded over hundreds of pages.”3 The principled wisdom proffered by the ancient Chinese sage Confucius was central to Pound’s poetic depiction of the social, political, and historical trajectory of the Far East. This longstanding interest in Confucianism is evident in the Chinese History Cantos (52–61). First published in 1940, the so-called “China Cantos” demonstrate that “Pound’s interest in Chinese history was essentially an interest in Confucian ethics and government, and his focus upon them, together with his concentration on the [written] characters, became the central pursuit in his subsequent work with Chinese.”4 But this is not all. Pound also discovered in the enlightened teachings

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of Confucius a rigorous moral and ethical system seemingly capable of correcting the ills of contemporary Western capitalist society.5 Further to this, Confucianism provided Pound with a systematic social and philosophical framework with which to identity and address issues such as “the tension between the modern individual and the cultural tradition, the formation of the nation-state, natural environment, crisis of spiritual beliefs, and so on.”6 Pound’s commitment to Confucianism set him apart from his Anglo-American modernist peers. However, “Pound’s conversion to Confucianism was not a matter of sudden revelation; no visions of light or love attended it as they did Eliot’s and Auden’s conversions to Anglicanism in 1928 and 1940 respectively.”7 Beginning in 1910, Pound’s Confucianism developed over an extended period of time and can be separated into three distinct stages, “which can be characterized ­successively as imitative, creative and comprehensive.”8 The imitative phase of Pound’s Confucianism ran between 1910 and 1930, and was “largely enabled by his reading of previous Western translations of Confucian works.”9 Following on from this primarily imitative stage, “[t]he second, creative phase of Pound’s relationship with Confucianism spanned from the early 1930s to the end of World War II.”10 Underwritten by a dogmatic commitment to radical economic and political reform, the second stage of Pound’s Confucianism came to an end with the collapse of Mussolini’s Fascist dictatorship in Italy. Emerging in the wake of his post-war Pisan imprisonment and subsequent transfer to St. Elisabeths Hospital, in Washington, DC, the all-encompassing final phase of Pound’s Confucianism “was conducted in a steadily systematic and comprehensive manner.”11 Written in 1923, and published in final form as part of A Draft of XVI Cantos (1925), Canto 13 falls under the first, imitative phase of Pound’s evolving Confucianism.12 This Canto is important for a variety of reasons. Canto 13 is the first poem in Pound’s epic to engage with China—specifically, Chinese philosophy—in any sort of sustained manner.13 As well as representing the “earliest attempt to provide The Cantos with an explicitly articulated philosophical grounding,”14 Canto

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13 is significant as it bridges the textual gap between “the strange land of the Cantos” and Pound’s earlier poetic forays into the realm of Chinese literature and aesthetics.15 Pound had been introduced to examples of Chinese art as a young child while living in Philadelphia, and later as a student enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania.16 This adolescent awareness of Chinese aesthetics explains why Pound appeared “so comfortable in his move toward the Orient in his early London years as he was expanding into the European avant-garde in all the arts.”17 Nevertheless, “it would be wrong to conclude that Pound’s notions of China had been formed in adolescence.”18 His appreciation of China (and Confucius) developed during the formative years he spent in London between 1909 and 1914.19 During this period, Pound’s burgeoning interest in the Orient benefited greatly from ready access to the British Museum’s wide-ranging collection of Chinese paintings. This was further complemented by the advice and expertise provided by his friend and mentor, the art critic Laurence Binyon. His informal schooling in matters of Chinese aesthetics meant that Pound was ideally positioned to “mine the treasures” he discovered in the notebooks of the late Sinologist Ernest Fenollosa (which came into his possession in September 1913).20 Responding enthusiastically to Fenollosa’s fragmentary notes concerning The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, Pound set out to pursue a course in Chinese literature with a renewed vigor.21 Having already read translations of Chinese verse by the Marquis d’Hervey de Saint-Denys and Judith Gautier,22 Pound began to write his own Chinese poems.23 Drawing heavily from H. A. Giles’s A History of Chinese Literature (1901), Pound’s initial attempt at producing adaptations of Chinese poetry yielded results such as “After Ch’u Yuan,” “Liu Ch’e,” and “Fan-Piece, For Her Imperial Lord.” Having “tinkered briefly” with Giles’s Chinese translations,24 Pound turned his attention to Fenollosa’s notes and commentary on the work of the T’ang dynasty poet Li Po. With recourse to Fenollosa’s notes, Pound created free verse translations of fourteen ancient Chinese poems that were subsequently published as Cathay (1915).

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The Cathay poems “catalyzed Pound’s early techniques. They provided a workshop in which he could mature his poetic talent until it was ready for the explosive appearance of the Cantos.”25 With Fenollosa’s annotations beside him, Pound was free “to transpose and appropriate freely according to his own interests and principles.”26 Left to his own devices, “[t]he seemingly unpromising task of trying to make over a body of Chinese poems into English seemed to contribute positively to the expressive potentialities of his own English.”27 Expressive and evocative, “[t]he language of Cathay was colloquial, prosaic, and contemporary; it did not try to cast the original Chinese in correspondingly archaic or antiquarian English, as was often Pound’s practice.”28 As a result, “Pound’s versions seem to come nearer to the real qualities of Chinese poetry, because he has largely stripped away most of the supposed or fictitious qualities that late-Victorian poetic treatment (by James Legge, Herbert Giles, and so on) had imposed upon classical Chinese poetry.”29 However, it should be added that “the success of Cathay is also largely due to Pound’s tacit and skillful reliance upon a stylized evocation of China with which he could expect his Georgian or Edwardian readers to be familiar.”30 That is to say, “the appeal of Cathay is largely its exoticism, evoking a poeticized imaginary realm with nineteenth-century Tennysonian associations.”31 Pound’s poetic treatment of the Chinese landscape seems, to take an example, “to provide a powerful confirmation of the kind of ‘otherness’ which Western readers tacitly identified with an emotional coding linked to understood conventions of feeling in Chinese art and poetry.”32 To an extent, the same thing is true of Canto 13. In this significant early Canto, Pound “establishes China via the minutiae of ‘Chineseseeming’ historical details.”33 This is evident in the opening lines of the Canto: Kung walked     by the dynastic temple and into the cedar grove,      and then out by the lower river,

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And with him Khieu, Tchi      and Tian the low speaking (13/58)34 As well as denoting the first appearance of Confucius (‘Kung’) in the strange land of The Cantos, this contemplative opening passage of Pound’s own imagining makes use of names, natural images, and specific details—such as “the dynastic temple”—in order to identify and establish China in the mind of the Western reader.35 Having done so, Pound then goes on to familiarize his Western audience with the moral and ethical wisdom of Confucius, as prescribed in three of The Four Books: the Ta Hsüeh, the Chung-Yung, and the Lun-Yu. Pound later translated these canonical Confucian texts as The Great Digest, The Unwobbling Pivot, and The Analects, but in 1923 he knew them in M. G. Pauthier’s 1841 French version as “La Grande Étude,” “L’Invariabilité dans le milieu,” and “Les Entretiens philosophiques.” Considered by Pound to be the “announcement of backbone moral of the Cantos,”36 Canto 13 is heavily indebted to Pauthier’s translations of Confucian philosophy. The main body of the Canto is a “pastiche of passages knit elegantly together” from Pauthier’s nineteenth-century adaptations.37 It presents the reader with “a Confucius one could imagine speaking French maxims.”38 Having introduced Confucius to the readers of his Cantos, Pound proceeds to refashion Pauthier’s transliteration of a long passage in The Analects (11:25): And “we are unknown,” said Kung, “You will take up charioteering?      Then you will become known, “Or perhaps I should take up charioteering, or archery? “Or the practice of public speaking?” (13/58) In this section of Canto 13 Pound dramatizes a conversation between Confucius and four of his disciples—Tseu-lou, Khieu, Tchi, and Tian. Previously described as “a sort of treatise on education,”39 these lines (5–30) are ones in “which Confucius asks his companions what they

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would do if they were ‘recognized’ as they are not now, presumably by a ruling body too corrupt to enlist men like Confucius and his followers.”40 The diverse responses of the four Confucian disciples constitute the next passage of Canto 13: And Tseu-lou said, “I would put the defences in order,” And Khieu said, “If I were lord of a province I would put it in better order than this is” (13/58) Pound then brings his poetic attention to bear on the third of Confucius’s suitably eager disciples: And Tchi said, “I would prefer a small mountain temple, “With order in the observances,      with a suitable performance of the ritual” (13/58) There is, however, more to life than mere matters of governance, ritual, and militaristic ordering. This is something that comes to the fore in the next passage, which takes on a decidedly musical lilt: And Tian said, with his hand on the strings of his lute The low sounds continuing      after his hand left the strings, And the sound went up like smoke, under the leaves, And he looked after the sound:     “The old swimming hole, “And the boys flopping off the planks, “Or sitting in the underbrush playing mandolins” (13/58) Broadly speaking, the answers Pound has the four disciples deliver in these extracts correspond with those put forward in Pauthier’s earlier translation of The Analects. Tseu-lou replies that he would strengthen the state’s “defences,” Khieu argues for the importance of responsible provincial governance, and Tchi calls for a reaffirmation of the

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ritualistic aspects of social and spiritual life. In marked contrast, the individualistic and hedonistic Tian (Tien or T’sang Hsi) says that he would content himself with music and relaxation by the nearby “swimming hole.” Tian then puts the following question to Confucius:     “Which had answered correctly?” And Kung said, “They have all answered correctly, “That is to say, each in his nature” (58) As should be clear, “the lesson of this passage in Canto 13 is the importance to each individual of fulfilling his ‘own nature,’ whatever the essential orientation of that nature, and this is consistent with the rule of respect for individual variety that first attracted Pound to Confucianism.”41 In the next section of Canto 13, Pound rewords passages from The Analects (14:46) and (9:22) and The Unwobbling Pivot (20:12). In these lines (31–44), Pound’s Confucius lambasts laziness and debates the value of “respect” (13/59). The poet then turns his attention to the topic of Confucian orderliness: And Kung said, and wrote on the bo leaves      If a man have not order within him He can not spread order about him; And if a man have not order within him His family will not act with due order;      And if the prince have not order within him He can not put order in his dominions. (13/59) These crucial lines (46–51) are approximations of those found in the opening passages of Pauthier’s translation of The Great Digest (1:7 and 1:4). Reading Pauthier’s translations of Confucius, Pound came to appreciate that “individual variety and prosperity are nothing without social order, and social order could not exist without individual variety and prosperity.”42 Accordingly, these lines underscore the intricate

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relationship between individuality and various forms of personal, familial, social, and political order. However, while “the idea of political order is present in this Canto, it is not paramount.”43 This fact is reflected in the next section of Canto 13 And Kung gave the words “order” and “brotherly deference” And said nothing of the “life after death.” (13/59) These lines (52–54) have their origins in The Analects (1:2 and 11:11) and “begin to specify what is meant by Confucian order: how it is concerned with the mundane (in the literal sense of the worldly) rather than the transcendent.”44 This distinction between the “worldly” and the “transcendent” is useful, as it helps us understand Pound’s initial interest in the version of ethical philosophical thinking espoused by Confucius. By 1923, Pound had grown extremely distrustful of what he regarded as a restrictive, self-centered, and transcendentally inclined system of Christian “conformity.”45 Significantly, “Confucianism offered an antidote to Christian conformism.”46 Pound responded enthusiastically to the fact that “Confucius was a worldly man, and [that] his philosophy was an ethics of individual, social, and political content, whereas Christ, having been young, outcast, and therefore absorbed, presumably, with the self, founded an ethics of the soul and the afterlife.”47 Furthermore, as a believer in the fundamental importance of individual liberty, the nonconformist Pound of the early Cantos had grown frustrated with moralistic religious dogma and “the impositions of Christian constraints on individual privacy and liberty.”48 This reaction against stifling Christian conformism should be read in relation to Pound’s antagonistic attitude towards various forms of preexisting religious, literary, economic, and political authority. By the time he wrote Canto 13, Pound had come to resent many institutions of moral, cultural, and societal authority, “not only for the relatively petty reason of his being excluded from their attention but because he

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was convinced the political authorities in particular were to blame for the tragedy and travesty of World War I.”49 Pound’s well-documented disdain for malfunctioning institutions of governmental and societal authority speaks to his interest in Confucianism,50 as well as to the reason why he might have chosen to include the following anecdotes about the ancient Chinese sage in Canto 13: And they said: If a man commit murder      Should his father protect him, and hide him? And Kung said:     He should hide him. And Kung gave his daughter to Kong-Tch‘ang      Although Kong-Tch‘ang was in prison And he gave his niece to Nan-Young      although Nan-Young was out of office. (13/59) Pound reworks these lines (59–66) from The Analects (13:18 and 5:1). The first anecdote finds Confucius suggesting that a father should hide his son from the authorities even if that son has committed the crime of murder; the second describes how Confucius was more than willing to give his daughter or niece away in marriage to men who had been convicted of crimes or who had fallen from political grace. These anecdotes emphasize Confucius’s individualism and his healthy disregard for intrusive moral strictures and levied forms of societal authority; it is clear that they resonated with the relatively youthful Pound of 1923. This much is evident in the closing lines (73–78) of Canto 13: And Kung said, “Without character you will      be unable to play on that instrument Or to execute the music fit for the Odes. The blossoms of the apricot      Blow from the east to the west, And I have tried to keep them from falling.” (13/60)

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While the remarks about “character” and musical ability are drawn from The Analects (3:3), the very last lines of the Canto—those concerning the “falling” apricot blossoms—belong to Pound. Inspired by Pauthier’s description of the apricot orchard where Confucius is thought to have delivered his lectures,51 these three lines are vital: they reveal the true extent of Pound’s profound personal identification with the ancient Chinese sage who dominates in Canto 13. This process of identification is suggested by Pound’s appropriation of natural imagery historically associated with Confucius, and by his decision to adopt “the persona of the Confucian historian-poet-musician.”52 In equal measure, the sudden shift into the singular first person which occurs in the final line of the Canto testifies to Pound’s desire “to keep Confucian thought alive and flowing from the Orient to the Occident.”53 As the subsequent trajectory of Pound’s life and literary career suggests, this desire to keep the Confucian “blossoms” of orderly ethical and moral wisdom flowing through the air as they traveled “from the east to the west” had far-reaching poetic and personal consequences that extended well beyond the pivotal lines of Canto 13.

11

Cantos 14–15 Andrew Thacker

For Pound, Hell is a quite shitty place to be. He referred to the Hell Cantos as being concerned with the state of England in the period immediately after the First World War and they were probably composed around the same time as Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, another poem offering a critique of the London scene he knew so well until he departed for Paris in 1920.1 Filtered through the medieval mythologies of Dante’s Inferno, the imagery of these two Cantos is perhaps among the most unpleasant that Pound ever composed. While Dante’s images of hell, recalled in the quotation of the first line of Canto 14 (“Io venni in luogo d’ogni luce muto”—I came to a place utterly without light, [14/61]),2 might terrify the reader with the alarming fates of the sinful, Pound’s reader here emerges feeling rather dirty, as if they had fallen into something resembling a poetic cesspool. Readers might search in vain for the difficult beauty that inheres in many other parts of the Cantos: there are few jewels in this mud, merely a heap of oozing pustulence, combining the scatological with the aesthetically rebarbative. In this way Pound’s poetry enacts, in quintessential modernist fashion, the content of his verse in the formal strategies he employs. If the hell of the contemporary London press, politicians, and financial leaders has contaminated the

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“pleasures of the senses” and “perverted” the language of contemporary expression then such a fate must be demonstrated in a verse which seems to delight in offending our aesthetic sensibilities with images of “infinite pus flakes,” “the arse-belching of preachers,” and “dung hatching obscenities.” As Daniel Albright comments, the key theme of the Hell Cantos “is the degradation of language, both spoken and written.”3 To show this linguistic degradation, Pound must himself degrade the language of his verse. This is partly achieved by the insistence of the scatological vocabulary in the two Cantos, allowing little escape from their bilious outpouring until we reach the sunlight at the end of Canto 15. This effect is also achieved by the omission in the published version of the full names of the “betrayers of language” and the frequent employment of ellipses. Canto 13 had ended with Kung (Confucius) recalling a time “when the historians left blanks in their writings, / I mean for things they didn’t know” (13/60). The drafts held in the Beinecke indicate the names of those public figures that Pound wished to indict for their behavior, but clearly the constraints of censorship meant that publishers were unlikely to risk libel cases by printing them.4 The effect of the missing names in the published version, however, only adds to the effect of linguistic degradation, as the personal markers of their identities are omitted in the linguistic hell created here. In a letter in 1937 to John Lackay Brown, Pound claimed that the anonymity deployed here was a deliberate textual strategy, and referred to forgetfulness by the first publisher of these Cantos, Bill Bird, as the reason rather than the question of censorship: Hell is not amusing. Not a joke. And when you get further along you find individuals, not abstracts. Even the XIV–XV has individuals in it, but not worth recording as such. In fact, Bill Bird rather entertained that I had forgotten which rotters were there. In his edtn. he tried to get the number of......correct in each case. My “point” being that not even the first but only last letters of their names had resisted corruption.5

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With the publication of the online The Cantos Project, as well as in the work of Matthew Hofer, we can now ascertain all of the missing names, in addition to the more obvious figures such as David Lloyd George and Woodrow Wilson in line three of Canto 14.6 However, the lacunae in the published version only reiterate the idea that those rotting in hell (here Carson, Helfferich, and Churchill) are punished for their misdemeanors with language by being stripped of their nomenclature: “. . . . . . n and . . . . . . . . h eaten by weevils, / . . . . . . . ll like a swollen fœtus” (15/64). Chief among the culprits who have betrayed language for Pound are the “press gang,” the commercial press who are said to have “lied for hire” (14/61), and which Hofer identifies with G. K. Chesterton, whose name was omitted (“. . . . . . n and the press gang,” [14/61]).7 Such figures have, therefore, not only sinned against language by not telling the truth, but also because their primary motivation was “money-lust” rather than veracity. Here we can see why Pound’s conception of an excremental hell was not just intended to show his disgust with English society at the end of the First World War, but was also to act as something akin to a poetic enema. In a letter of 1922 to Felix Schelling discussing the motivation for much of his work Pound argued that “the Brit. Empire is rotting because no one in England tries to treat it” and, continuing the idea of art as a social therapeutic, noted that until “the cells of humanity recognize certain things as excrement, they will stay in [the] human colon and poison it. Victoria was an excrement, Curtis, Lorrimer, all British journalism are excrement . . . Northcliffe gone off his head to prove this.”8 Demonstrating that the hell of London in 1919 was replete with excrement was thus designed to force a recognition of the poisonous effects of figures such as Lord Northcliffe, proprietor of the mass circulation newspaper, the Daily Mail. Not only are such figures peddlers of excrement, the “shit” they produce tends to block up the communication of knowledge. Like a poisonous blockage in the human colon, such figures are “obstructers of knowledge, / obstructers of distribution” (14/63).

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Readings in the Cantos In Canto 15, Pound refers to Northcliffe in the following way: a green bile-sweat, the news owners, . . . . s    the anonymous . . . . . . . ffe, broken     his head shot like a canon-ball toward the glass gate (15/65)

As Matthew Kibble argues, Pound seems to have been keen to allow Northcliffe to be identified more easily than some of the other dwellers in hell, as the 1933 Draft of XXX Cantos had only used the terminal letter “e” here, whereas later editions used the three letters “ffe.”9 Kibble suggests that Pound’s antipathy to Northcliffe partly stemmed from the newspaper proprietor’s role in aiding the propaganda campaign of the British Government in the First World War; neatly, Kibble also notes how Pound’s phrase “press gang” conflates newspaper publishing with military conscription, which Northcliffe championed in his paper.10 Pound’s attack here, as Kibble again points out, is also part of a much wider antagonism in this period among certain modernist writers to the mass-circulation press. Pound’s initial critique in Canto 14 of the “press gang” as “perverters of language” who have set money before “the pleasures of the senses” (14/61) is followed by a fascinating image of the mechanics of printing: “howling, as of a hen-yard in a printing-house, / the clatter of presses, / the blowing of dry dust and stray paper” (14/61–62). The immediate response here is to ponder why we might find hens in a printing press, and the bizarre juxtaposition works well to emphasize Pound’s argument about the incongruity of locating “money-lust” amidst the production of printed matter. Equally, the aural images of “clatter” and “howling” (repeated only a few lines later), along with the effect of the alliterative “h” sounds here (howling, hen, house), contrasts vividly with visual image of the presses and the “stray paper.” The focus on the mechanics of the press, along with the critique of the owners of these papers and those who write in them “for hire” raise a set of interesting issues surrounding

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the publication history of the Hell Cantos in particular, as well as Pound’s own troubled relationship to the periodical press. Pound was perhaps the most prolific modernist writer to the periodical press, publishing work of all kinds in many diverse forms of magazine, from classic “little magazines” to more mainstream and mass publication.11 He valued the independence of the “little magazine” and well understood its role in the dissemination of the experimental work of modernism. Equally, his criticism, journalism, and reviews, often in more mainstream magazines that paid better rates, were important sources of income for Pound.12 Almost all of the early Cantos were first published in such venues: the original three Cantos in Poetry (1917); Cantos 4–7 in the Dial (1920–1); 8–11 in the Criterion (1923); 12–13 in the Transatlantic Review; and 17–19 in This Quarter (1925). However, the Hell Cantos, along with the related Purgatory of Canto 16, did not appear in any “little magazine” that might publish radical or shocking work refused by the commercial “press gang,” but in a very limited luxury edition entitled A Draft of XVI Cantos, published by Bill Bird’s Three Mountain’s Press in Paris in 1925. Only 90 copies were printed, on three different kinds of quality paper, ranging in price from 400 to 1,600 francs.13 The initial letters, along with other aspects of the text, were impressively illustrated in color by Henry Strater and Pound very much approved of the way these images conjured up the workmanship of the medieval craftsman, as he noted in a letter to Kate Buss: It is to be one of the real bits of printing; modern book to be jacked up to somewhere near level of medieval mss. No Kelmscott mess of illegibility. Large clear type, but also large pages, and specially made capitals. Marse Henry [Strater] doing these; and the sketches already done are A-1. Not for the Vulgus. There’ll only be about 60 copies for sale; and about 15 more for the producers.14 This textual history points up further the seeming paradoxes of the Hell Cantos: while the language of the poem is almost willfully

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unpoetic, howling of the degradation forced upon discourse by the betrayers and perverters of communication, the physical text of these edition was to be an object both of luxury (the high-quality paper, the cost) and beauty (“jacked up to somewhere near level of medieval mss.”), appealing precisely to the “pleasures of the senses.” Equally puzzling in a poem lamenting how knowledge is obstructed from circulation by those whose main motivation is “money lust,” is the fact that the edition was a deliberately expensive publication and “Not for the Vulgus.” As Rebecca Beasley notes, it appears that this edition, along with other early small press editions of The Cantos, were “not intended for readers, as such, but collectors.”15 Pound justified his decision in a letter to R. P. Blackmur, where he argued that it was a combination of the present economic system (“The book . . . can’t be made for 25 bucks. Not if Strater and Bird and I were to be paid”), the lack of an English or American publisher committed to producing a cheaper edition for the “Vulgus,” and Article 211 of the 1909 American Penal Code, which forbade the mailing of obscene material, and which had been used in 1919 to suppress the publication of Joyce’s Ulysses in the Little Review.16 While the first two reasons may be seen as weak in terms of the critique of the press in Cantos 14–15, the reference to possible prosecution under libel laws underlines one of the key messages of the Hell Cantos: that artistic production was restricted by various official agencies acting as “obstructors of distribution” (14/63). Interestingly, just a few days after writing to Blackmur, Pound wrote to Wyndham Lewis, suggesting that he produce something like an artist’s book of the Hell Cantos: “perhaps ten or a dozen designs for the two cantos dealing with Hell might be circulatable. As that section of the poem can NOT be circulated freely.”17 Limited edition publication thus allowed Pound freely to lambast the “maggots” and “vice crusaders” without fear of legal redress, but also allowed him to demonstrate in his text that figures such as politicians and the press prevented the circulation of knowledge. Apart from the press and the politicians there are many other figures of authority lambasted in Canto 14’s vision of Hell. Reminding

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us that Pound was something of a supporter of Irish nationalism, we find several figures with their hands tied to their feet who were responsible for the deaths of leaders of the Easter 1916 Rising in Dublin. These include “agents provocateurs / The murderers of Pearse and MacDonagh” and a “Captain H. the chief torturer” (14/62).18 Pound then turns to “the vice-crusaders, fahrting through silk, / waving the Christian symbols,” “slum owners” and “usurers squeezing crab-lice,” university scholars (“pets-de-loup”) who work at “obscuring the texts with philology,” and, finally, figures from the Church (“the arse-belching of preachers”) and a Bishop “waving a condom full of black-beetles” (14/63). Much of the imagery Pound uses to describe these figures circulates around two sets of tropes: images of nature corrupted or of the unnatural, and imagery of fluidity rather than solidity. In the first group of images perhaps the key word is “soil,” which first occurs in l.17 (14/61). Pound here puns on soil both as natural, the earth itself, and as a term for excrement (“soiled”) or for something that is messed up or dirtied. Then we learn that the soil is “a decrepitude” (14/62); and then that it is a “living pus, full of vermin” (14/63). Thus the natural form of the earth itself has been soiled, and “the image of the earth,” referred to in the Greek of the placard “ΕΙΚΩΝ ΓΗΣ” (14/62), has become disassociated from fecundity (as seen in the condom full of beetles which occurs in both Hell Cantos) or the fertility of the soil, for here only “dead maggots” beget “live maggots” (14/63).19 This is also seen in the related terms “fœtor” (14/62) and “fœtid” (14/63), the offensive smell signified by these words arising from “fungus, / liquid animals, melted ossifications, / slow rot” (14/63). The unpleasant smells that waft through the Canto are yet another offense against the “pleasures of the senses.” The negative stink of “fœtor” is also opposed to the word that it visually recalls, “fœtus,” whose reproductive development is blocked by the condom; tellingly, the only reference to the genesis of life in the womb occurs in Canto 15’s description of Churchill as “a swollen fœtus, / the beast with a hundred legs, USURA” (15/64). Such a grotesque image recalls the symbolic universe of a medieval bestiary or the hellish gargoyles that decorate churches in a reminder

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of the consequences of a sinful life. However, in Pound’s symbolic universe the phallic world of natural human reproduction is associated with artistic creativity, as in Pound’s postscript to his translation of Remy de Gourmont’s The Natural Philosophy of Love (1921), where he describes the human brain as “a sort of great clot of genital fluid” and that “creative thought is an act like fecundation, like the male cast of the human seed.”20 This valorization of the phallus in Pound’s imagination is thus opposed to the anal imagery of shit and arseholes that he saw as unproductive and, hence, unnatural, as seen in his criticism of what he termed Joyce’s “obsessions arseore-ial, cloacal” in parts of Ulysses.21 The second set of images develops from this first set, for the excremental is consistently linked to a non-solid state in the Hell Cantos: hence it is a “dung-flow” (15/64) of “melted ossifications” and “dripping sh-t through the air” (14/62–63). The repeated imagery of things that “ooze” and “melt” produces a world of “lost contours, erosions” (14/62) or “inchoate error” (15/65). From his early Imagist aesthetics Pound valued a use of language that observed clear outlines, famously following the model of the sculptor with a block of stone. In 1915, he had informed Harriet Monroe that, “Language is made out of concrete things,” while around about the same time he was composing the Hell Cantos he wrote to William Carlos Williams: “When did I ever, in enmity, advise you to use vague words, to shun the welding of word to thing, to avoid hard statement, word close to the thing it means?”22 For Pound such a “welding” of word to thing, impossible in the squelchy ooze of the Hell Cantos, was not only an aesthetic imperative but also a political necessity, something that the “betrayers of language” identified here evidently did not possess.23 Canto 15 commences in the same vein, with repeated anal and excremental imagery suffused with “a stench like the fats at Grasse” (a French city whose industrial production of sweet smelling soaps paradoxically emitted an unpleasant aroma into the surroundings).24 The challenging anti-aesthetic employed here also becomes accompanied at times by quite surreal imagery, such as that of the Bishop from the

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previous Canto, who is said to possess “tattoo marks round the anus, / and a circle of lady golfers about him” (15/64). One can only surmise that the lady golfers are to take aim at the Bishop’s anus with their golf balls, yet another instance of a “perverted” sexuality in the poem. Further deterioration sets in as we progress deeper into this Hell, for now even the quality of the excrement is said to have declined: “and the laudatores temporis acti / claiming that the sh-t used to be blacker and richer” (15/64). After forty more such lines the reader is more than likely to concur with the statement that “a stench” is “stuck in the nostrils” (15/65) and hope for some respite. This begins in l.52 with the reappearance of the Dantean protagonist introduced in the first line of Canto 14; as Dante was accompanied by a guide, Virgil, Pound now asks his guide, who turns out to be the Neoplatonist philosopher of light, Plotinus, “‘How is it done?,’” a question directed toward how one might escape from the darkness of this Hell. The ascent from Hell commences after one final burst of “skinflakes, repetitions, erosions” (15/65) and the command to leave (“Andiamo!” 15/66). The remainder of the Canto, as Terrell notes, is an amalgam of material from Dante, Ovid, and Plotinus, in particular drawing upon the myths of the Gorgon and Medusa.25 The escape is tricky, as the protagonist’s feet keep sinking into the oozing mud. Recalling Pound’s aesthetics of solidity, the poet cleverly adapts the petrifying gaze of the Medusa by diverting it with a mirror onto the slippery soil beneath his feet: Prayed we to the Medusa,     petrifying the soil by the shield, Holding it downward     he hardened the track Inch before us, by inch,     the matter resisting (15/66) Here Pound restores some poetic shape to the “lost contours” displayed in the rest of these two Cantos by using repeated broken lines of

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roughly the same syllabic count, with the second indented line creating a strong visual pattern on the page that has been missing amidst all the ellipses and excrement. Visually, the poetry also captures the difficult movement along the narrow track (“Half the width of a sword’s edge”), moving inch by inch, “now sinking, now clinging” (15/66). Verbally, the poetry seems somewhat akin to the Anglo-Saxon alliterative verse Pound admired and adapted in “The Seafarer,” as shown in lines such as “Hammering the souse into hardness, / the narrow rast” (15/66). In this way, the feat of escaping from hell recalls earlier tales of epic adventures as well as the katabasis of Canto 1, as the poet staggers into the sunlight (with the Greek quote “the sun, the sun” from the writer who originated the epic tradition in the West, Homer)26 and finally rests, sinking into unconsciousness with the effort. The bathing in alkali and acid that concludes Canto 15, a rather zealous cleansing of shit from hell, continues into 16, with the poet bathing with “acid to free myself / of the hell ticks” (16/69). Equally, we might say, readers of these two Cantos also need the poetic equivalent of a warm bath to rid themselves of the odor of this place utterly without light. The Hell Cantos are, therefore, best read in conjunction with the next two Cantos, with their depictions of Purgatory and then the Earthly Paradise that metamorphoses into the creation of Venice. Only that way can the reader replace the olfactory stench of the “perverters of language” with the visual beauty of “the stone place, / Pale white, over water” (17/79).

12

Canto 17 Sean Pryor

The moment of miraculous metamorphosis that begins Canto 17, a burst through into an earthly paradise, took Pound some time to achieve. In the summer of 1923 he had rewritten the first three Cantos, including, in what would become Canto 3, the portrait of an indigent young poet in Venice and his vision of the realm of the gods.1 William Bird published A Draft of XVI Cantos at the Three Mountains Press in January 1925, but Pound had already begun drafting a new set of Cantos. That same month, while he and Dorothy were in Sicily, he typed up versions of a further four.2 The pair soon settled in Rapallo, and towards the end of the year Canto 17 made its first appearance in the Paris journal This Quarter.3 It was subsequently collected in A Draft of the Cantos 17–27 (1928), published in London by John Rodker, and then again in A Draft of XXX Cantos (1930), published by Nancy Cunard at the Hours Press in Paris. Like Canto 3, Canto 17 remembers Venice and envisions a divine world. One early manuscript of the Canto begins by evoking an ideal landscape: “So that first the pale clear of the heaven / and the cities set in their hills.”4 But though Pound kept the landscape, he later grafted on an alternative beginning, a short passage he had drafted on separate sheets: “So that the vines burst from my fingers / and the bees weighted with pollen / moved

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heavily in the vine-shoots.”5 With its sudden transformation, this gave him what would become the Canto’s first six lines. But what governed Pound’s choice between these beginnings, and what effects does his choice have? Why, moreover, did he subtly alter both passages before finishing the Canto? Clearly, he always intended to begin with the last words of Canto 1: “So that.”6 The phrase is a pivot, a mechanism for transferring poetic energy. It suggests temporal sequence and logical consequence, and it makes Canto 17 particularly prominent in the structure of The Cantos as a whole. In that placid early version, “So that” introduces a new beginning at the level of narration: “Firstly, I shall speak of the pale clear of the heaven.” The immediate subject of the story seems timeless, since, like “cities,” the heavenly “clear” is a noun without a verb. But in a subsequent typescript Pound shifted “first”: “So that / the first pale clear of the heaven.”7 Even without a verb, the wondrous clarity becomes an event in time, like the fleeting hue of a sky at dawn, or the divine “first light” (3/11) of Canto 3. Pound then amended “So that” to “With,” making way for the Canto’s new beginning, the sudden transformation. This second passage emphasizes a speaker (“my fingers”) and it introduces the themes of metamorphosis and fertility. It suggests the spiritual illumination of the Eleusinian mysteries and the Ovidian revelation of Pound’s early poem “The Tree”: “I stood still and was a tree amid the wood.”8 These are customary motifs for Pound, especially in his thinking about paradise, and what matters in Canto 17 is the peculiar way those motifs are inflected. The verbs in the first version of this second passage firmly define the poem as the record of a past metamorphosis: on that miraculous day, the vines “burst” and the bees “moved.” But everything changed when Pound scribbled out the “d.”9 A presenttense “Move” allows “burst” to tremble ambiguously between the perfect and present tenses, and between the indicative and subjunctive moods. It may be that, the vines having burst, the bees now move. It may be that the vines burst now, just as the bees move now. Or it may be that the vines will burst and the bees will move, whenever the

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conditions upon which “So that” depends are fulfilled. Each reading has its implications for the nature of the revelation, for the particular quality of this paradise. Is the bursting of the vines a singular event that precedes the bees’ ongoing movement, as a cause precedes an effect, or do the single burst and the ongoing movement happen, for a moment, to coincide? It depends partly on how we read the second line’s “And,” which can signify consequence or concomitance. If that bursting coincides with the moment of speaking, in the perpetual present of poetry, the singular event seems paradoxically permanent, rather like the bees’ continual movement. But if the bursting and the moving are contingent or potential, the paradise is forever prospective, the “divine or permanent world” permanently deferred for the present of this poem.10 Much more is at stake here than the minutiae of grammar and syntax. Or, rather, Pound involves the most minute poetic details in his most ambitious aesthetic and political thinking, his thinking about the quality and the possibility of a paradise to be had here and now, in the modern world. Subtle adjustments of tense, mood, and deixis affect the relation between these opening lines and the rest of the Canto, between this Canto and other Cantos, between the poem and its paradise, and between paradise and history. Considered in the narrative of A Draft of XXX Cantos, the opening “So that” positions this revelation as a reward for the descent into Hades described in Canto 1. While that Canto ends with Aphrodite, Canto 17 envisions a goddess who recalls Botticelli’s Venus: “Within her cave, Nerea, / she like a great shell curved” (17/76). (Pound had already referred to Botticelli’s painting in “Three Cantos I,” the first of his early versions of the opening three Cantos.)11 Perhaps, then, the Canto offers an Elysium glimpsed in the midst of hell, just as in The Aeneid or the Eleusinian mysteries. On the other hand, this “paradiso terrestre” can be read as a culmination of the Dantescan ascent through hell and purgatory described in Cantos 14, 15, and 16.12 Both models are complicated by the fact that a “further sort of paradiso” appears in Canto 20;13 that we have already had a vision of the gods’ world in Canto 3; and that the Dantescan ascent is actually split across the long poem’s first two volumes, A Draft of XVI

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Cantos and A Draft of the Cantos 17–27. As the opening of that second volume, Canto 17 suggests not a culmination, nor even a temporary reward on a longer journey, but a new beginning. One reason for reading Canto 17 as a new beginning is that A Draft of XVI Cantos ends so bleakly. In Canto 16 the poem emerges from the hell described in Cantos 14 and 15 into an earthly paradise peopled by “the heroes” Sigismondo Malatesta and his brother, Malatesta Novello (16/69). But the poet then falls asleep in the grass and hears, not a heavenly choir, but disembodied voices tell of the FrancoPrussian War, the Great War, and the Russian Revolution. This, it is customary to say, is Pound’s version of purgatory. The Canto finishes with a brief vignette: So we used to hear it at the opera, That they wouldn’t be under Haig;      and that the advance was beginning; That it was going to begin in a week. (16/75) In 1916, Pound attended performances by the Beecham Opera Company, which was set up after the Ministry of Works requisitioned Covent Garden as a furniture repository.14 On one occasion he sat in the front row between a duchess and Arthur Balfour, then First Lord of the Admiralty.15 Published nine years later, these lines from Canto 16 pitch society gossip against the slaughter of war, and they frame prediction with recollection. Shifting the verb begin from the past continuous to an infinitive, the last two lines teeter on a moment of expectation—whether a safe frisson of speculation or mounting dread at impending bloodshed—and that moment is satirized by the brute facts of history. Haig did stay in command, and advance after advance did begin, many of them disastrous. How, then, do we get to Canto 17? Since “So that” begins a subordinate clause, something must generate the “bust thru” into the “divine or permanent world,” whether historically or logically, actually or potentially.16 But how could paradise emerge out of the history that has just been recounted? By what logic

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could Canto 17 advance the tale of Canto 16? The distance between wartime London and the cities set in their hills is signaled by the difference between “So [. . .] That” and “So that.” In Canto 16, “So” has the force of continuation (as if to say “and so”) and “That” registers the fate of possibility: the past swallows the future in a long record of waste and folly. In Canto 17, the words record a miracle and they prophecy a miracle. The syntax grounds paradise in a past or antecedent, in an unsaid main clause, and at the same time the syntax keeps the future open, holds onto possibility. The difference between the possibility towards which the last line of Canto 16 looks, a military offensive, and the possibility towards which the first line of Canto 17 looks, the bursting of vines, is clear enough. The abrupt and total change indicates the value of this paradise, like the leap to the gods’ world in Canto 3. It is easy to see how different Canto 17 is, and why it has so often been praised. The prosaic and recalcitrant materials of the Malatesta Cantos, and the squalor and disgust of the Hell Cantos, give way to markers and manifestations of beauty: nymphs and goddesses, the natural world, Renaissance architecture, incantatory rhythms, classical allusions. It seems no accident that it was the only Canto which Yeats included in his edition of the Oxford Book of Modern Verse (1936). Canto 17 and others like it can seem to escape from modernist experimentation into tradition or convention, from history into paradise, from the temporal to the eternal. Pound more than once proposed that The Cantos could be divided into three realms: the permanent, the recurrent, and the casual.17 That is to say, the poem registers eternal verities, a typology for history’s patterns, and history’s mere accidental details. As Pound later explained, the “mythopoetic cantos are of the first [division]”; they represent the “enduring world.”18 The mythopoesis is certainly lovely: And thence down to the creek’s mouth, until evening, Flat water before me,      and the trees growing in water,

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Readings in the Cantos Marble trunks out of stillness, On past the palazzi,        in the stillness, The light now, not of the sun. (17/76)

Here Pound models the metamorphoses of organic and inorganic, and of nature and art, on the architecture of Venice, one of his most sacred places. Limestone encrusts timber pylons, and marble columns form forests.19 A rhythmic motif moves through various syntactic contexts and through lines of varying length: first in “vines burst from my fingers,” and then in “creek’s mouth, until evening,” “Flat water before me,” “trees growing in water,” and so on. Without ever reaching a main verb, the sentence navigates through a fluid space, propelled only by prepositional relations: “thence down,” “before me,” “On past.” We know we are being moved, but we do not quite know where or why. The deixis constantly shifts. The trees grow “in water” but not in the water, though “Flat water” spreads out before the speaker in the previous line, offering an antecedent. The trees grow “in” water but the trunks grow “out of stillness,” and then the palazzi formed by those trunks float “in the stillness.” Or perhaps that phrase qualifies the movement generated by “On past”; perhaps the speaker moves in surrounding stillness. Such verbal metamorphoses recur throughout the whole Canto. Each line becomes a discovery. Much of this does suggest the permanent or enduring. Pound’s verbless nouns and present participles conjure an available world; they give paradise presence. In contrast, the past-tense parataxis of surrounding Cantos records a chronicle of singular, unrepeatable events: “And he pulled his sword on a student for laughing, / And killed him, / And a cossack rode out of his squad” (16/75). But the paradise of Canto 17 does exist in time, and it also has a history. There is a narrative that moves from the “first” pale-clear of the heaven to “evening,” and so from the light of day to the light “now,” a new light, “not of the sun.” A past-tense verb first appears embedded in an ambiguous sequence of qualifications—“As shaft of compass, / Between them, trembled”—and

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then governs a main clause, delivering an event: “A boat came” (17/77). Towards the end of the Canto, there is unambiguously a narrative:           and that day, And for three days, and none after, Splendour, as the splendour of Hermes, And shipped thence          to the stone place. (17/79) But in the context of the whole this is puzzling. We are newly shipped to the stone place, to “the white forest of marble,” and yet we have been there before. When we first visited the marble trunks they seemed a revelation, but here the stone place is separate from revelatory splendor. For all that the otherworldly Venice looks miraculously paradisal, it can also feel like a sinister Hades.20 As the stone trees float in the darkness, we read: “‘In the gloom the gold / Gathers the light about it’” (17/78). Conspicuously framed by quotation marks, these two lines are adapted from Canto 11, the last of the Malatesta Cantos, in which Sigismondo is finally thwarted by Venetian politics and finance (11/51). In Canto 17, the lines suggest both the brilliance of Venice’s Byzantine mosaics and the iniquitous glint of hoarded ducats. If Canto 3 descends from its vision of the gods’ world to the exile of El Cid, the murder of Inés de Castro, and the ruin of the palace of the Gonzagas at Mantua, Canto 17 ends with the Venice in which, despite its beauties, Borso d’Este was shot at and Francesco Carmagnola was executed—a Venice of violence, power, and betrayal.21 The Canto thus delivers a shifting sequence in time and of times: between event and event, single events and eternal states, the momentary and the continuous, the present and the past, myth and history. This makes its paradise difficult to navigate and difficult to interpret—difficult even to interpret as paradise. The Canto appears to promise a timeless realm, but its language is tensed backwards and forwards at every level. When Carmagnola dies “between the two columns” (17/79) in Venice’s Piazzetta San Marco, the image reworks

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the landscape of Canto 16: “The road between the two hills, upward / slowly” (16/68).22 The images juxtapose this world’s violence with the arduous approach to paradise. The way through purgatory is long, the “road like a slow screw’s thread,” but that same rhythm and similar phrasing recur, in Canto 17, in the climactic theophany: “she like a great shell curved” (17/76). The angle of the screw’s thread is “almost imperceptible, / so that the circuit seemed hardly to rise” (16/68), and yet that “so that” foreshadows the “So that” which delivers the miraculous bursting of vines. Though the goal of that purgatorial climb seems to be a timeless realm, the otherworld of Canto 17 is built with history’s materials. The poem looks back to the mystery religions of ancient Greece, to the writings of Homer and Ovid and Virgil, to the politicking of Renaissance city-states, to the Venice of Ruskin, to A Draft of XVI Cantos, to Pound’s earlier poetry, and to the time he had spent in Venice, Sirmione, and Rapallo. In a basic sense, the poem looks to the past for paradisal examples, to the illumination captured in literature and myth, and to the intelligence and sensibility visible in the very fabric of Venice. In The Cantos, history is a lesson in what is possible, but, to be faithful to that possibility, the poem must balance the beauties of Venice with the city’s compromised history and eventual demise, a demise outlined later in A Draft of the Cantos 17–27. By Canto 26, Venice has succumbed to corruption, duplicity, and “the vice of luxuria” (26/122). At the same time, Canto 17 is itself an example: in the movement of words it offers new experiences of metamorphosis, and, in reimagining the past, it envisions a paradise never before seen. In this Canto, as Marcella Spann Booth noted from conversations with Pound, he “is making his own mythology instead of merely taking it out of Ovid.”23 He takes the story of Daphne and Apollo, of desperate escape from amorous pursuit, and makes it a figure for desired revelation. He appropriates Greek gods and invents others: Zothar, Aletha, and Nerea. There is something elusive about the Canto’s allusions. “Aletha” suggests ἀλήθεια, the truth, while “Nerea” suggests the Nereids, the sea-nymph daughters of Nereus, the old man of the sea. Jennifer

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Scappettone calls her “a feminised Proteus.”24 One can link Nerea to other precedents, too: Aphrodite, Calypso, Circe, the nymphs that inhabit the cave on Ithaca in The Odyssey (XIII.102–12), or Porphyry’s allegorical interpretation of those nymphs in De antro nympharum.25 In the end, “the context does not make it clear what she is meant to represent.”26 One can trace the “choros nympharum” (17/77) to Homer—the fair dancing-floors of the nymphs, “νυμφέων καλοὶ χοροὶ” (Odyssey XII.318)—or to Horace—the dance of the nymphs, “nympharumque [. . .] chori” (Odes 1.1.37)—but the diffuse allusion gives the words new life. Combining a transliteration of the Greek χορός with the Latin nympharum, Pound’s polyglot phrase is his own. There is something about this paradise “that escapes the order of clearly determined meaning,” which, in other contexts, Pound so often celebrated.27 There are aspects of this paradise that it is impossible to see or experience. What kind of light is a light “not of the sun,” exactly? (“[M]eaning the light of the mind?” David Moody wonders aloud.)28 The identification of a source, however certain, could never remove the unknown quality of that apophatic illumination. After the boatman has spoken of “the forest of marble” as “There,” the Canto depicts the “Stone trees, white and rose-white in the darkness, / Cypress there by the towers” (17/78). Has the boatman taken the speaker “Thither,” to that Venice, to see its trees and towers, or does the speaker only imagine or recall that other place, a place still somewhere else, still there and not here? There is something absent about this shifting otherworld, something not yet achieved. This is a delicate and perhaps impossible balance to strike. Pound cannot afford to dream idly of nymphs and palazzi, for that would mean mere escapism, an exercise in nostalgia or kitsch.29 Nor can he afford, as a good Futurist might, to abandon the past altogether. In 1925, or now, we need more than Arcadian daydreaming, antiquarian enthusiasm, or amnesia. Pound cannot afford to dally in paradise unless “So that” depends, not only on the Great War and the Russian Revolution, but also on the telling of that history, on his poem’s willingness to meet the modern world. “So that” needs to spring from having

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worked through the whole of A Draft of XVI Cantos, rather than from any one line. The poem is tensed backwards to ground the otherworld in this world, to make paradise more than fanciful daydreaming, and the poem is tensed forwards to save the otherworld from this world, to make paradise still possible. Canto 17 is at its most persuasive when this tensing backwards and forwards animates its rhythms and references, its inner and its outer relations. When each line is a discovery, the history of the poem is open. That is why the vines need to have burst and be ever about to burst.

13

Cantos 18–19 Alec Marsh

Cantos 18 and 19 were published together in the “Ezra Pound Issue” of This Quarter, Edward Walsh’s short-lived review in the winter of 1925.1 Cantos 18 and 19 are very different from paradisal Canto 17; these are historical and constitute a sharp critique of contemporary economic and political conditions. They should always be read together.      “Peace! Pieyce!” said Mr. Giddings, “Uni-ver-sal? Not while yew got tew billions ov money,” Said Mr. Giddings, “invested in the man-u-facture “Of war machinery. (18/81)2 and Canto 19 Yes, Vlettmann, and the Russian boys didn’t shoot’em.     Short story, entitled, the Birth of a Nation. (19/85) Worldly noise, the spoken word disfigured by dialect—in short, History—distinguishes Cantos 18 and 19. If Canto 17 calls Dante to mind, these evoke critiques of the European order of things in the wake of the Great War. These are documents implicitly debating the

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question of whether revolution or radical reconstruction is the proper way to reconstitute European societies in a way that provides a livable future. In this sense, Cantos 18 and 19 hearken back to Canto 16, the Canto taking testimony about the Great War from participants (the painter Fernand Léger and the poet Richard Aldington). That war was supposed to “end all wars,” but instead foreclosed what had been called “Western Civilization.” In the event, both revolution and reconstruction failed, the Great War was only the first phase of what one historian, Ernst Nolte, has called “the European Civil War” of 1914– 1945.3 That designation excludes its third, Cold War phase, lasting until the collapse of the Soviet Empire in 1989. Tendentious? I make this point only to make another; from beginning to end, The Cantos were entirely written during a period of intense ideological conflict and terrible warfare. The discourse of revolution and reconstruction is extensive in the years following the Great War. Relevant texts would include Lenin’s Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916); John Dewey’s Reconstruction in Philosophy (1920); John Maynard Keynes’s, The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1920)—(which T. S. Eliot read with attention4 and is a source for The Waste Land [1922]—itself part of this discourse); Thorstein Veblen’s The Vested Interests and the State of the Industrial Arts (1919)—first serialized in The Dial; Max Weber’s Wissenschaft als Beruf (1918); Tomáš Masaryk’s The New Europe (1918); and the attacks on finance capital and the banks in the work of Arthur Kitson (The Fraudulent Standard, 1917) and Major C. H. Douglas, both well-known influences on Pound. By his own account, Pound became a convert to Douglas’s Social Credit while working for The New Age, as did A. R. Orage, its editor, who helped write and distribute Douglas’s early books, including Economic Democracy (1920) and Social Credit (1924), which appeared the same year as Cantos 18 and 19 were written.5 These poems are “Evidence Cantos.” In his close analysis of The Fifth Decad of Cantos, Mike Malm has proposed a functional scheme that posits three species of Cantos. There are “Lyrical Cantos,” distinguishable by their “reduced number of historical references and a

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more lyrical style and content, i.e. a predominance of the poetical over the historical, of the metaphor over the plain fact and of the image over the event”6—Canto 17 is a perfect example. Malm calls “History Cantos” “those Cantos, which are mainly concerned with historical events and adhere more closely to historiographical narrative patterns than other Cantos.” These maintain “a fiction of historicity by means of an imitation of authenticity (transcriptions of documents) and by narrative devices (chronology, recurring characters)”;7 the Malatesta Cantos are “History Cantos.” Finally, there are “Evidence Cantos,” a subset of “History Cantos” “which are used by Pound with polemical intent to prove the negative influence and powers of usury in history. These Cantos are distinguished from the other History Cantos by their strong use of apocryphal elements and by their fragmented, more argumentative structure.”8 Evidence Cantos, like Cantos 18 and 19, make frequent use of Pound’s “anecdotal method”—the poet retelling “overheard” conversations, or stories—i.e. anecdotes—he has been told. In his textbook, Guide to Kulchur (1937), Pound notes how “An imperfect broken statement if uttered in sincerity often tells more to the auditor than the most meticulous caution of utterance would . . . the bare ‘wrong phrase’ carries a far heavier charge of meaning than any timorous qualifications.”9 These parapraxes give substance to Pound’s “anecdotal method.” The term anecdote literally means “unpublished” and thus an anecdote can be said to shed light on the way things really happened, the secret history of events that don’t get into official histories and memoirs. In these poems Pound relies heavily on things told him by the muckraking journalist Lincoln Steffens and Times editor, Wickham Steed. Pound wrote his father, who considered what he had been reading “satire,” to explain: Satire, my dear Homer, SATIRE!!! Wotcher mean satire?!?     Those are just the simple facts (Cantos 18, 19) wot have taken me a number of years to collect.

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Readings in the Cantos     And all of ’em by word of mouth, or from the original actors. Carranza, Massarich, Griffiths, the edtr. of the Times, the owner of Vicars [sic].10

What are these “facts”—“all of ’em by word of mouth”? Some can be confirmed in Steffens’s Autobiography (1931) others in Henry Wickham Steed’s memoir, Through Thirty Years 1892–1922: A Personal Narrative (1925) both published after these Cantos were, so Pound evidently got these anecdotes directly from Steed, Steffens, and perhaps other sources.11 Pound’s “facts” are in fact the voices he transcribes. In November 1924, Pound was asked by his father about how to read Cantos 18 and 19. His reply is very helpful: there aint no key. Simplest paralell [sic] I can give is radio where you tell who is talking by the noise they make . . . It is NOT a radio. You hear various people letting cats out of bags at maximum speed. Armaments, finance etc. A “great editor” . . . of the woild’s best known news sheet, a president of a new nation, or one then in the making, a salesman of battleships, etc. with bits of biography of a distinguished financier etc. mostly things you “oughtn’t to know”, not if you are to be a good quiet citizen.12 In short, these Cantos are a form of “muckraking” journalism, the form perfected by Steffens and encouraged in his many journalistic ventures. Perhaps we should list Pound as one of his protégés in this regard, along with Ida Tarbell and Walter Lippmann. Like other muckrakers, Pound’s task is to awaken “the good quiet citizen” to the harsh realities hidden beneath daily routines. That Pound would liken his presentation to a search across the radio dial as opposed to a newspaper, points us toward the aural aspect of these poems. These are not documents such as we find in the Malatesta Cantos, but anecdotes. I see no reason not to believe that the content of these Cantos was overheard or elicited in conversation by the poet himself. These Cantos are

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hearsay—the least reliable form of testimony perhaps, but testimony nonetheless. Cantos 18 and 19, the proximate subject of Homer’s inquiry, are about institutional “sabotage” by non-productive capital and the military/industrial complex. In closing, Ezra adds: “The cantos (XVIII and XIX) belong rather to the hell section of the poem; though I am not sorting it out in the Dantesquan manner, Cantos 1–34 hell, next 33 purgatory and next 33 paradise.” They explore the question, “Who made the bhloody war?”—i.e. the First World War—a preliminary to the greater question The Cantos would eventually try to answer: “Who is trying to destroy civilization?”13

Canto 18 Canto 18 begins with a story Pound had already told in one of his last pieces for The New Age (May 1920).14 He read it in The Travels Marco Polo. “Kublai Khan and His Currency” tells of Kublai’s invention of paper money, quoting the same passage that Pound would use in Canto 18. Pound wants to emphasize the fictional nature of currency here; the inner bark of mulberry trees, properly prepared and stamped with the emperor’s seal is, quite literally, good as gold within the Empire. Upheld by the credit embodied in the emperor himself, paper money performs better than metal, is more convenient, and, if it admittedly fails as “a universal medium of exchange,” Kublai’s Empire was nevertheless the most extensive polity on Earth. The lesson is “credit control.” Pound saw his article as an intervention in current discussions about whether the British Empire should or should not return to the Gold standard, which it had abandoned in August 1914, and which certain parties wished to resume after the war. The Cunliffe Currency Committee’s report, issued in August 1918, had advised the adoption of certain deflationary monetary policies accepted by the Lloyd George Government in 1920; specifically, the “restoration of the conditions necessary for the resumption of the Gold standard”15 (Cunliffe Report), which was duly reinstituted

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in 1925.16 Between 1918 and 1925, the debate about whether resumption was a good idea was considerable. Resumption of the status quo ante bellum meant that the control of credit would remain firmly in the hands of the Bank of England, a private corporation upholding the financial superstructure, governing classes, and vested interests of the British Empire. It meant restricting credit to a narrow basis— gold—not the credit of the Empire itself, uttered in “government securities.” Restoration meant deflation, which favored creditors and promised economic contraction, therefore spreading hardship at a time when demobilization of the armed forces threw hundreds of thousands of discharged military onto the labor market.17 Pound would notice the disastrous results of resumption in Canto 22 (1928), where he converses with “Mr. Bukos,” aka Keynes, about the “high cost of living” (“H.C.L.”). Keynes, who was not yet the Keynes of The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936) and still “an orthodox economist,” answers, the “‘Lack of Labour.’/ And there were two millions of men out of work” (22/101–2). Pound foresaw this in 1920, writing: “What we see on closer examination of the text is that Polo regarded the issue of paper money as a clever hoax, backed up by tyrannic power. The real tyranny resided, of course, in the Khan’s control of credit.” He continues, “We have ceased to regard the issue of paper as a hoax, yet Polo smelled a rat, and a real rat [. . .] It was not the bureaucratic solemnity of the officials ‘whose duty it was’ to write their names on the paper and affix the imperial seals; it was in credit-control. The unification of the function with the other functions of tyranny is very simple.”18 The New Age article shows that far from recondite economic learning, the Kublai material is a relevant economic fact. Specifically, it was relevant twice: in 1920, as an oblique critique of the Cunliffe Commission report, and again in Canto 18, as part of the debate leading to the resumption of the Gold Standard in 1925. If Kublai was a tyrant, so was the Bank of England: who controls credit, controls the empire. From Kublai and the monopoly of credit, Pound moves to “Metevsky” and an indictment of the international arms trade. The linkage is

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purposeful. If we think of the Canto as an essay, the opening vignette establishes the imperial nature of a monopoly of credit; part two addresses the international arms trade, the spearhead of industrial progress and globalization;19 while part three shows Pound’s awareness that the shift from coal burning to “oil burning apparatus”—not only by the British railroads, but (implicitly) by the Royal Navy (from 1912) and other navies thereafter—would change the shape of global conflict. Pound realized that imperial wars were to be fought over access to raw materials and energy resources as much as markets, and that future wars (as was the Second World War) might be decided by access to oil. The final section relays anecdotes of the link between technical know-how and imperialist expansion by “Hamish” (evidently, Albert “Taffy” Fowler, an engineer whose wife had a salon Pound frequented in his pre-War London period).20 These suggest how the spread of industrial technology brings peripheral nations into the European orbit—and into potential conflict as well. King Menelik used modern weapons to defeat the Italians at Adowa (1896). No doubt he got them from enterprising salesmen like Zaharoff, and they were delivered by hard-working people like “Dave” and “Hamish.” The end of the era of uncontested colonialism is signaled by the “buzz-saw,” which, when put “through an ebony log: whhsssh, t ttt, / Two days’ work in three minutes” (18/83), announces the necessity for European technology and power plants. The Japanese, mentioned on this page of the Canto (“The Jap observers” [18/83]) had realized this already. Fully modernized, they had patterned their Navy on the British one (even hiring British armaments firms to build their battleships);21 they used European technology soundly to defeat the Russians in 1905 and thereby to acquire an empire on the Asian continent. Happily, the Russian defeat provided opportunities for Zaharoff, who was soon selling weapons there—or “Haow I sold it to Russia” (18/81). The moral of all this is clearly stated: War, one war after another, Men start ’em who couldn’t put up a good hen-roost. (18/83)

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The arms trade enforced global hegemony by imperial powers, while it increased enormously the risk of international conflict. “Zenos Metevsky” based on that archetypal arms dealer, Sir Basil Zaharoff (1849–1936),22 “the salesman of battleships,” is one of Pound’s shrewdest investments. Zaharoff was born in Constantinople, but if “some Britisher kicked his arse” (18/80) thus, in Pound’s view, giving him a permanent case of Anglophobia, it says more about Pound than Zaharoff, who was not an Anglophobe so far as is known. In his important history of the international arms trade, The Arms Bazaar (1978), Anthony Sampson presents Zaharoff as the model of the unscrupulous man of business, and therefore a highly honored person; he bragged to the Times, “I made wars so that I could sell arms to both sides. I must have sold more arms than anyone else in the world.”23 The anecdotes in Pound’s Canto may not all be strictly true, but the drift is corroborated in various exposés. For “Biers” read Hiram Maxim, the plucky Vermonter who invented the machine gun. For “Humbers” read “Vickers”; if not an owner, from 1897 Zaharoff was “agent for the whole Vickers group,” which had by this time absorbed Maxim and Nordenfelt, the world’s pre-eminent manufacturers of machine guns, taking a percentage of all sales; “Exactly how important he was in the decisions of Vickers remains obscure,” Sampson writes; “he was never on the board, but he was probably the most valuable and highly paid member of the company, and according to the Times obituary of 1936 ‘he may almost be said to have been Vickers.’”24 Zaharoff eventually married The Duchess of Villafranca, kept a magnificent house in Paris, and lived in Monte Carlo. He may well have been “consulted before the offensives” on the Western Front, since he claimed to be an agent of British intelligence, his activities selling weapons giving him insight into the strengths of belligerents all round.25 Then, as now, bribery was an essential aspect of international arms deals: even the official history of Vickers cited by Sampson admits candidly that “bribery was not accidental or occasional but essential and systematic in every field of commerce” when trade was extended into foreign parts.26 It may be said that the international arms business is the quintessence of what

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is wrong with the liberal order of global capitalism, what Lenin would call “the intensification of its contradictions.”27 But, as the Canto says, repeating a conversation Pound had had with “a maker of war materials” around 1912 and published in The New Age in 1918: “you will never get universal peace when you have 2,000,000,000 invested in war machinery.”28 In this backwards world it makes sense that Zaharoff/Metevsky should be hailed as a great “philanthropist” who gave “A fine pair of giraffes to the nation, / And endowed a chair of ballistics” (18/82). In reality, Zaharoff was only a Knight of the British Empire and a member of the French Legion of Honor, and the chair he endowed was “a chair of aviation at the Sorbonne.”29 “Mr. Oige” is uncertain, but the Canto gives us confidence to believe that these words were said and that Pound heard them. The sea-mines in question can also point back to Zaharoff because of his connection with the Société française des torpilles Whitehead, which manufactured them: “the name was French but the potent 51 percent was English, in the hands of the ubiquitous Vickers Ltd., with Zaharoff on the board of directors.”30 But the larger point is not that drifting sea-mines are lethal, but that the gentleman fails to understand that the coal strike by which he loses money is caused as the result of a switch to “oil-burning apparatus,” soon after Sir Zenos Metevsky had been elected President of “Gethsemane Trebizond Petrol”—for which read Anglo-Persian Oil Co.—the ancestor of British Petroleum (BP). Zaharoff is reputed to have had a share in this entity.31 With extraordinary prescience, Pound has directed us to the birthplace of the arms/ oil/money nexus that haunts us today, causing “one war after another.” The Canto asks why it is that the choleric Mr. Oige cannot make a connection between the seemingly disparate economic facts that directly affect him. The connection is Metevsky/ Zaharoff, arms dealer and war-maker, who is also invested in Middle Eastern oil, thereby disrupting domestic English economic arrangements. “Hamish” (Albert Fowler) knows better than Oige, or else he wouldn’t go pale when asked about this modern Satan of business enterprise. But, people—especially English people—don’t think:

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“‘They’re solid bone. You can amputate from just above / The medulla, and it won’t alter life in that island’” (18/82). English bone-headedness is a constant theme of Pound’s. They can never face, much less understand, the dirty realities of empire.

Canto 19 “Sabotage?” (19/84). Sabotage does not mean in this case desperate workers throwing their wooden sabots into the machinery that would destroy their livelihoods; it means the calculated withdrawal of efficiency from production by shrewd men of business who understand that their role is not to produce useful goods, but to make money. The problem of sabotage by management to produce profit over the production of goods is endemic in the literature of the post-war period. For example, Major Douglas’s first book, Economic Democracy speaks of: the increased necessity of [. . .] economic sabotage; the colossal waste of effort that goes on in every walk of life quite unobserved by ordinary people because they are so familiar with it; a waste which yet so overtaxed the ingenuity of society to extend it that the climax of war only occurred in the moment when the culminating exhibition of organized sabotage was necessary to preserve the system from spontaneous combustion.32 We might think that the war was itself the “spontaneous combustion” the system was trying to avoid, but to Douglas, and consequently Pound, war is the apotheosis of the system. War is the only perfect consumer, and thus necessary to devour the productions of an industrial system run by business methods. To evoke the Social Credit adage: “Peace is economic war; War is economic peace.” Peace is economic war because it demands relentless and wasteful competition between firms and nations fighting for trade advantages; war is economic peace because it makes unlimited demands on industry. If the proverb is true,

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it implies that “sabotage” is the essence of the industrial system under business enterprise and corporate finance. It is only through sabotage that sufficient profit can be extracted from an economy within which all scarcity must be artificial because the problem of production has been solved. This is “scarcity economics,” and its goal is to produce scarcity in a world of abundance—a demonic reversal of the original sense of economics, which meant to husband and manage limited resources in a world of scarcity. Canto 19 gets underway with a gabble of voices: the inventor who “settled for one-half of one million,” and another who “had the ten thousand”, Old Spinder, and, finally, “the other chap” who never finished reading Marx’s Capital (19/84). Think of the radio dial pulling in voices from the ether, all of them telling tales of sabotage. Pound’s story of the inventor blackmailing a “big company” with a patented new gadget is an anecdote about one kind of sabotage. It is designed to point out the latent conflict of goals between the industrial arts and business enterprise. This conflict is the subject of Veblen’s The Vested Interests and the Industrial Arts, mentioned earlier. This inventor is not only a mechanical genius of some kind, he realizes that “the business man’s place in the economy is to ‘make money’ not to produce goods”33—an insight originally made by Marx, in Capital, volume 1. For this reason, the inventor is not downhearted by the bargain he has made with “the big company” because he’s got the money and as a result “a very nice place on the Hudson” (19/84). As for “old Spinder” who lives off his investments as a wealthy rentier in Paris, he can leave his “big business” in America because he is not in debt—he “ain’t had to rent any money” for a long time (19/84). The reason Spinder doesn’t want to talk about Marx is to show the relative irrelevance of a Marxist analysis in a world dominated by the arrangements of finance capital. The class struggle is not so much between bourgeois and proletarian as between creditor and debtor. The struggle is not about who controls the means of production, as the Marxists would have it, but who controls the means of distribution, as Social Credit understands it. This is the group that controls credit, call

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them “the Banks”—with Canto 18 in mind one might say the Bank of England. In the twentieth century, with the problems of production solved, the economy depends on the consumers of goods; it need no longer obsess over the means of production. One of the under-appreciated aspects of Douglas’s critique of the capitalist wage and price system is his focus on the consumer, the beneficiary of his projected “radical reconstruction”34 of the system by means of his democratic social credit scheme. In the meantime, Spinder, like the unnamed inventor, represents what Veblen called “vested interests,” defined by him as “a marketable right to get something for nothing.”35 “Vested interests are immaterial wealth, intangible assets” that derive, so says Veblen, from (a) “limitation of supply,” (b) “obstruction of traffic,” and (c) “meretricious publicity”—all with “a view to profitable sales.”36 Spinder, especially, through unnamed but implicit corporate securities of some kind, has his hands dipped into the “income stream” of his US concern, getting something for nothing, while effectively serving as a fixed charge on the firm. Veblen points out that purely financial investments such as the preferred stock we might expect Spinder to possess are nonproductive so far as the community is concerned, keeping prices high while increasing costs. He plays down the role the initial sale of stock has in the capitalization of growing firms. Thereafter, of course, stocks become objects of speculation—purely parasitical when compared to productive economic activity. “Once a run of free income has been capitalized and docketed as an asset it becomes a legitimate overhead charge, and it is then justly to be counted among necessary costs and covered by the price which consumers should reasonably pay for the concern’s goods and services.”37 If “the common good, so far as it is a question of material welfare, is evidently best served by an unhampered working of the industrial system at its full capacity, without interruption or dislocation” any tampering with the system with an end to profit must be “sabotage.”38 It is against this recalcitrant economic background that any ­revolution or radical reconstruction must take place.

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“So we sat there,” somebody says. There are reasons to think this is Pound himself speaking. If so, the “kindly old professor” might be Tomáš Masaryk (1850–1937), Professor of Philosophy at the Charles University, Prague, who was at the University of London from 1915 to 1917.39 His important talk, “The Problem of Small Nations in the European Crisis” could not have been more relevant to the Irish. Masaryk was great friends with Wickham Steed, editor of the Times, who translated Masaryk’s The New Europe (as The Making of a State) in 1918. Pound knew Steed as early as 1916 and likely met Masaryk at this time.40 He mentions both men together in the letter to his father cited above. Pound was personally friendly with the “stubby little man” Arthur Griffith (1872–1922), founder of Sinn Fein and later President of Dáil Éireann who died in office in 1922.41 Pound met Griffith in London in the autumn of 1921,42 when the truce leading to the Anglo-Irish treaty was being negotiated. Masaryk was there briefly at the time of the Armistice, from November 29 to December 6, 1918.43 Pound may be conflating two meetings for the purpose of bringing forward the representatives of subject peoples striving for recognition, the Czechs and the Irish, under the sign of “self-determination.” Pound recalled: One of the most illuminating hours of my life was that spent in conversation with Griffiths [sic], the founder of Sinn Fein. We were in his room to avoid the detectives who infested the hotel. It was the time of the Armistice when the Irish delegates had been invited to London with a guarantee of immunity. At a certain point Griffiths said: “All you say is true. But I can’t move ’em with a cold thing like economics.”44 Pound tried to convert Griffith to Social Credit, hoping that it might become the economic program of the future Irish Republic. Griffith’s reply, “Can’t move ’em with a cold thing like economics” (78/501), becomes a motif that runs through the Cantos. So, while Pound’s effort at radical reconstruction proceeds upstairs, the revolution seethes in the street and charges in afterwards, to beat up the police spy. It

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is understood that the vested interests are using everything in their power to derail any challenges to their control of the future. Meanwhile, in the east: Ever seen Prishnip, little hunchback, Couldn’t take him for any army. And he said: I haf a messache from dh’ professor, “There’s lots of ‘em want to go over, “But when they try to go over, Dh’ hRussian boys shoot ‘em, and they want to know “How to go over.” (19/85) In fact, we haven’t seen Prishnip. But Wickham Steed’s memoir, Through Thirty Years, ends speculation by Carroll Terrell and Peter Makin that “Prishnip, little hunchback” is supposed to be Gavrilo Princip, the anarchist whose assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand did indeed provide the spark that blew up Europe.45 Pound’s choice of Prishnip does suggest he wants us to think of Princip; however, despite the similar sound of their names. Princip was not a hunchback, and was in prison during the war—he would not be carrying messages for anybody. Thanks to Steed’s memoir, we learn that Prishnip is based on a story Steed told Pound. In Steed’s recollections, the “sturdy little hunchback…whom no Austrian would dream of claiming for the army” remains unnamed, but he was involved in a plan to get Czechs, Slavs and even Poles to abandon their Hapsburg overlords and “go over” to the Russians.46 If the Russians could be told that these renegade k. u. k. (koniglich und kaiserlich) soldiers would sing the Hé Sloveny! anthem to announce their defection to the Russian lines, the Russians would hold their fire. The message from the professor is from Masaryk to these restive Czechs and others. In fact, the idea seems to have been Steed’s; perhaps this is why this anecdote is not recounted in Masaryk’s memoir, President Masaryk Tells His Story (1935). Steed shows that Vlettman is Masaryk. His idea that the Hé Sloveny! would be a useful sign of pan-Slavic solidarity is culled from

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Masaryk’s conversation with him at a parade in Prague in 1912, which Pound slides into a vision fit for the World War. The “jolly chaps” were originally pan-Slavic “Sokols” massed some 35,000 strong in Prague. Masaryk certainly would have been in sympathy with the troops marching under his window “at two o’clock in the morning, / All singing, all singing the Hé Sloveny!:”—or “Up the Slavs! (19/85), not “The Internationale.” The “short story, entitled Birth of a Nation” refers not to the USSR, but to Czechoslovakia. The reference to D.W. Griffith’s great and controversial film is apt in one way, if not in another; whatever we may think of the film’s deplorable politics, it deals with war and reconstruction. If revolutionary Russia was the curious midwife of the democratic Czech Nation under Masaryk (who was made President in 1918) then the “squirt of an Austrian” (19/ 85) means more than if the Soviet Union is meant, for it was from Austria that Czech independence was gained. It would also best explain why the Austrian stayed on “here”—i.e. London, during the war, as opposed to “there”—in St. Petersburg. Needless to add, this Austrian, whoever he be, has much in common with Metevsky/Zaharoff of Canto 18, as well as “Wurmsdorf, / And old Ptierstoff ” (viz. Ambassadors Mensdorf of Austro-Hungary and Benkendorff of Russia, both well-known to Steed) later on in Canto 19 (19/87); he is part of the oil/arms/money nexus and the ­international diplomatic establishment that facilitated it. The next part of the poem, the bulk of pages 86–87, are two anecdotes of Steffens’s framed by a dramatic monologue involving Albert and what seems to be a cabal of old gentlemen representing the way things used to be done “in the old days” before the war, when the world ran smoothly on convertible gold with a nod and a wink on the exchange of “despatches” from the imperial capitals. Makin has a plausible reading of the meaning of this confab: he argues that the point is the post-war shift in power from supra-national aristocratic connections to mass fervours and nationalisms, and to networks of other kinds. The ambassador of Austria-Hungary, Mensdorf, and

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Readings in the Cantos the Russian Ambassador, Benkendorff and a number of their mutual relatives are in family/political conference in London. Mensdorf, from habit, is on the point of sharing the contents of his dispatches. But war has been declared; those present will be on opposing sides. The old aristocratic network no longer binds: “Those days are gone by for ever.” (19/87)47

Makin is likely right in suggesting that “Das thust du nicht, Albert?” (19/86) (“Don’t do that, Albert”) is not a question. The question mark is a printer’s error, unnoticed by Pound.48 Makin situates this gettogether in 1914, the opening phase of the war, but “Those days gone by for ever”—gone “like the cake shops in [sic] the Nevsky,” shops on the Nevsky Prospect in St. Petersburg49—so Pound pulls us up into the post-war, revolutionary situation: no cake shops, no cakes, and no St. Petersburg either. It is a shock then, to find ourselves in Mexico with Lincoln Steffens and not on Soviet trains with Dr. Zhivago, but that’s where Pound puts us. Perhaps it is because Steffens taught him to do it that way. In his Autobiography, Steffens describes how at the outbreak of the war he was in Italy and so headed “straight away to Mexico” on the “theory [. . .] that the inevitable war would bring on the inevitable revolution.”50 The economic system was so stupid and unsound that it would shatter under the pressure of war. Steffens, an economic determinist like most intelligent twentieth-century people, including Douglas, Pound, and “the reds,” knew that civilization is not steered by intelligence but by “economic forces.”51 Steffens’s story is about Carranza, who was trying to liberate Mexico from endemic corruption exacerbated by US oil interests, which habitually corrupt the leadership of oil-producing regions with “a view towards profit” invariably greased by the moral unction of the US State Department. Carranza did govern from a train, always on the move to outrun the lobbyists and bribers of the vested interests. The heart of Steffens’s anecdote can be found in the Autobiography. There, the reader will find written plainly what Pound’s Canto gestures to opaquely. Pound’s version is hopelessly cryptic:

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“Waal what are those lines?” “Yes, those straight lines.” “Those are roads.” And “what are those lines, [sic] “The wiggly ones?” “Rivers.” And Steff said: “Government property?” So two hours later an engine went off with the order: How to dig without confiscation. (19/86) A human reader can make nothing of this—Makin doesn’t touch it. Steffens’s readers learn that the “stream beds” in question are indeed government property. Let Steffens continue: “Well,” I said, “they go right over the oil fields. You could sink wells in them, and they’d be on your property; the oil would be your own government fuel.” Carranza stood there eying me for a moment; then he said, “Right. At once.” And he ordered an officer to take an engine and go and start drilling for oil. But I stopped him. “One moment Jefe,” I said. “You won’t have to drill. The oil men will see what you are up to, and they will offer you all the oil you want if you will stop boring.” The officer sent on the engine came back with oil and the assurance of all the oil that Mexico would need thereafter.52 Pound somehow forgot to drive home the most important lesson here: political power resides in economic realities, like control over the supply of a coveted natural resource. Any nation without such control over its own resources cannot be independent, only a condominium— a non-sovereign state, where extra-territorial interests hold a balance of power. Steffens supplies the next anecdote too. For Tommy Baymont, read J. P. Morgan (1837–1913) the great financier. Pound gives him this name from Thomas M. Lawson, a renegade Boston speculator who was regaling the readers of Steffens’s Everybody’s Magazine with

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the inside dope on high finance in a series called “Frenzied Finance.”53 Lawson’s revelations prompted Steffens to write an article in which he concluded there existed, outside the government in America, an unidentified seat of actual power, which in the final analysis, was the absolute control of credit; political power and business power and money were only phases of this business man’s political control of the function of money-lending, of creditlending. The bosses did not have to buy companies as they had to bribe political parties; like the political bosses, they had only to command the owners of property and the possessors of votes (whether ballots or proxies) to gain obedience. All but a few, very few, exceptional men wanted someone else to decide and command.54 Here we see the insight that led Steffens to admire Mussolini and, in a different way, the Bolshevik Revolution;55 he saw a universal, “instinctive drift toward dictatorship [. . .] in politics, business, society, journalism. While men cried out for liberty they called secretly for a boss.”56 In the USA, in 1910, Steffens thought, this boss was J. P. Morgan. Steffens was wrong, and he explains why. Again, where Pound is cryptic, Steffens is clear. Steffens tells us that the day after his article appeared a junior partner at Morgan’s bank explained how it really was, telling the same story that Pound tells of coal paradoxically too cheap to sell. This fellow said that “J. P. had no sense of ‘absolute power’ and that as a matter of fact his power was not absolute [. . .] J. P. had discovered that he could not make the New York, New Haven and Hartford railroad, which he controlled, buy its coal from a coal company he controlled without the consent of ‘Diamond Jim’ Brady.” It seems that Brady represented a company in which officers of the railroads held shares and this entity held exclusive rights to sell supplies, including coal, to the railroads in question. “It was a racket, of course, but the ramifications of its business, influence and power

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were so complex that even Morgan dared not touch it. Therefore he was not a sovereign.”57 There is no sovereign, Steffens is forced to conclude, only “vested interests.”58 If the universal dictatorship had a name, it was this, the same term Veblen used: [O]rganized society was really a dictatorship, in this sense, that it was an organization of the privileged for the control of privileges, of the sources of privilege, and of the thoughts and acts of the unprivileged, and that neither the privileged nor the unprivileged, neither the bosses nor the bossed, understood this or meant it.59 The final anecdote of Canto 19 is the reminiscence of an unidentified imperialist about his time in India. Oddly, however, the anecdote appears to be set in “Yash (Jassy)”, a city in Romania, although Terrell directs us to “Rumania”.60 In fact, neither place is meant. Pound is composing by ear here, as he was wont to do, and the place meant by the Englishman is Jasai, a village located near a riverine estuary in what is now Navi Mumbai, a suburb of Mumbai. If my speculation is correct, the anecdote makes a lot more geographical and economic sense. Regardless of location, the anecdote is a parable against scarcity economics. Douglas says scarcity economics works this way: the “very existence [of the capitalistic wage system] depends on the constant increase of variety of product, the stimulation of desire, and the keeping the articles desired in short supply.”61 Here the desirable and various products are girls, each of whom could be had for “ten bobs’ worth of turquoise” (19/88). The Englishman has English silver shillings—historically, silver is overvalued in South Asia. With it he buys turquoise, in which he has little interest. He does enjoy sex, however (he treasures the luxury of “14 girls in a fortnight”), and the girls in the bumboats (or the pimps who run them) want turquoise. This is an economic paradise, a perfect circle of exchange; everyone seems to have something the other wants, something that almost never happens

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in “real life,” but only in the half-mythical fringes of economics textbooks, and empires. Still, the girls in this idyll of equilibrium, of the pure meshing of supply and demand, of perfect circulation, are “Healthy but verminous” (19/87). The girls are lousy, but not clapped out. By analogy, the economic system, even in its ideal state, is a kind of prostitution, lousy at best, where human beings become commodities, and the “vested interests,” the British Empire, with its coinage and the invisible pimps, both make out like bandits. The Canto has shown throughout that the modern industrial economies run by business enterprise are vicious systems characterized more by sabotage than by solid economic achievements. Although the problem of production has been solved, the problem of distribution is “a racket.” Business enterprise works tirelessly to sabotage the flow of goods and divert the income stream into non-productive and actually destructive profittaking. Verminous? Yes. Healthy? Not in the least. In “making sense” of Cantos 18 and 19 I have been forced into speculation—especially with Canto 19. My introduction of Masaryk is based on a single reference in a letter; I have suggested one substantive change in the text: Jasai is not Jassy. Makin, of course, has already suggested another: that confusing question mark. He concludes his reading of The Cantos with observations that, I hope, justify some of the critical liberties I have taken here. He concludes his excellent book by remarking “Pound’s quite conscious method of haste”; this, he argues, “will probably have made some sources unascertainable” and even “irrelevant”—a judgment I can’t accept. “Facing his document,” that is to say, facing the notes he had collected, or recollected, towards his own poem, Pound would apparently rearrange phrases, “travesty syntax and sense of the detail of [the] original situation. Each step took him farther away from the words of his source, but not, he would say, of its meaning.”62 In a marvelous phrase, Makin argues that Pound “makes conscious use of the unconscious shaping effect of memory.”63 The “semantic distortion brought to the poem by the weaknesses of the text is [. . .] about at the same level as the scratches on a record”64 or, I want to say, the static interfering with the reception of a distant radio station.

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Cantos 18 and 19 are collections of anecdotes of revolution and radical reconstruction in the post-war flux of the 1920s. Canto 18 points out that the control of credit is equivalent to the control of the empire and exposes the international armaments trade and the oil/guns/money nexus that is at the core of the modern globalized economy, even today. Canto 19 shows that “sabotage” culminating in catastrophic wars is the essence of a system that is run for the benefit of “vested interests,” proposes that revolution is the likely alternative, and implies that the imperial fantasy of easy abundance is a pipe dream under present conditions. He returns to this theme in Canto 22.

14

Canto 20 Réka Mihálka

Canto 20 is a poetic treatise on the nature and attainability of paradise, with special regard to what can inhibit one’s quest for paradise. However, instead of presenting carefully crafted arguments, the poem explores its subject through juxtaposed images and stories to invite the reader to engage in this pursuit of knowledge and illumination. The whirling procession of troubadours, lotus eaters, and terrible beauties offers the reader glimpses of paradiso terrestre and challenges our—as well as its own—notions of paradise. Already in the opening lines, the densely woven texture of the Canto shrouds remarkable poetic beauty—but to lay it bare, we need to apply all our senses. Sound slender, quasi tinnula, Ligur’ aoide: Si no’us vei, Domna don plus mi cal, Negus vezer mon bel pensar no val.” Between the two almond trees flowering, The viel held close to his side; And another: s’adora ”. “Possum ego naturae non meminisse tuae!” Qui son Properzio ed Ovidio. (20/89)1

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The very first word underscores a dominant feature of this Canto: sound. Even when one does not understand the meaning of the quotations from Latin, Greek, Provençal, and Italian yet, one can appreciate the consonant harmonies: the alliteration of “Sound slender,” faintly echoed by the s in “quasi,” and the repeated, tenderly musical n and l sounds (carried on as far as “The viel held close”) smooth the linguistic differences. Musicality is encoded not only in the sound of these lines, but also in their references: “tinnula” originates from Catullus’s LXI, a Sapphic epithalamion or wedding hymn; the word evokes the ringing of bells.2 “Ligur’ aoide” is a Homeric allusion: Pound glossed it in a letter to his father as “keen or sharp singing. (sirens) song with an edge on it.”3 The next two lines (“Si no’us [. . .] val”) recall the troubadour Bernart de Ventadorn’s adoration of his beloved (“And if I see her not, / no sight is worth the beauty of my thought” [92/639 and 95/665]), with the ­subsequent two lines depicting a troubadour in an idyllic setting, clinging to his means of expression.4 The last two references of this part reinforce the presence of love, which has been the other integral theme of these lines: “s’adora” is from Cavalcanti’s Sonnet 35, meaning “(s)he is adored.” The second quotation is borrowed from a love elegy by Propertius, addressed to Cynthia (II.xx), which attests that Cynthia’s personality makes an ineradicable impression. The Latin addition (“Here are Propertius and Ovid”) includes Ovid in this company of immortal poets of love, even though there appears to be no specific allusion to his works. This section, therefore, sets the tone and theme of the opening sixty lines.5 That the rest of these sixty lines is a discrete unit is also indicated by a covert frame: as Kevin Oderman points out, Pound’s notes for this Canto offered a different, and more explicable, beginning.6 The bough is not more fresh where the almond shoots take their March green, than she square from the breasts to thighs.7

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Oderman aptly observes “Pound’s suppression of the erotic context in favor of the fragment.”8 By separating the lines, the erotic image is postponed—and more anticipated when it finally emerges. Even though sensuality is one of the key themes of Pound’s paradisal vision in this Canto, it has only subtle traces at the beginning. After having marveled at the flowering almonds and the green shoots of March, the speaker now witnesses the beginning of summer: “the vacation was just beginning” (20/89). This Poundian persona recalls his visit to a most renowned contemporary authority on Provençal language and culture, the German philologist and lexicographer Emil Levy, upon the encouragement of Pound’s professor at the University of Pennsylvania, Hugo Rennert.9 Pound had been preparing a collection of translations from the poems of the twelfth-century troubadour Arnaut Daniel, accompanied by essays and musical notations, when he was baffled by a very opaque word (noigandres) that can be found in a manuscript at the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan (“settant’uno R. superiore (Ambrosiana)” [20/89] refers to the location of the manuscript). Pound thus turned to Levy, the editor of the eight-volume Provenzalisches Supplement-Wörterbuch, for advice. Levy’s emendation of the word suggested that noigandres was not, in fact, a hapax legomenon, or a word with strictly one occurrence in the recorded history of a language, but a composite of two words: enoi (“ennui”) and gandres (from gandir, “ward off ”), which hence means “wards off boredom.”10 Though Pound’s translation of Daniel’s thirteenth canzone incorporated this emendation, he did not wish to erase the cryptic quality of the line ending, rendering it as “pain ameises.”11 The characteristically animated utterances of Rennert and Levy (note the emphatic denial in Rennert’s speech and the depiction of Levy’s dialect and exclamations) and the respectful tone of the speaker yield a living, expressive language, in sharp contrast to the seemingly dead phrase without a clear referent (noigandres). Remarkably, all three voices in this anecdote reflect on how much effort is needed to find knowledge. Rennert starts by rejecting even the possibility that it is worth searching for answers, but when he admits there may be a

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chance, the speaker sets out on his journey. In his turn, when asked what he wishes to know, he first mumbles a mere “I dunno, sir”; and in another scenario (“or”), he asks straight away: “Yes, Doctor, what do they mean by noigandres?” (20/89) Lastly, Levy reveals his frustration during his quest for knowledge (thus becoming the epitome of the Poundian reader) but ultimately finishes his task. Therefore, a lotuseater attitude is foreshadowed already in this episode, even though here it is overcome by Odysseus-like perseverance. The reward for steadfastness is paradiso terrestre. The abundant foliage, the welcoming fields and creeks excite all our senses and capture the mind. Not only is it a perfect landscape, but it is also the home of art. The sound harmonies of “The water runs, and the wind scented with pine” (20/90) may represent only poetry, but the presence of Italian sculptors and painters (all addressed, collegially, by their first names) suggests that all arts belong here. While Levy’s scholarship did advance our understanding of troubadour literature, it is ultimately poetry that can turn this knowledge into experience and thus make it accessible. Therefore, Daniel’s line “E jois lo grans, e l’olors d’enoi gandres” is transposed into contemporary, living language as “You would be happy for the smell of that place / And never tired of being there” (20/90). There is no more temporal abyss between Daniel and the speaker or between us and the painters: we are all there, as Pound imagined in “Provincia Deserta:” I have walked over these roads; I have thought of them living.12 The total unity of the scene is reinforced when we find all four elements together: air, fire, earth, and water13 are at the core of these images: Air moving under the boughs, The cedars there in the sun, Hay new cut on hill slope, And the water there in the cut (20/90)

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However, there is one note that upsets this (silent) symphony: “Sound: as of the nightingale too far off to be heard.” As Sean Pryor remarks, “paradise is lost twice over,” not only because the sound of the nightingale is too far off to be heard, but also because it is exactly this taunting silence that is the sound of paradise.14 This is not Keats’s urn, a “still unravish’d bride of quietness,” which holds the promise of beauties of the imagination—here, the paradisal sound is simply elsewhere: “too far off to be heard.” The unheard song of the nightingale is a subject rhyme with the sirens’ “ligur’ aoide” from the perspective of Odysseus’s shipmates: both represent unattainable beauty, just as noigandres stands for unattainable knowledge. Pryor is thus right in stating that “poetry loses the paradise which it delivers as it delivers it.”15 The reason why the paradiso terrestre disintegrates may be the speaker’s lack of perseverance or level-headedness, as he succumbs to the temptation of Eros: “And the light falls, remir, / from her breast to thighs” (20/90). In the Neoplatonic universe of yearning for the nous, this is distraction (cf. Circe and Kalypso), as Peter Liebregts notes: only the gifted, intelligent, and factive personality may attain the fruits of the divine, whereas those who are devoted to the merely sensual and material, misdirect their will, and remain, in the words of Mauberley, “drifting hedonists.”16 The next section of the Canto, a counterpoint to the previous idyll, deals with the mental collapse of the Marquis of Ferrara, Niccolò d’Este (1384–1441). Pound described the episode as his “delirium after [the] execution of Parisina and Ugo,” his wife and natural son, after d’Este exposed their adultery.17 The background story is merely hinted at: “‘E’l Marchese / Stava per divenir pazzo / after it all’” (20/90; “The Marquis / was about to go crazy”).18 Reminiscing first about the historical foundation of the Este family (“condit Atesten” or “founded Este”), Niccolò reminds his son, Borso, to keep the peace (and thus secure the economic and cultural

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prosperity of Ferrara). Afterwards, various literary and historical stories race through d’Este’s deranged mind. The method of presentation is described by Pound as follows: The whole reminiscence jumbled or “candied” in Nicolo’s delirium. Take that as a sort of bounding surface from which one gives the main subject of the Canto the lotophagoi: lotus eaters, or respectable dope smokers; and general paradise.19 D’Este first relives the death scene of Roland from the Old French chanson de geste, the Song of Roland. Betrayed and wounded, Roland gathers his strength to smite with his ivory horn a Saracen soldier who wants to take his sword. Yet the blow also breaks the horn, and Roland’s dying words mourn its lost beauty: “I have split my olifan, / I have spoiled the carbuncles and the gold.”20 This tragic image of Roland and his horn (“He holds the olifan, whereof he would not leave hold”)21 thus corrupts the perceived idyll of the initial image, too (“The viel held close to his side” [20/89]). The theme of betrayal and lust is further developed in d’Este’s hallucinations when he imagines seeing Sancho, the new king from Lope de Vega’s Las Almenas de Toro. Sancho attempts to take back the city of Toro from his sister, Elvira, when he sees a woman on the battlements, and his lust immediately overpowers him. However, the woman turns out to be his own sister, Elvira, whom he could not recognize from a distance. Elvira’s silhouette evokes the image of Helen of Troy. Pound explained to his father the allusion: “Helen on the wall of Troy with the old men fed up with the whole show and suggesting she be sent back to Greece”22—this is what “Neestho [“let her go back”], le’er go back... / in the autumn” (20/91) refers to. They are both subject rhymes with Parisina, too: on the one hand, Niccolò’s and Menelaus’s wives were both beautiful, young women with older husbands—and the harbinger of their husbands’ downfalls; on the other hand, both Parisina and Elvira were the targets of unlawful desires.

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D’Este’s ravings end in a reference to a wall painting: “between the walls, arras, / Painted to look like arras” (20/91). That this painting was highly significant for Pound is indicated by its recurrence in Canto 23: “Under the arras, or wall painted below like arras” (23/108). Akiko Miyake suggested this painting was the frescoes of the Palazzo Schifanoia in Ferrara, which were commissioned to celebrate Borso d’Este’s appointment as Duke of Ferrara.23 The jungle passage of the Canto, located between two references to Helen of Troy (“Neestho, le’er go back... / in the autumn” [20/91] and “HO BIOS / cosi Elena vedi” [20/92]; the latter an intentional misquote of Dante, meaning “LIFE / thus I saw Helen”),24 represents an ideogrammic kind of poetry as it reaches an exceptional density, but is able to communicate ideas through images.            Jungle: Glaze green and red feathers, jungle, Basis of renewal, renewals; Rising over the soul, green virid, of the jungle, Lozenge of the pavement, clear shapes, Broken, disrupted, body eternal, Wilderness of renewals, confusion Basis of renewals, subsistence, Glazed green of the jungle; (20/91–92)25 Helen’s presence at the end of the passage foregrounds the feminine element as a source of destruction (“broken, disrupted,” “confusion” and “loud over the banners”—the last a reference to wars that break out over women) but also of renewal. The cyclic nature of this Persephone-like feminine quality is exemplified in Helen’s character, since the destruction of Troy led (indirectly) to the foundation of the Este family: “And that was when Troy was down / And they came here and cut holes in the rock, / Down Rome way, and put up the timbers; / And came here, condit Atesten...” (20/90–91). Note that with the progression of this passage, renewal gains more and more emphasis: first it is simply

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“renewal,” then, in the plural, “renewals,” and it explodes into a “Wilderness of renewals.” Thus the feminine principle becomes the very symbol of abundance; the jungle itself, and its archetypal colors are identified as glazed (wet) green and crimson.26 While the masculine principle is also hinted at in its aspirations towards the nous—“Lozenge of the pavement, clear shapes, / Broken, disrupted, body eternal” (20/91)—it is ultimately overpowered by the feminine life force. After this grudgingly bestowed hymn to the feminine power of creation, comes a procession of insubstantial beings: “the faceted air: / Floating” (20/92). These are the sensualists, or hedonists, whose concerns in life do not rise above the horizon of physical experience. They lazily follow the current, instead of exercising their will: “Borne over the plain, recumbent, / The right arm cast back, / the right wrist for a pillow” (20/92). They appear to be quite content: “smoke as the olibanum’s, / Swift as if joyous” (20/92). The cold colors (“purple, bluepale smoke”) of their make-believe pleasures flaunt themselves “As hay in the sun, the olibanum, saffron, / As myrrh without styrax” (20/92), only to divert the drifters’ attention from the danger ahead: the waterfall. At the waterfall, however, a vision of transcendent “bright flames, V shaped” (20/92) appears in mid-air, as the promise of in coitu illuminatio. The reference to St. Francis of Assissi’s “Cantico Secondo” (“Nel fuoco / D’amore mi mise, nel fuoco d’amore mi mise... / [. . .] / ‘...Mi mise, il mio sposo novello’” [20/92–93] “In the flame / of love he put me, in the flame of love he put me . . . [. . .] . . . Put me, my new spouse”)27 suggests that there is salvation even for the drifters— in divine love that elevates their mind: “Shot from stream into spiral” (20/93). This Neoplatonic kind of illuminating love entails a burst of warmer colors (“Yellow, bright saffron, croceo” [20/93]). This poetic gesture of representing love by colors recalls the rich palette of the first line of Arnaut Daniel’s “noigandres” poem: “Er vei vermeils, vertz, blaus, blancs, gruocs” (“Vermeil, green, blue, peirs, white, cobalt”).28 This subtle allusion to the troubadour Daniel indicates that ecstatic love that offers a glimpse of divine beauty and intellect, the nous, also has the promise of paradise.

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Wendy Flory suggests the description of floating hedonists may be an ekphrasis of a painting and engraving by William Blake, both entitled “The Circle of the Lustful: Francesca da Rimini,” based on the Second Circle of Dante’s Hell.29 These show a crowd of carnal sinners drifting in a current, first “over the plain” (20/92), then in a sharply turning spiral, up and down, reminiscent of a waterfall. Blake’s engraving even has Paolo and Francesca “in their forked flame—‘nel fuoco d’amore.’”30 The striking similarity of the two artists’ representations of sensualists makes it likely that Pound may have drawn inspiration from Blake’s work, but there are also significant differences. First, Blake’s interpretation shows naked, slightly twisted bodies drifting with the current, while Pound depicts them as comfortable, if somewhat orientalized and exoticized: they are “Wrapped each in burnous,” surrounded by incense (the lotus is eaten, not smoked). The curious way one of them is holding his hand might even recall a Buddhist gesture: “Thumb held against finger, the third, / The first fingers petal’d up, the hand as a lamp” (20/92). They are not being punished, as in Blake’s engraving; rather, they are leisurely resting (“The right arm cast back, / the right wrist for a pillow” [20/92]). Furthermore, Blake’s people are drifting in a dense crowd, while Pound’s lotus-eaters float “each on invisible raft” (20/92). In spite of the obvious differences in the descriptions and their interpretation of Eros, however, these two works by Blake offer a revealing parallel and critique of the Canto. That the vision of transcendental love has the promise of illumination is indicated most by the subsequent passage. The Canto repeats the earlier gesture of depicting alternative scenarios (see Rennert and “I dunno, sir” [20/89]): we can see that not even rapture in love is an option for everyone. Some will have “followed the water” (20/93), or else, they will see the transformation in others who set their soul aflame in love and gain divine illumination: “Or looked back to the flowing; / Others approaching that cataract, / As to dawn out of shadow, the swathed cloths / Now purple and orange, / And the blue water dusky beneath them” (20/93). Eventually, those who fall down into the

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cataract, are smashed by the loud, mighty force of the water (“hah hah ahah thmm, thunb, ah / woh woh araha thumm, bhaaa” [20/93]), as mere pebbles. They are finally identified as the lotophagoi or lotuseaters, Odysseus’s companions who give up their quest and withdraw into the blissful oblivion of hallucinations. Echoing the tenor of Tennyson’s “The Lotos-Eaters,” which, significantly, also starts with an elaborate vision of the “downward smoke” (i.e. a waterfall), Odysseus’s former companions voice their weariness in Canto 20. While Tennyson’s lotus-eaters were exhausted and discontent because of their perpetual hardship and obligations (thus commenting on the Victorian ethos of work),31 they yearn only for pleasures in Pound’s portrayal (their preoccupations being food, fame, excitement, and physical love). Their fascination with material and sensual gain will be answered in the last part of the Canto: the procession of wealth and power. The lotus-eaters’ mourning of the drowned crew-members reaches its climax when the lotophagoi recount how the shipmates were mistreated and tricked by Odysseus as well as the gods. Odysseus stopped them from experiencing the exceptional beauty of the sirens’ song by putting wax into their ears, admittedly to protect them: so that they would not wreck the ship on the rocks when the sirens lured them closer. On the other hand, when Odysseus’s companions slaughtered and ate some of Helios’s32 sacred cattle on Thrinakia, the “neson amumona,” or the “noble island,” in spite of the warning of Odysseus, they were struck down by Zeus’s lightning. Walter Baumann also notes that “The continuation of this line is directly borrowed from Homer’s account of Zeus’ vengeance for the slaughter of [the cattle]: ‘their heads like sea crows.’”33 They proved as disposable in Odysseus’s story as a tin can; they are thus metaphorically transformed into cheap, massproduced commodities: canned beef. From their perspective, the ligur’ aoide has more edge than clarity. The final vision of the Canto is a land-based reformulation of the critique of luxury in “The River Song” in Cathay. Pound’s rendering of Li Po’s poem articulated the vanity of art’s subservience to wealth:

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This boat is of shato-wood, and its gunwales are cut magnolia, Musicians with jewelled flutes and with pipes of gold Fill full the sides in rows, and our wine Is rich for a thousand cups. We carry singing girls, drift with the drifting water34 Canto 20 is, similarly, a pageant of treasures and domination, weighing heavily on the subdued: Ac ferae familiares, and the cars slowly, And the panthers, soft-footed. Plain, as the plain of Somnus,      the heavy cars, as a triumph, Gilded, heavy on wheel,      and the panthers chained to the cars (20/94) This disheartening procession is reigned over by Isotta degli Atti (1432/33–74) and her son, Sallustio Malatesta. Canto 9 places the much-adored Isotta, the third wife of Sigismondo Malatesta (1417– 68), in a similar category to the femmes fatales of Canto 20. Terrell gives the translation of the medley of Italian and Medieval Latin sources related to Isotta as “And he loved Isotta degli Atti to distraction / and she was worthy of it / constant in purpose / She delighted the eye of the prince / lovely to look at / pleasing to the people (and the ornament of Italy).”35 The last line, however, associates Isotta with Helen: “Past ruin’d Latium” is an allusion to Walter Savage Landor’s (1775–1864) line: “Past ruined Ilion Helen lives.”36 While Isotta appears as the terrifying muse of destruction (“triumph” even suggests that the chained panthers may be spoils of war), she and her son also emerge in the poem as historical versions of the mythical lotophagoi, as their garb and posture recall the floating people in burnous: “the form wrapped, / Rose, crimson, deep crimson, / [. . .] Head in arm’s curve, reclining;” (20/94–95). To emphasize the inconsequential existence of luxury, the barren landscape contrasts

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strongly with the idyllic fields of rich vegetation from the beginning of the Canto. Not only are the surroundings infertile here, they also aggrieve nature: while there is an astounding lack of active verbs, to stress the inertia of the scene, the past participle form of cut appears three times in brief succession, twice as a sort of scar: The road, back and away, till cut along the face of the rock, And the cliff folds in like a curtain, The road cut in under the rock Square groove in the cliff ’s face, as chiostri, The columns crystal, with peacocks cut in the capitals (20/95) In more subtle form, cutting creates a sharp contrast between the initial paradise presented in the Canto and its corrupted version at the end. While the troubadour used to stand “Between the two almond trees flowering” (20/89), embracing his instrument, the half-naked Vanoka, the symbol of lust and doom (“waste hall there behind her” [20/95]) stands “between gilded barocco, / Two columns coiled and fluted” (20/95). Besides being barren, the scene is also utterly silent. The panthers are “soft-footed,” the plain is “as the plain of Somnus,” the god of sleep, the cars move “without creak,” and even the sirens are carved “in the pillar heads,” thus losing their charm: the ability to sing (20/94–95). In a Canto that is organized around the concept of the “Ligur’ aoide,” and started with the very word “sound,” song should be of crucial import. If we overview the Canto once more, a pattern emerges. In the first part, we saw a man trying to achieve or understand beauty (noigandres); this was emblematized in the unattainable but promising cry of the nightingale, a sort of nous. In the second part, we saw the man that fell victim to beauty (d’Este); the sound associated with him was cursing and ranting. In the scene of the lotophagoi, we saw men who are not even trying any longer; their symbol was the thundering sound of the doomsday waterfall. In the last section, we see people corrupted by luxury and lust,37 who “misdirected their will,” not unlike

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the lotophagoi, but who ended up like this not through suffering but by choice. Their sound is utter, unbreakable silence. No wonder that even Este’s earlier warning (“‘Peace! keep the peace, Borso’” [20/91]) is truncated, since it cannot penetrate the solid silence. Instead, the ellipsis shows the failed effort to pierce through the crystallized soundlessness: “‘Peace! / Borso..., Borso!’” (20/95). Canto 20 thus shows a vision of paradiso terrestre, populated, characteristically of Pound, by poets and artists, but also reminds us through stories and myths that unwavering dedication and the resistance of temptation are essential to achieve such an idyll. The femmes fatales of the Canto are depicted in the full glory of their ambivalence: they represent both the ultimate beauty and feminine life force but are also the source of misery and destruction. Maybe the most appealing aspect of this Canto is exactly its ability to present both aspects of the feminine enigma with equal zeal. Most notably, its sensual focus (with a strong visual and even stronger audial representation) creates a lasting impression of both paradise and the lack of it. Ultimately, both the beauty and the resentment linger long: ligur’ aoide.

15

Canto 21 James Dowthwaite

Despite being a microcosm of many of The Cantos’ concerns and narrative threads, Canto 21 has received scant critical attention in and of itself. Hugh Kenner, for example, glosses a small passage as anecdotal evidence of the dominance of Venice in Pound’s earlier Cantos.1 While Kenner’s insight reveals a valuable link between Canto 21 and its Venetian predecessors Cantos 11 and 17, it fails to take into account Pound’s unique judgment of economic and political history in relation to the mythical world of the pagan gods: a concern initiated by the Canto’s opening question, “Where are we?” (21/96).2 The Canto itself initially has much in common with the Malatesta Cantos, with its use of quotation, anecdotes, and litany forming the basis of its poetics. Yet the second part of the poem initiates a departure from the detail of history and returns to The Cantos’ lyrical treatment of a primordial world of pagan gods and natural harmony. James F. Knapp summarizes its variety: Assembled out of fragments of a dozen major cultural traditions, the Cantos are an ideal text for studying the broken lies and empty places in Modernist art. Canto 21 may serve as a representative example, interweaving as it does material

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Readings in the Cantos from several of the poem’s areas of major concern: the Italian Renaissance, the early years of the American republic, and Greek mythology.3

Furthermore, Canto 21 comprises an intersection of all three of the categories of material that Pound claimed the reader could identify in his long poem. Of these Pound writes in a 1933 letter to The New English Weekly, “if the reader wants three categories he can find them rather better in: permanent, recurrent and merely haphazard and casual.”4 Fundamentally, however, it is also in the conflation of these distinctions that Canto 21 captures cultural, narrative, and intellectual traces that Pound perceives as conducive to human understanding of the divine and transcendent. Hence, we may discern “In the crisp air, / the discontinuous gods” (21/99) at their work, or, in other words, interpret the signs of the divine as evidence of a natural harmony that recurs throughout history. The specific theme of this Canto is balance. At first, we encounter the Medici family’s (among others) weighing of financial frugality with artistic, public, and political patronage. Pound then leads us to the Eleusinian mysteries, the ancient cult at Eleusis honoring the chthonic deities and the return of Persephone through the ritual of the grain rite. There are symbols of regeneration both cultural and natural, with Pound unifying the two in his conflation of history and myth. Guy Davenport emphasizes the importance of Persephone, arguing that “one can follow throughout The Cantos the force that reclaims lost form, lost spirit, Persephone’s transformation back to virginity.”5 The beauty of Pound’s Eleusinian redemptions, however, is tempered with an echoing reminder of Persephone’s return to the underworld, the sadness underlying joy, or the recourse to violence upon which peace is built. This Canto is neither celebratory nor elegiac, but held in a stasis of contemplation, recalling “Another war without glory, and another peace without quiet” (21/98).

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Jefferson and/or the Medici An important aspect of Canto 21 is Pound’s attitude towards the Medici dynasty in Italian history. William Cookson notes Pound’s presentation of “Cosimo as a patron of learning who fostered the revival of the study of Greek.”6 Furthermore, Pound’s presentation of the Medici shifts between accounts of their balanced finances with their political achievements: specifically, the maintenance of peace and the balance of power, as well as their fostering of classical learning and Renaissance art. Pound presents Cosimo as a powerful example of how economics and culture may be mutually dependent: Intestate, 1429, leaving 178,221 florins di sugello, As is said in Cosimo’s red leather note book. Di sugello. And “with his credit emptied Venice of money”— That was Cosimo— “And Naples, and made them accept his peace.” And he caught the young boy Ficino And had him taught the greek language; “With two ells of red cloth per person I will make you”, Cosimo speaking, “as many Honest citizens as you desire.” (21/96) In marking the year, 1429, Pound answers the question posed at the outset of the Canto (“where are we”), laying down a boundary stone for the wayfarers of history. Continuing, Pound quotes the exact amount of money inherited by Cosimo on his father’s death, 178,221 florins, adding that it is “di sugello” or “with seal.” Given that Giovanni died “intestate,” the seal becomes a sign of authenticity, its significance emphasized by Pound’s repetition in the following line. Pound draws upon a symbolism of power; the seal functions as a genuine ­inheritance, establishing Cosimo as the true heir of the Medici wealth. Pound then turns from historical statistics towards two anecdotes of Cosimo’s life. The first alludes to Cosimo’s patronage of education,

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with his insistence that “the young boy Ficino” learn Greek. The “young boy” is Marsilio Ficino, the renowned Renaissance scholar who was the first to translate Plato’s entire known works into Latin. The second anecdote concerns Cosimo’s extravagance, accompanied by the claim that he could have made honest citizens through displays of wealth. Carroll F. Terrell suggests that cloth in red dye would undoubtedly have been a sign of wealth in the early Renaissance.7 Cosimo, for all his creditable patronage of culture, is thus presented as having established his right to the Medici inheritance on the basis of authenticity (a signature), while simultaneously establishing his legacy by the apparent or purely symbolic; he clothes the city in dye, in the flamboyant and inauthentic, the signs of a wealth inaccessible to his people. Pound compares Medici ingenuity with two figures of American history; one personal and one national.8 First, Pound introduces his grandfather, the former US Representative Thaddeus Coleman Pound (“And ‘that man sweated blood to put through that railway’” [21/97]), who, according to Pound, built railways for public benefit with the use of limited financial power. Second, he quotes extensively from Thomas Jefferson’s letters, which date from when he was serving as a delegate in the early years of the American Republic. Jefferson, one of the heroes of The Cantos, is presented as financially restrained, attempting to foster cultural activity in his young nation without going beyond the “bounds of American fortune” (21/97). The letter in question, of which there is no known addressee, was written to a French correspondent, requesting men able to perform the dual role of household maintenance and musicianship, emphasizing Jefferson’s frugality. The letter is largely quoted verbatim, with Pound’s only contribution two bracketed interruptions.               In a country like yours (id est Burgundy) where music is cultivated and Practised by every class of men, I suppose there might Be found persons of these trades who could perform on The french horn, clarionet, or hautboy and bassoon (21/97)9

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Pound’s authorial interjection is characteristic of his poetics, a large portion of which is comprised of acts of translation and quotation, a practice derived from the initial injunction that Andreas Divus “Lie quiet” (1/5) in the opening Canto of his epic. Pound uses Jefferson’s letter to represent the measured negotiation between culture and economics that he believes necessary for good governance: the figure of a bassoon-playing gardener clearly representative of this combination of frugality, ingenuity, and patronage. Another feature of Pound’s poetics is what he refers to as the “subject rhyme,” whereby two or more figures of similar characteristics are metamorphosed into a particular mode of thought, representation, or discussion.10 Examples include Helen of Troy and Eleanor of Aquitaine in Canto 7, Sigismondo Malatesta and Odysseus in Canto 9,11 and, particularly in Canto 21, Sigismondo Malatesta with Jefferson and the Este and Medici. He announces this in a second interpolation in Jefferson’s letter:         A certainty of employment for Half a dozen years     (affatigandose per suo piacer o non) And at the end of that time, to find them, if they Choose, a conveyance to their own country, might induce Them to come back here on reasonable wages. (21/97) The quotation in parenthesis is from Sigismondo Malatesta, and is translated by Pound as “So that he can work as he likes, / Or waste time as he likes” (8/29), a reference to the provision intended by Sigismondo for one particular artist. Given that Pound was to later compare Jefferson to Mussolini, one may trace the development of what Stephen Sicari refers to as a “multifaceted wanderer” whose various metamorphoses range from heroic figures of ancient Greece to political figures of Italian Renaissance, the American Republic and Mussolini’s Fascist regime.12 The subject-rhyme of patronage creates a series of echoes and repetitions from earlier Cantos and introduces a particular reading of history as repetitive.

