Ezra Pound: Pass The Peanuts!

TOP64-DES61
This Old Poem #64:
Ezra Pound’s Portrait D’une Femme
Copyright © by Dan Schneider, 9/5/03

OK, OK, folks have been emailing me over the months that all I ever do are bad poems by bad poets. Say they, Why don’t you ever show how a good poem by a good poet can be improved? Well, I have done a few- but, the time has come for another 1. So I choose every poet’s favorite raving lunatic, Ezra Pound. Or was he so crazy? The obligatory bio:

Ezra Pound (10/30/1885-11/1/1972) was an American poet and critic who was born in Hailey, Ohio, as an only child. His father, Homer Pound, was a civil servant who ran the government land office at Hailey, and became an assistant assayer, at the United States Mint when the family moved to Philadelphia when Pound was four- he retired forty years later. His mother was the Isabel Weston Pound of Washington, DC. Pound ridiculed his father and reviled his mother’s bourgeois ways.

At twelve Pound entered Cheltenham, a military college two miles from home. A neighbor recalled that he was all study, and that the other boys made fun of him. He wrote his first poem about William Jennings Bryan. Pound enlisted at the University of Pennsylvania at the age of only fifteen. There he made one friend with a medical student and poet of Spanish descent- William Carlos Williams. Pound later met, and had a romance with, the poet Hilda Doolittle (HD). He then went to Hamilton College, in upstate New York, as a special student. There he discovered Dante and the troubadour poetry, as well as a curiosity about foreign languages. He graduated from Hamilton in 1905 and returned to the University of Pennsylvania to work on English Literature and Romance Poetry. He gained an M.A. in 1906, then visited Spain on a fellowship.

By 1908 he left for London, via Italy, with a resentment against the United States and all of its universities, when a projected academic career was cut short. He set sail for Europe, spending several months in Venice and then made it to London, where he was befriended by his hero, W. B. Yeats. Between 1908 and 1911 he published six collections of verse, most of it dominated by a passion for Provençal and early Italian poetry. This is filtered through the medievalizing manner of Browning and the Pre-Raphaelites. Under the influence of Ford Madox Ford and T. E. Hulme he modernized his style, and in 1912 launched the Imagist movement, advocating concreteness, economy, and free verse. The oriental delicacy of his brief Imagist lyrics (e.g. 'In a Station of the Metro') soon gave way to the more dynamically avant-garde manner of Vorticism. Association with Vorticist visual artists (e.g. Henri Gaudier-Brzeska and Wyndham Lewis) helped him to see how poems could be made up, like post-Cubist sculptures, of juxtaposed masses and planes.

Then World War 1 hit- in the short term it provoked his first major poems, 'Homage to Sextus Propertius' (1919) and Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1921). These two ironic sequences represent a contrast. The free-verse 'Homage', an ironic persona poem based on the lyrics of the first-century Roman poet, is a defence of the private and erotic in poetry against the imperialistic jingoism promoted by war. Mauberly, in tautly rhymed satirical stanzas, depicts the war as the Götterdammerung of an emasculated and philistine culture, condemned by the limitation of its own horizons. The poem is also evidence of Pound's close working relationship with Eliot, whose taste it reflects (cf. the 'Sweeney' poems of the same period). The relationship was to culminate in the crucial part played by Pound in cutting The Waste Land (1922). By the early 1930s Pound had fallen to dissolution with his dull, plodding The Cantos, and his increasing hatred for Jews and America. In the later 1930s Pound devoted much of his energy to defending fascism and trying to avert war. When war broke out, he embarked on a series of fanatical addresses to American troops, which were broadcast on Rome Radio. As a result, he was arrested by partisans in 1945 and handed over to the US forces, who held him for six months at a Disciplinary Training Centre near Pisa, pending trial on a treason charge. It seems likely that the inhuman conditions he endured there for the first three weeks accelerated the breakdown in rationality already to be glimpsed in his writings. Repatriated to the United States to stand trial, he was found unfit to plead on grounds of insanity and incarcerated in St Elizabeth’s Hospital, Washington DC, from 1946 to 1958.

But, a revival in Pound's work had begun as early as 1947, largely promoted by James Laughlin's New Directions. Throughout the 1950s poets from all over the world pleaded for his release, and The Pisan Cantos received the prestigious Bollingen Award. This opened a bitter controversy which was eventually summed up by Allen Tate, who argued that even if Pound had been convicted of treason, he had in his revitalization of language performed an "indispensable duty to society." And, at least as a critic and as the poet of Mauberley, Pound had. He had been a central figure in modernism, and had- although not single-handedly- revived poetry in England. He had invented a kind of creative translation which, whatever it may be as translation, certainly led to the writing of much poetry.
Pound's poetry is collected in two volumes: Collected Shorter Poems (London, 1984)--the American edition is entitled Personae: Collected Poems (New York, 1971)--and The Cantos of Ezra Pound (New York, 1972; London, 1981).

This you probably already knew. There’s little doubt that EP was a great poet at his best, as well as an utter charlatan & fool who wasted the last 40+ years of his life writing 1 long mess of a terrible long poem- ironically, 1 he never even finished. The poem I chose to work over for this TOP is a very good poem that, I think, misses out on greatness because of its prolixity. Nonetheless, other (read- lesser) critics have opined differently:

The blank verse Portrait d'une Femme, a Browningesque- yet modern- vignette, depicts the emptiness and sterility of the life of a cultured woman, surrounded by an exotic assortment of objects of art: "Your mind and you are our Sargasso Sea, / London has swept about you this score years / And bright ships left you this or that in fee. . . ." Despite her acquisitions, often the "fee" of casual alliances with cultured lovers, the lady is without a sense of identity or fulfillment: "No! there is nothing! In the whole and all, / Nothing that's quite your own. / Yet this is you." This subject and theme was anticipatory of Eliot's hollow men and women.

The title recalls Henry James's Portrait of a Lady (1881), much admired by Pound. Pound later spoke of Mauberley (1920) as "an attempt to condense the James novel," and this poem is an early exercise in that vein, a character sketch recalling the descriptive vignettes of the Jamesian novel of manners. Pound first met "the Master" in a London drawing room in February 1912, and after James's death he composed a lengthy essay honoring him for "book after early book against oppression, against all the sordid petty personal crushing oppression, the domination of modern life."

Pound uses a prosaic and flexible blank verse and portrays the "lady" by means of the extended metaphor of the "Sargasso Sea," a relatively static area of the North Atlantic stretching between the West Indies and the Azores, where the currents deposit masses of seaweed (or "sargasso"). As the Sargasso collects seaweed, so this woman has, after twenty years of backwash from London's social currents, accumulated the flotsam and jetsam which makes her, paradoxically, both a "richly paying" institution in the eyes of the young and an impoverished self whose only interest is as repository of this "sea-hoard."

Kenner has noted that the women in Pound's poetry tend to merge into two basic archetypes: the goddess, radiant with a virtú which organizes the world about her; and the fragmented woman, lacking identity and organized by her environment….

The subject of "Portrait" is a modern woman without identity or virtú. She is but "a sort of nodal point in the flux," defined by her environment. Whereas the lady of "Apparuit" is organically inseparable from her setting ("Green the ways, the breath of the fields is thine there"), the London femme gains no identity from her oddments ("No! There is nothing ... that's quite your own"). She is the cultural "Sargasso Sea" of London, and her "spars of knowledge" are lifeless and stationary in that backwater. The light in her world is not self-generated, but reflected from above, shifting and uncertain: "the slow float of differing light and deep." Yet despite her lack of unity, the lady is not nothing. The poem is a study of the second-rate qualified by the poet's implied awareness of third, fourth, and fifth rates. If we say that this fragmented lady is the prototype of the figures satirized in Lustra, we must add that the perspective and balance of the "Portrait" are missing from most of Pound's later sketches. It was probably this poem that Eliot had most in mind when he spoke of "the effect of London" and said that Pound had become "more mature."

'Portrait d'une Femme' is an essay in something new, but the comparison with Eliot's 'Portrait of a Lady' is to Pound's disadvantage. Like Masefield's 'Quinquireme', the woman is interesting chiefly for her cargo; she is a Sargasso Sea of quaint wrecks, of cultural trophies and memories. Like other ladies in early Pound, Eliot, or Lewis, she is and has long been a hostess in the salon world, the object of ambiguous feeling on the part of the iconoclasts who drink her tea. The lady is a collection of curiosities, not a person; her identity is defined by her trophies. Very good; but Pound is too interested in the cultural rarities, too much the museum visitor. And the pot-hunter is not saved by his irony. His 'brilliant' dismissal of the dear old relic at the end 'falls heavily among the bric-à-brac'; but, unlike Mr. Eliot's young visitor, he doesn't notice.

Now you understand why I do these TOP essays, don’t you? For all of that flotsam, would you really think they are describing this poem?:

Portrait D’une Femme

Your mind and you are our Sargasso Sea,
London has swept about you this score years
And bright ships left you this or that in fee:
Ideas, old gossip, oddments of all things,
Strange spars of knowledge and dimmed wares of price.
Great minds have sought you--lacking someone else.
You have been second always. Tragical?
No. You preferred it to the usual thing:
One dull man, dulling and uxorious,
One average mind--with one thought less, each year.
Oh, you are patient, I have seen you sit
Hours, where something might have floated up.
And now you pay one. Yes, you richly pay.
You are a person of some interest, one comes to you
And takes strange gain away:
Trophies fished up; some curious suggestion;
Fact that leads nowhere; and a tale for two,
Pregnant with mandrakes, or with something else
That might prove useful and yet never proves,
That never fits a corner or shows use,
Or finds its hour upon the loom of days:
The tarnished, gaudy, wonderful old work;
Idols and ambergris and rare inlays,
These are your riches, your great store; and yet
For all this sea-hoard of deciduous things,
Strange woods half sodden, and new brighter stuff:
In the slow float of differing light and deep,
No! there is nothing! In the whole and all,
Nothing that's quite your own.
Yet this is you.

A flattering portrait? No. But not as harsh as the prior critics said. It works well as both a general & specific critique. A little sententious & redundant, but overall, just a little nip & tucking should make it an easier read.

Portrait D’une Femme

From 30 lines to 18- but what’s really missing? The poem still has great images & can work in the general & specific- but we are rid of some tired Romantic/Victorian images like a mandrake, + tired themes of pre-Feminist femininity like:

Oh, you are patient, I have seen you sit
Hours, where something might have floated up.
And now you pay one. Yes, you richly pay.

In short, this is a perfect example of addition by subtraction. Now, if we could only subtract 100 or so Cantos….

Final Score: (1-100):

Ezra Pound’s Portrait D’une Femme: 88
TOP’s Portrait D’une Femme: 95

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