Or, why even the simplest poems can be misread.
I spent the last few days rereading some of Pound's poems (mostly selections from the Cantos) and reading for the first time Hugh Kenner's mammoth The Pound Era. I don't know enough to know about Kenner's status in today's critical discourse (i.e., he might be passe, critiqued, etc.) and there is a good deal of the apologist/disciple in Kenner which often colors his glosses, but the work as a whole I found quite impressive, illuminating, extermely helpful for understanding what was going on in modernism by someone who knew personally most of the people he is writing about. Plus, it is written in enjoyable prose.
Most interesting, in the Kenner, for me, is the fact that he is giving a cultural history (the War is never far from his thinking) and an aesthetic history, showing that the two are never fully distinct but that they aren't identical, either. This is immensely valuable. The question, complicated as it may be, is that of agency: what brings about change, what makes the new (as Pound quoting a Confucian proverb was wont to say) happen. Cultural materialism, in its vaguest and most diverse sense, tends to see the larger social, political, technological, historical milieu as the agent: such and such aesthetic phenomena are really symptomatic of a larger cultural thing--what Althusser would have called "ideology" and Foucault, with an even more all encompasing term, the "episteme." L'art pour l'art types try to place the agency back in the hands of the artist or the artistic history: no, they say, the real agent of change in the world of art is art itself (art as craft arguments) or the artistic genius (romantic theories of art). History has little to do with it: aesthetic problems present themselves and those who can take up the task.
What Kenner does, effectively, I think, is to show that the cultural situation fuels the inquiries and experiments of aesthetic practitioners, guiding them toward the artistic problems they feel compelled to solve. By no means does that make the work mere "epistemic artifacts," but neither does it separate it into some sort of aesthetic autonomy. Thus, a figure like Pound turns to Chinese poetry for several interrelated reasons: a) an interest in human history and his search for what Kenner calls "radient gists," moments of cognitive/ethical/aesthetic value which, while not necessarily universal, "endure," b) a frustration with the superflous post-symbolist English verse as well as the efflusions of late Victorianism, c) an interest in cognitive constructs which directly present the thing (a "natural language," over which Derrida would have a heyday), d) the didactic use of such constructions (an ideograph allows you to see connections you otherwise might not, and thus, enable you to learn something that you could not get from mere narrative about the nature of things.) and e) anxieties over post WWI Western civilization and the transitory fluff of mass culture. To reduce the role of Chinese poetry in Pound (and modernism as a whole) to any one of these factors would be to do, simply, bad history, as well as fail to understand the complex interaction between "aesthetic" practice and "culture."
While we're on Chinese poetry, Kenner makes a passing comment that really fascinated me. It is very common in discussions surrounding modernism to talk about the advent of film as a major shift in aesthetic thinking, the spectacle, the status of the original (Benjamin), and, perhaps most interestingly, the role of the visual and its manipulation via montage and the relationship between montage and literary juxtaposition. Most of the discussions I've read/heard tend to emphasize the fact that the technological innovation (film) resulted in or at the very least made possible, prompted, a new aesthetic innovation (montage/juxtaposition). To a certain extent, this is, of course, true. But it's only part of the story. Kenner reports that during WWI, a young Sergei Eisenstein, years before he went into the theater, learned 300 ideographs from a "former instructor of Japanese": "knife-and-heart, 'sorrow'; water-and-eye, 'weep'" (162). When Eisenstein's intended career as an orientalist was derailed, he eventually became the director credited with the invention of montage, "applying ideographic principles to an art of blended snapshots" (162). Of course, this may be just a coincidence. But so could be the advent of film and the writing of the Waste Land. At the very least, it seems justified to point out that it wasn't technology alone which brought about a literary innovation: indeed, an ancient literary tradition was the source of generating cinematic techniques and not the other way around.
I don't raise this at all to try to privilege literature: I only call attention to this to show that our narratives of what came first and what caused what can be impoverished, indeed.
But back to Ez. There is a lot (too much) to say, and he himself sensed this, even as he realized he had said to much (he descended into an irregular silence toward the end of his life). I think Pound's entire project can be summarized by a concern for the beautiful, a concern for the political, a concern for the future. The music of some of his poems is really breathtaking, as in "A Virginal," and he is always looking for those "intellectual and emotional complexes in an instant of time" (his definition of an "image"). But beauty doesn't come easy, and it is never separate from the city, the management of the state. This is where the Cantos pick up. (Here's one: the Cantos as the inaugeration of cultural studies, albeit a fascist CS). The Cantos are an exploration of historical states and arts, in an effort to show things that only the poetic "intellectual and emotional complex" can reveal. The ideograph is essential to this, creating what Kenner calls conceptual, cognitive, emotional "rhymes" added to the tonal rhymes and rhythms of which Pound was a master. Language does more in Pound's poetry. That might be a good definition of modernist poetry in general: an effort to make language do more.
The future, the consequence of history, is always embedded in Pound the didact. His famous rants on Rome radio were the misplaced desire to teach on hyperdrive. The Cantos are meant to bring you into a knowledge which will spill into history itself, just as they were not to be poems about history but poems which contained history. Fascist, yes, aristocratic, yes. But strangely democratic in its application. No one is more privileged to historical knowledge, but that doesn't mean that everyone has it. Precisely because everyone doesn't have it and yet needs it so badly: this is, perhaps, what drove Pound. I qte from the dedication to his Guide to Kulchur, a statement about as multitonal as anything he wrote:
This book is not written for the over-fed. It is written for men who have not been able to afford an university education or for young men, whether or not threatened with universities, who want to know more at the age of fifty than I know today, and whom I might conceivably aid to that object.
I am fully aware of the dangers inherent in attempting such utility to them.
Dangers for them, dangers for him, dangers for the society subject to such ideas? Perhaps all of the above. But so, for that matter, is democracy without knowledge dangerous. EP and co. faced that problem, and, perhaps, so do we.