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Echoes From the conclusion of Thomas Jefferson’s letter, the Canto returns to the Medici, detailing in the form of a litany the achievements of Cosimo’s son Lorenzo (“the Magnificent”), which include fathering a pope (Leo X) and founding the university at Pisa. Between the lines describing Lorenzo de Medici, there lies a single, prosaic line that stands alone as a succinct and touching commentary on the turbulent period of history comprising the Italian Renaissance: “Another war without glory, and another peace without quiet” (21/98). As J. S. Childs has noted, “this line is apparently not quotation, and yet its epigrammatic quality seems to signify its origin in Lorenzo’s writing.”13 Regardless of its origin, in isolating the line Pound emphasizes not only its rich poetic beauty but also its emblematic description of the era. Furthermore, in a Canto so concerned with historical rhymes, it applies equally well to the era in which The Cantos developed, in the proximity of two world wars. Its cadence is reminiscent of Yeats’s “The Second Coming” where “the best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.”14 The line also exemplifies the balance upon which Canto 21 depends, with Cosimo’s patronage of learning tempered by his flamboyance and Jefferson’s attempt to foster cultural development reliant upon his frugal measures. Whether by quotation or original creation, Pound’s line (which itself is perfectly balanced with eight syllables either side of the punctuation) pre-empts the pivotal moment in the Canto where the focus shifts from the historical to the mythical. Through a shift in his language, Pound inaugurates a departure from the density of historical detail and returns to the paradiso terrestre of Ravenna and Venice, depicted in earlier Cantos: And there was grass on the floor of the temple, Or where the floor of it might have been;     Gold fades in the gloom,     Under the blue-black roof, Placidia’s,

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Of the exarchate; and we sit here By the arena, les gradins... And the palazzo, baseless, hangs there in the dawn With low mist over the tide-mark; (21/98) This passage contains a number of echoes from previous Cantos. The line “Gold fades in the gloom” is a direct contrast to the line “In the gloom, the gold gathers the light against it” (11/51)—itself repeated in Canto 17. The setting is, momentarily, the Mausoleum of Galla Placidia: the beautiful late Roman tomb of the daughter of Theodosius I in Ravenna. As Kenner reminds us, in The Cantos “the net is drawn tight: each sacred place remembers others.”15 Thus Pound’s reader has a fundamental role to play in connecting the poem’s references; we must too remember previous sacred places and bring them to bear upon each reading. From Ravenna, the next reference is Verona, the line “By the arena” recalling Canto 4, where Pound remembers sitting with T. S. Eliot at the Verona amphitheater in the early 1920s, “And we sit here... / there in the arena....” (4/16). The subject of the poem then becomes curiously dislocated. The reference to a “palazzo” hanging in the dawn, “With low mist over the tide-mark” recalls the imagery and cadences of the Venetian Canto 17, but no one place is maintained when Pound moves to a presentation of divine rituals:      Night of the golden tiger, And the dry flame in the air,        Voices of the procession, Faint now, from below us, And the sea with tin flash in the sun-dazzle        Like dark wine in the shadows. (21/99) These lyrical passages attempt to transcend history, recoiling from its recurrence and indulging in the category of permanence: this is an amalgamated paradise, drawn from various religious and literary traditions and transcending each one. The “dark wine in the shadows”

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are signs of Dionysus, announcing the presence of the pagan gods; we have moved from Renaissance Italy to a mythic landscape which resists historical location. It is here that Pound’s particular view of history reaches its fullest demonstration: “a culture persisted,” he argues in Guide to Kulchur in 1938, “only in basicly [sic] pagan Italy has Christianity escaped becoming a nuisance.”16 This statement may go some way to explaining the notable absence of Jesus Christ (and Christianity generally) in Pound’s tale of human history. To describe Italy as “basicly pagan” is to readdress the sentiment ascribed to Cosimo de Medici in encouraging Marsilio Ficino to study Greek; that the culture of Italy is in the persistence of traces from the ancients and, before them, the original world of the gods. History and myth are thus brought to a confluence in Pound’s conception, and the rest of the Canto then introduces the cycles of the chthonic deities and the Eleusinian mysteries.

Persephone and the Eleusinian Mysteries It is for Pound’s treatment of the Persephone myth that Canto 21 has received most critical attention. The Canto ends with a brief fragment of narrative from Hades’s abduction of Persephone/Proserpina, daughter of the harvest goddess, Demeter/Ceres. In short (following the versions given by the “Homeric Hymn to Demeter” and Ovid’s Metamorphoses), Persephone is seized by Hades, and Demeter begs Zeus for her daughter’s release. Zeus rules that Persephone must return to her mother, on the condition that she had not eaten any food in the Underworld. This deal is unknown to Persephone, as she has eaten pomegranate seeds offered to her by Hades (and these remain an enduring symbol of the myth). Persephone is condemned to spend part of the year in the Underworld with her consort and abductor and part of the year among the gods and back with her mother. Her descent initiates a period of mourning for Demeter, whereby she allows the earth to decay and turn barren (thus, autumn and winter), and her return brings joy and relief to both goddess and planet (spring and summer).

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The importance of Persephone in Pound’s conception of The Cantos’ structure is made clear by Lilian Feder, who argues that “her story is compressed into a metamorphic ideogram for Pound’s adaptation of metamorphosis as the seminal process that converts nature and history into myth, and society into a ritualized paradise in which order, fertility and love become one.”17 An intensely secretive cult dedicated to celebrating this myth was set up at Eleusis, and its mysteries are an important subject matter in The Cantos. Essentially, they comprise a celebration of fertility rites in general and the Persephone myth in particular. In the latter, initiates were admitted to a number of rituals believed to engage with the process of Persephone’s recurrence. In this sense, nature and divinity become one and the same cosmic act.18 Pound’s contemporary, Dudley Wright, explains the Eleusinian mysteries in relation to the myth’s narrative, their constituent parts demonstrating their appropriateness as an analogy for a Canto so dedicated to balance: The ceremonies of the Lesser mysteries were entirely different from those of the Greater mysteries. The Lesser mysteries represented the return of Persephone to earth—which, of course, took place at Eleusis; and the Greater mysteries represented her descent into the infernal regions.19 Thus, inscribed in the heart of the same mythic celebration is a simultaneous vision of infernal descent and of paradisal rising. To this end, Leon Surette sees the “rites of Eleusis as a paradigm for the Cantos’ actions.”20 Guy Davenport concurs, arguing that “one can follow throughout The Cantos the force that reclaims lost form, lost spirit, Persephone’s transformation back to virginity”; a reading that sees the flexibility of the Eleusinian mysteries as preferable to the rigid schemas of a Dantescan or Odyssean reading.21 Pound himself indicates the importance of Eleusis in the conception of his poetics, writing that “Eleusis did not distort truth by exaggerating the individual, neither could it have violated the individual spirit. Only in the high air and

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the great clarity can there be a just estimation of values.”22 With this in mind, we may turn to the final part of Canto 21: In the crisp air,     the discontinuous gods; Pallas, young owl in the cup of her hand, And, by night, the stag runs, and the leopard, Owl-eye amid pine boughs. (21/99) The ideogrammic quality of Pound’s writing is evident here, “Owleye amid pine boughs” (the owl being the symbol of Pallas/ Athene) is a concise image presenting divinity imbued in the natural world. The “discontinuous gods,” particularly beautiful when read in an Eleusinian context, carefully represents the cycle of disappearance and return in the drama of the Persephone myth. The stag and the leopard are figures used in The Cantos to represent myths of Artemis and Dionysus, respectively.23 All is in “the crisp air,” that space of clarity and judgment. The narrative then comes to focus on the natural world: Moon on the palm leaf,           confusion; Confusion, source of renewals; Yellow wing, pale in the moon shaft, Green wing, pale in the moon shaft, Pomegranate, pale in the moon shaft, White horn, pale in the moon shaft, and Titania By the drinking hole,      steps, cut in the basalt. Danced there Athame, danced, and there Phæthusa With colour in the vein, Strong as with blood-drink, once, With colour in the vein, Red in the smoke-faint throat. Dis caught her up. (21/100)

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The image of lunar light sets an Eleusinian scene. The pomegranate is a sign that Persephone pervades this passage, and the drinking hole, the steps, and the acts of dancing are for Leon Surette definite indications of Eleusis.24 As William Cookson astutely notes, Pound’s source for the narrative of Persephone’s abduction is not just Ovid alone, but specifically Arthur Golding’s translation (first published in its entirety in 1567), which renders it thus: While in this garden Proserpine was taking her pastime, In gathering either Violets blue, or Lillies white as Lime, And while of maidenly desire she filled her maund and Lap, Endeavouring to outgather her companions there, by hap Dis spied her: loved her: caught her up—and all at once, well near.25 Pound held Golding’s translation in high esteem, writing in The ABC of Reading (1934) that it is “the most beautiful book in the [English] language.”26 One may compare his use of a translation here to Canto I’s lengthy appropriation of Andreas Divus’s Latin version of The Odyssey, engaging not only with an original source but with its enduring legacy. Pound, channeling Golding, emphasizes Persephone’s lack of agency, as if even within her own myth she is only a sign of mysteries greater than she: namely, the essential intersection of nature, divinity, and cosmic understanding. The end of this Canto is perhaps the most difficult part to elucidate. Pound writes that “the old man went on there / beating his mule with an asphodel” (21/100). Jacob Korg notes the presence of Eleusis here as an asphodel is a flower grown in Hades’s realm, its being used to beat a mule a “reflection of the indifference to the sacred.”27 The identity of the old man is given as Hermes by Akiko Miyake, yet considering Pound’s credible knowledge of ancient Greece, this seems unlikely for two reasons. First, Hermes plays an active role as a psychopomp in the Eleusinian mysteries, and is thus too involved in the myth to play the role of an apathetic old man, who seems not to register

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the events narrated. Second, the old man could very well be the same who damns Midas for “lacking a Pan” (21/99). This is most likely to be Silenus, a companion (or sometimes mentor or foster father) of the god Dionysus, who while traveling arrived at King Midas’s palace. The King, having recognized him, lavishly celebrated his guest for ten days before returning him to a grateful Dionysus. In return Midas was granted any wish and he chose the ability to turn anything he touched into yellow gold. Of course, this included food and water, and Midas later prostrated himself before Dionysus and begged to have his lavish, avaricious gift taken away, thereafter becoming a worshipper of the god Pan.28 Silenus is an amusing figure, whose gifts of wisdom and prophecy come to him only in moments of drunkenness, and he is often depicted traveling on a simple mule. Pound’s addition of an asphodel, the sacred flower of the Greek underworld, adds to this comic portrayal. In this sense, the “old man” stands for both divine wisdom and human indifference; the divine secrets of nature often pass unacknowledged. In Canto 21, Pound’s Eleusinian drive is delicately balanced between the moment of ascent and the moment of descent; its divine revelation a fine balance between disappearance and return, descent and ascent, history and myth, and, furthermore, the poetics in which one may strike such balances. As throughout The Cantos, paradise comes and goes, rising out of history and fading back into the quotidian: it comes as a lyrical relief from the details of historical documents and economic theories, and yet, this Canto reminds us, speaks both to them and through them.

16

Canto 25 John Gery

Canto 25 makes a significant turn in The Cantos, in multiple ways. As the quarter point of what Pound may have anticipated as a hundred Cantos, it crystalizes at least four of his central preoccupations to this point: (a) the Imagist principle of the universal particular, (b) the role of patronage in culture, (c) a vision of paradisal beauty, as manifested in Venice, and (d) the Neoplatonic manifestation of divine light in myth and music. In addition, when read in sequence from Cantos 3 and 17, Canto 25 marks a shift in Pound’s view of Venice, from an exotic, transcendent city to a working example of culture, with decadent underpinnings, but also as prescient to the Fascist co-optation of the Italian Renaissance in the 1930s.1 Third, in sequence with Cantos 24 and 26, Canto 25 can be read as one of “the Venetian Cantos,” the “second most sustained section” within the arc of A Draft of XXX Cantos after the Malatesta Cantos (8–11).2 Fourth, by bringing Venice into prominence as a locus, something only alluded to in Cantos 3 and 17, Canto 25 creates a structural contrast to both the Malatesta and the Hell/Purgatory Cantos (14–16), substantiating a pattern of clusters to be repeated, expounded, and expanded in the Nuevo Mundo Cantos (31–34), Siena Cantos (42–44), Chinese Cantos (52–61), and Adams Cantos (62–71), as well as in such clusters as the economic (85–89)

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and love (90–95) sequences in Rock-Drill. Finally, in its style, Canto 25 showcases three of Pound’s most characteristic techniques—the invocation of other voices (as in Cantos 1–4, 12, and 19), the presentation of “original,” translated material from archival sources (as in Cantos 8–11, 13, and 24), and the “ideogrammic,” or “ply over ply” (15), method of juxtaposing disassociated images and passages as a structural “objective correlative” (to use T. S. Eliot’s phrase)3 to create vivid contrasts and invoke epic themes without overstating them. Yet despite its display of formal devices, overall Canto 25 offers a remarkably cogent demonstration of the reach of The Cantos. Its 185 lines divide into twelve, mostly discrete strophes, following the precedent of Canto 4, that signal transitions through spacing, although some turns occur within strophes. A clear way to block the Canto is into three thematic sections: (i) lines 1–86, an English translation from Italian of particular writs on various domestic laws approved by Venice’s Maggior Consiglio (Doge’s Council) between 1255 and 1415, mostly as related to the expansion of the Palazzo Ducale (Doge’s Palace), which served not only as the seat of the Venetian Republic, but as its most prominent civic monument, located in the heart of Venice adjacent to its majestic Byzantine cathedral in Piazza San Marco (St. Mark’s Square); (ii) lines 87–143, beginning with “And Sulpicia / green shoot now” (117),4 an interlude splicing lines that depict Sulpicia, the Roman poetess of the first century BCE as rendered by Tibullus, with a set of six allusions, ranging from the gesture of the nymph Phaethusa in the Odyssey to the vision of Pound’s contemporary, the sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska (1891–1915); and (iii) lines 144–85, a passage concerning a 1513 bid by the artist Titian to complete a historic painting for the “hall of the greater council” (119) in the Palazzo Ducale, a work that went unfinished for more than 25 years, despite Titian’s receiving a considerable advance. In interpreting these thematic turns in Canto 25, readers must also reconcile its tonal shifts, from the satiric voice (if not viciously so) of its opening section, reminiscent of the deadpan humor in Canto 12, to the elevated yet austere lyricism of its middle passage, echoing

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similar passages from earlier Cantos, to the documentary impersonality of the closing passage. But how exactly, then, do these three sections contribute to Pound’s developing vision of cultural history, beauty, and light?

The Palazzo Ducale Canto 25 begins by identifying its source, “THE BOOK OF THE COUNCIL MAJOR” (25/115), which records specific acts passed by the Doge’s Council, as derived from Gimbattista Lorenzi’s Monumenti per servire alla storia del Palazzo Ducale di Venezia (1868), an Italian history Pound probably discovered in an antiquarian bookshop in Venice’s Dorsoduro district in the late 1920s.5 Venice was founded as a Republic in 697 with the election of its first Doge, followed by the building of San Marco beginning in 830. But what interests Pound is less the birth of the Republic—which, while not a true democracy, was until the fourteenth century a government “more broadly based than that of any other European country except Switzerland”6—than its civic agenda, particularly in renovating the Palazzo Ducale between 1341 and 1425.7 Earlier buildings erected on the Piazzetta by the lagoon lacked sufficient size and grandeur for the expanding Doge’s Council, as Venice became a commercial and global power. But the grand palazzo that replaced them, designed by Pietro Baseggio, steadily grew in reputation and, even five centuries later, was praised by John Ruskin as the pinnacle achievement of Venice’s early regime, representing “the Gothic imagination in its full career”8 and successfully resisting the later Renaissance style that Ruskin denigrated. Describing Palazzo Ducale as “Buckingham Palace, the Tower of olden days, the Houses of Parliament, and Downing Street, all in one,”9 Ruskin considers it the Venetian Parthenon. Pound knew Ruskin’s The Stones of Venice well, yet he opens Canto 25 not by celebrating Palazzo Ducale’s majesty (which he invokes in Canto 21), but by citing a 1255 law by the Maggior Consiglio forbidding gambling in the Palazzo’s Council Chamber, followed by a similar

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act from 1266 outlawing the shooting of dice “anywhere in the palace or / in the loggia of the Rialto” (25/115), the famous stone bridge built across the Grand Canal a century earlier. Then the Canto presents an extended account from 1316 in the hand of “John Marchesini,” the Council “notary,” authenticating the successful mating of two lions “neath the portico next the house of the dwelling of / the Castaldio and of the heralds of the Lord Doge” (25/115). Most tellingly, Pound’s diction in rendering the annals includes a mix of legal jargon (“be it enacted,” “under pain of,” “In libro pactorum,” “dicto millessimo,” “knew carnally”) and slang (“shoot crap,” “kids,” “chucked in the water,” “folk”). Its sheer length, if nothing else, underscores the Council’s exaggerated, mock-official self-importance, as Marchesini notes how the coupling of the lions (the symbol of Saint Mark and the Republic) has resulted in “three lion cubs vivos et pilosos” (lively and hairy), as duly witnessed by “the aforesaid Lord Doge and as it / were all the Venetians and other folk who were in / Venice that day” (25/116). Peter Makin characterizes this opening as “delightful” in its depiction of the notary’s self-conscious attempt “vainly to distance himself from his own naivety,” conveying “the mental tone of the period,”10 but David Moody is more circumspect about Pound’s “translation” of the notary’s testimony. Comparing this strophe to Pound’s earlier portraits of the Renaissance’s Medici family of Florence (Canto 8) and Este family of Ferrara (Canto 24), Moody reads the passage as emphasizing the Council’s “petty regulations,” distracting from their real business, the expansion of the Palazzo.11 Structurally, the Council’s pompous preoccupation with the lions’ mating is ironically underscored by the next strophe—consisting of only one line, phrased as a postscript: “Also a note from Pontius Pilate dated the ‘year 33’” (25/116). Without comment, as though in an Imagist poem, Pound juxtaposes an aside on the prime event of Christian doctrine against the prolonged report on the lions’ birth— whether to reinforce Ruskin’s notion of Venetian decadence in the early Renaissance or for some other reason is not evident. Regardless, the satire seems implicit.12

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The next four-plus strophes then return to various minute acts recorded by the Council. Strophe three lists expenses for two columns in 1323 for the St. Nicholas chapel in the Palazzo and for gilding for the palace door; strophe four records permission granted a young woman, Donna Sorantia Soranzo, to come concealed at night (since women were prohibited entrance to the Palazzo) to “alight at the ripa del Palazzo” (25/116) to visit the Doge, her father. Then citations accelerate, as though the poet, assuming we have gotten the Canto’s drift, sees no need to prolong details: a single line (rhyming, perhaps, with the line on Pontius Pilate) prices the stone used for a lion’s statue in 1335, succeeded by five lines from a 1340 dictum by the “lords noble” determining that the new Council Chamber be built “over the columns toward the canal where the walk is” (25/117), facing the lagoon. The next strophe collapses seventy years of writs into five lines: A phrase from 1344 alludes to moving the Palazzo’s prison “because of the stink of the dungeon” which the doges can smell on their way to the assembly, anticipating the addition of the Bridge of Sighs on the Palazzo’s top floor. Then Pound cites a writ from 65 years later to enlarge the Doge’s private quarters, “since the most serene Doge can scarce / stand upright in his bedroom.”13 Although yet another of the Council’s “petty regulations,” no doubt, these lines also suggest the severe restrictions imposed on a doge, despite his prestige and power. As often in his “poem including history,”14 Pound revives controversies without taking sides. Finally, from 1415, the passage lists construction materials purchased to build a “stone stair” to beautify the Palazzo, referring to what Ruskin calls the “Giant’s Stair” leading up to the first floor.15 This list, while providing a glimpse into daily matters, also suggests the Council’s concern for artistry, a Renaissance practice which Pound introduces with Sigismondo Malatesta’s patronage of art in Canto 8 and to which he returns later in Canto 25. The stairs here also recall “the gray steps [that] lead up under the cedars” in Canto 3, there associated with the Dogana’s steps in line 1, on which the poet sits across the Grand Canal from Palazzo Ducale.

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But then, mid-strophe, the Canto abruptly turns lyrical, even Imagistic, as Pound describes the Palazzo’s appearance: Which is to say: they built out over the arches and the palace hangs there in the dawn, the mist, in that dimness, or as one rows in from past the murazzi the barge slow after moon-rise and the voice sounding under the sail. Mist gone. (25/117) This passage echoes lines in Canto 21 depicting this same scene. There Pound uses the term, “nel tramonto” (21/98), meaning, “at sunset,” echoing the evening splendor described in Cantos 3 and 17, but here he depicts the same scene at dawn. Structurally, Palazzo Ducale has a long row of arched columns at ground level, with a second row of columns along a portico above them, so that when the fog from the lagoon rolls into the Piazzetta, it obscures the palace’s ground level and creates the visual effect of the upper row of columns floating “With gold mist over the tide-mark” (21/98). The Council Chamber rises a level above that. In “a trick of craft,” writes Makin, the Palazzo’s “great upper mass hanging over a continuous open arcade can take one into the double and multiple realities that give a ‘sense of sudden liberation.’”16 Furthermore, “the voice sounding under the sail” recalls Canto 17, where “A boat came, / One man holding her sail, / Guiding her with oar caught over gunwale” (17/77–78). But in Canto 25, as the sun rises, the mist dissipates, and the poem veers into what becomes its centerpiece.

Pone metum Hugh Kenner may be the first critic to associate this passage from Canto 25 with Pound’s notion of virtù, as initially defined in his essay, “Cavalcanti.”17 There, describing virtù as an “interactive force,” Pound compares it to modern electricity, as a force with “no borders [. . .]

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a shapeless ‘mass’ of force,” which a “medieval ‘natural philosopher’ would find [. . .] full of enchantments, not only [in] the light of the electric bulb, but [in] the thought of the current hidden in air and in wire [which] would give him a mind full of forms.”18 In Canto 25, Pound finds this force present not only in nature, but in sculpture and music, simultaneously drawn together in the pastoral figure of Sulpicia, the poet whose opus, or “Garland of Sulpicia,” consists entirely of eleven poems gathered in The Poems, volume III, of Tibullus (ca. 55–19 BCE).19 In fact, Sulpicia may be a persona of Tibullus himself or one of his successors. Kenner considers her image “something to set against the ‘forest of marble’” in Canto 17, seen here lying in “the long soft grass” beside her beloved Cerinthus, the boy, with “the flute [. . .] by her thigh” among “the fauns, twig-strong” (25/118), akin to “a stone Aphrodite” rising from the Adriatic.20 In one of her poems, though struck ill by Apollo, she assures Cerinthus, who fears for her life: “Pone metum Cerinthe; deus nec laedit amantes” (“But shed your fear, Cerinthus; the god does not harm lovers”).21 Juxtaposing these lovers reclined in the grass against the image of Palazzo Ducale elevated in the fog, Pound clearly draws a line between them. Makin reads this shift as moving from the practical building of the Palazzo into “the territory of what is more real than the ordinary.”22 In other words, the Canto captures the force of virtù in a dramatic moment of change (something Ruskin also acknowledges), bolstered by Sulpicia’s reassuring words. To deepen this vision, Pound brings in the sculptor who “sees the form in the air / before he sets hand to mallet” (25/117), here alluding to Gaudier-Brzeska. In his 1916 tribute to the Vorticist sculptor who died in the First World War at age 23, Pound writes, “A given subject or emotion belongs to that [. . .] sort of artist who must know it most intimately and most intensely before he can render it adequately in his art.”23 The sculptor in particular, he argues, is engaged more in “planes” than in images; his vision is multidimensional, an advantage over the painter’s two-dimensional perspective. In fact, might not Gaudier-Brezeska’s “defining of these masses by planes”24 describe The Cantos’ method?

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Some critics read Canto 25’s middle section differently than do Kenner and Makin. Ron Bush, for example, argues that the analogy of “a structure like that of a Bach fugue” as the method of A Draft of XXX Cantos (as Pound himself explains it in a 1929 letter to his father) is, at best, revisionary, reflecting more Pound’s growing interest in music in the 1920s than his original conception of The Cantos.25 Wendy Flory considers the Sulpicia passage a “summarizing statement about the paradisal” but finds it “too general to be entirely effective,” adding that in deciding “to generalize his presentation of passionate love by focusing on the Roman poet Sulpicia rather than a specific beloved woman,” Pound creates a figure “more real than the ‘discontinuous gods’ [see 21/99] and yet frees [himself] from being too personal.”26 On the other hand, Kevin Oderman links this passage to “elements of visionary eroticism” in Pound’s earliest poetry: that the lovers lie in “the long soft grass” creates a “localization which is mildly suggestive, undulant, even erotic”; the flute lain aside “has a phallic significance, not so much as a symbol as a description born from habits of indirection” (Oderman cites a letter from Pound to Viola Dexter Jordan where he likens a phallus to a flute); and, through a series of interconnections, Oderman identifies the “ivory uncorrupted” (25/117) as “descriptive of an erotic encounter” of a particularly “hygienic” kind.27 By reconciling other phrases throughout this passage as not “nonsensical” but “superficially fragmented,” Oderman reads it, especially given the Latin phrase from Sulpicia’s poem on Cerinthus’s birthday, “Hic mihi dies sanctus” (25/118) (“This day you give me is sacred”), as highly intimate, because it “confirms the implicit spirituality with which Pound invests the passage throughout.”28 As the Canto continues, it shifts to “heavy voices, / Heavy sound,” uttering in Latin, “‘Sero, sero...’” (25/118) (“too late, too late”). Moody contends that these voices return to the doges’ council, as they lament, “‘Nothing we made, we set nothing in order, / ‘Neither house nor the carving, / [. . .] / We have gathered a sieve full of water’” (25/118), only to be countered again by Sulpicia’s song, accompanied by a “chorus of young fauns moving to the notes of a pan pipe.”29 In tone, these voices

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seem derived from The Waste Land, which Pound had worked over extensively and which he invokes earlier in Cantos 7 and 8.30 But in the eighth strophe he brings back the heavy voices, speaking of “the dead concepts,” as they seemingly take an excursion into Dante’s Inferno and find “the shadow, / Noble forms, lacking life, that bolge, that valley / the dead words keeping form, / and the cry: Civis Romanus” (25/118). Whether invoking Dante or echoing Canto 24’s account of Niccolò d’Este (1383–1441) on his 1415 Odyssey from Ferrara to Jerusalem, here the “clear air” is “dark, dark,” without hope or life.31 The sequence of allusions in the next two strophes further gloss this barren yet diaphanous landscape: first, “The vanity of Ferrara” suggests not only Niccolò’s journey to the East but, according to Carroll F. Terrell, the failed meeting in Ferrara in 1438 between Pope Eugenius IV and the Greek patriarch attempting to reconcile the Western and Eastern Churches.32 The next strophe presents a Neoplatonic vision of “Forms seen” (25/119) that includes (a) an alluring image of the nymph Phaethusa, daughter of Helios, whom Odysseus encounters at Circe’s directive in the Odyssey, Book XII, (b) the image of Sulpicia’s flute again, seen here “against” Phaethusa, an epic rhyme that creates a dreamlike aura, and (c) the Babylonian figure of Utnapishtim in Gilgamesh, Tablet XI: having survived the Great Flood with the god Ea’s assistance and been granted immortality, Utnapishtim teaches Gilgamesh to accept his own mortality, thereby “Casting his gods back into the νους” (25/119).33 After a strophe break comes the refrain, “‘as the sculptor sees the form in the air... / ‘as glass seen under water’” [25/119]),34 which blends with the words of Aphrodite, after coupling with Anchises (Aeneas’s father), when she reveals her godly nature, as the phrase, “the waves taking form as crystal” (25/119), echoes the close of Canto 23. This strophe ends with music, as “notes as facets of air” (25/119). Peter Liebregts finds in this passage telling evidence of Pound’s Neoplatonism. Citing Pound’s notes and earlier drafts of Canto 25, Liebregts traces its imagery as proceeding from the mortal world (smoke, meadows, guts) through “Forms, forms and renewal, gods

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held in the air” to the νους (“nous”), here making its first appearance in The Cantos. For Plotinus, argues Liebregts, “ultimately the nous of the ideal self ”—a “creative force” akin to virtù—and “the Nous”— or “Intellect,” which Plotinus considers “the principle and cause of essence, life, and cognitive activity,” but also “the world of Being” from which proceeds the “Soul”35—“are potentially one and the same.”36 Although Pound eventually removed passages from Canto 25 that explicitly linked Plotinus’s Neoplatonism with Utnapishtim, turning instead to the Western myth of Aphrodite and Anchises, his drafts document how he “connects the idea Love as an active instigation toward the divine with the notion of the Nous as a vortex of energy in which and through which the Ideas may be seen,” therein demonstrating that “when poetry is able to combine the auditory and the visual, it can elevate man from his material reality into a higher state [. . .] In this way, Canto XXV is Pound’s strongest expression of his ideal of sculptural-melopoeietic poetry.”37 Liebregts makes a compelling argument for the Neoplatonic foundation of Canto 25, as Pound’s layering of allusions, accentual rhythms, and diaphanous imagery creates an austere, ritualistic poetry. With rhetorical flourish, his lines perform the occasions they designate, drawing the reader in, as though by prayer. But they do so without proselytizing.

Titian’s Commission Canto 25 does not end with this merging of the nous/Nous, a descent into Hell, nor a rise to paradise, despite its sensually charged lyricism. Rather, Pound returns to the Palazzo Ducale for the last two strophes— this time concerning Titian’s bid in 1513 to provide a painting for the Council Chamber on “the worst side of the room / that no one has been willing to tackle, / and do it as cheap or much cheaper” (25/119) than anyone else. The penultimate strophe cites his offer, while the final strophe, longer than any other except the opening strophe, closes the Canto in a similarly bureaucratic style.38 By framing Canto 25 with

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these two passages, Pound affirms his documentary idiom as vital to the epic, not only in a dramatic break from a heroic, or any other, uniform metric, but in how his poem crosses from myth into history, from story into fact. As Donald Davie contends, linking Pound to William Carlos Williams, whenever Pound inserts “original documents” as “foreign bodies embedded in his poem,” though some readers may decry them as “proof of incurable dilettantism [. . .] they may just as well prove the direct opposite: his determination to hew the contours of his subject, to ‘prove the truth’ [to cite Williams] of his book.”39 Applying an archival method, Pound also implicitly affirms cultural politics as germane to poetry, thereby strategically distinguishing his modernist vocation as a poet from the aestheticism, for instance, of the Georgian poets who preceded him. When Titian (ca. 1485/90–1576) proposed to paint Battle of Spoleto40 for the Doge’s Council Chamber, he was only in his twenties, not yet established in Venice. Initially a student of Giovanni Bellini (ca. 1430–1516), the “Zuan Bellin” Pound celebrates in Canto 45,41 the precocious artist would soon rival his elder’s fame. But to gain notoriety (and lucrative commissions) he first needed to prove himself.42 This condition no doubt explains his eager offer to the Doge’s Council. However, before long he would dominate Venetian—and European— art for much of the sixteenth century.43 After Bellini’s “demise” (25/120) in 1516, the court in Ferrara conscripted Titian to replace him as court painter, and, with the great success of his Assumption in Venice’s Frari church and other works, his reputation soared, so by 1530 he became court painter for Charles V of Spain. As Pound reveals, for his contract, Titian requested and was granted not funds but a share in the brokerage at the “Fondamenta delli Thodeschi” (Venice’s stock exchange), and, as profits rose, he started receiving a considerable income for his unfinished work. The two documents Pound translates record the Council’s requisition nine years after Titian’s original bid that he either complete the job or lose his “succession” and return all payments, followed by another mandate fifteen years later demanding the same settlement, with the painting still unfinished after 25 years.

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Concerning this passage’s tone, William Cookson describes it neutrally as “an account of the corrupt behaviour of Titian,”44 but Michael Coyle argues that its “prosaicness [is of] a deliberately imported quality,” and Pound’s “long and capacious lines” that “include history in a concrete form” are “considered and polemical.”45 Still, what is at stake here is nothing less than the embattled relationship between art and patronage as it engaged Pound by the early 1920s, when this Canto was composed.46 From the Council’s perspective, Titian’s failure to meet the “reasonable” expectation of his government patrons is exploitative, if not illegal. Yet the passage also rhymes with earlier documents on patronage, which, as with other motifs in The Cantos, in Makin’s words, “recall each other through their differences, aesthetic and ‘moral.’”47 In Canto 8, Pound translates a 1449 letter from Malatesta (1417–68) to Giovanni de Medici (1421–63) requesting a painter (probably Piero della Francesca [1420?–92]) to come to Rimini to paint a fresco in the condottiere’s “Tempio,” still under construction. But in his letter Malatesta clarifies his intention to provide the artist “good treatment” with a permanent home and income, “So that he can work as he likes, / Or waste his time as he likes / (affatigandose per suo piacere o no / non gli manchera la provixione mai), never lacking provision” (8/29). In Canto 25, might not Titian be seen enacting the very behavior Malatesta considers an artist’s right, to be free of the prosaicness of the Maggior Consiglio? Flory reads this contrast as demonstrating the Council’s “impersonality and officiousness,” unlike Malatesta’s “highly personal involvement” in art.48 Dasenbrock takes this principle even further: The Venice of Titian’s time, in its very richness and commercialization, is reminiscent of the modern world, where commercial values have thoroughly infiltrated the art world. And what Pound disdains about the relation between Titian and the government of Venice is precisely what he disdains about the art world wherever it is corrupted by commercial and market forces.49

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In the end, Canto 25 leaves the inherent problems of patronage unresolved by the poet50—who himself appears next, at the beginning of Canto 26, lying idly and unemployed “under the crocodile / By the column” (26/121) directly beside Palazzo Ducale. As throughout The Cantos, Canto 25 raises serious questions about patronage without advocating one position. The patronage practiced by both Malatesta and the doges seem neither ideal nor unequivocally corrupt, but it is commonplace as a practice which Pound displays here as a blueprint for any deliberations on building a paradiso terrestre. Regardless, Pound brings the making of art, the struggle to realize a vision (as it was for Titian), directly into the world of day-to-day experience. Considered in the larger context of A Draft of XXX Cantos, as well as in relation to Pound’s Neoplatonic union of nous and Nous, the Canto’s framing of the Sulpicia passage between two strangely rendered documents from the Serene Republic’s history vividly conveys his conviction not only that creating a culture requires ingenious design, cunning, imagination, and the full commitment of resources, but that under any circumstances beauty is difficult.

17

Canto 26 David Barnes

Pound’s early and middle Cantos are characterized by the recurrence of certain spaces and locations. One of these “sacred places” (to borrow Hugh Kenner’s term)1 is the city of Venice, which surfaces with a reference to the “Dogana’s steps” in Canto 3 (3/11)2 and reemerges in Canto 17 (“Marble trunks out of stillness, / On past the palazzi” [17/76]). Venice forms the primary location of Cantos 25 and 26, written during the 1925–27 period as Pound was getting accustomed to a new life in Italy (he had moved to Rapallo, on the other side of Italy from Venice, in 1924). Canto 26 was first published in London by John Rodker, as part of A Draft of the Cantos 17–27, in September 1928.3 Both Cantos describe a Venetian “golden age” of political pomp and ceremony. Canto 25 is concerned with construction—in this case, the construction of the Doge’s Palace, the Palazzo Ducale. Canto 26 begins with a picture of Pound himself in Venice, before moving on to describe various political machinations to do with the meeting of East and West, alongside which he also examines changing attitudes to art. While treatments of Pound’s evocations of Venice tend to stress a fantasized and idyllic space, it is interesting to read his engagement with the city in parallel with his increasing cultural and political

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involvement in contemporary Italian life. In this context depictions of Venice may be related to the increasing importance of the city as one model of Italian history used by the Fascist regime. In particular, Fascism looked to Venetian history and iconography to justify aggressive expansion in the eastern Mediterranean. Icons such as the Lion of St. Mark were appropriated by some as a symbol not just of Venice but of Fascist Italy. As the historian Kate Ferris has shown, St. Mark’s lion statues (“symbol[s] of Italian might”) were sent to sites all over the Italian empire, including to Libya and to Littorio, Mussolini’s new city outside Rome.4 Fascism thus used the ancient Republic of Venice as a historical touchstone—along with ancient Rome, medieval Tuscany, and other models—to lend the regime authority and tradition. Pound’s move to Italy, and his increasing engagement with Fascism in the late 1920s and early 1930s, suggest he would have encountered this rhetoric at an early stage. Certainly, by 1937, in his essay, “Europe—MCMXXXVI: Reflections Written on the Eve of a New Era,” originally published in the Globe, Pound was attacking critics of Italian expansion in Yugoslavia, writing: “All the civilisation that there has ever been in the Dalmatian and Balkan countries went in from the Roman Empire and from Venice.”5 Fascist investigations into Venetian history—debates pursued throughout the later 1920s and 1930s—were contemporaneous with Pound’s writing of Cantos 25 and 26. The “lost Venice” which Pound is trying to reclaim in these Cantos was also being “revived” for the time of modernity by the Fascist administration. In Canto 25, for example, there can be seen to be a contrast between the life centered around the lions’ miraculous birth at the beginning of the Canto and the “dead” words and concepts which Pound describes later. Both Canto 25 and Canto 26 describe a Venice of life and vitality; far from a lost or “fallen” city, they articulate a space of economic, political, and cultural power. Canto 26 begins with a lyrical vision of Pound’s youthful experience of Venice in 1908: gondolas, singing, and lanterns. The beautiful flowing imagery here suggests an eternal or mythic vision of Venice pictured as boats moving over water, light interacting with shade:

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And I came here in my young youth and lay there under the crocodile By the column, looking East on the Friday, [. . .] And at night they sang in the gondolas And in the barche with lanthorns; (26/121) Massimo Bacigalupo reads these lines with Pound as the prototypical artist working, “following rhythms which cannot be determined by contract.”6 Here the rhythm is the movement of the sun in Venice, and Pound idles under the two columns in St. Mark’s Square, the same that Carmagnola was executed between back in Canto 17. There is certainly a lot to do with art and artists in this Canto: the sculptor Matteo de’ Pasti, the painter Carpaccio, and Mozart all feature. Yet these references occur against a backdrop of political and economic intrigue. Aside from the excursion into the Salzburg of Mozart at the end of the Canto, it is Venice as political and cultural powerhouse with which the poem is most concerned. Canto 26 is particularly interested in Venice’s relationship with the East. Pound begins by describing himself “looking East on the Friday” and this first reference establishes a recurrent theme in the poem. Venice itself was often seen as a kind of gateway to the East. With its trading links, Venice was often “traditionally” associated with the Ottomans in the early modern period, for example.7 To look East from the “crocodile” was also to look out towards the sea, towards Venice’s former colonies in the Eastern Mediterranean. Furthermore, the “crocodile” itself is interesting in this context, for the “crocodile” or dragon perched on one of the two columns at the water’s edge in Piazzetta San Marco is associated with St. Theodore, Venice’s first patron saint. An eastern saint, Theodore is associated with Venice’s origins as a trading post of the Byzantine Empire. Like St. George, he was supposed to have fought a dragon (the “crocodile” which Pound is resting under) and was one of a number of Greek military saints. This reference to Theodore seems to reinforce the connections to the East in the Canto—as

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a primarily Eastern Orthodox saint, his appearance anticipates the arrival of the Eastern Orthodox bishops later in the poem. Furthermore, Venice is considerably further west geographically than many of the places with which St. Theodore is associated—Constantinople, Jerusalem, and Damascus. Pound appears to be setting up Venice as a point of departure to the East and a place for encounters between East and West. The first “encounter” is witnessed fairly early on in the Canto, where the sculptor Matteo de’ Pasti, under the employment of Sigismondo Malatesta, is dispatched to Constantinople in 1461 to paint the Turkish sultan’s portrait. Here he is intercepted by the Venetians, who suspect him of being in league with the Turks. Pasti is released: “with a caveat/ ‘caveat ire ad Turchum, that he stay out of / Constantinople / ‘if he holds dear our government’s pleasure’” (26/121). Pasti is “let out” on condition that he beware the Turks and stays clear of Constantinople. What significance does this encounter hold, then, for the portrayal of Venice in Pound’s epic? Robert Casillo, in his impressive study The Genealogy of Demons: Anti-Semitism, Fascism and the Myths of Ezra Pound, suggests that Venice here is set up in the Canto as a rather suspect place, “infected” by contact with the Orient. It is, like Gibraltar, one of “Pound’s border places, where demarcations disappear and usury therefore inhabits.”8 Like Gibraltar—where, in Canto 22, Pound recalls the interior of a synagogue and Christians, Jews, and Muslims interact—it is a place where Eastern and Western traditions meet. Casillo sees this as having primarily negative connotations. His appraisal of the Venice of The Cantos as a place where “usury inhabits” relates it to the context of anti-Semitism. For Casillo, the “luxury” or luxuria that creeps into Canto 26 is from the Orient and connected to Pound’s paranoiac anxieties around “Jewishness.” The key passage is: And hither came Selvo, doge,      that first mosaic’d San Marco, And his wife that would touch food but with forks,

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Sed aurei furculis, that is     With small golden prongs Bringing in, thus, the vice of luxuria; (26/122) Casillo identifies “good” and “bad” forms of luxury existing in the universe of this poem. The “bad” luxury—luxuria—comes from the Orient: “introduced into Venice by the Doge’s Greek wife [Theodora, daughter of the Byzantine emperor, Constantine Ducas XI], whose culture is already corrupted by the decadent Near Eastern world.9 “Decadent” in this context stands for the effeminizing luxury that Pound associated with Hebraic culture. Casillo notes that this represents an attempt by Pound to blame “luxury’s bad effects on women and the foreign.”10 He also usefully shows how Pound borrowed concepts from the Orientalist obsessions of nineteenth-century decadence, and in particular highlights Pound’s interest in the figure of Salome.11 But Casillo’s reading dichotomizes too much; for the “good” luxury that Casillo associates with the “mosaic’ing” of the basilica of San Marco has also come from the East—Doge Selvo “required every Venetian ship loading in the East to bring home marbles or fine stones for the basilica” (my emphasis).12 Furthermore, as Tony Tanner has argued, it is unlikely that Pound saw the use of forks as an indicator of decadent luxury, thus making the comment on luxuria “a contemporary [i.e. medieval] one.”13 This further complicates Casillo’s reading of the comment on luxuria here as signaling the “decline” of Venice. What is more, the “luxurious pageant” that follows this section, which the critic takes to be “an image of Venice corrupted by Renaissance opulence,” seems, again, to be a more sympathetic evocation of Venetian pomp than such a comment would suggest.14 There is much joy and exuberance here: The masters of wool cloth Glass makers in scarlet Carrying fabrefactions of glass; 25th April the jousting,

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The whole scene seems to come out of one of Carpaccio’s processions and the presence of Niccolò d’Este, one of Pound’s “heroes” in the Cantos (these were the wedding festivities for Niccolò’s son Leonello), would further support the theory that this procession is being portrayed in a positive light. Casillo sees the Venice of Canto 26 as “both earthly paradise [. . .] and [. . .] Hell.”15 While it is true that the ambiguities of the city as portrayed in the early and middle Cantos never leave Pound’s poetry, I do not read Venice’s contact with the East as corrupting here. In the caveat quoted near the beginning of the Canto, it is Venice that is cautioning less contact with the East (the Turks, Constantinople). Furthermore, recent scholarship in Renaissance studies has constructed the East as a more complicated concept for Western Europe than had previously been thought (the work of Lisa Jardine and Jerry Brotton is an example of this).16 Rather than being construed as a dark “other,” the East (Ottoman Turkey in particular) is seen as a vital trading partner and site of cultural exchange, for Venice as for other European powers. Certainly, Pound’s interest in China and Japan might lead us away from a simplistic concept of “the East” as “corrupting” within the Poundian universe. In Casillo’s analysis, as we have seen, the sense of “corruption” which degrades Venice comes from the East and is related to the poet’s anti-Semitism. Other critics see Venice as inherently corrupt—Guy Davenport, for example, who views the city portrayed in both Cantos 25 and 26 as a “dark moral entity” or an “ominous, unworldly place.”17 The “crocodile” viewed at the beginning of Canto 26 is, in Davenport’s reading, stripped of all its contexts and set up simply as a symbol of “insincerity,” setting up the dark, unnatural world to follow.18 This chapter finds these arguments to be too simplistic a take on the meaning of Venice in these Cantos. The appearances of Venice

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in the middle Cantos come in an ever more complicated—and ever more political—world. Instead of a purely corrupt city, Venice instead emerges in Canto 26 as a vortex, a center where artistic and political power grow in parallel with one another. This picture is complex, and yet reflects Pound’s own increasing attraction to the Fascist regime as a potential politico-cultural “patron state” (the phrase is the historian Marla Stone’s).19 The blending of one historical epoch into another in Canto 26, beginning with the “Relaxetur!” that seems to jolt Pound out of his reverie (“I came here in my young youth”) and ending with Mozart’s note, represents, I suggest, a synchronicity of modernist and Fascist mythology for Pound. In “Ulysses, Order and Myth,” originally published in the Dial in 1923, T. S. Eliot had hailed James Joyce’s use of Homeric parallel in Ulysses as having “the importance of a scientific discovery.” Eliot praises Joyce for the use of what he describes as “a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity,” for the way in which he controls and orders “the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history.”20 Eliot’s approach to history—a “mythical method,” where historical processes could be tamed and “ordered” in creative ways—obviously aligns him with other modernists, including Pound and Yeats (to whom Eliot also alludes in the essay).21 Yet it also parallels Fascist concerns with “editing” history, where historical time could be synchronized, and marshaled in support of the Mussolini regime. Indeed, Eliot himself expressed sympathies for Fascism in the same year as his “Ulysses” essay was published. Writing to the Daily Mail newspaper in support of their pro-Fascist stance, he praised “the remarkable series of articles which you have been publishing on Fascismo; these alone constitute a public service of the greatest value.”22 There is some evidence to suggest that Yeats also figures as an influence on Pound’s writing of Cantos 25 and 26. Pound’s use of the word “gyring” in Canto 25 suggests an allusion to Yeats, whose theory of the historical “gyres” saw history as a series of interlocking spirals. Yeats’s gyre theory, like similar occultist and spiritualist ways of approaching history in the period (Jung’s interest in astrology is a parallel), saw

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events unfolding in unavoidable patterns, the circles of time representing different moods to be held in balance. The progress of the gyres, detailed at length in “A Vision,” became for Yeats a kind of “symbolical map” for the unfolding of history.23 Wars and conflicts, whether the Trojan war (as in his 1928 poem “Leda and the Swan”) or the First World War, become by-products of surges of energy—sexual, creative. For Yeats, for example, the “gyre of Will” interlocked with the gyre of “Creative Mind”; power and politics thus become essential for the creation of art.24 There seems to be a conscious or unconscious echoing of Yeats’s theories in Cantos 25 and 26, the creation of art mirroring and paralleling the political expansion of Venice. Although Pound would often dismiss Yeats’s spiritualism (“he [Yeats] will be quite sensible til [sic] some question of ghosts or occultism comes up,” he wrote in 1918 to John Quinn), the confluence of Pound’s and Yeats’s views of history is striking.25 Hence the power of Venice—as political and military center—becomes intrinsically linked with the condition of aesthetics. For Pound, history thus unfolds as a series of aesthetico-political interventions. Matteo de’ Pasti and the Turks, Doge Selvo and the “mosaic’ing” of St. Mark’s, the council of Ferrara (and Gemistus Plethon’s involvement with it), are all here examples of the interweaving of politics and culture; or, in “Yeatsian” terms, these examples sit at the crossing of the gyres. While the close of the Canto, with its discussion of Mozart’s residency in Salzburg, shows an example of bad patronage, the relationship between artist and patron gone wrong (“To the supreme pig, the archbishop of Salzburg: / Lasting filth and perdition” [26/128]), it is often hard to determine Pound’s attitude to events in the rest of the poem. Instead, violence and political uncertainty characterize the Canto, illuminated as it is by artistic or cultural high points: Aureo anulo, to wed the sea as a wife; for beating the Emperor Manuel, eleven hundred and seventy six. 1175 a. d. first bridge in Rialto. (26/124)

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Here for example, architectural creation (the building of the first Rialto bridge) is connected to the Venetian festival of the Doge marrying the sea. The custom derived from the 1176 defeat of the Byzantine empire by a combination of papal and Venetian power. Here, then, ritual, aesthetics, and politics are intertwined; military success leads to ritualized eroticism (the bizarre custom of wedding the sea), which is aligned with the growth of Venice as architectural structure (the Rialto bridge). Such alignments reflect, on the one hand, Yeats’s, Eliot’s, and Pound’s modernist revisions of myth and history, and, on the other, they articulate a Fascist politics of ritualization. As the historian Kate Ferris has shown in the Venetian context, the Mussolini regime’s “ritual organisers made connections between fascism and venezianità—a sense of ‘venetian-ness’ drawn from the myths, history [. . .] and collective memories of Venice.”26 While an emphasis on “rebirth” and organic form remains, Pound’s increasing interest in economics lead him to complex appraisals of Venetian history. Fascist approaches to a “lost Venice” run parallel to Pound’s investigations and act as a catalyst for his own recovery of the Venetian past in these poems.27 Pound’s recovery of Venetian history, along with his actual experience of the Fascist-era city, suggest that the depictions of Venice in The Cantos may be seen as having an increasingly political color. Despite the complexities of Venice’s appearance in these Cantos, the “potential” city revived by Fascist Nationalism is never absent from Pound’s epic. Much as the lyrical beauty of Pound’s visions may enchant, the relationship of his “Venices” to the ideologies of inter-war European politics remains crucial.

