Notes on Ezra Pound (3): Epic and/or Propaganda

1—Poetry and/or Propaganda

David Barnes, “Fascist Aesthetics: Ezra Pound’s Cultural Negotiations in 1930s Italy,” Journal of Modern Literature, 34.1 (autumn 2010), pp. 20–1:

For the purposes of this article, it suffices to say that there is some critical debate as to whether or not the two “Italian Cantos,” 72 and 73, represent an attempt at Fascist propagandizing by Pound. Patricia Cockram takes this view, seeing the Italian Cantos as esthetic [sic] failures on Pound’s part, driven by political and economic desperation (535). Bacigalupo, however, views these Cantos as both a return “to the ‘visionary’ structure attempted…in the ‘Three Cantos’ of 1917, and an anticipation of the autobiographical Pisan Cantos” (“The Poet at War” 71). Bacigalupo argues that the poems should not be seen as aberrations, but as crucial staging posts in the development of Pound’s writing.

Barnes’ references: Massimo Bacigalupo, “Ezra Pound’s Cantos 72 and 73: An Annotated Translation,” Paideuma, 20 (1991), pp. 10–41; Patricia Cockram, “Collapse and Recall: Ezra Pound’s Italian Cantos,” Journal of Modern Literature, 23.3–4 (summer 2000), pp. 535–44.

The options here are poetry or propaganda, but not both. The dichotomy is certainly not true to the text. Cantos 1 and 3: two songs glorifying war (Odyssey, Myo Cid). Canto 8, onwards: Sigismondo Malatesta, condottiero and patron. Cantos 36, 72 and 73: Cavalcanti and Marinetti (great influences on E.P.) as warrior-poets. (And so on.)

The claim I mean to elaborate over coming—…years?—is that the “Italian Cantos” (72–3), standing at the centre of the Cantos, and expressing the central experience of Pound’s life (the Ventennio, “nel mezzo del cammin della sua vita”), are a sort of “gnomon” (to borrow an image from Canto 85), a central pole which anchors the Cantos through the very engagement with the present that some denounce as propaganda, etc.

Put otherwise: by resuscitating Marinetti, Cavalcanti and Ezzelino—“giving them a post in a canto” (see 72) as he “dug up” Bertrans de Born in “Sestina: Altaforte”—Pound is reverting to the persona form he developed after Browning. It’s a “reversion” to a “reactionary” mode (neo-Mediaevalism) paralleling the pan-European fascist–neo-Ghibelline political project in whose service these poems are indubitably are (1, 2, 3). But he is reawakening them that they might fight at his side in the latest bout of the “guerra eterna.” There is none of the coyness of Canto 3, which juxtaposes E.P.’s autobiographical reminiscences (introducing his authorial “I”) of a scene in which he was a mere spectator against the legendary Cid, with whom he feels a merely phantastical affinity. He melds history and present, making the present historical, but more vital thereby.

 

2—Epic Confidence

Pound, in a Paris Review interview with Donald Hall:

An epic is a poem containing history. The modern world contains heteroclite elements. The past epos has succeeded when all see a great many of the answers were assumed, at least between author and audience, or a great mass of audience. The attempt in an experimental age is therefore rash.

Richard Sieburth: “The Cantos cannot be an epic, Pound realizes, because they are written from a position of radical alienation, from the vantage point of an out sider and exile” (“The Design of the ‘Cantos’: An Introduction,” The Iowa Review, 15.2 [1985], p. 32). Outsider art like Pound’s bears “the defects inherent in a record of struggle” (Guide to Kulchur [New York, 1970], p. 135]). On the same page of G.K., Pound contradistinguishes the outsider Beethoven from the insider Boccherini, and compares the latter to the anonymous masons of Santa Marie dei Miracoli.

This is “totalitarian art” (see John Lauber, “Pound’s ‘Cantos’: A Fascist Epic,” Journal of American Studies, 12.1 [April 1978] p. 12); and it requires its place in a totally integrated culture. For Twenty Years, Pound could be that. Lauber (p. 20) is almost right: “the Cantos are totalitarian and do not allow for scepticism or selectivity any more than fascist propaganda allowed for such attitudes.” The Cantos, on the whole, are an open, naked process of “scepticism,” “selectivity.” But in Cantos 72–3, at his “post” in his present, with his fellow soldier-poets, E.P. is like “Johnny” in the following anecdote (Sieburth quoting Hall’s interview again):

Do you know the story: “What are you drawing, Johnny?”

“God.”

“But nobody knows what He looks like.”

“They will when I get through!”

Pound appends, “That confidence is no longer obtainable.” Compare “Notes for CXVII et seq.”: “The dreams clash | and are shattered— | and that I tried to make a paradiso | terrestre.” Compare “the great tragedy of the dream,” etc. (Canto 74, my emphasis); and re. “paradiso” the equivocality here between Pound’s paradiso as new Dante and “terrestrial paradise” as grand Utopian project (the Ventennio again). Back to “Notes”: “I have tried to write paradise.” Compare the “painted paradise on his church wall” (Canto 45) rhyming with Santa Maria dei Miracoli’s carvings as ideals. Canto 116: “my errors and wrecks lie about me.” Pound has lost his epic confidence. “I cannot make it cohere.” That is, the individual artist cannot. Hence Pound’s “obsession” with economics, etc., and the inseparability of worldly political concerns from his art.