"But Sordello, and My Sordello?": Pound and Browning's Epic

Ezra Pound's "parleyings with Browning" are most apparent in the conception of the earliest Cantos. ¹ Pound left little other direct commentary on the ways in which Browning's work influenced his own literary endeavors, although he frequently acknowledged Browning to be among the greatest poetic geniuses since Dante, one of the few that modern England had brought forth. ² It has often been noted that Pound's early poetry imitates Browning's masks and the convolutions, colloquial tone, and rich, rugged rhythm of Browning's style. In his poem "Mesmerism" from 1906 Pound pays parodic tribute: "Here's to you, Old Hippety-Hop o' the accents." ³ The tone of Three Cantos 1, where Pound stages his exasperating effort of comprehending Browning's Sordello, is still dominated by such a self- ironizing admixture of irreverence and admiration. ⁴ Yet, Three Cantos also gives more complex testimony, both of Pound's deep indebtedness to Browning and of his struggle for poetic originality. Designed to be the exordium of Pound's modern epic, Three Cantos 1 in its first lines evokes Browning's Sordelloas a precursor text that is the unique example for a new form: a "bag of tricks" for poetic renewal, "a rag-bag" for modern consciousness, a theater for disembodied speech.

Hang it all, there can be but one Sordello!
But say I want to, say I take your whole bag of tricks,
Let in your quirks and tweeks, and say the thing's an art-form,
Your Sordello, and that the modern world
Needs such a rag-bag to stuff all its thought in;
Say I dump my silvery catch, shiny and silvery
As fresh sardines slapping and slipping on the marginal cobbles?
(I stand before the booth, the speech; but the truth
Is inside this discourse--this booth is full of the marrow of wisdom.) ⁵

Quarreling with his muse, throughout Three Cantos 1, Pound points out Browning's "quirks and tweeks," the jarring idiosyncrasies of his poetry. A few lines offer a parody à la "Mesmerism": "Tower by tower / Red-brown the rounded bases, and the plan / Follows the builder's whim. Beaucaire's slim gray / Leaps from the stubby base of Altaforte" (P, 229). ⁶ Others comment directly on Sordello's confoundingly convoluted, allusive language and risky rhyming of the seemingly incompatible: "What a hodge podge you have made there!--/ Zanze and swanzig, of all opprobrious rhymes!" (P, 232). ⁷ Yet it is precisely this daring strategy of assembling the disparate that Pound finds intriguing. He suggests that Browning created a text that borders on the grotesque: half epic, half burlesque romance--"The rough men swarm out / In robes that are half Roman, half like the Knave of Hearts"(P, 229).He particularly dwells on Browning's montage of historical figures, facts, events, and settings. He knowingly appraises Browning's "bag of tricks," devices for putting historical and literary tradition to free poetic use, as he points out that Browning falsely implied Sordello to be Dante's sole forerunner that he borrowed from Arnaut Daniel (whom Pound in turn had portrayed as a forerunner of Dante's in The Spirit of Romance) "that trick / Of the unfinished address," and that Browning disregards chronology:

And half your dates are out, you mix your eras;
For that great font Sordello sat beside--
'Tis an immortal passage, but the font?--
Is some two centuries out of the picture.
[P, 229] ⁸

Alluding to the rags of Sordello's narrator's motley dress, Pound labels a "rag-bag" Browning's technique of employing background materials, his drawing together bits and pieces into a plethora of textual and historical details. Pound implies that Browning has given him a good excuse for similarly pouring out on the public shore whatever he has gathered from the ocean of his readerly consciousness.

Say I dump my catch, shiny and silvery
As fresh sardines flapping and slipping on the marginal...