The H.D. Book (52 page)

In contrast, H.D.’s insistence upon the Living Christ, her sense that not only the Christian experience but the Greek and even the Egyptian experiences have not disappeared from the modern world but gather immediate to our own experience, does not recognize what the consensus of opinion of reasonable men has determined is the true nature of history. For all of human history appears to H.D. as if it were a Creation or fiction of reality, involving wish as well as world in its works—and here, the war as much as the writing is wish, but the writing triumphs, for it most approximates the total configuration. It is the “unalterable purpose” of the poem to convert the War to its own uses; the bombings of London are read as signs in the Poem Effort which claims priority over the War Effort. “Eternity endures” means not only that the eternal themes of the poem, the images—the cartouche or the sword—last beyond the war, but that they, like the poet, endure, as one endures the insolence of those who cannot understand, the War’s usurpation of human life from its most real purposes. There is the sense too that—as in the
Gospel of Saint Luke,
Jesus’ “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do,” or His “He who joins not in the dance mistakes the event” in
The Acts of Saint John
—the War is not to be taken for granted as simply an economic or political opportunity or as a disorder, but it is also a Mystery play or dream projection to be witnessed and interpreted, to be endured in order to be understood. The War rises from the dramatic necessity and informs: “Pompeii has nothing to teach us, / we know crack of volcanic fissure,” H.D. testifies. So, there were gnostics who taught that the human soul must come to know the depths of hell and sin as well as the heights of heaven and the good before it completes its human self or experience. In Freudian terms, the War is a manifestation of the latent content of the civilization and its discontents, a projection of the collective unconscious. “And beyond thought and idea,” H.D. continues: “their begetter . . . ”

Dream,
Vision.

•

“The total world of which the philosophers must take account,” William James writes in his
Principles of Psychology
in 1890, “is thus composed of the realities
plus
the fancies and illusions.” What we must deal with in such a totality of the human experience demands in poetry, as James saw it demanded in philosophy, a new structure of thought and imagination. “For there are various categories both of illusion and of reality, and alongside of the world of absolute error (i.e., error confined to single individuals) but still within the world of absolute reality (i.e., reality believed by the complete philosopher) there is the world of collective error, there are the worlds of abstract reality, of relative or practical reality, of ideal relations, and there is the supernatural world.”

•

It is “the total world which
is
” that concerns James; and in his sense that What Is is multifarious, in his insistence upon the many strands we must come to see before consciousness have something like the fullness demanded by What Is, James is kin to Emerson before him and to Dewey and Whitehead after. The quest he projects is not only that of the philosopher who would approach the nature of human experience in its complexity but also that of the poet who seeks a poetics adequate to convey various levels of feeling and thought toward the complete. Whitman’s “Self,” expanded to include the variety of human existence, is such a concept. The at-homeness in many persons, times, and places, that characterizes
The Cantos,
The War Trilogy, or
Paterson,
represents the tendency to think of completeness in terms of the variety of human life, even of life itself, beyond the less-than-total individual sub-world: “to determine the relation of each sub-world to the others in the total world which
is.
”

•

In the world of the imagination, of fiction and fable—the world of creation—James includes “the various supernatural worlds, the Christian heaven and hell, the world of the Hindoo mythology” with “the world of the
Iliad,
that of
King Lear,
of the
Pickwick Papers.
”

•

Money and war are also fictional entities, for men believe in them, as they believe in elves and gods, to make real their lives. Swords, spades, hearts, diamonds, and the drawings upon the walls, poems keeping their time, too, are conditions of the real, of What Is, man-made. All makers are at work between thought and the actual, feeling their way. It is what we call Poetry of The Making that articulates the feeling in language—the wish manifest in the image, Sword or new Master over Love—toward the fullness of experience. We see our Way and create our Thing in the world about us as desire illumines. “The ‘larger universe,’ here,” James writes, “which helps us to believe both in the dream and in the waking reality which is its immediate reductive, is the
total
universe, of Nature
plus
the Supernatural.”

