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This is KZSU Stanford.

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Welcome to entitled opinions.

My name is Robert Harrison.

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And we're coming to you live from the Stanford campus.

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And out of the light sagging, leaving behind all past destruction, let's lie us down again on that old bed.

Steadfast under the bamboo and seaweed ceiling, opening glad white arms to one another.

Then let me tell you all that story that's the skill of survival in the daily struggle.

The blows given, the beatings taken, of wandering for years and of winds and losses in the search not to end a destroyer.

While I watch over you, let down your long hair to shadow your shoulders before sleep.

For all this place shall break and fall apart.

Should you go absent.

Silence must be here.

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I just read a poem called Pillow Talk by the Irish poet, Desmonaux Grady.

We'll be devoting the next hour to the American poet as her pound, but I wanted to start with O'Grady for several reasons.

Desmonaux Grady was one of my high school English teachers at the Overseas School of Rome,

and he was the first person to introduce me to Ezra Pound.

In fact, to introduce me to poetry in general.

Can one person give another anything more valuable than that, a taste for poetry?

O'Grady was a wild, heavy drinking, dramatic kind of Irish bard.

He typically got to school unconscionably late in the morning, and you didn't want to take his morning classes anyway.

It was only after lunch break when he had a few beers in him that he came alive as a teacher.

The poet in him would wake up and we students would sit there mesmerized.

We're talking about 1970, 1971, '72.

O'Grady at the time was a disciple as well as friend of Ezra Pound.

This was toward the very end of Pound's stormy life when Pound had fallen into that famous silence of his.

Would hardly say a word to anybody.

O'Grady would go up to Venice to visit Pound almost every weekend, and when he returned to Rome he would adopt, in sympathy with Pound, a stubborn silence himself.

Hence, the Pound Mondays, as we students used to call them.

In class on Mondays, Desmond would hardly open his mouth even during the afternoon sessions.

He would hand out an incomprehensible can't do of Pound's, even if it was a course on Old English poetry.

Then he would stand by the window, one leg up on a chair, his hand over his mouth, and stare out over the lawn.

He didn't want anyone to speak until we had grappled with the guard and the keeper of the key.

The key to the poem that is.

Only much later did I realize that it was in fact a Dylan Thomas verse torn out of context.

If you asked him to clarify a verse or image in the can't though he would point at you with a scrawny, outstretched arm, and shout, "Graple with the guard, find the key."

By Tuesday he was usually talking again, and it was back to Beowulf.

And, out of the light's agony, leaving behind all past destruction.

O'Grady isn't the first person to begin a poem with the conjunction and.

Pound opens his can'tos with the same word, and then went down to the ship, ending them with the line to be men, not destroyers.

In Pound, the conjunction serves to link the can'tos to the epic tradition that he presumably wants to continue.

In O'Grady's case, he presumably links O'Grady to his adopted predecessor pound.

There's more to it than that of course since Pillow Talk, with all its illusions to Odysseus and Penelope, is really about matrimony.

Hence, the opening and also refers at some level to the conjoining of conjugal love.

Be that as it may, I cannot think of Ezra Pound without thinking also of Desmond O'Grady.

O'Grady is the and that connects me to Pound, and that's why I would like to dedicate this show to Desmond, who, as he's fond of saying, is not dead yet.

So, Ezra Pound, do we really know, after all, what the and that opens the can'tos is supposed to conjoin?

To what extent does the career of this astonishing and controversial poet lend itself to lucid analysis?

How are we supposed to make sense of the treason against America that got him arrested in Italy after the Second World War, and then committed to a mental hospital for several years?

Why is he undeniably one of the very greatest poets the 20th century produced?

I have with me in the studio perhaps the most qualified person in the world to pursue these questions with, and that's no exaggeration.

Professor Marjorie Pearloff is, in my opinion, the best American critic of 20th century poetry, as well as avant-garde aesthetics around.

Most people would agree with me about that, I'm sure, so it's a distinct pleasure and honor to welcome her to the show today.

Marjorie, thanks for coming on the program.

Thank you Robert, I'm delighted to be here.

Okay, but Marjorie Pearloff taught here at Stanford for 12 years, and now lives in Los Angeles,

but I'm taking advantage of one of her return visits to Stanford to whisker into the studios of KZSU to talk about Pound,

and in fact, I have to say it was a difficult decision.

We could have talked about any number of poets, Yates, Elliott, Budler, FEMBO, Franco,

here, Emily Dickinson, Ammons, Susan Howe, but I just couldn't pass up the occasion to talk with you about Ezra Pound, Marjorie.

So I began by giving a little personal narrative about how I got introduced to Pound.

Maybe we should start with how you found your way into the corpus of this poet.

Yes, when I went to graduate school, we were living in Washington, D.C.

This is back in the mid-50s, a long time ago, and I had gone to Oberlin College, a very Protestant college,

but one of my professors there told me that if I were in Washington, I should go to the Catholic University,

and that there were two people who could help me more than anybody else.

I was a little reluctant, not being Catholic, or having anything to do with a pontifical university,

but I did go, and there I met Craig Laudreir and Giovanni Jovonini, two people who were very close to Pound.

