W.B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, and the Poetry of Paradise by Pryor Sean

Author:Pryor, Sean.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing Ltd.
Published: 2011-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 4

Shut Gardens

We’ve never, no, not for a single day,

pure space before us, such as that which flowers

endlessly open into: always world,

and never nowhere without no: that pure,

unsuperintended element one breathes,

endlessly knows, and never craves.

—Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies1

A Draft of XXX Cantos is an odd work, compounded of two earlier volumes and three additional cantos. Yeats always organized his volumes carefully and, as we have seen, these larger structures shape and are shaped by his poems of paradise. Eliot once told Kenner that he considered Pound a gifted sequencer and that the ordering of Prufrock and Other Observations (1917) had been Pound’s.2 In May 1916, around the time he must have been advising Eliot, Pound wrote to his publisher, Elkin Matthews:

Do try to think of the book as a whole, not of individual words in it. Even certain smaller poems, unimportant in themselves have a function in the book-as-a-whole. This shaping up a book is very important. It is almost as important as the construction of a play or a novel.3

How, then, is A Draft of XXX Cantos shaped? Pound often tried to explain its structure, both to others and to himself. The difficulty of doing so is shown by the schema he once scribbled on the back of a sheet from a Frankfurt hotel, remarkable only because it offers no meaningful sequence. Instead it simply outlines what the contents, as it were, happened to be.4

Among the surviving manuscripts for A Draft of XXX Cantos there is a loose leaf which features various scribbled names, themes and schemas. One section lists abbreviated headings for cantos –

9–12. S.M.

13 Hell.

14.

15 Purg.

16 War.

17

18. Baldy.

19. Kung.

– and then shuffles them about, circling Baldy and Kung and inserting them after the Malatesta cantos (‘S.M.’). Beneath that Pound jotted another short list:

selv. osc.

parad. ter.

rep.

selv. osc.

metam.5

This corresponds to no sequence of cantos as they now stand, but it does show that Pound understood his poem would invoke linear structures – from Dante’s dark wood to the earthly paradise – and then complicate them with repetition and metamorphosis.

On a larger scale, Pound tried time and again to imagine a structure for The Cantos. Within the poem and in writing about the poem he invokes teleologies and then complicates or frustrates them: Odysseus’ return from Troy to Ithaca, Aeneas’ voyage from Troy to Rome, Dante’s ascent from hell to heaven. In 1944 he said, famously, that he had schooled himself ‘to write an epic poem which begins “In the Dark Forest” crosses the Purgatory of human error, and ends in the light, and “fra i maestri di color che sanno”’ (SP 137). (That he quotes from Inferno, 4.131 to describe the denizens of paradise suggests that the journey will not be straightforward.) At other times he invokes the cyclic narrative of the Eleusinian mysteries, or he tells Yeats that the poem will be like a Bach fugue or like the tripartite arrangement of the Schifanoia frescoes at Ferrara (VB 4–5).6 In one letter he explains that the best

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