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This is KZSU Stanford.
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Welcome to entitled opinions.
My name is Robert Harrison.
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And we're coming to you live from the Stanford campus.
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And out of the light sagging, leaving behind all past destruction, let's lie us down again on that old bed.
Steadfast under the bamboo and seaweed ceiling, opening glad white arms to one another.
Then let me tell you all that story that's the skill of survival in the daily struggle.
The blows given, the beatings taken, of wandering for years and of winds and losses in the search not to end a destroyer.
While I watch over you, let down your long hair to shadow your shoulders before sleep.
For all this place shall break and fall apart.
Should you go absent.
Silence must be here.
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I just read a poem called Pillow Talk by the Irish poet, Desmonaux Grady.
We'll be devoting the next hour to the American poet as her pound, but I wanted to start with O'Grady for several reasons.
Desmonaux Grady was one of my high school English teachers at the Overseas School of Rome,
and he was the first person to introduce me to Ezra Pound.
In fact, to introduce me to poetry in general.
Can one person give another anything more valuable than that, a taste for poetry?
O'Grady was a wild, heavy drinking, dramatic kind of Irish bard.
He typically got to school unconscionably late in the morning, and you didn't want to take his morning classes anyway.
It was only after lunch break when he had a few beers in him that he came alive as a teacher.
The poet in him would wake up and we students would sit there mesmerized.
We're talking about 1970, 1971, '72.
O'Grady at the time was a disciple as well as friend of Ezra Pound.
This was toward the very end of Pound's stormy life when Pound had fallen into that famous silence of his.
Would hardly say a word to anybody.
O'Grady would go up to Venice to visit Pound almost every weekend, and when he returned to Rome he would adopt, in sympathy with Pound, a stubborn silence himself.
Hence, the Pound Mondays, as we students used to call them.
In class on Mondays, Desmond would hardly open his mouth even during the afternoon sessions.
He would hand out an incomprehensible can't do of Pound's, even if it was a course on Old English poetry.
Then he would stand by the window, one leg up on a chair, his hand over his mouth, and stare out over the lawn.
He didn't want anyone to speak until we had grappled with the guard and the keeper of the key.
The key to the poem that is.
Only much later did I realize that it was in fact a Dylan Thomas verse torn out of context.
If you asked him to clarify a verse or image in the can't though he would point at you with a scrawny, outstretched arm, and shout, "Graple with the guard, find the key."
By Tuesday he was usually talking again, and it was back to Beowulf.
And, out of the light's agony, leaving behind all past destruction.
O'Grady isn't the first person to begin a poem with the conjunction and.
Pound opens his can'tos with the same word, and then went down to the ship, ending them with the line to be men, not destroyers.
In Pound, the conjunction serves to link the can'tos to the epic tradition that he presumably wants to continue.
In O'Grady's case, he presumably links O'Grady to his adopted predecessor pound.
There's more to it than that of course since Pillow Talk, with all its illusions to Odysseus and Penelope, is really about matrimony.
Hence, the opening and also refers at some level to the conjoining of conjugal love.
Be that as it may, I cannot think of Ezra Pound without thinking also of Desmond O'Grady.
O'Grady is the and that connects me to Pound, and that's why I would like to dedicate this show to Desmond, who, as he's fond of saying, is not dead yet.
So, Ezra Pound, do we really know, after all, what the and that opens the can'tos is supposed to conjoin?
To what extent does the career of this astonishing and controversial poet lend itself to lucid analysis?
How are we supposed to make sense of the treason against America that got him arrested in Italy after the Second World War, and then committed to a mental hospital for several years?
Why is he undeniably one of the very greatest poets the 20th century produced?
I have with me in the studio perhaps the most qualified person in the world to pursue these questions with, and that's no exaggeration.
Professor Marjorie Pearloff is, in my opinion, the best American critic of 20th century poetry, as well as avant-garde aesthetics around.
Most people would agree with me about that, I'm sure, so it's a distinct pleasure and honor to welcome her to the show today.
Marjorie, thanks for coming on the program.
Thank you Robert, I'm delighted to be here.
Okay, but Marjorie Pearloff taught here at Stanford for 12 years, and now lives in Los Angeles,
but I'm taking advantage of one of her return visits to Stanford to whisker into the studios of KZSU to talk about Pound,
and in fact, I have to say it was a difficult decision.
We could have talked about any number of poets, Yates, Elliott, Budler, FEMBO, Franco,
here, Emily Dickinson, Ammons, Susan Howe, but I just couldn't pass up the occasion to talk with you about Ezra Pound, Marjorie.
So I began by giving a little personal narrative about how I got introduced to Pound.
Maybe we should start with how you found your way into the corpus of this poet.
Yes, when I went to graduate school, we were living in Washington, D.C.
This is back in the mid-50s, a long time ago, and I had gone to Oberlin College, a very Protestant college,
but one of my professors there told me that if I were in Washington, I should go to the Catholic University,
and that there were two people who could help me more than anybody else.
I was a little reluctant, not being Catholic, or having anything to do with a pontifical university,
but I did go, and there I met Craig Laudreir and Giovanni Jovonini, two people who were very close to Pound.
They mentioned in all the biographies who went to see him regularly in St. Elizabeth's,
and in fact when Pound first left St. Elizabeth's when he was freed and went back to Genoa,
he stayed for a few days at Craig Laudreir's house.
Can we tell our listeners what is St. Elizabeth's?
St. Elizabeth's is the public, big, galling your general public mental hospital, not a pretty place.
It's in the slums, those are still slums in southwest Washington on the other side of the Capitol,
and it is a dark, dank, unpleasant place, and I believe Pound spent 13 years there.
Yeah, we'll talk about that when we talk about his career.
It's a mental hospital also for criminal.
Yeah, criminal behaviors.
Okay, so, yeah, go on.
And Giovanni Jovonini, who was very serious, wonderful scholar,
and we used to call him Giggles, Giovanni because he never smiled,
but he just loved Pound, and he was the one who first taught me to see what was so remarkable about
as repound that he was completely unique in terms of metrics, in terms of sound structure,
in terms of imagery, in terms of invention.
And I guess I was hooked not right away though.
I didn't work on Pound at that point, but then I came back to it later, and I'm sure that was one of the reasons why.
So why don't we introduce Pound, just the bare bones of the biography,
and what sort of course is his career followed.
Pound was born in 1885 and in Hailey, Idaho, and he always loved to say that he was from the Wild West,
from the Prairie, the real Prairie, but of course that was nonsense.
He moved his family movement.
He was about a year old to Philadelphia, the suburbs of Philadelphia, not Wild West at all.
And his father was an essay for the US Mint, which is wonderfully ironic in terms of
Pound's later theories, monetary theories, theories of money, and Pound went first went to a military school,
and he went to the University of Pennsylvania, where he studied romance languages, and for the rest of his life,
that stood him in good stead, and he also studied in Hamilton College.
He from the very first love Pueblo Sal, literature at that time, barely known by most people,
and universities and Italian, particularly Italian Renaissance Dante, Caval Cante, Guedeguenizelli,
this is what Pound excelled in, and it's fair to say that he introduced the larger public
that now reads these poets to this work.
He left the United States because he had a terrible adventure, and he always loved telling this story.
He got a job teaching at Wabash College in Crawfordville, Indiana,
when he finished his graduate work, not a PhD, but his masters.
And at Wabash College, which was really in the boondocks, he one night harbored a girl of a uncertain reputation.
I don't know whether she was a prostitute or not, he had nothing to do with her.
He just felt sorry for her and he let her stay at his house, and when the powers that be on the campus found this out,
he was expelled.
So he thought that was just as well.
He had had enough of the beaneries, as he called American universities, the beaneries, no more beaneries,
and he went off to Europe.
He had already spent time in Venice with his aunt who had taken him on a trip and in Spain,
but he went to Venice for a year and he wrote his first book, "Alumé Spento."
He had a line from Purgatory, I think.
Tapers extinguished, and then he went to London and lived for a decade in London, and I think we'll talk a little bit about that decade.
So from what I understand, once he left the States, he came back once or twice, maybe three times,
but basically he spent the rest of his life in Europe until he was interned in the hospital.
Absolutely.
He lived in the London, was many people thought his golden decade.
And at first he was very enthusiastic about London and he learned a lot from Yates and the pre-Rafialites and other poets,
but by the 1920 he hated London.
He thought it was a venal, crass place.
He was very unhappy about the war from all aspects, and he first went to Paris for a few years,
and was involved with Dada and Surrealism a little bit, but that was not his scene either.
In 1923 he went to Rapalo, and he spent the rest of his life in Italy, first in Rapalo, later in Venice.
He came back in 1939 briefly to try to convince Roosevelt that he didn't know what he was doing and not to get involved in the war.
This is the kind of thing that Pound thought, but except for brief visits, he didn't come back until he was flown to Washington to stand trial.
In 1936, 47, and then ended up in St. Elizabeth's, then when he left St. Elizabeth's he went back to Italy and spent the rest of his life there.
Now the reason that he went to St. Elizabeth's is because during the Second World War he was in a radio broadcasting,
speaking against America, taking the side of Mussolini and was tried and convicted of treason as a result of these radio broadcast.
Is that...is there other reasons also that he...
No, that's the reason. I think it's very hard for audiences today to understand what treason was in those days.
Today, when someone like Daniel Ellsberg steals the Pentagon Papers or, you know, these things are done, we often consider the person rather heroic.
But in World War II was a war where the lines were drawn very firmly, and you had people like Tokyo Rose, you know, convicted of treason and many of them were executed.
So, pound, it is true that pound was a fascist sympathizer. He was completely deluded. He thought that Mussolini somehow would create a wonderful renaissance like state where the arts could be practiced.
And he did have a few audiences with Mussolini, and one of the cantos begins with the phrase "Equesto e diva tente."
Oh, this is so amusing. So, he was very pleased that he had this opportunity, and he didn't understand.
He somehow thought that Mussolini, he wrote a book about this, that Mussolini was like Thomas Jefferson, who was his idol.
And he thought that if Mussolini somehow would get rid of capitalism and usury and these bad things, everything would be fine.
