Ezra Pound: Posthumous Cantos edited by Massimo Bacigalupo review – fresh insights into an epic masterpiece

Ezra Pound’s life is worth several fictions, but one unlikely novel he turns up in is Elmore Leonard’s Pronto, where a Miami Beach bookie, Harry Arno, uses the money he has skimmed from his bosses to retire to the Italian town of Rapallo. Rapallo has obvious attractions for a small-time fraudster on the run – the food, the climate, the girls – but the real draw, we discover, is Pound. Arno was a US soldier in Pisa in 1945, where the poet, imprisoned for treason, was in an outdoor steel cage writing what would become the Pisan Cantos. They spoke, and Pound read Arno a couple of lines: “The ant’s a centaur in his dragon world. Pull down thy vanity …” Two decades later, Arno returns to Rapallo, and sees Pound, in his 80s and accompanied by his mistress of 50 years, Olga Rudge, in a restaurant. Arno speaks the lines back to him but Ezra “walk[s] right past to the can, doesn’t say a word”. This is 1967: it’s late Pound, the last Pound, the mythical, Lear-like old man, who wrote, in “Canto 116”, “my errors and wrecks lie about me”, and who, after a performance of Endgame, told Beckett: “C’est moi dans la poubelle” – that’s me in the dustbin.

Arno’s fascination with Pound’s poetry will resonate with readers of The Cantos: we recognise their vastness of conception, we may admire the grandeur and the hubris of a poem that sought, as Pound put it, to “include history”, that tried to describe the interconnectedness of things, to “make it cohere”. But what we are drawn to first is the fragmentary, the broken, the lyrical; the contemplative, almost-whisper of a voice that floats free of the rambling, shouty, megaphone epic that The Cantos became. As Joyce, Arno’s girlfriend, puts it: “He spent 40 years writing a poem that hardly anyone in the world can understand.”

What Arno experiences, defending The Cantos to his baffled friends, is what Eliot meant when he recommended that poetry “communicate before it is understood”. Massimo Bacigalupo, editor of these Posthumous Cantos, has a non-fictional Rapallo link: his grandfather and parents were friends of Pound and Rudge. This edition starts with a 1917 version of Three Cantos, and ends with “Lines for Olga”, written 1962-1972. These last poems are plangent, vulnerable, confessional, emerging like clear notes from the ruins. “Hers the heroism to build upon sand,” writes Pound:

The gondolas dying in

their sewers

& the grasshopper dead

on his stalk

& she, Olga, with serene

courage

bearing it all

finding beauty

where the last

vestige of it

still was

Many readers come to Pound via the “Drafts and Fragments” that end the collected Faber edition, attracted by the depth and the nakedness of their feeling. This book movingly adds to them, but also, at the other end, to our sense of the early Pound. In the first canto, Pound addresses Robert Browning, whose Sordello, set in 13th-century Italy, begins by invoking the shades of the poets who came before. Pound often does this (Eliot, too), displaying the classic modernist anxiety that there’s nothing left to say, and no new ways to say it. The problem is also one of form. He tells Browning: “the modern world / Needs such a rag-bag to stuff all its thought in”.

That sense of speaking to Browning as an equal is typical of Pound, who thought he was everyone’s contemporary, from Dante to Baudelaire via the troubadours: he was the bumptious American who arrived in England and modernised its poetry and buttonholed its poets, dead or alive, as if they were tweedy laggards in need of a bracing lecture. The early cantos are full of humour and zesty New World egalitarianism. They are exuberant, learned, modern, funny, and also, in narrative terms, followable, though already starting to strain at the joins. In the later cantos, with their great collages of economics, statistics, social and political theory, unglossed segments of Chinese, French, Greek and Latin, Pound obscured the connections that might help us make sense of his project. Like a map with destinations but no roads, the cantos appear frightening, fascinating, rebarbative and barely navigable. The exception is the Pisan Cantos, whose birth Arno witnesses in Pronto, which may be Pound’s masterpiece.

In his shorter, imagist poems, Pound sought to abolish all that was not direct; he disliked the pedestrianism of figurative language, those similes and metaphors that abstract and slow down perception. It’s a small leap from that to abolishing the stepping stones of narrative that help readers make sense of the cantos. History itself stops being linear, and becomes instead a sort of cubist affair, with peaks and troughs of civilisation and great leaders from different cultures and epochs (ancient Chinese, Renaissance Italy, medieval France, fascist Europe) existing together, joined across centuries and made to rhyme in Pound’s mind. Hence the Italian Renaissance poet and nobleman Malatesta rhymes with Mussolini, who recurs in a few cantos in this book – ambiguously remembered, and not without regret. Pound was not the only writer to fall under the Duce’s spell, but it shows that no amount of intelligence stops you being stupid, and that knowing history, despite the cliche, won’t stop you repeating it (and may even do the opposite).

Gertrude Stein called the young Pound a “village explainer”; by that token the middle-aged Pound was a global village explainer, with theories about pretty much everything from economics (his main alibi for anti-semitism) to farming, industrial relations, ecology and, fatally, modern politics. The old Pound, dramatic to the end, made a virtue of his wrongness, and claimed it with a sort of depressed glee that may or may not merit the epithet “tragic”: “The madness & cancer are nothing / the suffering is not vicarious. / One dies without saving the world – / & with Seneca: no gods in this / part of sky space”

Those who know Pound’s work will find plenty here to enlarge their sense of the poet who promised to “make it new” and mostly did. Those who don’t will find that this book compels them to read on and discover him. They will be heartened, maybe even persuaded, by Pound’s claim, in “Canto 116”, that “it coheres all right even if my notes do not cohere”.