Journal of Literature and Art Studies, ISSN 2159-5836 April 2013, Vol. 3, No. 4, 213-223 D DAVID PUBLISHING

The Major Western Cultural Influences on the Incubating Process of Ezra Pound’s Early Poetics*

WEI Shu Beijing Information Science and Technology University, Beijing, China

This paper intends to study Ezra Pound’s early poetics and his modernist poetry through a close research of the various elements in the shaping process of his poetics, and the significance and influence of his poetic thoughts on the American New Poetry Movement. It studies firstly the early translations and romantic lyrics of Pound, trying to demonstrate that part of the influence on his early poetics is from the Western traditional cultural inheritance and that the emphasis on musicality that Pound inherited from traditional forms of poetry turns out to be one of the major principles that Pound advocates in his early poetics; then it comes to the discussion of the new translation concepts and poetics in “The Seafarer” (1911), which is a great work Pound translated based on an Old English poem; next this paper will focus on the influence of Robert Browning’s dramatic monologues and Yeats’ Symbolism on Pound’s transition from subjectivity to objectivity.

Keywords: Ezra Pound, early poetics, American New Poetry Movement

Introduction Ezra Pound has been widely acknowledged as the founder and the most prolific and talented poet of modernist poetry. Research on Pound is conducted mainly in Western countries and most of the precious manuscripts and materials are enshrined in Western universities like Yale. The achievements in China are relatively small and immature. This is due partly to the misunderstanding and misinterpretation of his works or his other political activities and partly to the difficulties in comprehending his works. In order to better present the history and status of Poundian studies, this paper will discuss the diversified Western elements in the incubating process of Pound’s early poetics and the formation of his poetic style. Those elements range from the Provençal lyrical poems, Browning’s dramatic monologues, Yeats’ Symbolism, and Old English poems.

Ezra Pound’s Early Translations, Romantic Lyrics, and Popular Ballads Like those literary careers begin with imitation, Ezra Pound also started with modeling on some previous masterpieces. From his university days to 1910, Pound wrote some lyrical poems, most of which were imitations based on his translations of Greek, Roman, Provençal lyric poems, minstrel or popular ballads, and Old English poems. Ezra Pound’s own publishing career began on November 8, 1902 with the short poem called “Ezra on

* This study is funded by Beijing Information Science and Technology University (No. 1335021). WEI Shu, lecturer, School of Foreign Languages, Beijing Information Science and Technology University. 214 THE MAJOR WESTERN CULTURAL INFLUENCES ON THE INCUBATING PROCESS the Strike” in a local newspaper. It contains eight quatrains in imitation of James Whitcomb Riley in the voice of an old farmer on his way to town with hay who comments on the approach of Thanksgiving Day and the effects of a strike:

Wal, Thanksgiving’ do be comin’ round./With the price of turkeys on the bound,/And Coal, by gum! Thet were just found,/Is surely getting’ cheaper./The winds will soon begin to howl,/And winter, in its yearly growl,/Across the medders begin to prowl,/And Jack Frost getting’ deeper. (Pound, 2003, p. 1149)

This little poem shows Pound has a good sense of conventional lyrics at that time. And another little poem is also interesting. It has only four lines, rhyming abba, a typical ballad quatrain. It was written in late 1903 or early 1904. It was called “Motif” when first published in his first book A Lume Spento (1908) and retitled “Search” in Personae (1909) the following year:

Through woodlands dim/Have I taken my way, And over silent waters, night and day/Have I sought the wee wind. (Pound, 2003, p. 55)

And probably in 1904, Pound wrote the two short poems, “Song” and “To the Dawn: Defiance”, which were first published in A Lume Spento. These two poems are the best examples of showing the formation of the dream element which is important later. “Song” begins with “love thou thy dream” and ends with “dream alone can truly be/for ’tis in dreams I come to thee” (Pound, 2003, p. 54) while the other “To the Dawn: Defiance” similarly tells of a “dream”: “ye blood-red spears-men of the dawn’s array/my moated soul shall dream in your despite/a refuge for the vanquished hosts of night” (Pound, 2003, p. 53). At that time, Pound was still not very skillful in poetry writing and picking the right words, so he had to employ the worn-out word-patterns. His “Belangal Alba” translated from the Provençal lyrical poem, was published in the May 1905 issue of the Hamilton Literary Magazine:

