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EZRA POUND AS CRITIC Also by G EZRA POUND AS CRITIC Also by G. Singh LEOPARD! AND THE THEORY OF POETRY EUGENIO MONTALE: A Critical Study EZRA POUND SWINBURNE'S EARLY POETRY F. R. LEAVIS: The Critic as Anti-Philosopher F. R. LEAVIS: Valuation in Criticism (editor) Q. D. LEAVIS: The Englishness of the English Novel (editor) Q. D. LEAVIS: The Novel of Religious Controversy (editor) EZRA POUND CENTENARY (editor) Q. D. LEAVIS: The American Novel and Reflections on the European Novel (editor) EUGENIO MONTALE: Selected Poems (editor) I GIACOMO LEOPARD!: 'Canti' (editor) Ezra Pound as Critic G. Singh Visiting Professor Department of Modern Languages University of Urbino, Italy ©G. Singh 1994 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1994 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1P 9HE. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. First published in Great Britain 1994 by THE MACMILLAN PRESS LTD Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 2XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 978-1-349-23504-9 ISBN 978-1-349-23502-5 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-23502-5 First published in the United States of America 1994 by Scholarly and Reference Division, ST. MARTIN'S PRESS, INC., 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 ISBN 978-0-312-12056-6 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Singh, G. Ezra Pound as critic I G. Singh. p. em. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 978-0-312-12056-6 1. Pound, Ezra, 1885-1972-Knowledge--Literature. 2. Criticism- -United States-History-20th century. I. Title. PS3531.082Z83642 1994 811' .52-dc20 93-39872 CIP 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 05 04 03 02 01 00 99 98 97 To Mario Luzi and Carlo Bo Pound's literary criticism is the most important con­ temporary criticism of its kind ... [and] the least dispensable body of critical writing in our time. Much of the permanence of Mr Pound's criticism is due simply to his having seen so clearly what needed to be said at a particular time. Mr Pound is more responsible for the XXth century revolution in poetry than is any other individual. T. S. Eliot, Introduction to Literary Essays of Ezra Pound (London, 1954) Contents Preface viii Introduction ix 1 The Sense of Historical Situation 1 2 Pound's Critical Credo 9 3 Pound's Poetics and his Theory of Imagism 26 4 The Making of an Artist 39 5 Critical Evaluations: Poetry 46 6 Critical Evaluations: Prose 76 7 Pound's Letters in Criticism 103 8 The Theory and Craft of Poetic Translation 120 9 Pound on Modem French Poetry and Prose 132 Conclusion: Pound and Criticism 145 Appendix: The Poundian 'Gists' and Maxims 157 Notes 161 Bibliography 166 Index 173 vii Preface 'There is also a point', Pound wrote in a letter (26 March 1925) to R. P. Blackmur, 'that has not been raised: i.e. whether I haven't outlined a new criticism or critical system. I don't propose to go back over my printed stuff, volumes, etc. and detach this. But there is material for an essay, or a Ph.D. thesis, or a volume' -material to which Pound addeq a lot in subsequent years in the form of letters, essays and reviews. In this book I have tried to 'detach' such criticism from Pound's writ­ ings in all its relevant aspects - though by no means in its exhaustive detail and entirety- and to assess it both in the light of what Eliot calls 'the sense of historical situation' and in the light of the intrinsic value and influence of that criticism. My principal aim has been that of sin­ gling out, analysing and commenting on the various critical notions and concepts, criteria and convictions that recur throughout, and con­ stitute the sum and substance of Pound's literary criticism and that may be regarded as constituting his 'poetics' even though it may not be seen to have achieved or to have been intended to achieve a coherent system or methodology. And yet Pound himself regarded his critical conclusions and evaluations, as he said in a letter to Louis Untermeyer in 1930, both as 'exposition of a method' and proof that his various prose books and literary studies had not been 'haphazard dilettantism but done in pursuance with plan and coherent design'. And in any case, the permanent value and significance of Pound's criticism doesn't suffer because of its lack, more than does the criticism of other poet­ critics - Dryden, Dr Johnson, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Landor and Matthew Arnold - with whom Eliot rightly associates