Durham E-Theses The Impersonal Modes of Ezra Pound and Wallace Stevens BAKER, JACK How to cite: BAKER, JACK (2014) The Impersonal Modes of Ezra Pound and Wallace Stevens, Durham theses, Durham University. Available at Durham E-Theses Online: http://etheses.dur.ac.uk/10773/ Use policy The full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-prot purposes provided that: • a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in Durham E-Theses • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders. Please consult the full Durham E-Theses policy for further details. Academic Support Oce, Durham University, University Oce, Old Elvet, Durham DH1 3HP e-mail: [email protected] Tel: +44 0191 334 6107 http://etheses.dur.ac.uk The Impersonal Modes of Ezra Pound and Wallace Stevens Jack Baker Submitted for a Phd Department of English Literature Durham University February 2014 Statement of Copyright The copyright of this thesis rests with the author. No quotation from it should be published without the author’s prior written consent and information derived from it should be acknowledged. The Impersonal Modes of Ezra Pound and Wallace Stevens Abstract This thesis examines the impersonal modes refined by Ezra Pound and Wallace Stevens. It argues that these major poets, commonly placed at opposite ends of the spectrum of modernism, share important formal and thematic preoccupations. Each evolves an impersonal sensibility designed to free the poet from the limitations of his merely private associations and social circumstances, and to licence extraordinary ambitions: Pound’s paradiso terrestre and Stevens’ supreme fiction constitute unifying artistic responses to a shaken, fragmenting and sceptical culture. Supreme fictions are not in vogue, and both poets have been chastised for the didacticism, elitism, or even pretension latent in their poetic theories: it is argued that their reach exceeds their grasp. But this thesis is not a critique of theory; it is a study of praxis. It explores the techniques of both poets’ greatest poems, and proposes the impersonal mode as one reason for their uncanny power. Chapter I explores poetic impersonality under three headings: “Inheritance”; “Sensibility”; and “Technique”. Chapter II contrasts the irregular progression of Pound’s early verse with the eerie precision of Stevens’ Harmonium. Chapter III traces the expansion of Pound’s impersonal voice through A Draft of XXX Cantos, and argues that “The Man with the Blue Guitar” is of crucial importance to the development of Stevens’ later style. Chapter IV argues that, in the plangent and elemental forms of Cantos XLVII and XLIX, and in the rôle of the “possible poet” explored in “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction”, Pound and Stevens come closest to fulfilling their early desires for a transcendent and autonomous rhetoric. Chapter V finds each poet plunged into crisis, toppling the fleeting consolations of Canto XLVII and “Notes”, and requiring new, more urgent and more expansive poetic modes. Pound’s Pisan Cantos, in their search for an idiom newly resistant to severe external pressures, are comparable to “The Auroras of Autumn” and “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven”, which reveal Stevens’ own bout of intense creative uncertainty. Chapter VI shows how the enduringly impersonal techniques of Pound’s and Stevens’ final poems – which preserve, on their surface, a grammatical and lexical detachment – increasingly come to register deeper emotions. The effect of subduing personal experience to an impersonal aesthetic is to enhance the poignancy of the very emotions and frailties that are all but veiled. Contents Acknowledgements i Texts and Abbreviations ii Preface 1 Chapter 1: The Impersonal Mode - As Inheritance 3 - As Sensibility 15 - As Technique 23 Chapter 2: Beginnings Pound: From Personae to Hugh Selwyn Mauberley 41 Stevens: Harmonium 75 Chapter 3: Finding a Form Pound: A Draft of XXX Cantos 103 Stevens: Poetry and Painting, “The Man with the Blue Guitar” 125 Chapter 4: The Vision Achieved Pound: XI New Cantos and The Fifth Decad of Cantos 148 Stevens: Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction 160 Chapter 5: Pressures and Accommodations Pound: The Pisan Cantos 184 Stevens: “The Auroras of Autumn”, “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven” 213 Chapter 6: Reckonings Pound: Rock-Drill, Thrones, Drafts & Fragments 231 Stevens: The Rock and the Late Poems 250 Conclusion 266 Bibliography 269 I Acknowledgements Gareth Reeves supervised this thesis with care, patience and good-humour. His expertise and sagacity were invaluable. Mary de Rachewiltz read an early paper of mine on the Pisan Cantos, and offered generous comments and encouragement. Annabel Haynes, John Clegg and Serena Gosden-Hood – fellow students of English – made the work less daunting and solitary. Their conversation has refined my approach to poetry, and their friendship has been a delight. Mike Johnson offered numerous insights into American cultural history. William Southwell-Wright gave candid advice on the more prosaic aspects of academe. And Nick Wellesley Hoggard’s Falstaffian wit, appetites and intuitions have been a continual source of comfort and inspiration. The expertise, generously shared, of Jonathan Clinch in twentieth-century classical music and of Laura Dearlove in the philosophy of aesthetics broadened my understanding of the modernist movement and helped me to avoid some of the more reductive and doctrinaire assumptions of modern literary theory. Mihaela Ionescu explained Chinese ideograms, and leavened the final stages of the thesis with timely donations of homemade cake and Italian smoked cheese. The thesis is dedicated to my parents, Helen and Steve, without whose love and support it would not have been possible. II A Note on Texts Except where otherwise noted, I use the following texts for Pound’s and Stevens’ poetry: Pound, Ezra. The Cantos of Ezra Pound. New York: New Directions, [1996]. ---. Poems and Translations. Ed. Richard Sieburth. New York: Lib. of Amer., 2003. Stevens, Wallace. Collected Poetry and Prose. Ed. Frank Kermode and Joan Richardson. New York: Lib. of Amer., 1997. Parenthetical references are used for works by Pound and Stevens. Secondary sources are footnoted. References to Pound’s Cantos are given as canto number/page number, e.g. (XVII/77). Italics distinguish Stevens’ volumes – The Man with the Blue Guitar – from the title poems: “The Man with the Blue Guitar”. Abbreviations Pound: ABC ABC of Reading. London: Faber, 1968. GK Guide to Kulchur. London: Peter Owen, 1952. L The Letters of Ezra Pound: 1907-1941. Ed. D. D. Paige. London: Faber, 1982. LE Literary Essays of Ezra Pound. Ed. T. S. Eliot. London: Faber, 1954. PT Poems and Translations. Ed. Richard Sieburth. New York: Lib. of Amer., 2003. SP Selected Prose 1909-1965. Notes and introd. William Cookson. London: Faber, 1978. SR The Spirit of Romance. Introd. Richard Sieburth. New York: New Directions, 2005. Stevens: CPP Collected Poetry and Prose. New York: Lib. of Amer., 1997. L Letters of Wallace Stevens. Ed. Holly Stevens. Berkeley: U of California P, 1996. OP Opus Posthumous. New York: Knopf, 1957. 1 Preface Pound and Stevens have long been estranged in reputation, their first major critics having offered accounts of each poet that are difficult to reconcile. Hugh Kenner’s Pound is the quintessential modernist, radical, restless and experimental; Harold Bloom’s Stevens is a direct inheritor of Romanticism, pursuing a belated version of the sublime. These designations were cemented by Marjorie Perloff’s influential essay “Pound/Stevens: Whose Era?” (1982). In Perloff’s reading, Pound is in tune with the energies of language and the challenges of modernity, whereas Stevens is an etiolated philosopher, whose abstract speculations lack consequence and vitality. This is, of course, a partisan view. But the assumptions underlying Perloff’s partiality – that Stevens’ poetry of ideas is wholly at odds with Pound’s tactile, experimental verse – still enjoy critical currency. Pound’s political aberrancies have received ample scrutiny, but discussions of his verse technique are still dominated by loyal exegetes, who are skilled in pattern-seeking and reference-hunting, but who habitually decline to place his poetry under genuine evaluative pressure. Meanwhile, critics of Stevens too often preoccupy themselves with matters of theory and epistemology, reading him as a philosopher-poet, whose technical achievements are of only incidental significance to the ideas explored in his work. I hope to challenge these reductive expositions by focusing on the techniques common to the impersonal modes that each poet evolved. Both adopt personae; find meaning in borrowed attitudes and voices; toy with perspective and narrative structure; and substitute the linear accumulation of sense in a poem for irregular leaps and vivid juxtapositions. And both subvert the expectations of the lyric “I”, deploying discontinuous arguments and perceptions even when the grammar and syntax imply a single, unified speaker. In Pound’s and Stevens’ finest poems, where these techniques are most strongly felt, effects are achieved which challenge conventional attitudes to the two poets. The lyric sections of The Cantos outstrip mere bricolage, achieving a conceptual subtlety vital to Pound’s paradisal vision. And Stevens’ mature verse deliberately deals with truths beyond philosophical inquiry, as the quiddities of poetic expression become the only possible response to an elusive and irreducible reality. The dominant theory of impersonal poetry is T.S. Eliot’s. His principles, become canonical, have been adopted as the yardstick with which to measure other poets – even poets radically unlike him. I do not wish to challenge Eliot’s place in the modernist matrix by subordinating his theories to those advanced by Pound and Stevens.