The Serious Poet

'… Mais d'abord il faut etre un poete', as MM Duhamel and Vildrae have said.
                        - Ezra Pound. (Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, p. 9.)

Introduction

The reappearance of the lost manuscript of The Waste Land caused amazement, wonder, and, in some cases indignation. What had previously emerged from letters now become unmistably clear: Pound's influence on the long poem had been significant - lines were scrapped, passages removed or kept in, epigraphs changed and so forth. Some critics have deplored Pound's severe cutting, being of the opinion that a great poem could have been even greater. Other critics say that the poem would just have been bigger and point out that Eliot was free to take Pound's advice or leave it. Some of the excised sections have grown into complete and independent poems, such as "The Hollow Men" which has developed from the section called Dream Songs; other fragments published more or less as they were when Pound suggested them out of The Waste Land. For some, this is evidence that Eliot regretted the loss of the passages, or did not in fact agree with Pound but submitted to his authority nevertheless. There are other critics who will point out that by doing so, Pound strengthened the poem considerably; Hugh Kenner, in The Invisible Poet, implies that by cutting out all passages that did not attain the highest form of intensity, Pound improved the overal quality of the poem, and furthermore discovered a unity in the long fragmentary poem which Eliot himself did not recognise at first, having been lost in creating a complicated and associative stream of consciousness that built on Browning's experimentation with the dramatic monologue and the concept of finiteness. Critics of this idea, however, will say that the unity was never meant to be there. There are even critics who do not see a unity in the poem in its present form.

One important side effect of this extensive discusion, however, is that more attention has since been paid to Pound's influence on Eliot as a friend and critic: Pound's successful introduction of both vers libre in general and T.S. Eliot poetry in particular to the English and American public. Then more first drafts appeared with corrections, comments, and suggestions in Pound's hand. Memories of 'literary sessions' start popping up here and there among the criticism - comments from interviews, anecdotes, memories, about how and when the idea to use the quatrain form arose. Wyndham Lewis remembers that although certainly there are certianly links with Prufrock, technically, "Gerontion" is "school of Ezra". Southam, who's greatest offense is producing an excellent guide without a clear attribution of sources, attributes the inspiration for a whole poem to Pound: the "Burbank" poem. Slowly but steadily, a more complete picture of the literary friendship between the two men stumbles into the critical daylight, undoubtedly having taken so long partly because of Pound's fascist faux pas in the second World War.

One large area that thus far remains unexplored, however, is the technical one. The interest for the technical aspect of poetry may be waning in contemporary criticism, but we might nevertheless wonder what Wyndham Lewis meant precisely when he said that Gerontion was "school of Ezra"?

In the rest of this section, I will try to make an overview of Pound's most prominent and important ideas - in short, to provide a little pamphlet which recreates this "school of Ezra", which behests more than imagism or vorticism alone. While doing so, I have focussed my research primarily on the Literary Essays from Ezra Pound (F&F, 1954), which T.S. Eliot has compiled and edited and to which he wrote an introduction. The collection is very suitable for the task at hand:

the editor ... wished to regard the material in historical perspective, to put a new generation of readers, into whose hands the earlier collections and scattered essays did not come when they were new, into a position to appreciate the central importance of Pound's critical writing in the development of poetry during the first half of the twentieth century.
...
I hope, furthermore, that this volume will demonstrate that Pound's literary criticism is the most important criticism of its kind. Of a very important kind - perhaps the kind that we an least afford to do without… (Literary Essays, p. x)

Eliot himself alots Pound's critical writing a role of "central importance" in the development of modernist poetry; already not uninteresting in itself, for any scholar who wishes to ascertain Pound's influence on Eliot, the latter poet's own perspective on Pound's historical importance in the field of literature is extremely interesting; after all, can it ever be wholly impartial? It will be Eliot's appreciation of Pound's importance, not anyone else's and therefore we will with great interest read what Eliot has to say about why Pound's crticism is 'vital':

1. That Pound has said much about the art of writing and of writing poetry in particular, that is perminantly valid and useful. Very few critics have done that.
2. That he said much that was peculiarly pertinent to the needs of the time at which it was written.
3. That he forced upon our attention not only individual authors, but whole areas of poetry which no further criticism can afford to ignore. (ibid., p. )

Fourty-five years later, we can ourselves ask a few questions, such as whether what Pound wrote in the first half of this century is still valid and useful today. Undoubtedly many a critic will have done without these areas of poetry and not think he or she is any worse for having ignored Pound. The millions of poets that the English language is rich today will think they have done perfectly well without Ezra Pound and his ideas. Nevertheless, Eliot's second point is very important to any investigation not only of modernist poetry in general, but particularly of Eliot's own poetry.

Due to the fragmentary nature of Pound's writings, an aspect of his critical work which Pound himself recognised, I have made an attempt to create a more coherent whole. If by doing so I have reconstructed a unity that was never there, I hope at least to have made a convincing argument of the kind of unity that Eliot could see in Pound, just like Pound saw in The Waste Land.

