by James Longenbach

from Southwest Review, Volume 94, Number 2

Ezra Pound was born in Hailey, Idaho, in 1885; he died in Venice in 1972. In between, he lived for extended periods of time in London, Paris, and the Ligurian resort town of Rapallo: each of these places he left with a feeling of having failed. Pound's lifelong ambition was (as he told his mother as a very young man) to write the epic of the West; the Cantos, left unfinished at Pound's death, is a record of the various forms this ambition would take. But this difficult, exasperating, beautiful poem was only one component of Pound's larger ambition, which was to rejuvenate Western culture—to make available to Western culture the full panoply of its neglected or unappreciated riches. The romantic poet Percy Shelley said famously that poets were the unacknowledged legislators of their time; Pound said that poets ought to be acknowledged legislators.

There is something narcissistic but also something noble about this ambition: it forced Pound to think of himself as someone stuck in a world that refused to acknowledge his power to make that world a better place—someone eternally exiled from the cultural richness to which he also aspired. One by one, every place where Pound lived disappointed him by refusing his efforts to transform that place into the cultural capital it deserved to be.

so that leaving America I brought with me $80
          and England a letter of Thomas Hardy's
          and Italy one eucalyptus pip

In these lines from the Pisan Cantos, written at the end of the Second World War when he was incarcerated at the Disciplinary Training Center near Pisa, Pound looks back most immediately to the moment when he was apprehended by Italian partisans and turned over to the United States government, which had indicted him for treason because of radio broadcasts in which he'd supported Mussolini's fascist government: leaving his house in the hills above Rapallo, Pound plucked a eucalyptus pip from a tree growing along the path. But despite the extraordinary circumstances surrounding this moment, Pound connects it to earlier occasions in which he was (in his own mind) similarly forced to emigrate. After having lived in London for a decade, Pound left that city for good in 1920, his ambition to make London the cultural capital of the world permanently deflated. Twelve years earlier, in 1908, Pound had abandoned the country of his birth with a similarly exasperated sense of America's refusal to inhabit its potential. He had eighty dollars in his pocket because on February 14, 1908, he had been fired from his job as an instructor of romance languages at Wabash College in Crawfordsville, Indiana.

From that moment on, Pound lived not in exile but at home. Or, to put it another way, Pound never left Crawfordsville. To leave London with a letter by Thomas Hardy was not only like leaving Rapallo with a eucalyptus pip; it was also like leaving Crawfordsville with eighty bucks. Pound's brief tenure at Wabash College was not an aberration in the long career of a brilliant, controversial artist; those five months determined the state of mind that would forever distinguish Pound's career, a feeling of standing at odds with a world to which he was also devoted. Crawfordsville, London, Paris—a place that did not resist Pound's efforts would have been, paradoxically, inhospitable.

Listen to the opening lines of the first of Pound's cantos, which were originally published in 1917 while Pound was living in London.

And then went down to the ship,
Set keel to breakers, forth on the godly sea, and
We set up mast and sail on that swart ship,
Bore sheep aboard her, and our bodies also
Heavy with weeping, and winds from sternward
Bore us out onward with bellying canvas.
Thus with stretched sail, we went over sea till day's end.
Sun to slumber, shadows o'er all the ocean.

This is Pound's English version of a passage from the eleventh book of Homer's Odyssey, a passage that Pound suspected was the oldest passage in Homer. The passage goes on to describe how Odysseus speaks with the spirits of the dead by pouring out a pool of sheep's blood; ghosts who drink from the pool are able to speak with human voices.

