370 Making It New: 1900–1945Writing in the aftermath of the Great War (which is very much a presence in the
poem), Pound analyzes the plight of modern society in and through an investigation
of the plight of its writers, who are tempted, he suggests, either to give in to society’s
claims, offering it “an image / Of its accelerated grimace,” or to withdraw from it
completely into “the obscure reveries / Of the inward gaze.” Going back into the
previous century, focusing powerfully on recent symptoms of cultural decline, mov-
ing like quicksilver between different personae and poetic forms, he offers us the
poetic equivalent of Henry Adams’s Education: an ironic, self-critical, third-person
account of a multiple, modern personality that is also a radical dissection of the
miscellaneousness of modern culture – its restlessness, its variety, and its lack of a
center. There are no answers in Mauberley except in the sense that the poem itself is
an answer, suggesting a way out from the constricting alternatives of surrender or
solipsism, a mask other than those of the pragmatist or aesthete. Instead, the reader
is offered a kaleidoscopic series of questions: a creative analysis that follows Pound’s
customary route from the state of the language to the state of the culture.
In its own way, this route is also the route of the Cantos, which Pound began very
early in his career, since before the Vorticist period (the first four appeared in Quia
Pauper Amavi (1919)), and was still writing shortly before his death (The Cantos of
Ezra Pound (I–CXVII) was published in 1970). Only here the route is a far more
complex and labyrinthine one because Pound is openly concerned, not just with
contemporary cultural decay, but with the possible sources of cultural renewal. The
Cantos are Pound’s epic. Following in the tradition of Whitman, he attempts to tell
the “tale of the tribe” in and through the story of an epic hero or wanderer who is,
first and last, the poet himself. In doing so, however, his poetic imagination ranges a
good deal further than Whitman’s, to embrace multifarious examples of humanity,
multiple ideas of order. There is a quest at the basis of the Cantos which, as Pound
suggests from time to time, can be likened to Odysseus’s ten-year quest in search of
his home. The difference – and it is a crucial one – is that this quest is unending,
involving the human being’s perpetual search for civilization, his constant attempts
to rediscover the springs of skill or delight. The content of the Cantos stretches out
far and wide in pursuit of appropriate models of language, thought, and conduct,
taking in, among many others, the Provencal and early Italian poets, founders of
modes of government and codes of behavior like Confucius and Jefferson, and some
of the examples of primitive religious feeling recorded in Ovid’s Metamorphoses.
And as it does so, Pound constantly reminds us of his Imagist background by relying,
not on an argument or a narrative in the traditional sense, but on a series of instances
and images that take fire from their placing – that quicken the reader’s mind into a
new sense of awareness by virtue of rhythm, phrasing, and juxtaposition.
It is not difficult to see how the Cantos grew out of Pound’s earlier work. The
imagistic form of discourse, the linking of ethics, politics, and aesthetics, the
founding of correct principles on correct language, and, not least, the belief that
poetry can offer a verbal equation for those moments when, metaphorically at least,
the human encounters the divine: all these are as basic to his poetic beginnings as
they are to the tale of his tribe. Nor is it difficult to see the connections with AmericanGGray_c04.indd 370ray_c 04 .indd 370 8 8/1/2011 7:53:51 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 53 : 51 AM