Ezra Pound
Ezra (Loomis) Pound was born at Hailey, Idaho, October 30, 1885; attended Hamilton College and the University of Pennsylvania; and went abroad, seeking fresh material to complete a thesis on Lope de Vega, in 1908. After visiting Spain on a roundabout journey to England, where he took up his residence and where he has lived ever since, Pound halted for a while in Italy. It was there, in Venice, to be precise, that Pound’s first book, A Lume Spento (1908), was printed. The following year Pound went to London and the chief poems of the little volume were incorporated in Personæ (1909), a small collection containing some of Pound’s finest work.
Although the young American was a total stranger to the English literary world, his book made a definite impression on critics of all shades and tastes. Edward Thomas, one of the most careful appraisers, wrote “the beauty of it is the beauty of passion, sincerity and intensity, not of beautiful words and images and suggestions.... The thought dominates the words and is greater than they are.” Another critic (Scott James) placed the chief emphasis on Pound’s metrical innovations, saying, “At first the whole thing may seem to be mere madness and rhetoric, a vain exhibition of force and passion without beauty. But as we read on, these curious meters seem to have a law and order of their own.”
Exultations (1909) was printed in the autumn of the same year that saw the appearance of Personæ. It was received with even greater cordiality; a new force and freedom were manifest in such poems as “Sestina: Altaforte,” “Ballad of the Goodly Fere,” “Francesca” and “Histrion.”
In both of these books there was evident Pound’s erudition—a familiarity with mediæval literature, Provençal singers, Troubadour ballads—that, later on, was to degenerate into pedantry and become hard and dry. Too often in his later work, Pound seems to be more the archaeologist than the artist, digging with little energy and less enthusiasm. Canzoni (1911) and Ripostes (1912) both contain much that is sharp and living; they also contain the germs of desiccation and decay. Pound began to scatter his talents; to start movements which he quickly discarded for new ones; to spend himself in poetic propaganda for the Imagists and others (see Preface); to give more and more time to translation (The Sonnets of Guido Cavalcanti appeared in 1912) and arrangements from the Chinese (Cathay, paraphrased from the notes of Ernest Fenollosa, was issued in 1915); to lay the chief stress on technique, shades of color, verbal nuances. The result was a lassitude of the creative faculties, an impoverishment of emotion. In the later books, Pound begins to suffer from a decadence which appraises the values in life chiefly as æsthetic values. And this decadence expresses itself in a weariness, a sterility of the imagination. Real feeling becomes rarer in his work and the poet descends to flashy trivialities, vagaries of assertion or sheer bravado of expression—wasting much of his gift in a mere tilting at convention.
But though this is true of a great quantity of his recent work, though he often seems a living anachronism, drawing life not from life itself but only from books, many of the poems in Lustra (1917) yield a hard brightness. The influence of Browning and the pre-Raphaelites is less pronounced and reflections of his earlier energy stand out with a peculiar brilliance.
Too special to achieve permanence, too intellectual to become popular, Pound’s contribution to his age should not be underestimated. He was a pioneer in the new forms; he fought dullness wherever he encountered it; under his leadership the Imagists became not only a group but a protest; he helped to make many of the paths which a score of unconsciously influenced poets tread with such ease and nonchalance. Much of his poetry gesticulates instead of speaking, a great portion of his art is poetry in pantomime. And yet, without Pound, American poetry would scarcely have been the many-voiced, multi-colored thing that it is.
A Girl
The tree has entered my hands,
The sap has ascended my arms,
The tree has grown in my breast
Downward,
The branches grow out of me, like arms.
Tree you are,
Moss you are,
You are violets with wind above them.
A child—so high—you are;
And all this is folly to the world.
A Virginal
No, no! Go from me. I have left her lately.
I will not spoil my sheath with lesser brightness,
For my surrounding air has a new lightness;
Slight are her arms, yet they have bound me straitly
And left me cloaked as with a gauze of aether;
As with sweet leaves; as with a subtle clearness.
Oh, I have picked up magic in her nearness
To sheathe me half in half the things that sheathe her.
No, no! Go from me. I have still the flavour,
Soft as spring wind that’s come from birchen bowers.
Green come the shoots, aye April in the branches,
As winter’s wound with her sleight hand she staunches,
Hath of the trees a likeness of the savour:
As white their bark, so white this lady’s hours.
Ballad for Gloom
For God, our God is a gallant foe
That playeth behind the veil.
I have loved my God as a child at heart
That seeketh deep bosoms for rest,
I have loved my God as a maid to man—
But lo, this thing is best:
To love your God as a gallant foe that plays behind the veil;
To meet your God as the night winds meet beyond Arcturus’ pale.
I have played with God for a woman,
I have staked with my God for truth,
I have lost to my God as a man, clear-eyed—
His dice be not of ruth.
For I am made as a naked blade,
But hear ye this thing in sooth:
Who loseth to God as man to man
Shall win at the turn of the game.
I have drawn my blade where the lightnings meet
But the ending is the same:
Who loseth to God as the sword blades lose
Shall win at the end of the game.
For God, our God is a gallant foe that playeth behind the veil.
When God deigns not to overthrow hath need of triple mail.
Δωρια
Be in me as the eternal moods
of the bleak wind, and not
As transient things are—
gaiety of flowers.
Have me in the strong loneliness
of sunless cliffs
And of gray waters.
Let the gods speak softly of us
In days hereafter,
the shadowy flowers of Orcus
Remember thee.
In a Station of the Metro
The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.