Pound wants us to think of this passage as a metaphor for his ambition in the Cantos, which he once defined as a "poem including history." The poem is populated by ghosts—the speaking presences of the dead—which Pound brings back to life. But Pound's medium is not sheep's blood but language, and Canto I asks us to think about the rejuvenating power of language in a particular way. Pound does not translate the passage directly from Homer's Greek; instead, he translates from a Latin translation of Homer's Greek that was made by the sixteenth-century Italian poet Andreas Divus. What's more, rather than translating the Latin translation into modern English, Pound translates it into a sonic approximation of Old English, the eighth-century language of "Beowulf" and "The Seafarer," which is now incomprehensible to our ears. In a line like "Bore sheep aboard her, and our bodies also," you can hear Pound emulating the starkly monosyllabic, alliterating line of Old English poetry: "bitre breostcaere gebidden haebbe," which translates literally into modern English as "bitter breast-cares abided I have."

Rather than making an unknown passage from Homer familiar to us, Pound is making a familiar passage from Homer strange again. Latin was already a dead language by the time Andreas Divus translated The Odyssey; his translation represents the effort of the Renaissance to reconfigure the classical origins of Western culture. By translating Divus's Latin translation into an archaic-sounding version of English, Pound is enacting a renaissance of the Renaissance. Rather than making translation a transparent vehicle through which we come to know an alien past, Pound wants us to become aware of the process of transmission. He wants us not only to remember Homer but to remember the ways in which we've come to know Homer over the centuries.

This notion of a renaissance of the Renaissance is crucial to what we've come to think of as Pound's modernism. "Make it new" was one of Pound's great mottoes, but the phrase mattered to him because he was talking about the past: in order for culture to progress, the past needed continually to be made available to us in new ways—made strange to us, so that we might inhabit its energies consciously. "A renaissance is a thing made—a thing made by conscious propaganda," said Pound when he was living in London in 1914.

But just a few years later, when the first cantos were published, Pound was again living in the Crawfordsville state of mind: he already felt that his own effort to forge a renaissance was doomed to fail. Pound published what he called "Three Cantos of a Poem of Some Length" in 1917, and the passage that now stands as Canto I (the passage translated by Divus's Latin translation of Homer's Greek) was originally the conclusion of Canto 3. In either position, the passage functions simultaneously as an emblem for and an embodiment of the intricate process of cultural recovery. But in its original position the Homeric passage appears to be not the point from which we begin but the culmination of a series of efforts to resurrect the energies of the renaissance for the twentieth century: the passage is preceded by a variety of more discursive or descriptive accounts of how one might, in dire circumstances, enact a renaissance of the Renaissance.

Listen to one of these accounts from the original Canto 2.

I knew a man, but where 'twas no matter:
Born on a farm, he hankered after painting;
His father kept him at work;
No luck—he married and got four sons;
Three died, the fourth he sent to Paris—
Ten years of Julian's and the ateliers,
Ten years of life, his pictures in the salons,
Name coming in the press.
                                    And when I knew him,
Back once again, in middle Indiana,
Acting as usher in the theatre,
Painting the local drug-shop and soda bars,
The local doctor's fancy for the mantel-piece;
Sheep-jabbing the wool upon their flea-bit backs—
The local doctor's ewe-ish pastoral;
Adoring Puvis, giving his family back
What they had spent for him, talking Italian cities,
Local excellence at Perugia,
                                        dreaming his renaissance,
Take my Sordello!

These lines are about Fred Vance and his father George Vance, the two best friends Pound had in Crawfordsville while he was teaching at Wabash College; they lived at 309 Plum Street. George Vance had entertained artistic ambitions but it was his son Fred who lived them, studying at the Art Institute of Chicago for four years and then for three more years at the Academy Julian in Paris. Subsequently he lived in Italy and France, but around the time Pound began teaching at Wabash in the fall of 1907, Fred Vance came home to Crawfordsville. Though he would return to France as a soldier in the First World War, Vance would find employment as a painter at home, decorating the walls of the local Elks Club and, more prominently, a theater in New Orleans and the grill room of the Grant Hotel in San Diego. At the time of his death he was a member of the board of directors of the Indiana Artists Club.

