“I am perhaps didactic; so in a sense, or in different senses are Homer, Dante, Villon, and Omar… It’s all rubbish to pretend that art isn’t didactic. A revelation is always didactic. Only the aesthetes since 1880 have pretended the contrary, and they aren’t a very sturdy lot.” Letter to Felix E. Schelling, 8 July 1922. (SL 1 80)
1Better than anyone, Pound knew the truth of the French proverb: Nul n’est prophète en son pays. He learned it the hard way. This may be one reason why he spent most of life abroad, an American exile who only came back to the US in literal chains, soon to be institutionalized in a mental hospital. All this has been too often rehearsed, but I still like to provoke Pound sympathizers and enemies alike by saying quite publicly that I find him more interesting, not less, just because he allowed himself to be tempted by the lure and the lies of Italian Fascism. It would take books to define precisely the nature of Pound’s Fascism, its mixture of embarrassing ignorance as to the real nature of Il Duce’s totalitarianism, of populist avant-gardism aligning him with the “left” within the party coupled with regressive reveries mistaking a totalitarian corporate state for a resurrection of Renaissance patronage. If no-one can excuse Pound’s drift to the right, especially after the war, his compromised position nevertheless forces any reader to deal with crucial points of ideology-critique. No reader can forget the absolute need to assess in parallel ways the ethics, the politics along with the language.
2How badly did Pound want to be a prophet and not merely a poet? Seen from his old alma mater, the University of Pennsylvania, it looks as if he was resurfacing (“Pound back on the map”) as a poet and as a poet only, with due accounts of why he could never be accepted as a prophet. For it is now possible to teach Pound’s œuvre at various levels, graduate and undergraduate alike, and no one would make the assumption that you are a Fascist or an anti-Semite if you include Pound’s name in a reading list. This was not the case ten years ago, as I could witness first hand, and this evolution is positive. However, if Pound’s photographs still adorn the walls of the English department at Penn, no hall, no building, no room in the university was ever named after him; nothing in Philadelphia at all. To be sure, Penn has a yearly “Ezra Pound prize” that crowns students’ efforts at creative poetic translation, but it is endowed with severely limited funds.
3When in July 2001 the usual discussion about the site of the next conference took place at the conclusion of the Paris conference which this collection memorializes, I was asked in a somewhat impromptu manner to defend the choice of Philadelphia. The other option was Hailey, Idaho, the city in which Pound had been born, to leave it forever before he was one year old. The Hailey group had come well prepared, they showed slides of serial birthday cakes and of Hemingway’s life-size statue (after Pound’s birth, Hailey had had to wait for Hemingway’s suicide to reconnect with American letters) while I failed lamentably in my attempt at improvising a captiously touristy picture of Philadelphia. In desperation, I decided to enliven the atmosphere by presenting a spurious scoop: I declared that I had found obscene graffiti in the men’s room of the old Fine Arts library (the beautiful Victorian building designed by Frank Furness) that were undoubtedly in Pound’s hand, one of them signed “R. Mutt.” This might suggest links between the enigmatic signature scrawled on Marcel Duchamp’s urinal and Pound’s younger years. If rare giggles greeted this fabrication, my weak joke could only antagonize traditional Poundians. My deliberate anachronism spanned ten years (Pound left Penn’s graduate program in 1907 with an MA in English and Comparative Literature but also an incomplete and never to be finished thesis on Lope de Vega; Duchamp’s practical joke against the organizers of the Independents’ show in New York that has so momentous consequences for the history of contemporary art was performed in 1917) but was underpinned by a genuine question: Why had Duchamp signed his urinal with this name, why had he sent it from Philadelphia? Of course in 1917, Pound was drafting his first cantos, and already dissatisfied with London, was preparing his next move to Paris; and among the numerous pseudonyms he had already used in his journalistic career, there never had been a Richard Mutt from Philadelphia. Inevitably, the majority of the audience voted for Hailey as the next Poundian venue. The distance from Philadelphia felt by those specialists of Pound who identify most with his life and personal symbols is not new. It is exactly parallel to the distance manifested by the city and the university in which Pound began his career.
4I had not chosen Duchamp’s urinal totally at random. What had always struck me in the apparently unaccountable decision to use Philadelphia as the sender’s home was that it looked as if Duchamp had anticipated that his works would find a place of honor in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, to the point that he worked during the last ten years of his life on the construction of his last piece, Étant Donnés, with a particular room in the Philadelphia Museum of Art in view.
