As an explanation for my bare handful of readers, I have been feeling a little fatigued and overwhelmed lately and have not been able to focus on my reading assignments.
We will be back next week, I promise.
Ezra Pound: Canto XXXVII
The Thirty-Seventh Canto once again is set (if setting is the right term to use) in America. It opens with Martin Van Buren, which is appropriate for his obsessions. During the aristocratic Van Buren’s presidency, the national bank (established by Founding Father and then Secretary of the Treasury). It goes on about the early days of financial speculation of in America.
Frankly, when Pound moves away from classical references and to his spiritual home in Italy, he becomes less interesting.
Ezra Pound: Canto XXXVI
The Thirty-Sixth Canto moves far differently than the previous one. The style is archaic, though it strikes me as more recent than the Renaissance style of earlier Cantos. Seventeenth century perhaps. Though it ends with a discussion of medievalism, including what I take to be a reference to Charles I of Anjou, who was the King of Sicily and Naples and Count of Anjou and Provence (there is a long history of French adventurers seizing for themselves some duchy or the like in a very disjointed medieval Italy), so perhaps assigning a time period to what Pound is attempting is pointless?
Cometh he to be
when the will
From overplus
Twisteth out of natural measure,
Never adorned with rest Moveth he changing colour
Either to laugh or weep
Contorting the face with fear
resteth but a little
Ezra Pound: Canto XXXV
The Thirty-Fifth Canto‘s first line ends with the wonderfully evocative and now word, Mitteleuropa.
There’s a lot going on here. The psychic wounds of the First World War. Sexual desire, which, as I have commented on before, does not usually figure prominently in Pound, appears here in conversation:
Mr Elias said to me:
” How do you get inspiration?
” Now my friend Hall Caine told me he came on a case
” a very sad case of a girl in the East End of London
” and it gave him an i n s p i r a t i o n . The only
” way I get inspiration is occasionally from a girl, I
” mean sometimes sitting in a restaurant and
looking at a pretty girl I
” get an i-de-a, I-mean-a biz-nis i-de-a? “
dixit sic felix Elias?
Ezra Pound: Canto XXXIV
In the Thirty-Fourth Canto, inside of a triangle:
“CITY
OF
ARRARAT
FOUNDED BY
MORDECAI NOAH”
And just below that:
These words I read on a pyramid, written
in English and Hebrew.
And before that, even, this throwaway remark:
Mr Noah has a project for colonizing jews in this country
And wd. like a job in Vienna….
The Canto, with early allusions and references to Napoleon and Russian campaign, mostly consists of fragments by and about the generation of American statesmen that followed the Revolutionary Era – John C. Calhoun, Daniel Webster, John Quincy Adams (it wasn’t clear if “Quincey” in the Thirty-Third Canto was truly him, but here we see the abbreviation J.Q.A.)
Am I letting the doubts inspired by Kenneth Rexroth’s remarks overwhelm my ability to appreciate one of the great and epic works of High Modernism?
Ezra Pound: Canto XXXIII
The Thirty-Third Canto continues both the overall theme of history and the narrower and recent topic of the earliest years of the United States.
It opens with a fragment of a letter from 1815 by “Quincey” on how, though he says it in a roundabout fashion, democracies and representative democracies can be just as despotic as a tyrannical king. Though it’s never said, I wonder whether “Quincey” isn’t the artistocratic and idealistic John Quincy Adams?
The whole thing consists of these incomplete fragments of letters and diaries, seeming to chronicle a democracy’s corruption by “land jobbers and stock jobbers,” as he once writes. Clearly, part of this is directed at the United States, though not exclusively, as Bonaparte is mentioned, and virtually any reference to Bonaparte must always, to me, seem to entail the idea of a democratic revolution betrayed (not that he was the only betrayer of the better angels of the French Revolution, of course).
Also, there is mention of reading Marx and Das Kapital and I always appreciate a good reference to Marx.
Ezra Pound: Canto XXXII
The Thirty-Second Canto continues the theme of the American Revolution and Founding Fathers (though John Adams, this time).
It opens in a very interesting juxtaposition. Adams says that “The revolution… Took place in the minds of the people.” But then follows with a list of war materiel, thereby contrasting that intellectual view of revolution with the actual necessities of winning military victories, as any violent revolution must do.
Towards the latter half of the Canto, he appears to mock the unpreparedness of the old European monarchies for the coming changes, ending with what I take to be a metaphor for the wars that rocked Europe in the nineteenth century and possibly also the First World War (not that WWI didn’t rock Europe, but whether Pound’s eye was fixed so far forward).
A guisa de leon
The cannibals of Europe are eating one another again
quando si posa.
Ezra Pound: Canto XXXI
The Thirty-First Canto is all about a series of missives sent by Thomas Jefferson to George Washington, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and other.
As per usual, Pound focuses on logistics and financial exchanges, including several references to slaves and slavery, though I can’t quite figure out if he is trying to make a particular statement with them.
Knowing as we do, Pound’s obsessions, I wonder whether he is attempting to chronicle the moment when the United States became entangled in finance and interest payments (would he call any such things usury, I wonder?).
Ezra Pound: Canto XXX
The Thirtieth Canto is explicitly archaic in its language, for example:
Compleynt, compleynt I hearde upon a day,
Artemis singing, Artemis, Artemis
Agaynst Pity lifted her wail:
Pity causeth the forest to fail,
After the first stanza, the levels of anachronism fall considerably, but never disappears.
Perhaps referencing his own creation and publication of literature, it ends with a fragment of a letter about the production of book of some kind (the implication is a religious book) in the early sixteenth century.
The Canto ends with this:
Explicit Canto
XXX
I enjoyed reading this, being pleasantly and slightly challenging, it also appealing the historian in me.
Ezra Pound: Canto XXIX
The Twenty-Nineth Canto contains our first little smidgeon of sex. Granted, nothing more than “lay with” and “begat.”
I’m reminded that Pound, despite his exhortations to others to “make it new,” had a conservative streak running through his poetry (read his older stuff -it’s pretty traditional). Despite this, we do see some avant garde and experimental streaks running through this Canto.
(Let us speak of the osmosis of persons)
The wail of the phonograph has penetrated their marrow
(Let us…
The wail of the pornograph….)
The cicadas continue uninterrupted.
the coffee philosopher 