PETER SHAW
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scored by five of these lines. In the earlier American history cantos Pound
emphasizes unconnected remarks about money by John Quincy Adams and
Martin Van Buren, along with their few mentions of the Jews.
Poundian critics have raised questions about the relationship between
the early American history cantos and the Adams cantos. Why do those on
John Quincy Adams and Martin Van Buren (34 and 37), precede rather
than follow the cantos on John Adams, who lived before them? And why
does John Adams, who is much less important than Jefferson in 31 to 33 ,
dominate 62 to 71 without reference to his earlier appearance? But these
questions , we are told, will trouble only sensibilities trained in old–
fashioned, chronologically arranged literature. Such readers are put in their
literal-minded places through invocation of the ideogrammatic method,
the vortex, or the promised revelation at the end of the
Cantos.
It seems
never to occur to the continuing champions of these methods of modernism
that their familiar litany is now seventy-five years old and that the sensibil–
ity which they present as embattled has been the accepted art language of
the century for over fifty years . In any event, no advanced literary concep–
tions are required to explain the anomalous discontinuity between the John
Adams of the early American history cantos and the John Adams of 62 to
71.
Pound, far from arranging and selecting from "historical documents"
in the American history cantos, used a single book or set of books for each of
them. In 31 to 33 he quoted from letters between Jefferson and Adams
appearing in
The Writings ofThomasJel/erson;
in 34 he quoted from a selected
edition of John Quincy Adams's diary, and in 37 he used a volume
containing Martin Van Buren's autobiography. These cantos were written
in the early 1930s. Later Pound wrote that it took him seven years
to
find a
set ofJohn Adams's works in Europe. By 1938 he had that set, and he used
it as his single source for cantos 62 to 71. If John Adams is dwarfed by
Jefferson in 31-34, then, it is because Pound is quoting from Jefferson's
works , which naturally contain more of jefferson's letters than Adams's .
Moreover, ifJefferson is forgotten in 62 through 71 it is because he was not
prominently before Pound in his source, Adams's works .
Professor Hugh Kenner, the best known and most influential Pound–
ian, established the terms of criticism for the Adams cantos in his
The Poetry
of Ezra Pound
(1951). There he explained that these cantos are "an applica–
tion to character of the method devised in
Mauberley
for rendering the
sensibility of an age. If we read rapidly in search of a narrative we shall be
very badly baffled indeed ." Noel Stock in
Reading the Cantos
(1967) expres–
ses some reservations about the Adams cantos but assures us: " there is never
any doubt where we are , or what we are doing even when we may be