18

Canto 29 Alex Pestell

When Cantos 28–30 were first published in 1930, in the little magazine Hound and Horn, Pound added the following footnote: It is increasingly difficult to make the fragments of this long poem complete each in itself, and were they entirely so they wd. be wrong for their purpose as parts. I have no desire either for needless mystery or for writing equally needless explanations. In the case of the present three cantos, I believe the thoughtful reader, if he will take the risk of guessing their probable function in the poem as a whole, will probably guess right. If he is unwilling to hazard such guess he may as well go back and read Tennyson.1 There is the possibility, Pound implies, that the reader who has not kept up with the themes and motifs that thread the sequence as a whole will find it difficult to make sense of three isolated Cantos. But if there are some exegetical problems (even now that we have the whole before us), the real difficulty in guessing Canto 29’s “probable function” comes less from incomplete contextual information than from its incomplete realization of the function itself. Pound’s disparaging

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reference to Tennyson is in keeping with the satirical tone of much of Canto 29, but while, on the face of it, the objects of this satire are the usual suspects—Georgian abstraction, “the contemporary average mind”2—as we traverse the Canto it becomes difficult to disentangle these targets from the values and habits of thought that underwrite the satire. My argument is that Canto 29’s tonal potpourri is a result of Pound’s anxiety over value, and that if this Canto has a “function” it is to signal a break in Pound’s understanding of value that can be dated to the early 1920s. Pound’s anxiety surfaces most clearly in his reflections on occult (or Neoplatonic) thought and in his attitude to women. Canto 29 begins at Lake Garda, a key location for Pound’s transmigration of souls. In 1910, Pound had made a trip to Garda to work on the proofs of The Spirit of Romance, and the view from the Hotel Eden had made its way into a poem, “The Flame.” In this poem, Pound is quite convinced about the location’s metaphysical properties (“Who can look on that blue and not believe?”), which are manifested in its ability to instigate an osmosis of the soul: If I have merged my soul, or utterly Am solved and bound in, through aught here on earth, There canst thou find me [. . .] I say my soul flowed back, became translucent.3 In this early poem, Pound’s sincerity inheres in the self-consciously archaic language and histrionic apostrophes to nature. Almost twenty years later the anachronisms have mostly been withdrawn from ­circulation, but the earnestness is still there: Pearl, great sphere, and hollow, Mist over lake, full of sunlight, Pernella concubina The sleeve green and shot gold over her hand (29/141)4

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If the passage has been shorn of poeticisms, a sincerely apprehended contiguity of souls is nonetheless discernible in the position of “Pernella concubina” as part of a series of comma-separated clauses, which confer upon her a presence as real as the empirically perceived mist and sunlight of Garda. Pernella is followed by Cunizza da Romano, who stands in opposition to Penelope on the ethical balance sheet:5 the passions, vicious or virtuous, of these two women are allocated columns as cleanly demarcated as Dante’s circles. When Pound now turns to the modern world, the contrast with these two archetypes unsurprisingly issues in satire. But at whom is this satire targeted? At stake appears to be a debased mysticism: the osmosis of persons with which the Canto begins is, later, tamed by parentheses and reduced to one voice among many in the bohemian salon: “(Let us speak of the osmosis of persons) / The wail of the phonograph has penetrated their marrow” (29/143). Christine Brooke-Rose is too quick to find here the voice of the poet himself, contrasting with “the lethargy of American suburban life,” unless she means a much younger version of himself, subjected here to at least a modicum of ridicule.6 No one can agree on who precisely the figures in Pound’s satire represent. Kenner sees the Juventus passage as representing an encounter between bourgeois philosophy and the iconoclastic modernist, “Lusty Juventus speculating grandly and the morticians’ house pullulating with scandalous daughters.”7 Daniel Albright, on the other hand, reads Juventus as “a Portrait of the Artist as a Young Ass,” a youthful poetaster interested only in “wine, women and song,” perhaps a parody of the young Pound.8 Following this idea, Albright elsewhere writes that “Pound presents a young numbskull named Juventus, also tantalized by glimpses of the glories beyond the earth’s.”9 For Barbara Will, though, Juventus is “the full man of modern life, [who] actively employs science as a new metaphorical language through which to specify eternal truths and values.”10 Forrest Read reads him as Yeats, and identifies the subsequent “old man” as G. R. S. Mead, whom Pound had met in 1911.11

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Mead also appears in Chapter 39 of Guide to Kulchur, “NeoPlatonicks etc.” Like Canto 29, this chapter is a melange of conflicted attitudes towards a tradition that holds a great deal of interest for Pound.12 Here Pound posits two traditions of study, “factual study” and “the celestial tradition.” At first he seems to prefer the former: he parodies Neoplatonism with lines like “The heaven which is above the heavens (etc.) no earthly poet (etc.) has sung [. . .] The colourless formless and intangible essence is visible to the mind which is the only lord of the soul.”13 This, Pound asserts, could excite “almost anyone if caught at the right state of adolescence,” and indeed seems to have excited the “Lusty Juventus” of Canto 29, who “looked from the planks to heaven” before uttering lines that are comparably gaseous: “Said Juventus: “Immortal... / He said: ‘Ten thousand years before now...’” (29/142). On the other hand, Pound offers an admiring account of Gemistus Plethon and grudgingly admits that the ecstasy borne of Neoplatonism “has done no man any harm.” Mead too is noted as someone who “never did any harm,” and the chapter’s closing account, of Madame Blavatsky informing Mead about “another sphere” perched on top of the world,14 echoes a passage from Canto 29: “In the globe over my head “Twenty feet in diameter, thirty feet in diameter “Glassy, the glaring surface— (29/143) While this corroborates Read’s identification of this speaker with Mead, it is difficult to distinguish these lines, which are not dissimilar from Pound’s own beatific lines elsewhere in The Cantos, from the earlier parodic ones. Albright seems to me to be correct in his assertion that “even Pound’s own holy things start to grow farcical before his acid gaze.”15 But Pound’s loss of focus diminishes both the discourse of mysticism to which his ideas about the persistence of personal virtù owed so much, and the satire to which he subjects this mysticism. Why, then, does Pound’s satire seem to feed on itself, to yawn and swallow the very positions (mythological and metaphysical) that

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inaugurate the Canto with complete sincerity? One reason is arguably to be found in the “two traditions”—“factual study” and “the celestial tradition”—that Pound hovers between in Guide to Kulchur. Will’s intuition that Juventus represents the spirit of science as conduit for eternal verities fails to see the clearly parodic aposiopesis of “‘Immortal...,” a desacralizing gesture that reads as a repudiation of Pound’s earlier enthusiasms. But her insistence on Pound’s scientific spirit at least highlights his urge to draw from empirical observation the utmost possible implications for society. Pound was working on Canto 29 not long before the stock market crash of 1929; at this point C. H. Douglas’s economic theories had replaced Mead’s Neoplatonism. He had met Douglas in 1918, in the office of A. R. Orage’s The New Age.16 But while Pound’s stance was, as Leon Surette observes, politically neutral before and during the First World War, by the 1920s he was immersed in the political and economic debates occurring in the pages of Orage’s journal. As Surette puts it, “Pound’s conversion to Social Credit was sudden and complete.”17 Kenner argues that Pound’s discovery of Douglas led him definitively to shelve his mystical aesthetics.18 In Canto 38, Pound recalls his meeting with Douglas. Having listened to the Major explain his “A+B” theorem, Pound writes, “the light became so bright and so blindin’ / in this layer of paradise / that the mind of man was bewildered” (38/190). Into the mists that accommodated the numinous apparitions which had previously guaranteed Pound’s critique of modernity, now entered a set of concerns whose urgency required attention to a quite different order of discourse: scientific, political, and economic. But, as Canto 29 shows, Pound was not ready to abandon the mythological and occult trappings of his earlier worldview, and the anxieties provoked by this conflict between value-systems is legible in the anecdotes in the canto. Canto 38 locates the genesis of his interest in political economy as a rival explanatory discourse for social injustice, but, importantly, this new, scientific approach is invested with a sacralizing glow that is barely distinguishable from the light philosophy espoused by the voice of Juventus or Mead in Canto 29. These alternating moments of sacralization and

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desacralization produce an interference pattern whose influence upon the Canto destabilizes its tone, as the nostrums of Pound’s occult acquaintances in London are subjected to the destabilization of values projected onto the world of phonographs and jazz bands. Perhaps the most symptomatic element of the Canto’s anxiety over value is its treatment of women. In her essay “Pound, Women and Gender,” Helen Dennis argues that The Cantos deploys femininity as a mythical archetype, citing the example of H.D., for whom “Pound’s proclivity to imaginatively transform her person into a mythological creature, which better suited his aesthetic stance” was “both seductive and profoundly disabling.”19 If, as Wendy Flory says, “the poet’s frustration at ‘the female’ is voiced strongly in Canto 29,” this is due less to the disparity Flory diagnoses between Pound’s “mythic assertions about sexuality” and his personal experience with women than to the competing account of value suggested by his encounter with Douglas.20 Pound had leant on the feminized “mythical archetype” as one of the guarantors of his developing epic, but now his adoption of Douglas’s “economic analysis,” as Surette notes, gave Pound “an intellectual tool that he believed was key to an understanding of history—a necessity for the would-be epic poet.”21 The opening passage of Canto 29 shows us Pound’s feminine archetypes in an equation as seductively simple as Douglas’s A+B; but frustration at the contemporary world’s obstinate refusal to fit this pattern reveals itself in Pound’s visions of women as, variously, channels for and obstructors of the circulation of value. Pound’s diagnoses of modernity often take on a biliously sexualized hue. The phonograph is a “pornograph”; the “ephèbe” returns home exasperated from his encounter with the “virgins” at the jazz concert. Myth is now a feminized “exterior,” mere decoration draped over “the moss in the forest,” whose questions about science (“Darwin”) are met with “a burning fire of fantasy.” What the young man (who seems in this case to be Pound) seeks is “Wein, Weib, TAN AOIDAN,” wine, women, and song. One encounter with the “Chiefest of these” (women) is wearily recounted in terms of value. The young man suggests a sexual encounter in the palm room:

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“No, not in the palm-room”. The lady says it is Too cold in the palm-room. Des valeurs, Nom de Dieu, et    encore des valeurs. (29/144–45) Terrell, oddly, translates the last sentence as “Stocks and bonds, / for God’s sake, and / more stocks and bonds”;22 a more accurate translation is Read’s “Considerations [. . .] always considerations.”23 The speaker is exasperated at the petty obstacles modern manners places in the path of his generative virtù. But the misguided translation in Terrell at least points towards the extent to which sexual relations were becoming for Pound a synecdoche for social and economic values. The argument over definition here corresponds to the difficulty Pound has in locating his source of value in the contemporary world, and I want to argue that he situates this difficulty in a particular period of his life—the early 1920s. In a small, Dadaesque poem, “Kongo Roux,” published in Paris in 1921, Pound wrote two words that foreshadow Canto 29: “Femelle, chaos.”24 This image is expanded in the later Canto:       the female Is an element, the female Is a chaos, An octopus (29/144) Critics usually associate this passage with Pound’s translation of Remy de Gourmont’s Physique de l’amour: Essai sur l’instinct sexuel (1903), which the poet had been working on in Paris in 1921.25 In his Postscript to the translation, Pound describes “woman” as the matrix of artistic thought: That is to say we have the hair-thinning “abstract thought” and we have the concrete thought of women, of artists, of musicians, the mockedly “long-haired”, who have made everything in the world.26

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By contrast with “abstract thought,” women preserve a tradition of cognition from which the artistic process draws its forms: Woman, the conservator, the inheritor of past gestures, clever, practical, as Gourmont says, not inventive, always the best disciple of any inventor, has been always the enemy of the dead or laborious form of compilation, abstraction.27 The woman as octopus is a “submarine” creature, associated with the conserving properties of water. In his chapter on “Neo-platonicks, etc.” in Guide to Kulchur, Pound seems to approve when he cites Plethon’s theology: “His gods come from Neptune, so that there is a single source of being, aquatic.”28 Yet in assigning to women this role in the creative process, Pound is also exposing his fear of the potential instability of values when their source is located in an “element” (women) over which he has no control. This discomfort is magnified by a consideration of Pound’s notebook draft of Canto 29, which contains an expanded description of the Hell in which Pernella is encountered. Amid the “Flames,” “bureaucrata,” and “Obstructors of circulations” is an “Octopus of red larva, bursting there in the midst / of that glucose.”29 Quite clearly, the larva’s purifying texture contrasts with the viscosity of the glucose, permitting rather than obstructing circulation, and therefore, presumably, a symbol of social and economic justice. It is also, however, a representation of mindless destruction, insensate matter expiring in the liquidation of its surroundings. At the very least it suggests that Pound’s aquatic source of value is not only to be placed in the Paradise inhabited by Cunizza, but in the Hell of Pernella, crossing the boundary of the balance sheet (though he would later restore the boundary by effacing this passage from the published Canto). Incidentally, it is difficult to read “octopus” without thinking of the imagery, prevalent in critiques of capitalism around the turn of the century and later, representing the world caught in the grip of an octopus’s tentacles. One article from 1921 published in The New

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Age speaks of the civilization of “Money-lenders, merchants, bankers, diplomats” which “spreading itself like an octopus, has choked all that is best in the ancient peoples, their art and thought, and substituted the odious uniformities of great modern cities.”30 Similarly, an article in the Freewoman refers to “the capitalist octopus,”31 while a plate in W. H. Harvey’s Coin’s Financial School features an octopus, representing the Rothschild family, spreading its tentacles over the world, with the caption “It Feeds on Nothing but Gold!”32 The octopus metaphor carried anti-Semitic overtones that are ominous when one considers Pound’s future political tendency. Jonathan Freedman writes that “In antisemitic discourse of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Jew’s monstrosity is performed by the transformation of the hand—that emblem of warmth, love, and pleasure—into bat wings, vampire talons, spider legs, or octopus tentacles.”33 While I have found no examples of Pound using this image in an antiSemitic context in the 1920s, he certainly used it in the 1930s, writing to fascist politician Arnold Leese, “ONCE money is free of control of international bankers, the jew octopus haint got a claw to pinch with.”34 In the 1950s, he speaks of “those who started RESISTING the jew-N.Pork-Moscow octopus back in the 1920s.” Archie Henderson comments that this probably refers to Elizabeth Dilling’s The Octopus, “considered by many the most virulent anti-Semitic tract ever published in the United States.”35 So, while the identification of woman with octopus begins, through a recontextualization from myth to pseudo-science (via de Gourmont), as a bizarre accolade, Pound’s insertion of an octopus in the Hell reserved to usurers, together with its pervasive anti-Semitic associations, place a distinctly ambivalent color on the metaphor. This ambivalence is itself an irony, for, as the close of the Canto makes clear, what Pound is valuing here is the sense of a clean “cut.” Richard Sieburth, in “Dada Pound,” his analysis of Pound’s time in Paris in the early 1920s, views this period as “a curious caesura in Pound’s career,”36 and the evidence offered above tempts me to argue that Canto 29 is to a great extent about the “caesura” (Latin “caedere,” to cut) in Pound’s life

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in the years following his meeting with Douglas. Canto 29 moves from reiterating that woman “is an octopus, she is / A biological process,” to the “wave pattern cut in the stone,” and “the tower with cut stone above that” (29/145), at Excideuil. Here, where Eliot and the Pounds holidayed in 1919, Eliot’s assertion that he is “afraid of the life after death” shocks Pound, and leads to another memory, the arena at Verona in 1922, where Pound sits with Eliot wearing “A little lace at the wrist” and reiterates his bafflement at this belief in an afterlife (29/145). Fittingly, for Canto 29, there is a sexual subtext buried under the metaphysics. Wendy Flory notes that Canto 78 (where the scene at Verona is recalled again) reveals that Pound and Eliot were accompanied in Verona by someone called “Thiy,” identified in most accounts as Bride Scratton. As Flory writes, “it seems that he had been in love with Bride Scratton as well as with his wife,” and Pound was eventually named as co-respondent in Scratton’s divorce case.37 Sieburth’s account of Pound in 1920s Paris suggests the importance of erotic attachments to Pound’s sense of civilization. Sieburth tells of “the boisterous priapic camaraderie of Pound and [Francis] Picabia,” an erotic sociality that results in Pound’s theatrical complaint that he is unable to find a mistress in Paris, a city that claims to be “centre du monde.”38 Paris, Pound’s complaint seems to imply, is remiss in failing to supply the necessary channels of value. Cities and women alike were receptacles for his genius: Pound had written in his 1921 postscript to the de Gourmont translation: There are traces of it in the symbolism of phallic religions, man really the phallus or spermatozoide charging, head-on, the female chaos. Integration of the male in the male organ. Even oneself has felt it, driving any new idea into the great passive vulva of London, a sensation analogous to the male feeling in copulation.39 But in Paris, it seems, where value was reduced to “valeurs,” there were too many “Obstructors of circulations.” “Des valeurs, / [. . .] et / encore

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des valeurs,” as Pound ruminates in Canto 29 (29/144–45), uncomfortably caught in the presence of a woman who refuses to allow him to circulate his fecundating seed. Pound’s visit to Verona with the nonobstructive Scratton represents a more happy thought, then, to usher in Canto 29’s final paradisal passage. With priapic triumph, Pound segues from Verona to “The tower [. . .] / Ivory rigid in sunlight,” penetrating “the pale clear of the heaven.” Here, in these last lines, no ambiguity remains in the “cut cool of the air” and the “Blossom cut on the wind” (29/145). Having passed through the struggle, first with the larva octopus in the usurer’s hell, then with the feminine octopus in the aquatic depths waiting for his creative seed, Pound emerges in the cool air of April, at the dawn of Provençal song.40

19

Canto 30 LeeAnn Derdeyn and Tim Redman

“COMPLEYNT, compleynt I hearde upon a day, / Artemis singing, Artemis, Artemis / Agaynst Pity lifted her wail” (30/147).1 Pound’s source for these lines is Chaucer’s “Compleynt Unto Pity.” Nancy Dean reminds us that Chaucer’s compleynts are a genre descended from the Heroides, related to the Latin planctus and the planh of Provence, but taking a decidedly amorous turn in Chaucer, who has put his own stamp on the genre.2 Larry Dean Benson observes that “Even for a complaint, this poem is markedly gloomy. It is permeated by death, with burials, biers, hearses, and the speaker’s announcement that Pity is dead and so is he.”3 A “complaint” poem is a kind of lament. Chaucer’s speaker writes: My purpose was to Pite to compleyne Upon the crueltee and tirannye Of Love [. . .] To Pitee ran I, al bespreynt with teres.4 The speaker finds that Pity is dead and there remains only cruelty. His beloved fails to have compassion for his lovelorn plight: “Thus am I slayn sith that Pite is ded.” The complaint is thus directed to her; it

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attempts to reawaken her heart to his plea. The poem also contains two legal metaphors that Pound’s Canto 30 will touch upon obliquely when he considers the contractual basis of marriage, an institution as much influenced by the legal transfer of property as it is by romantic love. Chaucer’s speaker considers filing a “bille” against Pity but concludes that it would be futile. In Canto 30, Pound provides a startling revision of the conventions and expectations of this Chaucerian genre: “Pity causeth the forests to fail, / Pity slayeth my nymphs, / Pity spareth so many an evil thing” (30/147). Artemis complains that Pity shows mercy, rather than withholding it. Instead of the complaint being somehow related to fascism (see Lawrence Rainey’s Institutions of Modernism, among others5 and Chris Chapman’s convincing rebuttal of this argument),6 the Canto instead represents an ecological turn in Pound’s thought that will find further development in Cantos 45 and 51, and in Pound’s correspondence and journalism of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s: Usura slayeth the child in the womb It stayeth the young man’s courting It hath brought palsey to bed, lyeth between the young bride and her bridegroom         CONTRA NATURAM. (45/230) and Usury kills the child in the womb And breaks short the young man’s courting Usury brings age into youth; it lies between the bride and the bridegroom Usury is against Nature’s increase. (51/250) These later Cantos echo Canto 30’s situations with the marital beds of King Pedro and Inês de Castro, and Alfonso d’Este and Lucrezia

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Borgia, but this is not too distant conceptually from that of the Venus/ Vulcan/Mars triangle, which David Moody has briefly touched upon.7 Pound writes: In Paphos on a day         I also heard: ... goeth not with young Mars to playe But she hath pity on a doddering fool, She tendeth his fyre, She keepeth his embers warm. (30/147) This echoes Chaucer’s “Compleynt of Mars,” which is a reimagination of Ovid’s reimagining and renaming of the Homeric version: Venus is married to Vulcan who snares her with Mars in their ­adulterous bed. John Steven Childs has drawn attention to the congruence of Canto 45 with Cantos 30 and 14.8 His illuminating reading emphasizes rhetorical, syntactic, and semantic parallelism (“couplings”) and merits attention. So too does Chris Chapman’s enlightening work on the material culture of Canto 30, and Pound’s interpretive insistence on “the inseparability of the symbolic and material functions of art” (emphasis original).9 However, we take the reading of Canto 30 in a different direction. Philip Furia also implicitly compares Canto 30 with Cantos 45 through 47 that take the Leopoldine bank reforms, much admired by Pound, as subject, specifically the founding of the Monte de Pietà and the Monte dei Paschi. Furia’s reading of Artemis’s “Complaint Against Pity” sketches a speculative line of thought upon which we build: The unnatural sentimentality of Pity here has its economic analogue in the excesses of usury. Just as natural death and renewal are frustrated “on account of Pity,” the gyrating accounts of usurious banks earn interest “unnaturally” on nonexistent money.10

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Our claim throughout this chapter will be that Pound’s thirtieth Canto privileges ecology, an ecological stance that situates human persons squarely within their organic, natural connections with the “green world” and its cycles of life. Pound considers that art is analogous to nature’s cycle of rebirth. Pound is an aesthetic environmentalist ahead of his time, and Canto 30—rather than being limited by an eros/thanatos conceptualization—is constituted by, and interconnected through, a “green” theme, death begetting life. Unlike a nature poet’s more celebratory tone, Canto 30’s opening “compleynt” is much more apropos to Pound’s aesthetic attitude. Artemis bewails that Pity has prevented the cycle of thanatos from providing the fecundity which falls to her purview as goddess: Pity causeth the forest to fail, Pity slayeth my nymphs, Pity spareth so many an evil thing. Pity befouleth April, Pity is the root and spring. Now if no fayre creature followeth me It is on account of Pity, It is on account that Pity forbideth them slaye. (30/147) Pound (through Artemis) uses “slay” equivocally here to highlight the internal contradiction in the narrative. The nymphs are “slayeth” by pity, in the sense of overcome, overwhelmed such that they spare an action that seems designed to bring about a good. The apparent good is in the negative, an abstention, the withholding of an action rather than the performance of an action. Yet the good is, if anything, only a temporary good which then leads to “many an evil thing.” Eva Hesse sheds light here. In the introduction to her 1969 collection of essays on Pound, Hesse asserts that Pound views humans as inextricably connected to nature and natural cycles, and that evil is thus a deviation from nature. Hesse asserts: “[E]vil, according to his lights, is quite simply a lapse from the ‘green world’ as the true measure and

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ultimate criterion of all human effort,” and she further elucidates: “Sin, to Pound’s way of thinking, is whatever does not square with reality; it is a deficiency of being.”11 Hesse makes an explicit connection with Pound’s famous apologia in Canto 81:        [. . .] it is not man Made courage, or made order, or made grace,     Pull down thy vanity, I say pull down. Learn of the green world what can be thy place (81/541) In this connection, man’s many interactions with, and impositions upon, nature proceed from a false sense of superiority that can allow an indiscriminate and disordered use of the good(s) of nature. Vanity permits humanly created order to supervene nature’s order. Vanity begins as a fraud of self-deception that often leads to additional evils. Additional explication is needed to understand how Pity not only promulgates evil here, but also decimates the connection to the “green world.” The later lines of this section inform the reader that the action that the nymphs have spared or withheld (while “slayed” by pity) is the slaying of the forest creatures on a hunt. The nymphs have been “slain” by pity so as to be unwilling to participate in the hunt; they are in absentia from the duty of death-dealing which Artemis directs them to undertake. The outcome of this failure to hunt is that in this season of spring when all things should be made fair, instead “All things are made foul” (30/147). Thus, in this Canto, what might appear as a good (the seeming preservation of life in the failure to slay) is actually an evil that brings about even more evils. Let us put this contradiction into a more understandable—if anachronistic to Artemis, not to what Chris Chapman interestingly calls Pound’s “anarcho-feminist interests”12—ecological perspective. During any forestry preservation process, forestation experts will recommend dense initial planting, but several subsequent cullings of the number of seedlings planted during the reforestation. They know, from studies of nature’s cycles, that a certain percentage of seedlings

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will die naturally, but they also advise successive culling based on the number of mature trees a particular parcel of land can viably sustain— its “carrying capacity.”13 Too many trees will crowd each other out and stunt the growth of all, as well as decimating the undergrowth (and then cyclically the wildlife which thrive in that undergrowth, and so forth) because of too much upper density. Forestry experts are thus counseling a judicious death-dealing in order to sustain maximized healthy population growth. This lesson they have in essence “learned of the green world.” Correspondingly, “limits” established during hunting seasons increase or decrease based on state wildlife rangers’ expert assessment of the current need—the species’ ability to survive and thrive in a sustainable population based on the surrounding ecosystem—thus these hunting limits are a form of regulated culling of the wildlife population. Similarly, Artemis (through Pound’s poetry) recognizes that if culling of the species of plants and animals within the forest does not occur, the eco-system of the forest will fail. Without selective hunting—if “on account that Pity forbideth them slaye,” the nymphs fail to follow Artemis’s directive—the wildlife population overseen by Artemis as Huntress/Protectress will exhibit unsustainable population growth. If “No more do my shaftes fly / To slay. Nothing is now clean slayne / But rotteth away” (33/147), then the eco-system of the forest will die in foul ways, rotting from starvation and from a disordered, indiscriminate use of the cycles of life and death of the green world. This “Having for foulnesse pity / And things growne awry” is eros/thanatos run amok (30/147). The seeming good of pity’s eros by which the nymphs spare thanatos to individual forest creatures in the hunt actually brings about the greater evil of a more pervasive death by disordering the entire eco-system. The gruesome story of King Pedro’s exhumation of his posthumous queen, Inês de Castro, would seem to support our ecological argument in reverse.14 As crown prince, Pedro is forced to marry the noblewoman Constanza, although he is in love with, and begins an affair with her illegitimate (though also of noble birth) cousin, Inês.

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In Pound’s role reversal of the classical Roman love triangle which in Canto XXX precedes this medieval Portuguese one, Pedro is the male Venus who must tend the marital sexual fires with Constanza (as Vulcan), while enjoying the true vitality and fecundity of love with Inês (as Mars). When Constanza dies, King Afonso decides that Pedro’s indiscriminate affair with Inês and their two thriving illegitimate sons pose a future threat to Pedro’s legitimate heir. Sending Pedro on a diplomatic trip, Afonso commissions a consortium of the Portuguese aristocracy to assassinate Inês. When Afonso dies, Pedro literalizes the metaphor of the heartless murderers by ripping their hearts from their bodies while still alive. Pedro’s revenge doesn’t end with this ritualized blood vengeance. His actions become more excessive, obsessive, perverted. Pedro claims that he and Inês had been secretly married, making her the Queen of Portugal, and then has her body exhumed and seated by him during the Coronation, requiring all the aristocracy to profess their fealty to her as well (most historical accounts include the dictated kissing of her corpse’s hand): Came the Lords in Lisboa         a day, and a day In homage. Seated there         dead eyes, Dead hair under the crown, The King still young there beside her. (30/148) There is the implication of dread here, not only in the incantation of “dead” that is reiterated in eyes and hair as synecdoche for the dead body, but also in contrast with Pedro, the King, still young and vibrant, but maddened, severed from the “green world,” in his fanatical attachment to an impossible, necrophilic love. Pedro has a legitimate “compleynt,” but, as George Dekker iterates, Pedro exhibits an instance of what Artemis has bewailed in the first stanza of Canto 30: “Having for foulness pity / And things growne awry.”15 Time is the evil. In that

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two-year period, Inês’s body would have become badly decomposed, and yet, in spite of irrepressible grief, Pedro would have remained young, vigorous, and full of life. The eco system goes awry, becoming disordered and contaminated, if living creatures attempt to maintain bodily physical connection, rather than simply memorial connection, with deceased things. There can be no life-begetting in these relationships. In addition to the prior citations from Cantos 45 and 51, it also echoes here: “Corpses are set to banquet / at behest of usura” (45/230). It is particularly tempting to think that Pound, in this enthymemic retelling of the love story of Pedro and Inês, alludes to recurrent ideas of eros as thanatos, especially with Pound’s less usual employment of the Greek goddess Artemis, rather than the more frequently mentioned Roman Diana. We must look beyond this initial temptation of surface reference. What Pound aims for is a much more ecological stance, something more green and in keeping with Artemis’s role: goddess of the hunt and of virgins, yes, but also goddess of wildlife, of childbirth, protectress of the forests and the animals within—thus goddess of the cycles of the “green world.” He would expect his reader to discover that Inês and Pedro’s story doesn’t end where he’s left us. Pedro’s next action is a restoration of order, a righting of the fraud of—on Pedro’s part—carrying on a private (as his wife) and a public (as his queen) relationship with a dead woman, and requiring his citizens to participate in that public fraud as well. According to a translation of the 1816 Collecção de livros ineditos de historia portugueza, “D. Pedro ordered a tomb of white marble, finely surmounted by her crowned statue, as if she was a Queen; and then he caused the tomb to be placed in the Monastery of Alcobaça.” Pedro then transported the body the 65 miles south from Coimbra via a procession of “many horses and noblemen and maids and clergymen [. . .] a thousand men were holding candles, in such a way that always the body was enlightened [. . .] And it was the most magnificent translation ever seen in Portugal.”16 While “translation” is the figurative medieval terminology for the change of the living person on earth to the living soul in heaven, the literal “translation” to which Fernao Lopes also refers is that of the lengthy procession to

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the entombment of the dead body still on earth. What spectacle! But this royal procession is also the restoration of order: the translation of King Pedro’s eros for the living Inês into the thanatos of the entombed queen bride. Yet, eros is then re-translated, retrieved from a permanent association with thanatos by the “living” art of the tomb, “living” in the way that art can have an ongoing presence in time, diachronic in ways neither its human creator nor its human participants can be. Pound is always interested in not only the cultural conservation of art but also the living quality of art, the liveliness—the fecundity, the ecology, of art. He is also driven to engender the renaissance of art as central to culture and the future of humanity. This tomb rebirths Inês as deceased but venerated queen, and deceased but cherished lover. The tomb memorializes her, and restores her appropriately into the progression of time. Art revitalizes Inês, reinvests her with a kind of a life, and gives her, as Pound might say, “place in the green world.” Art breathes life into and retranslates history in a way similar to the way mythos does. Dom Pedro commissions a corresponding tomb for himself with the feet of the two tombs facing each other, so that, as legend has it, the two lovers will arise and see each other’s face first on the Day of Resurrection. Dom Pedro makes art of love, makes love through art. It is in this way that art becomes not only a translation of history, but also an ecological stance. For Pound throughout The Cantos, not only the process of art, but also the funding of art, is itself a fecundity and reinvestiture, a vitalization and productivity having some analogy to the life (and death) cycles of the natural world. Dekker defines the first half of Canto 30—all that precedes the Portuguese love story—as an “independent poetic unit” and the second half—from Lucrezia Borgia on—as a “coda to the entire first book of thirty cantos.”17 The linkage he shows between Artemis, Aphrodite, Persephone, and Demeter develops precisely the ecological stance that Pound uses to thread together the prior Cantos, and will be seen in future Cantos: ideas of natural, cyclical, and sexual greenness and fecundity, an eros that thrives in spite of thanatos, possibly even directly out of a cycle of thanatos. It is, indeed, Pound’s connection of the “love/

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art” theme—the “translation” of eros/thanatos into love renewed by art in an imitation of nature’s engendering cycle—that allows the further poetic associative (and loosely logical) leap in Canto 30 to Lucrezia Borgia. Yet, Dekker does not realize this ecological stance to which he has pointed by way of his goddess connections, nor does he directly engage any text in the second half of Canto 30. Ezra Pound’s annotated version of the Borgia family saga comprises the “second half ” of Canto 30 and follows immediately upon the narrative of the coronation of the dead queen and living king. Lucrezia Borgia embodies, for Pound, the sexual fecundity that the dead Inês cannot, and the artistic fecundity that has been restorative. Lucrezia—like Inês—is also the illegitimate daughter of a nobleman, and a personage of political import; she is the “love child” of Rodrigo Borgia, who becomes, more famously, Pope Alexander VI, or “Pope Alessandro Borgia, / Il Papa,” as Pound calls him at the end of Canto 30 (30/149). That the Borgia clan has been described as epitomizing Machiavellian machinations, and that her father possibly manipulated the beautiful, much-desired Lucrezia as a pawn in a series of politically advantageous marriages, is not Pound’s focus here. While Moody refers to Lucrezia as “evil,” “[d]efective [. . .] in intellectual and spiritual virtue,”18 returning to Hesse’s formulation of Pound’s understanding of sin and evil, these actions for Pound would simply have conformed to the reality of the Borgias’s world. That Pope Alexander VI and his son, Cesare, were extravagant patrons of the arts, and that Lucrezia acts with intellectual and physical agency in her own fate (her depiction befitting Chapman’s “anarcho-feminist” tag for Pound), seems to have enabled Pound to overlook any troubling ethical repercussions. Lucrezia also enters Canto 30 in the spectacle of a wedding procession—not only her third wedding procession, but the third implicated in this short Canto. In order to extend the Borgias’s political alliances, Cesare, her brother, has had her second husband assassinated so that she may be married to “Messire Alfonso,” (30/148). Alfonso d’Este, the Duke of Ferrara—an important art patron in his own right.19 However, Alfonso has been hesitant to enter into an alliance with the disreputable

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Borgia clan, and hesitant to enter into a marriage with a bride whose previous marriages have not ended well for the grooms. He requests an exorbitant dowry in compensation for the perceived besmirching of his family honor by way of the marriage. Something of Pound’s own attitude to the ethical dilemma can be heard in the Canto’s “translation” of Cesare’s sarcastic response to Alfonso’s request: “‘Honour? Balls for yr. honour! / Take two million and swallow it’” (30/148). Alfonso does “take two million and swallow it,” finally agreeing to the dowry and the match, but when Lucrezia is still a considerable distance from Ferrara Alfonso comes with an entourage on horseback to vet her, apparently with the idea of still possibly declining. Lucrezia not only must have passed the test of approval, but passed it so winningly that Alfonso returned several times over a series of days to the caravan of the wedding procession, and, by historical accounts, the union was consummated prior to the wedding. Thus, there is a progression in the three wedding processions. Constanza’s procession results in a marriage, but no love match (Vulcan to Pedro’s Venus) and no fecundity; however, Constanza’s caravan brings love and fecundity by additionally bringing her cousin, Inês (Mars to Pedro’s Venus). Inês’s wedding procession results in official, social recognition of a marriage whose sexual fecundity and love match, consummated well before the marriage, has already come and gone: Inês’s wedding procession doubles as a funeral procession. Lucrezia’s wedding procession results in a sexual consummation, a wedding, and a marriage that is prolific in its offspring20 and its support of Renaissance art. While Moody notes Pound’s appellation of “Madame YAH,” and includes Pound’s translation of the Greek, he fails to discern its significance to Lucrezia’s character or its connection to Artemis’s complaint. Pound analogizes Lucrezia as the “‘uncut forest, the stuff of which a thing is made, matter as a principle of being.’”21 Thus, Lucrezia is primal; she in some way embodies the essence or brute fact of the world of human life. Guy Davenport glances toward this concept in his chapter about Persephone, when his two-line mention of Lucrezia characterizes her as: “a woman obedient to all of nature’s appetites, but with the balance

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and rhythm of nature’s seed-cycle regeneration.”22 Lucrezia Borgia is reborn as a respectable Renaissance matron who is also a sex symbol; a rhyme then for Davenport’s description of Fortuna/Natura—goddess of those very seed- and life-cycles of the green world—as “a striking figure, though her reputation, as now, vacillated between that of a strumpet and a powerful force worthy of placation and circumspect deference.”23 In its sexual and cultural aspects, the ecology of Lucrezia’s myth is emphasized and retranslated by Pound as a vision of organic fulfillment amidst the greenness of fecundity. Equally importantly, though, is the art patronage of Alexander and Cesare Borgia, and Alfonso d’Este and Lucrezia, which Pound admires. He moves from the procuring sexual consummation of Lucrezia’s wedding procession to the procuring patronage of printers, type-setters and die-cutters—those who allowed for the proliferation of the printed word. These artists have contributed to the reproductive process of art, to the flourishing of literature. We have intentionally chosen vocabulary evocative of the ecological process of the earth’s natural cycle of “life begetting life”: proliferation, reproduction, flourishing. Serving as corrective to Lawrence Rainey’s interpretation,24 Chris Chapman has interestingly elucidated the collaborative material history of the Broglio manuscript that Pound translates in this section.25 Chapman’s scholarship shows the tapestry of Pound’s collaboration with Nancy Cunard—his printer, researcher, and lover.26 That Pound considers art patronage as analogous to sexual fecundity and to nature’s cycles of rebirth has been noted earlier in this chapter, and becomes more explicit in the connections of the otherwise disparate tales. Through the proliferation of art by his patronage and his cultural conservation, the death of Pope Alexander VI which ends the Canto isn’t subsumed with the finality of thanatos, but, rather, is regenerative within the ecology of art. This is not perfection, but a world in sync, a world that values art. Pound has, then, in the brevity of Canto 30, created for us not simply a map of The Cantos, but—as he himself puns therein—the “Explicit canto” of the “green world”: a three-dimensional globe in miniature.

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And, he has brought us the Odyssean and Dantescan pilgrim-journeyman—Pound, the poet of ecology, tasked in The Cantos’ “periplum” to make a world for art, to make of art a world—a green world in which man, and woman, can find a place.

20

Canto 32 Eric White

First published with Cantos 31 and 33 in the Summer 1931 issue of Pagany: A Native Quarterly, Canto 32 remains a curiously elusive text when compared to the more closely scrutinized Cantos it appeared alongside. And yet, as an example of the “American turn” in Pound’s Middle Cantos, it neatly encapsulates the tensions that characterize his relationships not only with his homeland, but with the many literary milieus that he belonged to in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Indeed, Canto 32 exhibits some of the major antitheses that underwrite The Cantos themselves: sardonically didactic in some areas, yet collegiate, even collusive in others; opaque passages of textual collage in one section give way to pleas for clarity in another; and epistemological meditations frequently segue into ledgers of commodities and materials. Its opening lines distil such dichotomies neatly: “The revolution”,      said Mr Adams “Took place in the minds of the people.” ...with sixty cannon, ten tons of powder, 10,000 muskets and bayonets, lead, bed-covers, Uniforms and a colonel, to affirm their neutrality...1

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From the start of Canto 32, then, Pound counterpoints the lofty ideals of the American Revolution, articulated in 1815 by John Adams in a letter to Dr. J. Morse,2 with the material instruments of their prosecution (a gulf hinted at by the indent in the first line in its Pagany presentation). In Cantos 31–33, Pound erects lattices of lists, sums, transactions, and valuations among the axioms and observations extracted from the writings of Revolutionary figures to negotiate a new relationship between poetry and its socio-political contexts. By 1931, the cultural upheavals caused by the Great Depression had become deeply entrenched. Of the American Cantos, Canto 32 especially gestures towards the economic and human costs of military conflict, and echoes of “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley” surface in Pound’s quotation of Jefferson: “much desired that war be / avoided” (32/158). Indeed, Canto 32 is haunted by the possibility of war precipitated by an economic or political crisis, a sentiment Pound had articulated in his 1921 review of C. H. Douglas’s Credit Power and Democracy in Contact 4, in which he implied that corporations and corrupt governments were responsible for fueling the carnage of the First World War.3 As Tim Redman has shown, Canto 32 is an integral part of “an arc stretching from Jefferson to Mussolini,” one that “offers witness to Pound’s momentous conversion from Social Credit to fascism.”4 Undergirding those narratives are Pound’s attempts to mobilize historical precedents into a coherent warning, in which a future crisis might be averted by appealing to a specialized group of readers, such as those of William Carlos Williams’s little magazine Contact, but also to the broader American reading public who had taken notice of Pagany. Like Cantos 31 and 33, Canto 32 was “drawn largely from Pound’s copy of The Writings of Thomas Jefferson (Washington, D.C.: Thomas Jefferson Memorial Association, 1905) [...] a gift from T. S. Eliot.”5 Although it is rightly read in the schematic context of its publication in Eleven New Cantos, then, Canto 32 also registers Pound’s engagement with little magazines, and its appearance in Pagany suggests a useful context for framing its negotiation of history, economics, and writing. The present reading explores the material and critical cultures

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of Canto 32’s production in order to suggest ways in which The Cantos form dialogic relationships with modernist periodicals, and between America and Europe. Critics generally agree that Eleven New Cantos charts a crucial series of transitions in Pound’s career.6 His renewed enthusiasm for Douglas coincided with his drift towards Italian fascism, on the one hand, and the American Revolution, on the other. The result, as Stephen J. Adams, notes, was an “economic reformer carrying the banner of Social Credit” who also wrote as an “American patriot, and as [an] ardent supporter of Mussolini.”7 Moreover, the period in which these Cantos were published, 1931–34, was crucial for sustaining these tenuous links, “because they place the collection prior to Pound’s virulent anti-Semitic turn, which Surette has dated convincingly to early 1934, and prior to Mussolini’s invasion of Abyssinia in October 1935, which raised the outrage of the world against him.”8 They look simultaneously backward to Pound’s intense engagement with Douglas and A. R. Orage in the post-war period, and forward to his anti-Semitic fascism, as well as the ­achievements and preoccupations of the Adams and Pisan Cantos. As the Great Depression took hold, Pound became convinced that “Social Credit and Gesellism” movements could offer creditable “financial solutions which would remedy the evils of the Depression.”9 Yet these remedies could only be implemented with the direct intervention of public authorities, and as his interests drifted back towards America, so too did his interests in political representatives. In Canto 21, Pound’s longstanding emphasis on “Renaissance father-figures and arts patrons” became linked with the “Father of the [American] Revolution” Thomas Jefferson; in Eleven New Cantos, that association “coincide[d] with Pound’s figuration of Mussolini’s fascism as a revolutionary movement.”10 Concomitantly, the poet began gathering historical “evidence” to support his own belief systems, a project that started in the late 1920s.11 By apposition, juxtaposition, parataxis, and other cross-referential strategies, such fragments formed the bedrock of a cultural program Pound tried to galvanize in both The Cantos and various periodicals.12

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Edited from Italy but intended primarily for US readers, the first issue of his only solo little magazine project The Exile was printed in Dijon by the Three Mountains Press, before shifting production to Chicago, where the publisher Pascal Covici took over. Four issues appeared from 1927 to 1928, and Pound only published work that he personally endorsed. During this period, his editorials were often filled with paranoid invectives that focused on factors which impeded travel and communication between geographic locations, and which railed against the practical and legal barriers that he faced producing the magazine for his fellow citizens overseas.13 Import duties, customs officials, and the exigencies of American copyright law surface frequently in these tracts, prompting him to contemplate political solutions to these problems of location in various thought experiments. In the first issue, he describes “both Fascio and Russian revolution [as] interesting phenomena” and argues that “the capitalist imperialist state must not be judged only in comparison with unrealized utopias, but with past forms of the state.”14 Here Pound is interested in the idea of political revolution, but only in so far as it advances the production (and producers) of cultural capital and reinstates established models from the Renaissance and antiquity. Despite his continued insistence on the primacy of the artist’s interest, then, The Exile provided a forum in which Pound’s increasingly extreme politics inched closer to articulation. His quotation from Benito Mussolini in the second issue—“We are tired of government in which there is no responsible person having a hind-name, a front name and an address”—revealed a renewed emphasis on the geographical provenance of cultural and political authority that coincided with his re-engagement with the USA.15 Of course, Pound’s overt endorsement of il duce did not appear until Canto 41, but these preoccupations gathered force in the Pagany group of Cantos. Moreover, following his tumultuous re-engagement with an American audience in The Exile, his own relevance to his homeland was also clearly at issue. In the late 1920s, other modernist writers had taken notice of Pound’s Exile. For example, the New York Dadaist Matthew Josephson

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castigated “Mr. Ezra Pound and the Other ‘Exiles’” in transition for “admir[ing] and ap[ing] [...]the slavish and decadent section of European society” who in turn “take their rule from New York.”16 The barbs continued into the 1930s, even in the magazine in which Cantos 31–33 would eventually appear. The second issue of Pagany featured a lengthy article by Sherry Mangan, the journal’s de facto co-editor, in which he accused T. S. Eliot of exerting a “corrupting” influence on young writers because of his “academic” approach to poetry.17 Mangan also took aim at Eliot for his introduction to Pound’s Selected Poems, which he derided as simplistic and condescending. This critique prompted Pound to issue a response in an article that evaluated Pagany’s first year of publishing. Surprisingly, Pound replied by praising Pagany, and only defended Eliot’s introduction to his Selected Poems by explaining that it was intended for the British market, which Pound held in contempt. “The Bri’sh public is hardly our public,” Pound concluded, and his publication of new Cantos in American little magazines attempted to recalibrate his relationship with his homeland.18 Clearly, Pound’s endorsement of Pagany announced a new affiliation for him, but, tacitly, it also announced a rupture with another. In 1930, Cantos 28–30 appeared in The Hound & Horn, the experimental journal based in Harvard for which Pound served as contributing editor from 1930 to 1931. That association ended acrimoniously when Pound endured a myriad of petty slights from editors and reviewers at The Hound & Horn, and responded predictably with a series of caustic letters, some of which were printed in the journal (and some of which targeted Eliot’s own little magazine The Criterion).19 Privately and publicly, Pound distanced himself from both The Hound & Horn and Eliot, and, more broadly, journals with “academic” associations. Unlike the ivy league and more avant-garde little magazines, Richard Johns’s Pagany offered a literary miscellany that would “[fill] in the middle scene between the excellent conventional magazines and those which are entirely experimental in content”– one that would consider America’s localities as small and appraisable, but interconnected, units, while relying on selected “outsiders’” transatlantic perspectives.20

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Appropriated from Williams’s semi-autobiographical 1928 travel novel, A Voyage to Pagany, Johns’s title suggested a symposium that would frame the American experience as both domestic and ambassadorial. Johns also presented his journal as a repository for and chronicle of a growing archive of American modernism, as well as point of departure for new literary engagements. The publication of Cantos 31–33 announced the magazine’s overt engagement with the grand narrative of America’s modernist canon, but it also signaled its broader commitment to other poems “including history.”21 For Pound, it meant a route into a larger, but still specialized, audience with a more overtly political and social focus, outside of the Eliot-dominated academy. This tack matched the direction he was taking in The Cantos themselves. Cantos 30–33 began configuring poetry as a platform for economic and political propaganda in his poetry, but there is evidence that Pound was growing anxious about such literary interventions. Drawing on Pound’s manuscript notes on these Cantos, Redman observes that “Canto 33 finds Adams writing to Jefferson on 28 June 1812 ‘Litterae nihil sanantes’ [“Literature curing nothing”], echoing yet concealing Pound’s own ongoing crisis: whether in response to the world turmoil of the Great Depression his poetry was not merely frivolous.”22 The anxieties that underpinned the relationship between politics, writing, and print culture also surface between the fragments of “evidence” assembled in the Pagany Cantos. As Canto 32 veers into America’s historical “entanglements” with Russia and Jefferson’s views on the project of “civilizing the indians [sic],” for example, Pound’s reference to “shepherd dogs, true-bred” lends a disturbing eugenic overtone to the sequence, particularly in the context of his escalating admiration for fascism and Mussolini (32/158). In the “native” context of Pagany, Pound seems to be encouraging an “editorial” intelligence (Jefferson and/or Mussolini?) to “breed” desirable traits not only in the mind of America’s indigenous peoples, but also in the mind of the nation, and reclaim its Revolutionary genius in the process.23 Pound probably did not intend to evoke a eugenic assault on indigenous peoples, or any other aspect of their widespread genocide in the Americas, yet

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his associative strategy and subsequent reference to the “Cannibals of Europe” nevertheless encourages that chilling reading (32/159). And the role that print culture plays in facilitating Pound’s vision of a paternalistic social prophylactic against war (and its potential support of a eugenics-inflected project of “civilizing” the Americas) is telling, shepherding, as it does, the reader’s eye from the task of breeding desirable traits in America, to the nuts and bolts of print culture: If you return to us, to bring a couple of shepherd dogs, true-bred......much desired that war be avoided. type-founding to which antimony is essential, I therefore place Mr. Ronaldson in your hands. ...be avoided, if circumstances will admit... (32/158) As Carroll F. Terrell notes, James R. Ronaldson and Jefferson hoped to reduce America’s dependence on British books. Together with fellow Edinburgh native Archibald Binny, Ronaldson set up the first permanent type foundry in America in Philadelphia in 1796. In 1809, Ronaldson wrote to Jefferson to help him acquire antimony, a metal used in the manufacture of type, from France or Spain to reduce the impact of a British trade embargo on America’s print industry; by doing so, as Terrell notes, Ronaldson and Jefferson hoped to reduce America’s dependence on British books and provide a solid material infrastructure to create a secure foundation for the burgeoning cultural life of the nation.24 In this way, Canto 32 develops a thread of The Cantos that connects transatlantic exchanges of ideas to the transit of material goods and economic instruments—from exalted leaders and movements to lesser-known craftsmen. For example, in Canto 12, which originally appeared in Ford Madox Ford’s transatlantic review, he associated the American businessman Francis S. (aka “Baldy”) Bacon, an acquaintance he met on his 1910 visit to the USA, with the Americas’ colonial past. Pound alludes briefly to the risks, rewards, and systematic exploitation of people (especially minorities) involved

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in the economic history of the USA, and, inevitably, ties these systems of exchange to the printed word: Bacon “returned to Manhattan, ultimately to Manhattan” to resume the work of “job printing,” to “distributing jobs to the printers,” and transforming the written word into cold, hard cash (12/53). These Cantos meticulously and insistently cement the clear links that Pound identified between economics and literature—between the printed word and political power—and in Pagany Pound was not alone in this respect. The majority of Pagany’s content explored issues of class, politics, and labor in social realist fiction rather than poetry, but Williams’s serialized novel White Mule actually contains some parallels with Pound’s Pagany Cantos. Williams’s protagonist is a printer involved with union politics, and this snapshot of national economic forces inflecting American domestic life in some respects forms a parallel with Ronaldson, the Scottish immigrant printer to whom Pound refers in Canto 32. For both poets, the business of producing the news was itself becoming inextricable from the political and economic headlines of the times. In the little magazines, Pound often framed his economic histories in a collusive, almost conspiratorial tone, encouraging an audience of peers to revisit their own revolutionary history and apply it with intellectual vigor to the political realities of the Great Depression. And, typically for Pound, the spirit of generosity that he fostered in the pages of these magazines coexists with odious overtones of the political agenda taking shape in the Pagany Cantos and vitriolic invectives against those who he believed offended him. Equally, his estimation of editing, social reform, and intellectual collaboration strained against the almost solipsistic reverie of his individual poetic practice. Yet the desperation of the times stoked Pound’s sense of urgency, and visibly altered his themes and methods. Accordingly, exchanges of goods, capital, and intellectual energies across the Atlantic reach an almost frantic clip in Cantos 31–33. These Cantos explore with increasing anxiety the relationship between commodities and the exercise of power in the global arena, haunted by the prospect of war as he

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watched the economic crises spread and unfold. They are naturally preoccupied with major political figures such as Jefferson, Adams, and various aristocrats and rulers in Europe. However, as I have argued, these Cantos are also notable for the attention they give to enterprising but comparatively minor figures such as Ronaldson and Binny, anti-colonial rulers such as Hyder Ali (a maharaja whose strategic allegiances helped oppose the British in Mysore),25 and Revolutionary financiers and agents of espionage, such as Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais, the French playwright who “provided arms ammunition and supplies for the American Revolution,” but who was never reimbursed or rewarded for that support—a fact that he complained bitterly about until his death.26 Physical ciphers for crisis and contradiction also abound, such as Beaumarchais’s ship, the Amphritite, which appears in Canto 32. Since “her cargo [was] mainly munitions” (32/157), the transit of this vessel stands in sharp contrast to Jefferson’s insistent incantation that “war be / avoided” (32/158). As Canto 32 concludes, Pound anticipates Canto 33 by moving from the material infrastructures of the American Revolution to Marxist-inflected accounts of class and postcolonial struggle (in which the ruling classes conspire to keep indigenous populations and workers “down by hard labour, poverty, / ignorance” [32/158])—from the material and political machinations of American conflicts to the stimuli of European conflict. Here Pound recalls the bitter lamentations of “Mauberley,” where “a myriad [...] of the best” died “For an old bitch gone in the teeth, / For a botched civilization.”27 However, whereas “Mauberley” evoked the “hysterias” and shell shock of trench warfare,28 Canto 32 locates the madness of warfare with a corrupt aristocracy, who exploit the “unremitting labour” of workers “to maintain their privileged orders in splendour and / idleness” (32/158). Pound draws on the letters of Jefferson to demonstrate that this torpor in its leadership leads inexorably to idiocy, madness, and, ultimately, war:29      Louis Sixteenth was a fool The King of Spain was a fool, the King of Naples a fool

272

Readings in the Cantos         [...] the King of Sardinia was, like all the Bourbons, a fool, the Portuguese Queen a Braganza and therefore by nature an idiot, The successor to Frederic of Prussia, a mere hog in body and mind, Gustavus and Joseph of Austria were as you know really crazy, and George 3d was in a straight waistcoat, [...]     a guise de leon The cannibals of Europe are eating one another again     quando si posa. (32/159)

As the Great Depression took hold, the climate of crisis prompted Pound to consider the possibility that another great European war was taking shape. In his 1822 letter to Adams, Jefferson turns “to the news of the day” to observe that “it seems that the Cannibals of Europe are going to be eating one another again.”30 The closing lines of Canto 32 flank the crises in Europe with Dante’s description of the troubadour poet Sordello crouching like a lion.31 In this way, Pound evokes Sordello’s judgment on the moral failings of the rulers that inhabit the Vale of Princes, which he guards in Purgatory. Thus, in Canto 32, the poet interpolates “the news” to speak truth to power, a tendency which finds political expression through both the Revolutionary Fathers and, later, in Canto 41, through “the Boss” Mussolini (41/202). Yet “the news” and the motifs and methods for this shift were clearly established in the Pagany Cantos, as Pound attempted to convince his peers not only of his findings, but of the historical connections between literature and the actual world, from the highest corridors of power to the quotidian routines of getting and spending. Magazines such as Pagany, The Exile, and the transatlantic review helped Pound make news that stayed news.

21

Canto 35 Richard Parker

Canto 35 begins “So this is (may we take it) Mitteleuropa” (35/172),1 the poet introducing a theme and region that work together to create an unusually focused moment in The Cantos. Historian Jörg Brechtefeld writes: “Traditionally, Mitteleuropa has been that part of Europe between East and West. As profane as this may sound, this is probably the most precise definition of Mitteleuropa available.”2 Brechtefeld limits his conception of the region to Germany, Austria, Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia (as these countries stood in the 1930s); a geography which approximates that with which Canto 35 concerns itself, though Pound extends his slightly to include the Südtirol/Alto Adige region contested by Austria and Italy and introduces some divagations to anachronous Italian locales at the close. Brechtefeld insists that “[t]he term ‘Mitteleuropa’ never has been merely a geographical term; it is also a political one, much as Europe, East and West, are terms that political scientists employ as synonyms for political ideas or concepts.”3 Politically, it encompasses various versions of empire: that of the Hapsburg Austro-Hungarians, Prussian Pan-Germanism in the wake of Bismarck and what Brechtefeld calls “a vision, a concept, or a justification of imperialism” which would be used by Hitler and the Nazis to forward their expansion into the region.4

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Mitteleuropa also has a distinct cultural resonance. Brechtefeld calls the term “a mediator (Mittler) between the different ethnic and cultural groups in Europe’s centre. In this sense, supporters of Mitteleuropa have always stressed the cultural unity and the common traditions of the region by championing a truly multi-cultural society.”5 Between the world wars this cultural Mitteleuropa implied the residual cosmopolitanism and racial mixture left by the Austro-Hungarians, as well as vibrant, liberal-bourgeois production in the arts and sciences, much of which was centered on Vienna, the region’s cultural heart, as well as cities like Budapest, Prague, Zagreb, and Trieste. As Pound was drafting Eleven New Cantos (1934), this production was blooming from the rubble of the collapsed Austro-Hungarian Empire, while in Germany the concept of Mitteleuropa was being refashioned by the Nazis, planning the move of its ideological capital from cultured Vienna to martial Berlin. Critics have read Pound’s attitude towards this region as largely negative. For Terrell, Pound’s “Mitteleuropa” refers to “that part of Europe which the advocates of Pan-Germanism proposed to form into an empire,”6 the implications of which, for the pacifist poet, are made clear by James J. Wilhelm, who describes the region simply as “a part of Europe that Pound was never fond of.”7 Kenner, who characteristically leaves the line between paraphrase and interpretation unclear, refers to “Mitteleuropean civic slither,”8 while David Moody suggests that in Canto 35 “the general impression [. . .] is that there is now no civic sense in Austria and Hungary,”9 both critics seeing 35 as a contrast to the “civic sense” of the American Founding Fathers and Italian Renaissance exemplars scattered through Eleven New Cantos. Thus, as Roland John has suggested, this Canto should be read in direct opposition to that material, as an attack on the “conventional Middle European bourgeoisie” whose “ennui is contrasted with the vigorous government of the U.S.A.”10 This assumption of disapproval has fed into negative assessments of Canto 35. Stephen J. Adams, for example, writes that it is “the weakest canto in the volume” and that “Pound appears to dismiss a

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culture, or rather a diversity of cultures, of which he has little experience or understanding.”11 Noel Stock writes off the Canto as “only a caricature,”12 and complains that “we are not always sure what meaning Pound wishes us to draw,”13 while Michael Thurston reads it as a depiction of a “cultural hell” made up of “line after line of dull conversation and deadly pretension.”14 Such readings do not take into account the ambivalence that energizes this Canto, and conflate Pound’s mid-1930s Mitteleuropa with later, quite unambiguous, iterations, such as that in Canto 50 (1937), in which we read of [. . .] hell’s bog, in the slough of Vienna, in     the midden of Europe in the black hole of all mental vileness, in the privvy [sic] that stank Franz Josef, in Metternich’s merdery in the absolute rottenness, among embastardized cross-breeds (50/247) The finest moments in The Cantos are often those about which it is most difficult to know “what meaning Pound wishes us to draw,” and Mitteleuropa is, in this Canto, underdetermined in a manner which, I would argue, is integral to its argument. The thinking here may point us in the direction of the invective of Canto 50, but it is not there yet—35 remains usefully undecided. Other modernists, writing from a range of viewpoints, describe the region with similar anxiety. Eliot listed “the present decay of Eastern Europe” as one of the key themes of The Waste Land,15 and included a similar intercutting of voices and “gossip” to Canto 35 in his long poem, while Wyndham Lewis embodies an associated cultural phenomenon in the character of Kreisler in Tarr (1916/1928).16 Further from Pound, however, Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities (1930–43) offers the most extensive modernist elaboration of Mitteleuropa, while other accounts include Hermann Broch’s The Sleepwalkers (1931–32), Karl Kraus’s The Last Days of Mankind (1919), and Stefan Zweig’s The World of Yesterday (1942). These voices are culturally, politically, and racially various, yet they all present a recognizably similar conception—all

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agree on the cultural decadence left by the Hapsburgs and portray a region at the point of collapsing into chaos. Thus, Pound’s depiction of Mitteleuropa is not necessarily wholly indebted to his racial and political concerns and we should not simply conflate his writing about race elsewhere, nor his invective in Canto 50 with his analysis here. Philip Blair Rice describes Canto 35 as “gossip overheard in central Europe”17 and Wendy Flory writes that the piece “includes derogatory comments and anecdotes, mainly about people Pound had met.”18 The “overheard” nature of the Canto characterizes it most fully—the act of eavesdropping upon many aligned but distinct voices underscoring that integral indeterminacy. The piece is mostly made up of stories garnered from people Pound knew, and makes for an ambivalent atmosphere which reproduces some of the uncertainty with which Pound approaches the region he describes. Pound’s first anecdote in Canto 35 brings together martial and military Mitteleuropean themes around a character called “Corles.” Douglas Stone tells us that he is based on Alfred Perlès, “the son of a fairly well-to-do Viennese Jew and a French Catholic mother,”19 a writer associate of Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin, upon whom the “aristocratic little prick”20 Carl, in Miller’s Tropic of Cancer (published in 1934, the same year as Eleven New Cantos) and Quiet Days in Clichy (1940/1956), is based and who Pound met in 1934.21 Perlès writes: “My tragedy and my salvation consist in belonging to no race, to no nation. I have only a great capacity for floating, for being adrift”22—and he becomes, for Miller and Pound alike, almost the definition of the amoral, rootless cosmopolitan. Pound reviewed Tropic of Cancer in an unpublished essay23 that offers a surprisingly positive, and revealing, appreciation of Miller’s “hierarchy of values”24 in that text. Pound writes that “Bawdy the book is [. . .] But if an obscene book is obscene because of any vileness in the author’s mind, this book is certainly not obscene.”25 Pound refigures Miller in his own image, sketching him as a moralist depicting a decadent world with accuracy and integrity; he is “not a searcher for low life, but plunged into it by the destiny of our epoch, namely the monetary system.”26

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At the outset of Canto 35, Perlès’s presence matches Carl’s function in Tropic of Cancer, with Pound making him a member of (and synecdoche for) the great Hapsburg war machine. When facing the possibility of real warfare Corles/Carl/ Perlès reverts to type and to the bourgeois family, buying his way out of the army—and into the quintessentially Viennese institution of the “mind sanatorium”—through the intercession of “his ‘bon’ colonel, a friend of the family.”27 Moody writes that “with the passing of the imperial order the prevailing values are now those of the cultivated Viennese Jewish family,”28 a family which runs through Canto 35 as an analogue or a symptom of Hapsburg militarism—an analogue that has a marked racial valence (the “almost intravaginal warmth of / hebrew affections, in the family” (35/172–73). Miller’s Carl is Jewish, as is Pound’s Corles: Pound writes, approvingly, of Tropic of Cancer that Miller’s “Americans are very American, his orientals, very oriental.”29 And yet, we should not lose sight of the fact that Pound had met Perlès socially, and that this passage does not quite amount to a condemnation of Perlès’s role in the Hapsburg debacle—just as Carl, as decadent as he may be, is a strangely likeable character in Tropic of Cancer, and a friend of Henry, the narrator. Despite the ambiguity that runs through the piece, and Pound’s qualms about Mitteleuropa, it will be a Canto that deals in and with friends. The anecdote following Corles turns the reader’s attention towards the cultural products of Mitteleuropa, implying a causative connection with the familial world to which we have just been introduced. Thus, in the story of Fidascz and Nataanovitch, we hear the rich chromaticism of late-Romantic music—the Viennese sonorities of the likes of Richard Strauss and Gustave Mahler—contrasted with the ancient clarity of J. S. Bach: Mr Fidascz explained to me the horrors of playing the fiddle while that ass Nataanovitch, or some other better known -ovitch

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Readings in the Cantos whose name we must respect because of the law of libel, was conducting in particular the Mattias Passion, after requesting that the audience come in black clothes; (35/172)

Terrell identifies Fidascz as Tibor Serly (1901–78), the Hungarian violist, adaptor of Béla Bartók and friend of Pound and Louis Zukofsky, and Nataanovitch as the Polish-British conductor Leopold Stokowski (1882–1977), under whom Serly played in the Philadelphia Orchestra between 1928 and 1935.30 Fidascz/Serly is horrified by the contemporary approach to Bach, which is characterized by the bourgeois affectation of the black-clothed audience; cultural achievement thus desecrated by Mitteleuropean class-consciousness. Louis Zukofsky (1904–78), another Jewish friend of Pound’s, notes a connection with his own long poem “A” (1928–74), here, writing in a letter draft (dated April 8, 1935 and addressed to Pound) that my sober eye noticeth that in the new eleven Cantos you write about the audience in black at the Matthew Passion, matter handled in “A” (I’m not comparing how it was handled) and that you write about certain matters in a vein similar to “A” (you might look up “Active”—p 139 “Played polo / and they—they—the very old stutterers,” etc) I believe in the same Canto.31 We know that Pound knew the lines from “A”-1 (1928) because he revised them,32 and the lines from “A”-6 (1930) as they were included in his Active Anthology (1933).33 Zukofsky doesn’t compare how this material was handled in the two poems, but it is obvious that Pound and Zukofsky are making similar critiques in their respective pieces. In “A”-6 Zukofsky describes the “Ties, handkerchiefs to watch, / Mufflers, dress shirts, golf holes, / Chocolate eclaires, automobiles and entrees”34 immediately before the material quoted in his letter to Pound, which

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accoutrements embody the kind of bourgeois frivolity depicted in Canto 35. Zukofsky’s observation points up the proximity in the two poets’ projects in the mid-1930s. While Pound was working on Canto 35, Zukofsky was writing “A”-8, the longest installment of “A” thus far, and arguably its most Poundian; it begins with a restatement of various performances of the Passion,35 and then proceeds, through a wealth of collage-like documentary evidence, to make historiographical arguments that touch on many Poundian interests (including the Adamses as archetypal American family) and social analyses.36 The poets’ shared ground should give us pause for thought as we attempt to disentangle Pound’s prejudices in Canto 35—Pound’s “whoring countess” (35/173) and her debauched milieu could be at home in “A”-8, The Waste Land, or even The Man Without Qualities; this subject matter is not i­ nherently anti-Semitic nor fascistic. That is not to say that Pound’s Mitteleuropa is uncolored by such concerns. For Donald Davie, “Canto 35 contains the first display of Pound’s anti-Semitism”37 in The Cantos, and sporadic hints of prejudice build to a climax with another tale of intra-familial financial skullduggery, told through the nasal drawl of cartoon Yiddish: The tale of the perfect schnorrer: a peautiful chewisch poy wit a vo-ice dot woult meldt dh heart offa schtone and wit a likeing for to make arht-voiks and ven dh oldt ladty wasn’t dhere any more and dey didn’t know why, tdhere ee woss in the oldt antique schop and nobodty knew how he got dhere and venn hiss brudder diet widout any bapers he vept all ofer dh garpet so much he had to have his clothes aftervards pressed and he orderet a magnifficent funeral and tden zent dh pill to dh vife. (35/174)

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This, following “Mr Elias” (“‘The only / ‘way I get inspiration is occasionally from a girl’” [35/173]), is the second time that Pound renders a specifically Jewish voice in Canto 35, and in both cases a specific reading of Jewry is ventured: uncomfortable, duplicitous family relations and financial dubiety brought together with inauthentic artistic production. Terrell, quoting Rene Odlin, tells us that the Jewish boy in the story represents a “young artist. Pound gave him work space at Rapallo where he produced ‘a fairly good imitation of Gaudier and then went rapidly down hill.’”38 Michael Thurston’s reading is less ambiguous than Terrell’s, writing that, “[c]orrupted as they corrupt, the ‘schnorrers’ of Mitteleuropa threaten life and culture alike in their amateurish approach to ‘ahrt,’ their willingness to kill for wealth, and their unnatural propensity for collecting treasures and keeping them from circulation.”39 Perhaps the personal connection between Pound and his sources might add some amelioration to what seems an astringently bigoted moment, but in the final analysis it is difficult to dismiss Thurston’s reading. The final anecdote in the “Mitteleuropa” section of Canto 35 confuses this understanding of race once again, with Pound repeating— though rearranging—the racial and cultural arguments of the earlier parts of the poem and connecting them to the region’s distinctive Real Politik:               Eljen! Eljen Hatvany! He had ideals and he said to the general at the conference, “I introduce to you the head of the bakers’ union. “I introduce to you the head of the brick-layers’ union...”[40] “Comment! Vous êtes tombés si bas?”      replied General Franchet de Whatshisname on the part of the french royalist party, showing thus the use of ideals to a jewish Hungarian baron with a library (naturally with a library) and a fine collection of paintings? “We find the land over  brained.”

