CHAPTER 3 Creating the Modern Rhapsode: The Classics as World in Ezra Pound’s Cantos

Adam J. Goldwyn

Constructing Author(ity): Portraits of Ezra Pound in the Epigraphs to The Waste Land

For the original version of The Waste Land, T. S. Eliot chose as an epigraph the famous closing lines of his older contemporary Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899):

Did he live his life again in every detail of desire, temptation, and surren- der during that supreme moment of complete knowledge? He cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision – he cried out twice, a cry that was no more than breath – ‘The horror! the horror!’1

In this epigraph, Eliot uses Conrad to characterize his friend and fellow poet Ezra Pound, the poem’s dedicatee: Pound both assumes the role of and replaces Kurtz, the enigmatic figure at the center of Heart of Darkness, as the speaker in the epigraph. By 1922, Pound had become best known as the founder of Imagism, one of the early avant-gardes of Anglo-American that flourished between 1912 and 1917, and thus Eliot citing Conrad’s “image” was no doubt a marked and recognizable use to Pound. Kurtz’s utterance thus becomes Pound’s declaration of his poetic vision (“The horror! the horror!”). The epigraph, moreover, parallels Pound’s own definition of Imagism and poetry itself from his early aesthetic treatise “A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste” (1913): “An ‘Image’ is that which presents an intellectual and emotional com- plex in an instant of time.” Pound’s description of poetic epiphany parallels Conrad’s “supreme moment of complete knowledge.” The use of Heart of Darkness as an intertext also functions as a fitting intro- duction to a poem with such dystopian ambition: Eliot recognized in Kurtz’s final utterance his own vision of the modern world as a waste land, a vision of

1 Eliot (2005), 76.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi ��.��63/9789004335493_005 54 Goldwyn decay and hopelessness he shared with Pound. Through a complicated pro- cess of intertextuality and abstruse verbal allusions, Eliot compresses himself, Pound, Conrad, Kurtz and their various worldviews into a seamless polyvalent image, a motto as much for The Waste Land as for modernism itself. And yet, after reading a draft of the poem, Pound wrote a letter on January 24, 1922 expressing his dissatisfaction with the epigraph and suggesting Eliot change it: “I doubt if Conrad is weighty enough to stand the citation.”2 In the published version Eliot did heed Pound’s critique and replaced Conrad’s words with an epigraph taken from the first century Latin text, Petronius’ Satyricon. This change suggests both Pound’s and Eliot’s perspectives on the aesthetics and craft of poetry in the modern world, their relationship with one another, their identities as authors and authorial personae and, as importantly, their reception of the (Classical) past. Pound’s objection to the epigraph is based in neither aesthetics nor ideol- ogy. He does not object to Kurtz’s dystopian vision – indeed, that he shared it was no doubt among Eliot’s principal reasons for choosing the line – rather, he objects to a much more amorphous characteristic: what he calls its “weight.” An epigraph by a contemporary Polish-born novelist writing in English – no matter how lauded by his contemporaries – not only lacked the gravitas to give Eliot’s modernist masterpiece the stature of the ancient and medieval ante- cedents that are so deeply embedded in the poem’s architecture, it also lacked the power to properly position the poem’s dedicatee within the pantheon of canonical writers alongside whom he wished to reside – such as , Virgil, and Dante – at a moment in his creative life when he had just begun serious work on the epic work which would occupy him for the remainder of his life, The Cantos.3 Though the first epigraph and the one that replaced it shared the tripartite function of introducing the subject matter of The Waste Land, offering a portrait of Pound, and articulating a programmatic statement on modernism’s dystopian gaze, the second epigraph, which has appeared in all subsequent published versions, better reflected both the intertextual

2 Eliot (2005), 76. 3 Froula considers “the question of the poem’s form in its dimensions as a modern epic [. . .] perhaps the largest problem in Pound’s studies.” (1984), 7. That Pound sought a place along- side writers of epic is demonstration enough of his commitment to writing in the genre, whatever its formal or structural identifiers may be. Among the many problems in determin- ing Pound’s own view on the subject is that his views changed over the course of his lifetime, a lifetime devoted in large part to first conceiving of, then executing and revising, an epic project, with frequent extra-textual comments in the form of letters, critical writings and his interlocutors’ recollections of his various utterances.