They mentioned in all the biographies who went to see him regularly in St. Elizabeth's,

and in fact when Pound first left St. Elizabeth's when he was freed and went back to Genoa,

he stayed for a few days at Craig Laudreir's house.

Can we tell our listeners what is St. Elizabeth's?

St. Elizabeth's is the public, big, galling your general public mental hospital, not a pretty place.

It's in the slums, those are still slums in southwest Washington on the other side of the Capitol,

and it is a dark, dank, unpleasant place, and I believe Pound spent 13 years there.

Yeah, we'll talk about that when we talk about his career.

It's a mental hospital also for criminal.

Yeah, criminal behaviors.

Okay, so, yeah, go on.

And Giovanni Jovonini, who was very serious, wonderful scholar,

and we used to call him Giggles, Giovanni because he never smiled,

but he just loved Pound, and he was the one who first taught me to see what was so remarkable about

as repound that he was completely unique in terms of metrics, in terms of sound structure,

in terms of imagery, in terms of invention.

And I guess I was hooked not right away though.

I didn't work on Pound at that point, but then I came back to it later, and I'm sure that was one of the reasons why.

So why don't we introduce Pound, just the bare bones of the biography,

and what sort of course is his career followed.

Pound was born in 1885 and in Hailey, Idaho, and he always loved to say that he was from the Wild West,

from the Prairie, the real Prairie, but of course that was nonsense.

He moved his family movement.

He was about a year old to Philadelphia, the suburbs of Philadelphia, not Wild West at all.

And his father was an essay for the US Mint, which is wonderfully ironic in terms of

Pound's later theories, monetary theories, theories of money, and Pound went first went to a military school,

and he went to the University of Pennsylvania, where he studied romance languages, and for the rest of his life,

that stood him in good stead, and he also studied in Hamilton College.

He from the very first love Pueblo Sal, literature at that time, barely known by most people,

and universities and Italian, particularly Italian Renaissance Dante, Caval Cante, Guedeguenizelli,

this is what Pound excelled in, and it's fair to say that he introduced the larger public

that now reads these poets to this work.

He left the United States because he had a terrible adventure, and he always loved telling this story.

He got a job teaching at Wabash College in Crawfordville, Indiana,

when he finished his graduate work, not a PhD, but his masters.

And at Wabash College, which was really in the boondocks, he one night harbored a girl of a uncertain reputation.

I don't know whether she was a prostitute or not, he had nothing to do with her.

He just felt sorry for her and he let her stay at his house, and when the powers that be on the campus found this out,

he was expelled.

So he thought that was just as well.

He had had enough of the beaneries, as he called American universities, the beaneries, no more beaneries,

and he went off to Europe.

He had already spent time in Venice with his aunt who had taken him on a trip and in Spain,

but he went to Venice for a year and he wrote his first book, "Alumé Spento."

He had a line from Purgatory, I think.

Tapers extinguished, and then he went to London and lived for a decade in London, and I think we'll talk a little bit about that decade.

So from what I understand, once he left the States, he came back once or twice, maybe three times,

but basically he spent the rest of his life in Europe until he was interned in the hospital.

Absolutely.

He lived in the London, was many people thought his golden decade.

And at first he was very enthusiastic about London and he learned a lot from Yates and the pre-Rafialites and other poets,

but by the 1920 he hated London.

He thought it was a venal, crass place.

He was very unhappy about the war from all aspects, and he first went to Paris for a few years,

and was involved with Dada and Surrealism a little bit, but that was not his scene either.

In 1923 he went to Rapalo, and he spent the rest of his life in Italy, first in Rapalo, later in Venice.

He came back in 1939 briefly to try to convince Roosevelt that he didn't know what he was doing and not to get involved in the war.

This is the kind of thing that Pound thought, but except for brief visits, he didn't come back until he was flown to Washington to stand trial.

In 1936, 47, and then ended up in St. Elizabeth's, then when he left St. Elizabeth's he went back to Italy and spent the rest of his life there.

Now the reason that he went to St. Elizabeth's is because during the Second World War he was in a radio broadcasting,

speaking against America, taking the side of Mussolini and was tried and convicted of treason as a result of these radio broadcast.

Is that...is there other reasons also that he...

No, that's the reason. I think it's very hard for audiences today to understand what treason was in those days.

Today, when someone like Daniel Ellsberg steals the Pentagon Papers or, you know, these things are done, we often consider the person rather heroic.

But in World War II was a war where the lines were drawn very firmly, and you had people like Tokyo Rose, you know, convicted of treason and many of them were executed.

So, pound, it is true that pound was a fascist sympathizer. He was completely deluded. He thought that Mussolini somehow would create a wonderful renaissance like state where the arts could be practiced.

And he did have a few audiences with Mussolini, and one of the cantos begins with the phrase "Equesto e diva tente."

Oh, this is so amusing. So, he was very pleased that he had this opportunity, and he didn't understand.

He somehow thought that Mussolini, he wrote a book about this, that Mussolini was like Thomas Jefferson, who was his idol.

And he thought that if Mussolini somehow would get rid of capitalism and usury and these bad things, everything would be fine.