And just to show you how deluded pound was, which is why it's hard for me to condemn him totally for his politics, when he was first arrested and taken to the prison camp at Pisa. This was in 1946 when the Allies had arrived.
When he was first arrested, he asked them if he couldn't call Roosevelt up. I'm sorry, it would have been Truman. It was Truman by that time.
He could have called Truman up, and he would explain to him that he could make peace with Japan, because after all he had worked on the no theater, and he knew all about Japanese art, and if they just gave him a crack at talking to the emperor, he could make peace with Japan.
And that's truly what pound believed that some or other, you know, this would work. So, he wasn't really a fascist in any kind of reasoned way, but it is true that he made terrible.
He was very anti-Semitic, and he made terrible anti-Semitic remarks, and unfortunately when he was arrested, he made the mistake of comparing Hitler to Joan of Arc. This was at the end of the war, and he would say things like that, which of course did not stand him in good stead.
So, he was not only persona non-grata, but when the peace in Canto's won the Bolingian Prize, the peace in Canto's, which is probably the best part of the Canto.
Which he wrote during his internment at Pisa, and in 1948 it won the Bolingian Prize, and this created the kind of stir no literary event I think can create anymore.
Even the satanic verses, I suppose, because everybody cited one way or the other, Bennett Surf, who was the president of Random House, the biggest publisher that time in the United States, refused to anthologize a single poem by pound, and that's an angry people were that this anti-Semite.
It was a very difficult time, and that this anti-Semite, and this fascist, this terrible person, had won the Bolingian Prize, and the committee said, "Well, it was the best poem published this year, and it was."
Well, can I ask a personal question, you don't have to answer, but being Jewish yourself, you have this love for pound despite the fact that of this political record that he has and being an anti-Semite, does that create problems for you in any way?
Well, actually, doesn't. I mean, I do think he's economics. I come from a family of economists, and what bothers me more even than the anti-Semitism is the absurd economics. It's just plain silly.
It's just as if a 10-year-old child decided they were going to take up economics. He never really had any answers he wanted to restore Monday to Pazke.
You know, the bank in Siena, and he thought if there were bank that didn't lend money, that would be wonderful, own life would be beautiful, which of course is absurd.
But, first, the anti-Semitism goes. It was a kind of, what should I say, almost a kind of disease where some of his best friends were Jewish, like Louis O'Kofsky, to whom he was very good and many others, but in a general way he thought the Jews, that is the bankers, and the friends of Franklin Finkelstein Roosevelt, as he called him, were the enemy.
It is very bad. I find it just tasteful, but I couldn't condemn pound just for that, because in many ways it is, and this is what people don't understand, T.S. Eliot was just as anti-Semitic.
In a certain way more seriously, because more intelligently, if you will, anti-Semitic, Bertrand Russell, William Carlos Williams, even Wallace Stevens would say, Philip Bravo, although he's a Jew, you know, it's not a bad critic.
So you have to, people have to understand the times a little bit, and understand that racism was a terrible feature of the time, and it has to be understood in some kind of context.
I agree with you that his anti-Semitism is in a certain sense, more benign in nature, because I think, but correct me if I'm wrong, that it was an anti-Semitism that was founded upon a rather crazy theory of history, which saw usury, or the lending of money, the credit system that began in the Renaissance, as the source of all the woes of the modern world.
And he associated Jews with the money lending institutions, and he was just as much against bankers in general, whether they were Jews or not.
And so I think that the Jewish phenomenon for him was associated largely with the phenomenon of usury, whereas someone like Eliot might have also theological issues with Judaism and so forth.
Was there more in pounds case to within the... No, I think that's absolutely true, and we have to, there are two points to be made.
One is that he just associated the Jews with banking, and that's it. He hated bankers in general just as much even if they weren't Jewish, or presidents like Roosevelt, who certainly wasn't Jewish.
So it was a kind of craziness, really. But the second point that I make to students, and then I think is very important for people to see, is that poets are not necessarily nice people.
I don't want to excuse, I think it is a blot on pounds. There's no question that it is a blot on his work, and it perhaps means that he isn't, let's say, in the absolute first rank, although I don't like these rankings, one could argue the Joyce, for instance, James Joyce, who was his good friend, whom he knew all his life, is a greater writer, because he
didn't have that particular blot on his escutcheon that pound has. But it is very naive to think that poets are nice people, and that they have nice ideas. It's just that if centuries go on, we no longer expect them to have nice ideas. So when we look back at poets of Dante's drama or whatever, we don't wait for them to have nice ideas.
There's no question that pound had what we think are very unpleasant views, but other people who might have very nice views, but might just not be very good poets.
The crazy thing about many poets in general, and a lot of the great ones, I think pound and Dante are very similar in this regard, that, well,
Dante begins his career as a lyric poet, writing love forms for Beatrice, and then he gets involved in the local politics of Florence, and he gets exiled, and he writes this long epic poem called The Divine Comedy, in which he has his own theories of history,
and insanely, you know, idealogizes throughout that poem in ways that are in retrospect completely idiosyncratic, and have nothing to do with the true political realities of the time, but he had this obsessive notion that he brought to bear and he made a whole epic poem out of it, and
Pound likewise begins his career as a lyric poet. I think World War I probably talk about whether World War I kind of shattered his belief in continuing to be a lyric poet, but he turns to the epic as well, writes the very title of that is an illusion, I think to Dante, and he also infuses that whole long poem with his own theories of history, but fortunately, we don't have, you know, poets don't have to be very much in touch with reality in order to be really good,
poets, as just on the, you know, we're talking about the prosodic dimensions of their work, so maybe we should turn our discussion to what is it about the poetry of Pound, which despite the blocks, you know, remains something that one cannot just write off, and that it demands a certain degree of appreciation with all these qualifications.