Dawn light, o’er aea and height, riseth bright,/Passeth vigil, clear shineth on the night. They be careless of the agates, delaying,/Whom the ambush glides to hinder Whom I warn and cry to, praying./“Arise!” (Stock, 1970, p. 45)

This is a successful translation from which Pound has some basic sense of romantic spirit. It can be believed that such translations began modeling Pound’s early poetry and poetics. Of the five poems in A Lume Spento which appear to belong to 1905, two of them “Plotinus” and “Ballad for Gloom” move well enough, but the gap between his words and what he is trying to express is uncomfortably wide; he has had the experience but as yet lacks the means to turn it into genuine poetry. Two others of the five were successful and are rightly collected among the author’s shorter poems: “On His Own Face in a Glass” and “For E. McC.”. However, his later poem “The Cry of the Eyes”, which he began in 1905 and finished the following year, reflects Pound’s awakening of clarity and hardness in his verse; though it was coached in an artificial language, there is a quite delightful turn in some new poetic sense:

Would feel the fingers of the wind/Upon these lids that lie over us/Sodden and lead-heavy. (Pound, 2003, p. 37)

And at the same time, Pound began to follow a poetic rule, noticing the importance of the simplicity of style. The following sections are his practice of this style: THE MAJOR WESTERN CULTURAL INFLUENCES ON THE INCUBATING PROCESS 215

The yellow flame paleth/And the wax runs low./In this ever-flowing monotony/Of ugly print marks, black/Upon white parchment. (Pound, 2003, p. 37)

It may have been as early as the spring of 1906 that he composed the 19 lines which appear in A Lume Spento under the title “Vana” and as the opening section of “Praise of Ysolt” in Personae and later collections:

In vain have I striven/ To teach my heart to bow;/ In vain have I said to him/“These be many singers greater than thou”. (Pound, 2003, p. 40)

They are still fresh in their contrasts of rhythm (for example, “in vain have I striven” against “in vain have I said to him”) and still worth reading for the way in which emphasis is brought to bear on a key word—on “greater”, for instance, in the line “there be many singers greater than thou”. With another poem “From Syria” (1906) which appears to belong to this period when he was not so lucky. Pound stated in the notes of the poem that “From Syria” is a translation of a song by Peire Bremon “Lo Tort” that he made for his Lady in Provença:

In April when I see all through/Mead and garden new flowers blow,/And streams with ice-bands broken flow… To me, saying all in sorrow:/“Sweet friend, and what of me tomorrow?”/“Love mine, why wilt me so forsake?” (Pound, 2003, p. 95)

It has all the vices of the young poet struck with admiration for a distant time and place, without any compensating virtues. It begins in April when “new flowers” blow in “mead and garden” progresses by way of “my love’s land” to “Syrian strand”, and ends with the news that he is “desirous” and “grief-filled”, his days “full long”, etc. During this time, Pound has translated some Provençal poems and modeled them for his own poems, among which the best one is a 55-line poem called “The Mourn of Life” (1906). Before Pound went to London, he had published some good poems, a poem titled as “A Dawn Song” and published early in the December 1906 issue of Munsey’s Magazine (New York) should be mentioned:

God hath put me here/In earth’s goodly sphere/To sing the song of the day,/A strong, glad song,/If the road be long,/To me fellows in the way. (Pound, 2003, p. 1151)

Although Pound never belongs to any religion, he seems a strong believer of god. But anyway it is no more than an ignorant worship of a young college student. “La Fraisne”, is particular among all the early poems, for although it is mannered and form-conscious, it does have a sense of freshness, in terms of conception rather than of language, and vitality of rhythm. These win it a place among his best work:

She hath called me from mine old ways,/She hath hushed my rancour of council, Bidding me praise/Naught but the wind that flutters in the leaves. She hath drawn me from mine old ways,/Till men say that I am mad; But I have seen the sorrow of men, and am glad,/For I know that the wailing and bitterness are folly. (Pound, 2003, p. 23)

In his early poems, “Cino” and “Na Audiart” collected in A Lume Spento are so marvelous that they have stood the test of time. The subtitle to “Cino” is “Italian Campagna 1309, the open road”, and the poem itself opens out into other worlds: 216 THE MAJOR WESTERN CULTURAL INFLUENCES ON THE INCUBATING PROCESS

Eyes, dreams, lips, and the night goes,…/I will sing of the white birds In the blue waters of heaven,/The clouds that are spray to its sea. (Pound, 2003, p. 24)

At the point of poetic form, “Na Audiart” is a troubadour love song. It is set in the 12th century, Provençe and the plying of strands of sound by the young poet was a great achievement in its time and remains so today:

Broken of ancient pride,/Thou shalt then soften, Knowing, I know not how,/Thou wert once she Audiart, Audiart/For whose fairness once forgave Audiart, Audiart/Que be-m vols mal. (Pound, 2003, p. 28)

In a sense, this poem is a real love song of Pound who expresses his love to Mary Moor with whom Pound ever thought of marriage as a distinct possibility in the near future. No doubt, Pound’s translation of Greek and Provençal love songs provides him a spirit of Romance. So his own love songs are so touching that they can be viewed as the important ones of the world lyrics. In 1908, Pound went to Italy and stayed in Venice, Pavia, and Verona, where he was impressed by people’s worship of Dante Alighieri. During those days, he continued to translate some lyric poems and published some poems of Latin-style or of Provençal-style such as sonnets, “A Villonaud: Ballad of the Gibbet” (1908), “Sestina” (1908), and “Alba Belingalis” (1908). The most important gain for Pound when he traveled in Italy is to be close to the great poet Dante. Because of this, Pound began to think about how to compose a great epic The Cantos (1947). The first Canto is actually a translation of Homer’s Odyssey. Just at this time, Pound had his ambition to compose a great modern epic.

The New Translation Conception and Poetics in the Modern English Version of “The Seafarer” (1911) After translating some ancient Greek and Provenςal lyric poems, Pound translated and published “The Seafarer” in 1911. This translation marks an important change of Pound’s poetics, for it was one of his first major personae. That is to say, Pound employed some modernist conception in dealing with the Old English poems in his modern English version of it. Thus “since its appearance it has been the object of both attacks and defenses and its status as accurate translation has been much disputed” (XIE, 1999, p. 205). At the point of translation faithfulness, many critics complained. From both poetry translation and writing, the version of “The Seafarer” is a typical creative modern sample. Some critics doubted Pound’s ability of understanding Old English and blamed that his version was not faithful to the original and destroyed the Victorian convention of translation and poetry. But some scholars defended Pound’s version and proved that Pound’s Anglo-Saxon studies were very serious. More importantly, in translating this version Pound has presented his creative concepts and emphasizes the characterization of the poem as a “lyric” and his omission of its final section as the Christening addition of clerkly monks, Pound was following through on the standard scholarly interpretation of the day. It can be believed that Pound’s intention was simply to recover what he perceived to be the real, original Anglo-Saxon poem and he believed that his version was as close as any translation can be. In short, Pound’s version of “The Seafarer” can be viewed as the bridge for Pound to change his conventional poetic concepts to modern poetry. The following two sections are on the modernist characters of Pound’s translation and poetry. THE MAJOR WESTERN CULTURAL INFLUENCES ON THE INCUBATING PROCESS 217

