The H.D. Book (54 page)

These we call the worthiest of those subjects which can be handled; and now let us hunt out what they are. And, in order to make this clear, it must be observed that, as man has been endowed with a threefold life, namely, vegetable, animal, and rational, he journeys along a threefold road. . . . Wherefore these three things, namely, safety, love, and virtue, appear to be those capital matters which ought to be treated supremely, I mean the things which are most important in respect of them, as prowess in arms, the fire of love, and the direction of the will.

The direction of the will in the course of the twentieth century is deeply disturbed. The main drive of the Imagists away from the specially “poetic” dictions of the nineteenth century toward the syntax and rhythms of common daily speech was that of Dante in his
De Vulgari Eloquentia,
who argued that the vernacular “because it was the first employed by the human race, as because the whole world makes use of it” was “nobler than learned speech—” and “It is also nobler as being natural to us, where as the other is rather of an artificial kind.” Pound’s
Cathay,
meant as Hugh Kenner has pointed out to be carried in the soldier’s pocket, in 1914 had the eloquence of a new poetic vernacular, the force of a common nobility; but in the
Confucian Odes,
following the Second World War, the voices of his translation grow disparate; a jazzy and folksy dialect takes the place of common speech—the low-life specialty that operates even as the learned grammatical speech of upper classes to convey a class consciousness set apart from our common humanity. In his version of
The Women of Trachis
Pound runs the gamut between the Shelleyan sublime of the choruses and the stereotyped vulgarity of the Cockney waiting-woman or nurse. Her speech has just that artificiality that Dante felt robbed learned speech of nobility—it is furthest in Pound’s mind from the vernacular. Yet Dante sees this true or natural speech “as that which we acquire without any rule, by imitating our nurses.” Herakles has the voice of Pound’s own nature as he cries: “Splendor. It all coheres”—a cry that has tragic pathos in this translated play that incorporates the play of the poet’s own poetic tragedy, where Pound had been heroic in his life to restore the word
“common” to its coherence from the meaning of the word “common” as used by the middle-class of “lower classes.” But the hubris of self-improvement and advancement in status goes deep in our American world, of rescuing ourselves from the common lot, and, profoundly American, Pound inherits in full the class and racial antagonisms in which our American culture has developed, even as he struggles to transform that culture. The Nessus shirt in which Heracles burns is the shirt of a consciousness of what is going on, where Heracles is heroic, as Pound is, by his strength of character in adverse fate, by his taking on in full the way it is.

•

“We are alone . . . ” Freud writes in “The Dream-Work,” an essay of that last year of the nineteenth century: “We are alone in taking something else into account.”

“We have introduced a new class of psychical material between the manifest content of dreams and the conclusion of our enquiry.” It is this area between the manifest and the conclusion of his enquiry, between the manifest content of the poem and the enquiry into that content, that Pound cannot introduce as a conscious artist. The poetic genius “rescues” the content. This is the authenticity of
The Cantos:
the poet’s sensitivity, his feel for the material he admits. In his essays before the First World War his conscious mind allies itself with his genius; but, for the author of
Kulchur,
major themes of his poetic inspiration, indeed, inspiration itself, is suspect. The content of his great poem begins to seem to have “the defects of a time of struggle.” His conscious aesthetic contradicts the work of his creative aesthetic which must then come more and more as an unconscious directive—to the consciousness a matter of defect and struggle.

Because the poem-work then, like the dream-work, is a composition that takes place in the unconscious that the consciousness feels as an imperative towards form, in
The Cantos
we read, as Freud saw the dream was to be read, “as it were a pictographic script, the characters of which have to be transposed individually into the language of the dream-thoughts.” In the ideogrammic method, Pound finds a configuration
that returns, beyond his rationalizations and predispositions, to the feel of things; he has faith in the truth of the instinctive synthesis, where he must exceed his own conscious reading analysis.

