Ezra Pound: His Metric and Poetry by Eliot, T. S. (Thomas Stearns), 1888-1965

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

A word from our supporters: File extension FLAC

* * * * *

Bibliography Of By Ezra Pound Poems Prose Poems

Other Publications Poems Other Publications Poems Other Publications

Sur le Noel, morte saison,
Lorsque les loups vivent de vent ...

and the rest of that memorable Testament.

So much for the imagery. As to the "freedom" of his verse, Pound has made several statements in his articles on Dolmetsch which are to the point:

Any work of art is a compound of freedom and order. It is
perfectly obvious that art hangs between chaos on the one
side and mechanics on the other. A pedantic insistence upon
detail tends to drive out "major form." A firm hold on major
form makes for a freedom of detail. In painting men intent
on minutiae gradually lost the sense of form and form-
combination. An attempt to restore this sense is branded as
"revolution." It is revolution in the philological sense of
the term....Art is a departure from fixed positions; felicitous
departure from a norm....

The freedom of Pound's verse is rather a state of tension due to constant opposition between free and strict. There are not, as a matter of fact, two kinds of verse, the strict and the free; there is only a mastery which comes of being so well trained that form is an instinct and can be adapted to the particular purpose in hand.

* * * * *

After "Exultations" came the translation of the "Sonnets and Ballate of Guido Cavalcanti." It is worth noting that the writer of a long review in the "_Quest_"--speaking in praise of the translation, yet found fault with the author not on the ground of excessive mediaevalism, but because

he is concerned rather with the future than with a somewhat
remote past, so that in spite of his love for the mediaeval
poets, his very accomplishment as a distinctly modern poet
makes against his success as a wholly acceptable translator
of Cavalcanti, the heir of the Troubadours, the scholastic.

Yet the _Daily News_, in criticising "Canzoni," had remarked that Mr. Pound

seems to us rather a scholar than a poet, and we should like
to see him giving his unusual talent more to direct
translation from the Provencal.

and Mr. J. C. Squire (now the literary editor of the _New Statesman_), in an appreciative review in the _New Age_, had counselled the poet that he would

gain and not lose if he could forget all about the poets of
Dante's day, their roses and their flames, their gold and
their falcons, and their literary amorousness, and walk out
of the library into the fresh air.