Table Of ContentEzra Pound and the Symbolist Inheritance
Ezra Pound and the
Symbolist Inheritance
Scott Hamilton
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY
Copyright © 1992 by Princeton University Press
Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street,
Princeton, New Jersey 08540
In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, Oxford
All Rights Reserved
Library of Congress Catahging-in-Publication Data
Hamilton, Scott, 1954 Dec. 31-
Ezra Pound and the symbolist inheritance/
Scott Hamilton.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-691-06924-7 (cl) :
1. Pound, Ezra, 1885-1972—Knowledge—
Literature. 2. Symbolism (Literary movement)—
France. 3. French poetry—19th century—
History and criticism. 4. French poetry—
20th century—History and criticism.
I. Title.
PS3531.082Z6413 1992
811'.52—dc20 91-20023 CIP
This book has been composed in Linotron Baskerville
Princeton University Press books are
printed on acid-free paper and meet the guidelines for
permanence and durability of the Committee on
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CONTENTS
Preface and Acknowledgments vii
List of Abbreviations xiii
INTRODUCTION
Ezra Pound and the Symbolist Inheritance 3
CHAPTER ONE
Pound's Gradus ad Parnassum 30
CHAPTER TWO
Pound's Gradus a Parnasso: Misanthropy, Pound, and Some
French Satire 58
CHAPTER THREE
The Citadel of the Intelligent: Pound's Laforgue 91
CHAPTER FOUR
The Wobbling Pivot: Surface and Depth in the Early Cantos 131
CHAPTER FIVE
L'Eternelle Ritournelle in the Late Cantos 166
CONCLUSION
Robert Duncan's Revisionary Ratios: Rewriting The Spirit
of Romance 194
Notes 211
Index 255
PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
THE PROFOUND influence of nineteenth- and twentieth-century
French verse on Ezra Pound's poetry has long been overshadowed by
Pound's polemical rejection of symbolism. Pound once said that "im-
agisme is not symbolism," but it is apparent that he fashioned his ca
reer not only by what has become known as "'symbolism' in its pro-
founder sense," or what Pound called "real symbolism, Cabala, genesis
of symbols, rise of picture language, etc.," but also by means of "the
aesthetic symbolism of Villiers de l'lsle Adam, & that Arthur Symons
wrote a book about—the literwary movement." Pound's interest in the
literwary movement can only be told by escaping the narrow confines
of Anglo-American studies and by resituating Pound in his native
province of comparative literature. If Pound's fascination with the oc
cult helps to define his poetic sensibility, his early engagement with
nineteenth- and twentieth-century French verse shapes Pound's prac
tice as a modern poet.
In their reaction against Mallarm£'s symbolism, the post-Symbolists
showed Pound how to wage war against his own precursors. As early
as 1913, Pound wrote a number of important articles on French
(post)symbolist poets, and he repeatedly insisted that Gautier, Cor-
bi£re, Laforgue, and Rimbaud escaped Stendhal's condemnation of
poetry for "its bagwigs and bobwigs, and its padded calves and its per
iwigs, its 'fustian a la Louis XIV."' Nor was Pound's bold claim gratui
tous. Pound was well informed about the poetry that had been written
on the fringes of Symbolism, and he had firsthand knowledge about
the rich and unsettled history of French post-Symbolism. Next to F. S.
Flint, Pound was the anglophone critic most responsible for introduc
ing modern French poetry to the English-speaking public, and he
soon followed the post-Symbolists in their experimentation with vers
libre, their theorizing about the image, and their polemical call for a
poetry that considered men and women as social beings. Thus, al
though Pound's symbolist inheritance is in many ways that of his En
glish predecessors (Swinburne, Johnson, Dowson, Symons, and Yeats,
among others), it is powerfully inflected by the French post-Symbolist
poets' ambivalence about their own recent heritage. We can see this
influence in Pound's 1912 Ripostes, where many of the poems are mod
eled on poems of such (post)symbolists as Remy de Gourmont and
Henri de Regnier, and in Lustra, where Laurent Tailhade becomes a
powerful influence.
