As "The Return" suggests, it is one of Pound's distinctions that, alone of
the great Modernists, he gives due credit to his Victorian forebears at the
same time as announcing an end to their dominion. Richard Sieburth's huge
edition of Pound's Poems and Translations for the Library of America devotes
many pages to the young man "out of key with his time" who was steeped in
the work of Pre-Raphaelites and Aesthetes.

Sieburth has felt bound to include juvenilia, however embarrassing - and
Pound goes on being embarrassing for a while. The poems in the manuscript
Hilda's Book (1905-07) are vulnerable in this way, but they do throw light
on their author's later development and therefore deserve their place within
the corpus. Still more importantly, such poems show how right from the start
Pound was questioning the received measures.

This can sometimes be explained as the ordinary incompetence of youth, but
there is no doubt at other times that here is a poet in quest of new and
unexpected rhythms. Pound's career was chaotic, unremittingly productive and
riven with disaster - not for nothing did he talk of the wrecks that lay
about him - but if there is one thing that holds it together it is the
unerring subtlety of his ear, his ability to place sweet (or sometimes
deliberately jarring) sounds like jewels on the long threads of his rhythms.
Rhythm in verse, he says in that essay on Cavalcanti, is like line in
painting: "The line is unbounded, it marks the passage of a force, it
continues beyond the frame". It is no exaggeration to say that, without
Pound, English Modernist writing is inconceivable, for everyone learned from
him. What they learned first of all was the primacy of rhythm.

Given his importance for Joyce, Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Wyndham
Lewis and the later Yeats, to say nothing of their immediate followers (Hugh
MacDiarmid, Basil Bunting and the Objectivists) and several of the major
post-war writers (Charles Olson and Robert Duncan, Donald Davie and Charles
Tomlinson, Thom Gunn and Geoffrey Hill), it seems extraordinary that it has
taken so long to produce editions of Pound that are anything like
comprehensive or scholarly. After all, thirty-two years have now passed
since Pound died. In that period, we have been dependent for an
understanding of his work on two competing versions of his magnum opus, The
Cantos, on the Collected Shorter Poems (or Personae), first published as
long ago as 1952 and only 297 pages long, and on various volumes now mostly
out of print produced by a variety of well- intentioned editors. The book
authoritatively called The Translations of Ezra Pound, with an introduction
by the greatest of Pound scholars Hugh Kenner, is anything but complete.
Whatever its demerits, Poems and Translations is the first edition of
Pound's work with any claim to completeness, though even this, running to
1,365 pages, is only a selection.

Sieburth's brief seems to have been to produce a collection of all the poems
Pound published or included in finalized manuscripts apart from The Cantos,
the length of which demands a separate volume. He has also supplied a
modestly informative set of endnotes, a detailed chronology and a note on
the texts, but nothing in the way of a list of variants. Logic and (no
doubt) economy have required the inclusion of Pound's translations as well
as original poems, since so much of what Pound presents as original is
arguably translation - "Homage to Sextus Propertius" for instance - and
since the best of his overt translations are among his greatest achievements
as a poet, the Chinese poems collected as Cathay being the prime example.
The difficulty here has been that some of his translations are not poems.

There are his version of the Confucian classics, for example, and there are
the plays - the Noh dramas and the two versions of Sophocles, one of which,
The Women of Trachis, includes some of his finest poetry.

That things should be so complex and confused is no doubt a happy and
Poundian accident. To take one example: I know nothing of Confucian
philosophy and am told that Pound's translations from Chinese are
unreliable. For anyone studying Confucius, that would invalidate Pound's
texts, but for students of Pound's own poetry they are invaluable, even if
they include some misconceptions. It is good, therefore, to have them beside
the poems. On the other hand, there are other prose versions that Sieburth
has chosen to ignore - the translation of Remy de Gourmont, for instance -
and there is much in the way of introductory prose that gets omitted. It is
also odd to come across work by writers other than Pound. Ernest Fenollosa's
essay on the Noh, for example, which Pound included in "Noh" or
Accomplishment, is reprinted where it occurs in Pound's original plan of the
book.

It is certainly not unwelcome, and the book would have been disrupted if
Sieburth had not allowed it. But he does not include the much more important
essay by Fenollosa, The Chinese Character as a Medium for Poetry, which
Pound edited for publication, recommended throughout his life and used as
the foundation for his major innovations - all that comes under the heading
of "the ideogramic method".