Yes, if I just may make one more point there, it is also the case and I think this makes
and it does relate to Dante, it makes pound so important in the modern spectrum is how
great his ambition was.
You see ambition is a great thing, it's something we don't find in too many poets today.
By ambition I mean that he absolutely forced himself to learn all he could about Confucius
because he was going to write, he was going to put so much Confucian knowledge into the
poetry and do the ideograms and do Chinese ideograms.
He studied the no theater.
He when he came to all these things he absolutely studied them and he thought it really
mattered and I think one reason that young people today flock to pound again, pound is
very popular is that it gives you a feeling that what poetry can do and that it is such
an ambitious enterprise whether it's lyric or epic or whether it's the no theater or
his prose essays which he's one of the most important critics of the time certainly and
it is that amazing ambition that that's who you are, you are a poet.
There are not too many people we can say that about and it makes pound very special and
makes one feel that whatever his ridiculous theories of the stamp, script, and verbal
and so on were, no he was very important.
And the theories might be crazy but as you say the ambition was to see poetry as the medium
that would lead history forward into a kind of redemptive stage and he had a belief in
the powers of poetry which in retrospect seems completely out of sync for us because
we know how ultimately impotent poetry is politically speaking.
He was not so disabused at the time and he thought that the cantos were an essential,
sort of saving gesture for history as a whole western civilization all depended on the
poets.
Well he didn't quite think that later in his life, he did think they were failure and
that he had botched it in the in the great years of his silence later in life when he
was living with Olga Rudge, his mistress, left his wife finally and lived with Olga Rudge
in Venice.
He didn't speak, he stopped speaking, he was never quite clear why that was, he literally
didn't speak except to say I'll have the fish today and the restaurant or something.
And this puzzled many of his visitors like Alan Ginsburg by the way, Jewish poet who
was mad about pound and thought he was the great poet of our time.
He did feel somehow it had failed but he didn't feel it had failed because the public
had received it correctly. He thought he had failed because he couldn't really make it cohere
as Dante made the divine comedy cohere. That is no matter how many cantos he would have
written, it wasn't going in a circular direction, let's say, so that happens.
What are those last fragments where he says I have tried to write paradise that those
whom I love forgive what I have tried to do let the gods forgive me and that the realization
that he could not write the paradise which for him would have been the Dante part of the
poem that would have given it that wholeness and coherence and resolution. But maybe that
says something about the era too.
It says something about the air and pounds failure is like an emblem of our era. You cannot
write the Odyssey today, you cannot write the divine comedy, you're not going to have
a neat three-three grouping or whatever, but the sheer fragmentary quality which earlier poets
like Yates didn't like. Yates said about pound he has not got all the wine into the
bowl. That was very devastating. He says that in the preface to the Oxford book of modern
verse he has not got all the wine into the bowl. So, and that's what everybody believed
in some people still believe that it just isn't contained. It's not a poem that can
be contained. So that in that sense it was looked at as a failure today when art works in
general as so much more fragmentary and we have accepted the fragment as a kind of art
form that's okay.
And I think one could say that the huge achievement of the Kantos lies as much in its failures
as it does in its successes. I think that's a very important point. The failures, there's
been a lot written on that too. The failures, Mira, what the larger failures of the culture
were, nobody understood by the time you got to World War II. It was too difficult to
understand what was going on. It wasn't as an early times where there was even in the French
Revolution it was a clear cut idea of what issues were at stake. And so how to run the
world or what to do became just too hard for a poet or an individual to think of what
to do but at least pound tried. Whereas most of the poets of the time just wrote personal
lyrics about themselves.
Yeah, so maybe we should jump into the Kantos reminding our listeners that he began as
a exquisite lyric poet, not just writing poems about his personal emotions but as you
were mentioning earlier he recuperated these various traditions, the Poven-style poetry
of the early Middle Ages, the still-novas poetry of Dan Tickelakant, the and so forth.
And he experimented in all these different voices or masks as he calls it one of his
volumes per sewne. And then I think World War I, do you agree with me that World War I
came as a shock to him and as soon as that war was over he writes his poem Hugh Selwyn
Moberly where he's trying to come to grips with the fact that so many of his own generation
had perished and never were never given a voice to speak for themselves. And all of a sudden
now he's writing the Kantos which is with his epic ambition almost as if to that only the
epic poet can really give voice to the dead, descend into the underworld of the dead.
The first Kantos is a rewriting of book 11 of the Odyssey which is Odysseus' visit to
the dead and this descent into that underworld which is a very epic gesture. It does begin
with the word and and then went down to the ship. What do you think is that stake in this
turn to the epic? Why the Kantos begin with this conjunction as I mentioned in my opening
remarks and and what is this turn away from the lyric and where does that end up?
