Some of Our Best Poets Are Fascists
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Notes Abbreviations of works by Ezra Pound cited in notes ABCR The ABC of Reading (1934; London: Faber & Faber, 1951). CEP Collected Early Poems of Ezra Pound, ed. Michael John King (London: Faber & Faber, 1977). CNTJ The Classic Noh Theatre of Japan (Noh, or Accomplishment, 1916) (New York: New Directions, 1959). CWC The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry (1920; San Francisco: City Lights, 1969). GB Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir (1916; New York: New Directions, 1959). GK The Guide to Kulchur (1938; London: Peter Owen, 1966). JIM Jefferson and/or Mussolini (1935; New York: Liveright, 1970). L Selected Letters of Ezra Pound, 1907-1941, ed. D. D. Paige (1950; London: Faber & Faber, 1971). LE Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. T. S. Eliot (London: Faber & Faber, 1954). P Personae: the Collected Shorter Poems of Ezra Pound (1926; New York: New Directions, 1971). SP Selected Prose of Ezra Pound 1909-1965, ed. William Cookson (London: Faber & Faber, 1973). SR The Spirit of Romance (1910; New York: New Directions, 1968). Trans. Translations of Ezra Pound, ed. Hugh Kenner (London: Faber & Faber 1954). NOTES TO CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION: SOME OF OUR BEST POETS ARE FASCISTS 1 'Cavalcanti: Medievalism' (1910--34), in LE, p. 194. 2 'Vorticism', Fortnightly Review, xcvr.573 (1 Sep 1914), in GB, p. 85. 3 SR, p. 168. 4 SR, p. 178. 5 'The Ballad of the Gibbet', P, p. 12. 6 Citation for the Bollingen Prize for Poetry, quoted in Ezra Pound: The Critical Heritage, ed. Eric Hornberger (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972) p. 26. 7 Donald Davie, Ezra Pound: Poet as Sculptor (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1965) p. 242. See also A Casebook on Ezra Pound, ed. 164 Notes 165 William Van O'Connor and Edward Stone (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1959), which includes a selection of materials documenting the contemporary debate. 8 Peter Nicholls has recently made quite clear in what ways the Pisan Cantos are very much not a gesture of defeat or repentance; rather 'the "heroism" and "courage" for which the sequence has been praised often entail a holding-fast to those very ideas and principles which most critics are keen to see the poet "transcend" ' - Peter Nicholls, Ezra Pound: Politics, Economics and Writing (London: Macmillan, 1984) p. 163. 9 Hugh Kenner effectively launched modern Pound studies with his The Poetry of Ezra Pound (London: Faber & Faber, 1951). His The Pound Era (London: Faber & Faber, 1975), a study of modernism centred on Pound, Wyndham Lewis, James Joyce and T. S. Eliot, represented the case for Pound as modernist at the most ambitious level, as the title suggests. 10 The term 'objective correlative' was coined by T. S. Eliot, but the concept owes much to Pound's argument in SR- see Hugh Witemeyer, The Poetry of Ezra Pound, 1908-1920: Forms and Renewals (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1969) p. 29. 11 T. S. Eliot, in Poetry (Chicago), Sep 1946. 12 'Vorticism', in GB, p. 83. 13 Letter to Harriet Monroe, 7 Nov 1913, in L, p. 24. 14 'Prologomena', Poetry Review, 1.2 (Feb 1912), in LE, p. 9; see also, 'I Gather the Limbs of Osiris', New Age, x.5 (30Nov 1911) fortnightly to x.17 (22 Feb 1912), in SP, p. 34. 15 Pound first published this poem as the first instalment of the series 'I Gather the Limbs of Osiris' (see preceding note); it was reprinted in the volumes Ripostes (1912) and Cathay (1915). In the first case, it was singled out by The Times Literary Supplement (a journal not usually responsive to Pound's verse), along with his homage to Swinburne ('Salve, 0 Pontifex'), as examples of what Pound may be capable of (and which he spoilt by 'vulgar gesture[s] of defiance'); the editor of the New Age, A. R. Orage, greeted the 1915 republication by referring to the poem as 'without doubt one of the finest literary works of art produced in England in recent years' (see Pound: The Critical Heritage, ed. Hornberger, pp. 94 and 110). 16 'I Gather the Limbs of Osiris', in SP, p. 33. 17 Hugh Witemeyer provides a thorough account of this period, where he argues that 'Pound's personae combine his concern for revitalizing history with his concern for portraying dramatic ecstasy ... in other words, they stand somewhere between Browning's dramatic monologues and Yeats's masks' (Witemeyer, Poetry of Pound, p. 60; see the full discussion in his fourth chapter). 18 Interview with Donald Hall, Paris Review, 28 (1962), in Writers at Work, 2nd ser. ed. George Plimpton (New York: Viking, 1963) p. 33. 19 The distinction between 'symptomatic' and 'donative' facts and writers is made by Pound in 'I Gather the Limbs of Osiris', SP, p. 25. 20 Writers at Work, ed. Plimpton, p. 36. 