5Duchamp’s posthumous Philadelphian enshrining, in spite of all his radical gestures of provocation and parody, contrasts significantly with the fate of what is, next to the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s extraordinarily rich collections, an unrivalled private collection, the Barnes foundation located in Merion, a very close suburb of Philadelphia. It is tempting to allegorize the divide since it is clear that Pound’s sympathies went to Barnes and that he would probably remain suspicious of the way the city museum houses the rebel’s works.
6Besides having both graduated from Penn, Barnes and Pound had many features in common, especially in their impatience and unpredictability, in their relentless energy that would at time erupt in violent abuse and at times make them create new constellations of talent. Both shared a visual insight that eschewed discursive means and a talent for alienating people, especially when they were stuffy and pretentious: this happened to Pound who as a graduate student failed to humor Professors like Schelling and Penniman (now honored by a number of official rooms and lobbies in various buildings, including a Penniman library in the English department), which led him to a disguised exclusion from the graduate program he had been pursuing—a fateful decision, a true felix culpa without which he might never have become the poet he turned out to be—and it happened often to Barnes who fought in due time not only against the hierarchy of Penn professors but also against the trustees of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. It is no surprise to see Pound lavishing extravagant praise on Barnes when the latter opened his Merion museum and published his magnum opus The Artin Painting in 1925:
Not only has Monsieur Barnes spent a great deal of money on paintings by dead and living painters, and spent it with great intelligence, but he has put these pictures in a gallery open to serious members of the public, and provided instructors for those who are bewildered by being introduced to so much all at once. […] And as his gallery is open as a school, he obviously does not intend it simply as cold storage: any fool can see that he wants painting to exist in America, on a par with, and ultimately above the level of painting in Europe. Such a man is worth more to the country than 6000 Calvin Coolidges. (quoted in Greenfeld 110)
7What rings typically Poundian here is an immediate appreciation of Barnes’ momentous decision to turn his collection not into a private museum but into a teaching institution based upon principles laid out by Dewey Like Barnes, Pound never ceased asserting pedagogical priorities (with a political twist, quite visible in the article quoted) and soon realized that no extant institution would accept his own views—thus, like the Barnes foundation at Merion, the “Ezuversity” had to start at Rapallo and later become the loose circle of disciples visiting regularly among the inmates of St. Elizabeths hospital. Among the many projects Barnes had of linking his own foundation with Penn, it is interesting to note that it was the same Penniman, then a provost, who objected to Barnes’ amazingly generous offer. Barnes had plans to turn his collection to the university with the view of opening an arboretum and a School of Fine Arts almost entirely funded by his fortune.1 This rejection led to Barnes’s decision to pursue a totally original, if ultimately self-defeating and badly managed, institutional project. In this article, Pound was right in foreseeing that American art would rise above European art, but it would take another war to make this dream become a new reality,inwhich capital, power and networking had more influence than the rising level of education. But Pound’s prophetic view of America was by then framed by the wall of St. Elizabeths hospital.
- 2 I have developed this in James Joyce and the Politics of Egoism (194-97).
8If significant parallels between the careers and personalities of Pound and Barnes are unmistakable, it is also curious to note that the state of the once proud “Pound industry” and the once arrogant Barnes Foundation have reached a similar disarray. The P.C. wars of the nineties have diminished the expectations of PhD students who would want to specialize in Pound in American universities, the new editions of variorum Cantos or of the drafts and manuscripts housed in the Beinecke Library at Yale have been postponed sine die. Next to the thriving Joyce industry, for which the discovery of new drafts notebooks is immediately meaningful because the availability of the James Joyce Archive published by Garland has forced a new genetic literacy upon Joyceans,2 a would-be Poundian will only rely on Garland’s facsimile reprint of the works in the order of their publication. Similarly, Barnes’ Foundation, because it let its capital erode and had prevented exchanges or new acquisitions and because it lost a few lawsuits against its neighbors, is now deeply in debt and will soon have to make a hard choice between compromising on its statutes (which include the presence of African American professors from Lincoln University as members of the board of directors) and either selling some painting or altogether relocating in central Philadelphia to become a museum like the others (a situation to which Barnes vehemently objected). New developments are nevertheless eagerly expected in both domains.
- 3 See George Steiner’s Introduction to Benjamin’s The Origin of the German Tragic Drama 9-11.
