E-Mail This Article to a Friend Innocent abroad The Library of America brings Ezra Pound home BY WILLIAM CORBETT
	Poems and Translations By Ezra Pound. Edited by Richard Sieburth. The Library of America, 1393 pages, $45.

This welcome book, impeccably edited by Richard Sieburth, will not excuse Ezra Pound’s fascist sympathies and actions, but readers capable of seeing beyond his politics will learn why he is at the center of modernism in English and American poetry and why he is a great poet. So long as fascism’s crimes against humanity are remembered, Pound’s work will be judged in their light. My 46-year reading of that work and examination of his life have taught me to say, "Yes, he was a disgusting anti-Semite, but in his poetry he mostly transcended that." If it is having it both ways to value the poems while damning the poet, so be it. In my view Pound, a great teacher, forces this lesson upon his devoted readers.

The first third of this book, which takes the reader to 1920 (Pound was born in 1885 and died in 1972, in Venice), is what comes before the "And" in the first line of Pound’s The Cantos, "And then went down to the ship." After 1920, for all the poetry he translated, his own poetry became exclusively The Cantos (not included in Poems and Translations). For Pound, all history led up to the "and" that begins his poem of a lifetime. Only an arrogant, innocent American could presume to take a deep breath before starting humanity’s next chapter in mid sentence. What the first 572 pages in Poems & Translations show — from the poems the teenage Pound wrote to his first love, the poet Hilda Doolittle, through his book Personae (1909; Sieburth’s "piths and gists" chronology is an invaluable companion) — is that Pound’s modernism stands on four legs: 1) his being an American, "seeing he had been born/In a half savage country, out of date"; 2) his grand tour of Europe in 1898 and his subsequently becoming, in effect, a European; 3) his discovery of Provençal poetry; 4) his discovery of Chinese poetry.

Being an American born on the frontier in Hailey, Idaho, Pound had no literary tradition to live up to or tear down. He was free to invent a "live tradition" from whatever "lips, words, . . . Dreams" he could find. He was free, as his most famous pronouncement has it, to "Make It New." His rambunctious American energy was matched by his awe at the sacred places he discovered in Southern France and Northern Italy, at Mont Segur and Tempio Malatestiana in Rimini.

Pound found in Europe what he could not find in America, what Henry James, the apotheosis of the American European artists, called "the scrutable, palpable past." (Pound never forgot his meeting James on a London street before World War I.) He was able to do this because, like James, he was an outsider, one who could see things fresh because he had not been born, reared, and educated in England, France, or Italy. To grasp this, it might help to think of the Rolling Stones latching on to American blues music as if it were their own tradition. They could do this, at least in part, because they were not intimidated by race, as many American musicians of their generation were. Pound’s passport into European culture was both his natural brashness and a classic American innocence abroad.

Poems and Translations shows that from A Lume Spento (1908) through Arnaut Daniel (1917), his poetry is dominated by a passion for Provençal poetry. He first encountered these "troubadour" poets of the 12th and 13th centuries in 1905 in an American classroom. They were not well-known then, and today they are taught in only a handful of American universities. As he worked to translate and adapt their poems, Pound got from these poets the beginnings of his sound. You can hear it in this stanza from "Cino" in A Lume Spento:

Lips, words, and you snare them,

Dreams, words, and they are as jewels,

Strange spells of old deity,

Ravens, nights, allurement:

And they are not;

Having become the souls of song.

Later he described what he learned as "not the metronome, but the musical phrase," and his application of this remained central to his poetry.

Pound did not learn from books alone. He sought out those writers whom he believed had things to teach him. He had the excellent taste to listen to and work beside the British novelist, editor, and poet Ford Madox Ford — in Hugh Selwyn Mauberly Pound calls him "the stylist" — and William Butler Yeats. In his essential book on Pound, The Pound Era, Hugh Kenner writes, "Ford had hammered on the diction and syntax of natural speech: ‘nothing, nothing that you couldn’t in some circumstance, in the stress of emotion, actually say.’ Pound’s habit was to temper him with Yeats, seeing Ford in the afternoon and Yeats in the evening, and Yeats’s horror of the baldly mimetic. . . ." Thus Pound came to fuse the troubadour song with speech cadences so as to fix "what thou lovest well" in the ear.

Meanwhile, because in writing, as in life, many things happen nearly at once, a chance encounter at a London dinner party introduced Pound to Chinese poetry. He met the widow of Boston historian and Sinologist Ernest Fenollosa; charmed by the flamboyant young man, she gave him eight of Fenollosa’s notebooks, which contained his unfinished translations of Japanese noh plays and, more significantly, of a handful of Chinese poems by Rihaku (Li Po). Without knowing it, Pound had been looking for this poetry, and he recognized at once its importance to him. In bringing these poems into English, Pound, in Kenner’s phrase, "invented Chinese poetry" for the West. His short book Cathay (1915; excerpted in Poems and Translations) had a decisive effect on American poetry through its insistence on the primacy of images. Reading these poems at 16, I vowed to become a poet.

The best example of what Pound discovered for himself and bequeathed to the rest of us is his translation of this four-line poem by Rihaku, "The Jewel Stairs’ Grievance," which appeared in Cathay:

The jewelled steps are already quite white with dew,

It is so late that the dew soaks my gauze stockings,

And I let down the crystal curtain

And watch the moon through the clear autumn.

Pound’s "note" adds:

Jewel stairs, therefore a palace. Grievance, therefore there is something to complain of. Gauze stockings, therefore a court lady, not a servant who complains. Clear autumn, therefore he has no excuse on account of weather. Also, she has come early, for the dew has not merely whitened the stairs, but soaked her stockings. The poem is especially prized because she utters no direct reproach.

A great poem about being stood up! A clear surface and emotional resonance.

Pound is not alone at the center of 20th-century American poetry. There is also T.S. Eliot, whose "The Waste Land" might not exist without Pound’s fierce editorial pencil, Wallace Stevens, and William Carlos Williams. Take away any one of them and it is impossible to imagine what American poetry might look like today. Pound is the most difficult of access. He was both of his century and against it. He never learned to drive a car, and his fascism has more than a whiff of not wanting to live in the century of mass man. His Cantos are bookish and obscure, but they are also, like so much of the poetry in this book, absolutely beautiful to the ear, eye, and mind.