The ABC of Influence: Ezra Pound and the Remaking of American Poetic Tradition by Christopher Beach

ABC of Influence

Ezra Pound and the Remaking of American Poetic Tradition

by Christopher Beach

Introduction

This book looks at the development of a tradition of American poetic writing that found its primary source in the ideas and practices of Ezra Pound. I focus my study of a “Pound tradition” on the two decades following World War II. The poets writing in this postwar tradition—most importantly, Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Robert Creeley, Allen Ginsberg, Denise Levertov, and Gary Snyder—recurred to Pound in forming their sense of poetic inheritance and in establishing their own poetic theories. The tradition can be roughly defined as including those whose lives and work were directly related to Black Mountain College and the journals Black Mountain Review and Origin, to Duncan and the San Francisco countercultural movements, and to later descendants of these.^[1] Not only were these poets directly influenced by Pound’s writing but they also believed strongly in the importance of a tradition originating in the experimental, Modernist mode Pound represented. They promoted Pound, and to a lesser extent William Carlos Williams, as an essential counter-force to T. S. Eliot and to the “New Critical” poetry sanctioned by the Anglo-American academy. I am excluding from this book poets such as Robert Lowell, whose use of Pound, though significant, was not central to the way in which he defined himself culturally, historically, and institutionally as a poet. Nor do I treat the work of John Berryman, W. S. Merwin, Galway Kinnell, or Charles Wright, all of whom made interesting use of

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Pound’s work, yet whose primary affiliations lay outside the poetic tradition discussed here.^[2]

Pound’s influence cannot always be differentiated from more general values and poetic practices which he shared with other founding poets of the tradition I describe. There are instances in the work of Olson, Duncan, and others in which William Carlos Williams and even Louis Zukofsky may be more significant or direct influences than Pound himself. For Ginsberg, Pound serves largely as a mediator of Walt Whitman’s influence; for Creeley and Levertov, he mediates the more apparent influence of Williams. Nevertheless, as I argue in chapter 3, while Whitman, Williams, and Zukofsky share a good deal of the credit for the evolution of what I am calling the Pound tradition in the 1950s and 1960s, it is Pound himself who is the major source of its ideas and practices and the unifying link with the tradition’s predecessors.

I leave aside the value judgment of Pound’s relative importance; my focus on Pound as a poetic predecessor is necessitated by the constraints of time and space. It would be next to impossible to trace in a single book-length study the various influences exerted by Whitman, Pound, Williams, and Zukofsky—not to mention H. D., George Oppen, and many other poets for whom a convincing case could be made as forerunners of the tradition. I realize that in focusing on a single figure I am to some degree neglecting the influences of many other poets, both male and female. Among women poets, it goes without saying that Emily Dickinson is of tremendous importance to any twentieth-century American tradition; how direct an impact she had on the writing of this particular group of writers is open to question.^[3] H. D.,

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who played a significant role in the early life of both Pound and Williams, was an important influence on both Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov, and her work constitutes for both of them part of the same Modernist legacy as the work of Pound and Williams. But H. D.’s impact as a mediator of Pound’s influence is less discernible in the tradition as a whole than is that of Williams or Zukofsky. Two other women poets—Marianne Moore and Lorine Niedecker—also deserve attention in a discussion of this tradition. Moore’s work contributed significantly to the wider dissemination of Pound’s ideas and practices in American poetry; Niedecker was associated with Zukofsky and the Objectivists. Neither of them, however, has been claimed as a major predecessor by poets of the tradition as have Williams, Zukofsky, or, at times, George Oppen.

Several critics have posited poetic traditions that share certain elements with the one I discuss; each emphasizes different aspects of the Poundian legacy. Hugh Kenner describes a “vortex” of literary and artistic influence centering on Pound in his Modernist phase, but he does not trace the further evolution of this tradition in the work of postwar poets.^[4] Marjorie Perloff has also contributed significantly to our critical understanding of a Poundian strain of experimental Modernism. But her examination of Pound’s influence is almost exclusively formal and thematic; it does not address the social and historical factors affecting the extent and mode of this influence or its rationale.^[5] Charles Altieri has defined an “objectivist” tradition, linking poets such as Olson, Creeley, and Duncan in terms of how they exemplify an “immanentist mode” of poetry.^[6] And Laszlo Géfin has written a study of the impact of Pound on what he calls the “ideogrammatic” or “paratactic” method in poets such as Olson, Duncan, and Snyder.^[7]

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My purpose is not to trace the evolution of a particular stylistic trait or mode of writing, as Perloff, Altieri, and Géfin do, but rather to respond to the larger question of poetic influence in its social, historical, political, institutional, and interpersonal contexts. Reading later poets through the lens provided by Pound’s Objectivism or his ideogrammatic method can indeed provide insight into certain directions taken by poets who follow him; but these ideas, however central to Pound and his followers, do not account for the full range of attitudes and practices exemplified by these poets. My own reading stresses the tradition’s diversity rather than its homogeneity. I examine the range of ideas and practices defining the poetics of the Pound tradition both in the immediate context of the influence of Pound’s writing and in the larger historical context of the communal poetics that developed out of this influence. In providing such a biographical and historical context, I intend to recreate the sense shared by these postwar poets of a self-defining project—one that had at its root the awareness of a relationship with, and a debt to, not only Pound himself but the entire generation of Modernism that preceded them. There is at present no full-length critical or historical work that adequately covers this ground. My book is intended to fill the need for an updated and extended focus on Ezra Pound as an influence, while also addressing the question of canon and tradition in American poetry and delineating a postwar poetic of anticonventional orientation.

As will become clear in the following pages, a study of Pound’s influence would not be complete without an attempt to contextualize his poetry and poetic influence both within its historical setting—the rise of Italian fascism, World War II and its aftermath—and within his own political and historical agenda. It is now well established that significant aspects of Pound’s poetics—for example, his attempt to maintain an “absolute value” in the use of language and his promotion of a rigid and often authoritarian sense of cultural order—mirror fascist political beliefs.^[8] But no critic has yet explored how the most

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radically experimental poetic writing in twentieth-century America could have derived from a poetics that reflects a fascist ideology. This book is, in part, an attempt to explain how such Modernist “guides to culture” as those provided by Pound have resulted in what Charles Bernstein has called “the present flourishing of a formally innovative, open, investigative poetry . . . unprecedented in its scale in American literature.”^[9]

What interests me in particular, given Pound’s anti-Semitism and his embrace of Italian fascism, is that many of the most formally and politically radical postwar American poets have been drawn to his work. Why have writers as diverse as Charles Olson, Allen Ginsberg, Denise Levertov, and Gary Snyder, for example, claimed Pound as a predecessor of major importance? What have they found liberating in Pound’s formal experimentation and in his use of political and historical referents? Although the direct influence of Pound’s political and sociohistorical thought constitutes an important part of my discussion, the more interesting and complex issue concerns Pound’s reception: how were the formal and political aspects of Pound’s work combined in the operation of his influence on poets so clearly opposed to his political agenda?

The first two chapters provide, respectively, historical and theoretical overviews of the tradition. In chapter 1 I define the historical, canonical, and poetic contours of the postwar Pound tradition by exploring some of the issues that define a post-Poundian practice—most significantly, the question of tradition itself. The chapter provides a sense of the context in which Olson, Duncan, and other poets of the tradition wrote, and it examines Pound’s influence and example in light of the alternatives then available to American writers. The chapter then examines briefly the range of Pound’s influence as manifested in the work of Robert Creeley and Allen Ginsberg. Chapter 2 explores the way in which Pound’s writings develop a model of influence and tradition that serves as an alternative to the Oedipal paradigm Harold Bloom has applied to a “Romantic Sublime” tradition. Because Bloom’s model excludes from the poetic canon

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poets whose work does not display his particular brand of “revision,” “misreading,” or “poetic repression,” Pound’s paradigm can be seen as offering an alternative account that departs significantly from Bloom’s own and that provides a different framework for understanding influence and poetic creativity. Chapter 3 enlarges the scope of the Pound tradition, analyzing the important contributions made by Walt Whitman, William Carlos Williams, and Louis Zukofsky.

