Modern American Poetry

(^18) Harold Bloom
Cradle,” with Whitman their brother making a third, utter “three solemn
half notes” even as the loneliness of death came, for an instant, upon
Whitman’s son, Pound. Most powerful, to me, is Pound’s recall of
Whitman’s great image of voice, the tally, from “Lilacs,” “Song of Myself,”
and other contexts in the poet of night, death, the mother, and the sea. In
Whitman, the tally counts up the poet’s songs as so many wounds, so many
auto-erotic gratifications that yet, somehow, do not exclude otherness.
Pound, marrying the earth, realizes his terrible solitude: “man, earth: two
halves of the tally / but I will come out of this knowing no one / neither they
me.”
Kenner is able to read this as commerce between Whitman and Pound,
and insists that “the resources in the Canto are Pound’s, as are those of Canto
1.” But Homer, ultimate ancestor in Canto 1, was safely distant. Whitman is
very close in Canto 82, and the resources are clearly his. Pound does better
at converting Emerson to his own purposes, a canto later, than he is able to
do with Whitman here. Would the following judgment seem valid to a fully
informed and dispassionate reader?
Pound’s faults are superficial, he does convey an image of his
time, he has written histoire morale, as Montaigne wrote the
history of his epoch. You can learn more of 20th century America
from Pound than from any of the writers who either refrained
from perceiving, or limited their record to what they had been
taught to consider suitable literary expression. The only way to
enjoy Pound thoroughly is to concentrate on his fundamental
meaning.
This is Pound on Whitman from the ABC of Reading(1934), with
Pound substituted for Whitman, and the twentieth for the nineteenth
century. Pound was half right about Whitman; Whitman does teach us his
country in his century, but his form and his content are not so split as Pound
says, and his fundamental meaning resides in nuance, beautifully shaped in
figurative language. Pound’s faults are not superficial, and absolutely nothing
about our country in this century can be learned from him. He conveys an
image only of himself, and the only way to enjoy him is not to seek a
fundamental meaning that is not there, but to take his drafts and fragments
one by one, shattered crystals, but crystalline nevertheless. He had brought
the great ball of crystal, of poetic tradition, but it proved too heavy for him
to lift.