Peter Shaw
EZRA POUND ON AMERICAN HISTORY
The longest and most obscure section of Ezra Pound's
Cantos
has
until recently been all but ignored . His ten cantos devoted toJohn Adams,
when they are discussed, are described by Poundians as an extreme but
viable example of Pound's poetic method. Old fashioned readers, argue the
Poundians, are put off by chronological discontinuities and by apparently
obscure passages, but these fall into place in the harmonious design of the
whole work . This defense at once invokes the authority of Pound's private
terms for modernist poetics-vortex, ideogram, paideuma-and asserts
that he has written nothing but what can be understood with care by an
intelligent general reader. But aside from such generalizations, since publi–
cation of the Adams cantos in 1940 no more than six out of their twenty-five
hundred lines have been explicated, and these incorrectly. The case presents
a challenge not only to the reputations of Pound and his followers, but also
to some of the cherished dogmas of modernism.
The modernist movement came in two waves. The first, between about
1900 and 1910, brought new modes of expression in painting and litera–
ture. In the early 1920s the new movements-symbolism, cubism,
imagism-found their perfect expressions in two works on the literary side:
T.S . Eliot's
The Wasteland,
and James Joyce's
Ulysses.
Both appeared in
1922, soon after Pound's "Mauberley" and his first cantos. Then, after the
apotheosis of 1922, and while the pioneering works were still being
absorbed and made influential, their authors withdrew from the battle of
modernism in order to write at greater length in the idiom they had
established. This second wave of modernism saw the awed reception of
works in progress by the masters as they appeared over the next twenty
years . One could not hope to grasp all of the complexities until these works
appeared complete, and even then it promised to take years of explication
before critical evaluation could begin . In the meantime, the point was not
to criticize but to attempt
to
understand. In 1940, a year after
Finnegans
Wake,
there appeared "East Coker," Eliot's second Quartet, and Cantos 52