Pound’s Recreating the Verse Movement of the Anglo-Saxon In translating “The Seafarer”, Pound experimented with his remaking devices of translation and writing. He tried to recreate the verse movement of the Anglo-Saxon by closely approximating its sound effects and alliterative stress patterns. Pound did not pay much attention to the style of somberness and the people’s soreness, but he did notice the effect and importance of the sound. Just through this translation can the readers understand what the rhythm is like in Pound’s early poems, and how important the sense of rhythm is in some of his late poems. Actually, Pound emphasized more rhythm than rhyme. He has written: “Most so-called prose poetry lacks adequate rhythmic vitality” (as cited in Kenner, 1987, p. 109) and “In fact I am tempted to put it as a brace of axioms for all poetry: when the meter is bad, the language is apt to be poor; when the meter is good enough it will almost drive out all other defects of language” (as cited in Kenner, 1987, p. 109). So Pound emphasized the rhythmic patterns of the original Old English poem. As Hollander (1959) commented:

… Pound’s translation points up some of the basic devices of Anglo-Saxon verse and carries them over into modern English, if not tit for tat at each occurrence, then often one for another, and always with sufficient regularity to make them understood as conventions. (pp. 211-212)

In order to give a simplified version of the Anglo-Saxon rules, here is an explanation of the typical Anglo-Saxon line that is composed of two half-lines, which are separated by a caesura (symbolized by ║). Rhythmically, an Old English poem is characterized as that each half-line has two stressed syllables and an elastic number of unstressed syllables in three basic patterns: / x / x, x / x /, and x / / x, where x stands for one or more unstressed syllables and / stands for one stressed syllable. Other allowable patterns are achieved by combining a secondary stress, \, with the primary stresses and the unstressed syllables. Among the allowable patterns are / x \ / and / / x \. Thus a half-line must have a minimum number of four syllables. Among the few forbidden patterns for a half-line is x x / /. The two half-lines are bound together by alliteration. Pound’s version of “The Seafarer” seeks to overcome the change in the language by reducing the number of unstressed syllables, thus increasing the weight of the lines. To do so, Pound wrote half-lines with fewer than four syllables and half-lines in the pattern x x / /. Pound’s opening is scanned below, indicating some of the forbidden half-lines:

x / x x / \ / \ / x May I for my own self ║song’s truth reckon / x / x x / x / \ Journey’s jargon, ║how I in harsh days / \ x / / Hardship║ endured oft. / x / \ x / x / x Bitter breast-cares ║have I abided, / x x / \ x x / / Known on my keel ║many a care’s hold x / \ / x \ x / / And dire sea-surge ║and there I oft spent / x / \ x x / / Narrow night watch ║night the ship’s head x x / \ x / / x 218 THE MAJOR WESTERN CULTURAL INFLUENCES ON THE INCUBATING PROCESS

While she tossed close to cliffs, ║Coldly x / x afflicted, x / x x / x / My feet were by frost║ benumbed.

Despite the fact that it breaks the rule, Pound’ effort sounds really like the Old English poem. Though Pound’s alliterative effects are sometimes overdone and obtrusive, his main interest in the poem is its essential music and its prosodic movement.

Pound’s Use of Archaisms and Inversions In his translation of “The Seafarer”, Pound’s use of archaisms and inversions is deliberate. He just wanted to adapt his English to the Old English as closely as possible, not trying to assimilate the original to contemporary language. In the opening lines,

MÆAEg ic be me sylfum soðgied wrecan My I for my own self song’s truth reckon, Siþs secgan, hu ic geswincdagum Journey’s jargon, how I in harsh days earfoðhwile oft þrowade, Hardship endured oft. (Apter, 1987, p. 121)

