The Perverse Affections of Ezra Pound: A Response to Larry Scanlon

I must confess that I have not thought about Ezra Pound for quite some time. Of course, I have taught his poetry and recited facts about him in my classes. I have even discussed how to interpret the complexities of Pound’s various experiments with poetic voice, but that is not precisely the same task as thinking about him. I probably have not thought about him seriously since I decided somewhere around the late 1990s—along with a host of other literary scholars—that Ezra Pound was your garden variety brilliant but authoritarian modernist, certainly an agent provocateur, but not someone whose aesthetic and poetry I would return to and reinterpret with any earnest effort. For me, Pound’s work embodied what he himself called “the Totalitarian Synthesis,” in order to name that curious melding of art, artist, nation, and culture that flourished in the modernism that came into being during the age of excessive nationalism and state power. I had certainly never bothered to devote any serious consideration to Pound’s relationship to the medieval, the intense study of medieval and Romance languages that he undertook during his graduate education, or his revision of the tropes of laureation and courtly love. However, Larry Scanlon’s article has me thinking about Ezra Pound again. By discussing Pound in terms of laureation and, particularly, in terms of courtly love, Scanlon has offered us a new metric by which to measure Pound’s poetic and political perversity, for it is at the level of its perversity that Pound’s extorted yet innovative logic might just provide us with a coherent way to discuss his aesthetic. What I will offer are my thoughts about this perversity and then pose a few questions.

Scanlon illuminates what he calls Pound’s “counterintuitive view of the temporality of modern vanguardism” by demonstrating how Pound imagined an identity for the poet that brought together the historically distant Middle Ages with the concerns of the contemporary modernizing world. Pound often referred to his conception of history as a palimpsest theory, one that sought the traces and outlines of the past beneath the structures of the present. Whenever this species of theory is invoked, however, I always ask myself two questions: first, what nostalgic impulses underwrite the theory, and second, what new instrumental use has the present found for the discarded, forgotten, or concealed past? In this case, I am particularly intrigued by the way that Scanlon locates in Hugh Selwyn Mauberley an effort by Pound to deploy the medieval conception of courtly love for modern poetics. Courtly love, as I understand it, presents us with a knight who declares himself the servant of a sublime, unreachable lady. The woman, in this case, becomes an ennobling, spiritual force. In the face of historical ruptures, Pound uses his poetic voice to reimagine in Mauberley a courtly lover who expresses a desire for a beauty beyond “the reach of change.” For Pound, this is one way to balance the fragmentation of very real, very visceral historical variation with the striving for a transcendent—albeit icy and unapproachable—sense of the permanence of the beautiful. Poetry is, then, converted into the abstract and distant lady of courtly love, the lady whom one must continually strive—and fail—to please. Pound, like Mauberley, serves poetry. By the way, this also works when you consider him as a laureate who embodies the painful service that the representative poet enters into on the behalf of poetry. In either case, something outside of history—or immune to it—makes sense of our very historical suffering. The laureate as courtly lover suffers for the sake of the eternal.

Despite the obvious medieval implications here, we have several more contemporary models for thinking through courtly love that might help us to unpack both Pound’s nostalgic use of this theme and the modern, instrumental implications concealed within it. Both Jacques Lacan in “Courtly Love as Anamorphosis” and Slavoj Žižek in his discussion, “Courtly Love, or, Woman as Thing” draw attention to the masochistic theatricality of courtly love when it is...