PETER SHAW
113
to 71- the Chinese history and John Adams cantos. Both Eliot and Pound
continued not so much to be reviewed as ushered into the tradition. The
triumph of modernist principles had insured such a reception despite, or
rather because of the difficulty of their works: The
Quartets
and
Cantos
promised, like
Finnegans Wake,
to reveal their meanings with time. What–
ever the results of this attitude for other writers, in the case of Pound it
served to obscure the nature of what he had written .
Randall Jarrell's review of the twenty cantos published in 1940
presents something of an exception . Jarrell declared that Pound had "de–
teriorated."
Cantos
iII-LXXI," he wrote, "contains the dullest and prosiest
poetry that he has ever written. These Cantos are so bad that they would not
seem his at all, if they were not so exactly like the very worst portions of the
old ones. " Years later Donald Davie, in his book
Ezra Pound, Poet As Sculptor
(J
964), called the ten Chinese history cantos "pathological and sterile,"
and added: "The John Adams cantos ... are composed in the same way as the
Chinese History cantos that precede them." Jarrell, however, wrote that
Pound showed "a fine feel for anecdotes that carry the quality of a person or
an age" and Davie, though disappointed in the results, conceded that
Pound was carrying forward his "poetic method. " Significantly, neither of
these fine poet-critics quoted so much as a line of the Adams cantos, or
attempted to convey what he understood or felt about them.
Adams is the subject of Cantos 62 to 71. He is mentioned occasionally
in later cantos, notably in 94, and appears in Cantos 31 to 33, which are
mostly about Jefferson. In addition, Canto 34 is devoted to John Quincy
Adams, his son. Together with Canto 37, on Martin Van Buren, 31-34 and
62-71 are known as the American history cantos. In 62-71 one is faced with
eighty pages of unexplained prose quotations . These come from
The Works
ofJohn Adams,
and include passages from state papers, legal arguments,
diplomatic correspondence, and political treatises. The selections have no
apparent connection with the rest of the
Cantos
-not even the others on
American history . The Adams cantos are not in verse Garrell wrote: "the
versification of these cantos is interesting: there is none"), though they are
printed as poetry. Frequently, it is true, lines are indented, giving a look of
poetry to the page. And the most common device also has a poetic look: it is
the overrun line in which the latter part of a long sentence spills onto a
second line set at the right hand margin.
Comparison with Pound's source,
The Works ofJohn Adams,
reveals
;
that aside from rearrangement on the page, most changes
by
Pound involve
words omitted, abbreviated, lengthened, misspelled, misunderstood, or
put into slang. Pound's contributions are limited to occasional interpolated
phrases, exclamations, and foreign language tags (the Chinese ideogram for
