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Ezra Pound's Meters and Rhythms

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

William Mcnaughton
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Extract

EZRA POUND himself emphasizes somewhat his work on the element of meter.1 T. S. Eliot wrote of Pound's importance in prosody to younger poets that “there is no one else to study.”2 Yet of all the critical attention which Pound's poetry has received in recent years, not one piece analyzes this fundamental aspect of his work.3 We have almost uniquely Pound's critical pronouncements and the verse iteself to lead us to an understanding.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 78 , Issue 1 , March 1963 , pp. 136 - 146
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1963

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References

Note 1 in page 136 More of Pound's published writing on technical matters deals with metric than with any other problem. He concludes the primer ABC of Reading (Norfolk, Conn. : New Directions, n.d.; hereafter cited ABC) with a “Treatise on Metre,” of which he gives his own summary: “LISTEN to the sound it makes.” Equal emphasis with meter is probably shared in Pound's own poetics only by Gourmont's principle. “Rien ne pousse à la concision comme l'abondance des idées.” Quoted in Make It New (London: Faber, 1934), p. 328; hereafter cited MIN.

Note 2 in page 136 Quoted in Hugh Kenner, The Poetry of Ezra Pound (Norfolk: New Directions, n.d.), p. 109.

Note 3 in page 136 “That dimension of the Personae collection comes within the competence neither of the present commentator nor (fortunately) of the present book,” Kenner. J. J. Espey's Ezra Pound's Mauberley (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1955) accurately and sensitively analyzes the meter and rhythms of the Mauberley sequence.

Note 4 in page 136 Pound, “Canto LXXXI,” Cantos (New York: New Directions, 1948), p. 96.

Note 5 in page 136 ABC, pp. 14,61.

Note 6 in page 136 The poet in conversation, 1953 or 1954. He said that the idea was in Kulchur, although “maybe I buried it in that book.” I cannot now find the precise remark anywhere, yet it might be inferred from pp. 92–95, skilfully. See Guide to Kulchur (London: Faber, 1938).

Note 7 in page 136 A LumeSpento (Venice: A. Antonini, 1908).

Note 8 in page 136 Quoted MIN, p. 325.

Note 9 in page 136 Pound, Letters, ed. D. D. Paige (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1950), p. 260.

Note 10 in page 136 Pound continues characteristically: “I doubt, however, if you are sufficiently au courant to know just what the poets and musicians and painters are doing with a good deal that had masqueraded as law.” Letters, p. 4.

Note 11 in page 136 The Imagist manifesto of 1912. See MIN, p. 335.

Note 12 in page 136 Poetry, March 1913. See MIN, pp. 336–341.

Note 13 in page 136 See ABC, p. 48.

Note 14 in page 136 “Cino,”Personae (New York: New Directions, 1926), p. 6.

Note 15 in page 136 Christopher Simpson glosses this technical word as “driving a note.”

Note 16 in page 137 “Remember the SWAT must strain against the duration now and again, to maintain the tension,” Letters, p. 262.

Note 17 in page 137 “Canto 93,” Section: Rock-Drill 85–95 de los Cantares (Milano: Vanni Scheiwiller, 19SS), p. 88.

Note 18 in page 137 Poetical Works (Edinburgh, 1874), iv, 57.

Note 19 in page 137 “Aristophanes' Apology,” Poems (Boston, 1895), p. 629.

Note 20 in page 137 “The Meditation of the Old Fisherman,” Collected Poems (New York: Macmillan, 1956), p. 21.

Note 21 in page 137 Letters, pp. 274–275. Pound gives his own interpretation of the original Homeric effect: “the turn of the wave and the scutter of receding pebbles.”

Note 22 in page 137 Arnold Dolmetsch, The Interpretation of the Music of the XVII 6 XVIII Centuries (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1946), p. 71.

Note 23 in page 138 “The question of the relative duration of syllables has never been neglected by men with susceptible ears.” ABC, p. 56.

Note 24 in page 138 Milton, writing at the Puritanic distance from ancient myth, created a curious blend of mythologies. Dante invokes pagan enlightenment “rather tactfully to rebuke the Church, in a way that will not stir up the rabble.” See Pound, Spirit of Romance (London: J. M. Dent, 1910), p. 125.

Note 25 in page 138 Eliot observed that a man who introduces new rhythms to the language “enlarges our sensibilities.”

Note 26 in page 138 It is necessary to maintain the dissociation of verse “be it rouned, red or songe” (Hous of Fame. 1.722). Pound calls it “melopoeia … to sing; to chant or intone; and to speak.” ABC, p. 61. The Lustra poems, in which Pound catches so effectively various tones of voice, appear in Personae, pp. 81–123.

Note 27 in page 138 MIN, p. 336.

Note 28 in page 138 Eckermann, Gesprache mit Goethe (Zurich: Artemis-Verlag, 1948), n, 443.

Note 29 in page 138 Pavannes and Divisions (New York: Knopf, 1918), p. 155. 30 Dolmetsch, p. 17.

Note 31 in page 139 William Pierce Shepard “gave” Pound an extracurricular course in the Provençal poets at Hamilton.

Note 32 in page 139 The Sonnets and Ballate of Guido Cavalcanti (London, 1912).

Note 33 in page 139 “Homage a la Langue d'Or [sic],” Little Review, vi (May 1918), 19–24.

