To some extent this anomie was explicitly recognised and endorsed in some areas of official American culture in the first part of the 20th century. How else are we to explain the proliferation of 'Great Books' courses - as if any education could result from reading in succession Defoe, the Koran, the Baghavid Gita, King Lear, War and Peace, and Madame Bovary (in translation), a play or two of Shakespeare, perhaps accompanied by a light dose of Hegel and Thomas Mann? Not to mention a few dialogues of Plato.

It is usual that when a restless mind finds itself in a cultural vacuum, it seeks to (in Pound's own phrase) 'make it new', but that the newness in fact turns out to consist of a reinvention of the crassest aspects of the official high culture. And so we find Pound, like the dreamiest of the Victorians, obsessing with the Middle Ages, with knights and ladies, with Provence and Renaissance Italy, and writing in a strange artificial language which no-one had ever spoken, either in England, in America, still less in 11th century Provence. It is full of thees and thous and t'weres and shouldsts, inversions and invented expressions. No-one except God had seriously been addressed as 'thee' since the seventeenth century in English, and as for 't'were'? Words fail one! Then suddenly he moves to a half baked pastiche of Browning, and we hear another language not his own, equally remote from any real one.

You don't believe it, do you? Pound was a modern poet after all. Well, can this really be what, still in 1950, we thought was modernity?

Drink we the lusty robbers twain
Black is the pitch o' their wedding dress
Lips shrunk back for the wind's caress
As lips shrink back when we feel the strain
Of love that loveth in hell's disdeign....

But he doesn't even seem to have any idea what year he is living in, let alone what country. Can you imagine what state of mind one would have to be in to publish in London in about 1910, the following immortal lines:

Worth lieth riven and youth dolorous....

Grieving and sad and full of bitterness
Are left in teen the liegemen courteous....

O'er much hath ta'en Sir Death that deadly warrior...

You can find the original poem, rather inaccessible, because Provencal is not French, not even Old French, and a very readable translation here

The extraordinary afflatus that accompanies Pound's posturing is wonderfully revealed when he explains in a nearby verse:

Aye, I am a poet, and upon my tomb
Shall maidens scatter rose leaves
And men myrtles....

We turn to Pound's critical writing, perhaps to the ABC of Reading, in search of some account of what all this might be about, and find to our dismay that it may result from a sort of crazed ideology, our poet moving effortlessly from Egyptian hieroglyphs to Provencal to Italian, to Greek, Latin, Chinese, by way of Anglo Saxon and medieval English, without apparently having any idea that any of these works might be more or less accessible to him than others, or more or less relevant. It is striking however that his admiration passes silently over Wyatt, Shakespeare, Donne, Herbert, Marvell, King. It pauses lightly on Waller, and then rises only to alight again somewhere in the late nineteenth century on 'the English Rubyiat'. Pope and Dryden and Dr Johnson might never have written. The eighteenth century might not have existed. Thomas Nashe however does exist, very much so:

Brightness falls from the air
Queens have died young and fair
Dust hath closed Helen's eye
I am sick, I must die
Lord have mercy on us

Deracination has interesting and bizarre effects on literary judgment. The French reputation of AJ Cronin has always been incomprehensible to native readers. The difficulty we have in seeing what has happened to both Pound and Eliot is that they are native speakers. The deracination is cultural. Yet the same phenonmenon is at work. You can see it at work also in the very surprising context of Yvor Winters, who writes fluently and authoritatively on American literature, and then flounders into an extraordinary misguided admiration for Robert Bridges who he evidently simply doesn't know how to read.

Is it, you wonder, something Pound grew out of? Was all this just youthful enthusiasm. We have the case of Yeats, who moved from the Celtic mists and dreams of his youth to something quite different, and who famously did it with an explicit renunciation. 'In dreams begin responsibilities'. Well no, unfortunately not. Yeats' problem was growth into maturity. Pound's problem was lack of roots. Yeats could grow out of it. Pound has, and could have, no such revelation or change. Open the Cantos, and read the first one, which purports to be a rendering of, or homage to, Homer. It is in the style of the Anglo Saxon epics, based on a Renaissance translation of Homer from the Greek into Latin (the derivation is testimony enough to the deracinated insanity of the enterprise):

And then went down to the ship
Set keel to breakers, forth on the godly sea, and
We set up mast and sail on that swart ship.....

....And drawing sword from my hip
I dug the ell-square pitkin
Poured we libations unto each the dead....

All the characteristic early pathologies are there in this later piece - the pointless inversions - 'poured we', the invented archaisms - 'the ell-square pitkin', the invented words which add no extra meaning or force to what they evidently mean - 'swart', and words which have not been used outside 'poetry' in English for generations - 'unto'. This is what makes Pound a case for diagnosis rather than a poet for understanding or appraisal.

All the same, you may say, Canto 1 is powerful, there are some very striking lines in it, particularly those spoken by Elpenor, and it is even rather touching in its last lines, when you have looked up to find out who Andreas Divus was. He was the translator into Latin, which Pound read as badly as he read every language, including his own. And perhaps you'll point me a little further on in the first book of the Cantos to passages which are written in modern contemporary language. And you may point to Hugh Selwyn Mauberley. That after all is admitted to be mature, great, modern.

