Climbing the Poundian Alps

TheCanadian Review of American Studies, Volume 12, No. 3, Winter 1981 CliTnbing the Poundian Alps MichaelAlexander. The Poetic Achievement of£:,a Pound. Berkeley and Los Angeles: Universityof California Press, 1979. 247 pp. William Harmon. Time in Ezra Poulld '.\·Work. ChapelHill: University of North Carolina Press, lll77.165+ xiii pp. LeonSurette. A light,ti·om Eleusis: A St11d1• of Ezra Pound:~ Cantos. Oxford: Q\[ord U~iversity Press, 1979. 306 + xiv pp. Peter Stevens The greatest stumbling block in modern poetry is probably Ezra Pound's Cantos. What are we to make of this shambles of a long poem'? This sequence which occupied almost fifty years of a poet's career raises almost every question about the nature of the long poem in the twentieth century. If it is possible to construct a poem of any length, the Cantos have already worried at the nature of its structure-can there be an epic in the twentieth century? What form will give it coherence? Can there be an epic hero? If epic is not possible, can there be any other kind of mythic narrative? And what of narrative itself? Can poetry at length still tell a story'? Can there bea hero suited to modern demands? And will such a poem be able to radiate outwards from some moral center or has modernism put paid to the didactic element in poetry? These questions, and certainly there may be others, always spring to mind when reading the Cantos, a poem which cannot be avoided when the nature ofthe modern long poem is being discussed. It is small wonder Basil Bunting called them the Alps of modern poetry: "They don't make sense. Fatal glaciers, crags cranks climb," he claims them to be. And yet he goes on to say. "you will have to go a long way round/if you want to avoid them/It takes some getting used to.'' So his advice is to '"Sit down and wait for them to crumble." 356 Peter Stevens However, the writers of the three books under review have decided not to wait for the collapse. Indeed, many critics have often suggested that the Cantos have crumbled, or at least that the peaks might remain but manyof the slopes have slid away to dust. There is an element of this in much Pound criticism-the peaks are there and stand magnificently, but maybe one should reach them by flying to them rather than by making the arduous climb up the screes and loose shale. Certainly these three critics admit tothe notion of failure in the Cantos, yet each critic here makes a case for reading the whole. Alexander is perhaps the most whole-hearted in his statement about the unity of the Cantos. Indeed, he sees all of Pound's poetic output as a unity, and states, "the Cantos do form a unity and do record a moral progress both in their content (by design) and in the author" (p. 228). The other two critics qualify that contention. Surette does not agree with the idea of moral progress in the poem but attempts to show that some coherence (despite Pound's own late expression that his poem lacked coherence) is achieved, a coherence coming from the echoing repetition of reference to primitive religious cults associated with Eleusis which islayered with other mythic overtones by Pound, most notably of course the Odyssean descent to the underworld with which the Cantos start, making the figure of Odysseus a kind of hero of the whole structure, although he obviously goes through a series of metamorphoses emerging as the poet himself in the Pisan Cantos. Harmon sees the notion of time as an organizing factor in Pound's poetry, related to the unreality of historical time set against the continuity of a kind of personal time. Harmon claims that this results in two key concepts that unlock much of Pound's thought-"the contemporaneity of culture and the continuity of personality" (p. 4). From there Harmon proceeds to elucidate the central idea behind the Cantos; for him, Pound writes "the record of the poet's personal and artistic struggle to resist the killing flood of time" (p. 98). Alexander's book...