Pound tried to recreate the verse movement of the Anglo-Saxon by closely approximating its sound effects and alliterative stress patterns. He deliberately chose “reckon” to render both the sound and sense of wrecan (“to utter” or “to express”), and the forced alliteration provided by “jargon” in the second line, which is nevertheless a successful imitation of the original cadence. The translating process is closely and self-consciously interwoven with the contextual reality of the poem in all its minutiae of rhythm and sound-pressures, so that Pound’s language cannot but be heavily affected by the experience of the Anglo-Saxon poem, whatever distortion might have result in the process. This is Pound’s method of a heuristic translation: The new version sticks to certain intrinsic qualities of the original, while at the same time brings about the equivalent effects of these qualities in a new poem. Such translations based not so much on “The Seafarer” as a source-text of translation, so on “The Seafarer” as a poem that has been strongly made and can be re-made with a directly matching strength. The process of translation is thus one of closely studying the forces of the original “through their effects” (Pound, 1968b, p. 93), in order to “show where the treasure lies” (Pound, 1968b, p. 209). Though Pound’s alliterative effects are sometimes overdone and obtrusive, his main interest in the poem is in its essential music and its prosodic movement, which he believes to be the embodiment of the poem’s secular heroin in the face of physical harshness, solitary exile, and spiritual anguish. “These motifs of personal alienation and heroism came to have a major importance for Pound’s later development, and the idiom of ‘The Seafarer’ was to reappear in ‘Canto I’ in a translation from Homer’s Odyssey” (XIE, 1999, p. 207). Through the translation of this poem, Pound seemed to have a clear mind for how to view the past from the present. And his creative translation conception has come to an elementary shape at this time.

The Influence of Robert Browning’s Dramatic Monologues on Ezra Pound Robert Browning was one of the poets who solved the problem of how to reform the conventional Victorian THE MAJOR WESTERN CULTURAL INFLUENCES ON THE INCUBATING PROCESS 219 poetry. Abrams (1986) ever commented that Ezra Pound valued him as a major artist and recognized that more than any other 19th century poet (even including Hopkins, it was Browning who energetically hacked through a trail that has subsequently become the main road of the 20th century poetry) (Abrams, 1986, p. 1229). After his first poem Pauline was criticized by John Stuart Mill as being in a “‘morbid state’ of self worship” (Abrams, 1986, p. 1230), Browning turned towards exploring another form more congenial to his genius—the dramatic monologue, which enables the reader, speaker, and poet to be located at an appropriate distance from each other, aligned in such a way that the readers must work through the words of the speaker toward the meaning of the poems themselves. Browning distinguished himself from the Victorian age by reforming his poetic style. The most representative Victorian poets such as Alfred Tennyson or Dante Gabriel Rossetti wrote in the manner of Keats, Milton, Spenser, and of classical poets such as Virgil. Theirs are the central stylistic tradition in English poetry, one which favors “smoothly polished texture and pleasing liquidity of sound” (Abrams, 1986, p. 1233). Browning draws from a different tradition, more colloquial and discordant, a tradition which includes: “The poetry of John Donne, the soliloquies of Shakespeare, the comic verse of the early nineteenth-century poet Thomas Hood, and certain features of the narrative style of Chaucer” (Abrams, 1986, p. 1233). The problem of the subjectivity-objectivity dichotomy in poetry from the Romantic period to the 20th century has exercised many poets throughout their writing careers and is crucial if we are to understand the development of Ezra Pound’s poetry. In the struggle of deciding where to turn, Robert Browning gave Pound a lot of enlightenment. For Robert Browning, the objective poet is concerned with the world perceived as external to the self, to the soul, or to individuality. The poetry that results will of necessity be substantive, projected from himself and distinct. According to Browning (1981), the objective poet chooses to deal with the doings of men, finds his subject matter in the noisy, complex yet imperfect exhibitions of nature in the manifold experience of man around him and in the inexhaustible variety of existence, and finds his audience in the aggregate human mind. The subjective poet, on the other hand, deals in essences, not in empirical, external realities: “Not what man sees, but what God sees—the Ideas of Plato, seeds of creation lying burning on the Divine Hand—it is toward these that he struggles” (Browning, 1981, p. 75). To summarize, the subject of objective poetry is the world and the activity of men in the world, whereas the subject of subjective poetry is the selfhood of the poet. Any careful reader of Pound’s pre-cantos poetry will realize the enormous and enduring influence of Browning in Pound’s early poetry. The more one maps Pound’s poetic development, the more one sees that the path Pound followed was first laid down by Browning in his decade-long search through the 1830s for a way to shake off the subjectivity that is commonly seen in his Romantic forebears. The evidence of Pound’s attachment to Browning can be traced back to the early development of Pound’s poetry. The early publication of Pound shows very clear and immediate affinity to Browning. Many of pound’s early poems demonstrate Browning’s influence. Such poems as “Cino”, “Famam Librosque Cano”, “Marvoil”, “Sestina: Altaforte”, and “Piere Vidal Old” are accomplished exercises, but the skill they display is in large measure ventriloquial. Thus Grieve (1997) concludes in his thesis: “Pound’s career appears to begin at the point that Browning finally reached in the Dramatic Lyrics of 1842, which were published a full ten years after Pauline, the long confessional monodrama in the mold of his Romantic predecessors” (p. 30). 220 THE MAJOR WESTERN CULTURAL INFLUENCES ON THE INCUBATING PROCESS

