“A Virginal,” composed in 1912, is named for the diminutive keyboard instrument preferred by maidens during the late Renaissance. The poem reflects the early period of Pound’s development and his skillful use of the fourteen-line Petrarchan sonnet. He rhymes the first eight lines abbaabba, closing with the rhyme scheme cdeecd. Opening with a burst of emotion, he introduces his rejection with two strong beats, “No, no!” Speaking in the guise of a lover rejecting a lady, he cloaks his commentary on poetry in dashing romanticism, brandishing the female image of the Latin vagina or scabbard, which he will not soil with a dull blade. His rejection of classicism turns on an amusing overstatement of departure from the arms that “have bound me straitly,” a pun suggesting a straightjacket.
At the break between opening octave and concluding sestet, Pound returns to the original spondee and chops the line into three segments—another “No, no,” a dismissal of his castoff love, and the beginning of his reason for abandoning the allure of traditional verse. Intent on experimentation, he prefers the green shoots that signal a new thrust through earth’s crust. He alliterates the past as a “winter wound” and looks beyond to April’s white-barked trees, a color symbolic of an emerging purity.
Much of Hugh Selwyn Mauberley: Life and Contacts, written eight years after “A Virginal,” expresses Pound’s exasperation with predictable American artistry and with poets who refuse to let go of the past. In “Ode pour l’Election de Son Sepulchre” [“Ode on the Selection of His Tomb”], Pound draws on a work by Pierre de Ronsard, reclaimed by the initials E. P., to comfort the artist who is “out of key with his time.” The second quatrain follows the pattern of iambic tetrameter rhyming abab, but refuses to be tamed into stiff old-style measures. In zesty rhetoric, the poet leaps from one allusion to another, linking Ronsard with Capaneus, a Greek hero in ancient times who was halted in mid-rebellion by a bolt of lightning from the god Zeus. Rapidly covering ground with a line in Greek from Homer’s Odyssey, Pound extols another toiler, the sailor Odysseus, who had his men tie him to the mast so that he could experience the sirens’ song. The fourth stanza reaches toward Gustave Flaubert, a nineteenth-century novelist who persisted in stylistic growth, even though obstinacy cost him the admiration of his contemporaries.
Gradually relinquishing dependence on a tightly formed quatrain, Parts II and III of the stanza speak clearly about Pound’s annoyance with poetry that fails to acknowledge the “accelerated grimace” of the post–World War I era. To the poet, an artistic theft of the “classics in paraphrase” is preferable to a self-indulgent “inward gaze,” his term for confessional verse that obsesses over personal feelings and sentimentality. In his estimation, no rigid plaster can suffice in an era that demands agile, up-to-date language. In a rage at commercialism, Part III surges back into the allusive mode with cryptic poetic shards contrasting Edwardian niceties and Sappho’s spirited verses. Segueing into religion, Pound makes a similar comparison of the erotic Dionysians and breast-beating Christians.
By Parts IV and V, Pound has shucked off the constraints of pre-modern verse forms to embrace an expression free of rhyme and meter. The tone resorts to a free-ranging bitterness toward the literary status quo. His cunning rhythms, more attuned to pulpit delivery, depict the emotional drive of naive warriors marching to war. With bold pause, in line 71 he halts the parallel flow of complex motives—adventure, fear of weakness, fear of censure, love of slaughter, and outright terror—to note that some died, casualties for patriotism.
To Pound’s thinking, the so-called Great War violated Horace’s idealization of sweet and fitting martyrdom. Part IV concludes with a ghoulish belly laugh from the hapless dead as the stanza assails post–war distress. Disillusioned by leaders’ lies in the 1910s, which pour from the foul jaws of an aged bitch dog, in Part V, the poet lambastes tricksters for luring fine young men to slaughter. For refusing to recognize the threat, a decaying world sent them “under earth’s lid,” an evocative image of finality—closed eyes and coffins covered with soil.
“A Pact,” Pound’s forthright confrontation with Walt Whitman, allows the poet to come to terms with a debt to his American forebear, the father of free verse expressionism. Flaunting hatred of a dismally self-limiting poet, Pound depicts himself as the petulant child of an obstinate father, but stops short of a meaningless tantrum. By reining himself in in the fifth line, he gives over peevish vengeance to acknowledge the development of modernism from its foundations. From this “new wood” that Whitman exposed, Pound intends to carve the future of poetry, thus achieving a “commerce” between himself and his predecessor.
Pound’s lifetime of carving resulted in a masterwork of 116 stanzas that spanned the four decades of his mature and declining years. In “Canto I,” from The Cantos, he imitates the style and diction of Homer, whose Odyssey follows the fate-hounded Greek sailor all over the Mediterranean. Capturing the music of keel over waves and wind on sail, Pound envisions a “swart ship,” the boat that the Circe helped Odysseus build to make his final leg of the journey home. It is painted black, Greek fashion; the color prefigures description of that dark nether world that Odysseus must traverse and the murky rites he must perform to acquire the prophet Tiresias’ direction. To stress the grimness of the underworld, the poet relies on a heavy sibilance of repeated sounds in “sterile bulls,” “best for sacrifice,” and the double alliteration of “flowed in the fosse.”
In lush phrases, Pound enacts the scene at the trench, where Odysseus must feed the thronging ghosts on fresh-spilled blood to give them voice. After hearing Elpenor’s sex-charged explanation of sleeping in “Circe’s ingle” and descending the ladder of doom, Odysseus moves on to the next spirit—the sage Tiresias, who warns that return will cost him all his sailors. Following a two-line digression to acknowledge past translations of Homer, Pound venerates Aphrodite, the ancestor of Aeneas, whose subsequent voyage in Virgil’s Aeneid parallels the wanderings of Odysseus. Without warning, Pound breaks off the text, as though indicating that the chain of poetic renderings will keep epic alive in version after version.
“Canto XLV,” subtitled “With Usura,” displays flickering impressionism molded from splendid fragments, a mentally challenging style that Pound contributed to modernism. The haunting, exotic passage builds into fugue with melodic names of Renaissance artists and successors, none of whom paid the penalty of artistic usury. As though composing an oratorio of creative fragments, Pound pictures French churches and tools of the sculptor and weaver. A delicious verbal lyricism in “azure” and “cramoisi” (pronounced krah mwah zee) precedes a revelation: The publisher’s financial dealings are the source of declining artistic vigor and the era’s compromise of its artists. He suppresses the initial exuberance with a somber reminder that greed kills the artistic “child in the womb.” With a pontiff’s majesty, he thunders that usury—like whores replacing priestesses and corpses seated at banquets—is unnatural, that is, a violation of world order.
