Ezra Pound: Poems Ezra Pound

Meeting Eliot, Cathay, translation

When war was declared in August 1914, opportunities for writers were immediately reduced; poems were now expected to be patriotic.[150] Pound's income from October 1914 to October 1915 was £42.10.0,[151] apparently five times less than the year before.[152]

On 22 September 1914 T. S. Eliot traveled from Merton College, Oxford, with an introduction from Conrad Aiken, to have Pound read Eliot's unpublished "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock".[153] Pound wrote to Harriet Monroe, editor of Poetry, on 30 September to say that Eliot—who was at Oxford on a fellowship from Harvard—had "sent in the best poem I have yet had or seen from an American ... He has actually trained himself and modernized himself on his own."[154] Monroe did not like Prufrock's "very European world-weariness", according to Humphrey Carpenter, but she published it anyway, in June 1915.[155]

At fourteen I married My Lord you. I never laughed, being bashful. Lowering my head, I looked at the wall. Called to, a thousand times, I never looked back. At fifteen, I stopped scowling, I desired my dust to be mingled with yours Forever and forever and forever. Why should I climb the look out?

— "The River Merchant's Wife: A Letter" by Li Bai, translated in Cathay (1915)[156]

The 1915 poen Cathay contains 25 examples of Classical Chinese poetry that Pound translated into English based on the notes of the Orientalist Ernest Fenollosa. Fenollosa's widow, Mary McNeill Fenollosa, had given Pound her husband's notes in 1913,[157] after Laurence Binyon introduced them.[158] Michael Alexander saw Cathay as the most attractive of Pound's work.[159] There is a debate about whether the poems should be viewed primarily as translations or as contributions to Imagism and the modernization of English poetry.[160] English professor Steven Yao argued that Cathay shows that translation does not need a thorough knowledge of the source language.[l]

Pound's translations from Old English, Latin, Italian, French and Chinese were highly disputed. According to Alexander, they made him more unpopular in some circles than the treason charge.[163] Robert Graves wrote in 1955: "[Pound] knew little Latin, yet he translated Propertius; and less Greek, but he translated Alcaeus; and still less Anglo-Saxon, yet he translated The Seafarer. I once asked Arthur Waley how much Chinese Pound knew; Waley shook his head despondently."[164]

Pound was devastated when Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, from whom he had commissioned a sculpture of himself two years earlier, was killed in the trenches in June 1915. In response, he published Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir (1916), writing "A great spirit has been among us, and a great artist has gone."[165] Two months before he died, Gaudier-Brzeska had written to Pound to say that he kept Cathay in his pocket "to put courage in my fellows".[166]

"Three Cantos", resignation from Poetry

After the publication of Cathay, Pound mentioned that he was working on a long poem. He described it in September 1915 as a "cryselephantine poem of immeasurable length which will occupy me for the next four decades unless it becomes a bore".[167] In February 1916, when Pound was 30, the poet Carl Sandburg paid tribute to him in Poetry magazine. Pound "stains darkly and touches softly", he wrote:

All talk on modern poetry, by people who know, ends with dragging in Ezra Pound somewhere. He may be named only to be cursed as wanton and mocker, poseur, trifler and vagrant. Or he may be classed as filling a niche today like that of Keats in a preceding epoch. The point is, he will be mentioned. ...

In the cool and purple meantime, Pound goes ahead producing new poems having the slogan, "Guts and Efficiency," emblazoned above his daily program of work. His genius runs to various schools and styles. He acquires traits and then throws them away. One characteristic is that he has no characteristics. He is a new roamer of the beautiful, a new fetcher of wild shapes, in each new handful of writings offered us.[168]

In June, July and August 1917 Pound had the first three cantos published, as "Three Cantos", in Poetry.[169][170] He was now a regular contributor to three literary magazines. From 1917 he wrote music reviews for the New Age as William Atheling and art reviews as B. H. Dias.[171] In May 1917 Margaret Anderson hired him as foreign editor of the Little Review.[172] He also wrote weekly pieces for The Egoist and the Little Review; many of the latter complained about provincialism, which included the ringing of church bells.[173] (When Pound lived near St Mary Abbots he had "engaged in a fierce, guerrilla warfare of letters" about the bells with the vicar, Reverend R. E. Pennefather, according to Richard Aldington.)[174] The volume of writing exhausted him.[175] In 1918, after a bout of illness which was presumably the Spanish flu,[176] he decided to stop writing for the Little Review. He had asked the publisher for a raise to hire a typist, the 23-year-old Iseult Gonne, causing rumors that they were having an affair, but he was turned down.[177]

And the days are not full enough And the nights are not full enough And life slips by like a field mouse                 Not shaking the grass.