Chapters 4 through 7 center on the two key figures in the Pound tradition: Charles Olson and Robert Duncan. Both find a central model in Pound’s work, but they elaborate on Pound’s practice in different ways. The first of the two chapters on Olson (chapter 4) sets forth his poetics of “historical method” and delineates ways in which his poetics embodies a sense of history and tradition differing from that of Pound. Chapter 5 examines a particular poem directly concerned with the question of Pound’s influence—”I, Mencius, Pupil of the Master”—in light of recent critiques of Olson’s relation to poetic tradition. Chapter 6 reads the work of Duncan in terms of two opposing poles: the Objectivist framework of a Poundian poetics and the Romantic impulses Duncan feels are repressed in Pound’s work. Chapter 7 traces Duncan’s developing sense of poetic form, a sense based in large part on Poundian examples of “collage” technique and the ideogrammatic method.

The final chapters move beyond the immediate scope of Pound’s postwar influence to examine the way in which the tradition continued to develop among younger poets of the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. In chapter 8 I examine the work of the contemporary poets Denise Levertov and Gary Snyder in terms of their Poundian inheritance and their sense of a shared poetics. Chapter 9 is concerned with the poetry of Edward Dorn and with the ways in which his work moves beyond the immediate influence of Pound and Williams while still participating in a poetics defined by them and by Olson. Finally, I conclude the book by addressing the current state of poetry within the Pound-Olson tradition in the work of Language poet Charles Bernstein.

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An understanding of the Pound tradition, like that of any poetic tradition, depends on a broader theory of the nature of influence. I therefore pose in the course of this book several theoretical questions concerning the model of influence suggested by the work of Ezra Pound and his impact on later poets. Two of these questions are fundamental to this project. What is the nature of influence in general (and in what sense does the notion of influence describe the cycle of literary reception and production)^[10] What ideas did Pound express that might be formulated as a theory of influence and tradition? I also pose the more technical questions of how influence is to be identified, what importance it may have for an understanding or appreciation of an author’s work, and how it relates to the formation of a literary tradition or canon. I respond to these questions by contrasting Pound’s model of influence with other models that have contributed most significantly to my own discussion.

The most fundamental form of literary influence is that which transpires in the act of imitation. Influence as imitation assumes that literary “decorum” results from attempting to duplicate the formal, stylistic, and thematic achievements of one’s predecessors. The model writer can be a living teacher who passes on techniques or ideas to a younger student or disciple or an admired author from a previous era. In The Mirror and the Lamp M. H. Abrams traces the idea of imitation in English literature, from Sir Philip Sydney’s adaptation of Aristotle’s Poetics to the work of eighteenth-century writers such as Alexander Pope and Samuel Johnson. Abrams finds wide acceptance for the classical notion of art—one based on a faith in the universality of customs, beliefs, and ideals and on a relatively stable aesthetic order.

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In “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” T. S. Eliot redefines the process of influence in somewhat more reactive terms. Eliot likens the process to a chemical reaction in which the mind of the poet acts as a catalyst on the various combined substances that he or she finds—that is, the body of works making up the literary tradition. For Eliot, a constant interchange exists between the poet and the past: a mutual dependence in which the poet uses tradition to help create a new work while in turn using that new work to alter the entire structure of the “existing order.” Even though much of the poet’s work must take place on a deliberate level, much also involves “a passive attending on the event.” The poet uses tradition as an escape from his or her own “personality,” from the temptation to express subjective emotions. What takes place in any successful work of art, according to Eliot, is not a personal or emotional “sublime,” a search for novelty or originality divorced from a “sense of the past,” but a process of “depersonalization” in which the writer surrenders to “something more valuable”—namely, the entire pantheon of the tradition within which he or she is working.^[11]

Eliot’s essay stresses the importance of the poet’s choice of a tradition; the poet must remain “conscious of the main current, which does not at all flow invariably through the most distinguished reputations.” The greatest poets are those who remain balanced in their use of the tradition, focusing neither on one or two “private admirations” nor on a particular historical period. The writer should neither become “traditional” in the sense of “following the ways of the immediate generation before . . . in a blind and timid succession,” nor “conform” to the standards of the past. The poet’s reputation will ultimately be “measured,” however, by his or her ability to “fit in” to the canon of past literature; thus tradition remains for Eliot a relatively stable entity, a limited and canonical set of texts and practices. Pound himself was very aware of the limitations placed on the poet by

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Eliot’s sense of tradition.^[12] As John Guillory argues, noting Eliot’s later substitution of the term “orthodoxy” for “tradition,” Eliot’s writings advocate a strictly defined reformation of the canon that was in large part responsible for the critical hegemony of the New Criticism.^[13]

Claudio Guillen reorients the study of influence by replacing the notion of a relationship between an individual poet and a tradition with the idea of a broadly defined “experiential” or “aesthetic” process. In Literature as System Guillen argues that literary influence is only one of many artistic or intellectual experiences that affect the formation of a poet’s mind and may have little or no bearing on the poem in terms of textual similarities or parallelisms. Guillen’s argument opposes a rigidly deterministic understanding of influence—such as that implied by the agonistic poetic history of Harold Bloom—according to which a direct cause-and-effect relationship exists between one text and another, or material “flows” from one text to the next. The poem, according to Guillen, is the “displacement” of various literary and nonliterary influences, which themselves are consumed and forgotten in the process of artistic creation. The predecessors of the new poet are important mainly in supplying a poetic “vocabulary” with which the new poet can work. Guillen’s theory posits two distinct levels of influence: “genetic function,” or the generalized impact of one writer’s work on the creative process of another, and “textual function,” or the local parallelisms and echoes of one writer’s work in another’s. Guillen’s model stresses neither an emulative relation to a predecessor nor an antagonistic one; instead, artistic creation is viewed as a necessary bridging of the “ontological gap” between “unformed” experience and newly formed experience in the finished work.

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Northrop Frye’s archetypal paradigm extends Guillen’s sense of influence as a multilayered aesthetic process. Frye posits that literature is passed down through certain genres, figures, situations, and even linguistic or formal configurations rather than through contact between one artist and another. Frye’s approach obviates the necessity for historical or biographical evidence. It entails studying, for example, not the influence of Homer on Pound and Pound on Olson but of the epic form on The Cantos and in turn on The Maximus Poems or of a particular mode of nature poetry on American poets from Whitman to Snyder. Frye claims for the work of art an autonomy from the “unconditioned will of the artist.”^[14] In the study of literary history, according to Frye, “there are much bigger critical problems involved than biographical ones.” Thus, Frye’s archetypal approach also questions the conventional notion that literature is a process developing in time. The “converging patterns of significance” he sees in great works of art make us wonder “if we cannot see literature, not as complicating itself in time, but as spread out in conceptual space from some unseen center.”^[15]

In the past twenty years, literary theorists have moved beyond the limited claims of Guillen and Frye for a depersonalized notion of literary influence in positing a concept of “intertextuality”—the language one text shares with many others. Indeed, the idea of intertextuality can be seen as posing a radical challenge to the concept of an individual influence from one poet’s work to that of another. Julia Kristeva first adopted the concept from the work of Mikhail Bakhtin on the “dialogic” or “heteroglossic” structure of the European novel. Kristeva defines the “intertext” as a “crossing of words (texts) where we read at least one other word (text)”: “Any text is constructed as a mosaic of

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quotations; any text is the absorption and transformation of another.”^[16]