Almost everything, almost everything Pound wrote after 1917 went into the Kantos. So he started
writing it during World War I very disappointed especially at the death of his beloved
friend Godier Jerska the sculptor, Henri Godier Jerska, Mopulapatri at age 23 in
Flanders Fields that was a terrible blow and the tea Hume was killed. I mean very different
from what today and that many of one's best friends were killed. And first Pound was sort
of jocular about the war after all the United States wasn't involved, he thought both sides
was silly but then it wasn't silly it was it was very much for real and he had a very
hard time accepting that. As far as epic goes I think though he may have always wanted
to write an epic but of course the Kantos isn't really quite an epic. It's a circle of fragments
it's been called it's a collage and it's a whole question whether one can write epic in the
20th century. One problem being that epic steel with war always in somewhat a positive
way. I mean in real epic there are in Milton even there are you know war heroes even if
it's Satanists sort of celebrated. Yeah the Divine Comedy is one exception. Yeah the Divine
Comedy is the is a Christian epic but you have to have a coherent point of view to write
an epic. In other words what Pound said about the Kantos is a poem including history
that's a very good designation of it. He said I'm writing a poem including history and
that's what it is it certainly does include that but he also wrote to his father and
said don't ask me for an Aquinas map Thomas Aquinas don't ask me for an Aquinas map
but it does have three threads one live man goes into the world of the dead to sense
into the world of the dead that's book one the Nikui as in book 11 in the Odyssey live
man descends into the world of the dead to the repeat in history and three of it metamorphoses
from Avid which can you explain the last two what does I mean repeat the repeat in history
means that all the things he traces in the canoes echo each other so Francis Malatesta
their three early canoes eight to eleven eight night at four early canoes devoted to the
Renaissance
kondochier a seagus Mundo Malatesta who was not a very nice man had a few wives killed
off and so on who built the Tempeo in rimini a beautiful building and for Pound
uh... since you know he was fostered great artists that was good enough no matter what
he did in his personal life
and he worshipped Malatesta but then he relates Malatesta his the repeat in history
to Jefferson and then he relates in forward and backward and again everybody's always
related to everybody else so a particular goddess Aphrodite will be related to a china
a chinese goddess uh... kion and they will be seagods that come up in the in Greek mythology
but also come up in chinese mythology and come up in in other things in african sometimes
and african
uh... it's a credit so it's in credit so the repeat in history is very important
and the third one is yeah it's about that a lot of ways what what third one when he talks
about mythological characters being always a transformation metamorphosis the canoes is a book
of metamorphosis everything changes all the time and yet in other ways everything is the
same but the lines break off and another line comes in and you're not sure how that line
relates to the line before but just when you think the first line is gone it comes up
again in a different context so the metamorphosis where places are reborn this is very
much a geographic poem
uh... one thing that makes the canoes very distinctive is it's incredible sense of place
mythological place in real place ek baton the holy city places of this sort but actually
real places all the places he went to
uh... restaurants
uh...
different cities but especially in Paris particular cafes and restaurants or in
everywhere in Venice all the i sat on the go i sat on the dogana steps
uh... so it has a very firm sense of place that then branches out and relates to the
underworld
relates to other worlds and therefore has an enormous sweep an enormous historical and
mythological sweep so
a poem including history
uh... and live man goes into the world down into the world of the dead the repeat in
history and metamorphosis taken from all that
of it was another one of his
loves and it's interesting to me that often is once again so incredibly popular
today
in our time you'll constantly reading things about people using
all the different poets using all the
the idea of the transformation
of women transformed to demand men transformed to women into animals
what it all means that something that's very important
i think i think it's much more of a little video naged than anything else
because uh... in
all its metamorphosis there's a uh... there's no hierarchy
of being and humans
plants animals they're all interchangeable they participate in the same
substance
this was horrifying for someone like dante
who really uh... believed in the in the uh... intrinsic hierarchy of uh... of the
cosmos
and to confuse those boundaries was uh...
you know it was certainly
anti-Christian that the way he understood it but
in uh... the twenty century world at pounds kantos
gives life to their the uh...
the mutability of all things into each other
uh... is obidian i think uh... it's a kind of sensibility that
a lot of people share today hence maybe all that is the uh...
easily great
figure
uh... for this new kind of uh...
this new creed
uh... of the continuum of all beings uh... rather than you know their
separation
so marty you know
time goes very quickly on these programs we haven't even heard the
poets voice yet so
perhaps uh...
uh...
let we've been talking about the kantos let's just
there's all this great earlier stuff but let's just stick with the
kantos since we're uh... we're on it and maybe want to read uh...
rate a few lines from the first kantos and then maybe choose one of the
the first the first okay the first uh... kantos is written in the uh...
