Why Poetry Matters: The Transpersonal Force of Lyric Experience in Ezra Pound's The Pisan Cantos

Abstract

Why Poetry Matters:The Transpersonal Force of Lyric Experience in Ezra Pound's The Pisan Cantos Ayon Maharaj (bio) pandars to authoritypets-de-loup, sitting on piles of stone books,obscuring the texts with philology, hiding them under their persons,the air without refuge of silence . . . Ezra Pound, Canto 14 Recent critics in modernist studies have been eager to expose the often unsavory ideological commitments lurking at the basis of modernist aesthetics. There is perhaps no richer—and more contentious—locus for examining the vexed question of the status of ideology in modernism than The Cantos, Ezra Pound's great "poem including history."1 Ironically, the recent critical obsession with history and ideology in The Cantos has threatened to turn the poem into something more like a historical tract written incidentally in poetic form. Much of the drama and energy of The Cantos derives from the complex interplay of what might be called the poem's lyric and historical modes. The lyric mode of The Cantos is most often characterized by affective immediacy, elevated diction, aphoristic-philosophical pronouncement, and an emphasis on the natural and the transhistorical. The historical mode, by sharp contrast, is usually characterized by strident didacticism, quotidian and often vulgar prose, close attention to historical particulars, and the privileging of rationality over affect. The oppositions are [End Page 71] stark, and a number of critics have been tempted to subsume them under the master binary, "subjective" and "objective." As a result of the recent trend toward historicism and cultural studies, critics have tended to conceive the historical mode of The Cantos as the realm of the objective and interpersonal, while relegating the lyric mode to the realm of the subjective—the merely private reveries of the inward gaze.2 Even a cursory glance at the critical literature on The Pisan Cantos (Cantos 74-84), however, reflects the dangers inherent in such a straightforward mapping of the lyric and the historical onto the poles of "subjective" and "objective." It has led many commentators to read the lyric moments in The Pisan Cantos in strictly autobiographical terms as moments of mystical insight attained by Pound during his 1945 imprisonment in the Disciplinary Training Center at Pisa.3 The critic Michael Alexander is typical in latching onto a famous line from Canto 74 to justify an autobiographical approach. The poem, Alexander argues, "becomes for the first time openly autobiographical [in The Pisan Cantos]: it changes from a would-be objective presentation of ancient history to a private report on the author's actual situation and feelings: 'the drama is wholly subjective'" (194). The manifest problem with his claim is that he strips this oft-cited line of its context: that the drama is wholly subjectivestone knowing the form which the carver imparts itthe stone knows the form. . . . (LXXIV 450) Crucially, the "subjectivity" of the poetic drama that is The Pisan Cantos requires radical reconceptualization. This is a subjectivity so grounded in the formal structures of the work itself that the poem-stone actually "knows" the form imparted to it by the poet-carver; for Pound, in other words, the traditional opposition between "subjective" and "objective" collapses in the poetic act. In a 1920 essay, Pound approvingly cites Remy de Gourmont to that effect: "[L]'objectif est une des formes du subjectif" ("The objective is one of the forms of the subjective") (Literary Essays 353). So whether the "diary-like openness" of the poem's historical mode is privileged over the fascistic "symbolist closure" of the lyric mode or the epiphanic lyric mode is privileged over the quotidian historical mode, what gets taken for granted in either case is a certain traditional assumption about lyricism's isolation from the social.4 I hope to demonstrate, [End Page 72] however, that The Pisan Cantos conceive and deploy a special form of lyricism that anchors the subjective in objective energies and hence empowers the lyric to carry significant social force.5 Earlier in his essay on de Gourmont, Pound observes: "An 'idea' has little value apart from the modality of the mind which receives it" (Literary Essays 341). To read The Pisan Cantos, then, primarily for their "ideas"—be they...