FullReads

Sur le Noel, morte saison,
Lorsque les loups vivent de vent …

and the rest of that memorable Testament.

So much for the imagery. As to the “freedom” of his verse, Pound has made several statements in his articles on Dolmetsch which are to the point:

Any work of art is a compound of freedom and order. It is
perfectly obvious that art hangs between chaos on the one
side and mechanics on the other. A pedantic insistence upon
detail tends to drive out “major form.” A firm hold on major
form makes for a freedom of detail. In painting men intent
on minutiae gradually lost the sense of form and form-
combination. An attempt to restore this sense is branded as
“revolution.” It is revolution in the philological sense of
the term….

Art is a departure from fixed positions; felicitous
departure from a norm….

The freedom of Pound’s verse is rather a state of tension due to constant opposition between free and strict. There are not, as a matter of fact, two kinds of verse, the strict and the free; there is only a mastery which comes of being so well trained that form is an instinct and can be adapted to the particular purpose in hand.

* * * * *

After “Exultations” came the translation of the “Sonnets and Ballate of Guido Cavalcanti.” It is worth noting that the writer of a long review in the “Quest”–speaking in praise of the translation, yet found fault with the author not on the ground of excessive mediaevalism, but because

he is concerned rather with the future than with a somewhat
remote past, so that in spite of his love for the mediaeval
poets, his very accomplishment as a distinctly modern poet
makes against his success as a wholly acceptable translator
of Cavalcanti, the heir of the Troubadours, the scholastic.

Yet the Daily News, in criticising “Canzoni,” had remarked that Mr. Pound

seems to us rather a scholar than a poet, and we should like to see him giving his unusual talent more to direct translation from the Provencal.

and Mr. J. C. Squire (now the literary editor of the New
Statesman), in an appreciative review in the New Age, had
counselled the poet that he would

gain and not lose if he could forget all about the poets of
Dante’s day, their roses and their flames, their gold and
their falcons, and their literary amorousness, and walk out
of the library into the fresh air.

In “Ripostes” there are traces of a different idiom. Superficially, the work may appear less important. The diction is more restrained, the flights shorter, the dexterity of technique is less arresting. By romantic readers the book would be considered less “passionate.” But there is a much more solid substratum to this book; there is more thought; greater depth, if less agitation on the surface. The effect of London is apparent; the author has become a critic of men, surveying them from a consistent and developed point of view; he is more formidable and disconcerting; in short, much more mature. That he abandons nothing of his technical skill is evident from the translation from the Anglo-Saxon, the “Seafarer.” It is not a slight achievement to have brought to life alliterative verse: perhaps the “Seafarer” is the only successful piece of alliterative verse ever written in modern English; alliterative verse which is not merely a clever tour de force, but which suggests the possibility of a new development of this form. Mr. Richard Aldington (whose own accomplishments as a writer of vers libre qualify him to speak) called the poem “unsurpassed and unsurpassable,” and a writer in the New Age (a literary organ which has always been strongly opposed to metrical innovations) called it “one of the finest literary works of art produced in England during the last ten years.” And the rough, stern beauty of the Anglo-Saxon, we may remark, is at the opposite pole from that of the Provencal and Italian poets to whom Pound had previously devoted his attention.