FullReads

Don’t imagine that the art of poetry is any simpler than the
art of music or that you can please the expert before you
have spent at least as much effort on the art of verse as
the average piano teacher spends on the art of music.

Be influenced by as many great artists as you can, but have
the decency either to acknowledge the debt outright or try
to conceal it.

Consider the definiteness of Dante’s presentation as
compared with Milton’s. Read as much of Wordsworth as does
not seem to be unutterably dull.

If you want the gist of the matter go to Sappho, Catullus,
Villon when he is in the vein, Gautier when he is not too
frigid, or if yon have not the tongues seek out the
leisurely Chaucer.

Good prose will do you no harm. There is good discipline to
be had by trying to write it. Translation is also good
training.

The emphasis here is certainly on discipline and form. The Chicago Tribune recognized this as “sound sense,” adding:

If this is Imagism … we are for establishing Imagism by
constitutional amendment and imprisoning without recourse to
ink or paper all “literary” ladies or gents who break any of
these canons.

But other reviewers were less approving. While the writer in the Nation, quoted above, dreads the anarchy impending, Mr. William Archer was terrified at the prospect of hieratic formalisation. Mr. Archer believes in the simple untaught muse:

Mr. Pound’s commandments tend too much to make of poetry a
learned, self-conscious craft, to be cultivated by a guild
of adepts, from whose austere laboratories spontaneity and
simplicity are excluded…. A great deal of the best poetry
in the world has very little technical study behind it….
There are scores and hundreds of people in England who could
write this simple metre (i.e. of “A Shropshire Lad”)
successfully.

To be hanged for a cat and drowned for a rat is, perhaps, sufficient exculpation.

Probably Mr. Pound has won odium not so much by his theories as by his unstinted praise of certain contemporary authors whose work he has liked. Such expressions of approval are usually taken as a grievance–much more so than any personal abuse, which is comparatively a compliment–by the writers who escape his mention. He does not say “A., B., and C. are bad poets or novelists,” but when he says “The work of X., Y., and Z. is in such and such respects the most important work in verse (or prose) since so and so,” then A., B., and C. are aggrieved. Also, Pound has frequently expressed disapproval of Milton and Wordsworth.

After “Ripostes,” Mr. Pound’s idiom has advanced still farther. Inasmuch as “Cathay,” the volume of translations from the Chinese, appeared prior to “Lustra,” it is sometimes thought that his newer idiom is due to the Chinese influence. This is almost the reverse of the truth. The late Ernest Fenollosa left a quantity of manuscripts, including a great number of rough translations (literally exact) from the Chinese. After certain poems subsequently incorporated in “Lustra” had appeared in “Poetry,” Mrs. Fenollosa recognized that in Pound the Chinese manuscripts would find the interpreter whom her husband would have wished; she accordingly forwarded the papers for him to do as he liked with. It is thus due to Mrs. Fenollosa’s acumen that we have “Cathay”; it is not as a consequence of “Cathay” that we have “Lustra.” This fact must be borne in mind.

Poems afterward embodied in “Lustra” appeared in “Poetry,” in April, 1913, under the title of “Contemporanea.” They included among others “Tenzone,” “The Condolence,” “The Garret,” “Salutation the Second,” and “Dance Figure.”

There are influences, but deviously. It is rather a gradual development of experience into which literary experiences have entered. These have not brought the bondage of temporary enthusiasms, but have liberated the poet from his former restricted sphere. There is Catullus and Martial, Gautier, Laforgue and Tristan Corbiere. Whitman is certainly not an influence; there is not a trace of him anywhere; Whitman and Mr. Pound are antipodean to each other. Of “Contemporanea” the Chicago Evening Post discriminatingly observed: