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By Root 839 0

“laziness” should be associated with the erotic and, therefore, with the Eleusinian side of his temperament. As Whitman understood (and Pound, too, at times), one of the wellsprings of the creative spirit lies with “the stupid … crazy … uneducated” and idle. Fertility itself is dumb and lazy. Put it this way: unity—the unity of nature, or of “coitus … the mysterium,” or of the nous—is unwilled and unreflective. If we assume, therefore, that the only smart thought is reflective thought and the only active person is the willful person, fecundity itself will soon seem tinged with idiocy and laziness.

It may seem odd, I realize, to speak of Pound’s irritation— or better, his frustration—with the erotic. But there it is. He has a clear sense of the value and power of that side of creative life, but he is also exasperated by its nature.

In seeking to reconcile this disparity, I found myself led into imagining a fable about Pound as a young poet. Was there a time, I wondered, when Pound himself had this experience of “the soul in ascent”? Was there a Poundian epiphany, like Whitman’s or Ginsberg’s or like the moment when the young Eliot, walking in Boston, saw the street and all its objects turn to light? Such moments are rare, given only once or twice in a lifetime, and yet they serve as a fountain for a life’s work. Did Pound have one, and if he did, what happened afterward?

In Pavannes and Divagations Pound paused to imagine how a myth might have come about, saying:

The first myths arose when a man walked sheer into “nonsense,” that is to say, when some very vivid and undeniable adventure befell him, and he told someone else who called him a liar. Thereupon, after bitter experience, perceiving that no one could understand what he meant when he said that he “turned into a tree,” he made a myth—a work of art that is,—an impersonal or objective story woven out of his own emotion, as the nearest equation that he was capable of putting into words. The story, perhaps, then gave rise to a weaker copy of his emotion in others, until there arose a cult, a company of people who could understand each other’s nonsense about the gods.

Let us set this rumination beside the first poem in Pound’s Personae:

The Tree

I stood still and was a tree amid the wood,

Knowing the truth of things unseen before;

Of Daphne and the laurel bow

And that god-feasting couple old

That grew elm-oak amid the wold.

′Twas not until the gods had been

Kindly entreated, and been brought within

Unto the hearth of their heart’s home

That they might do this wonder thing;

Nathless I have been a tree amid the wood

And many a new thing understood

That was rank folly to my head before.

Certainly, it does no violence to the spirit of the work for us to imagine that there was a time Pound felt himself “turned into a tree” (or more simply, when he felt moved to the core of his being by the mosaics in Santa Maria in Trastevere, or became suddenly conscious of the reality of the nous). Nor does it seem unlikely that, on feeling with his whole being the worth of his experience, he set out to labor in the service of that metamorphosis or that image or that light.

Then: some “bitter experience.” They think he’s a liar. He discovers, in some way not hard to imagine, that what moves him the most has no currency in his age and homeland. Worse, it is under attack from all sides, ignored, belittled, and devalued. Ginsberg tells of such a reaction to his Blake vision:

I tried to evoke the sensations of the experience myself, artificially, by dancing around my apartment chanting a sort of homemade mantra: “Come, spirit. O spirit, spirit, come. Come, spirit. O spirit, spirit, come.” Something like that. There I was, in the dark, in an apartment in the middle of Harlem, whirling like a dervish and invoking powers.

And everybody I tried to talk to about it thought I was crazy. Not just [my] psychiatrist. The two girls who lived next door. My father. My teachers. Even most of my friends.

Now in a society which was open and dedicated to spirit, like in