By John Gery<\/p>\n
\nto ascend to those high places
\nwrote Heydon
\nstirring and changeable
\n\u201clight fighting for speed\u201d
\nand if Honour and pleasure will not be ruled
\nyet the mind come to that High City\u2026
\nEzra Pound, Canto 91 (1)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\nOctober 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\u2019s 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\u2019s 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 \u201cUnsound mind\u201d 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
But now, a half-century since his death, although Pound\u2019s 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\u2014far beyond expectations at the time of his death\u2014not the least of which are more than a dozen biographies, crowned by A. David Moody\u2019s definitive three-volume Ezra Pound: Poet<\/em> (Oxford, 2007-2015). Since 2000, scores of books and hundreds of articles on him have appeared, including Clemson\/Liverpool\u2019s signature Ezra Pound Center for Literature Book Series<\/a>, together with books in series from Cambridge University Press and Bloomsbury Press, among others.<\/p>\n
This expanding interest in Pound\u2019s 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, \u201cEvery man has the right to have his ideas examined one at a time.\u201d (2) Regardless of his outspoken political views\u2014not so unusual during the early twentieth century when European writers (Yeats, Neruda, C\u00e9line, \u00c9luard, MacDiarmid) were typically drawn to either fascist or communist views\u2014Pound 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 \u201cthe stupid suburban prejudice of anti-Semitism,\u201d(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\u2014from Italy\u2019s Pier Paolo Passolini in the 1960s to Nicaragua\u2019s Ernesto Cardenal in the 1990s, from American poets as diverse as Amiri Baraka, Robert Hass, and Rachel Blau DuPlessis, to the UK\u2019s Geoffrey Hill, J.H. Prynne, Veronica Forrest-Thompson, and Stephen Romer, and from Japan\u2019s Shuri Kido to China\u2019s 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 \u201cHomer of the twentieth century.\u201d(4)<\/p>\n
One of Pound\u2019s early poems, \u201cThe Return,\u201d composed in his twenties, begins mysteriously,<\/p>\n
\nSee, they return; ah, see the tentative
\nMovements, and the slow feet,
\nThe trouble in the pace and the uncertain
\nWavering. (5)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\nWhen this poem first appeared in 1914, Yeats described it as \u201cthe most beautiful poem that has been written in free form, one of the few in which I find real organic rhythm.\u201d(6) Nonetheless, beginning the poem in media res<\/em>, a reader has no idea who \u201cthey\u201d are. Are these warriors retreating from battle \u201cWith fear, as half-awakened\u201d? Are they gods? While Pound\u2019s imagery and rhythms are vivid, not until the second strophe are the figures identified as \u201cGods of the wing\u00e8d shoe!\u201d(7) Still, the poem never quite explains<\/em> these figures but instead coaxes the reader to imagine them by immersing in the poem\u2019s music.<\/p>\n
For me, figuratively, this poem speaks to Pound\u2019s 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\u2019s return to literature in an age when writers are struggling to define themselves in the hyper-digitalized, corporate, violent, and often stagnant present \u2013 to look at themselves, as Pound does in \u201cThe Return\u201d: \u201cThese were the swift to harry; \/ These the keen-scented; \/ These were the souls of blood.\u201d The Cantos<\/em>, Pound\u2019s \u201cpoem containing history,\u201d(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), \u201cto ascend those high places \/\u2026 \/ stirring and changeable \/ \u2018light fighting for speed.\u2019\u201d(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,<\/p>\n
The hells move in cycles
\nNo man can see his own end.
\nThe Gods have not returned. \u201cThey have never left us.\u201d (10)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n