The H.D. Book (28 page)

May we know that our spirits at last
will be cleansed of all bitterness—
that no one god may trample the earth,
but the others still dwell apart
in a high place
with our dead and our lost.

Now Wagadu no longer appears as an earlier city back of or surviving within the squalor of the contemporary city as in the poem “The Tribute,” where those “who recall the old splendour await the new beauty of cities,” but as a city in an other world evoked by a wish:

That the boys our city has lost
and the gods still dwell apart
in a city set fairer than this
with column and porch.

They appear here, the banished gods and lost boys, as the eternal ones who come in dreams, to whom the poet’s tribute is offered:

That the lads in that city apart
may know of our love and keep
remembrance and speak of us—
may lift their hands that the gods
revisit earth.

That the lads of the cities
may yet remember us,
we spread shaft of privet and sweet
lily from meadow and forest . . .

“And this we will say for remembrance,” the poet continues: “Speak this with their names”:

Could beauty be caught and hurt
they had done her to death with their sneers
in ages and ages past,
could beauty be sacrificed
for a thrust of a sword,
for a piece of thin money
tossed up to fall half alloy—
then beauty were dead
long, long before we saw her face.

“The Tribute” is not an easy poem to appreciate in terms of what came to be accepted as H.D.’s virtues in the modern aesthetic of the twenties—the ardor kept in restraint, the Hellenic remove, the hard-wrought art, the spare statement. The Imagist rules will not fit. But once we turn from “Cities” and “The Tribute,” keeping the context of these poems, the seemingly “removed” Hellenism of “Adonis,” “Pallas,” or “Sea Heroes,” written in the same period, proves to be a screen image in which another level of feeling is present.

Akroneos, Oknolos, Elatreus,
helm-of-boat, loosener of helm, dweller-by-sea,
Natueus, sea-man,

are lists of the war dead and lost from Homer. And now from our own sense of the experience of the War—and here her rites of remembrance have quickened in us the impact of what happened before we were born—we understand anew and in depth the agony of

But to name you,
we reverent are breathless,
weak with pain and old loss,
and exile and despair—

Since the dark, bitter, impassioned days of the First World War, even the words themselves—“beauty,” “lad,” or “boy”—have become uneasy
words, smacking of the idealistic or the sentimental before what we call the Real, the pervading triumph of mercantile utilitarianism. The “architecture” of the utilitarian city is inspired by the display aesthetic of packaging and advertising art to put over shoddy goods, where a wealth of glass or cellophane, aluminum, copper, or gold paper facing takes over the city, presented in a poverty of imagination, housing the same old shoddy operations of whiskey, cigarette, or paper companies, and back of the sell, the demand for profit and increase, the exploitation of mind and spirit to keep the rackets going, the economy of wage-slavery and armed forces; over all, the threat of impending collapse or disastrous war. We too, in a hostile environment, taking our faith and home in our exile, live in creative crisis.

•

There is this sense, then, in which the Imagists—that group of poets printing in the pages of
The Egoist
between 1914 and 1917—stand at the beginning of a phase in poetry that has not ended. Pound, writing in 1914, felt that a break was necessary with the preceding generation in poetry: “Surely there was never a time when the English ‘elder generation as a whole’ mattered less or had less claim to be taken seriously by ‘those on the threshold’.”

For my own generation, our elders—for me, specifically Pound, H.D., Williams, and Lawrence—remain primary generative forces. Their threshold remains ours. The time of war and exploitation, the infamy and lies of the new capitalist war-state, continue. And the answering intensity of the imagination to hold its own values must continue. The work of our elders in poetry was to make—“a Dream greater than Reality”—a time-space continuum in which their concern for quality and spirit, for romance and beauty, could survive. Estranged from all but a few about them, they made a new dimension in which eternal companions appeared. As to the Aranda the ancestors came, or to the Kabbalist mystics dreams and even immediate presences of Elijah or of a
maggid
or angel came, so to Pound Plotinus appears or to H.D., in the orders of the new poetry, the Christos or the Lady.

