Karina Lamas Evangelista
Make it New: The Poetry of Ezra Pound
With the phrase “make it new, day by day make it new” as his motto, Ezra Pound transformed
the early twentieth century literary scene. Pound along with other major modernists as T.S Eliot,
T. E. Hulme and James Joyce set English modernism into motion. They struggled “to modify if
not overturn existing modes of representation, partly by pushing them towards the abstract or the
introspective, and to express the new sensibilities of their time: in a compressed, condensed,
complex literature of the city, of industry and technology, war, machinery and speed, mass
markets and communication, of internationalism, the New Woman, the aesthete, the nihilist and
the flâneur” (Childs 3-4). Pound was so engaged with this renovation that he took part in almost
every field of the literary scene, he was a poet, translator, editor, anthologist, letter-writer, critic,
librettist, and dramatist. However, poetry was his calling.
Ezra Weston Loomis Pound was born in Hailey, Idaho, on 30 October 1885. Soon, in
1887 the Pounds left, first for New York and then in 1889 to Pennsylvania (Nadel 1). In
Wyncote, Pennsylvania, Ezra Pound attended the Cheltenham Military Academy (2). Before his
graduation, Pound began a series of trips to Europe. Between 1898 and 1908 he made five trips
visiting Italy, Spain, London, and Venice. According to Nadel, “these voyages instilled in Pound
a love for European culture, absorption with first hand research and incorporation of European
life in his poetry” (Nadel 8). Through his life Pound would variously live in Venice, London,
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Paris, Rapallo, Washington D.C., Brunnenburg in the Italian Alps, and Rome (2). Apart from
foreshadowing Pound’s condition as an expatriate poet, this nomadic impulse is the answer for
the multifarious renovated traditions we find in his poetic work that go from the English and the
Italian to the Chinese and Japanese.
Together with Pound’s diverse influences, his erudition, experimentation and orneriness
make his poetry a challenge to his reader (Nadel TCC 1). Regarding the complex character of
Pound’s poetry, Langdon Hammer states:
Pound can be hard to put together, he can be hard to get a picture of. What is Pound like? What was he
like? Well, this is a hard question for some of the same reasons that the poems are hard; that is, Pound's
poetry projects no determinate identity, no determinate poetic voice, unlike those distinctive voices of
Yeats and Frost. Instead, in Pound you encounter a multiplicity of identities, a multiplicity of voices.
There's an interesting contradiction in this. Pound is a kind of fierce individualist. He believes in, he
wants to honor – as a political thinker and as a poet, as a reader – he wants to honor a heroic and
sovereign idea of the individual. At the same time, in his writing, Pound repeatedly divests himself of
identity, of particular identity, in order to enter or to be entered by other identities, other poets, other
voices, creators, heroes. This is what he wants to give us access to as readers. (Hammer)
Theses multiple identities and voices in Pound’s poetry can be observed throughout his work.
His first incursions in poetry were intended to take distance from the Victorian tradition, and
then he gradually made more forceful innovations in his Imagist or Vorticist poems. Finally,
Pound’s innovative poetic trajectory is linked together in The Cantos that is regarded as “an
ambitious epic poem that he worked on from 1915 to 1968” (Nadel TCC 1). Ripostes, published
in 1912, was Pound’s sixth published volume of poems. Although Ripostes is generally
considered as a “relatively undistinguished text” (Nadel 44), we can find an interesting example
of his early struggle to innovate conventional poetic forms in the following sonnet:
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Silet
When I behold how black, immortal ink
Drips from my deathless pen -- ah, well-away!
Why should we stop at all for what I think?
There is enough in what I chance to say.
It is enough that we once came together;
What is the use of setting it to rime?
When it is autumn do we get spring weather,
Or gather may of harsh northwindish time?
It is enough that we once came together;
What if the wind have turned against the rain?
It is enough that we once came together;
Time has seen this, and will not turn again;
And who are we, who know that last intent,
To plague to-morrow with a testament!
Verona 1911
“Silet” is a traditional Shakespearean or English sonnet with fourteen lines, three
quatrains and a couplet. Although it has some minor variations, the meter is given mainly in
iambic pentameter and it has a regular rhyme scheme a-b-a-b, c-d-c-d, e-f-e-f, g-g. Its leitmotif
also fits within the convention; it is a meditation on the poetic task. However, along the poem
innovations are gradually introduced. The poetic voice begins musing on the transcendent
character of his task, “When I behold how black, immortal ink / Drips from my deathless pen --
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ah, well-away!” Then in the second line, the poetic voice makes a pause and a silence is
graphically indicated by the hyphen in the second hemistich of the second line. After this
interruption, the poetic voice resumes with two interjections that not only break the solemnity of
his tone but also express some kind of distress or lamentation. The discomfort posed by the
sudden silence is uttered as a question: “Why should we stop at all for what I think?” With this
query the poetic voice is acknowledging himself, as an individual, as an obstacle for his poetic
task. From this line on, queries that challenge the validity of the poetical task are alternated with
repetitions of a statement that emphasize the value of experience.
In the second stanza we can find the most challenging question of the sonnet: “What is
the use of setting it to rime?” The image we get from this question is that of confinement and
lack of movement. The interrogations that follow pose issues that challenge the most elemental
logic as: “When it is autumn do we get spring weather, / Or gather may of harsh northwindish
time?” or “What if the wind have turned against the rain?” Throughout the sonnet the
conventional leitmotif has been questioned by the poetic voice, but it is not until we reach the
volta that the major change is introduced. Although it is visually marked and introduced by the
coordinating conjunction “And,” this volta is not a turn in thought, an answer or conventional
condensation of the three previous quatrains. It could be said that the volta is posing one last
thought that reinforces the futility of the poetic task by subverting the conventional leitmotif. The
novelties introduced to the conventional and restricted forms as the sonnet were only a
movement of detachment from the Victorian tradition. After this detachment it followed the
Imagism movement, which began the Modernism in Britain (Childs 97).
