Late Modernist Poetics: From Pound to Prynne (review)

A research fellow in the School of English at UCE Birmingham, the editor of fragmente: a magazine of contemporary poetics, and a poet in his own right, Anthony Mellors speaks most eloquently in his closest readings, in his astute, crystalline analyses of the politics and poetries of Ezra Pound, Charles Olson, and J. H. Prynne. In Late Modernist Poetics from Pound to Prynne, the reader encounters, in Mellors’s sinewy, percipient observations of the aforementioned poets and their mythic method(s), a singularly enduring and assuredly prudent voice. Predictably, then, Mellors offers a cogent and compelling examination of Pound’s mythic (and hermetic) method, his trenchant and nefarious politics, and those belated modernists who, having embraced Pound’s method in pursuit of reactionary (and radical) leftist agendas, unwittingly reaffirm Pound’s problematic ideology.

Mellors contends that while myths may be apotheosized as “‘supreme fictions,’ intuitive representations of social and cosmic unity,” they can also be understood as “fact[s]” (2), as giving access to new kinds of spiritual, cultural, and political realities. When understood as both producing and communicating such realities, the mythic (and hermetic) method of Pound, characterized by his “theories of instinct, nature, and secret wisdom” (44), leads not to the liberal ideologies typically associated with the many late- and postmodernists who subsequently employ Pound’s method but to a well-publicized set of “phallic, racist and authoritarian beliefs” (44). In light of this, such a method, embraced by so many late- and postmodernist poets, would seem to preclude any disavowal of Pound’s abhorrent politics. According to Mellors, it only stands to reason that these poets would find themselves (invariably) unable to consummate the leftist utopias and political agnosticisms that form the pragmatic ground in and through which they reify their aesthetic ideals. For Mellors, Charles Olson stands as a nonpareil example of this belated modernist advocating an untenable revolutionary politics: “[Olson’s] historical practice attests to the unity of experience as the prime matter of poetry, but it supports a phallic, egotistical ideology that is inconsistent with its universalist claims” (96). Ultimately, though many poets—including Olson and J. H. Prynne (a British poet who has greatly influenced the contemporary British avant-garde, who has only recently been accepted into canonical surveys of contemporary British poetry, and who is claimed as a late modernist by Mellors)—try to transform Pound’s mythic (and hermetic) method “into a new conception of civic virtue” (144), they cannot seem to dissociate their critiques of rationalism, consumerism, and modernity from a nostalgic sanctification of nature, a naive apotheosis of instinct, and a self-interested conception of the poet as shaman and savior.

Interestingly, Mellors mentions William Carlos Williams only in passing, seemingly remarkable given that Mellors himself acknowledges that Williams represents, as he sees it, a prominent modernist and that Williams certainly employed a method in Kora in Hell, in Paterson that could be called, at least tentatively, mythic. And yet, this not so disconcerting when one understands that Mellors concerns himself primarily with the mythic method of Pound, a method that is characterized by the “hermetic,” which “refers to both the forging of private, enigmatic iconologies and the subordination of sense to sound, creating an interplay of deeply obscure significance and numinous vacancies” (4). Moreover, this method, practiced by those who “share this ability to distill the rational into the sensuously immediate,” “promote instinct and faith over analysis,” and “subordinate history to myth” (30), imparts the wisdom contained within it only to a select group of individuals who “lay claim to a shared Paideuma” (4). In contrast, Williams’s objectivism, his use of histories and documents and languages more exoteric than esoteric, and (what Mellors, citing James E. Miller, calls) his “ego submission” (99), would seem together to impel a movement toward the democratic and to contribute to a method that, though mythic, ought not to be called “hermetic.” Consequently, it would appear that, for Mellors, neither Williams’s poetry nor his politics succumbs to the...