Professional Documents
Culture Documents
PDF Ezra Pound in The Present Essays On Pound S Contemporaneity Park Ebook Full Chapter
PDF Ezra Pound in The Present Essays On Pound S Contemporaneity Park Ebook Full Chapter
PDF Ezra Pound in The Present Essays On Pound S Contemporaneity Park Ebook Full Chapter
https://textbookfull.com/product/how-children-learn-
book-3-contemporary-thinking-and-theorists-linda-pound/
https://textbookfull.com/product/transmediating-the-whedonverses-
essays-on-texts-paratexts-and-metatexts-juliette-c-kitchens/
https://textbookfull.com/product/hiking-mount-rainier-national-
park-a-guide-to-the-park-s-greatest-hiking-adventures-mary-
skjelset/
https://textbookfull.com/product/hiking-shenandoah-national-park-
a-guide-to-the-park-s-greatest-hiking-adventures-fifth-edition-
gildart/
The Zimbabwe Council of Churches and Development in
Zimbabwe Ezra Chitando
https://textbookfull.com/product/the-zimbabwe-council-of-
churches-and-development-in-zimbabwe-ezra-chitando/
https://textbookfull.com/product/new-essays-on-aristotle-s-
organon-routledge-monographs-in-classical-studies-1st-edition-
antonio-pedro-mesquita/
https://textbookfull.com/product/on-hegel-s-philosophy-of-right-
the-1934-35-seminar-and-interpretive-essays-martin-heidegger/
https://textbookfull.com/product/fichte-s-1804-
wissenschaftslehre-essays-on-the-science-of-knowing-42nd-edition-
benjamin-d-crowe/
https://textbookfull.com/product/hiking-mount-rainier-national-
park-a-guide-to-the-park-s-greatest-hiking-adventures-fourth-
edition-radlinski/
Ezra Pound in the Present
Ezra Pound in the Present
Essays on Pound’s Contemporaneity
Edited by
Paul Stasi and Josephine Park
Bloomsbury Academic
An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc
Contents
List of Figures
Preface
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Bibliography
Notes on Contributors
Index
List of Figures
The chapters
Divided into three parts—Pound’s Methods, Pound’s Worlds, and
Pound’s Values—the chapters in the book all take seriously Pound’s
idea that artists are the “race’s antennae,” a phrase often invoked to
valorize the artist’s prescience (SP 229). What immediately follows it,
however, is telling: “The effects of social evil show first in the arts”
(SP 229). These lines resonate in at least two ways with Pound’s
work. First, and most obviously, they suggest the ways in which a
familiar range of twentieth-century social evils made their way into
Pound’s art. More subtle, however, is the idea of registering that the
metaphor of antennae suggests, for Pound’s oeuvre provides a
record of the contradictions of his moment, many of which persist
into the present day. None of the chapters ignores Pound’s flaws nor
suggests that these flaws should themselves be dismissed. Rather,
what unites these chapters is the shared conviction that Pound’s
efforts to include history inevitably reveal the ways history included
him, and that these historical engagements are of a piece with his
aesthetic achievements.
In doing so, they cast new light on many of the old chestnuts of
Pound criticism. Charles Altieri returns to Pound’s image to identify
an alternative to the epiphanic lyricism that dominates poetry today.
Distinguishing the construction and intensity of Pound’s early lyrics
from the standard of visual epiphanies and aural refinement installed
by his fellow imagistes, the chapter rereads Pound against Vincent
Sherry’s recent claim for a lingering decadence in modernist verse.
Reconsidering the sights and sounds of Pound’s imagism—in which
we do not see pictures but relations, in music that does not make
impressions but patterns—Altieri reads these works as a movement
toward “concrete states of mind that establish their own complex
realities.” These states and realities form the platform for The
Cantos, and in marking this through line into Pound’s epic, the
chapter uncovers the “certitude”—Pound’s ideogram for truth, a
person standing beside his word—by which the private self
contributes to public culture. Altieri signals the remarkable conviction
of the “composing intelligence” of Pound’s image, whose ability to
manifest alternate worlds and independent beings is sorely needed
in our present scene of lyric.
If Pound’s images establish patterns and relations, they also build
the archive of materials to which The Cantos continually turn.