And just to show you how deluded pound was, which is why it's hard for me to condemn him totally for his politics, when he was first arrested and taken to the prison camp at Pisa. This was in 1946 when the Allies had arrived.

When he was first arrested, he asked them if he couldn't call Roosevelt up. I'm sorry, it would have been Truman. It was Truman by that time.

He could have called Truman up, and he would explain to him that he could make peace with Japan, because after all he had worked on the no theater, and he knew all about Japanese art, and if they just gave him a crack at talking to the emperor, he could make peace with Japan.

And that's truly what pound believed that some or other, you know, this would work. So, he wasn't really a fascist in any kind of reasoned way, but it is true that he made terrible.

He was very anti-Semitic, and he made terrible anti-Semitic remarks, and unfortunately when he was arrested, he made the mistake of comparing Hitler to Joan of Arc. This was at the end of the war, and he would say things like that, which of course did not stand him in good stead.

So, he was not only persona non-grata, but when the peace in Canto's won the Bolingian Prize, the peace in Canto's, which is probably the best part of the Canto.

Which he wrote during his internment at Pisa, and in 1948 it won the Bolingian Prize, and this created the kind of stir no literary event I think can create anymore.

Even the satanic verses, I suppose, because everybody cited one way or the other, Bennett Surf, who was the president of Random House, the biggest publisher that time in the United States, refused to anthologize a single poem by pound, and that's an angry people were that this anti-Semite.

It was a very difficult time, and that this anti-Semite, and this fascist, this terrible person, had won the Bolingian Prize, and the committee said, "Well, it was the best poem published this year, and it was."

Well, can I ask a personal question, you don't have to answer, but being Jewish yourself, you have this love for pound despite the fact that of this political record that he has and being an anti-Semite, does that create problems for you in any way?

Well, actually, doesn't. I mean, I do think he's economics. I come from a family of economists, and what bothers me more even than the anti-Semitism is the absurd economics. It's just plain silly.

It's just as if a 10-year-old child decided they were going to take up economics. He never really had any answers he wanted to restore Monday to Pazke.

You know, the bank in Siena, and he thought if there were bank that didn't lend money, that would be wonderful, own life would be beautiful, which of course is absurd.

But, first, the anti-Semitism goes. It was a kind of, what should I say, almost a kind of disease where some of his best friends were Jewish, like Louis O'Kofsky, to whom he was very good and many others, but in a general way he thought the Jews, that is the bankers, and the friends of Franklin Finkelstein Roosevelt, as he called him, were the enemy.

It is very bad. I find it just tasteful, but I couldn't condemn pound just for that, because in many ways it is, and this is what people don't understand, T.S. Eliot was just as anti-Semitic.

In a certain way more seriously, because more intelligently, if you will, anti-Semitic, Bertrand Russell, William Carlos Williams, even Wallace Stevens would say, Philip Bravo, although he's a Jew, you know, it's not a bad critic.

So you have to, people have to understand the times a little bit, and understand that racism was a terrible feature of the time, and it has to be understood in some kind of context.

I agree with you that his anti-Semitism is in a certain sense, more benign in nature, because I think, but correct me if I'm wrong, that it was an anti-Semitism that was founded upon a rather crazy theory of history, which saw usury, or the lending of money, the credit system that began in the Renaissance, as the source of all the woes of the modern world.

And he associated Jews with the money lending institutions, and he was just as much against bankers in general, whether they were Jews or not.

And so I think that the Jewish phenomenon for him was associated largely with the phenomenon of usury, whereas someone like Eliot might have also theological issues with Judaism and so forth.

Was there more in pounds case to within the... No, I think that's absolutely true, and we have to, there are two points to be made.

One is that he just associated the Jews with banking, and that's it. He hated bankers in general just as much even if they weren't Jewish, or presidents like Roosevelt, who certainly wasn't Jewish.

So it was a kind of craziness, really. But the second point that I make to students, and then I think is very important for people to see, is that poets are not necessarily nice people.

I don't want to excuse, I think it is a blot on pounds. There's no question that it is a blot on his work, and it perhaps means that he isn't, let's say, in the absolute first rank, although I don't like these rankings, one could argue the Joyce, for instance, James Joyce, who was his good friend, whom he knew all his life, is a greater writer, because he

didn't have that particular blot on his escutcheon that pound has. But it is very naive to think that poets are nice people, and that they have nice ideas. It's just that if centuries go on, we no longer expect them to have nice ideas. So when we look back at poets of Dante's drama or whatever, we don't wait for them to have nice ideas.

There's no question that pound had what we think are very unpleasant views, but other people who might have very nice views, but might just not be very good poets.

The crazy thing about many poets in general, and a lot of the great ones, I think pound and Dante are very similar in this regard, that, well,

Dante begins his career as a lyric poet, writing love forms for Beatrice, and then he gets involved in the local politics of Florence, and he gets exiled, and he writes this long epic poem called The Divine Comedy, in which he has his own theories of history,

and insanely, you know, idealogizes throughout that poem in ways that are in retrospect completely idiosyncratic, and have nothing to do with the true political realities of the time, but he had this obsessive notion that he brought to bear and he made a whole epic poem out of it, and

Pound likewise begins his career as a lyric poet. I think World War I probably talk about whether World War I kind of shattered his belief in continuing to be a lyric poet, but he turns to the epic as well, writes the very title of that is an illusion, I think to Dante, and he also infuses that whole long poem with his own theories of history, but fortunately, we don't have, you know, poets don't have to be very much in touch with reality in order to be really good,

poets, as just on the, you know, we're talking about the prosodic dimensions of their work, so maybe we should turn our discussion to what is it about the poetry of Pound, which despite the blocks, you know, remains something that one cannot just write off, and that it demands a certain degree of appreciation with all these qualifications.

