Progressive popularity

By the time of his death in 1894, Adolphe Sax had already achieved the near-impossible, though like many great inventors he would neither recognise this nor profit from it; to introduce a new musical instrument and gain acceptance of typically conservative musicians and public is a feat probably partially paralleled in the last 300 years only by Arnold Dolmetsch's re-introduction of the now common recorder. Sax's early liaison with the Garde Républicaine had assured the saxophone of a continuing presence in the French army bands, and it was this strength which eventually fed the instrument into other musical areas as the twentieth century dawned. His efforts in the classical field reaped little reward, and this was to remain a much less active arena for many years.

It is to Sax's credit that most of the acoustical and mechanical improvements to the saxophone constitute refinements which do not significantly depart from the original patents or render the early instruments unplayable today: most are developments appropriate to more modern manufacturing techniques, greater performer agility, or the optimisation of the tonal requirements of players. Since Sax's original patent rightly includes the mouthpiece, it is necessary to record a parallel development here also.

At the beginning of the twentieth century there was a firm and continuing role for the saxophone in the military bands of France, Germany and elsewhere in Europe, with a rather recalcitrant England soon to follow. In America the Gilmore and Sousa showbands did much to extend the exposure of the instrument to the general public. However, in classical music the saxophone made only an occasional appearance, due in large part to the lack of substantial repertoire and the disinterest of orchestral musicians. Indeed the tenuous thread spun by Adolphe’s early teaching at the Paris Conservatoire seems barely discernible until reinforced by Marcel Mule and Sigurd Rascher some fifty years later.

This is Ezra Pound to his friend James Joyce, who was a singer with, by some accounts, the potential for a career as such. On the other hand, all accounts of Pound's voice are pretty well in accord with his own jocular assessment - raucous, nasal, a scratchy phonograph. Recordings bear this out. When we say someone has a beautiful voice we usually mean a speaking or singing organ of great resonance, power, suppleness, freedom, range, capable of an infinitude of nuance, a strangely affecting Gestalt through which we experience a thrill akin to the sensation of flight. But there is another kind of voice than the merely frequency producing one, another kind of singer than the paragon of high notes - certain poets, who, either naturally, or by acquisition, have the ability to compose words which prescribe the voice which should utter them, poets with an “ear,” poets who never separate word from sounding tone and the percussive rhythm of consonants.

Here begins the great unwieldy poem, all light and mud, to which Ezra Pound devoted much of his life. It was the work of a poet too ambitious, too afraid of being cramped, to work according to a plan. Instead of a plan, Pound devised a strategy for creating a self-scrutinizing text, continually extending itself, ramifying outward, as it groped to comprehend its own prior meanings, to improvise new networks of connection, and to assimilate new material: a text shaped like a developing brain. New Cantos form themselves out of schemes to make sense of old Cantos: so the story of The Cantos comprises two intertwined stories, one concerning Pound's writing of the poem, the other concerning Pound's interpretations of what he had already written.

This twin story begins in 1915, when Pound was thirty years old. He was living in London, writing critical essays and reviews, shaping the modernist movement by propagandizing Eliot and other poets; and he felt that it was time to make a contribution of his own, by composing a grand poem worthy of Homer and Dante. As early as 1909, Pound told his mother that he intended to write an epic; but he was not immediately certain how to proceed.

Shifts in gender relations at the turn of the century were a key factor in the emergence of Modernism. The period from 1880 to 1920, within which Modernism emerged and rose to preeminence as the dominant art form in the West (it remained dominant until the end of World War II), was also the heyday of the first wave of feminism, consolidated in the woman suffrage movement. The protagonist of this movement was known as the “New Woman”: independent, educated, (relatively) sexually liberated, oriented more toward productive life in the public sphere than toward reproductive life in the home. The New Woman was dedicated, as Virginia Woolf passionately explained in “Professions for Women,” to the murder of the “Angel in the House,” Coventry Patmore's notorious poetic idealization of Victorian nurturant-domestic femininity. This New Woman inspired a great deal of ambivalent modernist characterization, from Hardy's Sue Bridehead and Ibsen's Hedda Gabler to Chopin's Edna Pontellier and Woolf's Lily Briscoe. But these famous characters, important as they are, constitute only the most obvious manifestation of turn-of-the-century feminism's formative influence on Modernism.

