1This book took shape in the wake of the 19th International Ezra Pound Conference in 2001, with the decision of gathering a few select articles around the problematic of referentiality. As the conference unfolded at the Sorbonne, Professor Georges Molinié’s opening words about Pound, but also about Louis-Ferdinand Céline, acquired increasing resonance: intrinsically linked to the aesthetic issues raised by Modernism and Pound’s poetic practice, and to the ethical debate around his political commitment and lasting allegiance to Fascism, the question of the materials used in his poems and the modes of this insertion of found elements in the poetic text became more and more acute. If there remained a way to follow Pound’s exhortation to “make it new” in the field of Pound studies, it seemed indeed to be by dealing with the radical coherence of his work, rather than rehashingits apparent discontinuities. This meant going beyond the scholarly task of identification, though it has allowed to recognize the highly complex texture of Pound’s work, so as to wonder about the poetic implications of these complexities. Even if a great deal of Pound’s poems could be deemed hermetic, they are not undecipherable, but on the contrary function as ciphers, constantly encoding and sending their readers back to some more or less hidden set of referents. This is probably the reason why the issue of referentiality is often hinged on the problems raised by discrepancy, distortion and appropriation, and the ways these strategies are successively and/or simultaneously worked out: they affect all fields of the poetic work, from the poet’s self-positioning in tradition, to his dialogue with other arts and artists, and to his ambiguous relations to historical facts and documents. Some of the questions thus raised by Pound’s work could be summarized as follows:
- 1 On this, see my study of Pound’s definitions of tradition in Ezra Pound and William Carlos William (...)
2It is a well known fact that Pound was acutely aware of his position in the development of literature and self-conscious about the way he approached past traditions. The ambivalence of the very concept of tradition is at the heart of his work since he both considers it as this inherited lot, whose coherence and prestige oppresses at the same time as it stimulates the poet, and as a corpus to be constituted and manipulated for later generations to learn from. The articles gathered in the first part of this volume deal with the issue of the success and/or failure of this project: Ezra Pound’s metamorphic tradition stands as an example both to imitate and to renege. His encyclopedic knowledge remains striking to every observer of his work, but it appears here that his selective work is more akin to a radicalization of personal taste than to any quest for a poetic canon. The contrast between his ordering and unifying mind and the sometimes contradictory eclecticism of his critical thinking is perhaps most obvious in his treatment of the Chinese tradition and in his use of Fenollosa’s work on the Chinese ideogram. Many of the concepts Pound pretends to extract from his study of the Chinese are in fact elements made up to fit his incipient theory of the vortex. In the same way, translation works for Pound as a critical and fully poetic enterprise: assuming that translating establishes a dialogue between the great minds, Pound uses texts, from the Chinese and the Provençal in particular, to illustrate his notion of logopoeia (in no way a translation but a transfer). Consequently Pound finds in his image of Robert Browning the definition of the poet and of the poem that will dominate the genesis of the Cantos: the poet would be a rag picker whose task is to mend the tatters of history and turn them into the beautiful fabric of a didactic, critical, epic poem. The arbitrariness of Pound’s approach transpires in his harsh criticism of Portuguese poet Camoens and in his enthusiastic extolling of the troubadours. However in most cases all those poets from whom he borrows are but personae, masks for the poet that he has willfully fabricated to suit his own purposes and which do not necessarily correspond to anything but a solipsistic conception of tradition. All the pieces of Pound’s encyclopedic jigsaw puzzle seem to compose a self-portrait.1
3And it is this self-portrait that we are reading today and trying to integrate into our conception and practice of poetry. The questions Jean-Michel Rabaté raises in his introduction about Pound’s institutionalization and the distinction Bob Perelman makes between pedagogy and initiation in defining Pound’s didacticism open onto a necessary reassessment of the whole work: against canonization, which is nothing but another way of dismissing the stimulating problematic of Pound’s work, the mode of critical homage attempts to explicate—and maybe explain—the need for Poundian readings, for analysis instead of the iteration of preconceived positive as well as negative conclusions. It is in this context that Peter Nicholls’s reconsideration of “Thrones,” and Andrew Eastman’s work on the Poundian revision of the epic voice’s status and forms are inscribed: whereas the former focuses on the issue of authority raised by Pound’s monetary preoccupations, the latter underlines the intrinsic links Pound makes us see between the invention of poetic voice and idiosyncratic modes of reorganizing history. Such reflections coalesce in Burton Hatlen’s comparison of Pound’s Cantos and Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project: in their attempts to embrace the condition of fragmentation in order to attain a form of truth and to recover the historical moment, both try to come to terms with the world and build modes of appraising poetry’s referent for the future. Thus examples of Pound’s ambivalent inheritance are to be found in Charles Rezni-koff’s archive work, as shown by Fiona McMahon, and in Geoffrey Hill’s attachment to “seeking the root in justice,” as apparent in Jennifer Kilgore’s article. In this context, Pound’s “legibility today,” to take up Perelman’s phrase, remains a central issue as readers grapple with the Cantos as a reference poem for the 20th century.
