Art Versus the Descent of the Iconoclasts: Cultural Memory in Ezra Pound's Pisan Cantos
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Well before publication it was apparent that Ezra Pound's greatest poetic achievement, The Pisan Cantos, was preoccupied with memory. When Pound's wife Dorothy received his first messy typescripts, she wrote back in surprise that the new Cantos, rather than treating historical concerns like the previous ones, "are your self, the memories that make up yr. person."1 Her comment provides an essential entry into a poem that, produced in the aftermath of a breakdown, dramatizes the resurrection of a self—so much so that one is tempted to approach The Pisan Cantos in the light of a heartbreaking outburst in Barry Levinson's 1999 film, "Liberty Heights," in which Levinson's alter ego—a younger brother and aspiring writer—concludes his account of adolescence in Baltimore with the remark that if he had realized so much of the world he grew up in would disappear, he would have tried harder to commit the whole of it to memory.
But Pound's wartime suite amounts to more than a private reminiscence, and the philosophical, historical, and ideological dimensions of memory in his meditation have only slowly come into focus. As concerns philosophy, Pound for more than ten years before the war had prepared himself to create in the last third of his projected hundred Cantos "un cielo sereno e filosofico" ("a serene philosophical heaven")—a Paradise based on the state of being implied by the highest flights of the mind.2 This project was [End Page 71] to be based largely on the neoplatonic implications of Cavalcanti's canzone "Donna mi prega" ("Because a Lady Asks Me")—a poem that treats the way affection prepares a place in the memory for images of beauty to reside, and celebrates the ability of those images to conjure up the intellectual form of Love and join the soul to universal intellect.3 (The special place of memory in the mind's quest for reunion with the forms of the divine had in Pound's view been theorized by the neoAristotelian tradition of Avicenna, which Pound believed had supplied Cavalcanti the key intellectual premises of his poetic disquisition, and which assigned an even more important place in cognition to memory than had Aristotle himself.4 )
In the late 1930s and early 1940s, Pound seized on a handful of key phrases in "Donna mi prega" and used them to explore similar philosophical notions in Scotus Erigena and elsewhere.5 Again and again in these notes he includes reference to Cavalcanti's "formato locho," which Pound translates in Canto 36 as the "forméd trace" of the beloved which Love carves "dove sta memoria"—"where memory liveth" (C36/178, 177).6 And when he produced the first fragments of his Paradiso in the early 1940s he built them around citations from Cavalcanti, Erigena, and Confucius.7 This constellation of material would have provided the core of the last section of the Cantos had Pound's situation not deteriorated during the Second World War. As Pound said at the time "if it weren't for this tiresome war," there would be time to consider whether Western thought had progressed or declined since the Middle Ages, and to ask questions such as, "Have we got better at thinkin'? Do we think with greater clarity? Or has the so-called program of science merely got us all cluttered up mentally and pitched us into greater confusion?"8
Relentlessly, though, wartime conditions in northern Italy did interrupt Pound's philosophical endeavors and turned his attention to the precariousness of another kind of thought—communal associations anchored by the monuments of Italian culture that Allied air raids in 1943 and 1944 were progressively ruining. As this destruction forced Pound back upon the cords of his personal memory frayed by the stresses of the war, he responded to the great theme of Italian Fascist...