Considering this archival structure in relation to what we have come
to call “big data,” Josephine Park queries the resonance of Pound’s
reading guides with the present digital turn in literary study.
Considering Pound’s literary data alongside Moretti’s distant reading
—both stunts against the conventional reading practices of the
classroom—the chapter identifies a shared desire for ever-larger
data sets as modes of capturing ethics, on the one hand, and the
elusive history of style, on the other. It is no coincidence that this
longing for big data sends both of these literary iconoclasts to China,
the ultimate storehouse in the Western imagination. Park reads the
onslaught of the China Cantos as the longed-for appearance of pure
data in Pound’s epic, while Moretti’s turn to the Chinese novel
becomes a refuge away from the close reading he eschews in his
accounts of the Western canon and its swaths of lesser works. China
is a strangely easy read in both cases, and both forays expose their
grounding methodological assumptions. Against Moretti’s literary
history routed through quantitative exploits, however, Pound is a
through-and-through media historian; the chapter concludes by
positioning Pound within the modern epistemic break of media
history, typing out data at once transparent and distant.
Aaron Jaffe’s chapter also reads Pound as a theorist of media,
though here the history is no longer literary but geological. Taking
up Pound’s notion of the “osmosis of persons,” which describes the
intercourse between humans and things, Jaffe develops a reading of
Pound in light of contemporary theories of deep time. Pound’s
“osmotic yield of permanent, classified, or uncorroded value” traces
a “technical drift across semi-permeable membranes,” that suggests
our constant exposure to “invisible agencies and hidden mechanisms
of value.” Jaffe’s chapter centers on the Twelfth Canto, often lost
between the grandeur of the Malatesta Cantos and the calm of the
thirteenth, to show how its simultaneous consideration of aesthetics,
Roman architecture, and speculative business endeavors
demonstrates the range of inhuman processes that structure our
lives.
The “deep time” of Pound’s aesthetic is also at the center of
Christopher Bush’s chapter on Pound and Japan. Tracking Pound’s
fifty-year engagement with Japanese art and artists, Bush
demonstrates that Japan was far more than an aesthetic container
for the revelations of Pound’s China. The political and philological
possibilities Bush discovers in Pound’s Japanese correspondence—
particularly evident in Pound’s longstanding exchange with avant-
garde Japanese artist Kitasono—present anew the highly unstable
compound of fascist and worldly fascinations that animated his work.
At the heart of this elaboration of Pound’s personal and political
investments in Japan as a modern empire is a revised understanding
of Pound’s notions of the image and the noh: the chapter insists
upon the cultural and political intensity invoked by each form—the
image belonged to collective experience; the noh told the tale of the
tribe—to build toward its culminating insight that the modern poem
that contains history “must also endeavor to contain the world.”
Attending to Pound’s Japan thus illuminates the geopolitics of
Pound’s epic ambition, fashioned out of a complicity between
cosmopolitanism and totalitarianism that undoes many of our
present cultural and political dichotomies.
Jean-Michel Rabaté takes up the question of Pound’s epic ambition
through the “whole dream” of his East–West assemblage, recovering
an oft-overlooked concept of globalized culture at the heart of The
Cantos. Returning to Pound’s encounters with Tagore and Fenollosa
—in order to elaborate Pound’s distaste for the haze of peaceful
global synthesis and the active knowledge work that saved him from
mere orientalist appropriation—the chapter demonstrates that
Pound’s modernist palimpsest, with its radical overlay of ages and
spaces, is not a dream of Spirit but a set of concrete references
linked by complex ideological bridges. Rabaté’s exhortation to take
seriously Pound’s methods of making use of the vast and highly
partial knowledge he plumbed is premised on a major gamble: that
this vital mode of comprehending world literature may show us a
way out of the present crisis in the discipline of comparative
literature. Reclaiming Ezra Pound as a radical guide to the globe,
Rabaté identifies him as “our American Nietzsche,” a global
theoretician whose works may be able to revive our presently lost
sense of world literature.
While Rabaté understands Pound through the rubric of world
literature, Christine Froula borrows a phrase from James Sibley
Watson to describe Pound’s “comparative literature of the present.”