There are other striking parallels in the careers of the two poets. In 1915, at the age of 30, Pound completed and published two works—“Near Perigord” and Cathay—that, having little in common with each other, have much in common with two of Browning’s equally disparate productions at the same age: Sordello (1840) and Dramatic Lyrics. Like Sordello, “Near Perigord” (and one should also mention here the first drafts of the early Cantos, which were begun in 1915) is the first instance of Pound’s long rumination on and self-reflective dialogue with history, “his questioning of the poet’s role in the world of action, and of his own enterprise in seeking truth outside the self” (Grieve, 1997, p. 31). Cathay, just like Browning’s Dramatic Lyrics, is the first volume of Pound that is accomplished through different speakers or voices in an objective way. Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, to extend the parallel a little further, resembles a number of poems in Browning’s Men and Women (1855)—“Fra Lippo Lippi”, “Chide Roland”, “How It Strikes a Contemporary”, “Andrea del Sarto”, and “Transcendentalism”. Pound insisted on objectification of the poetic activity in his craft. In the two collections A Lume Spento and A Quinzaine for this Yule, Pound’s poetical language, which to borrow Pound’s own phrase, is to “poeticize” (Pound, 1968b, p. 52) his poems. But later, Pound became dissatisfied with the naked confessions and self-centered declarations of his feelings and emotions. He realized to express his senses in an objective way would be more powerful and touching. According to Grieve (1997), “this transition can be proven by his republication and editing of his early poems in A Lume Spento and A Quinzaine for This Yule” (p. 44). Pound owes an initial debt to Browning for the general idea of troubadour personae, but “one of Pound’s most indubitable claims to genuine originality is… his revivification of the Provençal and early Italian poetry” (Grieve, 1997, p. 49). Pound had the ability to synthesize what he had got from the previous works and history and to generate his own opinion. He understood that the misappropriation of the history and the works of the predecessors would lead to banality and spiritual malaise. He put a lot of time in studying the history, the classics, but his novel ideas and originality in poetry really brought into those old subjects a sense of freshness. He made the old subjects new and glittering. When Pound needed a contrast to the Victorian medievalist, he invoked Browning, and so it is not at all surprising that in many of these poems Browning’s presence is strongly felt. Pound thought Browning was a learned person and the one who would guide him away from the Victorian tradition or the out-of-date Romantic banality. What most attracted Pound was Browning’s ability to “get at life” (Pound, 1973, p. 32). In The Spirit of Romance (1910), Browning, like Dante before him, is judged to be a “living man amongst the dead” (Pound, 1968a, p. 6). Dante has shown the medieval world that is ignorant, violent, and dirty, and Browning followed him in displaying the middle ages. Thus Pound (1968b) stressed Browning’s realistic presentation of thirteenth-century Italy and values Browning as “the soundest of all the Victorians” (p. 278), because his is the sole voice in 19th-century English literature. Under Browning’s influence, Pound started to use Provençe as a subject matter, trying to do “what Robert Browning was doing with Renaissance Italy” (Grieve, 1997, p. 64). He employed the Browningesque persona and experimented with the form of dramatic monologue to display medievalism in an objective way. Pound’s medievalism was crucial to the development of his poetry for two reasons: (1) It gave him a subject matter; and (2) It led him gradually towards reality, not the self. This complicated transition occurs simultaneously with the interrelationship between Pound and Yeats, which will be elaborated in the following section. THE MAJOR WESTERN CULTURAL INFLUENCES ON THE INCUBATING PROCESS 221

