Pound for Pound

After communism collapsed in Albania in the 1990s, followed by an unprecedented explosion of translation and publication of contemporary writing in a hitherto isolated European country, my friend Rudolf Marku, the poet, chose verse by Pound, Eliot, and W.H. Auden to introduce to a public hungry for knowledge of the wider world. When I read Marku’s translations I already possessed a selection of Pound rendered into Serbian, issued under the Tito regime–a book I found for sale on a Sarajevo street, scavenged from a house wrecked in the late Balkan war. It may seem absurd to have learned these languages by recourse to the most difficult of all American poets–spelled “Paund” in both Albanian and Serbian–but it was surprisingly helpful, and a source of pride in me as an American, demonstrating how far his standing is recognized.

Pound’s knotty character was defined early: A teenaged scholar at the University of Pennsylvania, he was judged “more or less obnoxiously different” by his fellow students. So writes A. David Moody, a British academic, in Ezra Pound: Poet, which far exceeds the previous contributions of Hugh Kenner, C. David Heymann, Noel Stock, and others. Moody writes that if Pound’s collegiate peers “could not take him seriously they were probably quite right not to, since his life among them was for the most part artificial. His real life was elsewhere.”

That last comment echoes a dictum of Pound’s younger French contemporary, the surrealist André Breton: “Living and ceasing to live are imaginary solutions. Existence is elsewhere.” In some ways Pound and Breton could not have been more different. Breton was a Trotskyist and pronounced Judeophile, Pound an admirer of Mussolini and infamous Jew-baiter. Yet in their understanding of the modernist impulse, they were alike. Pound’s “Salutation the Second,” one of a series of poems published during World War I, concludes with these lines:

This verse, reminiscent of the Russian futurism of Vladimir Mayakovsky, could stand as a credo for the adventurous intellect embodied in Dada and in Breton’s 1928 “novel,” Nadja, where there is no development of character, and no events of substance are described. (Breton had also pledged never to earn a living by ordinary means, and proclaimed his belief in his immortality.)

Pound further epitomized modernism in his pursuit of an ineffable poetic essence. Moody describes how, in his precocity, he

In this sense, the young Pound might have considered ridiculous the presumption of translating his work, many decades later, into the Balkan tongues. But more important, as Moody indicates, “The university which this wholly unusual young man wanted was indeed not there for him.”

This first volume of Ezra Pound: Poet traces, through the life of the young Pound, the transformation of Western literary sensibility, in its Anglo-Saxon incarnation, from the mannerism still in place at the end of the 19th century to the radical, dissonant aesthetic that emerged from the global conflict of 1914-18. More than any other writer in English, Pound served as a register for this change, and his work, although challenging, was foresighted.

The “nightmare, stammering confusion” of Pound’s later verse, as described by William Butler Yeats, represented a harbinger of the cultural babel of globalization. Pound brought together scraps and snatches of tradition and immediate communication in a mode very much like the Internet–polyphonically, to use one of Pound’s favorite terms. He was the first literary exemplar of today’s “remix”–parallel with, but because of the freedom of his words, bolder than his friends in such successive experimental movements as Imagism, Vorticism, futurism, poetic cubism, even Dada.

Still, his most permanent, satisfying works illustrate the continuing tension between classicism and modernism. There his voice, even as a translator, remains clearest. As noted by Moody, Pound’s incomparable rendition of the Anglo-Saxon poem “The Seafarer” revealed a translator “inventing a diction which kept as close as possible to the Anglo-Saxon, with a minimum of words from other sources.” At the other end of Pound’s universe, it is hard to imagine a better evocation of the confusion and anonymity of contemporary life than his 19-syllable haiku, “In a Station of the Metro,” perhaps the simplest and most appropriate of any 20th-century poem: The apparition of these faces in the crowd; Petals on a wet, black bough. An Eastern inspiration provides spiritual resolution for Pound’s introspection and sense of isolation.

Pound’s talent for anticipation naturally comprised positive and negative elements. His anti-Jewish prejudice proved to be a herald of the persistence of this atavism in modern life. But Pound began as a critic of all people of religion, not the Jews alone. In 1920, as argued by Moody, he showed little evidence of an exclusive anti-Semitic bias. Pound then wrote in an idiom remarkably like that of our contemporary enemies of faith, condemning Judaism, Christianity, and Islam alike: “All religions are evil. .  .  . We write in the fifth century of the Struggle for Deliverance from these religions.”

Like other agitators for irreligion, he appeared incapable of understanding his own contradictions. Pound had distinguished himself as a scholar and translator of the Mediterranean troubadours, whose prosody represented a unique product of Persian and Arabic influences, conveyed through medieval Andalusia, on the mystic Christian culture of Provence and Catalonia. There would have been no troubadours without the monotheistic passion for God, and without the troubadours, there would have been no Pound worth recalling.

This brilliant first volume records in detail the maturation of the poet, a period encompassing his Romance translations, his eccentric but monumental Chinese, Japanese, and other Asian studies, and concludes with the achievement of the long poem-cycle, “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley.” According to Moody, “Mauberley” was “metafictional” in its varied perspectives on the text and its creator. “Out of key with his time,” as self-described in its opening stanza, Pound drew far ahead of his peers aesthetically, rather than stagnating in a backward-looking snobbery, as he is often caricatured. A “metapoetics” that is still fecund today, it was implicit in all his well-known manipulation of “personae” or “masks.” Meanwhile, Pound had come to serve as an indispensable mentor to Eliot as well as friend of William Carlos Williams.

The narrative here ends in 1920, before Pound was disgraced by the full emergence (and allure) of fascism. It will be fascinating to see how Moody deals with the poet’s remaining 52 years of life.

Few phenomena in contemporary intellectual life are more tedious than the perfunctory, but typically strident, denunciations of Pound for his distasteful political views. While Pound’s long-term ideological stance embodied a cracked modernism that led him to embrace and express repellent opinions, this outlook had little or nothing, in principle or practice, to do with his verse or criticism. Unlike, say, Yeats, who wrote marching songs for the Irish fascist movement, Pound did not compose cadences for the Italian black shirts or the German brown shirts.

Moreover, considering that his offenses were almost exclusively intellectual and literary, attacks on Pound’s sanity are in vivid contrast to the near-universal adulation accorded such Stalinist scribblers as Pablo Neruda, who was a Soviet secret terror agent in addition to his wild, public enthusiasm for Stalin. In this regard, Pound is symbolic of other right-leaning authors, including Gottfried Benn and Knut Hamsun, whose biographies are habitually besmirched, while the lives of Soviet enthusiasts (and, sometimes, spies) such as the Pulitzer poetry laureate George Oppen and the Portuguese novelist José Saramago, are praised beyond measure.

At first look, Pound has little in common with the life of the Old Testament Ezra, except that he resembles him in his role as a scribe who sought to reorder the national tradition. But in line with a suggestion by Arthur Koestler discussing the fate of the 1930s Communists, Pound has more in common with Jacob. Laban promised Jacob the hand of his beautiful daughter Rachel, but Jacob was tricked on his wedding night into a match with the ugly Leah. Like most totalitarian intellectuals, Pound believed the grandiose promises of fascist modernism, and found himself tied to the bloody cart of Mussolini and, eventually, to Hitler’s minions. Yet he remains America’s Jacob, who taught us to wrestle with our idiom, and how to subdue it. In illuminating this development of Pound’s intellect, A. David Moody deserves our thanks.

Stephen Schwartz is the author of a forthcoming study of Sufism, The Other Islam.