Taking up the “striking reversal” in Pound’s estimation of imperial
force registered by the distance between Homage to Sextus
Propertius and The Pisan Cantos, Froula shows how The Cantos’
openness to history’s vicissitudes demonstrates “the inscrutability of
history as shared past and moral touchstone for the present.” Far
from diminishing The Cantos’ power, this realization “allows the
infinite web of interfering temporalities crisscrossing any present to
be felt” within its pages. Fleeting references to events such as the
Katyn Massacre become touchstones for thinking through the various
efforts of occlusion and recovery that constitute our relationship to a
past continually turning into our present.
The relationship between past and present is central to Paul Stasi’s
chapter, which finds Pound at the beginning of a capitalist crisis
whose effects are just now coming into focus. Drawing on the work
of the loosely affiliated German Wertkritik thinkers, Stasi argues that
Pound’s lifelong investment in utility represents nothing less than an
attempt to abolish value as it is currently constituted under capitalist
social relations. Beginning from the separation of value into use
value and exchange value, Wertkritik thinkers such as Robert Kurz
and Norbert Trenkle argue that capitalism is increasingly unable to
produce value in the narrow terms through which it understands the
concept. Valorizing only a thin slice of human existence—the surplus
value that can be generated through labor and which can, in turn,
be captured in the commodity—capitalism thus tramples over vast
areas of human life irrelevant to its basic processes. The goal is not,
however, to find ways to monetize these aspects of our existence,
but rather to transcend the entire division between use and
exchange. Stasi argues that Pound’s notion of the “cultural heritage”
represents an understanding of the dominance of past labor over
present labor. This understanding reaches its fruition in the
Adams/China sequence, where Pound effaces his own labor in a
relentless argument for social utility that not only ignores but also
actively seeks to combat contemporary notions of aesthetic
autonomy.
Of course, aesthetic autonomy has never been a prime Poundian
concern, as the presence of financial institutions such as the Monte
dei Paschi di Siena within The Cantos attests. Departing from the
curious fact that Pound’s “damned good bank” was in fact a key
player in the ongoing financial crisis begun in 2008, C. D. Blanton
situates the Bank of Siena at the center of a subtle shift in The
Cantos’ methodology. Premised on the “illuminating detail,” Pound’s
Cantos stake their poetic power on an immediacy that finds its
analogue in the factive personality, “a structure of causality visibly
reducible to the intention of an individual or corporate agency.” The
contrast, famously, is to a structure “concealed in distances and
absences, by abstruse calculations of value,” but the Bank of Siena
similarly lacks immediacy, presenting itself as the organizing ground
for the Fifth Decad’s set of otherwise inconsequential details that
rhymes with the absent cause of capitalist social relations. The
centrality of economics to modern life—the hidden cause it is the
effort of The Cantos to disclose and critique—turns against Pound’s
own poetic method. “Image,” Blanton concludes, is here “committed
to a concept and thereby rendered entirely mediate, withdrawn from
superficial legibility.”
Acknowledgments
The editors thank the contributors for their superb chapters and
Haaris Naqvi and Bloomsbury Press for their support. They also
thank their families—especially their respective “better makers”—for
living with Ezra Pound for longer than they might have wished.
Abbreviations
Pound’s Methods
1
Notice first how the opening stanza pushes for syntactic intricacy
that weaves a dense set of sensations together visually and
grammatically. Even though there is technical enjambment, each line
takes on the weight of defining a particular grouping of impressions
within the overall scene. Never one not to overdo a fine moment,
Lowell links the water to the throbbing air and therefore needs an
imaginative expansion of the scene that can begin to align the inner
life with the profusion of sensual details. So she turns to “you.” And
she makes the compelling decision to elaborate all the differences
between a person and the natural scene while stressing how she
wants the person as literal and as physical as the other sensations.
The epiphany, then, is simply the realization of how fully the person
not only fits into the scene but also somehow internalizes it or at
least modifies its significance for himself and for her by performing
the action of bathing. That action promises a resonance that does
not deny the domain of appearances but indicates his power within
it—to absorb the landscape and to elicit her distinctive care.
