ABSTRACT
Those many readers who wrote off Pound in the Thirties and were persuaded to give him a second chance, because of some poignant and direct passages in the Pisan Cantos, can now write him off again. For much of the new sequence of eleven cantos presents Pound at his most forbidding, stringing together 'gists' from unfamiliar works that he thinks wrongly neglected. Specifically, he draws here on three such sources: in Cantos 85 and 86, the Chinese history-classic, the Chou King; in Cantos 88 and 89, Benton's Thirty Years' View, a primary source for American history at the time of the Bank War; in Canto 94, the Bohn translation of the Life of Apollonius of Tyana, by Philostratus. Canto 85 will tax the patience of even a devout Poundian, since it can be read only with the Chinese source in one's lap. What with the Chinese characters, Couvreur's French version of these, and his Latin version, Canto 85 can hardly be called a poem in English at all. If, as Hugh MacDiarmid maintains, poetry must move 'Towards a World Language,' well, this is it. Cantos 90 and 91 seem to be Pound's Paradiso: they evoke what he calls 'The Great Crystal,' meaning by that the image of an ideal clarity which man of affairs and man of action, no less than poet and sage, have to keep before themselves. The paradisal flavour is in Pound's confidence, which he has expressed before ('it is not man Made courage, or made order, or made grace'), that this clarity, and the traditions of embodying it in thought, action and artifact, cannot be lost even when they go unhonoured. It's in the last few Cantos, where Pound guards against any hint of complacency, that we come nearest to the Pisan note: But in the great love, bewildered farfalla in ternpesta under rain in the dark: Many wings fragile Nymphalida?, basilarch, and lycæna, Ausonides, euchloe, and erynnis And from far il tremolar della marina.
