An Anthology of Poems - Ezra Pound

But never a cry cried he. 

"Ballad Of The Goodly Fere" was the first poem by Ezra Pound that I read while at school. "The hounds of the crimson sky gave tongue" - well how vivid and stark can you get. The poem describes the crucifixation of Christ as seen by one of his disciples. Pound describes a Christ who is not the soft and mellow one that we are familiar with but assertive & resolute. It was also one of the few poems that Pound wrote in Rhyme. Unfortunately for me, I got put off with the Poet's obsession with Religion as a subject and gave up the idea of exploring him further.

It was only when I reached college and found that Pound had edited the Wasteland in addition to editing/forewording many important works of the time, did my interest in him revive. And this was how I came to chance upon "Selected Poems Of Ezra Pound" and set myself the Herculean task of reading it.

Pound was an early 20th century American poet who was responsible for the Modernist & Imagist movement in much of the 20th century poetry. He advocated the importance of poetic clarity and the use of open verse for enabling more freedom of expression.

Though Pound was born in the USA, most of his literary career was spent on the continent in London & Paris. Notwithstanding his fondness of Yeats, whom he famously considered to be the greatest living poet and his mammoth contribution to promoting the careers of many of his contemporaries, notably, Eliot, Joyce, Frost, Hemingway and our own Tagore, he himself remained a much under-read and underappreciated poet; chiefly on account of his difficult poetry its abstract imagery.

"Selected Poems" is very representative of his work and contains over 50 poems/selections from his early career (A River Merchant's Wife, Ballad Of the Goodly Fere, A Virginal) through his maturing years (Hugh Selwyn Mauberly) to his later career difficult works (read The Cantos).

Pound was greatly interested in Oriental (read Chinese & Japanese) poetry and borrowed the central idea of Imagism from them. Sample a few lines from The River Merchants Wife :-

I played about the front gate, pulling flowers.

You came by on bamboo stilts, playing horse,

You walked about my seat, playing with Blue Plums.

And went on living in the village of Chokan:

Two small people, without dislike or suspicion.

The sheer abundance of imagery that he manages to convey with these lines is staggering. You dont need to be told that the lines have a "Chinese" inspiration. The straight cut hair, the flowers, the bamboo stilts, Chokan all point in the direction. You know the narrator is young, you know its a suburban locale, you know she is being wooed, you know she'll have a long association, you know she'll keep blind faith and you know she'll likely be disappointed. So much is given away in these first few lines that the climax is almost pre-empted. Look at the thriftiness of words, its almost reminiscent of Hemingway in "Old Man & The Sea". There is very little of rhyming, if any and hardly any metre, except in ideas.

In Hugh Selwyn Mauberly, a turning point of his literary output, Pound talks about his attempts to pursue aesthetics in poetry in the initial part of his career in USA which he refers to as "a half-savage country".

He strove to resuscitate the dead art

Of Poetry; to maintain the "sublime"

In the old sense. Wrong from the start --

Later in the same poem he also rues the fast growing materialist economies and denounces the World War I as being responsible for the death of poetic sensibilities. The poem also marks his departure from London and subsequent refuge in Paris and other towns of the Continent that were more receptive to his his ideas of poetry.

The Anthology serves to whet the appetite of those who might care to go on to the Cantos, Pound's Magnum Opus; a complicated work of around 120 cantos containing his ideas/beliefs on administration, economics, and culture woven together by allusions to a broad canvas of historical events from a widely spread geographical base including the Oriental Asian Countries (China, Japan), the Mediterranean and north African culture, Italy, England and his native United States.

I would say at a certain level the works of Pound are very similar to something like the Prophet by Khalil Gibran, except that they have a more poetical base, are broader in their content and more vivid in their imagery.

The Open Verse is something that you cant help discussing for days. Not only does it absolve you of the headache of rhyming (afterall not everybody can be a Byron), it also enables better expression, as the choice of words is not bound by a metre/rhyme and therefore more accurate. On the flip side it also means that you could have a dime a dozen pseudo-modernists writing unmistakable prose in the garb of open verse.

Pound's poems have the remarkable quality of transcending the limitation of language to showcase the beauty of ideas. Which is where he is streets apart from other poets and which is why he is often difficult to comprehend, in spite of his seemingly lucid words. Also any reading of Pond necessitates access to an authoritative encyclopedia to read into his frequently mythological allusions. But should you care to take some trouble, he offers the most enchanting set of poems to exhilarate the poet in you. Afterall a poet is in thoughts, not in words.

Let me end with a few lines where he conveys the idea of the desultoriness of our existence in dashed simple words, brought together in a breathtaking way and with an effect which I suppose only he can accomplish :-

And the nights are not full enough

And life slips by like a field mouse

    Not shaking the grass

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