More generally, we can see here how what Pound called
“Amygism” contributed to the historical shaping of what Imagism
seemed to exemplify as a set of possibilities for lyric poetry. The
most important change Imagism brought about was its critique of all
rhetorical effulgence (or language effects born of relations to other
language effects rather than to subject matter): only the unadorned
word, free verse, and elemental syntax will suffice to stage how
illumination might be possible within a manifestly secular world.2
The corollary of this critique of rhetoric is the possibility that poetry
can stage aspects of elemental experience in such a way as to call
attention to their place in our lives and thus perform an act of
valuing particulars sharply at odds with the instrumental
generalization so fundamental to our culture. Finally, poetry, in sharp
opposition to prose, has the power to alter the senses of time
fundamental to consumerist culture. Hence the significance of
Pound’s famous definition of the “Image” as “that which presents an
emotional and intellectual complex in an instant of time” (LE 4). The
emotional epiphany is just this sense of the power of intense
contemplation to isolate the instant and allow it to take on its own
identity in contemplative space. This is how “emotion endures” (LE
14).
But Pound, like virtually all major poets in the twentieth century,
refused to settle for these principles that would sustain the epiphanic
style. So I want to examine just what features of his versions of
Imagism display significant alternatives to that style, in the hope
that we can recover the force of his example and provide different
possibilities for contemporary poetry. However, to develop this
argument I have to address a second perspective on Pound that
threatens to undo much of his power to shape a future for poetry
because it mires him in aspects of literary history that do not
transfer effectively into forms of ongoing imaginative power. I refer
to Vincent Sherry’s brilliant Modernism and the Reinvention of
Decadence, a book that presents a very strong case for how the
values basic to Decadent Writing pervade Pound’s Imagist phase and
make it continuous with the Mauberley poems. In my view, Sherry’s
book tries, in the name of literary history, to treat Pound’s early
works as a series of dazzling enactments of what turn out to be
symptoms of a severely limited culture.
Sherry’s thesis on Pound is one aspect of his larger argument that
critics writing in the spirit of Modernism have suppressed the ways
Modernist writing partakes in and is pervaded by concerns that can
reasonably be labeled decadent. Critics have accomplished this by
absorbing decadence into Symbolisme and then stressing
Symbolisme as primarily a set of technical strategies rather than a
more encompassing fascination with particular structures for valuing
experience. Sherry shows how Symbolisme cannot account for the
continuing focus in Modernist writing on sensation, on a musicality
that pulls against any determinate speaker, on a congruent
absorption in the most private features of sensibility leading to a
repudiation of public life, on an overall sense of “the melancholy in
modernity,” and on the strong opposition between the symbol and
the many features of Modernist writing that are much closer to the
ironies of Benjaminian allegory.3 Above all, only the spirit of
decadence provides a sufficient context for why so many Modernists
deny any idea of progress, preferring instead to pursue a sense of
“perennial afterness” as the time zone in which modernist writing
most fully comes into its own.4
I think Sherry’s generalizations apply to most Imagist poetry,
especially Lowell’s. There is in this work an obvious fascination with
the immediacies of sensation, at least partially abstracted from any
specific objective situation. There is a corresponding musicality set
against the speaking as it pursues the poem’s interests in an
intensity almost divested of actuality because of its self-absorption.
Character tends to be absorbed in sensation rather than concerned
with action. And, most important, the primary effect of that sense of
character involves a radical splitting off of private sensibility from
concerns for public welfare, a situation that did not prepare writers
well for the shock of the First World War, where public events and
needs simply overwhelmed concerns for private sensibility, and
where writers had to find means of adapting their entire imaginative
dispositions to what perplexed the understanding.5
Yet, for all Sherry’s eloquence, he seems to me in the case of
Pound not to distinguish significantly between references to
decadence and fealty to decadent values. There remains for me a
huge difference between Pound’s American engagement with the
decadence he finds everywhere in Europe and the promise of work
capable of repudiating the core values of decadent pessimism. We
can test my claim by looking at three areas where Pound develops
alternatives to Sherry’s characterizations of his work. First, Sherry
wants to equate phanopoeia with decadence’s interest in the
particulars of sensation. But to do this he has to reduce Pound’s view
of sensation to the rendering of isolated phenomena, thereby
ignoring how Pound links ideals of sensation to the capacity to
register complex relational forces distinctive to how art makes its
worlds manifest. Second, there is the matter of lyrical music, where
Sherry simply never addresses Pound’s interest in the troubadours
and in Italian alternatives to iambic pentameter. If one emphasizes
these contexts, one can see the distinction between Pound’s
experiments in melopoeia and those of H.D. or Richard Aldington.