meter of the c_f_a_ so it's
it's in credit is not even the word for it has old english meter
it's based on a medieval it ends up talking about a medieval Latin poem
and it is the story
basically taken from
the odyssey from book eleven
of the descent after they leave cursies island
the descent into the underworld and it begins like this
and then went down to the ship
set keel to breakers fourth on the godly sea
and we set up massed in sale on that swatch ship
board sheep aboard her and our bodies also
heavy with weeping and wins from sternward
boar's out onward with belly and canvas
surcee's this craft
this trim
quite goddess
i'll stop there for a minute just to say first of all the end
that you mentioned earlier a minute ago
it starts in media's race in this poem ends in media's race really
because there is no beginning for pound
there is no beginning
middle and end
this is a
long poem that has what we often call serial structure that is parrotacti
which means and and and you pile up
and it's the sheer cumulative weight
that
makes meaning explode not any kind of reason or logical or sequential work
so it starts
in media's race and you hear those insistant four stresses per line
surcee's this craft the trim-poiled goddess
then sat we a minchips wind jamming the tiller
and so on and you get the whole story about at a clay coming
and the prophecy of what will happen but i want to say word about the end of the
first canto because it's so typical of everything that will happen later
he's he's telling the whole story
of
Odysus's father
telling him and then tyresia's telling him
what he will expect
and then we get these lines and i step back and he's strong with the blood and
then Odysus shall return through spiteful Neptune over dark seas
lose all companions
and then and to clay
came and to clay Odysus's mother
and then we suddenly get this
like quiet davis
i mean that is andrea's davis and off a gene of it jayley
fifteen thirty eight
out of home or
you think what in the world is going on here
he's referring to a little book that he found in a parastal on the keys
that par in paris
by andrea's davis written in fifteen thirty eight
and that version of
the odyssey out of home or
so you know pound is not a subcueris people think as he always explains
what he's saying and he explains it right here
what he's dealing with but like quiet davis
and then you get and he's sailed by sirens you come back to the Odysus story
and then's outward away and up to cursy
and then you still get some other myths put in
various greek myth putting in the story of a for d d
and then the very last line
bearing the golden bow of arjeceda
the argyve suns Achilles and then the end of the cata
is so that with a colon so that
throws the meaning forward there's no conclusion
and you have suddenly switched from a straightforward narrative
from davis to these
syncretic myths collage together
and i do think that's the basic mode of the cata is one that became in a sense the
basic twenty century mode
collage as in picasso's collage that is items
pasted together juxtaposed without explicit act without any kind of
explanation of how exactly how they put together
all why but meaning a cruise by their juxtaposition
now if i may go on a minute if you if you move from there
to can't afford which is one of my favorites
can't afford is a kind of metamorphosis can't have
where he deals with love romantic love and uh...
it begins i just want to say something about the beginning because it's so typical
of pound in this earlier phase and very dramatic
so we get four lines
listen to these lines palace in smoky light
try but a heap of smoldering boundary stones
on oxyforming a's argylea
hear me
proud he very quickly introduces here
the trojan theme
on a safe for me cases from the pandaric him
so to him to war and our real killer is the bride of katullis
so to him to love war and love come together here
and then hear me catmas
one of the seven against the ebs
catmas of golden
proud so paul introduce these mythical elements and in the early cattos
myth predominates greek myth
all kinds of especially secret myths
but also medieval and paul paul stories
and they tell us scope
and so you get the most wonderful conjunctions was suddenly you realize a
given line telescopes
the paul paul paul story with the greek myth and they come together
and meaning more or less explodes in your face so these are very wonderful
works uh... these early cattos
and these had been written by about nineteen twenty
nineteen twenty one
so it's quite early
can one read the cattos without extensive commentary
i think absolutely i think in fact the commentary has a way of burying a
great deal of it
if there's a visit if here
it is true that that people today who no longer know any greek myth
or and they don't know these little paul paul paul stories which paul
tells everywhere else
uh... the best way actually to read paul
is to also read some of his prose works which are like poems in their own
right the spirit of romance
which deals with his great love
for
uh... baton to born
the various true bhedora poets
and uh... all the way down then to false waville
and uh...
if you've read the spirit of romance and you know anything at all you know
the basic greek myths that you could learn in any
mythological dictionary
and you know something about what's going on in the London of the time
you really don't need all those notes because usually pound explains it about
a line later
if he uses a latin phrase he'll give it in english two lines later
or if he uses uh... it chinese itty grams which he did later he always tells
who what they mean
besides meaning is such isn't perhaps the key
because the wonderful thing is the way
it moves
and i once had the experience or i've had this experience a few times
of a signing a class
saying to them instead of writing an explication of this or that can't
over theme and pound
right a can't
the students all jump at all good
i can do that anybody can do that
and so they think all they have to do is take a few latin phrases
a chinese itty gram a little german
a reference to a goddess
uh... or a place in venice or so on
and sunvettard you know church
sunreemow or whatever
and and they have it and
absolutely teaches them
what pound didn't do
because it isn't that easy it's the way things are layered and put together
that is unique that later poets have tried to do
and simply can't do because the layering is always surprising
and it's always completely intricate and he does know exactly what he's
doing it never just rambles on
well i think i put a poet in order to be successful in this kind of writing you
have to have
thoroughly and genuinely
re-appropriated that whole tradition
and scondest school with the mid-evils you have to know your greek and latin you
have to know uh... your problem solved your atalian your friend your germ
and it's only through a a genuine kind of making it your own
that you can as he called it make it new i mean i'd love that uh...
