Fleet of feet
Christopher Logue
Ezra Pound and His World Peter Ackroyd (Thames and Hudson pp. 128, £5.95) Pound was the most vital of the inhumanist poets. Foxed by his passion for aesthetic excellence, in his middle age he preferred to be hated than neglected; almost loved to be hated, as if the clamour he provoked proved. the rightness of his thought. Although his verse has many references to this God or that, Pound was a materialist who thought that human affairs are governed by institutions. Uniquely among poets his work includes a programme for running the world. As part of this programme he invites his readers to treat the work of his favourite master-artists, and the acts of his favourite historical figures, as paradigms of ethical strength, clarity of thought, of power well used. Often a humorous man, he did not see the joke in this.
Either Pound chose to ignore or he lacked the means to discover anything of importance about himself or other people.. He devoted himself to the acquisition and promotion of literary skill, inventing a verse style that showed the inertia of once current fashions. In so doing he added a new voice to poetry. He was ardent, single-minded, a paragon of arrogance, brave, untainted by cynicism, tireless in his often successful effort to advance the work of those he admired, careless of worldly wealth, a splendid teacher, and a superb, practical critic – 'this is too long', 'emphasise this', 'kill the king here, not here'.
Towards the end of his life he came to the conclusion that his work was a failure and fell silent. He was wrong. Pound had the finest ear of any poet to write in English since Tennyson; he could impart fresh, deft, vigorous figures to his verse; his ability to convey a sense of place, or visions of Ovidian loveliness, or the apparent, perennial beauty inherent in the surface of things, is unrivalled. To add ten lines to the number that those who love poetry will wish to know, is rare: Pound added many. Searching until recently for a literary father, in 1952 or 3, [(among others) wrote a letter of admiration to Pound and asked for his advice on matters poetical. Much to my delight he replied, and with my typewritten letter in my hand I rushed round to my friend Trocchi's hotel room. Trocchi had tailored his natural canniness by studying logic at Glasgow university, I respected his views. Though he was glad for me, Trocchi's silence indicated how little he thought of the letter.
I ignored this warning, answered fulsomely, and, as the correspondence blossomed, started to do as bidden: study the Cantos with an eye to their mundane truthfulness. My feeble attempts at scholarship revealed that at least one of Pound's heroes, Sigismundo Malatesta, was not only a patron of Alberti and della Francesca, but a demented mercenary, a murderer, a treacherous lout; that he had tried to stab a crooked Pope and had been burned in effigy for his pains was the only thing I could find in his favour. By this time I had sent Pound my first book of poems. His handwritten comment was: 'Not bad. I can read quite a bit of it.' I kept this note to myself. I still have it. Thereafter our correspondence waned and in 1957 1 sold his letters to me for a pound apiece.
Nowadays Pound is a front-runner in the Books-on Handicap; 60 to date, Peter Ackroyd says, Bet you a tiddler to a trawler some 60 more poetical professors are banking on Pound to get them tenure, who was, by the mid-Thirties, a neglected exile. It turned him sour. I am sympathetic to the view that the only relevant question concerning practising antisemites is whether they should be gaoled or shot. In the early Forties Pound became temerarious and put his mouth at the disposal of, among other things, this kind of criminal demonology. Only poets and scholars have to read his broadcasts. What happened to the other American 'radio-traitors'? I do not know. Someone once told me that the woman known as Tokyo Rose got six months and a $10,000 fine. Pound served 13 years.
His best books of verse are Cathay and Homage to Sextus Propertius. I do not see why his name should be missing from the cover of the Waste Land.
Ackroyd's essay is excellent; terse, just, well-informed, forbearing. Apart from Pound's collected poems, it, and William Cookson's Guide to the Cantos, are all a serious reader needs.
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