Authors: Lewis Hyde
I • Scattered Light
“The images of the gods,” wrote Ezra Pound, “… move the soul to contemplation and preserve the tradition of the undivided light.” But those who turn to face either the poetry or the political economy of Ezra Pound will find no such light to guide them there. Something has scattered it in all directions, and it is this scattering to which we shall have to address ourselves if we are to speak of Pound.
Born in 1885, seven years before Whitman died, Pound grew up in the vicinity of Philadelphia, where his father was an assayer at the U.S. Mint. He attended the University of Pennsylvania and, briefly, Hamilton College in upstate New York. After graduation, Pound taught at Wabash College in Indiana, but not for long: his landlady one morning discovered an “actress” in his rooms and reported the discovery to the college authorities. They suggested that he marry the girl or leave. He left. He left the country, in fact, and but for two
brief visits did not return until the end of the Second World War, when the U.S. government flew him home to charge him with treason for having taken the side, vocally, of the Axis powers during the war.
During the course of his long career (he did not die until 1972) Ezra Pound came to promulgate an elaborate economic theory and to write, among many other things, an eight hundred–page sequence of poems, the
Cantos.
In order to describe the work and fate of this poet we could tell either of these stories, the one about art or the one about politics. It is the politics that will receive most of our attention here, but by that emphasis we shall not be slighting the poetry entirely, for in telling one story we will be giving at least an outline of the other. They have the same plot, it seems to me: the playing out of an opposition in Pound’s own temperament between forces of fertility and forces of order, or, to use slightly different terms, between two powers of the soul, imagination and will. Several people have made this point, but I think Clark Emery was the first, putting it in the language that Pound himself might have used: “One of the tensions [in the
Cantos]
… is the effort to bring together the Eleusinian (or Dionysian) concept of natural fecundity and the Confucian concept of human order … Without Eleusinian energy civilizations would not rise, without Kungian order they dissipate themselves. Civilization occurs and maintains itself when the two forces—the striving and the ordering—approach equipoise.”
“Before sewing one must cut,” the proverb says, and to begin our tale we must cut the pattern of these two forces, beginning with Eleusinian fecundity.
Pound referred broadly to all polytheistic religions as “pagan,” and when he speaks of them he tends to speak of mystery, fertility, and procreation. His 1939 statement, “Religio,” reads:
Paganism included a certain attitude toward, a certain understanding of, coitus, which is the mysterium.
The other rites are the festivals of fecundity of the grain and the sun festivals, without revival of which religion can not return to the hearts of the people.
A decade earlier he had written that “at the root of any mystery” lies what we now call “consciousness of the unity of nature.” The point is simple: nature’s fecundity depends upon its unity, and we shall not long enjoy the fruits of that fecundity if we cannot perceive the unity. The rituals of ancient mysteries were directed toward the apprehension (and therefore the preservation) of this unity.
Pound is after something even broader than the fertility of the crops when he speaks of mystery, however. In a prose text he once described how a man can become “suddenly conscious of the reality of the
nous
, of mind, apart from any man’s individual mind, of the sea crystalline and enduring, of the bright … molten glass that envelops us, full of light.” When Pound speaks of Eleusinian mysteries, he is speaking not only of the wheat whose recurrence bespeaks the fecundity of nature but also of this light that bespeaks the fecundity of the mind. Twitted once by Eliot to reveal his religious beliefs, Pound (after sending us to Confucius and Ovid) wrote: “I believe that a light from Eleusis persisted throughout the middle ages and set beauty in the song of Provence and of Italy.” This “undivided light” occasions beauty in art, and vice versa— that is, beauty in art sets, or awakens, the knowledge of this light in the mind of man.
Over and over in essays and in the
Cantos
, Pound tries to make it clear that fecundity can be destroyed by any dividing or splitting of the unity; in art and spiritual life the destructive force is a certain kind of abstraction.
We find two forces in history: one that divides … and one that contemplates the unity of the mystery … There is the force that destroys every clearly delineated symbol, dragging man into a maze of abstract arguments, destroying not one but every religion.
Before we go any further, I want to point out that this line of thought is of a piece with the central tenets of Imagism, that literary movement to which Pound’s name will be forever linked. “Go in fear of abstractions” was the cardinal Imagist injunction according to Pound’s own 1913 manifesto. “Don’t use such an expression as ‘dim lands of peace.’ It dulls the image. It mixes an abstraction with the concrete.” Pound was drawn to the study of Chinese written characters partly because they are image-writing, concrete speech. Pictograms “[have] to stay poetic,” he says, because their form itself prohibits the “maze” of abstractions that destroy the unity. He explains in the
ABC of Reading:
In Europe, if you ask a man to define anything, his definition always moves away from the simple things that he knows perfectly well, it recedes into an unknown region, that is a region of remoter and progressively remoter abstractions.
Thus if you ask him what red is, he says it is a “colour.”
If you ask him what a colour is, he tells you it is a vibration or a refraction of light, or a division of the spectrum.
And if you ask him what vibration is, he tells you it is a mode of energy, or something of that sort, until you arrive at a modality of being, or non-being, or at any rate you get in beyond your depth, and beyond his depth …
But when the Chinaman wanted to make a picture of… a general idea, how did he go about it? He is to define
red. How can he do it in a picture that isn’t painted in red paint?