I. The Serious Artist - the Artist as Scientist

The subject which the artists study is man. This subject he should treat with respect and with care. Does he follow the method of the scientist, his artistic 'reports' will be true, reliable, and lasting. He will have used sufficient amounts of data, for instance like the biologist who carefully observes "over 100 cultures from the secretions of the respiratory tracts of over 500 patients and 30 nurses and attendants." Then, he treats this data with respect: "The results of each observation must be precise and no single observation must in itself be taken as determining a general law, although after experiment, certain observations may be held as typical or normal." (Literary Essays, p. 46) As a result, he will produce good art.

If he follows the method of the theorist, basing his report on single observations or on his own wishes and desires, he will produce bad art. Bad art is immoral and should be punished, for:

If a scientist falsifies a report either deliberately or through negligence we consider him as either a criminal or a bad scientist according to the enormity of his offence, and he is punished or despised accordingly. (Literary Essays, p. 43)

Therefore, an artist will base his report on a number of careful observations, making perhaps only a few discoveries in his life, in any.

The life of the serious artist is not easy. Whereas a serious scientist such as Marconi is thrilled with the discovery of, for instance, radiowaves, and so are his fellow scientists, "the public so dear to the journalistic heart, is far more concerned with the shareholders in the Marconi company." The problem for the artist is possibly even bigger, for his subject of study is at the same time often his audience. If his diagnosis of the aegrum vulgus is that his audience cannot read, he will have a hard time making himself understood in writing and may have to devise a sign-language. If he cannot, fortunatetly, the results of the serious artist are durable:

The permanent property, the property given to the race at large is precisely these data of the serious scientist and of the serious artist; of the scientist as touching the relations of abstract numbers of molecular energy, of the composition of matter, etc.; of the serious artist, as touching the nature of man, of individuals. (ibid., p. 47)

These results, carefully recorded in his art, can hence be of avail to another scientist. "As there are in medicine the art of diagnosis and the art of cure, so in the arts, so in the particular arts of poetry and of literature, there is the art of diagnosis and there is the art of cure." (ibid., p. 46) It is therefore that the serious artist shall study with care the good work that has stood the test of time, re-evaluating and learning the processes, methods, observations and suggested cures of the past. After all, "the scientist does not expect to be acclaimed as a great scientist until he has discovered something. He begins by learning what has been discovered already. He goes from that point onwards."

A small discussion of two of Pound's examples of such anthropoligical observations will further elucidate matters:

If one finds it convenient to think in chronological cycles, and wants to 'relate literature to history', I suggest the three convenient 'breaks' or collapses. The fall of Alexander's Macedonian empire; the fall of the Roman empire; the collapse of Italy after 1500, the fall of Lodivico Moro, and the sack of Rome. That is to say, human lucidity appears to have approached several times a sort of maximum, and then suffered a set-back. (ibid., p. 40)

Here we see the serious artist at work. He makes observations, about literature and history; he gathers his evidence, makes generalisations, and presents a diagnosis. Of course, a great number of observations that went into this investigation have not made it into this report or were left implicit. It is now our task to verify the observation independently. If we accept the diagnosis, we can proceed to look for a cure, should there be any. Perhaps we can study the three respective breaks in more detail and attempt to learn the cause of this set-back, so that we may prevent or delay such a set-back in our own future.

The second observation is more specific, and clearer:

consider the Victory of Samothrace and the Taj of Agra. The man who carved the one and the man who designed the other may either or both of them have looked like an ape, or like two apes respectively. They may have looked like other apelike or swinelike men. We have the Victory and the Taj to witness that there was something within them differing from the contents of apes and of other swinelike men. Thus we learn that humanity is a species or genus of animals capable of a variation that will produce the desire for a Taj or a Victory, and moreover capable of effecting that Taj or Victory in stone. We know from other testimony of the arts and from ourselves that the desire often overshoots the power of efficient presentation; we therefore conclude that other members of the race may have desired to effect a Taj or a Victory. We even suppose that men have desired to effect more beautiful things although few of us are capable of forming any precise mental image of things, in their particular way, more beautiful than this statue or this building. So difficult is this that no one has yet been able to effect a restoration for the missing head of the Victory. At least no one has done so in stone, so far as I know. Doubtless many people have stood opposite the statue and made such heads in their imagination. (ibid., p. 44)

Again this is a diagnosis. We have a statue and a building of great beauty, effected by men who do not look like educated white Englishmen. One of them probably looked like an Indian, or perhaps a Pers or a Turk. The other possibly like an ancient Greek, or an African. Nevertheless, in both of these men of different races was the desire for the creation of a beautiful object, and moreover the capability of effecting this beautiful object in stone. If we look at the example more closely, however, we can also see a combination of diagnosis and cure at work behind this diagnosis. Behind the references to ape and swinelike men there is unmistakably Pound's observation of the folly of many of his contempories over-enthusiastic embracement of Darwin's theory of evolution as a means to deprecate other races. His cure is the observation of the beauty that these so called swinelike and apelike people can produce.