21 Arthur Symons, The Symbolist Movement in Literature (1899; rev. 1908, 1919; New York: E. P. Dutton, 1958) p. xix. 22 Ford Madox Ford, in Critical Writings of Ford Madox Ford, ed. Frank 166 Notes MacShane (Lincoln, Nebr.: University of Nebraska Press, 1964) p. 154. Ford was related to the Pre-Raphaelites through his maternal grandfather, the painter Ford Madox Brown, who was also the father of William Michael Rossetti's wife (Madox Brown's daughter by a previous marriage). Pound to an extent works out his relations with Dante Gabriel Rossetti in his translations of the Sonnets and Ballate of Guido Cavalcanti (1912), which Rossetti had himself translated in an influential edition. See the discussion in David Anderson, Pound's Cavalcanti: An Edition of the Translations, Notes, and Essays (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983) pp. xvii-xviii. 23 Ian F. A. Bell, Critic as Scientist: The Modernist Poetics of Ezra Pound (London: Methuen, 1981) p. 229. I make considerable use of this book throughout the present work. I also rely on its most thorough discussion of Pound's poetics (rather than his practice) and its relations to fields of science which are not embraced by my own work. Bell selects four familiar keynotes of the poetics: 'his analogies from geometry and electromagnetism, his campaign for the seriousness of the artist, his conceptions of the "vortex" and of "tradition" ' p. 3). He contextualises Pound's model of diagnosis, the luminous detail and the virtu, lines of force, the Vortex itself, the ideogram, tradition and historicity, the 'repeat', myth and metamorphosis, the palimpsest, etymologies, a language of objects, pattern, design and harmony of process, in terms of a poetic model oftranscendentalism and scientific models of, mainly, atomic physics and biology. Besides the clearer dependencies, what will be less visible is the extent to which Ian Bell's work has informed and assisted my own beyond what can be indicated by direct reference. 24 The anxiety is even present for Stephen Daedalus in Joyce's Ulysses: 'Who ever anywhere will read these written words?' - Joyce, Ulysses (1922; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969) p. 54. There is, of course, much talk of the death of literacy, but one might note that the novel still manages to survive more happily than poetry- even to the point, in more recent times, of adapting itself to the commercial dominance of television and cinema by providing texts for, or of, series and films. 25 There is of course the case of the Georgian poets and their (especially commercial) popularity. This success in relation to the modern reading public is, however, very much achieved at the cost of a marginalisation of the scope of poetry, reduced to a rather parochial pastoral mode dependent on sustaining a myth of 'England', most of which was destroyed (as we know, all too literally) by the First World War. It is none the less curious how many contemporary poets have recently returned to the sort of attention to place (as opposed, for example, to Pound's internationalist perspective) as is encountered in the work of the best of the Georgians, such as Edward Thomas. Despite the fact that many of them also acknowledge or exhibit the influence of Pound, the work of poets such as Basil Bunting (Briggflatts, 1965), Geoffrey Hill (King Log, 1968; Mercian Hymns, 1971), Seamus Heaney, Jeremy Hooker, Ronald Johnson and Jonathan Williams also demonstrates a recuperation of this alternative response to the fate of poetry in the modern world. Notes 167 26 Paul Valery, 'Existence du Symbolisme' (1938), Oeuvres, I (Paris: Ph~iade, 1962) 689-90. 27 Pound discharged, as it were, his debt to the religious cult of the Symbolists in his homage to Swinburne ('Salve, 0 Pontifex'), in which the poet is represented as a high priest, addressed here by an acolyte. The poem, first published in Ripostes (1912), was not reprinted in Pound's subsequent collections. Likewise, in 'Prologomena' (1912), Pound also acknowledges how Swinburne and Yeats, and their concept of 'pure art', had managed to restore musical values to a poetry otherwise decayed into rhetoric, a 'post-chaise for transmitting thoughts poetic or otherwise' (LE, p. 11). The problem with which they leave him appears to be that of enabling this musical art to display intelligent thought - hence his contemporary experimentations with translating Cavalcanti 'more for sense than for music' (see Pound's letter to The Times, published 5 Dec 1912, quoted in Anderson, Pound's Cavalcanti, p. xviii). 28 Symons, The Symbolist Movement, p. 94. 29 The Context of English Literature: 1900-1930, ed. Michael Bell (London: Methuen, 1980) p. 18. 30 'Plotinus', CEP, p. 36. 31 'Vorticism', in GB, p. 85. 32 Paul Valery, 'Dialogue ou nouveau fragment relatif aM Teste', M Teste (1946; Paris: Gallimard, 1969) p. 97. 33 Valery, 'La Soiree avec M.