But more to the point still, Sieburth is not always averse to disrupting the
plans of Pound's books. It must be said first of all that, to lovers of
Pound's work, Poems and Translations could not be more welcome, and that the
problems of editing that work and including as much of it as possible in one
volume make for an all but impossible task. Nevertheless, the difficulties
and failures must be looked at. The main difficulty is Pound's habit of
lifting poems from previous volumes and reprinting them in new contexts. I
think it's true to say that "The Tree", for example, appeared in five
different contexts and was for a great part of Pound's life the first item
in collections or selections of his work. It would be unrealistic to expect
this poem to appear in all five contexts, but I don't think it should
follow, as Sieburth has decided, that like most of the other repeated poems
it should only appear in the first of them (which remarkably, for such a
good poem, happens to be Hilda's Book).

Moreover, if we grant that repeats make a problem for the publisher (and
maybe for some readers), we might expect to be told in the notes where such
poems occurred in which volumes, for Pound thought of each collection as
itself a distinctive artefact. To take a momentous example, "The Seafarer"
is printed here where it first appeared, in the aforementioned Ripostes, as
is right and proper. But in 1915 this very Anglo-Saxon translation of an
Anglo-Saxon poem was audaciously reprinted in the middle of Cathay, a book
otherwise consisting of nothing but Chinese poems. The point is perhaps
obvious. The great lyrics of the T'ang Dynasty, so sophisticated and
civilized as they seem, were written at the time of Anglo-Saxon England - in
what used to be thought of as the Dark Ages. Pound's characteristic
juxtaposition reminds us of that - it constitutes a kind of cultural
ideogram - and draws our attention to qualities these two ancient poetries
can be seen to share: the use of "kennings", for example, or the relation of
the warrior to his Lord. The editor's plan, in my view, should have helped
us to notice this.

To ask that all such details of arrangement be observed is perhaps to ask
too much, but there are other related weaknesses which are sometimes more
serious.

Sieburth's policy of basing the texts of poems on their earliest publication
takes no account of revisions, as a result of which several poems appear in
inferior versions. This is the gravest of the shortcomings and it could have
been avoided.

It is an editor's duty, after all, to choose what he judges the best
available text. What is more, Sieburth sometimes makes exceptions to his
policy. In the case of translations that Pound rewrote repeatedly, Sieburth
reprints a range of different versions; Cavalcanti's "Chi e questa che
vien", for instance, appears three times - understandably, since the
versions are very different and all remarkable - but the exception seems to
make nonsense of the policy.

I assume that the Library of America will go on to produce an edition of The
Cantos. It seems extraordinary that neither of Pound's publishers - New
Directions in the US and Faber in Britain - has ever got round to producing
a properly edited text of so important a Modernist monument. In the case of
New Directions there may be an excuse. Pound disliked any suggestion that
his poetry might become the scholar's property, and is said to have
forbidden James Laughlin of New Directions to publish any edition with
annotations: poetry was not the property of scholars, it was meant to be
divertente (to borrow the word he attributes to Mussolini). In this, as in
much else, Pound was his own worst enemy. It is impossible to get through
much of The Cantos without editorial help, so the reader comes to depend
upon scholarly compendia and the spirit of Pound's prohibition is thus
defeated into the bargain. Neither text of The Cantos can be described as
authoritative.

The New Directions edition apparently represents Pound's latest thoughts and
so may be judged the better, but neither edition has so simple a facility as
line-numbering, which, given the complexity of the work, is the least the
reader might ask. The most recent edition of William Cookson's admirable
Guide to the Cantos of Ezra Pound is driven to the expedient of giving page
references - not line references - to two different editions.

In this context, a special welcome is due to an annotated edition of The
Pisan Cantos published by New Directions and edited by the indefatigable
Sieburth. This is the first annotated Pound to appear in print and, given
the complexities of the Pisan sequence - its almost manic allusiveness, not
only to literature in many tongues, but to the vagaries of Pound's own life
- Sieburth has done a strikingly good job. He does not overwhelm us with
notes but not much that really needs glossing has slipped his attention. His
introduction, moreover, is a model of its kind, both informative and a
serious work of criticism. He gives us the biographical facts about Pound's
arrest at the end of the war and his imprisonment - initially his caging -
in the US Disciplinary Training Center near Pisa. He then plots the history
of the section's composition, leads us through a subtle reading of it, and
concludes with the suspension of Pound's trial for treason and his detention
in St Elisabeths Hospital. Sieburth's account of the poem brings together a
great deal of recent scholarship and to some extent takes for granted the
work of older, pioneering scholars such as Kenner and Donald Davie. An
example of the gains of this approach would be the emphasis he gives to what
might be called the racial question: the poet's sympathy and affection for
the African-American soldiers and inmates at the DTC.