By John Gery
to ascend to those high places
wrote Heydon
stirring and changeable
“light fighting for speed”
and if Honour and pleasure will not be ruled
yet the mind come to that High City…
Ezra Pound, Canto 91 (1)
October 30th this year marks the 140th birthday of Ezra Pound (1885-1972), and November 1 marks 53 years since his death. At the time of his death, Pound had been a highly controversial figure for more than three decades, an iconoclastic poet who persistently evoked both praise and repudiation among those who knew of him. As is still true now, some readers thought of Pound only as an ardent supporter through the 1930s and 40s of Benito Mussolini’s Italian fascist regime. He had also been outspokenly antisemitic, his outbursts expressed most notably in a series of radio broadcasts he delivered from Rome during the early years of World War II, as he urged the U.S. to stay out of the war. These broadcasts, monitored by American forces, led to Pound’s 1945 arrest in Italy, his imprisonment for five months in a military detention camp in Pisa, and his transfer to Washington, D.C., where his eventual diagnosis as of “Unsound mind” spared him facing a trial on treason charges but resulted in his thirteen-year incarceration in St. Elizabeths asylum. Throughout his incarceration, however, poets, critics, scholars, translators and others continued to press for Pound’s release, lauding his singular leadership in shaping Modernism, hailing his unflagging generosity to writers and artists across a generation, and praising his literary contributions, especially his epic poem, The Cantos. If nothing else, Pound as a public figure after the war provoked impassioned responses on all sides from whomever encountered him.
But now, a half-century since his death, although Pound’s formidable body of work (poetry, criticism, drama, translations, economic treatises, and letters) continues to stir impassioned responses from new readers, the tenor of those responses is evolving toward something other than they were during his lifetime. In short, readers no longer feel compelled to decide whether to condemn or defend him. As the late bibliographer Archie Henderson has amply catalogued, the number of Pound studies and commentaries in multiple languages has grown exponentially—far beyond expectations at the time of his death—not the least of which are more than a dozen biographies, crowned by A. David Moody’s definitive three-volume Ezra Pound: Poet (Oxford, 2007-2015). Since 2000, scores of books and hundreds of articles on him have appeared, including Clemson/Liverpool’s signature Ezra Pound Center for Literature Book Series, together with books in series from Cambridge University Press and Bloomsbury Press, among others.
This expanding interest in Pound’s work demonstrates how much he continues to intrigue readers who set out neither to dismiss him nor to adulate him, but who are developing a more measured assessment of his indisputable place in literary history. As he himself said, after his release from St. Elizabeths, “Every man has the right to have his ideas examined one at a time.” (2) Regardless of his outspoken political views—not so unusual during the early twentieth century when European writers (Yeats, Neruda, Céline, Éluard, MacDiarmid) were typically drawn to either fascist or communist views—Pound matters because of his enormous impact on modern literature. More than a rebellious American poet who lost himself, as he later confessed to Allen Ginsberg, to “the stupid suburban prejudice of anti-Semitism,”(3) Pound has increasingly come to be recognized for what he really is, a global poet, embraced by writers across the political spectrum and across the world—from Italy’s Pier Paolo Passolini in the 1960s to Nicaragua’s Ernesto Cardenal in the 1990s, from American poets as diverse as Amiri Baraka, Robert Hass, and Rachel Blau DuPlessis, to the UK’s Geoffrey Hill, J.H. Prynne, Veronica Forrest-Thompson, and Stephen Romer, and from Japan’s Shuri Kido to China’s Yang Lian. Rather than ostracized as he was at the end of his life, today Pound is emerging as the complex, craggy, yet illuminating poet he strove to be, one whose idiosyncratic thinking invites open inquiry and challenges any who venture into his writing. As the Spanish Novissimo poet, Luis Alberto de Cuenca, has written, he is the “Homer of the twentieth century.”(4)
One of Pound’s early poems, “The Return,” composed in his twenties, begins mysteriously,
See, they return; ah, see the tentative
Movements, and the slow feet,
The trouble in the pace and the uncertain
Wavering. (5)
When this poem first appeared in 1914, Yeats described it as “the most beautiful poem that has been written in free form, one of the few in which I find real organic rhythm.”(6) Nonetheless, beginning the poem in media res, a reader has no idea who “they” are. Are these warriors retreating from battle “With fear, as half-awakened”? Are they gods? While Pound’s imagery and rhythms are vivid, not until the second strophe are the figures identified as “Gods of the wingèd shoe!”(7) Still, the poem never quite explains these figures but instead coaxes the reader to imagine them by immersing in the poem’s music.
For me, figuratively, this poem speaks to Pound’s legacy in the mid twenty-first century. His writing resonates, certainly, but there remain significant questions and paradoxes. Those who choose to read him no longer feel compelled to castigate him nor to redeem him from his lapses in conscience. His costly shortcomings have been well-documented. Rather, the time has come to acknowledge Pound’s return to literature in an age when writers are struggling to define themselves in the hyper-digitalized, corporate, violent, and often stagnant present – to look at themselves, as Pound does in “The Return”: “These were the swift to harry; / These the keen-scented; / These were the souls of blood.” The Cantos, Pound’s “poem containing history,”(8) burgeons with passages relevant to our time, once readers scout them out. Despite his inimitable sensibility, his work now relies on the community of his readers to identify his directive, as Pound puts it (echoing seventeenth-century philosopher John Heydon), “to ascend those high places /… / stirring and changeable / ‘light fighting for speed.’”(9) Today Pound belongs to all of us. Approaching Pound at 140 prompts us to return to him the vital life he led, as we work collectively to discover what endures in his vision. As he writes in Canto 113,
The hells move in cycles
No man can see his own end.
The Gods have not returned. “They have never left us.” (10)
This blog post was made in partnership with Liverpool University Press. Find out more about the Liverpool University Press blog here.
Notes
1. Ezra Pound, The Cantos of Ezra Pound (New York: New Directions, 1995), 636.
2. Ezra Pound, “Gists,” in Selected Prose, 1909-1965 (New York: New Directions), 355.
3. Allen Ginsberg, “Encounters with Ezra Pound: Journal Notes,” Composed on the Tongue, ed. Donald Allen (Bolinas, CA; Grey Fox Press, 1980), 8.
4. Luis Alberto de Cuenca, “Ezra Pound, The Homer of the 21st Century,” Ezra Pound and the Spanish World, ed. Viorica Patea, John Gery, and Walter Baumann (Clemson, SC: Clemson University Press, 2024), 286.
5. Ezra Pound, Personae: The Shorter Poems of Ezra Pound, ed. Lea Baechler and A. Walton Litz (New York: New Directions, 1992), 69.
6. See K.K. Ruthven, A Guide to Ezra Pound’s Personae (1926) (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), 204.
7. Pound, Personae, 70.
8. “Ezra Pound, Letter to Milton Bronner, 21 September 1915.” Quoted in Moody, A. David. Ezra Pound: Poet, A Portrait of the Man and His Work; Vol. I: The Young Genius, 1885–1920 (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2007), 306.
9. Pound, The Cantos, 636. For a full account of John Heydon, from whose Holy Guide whose writings Pound quotes here, see Walter Baumann, “Secretary of Nature, John Heydon,” New Approaches to Ezra Pound: A Co-ordinated Investigation of Pound’s Poetry and Ideas, ed. Eva Hesse (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), 303-18. Heydon (1629-c.1667), was a British astrologer, attorney, and Neoplatonist philosopher, best known for The Holy Guide: Leading the Way to the Wonder of the World (1662), whom Pound admired from his youth. For an annotation
of these lines, see Carroll F. Terrell, A Companion to The Cantos of Ezra Pound (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 553-54.