Where intelligence is consciousness, Pound is a marred intelligence. Not in the complex of heterodox material he has admitted into his ideogram, but in repressed contents of his experience that he does not and can not admit. Good or evil, Will moves in
The Cantos
separated from any psychological insight until the crisis of the Pisan Death Camp. But since intelligence is something larger than what consciousness can admit, an awareness that may lie in the feel of things’ fitting imperatively as they lead toward the form of the poem, even when the consciousness cannot think of what is at work there, at the fingertip’s sensitivity, at the ear’s equilibrium, and in the secret mind’s sense of undercurrents,
The Cantos
are a major breakthru. Pound is a great Dreamer, and it was a condition of his Dream that he vehemently and even violently reject the Freudian breakthru that began the translation of the language of dreams into our daily consciousness.

We may see the deeper significance the role of translation has had for Pound as a poetic task, when we think of how in psychoanalytic translation dreams and daily life have begun to appear as a language we must learn to read in order to translate something we have always to say that we do not know yet to hear. “The dream-thoughts,” Freud writes, “and the dream-content are presented to us like two versions of the same subject-matter in two different languages.” So, too, we see the importance of the ideogram for Pound for it is his route towards—“as it were a pictographic script”—the
condensare
of the dream.

2.

I

Poems are events of Poetry, of our consciousness of
making
a universe of feeling and thought in language. Celebrating, is it? or praying for? Of singing, of dancing, What Is.

•

As our concept of What Is changes, our concept of form changes, for our experience of form
is
our experience of What Is. As I begin to see in terms of William James’s pluralistic reality, a sense of the total world emerging from many kinds of apprehension, and, in terms of Freud’s exploration of one kind of psychosexual reality with its sense of the divine will as Eros and Thanatos, the three things Dante named as worthiest concerns in the poem—
safety, love,
and
virtue
—and their three appropriate means—
prowess in arms, the fire of love,
and
the direction of the will
—whatever their meaning in the thirteenth century and in Dante’s universe, take on new and troubled meanings when they are taken as primaries in the creation of our own world. Dante understood
safety
as having to do not with the interests of his city Florence primarily but with the good of humanity as a whole, and so he took the cause of the Emperor and the government of the Empire as even against the party of the city, and he was condemned to death, a traitor, in Florence. As today, for the sake of safety of humanity our own prowess of arms would have to be given, were we to take Dante’s sense of true government, to the union of all nations, against the contention of those who direct the United States in the name of private enterprise against communal goods and who are engaged in a disastrous struggle for domination against their counterparts in Russia and China. We live today, as Dante lived in the thirteenth century and in Florence, in a crisis of just these three worthiest subjects of the poem that must have their definitions not in our personal interests, or we find ourselves at war with our human commonality, not in our national interests, or we find ourselves at war with other nations, but in our human interests, our understanding of the universal term that is Man, the term not of a given reality but of a creation in process. “Of all civilizations,” Dante argues in
De Monarchia,
not of the city of Florence, not of Rome, nor even Christendom alone. The goal of the governing art he discerns is “the realizing of all the potentialities of the human mind.” “And this demands the harmonious development and co-operation of the several members of the universal body politic.” It is a body that extends not only thruout the global space of Man but thruout the time of Man.

•

All thru the body of our nation, where men are fighting for the realization of all the potentialities of the human mind, against exploitation and discrimination, for the potentialities that have been denied blacks, women, xicanos, and for our own potentialities of community, of brotherhood, companionship in work, and marriage, that have been denied, they are fighting, we are fighting, for our true “safety” and have that “prowess of arms” that poets would praise. “I too,” Whitman answers the Phantom, genius of poets of old, who challenges him that he does not sing the theme of War:

I too haughty Shade also sing war, and a longer and greater one than any,

Waged in my book with varying fortune, with flight, advance and retreat, victory deferr’d and wavering,

                 . . . the field the world,

For life and death, for the Body and for the eternal Soul

•

Living in the warp of a capitalistic oligarchy, we begin to realize that the potentialities of human mind lie hidden in what Pound calls “the increment of association,” our individual realization is curbed wherever there is private interest, our own or another’s. We must struggle for the extension of communal property in order to provide for the safety of our individual potentialities. As, we can see too, in Russia, the safety of the communal potentiality lies in the struggle for individual freedom.