Yes, if I just may make one more point there, it is also the case and I think this makes

and it does relate to Dante, it makes pound so important in the modern spectrum is how

great his ambition was.

You see ambition is a great thing, it's something we don't find in too many poets today.

By ambition I mean that he absolutely forced himself to learn all he could about Confucius

because he was going to write, he was going to put so much Confucian knowledge into the

poetry and do the ideograms and do Chinese ideograms.

He studied the no theater.

He when he came to all these things he absolutely studied them and he thought it really

mattered and I think one reason that young people today flock to pound again, pound is

very popular is that it gives you a feeling that what poetry can do and that it is such

an ambitious enterprise whether it's lyric or epic or whether it's the no theater or

his prose essays which he's one of the most important critics of the time certainly and

it is that amazing ambition that that's who you are, you are a poet.

There are not too many people we can say that about and it makes pound very special and

makes one feel that whatever his ridiculous theories of the stamp, script, and verbal

and so on were, no he was very important.

And the theories might be crazy but as you say the ambition was to see poetry as the medium

that would lead history forward into a kind of redemptive stage and he had a belief in

the powers of poetry which in retrospect seems completely out of sync for us because

we know how ultimately impotent poetry is politically speaking.

He was not so disabused at the time and he thought that the cantos were an essential,

sort of saving gesture for history as a whole western civilization all depended on the

poets.

Well he didn't quite think that later in his life, he did think they were failure and

that he had botched it in the in the great years of his silence later in life when he

was living with Olga Rudge, his mistress, left his wife finally and lived with Olga Rudge

in Venice.

He didn't speak, he stopped speaking, he was never quite clear why that was, he literally

didn't speak except to say I'll have the fish today and the restaurant or something.

And this puzzled many of his visitors like Alan Ginsburg by the way, Jewish poet who

was mad about pound and thought he was the great poet of our time.

He did feel somehow it had failed but he didn't feel it had failed because the public

had received it correctly. He thought he had failed because he couldn't really make it cohere

as Dante made the divine comedy cohere. That is no matter how many cantos he would have

written, it wasn't going in a circular direction, let's say, so that happens.

What are those last fragments where he says I have tried to write paradise that those

whom I love forgive what I have tried to do let the gods forgive me and that the realization

that he could not write the paradise which for him would have been the Dante part of the

poem that would have given it that wholeness and coherence and resolution. But maybe that

says something about the era too.

It says something about the air and pounds failure is like an emblem of our era. You cannot

write the Odyssey today, you cannot write the divine comedy, you're not going to have

a neat three-three grouping or whatever, but the sheer fragmentary quality which earlier poets

like Yates didn't like. Yates said about pound he has not got all the wine into the

bowl. That was very devastating. He says that in the preface to the Oxford book of modern

verse he has not got all the wine into the bowl. So, and that's what everybody believed

in some people still believe that it just isn't contained. It's not a poem that can

be contained. So that in that sense it was looked at as a failure today when art works in

general as so much more fragmentary and we have accepted the fragment as a kind of art

form that's okay.

And I think one could say that the huge achievement of the Kantos lies as much in its failures

as it does in its successes. I think that's a very important point. The failures, there's

been a lot written on that too. The failures, Mira, what the larger failures of the culture

were, nobody understood by the time you got to World War II. It was too difficult to

understand what was going on. It wasn't as an early times where there was even in the French

Revolution it was a clear cut idea of what issues were at stake. And so how to run the

world or what to do became just too hard for a poet or an individual to think of what

to do but at least pound tried. Whereas most of the poets of the time just wrote personal

lyrics about themselves.

Yeah, so maybe we should jump into the Kantos reminding our listeners that he began as

a exquisite lyric poet, not just writing poems about his personal emotions but as you

were mentioning earlier he recuperated these various traditions, the Poven-style poetry

of the early Middle Ages, the still-novas poetry of Dan Tickelakant, the and so forth.

And he experimented in all these different voices or masks as he calls it one of his

volumes per sewne. And then I think World War I, do you agree with me that World War I

came as a shock to him and as soon as that war was over he writes his poem Hugh Selwyn

Moberly where he's trying to come to grips with the fact that so many of his own generation

had perished and never were never given a voice to speak for themselves. And all of a sudden

now he's writing the Kantos which is with his epic ambition almost as if to that only the

epic poet can really give voice to the dead, descend into the underworld of the dead.

The first Kantos is a rewriting of book 11 of the Odyssey which is Odysseus' visit to

the dead and this descent into that underworld which is a very epic gesture. It does begin

with the word and and then went down to the ship. What do you think is that stake in this

turn to the epic? Why the Kantos begin with this conjunction as I mentioned in my opening

remarks and and what is this turn away from the lyric and where does that end up?

