Making It New: 1900–1945 369with a growing distinctiveness of voice and a greater alertness to the problems of
modern culture. A poem like “The Garden,” for instance, published in Lustra (1916)
shows Pound becoming distinctly “modern,” using unromantic similes drawn from
contemporary life. More to the point, it shows him developing his own language: a
combination of the mandarin and the demotic, the passionate, the satirical, and the
vividly self-critical, that serves to express both his own deracination and the
precarious, polyglot character of the society through which he moves.
So, in effect, Pound gradually added to his gift of melopoeia the two other
necessary constituents of good poetry, as he saw it: “phanopoeia,” which he described
as “a casting of images upon the visual imagination,” and “logopoeia,” “the dance of
the intellect among words.” As far as phanopoeia is concerned, Pound was helped,
not only by his formulation of “do’s” and “dont’s” for Imagists, but by his interest in
Japanese and Chinese poetry. His haiku “In a Station of the Metro” illustrates the
Japanese influence and how it helped Pound pursue brevity and imagistic indirection.
And the poems collected in Cathay (1915) reveal the importance of Chinese verse
for him. They were written after he had read the work of a distinguished Chinese
scholar, Ernest Fenollosa. Fenollosa pointed out that the Chinese language is made
up of characters, each simple character representing a “particular,” an image. Each
complex character is then made by combining simple characters; in this sense,
Chinese remains anchored in concrete, perceptual reality; it can never lose itself in
vague abstraction. Not surprisingly, Pound, with his hatred of abstract discourse,
jumped at this and, without knowing a word of the language, he began working on
a set of versions from the Chinese which, as Eliot said, made him “the inventor of
Chinese poetry for our time.” These are poems remarkable for their utter limpidity
of diction, the parallelism of line and rhythm, and the technique of intensification
by repetition whereby no phrase or image is memorable in itself but instead the sad,
slow dwelling on a dying cadence makes for the memorableness of mood. The
emotion generated by each piece is a matter of voice rather than statement. What
each says, its drama, is a product of movement and metaphor; typically of Pound,
the medium of a poem is its meaning.
Taken together, the poems in Cathay are not just a reinvention of a particular
language and culture, however, and are more than new chapters in the story of
Imagism. Their pervasive themes are loneliness, loss, exile – absence from home and
from loved ones through some accident, it may be, from human choice or historical
necessity. Which is as much to say that the voice of “The Seafarer” is recalled, albeit
in a different key; although Pound himself hardly begins to acknowledge it, these
pieces offer further impersonal and objective stories through which the poet can
express his feelings of uprootedness and isolation. In its own quiet way, each voice in
Cathay is a mask, a persona: just as, for that matter, the multiples voices in another,
very different poem are – Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, published in 1920. Mauberley has
been variously described as Pound’s departing address to England and his farewell
to aestheticism. But it could be more accurately described as a packed, allusive, and
notably modernistic look both at his own plight and the plight of modern culture.
In effect, the dance of the intellect in Mauberley is at once lively and complicated.GGray_c04.indd 369ray_c 04 .indd 369 8 8/1/2011 7:53:51 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 53 : 51 AM