368 Making It New: 1900–1945of rhythm. From first to last, Pound was blessed with the gift of what he called
“melopoeia,” “wherein the words are charged, over and above their meaning, with
some musical property, which directs the bearing or trend of that meaning.” Most of
these early poems are written according to an established metrical pattern, and
Pound turns the form into an instrument on which he can play his own music: an
apparently inevitable medium for his own speaking or singing voice.
The other important aspect of this earlier poetry is Pound’s use of antiquity.
Many of these poems are imitations of earlier verse or adopt the voice of an earlier
poet; and, even when this is not the case, Pound very often speaks from behind an
assumed character, a mask. The reasons for this return us to the heart of his beliefs.
Pound, after all, saw the poem as an objective verbal equation for an emotional, and
basically incommunicable, experience. Imagism or Vorticism was, he felt, one way of
finding such an equation; and the use of personae was another. The poet, he argued,
cannot relate a delightful psychic experience by speaking out directly in the first
person: he must “screen himself ” and speak indirectly through “an impersonal and
objective story.” The story, and in particular the stories of myth and earlier literature,
can supply the modern poet with luminous details which he can arrange to
adumbrate certain moods or perceptions of his own; they can provide him with the
means not only of expressing his own ecstatic encounter with fundamental principles
but of relating that encounter to the common stock of human experience. A poem
like “The Seafarer” illustrates how Pound turned these ideas into action. A transla-
tion of an Anglo-Saxon poem, it does two things. First, it communicates a sense of
the past in all its pastness: the use of the Anglo-Saxon alliterative verse form, the
stylistic tessellation, the gnomic phrasing excite a sense of strangeness, as if the
narrator were calling to the reader across the chasms of history. But, secondly, it
explores certain common human feelings that Pound himself experienced with
peculiar intensity: feelings of exile, distance, loss, separation not only from the world
of the “Burgher” but from other, more comforting domesticities that can never be
known to the poet-wanderer – feelings, too, of nostalgic stoicism, that have little to
do with the Christian elements in the original but have been highlighted by Pound,
not least through the vigorous, muscular quality of the language. The eventual result
of all this is a perfect example of what Pound called “criticism in new composition.”
Pound captures here something of what he termed the “permanent basis in
humanity”: the common principles, the moral order that survives through the flux
of experience. At the same time, however, he honors the thing as it was: the particular
historical shapes, the very specific human and physical ways in which such forms
necessarily manifest themselves.
“The Seafarer” appeared in Ripostes published in 1912; and, apart from Pound’s
subtle use of antiquity, this collection is remarkable because it reveals the poet’s
discarding of metrically regular unrhymed verse in favor of free verse. A poem like
“The Return” shows this; and it also illustrates Pound’s growing ability to write
pieces that are not necessarily “about” anything in any traditional sense but are,
rather, equations for a mood or an emotion. As Pound’s work grew in authority, he
retained this understanding of the possibilities of rhythm and image but coupled itGGray_c04.indd 368ray_c 04 .indd 368 8 8/1/2011 7:53:51 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 53 : 51 AM