Almost everything, almost everything Pound wrote after 1917 went into the Kantos. So he started

writing it during World War I very disappointed especially at the death of his beloved

friend Godier Jerska the sculptor, Henri Godier Jerska, Mopulapatri at age 23 in

Flanders Fields that was a terrible blow and the tea Hume was killed. I mean very different

from what today and that many of one's best friends were killed. And first Pound was sort

of jocular about the war after all the United States wasn't involved, he thought both sides

was silly but then it wasn't silly it was it was very much for real and he had a very

hard time accepting that. As far as epic goes I think though he may have always wanted

to write an epic but of course the Kantos isn't really quite an epic. It's a circle of fragments

it's been called it's a collage and it's a whole question whether one can write epic in the

20th century. One problem being that epic steel with war always in somewhat a positive

way. I mean in real epic there are in Milton even there are you know war heroes even if

it's Satanists sort of celebrated. Yeah the Divine Comedy is one exception. Yeah the Divine

Comedy is the is a Christian epic but you have to have a coherent point of view to write

an epic. In other words what Pound said about the Kantos is a poem including history

that's a very good designation of it. He said I'm writing a poem including history and

that's what it is it certainly does include that but he also wrote to his father and

said don't ask me for an Aquinas map Thomas Aquinas don't ask me for an Aquinas map

but it does have three threads one live man goes into the world of the dead to sense

into the world of the dead that's book one the Nikui as in book 11 in the Odyssey live

man descends into the world of the dead to the repeat in history and three of it metamorphoses

from Avid which can you explain the last two what does I mean repeat the repeat in history

means that all the things he traces in the canoes echo each other so Francis Malatesta

their three early canoes eight to eleven eight night at four early canoes devoted to the

Renaissance

kondochier a seagus Mundo Malatesta who was not a very nice man had a few wives killed

off and so on who built the Tempeo in rimini a beautiful building and for Pound

uh... since you know he was fostered great artists that was good enough no matter what

he did in his personal life

and he worshipped Malatesta but then he relates Malatesta his the repeat in history

to Jefferson and then he relates in forward and backward and again everybody's always

related to everybody else so a particular goddess Aphrodite will be related to a china

a chinese goddess uh... kion and they will be seagods that come up in the in Greek mythology

but also come up in chinese mythology and come up in in other things in african sometimes

and african

uh... it's a credit so it's in credit so the repeat in history is very important

and the third one is yeah it's about that a lot of ways what what third one when he talks

about mythological characters being always a transformation metamorphosis the canoes is a book

of metamorphosis everything changes all the time and yet in other ways everything is the

same but the lines break off and another line comes in and you're not sure how that line

relates to the line before but just when you think the first line is gone it comes up

again in a different context so the metamorphosis where places are reborn this is very

much a geographic poem

uh... one thing that makes the canoes very distinctive is it's incredible sense of place

mythological place in real place ek baton the holy city places of this sort but actually

real places all the places he went to

uh... restaurants

uh...

different cities but especially in Paris particular cafes and restaurants or in

everywhere in Venice all the i sat on the go i sat on the dogana steps

uh... so it has a very firm sense of place that then branches out and relates to the

underworld

relates to other worlds and therefore has an enormous sweep an enormous historical and

mythological sweep so

a poem including history

uh... and live man goes into the world down into the world of the dead the repeat in

history and metamorphosis taken from all that

of it was another one of his

loves and it's interesting to me that often is once again so incredibly popular

today

in our time you'll constantly reading things about people using

all the different poets using all the

the idea of the transformation

of women transformed to demand men transformed to women into animals

what it all means that something that's very important

i think i think it's much more of a little video naged than anything else

because uh... in

all its metamorphosis there's a uh... there's no hierarchy

of being and humans

plants animals they're all interchangeable they participate in the same

substance

this was horrifying for someone like dante

who really uh... believed in the in the uh... intrinsic hierarchy of uh... of the

cosmos

and to confuse those boundaries was uh...

you know it was certainly

anti-Christian that the way he understood it but

in uh... the twenty century world at pounds kantos

gives life to their the uh...

the mutability of all things into each other

uh... is obidian i think uh... it's a kind of sensibility that

a lot of people share today hence maybe all that is the uh...

easily great

figure

uh... for this new kind of uh...

this new creed

uh... of the continuum of all beings uh... rather than you know their

separation

so marty you know

time goes very quickly on these programs we haven't even heard the

poets voice yet so

perhaps uh...

uh...

let we've been talking about the kantos let's just

there's all this great earlier stuff but let's just stick with the

kantos since we're uh... we're on it and maybe want to read uh...

rate a few lines from the first kantos and then maybe choose one of the

the first the first okay the first uh... kantos is written in the uh...