The Relationship Between Pound and Yeats Unlike the relationship between Pound and Browning, the one between Pound and Yeats is complicated and is in no way unilateral. For Pound, Yeats’ poetics is based on a deep-seated resistance to technical innovation, to the search for new modes of expression or to any attempt to expand the arena of poetry by introducing into it any new subject matter. His whole art is a vision to combat and an edifice to resist all that is fragmentary in the modern condition. However, in Pound’s opinion, the poet should embrace the fragmentary and never take it in a conservative and traditional way. The correspondence and dialogue between Pound and Yeats can be traced back to the late 1900s. They first met probably in 1909. Pound heard of Yeats from the latter’s tour in 1903, and in 1908 he sent Yeats a copy of A Lume Spento, and received word back that it was “charming”. As early as 1909 Pound and Yeats were talking seriously enough about poetry for one of their conversations to last five hours. Pound had a number of qualities that made him attractive to Yeats: (1) He was “young, intelligent, acute as a critic and absolutely independent”; (2) He had some claim to scholarship but none of “the academic’s usual conservatism”; (3) He was respectful to Yeats, whose work he admired, but never “sycophantic”; he was “picturesque”; and (4) Above all, he was serious about poetry (Stead, 1986, p. 13). Yeats had no need for Pound—or rather, he had no obvious need. But he knew that in the eyes of the young he belonged to an earlier age. The establishment of Harriet Monroe’s periodical Poetry provides the first hard evidence of a working relationship between Pound and Yeats. Pound was then able to distinguish poems in the earlier manner and what he called the new Yeats. Pound himself was then in the process of shaping his own style. It is really a tough job to get a clear idea of his own style when facing various stylistic possibilities and to maintain objectivity towards his evaluation of Yeats’ poetry. At that time, Pound was greatly influenced by two men—Yeats and Ford Madox Ford, of which the former belonged to the past while the latter, or exactly the critical attitudes of the latter, is of the future. Ford’s conception that the new age called for a new style went deep into Pound’s heart. Pound was encouraging Yeats to go against with the wishes of his admirers, to disappoint them in the interests of bringing that later Yeats into being. Indeed, Ezra Pound was a man with an extraordinarily accurate eye for the strength and weaknesses in the writing of his contemporaries. Yeats had moved from Pre-Raphaelitism into Symbolism; Pound was able to help him go still further and let him become a poet of the twentieth century. Yeats was bound by the limits set by himself and he could not free himself from “the well-made poem, the isolated self-enclosed unit, into something of epic scope” (Stead, 1986, p. 21). One of the improvements Pound made on the poetry of Yeats can clarify this point. Once Yeats wrote a poem called “Fallen Majesty”, which was about his lover Maud Gonne. When it was handed to Pound, it read as follows:

Although crowds gathered once if she but showed her face, And even old men’s eyes grew dim, this hand alone Like some last courtier at a gipsy camping place Babbling of fallen majesty, records what’s gone. The lineaments, a heart that laughter has made sweet, These, these remain, but I record what’s gone. A crowd Will gather and not know that through its very street Once walked a thing that seemed, as it were, a burning cloud. (Stead, 1986, p. 21) 222 THE MAJOR WESTERN CULTURAL INFLUENCES ON THE INCUBATING PROCESS

In the last line, Pound deleted “as it were” because here it was an obvious filler, trying to make up the iambic hexameter; and the uncertain tone of the poet weakened the beauty and splendor of Maud and hence weakened the whole effect of this poem. Seeing the revised version, Yeats was so angry and irritated that he insisted on the publication of the original poem. Though later he realized the improvement of Pound’s version, he still would not accept that the last line could miss a foot. His later adaptation appeared:

… A crowd Will gather and not know it walks the very street Whereon a thing once walked that seemed a burning cloud. (Stead, 1986, p. 22)

