The Music of Lost Dynasties: Browning, Pound and History

Abstract

Ezra Pound's acknowledgment of his debt to Browning, the only one of the major Victorian poets he admired, is usually understood to mean that he imitated the older poet's vigorous conversational style and used forms adapted from the dramatic monologue. But he was also indebted to Browning's example for the dominant mode of the Cantos, the fusion of poetry and history. Aristotle, in distinguishing between the two, had conceded that historical events might be appropriate poetic subjects if they corresponded with universals, and Browning and Pound both felt that their favorite historical periods, at least, had enduring significance. Both poets responded strongly to the mute eloquence of old books, objects, towns, and works of art. J. P. Sullivan has observed that Pound was so fully occupied with that he seemed to do his work in a musee imaginaire.' After the first of the Cantos had been published, Pound wrote to Margaret Anderson: I desire to go on with my long poem; and like the Duke of Chang, I desire to hear the music of a lost dynasty. (Have managed to hear it, in fact) .' 2 Pound's feeling for was clearly his own. But Browning's historical poems, especially Sordello, and, to a lesser extent, The Ring and the Book, seem to have shown him how historical materials could contribute to the renovation of poetry. Like Browning, he believed that certain aspects of the past reflected his own convictions with special clarity, and offered indispensable chances for demonstrating the cohesion of fact and poetic imagination. This approach to had strong support among the Romantics. In arguing that poetry is superior to story in A Defence of Poetry, Shelley criticized strictly factual accounts as the moths of just history because they omitted the per-