Note 34 in page 139 So doing, he broke an oath taken to himself “never to attempt translation again.” The versions were published in an essay on Daniel in Instigations (New York, 1920), pp. 286320.

Note 35 in page 139 Guido Cavalcanti: Rime (Genova, 1931).

Note 36 in page 139 Eleven New Cantos, XXXI-XLI (New York, 1934).

Note 37 in page 139 The Classic Anthology Defined by Confucius (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1954).

Note 38 in page 139 New York: New Directions, 1957. Hereafter cited WOT.

Note 39 in page 139 “Music,” New Age, running almost every two weeks from 6 Dec. 1917–21 April 1921.

Note 40 in page 139 Kulchur, p. 199.

Note 41 in page 139 See Personae, pp. 171–177.

Note 42 in page 139 MIN, pp. 67–73. Cf. Carl Appel, Provenzalische Chresto-mathie (Leipzig, 1895), p. 11.

Note 43 in page 140 “Fourth Book of Ayres,” Third and Fourth Booke of Ayres (London, circa 1613), no. xvi. See also Works, ed. Percival Vivian (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1909), p. 183.

Note 44 in page 140 Anthology of the Provençal Troubadours, ed. R. T. Hill and T. G. Bergin (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1941), p. 9.

Note 45 in page 140 Ayres and Dialogues (London, 1653–58), Pt. i, p. 29 [misnumbered 27].

Note 46 in page 140 T'ao Yuan-ming, Shih, ed. Fu Tung-hwa (Hong Kong: Hsiang kang Shih Hsueh Shu Tien Yin Hang, n.d.), p. 1. Concerning the reconstruction of “Ancient Chinese” and the indication of tones, see Bernhard Karlgren, Grammala Serica Recensa (Stockholm, 1957), esp. pp. 4–5.

Note 47 in page 141 “… it seems even to be supposed by some critics that Donne did not know how to scan. This last supposition may be rejected at once; what there was to know about poetry was known to Donne. But it seems certain that he intentionally introduced a revolution into English versification.” Edmund Gosse, quoted by F. E. Schelling, “Elizabethan Lyrical Measures,” Elizabethan Lyrics, ed. Schelling (Boston: Ginn, 1895), p. lxvii.

Note 48 in page 141 Beddoes handles the rhyme too with great musical skill. He admits one unresolved rhyme (“sky”) to his first stanza and uses it in the second stanza to proceed to his close (die/ eye/sky).

Note 49 in page 141 See also Gourmont, “Le Vers Populaire,” Esthétique de la langue française, ed. R.-L. Wagner (Paris, 1938), pp. 171186.

Note 50 in page 141 “In tempo rubato in an Adagio, the left hand should go on playing in strict time.” Mozart's Letters, ed. Eric Blom (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1956), p. 58.

Note 51 in page 142 “A Defence of Poetry,” Prose Works, ed. H. B. Foreman (London: 1880), in, 107.

Note 52 in page 142 Anecdote told by Rudd Fleming.

Note 53 in page 142 Another indication of the translation's musical qualities is to be found in the excellence of the terminal sounds: tone …, moon, pain, … —the use of consonance across the rhymes. The rhymes were evidently planned out in advance, as the rhymes were in Arnaut Daniel's songs.

Note 54 in page 142 U. A. Canello, La Vita e le Opère del Trovalore Arnaldo Daniello (Halle, 1883), p. 98.

Note 55 in page 143 ?. L. Rosenthal, A Primer of Ezra Pound (New York: Macmillan, 1960), p. 43.

Note 56 in page 143 W. B. Yeats, Oxford Booh of Modern Verse (New York, 1936), p. viii.

Note 57 in page 143 Ezra Pound, his Metric and Poetry (New York: Knopf, 1917), pp. 7–8.

Note 58 in page 143 MIN, pp. 370–371.

Note 59 in page 143 Some Reminiscences (New York: Charles Scribner's Son, 1906), p. 400.

Note 60 in page 144 Dante, “De Vulgari Eloquentia,” n, iv, Le Opère, a cura M. Barbi et al. (Firenze: R. Bemporad & Figlio, 1921), p. 341.

Note 61 in page 144 Pound, Gaudier-Brzeska: a Memoir (London: John Lane, 1916), p. 89.

Note 62 in page 144 ABC, p. 36.

Note 63 in page 145 Late Archaic Chinese (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1959), p. xxvi.

Note 64 in page 145 Early Archaic Chinese (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1962), p. xxxi.

Note 65 in page 145 Literary Chinese by the Inductive Method (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1948), I, 95.

Note 66 in page 145 The Hsiao Ching, trans. Sister Mary Lelia Makra (New York: St. John's Univ. Press, 1961), p. 7.

Note 67 in page 145 “Canto 97,” Thrones: 96–109 de los Cantares (Milano: Vanni Scheiwiller, 1959), p. 22.

Note 68 in page 145 Pound comments on his principle for the organization of the introductory clauses in these sentences, which is his principle for the handling of detail generally in the Cantos, by remarking that “points define a periphery.” Sometimes, however, points may define a periphery as the blind men defined the elephant. Furthermore, in the same section of the poem where he assists us with “echoes, apparatus, text, translations, French version, Latin version, footnotes and … scholarly reverberation,” the poet advises us to “get rid of paraphernalia.” See Kenner, Gnomon (New York: McDowell-Obolensky, 1958), p. 288. Cf. “Canto 91,” Rock-Drill. p. 75.