The difference in relation to stylist choice between the two poets shows the different literary attitudes of the two. It is partly a matter of poetic form and partly of what might be called poeticizing, and the two in this case are closely interrelated. Pound thought that the corresponding fault in Yeats’ subjectivity was a tendency to lapse into sentiment. Pound is recognized as an extraordinary force in the development of modern literature. His part in making Eliot and Joyce known is so crucial that it is almost conceivable that without him, neither of them would have been known at all. But with Yeats the case is quite different. Yeats, 20 years older and already famous, did not need Pound’s help publicly. But privately he sought it. He put himself close to Pound, absorbing his influence, inviting, respecting and acknowledging his critical judgments, and knowing that in Pound’s breezy, energetic, confident presence he breathed something of the new age—something fresh, direct, practical, which his own poetry needed if it was to shake off the “dimness and tentativeness of the 1890s” and speak with “a voice that would catch the attention of a new generation” (Stead, 1986, p. 30). Pound was essential to that crucial stage in his development when Yeats returned to lyric poetry after his years with the Abbey Theatre. Yeats’ changing from a symbolist poet to a modernist one saw a historical development. To some extent in syntax, Yeats goes further along the path he had begun to take in the 1890s towards a vernacular norm. But he retains the traditional metrics and rhyme patterns, and the traditional modes, the poems dividing clearly into lyrics and narratives. Yeats and Pound were then at different direction of poetic intention. Yeats, though as genuine a poet had been attracted and touched by the poems of Pound, he just did not have the bravery and courage to conduct experiments and to innovate. Pound’s personae, although they derive from Browning, have very little to do with Yeats’ masks. Pound treated his personae only as the technical devices and used them to “redefine Poetry’s mandate and to redirect the energies of the poem” (Grieve, 1997, p. 77) while Yeats maintained that the mask is actually the link between himself and the outside world. Therefore in Pound’s eyes Yeats belonged to an earlier time, and he could not “make it new”, could not produce what the present age called for. Yeats’ prodigious efforts to make colloquial modern speech fit the conventional line and rhyme patterns led often to supreme eloquence, but as often the labor showed that “the eloquent and the merely labored appeared side by side in the same poem” (Stead, 1986, p. 33). During these years when Pound was assisting Yeats and making Eliot known, he was also experimenting with and developing some devices and techniques for his own poetry composition. None of his poems of this period, taken alone, was destined to make the kind of impact that Eliot’s “Prufrock” did. However, Pound was more open, more public, less secretive, and less self-protective. His experiments were more various; and it was THE MAJOR WESTERN CULTURAL INFLUENCES ON THE INCUBATING PROCESS 223 not until he had conceived of the “rag-bag” of The Cantos, and more important perhaps, acquired Eliot’s method of aggregation and juxtaposition, that there would be a single structure capacious enough to house them all. In Stead’s (1986) opinion, “their variety, together with that unique and therefore unifying energy that came distinctively from Pound the man, was an essential part of the historical drive towards what we now recognize as Modernism” (p. 52).

Conclusions At first, the paper has presented a microcosmic view of the incubating process of pound’s early poetics and the formation of his early poetic style. Those effective elements in the process include the Provençal lyrical poems, popular ballads, Browning’s dramatic monologues, Yeats’ Symbolism, and Old English poems. Pound absorbed different poetic concepts from all of them and transformed his poetry from the conventional Romanticism to the innovative Modernism. It is with such complex influences that Pound finally formed his early poetics. All these different cultural backgrounds and literature inheritance paved the way that Pound was going to follow in shaping his early poetics and his unique style and gradually led Pound into the grandiose palace of Modernism. A close examination of Pound’s early poems has revealed an important fact that most of his early poems are based on his translations of the different cultural classics. That is to say, Pound’s poetry is very closely related to his translation. In Pound’s works, it is hard to distinguish his translations and poems. According to Pound, there is no clear demarcation between translation and literary creation; and translation is a stimulating agent for one’s literary creation, especially for poetry writing. Pound’s translation has stimulated and enforced his poetry and his poetics, and his poetry, in turn, has enhanced his translation. So Pound’s poetics is basically a translation-poetics.

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