According to Kristeva, modern poetic texts have a tendency to “absorb and destroy at the same time other texts in the intertextual space,” thus becoming in themselves a space for what she calls the discursive “cross-junction”:

The poetic practice which links Poe-Baudelaire-Mallarmé provides one of the most striking examples of this alter-jonction . Baudelaire translates Poe; Mallarmé writes that he will take up the poetic task as a legacy of Baudelaire, and his first writings follow the trace of Baudelaire. In the same way, Mallarmé translates Poe and follows his writing; Poe himself departed from De Quincey. . . . The network can be multiplied, but it would always express the same law: the poetic text is produced in the complex movement of a simultaneous affirmation and negation of another.^[17]

Kristeva’s theory of intertextuality, though it may give the initial impression that all texts overlap or intersect, is really not as radical a formulation as the subsequent adoption of her terminology by Roland Barthes and others may suggest. While she speaks of an overdetermining “law” of textual multiplication and reduplication, she also suggests that a writer such as Poe, Baudelaire, or Mallarmé makes at least a partially conscious choice to translate, “follow the trace of,” or “depart from” the work of a previous author. In some respects, then, the process of textual absorption and rejection Kristeva identifies in her delineation of a Romantic-Symbolist tradition approximates the process of influence I describe within the Pound tradition.

Barthes, taking further Kristeva’s notion of the literary text as a “mosaic of quotations,” has advocated reading all texts outside the context of their “filiation” to sources and influences:

Every text, being itself the intertext of another text, belongs to the intertextual, which must not be confused with a text’s origins: to

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search for the “sources of” and “influence upon” a work is to satisfy the myth of filiation. The quotations from which a text is constructed are anonymous, irrecoverable, and yet already read: they are quotations without quotation marks.^[18]

To attempt finding the “author” of the text is for Barthes to deny that the author can reenter the universal intertext only “as a guest.” Even though Barthes accurately assigns elements of a text to the cultural discourses from which they are drawn, he does not adequately explain through what agency the author chooses, orders, and juxtaposes these elements into a comprehensible and unique form. Would not the directives by which these elements are ordered be provided by a tradition or an influential predecessor?

Michel Foucault launches a similar attack on the notion of influence as it participates in the models of traditional historicism and in the concepts of tradition, development, evolution, “spirit of the age,” oeuvre, and book. In The Archaeology of Knowledge he argues that these categories create a false sense of historical unity and continuity and should be replaced with certain “discursive formations.” These would operate outside the bounds of historical time within a field of “rules of formation”: “One may be compelled to dissociate certain oeuvres, ignore influences and traditions, abandon definitively the question of origin, allow the commanding presence of authors to fade into the background, and thus everything that was thought to be proper to the history of ideas may disappear from view.”^[19] Foucault maintains that “different oeuvres, dispersed books, that whole mass of texts that belong to a single discursive formation—and so many authors who know or do not know one another, criticize one another, invalidate one another, pillage one another—meet without knowing it and obstinately intersect their unique discourses in a web of which they are not the masters, of which they do not see the whole, and of whose

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breadth they have a very inadequate idea.”^[20] Thus, Foucault posits something like an intertextuality, although he defines the sharing of textual material more generally in terms of systems of discourse rather than as a more locally defined mosaic of quotations.

Barthes’s universal (inter)text and Foucault’s discursive formations are challenging alternatives to a personal and historical understanding of influence. They can be used to describe a large spectrum of the phenomena affecting literary production; in particular, they provide a rubric for examining questions of cultural discourse from a wider perspective than does a more narrowly defined study of an individual influence. The understanding of poetic influence reflected in this book is informed in part by the intertextual paradigm; Bakhtin’s theories of novelistic discourse are especially useful in thinking about the techniques employed by many of these poets. Readings of The Cantos and of later poetry in a similar mode can also be profitably informed by Barthes’s idea of “codes” or by Foucault’s discursive formations.^[21] Indeed, it would be next to impossible, having once considered the implications of such theories, to return to discussion of influence based solely on the identification of sources, echoes, or allusions or to maintain that a writer’s social or historical context can completely account for the various manifestations of literary influence.

Nevertheless, although reading Pound and other poets in his tradition in terms of a theory of intertextuality can be fruitful, the theory’s shortcomings merit attention, particularly in regard to literary history and reception. Although it is true that the syncretic mode of poetry adopted by Pound and his successors is one in which the poem is composed of, suggested by, or generated from the confluences of other discourses, these do not appear randomly in the poems discussed here. I do not propose

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as a model for the Pound tradition a poetics of aleatory process; rather, I advance one in which the poetic and nonpoetic discourses that enter the text are for the most part selected and coordinated according to well-defined aesthetic, philosophical, or ideological criteria. If I am not fully satisfied with the intertextual model, it is because I believe that some degree of historical and biographical specificity is necessary to provide a literary understanding that is incommensurate with the more totalizing and less locally applicable construct of the poem as intertext. My aim is to address not only a work’s textuality and its relation to other texts and discourses but also the more local and particular dynamic of its historical production and reception. By examining the role of the poet-as-reader in the transmission of literary texts—first as passive addressee, then as active critic, and finally as creative producer of new texts—we can better understand the extent to which the historical, social, and interpersonal details of a work’s reception determine its influence on other writers.^[22]

The component of reception in literary influence necessitates a reemphasis on the historical dimension of the literary process. It is extremely likely, for example, that a writer will become a greater influence at times when political, social, historical, geographical, or educational conditions favor a positive reception of his or her work. Factors exterior to the text itself may in many cases play the greater role in determining what author or work will be influential at a given time. A poem is not simply what exists textually (part of an intertext); it is also a product of other elements that poets themselves do not and cannot ignore: history and tradition, authors and books. For this reason, much of our interest in literary production remains within the realms of literary history, archival research, and bibliographical scholarship.

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Jerome McGann describes some of the dynamics involved in a historical reading of literary works.^[23] Tracing the decreasing popularity and prestige of historical, textual, and bibliographical criticism throughout this century, particularly during the past thirty years, McGann argues convincingly for a reintegration into literary criticism at large of historical methods now increasingly relegated to the work of “textual scholars.” McGann observes that a text’s historical reception and the critical task involved in interpreting that work are inextricably linked. Critical work on a text, even that which seeks to isolate it from any social or historical context, necessarily becomes part of the text’s history. In many cases, a conflictual relationship exists between the social and historical experience of an author and that of subsequent contexts in which his or her work is published and read. Because poetry is in large part a “social act”—an experience that cannot be conceived “outside of history and specific social environments”—it also entails a relationship on the part of the poet to “all human history (past and future).” The publication of authors’ statements about their own work is also, like the publication of poems or works of fiction, a “social event in [its] own right,” always contributing to and modifying the receptive history of those works.^[24]

Among the models of influence just discussed, the one that most clearly provides for both the social and the aesthetic dimension of literary production is Guillen’s: the displacement of various types of experience in the process of artistic creation. In the tradition beginning with Pound, each of the central poets adopts his or her metaphor or metaphors to describe that process: Pound’s notion of vortex, paideuma, or ideogrammatic method; Olson’s sense of the poetic process as an “autoclytic multiplication” or series of creative accidents; Duncan’s idea of the poem as cell or collage; Snyder’s theory of “interconnectedness,” “riprapping,” or “knot of turbulence”; and what I call

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Dorn’s “migratory” poetics. All these metaphorical constructs are related conceptions of the poetic process and the role of influence in it: this process is constituted not in reference to a narrowly defined literary tradition or canon but in the various textual and extratextual sources that are brought together and assimilated within the fabric of the poem itself.