descriptor for what poetry should do is to make it new that doesn't mean
you chase after novelty for novelty sake it means
re-inherit
the literary tradition and re-new it
and uh... in a modernityum
you need to inherit it first
and pound brought all these people to reading this work this is the fascinating
thing
people who went to college at pounds time let's see born eighteen eighty five
so it was the first decade
of the twentieth century before world world one that he was at pen
and it hamilton people studied english literature they studied chosser whom
pound also loved and they say they will chosser
shakespeare shakespeare shakespeare doesn't figure very much in pound
that's a whole interesting question why that so
uh... he switched
that he was a wife
that comes very to the right he switched the leadances
to romance literature
and especially tallyon
and it's incredible what an impact that is made now people take it for
granted that one should know something about donte
and cover county
and perhaps paul paul paul but that wasn't the case when pound came of age
by the way he does very little with german literature again a very fascinating
thing to do with pound
is to see what isn't talked about he does not talk about good day he i he
never mentions haldaloo
he has no interest in
high name maybe a little bit
but the german tradition is not here's not that he couldn't read german but
that's not the tradition he works with
and he doesn't work with most french tradition really
except in very limited ways he loved good tea
he loved a rainbow
they figure he did wonderful translations of that
well-go relatively few but they're very good they're wonderful
o'cabare there
at the green cabaret and so on
so that he really created
the taste by which he's then judged
and um...
may i say a word about
cafe and this will take us into maybe coming back to the early
poetry
pound in nineteen fifteen before he wrote the canos
pound published a volume called cafe which is basically translation
basically
but not quite
uh...
he got a hold from the widow of earnest fennel also who had died
uh... manuscripts
japanese
transliteration
of chinese poets likely poll
and he was absolutely mesmerized by this and he studied these
transliterations
and he used the transliterations and one can see how this works
by uh...
and and translated into english and in a way created
china
he can air in his book
the pound era has a chapter called the invention of china
and there's no question the pound did invent china for i age not that it's
accurate
this takes us back to myth and imagination
anybody who really knows chinese knows the poets will say it's not accurate
but there's a marvelous thing here
and that's in a in a short poem at the beginning of cafe called the beautiful
toilet
uh... we read as follows
this only has five lines
blue blue is the grass about the river
and the willows have overfill the close garden
and within the mistress in the midmost of her youth white white of face
hesitates passing the door
slender she puts forth a slender hand
now if you study
uh...
the uh... and then this the uh...
the next stanza which of just also read and she was a courteson in the old days
and she has married a sought
who now goes drunkenly out
and leaves her too much alone
but i want to come back to that first stanza
if you look at fenneloses transliteration
all the words
are
in
the original that is the translation the japanese transliteration of the
chinese
but the grass was not blue but was green
and so the question is why is the grass blue blue is the grass about the
river
in the beautiful toilet
and he can i was the first to realize that's because for pound china
meant the kind of china plates people had
that is blue and white china
i have china like that
uh... in the late nineteen early twenty century she was every the taste for
chinese that is chinese pottery
met blue and white pottery
and so the blue here becomes
but the grass becomes blue and it seems so apt but the grass should really be
blue
but be green and so this is what i mean about pound inventing china
and notice the and structure exactly like in the end that you talked about
in the cantos and the willows of overfilled the close garden
and within the mistress in the midmost of a youth white white of face
hesitates passing the door
each line adds a new image
and the rhythm we haven't talked about all about rhythm yet
the rhythm is absolutely marvelous because what pound did
as he later called it was to break the pentameter
and he said to break the pentameter that was the first he
english poetry
is very difficult to remove from
i am big pentameter ten syllables five stresses
praline it's just the basic
meter
of shakespeare
milton
words worth write down through the nineteen century browning
big influence on pound
but here you know only get i am big pentameter
you get heavily stressed lines that always begin with stresses blue
blue
is the grass about the river
these falling lines slender she puts forth a slender
hand
so these are very amazing poems
not so much because of what they say
pound is not a poet who had very profound things to say if you
abstract
theme from the poems themselves but what he could do with material
well we have about seven more minutes we have to
decide
you know what can we
what we want to emphasize in the in the concluding minutes but this is not
going to be our last discussion of pound because it's uh... we're gonna have
more for sure
uh...
because there's another beautiful poem one of my favorites is the river
merchants uh... you know why
uh... i don't have
the i don't know if we want to read it now but it's another
transcription from the chinese
but i guess
since time is limited margarine we so we go back to the cantos and we find that
as you were saying although it's in credit it doesn't
attempt to synthesize
all the various traditions you know of the of the west
a lot of things are left out
that there
idiosyncrasies
that pound managers to bring into uh... the poem and
as you say invent or reinvent
china
give
uh... western poetry the pouff all solid still no response for the first time
uh...
for all the
quirkiness of this poet
the tradition was a huge debt
before the you know these various gifts that he's given
uh... and certainly you know being a talent is myself
i know how much of uh... the poets that i studied that income of
content so forth
uh...
oh there american residents really to pounds efforts there
uh...
and
as you say what makes them work
is not just
the collage techniques but
a way of synthesizing these uh... otherwise incongruent elements
into uh...