— Personae (1926)[178]

A suspicion arose in June 1918 that Pound himself had written an article in The Egoist praising his own work, and it was clear from the response that he had acquired enemies. The poet F. S. Flint told The Egoist's editor that "we are all tired of Mr. Pound". British literary circles were "tired of his antics" and of him "puffing and swelling himself and his friends", Flint wrote. "His work has deteriorated from book to book; his manners have become more and more offensive; and we wish he would go back to America."[179]

The March 1919 issue of Poetry published Pound's Poems from the Propertius Series,[180] which appeared to be a translation of the Latin poet Sextus Propertius.[m] Harriet Monroe, editor of Poetry, published a letter in April 1919 from a professor of Latin, W. G. Hale, who found "about three-score errors" in the text; he said Pound was "incredibly ignorant of Latin", that "much of what he makes his author say is unintelligible", and that "If Mr. Pound were a professor of Latin, there would be nothing left for him but suicide" (adding "I do not counsel this").[181] Pound replied to Monroe: "Cat-piss and porcupines!! The thing is no more a translation than my 'Altaforte' is a translation, or than Fitzgerald's Omar is a translation." His letter ended "In final commiseration". Monroe interpreted his silence after that as his resignation from Poetry magazine.[182]

Hugh Selwyn Mauberley

Pound reading Mauberley, Washington, D.C., June 1958 OR three years, out of key with his time,

He strove to resuscitate the dead art Of poetry; to maintain "the sublime" In the old sense. Wrong from the start— No hardly, but, seeing he had been born In a half savage country, out of date; Bent resolutely on wringing lilies from the acorn; Capaneus; trout for factitious bait; Ἴδμεν γάρ τοι πάνθ', ὅσ' ἐνι Τροίῃ[n] Caught in the unstopped ear; Giving the rocks small lee-way The chopped seas held him, therefore, that year.

— Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920)[184]

By 1919 Pound felt there was no reason to stay in England. He had become "violently hostile" to England, according to Aldington,[185] feeling he was being "frozen out of everything" except the New Age,[186] and concluding that the British were insensitive to "mental agility in any and every form".[187] He had "muffed his chances of becoming literary director of London—to which he undoubtedly aspired," Aldington wrote in 1941, "by his own enormous conceit, folly, and bad manners."[185]

Published by John Rodker's The Ovid Press in June 1920,[188] Pound's poem Hugh Selwyn Mauberley marked his farewell to London, and by December the Pounds were subletting their apartment and preparing to move to France.[189] Consisting of 18 short parts, Mauberley describes a poet whose life has become sterile and meaningless. It begins with a satirical analysis of the London literary scene before turning to social criticism, economics, and the war. Here the word usury first appears in his work. Just as Eliot denied he was Prufrock, Pound denied he was Mauberley.[190] In 1932 the critic F. R. Leavis, then director of studies in English at Downing College, Cambridge, called Mauberley "great poetry, at once traditional and original. Mr. Pound's standing as a poet rests on it, and rests securely".[191]

On 13 January 1921 Orage wrote in the New Age: "Mr. Pound has shaken the dust of London from his feet with not too emphatic a gesture of disgust, but, at least, without gratitude to this country. ... [He] has been an exhilarating influence for culture in England; he has left his mark upon more than one of the arts, upon literature, music, poetry and sculpture; and quite a number of men and movements owe their initiation to his self-sacrificing stimulus ..."[192]

With all this, however, Mr. Pound, like so many others who have striven for advancement of intelligence and culture in England, has made more enemies than friends, and far more powerful enemies than friends. Much of the Press has been deliberately closed by cabal to him; his books have for some time been ignored or written down; and he himself has been compelled to live on much less than would support a navvy. His fate, as I have said, is not unusual ... Taken by and large, England hates men of culture until they are dead.[192][o]