1—
The Pound Tradition

But the things Pound turns you on to are groovy. . . . he has like a big influence on me.
Allen Ginsberg, in Jane Kramer, Allen Ginsberg in America

The wonder to me is, that, say, I can take yr premises, can learn so precisely from you, and just because I do, just because of it, I am able to make a verse which remains distinctly my own.
Robert Creeley, Charles Olson and Robert Creeley

At a moment of acute personal and spiritual crisis in his Pisan Cantos, Pound evokes as his sole means of salvation a “live tradition” to be gathered “from the air”:

What thou lovest well remains,
the rest is dross
What thou lov’st well shall not be reft from thee
What thou lov’st well is thy true heritage
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
But to have done instead of not doing
this is not vanity
To have, with decency, knocked
That a Blunt should open
To have gathered from the air a live tradition
or from a fine old eye the unconquered flame
This is not vanity.

(C, 521–522)

Christine Froula points out that Pound’s identification of the “minor” English poet Wilfred Blunt as the vessel of artistic tradition allows him to “[bypass] the great Romantics to affirm a minor lyric tradition.”^[1] Although this assessment is generally accurate, Pound’s “live” tradition is not a mere anthology of minor lyric poetry. What Pound proposes as a usable tradition of poetry is really a vortex of diverse poetic and artistic practices

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that can be rediscovered and resynthesized in new directions by new writers and that are constantly leading toward a new sense of “culture”—”a live paideuma and not a dead one” (SP, 393). In his essay “Prefatio aut Cimicium Tumulus,” first published as the preface to his 1933 Active Anthology, Pound chastises T. S. Eliot for supporting the notion of an already existing culture that “does nothing to prepare a better culture that must or ought to come into being” (SP, 393). Eliot, Pound claims, relies on culturally formed “taste” rather than actively seeking a greater diversity of poetic modes or traditions, and he does nothing to encourage an “appetite for the unknown best, or for the best still unread by the neophyte.” Eliot’s gesture in “revising” the poetic canon consists of little more than using Dryden as a “good club wherewith to smack Milton” (SP, 390).

For Pound, it is a question not so much of replacement as of augmentation. Tradition must be more than a sense of poetic inheritance provided by the available stock of writers within a given culture; it must indicate a web of shared poetic practice woven through the writings of poets from all ages and cultures, a nonlinear pattern of poetic writing. Pound comments, “After all, Homer, Propertius, Villon, speak of the world as I know it, whereas Mr. Tennyson and Dr. Bridges do not. Even Dante and Guido with their so highly specialised culture speak part of a life as I know it” (SP, 390).

It was Pound’s more idiosyncratic, iconoclastic, and interactive sense of tradition, rather than Eliot’s notion of tradition as orthodoxy, that appealed to postwar American poets such as Charles Olson and Robert Duncan. They and other poets of the 1950s and 1960s saw in Pound’s poetry and concerns an alternative model of literary Modernism to what they considered the more rigid and hierarchical set of values and expectations represented by Eliot and the New Criticism. Olson and many of the other poets who followed Pound in the postwar era saw the schools of T. S. Eliot and W. H. Auden as inhibited by the restrictive value judgments made by critics within the academy. They felt alienated from what they considered formalized and tightly controlled verse, which relied on subtle effects for its

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impact rather than proposing any radically new conception of poetry itself. Poets of the Pound tradition felt themselves to be part of a movement representing a “new poetry,” one generated by an altered conception of the poet’s relation to phenomenological and artistic experience.

Robert Creeley, Allen Ginsberg, and Robert Duncan helped to delineate this sense of a new tradition in the decade following World War II. Creeley defined his tradition in opposition to the dominant poetry of the time: that of Allen Tate, John Crowe Ransom, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, and Randall Jarrell. His countertradition—that of Pound, Williams, H. D., Zukofsky, George Oppen, and Charles Reznikoff—attracted to it younger poets who were “dissatisfied with the Ransom and Tate school” (CON, 14). Ginsberg, incensed by what he saw as the neglect by academic critics of Pound, Zukofsky, and “the other rough writers of the Whitmanic, open tradition in America,” located himself within a tradition of “Whitmanic adhesiveness” that he felt connected his generation with that of its Modernist predecessors (CT, 93). Duncan identified the same postwar movement more specifically as one “deriving its music from the ground Ezra Pound had given us in his theory and practice forty years earlier [and] . . . from the composition by phrase which Pound had advanced to the high art of The Pisan Cantos .”^[2]

The year Duncan identified as the beginning of a new poetic sensibility, 1950, was marked by the publication of Olson’s “Projective Verse,” the “postmodern” manifesto largely responsible for defining the context of postwar Poundian poetics. In his essay, Olson invoked Pound and Imagism—”the revolution of the ear . . . the trochee’s heave” (SW, 15)—of forty years earlier. Olson’s essay not only represented a significant watershed for a radical postwar poetic consciousness; it also signaled the return to prominence among younger American poets of the long expatriated, American Modernist Pound. The events of the preceding four years—Pound’s arrest and incarceration by the U.S. Army in Italy, his much publicized arraignment and trial, the

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publication of his Pisan Cantos, and the controversial Bollingen Award of 1949—all resulted in Pound’s name being far better known in American literary circles than it had been throughout the 1930s and early 1940s. Now every writer who knew Pound—along with many who did not—was forced to come to terms with often ambivalent feelings about Pound the man as well as Pound the poet. Opinions were sharply divided.^[3] Pound himself remained as active as one in his position reasonably could have. He continued to produce new Cantos and other writings, to meet with aspiring poets, critics, and followers of various kinds, and to disseminate his ideas by whatever channels he could find. It was the time of a remarkable resurgence of interest in Pound’s work and in that of his contemporary Williams and his American predecessor Whitman.

It was largely within the context of these developments that the early 1950s saw the birth and development of a “new American poetry,” a poetry of “open-form” composition that was in direct opposition to the more formal verse of the “establishment” poets writing in the New Critical tradition.^[4] Epithets such as “establishment poetry” and “academic verse” must be judged as only partially accurate; not all poetry written by academics in these years conformed to this mode, nor did all poets outside the academic establishment write according to the

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precepts of Pound and Williams. Nevertheless, the work to which Olson, Duncan, and others objected was a verse primarily written, promoted, and defended by professors of a relatively closed and well-defined academic / literary world. As such, it was a poetry doubly unattractive to writers who either by their own choice or through the neglect of academic critics were working outside mainstream academic circles—poets such as Pound, Williams, Zukofsky, Olson, the Beats, and many poets of the New York and San Francisco schools.

The late 1950s marked the second phase of the same movement. Ginsberg’s Howl (1956) introduced postwar open-form poetry to the larger reading public, as did Donald Allen’s anthology, The New American Poetry (1960), which helped define a context for the forty-three poets represented in it. Various journals and small presses, many of them run by the poets themselves, took on the role of publishing this experimental poetry.^[5] The poets included in the Allen anthology saw in the work of establishment poets a reactionary desire to return verse to inherited forms. Duncan, for example, wrote that poets who “once had dreams and epiphanies, now admit only to devices and ornament” and that “taste, reason, rationality” were the ruling forces of the day, blocking out “the darkness of possibilities that controls cannot manage.”^[6] In his discussion of the conventional” critic Elizabeth Drew, Duncan deplored the narrow-mindedness of those he felt were oppressing the “open” practices of Pound and Williams, finding in these critics “an imposing company of arbiters and camp followers . . . commandos of quatrains right! and myrmidons of the metaphysical stanza” (FC, 94). Ginsberg was even more outspoken in his

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criticism of mainstream academic critics who he felt would stifle any originality in poetic expression and who displayed either “total amnesia” regarding experimental poetry or “complete incompetence” in understanding or evaluating forms of writings not sanctioned by the academy: “All the universities [have been] fucking a dead horse for decades and this is culture?! Yet prosody and conceptions of poetry have been changing for half a century already and . . . yet I have to listen to people giving me doublethink gobbledygook about why I don’t write poems with form, construction, something charming and carefully made.”^[7]

Pound’s standards, by contrast, were seen as a call for greater artistic freedom on several levels. Following Pound’s example, along with that of Williams, poets could include subject matter and diction hitherto deemed unacceptable to poetry, they could derive new poetic forms from a sense of everyday speech, and they could emphasize in their work the previously neglected factor of the visual and aural qualities generated by the physical placement of the poem on the page. Pound’s poetry was unpredictable and idiosyncratic rather than conventional. It was “momently recognized” (moving instantly, as Olson would have it, “from one perception to another”) instead of determined by the impositions of conventional form, thought, and diction.

