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Truth and Calliope: Ezra Pound's Malatesta

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Michael F. Harper
Michael F. Harper*
Affiliation:
Scripps CollegeClaremont, California
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Abstract

Among critics who accept the Aristotelian distinction between “poetry” and “history,” those who recognize that Pound's Cantos aspires to “history” generally consider it bad history and “impure” poetry; critics who value it as poetry usually dismiss its claim to history. But Pound's aesthetic recognizes no essential difference between poetry and history; a poem, for him, is a report of its author's experience, and by reading historical documents as attentively as poetry, one can penetrate to the reality behind them, too. A good literary critic is therefore the best historian. The Malatesta Cantos show this theory in action; Pound's Sigismundo, derived from a critical reading of primary sources, seems more plausible than the one found in most secondary sources. These cantos show that Pound's attempts at writing history should be taken more seriously than they have been and that his achievement as an epic poet should be reevaluated.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 96 , Issue 1 , January 1981 , pp. 86 - 103
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1981

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References

Note 1 White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1973), p. x. The Aristotle quotations are taken from Poetics, trans. Ingram Bywater, in The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon (New York: Random, 1941), p. 1464.

Note 2 Barthes, “Historical Discourse,” trans. Peter Wexler, in Introduction to Structuralism, ed. Michael Lane (New York: Basic Books, 1970), p. 145.

Note 3 Pound's definition of “epic” appears in his ABC of Reading (1934; rpt. New York: New Directions, 1960), p. 46. Kipling's phrase is used in Pound, Guide to Kulchur (1938; rpt. New York: New Directions, 1968), p. 194: “There is no mystery about the Cantos, they are the tale of the tribe—give Rudyard credit for his use of the phrase. No one has claimed that the Malatesta cantos are obscure. They are openly volitionist, establishing, I think clearly, the effect of the factive personality, Sigismundo, an entire man.”

Note 4 “The Poet,” in The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. E. W. Emerson, m (Boston: Houghton, 1903), 37. Further quotations from the essay in my text are from this edition.

Note 5 Dekker, Sailing after Knowledge: The Cantos of Ezra Pound (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963), pp. 137–38. The American edition is entitled The Cantos of Ezra Pound: A Critical Study (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1963).

Note 6 Moramarco, “The Malatesta Cantos,” Mosaic, 12, No. 1 (1978), 115. Although suspicious of what he calls “judgmental history” (p. 107), Moramarco seems to accept the received idea of Malatesta in its essentials; he implies that Pound is correcting the historical record primarily in the sense of supplementing it, fleshing it out by writing as a poet rather than as a historian.

Note 7 Quoted from a private communication reported by William Cookson in Agenda, 8, Nos. 3–4 (1970), 6.

Note 8 Brooke-Rose, A ZBC of Ezra Pound (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1971), p. 172.

Note 9 Riddel, “Pound and the Decentered Image,” Georgia Review, 29 (1975), 590.

Note 10 Pound firmly believed that a poem was a “report” of a prior experience. His clearest statement of this belief is “The Serious Artist” (1913; rpt. in Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. T. S. Eliot [New York: New Directions, 1968], pp. 41–57). It was not just an early belief soon abandoned; see “The Teacher's Mission” (1934; rpt. in Literary Essays, pp. 58–63).

Note 11 Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, trans. S. G. C. Middlemore (1878; rpt. New York: Harper, 1958), ii, 442.

Note 12 The Commentaries of Pius II, trans. Florence Alden Gragg, with historical introduction and notes by Leona C. Gabel, Smith College Studies in History, 25 (Northampton, Mass.: Smith Coll., 1939–40), pp. 167–68.

Note 13 Commentaries, trans. Gragg, Smith College Studies in History, 35 (1951), pp. 504–05.

Note 14 The Cantos of Ezra Pound (1970; rpt. New York: New Directions, 1973), Canto ix, p. 36. I specify this printing since it incorporates many emendations from earlier texts, but I do not think they affect my argument. Subsequent references are cited parenthetically in the text by canto number and page.

Note 15 Blackmur, “Masks of Ezra Pound,” Hound and Horn, 7 (1934), 197, 198; rpt. in Ezra Pound: A Critical Anthology, ed. J. P. Sullivan (Harmondsworth, Eng.: Penguin, 1970), p. 160.

