Modern American Poetry

(^58) Hugh Kenner
wringing lilies from the acorn’) of an unclubbable sort. The epitaph modulates
into grudging admiration for the pertinacity of this dedicated spirit—
His true Penelope was Flaubert,
He fished by obstinate isles;
Observed the elegance of Circe’s hair
Rather than the mottoes on sun-dials.
The first line of this stanza renders with astonishing concision an intricate set
of cultural perspectives. Pound’s voyages to China, to Tuscany, to Provence,
his battles with Polyphemic editors and his dallyings with pre-Raphaelite
Sirens, are transformed, as in the Cantos,into an Odyssey of discovery and
frustration, imposed, for jealous and irrelevant reasons, by the ruler of the
seas (a neat fusion of the chaotic state of letters with English mercantile
smugness; the ‘obstinate isles’ are both the British Isles and recalcitrant
aesthetic objectives.) The irony with which the British mortician of
reputations is made to utter unambiguous truths about artistic effort (cf. the
‘Beauty is difficult’ motif of the Pisan Cantos) at the same time as he vaunts
his national obstinacy and imperception, is carried on with the mention of
Flaubert, the ‘true Penelope’ of this voyage. For Pound, Flaubert is the true
(=faithful) counterpart, entangling crowds of suitors (superficial ‘realists’) in
their own self-deceit while she awaits the dedicated partner whose arm can
bend the hard bow of the ‘mot juste’. Flaubert represents the ideal of
disciplined self-immolation from which English poetry has been too long
estranged, only to be rejoined by apparently circuitous voyaging. For the
writer of the epitaph, on the other hand, Flaubert is conceded to be E.P.’s
‘true’ (=equivalent) Penelope only in deprecation: Flaubert being for the
English literary mind of the first quarter of the present century a foreign,
feminine, rather comically earnest indulger in quite un-British preciosity;
‘wrong from the start,’ surrounded by mistaken admirers, and very possibly
a whore; a suitable Penelope for this energetic American. England was at that
time preparing to burn and ban Ulyssesexactly as France had sixty years
before subjected Madame Bovaryto juridical process; it was the complaint of
the tribunal against Flaubert that he had spent pains on the elegance of his
Circe’s hair that might better have been diverted to honester causes.
The implications of line after line, irony upon irony, might be
expanded in this way; the epitaph concludes with a superbly categorical
dismissal of this impetuus juventusfrom the cadres of responsible literary
position: