Ezra Pound's Literary Essays, or "the science of being discontented"

Literary Essays of Ezra Pound (1954) is a selection of Pound’s critical, scholarly, and ranting writings from say 1914 through 1934, heavily weighted to a glorious period from say 1916 through 1922 when Pound was reading everything, old and new, and writing about it with the greatest possible energy.  T. S. Eliot selected the essays, and while Pound’s criticism is no more insightful than Eliot’s – might be less, even – it is more fun to read.

So maybe sometimes Pound sounds like a crackpot.  Not that often, and Eliot protects him from his worst side.  By crackpot, I mean something like the sudden appearance, in a long, complex essay on Guido Cavalcanti, of Gabriele D’Annunzio, who is “[t]he only living author who has ever taken a city or held up the diplomatic crapule at the point of machine-guns, he is in a position to speak with more authority [about poetry!] than a batch of neurasthenic incompetents…” (192).

This is a late essay, from 1934, when Pound’s cracks are more visible.  Yet the very next page is full of insights about translating Cavalcanti, his own translations and D. G. Rossetti’s.  About poetic translation in general, really:

What obfuscated me was not the Italian but the crust of dead English, the sediment present in my own available vocabulary – which I, let us hope, got rid of a few years later.  You can’t go round this sort of thing.  It takes six or eight years to get educated in one’s art, and another ten to get rid of that education.

… Rossetti made his own language.  I hadn’t in 1910 made a language, I don’t mean a language to use, but even a language to think in.

It is stupid to overlook the lingual inventions of precurrent authors, even when they are fools or flapdoodles or Tennysons.  (193-4)

He is usually this casual, almost as if he is speaking.  He is naturally aphoristic.  “Beauty is a brief gasp between one cliché and another” (“Notes on Elizabethan Classicists,” 241) is one I like.  He means, he explains a bit later, historically.  “For every ‘great age’ a few poets have written a few beautiful lines, or found a few exquisite melodies, and ten thousand people have copied them, until each strand of music is planed down to a dullness” (243-4).

Pound’s demand to “make it new” is really to “make it great,” but with the assumption that who are we kidding the retreads of the old stuff, however skilled, will not end up in that “great” category.  In an early essay, “The Renaissance,” Pound lists “his own spectrum or table” of the greats, beginning with “Homer, Sappho, Ibycus, Theocritus’ idyl of the woman spinning with charmed wheel” (215), then moving on through the Romans and so on.  Catullus, “[n]ot Virgil,” a handful of his beloved Provençal poems, Dante and “The Seafarer” and Villon.

But not too much, really.  “A sound poetic training is nothing more than the science of being discontented,”  (“The Renaissance,” 216).  The poems that make us discontented with other poems, those are the great ones.  Different poems for each of us, of course.

Quite a collection.  Full of surprises, at the level of word, line, subject, and idea.

the substantial realities of Flatland itself - Edwin Abbott's Flatland

Italo Calvino’s Cosmicomics (1965), among my favorite books, sent me to revisit one of its Victorian precursors, Edwin Abbott’s Flatland (1884), which is not so much science fiction as mathematics fiction, or even more narrowly geometry fiction, which cannot be too big of a genre.  A square, a resident of the two-dimensional Flatland, describes a revelatory visit by a sphere, and his own journeys to the one-dimensional Lineland and the three-dimensional Spaceland, where I live.

I remembered – everyone remembers – the clever shifts in perspective and diagrams that help youngsters visualize the differences between the dimensions, even, for readers with mathematically imaginative gifts beyond mine, into the fourth dimension.

The short visit to the Pointland, “the Abyss of No dimensions” (Ch. 20), seemed especially brilliant to me, especially strange:  “It is; and there is none else beside It,” a Buddhist existence.  Calvino had primed me for this vision in his magnificent but rather different “All at One Point,” when all of existence, in the moment or eternity before the Big Bang, is contained in a single point yet is somehow also an Italian apartment building:

There was also a cleaning woman – “maintenance staff” she was called – only one, for the whole universe,  since there was so little room.  To tell the truth, she had nothing to do all day long, not even dusting – inside one point not even a grain of dust can enter – so she spent all her time gossiping and complaining.  (p. 44)

I had effectively forgotten the first half of Flatland, the description of the laws and institutions of the two-dimensional world, which is in a more heavily populated genre, the Lucianic satire, a cousin of Utopia and In Praise of Folly.  Flatland is, for example, a deeply sexist and class-bound society, where the women are lines, the soldiers triangles, and the priests and rulers circles (or approximate circles).  Is Abbott reinforcing Victorian sexism or satirizing it?  Who knows!  Someone might know, but not from the text itself.

I had also forgotten the surprising beauty of the end of Flatland.  The square has become a martyr of science, imprisoned and disbelieved for his visions, and has even begun to doubt his own ideas, which only return to him in dreams.

It is part of the martyrdom which I endure for the cause of Truth that there are seasons of mental weakness, when Cubes and Spheres flit away into the background of scarce-possible existences; when the Land of Three Dimensions seems almost as visionary as the Land of One or None; nay, when even this hard wall that bars me from my freedom, these very tablets on which I am writing, and all the substantial realities of Flatland itself, appear no better than the offspring of a diseased imagination, or the baseless fabric of a dream.  (Ch. 22, last lines)

But I had forgotten- I had forgotten so much – that Edwin Abbott was a Shakespearean scholar.  See The Tempest, Act IV, Scene 1.

Does anyone have a strong opinion about Charles Howard Hinton’s Scientific Romances (1884-6)?  A mild opinion?  Or other mathematical fictions?