Introduction 15nowhere near so dubious as it is in the Cantos. Confronted by a past poetic
wealth in figuration, Pound tends to resort to baroque elaborations of the
anterior metaphors. What he almost never manages is to achieve an ellipsis
of further troping by his own inventiveness at metaphor. He cannot make the
voices of Whitman and Browning seem belated, while his own voice
manifests what Stevens called an “ever early candor.”
I am aware that I am in apparent defiance of the proud Poundian
dictum: Make It New. Whitman made it new in one way, and Browning in
another, but Pound’s strength was elsewhere. Anglo-American Poetic
“Modernism” was Ezra Pound’s revolution, but it seems now only another
continuity in the long history of Romanticism. Literary history may or may
not someday regard Pound as it now regards Abraham Cowley, John
Cleveland, and Edmund Waller, luminaries of one era who faded into the
common light of another age. But, as a manneristic poet, master of a period
style, Pound has his deep affinities to Cowley, Cleveland, and above all
Waller. He has affinities also though to Dante Gabriel Rossetti, a permanent
poet who suffered from belatedness in a mode strikingly akin to that of
Pound. Poundian critics tend to regard Rossetti as a kind of embarrassing
prelude to their hero, but I certainly intend only a tribute to Pound in
comparing him to Rossetti. It is, after all, far better to be called the Dante
Gabriel Rossetti than the Edmund Waller of your era.
Pound, brash and natural child of Whitman and Browning, found his
idealized forerunners in Arnaut Daniel and Cavalcanti, Villon and Landor.
Oedipal ambivalence, which marks Pound’s stance towards Whitman, never
surfaces in his observations on Cavalcanti and Villon, safely remote not only
in time and language, but more crucially isolated from the realities of
Pound’s equivocal relation to his country and compatriots.
I find Whitman quite unrecognizable in nearly every reference Pound
makes to him. Our greatest poet and our most elusive, because most
figurative, Whitman consistently is literalized by Pound, as though the
Whitmanian self could be accepted as a machine rather than as a metaphor.
Many Poundians have quoted as evidence of their hero’s esteem of
Whitman a bad little poem of 1913:
A PACT
I make a pact with you, Walt Whitman—
I have detested you long enough.
I come to you as a grown child
Who has had a pig-headed father;
I am old enough now to make friends.