China and the West

Pound, Ezra. The art of poetry No. 5. Interviewed by Donald Hall [ID D29185].
Hall : You are nearly through the Cantos now, and this sets me to wondering about their beginning. In 1916 you wrote a letter in which you talked about trying to write a version of Andreas Divus in Seafarer rhythms. This sounds like a reference to Canto 1. Did you begin the Cantos in 1916?
Pound : I began the Cantos about 1904, I suppose. I had various schemes, starting in 1904 or 1905. The problem was to get a form—something elastic enough to take the necessary material. It had to be a form that wouldn't exclude something merely because it didn't fit. In the first sketches, a draft of the present first Canto was the third.
Obviously you haven't got a nice little road map such as the Middle Ages possessed of Heaven. Only a musical form would take the material, and the Confucian universe as I see it is a universe of interacting strains and tensions.
Hall : Had your interest in Confucius begun in 1904?
Pound : No, the first thing was this: you had six centuries that hadn't been packaged. It was a question of dealing with material that wasn't in the Divina Commedia. Hugo did a Légende des Siècles that wasn't an evaluative affair but just bits of history strung together. The problem was to build up a circle of reference—taking the modern mind to be the medieval mind with wash after wash of classical culture poured over it since the Renaissance. That was the psyche, if you like. One had to deal with one's own subject.
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Hall : Well, was there a point at which poetically and intellectually you felt further apart than you had been?
Pound : There's the whole problem of the relation of Christianity to Confucianism, and there's the whole problem of the different brands of Christianity. There is the struggle for orthodoxy—Eliot for the Church, me gunning round for particular theologians. In one sense Eliot's curiosity would appear to have been focused on a smaller number of problems. Even that is too much to say. The actual outlook of the experimental generation was all a question of the private ethos.
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Hall : I suppose your interest in words to be sung was especially stimulated by your study of Provence. Do you feel that the discovery of Provençal poetry was your greatest breakthrough? Or perhaps the Fenollosa manuscripts?
Pound : The Provençal began with a very early interest, so that it wasn't really a discovery. And the Fenollosa was a windfall and one struggled against one's ignorance. One had the inside knowledge of Fenollosa's notes and the ignorance of a five-year-old child.
Hall : How did Mrs. Fenollosa happen to hit upon you?
Pound : Well, I met her at Sarojini Naidu's and she said that Fenollosa had been in opposition to all the profs and academes, and she had seen some of my stuff and said I was the only person who could finish up these notes as Ernest would have wanted them done. Fenollosa saw what needed to be done but he didn't have time to finish it.
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Hall : Can an instrument which is orderly be used to create disorder? Suppose good language is used to forward bad government? Doesn't bad government make bad language?
Pound : Yes, but bad language is bound to make in addition bad government, whereas good language is not bound to make bad government. That again is clear Confucius: if the orders aren't clear they can't be carried out…
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Hall : What kind of action can you hope to take?
Pound : … It is doubtful whether the individual soul is going to be allowed to survive at all. Now you get a Buddhist movement with everything except Confucius taken into it. An Indian Circe of negation and dissolution…
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Hall : During those years in the war in Italy did you write poetry? The Pisan Cantos were written when you were interned. What did you write during those years?
Pound : Arguments, arguments and arguments. Oh, I did some of the Confucius translation.
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Hall : Since your internment, you’ve published three collections of Cantos, Thrones just recently. You must be near the end. Can you say what you are going to do in the remaining Cantos?
Pound : It is difficult to write a paradiso when all the superficial indications are that you ought to write an apocalypse. It is obviously much easier to find inhabitants for an inferno or even a purgatorio. I am trying to collect the record of the top flights of the mind. I might have done better to put Agassiz on top instead of Confucius.
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