"I knew a man," begins Pound's passage about Fred Vance, "but where 'twas no matter." The location doesn't matter not because Crawfordsville does not matter but because the story Pound is about to tell could happen anywhere—Crawfordsville, London, Paris, Rapallo. For what Pound saw in Fred Vance was an image of himself: the artist who sets out to connect himself to the great artistic achievements of Western culture and extend those achievements, making them new—the artist who ultimately finds himself not at the center of a new renaissance but back in Crawfordsville, adoring the French painter Puvis, speaking of life in the Italian city of Perguia, and dreaming his renaissance rather than living it.

To this artist Pound says, "take my Sordello!"—by which he means: take my poem. Pound had discussed the thirteenth-century poet Sordello (as well as the Victorian poet Robert Browning's poem about Sordello) earlier in the 1917 cantos, and by handing that act of cultural recovery over to Fred Vance, Pound does two things. He honors Vance's effort to become a great painter; more poignantly, he associates Vance's failure to become a great painter with his own sense of immanent failure—his growing sense that everyone who attempts to build a renaissance will find himself in the Crawfordsville of the mind, dreaming of the renaissance he failed to make real. In a sense, Pound's cantos began partly as an elegy for the doomed effort the poem would nonetheless undertake for the next fifty years.

The story of Pound's five months at Wabash College is well-known to Pound's readers, but more as legend than as fact. Pound was hired by the president of Wabash, George Lewes Mackintosh, to teach French and Spanish in the fall of 1907; he made it through the first two trimesters of the academic year, though not without some predictable tensions. Pound smoked cigarettes, failed to show up regularly at chapel, dressed in a somewhat peculiar fashion, and held weekly soirées for the aesthetically inclined. Clearly Pound was playing the mildly outrageous artist, but the presence of Fred Vance should remind us that Crawfordsville was not unacquainted with sophisticated varieties of artistic ambition. Pound had company; he stood out in the way that he and his friends would again stand out in London and Paris. "He was half a brilliant—at least superficially brilliant—and interesting man," remembered one of Pound's colleagues on the Wabash faculty, Rollo Walter Brown. "Sometimes when he came to our house I was exceedingly glad to see him. But by the time he had stayed from four on Sunday afternoon till twelve or one at night, and had crawled all over the sofa and stuck his feet up against the wall and otherwise engaged in unnecessary contortions, I was at least glad to see him go."

Somewhat more serious tensions ensued—and here the story of Pound at Wabash gets a little murky; we may never know the whole story, or the wholly real story. Pound was living in a rooming house on Washington Street that was populated by traveling vaudevillians who performed in Crawfordsville's two theaters, the Majestic and the Music Hall. One of these vaudevillians was a female male-impersonator, for whom Pound cooked a small supper in his room, only to be surprised by two students who came knocking on the door. Pound was not reprimanded formally, but he did move immediately to more reputable lodgings, a house facing the Wabash campus at 412 South Grant Avenue. His landladies were the Misses Ida and Belle Hall. Three months later, on February 14, 1908, Pound wrote his father that he'd "had a bust up" and would be home in a few days. "Don't let mother get excited," he added.

Here is the official version of what happened, as told by James Osborne and Theodore Gronert in Wabash College: The First Hundred Years.

After reading late into the night [Pound] walked downtown through a blizzard to mail a letter. On the street he met a girl from a stranded burlesque show, penniless and suffering from the cold. He took her to his warm rooms. She spent the night in his bed, he on the floor of his study. He went off to his eight o'clock recitation in the morning. The ladies from whom he rented the rooms, the Misses Hall, went upstairs to make the bed and found the girl from the burlesque .... They telephoned the president, and a trustee or two. Shortly after there was a discussion between these gentlemen and Mr. Pound.

It seems likely that this account represents more or less the truth, since many years later Pound told his friend James Joyce—to whom he had no reason to lie—that the woman "wouldn't have 'tempted' Caliban in the height of his first spring rut, ma che!" But more interresting than the particular nature of Pound's transgression are the other details woven into this tale. Crawfordsville was a town that featured not only a painter educated in Europe but a steady stream of actors and actresses that included at least one female male-impersonator. And even if Pound's transgression was enough to force President Mackintosh to fire him, Pound did receive his full salary through the end of February—enough money, as he remembered in the Pisan Cantos, to put him on the boat to Gibraltar just one month later, on March 17.