Ezra Pound made his first political statement when he was only seven years old. Reacting to the news that Grover Cleveland had defeated Benjamin Harrison in the presidential election of 1892, he threw his child's rocking chair across the room. Such a combination of rage and reaction would typify his approach to politics over his lifetime. But at that age his opinions were not yet his own, and his violent act was undoubtedly motivated by family discussions he had overheard. In his autobiography, Indiscretions (1920), he speculated:

As Pound remembered it, Homer Pound's job in the assayer's department at the US Mint in Philadelphia was not covered by the 1883 Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act, which dealt only with offices with more than fifty employees.

Ezra Pound published some seven books that can fall under the heading Literary Criticism. The majority of these were collections of previously printed essays: Favannes and Divisions (1918), Instigations (1920), Make It New (1934), Polite Essays (1937). None of these has remained in print, having been replaced by T. S. Eliot's excellent selection Literary Essays (1954), and by William Cookson's omnium gatherum, Selected Prose (1973). These anthologies contain some of Pound's better known and more important critical writings. But they are necessarily uneven, for they have not been conceived as a single effort by their author.

A more unified picture of Pound the critic emerges from the books and pamphlets that he envisaged and brought forth as a whole. These are The Spirit of Romance (1910), How To Read (1931), ABC of Reading (1934), Guide to Kulchur (1938), Carta da Visita (1942). The two last are devoted only in part to literature, but this is characteristic of the uncompartmentalized way Pound worked. In fact, Jefferson and/or Mussolini (1935) could be added to the list of books of criticism that were created as wholes. These unified volumes make for exciting reading because they move with their own momentum, in a somewhat improvisational fashion, from day to day, and often refer to their writing in process by place and date.

“There they are, you will have to go a long way round / if you want to avoid them”: these lines from Basil Bunting's poem “On the Fly-Leaf of Pound's Cantos” have a slightly ominous tone, preparing us for the complications which haunt the reception of Pound's work in America. You can't avoid The Cantos, says Bunting, if you are in any sense committed to the art of poetry - at least the work you will need to do for yourself which Pound has already done for you will be immense - yet there are at the same time reasons why you still might want to avoid the poem. Tellingly, perhaps, Bunting's poem carries the dateline 1949, the year in which Pound, now confined in St. Elizabeths, received the Bollingen Prize for poetry. The award - for The Pisan Cantos - was bound to provoke controversy: was it acceptable to give this type of recognition to a man who had espoused fascism and antisemitism, or could the remarkable lyric beauty of the new sequence be judged apart, as something transcending political error?

It is within this quite explosive context that we have to consider the nature of Pound's influence on a younger generation of writers. Indeed, the ambivalence which is hinted at in Bunting's lines makes the whole issue of influence complicated, especially if we assume it to connote forms of anxiety and concealment as it famously does for Harold Bloom.

It is tempting to argue that all films are modernist, that the cinema itself is an accelerated image of modernity, like the railway and the telephone. But to do this is to miss the nostalgia inseparable from the way the medium has worked out historically, its (amply rewarded) yearning to become our century's version of last century's novel. There are modernist films, even outside the period we associate with Modernism; but the largest fact about the cinema over the hundred years since its birth is its comfortable embrace of ancient conventions of realism and narrative coherence.

When the German critic Walter Benjamin describes the strange mingling of artifice and illusion in the cinema - we know all about the tricky construction of the pictured world, which we nevertheless take as far more intimately actual than anything we could find in the live theatre - he says “the sight of immediate reality has become an orchid in the land of technology.”

