Pound bits

Charles A. Watson / ENG 206 / April 30, 2015

Ezra Pound   A poet, translator, critic, essayist, and author—Pioneer from the West

• An editor by trade, an artist by nature, and a poet by no accident
• Although never contemporary in America, his contribution to this eternal moment in the history of American poetry represents a critical breakthrough in the literary struggle of the early Twentieth Century.
• Philadelphia, London, Paris, prisoner-of-war camp, trial for treason, 12-years in Washington D.C.insane asylum

Biography

• Ezra Weston Loomis Pound
  Born 1885 in Hailey, Idaho
• Deceased: Venice in 1972 at age 87
• Father: Homer Loomis, Register of the Government Land in Montana, Assayer at the Philadelphia Mint
• Mother: Isabel Weston Pound
• Grandson of politician Thadeus Coleman Pound, a Congressman from Wisconsin who had made and lost a fortune in the lumber business
• Wife: Dorothy Shakespear
• Ezra moved with his mother to Philadelphia for better opportunity when he was eighteen months.
• Revered more for what he said and published than for what he created in verse.
• Breaking writers from conventional Victorian and Romantic era literature.

Academe

• Studied literature at the University of Pennsylvania with poets William Carlos Williams and Hilda Doolittle
• Bullied for eccentricities, finished his Arts degree at Hamilton College
• taught briefly at Wabash College in conservative Indiana. Left in controversy.

Working life before the World Wars

• Collaboration with friends and colleagues included James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Pablo Picasso, T.S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, Henry James, and William Butler Yeats.
• Creative partnership with W.B. Yeats in 1908 London.
• 1912 Leader of a group of poets responsible for Imagism, a new school of literary thought that sought to pull poetry away from Victorian influence.
• Three rules for Imagism:
  • Direct treatment of the thing, whether subjective or objective
  • To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation
  • To compose in the sequence of a musical phrase, not in the sequence of a metronome like a musical phrase, as opposed to the predetermined pace of a poetic meter like a metronome.
• Published Blast, a London magazine of Vorticist views with an anarchic presentation, a variety of typesetting, and abstract illustrations.
• A leader of the Modernist movement in world literature with direct, realistic descriptions.

Politics

• Mussolini, charisma, and the developing middle class
• Even though he didn’t have the credentials of a diplomat, Pound could speak and write as one.
• His concern for humanity was in resource management “in the midst of plenty.”
• With his beliefs published and broadcasts on Italian radio, Pound was found to be supporting Fascist causes and later interred in an outdoor cage like a P.O.W. for three weeks
• Beyond the Italian radio broadcasts, Pound’s most outspoken views on money and economics were contained in six Money Pamphlets composed between 1935 and 1944. 

Explicata

• Canto One of The Cantos of Ezra Pound begins like Homer’s Odyssey,
  “And then went down to the ship, set keel to breakers, forth on the goodly sea”
• His Cantos ties together globally historical references, politicians, and players portrayed with shape-shifting symbolism in candid, epic form as caricature like Joyce’s Ulysses, thus lending to Pound’s controversial place in literature.
• Ripe with locations from a study of ancient Western Civilization and the Love Elegies, Pound provides a setting in the first stanza,
• Villanelle: The Psychological Hour
• Homage To Sextus Propertius – III
  Themes: trust his own shadow, submit to the bold hands of terror

Arrest for treason

http://www.poemhunter.com/ezra-pound/biography/

SUITABLE QUOTATIONS [   #ezraPound   ]

From an essay “An Introduction to the Economic Nature of the United States”

“The true history of the economy of the United States… is to be found in the correspondence between Adams and Jefferson, in the writings of Van Buren, and in quotations from the intimate letters of the Father of the Republic. The elements remain the same: debts, altering the value of monetary units, and the attempts and triumphs of the usury, due to monopolies, or to a ‘Corner’.”

http://archive.org/stream/AnIntroductionToTheEconomicNatureOfTheUnitedStates/AnIntroductionToTheEconomicNatureOfTheUnitedStates_djvu.txt

On writing and conduct:

“In short, behave as a musician, a good musician, when dealing with that phase of your art which has exact parallels in music. The same laws govern, and you are bound by no others.”

“Use no superfluous word, no adjective, which does not reveal something.”

“Let the candidate fill his mind with the finest cadences he can discover, preferably in a foreign language so that the meaning of the words may be less likely to divert his attention to the movement.”

“Consider the way of the scientists rather than the way of an advertising agent for a new soap.”

Two line Imagist Poem:
In a Station at the Metro

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

From my study: Homage to Sextus Propertius III

Bright tips reach up from twin towers
‘Anienan spring water falls into flat-spread pools

…

Nor is there anyone to whom lovers are not sacred at midnight…

…

“What if undertakers follow my track,
such a death is worth dying.
She would bring frankincense and wreaths to my tomb,
She would sit like an ornament on my pyre.

