BOOKS
MEDITERRANEAN MAN
EZRA POUND.
By
Donald Davie. New York. Viking Press.
$7.95.
In the Autumn 1956 number of
The Hudson Review
Yvor
Winters published a long essay called "Problems for the Modern Critic
of Literature." In a section on epic poetry he referred to Ezra Pound:
In our time we have had the
Cantos
of Ezra Pound, which may be an
epic or not, according to your definition. The work has no narrative
structure, such as that of
The Iliad;
it has no expository structure,
such as that of
The Divine Comedy.
It
thus avoids a variety of
difficulties. There are a few loosely related themes running through
the work, or at least there sometimes appear to be. The structure
appears to be that of more or less free association, or progression
through revery. Sensory perception replaces idea. Pound, early in his
career, adopted the inversion derived from Locke by the association–
ists: since all ideas arise from sensory impressions, all ideas can be
expressed in terms of sensory impressions. But of course they cannot
be: when we auemptthis method, what we get is sensory impressions
alone, and we have no way of knowing whether we have had any
ideas or not.
I have quoted the entire paragraph because Donald Davie's work in the
critique of Pound, unless I have misunderstood it, has been an effort
to
find an answer to Winters, particularly to that last sentence in which
Winters accused Pound of mistaking the eye for the mind. Davie took a
first shot at Winters in
Ezra Pound: Poet as Sculptor
(1965), where he
argued that Pound's arrangements of sensory impressions are designed
to express "not 'ideas,' some of which admittedly cannot be expressed
in this way, but rather a state of mind in which ideas as it were tremble
on the edge of expression ." What we get in Canto 17, for instance, "is
not quite the idea of Venice held in the mind of the Venetian builder
before he began to build; rather we have expressed the state of mind in
the builder immediately before the idea crystallizes." Davie's argument,
which seemed strong enough when I first read it, now seems inseture:
"trembling on the edge of expression" is itself a trembling expression
rather than a poised perception . I should have seen that Davie's
