Modern American Poetry

(^54) Hugh Kenner
had not a single Canto been finished, dispel any doubt of Pound’s being a
major poet.
It will be convenient to shorten our discussion by referring the reader
to Dr. Leavis’ tributes to Mauberleyin New Bearings in English Poetry.That
the poem moves him as it does, and that he registers his admiration so
adequately and with such economical power of inciting others to
comprehension, may, considering the intrinsic resistance of the Bloomsbury-
Cambridge milieu to all but certain types of subtly-discriminated moral
fervours, be taken as some gauge of the emotional weight, the momentum of
essential seriousness, massed in these seventeen pages of disrupted quatrains.
Yet the reader will infer correctly from this way of describing Dr.
Leavis’ dealings with Mauberleythat the highly selective vision of that honest
and irascible critic has screened out certain essential elements. Pound
emerges from his account as a man of one poem; the early work is
uninteresting, the Cantosa monument of elegant dilettantism. In Mauberley,
for a few pages, under urgent and unhappily transient personal pressures, he
found himself with precision and sincerity. Dr. Leavis’ view of Pound’s career
is introduced here as representative of the most respectable critical thought.
Setting aside journalistic opportunism of the kind that has no real concern
for letters, attacks on Pound are generally attacks on the Cantos.The isolated
success of Mauberleyis generally conceded. The dispraise even of Mr.
Winters is qualified somewhat at this point.
Mauberley,that is, is a tricky poem. It is difficult for men of a certain
training not to misread it subtly, to select from its elements certain strings
that reverberate to an Eliotic tuning fork. A taste for contemporary poetry
that has shaped itself almost entirely on Mr. Eliot’s resonant introspections
has no difficulty in catching what it has come to regard as the sole note of
contemporary poetic sincerity in:
For three years, out of key with his time,
He strove to resuscitate the dead art
Of poetry: to maintain ‘the sublime’
In the old sense. Wrong from the start—
It is easy to see how this chimes with such passages as:
So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years—
Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l’entre deux guerres—
Trying to learn to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure