Ezra Pound and Classical Reception
Published essay:
“Ezra Pound’s Ragbag: The Cantos as Cento”, in Cento-Texts in the Making: Aesthetics and Poetics of Cento-Techniques from Homer to Zong! ed. Manuel Baumbach (Trier, 2022).
“Poem as Inscription: Ezra Pound to Ian Hamilton Finlay”, Fleshing Out Words, University of Warwick, March 2019. [Abstract] [Presentation]
“I sailed never with Cadmus: Ezra Pound’s Thebes”, Classical Association Conference, Leicester, April 2018 [Abstract]
“Tin Wreaths and Broken Statues: Ezra Pound and the Commemorative Text”, Remembering Conflict from Ancient Greece to the Great War, UCL, June 2015. [Abstract]
"the modern world/ Needs such a rag-bag to stuff all its thought in"
Poem as Inscription: Ezra Pound to Ian Hamilton Finlay
My paper (see presentation) explores ways that modern poems draw on the traditions and generic resources of ancient inscription. They may imitate, or purport to be, inscriptions, finding new expressive potential in the conventions of epitaph, epigram, motto and graffito. Or they may be ecphrastic: evoking or meditating upon some inscribed object.
Three strands run through the paper: reader, writer and medium. Classical epigraphists have described how carved inscriptions invite a particular kind of reading experience, in which the passer-by approaches, views and responds to the written characters: there can be a dialogue with the monument and a re-performance of what it enjoins or commemorates. How do modern poems evoke a comparable experience in the reader? Can today’s poets, consigned to a narrowly private sphere, borrow (or mock) the authority of public inscription? What are the settings in which poems are placed, and the materials on and with which they are inscribed?
I begin with brief examples from three moments in the history of English literature which inform recent discussions of the “materiality” of word and text: Old English epic, Metaphysical conceit and Romantic lyric.
The paper then examines poems by Pound and Cavafy. Modernism was partly a response to new intimations of the elusiveness of meaning and the purely symbolic status of language. Pound’s poetry aims at perpetual mobility and open-endedness, even while aspiring to the condition of sculpture. Cavafy’s “inscription” poems are both lapidary and ironic, re-enacting the composition and reception of Greek epitaphs and dedications.
I conclude that a recurring impulse of later twentieth-century poets is to gesture towards monumentality in work that is fragmentary, lacunose, or ultimately erased. Examples include texts by U.A. Fanthorpe and Geoffrey Hill and laconic visual poems carved at “Little Sparta” by Ian Hamilton Finlay.
“I Sailed never with Cadmus”: Ezra Pound’s Thebes
“under the rain of dilated flakes of fire we find Capanaeus . . . unrelenting in his defiance of the supreme power”
Scenes and tropes from the Theban cycle are at the heart of Modernist literature in English. Writers who invoked Theban myths and characters for their own purposes include Virginia Woolf (Antigone), D.H. Lawrence (Oedipus) and W.B. Yeats and E.M. Forster (Oedipus at Colonus). James Joyce worked the double-edged Cadmean legacy of dragon’s teeth and alphabetic script into the verbal texture of Finnegans Wake. And T.S. Eliot re-invented the role of Tiresias as an all-knowing transhistorical consciousness helplessly trapped within the processes of history.
Ezra Pound, who identified Eliot with Tiresias, recognised quite different personae for himself within the same inherited narratives. Cadmus, as sailor-hero, acts as a counterpart to Odysseus in the early Cantos. The creation of Thebes contrasts with the destruction of Troy; it has a special resonance for an American poet as a topos in the discourse of the Founding Fathers and as an exemplar of the transformative power of the artist. Simultaneously, as the site of a fratricidal civil war, it adumbrates the repeated cycles of violence which the Cantos both enact and seek to escape.
Pound’s sources include Ovid (often in Golding’s translation), Dante and Gower. Within the context of this broader reception history my paper focuses on three characters from the Theban stories which hold particular literary and personal significance for Pound: Cadmus, whose city composed itself by way of Amphion’s lyre; Capaneus, whose over-reaching brought about his own destruction; Ino-Leucothea, who offers a vision of rescue, perhaps redemption, to the abject and defeated hero.
Tin Wreaths and Broken Statues: Ezra Pound and the Commemorative Text
“There died a myriad,/ And of the best, among them”: the deaths on active service of Modernist artists such as the sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska and the poet T.E. Hulme lent a particular poignancy and ironic edge to Pound’s writing during and immediately after the First World War. Having demolished what he saw as lethally false rhetorical and iconographic traditions Pound was wary of epitaphs and heroes; he turned to satire, parody and “translation” as more fitting forms through which to record the War.
My paper draws on poems Pound wrote in London between 1915 and 1920: Cathay, Homage to Sextus Propertius, Hugh Selwyn Mauberley and the earliest Cantos. It explores the ways that Pound’s commemoration of “War, one war after another” is shaped by his reading and re-writing of classical authors, especially Homer, Pindar, Horace and Propertius. The poet lays bare the “old lie” of patriotic language and the ambiguities of the victor’s wreath but recognises also the allure of monuments and rituals.
I discuss Pound’s ripostes to Classical modes and forms: his distinctive versions of epic, epinician and elegy, and especially his Horatian epode (“E.P. Ode”), in which blame for men who start wars is as prominent as homage to those who die. I acknowledge his invocations of Agamemnon and Actaeon as bringers of war but also his most moving classically-inspired tributes of remembrance: the libation and the planting of the single oar as grave-marker.
In conclusion I ask: how has Pound’s poetry contributed to, or remained separate from, the “long shadow” of the Great War in contemporary cultural memory?