The art of cure is also called ethics and practiced by several people, including a number of them who are not fitted for the task at hand, because their methods are unsound. An example of such a criminal is the social theoretician, an anthropological disease of which the English writers about sex are the most prominant symptoms:

"The theorist, and we see this constantly illustrated by the English writers on sex, the theorist constantly proceeds as if his own case, his own limits and predilictions were the typical case, or even as if it were the universal. He is constantly urging someone else to behave as he, the theorist, would like to behave." (ibid., p. 46)

The serious artist will do no such thing. The serious artist will collect his data and concern himself with producing an efficient representation of this data. This data may be anything - it may be the artists own desire, or hate, or indifference, towards a certain observation, idea, concept or image - but the serious artist will always present it as such: an object of his own desire or hate. He will not force his own behaviour on that of someone else, like the false theorist would do. A serious artist, like a serious scientist, will present his diagnosis, or his cure, or both, and the reader will be free to take or leave this diagnosis or cure.

As such, the best data for anthropological studies, for ethics, for the teaching of morality, for the determination of social norms, is good art. For good art "bears witness of and define for us the inner nature and conditions of man." (ibid., p. 4). And a final warning

In the writers of the duo-cento and early tre-cento we find a precise psychology, embedded in a now almost unintelligible jargon, but there nevertheless. If we cannot get back to these things; if the serious artist cannot attain this precision in verse, then he must either take to prose or give up his claim to being a serious artist. [!] (54)

Or, at leat, the artist may demonstrate that he has made a conscientious effort to reach this goal, and if he failed then by adhering to the strictures that a serious artist should oppose to himself, he will have paved the way for a more successful attempt by one of his successors.

In short, the serious artist mirrors himself to the serious scientist, in method of observation and research. He will study the work of his ancestors with great diligence; he will make his observations with accuracy and care.

II The Problem of Presentation - The Serious Artist's Implements

So, the young but serious artist commences his long journey with his eye opened. Left and right he makes observations. Perhaps he notices that while there is poverty and children die of hunger, the Bishop of London's encourages "this sort of increase" among his poor subjects. He might observe that as such the desires of the Bishop for more influence are projected onto his ethics rather than that he bases his government on careful scientific observation. He might contrast this with the shady activities of the souteneur, and wonder which one of the two is the more detestable (c.f. ibid., p. 42) After making a few more such observations and reading up on the literature so far produced by other serious artists and scientists, the serious artist wishes to present his results in the proper manner. What to do?

First of all, the serious artist must divorce himself (again) from the concerns of the public opinion. The public "will not consider the 'problem of style'. They want 'The value of art to life' and 'Fundamental issues'" Nevertheless, for the serious artist style is immensely important. He wishes to communicate his observations to his readers, current and future, and to his fellow artists. He desires to present his image with the maximum possible clarity, but stumbles across the boundaries of his material: language.

Fortunately for him, the serious artist is not alone:

Man desires to communicate with his fellows. He desires an ever increasing complicated communication. Gestures serves up to a point. Symbols may serve. When you desire something not present to the eye or when you desire to communicate ideas, you must have recourse to speech. Gradually you wish to communicate something less bare and ambiguous than ideas. You wish to communicate an idea and its modifications, an idea and a crowd of its effects, atmospheres, contradictions. You wish to question whether a certain formula works in every case, or in what per cent of cases, etc. etc. etc. you get the Henry James novel. (ibid., p. 51)

All the litterati have the same problem, and will have tried to deal with this problem in increasingly advanced manners. They will occasionally make a new invention, a new way of saying something, and just like the discoveries of a physicist these inventions are usually of lasting usefulness. Again the study of other sciences will aid the serious artist in taking stock of his precedents:

We apply a loose-leaf system to book-keeping so as to have the live items separated from the dead ones. In the study of physics we begin with simple mechanisms, wedge, lever and fulcrum, pully and inclined plane, all of them still as useful as when they were first invented. We proceed by a study of inventions. We are not asked to memorize a lot of the parts of a side-wheeler engine. (ibid., p. 18-9)

Similarly, throughout the history of poetry, there are "simple discoveries, clearly marked", discovered by a few men of genius in each historical age of literature. The bulk of the rest of the works consists of followers who further experiment with the fine details of the new principle, who wish simply to understand the new invention, or find it as an indispensible tool for presenting their own images or observations in other fields.

Pound has proposed, several times, to produce a work that contains a historical overview of these inventions, but the usual problems presented themselves and he could not overcome them; most notably, there were fears with publishers that such a revaluation of the past would also devaluate the "thousands of pounds sterling in electro-plate" (ibid., p.18). The serious artist will do well to mark his words, that "against ignorance one might struggle, and even against organic stupidity [universities, TLS], but against so vast a vested interest the lone odds were too heavy." Pound departed for the banks of the Seine, later followed by Ulysses, where he proceeded his study of inventions, producing report after report. Since however this work could not be completed (although there exist some timid attempts today), the serious artist will have to look himself at the work of his predecessors to see what he finds useful, or what has proven its usefulness over the years.