Pound’s music in his Imagist poems is in fact arguably his most
radical break from the nineteenth-century sensibility that,
nevertheless, still haunts some of his efforts to capture troubadour
love lyric. Finally, Sherry’s separation of poetry into private lyrics and
public address simply does not work for Pound because he
elaborates a third term—the constructivist work of art—which casts
the private self as capable of bearing significant public force because
of the work the composing intelligence can make manifest.
By taking up these three motifs I hope to show that the same
traits that provide alternatives to decadence also provide substantial
and still viable alternatives to the plain style epiphanic lyricism that
has become so dominant today. Sherry has to treat the Mauberley
poems as the culmination of Pound’s failure to break from
decadence, while my story prepares a stage for that other major
Pound text of 1917, a Draft of Three Cantos.6
Let us begin our analysis of Pound’s distinctive achievements in his
Imagist poems by elaborating two aspects of phanopoeia that break
sharply from any rhetoric of the image that relies on aligning poetry
with the task of description while simultaneously aligning poetic
affect with the cult of sensation. The first is simply the concision by
which Pound’s Imagist poetry managed to reconcile the speaking
energies of his Canzone poems with an aura of engagement with the
concrete world. Imagine how one might adapt the intricate play of
sensations in “Ballatetta” (1910) to a modern sensibility:
Haie! Haie!
These were the swift to harry;
These the keen-scented;
These were the souls of blood.
Slow on the leash,
pallid the leash-men! (P 69-70)
Here the sound-play is congruent with the speaking, or, rather, is the
speaking defined in the fullness of its will. One might say that the
adventure in this poem involves producing strong imperatives that
exemplify how a musical mode can take sexual form, and, then, the
way that sexual form establishes deep analogies with fundamental
conditions that shape overall attitudes toward experience. It seems
as if even the idea of the Dorian mode invokes a powerful will,
defined in the poem by the opening line’s long e’s and the
equivalences they can establish with feelings of surrender to the
power of what endures.
This imperative then defines itself further by a startling contrast
with how transient things come into language—their instability
captured in a flurry of short and long a sounds. Fortified by this
contrast, the voice in the poem can even appropriate the a sounds
for a third imperative that reaches beyond the bleakness to a kind of
transcendental comfort. Now the a’s mellow into the strong o’s that
provide a resting place for those who internalize that bleakness. This
sequence invites us to read the final two imperatives as implicating
something close to post-coital satisfaction for this relation to the
gods. Having completed the initial sharp demand, the poem can
soften, reaching out to a sense of the gods becoming an audience
(as in “Erat Hora”) and beautifully returning to the long e’s at the
end as softened and spread out in time by the fullness of vocalic
round sounds in “the shadowy flowers of Orcus.”
In “Doria,” Pound makes fully articulate what he means by
claiming that “in Provence … the arts of verse and music were most
closely knit together, when each thing done by the poet had some
definite musical urge or necessity bound up within it” (LE 91). This
poem does not just exemplify effective musicality, nor the power of
cadence, nor anything smacking of decadence. Instead, Pound puts
all the focus on the compositional act. The force of that act of
intelligence dispels any satisfaction in the vagaries of responding
sensitivities. The effect is not refinement of the senses but the
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
nouveaux ; nous causions vivement et n’étions pas d’accord, car il
ne l’était pas avec lui-même. Il contredisait tout ce qu’il a dit
autrefois. Et je le plaignais, le pauvre égaré ! — « Oh ! vous détestez
l’hérétique. — Non, Monsieur, non ; vous me causez une douleur
profonde, vous me semblez une étoile égarée, mais qui ne peut
manquer de reparaître au ciel. » Et sur ce, lui, l’hôtel où nous étions
et moi, nous sommes confondus dans le chaos du sommeil ; mais
cela m’est resté, et j’ai tout aujourd’hui ce génie dans la tête. Quand
je pense que tu as vécu chez lui, avec lui, reçu ses leçons, l’intérêt
que je lui porte devient intime. Oh ! que cet homme m’occupe, que je
pense à son salut, que je le demande à Dieu, que je regrette sa
gloire, sa gloire sainte ! Il me vient souvent de lui écrire sans me
nommer, de lui faire entendre une mystérieuse voix de supplications
et de larmes. Folie, audace de ma part ; mais une femme s’est
rencontrée avec lui pour l’enfer, pour compléter la réprobation de ce
prêtre : une autre ne pourra-t-elle pas s’en approcher pour le ciel ?
