Sieburth singles out "Mr Edwards", the black soldier who, against the
regulations, supplies the poet with a packing-crate to serve as a
writing-table in his tent:

"doan you tell no one

I made that table",

methenamine eases the urine

and the greatest is charity

to be found among those who have not

observed

regulations

Mr Edwards's charity, as Sieburth reminds us, returns seven cantos on, as
Pound prepares to embark on his great meditation on love, "What thou lovest
well remains":

What counts is the cultural level,

thank Benin for this table ex packing box

"doan yu tell no one I made it",

from a mask fine as any in Frankfurt

"It'll get you offn th'groun",

Light as the branch of Kuanon

The allusion to Frankfurt concerns one of Pound's heroes, the anthropologist
Leo Frobenius, whose institute of tribal art is among that city's many fine
museums.

"The ground Mr Edwards supplies", Sieburth comments, "is at once ethical
(the exemplification of charity), linguistic (the black vernacular), and
material (the very table Pound writes on)" - and, though he does not say so,
those are undoubtedly the three categories around which The Cantos is built.
The dark "ground" is characteristically transcended with the appearance in
the tent of the white goddess Aphrodite, of course, and Sieburth does not
run away from the uncom- fortable fact of Pound's racism. With a few
exceptions, previous critics, understandably embarrassed by his insistence
on "coons" and "niggers", have skated over these preoccupations, perhaps
pointing out that the attention he pays to the private soldiers and his
fellow inmates - most of them - is part of the care for particularity that
preserves him against breakdown: "When the mind swings by a grass-blade / an
ant's forefoot shall save you". It could be argued that this sympathy for
the children of rural slaves in preference to those rootless cosmopolitans,
the Jews, is sentimental, paternalistic and, in the end, more pernicious
than outright prejudice. Yet Pound, as Sieburth begins to show, is always
more complex than that. The Pisan Cantos includes condemnations of slavery
and unqualified admiration for Benin sculpture. It is also the one section
of the poem in which Pound consistently turns for wisdom to the Jewish texts
that constitute the Bible, one of the few books he had access to in the
compound. We have already heard him quoting St Paul; and that ant, as Davie
once noticed, is not only the insect in the grass out there but the one he
recalls from Proverbs:

"Go to the ant, thou sluggard; consider her ways, and be wise". As his
comments on usury, Third World poverty and what we now know as ecology
indicate, Pound was never simply a bigot; and the poetry is always wiser
than his stridently voiced opinions.

The other distinctive feature of Sieburth's introduction is the use it makes
of Pound's original drafts. Sometimes this is straightforwardly poignant, as
when the voice suddenly veers into six lines of rapidly drawn Chinese
characters which translate as "alone day by day alone day by day alone alone
alone alone alone alone / alone alone alone alone alone alone alone alone
alone alone etc". Such vulnerably personal passages were mostly cut from the
final drafts or significantly modified: Pound was always an assiduous
pruner. He cut twenty four pages of manuscript from Canto LXXIV, for
instance, and added ten opening lines, among the most memorable in the poem,
which he had scribbled on a sheet of toilet-paper.

It is perhaps due to the uncertain status of the published text that
insufficient attention has been paid to Pound's drafts. Until recently, the
only available place where the drafts of the early Cantos could be read was
Ronald Bush's indispensable book, The Genesis of Ezra Pound's "Cantos".
There are now two others. Poems and Translations includes "Three Cantos from
a Poem of Some Length" in the US edition of Lustra (1917). The version
published by Bush, though, contains variants; it first appeared, earlier in
the same year, in the Chicago magazine Poetry, and is now reprinted in the
most surprising of the books under review. Canti Postumi is a selection from
Pound's notebooks edited by a remarkable man. Massimo Bacigalupo, mostly
through his book on the later Cantos, The Formed Trace, is a major figure in
Pound scholarship. Though Italian, he writes a fluent critical English, and
of living Italian translators of English poetry he is much the most
important. To the shame of Anglo-American literary publishing, he has
persuaded a major Italian house to publish a selection, not of Pound's
established poems, but of passages that failed to end up in the published
texts of The Cantos. The poems are given in parallel text; a lucid
introduction and some brief but helpful endnotes are, naturally, in Italian.