This research may lead the serious artist to the very beginning of speech: with his first cry, the first man produced a sound which balanced the emotional content of his sound perfectly with the vocal quality of his sound, both of which, however, were fairly rough and simple. Since then, an ever increasing desire for more subtle statements has resulted in an ever increasing complexity of utterances:

You begin with the yeowl and the bark, and you develop into the dance and into music, and into music with words, and finally into words with a vague adumbration of music, words suggestive of music, words measures, or words in a rhythm that preserves some accurate trait of the emotive expression, or of the sheer character of the fostering or parental emotion. (ibid., p. 51)

Since the primeval scream, the complexity of vocal expression has developed such that the variety of detail and range of expression have expanded immensely. This has positive sides - a wider range of detailed expresseion - but it also has become easier to make mistakes. One such mistake is to take three pages to say nothing; it is, in a sense, the cry wolf of the stone age transposed to modernist modernity. The most efficient way of saying nothing is to keep quiet. The serious artist will have to study and make as best and as appropriate a use as he can of the possibilities of his medium.

One of the resulting forms of the ongoing development from the bark to the variety of forms that the serious artist can present his observations in is, as noted before, the Henry James novel. Another such form, is the poem. The serious artist must not mistake these two forms as completely different categories of science. The poet can learn from prose as well as from poetry something about effective ways of expression, or the presentation of images, as well as images themselves. A fluid line runs from one extreme to the other, but the fundamental principles are the same; each has to use words, and each wants to say something clearly and effectively in its own category. If there is a difference, "if the two arts must be divided" then Pound suggests the following distinction:

In the verse something has come upon the intelligence. In the prose the intelligence has found a subject for its observations. The poetic fact pre-exists. It is precisely because of this fustian that the Parnassiads and epics of the eighteenth century and most of the present-day words of most of our contemporary versifiers are pests and abominations. (ibid., pp. 53-4)

In Pound's opinion, prose is the medium for the intellect who wishes to concern himself with something intellectually, and premeditatedly. This is "the conscientious formulation" of a fact or an observation. The poetic fact, on the other hand, creeps up on the artist from behind, as it were, a side effect of life - something which dawns upon the poet, and 'will out' (54). To facilitate this 'willing out' and make it more effective, there is the "labour foregoing" - the work of the poet who has been caught by a stealthy poetic fact and now seeks to find the most efficient way of expressing that poetic fact, which will in most cases be in poetry, though not in all.

These distinctions, finally, lead to two important categories of serious artists: (ibid., p. 53):

1. The specialist, who concerns himself with "the patient testing of the media, the patient experiment which shall avail perhaps the artist himself, but is as likely to avail some successor."
2. The dilettante, who wishes as much to preserve items from the past as present something completely new to his audience. He "has no axe to grind for himself. If he be artist as well, he will be none the less eager to preserve the best precedent work. He will drag out 'sources' that prove him less original than his public would have him."

These are not mutually exclusive professions. On the contrary, under ideal circumstances a serious artist should try to be both. Only thus can he set out to create 'good', and eventually perhaps even 'great' art.

III The Four Forms

When this rhythm, or when the vowel and consonantial melody or sequence seems truly to bear the trace of emotion which the poem (for we have now come to the poem) is intended to communicate, we say that this part of the work is good. And 'this part of the work' is by now 'technique'. That 'dry, dull, pedantic' technique, that all bad artists rail against. It is only a part of technique, it is rhythm, cadence, and the arrangements of sounds.

In this section, we will go into some of the details of this 'dry, dull, pedantic' technique.

From the first scream onwards, four important categories of use have developed. Although they are valid for other 'forms' in which language manifests itself, we will look at them from the perspective of poetry. After all this what both Pound and Eliot themselves were most interested in.

The following main division into four forms in which the poetic aspect can express itself are taken from a later work than "The Serious Artist" (1913). As however Eliot places them before that section and as all Pound's concepts fit in neatly into that greater scheme, and as it is elsewhere implied that a number of these comments have been made before scattered in Pound's many other articles and pieces, I have decided to use that division here.

Many of the principles gathered here derive from Pound's "don'ts for imagists", rules which he start setting down in the summer of 1912 together with Richard Aldington and "H.D." There must, however, be no mistaking that the literary movements, when Pound was part of them, were mostly Pound's own poetic ideals and most of these lasted much longer than the trendy names of Imagism and Vorticism that lent expression to them.

To the four forms, then:

Melopoeia - "wherein the words are charged, over and above their plain meaning, with some musical property, which directs the bearing or trend of that meaning."

This is what Pound referred to earlier as "rhythm, cadence, and the arrangements of sounds." It is by far the most technical aspect of poetry - what levers, switches and pullies are to the fabrication of machinery, spondee, rhyme and caesura are to the composition of poems. Let the serious poet, however, not look down on this serious aspect of his craft; for, as was Pound's credo, "Technique ... is the test of a man's sincerity." (ibid., p. 8.)

The main consideration is that of the relationship between meaning and sound - although each can be studied in separation, the ultimate target is a combined effect.

A poem is always a tension between constraint and chaos. The spine of a poem is rhythm - a kind of beat from which can then be produced marked variations.