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said the bojars or whatever the old savages call it as they hung their old huntsman friend to his chandelier in his dining hall after the usual feasting and flagons VIRTUSCH!! it must be one helluva country. (35/174) Ben D.  Kimpel and T.  C.  Duncan Eaves identify the Hatvany mentioned here as Lajos, or Ludwig, Hatvany.41 An author, critic, and liberal-leftist, a Hungarian and a Jew, Hatvany was active in the Hungarian revolution against the Habsburgs in 1918, as well as the attempts to preserve a bourgeois liberalism in the face of Béla Kun’s Bolsheviks in the aftermath of the First World War.42 Hatvany’s book Das Verwundete Land (1921), which can be translated as something like The Wounded Land, caught Pound’s attention and he at least tried to get a copy, requesting one from Horace Liveright in 1928, suggesting to the Russian-Jewish John Cournos that he translate the work while mentioning that Hatvany had been imprisoned for defaming Hungary’s rulers.43 As Pound was not a fluent German speaker, it is likely that he found out about Das Verwundete Land through someone else or from the same newspaper reports in which he discovered Hatvany’s incarceration. The “Eljen Hatvany” passage, however, repeats closely, with some embellishment, a scene from Das Verwundete Land. This is Kimpel and Duncan’s account of it: Hatvany has accompanied Mihaily Karolyi, president of Hungary early in 1919, to Belgrade to meet the French Army in the Balkans under General Franchet d’Esperay [the commander of the Allied Army of the Orient], thinking of him as a representative of French democracy. He finds instead that France [. . .] “was represented by a French royalist and imperialist”. Karolyi (not Hatvany) offers to introduce the members of his delegation, and the General [. . .] “recognizes in order those who present themselves, the National Councilor and the Workers’ Councilor”. He smiles scornfully and in a soldier-like way remarks [. . .] “I did not think you had sunk so low!” Later,

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Readings in the Cantos the general always acts as a conqueror and forces a treaty on Hungary. He represents the same militarism the idealists had opposed in Germany and Austria[.]44

French aggression made Karolyi’s premiership untenable, forcing him out, and, contrary to French intentions, ushered in Kun’s Hungarian Bolshevism. Pound is not doing what we might expect him to do here; Hatvany is representative of a strain of Mitteleuropean idealism in which the Western European powers are the villains. As Kimpel and Duncan have it: “There is probably a little condescension toward the naive liberal, but Pound’s view of the victors was similar enough to Hatvany’s. There is no obvious anti-Semitism. It is hard to believe that Pound was not at least partly sincere in writing ‘Eljen Hatvany.’”45 Nonetheless, the fact that this is used as a counterpoint to three or four anecdotes in which Jews had been depicted as unequivocally scurrilous does not entirely mitigate Pound’s position. Pound’s underlying opinion of liberals like Hatvany is completed with the final subject rhyme, another opaque passage in which something reminiscent of a pogrom occurs: “‘We find the land over-brained.’ / said the bojars or whatever the old savages call it / as they hung their old huntsman friend to his chandelier” (35/174). These lines are ambivalent: is Pound celebrating the brutality of the Hungarian Bolsheviks? Or is he commiserating with the failed liberals? Both options seem hard to square with what we might assume to be Pound’s political bias. The fact that this passage is immediately followed by the second, distinct, section of the Canto, in which a correction to decadence is posited, makes this outburst of violence read something like a threat (and brings the Canto closer to the invective Adams, Stock, and Thurston complain about): Mitteleuropean decadence will be cured not just through financial realignments on the model of the Monte dei Paschi but also with popular force. After this, as Moody has it, Pound takes us to “Mantua in 1401 and Venice in 1423, to observe two varieties of civic sense,”46 in contrast to

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contemporary Mitteleuropa. Pound reiterates the connection between Jewishness and fraudulence and posits a more sturdily correct way of doing things: Quality. So that our goods please the buyer. Tell the Wazir that that stuff is ours only in name it is made by damned jews in exile, made by damned jews in Ragusa and sold with Venetian labels. Goods in Venetian bottoms no ship to be built out of Venice.     Mocenigo. Fourteen twenty-three. Have a load-line, no heavy deck cargo. Tola, octroi and decime. (35/176) Reclamation of production and protectionist policies will vouchsafe quality and honesty in business. The final triumvirate, which Terrell helpfully translates as “Tala: ML, ‘toll, tribute’; octroi: F, ‘dues, taxes’; decime: I, ‘tithes, imposts’”47 contrast both with what has come before in the text—the malignant Mitteleuropean family—and the transcendent intellectual order of Canto 36, following a transition that Daniel Albright suggests “is one of the most startling of the whole project.”48 There is ambiguity here too, however. Moody writes that “[b]oth cases, the Mantuan and the Venetian, exemplify a civic sense directed by a rational but rather limited self-interest,”49 and we should note how much more vivid the ambiguous lives of Pound’s Mitteleuropeans are than his depiction of Italian banking. The Venetians are also not unequivocally civic-minded, for, while the Jews are forgers, they act under Venetian instruction. Ambiguity returns, an ambiguity that is fundamental to the Canto, a correlative to the structural ambiguity of the liminal region of Mitteleuropa.

22

Canto 36 Mark Byron

Canto 36 presents itself as a special case within an epic poem replete with dense allusion, translation and literary remediation.1 Much of the Canto comprises Pound’s translation of Guido Cavalcanti’s philosophical canzone “Donna mi prega.” Pound studied this poem and attempted translations of it at different points in his adult life, including his “traduction” published in the Dial in 1928.2 The location of this poem in a Canto midway through Eleven New Cantos (1934) brings the general import and relevance of this suite into focus. It arrives almost miraculously amidst Cantos dealing with the economic conditions of eighteenth-century Europe and the emergent USA, the history of munitions manufacture leading into the First World War, and tableaux scenes from Greek mythology. Pound emulates Cavalcanti’s highly inflected vocabulary, extending Neoplatonic themes from earlier Cantos that will recur later in The Pisan Cantos, Rock-Drill, and Thrones. The history and provenance of Pound’s translation is of critical relevance to the meaning of the Canto, which also comprises two segments following “Donna mi prega”: the first concerns the ninth-century Hiberno-Carolingian theologian Johannes Scottus Eriugena and the Papal condemnations to which he was subject; and a final segment concerns the thirteenth-century Mantuan troubadour

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Sordello da Goito (a figure already familiar from the strident opening of Canto 2) and the mercantile and political matters in which he was embroiled. The relation of these segments to each other anchors Canto 36 in Pound’s epic as a whole. Pound first engaged with Cavalcanti’s poetry in college, performing research eventually published in his short monograph The Spirit of Romance (1910). “Donna mi prega” proved especially fascinating, not least for its abstruse philosophical vocabulary and its mediation of Neoplatonic thought and empirical observation of physical phenomena. Pound collected his dispersed commentary and critical apparatus into the essay “Cavalcanti” in Make It New (1934).3 Cavalcanti’s poem is crucial to Pound as an emblem of enduring truth, of amor understood as contemplation rather than emotion, symbolized by light and represented in a language of hermetic iconicity. Pound asserts that “the whole poem is a scholastic definition in form,”4 in contrast to what he considers the lifeless scholasticism of Aquinas. Cavalcanti’s poem represents a shift in poetic sensibility in thirteenthcentury Italy, to the dolce stil novo or “sweet new style.” Cavalcanti’s didactic, philosophical poem represents a union of prosodic dexterity and rhetorical complexity. A poetic genre that developed in the Sicilian Court of Frederico Barbarossa in the thirteenth century, the canzone was characterized by a variety of stanzaic structure and dense rhyme scheme (to which some 52 of 154 syllables contribute in each stanza of “Donna mi prega”). In his translation Pound retained other common features of the Italian canzoni: the hendecasyllabic line (eleven syllables) and the final envoi. The poem is also considered to be a response to Guido Orlandi’s sonnet, “Onde si move e done nasce Amore” (“Say what is Love, and whence doth he start”).5 It is a virtuoso adaptation of the Troubadour poetic mode of trobar clus (“closed form”), a poem intended for initiated readers. For Pound, Cavalcanti’s aesthetic requires human inventio, “an interactive force: the virtù in short,”6 in which bodily passions play a central part, rather than receding into asceticism or monasticism. The body, experiencing Love, is the vehicle by which is recalled “the radiant world where one thought cuts

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through another with clean edge, a world of moving energies ‘mezzo oscuro rade’, ‘risplende in sè perpetuale effecto’, magnetisms that take form, that are seen, or that border the visible.”7 Ronald Bush has defined the central problematic of Pound’s translation as a medieval synthesis of two apparently disparate philosophical systems—Aristotle’s rigorous definition of substance, matter, and form, in which memory plays a key role in the soul’s acquisition of enduring and impersonal forms of knowledge, and the Neoplatonists’ understanding of the emanation and return of divine intelligence (nous), in which memory helps the soul re-ascend to its divine home.8 Cavalcanti’s poem places Love in the Aristotelian realm of accident, not substance, making it an event of the senses, and then lodging it in the possible intellect where it awaits pleasurable fulfillment in the discovery of a matching temperament. His scholastic argument superficially resembles poetic arguments for gentilezza (the predisposition to love) associated with his earlier contemporary, Guido Guinizzelli.9 Pound instead finds evidence of medieval Arabic philosophy in Cavalcanti’s vocabulary. This tradition centers upon Aristotle’s De Anima and his distinction between the active intellect (νοῦς ποιητικός) and the potential or possible intellect (νοῦς δυνάμει): that is, the origin and function of human thought. Aristotle’s intent was not entirely clear on this point, inspiring an extensive philosophical commentary. The Arab tradition exemplified by Alfarabi, Avicenna, and Averroes absorbs the active and possible intellects into the larger cosmos: the supreme being consists in pure thought, giving rise to emanations or intelligences that keep the celestial spheres in motion. The most remote emanation is the active intellect, which is separate from the possible intellect but inspires human thought by motivating a “eudemonic state called conjunction.”10 This is a decisive element of Cavalcanti’s thinking for Pound. Images from the active intellect “graze” against the human possible

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intellect, making it aware of the divine through sensory experience. This is both empirical and esoteric, although Pound is careful to distinguish his formulation of the “magic moment” as distinct from such gnostic theories as articulated by Luigi Valli in Il linguaggio segreto di Dante e dei “Fideli d’Amore” (1928). Pound’s translation adapts the dominant prosodic conventions of the canzone: while retaining only a minimal rhyme scheme, the poem presents opportune instances of internal rhyme (season / reason in the opening lines, and delight / sight in the final lines of the first strophe, for example); the prosodic burden rests instead on repetition of words and assonantal and alliterative devices (“Having no hope,” “leave his true likeness,” “Disjunct in mid darkness,” etc. [36/177, 179]).11 Wordrepetition pronounces the philosophical register of the poem in the transcendental concepts of amor, “virtu,” “intellect possible,” and their basis in human experience. Pound supplements his complex argument for the influence of Avicenna and Averroes upon Cavalcanti with medieval light philosophy: “Grosseteste derives from Arabic treatises on perspective. It is too much to say that Guido had, perforce, read the Bishop of Lincoln, but certainly that is the sort of thing he had read.”12 In his own commentary on “Donna mi prega,” Pound quotes from Baur’s edition of Grosseteste’s De Luce: “Lux enim per se in omnem partem si ipsam diffundit...” (“For light of its very nature diffuses itself in every direction . . .”).13 Pound asserts the incendiary nature of Cavalcanti’s poem: “We may trace [Guido’s] ideas to Averroes, Avicenna; he does not definitely proclaim any heresy, but he shows leanings toward not only the proof by reason, but toward the proof by experiment,” where the whole poem is an extended definition of l’accidente and “a sort of metaphor on the generation of light.”14 As a meditation on the nature of Love, the poem is a rhetorical response to an implied question concerning the nature of love: “A lady asks me / I speak in season” (36/177). The first strophe sets out the terms of the problem: the lady “seeks a reason for an affect” that goes by the name of amor. The nature of this affect immediately drills down into complex philosophical strata, and entire traditions of

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commentary are represented in a handful of words. The “truth” of love can only be conveyed to “present knowers,” implying a kind of gnostic or otherwise esoteric dimension to this phenomenon. The emphasis on vision—“Having no hope that low-hearted / Can bring sight to such reason”—introduces the speaker’s disavowal of “natural demonstration” and “proof-bringing” before the uninitiated. However, there is a kind of sight perfectly suited to observing the essence of this affect, but one tied up in matters of the active and possible intellects. The provenance of love, “where it hath birth,” is beyond the ken of material conception, as are “its virtu and power / Its being and every moving”— that is, its strength, its source, its identity, and its agency. The second strophe is an elaboration upon the kind of proof required properly to define amor: Pound sees Cavalcanti navigating a way between the Scylla of proof by authority and the Charybdis of base materialism, attesting that “‘dove sta memoria’ is Platonism.”15 Thus the opening phrase, “Where memory liveth,” situates love as the lynchpin joining the transcendent active intellect and human knowledge. The following lines develop a complex and subtle argument concerning the animation of human thought: in effect, an epitome of the entire Neoplatonic and medieval Arab response to Aristotle’s De Anima. Love is infused into human experience the same way that light enters a dark zone and brings the potential for color into actuality: “Formed like a diafan from light on shade” (36/177). The term diafan admits a technical meaning here, deriving from Albertus Magnus’s commentary on De Anima (II.3.viii): “we see light not by itself but in a certain subject, and this is the diaphane.”16 Just as light makes its presence known by what it illuminates, love transmits from the higher realms (Nous) to the human realm (“of Mars”) in which it takes on “seen form,” in the present case the beauty of a woman. Love, “which being understood / Taketh locus and remaining in the intellect possible” (36/177), must be experienced in the sensible world, but in so doing it provides a conduit back to the divine intelligence, and by registering in the “intellect possible,” installs its image within human memory. It is crucial to note that Love is transcendent, with “neither weight nor still-standing,” but,

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like light, “shineth out / Himself his own effect unendingly.” Love is impassive, identified as stillness or “being aware,” and depositing “his true likeness” in precisely the correct locus. This analogy between light and love makes clear the Neoplatonic register Pound wishes to overlay upon Cavalcanti’s philosophy of love, sidelining the scholastic elements of Cavalcanti’s poem in order to enlist this trope in the general theme of the possibility of a human paradise terrestre. The third strophe elaborates on the transcendental nature of Love: being “not vertu but comes of that perfection” (36/178), Love emanates from Nous, activated into human awareness not by reason but by experience. The role of the human agent realizes this insight into the divine realm through love: “the attainment of Love and hence of insight into the divine depend on one’s active desire and will.”17 Conversely, those without the requisite attributes are denied such insights. This takes the form of a falsely negative projection onto Love itself, appearing to the unenlightened as “Poor in discernment, being thus weakness’ friend” (36/178). The following line asserts the life-giving powers of Love, whose power “cometh on death in the end,” functioning as a kind of counterweight, reinforced in the “friend / end” rhyme. Love is not a “natural opposite” to death but is an emissary from the divine, not emergent from “chance,” even if human memory is insufficiently strong to retain the experience. Pound embellishes the notion of an elect audience, open to the light of the divine denied others lacking the requisite faculties of the possible intellect and the locus of memory. The fourth strophe explores the precise mechanisms at work when Love registers its impact upon the human intelligence. The wording of the initial lines seems to suggest that Love is created out of human emotion: “Cometh he to be / when the will / From overplus / Twisteth out of natural measure” (36/178). Love is experienced in human terms and enters into the possible intellect as a consequence of its acting upon the receptive will. This point is confirmed by a continued association with light imagery: “Moveth he changing colour / Either to laugh or weep / Contorting the face with fear.” But a careful reading reveals that the poet addresses the physical effects of Love, “that shall ye see

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of him.” Pound presents something of a proof by “natural demonstration” in this strophe. Love is experienced by the receptive human intelligence—“folk who deserve him”—and is made manifest in the “colour[s]” of human emotion made visible by his “light” (36/178, 179). It reposes in human memory, conducive to further reception: “his strange quality sets sighs to move / Willing man look into that forméd trace in his mind” (36/178). Pound inverts the conventional image of the inflamed lover to depict a human receptivity to divine experience as “uneasiness that rouseth the flame.” The strophe moves into a kind of negative demonstration, whereby the “Unskilled can not form his image.” Love is essentially still, a dimension of divine experience, and one that “Neither turneth about to seek his delight” nor seeks to measure its dimensions “Be it so great or so small” (36/178). The vocabulary of this strophe is less technical than earlier sections of the poem (with a couple of significant exceptions such as “forméd trace”) but the hermeneutic challenges remain. The generalized, even vague, expressions of the process of Love entering into human intellect are compounded by the use of archaisms: “resteth,” “rouseth,” “turneth,” and “moveth” (twice). These active verbs shift the rhetorical focus of Cavalcanti’s argument (and Pound’s mediation of it) from matters of definition of the divine realm to the reception of Love and the potential thread from human experience to the “divine or permanent world.”18 The final strophe of the poem describes the way in which Love, as an emanation of Nous, can function separately from it and persist in human affairs. The first six lines establish a model of affinity between Love and its natural exemplars: “He draweth likeness and hue from like nature” (36/179). The phenomena of this world set to display Love are themselves images of Beauty, and thus share a likeness, drawing the sensitive to follow “Deserving spirit, that pierceth.” While Pound alludes to the stereotype of Eros/Cupid and his “darts,” this strategy only emboldens his schematic divergence from the model of love as the compelled intoxication of an unsuspecting subject, but rather a state of awareness of the divine thread joining Beauty to Nous. The vocabulary returns to a technical register, where the “face” of Love is unknowable,

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enshrouded in the “white light that is allness”—a clear reference to Grosseteste’s De Luce. The human intellect disposed to receiving Love “heareth, seeth not form” but its status as divine emanation functions as a kind of magnetism, and guides the receptive subject. The philosophical discussion turns to the nature of emanation, repeating the earlier suggestion that the way Love inspires an image in the possible intellect is akin to the way light realizes the potential color in things: “Being divided, set out from colour, / Disjunct in mid darkness / Grazeth the light” (36/179). The verb “to graze” is decisive (Pound’s translation of the Italian raser) as the action by which the magic moment is activated: “a moment of ‘grazing’ or ‘shining’ becomes the initiating figure for Pound’s representation of ‘Elisio’—Elysium, or Paradise.”19 In its transmission between the ideal realm and that of the senses, Love is the most potent vehicle for human insight into the divine, and captured in its grammatical inflections: the ideal (represented by the noun amore) must be received in its abstract form from the “universal intellect” and stored in the memory, which is part of the sensitive soul; it is then brought into being with the aid of the senses, to culminate in the individual physicalized experience (represented in the poem by the verb amare).20 The coda produces the familiar poetic formula of envoi in which the poem is an emissary for Love’s comprehension. Yet this diplomatic function is aimed only at the elect, those receptive to the experience and understanding of Love, reflecting Pound’s Neoplatonic focus. The canzone may wander freely, confident in its ornate art “that thy reasons / Shall be praised from thy understanders” (36/179) and the rest lack the “will” to make meaningful commerce. These lines reinforce this association of Love and the Beauty of art in their register, their use of archaic pronouns and phrasal inversions characteristic of formal speech. At this point the reader might pause to consider the singular oddity of this rhetorical exercise: Pound has produced a translated poem that

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seeks to convince a Lady of the nature of Love, in which the speaker gives a philosophically adept and abstruse account of its function as an emanation of Nous, and its ability to “graze” receptive human intellect into a recognition of its form, reflected in (recognized) Beauty and kept in the memory. The poem speaks exclusively, utterly unconcerned that those not adept at receiving such missives from the divine may simply pass by, oblivious. For Pound, this schema of hermetic wisdom also abides in the Troubadour poets: they speak a language of love and beauty conveyed through a vocabulary of precise definition. This has direct consequences for the final section of Canto 36. The transition of Canto 36 out of “Donna mi prega” occurs via a direct quotation from Dante’s Paradiso (IX.61–62): “Sù sono specchi, voi dicete Troni, / onde refulge a noi Dio giudicante” (“Above there are mirrors, you call them / Thrones, and from them God’s judging shines to us”).21 Dante refers to the celestial hierarchy—a tradition stemming from Pseudo-Dionysius and Pope Gregory the Great to Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologica— which provides a neat parallel to the theory of emanations Pound draws upon in Avicenna and Averroes. This motif of divine–human intercession links Cavalcanti’s poem with the papal condemnations of Eriugena. Pound here draws an association between the hermetic vocabulary and contemplative truth of Cavalcanti’s poem and the unjust besmirching of Eriugena’s reputation following his death. The passage settles upon the question of “exhumation”: Pound mentions it again in Canto 74, “and they dug him up out of sepulture” (74/449) and Canto 83, “so they dug up his bones in the time of De Montfort” (83/548). This first mention in Canto 36—“dug for, and damned Scotus Eriugina” (36/179)—is meant metaphorically (dug for his books, not his corpse), unlike the later passages, which refer, erroneously, to bodily exhumation. Eriugena suffered no such indignity, and it seems that in the later references Pound probably conflates Eriugena with Amalric, a scholar at the University of Paris in the early thirteenth century who was exhumed during the Aristotelian controversy. The Council of Paris in 1209 decreed that copies of Eriugena’s Periphyseon were to be burned along with the texts of Aristotle, perhaps prompting

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Pound’s conflation. The mention of Aquinas and Aristotle toward the end of this verse paragraph installs Pound’s conception of Eriugena as a counterweight to the straitened scholastic logic of Aquinas, as one who saw reason as the basis for authority, rather than deferring to the Church Fathers and institutional power. That Pound cites Eriugena in the Canto, instead of Averroes, Avicenna, or Grosseteste, is telling: at the time Pound had only read Eriugena second-hand, in Italian high school philosophy textbooks, and did not consult the relevant volume (122) of Migne’s Patrologia Latina until several years later in 1939–40. The direct quotation from Eriugena’s Periphyseon (“‘Authority comes from right reason, / never the other way on’” [36/179]) is Pound’s translation from Francesco Fiorentino’s Manuale di storia della filosofia (“Auctoritas ex vera ratione processi ratio vero nequaquam ex auctoritate”), and it became a formula he repeated elsewhere in his prose.22 Given the intensifying political context of Eleven New Cantos—American Revolutionary history and Italian Fascism in the shadow of modern warfare and its economic underpinnings—Pound saw Eriugena as an appropriately sacrificial figure in formulating a radically bold but equally misunderstood Neoplatonic system of thought, and as one who sustains the so-called “conspiracy of intelligence” beyond orthodox intellectual networks. Pound provides a neat bridge between the parts of this Canto, proclaiming Cavalcanti’s poem “alive with Eriugenian vigour.”23 This connection is consolidated in Pound’s mind when he eventually does read the Periphyseon, quoting Eriugena’s phrase “omnia quae sunt lumina sunt” in both Latin and English (“all things that are are lights”) in letters and in the Pisan Cantos. The third section of Canto 36 begins with an adapted Latin formula of Pound’s invention—“Sacrum, sacrum, inluminatio coitu” (36/180) (“the sacred, the sacred, illumination in coitus”). This functions as a Latinate analogue to the Eleusinian Mysteries cited elsewhere in The Cantos (45, 51, 53), which culminate in the hieros gamos (ἱερὸς γάμος), the sexual union of the high priestess and the hierophant or “the shower of the sacred.” The thread of divine illumination by way of “natural

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demonstration” unites this line with the erotic potential of “Donna mi prega.” Pound connects the antecedent Troubadour poetic tradition to Cavalcanti and Dante by reintroducing the figure of Sordello first encountered in Canto 2 (and indeed in the opening lines of the Ur-Cantos) in the following line—“Lo Sordels si fo di Mantovana.” Rather than focus on the erotic mysteries of love Pound saw at work in Troubadour lyric (although Sordello’s affair with Cunizza neatly ties in with the “lady” of Cavalcanti’s poem), these lines swerve into a dynamic dialogical account of Sordello’s economic and political affairs. Sordello da Goita (fl. 1220–69), Italian by birth, came into his fortune as repayment for military service to Charles of Anjou, King of Sicily and Naples. His abrupt rise to power (“‘Five castles!’” [36/180]) over several villages, including one famous for its textiles, establishes him as an active agent in his world—in addition to his identity as a poet to which Pound alludes in Canto 2, citing Robert Browning’s long poem Sordello. Pound quotes from the Latin document bestowing ownership of these properties—“castra Montis Odorisii [. . .]”—as well as from the letter Pope Clement IV sent to Charles, which ended Sordello’s time in prison—“..way you treat your men is a scandal....” Pound’s splicing of (mediated, translated) primary material into his own poetic material forms a long-standing pattern across The Cantos, and here it can be seen to reflect and compound the preceding imagery: just as Cavalcanti promotes a process of “natural demonstration” to illuminate the transit of Love from Nous to the human possible intellect, Pound provides his own empirical show of the human agent receptive both to the divine and to terrestrial experience that opens the way to the paradiso terrestre. This culminates in the final line of Canto 36—“Quan ben m’albir e mon ric pensamen” (36/180) (“When I consider well in my fine thoughts”)—taken from a poem in which Sordello meditates on the location of his experience of love in the memory. Pound endorses a view of Sordello as one who willingly abdicates material wealth for the metaphysical illuminations of love and the effulgence it bestows upon the poetic imagination. In this way, Canto 36 is a repository for such thinking, and literally frames Pound’s iterative translations

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of Cavalcanti’s subtle canzone. Canto 36 comprises a zone apart, a “shut garden”:24 it is a still point amidst the statecraft, diplomacy, and economy of Europe and the new American Republic of Eleven New Cantos.

23

Canto 37 Roxana Preda

“Perché,” asked Mussolini, “vuol mettere le sue idee in ordine?” The question, asked during Pound’s audience with the Italian dictator in January 1933, was directed at a concern that Pound may have had for some time, at least since the publication of A Draft of XXX Cantos, the volume he had brought with him to give to the Duce. It may not have been obvious to a stranger why Pound needed to put his ideas in order. And yet, if Pound wanted to finish writing drafts of Cantos and gain the confidence for a poem that should be a statement of certitude about the world and himself, he needed to organize his ideas and this is what in all candor he must have told Mussolini. At the time of the interview, Pound had finished six new Cantos that marked a different direction in his work, changing focus from European culture to American politics. The interview prompted him in February 1933 to write his pamphlet, Jefferson and/or Mussolini, which, in retrospect, appears to be a synthesis of the ideology underlying Eleven New Cantos still in the works. In that text he implies that he was working on a seventh Canto, about Martin Van Buren. This president occupies pride of place in Jefferson and/or Mussolini: to judge by the material contained in pages 94–97, Pound’s reading of Van Buren’s Autobiography was fresh and the points he wanted to make in the Canto were taking shape in

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his mind. He states: “I have already started to put the bank war into a canto. I don’t know whether to leave it at that, or to quote sixty pages of Van’s autobiography.”1 The bank war refers to the conflict between the Second Bank of the United States (BUS) and the government, particularly the president, Andrew Jackson, around the renewal of the bank’s charter for another fifteen years. “Just beginning” to write about the bank war was the shadow that was to accompany this Canto ever since, as readers to this day do not very well distinguish among possible foci of interest: is the Canto about the bank war or about Van Buren? It is also still difficult to regard this Canto on its own, and not as a preamble to Cantos 88 and 89, where the bank war would be treated in more detail. At the same time, the prose work of the period signaled that Pound was reassessing his roots to clear the way forward. Jefferson and/or Mussolini connects naturally to Pound’s earlier pamphlet, The ABC of Economics (1933), which was meant to revisit Social Credit, the economic theory he had allowed to slip into the background since leaving London in 1920. The ABC of Reading (1934) became his synthesis in poetics, deriving most of its strength from the recontextualization of the ideogram as presented in Fenollosa’s Chinese Written Character as Medium for Poetry, which Pound had discovered in 1913. Finally, his “Vorticism” article, initially published in the Fortnightly Review in September 1914 was translated into Italian and published in Il Mare in spring 1933.2 It bears witness to the high opinion he still had of that text and to the potential of Vorticism as a valid statement of his poetics relevant to the present. Thus it can be argued that “putting ideas in order,” consisted in re-evaluating the three main strands of innovation in which Pound had been involved in the London period: Vorticism, the ideogram, and Social Credit, which he recontextualized for the Fascist world of 1932–34. Both Miranda Hickman and Catherine Paul have shown the impact of the Fascist regime of cultural events on the evolution of Pound’s thought during the 1930s. The poet may have been encouraged to a personal retrospective by a public one, happening under

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his very eyes: La Mostra di rivoluzione fascista (MRF), which Pound called “Il Decennio.” La Mostra opened its gates in October 1932 and Pound visited it by December: it was an exhibition which, through a collage of posters, objects, photos, and newspaper articles, aimed to show the history of Fascist development and success.3 This history had two phases: the first, between 1914 and 1922, detailed the roots and prehistory of Fascism; the second, the Decennio proper, showed the struggles and successes of Fascism after the attainment of power in 1922. Pound may have been reminded of the crucial events of his own history, beginning with his discovery of the Fenollosa manuscripts and the doctrine of the ideogram in 1913, his participation in the Vorticist avant-garde in 1914, and finally his discovery of Social Credit in 1918. His own Decennio, the decade in which he had added his Draft of XXX Cantos to the publication of Eliot’s Waste Land and Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), needed to be more confidently based on his special knot of influences and modernization. In many ways, the history of Fascism and that of Pound’s own poetic project had run in parallel. Mussolini’s question, “Why do you want to put your ideas in order?” became unforgettable, resonating with Pound’s deepest need of the moment and generating his natural response: “for my poem.”4 Pound revived the old ties with Orage and Douglas while keeping up his friendship with Wyndham Lewis, responding positively to Lewis’s work of the 1920s. For Lewis, Vorticism had been destroyed in the Great War. Pound was not willing to let it go so easily, as for him Vorticism had been cut too short, before realizing its potential. All through his London years, from 1914 to 1920, he had tried to keep up the flame of the movement, by writing his Memoir of Gaudier-Brzeska (1916), and by selling Vorticist work to John Quinn. Pound declared in the Little Review in that year: “Gaudier-Brzeska’s life work may have been stopped by a German bullet but Vorticism has not yet had its funeral.”5 Pound’s correspondence with Lewis shows his nostalgia for the pre-war days when they had been involved together in Blast. Writing to him in 1924, Pound remarked: “We were hefty guys in them days;

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an [sic] . . . we seem to have survived without a great mass of successors [. . .] can we kick up any more or any new devilment?”6 Yet there was another reason why, on the ground of revisiting old devilment at the start of the 1930s, Pound could think of the new. Lewis had visited Germany and praised Hitler in his book by the same name in 1931. Parallels with Pound’s situation in Italy and his appreciation of the Duce invited themselves naturally. Besides, as Hickman argues, Pound had a regime of Vorticist signs and wonders in the immediate context of Italian visual culture under Fascism.7 The “hefty guy” was Mussolini in action, the Vorticist man of integrity cutting through the masses of weaknesses and corruption of his age with remarkable drive and determination. In Blast, Lewis had been attacking the “stagnant” fin de siècle England; in his turn, Mussolini was destroying the historical accretions of tradition that were preventing Italy’s modernization. At the time of writing the Eleven New Cantos Pound was involved in an “intense effort, nearly twenty years after the publication of Blast to revive Vorticism in the context of fascist Italy.”8 Around 1932 he was also planning to write a book about Lewis, probably a portrait conceived in Vorticist manner, as he had done previously about Gaudier. Lewis did not cooperate, though, and the project ran into sand. This might help explain why the new cycle, written between 1931 and 1933, has a distinctive Vorticist mode of organization that is a synthesis of all versions of Vorticism in Blast: Lewis’s, Gaudier’s, and his own. In 1914, Pound had still been very much an imagist poet, trying unsuccessfully to adjust to Lewis’s aesthetic demands for a new avant-garde. Pound had tried mordant satire, expressionist color, sparse diction, and a strong visual approach. His poems for Blast were unpersuasive, though, experiments that needed to be corrected by a more coherent and mature Vorticist poetics. Pound’s version, insisting on the concept of the “turbine,”9 a whirl of significant events of the past relevant to the present, differed from that of Lewis, which demanded an art of the North, responding to the essential character of the British nation, an art that should be unsentimental, machine-oriented, tragicomical.10 The Eleven New Cantos could be considered a more serious

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and elaborate attempt on Pound’s part to produce a model of Vorticism in poetry, being arranged as a whirl of historical events and characters around the still center of Canto 36, Pound’s translation of Cavalcanti’s “Donna mi prega.” The use of contrast between history writing and philosophical poetry, between capitalism and love is shown in the very construction of the cycle, which starts with the American presidents Adams and Jefferson in dialogue, continues with Cantos dedicated to their descendants, John Quincy Adams and Martin Van Buren, and ends with Mussolini. For Lewis, the still axis is the rationale of the vortex, its very justification: We start from opposite statements of a chosen world. Set up violent structure of adolescent clearness between two extremes. We discharge ourselves on both sides.11 And later, in “Our Vortex,” Lewis declared: The Vorticist is at his maximum point of energy when stillest The Vorticist is not the slave of commotion, but its master[.]12 Eleven New Cantos can then be considered a vortex, established as a play of continuities, analogies, and recurrences on both sides of the still pivot. The tone, subject matter, and contrasts between the historical material and love poetry, speed versus stillness, satire versus ideal, indicate Vorticist aesthetics at work. Pound follows Lewis in the creation of a drab journalistic style to give a certain austerity to the historical material. Lewis had said that: “The artist of the modern movement is a savage [. . .] this enormous, jangling, journalistic, fairy desert of modern life serves him as Nature did more technically primitive man.”13 For Lewis, this was part and parcel of what he called the art of the North as distinct from the “sentimental” fascination with beauty and eternity specific of Romance cultures. The art of the North was marked by “barrenness and

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hardness.” By contrast, “Latins” were the defenders of Romance even in their Futuristic posturing.14 The contrast between what is AngloSaxon and Northern and what is Romance and Romantic occupies center stage in the architecture of the Eleven New Cantos in the same way that it stands at the forefront of Lewis’s aesthetic concerns in Blast. It is important to consider Van Buren in Canto 37 not only as an individual portrait belonging solely to this particular poem, but as a character meant to serve the system of checks and balances within the cycle of the Eleven New Cantos as a whole. Pound presents Van Buren as the descendant of a revolutionary, Thomas Jefferson: he is a pair to John Quincy Adams, an honest fighter for democracy and the interests of the common man. Like John Quincy Adams he treads in the footsteps of a greater man; he is someone in the second rank who fights for his convictions to the extent that his limitations allow. To understand the significance of Van Buren largely depends on the answer we give to the overarching question: “what is Eleven New Cantos about?” The answer of the critical tradition, that of Leon Surette, Wendy Flory, Peter Makin, and Alec Marsh, is that the cycle as a whole is a critique of usury.15 This answer reflects on the critical handling of Pound’s portrait of Van Buren. He is seen as a hero in the fight against the corrupting influence of finance. And yet political, not exclusively financial concerns, move the dialogue between Adams and Jefferson in Cantos 31–33. The portraits of John Quincy Adams and Van Buren in Cantos 34 and 37, respectively, show us an implicit controversy between two figures in the second range. Pound binds their political biographies in his overall critique of democracy as instances of the struggle between strong individuals and the political, not solely economic, system in which their lives are embedded. Pound’s main claim about the democratic system, spelled out very clearly in Jefferson and/or Mussolini, is that it is not efficient in doing public good. It allows greed to replace responsibility in the minds of the political players. Just, humanitarian measures are delayed and weakened because the democratic arena structurally allows counterclaims from special interests to occupy the stage. The most scorching criticism

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of democracy occurs in Canto 33, where Pound quotes and reformulates Marx’s critique of the issue of child labor in England, 1830–60. The law against it battled the industrial interests: it was delayed 20 years and when finally passed, it was so feeble as to be impossible to implement.16 The idea that the democratic system is corrupt, allowing political players in Parliament/Congress/Senate to be actively bought by financial or industrial lobbies to represent their private interests against the good of the nation is further consolidated ideogrammically by Canto 37, showing the American situation, contemporary with the child labor issue in Britain. At that time, Andrew Jackson was battling a financial force that had been allowed to rise and compete with the government in the political arena—the Second Bank of the United States (1817–36). President Madison had chartered the Bank for 20 years as an instrument of fiscal policy in the aftermath of the Anglo-American war of 1812–16. The Bank’s president, Nicholas Biddle, was not going to leave the re-charter to chance and started the campaign for extending its mandate in 1832, four years before it was due to expire. The bank held government deposits and disposed of funds much larger than the government of the USA. It wielded a power that was not only financial, but political. By extending its number of loans suddenly, it created a demand for its continued services. The bank campaigned for its re-charter in the press, swaying national political opinion in its favor. Through its intermediaries, it aimed to influence the result of presidential elections: Senators Clay and Daniel Webster, its paid agents, were the most vociferous and eloquent on its behalf in the debates around the re-charter against President Andrew Jackson. His re-election in 1832 destroyed the hopes that the bank would continue to receive government deposits. In 1836, the bank became local and by 1841 it went bankrupt.17 To this situation, Pound advanced the counterclaim that the interests of the many are much better served by a strong individual player that is incorruptible and willing to do the national good. He has Mussolini in view, about whom he commented in Jefferson and/or Mussolini:

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The players of the first degree, the heroes, are many-sided—they are involved in politics but also art, both through patronage and through their drive to order the world. They feel responsible for the nation as a whole and always put the national interest before their private one. They are successful to the extent that their language is adjusted to the situation of their time and place. This adjustment between language and their respective space/time is what Jefferson and Mussolini have in common and the key to their political success. On this criterion, both John Quincy Adams and Van Buren fail, even if they feel responsible towards the nation. In spite of their great service and merit, neither of them had the degree of adjustment needed to become saviors or revolutionaries. Pound presents John Quincy Adams as a covert aristocrat who did not recognize the necessities and values of his time: in a country where land was plentiful, he wanted to set aside land “for the nation.” In Pound’s opinion, “the idea was unseasonable and would have held back the settlement of the continent for who knows how many decades.”19 Van Buren did recognize the pressing need of his time and was involved in the major event of the 1830s: the Bank war. He was firm enough to bear the brunt of the ensuing crisis and resist the pressures for re-chartering the BUS. But he lost the re-election because he did not have the quality of a successful revolutionary spelled out in Jefferson and/or Mussolini: the ability to formulate language perfectly adjusted to the historical conditions. Van Buren was prolix and his message was

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uncertain. The voters did not get his meaning and a clear orientation as to his political position: Said one of the wool-buyers:      “Able speech by Van Buren “Yes, very able.” “Ye-es, Mr Knower, an’ on wich side ov the tariff was it? “Point I was in the act of considering”      replied Mr Knower In the mirror of memory: have been told I rendered the truth a great service by that speech on the tariff but directness on all points wd. seem not to have been its conspicuous feature. (37/186) Pound’s portrait of Van Buren is that of a second rank figure who does not succeed: he gets an awful reputation as he is made responsible for the economic crisis of 1837–41; he is accused of intrigue, servility, love for luxury, demagoguery.20 His failure is not one of nerve or energy or political talent—it is one of language. Both Alec Marsh and Peter Makin have observed that Pound “improves” Van Buren by radically cutting through the rhetoric of his autobiography.21 Pound definitely streamlines Van Buren’s language, making it direct and sharp, not voluminous and undecided; he also points out that it was the use of language (“wich side ov the tariff was it?”) that ruined his presidential re-election. In spite of his early political successes, Van Buren was not suited to his time and place, he was not of first intensity. As Marsh points out, Pound’s choice to see the corrupting and dangerous existence of the BUS as more important than the slavery issue was the reason why he seemed to favor Van Buren over Adams. But if we consider the economy of Eleven New Cantos as a whole, we see that Pound needed to balance an American instance of corruption of democracy (the so-called Bank War) to the British example, the issue of child labor, presented in Canto 33. The BUS episode had the quality of being limited to a specific period, from the 1830s to the

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1860s. The slavery issue, though humanitarian, like the child labor one, had another, much longer time-span, affecting Jefferson and the American founders in general. The BUS was more circumscribed in time and a good example of the failure of democracy: as Van Buren recounted in his Autobiography, it allowed a private institution such as the bank to wreak havoc with the political machinery and to create a financial crisis affecting the whole nation; the BUS’s director created an artificial inflation by flooding the country with loans, which would have had to be returned in the event of the failure to re-charter. From the common man to the political elite, the whole nation was put under pressure. “To which end, largely increased line of discounts 1830, October, 40 million May, 1837 seventy millions and then some. Remembered this in Sorrento” in the vicinage of Vesuvius near exhumed Herculaneum... “30 million” said Mr Dan Webster “in states on the Mississippi “will all have to be called in, in three “years and nine months, if the charter be not extended.. “I hesertate nawt tew say et will dee-precierate “everyman’s prorperty from the etcetera “to the kepertal ov Missouri, affect the price of “crawps, leynd en the prordewce ov labour, to the embararsement......” de mortuis wrote Mr Van Buren don’t quite apply in a case of this character. (37/183–84) It is indeed difficult to avoid feeling that the Bank War occupies center stage in Canto 37, anticipating Cantos 88–89. Yet if we look at it in its own right we see that its construction serves another, more general agenda. What Van Buren ultimately fights for is not only the financial interest of the common people but the viability of democracy as a political system. Pound consistently shows him as championing the

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rights of the poor: against imprisonment for debt, against the lash, and for the extension of voting rights. Van Buren is also an able player in Senate politics, he is elected, takes part in the debates, knows friend from foe, sees corruption and demagoguery for what they are. Pound shows him as a strong, brilliant, honest individual playing a game he knows inside out. If he fails, the system must be structurally deficient. And Van Buren does fail, his missed re-election, his unhappy retirement in Sorrento, his memoirs forgotten, his reputation in tatters, all show it. Pound shows Van Buren as defeated, but seems to suggest that, though he failed, the honesty and intelligence of his struggle can and should serve as historical precedents. Van Buren, then, is a Malatestalike figure, someone who did an important cultural service and was submerged by the conflicts of the day, a historical actor whose name is saddled with the misfortunes of his time. Van Buren’s main merit is to have upheld Jackson’s victory against the BUS and resisted the pressure for the charter of a third BUS, or else a demand for inflation. And Van Buren, like Malatesta, seems a prelude to a successful struggle—that of Mussolini, who is shown to be involved into the same political effort for the common man against the greed of the rich and the corruption of the parliamentary system. Moreover, Pound’s portrayal of Van Buren owes much to his earlier response to Wyndham Lewis’s art. When writing about figures like Timon or Tarr, Pound commented that Lewis wanted to convey “the fury of intelligence baffled and shut in by circumjacent stupidity.”22 In a similar vein, Pound shows Van Buren fighting against the “circumjacent stupidity” of his corrupt opponents who defend the bank or the limited franchise either out of ignorance and blindness or out of outright bad will—the “fury of intelligence” of a hero who defends democracy and the working man’s interests, gives this Canto a particular Vorticist slant. The poem begins with a blast similar to the screaming title of Lewis’s magazine: “[‘]Thou shalt not,’ said Martin Van Buren, ‘jail ’em for / debt’” (37/181). It ends with an epitaph that is the natural

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conclusion of the beginning: “HIC / JACET / FISCI LIBERATOR” (36/186). Between the powerful statement of the beginning and the quietness of Van Buren’s legacy in the epitaph lies his portrait as Vorticist hero. Every other bit of information is draped around this strong axis. Pound follows Lewis in his requirement that the style of a work has to be adjusted to the essential character of the ethnic group to which it belongs—for Lewis the art of the North was marked by bold contrasts that partook of each other, especially the comic and the tragic. Canto 37 merges the two in its satirical take on the American political life of the 1830s mingled with Van Buren’s nostalgic even melodramatic retrospective of his life at a moment “[his] fortunes were too low in ebb / [. . .] at that moment to compromise” (37/186). For Lewis, “tragic humour is the birthright of the North.”23 Pound structures Van Buren’s interaction with his peers in the Senate as a comedy, juxtaposing his quietness and self-assuredness with the demagoguery of his opponents: “In Banking corporations” said Mr Webster “the “interests of the rich and the poor are happily blended.” Said Van Buren to Mr Clay: “If you will give me “A pinch of your excellent Maccoboy snuff...” (37/182) The Canto seems to follow Lewis’s aesthetic in creating a sense of intensity by using modern journalistic style complete with political slogans and newspaper headlines. Chunks of text derived from the source materials are chopped and juxtaposed to create the reading experience of someone skimming a newspaper. The satirical slant is unmistakable in Webster’s speech quoted above, intensifying to the guffaw similar to the one Pound had used in his “Salutation the Third” in Blast.24 The scene of the debates in the Senate approximates simultaneity in the quick changes of direction among various speakers. The speech of one participant is brusquely interrupted to turn the reader’s attention to the reply of the other and to Van Buren’s comment. All through the Canto we find frequent changes of perspective derived from pairing

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Van Buren with various other characters: Jackson, Clay, Webster, Clinton, the wool-buyers, by departures and returns. The way in which Pound manipulates the masses of text of various lengths in relation to each other follows Gaudier’s definition of sculpture as “masses in relation” and intersecting planes.25 His frequent turns in unexpected directions re-create Lewis’s jagged line in the verbal medium. Van Buren’s portrait done according to the Vorticist aesthetic ties this American president to the main concern of Eleven New Cantos— the critique of democracy and the need for the strong incorruptible leader that understands, formulates, and responds to the needs of his time. It is an abstract portrait, merging America and Italy, his past experiments with his now mature practice.

Notes

Introduction 1 Roxana Preda’s online The Cantos Project, which is appearing concurrently with the volumes of Readings in the Cantos, is beginning to offer a powerful alternative to Terrell’s Companion. See http://thecantosproject. ed.ac.uk/ 2 D. S. Carne-Ross, “The Music of a Lost Dynasty: Pound in the Classroom,” in Ezra Pound’s Cantos: A Casebook, ed. Peter Makin (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 182–83. 3 Carne-Ross, “Music of a Lost Dynasty,” 184. 4 Biographical material is drawn from A. David Moody, Ezra Pound: Poet. A Portrait of the Man and His Work, vol. 1, The Young Genius 1885–1920 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007) and Ezra Pound: Poet. A Portrait of the Man and His Work, vol. 2, The Epic Years 1921–1939 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014). 5 Ezra Pound, Section: Rock-Drill, 85–95 de los cantares (New York: New Directions, 1956), dust jacket. 6 Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1972), 416. 7 Ezra Pound, The [Selected] Letters of Ezra Pound, 1907–1941, ed. D. D. Paige (New York: New Directions, 1971 [1950]), 180. 8 A. Walton Litz, “Preface,” in Ezra Pound, A Draft of XXX Cantos (New York: New Directions, 1997), vii.

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Readings in the Cantos The Ur-Cantos

The version that was published in Poetry in June, July, and August 1917 is included in Personae: The Shorter Poems of Ezra Pound, revised edition prepared by Lea Baechler and A. Walton Litz (New York: New Directions, 1990), 229–45. The Lustra version is included in Ezra Pound: Poems and Translations, ed. Richard Sieburth (New York: Library of America, 2003), 318–30, and is also available on the online The Cantos Project, edited by Roxana Praeda and Andrew Taylor: http://thecantosproject.ed.ac.uk/. Both Sieburth and The Cantos Project provide annotations, the latter in particular detail, and The Cantos Project also has a very useful collection of contemporary comments from Pound and others which chart the development of the poem. For an account of the variant readings, see Richard Taylor, Variorum Edition of “Three Cantos”: A Prototype (Bayreuth: Boomerang Press-Norbert Aas, 1991). 2 The term “Ur-Cantos” is sometimes used to refer to all the published and unpublished drafts before the 1925 publication, but more often, as with my usage, to that first version. Some of the drafts have been published by Massimo Bacigalupo in Ezra Pound: Posthumous Cantos (Manchester: Carcanet, 2015). 3 Daniel Albright, “Early Cantos, I–XLI,” in The Cambridge Companion to Ezra Pound, ed. Ira B. Nadel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 75. 4 The Letters of Ezra Pound to Alice Corbin Henderson, ed. Ira B. Nadel (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993), 120. 5 See Leon Surette’s discussion of this claim in A Light from Eleusis: A Study of Ezra Pound’s Cantos (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), 6–7, but contrast Hugh Kenner’s argument in The Pound Era (London: Pimlico, 1971), 354. 6 Ezra Pound, “Vorticism,” in Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir by Ezra Pound (London: The Bodley Head; New York: John Lane, 1916), 109. 7 Pound, The Letters of Ezra Pound to Alice Corbin Henderson, 110. 8 James Longenbach, “Modern Poetry,” in Cambridge Companion to Modernism, ed. Michael Levenson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 117. 9 Mary Ellis Gibson, Epic Reinvented: Ezra Pound and the Victorians (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), passim, but see especially 1 and 181 n. 3. 10 On Pound and Pater, see Richard Parker, “Imagism–Pater–Objectivist Verse,” Victorian Network 3, no. 1 (2011): http://www.victoriannetwork. org/index.php/vn/issue/view/4. 11 Ezra Pound, “I Gather the Limbs of Osiris: A Rather Dull Introduction,” in The New Age (December 7, 1911), reprinted in Ezra Pound, Selected Prose 1909–1965, ed. William Cookson (London: Faber & Faber, 1973), 21.