viii PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
In his crucial revision of the Symbolist canon, Pound exorcises the
ghosts of Baudelaire, Verlaine, and Mallarmfe by turning to Thfeophile
Gautier, a poet who preceded, anticipated, and was celebrated by the
Symbolists, and to Corbifere and Laforgue, then largely unknown
poets. The key figure here is Gautier, for he can be seen as a romantic,
a Parnassian, or a proto-symbolist, and he allows Pound great flexibil
ity in envisioning what poetry should be. Pound begins by invoking the
Parnassianism of Gautier, Gourmont, and Regnier in Ripostes, but he
soon discovers a satirical vein in Gautier's "Carmen" that links Gautier
to Flaubert and anticipates the similarly ironic strategies of Corbifere,
Laforgue, Tailhade, and, later, in Lustra, of Pound himself. Pound's
exhaustive study of modern French verse gave him poetic models and
techniques that enabled him to escape his own decadent-symbolist in
heritance and to discover the distinctively modern voice that he began
to create in 1912.
I am thus at first concerned with classic models of influence, or, as
Harold Bloom redefines the term, with source studies. My study can
be seen as a straightforward literary history that revises some of our
long-held commonplaces about poetic modernism (and as a develop
mental study of Pound's poetic). Yet Pound was an inherendy imita
tive poet who often transcended his models because of his egotistical
belief that, as Charles Olson wittily and accurately put it, he could out-
talk all but Confucius and Dante. With "the beak of his ego," says
Olson, Pound "breaks all down to his equals or inferiors" and main
tains a belief that his own mots justes could of themselves rectify lan
guage for future generations. Contemporary theory has, of course,
proven over and over again that mots are never justes, and that inter-
textual subversion is always present. In Pound's case, the breaks or
ruptures in major poems often result from a crucial blind spot that
facilitated the return of precisely those romantic elements in Gautier
that Pound, as a modern poet, felt obliged to repress. In this regard,
my book veers toward a study in the manner of Harold Bloom.
To sum up: there was both an inexorable and entirely logical tra
jectory governing Pound's borrowing from the French tradition and
a paradoxical circularity (or periodicity) to Pound's poetic develop
ment. The first half of my book chronicles Pound's (re)discovery of
French verse and charts the successive influence of Gautier's Parnas-
sianism, Corbifere and Tailhade's satire, and Laforgue's irony. The
chapter on Laforgue marks an important shift in Pound's poetic and
in my own argument, for I show that Laforgue has a less significant
place in Mauberley than does Gautier. This time, the return of Gau
tier's romanticism haunts the poem and continues to haunt Pound
PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ix
throughout his Draft of XXX Cantos. Although Gautier's influence sub
sides in the middle cantos when Pound delegates his authority as a
poet to the politicians of China and Italy, the Pisan and later cantos
confirm our suspicion that any such firmly ingrained sensibility cannot
be so easily repressed.
Nor is Pound's response to the French Romantic and Symbolist tra
ditions an isolated, insignificant, or specifically modernist response. As
I show in the Conclusion, Robert Duncan's similar appropriation of
French Symbolist poetry reaffirms the connection between romantic,
modern, and postmodern poetry. Duncan returns to Baudelaire and
Mallarmd in an attempt to make sense of both modernism and his own
postmodern vision. By reading Modernism as Romanticism, Duncan is
able to isolate and make function in his own poetry the many aporias
that beset Pound's discourse.
Pound's hesitations, mystifications, and his ultimate resignation not
only provide greater definition to our vision of modernism, they en
able us to compare our postmodern sensibility with that of the past. If
Pound falsely believed that he could "make it new," we might want to
withhold judgment on the radical advances that we attribute to our
own postmodern discourse.
I owe debts to many scholars. My willingness to pursue such a broad
topic was fostered by many critical studies and chance conversations.
I am grateful to the staffs of the Lilly Library at Indiana University
and the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale Univer
sity for their generous assistance. I would like to thank the Division of
Humanities and Social Sciences at the California Institute of Technol
ogy for the research grants that made it possible for me to visit these
libraries. Finally, I would like to thank the Andrew Mellon Foundation
and the California Institute of Technology for the fellowship that ena
bled me to complete this book.
I have profited greatly from the suggestions and criticisms of all
those who have read, some anonymously, this manuscript. I would like
to thank Alex Zwerdling and Joseph Duggan for their helpful com
ments during the early stages of its composition, and James Longen-
bach, Cyrena N. Pondrom, and Richard Sieburth for their responses
to my near finished work. I would like to thank Anthony Zielonka and
Rosy Meiron for checking my translations against the French and for
their often brilliant solutions to passages that had me stymied. I would
also like to thank Joy Hansen for continually upgrading my computer