The movement that “purged poetry of excessive rhetoric and overly stated imagery
through the ‘direct treatment of the ‘thing’’” (Nadel 47) began with a small group headed by T.E.
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Hulme in 1909 and ended with an anthology published in New England in 1917 (Childs 97). The
Imagist poets did not like the iamb and abstractions thus they preferred the free verse and the
accuracy of scientific principles (97). The Japanese haiku, tanka and the French symbolist poetry
influenced the notion of the image (97). According to Pound in his essay “Vorticism” (1914)
“the image was not a static, rational idea: ‘It is a radiant node or cluster; it is what I can, and
most perforce call a VORTEX, from which, and through which, and into which, ideas are
constantly rushing’” (Pound in Hakutani 47). So, it can be said that Imagism was an approach to
poetry agreed by a group of people formed in London in 1912 (Childs 97). Ezra Pound, Hilda
Doolittle and Richard Addington, the three founding members agreed on three following
principles:
1. Direct treatment of the ‘thing’ whether subjective or objective;
2. To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation;
3. As regarding rhythm: to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence
of a metronome. (98)
Pound’s essays “Vorticism” (1914) and “As for Imagisme” (1915) supplemented the
previous Imagist principles. While Imagism “had affinities to the aims of sculpture: hardness,
craft and directness” (98); Vorticism was associated with the writings and paintings of Wyndham
Lewis (97). Now, the notion of the image was described in pictoric terms. Pound wrote regarding
the form of an image: “may be a sketch, a vignette, a criticism, an epigram or anything else you
like. It may be impressionism, it may be even be very good prose” (Pound in Hakutani 47).
Although the image is described in visual terms, Pound emphasizes that it continues being a
vortex “endowed with energy”, not a simple picture of a thing (47). Therefore the painter / poet
“should use his color because he sees it or feels it. I don’t much care whether he is representative
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or non-representative… It is the same in writing poems, the author must use his image… not
because he thinks he can use it to back up some creed or some system of ethics or economics”
(47-48). We can find an instance of the Imagist principles in the well-known “hokku-like
sentence” (Pound in Hakutani 48) “In a Station of The Metro”
The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals, in a wet, black bough.
This poem immediately refers us to the second Imagist principle; the diction is economic
hence precise, without any ornament. Although there is an absence of verbs, the image we get is
not static; it is indeed invested with energy. This vitality comes from the superposition that is a
fundamental composition principle of the hokku. The impression we get from the first line is
only set into motion when the second appears, it is “a form of superposition” (Pound in Bohn
33). When the first image is placed upon the second, we can find some kind of resemblance
between both images. The operation made in this superposition can also be elucidated if it is
equated to the one made in the metaphor. Thus, “Petals, in a wet, black bough” would be the
tenor—“the subject upon which it is hoped light will be shed” (Dawes 27) while “The apparition
of these faces in the crowd” would be the vehicle—“the subject to which allusion is made in
order to shed that light” (Dawes 27). The transition from the hardness of imagist compositions to
the fluidity of the vorticist ones is articulated in the following poem:
Epitaphs
Fu I
Fu I loved the high cloud and the hill,
Alas, he died of alcohol.
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Li Po
And Li Po also died drunk.
He tried to embrace a moon
In the Yellow River.
In “Epitaphs” Pound takes advantage of the briefness and epitomizing feature of this
inscriptions on a tomb or a grave to continue the exploration of the vitality that can be conveyed
through the precise image. Here the mechanism of superposition unfolds into a “perspective by
incongruity” (Kenner 62) device that is a sort of Aristotelian peripetia or “reversal of the
situation” (62). While Fu I’s visual field is located above in “the high cloud and the hill,” Li Po’s
is located in the opposite position. Although their perspective and therefore their expectations
are complete opposition their final outcome is the same, they both die drunk due to a “wry pathos
of inadequacy” (63).
Pound’s centrality in modernism is sometimes threatened by his reputation as a fascist
(Beasley 5) and provocateur (Nadel TCC 1) or darkened by the fact that he was the editor of the
monumental The Waste Land or Joyce’s literary promoter. However, his ample knowledge of
multifarious traditions and his virtuosity as a poet should keep him as one of the architects of the
Modernism. Not only did Pound transform the notion of image from a static lifeless thing into a
vital entity but also he revitalized the essence of the poetic task.
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Works Cited
Beasley, Rebecca. Theorists of Modernist Poetry: T.S. Eliot, T.E. Hulme and Ezra Pound. New
York: Routledge, 2007.
Bohn, Willard. Modern Visual Poetry. London: Associated University Presses. 2001.
Childs,Peter. Modernism. New York: Routledge, 2000.
Dawes, Gegory W. The Body in Question: Metaphor and Meaning in the Interpretation of
Ephesians 5: 21-33. Leiden: Brill, 1998.
Hakutani, Yoshinobu. “Ezra Pound, Yone Noguchi, and Imagism.” Modern Philology. 90.1
(1992): 46-69. Print
Hammer, Langdon. “Lecture 9: Ezra Pound.” Open Yale Courses. Yale University, February 14,
2007. Web. 6 Oct. 2012. http://oyc.yale.edu/english/engl-310/lecture-9
Kenner, Hugh. The Poetryof Ezra Pound. Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1985.
Nadel, I B. The Cambridge Companion to Ezra Pound. New York: Cambridge University Press,
1999.
_________. The Cambridge Introduction to Ezra Pound. New York: Cambridge University
Press, 2007.