….

May a woody and sequestered place cover me with its foliage
Or may I inter beneath the hummock
of some as yet uncatalogued sand;
At any rate I shall not have my epitaph in a high road.

“I had overprepared the event—
that much was obvious.

…

Beauty is so rare a thing … / So few drink of my fountain;

…

“Speak up! You have danced so stiffly?
Someone admired your works,
And said so frankly.”

…

“Dear Pound, I am leaving England.”

“It is on his total work of literature that he must be judged: on his poetry, and his criticism, and his influence on men and on events at a turning point in literature. … Criticism like Pound’s is advocacy of a certain kind of poetry; it is an assertion that poetry written in the immediate future must … observe certain methods and take certain directions.”

– T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound

POEMS FOR EXPLICATION:

Homage To Sextus Propertius – III

Midnight, and a letter comes to me from our mistress:
Telling me to come to Tibur:
At once!!
‘Bright tips reach up from twin towers,

5          ‘Anienan spring water falls into flat-spread pools.’
What is to be done about it?
Shall I entrust myself to entangled shadows,
Where bold hands may do violence to my person?
Yet if I postpone my obedience
10        because of this respectable terror,
I shall be prey to lamentations worse than a nocturnal assailant.
And I shall be in the wrong,
it will last a twelve month,
For her hands have no kindness me-ward,

15        Nor is there anyone to whom lovers are not sacred at midnight
And in the Via Sciro.
If any man would be a lover
he may walk on the Scythian coast,
No barbarism would go to the extent of doing him harm,
20        The moon will carry his candle,
and the stars will point out the stumbles,
Cupid will carry lighted torches before him
and keep mad dogs off his ankles.
Thus all roads are perfectly safe
25        and at any hour;
Who so indecorous as to shed the pure gore of a suitor?!
Cypris is his cicerone.

What if undertakers follow my track,
such a death is worth dying.
30        She would bring frankincense and wreaths to my tomb,
She would sit like an ornament on my pyre.

aid, let not my bones lie in a public location
With crowds too assiduous in their crossing of it;
For thus are tombs of lovers most desecrated.

35        May a woody and sequestered place cover me with its foliage
Or may I inter beneath the hummock
of some as yet uncatalogued sand;
At any rate I shall not have my epitaph in a high road.   (PoemHunter.com)

Villanelle: The Psychological Hour

I HAD over-prepared the event—
that much was ominous.
With middle-aging care
I had laid out just the right books,
I almost turned down the right pages.                                                     5
     Beauty is so rare a thing …
So few drink of my fountain.

So much barren regret!
So many hours wasted!
And now I watch from the window                                                        10
            rain, wandering busses.

Their little cosmos is shaken—
the air is alive with that fact.
In their parts of the city
they are played on by diverse forces;                                         15

I had over-prepared the event.
Beauty is so rare a thing …
So few drink at my fountain.
Two friends: a breath of the forest …
Friends? Are people less friends                                                             20
            because one has just, at last, found them?
Twice they promised to come.
“Between the night and morning?
Beauty would drink of my mind.
Youth would awhile forget                                                                      25
            my youth is gone from me.
Youth would hear speech of beauty.

II

(“Speak up! You have danced so stiffly?
Someone admired your works,
And said so frankly.                                                                                30
“Did you talk like a fool,
The first night?
The second evening?
“But they promised again:
‘Tomorrow at tea-time.’”)                                                          35

III

Now the third day is here—
no word from either;
No word from her nor him,
Only another man’s note:
“Dear Pound, I am leaving England.”                                      40
(Selected Poems of Ezra Pound, pages 39–41)

from Canto 37 (XXXVII)

“Thou shalt not,” said Martin van Buren, “jail ‘em for debt.”
“that an immigrant shd. set out with good banknotes
and find ‘’em at the end of the voyage
but waste paper..if a man have in primeval forest
5          set up his cabin, shall rich patron take it from him?
High judges? Are, I suppose, subject of passions
as have affected other great and good men, also
subject to esprit de corps.
The Calhouns” remarked Mr Adams
10        “Have flocked to the standard of feminine virtue”
“Peggy Eaton’s own story” (Headline 1932)
Shall we call in the world to conduct our
municipal government?

…
“To which end, largely increased line of discounts
90        1830, October, 40 million
May, 1837 seventy millions and then some.
Remembered this in Sorrento” in the vicinage of Vesuvius
near exhumed Herculaneum…
“30 million” said Mr Dan Wester “in states on the Mississippi
95        “will all have to be called in, in three
“years and nine months, if the charter be not extended..
“I hesertate nawt tew say et will dee-precierate
“everyman’s prorperty from the etcetera
“to the kepertal ov Missouri, affect the price of
100      “crawps, leynd en the prordewce ov labour, to the embararsement……”
de mortuis wrote Mr Van Buren
don’t quite apply in a case of this character…
(The Cantos of Ezra Pound)