Notes on Ezra Pound (2): “eternal war” and “Sagetrieb”

(My intention in the following is mainly to collect citations, drawing together a few threads through Pound’s Cantos on “the eternal war between light and mud.”)

 

1—Fango

In Canto 72, an “I” (Pound?), says to Marinetti’s unquiet spirit (who is eager to return to life and to war—“seule hygiène du monde”): “Lascia a me la parola. | Lascia a me ch’io mi spieghi, | ch’io faccia il canto della guerra eterna | Fra luce e fango” (which E.P. translates as “leave the talking to me. | And let me explain, | sing of the eternal war | between light and mud”).

The briefest of allusions at the incipit of Canto 87 suggests who the combatants in this eternal war are: “…between the usurer and any man who | wants to do a good job | (perenne).”

That this is indeed an allusion to the “guerra eterna” is confirmed in the following Canto 88, of which a passage begins, “Bellum perenne,” which goes on to cite a few significant dates (1694, 1750, 1878) in this apparently economic war. Then again a page later, in a very delicate epic allusion: “one, eight, seven, eight, | Mencius on tithing, | PERENNE. | Cano perenne.” “Arma virumque cano” (Aen., 1.1): eternal war, eternal song (see §3, infra).

Indeed, back at Canto 72, the worldly enemies (mud’s partisans) are named and given devilish pedigree. God, having created heaven and earth, “caco’ il gran’ usuraio Satana-Gerione, prototipo | Dei padroni di Churchill”: shat the great usurer Satan-Geryon, prototype of Churchill’s backers. Geryon, in Dante, is the beast of fraud.

The “Hell Cantos,” 15–6, begin with filth and shoddiness as effects of “USURA”; and they end by citing E.P.’s great contemporaries, felled by the usurers’ first war (in Pound’s telling). Compare Mauberley, “Ode,” IV – V: “There died a myriad, | And of the best…”

The Cantos are not anti-Semitic till, perhaps, Canto 52, in which Nazi economic policy is cited favourably. Nazi Jew-hatred is accounted for (though not, it must be said, excused), thus: “Stinkschuld’s sin drawing vengeance, poor Yitts paying for Stinkschuld | paying for a few big jews’ vendetta on goyim” (Stinkschuld being a monstrous amalgam of Rothschild, et al). And in Canto 91: “Democracies electing their sewage | […] a dung flow from 1913 | and, in this, their kikery functioned […] | Filth under filth”—E.P. also translates a line of Italian Canto 72 as “dung flow”; and “Filth under filth” recalls Eliot’s “Burbank,” from Poems 1920 (“The rats are underneath the piles. | The jew is underneath the lot”).

Canto 51: “Fifth element; mud; said Napoleon | With usury has no man a good house”—and so on: a recap of the famous condemnation of usury in Canto 45. See there what is crucial for E.P.: “with usura the line grows thick | with usura is no clear demarcation.” “Clear demarcation” could be his motto: it is his classicist aesthetic; it is his Confucian passion for the rectification of names; it is his political programme of dictatorial simplification and financial reform. It emblem is sculpture: the chisel finding the right form within the marble. Donald Davie explores this admirably in “The Poet as Sculptor,” excerpt in Eva Hesse (ed.), New Approached to Ezra Pound (London, 1969).

Mud, I think, is dross: what form (-ation) excludes. Of “dross,” see Canto 81: “What thou lovest well remains, | the rest is dross.” This “thou” is not just anyone but the virtù-ous man. Implied here seems to be a Platonic ethic (makes sense: E.P. is a neo-Platonist) of each man playing his part (function) within the polis’ corpora. 81 continues: “What thou lov’st well shall not be reft from thee.” Why not? Because the forms are eternal. As I wrote three days ago, hacking away the dross is as much of Artemis–Diana as of the sculptor: “All things are made foul in this season, | This is the reason, none may seek purity | Having for foulnesse pity” (Canto 30).

Pound indulges—for the catharsis of contempt?—in what is these days called “colourism” (back to Canto 72): W.W.2 is raging, and the Allies bring their troops with them to ravage Italy; says the unquiet spirit of Ezzelino, “Lo sterco sale sino a Bologna | Con stupor e fuoco, e dove il cavallo bagna | Son marocchini ed altra immondizia” (E.P.’s transl.: “The dung flow has got to Bologna as in the old war thro Romagna | Rape and fire as far as Bangacavallo”—and there he stops, embarrassed to translate what he, by then felt to be a low sentiment; but to finish it, “[at Bagnacavallo] are Moroccans and other filth”). Lo sterco sale sino…, or, in Lothrop Stoddard’s phrase, “The Rising Tide of Color.”

