The Rest

O helpless few in my country,

O remnant enslaved!

Artists broken against her,

A-stray, lost in the villages,

Mistrusted, spoken-against,

Lovers of beauty, starved,

Thwarted with systems,

Helpless against the control;

You who can not wear yourselves out

By persisting to successes,

You who can only speak,

Who can not steel yourselves into reiteration;

You of the finer sense,

Broken against false knowledge,

You who can know at first hand,

Hated, shut in, mistrusted:

Take thought:

I have weathered the storm,

I have beaten out my exile.

In a Station of the Metro

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;

Petals on a wet, black bough.

The Seeing Eye

The small dogs look at the big dogs;

They observe unwieldy dimensions

And curious imperfections of odor.

Here is the formal male group:

The young men look upon their seniors,

They consider the elderly mind

And observe its inexplicable correlations.

Said Tsin-Tsu:

It is only in small dogs and the young

That we find minute observation

Statement of being

I am a grave poetic hen

That lays poetic eggs

And to enhance my temperament

A little quiet begs.

We make the yolk philosophy,

True beauty the albumen.

And then gum on a shell of form

To make the screed sound human.

A Pact

I make a pact with you, Walt Whitman--

I have detested you long enough.

I come to you as a grown child

Who has had a pig-headed father;

I am old enough now to make friends.

It was you that broke the new wood,

Now is a time for carving.

We have one sap and one root--

Let there be commerce between us.

Ballad for Gloom

For God, our God is a gallant foe

That playeth behind the veil.

I have loved my God as a child at heart

That seeketh deep bosoms for rest,

I have loved my God as a maid to man—

But lo, this thing is best:

To love your God as a gallant foe that plays behind the veil;

To meet your God as the night winds meet beyond Arcturus' pale.

I have played with God for a woman,

I have staked with my God for truth,

I have lost to my God as a man, clear-eyed—

His dice be not of ruth.

For I am made as a naked blade,

But hear ye this thing in sooth:

Who loseth to God as man to man

Shall win at the turn of the game.

I have drawn my blade where the lightnings meet

But the ending is the same:

Who loseth to God as the sword blades lose

Shall win at the end of the game.

For God, our God is a gallant foe that playeth behind the veil.

Whom God deigns not to overthrow hath need of triple mail.

Villanelle: The Psychological Hour

I had over prepared the event,

that much was ominous.

With middle-ageing care

I had laid out just the right books.

I had almost turned down the pages.

Beauty is so rare a thing.

So few drink of my fountain.

So much barren regret,

So many hours wasted!

And now I watch, from the window,

the rain, the wandering busses.

"Their little cosmos is shaken" -

the air is alive with that fact.

In their parts of the city

they are played on by diverse forces.

How do I know?

Oh, I know well enough.

For them there is something afoot.

As for me;

I had over-prepared the event -

Beauty is so rare a thing.

So few drink of my fountain.

Two friends: a breath of the forest. . .

Friends? Are people less friends

because one has just, at last, found them?

Twice they promised to come.

"Between the night and the morning?"

Beauty would drink of my mind.

Youth would awhile forget

my youth is gone from me.

(Speak up! You have danced so stiffly?

Someone admired your works,

And said so frankly.

"Did you talk like a fool,

The first night?

The second evening?"

"But they promised again:

'To-morrow at tea-time'.")

Now the third day is here -

no word from either;

No word from her nor him,

Only another man's note:

"Dear Pound, I am leaving England."

http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/m_r/pound/pound.htm

The poet I have chosen is the British Ezra Loomis Pound. He lived from 1885 to 1972, a period in which the two World Wars took place. Because of this fact, and also by the absolutist periods, Ezra Pound’s poetry is highly related to his economical and political beliefs.

From my point of view, the most characteristic fact of the work of this poet is the frustration and disappointment that can be found throughout all his writings. A very illustrative example of this sad tone is the entire poem A Pact[1] (1913, 1916). Here Pound is trying to make a new friend, maybe a person who he did not speak to for a long time. And even in that situation, in which a person is supposed to sound friendly, the poet speaks as austere as always: I have detested you long enough (line 2), or Let there be commerce between us (line 9), meaning ‘let’s be friends’.

Moreover, his entire work is very much related to his biography. He was born in the U.S. but, during his twenties he was convinced that his country had no place for him, and that a country with no place for him had no place for art, so he moved to Europe[2]. From then on, his polemic against American society begins. This detestation of his natal country can be perfectly seen in the poem The Rest (1913, 1916)[3]. In this work he calls his contemporaries: Artists broken against her (line 3), in which ‘she’ refers to America. Furthermore, in the third paragraph, he defines the artists as:

                    Lovers of beauty, starved,

               Thwarted with systems,

               Helpless against the control;

Here he is denouncing and regretting a country which does not know to value the art, and in the end, he finishes his poem by saying:

               I have weathered the storm,

               I have beaten out my exile.

               Regarding his style, Pound first campaigned for ‘imagism’, a new kind of poetry stressing clarity, precision, and economy of language, and foregoing traditional rhyme and meter.[4] But, despite of this new trend he fostered, the austerity and disapproval continued to be a trend in Pound’s work. Maybe the best example of this modern tendency in Pound is the one-image poem In a Station of the Metro (1913, 1916).  Pound had seen a succession of beautiful faces one day on the Paris Metro, and in the evening he found suddenly the expression for his sudden emotion:

               The apparition of these faces in the crowd;

               Petals on a wet, black bough.[5]

In a later poem, Villanelle: The Psychological Hour (1916), however, we can find the topic of this new style explained, in other words, what Pound thinks about art. In it, he says that nobody understands his art, and that when it seems to him that somebody will admire his work, this person leaves him alone. He repeats twice the most visual lines of this sorrowful poem:

Beauty is so rare a thing.

So few drink of my fountain.

He criticizes his contemporary rules of art also in the poem Statement of Being[6] (1913, 1916), in which he compares his art to the yolk of the egg, claiming that the beauty is in the albumen.

Another highly visual example of the frustration and indignation of this artist is the poem Ballad for Gloom[7]. In this poem Pound repeats twice For God, our God is a gallant foe that playeth behind the veil, (lines 7, 21), showing his sorrow and his feeling of betrayal, maybe by the society.

Along all his poems from the mid-1920s he examined in several writings the ways economic systems promote or debase culture. Pound hoped, that fascism could establish the sort of society in which the arts could flourish. He met Mussolini in 1933 and saw in him the long-needed economic and social reformer. His support to the absolutist leader political beliefs is also collected in some of his poems, as in The Seeing Eye:

                    The young men look upon their seniors,

               They consider the elderly mind

Moreover, as we have already seen, he argued that poetry is not 'entertainment', and as an elitist he did not appreciate the common reader. Furthermore, he considered American culture isolated from the traditions that make the arts possible. All these beliefs together with his support to fascism made him to be remembered as a strange person. And he spent his last years of life in a mental illness hospital. On the other hand, some have often called him "the poet's poet" because of his profound influence on 20th century writing in English.

Personally, what has struck me the most is his serenity, his respectable austerity and his sorrowful mood. This way of writing combined with the sad and polemic topics that he chose, make him seem to be angry with the entire world.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Nina Baym, The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Volume D; American literature between the Wars 1914-1945, 6^th edition, Norton and Company, New York/London, 2003, Ezra Pound.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ezra_Pound, ‘Ezra Pound-Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, board@wikipedia.org, 2006, (05-04-06)

http://www.americanpoems.com/poets/ezrapound/, ‘Ezra Pound-Poems and Biography by AmericanPoems.com’ Gunnar Bengtsson, 2000-2006, (04-04-06).

REFERENCE BIBLIOGRAPHY

Dictionary of Contemporary English, Longman, UK, 2003

http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/epound.htm, ‘Ezra Pound’, Petri Liukkonen, 2000, (05-04-06).

http://www.americanpoems.com/poets/ezrapound/16177

http://www.americanpoems.com/poets/ezrapound/16183

http://www.americanpoems.com/poets/ezrapound/16159

http://www.americanpoems.com/poets/ezrapound/3819

http://www.americanpoems.com/poets/ezrapound/12629

http://www.americanpoems.com/poets/ezrapound/16142

http://www.americanpoems.com/poets/ezrapound/16188

http://www.americanpoems.com/poets/ezrapound/16143

[1] A poem addressed to Walt Whiltman, (1819-92) a US writer who wrote poetry about the beauty of nature and the value of freedom. He is one of the greatest and most influential US poets, and his best-known work is Leaves of Grass, (Longman).

[2] Nina Baym, The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Volume D; American literature between the Wars 1914-1945, 6^th edition, Norton and Company, New York/London, 2003, Ezra Pound.

[6] ‘Ezra Pound- Poems and Biography by AmericanPoems.com’, Gunnar Bengtsson.

[7] ‘Ezra Pound- Poems and Biography by AmericanPoems.com’, Gunnar Bengtsson.