meter of the c_f_a_ so it's

it's in credit is not even the word for it has old english meter

it's based on a medieval it ends up talking about a medieval Latin poem

and it is the story

basically taken from

the odyssey from book eleven

of the descent after they leave cursies island

the descent into the underworld and it begins like this

and then went down to the ship

set keel to breakers fourth on the godly sea

and we set up massed in sale on that swatch ship

board sheep aboard her and our bodies also

heavy with weeping and wins from sternward

boar's out onward with belly and canvas

surcee's this craft

this trim

quite goddess

i'll stop there for a minute just to say first of all the end

that you mentioned earlier a minute ago

it starts in media's race in this poem ends in media's race really

because there is no beginning for pound

there is no beginning

middle and end

this is a

long poem that has what we often call serial structure that is parrotacti

which means and and and you pile up

and it's the sheer cumulative weight

that

makes meaning explode not any kind of reason or logical or sequential work

so it starts

in media's race and you hear those insistant four stresses per line

surcee's this craft the trim-poiled goddess

then sat we a minchips wind jamming the tiller

and so on and you get the whole story about at a clay coming

and the prophecy of what will happen but i want to say word about the end of the

first canto because it's so typical of everything that will happen later

he's he's telling the whole story

of

Odysus's father

telling him and then tyresia's telling him

what he will expect

and then we get these lines and i step back and he's strong with the blood and

then Odysus shall return through spiteful Neptune over dark seas

lose all companions

and then and to clay

came and to clay Odysus's mother

and then we suddenly get this

like quiet davis

i mean that is andrea's davis and off a gene of it jayley

fifteen thirty eight

out of home or

you think what in the world is going on here

he's referring to a little book that he found in a parastal on the keys

that par in paris

by andrea's davis written in fifteen thirty eight

and that version of

the odyssey out of home or

so you know pound is not a subcueris people think as he always explains

what he's saying and he explains it right here

what he's dealing with but like quiet davis

and then you get and he's sailed by sirens you come back to the Odysus story

and then's outward away and up to cursy

and then you still get some other myths put in

various greek myth putting in the story of a for d d

and then the very last line

bearing the golden bow of arjeceda

the argyve suns Achilles and then the end of the cata

is so that with a colon so that

throws the meaning forward there's no conclusion

and you have suddenly switched from a straightforward narrative

from davis to these

syncretic myths collage together

and i do think that's the basic mode of the cata is one that became in a sense the

basic twenty century mode

collage as in picasso's collage that is items

pasted together juxtaposed without explicit act without any kind of

explanation of how exactly how they put together

all why but meaning a cruise by their juxtaposition

now if i may go on a minute if you if you move from there

to can't afford which is one of my favorites

can't afford is a kind of metamorphosis can't have

where he deals with love romantic love and uh...

it begins i just want to say something about the beginning because it's so typical

of pound in this earlier phase and very dramatic

so we get four lines

listen to these lines palace in smoky light

try but a heap of smoldering boundary stones

on oxyforming a's argylea

hear me

proud he very quickly introduces here

the trojan theme

on a safe for me cases from the pandaric him

so to him to war and our real killer is the bride of katullis

so to him to love war and love come together here

and then hear me catmas

one of the seven against the ebs

catmas of golden

proud so paul introduce these mythical elements and in the early cattos

myth predominates greek myth

all kinds of especially secret myths

but also medieval and paul paul stories

and they tell us scope

and so you get the most wonderful conjunctions was suddenly you realize a

given line telescopes

the paul paul paul story with the greek myth and they come together

and meaning more or less explodes in your face so these are very wonderful

works uh... these early cattos

and these had been written by about nineteen twenty

nineteen twenty one

so it's quite early

can one read the cattos without extensive commentary

i think absolutely i think in fact the commentary has a way of burying a

great deal of it

if there's a visit if here

it is true that that people today who no longer know any greek myth

or and they don't know these little paul paul paul stories which paul

tells everywhere else

uh... the best way actually to read paul

is to also read some of his prose works which are like poems in their own

right the spirit of romance

which deals with his great love

for

uh... baton to born

the various true bhedora poets

and uh... all the way down then to false waville

and uh...

if you've read the spirit of romance and you know anything at all you know

the basic greek myths that you could learn in any

mythological dictionary

and you know something about what's going on in the London of the time

you really don't need all those notes because usually pound explains it about

a line later

if he uses a latin phrase he'll give it in english two lines later

or if he uses uh... it chinese itty grams which he did later he always tells

who what they mean

besides meaning is such isn't perhaps the key

because the wonderful thing is the way

it moves

and i once had the experience or i've had this experience a few times

of a signing a class

saying to them instead of writing an explication of this or that can't

over theme and pound

right a can't

the students all jump at all good

i can do that anybody can do that

and so they think all they have to do is take a few latin phrases

a chinese itty gram a little german

a reference to a goddess

uh... or a place in venice or so on

and sunvettard you know church

sunreemow or whatever

and and they have it and

absolutely teaches them

what pound didn't do

because it isn't that easy it's the way things are layered and put together

that is unique that later poets have tried to do

and simply can't do because the layering is always surprising

and it's always completely intricate and he does know exactly what he's

doing it never just rambles on

well i think i put a poet in order to be successful in this kind of writing you

have to have

thoroughly and genuinely

re-appropriated that whole tradition

and scondest school with the mid-evils you have to know your greek and latin you

have to know uh... your problem solved your atalian your friend your germ

and it's only through a a genuine kind of making it your own

that you can as he called it make it new i mean i'd love that uh...