Light, clarity, Artemisian honesty and white marble, vs. the brown skin of Southern races, mud (the fifth element, i.e., the dross that skirts forms, the unformed) obscurantism, usury and subject races. Mussolini as sculptor: “USURY is the cancer of the world, which only the surgeon’s knife of Fascism can cut out of the life of the nations” (E.P., “What is Money For?” [1935]).

 

2—Luce

That’s a sketch of the enemy (mud’s partigiani). Re. light’s champions, take Canto 91: “[Drake] asked not | nor wavered, seeing, nor had fear of the wood-queen, Artemis | that is Diana | nor had killed save by the hunting rite, | sanctus.” A beautiful, dense passage. I discern the following elements.

1—The virtuous man kills only in the hunt and/or rite. That is, he knows that the Commandment is “Thou shalt do no murder.” To kill is not necessarily to murder. Where hunt (or war)—anyhow, rite, the formative force over the polis (thesaurus, Ecbatan [Canto 5]; Dioce [Canto 74] in connection with the “surgeon” Mussolini’s project)—requires, he kills. He doesn’t not kill “having for foulnesse pity.” Taste E.P.’s ethics: virtue (virtù), not morals (“moralic acid”…here, at Antichrist, 2, Nietzsche lauds virtù).

2—“Seeing” is important, but dangerous. Canto 104: “Adolf furious from perception.” Canto 90 (re. E.P. himself?): “not arrogant from habit, | but furious from perception.” Crucially, “arrogance”: to assume powers ultra vires. Unlike Hitler and Pound himself, the virtù-uous man is moderate, submits to rite. The emperor must perform the rites. Hitler is condemned on this ground—not Mussolini, whom E.P. witnesses and testifies as crucified like Manichaeus (for instance!).

3—Artemis–Diana: queen of the hunt. Apollo, per Nietzsche, is patron of static, spatial art. E.P. lauds Artemis as patroness of hacking away dross (in the hunt: killing legitimately, as allowed by rite), that is, chiselling away stone to find the (eternal) form within (always waiting to be found). (Check out Davie on this point—p. 214.)

4—Wavering. Canto 81 again: “But to have done instead of not doing | this is not vanity | To have, with decency, knocked | That a Blunt should open | 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…” Blunt is Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, poet and adventurer. Pound and some friends visited him before the first War, seeing him as a great living forebear (“a live tradition”); Blunt was bemused by their poetical efforts: they saw him as a forebear; but he couldn’t see that they were doing the same thing (couldn’t understand modernism as classicism). The vital, inspired, intuitive action of the artist with the forma, eîdos, coming alive at once in the mind, at the fingertips—poíēsis (Davie, p. 209: “a state of mind in which ideas as it were tremble on the edge of expression”)—this is what Pound is about. E.P. wants his Cantos, as necessary fragmented, imperfect, experimental art, to be “a link in a chain of causation” (Guide to Kulchur [New York, 1970], p. 136): to provoke this at once active and receptive state of mind in the virtuous man. This is his didacticism; this is how tradition stays “live.” Faltering, wavering: auto-interruption, a sign of decadence.

What tradition? Canto 90: “did Jacques de Molay | know these proportions? | And was Erigena ours?” “Ours” and 81’s “thou”: pupils at the “Ezuversity,” learning in order to keep the tradition alive. It’s to do with “proportion”—knowing the eternal forms waiting in the stone writ large—in matter: see Canto 47 for the extended image hillside–female body (matter as such)–quarrying–agriculture (frame of the shape of the polis). Creation as an unending (eterna…perenne…) participatory process between male–female pairs: sculptor–stone; poet–air (Yeats: “I made it out of a mouthful of air” [The Wind among the Reeds, 27]); prince (Napoleon, Jefferson, and/or Mussolini, etc.)–people; ploughman–land. This latter provides a fine exemplum though Cantos 52 (a redaction of Hesiod’s Works and Days) to its Chinese analogue in 53 (“Yeou taught men to break branches…”) where the catchword μῶλυ takes us (via a false etymology) from “grass that is called Tsing-mo’” to 47’s “molü,” a synopsis of works and days, and the land/woman–quarryman/man.

That is to say: creative action (Artemisian creation-in-destruction—sculpture writ large) moulded by rite, both requiring the light of perception. For this gathering from the air a live tradition E.P. coined a word, Sagetrieb: sagen, to say, to intend; treiben, to engender, or to urge—the urgency of the individual artist marries tradition. He introduces it in Canto 85: “naught above just contribution”—one’s function, one’s virtù?—“invicem docentes | That is Sagetrieb.” Then, immediately: “We flop”—compare waver, falter—“if we cannot maintain the awareness | Diaturna cogitates | respect the awareness and | train the fit men.”