9Thus, the morality of this rapid parallel is that whenever we observe the instutionalization of an individual’s “collection,” be it a series of masterpieces of the visual arts or a literary work, this often repeats the founder’s mistakes and contradictions. This is why it is so important to reopen Pound’s works now so as to contextualize them in different connections, frameworks, the oretical discourses. Recently, J. M. Coetzee made what is an important point when he compared the chaos of notes left by Walter Benjamin with Pound’s Cantos. It might be worth stressing that Benjamin’s essays and fragments share with Pound’s works the distinction of being extremely allusive and learned while neither author saw their research authenticated or accepted by universities—like Pound’s various attempts at having his edited volumes of poems or critical essays accepted as a substitute PhD by Penn, which all failed. Benjamin’s own thesis on German baroque drama (Trauerspiel) was not accepted by his supervisors in Frankfurt university.3 Both were forced to forge ahead on their own.
10Benjamin appears indispensable to us today above all because his central obsession was to define modernity without having to believe in the myth of progress understood as a straightforward historical process. He shares this with Pound, even if both of them have rejected different models of “progress,” Benjamin taking distances with Adorno’s neo-Marxist historical dialectics while Pound leaves behind any teleology when he takes Confucian China and 12th century Provence as stable points of reference. Coetzee’s impatience with the Benjamin cult makes him denounce the latter’s contradictions which then leads him to a comparison with Pound. I might add that both writers follow the principle of a cross-historical “ideogrammic method,” a method of poetic composition consisting in the juxtaposition of vivid particulars or splintered images whose assemblages evoke concepts in the mind of the reader. Even if the analogy with Chinese characters has no philological validity (no ideogram is composed of pictograms representing simple objects whose union illustrates an idea, as Fenollosa had claimed) this grammatological foundation myth rhymes well with Benjamin’s central contention that all sorts of “traces” can be seen, read in material objects. Traces lead the reader like a detective to the comprehension of what always appears as the scene of a crime. Thus Benjamin could be glossing Pound’s main insight when he writes to Adorno: “The concept of the trace is defined and determined philosophically in opposition to the concept of the aura” (Correspondence 290).
11Here is how Coetzee compares the two writers:
From a distance, Benjamin’s magnum opus is curiously reminiscent of another great ruin of twentieth century literature, Ezra Pound’s Cantos. Both are the issue of years of jackdaw reading. Both are built out of fragments and quotations, and adhere to the high-modernist aesthetics of image and montage. Both have economic ambitions and economists are presiding figures (Marx in one case, Gesell and Douglas in the other). Both authors have investments in antiquarian bodies of knowledge whose relevance to their own times they overestimate. Neither knows when to stop. And both were in the end consumed by the monster of fascism, Benjamin tragically, Pound shamefully. (33)
- 4 Wilhelm 153, and Carpenter
12If the tone is harsh and the indictment severe, Coetzee’s comparison is illuminating because it refuses to exploit the current fascination for Benjamin as way of reducing or salvaging Pound. Like Benjamin, Pound remained above all a paradoxical teacher, an educator in whose values we will not necessarily believe. Pound is an Erzieher, like Schopenhauer for Nietzsche (the German word keeps the etymological root of “guidance” in “education” without going too far in the direction of “der Führer” or of “Il Duce”!). This is why Nietzsche, who had paid his respect to his mentor, had to move out of Schopenhauer as fast as he could. What could not be accepted in Pound’s consistent educational project by Professors like Penniman is similar to what Adorno saw lacking in Benjamin’s Arcades project: let us call it simply “theory”—in other words, a meta-language based on universal principles, a discursive justification of their research project. It is therefore not a coincidence that Pound was the only graduate student who was flunked in Penniman’s graduate class precisely devoted to the “history of literary criticism.” He adds quite rightly that the paradox is that he was the only student who was interested in the subject: one explains the other.4 Theory understood in that sense works in similar ways for Barnes, Benjamin and Pound: it is a discourse that always connects issues of language and society, and that never shies in front of provocation and attack. If from the start, Pound had wanted to reach a vantage point that was not specialized, the danger—in which lay the root of his quarrels with professors—was that there is no way of stopping the investigation. His desire to reach a point of view that might be called “comparatist” did not exclude issues of prestige and privilege, of class and money. Indeed, this is the gist of James Wilhelm’s assessment in his excellent study of The American Roots of Ezra Pound: seeing how How to Read can be interpreted as a diatribe against the Penn graduate School, he concludes: “In short, Pound wanted to create a department of Comparative Literature, and was frustrated, just as today many schools tend to divide literary studies almost entirely along national lines” (15 3). What he does not add, is that Pound would have been the department himself! And the kind of education he wanted to sponsor had to be unconstrained, and closer to patronage than tuition. In a letter to his former professor Felix Schelling, Pound outlines a project that he will later try to implement with Eliot or other friends in need:
But then no American University has ever tried to be a centre of thought. Pennsylvania would score if she were first to institute such a fellowship. A fellowship given for creative abilities regardless of whether the man had any university degree whatsoever. The fellow would attend lectures when he liked and then only, he would have no examinations for the thought of them is a poison in a man’s ear… (SL 99)
13Like Barnes’s blend of pragmatist ideal and formalist principles, Pound’s revolutionary pedagogical impetus wishes to connect what may appear as formalist or “high-modernist” credo in the power of a new language and the vision of a “better life”. Among many statements, the famous 1915 letter to Harriet Monroe states the point quite well.
