Ezra Pound's Medieval Classicism: the Spirit of Romance and the Debt

Ezra Pound’s Medieval Classicism: The Spirit of Romance and the Debt to Philology

Jonathan Ullyot

Introduction

“I want to maintain that after a hundred years of romanticism,” T. E. Hulme begins his famous lecture to the Quest Society in 1911, “we are in for a classical revival.”1 Hulme characterizes Romanticism as the belief that man is “an infinite reservoir of possibilities,” whereas classicism contends that, “man is an extraordinarily fixed and limited animal whose nature is absolutely con- stant. It is only by tradition and organization that anything decent can be got out of him.” He calls for “accurate, precise and definite description” “without the infinite being in some way or other dragged in,” and insists that, “beau- ty may be a small, dry thing.” A year earlier, Ezra Pound wove a manifesto of classicism into an enthusiastic survey of medieval literature, The Spirit of Romance (1910).2 Taking as his authorities the scholarly works of Gaston Paris, Joseph Bédier, and Walter Ker, Pound teases out a definition of medieval classicism that would define (his) modernism and direct the methodology of The Cantos: the “Hellenic” austerity of style; the “depersonalization” of the implied author or poet; the idea of literary composition as the compiling and arranging of fragmented sources; the proximity of literary composition to (philological) literary criticism; the use of Latin texts as necessary intermedi- aries to understanding Greek texts; and the practice of the medieval transla- tio (studii et imperii), which means both to “translate” a classical text as well as “transfer” (adapt, update) its material to reflect contemporary (scientific and religious) “truths.” The Spirit of Romance is composed of a series of lectures about the burgeon- ing field of medieval literature. Part anthology and part textbook, it includes summaries of the “best” medieval works and Pound’s working translations of Provençal and early Italian poetry. The topic is “literature produced in the

1 T. E. Hulme, “Romanticism and Classicism,” http://www.poetryfoundation.org/learning/ essay/238694. Accessed October 1, 2015. 2 The Spirit of Romance was based on lectures Pound delivered in 1909. It was later reprinted with his 1912 lecture, “Psychology and the Troubadours.”

Middle Ages, derived from the Latin.”3 Pound argues that classicism was at its finest in the Middle Ages, beginning with the Pervigilium Veneris (the Provençal Alba) and ending with Dante, although two later chapters pay homage to Fran- cis Villon and Lope de Vega as the most “medieval” of the early Renaissance poets. Pound argues that the renaissance of the fifteenth century marked a decline from the golden Middle Ages, during which a pagan worship of nature and love was practiced alongside Christianity. Humanism is Romanticism dis- guised: a cult of the self which abandons the divinity of the natural world, the “universe of fluid force,” the “universe of wood alive, of stone alive,” when “man is concerned with man and forgets the whole and the flowing.”4 Pound’s understanding of medieval classicism was as much inspired by late nineteenth-century philology (as well as the Cambridge ritualists) as it was by the medieval texts themselves. Although Pound resented philologists for most of his life, and even went so far as to place them in hell with usurers and sod- omites in The Cantos (“pets-de-loup, sitting on piles of stone books, / obscuring the texts with philology”), his university training was as a philologist.5 Pound studied Dante’s Italian, Old French, Old Spanish, and Provençal as an under- graduate at Hamilton College in Clinton, New York, with William Pierce She- phard, an editor of Provençal poets, and Old English with Joseph D. Ibbotson, a specialist in Anglo-Saxon and Middle English. He received a master’s degree in Romance languages at the University of Pennsylvania under the direction of Hugo Rennert, the renowned scholar and editor of medieval Spanish ro- mances and the works of Lope de Vega. Pound registered to write a PhD on the role of the jester in Lope de Vega’s plays, but never pursued the project. Throughout his life, Pound resented not the scientific technique of the philologist, but his inability to separate good work from bad. His first published essay in 1906 was a book review that damned “the Germanic ideal of scholar” engaged “in endless pondering over some utterly unanswerable question of textual criticism.”6 His ideas were indebted to Ford Madox Hueffer’s When Blood is their Argu- ment (1915), which describes in detail how the German university system of the

3 Ezra Pound, The Spirit of Romance (London: Dent, 1910), 1. Hereafter sr, with page references quoted parenthetically. 4 Ezra Pound, “Psychology of the Troubadours,” in The Spirit of Romance, ed. Richard Sieburth (New York: New Directions, 2005), 92, 93. Hereafter pt, with page references quoted parenthetically. “Psychology and the Troubadours” initially appeared in The Quest in the fall of 1912. Pound later added it to the 1932 reprint of The Spirit of Romance. 5 Ezra Pound, Canto xiv, The Cantos (New York: New Directions, 1995), 63. A pet-de-loup is an old and ridiculous professor. 6 Quoted in Noel Stock, The Life of Ezra Pound (London: Routledge, 1970), 40.