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Intelligibility in The Pisan Cantos

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 January 2009

Donald Monk
Donald Monk
Affiliation:
University of Manchester
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Extract

Commonly Ezra Pound's Cantos have been attacked from two main directions. The first claims that the poem is interesting only at the level of technique, the second that the analysis of economics as the poem's thematic basis was either a mistaken choice of material or simply that Pound had inadequate mastery of this material. Both lines of attack agree in identifying a fatal imbalance between form and content which denies die Cantos an acceptable structure, but otherwise diverge: the first placing Pound as an aesthete-hedonist of his own rejected 1920 Mauberley model and the second presenting us with a mid-Western fascist yahoo. Neither proposition stands up to examination. Self-evidently die Cantos are a sensitive record and diagnosis of (and partial programme for) the civilization Pound felt was collapsing around him. The real difficulties confronting the reader lie in die arbitrary resorting to documentation, polyglot quotation and adaptation, the random shifts in time and place controlled by anecdotal maxims and categorizations operating as a formula for die healthy state. As a version of reality the poem does not initially seem to have significant correspondence with our own.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 9 , Issue 2 , August 1975 , pp. 213 - 227
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1975

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References

1 This line has a longstanding and honourable source. T. S. Eliot remarked in 1928, ‘I am seldom interested in what (Pound) is saying, but only in the way he says it’. W. B. Yeats in 1936 commented, ‘I find more style than form; at times more deliberate nobility and the means to convey it than in any other contemporary poet’.

2 Davis, Even Earle's largely sympathetic Vision Fugitive: Ezra Pound and Economics (1968)Google Scholar talks of writing ‘about economic theory alone, skimping the poetry’ (p. vii).

3 Confucius (The Great Digest and The Unwobbling Pivot), a Bible and, later acquired by finding, an anthology of English verse.

4 This aspect has been especially well covered by two books: Kenner, Hugh's The Pound Era (1971)Google Scholar and SisterQuinn, M. Bernetta's Ezra Pound: an introduction to his poetry (1972)Google Scholar.

5 “The ideogrammic method consists of presenting one fact and then another until at some point one gets off the dead and desensitized surface of the reader's mind, onto a part that will register.” Guide to Kulchur, p. 51.

6 The associations around life as repeated pattern clearly link with the woman who, unbroken by the loss of her children, proudly asserts ‘I still have the mould’ in C. 76.

7 Here is an alternative definition of the ideogram by Pound:

‘He (the Chinaman) is to define red. How can he do it in a picture that isn't painted in red paint?

He puts (or his ancestor put) together the abbreviated pictures of

That, you see, is very much the kind of thing a biologist does (in a very much more complicated way) when he gets together a few hundred or a thousand slides, and picks out what is necessary for his general statement. Something that fits the case, that applies in all of the cases.’ ABC of Reading, pp. 6–7.

8 Mencius, III, I, iv, 13. Such work is made much simpler by reference to Edwards, and Vasse, 's Annotated Index to the Cantos (1957)Google Scholar.

9 The deprivation of women's company is felt throughout by the ageing Pound; ‘senesco sed amo’ (C. 80).

10 huang3 niao3 chih3 = ‘the yellow bird alights’, from an ode in the Classic Anthology.

11 ‘for three months did not know the taste of his food’ (C. 74).

12 Twice in C. 74, once each in C. 76, C. 78, C. 79 and C. 84.

13 Holy Bible, Micah, iv, 3–5.