`Constellating Fragments'

I know from his books and the letters I received from him that Guy Davenport was constitutionally incapable of writing a dull sentence. Even the most functional was well built and animated with intelligent energy.

For the first time I have been looking at Cities on Hills: A Study of I-XXX of Ezra Pound’s Cantos, a revision of the doctoral dissertation Guy wrote at Harvard, published in book form in 1983. For Guy, as for his friend Hugh Kenner, Pound was the central figure of modernism, the inescapable clearing house for 20th-century art. I’m less infatuated with Pound, for both poetic and political reasons. Even Guy, in his Foreward to Cities on Hills, refers to Pound’s “damnable prejudices and crankiness,” which I think goes very easy on the anti-Semite and Fascist sympathizer. However, Guy, as always, has much to say that possesses relevance far beyond a scholarly interest in Pound. Some of his Foreward reads like an apologia for his own work:

“There is the feeling, I believe, that readers see in him….a mind that foresaw our present peril of nuclear war, the confusion of our arts, our distress economic and civil, and the poignancy of our longing for past historical moments….Pound lived into our postliterate age, and saw it as a new barbarity.

“He even believed that history had somehow stopped, and that the present is a hiatus between historical periods. Poets have had this feeling before: Petrarch, Donne, Milton. It is a feeling that we are living entirely off the provender of the past, having none of our own. It is easy (if wrong) to see our age as one of retrospect, and that is so because Pound was right: something has perverted values. There is a difference between a stove and an altar. There is a great hunger for meaning.”

This passage sounds elegiac, almost wistful, not like the jeremiads Guy occasionally wrote. Earlier in the Foreward, he spends a paragraph ripping the IRS, and concludes, “Where there is no concern there is no civilization.” The decay of our culture enraged him. Guy goes on to describe The Cantos and subsequent Pound-influenced long poems by William Carlos Williams, Charles Olson, David Jones and Louis Zukofsky, as “transitional”:

“Transitional to what? We don’t know yet. Writing in a postliterate age is in the same situation as writing in a newly literate age, like the early Victorian. A sharply zoned hierarchy of texts displaces smooth similarities of style. At the top of the hierarchy we have those agreeing with Pound’s intuition that the art of our time must be inventive, exploratory, and uncompromising. Far from writing for an audience, they must create an audience. Such experimentation can be explained. The arts of our time have been making an inventory of our culture, with an eye to saving what can be saved, with an eye for resuscitation, with an eye for planning renovations.”

This sounds hopeful, if not optimistic. Guy might be describing some of the good work accomplished by bloggers. He goes on:

“The genius of the century has been for constellating fragments in an integral field: a quest for resemblance among differences, for an order, perhaps hitherto unsuspected, that will redeem plurality from mere repetition and randomness. The Cantos can be seen as a Cubist mural, to be read as one looks at a collage. At first it is a confusion. One by one, we note relations, until we can say why all the elements are there, and what kind of knowing has been made possible by a complexity of images.”

Guy almost makes me want to read Pound again and reassess his achievement. He also gives me hope for work that is “inventive, exploratory, and uncompromising,” like his own.