Modernist Polemic: Ezra Pound v. "the perverters of language"

8. We set Humour at Humour's throat.
Stir up Civil War among peaceful apes.
9. We only want Humour if it has fought like Tragedy.
10. We only want Tragedy if it can clench its side-
muscles like hands on its belly, and bring to
the surface a laugh like a bomb.

—"Vorticist Manifesto" (1914) ¹

Predication and Attribution, or Publication as Public Action

"I take it in retrospect that my tendency to action had effects," Ezra Pound asserted in his radio broadcast on the vorticist journal BLAST, "and that the vast majority of the small minority into contact with which I came, was uneasy, disturbed, horrified in fact: for that sign of action was also some sort of a harbinger." ² His repeated reference to action, and to the effects of an active presence in literary language, was anything but incidental. The avant-garde satires that he had published in June 1914 were indeed a harbinger of increasingly polemical poems, and his Hell Cantos (numbers 14 and 15), drafted in the spring and summer of 1922, inaugurated an extreme style of poetic invective in which words were crafted as weapons and images designed to wound. Taken together in their own historical moment, the Hell Cantos represent the highest stage of development in Pound's discursive battle with modernity's monopolists following his retreat from London in January 1921. ³ As he refined his efforts to express his "impersonal indignation" at those forces that had effectively exiled him—and that he felt were obstructing, obfuscating, and obscuring what was best in postwar culture and society—the polemical poetic that had begun its evolution with BLAST ultimately came to test the limits of aesthetic representation. ⁴ These poems, through their almost visual and certainly visceral effects, are the first to conform fully to the etymology of polemic's Greek root, polemos, as "war." And yet Pound did not wage war (only) on the now-familiar political and economic targets, nor had his mode of assault yet been marred by fascistic or anti-Semitic rhetoric. Rather, he directed his counterstrike against

those who had lied for hire;
the perverts, the perverters of language,
      the perverts, who have set money lust
Before the pleasures of the senses. . . . ⁵

My analysis of Pound's polemic tracks a proliferation of modes of linguistic assault and means of attributing enemies that begins with BLAST and culminates in A Draft of XVI. Cantos toward a Poem of Some Length (and that later devolves into the diatribes of Jefferson and/or Mussolini and the incendiary broadcasts from Radio Rome). By paying particular attention first to the ways in which verbal invective works, and then to the process by which enemies were singled out for various kinds of assaults, we can discover much about the trajectory of Pound's career in London, Paris, and Rapallo. That is to say, while an attraction to polemic need not lead indelibly to racial intolerance, economic determinism, or political extremism, in this case it demonstrably encouraged the last at the very least. ⁶ It also contributed to some less predictable developments. Some of the surprises that attend Pound's sense of what constitutes an "enemy" bear on received versions of literary and cultural histories alike. The isolation of G. K. Chesterton as the model for the unserious artist was the first of a series of oppositions to persons, institutions, and ideals by which Pound defined himself throughout his life. Chesterton was Pound's first public enemy in the field of cultural production. His eventual replacement in that role by T. S. Eliot—in the guise of "Possum Episcopus"—recommends a closer look at perhaps the most celebrated collaboration between two poets in the twentieth century, that involving the editing and marketing of The Waste Land. The uncelebrated Hell Cantos, in which The Waste Land is parodied and Eliot appears not once but twice, are therefore a singularly important resource for the...