The sequence of the metronome is solitary confinement. The absence of rhythm altogether is anarchy. Inbetween there is the musical phrase. That is, of course, not to say that the poem cannot be written against a metronome, but the metronome can only serve as a rough pencil sketch of the outline for the musical phrase. Like the musician, the poet will consequently have to produce variations that vary the tempo, raise or lower the volume, change the key and other such effects. Here is a list of elements that the serious poet should consider, regrouped from the "don'ts for imagists":

• Let the neophyte know assonance and alliteration, rhyme immediate and delayed, simple and polyphonic, as a musician would expect to know harmony and counterpoint and all the minutiae of his craft.
• Don't chop your stuff into separate iambs. Dont' make each line stop dead at the end, and then begin every next line with a heave. Let the beginning of the next line catch the rise of the rhythm wave, unless you want a definite longish pause.
• Naturally, your rhythmic structure should not destroy the shape of your words, or their natural sound, or their meaning. It is improbable that, at the start, you will be able to get a rhythm structure strong enough to affect them very much though you may fall a victim to all sorts of false stopping due to line ends and caesurae.
• Let the candidate fill his mind with the finest cadences he can discover, preferably in a foreign language … Let him dissect the lyrics of Goethe coldly into their component sound values, syllables long and short, stressed and unstressed, into vowels and consonants.
• There is, however, in the best of verse a sort of residue of sound which remains in the ear of the hearer and acts more or less as an organ base.
• A rhyme must have in it some slight element of surprise if it is to give pleasure; it need not be bizarre or curious, but it must be well used if used at all.
• In short, behave as a musician, a good musician, when dealing with that phase of your art which has exact parallels in music. The same laws govern, and you are bound by no others.

An important aspect in producing such effects is the concept of quantity, which Pound also uses to underline the correspondences between the art of poetry and the art of music. Quantity is the idea that syllables have different lenghts and that these differences can be employed to devise a sort of rhythmical patterning. The concept derives from classical study, but for Pound it meant much more and his observations more than verge on the phonological. The concept of quantity is closely linked with that of vers libre and the discussion that went on about the format in Pound's days, when the form was young and considered unpoetical.

As to quantity, it is foolish to suppose that we are incapable of distinguishing a long vowel from a short one, or that we are mentally debarred from ascertaining how many consonants intervene between one vowel and the next.

Few phonologists will disagree with Pound today as extensive research in their field has demonstrated the capability of speakers to distinguish between such aspects as duration, voicing, friction, nasalisation, as well as the combined effect of all these together with the place of articulation and the position of the tongue. A simple three-word example derived from the book that taught me the inns and outs of English pronunciation (Pronunciation for Student Teachers, C. Gussenhoven & A. Broeders. 1981)::

cord - cod - cot

The three words are of decreasing duration, the allophone of the first word having approximately four times the duration of the last word. This concept can in turn be used to produce a rhythm, or to modify it. The most famous and most quoted example is Pound's "The Return", which Eliot himself quotes as an example of verse that is "really quantitative" (Ezra Pound: His Metrics and his Poems, TCTC)

See, they return; ah, see the tentative
Movements, and the slow feet
The trouble in the pace and the uncertain
Wavering!

We can try to make a distinction between spondee, dactyls, iambs and trochai, but the main effect is clear without them. There are forced pauses in odd places and the natural stresses of words are placed in awkward positions. The long syllables in the spondee "slow feet" is set off against a succession of four short and unstressed syllables. This effect is also used in the third line, where three short and unstressed syllables follow each other, thus preventing any iambic or trochaic rhythm to establish itself. It is only truly quantitative in that its rhythm is meant to be disruptive so that the rhythm is eventually 'drowned out'. In most other cases rhythm and quantity work together, much like the drummer and the flutist. It is hard to believe that a more appropriate poem can ever be found than "The Return". Consider the following lines (cf. Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era, p. 91):

Gods of the winged shoe!
With them the silver hounds,
                        sniffing the trace of air!

There lines are highly rhythmical. Pound's poem is prophetic - it signals the return of poets who know where to place their feet. The "Wing'd-with-Awe" are the old, muddling poets who had lost the scent of progress, deaf to the sound of their words and insensible or unaware of the rhythm and cadence that a good poem should have. What weaklings these young, timorous vers librists are when compared to the souls of blood, the courageous and bold ancient Greek poets. Pound, however, has picked up the scent again and is not about to let go. In his criticism of modern poetry, Pound would frequently complain of the modern lack of discipline, of technical skill, as for instance below, where he talks about modern practitioners of vers libre:

The actual language and phrasing is often as bad as that of our elders without even the excuse that the words are shovelled in to fill the metric pattern or to complete the noise of a rhyme-sound. Whether or not the phrases followed by the followers are musical must be left to the reader's decision. At times I can find a marked metre in 'vers libres', as stale and hackneyed as any pseudo-Swinburnian, at times the writers seem to follow no musical structure whatever. (Literary Essays, p. 3.)

