I deeply appreciate the thoroughgoing nature of James Matthew Wilson’s essay, but this sentence took me off guard:
While there is much warmed-over Victorian lyricism in [Ezra Pound’s Cantos], and such passages, in fact, account for almost all its memorable lines, the greater bulk of it consists of unreadable or barely readable passages meant to serve as what Pound called “luminous details.”
No doubt Pound emerges most immediately from Victorian Poetry’s coattails, especially those of Browning and Rossetti. Yet perusing these 818 pages, what I find is neither warmed-over, nor Victorian—nor even lyricism. The Cantos, to my reading, comprise narrative fragments, bits of dialog, maxims, inscriptions, passages in Italian, Latin, Greek, sea chanties, wordplay, repetition, concrete poetry, and maybe the first appearance of the term “bro” in any poem (at the beginning of LXIV).
I like how James McDougall describes The Cantos as
a densely packed whirring collection of politics, economics, high and low culture, history, commentary, fragments, monologues, classical texts, and endless rhythmic, visual, and linguistic poetic experimentation. The Cantos remains a high modernist text, par excellence, and it is hard to come across a poem that records a poet confronting poetry with such scope or depth.
Yes, this is a “poet confronting poetry,” i.e., smashing it to pieces and reconstituting an almost anatomical chart of what literature has been and can be—which is to say, he is not merely reheating Lord Tennyson’s pheasant.
And as for “unreadable or barely readable,” in the mid-1990s, upon emerging from NYU creative writing, I found an LP of the Cantos at the New York Public Library, took it home and copied it onto a Maxell Gold cassette and spent the next few years returning to it again and again, sometimes reading along with a fat orange hardback edition I still have (New Directions, 1970), but mostly just listening to the lapping waves of Pound’s language, his unapologetic transitions from tongue to tongue to tongue, movements up and down tonal and dictional registers. Pound’s manner of reading is monotonous and rhythmic and mesmerizing. In that aural space I began to discover my own poetic voice.
I was so moved I even wrote a letter to Pound’s daughter, who was then living at Brunnenburg Castle, and received a friendly reply from her inviting me to apply for one of the residencies. Later I discovered that Ezra Pound was very much a fascist, and on that ground objectionable, yet that he also singlehandedly created both Allen Ginsberg and Charles Olsen who were, you know, the opposite of fascists. In fact, the literary community (both hemispheres, creative writing and academic) I grew up in kept trying to figure out how to keep Pound in the discussion despite his being a fascist. This was not an effort to construct an apologetics for Pound’s fascism, but to hold in mind all aspects of his officious complexity at once.
My interest in poetry began in Pound and Eliot and then branched into Wallace Stevens, Hart Crane, then Frost and Dickinson, and then I found myself stuck in Thomas Hardy for some reason. Then I read a lot more Frost. Eventually, through the happenstance of an FSG “samples from our Spring list” cassette, I discovered John Ashbery’s “Myrtle” and then the New York School.
Next, I followed Ashbery’s lineage back to Wallace Stevens and then William Wordsworth, and finally to all of Romanticism. I could see that the same transcendent instinct that drove Beethoven’s sweeping crescendos and Wordsworth’s sublime landscapes also drove early 20th century poetry crazy, resulting in not only The Cantos but Tender Buttons, The Waste Land, Finnegans Wake, and Paterson. I began to regard Modernism as the romantic “spontaneous overflow” of machines, electricity, photography, media technology, and modern warfare. Not surprising if you think of Walt Whitman as the missing link—and Allen Ginsberg et al as Modernism’s final, dubious act.
Nowadays when I read poems like “Sunflower Sutra” and “A Supermarket in California,” I feel similar aesthetic principles at work all the way from Beethoven to the Beats. In fact, I can hear Ginsberg reading William Blake to us in a classroom at NYU. He regarded Blake as a primary influence, and he adored Pound. Whitman he regarded as a sort of godfather.