It's at this moment, or perhaps even earlier, that the legend of Pound's time at Wabash begins to take shape. In its baldest form, the legend goes something like this: the great avant-garde artist was constrained, mistreated, by a narrow, parochial village of the American mid-west, and once that village expelled him, the great artist was liberated to undertake greater things in the great cities of Europe. I don't think this legend is right, and I don't think that Pound himself thought it was right—even though he sometimes played into the legend. "If ever anybody shuts you up in Indiana for four months," he wrote to his friend William Carlos Williams, "you will probably rise up and bless the present and sacred name of Madame Grundy for all her holy hypocrisy." Statements such as these were delivered in order to save face: Pound had failed at the academic employment for which his graduate work at the University of Pennsylvania had prepared him. His parents were embarrassed. But the passage from Canto 80—which equates the eucalyptus pip with a letter from Thomas Hardy and the eighty dollars from Wabash College—tells a different story. And even more viscerally, Pound's tender respect for Fred Vance tells a different story. The painter from Crawfordsville is presented in the early cantos not as a pathetic failure, but as a noble failure, an artist who had no choice but to live in exile, dreaming of a renaissance rather than living it. The fate of Fred Vance is not something from which Pound fled, it was a fate he coveted: it conferred on Pound an identity that would not change much over the next fifty years.

Consider one of the poems that Pound wrote while living in Crawfordsville: "Villonaud for This Yule," completed in the fall of 1907 and published the following year in Pound's first book of poems, A Lume Spento.

Ask ye what ghosts I dream upon?
(What of the magian's scented gear?)
The ghosts of dead loves everyone
That make the stark winds reek with fear
Lest love return with the foison sun
And slay the memories that me cheer
(Such as I drink to mine fashion)
Wineing the ghosts of yester-year.

As Pound's title suggests, this is a poem in the manner of the fifteenth-century French poet, François Villon. Already, Pound is working to build his renaissance, reaching back into the past, making it new, but also keeping it strange: the language of the poem is meant to feel archaic, distant from everyday speech. What's more, Pound is for the first time employing the complicated strategy he would perfect in the Homeric passage that became the first canto—a way of translating or adapting an earlier author that does not disguise but rather highlights the mediated process through which the past becomes the present. While Pound translates and adapts lines from Villon in this poem, he uses as a refrain a very famous line from a translation of Villon by the Victorian poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti: "Wineing the ghosts of yester-year." Rather than disguising the fact that he came to know about Villon through Rossetti, Pound wants to record such layers of transmission, embedding them into the texture of his poem—much as he wants us to read his Homer not transparently but slightly muddled by the screens of Renaissance Latin and eighth-century English. In the final version of Canto I and also in "Villonaud for this Yule" Pound is courting the ghosts of the past by embedding their language into the texture of his poem in the present.

Pound described his camaraderie with such ghosts in another poem written in Crawfordsville, "In Durance":

     I am homesick after mine own kind
And ordinary people touch me not.
                                    And I am homesick
After mine own kind that know, and feel
And have some breath for beauty and the arts.

Aye, I am wistful for my kin of the spirit
And have none about me save in the shadows
When come they, surging of power, "DAEMON,"
"Quasi KALOUN." S. T. says Beauty is most that, a
         "calling to the soul."
Well then, so call they, the swirlers out of the mist of my soul,
They that come mewards, bearing old magic.

But for all that, I am homesick after mine own kind
And would meet kindred even as I am,
Flesh-shrouded bearing the secret.