•

Conventional poetics, which belongs to the Age of Reason that sought to reduce even religion to a consensus of the opinion of reasonable men, had reduced the frame of mind to exclude the supernatural from individual experience, to rationalize genius and make a metaphor of inspiration, to confine reality to what, as Dryden has it in his Preface to
All For Love,
“all reasonable men have long since concluded.” In philosophy, in poetics, in science, and in politics, men strove to make and to hold a world of sense, practical knowledge, ideal relations, logical conclusions, around which what Freud calls the Super-Ego, grown enormous, built its authority, against an enemy world of the irrational—fearful, to be avoided or rendered harmless—the world of fictions (romance, supernatural, vision, and dream), of “sheer madness and vagary.” Howling hairy madmen and shrieking desolate virgins appeared in the imaginations of Fuseli, Blake, Goya, Hoffman, Potocki, the Marquis de Sade.

•

James’s world of fictions is the real of the creative imagination. It is in the work of realizing, composing or bringing into cooperation the various worlds of senses, sciences, fictions, opinions, ideals, ideas, and “sheer madness and vagary,” held as one creation or poetics, that the
artist develops the imagination “to charge with meaning to the utmost possible degree.”

•

To recognize madness as a term of the real extends our life in What Is. This is the revelation of Goya’s
Caprichos
or of Gérard de Nerval’s
Chimeras,
that what otherwise had been isolated obsession and hallucination is brought into the communal imagination to become mystery and mystic vision. As, again, in the ritual of the Christian Mass, “madness and vagary” have been brought over into the order of the communal reality—a play enacted in which the body of Christ is eaten and His blood drunk, that must be held by the communicant as a mystery, an idea, but also an actual happening within a world of its own; that must also be not a play but a greater reality. The power of the Mass, its numinous force, its real, is that of a fiction where ideal and madness become contrasting elements of one structure. Conflicting elements, love and devouring cannibalistic hunger, are sublimated or condensed, held in a third element of devotion, the intensity of the created feeling arising from the incorporate disturbance.

•

“Dichten = condensare,” Pound notes in his
ABC of Reading:
“Basil Bunting, fumbling about with a German-Italian dictionary, found that this idea of poetry as concentration is as old almost as the German language. ‘Dichten’ is the German verb corresponding to the noun ‘Dichtung’ meaning poetry, and the lexicographer has rendered it by the Italian verb meaning ‘to condense’.”

•

“The first thing that becomes clear to anyone who compares the dream-content with the dream-thoughts,” Freud writes in
The Interpretation of Dreams
(1896), “is that a work of
condensation
on a large scale has been carried out.”

•

Ezra Pound has the daemon of a poet and has described the genius of a poem not as a descending spirit or inspiration but as a welling-up of a spring or emotion. So, in his “Retrospect” of 1918 he inscribes: “Only emotion endures.” “We might come to believe that the thing that matters in art,” he writes in “The Serious Artist” (1913), “is a sort of energy, something more or less like electricity . . . transfusing, welding, and unifying. . . . ” Then: “A force rather like water when it spurts up through very bright sand and sets it into swift motion.” But Pound is a man of divided mind, and a mind, further, impressed during his years as a would-be candidate for his doctorate with the concerns and ambitions of a would-be professor of literature. The poetic emotion which Pound experiences as being a truth of his own nature is complicated by considerations of a different order, the concern for literary opinion, for changing established standards and reading lists. In “The Serious Artist,” the arts “bear witness and define for us the inner nature and conditions of man” and are falsified if they be altered to “conform to the taste of the time, to the proprieties of a sovereign, to the conveniences of a preconceived code of ethics.” In
Guide to Kulchur,
as in
The Cantos
of the 1930s, the ideogram which presented in configuration the inner responses of the man became confused with the ideogram of a proper sovereignty. Ideas in action became
idées fixes
acting upon a recalcitrant world. “As the man, as his mind, becomes a heavier and heavier machine, a constantly more complicated structure,” Pound observes in “The Serious Artist,” “it requires a constantly greater voltage of emotional energy to set it into harmonious motion.” Only with the upsurge of emotional crisis that came at Pisa, where in the death-camp Pound came at last into the destiny of his poetic identity, did the conglomerate that had gathered in
The Cantos
begin to move again, and then it was to be a breaking up of fixed ideas into drifts and debris in the creative currents.