Much of Pound's technical wisdom is reflected in his poetry, whence Eliot says that his prose and poetry should not be read without each other, as they are to a large extent complementary. Another example demonstrates Pound's deep phonological insight: (cf. Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era, p. 91):

            In nature are signatures
    needing no verbal tradition,
oak leaf never plane leaf.
                                (87/573:609)

In the last line, all syllables are "stopped off" by consonants which produces a very disruptive effect. The common phonological effect called linking is thus prevented, and the effect is further enhanced by the unvoiced alveolar, fricative, and plosive which break up the voicing in the first three boundaries. It is a good example of a rhythm forcing itself on the reader, since by the time the last word-boundary is reached, most readers will pronounce the two words separately, disjuncted, even though in normal reading the two words would be linked by voicing which runs from the 'l' in plane up to the 'f' in leaf. In combination with short syllables the effect would be equivalent to that of staccato in music. We are reminded once more, that the serious artist should "In short, behave as a musician, a good musician, when dealing with that phase of your art which has exact parallels in music. The same laws govern, and you are bound by no others."

And so the artist is to look for inspiration in both music and this aspect of his work in other poetry, not only in his own language, but in that of other languages too. Or, if he has not the faculty, at the very least he can pay attention to those of his colleagues who do and learn the material second hand from them instead. For that, a serious artist could turn to critics like Pound himself, who made intensive study of Provencal, of Chinese, Japanese, of Latin, Greek, Italian and French poetry. Bearing in mind, that:

The melopoeia can be appreciated by a foreigner with a sensitive ear, even though he be ignorant of the language in which the poem is written. It is practically impossible to transfer or translate it from one language to another, save perhaps by divine accident, and for half a line at a time. (p.25)

This is because different languages have different sound associations, natural rhythms, stresses and pronunciation features. However, the ultimate goal in this aspect of poetry is producing a significant relationship between sound and sense, and as this effect occurs in other languages too, it can be studied with benefit to the serious artist, who will gain a broader and deeper insight into the fundamental properties and possibilities of language in general. These will help him in mastering these possibilities of his own language.

Finally, it can be noted that there are basically three kinds of melopoeia:

1. that made to be sung on a tune
2. that made to be intoned or sung to a sort of chant
3. that made to be spoken

Although the third is by now far the most common form, it is nevertheless important to be aware of the three different kinds, because "the art of conjoining words in each of these kinds is different, and cannot be clearly understood until the reader knows that there are three different objectives." The main difference between the three different forms is the prominence of the rhythm. In the third, the natural rhythm of spoken language itself will most prominently determine the musical property of the word and hence "the art of conjoining" or phonetic qualities, syllable length and so forth, much like in the modern poem; whereas in the first these features will largely be determined by an external musical pattern which is imposed on the text, and will call for syllables to be drawn out and modulated. This finds its equivalent in the modern pop-song, opera and musical. The second comes inbetween, where the interplay between rhythm and language is less exact, more equal. Usually a drum beat will determine the rhythm. Most of the standard features of the spoken text remain exact, but some may be stressed and reinforced to accompany and stress the rhythm, and alterations in the intonation patterns will occur. A modern equivalent will be found in rap, older forms include religious chants such as found in Africa.

One important consequences of this insight has been mentioned before:

When you have words of a lament set to the rhythm and tempo of There'll be a Hot Time in the Old Town to-night you have either an intentional burlesque or you have rotten art. (51)

As you see, even rhyme patterns have their histories and associations, and these should not be left unconsidered. For more, see logopoeia, below.

Phanopoeia - "which is a casting of images upon the visual imagination"

If melopoeia concerns itself with the ear, phanopoeia concerns itself with the eye. Note that this does not include the layout and form of the poem, which is part of architectonics, or the form of the whole. Phanopoeia covers anything from simple and straightforward description to complex symbols and use of metaphor, although in poetry it will specifically concern itself with the latter; for the most simple and straightforward manner of describing something is prose.

The subject of phanopoeia is too wide and too diverse to treat anywhere near exhaustive. Therefore, Pound concentrates on formulating a few of the most important issues involved. These primaly concern the problem of presentation:

When Shakespeare talks of the 'Dawn in russet mantle clad' he presents something which the painter does not present. There is in this line of his nothing that one can call description; he presents. (ibid., p. 6)

In other words, Shakespeare's dawn is not described, she walks onto the stage. This is closely linked to the Aristotalian method of metaphor, in the form which Pound likes best:

Aristotle will tell you that 'the apt use of metaphor, being as it is, the swift perception of relations, is the true hall-mark of genius.' That abundance, that readiness of the figure is indeed one of the surest proofs that the mind is up borne on the emotional surge. By apt use, I should say it were well to understand, a swiftness, almost a violence, and certainly a vividness. This does not mean elaboration and complication.(ibid., 52)

Precision is what counts. Great art is a combination of saying something new or saying something in a new way, and saying something "in such a way that one cannot re-say it more effectively." The trick is to use exactly as much words as you need and not one word more. Although it must be remembered that sometimes a certain amount of background noise can help to offset the primary image, in which case however these words are also necessary as precisely that - background material.

