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EZRA POUND AS Also by G. Singh

LEOPARD! AND THE THEORY OF EUGENIO MONTALE: A Critical Study EZRA POUND SWINBURNE'S EARLY POETRY F. R. LEAVIS: The Critic as Anti-Philosopher F. R. LEAVIS: Valuation in (editor) Q. D. LEAVIS: The Englishness of the English (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 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 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--. 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 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 and his Theory of Imagism 26

4 The Making of an Artist 39

5 Critical Evaluations: Poetry 46

6 Critical Evaluations: 76

7 Pound's Letters in Criticism 103

8 The Theory and Craft of Poetic 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 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 , 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 ' of a method' and proof that his various prose 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 • - Dryden, Dr Johnson, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Landor and - 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 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, ' 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 )'. 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 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 . Take, for instance, his comments on . 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 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. He leaves a tangential stimulus.' Here we have the criticism of a poet and a critic, a translator and a comparatist rolled into one - the criticism of one who considered critical writing 'ancillary' to creation, 'the shoe-hom not the foot', and described the attempt to pass it off as creative writing as rooted in an inferiority complex, 'the jealousy of the eunuch for Don Juan'. For Pound, even critical rules and maxims - including his own - were so many 'points of departure' or 'axes of reference', rather than 'limits of circumscription', and the test of critical ideas, as of ideas in general, was not so much their novelty or originality, as 'what hap• pens when they go into '. From critical ideas going into action, Pound expected, among other things, 'amelioration in the art of writing', just as Matthew Arnold expected it from 'the application of ideas to life'. Hence, as for Arnold or Lea vis, so for Pound, criticism was as much a criticism of life as of literature. Beauty and truth, eth• ics and , literary values and values, were, therefore, fundamentally indivisible for him, and 'carving a thesis in eternal beauty or in lasting verity' meant one and the same thing. He regarded the mind and the imagination to be the 'proper domain of freedom', and he exercised this freedom in his critical writings no less than in his Cantos, as a result of which his concepts and ideas, Introduction xi images, and luminous details, don't form themselves into a system or a pattern, but constitute what Pound calls a 'living vortex'. 'I make a jump instead of a step', he would say, and such a habit was hardly going to be conducive to a method or a system. And, so far as literary criticism is concerned, he could well have said with Eliot that 'the only method is to be very intelligent'. Even the history of criticism for Pound was 'largely of a vain struggle to find a terminology which will define something'. The fact that he himself had no such terminology at his disposal leads him to make use of an extraordinarily individual and, at times, strikingly unconventional and eccentric language and style to con• vey his critical intuitions, perceptions and ideas. Another reason might well be his desire to escape from dullness. For if good art 'begins with an escape from dullness', so does good criticism, and all the more so in the case of one who considered dullness to be the 'supreme crime' of the critic. Moreover, Pound believed that what he had to say was infinitely more important than the way in which he said it, so that for all his admiration for the art of prose like that of Hardy, Henry James, Ford and Joyce, or of Stendhal and Flaubert, he didn't think that art to be his, and he pleaded for what he himself considered to be his bad prose by saying that 'on ne peut pas pontif• ier and have style simultaneously'. And yet Pound achieves in his prose, as Leavis said apropos of Hardy's poetry, a style out of stylelessness, as a result of which not only is his prose at once so telling and so unmistakable, but also his criticism has such a lively force and immediacy, to which is to be added his experience as a poet. Pound believed that 'good generali• sation, or good criticism, in the arts, invariably follows performance', just as his own criticism did. Like Gandhi, though in an altogether different field, Pound practised first and preached afterwards, which makes his criticism very different from that of the general run of professional critics 'who make generalities about the creator'. His experience as a creative writer gives a peculiar edge and relevance to the qualities of integrity and sincerity that one invariably finds in his criticism. 'Any sincere criticism of the highest poetry', he tells us, 'must resolve itself into a sort of profession of faith', and the absence of such a faith usually implies a distrust in the author one is writing about - something that Pound never had. That is why, for instance, he refused to write on Meredith. 'I detest him too much ever to trust myself as a critic', he said. Similarly, he turned down Eliot's invita• tion to write on Bridges, arguing that 'if the luminous reason of xii Introduction one's criticism is that one shd. focus attention on what deserves it, a note by E. P. on Bridges wd. be a falsification of values'. 'No man ever writes very much poetry that "matters"', said Pound, and the same may be said of criticism. His own criticism that 'matters' may be divided into two categories - the theoretical and the practical. Through his poetics as well as through his theoret• ical criticism, Pound, 'the minister without portfolio of the arts' (Horace Gregory), a 'demon pantechnican driver, busy with moving the old world into new quarters' (Wyndham Lewis), or 'il miglior fabbro' (T. S. Eliot), was largely responsible for bringing about the birth of modem poetry, and, inferentially, of modem criticism as well. Through his 'practical' criticism, on the other hand, he dealt not only with Dante, Cavalcanti, Amaut Daniel and Villon, but also with his most gifted contemporaries (Hardy, Yeats, Joyce, Wyndham Lewis and Eliot), who were not only well known, but also most con• genial to him - writers about whom and about whose art he cared a great deal, thereby illustrating the validity of his own maxim: 'You never know unless you happen personally to care.'