ABSTRACT
IN AN UNPUBLISHED LETTER to a friend more than fifty years ago, Ezra Pound included on a separate sheet, dated ‘Saturday’, the words, ‘To build a dream over the world’. We have here the germ of the Pisan Cantos. The ‘Make strong old dreams’ of A Lume Spento and the ‘dream’ of the other early poems, in this line isolated thus are brought to a new focus. Let us follow its development. There is, first of all, talk in his correspondence of the time, of reviving old pagan customs, of keeping a lamp burning before a shrine. Complementary attitudes may be discerned in the published work, poetry and prose, right through until 1920. In cantos 4 and 5, published in 1919 and 1921, he mentions Ecbatan, ‘City of patterned streets’, where the god descended on Danaë in a golden shower. In 1920 or 1921 Pound and the friend of the early letter together visited Brancusi’s studio in Paris and watched the sculptor at work on a column. These facts, ideas and symbols-the dream, the shrine, the column, the ‘City of patterned streets’—began to merge and take new shape in the poet’s mind. By 1938 he is writing to the same friend that ‘after twenty years waiting’ Brancusi is now building the temple in India, and that the column ‘of which you saw the small start’ is now set up at Jargu in Roumania. Two years later he inserted in his own hand in a copy of Cantos LII-LXXI, near the date 11 February 1940, the words:
Finally, in the Pisan Cantos, it became
But it is not just the single line we see developing, it is the whole section. The Pisan Cantos were made from the dreams that remained after his world had been destroyed in the Second World War. Viewed in this light they introduce us to the heart of his successes and failures as a poet. For it was only after he had been thrown into an American detention camp at Pisa, the political world in which he had placed so much trust in ruins around him, that he wrote his best poetry: not about history, economics, or the contemporary world, but woven out of dreams. Forced by circumstances to be true to his gift, he left the world of fact, as it is portrayed in the first seventy cantos, and gave himself over to another dimension, to register for the first time at length that aspect of being for which he had aptitude. Compare the heaviness of:
with this from the Pisan section:
The reason for his long confusion and delay before this, is not far to seek. Pound inherited, naturally enough, the metaphysical poverty of the nineteenth century. We must notice two main features: the age’s horror at the reality pressing in on it, and the way it dealt with the situation. It had no true metaphysics through which it might place in perspective the advances in science and industry; and so, lost faith in a spiritual or metaphysical order beyond sensible nature. Fitzgerald’s letter to Cowell (1847) is a pathetic admission of this:
Those who did not go over to materialism, had not the equipment to deal with it. This is not the place to discuss, even if I were capable, the religious history of the time. Or describe, even briefly, the yearning reflection of a few of the more sensitive souls in a twilight world of doubt. The point is that they had no way of seeing that the spiritual order, approached first through the senses, is not exhausted by the sensible realities in which the intellect first discovers it. No way of grasping that metaphysical wisdom opens upon a world of realities which can exist apart from matter. Matter, which, ontologically speaking, is always in move towards unintelligibility. For in so far as things are ‘immersed’ in matter, just so far are they removed from pure intelligibility. In ignorance of such principles, the nineteenth century tried to face, and then either surrendered to, or turned away from, science and industrialism.