1

Notes

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12 Ezra Pound, Ezra Pound to His Parents: Letters 1895–1929, ed. Mary de Rachewiltz, A. David Moody, and Joanna Moody (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 361. 13 James Longenbach, Modernist Poetics of History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987), 109. 14 Ronald Bush, The Genesis of Ezra Pound’s Cantos (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976), 51. 15 As Lewis wryly put it, “All Europe was at war and a bigger Blast than mine had rather taken the wind out of my sail.” Wyndham Lewis, Blasting and Bombardiering (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1937), 85. 16 See Ezra Pound, Umbra: The Early Poems of Ezra Pound (London: Elkin Mathews, 1920), 128. 17 Noel Stock, The Life of Ezra Pound (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974 [1970]), 228. 18 See Ezra Pound, A Walking Tour in Southern France: Ezra Pound Among the Troubadours, ed. Richard Sieburth (New York: New Directions, 1992) and my discussion of the poetry from this walking tour in The Verse Revolutionaries: Pound, H.D. and the Imagists (London: Jonathan Cape, 2009), 461–65. 19 James Longenbach, Stone Cottage, Pound, Yeats and Modernism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 247, 245, 244. 20 Ezra Pound, “The Renaissance—III,” Poetry: A Magazine of Verse 6(2) (May 1915): 83–84. Pound was not explicitly to assert the centrality of Eleusis until 1930, but already by 1910, on his return from his first visit to Sirmione, he told D. H. Lawrence he wanted to write a book on the “mystic cult of love—the dionysian rites, and so on—from the earliest days to the present,” clearly an early version of his belief (see my comment in Carr, The Verse Revolutionaries, 28). 21 The question of the sources that Pound drew on for shaping his early versions of The Cantos has been explored by Ronald Bush, James Longenbach, Mary Ellis Gibson, and Christine Froula, from all of whom I have learnt much. The chief sources are also given on the online The Cantos Project: http://thecantosproject.ed.ac.uk/ 22 Pound, “Vorticism,” 98, 99. 23 Pound, “Vorticism,” 99–100. 24 Pound, “Vorticism,” 103. This was also the view of Dante put forward by Erich Auerbach in his groundbreaking 1929 study, Dante: Poet of the Secular World, trans. Ralph Mannheim (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961). 25 Bush, Genesis, 19. 26 Ezra Pound, The Spirit of Romance (New York: New Directions, 1968 [1910/1912]), 146. 27 Bush, Genesis, 88.

314

Readings in the Cantos

28 Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, “Allied Artists Association,” Gaudier-Brzeska, 255. 29 Pound, Gaudier-Brzeska, 155. 30 Bush suggests Pound is also influenced by the Vorticist “radicals in design” or “pattern-units.” See Genesis, 44. 31 Pound, Gaudier-Brzeska, 139. On Pound, haiku, and collage, see my “Imagism and Empire,” in Modernism and Empire, ed. H. Booth and N. Rigby (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 64–92. 32 Letters of Ezra Pound to Alice Corbin Henderson, 194. 33 Pound, Ezra Pound to His Parents, 360. 34 Pound, Ezra Pound to His Parents, 360. Sordello’s reputation had not yet recovered by 1915, though more recently it has been acclaimed as the “earliest substantial modernist poem in English” (Gibson 44). See Bush’s discussion of what Pound draws from Sordello in Genesis, 75–85. 35 Albright, “Early Cantos, I–XLI,” 62. 36 Pound, Personae, 229. 37 Mary Ellis Gibson, Epic Reinvented: Ezra Pound and the Victorians (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995) 40. 38 Quoted Bush, Genesis, 5. 39 Pound, Personae, 229. 40 Gibson, Epic Reinvented, 88. 41 Pound, Personae, 229. In an article in 1965 it was suggested that Browning had in mind a Victorian diorama (see The Poetical Works of Robert Browning, vol. 2, ed. Ian Jack and Margaret Smith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), 196), but Pound’s “booth” seems to me more generic. 42 Pound, Personae, 229, 196. 43 Pound, Personae, 229. 44 Robert Browning, Dedication, Sordello, Poetical Works of Robert Browning, 2.194. 45 Pound, Personae, 229–30. 46 Pound, Personae, 230. 47 Pound, Personae, 230. Letter to H.D., quoted in Carr, The Verse Revolutionaries, 277 and Ezra Pound and Margaret Cravens: A Tragic Friendship, ed. Omar Pound and Robert Spoo (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1988), 31. 48 Pound, Personae, 230. 49 Bush, Genesis, 114. 50 Bush, Genesis, 115. 51 Pound, Personae, 230. 52 Pound, Personae, 231. 53 Pound, Personae, 232. Pierre Puvis de Chavannes was a French nineteenth-century painter. 54 Pound, Personae, 232.

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55 Pound, Personae, 233. 56 Ezra Pound, Pound/Joyce: The Letters of Ezra Pound to James Joyce with Pound’s Essays on Joyce, ed. Forrest Read (New York: New Directions, 1968), 102. 57 Pound, Personae, 233. 58 Pound, Personae, 233. Bush, Genesis, 138. 59 Pound, Personae, 233. See Bush, Genesis, 138 and The Translations of Ezra Pound (London: Faber & Faber, 1954), 259–60. Zhaoming Qian also suggests the influence of a Far Eastern painting Pound remembered from before the war: Orientalism and Modernism: The Legacy of China in Pound and Williams (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), 184 n.7. 60 Pound, Personae, 233. 61 Pound, Personae, 234. 62 Peter Liebregts, Ezra Pound and Neoplatonism (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2004), 43. 63 Pound, Spirit of Romance, 92. 64 Pound, Personae, 234. 65 Pound, Personae, 234. See Rebecca Beasley, Ezra Pound and the Visual Culture of Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 131. 66 Pound, Personae, 234. 67 Ezra Pound, “How to Read,” Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. T. S. Eliot (London: Faber & Faber, 1954 [1918]), 25. 68 See Herbert N. Schneidau, “Pound’s Poetics of Loss,” in Ezra Pound: Tactics for Reading, ed. Ian F. Bell (London: Vision, 1982) and Nick Selby, Poetics of Loss in the Cantos of Ezra Pound: From Modernism to Fascism (Lampeter: Edwin Mellen, 2005). 69 Pound, Personae, 234. 70 Longenbach, Stone Cottage, 131. His comment is actually about Canto 4. Gaudier’s death would eventually appear in Canto 16. 71 A. David Moody, Ezra Pound: Poet. A Portrait of the Man and His Work, vol. 1, The Young Genius 1885–1920 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 311. 72 Quoted in Bush, Genesis, 5. 73 Peter Ackroyd, T. S. Eliot: A Life (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1993 [1984]), 66. 74 Gibson, Epic Reinvented, 177–220. 75 Bush, Genesis, 86–87. 76 Pound, Personae, 234. 77 Mantegna is not named here, though he is in the brief mention of this palace in Canto 3. 78 Pound, Personae, 234–35.

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Readings in the Cantos

79 Pound, Personae, 235. Browning’s poem begins “All that I know / Of a certain star.” It appeared in Men and Women in 1855. See Browning: Poetical Works, 1833–1864, ed. Ian Jack (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), 608–9. 80 See Ezra Pound, “Troubadours: Their Sorts and Conditions” (1913), in Literary Essays, 100. 81 Pound, Personae, 235. 82 Pound, Personae, 235. Pound had first come across this poem in H. A. Giles, History of Chinese Poetry (where Giles’s translation fills three pages) in 1913, and again later in Fenollosa’s manuscripts. 83 Pound, Personae, 235. 84 Pound, Personae, 235. 85 Pound, Personae, 236. 86 When he was there, he says, “there came a centaur, spying the land / And there were nymphs behind him.” See “The Serious Artist” (1913), in Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. T. S. Eliot (London: Faber & Faber, 1954 [1918]), 52, where Pound had written “Poetry is a centaur. The thinking word-arranging, clarifying faculty must move and leap with the energizing, sentient, musical, faculties.” 87 Pound, Personae, 236. 88 Pound, Personae, 237. Sieburth suggests the poem attributed here to Raimon Jordan was actually written by Pound himself, originally in somewhat “idiosyncratic” Provençal. Walking Tour, 111. 89 Pound, Personae, 237. 90 Pound, Personae, 238. 91 Pound, Personae, 239. This story appears in Luis Vaz de Camöes’s epic poem Os Lusiadas, 1572. See Pound’s discussion of it in The Spirit of Romance, 214–22, and also Sieburth’s note in Ezra Pound: Poems and Translations, 1290 n. 325.33. 92 Longenbach, Modernist Poetics, 111. 93 See Humphrey Carpenter, A Serious Character: The Life of Ezra Pound (London: Faber & Faber, 1988), 78–79, 291. 94 Pound, Personae, 240. 95 Pound, Personae, 241. 96 These words are part of the extended title, and appeared on the title page. John Heydon, The Holy Guide (London, 1662). 97 Pound, Gaudier-Brzeska, 157. 98 Pound, Personae, 241. In the Poetry version of this Canto it is explicit that these words are spoken by Heydon—they are preceded by the sentence “Let us hear John Heydon!” The cuts in the Lustra version make this less clear, and leads the online The Cantos Project to suggest, I think mistakenly, that they are spoken by Ficino himself, rather than just being a quotation from him. However, I do very much agree with the comment

Notes

317

that Pound is here emphasizing “the relation between Heydon and Ficino, established via the Neoplatonic and Hermetic traditions.” “Three Cantos III,” Roxana Preda, “The Online Companion to The Cantos of Ezra Pound,” IV, n. 11. The Cantos Project: http://thecantosproject.ed.ac. uk/, accessed April 15, 2017. 99 Liebregts, Ezra Pound and Neoplatonism, 117–19; Ezra Pound, The Translations of Ezra Pound (London: Faber & Faber, 1953), 238. 100 Liebregts, Ezra Pound and Neoplatonism, 118. 101 One other resonance of the phrase may be a look forward to the introduction of the polumetis or “many-minded” Odysseus later in the Canto. See Hugh Kenner, The Poetry of Ezra Pound (London: Faber & Faber, 1951), 317. 102 Pound, Personae, 241. 103 Pound, “Affirmations: Analysis of This Decade” (1915), in GaudierBrzeska, 135. 104 Pound, Personae, 241. 105 Pound, Personae, 242. 106 Pound, “Affirmations: Analysis of This Decade” (1915), in GaudierBrzeska, 136. 107 Pound misspells this as “Sir Blancatz.” 108 Pound, Personae, 242. 109 Jacob Burckhart’s The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860) sees the Renaissance as the achievement of a few passionate, free-thinking individuals, an account which Pound clearly found particularly congenial, and which is similar to his own account of the Vorticists. Cf. Gibson, Epic Reinvented, 107. 110 Pound, Personae, 242. Pater, “The Renaissance,” 220. 111 Pound, Personae, 242. 112 Humphrey Carpenter, A Serious Character, 292. 113 Pound, “Analysis of this Decade,” 136. 114 Pound, The [Selected] Letters of Ezra Pound, 1907–1941, ed. D. D. Paige (London: Faber 1950), 274. 115 Ezra Pound, “Vortex,” Blast, 1914, 153: Surette, A Light from Eleusis, 55. 116 Pound, Personae, 245. 117 Bush, Genesis, 152. 118 Moody, Ezra Pound: Poet, 1.368. See his discussion of Canto 4 (363–69) and Christina Froula’s study of its composition, To Write Paradise: Style and Error in Pound’s Cantos (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984). 119 Longenbach, Modernist Poetics, 130.

318

Readings in the Cantos Canto 1

1

This version of the text may be found at the digital research environment, The Cantos Project: http://thecantosproject.ed.ac.uk/index.php/tc-mainpage/three-cantos-iii-title-page, accessed September 1, 2017. See also Donald Gallup, Ezra Pound: A Bibliography (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1983), 244; Ronald Bush, The Genesis of Ezra Pound’s Cantos (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976), 309–12. 2 A Draft of XVI Cantos of Ezra Pound for the Beginning of a Poem of Some Length (Paris: Three Mountains Press, 1925). See Bush, Genesis, 193, 255. For a detailed calendar of composition and revision for this poem, see the online The Cantos Project: http://thecantosproject.ed.ac.uk/index.php/adraft-of-xvi-cantos-overview/c1-in-a-draft-of-16?showall=&start=4, accessed September 1, 2017. 3 Forrest Read, “Pound, Joyce, and Flaubert,” in New Approaches to Ezra Pound: A Co-Ordinated Investigation of Pound’s Poetry and Ideas, ed. Eva Hesse (London: Faber & Faber, 1969), 125–44; Bush, Genesis, 183–263. 4 A more complete stemma for this poem, beginning with its first publication in the Ur-Cantos and continuing through the 1989 edition of The Cantos, may be found in Richard Taylor, “The History and State of the Texts,” in A Poem Containing History: Textual Studies in The Cantos, ed. Lawrence Rainey (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 247. See also Myles Slatin, “A History of Pound’s Cantos I–XVI, 1915–1925,” American Literature 35 (1963/64): 183–95. 5 The Cantos of Ezra Pound (New York: New Directions, 1996). Subsequent references are to this edition, citing Canto and page number. 6 A. David Moody, Ezra Pound: Poet. A Portrait of the Man and His Work, vol. 1, The Young Genius 1885–1920 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 309. 7 Ezra Pound, “Translators of Greek: Early Translators of Homer” (1918; 1920), in Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. T. S. Eliot (New York: New Directions, 1968 [1918]), 259. 8 Pound, “Translators of Greek,” Literary Essays, 264. 9 Pound, “Translators of Greek,” Literary Essays, 259–64. 10 George Bornstein, Material Modernism: The Politics of the Page (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Miranda B. Hickman, “‘To Facilitate the Traffic’ (or ‘Damn Deluxe Edtns’): Ezra Pound’s Turn from the Deluxe,” Paideuma 28 (Fall/Winter 1999); Jerome McGann, “Pound’s Cantos: A Poem Including Bibliography,” in A Poem Containing History: Textual Studies in The Cantos, 173–92. For reproductions of the title pages of these editions, see the online The Cantos Project: http:// thecantosproject.ed.ac.uk/index.php/a-draft-of-xvi-cantos-overview/ c1-in-a-draft-of-16?showall=&start=3, accessed September 1, 2017.

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11 Bush, Genesis, 69–70. 12 On Pound’s and Yeats’s reading of John Heydon at Stone Cottage, see James Longenbach, Stone Cottage: Pound, Yeats and Modernism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 238–39 and Moody, Ezra Pound: Poet, 1.313. 13 This passage appears in Book I of The Trembling of the Veil (1920–21): see W. B. Yeats, Collected Works, vol. 3, Autobiographies, ed. William H. O’Donnell and Douglas N. Archibald (New York: Scribner, 1999), 139. 14 Longenbach, Stone Cottage, 192. See also Moody, Ezra Pound: Poet, 1.240–45. 15 Ezra Pound to Homer L. Pound, April 11, 1927, The [Selected] Letters of Ezra Pound, 1907–1941, ed. D. D. Paige (New York: New Directions, 1950), 210. 16 Demetres P. Tryphonopoulos, The Celestial Tradition: A Study of Ezra Pound’s “The Cantos” (Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1992), 104. 17 Hugh Kenner “Blood for Ghosts,” in New Approaches to Ezra Pound, 333. 18 Albert Gelpi, “The Map for the Periplum: Canto 1 as Archetypal Schema,” American Poetry 1(2) (Winter 1984): 54, 56. 19 Ezra Pound to W. H. D. Rouse, May 23, 1935, [Selected] Letters, 274. 20 Peter Liebregts, Ezra Pound and Neoplatonism (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2004), 129. 21 Liebregts, Pound and Neoplatonism, 102. 22 Liebregts, Pound and Neoplatonism, 138. 23 Tryphonopoulos, The Celestial Tradition, 29. 24 Leon Surette, A Light from Eleusis: A Study of Ezra Pound’s Cantos (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), 40–43. 25 Pound, “Translators of Greek,” Literary Essays, 259. 26 Pound, “Translators of Greek,” Literary Essays, 266. 27 See Aeneid Book VI and the online The Cantos Project’s annotation for this passage: http://thecantosproject.ed.ac.uk/index.php/a-draft-of-xvicantos-overview/c1-in-a-draft-of-16/i-annotations, accessed September 1, 2017. 28 Carroll F. Terrell, A Companion to the Cantos of Ezra Pound, single vol. rev. edn. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993), 3. 29 Tryphonopoulos, The Celestial Tradition, 109. 30 Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1971), 361. 31 Surette, A Light from Eleusis, 51.

320

Readings in the Cantos Canto 2

1 2

The Cantos of Ezra Pound (New York: New Directions, 1996). Subsequent references are to this edition, citing Canto and page number. Carroll F. Terrell, A Companion to the Cantos of Ezra Pound, single vol. rev. edn. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993), 5. Pound told his daughter that So-shu was “a Chinese mythological figure.” Mary de Rachewiltz, Discretions (New York: New Directions, 1975), 156. At the online The Cantos Project, Roxana Preda notes: The name could thus point to the short Noh play Shojo, which Pound published as early as 18 May 1915 in his article “Classical Stage of Japan” and republished in Noh or Accomplishment (79–82). Shojo means monkey and appears to the mortal eye as a man, but he is really the god of saké whose cup never runs dry. As an analogy to the meeting between Dionysus and Acoetes, which Pound details in this canto, S has an encounter with a pious man, reverent towards his ancestors and advises him that if he sells saké in the street of Yosu, he will become rich. The man follows S’s advice and does become rich. In the play, S is waiting for a friend on the bank of the Yangtze river: “The moonlight fills the tilted saké cup, waiting.” Pound seems to have been aware of the iconography of the shojo, which shows him floating on the sea in a saké cup and rowing or churning with a ladle.

3 4 5 6 7

8 9 10

See n. 4: http://thecantosproject.ed.ac.uk/index.php/a-draft-of-xvi-cantosoverview/c2-in-a-draft-of-16/ii-poem, accessed September 1, 2017. De Rachewiltz, Discretions, 156. Pound, “Translators of Greek,” Literary Essays, 250. Ezra Pound, Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. T. S. Eliot (New York: New Directions, 1968 [1918]), 250–54. Ezra Pound, The [Selected] Letters of Ezra Pound, 1907–1941, ed. D. D. Paige (New York: New Directions, 1971 [1950]), 210. On a close reading of this Canto that emphasizes the Dionysian element, see A. David Moody, Ezra Pound: Poet. A Portrait of the Man and His Work, vol. 2, The Epic Years 1921–1939 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 11–17. Peter Liebregts, “‘Bricks thought into being ex nihil’: Ezra Pound and Creation,” in Ezra Pound: Ends and Beginnings, ed. John Gery and William Pratt (New York: AMS Press, 2011), 81–96. Quoted in Hélène Aji, “Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams’s Romantic Dilemmas: From Obliteration to Remanence,” Cercles 12 (2005): 55. See Peter Liebregts, Ezra Pound and Neoplatonism (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickenson University Press, 2004).

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11 See De Rachewiltz, Discretions, 159, where Pound explains the structure of The Cantos: “The Cantos start with Homer, the descent into hell. Then a theme of Ovid—Dafne, my own myth, not changed into a laurel but into coral.” Canto 4 See Miles Slatin, “A History of Pound’s Cantos,” American Literature 35 (1963): 183–95 and Ronald Bush, The Genesis of Ezra Pound’s Cantos (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976), 21–52. 2 Christine Froula, To Write Paradise: Style and Error in Pound’s Cantos (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984), 11. 3 Froula holds that the subject rhyme makes its initial appearance in the first holograph sketch of the final Canto 4, MS AA, completed in 1918, more than a year after Pound finished the Ur-Cantos drafts discussed elsewhere in this book. See Froula, To Write Paradise, 22, 64. Arguably, subjectrhyme is foreshadowed in the ur-Cantos’ method of grouping analogous elements from literature as illustrations of a specific idea. For a calendar of the writing process for Canto 4, see http://thecantosproject.ed.ac.uk/ index.php/a-draft-of-xvi-cantos-overview/canto-iv?showall=&start=3, accessed September 1, 2017. 4 “Various things keep cropping up in the poem. The original world of gods; the Trojan War, Helen on the wall of Troy with the old men fed up with the whole show and suggesting she be sent back to Greece . . . Elvira on wall or Toro (subject-rhyme with Helen on Wall),” in Ezra Pound, The [Selected] Letters of Ezra Pound, 1907–1941, ed. D. D. Paige (London: Faber & Faber, 1950), 210. 5 See Froula, To Write Paradise, 11–52, for a meticulous account of the  drafting process. This account will concentrate on the text as published. 6 The Cantos of Ezra Pound (New York: New Directions, 1996). Subsequent references are to this edition, citing Canto and page number. 7 David Moody suggests that the palace glimpsed through “smoky light” (4/13) is Agamemnon’s palace at Argos, to which the King and his men returned with their Trojan spoils; however, other allusions in these lines seem to draw our attention back to Troy. See A. David Moody, Ezra Pound: Poet. A Portrait of the Man and His Work, vol. 1, The Young Genius 1885–1920 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 364. 8 Carroll F. Terrell, A Companion to the Cantos of Ezra Pound, vol. 1 (Cantos 1–71) (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1980), 11. 9 [“Rise, O thou smoky palace!”] (MS A), “[Rise O thou] . . . [Come then the smoky palace!] Troy but a heap of [Palace in smokey] . . . smouldering 1

322

Readings in the Cantos

boulder stones” (MS D). For details, see Froula, To Write Paradise, 33, 46–47. 10 “Use no superfluous word, no adjective, which does not reveal something . . . Use either no ornament or good ornament.” Ezra Pound, “A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste,” Poetry 1(6) (March 1913): 198–200 and 200–206. 11 Pound, [Selected] Letters, 138. See John J. Espey, Ezra Pound’s Mauberley: A Study in Composition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1955), 88; Baumann, Rose in the Steel Dust, 21 n. 30, 186. See also Pound, “Hellenist Series—VI,” 24. 12 Baumann, Rose in the Steel Dust, 22. 13 Baumann, Rose in the Steel Dust, 24. 14 See Ezra Pound, “A Pact,” in Ezra Pound: Poems and Translations, ed. Richard Sieburth (New York: Library of America, 2003), 269. 15 Baumann, Rose in the Steel Dust, 27. 16 William Cookson suggests the rhyme with the Old Men of Troy in his A Guide to the Cantos of Ezra Pound, rev. and expanded (New York: Persea Books, 2001), 9. 17 Ovid, Metamorphoses VI.426–674. 18 Horace, Odes IV, xii, 5. As noted in Baumann, Rose in the Steel Dust, 27. 19 For details of the story, see http://thecantosproject.ed.ac.uk/index. php/a-draft-of-xvi-cantos-overview/canto-iv/iv-sources/146-cabestan, accessed September 1, 2017. 20 Ezra Pound, The Caedmon Recordings, recorded in Washington, DC, June 12, 13, 26, 1958. Available at http://thecantosproject.ed.ac.uk/ index.php/a-draft-of-xvi-cantos-overview/canto-iv?showall=&start=1, accessed September 20, 2017. 21 See T. S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” in Selected Essays, 1917–1932 (London: Faber & Faber, 1932), for the classic statement on his desired “extinction of personality.” 22 T. S. Eliot, The Complete Poems and Plays (London: Faber & Faber, 2004), 64. 23 For a recent study of this convention, see Amanda Lillie, “Entering the Picture,” in Building the Picture: Architecture in Italian Renaissance Painting, The National Gallery, London (2014), http://www.national gallery.org.uk/paintings/research/exhibition-catalogues/building-thepicture/entering-the-picture/introduction, accessed December 17, 2016. 24 The term derives from Jean Cocteau’s Le rappel à l’ordre (Paris: Stock, 1926). 25 Ezra Pound: Poems and Translations, 264 and 290. 26 On July 2, 1912, and again between June 6 and August 15, 1919. See Terrell, Companion, 1.12.

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27 Ezra Pound: Poems and Translations, 107. The story is recounted in Camille Chabaneau, Les Biographies des troubadours en langue Provençale (Toulouse: Édouard Privat, 1885), 64–66. Translated from the Provençal by Eloisa Bressan for the online The Cantos Project, July 2016: http:// thecantosproject.ed.ac.uk/index.php/canto-iv/iv-sources/142-peirevidal?showall=&start=1, accessed September 1, 2017. 28 Richard Sieburth surmises Pound is thinking of the Church of St. Hilaire in Poitiers, but he does not mention it in his travel notes; he does, however, mention Notre-Dame. See A Walking Tour in Southern France: Ezra Pound among the Troubadours, ed. Richard Sieburth (New York: New Directions, 1992), 3–6 and http://thecantosproject.ed.ac.uk/index. php/a-draft-of-xvi-cantos-overview/canto-iv/companion-to-canto-iv, accessed September 1, 2017. 29 Two years later, Pound developed a theory of transformative sexual energy in his translation of Remy de Gourmont’s The Natural Philosophy of Love (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1922). 30 For the stories of Persephone, Actaeon, and Salmacis, see Ovid, Metamorphoses V.386; III.156; IV.285–388. 31 Froula, To Write Paradise, 35–37. 32 Froula, To Write Paradise, 37–39. 33 “Arnaut Daniel,” first published in Ezra Pound, Instigations (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1920). See Ezra Pound, Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. T. S. Eliot (London: Faber & Faber, 1985 [1918]), 121. 34 See Leon Surette, A Light from Eleusis: A Study of Ezra Pound’s “Cantos” (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979); Demetres Tryphonopoulos, The Celestial Tradition: A Study of Ezra Pound’s “The Cantos” (Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1992); Peter Liebregts, Ezra Pound and Neoplatonism (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2004); and A. David Moody, Ezra Pound: Poet. A Portrait of the Man and His Work, vol. 1, The Young Genius 1885–1920 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). 35 See Terrell, Companion, 1.13 for a discussion of possible sources for this phrase in Browning, Mallarmé, or—most likely—his own translation of “To-Em-Mei’s ‘The Unmoving Cloud,’” a poem by T’ai Ch’ien, based on Ernest Fenollosa’s manuscript notes, first published in The New Age 129, no. 8 (June 22, 1916): 187, and included in Personae: The Collected Poems of Ezra Pound (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1926), 142. 36 Ezra Pound, letter to Harriet Monroe (undated), The Letters of Ezra Pound to Alice Corbin Henderson, ed. Ira B. Nadel (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993), xxii; Pound proposes the Noh plays as a model for “a long Vorticist poem” in an endnote to “Vorticism,” Fortnightly Review 96 [n.s.] (September 1, 1914): 461–71 (471). 37 See Pound, Translations, 222, 246–47; Terrell, Companion, 1.13.

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38 Pound, “The Serious Artist,” Literary Essays, 49. 39 Allen Upward, The New Word (London: A. C. Fifield, 1908) and The Divine Mystery (Letchworth: Garden City Press: 1913). 40 W. B. Yeats, A Vision (London: T. Werner Laurie, 1925). 41 In “I Gather the Limbs of Osiris: On Technique,” The New Age 10, no. 3 (January 25, 1912): 298, Pound writes that “words are like great hollow cones of steel of different dullness . . . thinking and expression” (reprinted in Ezra Pound, Selected Prose 1909–1965 [New York: New Directions, 1973], 34). In “Vortex: Pound,” Blast 1 [June 20, 1914]: 154 and “Vorticism” (1914), he discusses the related figure of the Vortex. 42 Catullus LXI. 43 Terrell, Companion, 1.14. 44 See Froula, To Write Paradise, 39 for details of the provenance of the lines in Fenollosa’s papers. 45 Also known by the Japanese name of So-Gyoku. For Arthur Waley’s translation, see A Hundred and Seventy Chinese Poems (London: Constable, 1918), 41. 46 The metaphor of Osiris gathering his limbs is implied in the title of his The New Age article series “I Gather the Limbs of Osiris” (1911), Selected Prose, 21–43. 47 Terrell, Companion, 1.14. 48 Ezra Pound, letter to Homer Pound, late October 1919, Ezra Pound to His Parents: Letters 1895–1929, ed. Mary de Rachewiltz, A. David Moody, and Joanna Moody (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 450. See also http://thecantosproject.ed.ac.uk/index.php/a-draft-of-xvi-cantosoverview/c1-in-a-draft-of-16?showall=&start=3, accessed September 1, 2017. 49 Ezra Pound, Caedmon Recordings: https://media.sas.upenn.edu/ pennsound/authors/Pound/1958/Pound-Ezra_08_Canto-IV_DC_1958. mp3, accessed September 1, 2017. 50 The painting is now at the Castel Vecchio at Verona. See Terrell, Companion, 1.15. 51 Ezra Pound, Some Letters of Ezra Pound, ed. Louis Dudek (Montreal: DC Books, 1974), 32. 52 Cookson, A Guide to the Cantos, 11. 53 These terms occur in Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919), in Selected Essays, 1917–1932, 14, 16. 54 The arena was built in the first century AD; the Baedeker used by Pound suggested (erroneously) that it was built by Diocletian. See Karl Baedeker, L’Italie des alpes à Naples: Manuel Abrégé du voyageur avec 25 cartes, 29 plans de villes, 23 plans d’edificés ou de musée (Leipzig: Baedeker, 1909), 66, cited at http://thecantosproject.ed.ac.uk/index.php/a-draft-ofxvi-cantos-overview/canto-xii, accessed September 1, 2017.

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Canto 5 1

On December 18, 1915, he wrote to his father: “I don’t want to muddle my mind now in the Vth Canto.” Ezra Pound, Ezra Pound to His Parents: Letters 1895–1929, ed. Mary de Rachewiltz, A. David Moody, and Joanna Moody (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 360. 2 Pound, Ezra Pound to His Parents, 363. 3 Pound, Ezra Pound to His Parents, 441. 4 Pound, Ezra Pound to His Parents, 455. Interestingly, on the same day, Pound wrote to John Quinn: “I suspect my ‘Cantos’ are getting too too too abstruse and obscure for human consumption.” The Selected Letters of Ezra Pound to John Quinn 1915–1924, ed. Timothy Materer (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), 181. 5 Ezra Pound, “Four Cantos,” in Poems 1918–1921 (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1921), 71–89. Only Canto 6 was later revised. The variants of the 1921 Canto 5 are interesting but not relevant to the overall construction. 6 A. David Moody, Ezra Pound: Poet. A Portrait of the Man and His Work, vol. 1, The Young Genius 1885–1920 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 404. 7 See Ronald Bush, The Genesis of Ezra Pound’s Cantos (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976), 211. 8 Bush, Genesis, 216. 9 Walter Bauman, The Rose in the Steel Dust: An Examination of the Cantos of Ezra Pound (Coral Gables: University of Miami Press, 1970 [1967]), 49. 10 Daniel Perelman, The Barb of Time: On the Unity of Ezra Pound’s Cantos (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969), 55–56. 11 Peter Liebregts, Ezra Pound and Neoplatonism (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2004), 144–49. 12 Ira B. Nadel, “Introduction,” in Ezra Pound, Early Writings: Poems and Prose, ed. Ira B. Nadel (London: Penguin, 2005), ix–xxvi, xxi. 13 Daniel Albright, “Early Cantos I–XLI,” in The Cambridge Companion to Ezra Pound, ed. Ira B. Nadel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 59–91, 68. 14 For further bibliographical sources, and an interesting reading of Canto 5, with an analogical iconography, see Roxana Preda’s online The Cantos Project (Canto 5): http://thecantosproject.ed.ac.uk /, accessed September 1, 2017. 15 The Cantos of Ezra Pound (New York: New Directions, 1995), 17–20. Subsequent references are to this edition, citing Canto and page number. 16 Interestingly, according to Pound, Herodotus “wrote history that is literature.” See Ezra Pound, Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. T. S. Eliot (London: Faber & Faber, 1974 [1918]), 30.

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17 “plotted” in Canto 4. 18 Herodotus, The History, vol.  1, trans. G.  C.  Macaulay (London: Macmillan, 1904), 98. The colors listed by Herodotus are white for the first circle, and subsequently black, crimson, blue, and red, followed by silver for the sixth circle, and gold for the last one. One may infer a correspondence with the then five known planets plus Moon and Sun. See Canto 74/445 for Pound’s reformulation of Herodotus’s account: “To build the city of Dioce whose terraces are the colour of stars.” For a visual rendering of the chromatic interpretation of Canto 74 I may suggest—by analogy—a mosaic picture in the Arab-Byzantine Cathedral of Monreale, in Sicily, called Fiant Luminaria (Gen. 1:14). Pound visited Sicily and Monreale in 1925. See 104/765: “tessera, Monreale, / Topaz, God can sit on.” 19 See Fulvio Barberis’s Commentary to Erodoto, Le Storie. Libri I e II. Lidi, Persiani, Egizi (Milan: Garzanti, 1989), 419. 20 See Patria Mia on a vision of New York as a new Rome: “No nation can be considered historically as such, until it has achieved within itself a city to which all roads lead, and from which there goes out an authority.” Ezra Pound, Patria Mia and The Treatise on Harmony (London: Peter Owen, 1962), 9. 21 Herodotus, History, Book II, 5–13. 22 Herodotus, History, Book II, 4. 23 Moody, Ezra Pound: Poet, 1.404–5. 24 Liebregts, Neoplatonism, 148. 25 In Canto 5, Pound is primarily concerned with history and the reading of historical documents rather than with divination, although the Canto, as Roxana Preda correctly points out on the online The Cantos Project, deals with divination as well, as in the case of sluggish Alessandro de’ Medici. 26 See Ezra Pound, “Blandula, Tenella, Vagula,” in Collected Shorter Poems (London: Faber & Faber, 1973), 39. 27 Or “ungathered,” in Pound’s “Ίμέρρω,” in Collected Shorter Poems, 112. On Aldington’s translation, see Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era (London: Faber & Faber, 1972), 54–67. 28 Ezra Pound, The Spirit of Romance (London: Peter Owen, 1970), 96. 29 Ezra Pound, Literary Essays, 95–97. 30 Pound, Ezra Pound to His Parents, 625. 31 Moody, Ezra Pound: Poet, 1.405. 32 Pound, Literary Essays, 97. In Canto 23, the story is retold by Austors from the ruins of Montsegur. 33 Lorenzino de’ Medici, Apologia e Lettere, ed. F. Erspamer (Rome: Salerno, 1991), 35. Pound owned a copy of the Apologia dated 1921; see Mary de Rachewiltz, “Commento,” in Ezra Pound, I Cantos, ed. and trans. Mary de Rachewiltz (Milan: Mondadori, 1985), 1508.

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34 Benedetto Varchi, Storia Fiorentina, ed. L. Arbib, vol. 3 (Florence: Società Editrice del Nardi e del Varchi, 1844), 288. 35 Pound, Literary Essays, 250. 36 Varchi, Storia fiorentina, 267. 37 Varchi, Storia fiorentina, 262. Incidentally, Lorenzaccio’s death by murder in 1548 is recalled in Canto 26. 38 Ezra Pound, Ezra Pound’s Poetry and Prose: Contributions to Periodicals, ed. Lea Baechler, A. Walter Litz, and James Longenbach, 11 vols. (New York: Garland, 1991), 3.323. 39 Pound, Literary Essays, 355. 40 Varchi, Storia Fiorentina, 250. Varchi returns in Canto 87/589 as “one wanting the facts.” 41 John Burchard (1450–1506) was a renowned chronicler of Renaissance Rome. He acted as a cerimoniere to Pope Alexander VI. His often quoted Diary (trans. London, 1910) records a detailed, though not always accurate, account of the lives of the Borgias. 42 A. H. Matthew, The Life and Times of Rodrigo Borgia, Pope Alexander VI (New York: Brentano’s, 1910), 249. 43 Matthew, Life and Times, 249. For Burchard’s account as quoted by Matthew, see Fred Moramarco, “Schiavoni: ‘That Chap on the Wood Barge,’” Paideuma 4(1) (Spring 1975): 101–4, 102. 44 William Roscoe, The Life and Pontificate of Leo the Tenth, vol. 1 (London: T. Cadell, Strand, 1827), 282. 45 Roscoe, Life and Pontificate, 279. 46 Roscoe, Life and Pontificate, 283. 47 Matthew, Life and Times, 251–52. 48 Varchi, Storia fiorentina, 267. 49 Varchi, Storia fiorentina, 262. Canto 7 Ezra Pound, letter to Homer Pound, December 13, 1919, Ezra Pound to His Parents: Letters 1895–1929, ed. Mary de Rachewiltz, A. David Moody, and Joanna Moody (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 455. 2 Ezra Pound to John Quinn, October 9, 1920, The Selected Letters of Ezra Pound to John Quinn 1915–1924, ed. Timothy Materer (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), 195. 3 Ezra Pound, “Three Cantos [5, 6 and 7],” in Ezra Pound’s Poetry and Prose: Contributions to Periodicals, ed. Lea Baechler, A. Walter Litz, and James Longenbach, 11 vols. (New York: Garland, 1991), 4.172–81. 4 Donald Davie, Studies in Ezra Pound: Chronicle and Polemic (Manchester: Carcanet, 1991), 272. 1

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Gustave Flaubert, Trois Contes, ed. Pierre-Marc de Biasi (Paris: GF Flammarion, 1986), 43–44. 6 Sondra J. Stang (ed.), The Ford Madox Ford Reader (Manchester: Carcanet, 1986), 177–81. 7 Carroll F. Terrell, A Companion to the Cantos of Ezra Pound, vol. 1 (Cantos 1–71) (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1980), 30. 8 Stang, The Ford Madox Ford Reader, 181. 9 David Farley, “‘Damn the Partition!’: Ezra Pound and the Passport Nuisance,” Paideuma 30, no. 3 (Winter 2001): 79–90. 10 Robert Spoo, “Law,” in Ezra Pound in Context, ed. Ira B. Nadel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 125. 11 Louis L. Martz, Many Gods and Many Voices: The Role of the Prophet in English and American Modernism (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1998), 28–29. 12 H. Weir Smyth, ed. and trans., Aeschylus, vol. 2, Agamemnon ll. 685–90 (Cambridge, MA: Loeb Classical Library, 1926), 61. 13 Ovid, The Art of Love (Ars amatoria): http://poetryintranslation.com/ PITBR/Latin/ArtofLoveBkI.htm#_Toc521049257, accessed June 29, 2016. 14 Dante Alighieri, La Divina Commedia (Milan: Ulrico Hoepli, 1955), Paradiso XVIII.100. 15 Ezra Pound, Guide to Kulchur (New York: New Directions, 1970), 245. 16 Ezra Pound, Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. T. S. Eliot (London: Faber & Faber, 1954 [1918]), 295. 17 Dante, Purgatorio 6:63. 18 Dante, Inferno IV.112. 19 Pound, Literary Essays, 295. 20 Ezra Pound: Poems and Translations, ed. Richard Sieburth (New York: Library of America, 2003), 290. 21 Ezra Pound: Poems and Translations, 286. 22 Fritz-René Vanderpyl, “Canto VII,” in “A Guide to Ezra Pound’s Cantos (I–VIII): Addenda,” Analyst 6 (January 1955): 4–5. 23 Ezra Pound: Poems and Translations, 550. 24 Omar Pound and Robert Spoo, Ezra Pound and Margaret Cravens: A Tragic Friendship 1910—1912 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1988). 25 Luis de Camoes, Os Lusiadas, ed. Emanuel Paulo Ramos (Porto: Porto Editora, 1972), 105 (II.98.3–4). 26 Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading (New York: New Directions, 1960 [1934]), 127. 27 Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. A. S. Kline: http://ovid.lib.virginia.edu/ trans/Ovhome.htm#askline, accessed June 29, 2016. 28 Ezra Pound: Poems and Translations, 495. 5

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29 Terrell, Companion, 1.33. 30 Ezra Pound’s Poetry and Prose: Contributions to Periodicals, 1.154–55. 31 Pound, Literary Essays, 371. 32 Pound, Literary Essays, 339–58. 33 Richard Sieburth, Instigations: Ezra Pound and Remy de Gourmont (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), 67. 34 Eva Hesse, Beckett, Eliot, Pound: Drei Textanalysen (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1971). 35 Massimo Bacigalupo, ed. and trans., Ezra Pound: XXX Cantos (Parma: Ugo Guanda Editore, 2012), 80. 36 Terrell, Companion, 1.34. 37 Davie, Studies in Ezra Pound, 276. 38 Mary FitzGerald, “Ezra Pound and Irish Politics: An Unpublished Correspondence,” Paideuma 30(3) (Winter 2001): 377–417. 39 Terrell, Companion, 1.35. 40 William Cookson, A Guide to the Cantos of Ezra Pound, rev. and expanded (London: Anvil Press, 2001), 19. 41 James J. Wilhelm, Ezra Pound in London and Paris, 1908—1925 (University Park: Penn State University Press, 1990). 42 Massimo Bacigalupo, The Forméd Trace: The Later Cantos of Ezra Pound (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), 32. Canto 8 The Cantos of Ezra Pound (New York: New Directions, 1996). Subsequent references are to this edition, citing Canto and page number. 2 T. S. Eliot, The Annotated Waste Land with Eliot’s Contemporary Prose, ed. Lawrence Rainey, 2nd edn. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 70. This line along with the subsequent four lines were not present in the first published version of what would become Canto 8, published in The Criterion of July 1923, in Peter D’Epiro, A Touch of Rhetoric: Ezra Pound’s Malatesta Cantos (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1983), 5–6. Pound revisits the line in Canto 110, discarding Eliot’s first-person pronouns, “From time’s wreckage shored, / these fragments shored against ruin” (110/801). 3 Ezra Pound, Guide to Kulchur (New York: New Directions, 1970), 2. 4 Pound, “Rev. of Stones of Rimini, by Adrian Stokes,” The Criterion 13 (April 1934): 495–97. 5 Pound, ABC of Reading (New York: New Directions, 1960 [1934]), 46. 6 The phrase derives from Gérard de Nerval’s sonnet “Delfica,” first published in 1845. The French Romantic poet’s “chanson d’amour” alludes to the myth of Daphne’s transformation into a laurel tree as she flees a lustful Apollo, as told in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. See Lawrence Rainey’s 1

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gloss of Canto 8 in Modernism: An Anthology (Oxford: John Wiley & Sons, 2005), 66–71; Frederick Burwick, Poetic Madness and the Romantic Imagination (University Park: Penn State University Press, 1996), 244. 7 Marcel Detienne, The Masters of Truth in Archaic Greece, trans. Janet Lloyd (New York: Zone Books, 1996), 40–41. 8 Jean Pierre Vernant, Myth and Thought among the Greeks, trans. Janet Lloyd and Jeff Fort (New York: Zone Books, 2006), 119. 9 Pound, Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. T. S. Eliot (New York: New Directions, 1968 1918]), 77. 10 Lawrence Rainey, Ezra Pound and the Monument of Culture: Text, History, and the Malatesta Cantos (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 58. 11 Among these is a welter of pan-European sources, including the French historian and Malatesta biographer Charles Yriarte, the English novelist Edward Hutton, the Italian writer and historian Bartolomeo Platina, the German philosopher Fritz Schultze, Machiavelli, and Dante. 12 Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow, trans. Donald Bouchard and Sherry Simon (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 86. 13 Pound, “I Gather the Limbs of Osiris: II,” The New Age 10, no.  6 (December 7, 1911): 130. 14 Frank Shuffelton, “From Jefferson to Thoreau: The Possibilities of Discourse,” Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory 46, no. 1 (March 1990): 2. 15 Michael André Bernstein, The Tale of the Tribe: Ezra Pound and the Modern Verse Epic (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), 74. 16 Minou Schraven, “Founding Rome Anew: Pope Sixtus IV and the Foundation of Ponte Sisto, 1473,” in Foundation, Dedication and Consecration in Early Modern Europe, ed. Schraven and Maarten Delbeke (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 142–43. 17 See Roxana Preda, “VIII,” The Cantos Project: http://thecantosproject. ed.ac.uk/index.php/a-draft-of-xvi-cantos-overview/cantos-viii-xi/cantoviii, accessed September 1, 2017. 18 As Rainey points out, the poem was penned not by Malatesta but by the Sienese poet Simone Serdini. See Lawrence Rainey, “Pound or Eliot: Whose Era?,” in The Cambridge Companion to Modernist Poetry, ed. Alex Davis and Lee M. Jenkins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 103. 19 Maria Grazia Pernis and Laurie Schneider Adams, Federico Da Montefeltro and Sigismondo Malatesta: The Eagle and the Elephant (New York: Peter Lang, 1996), 46 ff. 20 Anthony F. D’Elia, Pagan Virtue in a Christian World: Sigismondo Malatesta and the Italian Renaissance (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), 3.

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21 Judith Davis, “William IX of Aquitaine (1071–1126),” in The Rise of the Medieval World, 500–1300: A Biographical Dictionary, ed. Jana K. Schulman (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2002), 437–39. 22 Pound, Literary Essays, 94. 23 See D’Epiro, Touch of Rhetoric, 18–19; Rainey, Monument of Culture, 49. 24 See Carroll F. Terrell, A Companion to the Cantos of Ezra Pound, vol. 1 (Cantos 1–71) (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1980), 22–23. 25 Jonathan M. Newman, “Poetic Self-Performance and Political Authority in the Companho Lyrics of Guilhem de Peitieus,” Tenso 27, no. 1 (2012): 25. 26 Ezra Pound, The [Selected] Letters of Ezra Pound, 1907–1941, ed. D. D. Paige (New York: New Directions, 1971 [1950]), 181. 27 Ezra Pound, The Spirit of Romance (New York: New Directions, 2005), 39. 28 Preda, “VIII.” 29 Susan Stanford Friedman, “Planetarity: Musing Modernist Studies,” Modernism/modernity 17, no. 3 (September 2010): 481 (italics in original). 30 Dante, The Divine Comedy, ed. David H. Higgins, trans. C. H. Sisson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 68. 31 Caroline Murphy, Murder of a Medici Princess (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 9; Kathleen Comerford, Jesuit Foundations and Medici Power, 1532–1621 (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 18. 32 In 1447, Malatesta not only reneged on a condotta to fight on Alfonso’s behalf in Tuscany by joining the defense of Florence, but he also kept his advance payment, in D’Elia, Pagan Virtue, 7. 33 Claudette Sartiliot, Citation and Modernity: Derrida, Joyce, and Brecht (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993), 3. 34 Ronald Bush, The Genesis of Ezra Pound’s Cantos (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976), 83. 35 Robert E. Spoo, “Ezra Pound Legislator: Perpetual Copyright and Unfair Competition with the Dead,” in Modernism and Copyright, ed. Paul K. Saint-Amour (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 40. 36 Peter Liebregts, Ezra Pound and Neoplatonism (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2004), 156. 37 C. M. Woodhouse, George Gemistos Plethon: The Last of the Hellenes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), 159–60, 164. Malatesta probably met Alberti for the first time in the early 1430s; see D’Elia, Pagan Virtue, 53. 38 Warren T. Treadgold, A Concise History of Byzantium (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 232. 39 Preda, “VIII.” 40 Pound, Guide to Kulchur, 224; cf. “Gemisto stemmed all from Neptune / hence the Rimini bas reliefs” (83/548).

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41 Niketas Siniossoglou, Radical Platonism in Byzantium: Illumination and Utopia in Gemistos Plethon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 5, 258. 42 Liebregts, Pound and Neoplatonism, 157. 43 Line Henriksen, Ambition and Anxiety: Ezra Pound’s Cantos and Derek Walcott’s Omeros as Twentieth-Century Epics (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006), 148. 44 P. J. Jones, The Malatesta of Rimini and the Papal State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 31 ff.; Adrian Stokes, The Quattro Cento; and, Stones of Rimini (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2002), 189. 45 Charles Yriarte, Un condottiere au XVe siècle (Paris: Jules Rothschild, 1882), 327. 46 Christina Wieland, The Undead Mother: Psychoanalytic Explorations of Masculinity, Femininity, and Matricide (London: Rebus Press, 2000), 36. 47 James Longenbach, The Resistance to Poetry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 76. Canto 11 1 Michael André Bernstein, The Tale of the Tribe: Ezra Pound and the Modern Verse Epic (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), 40. See also Hugh Kenner, “The Making of the Modernist Canon,” in Robert von Hallberg (ed.), Canons (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 365–66; Richard Sieburth, “Dada Pound,” South Atlantic Quarterly 83 (1984): 44–68; Ronald Bush, The Genesis of Ezra Pound’s Cantos (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1972), 247–49; Peter D’Epiro, A Touch of Rhetoric: Ezra Pound’s Malatesta Cantos (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1983), 28; and Lawrence Rainey, Ezra Pound and the Monument of Culture: Text, History, and the Malatesta Cantos (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 57 ff. Additional significant readings of the Malatesta Cantos can be found in Michael North, The Final Sculpture: Public Monuments and Modern Poets (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), 132–56; James Longenbach, Modernist Poetics of History: Pound, Eliot, and the Sense of the Past (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987), 131–52; Michael Harper, “Truth and Calliope: Ezra Pound’s Malatesta,” PMLA 96 (1981): 86–103; Daniel Bornstein, “The Poet as Historian: Researching the Malatesta Cantos,” Paideuma 10 (1981): 283–91; Ben D. Kimpel and T. C. Duncan Eaves, “Pound’s Research for the Malatesta Cantos,” Paideuma 11 (1982): 406–19; and Fred Moramarco, “The Malatesta Cantos,” Mosaic 12 (1978): 107–18. 2 The Cantos of Ezra Pound (New York: New Directions, 1996). Subsequent references are to this edition, citing Canto and page number.

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3 Harper, “Truth and Calliope,” 99. 4 See Marjorie Perloff, The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1983), 181–82. 5 Rainey, Monument of Culture, 70–72. Rainey (80) also expresses suspicions of Christine Froula’s attempt, in To Write Paradise: Style and Error in Pound’s Cantos (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984), 160, to explicate Pound’s practice in terms of a “historical ‘process’” steeped in literary hermeneutics, and of Richard Sieburth’s invocation, in Sieburth, “Dada Pound,” 57, of intertextuality: “For what . . . are the ‘facts’ to which the Cantos refer but texts in their turn, what is the ‘history’ that the poem includes but a body of written traces?” 6 D’Epiro, A Touch of Rhetoric, xiii–xiv, 61–62; Rainey, Monument of Culture, 123–27. 7 Rainey, Monument of Culture, 126. 8 D’Epiro, A Touch of Rhetoric, 63, 68. 9 See D’Epiro, A Touch of Rhetoric, 19–20; Rainey, Monument of Culture, 125, 130. For a slightly different reading of the soldier’s voice, see D’Epiro, A Touch of Rhetoric, 64 ff. 10 On Pound’s tentative path toward Canto 11’s final structure, see D’Epiro, A Touch of Rhetoric, 45–47, 51–59, 81–84. D’Epiro adds that, as Pound’s draft versions display “an impression of jumbled anticlimax . . . into which all the leftover pieces of the Malatesta puzzle are jammed willynilly” (45), the Canto’s final clarity seems particularly hard won. 11 The narrator refers to the episode in Canto 9 when Astorre Manfredi trapped Malatesta in the marshland (as Pound says in the next line “in 46 that was”). 12 See D’Epiro, A Touch of Rhetoric, 23 ff; Rainey, Monument of Culture, 53–55, 220 ff, 238–41. 13 In The Pound Era (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1972), 342. Hugh Kenner notes that the compound effect of juxtaposing the line about “fires” with “the gold gathers the light” is to suggest that “He is the gold, their torches rhyme with the light.” 14 See D’Epiro, A Touch of Rhetoric, 48. 15 See D’Epiro, A Touch of Rhetoric, 46. 16 D’Epiro, A Touch of Rhetoric, 24. 17 D’Epiro, A Touch of Rhetoric, 48. 18 Ital.: It appears that Master Sigismondo is no longer of this world (with a play on the “mondo” in Malatesta’s name and the Italian word for world). 19 “In squarciato,” Ital.: busted, torn off. 20 “Abozzi,” Ital.: sketches, first tries. 21 Ezra Pound Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Beinecke Series 5, Box 63, Folder

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22

23 24 25

26 27

28

Readings in the Cantos 2455 (formerly Folder 65.5). Draft of March 1923. (With thanks to Lawrence Rainey.) See, for example, Ronald Bush, “The Expatriate in Extremis: Caterina Sforza, Fascism, and Ezra Pound’s Pisan Cantos,” Revista di Letteratura d’America 25(108–9) (2005) [2007], 27–43 for a relevant discussion of the evolving significance of Caterina Sforza in the composition of The Pisan Cantos. C. Grigioni, “Un capriccio di Sigismondo Malatesta.” Arte e storia 3, no. 10 (1908): 40–41. See D’Epiro, A Touch of Rhetoric, 121–22. See D’Epiro, A Touch of Rhetoric, 53, 83. The Temple Classics, Inferno (London: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd, 1903), 164. Pound’s copy is now part of the collection of the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin, PQ 4306 A1 1903 PND. On the inside cover, Pound has inscribed his name and the date he acquired the book: “Mar. 1904”. See Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, Inferno, vol. 2, Commentary, ed. Charles S. Singleton (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970), 267. See Joan Ferrante, The Political Vision of the Divine Comedy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), 163–65 and Ricardo Quinones, Dante Alighieri (Boston: Twayne, 1979), 20–23. In Quinones’s words, “In Latini we see embodied the culture that Dante acquired in the Florence of his youth [and] . . . the limitation of the culture that he left behind” (23). Temple Classics, Inferno, 159. Canto 12

1 2

Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading (New York: New Directions, 1934), 46. The final version (with the Honest Sailor section) was first made public in a limited, deluxe edition of A Draft of XVI Cantos with a colophon dating production from May and December 1924. Strater’s illustrations provide some critical interpretive context for my reading, developed at more length in Aaron Jaffe, “Paleolithic Media: Deep Time and Ezra Pound’s Methods,” in Ezra Pound in the Present: Essays on Pound’s Contemporaneity, ed. Paul Stasi and Josephine Park (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 45–71. Myles Slatin notes that “the book was printed between May and December; it is not unlikely that Pound took three months to settle the text of the poem. By January 28, 1925, when he acknowledged the receipt of a proof copy of the whole book [Yale Collection of American Literature, Letters of Ezra Pound, No. 719], the early part of the poem had been given the form in which it is now known”. Slatin, “A History of Pound’s Cantos I–XVI, 1915–1925,” American Literature 35, no. 2 (May 1963): 183–95 (192–93). Pound’s letters to his parents provide additional information on his sporadic attentions to revisions of the Canto in 1922

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and 1923. See Ezra Pound, Ezra Pound to His Parents: Letters 1895–1929, ed. Mary de Rachewiltz, A. David Moody, and Joanna Moody (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). 3 T. S. Eliot, “Ulysses, Order, and Myth,” in Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot, ed. Frank Kermode (London: Faber & Faber, 1975), 178. 4 The Cantos of Ezra Pound (New York: New Directions, 1996). Subsequent references are to this edition, citing Canto and page number. 5 By the time Draft of XXX Cantos was published in 1930, he had embraced Rome as well as Roman numerals. 6 Lawrence Rainey, Ezra Pound and the Monument of Culture: Text, History, and the Malatesta Cantos (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1991), 238. See also Rainey’s second appendix, “Pound’s Travels in Italy, 1922,” 237–41. 7 See A. David Moody, Ezra Pound: Poet. A Portrait of the Man and His Work, vol. 1, The Young Genius 1885–1920 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 83. 8 Rainey, Monument of Culture, 240. 9 Pound, ABC of Reading, 34. 10 Moody, Ezra Pound: Poet, 1.84. 11 James J. Wilhelm, Ezra Pound in London and Paris, 1908–1925 (University Park: Penn State University Press, 1990), 308. 12 For Pound’s gendering and sexualization of collaborative work, see Aaron Jaffe, Modernism and the Culture of Celebrity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 127 ff. 13 T. S. Eliot, Complete Poems and Plays (London: Faber & Faber, 1969). 14 See Rainey, Monument of Culture, 54. Rainey tracks down the fact that Tontolini, a silent film star, comedian, and vaudevillian, was performing in the Verona amphitheater during Pound and Eliot’s visit. Based on current practice, they certainly saw posters for Tontolini from their seats, and, Rainey writes, they attended one of his performances. 15 Jean-Michel Rabaté, Language, Sexuality and Ideology in Ezra Pound’s Cantos (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986), 61. This is the moment, Rabaté writes, when Pound “cannot remain on a balcony, as in a play by Lope de Vega, but is caught up in the play.” 16 Carroll F. Terrell. A Companion to the Cantos of Ezra Pound, vol. 1 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1980), 58. 17 Peter D’Epiro, A Touch of Rhetoric: Ezra Pound’s Malatesta Cantos (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1983), 23. 18 Terrell, Companion, 1.59. 19 “Society Formed to Provide Leisure for Budding Authors and Artists,” Popular Mechanics (November 1922), 5. 20 Ezra Pound, The [Selected] Letters of Ezra Pound, 1907–1941, ed. D. D. Paige (New York: New Directions, 1950), 175.