4According to Jerome Rothenberg in Revolution of the Word (xviii), 1913 is the year of three major breakthroughs for all American artists including Pound: Imagism, the Armory Show and the publication of Gertrude Stein’s Cubist texts in Alfred Stieglitz’s Camera Work. Imagism is mentioned in every anthology as Pound’s provocative manifesto to promote young poets—perhaps more as a poetics than Vorticism, which however signals the real turn in Pound’s conception of the poem as the locus for the elaboration of a transgeneric aesthetics. The relation to other art media is in general problematic, and in Pound’s case it is informed by a close collaboration with visual artists at the same time as by ekphrastic attempts, such as his reading of the bas-reliefs of the Tempio Malatestiano, or his interpretations of Gaudier-Brzseska’s sculptures and drawings. Along with Stein’s literary Cubism, Pound’s move towards artistic referents is to be inscribed in the wider context of a poetic revolution seeking the energies for its renewal outside the confines of its medium. As he takes up the inheritance of the Italian Renaissance, makes Whistler the forerunner of 20th-century art and gathers artists around his Rebel Art Centre, Pound lays out the ground of his “little gang.” At the same time he defines the theoretical roots of his artistic movement by adopting T.E. Hulme’s anti-humanism and his machinism. To fit the shapes and structures of the industrial age, art must become as precise and rigorous as the blueprints of engineers and architects. Wyndham Lewis’s graphic experimentations for Timon of Athens or his representations of the big city correspond to Pound’s demand for sharp delineation. Vorticism is presented in the first issue of Blast as a movement opposing Marinetti’s Futurism, but it also glorifies energy and dynamics and produces very similar experiments in the representation of motion. To Pound the Vorticist artist par excellence is Henri Gaudier-Brzseska, the sculptor of his Hieratic Head, whose schematic features, geometric forms and sexual dynamics fit both the severity and violence of Vorticism. With Gaudier-Brzseska, A Memoir, Pound writes the Vorticist canto which is not in The Cantos: combining Pound’s criticism, Gaudier’s letters, excerpts from exhibition catalogues, and photographs it is the multifaceted, controversial, didactic text Pound aims at writing. Moreover it gives keys to the other cantos, expressing the traumatic shock of war and death, building the mythic voice which is to become Pound’s trademark, eventually formulating the consequences of modernity for Pound. The poet is forced to admit to his involvement in the world and to this world’s influence on his work. Gaudier-Brzseska, A Memoirmarks the turning point when Pound’s poetry becomes inexorably political and when art starts being seen for its propagandist potential. The first Vorticism was an opposition against the involvement of Futurism in politics, but from then on Pound will adopt many of Marinetti’s strategies such as aggressiveness in tone, hammering repetitions and didacticism. The work Pound did with contemporary artists leads to the definition of two poetics for modernity. He sees the artist as the agent that will give them the means for their poetic revolutions. In art, poets are to seek and find the ways of dealing with a modern world they see as empty, and deprived of any transcending human action. Beside a dynamic approach to the poem and the notion of occasional poetry, the work of artists provides Pound with new conceptions of the poem as montage. Using outside elements such as quotes, illustrations, in short what is subsumed for Pound under the tag of “ideograms,” viewing the poem as art and as manifesto, conceiving it, to take up Williams’s words, as a “machine made of words” generates the texture of the Cantos. As a “graph of consciousness” (Perloff 867), the poem is in the perpetual process of being written, both making and reflecting the modern world. But of course, the problem remains that between the world and its poetic reflection the poet may become a distorting mirror.
5This dialogue between Pound and the artist is thus one that informs the work and functions as a referent to be processed by the poem: Pound’s assessment and integration of Gaudier’s work is a homage as well as a projection, a Poundian “memoir” (Helen M. Dennis) and an elegy (Christine Froula), whereas his criticism of Adrian Stokes more obviously shows the discrepant inscription of the self in the Poundian approach to the contemporary arts (Richard Read). Richard Sieburth’s analysis of Pound’s take on Guido Cavalcanti underlines the matrix of Pound’s processes of appropriation of the arts’ breakthroughs. Be it with Surrealism (Daniel Albright) or Vortography (Rebecca Beasley), Pound’s method has much to do with Duchamp’s strategy of the ready made: as Marjorie Perloff demonstrates it, Pound’s aesthetic referent is of content as well as structure, reworking the complex techniques of arrangement and significant juxtaposition.
