Poet of the public stage

Why should we want to read a biography of Ezra Pound? If you asked the question about one of his poet-contemporaries, Robert Frost or Wallace Stevens, the answer is that reading their poems, “Mending Wall” or “Sunday Morning” say, makes us eager to know something about the man who wrote them. Both Frost and Stevens led essentially private lives in their early decades, Frost in the isolation of a New England farm, Stevens studying law in New York City.

Neither would publish a book of poems until roughly age 40. Nothing could be further from such lives than Ezra Pound’s, whose first 35 years, packed with incident, were lived very much on the public stage. They make up a story more compelling in its aggressive daring than many of the poetic experiments Pound engaged in during that time.

These years are the subject of Pound’s latest biographer, A. David Moody, author of a first-rate critical study of T.S. Eliot. Volume 1 of Mr. Moody’s projected two volumes takes Pound up to the moment when he is about to leave London. Between 1908, when he left America for Venice and published his first book of poems at age 23, and 1920 when one of his central works, “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley” appeared, he produced hundreds of poems and critical essays, while sponsoring such literary movements as Imagism and Vorticism. Mr. Moody’s subtitle, “The Young Genius” accurately names the way Pound saw himself as possessing what Mr. Moody calls “the authority of alienated superiority.” He relished controversy on all sorts of fronts in hopes of winning over or reforming or enlightening a public and a literary culture that, he was convinced, did not understand him.

Pound has been the subject of more than one previous biography, Humphrey Carpenter’s “A Serious Character” (1988) being the best of them. The main story Mr. Moody tells doesn’t significantly differ from Mr. Carpenter’s, and Mr. Moody has discovered no hitherto unknown facts that alter our sense of Pound. What he has done is to proceed, meticulously and sympathetically, through the ins and outs of Pound’s day-to-day career, only suspending the march of events when a new volume of the poet’s appears. Mr. Moody’s decision to treat both life and work is admirable, although anyone except a Pound expert will experience difficulty in being asked to consider in careful detail so many examples of Pound’s early efforts to find himself as a poet.

Beginning with “A Lume Spento” (1908) the thin volumes proliferate: “A Quinzaine for this Yule;” “Personae;” “Exultations;” “Canzoni;” “Ripostes;” “Cathay;” “Lustra,” with many of the poems reappearing in successive books. This is not to mention his translations and imitations of Italian and Provencal poets, or the Japanese Noh plays. The biographer assiduously traces continuities among the poems, especially their arrangement within individual volumes; even so, many of the poems strike at least this reader as precious and unsubstantial.

The ones that stand out from these early collections —”Sestina: Altaforte;” “Pierre Vidal Old;” “Apparuit;” “Portrait d’une Femme;” “The Return”— are relatively few. It is not until the “Chinese” poems in “Cathay” (“The River- Merchant’s Wife: A Letter,” “Lament for the Frontier Guard”) and the comic squibs from “Lustra” where the lyric Pound and the satiric Pound reveal themselves expertly.

Still, these 12 years of Pound in London make for inspiriting reading, since it was a time in which what Mr. Moody calls his “generous energy about the work of creation” was most vividly apparent. He had been a student of philology at the University of Pennsylvania and at Hamilton College, but found that, with a few exceptions, the academic presentation of literature “allowed little scope for comparative evaluations, critical responses, or discussion of whether one text was more or less pleasing, instructive or life-enhancing than another.”

From the beginning Pound was interested in, as he put it in an early poetic fragment, “always the spirit within/Shaping the form without.” His developing conviction was that the best poetry could liberate people—Americans, for example—from, in Mr. Moody’s words, “the tyranny of mass emotions and received ideas.” A quixotic conviction, we say, looking from 100 years later at the still unliberated state of all those people who don’t read Dante or Cavalcanti or Confucius.

But it is indeed life-enhancing to observe Pound’s struggles with his contemporaries—poets, editors, publishers, who couldn’t see what he saw; and it is instructive to follow, as Mr. Moody so faithfully does, his relations with Yeats, with Ford Madox Ford, and with perhaps his most prominent “discovery,” T.S. Eliot.

Clearly the young Pound was in many ways an impossible person, yet, at least for his friends, also impossible not to be compelled by. One of those friends, William Carlos Williams, whom Pound met at the University of Pennsylvania where Williams was a medical student, later wrote in his “Autobiography” that although he couldn’t take him for a “steady diet” and was annoyed by his posturings, still Pound was “the livest, most intelligent and unexplainable thing I’d ever seen, and the most fun.” The effort to explain this unexplainable person animates Mr. Moody’s biographical quest.

Pound’s “livest” self may be seen in the humorous affection of letters he wrote to his parents, resisting his mother’s suggestion that he come home to America (“I do not wish to be mayor of Cincinnati nor of Dayton, Ohio”) and in the unceasing efforts he made on behalf of writers he admired. He helped out others financially although he himself had arrived in London with three pounds in his pocket, and was dependent on his father’s generosity and later the patronage of the American collector, John Quinn.

His attractiveness to women is borne out by the number with whom he formed alliances: One of them, Dorothy Shakespeare, became his wife and would stand by him in the bad days of his later confinement; another, the young violinist Olga Rudge, who would later bear him a child and be his companion, appears briefly at the end of this volume.

Among the most useful parts of Mr. Moody’s criticism of Pound’s works are found in remarks about his essays, especially reviews of his contemporaries—Robert Frost, Ford, Eliot, Wyndham Lewis—and about “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley” in which he bids farewell to London. “Mauberley” has been the subject of some of the best previous criticism of Pound (by Hugh Kenner, Donald Davie, John Espey) and Moody’s pages on it are a heroic attempt to sort out the complicated interplay between Pound the writer, and his persona, Mauberley (also a poet), by way of ascertaining just who is speaking at this or that moment and in what tone.

“Mauberley” is a poem dense with ambiguity and even Moody’s careful and strenuous attempt to sort it out doesn’t convince me that, in places, ambiguity is not confusion and incoherence. But on balance it figures as one of the most challenging longer poems of the modernist era, and no subsequent poet has remained oblivious of its challenge.

In the concluding volume to come, Mr. Moody will have to deal with a Pound whose obsessions and recklessly publicized beliefs, most notably the anti-Semitic one, make for a more distressing, if potentially tragic, figure. The years in America and London as treated in this first volume so intelligently and fully, wear more the aspect of the human comedy from which, beginning in 1920, Pound would withdraw to occupy himself with writing the “Cantos” and with the disastrous public events he attempted so unsuccessfully to rectify.

William H. Pritchard teaches English at Amherst College. His latest book is “Shelf Life: Literary Essays and Reviews.”