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21 Pound, [Selected] Letters, 242. 22 T. S. Eliot, The Letters of T. S. Eliot, vol. 1, 1898–1922, ed. Valerie Eliot and Hugh Haughton (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 789–90. A newspaper had run a garbled—and libelous, in Eliot’s view—account of the management of the funds, and, more poignantly, Eliot received an anonymous letter which insulted his pride by including a meager “donation” of a handful of postage stamps. See also Eliot’s letter to Pound, February 9, 1923, Letters of T. S. Eliot, 1.49. 23 Pound, [Selected] Letters, 174. In a letter to H. L. Mencken, beating the drum for what he calls “this ‘Bel Esprit’ show . . . It will cost you fifty bones a year, but if I can afford it, you can,” he writes that “The Christian Era ended at midnight on Oct. 29–30 of [1921]. You are now in the year 1. p.s.U. [post scriptum Ulysses], if that is any comfort to you” (174). 24 Pound, [Selected] Letters, 10. 25 A frequently circulated estimate for the “coming of men like ourselves,” as H. G. Wells put it, was 44,000 years. In his enormously successful Outline of History, Wells notes that “between 40,000 and 25,000 years ago, as the Fourth Glacial Age softened towards more temperate conditions, a different human type came upon the scene, and, it would seem, exterminated Homo Neanderthalensis.” H. G. Wells, Outline of History (New York: Macmillan, 1921), 65. While it may be an exaggeration to say that the deep dating of behavioral modernity in this way was common then, no less a person than Theodore Roosevelt makes similar claims in an article titled “How Old is Man,” National Geographic (February 1916), 111–26. 26 See Moody, Ezra Pound: Poet, 1.360; Massimo Bacigalupo, “Tradition in 1919: Pound, Eliot and the ‘Historical Method’,” in T. S. Eliot and the Concept of Tradition, ed. Giovanni Cianci and Jason Harding (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2007), 111–12; Patrick Parrinder, “Science and Knowledge at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century,” in The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century English Literature, ed. Laura Marcus and Peter Nicholls (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 29. 27 T. S. Eliot, Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot, ed. Frank Kermode (London: Faber & Faber, 1975), 39. 28 Eliot, Selected Prose, 39. 29 Ezra Pound, Guide to Kulchur (New York: New Directions, 1938), 64. 30 Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (New York, Schocken, 1968), 257. 31 Peter Liebregts, Ezra Pound and Neoplatonism (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2004), 233–34; Sean Pryor, W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, and the Poetry of Paradise (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), 156. 32 Ezra Pound, “The Teacher’s Mission,” Literary Essays of Ezra Pound (London: Faber & Faber, 1985 [1918]), 58.

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33 Hugh Kenner, The Poetry of Ezra Pound (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1951), 244. 34 Tim Redman, Ezra Pound and Italian Fascism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 75. 35 Rainer Emig, Modernism in Poetry: Motivations, Structures and Limits (New York: Longman, 1995), 119. 36 Daniel Albright, “Early Cantos I–XLI,” in The Cambridge Companion to Ezra Pound, ed. Ira B. Nadel (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1999), 76. See also Michael Davidson, “Pregnant Men: Modernism, Disability, and Biofuturity,” Sex and Disability, ed. Robert McRuer and Anna Mollow (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), 123–44 (Davidson’s more general discussion of literary “pregnant men”). Davidson argues that Pound’s story condemns mobility and cosmopolitanism through what he describes as “the Dantean condemnation of usurers and sodomites as those who pervert nature through economic and sexual practices that prevent natural increase” (130). 37 Earle Rosco Davis, Vision Fugitive: Ezra Pound and Economics (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1968), 53; Peter Nicholls, Ezra Pound: Politics, Economics and Writing (London: Macmillan, 1984), 30. 38 Bacigalupo notes that Pound’s anthropogenic poetics was an early development: “[in] an important series of articles published in autumn 1913, Pound described the scientific function of the arts as providers of data for the study of man.” Bacigalupo, “Tradition in 1919,” 195. 39 If anything, the discrepancy between the coin’s face value and its commodity value as copper was the issue. Pre-republic centavos were far too cumbersome in weight and size; no one wanted them. Accounts of Cuba as a Spanish possession and in the earlier days as a US protectorate are full of tales of the currency crisis—big, clumsy, copper coins, and money-changers on every corner: “[N]o ordinary man would think of getting change in copper, as he would have to hire a pack mule to take it home, and then he would have to get rid of it in driblets, as cabmen object to taking twenty cents in copper, and small merchants do likewise, preferring silver and insisting upon getting it.” Murat Halstead, The Story of Cuba (Chicago: Werner, 1896), 375. Cubans couldn’t mint their own coins—eventually they were minted in Philadelphia. A buyer like Bacon willing to exchange copper for silver or gold would find many willing punters. He is buying all this copper at a time when the USA has sovereign control of Cuba’s monetary system and when available coinage is in scarce supply. 40 Terrell, Companion, 1.59. 41 In 1913, he praises Bacon’s energies in “Patria Mia,” Selected Prose, 1909–1965 (New York: New Directions, 1973), 99–142. In 1939, “Then there is Baldy Bacon . . . [D]on’t go fooling around with Mrs B / in fact

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you keep yr / eye on paint. If the republicans win and the crisis passes, the old New England habit of family portraits might REVIVE and baldy bee is on it.” Ezra Pound, Pound/Lewis: The Letters of Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis, ed. Tim Materer (New York: New D ­ irections, 1985), 216. 42 “Tagus Estuary Natural Reserve,” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 19 April 2013: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tagus_Estuary_Natural_ Reserve, accessed September 1, 2017. 43 After all, Quinn’s role in the Bel Esprit scheme—and supporting Eliot, for that matter—cannot be underestimated. See B. L. Reid, The Man from New York: John Quinn and His Friends (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969), 582–83. 44 Quoted in Reid, The Man from New York, 564. 45 Reid, The Man from New York, 569, 603. 46 Reid, The Man from New York, 630. 47 Reid, The Man from New York, 639. 48 Reid, The Man from New York, 636. 49 Letter of September 4, 1925, in Richard Londraville and Janis Londraville, Dear Yeats, Dear Pound, Dear Ford: Jeanne Robert Foster and Her Circle (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2001), 205. Canto 13 Zhaoming Qian, Ezra Pound’s Chinese Friends (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), xiii. 2 Eric Hayot, Chinese Dreams: Pound, Brecht, Tel Quel (Ann Arbor: Michigan University Press, 2004), 1. 3 Josephine Nock-Hee Park, Apparitions of Asia: Modernist Form and Asian American Poetics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 15. 4 Robert Kern, Orientalism, Modernism, and the American Poem (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 203. 5 Qian, Chinese Friends, xiii. 6 Fen Lan, Ezra Pound and Confucianism: Remaking Humanism in the Face of Modernity (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2005), 10. 7 Mary Paterson Cheadle, Ezra Pound’s Confucian Translations (Ann Arbor: Michigan University Press, 1997), 9. 8 Lan, Confucianism, 3. 9 Lan, Confucianism, 3 10 Lan, Confucianism, 5. 11 Lan, Confucianism, 6. 12 An initial version of Canto 13 was published as the first of “Two Cantos” in the Transatlantic Review (January 1924). This early version was unnumbered and omitted lines 3–6. 1

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13 Confucius makes a fleeting appearance in the first of the Ur-Cantos that appeared in Poetry (June 1917). 14 Steven G. Yao, Translation and the Language of Modernism: Gender, Politics, Language (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 159. 15 Wai-lim Yip, Ezra Pound’s Cathay (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1969), 158. 16 Zhaoming Qian, The Modernist Response to Chinese Art: Pound, Moore, Stevens (Charlottesville: Virginia University Press, 2003), 4. 17 Qian, Modernist Response, 5–6. 18 Qian, Modernist Response, 6. 19 Pound’s nascent interest in China and Confucianism is also evident in early critical pieces such as “The Words of Ming Mao ‘Least among the Disciples of Kung Fu-Tze’” (1914) and later ones such as “Provincialism the Enemy II” (1917) and “Prolegomena” (1927). His interest in ancient Chinese philosophy also prompted him to publish Allen Upward’s Confucian anthology Sayings of K’ung the Master (1904) in three issues of The New Freewoman (1913). 20 Cheadle, Confucian Translations, 11. 21 Qian, Modernist Response, 53. 22 Cheadle, Confucian Translations, 10. 23 Qian, Modernist Response, 53. 24 John J. Nolde, Blossoms from the East: The China Cantos of Ezra Pound (Orono: Maine University Press, 1983), 13. 25 Yip, Cathay, 164. 26 Ming Xie, Ezra Pound and the Appropriation of Chinese Poetry: Cathay, Translation, and Imagism (New York: Garland Publishing, 1999), 235. 27 Xie, Appropriation, 235. 28 Xie, Appropriation, 235. 29 Xie, Appropriation, 235. 30 Xie, Appropriation, 235. 31 Xie, Appropriation, 235. 32 Xie, Appropriation, 235. 33 Hayot, Chinese Dreams, 42. 34 The Cantos of Ezra Pound (New York: New Directions, 1996). Subsequent references are to this edition, citing Canto and page number. 35 At the same time, the meditative quality of the passage serves to distinguish the tranquil Eastern scene of Canto 13 from the more raucous one depicted in Canto 12. 36 Ezra Pound, cited in Peter Brooker, A Student’s Guide to the Selected Poems of Ezra Pound (London: Faber & Faber, 1979), 257. 37 Cheadle, Confucian Translations, 19. 38 Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1971), 445.

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39 George Dekker, Sailing After Knowledge: The Cantos of Ezra Pound [The Cantos of Ezra Pound: A Critical Study] (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963), 4. 40 Cheadle, Confucian Translations, 19. 41 Cheadle, Confucian Translations, 20. 42 Cheadle, Confucian Translations, 26. 43 Cheadle, Confucian Translations, 22. 44 Cheadle, Confucian Translations, 21. 45 Ezra Pound, cited in Omar Pound and A. Walton Litz, Ezra Pound and Dorothy Shakespear: Their Letters, 1909–1914 (New York: New Directions, 1984), 307. 46 Cheadle, Confucian Translations, 17. Pound rejects Christianity in favor of Confucianism in his seventh “Imaginary Letter.” Appearing in the Little Review (March 1918), Pound’s letter also includes material from The Analects which was to appear later in verse form in Canto 13. 47 Cheadle, Confucian Translations, 18. 48 Cheadle, Confucian Translations, 16. 49 Cheadle, Confucian Translations, 21. 50 Pound certainly responded positively to what he perceived as Confucius’s concern “for the proper ordering of the family and the state, and finds the basis of being true to one’s own individual nature.” A. David Moody, Ezra Pound: Poet. A Portrait of the Man and His Work, vol. 1, The Young Genius 1885–1920 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 240. 51 Nolde, Blossoms, 18. 52 Cheadle, Confucian Translations, 22. 53 Carroll F. Terrell, A Companion to the Cantos of Ezra Pound, single vol. rev. edn. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996), 64. Cantos 14–15 1

2

The exact date of composition is a matter of some confusion, although the consensus seems to be that the Hell Cantos were written while Pound was still living in London. Moody writes: “According to [Noel] Stock it was while he was still in England, in 1920, that Pound drafted his ‘hell cantos’”; see A. David Moody, Ezra Pound: Poet. A Portrait of the Man and His Work, vol. 1, The Young Genius 1885–1920 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 403. However, Stock actually suggests that Pound was drafting the Hell Cantos “about the time” he wrote to John Quinn on December 13; see Noel Stock, The Life of Ezra Pound (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974), 286. The Cantos of Ezra Pound (New York: New Directions, 1996). Subsequent references are to this edition, citing Canto and page number.

Notes 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

10 11 12

13 14

15

16

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Daniel Albright, “Early Cantos I–XLI,” in The Cambridge Companion to Ezra Pound, ed. Ira B. Nadel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 78. For copies of some of the drafts from the Beinecke, see the online The Cantos Project: http://thecantosproject.ed.ac.uk/, accessed September 1, 2017. Ezra Pound, The [Selected] Letters of Ezra Pound, 1907–1941, ed. D. D. Paige (London: Faber & Faber, 1950), 293. See Matthew Hofer, “Modernist Polemic: Ezra Pound v. ‘the perverters of language,’” Modernism/Modernity 9, no. 3 (September 2002): 483, and http://thecantosproject.ed.ac.uk/, accessed September 1, 2017. See Hofer, “Modernist Polemic,” 467–75. Pound, [Selected] Letters, 181. See Matthew Kibble, “Modernism and the Daily Mail,” Literature & History 11, no. 1 (Spring 2002): 77. Kibble notes that all Faber editions after the 1933 version published this as “e,” until the 1975 revised edition, which was based on the New Directions edition of 1972, and which introduced “effe.” Kibble, “Modernism and the Daily Mail,” 66–67. See the eleven volumes of Ezra Pound’s Poetry and Prose: Contributions to Periodicals, ed. Lea Baechler, A. Walton Litz, and James Longenbach (New York: Garland Press, 1991). On this, see his essay, “Small Magazines,” English Journal 19, no. 9 (November 1930): 689–704. In 1920, however, Pound’s income from journalism declined after he lost the £10 a month he was being paid for theatre reviews for the Athenæum (see Moody, Ezra Pound: Poet, 1.398). For detailed information and discussion of their publication, see Rebecca Beasley, Ezra Pound and the Visual Culture of Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Pres, 2007), chap. 6. Pound to Kate Buss, May 12, 1923, [Selected] Letters, 187. Later editions, such as A Draft of XXX Cantos, published by Nancy Cunard’s Hours Press in 1930, contained a different style of initial letter designed by Dorothy Pound. For analysis of the cultural implications of the different bibliographical codes in these two editions, see Beasley, Ezra Pound and Jerome McGann, The Textual Condition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), 130–40. See Rebecca Beasley, “Ezra Pound and Modern Art, 1906–1930” (PhD thesis, University of Cambridge, 1999), 181. For more discussion of the role of luxury editions in modernism, see Lawrence Rainey, Institutions of Modernism: Literary Elites and Public Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998). Pound to Blackmur, November 30, 1924, [Selected] Letters, 190.

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17 Pound to Lewis, December 3, 1924, [Selected] Letters, 191. 18 This is identified by Terrell as an Irish-born British Army Captain, J. C. Bowen-Colthurst, who in the aftermath of the Easter Rising shot three prisoners. There seems no indication, however, that he was the torturer of the imprisoned rebels Pearse and MacDonagh, who were later executed by the British. In the original drafts and in Bird’s 1925 edition, the text refers to “Captain B.” See Carroll F. Terrell, A Companion to the Cantos of Ezra Pound, single vol. rev edn. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993), 66. 19 See Pound’s essay, “Hell,” where he notes that in Dante’s vision of hell, the “usurers are there as against nature, against the natural increase of agriculture or of any productive work.” See Ezra Pound, Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. T. S. Eliot (London: Faber & Faber, 1954 [1918]), 211. 20 Pound, “Postscript,” in Remy de Gourmont, The Natural Philosophy of Love, trans. Ezra Pound (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1922), 206, 210. 21 See Pound to Joyce, June 10, 1919, Pound/Joyce: The Letters of Ezra Pound to James Joyce, with Pound’s Essays on Joyce, ed. Forrest Read (London: Faber & Faber, 1968), 158. And see the discussion in Alan Durant, Ezra Pound, Identity in Crisis: A Fundamental Reassessment of the Poet and his Work (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1981), 141–51. 22 Pound to Harriet Monroe, January 1915, [Selected] Letters, 49; Pound to Williams, September 11, 1920, [Selected] Letters, 158. 23 See Pound, “How to Read,” Literary Essays, 21 for a discussion of the importance of “the application of word to thing” for government and legislation. 24 See Terrell, Companion, 66. 25 Terrell, Companion, 67. 26 Terrell, Companion, 68. Canto 17 A. David Moody, Ezra Pound: Poet. A Portrait of the Man and His Work, vol. 2, The Epic Years 1921–1939 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 54. For the history of the long composition of Canto 3, see Sean Pryor, “‘How will you know?’: Paradise, Painting, and the Writing of Ezra Pound’s Canto 3,” Paideuma 37 (2010): 267–92. 2 Moody, Ezra Pound: Poet, 2.65. 3 Moody, Ezra Pound: Poet, 2.65; Ezra Pound, “Canto XVII,” This Quarter 1–2 (Autumn/Winter 1925–26): 5–7. 4 Ezra Pound, manuscript draft of Canto 17, in Ezra Pound Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, MS 43, Series IV, Box 71, Folder 3175. 1

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5 Ezra Pound, typescript draft of Canto 17, in Ezra Pound Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, MS 43, Series IV, Box 71, Folder 3174. 6 The Cantos of Ezra Pound (New York: New Directions, 1996), 3. Subsequent references are to this edition, citing Canto and page number. 7 Ezra Pound, typescript draft of Canto 17, in Ezra Pound Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, MS 43, Series IV, Box 71, Folder 3175. 8 Ezra Pound, Personae: The Shorter Poems of Ezra Pound, ed. Lea Baechler and A. Walton Litz, rev. edn (New York: New Directions, 1990), 3. See also Leon Surette, “‘A Light from Eleusis’: Some Thoughts on Pound’s Nekuia,” Paideuma 3, no. 2 (Fall 1974): 191–216. 9 Ezra Pound, typescript draft of Canto 17, in Ezra Pound Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, MS 43, Series IV, Box 71, Folder 3176. 10 Ezra Pound, The [Selected] Letters of Ezra Pound, 1907–1941, ed. D. D. Paige (London: Faber & Faber, 1971 [1950]), 210. 11 Pound, Personae, 234. 12 Ezra Pound, Ezra Pound to His Parents: Letters 1895–1929, ed. Mary de Rachewiltz, A. David Moody, and Joanna Moody (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 565; Pound, [Selected] Letters, 210. 13 Pound, Ezra Pound to His Parents, 565. 14 Pound, [Selected] Letters, 95, 104. 15 Ezra Pound, Pound/Joyce: The Letters of Ezra Pound to James Joyce, with Pound’s Essays on Joyce, ed. Forrest Read (New York: New Directions, 1967), 82. 16 Pound, [Selected] Letters, 210. 17 Pound, [Selected] Letters, 239. 18 Ezra Pound, Lettere 1907–1958, ed. Aldo Tagliaferri (Milan: Feltrinelli Editore, 1980), 150 (my translation). 19 See Donald Davie, “The Poet as Sculptor,” in New Approaches to Ezra Pound: A Co-Ordinated Investigation of Pound’s Poetry and Ideas, ed. Eva Hesse (London: Faber & Faber, 1969), 198–214 (202–3). 20 Guy Davenport, Cities on Hills: A Study of I–XXX of Ezra Pound’s Cantos (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1983), 199. 21 For a recent account of Pound’s ambivalent attitude to Venice, see Jason Harding, “The Myth of Venice in the Decline of Eliot and Pound,” in Venice and the Cultural Imagination, ed. Michael O’Neill, Mark Sandy, and Sarah Wootton (London: Routledge: 2012), 141–56. 22 Compare, too, “And by one cut of the hills, / the great alley of Memnons” (17/77) with “a procession coming down through / A cut in the hills” (16/70).

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23 Marcella Spann Booth, typed explanation of Canto 17, in Marcella Spann Booth Papers, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin, Series 1, Box 1, Folder 1. 24 Jennifer Scappettone, “Utopia Interrupted: Archipelago as Sociolyric Structure in A Draft of XXX Cantos,” PMLA 122, no. 1 (January 2007): 105–23 (117). 25 Peter Liebregts, Ezra Pound and Neoplatonism (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2004), 168–72. 26 Humphrey Carpenter, A Serious Character: The Life of Ezra Pound (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1988), 444. 27 Peter Nicholls, “A Necessary Blindness: Ezra Pound and Rhythm,” Journal of Philosophy 6, no. 13 (Fall 2010): 28–40 (38). 28 Moody, Ezra Pound: Poet, 2.89. 29 See Daniel Tiffany, “Kitsching The Cantos,” Modernism/modernity 12, no. 2 (April 2005): 329–37. Cantos 18–19 1

I wish to thank Archie Henderson for research help on this project as on so many others. 2 The Cantos of Ezra Pound (New York: New Directions, 1996). Subsequent references are to this edition, citing Canto and page number. 3 Ernst Nolte, Der Europäische Bürgerkrieg 1914–1945: Nationalsocializmus und Bolschewismus (Munich: Herbig. 1997), passim. 4 Eliot wrote his mother on January 6, 1920 recommending Keynes: “I believe by the way, that J. M. Keynes: The Economic Consequences of the Peace is an important book, if you can get hold of it.” The Letters of T. S. Eliot, vol. 1, 1898–1922 (New York. Harcourt Brace Jovanovitch, 1988), 353. 5 A. David Moody, Ezra Pound: Poet. A Portrait of the Man and His Work, vol. 2, The Epic Years 1921–1939 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 61. 6 Mike Malm, Editing Economic History: Ezra Pound’s The Fifth Decad of Cantos (Frankfurt am Main; Peter Lang, 2003), 204. 7 Malm, Editing Economic History, 203. 8 Malm, Editing Economic History, 203. 9 Ezra Pound, Guide to Kulchur (New York: New Directions, 1970), 129. 10 Ezra Pound, Ezra Pound to His Parents: Letters 1895–1929, ed. Mary de Rachewiltz, A. David Moody, and Joanna Moody (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 590–91. These original actors are Venustiano Carranza (1859, assassinated 1920), President of Mexico; Tomáš Masaryk (1850–1937), sociologist, thinker, three times President of Czechoslovakia; and Arthur Griffith (1872–1922), founder of Sinn Fein and later President of Dáil Éireann: he died in office in 1922. The editor of the

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Times must be Henry Wickham Steed (1871–1956); the owner of Vickers is the arms dealer Sir Basil Zaharoff (1849–1936). 11 I’m grateful to Roxana Preda who brought my attention to Steed’s narrative at a very late stage in the editing process. The most relevant of Steed’s material has been published by her on the Cantos website. 12 Pound, Ezra Pound to His Parents, 548. 13 Pound, Ezra Pound to His Parents, 548. 14 Ezra Pound, Selected Prose 1909–1965 (London: Faber & Faber, 1973), 174–76. 15 Arthur Kitson, The Bankers’ Conspiracy! Which Started the World Crisis (London: Hawthorne Press, 1966), 25. “Final Report of the Cunliffe Committee,” FRASER, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis: https://fraser. stlouisfed.org/files/docs/publications/FRB/pages/1920-1924/29667_19201924.pdf, accessed September 1, 2017. 16 Arthur Kitson wrote: “Notwithstanding the ruinous results of the deflationary policy recommended in this report during the years immediately following its adoption, Mr. Winston Churchill intensified these evils when he reestablished the Gold standard in 1925, which precipitated the great Strike of 1926.” Kitson, The Bankers’ Conspiracy!, 25. Pound thought highly of The Bankers’ Conspiracy! and translated it as La Storia di un Reato (Venice, 1944) as part of efforts on behalf of the Repubblica Sociale Italiana. His well-known hatred of Winston Churchill (that “sputtering tank of nicotine and stale whiskey” [84/560]), has much to do with his efforts on behalf of the resumption of gold. 17 John Kenneth Galbraith judged it “the most decisively damaging action involving money in modern times.” See J. K. Galbraith, Money: Whence it Came, Where it Went (London: Andre Deutsch, 1975), 168. 18 Pound, Selected Prose, 175. 19 Anthony Sampson, The Arms Bazaar: From Lebanon to Lockheed (New York: Bantam Books, 1978), 27. 20 Carroll. F. Terrell, A Companion to the Cantos of Ezra Pound, single vol. rev. edn. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984), 76. 21 Sampson, The Arms Bazaar, 50. 22 Zaharoff was portrayed as an almost satanic figure in exposés like Richard Lewinsohn’s The Man Behind the Scenes: The Career of Sir Basil Zaharoff (London: Victor Gollancz, 1929); Robert Neumann’s Zaharoff (New York: Allen & Unwin, 1935); Helmuth C. Englebrecht and Frank Cleary Hanighen’s Merchants of Death: A Study of the International Armaments Industry (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1934), which devotes a chapter to “The Supersalesman of Death”; and Guiles Davenport’s Zaharoff: High Priest of War (Boston: Lothrop, Lee and Shepard, 1934). Sampson relies heavily on an interview Zaharoff gave to the London Times, November 29, 1936.

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23 Sampson, The Arms Bazaar, 46–47. 24 Sampson, The Arms Bazaar, 47–48. 25 Sampson, The Arms Bazaar, 51. 26 Quoted in Sampson, The Arms Bazaar, 49. 27 V. I. Lenin, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (New York: International Publishers, 1939), 124. 28 Ezra Pound, “Studies in Contemporary Mentality,” The New Age 22, no. 10 (January 3, 1918), 193. 29 Englebrecht and Hanighen, Merchants of Death, 104. 30 Englebrecht and Hanighen, Merchants of Death, 106. 31 Terrell, Companion, 77. 32 C. H. Douglas, Economic Democracy (London: Palmer, 1920), 74–75. 33 Thorstein Veblen, The Vested Interests and the State of the Industrial Arts (New York: Huebsch, 1919), 92. 34 Douglas, Economic Democracy, 93. 35 Veblen, Vested Interests, 100. 36 Veblen, Vested Interests, 100. 37 Veblen, Vested Interests, 103. 38 Veblen, Vested Interests, 93. 39 He could not be Douglas Hyde, as Achilles Fang seems to have thought. Hyde was not a member of the Irish delegation. Arthur Griffith was Minister of Foreign Affairs at the time, and chairman of the delegation. See Terrell, Companion, 78 n. 9. 40 “Steed got ONE artl / of mine into the Slopliment/ [13] then Richmond [14] came home from vacation and plugged THAT spiraglio,” Pound wrote to Olivia Rossetti Agresti on May 13, 1954. Demetres P. Tryphanopoulos and Leon Surette, eds., “I Cease Not to Yowl”: Ezra Pound’s Letters to Olivia Rossetti Agresti (Urbana: University of Illinois Press. 1998), 150. See Pound, “An American on America,” Times Literary Supplement, October 19, 1916. So Pound knew Steed by October 1916. Pound probably met Masaryk at Steed’s in 1916 or thereabouts (communication from Archie Henderson). See also A. David Moody, Ezra Pound: Poet. A Portrait of the Man and His Work, vol. 1, The Young Genius 1885–1920 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 374, 399. 41 Pound’s Fenian sympathies were strong. Besides his close relationship with Yeats, Pound knew Maude Gonne and was intimate with her daughter Iseult. Then there was the Irish delegation to Imagism: Desmond FitzGerald and Joseph Campbell both participants in the Easter Rising—FitzGerald fought at the Post Office—and members of the Republican government; indeed, FitzGerald represented Éire at the League of Nations and became Minister of Defence. Finally, John Quinn was an ardent Fenian who raised money for republican causes.

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42 Terrell’s note on this moment in Canto 19 is confusing. He follows Norman in saying that Pound met Griffith in Paris in 1924 (Terrell, Companion, 78 n. 10), but quotes Pound saying (in “The Central Problem,” The Townsman 4, no. 13 [1941], not cited by Terrell) that he had met Griffith in London at the “time of the armistice”—i.e. the winter of 1918. By “armistice” Pound meant “truce.” James J. Wilhelm argues that Pound met Griffith in London in the autumn of 1921, during the “Truce” leading to the AngloIrish Treaty of December 6, 1921 (see James J. Wilhelm, Ezra Pound in London and Paris, 1908–1925 (University Park: Penn State University Press, 1990), 302). As for the alleged meeting in Paris, Griffith, who was President of Ireland at the time, did not attend the first “International Irish Race Conference” there in January 1922, but Desmond FitzGerald, who did attend, invited Pound to the farewell dinner, on January 30, 1922 (see Documents in Irish Foreign Policy (DIFP), “Report on the Irish Race Conference in Paris,” by D. Coffey, M. Hayes, D. Hyde, and E. MacNeill, February 1922, No. 239 NAI DFA ES Box 11, File 77, available online). Pound mentions this dinner in a letter to his father of February 19, 1922. See Ezra Pound, Ezra Pound to His Parents: Letters 1895–1929, ed. Mary de Rachewiltz, A. David Moody, and Joanna Moody (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 494. 43 See Christopher Seton-Watson, “Masaryk and R. W. Seton Watson,” in T. G. Masaryk (1850–1937), vol. 3, Statesman and Cultural Force, ed. Harry Hanek (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989), 19. 44 Pound, “The Central Problem.” 45 Terrell, Companion, 78; Makin, Pound’s Cantos, 165. 46 Wickham Steed, Through Thirty Years (London: Heinemann, 1924), II, 44. 47 Makin, Pound’s Cantos, 165. 47 See Makin, Pound’s Cantos, 165, 171–72 n. 10. 48 Surely “in” is a typographical error for “on.” 49 Lincoln Steffens, The Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1931), 712. 50 Steffens, Autobiography, 712. 51 Steffens, Autobiography, 730. 52 Steffens, Autobiography, 587. 53 Steffens, Autobiography, 588–90. 54 See Steffens, Autobiography, 812–20, 790–802. 55 Steffens, Autobiography, 590. 56 Steffens, Autobiography, 590. 57 Steffens, Autobiography, 590. 58 Steffens, Autobiography, 591. 59 Terrell, Companion, 78 n. 32. 60 Douglas, Economic Democracy, 78.

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61 Makin, Pound’s Cantos, 308. 62 Makin, Pound’s Cantos, 308. 63 Makin, Pound’s Cantos, 309. Canto 20 The Cantos of Ezra Pound (New York: New Directions, 1996). Subsequent references are to this edition, citing Canto and page number. 2 Carroll F. Terrell, A Companion to the Cantos of Ezra Pound, single vol. rev. edn. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993), 80. 3 Ezra Pound, Ezra Pound to His Parents: Letters 1895–1929, ed. Mary de Rachewiltz, A. David Moody, and Joanna Moody (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 626. 4 Pound’s notes for Canto 20 reveal that this setting is based on his wanderings in southern France in search of traces and the former surroundings of troubadours. His draft for these lines had “between two trees of almond flowers / like the flowering trees before Aubeterre”: Ezra Pound, “Notebook pages for Canto XX,” Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Beinecke Digital Collections: http:// brbl-dl.library.yale.edu/vufind/Record/3546308, accessed September 1, 2017. A later mention of almond trees may also be a recollection from Aubeterre: the lines “The ranunculæ, and almond, / Boughs set in espalier” may be a derivation from the view there: “A tree with what after [sic] to be pink wisteria blossoms & a defensible wall hung with flowers,” Ezra Pound, A Walking Tour in Southern France: Ezra Pound Among the Troubadours, ed. Richard Sieburth (New York: New Directions, 1992), 11. 5 This was the first part published, initially in Robert McAlmon’s Contact Collection of Contemporary Writers in Paris in 1925, and later in Pound’s magazine Exile in 1927. Sieburth, “Introduction: To Set Here the Roads of France,” in Pound, A Walking Tour in Southern France, xx. 6 Kevin Oderman, Ezra Pound and the Erotic Medium (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1986), 78. 7 Oderman, Erotic Medium, 78. 8 Oderman, Erotic Medium, 78. 9 For details about Rennert and Pound’s studies in Romantic Languages, see William D. Paden, “Provençal and the Troubadours,” in Ezra Pound in Context, ed. Ira B. Nadel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 181–91. 10 Terrell, Companion, 81. 11 Ezra Pound, Literary Essays of Ezra Pound (New York: New Directions, 1968 [1918]), 139. 12 Ezra Pound: Poems and Translations, ed. Richard Sieburth (New York: Library of America, 2003), 299. 1

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13 Sieburth, “Introduction,” xx. 14 Sean Pryor, W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, and the Poetry of Paradise (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), 77–78. 15 Pryor, Poetry of Paradise, 78. 16 Peter Liebregts, Ezra Pound and Neoplatonism (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2004), 182. 17 Ezra Pound, Ezra Pound to His Parents, 625. 18 Terrell, Companion, 82. 19 Pound, Ezra Pound to His Parents, 626. 20 Ezra Pound, The Spirit of Romance (New York: New Directions, 1968), 77. 21 Pound, Spirit of Romance, 77. 22 Pound, Ezra Pound to His Parents, 625. 23 Akiko Miyake, Ezra Pound and The Mysteries of Love: A Plan for the Cantos (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), 109. 24 Pound, Ezra Pound to His Parents, 626. 25 The ending of Canto 21 repeats motifs from the jungle passage, adding another female attribute: that of Isis, the moon. “Moon on the palm-leaf, / confusion; / Confusion, source of renewals” (21/100). 26 Wet foliage has long been an image routinely associated with female sexuality by Pound. “Coitus” in Lustra has the most explicit reference: “The gilded phaloi of the crocuses / are thrusting at the spring air. / [. . .] The dew is upon the leaf. / The night about us is restless” (Ezra Pound: Poems and Translations, 288). Similarly, in his haiku renderings, the feminine image of moist leaves and petals are regularly juxtaposed by the masculinity of the grass-blade and the fountain. “Fan-Piece” tells about “frost on the grass-blade,” “Alba” depicts the beloved “As cool as the pale wet leaves / of lily-of-the-valley,” and “Ts’ai Chi’h” finds that “The petals fall in the fountain” (Ezra Pound: Poems and Translations, 286–87). 27 Terrell, Companion, 83. 28 Pound, Literary Essays, 139. 29 Wendy Flory, Ezra Pound and the Cantos: A Record of Struggle (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1980), 134. 30 Flory, Record of Struggle, 135. 31 Lord Alfred Tennyson, “The Lotos-Eaters,” in English Poetry in Three Volumes: From Tennyson to Whitman (New York: P. F. Collier & Son, 2001). Online: http://www.bartleby.com/42/638.html, accessed September 1, 2017. 32 Although the Canto names Apollo as the owner of the cattle, they belonged, in fact, to Helios, the sun-god, a titan (as opposed to Apollo, an Olympian god). 33 Walter Baumann, The Rose in the Steel Dust: An Examination of the Cantos of Ezra Pound (Berne: Francke Verlag, 1967), 69.

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34 Ezra Pound: Poems and Translations, 250. 35 Terrell, Companion, 48. 36 Terrell, Companion, 49. 37 As Peter Liebregts points out, a draft for Canto 20 shows clearly that Pound envisioned the last scene as a reconfiguration of Circe’s island (Liebregts, Neoplatonism, 184). However, he apparently did not wish to overstretch the Odysseian element of the Canto, and abandoned the draft for the sake of a generic depiction of carnal desire (Vanoka) and luxury. Canto 21 Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1971), 342–44. 2 The Cantos of Ezra Pound (New York: New Directions, 1996). Subsequent references are to this edition, citing Canto and page number. 3 James F. Knapp, “Discontinuous Form in Modern Poetry: Myth and Counter-Myth,” boundary 2 12(1) (1983): 160. 4 Ezra Pound, “Mr. Ezra Pound’s Cantos,” New English Weekly 3(4) (May 11, 1933), 96. 5 Guy Davenport, “Persephone’s Ezra,” in New Approaches to Ezra Pound: A Co-Ordinated Investigation of Pound’s Poetry and Ideas, ed. Eva Hesse (London: Faber & Faber, 1969), 155. 6 Cookson, A Guide to the Cantos of Ezra Pound, 35. 7 Carroll F. Terrell, A Companion to the Cantos of Ezra Pound, vol. 1 (Cantos 1–71) (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1980), 86. 8 This distinction is of course purely for the purposes of exegesis. Pound’s point, rather, would be that his grandfather is at once a familial and a national reference. 9 For the original letter, see Thomas Jefferson, The Life and Letters of Thomas Jefferson: Being His Autobiography and Select Correspondence, From Original Manuscripts, ed. Henry Augustine Washington (New York: Edwards, Pratt and Foster, 1858), 209. 10 Ezra Pound, The [Selected] Letters of Ezra Pound, 1907–1941, ed. D. D. Paige (New York: New Directions, 1971 [1950]), 210. 11 Pound makes this comparison through the use of the word “polumetis,” a Homeric epithet for Odysseus, meaning “many-minded,” referring to his intelligence (9/36). 12 Stephen Sicari, Pound’s Epic Ambition: Dante and the Modern World (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991), 217. 13 J. S. Childs, Modernist Form: Pound’s Style in the Early Cantos (London: Associated University Presses, 1986), 136. 1

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14 W. B. Yeats, Selected Poems, ed. John Kelly (London: J. M. Dent, 1997), 39. 15 Kenner, The Pound Era, 342. 16 Ezra Pound, Guide to Kulchur (London: Peter Owen, 1978), 300. 17 Lilian Feder, “Pound and Ovid,” in Ezra Pound Among the Poets, ed. George Bornstein (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 27. 18 A dated but enduringly good introduction to the early mid-twentiethcentury conception of the Eleusinian Mysteries is provided by George E. Mylonas, “Eleusis and the Eleusinian Mysteries,” Classical Journal 43(3) (1947); see especially 140–46. 19 Dudley Wright, Eleusinian Mysteries and Rites (Whitefish, MT: Kessinger, 2003), 29. 20 Leon Surette, A Light from Eleusis: A Study of Ezra Pound’s Cantos (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), vii. 21 Davenport, “Persephone’s Ezra,” 155. 22 Pound, Guide to Kulchur, 299. 23 See, for example, Cantos 2, 6, and 17. 24 Surette, A Light from Eleusis, 46. 25 Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Arthur Golding (London: Penguin, 2002), V.500–504, 165, emphasis mine. 26 Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading (New York: New Directions, 1987 [1934]), 58. 27 Jacob Korg, “The Cantos,” in Ritual and Experiment in Modern Poetry (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1995), 103. 28 See Ovid, Metamorphoses XI.85–171. Canto 25 1

For the full argument of this shift in Pound’s thinking, see David Barnes, “‘Count Volpe’s Neck’: Re-approaching Pound’s Venice in the Fascist Context,” Ezra Pound, Ends and Beginnings: Essays and Poems, ed. John Gery and William Pratt (New York: AMS Press, 2011), 17–30; see also Wendy Stallard Flory, Ezra Pound and The Cantos: A Record of Struggle (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1980), 124, 130–31; Tony Tanner, Venice Desired (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 269–348; and Catherine Paul, Fascist Directive: Ezra Pound and Italian Cultural Nationalism (Clemson, SC: Clemson University Press, 2016), 20–29. 2 Reed Way Dasenbrock, “Pound and the Visual Arts,” The Cambridge Companion to Ezra Pound, ed. Ira B. Nadel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 230. 3 T. S. Eliot, “Hamlet,” Selected Prose of T.S. Eliot, ed. Frank Kermode (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975), 48.

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The Cantos of Ezra Pound (New York: New Directions, 1996). Subsequent references are to this edition, citing Canto and page number. 5 Mary de Rachewiltz, email correspondence with the author, September 16, 2016. 6 John Julius Norwich, A Traveller’s Companion to Venice (New York: Interlink, 2002), 12–13. 7 Norwich, Traveller’s Companion, 16. 8 John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice, ed. and abridged J. G. Links (New York: Da Capo Press, 1960), 193. 9 Ruskin, The Stones of Venice, 210. 10 Peter Makin, Pound’s Cantos (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), 162–63. 11 A. David Moody, Ezra Pound: Poet. A Portrait of the Man and His Work, vol. 2, The Epic Years 1921–1939 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 86. Similarly, Philip Furia remarks, “Through this solemn, bureaucratic entry—in the register of foreign affairs, no less—we can see voyeuristic counselors gazing at the caged beasts.” See Philip Furia, Pound’s Cantos Declassified (University Park: Penn State University Press, 1984), 36. 12 For a different reading of the lions, see Massimo Bacigalupo, “‘Safe with My Lynxes’: Pound’s Figure in the Carpet,” in Ezra Pound’s Cantos: A Casebook, ed. Peter Makin (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 111–19. Bacigalupo makes a case for the prevalence of felines as consistently positive throughout The Cantos, ranging from Canto 2 to Canto 79. As late as Canto 97, “the small lions beside San Marco” are associated with the Chinese ideogram of “ling / the benevolence” (695). 13 This explanation of these two lines is found in Carroll F. Terrell, A Companion to the Cantos of Ezra Pound, vol. 1 (Cantos 1–71) (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1980), 101. Another distinct possibility with these lines is their suggestion that the doge, whom Terrell identifies as Michele Steno (Doge from 1400 to 1413), was doddering and feeble, probably in need of replacement himself. 14 Ezra Pound, Social Credit: An Impact, Money Pamphlets by £ Number 5 (London: Peter Russell, 1951), 5. 15 Ruskin, The Stones of Venice, 194, 196. 16 Makin, Pound’s Cantos, 162. In fact, Ruskin devotes considerable attention to the history, planning, design, and construction of the Palazzo, including the rising effect of the two rows of columns, and the intricacies of the Council Chamber, as well as to the design of these three levels. See Ruskin, The Stones of Venice, 195–99. 17 Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1972), 154–55, 422. 18 Ezra Pound, “Cavalcanti,” Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. T. S. Eliot (New York: New Directions, 1968 [1918]), 154–55. 4

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19 Tibullus, The Poems, trans. Philip Dunlop (New York: Penguin, 1972), 140–53. 20 Kenner, The Pound Era, 422. 21 Tibullus, The Poems, 143. 22 Makin, Pound’s Cantos, 163–64. 23 Ezra Pound, Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir (New York: New Directions, 1970), 84. Later in this tribute, originally published in September 1914 in the Forthnightly Review, Pound elaborates: “There comes a time when one is more deeply moved by that form of intelligence which can present ‘masses in relation’ than by that combination of patience and trickery which can make marble chains with free links and spin out bronze until it copies the feathers on a general’s hat” (Gaudier-Brzeska, 93). 24 Pound, Gaudier-Brzeska, 93. 25 Ron Bush, The Genesis of Ezra Pound’s Cantos (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976), 8–10. For an account of the fugue-like structure of Cantos 24–30, see Daniel Albright, “Early Cantos I–XLI,” The Cambridge Companion to Ezra Pound, ed. Ira B. Nadel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 81–85. 26 Wendy Flory, Ezra Pound and The Cantos: A Record of Struggle (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1980), 130, 138. 27 Kevin Oderman, “Extracts from Ezra Pound and the Erotic Medium,” in Ezra Pound’s Cantos: A Casebook, ed. Peter Makin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 137–39. 28 Oderman, “Extracts,” 142. 29 Moody, Ezra Pound: Poet, 2.87. 30 See T. S. Eliot, Collected Poems, 1909–1962 (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1970), 57, 69. For instance, the rhetoric recalls Eliot’s lines, “Nothing again nothing” in Part II and “Shall I at least set my lands in order?” in Part V. See also Canto 7: “Dry casques of departed locusts / speaking a shell of speech . . .” (260) and the opening of Canto 8 (28). 31 The phrase, “The vanity of Ferrara,” also indirectly echoes the words inscribed on the wall in the Mantua rooms of Niccolò’s granddaughter, Isabelle d’Este (1474–1539), at the end of Canto 3: “Nec Spe Nec Metu” (with neither hope nor fear) (12). 32 Terrell, Companion, 1.101–2. 33 The Epic of Gilgamesh: An English Version with an Introduction, trans. N. K. Sandars (Baltimore: Penguin, 1964), 104–13. 34 The image of the glass under water not only invokes Pound’s account of virtù in “Cavalcanti,” but also rhymes with the image of “the blue-gray glass of the wave” in Canto 2 (6). See Pound, “Cavalcanti,” Literary Essays, 154. 35 Peter Liebregts, Ezra Pound and Neoplatonism (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2004), 20, 24.

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36 Liebregts, Ezra Pound and Neoplatonism, 194–95. 37 Liebregts, Ezra Pound and Neoplatonism, 198–99. 38 Philip Furia pinpoints “Titian’s commercial pitch” as Pound signifying the start of decadence in Venetian art, a “falling off from the clarity of early renaissance art, which eventually led to the ‘raw meat’ of Rubens and the ‘brown meat’ of Rembrandt (80/511 [531]).” See Furia, Pound’s Cantos Declassified, 37. 39 Donald Davie, Ezra Pound: Poet as Sculptor (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964), 125. 40 This painting has also been identified as Battle of Cadore; the battle it depicted remains uncertain, as the painting, which Titian finally completed in 1538, was later destroyed in the fire that devastated the Palazzo Ducale in 1577. Only Titian’s sketch for the painting remains. While it may suggest the 940 “Battle of Spoleto,” where Italian soldiers under command of Count Sarlio were directed by Hugh of Arles (King of Italy, 926–47) to defeat Anscar of Ivrea and reclaim southern Italy, the painting’s setting renders the landscape of Titian’s home, Cadore. For the history of the painting in relation to Titian’s early career, see Norbert Huse, “Painting,” The Art of Renaissance Venice: Architecture, Sculpture, and Painting, 1460–1590, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 262–64. For the exhibit of Titian’s preliminary drawings of Battle of Spoleto at The Louvre, see http://www.louvre.fr/en/ oeuvre-notices/battle-spoleto, accessed September 1, 2017. 41 See Canto 45 (230): “Zuan Bellin’ not by usura.” Pound further mentions him in Canto 74 (425). 42 Huse, “Painting,” 221. 43 Peter Robinson, “Ezra Pound and Italian Art,” Pound’s Artists: Ezra Pound and the Visual Arts in London, Paris and Italy (London: The Tate Gallery), 134–35. 44 William Cookson, A Guide to the Cantos of Ezra Pound, rev. and expanded (New York: Persea Books, 2001), 41. 45 Michael Coyle, Ezra Pound, Popular Genres, and the Discourse of Culture (University Park: Penn State University Press, 1995), 100–101. 46 In 1922 and 1923, after the publication of both Eliot’s The Waste Land and James Joyce’s Ulysses, in large part through Pound’s instigation, Pound devoted considerable time and effort to raising funds that might permit Eliot to leave his job at Lloyds Bank in London and provide sufficient support for Joyce to maintain his family, so that both writers could dedicate themselves to their art. See Moody, Ezra Pound: Poet, 2.34–39 on the Bel Esprit project to support Eliot. A draft of Canto 25 was completed in 1926 (Moody, Ezra Pound: Poet, 2.68). For an extended discussion of the relationship between Pound’s practice of citing or quoting archival or other sources and his engagement in literary patronage, especially in

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relation to Malatesta, see Lawrence Rainey, Ezra Pound and the Monument of Culture: Text, History, and the Malatesta Cantos (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 57–75. 47 Makin, Pound’s Cantos, 71. 48 Flory, Ezra Pound and The Cantos, 124. 49 Dasenbrock, “Pound and the Visual Arts,” 231. 50 Another important, perhaps mitigating, gloss to the end of Canto 25 occurs in Canto 21, where Pound cites a letter by Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) to a French correspondent also seeking artists for his colony—in this case, musicians, not painters. Given his remote location in Virginia, Jefferson has more modest expectations for his community than Malatesta does, as Jefferson writes that, because “music is cultivated and/ Practised by every class of men,” he hopes to employ craftsmen who might also perform music “without enlarging / Their domestic expenses.” Still, like Malatesta, Jefferson offers his musicians “a certainty of employment for / Half a dozen years” (97). As Makin puts it, “Pound is often at pains to make us see real splendour cohabitating with a homely stink” (Pound’s Cantos, 163). Canto 26 Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era (London: Faber & Faber, 1972), 318–48. The Cantos of Ezra Pound (New York: New Directions, 1996). Subsequent references are to this edition, citing Canto and page number. 3 See A. David Moody, Ezra Pound: Poet: A Portrait of the Man and His Work, vol. 2, The Epic Years 1921–1939 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 78. 4 Kate Ferris, Everyday Life in Fascist Venice (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2012), 88. 5 Ezra Pound, “Europe—MCMXXXVI: Reflections Written on the Eve of a New Era” (1937), in Ezra Pound’s Poetry and Prose: Contributions to Periodicals, ed. Lea Baechler, A. Walton Litz, and James Longenbach, 11 vols. (New York: Garland, 1991), 7.193, my emphasis. See also Catherine E. Paul, “Italian Fascist Exhibitions and Ezra Pound’s Move to the Imperial,” Twentieth Century Literature 51, no. 1 (Spring 2005): 64–97. 6 Massimo Bacigalupo, “Liguria Contro Venezia: Due Modelli nella Poesia di Ezra Pound,” in Ezra Pound e Venezia, ed. Rosella Mamoli Zorzi (Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 1985), 181–202, 191. 7 See Lisa Jardine and Jerry Brotton, Global Interests: Renaissance Art between East and West (London: Reaktion, 2000), 58–59. 8 Robert Casillo, The Genealogy of Demons: Anti-Semitism, Fascism and the Myths of Ezra Pound (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988), 235. 1 2

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9 Casillo, Genealogy of Demons, 236. 10 Casillo, Genealogy of Demons, 236. 11 Casillo, Genealogy of Demons, 68–70. 12 Casillo, Geneaology of Demons, 236. 13 Tony Tanner, Venice Desired (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), 331. 14 Casillo, Geneaology of Demons, 235. 15 Casillo, Genealogy of Demons, 235. 16 Jardine and Brotton, Global Interests, 7–10. 17 Guy Davenport, Cities on Hills: A Study of I–XXX of Ezra Pound’s Cantos (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1983), 199, 197. 18 Davenport, Cities on Hills, 231. 19 Marla Stone, The Patron State: Culture and Politics in Fascist Italy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998). 20 T. S. Eliot, “Ulysses, Order and Myth,” in Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot, ed. Frank Kermode (London: Faber & Faber, 1975), 177. 21 Eliot, “Ulysses,” 178. 22 T. S. Eliot, The Letters of T. S. Eliot, vol. 2, ed. Valerie Eliot and Hugh Haughton (London: Faber & Faber, 2009), 7. 23 W. B. Yeats, A Vision and Related Writings, ed. A. Norman Jeffares (London: Arena, 1990), 77. 24 Yeats, A Vision, 125–26. 25 Pound, The [Selected] Letters of Ezra Pound, 1907–1941, ed. D. D. Paige (New York: Harcourt, 1950), 141. 26 Ferris, Everyday Life, 85. 27 See David Barnes, The Venice Myth: Culture, Literature, Politics 1800 to the Present (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2014), 91–136. Canto 29 1 2 3 4 5 6

Ezra Pound, “Cantos XXVIII, XXIX, XXX,” in Ezra Pound’s Poetry and Prose: Contributions to Periodicals, ed. Lea Baechler, A. Walter Litz, and James Longenbach, 11 vols. (New York: Garland, 1991), 5.203. A. David Moody, Ezra Pound: Poet. A Portrait of the Man and His Work, vol. 2, The Epic Years 1921–1939 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 4. Ezra Pound: Poems and Translations, ed. Richard Sieburth (New York: Library of America, 2003), 169. The Cantos of Ezra Pound (New York: New Directions, 1996). Subsequent references are to this edition, citing Canto and page number. See Peter Makin, Provence and Pound (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1978), 197–205. Christine Brooke-Rose, A ZBC of Ezra Pound (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1971), 131.

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Hugh Kenner, The Poetry of Ezra Pound (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1985), 222. 8 Daniel Albright, Quantum Poetics: Yeats, Pound, Eliot, and the Science of Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 181. 9 Daniel Albright, “Early Cantos I–XLI,” in The Cambridge Companion to Ezra Pound, ed. Ira B. Nadel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 85. 10 Barbara Will, “Pound’s Feminine Other: A Reading of Canto 29,” Paideuma 19, no. 3 (1990): 140. 11 Forrest Read, ’76: One World and the Cantos of Ezra Pound (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981), 192. 12 Demetres Tryphonopoulos writes that “Of those who contributed to Pound’s occult education, G. R. S. Mead contributed the most.” The Celestial Tradition: A Study of Ezra Pound’s “The Cantos” (Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1992), 82. 13 Ezra Pound, Guide to Kulchur (New York: New Directions, 1970), 222. 14 Pound, Guide to Kulchur, 225–26. 15 Albright, “Early Cantos,” 85. Nadel also notes the satirical quality of this passage in The Cambridge Introduction to Ezra Pound (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 62, 70. Tentative support for the notion that “juventus” contrasts with the economic Pound is to be found in Ezra Pound, “On Giving it Up,” in Ezra Pound’s Poetry and Prose: Contributions to Periodicals, ed. Lea Baechler, A. Walter Litz, and James Longenbach, 11 vols. (New York: Garland, 1991), 10.280: “careless juventus”. 16 Letter dated September 7, [1927] from Rapallo to his father: “Am blocking in Cantos 28–30 but they wont [sic] affect the present volume.” Ezra Pound, Ezra Pound to His Parents: Letters 1895–1929, ed. Mary de Rachewiltz, A. David Moody, and Joanna Moody (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 636. 17 Leon Surette, Pound in Purgatory: From Economic Radicalism to AntiSemitism (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 38. 18 Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1971), 408. 19 Helen M. Dennis, “Pound, Women and Gender,” in The Cambridge Companion to Ezra Pound, ed. Ira B. Nadel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 273. 20 Wendy Flory, Ezra Pound and The Cantos: A Record of Struggle (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1980), 130. 21 Surette, Pound in Purgatory, 39. 22 Carroll F. Terrell, A Companion to the Cantos of Ezra Pound, single vol. rev. edn. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993, 117. 23 Read, ’76: One World, 193. 7

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24 “Femelle, chaos. / Mâle, point fixe de stupidité. / Femme, boulotte roulante sur quatre totems . . . / Homme, particule imbécile magnetisée par l’inconnu.” Quoted in Richard Sieburth, “Dada Pound,” South Atlantic Quarterly 83, no. 1 (1984): 61. 25 Moody, Ezra Pound: Poet, 2.9. 26 Remy de Gourmont, The Natural Philosophy of Love, trans. Ezra Pound (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1922), 211. 27 Gourmont, Natural Philosophy, 217. 28 Pound, Guide to Kulchur, 224. 29 Ezra Pound, “Canto XXIX.” Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, MS 43, Box 72, Folder 3230, 13. 30 Pierre Robert, “Claude Farrère,” The New Age 1529, 30, no. 9, December 29, 1921: 101. 31 E. F. Mylius, “State Banking and Currency v. Competition,” The Freewoman: A Weekly Humanist Review 2, no. 42, September 5, 1912: 319. 32 W. H. Harvey, Coin’s Financial School (Chicago: Coin Publishing Company, 1894), 124. 33 Jonathan Freedman, Klezmer America: Jewishness, Ethnicity, Modernity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 48. 34 Quoted in Alec Marsh, John Kasper and Ezra Pound: Saving the Republic (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 79. 35 Archie Henderson, I Cease Not to Yowl Reannotated: New Notes on the Pound/Agresti Correspondence (Houston: CreateSpace, 2009), 293. 36 Sieburth, “Dada Pound,” 44. 37 Flory, Ezra Pound and The Cantos, 115. 38 Sieburth, “Dada Pound,” 62–63. 39 Gourmont, Natural Philosophy, 207. 40 For a detailed explication of “nondum orto jubare,” see A. David Moody, “‘Phebi claro’ by Starlight,” Modern Language Review 76(4) (1981). Canto 30 The Cantos of Ezra Pound (New York: New Directions, 1996). Subsequent references are to this edition, citing Canto and page number. 2 Nancy Dean, “Chaucer’s Complaint: A Genre Descended from the Heroides,” Comparative Literature 19, no. 1 (1967): 1. 3 Geoffrey Chaucer, The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry Dean Benson (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 633. 4 Riverside Chaucer, 640. 5 Lawrence Rainey, Institutions of Modernism: Literary Elites and Public Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), 109 ff. 1

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Chris Chapman, “‘Do you want any more of this archaic information on folks, up to 1745?’: Rethinking Ezra Pound’s Italian Renaissance,” Textual Practice 25, no. 3 (2011): 543–62. 7 A. David Moody, Ezra Pound: Poet. A Portrait of the Man and His Work, vol. 2, The Epic Years 1921–1939 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 89. 8 John Steven Childs, Modernist Form: Pound’s Style in the Early Cantos (Selinsgrove, PA: Susquehenna University Press, 1986), 99–101. 9 Chapman, “Rethinking Ezra Pound’s Italian Renaissance,” 557. 10 Philip Furia, Pound’s Cantos Declassified (University Park: Penn State University Press, 1984), 68. 11 Eva Hesse, ed., New Approaches to Ezra Pound: A Co-Ordinated Investigation of Pound’s Poetry and Ideas (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1969), 20. 12 Chapman, “Rethinking Ezra Pound’s Italian Renaissance,” 553. 13 Jennifer Ouellette, The Calculus Diaries (New York: Penguin, 2010). See Ouellette’s brief historical account of Thomas Robert Malthius’s 1798 The Principal of Population regarding “population control” (referring to Pound’s pseudonymous writings about Ireland) and Pierre Verhulst’s better formulation of “carrying capacity” (142  ff ). 14 Pedro and Inês’s story is relatively common in Portuguese and Spanish literature. Pound may have discovered it in any number of sources, including Henry Morse Stephens, Portugal (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1898), 92–99 and the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica, q.v. “Castro, Inez de” by Hugh Chisholm. We are indebted to the information in “Inês de Castro: The Queen Who Was Crowned After Death” on the “The Royal Articles” website, contributed by Elsa M.: http://www. theroyalarticles.com/articles/71/1/Ines-de-Castro-The-Queen-WhoWas-Crowned-After-Death/Page1.html, accessed September 1, 2017. While we have not been able to determine the identity of Elsa M., nor her credentials, the site seems an additional centralized collection of credible facts, and served much as did the Wikipedia entry, pointing us to other sources, and including information and facts we were then able to track down in primary or more scholarly sources. 15 George Dekker, The Cantos of Ezra Pound: A Critical Study [Sailing After Knowledge: The Cantos of Ezra Pound] (New York: Barnes & Noble: 1963), 69. 16 “Royal Articles.” The original Portuguese Crónica de el-rei D. Pedro, first published in 1816 in J. F. Correia da Serra, ed., Collecção de livros ineditos de historia portugueza, vol. 4 (Lisbon: Academia das Ciências de Lisboa), can be found on Project Gutenberg, http://www.gutenberg.org/ ebooks/16633, accessed September 1, 2017. 17 Dekker, The Cantos of Ezra Pound: A Critical Study, 70.

