What Ezra Pound Taught Me

Mythology, for a long time, was the main form of explanation that humanity used to understand the phenomena that were surrounding them. The creativity of men knows no boundaries. We are, most of the times, being inspired, touched and molded by the unknown, the fear of the “yet to be discovered” is what makes us keep going and making the ignorance disappear. The unknown will always be our boat to the faraway lands that are yet to be discovered. And if we get closer, we will receive the epiphany and the uprise of a new point of view.
That’s what I learned with Ezra Pound, American, from Idaho, born in 1885 and died in Venezia, 1972. Pound was a poet, translator, critic, and musician. He traveled the world and in the places that he visited, the places that he saw, he took something with him. Pound was the main engine in the modernist movements and among them, we have the Imagism (which he was the main figure) and the Vorticism.
The roots of the Imagist school come from Chinese and Japanese poetry. Pound liked a lot to explore the metaphors and the images inside his poetry, he took this as inspiration for his works. He is not just writing a poem, he is, somehow, giving us a history lesson, he is showing us the particularities of different cultures, and he does this beautifully, like an alchemist. He gets all of these ingredients and put them together in a caldron: the images, the metaphors, the places that he saw during his travels. And then finally we get the result: His legacy.
When reading his Cantos I stumbled upon his objective, his intention, materialized right in front of me. Pound did not want to write just to write, he saw the creation of a text, of a poem, as a serious process; For him, writing is not just an activity that anyone can do, to write poetry takes time, takes inspiration, takes experience and a lot of knowledge about diverse themes.
We can have a glimpse about the imagism seeing one little part of his Cantos:
Canto IV
Ityn!
Et ter flebiliter, Ityn, Ityn!
And she went toward the window and cast her down,
“All the while, the while, swallows crying:
Ityn!
It is Cabestan’s heart in the dish.”
It is Cabestan’s heart in the dish?
No other taste shall change this.”
Canto IV, among many others, is taking our hands through mythology and history. Ityn was the son of Procne and Tereus, king of Thrace. Procne killed her son Itys to cook and feed him to Tereus after she discovered that he had raped Philomela, her sister. The expression “Et ter flebiliter, Ityn, Ityn!” means “And thrice with tears” (Orace, Odes IV). And finally, we have Guillems de Cabestanh or Cabestaing, an ascetic troubadour.
As you can see, inside this little stanza we have numerous quotations and inspirations of mythology and medieval poetry.
Just in a little stanza Pound put his knowledge and creates a whole image to us: He is simply taking our hands and saying: “Here, come with me, let me take you on a stroll through the myths and history.”
By the end of my studies with Ezra Pound, I concluded: “He is trying to tell me something. He is trying to give me something. These words, these parallels, these references are not here for no reason. There is something beyond this.” And It was. It is something far, far beyond the words that he chooses, the mythology that he so much loved. Pound is giving me a new tool: He is letting me know, by myself, that to know the history I must look for patterns, I must look for parallels, and if I want to change, if I want to learn I must first look for the past. That is why poetry is so powerful.
Poetry’s not just about stanzas, metrics, and content, poetry is about changing! And I have changed almost completely the way I used to read and study these poems and these authors. Now, with the guidance and the knowledge of Ezra Pound, I see through history, I see that poetry is a product of mankind, of our history, of the happenings that somehow marked and changed these human beings, the mythology that once was used to explain the phenomena in our world are now printed and carried through time inside these poems. And finally, my last quote before I end my essay, that resumes pretty well what I have felt during this process:
“It is Cabestan’s heart in the dish.”
“It is Cabestan’s heart in the dish?”
“No other taste shall change this.”