Poetry must be as well written as prose. Its language must be a fine language, departing in no way from speech save by a heightened intensity (i.e. simplicity). There must be no book words, no periphrases, no inversions. It must be as simple as De Maupassant’s best prose, and as hard as Stendhal’s. […] There must be no clichés, set phrases, stereotyped journalese. The only escape from such is precision, a result of concentrated attention to what is writing. (SL 48-49)
- 5 See Lyon, Manifestoes : Provocations of the Modern.
14This forcibly sums up the gist of previous manifestoes written at the time of Imagism or Vorticism. The new poetry will surprise the reader by its musical directness and its imagistic intensity. Pound’s letters, with their vivid and idiosyncratic style, are full of the echoes of other modernist manifestoes written in the first decade of the twentieth century.5 The new language (as Pound was later to says “Poetry is news that stays news”) will by itself disrupt, replace or condemn to oblivion the old poetic diction practiced by the Victorians. If we interject that much of Victorian poetry started as a derivation and a dilution perhaps of Romantic ideas, we have to assess whether there can be a radical rupture between Modernism and Romanticism. For the proximity between Pound’s statements and the program of the Lyrical Ballads is startling. When Pound writes in the same letter that a poet should not use expressions “that you couldn’t, in some circumstance, in the stress of some emotion, actually say,” Wordsworth’s Preface insiststhat the language of Coleridge’s and his own poetic “experiment” will reproduce “the real language of men in a state of vivid sensation” and describe situations taken from “common life” while drawing upon “language really used by men” (18 and 21).
15The decision to let speakers release emotions and utter spontaneously their inner thoughts leads to a literary practice that resembles what Russian Formalists called “defamiliarization.” Defamiliarization, in Russian ostranenie, means both “making it strange” and “making it foreign.” When Shklovsky introduced the concept (priem ostraneniya, the device of defamiliarization), he wished to augment the difficulty of texts by promoting “literariness.” This would successfully fight against the deadening weight of habit: a new way of seeing has to be forced upon the reader in a poetic language that carries heightened claims and expectations. Such a concept can send us in the direction of Imagistic poetry, of Dadaist shock-effects or Brechtian dialectical and politicized art relying on Verfremdungseffekte. In “Art as Technique,” Shklovsky writes typically: “The technique of art is to make objects ‘unfamiliar’, to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an esthetic end in itself and must be prolonged. Art is a way of experiencing the artfulness of an object: the object itself is not important…” (i 8). Although Pound would object strongly to the last sentence, he would have liked the beginning. Indeed, a recurring motto in the Cantos is “Beauty is difficult”—a quote lifted from Beardsley—and like some of his fellow Modernist writers, Pound was either faulted or praised for the difficulty or obscurity of his texts. Very often, their aim was not to be difficult but to force their readers to perceive the world differently—in short, to educate by providing new ways of looking at words and things.
16One of the main thrills provided for readers of a Modernist masterpiece like the Cantos is to have to live up to higher expectations set by a home-made culture created from scraps and fragments by the very text one is reading. In the end, those who accept to be readers in the strong sense will engage in a complex process of education that will force them to re-read classics in a new way, moving away from the traditional sense of culture (what vaguely surfaces on an ocean of references when all the rest has drowned and been forgotten) to a renewed and quickened association with the great minds of the past. This process leads to a cumulative discovery, an “odyssey” that forces readers to investigate language as language through an encounter with its layering in infinitely enmeshed historical styles.