Pound. While placing him along with these, Eliot points out how all of them were concerned with 'making new' in their own time, though none of these was 'so considerably concerned with teaching others how to write. And of no other poet can it be more important to say that his criticism and his poetry, his precept and his practice, compose a single oeuvre. It's necessary to read Pound's poetry to understand his criticism, and to read his criticism to understand his poetry'. One couldn't agree more. I am grateful to Miss Gabrielle Barfoot of Trieste University, Italy, for having gone through the typescript of this book - as of other books of mine - and for making some valuable suggestions that have been profitably incorporated. G. SINGH viii Introduction The habitually, almost compulsively interdependent and interactive nature of Pound's critical and creative faculties, the multifarious uses he put them to - literary, artistic and cultural, as well as politi­ cal, economic and pedagogical - and the freedom with which, both as a result of his being 'furious from perception' and by being goaded by a reformist and ethically charged passion and a singu­ larly practical imagination, he tackled a disconcertingly wide vari­ ety of themes and concepts, make his literary criticism the perennially dynamic and stimulating force it is. He defined litera­ ture as news that 'STAYS news', and the same could be said of his lit­ erary criticism. Forthright and trenchant to the point of being often rude and provocative, wholeheartedly committed to what he believed in ('I decline to suffer for what I don't believe in'), even though at the expense of incurring the charge of being dogmatic and intransigent, Pound achieved a kind of criticism that is at once hon­ est and objective, personal and disinterested, and that has not only the courage of a conviction, but also the certitude and clarity of an axiom which, to a large extent, explains its categorical and authori­ tative tone and manner. What he thinks, sees or perceives, he has no hesitation in stating deliberately as well as dogmatically, and with the minimum of explanatory gloss or comment. There is nothing lit­ erary, academic or exegetical about it. Pound had no use for 'an explaining critic', and he wasn't, by any means, one himself. 'Don't think', he wrote to a correspondent, 'I am writing an ultimatum. I am only trying to be clear.' For he missed no opportunity of empha­ sising both the need and the virtue of clarity which he regarded as the most essential characteristic of good writing, whereas lack of it for him was the main cause of what he calls the 'constipation of thought'. 'Clarity of style', says A. E. Housman ('the accomplished prose author') 'is not a virtue, but a duty', and Pound, who admired Housman's prose style to the point of envying it, would have fully agreed with him. Along with clarity went the virtue of succinctness; for, as Pound puts it, 'the arts are, when they are healthy, succinct', and so far as Pound himself is concerned, so is literary criticism. Having little interest in, and even less aptitude for criticism for its own sake, he believed that criticism should 'consume itself and disappear (as I ix X Introduction think it mostly does in my ABC of Reading)'. In fact, no critic's work is so free from 'words flying off to nothing ... cliches, set phrases, stereotyped journalese' as Pound's. At least in part it is this that makes his critical writings so full of illuminating insights, observa­ tions and generalisations, and which accounts for his being able to move, with such a convincing ease, from the general to the particu­ lar, and vice versa, in the course of a critical argument, exposition or analysis. Take, for instance, his comments on Horace. Starting from the supposition that 'half the bad poetry in English might seem to have been written under Horace's influence', Pound contrasts Horace's 'clubman's poise' and the absence in his poetry of any stronger emo­ tion that might move him (Pound) 'toward a particularly luscious oyster', with 'the granite acidity of Catullus's passion' or with Ovid's magic and sense of mystery. He also attributes 'the tremen­ dous fertility and stimulus' that has resulted in a number of English verse styles to the unsuccessful efforts to translate Horace into English. For Horace is 'not good enough; and not unified enough to absorb the translator or to cause a masterwork in the new language; comparable to the work of Golding or Gavin Douglas or Hugues Salet.
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