Pound’s work foregrounded for younger poets the importance of understanding language and form beyond the traditional concerns of poetry (diction, tone, and rhyme) so as to encompass the structural, etymological, and sonic properties of language, as well as the implicit social and political structures language contains. Pound’s application of ideogrammatic structure to Western poetry was of central significance, as were his introduction of the idea of the “tone leading of vowels,” his use of accentual meters and musical structures as a means of “breaking the pentameter,” and his direct quotation of heterogeneous registers of language in the poem. Equally important to later poets was Pound’s idea of an “absolute value” in language—that is, an

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“energy” or a “charge of meaning” within language that links it directly to an experience of the world and gives it a status independent of its existence within an arbitrary linguistic code.^[8] Following Pound’s logic, poets explored the idea of the “perfectibility” of language: the notion that an intensified and attentive “sincerity” in the use of words can function as a critique of the misuse of language in a society, a misuse directly related to the other problems that society may face.

During the 1940s, when poets of Duncan’s and Creeley’s generation reached their maturity, Pound and Williams appeared to many to be the only viable poetic models. Other choices of poetic forebears included a return to the Georgians (the worst kind of conservative and sentimental verse), the clever and highly formal poetry of the “Ransom-Tate nexus” (compared by Creeley to “antiques” made by “awfully-old-Southern-gentlemen”), and the loosely affiliated Modernism represented by Eliot, Moore, and Stevens, poets who seemed neither completely committed to the formal tradition nor part of the open tradition of Pound and Williams.^[9] The poetry written in these various modes was seen by those who accepted the teachings of “Projective Verse” as not only stylistically retrograde but as incapable of encompassing a sense of contemporary social and political reality. Duncan, for example, contrasted the poetry written by Eliot and Stevens with that of Pound:

The voices of Eliot and Stevens do not present us with . . . disturbances of mode. They preserve throughout a melodious poetic respectability, eminently sane in their restriction of poetic meaning to the bounds of the literary, of symbol and metaphor, but at the cost

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of avoiding facts and ideas that might disturb. Both the individual and the communal awareness are constricted to fit or adapted to the convenience of accepted culture.^[10]

Pound’s poetry differed from that of other contemporary models not only in the way it disturbed culturally accepted modes of expression but also in what it demanded of the reader—what Creeley called “an active involvement with what was happening in the given poem.” Unlike poets such as Auden and Stevens, whose works were read in the academy of the 1940s either in terms of their irony and the rigor of their verse patterns (Auden) or in conjunction with vague discussions of aesthetic value (Stevens), Pound insisted “on precisely how the line goes, how the word is, in its context, what has been done, in the practice of verse—and what now seems possible to do” (CE, 27). It was not always easy, according to Creeley, to find acceptance for alternative models like Pound within the academic curriculum of the 1940s and 1950s:

The colleges and universities were dominant in their insistence upon an idea of form extrinsic to the given instance. Poems were equivalent to cars insofar as many could occur of a similar pattern—although each was, of course, “singular.” But it was this assumption of a mold, of a means that could be gained beyond the literal fact of the writing here and now, that had authority. It is the more ironic to think of it, remembering the incredible pressure of feeling in these years—of all that did want “to be said,” of so much confusion and pain wanting statement in its own terms. But again, it is Karl Shapiro’s Essay on Rime which is successful and Auden is the measure of competence. In contrast Ezra Pound, H.D., William Carlos Williams (despite the token interest as Paterson begins to be published), Hart Crane, and especially Walt Whitman are largely disregarded.    (QG, 42)

In many respects, Pound was an ideal model for Olson and other poets of his camp. Pound was the neglected poet, the renegade, “reformer,” great experimenter, mentor, adviser, as well as the politically and intellectually disreputable “traitor.”

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As a figure encapsulating all those qualities, Pound was attractive to a group of poets who sought an antiestablishment stance as well as a new means of poetic expression.^[11] Pound was the great polemicizer who sought to “shake up the context” (Creeley) and “clear the ground” (Olson). He provided later poets not only with new “ground to walk on” (Ginsberg) but with convenient tags on which to hang their own stances. Pound’s assertion that “poets are the antennae of the race,” for example, was frequently summoned as an argument for a poetry relevant to the world of political, social, and economic realities. Poets with entirely different politics from Pound’s own were often attracted to him; in many cases it seemed to matter less to these poets what Pound’s politics actually were than that his work addressed political issues at all:

To the young of that period he was often simply a traitor, an anti-Semite, an obscurantist, a money crank—and such courses in universities and colleges as dealt with modern poetry frequently avoided all mention of the Cantos . . . . The work we were otherwise given was, on the one hand, Auden—wherein a socially based use of irony became the uselessly exact rigor of repetitive verse patterns—or perhaps Stevens, whose mind one respected, in the questions it realized, but again whose use of poetry had fallen to the questionable fact of a device.   (CE, 25)

Ironically, it was the “historical method” of The Cantos as well as Pound’s questionable political status that brought him to the attention of younger poets such as Olson, Creeley, and

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Ginsberg just as he reached the nadir of popularity within the academic world. It was not until the late 1950s and early 1960s—with the further maturation and institutionalization of the “new” poets—that Pound became an acceptable model for young writers.

The 1960s were marked by important and well-attended conferences in Vancouver (1963) and Berkeley (1965) celebrating poetry by followers of Pound, Williams, and Black Mountain. The 1960s also marked the rediscovery by many younger poets of Objectivist writers from the previous generation: especially Louis Zukofsky, George Oppen, and the English poet Basil Bunting. Bunting’s poem Briggflatts was published in 1966, and Zukofsky’s All: The Collected Short Poems finally reached print in the mid-1960s, along with the first twelve books of the long poem “A” . A second and then a third generation of poets in the Pound / Black Mountain tradition also appeared, as Ginsberg, Creeley, Levertov, Snyder, and Dorn reached their maturity and as younger writers such as Clayton Eshleman, Robert Kelly, Jerome Rothenberg, and Diane Wakoski sought out the more established poets of the tradition as teachers and mentors.

Nevertheless, by the end of the decade what had seemed urgently radical in Pound’s work ten or fifteen years earlier no longer seemed so: the force of the Pound tradition had dissipated, and its practitioners had been scattered. Olson, now the “old man” to a number of younger poets, died in 1970, and Pound himself passed away quietly two years later, far removed from the world of American poetry that his work had helped to create.

Pound, however, still provides the impetus for many of the experiments in contemporary poetry, not only in the United States but throughout the world. The manifestos of “concrete” poetry, for example, a movement that began in Latin America in the 1950s, credit Pound with important contributions: the concept of the ideogram as “spatial or visual syntax . . . [and] composition based on direct—analogical, not logical-discursive—juxtaposition of elements” and the idea of a musical (con-

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trapuntal or fugal) form of the poem.^[12] More generally, the techniques of repetition, syntactic and semantic play, minimalist composition, juxtaposition of diction, and the increased mixing of poetry with other media are all outgrowths of Pound’s work and ideas. American writers as diverse in their approaches to the poetic medium as Richard Kostelanetz, David Antin, Clark Coolidge, Jackson MacLow, John Cage, Barrett Watten, Susan Howe, Ron Silliman, and Charles Bernstein have all attempted to provide an enlarged critical vocabulary for dealing not only with the open poetic practices of Black Mountain and related movements but also with the projects currently taking place in such diverse areas as concrete poetry, oral and recorded poetry (sound poetry), various kinds of collage techniques, and Language poetry.

