List of Books

Comment by Ezra Pound

1

Passages from the Letters of John Butler Yeats. Cuala Press, Dundrum, Dublin. 12 shillings.

To begin with one of the more recent; I have already sent a longer review of John Yeats’ letters to Poetry on the ground that this selection from them contains much valuable criticism of the art to which that periodical is “devoted”. I again call attention to the book for its humanism, for its author’s freedom from the disease of the age. It is good, for America in particular, that some even-minded critic, writing in detachment, without thought of publication, should have recorded his meditations. There can be no supposition that he hoped to start a social reform. Carlos Williams wrote a few years ago:

“Nowhere the subtle, everywhere the electric”. Quibblers at once began a wrangle about the subtlety of electricity. We can not massacre the ergoteur wholesale, but we might at least learn to ignore him; to segregate him into such camps as the “New Statesman” and the “New Republic”; to leave him with his system of “graduated grunts” and his critical “apparatus”, his picayune little slot-machine.

John Yeats writes as a man who has refused to be stampeded; he has not been melted into the crowd; the “button-moulder” has not remade him. He praises solitude now and then, but he has not withdrawn himself into a pseudo-Thoreauian wilderness, nor attempted romantesque Borroviana. Lest we “of this generation and decade” imagine that all things began with us, it is well to note that a man over seventy has freed himself from the effects of the “Great Exposition” and of Carlyle and Wordsworth and Arnold—perhaps he never fell under the marasmus.

I have met men even older than Mr. John Yeats, men who remembered the writings of the French eighteenth century. They had endured the drought, and kept a former age’s richness. When I say “remembered the writings of the French eighteenth century,” I mean that they had received the effect of these writings as it were at first hand, they had got it out of the air; there is a later set who took it up as a speciality, almost a fanaticism; they are different. Then there came the bad generation; a generation of sticks. They are what we have had to put up with.

2

James Joyce’s Novel. The Egoist, London. B. W. Huebsch, New York.

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was so well reviewed in the April number of this paper that I might perhaps refrain from further comment. I have indeed little to add, but I would reaffirm all that I have yet said or written of the book, beginning in The Egoist, continuing in The Drama, etc. Joyce is the best prose writer of my decade. Wyndham Lewis’s Tarr is the only contemporary novel that can compare with A Portrait; Tarr being more inventive, more volcanic, and “not so well written.” And that last comparison is perhaps vicious. It would be ridiculous to measure Dostoevsky with the T-Square of Flaubert. Equally with Joyce and Lewis, the two men are so different, the two methods are so different that it is rash to attempt comparisons. Neither can I attempt to predict which will find the greater number of readers; all the readers who matter will certainly read both of the books.

As for Joyce, perhaps Jean de Bosschère will pardon me if I quote from a post card which he wrote me on beginning A Portrait. It was, naturally, not intended for publication, but it is interesting to see how a fine piece of English first strikes the critic from the continent.

“Charles Louis Philippe n’a pas fait mieux. Joyce le dépasse par le style qui n’est plus le style. Cette nudité de tout ornement rhétorique, de toute forme idiomatique (malgré la plus stricte sévérité contre le détour ou l’esthétique) et beaucoup d’autres qualités fondamentales font de ce livre la plus sérieuse oeuvre anglaise que j’aie lue. Les soixante premières pages sont incomparables, ...”

The “most serious”, or to translate it more colloquially: “It matters more than any other English book I have read”. De Bosschère has not yet published any criticism of Joyce, but he is not the only established critic who has written to me in praise of A Portrait ... Joyce has had a remarkable “press,” but back of that and much more important is the fact that the critics have praised with conviction, a personal and vital conviction.

3

Certain Noble Plays of Japan. Cuala Press, Dublin. 12 shillings.

Noh, or Accomplishment. Knopf, New York, $2.75. Macmillan, London.

The earlier and limited edition of this work of Ernest Fenollosa contains four plays, with an introduction by W. B. Yeats. The larger edition contains fifteen plays and abridgements and all of Fenollosa’s notes concerning the Japanese stage that I have yet been able to prepare for publication. This Japanese stuff has not the solidity, the body, of Rihaku (Li Po). It is not so important as the Chinese work left by Fenollosa, but on the other hand it is infinitely better than Tagore and the back-wash from India. Motokiyo and the fourteenth-century Japanese poets are worth more than Kabir. Fenollosa has given us more than Tagore has. Japan is not a Chinese decadence. Japan “went on with things” after China had quit. And China “quit” fairly early: T’ang is the best of her poetry, and after Sung her art grows steadily weaker.

