Making It New: 1900–1945 367Making it new in poetry
Of all the writers of this period, none revealed a greater commitment to the
imperatives of poetic modernism – a greater belief in the need, as he put it, to “make
it new” – than Ezra Pound (1885–1972). Pound’s commitment to poetry was total:
to poetry as a craft, as a moral and spiritual resource, and eventually as a means of
salvaging culture, redeeming history. “It is tremendously important that great poetry
be written,” he declared once, “it makes no jot of difference who writes it”; and this
disinterested belief in the poem – a belief that, not coincidentally, he shared with his
great American predecessor, Whitman – was proved by his dedicated support of
other poets. “Il miglior fabbro,” Eliot called him, borrowing the phrase from Dante,
“the better artist,” in recognition of Pound’s help in transforming The Waste Land
into the dense, allusive, and elliptical poem that we have today. Pound was the great
evangelist for poetry, and he was also the great assimilator: absorbing and, in the
best sense, imitating the work of other imaginations so as to make it available for his
own audiences. Starting from the premise that the state of art in a culture, and the
state of poetry and language in particular, is a gauge or symptom of its health, he
attempted to mediate the achievements of other, earlier periods – to offer the best
that had been thought and said in the past as an example and agent of recovery for
the present. This was not an antiquarian enterprise; Pound was not simply trying to
write “like” earlier poets, to borrow their idiom. His aim, rather, was to reclaim the
principles implicit in the work of other people: principles that were expressed, and
could only be expressed (for Pound was an Aristotelian, not a Platonist), in specific,
material terms, according to the language and conditions of an individual culture.
“Poetry is a sort of inspired mathematics,” Pound said, “which gives us equations ...
for human emotions. If one has a mind which inclines to magic rather than science,
one will prefer to speak of these equations as spells or incantations.” Human emo-
tions, for Pound, remained the same, but the equations or spells used to uncover
them altered with time and place. Each poet, in this sense, had to contrive his own
mathematics or magic; no matter how much he might derive from others, he had
ultimately to forge his own style – a voice that was more than just the sum of the
myriad voices he echoed.
Pound’s early poetry, in A Lume Spento (1908), Personae (1912), and Exultations
(1912), is saturated in the kind of fin-de-siècle romanticism he was later to abjure.
There are the familiar poetic subjects: songs in praise of a lady (“Praise of Ysolt,”
“Ballatetta”), songs concerning the poet’s craft (“Mesmerism,” “And Thus In
Nineveh”), love and friendship (“The House of Splendour,” “The Altar”), death
(“For E. McC.”), the transience of beauty and the permanence of art (“Ne Audiart”).
Not unrelated to these, there are some of the subjects that Pound was to make pecu-
liarly his own: the pain of exile (“In Durance”), metamorphosis (“The Tree”), the
“delightful psychic experience,” the ecstatic moment that is nonetheless perfect for
being just that, a moment (“Erat Hora”). There are elaborate conceits, images that
call attention to their own bravura, poetic inversions, self-conscious archaisms of
word and phrasing. What saves these poems, however, is Pound’s consummate senseGGray_c04.indd 367ray_c 04 .indd 367 8 8/1/2011 7:53:51 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 53 : 51 AM