In 1919 Pound published in
Quia Pauper Amavi
a first draft for the opening three Cantos of a new poem, addressing Robert Browning:

Hang it all, there can be but the one ‘Sordello,’
But say I want to, say I take your whole bag of tricks,
Let in your quirks and tweeks, and say the thing’s an art-form . . .

It was to be a realm in which Robert Browning and Arnaut, Brancusi and Kung could coexist; where Eleanor and Cunizza could come and go; and:

Gods float in the azure air,

Bright gods and Tuscan, back before dew was shed.

For the banished gods and for the heroes. And those lost. But not now, as in Dante, appearing each in his place in a set scene or architecture of Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise. For here, in
The Cantos
of Pound, the dead gather in as at a séance. “Ghosts move about me patched with histories,” it seems to the poet. But there are not only voices speaking,
personae,
in this “catch” of time as Pound called it, there are also scenes—images of the poem, moving pictures. Where Dante had back of
The Divine Comedy
his magics to call upon—the magic of the poetic and of the mystic descent or ascent to the eternal world, but drawing also upon the practice of the dream-vision in not only Medieval Christian but in classical Roman tradition, but drawing also upon the practice of the
Mi’raj,
the spiritual transportations of the Sufi Recital, Pound had these and other magics—the séance tables of London mediums, the discourse of voices in which the rivers of many traditions came into a sea of humanity, and also, a new clairvoyance, the photomontage of times and places in the movies of Griffith.

In the three masterworks of this period—Pound’s early
Cantos,
Eliot’s
The Waste Land,
and Joyce’s
Ulysses—
the contemporary opens upon eternity in the interpenetration of times. The literate public objected to or made fun of what they called their “references” or “quotes.” “Say that I dump my catch,” Pound had put it in the first draft of
The Cantos:

shiny and silvery

As fresh sardines flapping and slipping on the marginal cobbles?

and the image stands, for he was “fishing” and in it all working to catch something being said, about to be said, fishing along lines of metamorphoses in the beginning. Surely, knowing Mead and Yeats, Pound was aware of Eisler’s
Orpheus the Fisher,
where the god appeared as a fisher of souls who was also the divine poet—the lyre was also a net or the poem a net of words. In the early
Canto
I, the poem itself appears as a fish-monger’s booth:

I stand before the booth (the speech), but the truth
is inside this discourse: this booth is full of the

marrow of wisdom.

It may also be then the medium’s cabinet. Our own net casts wider than Pound would, and we see that the shaman’s tent is also such a booth. But Pound’s intuition moves out, back of his evocation of Robert Browning’s magic practice of the dramatic monologue, and So-shu churns in the sea,

So-shu also,

using the long moon for a churn-stick . . .

So Pound will give up the intaglio method and in the flux of a cinematographic art call in the swarming fish of the sea, where Robert Browning, Peire Cardenal, Catullus, gods, oak-girls and maenads, Metastasio, Ficino, Kuanon, Guido Cavalcanti, Botticelli, Mantegna are drawn into the nets of the first haul. These persons, like the place names of Wagadu—Dierra, Agada, Ganna, Silla—are loci of a virtu moving through time. Frobenius traces the wandering of the Fasa from Djerma of the Garama which he equates with Dierra, mentioned by Herodotus five hundred years before Christ, from the Fezzan of North Africa, to Tagadda on the ancient route through the Saliara, to Ganna and then to Silla of the Sahel. But the Wagadu of the Cantos is the lost city not of a tribe but of a kindred among all men, “an aristocracy of emotion” Pound called it.

It was the mixture of times and places, and especially the breakdown of all nationalistic distinctions that most angered the hostile critics and
readers. Renaissance English or medieval Italian or modern French could enter into an all-American poem. Not only Dante but Kung and even Gassi were to be our heroes in the new legend. The new practice was most concentrated in the famous coda of
The Waste Land
in 1922:

London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down
Poi s’ascose nel foco che gli affina
Quando fiam uti chelidon
—O swallow swallow
Le Prince d’Aquitaine à la tour abolie
These fragments I have shored against my ruins
Why then Ile fit you. Hieronymo’s mad againe.
Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.