descriptor for what poetry should do is to make it new that doesn't mean

you chase after novelty for novelty sake it means

re-inherit

the literary tradition and re-new it

and uh... in a modernityum

you need to inherit it first

and pound brought all these people to reading this work this is the fascinating

thing

people who went to college at pounds time let's see born eighteen eighty five

so it was the first decade

of the twentieth century before world world one that he was at pen

and it hamilton people studied english literature they studied chosser whom

pound also loved and they say they will chosser

shakespeare shakespeare shakespeare doesn't figure very much in pound

that's a whole interesting question why that so

uh... he switched

that he was a wife

that comes very to the right he switched the leadances

to romance literature

and especially tallyon

and it's incredible what an impact that is made now people take it for

granted that one should know something about donte

and cover county

and perhaps paul paul paul but that wasn't the case when pound came of age

by the way he does very little with german literature again a very fascinating

thing to do with pound

is to see what isn't talked about he does not talk about good day he i he

never mentions haldaloo

he has no interest in

high name maybe a little bit

but the german tradition is not here's not that he couldn't read german but

that's not the tradition he works with

and he doesn't work with most french tradition really

except in very limited ways he loved good tea

he loved a rainbow

they figure he did wonderful translations of that

well-go relatively few but they're very good they're wonderful

o'cabare there

at the green cabaret and so on

so that he really created

the taste by which he's then judged

and um...

may i say a word about

cafe and this will take us into maybe coming back to the early

poetry

pound in nineteen fifteen before he wrote the canos

pound published a volume called cafe which is basically translation

basically

but not quite

uh...

he got a hold from the widow of earnest fennel also who had died

uh... manuscripts

japanese

transliteration

of chinese poets likely poll

and he was absolutely mesmerized by this and he studied these

transliterations

and he used the transliterations and one can see how this works

by uh...

and and translated into english and in a way created

china

he can air in his book

the pound era has a chapter called the invention of china

and there's no question the pound did invent china for i age not that it's

accurate

this takes us back to myth and imagination

anybody who really knows chinese knows the poets will say it's not accurate

but there's a marvelous thing here

and that's in a in a short poem at the beginning of cafe called the beautiful

toilet

uh... we read as follows

this only has five lines

blue blue is the grass about the river

and the willows have overfill the close garden

and within the mistress in the midmost of her youth white white of face

hesitates passing the door

slender she puts forth a slender hand

now if you study

uh...

the uh... and then this the uh...

the next stanza which of just also read and she was a courteson in the old days

and she has married a sought

who now goes drunkenly out

and leaves her too much alone

but i want to come back to that first stanza

if you look at fenneloses transliteration

all the words

are

in

the original that is the translation the japanese transliteration of the

chinese

but the grass was not blue but was green

and so the question is why is the grass blue blue is the grass about the

river

in the beautiful toilet

and he can i was the first to realize that's because for pound china

meant the kind of china plates people had

that is blue and white china

i have china like that

uh... in the late nineteen early twenty century she was every the taste for

chinese that is chinese pottery

met blue and white pottery

and so the blue here becomes

but the grass becomes blue and it seems so apt but the grass should really be

blue

but be green and so this is what i mean about pound inventing china

and notice the and structure exactly like in the end that you talked about

in the cantos and the willows of overfilled the close garden

and within the mistress in the midmost of a youth white white of face

hesitates passing the door

each line adds a new image

and the rhythm we haven't talked about all about rhythm yet

the rhythm is absolutely marvelous because what pound did

as he later called it was to break the pentameter

and he said to break the pentameter that was the first he

english poetry

is very difficult to remove from

i am big pentameter ten syllables five stresses

praline it's just the basic

meter

of shakespeare

milton

words worth write down through the nineteen century browning

big influence on pound

but here you know only get i am big pentameter

you get heavily stressed lines that always begin with stresses blue

blue

is the grass about the river

these falling lines slender she puts forth a slender

hand

so these are very amazing poems

not so much because of what they say

pound is not a poet who had very profound things to say if you

abstract

theme from the poems themselves but what he could do with material

well we have about seven more minutes we have to

decide

you know what can we

what we want to emphasize in the in the concluding minutes but this is not

going to be our last discussion of pound because it's uh... we're gonna have

more for sure

uh...

because there's another beautiful poem one of my favorites is the river

merchants uh... you know why

uh... i don't have

the i don't know if we want to read it now but it's another

transcription from the chinese

but i guess

since time is limited margarine we so we go back to the cantos and we find that

as you were saying although it's in credit it doesn't

attempt to synthesize

all the various traditions you know of the of the west

a lot of things are left out

that there

idiosyncrasies

that pound managers to bring into uh... the poem and

as you say invent or reinvent

china

give

uh... western poetry the pouff all solid still no response for the first time

uh...

for all the

quirkiness of this poet

the tradition was a huge debt

before the you know these various gifts that he's given

uh... and certainly you know being a talent is myself

i know how much of uh... the poets that i studied that income of

content so forth

uh...

oh there american residents really to pounds efforts there

uh...

and

as you say what makes them work

is not just

the collage techniques but

a way of synthesizing these uh... otherwise incongruent elements

into uh...

