Pound and Eliot

Pound scholarship may be slacking somewhat; there were fewer articles than usual in journals, though their quality is generally high. A short biography, a collection of conference papers given in 2005, and two general studies appear. Last year’s chapter recorded the persistence in scholarly criticism of a particularly conservative and British Eliot, and the 2011 report involves, for the most part, more of the same. However, to many readers more of the same may seem in this instance more of a good thing.

Alec Marsh is responsible for the Pound section of this essay, and Matthew Hofer for the Eliot section.

i Ezra Pound

a. The Cantos

In 2004, Peter Liebregts published Ezra Pound and Neo-Platonism (see AmLS 2004, pp. 151–52), one of the best books on Pound and his long poem. Since then Liebregts has been engaged in a massive collaborative project on the work and reception of St. Augustine. A fruit of that obscure labor is “‘Love God and Do as You Please’: Ezra Pound and Augustine” (Paiduema 38: 55–88), a survey of Pound’s ambivalent relationship with the Bishop of Hippo. To assess this relationship, Liebregts reprises his belief that Pound was attracted to Plotinus and neo-Platonism because it was neither organized religion nor dogmatic. Rather, neo-Platonism offered a “spiritual-philosophical way of analyzing the self of man and thinking about the experience of reality”; it “offered a framework flexible enough to enable him to express himself and his personal, often vague, and never systematized, religiophilosophical worldview.” Evidently Augustine came to Christianity through neo-Platonism and brought neo-Platonic patterns of thought with him, notably the habit of triadic thinking that enabled Augustine to articulate the Trinity.

Augustine the Church Father bored Pound when he finally sat down to read him in earnest at St. Elizabeths. Nonetheless, passages Augustine had written concerning memory prompted Pound to consider whether or not Augustine’s thinking was part of the background necessary to fully appreciate Guido Cavalcanti’s “Donna mi prega,” the poem that obsessed him like no other. Pound had made several eccentric and highly neo-Platonized versions of this poem in the 1930s and now wondered whether an Augustinian reading of Cavalcanti was possible. The heart of Liebregts’s article is a test of this proposition, which shows the impossibility of such a reading for Pound because of Augustine’s “deviation from the Platonic tradition” of the sublimation of desire for bodies into the desire for “immaterial goodness,” as shown in The Symposium. Augustine’s Christian notion that only God (not Beauty) is worthy of love dramatically changes the direction from which love flows—Pound’s love flows upward, is aspirational; Christian love flows downward from heaven. “Pound could never accept this dependency of human love on divine grace” with the dogmatism such a switch implied. The fact that Pound’s hypothesized Augustinian reading of Cavalcanti could not work given Pound’s neo-Platonic bias is less important than the exciting scholarly periplum Liebregts undertakes to reach that conclusion. “Ezra Pound and Augustine” is a valuable addendum to Liebregts’s indispensable longer work.

In the learned article “The Energy of Language(s): What Pound Made of Philology” (ELH 78: 769–800) J. Mark Smith argues that what Pound made of philosophy was not nonphilology, as his vociferous rejection of the academic variety might suggest, but instead a supple “poetic practice…. Pound’s key premise is that the power of language latent in the poetic phrase, however ancient or alien, is never wholly ergon [fixed in form], hence always capable of being returned to activity through its use by a reader or speaker.” The specific practice Smith has in mind is Canto 20, in part an explicit meditation on philology because of the vignette with the premier philologist of the langue d’Oc, Professor Emil Lévy of Freiburg and the mysterious “noigandres”—one of the most deftly handled moments in The Cantos. Smith does not stop there, but shows how the whole discourse of philology is implicated at various other moments in the canto much more obscure; for...