If it is true that the garden of Pound and Co. springs forth from Romantic soil, plus a renewed interest in ancient Greek and Chinese poetics, a devotion to concision and the image, then The Cantos is not merely “the fragmentary, typographic hijinks of newsprint.” And it follows naturally that Dr. Mattix sees in Frank O’Hara a debt to the Romantics. Heck, if you’re going to associate Pound with “the news” you’re really going to do that with O’Hara. “Lana Turner Has Collapsed!” is a wonderful “news poem” based on an actual newspaper article. So is the utterly heartbreaking “Day Lady Died.” But the Cantos just aren’t about news, similar to news, or reflective of news, and neither is O’Hara.
One other factor worth noting here is that each of these poets from Blake to Ginsberg was regarded as scandalous when he wrote. Each, in a different way, blasphemed the gods of his own era’s literary culture. I believe one must be wary of creators who garner critical praise during their lifetimes. They often are playing to the audience. Pound assuredly was not doing that.
I recognize that I was supposed to write about “poetry and the news” and ended up responding to one claim made by one of the contributors to this sprawling discussion. Really if you want to know about Ezra Pound and his surprising connections to all sorts of literary goodness, you should read Hugh Kenner’s Pound Era. That book was my pathway to Henry James who, together with Hardy and Frost, is now the modernist author to whom I most often return.
Finally, if you want to know about the “news” you should look at Picasso’s “Bottle of Vieux Marc, Glass, Guitar and Newspaper,” currently on view at the Tate in London, which physically contains a torn piece of La Figaro dated Monday, May 28, 1883. On that date, according to the Internet, the Boston Beaneaters defeated the Detroit Wolverines 10-4. News reporting itself is never transcendent until it’s posted in the looking glass of human artistry. I believe Pound, the Cubists, any other modernists worth their salt, and pretty much every journalist alive would agree with this statement. If you’d like to know the real reason(s) poetry was blown to “luminous details” at the beginning of the 20th century, read Paul Fussell’s Great War and Modern Memory (1975).
Aaron Belz holds an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from NYU and a Ph.D. in American Literature from Saint Louis University, where he researched the influence of popular comedy on modernist poetics. He has published four books of his own poetry, which John Ashbery extolled as “bright, friendly, surprising, and totally committed to everything but itself.” He lives in Saint Louis, MO.
I deeply appreciate the thoroughgoing nature of James Matthew Wilson's essay, but this sentence took me off guard:
While there is much warmed-over Victorian lyricism in [Ezra Pound’s Cantos], and such passages, in fact, account for almost all its memorable lines, the greater bulk of it consists of unreadable or barely readable passages meant to serve as what Pound called “luminous details.”
No doubt Pound emerges most immediately from Victorian Poetry’s coattails, especially those of Browning and Rossetti. Yet perusing these 818 pages, what I find is neither warmed-over, nor Victorian—nor even lyricism. The Cantos, to my reading, comprise narrative fragments, bits of dialog, maxims, inscriptions, passages in Italian, Latin, Greek, sea chanties, wordplay, repetition, concrete poetry, and maybe the first appearance of the term “bro” in any poem (at the beginning of LXIV).
I like how James McDougall describes The Cantos as
a densely packed whirring collection of politics, economics, high and low culture, history, commentary, fragments, monologues, classical texts, and endless rhythmic, visual, and linguistic poetic experimentation. The Cantos remains a high modernist text, par excellence, and it is hard to come across a poem that records a poet confronting poetry with such scope or depth.
Yes, this is a “poet confronting poetry,” i.e., smashing it to pieces and reconstituting an almost anatomical chart of what literature has been and can be—which is to say, he is not merely reheating Lord Tennyson’s pheasant.
And as for “unreadable or barely readable,” in the mid-1990s, upon emerging from NYU creative writing, I found an LP of the Cantos at the New York Public Library, took it home and copied it onto a Maxell Gold cassette and spent the next few years returning to it again and again, sometimes reading along with a fat orange hardback edition I still have (New Directions, 1970), but mostly just listening to the lapping waves of Pound’s language, his unapologetic transitions from tongue to tongue to tongue, movements up and down tonal and dictional registers. Pound’s manner of reading is monotonous and rhythmic and mesmerizing. In that aural space I began to discover my own poetic voice.