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18 Moody, Ezra Pound: Poet, 2.90. 19 For more information on Lucrezia Borgia, see, among others, Maria Bellonci, The Life and Times of Lucrezia Borgia (London: Phoenix, 2003 [1953]); Sarah Bradford, Lucrezia Borgia: Life, Love and Death in Renaissance Italy (New York: Viking, 2005). 20 Lucrezia died giving birth to her eighth child, Alfonso. 21 Moody, Ezra Pound: Poet, 2.90. 22 Guy Davenport, “Persephone’s Ezra,” in Hesse, New Approaches to Ezra Pound, 145–73 (155). 23 Davenport, “Persephone’s Ezra,” 165. 24 Lawrence Rainey, Ezra Pound and the Monument of Culture: Text, History, and the Malatesta Cantos (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 66 ff. 25 Chapman, “Rethinking Ezra Pound’s Italian Renaissance,” 553–55. 26 Chapman, “Rethinking Ezra Pound’s Italian Renaissance,” 554–61. Canto 32 1 Ezra Pound, “Canto XXXII,” in “Three Cantos: XXX [i.e. XXXI]– XXXIII,” Pagany 2, no. 3 (1931): 43–53 (47–49). Cf. The Cantos of Ezra Pound (New York: New Directions, 1996), 157. Subsequent references are to this edition, citing Canto and page number. 2 Carroll F. Terrell, A Companion to the Cantos of Ezra Pound, single vol. rev edn. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993), 125. 3 Ezra Pound, “Credit Power and Democracy, by Maj. C. H. Douglas and A. R. Orange [sic],” Contact 4 (1921): 1. 4 Tim Redman, “An Epic Is a Hypertext Containing Poetry: Eleven New Cantos (31–41) by Ezra Pound,” in A Poem Containing History: Textual Studies in The Cantos, ed. Lawrence Rainey (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 117–49 (117). 5 Redman, “An Epic Is a Hypertext Containing Poetry,” 117–18. 6 See especially Redman, “An Epic Is a Hypertext.” See also David Ten Eyck, who argues that in these Cantos “Pound’s documentary method had undergone significant changes,” with the “bulk of the poetic burden” falling less on “[n]arrative statements” than on “the documentary transcription of source-based material.” Ezra Pound’s Adams Cantos (London: Bloomsbury, 2012), 51. 7 Stephen J. Adams, “The Cantos: Eleven New Cantos XXXI–XLI,” in The Ezra Pound Encyclopedia, ed. Demetres P. Tryphonopoulos and Stephen J. Adams (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2005), 30–33 (30). 8 Adams, “The Cantos,” 30–31. 9 Roxana Preda, “Social Credit in America: A View from Pound’s Economic Correspondence, 1933–1940,” Paideuma 34, no. 2–3 (2005): 201–27 (201).

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10 Nick Selby, “Revolutionary Figures in Canto XXXI,” in Ezra Pound and America, ed. Jacqueline Kaye (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992), 114–31 (115–16). 11 See Redman, who argues that “to some extent this pattern will become typical of Pound during the period. He will arrive at some conclusion about public affairs and then find what he takes to be confirmation of his views in his historical readings.” “An Epic Is a Hypertext,” 119. 12 See Ten Eyck, Ezra Pound’s Adams Cantos, 51–54. A. David Moody describes Pound’s intertextual strategy as a “musical” process whereby “things not syntactically connected can link up thematically” in these Cantos. A. David Moody, Ezra Pound: Poet. A Portrait of the Man and His Work, vol. 2, The Epic Years 1921–1939 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 162. 13 See Craig Monk, “The Price of Publishing Modernism: Ezra Pound and the Exile in America,” Canadian Review of American Studies 31, no. 1 (2001): 429–46 (437–38). 14 Ezra Pound, “The Exile,” The Exile 1 (1927): 88–92 (89–90). 15 Ezra Pound, “Modern Thought,” The Exile 2 (1927): 117. 16 Matthew Josephson, “Open Letter to Mr. Ezra Pound and the Other ‘Exiles’,” in “New York: 1928, A Group Manifestation,” transition 13 (1928): 83–102 (98–102, 99). 17 Sherry Mangan, “A Note: on the Somewhat Premature Apotheosis of Thomas Stearns Eliot,” Pagany 1, no. 2 (1930): 23–36 (30). 18 Ezra Pound, “The First Year of ‘Pagany’ and the Possibility of Criteria,” Pagany 2, no. 1 (January/March 1931): 104–11 (111). Also see Ezra Pound to William Carlos Williams, March 22, 1931, in A Return to Pagany: The History, Correspondence, and Selections from a Little Magazine 1929–1932, ed. Stephen Halpert and Richard Johns (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), 259–62. 19 As Michael Faherty points out, however, Pound also shifted his contributing editorship in October 1930 to the New Review, which may also have been a reason for the split with Hound & Horn. “Hound & Horn (1927– 34)” in The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, vol. 2, North America 1894–1960, ed. Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 420–36 (431–32). 20 Richard Johns, “Announcing Pagany,” in Halpert and Johns, A Return to Pagany, 40. 21 Ezra Pound, “Date Line (1934),” in Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. T. S. Eliot (New York: New Directions, 1968 [1918]), 86. 22 Redman, “An Epic Is a Hypertext Containing Poetry,” 119. 23 Alec Marsh has argued that “Pound saw the modern artist as an editor of tendencies and texts” (239). In this reading, Pound configures political leaders in similar terms, so that “Mussolini, as Pound saw him, was ‘an

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EDITORIAL eye and ear—precisely—an editor, who will see through the bunkum.’” Money and Modernity: Pound, Williams, and the Spirit of Jefferson (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1998), 239. 24 For synopses of the exchanges between Ronaldson and Jefferson, see Charles Creesy, “Monticello: The History of a Typeface,” Printing History 25, no. 1 (2006): 3–19. Terrell’s account of the events characterizes their historical significance, but it was France, rather than Spain, which would eventually supply the antimony—although Spain was mentioned as a possibility in Ronaldson’s letter to Jefferson (Terrell, Companion, 127). 25 Terrell, Companion, 125. 26 Terrell, Companion, 122. 27 Ezra Pound, “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley: Life and Contacts,” in Ezra Pound: Poems and Translations, ed. Richard Sieburth (New York: Library of America, 2003), 549–63 (552). 28 Pound, “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley: Life and Contacts,” 552. 29 The source of the lines is Jefferson’s 1823 letter to Supreme Court Judge William J. Johnson, in Thomas Jefferson, The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, vols. 12 and 15, ed. Andrew Lipscomb and Albert Bergh (Washington DC: Thomas Jefferson Memorial Society, 1905), 12.377–79; see also Terrell, Companion, 127–28. 30 Jefferson, Writings of Thomas Jefferson, 15.371. In this letter, Jefferson uses a reference to a specific crisis (a conflict between Russia and Turkey) as an opportunity to meditate on the animalistic nature of human conflict (Terrell, Companion, 127–28). Pound’s reference to Sordello as a lion has certain parallels. 31 Terrell, Companion, 128. Canto 35 The Cantos of Ezra Pound (New York: New Directions, 1996). Subsequent references are to this edition, citing Canto and page number. 2 Jörg Brechtefeld, Mitteleuropa and German Politics: 1848 to the Present (London: Macmillan, 1996), 1–2. 3 Brechtefeld, Mitteleuropa and German Politics, 1. 4 Brechtefeld, Mitteleuropa and German Politics, 1. 5 Brechtefeld, Mitteleuropa and German Politics, 2. 6 Carroll F. Terrell, A Companion to the Cantos of Ezra Pound, single vol. rev. edn. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1980), 139. 7 James J. Wilhelm, Ezra Pound: The Tragic Years, 1925–1972 (University Park: Penn State University Press, 1994), 99. 8 Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1971), 424. 1

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A. David Moody, Ezra Pound: Poet. A Portrait of the Man and His Work, vol. 2, The Epic Years 1921–1939 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 169. 10 Roland John, A Beginner’s Guide to the Cantos of Ezra Pound (Salzburg: University of Salzburg Press, 1995), 64. 11 Stephen J. Adams, “Eleven New Cantos XXXI–XL,” in The Ezra Pound Encyclopedia, ed. Demetres P. Tryphonopoulos and Stephen J. Adams (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2005), 32. 12 Noel Stock, Reading the Cantos: A Study of Meaning in Ezra Pound (London: Routledge, 2010), 16. 13 Stock, Reading the Cantos, 15. 14 Michael Thurston, Making Something Happen: American Political Poetry between the World Wars (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 160. 15 T. S. Eliot, Complete Poems and Plays (London: Faber & Faber, 1969), 79. See David Roessel, “‘Mr. Eugenides, the Smyrna Merchant,’ and Post-War Politics in The Waste Land,” Journal of Modern Literature 16, no. 1 (1989): 171–76 and David Ayers, “The New Europe and the New World: Eliot, Masaryk, and the Geopolitics of National Culture,” Modernist Cultures 11, no. 1 (2016): 8–25 for more information on the political situation behind Eliot’s cultural analysis in The Waste Land. 16 Scott W. Klein writes that Tarr “presents Kreisler’s dilemma as the inheritance of his Romantic Prussia, which stands in more generally for the entropic and destructive behaviour of the militarism that threatened European culture in the first decades of the twentieth century.” Scott W. Klein, “Introduction,” in Wyndham Lewis, Tarr (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), ix–xxix (xiv). 17 Philip Blair Rice, “The Education of Ezra Pound,” in Ezra Pound: The Contemporary Reviews, ed. Betsy Erkkila (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 225–26 (226). Reprinted from Nation, 139, November 21, 1934: 599–600. 18 Wendy Stallard Flory, “Pound and Antisemitism,” in The Cambridge Companion to Ezra Pound, ed. Ira B. Nadel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 284–300 (292). 19 Douglas Stone, Alfred Perlès: Renegade and Writer (London: Village Press, 1974), 5. 20 Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer (New York: Grove Press, 1961), 49. 21 Stone, Alfred Perlès: Renegade and Writer, 19. 22 Stone, Alfred Perlès: Renegade and Writer, 5. 23 See Ronald Gotesman, “Introduction,” in Critical Essays on Henry Miller, ed. Ronald Gotesman (New York: G. K. Hall, 1992), 5–6. 24 Ezra Pound, “Review of Tropic of Cancer,” in Critical Essays on Henry Miller, 87–89 (88). 9

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25 Pound, “Review of Tropic of Cancer,” 88. 26 Pound, “Review of Tropic of Cancer,” 88. 27 Stone, Alfred Perlès: Renegade and Writer, 15. 28 Moody, Ezra Pound: Poet, 2.169. 29 Pound, “Review of Tropic of Cancer,” 88. 30 Jeanne Behrend and Michael Meckna, “Serly, Tibor,” in Grove Music Online: http://oxfordindex.oup.com/view/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630. article.25467, accessed November 5, 2016. After Pound published Zukofsky’s “Poem Beginning ‘The’” in Exile in 1928 the two worked together extensively on the February 1931 “Objectivist” issue of Poetry and An “Objectivists” Anthology (1932), with Pound helping promulgate Zukofsky’s poetry and criticism throughout the period. When Zukofsky visited Europe for the first time in 1933—the first time he met Pound—he also met with Serly, who was visiting family in Hungary. See Mark Scroggins, The Poem of a Life: A Biography of Louis Zukofsky (Berkeley: Shoemaker Hoard, 2007), 132. 31 Louis Zukofsky, letter to Ezra Pound, April 8, 1935, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Centre, Austin, Texas, MS Box 20, Folder 11 (unpag.). The quoted material can be found in “A”-6. See Louis Zukofsky, “A” (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1978), 30. 32 Louis Zukofsky and Ezra Pound, “‘A [1]’: Opening Section Only” (1928), Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, TS 6523 (unpag.). 33 Active Anthology, ed. Ezra Pound (London: Faber & Faber, 1933) contains Zukofsky’s “Poem Beginning ‘The’” and early versions of “A”-5, “A”-6 and “A”-7. 34 Zukofsky, “A,” 30. 35 Zukofsky, “A,” 43. 36 For a thorough reading of the complexity of Zukofsky’s argument in “A”-8, see Jeffrey Twitchell-Waas, “‘epic of the class struggle?’: ‘A’-8,” The Z-Site: A Companion to the Works of Louis Zukofsky: http://www.z-site. net/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/A-8-10OCT2013.pdf, accessed April 4, 2017. 37 Donald Davie, Ezra Pound: Poet as Sculptor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968), 139. 38 Terrell, Companion, 140. This “perfect schnorrer” has been, probably incorrectly, identified as Heinz Henghes, upon whose work the New Directions colophon is based. Henghes visited Pound in Rapallo in either the summer of 1933 (during which period Basil Bunting, James Laughlin, and Zukofsky were also there; see Ian S. MacNiven, “Literchoor Is My Beat”: A Life of James Laughlin, Publisher of New Directions [New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014], 84) or 1934. Moody is persuaded that he visited Rapallo in 1934, which fits the story of the “peautiful chewisch

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poy” less well, as, in this case, Eleven New Cantos would already have been in the process of publication. Moody, Ezra Pound: Poet, 2.190. He had, according to his son Ian Henghes, “a Jewish mother, a Lutheran father and a Lutheran upbringing” (Moody, Ezra Pound: Poet, 2.380)—a background that does not suggest the strong accent reproduced in Canto 35. 39 Thurston, Making Something Happen, 160. 40 This response was actually proffered as he was introduced to the representative of the soldiers’ union. The French general also made anti-Semitic remarks to Hatvany. See Peter Pastor, “The Vix Mission in Hungary, 1918–1919: A Re-Examination,” Slavic Review 29, no. 3 (September 1970): 481–98. 41 See “Hatvany, Lajos,” “The Yivo Encyclopedia of The Jews in Eastern Europe”: http://www.yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/Hatvany_Lajos, accessed April 4, 2017. 42 For an account of this period that goes some way towards explaining and confronting Pound’s reading of events, see Pastor, “The Vix Mission in Hungary.” Pastor blames the disappointment of the Hungarians at the French at the hands of Brevet Lieutenant-Colonel Vix, the local leader of the French mission, rather than General Franchet d’Esperay, the more senior commander of the Allied Army of the Orient, who is blamed by Pound and his source. 43 Ben D. Kimpel and T. C. Duncan Eaves, “Two Notes on Ezra Pound’s ‘Cantos,’” Modern Philology 78, no. 3 (1981): 286. 44 Kimpel and Eaves, “Two Notes on Ezra Pound’s ‘Cantos,’” 286–87. 45 Kimpel and Eaves, “Two Notes on Ezra Pound’s ‘Cantos,’” 287. 46 Moody, Ezra Pound: Poet, 2.169. 47 Terrell, Companion, 141. 48 Daniel Albright, “Early Cantos I–XLI,” in The Cambridge Companion to Ezra Pound, ed. Ira B. Nadel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 59–91 (86). 49 Moody, Ezra Pound: Poet, 2.169. Canto 36 1

An earlier version of this reading of Canto 36 appeared in Mark Byron, Ezra Pound’s Eriugena (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 31–45. 2 Pound’s attempts to produce facing-page translations of Cavalcanti’s poetry include: Sonnets and Ballate of Guido Cavalcanti (Boston: Small, Maynard, 1912); Complete Works of Guido Cavalcanti (London: Aquila, 1929)—aborted when the Aquila Press declared bankruptcy—and Guido Cavalcanti Rime (Genoa: Marsano, 1932). The version of “Donna mi prega” in Canto 36 is distinctive in that it was not intended for facingpage comparison with an edited version of Cavalcanti’s text. For further

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details of this textual history, see David Anderson, Pound’s Cavalcanti: An Edition of the Translations, Notes, and Essays (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983). 3 Ezra Pound, “Cavalcanti–1910/1931,” in Make It New (London: Faber & Faber, 1934), 345–407. 4 Pound, “Cavalcanti,” 360. 5 Pound, “Cavalcanti,” 348. 6 Pound, “Cavalcanti,” 348. 7 Pound, “Cavalcanti,” 351. 8 Ronald Bush, “La filosofica famiglia: Cavalcanti, Avicenna, and the ‘Form’ of Ezra Pound’s Pisan Cantos,” Textual Practice 24, no. 4 (2010): 669–705 (670–71). 9 Jonathan Usher, “Part I: Origins and Duecento: Poetry,” in The Cambridge History of Italian Literature, ed. Peter Brand and Lino Pertile (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 5–27 (24). 10 Herbert A. Davidson, Alfarabi, Avicenna, and Averroes, on Intellect (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 4. 11 The Cantos of Ezra Pound (New York: New Directions, 1996). Subsequent references are to this edition, citing Canto and page number. 12 Pound, “Cavalcanti,” 360. 13 L. Baur, Die philosophischen Werke des Robert Grosseteste (Munster: Aschendorff, 1912), 51. English translation in Robert Grosseteste, On Light, trans. Clare C. Riedl (Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 1942), 10. 14 Pound, “Cavalcanti,” 345, 360. 15 Pound, “Cavalcanti,” 357. 16 Quoted in Peter Liebregts, Ezra Pound and Neoplatonism (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2004), 205. 17 Liebregts, Ezra Pound and Neoplatonism, 211. 18 Ezra Pound, The [Selected] Letters of Ezra Pound, 1907–1941, ed. D. D. Paige (London: Faber & Faber, 1950), 210. 19 Bush, “La filosofica famiglia,” 682. 20 Margaret Fisher, Ezra Pound’s Radio Operas: The BBC Experiments, 1931–1933 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 151. 21 Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, Paradiso, ed. and trans., with an introduction by Robert M. Durling (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 190–91. 22 Francesco Fiorentino, Manuale di storia della filosofia, 3rd edn., vol. 1 (Turin: Paravia, 1921), 217. “Ecclesiastical History,” in Ezra Pound, Selected Prose, 1909–1965, ed. William Cookson (London: Faber & Faber, 1973), 61; Ezra Pound, Guide to Kulchur (New York: New Directions, 1970), 74, 164, 333. 23 Pound, “Cavalcanti,” 381.

Notes

367

24 Sean Pryor, W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, and the Poetry of Paradise (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), 124–34. Canto 37 Ezra Pound, Jefferson and/or Mussolini: L’idea statale. Fascism as I have seen it (London: Nott, 1935), 95. Further works by Ezra Pound quoted in this chapter are: The Cantos of Ezra Pound (New York: New Directions, 1995); The [Selected] Letters of Ezra Pound, 1907–1941, ed. D. D. Paige (New York: New Directions, 1971 [1950]); Ezra Pound’s Poetry and Prose: Contributions to Periodicals, ed. Lea Baechler, A. Walter Litz, and James Longenbach, 11 vols. (New York: Garland, 1991). For references to Van Buren’s writings, see The Autobiography of Martin Van Buren (Washington, DC: Annual Report of the American Historical Association, 1918). 2 Miranda Hickman, The Geometry of Modernism: Vorticist Idiom in Lewis, Pound, H.D. and Yeats (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005), 92. See also her article “Vorticism,” in Ezra Pound in Context, ed. Ira Nadel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 285–97. 3 Catherine Paul, “Italian Fascist Exhibitions and Ezra Pound’s Move to the Imperial,” Twentieth Century Literature 51(1) (2005): 69. 4 Pound quotes the question once in Jefferson and/or Mussolini as a proof of Mussolini’s intuition and grasp of the essence of an individual. He then refashions it three times in the late Cantos (87/569, 89/601, 93/626). 5 Ezra Pound, “Death of Vorticism,” in Ezra Pound’s Poetry and Prose: Contributions to Periodicals, 3.279. 6 Ezra Pound, Pound/Lewis: The Letters of Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis, ed. Tim Materer (New York: New Directions, 1985), 138–39. See also Wyndham Lewis (ed.), Blast; Review of the Great English Vortex, 2 vols. (London: John Lane, 1914): 1.153; “The Modernist Journals Project”: http://modjourn.org/render.php?id=1158591480633184&view =mjp_object, accessed August 16, 2016. 7 Hickman, “Vorticism,” 294. 8 Hickman, Geometry of Modernism, 92. 9 Pound, “Vortex,” Blast 1.153. 10 Lewis, “Manifesto,” Blast 1.34–42. 11 Lewis, “Manifesto,” Blast 1.30. 12 Lewis, “Our Vortex,” Blast 1.148. 13 Lewis, “Manifesto,” Blast 1.33. 14 Lewis, “Manifesto,” Blast 1.41. 15 Wendy Flory, Ezra Pound and “The Cantos”: A Record of Struggle (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1980), 139–40; Peter Makin, Pound’s Cantos (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), 190–95; Alec 1

368

Readings in the Cantos

Marsh, “John Quincy Adams and/or Martin van Buren: Cantos 34 and 37,” Paideuma 34, no. 1 (2005): 59–89. 16 Tim Redman, “An Epic is a Hypertext Containing Poetry: Eleven New Cantos (31–41) by Ezra Pound,” in A Poem Containing History: Textual Studies in The Cantos, ed. Lawrence Rainey (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 126–30. 17 Hugh Brogan, The Penguin History of the USA (London: Penguin, 2001), 282; Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 373–95; Roxana Preda, Ezra Pound’s (Post)modern Poetics and Politics: Logocentrism, Language and Truth (New York: Peter Lang, 2001), 282–84. 18 Pound, Jefferson and/or Mussolini, 93–94. 19 Pound, Jefferson and/or Mussolini, 37. 20 Pound reproduces comments on Van Buren’s character further down in the canto: “brought in the vice of luxuria sed aureis furculis, / which forks were / bought back in the time of President Monroe / by Mr Lee our consul in Bordeaux. / The man is a dough-face, a profligate,” / won’t say he agrees with his party” (37/183). Hugh Brogan remarked that Van Buren was distrusted in the South as a gentleman of New York (History of the USA, 277). See also Makin: “the van Buren of most histories is a subtle contriver, a consummate demagogue and a verbal evader; Pound rewrites him” (Pound’s Cantos, 193). The suspicion of elitism and love of luxury was as damaging to his reputation as the decorum of his rhetoric. 21 Marsh, “Cantos 34 and 37,” 78 and Makin, Pound’s Cantos, 193. 22 Pound, “Vorticism,” in Ezra Pound’s Poetry and Prose: Contributions to Periodicals, 1.284. 23 Lewis, “Manifesto,” Blast 1.38. 24 Pound, “Salutation the Third,” Blast 1.45. 25 Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, “Vortex,” Blast 1.130.

Index

Adams, John 97, 263–64, 268, 271–72, 279, 301–2 Adams, John Quincy 279, 301­–2, 304 Adams, Stephen xiv, 265, 274–75, 282 Aeschylus 46 Agamemnon 46, 79–80, 82, 87, 90, 108 Albright, Daniel 9, 15, 74, 146, 239–40, 283 Aldington, Richard 77–78, 166 Alexander, Michael xiv Alfarabi 287 Ali, Hyder 271 Alma-Tadema, Lawrence 63 Amalric 293 Aquinas, Thomas 286, 293–94 Summa Theologica 293 Araujo, Anderson 5, 109 Aristotle 106, 287, 293–94 De Anima 287, 289 Atti, Isotta degli 99, 197 Auden, W. H. 136 Averroes 287–88, 293–94 Avicenna 287–88, 293–94

Bach, J. S. 220, 277–78 ­St Matthew Passion 278–79 Bacigalupo, Massimo xiv, 91, 94, 229 Baldy Bacon 127–30, 269–70, 337n39 Balfour, Arthur 158 Bank of England 169–70, 176 Bank of the United States 298, 303–7 Barnes, David 6 Barry, Iris 58 Bartók, Béla 278 Baseggio, Pietro 215 Baumann, Walter xiv, 5, 58–60, 74, 196 Beach, Sylvia 123 Beasley, Rebecca 150 Beaumarchais, Pierre-Augustin Caron de 271 Bel Esprit 123, 125–26, 128, 130, 336n22, 354n46 Bellini, Giovanni 223 Benjamin, Walter 17, 127 Benson, Larry Dean 249 Beowulf 33–34 Biddle, Nicholas 303 Binny, Archibald 269, 271 Binyon, Laurence 21, 137

369

370

Readings in the Cantos

Bird, William 122, 146, 149–50, 155 Blackmur, R. P. 150 Black Sun Press 5 Blake, William 195 “The Circle of the Lustful: Francesca da Rimini” 195 Blast 10–12, 299–300, 302, 307–8 Blavatsky, Helena 240 Borgia, Alessandro 258–60 Borgia, Cesare 80, 83, 258–60 Borgia family 79–83, 258–60 Borgia, Giovanni 79–83 Borgia, Lucrezia 250–51, 257­–60 Borgia, Rodrigo 258 Born, Bertran de 87 Bornstein, George xiv, 36 Botticelli, Sandro 21, 23 The Birth of Venus 21, 31, 157 Brechtefeld, Jörg 273–74 Broch, Hermann The Sleepwalkers 275 Brooker, Peter xiv Brooke-Rose, Christine xiv, 239 Brotton, Jerry 232 Browning, Robert 60 “My Star” 24 Sordello 4, 12–13, 15–19, 22, 25–29, 43–45, 50, 88, 104, 295 Bunting, Basil 6 Burchard, John Diary 82–83 Burckhardt, Jacob 30–31, 110 Bush, Ronald xiv–xv, 5, 11–12, 14, 18–23, 31, 34, 74, 104, 220, 287 Buss, Kate 149 Byron, Mark 6 Camões, Luís Vaz de The Lusiads 4, 26 Can Grande 18 Cantar de Mio Cid 4, 25, 161 The Cantos Project 147, 311n1 Carmagnola, Francesco 161, 229 Carne-Ross, Donald 2–3

Carpaccio, Vittore 229, 232 Carpenter, Humphrey xiv, 30 Carranza, Venustiano 168, 180–81 Carson, Edward 147 Casillo, Robert 230–32 The Genealogy of Demons 230 Castano, Nicholas 128 Castro, Inés de 26, 161, 250, 254–59 Catullus 18–19, 25, 59, 66, 68, 77–78, 99, 188 Collis o Heliconii 59 Cavalcanti, Guido 20, 28, 71, 100, 218, 285–96 “Donna mi prega” 285–96, 301 Sonnet 35 71, 188 Chapman, Chris 250–51, 253, 258, 260 Chaucer, Geoffrey 15, 27, 249–51 “Compleynt of Mars” 251 “Compleynt Unto Pity” 249–50 Chavannes, Puvis de 19 Chesterton, G. K. 147 Childs, John Steven 206, 251 Churchill, Winston 147, 151, 345n17 Clark, Emery xiv Clay, Henry 303, 308–9 Cocteau, Jean 63 Confucius 4, 5, 12, 20, 30, 84, 97, 121, 135­–44, 146 The Analects 139–44 The Great Digest 139, 141 The Unwobbling Pivot 139, 141 Conrad, Joseph 132 Contact 264 Cookson, William xiv, 72, 94, 203, 211, 224 Cournos, John 281 Covici, Pascal 266 Coyle, Michael 224 Cravens, Margaret 16, 23, 89 Cretensis, Georgius Dartona Hymni Deorum 33, 35, 41, 49 The Criterion 96, 149, 267 Crosby, Caresse 5

Index Cunard, Nancy 34, 155, 260 Cunliffe Currency Committee 169–70 Daily Mail 147, 233 Daniel, Arnaut 19, 24, 66–67, 75, 90, 189–90, 194 “Doutz brais e critz” 90 “Lancan son passat li giure” 19, 24, 66–67, 75 D’Annunzio, Gabriele 110 Dante 13–16, 18–19, 28, 31, 33, 76–77, 81–82, 87–88, 92, 102, 107, 118–19, 145, 153, 157, 165, 169, 193, 195, 209, 221, 239, 261, 272, 293, 295 The Divine Comedy 10, 12, 13–14, 28, 33, 50, 157 “Inferno” 5, 22, 81–82, 94, 102, 107, 145, 157, 169, 194, 221, 244 “Paradiso” 13, 16, 19, 22, 76–77, 87, 92, 118–19, 154, 157, 169, 293 “Purgatorio” 15, 149, 154, 157–58, 169, 272 Rime 82 Darwin, Charles 242 Dasenbrock, Reed Way 224 Davenport, Guy 202, 209, 232, 259–60 Davie, Donald xiv, 85, 92, 223, 279 Davis, Earle Rosco 129 Dean, Nancy 249 Dekker, George xiv, 255, 257–58 Dennis, Helen 242 D’Epiro, Peter 109, 112, 115–16 Derdeyn, LeeAnn 6 Deslys, Gaby 26 Dewey, John 166 Reconstruction in Philosophy 166 Dexter Jordan, Viola 220 The Dial 46, 73, 85, 149, 166, 233, 285 Dilling, Elizabeth 245 The Octopus 245 Divus, Andreas 30–31, 35–37, 41, 205, 211 Dolmetsch, Arnold 24 Doolittle, Hilda (“H. D.”) 242

371

Doughty, Charles Montagu 30, 37 Travels in Arabia Deserta 37 Douglas, C. H. 4, 166, 174, 176, 180, 183, 241–42, 246, 264–65, 299 Credit Power and Democracy 264 Economic Democracy 166, 174 Social Credit 166 Douglas, Gavin 39 The Aeneid 39 Dowthwaite, James 6 Eaves, T. C. Duncan 281–82 Ecbatan 69, 74–76, 78 Edwards, John Hamilton xiv The Egoist 38, 58 Eleanor of Aquitaine, 46, 87, 90, 205 Eleusinian Mysteries 12, 14, 19, 31, 40–42, 127, 156–57, 202, 208–12, 294–95 Eliot, T. S. 4, 17, 23, 34, 57, 60, 63, 71–73, 74, 95–96, 114–15, 121­–26, 130, 132–33, 136, 166, 207, 214, 233–235, 246, 264, 267–68, 275, 299 “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” 57 “Tradition and the Individual Talent” 126 “Ulysses, Order and Myth” 232 The Waste Land 4, 34, 60, 63, 71–72, 95–96, 121, 123–24, 166, 221, 275, 299 Emig, Rainer 128 English Review 88 Epstein, Jacob 13 The Sun God 13 Eriugena, Johannes Scottus 285, 293­–94 Periphyseon 293 Este, Alfonso d’ 250, 258–60 Este, Borso d’ 161, 192, 198–99 Este family 205, 216 Este, Niccolo d’ 107, 191–93, 198–99, 221, 232 Este, Obizzo d’ 94 Euripides 58 Trojan Women 58

372

Readings in the Cantos

Faber & Faber xiii, 87, 93 Feder, Lilian 209 Fenollosa, Ernest 5, 10, 37, 69, 137–38, 298–99 Chinese Written Character as Medium for Poetry 137, 298 Ferris, Kate 228, 235 Ficino, Marsilio 28, 29, 203–4, 208, 318n98 Fiorentino, Francesco 294 Manuale di storia della filosofia 294 Fitzgerald, Desmond 87, 93 Fitzgerald, Mary 93 Flaubert, Gustave 85–87, 89 Un coeur simple 85–87 Flory, Wendy xiv, 195, 220, 224, 242, 246, 276, 302 Fontenelle, Bernard 38 Nouveaux dialogues des mortes 38 Ford, Ford Madox 86, 88, 122, 132, 269 Forest, Ione de 88 Fortnightly Review 10, 298 Fowler, Albert “Taffy” 171, 173–74 Francesca, Piero della 98–99, 224 Frazer, James 14, 19 Freedman, Jonathan 245 Freewoman 245 Froula, Christine xiv, 57, 61, 66 Furia, Philip 251 Future 33 Galla Placidia 115, 206–7 Gama, Vasco da 89 Gaudier-Brzeska, Henri 12–15, 20, 22–23, 27, 214, 219, 280, 299–300, 309 Boy with a Coney 13­–14 Gautier, Judith 137 Gery, John 6 Gibson, Mary Ellis 10, 17, 23 Giles, H. A. 137–38 Gilgamesh 221 Globe 228

Golding, Arthur 47, 90, 211 Metamorphoses 47, 90, 211 Gold Standard 169–70, 345n17 Gonzaga family 21, 23, 161 Gonzaga, Francesco 232 Gould, Joe 5 Gourmont, Remy de 11, 90–91, 152, 243–46 Physique de l’amour: Essai sur l’instinct sexuel 243–46 The Great Depression 264–65, 268, 270–72 Griffith, Arthur 168, 177, 347n43 Griffiths, D. W. 179 Grosseteste, Robert 288, 292, 294 De Luce 288, 292 Guillaume de Poictiers 100–1 Harvey, W. H. 245 Coin’s Financial School 245 Hatvany, Lajos 280–82 Das Verwundete Land 281 Helfferich, Karl 147 Henderson, Alice Corbin 9, 12, 15 Henderson, Archie 245 Herodotus 73, 75–76 Hesiod 96–97 Hesse, Eva xiv, 91, 252­–53, 258 Hewlett, Maurice 25 Heydon, John 27–28, 37, 318n98 Holy Guide 27, 37 Heymann, David xiv Hickman, Miranda 36, 298, 300 Hitler, Adolf 273, 300 Hofer, Matthew 147 Homer 4, 30, 33–37, 41, 46­–49, 58, 60, 87, 106, 126, 154, 162–63, 188, 196, 208, 233, 251 The Iliad 47­–48, 58, 80, 193 The Odyssey 30–31, 33–40, 45–46, 48, 78, 101, 163, 210, 214, 221 Horace 61, 163 “The Delights of Spring” 61 Hound & Horn 237, 267

Index Howard, Alexander 5 Hutton, Edward 99 Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta, Lord of Rimini 99 Ideogrammic technique 193, 209–10, 214, 298–99, 303 Imagism[e] 10–15, 17, 21, 22, 29–31, 59, 62, 67–68, 152, 213, 216, 218, 300 Jackson, Andrew 298, 303, 307, 309 Jaffe, Aaron 5 James, Henry 11, 88, 94 “The Jolly Corner” 88 Jardine, Lisa 232 Jefferson, Thomas 97, 203–6, 264–65, 268–69, 271–72, 301–2, 304, 306 John, Roland 274 Joios of Tolosa 24–25 Jordan, Raimon 25 Josephson, Matthew 266–67 Joyce, James 20, 34, 74, 121, 131–32, 150, 152, 233, 299 Ulysses 34, 121, 126, 150, 152, 233, 299 Jung, Carl 40 Kearns, George xiv Keats, John 191 Kelmscott Press 149 Kenner, Hugh xiv, 4, 39, 41, 57, 128, 201, 207, 218–20, 227, 239, 241, 274 Keynes, John Maynard 166, 170 The Economic Consequences of the Peace 166 The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money 170 Kibble, Matthew 148 Kimpel, Ben D. 281–83 Kitson, Arthur 166, 345n17 The Fraudulent Standard 166 Knapp, James F. 201–2 Korg, Jacob 211

373

Kraus, Karl 275 The Last Days of Mankind 275 Kublai Khan 169–70 Lackay Brown, John 146 Landor, Walter Savage 73, 197 Laughlin, James 6 Lawrence, D. H. 313n20 Layamon 27 Leese, Arnold 245 Léger, Fernand 166 Legge, James 138 Leighton, Frederic 63 Lenin, Vladimir 166, 173 Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism 166 Levy, Emil 189–90 Lewis, Wyndham 11, 130, 132, 150, 275, 299–302, 307–9 Hitler 300 Tarr 275, 307 Timon of Athens 307 Li Po 137, 196–97 Liebregts, Peter 5, 20, 27, 40, 67, 74, 127, 191, 221–22 Lippman, Walter 168 Little Review 88, 150, 299 Liveright, Horace 281 Lloyd George, David 147, 169 London Cantos Reading Group xv Longenbach, James 10–12, 14, 22, 26, 29, 31–32, 37–38, 108 Lorenzi, Giambattista 215 Monumenti 215 MacDonagh, Thomas 151 Madison, James 303 Magnus, Albertus 289 Mahler, Gustave 277 Makin, Peter xiv, 178–81, 184, 216, 218, 220, 224, 302, 305 Malatesta, Gianciotto 81 Malatesta Novello 113, 158 Malatesta, Sallustio 197

374

Readings in the Cantos

Malatesta, Sigismondo Pandolfo 5, 26, 83, 95­–119, 121–122, 158, 197, 205, 217, 224–25, 230, 307 Malm, Mike 166–67 Mangan, Sherry 267 Mantegna, Andrea 21, 23 Manutius, Aldus 35 Batrachomyomachia 35 Il Mare 298 Marsh, Alec 6, 302, 305 Marx, Karl 175, 302 Capital 175 Masaryk, Tomáš 166, 168, 177–79, 184 The New Europe 166, 177 President Masaryk Tells His Story 178 “The Problem of Small Nations in the European Crisis” 177 Matthew, A. H. 82–83 Maxim, Hiram 172 McGann, Jerome 36 Mead, G. R. S. 20, 239–41 Mead, Henry 5 Medici, Alessandro de 80, 93–94, 102–3 Medici, Cesar de 83 Medici, Cosimo de 203, 206, 208 Medici family 79, 98, 202–6, 216 Medici, Giovanni de 97, 100, 224 Medici, Lorenzino de 80–84 Medici, Lorenzo de 29, 206 The Supreme Good 29 Migne, Jacques-Paul 294 Patrologia Latina 294 Mihálka, Réka 6 Miller, Henry 276–77 Quiet Days in Clichy 276 Tropic of Cancer 276­–77 Milton, John Paradise Regained 112 Miyake, Akiko 193, 211 Monroe, Harriet 15, 67, 152 Monte dei Paschi 251, 282 Montfort, Simone di 100, 293

Moody, A. David xv, 22, 31, 35, 73, 163, 216, 220, 251, 258–59, 274, 277, 282–83 Morgan, J. P. 181­–83 Morris, William 37 Morse, J. 264 La Mostra di rivoluzione fascista 299 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus 229, 233–34 Musil, Robert 275, 279 The Man Without Qualities 275, 279 Mussolini, Benito 6, 97, 122, 136, 182, 205, 228, 233, 235, 264­–66, 268, 272, 297, 299­–301, 303–4, 307 Nadel, Ira B. xv, 74 Neoplatonism 14, 20–21, 27–28, 40, 48–53, 65–67, 74, 76, 95–96, 106–7, 153, 191, 194, 198, 213, 221–22, 225, 238–41, 244, 285–96 The New Age 4, 11, 68, 74, 166, 169–70, 173, 241, 244–45 New Directions xiii, 85 The New English Weekly 202 Nicholls, Peter 129 Nin, Anaïs 276 Noh theatre 10, 12, 18, 20, 37, 67, 320n2 Nolte, Ernst 166 Lord Northcliffe, Alfred Harmsworth 147­–48 Oderman, Kevin 188–89, 220 Odlin, Rene 280 Odysseus 30, 33–42, 48, 54, 78, 100–1, 127, 130–31, 133, 190–91, 196, 205, 209, 221, 260 Orage, A.R. 4, 166, 241, 265, 299 Outlook 86 Ovid 4, 47, 49, 52, 60–61, 66–67, 69–70, 87, 90, 99, 153, 156, 162, 187–88, 208, 211, 251 Heroides 249 Metamorphoses 47, 49, 52, 60–61, 66, 67, 90, 208, 210

Index Pagany: A Native Quarterly 263­–72 Pandoni, Porcellio de 99 De amore Iovis in Isotta 99 Parker, Richard xvi, 6 Parma, Basinio di 99 Liber Isottaeus 99 Pasternak, Boris 180 Dr. Zhivago 180 Pasti, Matteo de 229–30, 234 Pater, Walter 11, 29 Paul, Catherine 5, 31, 298 Pauthier, M. G. 139–41, 144 Pearlman, Daniel xiv, 74 Pearse, Patrick 151 Pedro I of Portugal 26, 250, 254–59 Perlès, Alfred 276–77 Perloff, Marjorie xiv, 110 Pestell, Alex 6 Picasso, Pablo 21, 45 Pindar 58–59 “Olympian Ode II” 58–59 Pisanello 105 Plato 50 Timaeus 50 Plethon, Giorgios Gemistos 106–7, 234, 240, 244 Plotinus 51–52, 153, 222 Po-Chü-I 24 Poetry 3, 9, 15, 149 Polo, Marco 169–70 The Travels of Marco Polo 169 Pope, Alexander 112 The Dunciad 112 Popular Mechanics 125 Porphyry 27–28, 76, 163 De Occasionibus Pound, Dorothy 16, 23, 36, 73, 155, 246 Pound, Ezra Cantos, groups of Cantos and volumes of Cantos Adams Cantos 213, 265 Canto 1 9, 31, 33–42, 54, 154, 156–57, 214 Canto 2 9, 40, 41, 43–55, 90, 214

375

Canto 3 9, 25, 155–57, 161, 213–14, 218, 227 Canto 4 31–32, 57–72, 73, 76, 122, 149, 159, 214 Canto 5 73–84, 87, 149 Canto 6 46, 73, 149 Canto 7 46, 60, 73, 81, 85–94, 149, 205, 221 Canto 8 95–108, 109, 121, 124, 149, 214, 216, 221, 224 Canto 9 110, 121, 149, 205, 214 Canto 10 121, 149, 214 Canto 11 108, 109–19, 121, 149, 161, 201, 214 Canto 12 121–33, 149, 214, 270 Canto 13 121, 135–44, 146, 149, 214 Canto 14 145–54, 157–58, 213, 251 Canto 15 145–54, 157–58, 213–14 Canto 16 149, 157–59, 162, 166, 213 Canto 17 42, 149, 155–164, 165, 167, 201, 207, 213, 218–19, 227 Canto 18 149, 165–74, 179, 184–85 Canto 19 149, 165–69, 174–85 Canto 20 157, 187–99 Canto 21 53, 201–12 Canto 22 170, 185, 230 Canto 23 41–42, 221 Canto 24 41–42, 213–14, 216, 221 Canto 25 41–42, 48, 213–25, 227–28, 233­–34 Canto 26 105, 162, 213, 225, 227–35 Canto 28 237, 267 Canto 29 122, 127, 237–47, 267 Canto 30 237, 249–61, 267–68 Canto 31 213, 263­–64, 266, 268, 270, 302 Canto 32 213, 263–72, 302 Canto 33 213, 263–64, 266, 268, 270–71, 302, 305 Canto 34 213, 302 Canto 35 273–83 Canto 36 283, 285–96, 301 Canto 37 297–309 Canto 38 241

376

Readings in the Cantos

Canto 39 42 Canto 41 266, 272, 294 Canto 42 213 Canto 43 213 Canto 44 213 Canto 45 250–51, 256 Canto 46 251 Canto 47 42, 127, 251 Canto 50 275–76 Canto 51 250, 256, 294 Canto 52 135, 213 Canto 53 135, 213, 294 Canto 54 135, 213 Canto 55 135, 213 Canto 56 135, 213 Canto 57 135, 213 Canto 58 135, 213 Canto 59 122, 135, 213 Canto 60 135, 213 Canto 61 135, 213 Canto 62 135, 213 Canto 63 213 Canto 64 213 Canto 65 213 Canto 66 213 Canto 67 213 Canto 68 213 Canto 69 213 Canto 70 213 Canto 71 213 Canto 74 48, 126–27, 293 Canto 76 48 Canto 78 123, 246 Canto 81 253 Canto 83 293 Canto 85 213 Canto 86 213 Canto 87 213 Canto 88 213, 298, 306 Canto 89 213, 298, 306 Canto 90 48, 214 Canto 91 27, 214 Canto 92 214 Canto 93 214

Canto 94 214 Canto 95 214 Canto 116 102 Cantos LII–LXXI 7 Chinese Cantos 135, 213 A Draft of the Cantos 17–27 5, 35, 155, 158, 162, 227 A Draft of XVI Cantos 4, 5, 6, 34, 35, 71, 122, 132, 136, 149, 155, 157–58, 162 A Draft of XXX Cantos 5, 6, 34, 46, 122, 148, 155, 157, 213, 220, 225, 297, 299 Drafts and Fragments of Cantos CX– CXVII 3, 17, 35, 92 “The Eighth Canto” (1921) 46 Eleven New Cantos 3, 6, 264­–65, 274, 276, 278, 285, 294–95, 297, 300­–2, 305, 309 “Four Cantos” 73 The Fifth Decad of the Cantos 3, 166 “From Canto CXV” 92 The Hell Cantos 5, 22, 122, 145–54, 159, 213 The Italian Cantos 3, 7 The Malatesta Cantos 4, 75, 95–119, 159, 161, 167–68, 201, 213 The Pisan Cantos 3, 7, 17, 35, 126, 265, 285, 294 Rock-Drill de los Cantares 3, 213–14, 285 Selected Cantos 17 Siena Cantos 213 “Three Cantos” 3, 9–32, 149, 155 Thrones: 96–109 de los cantares 285 Ur-Canto 1 9, 15–21, 22, 23, 24, 28, 30, 43, 51, 157 Ur-Canto 2 9, 21–26, 30, 31 Ur-Canto 3 27–32, 33, 35–37, 39 The Ur­-Cantos 3, 9–32, 57–58, 68, 73, 295 The Venetian Cantos 213–25, 227–35 Musical compositions Le Testament de Villon 4

Index Other poems and books of poetry “After Ch’u Yuan” 127 Cathay 5, 12, 58, 137–38, 196 “Fan-Piece, For Her Imperial Lord” 137 “The Flame” 238 “The Garden” 63 Gaudier-Brzeska 27, 126, 299 Guide to Kulchur 87–88, 106, 167, 208, 240–41, 244 “Homage to Sextus Propertius” 4, 31, 77 Hugh Selwyn Mauberley 4, 10, 17, 89, 145, 264, 271 “I Gather the Limbs of Osiris” 11, 40, 68 “In a Station of the Metro” 22 “Ione, Dead the Long Year” 88 “Kongo Roux” 243 “Liu Ch’e” 88, 137 Lustra 9, 63 “Near Perigord” 10 New Selected Poems and Translations 121 Personae 13 “Piere Vidal Old” 64 Poems 1918–1921 73 “Provincia Deserta” 10, 38, 190 Quia Pauper Amavi 9 “The Return” 13 “The River Song” 196–97 “Salutation the Third” 308 “The Seafarer” 30, 38, 154 Selected Poems 121, 267 “Shop Girl” 63 “Villanelle: The Psychological Hour” 38 Prose The ABC of Economics 298 ABC of Reading 90, 210, 298 Active Anthology 278 “Cavalcanti” 286 “Early Translators of Homer” 47 “Europe—MCMXXXVI” 228

377

The Exile 5, 265–66, 272 Jefferson and/or Mussolini 6, 268, 297­–98, 302–4 “Kublai Khan and His Currency” 169 Make it New 286 “Pastiche:—The Regional” 74, 81 “Psychology and the Troubadours” 13 “The Serious Artist” 67–68 Social Credit: An Impact 6 The Spirit of Romance 25, 101, 238, 286 “Translators of Greek: Early Translators of Homer” 35, 41 “Troubadours: Their Sorts and Conditions” 66, 78 “Vorticism” 10, 12–13, 22, 298 Pound, Homer 15, 38, 57, 70–71, 85, 167­–69, 220 Pound, Thaddeus Coleman 204 Preda, Roxana 6, 106 Princip, Gavrilo 178 Propertius 77, 188 Pryor, Sean 6, 127, 191 Psellus, Michael 27–28 De Daemonibus 27–28 Quarterly Review 100 The Quest Society 20 Quinn, John 85, 121, 130–33, 234, 299, 346n42 Rabaté, Jean-Michel 124 Rachewiltz, Mary de xv, 45 Raimbaut de Vaqueiras 101 Rainey, Lawrence 97, 109–10, 123, 250, 260 Institutions of Modernism 250 Rapallo 6, 155, 162, 227, 280 Ravenna 115, 206–7 Read, Forrest 34, 239–240, 243 Redman, Tim 6, 128, 264, 268 Rennert, Hugo 189–90, 195 Ricciardi, Caterina 5 Rice, Philip Blair 276

378

Readings in the Cantos

Rimini 95, 99, 102, 105–7, 115, 122, 224 Rodker, John 5, 155, 227 Romano, Cunizza da 239, 244, 295 Ronaldson, James R. 269–71 Roscoe, William 73–74, 83 The Life and Pontificate of Leo the Tenth 73, 83 Rothschilds 245 Rouse, W. H. D. 40 Ruskin, John 10, 162, 215–17, 219 Stones of Venice 215 Ruthven, K. K. xiv Saint-Denys, Marquis d’Hervey de 137 Sampson, Anthony 172 The Arms Bazaar 172 Santos, Jose Maria dos 121, 127, 130, 133 Sappho 77, 99 Scappettone, Jennifer 162–63 Schelling, Felix 5, 101, 147 Scratton, Bride 115, 123, 246–47 Selby, Nick 21 Serly, Tibor 278 Sforza, Francesco 98, 100, 104–5 Sicari, Stephen 205 Sieburth, Richard xiv–xv, 90, 245–46 Sirmione 16–20, 22, 162, 238, 313n20 Social Credit 4, 32, 166, 174–77, 241, 264–65, 298­–99 Song of Roland 192 Song Yu 69 “Rhapsody on the Wind” 69 Sophocles 105 Sordello da Goito 15, 44, 272, 286, 295 Spoo, Robert 87, 89, 105 Steed, Wickham 167­–68, 177–79 Through Thirty Years 1892–1922: A Personal Narrative 168 Stefano of Verona 71 Madonna in hortulo 71 Steffens, Lincoln 167–68, 179–82 Autobiography 168, 180 Stock, Noel xiv, 275, 282

Stokowski, Leopold 278 Stone, Douglas 276 Stone, Marla 233 Strater, Henry 122, 133, 149–50 Strauss, Richard 277 Surette, Leon xiv, 31, 40, 42, 209, 211, 241–42, 265, 302 Symonds, John Addington 110 Tanner, Tony 231 Tarbell, Ida 168 Taylor, Richard 318n4 Tempio Malatestiano 95–96, 98–101, 106–7, 114, 122, 224 Tennyson, Alfred 138, 196, 237–38 “The Lotos-Eaters” 196 Terrell, Carroll F. xiv, 2, 41, 58, 68–69, 86, 90, 92, 94, 124, 153, 178, 183, 197, 204, 221, 243, 269, 274, 278, 280, 283 Thacker, Andrew 5 This Quarter 149, 155, 165 Three Mountains Press, 4, 149, 155, 266 Thurston, Michael 275, 280, 282 Tibullus 214, 219 Titian 214, 222–25 Assumption 223 Battle of Spoleto 223 Torrey, E. Fuller xiv transatlantic review 122, 149, 266, 269, 272 Tryphonopoulos, Demetres P. xiv, 38, 40–41 Tytell, John xiv Upward, Allen 68 The Divine Mystery 68 The New Word 68 Valla, Lorenzo 29, 30 Valli, Luigi 288 Il linguaggio segreto di Dante e dei “Fideli d’Amore” 288 Van Buren, Martin 297–98, 301–9 Autobiography 297–98, 306

Index Vance, Fred 26 Vanderpyl, Fritz-René 89 Varchi, Benedetto 74, 79–84, 93, 103 Storia Fiorentina 103 Vasse, William J. xiv Veblen, Thorstein 166, 175–76, 183 The Vested Interests and the State of the Industrial Arts 166, 175 Vega, Lope de 192 Las Almenas de Toro 192 Venice 80–81, 131, 154–55, 160–63, 201, 203, 206–7, 213–25, 227–35, 282–83 Verona 18, 71–72, 114­–15, 118–19, 121–133, 207, 246–47 Vickers 172–73 Villari, Pasquale 29 Virgil 30, 33, 39, 41, 47, 50, 58, 76, 92, 99, 113, 153, 157, 162 The Aeneid 30, 33, 39, 41, 58, 76, 92, 157 Vlaminck, Maurice de 89 Vorticism 10–15, 21, 27–28, 32, 36, 68, 123, 219, 298­–309 Walsh, Edward 165 Watts, Harold H. xiv Weber, Max 166 Wissenschaft als Beruf 166 Webster, Daniel 303, 306, 308–9 White, Eric 6 Whitman, Walt 59 “Drum-taps” 59 Wilhelm, James J. xiv, 94, 274 Will, Barbara 239

379

William of Malmesbury 101 Williams, Edgar 21 Williams, William Carlos 5, 21, 152, 223, 264, 268, 270 A Voyage to Pagany 268 White Mule 270 Wilson, Woodrow 147 Witemeyer, Hugh xiv World War I 3–4, 11, 86, 88, 111, 143, 145, 147­–48, 158, 163, 165–66, 169, 171–73, 234, 241, 274, 299 World War II 136, 171, 273–74 Wright, Dudley 209 Yeats, W. B. 5, 14, 27–28, 37–38, 40, 68, 132, 159, 206, 233–35, 239, 346n42 The Dreaming of the Bones 37 “Leda and the Swan” 234 Oxford Book of Modern Verse 159 Per Amica Silentia Lunae 37 “The Second Coming” 206 A Vision 38, 234 Yriarte, Charles 99, 107 Un condottiere au XVe siècle 99, 107 Zaharoff, Basil 170–73, 179, 346n23 Zukofsky, Louis 5, 6, 278–79 “A”–1 278 “A”–6 278 “A”–8 279 Zweig, Stefan 275 The World of Yesterday 275