The Lost Leader

In a whimsical mood, Poet Randall Jarrell once conjured up a vision of the muse of poetry as a kind of fairy godmother "who says to the poet, after her colleagues have showered on him the most disconcerting and ambiguous gifts, 'Well, never mind. You're still the only one who can write poetry.' "

Of all modern poets, Ezra Pound, who died at 87 in Venice last week, caught the heavenly benefactors in the most contrary of moods. Few literary figures in history have stirred such admiration, affection and gratitude among fellow artists. But none has aroused such hatred. In art, Pound's instincts were always right when it counted. In life, he tragically erred when the moral stakes were highest.

Pound's mission in life, as he announced in Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, was "To resuscitate the dead art/ of poetry; to maintain the sublime/ In the old sense." After the rhetoric and moral posturing of the Victorians, he declared early for a different approach --harder, saner, nearer the bone, Pound said, "austere, direct, free from emotional slither." Then as gadfly, teacher, prosodist and selfless promoter of gifted contemporaries (Eliot, Yeats, Frost), he encouraged the spare, sensuous verse, the ironic double vision that has helped modern poets consider and refine the challenges and confusions of a new and terrifying century.

Experiments. One mark of that century's rich outpouring of verse was the fact that Americans for the first time dominated poetry written in English. Pound served as a link between what Walt Whitman called "the American yawp" and the sophisticated experiments going on overseas. He was born in Hailey, Idaho. At 15--already 6 ft. tall, with a blazing shock of carrot hair--he entered the University of Pennsylvania to study "eight or nine" languages and flout the regular curriculum. He also met a medical student named William Carlos Williams, and they began poetic experiments together. After his studies, Pound taught briefly at Wabash College but was thrown out--he kept a girl in his room for a night. Outraged but probably relieved too, Pound set off for the Continent in 1908, the first of the modern expatriates. "London, Lundon, the place of poesy," he chortled to Williams.

Poesy indeed. The "arthritic milieu" he encountered was not what this energy-packed, short-tempered, culture-hungry provincial had in mind at all. But Pound also found Yeats and Ford Madox Ford, who befriended him at once. To Yeats he explained his conviction that verse must be concrete and contain no superfluous words. The older poet was astonished at how many abstractions he had been using, and began to cut down. The streamlined effect on his writing was immediate.

In many ways that period so long ago was the high point of Pound's life. He had as yet slight credentials in poetry. But he had enthusiasm, a piercing voice and a shattering laugh, as well as a witty natural-born teacher's gift for provocative pronouncement ("I believe in technique as the test of a man's sincerity"). He soon was ringleader of a group of young revolutionaries that included Richard Aldington and Wyndham Lewis. It is typical of the time and of the man that at one point Pound challenged a critic from the Times to a duel for holding "too high an opinion of Milton." Pound helped launch the unknown Robert Frost when he came to London. Singlehanded, he talked the owners of the Little Review into printing James Joyce's Ulysses in installments. Pound's celebrated editing of T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land lies somewhere between major surgery and crucial midwifery.

The great poetic revolution Pound had hoped for occurred, with great help from the shock and disillusion of World War I. Pound wrote of it, very much in the "new way," in Mauberley:

There died a myriad

And of the best, among them,

For an old bitch gone in the teeth

For a botched civilization...

In the '20s, however, many of the writers Pound had sponsored began to find the success and fame that always just eluded him. Still, Pound's range was boundless. He was a linguist, and he revived verse, all manner of splendid and intricate metrical forms from medieval and Anglo-Saxon poetry, Greek epics and Latin odes. He used ancient characters as masks to speak for Pound: Lonely seafarers, loyal warriors, great romantic lovers ("Soft as spring wind that's come from birchen bowers...As white their bark, so white this lady's hours"). His most attractive and accessible adaptations are a series of poems modeled on the Chinese, which beautifully use understatement and delicate description to communicate emotion.

A few years before Pound moved to Italy for good in 1924, he began the Cantos, the extraordinary and difficult work that would run to several volumes and stop short at Canto 117. Part talkathon, part autobiography, part scholarly gimcrackery, the Cantos are a loosely linked series of often arcane verses that use history and myth (notably Ulysses' descent into hell), to create a Poundian commentary on the decline of our age. As they progress, they become more anecdotal and bizarre, reflecting Pound's passions of the moment: Chinese history, for instance, or the diaries of John Adams and fiscal policies of the young American Republic. But bright flashes of poetry appear throughout:

The ant's a centaur in his dragon

world.

Pull down thy vanity, it is not man

Made courage or made order or

made grace,

Pull down thy vanity, I say pull

down.

Learn of the green world what can

be thy place.

Increasingly in the 1930s, the Cantos reflected the poet's fondness for Mussolini's Fascism, his zany theories about usury and money (a modification of the labor theory of value) and finally, vicious anti-Semitic doggerel. War came. By 1941 Pound was making paid propaganda speeches in English from Rome. After the war, back in the U.S., he was charged with treason, and, starting at age 60, spent twelve years as a patient and prisoner in a mental hospital in Washington--a long punishment, whatever his offenses. His defenders claim that Pound was not mentally responsible for much of his collaboration with the enemy. The defense is only partially true. The sad and tragic climax to Pound's political life had long roots in exile, loneliness and disappointment, as well as in a curious lack of compassion, evident in much of his poetry. It was Eliot who best described Pound's weakness, when he wrote, "Pound's hells are for other people." Eliot became a British citizen. Mad Ireland hurt Yeats into poetry. William Carlos Williams had his doctoring. Frost never left New England. In the poetry of the age, Ezra Pound was the lost leader--and the man who never found a home.

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