The various manifestations of post-Poundian poetry, from Olson in the early 1950s to Bernstein in the 1980s, all in some measure fall under the rubric of postmodernism, though as James Breslin and others have indicated, the idea of the postmodern in American poetry is highly problematic. In the most fundamental sense, all these writers are by definition postmodernist in coming after Modernists like Pound and Williams and in one way or another following, reacting to, or departing from these Modernist predecessors. In addition, they are part of a broader movement of experimental postmodernism in all the arts that took place in the 1950s and early 1960s.^[13] In a still more specific context, they are postmodern in the sense suggested by critics such as David Antin and Charles Altieri, both of whom describe a postmodernism corresponding to the “field poetics” of Charles Olson and the Black Mountain school. Altieri, for example, defines postmodern poetry as that which is formally radical, constituted by “essentially phenomenological forms of imaginative activity,” and resistant to “tastes fostered

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by academic, pedagogical versions of the New Criticism.”^[14] (I return to a more detailed discussion of the postmodern in chapter 4.)

Olson, the first American poet to theorize the postmodern and to use the term consistently, approached the change to a postmodern consciousness as nothing less than revolutionary: it was not to be seen merely as a technical or formal shift but as an epistemological reorientation that would be all-encompassing in its scope and far-reaching in its consequences. In time, poets such

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as Creeley, Ginsberg, Duncan, Snyder, and Dorn would come to share at least parts of Olson’s postmodern vision. All these poets would enter into a complex dialogue (or polylogue) with Modernism, with Pound, and with the notions of textuality, influence, and tradition he had proposed.

I conclude this general overview of the Pound tradition by looking briefly at two writers who represent very different strains of postmodern American poetry and whose practices I do not have the opportunity to examine in separate chapters: Robert Creeley and Allen Ginsberg. Neither of these poets writes in a way that immediately identifies him as an heir to Pound, and both have been conventionally aligned with other predecessors: Creeley with Williams and Zukofsky and Ginsberg with Whitman. Yet both were profoundly influenced by Pound’s writing and example, and both have been central figures in the development of the Pound tradition. Their participation in the tradition emphasizes two aspects of Pound’s influence that I develop throughout this book. First, what these poets share with Pound and with each other is manifested less in terms of stylistic and formal resemblances, thematic echoes, or repetition of tropes than in the sense of a continuity of techniques, attitudes, and stances toward poetic practice and tradition. Second, the diversity represented by their different understandings of Pound and their equally different uses of his work is itself a salient characteristic of this tradition.

Creeley’s importance in the Pound tradition rests largely on his place as an editor, a correspondent, and an advocate for Pound, Williams, Zukofsky, and the new poetry of the 1950s and 1960s. By the time Creeley began his correspondence with Olson in the spring of 1950, he had already decided that Pound and Williams together represented the central movement in American Modernist writing: “I do have the feeling, those two are almost: a common ground. . . . Not then, Joyce & Pound, Lewis, Eliot, et al. 1s/ always has been: Williams & Pound” (CORC, vol. 4, 72). In that same year Creeley wrote to Pound asking him for advice about a journal of contemporary poetry he

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wished to start up. Pound advised Creeley to stick to a practical format: to use as a base the work of the editor himself and “about four others whose work could be depended on” and to supplement that base with a “variant,” the content of which should be “as hogwild as possible” (CE, 506). Creeley’s magazine never got off the ground, despite his attempts to enlist the support of both Pound and Williams, and he had to wait until the first volume of Black Mountain Review in 1953 to put Pound’s ideas into practice. Creeley’s magazine, which ran for several issues, did establish itself on the “base” of a few central Black Mountain poets, and it joined Cid Corman’s Origin in printing some of the more experimental poetry being written in America at the time.^[15]

As a Harvard undergraduate in the mid-1940s, Creeley had discovered that an academic education would not in itself teach him what he needed to know as a poet. His course on contemporary poetry at Harvard was taught by F. O. Matthiessen, a professor who was unusually open to flexibility in the canon. But when Creeley asked him why Pound’s Cantos were not being taught, Matthiessen replied “that he understood Pound’s work too poorly, that he felt Pound’s political attitudes most suspect, and that he could not finally see the value of the work in a course such as ours was” (QG, 95).^[16] Creeley himself found the form of The Cantos “intimidating” at first, though he had already profited from Pound’s critical writings and the shorter poems of Personae . Learning to read The Cantos was unquestionably difficult for a young and relatively unguided poet in the years following World War II, but the “work” Creeley put into trying to read Pound’s poem expanded his own horizons. Creeley identified in Pound’s work technical “possibilities” of great im-

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portance to him and other young poets. Pound had made it possible for them to “find the character of our own intelligence” by means of a “preoccupation with how the poem is to be put on the page” (CON, 5).

It was in large part Creeley’s discovery of Pound’s Imagist and Objectivist precepts that led him to adopt what Charles Altieri calls an “immanentist poetics,” one “stressing the ways in which an imagination attentive to common or casual experience can transform the mind.” It was a poetic mode opposed to the Symbolist model predominant at the time, which emphasized an “abstract meditation on poetic structure and on the mind’s dialectical pursuit of ideal unity.”^[17] Creeley was himself mindful of Pound’s relation to Symbolism. As Creeley noted in an interview with Charles Tomlinson, Pound “has always been intent to make a very clear demarcation between a symbol which in effect exhausts its references as opposed to a sign or mark of something which constantly renews its reference” (CON, 15).

Creeley joined Olson as one of Pound’s public advocates when in a 1952 letter to the editor of the journal Goad he defended his predecessor against what he considered unfair attacks in an article printed there. In the letter, Creeley listed Pound’s most important contributions to modern and contemporary poetry:

1) 50 years of work. . . . Criticism. Translation. Hauling over into the English of at least 3 major areas of thought. 2) A principle of verse (kinetic) which has made, literally, the basic condition which now makes it possible for us to go on with it. . . . 3) A body of work … based, surely, on a man’s actuality, on his own actuality, and isn’t that what, precisely, poetry is supposed to be?    (QG, 92–94)

In a 1969 essay called simply “Why Pound!?!” Creeley elaborated on the significance of Pound’s poetry and ideas to the postmodern generation. Most important was what he called Pound’s “insistent stance of an active . . . intelligence” (CE, 28). Pound’s criticism in books such as Make It New, ABC of Reading, Guide to Kulchur, and Polite Essays taught Creeley that it

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was not a knowledge of the canon or of literary history that would make him a poet; rather, he would become a poet by virtue of a poetic intelligence and awareness made possible by repeated practice and experimentation and by a greater attentiveness to language, music, and rhythm. What Pound taught was a practical method of “how to write”:

Rather than tell me about some character of verse, he would give the literal instance side by side with that which gave it context. . . . This emphasis I feel to be present in all his work, from the rationale of imagism, to the latest Cantos . . . . Pound took the possibility of writing to involve more than descriptive aesthetics. . . . He moved upon the active principle of the intelligence, the concept of virtu . . . the experience of an energy, of ear and mind, which makes of language man’s primary act.    (CE, 26–27)

From The Cantos Creeley also learned that locally defined formal considerations were not in themselves adequate directives in making a poem: the inclusive structure of The Cantos taught him that “the variousness of life is as much its quality as its quantity” (QG, 96). Creeley agreed with Pound that the “content” of a poem (its direct reference to events or objects in the world) should not be subjugated to formal or symbolic concerns. But if poetic form for Creeley was “never more than an extension of content,” he would not go as far as Pound, or even Olson, in allowing content itself to sustain the poem. Creeley believed that the necessary balance between form and content in the poem could be achieved and apprehended only through the language used: “I mean then words —as opposed to content. I care what the poem says, only as a poem—I am no longer interested in the exterior attitude to which a poem may well point, a signboard. That concern I have found is best settled elsewhere” (QG, 32).

