Ezra Pound and British Radicalism

Abstract

Listen

Translate article

E Z R A P O U N D A N D B R I T I S H R A D I C A L I S M L E O N SU R E T T E University of Western Ontario 1 . S. Eliot’s conversion to Anglicanism has long been perceived as a water­ shed in his literary career. Not only was his announcement of his Classicism, Royalism, and Anglicanism a dramatic event at the time, academic opinion has been nearly unanimous in dividing his poetic canon on both expressive and thematic grounds at Ash Wednesday. Even Lyndall Gordon’s recent and persuasive argument that Eliot was, from his youth, a religious sen­ sibility in search of an acceptable creed, cannot displace Eliot’s religious conversion from its central place in the curve of his literary career.1 No such neat bifurcation is present in the academic formulation of Ezra Pound’s literary career. On the contrary, the thrust of Pound criticism has been to discover some continuity of expressive features and thematic con­ cerns in a career that seems at first glance to be running off in several directions at once. It is not the intention of this essay, however, to deny the continuities perceived by such scholars as Hugh Kenner, George Dekker, and Donald Davie. Indeed, I have, myself, argued elsewhere for such con­ tinuities. Nonetheless, the effort to discover coherence in an apparent crazyquilt of verse styles, critical principles, crankish economic theories, and distasteful political affiliations has made it difficult to perceive the genesis and development of any of these components of Pound’s career. In partic­ ular, Pound’s economic and political opinions have not been properly dated, nor has the suddenness of his radicalization been appreciated. Pound had a conversion experience — in 1919 — but it was ideological, not religious.2 Any consideration of the shape of Pound’s literary career must, of course, begin with the inescapable and seemingly incommensurable datum of his life work, The Cantos. Begun in 1915, The Cantos absorbed virtually all of Pound’s original composition from 1920 until his death in 1972. Never finished, the poem was, nevertheless, never abandoned. Pound intended it to be the epic of the Modern Age, a poem worthy to take its place alongside Dante’s Commedia and Virgil’s Aeneid — if not the Homeric epics them­ selves. English Studies in Canada, ix, 4, December 1983 Pound believed that the epic was, at its heart, ideological. The questions it must answer are questions about men’s beliefs, institutions, and collective behaviour. All of the epics of the past, he thought, had expressed some widely held belief or ideology: for Homer it was the Greek paideia; for Virgil, the Roman Imperium; for Spenser, English Protestantism; and for Milton, Militant Puritanism. In 1915 the dominant ideology in the Englishspeaking world was the matrix of democratic liberalism and free enterprise economics. It was the ideology in which Pound — like all Americans — had grown up. But by the end of the Great War, men’s confidence in that faith was already beginning to be shaken. It was a time for elegy, jeremiad or mockery, not for epic. The three pre-eminent literary classics of the First W ar— The Waste Land, Women in Love, and Ulysses — surely belong to those categories. Paradoxically, the profound disillusionment occasioned by the First War did not discourage Pound from his overweening literary ambition — perhaps because the prevailing artistic doctrine of the time was that the artist was a man set apart, an “unacknowledged legislator” who saw clearly where others were muddled, blind, or hypocritical. Thus the confused states of men’s minds during the War and in the post-war years was a challenge and an opportunity for the poet to show the way. Although no one knew what the Modern Age was, they would when Pound finished his epic. Even though Pound began in 1915, for a good many years he was not at all sure what shape and direction his poem should take. Indeed, he did not publish any section of it — as opposed to individual cantos or small groups of cantos — until 1925. And even then, he...