Pound It, Dog
The poet Ezra Pound died the year I was born: 1972. By that time, he was a relic. The period of high modernism with which he was indelibly linked was long passed and his reputation was saddled with the more unsavory parts of his personality: his anti-Semitism, his treasonous wartime radio broadcasts from Italy, and his madness.
In graduate school at UMass-Amherst, Pound was not held with especially high esteem. One of my teachers remarked that "The River Merchant's Wife" was the only poem of his that was worth her regard. With all of his classical allusions and such, Pound was considered unbearably difficult. But it was in Prof. Paul Mariani's class that I read the Pisan Cantos and came to my own discovery of Pound's work: his ambition, his reverant ear for languages, and his moments of transcendent lyricism that leap out from his denser, allusive passages.
I'm wondering if I should go back to Pound. When I was painting my daughter's nursery, I listened to a Poetry Magazine podcast talking about this essay by Clive James, chronicaling the decline of the critic's estimation of Pound from James's youth into his later years. James calls the Cantos, with their reading of American history, their bizarre economic screeds, and their unabashed fascism, "a nut-job blog before the fact."
And today, I come across an essay in The New Yorker by Louis Menand (author of The Metaphysical Club) called "The Pound Error." Menand lays out the arguments behind Pound's reduced stature and mounts a qualified defense of Pound's continuing relevance. Near the end, he concludes: Pound was, in the end, a poet’s poet-he looked like a poet-and, despite the shambles of his political beliefs and the limitations of his poetics, he does stand for something. His claims for literature were free of supernatural mystification, and he believed that the proper organization of language was supremely important. If you are a poet, or any serious kind of writer, you have to believe that, whether you think Pound’s formula is workable or not. Getting the words right is, at a minimum, part of the therapy.
In graduate school at UMass-Amherst, Pound was not held with especially high esteem. One of my teachers remarked that "The River Merchant's Wife" was the only poem of his that was worth her regard. With all of his classical allusions and such, Pound was considered unbearably difficult. But it was in Prof. Paul Mariani's class that I read the Pisan Cantos and came to my own discovery of Pound's work: his ambition, his reverant ear for languages, and his moments of transcendent lyricism that leap out from his denser, allusive passages.
I'm wondering if I should go back to Pound. When I was painting my daughter's nursery, I listened to a Poetry Magazine podcast talking about this essay by Clive James, chronicaling the decline of the critic's estimation of Pound from James's youth into his later years. James calls the Cantos, with their reading of American history, their bizarre economic screeds, and their unabashed fascism, "a nut-job blog before the fact."
And today, I come across an essay in The New Yorker by Louis Menand (author of The Metaphysical Club) called "The Pound Error." Menand lays out the arguments behind Pound's reduced stature and mounts a qualified defense of Pound's continuing relevance. Near the end, he concludes: Pound was, in the end, a poet’s poet-he looked like a poet-and, despite the shambles of his political beliefs and the limitations of his poetics, he does stand for something. His claims for literature were free of supernatural mystification, and he believed that the proper organization of language was supremely important. If you are a poet, or any serious kind of writer, you have to believe that, whether you think Pound’s formula is workable or not. Getting the words right is, at a minimum, part of the therapy.