On met en terre un brave et saint homme, le Durel de Lentin, del
Mas des Mérix [21] , un modèle de paysan, simple, bon ; religieux,
respectueux, nous tirant son chapeau jusqu’à terre. Il était aussi de
ceux qu’on ne peut s’empêcher de saluer comme si on voyait la
vertu. Ces hommes de bien sont rares, ils s’en vont et on n’en voit
pas venir de pareils.
[21] Du hameau des Mérix.
Le 12. — Depuis cinq jours je n’ai pas écrit ici ; dans ce temps il
est venu des feuilles, des fleurs, des roses. En voilà une sous mon
front, qui m’embaume, la première du printemps. J’aime à marquer
le jour de cette belle venue. Qui sait les printemps que je retrouve
ainsi dans des livres, sur une feuille de rose où je date le jour et
l’an ? Une de ces feuilles s’en fut à l’île de France, où elle fit bien
plaisir à ce pauvre Philibert. Hélas ! elle aura disparu comme lui !
Quoique je le regrette, ce n’est pas cela, mais je ne sais quoi qui
m’attriste, me tient dans la langueur aujourd’hui. Pauvre âme,
pauvre âme, qu’as-tu donc ? que te faut-il ? Où est ton remède ?
Tout verdit, tout fleurit, tout chante, tout l’air est embaumé comme s’il
sortait d’une fleur. Oh ! c’est si beau ! allons dehors. Non, je serais
seule et la belle solitude ne vaut rien. Ève le fit voir dans Éden. Que
faire donc ? Lire, écrire, prier, prendre une corbeille de sable sur la
tête comme ce solitaire et marcher. Oui, le travail, le travail ! occuper
le corps qui nuit à l’âme. Je suis demeurée trop tranquille
aujourd’hui, ce qui fait mal, ce qui donne le temps de croupir à un
certain ennui qui est en moi.
Pourquoi est-ce que je m’ennuie ? Est-ce que je n’ai pas tout ce
qu’il me faut, tout ce que j’aime, hormis toi ? Quelquefois je pense
que c’est la pensée du couvent qui fait cela, qui m’attire et m’attriste.
J’envie le bonheur d’une sainte Thérèse, de sainte Paule à
Bethléem. Si je pouvais me trouver dans quelque sainte solitude !…
Le monde n’est pas mon endroit ; mon avenir serait fait alors, et je
ne sais ce qu’il sera. Quelle belle-sœur aurons-nous ? J’ai deux de
mes amies qui, après la mort de leur père, ont reçu leur congé de la
maison, et je trouve cela si amer ! Ensuite le ciel qu’on s’assure bien
mieux dans la retraite. Ce sont mes raisons, pas les tiennes :
quittons-nous. Je ne veux plus te rien dire que je ne sois plus
tranquille, je ne te dirais rien de bon. Adieu jusqu’à…
Me voici ce soir avec trois lettres, d’Euphrasie, de Marie, de
Lucie, jeunes filles bien peu ressemblantes, chacune avec son
charme. Les femmes, nous sommes variées comme les fleurs et
nous n’en sommes pas fâchées.
Le 24. — Un mot ce soir que j’ai le temps, que je suis seule, que
je pense à toi, que c’est l’Ascension, un beau jour, un jour saint où
l’âme monte, monte au ciel. Mais non, je suis bien ici, il semble
qu’on ne se détache point d’écrire. On m’appelle.
Le 26. — Deux jours entre ces lignes sans t’écrire, et depuis sont
venues des lettres, des nids d’oiseau, des roses sur la terrasse, sur
ma table, partout. Il est venu cent choses de Gaillac ; de plus loin, la
mort du prince de Talleyrand : c’était de quoi écrire ou jamais ; mais
nous faisons des pèlerines avec Éliza, et le monde passerait sous
notre aiguille qu’on ne la quitterait pas. Que peu de chose nous
suffit ! cela m’étonne. Je n’ai pas le temps de dire pourquoi.