Regardless of which method of presentation is being used, two distinctions of method can be made. Or, to put it differently, the presentation can have two different attributes. These are, for a lack of better terms, hardness and softness. The qualities are somewhat hard to describe, but Pound gives a few examples and as he shows a clear prediliction for hard verse, we can derive much of the rest: hardness is a certain kind of minimalism in reproducing or representing the poetic subject.

• In the writers of the duo-cento and early tre-cento we find a precise psychology, embedded in a now almost unintelligible jargon, but there nevertheless. If we cannot get back to these things; if the serious artist cannot attain this precision in verse, then he must either take to prose or give up his claim to being a serious artist. (53)
• "Use no superfluous word and no adjective which does not reveal something. (7)
• One moves the reader only by clarity. In depicting the motions of the 'human heart' the durability of the writing depends on the exactitude. (22)
• litterati - when their very medium, the very essence of their work, the application of word to things goes rotten, i.e. becomes slushy and inexact, or excessive or bloated, the whole machinery of social and of individual thought and order goes to rot. This is a lesson of history, and a lesson not yet half learned. (21)
• As the most efficient way to say nothing is to keep quiet, and as technique consists precisely in doing the thing that one sets out to do, in the most efficient manner, no man who takes three pages to say nothing can expect to be seriously considered as a technician. To take three pages to say nothing is not style, in the serious sense of that word. (54)
• Rimbaud brought back to phanopoeia its clarity and directness (35)
• Learn to charge words from Flaubert (idem)
• "Consider the definiteness of Dante's presentation as compared with Milton's. (9)
• In the art of Daniel and Cavalcanti, I have seen that precision which I miss in the Victorians, that explicit rendering, be it of external nature, or of emotion. Their testimony is of the eyewitness, their symptoms are first-hand. (10)
• It is precisely because of this fustian that the Parnassiads and epics of the eighteenth century and most of the present-day works of most of our contemporary versifiers are pests and abominations. (53)
• As for the nineteenth century, with all respect to its achievements, I think we shall look back upon it as a rather blurry, messy sort of period, a rather sentimentalistic, mannerish sort of period. (10)

And undoubtedly, the list can be made much longer.

Perhaps the strongest evidence of Pound's insistence on this matter is that the first of the three groundrules he established for imagism together with "H.D." and Richard Aldington, is virtually identical to the second:

As you saw in the list, again Pound invites us to consider what men in other languages have done before us, for

Phanopoeia can ... be translated almost, or wholly, intact. When it is good enough, it is practically impossible for the translator to destroy it save by very crass bungling, and the neglect of perfectly well-known and formulative rules.

Logopoeia -

'the dance of the intellect among words', that is to say, it employs words not only for their direct meaning, but it takes count in a special way of habits of usage, of the context we expect to find the word, its usual concomitants, of its known acceptances, and of ironical play. It holds the aesthetic content which is peculiarly the domain of verbal manifestation, and cannot possibly be contained in plastics or music. It is the latest come, and perhaps most tricky and undependable mode."

This is the mode which reached a definite climax during modernism. Pound credits Laforgue with the (re)discovery of this tricky aspect of poetry. Its popularity and interest was further boosted by works such as the production of great dictionaries and etymological works, Jung's archetypes, Freud's dream interpretations and Frazer's cultural analysis, most notably The Golden Bough. All this was combined with an increasing awareness of the presence of the past in the present strengthened by the awakening belief that the principles of Darwinian evolution existed in areas besides biology.

To give an idea of the complexity of this concept in the field of prosody, we can say that logopoeia covers a vast range of linguistic categories, most notably connotation and collocation, among which also punning, all the way through etymology to cultural history, all of which can be used to understand and control the use of words, as well as make them more effective in doing so. It is not for nothing that Pound quotes Frazer's Golden Bough as a book which displays the "implements by which one can pour." (ibid., p. 32) Detailed cultural history of ancient mythologies, cult, ritual and their interrelations with Christianity helped to expose the enormous history that hid behind a great number of contemporary cultural phenomenon, and a skilled poet will be able to resuscitate all this with only a few words, thus achieving a much more intense of expression.

The trickyness of this mode, however, does not only lie in its complexity but perhaps even more its undependablity. As historical research uncovers the different contexts in which words have been used, we also become aware of word-use being subject to considerable change. The shifty nature of the word and symbol causes different readers to read or see different things; not everyone possesses equal amounts of background knowledge.

The partial solution to this aspect of the problem of logopoeia is closely linked to the work of the dilettante and the serious artist. First, let us remember the general idea that lies behind the work of both, the study of his predecessors.

• It is a foolish thing for a man to begin his work on a too narrow foundation, it is a disgraceful thing for a man's work not to show steady growth and increased fineness from first to last. (9)
• As for 'adaptations'; one finds that all the old masters of painting recommend to their pupils that they begin by copying masterwork and proceed to their own composition.(9)

Now, consider the following point:

• "Be influenced by as many great artists as you can, but have the decency either to acknowledge the debt outright or try to conceal it.

