Skip to main content
Read page text
page 12
result he started again from the beginning. This explains in part the notorious obscurity of Pound, who as he wrote and rewrote the same passages forgot, or decided he could do without, this or that clarification. Let the readers worry. He had more important matters to attend to, nothing less than ‘the tale of the tribe’, as he called his poem. (In the meantime he had become enthusiastic about Leo Frobenius and African civilizations.) Surprisingly enough, Pound carefully preserved his notebooks and drafts, perhaps thinking that he could make use of them later. (He surely did not anticipate that university libraries in his native land would vie for their possession.) Thus the text of The Cantos as published is only the tip of an iceberg of mostly unpublished material: notebooks, typescripts, proofs. At times Pound really forgot memorable passages among his drafts, though generally he proved a good judge in choosing what to preserve and what to discard. The present volume offers a selection from this abundant material, based on criteria of quality, accessibility, and documentary interest. Passages from the inter-war years are relatively few because the best writing appears to have made it into The Cantos as we have them. The early lines about Pound’s meeting with Eliot in Verona (By the arena, you, Thomas amics) offer a sketch of an encounter that was to find its place, more allusively, in the Pisan Cantos, and give an idea of Pound’s method. (It is striking how rough and journal-like these notes are, even mentioning ‘Bitter Bonomelli’, a popular drink in Italian cafés of the period.) Similarly, the three discarded openings of what was to become canto 2 (And So-shu stirred in the sea) show us the poet at work, sketching, abbreviating and even eliminating entire segments, some of them notable, as he seeks both themes and procedures. Of great interest are three such passages that appeared in various drafts of canto 49, the often-cited ‘Seven Lakes Canto’ on Chinese themes. This originally had an anecdotal prologue (two distinct and striking versions) and included a long and distasteful invective, wisely omitted by Pound. This is the period in which Pound wrote his celebrated ‘Usura’ canto, denouncing with Ruskinian fervour the destruction that bad economic practices brought to the pre-Raphaelite ‘world of moving energies’, and to great art and artists. He repeated the theme in canto 51 (for ‘repetita juvant’), a canto for which we have many discarded passages, some of them linking Pound’s usurious foes ( John Law, founder of the bank of France) and his musical friends (Antonio Vivaldi) against a Venetian background. At the same time xii Posthumous Cantos
page 13
he was attempting to reconstruct in his poem the unspoiled pre-capitalist world in which nature and culture coalesce, and he found it in the ancient customs that he noted among his peasant neighbours in Rapallo (the town near Genoa where Pound spent much of his writing life). These he describes excitedly in drafts dealing with nature, folklore, and sexuality, preliminary to the well-known, and somewhat truculent, ‘fertility cantos’ (39 and 47). With the war, the development of the poem entered upon a more turbulent and poetically productive phase. Pound did not grasp at first the enormity of events, or what his collaboration with the Italian state radio would cost him. In 1940 he had published Cantos LII–LXXI and he was already envisaging a final volume devoted to religion and philosophy. Many notes, here titled Voices of War, evoke nature rituals going back to Greek myth, but they are interspersed with reports of contemporary disasters, among them the testimony of a veteran of the war in Greece. One draft was of special interest to me, for it opens with an anecdote about my grandfather (and namesake), who operated a pharmacy in Rapallo. In August 1943 (as we learn from the draft) he lent Ezra the bound volume of the Gazzetta di Genova for 1815, which he happened to possess and was showing to his friends in the shop. Pound carried this precious find to his attic apartment on the Rapallo seafront, and began making notes of events surrounding Napoleon’s Hundred Days – that is, his brief return to power after the Elba exile – implying a parallel with the arrest of Mussolini ( July 1943) and possibly with his rescue by the Germans, that led to the creation of the puppet Republic of Salò (1943–45). Again, Pound could not imagine the consequence of these events and how much he and his poem would be overwhelmed by them. The notion of a fearless last stand against all enemies, with anarchic and antibourgeois components, attracted Pound as much as Marinetti, his Futurist antagonist and associate, and both reaffirmed their allegiance to their contemporary Mussolini in his pathetic and bloody decline. Pound wrote articles for the newspapers of the Repubblica Sociale Italiana (as the Salò Republic was called), published economic and historical pamphlets in Rapallo and Venice, and even composed two cantos in Italian (cantos 72–73) to salute the ‘boys’ and ‘girls’ who ‘wear black’ (i.e., the Fascist black shirt). Part of canto 72 and all of canto 73 appeared in a fugitive periodical of the ‘Republican Navy’ (Marina Repubblicana), to be included only in 1985 in the full Introduction xiii

Page Text

View plaintext

result he started again from the beginning. This explains in part the notorious obscurity of Pound, who as he wrote and rewrote the same passages forgot, or decided he could do without, this or that clarification. Let the readers worry. He had more important matters to attend to, nothing less than ‘the tale of the tribe’, as he called his poem. (In the meantime he had become enthusiastic about Leo Frobenius and African civilizations.) Surprisingly enough, Pound carefully preserved his notebooks and drafts, perhaps thinking that he could make use of them later. (He surely did not anticipate that university libraries in his native land would vie for their possession.) Thus the text of The Cantos as published is only the tip of an iceberg of mostly unpublished material: notebooks, typescripts, proofs. At times Pound really forgot memorable passages among his drafts, though generally he proved a good judge in choosing what to preserve and what to discard.

The present volume offers a selection from this abundant material, based on criteria of quality, accessibility, and documentary interest. Passages from the inter-war years are relatively few because the best writing appears to have made it into The Cantos as we have them. The early lines about Pound’s meeting with Eliot in Verona (By the arena, you, Thomas amics) offer a sketch of an encounter that was to find its place, more allusively, in the Pisan Cantos, and give an idea of Pound’s method. (It is striking how rough and journal-like these notes are, even mentioning ‘Bitter Bonomelli’, a popular drink in Italian cafés of the period.) Similarly, the three discarded openings of what was to become canto 2 (And So-shu stirred in the sea) show us the poet at work, sketching, abbreviating and even eliminating entire segments, some of them notable, as he seeks both themes and procedures. Of great interest are three such passages that appeared in various drafts of canto 49, the often-cited ‘Seven Lakes Canto’ on Chinese themes. This originally had an anecdotal prologue (two distinct and striking versions) and included a long and distasteful invective, wisely omitted by Pound. This is the period in which Pound wrote his celebrated ‘Usura’ canto, denouncing with Ruskinian fervour the destruction that bad economic practices brought to the pre-Raphaelite ‘world of moving energies’, and to great art and artists. He repeated the theme in canto 51 (for ‘repetita juvant’), a canto for which we have many discarded passages, some of them linking Pound’s usurious foes ( John Law, founder of the bank of France) and his musical friends (Antonio Vivaldi) against a Venetian background. At the same time xii Posthumous Cantos

read next page

My Bookmarks

Buy this Book
Skip to main content