The process of writing such open-ended constructs as The Cantos inevitably
created a lot of wastage. A wonderful passage chosen by Bacigalupo evokes
the cave paintings of Lascaux and Les Eyzies, not far from Pound's beloved
Perigord. His descent into these caves of making leads him to the roots of
art and the imaginative sources of his friends Wyndham Lewis and the then
recently dead Henri Gaudier-Brzeska. This passage, distinguished by any
standards and capable of further development, was intended for Canto II,
which became for the most part a single meditation on a moment of
metamorphosis taken from Ovid. As the canto took shape, presumably, the
cave-painting verses lost their relevance and had to be discarded. Like much
else in the book, including some passages of lyrical love poetry from his
late years, they never found a place for themselves in the poem and so were
forgotten. Bacigalupo has done a notable service in drawing our attention to
their existence. As Pound revised, of course, he would sometimes find more
appropriate contexts for passages he had written. Thus, in the last of the
"Three Cantos" we find the passage from Odyssey XI that begins all
subsequent versions of the poem. This may have been the most significant
revision in the entire process of composition, since it changed the poem's
character, projecting the poet as wandering Odysseus and removing all signs
of a personal imprimatur.

Before this passage was moved to the opening pages, the poem began with an
apostrophe to Browning:

Hang it all, there can be but one Sordello!

But say I want to, say I take your whole bag

of tricks,

Let in your quirks and tweeks, and say the

whole thing's an art-form,

Your Sordello, and that the modern world

Needs such a rag-bag to stuff all its thought in;

Say that I dump my catch, shiny and silvery

As fresh sardines flapping and slipping on

the marginal cobbles?

(I stand before the booth, the speech, but

the truth

Is inside this discourse - this booth is full

of the marrow of wisdom.)

Give up the intaglio method.

(The first line of this passage was eventually moved to Canto II.) It is
clear from this passage alone, not only that Pound's original conception was
different from that of "the poem including history" he went on to write, but
that the poem he had embarked on might have been, in its way, quite as
remarkable.

"Three Cantos" is overtly a personal poem: it is concerned with the
"rag-bag" of consciousness, the arbitrary accumulation of this and that
which goes to the make-up of what Browning would have called an "individual
soul". Browning in his dramatic monologues takes the Romantic self and
projects it outward, objectifies it, subjects it to scrutiny. In doing so,
he approaches relativism, and makes a virtue of doing so. Sordello, unlike
his later poems - indeed unlike Pound's own poems in Browningesque mode - is
not a dramatic monologue, but in its notorious obscurity, its
unpredictability, its open-ended form and its engagingly protean
transformations, it welcomes the arbitrary. Like a Modernist work, it
challenges the reader to find meaning. This clearly attracted Pound who,
unlike Eliot, was inclined to relish the plurality and confusion of modern
experience. The Cantos was intended to display something of that sense of
things: a market for the varieties of shiny and silvery fish, gleaming in
the sunlight and eluding the grasp of the writer as much as the reader.

The Cantos is not without those characteristics, but there are fundamental
differences. First of all - perhaps in competition with The Waste Land - the
final sequence tries to be impersonal. (Pound, we should remember, was
"wracked by the seven jealousies" when he read the final version of Eliot's
poem, which he had done much to create.) Rereading The Pisan Cantos reminds
one again of how Pound, in extremis, to some extent discards that
aspiration. As Maud Ellmann has noticed, Pound's "Ego scriptor" in the Pisan
context is a proud boast, and a much more personal one than the earlier
"Adamo me fecit". Second, and connected with that, The Cantos appears to
assume that history does have its meanings, hard though they may be to find.
Third, if the structure of The Cantos also seems like a rag-bag, that is no
more than an appearance.

Beneath the apparent chaos, as Yeats tells us in A Packet for Ezra Pound,
there's supposed to be an order like that of a fugue. The ending which Pound
could never arrive at was to have been like a fugal resolution.

We can now see that any such resolution would not have been true to the
poem.

Perhaps it was unfinishable, with open-endedness its final virtue. The fugal
metaphor is nonetheless suggestive. Often as we follow Pound's lines of
rhythm, we are conscious of harmonies held as it were in suspension, as if
we could sense a distant resolution. Reading all three of these very welcome
books, you keep returning to a paradox: that this poet who worshipped order
and harmony seems to thrive on the edge of discord and chaos. The editor
forced to make choices, to produce a book that says one thing rather than
many different things at the same time, deserves the reader's sympathy.
Meanwhile, the maker of lovely songs renews our admiration.


Maker of songs
Clive Wilmer
04 June 2004--The TLS