It would be hard to prove that the Japanese does not attempt (in his art, that is) to die in aromatic pain of the cherry blossom; but his delicacy is not always a weakness. His preoccupation with nuances may set one against him. Where a Chinese poet shows a sort of rugged endurance, the Japanese dramatist presents a fine point of punctilio. He is “romanticist” against the “classical” and poetic matter-of-factness of the Chinese writer. The sense of punctilio is, so far as I can make out, a Japanese characteristic, and a differentiating characteristic, and from it the Japanese poetry obtains a quality of its own.

The poetic sense, almost the sole thing which one can postulate as underlying all great poetry and indispensible to it, is simply the sense of overwhelming emotional values. (For those who must have definitions: Poetry is a verbal statement of emotional values. A poem is an emotional value verbally stated.) In the face of this sense of emotional values there are no national borders. One can not consider Rihaku as a foreigner, one can only consider him human. One can not consider Odysseus, or Hamlet, or Kagekiyo as foreigners, one can only consider them human.

At one point in the Noh plays, namely in the climax of Kagekiyo we find a truly Homeric laughter, and I do not think the final passages of this play will greatly suffer by any comparison the reader will be able to make. If I had found nothing else in Fenollosa’s notes I should have been well paid for the three years I have spent on them.

If I dispraise Tagore now I can only say that I was among the first to praise him before he became a popular fad. The decadence of Tagore may be measured. His first translations were revised by W. B. Yeats; later translations by Evelyn Underhill, facilis et perfacilis descensus, and now they say he has taken to writing in English, a language for which he has no special talent. If his first drafts contained such clichés as “sunshine in my soul”, he was at least conscious at that time of his defects. Praise was rightly given to his first poems because it was demonstrated and demonstrable that they were well done in Bengali, i. e. that they were written in a precise and objective language, and in a metric full of interest and variety. The popular megaphone took up phrases made to define the originals and applied them to the translations. Imagine a criticism of Herrick and Campion applied to a French or German prose translation of these poets, however excellent as a translation in prose! As the vulgarizer hates any form of literary excellence, he was well content with obscuring the real grounds for praise. The unimportant element, that which has made Tagore the prey of religiose nincompoops, might easily have passed without comment. However, it has proved the baccillus of decay. Sir Rabindranath having been raised in a country where the author need not defend himself against blandishment ... I mean the force of the babu press is scarcely enough to turn anyone’s head or his judgement.... Sir Rabindranath is not particularly culpable. His disciples may bear the blame as best they may; along with his publishers. But no old established publishing house cares a damn about literature; and once Tagore had become a commercial property, they could scarcely be expected to care for his literary integrity.

He might still wash and be clean; that is to say there is still time for him to suppress about three fourths of the stuff he has published in English, and retain some sort of literary position.

Another man who stands in peril is Edgar Masters. He did a good job in The Spoon River Anthology. What is good in it is good in common with like things in the Greek anthology, Villon and Crabbe: plus Masters’s sense of real people. The work as a whole needs rewriting. The difference between a fine poem and a mediocre one is often only the fact that the good poet could force himself to rewrite. “No appearance of labour?” No, there need be no appearance of labour. I have seen too many early drafts of known and accepted poems not to know the difference between a draft and the final work. Masters must go back and take the gobbetts of magazine cliché out of his later work; he must spend more time on Spoon River if he wants his stuff to last as Crabbe’s Borough has lasted. There is a great gulph between a “successful” book and a book that endures; that endures even a couple of centuries.

I would not at any cost minimize what Edgar Masters has done, but his fight is not yet over.

4

The Interpretation of the Music of the XVIIth and XVIIIth Centuries, by Arnold Dolmetsch. Novello, London. W. H. Gray, New York.

Arnold Dolmetsch’s book has been out for some time. No intelligent musician would willingly remain without it. No intelligent musician is wholly without interest in the music of those two centuries. But this book is more than a technical guide to musicians. It is not merely “full of suggestion” for the thorough artist of any sort, but it shows a way whereby the musician and the “intelligent” can once more be brought into touch. If Dolmetsch could be persuaded to write a shilling manual for the instruction of children and of mis-taught elders it might save the world’s ears much torture. Dolmetsch’s initial move was to demonstrate that the music of the old instruments could not be given on the piano; any more than you could give violin music on the piano. His next was to restore the old instruments to us. There is too much intelligence in him and his book adequately to be treated in a paragraph. I am writing of him at greater length in The Egoist. His citations from Couperin show the existence of vers libre in early eighteenth-century music. I do not however care unduly to stir up the rather uninteresting discussion as to the archaeology of “free” verse.

5

Prufrock and Other Observations, by T. S. Eliot. The Egoist, London. One shilling.

The book-buyer can not do better.

... The red sun blots on the sky the line of the colour-drenched mountains. The flowers rain in a gust; it is no racking storm that comes over this green moor, which is afloat, as it would seem, in these waves.

Wonderful is the sleeve of the white cloud, whirling such snow here.

—From “Noh”, by Ernest Fenollosa and Ezra Pound.