Besides showing you are a decent as well as a serious artist and work in accordance with (current) practice in most scientific research and publication, there is obviously another advantage to acknowledging your debt: by somehow indicating your source-material, by somehow identifying the works of your predecessors that have helped you create your own work, the reader will be in the possession of a key to unlock the precedent work on which the newer work builds. Through being able to check the sourcetext of the work that the dilettante builds upon, the reader who lacks suficient background knowledge (or possesses too much, for that matter) will be able to figure out what the artist was up to, and also perhaps determine whether he has succeeded or failed.

Again, a final word of advice from Pound on the study of other languages:

"Logopoeia does not translate; although the attitude of mind it expresses may pass through a paraphrase. Or one might say, you can not translate it ‘locally’, but having determined the original author’s state of mind, you may or may not be able to find a derivative or an equivalent" (25).

Architectonics - "the form of the whole."

"Any work of art is a compound of freedom and order. It is perfectly obvious that art hangs between chaos on the one side and mechanics on the other. A pedantic insistence upon detail tends to drive out 'major form'. A firm hold on major form makes for a freedom of detail. In painting men intent on minutiae gradually lost the sense of form and form-combination.

The form of the whole is not just the shape of the poem - the sonnet, or the lyric, or the ballad, the epic poem, the Sapphic ode, the alexandrine, the heroic couplet, and so on. Rather, it is a kind of unity that works on all levels mentioned so far. Consider a castle with magnificent towers, which, however, are far too large in comparison with the puny walls to which they form the corner. Consider a musical piece that consists of a number of near-perfect technical and compositional gems, without, however, any larger division in movements or any dramatic development. Consider a play full of brilliant jokes but no plot. Or, consider a painting that whether you look at it from afar or with a magnifying glass, does not disclose anything other than beautiful little round dots with a chaotic pattern.

None of these examples are bad art in themselves; their success depends on whether the artist achieves the effect he set out to create. What is important, is the consideration of form in creating the work of art. If, for instance, a serious artist wished to create a sonnet, then he should have an idea to express which can be fitted precisely into a sonnet. It is no use fitting the idea in the couplet and then fill up the octet and sextet with meaningless detail that does nothing to enhance the effect of the couplet. Or, to turn the matter around, when an idea taps you on the shoulder, turn around and look at it carefully to see what kind of form it would wear most gracefully, that would not only fit the idea tightly, but could even contribute to the expression, the intensity of that idea.

Conclusion

What I've been able to do here is little more than make a coherent sketch of Pound's theoretical heritage. Perhaps such coherence was not always apparent to readers, but I believe that those who were familiar enough with his work, like Eliot, were able to see enough of a unity to be profoundly influenced. There were undoubtedly other poets, and perhaps this overview will help to identify them and determine how far the influence went; where the disagreements were and so forth. One poet who was at least partially under the influence of Pound was Marianne Moore, evidence of which is given in The Pound Era.

Eliot, however, was perhaps closest to Pound and perhaps also most strongly influenced. There are numerous effects in Eliot's poetry, such as the working of shards of popular songs, extensive allusions to and borrowings from influences, use of various rhythmical formats and metrical effects, foreign influences, and much more. We see Eliot's attack on vers libre, so much like Pound's attack on vers libre, with the same arguments. We read essays like The Music of Poetry, which, 30 years after Pound started formulating and stressing the important and instructive similarities between the two media, are little more than a rehashing of what Pound said, in a milder form. An essay like Tradition and the Individual Talent is, in the light of this reformulation, little more than a somewhat romantic rephrasing of Pound's idea that an artist should know the work of his predecessors, on a slightly larger scale. Almost conform to Pound's criterium of the dilettante, Eliot acknowledges his debt in the last paragraph of part I of the essay:

There remains to define this process of depersonalization and its relation to the sense of tradition. It is in this depersonalization that art may be said to approach the condition of science. I shall, therefore, invite you to consider, as a suggestive analogy, the action which takes place when a bit of finely filiated platinum is introduced into a chamber containing oxygen and sulphur dioxide.

Like Pound, Eliot makes an analogy between the work of art and of science. He stresses the importance of the past in relation to the present. His focus on 'what is already living' is congruous with Pound's idea that poetry should be written in the medium of the present, unless there is a very good reason to revive a medium from the past (for instance the stricture of the quatrain form as a counterforce to excesses of the diluters of bad vers libre). Certainly, there are influences from Bradley's concept of history, and perhaps even from Joyce, who occasionally mentions the concept of personalisation for instance in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, not to mention Wordsworth's introduction to the Lyrical Ballads. But the process of thinking about the art of poetry in this manner is unmistakably in the style of Pound's serious artist. Perhaps the strongest evidence of Pound's influence in this respect is Eliot's statement that his critical writing was more or less a side-effect of his poetry-writing. It shows that Eliot was thinking about his poetry in a deliberate, conscious, and near scientific manner much in agreement with Pound's definition of the Serious Artist. There is much more, but that lies beyond the scope of this essay, which intends to provide a point of reference and a springboard for further research. An attempt to pave the way for other serious artists - or critics for that matter.