Pound and Eliot

Pound and Eliot scholarship continues to be strong, with two new introductions to Eliot, a “casebook” on The Cantos, an excellent book-length monograph on The Fifth Decad, and a host of essays and book chapters. There is a renewal of interest in Eliot’s cultural criticism as secular ideals of democracy collide with the global imperatives of religion.

i Pound

a. The Cantos

Ezra Pound’s “Cantos”: A Casebook, ed. Peter Makin (Oxford), is an excellent resource, reprinting key essays on the poet (many of them hard to find) and two important interviews: Donald Hall’s invaluable Paris Review interview (pp. 251–60), which contains many dicta by the poet on his project, and the portion of the BBC interview with D. G. Bridson that appeared in New Directions 17 in 1961 (pp. 247–50), one of Pound’s few statements about Thrones. Makin has also translated as “The Ideogrammic Method in the Cantos” a chapter from Girolo Mancuso’s Pound e la Cina (1974), appearing here for the first time in English (pp. 65–80). Like any good editor, Makin, by now one of the most authoritative Pound critics, has an argument behind his selection. Rather than “cover” the poem by choosing essays on each of its sections, Makin selects essays to “represent each of the major phases of Cantos criticism.” By his reckoning there are only two, an early period of holistic approaches and a turn in the mid-1980s to historicizing and archival research. With one glancing exception, an odd if charming 1982 essay by Donald Davie addressing structuralism and its problems (“Res and Verba in Rock-Drill and After,” pp. 205–20), Makin’s scheme excludes anything to do with “theory,” though poststructuralist analyses do exist; see, for instance, Tim Campbell’s Wireless Writing in the Age of Marconi, reviewed below, and the Lacan-inspired work of Jean Michel Rabaté. Theoretical works may not lend themselves to the short essays most apt for a “casebook,” but Makin might have at least mentioned that other critical approaches to Pound have been undertaken.

By anybody’s reckoning Pound criticism properly begins with Hugh Kenner’s pathbreaking The Poetry of Ezra Pound (1950), which ushered in an era of holistic approaches to the poem. Kenner is represented by two essays in the casebook: the first is “Voices and Visions,” written to give substance to the television series of the same name about American poets (pp. 29–46), the quintessence of his inspiring and inspired reading of Pound and both a kind of eulogy and a perfect introduction; and the second is “Inventing Confucius,” a chapter from The Pound Era (1971), a taste of the most luminous literary criticism of its time (pp. 165–80). The holistic approach made plausible by Kenner is represented in Makin’s anthology by Guy Davenport’s mythic take in his 1969 essay “Persephone’s Ezra” (pp. 47–64), which finds Persephone and “the Eleusinian theme” an organizing strand from Pound’s very beginnings to the end. Girolo Mancuso, “The Ideogrammic Method in The Cantos” (pp. 65–80), sees the poem as a “fugue” organized by four levels of ideograms, meaning not only actual Chinese signs but talismanic expressions in foreign languages; these function as quotations, images, and ideograms per se but they also function as catalysts, as centers organizing gravitational or magnetic concentric fields of meaning.

Reed Way Dasenbrock’s “Why the Commedia Is Not the Model for The Cantos and What Is” (pp. 81–92), a compact rejection of the most frequently invoked holistic paradigm for The Cantos, the tripartite cosmos of Dante that Pound encouraged, announces the historicist turn in Makin’s program. In this 1993 essay Dasenbrock points out that whenever Pound asserts “a structural resemblance between his poem and the Commedia he reshapes his model in the process”; in short, they are nothing alike. Rather, Pound is working in a specific subgenre of epic, “the epideictic epic in the Renaissance sense, concerned with establishing images of virtue and vice. . . . Pound’s practice is closer to the theory and practice of renaissance writers than it...