Although Creeley found fault with Pound for relying too heavily on the content or material in The Cantos rather than on formal concerns more intrinsic to the poetic process, he recognized the important example of Pound’s use of various materials as an essential “building place” where the “particulars” of a poem’s “reality” can be stored (CORC, vol. 4, 31). Creeley

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wrote to Olson of his admiration for Pound’s ability to “go by feel,” “by ear,” or “by language” in the poem, instead of writing “mechanically.” Rather than write sentimental poems that “plot the heart … like one would nail a butterfly to a board,” Pound used words to convey “the sensing” of an object or experience; he shaped “the word round the thing” (CORC, vol. 1, 103). Pound also provided a sincerity in his poetry that acted as an important counterbalance to the predominantly ironic mode of poetry at the time and that was reflected in Pound’s constant vigilance against the misuses or perversions of language:

Pound, early in the century, teaches the tradition of “man-standing-by-his-word,” the problem of sincerity, which is never as simple as it may be made to seem. The poet, of all men, has best cause and least excuse to pervert his language, since what he markets is so little in demand…. I think the poem’s morality is contained as a term of its structure, and is there to be determined and nowhere else. (Pound: “Prosody is the total articulation of the sound in a poem.”) Only craft determines the morality of a poem.    (QG, 32)^[18]

This concern with craft runs throughout Creeley’s writings; it and a number of related concerns having to do with form and measure all derive from the original tenets of Imagism and the later reformulations of Objectivism. Foremost among these concepts is the idea of poetry as “condensation”; Creeley’s work, more than that of any other poet in the Pound tradition, maintains a sense of extremely condensed, often almost minimalist expression in keeping with the Objectivist equation Dichten = condensare (to write poetry is to condense) suggested to Pound by Basil Bunting. For Creeley, the idea of the poem as a “literal transmission” of experience manifests itself not in terms of a fluidity of language and image (as for Duncan) or in the variable patterning of an excited state of mind (as for Olson), but in the transcription of a highly cautious, controlled statement. Such a transcription or transmission is a celebration of language as

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“speech” in keeping with Pound’s Cantos: “The Cantos are, first of all, an incredible condensing, as speech is” (QG, 94).

Also of great importance to Creeley’s work is Pound’s sense of “measure”—of an exacting sense of metrical, syllabic, and sonic “weights and durations.” Creeley’s use of the short, often enjambed line shows most clearly the influence of Williams; but the tight, almost sculptural form of many of his poems as well as their attention to the sounds and rhythms of language owes a great deal to Pound. In his essay “I’m given to write poems” Creeley quotes several of Pound’s statements from his “Treatise of Meter” at the end of ABC of Reading . Besides the idea of the weights and durations of syllables, Creeley views as Pound’s most important injunctions those concerning rhythm as “form cut into TIME , as a design is cut into SPACE ,” and those showing an awareness of the poem’s sonic possibilities—”the sound it makes” (CE, 503).

The poem of Creeley’s in which Pound’s presence is most clearly felt is “The Finger,” written in the late 1960s. It is not unusual that only one of Creeley’s poems shows such a direct relationship to his predecessor—after all, Creeley’s characteristic voice is not one of allusion or quotation, like the voices of Olson, Duncan, and Snyder. As Creeley himself explains, this poem’s allusions place it in the same relationship to Pound as The Cantos does to many prior works, which appear as single or multiple echoes within its overall structure.^[19] Unlike Olson or Duncan, who return repeatedly to Pound’s work as a model or source for their own poetry, Creeley uses this single poem—significantly one of his longest and most impressive works—as his poetic acknowledgment of Pound’s importance.

Creeley had already decided by the time of his 1951 poem “Helas” that even though he was “impressed by Pound’s authority in the language,” Pound’s poetic solutions were not viable ones for him. Creeley differed from contemporaries such as Olson and Duncan in not wishing to pattern his writing on

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the “didacticism” of Pound’s poetic project.^[20] Even this early in his poetic career, Creeley had determined that he could not find in his own experience a certainty corresponding to Pound’s “axe” of lucidity and “right reason”; his was to be a poetry for the “indefinite,” without the firm “edge” of didacticism or authority.

Cynthia Edelberg reads “The Finger” as an epic descent, or nekuia, by a hero figure bearing some resemblance to the Odysseus persona of Pound’s Cantos .^[21] I read the poem as going even further in creating a full-scale mosaic of allusions to Pound. In the first lines of “The Finger,” Creeley alludes directly to Pound’s “So that,” which ends Canto I and begins Canto XVII. Pound first uses the words to form a transition from the translation of the Odyssey into his own poetic project, and later he uses them to reintroduce the divine and metamorphic world of the earlier Cantos. Although on a smaller scale, Creeley’s poem and volume enact a similar “timeless” journey: “that time I was a stranger, / bearded, with clothes that were / old and torn. I was told, / it was known to me, my fate would be timeless.” The poem goes on to evoke Pound’s early Cantos on several levels: in the images of light and blindness suggesting Pound’s Tiresias and Homer in the first two Cantos, in the mythological figures of Aphrodite and Hermes, in the seabird imagery derived from the beginning of Canto II, and in the overall attitude of stately reverence.

The quiet shatter of the light,
the image folded into
endlessly opening patterns—

Had they faced me into
the light so that my
eye was blinded? At moments
I knew they had gone by

searched for her face, the pureness
of its beauty, the endlessly sensual—
but no sense as that now reports it.
Rather, she was beauty, that

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Aphrodite I had known of,
and caught sight of as maid—
a girlish openness—or known
as a woman turned from the light.

I knew, however, the other,
perhaps even more. She was there
in the room’s corner, as she would be,
bent by a wind it seemed

would never stop blowing,
braced like a seabird,
with those endlessly clear grey eyes.
Name her, Athena, what name.^[22]

Creeley, however, cannot remain long in his mode of Poundian authority; soon the myth becomes modernized, as first a sense of Christian martyrdom and then a disturbing note of sensuality enter the poem. Creeley’s “hero” dances an unheroic “jig” as he approaches the “goddess,” now transformed into a fleshly woman with a “low, chuckling laugh.” As Creeley’s vision of feminine beauty moves further away from Pound’s, the style and language follow: Creeley’s more characteristic lines reappear, with their self-consciously awkward enjambments and halting punctuation. The rest of the volume returns to the scattered, fragmentary format of poems as “pieces,” leaving behind the brief but powerful moment of Poundian certainty and transcendence.

Compared to Olson, Duncan, and Creeley, Allen Ginsberg was late in recognizing Pound as an important precursor. In a letter to Lionel Trilling shortly before the publication of Howl (May 1956), Ginsberg contrasted the “classicism” represented by Eliot and Pound with the “romanticism” of his own generation:

I think what is coming is a romantic period (strangely tho everybody thinks that by being hard-up and classical they are going to make it like Eliot which is silly). Eliot & Pound are like Dryden & Pope. What gives now is much more personal—how could there be now

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anything but a reassertion of naked personal subjective truth—eternally real? Perhaps Whitman will be seen to have set the example and been bypassed by half a century.    (H, 155)

But in the next month Ginsberg seemed to revise his opinion of Pound; Ginsberg sent him the manuscript of Howl with a letter that indicated his respect for Pound’s judgment: “Please read at least 1 page of the enclosed mss. Or 1 line for that matter so long as you can judge the rhythm. These are all l-o-n-g lines, used in various ways. I don’t think nobody’s tried this this way. . . . Please let me know how the poems strike or affect you” (H, 157).