In Pound's oeuvre, it is often difficult to distinguish between what is translation or adaptation and what is original composition. For Pound there seems to be no fundamental distinction between the two. More than a mere preparation to stimulate his own creative faculties, translation served as an “adjunct to the Muses' diadem” (HSM) and assumed an importance seldom found in other modern poets. Pound's translations stimulated and strengthened his poetic innovations, which in turn guided and promoted his translations. Pound's poetics is essentially a poetics of translation and he has largely redefined the nature and ideal of poetic translation for the twentieth century. This essay will try to present a roughly chronological outline of Pound's major translations and to highlight some of the most salient features of his involvement with translation in relation to his fundamental concerns as a modern poet.

Pound embarked upon the career of poetry with the determination, as he recalled in 1913, that he would try to know what was counted as poetry anywhere by finding out what part of poetry "could not be lost by translation" and also whatever was unique to each language. He claimed that he began this comparative examination of European literature as early as 1901 (LE, 77), and in 1915 he again defined his Goethean conception of world literature as involving a criticism of excellence "based on world-poetry" (LE, 225).

Understanding Ezra Pound has never been easy. His erudition and experimentation, not to say his orneriness, have constantly challenged readers. His life as an expatriate in Venice, London, Paris and Rapallo clouded his identity as an American; the war years obscured it when he delivered a series of anti-American and antisemitic radio broadcasts supporting Mussolini. That led to his subsequent arrest, trial and imprisonment in a Washington, DC mental hospital. It also led to The Pisan Cantos, which won the prestigious Bollingen Prize in 1949. His release in 1958 saw him return to Italy where he died in 1972. Yet as he wrote in 1920, “I am terribly, appallingly, but I am not sure about the 'deplorably' American.” That for Pound did not change.

Literature, not politics, was his calling. As poet, translator, editor, critic, librettist, and dramatist, drawing on medieval, Italian, American, English, Chinese, French, and contemporary traditions, Pound created works that were as complex as they were absorbing. From 1915 until 1969 he worked on an ambitious epic poem, The Cantos, which embraced the multiple traditions that informed his work. Its part-publication over the years marked its constant re-creation as new influences and sources appeared. Before and during that effort, he produced a series of innovative lyric and dramatic poems that were alternately identified as Imagist or Vorticist but were undeniably modern.

Our general understanding of textual criticism, its aims and procedures, has changed rather dramatically over the past twenty years or so, and it is no longer possible to consider the texts of The Cantos, or of any other major modernist work, without first reviewing, at least in outline form, relevant theoretical perspectives. Earlier views held that authors are isolated, unified, and integral personalities, and that they naturally work toward the creation of an end-product. In fact, no one lives in total isolation as a self-contained and consistent integer. Writers normally exist in a world of friends and family, as well as of colleagues and business associates. It is also difficult to assume that they never change their minds or points of view. More importantly, authors are in constant contact with literary tradition, the innumerable works of existing literature which form and influence them, not to mention their experience of both current and historical events.

Of course, writers set out to produce poems, novels, plays, etc., but there are two possible models for the process. The first contends that the most important moment in the creative process is the initial flash of inspiration and that subsequent rewriting, the working-out of an idea into final form, compromises the tension which gave birth to the work by moving further and further away from it, perhaps even censoring or repressing it.

Ezra Pound wrote a good deal of art journalism and criticism, participated actively in one art movement, Vorticism, and wrote extensively in his poetry and prose about the effect chosen instances of art, particularly Italian Renaissance and modernist art, had on his sensibility and thinking. Aside from his 1916 book, Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir, his writing on art has been collected in Ezra Pound and the Visual Arts (1980), and most of the details of his varied interests in the visual arts have been carefully studied by a number of different critics. This essay is not one more detailed study of an aspect of Pound's interests in the visual arts as much as a synoptic overview of those interests. What, if anything, links and renders coherent Pound's varied interests in art? More importantly, what motivated Pound's interest in the visual arts?