The "S. T." to whom Pound refers in this passage is the romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge; Pound quotes Coleridge's definition of beauty from an essay called "On the Principles of Genial Criticism," a definition derived in turn from Plato: beauty, says Coleridge, is a "calling on the soul, which receives instantly, and welcomes it as something connatural." Adapting this sense of beauty in his poem, Pound says that his soul recognizes the spirits of beauty because those spirits emanate from his soul: "the swirlers out of the mist of my soul" come "mewards, bearing old magic." But while this logic ought to render him perfectly self-satisfying, Pound feels exiled rather than complete. He wants to know not just spiritual emanations but "flesh-shrouded" souls, real people: "I am homesick / After mine own kind," Pound repeats, "that know, and feel / And have some breath for beauty and the arts." These lines might make Crawfordsville sound like the barren outpost of the legend, but where in this logic is the home for which Pound is sick? What would it mean for the author of poems like "Villonaud for this Yule"—poems driven by the conviction that the past must consciously be recovered—to be fully at home in the present, satisfied with the world as it is?

When Pound left the United States with his eighty bucks in 1908, he headed to Venice—the city where, more than any other place on earth, the past is inextricably and palpably woven into the texture of everyday life. Nothing in Venice is indigenous; everything is borrowed or pillaged or adapted from some other place and time. The great Victorian critic John Ruskin, from whom Pound learned a great deal, maintained that, unlike other Italian cities, Venice didn't really need the Renaissance because it had never ceased to be infused by Arab and Byzantine cultures that had themselves rejuvenated the classical origins of Western culture in multiple ways. This is true of the great instances of Venetian painting or architecture, but it's also true of what you might think of as any ordinary house on any ordinary Venetian street: the very stones have history—as if the city were a living version of the kind of culturally layered poem Pound tried to make in "Villonaud for this Yule" or the Homeric passage from the early cantos.

No wonder, then, that Pound could not stay in Venice: there was no possibility of deprivation there, no need to rekindle the energies of the Renaissance, no reason to write the kind of poems Pound was writing. By saying of his time in Crawfordsville that he was homesick after his kind, Pound was describing the state of mind that he required—a state of mind that he would replicate in London and Paris, cities that, whatever their riches, enabled Pound's work as cultural instigator as Venice did not. Pound left Venice after five months, saying that he wanted to head up to London in order to meet William Butler Yeats—the poet whom Pound would soon describe as "a specialist in renaissances." Pound aspired to that position himself, and the aspiration required a town in which he would by definition feel homesick for a home that did not yet exist.

Yeats seemed to Pound like a specialist in renaissances because of his work with other artists in the Irish Renaissance, an effort to resurrect and capitalize upon Ireland's cultural heritage in ways that give the Irish people not only cultural but political prominence. Many people thought of Yeats this way; the African-American writers of what came to be known as the Harlem Renaissance also looked to Yeats, specialist in renaissances, as a model for their work. But unlike them, Pound also craved the proximity of Yeats's prestige, and after arriving in London he quickly became part of Yeats's inner circle, eventually developing with Yeats a friendship whose intimacy excluded the circle, in part because Pound and Yeats would marry two women who were best friends.

But if you'd imagine that such an alliance with the man whom Pound thought of as the greatest living poet would make Pound feel at home, you'd be wrong. Consider two passages from Pound's translation of the Old English poem "The Seafarer," first published in 1911.

                               Lest man know not
That he on dry land loveliest liveth,
List how I, care-wretched, on ice-cold sea,
Weathered the winter, wretched outcast
Deprived of my kinsmen;
Hung with hard ice-flakes, where hail-scur flew,
There I heard naught save the harsh sea
And ice-cold wave.
.      .      .      .

                               Nathless there knocketh now
The heart's thought that I on high streams
The salt-wavy tumult traverse alone.
Moaneth always my mind's lust
That I fare forth, that I afar hence
Seek out a foreign fastness.

Pound is one of the most occasional of poets. Even when he is translating a poem, rather than writing his own, the translation is refracted through his own situation; the otherness of the foreign poem is absorbed into that situation, much as the otherness of Villon is mitigated by the language of Rossetti in "Villonaud for this Yule." So while Pound is attempting truly to emphasize the otherness of "The Seafarer" in his translation (you can hear him perfecting the modern equivalent for the Anglo-Saxon alliterative line he would subsequently employ in Canto I), he is also using "The Seafarer" to describe himself: a poet who in London is "deprived of kinsmen" and must seek out a "foreign fastness"—manufacture a renaissance—if he's ever going to feel at home. The Homeric passage that became Canto I says the same thing: Odysseus is told by the ghost of Tiresias that he must "lose all companions" on his journey home.