17Pound understood very early the process that would become emblematic of “high modernism.” The discovery that civilizations are mortal—as Spengler and Valéry argued—is accompanied by an awareness that they survive in so far as they bequeath linguistic layers made up of stylistic sediments, intertextual echoes, etymological concatenations, thematic rhymes, allusive subliminal traces deposited in each of us. Pound’s “Canto I” will serve as an illustration of this procedure. When we read Pound’s English translation of a sixteenth-century Latin translation of Homer’s Greek lines calling up Odysseus’voyage to Hades, we realize that Odysseus’ nekuia is also ours, that like him we have to progress through layers of living and dead language in order to find our way home. To make this re-translation somewhat foreign, Pound uses a strong-stress meter and alliterative style derived from his previous translations of Anglo-Saxon poems like the “Seafarer.” Thus the superimposition of patterns and techniques imitating Anglo-Saxon poetry passing through the Latinate diction of a post-Virgilian Renaissance still alive in Divus’ Latin, finally leads us back to Homer’s most “archaic” moment when we encounter a world of shades, blood-rites, soothsaying and thirsty but talkative ghosts, and in the end produces a typically Modernist palimpsest:
And then went down to the ship,
Set keel to breakers, forth on the godly sea, and (3)
18A stylistic odyssey sends us into strange regions indeed, we are caught up in whirling spirals of time that act out the consequences of the injunction to “make it new.” Paradoxically, we need to take a fresh and different look at “roots” whose origins or originality always resides in some other text. The scholarship needed is never given as a “pre-requisite” but projected in the future, as something to acquire. Pound expresses this somewhat shrilly in “Canto CV”:
I shall have to learn a little greek to keep up with this but so will you, drratt you. (764)
19Which is why Pound scholars often find themselves reading Chinese texts when they do not know Chinese, discussing Australian aboriginal rituals when they are not anthropologists and dipping into various volumes of Migne’s Latin Patrologia when they know little Latin and no Catholic theology, to say noting of Dante, cranky economic theories or the wisdom of Confucius. In this they merely follow the example of the poet.
20However, it is not a paradox to affirm that Pound was saved from compromising “orientalizations” by his very lack of academic knowledge, by his ignorance in fact. By the very fact that he acts upon his readings and puts them into action, the very limitations of his scholarship prevent him from adopting the patronizing tone that Said and others recent critics have often denounced in their critique of Western Orientalism. Knowledge is never static in Pound, and he holds that it is better to reawaken its hysterical origins, the “impatience of knowledge” already praised by Hermann Broch than let knowledge remain stable or stale—two terms almost synonymous for Pound. If knowledge is always seen “in action,” this entails that knowledge has no time to be self-reflexive, that it cannot reason about itself in a staid and dispassionate way.
21However, it would be misleading to conclude this introduction with the old motto of “Tempus loquendi, tempus tacendi,” a maxim that did very well for the Malatesta family, but that might be claimed with equal relevance by the Quakers—both believing in oratorical force followed by moments of utter silence, silence leading to a direct contact with the divine. Pound’s Quaker ancestors are probably never far from his preoccupations, and his final silence in front of the demands of cultural life keeps a Quaker ring. One might indeed be tempted to oppose Basil Bunting as a left-wing Quaker to Pound, his master and friend, as a right-wing Quaker. However, it might be that today we can move beyond this alternative as we have reached a tempus legendi: we don’t feel we have to hush our objections and be silent on the numerous and objectionable elements that crop up in Pound’s poetry and prose. We can denounce his intolerance and prejudice as important flaws that will not deter us from reading the whole works. We don’t need to be stuck in an ideological grove either, reiterating purely ideological attacks. We have simply to read Pound and also theorize about this reading, especially if we see in Pound the practitioner of a revolutionary writing who was often unaware of what he was actually producing.
- 6 I am referring to the two forthcoming volumes edited by Richard Sieburth, first the edition of Poun (...)
22Since the time of the collective effort of gloss and annotation (carried in part by journals like Paideuma) is admittedly over, we are left with an added responsibility: now the texts have to be read when most difficulties have been accounted for if not explained away. As two forthcoming publications both edited by one of the authors gathered in this volume announce, we will soon be able to read the Pisan Cantos more accurately, literally in fact, and also gauge the evolution of Pound’s entire poetic oeuvre in one volume.6 Let us take Pound as Erzieher yes, but only in so far as we see him as deliberately unzeitgemäss—that is all at once “unmodern” and “out of season,” although he appears all the more relevant as his fundamental “untimeliness” allows for a radical critique of our “modern times.” In that sense, Pound would have to admit a deep complicity with Nietzsche especially when he quotes Emerson, presented as “an American”: “Beware, when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet. Then all things are at risk. It is as when a conflagration has broken out in a great city, and no man knows what is safe, or where it will end. […]A new degree of culture would instantly revolutionize the entire system of human pursuits” (Nietzsche 193). Nietzsche continues in the same vein by quoting Diogenes who attacked official and traditional knowledge with this devastating remark: “How can he be considered great, since he has been a philosopher for so long and has never yet disturbed anybody?” (194). Pound, although always deeply and consistently didactic, never wished to become an “academic thinker” whose thoughts grow slowly and peacefully out of respectful tradition: his tradition had to be reinvented anew so as to keep its dangerous edge.