Picture, if you will, a wire cage; small in size and out in the open. Imagine the man in it. Facing, suffering, struggling with — and not quite succeeding in — braving the elements. Jailed for radio commentaries that denounced the President of the country he lived in, for blaming a particular community for the war. It is 1945.
The cage is in Italy, near Pisa. The time is summer; so it is hot during the day and uncomfortable at night. The morning heat and dazzling light made way for beacons of light at night. The man was held in this cage for three weeks. When he suffered a breakdown, a tent replaced the cage. The compound remained the same. Deemed unfit to stand trial, he was moved to St. Elizabeth’s, an asylum for the criminally insane. He stayed in hospital till his friends interceded on his behalf and the charges of treason levelled against him were dropped. It is 1958.
The man in the cage was the poet, Ezra Pound (born on October 30, 1885). Poets are often political, virulently so, and yet the idea of a man in a wire cage is haunting. Brutal and oppressive. It makes me wonder if the punishment was excessive; if the crime, and the man, deserved such treatment. It shattered him in more ways than one, but also gave us some of his most sublime work in the form of The Pisan Cantos .
His place in modern poetry is indelible. Yet, he isn’t as widely read as he should be. This is strange, given how astonishing his career was. For one, he helped poets hone their craft, worked untiringly towards getting the writing to the editors, and then to the readers. When I say, ‘poets’, I mean W.B. Yeats and T.S. Eliot and Robert Frost. Yes, them. The title of this article was how T.S. Eliot described Pound. Along the way, Pound helped James Joyce find a publisher for Ulysses . Unabashed in his support for his fellow poets, creating sources of influence and funds for poets, Pound also made some unknowns household names — Ernest Hemingway and D.H. Lawrence, among others.
The other reason for his unshakable position is his writing. He was a keen believer in the craft of poetry and his need to know all there is to know about poetry made him a formidable presence in the intellectual circles. His Cantos is considered his most significant work. Ambitious, sweeping, grand and dazzlingly full of erudition, this epic poem isn’t straightforward in the least. In fact, this is one of the reasons that Ezra Pound isn’t as well-read as he should be. His work is dense, stippled with so many references and connections.
In ‘Ladies’, Ezra Pound says, “ Flawless as Aphrodite/Thoroughly beautiful/Brainless/The faint odor of your patchouli/Faint, almost, as the lines of cruelty about your chin/Assails me, and concerns me almost as little. ”
I also like the simple truth in ‘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. ” The screed sounds human — without form, it would show up as having no substance at all. Not all his poetry is unapproachable. In fact, none of it is, though you might need a helping hand every now and then.
But look at this simple one: “ And the days are not full enough/And the nights are not full enough/And life slips by like a field mouse/Not shaking the grass. ” A field mouse, moving so slowly, ponderously, that it doesn’t even make the slightest ricochet movement or the least impact. Life moves along and we don’t realise that so much time has passed.
Pound was always talking of ‘make it new’. Indeed, he spent most of his life in pursuit of this, not just with his writing, but with his writer, creator friends as well — modern poetry owes a great deal to the single- minded pursuit of this crafter.
His long incarceration resulted in an almost absolute silence towards the end of his life. It isn’t hard to imagine what the time under the harsh sun, and subsequent years in an asylum must have done to Pound. Yet, his generosity and his genius shine through. Brighter than the floodlights that once accompanied those long harsh nights.
Srividya is a poet. Read her work at rumwrapt.blogspot.in