a parentactical
uh... structures
do the work of synthesis
where these incongruent things that are juxtaposed i get would you say that
it's in the it's in the uh...
among other things the rhythm of the lines that this work is
is happening
it it it happens almost in waveform
that you have these wonderful shifts the first piece of canto
uh... we talked about mousalini before the first piece of canto can't go seventy
before begins with the lines the enormous tragedy of the dream in the peasants
spent shoulders
mane smanas is god was tanned in stuff
thus been and la clada
amilano by the heels at melano
so that they were
was he's referring to mousalini
and his mistress
hung upside down and hung
and killed at at milan
at the end of the war
and many people get very angry that he's memorializing a horrible mousalini
there
it's very moving in the context the next line is that maggots should eat
the dead bullock
and then diganos diocese diganos but the twice crucified
wearing history will you find it
feeling almost that
they had been twice that mousalinos twice crucified yet say this to the
possum and the possum anybody who reads enough and pamnoses his name for
t_s_ l_a_ he always called him the possum because lea it was very
cagey
yet say this to the possum a bang not a whimper
with a bang not with a whimper
to build the city of diocese whose terraces of the color of stars
that's terribly moving you start out with the image of mousalini and his
mistress being hung
and how could this happen and you can tell the poet doesn't know how it
could happen he's he doesn't understand it
one of the tragedies of the canters is the pound never really understood what
gone wrong
after thirteen years to say the list of this when he left and went back to
general he gave the fascist salute
he never really learned
and on the other hand it's very moving when he's trying to justify itself to
his friend t_s_ l_a_ it
yet say this to the boss possum a bang not a whimper not with a bang but a
whimper
as a home he's referring to elia's famous poem the hollow men
this is the way the world ends this is the way the world ends not with a
bang but a whimper
in other words in our century
there's only a whimper there is no more bang so
pounce as
a bang not a whimper
and then comes his ideal city mythical city
to build the city of diacy whose terraces of the color of stars now you
have to try and picture
that here's pounce sitting in the prison camp with the sun beating down
he was not allowed to do any exercise he was not allowed anything he had no
books with him
accepted chinese dictionary and a copy of confucius
and so he had to do everything from memory this time he couldn't refer to
things as he had in the early account of
and he's still talking about building the ideal city
with stars and i think it's that idealism
and it's that drive
and the way it's worked in the very fluidly with the opposite
the normist tragedy in the peasants benchholders that makes it makes the
can't house and we can say more about it perhaps at our
uh... if we have another session don't let yes but it's makes it so beautiful
it's not a beautiful and very moving down the road here is again i
dances in the background for me always at
division of hell
has at the heart of it also an expectation
paradise
and he understood perhaps the hell
of his own air
but also was always had that i out for where we're disparodize lie
and how can i write paradise and the the pathos's tragedy is at the end
and maybe this uh...
com this realization
uh... paradise was excluded
to him or he was excluded from it and from all of us and that
maybe only hell is left and and
hence maybe that silence that consumed him to to the end of his life but
never giving up the hope or expectation
out until a certain point for for paradise is a very moving uh... and a very
important point we might end with this
that um... and this i want listeners to really think about this
today there's so much talk about can we have war poetry
can we write good poems about the a rocky war
and uh...
the fact is that you know people will sort of say war is terrible or give
pictures of battle scenes and how shocked and horrified they are
and see pound never did that he doesn't say here
isn't it awful what world war two did or
aren't a horrified or look what's happened to me
the enormous tragedy
of the dream in the peasant spent shoulders and you have to
everything is elusive but it's never directly stated
and it's not self-pitting really either
and so it's very moving because you feel here somebody who's lived through it
but it doesn't ever really quite understand what is it that happened
how could i have been so diluted
there is no self-pity of but it can we read just in the two minutes that
remain the the uh... the the final fragment or two of the the cantas if you
don't mind
the where he he asked for goodness
and he says uh...
to be meant not to start at the last try to write paradise first of it
uh... too
they too
got mamua mamua what do i love and where are you
that i lost my center fighting the world
the dreams clash and are shattered
and that i tried to make a pada diso
terrace
pada diso pada diso
i've tried to write paradise do not move let the wind speak that is
paradise
let the gods forgive what i have made
the let those i love try to forgive
what i have made
and that's very moving i think beautifully moving and there's one more right
after that
isn't there
i've tried to the pada diso terrace
o to be meant not destroyers yes
uh... very last uh... very very very very last fragment
uh... wages
to mice and a moth my guides
to have heard the far-fallen gasping as toward a bridge over worlds
that the kings meet in that island
where no food is after flight from the pole milkweed the sustenance as to
enter our kingdom
to be men
not destroyers
beautiful
margarine this is to be continued uh... all in the end
so thank you very much for this hour we're we're gonna get you back the
next time you come up to stand for
thank you Robert it's been wonderful discussing uh... the can't i was
in pound with you
want to remind our listeners that you can uh...
listen to us uh...
live by uh... going to the home page of the french and Italian department of
standford and clicking on the web page of this program
entitled opinions
uh... and there you can also listen to previous shows that have been archived
uh... and podcast so
thanks for joining us we'll see you next time
the
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