I was so moved I even wrote a letter to Pound’s daughter, who was then living at Brunnenburg Castle, and received a friendly reply from her inviting me to apply for one of the residencies. Later I discovered that Ezra Pound was very much a fascist, and on that ground objectionable, yet that he also singlehandedly created both Allen Ginsberg and Charles Olsen who were, you know, the opposite of fascists. In fact, the literary community (both hemispheres, creative writing and academic) I grew up in kept trying to figure out how to keep Pound in the discussion despite his being a fascist. This was not an effort to construct an apologetics for Pound’s fascism, but to hold in mind all aspects of his officious complexity at once.
My interest in poetry began in Pound and Eliot and then branched into Wallace Stevens, Hart Crane, then Frost and Dickinson, and then I found myself stuck in Thomas Hardy for some reason. Then I read a lot more Frost. Eventually, through the happenstance of an FSG “samples from our Spring list” cassette, I discovered John Ashbery’s “Myrtle” and then the New York School.
Next, I followed Ashbery’s lineage back to Wallace Stevens and then William Wordsworth, and finally to all of Romanticism. I could see that the same transcendent instinct that drove Beethoven’s sweeping crescendos and Wordsworth’s sublime landscapes also drove early 20th century poetry crazy, resulting in not only The Cantos but Tender Buttons, The Waste Land, Finnegans Wake, and Paterson. I began to regard Modernism as the romantic “spontaneous overflow” of machines, electricity, photography, media technology, and modern warfare. Not surprising if you think of Walt Whitman as the missing link—and Allen Ginsberg et al as Modernism’s final, dubious act.
Nowadays when I read poems like “Sunflower Sutra” and “A Supermarket in California,” I feel similar aesthetic principles at work all the way from Beethoven to the Beats. In fact, I can hear Ginsberg reading William Blake to us in a classroom at NYU. He regarded Blake as a primary influence, and he adored Pound. Whitman he regarded as a sort of godfather.
If it is true that the garden of Pound and Co. springs forth from Romantic soil, plus a renewed interest in ancient Greek and Chinese poetics, a devotion to concision and the image, then The Cantos is not merely “the fragmentary, typographic hijinks of newsprint.” And it follows naturally that Dr. Mattix sees in Frank O’Hara a debt to the Romantics. Heck, if you’re going to associate Pound with “the news” you’re really going to do that with O’Hara. “Lana Turner Has Collapsed!” is a wonderful “news poem” based on an actual newspaper article. So is the utterly heartbreaking “Day Lady Died.” But the Cantos just aren’t about news, similar to news, or reflective of news, and neither is O’Hara.
One other factor worth noting here is that each of these poets from Blake to Ginsberg was regarded as scandalous when he wrote. Each, in a different way, blasphemed the gods of his own era’s literary culture. I believe one must be wary of creators who garner critical praise during their lifetimes. They often are playing to the audience. Pound assuredly was not doing that.
I recognize that I was supposed to write about “poetry and the news” and ended up responding to one claim made by one of the contributors to this sprawling discussion. Really if you want to know about Ezra Pound and his surprising connections to all sorts of literary goodness, you should read Hugh Kenner’s Pound Era. That book was my pathway to Henry James who, together with Hardy and Frost, is now the modernist author to whom I most often return.
Finally, if you want to know about the “news” you should look at Picasso’s “Bottle of Vieux Marc, Glass, Guitar and Newspaper,” currently on view at the Tate in London, which physically contains a torn piece of La Figaro dated Monday, May 28, 1883. On that date, according to the Internet, the Boston Beaneaters defeated the Detroit Wolverines 10-4. News reporting itself is never transcendent until it’s posted in the looking glass of human artistry. I believe Pound, the Cubists, any other modernists worth their salt, and pretty much every journalist alive would agree with this statement. If you’d like to know the real reason(s) poetry was blown to “luminous details” at the beginning of the 20th century, read Paul Fussell’s Great War and Modern Memory (1975).
Aaron Belz holds an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from NYU and a Ph.D. in American Literature from Saint Louis University, where he researched the influence of popular comedy on modernist poetics. He has published four books of his own poetry, which John Ashbery extolled as "bright, friendly, surprising, and totally committed to everything but itself." He lives in Saint Louis, MO.
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