Pound's greatest achievement during the London years was his engineering of the Imagist movement, an avant-garde push for a poetry of intense precision and condensation, but in most of the Imagist poems Pound writes not of the feeling of camaraderie within that avant-garde movement but about the shallowness of village life and the longing for flesh-shrouded companions.

Come my cantilations,
Let us dump our hatreds into one bunch and be done with them,
Hot sun, clear water, fresh wind,
Let me be free of pavements,
Let me be free of printers.
Let come beautiful people
Wearing raw silk of good colour,
Let come graceful speakers,
Let come the ready of wit,
Let come the gay of manner, the insolent and the exulting.
We speak of burnished lakes,
Of dry air, as clear as metal.

The grammatical mood of the final two lines of "Come My Cantilations," published in the avant-garde magazine Blast in 1914, is deceptive, for the lines should say that we would speak of burnished lakes and dry air if only the true companions would appear to rescue us from the doldrums world of pavements and printers. "Come My Cantilations" is a beautifully made poem, subtle and sure-footed in ways that an early apprentice poem like "In Durance" is not, but it makes the same argument about London that the earlier poem made about Crawfordsville. "London is dead to deadish," said Pound when he abandoned the city in 1920. And as Dr. Johnson once said, the man who is tired of London is tired of life. Paris immediately seemed like another Crawfordsville: Picabia and Cocteau "are intelligent," Pound admitted, "which a damn'd number of Parisians aren't." Crawfordsville, London, Paris, Rapallo: Pound lived at home.

Home sounds less interesting, less exotic or challenging than exile. There is something chilling about the artist who never changes, who continually recreates the terms of his own failure so that he might enjoy a strange species of success. Over time, this logic isolated Pound from the world he also wanted to change; his aesthetic and political principles were pretty much set by the time he left London after the First World War, and his later fascism and anti-Semitism, deplorable as they are, also seem pathetic, for Pound seemed to be talking to no one but himself—or to a world that no longer existed except inasmuch as he was able continually to recreate it for himself.

But what makes this Pound's story poignant as well as pathetic is that it is a version of a very familiar tale. Who ever leaves home? Who is not shaped irremediably by parents, friends, teachers, the town, the school, the cotillion of overlapping, contradictory influences from whom our selves are woven? While living in London, Pound declared that his older friends W. B. Yeats and Ford Madox Ford were the two giants of the English language, and after four decades Pound's feelings did not change. In the Pisan Cantos he eulogized Ford and Yeats as great artists whom the culture did not appreciate sufficiently, beginning with a line from his own translation of the Anglo-Saxon "Seafarer"—as if he were by implication also commemorating his own doomed effort to bring a renaissance to literary London:

Lordly men are to earth o'ergiven
          these the companions
Fordie that wrote of giants
          and William who dreamed of nobility

Here again is the Crawfordsville state of mind, the elegiac sense of foreclosed possibility that honors the renegade artist by making his inevitable failure seem noble. These lines commemorate the artistic community Pound craved, mourned, but finally could not allow himself to experience. The fulfillment of the dream would deprive him of purpose, and the true community—one that included Fred Vance as much as W. B. Yeats—could not be found anywhere on earth.

About the Author
James Longenbach is the author most recently of Draft of a Letter, a collection of poems, and The Art of the Poetic Line, essays on poetic craft. "Ezra Pound at Home" is based on a lecture delivered at Wabash College on the occasion of the one hundredth anniversary of Pound's brief tenure there.

Southwest Review
Southern Methodist University

Editor-in-Chief: Willard Spiegelman
Senior Editor and Fiction Editor: Jennifer Cranfill