6In fact, Pound’s procedures in the Cantos can all be subsumed under the category of a documentary method: the modern world is expressed through an ever changing array of historical texts, economic data and sociological questions which the poet cannot ignore. Pound, always in search of dominant posture for the poet in the world, deplores the decay of civilizational values and the rise of the economic as financial monetary manipulation; the society he describes is gnawed at the core by usury, the illegitimate use of money and words. The urban landscapes of London and Paris compound to form an inhospitable world, to which the bucolic beauty of the Italian Riviera is to be preferred. However, and paradoxically, the elements Pound deems to be arguments in his demonstration of evil are lifted from their contexts; rather than quoted they are montaged to compose the heterogeneous texture of the Cantos; and with them and for the sake of art, economics, history and politics enter the poem intentionally to make it a didactic instrument of social change, actually to construct it as the complex deep structure of the Modernist text. The links between The Cantos and Pound’s theoretical statements along with his broadcasts for Radio Roma in fascist Italy are one example in this direction. Because the media are diverse and the modes of discourse seem heterogeneous, interpreting and rationalizing Pound’s work as a whole appears as difficult, impossible, or even unnecessary. However the chronological development of Pound’s thinking and writing goes through phases of discovery in the fields of economics and history and leads to a didactic project. Pound’s reading of history must be seen as the illustration of the economic theories he believes in and consequently as a tool in his political revolution. There is a dialectical move from reflection to action. Pound’s Fascism and anti-Semitism are parts of his ideological rewriting of history which he presents as revolutionary but which may appear to us as basically manipulative. Douglas and Gesell’s theories are the mere starting points for a theory with which Pound wants to convince. Based on the concept of usura, Pound’s vision borrows from varied and sometimes contradictory sources (Douglas’s notion of moneyed interests, the Jewish conspiracy invented by the Protocols, Fascist journalist Beltramelli’s vision of Renaissance banking, etc.). Through selection, Pound progressively turns his cantos into political manifestos, some of them being broadcasts, and starts serving a highly idiosyncratic ideology. Yet as he tries to establish his vision of the world and to define the materials for his poetry, Pound constantly undermines his own credibility: his ideas are hammered in obsessively through the repetition of obscure notions hidden behind a semantic code. In this, Pound forgets the basic aims of the propagandist’s work (and incidentally of the poet’s): the text is an instrument for communication. Responding to the need to integrate history and its corollary fields into the modern poem, Pound’s historicism corresponds to a specific conception of time, in which chronology is to be replaced by the logical order imposed by the genius’s mind. Diversity and discontinuity do not matter and are fused into a timeless unity—that which he calls the “cosmos of souls” (SP “I Gather the Limbs of Osiris” 28). The risk is to produce a monotonous vision of history. Paradoxically, Pound’s unifying concept of usura contributes to conveying a fragmented vision of history in which violent breaks and upheavals dominate. Pound’s timeless, fragmented and fragmenting vision of history is characterized by the tension between his ideological aspirations and his nostalgia for mythic eras. Political choices imply poetic choices in Pound: with Pound’s usura, the very negation of contemporary creation produces the conditions for a new poetic architecture, whose coherence is to be found as a substratum, in the very praxis that underpins Pound’s theoretical “I cannot make it cohere” (Cantos 810). The didactic project of the Cantos is served by a language whose usury is denounced, whose objectives are undermined by opaqueness, whose result is an aporetic encoding of the world.
7These are some of the assumptions underpinning Christine Savinel’s reflection on the tension between “présenta,” in all its authoritarian as well as mystical thrust, and “presentation,” the destructured mimesis of the Cantos. The issue is best examplified in the controversial “Pisan Cantos,” whose text (Mark Byron) and sources (James Kraus) still remain to be explored. The question of Pound’s political involvement, tantamount in the consideration of his significance today, finds new expression and response in Leon Surette’s examination of his relation to Proudhon and in Philip Grover’s assessment of his agrarian tendencies. The oscillation between dogmatic involvement and anonymous impersonality in statement is what informs Pound’s documentary method according to David Ten Eyck and leads to Stephen Fender’s comparison between Pound’s techniques of investigation and information and the contemporary practices of American journalism.
CODA
Two boys went to Harvard. One stayed home afterward, and became an insurance executive. The other went abroad, and became a banker and publisher. Both wrote poetry.
Two boys went to Penn. One stayed home afterward and became a physician. The other went abroad, and became Ezra Pound.
Stevens: Eliot. Williams: Pound. It is as neat as a laboratory experiment. (Kenner516)
8Hugh Kenner, in The Pound Era, underlines the specificity of Ezra Pound, as a poet and as a person. His comparison indirectly thematizes the issue of ref erentiality, isofar as Pound seems in the end to refer but to himself. The poem thus produced is the culmination of a complex and total project which starts with a tentative break from Romanticism, develops into the genesis of Modernism to lay the foundations for post modernity. It is the aim of this collective reading of Pound’s poetry and continued examination of his methods and their inscription against and in the poem and the world to provide readers of Pound and of modernism with detailed analysis and stimulating reflection on the poetry and its significance—in short an invitation to revisit the Cantos, both as referential and as reference.