•

James and Freud in the eighteen-nineties were drawn to study hallucination, hysteria, and neurosis, where feelings of safety, love, and virtue were confused and even lost. James saw that man must cope with a more and more complicated picture of the real—the communal composite—if he desire fullness. Freud saw that the unconscious creativity of man—where arts, wars, rituals of flower worship and death orgy, forbidden sexual cravings, and the highest ideals swarmed—must become part of man’s conscious life, his responsibility, or else, if it does
not have to do with the nature of his individual potentialities, there was the hubris incurred. Safety, love, and virtue were under threat.

•

For men at the beginning of the century aware of the gap between the ideals men sounded and the motives of their actions, cynicism and embarrassment, seeing thru or dismissing, was an alternative to taking things too seriously. Thus Pound and Williams, not to be taken in by things that are “poetic”—Spring, Love, Trees, Wind, are embarrassed before their inspiration. And then, as if to disavow their manliness, their sincerity, in writing to each other they cultivate this special Man-Talk. It had its counterpart in the girlish-idiotic manner cultivated by some women; and it seemed to provide a striking method for achieving style in a period obsessed with style. Not only Anita Loos, where the effect was for a comic chic, but Stein, Hemingway, McAlmon, Cummings, became sophisticated in language as a jargon. It was the crux of H.D.’s objection in the letter Williams was to quote in the Prologue to
Kora in Hell
concerning the “hey-ding-ding touch,” the “flippancies”: “It is as if you were
ashamed
of your Spirit, ashamed of your inspiration!—as if you mocked at your own song.”

•

In Williams’s reply we see that back of the challenged “hey-ding-ding touch” that Williams said “filled a gap that I did not know how better to fill at the time” lay something else, a felt need of the man in his struggle for individual feeling against the popularly-debased meanings. “The true value,” he goes on to say, “is that peculiarity which gives an object a character by itself. The associational or sentimental value is the false.”

•

But turning to the poem “March,” as it stands in
The Collected Poems
of Williams, I cannot find anything to substantiate H.D.’s sense of flippancy. I find:

I deride with all the ridicule
of misery—

and the realization that follows, where the image has meaning in a series of realities—poetic, politic, physical, and erotic:

Counter-cutting winds strike against me
refreshing their fury!

William Carlos Williams and Ezra Pound had this prowess in arms, anyway, to take their stand, winning a high place for the art of poetry again in men’s minds. If Williams takes on the regular-guy voice, or Pound his cracker-barrel Alfred Venison or Uncle Ez voice, it is defensive strategy in a society that demanded the manner and condemned the nature. He-man bravado or working-class lingo was their affectation of the vernacular, meant to cut thru the genteel affectation of devotion or culture with which the middle-class poetry-lover read.

•

It was the false currency of middle-class associations and stereotyped sentiments that had converted safety, love, and virtue into mistrusted words. He-man bravado was popular; but manliness was a threat to the values of the marketplace. The anti-poetic voice was not only a defense but an attack, a show of sophistication to the pretension of the cultured. Associations and sentiments in themselves had come to seem false to the modern sensibility, and Williams took up his crusade for what he called “that peculiarity which gives an object a character by itself,” for the “no ideas but in things.” Pound, H.D., and Aldington in 1912 agreed to “direct treatment of the thing.” To regain the feeling of the thing itself was a battle against its conversion into use and commodity values.

But this idea of the image in itself, of a character by itself, does not last long as a primary. By 1914 Pound is concerned with the vortex of energies. By 1916, H.D., reviewing John Gould Fletcher’s
Goblins and Pagodas,
speaks of “a more difficult and, when successfully handled, richer form of art: not that of direct presentation, but that of suggestion.” Only Williams remained as protagonist for the theory of the thing in itself, which culminated in the Objectivist movement of the thirties, where the poem was thought of as a
thing.