[Gregory Dowling]

There is a brilliant essay by Richard Wilbur entitled "Round About a Poem of Housman's". The poem is "Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries", and he shows how the poem works more effectively for a reader who can catch the allusions to Milton and to the letters of Saint Paul. However, even a reader who doesn’t catch them will appreciate much that the poem offers. Wilbur says: “A poem should not be a like a Double-Crostic; it should not be the sort of puzzle in which you get nothing until you get it all.” The essay goes on to talk more generally about “the art of referring”, which, he says, ultimately comes down to a question of tact. The tactful poet knows how to refer to things that a reader is likely to know; if the reader doesn't know them, the poem will often still work, even if not so fully. Pound’s Cantos, he says, "are supremely tactless. That is, they seem to arise from a despair of any community, and they do not imply a possible audience as Housman's poem does."

Let me quote his final remarks about the Cantos, with which I thoroughly agree:

There are three things a reader might do about the Cantos. First, he might decide not to read them. Second, he might read them, as Dr. Williams recommends, putting up with much bafflement for the sake of the occasional perfect lyric, the consistently clean and musical language, and the masterly achievement of quantitative effects through the strophic balancing of rhythmic masses. Or, thirdly, the reader might decide to understand the Cantos by consulting, over a period of years, the many books from which Pound drew his material. At almost every university, nowadays, there is someone who has undertaken that task: he may be identified by the misshapenness of his learning and by his air of lost identity.

[Andrew Frisardi]

Great post, Gregory. The humane equanimity of Richard Wilbur is something Pound sorely lacked. However, the Housman example doesn’t address the question of what place there is in modern poetry for epic scope and encyclopedic content. Pound’s references are centrifugal because we lack unity of culture, and he mistakenly thought that epic-scale poetry was possible simply through juxtaposition and compilation.

Also, whatever one thinks about Pound or his poetry, he sure had a huge influence on some very good poets. An old Milanese poet I know, a Communist Party member from way back, and his parents were in the thick of the Resistance, nonetheless loves and emulates Pound. Go figure. Then again, there’s a neofascist organization, based in Rome, called CasaPound. A polarizing figure if there ever was one in po-biz.

About ten years ago I became friends with an old English poet living in Tuscany, Peter Russell, who’d known Pound well in his last years in Venice. Peter founded a journal in the late 1940s and ’50s called Nine, which published Graves, Cummings, Tom Scott, Allen Tate, Edith Sitwell, Wyndham Lewis, Roy Campbell, and others, with Pound’s ideas about poetry having a lot to do with it. William Cookson’s Agenda was a spinoff of it. Geoffrey Hill, Derek Walcott . . . The list is long.

I did an interview with Peter in which he talked a bit about Pound’s anti-Semitism. Admirers of Pound do gloss over the nasty bits, and Peter was no exception, but I have never had the impression that Pound was an incarnation of evil. An arrogant rank blowhard who said some stupid and evil things, but not “evil” as I take that word.

There’s a story that when he was in St. Elizabeth’s, some poets came to visit him with a young guy who was about to go off to be a soldier in Vietnam. When they left, Pound said to the kid, “God be with you . . . if you can stand the company.” For me, that combination of wit, cheekiness, and off-the-cuff profundity captures something of the good of Pound the man.

[Gregory Dowling]

So you knew Peter Russell, Andrew. That’s fascinating. I have a number of friends in Venice who remember him well. I attended a reading he gave once, on a return visit to the city, and found him very engaging.

And there are, of course, many people here who remember Pound well, and many of them with affection. Pound’s daughter, Mary de Rachewiltz, has devoted her life to promoting her father’s works and translating them into Italian, and she rents out the house he lived in near the Zattere to Pound scholars. She is horrified by the use that CasaPound has made of her father’s name, although it can’t be said that they are entirely wrong in so appropriating it.

There are a number of poets, whose works I respect, who are devoted to Pound. Clive Wilmer is one such person. Donald Davie another. I remain somewhat baffled.

On Pound in St. Elizabeth’s the last word must go to Elizabeth Bishop, of course.

[Gregory Dowling]

This review of the Posthumous Cantos is worth taking a look at. Massimo Bacigalupo is a very eminent figure in Pound scholarship here in Italy; interesting to see that he knew Pound as a boy.

[Bill Carpenter]

Thanks, Gregory and Andrew, for your informative and informed posts. "Humane equanimity," a valuable commodity! I met Omar Pound when I was in graduate school. He was an unpretentious man who cordially encouraged any interest in Pound's work.

Here is the Bishop poem. http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/237932

[Andrew Mandelbaum]

Originally Posted by Gregory Dowling

There is a brilliant essay by Richard Wilbur entitled "Round About a Poem of Housman's"...

Great last few posts everyone. I regret my fooling around yesterday as this is good chat.
I found this poem by Pound. Is it about this same Housman? Just thought it interesting that it was the first piece I opened on after your post.

Song in the Manner of Housman

by Ezra Pound



O woe, woe,
People are born and die,
We also shall be dead pretty soon
Therefore let us act as if we were
dead already.

The bird sits on the hawthorn tree
But he dies also, presently.
Some lads get hung, and some get shot.
Woeful is this human lot.
Woe! woe, etcetera . . . .

London is a woeful place,
Shropshire is much pleasanter.
Then let us smile a little space
Upon fond nature's morbid grace.
Oh, Woe, woe, woe, etcetera . . . .

[Gregory Dowling]

Yes, that's the same Housman. It's quite funny but I think this one by by Hugh Kingsmill is better:

What - still alive at twenty-two,
A clean, upstanding chap like you?
Sure, if your throat is hard to slit,
Slit your girl's, and swing for it.

Like enough you won't be glad,
When they come to hang you, lad:
But bacon's not the only thing
That's cured by hanging from a string.

So, when the spilt ink of the night
Spreads o'er the blotting-pad of light,
Lads whose job is still to do
Shall whet their knives, and think of you.

Apparently Housman himself said this was the best parody he had seen of himself.

[W.F. Lantry]

O GOD, O Venus, O Mercury, patron of thieves,
Give me in due time, I beseech you, a little tobacco-shop,
With the little bright boxes
piled up neatly upon the shelves
And the loose fragrant cavendish
and the shag,
And the bright Virginia
loose under the bright glass cases,
And a pair of scales
not too greasy,
And the volailles dropping in for a word or two in passing,
For a flip word, and to tidy their hair a bit.

O God, O Venus, O Mercury, patron of thieves,
Lend me a little tobacco-shop,
or install me in any profession
Save this damn’d profession of writing,
where one needs one’s brains all the time.