Pound did not reply to Ginsberg’s letter, but he did send the poem on to Williams with a typically cranky note: “You got more room in yr house than I hv in my cubicle. If he’s yours why dont yu teach him the value of time to those who want to read something that wil tell ‘em something what they dont know” (H, 157). There is no indication that Ginsberg was aware of Pound’s reaction or, if he was, that it bothered him greatly; in any case, Ginsberg’s estimation of Pound’s poetry continued to grow. When he visited Pound at Rapallo in 1967, Ginsberg praised Pound’s poetry as “the best of its time” and stressed the importance of its impact on contemporary poets.^[23] In his meetings with Pound, Ginsberg not only praised Pound’s poetry; he accepted Pound’s anti-Semitism in The Cantos as part of a natural “process of thought” and expressed agreement with Pound’s economic critiques, especially those concerning the very institutions of banking and “usury” that Pound had attributed to Jewish moneylenders and financiers.^[24]

Two possible explanations for Ginsberg’s reaction can be proposed—one personal and one historical. By the time Ginsberg met Pound, he spoke only apologetically about his work and his anti-Semitic prejudice. Rather than having to deal with the political, economic, and sometimes anti-Semitic “ravings” to

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which Olson and Duncan had been subjected at St. Elizabeth’s, Ginsberg had only to counteract Pound’s silence and depression and to try impressing on him the value of The Cantos and its importance to younger poets. And by the time of Ginsberg’s poetic success (the late 1950s and early 1960s), the immediate mood cast over the United States by the acts of Mussolini and Hitler had subsided. In consequence, the antiwar sentiment and the critique of the capitalist system Pound provided were more attractive to younger writers than they had been a decade or two earlier.

Ginsberg rationalized Pound’s statements against Jews in The Cantos as part of an overall structure of “humours . . . irritations and angers.” Ginsberg explained that the uniqueness of The Cantos’ form lay in the way Pound registered the state of flux of such “humours” in his life: “The Cantos were for the first time a single person registering over the course of a lifetime all of his major obsessions and thoughts and the entire rainbow of his images and clingings and attachments and discoveries and perceptions” (AV, 181). Pound’s perceptions, Ginsberg claimed, were “manifest in procession as time mosaics”: “His irritations, against Buddhists, Taoists, and Jews, fitted into place, despite his intentions, as part of the drama, the theater, the presentation, the record of mind-flux.”^[25]

Clearly, something of Pound’s social and economic critique also informs Ginsberg’s work, as it does that of Olson, Duncan, and others. The moral outrage Ginsberg expresses in a passage like the “Moloch” section of Howl matches Pound’s own disgust at economic ills and misuses in the Cantos dealing with “Usura.” Ginsberg’s Moloch, like the figure of Geryon in The Cantos, is the monster of economic evil that leaves a trail of corruption and social devastation in its wake. Ginsberg’s commentary on Pound’s “Usura Cantos” indicates a conscious parallel with his own Moloch. In an essay entitled “Pound Contra Usura,” Ginsberg adumbrates Pound’s Canto XLVI, the one following his

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famous “exorcism of usury”: “He goes into incidents and scenes from World War I, people making money on the war…. Speaking from the American experience, he says that when a small group of people get a monopoly on the physical issue of actual money, currency, then corruption enters our polis, enters into our government and into the conduct of economic and political affairs” (AV, 173–74). Ginsberg’s own poem reiterates in more compressed form the same images: “unobtainable dollars,” “the vast stone of war,” “the crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of sorrows,” and “the stunned government.”^[26]

Like Creeley, Ginsberg learned aspects of poetic technique from Pound, but the concepts he adopted from Pound’s practice were in most cases different from those that interested Creeley. Ginsberg praised Pound both for his use of classical meter as an alternative to a standard iambic-based rhythm and for a “mystical ear” that allowed him to “hear gradations of vowel lengths that other people wouldn’t notice” and to “balance vowels from line to line, work with vowels as a measure of the line as other people couldn’t.” Pound’s “ear,” Ginsberg felt, had enabled him to “make a new kind of American measure based on the approximation of classical quantity.” Ginsberg saw this new measure as “a revelation . . . of the musical possibilities of the vowels,” and he contrasted Pound’s experimental metrics with those of his more conventional contemporaries, in whose work the musical possibilities and shades of meaning were subjugated to a controlling metrical structure (CT, 127). Pound’s poetics—with its emphasis on sound, or “melopoeia”—foregrounded the vital connections among poetry, speech, and song.

In a letter to Richard Eberhart, subsequently published as To Eberhart, from Ginsberg: Letter about Howl, 1956, Ginsberg discusses his technique in parts of Howl and in “Sunflower Sutra.” He provides an example from the final line of “Sunflower Sutra”—”mad locomotive riverbank sunset Frisco hilly tincan evening sitdown vision”—a line that he calls “a curious but

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really rather logical development of Pound—Fenollosa Chinese Written Character—W. C. Williams—imagist practice.”^[27]

If we examine this example along with similar lines from Howl —”backyard green tree cemetery dawns” or “teahead joyride neon blinking traffic light”—we find that Ginsberg follows Pound’s practice in several ways. Ginsberg eliminates connectives of any kind, as if in a more radical extension of Pound’s Imagist directive “to use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation.” The Pound-Fenollosa adaptation of the ideogrammatic method is apparent in the direct juxtaposition of elements taken as independent visual concepts that together form a coherent meaning. In The Cantos Ginsberg finds a technique based on an “attention to specific perceptions” and “descriptions of exact language” that serves as a model for his own writing (AV, 12). Pound’s most vivid passages—such as “tin flash in the sun dazzle” and “Soapsmooth stone posts”—form “a sequence of phanopoeic images,” a “praxis of perceptions manifested in phrasing” (AV, 13). Ginsberg refers to such instances as the poetic “transcription” of images into words. Ginsberg’s lines, like Pound’s, transcribe images directly through the use of “condensed perception concrete images” around which other thoughts or references can revolve. As in the haiku-like condensation of Pound’s Imagist poems and the later ideogrammatic constructions in The Cantos, Ginsberg’s poem eliminates the use of the simile, thus allowing complexes of images, or ” thing-facts,” to “jump together in the mind” (AV, 182).

Finally, Ginsberg’s phrases reflect his interest in Pound’s idea of the tone leading of vowels and in the musical, or melopoeic, possibilities of poetry. Ginsberg’s choice of words in the lines just quoted are determined as much by their sounds as by the visual or mental image they evoke. As in the lines from Pound’s “Usura Canto” that Ginsberg quotes—”or where virgin receiveth message / and halo projects from incision”—the vowels in Ginsberg’s lines create a sense of internal melody. In the “Sunflower Sutra,” for example, a pattern of “i” sounds sustains this

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melody: “locomotive riv erbank sunset Frisco hilly tin can evening sit down vi sion.”

The examples of Creeley and Ginsberg illustrate two of the directions in which Pound’s poetics have been developed by the postmodern generation. They also demonstrate how Pound’s sense of a live tradition continues to operate among the poets who follow him. Both Creeley and Ginsberg exemplify the impact of Pound’s notions of technique, or craft; both adopt Pound’s ideas concerning the ideogrammatic method and the condensation of language it entails; both reenact his attention to sound and poetic form; and both share with Pound a sense of poetry’s social and political role. Yet the poetry that results can hardly be more different than in the case of these two contemporaries. What they demonstrate most obviously in their use of Pound is the synthetic, nonlinear sense of tradition contained in Pound’s own project; Pound’s work and ideas become part of a vortex of diverse influences including the jazz of Charlie Parker in the case of Creeley and the poetry of Whitman, Blake, Apollinaire, Lorca, and Williams (not to mention traditions of Eastern religion and meditation) in the case of Ginsberg. It is this incorporative poetic and its theoretical implications for influence and tradition that I explore in the next chapter.