He puts … together the abbreviated pictures of
| ROSE | CHERRY |
| IRON RUST | FLAMINGO |
Ezra Pound was essentially a religious poet. His cautions against abstraction in art serve the spiritual ends of the work; they are not merely advice on style. An Italian country priest once turned a corner of the temple of St. Francis in Rimini—the temple erected by that hero of the
Cantos
, Sigismondo Malatesta—to find the poet bowing to the stone elephants carved in the side of the building rather than to the “altar furniture.” Pound was an idolater in the old sense: he put himself in the service of images. One of the most remarkable things about the
Cantos
is Pound’s ability to convey a sense of the undivided light in concrete speech:
rain beat as with colour of feldspar
in the gloom, the gold gathers the light against it
with a sky wet as ocean / flowing with liquid slate
Such light is in sea-caves
e la bella Ciprigna
where copper throws back the flame from pinned eyes, the flames rise to fade in green air.
And in old age:
When one’s friends hate each other
how can there be peace in the world?
Their asperities diverted me in my green time.
A blown husk that is finished
but the light sings eternal
a pale flare over marshes
where the salt hay whispers to tide’s change …
While teaching in Indiana, long before he had discovered Chinese written characters, Pound wrote to William Carlos Williams: “I am interested in art and ecstasy, ecstasy which I would define as the sensation of the soul in ascent, art as the expression and sole means … of passing on that ecstasy to others.” In an essay on the art of fiction Flannery O’Connor once wrote that “the world of the fiction writer is full of matter”; fiction is an “incarnational art,” she says, full of “those concrete details of life that make actual the mystery of our position on earth.” I imagine Pound would have broadened the stroke: all art is incarnational, full of matter, and for the same reason, to make actual the mystery. Pound is right: some knowledge cannot survive abstraction, and to preserve this knowledge we must have art. The liquid light, the
nous
, the fecundity of nature, the feeling of the soul in ascent—only the imagination can articulate our apprehension of these things, and the imagination speaks to us in images.
Confucius (or Kung Fu Tseu, as Pound usually has it) first appears in Canto 13. For the question of “Kungian order” the important lines are these:
And Kung said, and wrote on the bo leaves:
If a man have not order within him
He can not spread order about him;
And if a man have not order within him
His family will not act with due order;
And if the prince have not order within him He can not put order in his dominions.
“The principle of good is enunciated by Confucius,” Pound had explained in his magazine,
The Exile.
“It consists in establishing order within oneself. This order or harmony spreads by a sort of contagion without specific effort. The principle of evil consists in messing into other people’s affairs.”
Clark Emery speaks of a “tension” in the
Cantos
between Eleusinian fecundity and Confucian order, but I am not sure it is immediately apparent why any such tension should exist. Fecundity is not without order. Order inheres in all that is fertile in nature, and the liquid light of the
nous
, Pound tells us, induces order in those who perceive it.
This liquid is certainlya
property of the mind
nec accidens est but an element
in the mind’s make-up …
Hast ′ou seen the rose in the steel dust
(or swansdown ever?) so light is the urging, so ordered
the dark
petals of iron we who have passed over Lethe.
In art and in human affairs there is a force corresponding to that which has given swansdown its beauty, and that force is
virtù
(“in the light of light is the
virtù,”
says the same Canto). Just as electromagnetism induces order in a pile of iron filings, so
virtù
induces order in the works of man. And like the magnet, or so the image leads us to believe, this
virtù
creates order by its presence alone, “by a sort of contagion without specific effort.”
At this point, however, we come to a slight disparity in Pound’s idea of order. There is a strange phrase in his prose writings—strange, at least, if we set it beside this other one about “contagion”—and that phrase is “the will toward order.”
Virtù
is not the same thing as willpower, but for Pound it is the will that directs the force of
virtù
and in the last analysis, therefore, it is the will that is the agent of order. In the context from which I have taken the phrase, “the will toward order” refers to social order and to the men through whose will societies have developed and maintained their structures. But willpower plays a role in Pound’s aesthetic as well: “The greater the artist the more permanent his creation, and this is a matter of WILL,” he writes, a sentence that belongs beside Clark Emery’s explication: “Without Eleusinian energy civilizations would not rise, without Kungian order they dissipate themselves.” I am not, at this point, trying to address the validity of these ideas. I am only trying to point out that, for Pound, Confucian order is associated with two things, willpower and durability. The will is the agent of the forces of order, and durability is the consequence of its agency.
We shall have more to say of political will in a later section of this chapter; at this point I want to offer a few remarks on the role of willpower in art. There are at least two phases in the completion of a work of art, one in which the will is suspended and another in which it is active. The suspension is primary. It is when the will is slack that we feel moved or we are struck by an event, intuition, or image. The
materia
must begin to flow before it can be worked, and not only is the will powerless to initiate that flow, but it actually seems to interfere, for artists have traditionally used devices—drugs, fasting, trances, sleep deprivation, dancing—to suspend the will
so that something “other” will come forward. When the material finally appears, it is usually in a jumble, personally moving, perhaps, but not much use to someone else—not, at any rate, a work of art. There are exceptions, but the initial formulation of a work is rarely satisfactory—satisfactory, I mean, to the imagination itself, for, like a person who must struggle to say what he means, the imagination stutters toward the clear articulation of its feeling. The will has the power to carry the material back to the imagination and contain it there while it is re-formed. The will does not create the “germinating image” of a work, nor does it give the work its form, but it does provide the energy and the directed attention called for by a dialogue with the imagination.
Artists might be classified by the different weight given to these two phases of the work. Whitman or a prose writer like Jack Kerouac fall on the suspend-the-will side of the spectrum. Whitman begins to work by lolling on the grass. Kerouac’s “Belief & Technique for Modern Prose”—a list of thirty aphorisms—includes the following:
Submissive to everything, open listening
Something that you feel will find its own form
Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind
No time for poetry but exactly what is
In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you
Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better.