Pound's interest in the visual arts offers a significant contrast to his interest in music. There are, of course, some similarities between the two interests. His opinions about music and painting were both widely divergent from received notions, both in his praise of modern artists such as Henri Gaudier-Brzeska and George Antheil, and in his intemperate dismissal of Rubens and Rembrandt and the entire solo piano repertoire. We have not quite known how to learn from Pound's consciously eccentric views without adopting all of them, but for me the value of Pound's criticism is at both extremes of the range, rarely in the middle (fortunately, he is rarely in the middle).

Approaching Modernism

Although the difficulties of defining Modernism are properly aired elsewhere in this volume, its broad outlines are now only too familiar: its peak period in the Anglo-American context lay between 1910 and 1925, while its intellectual formation encompassed a coming to terms with the lines of thought associated with Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche. Yet despite its apparent familiarity, interpretation of the literature of the period has become less rather than more clear by the end of the century. In particular, as Modernism becomes the assumed background against which to define postmodernism, it is in danger of being both banalized and misappreciated at the same time. Since the change from Modernism to postmodernism is not a difference in metaphysic so much as a different stage in the digestion of the same metaphysic, this chapter focuses on how new thought was assimilated at the time. And similarly, rather than giving an encyclopedic synopsis of intellectual developments within and preceding the period, it concentrates on the interpretative cruxes of Modernism, which are in many ways precisely a testing of this body of thought.

Hugh Kenner's The Pound Era characterizes Ezra Pound as the driving force, the dynamo, the vortex which propelled, revitalized, energized the era of high modernism which began sometime around the beginning of the twentieth century and which survived World War II before becoming part of literary history. There are many different and differing accounts of modernism, and Peter Nicholls's Modernisms (1995) makes this clear in its very title, but one could argue that high literary modernism of the sort Pound promulgated and claimed to invent, neglected or misunderstood the significance of gender, and indeed relied on doing so. If this is the case, one could also argue that Pound's texts articulate a strenuous and at times exaggerated masculinity, and concomitantly, enunciate a range of profoundly traditional versions of the feminine. This may seem odd, given that women feature so prominently in Pound's personal and professional life and as subjects in his writing. This essay investigates Pound's relationship with some of the significant women in his life and analyzes those moments in his poetry which inscribe the archetypal feminine while recalling individual women.

“ad interim 1933” is the promisory note concluding Eleven New Cantos of 1934 in a Canto which offers Mussolini and the shade of Jefferson as potential ameliorators within the crisis of belligerency and money that for Pound constituted contemporary Europe. It is the function of the two following volumes, The Fifth Decad of Cantos (1937) and Cantos LIILXXI (1940), to meet that promise through a negotiation of a cultural map constructed in the main by the founding of a bank, the Monte dei Paschi, in sixteenth-century Siena, the reforms instigated in Tuscany during the eighteenth century by the Grand Duke Pietro Leopoldo and his son Ferdinando (in JFDC), the history of China (based largely on Confucian principles) through to the eighteenth century, and the career of John Adams (in CL). These are the presiding issues in a pair of volumes which offer a diagnosis of the corruption of Western culture by usury and seek to discover alternatives through resurrecting pre-capitalist systems of exchange, the values of Confucian thought, and the ideals of the early American Republic.

While Cantos LII-LXXI uses a simple bipartite structure (where the first half, Cantos LII-LXI, is devoted to China and the second half, Cantos LXII-LXXI, to Adams), The Fifth Decad is more various in its preoccupations. It begins with the Monte dei Paschi in Cantos XLII and XLIII where the bank is figured as an image of fiscal solidity and certainty based upon its deployment not of the abstract and speculatory structure of capitalist finance but of the produce from the immediate region (see SPR, 240).