Utopias of One by Joshua Kotin

Author:Joshua Kotin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press

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In short, the great gamble continues. The method is being pressed to its logical conclusion. Either this is the waste of a prodigious talent, or else it is the poetry of the future.

—DONALD DAVIE ON CANTO 8538

In the aftermath of World War I and, especially, World War II, this denial of expertise became increasingly important for Pound’s poetry.39 Indeed, Cathay helps make sense of the seemingly impossible demands of the late cantos. Pound’s epic is not a departure from Cathay’s populism but a commitment to its poetics of natural law. Consider Canto 85 from Section: Rock-Drill de los Cantares LXXXV–XCV (1955), the section of the poem with the greatest number and frequency of Chinese characters.40 As A. Alvarez declares, “the work is no longer like ideograms, it actually is ideograms.”41

“The mere look of Canto 85 on the page . . . announces it as ‘unreadable,’” writes Donald Davie in Ezra Pound: Poet as Sculptor (1964): “bold black Chinese characters . . . interspersed with sparse print which includes Roman and Arabic numerals, Greek, Latin, French, and phonetic transcriptions of Chinese, as well as English.”42 In a contemporary review, Hugh Kenner notes that, “Rock-Drill, Pound’s first post-Pisan sequence, opens with a Canto that defies the elocutionist; it is written for the printed page, as it were for stone tablets.”43

How should readers approach Canto 85? Davie and Kenner agree that we should pair the canto with its main source, Séraphin Couvreur’s Latin and French translation of the Confucian Book of History.44 (Pound cites the book in a note at the end of the canto and in references throughout.)45 The pairing reveals a series of correspondences that reinforce Pound’s statements on statecraft.

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