Not so. The thing that was not apparent to early readers of Mauberly or the Cantos is that they are not Pound's voice. He does not have a voice. They too are the same kind of strange pastiche as the early work, its just that the pastiche is of a more modern dialect. Pound does not have feelings either in his verse. He sometimes has a verbal dexterity that simulates the expression of feeling. Read the last lines of Canto 1, and you find

Lie quiet Divus That is, I mean, Andreas Divus

We have the usual fatal effort to evoke a vague emotion by means of an obscure reference which the poet uses to imply that he has some personal and deeply felt connection to it. You find it in the wonderfully idiotic and pretentious footnote to The Waste Land, on the line 'Shantih, Shantih, Shantih', which Eliot understood no more than the rest of us, but which he patronizingly assures us is only feebly translatable by 'the peace that passeth understanding'. You find it in Pound's endless efforts to make us feel something, though what is not clear, in the story of Cabestan. You find it at the end of his life in the late Cantos, filled with Chinese characters, a language which he seems to have had only a fragmentary acquaintance with, which he similarly expects his readers to be moved and impressed by. The main purpose of these obscure references, in Pound and in Eliot, is to coerce the reader into accepting as valid and valuable and moving material which he does not understand, and which does not move him, on the bare assurances of a writer who offers the references as proof of superior knowledge and sophistication.

As for Elpenor, yes, the lines have a ring to them:

But thou O king I bid remember me unwept, unburied

They have the ring of expertly done Hollywood tear jerking. We are invited to feel along, but with what exactly is not clear, other than a vague state of exaltation, we are not invited to understand and be moved by what we understand.

You can see how superficial the pastiche is, if you read the Envoi in the Mauberley collection. You can find it here, and compare it with the original at this page

Waller's poem is light, courtly, amusing, with a serious undertone to it, in a style that goes back centuries. It echoes the far graver and deeper tones of 'To His Coy Mistress', but with the light touch that is to be expected of the man who 'reformed our numbers'. Pound takes this model, rephrases it as an address to his adopted country, but there is no clear train of reasoning or feeling in it, nothing to the comparison but the form, and once again we have the wearisome archaisms that attempt to supply the lack of meaning or weight. It is a pastiche that captures the style, while missing the essence, of the original.

If a comparison is needed, take Yeat's recreation of Ronsard in 'When you are old and grey and full of sleep'. Yeats, moving perceptibly toward the period of the height of his powers, is writing with the feeling which inspired the original, and expresses it in his own terms. One feels, reading it with a knowledge of the original, that this was a comparison he was ready to invite and in which if he fails to equals his master, he at least does him credit.

If you want to refresh your memory of both, this is a site with Yeats' poem, and on the same page is Ronsard's original (with unfortunately a truly awful translation next to it). Go here.

By the way, Candlelight Blues on this same page isn't any kind of a translation at all. The original is grave, formal, polite. It doesn't do blues.

You can see the difference at once between this and Pound. Yeats understood his original, knew his own situation to be in some ways similar to what prompted Ronsard's lines, but in other ways quite different, and wrote a poem which draws on the original but stands on its own and states its own variant on the message. The message is, you do not know what you are sacrificing. What exactly is Pound saying? The giveaway line is the invocation of Beauty with a capital 'B' in the last line. We are still in the world of the Nineties.

If we look at Mauberley, there is more of the same. We start with a title which refers to a poem by Ronsard. We move by way of a quote from Homer in the original to a quotation from Villon. In between are references to Greek mythology and Flaubert. None of these references do more than give a vague sense of an erudite and sophisticated author. They are saying nothing at all. But note

He fished by obstinate isles
Observed the elegance of Circe's hair
Rather than the mottoes on sun-dials.

Surely there might be some alternative other than meaningless pedantry to 'observing the elegance of Circe's hair'? But just as he purports to distance himself from his aesthete past, the ghost of Oscar Wilde appears and gestures to us, to tell us that trivia is so much more appealing than the only alternative, silly drudgery.

The last lines are revealing:

Unaffected by "the march of events,"
He passed from men's memory in l'an trentiesme
De son eage; the case presents
No adjunct to the Muses' diadem.

The metaphor is characteristically vague and confused. How exactly do cases present adjuncts? And what are adjuncts to diadems? This could have been Pound's equivalent of Responsibilities, but he didn't have it in him.

Pound's later personal history was chequered, but his intellectual history was sad and unpleasant. His deracination was total. Unaware that he was unequipped for sustained thought of any kind, he embarked on political philosophy. If you have read so far, you will not be surprised to find that he developed a hodgepodge of Confucianism, Social Credit, Anti-Semitism, Fascism, leavened somewhat with excerpts from the American Founding Fathers and obscure Catholic writers of the medieval period. What he called Usury became a particular focus, and he seems to have believed that you could see the rising tide of Usury (all due to the Jews of course) in the Italian painters because as it increased, their lines thickened. These ideas, if you can call them that, are the basis of much of the Cantos. You may feel this has to be unfair. One can only say, read Cantos 14 and 15. Then read the Jefferson Cantos.

The view of human evil and wickedness is confined to demonization of people or peoples, and an attempt to evoke horror at the scatalogical. The view of human good is confined to incoherent admiration of individuals, most as obscure as the conditiore Malatesta.

When I was growing up, Pound and Eliot were still thought of as modern, and were generally regarded as the defining major poets of the first half of the twentieth century. It seems increasingly clear that a hundred years from now, this view of Pound will seem as incomprehensible as the high estimation in which Robert Bridges was held at the turn of the century. People will simply shake their heads at the idea. And is there nothing of value in Pound? Alas, no. As Gertude Stein eloquently put it, there is simply no there, there.

For more on a wide array of other topics, please visit the oftwominds.com weblog.