a parentactical

uh... structures

do the work of synthesis

where these incongruent things that are juxtaposed i get would you say that

it's in the it's in the uh...

among other things the rhythm of the lines that this work is

is happening

it it it happens almost in waveform

that you have these wonderful shifts the first piece of canto

uh... we talked about mousalini before the first piece of canto can't go seventy

before begins with the lines the enormous tragedy of the dream in the peasants

spent shoulders

mane smanas is god was tanned in stuff

thus been and la clada

amilano by the heels at melano

so that they were

was he's referring to mousalini

and his mistress

hung upside down and hung

and killed at at milan

at the end of the war

and many people get very angry that he's memorializing a horrible mousalini

there

it's very moving in the context the next line is that maggots should eat

the dead bullock

and then diganos diocese diganos but the twice crucified

wearing history will you find it

feeling almost that

they had been twice that mousalinos twice crucified yet say this to the

possum and the possum anybody who reads enough and pamnoses his name for

t_s_ l_a_ he always called him the possum because lea it was very

cagey

yet say this to the possum a bang not a whimper

with a bang not with a whimper

to build the city of diocese whose terraces of the color of stars

that's terribly moving you start out with the image of mousalini and his

mistress being hung

and how could this happen and you can tell the poet doesn't know how it

could happen he's he doesn't understand it

one of the tragedies of the canters is the pound never really understood what

gone wrong

after thirteen years to say the list of this when he left and went back to

general he gave the fascist salute

he never really learned

and on the other hand it's very moving when he's trying to justify itself to

his friend t_s_ l_a_ it

yet say this to the boss possum a bang not a whimper not with a bang but a

whimper

as a home he's referring to elia's famous poem the hollow men

this is the way the world ends this is the way the world ends not with a

bang but a whimper

in other words in our century

there's only a whimper there is no more bang so

pounce as

a bang not a whimper

and then comes his ideal city mythical city

to build the city of diacy whose terraces of the color of stars now you

have to try and picture

that here's pounce sitting in the prison camp with the sun beating down

he was not allowed to do any exercise he was not allowed anything he had no

books with him

accepted chinese dictionary and a copy of confucius

and so he had to do everything from memory this time he couldn't refer to

things as he had in the early account of

and he's still talking about building the ideal city

with stars and i think it's that idealism

and it's that drive

and the way it's worked in the very fluidly with the opposite

the normist tragedy in the peasants benchholders that makes it makes the

can't house and we can say more about it perhaps at our

uh... if we have another session don't let yes but it's makes it so beautiful

it's not a beautiful and very moving down the road here is again i

dances in the background for me always at

division of hell

has at the heart of it also an expectation

paradise

and he understood perhaps the hell

of his own air

but also was always had that i out for where we're disparodize lie

and how can i write paradise and the the pathos's tragedy is at the end

and maybe this uh...

com this realization

uh... paradise was excluded

to him or he was excluded from it and from all of us and that

maybe only hell is left and and

hence maybe that silence that consumed him to to the end of his life but

never giving up the hope or expectation

out until a certain point for for paradise is a very moving uh... and a very

important point we might end with this

that um... and this i want listeners to really think about this

today there's so much talk about can we have war poetry

can we write good poems about the a rocky war

and uh...

the fact is that you know people will sort of say war is terrible or give

pictures of battle scenes and how shocked and horrified they are

and see pound never did that he doesn't say here

isn't it awful what world war two did or

aren't a horrified or look what's happened to me

the enormous tragedy

of the dream in the peasant spent shoulders and you have to

everything is elusive but it's never directly stated

and it's not self-pitting really either

and so it's very moving because you feel here somebody who's lived through it

but it doesn't ever really quite understand what is it that happened

how could i have been so diluted

there is no self-pity of but it can we read just in the two minutes that

remain the the uh... the the final fragment or two of the the cantas if you

don't mind

the where he he asked for goodness

and he says uh...

to be meant not to start at the last try to write paradise first of it

uh... too

they too

got mamua mamua what do i love and where are you

that i lost my center fighting the world

the dreams clash and are shattered

and that i tried to make a pada diso

terrace

pada diso pada diso

i've tried to write paradise do not move let the wind speak that is

paradise

let the gods forgive what i have made

the let those i love try to forgive

what i have made

and that's very moving i think beautifully moving and there's one more right

after that

isn't there

i've tried to the pada diso terrace

o to be meant not destroyers yes

uh... very last uh... very very very very last fragment

uh... wages

to mice and a moth my guides

to have heard the far-fallen gasping as toward a bridge over worlds

that the kings meet in that island

where no food is after flight from the pole milkweed the sustenance as to

enter our kingdom

to be men

not destroyers

beautiful

margarine this is to be continued uh... all in the end

so thank you very much for this hour we're we're gonna get you back the

next time you come up to stand for

thank you Robert it's been wonderful discussing uh... the can't i was

in pound with you

want to remind our listeners that you can uh...

listen to us uh...

live by uh... going to the home page of the french and Italian department of

standford and clicking on the web page of this program

entitled opinions

uh... and there you can also listen to previous shows that have been archived

uh... and podcast so

thanks for joining us we'll see you next time

the

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