Note 16 Thomas Jackson, “The Adventures of Messire Wronghead,” ELH, 32 (1965), 241, n. John Drummond, “The Italian Background to The Cantos,” in An Examination of Ezra Pound, ed. Peter Russell (1950; rev. ed. New York: Gordian Press, 1973), p. Ill, n. Charles Yriarte, Un Condottiere au XVe siècle, Rimini: Etudes sur les lettres et les arts à la cour des Malatesta (Paris: J. Rothschild, 1882), p. 82. The translations from this work are my own.

Note 17 Quoted in Pearlman, The Barb of Time: On the Unity of Ezra Pound's Cantos (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1969), pp. 302–03. Moramarco also quotes this passage but draws a conclusion contrary to mine (p. 112): he insists that Pound is a poet, not a historian, and that historical events in The Cantos are a means rather than an end.

Note 18 See Noel Stock, The Life of Ezra Pound (New York: Pantheon, 1970), pp. 251–53.

Note 19 Soranzo, Pio II e la politico italiana nella lotta contro i Malatesti 1457–1463 (Padua: Fratelli Drucker, 1911), pp. 12–13. The translation is mine. See also Ludwig Pastor, The History of the Popes from the Close of the Middle Ages (London: Kegan Paul, 1910), iii, 415–18.

Note 20 Smith College Studies in History, 22 (1936–37), pp. 5–6.

Note 21 Smith College Studies in History, 35 (1951), p. 504.

Note 22 Pound, “Economic Democracy”; rpt. in Ezra Pound: Selected Prose 1909–1965, ed. William Cookson (New York: New Directions, 1973), p. 210.

Note 23 Eva Hesse has given an extensive list of the materials Pound used in “Books behind The Cantos,” Paideuma, 1 (1972), 147–48. Hesse calls Pound's “historical technique … documentary in nature, presenting matters so that the reader sees them from the periplus of the participants without the benefit of the hindsight provided by the chronological method of historians.”

Note 24 Pound, Introduzione alia Natura Economica degli S. U. A. (Venice: Casa Editrice delie Edizioni Popolari, 1944); An Introduction to the Economic Nature of the United States (1944), the English translation, by Carmine Amore and John Drummond, appears in Ezra Pound: Selected Prose 1909–1965, pp. 169–76:

Some events can be known only after centuries. We know, for example, that Parisina d'Este incurred certain expenditures which were paid from the Ducal Treasury of Ferrara, and we also know the date of these payments. Other deeds are never explained and must remain enigmas of the participants. A signed letter proves what the writer wanted the recipient to believe on such and such a day. But the clarity of an idea remains among the ASCERTAINED facts. The definition of an idea, as observed by someone who understands the events of the day, may shed more light on the historical process than many volumes.

Note 25 Yriarte discusses this matter on pp. 280–83, singling out, on p. 282, n., the passage from which Pound quotes.

Note 26 Quotations in my text are from Pii II Epistolae, ed. Antonius de Zarotis (Mediolani, 1487). For clarity, I have spelled out some abbreviations used in the original and replaced ampersands with “et.” In all other details the quotations are exact. The translation that follows each quotation is my own, offered as a “crib” rather than as an elegant “Englishing.” There is, of course, no question of a literal translation here; what is precisely at issue in Pound's reading is whether there is any specific referent behind each of the many similar characterizations Pius includes in his lists.

Note 27 Miller, Diacritics, 5, No. 2 ( 1975 ), 24.

Note 28 From a 1926 letter to Joyce, in The Selected Letters of Ezra Pound 1907–1941, ed. D. D. Paige (1950; rpt. New York: New Directions, 1971), p. 202.

Note 29 Jones, The Malatesta of Rimini and the Papal State (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1974), pp. 176–77. Chapter vii discusses the charges against Sigismondo in some detail.

Note 30 Personae: The Collected Shorter Poems of Ezra Pound (New York: New Directions, 1971), p. 196.

Note 31 Davie, Ezra Pound: Poet as Sculptor (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1965), pp. 242–43.

Note 32 I refer specifically to the work of I. A. Richards, as elaborated in Science and Poetry (1926), now most conveniently found in a reissue with commentary entitled Poetries and Sciences (New York: Norton, 1970). But I would want to argue that, whatever the terminology used in any given case, the whole New Critical enterprise effected a similar restriction of the kind of “meaning” to be sought in poetry.

Note 33 Pound, Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, in Personae, pp. 185, 188.

Note 34 Eagleton, Marxism and Literary Criticism (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1976), p. 8.