Notes on Ezra Pound (1): “clear demarcation” and “the diffidence that faltered”

1—A passion for the clean line

If Pound was an anti-militarist, he wasn’t a pacifist. In the luminous opening lines of Canto 30, the Futurist doctrine of “war—the world’s only hygiene” is put into Artemis’ mouth (see Marinetti, “Fondation et Manifeste du Futurisme” [1909]).

“Pity spareth so many an evil thing.” Artemis–Diana is mistress of the hunt and of the moon, which bewitched E.P., in later Cantos especially. “Now if no fayre creature followeth me | […] It is on account that Pity forbideth them slaye.” The hunt is a test of virtù. Its ruthlessness is necessary for the triumph of the strong over the weak, beauty over “foulnesse,” form over matter.

“All things are made foul in this season, | This is the reason, none may seek purity | Having for foulnesse pity | And things growne awry.” Artemis represents this creative-destructive principle (creative destruction): removing the dross [see addendum]. The same is exemplified in that most Apollonian of arts, sculpture.

Canto 45 descants upon the same principle (or its perversion, subversion, rather): “with usura the line grows thick | with usura is no clear demarcation […] Usura rusteth the chisel.” Pound’s is a passion for the clean line; and this is itself a clean line running thru his poetic innovations (following on from Hulme’s classicism and “the forgotten school of 1909”) to his Fascism with Chinese characteristics. The nub of it: the struggle against shoddiness and obscurity of that purity of form begotten of mastery (virtù). (Or, as Canto 72 has it, “la guerra eterna | Fra luce e fango” [the unending war between light and mud]. This in the context of a neo-Ghibelline, pro-Fascist harangue. Aesthetics and politics are one, here.)

[Addendum re. "purity of form begotten of mastery" -- as E.P. says in Canto 81, "What thou lovest well remains, | the rest is dross"; then (not so oft remembered) "What thou lov’st well is thy true heritage." The "Thou" here can only be the virtù-ous. "'Master thyself, then others shall thee beare' | Pull down thy vanity," etc. In poesy, "what I call adequate preparation for writing": "[Eliot] has actually trained himself and modernized himself on his own" (my emphases; E.P. to Harriet Monroe [30 September 1914]: see Cyril Connolly, "The Break-Through in Modern Verse," The London Magazine, 1.3 [June, 1961]) -- that is, returning to the above essentials, "gathering from the air a live tradition" (see below); and in politics -- much the same.]

 

2—Pound’s tragedy

“The enormous tragedy of the dream in the peasant’s bent shoulders,” opens Canto 74 (immediately following the nakedly Fascistic 72–3), in reference to the failure of the Fascist—experiment? dream?—experience, certainly: “Manes was tanned and stuffed, | Thus Ben and la Clara a Milano.”

Pound’s tragedy was his own “bent shoulders”—his loss of conviction. His famous (even over-cited) call to “make it new” and his basically forgotten motto from A Lume Spento, “Make strong old dreams lest this our world lose heart”—are one and the same. This is a basically conservative-revolutionary Weltanschauung, or vision du monde—but whatever it is, it’s rooted in an Apollonian, or rather Artemisian, visionary experience—echoed in Canto 81: “To have gathered from the air a live tradition | or from a fine old eye the unconquered flame | This is not vanity. | Here error is all in the not done, | all in the diffidence that faltered.”

And falter Pound did. I don’t blame him; but his candle flickered.

When John Lauber calls the Cantos a “Fascist epic” (Journal of American Studies, 12.1 [April 1978]), I take it not as a political sleight, from which to defend Pound, but as a legitimate, perceptive aesthetic characterisation, with which I—obviously, given the above—concur. But the Cantos’ sin, I think is its gradual—if accelerated after the betrayal and conquest of “the dream in 1945” (Cantos 74, onward)—and half wilful dissolution into “drafts and fragments” (Cantos 110, onward) (…and their wanton chinoiserie!).

[Addendum. That is, E.P. is at his aesthetic best when most fascistic. His mystical-aestheticized visions of the State in the Cantos, but more especially these lapidary -- meditate upon this word! -- pronouncements, of which I've cited a few...these are the best of E.P.]