Children singing a round dance; Dante in Purgatory telling of Arnaut Daniel, master of the
trobar clus,
“Then he hid himself in the fire which refines them,” and the voices of the poet—of the
Pervigilium Veneris,
of Gerard de Nerval, of Kyd in the person of Hieronimo, and of the thunder out of the Upanishads, speak one after another, taking over from Eliot’s “own” voice, or speaking for Eliot, meeting through Eliot as through a medium. “Tiresias, although a mere spectator and not indeed a ‘character’,” Eliot notes, “is yet the most important personage in the poem, uniting all the rest. Just as the one-eyed merchant, seller of currants, melts into the Phoenician Sailor, and the latter is not wholly distinct from Ferdinand Prince of Naples, so all the women are one woman, and the two sexes meet in Tiresias.” (Eliot,
Collected Poems 1909–1935,
p. 94)

For William Carlos Williams it was “the great catastrophe to our letters
.
” “There was heat in us, a core and a drive that was gathering headway upon the theme of a rediscovery of a primary impetus, the elementary principle of all art, in the local conditions,” he writes in his
Autobiography:
“Our work staggered to a halt for a moment under the blast of Eliot’s genius which gave the poem back to the academics.” Picturing himself as defending something betrayed by Eliot, and by Pound in his admiration of Eliot, Williams posed against the internationalism of
The Waste Land
the authenticism of the American speech. “Nothing from abroad would have the reality for me that native writing
of the same quality would have,” he resolves as an editor of
Contact
in 1922: “Eliot or Pound might say to me today—‘Read Laforgue!’ I might even be tempted to read because I had respect for their intelligence. But their words could not tempt me, force me, accompany me into the reading
.
” Against the cinematographic time-flux, he meant to take with a vengeance the camera eye of still photography, the locality in time.

There was the studied disdain of silence on Eliot’s part for Williams’s work. It meant that Williams was never taken up in England; no influence could move Eliot who came to rule the informed taste abroad as Pound never did. And there was the increasing grievance on Williams’s part. Not only Eliot but Pound and H.D. came to be seen as betrayers of the American thing in their exile, their “foreign” work. “When one’s friends hate each other,” the old man Pound as an old man would write in
Canto
CXV:

how can there be peace in the world?

Their asperities diverted me in my green time.

At heart, Williams’s genius as a poet lay not in the local condition, in the isolated percept, the “American” thing or speech, but in the heritage Eliot—Jacob to his Esau—had stolen from him, in the world-poem where the wives of an African chief, a red basalt grasshopper recalling Chapultepec, Toulouse-Lautrec, Madam Curie working the pitchblende, Sappho, and Peter Brueghel were to enter into one cultural design.
The Waste Land
had stolen a march on
Paterson,
but, by the time the first volume of
Paterson
appeared twenty-four years later, Williams had brought his early poem into a fullness that was to be a challenge to the poets to come as
The Waste Land
was not.

In his Preface to
Selected Essays
in 1954 Williams tells us: “Poetry is a dangerous subject for a boy to fool with, for the dreams of the race are involved in it.” He sought, he writes of
Paterson
in his
Autobiography
in 1951, “to find an image large enough to embody the whole knowable world about me.” Between “the dream of the race” and “the knowable world,” between the “idea” and the “thing” his river was to flow, the Passaic, yes, but also in the realized poem “the thunder of the waters filling his dreams!”

“The
subject matter
of the poem,” he said in his lecture at the University of Washington in 1948, calling upon Freud’s theory of the dream, “is always phantasy—what is wished for, realized in the ‘dream’ of the poem—but the structure confronts something else.” “The Poem as a Field of Action,” he titles that lecture, anticipating Charles Olson’s “Projective Verse” with its proposition of composition by field. “The only reality we can know,” he continues, “is
measure
. . . ”

How can we accept Einstein’s theory of relativity, affecting our very conception of the heavens about us of which poets write so much, without incorporating its essential fact—the relativity of measurements—into our own category of activity: the poem. Do we think we stand outside the universe? Or that the Church of England does? Relativity applies to everything, like love, if it applies to anything in the world.