 

3—Cavalcanti, Ezzelino

Davie offers the lyric tradition as an example of Sagetrieb (without using the word).

In Canto 81, at margent note “libretto,” Pound does a beautiful imitation of an English Renaissance-style lyric, invoking “Lawes and Jenkyns,” Waller, Dowland (all great artists of that time and place), and Dolmetsch (Victorian revivifyer of the instrument-making tradition); then he quotes a Chaucer lyric (“Merciless Beauty”); then—“And for 180 years almost nothing”—a break in tradition.

Rossetti (E.P.’s “father and mother,” per Bunting), Yeats (“Celtic twilight”), and Hulme–Pound classicism (“modernism”): a straight line, a formal tradition “live” once more. And form is key: in the same Canto 81, “nor was place for the full Ειδως” (I think that omega ought to be an omicron). Pound strives to make of this revival something approaching the climax he sees in the troubadours (the vehicles for his first personae—especially Bertrans de Born), and English lyricists, but crucially Cavalcanti.

This brings us back to the Italian Cantos, specifically 73. Cavalcanti, like Ezzelino in the foregoing, returns from the dead to help the Axis against the Allies. In this Canto, Pound attempts to make Cavalcanti speak in his own voice, specifically aiming for something like his “Donna mi prega”—a beast E.P. quested all his life, and which he Englishes in Canto 36 (“A lady asks me | I speak in season”). Cavalcanti is at once poet and soldier (like T. E. Hulme).

Similarly, in the early persona “Sestina: Altaforte,” Pound ventriloquizes En Bertrans: “Damn it all! all this our South stinks peace. | You whoreson dog, Papiols, come! Let’s to music! | I have no life save when the swords clash.” The point is the deep unity of the passion for poíēsis (in the sense elaborated above) and the passion for “war—the world’s only hygiene.” Hygiene—absence of dross—“clear demarcation.”

Cavalcanti speaks 73; first Marinetti, then Ezzelino III da Romano, speak 72. Ezzelino was the Ghibelline par excellence, son-in-law of Emperor Frederick II Hohenstaufen, stupor mundi. Note some parallels in passing.

1—The importance of proportion: (72) “Sovra-voler produce sovra-effetto | Purtroppo troppo…” (“Over-will produces over effect | too bad: too badly…”—never mind about the pun…); (73) idealised folkish beauty, thus—“Tozza un po’ ma non troppo” (“A little chunky but not too much”).

2—Ezzelino inveighs against “Di sporco vidi io parecchio ai miei tempi, | La storia da’ esempi a serie sporca” (“I saw a lot of filth in my time: | History gives a filthy series of examples”); Cavalcanti against “Roosevelt, Churchill ed Eden | bastardi ed ebreucci” (“bastards and big Jews”).

3—“The eternal war between light and mud” vs. “infangata della vergogna” (Cavalcanti on Ally-invaded Italy: “muddied by shame”).

Anyway. Ezzelino was so crucial to the Empire because of his geopolitically-strategically vital position at the mouths of Alpine passes. He was a bridge between Germany and Italy. He represents the North and the Empire against proto-democratist Guelf forces. For Pound, this latter means falsity: “Calunnia Guelfa,” yells his Ezzelino—“e sempre la loro arma | fu la calunnia” (“Guelph calumny: and always their weapon | was calumny”). Cavalcanti proclaims: “Nel settentrion rinasce la patria” (“In the north the fatherland is reborn”).

In the Italian Cantos, the Guelf–Ghibelline and Allies–Axis wars are part of the “perennial war” of light against mud, of form against dross.

In Canto 72, Ezzelino says, “Né Pietro pietra fu prima che Augusto | Tutta la virtu’ ebbe e funzione” (in E.P.’s drafty transl.—“Peter was no rock before Augustus | had all the powers and functions”). This is Ghibelline political theology: Empire before Church. Even ontologically prior, virtù being as much a metaphysical as an ethical category (as above). Augustus–Frederick–Mussolini (“Rome was reborn. The Sacred Empire was reborn,” says E.P. in a radio broadcast arguing for a pan-European Fascism) on the side of “light.” On the other, pity, thus foulness, dross; the “mezzo-foetus” Vittorio Emanuele (Ezzelino, 72) and the Allies, modern Guelfs.