I Still Really Hate Ezra Pound

There are so many reasons to hate Ezra Pound.

Some of these reasons to hate Ezra Pound would include: his pompous pronouncements, his nastiness, his snobbishness, his racism, his traitorous nature, his sexism and his tremendous ego.

Another reason would be that invidious introduction where he presented the works of Marianne Moore and Mina Loy to readers with a sentence that began, "What these girls have done..." It's a wonder he didn't say "broads." I guess "broad" came into currency a few decades later.

Oh, and about 88.87% of his poetry. When it's not manicured to death, it's bloviating. In the dictionary, under the word "bloviate," it should say "SEE The Cantos." Is it true that Warren G. Harding coined the word "bloviate?" I "learned" that in a John Ashbery poem fifteen years ago. I wonder if it's true. The book it originated in was filled with insipid truths, so I'm guessing it is. I never fact-checked it.

And then there are reasons to be grateful for Pound's existence, like the fact that he was probably the single greatest facilitator of English language poetry in the early twentieth century, and was such a great friend to so many truly great poets. "Il miglior fabbro?" Probably not. But the better editor for that poem, no doubt, if you've read the drafts.

I was reading by accident the New Directions Selected (it fell off a bookshelf) and stopping here and there, and then I remembered--as I was reading his early Imagist poems--his smarmy comment about how Imagism was a stage some poets outgrew and others didn't. That was probably a barb intended for H.D., and others from his former London set (Aldington and the rest). This is ironic, because H.D. was such a better writer in that tradition. There's really no comparison. She totally assimilated not just the Greek lexicon and imagery (as Pound did), but the Greek spirit as well. Pound could achieve it in tiny glimmers in his Imagist poems, and yes we do have him to thank for "the apparition of these faces in the crowd." But it's good he moved on. And, of course, H.D. did too. But she kept that sense of lineage in language; she remained rather a psychopomp of sorts. She could always travel the secret passageways between languages; the subway really belonged to Her. Pound stayed above-ground; his ego probably floated him up. Pound's later poetry became a rhetorical nightmare, and comparisons with King Lear would probably be very apt. I can think of no poet who reminds me more of Lear than Ezra Pound in his later years.

Pound liked to goad people in his poems. The insults come fast and furious...like this nasty one, which is a pointless piece of literature, and lacks all charm. Why was this piece of tripe included in his thin Selected? Did he insist on retasting his bile?

    Amities

I.

To one, on returning certain years after.

You wore the same quite correct clothing,
You took no pleasure at all in my triumphs,
You had the same old air of condescension
Mingled with a curious fear
    That I, myself, might have enjoyed them.
Te Voila, mon Bourrienne, you also shall be immortal.


II.

To another.

And we say good-bye to you also,
For you seem never to have discovered
That your relationship is wholly parasitic;
Yet to our feasts you bring neither
Wit, nor good spirits, nor the pleasing attitudes
    Of discipleship.


III.

But you, bos amic, we keep on,
For to you we owe a real debt:
In spite of your obvious flaws,
You once discovered a moderate chop-house.


Okay, this is the sort of poem to make your chummy old boy network laugh, and perpetuate the idea that there is no such thing as "friendship" in literature, only favors curried and favors owed. Ick! If you think he's being ironic with lines like "the pleasing attitudes / of discipleship," you need to read more biographical material. One wonders if the "we" in that second section is already the royal "we" announcing itself, or whether it's just Pound's wegotism speaking for the circle he presided over.

Yes, this is a poem that draws its inspiration and acidic formalism from the poems of the Greek Anthology. But just as those poets meant what they wrote, the ugliness as well as the generosity, I'm sure Pound meant this.

I love the shiv Gertrude stuck in Pound. The jibe about the "village explainer." It's so true. And it became truer as Pound aged. I would charge his poetry with the very usury he detested; he charges too much for the beauty he's going to loan us in "The Cantos." We have to take the castor oil of the rhetoric and the pompously pointless classical references set around everywhere like caryatids on the porch of a yuppie's house (you can be sure the caryatids disapprove of the yellow Hummer in the drive a few feet away).

Reading the earliest poems included in the New Directions anthology, I'm still struck by how awful many of the poems are. Of course, this is a very young man falling in love with poetry for the first time, and he has no bearings. He has his shopping cart, and he's like a stoner in the grocery store at 2 a.m. throwing EVERYTHING in it, and I suppose there is a goofy charm to how bewildered he is. But many of the poems are very, very bad.

But then one has only to read "In A Station of the Metro" or "The River-Merchant's Wife: A Letter" to realize the man is capable of writing poems that move generations.

And yet I still hate to read him. I liked him most when I was a child, when I used to memorize poems like his.

Odi et amo, indeed. But more odi.