•

In certain works of his pre-War London period, in
The Spirit of Romance,
“Religio,” “Aux Étuves de Wiesbaden,” “Genesis (after Voltaire),” and
“Cavalcanti,” Pound derives from the neo-Platonic cult of Helios, from the Provençal cult of Amor, from the Renaissance revival of pagan mysteries after Gemistos Plethon, and from the immediate influence of the theosophical revival in which Yeats was immersed, an analogous tradition of poetry as a vehicle for heterodox belief, a ground in which the divine world may appear (with the exception of the Judaeo-Christian orders). At the thought of Jesus, Pound has all the furious fanaticism of the Emperor Julian; he is a pagan fundamentalist. Aphrodite may appear to the poet, and even Kuanon, but not Mary; Helios and even Ra-Set may come into the poem, but not Christ. Yet these gods of the old world are not only illustrations of a living tradition; they are, Pound testifies thruout
The Cantos,
presences of a living experience. Does the poet cast them as images upon our minds or do they use the medium of the poem to present themselves? They come to the poet or he calls them up. So, in the first draft of
Canto
I: “Gods float in the azure air . . . ”

       ‘It is not gone.’ Metastasio

Is right, we have that world about us.

•

Even as H.D. testifies in
The Walls Do Not Fall
in 1942 to the attendance or Presence of Ammon-Ra-Christos and of Mary in London, so in
The Pisan Cantos
Pound in 1945 testifies he was attended in his tent by his familiar gods—Helios, Hermes, Aphrodite, and the Lady of the Pomegranate. It was a heterodox religion to hold, and Pound in other works of the pre-War London period, particularly in “The Serious Artist,” strove to rationalize or make respectable the content of this tradition in terms of a natural philosophy of poetry, after the models of Remy de Gourmont’s
Natural Philosophy of Love
or of Allen Upward’s
The Divine Mystery,
appealing to the authority of Fabre and Frazer, to give his adherence a biological and anthropological reality, but also to uphold the poetic intuition itself against the attack of what he knows cultural and religious orthodoxy to be. To hold the poetic intuition in the face of his own professorial or professional righteousness, the rationalizing authority, Pound often writes to cover for the shamanistic
poet he is at heart. But this Super-Ego could disapprove too of Pound’s delite in pedantry. This is the poetic pathos in
Thrones
where, pursuing lexicographical speculations, Pound breaks with impatience to answer the impending voice of an inner adversary:

If we never write anything save what is already understood, the field of understanding will never be extended. One demands the right, now and again, to write for a few people with special interests and whose curiosity reaches into greater detail.

Not only must the poet cover for the devotional character of the poem but he must defend the scholarly character too against some shadowy critical authority.

•

Only by interrupting the imagination can Pound incorporate certain “worlds” of his individual reality. The texture of the poem must allow for the contention of the mind. Abrupt interjections appear, dramatizing the conflict between two drives: one, akin to that of William James or William Carlos Williams or H.D.—“to extend the field of understanding”; the other, after Dryden, akin to Eliot, to appeal to “what all reasonable men have long since concluded.” The problem thruout is one of translation between the individual experience, which is repressed in the official culture or banished to the realm of madness, and the body of what is taken as authoritative. Fenollosa’s Chinese written character, Gaudier-Brzeska’s vortex of energy in sculpture, Frobenius’s culture-morphology, Gesell’s justice and freedom in the exchange of goods—all these correspond to the poet’s inspiration to extend the field of understanding in a new poetics. Ideogram, vortex of energies, form as meaningful and organic, and equilibrium in the circulation of goods (feelings and thoughts) are basic terms of what happens in
The Cantos.
Just as, significantly, they, like
The Cantos,
are rejected by the taste and opinion of reasonable men or relegated to the peripheries of the culture where harmless fantasies, or worse, madness and vagary begin to appear. The form of
The Cantos,
like the ideal form of a democratic government, must allow for the authority of the individual—here the
authority of the individual response or impulse—within a community of differing responses. Of all contemporary poetries it has the greatest inner tolerance for even conflicting tones, certainties, doubts—the texture of a widely, even wildly, multiphasic personality.